Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (5 page)

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Authors: Daniel Boyarin

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BOOK: Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture
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androcentric economy of the midrash, the woman is God's greatest gift to the man, not his revenge. The midrash emphasizes over and over that the creation of sexuality and God's participation in the wedding, as it were, signify his "steadfast love" for humans both male and femalesteadfast love, as opposed to the anger and jealousy manifested by Zeus. The very excessiveness of this repetition serves, I would suggest, as an index to the energy that is being mobilized to reverse the meaning of the Hesiodic motif. Moreover, in the midrash, both man and woman are subjects, and both recipients, of God's graciousness to them in the marriage relationship.
Woman exists only to be a marriage partner, but as such, her attractiveness and pleasure are warmly appreciated, not reviled as snares and deceptions, and her ornaments and decorations are also positively valued. God himself acts the bridesmaid and prepares her for the nuptial night. Woman is not a deviation from humanity but rather its completion, for as the Rabbis proclaim, "One who is not married is not a whole human." Sin and its punishment, according to the Rabbis, initiate not sexuality but sexual shame. In describing the rabbinic ideology of sex and gender an important set of distinctions made by anthropologist Sherry Ortner in a classic paper will be very useful (1974). She identifies three different versions of female inferiority in different cultures:
(1) elements of cultural ideology and informants' statements that explicitly devalue women, according them, their roles, their tasks, their products, and their social milieux less prestige than are accorded men and the male correlates; (2) symbolic devices, such as the attribution of defilement, which may be interpreted as implicitly making a statement of inferior valuation; and (3) social-structural arrangements that exclude women from participation in or contact with some realm in which the highest powers of the society are felt to reside. These three types of data may all of course be interrelated in any particular system, though they need not necessarily be.
(1974, 6970)
My claim is that an ethnography of rabbinic culture would find that the first two categories are
not
dominant in this formation, i.e., that explicit devaluation of women, while certainly present in the texts, is not in them a key symbol (Ortner 1973). Moreover, as I have tried to show here, even practices such as menstrual defilement do not necessarily reflect a general attribution of defilement to women or female sexuality and that within the classical rabbinic periodas opposed to medieval Judaismthey, in fact, do not. If, however, Ortner's first two categories of female inferiority
 
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devaluation of women and attribution of essential defilementdo not prominently obtain for the rabbinic culture, the third category"social-structural arrangements that exclude women from participation in or contact with some realm in which the highest powers of the society are felt to reside"does so with a vengeance.
In summation, then, rabbinic culture is gender-asymmetric. Women are imagined as enablers of men by providing for their sexual and procreative needs (which is not to deny women's independent subjectivity or rights as persons in many areas, including the right to pleasure). Such androcentric (and indeed egocentric) constructions of gender roles, however, do not imply demonization or a view of women as impure and contaminating, as I hope to have shown here. Marriage and sexuality accordingly are seen in this formation as wholly positive, as they were not, of course, in either Philo or the patristic and medieval church. The Rabbis continue a biblical sense of the essential good of sex and procreation, while the negative valence given to sexuality, the body, and in particular the woman's body, in Hellenistic Judaism and its Christian successors, continues and transforms the classical Greek ambivalence about sexuality and procreation. The rabbinic tradition rejects the characteristic ontological move of western gender discourse by which "the masculine pose[s] as a disembodied universality and the feminine get[s] constructed as a disavowed corporeality" (Butler 1990, 12). Because the Rabbis do not disavow their corporeality, they do not construct it as feminine. In the next chapter, I shall attempt to analyze something of the discourse of sexual desire and interaction in marriage, particularly as it affects the differential power of men and women in the culture.
 
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4
Engendering Desire
Husbands, Wives, and Sexual Intercourse
The object, in short, is to define the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human sexuality . . . to account for the fact that it is spoken about, to discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which they speak, the institutions which prompt people to speak about it and which store and distribute the things that are said. What is at issue, briefly, is the over-all "discursive fact," the way in which sex is "put into discourse." Hence, too, my main concern will be to locate the forms of power, the channels it takes, and the discourses it permeates in order to reach the most tenuous and individual modes of behavior, the paths that give it access to the rare or scarcely perceivable forms of desire, how it penetrates and controls everyday pleasureall this entailing effects that may be those of refusal, blockage, and invalidation, but also incitement and intensification: in short, the "polymorphous techniques of power."
(Foucault1980, 11)
My purpose in this chapter is to begin the charting of the operations of power over and within the forms of pleasure and desire in the talmudic culture, the power of the rabbinic class over the sexual practices of married couples, and the power of men over women in sexual life. The Foucauldian critique of the "repressive hypothesis" will serve us well here in looking at the complex modalities of power and production within which rabbinic texts on sexuality function. I will be looking at texts that have been read until now as the very origin and sites of a repressive discourse, but my aim will be to show that their actual function is quite different from what has usually been portrayed. The text often cited as the marker of a controlling force that the Rabbis claimed over the conduct of married sexual practice can be read precisely as a renunciation of such control. In several ways, through several textual practices, the Rabbis removed from the Torah's purview the actual practices of married couples in the bedroom, and their extreme codification of the necessity for privacy during sexual activity makes actual sexual practice invisible and thus
 
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uncontrollable. The area over which the Rabbis do wish to retain control is paradoxically the emotional, affective state of relations between the husband and wife at the time of sexual contact, which they codify as requiring intimacy, harmony of desires, and mutual arousal and pleasure. This point will raise serious questions regarding a commonly held view that woman is a sexual object and not subject in rabbinic culture. While the only voices heard in the talmudic and midrashic texts are male ones, among those male voices many are earnestly empathic of female need and desire.
Indeed, this ironic double stance of both genuine empathy for women and rigid hierarchical domination of women is endemic in the talmudic discourse. Perhaps its most sardonic moment comes in a text that I will analyze in the next chapter, where a husband who has spent more than a decade away from home to study Torah refers to his wife as ''that poor woman,"
because he has been away for more than a decade studying Torah!
In general, however, women are held to be in the category of virtually powerless people who need to be dealt with in a solicitous fashion. Thus, in a talmudic passage dealing with the ineluctable moral power that wronged people have when they pray to God, most of the examples deal with the treatment of wives by husbands:
Said Rav: A man should always be careful not to grieve his wife, for since her tears are nigh, [the punishment for] her grief is nigh.
Rabbi El'azar said: From the day that the Temple was destroyed, the gates of prayer have been shut, as it says:
Even though I call out and shout, he shut out my prayer
[Lamentations 3:8]. But even though the gates of prayer were locked, the gates of tears were not locked, as it says:
Hear my prayer, O God; listen to my supplication. Do not be silent [in the face of] my tears
[Psalms 39:13].
(Baba Metsia 59a)
Wives are represented as virtually powerless creatures, whose only weapon is tearstears which, to be sure, guarantee an automatic divine response. It is nevertheless the case, however, that the force of this discourse, far from authorizing men to mistreat women as their property, is rather to encourage men to be very solicitous (even patronizing) of women. The text goes on:
And Rav [also] said: He who follows the advice of his wife, will fall into Hell, for it says:
But there was none like Ahab, who gave himself over to do what was evil in the sight of the Lord, as Jezebel his wife had incited him
[1 Kings 21:25].
 
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