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InsideTheOU
NEW BOOKS FROM
The Royal Table: A Passover Haggadah OU Press ow is it that an elder statesman of
Hthe Jewish community, a man with wide-ranging responsibility in a massive organization he helped build, can find the time to write a beautifully flowing commentary on the Haggadah that combines exquisite language, brilliant insights and powerful messages? Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm, chancellor of Yeshiva University, has a schedule packed full of meetings with a Who’s Who in the Jewish world. As not only a leader of his university but also the doyen of Jewish scholars, he is a man in constant motion. Yet, despite this, he has many books all-but-written. These are not books that Rabbi Lamm has authored in the conventional manner, but are in the form of a vast repository of magnificent sermons that he delivered over the course of a rabbinic career that has spanned more than half a century. Over his long and illustrious career, Rabbi Lamm has developed the wellearned reputation of being an expert darshan, a sermonizer par excellence. If darshanut were a tournament event
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I JEWISH ACTION
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like chess, Rabbi Lamm would be titled a grandmaster. Each of his carefully crafted speeches is a tour de force of homiletics. Rabbi Lamm dissects Biblical and rabbinic passages, offering brilliant interpretations and applications that make the wisdom of the Torah directly relevant to our communal priorities and personal lives. You don’t sleep during one of his sermons. You dream; you soar; you feel uplifted and inspired. A rabbi and administrator of Rabbi Lamm’s caliber keeps careful files. But a man as busy as he rarely has time to consult those files, let alone prepare them for publication. Two years ago, Yeshiva University unveiled its Lamm Archives, part of the Lamm Heritage project. The Lamm Archives is an online database containing over 800 of Rabbi Lamm’s sermons from 1951 through 2004, scanned in unedited and in their original typed or handwritten format. This is a treasure trove for researchers interested in the history of mid-to-late twentieth century American Judaism. It is also the
main source for a new project to select sermons by topic and, after a careful editorial process, publish them as themed books. The first book in this projected series is The Royal Table: A Passover Haggadah, edited by Dr. Joel B. Wolowelsky, who pored through the Lamm Archives and selected Rabbi Lamm’s most original insights on the Haggadah and on Pesach. His main difficulty was making the painful decisions of what to exclude, given the space limitations that inhere when creating a usable Haggadah. Throughout Rabbi Lamm’s long career, he may have given differing interpretations to certain passages and usually only one could be included in the commentary. Dr. Wolowelsky’s guiding principle was to include insights that continue to speak to contemporary readers. After Dr. Wolowelsky’s yeoman effort in selecting, editing and adapting the sermons, turning them into a Haggadah commentary, Rabbi Lamm carefully reviewed the manuscript. Not only did he make changes to his original essays, he added significant new material so that the commentary stretches across the decades, combining new and old into a unified whole. The final touch was a supplement of essays on Shir HaShirim, newly revised sermons that develop contemporary themes from this Biblical book traditionally appended to the Haggadah. The OU Press team, led by General Editor Rabbi Menachem Genack, shepherded this process along and arranged
Spring10B-1.qxd:Layout 1
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for a beautiful layout of the page and an exceptional cover for the book. The extraordinary Haggadah that emerged from this combined effort is a fitting testament to Rabbi Lamm’s visionary rabbinic leadership and stands to be a major contribution to Torah literature.
Covenant & Conversation: Genesis–The Book of Beginnings
Do You Have Any Old Issues of “Jewish Life”?
OU Press and Maggid Books, an imprint of Koren Publishers Jerusalem Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks does something remarkChief able in his latest book, Covenant & Conversation: Genesis–The Book of Beginnings—he interprets the Torah through his personality. Rabbi Sacks is one of the most original thinkers and articulate writers in the Jewish world today. In this collection of essays on the weekly Torah portion, he explores foundational concepts as they relate to the Torah and to issues we face as individuals and a community. Through Rabbi Sacks’ eyes, the Torah is an encounter between past and present, tradition and the world in which we live. He fuses Talmud, Midrash and commentaries with Western philosophy and literature, illuminating the Torah path on subjects such as freedom, love, responsibility, identity and destiny. Everything he knows is a tool to decipher the Divine word. Rabbi Sacks won the 2009 National Jewish Book Award in the Modern Jewish Thought and Experience for Covenant & Conversation. This book, the first in a five-volume series, eloquently teaches that not only can the Torah be better understood through wide erudition, but that the wisdom of the Torah sheds light on every major religious, political and philosophical issue of our day.
