BOOK REVIEWS Jacob Neusner, The Halakhah, An Encyclopaedia of the Law of Judaism (Leiden: E.J.

Brill, 2000) ISBN 90-04-11617-6, 5 volumes, 3000 pp., $500. This is a powerful tool carefully designed to study, investigate, and further research on the halakhah, the most important (and least known) area of Jewish studies. In common parlance, halakhah designates the authoritative interpretation of Jewish law passing through the chain of tradition from antiquity to the present. In this work, halakhah stands for the norms of Judaism as contained in the classical documents of the Rabbinic Oral Law, roughly dating from ca. 200-600 C.E. These are: (i) the Mishnah, (ii) the Tosefta, and (iii) the Palestinian and (iv) Babylonian Talmuds. In consideration to the reader, citations are printed in four diVerent types, so that the source is immediately identi able. The aim is not to diVerentiate between these documents but of synthesizing the single, unitary message of the halakhah. With this purpose in mind each entry opens with An Outline of the Topic, describing the legal issues it comprises. The entry concludes with an Analysis: The Problematics of the Topic examining the problems peculiar to that particular law; ending with Interpretation: Religious Principles, probing onto the religious signi cance of the law. The net result is a very precise and clearly argued account, meticulously articulated in all its aspects and diversity. This approach makes the halakhaha highly complex subject even for rabbinical studentsfairly accessible and easy to handle. Wisely, the entries are not organized alphabetically. (A complete set of indices of subjects and textual references at the end of each volume is a much more re ned instrument in the hand of an intelligent reader than alphabetically arraigned entries). Rather they are structured along three major themes embracing the totality of halakhah. These are: Between Israel and God, dealing with the laws expressing the particular relationship between God and Israel (vols. I-II); Within Israels Social Order, focusing on the principles of justice
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regulating Israelite society (vol. III); and Inside the Walls of the Israelite Household, examining the norms governing the Jewish dwelling as the counterpart to Gods dwelling at the Temple in Jerusalem (vols. IV-V). One of the consequences of nineteenth century German Wissenschaft des Judenthums has been the examination of Jewish subjects within Western categories, which have been arti cially imposed on the subject. Ideas rarely cohere. An important aspect of this work is the development of native category-formation, that is, the explanation and expansion of Rabbinic categories underlying the religious logic and modes of emotion, giving intellectual and spiritual coherence to the halakhah. Accordingly, fty-eight category formations, each bearing the title of a Rabbinic tractate, head the entries. Each of these categories is discussed with insight and authority, wit and scintillating energy. This Encyclopaedia covers the entire corpus of the halakhahan exceptional feat! A word about the two levels of rabbinical studies would help us gain a proper understanding of this accomplishment. Rabbinic tradition recognizes two classes of sages, one only uent in the text ( gamir) of the Law, and another only uent in the theory (sabir) of the Law. To apply the Law authoritatively (horaa), a sage must be uent in both the text and the theory of the entire corpus of the Oral Law. There is logic to this requirement. Since situations are in constant ux, it stands to reason that one who is not uent in the theoretic apparatus underlying the text of the Oral Law should not be quali ed to speak authoritatively about it. It is generally believed that the Geonim, heads of the ancient Talmudic academies in Babylonia (eighth-twelfth centuries) were such scholars. These were national institutions. Therefore one may assume that the members of the academy would not have consented to have an unquali ed scholar at the helm. In the post-Geonic period, the situation changed. The material produced by Jewish legal scholars throughout the centuries prove that many were partially competent at the gamir and sabir levels. To ascertain that a sage has mastery of both these levels, he would need to have produced a work demonstrating not only total mastery at the gamir level but also an original sabir apparatus cohering the theoretic bases of the Oral Law in its totality. (Rehearsing someone elses apparatus would not suYce). This feat was accomplished only once. In his famous Mishneh Torah (1180), Maimonides meticulously codi ed the entire corpus

