Post by Rabbi Neil on Oct 28, 2017 2:54:26 GMT
In Tractate Sanhedrin (71a) Rav Yehudah quotes Rav regarding an incident with a man who set his eyes on a woman and whose passion so rose up within him that he became deathly ill. The doctors said that in order to make him better she should sleep with him. The Rabbis said no. So the doctors said at least she should stand in front of him naked, and again the Rabbis said no. So the doctors said at least she should talk with him through a fence and again the Rabbis said no. The Gemara then goes on to discuss this story and why the Rabbis said no. The first suggestion is that she’s married, so it would be a breach of the Ten Commandments. But then that is refuted, and the Gemara says she was in fact unmarried. So, why did the Rabbis say no? Rav Papa says that it was because she would have brought down the family name. Rav Icha says that it was to teach the daughters of Israel not to be promiscuous. And that’s it. That, according to Tractate Sanhedrin, is why a woman shouldn’t be made to sleep with a man who lusts after her – either because it will damage her family name or because it might make her promiscuous. It takes the focus of the story about a man lusting after a woman to the point that he becomes ill, and turns it into a lesson about her. Sadly, this is not the only such instance in Talmud. In Tractate Ta’anit (24a), a man has a very beautiful daughter and one day Rabbi Yosei from Yokrat sees a certain man piercing a hole in the hedge surrounding his property and looking at his daughter. Rabbi Yosei said to him, “What is this?” The man replied, “My teacher, if I have not merited taking her in marriage, shall I not at least merit to look at her?” So, what do we think Rabbi Yosei replied? We would probably all hope for something like, “No, you pervert, get off my lawn.” But we all know that’s not where we’re going! We would probably expect him to say something like “Dear, you need to cover yourself up so that you’re not a distraction to the men.” That would have been frustrating, but understandable in context at least. But what he says is in fact even more disturbing than that. He says, “My daughter, you are causing men distress. Return to your dust, and let men no longer stumble into sin due to you.” What he says to his daughter is, basically, “Because you’re so good-looking, for the good of men you need to die.”
What kind of a father says that to his child?!? I want to assume that this is a totally fictional account and that no father in his right mind would ever say such a thing to a child of his. But then I remember the picture many years ago of a Chinese baby dead on the street with everyone walking by, because it is socially possible to wish for the death of a daughter. To me, and hopefully to all of us, such a thing is totally repugnant, but we have to accept that it is possible that this is a real account. But real or not, it’s an account that is happily placed in the Talmud and passed down from generation to generation. Contemporary Judaism is essentially Rabbinic or Talmudic Judaism, and there are millions of Jews worldwide who hold that this story, as part of the Torah Sheba’al Peh – the Oral Law – is the literal word of God, which means that a story that has a father say to his beautiful daughter, “For the good of men, you really should die” has Divine sanction. And that’s simply not okay. It’s reprehensible in the modern age. This is the kind of thing that drives Jews from Judaism, so we in the Reform Movement have to very openly clarify that this is not our Judaism, that our Judaism has Reformed dramatically since then.
As much as we disavow ourselves of such Judaism, we have to recognize the message that it carried and ask ourselves whether that message continues today. Elsewhere in Talmud (Bava Metzia 84), we learn that Rabbi Yochanan, who is described elsewhere is having clearly effeminate beauty, is bathing in the Jordan River. Resh Lakish, who elsewhere is described as a bit of a brute, sees the beauty in the water and swims towards her, only to discover that she is a he. “Your beauty for women!” he cries. “Your strength for Torah,” replies the other. In other words, Resh Lakish says he wishes there were women and beautiful as Rabbi Yochanan, and Rabbi Yochanan says he wishes Resh Lakish would focus his strength onto something more constructive. That’s the first half of the story. The second half carries a familiar trope… Rabbi Yochanan says “If you will give up being a robber, I will give you my sister who is even more beautiful than I am.” Resh Lakish accepted and became a great Torah scholar. The familiar ancient trope of women having no agency really comes as no surprise to us, and usually modern commentaries focus on this. But there’s another issue that really needs to be addressed more – the fact that Resh Lakish leaps into the river as soon as he sees this effeminate Rabbi as though he’s entitled to do that! And what’s even more even more disturbing than his sense of entitlement is that Rabbi Yochanan doesn’t seem to have any issue with it. One would expect the narrative to go something like, “One day Rabbi Yochanan was bathing in the Jordan River and Resh Lakish saw him and thought he was a woman. Resh Lakish leapt into the river and swam over to him. When he realised he was in fact a man, Resh Lakish said, “Your beauty for women,” to which Rabbi Yochanan replied, “Dude, I’m in the bath!!!!”
