The story behind Joseph Skibell’s 'Six Memos from the Last Millennium'

Joseph Skibell is renowned as a critically acclaimed and prize-winning novelist, the author of such genre-defying works as A Blessing on the Moon and A Curable Romantic. Critics have called him “a major talent” (Publishers Weekly) whose “gifted, committed imagination” (New York Times) has produced works that are “always a joy to read” (Jerusalem Report). His new book is nothing short, while also a bit of a departure. Entitled Six Memos from the Last Millennium: A Novelist Reads the Talmud, it’s an elegantly written literary investigation into

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the tales of the Talmud – the great repository of ancient wisdom that is the foundation text, along with the Bible, of Rabbinic Judaism. (The Talmud’s composition dates roughly from between 200 and 500 CE.) This new work is no less genre-defying. Part fiction, part exegesis, part speculative theology, the book is, above all, a love letter to art of storytelling. And in its pages, Skibell looks at these old stories from the vantage of a modern novelist in order to find their relevance for readers today.

A Childlike Love of Stories, the Essence of Human Life
The story behind Joseph Skibell’s Six Memos from the Last Millennium: A Novelist Reads the Talmud

Can you tell us a little about the history of this project?

Well, that’s a great question. As I explain in the book’s introduction, some years ago, I was taking a Talmud class at an Orthodox synagogue. I was raised in a Reform community, so the Talmud was like a vast, unmapped world for me. About 4/5th of the Talmud is dedicated to – let’s call them – the theo-legal discussions of the Sages. Rabbinic Judaism is a religion of laws – what’s permitted, what’s forbidden – and the Talmudic Sages devote a kind of scientific rigor to deciphering the will of the Creator as it has been revealed in the pages of the Torah.

The other fifth of the Talmud, though, is the legendary parts: the stories of the Sages’ lives, tall tales, myths, legends. As a fiction writer, I was drawn to these stories, of course, but my teachers tended to skip over them or hurry past them, and they were given none of the time and attention, the almost scientific dissection, the legal parts of the Talmud were given. And so I decided to study them on my own, in a kind of openhearted, open-minded way, taking them at face value and seeing what they were really all about.

And what did you discover?

Well, first of all, I discovered that there’s a genius afoot in the Talmud, a dramatist with a kind of Shakespearean scope. This, I should say, is just my way of talking about these things. Originally, the Talmud was an oral law, and one spanning many generations. So it’s the work of many tongues and many hands – you can’t literally speak of an author – but the little stories and tales in it are all, curiously enough, dramatic in form.

Meaning?

Meaning that, like scenes in a play, they all take place in “real time.” They’re made out of dialogue and action. With very few exceptions, there’s no interiority in these stories, so if people in these tales want to think, they have to speak aloud, just like characters in a play. The narrative descriptions are mostly simple, physical actions, not unlike a playwright’s stage direction. I started by gathering all the stories and story fragments that had to do with the same figures or constellations of figures, and what I found is that each piece sort of illuminated the other pieces, and if you brought them all together, they formed a larger narrative or a more complete drama. And then I realized that you could approach these “scenes” as an actor or a director or a writer might, asking questions like, “What’s this person’s motivation?” or “Why would he say this?” or “Why would he do this?” or “What is he thinking here?”

It’s a different way of thinking about sacred text, and in my experience, it was a very fruitful approach.