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of the Oral Law, structuring its theoretic apparatus along fourteen major categories (distributed in exactly one thousand chapters). No other such work, in either scope or method, has been produced. The Encyclopaedia of the Law of Judaism is a creative exposition, argued with clarity and assurance (sabir), of the entire corpus ( gamir) of the Oral Law. In the same fashion that Maimonides structured his work according to the values of his time and culture, Neusner has developed the same topic along structures and categories congruent with the inner dynamics of Western thought and culture. Written in crystalline and precise style, this is an indispensable source of reference full of new insights, constantly opening new windows into the intricacies of Jewish law. A truly inclusive work, it is designed for a wide audience, both Jewish and Christian scholars, for specialists as lay person. It is also an involving and highly provocative work. The author has the soul of a rebel. He passionately believes in the Torah, and I suspect that he occasionally has diYculty camou aging these feelings in scholarly discourse. Worse, he dares question standard wisdom and biases. As with his other works, this, too, constitutes a challenge to the establishment. His critics, in an exhilarating state of perennial disorientation, dont know what to do! As it were, every time Professor Neusner produces something new, he is saying to his critics: Rather than being nasty, why dont you show us what you can do. He also has the soul of a poet (rebels usually do). Here is one of many such gems: The Halakhah then serves as the medium of sancti cation of Israel in the here-and-now, in preparation for the salvation of Israel and its restoration to Eden (vol. 1, p. xix). Jos Faur Bar-Ilan University and Netanya College

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Alon Goshen-Gottstein, The Sinner and the Amnesiac. The Rabbinic Invention of Elisha ben Abuya and Eleazar ben Arach (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). In the series, Contraversions. Jews and Other DiVerences, eds. by Daniel Boyarin, Chana Kronfeld, and Naomi Seidman. 416 pp., ISBN: 0-8047-33887-2. Promising critical biographies of two Rabbinic gures of the late rst and early second centuries, but denying that critical biographies are possible, Alon Goshen-Gottstein, who is Director of the Institute for the Study of Rabbinic Thought, Bet Morasha, Jerusalem, cannot decide what he wishes to say, the problem he proposes to solve, the questions he wants to answer. So he leaves for the reader the task of writing a book out of a mass of data, never subjected to a single analytical program. The plan of the book masks its prolixity and confusion. He covers these subjects: the quest for Rabbinic biography: history, hermeneutics, and ideology; then seven chapters on Elisha ben Abuya, attending to methodological considerations, Elisha in Tannaite literature, Elisha in post-Tannaite sources, Bavli Hagigahs stories about how he came into sin; Elisha and his disciple Meir, the story as it occurs in the Yerushalmi, nally: Bavli and Yerushalmi: ideology, literary formation, and historical in uence. Then for the second gure, Eleazar ben Arach, a critical biography, he provides only one chapter: Eleazar ben Arach, symbol and reality, and by way of conclusion: collective Torah culture and individual Rabbinic biography. There is an appendix with the Hebrew text and variations of the passage of Bavli Hagigah. The footnotes run from p. 286 to p. 402. Goshen-Gottsteins problem is that he acknowledges that the Rabbinic documents are not so constructed as to sustain biography in any conventional sense, but he wants to write a book of Rabbinic biographyindeed, two of them, a long one, and a brief one, as indicated. As a result, he engages in a constant dialogue with questions of critical history (even asking for verbatim reports of dialogues that actually took place), wanting to know whether a given story really happened, or what details thereof can have taken place, and so forth interminably. But all this is for naught, since, as he says, My working assumption is that texts should not be treated as a reservoir of information in which we can nd answers to historical or other concerns of a later culture. We should try to discover their
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internal concerns, to study their exegetical, contextual, and literary components and not just the historical dimension. Well said; no one outside of small circles in Jerusalem would disagree. His goal is to identify the true concerns of the text . . . the life of the sage is often little more than a vehicle to express ideas that are signi cant for the sages and story-tellers. The only question is, how well has he executed his plan? The answer is, not very well at all. His program is imperfectly executed. Because Goshen-Gottstein has not framed a strategy of exposition and argument, he has left to the reader the task of writing the book out of these research-notes and observations. He excels at dismantling prior approaches but has diYculty clearly and in a focused manner constructing his own. I cannot overstress that this is not because good ideas are lacking; it is, rather, because there is no system or order in realizing them. The book is disorganized and confused; the exposition is a mass of inchoate detail, the main point being buried and not realized. His personal translations of texts are awkward and sometimes just not comprehensible. Paragraphs wander hither and yon, emerging far from their topic, making no clear point, and the thread of exposition is constantly getting lost. The footnotes run on and on, as the author passes his opinion on this and that. In all, the book is amateurish. Stanford University Press should employ manuscript-editors to make certain its books are readable. Unsystematic, confused, and ailing about in all directions, GoshenGottstein has missed the mark. He could have produced a documentary history of ideas, but has not done so. He might have framed an account of the Rabbinic system as illustrated by the stories at hands, but such an account does not emerge in an orderly manner. He could have illuminated sublime stories but has buried them in recondite obscurities. The upshot is he has abandoned the complementary worlds of the Yeshiva, with its powerful hermeneutics of theology and law, and the Israeli university, with its paralyzing heritage of historicism, but he does not then address the secular academy within its norms and by its logic. Goshen-Gottstein is left in the liminal position of that very interstitial gure that he portrays in the person of Elisha ben Abuya. At what cost? He has turned vivid stories into a boring exercise of sterile academicism. Jacob Neusner Bard College

