In celebration of 16 years of fruitful collaboration between the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies and the Robbins Collection and Research Center, the 2025 Robbins Collection Lecture in Jewish Law, Thought, and Identity brought together an enthusiastic gathering of law students and community members. Held on February 25, 2025, this event was co-sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies, the Center for the Study of Religion, and the Department of Languages and Cultures. This year’s lecture, intriguingly titled “What’s God Playing at? Law as Performance,” was delivered by Christine Hayes, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at Yale University. Hayes employed performance studies, humor, and play to delve into Talmudic views of divine law, presenting it as a dynamic and contingent phenomenon.
Christine Hayes began her lecture by discussing the Stoic view of divine law, describing it as a universal, unwritten principle—an “absolute and immutable law that transcends history.” She asserted that Greek philosophers saw divine law and human law as separate. Human law was a second-best accommodation of divine law backed by the will of a sovereign authority and based in historical contexts, rather than universal reason. In contrast, biblical law was given to a people to establish a community. Authored by God, it is divine in its source rather than its character; it is not rational, not universal, not transcendent but mutable, written and embedded in history. Reading these different definitions of divine law through the lens of incongruity theory, Hayes outlined the ways in which Jews living in the Hellenic empire responded to the dissonance with puzzlement and distress or amusement and enjoyment.
Ancient Jews, she maintained, were aware of this incongruity. Those who admired Hellenic culture found it distressing and worked to align biblical law with the Hellenic definitions of divine law. Some, like Philo, argued that biblical law was in agreement with natural law, and thus universal and rational. Talmudic rabbis, on the other hand, were aware of the incongruity but unapologetic: embracing and doubling-down on it in asserting the biblical conception of divine law. Hayes argued that the rabbis pointed to the law’s irrationality, such as the law of the red heifer, and celebrated it, as only a divine being can transcend reason. They emphasized that Mosaic law was not universal or rational, but a divine decree that might deviate from truth and rationality. Balancing justice with other virtues, judges could adjust divine law for social welfare, by deciding (for example) that a man could not annul a marriage without his wife’s knowledge. This responsive flexibility was a sign of the law’s divinity.
In their opposition to Hellenic conceptions of divine law, the rabbis resisted and dismantled prevailing definitions with humor. Performance studies and play are, Hayes asserted, useful theoretical frameworks for understanding the rabbinic approaches to divine law. She cited several examples, including R. Akiva’s interpretation of a bloodstain, in which Akiva “stepped outside of the law and pulled the law to him to create something new,” and R. Ishmael’s story of two rabbis praying in different postures.
These examples illustrate how performance studies are uniquely equipped to illuminate conceptions of divine law, as it allows for playfully exploring the law’s boundaries. She also rallies against the understood dichotomy between the serious and the comedic, as she argues that serious topics of the Torah can be expertly explored in the spirit of play.
Finally, reading the Talmud in terms of performance and play, Hayes suggests that arguments are staged like performances in which increasing levels of detail are used to keep the game going, creating a dialectical performance with no genuine sense of closure and infinite possibilities. The Talmud can thus be understood as an infinite game, where the purpose is to continue play, rather than win. The rabbis performed divine law with play and with humor, she concluded, and so resisted the transhistorical divine law with historical, contingent law.
Participants asked questions regarding the evolution of views of Jewish thinkers from the Talmudic to the Medieval period, the gendered nature of religious texts, the blend between serious and comedic tones used by rabbis, infinite dialogues of play constituting speech acts, and the strategies rabbis used to adjust or correct the law of the Torah to meet the needs of a changing world.
The Helen Diller Institute’s Director, Professor Kenneth Bamberger, expressed his appreciation for the Institute’s ongoing partnership with the Robbins Collection Research Center. Calling the Center “a vibrant center for research right here at Berkeley Law, holding one of the nation’s largest collections of religious and Jewish law texts,” Bamberger thanked the Robbins Collection Research Center for their continued support of the Diller Center through this annual lecture. She also presented a workshop while visiting Berkeley Law.