Chapter 1 argues that thinking about boxes will allow us to comprehend the reparative work that comics can do in approaching transgenerational Holocaust memory and trauma. What would it mean to read Maus as a Jewish text in our moment of global attention to Jewish identity and Holocaust memory? Building upon Hillary Chute’s landmark scholarship on Spiegelman’s Maus and comics and/as archives, I show how Spiegelman’s slippery, evocative metaphor of comics panels as built boxes links his magnum opus to Jewish traditions surrounding the material preservation and transmission of historical texts. Reconsidering Maus together with boxes, in light of what can – and can’t – be enclosed and contained, illuminates formal congruences between Maus, the architected space of the Mishkan, and the textual practice of Midrash. Unpacking these congruences in turn reveals Spiegelman’s survivor’s “tale” as a text, commentary, object, memorial, testimony, even a kind of secular phylactery or reliquary, through which the son of survivors negotiates his inherited trauma and his own Jewishness.

Chapter 4 (The Idolatrous Professional and the Bad Faith Argument): In this chapter, I juxtapose pericopes from the Hebrew Bible with thematically similar texts from the mid to late Second Temple and tannaitic periods. In so doing, I demonstrate that, despite the overall resemblance between them, these texts differ dramatically in their portrayal of pagan worship, with the earlier texts assuming the sincerity of such practices and the later texts arguing for their insincerity.

Chapter 3 (The Second Temple/Tannaitic Portrayal of Transgressive Worship): In this chapter, I focus on Jewish texts from the mid to late Second Temple period and the tannaitic period (i.e. from around the end of the third century BCE to around the third century CE). I argue that texts from this period frequently portray the worship of other gods and the reverence of their icons as insincere, and I present a taxonomy of different ways in which such a portrayal manifests itself within this literature.

Chapter 5 (Sex and the Bad Faith Argument): In this chapter, I focus on the shifting relationship that ancient authors imagined between sex and the worship of other gods. Within the Hebrew Bible, I argue, sex precedes such “transgressive” worship and leads to it causally, whereas in the literature of the late Second Temple and tannaitic periods pagan worship precedes sex and is performed only as a means to achieve sex.

This chapter takes up a series of popular folktales about radical inequality (Aesop, Gevia ben Psisa/ben Qosem) to argue that provincial communities become increasingly interested in reframing quotidian interactions as legal interactions. Legal dialogue came to be imagined as a register of discourse capable of controlling powerful people. Interestingly, however, all of these stories feature a protagonist somehow marked as physically deformed or otherwise grotesque: Aesop was the ugliest slave imaginable, Geviah a hunchback. The very bizarreness of these characters offers a standing challenge to normative understandings of power: in each case, it is the most degraded members of society who manage to wield legal logos to control their superiors, society’s notional elites.

This chapter examines a wide range of rabbinic sources and demonstrates that the rabbis gave considerable attention to God’s independent existence and strongly affirmed our capacity to refer to and speak truthfully about God.

Explains both conceptually and historically the project of the book, which is to integrate Jewish tradition with analytic philosophy. It identifies the various forms that Jewish philosophy has taken, as well as the methods and source materials with which it is pursued in this book.

Because the consensus view is that rabbinic theology is not theoretical, it is necessary to show that the rabbis prized knowledge of God. Using a range of literary, rhetorical, and epistemological approaches, the chapter firmly establishes the place of theology in rabbinic Judaism.

In “Impressions of Isaiah in Classical Rabbinic Literature,” Joshua Ezra Burns surveys the reception of Isaiah in postbiblical Jewish culture. Focusing on the works and folkways of the rabbinic sages, the author illustrates how early Jewish interpreters understood the book of Isaiah as a testament to the life and vocation of its ancient namesake and as a source of reassurance for future generations of Jews. Innocent of contemporary science concerning his book’s composition, the sages portrayed Isaiah as a brash prophet of unmatched visionary ability who foretold the destruction of the first Jerusalem Temple and its restoration with uncanny accuracy. The fulfillment of his visions made Isaiah’s prophecies valuable resources for liturgies, homilies, and other rabbinic literary compositions expressing hope in another national revival led by their long-promised Messiah following the loss of the second Jerusalem Temple and subjection of the Jews to Christian imperialism.

This chapter covers rabbinic interpretations of biblical law and the different hermeneutical strategies used by the rabbis in these efforts. Rabbinic law in some cases can circumvent biblical law and in others demand greater attention and consequence than its scriptural counterpart.

The chapter on Jewish interpretation focuses on the role that biblical interpretation has played and still plays in the development of Jewish tradition, and how it has shaped Jewish practices, theology and ethics from antiquity to our own time. It provides a survey of important phases in the history of biblical interpretation from antiquity to the present.

Abstract: This article explores early Jewish conceptions of the “bad man” as reflected in the hermeneutic legacy of one seminal biblical passage (Num 15:30-31) in order to discern the most egregious forms of religious wrongs. This offers a prism for gauging whether early iterations of “Judaism” were so fully aligned with law and praxis that this constituted the entirety of religious life and its ultimate measure. Or, alternatively, whether one can already perceive in classical Jewish discourse an acknowledgement, or even an articulation, of a “religious” or “theological” nucleus apart from the normative order.