Thinking with the Physical Body

In tractate Yoma one of the ways the rabbis reflect on their relationship with the priesthood is through the lens of the physical body. They describe a physical Temple-based ceremony on Yom Kippur that depends on the purity of the high priest's body. He must protect himself from seminal emissions, immerse his full body five times, as well as wash his hands and feet ten times before and after changing from one set of beautiful vestments into another. This vivid picture of Temple procedure, so focused on the physical body, is entirely different from the bodily self-denial explored in detail in the eighth chapter of Bavli Yoma, where eating, washing, anointing, sandal wearing, and sexual relations are prohibited. No doubt, the rabbis build up the grandeur of the Temple and the priesthood in a desire to present their knowledge of all of the intricate details associated with them. However, in analyzing the observance of Yom Kippur in the Temple and the prohibitions that define the rabbinic Yom Kippur, given the extent to which the rabbis controlled both the Temple accounts in Yoma and the discussions about Yom Kippur in the eighth chapter of this tractate, it is surprising to observe the discontinuities. Focusing on references to feet, because both the Temple rite and the rabbinic observance of Yom Kippur involve feet, I will offer one perspective on how the Bavli, specifically in tractate Yoma, constructs as well as deconstructs the Temple and its priests, providing insight into the rabbinic departure from the Temple Yom Kippur.Footnote ⁴

My focus on the physical body, both male and female, emerges directly from a continuous engagement with feminist analysis, especially in light of the shift from Temple rites involving the body to the rabbinic Yom Kippur prohibitions that involve acts of physical self-denial. By choosing to focus on the sources in Bavli Yoma that mention feet (as one example), I am aligned methodologically with Ishay Rosen-Zvi, who, in his work on Mishnah Sotah, suggests the need to produce more narrowly focused studies of the rabbis’ use of gender, analyzing specific cases. In doing so, he argues, we can resist generalizing about the rabbis’ process of gendering and its purposes, and become more nuanced readers who can better detect the different processes of marginalization and mechanisms of exclusion on the part of the rabbis. As Rosen-Zvi correctly illuminates, at the root of every exclusion, every act of differentiation, is a different problem.Footnote ⁵ The male and female bodies are a literary medium through which the rabbis think about their world with the goal of “othering,” or marginalizing, the priests and women, not to mention the Temple and its rituals. Just as the issues driving the inclusion of a certain type of male and the exclusion of women from the house of study are different from the role of men and the exclusion of women from the courthouse, by focusing on the rabbis’ references to the body, and specifically to feet in Bavli Yoma, we can detect a complex process of marginalization that involves a more critical attitude on the part of the rabbis toward the Temple than we might acknowledge. Indeed, we can find many rabbinic sources that praise the Temple, map its space, and establish continuities between Temple practice and rabbinic practice. The memory of the Passover sacrifice and its reintegration into the rituals of the seder in rabbinic sources in tractate Pesaḥim creates a far more seamless connection than what we see with respect to Yom Kippur.Footnote ⁶ But, as Rosen-Zvi would have us ask—toward what end?Footnote ⁷

By focusing on references to feet, I acknowledge that the body is a bearer of symbolic value, communicating not only social and religious agendas, but objectionable behaviors as well.Footnote ⁸ Building on Mary Douglas, feminist analyses lend further support to her observation that a society's boundaries are associated metaphorically with the body by the social group constructing them, especially in moments when they are experiencing crisis and threat.Footnote ⁹ Indeed, the powers and dangers that the rabbis perceive in their desire to establish a rabbinic Yom Kippur that is distinctly theirs are reproduced in miniature in the different ways they portray the human body in the Temple versus the human body in their discussion of the rabbinic Yom Kippur. The body is a metaphor for how the rabbis see themselves and their society.Footnote ¹⁰ By looking at talmudic references to priests and their feet and by comparing this to the way in which barefootedness is treated in the eighth chapter of Yoma, we can think more carefully about how the rabbis view God's physical house, the priests who conduct its rites, and their understandings of the reasons for its destruction. My goal is to expose one small slice of a larger phenomenon found throughout Bavli Yoma, where the rabbis embody priests and women in ways that mark them as distinct from themselves. That said, each rabbinic attempt to differentiate themselves takes a different form and highlights a different aspect of what is problematic for the rabbis about the priesthood and women. As such, my focus on texts about feet brings to the fore issues such as the rabbinic discomfort with the rootedness of the priesthood in kinship ties and their fear of the construction or use of alternative temples. Women raise anxieties for the rabbis about uncontrolled sexuality over which they want to assert power and authority. By blaming women for lasciviousness, the rabbis locate the source of sinfulness and generate an imagined belief that they understand the formula for preventing promiscuous behaviors. Comparing specific cases, like how feet are treated in the first seven chapters of the tractate with respect to the Temple and how they are treated in the final chapter with respect to the rabbinic Yom Kippur, leads us to think about what the rabbis would like to leave behind when they construct their lives as leaders outside of the Temple complex.

