Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (173 page)

Read Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture Online

Authors: Daniel Boyarin

Tags: #Religion, #Judaism, #General

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the result and cause of a denigration of sexuality. We would wish, then, to see them as antitheses and not discursive allies. By exploring here the figuration of sexuality in the rabbinic culture, I hope to show why Mopsik's analysis is powerfully revealing of what the cultural stakes are in our dissociation of desire from reproduction.
¹¹

One of the most pervasive metaphors for sex in talmudic literature associates it with food. (See also Chapter 4.) A close reading of this metaphorical field will provide important clues to the rabbinic discourse of sexuality in general, in contrast to that of other cultural formations, in which sexuality was figured in the semantic field of elimination. For example, wives in the talmudic texts to be discussed below describe their and their husbands' sexual practice as "setting the table" and "turning it over," and the Talmud itself produces a comparison between sexuality and foodeither of which one may "cook'' however one pleases, provided only that it is kosher to begin with. This metaphorical association is very productive in the culture, producing (or supporting) normative determinations of various types. Reading it will, I think, help us to see the connection between the two splits that Mopsik connects genetically.

Let us think about the functions of eating in our culture. I think we all assume that its primary purpose has to do with the continuation of the vitality of the body, though we also recognize other very important functions and values for eating, including pleasure in good food, social binding from sharing food and eating together, and even ritual purposes in many groups from particular acts of eating. All of these are understood, however, as being subordinated to and generated by the primary function of eating, the continuation of life in the body. We consider absurd if not repelling such cultural practices as that of those Romans who reportedly caused themselves to vomit so that they could eat again.
¹²I think that for the Rabbis, sexuality was conceived of in an analogous fashion. It was clear to them that the primary purpose for the existence of sexuality was the continuation of creationin many senses: first and foremost, procreation. However, there were also well-understood and valorized secondary purposes for sexuality: pleasure, intimacy, and corporeal well-being. When


11. This becomes, then, another moment in the discrediting of the "repressive hypothesis," carried out so brilliantly in Foucault (1980).


12. In the Middle Ages some rabbinic thinkers would actualize this aspect of the metaphor in a way that the talmudic Rabbis never envisioned, regarding all non-procreative sex as equivalent to eating and then vomiting (Biale 1992).

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the Rabbis speak of pleasure and intimacy as leading to the conception of desirable children, then, they are simply integrating various realms of erotic life into one harmonious whole. When for whatever reason sex could not be procreative, its other purposes remained valid and valorized, for as we have seen, in this culture's normative determinations, sex was permitted and indeed encouraged with pregnant and sterile wives. And when pregnancy was contraindicated for medical reasons, contraception was permitted for the pleasure and health of the body.
¹³Sexuality was primarily oriented toward the needs of the body, and the central need of the body was to continue its life, through eating and ultimately through reproducing.

Interpreting Mopsik's remark then, I would suggest that what occasions our discomfort with both the indissociable connection of sex with procreation and the pervasive metaphors of sex as eating is our desire to spiritualize sexuality itself. Still inhabiting the platonic universe of dualism, in which the body is devalued vis-à-vis the spirit, and yet desiring to valorize sexuality, the culture discovered a powerful strategy. Much of our culture has spiritualized desire, removing it from the realm of such bodily processes as becoming pregnant: the body of desire is almost not a body at all but an adjunct of the spirit. The effect is a reinscription within desire of that spiritualizing impulse of which Judith Butler speaks as transcending desire: "That sexuality now embodies this religious impulse in the form of the demand for love (considered to be an 'absolute' demand) that is distinct from both need and desire (a kind of ecstatic transcendence that eclipses sexuality altogether) lends further credibility to the Symbolic as that which operates for human subjects as the inaccessible but all-determining deity" (1990, 56). In the split of the two bodies, sexuality itself eclipses sexuality altogether by disembodying it. This is part and parcelif a sort of reversalof that very moralizing process regarding sexuality that Foucault has documented so powerfully in his works. Peter Gardella has documented this process in American culture: "Finally, experts on sex inherited their faith in liberation through orgasm from

13. Interestingly enough, in the early modern period when technologies of contraception became readily available, the condom was rejected as a mode of contraception by rabbinic authorities, while such devices as the pessary were deemed acceptable. The rationale advanced by at least one leading seventeenth-century rabbi was that the condom interfered with the "pleasure of one body with another," which
was the natural purpose of sex
.

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Christians who had found freedom from sin in moments of religious ecstasy. The quest for ecstasy in orgasm then led people to neglect sensuality. Western mystical tradition has always known that in ecstasy the action of the senses is suspended. In America the pursuit of orgasm as the equivalent of religious ecstasy quickly became an ascetic practice" (1985, 7 and 117). According to Gardella, then, that very Christian impulse which had produced the doctrine of sensuality as sin was continued in the doctrine of a paradoxically disembodied sex.

For the Rabbis, sexuality in general was a powerful drive with very destructive possibilities but essentially a creative force in the world's life. Its proper deployment was as unproblematic as proper eating, and violation of its proper practice was similar to the eating of food that is nonkosher, a violation of the laws of the Torah, no more or less, excepting, of course, the social consequences of some types of sexual transgression, notably those that produce bastard children.
¹⁴The hidden workings of desire have not yet becomeas they would in the Middle Ages for many Jewish thinkersthe object of an intense activity of personal scrutiny and the marker of the state of the soul. Foucault could have supported his claim that "sexuality" in the modern sense, that is in the sense that someone has a sexuality, is culturally specific to our modern formation by referring to late-antique Jewish culture as well as to the Greeks and Romans.

In fine, then, what I am suggesting is that rabbinic Judaism was marked by a double discourse on human good and evil.
¹⁵The first was a moral psychology in which a fully formed Evil Instinct contested with a Good Instinct within the breast of each human being. The goal was, of course, for the Good Instinct to defeat the Evil Instinct. There is a tendencybut only thatfor the Evil Instinct to be identified with sexual-

14. Ironically, Gardella continues: "Marabel Morgan, evangelical author of
The Total Woman,
urged wives to seduce their husbands every day for a week. But she also illustrated the gulf that innocent ecstasy set between sex and sensuality when she wrote that 'sex is as clean and pure as eating cottage cheese'" (1985, 7). The desensualization of sex here is not in the metaphor of food but in the choice of menu. One could write as well, "Sex is as meaty and bloody as eating rare steak," a suggestion that I imagine some of my readers will find crude, thus helping me make my point.


15. I do not find any way of sorting these two discourses chronologically or geographically, between authorities or between documents. The Yetser Hara' could be the subject of an entire monograph, and I have barely scratched its surface here. Cf. Leaney (1966, 42).

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