Elliot Dorff
Fixing the Broken
With all the news of tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes and war, there is no better time for a book like Elliot Dorff's The Way into Tikkun Olam (Repairing the World), published this month by Jewish Lights.
Current events "made the book more urgent because what I do is write about why we should care," says Dorff, a Conservative rabbi and professor of philosophy at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. "What I try to show in the book is that the Jewish tradition of tikkun olam goes much further than a humanitarian feeling or quid pro quo. Tikkun olam is about how each of us is created in the image of God, and because of that we have a duty to everyone who is created in the image of God."
But Dorff, who has a background in ethics, takes the ancient Jewish mandate of social action and social justice beyond its global applications and shows how we can enact tikkun olam with our local community of family and friends as well. "We don't come into contact with the entire world on a day-to-day basis, but we do with our families," he says. "So how we speak to each other, care for each other, is very important. In some ways, that is at least as important as fixing the social world."
Tikkun Olamis the fifth in the Jewish Lights The Way into... series, but the first to step away from examining individual concepts of Judaism and to move into exploring how Judaism and Jewish traditions relate to people of other faiths and the world in general. Future titles in the same vein will be The Way into Judaism and the Environment, The Way into the Relationship Between Jews and Non-Jews and The Way into the Varieties of Jewishness,all slated for 2006 and beyond.
Stuart Matlins, editor-in-chief and publisher of Jewish Lights, thinks the new focus of the series will reach a broader audience. "There are many Jews and non-Jews who are not interested in the spiritual teachings of Judaism, but who are interested in the ethical teachings," he says.
Dorff also sees the book reaching a wider audience. "A lot of traditions of the world have things like tikkun olam, but they may express them in different ways," he says. "Hopefully, this book will help people locate tikkun olam in their own traditions." Even more than that, he thinks the recent disasters show that people are more ready to accept the idea of tikkun olam than they have ever been before. "I think the outpouring of aid for the people of the tsunami and then Katrina is indicative of that," he says. "We now see in very dramatic ways the need we have to help others. But hopefully this book will help people understand that tikkun olam is not reserved for dramatic situations but is an ongoing duty that we have. This is about being the type of person we should want to be." —Kimberly Winston
Amanda Porterfield
Inspired by Science
Church history isn't brain surgery, but brain science is precisely what inspired Amanda Porterfield to write her latest book, Healing in the History of Christianity, published this month by Oxford University Press.
"I chose the topic because of recent developments in the understanding of healing," says Porterfield, a professor of religion at Florida State University. "Advances in brain science challenge the mind/body dichotomy and have demonstrated that [religious] experiences and emotional states sometimes have a profound biological effect."
Healing in the History of Christianity synthesizes more than 2,000 years' worth of material into barely 200 pages, covering everything from Jesus' healing miracles and exorcisms to Christian physicians in the early church, monks who safeguarded medical research in the Middle Ages, 20th-century Pentecostal faith healers, modern medical missionaries and lots in between. For Porterfield, a scholar of American religious history, it was a bold undertaking. "There's so much fabulous material out there, and my job was to put it in some kind of narrative."
By writing the book, says Porterfield, "not only did I learn a lot about the history of Christianity outside of America but I was able to see certain developments in a new perspective," for example, how intertwined the fields of medicine and Christian healing have been. "You really can't tell the story of one without parts of the story of the other," Porterfield notes. Medical science has become the dominant model of healing, and it "sets the tone for the kinds of metaphors and the ways of thinking that Christians interested in healing use."
Theologically, the project gave Porterfield a heightened appreciation for liturgy, a more profound sense of the resurrection and an ability to see Christianity as "a vision of the cosmos, of how the world is. Although I've studied Christianity forever, I hadn't thought of it in quite that way," she says.
Porterfield was expecting to track the changes in how Christians approached healing from century to century, but instead was surprised to discover a strong continuity. "Everything traces back to the body of Christ. It's a body that's broken and suffers and is killed but is healed and becomes whole."
Porterfield's book is an "archetypical Oxford academic/trade title in that it couples a thought-provoking and dynamic thesis with accessible, jargon-free writing," says Rudy Faust, publicity manager of the academic division at OUP. "It challenges the Christian believer and detached observer alike to reconsider the place of healing, which has a rich and central place in Christian belief, in Christian ministry." Since the book's topic is not limited by particular denominational boundaries, Faust says it nicely mirrors OUP's position and role in the religion market. "The core audience is of course the readership of the Christian periodicals, but we are also pitching the mainstream book reviews and the religion beat."
Since finishing the book, Porterfield has returned to more familiar territory. She edited volume six of The People's History of Christianity: Modern Christianity to 1900, due out later this year from Augsburg Fortress, and is finishing up The Protestant Experience in America, due out next year from Greenwood Publishing Group.
While her own book is done, researchers continue to study the connection between biology and spirituality, and much of that research is being done in the U.S. "America is unusually ahead of the curve in terms of wanting to connect [religious healing] with science," Porterfield says. "The attitude that science and Protestant Christianity are mutually reaffirming has helped science advance as fast as it has in this country." —Heather Grennan Gary
Shuly Rubin Schwartz
Behind Every Great Rabbi…
Shuly Rubin Schwartz has three reasons to write about the history of the rebbetzin, the Yiddish word that refers to a rabbi's wife. First, she's a scholar of American Jewish history. Second, she is the daughter of a rabbi and rebbetzin. Third, she was a rebbetzin herself until she was widowed last year.
