A Concept

[debka_notion]

I've been thinking, on and off for a while, about setting up a reading list of stories and novels that fit conceptually with different parshiot of the Torah. I get a lot of inspiration out of reading regular old fiction, and I figure that this is another way of exploring Torah- rather like some of the theological reflection techniques that I learned in CPE- one of which involved taking an encounter, and coming up with related physical images, biblical stories/images, cultural images, and one more which I'm not remembering right now, and then using those to go back and think about the encounter. So, playing off the cultural and the biblical images- here's another little side project. The book that sparked it was Ursula K. LeGuin's "Four Ways to Forgiveness", relating to any of the parshiot in the desert as B'nei Yisrael start exploring freedom after being slaves.

Anyone else want to play with this idea with me?

Comments

[fiddledragon.livejournal.com]

That sounds fascinating!

[taylweaver.livejournal.com]

Not thinking of any particular stories at the moment - aside from the few very obvious ones like Card's books about the Imahot. But you just made me think of this week's parsha in particular, which talks about how one of the reasons God did some of the stuff that God did was, "and in order that you shall tell your children..." (can't recall where in the parsha it is, but gave a dvar torah on it a year or two ago). So I guess for this week's parsha, stories about telling/sharing stories. Actually, this week's parsha is so full of ideas and concepts that it's almost overwhelming (time being our own - or not, miracles and plagues, transmission of stories, slavery and freedom, transitions, things that happen in the middle of the night...)

Anyway, even though no stories come to mind at the moment, it's a very cool idea.

[debka-notion.livejournal.com]

You see, that's exactly why I'd love other people's ideas for this as well- I don't know that I would have thought of that one (not to mention that my tastes in books tend to fall into a fairly small range of genres most of the time). And I think it would make for a pretty awesome book club program, eventually...

[margavriel.livejournal.com]

Does it make sense that this reminds me of a game that a friend of mine plays with his Daf Yomi shiur, called "The Lubliner Strikes Again"?

The premise of the game is that when the Lubliner set the Daf Yomi schedule for all eternity, he thought of all the times when something on the daf would relate to the weekly parasha, the current events, the holidays which fall during the week, etc.

Today's daf contains a Rashbam which cites רבותינו שבלותיר -- our teachers in Lothair (AKA Lotharingia, Luther, Lorraine). And today was Martin *Luther* King Day. The Lubliner strikes again!

[debka-notion.livejournal.com]

Similar concept, yeah, although I'm eventually looking for more conceptual relationships that one might use to think about various ideas and experiences in the parsha.

[carnilius.livejournal.com]

That sounds cool, though I'm not as knowledgeable as I would like about parshiot. I have yet to read that Le Guin book -- is it a novel or short stories? She is my favorite author.

[debka-notion.livejournal.com]

It's a set of 4 novellas. I feel like a variety of her short stories would also work for different parts of the Bible, I just have to go back through some of them. Her writing is pretty incredible.

As for knowledge of Torah-if you can pair up with a bible story, I can always assign that to the appropriate parsha later...