Rabbinic thought

Over the last twenty years there has been a growing participation of a wide audience from Israel and other Jewish communities around the world in the Rosh Hashana pilgrimage to Uman. Recently more and more people affiliated with Religious Zionists have joined this spiritual festival; participation which comes into conflict with some core issues in what can be seen as Religious Zionist ethos and doctrines. This paper quotes the reactions of some R"Z rabbis and analyses kinds of discourses which take place in regard to this issue. The paper concludes that there are different trends in the rabbinic discourse in R"Z, and while it seems that some trends are using an authoritative "Daat Torah" style to try to dictate religious behavior, the R"Z mainstream rabbinic discourse uses a more subtle and relational-educational means of coping with issues of this kind. Thus the R"Z Rabbis’ answers to the religious problems they are asked are being negotiated with their adherents with less ideological conviction and more practical pragmatic and personal guiding.

L’article a pour sujet la personnalité extraordinaire du kabbaliste le Rabbin Levi Isaac Krakovsky (1891–1966), un des étudiants oubliés du Rabbin Yehuda Leib Ashlag (1885–1955). Krakovsky diffusait l’enseignement de son maître en Amérique en anglais, écrivait des douzaines de livres et essayait d’établir des yeshivot de Kabbalistes. Contrairement à son maître, il présentait un enseignement exotérique et une vision de diffusion de la Kabbale dans le monde entier. Son influence était minime, mais un de ses élèves était Shraga Philip Berg qui continuait son chemin et le complétait de plusieurs points de vue. L’article se base sur de riches matières archivales, parmi lesquelles de longues essays de l’auteur en manuscrit qui sont décrits ici pour la premiere fois. D’une telle façon, nous décrivons le dévelopment de la Kabbale en Amérique du début du vingtième siècle jusqu’ aujourd’hui.

In this article it is argued that the Qiblah passages in the Qur’an, which are commonly understood as referring to the direction of the prayer, are directly engaging with and interpreting the Shema passages in Deuteronomy and their Talmudic commentaries. By defining and applying the method of intertextual polysemy, nine points of intertextuality are identified between the various Qur’anic, Biblical, and Talmudic passages. Against this background, the article implies that narrations from traditional Qur’anic commentaries are lacking in their interpretation of these passages, since they do not employ any extra-Quranic contexts to explain their meaning. Through the method of intertextual polysemy, the alternative thesis propounded here is that the historical reference for the Qiblah passages is the Shema.

כשהופיע ספרו של אברהם יהושע השל, 'תורה מן השמים', הוא נדחה על הסף כחובבני בידי חוקרי התלמוד, ובראשם אפרים אלימלך אורבך. בשנים האחרונות חוקרי התלמוד בוחנים מחדש את תרומתו של השל בספר זה להבנת המחלוקות בין דבי רבי עקיבא לדבי רבי ישמעאל. בהרצאה זו אני בוחן את סוגיית 'כפה עליהם הר כגיגית', על-מנת להעריך את תרומתם היחסית של השל ושל אורבך להבנת הסוגיה.

Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, one of the leading Zionist rabbis in Israel, and an appraised spiritual leader of American Modern Orthodoxy, expressed numerous times his admiration to Nahmanides (Ramban). He also claims Nahamnides' teachings are essential in the developing of Talmudic scholars (Talmidei Hakhamim). However, observing the writings of Rabbi Lichtenstein will reveal that the actual effect of Nahmanides on Rabbi Lichtenstein's works is meager, and cannot compete by any means with that of Maimonides, a very different spiritual teacher and founder of a school of thinkers. Moreover, dealing with several fundamental issues within Nahmanides' literary corpus, i.e. the questions of the commandment to settle the Land of Israel and the religious confidence in the Creator and His providence, Rabbi Lichtenstein consciously and openly chooses alternative ways to those proposed by Nahmanides.
This dissonance is a result of Rabbi Lichtenstein's esteem of Nahmanides' unique contribution to an infrastructure of life in light of the Torah, while he is less impressed by Nahmanides' actual contribution to the forming of an ample rabbinic outlook. Rabbi Lichtenstein learned From Nahmanides the secret of the expansion of the Torah and its ability to contain numerous intellectual worlds - all without exiting the Beit Midrash, with the exception of existential necessities which might coerce te religious person to seek repose to his soul in other intellectual worlds.
Conversely, Rabbi Lichtenstein did not see Nahmanides as his sole teacher in terms of the nature of the relationship between God and the world, and understanding the religious foundations of Judaism (i.e. Rabbi Lichtenstein's meditations lack the primary mystical component of Nahmanides' works).
Rabbi Lichtenstein insinuates a modern and innovative interpretation of Nahmanides' intellectual stature, while repeatedly expressing reluctance toward some of Nahmanides' major recognized conceptual foundations, as they were known and highly appraised throughout the ages by rabbinic scholars.

