As the Deep River Rises

The present essay seeks to offer a conceptual framework for grappling with climate change from within the sources of Jewish law (halakhah), a discourse rooted in the Hebrew Bible but developed in the rabbinic literature of Late Antiquity and then in medieval and modern codes and commentaries. Halakhah reflects deeply-held intellectual, theological, ontological, and sociological values. As a modus vivendi, rabbinic law—variously interpreted by Jews of different stripes—remains a vital force that shapes the life of contemporary practitioners. We are interested in how a variety of contemporary scholars, theologians, and activists might use the full range of rabbinic legal sources—and their philosophical, jurisprudential, and moral values—to construct an alternative environmental ethic founded in a worldview rooted in obligation and a matrix of kinship relationships. Our essay is thus an exercise in decolonizing knowledge by moving beyond the search for environmental keywords or ready analogies to contemporary western discourse. We join the voices of recent scholars who have sought to revise regnant assumptions about how religious traditions should be read and interpreted with an eye to formulating constructive ethics.

John Selden

The life of John Selden (1584–1654) was both contemplative and active. Seventeenth-century England’s most learned person, he continued in the Long Parliament of the 1640s his vigorous opposition, begun in the 1620s, to the abuses of power, whether by Charles I or, later, by the Presbyterian-controlled Westminster Assembly. His gift for finding analogies among different cultures—Greco-Roman, Christian, Jewish, and Islamic—helped to transform both the poetry and prose of the century’s greatest poet, John Milton. Regarding family law, the two might have influenced one another. Milton cites Selden, and Selden owned two of Milton’s treatises on divorce, published in 1645, both of them presumably acquired while he was writing Uxor Ebraica (1646). Selden accepted the non-biblically rabbinic, externally imposed, coercive Adamic/Noachide precepts as universal laws of perpetual obligation, rejecting his predecessor Hugo Grotius’ view of natural law as the innate result of right reason. He employed rhetorical strategies in De Jure Naturali et Gentium (“The Law of Nature and of Nations”) to prepare his readers for what might otherwise have shocked them: his belief in classic rabbinic law (halakha) as authoritative testimony. Although Selden was very active in the Long Parliament, his only surviving debates from that decade were as a lay member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines. The Assembly’s scribe left so many gaps that the transcript is sometimes indecipherable. This book fills in the gaps and makes the speeches coherent by finding their contexts in Selden’s printed works, both the scholarly, as in the massive De Synedriis, but also in the witty and informal Table Talk.

Soldiers and Scholars: Ritual Dilemmas among National Religious Combat Soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces

This article explores how the practice of Jewish rabbinic law within the combat ranks of the Israel Defense Forces can be used as an ethnographic medium through which anthropologists may better contextualize the social and political tensions that characterize Jewish religious nationalism in Israel. We argue that national religious combat soldiers rarely turn to rabbinic legal tracts, or to the overlapping levels of military and civilian rabbinic leadership in their immediate efforts to resolve the everyday ritual dilemmas of their service. Rather, these dilemmas are primarily addressed and (always imperfectly) resolved on the small-scale intra-unit level. Through this ethnographic window into the religious and ritual aspects of military life, this article ultimately argues that the experience of political piety in Israel (and perhaps the wider Middle East) hinges not so much upon the power play between opposing religious and secular institutions but rather in the daily ambivalences and ambiguities experienced by individual adherents as they go about their daily lives.

Women, Children, and Slaves in Rabbinic Law

Rabbinic law on women, children, and slaves developed on the basis of biblical law and in the context of the Greco-Roman and Sasanian cultural environments in which Palestinian and Babylonian rabbis lived. The discussions were innovative in their adaptation of biblical law to new circumstances. From a sociological point of view, women, children, and slaves were dependents of the householder who were generally associated with the private sphere of the household. At the same time, they differed from each other with regard to honor, which only free persons possessed, and with regard to gender, since male children were raised to become Torah-observant male Jews themselves. Palestinian rabbinic law shows interesting similarities with and differences to Roman law of which rabbis would have been aware even if direct influences cannot be established.

The Bible and the Sources of Rabbinic Law

There are two aspects to the question of the relation between biblical law and rabbinic halakhah: the historical one, which refers to the continuum between the two cultures, and the creative one, which refers to the conscious efforts of the rabbis to interpret the biblical text and to deduce halakhic details from it. This chapter deals primarily with the second aspect, and surveys the state of research of the literature of halakhic midrashim—focusing on their division into two tannaitic schools—as well as of the place of midrash in other rabbinic compilations, notably the Babylonian Talmud. Following this survey the chapter discusses several relevant historical questions, especially the question whether midrash is the true source of halakhah, or just a method to artificially link pre-existing halakhot to the biblical text. Based on the view that the nature of midrash is the impetus to extract from the biblical text answers to all halakhic questions which bother the reader, whether or not they are actually referred to in the text, the chapter suggests several arguments in favor of the former view. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the great historical question of the continuity between biblical law and rabbinic halakhah. The chapter proposes studying halakhah from a longue durée perspective, which will enable us to approach this question on an evidential basis, and sketches some of the methodologies and research developments needed to advance this goal.