“The Other … is desired in my shame.”Footnote 1
Introduction
According to a ninth-century midrash, God asks the wicked of the world why they did not come closer to God. Each person responds, “I was so steeped in my wickedness that I was ashamed.”Footnote 2 Too ashamed,Footnote 3 it seems, to muster sufficient courage to admit failures, change behaviors, and move closer—ritually if not spiritually—to God, and so they wallowed deeper into wickedness. Had these people not been so wicked, their shame might have spurred a return to God. A few centuries later, Moses Maimonides prefaces his introductory remarks to the Mishneh Torah with a quotation from Psalms: “Then I would not be ashamed when I regard all Your commandments.”Footnote 4 This verse, coming after and completing the psalmist's prayer, “Would that my ways were firm in keeping your laws,”Footnote 5 suggests that between action and complete lawfulness shamefulness exists. It is unclear whether the shamefulness Maimonides speaks of inspires fidelity to the law or impinges it. Either way, shame precedes (seeing) the law both lexicographically and phenomenologically. Before lawfulness, shame facilitates both regard of self as well as regard of notions of uprightness and of wickedness. At least according to these two sources, shame intertwines self-consciousness with self-evaluation; it mixes a sense of dark depths with a notion of ascent toward righteousness. Shame breeds inwardness and otherness, and can debilitate as well as empower. In short, shame simultaneously damns and redeems.
Insofar as shame entails these two powerful vectors, it should come as no surprise that the rabbis of old express ambivalence toward it. Rabbinic ambivalence dramatically counters Aristotle's clear abhorrence of shame. To him, shame is no virtue but a feeling of “a kind of fear of disgrace… . Indeed, the virtuous man does not feel shame… . One never ought to feel shame. Shame is a mark of a base man, and derives from a faulty character.”Footnote 6 A base person feels shame because of “bad things”—things that are morally bad, such as lacking what is given to others of a similar station, being subject to dishonor and reproach, and being sexually violated.Footnote 7 Aristotle states that “shame is a mental picture of disgrace, in which we shrink from the disgrace itself and not from its consequences, and we only care what opinion is held of us because of the people who form that opinion, it follows that the people before whom we feel shame are those whose opinion of us matters to us.”Footnote 8 As a mental depiction of an emotion, shame is a second-order emotion, and it retracts from its primary cause. Furthermore, Aristotle's notion of shame relies heavily on emulating, if not embodying completely, others’ disapproval of the self for these “bad things.” The base person thus experiences multiple dislocations from equanimity: first, by the “bad things” themselves; second, by disgrace inherent in those things; third, by fearing the disgrace inhering in those things; fourth, by picturing how others retract from the self for the disgrace inhering in those things and consequently to the self. For all these reasons, “one never ought to feel shame”—lest one suffer quadruple dissociations from oneself, a move that is both the mark of and derives from a “faulty character.” Conversely, since a virtuous person never voluntarily does or experiences base things, that person is never ashamed.Footnote 9
Unlike Aristotle's strong allergic response to shame, the rabbis are more ambivalent. Their ambivalence toward shame does not emerge ex nihilo, however. Biblical notions of shame begin with Adam and Eve, who were not ashamed at being naked.Footnote 10 This is one of the earliest sources connecting shame and genitals.Footnote 11 When Adam and Eve opened their eyes after eating fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they did not become ashamed of their naked genitals per se but could now view their nakedness with sexual overtones.Footnote 12 With their new powers to recognize sexiness, Adam and Eve did not opt to shut their eyes or avert their gazes but decided to cover those things that inspired arousal. In this way, the fig leaf became more than mere clothing: It was the marker of the other's privacy as much as the protector against the self being seen in ways one did not desire.
Shame then slips from the Bible for the most part, until late prophets invoke the notion of bushah with gusto.Footnote 13 Modern scholarship on these later biblical invocations of shame juxtaposes them to such concepts as guilt, forgiveness, honor, and covenant, and locates shame within both social upheaval and social cohesion.Footnote 14 This scholarship demonstrates that already in the biblical corpus shame involves more than just physical exposure or an emotion related solely to nakedness; biblical shame has broader resonances in legal, social, and theological arenas.
The rabbis, from the Talmud to modern times, further examine shame and find its presence in many aspects of life. As will be shown, for them shame is paradoxically ineluctable and eliminable, destructive and constructive. Whereas Aristotle discourages shame at most any cost, the rabbis seek to cleave shame from and to Jewish law, learning, and life itself. Their ambivalence toward shame is ultimately paradoxical.
But why examine shame at all? Shame is a pervasive if not universal human experience. Modern scholars argue that shame plays a pivotal role in personal psychological and character development as well as in differentiating cultures.Footnote 15 Something similar could be said of the Judaic textual tradition. Judaic conceptualizations of personal virtue, righteous behavior, and what constitutes a commendable society often invoke shame—yet scant scholarly attention has been devoted to rabbinic deliberations on the subject. The few pieces that do attend to rabbinic notions of shame focus on its legal aspects or on one ethical concern or another.Footnote 16 None takes a larger, more complex picture of how the rabbis—from the Talmud to today—conceptualize, appraise, and regulate shame. Nor does any contemporary scholar dealing with rabbinic shame situate it in the contemporary world theologically or philosophically. This paper offers some preliminary efforts toward this larger goal.