Before embarking on a discussion of the long and continuing history of exegetical engagements with Maimonidean thought, it is fitting to examine the dynamics of Maimonides’ own concept of the love of God, a core theological, philosophical, juridical, and Jewish notion. Love is the premiere example of what I consider here to be an essential feature of Jewish intellectual history since Maimonides. It illustrates well the ongoing process of reworking and refining, unfolding internally within his own thought and producing works of different genres that look dialogically to each other – in other words, Maimonides engaging Maimonides.

Michael Levi Rodkinson (1845–1904) was a journalist, author, and publisher whose literary projects spanned numerous countries and continents. Hero to some and scoundrel to others, Rodkinson was a polemical figure whose beliefs underwent many transformations over the course of his life, most significantly from Hasidism to combative Haskalah to eventually anticipating the neo-Romantic trends of the early twentieth century. Throughout his career, Rodkinson’s writing challenged the familiar genres of the literature of Hasidism and the Haskalah, shaping the religious realities of his readers and articulating a spiritual and community life among Jews, who took his ideas to heart in surprising ways.Today, Rodkinson is frequently referred to as a minor Hasidic author and publisher, a characterization based on the criticism of his opponents rather than on his writings. In Literary Hasidism, Meir draws upon those writings and their reception to present a completely different picture of this colorful and influential writer. Examining Rodkinson’s lifelong role as a catalyzing agent of different cultural phenomena, his diverse publishing activities, and his writings in their respective stages, Meir grants readers a provocative new vantage point from which to consider this divisive, enigmatic figure.
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“A must read for anyone interested in the history of Hasidic literature. Jonatan Meir masterfully tells the story of late nineteenth-century eastern
European Jewish scholarship through the bruising battles, big ideas, and petty intrigues of Michael Levi Rodkinson.”
—Eliyahu Stern, Yale University
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Jonatan Meir portrays the career of one of the most ambivalent characters of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, Michael Levi Rodkinson, and his move from the propagation of popular Hasidism to his more grandiose attempts to reframe and restructure the entire Jewish canon. This look into the world of the late nineteenthcentury Jewish Enlightenment will be an eye-opener."—Pinchas Giller, Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, American Jewish University
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"Meir has taken the relatively neglected figure of Rodkinson and created a detailed and fascinating portrait. He ably demonstrates that the boundaries between Hasidism and Haskalah were frequently crossed, and this markedly improves our understanding of the dynamics of Jewish intellectual history in the crucial period of the late nineteenth century."—Ira Robinson, Concordia University

דרשת 'כפה עליהם הר כגיגית' מאתגרת את הלומדים, מקושיית רב אחא בר יעקב 'מכאן מודעא רבא לאורייתא' ועד לחוקרים בני-זמננו. הן הפרשנות המסורתית הן המחקר האקדמי ניסו לנמק את הכפייה בנחיצות הגורלית של מתן תורה ו/או בחוסר-היכולת לסמוך על עם ישראל שיבחרו נכון. תרומה חשובה לדיון הוצעה בידי אברהם יהושע השל, אשר ראה באמירה תלמודית זו ביטוי מובהק לגישתו התאולוגית של רבי עקיבא, ובניגוד לגישת רבי ישמעאל, אך כמו במקומות אחרים הבסיס המחקרי שהציע השל לתובנה חריפה זו היה רעוע. מאמר זה מציע מבט מחודש על כפיית ההר כגיגית, הנשען על ניתוח מדוקדק של מבנה הסוגיה שבה מופיעה אמירה זו. העיצוב הספרותי של הסוגיה חושף מוטיבים מרכזיים המשליכים אור חדש על מטרתה ומשמעותה של כפיית ההר כגיגית, ומתוך כך נוכל להתבונן באופן מבוסס יותר ומעמיק יותר בזיקת אמירה זו למשנה הרעיונית של בית מדרשו של רבי עקיבא.

