Jun 11, 2012
Book Review; Destiny's Call
NOTE: I was not paid to review this book. It is an unbiased and objective review. If you have a book with Jewish or Israel related content and would like me to write a review, contact me for details of where to send me a review copy of the book.
Book Review: Destiny's Call
I received the book, "Destiny's Call" by Ben-Tzion Spitz a while back. Destiny's Call, Book One - Genesis is a book in the category called "Biblical Fiction".Biblical fiction is taking characters out of the Bible and creating stories around them. Biblical fiction is a tricky category for a religious audience. I know many people who are opposed to the idea of biblical fiction, and rate it almost near heretical levels. Other people, on the other hand, are fine with it. The reason why some oppose biblical fiction is because by creating stories around the characters of the Bible, basically humanizes them and endows them with the same faults, the same desires, the same challenges that we face and experience.
Destiny's Call is a small book. It has one story per parsha from Sefer Breishis, and each story is just a few pages long. At the end of each story is a bibliography of sources from where Spitz created the details of the story. At the end of the book is about 10 pages of questions for discussion based on the topics embellished on through the book. And after the questions is an essay explaining why he wrote the book in this style.The book itself contains fascinating stories. Spitz is a talented story-teller. When I read the parsha, I imagine a bit how an incident might have developed. Spitz really weaves an entire tale to describe the situation and it all makes so much sense and fits so well together. And it reads like a great story, fiction or not. Of course, whether it is accurate or not is irrelevant, as it is Biblical Fiction, and not being sold as historical truth, but it does jog a persons imagination to picture a bit more fully the setting in which the stories happened.
The book is a fairly quick read. The stories are short and interesting. A person could spend much more time concentrating on the questions for discussion then he might on the stories themselves.
Personally, I enjoyed all the stories, but I particularly enjoyed the story entitled "Joseph's Egyptian Attorney". This was the story for Parshat VaYeishev, and it describes how Joseph might have been tried for his "attack" on the wife of Potiphar.
Destiny's Call is a fairly light book, an easy read, and a good book to read with one's children. It gives one a picture of what might have been, in a fuller sense of the picture, and encourages one to try to imagine the incidents of the Bible as if they were actually happening.
NOTE: I was not paid to review this book. It is an unbiased and objective review. If you have a book with Jewish or Israel related content and would like me to write a review, contact me for details of where to send me a review copy of the book.
------------------------------------------------------
Reach thousands of readers with your ad by advertising on Life in Israel
------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------
Reach thousands of readers with your ad by advertising on Life in Israel
------------------------------------------------------
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Related Posts
My objection to this is that one loses the clarity between what happened and what is portrayed. For this reason I have never watched The Ten Commandments, or any other Biblical narrative. Best to have in mind the picture painted by Rashi and your Rebbeim than some novelist.
ReplyDeleteThe irony of such an objection is that the Torah describes our foreparents in very realistic terms, and doesn't hide from us that they had "the same faults, the same desires, the same challenges that we face and experience." None of our 3 avot had an easy time raising their children, and there are many children of these giants who went OTD, and there are plenty of 'dysfunctional' families...We can learn a lot from how they coped or failed to cope with these challenges.
ReplyDeleteOther religions paint their gods as 'superhuman' powers with no human failings, but Judaism's founders are very easy to relate to and aspire to because they are so human.
While I enjoy reading Biblical fiction, for me the concern is knowing enough about the background and agenda of the author.
It doesn't bother me to read about the foibles of our forebears. But I don't want to distort what I view as the authentic vision in my brain composed by teachers with Yiras Shamayim. My image of Moshe is a lot different than what the media portrays Moses as.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this review, sound very interesting, I always wanted to know more about the backgrounds and circumstances of the Bereshis notables.
ReplyDeleteI understand this is fiction, nevertheless I’m intrigued now.