DEEPER, LOUDER, HARDER: Lust and Love in Three Stories: A Compilation of Multicultural Erotica

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Yet, in contrast to the tyrannical Roman system, God chooses to make room for human choice in matchmaking. When God proposes matches for Adam, God gives Adam the prerogative to accept or to decline those candidates. Human couples must select one another freely and then voluntarily negotiate a contract to govern their living together. Here even Divine omnipotence, let alone legal sanctions and rabbinic wisdom, often prove inadequate to enforce domestic tranquility.

By contrast, God recognizes the uniqueness and diversity among human creatures. The human monarch produces coins bearing an identical image of himself. Standardization is the mark of his authority impressed on metals, just as imperial authority permits him to impress his will on all human beings and to form ranks of identical soldiers marching together in a phalanx like a machine God is greater still than any monarch, because God mints human beings according to the same mold, the image of God, and yet God makes each one unique Mishna Sanhedrin 4: For that very reason, in the midrash of Rabbi Yossi ben Halafta, God must invest much more effort to find compatible matches, since each person has different singular traits.

While Bar Halafta praises God for succeeding where the Roman matron fails, he admits readily the limits of divine power and of all forms of coercion in marital relations. Some [couples] are crying and some are rejoicing. God brings couples together even against their will. In that way God sets them free from depression and isolation. This is the same God who saw Adam alone, declaring, It is not good for a human being to be alone Gen.

On the other hand, even God has many failed matches to his credit — some couples go singing and some go crying. In the verse Rabbi Yossi ben Halafta quotes, placing singles together in a home is parallel to releasing prisoners. The parallel suggests that to be married is to be liberated from the prison of loneliness and that coming home is a form of redemption. Yet marriage too can become a prison, when it is a bad marriage. So much so that divorce is preferable. Even with the best match, marital relations need constant tweaking, renewal of love and often major overhauls to persist and to flourish.

Relationships are hard for so many reasons — different personalities, opposite genders, variant sexual and emotional needs. Issues arise from different upbringing in the past and career issues and domestic tasks in the present. Emotional challenges are posed by infidelity, on one hand, and by obsessive distrust, on the other.

Further, passionate love decays when familiarity breeds contempt. True, in the rabbinic nuptial blessings, bride and groom are lionized as a loving couple, like Adam and Eve in the Garden. A thousand years later, Martin Luther, once a monk but now married, concurs wholeheartedly with the view that marriages are hard to maintain: What it costs to bring married people [back] together! And after that it takes much more effort to keep them together. Oh, how good things are when married people are together at table and in bed! Even if they occasionally quarrel and complain, that does not hurt; marriage does not always run smoothly, it is a chancy thing.

One has to commit oneself to it. Adam and Eve will have fought with one another lustily indeed over nine hundred years. All of this derived from their fall and disobedience and was caused by it. You are not the only ones, my dear sirs, who are having a great deal of trouble with marriage matters; others are having the same experience.

I myself am greatly plagued by them. Towards that sacred purpose, Talmudic Marital Dramas gathers the insights of rabbinic tradition relevant to these gnarled domestic issues.

See a Problem?

According to the midrash about Rabbi Yossi ben Halafta, private marital issues are as important and as difficult hence as in need of divine wisdom , as the big issues of national redemption and human freedom associated with the splitting of the Red Sea. The Significance of Narratives on Marital Troubles: In a word, he found himself lonely and forsaken.

Another human persona is necessary to complete man's existence, to endow it with existential meaning and directedness…. Marriage is not just a successful partnership, but an existential community. On one hand, each member of a heterosexual couple discovers how different they are from one another and how hard it is to communicate between their different worldviews: However, they are also different; their existential experiences are incommensurate.

The I-awareness of Adam is totally incomprehensible to Eve, and vice versa. Each of them has a secret which neither will ever betray. Man-persona and woman-persona resemble each other and at the same time do not understand each other. She is ezer ke-negdo, his helper and opponent at the same time. For man and woman differ not only physiologically This is the way in which the Creator has ordained human lonely destiny. In the interpersonal existential tension, both man and woman find redemption. Their deeper aspiration is to achieve existential dialogue and partnership through covenant: And the objective medium of attaining that meeting is the assumption of covenantal obligations which are based on the principle of equality.

Law provides the institutional arrangements, such as the ketubah marriage contract, indispensable for building a dialogic covenantal relationship. For my teacher, David Hartman, as well, marriage is not merely a private matter, but an embodiment of the same covenantal love between God and Israel. Following the rabbinic midrash, he understands the image of God within human beings in terms of the divine and human need for companionship.

Therefore, the ideal human being created in the Divine image is not a self-sufficient creature freed of needs. Rather humans, like God himself, appreciate finitude and interdependency. Human neediness is not just a fact, an unfortunate condition to be remedied, but the basic medium of human relationship. In marriage, the give-and-take of care is what makes us human beings in the most positive sense. Hartman celebrates such human interdependency — physical, emotional and intellectual — as the key to the healthiest relationships and to the telos of human existence.

