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March 2010/Adar 5770
A JOURNAL OF JEWISH RESPONSIBILITY
Stories & the
Jewish Narrative
Barry Shrage
Story Tellers: A New
Story of Jewish Identity . 1
Amichai Lau-Lavie
Restoring the
Sacred Story. . . . . . . . . . 2
Ken Gordon
iPhoning It In. . . . . . . . . 4
Josh Lambert
Serving a Shared
Culture. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Tali Zelkowicz
The Storying of
Jewish Education . . . . . . 6
Discussion Guide . . . . . . 7
Stephen Hazan Arnoff
The Ethnopoetics of
Jewish Study ......... 8
Siona Benjamin, Peter
Pizele, David Wander
NiSh’ma. . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Matt Bar
Bible Raps:
All TattedUp ........ 12
Gail Reimer &
Jayne Guberman
Stories to the Rescue . . 13
Josh Berer
Fieldwork in Yemen . . . 14
Lauren Bahary Wilner,
Adam Eilath, &
Jason Guberman-Pfeffer
Our Homes, Our Story. . 15
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh
Silence and Wondering . 18
Devora Kimelman-Block
Sh’ma Ethics:
Sustainable Agriculture . 20
Is There a Jewish Story?
Reflections by Chava
Weissler, Adrian Leveen,
Todd Hasak-Lowy &
Jerome A. Chanes
William Cutter
The Pain, the Patient,
and Subjectivity
Rather late in the process of putting together this issue, I asked four people who work with stories — writers, biblical scholars, and folklorists — to answer a simple but nuanced question: Is there a Jewish story? Their brief, pointed responses, interspersed
throughout the following pages, provide threads that weave together this issue of Sh’ma. What
began as an exercise in airing out our great historical narrative, the Pesach story — that is,
exploring how Jews continue to build on that story as a cultural and religious cornerstone —
emerged as a collection of reflections on our diasporic existence, our creative riff on Bible, our
deep and powerful culture of storytelling, and our broad interpretation of narrative.
Story Tellers: A New Story of Jewish Identity
BARRY SHRAGE
The ultimate impact of the leader depends most significantly on the particular story that he or she
relates or embodies… Leaders tell stories about themselves and their groups, about where they are
coming from and where they are headed, about what is to be feared, struggled against, and
dreamed about… The most basic story has to do with issues of identity. And so it is the leader who
succeeds in conveying a new version of a given group’s story, who is likely to be effective.
—Howard Gardner, Leading Minds
This year, Passover arrives at a time of great hope and frightening dreams, of pessimism and renewed optimism, of
darkness and vision — on the surface, assimi-
lation and decline; beneath the surface, ren-
aissance and renewal. For a moment, a brief
moment perhaps, the American Jewish com-
munity has the power to define itself, to tell a
new story.
