Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (62 page)

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Authors: Daniel Boyarin

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BOOK: Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture
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ably inhabit nor to reject the importance of biological filiation as a signifier of value. Indeed, the text is not at all sure about the educability (or malleability) of human nature. Both Rabbi Yohanan, with his assertion that Resh Lakish is still, as it were, a brigand and the latter's answer that "There they called me Rabbi, and here they call me Rabbi" seem to express great reservation about whether anything at all has changed. So while the raising of spiritual progeny is produced by our text, on my reading, as a solution to a deep-seated problem in the culture, it was itself perhaps no less of a problem for the culture than the problem of procreation which it was supposed to solve. Having downplayed out of a certain despair the consequence of genetic filiation, the culture seems still very uncertain about the reliability of filiation through pedagogy as well.
37
The result is the very anxious and conflicted text we have before us. In a culture in which the body is the very center of the sense of being human, the problem of the bodymale and femaleremains unsolved.
Appendix: The Tale of Rabbi El'azar the Son of Rabbi Shim'on (Babylonian Talmud Baba Metsia 83b85a)
Rabbi El'azar the son of Rabbi Shim'on found a certain officer of the king who used to catch thieves. He asked him, "How do you prevail over them? Aren't they compared to animals, as it is written 'at night tramp all the animals of the forest' [Psalms 104:20]?"
There are those who say that he said it to him from the following verse: "He will ambush from a hiding place like a lion in a thicket"
[Psalms 10:9]. Said he to him, "Perhaps you are taking the innocent and leaving the guilty.'' He said to him, "How shall I do it?" He said to him, "Come I will teach you how to do it. Go in the first four hours of the morning to the wine-bar. If you see someone drinking wine and falling asleep, ask of him what his profession is. If he is a rabbinical student, he has arisen early for study. If he is a day-laborer, he has arisen early to his labor. If he worked at night, [find out] perhaps it is metal smelting [a silent form of work], and if not, then he is a thief and seize him.'' The rumor reached the king's house, and he said, "Let him who read the proclamation be the one to execute it." They brought Rabbi
37. I am indebted for this last comment to David Resnick.
 
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to their own tradition and to relegate the unfortunate sexism of the actually existing socio-cultural practices to the deleterious influence of "others." Concurrent with this practice goes a mode of writing whereby one's own tradition is described as heterogeneous, while those of others are rendered monoliths. This has often happened in Christian feminist accounts of the feminism of Jesus and even Paul, whose unfortunate lapses are laid at the door of a "Jewish" or "rabbinic" residue or even backsliding. I will not mention simple vulgar examples of such writing, but even as careful a scholar as Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza does not escape it entirely when she reproduces approvingly a student's paper that attributes Paul's backsliding between Galatians and Corinthians as "reverting to his rabbinic prejudices"! (Fiorenza 1983, 6364). I mention this point not so much to protest, which others have done already and I believe to good effect (at least with Fiorenza), but to emphasize how great the temptation has been
for me
to do the same sort of thing: to paint the rabbinic tradition as non-misogynistic in essence and marginalize the evidence for woman-despising to a popular, Hellenistic residue, which moreover characterizes Christianity. I have tried assiduously to avoid this temptation, perhaps not always and entirely successfully. I am more and more convinced that reception history closes off options of reading virtually any tradition, and that an important task of criticism is to re-open the options that have been suppressed.
On the other hand, I do not wish to undermine my very project by describing each cultural formation as so heterogeneous that there are no important differences between cultures. This reading of talmudic culture does insist that rabbinic Judaism as a whole was different from the Others of this culture, Hellenistic Judaism and Pauline (and post-Pauline) Christianity, in spite of the internal heterogeneities of each formation. A major danger haunting the work from the beginning, then, has been a tendency, connected with the danger described in the last paragraph, toward a triumphalist comparison of Judaism with Christianity in which Judaism emerges as pro-body or pro-sex, and thus healthier. Indeed, such comparisons are a commonplace of recent American Jewish apologetics (David Biale 1992). Since this is not my intent, I have spent considerable time developing a method of presentation that I call
cultural dialectics
. By cultural dialectics, I intend a mode of analysis that compares related cultural formations by showing that they represent complementary "solutions" to given cultural "problems." Among other things, this method of
 