Thinking with One Tractate

My decision to confront one tractate in its entirety, rather than explore references to feet throughout the talmudim, stems from my interest in exploring whether individual tractates have their own agendas or narrative arcs. Driven primarily by my observation that the first seven chapters of the tractate, both in the Mishnah and in the talmudim, do not mention anything about the central Yom Kippur practice of ‘ innuy (self-denial) as noted in Leviticus 16:29 and 23:27; nor quote from these verses; nor offer any reference to the priests fasting on Yom Kippur, offering sacrifices barefooted, or refraining from washing, I began to wonder whether the discrepancies were intentionally constructed as a way to mark the rabbinic Yom Kippur as somehow different from the priestly Yom Kippur (without highlighting the obvious point that there would be no Yom Kippur Temple-like Avodah and no goat pushed off a cliff carrying away the people's sins without a temple in Jerusalem).Footnote ¹¹ Additionally, a feminist reading of tractate Yoma, both of the Mishnah and the Bavli, consistently exposes efforts to marginalize and disempower both priests and women throughout its first seven chapters, reversing this trajectory in chapter 8 in its treatment of the prohibitions that define Yom Kippur, which are incumbent on both men and women.

To date, many scholars have argued that talmudic tractates are compilations of sources from different places woven together. Consequently, material found elsewhere, that is, in other tractates, helps to elucidate sources in a given tractate. A historically conscious and textually responsible approach to Yom Kippur rituals means exhausting rabbinic literature. For example, bringing material found in B. Rosh Ha-shanah 16b and Y. Rosh Ha-shanah 1:3 (57c) to bear on our understanding of the development of Yom Kippur informs our sense of the period from Rosh Ha-shanah to Yom Kippur as a time when God sits in judgment, opening up a “book of life,” ideas that are integrally connected to these holidays, but which happen not to appear in tractate Yoma. However, in the instances when we detect patterns and overarching agendas within one tractate, it behooves us to consider the possibility that its editors took on a more robust authorial role and, in such a case, to think about what the tractate means and communicates about itself.Footnote ¹² Methodologically, this means not only studying sources within the tractate to understand others, but also, in the case of Bavli Yoma, to wonder why sources found in the eighth chapter, including the quotation of biblical verses specifically about self-denial on Yom Kippur (Leviticus 16:29; 23:27), are not mentioned at all in the first seven chapters. There seems to be an ideological inconsistency. The end goal is to make sense of the different treatments of Yom Kippur generated specifically by Bavli Yoma's creators, questioning why the image of Yom Kippur in the eighth chapter does not seem to be a direct outgrowth of the other chapters in the tractate.Footnote ¹³ That said, I am not claiming that Bavli Yoma's perspective is the only view of Yom Kippur, as there are others found in rabbinic and nonrabbinic sources.Footnote ¹⁴ Rather, I intend to further complicate the relationship that the rabbis had with the Temple past, exploring the literary moves that they used to signal a different vision of Yom Kippur.Footnote ¹⁵

Looking at Feet through the Lens of the Temple: A View from Chapters 1–7

In the first seven chapters of tractate Yoma, the rabbis’ description of a very physical Temple-based ceremony on Yom Kippur revolves around the priest's body, including the high priest's need to change from one set of beautiful vestments into another (M. Yoma 3:4; B. Yoma 30b and 31b; Y. Yoma 1:4 [39a]). He cannot have a seminal emission or fall asleep; he prevents this from occurring by eating appropriate food in advance of Yom Kippur (M. Yoma 1:4; B. Yoma 18ab). The high priest is required to perform several full-body immersions, as no priest could enter the Temple precincts unless he had immersed in a mikveh (ritual bath) (Leviticus 16:4; M. Yoma 3:3; B. Yoma 30b–31b). Fellow priests warm the ritual bathwater for the high priest in case he is too old or fastidious and might feel too chilled.Footnote ¹⁶ He washes his hands and feet over and over again (M. Yoma 3:4–6; B. Yoma 31b–32b; Y. Yoma 3:6 [40c]) and separates himself from other priests with a linen sheet so that no one would see him naked as he prepares to immerse (M. Yoma 3:4, 3:6; B. Yoma 31b; B. Yoma 35a).

