Meet the Author: Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg, “The Closed Book: How the Rabbis Taught the Jews (Not) to Read the Bible” (10:30am-12:30 pm ET, Oct 28)

Early Judaism is often described as the religion of the book par excellence—a movement built around the study of the Bible and steeped in a culture of sacred bookishness that evolved from an unrelenting focus on a canonical text. But in The Closed Book, Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg argues that Jews didn’t truly embrace the biblical text until nearly a thousand years after the Bible was first canonized. She tells the story of the intervening centuries during which even rabbis seldom opened a Bible and many rabbinic authorities remained deeply ambivalent about the biblical text as a source of sacred knowledge.

Join the Enoch Seminar virtually from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. ET on Monday, October 28, for a dialogue about rabbinic authority over scripture. Rebecca Wollenberg will be interviewed by Isaac Oliver, Director of ‘Talmud for Everyone,’ and joined by Marjorie Lehman, Laura S. Lieber, Michal Bar-Asher Siegal
and Daniel H. Weiss. 

The book is available for purchase here: https://a.co/d/dWPvK9u

Register for the event here: https://tinyurl.com/hepby8ha