#rabbinic — Public Fediverse posts

"In a townhouse in #Greenpoint, #Brooklyn, a gathering for #TuBAv was underway. There was chanting and breathwork, singing and ceremony. Several Brooklyn-based #Jewish communities, including Temple of the Stranger and Lab/ #Shul, had come together for the experience.

These vibes are usually associated with Eastern traditions, paganism or indigenous American practices; most Westerners who want that form of spirituality go looking for it at Buddhist meditation centers or ayahuasca retreats, forms of engagement more often associated with the 1960s or ’70s #counterculture movement than with a #synagogue.

But a group of #rabbis, leaders and #spiritual seekers believe drum circles, chanting, #meditation and #mysticism are, in fact, just as core to #Judaism as any #rabbinic text — a sort of lost magic that has impeded vibrant, direct spiritual experience."

https://forward.com/culture/845078/ivri-judaism-jewish-ritual-practice-mysticism-spirituality/

"We want to make you aware of an incident that occurred at the home of #Jewish #students at #UCSD over the weekend.

We will not allow #antisemitism or hate to diminish our Jewish pride or deter our Jewish joy.

I want to pull back the curtain a little bit and be real with you. Over the past 24 hours, #Hillel has checked in multiple times with students, coordinated with #University police, SDPD, worked with our partners at #UC #SanDiego, #SCN, and all the other Jewish agencies, provided meals and will continue to provide dinners all week for students, communicated with our community, helped facilitate #rabbinic support, and purchased extra security devices for four different student homes– again all in a matter of hours. We also raised enough in the moment to make that happen, as these are not expenses normally worked into our budget.

While we all hope each incident is the last, the reality is that vandalism, harassment, and threats have not stopped."

https://www.sdjewishworld.com/2026/08/10/vandals-deface-private-residence-utilized-by-aepi/

"The #Samaritans are different. They are a tiny community of around 800 souls, divided between #Holon and #KiryatLuza near #Nablus. They trace their ancestry back to the ancient #Israelites and possess a version of the #Torah that differs only slightly from our own. Their central point of departure from mainstream #Judaism is their belief that #MountGerizim, rather than #Jerusalem, is the divinely chosen place, together with their rejection of the Oral Law and #rabbinic tradition.

As I stood among them, watching ancient rituals performed with immense sincerity, hearing #Hebrew prayers and seeing #Torahscrolls carried with reverence, I could not help feeling that I was encountering not strangers, but long-lost cousins.

Their Torah is, with only relatively minor differences, our Torah. #Abraham, #Isaac, #Jacob, and #Moses are their ancestors no less than ours. Yet somewhere in the distant past, our paths diverged."

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-900393

I don't go in for all the Mamdani bashing, and I think AIPAC's politics suck, but the left's fixation on demonizing AIPAC above all other lobbying groups, many quite a bit more powerful, gets a side-eye from me.

"#NewYorkCity #Mayor #ZohranMamdani on Monday defended his use of the word “monsters” to describe #AIPAC at a rally on Friday for #progressive candidates, as some of his #Jewish supporters expressed concern that the term may connote an #antisemitic trope.

The war of words came as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is increasingly a target of the progressive movement, including in acts of attempted violence, and as progressive #Jews have accused some Israeli right-wing figures of dehumanizing liberal pro-Israel lobbying groups.

“Calling AIPAC and its backers ‘monsters’ casts them as less than human, rather than as human beings who are one’s political opponents,” #Rabbi #JillJacobs, head of the progressive #rabbinic #humanrights group #Truah[...]"

https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-900200

Leiden Summer School 2025

The program for this year’s Leiden Summer School in Languages and Linguistics is up. Besides the Caucasian, Chinese, Language Description, Language Documentation, Indo-European (I/II), Celtic, Indology, Iranian, Linguistics (I/II), Mediterranean World, and Russian tracks, here’s the line-up for Semitic this year:

• An introduction to Arabic paleography and epigraphy (Ahmad Al-Jallad)
• Comparative Semitics (Marijn van Putten with guest lectures by me and maybe others)
• Rabbinic Hebrew (Martin Baasten)
• Classical Ethiopic (Martin Baasten)

Registration opens soon! The Summer School will run from July 21st through August 1st.

#Arabic #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #news #ProtoSemitic #Rabbinic

Hebrew is somewhat famous as the most successful attempt to bring a formerly dead language back to life. But when did Hebrew die out in the first place? Up to the early 20th century, scholars thought that basically all speakers switched to Aramaic during the Babylonian Exile (sixth century BCE), killing off Hebrew in the process. The Hebrew literature written after that point would then have been composed in a language that was no longer in spoken use. Since then, however, a better appreciation of the vernacular status of Rabbinic Hebrew as well as epigraphic finds have shifted the consensus. Today, most scholars believe Hebrew died out as a spoken language after another dramatic event: the failed Bar Kokhba Revolt (second sentury CE) and subsequent deportation of most Jews from Jerusalem and the Roman province of Judaea (renamed Aelia Capitolina and Syria Palaestina for good measure).

