WHAT TORAH STUDY INVOLVES

Verbalization concretizes a concept, taking it from the level of the hazy intellectual into a true and down-to-earth guide for life.
In addition, studying orally is an invaluable memory aid, allowing the Torah to be internalized via our ears as well -- in the process generating more of the "attentive listening" of Way 2.
Thus, one who studies Torah must take it to heart as well to head. One might even suggest that knowledge without the emotional resources to assimilate it is more harmful than beneficial. Recall that we are descended from a nation which danced around a golden calf .......
The Malbim (R. Meir Leibush of 19th Century Eastern Europe), in his commentary to the Scriptures, explains saichel as the ability to fathom principles and concepts which cannot be mastered through observation or factual knowledge alone (commentary to Mishle 12:8). It requires the ability to think creatively -- outside of the box -- and to comprehend that beyond the ordinary experiences of man. The Tiferes Yisrael (R. Yisrael Lipschutz of 19th Century Germany) likewise relates saichel to "seeing" (as in Hebrew "histakail" is to stare or look intently), and describes it as the ability to see distant ideas -- and to grasp concepts beyond one's immediate realm.

Pirkei Avos       by Rabbi Dovid Rosenfeld       Print Version To sponsor an edition of the Pirkei Avos e-mail list, click here

Patience Chapter 6, Mishna 6, Ways 12-13 "Torah is greater than priesthood and kingship, for kingship is acquired with 30 qualities, priesthood is acquired with 24, whereas the Torah is acquired with 48 ways. These are: ... (12) composure, (13) Scripture and Mishna..." This first quality of this week, "yishuv", literally means dwelling, sitting or resting. The commentators understand this as either a frame of mind -- studying with composure and careful diligence, or more literally -- spending sufficient time learning in a yeshiva (rabbinical college). The second quality, Scripture and Mishna (understood to be a single quality by the commentator Midrash Shmuel), means that one must master the basic texts of the Torah before he begins to delve into the Talmud and advanced Torah study. R. Samson Raphael Hirsch notes the close connection between these two traits. Most people -- late-starting beginners in particular -- are anxious to go beyond the basics. When people first begin to study Torah, they understandably get very excited. When they see the wisdom of Torah and begin to make sense out of life, they become very anxious to articulate, to formulate their own ideas and insights. This is understandable. As we saw earlier in Way 3 (http://www.torah.org/learning/pirkei-avos/chapter6-63-4.html), to fully comprehend and internalize a concept, one must express it himself. However, in their well-meaning enthusiasm, such students begin proposing all sorts of their own ideas and ruminations. They don't want to just hear explanations from others. They are anxious to advance their own insights, to make their own personal acquisition of the Torah. And they start proposing their own innovations where, frankly, they have no business being. They "explain" the sin of Adam and Eve (not that any of us can explain why we ourselves sin), the faults of the Patriarchs (why Isaac favored Esau etc.), and the meanings behind the commandments. They have all the answers, they know just why G-d created the world, and -- mockery of mockeries -- they are brimful ready and willing to delve into the secr ets of Kabbalah. There is no denying that the sheer excitement of studying the Torah -- and of making sense out of the universe -- inspires a soul and stirs it to creativity. This is really a great part of what Torah study is. As we've discussed in the past, Torah study is anything but a dull exercise in text memorization. It involves vigorous and lively debate -- each student understanding the Torah in his own way and making his own personal acquisition. We must understand for ourselves -- questioning and challenging till we are satisfied, rather than submissively swallowing whatever our rabbi tells us. And the student who brings out new ideas and supplements his teacher's lessons has made his own personal contribution to G-d's Torah. As the Talmud states, whatever an accomplished student will one day say has already been taught to Moses at Sinai (Jerusalem Talmud, Pe'ah, 2:6). Such insights are a part of our Living Torah. And the student who takes what he has studied and builds upon it has merited to make the Torah and its wisdom a part of his very essence. For this reason, as we've discussed in the past, most of the Torah handed to us at Sinai, beyond the Pentateuch itself, was given in oral form (the Oral Torah). The Torah was -- and to a great extent still is -- a living document. It is not preserved in amber to be studied as some historical curiosity. Nor is it carved in stone -- to be viewed and admired, but not analyzed and applied. The Mishna and Talmud we have today are a compilation of layer upon layer of study and discussion. Each generation applied its own wisdom and experiences to the Torah's timeless truths and saw new levels of relevance and application. The Torah we have today is the result of human insight applied to permanent and unchanging values, each and every Jew making his own subjective connection to the Torah's objective truths. However, our mishna charges us with an important word of caution. We must make the Torah our personal possession, but only when we are ready. We must first study with patience and diligence. It takes a lifetime of study and review till we can put it all together and understand for ourselves. In all our enthusiasm to acquire Torah knowledge, it must be based on the slow and steady, on the mastering of the texts as well as the languages of the Sages. (English translations, Internet classes, etc. are wonderful for beginners, but modern presentations and translated snippets hardly a scholar make.) And there are no shortcuts. The path to accomplishment in Torah requires years of poring over basic texts. When we know everything the Sages have to say about why Adam sinned, why Joseph boasted his dreams to his brothers, why the brothers attempted to kill him, etc. we will have a faint hope of truly understanding what the Torah is all about. In a similar vein, it takes an expert in Jewish law to truly comprehend G-d's value system and appreciate the value of a Torah lifestyle. A traditional but not terribly knowledgeable Jew once told me that he permits himself to eat at non-kosher restaurants with his rough idea of what he should avoid. He felt he was basically doing right, avoiding the "important stuff." At the time, I didn't mean to make light of his efforts -- and I was wise enough not to offer much criticism. G-d for that matter does not sneeze at *any* effort to keep His laws, and far be it from me to be any more critical. However, it occurred to me at the time that perhaps *I* (the great and learned Dovid Rosenfeld) would know enough to enter such an establishment knowing what should and should not be avoided (and only perhaps -- I'm sure I'd want to do some homework first). But someone who has only the barest background in Jewish law is so much more poorly equipped to take such risks, stating standards and priorities in such a fundamental yet intricate area of Jewish law. But until we reach that point of mastery and proficiency, we must accept that as much as we have a right to question, challenge and articulate, attempting to understand G-d and Torah is in essence going beyond our ken. And as perpetual beginners, we must just be patient and accepting.

