336 - The Book of Legends: Sefer Ha-Aggadah. Legends from the Talmud and Midrash

The Book of Legends: Sefer Ha-Aggadah. Legends from the Talmud and Midrash
By Hayim Nahman Bialik and Yehoshua Hana Ravnitzky, Editors
New York, Schocken Books, 1992. 897 pp. $75.00.

The appearance in English of this masterpiece, an organization of Jewish 'aggadot (stories and whatever was not halachah), is a major event in the spiritual and cultural (non-political) renaissance of Judaism in this century and a potential boost for revival of the current Jewish-Christian dialogue. Braude, best known for his translation of the Midrash on Psalms, has given us a tremendous gift in both of these arenas.

The introduction (by David Stern) is essential for understanding the collection. In it, Stern explains what the atheist poet Bialik and the industrious publisher Ravnitzky did (in Odessa from 1908-11) in culling through widely disparate rabbinic sources and arranging the scattered gems into a "palace" of stories and proverbs that provide "the key to Jewish uniqueness." The fact that the thousands of snippets were all taken out of their original religious and homiletical contexts did not disturb Bialik.

Like all responsible tradents, including Louis Ginzberg in The Legends of the Jews at about the same time, they adapted what they gathered from Judaism's past to make rabbinic culture comprehensible to the ingathering Zionists in the new form of Hebrew of the early part of this century. With the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE and the devastation of Early Judaism in the disastrous Bar Kochba Revolt, Judaism was reformed into "a portable possession." With the loss of the temple and its cult, Judaism became a complex of synagogue, Torah study, worship, and the development of halachah within communities that existed in "a mythical, timeless realm removed from the travails and injustices of contemporary history."

Since the Jewish Enlightenment of the nineteenth century, much of that ethos has been dissolved, and Bialik especially feared that there would be a Zion without a Jewish soul. Now with very legible translations by William Braude, Bialik's mission is extended to Jews worldwide and to non-Jews who want to learn what God would say to them through the "epic literature of the Jewish people."

James A. Sanders
School of Theology at Claremont
Claremont, CA.