More specifically, according to Bavli Yoma, the high priest was required to perform five immersions, accompanied by ten sanctifications (kiddushin), that separated each of five Yom Kippur services that took place throughout the day one after the other (M. Yoma 3: 3–4, 3:6; B. Yoma 31b–32b). Immersions were full-body submersions, while sanctifications involved washing one's hands and feet each time a priest removed his vestments, and then again prior to donning the new ones for the next service.Footnote ¹⁷ A detailed discussion explores exactly when the high priest was to perform these sanctifications so as to ensure that he washed his hands and feet ten times in total. But, despite this lengthy discussion about hand and foot washing in the Bavli,Footnote ¹⁸ and a clear biblical commandment incumbent upon Aaron and his sons to wash their hands and feet before approaching the altar (Exodus 30:19–21), Yerushalmi Yoma does not share the same interest in these sanctifications. In the Yerushalmi, Rabbi Yoḥanan argues that this Yom Kippur rite is not essential to the overall ritual of the Avodah, paralleling the fact that hand and foot washing is ultimately lost to Jewish tradition, not to mention to Yom Kippur.Footnote ¹⁹ This merely heightens the question as to what Bavli Yoma conveys via its interest in this rite and in its discussion of how to go about its proper performance.

More noteworthy is that in the midst of describing the need for performing the rite of sanctification of the hands and feet ten times during the Yom Kippur Avodah, M. Yoma 3:2 records a general rule that applies even when it is not Yom Kippur: “everyone” (kol), that is, every priest who serves in the Temple, must also perform this same rite when he urinates. In bringing this to the fore, the Mishnah interrupts the overall narrative describing the Yom Kippur Avodah and the ritual of the high priest in a way that distances us from the sanctity of the Yom Kippur Temple rite to discuss a daily purification rite incumbent on every priest before serving in the Temple. M. Yoma 3:2 states:

Remarkably, B. Yoma 29b–30a extrapolates further, turning hand and foot washing into a precautionary move aimed to protect priests from being judged improperly (also see M. Yoma 7:3; B. Yoma 70b):

A mere gaze at the feet of a priest can inform an onlooker about the health of the most intimate part of a priest's anatomy, his penis.Footnote ²⁴ When the Bavli labels the priest who neglects to perform the rite of hand and foot washing and therefore fails to remove droplets of urine from his feet a kerut shofkhah, it invokes Deuteronomy 23:2 in a powerful literary move. Deuteronomy 23:2 commands that a man without a penis or with a crushed penis cannot be “admitted into the congregation of the Lord.” Indeed, he is the quintessential outsider. Rashi, in trying to figure out why droplets of urine would land on a priest's feet as well as why the Mishnah mentions mamzerut, describes this situation as one in which droplets of urine emerge slowly from a man's penis, falling on his feet due to an anatomical defect that not only causes difficulty urinating, but also causes impotence. Droplets of urine on a priest's feet would therefore signify his inability to have children, deeming him an outsider to an institution built on the rules of kinship. Any children he claims as his own would be suspected as mamzerim. In other words, there would be doubts about the paternity of his children and concerns that they were born to a different father, who had engaged in an adulterous relationship with his wife. However, if he had rubbed off the droplets and performed the rite of hand and foot washing no one would be suspicious.