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Rivka and Ben-Zion Dorfman, Synagogues without Jews and the Communities that Built and Used Them (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2000). ISBN 0 8276 0692 3, 368 pp., $50. When Jews move on, they leave behind cemeteries and synagogues, spore of Israels bones, fragile monuments to Israels indomitable spirit. For, outside the land of Israel, no space is holier than any other, none a worthier location for Jewish settlement. A wise professor at Haifa University once remarked to me, What diVerence does it make whether or where Jews live in Mississippi or in Moscow? All that matters over time is living in Eretz Yisrael. But this remarkable record of bare, ruined synagogues by quintessential wandering JewsJews in years of quest for Jews remnants and recordstakes the other view: it matters. Remember! In this exquisite book we do. The Dorfmans went in search of synagogue art and architecture through the cities and towns of southern and central Europe. They traveled for fty-four weeks and photographed 350 synagogues. They interviewed residents where they could and collected documents where they found them. Then they went to the library and followed up, town by town, synagogue by synagogue. Every community had its own history, but all of them ended in the same place. This superb memorial book preserves the material and visual record of European Jewry that perished in the Holocaust out of places few knew Jews lived. Each chapter follows the same pattern: when Jews came to the place, what they did and what happened to them there, noteworthy events and personalitiesand the end. Then there is an epilogue on the fate of the material remnants of the communities: what has happened to these synagogues without Jews in the world beyond the abyss. We cannot list the names of the personsthe dozens from here and hundreds from therewho lived their ordinary lives but died in extraordinary circumstances. But we can remember the names of the places memorialized by the Dorfmans: in Italy, Ancona, (1550, 1635), Casale Monferrato (1595), Gorizia (1699), Mondovi (1700), Mantua (1751), Trieste (1912); in Croatia and Serbia (Dubrovnik (1408), Osijek (1903), Subotica (1903); in Greece: Rhodes (1577), Veroia (1850), Ioannina (1829); in Austria: Eisenstadt (1700), Graz (1892), St. Poelten (1913); in the Czech Republic, Bohemia and Moravia: Mikulov (1550), Kojetin (1614), Trebic (1700), Polna (1684),
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Breznice (1725), Jicin (1840), Pilsen (1892); in Slovakia: Svaty Jur (1790), Bardejov (1830), Liptovsky Svaty Mikulas (1845), Vrbove (1883), Trnava (1892), Presov (1898), Lucenec (1925); in Hungary: Apostag (1822), Papa (1846), Koszeg (1859), Gyor (1870), Szeged (1903). Every synagogue is photographed, the layout and design recorded, and the Jewish communitys history reviewed, start to nish. The Dorfmans remember their visit to the place and tell about the people they met. Then there is a section on women in the synagogues (a gallery of women), a chapter on the Italian synagogue through the ages by Noemi Cassuto, another on synagogue interior decoration and the Halakhah by Shalom Sabar, and an essay on spirituality and space by Rudolf Klein. So many people collaborated in the work that the book represents a monument, erected by the Jewish People, to the Jewries of distant lands, some bereft of their ancient Jewish communities, a few still possessed of them. When after two or three generations, young Jews these days leave small towns like Sioux City or Tupelo, Kimberly or Bloemfontein or Christchurch, it is for Chicago or New Orleans, Johannesburg or Auckland or Sydneyor Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. When they left Rhodes or Graz or Trebic, where they had been resident for centuries, it was to a single destination. At least there is the record in word and picture. The Dorfmans have created a monument, but they have also published a powerful, beautiful, aVecting book, a treasury of the spirit of the Jewish People in its material expression in holy buildings. Here is how beauty in material culture of the synagogue celebrates that intangible life of Israel that lasts. Jacob Neusner Bard College

