21/05/2024 15:30 - 16:30

HALL: FATESI - TOMASI

Proponent: Ben Ami I.

Chair: Ben Ami I.

Speaker: Batnitzk L., Ben Ami I., Rashkover R.

In his book The Sacred Canopy, Peter Berger argues that the same notion of the 'sacred' that grounds religion's ability to overcome the threat of anomie, also prohibits religious traditions from exercising the reflective ability to adapt their traditions to changing times.  Unfortunately, this view overlooks the role of hermeneutics as a this-worldly form of practical knowledge production. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, a good deal of modern Jewish thought also perpetuated this neglect of the practical and this-worldly character of hermeneutics by either reifying Jewish law or Jewish history as the singular objects of Jewish text analysis or by neglecting the objective contents of revelation altogether and collapsing hermeneutical activities into the subjective desires of the reading community.  In this panel, scholars will by contrast, demonstrate how Jewish hermeneutical activity sustains Judaism's ability to change over time. In her paper, Leora Batnitzky will examine how the relationship between narrative and law within Jewish hermeneutical activity is a vital component of how Jewish communities engage with their environments. In her paper, Randi Rashkover will draw from Rahel Jaeggi's account of forms of life to demonstrate how the hermeneutical relationship between Jewish communal subjectivity and its pragmatic apprehension of the world interacts with Judaism as a normative tradition to determine Jewish practical social coordination in history.