In the course of the discussion of the laws of mourning in the third chapter of BT Moed Katan, the stam repeatedly invokes rabbis' near kin: the text is replete with not only stories of rabbis mourning their own relatives' deaths, but also seeming asides as to the kinship relations between rabbis in the midst of legal discourse. What is the relationship between these stories, rabbinic law on mourning, and the role of the rabbi as both legal authority and private individual? How does the rabbinic conception of kinship shape their understanding of loss? Drawing on both contemporary anthropological theories of kinship and mourning, as well as a literary analysis of these stories and their parallels in the rabbinic canon, this paper will explore the role of relatedness in the rabbinic imagination, and how it shapes the rabbinic approach to death and loss.
