Units

Kingship and Its Discontents: Foundational Scenes in the David Story

The story of the foundation of kingship in the Book of Samuel provides a highly complex meditation on royal rule.
We will focus on the emotional dimension of the account of David's rise to power.

The Origin of the Jews: Jewish Studies and Genetics

Although the Bible would seem to offer a clear origin story for the Jews, scholars have had their doubts and proposed many alternative origins for the Jews. The debate reflects different understandings of what a Jew is, and it also reflects different conceptions of what an origin is. This class will explore the debate around the origin of the Jews, focusing in particular on efforts to use genetics to shed light on the question. This will NOT be a biology class, but it will explore what genetics can teach the field of Jewish Studies, and what Jewish Studies can teach genetics.

Migration, New Beginnings, and Loss: Identity, Trauma, and Politics in Joseph’s Story and Beyond

This session turns to Genesis 37-45 as well as to the book of Ruth to consider themes of migration, new beginnings, and loss in the Bible as well as in contemporary Israeli culture.  We will focus especially on the ambiguities of identity and their psychological and political costs.   

​The Tower of Babel and New Beginnings – with Kafka, Hegel and Brueghel​The episode of the Tower of Babel is, in many ways a story of a Grand New Beginning, maybe the first New Beginning - its beginning. Coming right after the flood, it depicts humanity’s beginning anew after global destruction. It is, in every sense the project of a majestic beginning: a towering structure, a mighty city, a lofty ideal of preserving unity, homogeneity, a single project signifying elevation all the way to heaven. It is a grand beginning that ends up in failure: the Tower is not completed, the people disperse, the project leads to dissemination and fragmentation – it is in some sense the actual beginning of human history. Could it be that this New Beginning was too grand to begin with? Could there be something wrong with Grand New Beginnings altogether? And how does the Jewish Biblical tradition relate to this question? How is it approached in philosophy, art and modern Jewish thought? We will discuss these questions in light of Kafka’s text “The City Coat of Arms,” Hegel’s comments on the Tower of Babel as first architecture and a close look at Pieter Brueghel’s famous painting depicting its construction.

New Beginning in Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis 

The lecture will deal with concepts of formation, beginning and birth in Jewish mystical literature and spiritual trends in modern psychoanalytic thought. The class will be based on beit midrash (hevruta study) accompanied by a presentation of  kabbalistic innovative ideas concerning creation of the soul and the cosmos. I aim to discuss Zoharic patterns of maternal and paternal conceptions, as well as the oscillation in mystical thought between metaphorical expression and concrete or literal manifestations of birth and creation.   

Hannah Arendt’s New Beginnings

Hannah Arendt is known in the canon of modern Jewish thought as a philosopher of beginnings. This session will explore some of her work on the themes of natality and revolution, and the role that these themes played in the wider canon of her thought.

You are a Jew Now: Scripting Jewish Conversion

To study religious conversion is to study stories of new beginnings, and Jewish conversion is not exceptional. But writing, telling and performing a narrative of new beginning is far from being simple or straightforward for Jewish converts in contemporary Israel. In this session we will engage with how religious conversion is being scripted in this complex terrain.

How Jews became a people of the printed book

This session will be devoted to one of the most consequential new beginnings in Jewish history: the embrace of the printing press in the second half of the 15th century and its explosion from the 16th century onwards.

Given the ancient and vital halachic role of the sopher (scribe) in Jewish life, this immediate and near-universal enthusiasm for the printing press is far from self-evident. We will consider what it means for the notion of "holy scriptures" to move from a culture of manuscript to a culture of print, reflect on vital centers of printing and several transformative editions printed in the first century of Hebrew printing, discuss more theoretically the dynamics between ideas of Torah, the material text, and revolutions in information technology, and highlight the central role of 16th-century Antwerp in this story.

God and the Need for Temporality

The first verse of Genesis famously invites a plethora of philosophical and theological questions, particularly about God's relationship to time and cosmic beginnings.  One such question is about the need for time at all: what possible theological purpose would require that the created universe have a temporal dimension?  This session will be an exercise in speculative philosophical theology, which will draw heavily on the work of Hasdai Crescas.