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"Pious Irreverence" Book Launch with Dov Weiss

Wednesday, September 21, 2016 18 Elul 5776

8:00 PM - 9:00 PMASBI

Join community member Dov Weiss at ASBI to celebrate and learn about his recently-published book, Pious Irreverence: Confronting God in Rabbinic Judaism. Copies of the book will be for sale at a special discount. Snacks will be provided.

About Pious Irreverence:

Judaism is often described as a religion that tolerates, even celebrates arguments with God. Unlike Christianity and Islam, it is said, Judaism endorses a tradition of protest as first expressed in the biblical stories of Abraham, Job, and Jeremiah. In Pious Irreverence, Dov Weiss has written the first scholarly study of the premodern roots of this distinctively Jewish theology of protest, examining its origins and development in the rabbinic age.

Weiss argues that this particular Jewish relationship to the divine is rooted in the most canonical of rabbinic texts even as he demonstrates that in ancient Judaism the idea of debating God was itself a matter of debate. By elucidating competing views and exploring their theological assumptions, the book challenges the scholarly claim that the early rabbis conceived of God as a morally perfect being whose goodness had to be defended in the face of biblical accounts of unethical divine action. Pious Irreverence examines the ways in which the rabbis searched the words of the Torah for hidden meanings that could grant them the moral authority to express doubt about, and frustration with, the biblical God. Using characters from the Bible as their mouthpieces, they often challenged God's behavior, even in a few remarkable instances, envisioning God conceding error, declaring to the protestor, "You have taught Me something; I will nullify My decree and accept your word."

 

Dov Weiss is an Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of Religion at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He completed his PhD at the University of Chicago Divinity School as a Martin Meyer Fellow in 2011 and was the Alan M. Stock Fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Jewish Studies in 2012. After receiving rabbinic ordination from RIETS (Yeshiva University) in 1999 as a Wexner Graduate Fellow, Dov helped found Yeshivat Chovevei Torah (YCT) Rabbinic School where he served as Director of Operations and instructor of Talmud and Jewish Law. Specializing in the history of Jewish biblical interpretation and rabbinic theology, Dov’s most recent articles include “Divine Concessions in the Tanhuma Midrashim” [Harvard Theological Review (108:1)] and “The Sin of Protesting God in Rabbinic and Patristic Literature” [AJS Review39:2].

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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