Читать книгу Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature - DR. S Mira Balberg - Страница 9

Introduction

“From the day the Temple was destroyed there has been no impurity and no purity,” medieval and modern Jewish authors often proclaim,¹ identifying the Roman demolition and burning of the Jerusalem Temple in the year 70 C.E. as a point of no return, after which the complex array of biblical laws pertaining to ritual purity and impurity became almost entirely inapplicable. According to this prevalent view, to write a book on the ways in which the rabbis of Roman Palestine in the second and third centuries C.E. reinterpreted, reshaped, and reconstructed the biblical concepts of purity and impurity is to be immersed in obsoleteness. It is to engage with an arcane body of legal themes that are not only without consequence for our time, but were, so it is often believed, even without consequence for the rabbis’ own time.

Those who are inclined to dismiss all concerns with practices of ritual purity and impurity as a thing of the distant past, or perhaps, for some, of the unknown messianic future,² might want to stop and consider the following question, posted on the Israeli orthodox website Kippa on April 25, 2010:

I am a hozer bi-teshuva (recently became religious and observant), and most of my coworkers are entirely secular, who are in the habit of eating nonkosher food even in our workplace. I try to refrain from touching objects that we all share, yet several questions have come up recently:

1 If someone who sat in my working environment has been eating nonkosher food, should I take any measures in case they dropped some bits of their food in my vicinity?

2 If a person ate nonkosher food and then touched certain objects (folder, fax machine, keyboard), should I refrain from touching these objects? And if such contact took place, does the impurity of the food pass on to the objects? . . .

3 If I happened to touch such an object, how should I go about purifying myself from this impurity?3

The anonymous inquirer’s questions are, to be sure, guided by a number of misconceptions in terms of codified Jewish law. Nonkosher food does not convey impurity of any sort, certainly not to those who happen to touch it by mistake and most certainly not to objects that came into contact with it. But it is exactly these misconceptions and the lack of commensurability between the inquirer’s presuppositions and the governing paradigms in Jewish law that reveal the enduring relevance and power of the concepts and rhetoric of ritual purity and impurity. The person who posed this question did not know what, exactly, constitutes a source of impurity and how impurity is contracted, but he had a strong sense that the difference between his religious self and his nonobservant coworkers must be somehow expressed through palpable “impurity.” Moreover, he had a strong sense that interaction with them, in one way or another, endangers him, and specifically endangers him through the material environment that he reluctantly shares with those different from him. These notions, which dominate almost every cultural system of purity and impurity (even though they are completely misguided in the context of contemporary Jewish law), speak to the force of ideas of purity and impurity in one’s self-making as a pious subject, and to the way these concepts give concrete form to the desire to conduct oneself and one’s body by separation from others and by constant reflection on oneself and one’s surroundings.

Purity and impurity, then, as potent and dominant themes in Judaism’s religious vocabulary, did not become obsolete even when some or all of the practices pertaining to them were no longer performed. Rather, they live on as powerful conceptual and hermeneutic tools through which ideas about self and other can be manifested, through which one’s body and environment can be scrutinized and defined, and through which one constitutes and forms oneself as a subject. This book explores the early rabbis’ comprehensive attempt to recompose and interpret the biblical code of purity and impurity, and examines how this enterprise of recomposition constructed a new and powerful discourse that is deeply engaged with and informed by concerns with body, self, lived environment, and religious subjectivity.

In this book I trace and analyze the ways in which the early rabbis, in their remaking of the biblical laws of purity and impurity, negotiate and develop a unique notion of a bodily self. I argue that the rabbis construct the drama of contracting, conveying, and managing impurity as a manifestation of the relations between oneself and one’s human and nonhuman surroundings, and that they create a new array of physical and mental purity-related practices that both assume and generate a particular kind of subject. This book, then, seeks to introduce rabbinic legal discourse into the landscape of ancient and late ancient modes of reflection on, engagement with, and shaping of the self, and to explore the rabbis’ textual reconstruction of biblical purity and impurity as a site in which inherited scriptural traditions are remolded in the cultural and intellectual climate of the Graeco-Roman Mediterranean of the high empire.

