The term People of the Book, which sounds much better in Hebrew, Am HaSefer, is indeed apt. Walk into any Jewish bookstore or browse on Amazon, and new titles arrive daily.

5786 is coming to a close, and the year, like previous ones, was blessed with many excellent books. Here is my list of the top books of the year.

My friend Meyer Mandel said a good shiur is one that, after it’s over, makes you want to open a sefer. With some license, a really good book makes you want to open up more books. And all of the ones listed here do just that.

Book of the year – Ezra-Nehemiah: Retrograde Revolution

“Ta’amu u’re’u ki tov Hashem” – “Taste and see hat the LORD is good” (Tehillim 34:9). Some books are meant merely to be read; the finest are meant to be savored. Ezra-Nehemiah: Retrograde Revolution (Maggid Books) by Yael Leibowitz is one of those books.

It is a work rich in sophisticated ideas, intellectual nuance, and insights that reveal their depth with every page. Like a fine dish, it rewards careful tasting, reflection, and appreciation.

This is an unusually rich and intellectually satisfying work of Tanakh scholarship. What makes it remarkable is that Leibowitz takes a part of the Tanakh that is often overlooked and shows it is a remarkably sophisticated study of Jewish survival, identity, leadership, political reality, and religious renewal.

She examines how Ezra and Nehemiah rebuilt Jewish life after the Babylonian exile, not simply by looking forward, but by looking backward to Torah and Jewish tradition for the principles needed to construct the future. That paradox is the title’s brilliance: a revolution accomplished by returning to the past.

Leibowitz is a teacher at the Matan Women’s Institute for Torah Studies (Matan, an acronym for Machon Torani l’Nashim), a Jerusalem-based midrasha. The Kitvuni Fellowship, part of Matan, aims to promote the publication of........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)