Rabbi James Diamond leafs through Stringing the Pearls in the Wilf Chapel at Princeton University’s Center for Jewish Life/Hillel. Photo by Marilyn Silverstein
May 06, 2008
If reading the Torah can be described as a journey — a spiritual, intellectual, emotional, literary journey — then think of Rabbi James Diamond’s new book, Stringing the Pearls, as an exquisitely drawn road map.
The 210-page book, which has just been published by the Philadelphia-based Jewish Publication Society, is subtitled How to Read the Weekly Torah Portion. The guide may very well be the first and only one of its kind.
“As I wrote it, I said to myself, there’s nothing like this,” Diamond said as he relaxed with a cup of coffee at Princeton University’s Center for Jewish Life/Hillel, where he served as executive director from 1995 to 2004. “I felt I was making a contribution.”
The title of Stringing the Pearls comes from Midrash Rabbah, a commentary on a passage from the Song of Songs: “These are the portions of the Torah, which are strung together, and which draw upon each other, and which jump back and forth among each other, which resemble each other, and which share affinities with each other.”
The book, at its core, is a primer on reading and hearing the Torah and its 54 parashot, or portions. It provides a discrete methodology for processing the weekly Torah portion. Beyond that, the text offers a set of lenses through which to view each portion — lenses of history, art, midrash (explication and interpretation) and spirituality.
Stringing the Pearls also discusses the sources and writers of the Torah, explores the major approaches to reading a parsha, provides a concise guide to commentaries on the Torah, and offers guided readings of the parashot. Each section stands alone, inviting the reader to dip in at any point.
The idea for Stringing the Pearls simmered within him from his earliest days at the CJL, according to Diamond. One impetus for the book was his experiences as a member/leader of the Saturday-morning Conservative minyan there. Another was his role as a teacher of Bible for Me’ah, a 100-hour, Hebrew College course in Jewish history and thought that has been given at The Jewish Center and also in Cherry Hill over the past few years.
“In a way, teaching that class and having a connection with students was an impetus. It helped me to focus the book,” Diamond said. “But the book didn’t grow out of one particular experience. It grew out of a number of experiences that came together in my mind. I tried as far back as 2001 to write something about how we read Torah.”
The project simmered, but it never came to a boil until one day a couple of years ago, when a colleague made a comment that crystallized things in Diamond’s mind.
“He said, ‘I would like a book I can give to my congregants on how to make sense of a Torah portion. We have nothing,’” the rabbi recalled. “As soon as he said it, the whole thing went through my mind: the whole Table of Contents.”
As he wrote Stringing the Pearls, Diamond said, he had several kinds of readers in mind — adult study groups, havurot, rabbis, seminarians, educators interested in gaining a teaching tool, individual learners interested in relating to the text. The book also invites in Christian readers who may be interested in studying Jewish practice as a gateway to deepening their understanding of their own tradition.
“My goal was first of all to demystify the weekly Torah portion and sort of open the door to people who might not know how to go about reading it,” he said. “Many people — even people far along in Jewish knowledge — when they sit in synagogue and open up to the weekly portion still don’t have a context in which to read it. The book opens up to different kinds of readers a number of available contexts in which to make sense of the Torah.”
Another goal was related to his role as an academician, said Diamond, who is currently teaching a seminar on the book of Genesis in his role as a lecturer in Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies.
“There is a wealth of wonderful biblical scholarship around, and this knowledge is really only accessible to specialists,” he said. “The average intelligent reader doesn’t know about them. So part of my agenda was that I wanted to bridge the gap between the scholarship of the academy and the intelligence and interest of the non-specialist.”
Writing Stringing the Pearls was a journey in and of itself, the rabbi added. “It certainly allowed me to appreciate the amazing complexity and the multiple kinds of issues that reading this text can raise — literary issues, philosophical issues, religious issues, moral issues, historic issues, psychological issues,” he said. “There’s just so much there. It confirmed that there’s still a lot there left for us to process. It has not all been said.”
The publication of Stringing the Pearls has particular meaning for him, Diamond said, because it weaves together the two strands of his life’s work — the rabbinic and the literary.
“I’m a Gemini — the twins — because really there are two persons inside me,” he said. “I’m a rabbi and I’m an academic. In the Middle Ages, these two personae coexisted. In the modern period, the two have been sundered from each other. But both live within me.
“The rabbi got the better end of the deal in terms of number of years,” Diamond added. He noted that the primary focus of his 36-year career with Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life was the task of building institutions.
“On the other hand, to write a book is not much different from building an institution, because you’re creating something of value,” he said. “It’s the same creative energy. It’s just channeled in a different way.”
Excerpt from Stringing the Pearls
Each of the 54 portions, from the beginning of Genesis to the end of Deuteronomy, is a precious and exquisite pearl. Each of them has its place on the necklace to which it belongs. How many necklaces are there? Five? One? It doesn’t matter. The necklaces or the necklace is the Torah — which, in its totality, adorns the body of Israel.
Each time we read a parashah, we string another pearl onto its necklace. One by one we read them, week by week, from the time of the first frost through the dead of winter into the budding of spring and over the flowering of summer. …
This is how we read the Torah, and maybe, why we read it this way. Within the inexorable linearity of the progression of the years of our lives, there is the recurring cycle of the weekly portions. That moment when we finish Deuteronomy and immediately begin reading Genesis, again, is one of the most extraordinary moments in the Jewish calendar. … Simchat Torah marks off the beginning of the new cycle within which our renewed lives will unfold.
This means that with each passing year, as we string the pearls again and again, we should be reading and understanding Torah on a deeper and deeper level.
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