In celebration of sixteen years of fruitful collaboration between the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies and the Robbins Collection 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 cosponsored 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 drew on performance studies, humor, and play to explore Talmudic views of divine law, presenting it as a dynamic and contingent phenomenon.
Hayes began 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 regarded divine law and human law as distinct: the latter a second-best accommodation of the former, grounded in historical context and the will of a sovereign authority rather than in universal reason. By contrast, biblical law was given to a people to establish a community. Authored by God, it is divine by source rather than by character—neither rational, universal, nor transcendent, but mutable, written, and embedded in history. Reading these different definitions of divine law through the lens of incongruity theory, Hayes examined how Jews living in the Hellenic empire responded to this dissonance—with puzzlement and distress, or with amusement and enjoyment.
Ancient Jews, she maintained, were aware of this incongruity. Those who admired Hellenic culture found it troubling and worked to reconcile biblical law with Hellenic definitions of divine law. Some, such as Philo, argued that biblical law aligned with natural law, and was therefore universal and rational. Talmudic rabbis, however, recognized the incongruity and embraced it, asserting the biblical conception of divine law. Hayes argued that the rabbis highlighted the law’s irrational elements—such as the law of the red heifer, the ritual sacrifice of a reddish-brown cow for purification—and celebrated them, contending that only a divine being can transcend reason. Mosaic law, they emphasized, was not universal or rational but a divine decree capable of deviating from empirical truth. Judges could balance justice with other virtues, adapting divine law for social welfare—for example, by deciding that a man could not annul a marriage without his wife’s knowledge. This responsive flexibility signaled the law’s divinity.
In opposing Hellenic conceptions of divine law, the rabbis resisted and dismantled prevailing definitions through humor. Hayes proposed that performance studies and play offer useful frameworks for understanding rabbinic approaches to divine law. She cited examples such as R. Akiva’s interpretation of a bloodstain—where he “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, she observed, illustrate how performance studies illuminate conceptions of divine law by enabling a playful exploration of its boundaries.
Hayes also challenged the conventional divide between the serious and the comedic, interpreting the Talmud through the lenses of performance and play and suggesting that its arguments unfold like staged performances. Increasing levels of detail keep the game going, creating a dialectical performance with no genuine sense of closure but infinite possibilities. The Talmud thus functions as an infinite game, whose purpose is not to win but to continue playing. The rabbis, she concluded, enacted divine law with play and humor, thereby countering the transhistorical ideal of divine law with a historically grounded, contingent practice.
During the Q&A, participants asked about the evolution of Jewish thought from the Talmudic to the medieval period, the gendered nature of religious texts, the interplay of serious and comedic tones in rabbinic writing, infinite dialogues of play constituting speech acts, and the strategies rabbis employed to adapt Torah law to changing circumstances.
Following the lecture and robust discussions, Professor Kenneth Bamberger, director of the Helen Diller Institute, expressed his appreciation for the Institute’s ongoing partnership with the Robbins Collection Research Center. Calling it “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 Center for its continued support through this annual lecture.