“…You punished Eve, our Mother, because she persuaded her man to flaunt Your Commandment. And he ate from the tree which you forbade. This troubled you so greatly that you decreed that all her descendants, all women, must suffer…”Footnote 1
This interdisciplinary study of gender in Avot de Rabbi Natan,Footnote 2 using a theoretical frame from cultural anthropology, is an enterprise of feminist historiography.Footnote 3 Focusing on ARNB's singular formulation of aggadic accounts of Eve's sin, it proposes a possible historical trajectory of Jewish women's experience and how that experience was perceived, manipulated and/or negotiated by the Jewish men who were the formulators and transmitters of rabbinic tradition. Generally speaking, traditions about women and gender in ARN demonstrate a stance on the natural, religious and social subordination of women to men, which I will designate “patriarchal stewardship.” Yet the Eve traditions, especially those in ARNB, go beyond articulating this androcentric stance on gender differentiation and social hierarchy; they negotiate a cognitive, religious problem: why do women, and women alone, suffer and die in the process of biological reproduction if “be fruitful and multiply” is a divine imperative in Genesis 1:28?
According to Tal Ilan, one of the most important tasks of the feminist study of rabbinic texts is to investigate their history of textual transmission to show “…how editing and copying worked in a specific direction—to belittle, denigrate and silence women.”Footnote 4 Indeed, previous feminist scholarship has devoted substantial discussion to the Eve traditions in ARN and parallels, viewing them, to different extents, as unambiguous illustrations of the rabbinic view of the inherent natural inferiority of women and their corresponding social subordination.Footnote 5 Charlotte Fonrobert goes so far as to assert that ARN has “… a Tendenz in… [its] redaction…which makes it one of the more misogynist texts in rabbinic literature.”Footnote 6 Certainly arguing whether one rabbinic text is more or less misogynist than another serves no real critical purpose; all such texts were composed and transmitted by men and for men and, thus, are all androcentric, if not to some degree misogynist. However, it is useful to identify and distinguish the particular nuances of androcentrism/misogyny evident in different texts. I hope to offer convincing evidence that the process of transmission and redaction was not always, so to speak, a one-way street. Indeed, a close examination of the Eve traditions in Avot de-Rabbi Natan reveals a case where the redaction process developed in the direction of according women increased status and ritual agency through the performance of their three commandments.
The theological problem addressed by the Eve traditions in ARNB requires a theoretical frame that addresses both the cognitive and the ritual functions of religious tradition. Privileging the social function of rabbinic aggadah, Joshua Levinson recently remarked that when “cultures feel threatened they often begin to tell tales,” tales which are “fictions of identity,” through which “continued dominance” is achieved so that “…the community [can] guard its borders and defines for itself who is inside, who is outside, and why.”Footnote 7 In the case of the Eve traditions, the threat is theodicean, rather than social, disrupting the received understanding of how God works in the cosmos at large, prompting a specifically cognitive religious response. Cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz's theory of religion is used as a theoretical model in which to frame the textual analysis, precisely because Geertz sees religion as first and foremost a cognitive human enterprise. I am well aware that Geertz's theory of religion and other theories of religion originating in schools of cultural and/or structural anthropologyFootnote 8 are now considered out of date, arguably because they are interested in the cognitive aspects of religion rather than its role as a discursive system of power and control. However, I strongly believe that good theory does not go out of date. Defining “good theory” as that which enables the critical analysis of phenomena so that they remain coherent and true to the dictates of their own enterprise, I feel that such theory remains relevant as long as the human phenomena it renders coherent remain pertinent. Indeed, other recent scholarship on rabbinic narrative and ritual employs Geertz's anthropological theories and methods to advantage.Footnote 9
In line with methodologies of reading and textual analysis of the school loosely designated “literary approaches to the study of aggadah,”Footnote 10 this study assumes that ARN evidences a type of aesthetic redactional poetics, “poetics” understood as how the particular forms and structures of a literary artifact generate meaning. Indeed, the poetics specific to the genres of exegetical midrash,Footnote 11 aggadicFootnote 12 and halakhicFootnote 13 narrative and sugyot of the BavliFootnote 14 have received substantial recent critical attention. This analysis assumes that, in places, ARN's redactional impulse is driven by a poetics peculiar to a redacted, composite text, in which the juxtaposition of textual units generates coherent meaning well beyond the sum of its parts. While previous literary study of aggadah has implicitly assumed this type of poetics as an aesthetic feature,Footnote 15 Joshua Levinson has recently described it in detail.Footnote 16 Following Michael Roberts' comparative work on poetics in Late Antiquity,Footnote 17 Levinson deems this poetics as a “jeweled” or “mosaic” style, in which fragments of earlier materials “…are manipulated and juxtaposed in striking new combinations, often exploiting the contrast with the previous text in sense, situation or setting.”Footnote 18 This poetics generates meaning structurally, so that an individual literary unit contributes to the significance of a larger redacted composition not simply by virtue of its surface content, but also by how that content, as well as its generic form, are juxtaposed with other individual units, whether proximate or distant.Footnote 19 According to my reading, this poetic phenomenon is evident in certain sections of ARN, the Adam and Eve traditions under close analysis here a case in point.Footnote 20 If so, the significance of the individual traditions can only be fully appreciated by explicating their position in the overarching structure of the redactional unit. Given the current difficulties of assigning a date and provenance to either version of ARN (to be discussed below), this particular study will focus on the aesthetic and the ideological/theological aspects of the texts under analysis, leaving a detailed exploration of a compatible historical/cultural context for ARN's views about women and gender for another study.
Feminist historiography finds the reconstruction of historical trajectories of Jewish women's experience especially problematic, in that the historical evidence is almost exclusively textual, composed by and for men.Footnote 21 Thus, care must be taken to distinguish methodologically between evidence of actual women's religious practices preserved in the texts, and discursive practices involving women. The former constitutes what women actually did to participate in their religious tradition in any given place and time, and hence, can be assumed to have been experienced as normatively valid and meaningful by practicing women themselves; the latter designates the way in which women are represented in the religious textual traditions and how that representation attempts to ideologically define and/or control various aspects of women's lives as lived, including how men should think about women and how both should interact with each other.Footnote 22 Gender-focused study of rabbinic literary tradition has explored how its discursive practices have imagined and controlled Jewish women, their lives and bodies, both through theological constructs modeling the essential nature of womanhood,Footnote 23 and, in halakhic texts, by legal mandates directing women's behavior and gender relations, often informed by those theological constructs or by internal issues of authority.Footnote 24 As recently remarked by Daniel Boyarin in his analysis of a Babylonian talmudic narrative (B. Nedarim 20a–b) involving appropriate positions during sexual intercourse, such traditions should not be considered primarily as evidence of what women were actually doing and thinking, but as discourse invoked “…in the struggle for rabbinic authority, …an instrument …which is, of course, against other men.”Footnote 25 If women's “discursive bodies,” rather than their actual bodily practices, have been the focus of feminist scholarship in the area of rabbinic Judaism, it has not been for want of awareness of the critical place of actual women's practice, but due to the lack of evidence. However, despite the insurmountable difficulties in reconstructing women's actual practices in ancient Judaism for the purposes of analysis, it is important to keep in mind that they existed independently from rabbinic discursive practices.
