DETAILED SCHEDULE AND ABSTRACTS
FOR THE CONFERENCE ON TEXTUAL REASONING
DREW UNIVERSITY, JUNE 1997

Following is a detailed schedule of the conference at Drew.
This program contains a brief description of the main paper
topic, thesis, and/or abstracts of the responses as planned.
A response to the conference by Steven Kepnes is given in the
new programmatic statement Professor Kepnes kindly wrote for
this website.

SUNDAY JUNE 15. SESSION 1: MIDRASH HALACHA
"COMMENTARY WITHOUT LOGOS, OR INTERPRETATION
IN A BARTER ECONOMY:
PEREK HAZAHAV (TB BABA MATZIA)"
This first session warms us up for the whole conference:
introducing some of the most dramatic issues and debates on the
relation of theory to practice to textual reasoning.
The main speaker is Daniel Boyarin: a rabbinic text response to
Jean-Joseph Goux's neo-Marxian, semi-structuralist analysis of
money economies.
Prof. Boyarin writes that his "intention is to use the teaching of
Hazahav to introduce the non-logocentricity of rabbinic culture,
expressed through its non-monatery nature. This is rabbinic
Judaism as a mode of signification, dictated by its non-logos."
Drawing on a study previously presented in the electronic journal
Textual Reasoning, Robert Gibbs suggests that the Amoraim, albeit
not the Tannaitic commentary, may be more open to monetary value
and its associated semiotic than Boyarin allows.

ABSTRACT OF ROBERT GIBBS, RESPONSE TO DANIEL BOYARIN
The central topic of Boyarin's paper is the Sages' semiotics, and I find myself in profound agreement with his desire to travel across fields of semiosis (money, Scriptural interpretation, gender relations, etc.), in order to understand the self-conscious rejection of a certain sort of Platonising view of reality and signs. My job, however, is to respond not merely to affirm, and I believe that I can set in motion a discussion that addresses both the economics and the sort of reasoning the Sages do.
The theory I propose is less well-formed than Goux's but I believe that you will also see that it is inclined toward theology more specifically. At the level of the text, I would like to consider further the economics of the Sages and its relation to what I will call the Temple economy. I will distinguish three historical phases of the economic theory. The chapter of mishnah addresses the relation of money as signs and things, but it is confused about whether signs themselves are things and is concerned about the exchange of one sign (gold) for another (silver). This is the problem of translation of meaning. The Tannaim seem determined to make the reality lie in the thing (fruit), and not in the money (only a sign). But their anxiety, as Peter Ochs and I read it, is complicated because there used to be a Temple economy where things and money had absolute value, ascribed through sanctification, and measured by the requirements of Temple service (See Mishnayot 6-8). Thus a third element is introduced by recourse to the Temple economics: the process of signifiying, the way of making a cow or some money sanctified and revalued in relation to the Temple. This way of absolute signification/sanctification is destroyed with the destruction.
The problem is the transition from the a Temple Economics (Phase 1) to a realistic economics, where the realia, the produce serves as norm for the economic exchange (Phase 2). I wish to raise the question of how these phases relate to a gold standard economy? Can we make a gold standard substitute for a Temple standard? Or had we better to advocate barter? Our reading of the gemarah, however, points in a quite different direction. While the Tannaim sought an ersatz for the Temple economy, the Amoraim accept the reality of the money economy, but understand it not as a gold standard, but as an exchange between monetary systems, in which there is no absolute standard for the meaning (Phase 3). The focus now is not on money or thing, but on the way we exchange from money to money, from thing to thing. But this elevates that third element, the process of signification and allows the ethical issues of exchange to dominate (See 45a and following).
At the heart of that examination of signification is an analysis of how authority is secured--how rules of exchange and meaning themselves get established. Without an absolute sanctification securing the rules, the Sages themselves became agents in determining the semiosis. Thus, with Danny, I hold that the Amoraim self-consciously frame their economics against the gold standard, but their interests are not simply barter, a barter that is historically situated after the collapse of an absolute economy.
The second level of my response is a translation of these economic semiotics into a general theory. The distance from Temple Economy to Gold standard becomes one from a theological discourse that has a transcendent God to one that tries to Platonize in the sense of elevating one human idea to a standard position. It is not clear that the Tannaim are following this Platonic tendency, but it is quite clear that the Amoraim are refusing it. One could note that God's Name follows a semiotic like the Temple economy, while theological discourse understood as descriptive disourse about a transcendental principle follows that of the gold standard. But what of the gemarah? If there is a third phase, a post-absolute barter, then this becomes the discourse of a God withdrawn, no longer speaking through prophets, but also not the transcendental signified of philosophic discourse. Just as translations begin to appear kosher, so exchange between currencies is possible. An erased, withdrawn, exiled God is neither the present God nor the pinacle of logic and authority. Instead of securing reference by recourse to the transcendentally real, we look more to the question of how rules get authorized.
If we can distinguish between 1) some idea that governs all discourse and 2) the God who spoke through the prophets and 3) the situation of the name vulnerable to erasure, then we can see that the transcendence of the revealing God does not model the violence and governance of the Platonic logos, but provides for a richer materialism and a more thorough-going exchange economy than the inversion of the Platonic logos/Gold Standard. The absolute transcendence--especially withdrawn--produces a greater role for the human interpreters, who can neither rely on a natural order nor on a logocentric one. The Sages offer a model not of inverted Platonism, but of God who in exceeding the economy of present entities generates an abundance of meanings for those who interpret.
[END OF ABSTRACT]
Susan Shapiro has recently joined this debate to ask if Boyarin's critique of logocentricism would be better served if it began, itself, in midrash before theory; she asks what midrash itself may say about "economy." Here is what Susan submitted to us in preparation for the exchange.