In two recent papers (and more to come?), Ivri J. Bunis argues that Hebrew persevered even longer, surviving in Palestine into the late Roman and (say it with me) Eastern Roman period. Both papers focus on Palestinian Amoraic (not Aramaic!) Hebrew, that is: Hebrew from Palestine (mostly Galilee) from ca. 200–500 CE. A summary of his arguments:

In his 2020 paper, Bunis shows that sequences of imperatives, especially with verbs of movement, are mostly expressed without ‘and’ (e.g. “go see”) in both Biblical Hebrew and Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, while Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew mostly does use ‘and’ (“go and see”), like the earlier phase of Rabbinic Hebrew, Tannaitic Hebrew, which is now generally considered to reflect a living language. This shows that the people writing Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew weren’t just writing Aramaic with a thin Hebrew veneer or basing themselves on Biblical Hebrew. In my opinion, this mainly shows that Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew is indeed a form of Rabbinic Hebrew, continuing the earlier, Tannaitic stage of the language. But especially with subtle, syntactic things like this, it would be very easy for a scribe who was dominant in Aramaic to slip up and get it wrong. This paper also has a detailed review of the scholarship on the survival of Hebrew in previous literature.

A stronger case is made in Bunis’s 2022 paper on Rabbinic Hebrew hallā– pronouns. (Conflict of interest: I hope to present something on these pronouns together with Ivri at a conference this summer.) Bunis does a really quite excellent job of showing that the use of these demonstratives evolves throughout the attested stages of Rabbinic Hebrew. Hopefully without oversimplifying or getting too much wrong, the picture looks something like this :

Bar Kokhba Letters (some of these forms aren’t attested as such and some other variants occur)

Eearlier Tannaitic Hebrew

Later Tannaitic Hebrew

Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew

So: the hallā– pronouns are quite common in the 2nd-century Bar Kokhba Letters; Tannaitic Hebrew innovates a much more productive set of distal demonstratives based on ʔōṯ- and later restricts the hallā– pronouns to substantive use; and Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew loses them altogether, except for plural hallā́lū, which gets repurposed as the adnominal counterpart of proximal plural ʔḗllū for morphological reasons. All of those developments, including the ones in Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew, look perfectly natural, like the kind of thing speakers would do in a living language. And while Bunis doesn’t spell this out as much as in the 2020 paper, there’s nothing at all in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic or Biblical Hebrew that would motivate this.

Based on the second paper, especially, I think I’m convinced that Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew had some kind of living status. I’m not sure Bunis has shown that it was a living language in the strict sense, with children acquiring it as their first language; it could still be that it was only used in an academic setting, so to speak. But either way, it clearly had some kind of life of its own: speakers were apparently still learning to produce Hebrew very fluently, whether as a first or second language.

So, should we revise the date of the death of Hebrew once again? Both papers can be read for free on Bunis’s Academia page, and while they’re fairly long, I think they’re well written and easy to follow. So if you want to form an opinion on what might be a big development in the historiography of Hebrew, do head over there and give hammaʔămārīm hallā́lū a read.

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2024/03/18/bunis-on-the-survival-of-hebrew/

#Aramaic #Bible #Hebrew #linguistics #Rabbinic

I’m an #ultraOrthodox #Rabbi and I #SpeakUp for #LGBTQ #Jews.

No one should ever have to choose between a #queer #identity and a #religious one. #Rabbinic #voices can even be used to #incite #evil, or it can #inspire #love, #acceptance, and #celebration. That is why I spoke at the #Jerusalem
#PrideMarch earlier this month.

#Women #Transgender #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA #Israel #Religion #Pride #PrideMonth #Representation #Culture

https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2023-06-18/ty-article-opinion/.premium/im-an-ultra-orthodox-rabbi-and-i-speak-up-for-lgbtq-jews/00000188-cece-d18d-a7ae-dfde75300000

Hadar’s #Rabbinic #Yeshiva Intensive (RYI) aims to refill the spiritual and intellectual wells of #rabbis from across the denominational and geographical spectrum through text study and meaningful conversation.
It offers a remarkable space for rabbis of all backgrounds to come together to learn resonant and relevant Torah in Hadar’s beit midrash.

@mazeldon
#Hadar #Torah #Judaism