Wimpfheimer_ Is it not so.pdf

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Toward a Poetics of Legal Narrative in the Talmud ❙ 55 surprising. The scholars in attendance translate his new category of employee, conceptually formed, into proximate reality by suggesting that Rava, their teacher, is in this category. In this move, the students note that their subject matterÐthe hiring of this new category of employeesÐreplicates itself within their relationship to their teacher. The students' legal extension o²ends and enrages Rava. As readers, we are surprised by his rage, which strikes us as counterintuitive. Why is there such rage from one who is clearly still the teacherÐone who in spite of his students' joke, still bests them in knowledge and wisdom? Our surprise at his rage motivates a reading inspired by the strategies of deconstructionist criticismÐa reading that uses Rava's own rhetoric to gain insight into the ways in which the text reads itself. The exchange between Rava and his students is a structural parallel of the opening lines of our narrative, in which a borrower seeks blanket liability protection. Like the lender, the students attempt to utilize mastery of law as a means of avoiding responsibility. The cleverness of their comment, as in the opening, is the legal application. The borrower of the initial passage attempts to exploit the formal possibilities of tannaitic law by satisfying a technical requirement of exonerationÐ prior contractual hiring. The students' question similarly exploits a formal possibility in Rava's articulation. Rava, as a teacher, is in their service. Rather than concede the point, he is enraged. Using his own mastery of law, Rava, in parallel with the wily lender in his initial passage, manipulates the situation to defend against the blanket exoneration sought by his students. But Rava's response is not as straightforward an application of law as the parallel of the wily lender might imply. Powerfully and unsubtly, he changes the currency in the notion of service. Instantly, the topic of conversation shifts from hiring or borrowingÐthe transaction of goodsÐto that of choosing the subject matter. The shift enables Rava, unlike the lender, not simply to evade service but to turn the service relationship on his students and make them his employees. While the lender's reaction is defensive, Rava's is o²ensive. Unlike a teacher who is paid in ®nancial currency, Rava is a teacher who pays in educational currency. When the currency is rabbinic law, the service relationship is reversed. Rava is the hirer because he controls the currency, its direction, and its coinage. He is not ``hired,'' because the salary of a teacher is irrelevant.²⁵ He asserts his control over the conversation by
56 ❙ Barry Wimpfheimer claiming to control the topic. By actually changing the topic, he enacts his claim while simultaneously making it. Rava creates in form what he has just tried to claim as content. Rava's response to his students recalls another passage in the Babylonian Talmud that elaborates on his pedagogic technique: For Rava²⁶ before he commenced [his discourse] to the scholars, used to say something humorous, and the scholars were amused; after that, he sat in awe and began the discourse. (Shabbat 30b) The intertext suggests additional ways in which the students' question threatens Rava's control. In our own text, which commenced with ``something humorous,'' the students hear Rava's law, uttered as he ``sat in awe,'' but respond to it bemusedly, as if continuing the humorous theme with which he opened. ``If a teacher is one such employee,'' they say, ``then you, Master, are loaned to us.'' By responding lightheartedly to his state of awe, the students wrest control of the lecture from Rava and revert to the opening mindset of the lecture. The students reject Rava's control and assert their own ability to control the currency by forcing the teacher to respond to their concerns. Rava responds by recognizing, in both the substance and the form, the way in which he himself is implicated in this discourseÐby responding to his students' attempt to reduce him to the mere teacher of his legal creation. The ``teacher'' in Rava's statement is a ``teacher of children''Ðan unprestigious member of the secondary intelligentsia.²⁷ Rava does not and will not view himself as such a ``teacher.'' He is a lecturer, a lawmaker, a creator, and an authorizerÐhe picks the topic because his intellectual presence is a force that the students and the law must reckon with. An artist mistaken for a caricaturist, Rava refuses to allow the mold to setÐto allow the law to lend imprimatur to the false contours of such a description. By changing the currency, he denies the societal and commercial parallels inherent in the comparison between one teacher type and another. In reacting strongly against this innocent extension of law, he performatively demonstrates rabbinic anxieties and the speci®c fear that the shared task of teaching could diminish the hierarchical status of a rabbinic scholar.
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Page 17 and 18: 66 ❙ Barry Wimpfheimer erredÐtha
Page 19 and 20: 68 ❙ Barry Wimpfheimer empathic d
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