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The polar views of God as a demanding judge and an all-compassionate parent live in tension

The polar views of God as a demanding judge (on the one hand) and an all-compassionate parent (on the other) live in tension. We ought to act as if God does indeed demand that we rise to the occasion of deserving deliverance. At the same time, God knows, as we do, that perfection is beyond us, and when we are about to give up hope, we should remember that God really does offer unconditional love in the end.

All of this matters — not because of God but because theological models are templates for the way we humans, made in God’s image, are supposed to behave…. The expectations that govern God’s relationship with us should exemplify the ground rules of our relationships with others.

In practice, we are held to the highest standards when it comes to people who depend upon us or who otherwise come into our orbit: we must apologize especially to those we love, and strive to do whatever we can to correct the behavior that hurts them. But if we are on the receiving end of these relationships — if friends and family ask pardon of us, that is — we ought not to be unreasonably demanding of them. Rather, like God, we can welcome them back with the good grace of love that asks nothing beyond their sincere overture across the divide that separates us.

Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, “A Song of God’s Grace”, The Jewish Week (6 September 2013), 56.

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How intermarried women and men experience parenthood is essential to increasing the likelihood that they will raise children to identify as Jews

How intermarried women and men experience parenthood is essential to increasing the likelihood that they will raise children to identify as Jews. When a Jewish woman intermarries and becomes a parent and when a Jewish man intermarries and becomes a parent, their experiences are different. The influence of becoming a parent on their respective Jewish identities, however, is surprisingly similar. Jewish identity is maintained, transformed, and reinvented in ways that are authentically meaningful to people who self-identify as Jewish and intermarry.

Keren McGinity, “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle: How the Gender of the Jewish Parent Influences Intermarriage”, AJS Perspectives (Spring 2013), 42.

“There’s a big difference between building bridges across cultures to foster understanding and building bridges so you can run across and ransack the other side”

Most modern-day Protestant fundamentalists believe that the Jews are (at least until Jesus’ return) God’s chosen people. If Christ himself was Jewish, and followed Jewish tradition, the thinking goes, why shouldn’t Christians consider the ways their savior actually lived and practice the rituals he practiced? Many evangelicals have traded contempt of the past for a respectful, almost fetishistic view of Jews and, now, Jewish tradition. What this means in practice is extremely complicated. There’s a big difference between building bridges across cultures to foster understanding and building bridges so you can run across and ransack the other side.

Maud Newton, “Oy Vey, Christian Soldiers”, The New York Times Magazine (24 March 2013), 49.

Restoration of the dead to life mentioned in the Bible

In Isa. xxvi, 19, a restoration of the dead to life is mentioned. ‘Thy dead shall live; my dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing ye that dwell in the dust; for thy dew is as the dew of light, and the earth shall cast forth thy dead.’ In these words are discerned the earliest traces of the idea of a national resurrection. The prophet speaks of the time when calamity will overtake Israel’s enemies. Israel will endure long suffering, however, before the time of their inevitable vindication in the eyes of the nations comes (chapters xxv-xxvi). Nevertheless, it will come, and with it, will take place the return to life of numerous generations.

A. Melinek, “The Doctrine of Reward and Punishment in Biblical and Early Rabbinic Writings,” in Essays Presented to Chief Rabbi Israel Brodie on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. H.J. Zimmels, J. Rabbinowitz, & I. Finestein (London: The Soncino Press Limited, 1967), 282.

Every magazine is addressed to a readership for whom what the magazine presents as attained is in truth aspirational

Every magazine is addressed to a readership for whom what the magazine presents as attained is in truth aspirational: Seventeen is read by twelve-year-olds, and no playboy has ever read Playboy. The explicit goal of the National Geographic Society, and of its house journal, was to show the world to the worldly, to enlarge the map, to support exploration with grants and medals. But the real task of National Geographic was to show white people who rarely got far from Cincinnati or San Francisco what lay beyond their ken.

Adam Gopnik, “Yellow Fever”, The New Yorker (22 April 2013), 104.

