For the source text click/tap here: Taanit 24
To download, click/tap here: PDF
Many Talmudic scholars took great pride in their clarity of thought, their verbal precision and their rationality. The Talmud is however a vast literary sea. It encompasses law, philosophy, science, literature and creative ideas. Thus, it should not come as a surprise that among its many tomes and thousands of pages of text, we also move from the rational to the mystical and from the mystical to the world of miracles.
Such is the journey that Rabbi Chanina (also spelled Haninah) ben Dosa provides for us. Rabbi Chanina is different from the other Talmudic personages about whom we have studied. If the others dealt with the laws of probability and probability, Chanina was their opposite. His world was one of the improbable, of the irrational, of the unprovable.
We explore the permissibility of praying or relying on miracles and review the scholarship on charismatic Galillean hassidim like Chanina, and the controversial influence they might have had on the founder of Christianity and his own performance of miracles.