Why does he not say this? I think it’s because of the male acceptance of total lack of control of the sexual urge by men. Just like in the story of the man who has to have intercourse with a particular women or he’ll die, or the story of the peeping tom who says that if he can’t marry her can he it least perve over her in secret, early Rabbinic Judaism seemed totally comfortable with the idea that men simply can’t control themselves around women. I don’t think that originally Rabbinic Judaism disparaged women, I think it sought to control them because the man found it too difficult to control themselves. Once the women were controlled, then they were disparaged in order to justify the control. Early Rabbinic Judaism controlled women not because of anything that women did per se, it was because men were seen as weak-willed.
There’s no question that over the millennia, Jewish tradition tried to get men to control their lustful urges. Biblical commentator Ibn Ezra, for example, explained (commentary on Numbers 6:7) that the person who truly deserves the royal crown is someone who is free from the pressure of his desires. Moderation and control was constantly reinforced. But at the back of the mind must always have been the Rabbinic dictum, “The greater the man, the greater the temptation.” That actually runs totally contrary to the idea of moderation – that if a man is filled with lustful urges then it must mean that he’s a great man, not that he has no control over his emotions! So the man who gets filled with lust to the point that if it’s unfulfilled he’ll die, or the man who carves a hole in a hedge to stare at a beautiful woman, or the man who leaps into a river uninvited to be with someone he thinks is a beautiful woman, all these men can say, “Yeah, but I only did that because I’m great.”
It’s time to deliberately turn our tradition on its head. Being filled with lust is not a sign of greatness, it’s a sign of imbalance. And it’s not a women’s issue, it’s an issue of weak-willed men who are unable to control their urges. If Reform Judaism is to be fully egalitarian, it can’t simply say that men and women are equal in all regards and that we distance ourselves from the lack of agency that Judaism previously thrust upon women due to male weakness. No, we have to go further and acknowledge that our tradition has for a long time empowered men to impose themselves on women and has blamed women for creating the situations in which weak-willed men cannot control themselves. We have to condemn those men who need to turn Judaism into a tool of oppression simply because they worried about what they might do were they not to oppress women. And we have to truly Reform our tradition to help all people to learn to embrace their emotions properly, channel them in a healthy way and to find balance within oneself and with other people. May we create such a tradition, and find such balance within ourselves and others, and let us say, amen.
What kind of a father says that to his child?!? I want to assume that this is a totally fictional account and that no father in his right mind would ever say such a thing to a child of his. But then I remember the picture many years ago of a Chinese baby dead on the street with everyone walking by, because it is socially possible to wish for the death of a daughter. To me, and hopefully to all of us, such a thing is totally repugnant, but we have to accept that it is possible that this is a real account. But real or not, it’s an account that is happily placed in the Talmud and passed down from generation to generation. Contemporary Judaism is essentially Rabbinic or Talmudic Judaism, and there are millions of Jews worldwide who hold that this story, as part of the Torah Sheba’al Peh – the Oral Law – is the literal word of God, which means that a story that has a father say to his beautiful daughter, “For the good of men, you really should die” has Divine sanction. And that’s simply not okay. It’s reprehensible in the modern age. This is the kind of thing that drives Jews from Judaism, so we in the Reform Movement have to very openly clarify that this is not our Judaism, that our Judaism has Reformed dramatically since then.