While not going so far as to view the narrative in B. Nedarim 20a–b as evidence of actual women's experience, Boyarin claims it reflects a cultural climate in which Jewish women's authority challenged rabbinic control.Footnote 26 Generally speaking, contemporary feminist analysis of women in traditional Judaism and its literary production assumes three stances: (1) critique of an inherent, systemic structural and ideological oppression of women in rabbinic social and religious culture;Footnote 27 (2) the same critique, with the caveat that the rabbis attempted to ameliorate women's status through halakhic development;Footnote 28 and, (3) a focus on how Jewish women assumed a stance of challenge and/or resistance to male authority as well as to discursive, ideological control.Footnote 29 An analytical stance other than obvious critique or assumption of resistance risks being labeled as apologist for essentialist ideologies/theologies of women and gender roles in contemporary traditional Judaism. Let it be clear at the onset that apology for rabbinic androcentrism and misogyny is scarcely the intention here, but rather, a literary exploration of their unique nuances evident in ARN's Eve traditions.
Certainly, Jewish women did not always resist androcentric, even what we may well deem misogynist, rabbinic discursive practices. A case in point is the eventual incorporation into popular women's religious practice of the mishnaic set of three women's commandments, neglect of which the Mishnah deems so serious as to warrant the sentence of death in a manner unique to women: “For three transgressions women die in childbirth: if they are not meticulous in the performance of niddah, the dough offering (ḥallah) and the kindling of Sabbath lights” (M. Shabbat 2:6). This version of the set, presumably its earliest extant formulation, lacks a rationale for the singularly deadly power accorded such neglect.Footnote 30 However, the aggadic expansions of this mishnah stipulate a causal connection between women's obligation to perform these three commandments and Eve's primordial sin. In many of these sources, their performance atones for the sin of Eve, who brought death into the world through her disobedience, by enabling Jewish women to be efficient vehicles of bringing life into the world. For, through their performance, individual Jewish women can prevent the punishment imposed in Eve's curse from being visited upon themselves: “In pain you shall bring forth children” (Genesis 3:16).Footnote 31
While the historical trajectory of development remains obscure, the performance of the three women's commandments and their ritual efficacy as protection from danger in childbirth eventually assumed a central place in European Jewish women's ritual practice and, we can safely assume, their subjective spiritual experience, judging from their prominent place in the liturgical corpus known as the Teḥinos,Footnote 32 popular collections of prayers in the vernacularFootnote 33 composed, in part, byFootnote 34 and for the exclusive use of Jewish women. The Teḥinos, which appeared and quickly proliferated in the late medieval and early modern periods in Eastern and Western Europe,Footnote 35 clearly evidence the assimilation of the three women's commandments into women's normative ritual practice.Footnote 36 Not only do the anthologies of Techinos include special prayers of supplication to accompany their quotidian performance, but also they are organized in a distinct liturgical unit often designated by an official title, “The Three Gates.”Footnote 37 Moreover, the liturgical texts accompanying the three women's commandments, as well as those recommended for supplication during pregnancy and childbirth, often refer to the sin of Eve and the ritual means of preventing its bitter consequences.Footnote 38 Certainly, the time gap is very great between the formulations of the traditions in Avot de-Rabbi Natan under discussion here and the appearance of the first manuscripts of Teḥinos in the 15th century, let alone the heyday of their popularity in print in the 18th and 19th centuries. However, the Teḥinos liturgy may well be viewed as a later stage in a trajectory of development of a living, women's tradition, into which, at some point, the aggadic traditions connecting the women's commandments with the sin of Eve were assimilated into women's ritual practice and experienced as religiously meaningful by Jewish women themselves.
From a contemporary feminist perspective it may be disturbing to consider that Jewish women themselves valorized a ritual tradition we consider so obviously misogynist, indeed, possibly a Jewish version of “original sin,” according a special burden of guilt to Eve and by extension to all women after her.Footnote 39 Perhaps Chava Weissler's ambiguous evaluation of the relationship between Eve's sin and the three women's commandments in the Teḥinos is motivated by a discomfort with this valorization.Footnote 40 Weissler claims such Teḥinos take a theodicean position, implying a divine injustice by “…rais[ing] the question of the relationship between women's present suffering and Eve's sin,” yet accept “…the punishment with resignation.”Footnote 41 Yet again, part of our difficulty with these traditions may be due to our failure to consider them empathetically, with “imaginative displacement,” that is, placing ourselves in the cosmosFootnote 42 in which actual women of the past lived their inner and outer lives. Clearly, this cosmos is alien to us, a cosmos in which women ritually experience what we consider patently misogynist traditions as not only rationally coherent, but as eminently reasonable and deeply spiritually meaningful. However, in this case there is a very real reason for the popularity of such ritual, a reason, it seems, it is difficult for us to acknowledge. A persistent anxiety pervades the liturgy of the Teḥinos, an anxiety not only over the certain physical pain, but also over the threat of impending death of women during pregnancy and childbirth.Footnote 43 While scholarly consensus recognizes this fact, it is often articulated with a positive turn, that is, the Teḥinos are deemed to be about promoting fertility, rather than preventing death.Footnote 44 Our difficulty with imaginative displacement in this particular case may have to do with the repression of a latent, primal fear that, for some of us, thankfully, is no longer so immediate. For, excluding us who live in 21st-century developed countries and have access to adequate medical services, it is, and has been, an observable, brute fact of life that unlike human males, and unlike the females of most other animal species, the human female is especially prone to pain, suffering and death in the process of biological reproduction.Footnote 45 Eve's curse in Genesis 3:16 is but a very ancient, parochial, theological rationalization of this basic biological fact.Footnote 46 Given the unequivocal reality of women's pain and biological vulnerability, and historically speaking, their frequent debilitation and/or death during pregnancy and childbed, the aggadic traditions of Eve's sin and punishment can be seen not as misogynist ideological rationalizations of women's subjugation, but, like their eventual formulations in the Teḥinos, as evidence that for the rabbis the unequal burden of women in sexual reproduction was theologically problematic and required explanation and/or rationalization.Footnote 47
The core text of both versions of ARN is considered the earliest commentary on the Mishnah tractate Pirke Avot (henceforward, M. Avot) albeit a shorter and earlier version than the one extant in our Mishnah.Footnote 48 ARN evolved into two distinct versions, usually identified as ARNA and ARNB following Solomon Schechter's designation in his critical edition, which, with revisions and updates, is still the edition most commonly in use.Footnote 49 ARNA and ARNB share a basic structure (a running commentary on M. Avot) and a substantial amount of parallel content; they are distinguished as two distinct versions, rather than two recensions of the same text, by virtue of distinctive redactional and textual development, distinct manuscript traditions and unique contents and stylistic features. ARNA circulated more widely than ARNB through a long transmission process evidencing ARN's continuous popularity,Footnote 50 and eventually became the “official” version of the text when it was printed as one of the so called “extra-canonical” tractates of the Bavli in the 16th century as a sort of gemara on M. Avot.Footnote 51 Until the end of the last century, almost unanimous scholarly consensus considered ARN to have a Palestinian tannaitic core,Footnote 52 viewing it primarily as a pedagogical text used to teach the values and hierarchical order of a community of rabbis and rabbis in training in the context of a tannaitic Palestinian rabbinic school.Footnote 53 However, Menahem Kister's recent painstaking textual work has established that substantial portions of both versions are so late that the received versions of ARN cannot be considered amoraic, let alone tannaitic, and may even be geonic.Footnote 54 Although Schechter's judgment that ARNB has undergone a shorter transmission process than ARNA still stands,Footnote 55 Kister's work demonstrates that it is impossible to designate one version, or even one manuscript of a version, as representing a more original or more accurate text tradition. In Kister's view, since both versions exhibit uneven development, valid statements about its redaction and transmission history are limited to its discrete parts, and nothing conclusive can be said about either version of the text as a whole.Footnote 56 If Kister's evaluation is correct, the attempt to fix any of ARN's traditions in a pre-medieval cultural-historical context are fraught with uncertainty. Scholarly consensus, past and present, has considered ARN a singular rabbinic document;Footnote 57 however, precisely what constitutes this singularity has never been satisfactorily clarified. In my opinion, part of its idiosyncrasy is an overall unevenness in the redactional artistry evident in both versions, no doubt a sign of the uneven textual development proposed by Kister.
