Recommended reading: "Seven Mothers" by Yochi Brandes

As I was preparing to embark on a voyage, I decided to take up the recommendation of Father Paul, parish priest of Beer Sheva, and I bought the latest book of Israeli author Yochi Brandes at Ben Gurion Airport. The book is titled "Seven Mothers" and brings the innovative and refreshing commentary of Yochi Brandes as she reads certain pages of the Old Testament.

The book focuses on seven female characters from the Old Testament: Lot's daughter (the mother of Moab), Tamar, Miriam the sister of Moses, the daughter of Pharaoh, Ruth, Michal and Queen Esther. The book is fascinating and brings new insights. Brandes, a daughter to an ultra-Orthodox family who received a traditional Jewish education, studied at Bar Ilan University and then completed a MA at the Schechter Institute of the Conservative Jewish movement. She studied with the best teachers of Bible in Israel today. She brings to the book her literary sensibility, her social involvement and her feminism and the end result is a highly recommendable book to anyone who wants to refresh his or her view of the well known stories of the history of Israel.

Brandes writes in her introduction to the book: "I am about to propose to you a personal reading of my own of well known Bible stories, which you have read many times before. In Jewish culture, the approach formulated within the picturesque saying: "The Torah has seventy faces" was accepted. That means, my reading is one of seventy, or one of seven thousand, or even one of six hundred thousand readings – and this reading has no desire or pretention to be the only interpretation of the Bible".