On one level, the remedy seems sensitive, in that priests can undergo a rite of sanctification. They wash their hands and feet after wiping off droplets of urine from their feet with their hands and prevent the improper judgment of others. However, hand and foot washing also challenges the holiness of the rite of sanctification and its function as an act of purification associated with the proper performance of the Yom Kippur Avodah. Washing one's hands and feet ten times may have no connection with urinating during the observance of Yom Kippur by the high priest. However, in B. Yoma 29b–30a “urine droplets” and “feet” become the means through which the rabbis couch the priests as men who cover up their imperfections, allowing sons without priestly blood to become priests. Furthermore, this text casts aspersions on the priests, constructing the bodies of some as incapable of having sex, not to mention progeny.Footnote ²⁵ The rabbis grant the priests the right to manipulate a legal system by performing a commandment to wash off droplets of urine so that they can potentially hide their faulty anatomy in the name of keeping the priesthood intact. The mere suggestion that priests could falsify their sons’ lineage enabled the rabbis to construct imagined deficiencies in priestly leadership.

Moreover, the triviality of the example the rabbis bring, that is, the notion that one could use urine droplets on a priest's feet to determine something about their sexuality, also highlights a level of insecurity related to the difficulties of establishing a rabbinic patriarchy where not all Jews are rabbinic Jews.Footnote ²⁶ No doubt, priests symbolized a threat to the rabbis’ desire for authority, and so recasting a purification rite into one whose purpose it is to remove droplets of urine from a priest's feet in order to construct not only the possibility of sexual weakness on the part of priests, but also a way for them to hide it, makes claims for rabbinic power over priestly control. When the rabbis conjure up the impotent priest who seeks to hide his failings with foot washing, they reveal a desire for authority in the wake of a presumed culture dominated by a scripturally sanctioned group of leaders who can serve as priests because they are related to one another. Inherited leadership was an issue of concern to the Babylonian rabbinic elite, for whom religious and cultural reproduction were rooted in a master/disciple relationship and not a bloodline.Footnote ²⁷ In the wake of a significant social and religious anxiety with respect to the power of kinship, the rabbis attempt to make sense of this desired shift. As such, they take the opportunity to denigrate the priests in the wake of vivid and seemingly nostalgic descriptions of Temple ritual, convincing themselves that religious authority rightfully belongs to them.Footnote ²⁸

Another text that centers on feet functions in the larger schema of a challenge to the image of the high priest Shimon ha-Ẓaddik (B. Yoma 69a).Footnote ²⁹ In the wake of many rabbinic sources in Yoma that offer a clear and far more favorable picture of him, this passage problematizes the image of this high priest, highlighting a sense of rabbinic conflict regarding the priesthood.Footnote ³⁰ In a context where Bavli Yoma suggests limiting the donning of priestly garb to service in the Temple alone, a tannaitic aggadic story depicts Shimon ha-Ẓaddik's role in the destruction of Mount Gerizim, wearing his priestly clothing. Once again, we find the rabbis focused on feet, this time not for spiritual and ritual ends, as we saw above, but to physically weaken a different Other, that is, the Kutim (Samaritans), and the position of the high priest, as well as the notion of an alternative temple site.Footnote ³¹

B. Yoma 69a presents us with a story about Shimon ha-Ẓaddik, the high priest who convinces Alexander of Macedon to allow him to lead an attack against the Kutim, another priestly sect with claims to the same Torah and a competing temple at Mount Gerizim.Footnote ³² They had threatened to destroy the Temple in Jerusalem. In the story the question is posed, “What did [Shimon ha-Ẓaddik] do? He donned priestly vestments and wrapped [his head] in priestly vestments” and went out with an army of some of the most prominent people in Israel (who could have been priests but may not have been only priests) in order to ask that Alexander allow him to destroy the Kutim and their temple. Convinced by an image of Shimon ha-Ẓaddik's successes on the battlefield and by this priest's promise that they would pray for Alexander in the Jerusalem Temple, he granted him his request, giving the Kutim into Shimon's hands to do whatever he wished in order to protect the centrality of the Jerusalem Temple.

Immediately following their interchange, Shimon ha-Ẓaddik's army “pierced the heels [of the Kutim] and suspended them from the tails of their horses and dragged them over thorns and thistles until they reached Mount Gerizim,” the site of the temple of the Kutim, which they plowed over. The victory is commemorated with a holiday celebration on the twenty-fifth day of Tevet, which became known as the day of Mount Gerizim. While a high priest emerges here as powerful and protective, not to mention as an intercessor capable of winning over a Greek king, the physical violence that he and his army employ, albeit while donning priestly clothing used to perform the holiest of acts before God, equates the priesthood with military ferocity. Why do the rabbis choose to tell the story this way in Bavli Yoma, a story that parallels both Josephus's presentation of the destruction of Mount Gerizim by John Hyrcanus, the Hasmonean high priest who wishes to consolidate power, and a version found in Megillat Taʿanit establishing a holiday to celebrate this victory on the twenty-first of Kislev? What does the text in Yoma do when contextualized in the Bavli?

