Uncategorized

The other day I travelled from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv.  I sp’end most of the day at Tel Aviv University meeting with colleagues, researching, and getting organized for the fall semester that I will spend as part of this intellectual community (although I will not be teaching).  Despite the punishing heat, it was delightful.  Then in the late afternoon I set out to the beach, where I met my family.  We swam in the Mediterranean (that, yes, was far hotter and saltier than the Atlantic up where I live), changed, and ate a light dinner on the beach as the sun set.  It was a terrific day, and as night fell we boarded the bus to return to Jerusalem.

At the same time, unbeknownst to us, the spiritual leader of the Lithuanian yeshiva movement, Rav Elyashiv, died in Jerusalem at the age of 102.  As we sat at the beach in Tel Aviv, the funeral procession was planned.  By the time our bus left the depot in Tel Aviv, scores of Rav Elyashiv’s followers had assembled and began to carry his body from his home in Meah Shearim to Givat Shaul, where he was buried next to his wife.  By the time the bus arrived at the outskirts of Jerusalem, the roads were clogged with people – the estimate the next day was 250,000.  The bus could not get through to the station.  The driver got lost, and the bus never made it to the station.  Finally, the bus driver pulled over to the side of the road next to yet another closed section of town, and discharged us all.  It was midnight, and we all trudged through the crowds attempting to find an open road to get a taxi home.  It took a while.

From what I understand, there are many things not to like about Rav Elyashiv that go far beyond the inconvenience his funeral caused us.  He was the standard-bearer of isolationism, opposing most all kinds of participation of his community in general society.  This too might not have been so bad had he not also been the unofficial spiritual leader of the Degel HaTorah political movement in Israel.  What makes this even more ironic and distasteful is that he turned on the religious Zionists who taught and nurtured him, coming to reject ideologically the State of Israel itself. For an interesting profile, see this essay by Matti Friedman.

That said, though, unlike so many political and religious leaders, Elyashiv was no pious fraud.  He walked the walk, studying most of his waking hours and living modestly and without scandal.  He was revered as an embodiment of Torah who also had a keen skill for reconciling theoretical law to pragmatic needs.  Accordingly, his opinion and legal rulings were sought on many topics.

As we weaved through the enormous crowd the other night, it was clear that people attended for a variety of reasons.  Many were gawkers and others came out of social expectations or desires.  Many, though, also came sincerely, to pay their last respects to a man they never personally knew, who for them embodied the life that they sought to lead.  250,000 people turning out on an afternoon’s notice to mourn a 102 year old man who occupied no official position, but sat most days studying Talmud?  There must be something that we can learn from that.

 The recent demonstrations in Tel Aviv highlighted two economic issues in Israel.  The first is the increasing economic stratification.  The second is the cost of living: younger Israelis are concerned that it simply costs so damn much to live in Israel.

Personally, I have never understood how middle class Israelis manage to get by financially.  Even with the legendary “overdrafts” – the bank allowing you to overdraw your bank account – that many Israeli families regularly use, I could never figure out how the numbers worked.  I am hardly alone; nearly every Israeli to whom I talk expresses a similar bewilderment about his or her, and especially their neighbors’, finances. 

This year, thanks to a sabbatical from Brown University as well as fellowships from the Fulbright Commission and the Albright Institute, my family and I will be in Jerusalem.  I have several ambitious professional goals, and many more personal ones.  Among the latter is finally cracking the mystery of the ordinary household economics of Israeli families.

Toward that end, and still very much at the beginning of my research, I offer you my itemized grocery bill.  We are just beginning to settle in, and I made my first run to a large, local supermarket that is not far from our apartment and that was recommended to me for its good selection and prices.  Here I offer only unit prices converted into U.S. equivalents (kg to lbs; shekels to dollars, all a little approximate).  As I learn more about the somewhat overwhelming selection of dairy and meat products, I will report on those as well.   All prices are in US dollars at about 4 NIS = 1 USD.

Many Several years ago, I wrote an essay on ancient rabbinic understandings of masculinity.  In that paper, I argued that the rabbis understood all human beings – men and women, Jews and Gentiles – to have an “evil inclination” that drove their appetites.  For these rabbis, though, only Torah-true, well-disciplined, Jewish men really had the capacity to control this inclination, and it was that very ability of self-control that not only gendered as “masculine” but, in fact, defined what it meant for them to be a man.  They thus created an alternative version of masculinity – one that had strong parallels to some early Christians and Roman philosophers – that stood in contrast to the hegemonic Roman understanding of masculinity as an embodiment of physical power and domination.  I developed some of these ideas in a later essay on rabbinic asceticism, and these studies were joined by those of scholars such as Daniel Boyarin, Eliezer Diamond, and Ishay Rosen-Zvi who (despite my occasional disagreements with their conclusions) further enriched our understanding of rabbinic understandings of masculinity.  In the meantime, I left this question as an active research pursuit and moved on to other things.