ABSTRACT OF SUSAN SHAPIRO'S RESPONSE TO BOYARIN
I find intruiging the notion of treating midrash in the context of a barter economy, as Boyarin, following Goux, suggests. If one wants to make determinative economic relations for how all other exchanges were enacted, including all forms of discursive judgments and communication--legal and narratological--then reading midrash in these terms helps to locate its economy. But, surely, this is to be only the starting point of Boyarin's treatment of midrash. For, although I think Boyarin attempts to free midrash a bit from its containment within Goux's developmental and explanatory narrative, B. does not fully succed in doing so and midrash remains captive to the logoscentric (and phalocentric) charater of Goux's theory.
In order to lift out the barter-economic aspect of Goux's theory from within its teleological narrative, I suggest that B. reverse or, at least, double his starting point. Why not begin with midrash, even the midrashim that are now embedded within the Goux theory? Or, retain the Goux beginning and supplement it by a second beginning within barter economy and the exchange of midrashim? Starting with another midrashic reading would also be in keeping with the surplus economy of midrash in which meaning is not fulfilled, but augmented. Is there something about economy that midrash can teach us, if we follow its modes of argument, supplement, addition as well as displacement (without loss)? If Goux, in other words, can be used to tell us something about the exchange of words, can midrash tell us something about "economy"? Would even thinking economically differ for being outside of the logoscentric mode?
Another possiblity. Take another midrashic text (the Brachot material on dreams, for example) and interpret it in such a way that the issues of Goux and Boyarin are thematized but also interpreted differently, i.e., questioned. I would like to do--and at some point will-- this latter project.
There are other matters having to do with God as the measurer and not only as the measured or standard that may complicate some of Boyarin's present ideas about the shift away from phallocentrism. (Some of this is in Yoma, I believe).
[END OF ABSTRACT]

Susan Handelman, the session host, also reflects on the relation of non-logocentric textual study to the theory of non-logocentricity. She offers an appeal . . To enter into this discussion, participants may want first to read Perek Hazahav as a study of semiotics as well as economy: that is, of how money represents a means of signification that separates use (economic or linguistic) from absolute value. Goux's theory interjects themes of money and mediterranean patriarchy. The resultant discourse finds its way, gradually, from the Father-Logos back to text-immanent reasoning.