Mary Douglas, Leviticus as Literature (Oxford University Press, 1999), ISBN 0-19-815092-X, 280 pp. Mary Douglas sees Leviticus as a carefully composed structure, each detail accessible of explanation within a single overriding theory: the book of Leviticus structured as a tripartite projection of the tabernacle and thus also as a projection of Mount Sinai (p. 195). She
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thus nds in Leviticus a tripartite structure, yielding a correspondence between the tabernacle in the desert and the parts of Mount Sinai. The central idea of this book is that Leviticus exploits to the full an ancient tradition which makes a parallel between Mount Sinai and the tabernacle. She points to various antique transpositions between houses, bodies, and Temples and wishes to draw a parallel between the desert tabernacle and Mount Sinai. Mountain and tabernacle were each divided into three zones, each zone represented a further step in approaching God, the graduated holiness coming to a double climax at the top of the mountain and in the inner recesses of the tabernacle (p. 59). And again, The rst chapters of Leviticus have introduced a microcosm at three levels, with the tabernacle and Mount Sinai transposed on to the dismembered trunk of the sacri cial animal. The worshippers body has already been paralleled to the altar by shared restrictions on animal foods and animal sacri ce (p. 176). Mountain, Tabernacle, Body in Leviticus 1-7 argues, When Deuteronomy speaks of sacri ce, sacri ces is all that it means. But Leviticus has taken sacri ce in the same spirit as the wisdom literature uses seafaring, trade, or horticulture, and made it the framework for a philosophy of life. Sacri ce is one of the main gural motifs with which it presents the principles of Gods creation and the divine order of existence (p. 66). Douglas advances the comparison between Deuteronomy and Leviticus in these terms: the question of whether the Levitical laws supported the idea of one central shrine at Jerusalemthe two books are at odds; the other is the question of cults of the dead, on which they are at one (p. 87). Concerning the pure and impure land animals, she holds, The animal taken into the body by eating corresponds to that which is oVered on the altar by re; what is disallowed for the one is disallowed for the other; what harms the one harms the other (p. 134). Along these same lines: Thinking on the lines of binary opposition, the Leviticus writer nds the world divided into two kinds of humans, those under the covenant and the rest, and two kinds of land animals, those under the covenant and the rest. But the rest are not evil (p. 152). The uncleanness laws are treated in the same framework (p. 176): Another microcosm of the sanctuary in danger of de lement is to be built from the human body prone to sickness. The upshot is stated in this language (p. 217): Gods compassion and Gods justice would be revealed to anyone allowed to pass through the screens and able to read the testament

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of the covenant hidden in the most holy place. Only the high priest can do that, but anyone can know what is there from reading the book. So too she states, When the second screen has been passed, the reader is standing inside the holy of holies. This is the apotheosis of the principle of containing forms. Jerusalem is the center of the world, in the center of Jerusalem is the tabernacle, in the center of the tabernacle is the ark of the covenant. The virtual pilgrim with book in hand knows that he has arrived at this hidden place because in chapter 26 the Lord God proclaims his covenant no less than eight times. In the innermost, holiest part of the tabernacle, under the shadowing protective wings, the testament of the covenant lies in the coVer or ark. At the very end of the book, the enigmatic analogies are nally expounded. Read chapter 26 and nd nothing less than the terms of the covenant itself, strict reciprocity, honorable dealings, and simple fairness (pp. 241242). All of this writing in parallels emerges: It is only possible to write in parallels because it is a way of thinking, which is also a way of living in which it is impossible to organize except in terms of wholes and their halves, sometimes equal, more often unequal. Here Douglas advances ideas begun with Purity and Danger (1966), further elaborated in her work on Numbers, In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of De lement in the Book of Numbers (1993). She is no Johnnyone-note. She has considerably developed her initial reading of matters. But her writing presents its frustrations and makes this reader miss the lucidity and compelling insight of Edmund Leach, the other anthropologist who in our times has undertaken to read Scripture within the discipline of anthropology. First, Douglas cannot be described as a systematic and well-organized thinker; she rambles, she digresses, she quotes other scholars endlessly, one occasionally suspects more for good politics than necessary research. Consequently, she pads her pages with only marginally relevant discussions and does not pursue a clear point. In her behalf, I hasten to add, at some point at the start and end of each chapter, she does take the trouble to announce the topic and thesis of the chapter. It is what is in-between that is hard to follow. Second, this is a highly sectarian work. Douglas wholly depends upon a narrow selection of scholarly opinion, not having on her own mastered the sources on which she works or the scholarly traditions of her subject. So she engages with only part of scholarship on the subject and ignores a vast range of important learning. The range

