A Shtikle Faygele, Uber Nisht a Zionishe Kayfer
by Josh Harrison
May 16, 2005
When the Hassid in Boro Park saw me reading Daniel Boyarin's Border Lines he asked if I had "sefeikos in emunah." I told him that he might sympathize with Boyarin, seeing as how both of them are anti-Zionists. Sadly he was a "modern" Hassid and he told me that he didn't "judge people just on Zionism one way or the other." [sic]
Boyarin challenges our assumptions in many ways. His first challenge comes merely through being Boyarin. Elusive and brilliant, this Talmudist doesn't have the classical rabbinic mien. Despite his short gig teaching at YU, Boyarin admits that he falls "seriously out of step" with his "self-identification as an Orthodox Jew."
I am seriously out of step with my community at this moment, in a position of marginality...The present is a time in which Jewish Orthodoxy has been redefined as including the unquestioning support for a political entity, the State of Israel, and all of its martial adventures...On the stairs of my synagogue, in Berkeley, on Rosh Hashana...I was told that I should be praying in a mosque.
Beyond his anti-Zionism, Boyarin admits to a love for Christianity. He has "always been in love with some manifestations of Christianity...For an oddly gendered teenager, Saint Francis, the sissy proved an increadibly tantalizing figure of a man." This from an intellectual whose output includes a book on the mysterious chug HaIyun group of Spanish Jewish exegetes, not to mention a book on Midrash!
The challenge of dealing with a figure as different as Boyarin might faze some Centrist Orthodox students. It certainly flummozed my "modern" Hassidische friend. Boyarin is weird, and he admits it in the front of his book. He has gender identity issues, and he likes Christians and Palestinians, not to mention the Talmud. In the beginning of his Dying for God, he actually thanks his therapist for counseling him through the writing of his previous books. Yet, it would be a shame if these idiosyncrasies led us to abandon the actual theories in Border Lines. After all, if there is a challenge beyond that of Boyarin himself, it might be Boyarin's cutting-edge theories.
Border Lines rests on two central claims. First, Boyarin gives his account of the development of heresy and Orthodoxy (in his specific context, the rise of "Christians" and "Jews" from a Judeo-Christian whole). According to Boyarin, heresy begets Orthodoxy as Orthodoxy begets heresy. Thus, the rabbinic elite made certain elements taboo, and those elements became Christian. The opposite of the newly proscribed rituals or theologies would be the newly minted Orthodoxy. In this vein, Boyarin reads "Justin martyr with an ear out for echoes of the role that the contruction of Judaism was playing in his efforts to produce Christian identity." Afer this, Boyarin reads claims of epistemic succession (we call it mesorah) in Judaism and in Christianity.
Of course, Boyarin's theory flounders if he cannot prove that there was a Judeo-Christianity in antiquity. If there was no hybrid group that was stamped out by heresiological border guards, then there was no imposition of a border on an ambiguous group. According to Boyarin "hybridity was threatening to a 'pure' rabbinic Judaism as it was to an Orthodox Christianity." (14) One of the central tasks that Boyarin sets for himself is proving this hybridity.
In order to prove that there was a hyphenated and hybridized Judeo-Christianity, Boyarin sets out to read logos theology into the rabbinic discourse. The belief that "between God and the world there is a second divine entity, God's word (logos), or God's wisdom," used to be seen as the "trip wire" between the Jews and the Christians. Boyarin argues that this situation came to be "via the technologies of heresiology," and that it has nothing to do with the reality of a hybridized Judeo-Christianity. People saw a trip wire where there was none, assuming that the static borders presented to them were always just so.
Assuming from the get go that rabbinic Judaism wasn't the predominant form of Judaism in antiquity (think of the demainproducing am haaretz of Talmudic fame) Boyarin digs up a popular logos theology that is native to Judaism and not to Christianity. Statements about the memra of God in Targum, for instance, are taken as instances of logos theology (even if, post-Maimonides, we read them allegorizations of physical depictions of God in scripture). For Boyarin, "the memra performs...all of the functions of the Logos of Christian Logos theology." Quoting Elliot Wolfson's Through a Speculum that Shines, (Wolfson is currently visiting at Revel) Boyarin digs up Metatron from Sanhedrin 38b, and sees that archangel as an intermediary between God and man. Finally, Boyarin finds an extensive "passage in Philo that could just as easily fit into Justin [Martyr]'s Apologetics." There, Philo basically says that the voice of God is "seen as light is seen...the radiating splendor of virtue indistinguishable from a fountain of reason."