ABSTRACT HANDELMAN, RESPONSE TO BOYARIN
This paper raises for me certain questions which I have been struggling with in my own work, and my own engagement with postmodern literary and cultural theory. They are not so much directed at the "argument" of the essay itself but about methodology, theology, language, academic discoruse, and the goal of our endeavors.
**isn't there some ultimate abyss between the assumptions of "cultural materialism" and the renewal of theology which I think a psotmodern sensibility can bring?
** Postmodernism should help us also question and alter the very rhetoric and pretentiousness of our academic discourse...and yet all too often we wind up feeling constrained to speak in the jargon of the reigning theorists, who become a kind of new Canon. In the name of differentiating rabbinic or "jewish discourse" from "hellenistic", we often adopt the "hellenistic " language of current academic discourse--whether it be Derridean, Lacanian, New Historicist,body studies etc. How should/could our own academic writing itself enact and emody that which we claim for rabbinic discourse?
** who are we writing for? what is the relation of our work to *amcha* and to undergaduate students in their spiritual struggles? How can their resistance to our work also teach us? How do we speak to those in deep search for a language about God, a language of mitzvah, a language of the soul...the latter being a word not commonly found in cultural materialist writing.
**in the trinity of "gender, race, class" or "knowledge, power, subversion" where is there room for *emunah*, faith? A story in my college alumna magazine (Smith college) about "religion on campus" quoted a Smith student who said "It is easier to come out as a Lesbian at Smith than as a person of faith." Professors of religion, someone noted, are the only people who are forbidden to profess what they believe.

SUNDAY. PANEL 1: "BEGINNINGS"
An introduction to a new book project on "Beginnings," edited by Aryeh Cohen and Shaul Magid. The panel introduces some of the new approaches to textual reasoning displayed in the book: for example, by Shaul Magid, Charlotte Fonrobert, and Aryeh Cohen as well as by other Conference participants.
MONDAY MORNING JUNE 16.
SESSION 2: BIBLE "REVELATION REVEALED"
(Nu 25: 1-5; Ex 19; 1 King 22; Ezek 20:21-26)
The center and model of all Jewish and other monotheistic revealed religions is the Torah with its assumption of the Mosaic revelation. The main speaker, Tikvah Frymer-Kensky, will present her provocative re-readings of the Biblical texts listed above. In a conference focussing on Talmud Torah -- the oral interpretation of Torah --we might expect a session on the written Torah to return us to the conditions and signs of "revelation" itself. Not so, says Prof. Frymer-Kensky: the written Torah itself expresses doubts about the non-interpretive character of any revealed text. The *torah she b'chtav* has its own thickness, we might say.
Virginia Burrus responds affirmatively, articulating the session's critique of foundationalist text-reading, wondering aloud whether the session's thesis might not raise questions about the very distinction between written and oral Torah, and extending the issues to the study of Patristic oral tradition as well. Here is her abstract.