Marriage is understood through the concept of brit, covenantal love: The biblical tradition, which expresses the relationship of God and the people of Israel, is a paradigm case of this outlook. The Other Woman and the Fear of Betrayed Loyalty In conceptualizing the human love relationship, 20th century rabbinic philosophers, like Soloveitchik, Buber and Hartman, employ the model of the covenantal relationship between God and Israel. But rabbinic marriage is not spiritualized or idealized. Covenantal love is inseparable from an anxious demand for allegiance.

The Biblical God feared that Israel, who had entered into a monogamous, marriage-like contract with God at Sinai, would be attracted by the sexual wiles of the pagans of the land of Israel Numbers Further, Maimonides, inspired by the biblical law of the sotah, insists that in marriage every husband is expected to keep his wife under his paternalistic control, lest she engage in adultery. Only thus can she restore his trust in her. As we shall see, jealousy is central to the rabbinic pathology of marital relations in multiple dimensions.

The monotheist Jew, especially the rabbi or the priest, is enticed by the polytheist foreign woman. For example, Rabbi Elazar ben Dordia and Rabbi Tzadok are lured away from their love for Torah by the attractions of prostitutes or noble Roman matrons. The woman, especially but not exclusively the foreign woman, endangers the monogamous relationship with an all-consuming love for Torah and allegiance to Judaism. The Rabbis tend to conflate the culture of sexuality prostitution and of idolatrous Roman civilization.

The scholar, enamored of an eroticized Torah, becomes, in effect and in affect, a female partner as well as a stand-in for God. He turns his back on his flesh-and-blood wife and neglects, as do many otherwise law-abiding rabbis, his conjugal duties to visit his wife regularly. It is unusual to find a wife like Rabbi Akiba who insists that her husband abandon her for 24 years to devote himself to Torah. Rather than feeling jealousy and resentment, she partakes vicariously in his love affair and regards his studies as a mark of his devotion to and obedience to his earthly wife.

In rabbinic literature, these desperate efforts to reinforce loyalty often undermine, rather than preserve, a committed love relationship. The same stories and laws that portray betrayal also address its opposite. Those positive legacies of rabbinic narratives and laws are the lessons of our study as well. Rashi conceptualizes the ideal marriage as a relationship of trust and hence love, while he condemns irrational suspicion and obsessive control as contributing factors to marital infidelity.

He puts in the mouth of a wife who is subjected to unfounded suspicions the retort: Rashi bases his moral and legal demand that husbands show love and loyalty to their covenantal partners on the poetic description of the prophet Malachi who describes the female spouse as "my companion and my wife in covenant" Malachi 2: In prophetic poetry, covenantal love is a metaphor to explain the passionate God-Israel marriage. The prophets generated inspiring as well as terrifying pictures of couple love and spousal violence.

For him a marriage defiled by infidelity and vengeful abandonment can be healed and replaced with a covenantal recommitment of trust: I will betroth espouse you to me forever; I will betroth you in justice and law, in goodness and love compassion. I will betroth you in faithfulness, and then you will know Adonai. I will show my love to the one I called 'Not my loved one.

Friedman describes his vocation felicitously: Every column or blog has to either turn on a lightbulb in your reader's head—illuminate an issue in a way that will inspire them to look at it anew—or stoke an emotion in your reader's heart that prompts them to feel or act more intensely or differently about an issue. The ideal column does both. At the same time, I want to warm the reader to the urgency of investing in loving human relationships in a time of crisis. This series of books explores these large themes piecemeal through the prism of tiny vessels, finely-crafted stories of marital relations, miniatures of rabbinic belle lettres.

In books one, two, three, and four, we analyze descriptive renderings of marriage under stress. In books five, six and seven we also chart prescriptive marital advice in rabbinic literature.

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Talmudic anecdotes, Kabbalist prescriptions and contemporary Haredi instructions to bridegrooms generate a debate about the guidelines for conjugal lovemaking book five, The Talmudic Kama Sutra. Rashi and Maimonides present idealized models of marriage implicit in rabbinic marital law book six, Marital Friendship and Covenantal Partnership. Hillel and Shammai and their heirs debate the question: In both the prescriptive halakhic books as well as the descriptive literary books, the analysis of narratives is a central tool of this series.

In analyzing these intriguing and often bizarre tales, we will consider the Biblical and Rabbinic contexts into which they are set by the editors of Talmudic literature and engage in conversations with medieval and especially modern commentators — historical, cultural and psychological — who have sought to illuminate them historically and to elicit their relevance to our lives.

Back to the Classics: Reading Rabbinic Narratives The human being is a story-telling animal. Alongside of theology, politics, law and history, Jewish literature has long specialized in the art of the narrative — Biblical, Rabbinic, Hasidic and modern novelistic stories. In this study, you are invited to enjoy and ponder brief, enigmatic tales of the Rabbis about their own relationships.

These stories are beautiful in Baudelaire's sense: The gaps and conundrums are more obvious than the moral lessons of these stories. In reading Talmudic narratives closely, we revert from the modern form of extensive reading to the pre-modern art of intensive reading practiced by students of poetry and of prose classics from the Bible to Homer and from Plato to the Renaissance. In his masterful book, The Gutenberg Elegies, Svert Birkets explains how classics have been read and ought to be read still: Quantity is elevated over quality.

