Halakhic Responses to Past Pandemics
Aug 3, 2020 By Daniel Nevins | Public Event video | Video Lecture
Our ancestors have contended with outbreaks of disease over the centuries, and rabbis have often responded with daring halakhic activism. We will focus in particular on the case of Rabbi Haim Yosef David Azulai, who served at as the rabbinic leader of Leghorn (Livorno) in Italy, the home of a quarantine facility.
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Israel’s Prophets as Innovators During Crisis
Jul 27, 2020 By Amy Kalmanofsky | Public Event video | Video Lecture
Prophets were social and political change-makers and theological mavericks. They offered bold responses to grave challenges that enabled their communities to survive crisis and that paved the way for Judaism. This session explores how prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah offered innovation in the face of destruction.
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The End of Days in Isaiah: Coming Soon (and Still Waiting)
Jul 20, 2020 By Benjamin D. Sommer | Public Event video | Video Lecture
The prophet Isaiah is famous for his descriptions of the aftertimes, a period of world peace that will follow a cataclysmic crisis. Several of these passages are well-known, whether from haftarot, from Handel’s Messiah, or from the inscription across the street from the United Nations. The details and the fascinating synthesis of universalism and particularism in his vision of the future, however, are less widely understood. We explore a few of these sections to discover precisely what Isaiah had in mind, and why his vision, so long delayed, remains compelling and influential.
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The Promise and Perils of Revolution: Jewish Life in the Soviet Union After 1917
Jul 13, 2020 By David Fishman | Public Event video | Video Lecture
The 1917 Russian revolution and its aftermath were a time of both promise and crisis for the Jews of Russia, who constituted the largest Jewish community in the world at the time. The Soviet Union was the first state to outlaw antisemitism, and more than half of the first Soviet cabinet consisted of Jews. Yet the new regime mercilessly persecuted organized religion and outlawed all non-Communist political movements, including Zionism. Focusing on the years between the revolution and the Second World War, this session explores the diversity of Jewish responses to sweeping political and social change.
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In the Wake of the Golden Calf: Is God Punishing Us?
Jul 6, 2020 By Yedida Eisenstat | Public Event video | Video Lecture
Israel’s fashioning of the Golden Calf–an immediate and direct violation of the first commandment they had just heard directly from God—led God to threaten to destroy all of Israel. Responding to this crisis, Moses protected Israel from God’s temper and renegotiated the terms of the people’s relationship with God. In this session, we revisit this episode and closely read a number of fascinating interpretations. In particular, we focus on the questions of divine justice and mercy raised in Rashi’s comment that in every generation God will exact a little bit of punishment from Israel for fashioning the Golden Calf.
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Remembering the Pandemic: Learning from Yehuda Amichai
Jun 29, 2020 By Barbara Mann | Public Event video | Video Lecture
What will we remember from this pandemic? And how will we preserve and pass down the memory of those we’ve lost to future generations? Through a close reading of Yehuda Amichai’s “And Who Will Remember the Rememberers?”, a poem sequence exploring Israel’s memorialization of 1948, we reflect on the elusiveness of memory, the limits of public forms of memorializing and mourning, and the paradoxical relationship between memory and forgetting.
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“A Time to Weep”: The Power of Lament in Times of Crisis
Jun 22, 2020 By Alan Cooper | Public Event video | Video Lecture
More than a century ago, William James asserted that prayer was “the very soul and essence of religion.” At the same time that James was writing, biblical scholars were identifying and analyzing the forms and genres of biblical prayer. One of the most prominent of them is the lament, in which worshippers (individual or communal) cry out to God in times of duress. The effusion of pain and grief is a way of reaching out for the knowledge and comfort of God’s Presence—for reassurance that the suffering has been noticed and that God may be moved to provide relief. In this class, we consider selected prayers of lament in order to discern the continuing power of the genre as form of prayerful expression.
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Literature as Lifeline: What were Jews Reading and Writing in the Ghettos?
Jun 15, 2020 By Edna Friedberg | Public Event video | Video Lecture
During the Holocaust, hundreds of thousands of Jews were imprisoned in urban prison zones known as ghettos. Reading and writing offered a form of spiritual sustenance to these communities under siege. This is an exploration of the literature that Jews passed around the ghettos–novels, poetry, religious commentary, and even dark humor.
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