Wow, it's been awhile since I've written on this blog! I was out on maternity leave for a couple of months, and now I'm finally getting back into the swing of things. As we head into the summer months, I thought I'd suggest a few terrific blogs to read / follow... by a father/son duo...
The first blog I recommend reading is called "God Didn't Say That." It's by Dr. Joel Hoffman, who is an expert in Hebrew / biblical translations. Many of his posts are fascinating, including one I read recently that's called "Sometimes the right word is the wrong word to use when translating the Bible." His post reminds me of something I learned in rabbinical school, which is that translating literally from one language to another doesn't necessarily tell you what the original text meant. For example... let's say you were living two thousand years from now (i.e. in the year 4012), speaking a completely different language, and you 'discovered' a copy of the New York Times (in English) from our current era. The headline of the paper said "Wall Street Crashed Yesterday", and you were trying to translate it from English into your current language. Using a dictionary, you looked up the words "wall", "street", "crash", and "yesterday," and you would probably assume that the article was referring to a street that had a wall on it or near it, and the wall fell down yesterday. Obviously you and I know that that has nothing to do with the real meaning of the headline... but that's because we know what the phrase "Wall Street" means, and what it means when Wall Street "crashes" - it's not at all about a street with a wall. As this little example highlights, translation can be a very tricky business, especially when we are translating texts from hundreds or even thousands of years ago!
The second blog I want to recommend is by my former professor and mentor, Rabbi/Dr Larry Hoffman (father of Joel Hoffman). Rabbi Hoffman is an expert in liturgy, worship, and ritual (among other things), and his blog is called Life and a Little Liturgy. His posts are fascinating, including his latest, "The Bible is Fiction" as well as one from a couple weeks ago called "Why we need synagogues, or what synagogues need to be."
Hope you find these blogs thought-provoking... let me know if you have any responses and/or questions for me to address here!
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