Dati-Leumi perspectives – which may not differ at all. Traditionalist presentations are made by from both charedi and.
Eliyahu Krakowski provides a fascinating historical review of when learning Tanach went out of style, and why.
There are contributions from the past (Nechama Leibowitz) and present. While tensions between proponents and opponents of the “new” approaches have been simmering for years, the editors diplomatically chose to ignore them and simply present to readers in the space of eight articles some of the views and some of the personalities on both sides.
#Jimmy the greek how to
The current issue of Jewish Action devotes a number of articles exploring some of the current issues in how to approach Tanach. In fact, there has been a quiet revolution in parts of the community in devoting more energy in looking at the plain peshat of Torah text, especially utilizing literary techniques that emerge from the secular academic world – techniques which, in many cases seem to have been very much part of the methodology of Chazal. You would think that after all this time, no strikingly new methodologies would appear. Centuries of our meforshim have given us many different approaches, allowing us to share the variegated responses that only a Divine text can evoke. Fortunately, there are many ways of understanding almost any pasuk in Tanach. Calvin, the famous Protestant leader, paraphrased it as, “The Lord commands that all those who are disobedient to their parents be put to death.” Had Calvin been willing to consider the Jewish approach to the verse, Calas perhaps would have been spared.Ĭalas aside, if Calvin were correct many more of us could be in deep trouble. (A later inquiry posthumously sustained Calas’ claim that his son had taken his own life.) The Catholics believed that Calas accepted John Calvin’s take on Devarim 18:21, the ben sorer umoreh passage. Calas, a Protestant, was tortured to death in 1762 on the spurious charge of having murdered his son because he believed that he was planning to convert to Catholicism, the dominant religion at the time in France. Jean Calas learned the hard way that reading a dubious peshat into a pasuk can be fatal.