A Haskell talk by Professor Christine Hayes
In many legends and stories, the Talmudic rabbis depict God in shockingly human terms: the divine being wears tefillin and prays, studies Torah, weeps, makes mistakes, and suffers correction by humans. Were the rabbis just having fun? Or were these anthropomorphic representations of God grounded in a subversive resistance to prevailing Greco-Roman ideas about the divine? This lecture considers the ancient rabbis' use of humor to explore and express the "seriously" distinctive character of Israel's God.
Christine Hayes is Sterling Professor Emerita of Jewish Studies, Yale University, where she taught courses in talmudic and midrashic studies, Bible, and ancient Jewish history and culture. Her publications include Between the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds (1997 Salo Baron prize); Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities (2003 National Jewish Book Award finalist); What’s Divine about Divine Law: Early Perspectives? (2015 National Jewish Book Award; 2016 American Publishers Association Award; 2016 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award); three edited collections; two introductory volumes (The Emergence of Judaism and Introduction to the Bible); and numerous journal articles. Hayes has been the Gruss Visiting Professor of Jewish law at Harvard Law School and U Penn Carey Law School, and has held visiting positions at the Buchmann Faculty of Law in Tel Aviv and Reichman University. She is a Senior Research Fellow with the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, and past President of the Association for Jewish Studies.
Open to the public
