Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion) by Daniel Boyarin

Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion) by Daniel Boyarin

Author:Daniel Boyarin [Boyarin, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2010-11-23T16:00:00+00:00


Classical Judaism, by contrast, produced a literature which looks at first sight like someone's grandmother's attic in which endless quantities of curious things which “might some day come in handy” have been passed down like so many balls of string lovingly collected over the years and piled on top of each other without apparent concern for distinctions between weighty and trivial matters. It is only with the greatest difficulty that those accustomed to systematic modes of thought, logical progression, and hierarchical ordering can adjust themselves to the discursive and unsystematic style of the rabbis and begin to discern the thread of thought that underlies what appears to be random discussion and linking of themes. But gradually one comes to see that this apparent jumble of piety and trivia is the medium of the rabbinic message which is the effort to penetrate every corner of ordinary life with God's presence. This expressed itself in an innocence of most of the Christian hierarchies of being, order, and value, and in an ability to see theological meaning in details of ordinary life. The rabbis think nothing of making their most profound comments on the nature of God in the midst of discussing the uses of cheese!167

An example of such discussion, characterized by R. Travers Herford as “dry and tedious”168 will exemplify Ruether's point. This text exemplifies in both its theme and its discursive method the differentiating and distinctive workings of late Babylonian rabbinic orthodoxy:



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