Why should we be excluded from the history and literature of
Judaism because the world of our fathers and mothers became a
secularized one, Geoffrey Hartman asks, or because religious
literacy, whatever our faith or community affiliation, has gone
into relative decline? And why, he asks, do those who have no
trouble finding pleasure and intellectual profit in the Greek and
Roman classics or in the literary and artistic productions of two
millennia of Western Christianity not easily find equal resonance
and reward in the major texts in the Jewish tradition? For if
Christianity and the classical inheritance stand as two pillars of
Western civilization, surely the third pillar is the Jewish
tradition.In "The Third Pillar" Hartman, one of the most
influential scholars and teachers of English and comparative
literature of recent decades, has brought together some of the most
important and eloquent essays he has written since the 1980s on the
major texts of the Jewish tradition. In three groupings, on Bible,
Midrash, and education, Hartman clarifies the relevance of
contemporary literary criticism to canonical texts in the
tradition, while demonstrating what has been--and what still
remains to be--learned from the Midrash to enrich the
interpretation of commentary and art, sacred or secular. "The map
of the discipline of Jewish studies] is still being drawn," Hartman
writes. "Barely known areas tempt the explorer, and major
reinterpretations remain possible. This third pillar of our
civilization . . . is only now being fully excavated: we have
discovered something but not everything about its structure and
upholding function."
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