Isaac Bashevis Singer.

https://youtu.be/jCR4kVEniOo

• Reaches of Heaven: A Story of the Baal Shem Tov (1980)
• The Penitent (1983)
• Teibele and Her Demon (1983) (play)

Isaac Bashevis Singer. Source: MDCarchives cropped by Beyond My Ken, Wikimedia Commons.

This is a lecture I delivered at the University of Central Florida back in October 2004 (my hair was quite a bit darker and, well, there).  Found the CD when I was cleaning out some old files. There’s a PPT that goes with this lecture, and I’m going to try to find a way to post it.  Anyway, this is the summer, so I won’t be sending out too many new lectures, thought I would add this one as well.  Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991) was a Nobel Laureate for Literature, the first Yiddish writer to receive this distinguished award.  He was also a resident of my current home in Surfside, Florida. Hope you enjoy it!

Nostalgia and revulsion of the shtetl--piety often false  stifling atmosphere of the shtetl-- Desire to do good and evil within the character.Yet the simplicity of the shtetl.  Writes of demons  as well.  Shtetl  as darkness.

Simplistic kabbalah

Isaac Bashevis Singer - Biographical

In one of his more light-hearted books, Isaac Bashevis Singerdepicts his childhood in one of the over-populated poor quarters of Warsaw, a Jewish quarter, just before and during the First World War. The book, called In My Father's Court(1966), is sustained by a redeeming, melancholy sense of humour and a clear-sightedness free of illusion. This world has gone forever, destroyed by the most terrible of all scourges that have afflicted the Jews and other people in Poland. But it comes to life in Singer's memories and writing in general. Its mental and physical environment and its centuries-old traditions have set their stamp on Singer as a man and a writer, and provide the ever-vivid subject matter for his inspiration and imagination. It is the world and life of East European Jewry, such as it was lived in cities and villages, in poverty and persecution, and imbued with sincere piety and rites combined with blind faith and superstition.

 Its language was Yiddish - the language of the simple people and of the women, the language of the mothers which preserved fairytales and anecdotes, legends and memories for hundreds of years past, through a history which seems to have left nothing untried in the way of agony, passions, aberrations, cruelty and bestiality, but also of heroism, love and self-sacrifice.

