Rabbi Dov Lipman

Over twenty years ago, during the Martin Luther King Civil Right's Day Festival in Phoenix, I was confronted by three ladies questioning my objections to a certain procedure performed on infant boys. "How can you say that", one of them challenged,"When it's in the Bible"? Somehow I cobbled together a response, but determined to discover just how "it" found its way in the Bible, I began a decades long search for answers.

This book is part of the same search ... but, I must say, I've never been confronted by so many terms that were unfamiliar and strange to me. I was more than half through the book before I realized ... if I read the book while sitting in front of my computer, I could Google the terms. That, finally, made reading this book not quite so difficult, because Google fleshed out the stories found in every chapter, and the lives of the individuals being discussed ... as well as their more familiar names ... i.e. Moshe Rabbeinu, for instance, = Moses. Nevertheless, for someone not familiar with Jewish terms and names, reading this book can be tough going. Even with the Google advantage ... you might have to stop a half-dozen times on more than one page before you know what's being discussed.

The book was obviously meant for Jews in the Diaspora, and I can't fault the author for that, because his book does convey a sense of the deep longing many Jews have for their spiritual home. I have "spiritual homes" of my own, so it's easy for me to identify. Nevertheless ... that "home" has also been home for countless thousands of peoples for millenniums , and sometimes the reader gets a sense that no one else counts.

I cannot help get a feeling that too much emphasis is placed on "words" ... the word ... of God ... when we all know that words are a human construct. If we see otherwise ... we can easily become entwined in words ... such as the almost constant disputes regarding whether laws apply in the Diaspora as well as in Israel. You just want to throw up your hands and say ... enough!… (mehr)