At the center of this study stands the Mishnah, the earliest comprehensive rabbinic legal codex known to us. More specifically, this study focuses mainly on one of the six divisions, or “orders,” that comprise the Mishnah, the division dedicated to the topic of purity and impurity, which is known as Seder Tohorot (the Order of Purities). The final compilation of the Mishnah can be dated with relative confidence to the first quarter of the third century C.E., and is commonly associated with the name of Rabbi Yehuda the Patriarch (who died around 220 C.E.) and his circle. However, the Mishnah consists of hundreds of legal and interpretive traditions, generated and transmitted by different named and unnamed rabbis over a time period that spans between a few dozen years and a few hundred years. While the most dominant sages of the Mishnah, to whom the greatest amount of material in this work is attributed, seem to have been active primarily in the course of the second century C.E., a substantial amount of foundational legal teachings in the Mishnah apparently dates back to the first century C.E., and the Mishnah even contains traditions, albeit few and far between, from sages who presumably lived as early as the mid-second century B.C.E. The diverse and multilayered nature of the Mishnah and the fact that it constitutes a repository of traditions created over a rather long period of time compel us to consider this rich and complex work both in terms of its organic continuity with earlier Jewish legal and interpretive works, and in terms of its active transformation and change of concepts, practices, and legal modes of thought inherited from the rabbis’ predecessors.

The foundation of the Mishnah, and the point of departure of its makers, is the patrimony they received from previous generations: first and foremost, the laws of the Pentateuch, but also various traditions, regulations, and customs that emerged during the time known as the Second Temple period (538 B.C.E.–70 C.E.). Ideas and rules of purity and impurity were undoubtedly among the most dominant components of the legal and cultural traditions the rabbis inherited. In the biblical Priestly Code, the laws of purity play a key role in the cult of the Tabernacle and in the organization of the camp of Israel, and the rhetoric of impurity and purification is also highly prevalent in the books of the Prophets. It is especially in the literature of the Second Temple period, however, that purity and impurity emerge as a central concern and as a source of ongoing preoccupation.⁴ This preoccupation is manifested not only in the presumed scrupulous observance of ritual purity laws at the time (at least in some circles),⁵ which led later rabbis to describe this period longingly as “the time in which purity burst out in Israel,”⁶ but also in the fact that the language of impurity and the metaphors it engenders colored the social and religious discourse of this period in a remarkable way. In the literature of the turn of the first century C.E., the theme of purity recurs as one of the pivots of the consistent effort to distinguish “us” from “them”: non-Jews from Jews,⁷ Sadducees from Pharisees,⁸ followers of Jesus from the ones renouncing him,⁹ and sons of light from sons of darkness.¹⁰

The rabbis who created the Mishnah were heirs to the notions and practices of purity and impurity that their predecessors developed, as well as to the emphasis on scrupulousness in observance of purity as a way of differentiating insiders from outsiders and of expressing utmost piety. The twelve tractates that comprise the Order of Purities, and likewise other mishnaic tractates and textual units that discuss matters of purity and impurity, present an ambitious and comprehensive attempt further to develop, systematize, arrange, scrutinize, and augment this biblical and postbiblical inheritance, and to weave out of numerous legal details a rich picture of everyday activities, encounters, and practices that are defined and governed by observance of ritual purity. In essence, the Mishnah’s vast purity and impurity corpus can be seen as a direct continuation of frames of thought and of hermeneutic and legislative endeavors that preceded it,¹¹ and as an edifice whose foundations are firmly grounded in the Second Temple period. However, the construction of this impressive mishnaic edifice cannot be understood merely in terms of the preservation and systematization of past teachings and customs. Rather, it is the result of a creative encounter between the formative biblical purity texts and the established interpretive traditions that accompanied them, on the one hand, and the ideas, perceptions, convictions, and concerns of the mishnaic rabbis, who were denizens (however reticent) of the cultural and intellectual world of the Graeco-Roman Mediterranean of the Antonine period, on the other hand. This creative encounter gave birth to striking conceptual innovations that profoundly transformed the biblical notions of purity and impurity, and that introduced new focal points around which the rabbinic purity discourse was constructed, thereby giving the observance of purity laws in their rabbinic setting new and vibrant meanings.

As I will show throughout the book, while the rabbis adhere to the basic schemes of purity and impurity put forth in the Priestly Code, and do not add any new sources of impurity to the biblical system, they suggest an array of unprecedented principles regarding the contraction, conveyance, and management of impurity, as well as sets of practices that derive from these principles. The purpose of this study is to trace the new principles that the rabbis introduced to the biblical system of purity and impurity, and to reconstruct and explain the conceptual framework that brought them about. I will argue that a central dimension of the rabbinic reconstruction of the purity system is unparalleled attention to questions of subjectivity, and more specifically, to the ways in which persons relate to themselves, to their bodies, and to their material surroundings. Whereas in the Bible and in Second Temple literature the dominant focal points of the discourse on purity and impurity are the sancta and the Temple,¹² and by extension the camp, the city, and the community insofar as those bear a sanctity of their own,¹³ the Mishnah’s Order of Purities introduces the self, the individual subject of the law, as a new focal point.¹⁴ This is not to say that the Temple or the community are of no interest to the rabbis, but it is to say that the discourse on these topics in the context of purity and impurity is reoriented toward the self, the agent whose body (as well as property, which, as I will argue, functions in the Mishnah as part of one’s extended body) goes through the vicissitudes of purity and impurity.

