A Year with Martin Buber
Wisdom on the Weekly Torah Portion
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
2022 Top Ten Book from Academy of Parish Clergy
The teachings of the great twentieth-century Jewish thinker Martin Buber empower us to enter a spiritual dimension that often passes unnoticed in the daily routine. In A Year with Martin Buber, the first Torah commentary to focus on his life’s work, we experience the fifty-four weekly Torah portions and eleven Jewish holidays through Buber’s eyes.
While best known for the spiritual concept of the I-Thou relationship between people, Buber graced us with other fundamentals, including Over Against, Afterglow, Will and Grace, Reification, Inclusion, and Imagine the Real. And his life itself—including his defiance of the Nazis, his call for Jewish-Arab reconciliation, and his protest of Adolf Eichmann’s execution—modeled these teachings in action.
Rabbi Dennis S. Ross demonstrates Buber’s roots in Jewish thought and breaks new ground by explaining the broader scope of Buber’s life and work in a clear, conversational voice. He quotes from the weekly Torah portion; draws lessons from Jewish commentators; and sets Buber’s related words in context with Buber’s remarkable life story, Hasidic tales, and writing. A wide variety of anecdotal illustrations from Buber as well as the author’s life encourages each of us to “hallow the everyday” and seek out spirituality “hiding in plain sight.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rabbi Ross (When a Lie Is Not a Sin) superbly distills the theology of Martin Buber (1878-1965), a consequential Jewish thinker whose focus on making human interactions meaningful influenced Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." As Ross concedes, Buber's writings, marked by "artistic flourishes," can be "difficult reading." Ross's artful solution is to pen short sections on every Torah portion, divided into three parts: a short summary of an aspect of that portion (such as the debate over whether Noah was righteous only by the low standards of his time), followed by an interpretation of a relevant section of Buber's work, and then Ross's own perspective on and struggles with related ethical issues. Not every section is equally valuable; for example, following up a discussion of Abraham's challenging God not to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah with an anecdote about Buber confronting Reinhold Niebuhr about a partially critical review is a letdown that only undermines the implications of the biblical patriarch's famous question, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justly?" Despite that, this remains an invaluable entry point to a humanist thinker who sought to identify, build, and preserve "holiness in our daily routines" by putting people, rather than objects, first.