The two versions of ARN contain parallel traditions of the three women's commandments, located in larger, roughly parallel units about Adam and Eve: their creation, life experience in Eden, act of disobedience and subsequent punishment.Footnote 58 While Fonrobert correctly identifies ARN's, especially ARNB's, framing of the practice of niddah as extreme compared with the parallels in other sources,Footnote 59 she has misjudged the significance of its extremity. Indeed, ARNB's peculiar redactional structure positions the three women's commandments as positive illustrations of the M. Avot maxim of Shimon the Righteous: “The world stands on three things: on the Torah, on the Temple service and on acts of loving kindness” (Schechter, 18). Only ARNB presents the three women's commandments as gender-specific practices performed by women required for the perpetuation of “the world,” complementary to the three commandments performed by men: Torah, Temple service and acts of loving kindness. Only here, in the light of rabbinic beliefs about the prophylactic power of the performance of commandments,Footnote 60 are women considered fully halakhically empowered to defy the consequences of the curse of Eve.
Since rabbinic documents evidence women's religious experience and practice through a discursive filter written by men, feminist scholarship must be resourceful and innovative. Elizabeth Shanks Alexander has recently called for methods, especially modes of literary analysis which can be used to stabilize “…the unruly, uncontainable quality of rabbinic literature…for interpretation.”Footnote 61 Three distinct modes of analysis will be used to stabilize hermeneutic frames for ARN's Eve traditions: (1) theoretical contextualization; (2) an ideological/theological frame, and (3) literary analysis, both of discrete traditions and of their position in the greater, commentary context. A theoretical frame informing the peculiar cognitive role of ritual in religious practice is critical here, since the aggadot rationalizing the guilt of Eve provide a ritual solution to the cognitive negotiation of the disproportionate nature of women's experience of suffering and mortality in the process of biological reproduction.
The theoretical frame for my analysis is that of cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz, whose innovative cognitive theories of religious experience and ritual were popular from the 1970's–1990's,Footnote 62 after which deconstructionist theoretical frames became de rigueur across the Humanities and the Social Sciences. Even when not explicitly articulated, most recent studies of women's ritual practice in Judaism assume a deconstructionist stance, assuming ritual to be “…first and foremost, a strategy for the construction of certain types of power relationship effective within particular social organizations.”Footnote 63 Undeniably, the development of the category of the three women's commandments and the rituals associated with them show how rabbinic male authorities have deployed ritual to exert control over women and to privilege the male rabbinic class. However, this fact in and of itself helps us understand neither the nuances of the traditions' trajectory of development, nor the cognitive function of the religious practices associated with them. If religious experience has been, and still is, a coherent part of human cognitive, as well as social, experience, theoretical frames based in cultural anthropology remain useful. That Geertz's theoretical work has maintained critical relevance is shown in some of the scholarship cited in this article. As we shall see, Geertz maintains that the prime function of religious experience and ritual is the cognitive negotiation of two human realities: the ideal way in which life is imagined, and day-to-day life as actually lived. Chava Weissler's analysis of the religious function of the Teḥinos implicitly assumes this theoretical frame. Says Weissler, “The voices one hears in the tkhines speak to a fundamental reality of the religious life…, [t]he disparity between day-to-day experience and spiritual ideals…. [T]he tkines are grounded in routine realities even as they exist in tension with them.”Footnote 64 More recently, Barry Wimpfheimer's study of the peculiarities of halakhic narrative in the Bavli explicitly adopts some of Geertz's modes of analysis.Footnote 65
Geertz considers religious experience an inherently and uniquely human cognitive process; its primary function is to mediate between the world of nature (i.e., that which is not organized, imagined and/or tangibly created by humans themselves) and the world of culture (i.e., all that which is organized, imagined and/or tangibly created by humans). Religious behaviors “work,” that is, appear meaningful and reasonable to human cognition, because they effect the integration of human natural and cultural environments through the interplay between actual human experience and its subjective, cognitive processing. In effect, religion enables humans to experience their lives as actually lived as fully integrated with their lives as they imagine they should be, as they strive to make their cosmos a cognitively integrated, coherent system. Thus, according to Geertz, cosmological “…conceptions of a general order of existence” become clothed “…with such an aura of factuality that… [they] seem uniquely realistic.”Footnote 66 Religious practice is, thus, both a response to the real world, and a way of making the real world reflect imagined, culturally specific, conceptualizations of cosmological order.Footnote 67
Geertz identifies three cognitive problems he considers basic to all religions, the first two of which are relevant here: the problem of suffering, the problem of moral order and the problem of knowledge.Footnote 68 Human life as lived is always, to a greater or lesser extent, undeservedly painful and full of suffering when considered in light of projected cosmological systems of moral order. According to Geertz, religion provides cognitive, rather than material, solutions to this fact, by making “…physical pain, personal loss, worldly defeat, or the helpless contemplation of others' agony something bearable, supportable—something, as we say, sufferable.”Footnote 69 Religious ritual has a critical function in Geertz's phenomenology of religious experience; for cognitive solutions to the problems of suffering and moral uncertainty can only be experienced holistically by the believer as real and true through ritual performance. The only way religious truth can be rendered fully veridical to the believer as a whole person, in mind and in body (i.e., life as imagined and life as lived), is when the cognitive solutions in the realm of the imagination are externalized and thus formally, if ephemerally, enacted by practitioners as part of the world of real life. In Geertz's words, ritual enactment, causes “…the world as lived and the world as imagined, [to become] fused under the agency of a single set of symbolic forms, [and thus] turn out to be the same world.”Footnote 70
Geertz's notion of the function of ritual is a useful frame for the traditions of the three women's commandments, since they offer a ritual solution to a specific problem involving suffering and moral order: women suffer pain and tend to die in the process of biological reproduction, while men do not. According to the rabbinic traditions in ARN and parallels, this is because individual women bear the guilt for a sin they themselves did not actually commit;Footnote 71 consequently, they are punished disproportionately in comparison to men. The three commandments, niddah, the dough offering, and kindling the Sabbath lights, become the ritual solutions to this problem, simultaneously rationalizing Eve's sin and the immense guilt debt it generated in the “real world” (causing disproportionate suffering to women) as well as offering each individual Jewish woman the possibility of atonement, and hence, safe childbirth, in the theological economy of the covenantal system.Footnote 72
The rabbinic hierarchy of covenantal status informs the theological frame for my analysis. The vertical lines of hierarchical status in rabbinic covenantal theology are determined by the level of obligation to perform the commandments; the more one is obligated to perform, the higher one's status. Paradoxically, the more commandments one is obligated to perform, the more potential one has to sin; thus, there is a positive correlation between one's potential to sin and one's hierarchical status. By extension, the more one sins, the more opportunities one has to atone for one's sin, a commandment in its own right. Jewish women have a liminal status in the rabbinic theological hierarchy since they are clearly fully Jewish theologically speaking, being included in the covenant,Footnote 73 but arguably, not fully Jewish halakhically speaking, due to their exemption from quotidian, positive time-bound commandments.Footnote 74 Certainly, women stand lower in the covenantal hierarchy than men since they are obligated to perform fewer commandments, and by extension, have less potential to sin and, hence, fewer reasons to repent. Arguably, the Eve traditions, especially those in ARNB, raise women's hierarchical status in the covenant by increasing women's level of obligation (the guilt debt of the sin of Eve), potential to sin (by not performing the three commandments meticulously) and the ability to atone for sin (through ritual performance).
