Workshop on Talmud and Contemporary Thought – Communities of Disagreement

The Workshop on Talmud and Contemporary Thought is an annual intellectual encounter, which explores ways of how the Talmudic tradition of text may offer a medium for contemporary thought, in the sense of thought that engages on issues of contemporary social, political and cultural concern.

The workshop revolves around a Talmudic text, which serves as a medium and environment for thinking together politico-theoretical questions of contemporary concern. The program is based on readings of these texts in view of the guiding questions, which are presented by different participants as a basis for group discussions. A unique feature of the workshop is that it brings together intellectuals with various backgrounds, some more Talmudic, some from other disciplines, in an attempt to enrich conversations and broaden horizons.

The theme for the 2024 workshop is Communities of Disagreement. We would like to reflect on the political function and meaning of not agreeing, of disputation and polemics, of conflict and strife, of makhloykes.

Our conceptions and imaginations of politics, of the condition of co-existence, are basically marked by the notion of agreement. Co-existence requires harmony. Society is based on association, on coming together, in modern terms on a social contract. We imagine the absolute telos of politics, and the basic regulative idea of our political institutions, to be the achievement of peace, eternal peace. The prophets imagined peace as the end of all conflict, even those between wolves and lambs.

On the other hand, political life, the life of society, at least the premessianic one, is made of disagreement. Conflicts are not only everywhere, but the very raison d’être of political institutions is to manage conflicts, on different levels, in different forms. The existence and language of politics is articulated by difference of opinions, parties, factions, debates and polemics, struggles, battles, campaigns and also violence and war.

Accordingly, politics, and more generally collective humane existence, seems to consist in a fine and paradoxical art of accommodating the conflict, the architecture of instituting crisis. The life of the community consists in disagreement, which by its very nature always holds the telos and potential of destroying the community, of rupture and fragmentation.

There are moments in history when the balance is lost. The community or the political system, the society, loses its ability to contain its disagreements. The destructive power of the conflict, the image of war, emerges. In such moments conversation itself, the disagreement in words, in arguments, in debate, in disputation, may become or seem impossible. Violence threatens collective life on the level of the micro-society, by disabling the basic exchange face to face.

We are currently experiencing such a moment, a moment of crisis and loss of ability to contain disagreements. It seems that an entire system of common understandings, shared conceptions, agreements, conventions and institutions that have been established in the post-WWII era to prevent the general collapse of human society – are now collapsing, and have been for some time. As diplomacy transforms into war, arguments shift into fights and conversations fall into silence. Do we lose our ability to disagree? Is this a danger to the foundation of politics and society as we know it? Can we relearn the art of makhloykes?

The Talmud is founded on difference of opinions. Sergey Dolgopolski wrote about the talmudic discourse as “The Art of Disagreement”. The talmudic community, namely the political project that is imagined and enacted by the talmudic discourse, the society of rabbis, the collective of Israel – is constituted by the makhloket, the polemics, debate and refutation.

This year’s workshop will turn to the talmudic text in an attempt to contemplate through it the idea, the life and the limits of human co-existence as a community of disagreement.