New Jewish Philosophy and Thought

Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought

Mara H. Benjamin

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780253034366
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Filosofía de la religión

Mara H. Benjamin contends that the physical and psychological work of caring for children presents theologically fruitful but largely unexplored terrain for feminists. Attending to the constant, concrete, and urgent needs of children, she argues, necessitates engaging with profound questions concerning the responsible use of power in unequal relationships, the transformative influence of love, human fragility and vulnerability, and the embeddedness of self in relationships and obligations. Viewing child-rearing as an embodied practice, Benjamin's theological reflection invites a profound reengagement with Jewish sources from the Talmud to modern Jewish philosophy. Her contemporary feminist stance forges a convergence between Jewish theological anthropology and the demands of parental caregiving.

PART I

CHAPTER 1

Obligation

TO BE A Jew, according to the classical textual tradition, is to be obligated. Acts of service to one’s neighbor and to God devolve on the individual simply by virtue of being a Jew. This foundational assumption forms the substructure of the commandments enjoined to the people of Israel; few are the matters the realm of obligation does not touch. This privileging of deontology over virtue, of obligation over voluntarism, finds quintessential expression in the Talmudic dictum: “Greater is one who is commanded and does than he who is not commanded and does” (bQiddushin 31a).¹ Obligation has been a “fundamental word” that structures Jewish thought and behavior for centuries.²

The project of modernity, as it unfolded in late eighteenth-century central and western Europe, sought to dismantle this sort of obligation in both its religious and its existential forms. In classical liberalism, individual obligation extended only to the obeying of natural law and reason. Agency was formulated in opposition to constraint. In this light, inherited obligations appeared contrary, benighted.

Although the liberal critique of religion primarily targeted church authority, a number of Enlightenment thinkers used the ritual, historical, and communal obligations of Jewish life—and the rabbinic presumption of obligation as a condition of human existence—as a negative illustration in their arguments. The mitzvot appeared as a particularly egregious example of illegitimate compulsion; Judaism’s commands “are of such a kind that even a political constitution can be concerned with them and impose them as coercive laws, because they pertain merely to external actions; and although before reason the Ten Commandments would already hold as ethical ones, even if they had not been given publicly, in that legislation they have not been given at all with the demand on one’s moral attitude in obeying them (wherein Christianity later posited its main work), but have been directed absolutely only to the external observance.”³ In keeping with the preference for liberal rationalism, empiricism, and individual autonomy, Jews largely jettisoned the framework that had grounded their communal functions and religious life.⁴

In recent decades, Western thinkers have interrogated the presumptions of the modern critique of religion. The ideals of liberalism now suggest a fantasy in which individuals stand outside of language, body, and history, surveying the world and inherited truths from an Archimedean remove. The supposedly “universal” truths prized in dominant strains of Enlightenment thought, we now understand, can never be known outside of the particularities of specific existences in time and space. The rabbinic idiom of obligation may be unfamiliar, but postmodernity has attuned us to the inevitability of being conditioned by the world and responsive to it—that is, to the most basic meaning of obligation.

Obligation, as its root suggests, refers to what binds us to others and the world (ob-, toward; ligare, bind). Obligation constitutes us as subjects; “already from the first, and with every act of sensation, the world is ‘there’ as a field of phenomenality, as a world of claims imposing themselves with an ever-present and evident presence. These claims put one under a primary obligation,” as Michael Fishbane writes.⁵ The work of “coming to be” in a world demands attention and response; we are constituted by the contingent, dynamic networks of relationships in which we are embedded. We are tethered to linguistic, spatial, social, and temporal landscapes; we cannot escape them no matter how far we travel.

Maternity, particularly in the contemporary West, compels acute attention to the fact of being planted in and responsive to a world. Maternity presents a primal experience of being subject to rather than master over. Tied by knots of obligation and service to another person and to her world, the adult caregiver knows what it is to be tethered, materially and bodily. Maternity simultaneously induces and reveals this inner core of our existence as given. At the same time, it demands a dialectical understanding of the relationship between obligation and agency, for the imposed condition of obligation does not produce a singular response. Rather, it generates human creativity in its multiplicity.

Analysis of maternal experience yields insight into this condition of obligation in ways that are productive for Jewish thought in particular and for contemporary thought as a whole. Maternal obligation, in both its practical and its existential dimensions, offers contemporary Western people’s most substantive experience with the meaning of obligation. Raising a child demands an episodic and complex subjection of self that confronts notions of individual freedom. This subjection, for Kant and others, was pejoratively called “heteronomy,” that is, submission to “the law of another.” Viewing maternal subjectivity as a simultaneous exercise in submission and an exercise of agency within a set of constraints offers a new lens on obligation in Jewish thought. A feminist analysis of maternal subjectivity demands critique of traditional Jewish understandings of obligation and, at the same time, suggests a starting point for reappropriating Judaism’s religious discourse of obligation.

* * *

A theological anthropology of the individual as “bound” or “yoked” shaped Jewish thought and practice from the rabbinic period until the advent of modernity. In the rich repository of traditional Jewish legal and narrative texts, to be a Jewish self means to have entered a social world already encumbered with tasks, duties, and relationships. The mitzvot that devolve on the Jew constitute the outward expression of this more fundamental orientation.⁶

The rabbis detailed extensive and diverse obligations that Jews owe to parents, teachers, the community as a whole, one’s fellow Jew, non-Jews, the (non-Jewish) government, and God. These obligations, taken together, establish a lexicon of practical action suited to different occasions, places, and occurrences, and to arbitrating the inevitable conflicts among these duties. The obligations debated and illustrated in normative Jewish texts were likely not executed in a way remotely resembling how they are presented in the classical literature; many of them by definition could not be.⁷ Nonetheless, this literature is instructive for understanding the rabbinic imagination at work, sorting out complex webs of multiple relationships and exploring the interlocking, often competing, obligations those relationships create.