Finally, assuming that literary artistry can be manifest on the level of redaction, the ARN traditions are evaluated in light of their position in their greater commentary context. The redactors of the two versions of ARN adapted traditions of the creation and Eden experience of Adam and Eve from their original textual contexts and positioned themFootnote 75 to illustrate two M. Avot maxims having, in themselves, nothing whatsoever to do with the creation story: the maxim of the Men of the Great Assembly “Make a fence around the Torah” (ARNA:1/ARNB:1, ed. Schechter, 4–8) and that of Shimon the Righteous “The world stands on three things” (ARNA:4/ARNB:8–9, ed. Schechter, 21–25).Footnote 76 While literary interpretation is always subjective to some degree, concrete textual evidence supports the position that in this particular section of ARN, the redactional process has deployed the Adam and Eve traditions to explore a specific theme involving human suffering, namely, the human response to cataclysmic ruptures in human history, and in doing so, has enhanced the status of women and their special role in maintaining the continuity of Jewish and human life.
The remarkable textual attention both versions of ARN pay to Eve must be contextualized in its overall treatment of women and gender relations. Since M. Avot pays women and gender issues scant attention, correspondingly, ARN exhibits relatively little interest in either women or gender relations. Only two M. Avot sayings present teachings relevant to women and/or gender relations:Footnote 77 “Don't talk to your wife any more than necessary” (attributed to Yosi ben Yoḥanan of Jerusalem, M. Avot 1.5); and the maxim, “The more wives the more witchcraft, the more maidservants, the more licentiousness” (attributed to Hillel, M. Avot 2.7).Footnote 78 While the two versions of ARN show distinctive patterns in their incorporation of content concerning women and gender relations,Footnote 79 neither pay them substantial attention.Footnote 80 Such content as there is appears as an accessory to the moral pedagogy aimed at the male target audience, usually part of an incidental narrative background. ARN's lack of interest in women and gender relations is scarcely surprising when considered in light of its merely aggadic authority. The absence of any halakhic imperative to address real life situations, which would necessitate halakhic discussion and or mediation in issues concerning women and/or gender relations, allows both M. Avot and ARN (although to a lesser extent) to project an androcentric, ideologically intact “rabbinic community of the imagination,”Footnote 81 a cosmos in which women are largely irrelevant except as accessories to appropriate male behavior in a hierarchical social system built on discursive structures of rabbinic knowledge and the social process of its acquisition in an all-male rabbinic community.Footnote 82 Significantly, despite ARN's neglect of women and gender issues, Eve is not only the female personage given the most attention, but her textual presence rivals that of most key male figures; only Adam, Moses, Rabbi Yoḥanan ben Zakkai, Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus have more textual space devoted to them than to Eve. Thus, whatever function the Eve traditions fulfill for ARN's redactors, they must have been important.
Apart from Eve, women intrude only occasionally into ARN's textual content as conventional, undistinguished, usually unnamed, stereotypical characters, most often lacking moral and/or narrative agency, whose presence facilitates ethical pedagogy aimed at males. Throughout, women (whether they are intended to be understood as real women or as metaphorical and/or theological constructs)Footnote 83 are presented as vulnerable, sometimes (but rarely) as sexual distractions, and always in need of male protection and/or moral control. The male target audience is advised to be masters in their home by maintaining an appropriate moral climate therein, which necessitates treating the women for whom they are responsible as physically and morally vulnerable dependents, who should intrude on the activities of the male community as little as possible. I designate this construct of women and gender relations “patriarchal stewardship” (my phrase, appearing nowhere in the text). Given ARN's overall lack of focus on women and gender relations, the concept of patriarchal stewardship is usually implied, and is rarely articulated as part of the explicit teaching.Footnote 84
The concept of patriarchal stewardship is, however, clearly illustrated in the two long sections of traditions about Adam and Eve in both versions of ARN. The first section is part of ARN's commentary on the first maxim in the Chain of Tradition transmitted in the name of the Men of the Great Assembly, “Make a fence around the Torah” (ARNA:1/ARNB:1, ed. Schechter, 4–8). Long enough to be considered a multi-genre anthology, especially expanded in ARNB, the unit is comprised of scriptural narrative, scriptural commentary, parables, direct commentary on M. Avot and enumeration lists, relating, in the haphazard manner usual in such anthologies of midrashic material, the story of Adam and Eve's creation, their Eden experience, their act of disobedience and its consequences. The second section comprises part of the commentary on the maxim of Shimon the Righteous: “The world stands on three things, on Torah, on Temple service and on acts of loving kindness” (ARNA:4/ARNB:8–9, ed. Schechter, 21–25). Here, the Adam and Eve traditions are situated immediately after another multi-genre anthology describing the destruction of Jerusalem, the flight of Rabban Yoḥanan ben Zakkai and the founding of Yavneh, which I designate the “Destruction Cluster,” which is much longer in ARNB than in ARNA.Footnote 85 Both versions of the anthology present Adam and Eve's experiences as archetypal models of and for human behavior, however, unsurprisingly, their qualities as paradigmatic, natural humans conform to stereotypical rabbinic ethical and cultural norms. Especially in the sections of scriptural narrative, Adam as the paradigmatic “patriarchal steward,” is responsible for the moral integrity of his household, namely, Eve.Footnote 86 While Eve's actions are condemned, Adam is held to be ultimately accountable for Eve's vulnerability to the serpent because he misled her by not transmitting God's prohibition to her verbatim: “Adam did not wish to speak to Eve the way the Holy One, blessed be He, had spoken to him. Rather, this is what he said to her…. What led to Eve touching the tree? It was the hedge that Adam put around his words” (ARNA:1, ed. Schechter, 4); and: “Now from the words of Eve we learn that Adam hedged her in” (ARNB:1, ed. Schechter, 4).Footnote 87 Two sophisticated parables follow in both versions to emphasize the force of Adam's ultimate responsibility for Eve's disobedience, both of which reiterate the concept of patriarchal stewardship in their narrative content.Footnote 88
Compared with ARNA, ARNB not only has much more material about Eve, including a substantial number of traditions not in ARNA,Footnote 89 but also presents her as a significantly more proactive and morally independent character, and by correlation, more responsible for the ultimate consequences of her sin. Eve's presence is diminished in ARNA's shorter unit, in which she is rendered a passive character with a non-speaking role.Footnote 90 This pattern is illustrated in the two parables mentioned above. Although both versions of the parables illustrate the negative consequences of a “patriarchal steward's” inadequate or deficient instructions to his wife, ARNB's introductory formula designates the parable as being about Eve (“To what was Eve likened at that time?…”) (ARNB:1, ed. Schechter, 7); by contrast, ARNA's introductory formula identifies the parable as being about Adam: “Let me compare with a parable, to what may Adam be likened?” (ARNA:1, ed. Schechter, 6). Moreover, the largely parallel sequence of scriptural narratives illustrating “the fence” that Adam put around his words (ARNA:1) further illustrates ARNA's tendency to diminish content concerning women and gender relations. Its much shorter version of Eve's seduction by the serpent presents her as a silent, passive character, engaging in internal dialogue, rather than speaking out: “What did Eve say in her heart? All of the things which my master commanded me from the outset are but lies” (ARNA:1, ed. Schechter, 4).Footnote 91 By contrast, ARNB's Eve is a proactive, speaking character, who not only carries on a direct conversation with the serpent, but whose speaking role is singled out: “It is from the words of Eve herself that we learn about the fence with which the first human male encircled her” (ARNB:1, ed. Schechter, 4).Footnote 92