If logos theology was native to Judaism, it got taken by Judeo-Christians. This led to a rabbinic excommunication of the logos and a Christian crucifixion of the memra. Boyarin describes the excommunication of the logos in vivid detail. Detailing a rabbinic conspiracy centering on the Talmudic passages of Hagiga 14b, Boyarin finds evidence of a systematic attempt to push the logos out of the Jewish canon. This attempt started in the epicenter of the rabbinic universe, with one of the greatest expositors of rabbinic Judaism, Rabbi Akiva.
...the second century Rabbi Akiva is portrayed as interpreting these verses [Daniel 7:9] in a way that certainly would seem consistent with Two Powers in Heaven. The crux is his indentification of David, the Messiah, as the "Son of Man" who sits at God's right hand, thus suggesting not only a divine figure, but one who is incarnate as a human being as well. "I am [Messiah] and you shall see 'the Son of Man' sitting on the right hand of power and coming in on the cloud of heaven." (Mark 14:62)...His contemporary Rabbi Yose the Galilean (perhaps a more assiduous reader of the Gospels) strenuously objects to Rabbi Akiva's "dangerous" interpretation...Of course, the Talmud itself must record that Rabbi Akiva changed his mind on order for him to remain "orthodox." Two Powers in Heaven is thus not foreign even at the very heart of the rabbinic enterprise.
Boyarin goes farther than positing a comprehensive rabbinic conspiracy to excommunicate the logos from the inner sanctum of rabbinic Judaism. Boyarin marks the death of logos theology as the factor that allowed the rise of the Talmudic hermeneutic. Contrasting the Talmud with the Council of Nicea and other early Church debates, Boyarin points to the famous story of Menahot 29b as the prime example of "the development of rabbinic discourse." "The rabbinic literary tradition itself seems to 'remember' the historical processes that generated its own contruction of dissensus as constitutive of its power and authority." When Moses saw Rabbi Akiva interpreting the crowns of the letters, he "was being told to be quiet and recognize that there is much that human beings cannot know," for the knowledge of Rabbi Akiva was thoroughly "opaque." (166) In contrast to the legend of the Council of Nicea, Boyarin brings the story of the oven of Akhnai [Bava Metzia 59a] as illustrative of the rabbinic hermeneutic. Victory at the council of Nicea is proven "via the miracles performed by great and holy confessors," where in "the rabbinic legend of the same moment, debate is made the crux of religious life...God himself...cannot interfere with this holy dialectic." While there are stories that seem to militate against this reading, like Tosefta Hagiga 2:9, Boyarin historicizes rabbinic religion, and attributes the polyphonic sentiments to the later Stammim, the later redactors of the Talmud, identifying statements that didn't value the opne dialectic of the Stammim as an earlier strata. The redactors, of course, read their hermeneutic back into the "Yavneh" of the early Talmud, creating a "Yavneh legend."
The implication of Boyarin's book is troubling. On the one hand, he begs us (in his preface) not to commit the almost violent act of labeling "Others," of spinning off heresies and Orthodoxies. On the other hand, Boyarin identifies the entire Talmudic dialectic in its glorious indeterminancy in the break from logos theology. Further complicating the picture is the opposite example of a harmonious Christian discourse, one more concerned with Halakha le'Maaseh than pilpul. Boyarin, points to at least one model of compromise when he asks for Jews to "maintain our existence, our cultural, religious memory...without fetishizing borders and boundaries in the encactment of an ethnic cleansing that...negates the very meaning of Jewish survival until now."
As students in Yeshiva College, I feel like we fundamentally agree with Boyarin. Struggling to maintain boundaries without fetishizing them, we even erupt into internecine battles about where the boundaries should be and what precisely constitutes "fetishization." With all of Boyarin's discourse on his own troubled sexuality, it shouldn't surprise us that his definition of a fetish is probably a little different than ours, but the point remains just the same. If we don't have boundaries, the we have not Talmud, no glorious hermeneutic of indeterminacy. If our boundaries are overwrought, then we commit violence to others unfairly. It is important to be "modern," and like my Hassidic friend not to "judge people just on Zionism [or any other issue] one way or the other."
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