The rabbinic shift of focus from the Temple to the self seems, on the face of it, to lend itself readily to the prevalent view that the Mishnah is in essence a response to the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. and, later on, to the demolition and resettlement of Jerusalem and its region following the Bar Kokhva revolt in 132–135 C.E. Various scholars hold the view that the Mishnah and the rabbinic enterprise more broadly were devised in an attempt to provide viable substitutes to the destroyed Temple, and thereby to allow Jewish life to persist in a new, durable configuration under the new circumstances.¹⁵ Within this paradigm, it seems almost warranted to assume that the emergence of the self as a critical focal point of the rabbinic discourse of purity and impurity is a facet of the rabbinic effort to replace Temple-based forms of piety with Temple-less forms of piety. My analysis in this study, however, does not subscribe to this paradigm, and does not examine the rabbinic discourse of purity and impurity through the lens of the destruction of the Temple, for the simple reason that there are no real grounds for identifying a break between perceptions and practices of purity that prevailed during the time of the Temple and perceptions and practices of purity that prevailed after its destruction. As I will argue in the first chapter, it is evident that purity was pursued beyond the Temple and beyond Jerusalem even while the Temple was still functioning, and it is also quite evident that purity-related practices were still prevalent in Palestine for decades after the destruction of the Temple (with the obvious exception of elements that could only take place in the Temple, such as purificatory sacrifices). In addition, some of the central legal innovations that stand at the core of the rabbinic transformation of the biblical impurity system clearly date back to the first century C.E. or even earlier. The Mishnah’s discourse of purity and impurity should be understood, I contend, not as a “response” to specific historical crises, but as the result of a very gradual evolvement and change of social, intellectual, and ideological concerns and interests that converged in the encounter between the rabbis, the traditions they interpreted, and the greater cultural context in which this interpretation was taking place.

With this view of the mishnaic discourse of purity and impurity as a site in which biblical institutions are transformed and reshaped and cultural modes of engagement with notions of body and self are negotiated, this book engages in conversation with three central fields of interest: purity in ancient Judaism, the body in rabbinic culture, and the self in antiquity. However, since the topic of this book is the reinterpretation and reinvention of an inherited ritual language in a changing world, it invites to this conversation a wide variety of scholars, students, and interested readers who are fascinated by the relations between tradition and innovation in religious communities.

PURITY IN ANCIENT JUDAISM

The constitutive corpus for the discourse of ritual purity and impurity in ancient Judaism is chapters 11–15 in the book of Leviticus and chapter 19 in the book of Numbers. These chapters, which discuss a number of creatures, substances, and bodily conditions that are considered sources of impurity and are thus proscribed in different ways, have elicited ongoing interest among traditional and modern scholars alike. Whereas scholars of the Hebrew Bible or the ancient Near East are mainly interested in deciphering the biblical purity laws in terms of their meaning or origin, scholars of postbiblical Judaism are concerned with the question of how the biblical purity system was applied and interpreted in different social and religious contexts. The working assumption that guides studies of the latter interest, which includes this book, is that in postbiblical ancient Judaism the biblical purity system itself is not negotiable, and its particular details are a given; the question is what, if anything, is done with this system. While the topic of purity in postbiblical Judaism has received some scholarly attention over the past century, the last two decades can be described as a time of an unprecedented boom of interest in this topic.¹⁶ Within this fairly recent abundance of studies, one can identify two central modes of engagement with the topic, which I will define here as sociohistorical and textual-conceptual.

Studies conducted with a sociohistorical orientation are concerned with questions of actual observance of purity laws in ancient Jewish societies, namely, how many people observed these laws, which laws exactly were observed, how they were observed by different groups, what were the different levels of observance during different periods, and so forth.¹⁷ Many of these studies focus mainly on the two centuries before the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, a period from which there is relatively abundant evidence, and use rabbinic sources primarily to reconstruct a historical account of the prerabbinic period. This tendency not only is a result of the relative paucity of archeological and nonrabbinic textual evidence from the time after the destruction of the Temple, but also often stems from the prevalent assumption that after the destruction of the Temple the observance of ritual purity was, on the whole, irrelevant and unattainable (except for little “pockets” of observance, like the laws of menstrual purity or the laws of corpse impurity that pertain to priests).¹⁸ Guided by this assumption, Jacob Neusner dedicated the twenty-two volumes of his History of the Mishnaic Laws of Purities to arguing that, after the destruction of the Temple, purity turned from an everyday concern, centered on eating practices, to an abstract notion with no bearing on everyday life that the rabbis utilized to develop their inquiry of reality.¹⁹ More recent scholarship, however, which relies both on careful textual analysis and on archeological evidence,²⁰ persuasively shows that while some purity laws could obviously not be observed in the absence of a Temple (mainly laws that require sacrifices as part of the purification process), various purity-related practices, most notably practices pertaining to the preparation and consumption of food, were maintained throughout the mishnaic period, although they had apparently been in rapid decline as of the second half of the second century C.E.²¹

