Current Issue: Volume 15, Number 1 (2024) The Talmud as an Ethical Prompt
Introduction
This essays in this special issue of the Journal of Textual Reasoning propose an approach to moral reasoning that models it as a conversation between an individual or community and a specific ethical prompt. An ethical prompt is not simply a nudge or push to do the right thing, but a source or text—though it could be a work of art, a concrete experience—that sparks a process of thinking, reflection, and discernment. This encounter expands our mental toolbox by providing new data and methods of reasoning, thereby deepening our capacity for ethical decision-making. In some cases, these texts may offer us values or models that can be imported into our daily lives. The primary aim of this type of reasoning, borne out in the present collection of studies, is to enter into a conversation that stretches and transforms our moral frameworks rather than to identify or adopt wholesale responses from ancient sources.
Introduction
Deborah Barer and Ariel Evan Mayse
I. Text as Ethical Prompt
Ethics and the Public Reading of Scripture: b. Megillah 30b–31a on the Haftarot for Annual Holidays
Jonathan Wyn Schofer
Murder by Shunning
Sarra Lev
Talmud Lomar the Ethical: A Return to the Original Stamma
Elisha Anscelovits
II. Idea as Ethical Prompt
III. World as Ethical Prompt
The Student as “Ethical Prompt”
Marjorie Lehman
Moving Torah into the Street
Aryeh Cohen
Turn It and Turn It Again: The Talmud, Ethics, and #MeToo
Mira Beth Wasserman