Rabbinic and Lay Communal Authority
Author: Suzanne Last Stone
Publisher: KTAV Publishing House, Inc.
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 206
ISBN-13: 9780881259537
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: Suzanne Last Stone
Publisher: KTAV Publishing House, Inc.
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 206
ISBN-13: 9780881259537
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: Zev Eleff
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016
Total Pages: 345
ISBN-13: 0190490276
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Who Rules the Synagogue? explores how American Jewry in the nineteenth century transformed from a lay dominated community to one whose leading religious authorities were rabbis. Zev Eleff weaves together the significant episodes and debates that shaped American Judaism during this formative period, and places this story into the larger context of American religious history and modern Jewish history.
Author: Elliot Stevens
Publisher: CCAR Press
Published: 1982
Total Pages: 138
ISBN-13: 9780916694883
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Prominent rabbis from both the pulpit and academia examine how the rabbinate is affected by halacha, personal charisma, semichah, Reform minhag and the rabbi's own religious views.
Author: Walter Jacob
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 1993
Total Pages: 148
ISBN-13: 9780929699042
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →It seeks to provide an ongoing forum through symposia, colloquia and publications. The foremost halakhic scholars in the Reform, Liberal, and Progressive rabbinate along with some Conservative and Orthodox colleagues as well as university professors serve on our Academic Council.
Author: Alexander Kaye
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-01-22
Total Pages: 256
ISBN-13: 0190922753
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The tension between secular politics and religious fundamentalism is a problem shared by many modern states. This is certainly true of the State of Israel, where the religious-secular schism provokes conflict at every level of politics and society. Driving this schism is the idea of the halakhic state, the demand by many religious Jews that Israel should be governed by the law of the Torah as interpreted by Orthodox rabbis. Understanding this idea is a priority for scholars of Israel and for anyone with an interest in its future. The Invention of Jewish Theocracy is the first book in any language to trace the origins of the idea, to track its development, and to explain its crucial importance in Israel's past and present. The book also shows how the history of this idea engages with burning contemporary debates on questions of global human rights, the role of religion in Middle East conflict, and the long-term consequences of European imperialism. The Invention of Jewish Theocracy is an intellectual history, based on newly discovered material from numerous Israeli archives, private correspondence, court records, and lesser-known published works. It explains why the idea of the halakhic state emerged when it did, what happened after it initially failed to take hold, and how it has regained popularity in recent decades, provoking cultural conflict that has severely shaken Israeli society. The book's historical analysis gives rise to two wide-reaching insights. First, it argues that religious politics in Israel can be understood only within the context of the largely secular history of European nationalism and not, as is commonly argued, as an anomalous exception to it. It shows how even religious Jews most opposed to modern political thought nevertheless absorbed the fundamental assumptions of modern European political thought and reread their own religious traditions onto that model. Second, it demonstrates that religious-secular tensions are built into the intellectual foundations of Israel rather than being the outcome of major events like the 1967 War. These insights have significant ramifications for the understanding of the modern state. In particular, the account of the blurring of the categories of "secular" and "religious" illustrated in the book are relevant to all studies of modern history and to scholars of the intersection of religion and human rights
Author: A. Yehuda Warburg
Publisher: Urim Publications
Published: 2014-10-01
Total Pages: 345
ISBN-13: 9655242064
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Introducing English-speaking readers to the parameters and scope of rabbinic authority in general, and the workings of the institution of the beit din—the Jewish court of law—in particular, this book presents 10 rulings in cases of Jewish civil law that the author handed down as a member of a beit din panel. These decisions touch on matters pertaining to employment termination, tenure rights and severance pay, rabbinic contracts, issues in the not-for-profit boardroom, real estate brokerage commission, drafting a halakhic will, a revocable living trust agreement, the division of marital assets upon divorce, spousal abuse, and a father's duty to support his estranged children. Accompanying these presentations is an examination of the notion of rabbinic authority, the business judgment rule, and an agunah's ability to recover for the infliction of emotional stress.