As will be seen, the rabbis wrestle with shame in a variety of legal and ethical arenas of human existence. This essay begins with a cursory overview of halakhot pertaining to the injury of shame before focusing on the ethical arenas of rabbinic concern. Even within the context of law, the rabbis view shame as a complex issue. In the nonlegal literature, embodiment poses a particularly challenging arena insofar as the human body is, ultimately, naked regardless of stitches or strictures placed upon it. And because the body must eat, food also appears as an elemental shameful problem. I bring Emmanuel Levinas into the conversation here to help us appreciate these two interlocking aspects of embodied existence. Levinas's insights about the impossibility of escaping embodiment bear directly on shame and, as will be shown, his analysis helps us transport these ancient concerns into a modern philosophical milieu.Footnote 17 Indeed, it is Levinas who has dwelled on the notion of shame more than any other modern Jewish philosopher or theologian.Footnote 18 And as will be shown, tropes from Levinas also prove useful in subsequent sections that look at intellectual integrity, substitution, and virtues, all of which take seriously the role of the mind in relation to shame. The conclusion considers paradoxes proposed by rabbinic ambivalence toward shame and offers some theological and philosophical reflections.
Shameful Laws
The Tannaim understood boshet to be a tortious injury.Footnote 19 Compensation for the injury of shame depends on the status of both the offender and the offended.Footnote 20 As such, boshet dwells in two domains simultaneously: the domain of physical injury as well as the domain of personal dignity. Because of this dual nature, boshet differs from the more famous injunction about humiliating others in public—malbin penei ḥavero b'arabbin—which operates exclusively within the domain of personal dignity.Footnote 21 While embarrassing another is strongly censured by the rabbis, it does not command pecuniary punishment as does boshet.Footnote 22
The Tannaim and Amoraim are clear that the offender is to compensate for shameful injury especially if he or she intended to shame the offended.Footnote 23 Rashi, along with the talmudic rabbis, understands that this holds also for someone who benefits from an action even though one did not intend to shame the injured.Footnote 24 Their example is someone falling from a roof: If one conscientiously moves midflight to land on an unsuspecting individual to soften the inevitable landing, one is legally bound to compensate the injured for all five kinds of injury, including shame. This is because the faller benefits from the decision even though humiliating the receiving individual is not intended. In this way, boshet is akin to other kinds of physical injury. Other medieval sages disagree with this interpretation. The Rashba holds that insofar as the one landed upon is also injured in terms of boshet, the complete range of liabilities for injury apply—regardless of the intent of the offender.Footnote 25 By contrast, the Maharshal understands that the offender must have intended to humiliate the injured to be liable for boshet.Footnote 26 Either way, boshet is more about personal dignity than physical injury per se.
Concern for personal dignity arches back to the talmudic consideration of shaming someone who is naked and shaming someone who is sleeping. In regard to the former, the Talmud holds that context matters: Insulting someone in a bathhouse where people are intentionally naked is less injurious than deliberately denuding someone along a stream where people are partially clothed. Even though the offended suffers no physical injury in either case, assault to personal dignity certainly occurs and should be compensated.Footnote 27 In regard to insulting a sleeping person who dies before learning of the insult, the sages debate whether the offender is liable for boshet. They construe the case in such a way that boshet affects the individual's lingering reputation as well as the dignity of the individual's family.Footnote 28
Insofar as boshet refers to damage to one's physicality and dignity, it is reasonable to conclude—as does one scholar—that shame, legally speaking, reflects Judaism's insistence on “the indivisibility of the material and the moral, the bodily and the spiritual.”Footnote 29 This interconnection between legally punishing criminals for material offenses and emotional damage is heightened by a fin-de-siècle rabbi when he says that “all punishment is humiliation,” because “the purpose of punishment is humiliation.”Footnote 30 It is possible to say that this scholar overstates the purpose of all legal punishments, as some punishments are designed to protect the public or an individual from future aggression, or to deter would-be assailants, or to somehow convert an individual from criminality. Nevertheless, he suggests that those who are convicted of crimes are shamed twice over: Once for their crimes being publicly acknowledged when their cases are tried, and again by the punishments meted out to them. This does not mean that Judaism conflates guilt and shame. Guilt is ascertained through the legal system and need not implicate anyone else but the offender. Shame, by contrast, focuses on the offended as well as the offender, and may extend to others not immediately involved in the incident.Footnote 31 In sum, halakhah considers shame not merely tortious physical injury; it is also tortious injury to personal dignity.
Shameful Ethics
Just as halakhah considers bushah necessarily involving the physical, emotional, and willful, so too do nonlegal rabbinic texts. In these more ethical tracts, the rabbis discuss shame as it pertains to two major baskets of issues: Embodiment and aspects of the mind. In regard to the first, the rabbis are particularly concerned about shame in relation to nakedness and eating. In regard to the second, they see shame intertwining with intellectual integrity, substitution, and virtue. It is curious that the rabbis do not link shame to other issues, especially to liturgy and ritual. For if shame is so tied with body and mind as this survey suggests, it makes modest sense that some connection between shame and rites also arises. Conversely, this lacuna suggests that shame does not belong in the beit tefillah (house of prayer) as it does in the beit midrash (house of learning). Though shame may be pervasive in many aspects of life, it appears the rabbis would rather it exist and function in only certain arenas and not others.
