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Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/38080/full/38080/law-to-lit-attorney-creates-a-post-modern-parable/ <br /><br /> <b>Law to lit: Attorney creates a post-modern parable</b> <br /> Thursday, May 14, 2009 | by dan pine <br /><br /><p>The last rebbe of Bialystock never existed. So Neil Levy found it necessary to invent him.</p> <p>The Berkeley attorney and law professor first published “The Last Rebbe of Bialystok” in 2003 and has just put out a revised edition of the book.</p> <p>Nominally a work of fiction, it does not lend itself to easy categorization. It’s 128 pages of Torah commentary, legends, poems and Pascal-like aphorisms, all filtered through the mind, heart and soul of Levy’s imagined rebbe.</p> <div class="capDivLeft" style="width: 126px;"><img alt="BAlevy" class="left" height="186" src="/images/uploads/z_photos_2009/ze_05_15_09/BAlevy.jpg" title="Neil Levy" width="126" /> <div class="caption">Neil Levy</div> </div> “He’s our collective wisdom,” he says. <p>Levy organized the book into 52 chapters, one for each Torah portion. On each right-hand page, he placed a short, cogent commentary, complete with footnotes. On the left are legends and sayings of the rabbi — some mini–short stories, others more like Zen koans.</p> <p>A sample, from Parashat Tetzaveh: “The shape of the pomegranate is beautiful/Sweetness surrounds its seeds.”</p> <p>He even throws in wry humor, as in an accompanying legend to Parashat Ekev, in which the rebbe dismisses the idea of a combination mezuzah-doorbell. Another begins, “The Rebbe sat in a coffee shop…”</p> <p>Levy, 66, deliberately created “a character that sounds like a 19th century person in one part,” he says, “yet using manner, speech and thought that is obviously postmodern.”</p> <p>Why the Polish city of Bialystok?</p> <p>“My father was born in Bialystok,” Levy says. “He came over after the 1905 pogrom. Talking to him, I think he was anti-religious. He said in Bialystok, these rebbes would just run your life, and he was very resentful about that. I was creating an alternative rebbe for him.”</p> <p>A Brooklyn native, Levy grew up in a Conservative home and attended cheder. But he says little of his Jewish education stuck, and he avoided Judaism for years after his bar mitzvah. After that, a busy legal career beckoned.</p> <p>The genesis for the book grew out of his Torah study at Berkeley’s Congregation Beth El. “I had never read any Torah until 20 years ago,” Levy says. “I had spent a summer in Jerusalem, and when I got back I decided I wanted to read one year through the five books. After reading the Torah once, I wanted to read it a second and a third time.”</p> <p>He read not only the Bible, but also the commentaries of Rashi. He read the midrashim and the legends of Bialik. Over time he began sketching out his own commentaries and legends. And eventually the character of the last rebbe of Bialystok took shape in his mind.</p> <p>“I had a stack of legends, a stack of midrash,” he recalls. “I said to myself, I think I’m getting enough material for a book. Then it came to me to match up midrash with legends.”</p> <p>Levy has written other books, though all belong in a law library. He taught law at Golden Gate University and currently teaches torts at U.C. Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law.</p> <p>Although “The Last Rebbe of Bialystok” is fictional, Levy did visit the real town a few years ago. Once home to more than 200,000 Jews, Bialystok was one of the largest cities in Poland with a Jewish majority.</p> <p>After the Holocaust, the town’s Jewish population totaled seven.</p> <p>On his drive back to Warsaw, Levy stopped to pay his respects at Treblinka, site of one of the worst Nazi death camps.</p> <p>“As you walk in, you see this huge spiral of tombstones,” he recalls. “When you get close enough to read them, each is not for a person. Each is for a whole town.”</p> <p>Levy says anguish over the Holocaust can be soothed somewhat by Torah study, something inextinguishable within the Jewish people.</p> <p>“It’s important to put Torah into you,” Levy says, “but it’s as important to put yourself into Torah, to read it from who you are at that time. I’m different from the year before, and each time, I read something different.”</p> <p><br /><strong>“The Last Rebbe of Bialystok”</strong> by Neil M. Levy ($18.95, Red Oak Tree Press, 128 pages). Information: <a href="http://www.redoaktreepress.com">http://www.redoaktreepress.com</a>.</p>

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