Narrating the Law: A Poetics of Talmudic Legal Stories

Chapter 2. Deconstructing Halakhah and Aggadah

Chapter 2 Deconstructing Halakhah and Aggadah We have indeed paved other ways to the writing of laws and legal traditions; These are the finest sifted white flour, But aggadot are the leavings. —Samuel ben H . ofnî Gaon1 The dichotomy that divides rabbinic literature into “Halakhah” and “Aggadah ” (meanings elaborated below) is extremely well entrenched both because it is seemingly self-evident and because it can be exceedingly helpful. When it comes to assigning talmudic legal narratives to one of these classifications, the categorization is not self-evident and, as this chapter will demonstrate, the limitations on interpretation that derive from the dichotomy cease to be helpful. Talmudic legal narratives constitute a genre that elides the division between Halakhah and Aggadah; this liminal status marks this set of texts as an ideal site to reflect upon the nature of the dichotomy, its genealogy, and the ramifications of using it as a heuristic tool. This chapter argues against the conventional wisdom that Halakhah/Aggadah is a binary classification that inheres within rabbinic text. From its origins to the present this distinction has always been most forceful in determining the ways in which readers approach texts—that is, as a hermeneutic lens. It is not that a given text is Halakhah or Aggadah but rather that it is treated in the conventional manner such texts have come to be treated. Moreover, the distinction between Halakhah and Aggadah as reading practices has not divided two discourses of equal weight; rather, the distinction elevates Halakhah over Aggadah. The example of a talmudic legal narrative about lovesickness, discussed in this chapter , helps illustrate the ways in which the legal discourse beginning already 32 Chapter 2 within the Talmud seeks to suppress the story as an incoherent legal source; the Talmud’s uncanny resolution of this incoherence in a text that has been categorized as Aggadah illustrates the need to deconstruct this dichotomy for the purpose of reading legal narrative and suggests that the division might helpfully be challenged in other contexts as well. All expositions of rabbinic literature—from broad introductions to specific analyses—operate within the framework of the well-established dichotomy between Halakhah and Aggadah.2 “Halakhah” refers to Jewish law. “Aggadah” (sometimes Haggadah) is harder to define both etymologically and categorically. Because the two categories are presumed to encompass all of rabbinic literature, scholars since Sĕʿadîyâ Gāōn have found it helpful to define “Aggadah” as the complementary opposite of “Halakhah”: Aggadah is everything nonlegal. Since Halakhah includes all law and Aggadah everything else, all of rabbinic literature is wholly subsumed. Rabbinic literature is not divided a priori into halakhic and aggadic corpora . Its books are not internally marked nor are its genres of composition determinative. While one could make the case for the Mishnah as a work whose genre is dedicated to Halakhah, it is not uncommon to find nonlegal materials in the Mishnah. Though some rabbinic works of midrash seem unconcerned with legal issues, one is hard pressed to find any such work that avoids the law entirely. It is thus fair to say that there are no works of rabbinic literature that are written exclusively in a specifically halakhic or aggadic mode.3 This failure to distinguish at the compositional level leads to the conclusion that the rabbinic process of textual production did not include a self-conscious pigeonholing along these lines.4 Though the evidence of composition downplays the self-evidence of a Halakhah/Aggadah dichotomy, scholars generally consider the dichotomy to emerge within the rabbinic period itself because of several rabbinic texts that divide between the two discourses.5 It is important to note, though, that few of these rabbinic texts juxtapose the terms “Halakhah” and “Aggadah,” and fewer still consider these to be a set of categories that together encompass all of rabbinic literature.6 If the dichotomy existed in rabbinic times, it did not have much force or consequence.7 In the post-rabbinic world that would change. The Babylonian geonim who followed on the heels of the rabbis responsible for the Talmud succeeded in institutionalizing rabbinic Judaism by creating large yeshivas to train rabbis, proliferating responsa to advise world Jewry on matters of Jewish law and currying the political favor of the Abbasid rulers who controlled Deconstructing Halakhah and Aggadah 33 the majority of the known world in their day.8 It is no exaggeration to suggest that the period of...