Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (27 page)

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Authors: Daniel Boyarin

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BOOK: Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture
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The Talmud then tells us a tale of one who regularly came home on such a schedule and met dire consequences when he missed this appointment one time:
Yehuda, the son of Rabbi Hiyya, was the son-in-law of Rabbi Yannai. He went and sat in the House of Study. Every Friday at twilight he would come to his wife, and when he would come they would see in front of him a pillar of fire. One day, he became engrossed in his study and did not come. As soon as they did not see the sign [the pillar of fire], Rabbi Yannai said to them, "Turn over his bed, for were Yehuda alive, he would not fail to fulfill his sexual obligation," and it was
like an error from the mouth of a ruler
[Eccles. 10:5], and Yehuda died.
This story not only encodes opposition to the practice of extended absences of Rabbis from their wives, it also encodes in narrative the ideological significance of sexuality which is the reason for the opposition (Fränkel 1981, 10204). Fränkel notes that the pillar of fire functions in the tale as a hermeneutic key. Were we not to have this element, it is conceivable that the story could be understood as a story of conflict between the sacred and the secular, and that its point is render unto Caesar, as it were. However, the fact that Yehuda's procession to his home is preceded by a pillar of fire, the very sign that led the Jews in the Wilderness and brought them to the Promised Land, is a strong indication that we are not to read the narrative as a conflict of values. Both the study of Torah and marital sex are holy acts. Moreover, the "pillar of fire" is highly charged as an erotic symbol, since it is phallic in shape and since fire has strongly erotic associations. If the previous story encodes the erotic nature of Torah-study, this one complements it by strongly encoding a sacred status for marital sex. The nexus between the Sabbath and sexual intercourse also promotes this connection. To put it in structural terms, in both cases, sex and Torah, or marriage and the study-house, are set up as equal but opposed alternatives in complementary distribution.
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Yehuda, who should be equally willing to fulfill both religious obligations, seems, however, to perform the obligation of study with zeal and joy, while his coming home to sleep with his wife seems almost against his
27. I owe this formulation to Alan Dundes. Although this text encodes equal status, as it were, to the wife and the Torah, it also removes women entirely from the sphere of Torah through this complementary distribution. Another way to put this would be that the woman is raised to the status of Torah and therefore prevented from engaging in Torahanalogous to the status of women as art objects in "Western" culture, which has barred them from being artists. See also Moi (1990, 6). In the next chapter I will analyze at length a discontinuity in the discourse of gender that allows women access to study of Torah, as well as further explaining this structural issue.
 
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which we can read against the grain of the texts and learn anything about ideological conflict and power relations within this culture, and indeed, most scholarship on such a culture is non-critical, at best reproducing the ideology of the dominant voices structuring the texts of the culture. My practice here will be to look at texts as (necessarily failed) attempts to propose utopian solutions to cultural tensions. The tensions are what interest me, so using the sensibilities and even techniques of the various hermeneutics of suspicion, I hope that by observing the effects of the energy expended by the culture in attempting to suppress or (put more positively) deal with the tensions, the underlying strains and pressures can be brought to light. Like astronomers who discover heavenly bodies too small for their eyes to see by observing the distorting effects of such bodies on other entities, the equivocations in the texts will be taken as evidence for tensions in the society. As a stand-in for the documentary richness that historicists of more fortunate climes have at their disposal, I will substitute a method of arguing that texts from the talmudic literature (including midrash) of very different genres share the same cultural problematics as their underlying (sometimes implicit) themes. I will refer to a complex of such texts that deal with a given cultural problematic as a
discursive formation
.
26
Cultural poetics thus provides tools for a unitary explanation of halakha (religious law) and aggada (narrative), especially biographical legends about the Rabbis, as participating in the same discursive formations. Where previous generations of researchers in Jewish history have seen the biographical legends as preserving a "kernel" of historical truth, which may be used as explanatory "background" to explain legal opinions and innovations, and a later generation of scholars insisted on the ''autonomy" of the aggada qua literature (Fränkel 1981), the method of cultural poetics recombines aggada and halakha, but in a new fashion. I assume that both the halakha and the aggada represent attempts to work out the same cultural, political, social, ideological, and religious problems. They are, therefore, connected, but not in the way that the older historicism wished to connect them. We cannot read the aggada as background for the halakha, but if anything, the opposite: the halakha can be read as background and explanation for the way that the rabbinic biographies are
26. It should be obvious from this statement why form-critical methods are foreign to this particular research project. I do not, of course, discount them in general.
 
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will and only out of a sense of obligation. That is what trips him up and leads to his death. His father-in-law is sure that only death could have prevented Yehuda from fulfilling the commandment, and he therefore enacts a rite of mourning for himturning over his bed. The performance of the rite, however, turns out to cause his death. As the citation from Ecclesiastes implies, a sentence of capital punishment given by the king, even in error, may not be revoked in certain legal situations. So here, performing a rite that indicated death is held to have caused the death. The fact that this rite is precisely a turning over of the bed is most evocative, as Fränkel acutely notes: he who ignored the responsibilities of the bed is punished by the bed, as it were. Without a doubt, the point of the story is, as Fränkel claims, that the Rabbi suffers a divine sentence of capital punishment because of his failure to perceive that the obligation to sleep with his wife is as holy a commandment as the obligation to study Torah. The story, like the previous one, remains an eloquent testimony to the unworkability of the utopian solution of the halakha requiring the husband who studies to nevertheless come home regularly. The tension and contradiction remain.
At this point in the text of the Babylonian Talmud, the story of Rabbi Akiva and his romance with Rachel is produced.
28
We are now in a position to read that story. Both the immediate textual context and the larger cultural intertextual context suggest that this romantic narrative is the ultimate Babylonian attempt at a utopian resolution and justification for the local practice, attested to in the name of Rava, of husbands spending enormous quantities of time away from home to study Torah. It will be remembered that this practice is contrary to the express moral injunctions of both early Palestinian and Babylonian supreme authorities, who said that even with permission, husbands should not be away for more than a month at a time.
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It stands, also, in contradiction to the view of Shmuel,
28. For a sensitive analysis of the differences between the two versions (which are irrelevant for my reading here), see Weller (1989, 10105). I find implausible, however, her assumption of a "nuclear story" that was elaborated in the two texts.
29. This contradiction was already remarked by the twelfth-century talmudic commentators, the Tosafists, who were puzzled at the fact that the Rabbis stay away from home for two or three years, in direct contradiction to the views of both Rav and Rabbi Yohanan. They reinterpret the clear meaning of the text in order to escape from this contradiction, while in my view the whole function of these stories is to neutralize Rav and Rabbi Yohanan, as explicitly noted by Rava himself, who is presented as citing the first one.
 
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