Fresh Fruit & Vintage Wine: Ethics and Wisdom of the Aggada OU Press, Ktav and Yeshivat Har Etzion abbi Yitzchak Blau shows how the wisdom of the Tal-
Rmud is relevant to our personal dilemmas in his new
book, Fresh Fruit & Vintage Wine: Ethics and Wisdom of the Aggada. Jewish tradition includes a great deal of commentary on the psychologically astute stories and insightful ethical maxims of the Talmud, known as the Aggadah. Rabbi Blau opens a window into the world of Jewish wisdom by providing access to this commentary culled from the broad
Jewish Action is seeking issues of Jewish Life, its predecessor magazine. If you have any copies you can give us, please call 212.613.8146, or email [email protected].
range of Jewish literature: Talmudic commentaries, works of Jewish philosophy, Chassidic homilies, Biblical commentaries and ethical tracts. Insights adapted from the finest examples of Western literature also aid the interpretative process. Rabbi Blau takes the enduring wisdom of ancient texts and expresses it with freshness and vitality, applying these lessons to the world in which we live today. The volume speaks directly to personal religious issues: freedom, sensitivity, responsibility, balance, goals, education and modernity. The writing is lively, engaging the mind and elevating the soul, and the unfolding meaning is a profound and original experience of studying Torah. More information on OU Press books is available at www.OUPress.org
I
Spring 5770/2010 JEWISH ACTION 51
2/12/10
1:45 PM
Page 50
InsideTheOU
NEW BOOKS FROM
The Royal Table: A Passover Haggadah OU Press ow is it that an elder statesman of
Hthe Jewish community, a man with wide-ranging responsibility in a massive organization he helped build, can find the time to write a beautifully flowing commentary on the Haggadah that combines exquisite language, brilliant insights and powerful messages? Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm, chancellor of Yeshiva University, has a schedule packed full of meetings with a Who’s Who in the Jewish world. As not only a leader of his university but also the doyen of Jewish scholars, he is a man in constant motion. Yet, despite this, he has many books all-but-written. These are not books that Rabbi Lamm has authored in the conventional manner, but are in the form of a vast repository of magnificent sermons that he delivered over the course of a rabbinic career that has spanned more than half a century. Over his long and illustrious career, Rabbi Lamm has developed the wellearned reputation of being an expert darshan, a sermonizer par excellence. If darshanut were a tournament event
50
I JEWISH ACTION
Spring 5770/2010
like chess, Rabbi Lamm would be titled a grandmaster. Each of his carefully crafted speeches is a tour de force of homiletics. Rabbi Lamm dissects Biblical and rabbinic passages, offering brilliant interpretations and applications that make the wisdom of the Torah directly relevant to our communal priorities and personal lives. You don’t sleep during one of his sermons. You dream; you soar; you feel uplifted and inspired. A rabbi and administrator of Rabbi Lamm’s caliber keeps careful files. But a man as busy as he rarely has time to consult those files, let alone prepare them for publication. Two years ago, Yeshiva University unveiled its Lamm Archives, part of the Lamm Heritage project. The Lamm Archives is an online database containing over 800 of Rabbi Lamm’s sermons from 1951 through 2004, scanned in unedited and in their original typed or handwritten format. This is a treasure trove for researchers interested in the history of mid-to-late twentieth century American Judaism. It is also the
