Reclaiming Halakhah: On the Recent Works of Aharon Shemesh

Abstract

Bialik may have protested in “halakhah and aggadah” that aggadah had become too dominant in his day, but for countless generations it was halakhah that possessed greater gravitas, thanks to the geonim and their successors. Bialik was onto something, however, since even he succumbed to the power of aggadah—his most popular work wasSefer Ha-Aggadah.In the contemporary academy, aggadah continues to flourish. The encounter between midrash and literary theory in the 1980s, and between talmudic aggadah andstam-oriented source criticism in the 1990s and today, have firmly secured aggadah's territory on the academic map. Some aggadot have been scrutinized by so many scholarly eyes—the oven of Akhnai, the heresy of Elisha ben Abuya, the partnership of Rabbi Yoḥanan and Resh Lakish—that they seem to constitute a new Jewish core curriculum.

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