Torah, the name of the first five books of the ?sacred history? comprised by the Hebrew Bible, tends to be translated as ?Law? and to be affiliated with the separating ?Law of the Father.? But Torah means ?teaching.? Venerable tradition allies this teaching with feminine Wisdom, ?a tree of life.? Theories of poetic language elaborated by such scholars as Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous facilitate discovering beneath the Torah's fractured and labyrinthine surface a way of return to (...) the mother. This way is embodied in the inversions, textuality, and concentricity of the rhetorical trope of chiasmus, which exceeds the bounds of the Law to provide a form for the expression of ?woman's desire? and so for the feminine text. Exploring as such the doubly chiastic poem in which, when naming woman in Eden, a human being (adam) changes its name to man (iysh) challenges man's biblical history, while restoring the memory of interconnection with the mother and all life. Reduplications of this transformative moment expand upon sacred history in terms of the Torah's central injunction to love one's neighbor as oneself. (shrink)

The Hebrew Bible does not present the pleasure as a problem. Nevertheless, the relationship with Greek philosophical tradition made it possible to Jewish interpreters to relate their Sacred Book to the question of the pleasure. In Philo of Alexandria the Torah is directly involved in a radical opposition to hedonism. In this article, I observe the way this opposition takes place in Philo’s writing, and I suggest that it is an opposition of discourses motivated not only by the resistance (...) to the pleasure itself or by the commitment to philosophical tradition, but also by the necessity of preservation of the pertinence of the Book itself. Before approaching the Alexandrian’s works, I refer briefly to what is found on the pleasure in the Hebrew / Greek Bible, in the Letter to Aristeas and in 4 Maccabees. These readings will proportionate the observation of a process of change in Jewish writers’ relationship to the theme of pleasure. Moreover, it will make evident the specificity and complexity present in Philo’s treatment of this subject. (shrink)

Moses Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, ed. Rabbi Eliyahu Touger, 18 vols.

Modern philosophy's fascination with language - for the last century, its obsession- may illustrate the axiom that we love to talk about what we desire and we desire what we don't have. From the perspective of traditional Judaism, philosophic obsession with language reflects the modern philosopher's dislocation from those speech communities in which, alone, language has meaning. Natural speech communities, meaning those whose origins are either unknown or referred to an indefinite past, are characterized by inherent semiotic norms: rules for (...) transforming elements of the natural world into meaningful signs (morphology), for determining relations among those signs (syntax), for determining relations between signs and intended objects (semantics), and for determining relations between signs and the actual behavior which they recommend (what the American philosopher Charles Peirce calls pragmatics). For the traditional Jew, these norms are collected in what is called Torah: God's speech to Israel and the literary and behavioral history of Israel's attempts to interpret what that speech means. For this Jew, dislocation from the speech community of Israel would imply dislocation from Torah, and, thereby, from the possibility of meaningful speech and controlled behavior. Jewish philosophy is the attempt to find means of reintegrating dislocated persons into appropriate speech communities: in particular of reintegrating Jews into the speech community of Israel. On the following pages, I describe what modern philosophy looks like in terms set by Torah. Without apology, the Jewish philosopher first defines the non-problematic (the language of Torah), then the problematic (the enterprise of modern philosophy), then suggests means of placing the two in dialogue. (shrink)

"Expanding the Palace of Torah" offers a broad philosophical overview of the challenges the women's revolution poses to Orthodox Judaism, and Orthodox Judaism's response to those challenges.

La signification de la Torah pour l’éthique chrétienne se prête à trois perspectives différentes : la création divine, la rédemption en Christ, la sanctification par l’Esprit Saint. Selon la première approche, examinée à partir de Thomas d’Aquin, la Torah affirme que la « loi naturelle » est inscrite par le Créateur dans le coeur de l’homme. Selon la seconde, christologique, suivie dans les écrits de Luther, la relation créatrice se trouve reprise dans la dialectique Loi-Évangile, en évitant à (...) la fois des tendances antinomistes et légalistes. Dans la dernière perspective, pneumatologique, présente entre autres chez Barth et Bonhoeffer, la Torah est, toujours à nouveau, un « enseignement » qui forme le caractère du chrétien à l’image du Christ. Le « commandement concret » ne se découvre que dans la situation même de la décision, en tant que parole concrète de l’Esprit Saint. (shrink)

The canon, this full Christian-Torah story, is the paradigm God has given us so that we too can conjugate the verbs of his activity today and know his participation in our lives now.

This paper describes the practice of rabbinic Torah-Study in Pragmatist epistemological terms. Pragmatists describe the quest for knowledge as a process in which we interpret our experiences and thereby construct an idea of our reality. This description creates or generates a tension between the constructive aspect of the knowledge quest and the idea of an independent reality. The paper argues that Pragmatism shares this tension, as well as the hermeneutical and pragmatic method for overcoming it, with the rabbinic concept (...) of "Torah Study." This association is illustrated through a close reading of a Midrash on the first verse of the Biblical "Woman of Valor" song. (shrink)

Logic in the Torah is a ‘thematic compilation’ by Avi Sion. It collects in one volume essays that he has written on this subject in Judaic Logic (1995) and A Fortiori Logic (2013), in which traces of logic in the Torah and related religious documents (the Nakh, the Christian Bible, and the Koran and Hadiths) are identified and analyzed.

Orot ha-Torah : 13 peraḳim ʻal ʻerekh ha-Torah, limudah ṿe-hadrakhatah -- Orot ha-teshuvah : 17 peraḳim ʻal ʻerekh ha-teshuvah ṿe-hadrakhatah be-ḥaye ha-peraṭ uve-ḥaye ha-kelal.

