Wimpfheimer_ Is it not so.pdf

Toward a Poetics of Legal Narrative in the Talmud ❙ 59
through a mediated compromise o²stage that recognizes the relational aspect of
talmudic education. Rava's victory is incomplete, for the stam who intervenes in the
talmudic text does not allow Rava the freedom to change currency without forcing
him to pay opportunity costs. Rava changes the currency by highlighting a feature of
his controlÐthe ability to change topic. It is his intent to use control of topic as a
symbol of domination, not its de®nition. Changing topic is not meant as a
prescriptive de®nition of control, but as a signal that the relationship is unidirectional.
The stam borrows Rava's description for prescriptive purposes. The days of
the Kallah, the short preholiday period when scholars necessarily speak of holiday
matters, become the days in which Rava's prescription enslaves its creator. On those
days, though the currency is still educational and the teacher pays, there is no option
for currency control, and he is in their service. Remarkably, the battle over control of
the law is won by a text, Rava's prescriptionÐa testament to the power of a text and
its ability to transcend both genesis and author.
By allowing Rava's text a prescriptive character, the stam succeeds in contextualizing
Rava's genius and scholarship in general. While Rava's is the creative
energetic voice behind this and many passages of the Talmud, it is the communal
interest, the communal practice, and the communal attention that authorize
discourse by constituting its signi®cance. On the Kallah days, the most signi®cant
days for the creative rabbinic scholar, it is not the scholar who authorizes, but the
community of students, and the community of legal practitioners. On those days,
Rava is in the service of that voice that ultimately authorizes scholarship, the voice
of community.
In contextualizing scholarship, the stam responds directly to Rava, indirectly to
the Derridean notion that there is nothing in the world outside of text.³⁷ The world
is textualized and the interpreter of text empowered. Archimedes' problem remains,
though, for one cannot move the text with no place to standÐno grounding in
meaning for whatever interpretation mastery of text allows. The powerful is
powerless. In Derrida's empowered interpreter, the con¯uence of power and
weakness is realized in the notion of play that dominates his theory of interpretation.³⁸
After the empowered interpreter has been disempowered, all that is left is an
uninvested player cognizant of his or her abilities to interpret, but equally aware of
the futility of the enterprise of interpretation as the pursuit of an end. This