Meditatio Septuaginta: Torah recitation as a spiritual discipline

There is evidence that the practice of meditative reading was cultivated by Hellenistic Jews as a discipline analogous to the spiritual exercises of the philosophical schools. The present study traces (1) the Deuteronomic antecedents of this practice, (2) its reconfiguration in the Torah Psalms, and (3) finally its expression in Greco-Jewish translation, with special reference to the Greek Psalter. Taking its cue from the work of Pierre Hadot, it situates this development within the larger matrix of Hellenistic philosophical discourse. The philological focus of the study is the use of the Hebrew verb I הגה Qal in contexts where Torah study is thematic and its rendering by μελετάω in the Septuagint. To frame the lexical analysis, it draws on the slot-filler model pioneered by Charles Fillmore.Contribution: This article situates a key Greco-Jewish translation with reference to both its Deuteronomic antecedents and to practices cultivated within the philosophical schools of the Hellenistic period. The analysis demonstrates the relevance of Frame Semantics to philological investigation.

Studying Jewish Women

This chapter explores the problems of studying Orthodox Jewish women, in particular the 'double invisibility' they experience, first from the perspective of male Orthodox Jews, and, second, in the lack of knowledge about them in the non-Jewish world. Orthodox women engage in a wide range of communal and domestic religious activities, in spite of their exclusion from an active role in worship in synagogue and from some areas of Torah study. Activities defined by Orthodoxy as the supreme religious privileges of women, such as keeping a kosher kitchen, preparing food for sabbath and festivals, and nurturing and educating children, remain largely invisible to Orthodox men. Standard descriptions of women's practices in the domestic and individual spheres omit many widespread customs and practices, often characterized as 'superstitions' although they form an integral and meaningful part of many women's religious lives. A major problem in studying women's religious lives and the ways in which they differ from and intersect with those of men is imagining how women fit into one's overall picture of Jewish religious activity. Neither the 'separate but equal' apologetic nor the simplistic identification of 'oppressed and oppressors' made by some feminists provides an adequate way of thinking about the relationship between male and female lived experience of Judaism. Given that Orthodox Judaism is undeniably patriarchal, it may reasonably be asked whether women have any access to power or agency within the religious life of the community, particularly in matters of ritual and correct practice.

Knowledge

This chapter describes the Book of Knowledge (Sefer hamada) as the most unusual of all fourteen books of the Mishneh torah, containing materials not ordinarily found in halakhic works. It covers the closing paragraph of the Book of Knowledge, which includes digressions to the opening paragraphs of the Mishneh torah, passages in Maimonides' Book of Commandments, including his discussions of love and knowledge of God, and of the patriarch Abraham. It also mentions Maimonides' explanation about the Book of Knowledge, in which it teaches that which one must know in order to make possible the fulfilment of the Torah's commandments. The chapter cites five sections of the Book of Knowledge that are considered relevant to an exposition of what must be known so that the commandments of the Torah may be properly obeyed. The sections compose of the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah, Laws of Idolatry, Laws of Moral Qualities, Laws of Torah Study, and Laws of Repentance.

Introduction

This chapter attempts to assemble a picture of what Maimonides sees when he lifts his gaze from the technical details of halakhah. It stresses that the vision that Maimonides sees is universalist as all the Mishneh torah is a code of Jewish law. It also discusses weak universalism, which is to say that Maimonides sees the commandments of the Torah as a particular means to a universal end. The chapter explains that the universal end is that of Torah in the larger sense, which, according to Maimonides, encompasses the universal disciplines of physics and metaphysics. It considers the universal disciplines as the pinnacle of Torah study, representing the content of what the rabbis called ma'aseh bereshit and ma'aseh merkavah, or collectively, pardes.

