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“the structuralist approach to literary texts has been replaced by the post-modern approach…”

In recent years, the structuralist approach to literary texts has been replaced by the post-modern approach which focuses on intertextuality and indeterminacy. Such approaches have been applied to midrash, but have not been sufficiently exploited in the study of legal texts. In addition, rabbinic legal literature and hermeneutics may be compared with the forms and rhetorics of Graeco-Roman and other Ancient Near Eastern legal traditions in order to determine shared forms and styles.

Catherine Hezser, “Form-Criticism of Rabbinic Literature”, in The New Testament and Rabbinic Literature, eds. Reimund Bieringer, Florentino García Martinez, Dider Pollefeyt and Peter J. Tomson (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2010), 104.

Jews “are responsible for each other…” & our actions reflect on others

…it…brings to mind another expression, this time from the Talmud: “kol Yisrael arevim ze le’zeh.” It means that we are responsible for each other — physically, spiritually and morally. If we are supposed to be an extended family with a purpose, then when someone does something morally repugnant, it reflects badly on the family, in much the same way that we take collective pride in Jewish accomplishments. It does not mean that all members of the family are to blame. But it does mean that we have to go out of our way to build trust and repair the wounds of shame and embarrassment.

Misha Galperin, “One Bit of Good News From This Summer of Scandals”, The Jewish Week (30 August 2013), 29.

“Most of the traditions which were eventually integrated into the Talmud and Midrash will have originally circulated orally, sometimes for hundreds of years”

Most of the traditions which were eventually integrated into the Talmud and Midrash will have originally circulated orally, sometimes for hundreds of years. The long process of transmission makes it impossible to reconstruct “original” versions of traditions, if they ever existed. Stories about rabbis and teachings associated with them will have circulated in various different versions and were adapted to the contexts and purposes for which they were retold and rewritten. Therefore, even if one assumes that a certain text had a prehistory, one cannot trace that prehistory back to its origins or early stages.

Catherine Hezser, “Form-Criticism of Rabbinic Literature”, in The New Testament and Rabbinic Literature, eds. Reimund Bieringer, Florentino García Martinez, Dider Pollefeyt and Peter J. Tomson (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2010), 100.

“Meta became shorthand for knowingness. It went beyond beyond. And it used to be fun”

Lost in all the anxiety and hand-wringing over revelations about big data, personal privacy and the National Security Agency is another unfortunate, and consequential, societal development: A transformation in the meaning of “meta.” This has happened specifically in relation to metadata — the transactional digital information that pinpoints the date and time you called someone, for example, or locates the spot from which you last accessed your e-mail account — but also to our larger understanding of the concept of meta; our metaunderstanding, as it were.

Meta, once an intriguing, even playful prefix, has emerged as something darker, heavier and not at all amusing, but perhaps better suited to the times in which we’re living. Meta, as repurposed by the N.S.A., succinctly redefines our trans-post-postmodern era.

Welcome to the age of Heavy Meta.

Meta, which stems from the Greek word for “after,” “beyond,” “beside” (or change of place, order or condition), existed for centuries in obscurity in the hard sciences — it was perhaps best identified with the scholars who assembled Aristotle’s fourth-century-B.C. papers and used meta as part of the title for one of his most famous works, “Metaphysics.”

By the early ’90s, high meta had turned into low meta, as the individual self-awareness (of Antonin Artaud or Jorge Luis Borges) gave way to indulgent self-referencing (Philip Roth, “Seinfeld”), which gave way to meta as a stand-alone word. If, say, a conversation turned into a conversation about the conversation? Meta. A “that’s so meta” refrain became part of the ethos of “Family Guy,” reality TV, insidery advertising and self-conscious memoirs.

In short, meta became shorthand for knowingness. It went beyond beyond. And it used to be fun. Meta could be used to mean something you knew wasn’t true but you believed in anyway. Or it could mean you weren’t quite sure if something was or wasn’t true — an ambiguity that was as playful as it was, well, metaphysical. Meta also raised profound artistic and philosophical questions about truth, reality and identity. But those meatier and rompier ventures into metahood (via Borges, Philip K. Dick, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith and others) have been superseded by the endless depth and breadth of the Internet (meta on steroids) and the triumphal pervasiveness of social media.

We got to the point where we were so in on the joke that we already knew the punch line. Or rather, we knew, or thought we knew, every (possible) punch line. And it’s this knowingness, a knowingness not based in or on knowledge or experience but simply in the recognition of the artifice at hand, that has arguably numbed us to ourselves, to each other, to love, to freedom, to activism and agitation and protest, to the very act of creating something unironic or nonmeta. Paradoxically, the metadata that our government and our communications giants have been gathering is something this very cynicism of ours helped create.

Few of us, though, realistically, truly “know” the conventions that are forever being spoofed in the culture just about everywhere we turn. No matter. Thinking we know is good enough. Or so we thought.

Devon McCann Jackson, “‘Welcome to the Age of Heavy Meta’”, The New York Times Magazine (6 October 2013), 52.

