History
The Holocaust was more than the greatest catastrophe in Jewish history. It is a watershed in human civilization. The event challenges the credibility of religions, in particular Judaism and Christianity, confronts the fundamental assumptions and self-understanding of modern civilization, and demands revisions in ethical norms and behaviors.
One of the world's leading Holocaust theologians, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, in decades of teaching and writing, has taken up the challenges of this conversation head-on. As he concludes, the Holocaust is far too big an event to assimilate into any prior version of Jewish theology. It requires new answers and new paradigms.
In this course, we will explore Greenberg's revolutionary framework of covenant and what he sees as the core vision of Judaism in the modern world in order to begin thinking about these huge, terrifying, and challenging themes.
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The past year has brought with it tremendous loss and uncertainty. On a personal and communal level, many of us find ourselves grieving very tangible losses: the loss of life above all, the loss of financial security, and the loss of the intimacy of in-person relationships. At the same time, we find ourselves mourning abstract but very real losses: the loss of the world we once knew, the loss of a sense of security, the loss of normalcy. Throughout the ages, the Jewish people have experienced significant downfalls and periods of great adversity from the flood that nearly destroyed the world to the destruction of the Temple to the Holocaust, an unprecedented time of darkness and despair. And, yet each time, the Jewish people drew on wellsprings of resilience to not only continue on but to continue forward, rebuilding for the next generation.
In this four-session course, we’ll look to our own tradition, focusing on narratives from the Torah as well as the events of Jewish history to mine our texts for wisdom on resilience. We’ll ask: what are the different shapes resilience takes and how might we cultivate our own capacity for resilience based on the wisdom of Jewish tradition?
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In these sessions, we will explore the ways in which Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972) came to articulate a theology of social activism and political engagement from within the sources of traditional Judaism. We will look at some key passages in his writings and identify some of the key strands in this theology, as well as raising some challenges implicit in his approach. The Bible, Rabbinic literature, Maimonides, the Kabbalah and Hasidism – all these and more play a role in the development of his activism. We will consider some of these sources and ask if it is possible or desirable to seek a basis for a liberal political agenda from within an ancient tradition.
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Avraham smashing the idols, Vashti sprouting a tail, and the very fact that the Torah was created 974 generations before creation. Many of the stories Jews (and other readers of scripture) tell about the characters in Tanakh are not found there, but are contained in a large body of literature called Midrash.
How did Midrash come to be, and how old is it? How do practitioners of midrash decide what stories to tell, and did they actually think they were part of scripture?
In this course we learn the tools of learning midrash as a sophisticated and rich method of reading scripture, from its beginnings to the eighth century, but mostly through conversations on and close readings of "classical midrash," redacted in 4th century Palestina/Eretz Israel.
**This course is going to take an academic look at how midrash is structured. If you have experience learning midrash and have always wondered how it "works," this is the course for you. This course will not be an intro to midrashic stories.**
With true poetic licence, Yehuda Amichai changed the name of God from 'Makom,' or ‘Place,’ to 'M'komot', or ‘God of the Places.’ Amichai’s use of the plural points to a crucial aspect of the Jewish past, for great controversy has always surrounded the ways Jews viewed the they departed from and the one’s they now call home.
It is clear that places of residence and departure are a key determining features of Jewish identity, as suggested by the terms Israeli, Diasporic, Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrachi. Yet, perhaps the real controversy does not lie in the places themselves but rather in the decisions of whether to move from one place to another. Do Jews flourish in the stasis of settled life, in the turbulence of movement, or are they happiest when ’between two worlds'? The course will work through the shelves of the Jewish library, drawing on texts that illuminate the dynamics of Jews and travel, stasis and movement.