No such proximity between man and God is conceivable within Hebrew tradition, which constitutes the mainstream of Biblical and later Jewish thinking. God is above and man is below; God is one and man is many; the distance between them is not merely great, it is absolute; the relation between them is that between the spiritual All and a speck of dust. The one and only feature of virtue with which the Jewish narrative can endow its hero is his extraordinary ability to understand what God wants of him, and his equally extraordinary readiness to obey every divine command. Typologically, almost all the Biblical and later Jewish heroes conform to this single pattern: they are heroes of piety, giants of belief, masters to obedience. Their one and only heroic feat is to perceive and obey God's command.
Thus the Biblical and later Jewish hero is only partly mythical; mostly he is legendary. In contrast to the great human and semihuman heroes of pagan polytheistic traditions who are totally and full-bloodedly mythical, the typical heroes of the Biblical and later Jewish narratives are of a pseudo-mythical character in which the legendary features predominate. [1]
My first encounter with scholar Raphael Patai: The Arab Mind [2], which I read around the time I started this blog and its Internet-based venture into the Islamic Small Wars. With the companion, The Jewish Mind [3], I made little way, hanging a bookmark in an early chapter for months before admitting temporary defeat, vowing to return on some more leisured day.
Truth is, I could not have more leisured days, but of all the possible arts and letters activities laid out on one's table for choosing, reading at length may rank among the most challenging: one has to set aside all those other possibilities, including the whole smorgassbord of contemporary social communicating channels and the behaviors associated with them.
Add back to the new distractions the old one that entailed closing one's doors and letting the world pass by for the next turn of a page.
With a book, especially an engaging, great, and lengthy one, one may and must still disappear, bidding all competitors for attention a temporary and interminable stay by perceptual social cyber standards, .
Where is he?
What is he doing?
Is he still reading?
If carving time for reading (at length) has become an issue for post-Internet culture, imagine how Patai himself may have had to experience time--whole oceans of it--to produce his own formidable record of accomplishment.
Born a little more than 100 years ago, Patai's Wikipedia brief credits him with the authorship of more than 40 seminal works [4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael_Patai
A more detailed description of Patai's prodigious output has been provided in an obituary by Eva Hentschel:
At the outset of his career in America, Patai was approaching 40 and at the height of his powers. For close on five ensuing decades he issued a spate of publications, over 30 volumes in all, including a number of important editorial commissions: Herzl's diaries, an Encyclopedia of Zionism and Israel (1971), and even a series of handbooks on modern Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.
It was only two months after his arrival in New York that Patai received an unexpected letter from Robert Graves. This took the form of an appreciative commentary on Man and Temple in Ancient Jewish Myth and Ritual (1947), a revised version of the earlier Man and Earth in Hebrew Custom, Belief and Legend and, incidentally, the first of Patai's books to be published in English.
And on Hentschel goes, for with Patai, one never lacks for having one more good thing to say.
Should I read through the 800 plus pages of Gates of the Old City, I will claim that a minor accomplishment, but forgive me if I then overlook mention of the author for whom translating and compiling the same was but a schoolboy's project.
From Hentschel's obituary (I recommend the full reading--the excerpts here are the filigree):
Raphael Patai, anthropologist and historian; born Budapest 22 November 1910; Instructor of Hebrew Language, Hebrew University, Jerusalem 1938- 42, Research Fellow in Ethnology 1943-47; Professor of Anthropology, Dropsie College, Philadelphia 1948-57; Lecturer in Anthropology, New York University 1951-53; Director of Research, Herzl Institute 1956-71; Professor of Anthropology, Fairleigh Dickinson University 1966-76; married four times (two daughters); died Tucson, Arizona 20 July 1996.
Daughters Jennifer and Daphne [6] would seem to have proven formidable scholars themselves, but one may wonder what twists the contemporary communications, information, and media tsunamis have had on their journies.
This blog's readers know the prelude to my Sabbath: I shut down the computer before Kiddush.
Here on a Sunday afternoon with a volume of stories, access to which may be credited to Raphael Patai, comes another sort of prelude, indeed a gateway, but not to an old city--rather one reinvented and renewed.
Reference
1. Patai, Raphael. Gates to the Old City: A Book of Jewish Legends. Introduction, xix. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1981.
2. Patai, Raphael. The Arab Mind. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973.
3. Patai, Raphael. The Jewish Mind. New York: Jason Aronson, 1977.
4. Wikipedia. "Raphael Patai": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael_Patai
5. Hentschel, Eva. "Obituary: Raphael Patai." The Independent. August 7, 1996: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/obituary-raphael-patai-1308610.html
6. Wikipedia: "Daphne Patai": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Patai; Dr. Jennifer P. Schneider: http://www.jenniferschneider.com/
Other Reference
Thomas, Robert McG., Jr. "Raphael Patai, 85, a Scholar of Jewish and Arab Cultures." Obituary. The New York Times, July 25, 1996: http://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/25/arts/raphael-patai-85-a-scholar-of-jewish-and-arab-cultures.html
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Jim,
Glad you enjoyed your Sabbath. The move away from distractions always shows in your subsequent posts. I agree with the need to carve out a niche of time for uninterrupted reading. Believe me, I am trying! Really! smile
Best,
Tammy
Posted by: tammy swofford | March 07, 2010 at 03:06 PM