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November 3, 2024

All Israel Are Guarantors for One Another: The History of a Metaphor

Dr. Ayelet Hoffmann Libson

Dr. Ayelet Hoffmann Libson

Dr. Ayelet Hoffmann Libson is a scholar of Talmud and Jewish law, and serves as assistant professor of law at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya. She received a B.A. from the Hebrew University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from New York University. She is also a graduate of the MaTaN Advanced Talmud Institute and the Beit Morasha Program in Jewish Law. In 2017-2018 she was the Gruss Visiting Professor of Jewish Law at Harvard Law School, and she has also served as a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute. Her first book is entitled Law and Self-Knowledge in the Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

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This lecture uncovers the historical and theological context of the well-known “kol yisrael arevim ze ba-ze” statement. Rather than simply a pithy maxim on the importance of solidarity, we will show that this statement is part of a group of texts which employ financial metaphors to think about the repercussions of sin. Not only Jews but also Christians in late antiquity took very seriously the idea that each and every human action bears great weight and can tilt the heavenly scales toward redemption or oblivion. As a result, these texts demonstrate profound anxiety about the implications of every person’s sin, which is often described in financial terms. The solution to this problem is presented through the metaphor of guarantorship, by which one person’s merits, accumulated through good deeds, can balance the sins of another. The collective community, bound together through the performance of mitzvot, is thus a solution to the challenges of facing divine demands as an individual person.

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