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This thesis explores the role and status of the biblical matriarchs in Genesis Rabbah, the fifth century CE rabbinic commentary on Genesis. Whilst scholarship on the role of women in the Bible and rabbinic Judaism has greatly increased, the authoritative group of women known as "the matriarchs" (האימהות) have been neglected. The Introduction outlines the research context of this work; the thesis then proceeds in three parts. Part One explores definitions. The first chapter considers the nature of midrash; the rabbinic worldview; and rabbinic exegetical techniques. Genesis Rabbah is then introduced. The second chapter explores the title "the matriarchs." Modern scholars use, but often fail to define, the term, so I turn to ancient texts from Bible to midrash to explore the category's origins. The use of the title "the matriarchs" in Genesis Rabbah is then considered. Two main definitions emerge: first, the matriarchs are the legitimate wives of the patriarchs; secondly, the title sometimes refers to Jacob's four wives, who bore Israel's tribal ancestors. Part Two explores the "matriarchal cycle" in Genesis Rabbah. This cycle has three stages: barrenness, motherhood, and succession. Each matriarch undergoes a transformation from barren woman to the mother of covenant sons. After a brief Preface, each stage is explored. The "matriarchal cycle" is central to rabbinic characterisation of these women. Finally, Part Three considers Genesis Rabbah's portrayal of the matriarchs as representatives of the female sex. This chapter explores positive and negative rabbinic attitudes towards women, focusing on piety, prayer, praise, beauty and sexuality, and the matriarchs exemplifying stereotypical, negative female traits. When portrayed as women, the matriarchs are sometimes portrayed negatively; yet positive traditions dominate. This thesis concludes that for the ancient rabbis, the matriarchs were the historical mothers of Israel, bearing covenant sons, but also the present mothers of Israel, continuing to influence Jewish identity.

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Ample evidence exists for American Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard's life-long interest in Jewish mysticism. However, to date, its shaping influence on her work has remained unexamined. This thesis seeks to explore the role of Jewish mystical theology, particularly Lurianic Kabbalism and Martin Buber's Hasidism, in three seminal theological movements found within Dillard's canon: creation, evil, and redemption. Chapter 1 demonstrates that although there exist connections between Jewish mysticism and the Neoplatonic traditions with which Dillard is frequently linked, her pansacramental vision of God's presence in creation seems far more closely allied with Hasidism than Neoplatonism, particularly in her depictions of mystical descents. Chapter 2 explores Dillard's challenges to Western Christianity's notions of an omnipotent God as she wrestles with questions about evil and suffering. Her synthesis of the Kabbalistic concepts of tsimtsum and shevirat ha-kelim with Christian kenotic theology allows her to create within her literary cosmos a God who elects to be self-limiting. Chapter 3 suggests that the inherent kenoticism of tsimtsum and shevirat ha-kelim enables Dillard to explore questions about evil and suffering within the tension of theodicean spaces created by gaps between apparently contradictory existential and spiritual truths. The chapter also proposes that Dillard's asyndetic style both reflects and creates deliberately unsettling textual ellipses that locate readers within the silence of theodicean spaces. Chapter 4 begins the arc of the thesis' movement toward redemption by demonstrating how gaps and absences within Dillard's work function not merely as theodicean spaces but also as affective absences that, like the mystical white spaces between the Torah's black letters, can become fecund, plurivocal gaps that engender mystery and meaning.

