Beginning Again: Toward a Hermeneutics of Jewish Texts

275 Pages·2002·0.9 MB·English

by  Aryeh Cohen (ed.)

Beginning/Again

Beginning/Again
Toward a Hermeneutics of Jewish Texts
edited by
Aryeh Cohen
University of Judaism
and
Shaul Magid
Jewish Theological Seminary
Seven Bridges Press
135 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010–7101
Copyright © 2002 by Seven Bridges Press, LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a re-
trieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, me-
chanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission
of the publisher.
Publisher: Ted Bolen
Managing Editor: Katharine Miller
Composition: Rachel Hegarty
Cover design: Stefan Killen Design
Printing and Binding: CSS Publishing
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
[CIP data here]
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Shachar Ayala and Oryah Menachem Yitchak
.µlw[ hnwb dsj lk—hnby dsj µlw[ ytrma yk
For Chisda
who knows the secret of how to begin in the middle

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Preface xi
Introduction: Beginning, False Beginning, and
the Desire for Innovation xvii
MICHAELCARASIK
1 Three Biblical Beginnings 1
BENJAMIN D. SOMMER
2 Expulsion as Initiation: Displacement, Divine Presence,
and Divine Exile in the Torah 23
CHARLOTTE FONROBERT
3 The Beginnings of Rabbinic Textuality: Women’s Bodies
and Paternal Knowledge 49
ARYEH COHEN
4 Beginning Gittin/Mapping Exile 69
MIRIAM PESKOWITZ
5 Burying the Dead 113
ELLIOTR. WOLFSON
6 Before ‘Alef/Where Beginnings End 135
SHAULMAGID
7 Origin and Overcoming the Beginning: Zimzum as a Trope
of Reading in Post-Lurianic Kabbala 163
ZACHARY BRAITERMAN
8 Cyclical Motions and the Force of Repetition in the
Thought of Franz Rosenzweig 215

Acknowledgments
This project has taken many years from formulation to fruition. The idea
received its first public hearing at a panel at the Association for Jewish Studies
Conference in Boston in December 1995. The editors conceived the idea of a
panel on Beginnings, and invited Elliot Wolfson to join them in presenting pa-
pers on the topic. Elliot graciously agreed and we saw, in retrospect, that the
papers shared many themes though their specific texts and topics were differ-
ent. At that point the idea for the book was born. We are very thankful to El-
liot both for his contribution to that session, for introducing our project to
Seven Bridges Press, and for his wise counsel and friendship through the whole
process.
The second public hearing was at the Textualities conference at Drew Uni-
versity in July of 1997. We are grateful to Peter Ochs for inviting us (i.e., Aryeh
Cohen, Shaul Magid and Charlotte Fonrobert) to present our research as a
work in progress at that conference. This is but one example of Peter’s intellec-
tual and personal generosity and encouragement of scholarship and scholars.
We are grateful to each of the contributors for their commitment to the
project. We also thank them for their patience as we kept assuring them that
this work would actually see the light of day.
We could not have found a better home for this book than Seven Bridges
Press. We are especially grateful to Ted Bolen for his care and commitment, and
for inaugurating the Jewish Studies Series with this volume.
Aryeh would like to thank Andrea Hodos for the space we have created to-
gether, Charlotte Fonrobert, Pinhas Giller and Maeera Schreiber, for their
friendship, intellectual support and scholarly critique. I am especially grateful
to Shaul Magid for this collaboration and our ongoing friendship.
Shaul would like to thank Nancy Levene for simply being there, David
Roskies, for carefully reading and correcting my Introduction, the hevraya at
Yeshivat Ha-Hayyim ve Ha-Shalom in Jerusalem, especially Rabbi Mordecai
Attia, with whom I first studied Lurianic Kabbala, and to my students at the