Going Off Script: Improvisational Judgment in the Talmud

Going Off Script offers a novel explanation of what it means to act lifnim mi-shurat ha-din (within the line of the law). Tracing the development of this phrase within classical rabbinic literature, the book intervenes in longstanding debates over what this phrase signals about the relationship between Jewish ethics and Jewish law. Deborah Barer breaks with previous scholarship to argue that lifnim mi-shurat ha-din does not represent a particular type of moral or legal action, but rather a way of making decisions. When rabbis act lifnim mi-shurat ha-din, they improvise, deviating from established norms of behavior in order to pursue a specific, case-based outcome.

The creation of this category helps the Talmudic editors make sense of otherwise confusing accounts of rabbinic conduct. It also enables them to solve apparent conflicts between their inherited sources, thus resolving a specific set of legal and hermeneutic challenges that arise in the process of producing the Talmud. Once created, however, this category takes on a life of its own. Later generations of Talmudic readers and interpreters develop lifnim mi-shurat ha-din as a particular type of moral action, rather than as a way of making decisions, and they import those assumptions back onto their reading of the Talmudic text.

By identifying lifnim mi-shurat ha-din as a mode of decision-making, Going Off Script disentangles these later assumptions from the textual record, clarifying the extent to which, at the level of the Talmud itself, lifnim mi-shurat ha-din is a morally evaluative term. It identifies improvisation as a type of decision-making that introduces new moral possibilities, and traces how the Talmudic editors contend both with the destabilization that improvisation introduces as well as the beneficial outcomes it makes possible.

Deborah Barer is Senior Faculty with the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. She holds a PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia, with an emphasis on rabbinic literature and Jewish ethics. Previously, she was Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Towson University, and she has also taught at Oberlin College and for the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies (North America). She served as the editor of the Journal of Textual Reasoning.