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of her ignorance is staggering. One should expect a scholar of the book of Leviticus to master received readings of the same book, to acquaint herself with the issues and arguments that have focused on the very writing she proposes to read in a fresh way. But here Douglass reading is not only political but derisive: she simply ignores the principal Judaic tradition of reading Leviticus, as though the rabbis before our own day knew nothing, but the contemporary scholars know all that is worth knowing. And that is the case even though the entire corpus of Rabbinic reading of Leviticus is available in English. The consequent super ciality of her treatment of speci c points may be instantiated very simply. She dwells on some medieval Jewish commentators, cited by contemporary scholars whom she cites, but totally ignores the massive, systematic, and profound reading of Leviticus set forth by the Judaic sages in Sifra, not to mention Leviticus Rabbah. She alludes to Sifra only once, in a note to her statement (p. 13), Through two millennia Leviticus has been read through Deuteronomy, with divergences reconciled by imposing the Deuteronomic version on the Levitical one. Here she states, n. 2: The following is evidence that the school which produced the commentary on Deuteronomy also produced the commentary on Leviticus: The Sifra is a commentary on the whole book of Leviticus and is the production of the School of Akiba, which is also responsible for the Deuteronomic part of the Sifre. The fact is dubious, the reasoning obscure. The attribution of Sifra to the school of Akiba hardly stands so rm, in contemporary scholarship as to sustain Douglass judgment, and she oVers not a shred of evidence that she has opened the document and on her own found reasonbased on what is in the book to which she makes casual referenceto take such a dubious position. But she announces her fact with robust con dence indeed. And that is the sole point in her book at which the huge Rabbinic reading of Leviticus set forth by Sifra gures, and Leviticus Rabbah, which makes many of the points she makes here, she does not appear to have opened. Instead, she privileges the contemporary Scripture scholar, Jacob Milgrom, a highly accomplished gure to be sure but no competition for the sages of Judaism in acuity and perspicacity. Indeed, much of the book is simply a reprise of, and meditation upon, his opinions. It does not diminish the value of Milgroms scholarship on Leviticus to say that Douglas misses much of value in historical and contemporary learning of value and of relevance to her thesis. Third, a

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certain slovenliness mars the book throughout, a haste that is uncalled for. This is best illustrated in the bibliography. Speci cally, the footnotes refer countless times to writings not then identi ed in the bibliography at all. And a suitable level of meticulous work is hardly suggested by a bibliography that assigns books to the wrong author. Thus Baruch A. Levines Studies in Cultic Theology and Terminology appears in the list of Neusner, Jacob., editor, but not under Levines name at all. I did not write that book, Levine did. Nor is it obvious that Douglas has made much use of a huge part of the scholarship she lists. The disorganized and rambling quality of the whole suggest that Douglas has been given a pass by the scholarly world engaged by her subject. She is an anthropologist working on Scripture, hence not held to the standards of scriptural studies at all. So knowing Hebrew only in an elementary way and little else, she is celebrated in the biblical eld at a scholarly conference at Lancaster devoted to her ideas, another month in Jerusalem where the great names of the place assembled to pay their homage. But scholars do not ordinarily celebrate scholarship that is derivative, impressionistic, and unfocused. When visiting Brigham Young University, the Mormon center of higher learning in Utah, I was told about a remarkable work on the Latter Day Saint religion by Harold Bloom, otherwise not famous for scholarship on religion, religion in America, or the Latter Day Saints. I asked, Is the work remarkable by the standards of scholarship on the Latter Day Saint religion by specialists in the subjectdid you all learn things from it? Or is it remarkable because a famous scholar of literature has written a book about Mormonism? In Provo, Utah, what is remarkable is that the elephant dances, not that it dances awfully well. And so too with Mary Douglas, after thirty years: still the anthropologist, not yet the biblical scholar. Jacob Neusner Bard College