In contrast to sociohistorical studies, the main purpose of textual-conceptual studies is to examine how notions of purity and impurity are interpreted in different ancient Jewish texts. The purpose of such studies is not to uncover what different Jewish groups did, but how these groups perceived different aspects of the concepts of purity and impurity: which cosmic powers they stood for, what their moral and theological undertones were, what social and communal ideologies they served, and so forth. The main characteristic of existing textual-conceptual studies of this sort is their clear comparative orientation and diachronic organization, since their central undertaking is to examine several different corpora against one another and to point to similarities and differences between the ideas of purity and impurity in these corpora. Whereas earlier textual-conceptual studies attempted to encompass the treatment of purity and impurity in given texts as one indivisible whole,²² more recent works have focused on specific aspects of purity or impurity, and thus were able to present a much more detailed, nuanced, and scholarly sound picture.²³

While I fully acknowledge the tremendous value of studies of both approaches and am greatly indebted, in almost every page of this book, to the many penetrating questions they raise and cogent insights they provide, this book falls under neither the sociohistorical nor the textual-conceptual category. Instead, it suggests a break from these two common modes of engaging with purity in ancient Judaism. While I subscribe to the view that purity and impurity were, at least to a certain extent, matters of practical and not just theoretical concern for the mishnaic rabbis, I do not wish to utilize the mishnaic texts for historical reconstruction of actual practices, but rather to explore the discourse of impurity that the rabbis construct in the Mishnah, a compilation that uniquely and famously merges together depictions of the (real or imagined) past, practical prescriptions for the present, utopian ideas, and interpretive imagination.²⁴ The Mishnah presents its rulings and guidelines in matters of purity and impurity as one whole, complete, and comprehensive system, offering no hint of distinction between laws that in certainty could not have been followed at the rabbis’ time and laws that were an inextricable part of the rabbis’ world. Rather, the Mishnah incorporates all its rulings into a timeless framework, as an everlasting key component of one’s lived experience and of one’s self-governance as a subject of the law. My interest lies in this timeless framework that the rabbis construct, which consists of both concrete and applicable everyday practices and hypothetical or idealized ways of conduct, and in the subject that this framework, with its multiple discursive and practical components, creates.

With this interest in the discursive and ideational aspects of purity and impurity, my perspective is closer to the textual-conceptual orientation in the study of purity in ancient Judaism. However, I differ from the majority of studies directed by this orientation in that my approach is distinctly synchronic and not diachronic. This book is concerned with the Mishnah as an independent cultural creation, which, while consisting of various sources, also stands as a unified text. I am not examining the Mishnah from an external point of reference, but rather from within its own concepts, concerns, and modes of discourse. Clearly, as I mentioned, the ingenuity of the rabbis and the uniqueness of their ideas can only be appreciated vis-à-vis the traditions they inherited, but my main purpose is not to examine how the rabbis differ from what preceded them, but to analyze what the rabbis did with the materials they inherited to construct something new and inimitable. This approach allows me to examine aspects of rabbinic purity laws that have not drawn scholarly attention in the past, since they could not be construed as part of the common ground of ancient Judaism.

THE BODY IN RABBINIC CULTURE

In many ways, the cultural orientation in the study of rabbinic literature and the interest in the representation and construction of the body in this literature are so closely intertwined that “the body in rabbinic culture” is somewhat redundant. Pioneered and deeply influenced by Daniel Boyarin’s Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture, corporeal-cultural studies of rabbinic literature are guided by the premise that reading texts is reading culture. Often utilizing Foucault’s notion of discourse as a complex and diverse array of statements, rhetorical structures, beliefs, and courses of actions, students of rabbinic literature as culture attempt to read rabbinic texts in their greater social context without simplistically seeing them as historical sources, and examine the very production of rabbinic texts as a form of cultural practice. The centrality of practice in the cultural approach to rabbinic literature emphatically brings the body to the fore as the main locus of practice, not simply as an interesting topic to be examined, but as a site through which identities are performed and cultural concerns are negotiated.²⁵

