In this article, we consider the presence of what appear to be true contradictions in the Talmud. We consider and reject a glut-theoretic response. We argue these apparently contradictory Talmudic passages should be understood not as ordinary propositions, but as being given under an operator. This allows us to understand these rulings as genuinely conflicting, but not genuinely contradictory. We illustrate the broad shape of such a view through consideration of Hans Kelsen's late-period philosophy of law. We also consider and reject responses to this issue given by Rashi, R. Kook, and R. Feinstein. We close by considering why a system of Jewish law which allows for jointly affirmed conflicting propositions is desirable. We claim that if, as Maimonides suggests, the fundamental project of Jewish law is the eradication of idolatry, then the law itself should remind us that God's ways are higher than our ways. One way of doing so is to resist capture by a transparent set of principles, by allowing for conflicting rulings to be affirmed. This article does not presuppose familiarity with the Talmudic corpus or Jewish tradition.

Moses Mendelssohn, arguably the founding figure of modern Jewish philosophy, famously quipped that it was the hours of his youth spent studying the philosophical work of another Moses—Moses Maimonides—that left him with his famously crooked posture. This study investigates one important aspect of the relationship between Mendelssohn and Maimonides: their respective attitudes toward anthropomorphic language in the Bible. Much of the first part of Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed is devoted to reinterpretation of scriptural language in light of Maimonides’s non-anthropomorphic, incorporeal conception of God. These chapters constitute a central plank of Maimonides’s religious agenda. Like Maimonides, Mendelssohn was both a philosopher and a religious Jew. His most extensive project intended for a Jewish audience was his German translation of the Pentateuch, accompanied by a Hebrew commentary, known as the Bi’ur. This study examines the manner in which Mendelssohn saw fit to interpret precisely the same set of biblical terms selected by Maimonides for philosophical reinterpretation. Through an investigation of Mendelssohn’s approach to anthropomorphism, divine incorporeality, and philosophical reinterpretation in the biblical commentary, I hope to shed light on an important dimension of the nature of his engagement with Maimonides.

The emergence of Scriptural Reasoning (SR) as a movement and a society of scholars was made possible by the hospitality, influence and cohort of two Anglican theologians, the late Revd Daniel Hardy and Professor David Ford. In this essay, I offer a Jewish commentary on several Anglican theological dispositions that might contribute to this hospitality: among them are ‘found theology’ (as I label it), responsiveness to the powers of divine attraction, concern to repair obstructions to the healing work of the Spirit, and attentiveness to Scripture as host and source of reparative reasoning. While the primary subject of the essay is a species of Christian theology, the method of the essay emerges from a recent approach to Jewish philosophy we call ‘textual reasoning’ (TR), one of the antecedents of SR. In the style of TR, I encounter theology as a ‘disposition’, or mode of practice, displayed in particular in practices of reading and interpreting Scripture and of responding to the call of Scripture in societal action. The essay is structured as a series of brief accounts of Anglican theological dispositions, each one followed by a Jewish ‘commentary’, culminating in a sample of Anglican-Jewish dialogue as it might be overheard within a session of scriptural reasoning.