Full Description
Exodus in the Jewish Experience: Echoes and Reverberations investigates how the Exodus has been, and continues to be, a crucial source of identity for both Jews and Judaism. It explores how the Exodus has functioned as the primary model from which Jews have created theological meaning and historical self-understanding. It probes how and why the Exodus has continued to be vital to Jews throughout the unfolding of the Jewish experience. As an interdisciplinary work, it incorporates contributions from a range of Jewish Studies scholars in order to explore the Exodus from a variety of vantage points. It addresses such topics as: the Jewish reception of the biblical text of Exodus; the progressive unfolding of the Exodus in the Jewish interpretive tradition; the religious expression of the Exodus as ritual in Judaism; and the Exodus as an ongoing lens of self-understanding for both the State of Israel and contemporary Judaism. The essays are guided by a common goal: to render comprehensible how the re-envisioning of Exodus throughout the unfolding of the Jewish experience has enabled it to function for thousands of years as the central motif for the Jewish people.
Contents
Introduction: The Exodus: Central, Enduring, and Generative, Pamela Barmash
Chapter 1: Out of the Mists of History: The Exaltation of the Exodus in the Bible, Pamela Barmash
Chapter 2: Discontinuity and Dissonance: Torah, Textuality, and Early Rabbinic Hermeneutics of Exodus, W. David Nelson
Chapter 3: The Past as Paradigm: Enactments of the Exodus Motif in Jewish Liturgy, Richard S. Sarason
Chapter 4: The Impact of the Exodus on Halakhah (Jewish Law), Reuven Hammer
Chapter 5: Passover and Thanatos in Medieval Jewish Consciousness, Kalman P. Bland
Chapter 6: Observations on the Biblical Miniatures in Spanish Haggadot, Vivian B. Mann
Chapter 7: From Myth to Memory: German Jewish Translations of Exodus 12-13, Abigail E. Gillman
Chapter 8: The Desert Comes to Zion: A Narrative Ends its Wandering, Arieh Saposnik
