Rabbi Jack Riemer on 70 faces
June 23, 2016
A while back I received a note from Rabbi Jack Riemer, author of one of my favorite revisionings of Unetaneh Tokef, and co-author with Sylvan Kamens of We Remember Them, which I use at every funeral. He had written a new review of 70 faces: Torah poems (Phoenicia Publishing, 2011), and his review was published in the South Florida Jewish Journal.
It's always a gift to receive a review of a book some years after its publication -- and especially so when the author of the review is someone whose work I so respect. Thank you, Rabbi Riemer! And thank you also for giving me permission to reprint the review in full on this blog.
70 faces: Torah poems
by Rachel Barenblat,
Phoenicia Publishing,
Montreal, Canada, 2015, 81 pages
Reviewed by Jack Riemer
We have had women rabbis for more than a generation now. We have a generation of young people who have never known it any other way. But if we stand back, we can see at least three contributions that women rabbis have made to our spiritual lives.
One is that women rabbis have given a whole new emphasis to the spiritual side of healing. We knew that rabbis were supposed to visit the sick, but women rabbis have given us a whole new perspective into the spiritual dimension of healing. A second contribution they have made is their emphasis on prayer as a matter of the inner life, which was always there, but which was and is often neglected. And a third contribution that women rabbis have made is the creation of poems that see God in a whole series of bold new images that we were not accustomed to seeing before.
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