(heads framed in geometric ornament, Khirbat al-Mafjar, Palestine) This semester by a fluke I’m teaching three classes: a lower level survey on Religion and Art, and two advanced classes, a modern Jewish philosophy and thought class entitled Religion & Politics in Modern Judaism, and the Jewish Studies Seminar, this time on Israel and Zionism with a focus on “religion.” Today I went from Islamic ornament, to a basic introduction to Spinoza on imagination and reason in religion and metaphysics, to tractate Ketubot in the Babylonian Talmud expositing on the Land of Israel,the virtue of Babylonian talmud Torah, and the resurrection of the dead.