ABSTRACT VIRGINIA BURRUS, RESPONSE TO TIKVA
FRYMER-KENSKY

The four scriptural texts selected by Dr. Frymer-Kensky--Nu 25:1- 5, Ex 19, 1 King 22, Ezek 20:21-26--all constitute, in various ways, through the instantiation of "chaotic" or self-contesting, multi-vocal discourses, "stumbling blocks" for any simple reading of the authoritative status of Scripture itself. Dr. Frymer-Kensky seems to invite us to follow with her the non-linear and self- dissolving "(dia)logic" of a "prohetic" or "revelatory" book that represents Moses himself as a lying prophet, questions the possibility of a final assessment of the reliability of any voice in the clamor of competitive and contradictory revelations, and suggests that God Godself is capably of issuing "bad laws" purposefully. At stake (perhaps)is the viability of the distinction between "written" and "oral" Torah, between "text" and "commentary." "The authority of Scripture to say, 'It's true because it's written,' simply disappears." The multivocality and unresolved contestatory structure of "oral" traditions of commentary are sunk deep into the "written" text itself, on her reading, so that the line between the two "simply disappears."
Among my own scholarly preoccupations are questions about similarities and differences between "Christian" and "Jewish" theories and practices of reading in late antiquity; this present conversation seems to offer a productive opportunity for one "reperformance" of the ancient dialogue. Several possible lines of exploration suggest themselves at this point. If it may be argued that many early Christians were inclined to subordinate the "letter" of the written text to the prior "authority" of the "Logos" (or "Gospel of Christ"), as mediated by an "oral (apostolic) tradition" that effectively dissolved the distinction between divine author and human commentator (perhaps reflected in the shift from the use of scrolls to more everyday "notebooks" or codices for the copying of Scripture), how does this strategy compare? What is to be said about the structure of a Christian "oral tradition" that began to take the form, first, of schematized narrative "rules of faith" and, later, of codified "creeds"? Origen of Alexandria might provide an interesting focus, given his preoccupation with the "stumbling blocks" in Scripture, his willingness to entertain the possibility of a God who is a "lying" "author," his conviction that truth is to be pursued (but never grasped) through the text of Scripture, and his irrepressible hunch that "rules of faith" provide merely the starting point for a salvific "oral" interpretive enterprise that begins with their disciplined transgression. Later, Origen's conversation about "lies" in Scripture is taken up in a famous epistolary debate between Jerome and Augustine.
Other, more particular and idiosyncratic directions for my own reflections might include consideration of Patristic readings of the figure of Phineas in Numbers 25, or the Christian production (partly outside the commentary tradition) of "chaotic" multivocal texts that enact unresolved contestations of gender roles analogous to those of the Exodus 19 text.
[END OF ABSTRACT]

Session host, Aryeh Cohen, draws lessons for feminist readings of rabbinic as well as biblical literature.

MONDAY LUNCH. SESSION 3: MIDRASH AGGADAH
"TALMUD TORAH AS SPIRITUAL DESIRE:
ON SHIR HASHIRIM RABBAH"
The main speaker, Michael Fishbane, summons our attention with these few words:
"Song of Songs Rabba I.2 offers a unique opportunity to consider a midrashic pericope as a religious-cultural instruction. In the present case, numerous traditions have been anthologized with a pedagogical purpose. Much can be learned from it regarding the mythic dimensions of Torah, the task of study, and the connections between study and spiritual desire. Diverse dynamics shall be considered -- particularly those of fulness/emptiness; presence/loss; national/individual eschatology; spiritual desire/sin. I shall hope to consider the semiotics of the whole collection, as well as the religious hermeneutics of two or three key units."
Prof. Fishbane's previous work displays his tendency to offer concentric circles of readings, moving out from the narrative in its historical, literary, and redactional setting, to phenomenological, semiotic, and what we might call religious and spiritual dimensions of reading -- or perhaps what we should call readings of the religious and spiritual dimensions of the text.
Steven Fraade's commentary addresses the latter perspective in particular: how the midrash may disclose inner dimensions of the biblical text itself, or at least bring the text into intimate, dialogic relation with those who engage in Talmud Torah.

