To Dwell Within Them

A leading scholar of Jewish mysticism with Hasidic insight for every Shabbat Arthur Green has been the leader of a neo-Hasidic revival in modern American Judaism for the last half-century. All of that comes together in this new book of Torah interpretation. His reflections on the weekly Torah portions are replete with the sense that the text is torah, teaching, and we are here to learn from it. This is done by entering the text and its reality. The frequent refrain of the early Hasidic sources (“Torah is eternal, speaking to each generation. What does this text have to teach us today?”) is echoed loudly, here, for a new generation of listeners determined to set its own course. Even in original Hasidism, while the vocabulary of postmodernism hadn’t yet emerged, there was a growing sense of the readers’ right to take an active role in allowing the text to speak. Twin understandings of this process, one seeing a new generation of seekers wanting to enter the text, and the other seeing the ancient sources in quest of new and creative readers and interpreters, have continued to emerge in tandem over the past half-century. This way of reading Torah has entered many synagogues as well. And that is the spirit in which the present collection of divrey torah is offered. Rabbi Green does not need to call for a new renaissance of the midrashic art or the Hasidic boldness in reading scripture. This rebirth is already underway—and here it is being noticed and nurtured.