There is no faction within rabbinic Judaism with which to attach oneself, because the opposing views are all incorporated into the same canonical texts. Declaring oneself, then, an adherent of either Rabbi Meir or Rabbi Akiva would involve precisely the denial of some part of the canonical text. Indeed, given the notorious difficulties of relying on the attributions of utterances to named authorities in the Talmud and midrash, we cannot even describe what it would be to be an Akivan or a Meirite, and this, itself, can be understood as a cultural practice. Ideologies are always, then, in dialogue with their others within the culture.
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To take a salient example from a case which has already been mentioned above: the fundamental question about whether the first Adam was androgynous or male, with its attendant corollary of the ontological status of sex and woman, is debated within the talmudic and midrashic texts and not resolved. To be sure, the majority opinion seems to have been that when the Torah says, "male and female created He them," it means that God created an androgyne, but there is simply no mechanism within the texts for finally suppressing or dismissing the other view. Both views come from the same source and have the same authority, in a way that the same controversy debated, for hypothetical example, between Origen and Augustine would not. This latter practice bids us to try to decide which view is correct, while the rabbinic textual practice labels as almost heretical any attempt to so decide.
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There is a fundamental semiotic difference between two interpretations that are presented in two separate works by named authors and the canonized dissensus of midrash and Talmud (Boyarin 1990c, 7879). Any view or interpretation that is undercut by another in the same canonical work unsettles, almost by definition, its own use as a foundation for cultural and social practice. Accordingly, in the research on this culture it is vital always to pay very close attention to the structures built into the very texts, to the interplay of view and counter-view. I think that it is this last point that is most often ignored when history is written by non-talmudists using talmudic texts. Thus, a view will often enough be quoted as if typical of rabbinic Judaism when in fact it has been cited in the talmudic text only to be discredited or at any rate undermined by a counter-text. An example of this can be found in Chapter 4 below, where a text that has often been cited as evidence for a rabbinically repressive attitude toward sexual practice is interpreted as in fact cited in the Talmud
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