Sarah鈥檚 Laugh: Doubt, Trust, and the Ambiguity of the Womb
May 1, 2023 By Mychal Springer | Public Event video | Video Lecture
On Rosh Hashanah we read about two central biblical characters, Sarah and Hannah, who after facing infertility for many years are told that they will conceive. Many years ago, when I was undergoing fertility treatments and listened to these stories on Rosh Hashanah, I felt聽as if my struggles were actually at the heart of Jewish religious experience, selected by the rabbis to echo in the birth of every new year for generations of Jews.聽
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The Blasphemer in Leviticus: A Marginal Figure聽
Apr 24, 2023 By Alan Cooper | Public Event video | Video Lecture
The Bible abounds with characters who transgress boundaries, for better and for worse. One of these characters who comes to a bad end is the half-Israelite, half-Egyptian blasphemer in Leviticus 24:10-16, 23. It鈥檚 clear that the Bible wants this story to show the dire consequences for blasphemy, but why is the identity of the blasphemer so specific, and how does this story relate to other laws outlined in the same chapter of the Torah? We explore these issues with the aid of both traditional and modern critical commentary.
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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鈥檚 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聽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.聽
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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.聽
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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 鈥� or rejection 鈥� of certain people as 鈥淛ews鈥� 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鈥檛) 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.聽
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Jewish-American, American-Jew: The Complexities and Joys of Living a Hyphenated Identity聽
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; 聽JTS (and I myself) prefer the second. 聽 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. 聽聽
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Between Obligation and Free Choice聽
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.聽
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