Not only is Eve allotted more textual presence in ARNB, she is held to be more responsible for her actions; indeed, it is precisely these traditions which accord her more responsibility and liability for sin which have been regarded as evidence of ARNB's extremely misogynistic stance. The consequences of the sins of Adam, Eve and the serpent appear in six enumeration lists, two in ARNA and four in ARNB, although ARNA's two lists have been assimilated to the genre of scriptural narrative by placing them in the exegetical framework of Genesis 3:15 (“In pain you shall bring forth children”). The texts appear below, along with the parallels in Bereshit Rabbah and the Yerushalmi,Footnote 93 in Hebrew and in English, followed by a comparative analysis:Footnote 94
Generically speaking, all six ARN traditions above are enumeration lists, although only three are explicitly introduced as such (the lists of the three decrees and ten curses in ARNA:1 and the list of the ten decrees in ARNB:42). ARNA:1's list of Eve's ten curses, which itemizes only three, not ten, examples prompted by scriptural citations,Footnote 95 appears to be a synthesis of the other two lists, exhibiting the exegetical structure of ARNA:1's list of the three decrees (as well as parallel content) and the numerical organizing principle of the list of ten decrees in ARNB:42, which does itemize ten examples. The exegesis in ARNA:1's list of ten curses reflects a normative rabbinic anthropology of female desire, specifically, its passive character, compared with a man's active sexual impulse.Footnote 96 All of the lists essentialize the consequences of Eve's sin, both biological (menstruation, childbearing, the breaking of the hymen, aging quickly, menopause) and cultural (sexual passivity, leading the funeral procession), thus Eve's punishments become a paradigmatic discursive model for objectifying and rationalizing what is understood as universal women's experience.Footnote 97
ARNB's three traditions appear in two locations: once in the anthology of lists of scriptural examples of which ARNB:42 is but one chapter,Footnote 98 and, again, at the very end of the anthology of creation traditions following ARNB's Destruction Cluster (ARNB:9). Unlike ARNA, which has assimilated its lists into an exegetical framework,Footnote 99 ARNB's three lists retain a precise list form while exhibiting signs of redactional reworking.Footnote 100 All three lists are obvious interpretive expansions of the mishnaic tradition of the three women's commandments (M. Shabbat 2:6); indeed, the two shorter lists cite M. Shabbat 2:6 explicitly as a formal conclusion, thus presenting the preceding scriptural allusions to the story of Eve as the basis for its production: “Due to this our Sages said…” (ARNB:42, Schechter, 117); “Based on this the Sages said…” (ARNB:9, Schechter, 25). These two shorter lists are virtually identical, with only slightly different readings. The second, more developed, tradition in ARNB:9 also cites the mishnaic source more or less verbatim in a formal introductory unit, however, with no explicit reference to its source. This tradition has been expanded to contain not only the introduction paraphrasing M. Shabbat 2:6, but also a clear tripartite structure, each part itemizing what the rabbinic view considered an essential difference between men and women and the relation of this difference to each of the three women's commandments. Moreover, idiosyncratic, parallel formulaic introductions and conclusions appear in each of its three parts.Footnote 101 Significantly, while the parallel tradition in Bereshit Rabbah 17 is very close to the longer, developed tradition in ARNB:9 as far as its content is concerned,Footnote 102 it is not in the form of an enumeration list and it neither cites nor paraphrases the Mishnah.Footnote 103
In her detailed comparison of the consequences of Eve's sin in midrashic sources specifically concerning menstruation, Charlotte Fonrobert locates the extreme misogyny of the ARNB traditions in what she regards as their especially punitive force: “Obviously, these preceding versions are highly problematic, not only as to their view of women's mythological role in the origin of human civilization, but also as to their punitive framing of the rabbinic ritualization of menstruation.”Footnote 104 Judith Baskin also regards the ARN traditions, especially those in ARNB, as particularly misogynist compared with the parallels, illustrating “…the essential components of rabbinic Judaism's [negative] conception of women.”Footnote 105 True, these traditions reflect what we deem an essentialist, androcentric, if not misogynistic and exclusionary stance towards women and their life experience. However, it is also true that the performance of the three women's commandments associated with the sin of Eve and its consequences was later assimilated into women's religious practice, hence, eventually experienced by women as ritually effective and spiritually meaningful. We could simply assume that, unlike ourselves, the generations of Jewish women informing their ritual practice with reference to the sins of Eve were colluding with their hegemonic oppression, but I think there is more to it than that.
Indeed, while M. Shabbat 2:6 and some of the traditions expanding it can certainly be viewed as punitive,Footnote 106 ARNB's version suggests that some rabbinic formulators considered the punitive nature of the Mishnah theologically problematic.Footnote 107 Moreover, some of the ARN traditions, most notably the “extreme” version in ARNB, have formulated the consequences of Eve's sin so as to enhance, not to diminish, women's halakhic status and ritual empowerment. This enhancement is achieved discursively by articulating the performance of the three women's commandments in explicit language of the covenantal economy of obligation, sin, punishment and atonement, and, in the case of the longer, more developed tradition in ARNB:9, by a hyperbolic exaggeration of Eve's culpability.
Even a superficial comparison shows how very differently the consequences of Eve's sin are presented in the exegetical and enumeration lists (ARNA:1/ARNB:42), compared with ARNB's three traditions enumerating the three women's commandments based upon M. Shabbat 2:6 (ARNB:9/ARNB:42). All of the former identify these consequences as generalized, stereotypical natural and/or cultural events in what the rabbis considered to be women's “natural” life experience, listed in a conventionalized chronological sequence of a woman's lifespan. While some may be deemed biological and some cultural, none of these life experiences are peculiarly Jewish; conventionally speaking, at any rate, they were probably assumed to befall all women living in a patriarchal society in antiquity.Footnote 108 In keeping with their universal purview, here female biology is destiny; neither halakhic obligations nor ritual performances are presented as remedies for the consequences of Eve's sin. By contrast, ARNB's three traditions (as well as the parallels in Bereshit Rabbah 17 and Y. Shabbat 2:6) identify only one natural consequence of Eve's sin, death in childbed; the three remedial consequences, the three women's commandments, are halakhic and ritual, thus specifically Jewish, rather than universal. Moreover, both Eve's actions and the halakhic ritual remedies, the three women's commandments, are situated in an explicit theological framework of sin and punishment with a middah ke-neged middah Footnote 109 (“measure for measure”) correspondence between the two.Footnote 110 Hence, the two groups of traditions show a radical shift from a universal, natural, ideology in which biology is destiny, to a Jewish halakhic paradigm, in which destiny can be “trumped” through ritual means of atonement.Footnote 111
A comparison between the traditions in Bereshit Rabbah, the Yerushalmi and ARNB shows the latter's enhancement of Eve's sin and, paradoxically, the corresponding enhancement of her covenantal status. In both of the former, Eve commits only one severe sin, bringing death into the world, expressed synecdochically as the murder of Adam; each of the three women's commandments is shown to be a consequence of this primordial murder through metaphoric or exegetical correspondence.Footnote 112 While a theological rationale for the three commandments unique to women is assumed, there is little explicit language denoting the covenantal framework of a system of sin and punishment beyond the word “commandment” itself. Moreover, the Bereshit Rabbah version makes no explicit mention of women's death in childbed, nor any connection between it and the performance of the three women's commandments.
