Leon Kass on Reading Ruth
The Tikvah Podcast
Tikvah
4.8 • 658 Ratings
🗓️ 24 May 2023
⏱️ 72 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Most everyone who reads it loves the book of Ruth, with its bucolic settings, its charming loves, its grace, and its devoted characters—Naomi, Boaz, and Ruth herself. Alongside that appeal, the book of Ruth also conveys truths about the human condition: about who children are and what they mean for the life of a woman, a family, and a nation; about the complementary human and divine sources of redemption; and about a distinctly Hebraic sense of the shape of a human life.
These ideas and more are offered up in a 2021 book about Ruth by Leon Kass and Hannah Mandelbaum, Reading Ruth: Birth, Redemption, and the Way of Israel. The origins of their book—a line by line commentary on Ruth—is itself a story no less moving than the text it interprets. Hannah Mandelbaum is Leon Kass's granddaughter, and they began to read the book of Ruth together while mourning Amy Kass, Kass's late and beloved wife of 54 years and Mandelbaum's grandmother. In so doing, they followed a path that Ruth herself treads, from desolation to gladness, with a distinguished Jewish future unfurling along the way.
Leon Kass is an emeritus professor at the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought, the author of many books, including studies of Genesis and Exodus, and the dean of faculty at Shalem College in Jerusalem. In this conversation, recorded at an event in 2021, he joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to talk about Reading Ruth and writing it with his granddaughter.
Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Jewish people will soon celebrate the harvest festival of Shavuot, |
| 0:11.9 | during which we also mark the moment when our ancestors received the Torah from God, |
| 0:16.7 | and when we affirmed our covenant with Him. |
| 0:19.4 | For many communities, it is traditional to study |
| 0:22.5 | Anshavuot the biblical book of Ruth. Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. |
| 0:28.6 | Today I'm bringing you a conversation that I recorded two years ago with Leon Cass of Shalem |
| 0:34.9 | College, who, together with his granddaughter Hannah Mandelbaum, |
| 0:39.1 | had then just published a new commentary entitled Reading Ruth, Birth, Redemption, and the Way of Israel. |
| 0:45.9 | It was published by Paul Dry Books in 2021. |
| 0:49.6 | If you enjoyed this conversation, you can subscribe to the Tikva podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, |
| 0:55.3 | Google Play, and Spotify, I hope you'll leave us a five-star review to help us grow this community of |
| 1:00.3 | ideas. I welcome your feedback on this or any of our other podcast episodes at podcast |
| 1:05.8 | at TikTokFund.org. And of course, if you want to learn more about our work at Tikva, you can visit our website, |
| 1:12.3 | tikvafund.org, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Here now is my conversation from 2021 with |
| 1:19.2 | Leon Kass. Most everyone loves the Book of Ruth, with its bucolic settings, its charming loves, |
| 1:27.3 | its grace, its devoted and worthy characters, |
| 1:30.3 | Naomi, Boaz, and Ruth herself. |
| 1:33.6 | But of course, alongside that appeal, the Book of Ruth also conveys truths about the human condition. |
| 1:40.5 | It has something powerful to say about who children are, |
| 1:46.7 | and what they mean for the life of a woman, |
| 1:48.9 | a family, and a nation. |
| 1:54.4 | It has something to say about the complementary human and divine sources of redemption. |
... |
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