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xvii THE IMAGINATIVE MAP The stories in this book take place in a variety of settings: the market, the home, the bathhouse, the fishpond, the study house in Tiberias, the courtroom in Mahoza, a southern desert, a cave in the Galilee, the Temple in Jerusalem. Even if my selection of these stories out of the entire corpus of aggadic literature in the Talmud and midrash was a matter of personal choice, the stories nonetheless constitute a complete landscape—an imaginary expanse that can be depicted on a map. I never saw a map in any of the midrashic collections or talmudic volumes I studied. Yet I contend that in the minds and consciousness of Torah scholars throughout the generations, there existed an imaginary map representing the literary landscape in which the aggadic stories of the rabbis took place. The map is not real, given that its borders defy nearly every accepted principle of modern Western cartography. Furthermore , it has its own rules regarding time and place, fiction and reality . As such, it resembles the maps depicted on the endpapers of popular children’s books such as The Hobbit or Winnie the Pooh, in which the meaningful landscape is subjective, taking its shape from the events depicted in the story rather than from particular geographic features. At the center and heart of the imaginary aggadic map lies the Holy of Holies in the Temple in Jerusalem. The Temple occupies this central place even during periods in which the “real” Jerusalem was destroyed and all of its inhabitants were exiled. Thus, in the Aggadah, Rabbi Yishmael can enter the Holy of Holies of a Temple that was destroyed before his time. The talmudic village is also described throughout these stories, albeit indirectly, so that the reader can feel as if he or she is walking through it. There is the home, which consists of the warm stove at its heart, the steps up to the parents’ bedroom, and the roof where fruit is laid out to xviii The Imaginative Map dry in the sun. There are the alleys that lead to the market, which is bustling on Mondays and Thursdays, filled with wagons that come from afar. There is the study house, the synagogue, and the courtroom, sometimes all in one building. There is a central public square where the old men and the idle bums while away the morning and where women spin flax and gossip by moonlight. There are the cultivated fields that surround the town, which give forth fruit and grain. And there are the pathways between the fields, which lead to the outskirts of the town with its outhouses and cemeteries. The heroes of the aggadic stories cross over the boundary between this world and the next one, like Rabbi Yohanan, who enters the cave of Rav Kahana and restores him to life in order to reconcile with him. The heavenly study house, which also has a place within the borders of the imaginary map, looks out over the earthly study house. Sometimes a note falls from the heavens or a still, small voice calls out from above. Those who sit in the study house look and listen. The whole world is interconnected . The academies of Babylon are just a journey’s distance from the academies of Israel, even before the Babylonian academies have been founded. The Jordan River flows near Tiberias and resembles the rushing rivers of Babylon. Beyond the sea lies Rome, the great metropolis , the New York City of ancient times. At the gates leading into Rome, among the leprosy-infected beggars, the Messiah leans against the wall, dressed like a beggar and tending to his wounds (B. Sanhedrin 98a). Beyond the environs of Jerusalem and Babylon, where most of the Talmud’s stories take place, the other nations of the world are spread out to form a distant background: Egypt, Arabia, Spain, Persia, Medea, India, Ethiopia. At the edge of the map the River Sambatyon casts out huge fragments of stone that vault like rebounding hail, and still beyond it lie the ten lost tribes. Throughout the aggadic stories that were chosen here, several dramatic events unfold, which cast light on important landmarks on the map. When more stories are told, other landscapes will be illuminated as well. Modern talmudic scholars were often embarrassed by the unconventional depictions of time, space, and reality in these stories. They sometimes reacted paternalistically, viewing the authors of the Aggadah as [18.222.22.244] Project MUSE (2024...

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