Ethical and Moral Duties in Rabbinic Judaism

2019 ◽  
pp. 424-436
Author(s):  
Jonathan Wyn Schofer
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Ritual Practice ◽  
Conceptual Content ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Identity Creation ◽  
Rabbinic Judaism ◽  
Legal Standards ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Moral Duties

The modern study of ethics and moral duties in Rabbinic Judaism has its foundation in the examination of halakhah and covenant. Recent scholarship of the last twenty-five years has emphasized that rabbinic sources situate law in relation to exegesis and narrative, and the well-known distinction between law (halakhah) and non-legal materials (aggadah) has been examined both for its significance in culture and identity creation and for its intellectual and moral features. A renewed approach to ethics and moral duties in Rabbinic Judaism studies halakhah with attention to the intertwining of textual and literary forms with conceptual content, and with attention to political and social contestation, as well as identity formation, in the articulation of legal standards. The domain of law overlaps with that of morality in several elements of halakhah, including ritual practice, taxation and charity, relations between men and women, and responses to damages.

Holy Men and Women of the Desert

2020 ◽  
pp. 34-50
Author(s):  
David Brakke
Keyword(s):  
Complete Separation ◽  
Women And Gender ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The World ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Holy Man ◽  
Evagrius Ponticus

Recent scholarship has undermined the traditional picture of desert monasticism as originating with Antony of Egypt and then spreading to Palestine and Syria, as consisting of the poor and uneducated, and as developing in complete separation from the world. This essay discusses key trends in the study of late ancient desert monks including: the decentring of Egypt and the turn away from single founders; philosophy as the source of and background for monastic practices and literary forms; scepticism about the myth of the desert; the engagement of monks with wider society; rethinking the concept of the holy man; and attention to women and gender. Publications of new sources (such as the works of Evagrius Ponticus and Shenoute), more theoretically aware readings of old sources, and studies of archaeological and papyrological remains have contributed to these developments.

scholarly journals Worn Shoes: Identity, Memory and Footwear

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 128-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Hockey ◽  
Rachel Dilley ◽  
Victoria Robinson ◽  
Alexandra Sherlock
Keyword(s):  
Life Course ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Personal Transformation ◽  
The Self ◽  
Theoretical Understanding ◽  
Ongoing Research ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The North ◽  
The Way

This article raises questions about the role of footwear within contemporary processes of identity formation and presents ongoing research into perceptions, experiences and memories of shoes among men and women in the North of England. In a series of linked theoretical discussions it argues that a focus on women, fashion and shoe consumption as a feature of a modern, western ‘project of the self’ obscures a more revealing line of inquiry where footwear can be used to explore the way men and women live out their identities as fluid, embodied processes. In a bid to deepen theoretical understanding of such processes, it takes account of historical and contemporary representations of shoes as a symbolically efficacious vehicle for personal transformation, asking how the idea and experience of transformation informs everyday and life course experiences of transition, as individuals put on and take off particular pairs of shoes. In so doing, the article addresses the methodological and analytic challenges of accessing experience that is both fluid and embodied.

Breathing Under Water

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Gabriela Mesquita Borges ◽  
Rita Faria
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Interpersonal Violence ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
Symbolic Violence ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Refugee Women ◽  
Specific Analysis ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
Gender Specific

The current chapter will allow a better understanding of refugee women's situation in global-forced migration. It also offers a comprehensive account of the ways in which refugee women's experiences of violence are shaped by gendered relations and structures. Furthermore, the chapter will analyze the interactions between the gender identity formation of men and women, the context of escape, displacement and asylum seeking, and the experience or manifestation of gender-based violence against refugee women. Finally, it also intends to illustrate how structural and symbolic violence and power relations cooperate to shape experiences of violence for refugee women and how it can influence and perpetuate interpersonal violence. In this sense, several studies are presented that demonstrate, on one hand, how gender relations are affected by escape, displacement, and asylum, and how they can create different practices of structural and symbolic violence; and, on the other hand, draw attention to the current lack of gender-specific analysis of the problem of asylum and refugees.

