Customer Reviews

The Song of the Distant Dove: Judah Halevi's Pilgrimage

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4 star:		(1)
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This has to be one of the most beautiful books I have ever read. Halevi's poetry is so much more moving in these translations that in the earlier ones I have read.And the story of the pilgimage is very vividly told. I had no idea that so much was known about it. I always thought that Halevi was trying to lead the Jews back to Palestine and start the messianic era; but Scheindlin really opened my eyes to his inner spirituality as being the main thing behind his pilgrimage. The whole thing came alive. So interesting to see how much a rabbi like Halevi was involved in Arabic culture, and how much he was influenced by Islam. Did he really model his pilgrimage after al-Ghazzali? Scheindlin almost says so, but not quite. Gives you a lot to think about. The translations are so beautiful they can stand on their own as poetry!

I thought I knew all about Judah Halevi from day school but this book
really makes him come alive. The poem translations are great, but the
story is really something else. I couldn't believe I was actually
reading letters by Judah Halevi himself! And who knew Jews spoke and
wrote in Arabic in his time! This book is a keeper!

Scheindlin has a very strongly felt perspective about Judah Halevi's late-life pilgrimage to the land of Israel, a perspective that informs this entire book. He sees Halevi as motivated by spiritual concerns -- the desire to literally embrace the stones and dirt of the land and to see the places where biblical miracles were done for the Jewish people. He rejects the notions that Halevi was driven primarily by political or messianic concerns. Halevi, he says, wanted to die in the promised land as much as he wanted to live there. Scheindlin does an excellent job of marshaling his evidence, both from the text of Halevi's poems and from the large cache of now-available letters to, from, and about Halevi.

In addition to being an excellent historian, Scheindlin is also a sensitive reader of poetry and a good translator. These characteristics are not always present at the same time in one person. Scheindlin's own prose is not always graceful, however; otherwise, this would have been a five-star review.