The act of injuring the heels of an enemy conjures up the myth of Achilles, whose mother, Thetis, dipped him in the river Styx in order to make him invulnerable. His heel was the only body part that was not covered with water and therefore he was killed by a poisoned-arrow wound directly to his heel. The priest, Shimon ha-Ẓaddik, who is cast here as an exemplary warrior and who is ultimately absolved of wearing his priestly garb outside of the Temple,Footnote ³³ knows exactly which part of the body will make the Kutim the most vulnerable. Therefore, he takes aim at the heels of the Kutim. Surprisingly, the act of dragging Kutim by horses over thorns and thistles seems insufficient to assert absolute control.Footnote ³⁴ Piercing the heels of the Kutim ensures that they will never engage in battle; they will never bring offerings or officiate in their temple. Crippled and maimed, they are symbolic of the destruction of an alternative temple, but a temple nevertheless, accentuating the vulnerability of sacred places of worship and the priests who officiate within them. Without their heels the Kutim emerge as powerless; without a temple the priests are, as the rabbis imagine them, powerless as well.

The rabbis present Shimon ha-Ẓaddik in all of his glory; he is a hero unlike the kind of hero that the rabbis want to imagine themselves to be. In so doing, they deconstruct him. They transfer the violent maneuvers of the battlefield and the military tactics necessary for protecting the Jerusalem Temple to a high priest who fights battles garbed in holy clothing. Instead of a rabbinic figure, it is a priest, Shimon ha-Ẓaddik, who destroys competing temples. The rabbis do not want to lead armies to destroy others, nor do they see themselves with the power to convince foreign kings to take their side. They do not don holy vestments to signify who they are in relationship to other Jews or to God.Footnote ³⁵ Their domain is the house of study; one house of study never threatens the physical existence of another. Nor does it require a specific type of dress. The way that Shimon ha-Ẓaddik attacks the Kutim couches him, a most righteous high priest, as exhibiting an aggressive type of masculinity aimed to consolidate power in one temple and one priesthood. But this type of leadership role, not to mention this type of masculinity, symbolized by the physical act of piercing his enemies’ heels, is not one that the rabbis embrace. They believe or hope that their intellectual abilities and knowledge of Torah are far more sustainable. Indeed, we find this ideational thread in Bavli Yoma 35b conveyed through the transformation of the priest Eleazar ben Ḥarsom from a priest who dons inappropriate priestly garb woven by his mother, into a scholar of Torah willing to give up his father's wealth so that he can study Torah all of the time.Footnote ³⁶

Further support for this attitude toward the priests can be found more directly in another tannaitic aggadic story (B. Yoma 19b), where a Sadducean father explicitly warns his son, the high priest, of the need to be “fearful of the Pharisees.”Footnote ³⁷ His son had not followed the proper Temple procedure, presumably one that the Pharisees and not the priests oversaw, and had brought incense into the holy of holies while the incense was still burning. As a result, a few days later, the son died and, as one report in the baraita conveys, an angel had struck him in the face, leaving a mark that appeared like the “footprint of a calf's foot [hoof] between his shoulders,” although Y. Yoma 1:5 (39a) indicates that the footprint appeared on the priest's forehead, which makes more sense in context.Footnote ³⁸ This footprint signifies that God's angel had stepped on the priest deservedly, physically maiming him through the symbol of an animal's hoof, communicating through this act that he was disqualified from the priesthood and that his death was, indeed, an unnatural one brought about by divine forces. Moreover, the footprint also suggests that there is good reason to be worried about the Pharisees (who prefigure the rabbis themselves), for God's angel approves of Pharisaic oversight of the Temple and not independent priestly decision-making.

