sleeps with his wife every Eve of the Sabbath.
25. And note that the word for the sex or vagina of the gazelle is from the same root as the name Rehume, the lover!
26. In Boyarin 1992, I consider more unambivalently positive connotations of the religious life as erotic. As this book was going to press, Michael White informed me of Greek texts in which courtesans complain of philosophers who seduce their lovers away from them. Our stories may very well be formed, once more, as parodic appropriations of these narratives.
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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. 27
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
25. And note that the word for the sex or vagina of the gazelle is from the same root as the name Rehume, the lover!
26. In Boyarin 1992, I consider more unambivalently positive connotations of the religious life as erotic. As this book was going to press, Michael White informed me of Greek texts in which courtesans complain of philosophers who seduce their lovers away from them. Our stories may very well be formed, once more, as parodic appropriations of these narratives.
< previous page
page_148
next page >
< previous page
page_149
next page >
Page 149
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. 27
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.
< previous page
page_149
next page >
< previous page
page_15
next page >
Page 15
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
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