Jacob Neusner

Paradigmatic versus historical thinking : The case of Rabbinic Judaism

The idea of history, with its rigid distinction between past and present and its careful sifting of connections from the one to the other, came quite late onto the scene of intellectual life. Both Judaism and Christianity for most of their histories have read the Hebrew Scriptures from within an other-than-historical framework. They found in Scriptures words paradigms of an enduring present, by which all things must take their measure; they possessed no conception whatsoever of the pastness of the past. Rabbinic Judaism invented an entirely new way to think about times past and to keep all time—past, present, and future—within a single framework. For that purpose, a model was constructed, consisting of selected events held to form a pattern that imposes order and meaning on the chaos of what happens, whether past or present or future. Time measured in the paradigmatic manner is time formulated by a free-standing, (incidentally) atemporal model, not appealing to the course of sun and moon, nor concerned with the metaphor of human life and its cyclicality. Not only so, but the paradigm obliterates distinctions between past, present, and future, between here and now and then and there. The past participates in the present, the present recapitulates the past, and the future finds itself determined, predetermined really, within the same free-standing structure comprised by Gods way of telling time.

Defining Scarce Resources: Real Estate or Intellect ?

The Mishnah, a philosophical law code of ca. 200 AD, stands at the foundation of the Talmud and forms the first document of Judaism beyond the Hebrew Scriptures and presents a full-scale theory of the social order, encompassing an economics, politics and philosophical method. The system, viewed as a whole, makes a statement of hierarchical classification showing that all things derive from one thing and one thing encompasses all things— that is, a philosophy of Judaism akin to the philosophy of Plotinus. This essay spells out the economics of the Mishnah and shows how the various laws bear within themselves a portion of the systemic statement as a whole.

How Through Economics Rabbinic Judaism States its Theory of the Social Order

[Aristotle] will be seen as attacking the problem of man’s livelihood with a radicalism of which no later writer on the subject was capable — none has ever penetrated deeper into the material organization of man’s life. In effect, he posed, in all its breadth, the question of the place occupied by the economy in society. (Polanyi 1957, 66)