Author: Michael S. Berger
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1998-10-15
Total Pages: 241
ISBN-13: 0195352718
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Rabbis of the first five centuries of the Common Era loom large in the Jewish tradition. Until the modern period, Jews viewed the Rabbinic traditions as the authoritative contents of their covenant with God, and scholars debated the meanings of these ancient Sages words. Even after the eighteenth century, when varied denominations emerged within Judaism, each with its own approach to the tradition, the literary legacy of the talmudic Sages continued to be consulted. In this book, Michael S. Berger analyzes the notion of Rabbinic authority from a philosophical standpoint. He sets out a typology of theories that can be used to understand the authority of these Sages, showing the coherence of each, its strengths and weaknesses, and what aspects of the Rabbinic enterprise it covers. His careful and thorough analysis reveals that owing to the multifaceted character of the Rabbinic enterprise, no single theory is adequate to fully ground Rabbinic authority as traditionally understood. The final section of the book argues that the notion of Rabbinic authority may indeed have been transformed over time, even as it retained the original name. Drawing on the debates about legal hermeneutics between Ronald Dworkin and Stanley Fish, Berger introduces the idea that Rabbinic authority is not a strict consequence of a preexisting theory, but rather is embedded in a form of life that includes text, interpretation, and practices. Rabbinic authority is shown to be a nuanced concept unique to Judaism, in that it is taken to justify those sorts of activities which in turn actually deepen the authority itself. Students of Judaism and philosophers of religion in general will be intrigued by this philosophical examination of a central issue of Judaism, conducted with unprecedented rigor and refreshing creative insight.
Author: Jonathan Karp
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2017-11-30
Total Pages: 1154
ISBN-13: 110813906X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This seventh volume of The Cambridge History of Judaism provides an authoritative and detailed overview of early modern Jewish history, from 1500 to 1815. The essays, written by an international team of scholars, situate the Jewish experience in relation to the multiple political, intellectual and cultural currents of the period. They also explore and problematize the 'modernization' of world Jewry over this period from a global perspective, covering Jews in the Islamic world and in the Americas, as well as in Europe, with many chapters straddling the conventional lines of division between Sephardic, Ashkenazic, and Mizrahi history. The most up-to-date, comprehensive, and authoritative work in this field currently available, this volume will serve as an essential reference tool and ideal point of entry for advanced students and scholars of early modern Jewish history.
Author: Benjamin E. Fisher
Publisher: Hebrew Union College Press
Published: 2020-03-30
Total Pages: 331
ISBN-13: 0878201890
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Spanish and Portuguese Jews of seventeenth-century Amsterdam cultivated a remarkable culture centered on the Bible. School children studied the Bible systematically, while rabbinic literature was pushed to levels reached by few students; adults met in confraternities to study Scripture; and families listened to Scripture-based sermons in synagogue, and to help pass the long, cold winter nights of northwest Europe. The community's rabbis produced creative, and often unprecedented scholarship on the Jewish Bible as well as the New Testament. Amsterdam's People of the Book shows that this unique, Bible-centered culture resulted from the confluence of the Jewish community's Catholic and converso past with the Protestant world in which they came to live. Studying Amsterdam's Jews offers an early window into the prioritization of the Bible over rabbinic literature -- a trend that continues through modernity in western Europe. It allows us to see how Amsterdam's rabbis experimented with new historical methods for understanding the Bible, and how they grappled with doubts about the authority and truth of the Bible that were growing in the world around them. Amsterdam's People of the Book allows us to appreciate how Benedict Spinoza's ideas were in fact shaped by the approaches to reading the Bible in the community where he was born, raised, and educated. After all, as Spinoza himself remarked, before becoming Amsterdam's most famous heretic and one of Europe's leading philosophers and biblical critics, he was "steeped in the common beliefs about the Bible from childhood on."
Author: Yosie Levine
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Published: 2024-11-15
Total Pages: 218
ISBN-13: 1802072047
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →With the social and cultural upheavals of early modern Europe, rabbis had to fight to preserve Jewish tradition. Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi, chief rabbi of Amsterdam, emerged as one of the leading halakhic authorities of the epoch, and the battles he waged would come to define rabbinic norms in the decades that followed.