main source for a new project to select sermons by topic and, after a careful editorial process, publish them as themed books. The first book in this projected series is The Royal Table: A Passover Haggadah, edited by Dr. Joel B. Wolowelsky, who pored through the Lamm Archives and selected Rabbi Lamm’s most original insights on the Haggadah and on Pesach. His main difficulty was making the painful decisions of what to exclude, given the space limitations that inhere when creating a usable Haggadah. Throughout Rabbi Lamm’s long career, he may have given differing interpretations to certain passages and usually only one could be included in the commentary. Dr. Wolowelsky’s guiding principle was to include insights that continue to speak to contemporary readers. After Dr. Wolowelsky’s yeoman effort in selecting, editing and adapting the sermons, turning them into a Haggadah commentary, Rabbi Lamm carefully reviewed the manuscript. Not only did he make changes to his original essays, he added significant new material so that the commentary stretches across the decades, combining new and old into a unified whole. The final touch was a supplement of essays on Shir HaShirim, newly revised sermons that develop contemporary themes from this Biblical book traditionally appended to the Haggadah. The OU Press team, led by General Editor Rabbi Menachem Genack, shepherded this process along and arranged
Spring10B-1.qxd:Layout 1
2/12/10
1:45 PM
Page 51
for a beautiful layout of the page and an exceptional cover for the book. The extraordinary Haggadah that emerged from this combined effort is a fitting testament to Rabbi Lamm’s visionary rabbinic leadership and stands to be a major contribution to Torah literature.
Covenant & Conversation: Genesis–The Book of Beginnings
Do You Have Any Old Issues of “Jewish Life”?
OU Press and Maggid Books, an imprint of Koren Publishers Jerusalem Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks does something remarkChief able in his latest book, Covenant & Conversation: Genesis–The Book of Beginnings—he interprets the Torah through his personality. Rabbi Sacks is one of the most original thinkers and articulate writers in the Jewish world today. In this collection of essays on the weekly Torah portion, he explores foundational concepts as they relate to the Torah and to issues we face as individuals and a community. Through Rabbi Sacks’ eyes, the Torah is an encounter between past and present, tradition and the world in which we live. He fuses Talmud, Midrash and commentaries with Western philosophy and literature, illuminating the Torah path on subjects such as freedom, love, responsibility, identity and destiny. Everything he knows is a tool to decipher the Divine word. Rabbi Sacks won the 2009 National Jewish Book Award in the Modern Jewish Thought and Experience for Covenant & Conversation. This book, the first in a five-volume series, eloquently teaches that not only can the Torah be better understood through wide erudition, but that the wisdom of the Torah sheds light on every major religious, political and philosophical issue of our day.
Fresh Fruit & Vintage Wine: Ethics and Wisdom of the Aggada OU Press, Ktav and Yeshivat Har Etzion abbi Yitzchak Blau shows how the wisdom of the Tal-
Rmud is relevant to our personal dilemmas in his new
book, Fresh Fruit & Vintage Wine: Ethics and Wisdom of the Aggada. Jewish tradition includes a great deal of commentary on the psychologically astute stories and insightful ethical maxims of the Talmud, known as the Aggadah. Rabbi Blau opens a window into the world of Jewish wisdom by providing access to this commentary culled from the broad
Jewish Action is seeking issues of Jewish Life, its predecessor magazine. If you have any copies you can give us, please call 212.613.8146, or email [email protected].
range of Jewish literature: Talmudic commentaries, works of Jewish philosophy, Chassidic homilies, Biblical commentaries and ethical tracts. Insights adapted from the finest examples of Western literature also aid the interpretative process. Rabbi Blau takes the enduring wisdom of ancient texts and expresses it with freshness and vitality, applying these lessons to the world in which we live today. The volume speaks directly to personal religious issues: freedom, sensitivity, responsibility, balance, goals, education and modernity. The writing is lively, engaging the mind and elevating the soul, and the unfolding meaning is a profound and original experience of studying Torah. More information on OU Press books is available at www.OUPress.org
I
Spring 5770/2010 JEWISH ACTION 51
