intercourse: sexual acts of love, compassion [g d]


SO
in addition
to the question
of gender and power
vis-a-vis Rome [or any
other past/present/future Worldpower and Overlord]
that is most actively mobilized by this text,
there is perhaps another subtheme of public and private
that is also lurking under its surface,
one that has to do with internal power
relations within Jewish society
between different sects
or competing
elites.

The
"people of
the land" certainly
represent suchlike competing groups.
For the Rabbis, the Bet-haMidrash, the Study House {'t Leerhuis},
functioned as private space in another sense,
a sense internal to Jews and not only in the conflict between Jews and Romans {a.s.o.},
for the Study House was the quintessential place for the formation of rabbinic identity
over against these Others who are Jews,
the
Am haAretz.

Since
one who
studies Torah in
the presence of these Jewish Others
is compared to one who has sexual intercourse with his fiancee in their presence,
this continues a commonplace rabbinic metaphor of Torah study as the act of love,
the Torah as bride for the Rabbis, and the
privacy
that such a relationship connotes ~ as well, of course,
as marking clearly once again
the gender of those
who have exclusive
access to
Torah.

In
addition, then,
to provoking Rome,
Rabbi Hanina may have been inviting the wrath of the other Rabbis
by convening congregations and teaching Torah in public spaces
analogous to the Synagogues {"congregations"}. which were still.
at this early time, in the control of the nonrabbinic parties among the Jews,
or even worse, in the virtual equivalent of the marketplace,
that site of "social intercourse at its most chaotic and uncertain,
and therefore most dangerous".

This interpretation of Torah
as virtually esorteric knowledge, almost as a mystery,
is strongly supported by the doubling in the text,
whereby convening of public congregations for the teaching of Torah
is made analogous to the revealing of G d's Holy Name in public.

Resistance, according to this view ~ the trickster party in rabbinic Judaism ~
consists of doing what we do without getting into trouble and using evasiveness
in order to keep doing it.

Interestingly enough,
in defying the Romans and thus courting a martyr's death,
Rabbi Hanina was behaving in a way culturally intelligible to the Romans
~ behaving like a "real man," a muscle Jew ~
while Rabbi Yose the son of Kisma through deceptive,
i.o.w. "womanish" complicity with
the Romans,
resisted
their cultural
hegemony.

Boqer Tov!

blozen
engel
cool!
07 aug 2008 - bewerkt op 07 aug 2008 - meld ongepast verhaal
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