Modern redaction-criticism of Talmudic attributions relies on the notion that scholars can successfully localize earlier tannaitic and amoraic texts within a Talmudic passage

…modern redaction-criticism of Talmudic attributions relies on the notion that scholars can successfully localize earlier tannaitic and amoraic texts within a Talmudic passage, and that these sources, for the most part, retain their distinct identity. It is this ability that allows Talmudists to access not only amoraic culture, but also the world of the Stam.

Shai Secunda, “The Sasanian ‘<i>Stam</i>’: Orality and the Composition of Babylonian Rabbinic and Zoroastrian Legal Literature” in <i>The Talmud in Its Iranian Context</i>, eds. Carol Bakhos and M. Rahim Shayegan (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 141-142, n. 6.

If reference to the past could contribute to the inculcation of moral values, the rabbis were not averse to making such reference

The rabbinic agenda, at least as expressed in the Talmudic literature at hand, embraced scriptural interpretation, legal explication and instruction coupled with the inculcation of moral values. If reference to the past could contribute to these categories, the rabbis were not averse to making such reference, for in so doing the past was rendered relevant. The use of מאי דהוה הוה – the anonymous Talmudic redactors might thus be considered a literary device, employed when the rabbinic discourse entered unfamiliar territory, albeit within the larger context of the accepted rabbinic agenda.

Isaiah Gafni, “Concepts of Periodization and Causality in Talmudic Literature”, Jewish History, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Spring, 1996), 31-32.

Henry Monsky “was less concerned with the problems of anti-Semitism and discrimination than with building positive values in the minds of the young people of the country”

He was less concerned with the problems of anti-Semitism and discrimination than with building positive values in the minds of the young people of the country.

Maurice Bisgyer, “Henry Monsky: His Work”, in Mrs. Henry Monsky and Maurice Bisgyer, Henry Monsky: The Man and His Work (New York: Crown Publishers, 1947), 75.

Relationship between print and manuscript was a long divorce, but never finalized for the Jews

In his Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order, David McKitterick characterizes the relationship between print and manuscript in the early modern period as a long divorce. For Jews, one might posit that the divorce was never finalized: The composition of texts in manuscript never disappeared from Jewish culture. The writing of a Torah scroll, the composition of a mezuzah, and other such sacred objects continues uninterrupted. Even beyond these basic ritual functions, manuscript writing continued to play a crucial role in Jewish societies for centuries after the invention of printing, and manuscripts continue to exist in persistent tension with printed books. One could write an entire work on manuscript culture among early modern Jewry along the lines of Brian Richardson’s recent study. Such a book would unearth a range of intellectual activities that have either been studied in isolation from one another or not studied at all. Here, too, the history of the Shulhan ‘arukh proves particularly instructive. In his discussion of the Ashkenazic tradition of glossing the Shulhan ‘arukh, Elchanan Reiner concluded: “The Ashkenazi halakhic book at the beginning of the modern era retained certain features inherited from the medieval scribal tradition of knowledge transmission. In certain respects it was a kind of printed manuscript, that is, a text which, in the way it took shape, rejected the new communicative values of print culture and created a text with esoteric components, thus protecting its elitist position.” Reiner’s concept of a “printed manuscript” neatly dissolves the distinction between print and manuscript so beloved by historians fixated on rupture. It should also serve as the point of departure for the study of several aspects of early modern Jewish culture: the spread of kabbalistic books, the development of Jewish reference works, the study of marginal annotations, and the history of collections to name only a few.

Yaacob Dweck, “What is a Jewish Book?”, AJS Review 34:2 (November 2010), 371-372.

The era of the religious Right is over. Its collapse is part of a larger decline of…

The era of the religious Right is over. Its collapse is part of a larger decline of a style of ideological conservatism that reached high points in 1980 and 1994 but suffered a series of decisive – and I believe fatal – setbacks during George W. Bush’s second term. The end of the religious Right does not signal a decline in evangelical Christianity. On the contrary, it is a sign of a new reformation among Christians – Warren and Cizik are representative figures – who are disentangling their great movement from a political machine. This will require liberals and conservatives alike to abandon their sometimes narrow views of who evangelicals are and what they believe.

E.J. Dionne Jr., Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith & Politics After the Religious Right (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008), 4-5.