“Disagreement is destructive when a community of readers believes that if their reading of text A is true, then any other reading is necessarily false…” writes Professor Peter Ochs from University of Virginia. “If readers share the plain sense of the text but disagree about how its lived meaning will be clarified and defined in a given time and place, then this is a machloket l’shem shamayim, since either reading could logically and possibly be valid, even though only one may be chosen to guide a community’s life at a particular moment. ” Read more in Peter Ochs’ article on Machloket l’shem Shamayim in the Societies for Scriptural and Textual Reasoning.
In honor of 9 Adar, the 10 best essay submissions will be published as a spring/summer 2014 issue of The Journal of Textual Reasoning. Entries welcome from scholars, students (grad, undergrad, high school, yeshiva), and community members. Read more…
