Wimpfheimer_ Is it not so.pdf

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Toward a Poetics of Legal Narrative in the Talmud ❙ 85 69 There are six examples of the formula Iykhsif lesof igla¥i milta (He was ashamed; eventually it was ascertained . . .) in the Babylonian Talmud: Gittin 29b and 77b; Bava Metsi¦a 81a, 81b, and 97a; and ¦Avodah Zarah 22a. One of the cases (Bava Metsi¦a 81a) is the cognate of this story repeated with Rav Pappa, Rava's student, as the hero. (The closeness of the two scholars determines that some Rava statements should be attributed to Rav Pappa. The Talmud is itself aware of this on Bava Kamma 67b). The other ®ve cases refer to Rava. This may suggest that the language of Iykhsif is not terribly uncommon for Rava narratives. Shamma Friedman, Perush, 273, claims that the Rav Pappa parallel to our passage on Bava Metsi¦a 81a±b was formulated to re¯ect the story of Rava. In light of the inconsistent legality of our passage and its relationship with the prior passage, we can perhaps suggest the opposite. The story told in our passage is a retelling of Rav Pappa's tale in a manner that creates a mirror e²ect between the two narratives, as I will suggest below. The attribution of the passage to Rava is a literary necessity, given the appearance of Rava in the previous narrative. 70 The traditional way of reading this story assumes that the undoing of Rava's shame is a historical account of the courtroom proceedings (S. Friedman, Perush, 274 n. 42). I am suggesting that this undoing is a literary device that empowers the anonymous narrator to resurrect the reputation of a distinguished scholar. Rather than rewrite the original story, the narrator performs the process of encountering the fallen scholar and resurrecting him. Despite the inclination to salvage Rava, though, the narrator preserves the court-presented facts to maintain the drama of Rava's shame. (¦Avodah Zarah 22a explicitly questions the historical veracity of a similar legal shame narrative, and the redactor concludes that the shame incident never occurred.) 71 From this point on, the ``narrator'' is a signi®cant player. I am distinguishing the narrator here from the stam whom I identi®ed in the earlier passage. It is my contention that the narrator in this story predates the stam because there is later material in this section. In the ®rst narrative, the material until vela hi is entirely the work of a narrator who is not the stam. The di²erence is that in the second narrative it is the narrator who is responsible for Rava's ultimate salvation, while in the ®rst narrative it is the stam who is responsible for his ultimate condemnation. For an opinion that would turn the narrator into the stam see further n. 75. 72 There is a possibility that the narrator does not mis-narrate, but uses an ambiguous term, ledaluyei, which was translated above as ``to load.'' Though this form of the term always has the meaning we used in our translation, there is a form of the verb that means ``to remove.'' Perhaps the narrator ®nds refuge in the ambiguity of language; where originally we translated the term as ``to load,'' we must now translate it as ``to remove.''
86 ❙ Barry Wimpfheimer 73 BT Sanhedrin 6b. 74 J. Theodor and Chanoch Albeck, eds., Midrash bereshit rabbah (Jerusalem: Wahrman, 1965), 60:32. 75 Yevamot 99b; Ketubbot 28b; Gittin 7a; ¼ullin 5b, 6a, 7a. In a forthcoming article entitled ```The Holy One Blessed Be He . . . Does Not Permit the Righteous to Stumble'ÐRe¯ections on the Development of a Remarkable BT Theologoumenon,'' Leib Moscovitz notes the connection between this conceptual notion of God not allowing the righteous to stumble and the trope of shame and its undoing. Moscovitz's thesis is that the theologoumenon is a product of the Talmud's anonymous stratum. If Moscovitz is correct, then the term ``narrator'' in this section could be replaced with stam as in the reading of our earlier narrative. 76 These ideas are adapted from Shoshana Felman, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 92. 77 To level out the comparison, one can compare the redactors of both stories as the hands responsible for the inclusion of anonymous material even if that material comes from two di²erent periods.
Page 1 and 2: “But It Is Not So”: Toward a Po
Page 3 and 4: 52 ❙ Barry Wimpfheimer speci®c n
Page 5 and 6: 54 ❙ Barry Wimpfheimer Rava said:
Page 7 and 8: 56 ❙ Barry Wimpfheimer claiming t
Page 9 and 10: 58 ❙ Barry Wimpfheimer Teaching i
Page 11 and 12: 60 ❙ Barry Wimpfheimer teleologic
Page 13 and 14: 62 ❙ Barry Wimpfheimer Mar⁴¹ b
Page 15 and 16: 64 ❙ Barry Wimpfheimer reachÐwhi
Page 17 and 18: 66 ❙ Barry Wimpfheimer erredÐtha
Page 19 and 20: 68 ❙ Barry Wimpfheimer empathic d
Page 21 and 22: 70 ❙ Barry Wimpfheimer failed to
Page 23 and 24: 72 ❙ Barry Wimpfheimer for Rava t
Page 25 and 26: 74 ❙ Barry Wimpfheimer rulings co
Page 27 and 28: 76 ❙ Barry Wimpfheimer In our pas
Page 29 and 30: 78 ❙ Barry Wimpfheimer Rabbenu Ba
Page 31 and 32: 80 ❙ Barry Wimpfheimer 35 The ter
Page 33 and 34: 82 ❙ Barry Wimpfheimer 330): ``in
Page 35: 84 ❙ Barry Wimpfheimer 64 Though

Wimpfheimer_ Is it not so.pdf

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?