Omen and Anti-omen: The Rabbinic Hagiography of the Scapegoat’s Scarlet Ribbon

Abstract This article proposes that the place and meaning of various objects among religious communities can be explored in terms of “hagiography,” that is, through the narratives constructed around sacred objects sometimes long after their physical disappearance. It takes as its point of departure the assumption that in the same way that written accounts of saints’ lives disclose more about the authors of these accounts than about the protagonists, so narratives regarding “things” reveal the concerns and debates of their authors, and in particular their concerns about materiality and divine presence within physical objects. The article explores the rabbinic narratives concerning the scarlet ribbon tied to the scapegoat of the Day of Atonement, its function and its vicissitudes, as developed in the Mishnah and in the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds. Using both a synchronic and a diachronic lens, the article shows how the scarlet ribbon is utilized in the rabbis’ attempts to define their own times vis-à-vis earlier times, and to grapple with pressing religious uncertainties

Ritual Studies and the Study of Rabbinic Literature

In the last two decades several important studies have been published that focus on ritual in rabbinic literature, and consider ritual to be a critically important conceptual and analytical category in approaching rabbinic texts and rabbinic culture. This article provides an account of the intersection of Ritual Studies with the study of rabbinic literature, surveys key works and significant developments and shifts in the field, and identifies the central challenges in and benefits of examining rabbinic texts through ritual lenses. The article pays special attention to the complex relations between texts about rituals and ritual performances, as well as to the blurry boundaries between law and ritual in the realm of rabbinic halakhah

Galaxy Evolution: Modeling the Role of Non-thermal Pressure in the Interstellar medium

Galaxy evolution depends strongly on the physics of the interstellar medium (ISM). Motivated by the need to incorporate the properties of the ISM in cosmological simulations we construct a simple method to include the contribution of non-thermal components in the calculation of pressure of interstellar gas. In our method we treat three non-thermal components - turbulence, magnetic fields and cosmic rays - and effectively parametrize their amplitude. We assume that the three components settle into a quasi-steady-state that is governed by the star formation rate, and calibrate their magnitude and density dependence by the observed Radio-FIR correlation, relating synchrotron radiation to star formation rates of galaxies. We implement our model in single cell numerical simulation of a parcel of gas with constant pressure boundary conditions and demonstrate its effect and potential. Then, the non-thermal pressure model is incorporated into RAMSES and hydrodynamic simulations of isolated galaxies with and without the non-thermal pressure model are presented and studied. Specifically, we demonstrate that the inclusion of realistic non-thermal pressure reduces the star formation rate by an order of magnitude and increases the gas depletion time by as much. We conclude that the non-thermal pressure can prolong the star formation epoch and achieve consistency with observations without invoking artificially strong stellar feedback.Comment: 18 pages, 14 figures, accepted to MNRAS. Updated to match final versio

Critical Conditions for Core-Collapse Supernovae

The explosion of a core-collapse supernova can be approximated by the breakdown of steady-state solutions for accretion onto a proto-neutron star (PNS). We analytically show that as the neutrino luminosity exceeds a critical value L_c, the neutrinosphere pressure exceeds the hydrostatic limit even for an optimal shock radius R. This yields L_c \propto M^2 T^2 (with logarithmic corrections) and R \propto M/T, in agreement with numerical results, where M, T are the PNS mass, neutrino temperature. The near-critical flow can be approximated as a ballistic shell on top of an isothermal layer.Comment: PRL accepte

The Will of Others

Scholarly reflections on the concept of the will as it is articulated in late ancient texts have centered on the male individual and the difficulties he faces as he tries to train or direct his intentions. By contrast, in this article we seek to explore late ancient concepts and negotiations of the will by considering a cluster of ancient Jewish and Christian narrative scenarios in which women are under the threat of sexual assault. Rather than a split between warring parts of one person, these narratives treat moments when the will of one actor is in conflict with the will of another. Thus, these scenarios raise questions that cannot otherwise be accessed about human intention, agency, and subjectivity, and their limitations by social and cultural realities. We argue that these cases should be viewed not as the marginal troubles that sometimes happen to women, but as expressions of the fundamental problems at the heart of the theories of the will embraced within late ancient Judaism and Christianity