HOME ( http://reddit.com/submit?url=http://readingreligion.org/books/time-babylonian-talmud& title=Time in the Babylonian Talmud ) ( http://twitter.com/share?url=http://readingreligion.org/books/time-babylonian-talmud& text=Time in the Babylonian Talmud http://readingreligion.org/books/time-babylonian-talmud via @[socialmedia:sm-twitter_username] ) ( http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://readingreligion.org/books/time-babylonian- talmud&t=Time in the Babylonian Talmud ) ( http://www.google.com/bookmarks/mark?op=add&bkmk=http://readingreligion.org/books /time-babylonian-talmud&title=Time in the Babylonian Talmud ) ( http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=http://readingreligion.org/books/time- babylonian-talmud&title=Time in the Babylonian Talmud ) Time in the Babylonian Talmud Natural and Imagined Times in Jewish Law and Narrative Lynne Kaye Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, February 2018. 192 pages. $99.00. Hardcover. ISBN 9781108423236. For other formats: . Review Everyone has a sense of time. Augustine told us that no one can define it. Now we understand his words even better, and Lynn Kaye’s book advances that new understanding further. Scholars in the 20th century rediscovered the complexity of time beyond the theretofore regnant notion of time as an abstract arrow, just as scholars in this century are rediscovering place beyond the heretofore dominant notion of place as a segment of abstract space. Kaye’s work threatens to complicate both discoveries by reclaiming the role of the Babylonian Talmud (Bavli) in these broader discussions in the humanities. In my shortest rendition, her argument is that for the characters in the Bavli an event taking place in the past is always taking time in the now, and the now, too, is always taking a certain place. To get there, Kaye stands on the shoulders of Sacha Stern in his pioneering work, Time and Process in Ancient Judaism (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2003, 2007) who—following the British philosophical tradition of empiricism—argued the rabbis had no concept of abstract time, but only of concrete processes; no abstract chronology, but only concrete genealogy; no abstract historical time, but only concrete, often competing, reconstructions of the events of the past. In contrast to Stern, Kaye turns to continental philosophy and literature and thereby reaches beyond the methodological premises of empiricism. She in effect argues that Stern is right only as long as his empiricist, abstract, schematically represented concept of time is assumed. By contrast, Kaye moves away from understanding time as a schematically represented concept (arrow, line, spiral, etc.). Rather, in keeping with the tradition extending from Plato to Kant and beyond, she reclaims time as an image, and therefore, as a sense (an inner sense, as well), which may or may not serve as a schematic representation of a concept, but strongly connects to the other sense, that of place. On these grounds, she asks and answers Stern’s question anew: is there time in the Talmud? Rabbis might not explicitly discuss or have any concept of time, but they operate with a specific sense or “image” of time. She is engaged in discerning and displaying that image. For Kaye, there is time in the Talmud, and more than one type of time. First, there is “natural time,” which rabbis think they cannot control and/or change: the succession of days, months, and years, birth and death, or in more traditional philosophical terms that she implies but does not use, the time of becoming. Second and most important for her, there is a legally, narratively, or homiletically “imagined” time, or to reformulate it again in the implied traditional philosophical notion, the time in which human thinking and action unfolds and makes sense. In their pursuit of justice, the rabbis constantly negotiate and renegotiate the latter sense of time. According to the book’s central thesis, resistant to relegating time to either a purely natural flow or to a purely Time in the Babylonian Talmud | Reading Religion http://readingreligion.org/books/time-babylonian-talmud 1 of 2 8/29/2018, 4:53 PM