Singer's father was a rabbi, a spiritual mentor and confessor, of the Hasid school of piety. His mother also came from a family of rabbis. The East European Jewish-mystical Hasidism combined Talmud doctrine and a fidelity to scripture and rites - which often merged into prudery and strict adherence to the law - with a lively and sensually candid earthiness that seemed familiar with all human experience. Its world, which the reader encounters in Singer's stories, is a very Jewish but also a very human world. It appears to include everything - pleasure and suffering, coarseness and subtlety. We find obstrusive carnality, spicy, colourful, fragrant or smelly, lewd or violent. But there is also room for sagacity, worldly wisdom and shrewd speculation. The range extends from the saintly to the demoniacal, from quiet contemplation and sublimity, to ruthless obsession and infernal confusion or destruction. It is typical that among the authors Singer read at an early age who have influenced him and accompanied him through life were Spinoza, Gogol and Dostoievsky, in addition to Talmud, Kabbala and kindred writings.

Singer began his writing career as a journalist in Warsaw in the years between the wars. He was influenced by his elder brother, now dead, who was already an author and who contributed to the younger brother's spiritual liberation and contact with the new currents of seething political, social and cultural upheaval. The clash between tradition and renewal, between other-worldliness and faith and mysticism on the one hand, and free thought, secularization, doubt and nihilism on the other, is an essential theme in Singer's short stories and novels. The theme is Jewish, made topical by the barbarous conflicts of our age, a painful drama between contentious loyalties. But it is also of concern to mankind, to us all, Jew or non-Jew, actualized by modern western culture's struggles between preservation and renewal.Among many other themes, it is dealt with in Singer's big family chronicles - the novels, The Family Moskat (1950), The Manor (1967), and The Estate (1969). These extensive epic works have been compared with Thomas Mann's novel,Buddenbrooks. Like Mann, Singer describes how old families are broken up by the new age and its demands, from the middle of the 19th century up to the Second World War, and how they are split, financially, socially and humanly. But Singer's chronicles are greater in scope than Mann's novel and more richly orchestrated in their characterization. The author's apparently inexhaustible psychological fantasy has created a microcosm, or rather, a well-populated microchaos, out of independent and graphically convincing figures. They bring to mind another writer whom Singer read when young - Leo Tolstoy

Singer's earliest fictional works, however, were not big novels but short stories and novellas, a genre in which he has perhaps given his very best as a consummate storyteller and stylist. The novel, Satan in Goray, written originally in Yiddish, like practically all Singer books, appeared in 1935 when the Nazi catastrophe was threatening and just before the author emigrated to the USA, where he has lived and worked ever since. It treats of a theme to which Singer has often returned in different ways and with variations in time, place and personages - the false Messiah, his seductive arts and successes, the mass hysteria around him, his fall and the breaking up of illusions in destitution and new illusion, or in penance and purity. Satan in Goray takes place in the 17th century, in the confusion and the sufferings after the cruel ravages of the Cossacks, with outrages and mass murder of Jews and other wretched peasants and artisans. The people in this novel, as elsewhere with Singer, are often at the mercy of the capricious infliction of circumstance, but even more so, their own passions. The passions are frequently of a sexual nature but also of another kind - manias and superstitions, fanatical hopes and dreams, the figments of terror, the lure of lust or power, the nightmares of anguish, and so on. Even boredom can become a restless passion, as with the main character in the tragi-comic picaresque novel,The Magician of Lublin (1961), a most eccentric anti-hero, a kind of Jewish Don Juan and rogue, who ends up as an ascetic or saint.

This is one of the most characteristic themes with Singer - the tyranny of the passions, the power and fickle inventiveness of obsession, the grotesque wealth of variation, and the destructive, but also inflaming and paradoxically creative potential of the emotions. We encounter this tumultuous and colourful world particularly in Singer's numerous and fantastic short stories, available in English translation in about a dozen collections, from the early Gimpel The Fool (translated 1953), to the later work, A Crown of Feathers (1973), with notable masterpieces in between, such as, The Spinoza of Market Street (1961), or, A Friend of Kafka (1970). The passions and crazes are personified in Singer as demons, spectres, ghosts and all kinds of infernal or supernatural powers from the rich storehouse of Jewish popular imagination. These demons are not only graphic literary symbols, but also real, tangible beings - Singer, in fact, says he believes in their physical presence. The middle ages rise up in his work and permeate the present. Everyday life is interwoven with wonders, reality spun from dreams, the blood of the past with the moment in which we are living. This is where Singer's narrative art celebrates its greatest triumphs and bestows a reading experience of a deeply original kind, harrowing, but also stimulating and edifying. Many of his characters step with unquestioned authority into the Pantheon of literature, where the eternal companions and mythical figures live, tragic and grotesque, comic and touching, weird and wonderful people of dream and torment, baseness and grandeur.

