The Book And The Sword: A Life Of Learning In The Shadow Of Destruction

The words of the Talmud were the universe for David Weiss Halivni during his childhood in Sighet in the Carpathian Mountains. Before he was five he began his studies; by the time he was ten he had outgrown the towns teachers and started to learn at home with his scholarly impoverished grandfather. Even before his ordination at the age of fifteen in 1943 he was famous for his erudition. But when the Nazis crushed the Jewish community of the Carpathians in 1944 he closed his Talmud. Halivni taught in the concentration camps and risked his life to save a scrap of paper from a sacred book. But adherence to the fundamentalist worldview that insists on reconciling every apparent contradiction in the texttroubling to him even as a childhad become impossible for him now. When he arrived in New York after the war he began struggling toward the window of secular learning. From that synthesis emerged his original approach to critical study of the Talmudic text not only in its modern printed form but as it was in its original form the Oral Torah from the mouths of countless sages.