The Big Room

This chapter describes the rooms where all Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem (MTJ) activities took place. It specifically mentions the smaller room, the library, wherein plenty of books on the walls of the beis medresh were stored. Here the Rosh Yeshiva holds his 11:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. Talmud classes. The chapter also illustrates the big room, which a bimah, the platform from which the Torah is read on appropriate occasions, stands. They are all male, consistent with standards of modest comportment that dictate general segregation of males and females in public, and with the traditional Orthodox view that women are not obligated in Torah study generally, nor is it seemly for them to study Talmud. It analyses the volumes of the Babylonian Talmud, which are shelved on the rear right side of the beis medresh, right behind the table where the author is most frequently sat with his study partners. Ultimately, the chapter discusses the author's early kollel year during the Rosh Yeshiva's shiur (lesson), with his study partners Asher Stoler, Yisroel Ruven and Hillel. It highlights some of the yeshiva's routines, one of these is the annual procedure in which observant Jews, in preparation for Passover, formally transfer all of their chomets (leavened goods) to a non-Jew, who then inevitably transfers it back after the holiday ends.

Book Review: Rav Sa‘adya Ga’on in the focus of controversies in Baghdad

On the occasion of Professor Joshua Blau’s centenary jubilee, the book Rav Sa‘adya Ga’on in the focus of controversies in Baghdad: Sa'adya’s Sefer Ha-Galuy and Mevasser's two books of critiques on him, by Joshua Blau himself and Joseph Yahalom, was published in 2019 by the Ben-Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East of Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The book includes the original Hebrew version of Sefer Ha-Galuy; Sefer Eppiqoros, by Khalaf ibn Sarjadu; The Arabic version (Tafsir) of Sefer Ha-Galuy; and two critical works by by Mevasser ben Nissi Halevi: The Book of Correcting the Errors Found in the Writings of the Fayyumite Rosh Yeshiva, and The Book of Revealing the Errors Found in the Writings of the Fayyumite Rosh Yeshiva. I briefly review the content of these works as well as the cultural and historical background, and focus on the reasons for which Rav Sa‘adya composed Sefer Ha-Galuy and the ten benefits he detailed which may be gained from his work. We stress additional insights that the modern reader may find in this work, among them a glimpse into Rav Sa‘adya’s methodology in his Biblical commentary as reflected in his usage of biblical words in Sefer Ha-Galuy. We also discuss the history of the publication of Sefer Ha-Galuy throughout the past century and a half, little by little, until the nearly complete edition by Blau and Yahalom. The newly published translation reads fluently and is enlightening, bringing the reader into the atmosphere of those distant days. The reconstruction of the manuscript from the Geniza fragments is mostly plausible, but seems to be incorrect in a few places. I present here three additional yet unpublished fragments of the Sefer Ha-Galuy that include sections not included in the new printed edition, and suggest that some of the printed sections should be reordered. In addition, considerations regarding the internal coherency of the text, as well as the physical properties of the Geniza fragments, may lead to a slightly different ordering. One of the newly presented fragments reveals that in his commentary on the Sefer Ha-Galuy Rav Sa‘adya aimed at demonstrating the utility of high mathematics to Torah study, thereby emphasizing his own personal virtue as one having extensive knowledge in these fields. Furthermore, one can learn from the new Geniza sections about the proper order in which Rav Sa‘adya mentions the people whom he attacks in this manuscript, including a name that has disappeared so far from the eyes of the researchers, Judah the son of the Exilarch, David Ben Zakkai. The edition is accompanied by brief expansive comments. I illustrate how these may be the basis for further discussions, addressing the calculation of the end-of-days included in Sefer Ha-Galuy, probably as part of Rav Sa‘adya's method of historiography, which divides Jewish history into periods of 500 years.

Law, Hierarchy, and Gender

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.

Abraham Unbound: The Prefiguration of the Unconscious in the First Generation of the Musar and Hasidic Movements

This study examines the respective theological assumptions of two major forces in nineteenth-century Judaism—the Musar and the early Hasidic movements, and the way in which the budding concept of the unconscious illuminates both. Often translated as an ethical approach, the Musar movement originated from Lithuania and focused on Torah study as it deemed Talmud insufficient to create a deep, emotional attachment to Judaism; yet, despite their shared emphasis on emotions and their criticism of talmudic studies, the Musar movement was at odds with Hasidism, the mystical Jewish current that swept Eastern Europe from the eighteenth century onward. Through an examination of the biblical motif of the binding of Isaac, and the reaction of Abraham, this article will probe both movements’ analysis of the patriarch’s psychological make up. Such a comparison of their understanding of the pre-conscious psychic states will illustrate the nature of their theological opposition.