As much as we disavow ourselves of such Judaism, we have to recognize the message that it carried and ask ourselves whether that message continues today. Elsewhere in Talmud (Bava Metzia 84), we learn that Rabbi Yochanan, who is described elsewhere is having clearly effeminate beauty, is bathing in the Jordan River. Resh Lakish, who elsewhere is described as a bit of a brute, sees the beauty in the water and swims towards her, only to discover that she is a he. “Your beauty for women!” he cries. “Your strength for Torah,” replies the other. In other words, Resh Lakish says he wishes there were women and beautiful as Rabbi Yochanan, and Rabbi Yochanan says he wishes Resh Lakish would focus his strength onto something more constructive. That’s the first half of the story. The second half carries a familiar trope… Rabbi Yochanan says “If you will give up being a robber, I will give you my sister who is even more beautiful than I am.” Resh Lakish accepted and became a great Torah scholar. The familiar ancient trope of women having no agency really comes as no surprise to us, and usually modern commentaries focus on this. But there’s another issue that really needs to be addressed more – the fact that Resh Lakish leaps into the river as soon as he sees this effeminate Rabbi as though he’s entitled to do that! And what’s even more even more disturbing than his sense of entitlement is that Rabbi Yochanan doesn’t seem to have any issue with it. One would expect the narrative to go something like, “One day Rabbi Yochanan was bathing in the Jordan River and Resh Lakish saw him and thought he was a woman. Resh Lakish leapt into the river and swam over to him. When he realised he was in fact a man, Resh Lakish said, “Your beauty for women,” to which Rabbi Yochanan replied, “Dude, I’m in the bath!!!!”
Why does he not say this? I think it’s because of the male acceptance of total lack of control of the sexual urge by men. Just like in the story of the man who has to have intercourse with a particular women or he’ll die, or the story of the peeping tom who says that if he can’t marry her can he it least perve over her in secret, early Rabbinic Judaism seemed totally comfortable with the idea that men simply can’t control themselves around women. I don’t think that originally Rabbinic Judaism disparaged women, I think it sought to control them because the man found it too difficult to control themselves. Once the women were controlled, then they were disparaged in order to justify the control. Early Rabbinic Judaism controlled women not because of anything that women did per se, it was because men were seen as weak-willed.
There’s no question that over the millennia, Jewish tradition tried to get men to control their lustful urges. Biblical commentator Ibn Ezra, for example, explained (commentary on Numbers 6:7) that the person who truly deserves the royal crown is someone who is free from the pressure of his desires. Moderation and control was constantly reinforced. But at the back of the mind must always have been the Rabbinic dictum, “The greater the man, the greater the temptation.” That actually runs totally contrary to the idea of moderation – that if a man is filled with lustful urges then it must mean that he’s a great man, not that he has no control over his emotions! So the man who gets filled with lust to the point that if it’s unfulfilled he’ll die, or the man who carves a hole in a hedge to stare at a beautiful woman, or the man who leaps into a river uninvited to be with someone he thinks is a beautiful woman, all these men can say, “Yeah, but I only did that because I’m great.”
It’s time to deliberately turn our tradition on its head. Being filled with lust is not a sign of greatness, it’s a sign of imbalance. And it’s not a women’s issue, it’s an issue of weak-willed men who are unable to control their urges. If Reform Judaism is to be fully egalitarian, it can’t simply say that men and women are equal in all regards and that we distance ourselves from the lack of agency that Judaism previously thrust upon women due to male weakness. No, we have to go further and acknowledge that our tradition has for a long time empowered men to impose themselves on women and has blamed women for creating the situations in which weak-willed men cannot control themselves. We have to condemn those men who need to turn Judaism into a tool of oppression simply because they worried about what they might do were they not to oppress women. And we have to truly Reform our tradition to help all people to learn to embrace their emotions properly, channel them in a healthy way and to find balance within oneself and with other people. May we create such a tradition, and find such balance within ourselves and others, and let us say, amen.