“No longer is the teacher the bottleneck between students and knowledge. Rather, the teacher architects the environment”

The key, [Robin Britt] said, is personalized learning — breaking free of the mass-production model, tailoring the curriculum to the student and redesigning it around proven competence rather than accrued face time, so that each student can go at his own pace. “Now your job is not to dispense knowledge,” Britt told the trainees. “It’s to facilitate learning. No longer is the teacher the bottleneck between students and knowledge. Rather, the teacher architects the environment — in the classroom, on the tablet, online, everywhere.”

Carlo Rotella, “No Child Left Untableted”, The New York Times Magazine (15 September 2013), 29.

An everyday experience in “studying a rabbinic text using manuscripts and the subsequent tradition more or less based on manuscripts”

The editing of rabbinic texts is much more complicated. The documents which have come down to us in the multifarious forms of mishnayot, midrashim, halakhot, aggadot, targums and talmuds cannot be considered to be authored literature. They are only kind of snapshots from a world of exegesis and school opinions. When recently reading the Mishnah tractate Sotah together with Midrash Sipre be-Midbar with my students, we had to answer the question of variant readings in parashat sotah with reference to the warning of witnesses in the case of adultery or suspicion of such. One student asked in some surprise: do the different manuscripts of one treatise also testify to different schools of opinion? Such, indeed, is the everyday experience we have in studying a rabbinic text using manuscripts and the subsequent tradition more or less based on manuscripts.

Giuseppe Veltri, “From The Best Text To The Pragmatic Edition: On Editing Rabbinic Texts”, in The New Testament and Rabbinic Literature, eds. Reimund Bieringer, Florentino García Martínez, Didier Pollefeyt, Peter Tomson (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2010), 67.

“Is it any wonder that many Jews opt out of involvement in a community that can be unwelcoming or even intimidating?”

Our Jewish community currently focuses its energies on threats: threats from anti-Semitism, threats to Israel, and the threat of Jews leaving the fold through intermarriage. Such concerns have their place; to be unmindful of threats abandons our responsibility to adopt strategies that successfully address them. However, in the pursuit of these strategies arises perhaps the greatest threat of all: discord among Jews that makes our community a dysfunctional family, driving some of its members out and causing those on the periphery to be wary, if not fearful. Is it any wonder that many Jews opt out of involvement in a community that can be unwelcoming or even intimidating?

Larry Sternberg, “Biggest Campus Threat Is Jewish Disunity, Not BDS”, The Jewish Week (4 Oct 2013), 22.

Why Does Rabbi Avi Weiss Frequently Refer to Tzelem Elohim?

You could say that it’s our job in this world to make manifest what God intended because God’s not doing it, that’s our job. So, all Rabbi Weiss is doing is trying to implement in this world the ideal that he sees fit. I think that’s part of why he keeps going back to tzelem Elohim, because which narrative is that from? The narrative of creation. He’s following that more than anything else because he’s trying to recreate the world. Not just tikkun olam, mind you – although he does make references to repairing the world – there’s an act of world-creation here, along the lines of what Rav Soloveitchik has advocated. And part of that means shaping the world in the image that you think it ought to be.

Rabbi Josh Yuter, “Halakhic Process 25: Open Orthodoxy“, Yutopia Podcast #119 (27 October 2013).

“Any Reference to Jewish values is the da’as Torah…on the left”

Any reference to Jewish values is – when you follow it through logically – the da’as Torah that is used more commonly on the left: that you know what God really wants, that you know that this is what God thinks is more important than anything else. And that is a presumptuous statement, no less presumptuous by the rabbis on the right who do that, but presumptuous, nonetheless.

Rabbi Josh Yuter, “Halakhic Process 25: Open Orthodoxy“, Yutopia Podcast #119 (27 October 2013).

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Some issues with considering versions of rabbinic texts

If accepted, the new version or publication crystallizes a fleeting moment in the tradition and, in so doing, makes further commentaries possible. It depends on the authority of the writer if his composition is to be considered a step forward in the tradition. If we consider a piece of tradition literature like the Mishnah, the situation is similar but not precisely the same. For we can imagine various attempts to publish Mishnayot, orally or in writing, to canonize a particular school’s tradition. That is, in my view, the main reason for the differences between the Mishnayot of the corpus of the Mishnah, the Tosefta and the Halakhic Midrashim, as well as the Mishnayot presupposed in Yerushalmi and Bavli. However, we have to be careful because ancient and medieval manuscript composers and writers could have had different “quotations” of the Mishnah before them, and the successive copyists could have harmonized their quotations according to the “vulgate”, namely according to the commonly used text in the academies.

Giuseppe Veltri, “From The Best Text To The Pragmatic Edition: On Editing Rabbinic Texts”, in The New Testament and Rabbinic Literature, eds. Reimund Bieringer, Florentino García Martínez, Didier Pollefeyt, Peter Tomson (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2010), 68-69.