Smash­ing the Tablets: Rad­i­cal Retellings of the Hebrew Bible is arguably the most excit­ing cre­ative vol­ume devot­ed to bib­li­cal nar­ra­tive in years and brims with stun­ning scrip­tur­al and psy­cho­log­i­cal insights. The edi­tors’ Intro­duc­tion delves astute­ly into mat­ters such as the pro­duc­tive ten­sions between oral­i­ty and tex­tu­al­i­ty and divine ver­sus. human author­ship, two ques­tions at the heart of ancient Jew­ish scrip­tur­al tra­di­tion. From the out­set it becomes clear that both schol­ar­ly and gen­er­al read­ers will be reward­ed by this col­lec­tion, most of it pre­vi­ous­ly unpublished. 

For edi­tors Sara Lipp­mann and Seth Rogoff, as reflect­ed in the sto­ries, poems, essays, and cre­ative non­fic­tion of their twen­ty-three con­trib­u­tors (includ­ing recip­i­ents of Nation­al Jew­ish Book Awards and oth­er pres­ti­gious lit­er­ary prizes), Jew­ish sto­ry­telling and retelling is ​“essen­tial, core, foun­da­tion­al — rad­i­cal.” Fol­low­ing their brief but pro­fi­cient account of the role of midrash in inter­pre­ta­tion, the edi­tors pro­claim the ethos of Smash­ing the Tablets which ​“seeks to cap­ture the gen­er­a­tive ener­gy of the bib­li­cal text…the Bible’s open­ness to inter­pre­ta­tion, its won­drous accep­tance of incom­ple­tion, frag­men­ta­tion, and inter­nal debate, its inter­tex­tu­al rela­tions, its ten­sions and con­tra­dic­tions.” They are guid­ed by a par­a­digm born in antiq­ui­ty: ​“The text pulled the sages toward it; the sages pulled the text toward them…Truth exists in the lim­i­nal space between sage and text.” The nar­ra­tives that fol­low this intro­duc­tion more than suc­ceed in grap­pling (often in sur­pris­ing ways) with these and oth­er dimen­sions of the Hebrew Bible’s rev­o­lu­tion­ary tex­tu­al open­ness, often by way of con­tem­po­rary retellings in unex­pect­ed settings.

Apt­ly hailed by the edi­tors as ​“a spir­it­ed take­down of God and the lit­er­al­ists,” Sholom Auslander’s com­i­cal­ly acer­bic Fore­word (“You Suck and Oth­er Sto­ries”) alone is near­ly worth the price of admis­sion. The tone of the con­tri­bu­tions that fol­low is refresh­ing­ly incon­sis­tent (though struc­tured accord­ing to bib­li­cal order), some are wit­ty and light­ly enter­tain­ing, while oth­ers are grim or qui­et­ly dev­as­tat­ing giv­en the somber ques­tions of vio­lence and pow­er that abound, begin­ning with sev­er­al pieces that con­sid­er the life of Cain. Oth­er reflec­tions are inti­mate­ly con­fes­sion­al. But always, the range of approach­es to lan­guage and sto­ry­telling proves breath­tak­ing and occa­sion­al­ly uplift­ing. Trust­ing the reader’s capac­i­ty to wres­tle with their com­plex­i­ties, these auda­cious inter­ven­tions will like­ly stir fur­ther ques­tion­ing and per­haps the reader’s own cre­ative medi­a­tions. The rad­i­cal, irrev­er­ent, and often pro­found work gath­ered here rep­re­sents some of the best Jew­ish writ­ing in recent years, which is fur­ther dis­tin­guished by the inter­na­tion­al ori­gins of the authors as well as the stir­ring LGBTQ per­spec­tives includ­ed. The con­trib­u­tors to Smash­ing the Tablets are won­der­ful­ly atten­tive to the women of the Hebrew Bible, named and unnamed, who are after all the cat­a­lysts and vic­tims of so much of the action. Court­ney Sender’s star­tling med­i­ta­tion on the midrashic fig­ure of Lilith, Zee­va Bukai’s ren­der­ing of Lot’s daugh­ters, Sarah Blake’s sear­ing retelling of Dinah, and Eri­ka Dreifus’s explo­ration of that less­er-known child sac­ri­fice, Jephthah’s daugh­ter, are among many pow­er­ful respons­es to the roles of patri­archy and the fem­i­nine in scrip­ture. Indeed, each of the volume’s thought-pro­vok­ing read­ings are imag­i­na­tive­ly trans­for­ma­tive in their own way and deserve their own men­tion here but space doesn’t allow for that.

In ​“Scroll of Stars,” which serves as the collection’s elo­quent coda, nov­el­ist Michael David Lukas declares: ​“Some­times we need to bend the sto­ries we’ve been giv­en if we want to keep our­selves from repeat­ing the same mis­takes.” While an absolute gift for those of us teach­ing Midrash or Bible as lit­er­a­ture uni­ver­si­ty cours­es, this daz­zling col­lec­tion of often mag­i­cal but nev­er reduc­tive­ly moral­is­tic sto­ry­telling will sure­ly enter­tain and delight every read­er. Smash­ing the Tablets is a tri­umph of the moral as well as aes­thet­ic imag­i­na­tion and deserves a place in every Jew­ish library.