And finally, B. Yoma 9b uses feet that belong to women to account for the destruction of the First Temple.Footnote ³⁹ In this case the rabbis turn to female sexuality to imagine that men were not culpable in the destruction of the Temple. The rabbis propose that the Temple fell due to acts categorized as illicit sexual behavior (giluy ʿarayot). A running exegetical comment on Isaiah 3:16 conveys that it was the illicit sexual behaviors of women and not men that led to this destruction, highlighting their very seductive nature, as is common in rabbinic depictions of women. This time seduction is generated by their erotic strutting and by the aroma that wafts from their feet:

The rabbis use women's feet and their shoes as a metonym for women's personhood, couching them as sexually enticing, albeit while granting them a degree of power over the men they seduce.Footnote ⁴¹ In this case, women use their feet to entice young men to commit illicit sex; they arouse the evil inclination in men, luring them with the smells of myrrh and balsam coming from their feet as they walk.Footnote ⁴² Men, in and of themselves, are upright until led astray, even weakened, by the sexual advances of the smells that emerge from the feet of women.Footnote ⁴³ Achillean vulnerability is evoked in men because women use their feet. These women awaken impulses that promote chaos and bring about destruction. The depiction of women as able to sexually entice men disclaims the rabbis’ ownership of their own male bodies and their desires. The awakening of sexual yearning is the result of female manipulation, and so fault rests with women and not with men.Footnote ⁴⁴ In this case, culpability extends to the destruction of God's holy house.

Feet, in Bavli Yoma, are one trope, fully mutable and therefore usable in different contexts by the rabbis to bring to light a patriarchal agenda that “others” priests as well as women. Discussions of feet are also gendered, highlighting a power dynamic characteristic of the rabbis who are vying for authority. As such, the rabbis depict male priests as washing their feet because of the urine that drips from their penises, threatening a priestly system built upon a bloodline and a sacred place. Male priests also weaken their enemies by physically and violently attacking them at the heel, distinguishing the “righteous,” warring, masculine priest, Shimon ha-Ẓaddik, from the rabbis who construct his story and see themselves as different types of men, who study Torah. And young women attack Israelite men with their feet, tempting them sexually, upsetting a desired social order, which explains why the destruction of the First Temple occurred.

The Rabbinic Body and Yom Kippur: Barefootedness in Yoma, Chapter Eight

The references to feet noted above symbolize Temple rites gone awry—whether because these passages cover up a priest's sexual dysfunction, or highlight a priest's decision to wear his priestly garb and lead an army into battle, or inform us of the culpability of women in bringing about the Temple's destruction. In the prohibition regarding shoes on Yom Kippur in chapter 8, we sense different motives entirely. The gendered presentation of feet in the first seven chapters, both in the Mishnah and the Bavli, that distinguishes between the male and the female foot, is entirely distinct from the prohibition regarding shoes required of both men and women (although women who have just given birth are exempt from the prohibition). We begin in M. Yoma 8:1 (and T. Yoma 4:1) with the Mishnah's attempt to define what it means to practice ʿinnuy, that is, the self-denial of one's body before God, in keeping with the commandment in Leviticus 16:29. The prohibition of neʿilat ha-sandal (wearing shoes) is central to this definition.

In considering the motivations for the prohibition in M. Yoma 8:1 (and T. Yoma 4:1) against wearing shoes as one expression of the commandment of self-denial in Leviticus we might connect this prohibition to the priests’ barefootedness in the Temple. Arguably, prohibitions required of nonpriests, especially in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple, were an outgrowth of restrictions incumbent on their priestly contemporaries and ancestors. Thinking about it from another perspective, the Bavli also had ample biblical loci to explain the Mishnah's requirement of barefootedness, including God's first commandment to Moses at the burning bush, “Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground” (Exodus 3:5). Joshua, too, upon meeting God's servant for the first time, took off his shoes in order to mark the place where he stood as sacred (Joshua 5:15). The physical act of removing one's shoes and the fleshly act of touching one's feet to the ground inscribe a particular place as holy and, at the same time, evoke a feeling of spiritual connection with God, certainly important for observing Yom Kippur.Footnote ⁴⁵ However, the Babylonian sugya constructed to answer the question, “from where in Scripture do we learn about the prohibition against wearing shoes on Yom Kippur?,” does not mention these verses. This is also surprising given the availability of tannaitic sources not found in Yoma that tie these verses regarding Moses and Joshua to the barefootedness required of anyone who entered the Temple precincts. Additionally, later sources, such as Shemot Rabbah, are profoundly aware of this connection.Footnote ⁴⁶ Indeed, rabbinic literature is replete with sources that warn against entering the Temple wearing shoes or even with dust on one's feet (B. Berakhot 9:5; B. Berakhot 62b; B. Sotah 40a; Y. Shekalim 5:1 [48d]). Rabban Yoḥanan ben Zakkai establishes a takkanah prohibiting priests from ascending the platform to bestow priestly blessings unless barefooted (B. Rosh Ha-shanah 31b). Yet, none of these sources appear in M. Yoma, T. Yoma, B. Yoma, or Y. Yoma.

