Jewish Stories of Love and Marriage

Folktales, Legends, and Letters

By (author) Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, Peninnah Schram

Publication date:

20 August 2015

Length of book:

278 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781442238985

Jewish Stories of Love and Marriage offers a treasury of tales that speak to the tenderness and passion, difficulties and blessings of love. Jewish tradition overflows with love stories from the Bible, Talmud, and Midrash. Folktales continue the tradition, and contemporary writers highlight the way their faith and love interweave and enrich each other.

From Adam and Eve to Song of Songs, from legends of Solomon to the letters of Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus, these are stories of heartbreak, devotion, and celebration. They tell of how people fall in love and how they grow in love. The narratives are as old as the Bible and as new as the twenty-first century. They come from places as far-ranging as Yemen and New York. The relationships are heterosexual and homosexual, arranged and spontaneous, young and mature. Though the stories reflect the times and places in which they were told, they have a universal message about longing and romance, relationship, respect, and commitment.

Noted storyteller Peninnah Schram and Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso collect these narratives and letters for the first time, inviting readers to delve into these stories for entertainment and inspiration, at engagements, weddings, and anniversaries, to recall what once brought people close and what continues to hold them in love.

Jewish Stories of Love and Marriage, Sandy Eisenberg Sasso and Peninnah Schram demonstrate the oral tradition in practice. The collection challenges, adapts, and celebrates traditional notions of love and marriage in Judaism, juxtaposing aggadah and halakha ( Jewish law) with personal and cultural stories. Sasso and Schram make their book as accessible as possible to anyone interested in storytelling.