The beginning of desire

In her first book, Genesis: The Beginning of Desire, based on her immensely popular weekly lectures in Jerusalem, Avivah Zornberg reanimates the ancient characters of the Bible through her lyrical prose and modern sensibilities. Zornberg illumines the inevitable tensions that grip human beings as they search for and encounter God: the disorder that threatens order, the instability that shatters stability. On the one hand, she writes, we are reassured to find our own tensions reflected in these ancient texts. But on the other hand, the midrashic strategy we bring to the texts will not comfort us with a formalized, serenely fixed image of human life, with pious homiletical messages to shore up our insecurities. For the Torah that seemed so accessible is more multi-layered than we knew; it can be approached only by the strenuous and imaginative 'making' of the reader.