Zev Garber

Symposium on Messianic Judaism: Presented in Memory of Mishael M. Caspi z"l

The 2014 Annual Meeting of NAPH was held in San Diego, California, during the annual meeting of AAR-SBL, November 22–25. An NAPH session was devoted to recently published Introduction to Messianic Judaism. Panelists reflected on historical and contemporary concerns related to the biblical foundations and ecclesiastical context of the diverse and controversial Messianic Jewish movement. The volume’s co-editors, Cambridge-trained David Rudolph (a Jew) and Joel Willitts (a Gentile), spoke on the makeup and intent of this pioneering work on the history, philosophy, sociology, and theology of Messianic Jews. Their post-supersessionist hermeneutical presentation suggested theological divisions within the movement. Mark S. Kinzer, a key theologian and pacesetter of the non-Evangelical Messianic Jewish involvement and outreach, projected the face of twenty-first century Evangelical and post-Evangelical Messianic Judaism. Isaac Oliver delved into the nexus of Messianic Judaism: early Jewish followers of Jesus. Yaakov Ariel, an Israeli scholar working in the United States, talked on the intellectual and theological coming of age of Messianic Judaism at the turn of the twenty-first century. Finally, convener Zev Garber offered alternate views on the legitimacy and acceptance of Messianic Judaism within a Torah-centered halakically observant Jewish community. He discussed how God, Torah, and Jesus talk are used, misused, and confused. The sponsorship of a session on Messianic Judaism under the aegis of NAPH was accompanied by controversy—clearly understandable but baseless, in my opinion, at an academic conference committed to learning, discussion, varied opinions, openness, outreach, and fellowship. The well-attended

Adam Kolman Marshak. The Many Faces of Herod the Great. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015. 400 pp.

Adam Kolman Marshak (head history teacher and supervisor at the Gann Academy in Waltham, MA) provides an informative account of the life and times of Herod the Great (74/73–4 BCE). Rereading, reinterpreting, and reconstructing primary Jewish, Hellenistic, and Roman ancient literature and related sources (e.g., archaeology, coins) are key to Marshak’s primary contribution to Herodian scholarship. By distinguishing Herod the actual person from Herod the public figure, he offers a historical breakthrough as he mediates between hostile literary traditions and depictions of a client king obedient to the Roman emperor Augustus (Octavian). Marshak builds on his years of research and writings (dissertation, articles) in reconstructing the legacy of Herod, encompassing a plethora of views. He necessarily comments on relevant materials in the Hebrew Scriptures, Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament, rabbinic writings, modern writers, and gleanings from nonhistorical sources that have contributed to Herod’s image as fratricidal and despotic, feeding centuries of anti-Judaism associated with Herod. The introduction provides a short overview of the book’s intent to strike the “right relationship” in analyzing the many facets of Herod in a nonbiased, scholarly manner. Thus the chapters present the cultural and intellectual milieu of the Greco-Roman world and the rise and fall of the Hasmonean dynasty; survey the multifaceted and complicated life and dynasty of Herod; and invite a new approach to an oft-referenced, but misunderstood era of Judean history. Marshak’s broad and balanced vision represents a major step forward to understanding the challenges, triumphs, and failures of a man who has left an unquestionable mark on Second Temple Judaism and beyond. The checkered life of Herod the Great is often traced to his personal insecurities, his insensitivity toward others, and what many perceive as his paranoia. Marshak notes the importance of his non-Jewish Idumaean origins and Herod’s marital choices. The region of Idumaea (biblical Edom), south of Judea, spanned the eastern border of the Aravah Valley, land extending from the Dead Sea to Eilat. Edomite history is marked by ongoing conflict and battle with Judeans, Syrians, and Assyrians, ending in forced total conversion (circumcision) of Esau’s children into Judaism, conducted by the Hasmonean priest-king John Hyrcanus between 140–130 BCE. Tannaitic decisions aside, Herod’s Jewishness was not completely respected, since he was a descendant of Jews by force, not choice nor birth. Marriage to Mariamme of the Hasmonean dynasty did not increase his social acceptance. As a despot, he often struck out against real and imagined foes near and far; murdering family (wife, three sons, others), former sovereign John Hyrcanus II, and countless others. Was he an “evil genius of the Judean nation” (Heinrich Grätz, History of the Jews, 2:72), who was “prepared to commit any crime in order to gratify his unbounded ambition” (Isaac Broydè, “Herod I (surnamed the Great),” in The Jewish Encyclopedia, 6:356)? Book Reviews

