Baruch Atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech Ha’Olam, Asher Kideshanu BeMitzvotav VeTzivanu, La’asok BeDivrei Torah. Hafoch Bah!

Text 1: Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism, p. 239

The Bible is not an end, but a beginning; a precedent, not a story. Its being embedded in particular historic situations has not deterred it from being everlasting. Nothing in it is surreptitious or trite. It is not an epic about the life of heroes but the story of every man in all climates and all ages. Its topic is the world, the whole if history, containing the pattern of a constitution of a united mankind as well as guidance toward establishing such a union. It shows the way to nations as well as to individuals. It continues to scatter seeds of justice and compassion, to echo God’s cry to the world and to pierce man’s armor of callousness.

…Narrative is a two-way street. Without our collaboration, there is no narrative to begin with. And if it is true that we allow ourselves to be manipulated by narrative, it is also true that we do manipulating of our own.

Text 3: Rita Charon, Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness, p. 231

… the power of narrative to affiliate into community and hence to amplify power on behalf of those who suffer. …[N]arratively obtained knowledge of the other, especially the other who has suffered pain ot trauma, can serve to improve health in the widest, most global frame by harnessing narrative as a force for freedom…

Text 4: Jacob Neusner, The Classics of Judaism, p. 7

The second trait of any book of Judaism, therefore, concerns how it makes sense, by which I mean, how sentences hold together to form coherent thoughts. Some books present propositions, evidence, and arguments, and so they make points the way argumentative books do. Others tell stories, and so sentences hold together through the power of narrative. Still others may conduct a systematic and consistent reading of some prior text, so that the authors make their points by saying the same thing about many things, over and over again. These are all familiar ways by which, in our own time, people write books. But there is a fourth way, and that is not so familiar. In this way, a prior text, for example a chapter of Scripture or of Mishnah, will provice the framework and structure that holds together different thoughts that do not relate to one another but do amplify sentences in that prior framework or structure. In simple terms, we should call that a commentary, that is, a piece of writing that not only comments on a prior writing, but also depends on that prior writing for sense and coherence.

Text 5: Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, p. 48-49

[A myth is different from a dream because] a dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is the society’s dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn’t, you’ve got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you. [If your private dreams are out of step with the public] you’ll be in trouble. If you’re forced to live in that system, you’ll be a nerotic. [Many visionaries and even leaders and heroes are close to the edge of neuroticism.] They’ve moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you’ve got to work out your life for yourself. Either you can take it or you can’t. You don’t have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience – that is the hero’s deed.