Search Results
Back to 91抖阴 Torah Online's Main page
Patient Change, Slow Influence: The Model of the Rabbis of Late Antiquity
Jun 26, 2023 By David C. Kraemer | Public Event video | Video Lecture
Download Sources Part of the series, The Dynamics of Change With Dr. David Kraemer, Joseph J. and Dora Abbell Librarian and Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics, 91抖阴 Perhaps the most important change-agents in all of Jewish history were the Rabbis of Late Antiquity. It is they who transformed Judaism鈥攁nd Jews鈥攆rom a Temple-based religion to one that needed no […]
Read More
Between the Lines: Where I Am
Jun 20, 2023 By Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event video
Dana Shem-Ur鈥榮 book is a piercing novel about life abroad in a cultural setting not one鈥檚 own: Reut is an Israeli translator living in Paris with a French husband and their child. She鈥檚 made sacrifices for her family but now feels a simmering discontent and estrangement that erupts at a festive dinner party with affluent, intellectual friends. During the sumptuous meal, she navigates a tangle of cultural codes with which she鈥檚 never been fully at ease. This is a novel about big life choices that examines a woman鈥檚 attitudes toward belonging to a man, to a culture, to a language.Where I Amis an intimate, witty book portraying a profoundly human yearning to stop everything, to lay down one鈥檚 head, and to feel鈥昳f only for a moment鈥昦t home.
Read More
Between the Lines: The Confidante
Jun 13, 2023 By Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event video
Christopher C. Gorham discusses his bookThe Confidante, the first biography of Anna Marie Rosenberg, a Hungarian Jewish immigrant with only a high school education who went on to be dubbed byLife Magazine, 鈥渢he most important woman in the American government.鈥� Her life ran parallel to the front lines of history, yet her influence on 20th-century […]
Read More
God: Unchanging?
Jun 12, 2023 By Alan Cooper | Public Event video | Video Lecture
When we sing the hymnYigdal, we declare that God is One and unique in Unity, of mysterious and infinite Oneness.The idea that God is ineffable and unchanging is embedded in Jewish (as well as Christian and Muslim) thought. While thatmaybe true of God, however, it does not apply to the various ways of discerning God鈥檚 Presence from biblical times to the present. In this session, we explore some of the ways in which perception of God has changed, especially in the transition from biblical religion to post-Temple and post-prophetic Judaism.
Read More
鈥淧erhaps They Will Listen鈥�: Prophets and the Art of Persuasion
Jun 5, 2023 By Yael Landman | Public Event video | Video Lecture
While the biblical prophets wore many hats鈥攄efense attorney, miracle worker, leader, and commander-in-chief, among others鈥攐ne role of the prophets was to persuade their audiences. These audiences are often portrayed as uninterested in the prophets鈥� words, or even violently opposed to them. In the face of resistance, the prophets deploy numerous rhetorical strategies in order to convince their audiences to listen to them; many of these strategies, which we explore in this session, are the same devices that make biblical prophecies works of art that continue to strike a chord with readers today.
Read More
Kiddush and Havdalah: Marking the Boundaries of Sanctified Time
May 22, 2023 By Judith Hauptman | Public Event video | Video Lecture
Kiddush marks the onset of Sabbath sanctity and havdalah marks its end. Both of these ritual acts derive from the Talmud. A review of Talmudic texts reveals that although kiddush did not change much during the Talmudic period, havdalah underwent significant modification. It began as a simple statement of the end of Sabbath sanctity but evolved into a full-blown ritual in which we recite blessings, light a candle, smell spices, and drink wine.
Read More
Between Suns: Twilight in Rabbinic Sources
May 15, 2023 By Sarit Kattan Gribetz | Public Event video | Video Lecture
Rabbinic sources imagine the period of twilight between the six days of creation and the Sabbath to be a mystically productive time. It was then, they explain, that God created the rainbow and the manna, letters and writing, Abraham’s ram and Moses’s staff. But when is twilight and how long does it last? Does it belong to the day that is ending, the day that is beginning, or to both days at once? These questions are not merely theoretical鈥攖heir answers determine important matters of Jewish practice.
Read More
Talmudic Writings on the Passage from this Life to the Next
May 8, 2023 By David C. Kraemer | Public Event video | Video Lecture
It may surprise you to learn that, in the opinion of Talmudic teachings and the traditions that emerge from them, death is not a moment but a process鈥攁 transition that leads from one stage of life (which we call 鈥渓ife鈥�) to another (which we call 鈥渄eath鈥�). These beliefs have profound implications for our understanding of Jewish rituals of death and mourning, Jewish theology, and much else. Prof. Kraemer offers a close reading of the texts that discuss these rituals as well as the beliefs underlying them.
Read More
Can Citizens Be Friends?
May 2, 2023
How much divisiveness, anger, contempt, distrust, and fear can democratic citizens have for one another before a democratic society irreparably weakens? Political philosophers since Aristotle have wondered about what citizens owe one another; whether they ought to recognize and respect one another鈥檚 views, profound disagreements notwithstanding. The ideal of mutual respect among democratic citizens as a foundation for a thriving civil society is called 鈥渃ivic friendship.鈥� Join us as we explore this idea and its potential for diminishing the 鈥渃ivic enmity鈥� that afflicts the US today.
Read More
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 feltas 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.
Read More
The Blasphemer in Leviticus: A Marginal Figure
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.
Read More
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 movedfrom 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.
Read More
Between the Lines: The Kabbalistic Tree
Mar 29, 2023 By Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event video
The Kabbalistic Tree, by J.H. Chajes, is the first book to explore the esoteric artifacts at the heart of Jewish mystical practice for the past 700 years:ilanot(trees). Melding maps, mandalas, and mnemonic memory palaces,ilanotprovided kabbalists with diagrammatic representation of their structured image of the Divine. Scrolling anilanparchment in contemplative study, the kabbalist participated mimetically intikkun,the […]
Read More
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.
Read More
Between Words and Pictures: Medieval Illuminated Haggadot from the 91抖阴 Library
Mar 23, 2023 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Public Event video | Pesah
This session explored some of the priceless treasures in 91抖阴鈥檚 collection of Haggadah manuscripts. We consider how the text of the Haggadah and the accompanying hand-drawn illustrations are鈥攐r are not鈥攊n conversation with each other and make some other unexpected discoveries between the covers of these rare medieval manuscripts.
Read More
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.
Read More
Between the Lines: Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy
Mar 14, 2023 By Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event video
SHANDA: A MEMOIR OF SHAME AND SECRECY Part of Between the Lines: Author Conversations from The Library of 91抖阴 The word 鈥渟handa鈥� is defined as shame or disgrace in Yiddish. This book, Shanda, tells the story of three generations of complicated, intense 20th-century Jews for whom the desire to fit in and the fear of public […]
Read More
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; 91抖阴 (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.
Read More
Between the Lines: Sephardic Food and Culture
Mar 8, 2023 By Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event video
Dr. H茅l猫ne Jawhara Pi帽er and Dr. Benjamin Gampel discuss how the mass conversion of Iberian Jews in the late 14th and 15th centuries, initially triggered by the anti-Jewish riots that swept Castile and Aragon in 1391, led to distinctive and identifiable food and eating practices among those Jews who were compelled to embrace the Christian faith.
Read More
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?
Read More
SUBSCRIBE TO TORAH FROM 91抖阴
Our regular commentaries and videos are a great way to stay intellectually and spiritually engaged with Jewish thought and wisdom.