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Title: Erudition
Review: This is a truly wonderful book. This author draws on remarkable and broad fluency with text--from Shakespeare and Sartre to Harold Bloom, the Bible itself from Genesis to Chronicles, and rabbinic literature from the Tanhuma to Rashi to R. David Hutner. What pervades this textual fluency is a marvelous attention to language, to the words with which worlds are created.This book is no easy read. I recommend reading each chapter twice and highlighting or underlining, writing notes in the margins and discussing passages with a partner as you go. Active reading is required, but isn't that just what "midrash," literally to "search" for the meanings of a text, is all about?This is a study of the book of Genesis but it is also a study of rabbinic midrashic exploration of the book of Genesis. I cannot recommend it highly enough!
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