RESPONSE TO READING LEVINAS/READING TALMUD BY IRA F. STONE

Kris Lindbeck
JTS and Drew University

I first encountered the Talmud in college about fifteen years ago,
and studied it academically at JTS beginning in 1986. As someone who came
to the Bavli late and fell almost immediately under the spell of its
kaleidoscopic argumentation, I deeply appreciate a book which seeks to
spark wide interest in Talmud. It is past time to bring this incredible
text out of the exclusive realm of "experts," whether religious or
scholarly.

Since one of Rabbi Stone's points is that we should bring our
whole selves to the reading of the Talmud, I want to bring my whole self
to the reading of his book, to write in the first person, as he does, and
therefore to state that I read it as a Christian. This is not to say, I
hasten to add, that I try to impose Christian readings on Talmud, or on
Levinas. In fact, at least on a conscious level, Judaism (and Talmud) has
influenced my Protestant faith far more than my faith has influenced my
study of Talmud (and Judaism).

Nevertheless, certain questions must and do arise when a Christian
studies a core text of Judaism. This is not merely the holy book of
another religion, but of a religion which Christians have belittled,
slandered, and tried to destroy, culminating in the genocide of the 20th
century. (one may argue that Nazism was not Christian, but Nazi
anti-semitism could only have prevailed in a context of Christian
anti-Judaism). I am inspired here by Charlotte Fonrobert's editorial
essay in the latest edition of Textual Reasoning, the Journal of the
Postmodern Jewish Philosophy Network. Since she will probably not quote
from herself, I will take the liberty of reproducing her words, "Therefore
the Talmud came to promise me . . . [when still a Christian] the
understanding of what it was that those [who practiced my faith] tried to
murder. To unlock the secret of otherness" which those who feared it
sought to annihilate.

Charlotte Fonrobert's use of the word "otherness" recalls what Ira
Stone writes about "the other" as the face of a fellow human creature who
obligates (and elects) me to respond and to serve her needs, and by doing
so interrupts my sterile self-absorption with my own desires. I wonder
whether this may be true of communities as well as individuals -- whether
religious movements/denominations or whole religions may have their sinful
self-absorption broken by encounter with the enlivening and challenging
(and irritating and incomprehensible) otherness of different ways of
relating to the Divine. In any case, Levinas's image of encounter with
the other is one of the points which, to borrow Stone's term, resonated
most deeply with me in his presentation of Levinas's philosophy.

Although there were a number of ideas which I did not entirely
understand in the introductory section on philosophy (I suspect having
read Levinas would have helped greatly) many ideas it presented were
meaningful and memorable. The primacy of ethics as prior to reason makes
overwhelming intuitive sense from a biblical perspective. After all, the
Bible's warp and woof, from creation through Ezra, is an account of our
obligations to God our creator and to our fellow human beings. One can
also understand "ethics as prior to reason" as a chronological observation
about the moral development of our species. The first building block of
ethics, empathy for others' pain (yetzer ha-tov?) is found even in barely verbal infants; empathy long precedes an understanding of philosophical
discourse, and is thus as innate a quality as our greed and anger (yetzer ha-ra?)

I was also struck by Stone's presentation of Levinas's discussion
of particularity. It strikes me that the acceptance and celebration of
particularity is the opposite not only of the violent (totalitarian)
totalizing which Levinas speaks of, but also of another kind of
philosophical/theological universalism. This is the stance of a tolerant
apparent inclusivity -- "we are so universalist that we can allow others
their particularity." This notion can either become condescending (our
religion is more universal, hence truer) or lead to a weakening of one's
own religious faith in so far as it is seen as one co-equal expression of
some abstract Divine which can gestured towards by philosophical thinking.
This universalist stance, I believe, privileges philosophical abstraction
(even while recognizing that such abstraction cannot fully grasp the
Divine) and hence places philosophical observers above both their own
faith and the faith of the other.

In contrast, when the idea of particularity is applied to the
encounter between individuals of different religions, it leads to persons
standing beside one another, rather than one or the other of them taking
the more abstract high ground. People of different faiths may recognize
their human and ethical kinship, and yet have highly particularistic and
even mutually incomprehensible responses to that which Levinas in his
Jewish/philosophical/kabbalistic particularity calls God, the Infinite,
the Ein Sof. Certainly Judaism and Christianity are not thoroughly alien to one another, but neither are they commensurable; the same measuring
stick cannot apply to both, and no one explanation of the role of both
faiths in God's plan will be equally satisfying to both Jews and
Christians. And this is good.

As Stone eloquently shows, this insistence on particularity is
necessary for -- and fostered by -- the study of Talmud. Not only is the
multi-layered argumentation of the Talmud, with its insistence on the
realia of life and its characteristic rejection of closure, antithetical
to totalizing readings. Also, as Stone writes: we today often believe we
must pray to a God who is "consistent with our philosophy . . . our
political and moral initiatives" etc. "Such a need for consistency is a
response to our yearning for intellectual totality, not a response to our
own experience" (Stone, p. 52). Our actual experience of God, better
reflected in Talmud than in Western philosophy, is fragmented both
conceptually and over time. Talking to God in prayer is different from
thinking about God; God as we face Her in times of tragedy is different
from God as we thank Him in times of blessing.

Turning to the next section, on method, I'll again discuss what
spoke to me. I was especially struck by Levinas's stress on the role of
the imagination in reading Talmud. This is indeed my experience, one
thinks, one imagines, and one recreates oneself to come to terms with this
text. On a related point, Stone writes in his assumption #6 on page 36
"Although historical and scientific information is essential for a proper
reading of the Talmud, such information must be subject to the same
images, ideas, reactions, random thoughts . . . and -- especially --
questions as the text." This is not how I have learned how to read Talmud
at JTS, and yet it is attractive to me. Although there is a place for
striving for objectivity (even as it eludes our grasp) in approaching this
ancient text from a culture foreign our own, our study will be personally
and spiritual fruitful only in so far as we bring ourselves and our
religious questions to meet the text, allowing history to have a voice,
but not the last voice. As I may reveal in my later comments, my own
impulse is to allow history a greater voice than Stone does in his reading
of the Talmud, but such differences in emphasis are the raw materials of
the discussion in which Rabbi Stone invites us participate.