In my view of rabbinic texts as cultural products, in my vested interest in the ways the rabbis integrate biblical concepts and institutions with ideas and practices from the intellectual and religious cultures that surround them, and in my approach to rabbinic literature through the methodological lens of discourse analysis, I am inspired by and beholden to the many studies that apply cultural-critical tools and frames of thought to suggest new and provocative ways to engage with rabbinic literature.²⁶ Needless to say, my focus on purity and impurity, as discursive sites in which dramas of interpretation and innovation take place in the body itself, makes this book a very “corporeal” study and puts it in dialogue with other studies of rabbinic literature that have put the body at their center. There are, however, several little-discussed aspects of embodiment and corporeality that this book particularly emphasizes, and through which I hope to bring rabbinic texts into broader contemporary conversations that prolifically challenge our view of the body as a self-contained and well-defined unit and our way of approaching human materiality more broadly.²⁷

First, the very concept of impurity, which stands at the center of this book, and the modes of operation of impurity as the rabbis conceived them bring to the fore phenomena such as decomposition and contagion, which compel us to think of the body as an entity whose boundaries and constituent elements are not stable, but are rather constantly mutating. The rabbinic impurity discourse, which habitually parses the body into parts and fragments, does not put forth any coherent notion of the body as a single self-explanatory unit, but rather depicts a complex web of organs, limbs, and visceral components, a web in which different bodies are connected and then separated, and in which bodies are continually being remolded and redefined. Thus, rather than positing the question of what can be done to and with the body as a biosocial given, this book engages time and again with the question of what the body is: where does it begin and end, what does it consist of, and what makes a body into a person.

Second, the prominent place of inanimate objects in the rabbinic discourse of purity and impurity provokes us to think of them not simply as external additions to the human habitat, but also, as I argue in detail in the third chapter, as extensions of the human body. Through my heightened attention to the relations of the human body, as a material entity among material entities, with its nonhuman environment, I hope to introduce inanimate objects as a new point of interest in the study of rabbinic culture, and in the study of late antiquity more broadly.

Finally, one of my main goals in this book is to tie together the study of the body with the study of self and subjectivity. While several studies have discussed the body as a site for the construction of specific identities—ethnic, religious, sexual, and so forth²⁸—the question of whether and how one’s body is identical to or different from one’s self has received little scholarly attention in rabbinic studies. The themes of purity and impurity, however, raise questions that pertain to the ways in which one’s body is understood and negotiated as both identical to and disparate from the legal subject that governs this body and interprets it. Throughout this book, I explore the rabbinic treatment of questions such as “What parts of my body are really ‘me’”? “In what sense is a dead body still a person?” and “What makes a human body different from other organic and nonorganic entities?” Of course, as I show in the fifth and sixth chapters, a sense of self can never be extricated from an array of political, social, and sexual identities, but I propose to examine these identities as part of a larger matrix of relations between one and one’s body, relations that are established through various practices, both corporeal and mental.

THE SELF IN ANTIQUITY

The concept of self, as well as other related or overlapping terms such as I, subject, and person, is extremely elusive, and these words have different sets of meanings in different cultural and scholarly contexts.²⁹ In this book I use the term self in a very broad sense, to refer to a human entity that is seen as capable of reflecting on its own actions, thoughts, biography, and so forth.³⁰ While the terms subject and person are oftentimes used interchangeably with the term self, for the sake of consistency I use subject either as the opposite of object (that is, to denote agency) or specifically when discussing a subject of someone or something, and I use person to denote a human being as opposed to other creatures, material artifacts, or organic matter. While all three terms will inevitably overlap from time to time, my main interest is in the category of self as a way of conceptualizing one’s understanding of one’s own (and others’) being.

Whereas modern philosophers and psychologists dedicate endless efforts to proposing exacting and exhaustive definitions of the self,³¹ several scholars of antiquity have attempted to determine whether this term is applicable to ancient contexts, and if so, in what ways. To be clear, none of the scholars who questioned the validity of the category of self in respect to antiquity denied that the inhabitants of the ancient world had thoughts, feelings, ideas, and biographies that were unique to them, as well as an ability to reflect on what they did, what they thought, and what they wanted. What some scholars did deny, however, is that the ancients centered their concept of self on the irreplaceable and one-of-a-kind individual with which the self has been identified since Rousseau.³² Nevertheless, the important observation that notions of self in antiquity are not identical to notions of self in modern times does not mean that ancient writers were not concerned with the fundamental questions “What am I?” and “What should I be?”; these we can define as the critical questions that pertain to the self. Such concerns were brought to the foreground in the last few decades in numerous fascinating and wide-ranging studies, which were dedicated to deciphering the varieties of concepts of self and subjectivity in ancient and late ancient literature—Greek, Roman, and early Christian.³³