Nakedness
Being naked in the marketplace is perhaps the most shameful of situations.Footnote 32 But does being naked mean the same thing for women as it does for men, and are all public spaces equally shaming when exposed? According to one scholar, male nakedness refers to exposure of the penis.Footnote 33 Remember that while Adam's penis was naked before he ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, he was not ashamed.Footnote 34 Understandably, the rabbis construe male nakedness in holy places to be spiritually repugnant both to humans and to God, while nakedness in open fields is merely humanly distasteful and divinely undesired. Regulating male nudity became a way of protecting the sancta as well as enforcing social hierarchies.Footnote 35 Female nudity, by contrast, is no affront to God nor does it bespeak social status. Rather, the androcentricity of the textual tradition portrays female nakedness in terms of its capacity to arouse male sexuality and its service as “a marker of moral character.”Footnote 36 In other words, female nudity is powerful precisely through the male social and sexual gaze.
That said, few rabbinic pieces link physical exposure and shame.Footnote 37 What concerns the rabbis, and especially Maimonides, is unwanted exposure of sexual arousal. Put specifically, the undesired erection becomes a source of shame.Footnote 38 Insofar as the penis becomes aroused against one's will it is, as one scholar says, “a glaring failure of privacy” because it demonstrates a man's inability to willfully self-present and thus constitutes shame.Footnote 39 Maimonides concurs: Even though the unwanted erection is natural, it is shameful because it distracts a man from what he ought to be doing, such as studying or praying or engaging in proper business. He encourages the man with the unwanted erection to distract himself through these activities and intellectual exercises so that it deflates and his composure can return. And yet, to the degree that natural nightly erections are not shameful in and of themselves because they are unknown, man's unruly member shames precisely at that moment when its presence becomes cognized.Footnote 40
When the young Levinas asks in De l’évasion, “For what is the meaning of shameful nakedness? It is this that one seeks to hide from the others, but also from oneself,”Footnote 41 he points to self-consciousness as a necessary component of shame. For it is when we are aware of what our bodies do—even naturally do—that we would rather hide this fact from others as well as from ourselves. No matter how much we would want to hide this fact, to unlearn it and render ourselves blissfully ignorant as was Adam, this is impossible. Levinas continues:
If shame is present, it means that we cannot hide what we should like to hide. The necessity of fleeing, in order to hide oneself, is put in check by the impossibility of fleeing oneself. What appears in shame is thus precisely the fact of being riveted to oneself, the radical impossibility of fleeing oneself to hide from oneself, the unalterably binding presence of the I to itself. Nakedness is shameful when it is sheer visibility of our being, of its ultimate intimacy. And the nakedness of our body is not that of a material thing, antithesis of spirit, but the nakedness of our total being in all its fullness and solidity, of its most brutal expression of which we could not fail to take note.Footnote 42
The shamefulness of the recognized unwanted erection, then, is not just the mere physicality of the erection but the consciousness that human existence naturally and necessarily entails the willed and unwilled alike.Footnote 43 Shame takes note of our binatural nakedness and this intimate self-knowledge constitutes shame: “Our intimacy, that is, our presence to ourselves, is shameful.”Footnote 44 When we are knowingly naked, we know the totality of our existence, and in our search for cover—which even the TanakhFootnote 45 recognizes as the primal reaction to shame—we seek to excuse ourselves from ourselves. We want to hide our nakedness not only from others but also from ourselves. In the last analysis, shame is, Levinas says, “an existence that seeks excuses. What shame discovers is the being who uncovers himself.”Footnote 46 Put more sharply: Shame discovers—that is, becomes conscious of—the being with a fig leaf who uncovers himself willfully, unwittingly, and unwillfully.Footnote 47
Maimonides agrees, for the most part. He says that “gatherings of naked people with uncovered private parts who excrete in daylight sitting together” are shameful, but less shameful than drinking intoxicants publicly.Footnote 48 In his view, feces are an innately humiliating matter and any action involving them necessarily humiliates.Footnote 49 Yet because excreting is a necessary function of human embodiment, refraining from all excretions is humanly impossible. Choosing to get drunk, by contrast, is a voluntary and intellectual matter; thus, its moral evaluation transcends that which is physically necessary twice over. So while both uncovered genitals and feces are sources of shame, Maimonides views the “gatherings” or public nature of this necessarily naked act to be the more troublesome.Footnote 50 Deliberately and thus knowingly being nude in public humiliates more than merely being nude.
Shame, then, is less about being naked per se than about knowing that one chooses to be or is naked. Knowing one is physically exposed voluntarily or against one's will—be it caused by nature or by another human—is shameful. For this reason Levinas concludes, “being naked is not a question of wearing clothes.”Footnote 51 It is a question of knowing whether one's clothes cover one's inescapable nakedness. As Bernard Williams says, shame is a reaction to the consciousness of exposure.Footnote 52 It is the mind's acknowledgment of nakedness that sparks shame.
