Articles & Reviews by Moshe Halbertal
, 2010), p. 39, lines 174-90. 3. Naming this new phenomenon of the creation of dense, thick legal... more , 2010), p. 39, lines 174-90. 3. Naming this new phenomenon of the creation of dense, thick legal domains that far exceed the commandments in the Torah using the term "halakhah" is not an arbitrary semantic choice. Halakhah is a unique term innovated in rabbinic literature, and among other things it designates, in this literature, the legal realm which is beyond the commandments that were explicitly written in the Torah. On this see E. E. Urbach, The Halakhah: Its Sources and Development (Hebrew; Jerusalem, 1984), 8.
Moshe Halbertal, “Jacob Katz on Halakhah, Orthodox, and History,” in Giti Bendheim, Menachem Butler, Jay M. Harris, and Uriel Katz, eds., Jacob Katz on the Origins of Orthodoxy (Cambridge, MA: Shikey Press, 2022), 69-81
Not all emergencies pose a surprise. Hurricanes, though devastating, are common and predictable. ... more Not all emergencies pose a surprise. Hurricanes, though devastating, are common and predictable. The bombing of Aleppo by Russian and President Assad's forces caused a grave emergency to its inhabitants, but given the past brutal conduct of the Syrian Civil War, it came as no surprise. Not all emergencies evoke menacing uncertainty; in many of them, we have a clear sense of what they entail. The nature of the threat, its duration, and its impact are more or less predictable. The COVID-19 pandemic caught us unprepared; it appeared as a surprise (though we should have known better), and its future ruinous path is unknown to us. The conjunction of emergency, surprise, and uncertainty formed a perfect, unsettling, ominous storm. Unprepared and uncertain, we seek ways of responding to the pandemic. The effectiveness of our response to the threat and our capacity to weather its devastating impact rest on the strength of our public institutions and the quality of our political discourse.
4 The God of the Rabbis moshe halbertal i The Rabbis never produced a systematic theology but rat... more 4 The God of the Rabbis moshe halbertal i The Rabbis never produced a systematic theology but rather expressed their religious attitude and sensibility mainly through a creative interpretive encounter with Scripture. The rabbinic sources in the various midrashim reveal an intense attentiveness to God as a divine relational subject, a subject that resonated and sometimes stood in tension with the historical and personal experiences of the Rabbis. A freestanding philosophical inquiry of God's attributes and being, and the appeal to reason for refining, defining, or proving God's existence were thoroughly alien to the Rabbis.
Rabbinic culture spanned roughly eight centuries, from the end of the Persian occupation of the L... more Rabbinic culture spanned roughly eight centuries, from the end of the Persian occupation of the Land of Israel at the beginning of the second century BCE until the advent of the Muslim conquest of the Land in the seventh century CE. It flourished in diverse geographical and geopolitical settings: under the Hellenistic and Roman rule of Palestine and as part of the Sasanian Empire in Babylonia. The literature produced during this long period consisted of radically different genres; its major canonical compilation-the Mishnah-which is organized thematically, is of a different nature than the midrash, which follows the sequence of scriptural verses and interprets them creatively. The Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud, devoted to meticulously complex interpretations of the Mishnah, differ dramatically from the Mishnah and the midrash as well, in style, modes of thinking, and language. Dozens of scholars were part of this immense creative outburst, and its diversity in geopolitical settings and literary genres is matched by the multiplicity of opinions and stances expressed in this vast literature. Nevertheless, there is justification for approaching this diverse collection of texts under the unified rubric of "Rabbinic culture. " The coherence of the thought of Ḥazal (the Rabbis) can be traced to four central features that are present in every page of this immense scholarly endeavor, features that distinguish Rabbinic literature culturally and religiously from that which preceded it in the biblical and Second Temple periods. * To Chaim, who knows how to question.
Moshe Halbertal, “The Dance Goes On – Review of ‘Hasidism: A New History’, by David Biale, David Assaf, Benjamin Brown, Uriel Gellman, Samuel C. Heilman, Moshe Rosman, Gadi Sagiv, and Marcin Wodziński,” The New York Review of Books, vol. 65, no. 9 (24 May 2018)
Moshe Halbertal, “Particularism, Exclusivity, and Monopoly: The History of a Talmudic Statement,” in Chaeran Y. Freeze, Sylvia Fuks Fried, and Eugene Sheppard, eds., The Individual in History: Essays in Honor of Jehuda Reinharz (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2015), 269-283
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Articles & Reviews by Moshe Halbertal