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This chapter considers grounds for hearing listening in The Tempest as a Jewish, and specifically Rabbinic, virtue, namely, the virtue of a “listening ear” (middat shmiat ha’ozen) described in Pirke Avot, a core text of Jewish ethical literature, published in Latin in 1541. I suggest that this publication witnesses a tension in the Reformation’s re-inscription of supersessionary tropes of Jewish otherness as spiritual deafness. I theorize this tension as sublimation of the memory of Jewish virtue ethics and ethical listening. I trace the oneiric distribution of signifiers of Jewish alterity in the figures of the vengeful, bookish, exiled Prospero and the dispossessed indigene alike, considering the implications of this reading of the spiritual subaltern as one who can hear but not access the spiritual bounty of their birthright. I suggest that the suppressed memory of Jewish virtue ethics in the Tempest surfaces in the memory of drowned books and fathers and in the play’s echoes of the Book of Jonah, particularly its auditory compulsion to mercy and its song of the deep. I demonstrate how the play bears witness to this sublimation in its “sounding” (plumbing and amplifying) of submerged memory and in the auditory virtue demonstrated by its percipients.
"Eight Chapters" is an introduction to Maimonides' commentary on the Mishnaic treatise Pirke Avot. His response is to begin "Eight Chapters" by citing a rabbinic dictum according to which a person who wants to become pious should follow the advice set forth in Pirke Avot. Maimonides introduces the concept of the pious person (Hasid), saying that this person deviates from the mean. One of the distinguishing features of generally recognized opinions is that a couple of exceptions still leave a rule intact. Maimonides did not consider practical wisdom to be worthy of the name wisdom. As far as Maimonides is concerned, only truth fulfills the soul's quest for perfection. For Maimonides intellectualism and asceticism go hand in hand. Though Maimonides enlists Aristotle's support in denigrating the sense of touch, one would be hard pressed to find asceticism in Aristotle's writings.
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