Six Memos from the Last Millennium (Exploring Jewish Arts and Culture): A Novelist Reads the Talmud - Hardcover

Joseph Skibell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1477307346 ISBN 13: 9781477307342

Publisher: University of Texas Press, 2016

Synopsis

A thief-turned-saint, killed by an insult. A rabbi burning down his world in order to save it. A man who lost his sanity while trying to fathom the origin of the universe. A beautiful woman battling her brother's and her husband's egos to preserve their family. Stories such as these enliven the pages of the Talmud, the great repository of ancient wisdom that is one of the sacred texts of the Jewish people. Comprised of the Mishnah, the oral law of the Torah, and the Gemara, a multigenerational metacommentary on the Mishnah dating from between 3950 and 4235 (190 and 475 CE), the Talmud presents a formidable challenge to understand without scholarly training and study. But what if one approaches it as a collection of tales with surprising relevance for contemporary readers? In Six Memos from the Last Millennium, critically acclaimed novelist Joseph Skibell reads some of the Talmud's tales with a storyteller's insight, concentrating on the lives of the legendary rabbis depicted in its pages to uncover the wisdom they can still impart to our modern age. He unifies strands of stories that are scattered throughout the Talmud into coherent narratives or "memos," which he then analyzes and interprets from his perspective as a novelist. In Skibell's imaginative and personal readings, this sacred literature frequently defies our conventional notions of piety. Sometimes wild, rude, and even bawdy, these memos from the last millennium pursue a livable transcendence, a way of fusing the mundane hours of earthly life with a cosmic sense of holiness and wonder.

About this title

Review:

"In Six Memos from the Last Millennium, a master storyteller takes on stories of the masters, bringing to modern life the millennia-old stories of the Talmud. Skibell discerns in those stories motifs and strands of thought that join the apparently disjointed, propelling the mini-narratives into our modern mindset with clarity and depth. I finished Six Memos reading and thinking―maybe even living―more deliberately and intelligently."

Author:

W. Mark Lanier, founder, Lanier Theological Library, and author of Christianity on Trial: A Lawyer Examines the Christian Faith

Review:

"Skibell's work is lucid and erudite, and he does honor to his subject matter...A fresh look at an ancient source." Source: Kirkus

". . . highly readable, and deeply thought-provoking...he presents the Talmud’s treatment of its own authors as both role models and warnings, a remarkably self-reflective approach that is needed today perhaps more than ever." Source: Jewish Book Council

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1477307346
• ISBN 13: 9781477307342
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 236