Justify My Love

80 SHOFAR Fall 1995 Vol. 14, No.1 JUSTIFY MY LOVE! by Daniel Boyarin Daniel Boyarinis Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the departments of Near Eastern and Women's Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. His two most recent books are Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1993) and A RadicalJew: Paul and the Politics ofIdentity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). The present essay is excerpted from the introduction to his forthcoming Judaism as a Gender; or, the Rise ofHeterosexuality and the Invention of theJewish Man: An Autobiography. From almost the first sentence in my first preparatory course in reading the Talmud, I was channed-in the full antique sense of the word. Here was a world so strange and rich, so colorful and exciting, with myths and legends, challenges to the intellect, and most of all, personalities rendered so vital that they seemed living men, men, moreover, who devoted their lives to the elaboration of what it means to live correctly as a Jew. And all this was "mine." I became Orthodox for love of the Talmud. I admit freely, if ruefully, that it was all so absorbing that I hardly noticed at all that they were all men, or that the text was primarily addressed to me just because I was a Jewish man. I failed to see the exclusions and oppressions that those facts encode and mystify. I believe there is no textual product of human culture quite like the jumbled, carnivalesque, raucous, vulgar, Vital, exciting Talmud, nor any practice quite like the practices of study that characterize it and the way of life it subtends. And just as the Talmud entranced me, so much that I 1 Many warm thanks to Laura Levitt and Miriam Peskowitz-colleagues in the richest sense of the word. Their help here has gone far beyond the work of editors. Justify My Love 81 decided to devote my life to it, others have been drawn to it, including women and lesbigay people. I feel a deep love for and connection to rabbinic texts and culture, and more so, to the Rabbis themselves. But there is much that I find deeply disturbing as well, and much of that has to do with the oppression of women. My endeavor is to justify my love, that is, both to explain it and to make it just. I explain my devotion in part by showing that Judaism provides exempla and ideals for an Other kind of masculinity, one in which men do not manifest "a deeply rooted concern about the possible meanings of dependence on other males,"2 and thus one within which "feminization" is not experienced as a threat or a danger. I cannot, however, paper over, ignore, or explain away the oppressions of women and lesbigay people that this culture has practiced, and therefore, I endeavor as well to render my love just by presenting a way of reading the tradition that may help it surmount or expunge-in time-that which I, and many others, can no longer live with. In this respect, my project is homologous to other political and cultural acts of resistance in the face of colonialisms. For some three hundred years now, Jews have been the target of Western and Central Europe's civilizing mission. Laura levitt makes palpably clear the homologies between the "liberal" coloniZing impulse directed locally toward those Others within Europe, and outward, toward those colonized outside Europe's geographic borders, insofar as both were made to "reform" their sexual practices in order to conform to the liberal bourgeois regime.3 One of the most common of liberal justifications for the extension of colonial control over a given people and for the maintenance of the civilizing mission is the imputed barbarity of the treatment of women within the culture under attack. The fact that Jewish women behaved in ways that European bourgeois society considered masculine was simply monstrous to the civiliZing mission and its Jewish collaborators-the ..Enlighteners." This civilizing mission, in turn, led to the· development of modern Jewish culture, with its liberal, bourgeois aspirations and its preferred patterns ofgendered life. As Paula Hyman has...