Jake Marmer

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Talmud vs. Anna Akhmatova

By Jake Marmer

This week’s Torah portion is Parshat Vayera in which Lot’s wife looks back and turns into a pillar of salt. Midrash makes some guesses at the reasons for the punishment, but the famous Russian poet Anna Akhmatova writes not about events but about what she was feeling as she disobeyed her husband and looked back at the city she had left.Read More

Jennifer Kronovet’s "Awayward" is Way Inward

By Jake Marmer

Reading Jennifer Kronovet’s poetry is like understanding English as a foreign language. The translation is the key to our enjoyment.Read More

The Shrine Whose Shape I Am

By Jake Marmer

At first, Babylonian yeshivas of Sura and Pumpedisa were full of poets. Every wagging finger, every dipping thumb, belonged to a poet; the spittle of ferocious arguments was real poetry. As Shelley wrote: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” These Babylonian rabbis, composing Talmud and midrash, dreamed of legislating the myth; sensing the growing chasm between their mighty imagination — so new, personal, subjective — and the pure universalism of Torah, they gradually turned into dreamy lawyers, advocating their abstract bridges, suspending themselves further in ultimate nihilism. We’re their progeny.Read More

A Pied Piper of Music and Ideas

By Jake Marmer

Even before Jeremy Danneman had a chance to tuck the reed into his saxophone, people began to gather around him. As he strapped on the instrument and began to play, he recounts, a large crowd of shoppers at the marketplace of Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, abandoned their errands and circled around him. In this East Central African country that is still recovering from the brutal civil war of 1990–1994, which claimed lives of nearly one million people, the tradition of street performance has been all but completely abandoned. A Westerner is rare enough to come by in Kigali, not to mention one with a saxophone, playing a wild improvised jazz solo out in the open. The crowd was elated, though completely flabbergasted by the performance. Finally, the few English speakers in the audience stepped up and translated the question on everyone’s lips: What is going on here?Read More

Avivah Zornberg and the ‘Biblical Unconscious’

By Jake Marmer

Dr. Avivah Zornberg is a Jerusalem-based educator, Torah scholar, and philosopher. Though Zornberg’s two previous books have followed the traditional Torah-commentary format, her new book, “The Murmuring Deep Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious” (Shocken) comprises a collection of essays on various characters and themes in the Hebrew bibleRead More


 

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