Menorah Review (No. 66, Winter/Spring, 2007)

A Collection by MR\u27s Poet Laureate -- Examining Historiography -- Revisiting Jewish Radicalism -- The World of Rabbi Nathan -- Why a Dictionary of Antisemitis

Menorah Review (No. 65, Summer/Fall, 2006)

A Rebbe in Skirts -- By Way of Introduction: Reflections on Israeli Women\u27s Studies: A Reader -- Israeli Literature and Israeli Politics -- More in than Out -- Revisiting Old Themes Through a Contemporary Lens -- The World of Rabbi Nathan -- Noteworthy Book

The Night Rabbi Aqiba Slept With Two Women

In the rabbinic worldview, man goes through life surrounded by temptation. The world is a place where temptation lurks on every street corner, at every table, and at every moment. For the rabbis, Torah – both Written and Oral – is the solution to controlling the yeẓer (יצר), the inclination to act on one’s desires. The ability to control one’s yeẓer is essential for proper rabbinic comportment. Unfortunately for women, according to the rabbis, only men are capable of controlling their yeẓer. Given that only men could control their yeẓer, women often appear in rabbinic literature in the role of the temptress, seeking to seduce men into transgressing social, ethical, legal, and theological practices. All of this helps to explain how Rabbi Aqiba found himself in bed with two women

‘Their Backs toward the Temple, and Their Faces toward the East:’ The Temple and Toilet Practices in Rabbinic Palestine and Babylonia

This article treats the cultural meaning of rabbinic toilet rules from their Tannaitic instantiation through to later developments in Palestine and Mesopotamia. It argues that these rules draw their corporeal and mental bearings from the Jerusalem temple, in inverse and opposite directions to prayer deportment. It shows how the juxtaposition of the sacred (temple) and profane (toilet) triggered the temple in unlikely instances under the guise of prohibition. As such, toilet rules are the underside of a rabbinic mapping project, similar to rules of bodily orientation in prayer. This map, effectively drawn by corporeal direction and orientation, with the (absent) temple at its center, traversed Palestine and the Diaspora, and ignored contemporary religious and imperials maps and limes. Thus developing toilet practices can tell us something about how a minority religious and social formation shaped bodily functions not necessarily in the more predictable terms of disgust and expulsion but rather as devices through which to uphold a lost center

Abortion and Moral Context: Human Beings in a Moral Community

In this dissertation, I urge that ethical discussions of abortion remain dissatisfying in large part because they conduct the debate in terms of the contested concept of the ‘person.’ Building on the reflections of MacIntyre, I will argue that the loss of ethical context to which he refers has also meant that we have come to view ‘persons’ and human beings as individual, independent units, abstracted from their relations with others. Philosophers have sought to analyse and elevate the concept of ‘person’; competing conceptions of personhood have pursued the specific individual qualities that grounds a being's claim to having a morally significant life. This predilection of the personhood literature has often severely limited the abortion dialogue and prevented richer and varied understandings of our layered nature from emerging. I contend that the deadlock, to which Ruth Macklin refers, within the personhood dialogue means that we need to broaden our moral vocabulary and give a much more central place to the notion of the socialised human being. Rather than place personhood at the heart of the debate, I would suggest we should emphasise our relationships and our membership in an already-existing moral context and community, and that we should reflect far more fully on these settings. Rather than considering what kinds of entities qualify as ‘persons,’ we should instead consider the notion of the human being existing in a moral community and thereby situated in a wide and complex web of relationships. I argue that an ethic of care, coupled with a phenomenological approach, will provide the most fruitful framework when responding to ethical issues generated by the abortion dialogue. Taking account of our nature as socialised beings, in relationship with other beings is, I shall try to show, key to understanding our moral existence in general and to grasping the intricacies of the moral debate over abortion in particular. Membership within a social network or moral community is fundamentally a moral issue where certain experiences and conditions can threaten what really matters. When providing us with accounts of the moral community, philosophers have often put forward very particular qualifications for membership. To underscore the need to explore further accounts of moral communities I consider the work of cultural and philosophical anthropology where we find that observations relating to the distinctly human life remain pertinent for our current ethical climate. Philosophical anthropology reveals just how complex the idea of moral community is and hints at the broader moral vocabulary I believe is required. I argue that it is crucial that we understand the ethical consequences of choosing to see someone as being either a member or not a member of the moral community and as Eva Feder Kittay argues, there are a range of morally repugnant current moral exclusions. I believe this discussion has considerable bearing on the abortion debate, and I provide two specific examples of the marginalisations that a moral community can create: recent empirical studies into abortion stigma and Judith Butler’s considerations on vulnerability and female sexuality. We need to address these exclusions and consider the ways we define the moral agent, and consider how we make assumptions about which human lives have value. With an ever-expanding and complex ‘moral community’ under review I would argue that recognizing ourselves as human beings, participants in a moral community, must be our starting point. It is from this platform that we can then refuse to enact exclusions and try to live out Butler’s call to make a concern for all human lives a real and valid ethical concern

Becoming Wholehearted: Constructing a Jewish Liturgical Asceticism

Thesis advisor: Ruth LangerThis dissertation creates a Jewish theology of asceticism focused on articulating the ideals toward which Jewish observant life is directed, a method for reflecting on the ‘ends’ of a Jewish life well lived in relationship to practice. I apply this theological asceticism to an analysis of Jewish liturgical prayer (tefilat keva), arguing that it is a desire-forming practice that causes practitioners to reimagine human flourishing and what leads to true satisfaction. My approach to this topic is modeled on a careful analysis and evaluation of the Anglican theologian Sarah Coakley’s “new asceticism” in light of Charles Taylor’s “maximal demand.” I augment Coakley’s definition of asceticism to fit a Jewish theological anthropology articulated by Rabbi Israel Salanter. I then apply this ascetic discourse to the study of the daily practice of liturgy. The Jewish liturgical asceticism I develop draws together elements from the Catholic James Fagerberg’s liturgical theology, the Presbyterian theologian James K. A. Smith’s theories about how liturgy forms a social-imaginary, and R. Israel Salanter’s teachings on the formation of desire (ta’avah) through the practice of hitpa’alut. The dissertation ends with an application of this method for theologically reflecting on the desire forming power of a daily prayer life through a close reading of elements of the weekday morning service, shacharit. This dissertation offers a Jewish theological account of the formative power of liturgical prayer on human desire. It also creates an approach for thinking more broadly about desire formation as a key component in the ideal goals of a normative Jewish lifestyle. This theological project will benefit communities of practice looking to better understand the wisdom of their inherited spiritual practices, educators and communal rabbis looking to commend traditional Jewish ways of life, Jewish theologians looking for an approach to discussing the ideals within Jewish life in a way that stays rooted in practice, and scholars of Jewish liturgy who are looking for methods for studying liturgy as a formative act and not merely an historical text.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Theology