LWMO Engagements with Biblical Criticism & James Kugel
Rabbi David Silber (founder of Drisha), and Prof. James Kugel (who needs no intro), here.
R. Yosie Levine does a followup in two posts from yutorah.org (under machshava).
an audio interview with Kugel from Canadian public radio.
-A 2008 lecture by R. Hanan Schlesinger at the Dallas YU Kollel on Kugel, Bib Crit, etc.
-Lectures from the Judaic Seminar (1996-7), by R. Dr. Sid Leiman on BibCrit, scholarship and text, etc.
-YCT Yemei Iyun 2006 lecture on Lower Biblical Criticism by R. Nathaniel Helfgot.
-Panel discussion with some interesting speakers (R. Shalom Carmy, Dr. Lawrence Schiffman, Zelig Aster, etc), on Biblical Criticism all from Orthodox perspectives - but some with interesting suggestions.
Also this post I'd done on R. Kook and Bib Crit.
6 Comments:
thank you for these links -- very good stuff to hear from Dr. Kugel directly.
one thing: it seems to be part 1 and part 3 -- part 2 seems not there. if you have any ideas....
James Kugel...really doesn't have much to say, other than he somehow cleaves justifying his practice from his scholarship. There are a gammet of 'Conservative' approaches for accepting academic criticism as well as managing to justify observance - a gammet because Conservative Judaism has always been a range of views. This is the same with Orthodoxy, but there is no agreed-upon legislating body to sanction one view or range of views; conservatives have simply held them. Kugel, literally, just says he's a "creature of habit!"...his attitude is more a threat than his scholarship for this very reason. How do you deal with someone who accepts the conclusion of the DH and other approaches and claims to believe in Revelation - but HOW these are not necessarily competing claims (as CLAIMS, really, they're not, necessarily!), *you can't eek out of him* because he just...won't...say! At least Conservatives present their views to the gauntlet of practical application - and for many of them, their views are not communally justifiable, as many don't have the resolution-knowledge-base as the scholar who prsents the veiew. And the same could be said for Kugel. So stop wearing a kippah in [the very modern, present] public, if you refuse to present your religious justifications in [the very modern, current] public, I say.
..And it's just that; the views of the academia are in public, many of them, where they have to be relevant, have currency, publish and parish, etc, to be accepted. Many of these views are in competition, contradiction with each other. Any so many sceptics are proud to claim being 'scientific' when they accept...all views that are...critical of Yahadut. I have no idea how ALL these views can be true, in any scientific sense! I especially wonder this about statements like "the P Source believed such-and-such as evidenced by this posuk"; but if the P Source is a redaction of some other material in the process of building the Torah narrative...how can you say anything systematic about what P "says"?...it's a very real sense, its a few lines clipped from a magazine article!! It reminds me of so much cut-and-pasting of letters and words from magazines, to make an anonymous message intended BY THE CLIPPER - regardless of what the intent of their source *as such* was - unless it would be recognized by readers, etc. And this is exactly the sort of supposition about the text behind some historical Conservative resolutions. If the 'historical' claims are secondary to the ethical/spiritual import - why obsess over the historical claims? Same with other issues. Competing halachot?; they're orchestrated by the 'redactor' with the oral law in mind - not the other way around. I really don't know what would is so threatening about the claim that text is a thorough, faith-community attempt at approximating their history and religious experience with HKBH, and that various texts/oral narratives, etc, were cut, pasted, written down, etc., to make for a written match to what was generally known by the people. Again, I'm just laying out some of the historical Conservative attitudes - some of which may be formulations from Torah sources (that were not unpacked among the "orthodox", as they came to self-identify...) - not formulating a systematic response.
In a very real way, there are Torah views behind some of these historical Conservative approaches; the community does not determine the text; Neviim/leaders did. Nach, there abound sources discussing what volumes would be in the canon.
narratives being cut/pasted/written down? We have in the tradition sources that indeed propose Sifre Avot, that preceded Sinai that were edited into the Revelation [beginning] at Sinai.
These classical Conservative proposals are forms of these ideas that I think came about because, for various reasons, the Orthodox didn't unpack them - though they were in their own luggage, as it were.
not sure were the part two is, you might email the sources about them.
might check out this older post, and/or search my blog
http://harherem.blogspot.com/2007/07/original-post-of-newly-onlined-material.html
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