Excerpts: 2

More Boyarin Excerpts

pg 82: "In midrashic texts, Eve is nearly always presented as the victim of the snake and not the victimizer of man. According to the midrash, the snake did not seduce Eve to have sex with Adam - she had already had sex with Adam - but rather, he seduces her to have adultery with him....human intercourse, even in this world, carries no stain, just as it did not for Adam and Eve..."Woman" in Bible and midrash, is almost never essentialized as something evil and dangerous, as a snare to man. According to the rabbis, there was no Fall into sexuality in the Garden of Eden. On the rabbinic readings, Adam has had intercourse with Eve from the beginning. Their intercourse is not associated in any way with the snake, the "forbidden fruit", or a Fall or expulsion from the garden. Licit sexuality, the intercourse of married couples, belongs not to the demonic realm of the snake, but to the innocent realm of the Garden of Innocence itself. Indeed, according to Genesis Rabbah 18:6, the snake became inflamed with lust for Eve because he saw Adam and Eve having intercourse with each other, and according to 19:3, he came and spoke to Eve while Adam was sleeping after having intercourse with her."

Pgs. 84-88 engage in a feminist readings of Pandor in Hesiod, and of a Pandora-like rabbinic midrash, in which Pandora's guilt is displaced onto Adam.

95-97: Boyarin cites Buckley and Gottleib, who point out that historically, when women have been excluded from male domains, such as "hunting gear", that object has been interpreted as prestigious, and women's exclusion signs of their inferiority, whereas when men have been excluded from a female domain - "such as menstrual blood" - that object has been classified as inferior, and women's inclusion signs of their inferiority. Boyarin then explains, "If as I have argued, within Rabbinic Judaism of the Talmudic period, even menstrual taboos did not constitute an essentialized fear and hatred of women as defiling, such interpretations were certainly latent and easily derived from the practices...In the rabbinic period...legends, fears, and terrors of women's sexuality apparently persisted below the official consciousness of textuality and culture. The evidence for the existence of such legends in the rabbinic culture, however, comes only from the repression or denial in the "official texts". The rabbinic culture (understood strictly here as the culture of the Rabbis themselves) did not countenance them. But from the Middle Ages on, they became well entrenched in rabbinic culture and official religion, paralleled exactly by similar changes in the discourse of menstruation from cultic disability to near-demonic contamination. The development of such demonized images of women...is, moreover, paralleled by a growing anxiety about sexuality itself during the Jewish Middle Ages. We could argue then, that mysogyny was a latent and predictable effect of the disenfranchisement of women, and even more so of the menstrual taboos themselves. We must not however, read the texts of classical rabbinic literature through the fear and hatred of women characteristic of the later period, running the risk, by doing so, of further cannonizing the mysogynistic position."

pg. 109: Baba Metzia 59a: "Rav Pappa to Abbaye: Don't people say," if you wife is short, bend down and whisper to her?""

pg.110 Nedarm 29a-b - worth looking up, too long to quote.

pg. 142-143, discussing Ketubot 61b: "In addition to the aspect of sexuality as an obligation a man owns his own body, ..the married man was considered by Talmudic law under a legal-contractual obligation to sleep with his wife regularly for her pleasure and benefit. This obligation was derived by the Rabbis from the verse that, when taking a second wife, a man must not "reduce the flesh, covering, or seasons" (Exodus:21:10) of the first wife...the hegemonic opinion is that "flesh" means food, "covering" refers to clothing, and "seasons" refers to the regularity of sexual intercourse. This obligation was made contractual in the standard rabbinically approved marriage contract, which reads, "I will feed you, clothe you, and have intercourse with you, in accordance with the customs of Jewish husbands."

pg. 227-228: "My assumption is we can not change the actual past. We can only change the present and the future, in part by changing our understanding of the past. Unless the assumption is that the past is ... a burden to be thrown off...then constructing a monolithically negative perception of the past and cultivating anger at it seem to be counterproductive and disempowering for change. Finding only mysogyny in the past reproduces mysogyny; finding only a lack of female power.autonomy, and creativity, reifies female passivity and victimhood. In contrast to this, recovery of those forces in the past that opposed the dominant andocentriscm can help put us on trajectory for empowerment and transformation."

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Thanks to a friend for sharing the following link: http://nes.berkeley.edu/Web_Boyarin/BoyarinArticles/