READING LEVINAS/READING TALMUD

Martin S. Jaffee

In this graceful, wise, and thoroughly unique little volume Rabbi Ira Stone tackles two notoriously arcane and difficult literary ouvres--the neologistic philosophical writings of Emmanuel Levinas and the unruly remnants of ancient Rabbinic oral tradition enscripted by un-numbered anonymous scribal hands in the Babylonian Talmud. His achievement is to have made them (as) accessible (as possible) to a non-specialist audience without dishonoring the texts and without talking down to his reader. This book is neither Levinas nor Talmud "made easy" or cooked down to a digestible-but-tasteless porridge. It makes genuine demands upon its readers. But it offers those who make the effort a serious chance to engage--and test the boundaries of--the intellectual worlds that make Levinas and the Talmud compelling to those who are nourished by them.

My response to Stone's book will not engage him where he, I imgagine, would most like to be challenged--on either his reading of Levinas or on his specific interpretations of the talmudic passages he has chosen to address. I am no expert in Levinasian thought and, therefore, in no position to quibble with Stone about his interpretation of it. And let me admit at the outset: as a hopelessly "literary-critical" (pre-post-modern?) reader of the Talmud, I am no fan of Levinas' Talmudic essays (which I find self-indulgent and infuriatingly disinterested in the text itself, after the manner of French intellectuals in general, beginning with the Tosafists and continuing, perhaps, through Derrida). But it would be pointless to take Stone to task for applying a Levinasian program with vigor and great intelligence to a series of Talmudic passages that well-lend themselves to Levinasian readings. If one must engage in Levinasian Talmudics, Stone has done a remarkable job. In any case, in light of the intellectual richness and moral seriousness that Stone brings to his discussions, his book must be counted as an event in American Jewish religious thought equal, at least, to the publication of Arthur A. Cohen's THE NATURAL AND THE SUPERNATURAL JEW in 1962.

The following comments, then, are offered in a constructive spirit and focus on a methodological issue which is of concern to Stone himself and of great interest to the audience of TEXTUAL REASONING--how, exactly, does one one generate a "reading" of a talmudic sugya? For Stone the work of reading the Talmud begins in translation--rendering the text in a new idiom that can open the text's world to that of the reader, enabling the work of understanding. Accordingly, I'll explore ways in which a more focused attempt to graphically represent the oral-rhetorical character of the Talmudic text in translation might have enabled Stone to offer even stronger readings in the Levinasian mode of his own choosing.

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Let me explain where I'm coming from. My work over the past decade--on ways in which oral-rhetorical style shapes the compositional character of rabbinic literature--has sensitized me to the problematics of rendering rabbinic texts in English (see, for example, my review of Baruch Bokser's translation of Yerushalmi Pesahim in Prooftexts 16 [1996], pp. 175-188). The issue is more complex than simply choosing an English idiom that renders a "sense" of the talmudic source-text. I can think of at least three aspects of the problem that any translator must confront.

First of all, how shall a talmudic translator convey a "sense" which does justice to a very basic fact of talmudic literary discourse--the composers of talmudic texts expected to have readers who were thoroughly drenched in the oral teaching milieu of ancient rabbinic discipleship circles. They did not, in other words, write for people who were outsiders to rabbinic culture. Accordingly, the words on the present printed page were, as often as not, designed to serve as mnemonic markers for entire complexes of ideas presumed to be familiar from the aural/oral milieu of which the text itself is merely an adventitious expression. In the Talmud the "sense" emerging from the written words is rarely equivalent to the ambient world of unwritten meanings which themselves enable the text to speak. If the translator cannot translate that unwritten world of meaning, how does s/he at least suggest its presence?

This problem opens to another: in the medium of translation, which relies on the fiction that a text's meaning is retrievable and communicable in a foreign idiom, how does one render a text, such as the Talmud's, that has virtually no generic equivalent in the target language and thus no models for the construction of an equivalent "sense?" To be sure, English literature does preserve an important tradition of texts composed in deep resonance with the cadences and oral tradition--but these are all poetic, epic, or oratorical texts. All of the genres of the English-language intellectual tradition that might be closest to the talmud generically--philosophy, theology, law--have long ago lost all living connection to an oral-literary milieu.

Finally: for readers (like you and me) conditioned to experience written texts as silent psychological presences devoid of the embodied voice, how does the translator render texts, like the Talmud, that convey their meanings precisely in and through the performative work of re-enacting and re-actualizing the written script in speech? Can a translation, through its very visual form, encourage a performative reading that approximates for the English reader the experience of meaning encoded in the original composition?

