Talmudic Stories

Catalog description

The Babylonian Talmud, the foundational source of Jewish law, also contains a vast corpus of stories that tell of the lives and deeds of the Talmudic Rabbis. Although the stories preserve many historical and biographical details, they are best approached as didactic fictions that serve a variety of functions. Some stories transmit values, portray ethical living, provide role models for students and teach elements of Jewish religious practice. Other stories engage Talmudic laws, explain their origins, justify changes, and even challenge or undermine them. Still others grapple with the enduring questions of human existence: suffering and illness, death, the relationship between the sexes, free will and fate. Other stories focus on particular dimensions of rabbinic life within the Talmudic academy, such as the demands of Torah study, competition with other sages, and even jockeying for leadership positions. Apart from providing an introduction to basic Jewish beliefs and practices, this course will focus on method, on how to read and interpret Talmudic stories. Originally transmitted orally, Talmudic stories are extremely terse, and demand careful attention to the artful use of language, vocabulary, figurative expressions, metaphors, the use of irony, and literary structure, much like the study of poetry. Most of class time will be devoted to the close reading, discussion and interpretation of stories. We will also learn how to apply different methods of literary analysis, including structuralism, folkloristic methods, comparative analysis, new historicism, and gender criticism.