Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (35 page)

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Authors: Daniel Boyarin

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BOOK: Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture
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with whom the Shekina only spoke for a short time, and only for a set time, the Torah said, "For three days do not approach woman," I with whom the Shekina speaks at every moment and without a set time, a fortiori. And how do we know that God agreed with him, for it says, "Go tell them, return to your tents" and right after that, "But you stay here with me." And there are those who say [that we learn it] from ''Mouth to mouth will I speak with him.''
(Shabbat 67a)
This Babylonian retelling of the story is conspicuous for its absences and by its absences makes the presences of the Palestinian version all the more prominent. There is no representation here, whatsoever, of the feelings of the wife, indeed no recognition that she is, in any way, an interested party in the decision. Moreover, although the difference between Moses and the ordinary people is adduced here as well, the difference does not lead clearly to the understanding that for all others, renunciation of marital sex is excluded and regarded as arrogance and wrong, as it is in the midrash. One could easily read this text as a further authorization for the apparent Babylonian practice of long marital separations for the study of Torah, while the Palestinian version above strongly condemns the practice.
The Case of the Married Monk
By cross-examining the talmudic texts, then, I have proffered a solution to the case of the married monk. A set of directly contradictory social demands was current within the culture; on the one hand, the highest of achievements was to devote oneself entirely to the study of Torah, and on the other hand, there was an absolute demand on everyone to marry and procreate. The Palestinians resolved this tension by following a common Hellenistic practice of marrying late after an extended period devoted to "philosophy"for the Jews, Torah. The Babylonians, on the other hand, having a strong cultural model of the necessity of sexual activity for postpubescent men, were prevented from such a pattern. They produced at some point, therefore, the impossible "solution" of men marrying young and then leaving their wives for extended periods of study, creating, as it
(footnote continued from the previous page)
talmudic Rabbis; rather, it would have to be attacking other well-attested practices of
mariage blanc
among Jews and non-Jews at least as early as the first century. It becomes then a polemic against the Babylonian institution avant la lettre.
 
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were, a class of "married monks." The romantic story of the marriage of the hegemonic symbol, Rabbi Akiva, is a text produced to institute a practical resolution of the social dilemma. The talmudic literature also represents strong (and often covert) opposition to the practice that this story attempts to institute.
48
These oppositional literary techniques take many of the forms of oppositional literature in other cultures as well, including ironic appropriation (Chambers 1991, 117). Even though we cannot know to what extent the practice of married monkship was ever "actually" implemented, the literary evidence can certainly be taken as evidence of socio-cultural struggle around the attempt (at least) to implement it. Literary analysis can be then a means to tentative exposition of cultural reality. Precisely through close (but contextualized) reading, the surface of the text manifests unresolved tensions and conflicts within the actual social structure. It is the failure of the narrative to totalize that is significant, not its success. We do not have to read the texts as documents that reflect social practice, as in the older historicism, nor as "texts" that are entirely self-enclosed and autonomous, as in the various formalistic practices of literary criticism, but as themselves practices of culture that can be pressured to reveal from within themselves the cultural work that they do.
My reading of the textual complex surrounding rabbinic marriage has suggested that a major goal of the hegemonic rabbinic discourse was the securing of a self-abnegating role for Jewish wives (at least those of a certain class)a role in which their status or prestige was defined through the spiritual and intellectual achievements of their husbands. One extreme form of this development was the institution (ideal or real) of married monks, that is, of married Torah-students who spent years of study away from their wives. We have seen how opposition to the sexual deprivation imposed on women by this practice was registered within the rabbinic texts themselves. In the next chapter, we will see that there was internal opposition as well to the total confinement of women to sexual and procreative roles, however honored.
48. I would like to make clear the difference between my interpretative practice and that of structuralist readings of myth, which also see the myth as an attempt at resolution of tensions in the culture. In structuralism, the tensions are reconstructed at a level of deep structure, and the myth is read as a perfect resolution; the surface of the mythic text is, therefore, not significant. For an example of structuralist reading at its best, see Vernant (1990) on the Prometheus myth.
 
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