When books are rare, hard to obtain, and, expensive, the reader must compensate through intensified focus, reading the same passages over and over, memorizing, inscribing the words deeply on the slate of the attention, subjecting them to an interpretive pressure not unlike what students of scripture practice upon their texts. This is ferocious reading—prison or "desert island" reading — and where it does not assume depth, it creates it.

We tend to think of reading as a means to an end. Like driving, it gets us from here to there…. But such an attitude greatly diminishes the scope and importance of reading. Reading argues for a larger conception of the meaningful, and its implicit injunction seldom heeded even by [intensive] readers is that we change our lives, that we strive to live them in the light of meaning.

Birkets explains that the intensive method transforms reading from information-gathering to meaning-making. In that sense it is congruent with rabbinic study as a didactic search for moral and religious teachings: Everything in the book exists under the aspect of meaning; every sentence takes its place in the overall design. To participate in this meaning is to make the radical assumption — for oneself no less than for the characters — that the least moment will take its appointed place in the whole, and that at last all parts of the whole will flash forth their pattern of significance.

We bring our substance to them and make them live. What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that a life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny. That, God or no God, life has a unitary pattern inscribed within it a pattern that we could discern for ourselves if we could somehow lay the whole of our experience out like a map. We invite you to read these bizarre stories from another time and place, to delve deeply into them, reading them over and over from different perspectives provided by perceptive modern readers. Then you must struggle to make sense out of them for yourself.

In the process, perhaps you may find your own angle of vision and your own world of relationships altered. In these books, you will not simply be listening to my interpretation of these ancient gems, but joining a discussion with a chorus of contemporary readers who have fallen into a love — and sometimes a hate — relationship with these controversial tales. These scholars have chosen to research these stories not merely as academics but as seekers of wisdom who find them personally significant. You are best advised to proceed to any book in the seven-part series — in any order see the complete table of contents at the end of this volume.

In each book you will find short stories of marital drama that illuminate the challenges to developing loving and loyal relationships and the pitfalls to marital intimacy posed by betrayal of loyalty, on one side, and of manipulative control and obsessive suspicion, on the other. Along with each story, we will explicate in brief the legal and institutional superstructures within which these marital conflicts are conducted.

Rabbinic marital law tries to clarify marital dilemmas: Both the literary and the legal aspects will be explored from various points of views and placed within multiple contexts. See a detailed table of contents of each book in the appendix of this volume. Yet for those interested in methodologies for investigating classic rabbinic quasi-biographical narratives, like those told of Rabbi Meir and his assertive wife Bruria or of Rabbi Akiba and his self-sacrificing wife, you will find in the continuation of this book, Romantic Rabbis: How to Study Talmudic Tales of Love and Lust, rich reflections on method and genre garnered from the modern commentators who will be cited in interpreting each story.

Our goal here is not to determine the best literary theory and justify its use exclusively, but to survey and compare the historical-cum-literary approaches of many modern scholars to rabbinic tales. Besides responding to the vocation of the professional historian and literary critic to analyze classical texts in terms of their original historical contexts, most of these scholars also study Torah as committed Jews who believe deeply that this classical literature can illuminate contemporary and perennial concerns with love and marriage. Four methodological aspects will be explored briefly in this volume: The Drama of Free Creativity In contrast with many academic studies, in this book I assemble eclectically many perspectives on the same story without, for the most part, trying to determine which one is the most objective historically and philologically.

For us the truth of a classical text is its protean power to stimulate many readings. Our pluralist approach is championed by theoreticians like William James and John Dewey, the philosophical pragmatists of 20th century America: It is enough to ask of each of us that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and to make the most of his own blessings without presuming to regulate the rest of the vast field. First, Nietzsche dismisses the fiction that human scholars can be objective by taking a neutral stance: My dear philosophers, let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a "pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject"; let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as "pure reason," "absolute spirituality," "knowledge in itself': By combining them, he contends, we achieve a more comprehensive point of view that transcends any subjective prejudice: There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective "knowing;" and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our "concept" of this thing, our "objectivity," be.

But to eliminate the will altogether, to suspend each and every affect, supposing we were capable of this — what would that mean but to castrate the intellect? Finally, he urges us to be patient with the frustrations that come when each interpretation is overthrown by the next. We need to develop a discipline that welcomes multiple perspectives: Precisely because we seek knowledge, let us not be ungrateful to such resolute reversals of accustomed perspectives and valuations with which the spirit has, with apparent mischievousness and futility, raged against itself for so long: Genealogy of Morals ; Following in footsteps of Nietzsche, but also of the Rabbis, I present to you a plethora of interpretations of these biographical tales about rabbis and their relationships with women.

In contradistinction to academic research aimed at a univocal, objective, historical understanding of texts, postmodern literary pluralists have developed an alternative methodology: Texts do not have one clear intention. Below the surface several meanings stew in a state of potentiality. The author's self-conscious aims compete with unconscious ones, with unintended possibilities. Beyond the literal meaning of the words, beyond the decoded contextual meaning of a text, several equally plausible meanings wait for actualization. The loyalty to textual concreteness while multiplying interpretations characterizes rabbinic midrashic exegesis as well.

