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to spawn major maimonidean biographies moshe halbertal h a rambam jerusalem 2009 translations michael schwarz sefer moreh nevukhim tel aviv 2008 intellectual portraits joel kraemer maimonides the life and world of one of civilization s greatest minds new york 2010 and even a so called rambam diet david zulberg the life transforming diet health and psychological principles of maimonides new york 2007 ecclesiastes warning against the endless making of books has been observed only in the breach but in stroumsa s case we are all the more fortunate maimonides in his world presents a fully integrated and contextualized figure the attempt to separate maimonides the philosopher from maimonides the halakhist is smartly refuted in addition maimonides is now located in what stroumsa calls his mediterranean islamic context both the integration and contextualization of maimonides are likely to be resisted by those who devote themselves to the traditional study of rambam s writings but given stroumsa s mastery of the material and the way she consistently links the rambam s language to a rich lexicon of arabic terms and islamic ideas the book s conclusions are hard to avoid of course the unfortunate truth is that a book by a professor of arabic philosophy published in english by a university press will never make it into the study halls where the rambam is most venerated but it should and to its credit it theoretically could despite the fact that maimonides in his world derives from over twenty years of painstaking philological research on hebrew and arabic texts like the ipad the complex machinery is present but elegantly tucked away using advanced linguistic and scholarly tools stroumsa demonstrates how virtually every one of maimonides projects can be properly understood only in relation to broader trends in the islamic mediterranean these include maimonides polemics against the widespread theological approach of his day kalām his heresiography in which deviant jews of the past and present are essentially depicted as muslim heretics zandādiqa the creation of the mishn e h torah a new primary source of jewish law that eschews fundamentals furū and uncovers basic legal principles uşūl according to stroumsa the composition of mishn e h torah is to be connected with currents that maimonides was exposed to under the almohads during the years 1148 1165 as is his almost militant anti anthropomorphism his image of messianic kingship similar to the islamic mahdī and his impatience with ptolemaic astronomy maimonides famous position regarding animal sacrifices in the temple which are seen as but one step in the evolution of judaism from its pagan past is of a piece with the renewed interest in religious phenomenology his denigration of darshanim and the uncritical use of aggada parallels muslim assessment of preachers wu āz and religious storytellers qusşāş maimonides vision of human perfection and an austere intellectual afterlife plainly reflects the dominant philosophical approach of his day famously this approach engendered considerable problems for maimonides both during his life and after his death for if there is no need for the body after death why would god have to resurrect the dead one of the most original claims in the book is that maimonides codification of this belief in his thirteen principles was neither an abandonment of his philosophical approach nor an attempt at synthesis rather it was a shrewd strategy he hoped would allow him to avoid the discussion entirely unfortunately for his sake he was mistaken in stroumsa s capable hands the image of maimonides that emerges is not a portrait of a brilliant talmud centric lithuanian rosh yeshiva rather a kind of pre renaissance renaissance man who was completely fluent in the philosophical discourse of his day and who attempted an unapologetic reading of judaism using the prevailing intellectual tools of his day the secret to maimonides success which stroumsa sees as the culmination of prior attempts by jewish philosophers was his distinct ability to observe with cool scholarly detachment all of the philosophical and religious traditions that preceded him including his own judaism pervasive self awareness is both the blessing and curse of modernity however when you are hundreds of years ahead of your time it can only be experienced as a howling loneliness taking its cue from the popular saying from moshe rabbeinu to moshe ben maimon there arose none like moshe the final section of the book explores maimonides idea of the philosopher king a man who responds to the call for communal involvement yet remains in philosophical contemplation it is good to be king but how lonely it is the second half of the twentieth century saw modern orthodox judaism particularly in its american strain attempt to fashion itself as a maimonidean movement some continue to call for maimonidean reform marc d angel maimonides spinoza and us toward an intellectually vibrant judaism woodstock vt 2009 at the same time there has been hesitation about a pure imatatio maimonides with some questioning the wisdom and feasibility of community wide emulation of this elite intellectually unparalleled and singular jewish leader in the future conversations that are sure to ensue about maimonides place in contemporary jewish life stroumsa s portrait will be a most welcome indispensible guide dr shai secunda is a fellow at the scholion center for interdisciplinary jewish research the hebrew university of jerusaelm posted by shai at 4 33 am 1 comment labels reviews friday march 19 2010 notes towards srugim and talmudic culture i nstability despite the accolades that srugim has received for achieving a kind of objective correlative that affords access to dati and hillon audiences it simultaneously point to aspects of the dati hiloni divide especially in terms of perceptions of the other a number of episodes ago hodaya the rabbi s daughter who left the fold and is now officially a datlash and finds herself in a relatively unfulfilled relationship with a fellow datlash one depressing evening she heads out to a bar alone and phones her old boyfriend the hebrew u archeologist avri who was the focus of a number of episodes last season avri was truly secular not a drop of datlash in him the chemistry is still there but avri has found someone new and as he repeats over and over again his new girlfriend unlike hodaya is stable the scene sheds light on an interesting assumption pretty much all of the characters are in their own way unstable especially in their obsessive and unending search for identity and the interplay between identity and religion hodaya is of course the perfect example but the same could be said of the other characters like amir the married man who is less happy with having to fake as an ashkenazi roi with the questions of his sexual identity etc one episode poked fun of a hilonit trying to leave her cozy tel aviv world and play the complex experience of being religious clearly a nod to the experience of srugim s actors it is worth noting that srugim assumes that there is an inherent instability in the religious experience an idea that r j b soloveitchik famously celebrated in footnote 4 of his halakhic man from the staid mid century confines of orthodox america r soloveitchik tried to demonstrate that being religious was no trip alongside the tranquil waters but a tortuous existential experience at least in certain corners of