This summer I was asked to revisit the topic for a talk at a conference on “Religious Men in the Middle Ages,” held the other week at the University of Huddersfield.  In this paper, I extended my previous conclusions to the Babylonian Talmud.  I was struck by the research conducted over the last decade or so by scholars such as Marc Hirshman and Jeffrey Rubenstein pointing to a shift in rabbinic discourses of learning.  The Babylonian Talmud, particularly in relatively late strata, uses violent metaphors for learning and intellectual discourse.  Learning becomes a war, against both the evil inclination and, socially, against other rabbis.  Rubenstein in particular has suggested that the institutionalization of the rabbinic academy had much to do with this shift, and I find his account largely convincing.  At the same time, though, I think that his explanation can be enriched with considering issues of gender.  As I wrote in the paper:

I would like to suggest here that the seeds for these aggressive intellectual tendencies can be found in the earlier, Palestinian literature, particularly the gendering of Torah study as masculine.  This gendering arose, I have argued, from a conception of self-control; the active force – of which Torah was one tool – that allowed a man to subdue his desire was seen as male.  The Babylonian rabbis inherited the gendering of Torah study as masculine, but the reasons behind it were ignored, perhaps as a matter of transmission but more likely of cultural difference.  Self-control as denoting male power was, perhaps, distinctly Greco-Roman.

This basic equation of Torah study as a masculine activity helped to inform the development of the peculiar culture of the Babylonian Talmud.  For Babylonian rabbis, masculinity meant violence, power, aggression, war, and competition.  These became the values of the academy.  The ability to argue aggressively proved one’s masculinity within the academy, and was rewarded by winning the competition for moving up the academy’s hierarchical ladder.  The transfer of masculine values from the realm of true physical violence to the intellectual realm, though, was by no means transparent and clean.  As we saw in the story of Rabbi Yohanan and Resh Lakish, the rabbis themselves acknowledged their adaption of traditional masculine values to the academy, and reflected on that very tension.  They were not necessarily sold on their own creation.

The full paper will hopefully be forthcoming in the conference volume.

Traditionally, much economic theory assumes that humans are perfectly rational economic actors – we do things that are in our economic self-interest and avoid things that aren’t.  More recently, economists have increasingly come to recognize that actual people aren’t always as predictable as the models predict.  Despite the growth of behavioral economics (which does try to account for economics in light of real human behavior and psychology), in my limited understanding the assumption of “homo economicus” remains fundamental to most economic theory, especially the so-called “Chicago School.”

I would never have thought to look for homo economicus in the Talmud, but he popped out at me the other day.  The Babylonian Talmud (Avodah Zarah 34b) discusses the permissibility of fish sauce produced by non-Jews, whether for consumption or deriving benefit (e.g., engaging in commerce in it).  Fish sauce, made primarily from fermented, oily fish like anchovies was an important and popular condiment in antiquity (and continues to exist in the form of Worcestershire sauce).  The rabbis had two potential worries: (1) that unkosher fish would be used; and (2) that gentile wine would be mixed in.  It is the concept of homo economicus that is brought to solve both problems:

(1)  A skilled maker of fish sauce can be assumed to be using only one kind of (kosher) fish, because mixing in other kinds of fish would degrade the product and thus lead him to lose business;

(2)  Wine really isn’t that good in fish sauce, so it would only be added in order to dilute it so one could sell more.  But in the places that make fish sauce wine is more expensive than the sauce!  So it would make no sense to add wine, and thus the sauce need not be supervised and is permitted.

Both of these answers assume that non-Jews are rational economic actors; they don’t, for example, just want to add wine because of one person’s idiosyncratic tastes or out of maliciousness.  This is somewhat surprising, as rabbinic literature contains all kinds of assumptions about gentiles that do not always have them act “rationally.”

More interesting to me, though, is the economic assumption embedded in this discussion.  The stakes here, from a rabbinic perspective, are surprisingly high: to benefit from a substance used in idolatrous worship (i.e., the wine from which a libation was made) is akin to idolatry, seen as a grievous sin.  Yet the assumption of rational economic action is so strong that it outweighs the possibility that such wine was used in the fish sauce.  I am sure that this assumption appears elsewhere in rabbinic literature, and it would be interesting to see where and how consistently.

Now, if I was only as rational actor as both the University of Chicago and the Talmud say I should be….