For too long, Jews have defined themselves in light of the bad
things that have happened to them. And it is true that, many times
in the course of history, they have been nearly decimated: when the
First and Second Temples were destroyed, when the Jews were
expelled from Spain, when Hitler proposed his Final Solution.
Astoundingly, the Jewish people have survived catastrophe after
catastrophe and remained a thriving and vibrant community. The
question Rabbi Jonathan Sacks asks is, quite simply: How? How, in
the face of such adversity, has Judaism remained and flourished,
making a mark on human history out of all proportion to its
numbers?
Written originally as a wedding gift to his son and
daughter-in-law, "A Letter in the Scroll" is Rabbi Sacks's personal
answer to that question, a testimony to the enduring strength of
his religion. Tracing the revolutionary series of philosophical and
theological ideas that Judaism created -- from covenant to sabbath
to formal education -- and showing us how they remain compellingly
relevant in our time, Sacks portrays Jewish identity as an honor as
well as a duty.
The Ba'al Shem Tov, an eighteenth-century rabbi and founder of
the Hasidic movement, famously noted that the Jewish people are
like a living Torah scroll, and every individual Jew is a letter
within it. If a single letter is damaged or missing or incorrectly
drawn, a Torah scroll is considered invalid. So too, in Judaism,
each individual is considered a crucial part of the people, without
whom the entire religion would suffer. Rabbi Sacks uses this
metaphor to make a passionate argument in favor of affiliation and
practice in our secular times, and invites us to engage in our
dynamic and inclusive tradition. Never has a book more eloquently
expressed the joys of being a Jew.
This is the story of one man's hope for the future -- a future
in which the next generation, his children and ours, will happily
embrace the beauty of the world's oldest religion.
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