Shoah Theology in America: First Responses and Interfaith Statement

In a post-Shoah world, theological exploration of Shoah issues and events questions the interrelationship between human and divine responsibility, often shaking and rendering radical reorientation to faith belief and living among ashes of evil. This paper summarizes and, to some extent, critiques the thought of early key thinkers of Shoah theology in America, including Eliezer Berkovits, who attempted to understand and explain religiously Shoadicy. It also argues for cooperative Jewish-Christian dialogue and activity in dealing with Shoah-related matters, a position neither engaged in nor supported by Berkovits.

The Shadow of Death: Letters in Flames (review)

tension urgently underscores “the divide between the speaker’s experience in Palestine and that of his parents and his past in Europe” (p. 132). One of the most original and critically imaginative moments of her discussion concerns her conflict with generations of scholars who she claims exaggerated Shlonsky’s primacy even as she acknowledges that “his sheer creativity and poetic-linguistic manipulation of the new accent is nothing short of breath-taking.” For Segal, Shlonsky serves not only as the exemplar of a literary generation but also embodies the condition of the “Jewish immigrant...undergoing a traumatic displacement at the same time as Hebrew culture itself was struggling to plant roots in Palestine” (p. 138). While she does a fine job of aligning his verse to Italian futurism and other aesthetic movements of high modernism, for Segal, his truly transformative value lies not in his much-hailed prosody but rather in the “particular, subtle refreshing, innovative, and seductive ways [he] gave meaning to the new sound in Hebrew poetry” (p. 17). To Segal’s credit, her exciting work with notable poems gives exciting proof of that claim. Other highlights in this admirable study include Segal’s worthy consideration of the salient role of “the trope of woman as land” (p. 94) in the poetry of Rahel. Even more intriguing is her argument that the wild popularity of Rahel’s lyricism can be traced in part to the fact that she burst forth (somewhat like a Hebrew Athena) on the literary scene without an earlier history of publishing in an Ashkenazic Hebrew: “Even though [Rahel] made no claim to a genetically Jewish or Israelite identity, her lack of connection to the devalued Ashkenazic Jewish identity renders her authentic” (p. 99). This and other rich critical insights too numerous to recount here strongly suggest that for anyone interested in the literary history of modern Hebrew literature, or indeed the cultural story of Zionism itself, Segal’s refreshingly succinct book should be regarded as indispensable.

Jesus in the Context of Judaism: Quest, Con-Quest, or Conquest?: Editor's Introduction

Though many articles, reviews, and books are not of one opinion on the life and time of Jesus, there is a general understanding in the dogma of the Church and in the Quests of the Academy that the incarnate Christ of Christian belief lived and died a faithful Jew, and what this says to contemporary Jews and Christians is the focus of this special issue of Shofar.

Matthew Kraus, ed. How Should Rabbinic Literature Be Read in the Modern World? Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006. vii, 217 pp.Rivka Ulmer, ed. Discussing Cultural Influences: Text, Context and Non-Text in Rabbinic Judaism. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2007. viii, 248 pp.

