MakomDC October Scholar: Dr. Barry Wimpfheimer
Charity Begins at Home: A Talmudic Rejoinder?

The second Tuesday of the month at MakomDC will offer a keynote experience, featuring a dynamic scholar and master-teacher to explore the month’s topic, expanding and deepening the texts covered in the first week.

A set of rabbinic texts describes how individuals and communities are obligated to support the once wealthy indigent by providing them with resources that match the ones to which they are accustomed. Our session will reflect on the tensions that emerge within the talmudic discussion of this case between ethical care and economic responsibility while noting the literary relationship within the text between legal statutes and stories about the rabbis.

Dr. Barry Wimpfheimer is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Law at Northwestern University and the author of The Talmud: A Biography and Narrating the Law: A Poetics of Talmudic Legal Stories.