Author Description

Eighty years from now, in a time of increasing environmental degradation and after one-sixth of the Earth's population has died in a vast pandemic, a noted woman rabbi in Brooklyn hosts a convocation for Jewish clergy and scholars from every background to create a new Talmud for living in such dangerous times. Over the course of five years, the attendees work to compile a text in multiple genres--but their text is never completed. Eighty years later, a single laptop is discovered that contains fragments of their text--and that is what this book contains. There are poems, stories, legal texts, and conversations, on belief, practice, liturgy, all designed for beleaguered people living in what seems to them the end of time. There are texts of hope, humor, despair, rage, and simple witnessing of the dying world around them (which may or may not be our world). ""Andrew Ramer has taken us deep into our collective Jewish past, but with Fragments, he takes us into our future. He whimsically envisions a future world in which ancient Jewish texts continue to inform our choices, our laments, an d our responsibilities. At times wistful, at times comical, Ramer takes us on a journey of what could be if we continue down our present global path. He calls us to task; he calls God to task as well."" --Rabbi Mychal Copeland, Congregation Sha'ar Zahav, San Francisco, co-editor of Struggling in Good Faith, LGBTQI Inclusion from 13 American Religious Perspectives ""A courageous, brilliant, visionary work! In Fragments of the Brooklyn Talmud, Andrew Ramer dares to imagine the future after climatological, environmental, and nuclear catastrophes render human life nearly unrecognizable. It is a heartbreaking vision that manages to offer hope in its portrait of Jewish resilience."" --Rabbi Jacob Staub, Professor of Jewish Philosophy and Spirituality at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College ""In this creative, imaginative, original, and provocative work, Andrew Ramer once again challenges