ABSTRACT STEVEN FRAADE, RESPONSE TO FISHBANE
Midrash Song of Songs Rabba, like all early midrashic commentaries, is an anthology of comments that derive from different authorities, times, and contexts. Many of the traditions contained within our sample have previous careers, some first evidenced in earlier midrashic commentaries to books of the Torah (e.g., the Mekilta to Exodus and the Sifre to Deuteronomy in con- junction with explicating the Song at the Sea or the revelation at Mt. Sinai). Reading Neusner's brief explanations to our text, it would appear that the creation of a running commentary to the Song of Songs was simply an editorial opportunity to join together such thematically related tradtions with little hermeneutical relation to the sequential verses of Song of Songs to which they were attached. However, reading the list of themes that Buzzy will be addressing in his exploration of this commentary, we might ask to what extent the anthologized commentary, not withstanding its characteristically midrashic reading of single verses or parts of verses out of context (or, into other contexts), is not, indeed, deeply colored and shaped by an engagement with the Song of Songs as a whole.
The recurring midrashic trope of desire and its deferral is certainly that of the Song of Songs itself, however much its sensual terms have been allegorized or rabbinized. Thus, the lovers of the Song, like Israel and God of the midrash, shuttle between intimacy of each other's presence and the sorrow of mutual loss, the simultaneous desire for and fear of unmediated ("mouth to mouth") contact, being alone to each other while in the lurking presence of others, the longing for knowledge and the fear of forgetting, the blending of love and death.
But there is a third level -- besides that of the Song of Songs and its literary midrash -- at which these correspondences play out in the formation of commentary: the relation between the midrashic commentary and its oral enactment through social study by and between its students. In the time between promise/desire and its fulfillment, they too seek, experience, but ultimately defer spiritual intimacy. In their active yet anxious engage- ment with midrash, they uncover meaning even as it escapes them, they gain knowledge even as they forget it, they foretaste transcendence and holiness in the very midst of their mortality and evil. To borrow a psychoanalytic term, how does midrashic process fashion for its students a "talking cure" for the anxieties of these anomalies?
[END OF ABSTRACT]

Session host, Steven Kepnes, will address how Talmud Torah may disclose inner dimensions of the community of reading.

MONDAY AFTERNOON. SESSION 4: TALMUD
"IF THE TORAH HAD NOT BEEN GIVEN TO MOSHE . . . ?
On: b Sanhedrin. 21b-22a and parallels"
The main speaker, David Weiss Halivni, will present his theologically charged, historiographic reading of tb Sanh 21b-22 and related Talmudic passages. Halivni articulates a talmudic tradition according to which Ezra received, restored and repaired a "maculate" Torah, thereby initiating the tradition of oral Torah, torah she b'chtav, to which the rabbinic sages, and also Halivni, contribute. Commenting on Talmudic treatments of Shimon haTsaddik and on related texts, Halivni will make further claims about the evolutionary development of the oral torah throughout rabbinic history.
In response to Halivni, Menachem Lorberbaum asks "if a number of questions are not being conflated in Halivni's uses of the image of Ezra: the importance of Ezra, the meaning of the redaction of the Torah, and the question of analyzing a Talmudic sugya, or argument.. . . I think this is all unnecessary because I think Hazal (the sages) were of a radical hemeneutic mindset."
Offering another response, Peter Ochs asks if Halivni has not introduced a paradigm for postcritical historiography. He suggests that the burden of modern academic inquiry has been reductive historicism as well as reductive theoria. In the manner of his academic colleagues, Halivni offers "plain sense historiography," but he also offers a "depth historiography"

MONDAY EVENING. FIFTH SESSION:
MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY
"GERSONIDES ON THE TORAH OF CREATION:
ON PESHAT AND TRANSLATION"

The main speaker on this topic is Norbert Samuelson, who will focus on pp. 9a-b of Levi ben Gershom's (Gersonides') Interpretive Commentary on Gen.1.1. The texts to be studied under Norbert's guidance is a line by line comparison of the Hebrew of Gersonides used by Samuelson and by Robert Eisen, line by line comparisons of their two translations, and a letter from Samuelson about what he will present at the conference. Rober Eisen, Michael Signer, and session host Almut Bruckstein will respond to this guided reading.
Samuelson's Jewish-philosophic interest in this philosopher's Bible commentary will be captured through comments on how Gersonides has been translated and, in turn, how he "translates" the words and meanings of Genesis.

