What Dorothy discovered in Oz and Alice discovered in Wonderland you'll discover here: a parallel reality where a third temple rose and fell in antiquity, women were ordained in the fifth century CE, and alternate sages and texts ripple in and out of the ones we know from history. This work of midrash, interpretive stories, opens with: Before God began to create anything, before there was heaven or earth, night or day, good or bad, in or out, up or down, God said, "I must create Myself." and heads toward its conclusion with: It was late afternoon. Tirzah, the designated messiah for our planet, was sitting in her study, up in sixth heaven. These are two of the ways in which this book is different. Liturgist and midrash writer Andrew Ramer not only reinvents Jewish history. He also reinvents his own family, the Talmud, and the Hebrew Bible, adding excerpts from texts by some of our ancient women sages, inviting you to ask yourself, "What does it mean to be a Jew in the twenty-first century? What grounds me and guides me in our tradition? And what gives me hope and dreams in a troubled world of trembling possibilities?" ""Andrew Ramer has opened doors of the heart to words and worlds of Torah that have been waiting for our discovery and exploration. This masterful work invites each of us to discover, dream, dance, and sing new Torah, new truth, revealing new sources of strength for living in our magnificent, complex, challenging, heartbreaking, beautiful world."" --Sue Levi Elwell, Rabbi, Scholar in Residence, Washington Hebrew Congregation ""Part memoir, part deep dive into text, and part wild invention, Andrew Ramer's stories captivate, instruct, and always, always delight."" --David Wolpe, Rabbi; Author of David: The Divided Heart ""Andrew Ramer has produced a lucid, beautifully crafted work of extraordinary imagination and learning. Reading in-between the lines of biblical and post-biblical texts, he opens these up in ways whimsical and earnest, and consistently compelling."" --Steven J. Zipperstein, Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History, Stanford University ""In this book biblical figures find themselves clothed in new daring stories. And figures who should have been there to begin with now leap forth to greet and invite us into their life; thanks to them and to Andrew, we find ourselves traversing new worlds. These are journeys not to be missed."" --Tamara Cohn Eskenazi, Rabbi, The Effie Wise Ochs Professor of Biblical Literature and History, Hebrew Union College--Jewish Institute of Religion Eli Andrew Ramer is the author of several books from Wipf and Stock including Ever After , a queer extension of the lives of 11 famous writers, Revelations for a New Millennium , and five books of Jewish stories: Texting with Angels , Queering the Text , Torah Told Different , Deathless , and Fragments of the Brooklyn Talmud . He's a co-author of the international best seller Ask Your Angels and the author of Angel Answers . An ordained maggid (sacred storyteller in the Jewish tradition) he lives in Oakland, California up the street from an amusement park called Fairyland. For more information on his writing and teaching please visit his website - www.andrewramer.com Rabbi Sue Levi Elwell, who works for the Reform movement as a congregational consultant, edited Lesbian Rabbis (2001) and The Open Door (2002).