Customer Reviews

From Jerusalem to the Edge of Heaven

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Ari Elon advocates a kind of Jewish pluralism, where being Jewish includes a cultural and ethical heritage but does not necessarily mean accepting rabbinic Judaism as a religion. He celebrates the Torah, and particularly the aggadic portions of the Babylonian Talmud, as a source of creativity and inspiration for secular and religious alike and hopes, through his teaching, to bring it to a wider audience. In Elon's view, only free-thinking Jews, grounded in but not controlled by their traditions, can have the creativity to be their own gods, to find uniquely Jewish solutions to the problems that beset Israel and Jewish culture more generally.

"From Jerusalem to the Edge of Heaven" is not so much an attempt to persuade anyone that Elon is correct, as it is an attempt to persuade that such a thing is possible and to provide a vision of what a free-thinking Jewish creativity might look like. The beginning and end of the book are a pastiche of autobiographical sketches, speeches given by Elon while teaching Talmud to secular Israelis, and Elon's imaginative diary of reserve duty in Gaza. These sections (some of which are more successful than others) provide context for the book's longest section, an extended fantasia, based on Talmudic stories, on what it means to live a life of learning and creativity. This seems to me an utterly original and mostly convincing understanding of the sages of the Talmud, with modern implications that are only hinted at in Elon's brief book.

Elon assumes some basic familiarity with Zionist leaders and ideas and with Talmudic aggadah, but he is writing for educated lay people, not scholars. His argument is mostly easy to follow, although I found it repetitive in a few spots. The style is poetic and idiosyncratic, but easy to read once you get into it. Recommended to anyone with an interest in secular alternatives that preserve tradition without becoming enslaved by it.

The book takes the form of dream-like midrash, mostly on the Talmud,but also on Elon's experience in the Israeli army AND in the Israeli peace movement. Call it mystical realism. Such a book appears only once every few hundred years, in a generation of deep Jewish upheaval, like the mystical Zohar and the Prophet Amos. Jews will be reading it hundreds of years from no