Scott S. Elliott

‘Thanks, but no Thanks’: Tact, Persuasion, and the Negotiation of Power in Paul's Letter to Philemon

Historical reconstructions concerning Philemon consistently illustrate an overwhelming tendency to see Paul as operating with the most innocuous and transparent of motives. In contrast, my (mildly playful) reading of Philemon posits a Paul engaged in power negotiations with his addressee. Though Philemon acts as Pauls would-be patron, Paul resists the gesture and opts instead to assign Philemon a carefully proscribed role vis-a-vis himself. Paul relies on rhetorical techniques of tact to coerce Philemon to adopt this role ‘voluntarily’. Onesimus emerges, then, as a pawn in a negotiation for power and status in the community.

Review of George Aichele, Simulating Jesus: Reality Effects in the Gospels. BibleWorld. London: Equinox, 2011.

Simulating Jesus is an engaging and provocative book that stems from one fundamental supposition: “despite interesting similarities between the four gospels’ stories and their Jesuses, neither the stories nor the characters in them are the same. Important differences and even contradictions appear between these stories, and therefore they cannot all be true and they all cannot refer to the same person named Jesus. Instead, the name of Jesus serves as a hook in each story on which it hangs diverse predicates, and as a result each of these Jesuses is a distinct reality effect. These four Jesuses are four distinct simulacra or virtual beings, the ideological products of the reader’s attempts to decode the texts” (p. 187).

Book Review: The Social Sciences and Biblical Translation. Edited by Dietmar Neufeld. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2008. Pp. ix + 214.

David Weiss Halivni’s Breaking the Tablets: Jewish Theology After the Shoah opens with a problem: how to bridge the theological chasm between God’s presence at Sinai, and God’s absence at Auschwitz. The movement between these two revelatory events resonates throughout Jewish history, thought and spirituality. As a Talmudic scholar, Halivni ident ifies study of the Torah as the key to wrestling with this problem. He asks how the historical movement from divine presence to divine absence shapes the study of Torah and even more urgently, informs the halakhic and theological interpretations that shape Jewish life. His analysis proceeds through four concise chapters, each illuminated by David Ochs’s powerful introduction and cogent commentary. Halivni skilfully weaves together the concerns of traditional learning with the exigencies of scientific scholarship and through that synthesis, transcends both disciplines. The opening chapter, described by Ochs as “theological testimony,” reflects on the meaning of prayer both in the camps and afterwards. Halivni tells us that this essay was originally composed to accompany the prayer book, Machsor Wolfsberg. The liturgies were written down by memory alone by Satmar Hazan Napthali Stern in the Wolfsberg Labor Camp, where prisoners were given the exceptional permission to gather and pray aloud. Halivni speaks of the “unique kavanah,” the intention that is at the core of sincere and authentic prayer, which accompanied that Rosh Hashanah prayer service in the camp. The prayers of the prisoners were suffused with yearning for God’s return to dominion over the world. That yearning in the shadows of the camps provides the interpretative key for his project: a meaningful theological response to the spiritual and communal trauma of the Shoah. This cannot be only additive; the Shoah must be introduced and internalized within the rabbinic tradition. The second chapter builds on this insight by recognizing the consequential imperative to “restore” Scripture. This is accomplished by focusing on the straightforward divine intention as revealed in Torah. This “plain” reading, necessitated by God’s absence, is all the more urgent because that absence has introduced human misreading and “forced interpretations” into our analysis. Here Halivni argues that the tools of historical criticism and close scientific textual analysis have the ability slowly and carefully to lay sure foundations for seeking out God’s plain intent in Scripture and not only to repair the text but to renew God’s presence. The third chapter, artfully entitled “Break ing the Tablets and Begetting the Oral Law,” takes us through the historical development of rabbinic understandings of the Oral Law. With a delicate hand, Halivni raises the theological problem of critically engaging the Oral Law if one accepts, as Medieval sages did, that the Oral Law was incorruptible revelation. Arguing that even the rabbis recognized that the Oral Law included materials that had accrued over time, Halivni prescribes the need to identify what in the Oral Law is “indispensable” and what is “extrascriptural teaching” that might be understood as “opinion.” He cites the example of the Talmudic saying, “women are lightminded” (Shabbat 33b) as illustrating what might not necessarily be accorded the authority of revelation even if that transforms legal practice. He recognizes that determining what falls into each category is subjective and insists that human judgment is inextricably intertwined in any reception of divine Law. It is here that Halivni’s stature as a Talmudic scholar is critical to the reception his argument will receive. Because he has so effectively revealed the built up layers of interpretation that make up rabbinic Talmudic analysis, he is able to ground his project within the rabbinic tradition as theological repair and not violence. Halivni’s epilogue, “Between Auschwitz and Sinai,” reflects on the themes and questions that span this project. Reaffirming the desire for God’s presence and, more clearly, God’s dominion over the world once again, Halivni reasserts the role of Scripture and text in fulfilling this prayer and healing the wound of the Shoah. This groundbreaking and luminous text will find its audience not only among scholars but among the general public as well. Ochs’s dense commentary will speak primarily to scholars in offering an incisive intertext that explicates and enriches Halivni’s work and places it within the context of Talmudic scholarship and post-Holocaust theology. It is an invaluable resource for Holocaust scholars who seek to trace the reverberations of the Shoah through Jewish life and thought. Halivni’s lucid and powerful prose can easily stand on its own and is thoroughly accessible to anyone interested in Jewish thought, classical Jewish texts, or Holocaust theology. Deidre Butler Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario, K1S 5B6