While one important aspect of the study of self and subjectivity is deciphering different philosophical-psychological concepts of self, that is, approaching the self as something one thinks about, a different perspective on the self in antiquity pertains to the question of self-formation, or to the self as something one develops and cultivates. This perspective was introduced by Pierre Hadot and, more rigorously and influentially, by Michel Foucault. Hadot made the argument that in the ancient world philosophy was “a way of life,” which meant living in a certain way and striving to become a certain kind of person, rather than merely contemplating abstract ideas.³⁴ Accordingly, those committed to a philosophical way of life were constantly engaged in active attempts to cultivate certain character traits and dispositions within themselves through various mental and physical practices.³⁵ Following in the footsteps of Hadot, and integrating Hadot’s ideas into his own larger framework of an archeology of knowledge, Michel Foucault developed the idea that in the ancient world persons had to become subjects by taking on certain modes of living and certain activities; in other words, the self was something one had to make.³⁶ In his works on self-formation, and particularly in The Care of the Self, Foucault tied together body, self, and practice, suggesting that to attain a personal ideal of what one ought to be is essentially to shape, control, and reflect on the body through a set of fixed practices, which he called “techniques of the self.”³⁷ While Foucault’s reconstruction of ancient ideas and practices of the self was harshly criticized as lacking and inaccurate,³⁸ his notion of techniques of the self has remained extremely influential. Moreover, Foucault’s broader understanding of the self as a discursive construct, as something that is formed through certain social practices and changes along with them, allowed the self to take a much more central place in the study of ancient literatures and cultures. Following Foucault, the variety of ancient concepts of self was no longer conceived as the arcane interest of philosophers, but as a gateway for engaging with essential questions of identity, body, class, gender, and so on.³⁹

Guided by ongoing attention both to conceptual aspects of self and subjectivity and to questions of self-formation and self-cultivation, I attempt in this book to introduce rabbinic sources—and emphatically, rabbinic legal sources—into the vibrant conversation about the self in antiquity and late antiquity.⁴⁰ The critical contribution of rabbinic legal discourse to this conversation lies not only in the centrality and heft of rabbinic legal compilations within the corpus of early Judaism, but also in the unique nature of rabbinic law as an intriguing site for the examination of practices of self-formation. Rabbinic legislation, or halakhah, can be viewed as a radical attempt to construct a self whose every single quotidian activity, from sneezing to shoe-lacing, is shaped and reflected upon through the prism of commitment to the law, and thus as shaping a mode of living that entails incessant self-scrutiny and striving for self-perfection. Through my discussions on the relations between halakhic practice and the constitution of self, and by pointing out ways in which mishnaic themes resonate with ideas on self-formation that can be found in Greek and Roman literature, I hope to show the enormous potential that the study of halakhah has for the exploration of the self in antiquity.⁴¹

This book does not purport to present a systematic and exhaustive picture of the self in the Mishnah, but rather, much more modestly, to show how the mishnaic discourse of purity and impurity constructs and develops certain ideas about the self and certain techniques of the self. These ideas and techniques pertain to the ways in which one governs one’s body, one’s possessions (which are an extended part of the body, as I suggest), and one’s behavior, as well as to the ways in which one conducts oneself vis-à-vis the law and its rabbinic self-proclaimed representatives. It is important to emphasize, however, that I am in no way suggesting that the Mishnah’s discourse of purity and impurity was meant by the rabbis as a manual of self-formation and self-reflection in disguise, or even that the rabbis consciously asked themselves, when developing the laws of purity and impurity, “What is a person?” and “What kind of person should one be?” Rather, I hold that the rabbis’ corpus of purity and impurity is in essence a technical legal corpus meant to provide a comprehensive picture of a central aspect of Jewish ritual life, but that this corpus both is guided by unspoken, and perhaps unconscious, assumptions about personhood and subjectivity, and creates certain dispositions and attitudes toward the self through its authoritative rhetoric. It is the underlying assumptions about selfhood underneath the surface of the Mishnah, on the one hand, and the idealized self on its horizon, on the other hand, that I wish to uncover in this study.

READING THE MISHNAH

Among the various rabbinic compilations, the Mishnah stands out as highly unified in its style and structured in its form, in such a way that the composition as it we have it before us reads as a distinct textual unity.⁴² However, while it is quite evident that the Mishnah was shaped by a conscientious and dominant redactor or several redactors, and thus can be discussed as a textual whole, it is nonetheless clear that the Mishnah was created and compiled in a lengthy process, and that different people took part in its making at various points in time. The collective nature of this work and the absence of any narrating voice from the text do not allow us to speak of an author in the ordinary sense of the word in respect to the Mishnah. Therefore, while I am very aware of the awkwardness of attributing agency to a literary work, I oftentimes use phrases such as “the Mishnah says” or “the Mishnah explains,” since such phrases best reflect the manner in which the mishnaic text is introduced to its reader: without an identifiable narrating voice and without a programmatic introduction, as a creation of everyone and of no one at the same time.

