Lore Segal
By Lore Segal
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Culture Moses’ 120th Birthday
On his 120th birthday, Moses addresses the Israelite people encamped outside Jericho: I don’t walk as well as I used to, he tells them. (Elsewhere we learn that his powers are divinely undiminished, but we had better be willing to accept two truths for the price of one in life as well as in story.)…
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Culture The God In the Translation
The sadness of reading Torah without benefit of Hebrew has small compensations: I’m forced to look for — to participate in — the struggle of translators wrestling every last meaning from the original in order not to miss the god in the detail. The first half of the first sentence of this week’s portion offers…
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Culture God’s Dream of a Holy Nation
The week’s portion relates two events, a pleasant one between a man and a man, and the one central between the godhead and mankind. There is a charm in reading about an ancient iconic figure in human trouble to which there is a sensible human solution. Father-in-law Jethro tells young Moses he is overdoing it…
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Culture The Bible’s Babies
Some 50 years ago, on a radio program called “Invitation to Learning,” Mark Van Doren argued that we betray biblical literature by reading it as literature instead of sacred text. I have always remembered this and sadly. If it’s so, the deficit is mine. I read the book not as a believer but as a…
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News Acts of Holiness
When Jews strike the breast for each item in the comprehensive list of human sins it is a communal confession; it was of the nation that holiness was required. I ask leave to think personally and tell an anecdote I’ve told before. In the bitterly cold winter of 1938 I sat in the vast glass-and-iron…
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Culture Left Alone, at the Edge of the World
Lifesaving Letters: A Child’s Flight From the Holocaust By Milena Roth University of Washington Press, 192 pages, $24.95. * * *| Little Milena Roth and her parents lived an ordinary middle-class life in a pleasant part of a Jewish district in Prague. It was a large, close-knit family with grandparents and many cousins. Milena remembers…
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News The Lord Is a Great Writer
When Torah commands us to identify with the crowd at Sinai, it means for us to be one with the community of Israel. But can we identify with our fore-fathers and -mothers in the other sense of the word? Can the 21st Century New York apartment dweller imagine the experiences of a Middle Eastern desert…
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News What Did Adam Know And When Did He Know It?
We breathe Genesis with the air, as if we need never to have read a Bible to list the creation of light and dark, land, sea and heaven, animals and vegetables, time, work and holiday, and the beautiful idea that these things are Good with the inevitable corollary that other things are Bad, followed, hard…
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