find the injunction to "give splendor to the face of an elder" (Leviticus 19:32), which is interpreted in midrash to mean that one must grow a beard. What was lacking, then, in Rabbi Yohanan's beauty was a beard, the lack of which was precisely what defined his beauty for Resh Lakish, his effeminate appearance! The text seems then to contradict itself, asserting that the lack of the beard is a marker of beauty and at the same time that it is a defect in beauty. This text manifests, therefore, an ambivalence or anxiety about the value of virility; on the one hand, the signs of virility are what produce beauty in the male, and at the same time, it is the very lack of those signs that produce the male as beautiful.
33
This ambivalence about the effeminate body of Rabbi Yohanan is thus the double of the ambivalence about the grotesquely masculine bodies of the fat rabbis. The ideal male seems to be feminized in this culture, but since that very ideality is openly marked as effeminate, the textand presumably the cultureseems hopelessly ambivalent about male identity.
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I would claim that contestation of the significance of physical virility, substituting replication through teaching for replication through reproduction, is an attempt (doomed to failure, as it happens) to reduce this anxiety. The production of spiritual children, those who will follow in the moral and religious ways of the parent, is claimed by our text as more important than the production of biological childrennot, I hasten to add, because of a hierarchical privileging of "spirit"
34
over body, but rather because of a profound skepticism about replication of the qualities of the parent in the child. Spiritual excellence is claimed as superior to physical prowess. Reversing the Hellenic pattern, the masculine figure joins the "effeminate" one, and while losing his physical virility, becomes nevertheless, or accordingly, a "great man."
35
The narrative seems, therefore, to be challenging the cult of physical virility and male beauty, substituting
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 | | 33. See Gleason (1990, 400401) for the sources of one pole of the ambivalence.
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| | 34. In fact, one of the main points of this entire project is to argue against such dualism in rabbinic culture.
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| | 35. Jonah Fränkel already remarked this reversal of expectations (Fränkel 1981, 7377). Fränkel's reading of the story of Rabbi Yohanan and Resh Lakish is of great interest, but it entirely removes that story from its literary context as part of a larger narrative text, apparently assuming that it was attached here secondarily and by mere association. However, as Shamma Friedman (1985, 7980 nn. 49, 50) has already shown, there is no doubt that the present editor carefully wove these two sources into a single narrative text, and it is that text that I am reading here. This does not invalidate Fränkel's reading as far as it goes, and indeed his work is a necessary supplement to the interpretation I am giving here.
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