Stars to the State and Beyond: Globalization, Identity, and Asian Popular Music

2013 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Milioto Matsue
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Vast Array ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Global Moment ◽  
The Individual

Popular music is a dynamic portal through which to gain a greater understanding of a vast array of social phenomena within Asia. In particular, the power of pop to actively shape conceptions of self and inform the ways in which we interact with others at the individual, communal, and even national and transnational levels has taken center stage, but understanding just how these identities are formed through the performance of popular music is quite complex in the current global moment. Through comparison of recent scholarship covering diverse types of popular music throughout Asia, this article explores how identity formation is informed by an increasingly nuanced understanding of globalization. Moving from a most intimate sense to broad transnational and inter-ethnic contexts, it not only expands the concept of identity in Asia, but also reveals how the study of popular music in general can illuminate other social issues important to Asianists.

Let Them Eat Fish: Food for the Poor in Early Rabbinic Judaism

2014 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 250-270
Author(s):  
Gregg E. Gardner
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Fish Food ◽  
Rabbinic Judaism ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Tiered System ◽  
Social Separation ◽  
Material Requirements

Abstract Recent scholarship has shown how investigations into food and poverty contribute to our understanding of late-antique Judaism and Christianity. These areas of inquiry overlap in the study of charity, as providing food was the preeminent way to support the poor. What foods and foodways do the earliest texts of rabbinic Judaism prescribe for the poor? This article examines Tannaitic discussions of the foods that should be given as charity, reading these texts within their literary and historical contexts. I find that they prescribe a two-tiered system whereby foods for the week aim to meet the poor’s biological needs, while those for the Sabbath fulfill religious requirements. These rabbinic instructions, however, also reinforce social separation and deepen the poor’s sense of exclusion. This article contributes to scholarship on poverty and charity in late antiquity, the use of food in the construction of rabbinic identity, and the tensions that arise from establishing material requirements for religious observances.

Blending: A Response

2006 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret H. Freeman
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Narrative Perspective ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Prose Narratives ◽  
Reader Reception ◽  
Human Creativity

This response to the five articles in this special issue on blending focuses on how the power of blending as a basic human cognitive ability not surprisingly extends into all aspects of human creativity, illuminating such literary forms as narrative perspective, character and identity formation, and poetic styles, as well as reader reception and response or cultural development and transmission. In their extension of earlier studies of blending in poetry to drama, film, and prose narratives, these five articles reveal the possibilities of a broader scope for blending theory in literature. However, if blending theory is to succeed in modeling the human mind, it must also account for intentionality and feeling. In the second section of this article, therefore, I explore Susanne K. Langer's idea that literature creates the semblance of felt life, an idea that raises the possibility that form-meaning blending includes the iconic notion of form as feeling. Using Per Aage Brandt's cognitive-semiotic elaboration of Fauconnier and Turner's blending model and Masako Hiraga's model for metaphor-icon links in language, I suggest the possibility of constructing an aesthetic theory of literature that would reveal the central and crucial role that literature (and all the arts) play in human consciousness and feeling.

Tragic form and feeling in theIliad

1982 ◽  
Vol 102 ◽  
pp. 145-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. B. Rutherford
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Focus Attention ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Past ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
The Way

These hours of backward clearness come to all men and women, once at least, when they read the past in the light of the present, with the reasons of things, like unobserved finger-posts, protruding where they never saw them before. The journey behind them is mapped out, and figured with its false steps, its wrong observations, all its infatuated, deluded geography.Henry James,The Bostonians, ch. xxxixThis paper is intended to contribute to the study of both Homer and Greek tragedy, and more particularly to the study of the influence of the epic upon the later poets. The current revival of interest among English scholars in the poetic qualities of the Homeric poems must be welcomed by all who care for the continuing survival and propagation of classical literature. The renewed emphasis on the validity of literary criticism as applied to presumably oral texts may encourage a more positive appreciation of the subtlety of Homeric narrative techniques, and of the coherent plan which unifies each poem. The aim of this paper is to focus attention on a number of elements in Greek tragedy which are already present in Homer, and especially on the way in which these poets exploit the theme of knowledge—knowledge of one's future, knowledge of one's circumstances, knowledge of oneself. Recent scholarship on tragedy has paid much more attention to literary criticism in general and to poetic irony in particular: these insights can also illuminate the epic. Conversely, the renewed interest in Homer's structural and thematic complexity should also enrich the study of the tragedians, his true heirs.