Emmanuel Levinas commends Talmudic exegesis for its persistent concreteness: That is what Levinas appreciates in the teaching of Rabbi Yehoshua who said: But to find hidden truths, the learner must be active, even aggressive, in wresting multiple meanings from each verse. In Rabbi Ishmael's School it was taught: And like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces Jer. Babylonian Geonim 8thth C. Maimonides 12th Century 39 The Recovery of Aesthetics: The Italian Renaissance 16th C.

Ephraim Urbach 56 Disciple Training Manuals: The literary study of rabbinic mini-narratives is a new phenomenon, dating approximately to , when Yona Fraenkel published his groundbreaking popular book, Studies in the Spiritual World of the Aggadic Story Hebrew. These biographical tales had almost never been studied literarily.

Their standing as sources of factual truth, along with the value of aggada in general, had been problematic for many philosophically oriented rabbis for more than a thousand years. While traditional Talmudists took the historical accuracy of these stories for granted, their real interest was to derive from them their legal implications.

By contrast, in the modern era, 19th and 20th century academic historians used them to construct a critical history by filtering out their supernatural elements. More recently, late 20th century historians of the rabbinic era have cast doubt on the veracity of almost all of these tales as historical sources. At the same time, during the last thirty years, a renaissance in the literary and normative study of these tales has taken place both in Israeli and American Jewish academic circles and in Israeli adult study groups.

This academic phenomenon has generated several curious cultural events on the Israeli scene. In an acclaimed Israeli film, Footnote , the filmmaker Joseph Cedar chose for his main theme the generational conflict between a father and son, both on the faculty of the prestigious Hebrew University Talmud Department. Calderon, herself a secular feminist who wrote her doctorate at the Hebrew University on rabbinic tales, is the first Knesset member in history to teach a Talmudic text to her Knesset colleagues, including many Orthodox rabbis.

The video of her speech was very popular on YouTube. The interpretations proposed by Calderon and Kosman feature prominently in our series of books. When Fraenkel established this new academic field of study at the Hebrew University in the late s , he identified these narrative texts as a genre of literature worthy of close reading in the humanist tradition. He contested alternative approaches that he felt devalued these stories as historical legends or as popular folklore.

His approach has been adopted by his intellectual heirs and integrated in the newer schools of culture-critique and gender studies among new generations of Jewish studies academics. Like modern short stories, they have a surprise twist. Like poems, their word choice is artistic. They highlight keywords leitmotif words — whether in Hebrew or Aramaic — that play off on one another. As in Biblical narratives, rabbinic narratives use dialogue and dramatic action to convey their central meanings rather than introspective monologues, formal speeches and third-person descriptions of character or setting.

Second, the themes of these narratives contribute to the humanist search for wisdom about existential human issues, such as familial and master-disciple relationships, death and love, and the ultimate goals of life. Third, as expressions of the rabbinic literature, these narratives integrate imaginative reinterpretations of Biblical verses, popular mottos and especially rabbinic laws and institutions belonging to the world of the Beit Midrash.

Joshua Levinson,2 Aryeh Cohen,3 and Stephen Wald have produced the best surveys of the history of the study of aggada and our discussion owes a great deal to their insightful work. History methodologies of interpretation: First, classic texts must be regarded as canonized, fixed. Second, interpretation is mandated by the sacred status of the tales which endows them with normative authority and attributes to them spiritual messages. Third, the readers of a later generation must feel sufficiently at a distance from the classics, linguistically and culturally, to need an interpretative bridge to understand them.

Each school of interpreters of aggada arises at a particular juncture in cultural history. It serves a vital need of the community in reclaiming these classics after their value has been called into question. The great interpretative traditions are responses to the cultural need of a society to claim and to defend the authority of the classic literature from which they derive their identity in the face of changing paradigms of meaning, value and truth.

Unofficially, certain kinds of texts are marginalized, while others are celebrated as canonical, as the true representative of the Tradition. Only when a genre of texts and its interpretation have established a valued place in a culture do interpreters bother to engage with them. Otherwise, who would publish, preserve, read and appreciate their interpretative work. The commentaries, traditional and modern, even when produced by so-called objective historical scholars, betray the interests of their own culture in retrieving these texts in a particular way.

For many centuries, rabbinic tales and midrash aggada did not engender disciplined study in a way that singled them out within the Talmudic corpus. Rabbinic quasi-biographical stories were studied carefully as halakhic exemplars in a legal debate, but their literary and historical implications drew almost no interpretive interest. During the era of the Geonim in Arab-ruled Babylonia 8thth C.

The newly identified aggada as a genre appeared to them to deviate from recently adopted scientific, philosophical and theological standards of truth in the Arabic- speaking world. Also the sectarian Karaites from the 7th C. The Geonim needed to defend the Talmudic corpus upon which their authority was founded, so they often accepted the criticism of aggada and demoted its status in order to salvage the dignity and authority of halakha and Jewish theology.

