Read Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture Online

Authors: Daniel Boyarin

Tags: #Religion, #Judaism, #General

Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (28 page)

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Page 151
another major Babylonian authority, to the effect that a Rabbi should sleep with his wife at least once a week. It is not surprising that, given the weight of halakhic and moral authority to be overcome, symbols with great cultural authority were necessary, and there is none greater in Jewish tradition than Rabbi Akiva. The thoroughly romantic quality of the story of his marriage to Rachel underscores dramatically how extremely disrupting the practice must have beena disruptiveness that is allowed place in all of the other stories but completely suppressed in the story of Rabbi Akiva. Twice, the story emphasizes the fact that the Rabbi had been given "permission" by his bride to be away for so long. The "solution" that the Babylonian Talmud produces is to create a system of enormous socio-cultural pressure on women to "voluntarily" renounce their rights. As we shall see below, this Babylonian innovation was vigorously contested from Palestine on near-feminist grounds.
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Close reading of the story will show how it performs as narrative its ideological and cultural function of female subjugation and how its deployment of the romance genre is crucial as well. The key to my reading is the name, Rachel, which the tradition has universally (and with good textual warrant, as we will see) assigned to Rabbi Akiva's wife. This name, while quite common for Hebrew women, is also the usual word for ewe.
31
The entire story of the romance of Rabbi Akiva and Rachel is generated by one root metaphor: Akiva as the shepherd and Rachel as a ewe. Rabbi Akiva's relationship with his wife is figured in several ways as the relationship of a shepherd to a beloved ewe-lamb; the very site of their erotic idyll is a barn. Rachel's declaration that the "righteous [shepherd] knows the soul [desire] of his animal" is, in fact, the key moment in the story. The metaphor of male lover as shepherd and female beloved as ewe is, in fact, common in biblical discourse, used frequently as a figure for the relationship of God and Israel and appearing often in the Song of Songs. The story of Rabbi Akiva and Rachel is thus a plausible narrative development of a common biblical erotic metaphorical model.
30. That is, the opposition grows out of a representation of women's subjectivity (not that it is a presentation of actual women's subjectivity). See also below, n. 40.
31. Since Rachel's father, the quintessential fat cat, also has an emblematic name in this text, "Satisfied Dog," I do not think that reading Rachel's name as emblematic is overdrawn. Note that her name is only hinted at in the talmudic text, but so strongly that the tradition univocally understood that her name was Rachel. The very absence of explicit reference becomes, accordingly, almost a means of drawing attention to the symbolic value of the name. See further support for this point below.
 
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The relationship between shepherd and ewe is an extraordinarily poignant and marked liaison within the context of the pastoral culture. As obnoxious as we may find the status of wife that is encoded in this metaphor, we will not be able to understand it or its power to persuade without taking seriously the cultural context in which it was generated. In order to get some feel for what this relationship might have evoked in the rabbinic culture, a vivid biblical text will be helpful. The text is the famous parable of the Poor Man's Ewe-Lamb in 2 Samuel 12:
And God sent Nathan to David and he came to him and said to him: "There were two men in the city, one rich and one poor. [2] The rich man had very great flocks and cattle. [3] The poor man had nothing but one small ewe-lamb, which he had acquired and which he sustained and she grew up with him and with his children together; from his bread she would eat, and from his glass she would drink, and she would lie in his arms and was a daughter to him. [4] And a guest came to the rich man, and he didn't want to take from his flock or herd to cook for the guest who had come to him, and he took the ewe-lamb of the poor man and cooked it for his guest." [5] David was horrified, and said to Nathan, "That man should be executed."
This is an extraordinary picture from the point of view of our cultural stance. The animal is adopted into the family as a foundling child would be. Note as well the explicit class-coding in the story; the poor man feeds and cares for the animal as if human; the rich man thinks of the animal (and of the poor man!) as only an instrument to fulfill his economic needs. There is, moreover, a powerful erotic valence to the word-picture of the man sharing his bed with the ewe, an overtone the talmudic Rabbis do not miss: "By sleeping in his arms, she is a daughter?! Rather, a wife" (Megillah 13a). The midrashic comment is based on a linguistic subtlety; the word for daughter is
bat,
while the word for house, often used to mean wife, is
bayt
.
32
The context in which this parable is told makes this erotic overtone inescapable: David, the king with many wives, is accused of stealing the one beloved wife of his servant Uriah. The biblical text encodes a very vivid picture of an ideal marriage as like the love of a
32. The slippage between wife and daughter is not accidental; "my daughter" was a common mode of address used by the Rabbis toward their wives and other adult women. Moreover, as Chana Kronfeld remarks, erotic love is often figured in biblical (and later Hebrew) parlance as kinship, thus "my sister, my bride" in the Song of Songs.
 
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