Book of Legends/Sefer Ha-Aggadah: Legends from the Talmud and Midrash
The first complete English translation of the Hebrew classic Sefer
Ha-Aggadah brings to the English-speaking world the greatest and
best-loved anthology of classical Rabbinic literature ever
compiled. First published in Odessa in 1908-11, it was recognized
immediately as a masterwork in its own right, and reprinted
numerous times in Israel. The Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik and
the renowned editor Yehoshua Hana Ravnitzky, the architects of this
masterful compendium, selected hundreds of texts from the Talmud
and midrashic literature and arranged them thematically, in order
to provide their contemporaries with easy access to the national
literary heritage of the Jewish people -- the texts of Rabbinic
Judaism that remain at the heart of Jewish literacy today. Bialik
and Ravnitzky chose Aggadah -- the non-legal portions of the Talmud
and Midrash -- for their anthology. Loosely translated as
"legends," Aggadah includes the genres of biblical
exegesis, stories about biblical characters, the lives of the
Talmudic era sages and their contemporary history, parables,
proverbs, and folklore. A captivating melange of wisdom and piety,
fantasy and satire, Aggadah is the expressive medium of the Jewish
creative genius. The arrangement of this compendium reflects the
theological concerns of the Rabbinic sages: the role of Israel and
the nations; God, good and evil; human relations; the world of
nature; and the art of healing. Here, the reader who wants to
explore traditional Jewish views on a particular subject is treated
to a selection of relevant texts at his fingertips but will soon
become immersed in a way of thinking, exploring, and questioning
that is the hallmark of Jewishinquiry. "Whatever the
imagination can invent is found in the Aggadah," wrote the
historian Leopold Zunz, "its purpose always being to teach man
the ways of God." The Book of Legends/Sefer Ha-Aggadah, now
available in william Braude's superbly annotated translation,
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