At the age of 27, alone in Jerusalem in the wake of a painful divorce, Ilana Kurshan joined the world s largest book club, learning daf yomi, Hebrew for daily page" of the Talmud, a book of rabbinic teachings spanning about 600 years and the basis for all codes of Jewish law. A runner, a reader and a romantic, Kurshan adapted to its pace, attuned her ear to its poetry, and discovered her passions in its pages. She brought the Talmud with her wherever she went, studying in airplanes, supermarket lines, and over a plate of pasta at home, careful not to drip tomato sauce upon discussions about the sprinkling of blood on the Temple altar. By the time she completed the Talmud after seven and a half years, Kurshan was remarried with three young children. With each pregnancy, her Talmud sat perched atop her growing belly. This memoir is a tale of heartache and humor, of love and loss, of marriage and motherhood, and of learning to put one foot in front of the other by turning page after page. Kurshan takes us on a deeply accessible and personal guided tour of the Talmud, shedding new light on its stories and offering insights into its arguments both for those already familiar with the text and for those who have never encountered it. For people of the book both Jewish and non-Jewish If All the Seas Were Ink is a celebration of learning through literature how to fall in love once again.

"Comprised of rabbinic debates in the aftermath of the destruction of the Second Temple (70 C.E.), the Talmud has provided the basis for Jewish ethical and practical norms for centuries. It is also an extremely long and forbiddingly difficult work that has accumulated countless commentaries just as complex. A recent translation with extensive notes has made the Talmud more accessible to English-language readers, but the textual difficulties remain. This volume looks at Avodah Zarah, one tractate of the Talmud concerned with idolatry, page by page. Idolatry was one of the cardinal sins for which an observant Jew was to accept death before transgressing. Daily Reflections on Idolatry offers a modern commentary with doses of humor and comparative examples in an effort to both explain and humanize the text and make it even more accessible to contemporary readers." --Cover page 4.

" . . . a fascinating and thought-provoking book . . . " ―The Jewish Quarterly "The best introduction to the talmudic literature that is available. . . . An extraordinarily important book, brilliant, and lucid." ―Daniel Boyarin "Menachem Fisch has written a rich, thoughtful book. One will come away from Rational Rabbis with a deeper understanding of just what the Talmud is." ―Hilary Putnam Talmudic culture is often viewed as bound by its traditions. Menachem Fisch maintains that a close reading of talmudic texts frequently reveals their authors as rabbis who, rather than conform uncritically to tradition, knowingly set out to expose and resolve problems inherent in the received traditions.

Argues that the rabbis of late antiquity, in the normative law set forth in the Mishnah-Tosefta-Yerushalmi-Bavli, liberated Israelite women by according them what Scripture had denied: the standing and powers of sentient beings; a role in critical transactions of their existence that, if not entirely equal to that of men, at least corresponded to it; and agency and intentionality. Few bibliographic references. No index. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Perhaps more than any other aspect of rabbinic literature, the laws about and discussions of menstruation have polarized current discussions of gender relations in Jewish culture. Is the designated impurity of menstruation sexist? Or does ritual absence from sex during menstruation encourage a rhythmic reaffirmation of conjugal intimacy?This book offers a new perspective on the extensive rabbinic discussions of menstrual impurity, female physiology, and anatomy, and on the social and religious institutions those discussions engendered. It analyzes the functions of these discussions within the larger textual world of rabbinic literature and in the context of Jewish and Christian culture in late antiquity. How did gender work—how was it made to work—in rabbinic literature? How did that literature dictate the place of women in Jewish culture? In search of answers to these questions, the author analyzes the architectural metaphors deployed to describe female anatomy, arguing that this discursive construction operated culturally to associate women with the home and exclude them from rabbinic study halls. The author shows that rabbinic discourse is not completely controlled by rabbinic ideology, however. She analyzes talmudic discussions that allow alternative gender perspectives to emerge, indicating that women and their bodies were not completely objectified. This suggests that the Babylonian Talmud does not present a completely homogeneous gender structure, but contains a number of different, sometimes contradictory, possibilities. The book concludes with a study of early Christian texts that relate to the same biblical laws on menstrual impurity as rabbinic texts, focusing in particular on a Jewish-Christian text in which the anonymous author polemicizes against Jewish women converts who remain attached to the biblical laws. This text allows us to reconstruct women’s perspectives on the inscription of religious meaning onto their bodies and physiological processes.

Most ancient societies were patriarchal in outlook, but not all patriarchies are equally condescending toward women. Impelled by the gnawing question of whether the inferiority of women is integral to the Torah's vision, Sassoon sets out to determine where the Bible, the Talmud, and related literature, especially the Dead Sea Scrolls, sit on this continuum of patriarchal condescension. Of course, there are multiple voices in both Biblical and Talmudic literature, but more surprising is how divergent these voices are. Some points of view seem intent on the disenfranchisement and domestication of women, whereas others prove to be not far short of egalitarian. Opinions that downplay the applicability of the Biblical commandments to women and that strongly deprecate Torah study by women emerge from this study as arguably no more than the views of an especially vocal minority.

The latest in Jacob Neusner's informative series on the theology and hermeneutics of Rabbinical Judaism, The Emergence of Judaism offers insight into the development of Judaism in antiquity. Based on the author's lectures, this volume focuses on the social setting of Judaism, the Babylonian Talmud, and the Bavli.

This book discusses the interaction between history, rabbinic literature and feminist studies. Recent approaches to rabbinic literature have overturned the traditional view of these writings and new literary methods were suggested, mostly denying them all historical value. But rabbinic literature constitutes the main source for the lives of Jews in Palestine and Babylonia during the late Roman period, and thus should not be totally rejected. This study suggests a new post-literary approach, i.e. it discusses the residue of the texts after these have been analyzed and dissected by literary critics. But mainly this is a book about women's history, adopting many assumptions of feminist criticism about the androcentric nature of all ancient texts, and approaches them with due suspicion. The Rabbis treated women differently from the way they treated men. This resulted in the former's marginalization and manipulation by the texts. On the other hand, however, it created an ironic situation whereby principles useful for the recovery of historical information on women, are useless when applied to men. This study describes such principles and demonstrates them with the help of many examples.

Laws, or Halakhah, and narratives, or Aggadah, comprise the Torah. Halakhah, normative law, makes the same statement in terms of behavior that Aggadah, in its systematic and abstract mode, makes in terms of beliefs. The Halakhic theology focuses on the interior existence of Israelite. In this sourcebook, author Jacob Neusner derives from details of legal expositions some of the Halakhah's theological propositions, in order to show how normative laws of conduct express the narrative monotheism of the Torah. An introductory overview of the Halakhic theological program, seen through topical expositions of law, briefly compares Halakhic texts with Aggadic theological programs.

About the Author Jacob Neusner is Research Professor of Religion and Theology Bard College Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. Product description