The rabbis employ a powerful metaphor to communicate this understanding of the Jewish self as tethered to Torah and mitzvot. In keeping with the theme of divine redemption as distinct from negative liberty, the normative self envisioned by rabbinic Judaism is imagined as a beast of burden, an ox on whom a yoke—the “yoke of God’s dominion” (‘ol malkhut shamayim) and the “yoke of the commandments” (‘ol mitzvot)—is placed.⁸ The great medieval commentator Rashi explains the metaphor in no uncertain terms: “The commandments were not given to Israel to fulfill them for their enjoyment, but were given to be a yoke around their necks.”⁹ This historical and collective acceptance of the yoke (qabbalat ‘ol) is ritually reenacted through the daily recitation of the Shema and performed in the vast system of ritual, civil, and ethical commandments that create the texture of normative rabbinic piety.

This posture of obligation provides an inviting entry point for rethinking subjectivity and selfhood in the present moment. Contemporary scholars of religion have become increasingly interested in the project of self-formation through discipline, constraint, and subjection in pre- or nonmodern traditions.¹⁰ These modes of thought represent a challenge to the presuppositions encoded in liberal thought.

However, in the case of rabbinic Judaism, any impulse toward retrieval cannot proceed far without questioning the very possibility of speaking about a “Jewish self,” even within the framework of normative legal texts.¹¹ For the obligated self of rabbinic Judaism is normatively adult, male, able-bodied, and Jewish. Furthermore, obligation may be the default status for males and females in the classical tradition, but the “official” or normative commandments in Jewish religious life are unevenly distributed.¹² All adult Jews are commanded, as it were, but some Jews are more commanded than others. Whole classes of people, including females, are temporarily or congenitally exempt from the category of mitzvot referred to as “positive time-bound commandments,” which have long held a particular status of importance and visibility among Jews.¹³

In her classic work Standing Again at Sinai, Judith Plaskow draws attention to the roots of this differential in the “origin story” of the mitzvot: “There can be no verse in Torah more disturbing to the feminist than Moses’ warning to his people in Ex. 19:15, ‘Be ready for the third day; do not go near a woman.’ For here, at the very moment that the Jewish people stands at Sinai ready to receive the covenant . . . Moses addresses the community only as men.”¹⁴ Sinai is a locus of command and, for readers attuned to gender, of exclusion.

If the metaphor of the yoked ox disregards this gender differentiation, other metaphors of rabbinic literature telegraph the maleness of Jewish selfhood explicitly. The mitzvot as visible tokens of the physical intimacy of God’s love are, for instance, connected to the male body, as in the following midrash:¹⁵

Beloved is Israel, for they are surrounded with commandments: tefillin on their heads and tefillin on their arms, mezuzot on their doorways and tzitzit on their clothes. Concerning them [these commandments], David said: SEVEN TIMES A DAY I HAVE PRAISED YOU FOR YOUR RIGHTEOUS COMMANDMENTS [Ps. 119:164]. When David entered the bathhouse and saw that he was naked, he said, “Woe is me, that I should am naked of commandments. [When] he saw his circumcision, he felt comforted and began to compose praise: TO THE CHOIR LEADER, ON THE EIGHTH DAY [i.e., the day of circumcision], A PSALM OF DAVID.”¹⁶

The male Jew walks through the world garbed and even physically inscribed by the visible signs of divine election. Clothing and other external markers of Jewish identity might conceivably be worn by women (as they are for some religiously observant Jewish women today), but for the rabbis, clothes-as-mitzvot were decidedly male garb.¹⁷ If there were any doubt, circumcision is used as the specifically and exclusively male physical sign of the mitzvot that, for the rabbis, cannot be erased.¹⁸

The values and assumptions the rabbis express underscore a historical, intellectual, and moral distance between their world and ours that is problematic as well as corrective. As Jonathan Schofer has argued, “late ancient rabbinic ethical instruction addressed a group defined by nation or ethnicity, gender, and elite community,” largely excluding Gentile males, but also non-rabbinic Jewish men, and women of all social and ethnic subdivisions.¹⁹ In drawing out the obligated self of rabbinic thought, we unintentionally catch unwanted presumptions in our net.

Nonetheless, a dialectical approach to rabbinic constructions of obligation enables us to apprehend maternity in a new light. Much as the rabbinic Jewish male finds both burden and reminder in his tallit and circumcision, mothers carrying their children are clothed in a kind of ritual garment and bodily sign of relationship. The juxtaposition of these postures of obligation becomes generative when we acknowledge both the parallels and the limits of the analogue: feminists cannot simply endorse the concept of heteronomy, so central to the rabbis’ theological anthropology, in the context of maternal subjectivity. Heteronomous obligation—especially the obligation to bear and raise children—has, for centuries, underwritten women’s subjugation.²⁰ Nonetheless, by placing these two forms of obligation into relationship with one another, we can move toward a feminist reengagement with rabbinic thought.

* * *

In the early days and months of first having a baby, the raw, immediate assault on my freedom—a freedom I had not even known I had previously enjoyed—struck me with overwhelming force. No sooner had this baby, this stranger, appeared than she held a claim on me. I was now responsible for addressing her n...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Series Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I
• PART II
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover