Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (18 page)

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Authors: Daniel Boyarin

Tags: #Religion, #Judaism, #General

BOOK: Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture
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Page 131
them their speech but even exuberantly praised the speaking of female desire. Still, the dominant tradition remained, to be sure, the one that suppressed the open speaking of desire by women.
But emblematic of the ideology of gender in the rabbinic culture is the fact that this interdiction on speaking her desire on the part of women was
not
supposed to create conditions of suffering and deprivation for her, but rather to impose a special obligation on her husband to be attentive and sensitive to her subtle signals. The fact that she desired him especially when he was about to go on a journey,
which is one of the curses with which she was cursed,
does
not
mean that therefore she must suffer frustration but that he must sleep with her before he leaves:
Rabbi Yehoshua the son of Levi said, "A man is required to sleep with his wife when he is about to go on a journey, for it says
And you shall know that your tent is peace and you shall pay attention to your dwelling, and thus you will not sin"
[Job 5:25].
Does it in fact derive from that verse? Doesn't it derive from
And unto the man is her desire
[Gen. 3:16], which teaches that the woman desires her husband when he goes on a journey.
Rav Yosef said, "It was not necessary [to cite the other verse] except for the situation in which she is close to her period [when normally sex is forbidden, but this prohibition is lifted when he is going to go on a journey]" [Yevamot 62b].
The "curses" are women's state, not their estate. Not only is the curse not a justification for causing her to suffer, it is that very curse that creates the obligation for the husband to "take care of her." Once again it is clearly the case, however, that the gender relations are asymmetrical, that the position of women in sexuality is subordinate, and the position of men is dominant. The very consideration that
he
is supposed to show
her
is the marker of this magnanimous but confining patriarchy. As the Talmud says explicitly in the continuation, "She is a mattress for her husband."
Truth and Desire
At the bottom of this (inter)textual complex, I read, then, an intricate strategy for "putting sex into discourse," and at the same time for limiting the discourse of sexual control. Foucault has contrasted two relations of sexuality to truth as characteristic of two cultural formations, that of the ancient Greeks and "ours":
 
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In Greece, truth and sex were linked, in the form of pedagogy, by the transmission of a precious knowledge from one body to another; sex served as a medium for initiations into learning. For us, it is in the confession that truth and sex are joined, through the obligatory and exhaustive expression of an individual secret. But this time it is truth that serves as a medium for sex and its manifestations.
(Foucault 1980, 61)
What, then, is the link between truth and sex in the textual complex that we have been reading here? That is, how shall we describe the talmudic culture on the scale of Foucault's taxonomy? Certainly, neither of the alternatives that he proposes to describe the two formations with which he deals are adequate for describing this culture, for sex is not the medium of a
paideia,
and confession is not a mode of producing truth in this culture. It would seem, indeed, that what the Talmud is telling us is that the truth of sex (that is, the Torah of sex) is concerned with two aspects of sexuality only: that the objects of sexual interaction be appropriate, and that the connection between wife and husband be marked by warmth, intimacy, exclusiveness (even in polygyny!), and respect for the desire and pleasure of the subordinate female partner. The actual deployment of bodies and pleasures lies outside of the purview of Torah.
The rabbinic culture thus occupies a position somewhere "between" Foucault's Greek and Christian cultures. On the one hand, there is a near-explicit rejection of the model of the panoptical surveillance of sexual behavior between husbands and wives; on the other hand, sexuality itself is not seen as an area entirely out of the realm of socio-cultural legislation. The Talmud achieves diverse (and not always compatible) discursive objectives through this complicated strategy. The "repressive" discourse is made availableand indeed, later cultural forces will mobilize itbut it is rendered counter-normative and marginalized. The net effect of such textual tactics is that out of the ashes of a rejected
scientia sexualis
a very embryonic
ars erotica
is produced.
23
The (male) reader of the text now knows that it is possible to derive pleasure from looking at his wife's genitals, from kissing them, from "turning the tables," and most of all, from conversing with her, laughing and playing while making love.
23. The terms are, of course, those of Michel Foucault, whose influence pervades this chapter (Foucault 1980, 67). To be sure, they are only partially appropriate in the present context, but Foucault himself allows that the binary opposition between the two may be deconstructible.
 
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