Mira Balberg, Fractured Tablets: Forgetfulness and Fallibility in Late Ancient Rabbinic Culture, Oakland: University of California Press, 2023, viii+278 pages, open accessIt would be interesting to bring the Sar Torah traditions in the Hekhalot literature into conversation with these ideas. These text give instructions for invoking the angelic "Prince of Torah" (Sar Torah) to give the practitioner supernatural knowledge and retention of Torah.... Mira Balberg, however, points to the shifting attitudes towards forgetfulness and forgetting as a pivotal moment in the history of the rabbinic movement, and in Fractured Tablets she offers a fresh new reading of the rabbinic construction of forgetting. The rabbis shaped their subject as a fallible and often confused human being, bumbling around the world, trying to observe God’s commandments. Sadly, they are foiled by the intellectual limitations of their humanity—wich means the rabbis can offer him salvation in the image of the rabbinic movement itself. Balberg explains that at the same time that the rabbis made the cognitive demands of the Torah ever more complicated, they made confusion and forgetfulness an inseparable and totally understandable part of that same Torah itself. This is true, Balberg shows, both for observing the commandments of the complex and all-encompassing rabbinic Torah, and for retaining them in memory. ...
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