Eriko Ishihara
Vocalist

+

Amy Baldwin 
Bass

(plus £5 for the artists) 

Dinner at 7.00pm
or 8.00pm

Jazz from 8.00pm

A CHANGE IN EVENT – SOCIETY FOR JEWISH STUDY MONDAY 5 FEBRUARY 8pm;

^{SOCIETY FOR JEWISH STUDY}

Rabbi Dr Norman Solomon

President of the Society

will discuss

Divided by a Common Scripture: How Jews Read the Bible

Until the late 1990s you could go into a synagogue in any English-speaking part of the world and follow the Reading of the Torah in the ‘Hertz Chumash’, first published in 1936 with Commentary and Notes by Chief Rabbi Hertz.

This has changed. Hertz is regarded either as outmoded (by Progressives) or heterodox (by Orthodox). Although the main denominations still read the same Torah portion from the same Hebrew scroll in the same week, they no longer read it in the same way. In many Orthodox Synagogues Art Scroll versions have replaced Hertz; since 1981 Reform congregations have preferred W. Gunther Plaut’s The Torah:  A Modern Commentary; and since 2001 Conservative (Masorti) Jews have had their own single-volume Etz Hayyim: Torah and Commentary.

What do these changes mean, and what do they tell us about the denominalisation of contemporary Judaism? Can it any longer be said that we all read the same Torah?

(For background information read Chapter 21 (pp.272-288) of Norman Solomon’s Torah from Heaven: The Reconstruction of Faith, published by the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization in 2012)

Non Members £5

Next Society of Jewish Study Event

Monday 5th March 8pm

Montefiore Endowment Lecture

Professor Martin Goodman

‘President of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies’

Will discuss his new book

A History of Judaism

by Martin Goodman

HB NF

Allen Lane  October 2017

For bookings please
call the bookshop
or restaurant