AM-05 – What did we Lose When we Lost the Temple?
Avi Garelick
The Temple is a central element of our learning and liturgy, not only on Tisha B’Av, but also at weddings and even at funerals. The echo of lament and yearning for this ruin can seem very strange, remote from both our experience and our values. In fact, the rabbis of the Talmud faced a similar disconnect. They were apparently fascinated with the Temple, devoting scrupulous attention to the details of its daily existence. In this class we too will attempt to make the Temple less remote. What did it feel like to be there? Was that feeling different on Erev Pesach compared to regular Tuesdays? What did it smell and sound like? While involving ourselves with in-depth study of the rabbinic Temple imagination, we will also try to determine why this utopian nostalgia was of such value to the rabbis, and what it can offer us today.
Avi Garelick teaches Oral Torah at Pre-Collegiate Learning Center of New Jersey and is an editor in chief at Hypocritereader.com, a monthly magazine of essays both conceptual and timely. He likes to teach in ways that provoke participation and to guide students into conversation with each other.
PM-09 – How Much Christianity is There in the Talmud?
Micha’el Rosenberg
The Babylonian Talmud has shaped Jewish life for over a thousand years, but it’s easy to forget–or never to have considered–that the Talmud was produced by a Jewish community living in multicultural Iran, where Jews, Zoroastrians, Christians, and a host of other religious groups lived side by side. In this course, we will look at talmudic passages that have striking parallels to texts written by Christians in the surrounding area; they wrote in Syriac, a language very similar to talmudic Aramaic. These will help us make sense of passages in the Talmud that otherwise would be impossible to understand, and will show both the competition with and the allure of Christianity for the Babylonian Jews who shaped the future of Judaism. What does it mean that there’s so much Christianity in the quintessential Jewish text?
Micha’el Rosenberg is assistant professor of rabbinics at Hebrew College in Boston. Formerly the rabbi of the Fort Washington Jewish Center in the Washington Heights section of New York, he has taught at JTS, and the Northwoods Kollel and Beit Midrash of Ramah Wisconsin.