Books

Issac Bashevis Singer, born in Leoncin near Warsaw, emigrated 1935 to USA. He died in 1991. In addition to the works mentioned above Singer's writings include - in English:

the novels

The Slave, transl. by the author and Cecil Hemley. New York: Farrar Straus, 1962; London: Secker and Warburg, 1963.

Enemies: A Love Story, transl. by Alizah Shevrin and Elizabeth Shub. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1972.

Shosha. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1978.

Reaches of Heaven. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1980.

The Golem. London: Deutsch, 1983.

The Penitent. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1983.

Yentl the Yeshiva Boy, transl. from the Yiddish by Marion Magid and Elisabeth Pallet. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1983.

The Ring of the Fields. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1988.

Scum, transl. by Rosaline Dukalsky Schwartz. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1991.

the collections of short stories

Short Friday, transl. by Ruth Whitman and others. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1964; London: Seeker and Warburg, 1967.

The Seance, transl. by Ruth Whitman and others. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1968; London: Cape, 1970.

Passions, transl. by the author in collab. with others. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1975; London: Cape, 1976.

Old Love. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1979.

The Power of Light. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1980.

The Image and Other Stories. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1985.

The Death of Metuselah and Other Stories. London: Cape, 1988.

the memoirs

A Little Boy in Search of God: Mysticism in a Personal Light. N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976.

A Young Man in Search of Love, transl. by Joseph Singer. N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978.

Lost in America. N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981.

for children

Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories, transl. by the author and Elizabeth Shub. N.Y.: Harper, 1966; London: Secker and Warburg, 1967.

When Schlemiel Went to Warsaw and Other Stories, transl. by the author and Elizabeth Shub. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1968.

A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing up in Warsaw, transl. by the author and Elizabeth Shub. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1969.

The Fools of Chelm and Their History, transl. by the author and Elizabeth Shub. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1973.

Why Noah Chose the Dove, transl. by Elizabeth Shub. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1974.

Stories for Children. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1986.

From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1968-1980, Editor-in-Charge Tore Frängsmyr, Editor Sture Allén, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1993

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.

Isaac Bashevir Singer died on July 24, 1991.

Award Ceremony Speech

Presentation Speech by Professor Lars Gyllensten of the Swedish Academy

Translation from the Swedish text

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen,

"Heaven and earth conspire that everything which has been, be rooted out and reduced to dust. Only the dreamers, who dream while awake, call back the shadows of the past and braid from unspun threads, unspun nets." These words from one of Isaac Bashevis Singer's stories in the collection The Spinoza of Market Street (1961) say quite a lot about the writer himself and his narrative art.

Singer was born in a small town or village in eastern Poland and grew up in one of the poor, over-populated Jewish quarters of Warsaw, before and during the First World War. His father was a rabbi of the Hasid school of piety, a spiritual mentor for a motley collection of people who sought his help. Their language was Yiddish - the language of the simple people and of the mothers, with its sources far back in the middle ages and with an influx from several different cultures with which this people had come in contact during the many centuries they had been scattered abroad. It is Singer's language. And it is a storehouse which has gathered fairytales and anecdotes, wisdom, superstitions and memories for hundreds of years past through a history that seems to have left nothing untried in the way of adventures and afflictions. The Hasid piety was a kind of popular Jewish mysticism. It could merge into prudery and petty-minded, strict adherence to the law. But it could also open out towards orgiastic frenzy and messianic raptures or illusions.

This world was that of East-European Jewry - at once very rich and very poor, peculiar and exotic but also familiar with all human experience behind its strange garb. This world has now been laid waste by the most violent of all the disasters that have overtaken the Jews and other people in Poland. It has been rooted out and reduced to dust. But it comes alive in Singer's writings, in his waking dreams, his very waking dreams, clear-sighted and free of illusion but also full of broad-mindedness and unsentimental compassion. Fantasy and experience change shape. The evocative power of Singer's inspiration acquires the stamp of reality, and reality is lifted up by dreams and imagination into the sphere of the supernatural, where nothing is impossible and nothing is sure.

