mail-jewish Vol.66 #75 Digest

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Mail.Jewish Mailing List
Volume 66 Number 75
Produced: Wed, 28 Aug 24 09:40:18 -0400


Subjects Discussed In This Issue:

Jewish Law Association conference
[Yisrael Medad]
Land inheritance
[Ari Trachtenberg]
Open Orthodoxy
[Joel Rich]
Were tefillin boxes in antiquity painted black?
[Yisrael Medad]



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From: Yisrael Medad <yisrae...@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Jul 29,2024 at 06:17 AM
Subject: Jewish Law Association conference

Interested participants are invited to register for the 2024 International
Conference of the Jewish Law Association, to be held at Harvard on 19-21 August.
Hosted by the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law at Harvard Law
School, the conference will bring scholars from around the world - and from
across disciplines and periods of interest - to hear two keynote lectures and
over fifty papers addressing topics relating to the theme Canon, Authority, and
the Creation of Halakhah. Programme details will be sent out on registration,
and the registration process will close by 12 August. The conference fee is
$260, with a reduction for members of the Jewish Law Association, and covers
refreshments, including two lunches and dinners. Further information and
registration will be found at

https://jewishlawassociation.org/2024-harvard-conference

--
Yisrael Medad
Shiloh
Israel

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From: Ari Trachtenberg <trac...@bu.edu>
Date: Sun, Jul 28,2024 at 09:17 AM
Subject: Land inheritance

In this last week's Torah portion, the daughters of Tzlaphad famously request
(and are given) land inheritance rights from their father, who dies without
sons. Later on we see that this comes with the stipulation that they only marry
within his tribe (Menashe), so that land does not get transferred from one tribe
to another.

My question is: how is Tzlaphad's wife different, from a halachic perspective,
from his daughters? Why does she not have land inheritance rights as well,
possibly under the same remarriage conditions?

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From: Joel Rich <joeli...@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Jul 9,2024 at 11:17 PM
Subject: Open Orthodoxy

During a recent Q&A session, R S Fuerst (Chicago) mentioned that the Moetzet
Gdolei HaTorah had developed Open Orthodoxy as being beyond the pale of
Orthodoxy. Has anyone seen an official pronouncement on this issue?

Bsorot tovot

Joel Rich

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From: Yisrael Medad <yisrae...@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Jun 14,2024 at 03:17 AM
Subject: Were tefillin boxes in antiquity painted black?

"Our suggestion that none of the tefillin cases or straps analyzed here had been
intentionally colored black in antiquity raises the question why the ancient
Jews who manufactured these artifacts and put them to ritual use would have
disregarded the regulation found in rabbinic literature which prescribes that
tefillin cases and straps must be colored black. Assuming that the corpus of
tefillin cases from the Judean Desert is generally representative of practices
which were widespread among Jews living in the first and early second centuries
CE, it seems reasonable to suggest that the Judean Desert tefillin represent
practices during a period of time *prior* to when the rabbinic prescription on
this matter was widely practiced or perhaps even conceived. Although the rule
that tefillin cases and straps must be black is said to be a law given to Moses
at Sinai, this assertion should hardly be taken as some sort of historical claim
of an extraordinarily ancient practice. Indeed, the Babylonian Talmud cites
alternative traditions which would allow leather straps colored green or
white (traditions which remain significant despite the fact that the later
editorial stratum of the Talmud harmonized these traditions with R. Isaac's dictum)

Instead, Christine Hayes has described the attribution of this rabbinic rule to
Moses from Sinai as an effort to legitimize rabbinic practices regarding
tefillin in the face of deviant and sectarian practices

Our present study suggests that the kind of non-blackened tefillin which the
Amoraic rabbis rejected as deviant in their own times may well have been quite
common in earlier times."

The full article is here:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0303635

--
Yisrael Medad
Shiloh
Israel

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