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