In their summaries of Talmudic law, some Geonim sifted out aggadic creations, including most quasi-biographical stories, from their authoritative summaries of halakhic Talmudic texts. Maimonides saw in Talmudic aggada a dangerous source of misunderstanding for literalists and simpletons, the bulk of the Jewish people.

The literalist exegesis of aggada leads to anthropomorphic theological errors. Thus it undermines the claim of the Jewish people to be a sophisticated people possessing a Torah of wisdom. Resorting to the technique of midrash, this [deficient] category of people interprets what the Sages say literally, and extract from them things that, if the [gentile] nations would have heard, they would have said: If they do not understand, would that they have kept their mouth shut!

Or else, they could have said: Maimonides, Introduction to Pereq Heleq, Commentary on the Mishna Therefore, Maimonides recommended that aggadot not be studied in depth: All these things are legends divrei aggada , and in what pertains to legends one should not attempt a rational examination. Each person contemplates the [scriptural] verse according to that which he sees in the verse.

Now you may say, as many do: The content of these things, and whatever belongs to this category, defines them as legends, regardless of where they are written,v whether it is in the Talmud, or in homiletic writings, or in books of legends. Midrashic legends are not, however, identical with rabbinic biographies which Maimonides may have regarded as biographical reports. Factual accounts have a value, but the literary features and miraculous events reported are not worthy of analysis.

Rabbi Yehiel of Paris distinguished between his belief in all the laws of the Talmud, which is obligatory, and his disbelief in dubious aggadot: Had these biographical narratives been considered literary fictions, the Geonim would have completely dismissed them as insignificant. At best the rabbinic folktales could be preserved under the classification of moral fables or light literary entertainment to cheer up a persecuted Jewish community. Thus the poet and exegete Abraham Ibn Ezra Spain, d. Of course, the halakhic implications of these stories were studied carefully, even while disregarding their literary form and message.

Maimonides 12th Century As in the era of the Geonim, in the early Middle Ages in Spain and Provence, rabbinic philosophers, such as Maimonides and Meiri, faced an intellectual assault on the irrational aspects of the literal meaning of the aggada. Following Plato and Arab philosophers, Maimonides believed that the higher levels of rational truths were only beneficial for the wise, while the people needed to be educated in mythic terms that were inaccurate scientifically but could be manipulated to encourage beneficial behaviors.

Thus aggada and anthropomorphic features of the Bible achieved two goals simultaneously. While read literally, they taught ethical behavior, as for example when God is described as angry at immoral behavior. He believed that Moses and all the prophets had also been philosophers whose knowledge was later conveyed to the Greek philosophers.

History Maimonides rediscovered these truths encoded in literary "fictions" in the written and oral Torah. The alliance between philosophy and aggada was mutually beneficial, for philosophic authority was accommodated to Torah and, in turn, philosophy gained traditional religious authority. Literature was not valued for its aesthetics, but for its ability to mediate truth through a veil by inviting close allegorical study.

Only the methodologically astute could penetrate the veil. Armed with the right knowledge and method in advance, scholars could glimpse the true philosophic system via the literary parable. In the medieval and early modern era, the kabbalists used allegorical and many other non-literalist readings of Bible to generate mystical truths, not otherwise detectable from the literal and contextual reading of Torah. He categorizes them not as aesthetic literature, but rather simultaneously as actual historical events, as moral parables and as esoteric spiritual allegories.

Maimonides, his father, follows the Platonic tradition in condemning the poets and the narrative mythology of the classic tradition as false, misleading and immoral. They are a waste of time, like the books Arabs read about ancient lore, the customs of kings, the genealogies of tribes, poetry and so on. Even on non-sacred days, I do not know who gave permission to read them, since it says: Do not sit in a house of party making. Confronted by the division between aggada and pshat, on the one hand, and the dismissal of literary fiction and history, on the other, the identification of aggada as a parable or an allegory was a convenient solution.

The Recovery of Aesthetics: He also rehabilitates the standing of the human faculty of imagination itself. Aristotle taught the value of fictions that are neither about philosophic and theological truths nor about moral dictums. History their cathartic effect on emotions. To gain acceptance with the Church, the humanists who wished to celebrate aesthetics needed to justify these fictions by declaring that, while false in factual content and illogical in form, they have beneficial social and moral affects.

The Renaissance revalidated and then revived the field of literature — through its study and through the composition of plays and musical oratoria, but this trend barely affected the Jewish community beyond Italy. The Maharal of Prague 16th C. The truth of aggada is not factual, rather each aggada captures its own aspect of the complex truth of reality and of Torah through the prism of the unique soul and perspective God granted to each individual.

The Holy One appeared like this icon that has many faces in every direction. If a thousand people look at it, she looks at each one. Thus, the Holy One when speaking to each and every one of the people of Israel, each one would say: With me, God is speaking. Rabbi Yossi son of Rabbi Haninah said: The Speaker [God] spoke with them according to the powers of each and every one.

