Tag: S.Y. Agnon

In Pursuit of Wholeness: The Book of Ruth in Modern Literature

On By SarahIn Book Review, Chesed, Modernism, Ruth, ShavuotLeave a comment

In anticipation of the upcoming holiday of Shavuot, the Jewish Review of Books printed an adapted and shortened version of my essay in the newly released anthology Gleanings: Reflections on Ruth (Maggid Press, 2019).

“While not the most dramatic of all the biblical stories, the quietly moving book of Ruth, which we read on Shavuot, continues to resonate in Western literature. Sometimes the references are explicit, as when John Keats famously wrote, “Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home / She stood in tears amid the alien corn.” Yet we also encounter Ruth-like scenarios that draw on, or even undermine, the book’s central theme of chesed, or loving-kindness.

American novelist Marilynne Robinson and Israeli writer Meir Shalev invoke the Ruth story to tell biblically infused stories that expressly do not end in redemption. In contrast, S. Y. Agnon found a way to draw upon it while keeping the transformative spirit of the biblical narrative.”

To read more, see The Jewish Review of Books or for the full version the anthology is available on Amazon.

 

S.Y. Agnon and the Orthodox Reader

On By SarahIn Book Review, Holocaust, Modernism, The Destruction of the Temple, Zionism2 Comments

This review appeared in the Fall issue of Jewish Action Magazine

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 The Israeli writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966, authored works of modern Hebrew literature that are steeped in the language of the Torah and hundreds of years of Eastern European Jewish history and tradition. His stories, set in his Galician hometown of Buczacz, transport the reader into the vibrant world of Polish Jewry before World War II. There are probably few readers outside of the Orthodox Jewish community who have the cultural literacy necessary to recognize many of the Jewish allusions in Agnon’s stories. Yet Agnon’s works have not made the deep inroads into the Orthodox world that one might imagine they would.

Click here for the full article

Harnessing the Spiritual Power of Irony: Rav Shagar, S.Y. Agnon and Yom Kippur

On By SarahIn Yom KippurLeave a comment

In the discussion of Yom Kippur that appears in The Human and the Infinite, a compendium of translated essays by the late Rav Shagar (Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg z”l), Rav Shagar describes the difficulty of truly feeling awe during the Days of Awe. A serious attempt to grasp the Absolute during this time-period will, according to Rav Shagar, invariably lead to a kind of anxiety. This anxiety, which may at times be confused with piety, is not actually religiously productive. It can even cause deep despair: “there is an essential paradox in the attempt to understand the Holy with the limited faculties at our command – words, deeds, etc… This paradox, then, fuels despair in the believer.”

The solution to this despair, for Rav Shagar, is a healthy dose of irony. Irony, he reminds us, should not be confused with cynicism: “Cynicism ridicules its subject, presenting it as pathetic. Irony, on the other hand, is a delicate instrument able to grasp two different sides of an issue at once. It can understand the true gravity of a subject, while at the same time showing up its limitations.” Rav Shagar explains that “[i]rony emphasizes new and different possibilities – even for those subjects that are seemingly absolute. The reflectivity of irony can breathe a new spiritual life into the stolid…. The ironic stance adds a lighter side to the religious act and so enlivens it. The religious can no longer stay fixed and see itself, as it were, as its own absolute. The ironic allows the religious to become what it should be.”

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