Boyarin: Fucking Talmud
Nov. 14th, 2018 04:52 pmOh gosh, there was a lot to say about this limmud talk. It was a reading of an academic paper, so it had a more coherent theme than several of his previous talks, which were amazing, but impossible to follow if you didn't have a lot of context about what he was already working on.
I certainly understood it better for structure, although I admit, my brain follows talks better when they're broken down into clear discrete blocks, "Today we will advance a theory that X. This is supported by three arguments, A, B and C. Here is A. Here are several supporting examples in favour of A, referencing B and C where appropriate. Etc." But apparently this is out of style basically everywhere.
So, I'm going to reflect his argument quite badly here, but there were enough really interesting things it will hopefully be interesting even if it's a bit of a random selection.
The story
It was all framed around a little-known (?) story from the Talmud, going roughly, "He went away to study and become a rabbi. He worked hard studying every day, except one a day year he went home to visit his wife (and presumably the only occasion they have sex). One year he kept working and forgot to go home. His wife was really upset at him and he fell off the roof and died."
This raises several questions. One of the smallest but also intriguing was "why was he on the roof?" To which there's no good answer, other than "if you live in a country with flat rooves, studying on the roof is fairly normal".
The thesis
Different cultures have different words for concepts. E.g. Some languages have a word for "blue/green", some one word for each, and some have a separate word for "dark blue" and "light blue" (not sure if they have a word for "blue as a whole" or not).
This affects our perception. English speakers CAN distinguish a dark blue from a light blue, but it's not as obvious as in languages where there's a word for it. We are (I think) more likely to muddle up the dark blue and light blue game piece than another two, even if we can see the difference, because our brain didn't remember the look, it remembered the label.
The same applies to emotions. They can be collated into named concepts in different ways in different cultures. Boyarin had some contemporary examples from anthropology.
Thus we might expect emotions to present differently in different cultures. I don't know about cultures, but I very much recognised the "I know I feel bad, but I only realised I felt annoyed not guilty when I stopped to think about it" phenomenon.
Boyarin phrased this quite strongly, "the ancient hebrews had different emotions to us", although I think it's interesting whether or not I can remember enough of the talk to justify it. And you need to understand that to understand many talmud stories.
Anthropology
He said, people often think of anthropology as assuming we have "correct" concepts, and describing another culture in those terms, when it might be better to think of it as, describing another culture understanding of something by translating it into concepts we have -- which might involve reducing or increasing ambiguity in order to convey the original understanding.
Feeling "Upset"
Earlier, I used the word "upset". Boyarin used "distraught". He described the word used in the original as a concept encompassing feeling bad -- either sad or mad, which you can usually tell from context. The literal translation was "weakened mind" iirc (?)
Affection/Love/Passion
This is the one Boyarin spent most time on.
He said that ancient hebrews had the same word for several sorts of passion, including studying, and sexual desire. But *didn't* use the same word for love-as-sexual-desire and love-as-a-family-eg-parent-to-child.
That's a considerable simplification of what he actually described, but I think that was a reasonable summary.
This was important, because to us it doesn't completely make sense the husband just forgot. Even if he preferred to stay studying, he wouldn't really get confused between "go home and have romantic time with his wife" and "stay studying". But if you think those are the same word, he might -- or the story might have been written with that correspondence in mind.
I'm not sure if that word was actually used in this particular story -- I think this is Boyarin's interpretation, not that he's sure it's the only sensible interpretation.
This is where the "Fucking Talmud" subtitle came from (mine, not Boyarin, although he made that sort of allusion throughout :))
Magic vs strong feeling
This is my gloss, not Boyarin's, but it seemed so apt I wanted to include it. It references this story and also the one Boyarin has previous written about and referenced several times here, where the Rabbi Yochanan is sooooo beautiful the highwayman falls in love with him and for his sake marries his sister and becomes the famous rabbi Resh Lakish.
My summary: https://jack.dreamwidth.org/695757.html
In both cases, they end where someone's really upset, and end up accidentally or in a fit of rage killing someone they love by a poorly-specified supernatural mechanism.
But if you think of a curse as something that just naturally happens when someone has a strong enough hatred (like people believe in some circumstances, and happens mechanically in the roleplaying Dogs in the Vineyard), then "don't get upset with someone, they might die" makes sense. It's not just that -- there's a specific story about R Yochanan's eyes being so beautiful they can kill you if you look in them unexpectedly. But there's the same theme of "got really cross, oops, someone died", which makes sense if you divide up "strong emotion" and "magic" into categories differently to how we usually do in this culture.
