Fractured tablets : forgetfulness and fallibility in late ancient rabbinic culture / Mira Balberg.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction -- Memory and doubt -- Remembering forgetfulness -- Partial eclipse of the mind -- Rituals of recollection -- When teachings fly away -- Bad tidings, good tidings -- Conclusion : what Moses forgot.

"This book examines the significant role that memory failures play in early rabbinic literature. The rabbis who shaped Judaism in late antiquity envisioned the commitment to the Torah and to its commandments as governing every single aspect of a person's life. Their vision of a Jewish subject who must keep constant mental track of multiple obligations and teachings led them to be very preoccupied with forgetting: forgetting of tasks, forgetting of facts, forgetting of texts, and--most broadly--forgetting the Torah altogether. In Fractured Tablets, Mira Balberg studies the ways in which the early rabbis approached and delineated the possibility of forgetfulness in practice and study and the solutions and responses they conjured for forgetfulness, along with the manners in which they used human fallibility to bolster their vision of Jewish observance and their own role as religious experts. In the process, Balberg shows that the rabbis' intense preoccupation with the prospect of forgetfulness was a meaningful ideological choice with profound implications for our understanding of Judaism in late antiquity"--