Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (159 page)

Read Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture Online

Authors: Daniel Boyarin

Tags: #Religion, #Judaism, #General

 
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may there be heard in the hills of Judea the voice of joy and voice of happiness, the voice of the singing of bridegrooms from their bridal chambers and youths from their marriage celebrations. Blessed art thou, O Lord, who makes the groom rejoice with his bride.
This ritual text is a reading of the creation of gender and sex that is narrated in Genesis. Like Philo's ritual of the Therapeutae, it is a translation into explicit social practice of the interpretative moment encompassed by midrash. In the first of the blessings, God is thanked for making Adam and then, from him, Eve. In the second blessing, abandoned Zion is figured as a barren woman. In the third, a prayer is said for the newly married couple, that they should be as happy together as Adam was at the creation of Eve. The final moment of the ritual is the declaration that God makes the groom rejoice with his bride. This "rejoicing," which certainly refers to the sexual act (Anderson 1989, 13336), is that for which God is being praised and thanked in the entire ceremony. It is in the joyful union of husband and wife that the happiness that God vouchsafed his creature in the Garden of Eden is to be restored, for a moment in the present and forever at the eschaton. And at the eschaton, as well, this union will be the site and marker of the greatest redemption. If such a celebratory attitude toward married sex is maintained even by a text that adheres to the view that Eve was created second, how much more so do we expect it according to the more common rabbinic view that Eve and Adam (or at any rate, their genitals) were both contained physically in the first human being.
In the rabbinic culture, the human race is thus marked from the very beginning by corporeality, difference, and heterogeneity. For the Rabbis, sexuality belongs to the original created (and not fallen) state of humanity. Humanity did not fall from a metaphysical condition, nor is there any Fall into sexuality in rabbinic Judaism (Pardes 1989). The midrashic reading of the text cited above presents the originary human person as dualsexed, as two sexes joined in one body. The splitting of the androgynous body ordains sexuality:
Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother
and cleaves to his woman
and they become one flesh
There is nothing in the biblical text or in our midrashic reading of it that indicates that marriage is either a Fall or a concession. The definitive rabbinic statement on marriage is from Genesis Rabba:
 
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And God said, it is not good for the man to be alone:
it has been taught: one who has no wife remains without good, without help, without joy, without blessing, and without atonement. . . .
R. Hiyya the son of Gumadi said, also he is not a complete human, for it says, "And He blessed them and called their name, Adam"
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[Gen. 5:2]. And there are those who say that he even decreases the likeness [of God], for it says, "In the image of God, He made the Adam" [Gen. 9:6], and what does it say after this? ''And as for you, be fruitful and multiply" [Gen. 9:7].
(Theodor and Albeck 1965, 152)
This midrashic text explicitly grounds the Rabbis' ideology of marriage in their interpretation of the creation stories of Genesis. The telos of marriage is a return to the condition of completeness or even of
imago dei
in the act of marriage that reconstructs the Divine Image in which the original androgyne was created.
27
No wonder, then, that Augustine and other Christian writers would make reference to this difference between Judaism and Christianity and consider the Jews "indisputably carnal."
The Rabbis on Sex: Palestine and Babylonia
The Jews disdained the beauty of virginity, which is not surprising, since they heaped ignominy upon Christ himself, who was born of a virgin. The Greeks admired and revered the virgin, but only the Church of God adored her with zeal.
(John Chrysostom,
On Virginity
1,1)
In this passage the fourth-century Father represents the basic difference between rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, as well as the Greek origins of the valorization of virginity. Once again, I would claim, this sensibility is grounded in cultural reality. Marriage is the positively marked term in rabbinic culture, while virginity is marked as negative. Within this frame-
26. Emphasis mine. Here we have the most clear antithesis to the view held by some Christian thinkers that only the virgin is a complete human. Whatever can be said about the "status" of women in rabbinic Judaism, "woman" is not essentialized as lack (as in Freud, e.g.), but as the fulfillment of lack. I will come back to this in Chapter 3 and again in the conclusion, but meanwhile see duBois (1988).
27. Another take on this would be that procreation is the
imago dei
. Other rabbinic texts would certainly interpret that way.

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