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El'azar the son of Rabbi Shim'on, and he began to catch thieves. He met Rabbi Yehoshua, the Bald, who said to him, "Vinegar, son of Wine: How long will you persist in sending the people of our God to death?!" He said to him, "I am removing thorns from the vineyard." He said to him, "Let the Owner of the vineyard come and remove the thorns." One day a certain laundry man met him, and called him "Vinegar, son of Wine.'' He said, "Since he is so brazen, one can assume that he is wicked.'' He said, "Seize him." They seized him. After he had settled down, he went in to release him, but he could not. He applied to him the verse "One who guards his mouth and his tongue, guards himself from troubles" [Proverbs 21:23]. They hung him. He stood under the hanged man and cried. Someone said to him, "Be not troubled; he and his son both had intercourse with an engaged girl on
Yom Kippur
." In that minute, he placed his hands on his guts, and said, "Be joyful, O my guts, be joyful! If it is thus when you are doubtful, when you are certain even more so. I am confident that rot and worms cannot prevail over you." But even so, he was not calmed. They gave him a sleeping potion and took him into a marble room and ripped open his stomach and were taking out baskets of fat and placing it in the July sun and it did not stink.
But no fat stinks. It does if it has red blood vessels in it, and this even though it had red blood vessels in it, did not stink
. He applied to himself the verse, "even my flesh will remain preserved" [Psalms 16:89].
To Rabbi Ishma'el the son of Yose there also occurred a similar situation. Eliahu (the Prophet Elijah) met him and said to him, "How long will you persist in sending the people of our God to death?!" He said to him, "What can I do; it is the king's order?" He said to him, "Your father ran away to Asia-Minor; you run away to Lydia."
When Rabbi Ishma'el the son of Yose and Rabbi El'azar the son of Rabbi Shim'on used to meet each other, an ox could walk between them and not touch them. A certain matron said to them, "Your children are not yours." They said, "Theirs are bigger than ours." "If that is the case, even more so!"
There are those who say that thus they said to her: "As the man, so is his virility." And there are those who say that thus did they say to her: "Love compresses the flesh." And why did they answer her at all? Does it not say, "Do not answer a fool according to his foolishness"? In order not to produce slander on their children, that they are bastards
.
Said Rabbi Yohanan, "Rabbi Ishma'el the son of Yose's member was like a wineskin of nine
kav;
Rabbi El'azar the son of Rabbi Shim'on's
 
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member was like a wineskin of seven
kav
." Rav Papa said, "Rabbi Yohanan's member was like a wineskin of three
kav
."
And there are those who say: like a wineskin of five kav. Rav Papa himself had a member which was like the baskets of Hipparenum
.
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Said Rabbi Yohanan, "I have survived from the beautiful of Jerusalem." One who wishes to see the beauty of Rabbi Yohanan should bring a brand new silver cup and fill it with the red seeds of the pomegranate and place around its rim a garland of red roses, and let him place it at the place where the sun meets the shade, and that vision is the beauty of Rabbi Yohanan.
Is that true?! But haven't we been taught by our master that, "The beauty of Rabbi Kahana is like the beauty of Rabbi Abbahu. The beauty of Rabbi Abbahu is like the beauty of our father Jacob. The beauty of our father Jacob is like the beauty of Adam," and that of Rabbi Yohanan is not mentioned. Rabbi Yohanan did not have splendor of face
. Rabbi Yohanan used to go and sit at the gate of the ritual bath. He said, ''When the daughters of Israel come out from the bath, they will look at me in order that they will have children as beautiful as I am.'' The Rabbis said to him, "Are you not afraid of the Evil Eye?" He replied, "I am of the seed of Joseph, our father, of whom it is said, 'A fruitful son is Joseph, a fruitful son by the spring'" [Gen. 49:22], and Rabbi Abbahu said [of this verse], "Do not read it, 'by the spring' but 'safe from the Eye.'" Rabbi Yosef the son of Rabbi Hanina learned it from here, "'And they will multiply like fish in the midst of the Land' [Gen. 48:16], just as the fish of the sea, the water covers them and the Eye does not prevail over them, so also the seed of Joseph, the Eye does not prevail over it."
One day, Rabbi Yohanan was bathing in the Jordan. Resh Lakish saw him and thought he was a woman. He crossed the Jordan after him by placing his lance in the Jordan and vaulting to the other side. When Rabbi Yohanan saw Rabbi Shim'on the son of Lakish [Resh Lakish], he said to him, "Your strength for Torah!" He replied, "Your beauty for women!" He said to him, "If you repent, I will give you my sister who is more beautiful than I am." He agreed. He wanted to cross back to take his clothes but he couldn't. He taught him Mishna and Talmud and made him into a great man. Once they were disputing in the study-house: "The sword and the lance and the dagger, from whence can they become
38. Rav Papa is also a legendary fat rabbi, as is known from several other Babylonian talmudic intertexts.
 
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