The Perfect Torah ISBN: 9789047402220 Platform/Publisher: BRILL / BRILL Digital rights:Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited Subjects: Myriapoda.;
The perfect Torah is the medium through which the one, unique God makes himself known. The Judaic statement of monotheism comes to expression in Scripture as perfected by the Oral Torah in its native category-formations, Halakhah, norms of behavior, and Aggadah norms of belief. The Halakhah of the oral Torah conveys monotheism in a philosophical mode, and the Aggadah, monotheism in a mythic mode. What is perfect about the dual Torah, written and oral, is the perfect match between the message and the medium, Halakhah for the philosophical monotheism, Aggadah for the mythic statement of the same monotheism. Chapters One and Two explain the former, Chapters Three and Four the latter.
The question answered here concerns how one canonical corpus perfects its companion and produces in consequence perfection: the realization of the initial intent and program of the Written by the Oral Torah. That is addressed by the construction of large exemplary structures of comparison and contrast in the shank of the book. Four principles are established: [1] the perfection through the systematization of the law of the Written Torah by the Oral Torah, in Chapter One; [2] the perfection of the medium of the Halakhah for the message of philosophical monotheism, in Chapter Two; [3] the perfection of Scripture's anomalous writings through the dismantling of one document and the systematic recasting of another, in Chapter Three; [4] the perfection of the medium of Aggadah in its form of narrative for the message of theology concerning God's personality and activity, in Chapter Four.
Jacob Neusner was born in Hartford, Connecticut on July 28, 1932. He received a bachelor's degree in history from Harvard University in 1953. He studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, where he was ordained a Conservative rabbi and received a master's degree in Hebrew letters in 1960. He also received a doctorate in religion from Columbia University. He taught at Dartmouth College, Brown University, and the University of South Florida before joining the religion department at Bard College in 1994. He retired from there in 2014.
He was a religious historian and one of the world's foremost scholars of Jewish rabbinical texts. He published more than 900 books during his lifetime including A Life of Yohanan ben Zakkai; The Way of Torah: An Introduction to Judaism; Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah; Strangers at Home: The 'Holocaust,' Zionism, and American Judaism; Translating the Classics of Judaism: In Theory and in Practice; Why There Never Was a 'Talmud of Caesarea': Saul Lieberman's Mistakes; and Judaism: An Introduction. He wrote The Bible and Us: A Priest and a Rabbi Read Scripture Together with Andrew M. Greeley and A Rabbi Talks with Jesus with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI. He also edited and translated, with others, nearly the entirety of the Jewish rabbinical texts. He died on October 8, 2016 at the age of 84.