Schwartz's book The Rabbi's Wife: The Rebbetzin in American Jewish Life will be published in January by New York University Press (see review, page S12). Schwartz, who is associate professor of American Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York as well as the dean of its undergraduate List College, took an academic approach to a very personal topic.
When Schwartz married a rabbi in 1973, American Judaism was in the midst of tremendous "agitation," she says, about the question of whether women could be ordained as rabbis. Jewish feminism was taking shape, and a generation of Jewish women were making the case that they should be entitled to the chance to earn ordination. "It raised the question in my mind," Schwartz recalls, "where were all these talented women in the generation before?"
The answer to her question was that many of those women were rebbetzins. Being married to a rabbi "gave them a platform to be religious leaders," Schwartz says. "It gave them an instant congregation to teach, to counsel."
Schwartz was interested to observe, in her interviews with dozens of women and her archival research of earlier generations, that rabbi's wives had escaped a big part of the pre-feminist gender struggle that many American women endured.
"For most of the 20th century, marriage and career were seen as incompatible for women in this country. Many women felt they had to choose," says Schwartz. "Rabbis' wives found that marriage to a rabbi gave them an opportunity to have a career—albeit an unpaid career—and have a marriage and have children," she says.
The 1930s and '40s were the heyday of the rebbetzin's role, Schwartz explains, a time when Jewish immigrants were adjusting to their new country and rabbis' wives were respected in the community and sought after for their guidance and strength. By the postwar period of the 1950s, says Schwartz, "women were already trying to measure up to what they had seen as larger-than-life rabbis' wives" of the earlier generation.
But by the 1960s and '70s, and even up to the present day, increasing numbers of rabbis' wives were "resentful" of the expectations placed upon the rebbetzin, to be what they saw as an unpaid community resource. "You're hiring my husband, you're not hiring me" became the common refrain, Schwartz says.
Schwartz says that Christian ministers' wives, doctors' wives, politicians' wives and military wives have historically faced similar challenges, and she hopes the book will appeal to a diverse audience.
NYU Press also hopes the book will have appeal for both academic and general audiences. The press has plans for targeted advertising in national Jewish publications, as well as a presence for the book at conferences like AAR/SBL, the American Jewish Studies Association, and women's studies and American studies academic meetings in the coming year.
"It's an important work of historical recovery," says Fred Nachbaur, marketing and sales manager at NYU Press. Rabbis' wives "had a very interesting role, but it's never been explored." —Holly Lebowitz Rossi
Wendy Farley
Hurt and Healing
At 41, Wendy Farley—scholar, theologian and associate professor of religion at Emory University since 1988—lost the ability to read. Tragic family circumstances left her with an 18-month migraine, an episode of post-traumatic stress disorder and a six-year forced hiatus from the books that were not only essential to her professional work but also important for her own well-being.
During this time, Farley taught (when she was able) without her customary rereading of every book her classes addressed, something that "was like walking over an abyss without a net," she says. There were some advantages, though: "I found that instead of paying real close attention to each word and sentence, we could pay very close attention to the ideas, so it kind of took me to another level of analysis."
Farley also listened to a lot of religious folk music—primarily by women—and was captivated by the recurring theme of suffering. The suffering of these women was never linked to sin, as though they needed forgiveness. Instead their oft-repeated refrain was "Jesus makes you strong enough to get through." It was this folk music that inspired Farley to begin writing her new book, The Wounding and Healing of Desire (Westminster John Knox, Oct.). A companion CD of folk music, Weaving Heaven and Earth, produced by Farley's friends Liz McGeachy and Tim Marema, is available at www.lizandtim.com.
Why we suffer is the book's theme, according to Farley, who says she has moved away from the traditional Christian theological view of suffering, with its emphasis on sin. "Instead," she says, "I look at the ways our own psychic and spiritual lives bind us to ways of life that are self-destructive, particularly at experiences of victimization." Her starting place is "a pretty radical theology of the love of God, the goodness of God. I approach wounding with the metaphor of bondage rather than guilt."
Farley looks at contemplative practices as ways to release that bondage, drawing on her own experiences with both Buddhist and Christian practices. She also draws on desert ascetics and women mystics like Mechthild of Magdeburg, Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila. "I was struck by how much I share their sense of the utter goodness of God and the presence of God in suffering."
Donald McKim, academic and reference editor for WJK, says there are several things that make Farley's book stand out. "Wendy is tapping into sources that are not always prominent in the West. Then there's her use of language; her voice picks up on human experiential reality. And because she's using desire as the dominant paradigm for telling the Christian story, she makes everything sound fresh and different and new."
In some ways, the book is not a traditional academic book. Because it was written during the period when Farley was unable to read, it's light on footnotes. According to Farley, "It's more like poetry than a rigorous theological argument. But on the other hand, I am a theologian, and it is a conversation with these texts that have shaped me." McKim believes the book is appropriate for "seminary courses on contemporary theology or contemporary religious thought, courses that deal with sin and redemption, with women's experiences or feminist theology."
Nicole Smith Murphy, product manager at WJK, said the press is "in the midst of a substantial print media publicity campaign and is positioning the book to be carried at the major trade bookstores." —Lori Smith
