The Lilac Tree
A Rabbi's Reflections on Love, Courage, and History
-
- $14.99
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
Applying Jewish values to our personal and communal lives.
Ammiel Hirsch has been one of America’s leading rabbis for more than three decades. A Zionist activist who spent his formative years in Israel, Hirsch rose to prominence as the executive director of the Association of Reform Zionists of America and then as the spiritual leader of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in the Upper West Side in Manhattan.
The Lilac Tree offers stirring reflections on life and death, science and faith, political activism and deep learning, and history and the future. Hirsch grapples with the harsh realities of COVID-19, anti-Semitism, and America in the wake of the Trump presidency. We travel with him to the ruins of Ancient Greece and Rome, the site of Auschwitz, and a hotel in Basel where Theodor Herzl dreamed of a Jewish state—all seen through his incisive, witty, and eminently Jewish lens.
Moving easily between the day-to-day and the sublime, The Lilac Tree draws upon Hirsch’s wealth of Jewish and general wisdom to present a comprehensive worldview that is both eternal in its scope and acutely relevant, even urgent, for our own lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Reform rabbi Hirsch (coauthor, One People Two Worlds) underwhelms in these brief essays on Jewish life. Hirsch reflects on "our individual and communal lives" in pieces that cover his personal family history, post-Holocaust Europe, Israel, and more, though his musings often prove too cursory. In one essay, Hirsch recounts leading a delegation of reform rabbis on a trip to Jordan in 1994, several months before the country signed a peace treaty with Israel. The Israeli government deemed the trip significant to the negotiations-in-progress, but Hirsch's superficial account relies on platitudes ("Standing there amongst... descendents of a people who should have died a hundred times over, I felt the miracle of Jewish life") to deliver a fairly banal message of Jewish resilience. Elsewhere, a meditation on social responsibility has its poignant moments ("We come as close to God... as possible when we give of ourselves to others") before it turns sermonlike ("All of humanity is in the same boat... we are all at risk of going down with the ship"). Though Hirsch bravely wades into complex issues like blind faith and American Jewish alienation from Israel, the subpar execution leaves promising ground unexplored. Readers seeking depth will be disappointed.