Food
Avoiding shame associated with nakedness may be plausible, but this is not so with the shame associated with food. Maimonides, following Aristotle, asserts that even though eating and drinking are necessary for human existence, they should be done privately and with sorrow, and should be controlled by one's will—for they are inherently disgraceful activities.Footnote 53
Maimonides’ preference for private dining notwithstanding, it was common for Jews to eat together publicly. A story in the TalmudFootnote 54 describes an incident that occurred with a group of working men who regularly pooled their bread together in a basket and then ate collectively. One day an individual did not have any bread to contribute to the coffers and felt ashamed. A member of the group recognized that man's situation and offered to go about collecting bread, and when he approached the breadless man, he pretended to take from him so that the man would not be ashamed.Footnote 55 Even royalty ate from such a collective pot. A midrash depicts King David eating from a common pot on a regular basis, though he would not eat sacred foods from it lest he become ashamed.Footnote 56 To buttress this position, the midrash invokes verses from Psalms depicting the poor and hungry as objects of scorn and as deserving of divine protection.Footnote 57
Another talmudic story also posits God as integral to both food and avoiding shame.Footnote 58 Rav's son went to R. Simeon ben Ḥalafta for a blessing. R. Ḥalafta said, “Let it be God's will that you shall not shame others and others shall not shame you.” When the son related this to his father, Rav explained that this is the same blessing that God pronounced over the community of Israel, as recited by the prophet Joel: “And you shall eat your fill and praise the name of the Lord your God who dealt so wondrously with you—my people shall be shamed no more. And you shall know that I am in the midst of Israel, that I the Lord am your God and there is no other. And My people shall be shamed no more.”Footnote 59 These prophetic verses conclude a lengthy argument stating that it is none other than God who replenishes the fields, fruits, and fauna that sustain Jewish existence, and who thus nourishes Jewish shamelessness.Footnote 60
A third talmudic story intertwines God and gender and shame. Rav Ḥanina's wife would make a fire in her home's oven before every Shabbat evening. This would send up smoke and signal to neighbors that she had sufficient ingredients to make ḥallah—the bread required for the Friday night meal.Footnote 61 She did this so as to avoid being ashamed of the truth, that is, their family was too impoverished even to make bread. One female neighbor, knowing Ḥanina's poverty, became suspicious of this activity and approached her. When she knocked at the door, Ḥanina's wife became ashamed and hid in another room. A miracle occurred and bread filled her hot oven. When the neighbor saw the bread therein, she called out to the hidden wife to bring a bread-shovel lest the bread burn. Ḥanina's wife emerged with the shovel, declaring that she had gone into the next room precisely to retrieve it.Footnote 62 At one level, this story focuses on the shame a woman feels at not being able to provide for her family and the lengths she will go to disguise the truth of the matter. More precisely, she seeks to hide her shame from fellow womenfolk. Does her shame in front of another woman arise because of lack itself or because the missing ingredients signify her husband's poor financial situation—his inability to provide for them both? Would she have acted similarly had a man come knocking? Though these questions remain unanswered at this level, at another level the story undoes her shame through God's miraculous oven-filling intervention. This miracle happened in the instant between the neighbor's knock—which caused the wife to flee the front room where the kitchen was situated—and the neighbor's invasive glance inside the doorway. That moment of human egress and invasion housed God's baking hand. No one witnessed the bread actually arise in the oven; the women could only see that, lo, it was there and needed turning lest it burned. Ḥanina's wife does not seem to be curious about how the bread got there. Perhaps from her perspective the neighbor put it there. If this were the case, her hiding suggests that she was ashamed of receiving Ẓedakah for Shabbat.Footnote 63 It is curious, then, why she lied when appearing with the shovel. The lie betrayed her shame: She tried to dissimulate the fact that she was ashamed, regardless of how the bread got into her oven. At a third level, a linguistic analysis suggests something else. The above story is in Aramaic, which suggests a late textual provenance, perhaps written by the stam, or redactor of the Talmud (more on this below). For immediately following this story is a baraita, written in Hebrew, teaching that she really did go to the next room for the purpose of retrieving a bread-shovel because she was accustomed to having miracles occur.Footnote 64 This linguistic difference suggests that an earlier version of this story focused less on her shame than on the miracles showered upon her because of her husband's merit.Footnote 65 Shame around food—or the lack thereof—would thus seem to be a later rabbinic concern. God, nonetheless, remains a potent force protecting one from unnecessary shame associated with food.
Though God may be the ultimate shield against shame associated with food, humankind also has agency in this regard. Seeds of a more profound attitude toward shame can be found in a discussion ostensibly about class and food. The Amoraim overturned the accepted earlier practice of the wealthy bringing food in silver and gold baskets to a house of mourning and the poor bringing food in peeled willow baskets, because this practice was a source of shame for the poor. Instead, everyone was to bring food to a mourner's house only in peeled willow baskets, to protect the dignity and honor of the poor.Footnote 66 Class aside, people were to provide food to each other. But inside class, the wealthy had to adjust their habits to match those of the impoverished. In this way, the poor become the master to whom others must bend and give.
Levinas weaves together these themes when he says “the nakedness of the face is destituteness. To recognize the Other is to recognize a hunger. To recognize the Other is to give. But it is to give to the master, to the lord, to him whom one approaches as ‘You’ in a dimension of height.”Footnote 67 The lowly hungry become masters for whom we are responsible. Acknowledging this responsibility is what Levinas calls remorse, a “gnawing away at oneself” insofar as it is a “responsibility of the ego for what the ego has not wished, that is, for the others.”Footnote 68 This hungry remorse, this gnawing away at oneself, is shame: It is the increasing awareness that one is already obliged to feed the impoverished other. Put differently, we cannot escape food's shamefulness, for it is only we who can and should pull the bread from our mouths so as to give it to the hungry. Our relations with food are simultaneously a source of shame and ethics. Or, as Levinas suggests later on, consuming is the first morality.Footnote 69 Satiety shames less because of the food per se but because of the other's hunger it could satisfy: “To give, to-be-for-another, despite oneself, but in interrupting the for-oneself, is to take the bread out of one's own mouth, to nourish the hunger of another with one's own fasting.”Footnote 70 Levinas thus links food to Hillel's famous statement, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me, and if I am only for myself, what am I, and if not now, then when?”Footnote 71 What Levinas points to is not an eating disorder but to conscientious eating.Footnote 72 Eating conscientiously differs from eating consciously, which Judaism teaches should be book-ended with praises to God and would prefer if those praises were done with heartfelt sincerity. Overall, these shameful texts suggest that conscientious eating involves ensuring that others have the wherewithal to satiate themselves now, not later.
