Your Humble Blogger came across Anita Diamant when looking for info about my Perfect Non-reader’s naming ceremony. The New Jewish Baby Book was pretty clearly the best of breed, and was written in the sort of voice that made me interested in reading more of her stuff. I can’t remember whether it was Living a Jewish Life or How to Be a Jewish Parent that I picked up and browsed through, but whichever it was, looked pretty good. My Best Reader picked up The Red Tent at the library a couple of years ago and adored it; I, er, haven’t got around to it yet. Maybe soon.
Anyway, Ms. Diamant’s newest book, Pitching My Tent: On Marriage, Motherhood, Friendship and Other Leaps of Faith (New York: Scribner 2003), is a collection of short pieces from her days as an essayist and columnist. There are more than fifty of these, mostly around four pages long. Some of them are duds, I admit, and some of them are pretty good, and some are oh-that’s-just-so-perfect, and some of them are tears-streaming-down-the-face that-just-changed-my-whole-life great.
Which isn’t bad.
Ms. Diamant is a thoughtful, skillful writer who has thought a lot about her religion and her life, and really likes praying in shul. She likes tradition, as I do, and for much of the same reasons I do. She distrusts tradition, as I do, and for much of the same reasons I do. So I’m bound to like a lot of her stuff. But I certainly don’t agree with everything she says, and I enjoyed reading the stuff I disagreed with, too.
OK, a couple of paragraphs, for those of you who will like them:
The Hebrew word “rabbi” means “teacher.” For much of Jewish history, when someone said, “He is my teacher,” he was very nearly genuflecting. To call someone “my teacher” was to hint at a relationship of intimate and ultimate importance. It meant, “I would not be who I am were it not for what I learned from this person.” It meant, “I am proud of the part of me that was influenced by this teacher.” The Talmud goes so far as to say “He who teaches a person, it is as if he had created him.”
Teachers no longer enjoy this kind of esteem. “Teacher” is a word without much clout or mystique in America, Jewish Americans included. Compare the impact of “my daughter the teacher” with “my daughter the surgeon,” or “my daughter the assistant district attorney,” or “my daughter the concert pianist.”
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.
The book sounds cool. But I’m curious about something unrelated: what are you going to use for a naming scheme when your Perfect Non-Reader learns to read?
Is the Perfect Non-Reader known by that name because they don’t read yet, or because they don’t read Tohu Bohu? My guess is that even after a couple of years of reading, the Perfect Non-Reader may not be a Reader of intellectual political commentary.
I only hope they continue to seem Perfect.
Jacob