Rabbis and their Opponents: The Construction of the "Min" in Rabbinic Anecdotes

Holy men, to recast Stanley Tambiah’s phrase, are “good to think.” ² Just as Tambiah investigates food taboos as a tool for understanding marriage prohibitions in northeastern Thailand, so tracing the holy man, we have learned from Peter Brown’s work, can help us rethink classic scholarly conceptions of late antique religion. If we turn to the data of late antique Judaism, we find some of the most classically entrenched charismatic figures, that is, the rabbis. Only a few decades ago late antique Judaism was reconstructed through the eyes of the rabbis with, not surprisingly, rabbis at the center of the picture as conveyors of normative, orthodox Judaism. Attention to new sources (archaeological finds, Jewish texts written in Greek) and new questions (where are the women?) has so changed our view that we now find ourselves asking: How is it that rabbis were able to build an institutional basis that so thoroughly drowned out the many other voices?

The demise of notions of orthodoxy has been slower in the case of Judaism than in the study of early Christianity, where sixty years post-Bauer it has become common to ask whether heresy is the primary form of religious expression, or in the words of Rowan Williams, to posit that “Heresy is the necessary precondition for orthodoxy, yet orthodoxy may be as much a metamorphosis (or pseudo-metamorphosis) of the foundational religious idea as heresy.” ³

Focusing these questions on rabbinic texts presents sobering challenges: in addition to being the object of long-entrenched views, rabbinic literature is also agonizingly complex to date and its mesmerizing rhetoric hinders our attempts to place the texts in the social webs Brown points us to. Following the model of Brown’s creative use of Mary Douglas I shall make my own raid on anthropological theory and in particular on recent critiques of symbolic theories of religion and their implicit presumptions about the fixed meaning of symbols. These critiques resonate with my concerns about the static interpretation of rabbinic anecdotes; I hope that the critiques can help us see rabbis less as conveyors of traditional theology, enlivened by a miracle or two, and more as negotiators who in their quest for authority must construct for us the illusion of a stable and coherent theological order. That order is so familiar, even reassuring to us, that we often lack the nerve to look behind the textual strategies at the real-life confusion which marks religious debate. Rabbinic anecdotes about conflict, disarmingly charming stories about misguided opponents, reveal some of the steps that lead to the rabbinic foreclosure of other late antique Jewish modes of expression.

We begin, as always with rabbinic literature, with an anecdote.

A certain min ⁴ once said to Rabbi, “He who formed the mountains did not create the wind, and he who created the wind did not form the mountains, for it is written, ‘For lo, He who forms the mountains and creates the wind (Amos 4.13).’ ” He [Rabbi] replied, “You fool, turn to the end of the verse, ‘the Lord of Hosts is His name.’ ” Said the other, “Give me three days and I will return with an answer to you.” Rabbi spent those three days in fasting; thereafter, as he was about to partake he was told, “There was a min waiting at the door.” Rabbi exclaimed, “Yea, they put poison in my food” (Ps 69.22). Said [the min], “My master, I bring you good tidings; your opponent could find no answer and so threw himself down from the roof and died. He said “Would you dine with me?” He replied, “Yes.” After they had eaten and drunk he [Rabbi] said to him, “Will you drink the cup of wine over which the benedictions of the Grace have been said, or would you rather have forty gold coins?” He replied, “I would rather drink the cup of wine.” Thereupon a voice from heaven came and said “The cup of wine over which the benedictions [are said] is worth forty gold coins.” R. Isaac said, “The family [of that...