Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (153 page)


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different and originally external to the gadget. However, the difference is not one of essence. Nowhere in rabbinic literature is the soul regarded as Divine. It may be of heavenly origin, but is not Divine. More significantly, the gadget and its power source ultimately belong together, rather than separately. Thus the soul is the vitalizing agent, whose proper place is in the body, not out of it.


(Goshen-Gottstein 1991)

The Rabbis are thus only one ideological group within late-antique Judaism, and their anthropology is one of their main distinguishing marks. The soul is frequently likened in their writings to salt which preserves meat (Theodor and Albeck 1965, 32021; see also Urbach 1975, 22021 and Stiegman 1977, 50816). Perhaps the most elegant demonstration of the essentially monistic anthropology of rabbinic Judaism is from its daily prayer service; after urinating or defecating, the Jew is enjoined to pronounce the following blessing:


Blessed art Thou O Lord, King of the Universe, Who has made the human with wisdom, and created in it orifices and hollows. Revealed and known it is before Your Throne of Glory, that should any of these be opened or shut up, it would be impossible to live before You. Blessed Art Thou, the Healer of all flesh Who does wondrous things.

This text shows clearly two things: first, the acceptance of fleshliness in its most material and lower-body forms as the embodiment of God's wisdom, and second, the definition of the human as his or her body.
⁶No wonder that Augustine regarded the Jews as indisputably carnal.

Nonetheless, the body was hardly unproblematic or uncontested in the rabbinic culture, nor was asceticism unknown. In a recent essay, Steven Fraade has formulated the question which must be addressed in a study of this discourse:

[A] broader understanding of asceticism sees it as responding, in a variety of ways, to a
tension
inherent in all religious systems: humans (whether individually or collectively) aspire to advance ever closer to an ideal of spiritual fulfillment and perfection, while confronting a self and a world that continually set obstacles in that path, whatever its particular course. How can one proceed along that path with a whole,


6. I am going to use this form for ethical reasons rooted in present practice. It does not constitute a declaration that sex is a "natural" category, which will be precisely raised as an issue in the concluding section of this book. For the nonce, see Butler (1990, 152 n. 15). In any case, both men and women say this blessing.

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undivided, undistracted "heart" (all one's energies and intentions) while living among the distractions of the present world?


(Fraade 1986, 255)

Although "confronting a self" and "spiritual fulfillment" seem to beg some questions they ought rather to be asking, Fraade's definition is useful. Asceticism is not, on his account, a product of dualistic contempt for the body; indeed, that dualistic contempt, which we find in several forms of ancient Judaism, is one response to the ascetic tension. A
skesis
itself is religious athleticism, "the willful and arduous training and testing, often through abstention from what was generally permitted, of one's creaturely faculties in the
positive
pursuit of moral and spiritual perfection'' (Fraade 1986, 257; see also Dodds 1965, 24).

Unlike other forms of asceticism, sexual renunciation was excluded for the Rabbis. Everyone was expected to marry, have sex, and have children, and people who refused to do so were hyperbolically stigmatized as murderers and blasphemers (Tosefta Yevamot 8:7 and Babylonian Talmud Yevamot 63b). The necessity for such hyperbole attests to the attractions of celibacy for Semitic-speaking Jews.
⁷The Rabbis were part of the Hellenistic world, even though their conception of the body departed significantly from (or even resisted) prevailing Hellenistic anthropological notions that other Jews had assimilated. Because the Rabbis understood the human being as a body, sexuality was an essential component of being human, while in platonized formations, one could imagine an escape from sexuality into a purely spiritual and thus truly "human" state.
⁸The rabbinic insistence on the essentiality of the corporeal and thus the sexual in the constitution of human being represents then a point of resistance to the dominant discursive practices of both Jewish and non-Jewish cultures of late antiquity.

Incorporating the Primal Androgyne

One of the clearest arguments for rabbinic resistance to the surrounding discourse of the body is the Rabbis' citation of that discourse while