A Highly Original Work Looks at the Pentateuch with the Sensibilities of the Psalms

Reviewing Laurance Wieder’s unusual work After Adam: The Books of Moses, Michal Leibowitz writes:

After Adam is a prosimetrum, a story told in verse and prose. . . . [I]ts subject is the Pentateuch, and each of the book’s 54 chapters corresponds to a single Sabbath Torah portion.

But Wieder’s work is not simply a poet’s retelling of the books of Moses. It is also the work of an anthologist, and much of the text is composed of biblical commentaries—largely, though not exclusively, midrashim—from a vast variety of texts spanning the apocryphal book of Enoch to the philosophical dialogues of Judah Halevi. Following the associative mode of the Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon in Present at Sinai, Wieder intermixes his commentaries with little regard for their original context or chronology. Like Agnon, he sometimes alters sources—abridging, paraphrasing, even extending—without making his readers aware of his changes. Other times, he offers commentary that is entirely his own.

Wieder’s individualistic approach never degenerates into chaos or mere whim. Rather, his selections are drawn together by a strong guiding vision—one might say a theology—that more than anything, reflects the voice and worldview of . . . the book of Psalms. [It thus] envisions a world in which God listens and responds to the calls of human beings. The varied forms of the psalms—praise, lament, thanksgiving, individual, communal—all rely on the assumption of continued divine love for, and involvement in, the world.

Read more at Lehrhaus

More about: Hebrew Bible, Midrash, Poetry, Psalms, S. Y. Agnon

The Democratic Party Is Losing Its Grip on Jews

Since the 1930s, Jews have been one of America’s most solidly Democratic ethnic groups. Although, true to form, a majority again voted for Kamala Harris, something clearly has shifted. John Podhoretz writes:

Over the course of the past thirteen months, Jews in America have been harassed, threatened, seen their ancestral homeland derided as a settler-colonial genocidal state. They have seen Jewish kids mistreated on college campuses. And they have seen the Biden administration kowtow to Muslim populations hostile to Jews and the Jewish state in Michigan. They have heard the criticisms of Israel’s efforts to defend itself, and have noted the silence from the administration when it came to anti-Semitic assaults and the refusal of college presidents to condemn the treatment of Jews and Jewish topics under their ambit.

And Jews have acted.

The initial evidence from last night’s election is that there has been a significant shift in the Jewish vote from previous elections, a delta of anywhere from 10 to 40 percent overall.

Read more at Commentary

More about: 2024 Election, American Jewry, Anti-Semitism, Democrats, U.S. Politics