My construction of the position of the eye in Rabbinic Judaism represents almost a reversal of the roles “Hebraic” and “Hellenic.” A powerful case can be made that only under Hellenic influence do Jewish cultures exhibit any anxiety about the corporeality of visibility of God; the biblical and Rabbinic religions were quite free of such influences and anxieties. Thus I would identify Greek influences on Judaism in the Middle Ages as being the force for repressing the visual. The Neoplatonic and (...) Airstotelian revision of Judaism undertaken by the Jewish scholastics was so successful that it has resulted in the near-total forgetting of the biblical and Rabbinic traditions of God’s visibility. W. J. T. Mitchell’s characterization of the Rabbinic tradition is a perfect example of this “forgetting.” In order to position Judaism in a typology of cultures, Mitchell cites Moses Maimonides. Mitchell’s reading of Maimonides is well-founded; the problem lies rather in the identification of Maimonides as if he typified the old Rabbinic tradition. In my view, he represents a distinct departure from that tradition. This Platonic departure was indeed marked and condemned as such by many of his contemporaries, but it has become the almost unchallenged orthodoxy of later Judaism as well as of the critical tradition. The memory of having seen God in the Bible and the desire to have that experience again were a vital part of Rabbinic religion. They constituted, moreover, a key element in the study of Torah, the making of midrash. Daniel Boyarin, associate professor of Talmud and midrash at Bar-Ilan University, has published essays on midrash and literary theory. His book Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash is forthcoming. This essay is part of a larger project tentatively entitled Bodies of Torah: Language, Sex and God in Talmudic Judaism. (shrink)

David Shatz is the Ronald P. Stanton University Professor of Philosophy, Ethics, and Religious Thought at Yeshiva University and the editor of the _Torah u-Madda Journal._.

The article deals with changing conceptions of Torah in the formative two phases of Jewish tradition. The first major transformation in the Hebrew Bible is the ‘arcanization’ (Idel’s term) or esotericization of the subject. This occurs through the use of an old term for divinization (the verbal stem darash) for exegetical inquiry into the meaning of Torah (Ezra 7: 9-10). The second is the ‘spiritualization’ of Torah, evident in the transfer to it of verbs used with respect (...) to relationship with God (see Psalm 119). A notable transformation in early rabbinic texts is the role of study as a substitute for ritual action. (shrink)

Every speech has a long ancestry, even if it was composed for a novel occasion. It may help to clarify my purposes in today’s speech if I say a few words about its genealogy and its genesis. Its lone ancestor was my undergraduate teacher, Simon Kaplan, a learned and a pious man. I recall vividly the day he admonished me in a thick Russian accent which I can’t mimic, “Mr. Lachterman, you spend all your time with the Greeks and none (...) of your time with the Jews.” Although he prepared a reading list of traditional Jewish texts for me, it was many years before I undertook to read the books on that list. I was, however, able to repay a small portion of the extravagant debt that I owed him both as a teacher and as a friend, by helping him with the English translation of Hermann Cohen’s Religion of Reason, a book about which I shall have more to say later. (shrink)

The topic of time is central to Levinas's philosophy. By examining aspects of the Biblical stories of Abraham and Moses compared with Greek myths, mainly that of Cronos devouring his children, this paper aims to show that Levinas's view of time, though certainly indebted to the Greek (i.e. philosophical) tradition, contains traces of Biblical experiences. Moreover, Levinas's interpretation of time will serve as a concrete demonstration of the way the Jewish experience enables Levinas to express his criticism of the philosophical-Greek (...) tradition. (shrink)

Discusses the respects in which religiously grounded considerations can have an appropriate---even important--role in the public and political discourse of a liberal polity. Examines the role tradition can have in enabling people to attain a reasoned justification for moral ideas and ideals, i.e., tradition is not always an impediment to universally valid or objective considerations. Also, discusses respects in which modern liberalism owes an important debt to religious ideas.

The topic of time is central to Levinas's philosophy. By examining aspects of the Biblical stories of Abraham and Moses compared with Greek myths, mainly that of Cronos devouring his children, this paper aims to show that Levinas's view of time, though certainly indebted to the Greek (i.e. philosophical) tradition, contains traces of Biblical experiences. Moreover, Levinas's interpretation of time will serve as a concrete demonstration of the way the Jewish experience enables Levinas to express his criticism of the philosophical‐Greek (...) tradition. (shrink)

[1] ḥeleḳ ha-rishon. ḥeleḳ ha-hilkhati ha-maʻaśi. ḥeleḳ ha-sheni. heleḳ ha-agadah ha-musari maʻaśi --.

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. (shrink)

Catherine Chalier est professeure à l’UFR de philosophie de l’université Paris Ouest-Nanterre. Elle a publié de nombreux livres sur le judaïsme, la philosophie morale, la spiritualité. Dans Lire la Torah, elle expose les principes, les ressources et les enjeux de la lecture spirituelle de la Torah à quoi s’identifie la tradition religieuse du judaïsme.

In this original study, noted scholar and theologian David Hartman discusses the relation between Maimonides' halakhic writings and The Guide of the Perplexed- ...

Providence and the rabbinic tradition -- Mosaic prophecy: Maimonides and Gersonides -- Eschatology and miracles -- Creation, miracles, revelation -- Song of Songs and Gersonides' world -- Maimonides and Gersonides on astronomy and metaphysics -- Gersonides on the Song of Songs and the nature of science -- Politics and perfection: Gersonides vs. Maimonides -- The role of the active intellect in human cognition -- Imitatio dei and the dissemination of scientific knowledge -- Moses ibn Tibbon and Gersonides on Song of (...) Songs -- Misogyny: Gersonides vs. Maimonides -- Gersonides and his cultured despisers: Arama and Abravanel. (shrink)