No translator of the Talmud has yet solved these problems, and I shall not blame Stone for failing. But he might have been more adventurous in his failure. Stone devotes about 15 pages of his introductory comments to the methods by which he generates the meaning of a talmudic sugya. On one of these pages in particular (p. 41) he properly notes the difference between an accurate-but-unintelligible English rendering of the printed page of a talmudic discourse and an interpretive rendering that attempts to convey the larger "sense" behind the words and phrases.

The first step in generating the "meaning" of a sugya, Stone properly recognizes, is to find one's path from the jumble on the printed page to an interpretive rendering that re-presents the Talmud in a way that is familiar enough to the reader to be accessible, yet foreign enough to mark the text off as something inhabiting its own world. Let's take a look at Stone's rendering of a portion of B. Megillah 2b-3a (p. 41 of his book)::

Rabbi Yirmeyah said, and some say it was Rabbi Hiyya bar Abba: the form of the Hebrew letters mem, nun, tzadi, peh, and kaf were instituted by the Prophets. Is this reasonable? But it is written in the Torah: "These are the commandments," teaching that a prophet is not permitted to introduce anything new from now on. And further, Rabbi [sic: it should be "Rav"] Hisda said that the letters mem and samekh of the Tablets of the Law stood in place only by a miracle. Yes, they existed, but they did not knkow which form was to be used in the middle of a word and which at the end of a word, and the Prophets came and established that the open forms are to be used in the middle and the closed form at the end. Still and all, there is "These are the commandments," teaching that from now on no prophet will introduce anything new? Rather, they had forgotten, and they came and established them.

In this example, typical of his translations throughout, the rendering that Stone settles upon is the undifferentiated block of punctuated prose familiar to any reader of the philologically-sound, yet generally-impenetrable Soncino Talmud. Conventions such as quotation marks do set off biblical citations as sources and, of course, punctuation guides the reader to a preliminary grasp of the dialectical pattern of the discussion.

This translational choice solves one interpretive problem. It allows the reader the advantage of working with a text that can now be labored over and decoded. Like any post-Talmudic reader working with the written text (originally in manuscripts and later in print), the English reader confronts a text that is just intelligible enough to convey a "gist" and to suggest some guesses about the larger portion that remains obscure. But this translation choice also has a down side. It encourages the English decoder in particular to think of the text as an exotic--or failed--example of something it is not, viz., a paragraph of expository prose composed by an author addressing a disembodied reader.

The problem, of course, is not merely that this rendering of the Talmud mis-represents the genre of the rendered text. What translation does not tell some lies in order to get at the truth? And what sort of English literary equivalent can one find for the Talmud anyway? Rather, the real problem is that turning the Talmud into expository English prose paragraphs forecloses the possibility of perceiving precisely those compositional conventions which bear the weight of talmudic meaning and have made the Talmud so . . . well, "talmudic"--it's textured, agonistic juxtaposition of statement and counter-statement, its persistant refusal to permit the mind to rest with an established truth as the firm ground for further thinking. No, the Talmudic sugya is not plodding, impossibly esoteric prose; it is a series of rhetorical thrusts and parries carried forward by explicit rhetorical conventions that the translator is obliged to capture.

Let me now offer an alternative representation of the same same text cited above. I use Stone's translation verbatim, but reconfigure the text to enable the reader to discern and, perhaps, re-voice the rhetorical performance of which the sugya constitutes a kind of script.

As you read, it will be helpful to keep in mind a few conventions of my presentation. The first passage of text is a citation of a source-text that serves as the topic of the gemara's discussion. I have centered it in the page. The ensuing discussion is divided into brief paragraphs represented by the sigla A1, A2, B, and C. These represent distinct voices--rhetorical personalities, if you will, who contend with each other to grasp the implications of the cited source-text. The capitalized Hebrew/Aramaic words beginning each paragraph of the discussion identify standard, interchangeable talmudic rhetorical devices that routinely signal turns of argument irrespective of specific topic or issue. The indented paragraphs following these capitalized devices are the specifics of the sugya's substantive discourse.

Here's the reconfigured sugya:

Rabbi Yirmiyah said,

and some say it was Rabbi Hiyya bar Abba:

the form of the Hebrew letters mem, nun, tzadi, peh, and kaf were instituted by the Prophets.

A1. Is this reasonable (VE-TISBERA)?

But it is written in the Torah: "These are the commandments,"

teaching that a prophet is not permitted to introduce anything new from now on.

A2. And further (VE-`OD),

Rav Hisda said that the letters mem and samekh of the Tablets of the Law stood in place only by a miracle.

