By Rabbi Rachel Esserman
Can we truly understand the past – not only the stories of our relatives, but our own actions – if we don’t know everything that occurred? Can learning a different side to events from years before change the way we view the world? These ideas are explored in t…
By Rabbi Rachel Esserman
Searching for the true meaning of the biblical text
In 1944, at the age of 21, Segundo Villanuena sought to avenge his father’s murder. His only real inheritance was a trunk, which he hoped would hold either an inheritance or a message from his father. What he d…
By Rabbi Rachel Esserman
When considering major Jewish literary figures of the past 100 years, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Amos Oz certainly qualify, even though they represent two different traditions. Singer has been called a master of Yiddish literature (something with which the Nobel Pri…
By Rabbi Rachel Esserman
A new genre of biblical commentary has appeared over the past few years. Rather than doing a line-by-line discussion of the text, these commentators use the text as a starting point to explore contemporary moral and ethical problems. One recent example is “The Bo…
By Rabbi Rachel Esserman
An author once commented that she enjoyed seeing her book “in conversation” with another in one of my reviews. I’d never thought about my work in those terms, but I often try to pair books with similar themes because the reviews are more interesting to write …