Intellectual Integrity
Rabbinic concern for intellectual integrity dwells a great deal on shame as well. Jeffrey Rubenstein has demonstrated that late Babylonian sages were more concerned with maintaining intellectual integrity among their peers than were their predecessors or colleagues in Palestine.Footnote 73 This may be true, but Rubenstein fails to illumine adequately the anticipatory nature of rabbinic shame and its deflection. Four stories demonstrate these details.
In response to R. Simeon ben Eliakim's difficult question, R. Eleazar says, “Do you ask me in the study house about a matter which former scholars did not explain in order to shame me?”Footnote 74 We do not know whether Eleazar answers Simeon's question correctly, incorrectly, or at all. Yet Eleazar's rhetorical response suggests not only that asking provocative questions was fraught if not dangerous in intellectual environs; it also suggests that the question did not actually shame him, for had he been ashamed, he—like most other humans—would have opted to hide intellectually by masking his ignorance through obfuscation or digression. Rather, he confronts his interlocutor with a metaquestion about intent that inspires a sense of self-regard in the interlocutor.Footnote 75 Eleazar's response bespeaks of anticipated public shame resulting from unwillingly exposed ignorance.
Similarly, R. Ḥiyya rebukes Rav for asking Rabbi Judah HaNasi a difficult question by saying, “Did I not say to you that when Rabbi is occupied with one tractate you should not ask him about another tractate. Perhaps he will not be acquainted with it. Were Rabbi not a great man, you would have shamed him, for he would have taught an incorrect teaching. In this case, however, he taught you correctly.”Footnote 76 Again, shame is not actually experienced but anticipated, or more precisely, projected. Whatever shame Rabbi might have experienced from a particularly difficult question is hereby deflected onto Rav by Ḥiyya. This occurs with Ḥiyya's opening rhetorical question: “Did I not say to you … ?” Like Eleazar's retort, this rhetorical device shoves shame back toward the provocateur.
A third story depicts R. Shimon ben Gamliel defending himself against rabble-rousing members of the academy, who want him deposed as the Nasi. They plot to ask Shimon about a tractate he has not studied. A colleague overhears their plot and realizes that their intention is to shame Shimon publicly in the academy. He sets about that night teaching Shimon the tractate in question, and Shimon, surprised to hear Talmud being taught aloud behind him while at home, realizes that something is afoot and concentrates on what is being taught. The next day the rabble-rousers ask their question and, to their surprise, Shimon deftly answers. Shimon then concludes by saying, “Had I not familiarized myself with this material, you would have shamed me!”Footnote 77 Again, shame is anticipated but not experienced by the target of the plot. Rather, shame is deflected back upon the provocateurs insofar as they are the ones who are removed from the academy, not Shimon. What this story adds is that solid knowledge can protect against shaming attacks.Footnote 78
Conversely, mastery of material is not always sufficient to protect a sage from shame. Rava's students interject against his ruling on a particular case and thereby shame him.Footnote 79 As Barry Wimpfheimer astutely argues, Rava is ashamed not because he is wrong and made aware of this error, but because his students recognize the reasoning behind his error and have made him aware of his now legal antiquation.Footnote 80 Wimpfheimer concludes that “Rava has knowledge, but does not know what he knows—he has knowledge that he does not master.” Knowledgeable as he is, Rava is nevertheless unable to hide his incomplete mastery from his students. He fails to sustain the facade of an unblemished scholar and legist, and he knows it. Thus, Levinas's definition: “shame arises each time we are unable to make others forget our basic nudity. It is related to everything we would like to hide and that we cannot bury or cover up”—now seems apt.Footnote 81
A strong rabbinic preference to anticipate shame and hide intellectual limitations certainly exists.Footnote 82 Rubenstein is thus right to identify in rabbinic culture the practice of squelching difficult questions. This observation points to the underlying inclination to avoid unearthing ignorance and, as in Rava's case, the explicit reluctance to become a legal relic before one is ready. And yet for the most part the shame the rabbis construe in these texts is not that of the to-be-exposed sage but that of the interlocutor. The interlocutor is repeatedly met with rhetorical questions about intent, suggesting that in the rabbinic mindset the one who seeks to shame ought to be ashamed. The rabbis do not think shame is so horrendous that none should experience it; indeed, the interlocutor confronts shame in the rhetorical mirror. Rather, the rabbis’ view is that shame is such a powerful injury, tool, and emotion that inflicting and deploying it must be carefully executed by rightful authorities for proper intentions. For the most part, shaming backfires: The emperor's new clothes are not found lacking on the master but on the uppity provocateur.
Substitution
The provocateur is not always denuded publicly. In a fascinating sugya, the great sage Shemuel HaKatan ascends to an upper chamber when Rabban Gamliel asks for colleagues to assist in intercalating the calendar. Although Gamliel requests seven scholars to join him, eight arrive. He asks, “Who is it that came up without permission? Let him go down.” Shemuel HaKatan arises and says, “It was I who came up without permission; my object was not to join in the intercalation but because I felt the necessity of learning the practical application of the law.” Gamliel urges him to sit and stay because he is indeed a great sage and worthy to participate in such deliberations. The Babylonian stam adds, “But in reality it was not Shemuel HaKatan but another [who was uninvited]; he only wished to save the intruder from shame.”Footnote 83
The stam's late moral aside, it appears that Shemuel stands to assume responsibility. His intelligible explanation for his presence—to learn how the law is applied—fails: Gamliel does not want him merely to observe the group's deliberations but to be an active contributor therein. This disagreement flusters neither man; indeed, they know each other well and are familiar with the other's eminent qualifications.Footnote 84 Both Shemuel and Gamliel know that Shemuel belonged in the chamber; thus both know that the real culprit has yet to identify himself. Insofar as the text does not say if Gamliel waits until the interloper descends, it is reasonable to assume that he begins the group's calculations with all eight guests.
