Judaism and Christianity are two religions separated by a common Scripture. Both observant Jews and believing Christians agree on the divine provenance of the Tanakh—the acronym for the Pentateuch, Prophets, and Writings. For Christians, the Hebrew Bible foreshadows the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth; for Jews, it recounts the Election of Abraham and his family, the redemption from Egypt, the foundation and loss of the Jewish kingdom, and the constancy of God's promise to his people.
Observant Jews hear the entire Pentateuch read aloud in an annual cycle, in order to recreate the giving of the Torah at Sinai. It is a commonplace that Judaism places more attention on this world and Christianity on the next, but that requires qualification. The Jewish engagement with Scripture aims at an existential fusion of past and future into a present. This fusion brings the past to life and “plants eternal life among us,” according to the concluding blessing of each section of the weekly Torah reading.
Chumash Mesoras HaRav: The Pentateuch Annotated with the Writings of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik is the first Orthodox Jewish presentation of the Pentateuch likely to interest a broad audience. Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik (1903–1993) is a unique figure in the religious world. He's the only traditional Jewish thinker to have gained a substantial following among Christian readers, initially through the essay “The Lonely Man of Faith” (1965), his only work composed for a Christian audience. Soloveitchik speaks vividly to today's believers, who find themselves surrounded by a world “technically minded, self-centered, and self-loving, almost in a sickly narcissistic fashion…seeing in the here-and-now sensible world the only manifestation of being.”
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