Defying All Categories: Witches in the Talmud
Date: Apr 17, 2023
Time: 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm
Sponsor: Online Learning | Public Lectures and Events
Location: Online
Category: Online Learning Public Lectures & Events
Defying All Categories: Witches in the Talmud
Part of our spring learning series, The Space In Between: Thresholds and Borders in Jewish Life and Thought
Monday, April 17, 2023
1:00–2:30 p.m. ET
Online
With Dr. Marjorie Lehman, Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics, JTS
This session will explore the story of Rav Nachman’s daughters and examine their transformation from daughters and wives to witches. Taken into captivity and then returned, they emerge as women on the margins of rabbinic culture. For the Rabbis, this transformation is a means for communicating their deepest anxieties and fears. How do they respond to this kind of challenge to their world order? How do they seek to control the uncontrollable? In examining this story of women who are moved from inside the family to the margins of rabbinic life and culture, we may find resonances with our own complex journeys of navigating where it is that we are and where it is that we want to be.
If you have previously registered for another session in this series, your registration admits you to all sessions in the series, and you may attend as many as you’d like.
Note: The Zoom link for this session will be in the confirmation email that you will receive after you register.
ABOUT THE SERIES
The Space In Between: Thresholds and Borders in Jewish Life and Thought
We are living in an undefined time: our daily existence is no longer dominated by the pandemic, yet neither have we settled into a new normal. This sense of being in transition—neither here nor there—can feel destabilizing; but is the time in between really temporary, or are we always living in between moments, identities, and phases of life?
In this series, JTS scholars will delve into the idea of liminality—the time or space in between—which we encounter often in Jewish ritual, identity, law, and life. Join us to consider what these many manifestations of “in-between-ness” can teach us about ourselves and about Judaism, and to explore how we might find strength and meaning in an orientation not of “either/or” but of “both/and.”