The Mishnah’s standing as a cohesive textual unit does not obfuscate the fact that it consists of multiple layers, traditions, and sources. The Mishnah comprises different tractates, each one of them presumably a unit unto itself, with its own complex history of formation and redaction; different passages in the Mishnah are likely to have been shaped at different periods, by different people, and to have been compiled at different stages; and even within the same passage, different statements or narratives may derive from different sources. Although I am fully cognizant of the enormous complexity of the Mishnah as a text, in this book I am not concerned with investigating the formation or redaction of the mishnaic text, nor am I attempting to ascribe different mishnaic traditions to different periods. First, I am very skeptical regarding our ability to recover the different stages of the development of the text, an enterprise that is usually undertaken by identifying the particular sage or sages whose statements are included in a passage as the key to dating the passage to a particular period. Even if we take the attributions of statements as reliable, and even if we exclude the possibility that the words of a sage from one period were integrated into a passage from another period, the overwhelming majority of passages I examine in this book are anonymous. Second, and more importantly, I do not think that the question of when a specific tradition emerged is of particular importance when trying to identify certain mindsets in the Mishnah as a cohesive redacted work. The very fact that a specific tradition was introduced sometime during the period in which the Mishnah was formed and that the redactors considered this tradition to be worth preserving is an indication that the view expressed in this tradition was part of the thought-world of the rabbis who formed the Mishnah. It was not necessarily something to which they all subscribed, nor was it necessarily the only view on the matter, but it is constitutive of the mishnaic discourse as such, which is where my interest lies.

One of the main challenges with which every reader of the Mishnah is faced is the fact that it is entangled in a web of textual and interpretive relations with other rabbinic compilations. The Halakhic Midrashim, which are contemporaneous with or slightly later than the Mishnah, not only present numerous textual parallels with the Mishnah but also provide important scriptural reasonings for its rulings.⁴³ The Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds, which were compiled between two hundred and four hundred years after the Mishnah, are the most immediate tools that we have when trying to interpret the mishnaic sources and to understand the way they resonate in the larger frameworks of rabbinic law and thought. However, while an examination of the topic of purity and impurity across rabbinic literature is certainly a worthwhile endeavor, since my main purpose in this study is to present a rich and coherent thematic picture of purity and impurity in the Mishnah, I choose to engage midrashic and talmudic materials only when they significantly promote our understanding of specific mishnaic passages.

Somewhat different is my approach to the Tosefta, an early rabbinic compilation that is structured in correlation with the order of the Mishnah, uses the same rhetorical forms and style, and presents an array of materials relevant to the Mishnah—alternative traditions, additional rulings, parallel texts, interpretive clauses, and so forth.⁴⁴ A lively discussion has been taking place in recent scholarship on the question of whether the Tosefta is later than the Mishnah and should be seen as an early commentary on it,⁴⁵ or earlier than the Mishnah and should be seen as its main source.⁴⁶ (There is also a recent third suggestion, according to which the two are free renditions of the same essential text.)⁴⁷ Personally I tend to adopt Shamma Friedman’s view of the Tosefta as a compilation of various materials relevant to the Mishnah: some of these materials are the sources of the Mishnah, some of them are later interpretations, and so on, but the compilation as a whole is later.⁴⁸ Either way, it is my conviction that the Tosefta is complementary to the Mishnah and cannot be viewed as its own independent text. This is not to say that the redactors of the Tosefta did not have an agenda of their own, which may have been different from that of the redactors of the Mishnah, but it is to say that the Tosefta was meant to be studied alongside the Mishnah, whether the Mishnah as we know it or an earlier version of it. Therefore, whenever I find traditions in the Tosefta that are particularly illuminating vis-à-vis themes I identify in the Mishnah, I use them to broaden our scope and to suggest different angles from which to understand the mishnaic text. Thus, while the focus of this book is the Mishnah, I use the Tosefta as an important source for presenting a richer and more complete picture of the mishnaic traditions.

Naturally, the lion’s share of rabbinic traditions on purity and impurity can be found in the twelve tractates that compose the Order of Purities, which is dedicated exclusively to this topic. However, important textual units that are germane to purity and impurity can also be found in other mishnaic tractates such as Hagigah, Eduyot, and more. The particular themes with which I am concerned in this study are not concentrated in a limited number of textual units, but are dispersed and arise in very different contexts and in very different textual settings. In order to present a picture that is as broad and rich as possible, I chose to discuss a large number of individual passages as units unto themselves. While I always make a point of presenting the general context of the passages in question and not isolating them from their original textual settings, I am aware that by picking and choosing relevant texts I am emphasizing some aspects of some texts over others, and am certainly not doing justice to the corpus as a whole. However, I see no other way of analytically engaging with such a large corpus in a meaningful way, which is what this book sets out to achieve.

