Women’s Initiative for Jewish Studies (WIJS) at Young Israel of New Rochelle is proud to present Dr. Christine Hayes on Tuesday, April 1 at 8:15 p.m. (ET) on Zoom. Hayes will be the eighth speaker of the 2024-2025 season in the monthly scholarly programming offered by WIJS at YINR.

Dr. Hayes’s lecture is entitled, “Humor and Play in Rabbinic Literature: Can We Laugh at God?” In many legends and stories, the Talmudic rabbis depict God in shockingly human terms: the Divine being wears tefillin and prays, studies Torah, weeps, makes mistakes, and suffers correction by humans. Were the rabbis just having fun? Or were these anthropomorphic representations of God grounded in a subversive resistance to prevailing Greco-Roman ideas about the divine? This lecture considers the ancient rabbis’ use of humor and play to explore and express the “seriously” distinctive character of Israel’s God.

Christine Hayes, Sterling Professor Emerita of Religious Studies in Classical Judaica, Yale University, specializes in Talmudic-midrashic studies. She is a senior research fellow with the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and recently served as the president of the Association for Jewish Studies.

All WIJS programming is open to women and men. Please visit https://www.yinr.org/wijs.html to view the complete WIJS 2024-25 schedule. For more information, to be added to the WIJS email list, or for Zoom information, please call 914-636-2215 or email: [email protected]. Individuals on the WIJS mailing list will automatically receive the Zoom information.