Emmanuel Levinas' s reorientation of ethics as preceding ontology and his radical presentation of responsibility, justice, consciousness and knowledge are of clear relevance for education. It is therefore not surprising that in the last decade we have seen a number of studies ofLevinas by educational theorists. Much of this work has focused on Levinas's relevance for issues of ethics, social justice, multiculturalism and moral education. This thesis draws on this previous research, but aims to take educational readings of Levinas in another direction through considering how his presentation of discourse, language and subjectivity, as dependent on an infinite ethical demand, troubles several dominant orientations within educational discourse that treat education in ways that can become totalising and instrumentalist. I begin by offering a philosophical analysis of how Levinas describes the scene of teaching and the nature of subjectivity. I then interrogate how this reading of Levinas disturbs some current understandings of education: first, the way that, within liberalism, education can be conceived instrumentally as the site for the development of a certain kind of individual (a rationally autonomous chooser, etc.), and second, the way that neoliberal educational ideologies have privileged managerialism, performance and the market, with Religious Education providing a case study of the implications of Levinas's interruption. I then consider how this leads to new understandings of community and political subjectivity within education. In this way, I explore how responding to Levinas, and reading his work together with criticisms addressed by Badiou and others, leads us not just to a richer vision of the meaning of education, but also to a more motivating understanding of the ethical subjectivity of both students and teachers, which is dependent on a deepening and anarchic responsibility, and which invites us to work for a better education extending beyond the straight line ofthe law.

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The Name of God has formed a crucial element of Jewish thought throughout its history, from the Biblical text, through the rabbinic and kabbalistic writings and into the modern age when the topic has still been a focal point for Jewish philosophers. The purpose of this study is to examine the texts of Judaism, especially those within the mystical tradition, pertaining to the Name of God, and to offer a philosophical analysis of these as a means of understanding the metaphysical role of the name generally, in terms of its relationship with identity. While the materials are historical, the aim is a speculative re/construction of a systematic philosophical approach to naming from these materials. Beginning with the formation of rabbinic Judaism in Late Antiquity, I will progress through the development of the motif into the Medieval Kabbalah, where the Name reaches its grandest and most systematic statement – and the one which has most helped to form the ideas of Jewish philosophers in the 20th Century. This will highlight certain metaphysical ideas which have developed within Judaism from the Biblical sources, and which present a direct challenge to the paradigms of western philosophy. Thus a grander subtext is a criticism of the Greek metaphysics of being which the west has inherited, and which Jewish philosophers often subject to challenges of varying subtlety; it is these philosophers who often place a peculiar emphasis on the personal name, and this emphasis seems to depend on the historical influence of the Jewish metaphysical tradition of the Name of God.

This thesis is an exploration of the relationship between the understanding of the past and the practice of theology. It is built around three major case studies: the history of interpretation of the commandment to blot out the memory of Amalek (Deuteronomy 25:17-19), the commemoration of the First World War in Canada, and the development of post-Holocaust theology. Linking these cases are issues of theological response to (or justification for) violence, and tensions between individual and collective identity. Part I focuses on Deuteronomy 25:17-19, and the internal contradiction between the commandments to remember and blot out the memory of Amalek. The passage is analysed both in terms of language and reception history, with special attention paid to Rabbinic interpretations from the 19th and 20th centuries (sermons and commentaries generated during or immediately after the German Reform movement, the American Civil War, and the Nazi occupation of Poland). This reading prompts two further strands of analysis, which are pursued separately: the distinction between the remembering commanded in the passage and concepts of memory active in the Western philosophical tradition prior to the 20th century, and the place this passage has in a larger tradition of religious and secular discourse on acceptable justifications for violence, again in both Jewish and more broadly Western thought. Part II takes up these themes, beginning with an historically contextualised reading of two versions of Antigone—one written by Sophocles in the early days of the Athenian Empire, and the other by Jean Anouilh during the Second World War. Both of these focus on a dead body as the site of ideological contestation between divergent identity narratives—a conflict that is also apparent in negotiations over the memorialisation of the First World War, which is the main focus of this part. A close reading of novels from L. M. Montgomery‘s Anne of Green Gables series, published before, during, and just after the war reveals that the First World War partly destabilised the individual-focused structures of memorialisation that were in place prior to its beginning, in favour of structures which enforced the collective identity of the soldiers who died in the war; while much of this instability could be (and was) addressed in existing theological language, the war nevertheless left a mark on Canadian society and religious practice. This part concludes with an examination of the Canadian National Monument at Vimy, conducted via archival documentation of the monument‘s design and construction and then through a reading of The Stone Carvers, a recent novel which re-imagines the circumstances documented in the archives through the eyes of one war veteran and his family. This dual reading also demonstrates the instability of memorials, the tendency of their meaning to shift over time. Part III commences with a discussion of the shift in memorial forms precipitated by the Holocaust. I contend that the tendency to memorialise the Holocaust with complex museum narratives betrays an anxiety about the intended audience of these memorials, which points in turn to the degree to which the Holocaust upset previous cultural and religious worldviews. This section focuses on theological and literary attempts to record and respond to the ruptures caused by the Holocaust, with specific reference to two recent novels by Jewish Candian women which, taken together, provide a constructive interruption to overly tidy narratives of national and religious identity.