This paper examines the macro-redaction of a tractate, Berakhot. In previous work I have shown how the conclusion of the Toseftan tractate sums up the major themes of the tractate and integrates them into a cohesive conceptual framework. In this paper I show how additional aspects of the concluding unit interact with earlier passages, providing a fuller and richer picture of the tractate's redaction and ideas.

Much of Mishnah Tractate Sotah consists of digressions from the titular topic. Going beyond the standard explanation of pre-existing collections included by the redactor for mnemotechnical reasons, this article will demonstrate the literary associations which connect the digressions to the main body of the tractate, suggesting deeper conceptual inks which we will seek to discover.

רבים תוהים מדוע המשנה במסכת שבת מקדימה למשנה המרכזית של 39 מלאכות (פ"ז מ"ב) את ששת הפרקים הראשונים, העוסקים בחלקם בהכנות לקראת שבת ובחלקם בענייני הוצאה. במאמר זה נבחן הסברים שונים שהוצעו לסדר הפרקים כאן, ונתמקד בפתיחה 'במה' המופיעה בארבעה מתוך ששת הפרקים. פרקי 'במה' מתחלקים לשניים העוסקים בהכנות לקראת שבת ושניים העוסקים במלאכת הוצאה, והפתיחה המשותפת רומזת שעורך המשנה מבקש לקשור בין שני הנושאים האלו. ננסה לעמוד על משמעות הקשר בין שני הנושאים הללו, ונציע כי ביחד שני הנושאים מבטאים את ייחודה של השבת ומבליטים את ההבדלים העיקריים בין השבת לבין מועדים מקודשים אחרים.

The paper offers a rabbinic conception of political space as possibly opening up new ways of thinking beyond the Westphalian paradigm that approaches "otherness" with partition or marginalization.  המאמר מציע תפיסת מרחב רבנית שיכולה לפתוח אופקים חדשים לחשיבה פוליטית-מרחבית מעבר לפרדיגמה המוכרת של המדינה המערבית המודרנית, שמותירה אותנו בין האפשרויות של חלוקה או הדרה.

In defining the topic to which this session is devoted, Moshe Lavee has focused attention on the issue of how assigning a work canonical status might impact on the way in which it is read. In the discussion we further discussed how the canonical status of a work often carries with it a presupposition of perfect and laconic language, laden with what scholars have termed " omnisignificance ". In this paper I would like to explore the other side of the coin – how the redactor of a work may facilitate its acceptance as a canonical text by composing it with great care and attention to the literary nuances and connotations of the language, to verbal associations and echoes and to literary structures. Put differently, the " omnisignificance " of a canonical document may often be seen as an integral feature of its arrangement and composition, serving as a factor in its acceptance as canonical, rather than as a hermeneutical presupposition resulting from such acceptance. The arrangement and structure of central legal documents of rabbinic literature, such as Mishnah, Tosefta, and the two Talmuds, has baffled and intrigued scholars. All of these texts are marked by abrupt shifts from topical to associative methods of arrangement, and not infrequently one associative connection begets another, to the point where the connection between a single literary unit and the larger unit in which it appears is tenuous at best. Not only is it often difficult to follow the inner logic govening the arrangement of these compositions, but scholars have had difficulty in determining what was the purpose of composing them. None of these documents has the consistent or even coherent arrangement we would expect to find in a legal code, and scholars have ranged far afield in seeking alternative explanations of the purpose and methods underlying their redaction. My approach to these issues is grounded in the surprising discovery that the materials of Mishnah and Tosefta yield themselves readily to the tools of literary analysis, including the use of different kinds of verbal associations, wordplays, and literary structures such as inclusios (envelope structures), and other kinds of strategically located verbal parallels. Recently I have discovered some striking examples of such phenomena in the Talmud Bavli, and I suspect that they may be found in the Yerushalmi as well. Discovery of these phenomena immediately raises the issue of their significance and purpose. Scholars of rabbinic literature may assume, with some reason, that these phenomena are characteristic of documents composed and transmitted orally; however, some of the phenomena resist such explanation, and moreover, mnemotechnical techniques of the pre-modern world were closely-linked to patterns of thought. Hence, I will argue that the literary structure of rabbinic legal documents can be adequately understood only by assuming that literary phenomena here play the same role which we would assign to them in any other context, namely that verbal associations are meant to convey associations of ideas and values. In this paper we will examine a chapter of Mishnah, together with parallel discussion in the Tosefta and a section of the related Bavli and Yerushalmi discussions. By analyzing the literary cues found in each of these documents, we will attempt to understand how their redactors gave expression to different, but interlocking, frameworks of religious ideas and spiritual values.