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Jonathan Sacks, Radical Then, Radical Now. The Legacy of the Worlds Oldest Religion. London, 2001: HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN 0 00 710842 7. 246 pp. I have read all of the British Chief Rabbis books and admired and learned from each one. Among them, this work of pastoral theology and apologetics, answering the question, why should I be Jewish? stands out as the most compelling. Here he is truly the chief among rabbis: the voice for them all, whether segregationist Orthodox or integrationist Reform. He has found his mtier as intellectual guide of this time and place. In the English language I know of no more urgent contemporary response to the existential question confronting Israel, the Jewish people, in every generationbut especially in this one. For with an intermarriage rate of fty per cent and a low birth rate, with decisions not to marry, the continuity of the Jewish people is called into doubt in much of the diaspora, and especially in Britain. The book follows a coherent outline: the question, the journey, the vision, the future. The contents are these: the question: why be Jewish? answers, who am I, who are we? A letter in the scroll; the journey: a palace in ames, the idea of man, covenantal morality, the chosen people; the vision: exodus and revelation, covenantal society, tragedy and triumph, truth lived; the future: in the valley of the shadow, ambivalence and assimilation, this is ours, why I am a Jew. The book was provoked by the experience of a group of university students, advised by the Chief Rabbi to write to exemplary Jews in all professions and callings, asking them what being a Jew means to them. They got six replies out of two hundred inquiries, none commensurate. So Sacks undertook to write the answer himself. He asks about times past when the question was raised for the rst time and nds himself in Spain, when the givenness of being Jewish came into question. Speci cally, in theological form, the question was raised, how could Sinai have imposed an oath on generations unborn: How can I be bound by a covenant enacted long ago in the desert by my distant ancestors? Systematically, Sacks reviews the answers of Arama, Abrabanel, Ezekiel, Hess, and others. His is as follows: God calls on us to undertake a journey . . . the vision they saw was compellingnot because of its coercive force, its implacable fate, but by its moral beautify and spiritual grace.
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That journey is spelled out here and covers the Judaic itinerary. It is recapitulated by addressing these questions: Who am I? What are the claims that Jewish identity makes upon me? Who are we? What is the nature of the collective Jewish journey that I am asked to continue? How did we lose our way? The answers bear the ring of truth, because Sacks tells his own story, the intellectual autobiography that he oVers in evidence, a brave gesture indeed. The argument is summed up in this formulation: how does where I come from tell me who I am called upon to be? The answer, articulated in many ways, is captured in the following:
Judaism [is] one of the noblest dreams ever to take hold of the human imaginationthe idea that God, in His lonely singularity, might reach out to an individual, then to a nation, in its lonely singularity, proposing a partnership whereby, deed by deed and generation by generation, together they might fashion a living example of what it is to honor the humanity of God and the image of God that is the human person.

The argument of the book is captured in that formulation, but the richness and density of the argument hardly come to expression in it. Then what of the contemporary crisis of faith? To this question he replies: When Jews began to de ne themselves horizontally, in terms of their relationship to those around them [represented by Emancipation and anti-Semitism], they found themselves pray to a range of syndromes from insecurity to aggression, from self-hatred to a narrow ethnic pride. Rather: Jewish identity . . . can never be merely horizontal, synchronic, secular, untouched by the still small voice of eternity and destiny. We are a vertical people, linked through a covenantal bond to the past, the future, and to heaven itself. Among Judaic classics of the genre of theological apologetics, such as Herman Wouks This Is My God and Milton Steinbergs Basic Judaism, Jonathan Sackss Radical Then, Radical Now nds an honored place: a systematic, original argument. When Judaism nds its voice to speak both out of and into the interiority of holy Israel, this is what it has to say. Whether those beyond the framework of the faith will hear the message I doubt. That is because the power of the book lies in nding coherent reason to believe and practice the faith for those who already believe and practice. As to those who stand on the exterior side of the border, in these pages they will nd no path inside. But I do not doubt that some Jews, at least, in these

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pages can nd strengthreason and emotion aliketo leap over the boundary-line. My own view is, most of the Jews beyond the circle of the faith do not resonate to the music of the faith: its melodies for them are just noise. To that we have come. Jacob Neusner Bard College