The Lilac Tree: A Rabbi’s Reflectons on Love, Courage, and History

Reform rabbi Hirsch (coauthor, One People Two Worlds) underwhelms in these brief essays on Jewish life. Hirsch reflects on “our individual and communal lives” in pieces that cover his personal family history, post-Holocaust Europe, Israel, and more, though his musings often prove too cursory. In one essay, Hirsch recounts leading a delegation of reform rabbis on a trip to Jordan in 1994, several months before the country signed a peace treaty with Israel. The Israeli government deemed the trip significant to the negotiations-in-progress, but Hirsch’s superficial account relies on platitudes (“Standing there amongst... descendents of a people who should have died a hundred times over, I felt the miracle of Jewish life”) to deliver a fairly banal message of Jewish resilience. Elsewhere, a meditation on social responsibility has its poignant moments (“We come as close to God... as possible when we give of ourselves to others”) before it turns sermonlike (“All of humanity is in the same boat... we are all at risk of going down with the ship”). Though Hirsch bravely wades into complex issues like blind faith and American Jewish alienation from Israel, the subpar execution leaves promising ground unexplored. Readers seeking depth will be disappointed. (May)