In the spirit of this discussion, I would like to voice my
questions about his last assumption on page 36 "The mention of Israel
means human being." Yes, in a sense this is true -- it is in fact what
allows me as a Gentile to be spiritually nourished by the Talmud. But, on
the other hand, I believe one must continue to confront the truth that for
the Sages "Israel" meant Jews, and often male Jews (the ones e.g. who pray
to find a good wife), and that conversely "human being" often means "Jew":
"As it is taught in a beraita, Rabbi Shimon ben Yo[[caron]]hDai says, The graves of the Gentiles do not make one impure. As it is said, `But you are my
flock, the sheep of my pasture; you are human beings' [Ez. 34:31]. You
are called human; Gentiles are not called human." (Bava Metzia 114a-b)
If we dodge or soften potentially offensive passages such as this one, I
think that we are reading in too much of our own modern liberalism, and
not confronting the Talmud enough head on.

Finally, one remaining point about Rabbi Stone's discussion of
methodology. If this book is to be used as a handbook of concrete advice
for Talmud study, I think it should discuss the timing of the three
readings. I, at least, have found it invaluable to put at least one
night's sleep between the first and the second readings. Somehow even the
simple meaning of the text seems to need that time to incubate in me. The
third reading, I suspect, is best done about a week later, or over the
course of the next several weeks, so long as the sugya remains active in
one's mind. Certainly, in the course of writing my dissertation on Elijah
legends in the Bavli, I sometimes worked on one story for more than a
week, often discussing it with others, as it revealed deeper and deeper
levels of meaning.

In what little space I have remaining, I turn to the core of the
book, Ira Stone's own readings of Talmud. Studying them, I by turns
strongly agreed and violently disagreed, surely a sign of reading a
worthwhile book. This book was so worthwhile that I found myself thinking
"Yes, yes now I understand!" and "No, no, he's got it all wrong!" and
writing question marks and exclamation points in the margins. I suspect
this may be precisely what Rabbi Stone is aiming for -- to make readers
part of a dialogue with him, Levinas, and the Talmud, and for me he has
succeeded.

In the first reading, on Berakhot 8a, I was at first inspired by
Rabbi Stone's discussion (mentioned above) on how our need to pray to a
consistent God is an intellectual construct which does not arise from our
actual experience. As the discussion continued, however, I found myself
perturbed by the degree of closure and the abstraction of Rabbi Stone's
"third reading" presented here. To give one small example, does Rabbi
Chanina's view that one can pray to find a good wife in fact mean that one
can/should pray for material happiness? (p. 53) Doesn't do this do
violence to the specificity of the text? And even if one can abstract
from the text, isn't the finding of a supportive wife/spouse far more than
merely material happiness, being perhaps rather a shorthand for self
respect, friendship, and the other goods of existing as a social being?
(And even this reading leaves out the issues of gender raised in me as a
woman reading the text) Thus I seem to have more questions, and to want
fewer answers, than Rabbi Stone does here. On the other hand, Stone's
forthright recognition of the robustly scatological humor of the
conclusion -- that prayer "at the time of finding" refers to finding a
privy -- and his philosophical riff on prayer as that which humbles
philosophy (p. 56-7), inspired me to appreciative laughter as well as
thought.

Another aspect of Ira Stone's (and I imagine Levinas's) reading
which challenged and interested me is his penchant to do a kind of
philosophic midrash on Talmud, finding fairly systematic treatment of
religious and ethical issues hidden within legal discussions. In "Life,
Death and Doing the Laundry," on Ta'anit 26b and 29a (pp. 80-84), this
approach did not work for me. The tension between Sabbath and Tisha b'Av
is here I think much more of a halakhic dilemma than an existential one,
and the concern for the poor much more practical and legal than prophetic.
(One could even make a case that the permission for the poor person with
one shirt to wash it for Shabbat is for the honor of the day and of the
community as much as for the poor man's or woman's honor -- after all,
it's not easy to pray with concentration while standing next to someone
who smells bad.)

On the other hand, this "midrashic" approach made great sense to
me in "The Search for Meaning, and the Meaning of the Search" on the sugya
about searching for leaven on Pesachim 7b-8a (pp. 72-84). I am still not
absolutely convinced that this reading is the original historical meaning
of the passage (whatever that means!) but I know that I will never be able
to read this sugya without reference to Rabbi Stone's explanation of it.
Furthermore, I will never see a certain kind of halakhic sugya without
asking myself if this kind of explanation should apply. Part of what
makes the religious or theological reading work here and not (I think) in
the sugya discussed above hangs on two points which Stone mentions.
First, the ritual of bedikat chametz is largely symbolic, "One certainly
cannot wait until the night before Pesach to begin looking for chametz."
Secondly, the law is not here in question: we know that we perform this
ritual with a lamp; the purpose of the sugya is to explain why. In
addition, the sugya's prooftexts are mostly from narrative or prophetic
passages rather than legal ones. Especially in the first section, which
explicitly says that it is bringing not a legal proof but a biblical
"memory" to explain searching by lamplight, the spiritual import of the
discussion is inescapable.

In sum, I want to thank Rabbi Ira Stone, for his gift to the world
of a fascinating book, which I enjoyed and hope someday to teach from.

Back to Textual Reasoning vol. 8, table of contents