Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture by Daniel Boyarin Page A
Authors: Daniel Boyarin
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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
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.
< previous page
page_15
next page >
< previous page
page_150
next page >
Page 150
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
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