Don't be incredulous about that, for when the manna descended to Israel, each one tasted it according to each one's powers: The children according to their capacity, the youths according to their capacity, and the elderly according to their capacity. For the children, it tasted like the mother's milk from the breast, as its says, its taste was like the breast, like rich oil Numbers Yet the Holy One told them: Though you see Me appear in many images, [don't think I am many gods], rather I am the same one on the Sea and at Sinai, as I said: God appeared appropriately according to needs of each activity, and of each thing…of the behavior of each generation.

God appeared to them with an angry face, with a sober face, with a persuasive face and with a laughing face. Angry for teaching Tanakh, for a father must teaching his son Torah with awe; sober for teaching Mishna, persuasive [explaining] for teaching Talmud, and laughing for teaching Aggada. History and TB Hagiga 3b. The Maharal explains that the disputes between scholars in halakha and aggada are a reflection of their blessed innate God-given differences: Human beings are divided in their intelligence and it is impossible that the minds of all human beings can follow the same path.

Rather he brings out what each aggada adds to a complex picture of Divine reality. However, the Sovereign of Sovereigns, God, created each human being in the image of the first human being, yet no one is identical with any other. In studying Torah no viewpoint should be censored and suppressed. Freedom of conscience and of speech both apply to Torah study. The Maharal cites Averroes Ibn Rushd who had argued that you should always, when presenting a philosophical argument, cite the views of your opponents.

Failure to do so is an implicit acknowledgement of the weakness of your own case: It is not proper that we despise the words [of our adversaries], but rather we must draw them as close as we can…. Therefore, it is proper, out of love of reason and knowledge, that you should not summarily reject anything that opposes your own ideas, especially so if your adversary does not intend merely to provoke you, but rather to declare his beliefs.

On the contrary, you should, at such times, say, 'Speak up as much as you want, say whatever you wish, and do not say later that had you been able to speak you would have replied further'…. This is the opposite of what some people think, namely, that when you prevent someone from speaking against religion that strengthens religion. That is not so, because curbing the words of an opponent in religious matters is nothing but the curbing and enfeebling of religion itself…. When a powerful man seeks out an opponent in order to demonstrate his own strength, he very much wants his opponent to exercise as much power as he can, so that if he defeats him, his own victory will be more pronounced.

What strength is manifested when the opponent is not permitted to fight?

Hence, one should not silence those who speak against religion…for to do so is an admission of weakness. Each viewpoint brings out another system and another aspect of Torah; each has its own place and its own value: Three cultural trends of this era generate three approaches to rabbinic tales: Folklore is important, because it is the creative product of a living nation.

Nationalist Jews first learned to cherish their own Talmudic stories qua folklore from the German revival of national folklore by the brothers Grimm who collected German folk tales in order to shape the revival of their national identity. For the Jewish national revival of the Romantic Age, the anonymity of the authors of rabbinic tales and their popular style made them prime representatives of the collective living spirit of the Jewish people as a whole. They opposed the idealization of rationalist philosophies of the medieval elites, like Maimonides, who was popular among modern anti-Zionist Reform and Orthodox rabbis in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

History told and retold in new ways from generation to generation. The Zionist poet H. Bialik rhapsodized on the process by which oral literature is polished anew in each retelling: Louis Ginsburg collected and rewrote rabbinic aggada in his monumental work aptly titled, not the "Legends of the Rabbis or the Talmud," but Legends of the Jews In Odessa the national Hebrew poet H. Bialik, along with Y.

www.farmersmarketmusic.com: Jorja Tabu: Books, Biography, Blogs, Audiobooks, Kindle

Rawnitzki, collected and published Sefer HaAggada , an annotated anthology of all rabbinic stories, exegesis and maxims by theme in order to preserve, make accessible and enrich the popular culture of the Jewish people. Thus Talmud was extracted from the hands of elitist Orthodox rabbis and reworked to serve the needs of Hebrew-speaking secular nationalist adults and their children, and especially Zionist educators. Only later in the midth century at the Hebrew University, did the academic analysis of aggada as folklore develop.

In that populist spirit, contemporary scholars continue to research rabbinic folklore. Each demonstrates how aggada reflects the way of life of a people who embody human values. Aggada focuses attention on marginalized members of society and brings them to the center stage of rabbinic culture. Germany during the successful German national struggle for unification and independence, romantic nationalists wrote historical accounts of their legendary heroes to inspire their people to struggle for renaissance, for liberation and for greatness.

Romantic nationalist writers also influenced Jewish scholars of rabbinic literature, such as Heinrich Graetz. For them, the reconstruction of a usable Jewish history and the writing of biographies of great leaders of the rabbinic era served to reinforce and reshape modern Jewish identity.

History means to redress the shameful state of modern national passivity and self-loathing, when compared to modern Western nations. Their ideologies and methodologies differed, but they shared a common quest for the historical kernel within rabbinic literature.

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They hoped to reconstitute a glorious, if tragic, Jewish past composed of inspiring leaders setting the course of national, not merely religious, history. The forerunner of the nationalist tradition was Rabbi Azaria de Rossi 16th C. Italy who, as we noted above, invented the aesthetic approach to aggada. These Jewish historians believed they must recast the tales of the rabbis as historical sources by disregarding miraculous, and hence inherently false, fictional exaggerations. They attributed these improbable aspects of aggada to the nature of Talmudic literature, in which they are embedded, since Talmud and Midrash are not critical historical genres.