TUESDAY JUNE 17. BREAKFAST PANEL
RESPONSES TO THE CONFERENCE BY A PANEL OF
CHRISTIAN THEOLOGIANS:
George Lindbeck, David Ford, Daniel Hardy

TUESDAY MORNING. SIXTH SESSION: MYSTICISM
"TALMUD TORAH AS TIKKUN HASHECHINA:
MOSHE H. LUZZATTO'S ADIR BAMAROM
(a commentary on the Zohar)"

Elliot Wolfson will present the main paper for this panel. He writes,
"In my presentation, I will focus on the link between Torah study and the task of repairing the Shekhina in the messianic kabbalah of Ramhal (1707-1746). The kernel of this idea is much older, indeed traceable to a passage in the BAHIR, on of the foundational texts in the emergence of kabbalah. What interests me is not the textual history of this idea, but the experiential dimension it assumes in its particular application within the kabbalistic fraternity of Luzzatto."
First Respondent is Tzvi Blanchard, Session Chair and Second Respondent is David Novak. Novak's response will focus on the question of sexuality:

NOVAK ON WOLFSON
Wolfson's presentation cogently analyzes not only the motif of sexuality that is integral to kabbalistic theology, but also how specific its symbolism becomes in the work of Luzzatto. That specificity extends to actually seeing symbolic significance in the parts of the male genitalia. After Freud, however, one must ask Wolfson just how one is to take the connection between religious and sexual reality in kabbalistic theology, especially but not exclusively that of Luzzatto. Is it one that assumes a pansexuality, where sexuality is the key whereby all reality is to be understood? Or, is it a cosmic sublimation of sexuality, one that takes sexuality to be essentially epiphenomenal and thus ultimately deprived of its own reality for the sake of a superphysical and superpsychical replacement? If the former, then how is religious practice sexualized? If the latter, then how is sexual practice transcended? Finally, what does all of this contribute to the cultural and political debates about embodiment, gender, and sexuality taking place in our society today?
[END OF ABSTRACT]

In a third response, Edith Wyschogrod raises the question of "epistemic affinities" between Luzzatto and Spinoza.

WYSCHOGROD ON WOLFSON
The theological disclosures of Luzzato's text are read through its rich imagery. How are images as such construed, ie can a meta- level theory of images be discerned in his work? Where are the similarities and differences between the structural and lexical elements of Luzzato's account of image/imagination and those of the preceding rationalist view of Spinoza? Elliot argues (contra Scholem) that Luzzato's theistic view of the partsufim is not merely a demythologizing strategy; instead Luzzato is said to espouse the myth of the theosophical kabbalah but to locate the myth in the imagination. Elliot (in his galleys) cites Luzzato as saying "The soul that sees what it sees outside the body depicts these things the imagination" (p. 292n). Spinoza, amicus of intellecrt rather than of imagination, nevertheless contends that so long as the mind imagjnes those things that increase the body's power to act, the body's powers are actually increased and, as a result, the mind's power of thinking is increased; conversely the mind's powers are diminished when it imagines what diminishes the body's actions. Does imagination function in something like this fashion in the reparation of the Shekhina in Luzzato? (This is not intended as a historical question about the possible kabbalistic resonances in Spinoza but rather as one about epistemic affinities.)

TUESDAY LUNCH: CONCLUDING PANEL:
"MODERN AND POSTMODERN JEWISH THOUGHT"
Session Chair and First Presenter: Eugene Borowitz
Panel: Yudit Greenberg, Irwin Kula, Jacob Meskin,
Michael Zank, Laurie Zoloth-Dorfman.

"Textualities" is underwritten by a Collaborative Research Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities,
with matching support from The Wallerstein Foundation and from additional individual contributors,
and with the sponsorship of Drew University and The Society for Textual Reasoning.