Singer began his writing career in Warsaw in the years between the wars. Contact with the secularized environment and the surging social and cultural currents involved a liberation from the setting in which he had grown up - but also a conflict. The clash between tradition and renewal, between other-worldliness and pious mysticism on the one hand and free thought, doubt and nihilism on the other, is an essential theme in Singer's short stories and novels. Among many other themes, it is dealt with in Singer's big family chronicles - the novels The Family Moskat, The Manorand The Estate, from the 1950s and 1960s. These extensive epic works depict how old Jewish families are broken up by the new age and its demands and how they are split, socially and humanly. The author's apparently inexhaustible psychological fantasy and insight have created a microcosm, or rather a well-populated micro-chaos, out of independent and graphically convincing figures.

Singer's earliest fictional works, however, were not big novels but short stories and novellas. The novel Satan in Gorayappeared in 1935, when the Nazi terror was threatening and just before the author emigrated to the USA, where he has lived and worked ever since. It treats of a theme to which Singer has often returned in different ways - the false Messiah, his seductive arts and successes, the mass hysteria around him, his fall and the breaking up of illusions in destitution and new illusions or in penance and purity. Satan in Goray takes place in the 17th century after the cruel ravages of the Cossacks with outrages and mass murder of Jews and others. The book anticipates what was to come inour time. These people are not wholly evil, not wholly good - they are haunted and harassed by things over which they have no control, by the force of circumstances and by their own passions - something alien but also very close.

This is typical of Singer's view of humanity - the power and fickle inventiveness of obsession, the destructive but also inflaming and creative potential - of the emotions and their grotesque wealth of variation. The passions can be of the most varied kinds - often sexual but also fanatical hopes and dreams, the figments of terror, the lure of lust or power, the nightmares of anguish. Even boredom can become a restless passion, as with the main character in the tragicomic picaresque novel The Magician of Lublin (1961), a kind of Jewish Don Juan and rogue, who ends up as an ascetic or saint. In a sense a counterpart to this book is The Slave(1962), really a legend of a lifelong, faithful love which becomes a compulsion, forced into fraud despite its purity, heavy to bear though sweet, saintly but with the seeds of shamefulness and deceit. The saint and the rogue are near of kin.

Singer has perhaps given of his best as a consummate storyteller and stylist in the short stories and in the numerous and fantastic novellas, available in English translation in about a dozen collections. The passions and crazes are personified in these strange tales as demons, spectres and ghosts, all kinds of infernal or supernatural powers from the rich storehouse of Jewish popular belief or of his own imagination. These demons are not only graphic literary symbols but also real, tangible forces. The middle ages seem to spring to life again in Singer's works, the daily round is interwoven with wonders, reality is spun from dreams, the blood of the past pulsates in the present. This is where Singer's narrative art celebrates its greatest triumphs and bestows a reading experience of a deeply original kind, harrowing but also stimulating and edifying. Many of his characters step with unquestioned authority into the Pantheon of literature where the eternal companions and mythical figures live, tragic - and grotesque, comic and touching, weird and wonderful - people of dream and torment, baseness and grandeur.

Dear Mr. Singer, master and magician! It is my task and my great pleasure to convey to you the heartiest congratulations of the Swedish Academy and to ask you to receive from the hands of His Majesty the King the Nobel Prize for Literature 1978.

 Abramson is a specialist in Jewish history and thought. Author of A Prayer for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times (Harvard, 1999) and Reading the Talmud: Developing Independence in Gemara Learning (Feldheim, 2006), and most recently The Kabbalah of Forgiveness: The Thirteen Levels of Mercy in Rabbi Moshe Cordovero's Tomer Devorah (Date Palm of Devorah) (Smashwords, 2014). Dr. Abramson is a Dean of Touro's Lander Colleges.

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Obama to Push U.S. Sentencing Change Backed by Koch Billionaires

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© AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack, File In this Aug. 30, 2013 file photo, Americans for Prosperity Foundation Chairman David Koch speaks in Orlando, Fla.

(Bloomberg) -- The White House is preparing to seize advantage of bipartisan concern over the burgeoning U.S. prison population and push for legislation that would reduce federal sentences for nonviolent crimes.

President Barack Obama is expected to argue for revamping U.S. sentencing guidelines during a speech to the NAACP annual convention on Tuesday in Philadelphia. Top officials from the Justice Department, including Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, have recently met with members of Congress to express support for sentencing reform legislation. Key lawmakers from both parties have been invited to the White House next week to discuss strategy.