With modern historical tools, the popular fictional skin can be peeled away to reach the truly valuable historical kernel. Only as an adult did he begin to take an interest in the study of the Torah, to which he devoted himself while making a bare living from casual labor. He was executed in the course of the persecution of Jewish leaders after the revolt. National history studded with colorful personalities was the narrative these educators-cum-historians, like Ben-Zion Dinur, were anxious to supply their people as they emerged as an independent nation.

The era of Yavneh as the new post-Jerusalem rabbinic center was viewed as a period in which the rabbis led the national effort to reclaim a measure of political autonomy, even under the hegemony of the Roman Empire. The great scholar Rabbi Akiba became the nationalist hero to be emulated by Zionists, because he supposedly joined the last pre-modern military revolt of the Jewish people, the Bar Kokhba Revolt CE.

Raising and Reforming National Consciousness A third aspect of romantic nationalism is the vaunted role of educators in elevating national consciousness and shaping indigenous national values. In the 19th century the chief educators were the liberal rabbis who identified with the Talmudic rabbis, as teachers of religion. In the 20th century, by contrast, the chief educators of the Zionist movement were secular literati. History Aggada as Sermon: Ancient National Educators The liberal and modern Orthodox religious scholars of Germany sought to educate the Jewish people to continue, not as a nation, but as a religious minority in an emancipated Germany.

Not the Hebrew poet, essayist or the novelist, but the modern rabbi would lead this renaissance.

DEEPER, LOUDER, HARDER: Lust and Love in Three Stories; A Compilation of Multicultural Erotica

In HaDerashot B'Yisrael , the 19th century liberal rabbi and scholar Leopold Zunz portrayed the rabbis, in the past and in the present, as the educators of the people by means of their sermons in the synagogue. Aggada could now be regarded as a product of the rabbinic elite promoting ideas for the people, rather than fictions invented to entertain the masses.

However, aggadot did not always derive from biblical exegesis…. The word aggadah…means simply 'relating,' i. The 'telling'…is designed to touch the human heart TB Yoma 75a , 'so that one should recognize Him who created the world, and so cling to His ways' Sifrei Deut. Its purpose is 'to bring Heaven down to earth and to elevate man to Heaven' Leopold Zunz. Midrash was to be taught in the spirit of panim sohakot, the smiling or laughing face of God, as opposed to the more serious face or tone of Bible or Mishna.

They also told stories about their own social elite of preachers who flourished in the rabbinic world of the Beit Midrash. In interpreting a Biblical text, the preacher addressed contemporary issues and promoted rabbinic values for the people for whose education they took responsibility. The audiences were the masses whose popular imagination was shaped in dialogue with the competing Greco-Roman popular culture mythology, theater, history, courtroom rhetoric, novella, and exotic stories such as those reported by Herodotus.

These darshanim preachers were heirs to an oral tradition of storytelling and popular explication that was never fully formulated in an official corpus. Aggadot, unlike halakhot, were not fully formed literarily nor were they canonized into official versions for use in the rabbinic curriculum. Hanina bar Papa says: History prestigious, indiscriminate, popular audience, while halakhic texts were formulated for fellow rabbis of the beit midrash-cum-court-cum- legislative body. Even if these rabbinic tales had been equally important culturally with the legal texts, they would not have taken on a fixed wording — as we see from the many different versions we have for each story.

Aggada must maintain its vitality by reworking its fluid form to fit the changing circumstances of its delivery. This is still the case with the genre of the sermon today. Therefore, those studying aggada were less concerned with literary form or with abstract ethical, theological, legal or historical truth. By modern standards these ancient narrative types should be classified as didactic fiction. Stories accordingly had to be relevant to the audience and the audience's situation, values, conflicts, and struggles or they would not be transmitted or preserved.

Oral narrative, in particular, is generally far more malleable than stories transmitted in writing. As storytellers retell stories they update them to make them comprehensible and pertinent to their audience. They tend to jettison older terms that would be poorly understood, transform anachronistic situations, and replace obsolete issues with contemporary concerns.

Moreover, in an oral milieu a storyteller typically receives, memorizes, and transmits only the skeletal outline of the story. These Eastern European intellectuals were the would-be instructors of the modern Hebrew nation by facilitating the adaptation of the literature of the aggada for a secular, Hebrew-speaking age. Bialik saw themselves as playing a crucial role as critical inheritors of the rabbinic role of nurturing the people. While the values they advanced were very different, they utilized the same rabbinic sources.

They identified with the historical era of the revival of the people after the destruction of the Second Temple by means of literary and educational activity. Bialik's Sefer HaAggada, the classic anthology of edited Jewish tales culled from rabbinic sources, was created not to commemorate literature of the past, but to revive national self- expression in literature.