Shemuel's failed explanation yet successful diversion is nothing but a lie, and he and Gamliel both know it. Shemuel lies so as to prevent the real intruder from identifying himself to the group and being publicly shamed. This incident becomes a prooftext for a medieval midrash permitting lying to save another from shame.Footnote 85 Even though Shemuel's well-intentioned dissimulation saves the true interloper from public shame, it nonetheless does not prevent that person from experiencing private shame. Surely the intruder knew his ascent to the chamber was unwelcome, and now he witnesses the great Shemuel lie on his behalf. Whatever his original intentions might have been in joining the group can now only appear bizarre if not unjustifiable in the light of Shemuel's generosity of spirit. Aware of his new indebtedness to Shemuel for taking the heat, the intruder probably burns inside with shame because he all but causes a sage not only to lie but to lie among such esteemed peers.
We may be tempted, then, to read the stam's blatant moral, “Shemuel only wished to save the intruder from shame,” as saying that Shemuel felt shame in lieu of the true culprit. That is, Shemuel voluntarily took on shame rightfully belonging to another, but this misses the target. The intruder probably did feel shame, especially private shame, the shame that burns through any attempt to hide from oneself, to excuse oneself from one's being. He cannot separate himself from that self who earlier justified his presence where uninvited and, moreover, did not take responsibility for his presence. He cannot but stand in solidarity with his earlier self, a self he would rather cover up or deny: He must stand in his own private shame.Footnote 86 If, conversely, one reads in this story that the culprit felt no shame whatsoever, then it is plausible to argue that he acted out of shamelessness.Footnote 87 Were the culprit truly shameless, nothing Gamliel or Shemuel could have done would have shamed him. His indifference to the opinion of others and also of himself would protect him from any semblance of shame. If this were the case, the stam's moral would be moot. But since the stam felt it necessary to add the moral about protecting another from public shame, it is reasonable to conclude that the stam understands that the culprit feels shame privately.
The sugya continues with two further illustrations of attempted substitution. As he lectures one night, Rabbi Judah haNasi smells garlic and asks the malodorous individual to leave. R. Ḥiyya arises and leaves, and then all the other disciples leave. The rabbi's son confronts Ḥiyya the next day to inquire if he indeed had eaten garlic and displeased his father. Ḥiyya retorts, “Heaven forefend that such a thing should happen in Israel.” Next, a woman comes to R. Meir's beit hamidrash and says, “Rabbi, one of your school has taken me to wife by cohabitation”—implying that she desired a get (a divorce document). Meir arises and gives her a get, after which all the other students provide her gittin. The sugya asserts that Ḥiyya learned to voluntarily take on another's shame from Meir, and Meir from Shemuel HaKatan, and Shemuel from Shecaniah the son of Jehiel in the Book of Ezra, and Shecaniah from Joshua, and perhaps even as far back as from Moses himself.Footnote 88 At one level, all these incidents valorize voluntarily protecting others from public shame, yet at another level they suggest that true offenders rightfully suffer private shame for voluntarily doing something that they know, especially retrospectively, is inappropriate.Footnote 89 In this way, the offender becomes ashamed of his shame.Footnote 90
Put in Levinasian terms, no matter how hard one tries, substitution ultimately fails. This is because one can never completely abscond from oneself. Nor can one completely stand in lieu of another who is not just an other but an other even to himself for he desires but is not able to escape his shame.Footnote 91 In this way, private shame reflects upon and reinforces the fact of personal solidarity. Put differently, public attempts to save another's face may prompt internal defacement, an internal sense of defilement.
Shame's Virtues
Intertwined within these legal and ethical rabbinic perspectives on shame are reflections on shame's virtues. For example, the Talmud imagines King David telling the Gibeonites just how special Jews are. He says Jews are distinctive because they are merciful, ashamed, and benevolent—traits given to them by God.Footnote 92 Furthermore, he says, only those who cultivate these three characteristics are fit to join the nation. While this assertion has implications for conversion, it nonetheless points to the fact that the rabbis view shame as a virtue, albeit one among many, and a virtue necessary for Jewish membership.
Elsewhere, talmudic sages assert that there is a substantial difference between shaming oneself and being shamed by others.Footnote 93 In this view, shame can be self-activated and others need not be involved at all. This view is reinforced by Rav's teaching, “If one commits a transgression and is ashamed of it, all his sins are forgiven him.”Footnote 94 No one else must be aware of one's transgression or shame. Furthermore, such private shame is so efficacious that all one's other sins are pardoned as well. Does shame redeem even as it damns?
Insofar as privately constructed shame is preferable to public shame, might the rabbis hereby imply that the psyche incorporates an aspect that reflectively evaluates the self? This proposal is taken up in earnest by a midrash that says, “It is the heart which puts a man to shame because the heart knows what it has done and is ashamed of itself.”Footnote 95 In rabbinic literature, the heart serves as the source of intellection; here, the reflective heart is both subject and object of shame. The reflective heart simultaneously shames as well as serves as the source inspiring that shame. Insofar as the self-critical heart knows itself, shame too is aware of itself, and being self-aware, reifies itself.Footnote 96 In a sense, shame learns from itself.