1991 Talk at the Association of Jewish Studies annual meeting: praising Steven Fraade's first book as extending "the paradigm shift in post-structuralist and postcritical literary, socio-historical and philosophic study that has finally brought rabbinic scholarship home to the rabbinic text."
From History to Hermeneutics:
A Discussion of Steven Fraade's From Tradition to Commentary: Torah and Its Interpretation in the Midrash Sifre to Deuteronomy

Presenters:
Steven Fraade, Yale University
Introductory Comments and Response
Isaiah Gafni, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
History in From Tradition to Commentary
Michael Fishbane, The University of Chicago Divinity School
Literary Hermeneutics in From Tradition to Commentary
Peter Ochs, Drew University
Performative Interpretation in From Tradition to Commentary


Abstract:

According to Steven Fraade's From Tradition to Commentary, early rabbinic commentary mediated dialogically among revealed text, received tradition, and the sociohistorical circumstances of its own interpretive community of collaborative readers.  Fraade believes that, to examine such commentary, scholars must therefore make use of the instruments of both historical and literary criticism, integrated through the mediating dialogue proper to interpretive scholarship itself.  He illustrates this thesis through a literary-historical examination of what the the midrash Sifre to Deuteronomy had to say about the class of sages and their multiple interpretations of revelation and its reception at Sinai.  In this session, Fraade will respond to three evaluations of his thesis and methodology:  from the perspectives of the historical, the literary and the performative/pragmatic study of rabbinic Judaism.

This paper examines the mid-twelfth century controversy that arose over the issue of whether the Sabbath begins at evening or in the morning and was presented at the 43rd International Conference on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University on May 8, 2008.

Massekhet Megillah discusses two main topics: the reading of Megillat Esther and communal Torah reading, interspersing throughout the discussion a broad variety of other topics. By means of close reading techniques and intertextual analysis, we will try to understand how and why the Mishnah redactor has structured the discussion in this way, and what messages regarding Megillah and Torah readings are encoded in the text. Many of the Mishnah's textual cues point towards the historical background behind the institution of communal reading of Scripture and guide us to a deeper understanding of how Jewish communal life was restructured in the wake of the destruction of the Temple.

אחד מכלי העבודה העיקריים של חוקרי מחשבת חז"ל הוא ה'פריודיזציה', החלוקה לתקופות, ומספר חוקרים נוהגים להבחין בין תפיסות התנאים לתפיסות האמוראים באמצעות טענות משתיקה: מושג או מונח המופיע בספרות האמוראית, אך חסר מהספרות התנאית, סימן שהוא חידוש מהתקופה האמוראית. במאמר זה נבחן את תקפותה של המתודה הזאת, ונטען שיש להשתמש במתודה זו בזהירות מרובה ובצירוף עך דרכי הוכחה נוספות.