Distinguished translator and critic Robert Alter expressed similar sympathy for the task Kushner had taken on for herself. \u201cExistent English versions have not paid sufficient attention to issues of style,\u201d\u009d he wrote to me, because \u201cmany biblical words do not map semantically onto their approximate English equivalents\u201d\u009d and \u201cthe structure of biblical Hebrew is so different from that of modern English.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n
Kushner writes in a chapter titled \u201cGod\u201d\u009d that her mother taught her that language isn\u2019t simply a collection of words. \u201cIt is an opening into a way of thinking,\u201d\u009d she writes, \u201ca view of the world, a naming of its neighborhoods. But it is not easy to make a language come alive for someone who does not speak that language; it is a challenge to rename the seemingly familiar and name the unfamiliar. The effort often results in clumsiness and misunderstanding. Perhaps that is why translators are often reviled.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n
One of the many pleasures of this new book is to see the process by which Kushner struggles to come to an understanding of the text in language that at once is poetic and does justice to its source. \u201cWhat Jewish law wants is an ongoing conversation between man and God, and between man and man\u201d\u201dbut most of all, between man and himself,\u201d\u009d she writes. \u201cIt\u2019s not a command, exactly, but a conversation: an inner song, full of melody and refrain.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n
The book\u2019s key message is that studying the Bible is never about just one solitary reading.<\/p>\n