B. Yes ('IN),

they existed, but they did not know which form was to be used in the middle of a word and which at the end of a word,

and the Prophets came and established that the open forms were to be used in the middle and the closed form at the end.

A1. Still and all (SOF SOF),

there is "These are the commandments,"

teaching that from now on no prophet will introduce anything new?

C. Rather ('EL'A),

they had forgotten, and they came and established them.

Before us is as simple a talmudic sugya as one might hope to find. It is a literary representation of conflict and resolution: the logical cogency of a transmitted tradition (in the name of Rabbi Yirmiyah or Rabbi Hiyya bar Abba) is constructed (C) in such a way as to preserve the essential integrity of both the tradition's critics (A1 and A2) and its defender (B). My representation of the text highlights its simplicity by making the basic rhetorical structure of the sugya immediately apparent to the eye of the silent reader. The scanning eye discerns patterns that approximate the immediate aural recognition that the talmudic audience, schooled in the rhetorical debate-cadences of the rabbis, would enjoy.

What makes this visual recognition so immediate? Precisely those elements that made its aural apprehension immediate within the oral-dialogical setting from whose rhythms our sugya's composer has drawn. That is: a small repertoire of interchangeable stock-phrases signals shifts of thought regardless of particular conceptual content. These rhetorical guides serve as the skeletal frame upon which the composer-editor constructs this particular inquiry into prophetic activity. Indeed, the "meaning" of the sugya emerges out of the confluence of these universal stock-phrases and the content-clauses unique to the sugya.

Note also how meaning is at each point mediated in a form responsive to the requirements of speech. Each phrase is brief and deliverable in a single breath (more easily managed in Hebrew, I admit, than in English). Each rhetorical turn is composed of at least one breath; the lengthier rhetorical units are simply built up from a sequence of such breaths, one breath of speech balanced by another, a pair of breaths at the most constituting a complete rhetorical unit. Clearly, the text's composer expects the audience of the text to be grasping its meaning as it performs the text. The representation of the text I have offered is designed to help you be the audience that the composer had in mind (sort of--the composer, no doubt, assumed that his audience was also exclusively male, observant of rabbinic halakhah, and living in pre-Islamic Iraq; there are limits to textual magic).

My readers are, at this point, no doubt asking themselves: "Fine, but what does this have to do with understanding the substance of the sugya?" And those who have already read Stone, will surely observe that Stone's unfolding discussion of this sugya demonstrates that he reads its rhetorical structure essentially as I do--without all the graphic monkey business. So what is gained?

A fair question. But let us look now at Stone's discussion of the substance of this sugya. As he goes on to develop his thought, Stone argues that the gemara is--when read from a certain Levinasian perspective--an inquiry into the problematics of textuality and translation:

According to the gemara, there is a gap or opening between the original saying of a text and its written record. When we pass through that opening, we participate in a miracle. The letters are poised to float off the page but do not. Instead, their form, and ultimately their meaning, are fixed. The reader who can fix the form of the text must be someone commited to the tradition within which the text is read. But such a skilled reader is not free to jeopardize the society in which the text must function. A Prophet is needed, not a seer. At stake is the fundamental notion of the commandment, of our being commanded (p. 48).

If I understand Stone correctly, he wants to stress that the richest reading of the Talmud is a "religious" reading, a reading characterized by an opening of the person toward the text in the context of a community committed to the text. Let us grant that Stone has good grounds for such a view. I would only add that the very form of our gemara itself embodies Stone's thesis about the "opening between the original saying of a text and its written record," and the importance of the reader's participation in the society in which the text functions. And not only THIS sugya, but virtually any literary construction framed within the oral-rhetorical conventions of the Talmud.

Even before we grasp "what is said", the Talmud's "way of saying" brings its reader/performer into the miraculous space that every student must recreate between the eternally vanished "original saying" and the "written record" that is perpetually being returned to living discourse whenever the gemara is properly read. As I have argued in another context: "the conceptual content of Oral Torah might be confined to [a written] text, but the ontological fullness of Oral Torah was elsewhere. . . . [T]he written texts of Oral Torah were inert traces of [Sinaitic] revelation--of mnemotechnical value only. These mnemonic traces of revelation could be restored to life as Torah only in the mouths of Sages and disciples." (JAAR, 65 [1997], pp. 541-42). Ira Stone's project reveals in many ways a deep appreciation of the hermeneutic importance of this performative dimension of talmudic textuality. He is as well deeeply concerned to bring his reader into the textual community of the Talmud. I hope that my own observations encourage him in the future to experiment more freely with his representations of the rhetorically-mediated meanings of the Talmud.

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