I certainly understood it better for structure, although I admit, my brain follows talks better when they're broken down into clear discrete blocks, "Today we will advance a theory that X. This is supported by three arguments, A, B and C. Here is A. Here are several supporting examples in favour of A, referencing B and C where appropriate. Etc." But apparently this is out of style basically everywhere.
So, I'm going to reflect his argument quite badly here, but there were enough really interesting things it will hopefully be interesting even if it's a bit of a random selection.
The story
It was all framed around a little-known (?) story from the Talmud, going roughly, "He went away to study and become a rabbi. He worked hard studying every day, except one a day year he went home to visit his wife (and presumably the only occasion they have sex). One year he kept working and forgot to go home. His wife was really upset at him and he fell off the roof and died."
This raises several questions. One of the smallest but also intriguing was "why was he on the roof?" To which there's no good answer, other than "if you live in a country with flat rooves, studying on the roof is fairly normal".
The thesis
Different cultures have different words for concepts. E.g. Some languages have a word for "blue/green", some one word for each, and some have a separate word for "dark blue" and "light blue" (not sure if they have a word for "blue as a whole" or not).
This affects our perception. English speakers CAN distinguish a dark blue from a light blue, but it's not as obvious as in languages where there's a word for it. We are (I think) more likely to muddle up the dark blue and light blue game piece than another two, even if we can see the difference, because our brain didn't remember the look, it remembered the label.
The same applies to emotions. They can be collated into named concepts in different ways in different cultures. Boyarin had some contemporary examples from anthropology.
Thus we might expect emotions to present differently in different cultures. I don't know about cultures, but I very much recognised the "I know I feel bad, but I only realised I felt annoyed not guilty when I stopped to think about it" phenomenon.
Boyarin phrased this quite strongly, "the ancient hebrews had different emotions to us", although I think it's interesting whether or not I can remember enough of the talk to justify it. And you need to understand that to understand many talmud stories.
Anthropology
He said, people often think of anthropology as assuming we have "correct" concepts, and describing another culture in those terms, when it might be better to think of it as, describing another culture understanding of something by translating it into concepts we have -- which might involve reducing or increasing ambiguity in order to convey the original understanding.
Feeling "Upset"
Earlier, I used the word "upset". Boyarin used "distraught". He described the word used in the original as a concept encompassing feeling bad -- either sad or mad, which you can usually tell from context. The literal translation was "weakened mind" iirc (?)
Affection/Love/Passion
This is the one Boyarin spent most time on.
He said that ancient hebrews had the same word for several sorts of passion, including studying, and sexual desire. But *didn't* use the same word for love-as-sexual-desire and love-as-a-family-eg-parent-to-child.
That's a considerable simplification of what he actually described, but I think that was a reasonable summary.
This was important, because to us it doesn't completely make sense the husband just forgot. Even if he preferred to stay studying, he wouldn't really get confused between "go home and have romantic time with his wife" and "stay studying". But if you think those are the same word, he might -- or the story might have been written with that correspondence in mind.
I'm not sure if that word was actually used in this particular story -- I think this is Boyarin's interpretation, not that he's sure it's the only sensible interpretation.
This is where the "Fucking Talmud" subtitle came from (mine, not Boyarin, although he made that sort of allusion throughout :))
Magic vs strong feeling
This is my gloss, not Boyarin's, but it seemed so apt I wanted to include it. It references this story and also the one Boyarin has previous written about and referenced several times here, where the Rabbi Yochanan is sooooo beautiful the highwayman falls in love with him and for his sake marries his sister and becomes the famous rabbi Resh Lakish.
My summary: https://jack.dreamwidth.org/695757.html
In both cases, they end where someone's really upset, and end up accidentally or in a fit of rage killing someone they love by a poorly-specified supernatural mechanism.
But if you think of a curse as something that just naturally happens when someone has a strong enough hatred (like people believe in some circumstances, and happens mechanically in the roleplaying Dogs in the Vineyard), then "don't get upset with someone, they might die" makes sense. It's not just that -- there's a specific story about R Yochanan's eyes being so beautiful they can kill you if you look in them unexpectedly. But there's the same theme of "got really cross, oops, someone died", which makes sense if you divide up "strong emotion" and "magic" into categories differently to how we usually do in this culture.