Customer Reviews

Genesis: The Beginning of Desire

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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!

Avivah Gottleib Zornberg has compiled her essays on the weekly Parsha, and a lifetime of learning and teaching, to write these extraordinary commentaries on the Book of Genesis. She shares her own personal struggles for meaning "to discover the ways in which life and text inform each other." With a particularly fluid writing style the author weaves together biblical, midrashic and literary sources - from Rashi to Shakespeare - and, for me, she makes Torah more accessible and brings biblical characters to life. The interpretations presented here are offered as alternative understandings to literal translations and not given as fact. The depth and detail with which Ms. Gottlieb Zornberg reanimates the texts of "Bereshit," is extraordinary. This is a truly beautiful book.

The title "Genesis: The Beginning Of Desire" is taken from Wallace Stevens' "Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction" - "...not to have is the beginning of desire."
JANA

Zornberg's love, for the created order and its Creator, is just one of the refreshingly different things about this book, but perhaps in the last analysis the most important. If you are tired of titled and degreed fools who long ago stopped believing that God exists and cares about us, but have to keep publishing, get this book. But be prepared to invest time, and to sacrifice most of what you learned in Sunday School! Most highly recommended!