[We] Jews spend a long time on a page. We do not read rapidly through a biblical text, so much as we read a single verse or two, and then let our eyes meander through various commentaries on the page, playing with the various ways Jews in times past have read the passage before us. . . . [In this way] any given page of the book in our hands is like a guided tour through the inner landscape of the collective Jewish soul: all the way from the ancient Aramaic alternative version of the biblical text itself, to the medieval mystics and rationalists, with stop-off points in classical rabbinic
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