By contrast, all of the ARNB traditions, especially the long tradition in ARNB:9, place the three women's commandments in an explicit overarching theological framework of sin, punishment and covenantal obligation. Indeed, the obligation of Jewish women is rendered explicitly by the verb “to incur an obligation” (נתחייבה), repeated three times in each tradition. Moreover, each of ARNB's traditions makes an explicit middah ke-neged middah correspondence between Eve's sin and Jewish women's obligation to perform their three commandments as a factor causing/avoiding death in childbed. Significantly, the most extreme statement of Eve's guilt in ARNB:9 evidences the most, and the most explicit, covenantal language. Here, not only is Eve explicitly identified as having incurred obligation, but the term “commandment” and “atonement” (שׁיתכפר) also appear three times, once in each of its three parts. Thus, a transgenerational narrative of the economy of covenantal salvation, highlighting proactive female agency, is fully developed in the ARNB:9 tradition alone. Arguably, ARNB:9's unique formulation enhances, rather than diminishes, Jewish women's covenantal status, not only through the explicit covenantal language, but, paradoxically, through its extreme rendition of Eve's sins, and hence, Jewish women's liability.
While the versions in Bereshit Rabbah and the Yerushalmi hold Eve guilty of only one sin, Adam's death, ARNB deems her guilty of three, which correspond to the three “cardinal sins” of Judaism, the worst sins a Jew could ever commit, the sins one must allow oneself to die for before committing: murder, sexual immorality (gilui ‘arayot) and idolatry.Footnote 113 ARNB's unique formulation appears to have been motivated by a very precise application of the logic of middah ke-neged middah, which dictated that if, in fact, Jewish women were given three unique commandments to atone for Eve's sin, Eve must have committed three distinct sins. Each of the three women's commandments is identified, either explicitly or by extension, both as a consequence of, and a means of atonement for, one of the three rabbinic “cardinal” sins. The sin of murder is explicit in the text: “Adam was the blood of the Holy One, blessed be He. Eve came and spilled it/him” (ARNB:9, Schechter, 25). The severe sin of sexual immorality is less explicit, but clearly implied, as Eve is deemed to have contaminated Adam with menstrual impurity (ותטמאתו), one of the prohibitions of gilui ‘arayot in Leviticus 18:19. Eve's third sin, extinguishing God's light in the world, does not correspond to idolatry in its strict sense. However, there is substantial evidence of a process of the ideological and halakhic conflation of the sins of idolatry and Ḥillul ha-Shem, the desecration or literal obliteration of God's name, beginning in the rabbinic period and fully developed in medieval sources.Footnote 114
The ARNB:9 tradition may well be an aggadic example of a step in this process of conflation. Here, a complicated metaphor designates Adam as the “light of God,” rather than the more usual metaphoric understanding of “light” as a human soul.Footnote 115 Adam's “light” here appears to represent the potential for divine revelation itself, for “the first man is the light of the world, with which the Holy One, blessed be He, used to illuminate all of creation.” Eve's sin obliterates this divine light, a sin immense, even cosmic, in its magnitude, for by murdering Adam she stood to extinguish God's future potential to make His presence known to all created creatures, thus, in a sense, she threatened to obliterate God's presence itself from the world. Indeed, the metaphor is so extreme that it borders on blasphemy, certainly holding Eve guilty, if not of idolatry proper, of the violation of Ḥillul ha-Shem, desecration of God's name, which, as we have seen, became associated with idolatry.Footnote 116 Undoubtedly, the extreme scope of Eve's sins in ARNB is both androcentric and misogynist, simultaneously condemning Eve and aggrandizing the male Adam as the sole repository of the divine light in the world; yet, with paradoxical logic, it enhances the power and status of Eve and Jewish women after her, for the greater Eve's sins, the greater agency each and every Jewish woman is imagined to have to atone for them, to the point of becoming active agents in restoring divine light to the world through lighting the Sabbath lights.
The point is, whether or not the formulation of these ARNB traditions was motivated by an especially virulent misogynist impulse, their discursive energy is not directed at the social subjugation of women, as in the enumeration lists, but at the theodicean problem of women being punished disproportionately, hence at the fact of women being prone to death in childbed being at odds with the efficiency and justice of the divine imperative to procreate.Footnote 117 The ARNB traditions show a point in time (when and where remains highly uncertain) when three halakhically stipulated ritual actions, already being routinely performed by Jewish women, were categorized as a unit and located in the covenantal economy of sin and punishment in a discursive exploration of the problem of theodicy. Thus, the punitive energy behind the category of the three women's commandments in M. Shabbat 2:6 and perhaps the Yerushalmi is problematized. Certainly, the ARNB traditions highlight the extremely disproportionate tragedy of women being prone to suffering and death in the process of biological reproduction, in comparison with men, by assuming that only very severe sins could account for such an extreme punishment.
Geertz's phenomenology of ritual practice is key here, namely, that through ritual practice, life as lived (women suffer and die in childbed) and life as imagined (God is a just God) are integrated as reasonable and coherent in the minds of practitioners. For I believe it is reasonable to assume that not only were the three women's ritual practices performed by women as part of a regular domestic routine from the rabbinic period onwards, but, moreover they were witnessed, directly or indirectly, by the men and children of Jewish households. The daily (the taking of the dough offering), weekly (the kindling of Sabbath lights) and monthly (niddah) normative cycles of a Jewish woman's life in the domestic sphere are transformed into an ongoing, lifelong process of atonement to rectify the threat of death in another, less predictable, domestic routine, childbed. Living as most of my readers probably do, in a time and place in which childbirth has been pathologized and institutionalized, with the vast majority of births taking place in hospitals or ancillary locations, it is easy to forget that until the 20th century women gave birth at home, often within the earshot, if not the eyesight, of other family members. One might go so far as to say that the framing of childbirth by the three women's commandments ritualizes, hence elevates, the biological act of giving birth. Now that death or severe physical incapacity resulting from childbed is no longer a realistic expectation of every confinement (at least in the developed, affluent West), it is difficult to assess the relative misogyny of these traditions.Footnote 118 A conventional feminist reading demands that, due to their connection with Eve's sin, the ritual performance of the three women's commandments must needs be a negative, diminishing experience, through which women internalize their destiny of perpetual guilt and probable death in childbed as valid and deserved. While some women may well have felt this way, the later evidence of the Teḥinos shows otherwise, namely, that their performance was experienced by Jewish women as ritually empowering and theologically meaningful, in part due to their perceived prophylactic agency against death in childbed and related anxieties.