More specifically, when the Bavli interprets M. Yoma 8:1 and tries to root the prohibition against wearing shoes in a biblical source, it does nothing to equate barefootedness with any priestly rite, including that of hand and foot washing. Indeed, even washing itself is prohibited according to M. Yoma 8:1, which seems surprising in light of the high priest's continuous immersions throughout Yom Kippur. The Bavli does not point to the Yom Kippur ritual involving barefootedness as connected to that which weakened the Kutim and led to the destruction of their temple, or even with the fact that shoes can have sexual allure. No sources that refer specifically to barefootedness in the Temple appear, suggesting a desire to resist a more locative ritual situated in the place of the Temple in favor of a more universal type of rite, observed by men and women alike.Footnote ⁴⁷ In the eighth chapter of Yoma (B. Yoma 77a), while attempting to elucidate references to barefootedness by focusing on the word yaḥef, the passage ultimately leads us to Jeremiah's warning in 2:25, “Save your foot from going bare, and your throat from thirst.” As B. Yoma 77a tells us, “Save your foot” means “prevent yourself from [committing sin] so that your foot will not come to barefootedness,” the punishment for which in Jeremiah is exile. If sinning provokes barefootedness, then removing one's shoes on Yom Kippur is a symbol of culpability and the need to atone. It is a way for the body to physically experience the manner in which sinful behavior fails to protect individuals.

In Bavli Yoma 77a the rabbis also embrace King David's suffering as he ascended the Mount of Olives yaḥef, barefoot (2 Samuel 15:30), as a way to define what self-denial on Yom Kippur means. Focusing on David's escape from Jerusalem without his horse and his whip as he fled from Avshalom his son, who threatened to take over the kingship, Bavli Yoma 77a also uses David's afflictions of hunger, weariness,Footnote ⁴⁸ and thirst (2 Samuel 17:21–29) in order to make sense of the prohibitions found in M. Yoma 8:1. This is then the biblical source used to define ʿinnuy as a prohibition against eating, drinking, and wearing shoes. The rabbis highlight David's weaknesses, rather than his strengths, suggesting that our understanding of self-denial as practiced on Yom Kippur emerges from those moments when David exhibited vulnerability and frailty, never mentioning the vulnerability of the priests before God during the Yom Kippur Avodah. This passage in the Bavli makes no reference to the priests’ power to remove the people's sins through a scapegoat that marched into the wilderness. Nothing is said about their ability to transmute sin onto the Yom Kippur Avodah offering or about the practice of changing their clothing and “sanctifying” their hands and feet by washing them. As such, the rabbinic Yom Kippur equates barefootedness with self-denial of the human body, rather than with any act the priests performed that would evoke some sense of purity or sanctity in the name of Temple continuity. The absence of this link between the barefootedness of the priests and the Yom Kippur rabbinic prohibition to abstain from wearing shoes therefore feels disjunctive. It is as if the rabbis are imagining something entirely different for their rabbinic Yom Kippur from the one observed in the Temple. Indeed, the demand for no washing and sandal-wearing on Yom Kippur, arguably part of a “negative cult” (to use a phrase from Durkheim), was a means through which the rabbis could resist a complete symbolic reproduction of Temple rites, creating a breach between the Temple Yom Kippur and the rabbinic one.Footnote ⁴⁹

More curious, however, is the fact that in the eighth chapter of Yoma the Bavli relaxes the prohibition against wearing shoes by drawing a distinction between the Hebrew word sandal, סנדל, found in M. Yoma 8:1, and the word naʿal, נעל, disallowing a particular type of more substantial shoe and allowing one to wear far more flimsy foot coverings on Yom Kippur (B. Yoma 78b).Footnote ⁵⁰ Postmishnaic rabbis allowed certain types of foot coverings, loosening the prohibition. While one could not wear a “sandal” on Yom Kippur, that is, a shoe with a strong sole with straps, one could wear other types of foot coverings that did not qualify as sandals.Footnote ⁵¹ This leniency, too, surely has no connection to Temple practice.

