Yitzhak Buxbaum, Jossey-Bass, 2002
Buxbaum is the author of a number of slightly way-out, but fascinating books on Judaism, including two on Tu B’Shvat and others on story-telling themes. He describes himself as having ‘semichah in story-telling’ from Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach’; he even prints the text of his ordination at the front of the book (it’s a spoof on a real semichah!) The book itself contains numerous stories, of varying length, most with Chassidic or other righteous women as their central character. In many, the woman fulfils the ‘rebbe’ type role. The tales address the common themes of poverty, illness, childlessness as persecution, as well as offering inspiring insights into interesting and little-known virtuous lives. In many of them, there is a sense that the righteous woman was years ahead of her time, born into an age when her contemporaries found her gender impossible to reconcile with her abilities and spiritual leanings. One, called ‘pawn’ describes the wife of the Rebbe of Vishnitz, who pawned her jewellery to pay for the dowry of a widow’s daughter. The remarkable part of the story is that she then told everyone that her jewellery had been stolen, in order to conceal what she had done. A great book for those long winter Friday nights.
