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Reclaiming Halakhah: On the Recent Works of Aharon Shemesh

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 May 2011

Beth Berkowitz*
Affiliation:
Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York, New York
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Extract

Bialik may have protested in “halakhah and aggadah” that aggadah had become too dominant in his day, but for countless generations it was halakhah that possessed greater gravitas, thanks to the geonim and their successors. Bialik was onto something, however, since even he succumbed to the power of aggadah—his most popular work was Sefer Ha-Aggadah. In the contemporary academy, aggadah continues to flourish. The encounter between midrash and literary theory in the 1980s, and between talmudic aggadah and stam-oriented source criticism in the 1990s and today, have firmly secured aggadah's territory on the academic map. Some aggadot have been scrutinized by so many scholarly eyes—the oven of Akhnai, the heresy of Elisha ben Abuya, the partnership of Rabbi Yoḥanan and Resh Lakish—that they seem to constitute a new Jewish core curriculum.

Type
Review Essays
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Jewish Studies 2011

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References

1. On the role of the geonim in manufacturing the halakhah/aggadah binary and in draining aggadah of legal significance, see Stone, Suzanne Last, Preface, in Diné Israel: Studies in Halakhah and Jewish Law, vol. 24, eds., Edrei, Arye and Stone, Suzanne Last (Tel-Aviv: Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel-Aviv University, 2007), 19Google Scholar (and articles within the volume by Berachyahu Lifshitz and Yair Lorberbaum). Bialik tends to use the terms metaphorically rather than as referring to the constituent parts of classical rabbinic literature; see Rubin, Adam, “‘Like a Necklace of Black Pearls Whose String Has Snapped’: Bialik's ‘Aron ha-Sefarim’ and the Sacralization of Zionism,” Prooftexts 28, no. 2 (2008): 181CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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