Book Summary
In her first book, Genesis: The Beginning of Desire, based on her immensely popular weekly lectures in Jerusalem, Avivah Zornberg reanimates the ancient characters of the Bible through her lyrical prose and modern sensibilities. Zornberg illumines the inevitable tensions that grip human beings as they search for and encounter God: the disorder that threatens order, the instability that shatters stability. On the one hand, she writes, we are reassured to find our own tensions reflected in these ancient texts. But on the other hand, the midrashic strategy we bring to the texts will not comfort us with a formalized, serenely fixed image of human life, with pious homiletical messages to shore up our insecurities. For the Torah that seemed so accessible is more multi-layered than we knew; it can be approached only by the strenuous and imaginative 'making' of the reader. Zornberg magically weaves together biblical, midrashic, and literary sources into a seamless tapestry as she wrestles with the parshiyot, the weekly biblical readings, and illuminates the tensions that grip human beings as they search for an encounter with God.
Book Details
| Book Name | Genesis: The Beginning Of Desire |
| Author | Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg |
| Publisher | Jewish Publication Society Of America (Oct 1995) |
| ISBN | 9780827605213 |
| Pages | 456 |
| Language | English |
| Price | 1811 |
