ABSTRACT
Chapter 6, Charity and beyond: the Talmud Bavli’s limitations on a divine role in human affairs argues that the Bavli’s demonstrable pattern of limiting the divine role in charity and heightening the human role is consistent with its limitations on the divine and accentuations of the human in other contexts. The chapter begins by systematically collecting the tzedaqah evidence developed earlier in the book. The Babylonian amora Rava and the Bavli narrator are singled out as major exemplars of this tendency, and a comparison is made with Yaakov Elman’s earlier findings about Rava’s and the Bavli’s tendency to limit divine providence in other contexts. The chapter continues by linking up the tzedaqah evidence and that developed by Elman to three other categories of examples of this Bavli tendency: its limitation of the divine role and accentuation of the human in the acceptance and study of Torah; the making of new law; and the forgetting and restoration of law (halachah).