Arguably, when reading the rabbinic texts of the eighth chapter of Bavli Yoma, we are thinking with texts formulated in a culture where asceticism emerges as a seminal religious expression. Jews, along with pagan philosophers, early Christians, and Persians, struggled to understand the relationship between bodily self-denial and its impact on developing a close relationship with God. Would bodily affliction make the human body a more appropriate vehicle to receive divine inspiration? What is the relationship between the denial of body, sense, and pleasure and the positive pursuit of moral and spiritual perfection through self-denial and atonement?Footnote ⁵² Did feet convey nothing more than desire to rid oneself from sin as compared to associations made between feet and the Temple that conjured up sexual promiscuity and physical weakness? For Jews, the issue of how one was to atone for sin became central, not only as a way to define Yom Kippur outside of the context of the Temple and the priests, but also as a way to do the cultural work involved in locating the boundaries between rabbi and priest, and between Jewish forms of asceticism and those of others, including Christians.Footnote ⁵³ In fact, as Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra argues in The Impact of Yom Kippur on Early Christianity, the idea of atonement through a sacrifice or a scapegoat to atone for sinfulness had a significant effect on portrayals of Jesus's death and his ascent to God, possibly generating a desire on the part of the rabbis to distance themselves from associations with the Yom Kippur sacrifice.Footnote ⁵⁴ For the Babylonian rabbis, bodily prohibitions, as they struggle to define them, represent a rabbinic form of asceticism different from other expressions of religious asceticism, including those of priests in the first several chapters of tractate Yoma, who are described as having greater concern with issues of purity and impurity than the rabbis.Footnote ⁵⁵

What does the prohibition against wearing foot coverings and its relaxation signify? Is the motivation practical—it was not comfortable to be barefoot—or does it have something to do with rethinking rabbinic asceticism and what it means in a diasporic context? Arguably, both. The Yom Kippur prohibitions of Mishnah 8:1 were not intended to be bodily afflictions that induce suffering, nor a means for recreating the priestly Yom Kippur experience in any way, but were a way of defining the rabbinic understanding of ʿinnuy in a world where others practiced different forms of it.Footnote ⁵⁶ ʿInnuy was also about self-denial, that is, a clear reversal of the Temple rite and its affirmation of the centrality of the priest's body in atoning, along with a sacrificial animal, for the sins of the people. As part of this reversal we also find women now required for the same prohibitions in the eighth chapter of Yoma, unlike in the first seven chapters, where only a male priest could represent them. As such, the eighth chapter presents us with an intentional literary move, signaling the rabbis’ desire for something new to emerge.

Conclusion: Studying Feet—Toward What End?Footnote ⁵⁷

Studying tractate Yoma in order to understand the tractate as a whole requires us to analyze sources such as these about feet alongside one another, putting texts within one tractate into conversation that we might not necessarily have read together. In the first seven chapters of Bavli Yoma, references to feet are highly gendered when discussed outside of the context of the definition of ʿinnuy. In contrast, the Yom Kippur prohibition against wearing shoes in the eighth chapter includes women and is, therefore, gendered differently. Interestingly, these sources that mention feet do not build one on the other directly, nor do they explain why the rabbis associated barefootedness (or some type of shoe restriction) with self-denial in the observance of Yom Kippur. One cannot draw a straight line connecting these sources in the eighth chapter to the legal decision linking the commandment of ʿinnuy in Leviticus with barefootedness, or to the priests’ behaviors in the earlier chapters of the tractate. What unifies them is that they draw our attention to the rabbis’ focus on the gendered body, specifically feet, in ways that point to the development of a rabbinized and very different Yom Kippur from the rabbis’ imagined sense of the Temple Yom Kippur. These sources highlight the complex relationship between the rabbis and priests and their desires to leave behind an active and communal Avodah through which a priest atoned for everyone via a sacrificial offering or a scapegoat. Instead, individuals atoned through self-denial, where the cleansing waters of the mikveh became a metaphor, in the final mishnah of the tractate, for God's spiritual atonement.