How Should Rabbinic Literature Be Read in the Modern World? edited by Matthew Kraus (University of Cincinnati), with an introduction by Richard S. Sarason (Hebrew Union College/Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati), contains seven chapters assessing the historical value of rabbinic texts in light of oral and literary criticism. The book is an amalgam of invited conference papers presented at Williams College on October 26–27, 2003. Though the essays vary widely in intent and scope, they show methodological perspectives drawn from contextual interpretation and comparative study. Chapters 1 and 2 discuss features of oral tradition that underlie written rabbinic texts. Martin S. Jaffee (University of Washington), “What Difference Does the ‘Orality’ of Rabbinic Writing Make for The Interpretation of Rabbinic Writings” (11–33), suggests that symmetry in parallel rabbinic texts is not necessarily derived from a presumed Urtext or an existing text drawing from another but generated from mnemonic cues and stock phrases found in rabbinic oral tradition. Alyssa Gray (Hebrew Union College/Jewish Institute of Religion, New York), “A Bavli Sugya and its Two Yerushalmi Parallels: Issues of Literary Relationship and Redaction” (35–77), analyzes the discussion on who and what makes a zimmun (“convocation” for Grace) in B. Ber. 47b–48b and similar Palestinian rabbinic discussion in Y. Ber. 7:2, and Gen. Rab. 91:4. She opines that the apparent hybrid version in the Bavli of the older Palestinian texts is most likely a Babylonian redaction of a common oral version of the sugya. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert (Stanford University), “The Semiotics of the Sexed Body in Early Halakhic Discourse” (79–104), explores the semiotics of gender identities from the rabbinic-halakhic and the Greco-Roman worldviews. Her contextual cultural study argues that the fundamental issue of gender dimorphism in Jewish law is reproduction and fertility. Are aggadic and halakhic stories history or literature? This question is tweaked in Hillel I. Newman (University of Haifa), “Closing the Circle: Yonah Fraenkel, the Talmudic Story, and Rabbinic History” (105–35). Here Newman disagrees with Yonah Fraenkel’s (“this generation’s most sensitive, insightful and eloquent interpreter of the rabbinic story”) literary approach, which is constricted by reading the text against itself. Rather, Newman reasons that contextual and cultural studies evidence a kernel of history in the rabbinic narrative. In the following chapter, Jeffrey L. Rubenstein (New York University), “Context and Genre: Elements of a Literary Approach to the Rabbinic Narrative” (137–65), cites the story of Elisha ben Abuya, the pardes tradition, and agricultural tall tales (among others) to analyze issues of content, genre, and redaction in a Bavli sugya. Oded Irshai (Hebrew University), “Ephraim E. Urbach and the Study of Judeo-Christian Dialogue in Late Antiquity—Some Preliminary Observations” Book Reviews

Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (review)

lacking. Sometimes, Bar-Asher is not clear enough (see above, on the use of the Arabic plural, or transcribing lav with I rather than IS, p. 41). Aside from these remarks, though, this volume is a pioneer work of the Hebrew elements in North African Judeo-Arabic. It is an important contribution to the study of Judeo-Arabic in particular and Jewish languages in general. The book also sheds light in other areas: it makes a contribution to the understanding of earlier Hebrew traditions in the Jewish Arab world, and it makes a good start toward a North African Judeo-Arabic dialectology atlas. As the Jewish communities of the Arab world are almost totally dismantled and Judeo-Arabic native speakers are getting older and fewer, this book is a salvage operation in many respects, and here lies our gratitude for Professor Bar-Asher.

Teaching Zionism: The Introductory Course

Zev Garber is Professor of Jewish Studies, Los Angeles Valley College, and Visiting Professor of Religious Studies, University of California at Riverside. The editor oi Methodology in the Academic Teaching of Judaism (1986), Methodology in the Academic Teaching of the Holocaust (with A. Berger and R. Libowitz, 1988), and Teaching Hebrew Language and Literature at the College Level {Shofar 9 3, Spring 1991), he is also editor-in-chief of Studies in the Shoah (University Press of America). His Shoah , the Paradigmatic Genocide: Essays in Exegesis and Eisegesis (1994) has recently been published in the series. Finally, he served as President of the National Association of Professors of Hebrew.

Translating the Classics of Judaism: In Theory and in Practice, and: Medium and Message in Judaism (review)

through them at the end. (For other themes in Genesis Rabbah see Neusners other anthology, Genesis and Judaism: The Perspective of Genesis Rabbah: An Analytical Anthology [Atlanta: Scholars, 1985]. For a synthetic analysis of the various ways works of rabbinic literature interact with scripture, see Neusner and William S. Green, Writing with Scripture: The Amhority and Uses of the Hebrew Bible in the Torah of Formative Judaism [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989].) Neusner is certainly correct in his program for interpreting the midrash. He has shown that many of the halakhic and Rabbah midrashim are not miscellaneous collections, but carefully crafted interpretations of Israels traditions. Instead of atomizing the midrashim and comparing decontextualized exegetical comments, sayings, and stories, readers should apprehend the unified visions of various works within which interpretations are made. This is not to deny the numerous detailed textual and exegetical problems remaining to be solved nor the variety of views and the loose ends comprehended but not fully explained by Neusners master hypotheses. Rather modem literary studies of textual units, sociological studies of the settings of works, comparisons of documents and historicalphilological analyses of individual problems must take place within the larger setting of whole documents. And ultimately the fruits of these studies must be related to the outlooks and needs of modem communities, as Neusner has begun to relate Genesis Rabbah to Israel today.