Choice Review

This interdisciplinary book makes a contribution to understanding the rabbinic legal process and rabbinic sensibilities, incorporating law, logic, narrative, feminism, and theology to explicate rabbinic legal authority and its limits. It is divided into two parts: "Truth and Human Jurisprudence" and "Truth and Divine Justice." Halberstam asks, "How can humans ever attain the knowledge required to administer and implement divine law and render perfect justice ...?" The author (Indiana Univ., Bloomington) deals with rabbinic juridical decision-making and standards of proof, establishing facts and evidence, rabbinic juridical procedure, and the shaping of law. She does a nice job of distinguishing between testimony that stands (qayemet) and is nullified (betalah) and a judge who either acquits (mezakeh) or convicts (mehayeb). She argues that early rabbinic jurisprudence is characterized by uncertainty--that rabbinic understandings of the law were filled with doubt, ambiguity, and indeterminacy as to the possibility of justice on the stage of human history. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-level undergraduates and above. D. B. Levy Touro College, Lander College for Women