(Illustration by Julia Breckenreid)
My friend Joanne has been translating Deuteronomy word for word, a book she calls “the great poetic part of the Torah.” Joanne is 88 and the author of more than 20 novels. A former EMT, firefighter, and college professor, she is a master of English and a student of Hebrew. She and I meet monthly in a group of writers—a mix of Reconstructionist Jews and deconstructionist Episcopalians—and I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that Deuteronomy would eventually come up. Everything else has. We’ve written letters to the dead. We’ve had extensive pretend correspondence with internet hucksters. One time we all wrote about knees. So why not Deuteronomy?
But I don’t think I had given Deuteronomy any thought since high school, when I was urged to read the Bible straight through as an act of pious stamina. By the time I got to Deuteronomy, I’m sure I was skimming and looking for the good parts. Until Joanne, I had never understood Deuteronomy as “the good parts.”
All of that changed in a glance at Deuteronomy 28: the blessings and the curses. I fell in love.
