Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature. DR. S Mira Balberg
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