As every human intellect is the agent and provocateur of shame, shame is inescapable. According to Maimonides, when the self recognizes its inescapable embodiment, it struggles against self-repugnance and seeks to diminish this feeling of self-shame.Footnote 97 The self chafes against itself in its very learning of why it rightfully deserves shame.Footnote 98 This reflexive intensification of shame teaches the self both that it deserves shame and how to avoid its shame. Even as shame shames the self, shame teaches and learns its own undoing.Footnote 99 As the Talmud says, “every person who is ashamed will not quickly sin.”Footnote 100 Shamefulness may decrease the propensity for wrongdoing, but does not eliminate it completely. The self, even the ashamed self, ever retains the capacity to deserve shame. Even as shame tries desperately to disassociate itself from its materiality or whatever it was, is, or will be that inspires shame, shame further entangles itself with that which is shameful. Shame cannot escape itself, nor can the self escape shame.
Shame's self-entrapment, or as Levinas might say, its being hostage to itself, leads Maimonides and other scholars to assert that shame involves an internal evaluative audience—over and above the obvious external evaluating audience.Footnote 101 This internal moral gaze evaluates and elevates that which should be aspired to and, conversely, demotes that which should be avoided. The perfect man, Maimonides says, understands that this internal moral gaze watches eternally and, to avoid self-loathing, comports himself so that there is consistency between his private and public affairs. Hence Maimonides considers that shame is coincidental to humility, as well as to other virtues such as awe, fear, and reverence of God.Footnote 102
Shame is lauded for its personal virtues as well as for its public value. When the rabbis brainstormed reasons why Jerusalem was destroyed, Ulla opined: “Jerusalem was destroyed only because [its inhabitants] were not ashamed of each other.”Footnote 103 He cites Jeremiah's prophecy that God will destroy Jerusalem because of the people's insolence, violence, and indifference to divine instruction. “Are they ashamed of their loathsome actions?” Jeremiah inquires. “No, they have no shame at all. They do not even know how to blush. So they will fall among the fallen, and they will be brought down when I punish them, says Adonai.”Footnote 104 Had the Jerusalemites demonstrated sufficient shame for their own and each other's waywardness, God might have relented from destroying the city. Unlike the idea of a communal gaze shaming individuals, here the internal evaluative gaze functions collectively. Ulla's opinion suggests that shame has social value beyond personal improvement; it can build social cohesion and orient a community toward sufficient uprightness to deserve protection.
Shameful Paradoxes
Rabbinic ambivalence about shame is now readily apparent. The rabbis understand shame to be simultaneously personal as well as communal. It can be legally enforceable and ethically transgressed. Shame has procedural implications and character applications.Footnote 105 It can promote social cohesion, just as it can further divisiveness, marginalization, and isolation. For better and for worse, life is embroiled in shame and shame in life. This observation fuels rabbinic opinion that shame deserves avoidance even though shame is ultimately inescapable.
Shame is at once instilled in Jews as a gift from God and is also something that only God can erase. Recall R. Simeon ben Ḥalafta's blessing, “Let it be God's will that you shall not shame others and others shall not shame you.”Footnote 106 Just as a shameful life—that is, a life full of reverence for God—is a divine gift, so too is a shameless life: A shameless life is one granted by God. Indeed, in the Ahavah Rabbah Ahavtanu prayer recited many times daily, Jews seek divine intervention so that “we never be shamed.”Footnote 107 Human agency appears irrelevant insofar as God is the sole agent granting and relieving shame. The human pursues shamelessness in paradox. On the one hand, a completely shameless or blameless life is a divine gift and is commendable, but it is, as such, unnatural. On the other hand, a life so devoid of shame—a shameless life in which one does not care about the ramifications of one's actions—is a life so wicked that it cannot be transformed through the self-conscious self-transcendence that shame brings about. Such a shameless or wicked life is, for the most part, natural and condemnable. Pursuing shamelessness is a paradoxical task that navigates between natural impulses toward wickedness and unnatural aspirations toward righteousness. Achieving complete shamelessness is therefore found only at the extremes, in either the absolute rejection of God in favor of humus, or earthy materiality, or in the absolute rejection of all physicality in favor of purely humble, or ethereal, spirituality.Footnote 108 Regardless of which end of the proverbial shameless spectrum one pursues, it is human agency and not God that inspires and deserves shame and through shame is transformed toward one end or the other. God may be the source and telos of shame, but shame functions in and through the human.
Embedded in the paradox of pursuing shamelessness is the paradox of inculcating the virtue of shamefulness. In these and other texts the rabbis, following prophetic models, rail against individuals who demonstrate hubris or engage in wayward behavior. They even criticize those who are not sufficiently shameful. Take, for example, the uninvited interloper. Shemuel HaKatan's deception may not have publicly shamed the individual in question, but it assuredly inspired private shame. Shemuel's action covertly shamed the one who was not sufficiently ashamed. That is, inculcating the virtue of shamefulness sometimes—or perhaps all the time—requires filling someone or oneself with shame. Becoming appropriately and sufficiently shameful, and thus knowing and doing what is necessary to avoid shame (that is, to be shameless), paradoxically involves being shamed and ashamed. Pedagogically speaking, shame simultaneously teaches the ashamed individual what caused shame in the first place, and shame learns from its self-consciousness how to avoid exacerbating or inspiring shame now and in the future. Or, as Aristotle (or Levinas) might say, self-conscious shame finds itself allergic to itself and in its growing self-awareness becomes sick of or embarrassed about its very existence; it seeks its own demise. Shame shames itself to undo itself.
