7/27/2019 Jacob Neusner - Selected Quotes

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Is that to say sages do not believe in the material-reality of the system of uncleanness

and sanctification of the household? Certainly sages deem palpable results to emerge

from violation of the rules that protect Israel’s status of sanctification. Violating the

sanctity of the marriage bed produces mamzerim, and for generations to come the

offspring of the union of two persons who are legally forbidden to wed suffer the

result. That is hardly a matter relative to anyone’s intentionality, even though theoffspring come about by reason of will. Meat destined for the Lord’s altar that

contracts uncleanness is burned, not eaten. That is not subject to negotiation or 

compromise…

So we may say… nothing that matters in issues of genealogy and cult is treated as

relative. Absolutes govern: one may not marry his mother, one may not offer carrion

upon the altar, and nothing complicates those simple rules. But when we deal with

the household and its table, the Halakhah certainly does set aside considerations of 

intrinsic uncleanness and treats matters of status and taxonomy as relative to the

intangibilities of attitude…. Everything now is made to depend upon the

watchfulness, the alertness, of the householder and his ménage, their (likely) capacity

to take note of what is taking place round about: a dead frog here, a menstruatingwoman there, a corpse in the neighbor’s attached dwelling, under the same roof – the

list is formidable. (p.289)

But are these not practical matters, immune to considerations of relationship and

circumstance..? The law contains within itself its own judgment: the household is not

the Temple, the table is not the altar. (p.290)

Jacob Neusner, The Theology of the Halakhah (Brill 2001),??

He misses the force of the later Talmudic dialectic. He writes accurately: “The

dialectic argument opens the possibility of reaching out from one thing to something

else, and the path’s wandering is part of the reason. It is not because people have lost

sight of their starting point or their goal in the end, but because they want to

encompass, in the analytical argument as it gets underway, as broad and

comprehensive a range of cases and rules as they can.” (p. 298) “The dialectics aims

at making manifest how to read the laws in such a way as to discern that many things

really say one thing. The variations on the theme than take the form of detailed

expositions of this and that.” (p. 299)

 Neusner, Jacob. 2004. How Not To Study Judaism, Examples And Counter-examples:

 Parables, Rabbinic Narratives, Rabbis' Biographies, Rabbis' Disputes. University

Press of America.