29 November 2006

My Article for This [Upcoming] Year's Milin Havivin

As mentioned nearly two weeks ago, I've been spending a lot of time trying to research that topic in order to try to submit it to my school's journal on time in about two weeks' time. However, I realized today that it would not have been as good of a quality as I would have liked it to be - it would have been too rushed, especially as I need to do a lot more research into four main topic areas: 1) medieval and other Talmudic commentators, 2) menstruation, Jewish menstrual taboos, and other perceptions of menstruation, 3) understandings of women's communities, speaking practices, and their relationships to their counterpart [men's] communities, and 4) attitudes about women during Talmudic times.
Anyways, I decided I'd go with another article on sleep, which is good, as it's something into which I've already done a significant amount of research, so I won't be having to do ridiculous hours of research, although there still is much to be done on it. This one, however, in contradistinction to many of my other sleep article interests which are usually on sleep views within a given body of literature, this one will be focusing on Jewish blessings immediately prior to, and after, sleep.
This isn't to say that I am giving up on the article [research] that I have been doing as of late, it's just that I will continue to work on it in earnest in January.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I once gave a shiur about the positive and negative attitudes to sleep in Judaism. It was for parshat Vayetze, where Aviva Zorenberg talks about the "paradox of sleep" - that Yaakov felt that sleeping in a holy place was not appropriate, but he would not have found out that the place was holy had he not gone to sleep.

If you'd like more sources, let me know.