Defying All Categories: Witches in the Talmud
Apr 17, 2023 By Marjorie Lehman | Public Event video | Video Lecture
Together we explore the story of Rav Nachman’s daughters and examine their transformation from daughters and wives to witches. Taken into captivity and then returned, they emerge as women on the margins of rabbinic culture. For the rabbis this transformation represents a great challenge to the world order and thus is an expression of their deepest anxieties and fears where they must face that certain things are not within their control. In our reading of this story, we see how the women who are moved from inside the family to the margins of rabbinic life and culture reminds us of our own complicated journeys navigating where it is we are, and where it is we want to be.
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Gender Identity in Rabbinic Literature
Mar 27, 2023 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Public Event video | Video Lecture
Great fans of ambiguity, the sages of the Mishnah and the Talmud loved to problematize what people of their day considered the most deeply ingrained of binaries, including gender and sex identity. For them, human understandings were imperfect, and every perspective was up for debate. Torah was Divine and perfect, but its interpreters were not. Long ago, our sages debated questions of sex difference and the extent of our capacity to know what we are. We explore some of these debates and ask if they still hold relevance for us.
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On the Margins: Conversos and the Question of Jewish Belonging Throughout History
Mar 20, 2023 By Jonathan Ray | Public Event video | Video Lecture
Jewish law provides relatively clear standards for who is, and who is not, a member of Jewish society. But popular Jewish acceptance – or rejection – of certain people as “Jews” has often run counter to these legal definitions. From medieval Spain to the Ottoman Empire to modern day America and the State of Israel, conversion out of, or into, the Jewish community has raised tensions over who is (and isn’t) considered Jewish. We discuss the question of Jewish belonging throughout history by looking at groups of converts and the liminal space they inhabited on the margins of the Jewish world.
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Jewish-American, American-Jew: The Complexities and Joys of Living a Hyphenated Identity
Mar 13, 2023 By Arnold M. Eisen | Public Event video | Video Lecture
The Pew Reports and many scholars use the first description of who we are; JTS (and I myself) prefer the second. It matters a great deal to a person’s identity whether “Jew” and “American” are adjective or noun; it matters still more how Jews and non-Jews understand the hyphen that links the two parts of these (and other religious and ethnic identities) one to another. We explore that “liminal space” of the self through analysis of a wide range of books, essays, films and literary characters.
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Between Obligation and Free Choice
Mar 6, 2023 By Gordon Tucker | Public Event video | Video Lecture
Jewish tradition prizes hiyyuv, the obligation to follow Jewish law, whereas modern culture places a great emphasis on making autonomous choices, and commitments that are voluntarily chosen. How do we find a comfortable space in between?
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Between Law and Narrative in the Talmud
Feb 27, 2023 By Sarah Wolf | Public Event video | Video Lecture
This session presents the history of the law vs. narrative distinction in reference to the Talmud, and will show how this categorization became central to how Jews think about Jewish texts and Jewish learning more generally. We consider the limits of this binary by looking at some texts from the Talmud that seem to defy categorization, raising the question of what possibilities open up when we read Jewish legal texts as literature.
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The Tent of Meeting: Central or Marginal?
Feb 13, 2023 By Benjamin D. Sommer | Public Event video | Video Lecture
The Tent of Meeting is described at great length in the Torah as the elaborate sacred tent located in the center of the Israelite encampment that travelled through the wilderness for forty years. But several passages in the Torah describe the Tent of Meeting differently, as a tiny structure located outside the Israelite camp. Why does the Torah include both historical memories of this structure? How does each structure reflect a particular religious worldview, and what does the presence of both in the Torah tell us about Judaism?
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Between This World and the Next: Rabbinic Visions of Purgatory
Feb 6, 2023 By Rachel Rosenthal | Public Event video | Video Lecture
Gehenom is often thought of as the Jewish version of hell, but an examination of the places it appears in the Talmud presents something more nuanced. Part purgatory, part hell, part passageway, Gehenom becomes a place for punishment and redemption. Through a close reading of the texts concerning Gehonom, we will gain a clearer understanding of what, exactly, its purpose might be, and what it might tell us about rabbinic views of what happens after we die.
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