the modern orthodox world it seems this battle of perception was won identity speaking of identity the questions of datlashim and borders came up as well hodaya s new boyfriend has no problem whatsoever with ordering shrimp he is not dati so what difference does it make if he transgresses the rules of shabbat or eats creepy crawly things but hodaya is uninterested in the treif indeed hodaya is interested only in pursuing a traditional existential quest so when she gets a tattoo on her back after wandering the streets of tel aviv her datlash boyfriend is less than happy it s an interesting way to think of the halakhic categories of mumar lehahis and mumar leteavon the datlash boyfriend is essentially portrayed as a mumar leteyavon he is in it for the non kosher food and premarital sex while identity seems less a part of it on the other hand identity is hodaya s obsession and in order to concretize her new identity as secular she inscribes it as a sign on her body i don t necessarily want to characterize hodaya as lehahis except in the sense that what she s doing is for real and not a temporary phase in the passion of the moment as much as possible she wants her new secularism etched on her body and soul trust and believablity amir and yefat have been having some marital problems not only in conceiving a child but also in trust from the banal to the serious amir crashes the car and tries not to tell yefat etc etc at the beginning of the episode entitled shivah neqiyim the glasses waiting to be immersed in the mikveh are still on the kitchen counter amir simply has not gotten around to do it and yifat has been taking hormonal supplements to play with her cycle since she s been having fertility problems a matter of some controversy in israel over the last few years menahem mendel posted about it a while back at hodaya s insistence yifat considers rethinking when to begin counting the shivah neqiyim this is rather interesting since she is married to a sefardi who begin counting from the fourth and not fifth day of the onset of the period but amir loses trust in yifat he asks a rav how one can trust one s wife that she has immersed in the mikveh and receives a lesson about notions of believability in jewish law the idea that a person is believed regarding forbidden things is actually derived from the menstruant s believability it doesn t work for amir and he does everything to avoid the mikveh night since according to his mistaken calculation yifat has immersed too early the irony is profound the glasses that amir finally ends up immersing are partially broken while his wife who has immersed properly is broken as well judging by the facebook comments on amir s profile he is not exactly the most beloved character right now to say the least niddah as for the shivah neqiyim themselves it is interesting how yifat the woman is less sure of the process of shivah nekiqiym than her husband while at least according to the bavli it was a female innovation in my dissertation i made a fairly radical claim that i have yet to receive a response to i hope i will get some pushback when i publish it in article form for further details i would suggest looking there but in short i argue that by comparing the bavli and the yerushalmi we can see that the phrase the daughters of israel were stringent is a babylonian addition to a palestinian kernel which merely declares a woman a menstruant even upon seeing a small drop of blood in tannaitic sources shivah neqiyim need not refer to seven clean days without blood but a period of time that is divorced from relations this is at least how it appears in tannaitic hebrew r zera cited the tradition in the name of r huna and it made it into babylonia in slightly altered form in rava s circle it was not entirely clear what the decision was a stringency of the women or one that was simply folk or rabbinic and connected to the tendency to blur the distinction between zavah and niddah already apparent in some respects in the dead sea scrolls there also was the factor of zoroastrian practice which similarly preached a need to divide the period from purification and underwent a comparitive development it is interesting how the sources are in fact much less clear regarding who was responsible for the innovation pious women rabbis general folk custom etc and the same dynamic can be found in the later history of hilkhot niddah which ossocilates between rabbinic concern female stringencies occasionally looked down upon by the rabbis mikveh ladies etc as always things are messier than they first appear the texts testify to this if you look closely enough posted by shai at 9 11 am 3 comments labels gender pop watch sasanian context srugim zoroastrianism wednesday january 6 2010 stiched the much anticipated new season of the israeli award winning t v series srugim is about to begin january 10st though virtually it has already aired following a few screenings and discussions in and around jerusalem the first season picked up prizes not just because of the generally good acting and artsy sophisticated cinematography but unquestionably for the very novelty of screening a series about religious singles in jerusalem srugim was reviewed and simultaneously praised and pilfered in the israeli religious press and as always quality is in the eye of the beholder much of the wider audience saw in srugim either a kind of ethnographic study of israeli religious society whose success is to be measured by the lack of mistakes in accurately depicting a certain ethnographic reality what we may call the stranger among us phenomenon good clip on sidelocks but did anyone notice how they did not check the eggs for bloodspots while baking etc etc in a similiar vein others particularly the religious public looked to srugim and its religious director lazy shapiro to represent halakha in its intracies and to show the unbroken piety of the religious public of course shapiro is interested in nothing but the creation of art and telling narratives of identity and community of which the latter is quite problematic in the identity construction of older singles in the dati world shapiro s art reflects and refracts contemporary israeli society in a myriad of ways the yes network on which srugim airs has told us in no fewer words that מה שהיה היה what was was still the series picked up from where it left off d ati hiloni issues continue to figure prominently and srugim continues to have some new and interesting if disturbing things to say in this episode hodaya the recently secular or datl ash formerly religious character is still finding her place as a hiloni in jeruslaem and meets what turns out to be a fellow datlash at work which by the end turns into something romantic only confirming the truism that datlashim cannot mainstream into hiloni society but what really does it mean to be hiloni or formerly religious in jerusalem a difficult question indeed srugim seems to conceive of the issue as being largely about sex with sexual initiation acting as the true initiation into secular society until hodaya experiences sex she remains dati despite her previous sabbath desecration as hodaya tells yifat on her wedding day she has still not done anything and so it goes while the datiim share their separate beds and at that only after marriage hilonim experience something that datiim will never have a different kind of sex and yet one cannot help but detect a look of dissapointment in hodaya s contenance as she looked out...