Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [103]
3. Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5
4. This is a paraphrasing of Heschel's oral teaching as I recall it, not a direct quotation from his writings.
5. See the important discussion by Yair Lorberbaum in Tselem Elohim (Jerusalem: Schocken, 2004), pp. 27ff., where he shows how the Maimonidean prism through which we are often trained to read early rabbinic sources in this case distorts their original meaning. Lorberbaum's book is soon to appear in English translation.
6. T. Jonathan to Gen. 5:3.
7. T. Y. Nedarim 9:5.
8. Perhaps I should say that he shares this place with Jesus of Nazareth, also martyred by the Romans, just a century earlier.
9. Mishnah Yadayim 3:5. It was Saul Lieberman who suggested that “the day when the Song of Songs was given to Israel” in that Mishnah most likely refers to Sinai. See also Aggadat Shir ha-Shirim (ed. Solomon Schechter [Cambridge, 1896]), line 22, a late Midrash in which Akiva is quoted as saying: “Had Torah not been given, it would have been possible to conduct the world by the Song of Songs.” Quite a world!
10. T. B. Nedarim 50a.
11. T. B. Berakhot 54a.
12. I thus disagree with Loberbaum about the essential meaning of this debate. See his discussion in Tselem, pp. 131ff. I believe the discussion has implications regarding the commandment to propagate the species, and does take on a special poignancy because it involves the childless Ben Azzai—but that is not its essential meaning. The debate is rather about whether love suffices as a basis for the religious life.
13. See Alon Goshen-Gottstein's interesting explanation of why tselem elohim is so little used in halakhic discussion (he claims that its implications were well understood by the rabbis as being too universalistic for the halakhic universe they were seeking to create). “The Body as Image of God in Rabbinic Literature,” Harvard Theological Review 87:2 (1994): 171-195. But see more recently Lorberbaum, Tselem, claiming that major areas of halakhah surrounding both reproduction/birth and death were shaped by this belief.
14. Midrash Va-Yiqra Rabbah 34:3.
15. Commentary to Deut. 21:23.
16. See Lorberbaum, Tselem, but also Mendel Kasher in Torah Shelemah, addenda to Parashat Yitro.
17. T. B. Berakhot 10a. Within the rabbinic materials, it seems fair to say that these soul-centered texts were probably the result of living in the Hellenistic milieu, while the notion of bodily form as tselem represented an older and more native tradition.
18. See the famous note by R. Abraham ben David of Posquieres, the earliest historical figure associated with Kabbalah, to Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Teshuvah 3:7 and the discussion by Gershom Scholem in Origins of the Kabbalah (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1987), pp. 211ff.
19. Quoted from the Zohar in Tanya, chapter 2, and frequently found in Hasidic writings. I have not found the original Zohar source and I suspect the text may have originated later.
20. Insofar as we know. The high regard our tradition places on uniquely human life necessarily devalues the lives of other species in comparison. While I am not ready to call for eliminating the claim for human uniqueness, it behooves us to be aware of this immodesty. The rabbis warned us long ago to remember, when we are overcome by pride, that even the mosquitoes were here before us (T. B. Sanhedrin 38a). They understood that precedence to be of one “day;” we understand it as some millions of years.
21. “Just as God fills all the world, so does the soul fill all the body.” T. B. Berakhot 10a.
22. Hos. 11:9 and T. B. Ta'anit 11a-b.
23. See the comment of the Sefat Emet on “inscribe us for life,” translated in my Language of Truth: The Torah Commentary of the Sefat Emet (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1978), pp. 343f.
24. This is how I understand the Kabbalistic image of kelipah. The “cosmic” shells are projections of this psychological reality.
25. See the very rich treatment of Zoharic understandings of the