Women’s Initiative for Jewish Studies (WIJS) at Young Israel of New Rochelle is proud to present Dr. Christine Hayes on Tuesday, April 1, 2025 @ 8:15 pm (ET) on Zoom. Hayes will be the eighth speaker of the 2024-2025 season in the monthly scholarly programming offered by WIJS at YINR.
Dr. Hayes’s lecture is entitled, “Humor and Play in Rabbinic Literature: Can We Laugh at God?” In many legends and stories, the Talmudic rabbis depict God in shockingly human terms: the divine being wears tefillin and prays, studies Torah, weeps, makes mistakes, and suffers correction by humans. Were the rabbis just having fun? Or were these anthropomorphic representations of God grounded in a subversive resistance to prevailing Greco-Roman ideas about the divine? This lecture considers the ancient rabbis’ use of humor and play to explore and express the “seriously” distinctive character of Israel’s God.
Christine Hayes, Sterling Professor Emerita of Religious Studies in Classical Judaica, Yale University, specializes in Talmudic-midrashic studies. Her books include: Between the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds (1997 Salo Baron prize); Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities (a 2003 National Jewish Book Award finalist); and What’s Divine about Divine Law? Early Perspectives (2015 National Jewish Book Award in Scholarship; 2016 award from the American Publishers Association; 2016 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award), and most recently Literature of the Sages: A Revisioning (2023). Edited volumes include: The Cambridge Companion to Judaism and Law (2017) and Classic Essays in Rabbinic Culture and History (2018). She has authored two introductory volumes (The Emergence of Judaism and Introduction to the Bible) as well as numerous journal articles. Hayes is a Senior Research Fellow with the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, and recently served as the President of the Association for Jewish Studies.
All WIJS programming is open to women and men. Please visit https://www.yinr.org/wijs.html to view the complete WIJS 2024-25 schedule. For more information, to be added to the WIJS email list, or for Zoom information, please call 914-636-2215 or email: wijs@yinr.org. Individuals on the WIJS mailing list will automatically receive the Zoom information.