This dissertation combines a sustained reflection on the European and North American Post-Holocaust theological landscape with the themes of otherness, exclusion, and identity. The study aims to offer a constructive contribution toward ecclesiology in a post-Holocaust world riven with a rejection of otherness. The consensus among Holocaust scholars is that the moral failure of the churches to engage on behalf of the vast majority of victims of the Third Reich evinces a profound sickness at the heart of the Christian faith. Both Holocaust theologians and ecclesial statements have made notable strides towards diagnosing and curing this illness through proposals to radically reshape Christian theology in the shadow of Holocaust atrocities. However, rarely have these proposals outlined revisions in the realm of practical theology, specifically relating to ecclesiology and how the Christian community might live as church in the post-Holocaust era. This study conducts an interdisciplinary analysis of dominant trends within post-Holocaust theology through the hermeneutical lens of the propensity to abandon, dominate, or eliminate the Other. It argues that the leitmotif of post-Holocaust proposals for revision, i.e. the refutation of antisemitism and a renewed emphasis on Christian/Jewish solidarity, is potentially an exacerbation of the problem of otherness rather than a corrective. Chapter one cultivates a conceptual lens of a rejection of otherness, highlighting its pervasiveness and its deleterious implications for Christian churches. Chapter two surveys a wide range of post-Holocaust ecclesial statements as well as reflections by Holocaust theologians in order to portray the churches’ own perception of their role during the Holocaust and how they have begun to reformulate Christian theology and practice in this light. Chapter three analyzes three dominant trends that come to light when the post-Holocaust landscape is assessed through the lens of otherness. Chapter four explores dynamics of Christian and ecclesial identity as a framework for the cultivation of multi-dimensional identities which make space for the Other. Finally, chapter five will briefly envision some ecclesial characteristics and practices that might better equip churches with the moral resources to resist a rejection of otherness and build an ethical responsibility for the Other into the core of ecclesial identity.

The present study argues that a series of programmatic additions were made to the oracles concerning the nations in Isa 13-23 during the late-exilic period by the same circle of writers who were responsible for Isa 40-55. These additions were made to create continuity between the ancient oracles against the nations from the Isaiah tradition and the future fate of the same nations as the late-exilic redactor(s) foresaw. The additions portray a two-sided vision concerning the nations. One group of passages (14:1-2; 14:32b; 16:1-4a; 18:7) depicts a positive turn for certain nations while the other group of passages (14:26-27; 19:16-17; 23:8-9, 11) continues to pronounce doom against the remaining nations. This double-sided vision is set out first in Isa 14 surrounding the famous taunt against the fallen tyrant. 14:1-2, before the taunt, paints the broad picture of the future return of the exiles and the attachment of the gentiles to the people of Israel. After the taunt and other sayings of YHWH against his enemies, 14:26-27 extends the sphere of the underlying theme of 14:4b-25a, namely YHWH's judgement against boastful and tyrannical power(s), to all nations and the whole earth. The two sides of this vision are then applied accordingly to the rest of the oracles concerning nations in chs 13-23. To the nations that have experienced similar disasters as the people of Israel, words of hope in line with 14:1-2 were given. To the nations that still possessed some prominence and reasons to be proud, words of doom in line with 14:26-27 were decreed. Only later in the post-exilic period, for whatever reason, be it changed international political climate or further spread of the Jewish diaspora, was the inclusive vision of 14:1-2 extended even to the nations that were not so favourably viewed by our late-exilic redactor (19:18-25; 23:15-18).