Adar is the month of Jewish Joy!

"In the #Jewish calendar, the month of #Adar, the month of #Purim, marks the transition from the darkness of winter to the spring redemption story that is enacted on the holidays of #Passover and #Shavuot. This is expressed in the four unique #Torah readings of this period, which all address different aspects of preparing for Passover. It may also be behind the well-known #rabbinic teaching (#Taanit 29a) that when Adar begins, we increase our joy.

It is important to notice that this teaching is not descriptive. It is not a comment on the fact that as the air grows warmer, the hours of daylight lengthen and the first spots of green begin to appear on the trees, we might begin to feel some of the heaviness of winter lifting from our souls. Though this is true, the teaching is articulated as an imperative, calling on us to engage actively in creating more joy in our lives during this period."

https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/redemption-songs/

"For more than a decade, #Jewish communal leaders have spoken about a “pipeline crisis” in #rabbinic leadership. We are told that fewer young people feel called, fewer students are applying and interest is waning. Yet in advanced learning spaces such as #SVARA, #Hadar, #Pardes and other serious #bateimidrash, this narrative feels disconnected from reality. These environments are filled with intellectually rigorous, spiritually engaged young #Jews immersed in serious study and communal work. Many aspire to a rabbinate grounded in #Torah, pastoral care, ethical leadership, and intellectual depth.

The pipeline is not empty. It is leaking."

https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/386697/my-response-to-rabbi-wolpes-column-on-the-rabbinate/

Leiden Summer School 2025

The program for this year’s Leiden Summer School in Languages and Linguistics is up. Besides the Caucasian, Chinese, Language Description, Language Documentation, Indo-European (I/II), Celtic, Indology, Iranian, Linguistics (I/II), Mediterranean World, and Russian tracks, here’s the line-up for Semitic this year:

• An introduction to Arabic paleography and epigraphy (Ahmad Al-Jallad)
• Comparative Semitics (Marijn van Putten with guest lectures by me and maybe others)
• Rabbinic Hebrew (Martin Baasten)
• Classical Ethiopic (Martin Baasten)

Registration opens soon! The Summer School will run from July 21st through August 1st.

#Arabic #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #news #ProtoSemitic #Rabbinic

Hebrew is somewhat famous as the most successful attempt to bring a formerly dead language back to life. But when did Hebrew die out in the first place? Up to the early 20th century, scholars thought that basically all speakers switched to Aramaic during the Babylonian Exile (sixth century BCE), killing off Hebrew in the process. The Hebrew literature written after that point would then have been composed in a language that was no longer in spoken use. Since then, however, a better appreciation of the vernacular status of Rabbinic Hebrew as well as epigraphic finds have shifted the consensus. Today, most scholars believe Hebrew died out as a spoken language after another dramatic event: the failed Bar Kokhba Revolt (second sentury CE) and subsequent deportation of most Jews from Jerusalem and the Roman province of Judaea (renamed Aelia Capitolina and Syria Palaestina for good measure).

In two recent papers (and more to come?), Ivri J. Bunis argues that Hebrew persevered even longer, surviving in Palestine into the late Roman and (say it with me) Eastern Roman period. Both papers focus on Palestinian Amoraic (not Aramaic!) Hebrew, that is: Hebrew from Palestine (mostly Galilee) from ca. 200–500 CE. A summary of his arguments:

In his 2020 paper, Bunis shows that sequences of imperatives, especially with verbs of movement, are mostly expressed without ‘and’ (e.g. “go see”) in both Biblical Hebrew and Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, while Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew mostly does use ‘and’ (“go and see”), like the earlier phase of Rabbinic Hebrew, Tannaitic Hebrew, which is now generally considered to reflect a living language. This shows that the people writing Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew weren’t just writing Aramaic with a thin Hebrew veneer or basing themselves on Biblical Hebrew. In my opinion, this mainly shows that Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew is indeed a form of Rabbinic Hebrew, continuing the earlier, Tannaitic stage of the language. But especially with subtle, syntactic things like this, it would be very easy for a scribe who was dominant in Aramaic to slip up and get it wrong. This paper also has a detailed review of the scholarship on the survival of Hebrew in previous literature.

A stronger case is made in Bunis’s 2022 paper on Rabbinic Hebrew hallā– pronouns. (Conflict of interest: I hope to present something on these pronouns together with Ivri at a conference this summer.) Bunis does a really quite excellent job of showing that the use of these demonstratives evolves throughout the attested stages of Rabbinic Hebrew. Hopefully without oversimplifying or getting too much wrong, the picture looks something like this :

Bar Kokhba Letters (some of these forms aren’t attested as such and some other variants occur)

Eearlier Tannaitic Hebrew

Later Tannaitic Hebrew

Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew

So: the hallā– pronouns are quite common in the 2nd-century Bar Kokhba Letters; Tannaitic Hebrew innovates a much more productive set of distal demonstratives based on ʔōṯ- and later restricts the hallā– pronouns to substantive use; and Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew loses them altogether, except for plural hallā́lū, which gets repurposed as the adnominal counterpart of proximal plural ʔḗllū for morphological reasons. All of those developments, including the ones in Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew, look perfectly natural, like the kind of thing speakers would do in a living language. And while Bunis doesn’t spell this out as much as in the 2020 paper, there’s nothing at all in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic or Biblical Hebrew that would motivate this.

Based on the second paper, especially, I think I’m convinced that Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew had some kind of living status. I’m not sure Bunis has shown that it was a living language in the strict sense, with children acquiring it as their first language; it could still be that it was only used in an academic setting, so to speak. But either way, it clearly had some kind of life of its own: speakers were apparently still learning to produce Hebrew very fluently, whether as a first or second language.

So, should we revise the date of the death of Hebrew once again? Both papers can be read for free on Bunis’s Academia page, and while they’re fairly long, I think they’re well written and easy to follow. So if you want to form an opinion on what might be a big development in the historiography of Hebrew, do head over there and give hammaʔămārīm hallā́lū a read.

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2024/03/18/bunis-on-the-survival-of-hebrew/

#Aramaic #Bible #Hebrew #linguistics #Rabbinic

I’m an #ultraOrthodox #Rabbi and I #SpeakUp for #LGBTQ #Jews.

No one should ever have to choose between a #queer #identity and a #religious one. #Rabbinic #voices can even be used to #incite #evil, or it can #inspire #love, #acceptance, and #celebration. That is why I spoke at the #Jerusalem
#PrideMarch earlier this month.

#Women #Transgender #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA #Israel #Religion #Pride #PrideMonth #Representation #Culture

https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2023-06-18/ty-article-opinion/.premium/im-an-ultra-orthodox-rabbi-and-i-speak-up-for-lgbtq-jews/00000188-cece-d18d-a7ae-dfde75300000

Hadar’s #Rabbinic #Yeshiva Intensive (RYI) aims to refill the spiritual and intellectual wells of #rabbis from across the denominational and geographical spectrum through text study and meaningful conversation.
It offers a remarkable space for rabbis of all backgrounds to come together to learn resonant and relevant Torah in Hadar’s beit midrash.

@mazeldon
#Hadar #Torah #Judaism