Bialik felt a calling to redeem the literary aspects of aggada as the spiritual core of a contemporary Hebrew culture: To what concept of our times does this text refer? Thus they will come to know that there is no great iron barrier separating the literature of improvised details to spark the audience's interest. Those enhancements typically are taken from his or her experience. History aggada from our contemporary literature. There are many bridges leading from this literature to the literature that followed it.

In its updated version was republished under the direction of an academic scholar of aggada and popular educator Avigdor Shinan. The History of Religious Polemic: Ephraim Urbach While students of folklore and sermons saw in the uneducated Jewish masses the primary audience of aggada, Ephraim Urbach, the Israeli historian of rabbinic literature and thought, treated aggada as a medium of theological and ethical polemic against opposing schools of elite thinkers.

In his book Hazal, The Sages and their Concepts and Beliefs , he demonstrates that rabbinic tales were not written in a historical genre to preserve facts or describe events objectively, but rather in an ideological genre to promote beliefs and educate people. Midrashic religious disputes with Christians, Sadducees and Romans became a record of ancient rabbinic thought. These quasi-biographical stories preserve historical truth, he believed, only in so far as they reveal the religious polemics of competing ideological groups.

Their literary form was secondary to the explicit religious worldviews that were promoted. The subtext of these tales was the interreligious contest for loyalty among competing schools of thought and religious sects in the late antiquity. In the midth C. Similarly, modern religious movements, like the Orthodox, Conservative and Reform movements, competed as alternative belief systems. Writing in this cultural milieu, Urbach addressed the need to define the dogmas of normative traditional Judaism as against Christianity, other Jewish sects and Western philosophy.

While Christianity and Kantian Western thought downgraded Judaism from a religion to a miscellany of heteronomous legal customs and superstitions, Urbach sought to upgrade Judaism, especially ancient rabbinic Judaism, to a philosophical and religious height. In response to the competing schools of the Greco-Roman world, the Rabbis fashioned their own set of abstract worldviews. With this philosophical rubric for aggada, Urbach hoped Rabbinic Judaism would earn greater respect from the German Protestant academic professors of religion.

Rabbinic Judaism could then become a worthy subject in the curriculum of Jewish Thought in the Hebrew University, rather than being marginalized when consigned to ex- yeshiva students with their philological expertise who occupied the chairs of the Talmud Department. Urbach's ideological analysis of stories about the disputations of ancient rabbis with their cultural and religious rivals aimed to extricate Talmud from its academic ghetto as a field of philology or as an ancient law code lacking an ideology that could be expressed in abstract thought.

History biographic tales as the grist of initiation texts for the Beit Midrash as a house of study. Its audience was elite, young adult male disciples. This literature was produced to help induct new students, just as Greco-Roman schools of philosophy generated literature about their philosophic masters for their new disciples.

Stories of the founders were hagiographic and pedagogic. These holy stories sanctify and praise the great, and at the same time provide models for emulation by new recruits. For example, Hillel, portrayed as the wise and exceptionally patient teacher, was the subject of many rabbinic tales. On the other, these stories were educational resources for attracting students to his school, while denigrating the rival school of Shammai.

To develop this innovative approach to rabbinic tales, Jaffee draws on the sociology of knowledge. The producers of knowledge must have the leisure to create texts and they must nurture students to imbibe these texts and to emulate their protagonists in houses of study. Only thus can tradition be transmitted to the next generation. Rabbinic tales must be analyzed not only for their beliefs about the world but for their didactic and social functions in the Beit Midrash.

Both elite oral cultures have the same view of education, rabbinic Torah or Greek paideia. In both schools, education is accomplished through personal cultivation of an ideal character, through learning a literary and an oral tradition, and through embodying its values in lived practices. The primary mechanism of enculturation is the teacher-student bond of discipline and service.

The student imitates and tries to embody the same values embodied in the life of the teacher. One learns not only from the statements made by the teacher as in Pirkei Avot , but also from exempla of his behavior that demonstrate the internalization of these values as lived Torah. The living presence of the Sage is a source of transformative instruction. Out of these anecdotes about a master developed the Western genre of biography.

Like rabbinic tales, chreiai emerged from a scholastic context and served as pedagogic texts Progymnasmata in the rhetorical education in the Greco-Roman world. Peter Brown, the scholar of the Late Antiquity, describes that classical world as a "civilization of paideia: History and aesthetic… The late classical [world had an] overwhelming tendency to find what is exemplary in persons rather than general entities. The study of Torah was also an essentially transformative activity, meant to create 'living Torah scrolls. JORJA TABU's imagination explores the love between three black women and men of a different color, where no one is who you expect, and the sex follows suit.

These stories contain sexual language and content. Kindle Edition , pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. Lists with This Book. Dyeonell rated it really liked it Jun 04, Tracy rated it did not like it Jan 02, Lolita rated it really liked it May 17, KrisN rated it really liked it Apr 20, Tammy rated it really liked it Dec 28, Lesley Sasser is currently reading it Feb 17, Rodney Hay is currently reading it Feb 23, Pam Smith marked it as to-read Mar 24, Arin marked it as to-read Apr 22, Mel marked it as to-read Sep 27, There are no discussion topics on this book yet.

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