Tikvah Scholar
Academic Year 2011-2012
Lynn Kaye
Lynn Kaye is completing her PhD in Rabbinic Literature at NYU as a recipient of the Dean's Dissertation Fellowship. She was also awarded a Doctoral Scholarship by the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.
She was a fellow at the Center for Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization at Cardozo School of Law, and at the Graduate Program in Advanced Talmudic Studies at Yeshiva University. She completed her master's degree in the Hebrew Bible at the University of Cambridge with a fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Board of Great Britain. Ms. Kaye graduated with the highest honors from the University of Cambridge with a BA in Hebrew and Aramaic Literature.
She served for four years as Assistant Congregational Leader at the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in Manhattan, the first Jewish Congregation in North America.
Research
Doing Time: Law and Temporality in the Babylonian Talmud
The Babylonian Talmud, composed in the Persian Jewish diaspora between the third and sixth centuries C.E., remains the foundational text for Jewish law today. This intriguing legal corpus displays a complex temporal system that has yet to be fully understood. “Doing Time” argues that the Babylonian Talmud produced diverse notions of temporality for distinct legal purposes. Much previous scholarship assumed time in the Talmud to be monolithic, that is, the same in all legal and narrative contexts. By contrast, this work highlights the varieties of time underlying rules and legal opinions through analyzing figurative language and the interrelation between laws and stories. Temporal variety does not preclude unifying factors, but it introduces a more textured view of unity. Investigating time in Talmudic law provokes questions about the role of time in other legal systems, including those of modern states. The elucidation of multiple forms of temporality in a legal corpus engages problems around time currently being explored in Anglo-American legal theory, such as the justification of the legal authority across time and the role of time in framing a legal narrative. As such, this project examines an enduring question of wider society, how time shapes our experience, through the particular contribution of Jewish law and literature.
