5 Quotes by Aviya Kushner

Translation means that a translator has picked one word above all the others: one winner, with all the finalists gone from the page forever. Translation always calls upon the translator to make a judgement call, and what the reader hears, then, is a judgement

Translation means that a translator has picked one word above all the others: one winner, with all the finalists gone from the page forever. Translation always calls upon the translator to make a judgement call, and what the reader hears, then, is a judgement.

In Hebrew, mayim is the word for water and elohim is the name of God used in the first two verses. Mayim and elohim rhyme; water and God are therefore paired in Hebrew. It is part of the poignancy of the psalm, this rhyme of the visible and the invisible, the knowable and the unknowable.

What Jewish law wants is an ongoing conversation between man and G-d, and between man and man – but most of all, between man and himself. It’s not a command, exactly, but a conversation: an inner song, full of melody and refrain, sometimes heard only by what Rabbi Soloveitchik so movingly called the lonely man of faith.

Slowly, I understood that the way I read is intertwined with the way my family reads. Investigating the often tumultuous lives of the commentators, reading biographies and looking for patterns, I noticed that the idea of family influencing reading is actually a centuries-old phenomenon.