Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism by Sarit Kattan-Gribetz (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism by Sarit Kattan-Gribetz
• Marie-Ange Rakotoniaina

Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism Sarit Kattan-Gribetz Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022. Pp. 408. ISBN: 9780691242095.

Upon sitting with Sarit Kattan Gribetz's Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism, the reader journeys through the multifaceted temporal worlds that the rabbis' imagination fashioned in Late Antiquity, from Roman Palestine to the Sasanian Empire, from Second Temple times to the Talmud. To reveal how these universes of time in turn intersect with the creation of forms of difference within and beyond the rabbinic community—such is the promise of the book. It does so with exquisite erudition and delightful readability, while distilling the conceptualization of "rabbinic timescapes" (1, 5, and 22)—as the author put it, "the many dimensions of time that operate within any given society—similar to the use of 'landscape' to describe the variety of natural and human dimensions of space in any given location" (258 n. 16). The approach taken does not merely spatialize time. It actualizes and classifies its multiplicity as contained in rabbinic texts: time reveals itself as at once mythic and quotidian, historical and lived, ritual and biological. The book aims at demonstrating how these dimensions of time function as vectors of cohesion and separation.

The Introduction sets the scene upon the remains of a lost epoch: the disappearance of the temple leaving behind it a "temporal trauma" (9). Henceforth a "conceptual temple" commands the rabbinic effort to re-imagine and negotiate the shifting boundaries of timekeeping and community. The following chapters associate a particular configuration of time—from the units of the year and the week to that of the day and the hour—to the formation of a series of respective dualities: between rabbis and Romans, Jews and Christians, men and women, human and divine. Each chapter's textual analyses embody the playfulness of rabbinic engagement with time, their refusal to dwell in the past or linger in an uncatchable future. They would rather drink the promise of the present. Emulating this promise, the book offers itself as much as the linear unfolding of temporal scales as the sketching of a mosaic of identities generated by quotidian rhythms. In other words, imagine a rabbinic replay of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day or Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.

Time has captivated countless studies. In the context of the most recent [End Page 276] tide of this fascination (which Gribetz has elsewhere labelled as "the temporal turn"), the book bears affinities with investigations in ancient Judaism and beyond uncovering rabbinic calendars, time-markers, chronologies, ideas of history and memory—from Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's Zakhor to Eve-Marie Becker's The Birth of Christian History and Lynn Kaye's Negating Time. The book favors a sociological approach (in the footsteps of Eviatar Zerubavel) focusing on discourses and practices. Yet its intellectual lineage reaches wider and deeper. Drawing from anthropology and phenomenology to neuroscience, from historical studies to the technicities of timekeeping in the ancient world, the investigation invokes as its theoretical foundation a mesmerizing array of interdisciplinary analyses of time. It stands out by the conviction and exactitude with which it navigates between "the conceptual and the practical, the symbolic and the quotidian, weaving together the history of daily life, social history, cultural studies, religious studies, and rabbinics" (4). As a result, a series of close readings unfold the "constellation of times and differences" (230) that the rabbis' literary mastery, legal virtuosities, and ritual innovations designed.

Chapter 1 gives a captivating glimpse into the cultivation of a Roman-rabbinic identity through the differentiation and synchronization of Roman and Jewish annual rhythms. The reader may delight in the minute weaving of material and textual sources. Numismatic depictions, frescoes, and floor mosaics give sharper relief to the "temporal modes of imperial resistance" (39) of the Midrashic project. Yet these "hidden transcripts" (57) are not without similarities to Livy or Ovid. The rabbis' practices of storytelling emulate Roman etiologies. The Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds project a "hybrid historical time onto the Roman calendar" (38), which points to the (paradoxical) Romanness both...