Book Review – I Read This Over Shabbos: Reading Jewish History in the Parasha

Pirkei Avot 1:6 advises, “Acquire for yourself a friend.” In I Read This Over Shabbos: Reading Jewish History in the Parasha (Koren Publishers), Rabbi Dr. David Bashevkin shows that he has certainly taken that advice to heart.

Throughout the book, Bashevkin draws on the insights and reflections of friends, colleagues, and others who have shaped his intellectual journey. In the spirit of “with a little help from my friends,” he has created a remarkably engaging and accessible work. The many voices woven throughout the narrative give the book a warm, conversational quality, even as Bashevkin explores complex and sometimes contentious subjects.

Organized around the weekly parasha, the book uses each portion of the Torah as a springboard for 54 fascinating lessons in Jewish history. Bashevkin brings to life some of the most consequential episodes and personalities in Jewish history, offering insights that are both entertaining and thought-provoking. More importantly, he demonstrates how the parasha can serve as a gateway to questions that extend far beyond the biblical text itself.

Two of the chapters I found most interesting focus on Moses Mendelssohn (Parshat Mishpatim) and the Chazon Ish (Parshat Bo).

As Bashevkin explains, Mendelssohn has long gotten a bad rap in the Charedi world, often for reasons unrelated to the facts. Mendelssohn was hardly an intellectual lightweight. He won the Berlin Academy top prize for an essay on metaphysics. The fact that Immanuel Kant finished second in the competition says quite a bit about Mendelssohn’s intellectual stature.

While Mendelssohn was less accomplished as a Jewish scholar, he was certainly comfortable with traditional Jewish texts. Yet he became a major target of criticism in the Charedi world. The controversy became so pronounced that when The Jewish Observer published a harsh article against him, they eventually had to retract it.

Bashevkin argues that the controversy’s real source was more complicated. Mendelssohn’s vision would have diminished the independent authority of Jewish communal institutions, including the traditional system of Jewish courts. That represented a dramatic departure from the historical model in which Jewish communities exercised significant powers of self-government.

Bashevkin also examines the Chazon Ish, whom the Charedi world has long viewed as the epitome of what Torah knowledge alone can achieve. Stories about his extraordinary wisdom abound, including accounts of his purported ability to advise neurosurgeons about where to operate.

Yet when it came to the highly contentious question of German reparations, an issue that tore Israeli society apart, the Chazon Ish did not pretend to have a definitive answer. When Rabbi Shlomo Lorincz, an Agudat Yisrael member of the Knesset from 1951 to 1984, asked him what to do about the vote, the Chazon Ish ultimately advised him to remain absent that day because he could not reach a conclusive answer.

He also made clear that this was not a matter that could simply be resolved by invoking daas Torah. As the Chazon Ish reportedly said, “I don’t just pull daas Torah from my hat.”

Perhaps the most striking illustration of the limitations of daas Torah comes from the very idea that every significant question must have a definitive answer. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems provide an interesting analogy: even formal systems of reasoning have inherent limits. They remind us that there can be meaningful and even true propositions that cannot be established from within a given formal system. The analogy is not exact, of course, but it offers a useful caution against assuming that every question can be resolved via daas Torah.

These observations capture one of the book’s central virtues. Bashevkin isn’t afraid to examine the complexity behind figures and controversies that are often presented in overly simplistic terms. Rather than simply repeating the conventional Orthodox narrative, he asks why particular controversies became so heated in the first place and what was actually at stake.

He also revisits controversies that once generated tremendous hullabaloo in the Orthodox world, from machine-made matzah to the Steinsaltz Talmud and beyond. Interestingly, many practices or ideas that were once fiercely opposed have since become widely accepted. This provides another recurring theme of the book: today’s conventional wisdom can look remarkably different from yesterday’s controversy.

The Koren Sacks Siddur was first published around 2009. Koren used extremely thin paper to fit its roughly 1,244 pages into a reasonably compact volume. Harry Maryles described the pages as “almost tissue thin,” noting that the reverse-side printing could be seen through the paper and that the pages might be more prone to wear.

This book suffers the opposite fate. At 507 pages, the paper is quite thick, making the volume surprisingly heavy. If you want to read this on Shabbos, you may have to do it at a table, not in a recliner. It is a minor complaint, but a real one: a book designed to be read over Shabbos would benefit from being somewhat easier to hold and maneuver.

Anyone who has listened to Bashevkin’s 18Forty podcasts knows that he is a gifted raconteur. The book demonstrates that he is not merely an engaging speaker, but a superb writer as well. His writing has the same quality that makes his podcasts so appealing: he knows how to take a subject that might initially seem obscure and turn it into a story that makes you want to keep reading.

The book’s greatest strength may be its ability to make Jewish history feel less like a collection of dates and names and more like an ongoing conversation. Bashevkin is particularly effective when he takes a familiar figure or controversy and asks the reader to look at it from a different angle. He does not necessarily ask us to abandon what we thought we knew; he asks us to recognize that the story is often more complicated than the version we inherited.

That is also what makes the book particularly well suited to Shabbos reading. The chapters are short enough to be approachable, but substantial enough to provoke conversation. One can read a chapter, put the book down, and easily find oneself discussing the personalities, decisions, and controversies it raises.

The result is a book that does exactly what good Jewish history should do: it makes the past come alive, challenges some comfortable assumptions, and leaves the reader with plenty to think about long after Shabbos is over.

Bashevkin has combined scholarship, storytelling, and a healthy willingness to question conventional wisdom. That is no small accomplishment, and it makes I Read This Over Shabbos a particularly enjoyable and worthwhile read.