Babylon Background
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More on Monsters and Storytelling
Exploring Babylon Chapter 20.1 A Monster Chronology On March 15, I watched author Junot Díaz interact with a room full of youngsters, introducing his new book, Islandborn (Dial Books for Young Readers), discussing the writing […]
Monsters, Exile, and Storytelling
UPDATE: The event described here, including the brief interview with Díaz, took place on March 15, 2018. The piece below was posted on April 1. The New Yorker article, “The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood […]
Poverty and the White Horse’s Red Strap
Exploring Babylon Chapter 18-1/2 The previous chapter, “Exile, Passover, and Melting Pot,” looked at nine bible verses using the word “kur,” usually translated as “crucible” or “furnace.” This addendum shares the odd midrash on one […]
Exile, Passover, and Melting Pot
Exploring Babylon Chapter 18 “The Americas were far. The Americas were different. It was rabbinic exile.” This, writes Rabbi Oran Zweiter, is how European immigrant rabbis to the New World felt, beginning with Rabbi Isaac […]
Ezekiel, Exodus, and Babylon
Exploring Babylon Chapter 17 Recent scholarship concerning the prophet Ezekiel touches on some fascinating questions about the extent to which Judeans in Babylonian exile were acculturated and how cultural contact between Babylon and Israel might […]
Computing Failures and Babylon
The People’s calculations before the Golden Calf incident, like attempts to calculate the end of exile, yield disastrous results.
Lament for Mismatched Glassware
Exploring Babylon Chapter 16.1 At several points in the Megillah reading, the chant for the Book of Esther shifts to the Lamentations chant. The lament behind some verses seems clear: Mordecai’s introduction as a descendant […]
The Treasure and the Favor
Just as the stories of Exile and Return include people of quite different mindsets, Exodus peoples are not monolithic.
The Powers and the Wealth
Exploring Babylon Chapter 15.1 The battle between God and Pharaoh reaches a crescendo in this week’s Torah portion — Bo (Ex 10:1 – 13:16) — and the denouement includes an exchange of treasure between the […]
Babylon and New Beginnings
Exploring Babylon Chapter 14 The Joseph Cycle, which closes out the Book of Genesis, has it all, in terms of story-telling: politics, sex, family drama, passages that touch on religious and cultural practices, plus a […]
