From the editor

I have been reading Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg's The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus with increasing pleasure and amazement. Putting the insights of midrash and contemporary critical theory into dialogue, she has articulated an important perspective, which builds on her earlier (and just as important) book, Genesis: The Beginning of Desire. As she guides me through the reading of Shemot, enriching the weekly parashot with a deft use of classical commentaries including the Chassidic masters, my Torah study leads me to reach for an understanding of our people's ancient history as present experience. In the words of the Haggadah, "bekhol dor vador khayav kol adam lee'rot et atzmo ke'ilu hu yatza mimitzrayim:" "in every generation each one of us must imagine himself as if he were leaving Egypt.

This idea was also part of the exchange between Robert Alter and David Grossman, on the first day of the conference on "The Future of the Holocaust," which took place last year in northern California. In his conversation with David Grossman on the Santa Cruz campus of the University of California, Robert Alter posed the following query: "The fact that you were told that you couldn't write about the Shoah because you didn't experience it reminds me that we celebrate Pesach every year--and we are told unambiguously that we must put ourselves into the Exodus regardless of the fact that we were not there. I wonder whether you see a parallel, and whether we are going to have a parallel experience as the years go by with the Shoah."

David Grossman's response was unhesitating: "Yes, it's a good comparison. In our Haggadah, in our Passover ceremony, we say that every person must see himself as if he or she, himself or herself, came out of Egypt in this Exodus. I believe we must do it. We must put ourselves there in the Shoah, and try to experience how it was like to be there. But may I add, as I said before, we must do it from both sides..."

These questions were at the center of the conference; five of the talks from that gathering of writers and scholars, are included in this issue.

The conference drew over five hundred people; it coincided with the opening performances of a dramatization of David Grossman's novel, See Under: LOVE, by A Traveling Jewish Theatre, that was seen by some three thousand people during its six week run. The stage adaptation and script were the work of Corey Fischer and received an award from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays-the nation's most distinguished honor for new theater. The event was embraced by the San Francisco Bay Area, San Jose, and Santa Cruz communities, and was underwritten by a host of donors, including the jewish Community Endowment Fund, the Koret Foundation, the NeufeldLevin Endowment for Holocaust Studies, the San Francisco Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

We are perhaps more ready these days to explore the complexities--the ambiguities and ambivalences, narratives and counter-narratives-of the Shoah than the Exodus narrative, which many have construed as the triumphalist epic of national Jewish liberation. Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg's turn to the midrashic sources undermines any binary or simplistic view of the story of Exodus; instead, it urges upon us the key questions of how each of us tells and retells this complex event, and in the process articulates its meanings. The question of narration and the articulation of difficult meanings is central as well to how we understand and experience the Shoah.

This Jewish habit--to put the imagination into play so as to make the past our present and thus articulate our future possibilities--forms the text, context, and subtext of this issue of JUDAISM. It figures throughout, including Judith Hauptman's essay on the Haggadah, the essays from the Holocaust conference, and Juduy Seligson's "Fire/Men," which responds to the terrorist attack of September 11. It is a fitting theme for this issue, which inaugurates the 51st year of publication of JUDAISM: A QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF JEWISH LIFE & THOUGHT. I hope you will join me in celebrating this achievement as we continue to engage in the ongoing work of the Jewish imagination.

Murray Baumgarten