Shame seeks its own end even as it breeds its own beginning. The rabbis interpret the biblical verse, “that the fear of God may be before your faces,” to mean that the Israelites at Mount Sinai were shamefaced.Footnote 109 The verse continues, “so that you will not sin,” which to the rabbis means that shamefulness leads to fear of sin. Indeed, an old saying goes, “It is a good sign when a man is shamefaced.”Footnote 110 Fear of sin differs from Rav's teaching that shame pardons one's sins. Whereas Rav believes that shame retroactively redeems one from the repercussions of one's waywardness, this talmudic text construes shame as a prophylactic: Shame proactively keeps waywardness at bay. By learning how to fear sin, we become increasingly empowered to identify that which is or should be inappropriate.Footnote 111 Because shame sharpens our moral sensitivities, it is necessary and beneficial for righteous living.Footnote 112 Shame makes us morally savvy so that, by avoiding sinfulness, we rely less upon it—hence shame's self-producing and self-eliminating dynamic. This is perhaps one reason why the wicked could not escape their downward trends: Diminished senses of shame breed insufficient fear of sin that would protect against further transgression. Conversely, excessive shamefulness—being too afraid to do anything untoward—undermines attempts toward righteousness: Being too ashamed can debilitate as much as being too shameless.
Levinas similarly connects shame and righteousness or ethicality, but he does so by challenging the notion that the susceptibility to sin or a morally bad act is shame's foundation.Footnote 113 When he says that “the Other … is desired in my shame,” he means that desire conditions shame.Footnote 114 Desiring an Other is “the welcoming of the Other, the commencement of moral consciousness, which calls in question my freedom.”Footnote 115 Insofar as desire—by definition and by experience—can never be satiatedFootnote 116 or fulfilled, welcoming the Other, who can never be completely recognized, remains an ever uncompleted task and condition. Attending to the Other's incomprehensible presence is thus an infinite and infinitesimal obligation in each and every moment, and this immense responsibility uncovers to me my role as “usurper and murderer”—for I am not fulfilling my obligations and it “provokes my shame.”Footnote 117 For this reason, Levinas says “the Other measures me with a gaze incomparable to the gaze by which I discover him,” as ultimately, “the Other is metaphysical.”Footnote 118 This metaphysical Other, “a privileged heteronomy,” thus invests my freedom with shame, for it is when I stand in solidarity with my being that I claim responsibility for myself.Footnote 119 My shame, then, is my experience of my moral responsibilities toward the Other and for myself, responsibilities that I can never fully complete but nonetheless am obliged to.Footnote 120 And insofar as God—the ultimate Other (illeity)—is inescapable, my shamefulness is also inescapable.Footnote 121
As Levinas construes shame to be necessarily ineliminable, so too do the rabbis understand shame to be quintessential to Jewish existence. The sugya mentioned just above continues to say that in regard to “the one who is not shamefaced, it is certain that his ancestors were not present at Mount Sinai.”Footnote 122 The fourteenth-century legist R. Nissin ben Reuven of Gerona links this idea with the DeuteronomicFootnote 123 insistence that those who stood at Sinai included all subsequent generations, meaning that anyone born from someone who is not shamefaced also lacks shame.Footnote 124 A generation later, R. Simeon ben Ẓemeḥ Duran added that anyone who was insolent did not stand at Mt. Sinai.Footnote 125 This line of reasoning does more than reinforce David's assertion that shame is a necessary virtue for membership in the Jewish community. Indeed, as Jews and Judaism hearken to Mt. Sinai as the pivotal moment in Jewish moral and spiritual maturation, shame is the hinge upon which all turns. What action might have brought shame to the ancient Sinai community? Could it have been the golden calf? If so, the shamefulness produced by this egregious act of idolatry is paradoxical—less than precluding the ancient community from revelation, it prepared them for it.Footnote 126 Insofar as all subsequent generations, including the rabbis of old and today, venerate that ancient ashamed community as much as the traditions they transmitted forward in time, might we say that the rabbis are proud of their shameful heritage? Could it be that Judaism generally cannot but take pride in shame?Footnote 127
This perhaps surprising paradox is less revolutionary than redemptive. It does not claim that Judaism was or is a tradition that revolves solely around shame. Rather, this study strives to demonstrate that rabbinically construed shame has both legal and ethical dimensions, personal and communal applications, intellectual and spiritual implications. Perhaps alongside other elements of human existence, shame is that which connects the totality of Jewish life. Judaic ambivalence toward shame reflects and reinforces the rabbis’ inability to conceive of a life—righteous or wicked or anywhere in between—that does not relate to shame in some way or another. Whereas Aristotle encourages the erasure of shame altogether, rabbinic ambivalence about the inescapable prevalence of shame suggests both that shame is ineliminable and that it invests life with purpose, with meaning. It would be a disservice, then, to contemporary Jews, and it would be dishonest to the Judaic textual tradition were we to put aside, belittle, ignore, or erase these shame-full texts or their overarching concerns. The fact that the rabbis understand shame to be integrated into most every aspect of human existence, and that they consider shame so critical to Jewish spirituality as to ensconce it in daily liturgy—bespeaks of a humble acknowledgment, a pride even, of shame's importance to meaningful Jewish life.