“Engagement with the president has been lacking for the past six years, but this is one topic where it has been refreshingly bipartisan,” Jason Chaffetz, the Utah Republican who heads the House Oversight Committee, said in a phone interview.

Obama came to office promising to reduce the number of Americans imprisoned for nonviolent drug offenses, and in 2010 signed a law reducing disparities in sentences for possession of crack and powder cocaine. Some Republicans and police organizations criticized the moves as too lenient, but now a bipartisan coalition that includes Obama’s chief political antagonists, billionaires Charles and David Koch, have joined him to support relaxing federal sentencing guidelines.

Mass Incarceration

More than 2.2 million adults are imprisoned in the U.S., the most in the world, and the incarceration rate is between five and 10 times higher than in Western European countries, according to the National Research Council. Lawmakers in both parties have been raising alarms about the cost of mass incarceration to taxpayers and to minority communities that are disproportionately the source of prisoners.

About 60 percent of all prisoners are black or Hispanic, and black men under age 35 who did not finish high school are more likely to be behind bars than to hold a job, according to the research council. More than 100,000 people are currently in federal prison for drug-related crimes, at a cost of about $30,000 per person each year, the United States Sentencing Commission said in a May report.

That price tag has drawn a cadre of fiscally-conservative Republicans to join with Democrats in a bid to overhaul sentencing. Success would mean a rare bipartisan legislative victory for Obama and a concrete policy achievement to match recent speeches urging the nation to focus on racial and criminal-justice issues.

Unusual Allies

Chaffetz said he was optimistic that a package of bills would advance because of a diverse coalition of supporters lined up behind it. The president dubbed the legislation “a big sack of potatoes” in a meeting with lawmakers in February, Chaffetz said. The composition of the legislation isn’t final.

The Koch brothers, billionaire Republican donors, support a bill introduced last month by Representatives Jim Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican, and Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat, that would encourage probation rather than imprisonment for relatively minor, non-violent offenses and improve parole programs in order to reduce recidivism.

The Sensenbrenner-Scott bill is modeled on state efforts to reduce incarceration. While the federal prison population has grown 15 percent in the last decade, state prisons hold 4 percent fewer people, according to Sensenbrenner’s office. Thirty-two states have saved a cumulative $4.6 billion in the past five years from reduced crime and imprisonment, his office said in a report.

Studying Sentencing

The legislation “is the result of years of efforts to identify, compile and bring to the national level the best, evidence-based practices in criminal justice reform,” Representative Elijah Cummings, a Maryland Democrat said in a statement.

Bob Goodlatte, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, held a meeting in late June to listen to proposals from lawmakers in both parties. And Chaffetz, who described Republican leadership in the House as “very optimistic and encouraging,” scheduled hearings on the issue by his committee for July 14 and 15.

“I don’t normally do two days of hearings, we’re giving it that much attention,” Chaffetz said. “So it has more momentum than anybody realizes.”

There is a significant obstacle on the other side of the Capitol: Senator Chuck Grassley, the Iowa Republican who chairs his chamber’s Judiciary Committee.

Winning Grassley

An effort in February to advance legislation that included across-the-board reductions in minimum mandatory sentences met with resistance from Grassley, who wouldn’t put it to a vote in his committee. But supporters of the House legislation have reason for optimism: last month, Grassley announced he would work on a compromise in the Senate.

While Grassley has indicated a willingness to reduce penalties for some crimes, he wants to increase mandatory minimum sentences for other offenses, a Senate Republican aide said. The person requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

That could make sentencing changes an easier sell to tough- on-crime voters, but endanger the support of lawmakers who see mandatory minimums as bad policy.

“There does appear hope for a bipartisan compromise,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday. “We obviously welcome that opportunity.”

Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican who has long championed criminal justice reform, is leading negotiations with Grassley. He’s backed by Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the senior Democrat on Grassley’s committee, and Dick Durbin of Illinois, the second- ranking Democrat in the Senate.

The talks remain sensitive. During a Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, Leahy -- admitting he already knew the answer -- asked Yates, who was testifying before the panel, to restate her support for sentencing reform.

“I was born at night, but not last night,” Grassley interjected. “And I know that question was in reference to me, and I want everybody to know that we’re working hard on getting a sentencing reform compromise that we can introduce. And if we don’t get one pretty soon, I’ll probably have my own ideas to put forward.”