Narrating the Law: A Poetics of Talmudic Legal Stories

Chapter 4. Social Dynamics of Pedagogy: Rabbis and Students

Chapter 4 Social Dynamics of Pedagogy: Rabbis and Students No relationship is more central to the fabric of rabbinic culture and its law than that of teacher and student. The pedagogical scene of student before teacher is the implicit context of all talmudic text. Readers rightly presume such a setting when they read talmudic legal discussions that present themselves as dialogues. Despite the ubiquity of texts that implicate a pedagogical environment, only a small percentage of talmudic texts lend themselves to explorations of the social dynamics of rabbinic pedagogy. This chapter takes the opportunity offered by one such text to undertake this exploration.1 This chapter attends to two narratives situated in the heart of a talmudic legal passage that encourage a psychological investigation of the teacherstudent relationship in rabbinic Babylonia by including the emotional register within their legal conversation. As the emotional investments of teacher and students bubble to the surface, they stand as visible representatives of relational undercurrents that are regularly suppressed within talmudic legal discourse . The legal narratives about bailee liability that provoke this inquiry into teacher-student social dynamics constitute the expandable cultural nuggets to which I referred in the preceding chapter. Like a rich fieldwork narrative , these stories encourage an interpretive anthropology that unpacks their historiographic potential, providing an opportunity for dynamic depiction of cultural life rather than a static description of cultural facts. While the presumption of rabbinic historiography has generally been that teacher-student relations were stable manifestations of cultural institutions, this chapter demonstrates the local instability of these relationships and articulates their contours, explaining where the teacher-student relationship is located within rabbinic culture. Social Dynamics 97 The preceding chapter referenced David Goodblatt’s thesis that amoraic Babylonia was not populated by the bureaucratized and politically empowering yeshivas of later Babylonian life in the geonic period.2 This discovery has untapped potential for transforming the presumptions of readers who rightly read talmudic texts as produced in pedagogic settings. Where scholars once imagined amoraim as heads of yeshivas with concomitant political authority and economic stability, now scholars must consider the smaller scale pedagogical setting of the disciple circle. Within the richer world of Palestinian rabbinic historiography, scholars are increasingly reaching a conclusion analogous to Goodblatt’s, denying the existence of institutional yeshivas during the amoraic period.3 The highest level of rabbinic pedagogy—the amoraic dialogue whose literary representation appears in the Talmud—was produced in small disciple circles in which rabbis discussed their statutory declarations, midrashic inferences, and legal rationalizations with small groups of students. In both Palestine and Babylonia there was an institution that had power by virtue of its relationship with secular authorities. The patriarch in Palestine represented the Jewish community vis-à-vis the Romans and often the patriarchy’s interests overlapped with those of the rabbis.4 Likewise, the exilarch in Babylonia represented the Jewish community vis-à-vis the Sassanians and sometimes (less often than in Palestine) found common cause with the rabbis.5 While the patriarchy and exilarchate provide the strongest argument for actual rabbinic authority, in neither culture is there a strong connection between the power-giving institution and the context of pedagogy.6 Rabbinic education in both cultures takes place in an institutional vacuum. The noninstitutional nature of rabbinic pedagogy becomes visible in a highly charged text at Bābā Mĕs .îʿā 97a, which will be examined shortly. To understand this text, one needs to understand the rabbinic legal context of bailee liability. Bailee Liability The section of Exodus 22 sometimes called “The Covenant Code” describes three different scenarios of liability for an object or animal that one guards, rents, or borrows (bailee liability): a person who is exonerated from liability in the event of theft, a person who is liable for theft but not for acts of God, and a person who is liable even for acts of God. Though there is clarity in the differing outcomes of the scenarios, the biblical passage is murky in its delineation of these different liability categories. One reading of the passage distinguishes 98 Chapter 4 the first and second bailees from each other on account of the goods being watched (greater liability for animals, lesser liability for chattel).7 Various rabbinic sources distinguish the two scenarios by establishing that the verses of lesser liability refer to one who watches a friend’s items without compensation while the verses of greater liability refer to a paid watchman...