The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus (review)

If you take the Torah seriously but midrashically; if your understanding is informed and enriched by reference to Walter Benjamin, William Blake, Isaiah Berlin, Italo Calvino, Jacques Derrida, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Søren Kirkegaard, Rav Kook, Thomas Mann, Stephen Mitchell, Susan Sontag, George Steiner, Wallace Stevens, Ludwig Wittgenstein, et al.; if you savor sentiments like “It is only by taking the real risks of language, by rupturing the autistic safety of silence, that the self can reclaim itself”; then I recommend highly The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus, by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg.

The book is conveniently divided up into weekly Torah portions. One chapter every seven days is about all the average, intelligent reader will be able comfortably to digest. Zornberg’s is a subtle, hip approach to midrash, with a modern sensitivity to psychol ogy, politics, and literary deconstruction. Alas, it makes virtually no reference to modern academic biblical or rabbinic studies. From this book you will learn a little bit about the biblical book of Exodus, a fair bit about rabbinic midrash, and a great deal about the author—what she has read, how her mind makes connections, how the Bible and its midrash are relevant for a modern woman and scholar. One suspects the author of being a brilliant conversationalist.

Most, I am certain, will find Zornberg’s work stimulating. It is far more readable than much modern criticism. If, however, like this dyspeptic reviewer, your biblical exegesis is more informed by the archaeological and philological discoveries of the past two centuries, if a Beethoven piano sonata does not inevitably bring to mind Milan Kundera or the Bible, then The Particulars of Rapture will embody “the unbearable heaviness of reading.”.