The book consists of six chapters, in each of which I explore a different facet of the mishnaic purity and impurity discourse from the perspective of the relations between body and self. While each of the chapters is concerned with different themes and texts, the book’s argument builds from chapter to chapter, since the argument presented in each chapter serves as a point of departure for the subsequent chapter.

The first chapter sets the stage for the chapters that follow by overviewing some of the central innovations that the rabbis introduced into the biblical system of impurity, innovations that effectively turn impurity from a concern restricted to those who function as sources of impurity or to those in their immediate vicinity to a concern pertaining to anyone and everyone at any given time. Through this transformation in the scope and impact of impurity, the rabbis of the Mishnah portray the entire lived world as infused with impurity, and depict one’s daily interactions with people and things as governed by constant attention to impurity. Thus, I argue, the rabbis posit the engagement with impurity—avoiding it, managing it, purifying oneself from it, and so on—as a critical component in one’s formation as a committed rabbinic Jewish subject.

The second chapter explores the most dominant and paradigmatic actor in the realm of purity and impurity, the human body. I attempt to decipher how the rabbis perceived of the body as a material entity and how they imagined its physical function in the contraction and transmission of impurity, and focus on their construction of the body as a fluid and modular entity whose boundaries are in constant flux. I then turn to show that the rabbis divide the body into different areas, in such a way that areas that are less consequential to the subject and that one does not strongly identify with oneself are not susceptible to impurity. Thereby, the rabbis create a unique paradigm of a bodily self in which the body is identical to the self only insofar as the body is invested with subjectivity.

The third chapter moves from the human body to inanimate objects, which, as I argue, were conceived by the rabbis as extensions of the human body and as entities in which, like in the body, one must invest subjectivity in order to introduce them into the realm of impurity. The susceptibility to impurity of inanimate objects, whether artifacts or foodstuffs, is largely determined by the consciousness of their owners, since one must care about the object in question and must actively identify it as one’s own to allow it to be rendered impure. The mishnaic subject thus not only responds to the world of impurity but also, through the force of deliberation, thought, and intention, constructs the world of impurity, in such a way that the ability of objects to contract impurity serves in the Mishnah as a marker of these objects’ consequentiality for human beings.

The fourth chapter focuses on the rabbinic reconstruction of corpse impurity. At the center of this chapter stands the unprecedented rabbinic ruling that fragments of corpses must be either significant enough in size or of a form that is distinctly and recognizably human in order fully to convey impurity. I argue that the rabbis construct the ability of corpse fragments to convey impurity as dependent upon their ability to invoke the mental picture of a whole human being, and I further argue that for the rabbis the point of reference against which all corpse fragments are assessed and measured is distinctly and paradoxically a living body. Thereby, I argue, the rabbis create a system in which the corpse loses its power to convey impurity the more it resembles lifeless and formless organic matter, that is, the more it becomes something one cannot identify with oneself.

The fifth chapter turns to discuss the role and function of non-Jews in the mishnaic system of impurity. In the mishnaic setting, the purity status of non-Jews is strangely dual: while they are considered to be entirely insusceptible to the ritual impurities to which Jews are susceptible, they are also considered to convey the same impurity as persons with abnormal genital discharges, regardless of their physical condition. Attempting to disentangle this perplexing duality, I suggest how these two seemingly contradictory notions came to be, and how they are utilized by the rabbis to construct a discourse not only about Gentiles, but also and especially about the subjectivity of Jews. Whereas the inability of Gentiles to contract impurity is presented in the Mishnah as a result of a lack of legal subjectivity, their perpetual impurity is strongly identified with effeminacy and loss of bodily control. Thus the rabbis define Gentiles through their lacking or deficient subjectivity and, by way of contrast, also construct an ideal rabbinic Jewish subject.

Finally, the sixth chapter examines the pursuit of ritual purity as a means and an end in the rabbinic ethics of the self. I show that the Mishnah’s idealized subjects are distinguished, first and foremost, by their mental disposition toward purity, that is, by their ability to be attentive to impurity at all times. This attentiveness manifests itself in constant reflection on one’s actions and encounters, in regular physical self-scrutiny, and, perhaps most importantly, in unrelenting reflection on one’s own mental dedication to purity. I argue that through the recurring theme of self-examination the rabbis construct one’s relation to the law as entailing a certain relation to oneself. They shape the mishnaic intended subject as possessed of both self-control and self-knowledge, thus turning the everyday engagement with purity and impurity into an arena in which one’s meritorious qualities are both exhibited and cultivated, and turning the quest for purity into a quest for self-perfection as a subject of the law.