Moving from an examination of the traditions themselves to their redacted context, the underlying poetics of ARNB:9's unique redactional structure reveals further enhancement of women's status due to the placement of the traditions at the very end of a long unit of commentary on the maxim of Shimon the Righteous: “The world stands on three things, on the Torah, on Temple service and on acts of loving kindness” (ARNB:5–9). The unit begins with the citation of the maxim, and ends with the two versions of the three women's commandments, which are placed in a parallel position with the maxim and which, thus, function structurally as a thematic resolution to the previous five chapters. An extended composite narrative (a multi-genre anthology of traditions forming a coherent narrative sequence), these five chapters are divided into four distinct units, presented as commentary on the three parts of the maxim. “On the Torah” (ARNB:5) is followed by a list of scriptural examples and exegetical traditions about the cause of the destruction of the First Temple. The commentary on “on Temple service” (ARNB:5–7) is largely made up of the Destruction Cluster, a composite rabbinic narrative telling the story of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple.Footnote 119 The commentary on the third part of the maxim, “on acts of loving kindness” (ARNB:8–9), is largely composed of the anthology of traditions about Adam and Eve, after an initial short sequence of rabbinic and scriptural narrative examples of acts of loving kindness in action.
While parallels to the traditions making up ARN's Destruction Cluster appear in other sources,Footnote 120 ARNB's is unique (even compared with its parallel in ARNA) in that, to my knowledge, it is the only sustained sequence of traditions describing the destruction of the Second Temple redacted in juxtaposition with a sustained sequence of traditions about the creation and sin of Adam and Eve.Footnote 121 Reading ARN's redactional artistry as a poetics in which juxtaposition generates meaning, this arrangement is significant. Ironically, despite ARNB's graphic, pathetic detailed description of the destruction of the Temple, its Destruction Cluster is positioned as a positive illustration of how the world “stands” or endures, not of how the world was destroyed.Footnote 122 ARNB's unique juxtaposition of the Destruction Cluster with the Adam and Eve anthology compares, and eventually proposes halakhic remedies for, two events of cataclysmic proportions, which effected ruptures in natural and/or historical order and which, hence, severely threatened the continuity of human and/or Jewish life: the disobedience of Adam and Eve at the beginning of time and the destruction of the Second Temple at the hand of Titus. Complementary, gendered ritual solutions are proposed to remedy the threat of discontinuity posed by each of the two cataclysmic events. Placed at the very end of the unit, the ritual solution to the disobedience of Adam and Eve is the performance of the three women's commandments, which ensure the perpetuation of both the Jewish people and the entire human species by preventing death in childbed. The ritual solution to the destruction of the Temple are commandments performed by men, the study of Torah and the practices categorized as “acts of loving kindness,” presented immediately following the Destruction Cluster at the beginning of ARNB:8.
The Destruction Cluster sections of both ARNA and ARNB stress ultimate Jewish continuity despite the threatening historical rupture caused by the destruction of the Temple.Footnote 123 The two ritual solutions to historical rupture to be performed by men, Torah study and acts of loving kindness, are presented as substitutes for Temple sacrifice, enabling the perpetuation of divine service in the Temple's absence, insofar as the ability to atone for sin is concerned.Footnote 124 However, only ARNB presents an explicit structural correspondence between the three women's commandments and the study of Torah and acts of loving kindness, prompting their interpretation as parallel, gender-specific, ritual solutions to situations of abrupt, catastrophic historical discontinuity. Their complementary equivalence is communicated through their redactional arrangement, the former positioned as conclusion to the Adam and Eve anthology, the latter positioned as a sort of coda to the Destruction Cluster proper,Footnote 125 as well as through explicit linguistic parallels found in the list in ARNB:9 and in other parts of the commentary. Thus, ARNB but not ARNA elevates the status of the three women's commandments, making them analogous to men's performance of Torah study and acts of loving kindness in terms of their impact on the continuity of the world.
Torah study and acts of loving kindness, the ritual substitutions for Temple sacrifice effective for atonement to be performed by men, appear immediately following the citation of the third part of the maxim “on acts of loving kindness” (ARNB:8). First, a section of scriptural commentary derives the maxim exegetically from the word “loving kindness” (חסד) in Hosea 6:6: “For I desire loving kindness and not sacrifice.” The substitution of Torah study and acts of loving kindness for Temple sacrifice posited in the scriptural commentary is reinforced through the rabbinic authority of Rabban Yoḥanan ben Zakkai in a story that follows. A short sequence of exempla illustrating acts of loving kindness then transitions into the Adam and Eve anthology, extending through ARNB:8–9. A summary of the traditions comprising ARNB:8–9 appears below to facilitate discussion and to clarify their redactional order:
ARNB:8
The citation of the third segment of the maxim of Shimon the Righteous: “On acts of loving kindness”
I. Coda to the Destruction Cluster proper:
(a) Homiletical commentary on Hosea 6:6: “For I desire loving kindness and not sacrifice….” identifying Torah study as a ritual substitution for sacrifice.
(b) The story of Yoḥanan ben Zakkai and Rabbi Joshua meeting after the destruction of the Temple. Ends with the repetition of Hosea 6:6.
II. Transitional exempla illustrating acts of loving kindness:
(a) Anonymous Baraita: “When scholars sit studying…” Joining a funeral or a wedding procession may take precedence over Torah study.
(b) The story of Rabbi Judah rejoicing with a bride. Ends with Genesis 2:22: “And the rib which the Lord had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.”
III. Anthology of traditions about Adam and Eve largely parallel to Bereshit Rabbah 17
(a) Saying attributed to Rabbi Shimon ben Menasia based on Genesis 2:22. God, Adam's best man, beautifies Eve before presenting her to Adam.
(b) Running commentary on Psalm 139:5: “You have formed me behind and in front….”
(c) Scriptural narrative about the naming of the animals based on Genesis 2:19: “So out of the ground the Lord formed every beast of the field….”
(d) Scriptural narrative about the creation of Eve based on Genesis 2:20: “But for the man there was not found a helper fit for him.”
(e) Polemical narrative of conversation between Rabbi Joshua and a Roman matron, containing a parable of the creation of Eve (a brick of gold substituted for a brick of clay).
(f) Second polemical narrative of conversation between Rabbi Joshua and a Roman matron containing another parable of the creation of Eve (bones and meat from the butcher).
(g) Comments about suitable female marriage partners in a conversation between Rabbi Joshua and a Roman matron placed in a loose narrative frame.
ARNB:9
(h) A list of natural and cultural differences between men and women, arranged as commentary to Genesis 2:23: “Bone of my bone.”Footnote 126
(i) The longer, more developed tradition providing a ritual solution for the consequences of Eve's sin: “For three sins do women die during childbirth: Because they are not meticulous regarding niddah, the dough offering and kindling the Sabbath lights.”Footnote 127
(j) The shorter parallel of (i) above.Footnote 128
Judging from the examples above, the halakhic category of “acts of loving kindness”Footnote 129 is understood here as proactive, empathetic participation in ritual commandments being fulfilled by people other than oneself, especially commandments social in nature, like marriage and funeral rites. Thus, ritualized involvement in the social world of human joy and sorrow is made an ethical imperative for Jewish men (as in II.a, II.b and III.a above).Footnote 130
The function of ARNB's anthology of Adam and Eve traditions, following hard after the story of Yoḥanan ben Zakkai (I.b above), is not immediately obvious; indeed, it is usually viewed as an irrelevant, lengthy interpolation.Footnote 131 However, the Adam and Eve materials are not superfluous if considered in light of the theme of the role of ritual in effecting human continuity and thereby mending catastrophic rupture. A thematic correspondence is effected between the repair of the rupture caused by the destruction of the Temple and that caused by the disobedience of Adam and Eve by their structural juxtaposition, and also by explicit language shared by the story of Yoḥanan ben Zakkai and the tradition of the three women's commandments at the end of ARNB:9 (III.i and j above). To facilitate illustration, the story is cited in full below:
A story is told about Rabban Yoḥanan ben Zakkai who was walking along the road when Rabbi Joshua ran after him and said to him, “Woe unto us, for the house of our life has been destroyed, the place in which we used to atone for our sins!” He said to him, “Do not fear. We have another means of atonement to take its place.” He asked, “What is it?” Yoḥanan answered, “For I desire loving kindness and not sacrifice” (Hosea 6:6).