On How To Be or Not To Be: Theoretical Reflection On Religion and Identity in Africa

2001 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerhard Van Den Heever
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Social Constructivist ◽  
Social Formation ◽  
Identity Creation ◽  
African Identity ◽  
Social Interests ◽  
Theories Of Religion ◽  
African Context ◽  
Theoretical Reflection

AbstractIn introducing this issue on 'Religion and Identity in Africa' the debates regarding African identity in religion here is placed within a wider theoretical framework of social constructivist theories of religion. Within the ambit of these social approaches to religion, it is argued that issues of identity and religion are essentially issues of mythmaking and social formation with a view to satisfying social interests. However, describing religion and explaining identity formation are not innocent scholarly activities, embedded as they are in the politics of conceptual manipulation and the rhetoric of identity creation. In light of this it can be argued that the contributions assembled in this issue represent both descriptions of processes, and appeals to or indicators towards the development of an African identity in conceptualising religion in the African context.

scholarly journals Who really creates the place brand? Considering the role of user generated content in creating and communicating a place identity

1970 ◽  
pp. 9-24
Author(s):  
Heather Skinner
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Formation Process ◽  
Brand Image ◽  
Place Identity ◽  
Brand Identity ◽  
Identity Creation ◽  
Unique Event ◽  
Local Municipality ◽  
Place Brand

This paper explores online and social media users’ contributions to place identity creation, challenging the role and importance of various actors in the place brand identity and place brand image formation process. Findings arise from a content analysis of 149 separate photographs of a unique event that takes place on the Greek island of Corfu as part of the Orthodox Easter festival. Findings are also informed by autoethnographic reflexivity from the researcher’s own participation in and observation of the event, and 84 images from the researcher’s own photographic record of the event. Comparisons are drawn between social media users’ images and those communicated by the local Municipality through 7 relevant images reproduced in the official Easter on Corfu brochure. The images uploaded by social media users were not vastly different in terms of content from those of the local authority, and were also similar to those taken by the researcher. Perhaps it may be time for place branders to not only voluntarily give up their perceptions of control over at least part of the identity formation process and encourage contributions from wider stakeholders, but to no longer perceive them as mere consumers of the brand, but also as its co-creators. However, this will require another shift in academic understanding of place brand identity and place brand image, which may be difficult to achieve considering that there has only recently been reached a certain level of agreement within the extant literature about the various definitions of terms associated with these constructs.

scholarly journals Law, Hierarchy, and Gender

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valérie Rhein
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Rabbinic Judaism ◽  
Torah Study ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Selection Of

Why do the tannaim exempt women from time-bound commandments (m. Qiddushin 1:7)? In this paper it is argued that the unequal levels of obligation for men and women in rabbinic Judaism creates a hierarchy of mitzvot between them that mimics and virtually replaces the earlier biblical hierarchy of mitzvot between priests and Israel. In both constellations the rabbis consider the obligation to fulfill more commandments to be a privilege. The similarity between the hierarchies priests–Israel and men–women becomes apparent when the selection of commandments from which the tannaim and the amoraim explicitly exempt women are examined more closely: Many of them – the time-bound commandments shofar, lulav, tzitzit, tefillin, and shema as well as the non-time-bound mitzvah of Torah study – share a common feature, namely, their function as “ersatz Temple rituals.” During the transition from a Temple-oriented, priest-based Judaism to a study-oriented rabbinic Judaism, rituals such as these played a crucial role.

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