Summer (Aliyah!) Break and Updates

🇮🇱 I'm signing off for a few weeks as my family makes aliyah, but I'll be back in time for your Av newsletter, writing from my new home in Modiin. In the meantime, some updates.

That’s little me in the photo above, taken on a trip to Jerusalem. I’m standing in the Armenian Quarter, according to the note on the photo. Shortly after it was taken, my parents left for a postdoc in the United States. We were supposed to be here for two years; I never stopped wanting to go home. Next week, I am finally fulfilling that dream. My family is making aliyah. (Including the cat.)

As you can imagine, things will be unusually busy over the next several weeks, so I’m taking my summer break now, but I’ll be back with you on August 6 with an Av newsletter. Here are a few more things coming up—

Upcoming Series: The Maimonidean Controversies

Thanks to all who responded to the informal poll about upcoming series—the winner was Maimonidean Controversies. I’m really excited that you are as excited about this one as I am: it was the topic of my dissertation (more specifically, the controversy beginning in 1304, which was a knock-down, drag-out, though it ultimately ended with a whimper). One reason I find this topic so fascinating is because, mutatis mutandis (an amazingly handy Latin phrase meaning “the changes having been made in the relevant places”), the underlying question is still very much with us today: what do we do when external ways of knowing (say, the thing we now call the scientific method) conflicts with internal ways of knowing (Masorah, the Jewish tradition)?

I think this is an apt follow-up to our examination of the historical development of Kabbala, in which I argued that Kabbala was successful as a movement within Judaism in part because its foundational texts built upon internal methodologies of inquiry and interpretation, especially midrash. I can’t promise you any answers, but I hope to give you a historical examples that will show you how Jews have struggled with such questions in the past—even when it was hard and contentious.

Holiday Readers eBook

A reader made an excellent suggestion (thank you!) that, now that we’re closing on a full year’s cycle of monthly holiday newsletters, I create an eBook of the special issues for the year. I’ll make one as soon as I complete 5784, with Elul’s newsletter. Along with the 5784 issues, I’ll include four issues of 5783 (Sivan through Elul) in the first eBook, then make one for each year going forward.

Book Update

Some of you have asked about my book, which I’m excited to say has been progressing nicely. The book is planned to span six chapters, and to be finished in three years. Right now I’m on track with two chapters in the first year. The fall will be dedicated to revising them, then it’s on to hopefully write three more in 2025.

This last Kabbala series also helped me decide on an end point for the book. The starting point of the Middle Ages was easy: both the internal tradition and historians generally point to 500 CE as the close of the Talmud (though, in the case of the latter, not necessarily the end of redactional activity), and 500 is often the marker of the boundary between late antiquity and the early medieval period in Mediterranean/European history. The end point of the Middle Ages is a little murkier. Is it the European invention of the printing press c. the 1440s, or perhaps the Iberian expulsions, beginning in 1492, that created the rupture between what we now call the Middle Ages and modernity, to speak in reductive terms?

I preferred an internal marker: the Shulchan Aruch. But to pick its date of composition (1563), first publication (Venice, 1565), or first publication with the haggahot (critical glosses) of the Rema (Krakow, 1570)? I was inclined to go with 1570, though it feels late to me for the “end” of the Middle Ages and the start of the period of the the Acharonim. The more correct answer, of course, is that we are talking about a long and gradual historical process here, one that stretched, arguably, from glimmers already in the late 1300s and all the way into the seventeenth century, if not the eighteenth.

But books need parameters and students of history need periodization, so I was still in search of a date. Then it occurred to me: I could not omit the two enormously important years the Arizal spent in Tzfat, from 1570 until his death in 1572. What the Jewish world would do with the Kabbala of the Ari, it seems to me, is a story that belongs to the modern era. But the foundation, the inception of Lurianic Kabbal itself, straddles the boundary. 1572 it is! A millennium of Jewish life and thought, but add 72 crucial years.

I’d love to hear what you’re interested in seeing in a book about the period of Rishonim. Write and tell me, and I’ll see you back in this space in a few weeks, writing from Israel!