Bearing in mind that the only version of the tradition of the three women's commandments with explicit language of atonement (repeated three times) is the longer list at the end of ARNB:9, it is significant that explicit language of atonement also appears in the story of Yoḥanan ben Zakkai (כפרה אחרת\מכפר), situated in the coda to the Destruction Cluster. This repetition of the language of atonement effects a correspondence between the two traditions, drawing attention to the two complementary, gender specific, modes of ritual atonement prescribed in each. Rabbi Yoḥanan ben Zakkai assures Rabbi Joshua that Torah study and acts of loving kindness substitute for the atoning efficacy of sacrifice, ensuring the perpetuation of the covenantal relationship between God and Israel; by correlation, women's performance of their three commandments becomes a kind of expiatory “sacrifice,” warding off death in childbed and thus perpetuating the Jewish people through biological reproduction.Footnote 132
Further evidence of the complementary role ARNB posits for women in Jewish continuity is suggested by Rabbi Joshua's most unusual designation for the Temple, suggesting a homology between it and the female reproductive body. Instead of ARN's usual term, “the house of the sanctuary,” normatively translated “the Temple” (בית המקדשׁ), Rabbi Joshua uses the unusual designation “the house of our life” (בית חיינו).Footnote 133 Metaphorically resonant, “the house of our life” bears a range of associations, denoting the center, the matrix, not only the critical place of Temple service to the continuity of the Jewish people and their covenantal relationship with God, but also the “center” of the female body, the source of human life.
Recent feminist studies of the rabbinic discursive articulation of the female body have explored the multi-layered, interwoven historical and halakhic nuances of the metaphor “woman as house.”Footnote 134 Indeed, the word “house” in rabbinic usage may designate both woman and/or wife, as well as the female genitalia.Footnote 135 Moreover, according to this scholarship, the rabbinic discursive field implicated in the “woman as house” metaphor designates the specifically female reproductive capacity.Footnote 136 ARNB's unique trope of woman/Temple as the “house of life” has a scriptural resonance with female biological reproduction, for “our life” (חיינו) and the name “Eve” (חוה) share the same root, reflected in the etiological verse: “And Adam called the woman Eve, for she was the mother of all life” (Genesis 3:20). The unusual designation for the Temple, along with the parallel positions of the story of Rabbi Yoḥanan ben Zakkai and the tradition of the three women's commandments (both placed at the very end of their respective anthological units) effects a homological correspondence between Eve (and by extension, Jewish women after her) and the Temple. The female womb and the altar are thus, in very different ways, analogized as sites of mediation and divine atonement. The logical progression of this homology creates a further correspondence between the destruction of the Temple and the death of women in childbed,Footnote 137 highlighting women's critical place in the continuity of Jewish life and tradition.Footnote 138
This unusual homological correspondence between Eve and the Temple is supported by more textual evidence, namely, the repetition of the term “in its place” or “in its stead” (תחתיה), which refers both to Temple worship in the story of Yoḥanan ben Zakkai (I.b) and to the creation of Eve (in scripture itself, as well as in the two parables in the Adam and Eve anthology – III.e,f). In the former, Rabban Yoḥanan ben Zakkai uses the term to inform Rabbi Joshua that acts of loving kindness are a substitution for the atoning power of sacrifice thus: “…we have another means of atonement in its place (תחתיה).” The biblical account of Eve's creation also employs the term: “He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place (תחתנה)” (Genesis 2:21). Echoing scripture, the same term appears in ARNB:9 in a pair of polemical parables illustrating the creation of Eve: “The king got up at night, removed a brick of clay and put in its place (תחתיה) a brick of gold;” “He said to the butcher, ‘Take this bone and give me some meat in its place (תחתיו)…. Thus did the Holy One blessed be He with the first man. He took a bone from him and gave him flesh in its place (תחתיו)” (ARNB:9, Schechter, 23–24). The parables reveal the substituted gold brick and the meat to be far superior to the inferior clay brick and bone; correspondingly Eve, and all women after her, are a superior substitution for a man's rib, and further, acts of loving kindness (and by implication Torah study) are a superior substitution for Temple sacrifice. Pushing the logical trajectory of the Temple/Eve homology just a bit further, Eve's female Jewish descendants can be understood to be a superior substitution for Eve herself, since unlike her, they are able to avoid the consequences of her sin by atoning through the performance of the three covenantal commandments peculiar to them.Footnote 139
My premise that a redactional impulse in this portion of ARNB enhances, rather than diminishes, the status of Jewish women by homologizing their role in Jewish continuity to that of the Temple itself, has been supported by the textual evidence. ARNB's Destruction Cluster and anthology of Adam and Eve traditions are juxtaposed in such a way as to propose two sets of gender-specific, ritual solutions to theodicean problems of human life as lived, both historical and cosmic, which threaten rupture in the continuity of Jewish life.Footnote 140 Certainly, the complementary ritual solutions accorded to men and to women embody essentializing, binary conceptions of gender positioned along the nature/culture axis, so that while the designated men's commandments are specifically cultural, the women's commandments, cultural activities in and of themselves, are related to biological reproduction. However, ARNB clearly considers both Jewish men and women necessary in the perpetuation of the “Jewish species,” (to concoct a Levi-Straussian term synthesizing nature and culture). Men must study Torah and participate in acts of loving kindness, many of which force them to be active, empathetic witnesses to the normative human life cycle; women must perform the three women's commandments, niddah, the dough offering and kindling the Sabbath lights, hence ensuring effective biological reproduction.Footnote 141 It is noteworthy, although beyond immediate discussion here, that the Jewish male role in biological reproduction is not identified as required for the continuity of Jewish survival. This may be due to the fact that Jewish male reproduction is a halakhic obligation, while women's biological role in childbearing is not so,Footnote 142 perhaps identifying the latter as a supreme example of “acts of loving kindness” beyond the strict line of the law on the part of Jewish women.
While women clearly are essentialized as more essentially natural agents in the perpetuation of Jewish continuity, ARNB's traditions accord Jewish women agency, in the form of both halakhic responsibility and spiritual empowerment, thus placing their performance of the three women's commandments in a critical place in the cosmic scheme of things. This position is certainly essentialist, highly binary and gendered, but, I think, hardly expresses extreme misogyny. Let us reconsider the maxim of Shimon the Righteous: “The world stands on three things: on the Torah, on Temple service and on acts of loving kindness.” While the M. Avot maxim lists three commandments primarily directed at men, ARNB's unique redactional arrangement encourages its lists of the women's commandments to be read as three other things which make the world endure. Thus, reading creatively, but I think not perversely, ARNB accords Jewish women a critical place in the perpetuation of the cultural world of Jewish men, according them covenantal status, halakhic responsibility and ritual power, certainly more so than M. Avot or ARNA. Indeed, ARNB's formulation of these traditions may be viewed as an implicit critique of the much more androcentric M. Avot and its static world view,Footnote 143 which lacks virtually any reference to women and/or gender relations. While my reading of ARNB's Eve traditions still excludes women from a place in cultural reproduction of Torah study, it deems them central to its continuity.
