← New Books Network
New Books Network
James Redfield, "Adventures of Rabah and Friends: The Talmud's Strange Tales and Their Readers" (Brown Judaic Studies, 2025)
00:48:55
Loading summary
Transcript47 lines
- [00:01]
Dr. James Adam Redfield
Monster Energy. Everybody knows White Monster Zero Ultra. That's the OG it kicked off this whole zero sugar energy drink thing. But Ultra is a whole lineup now. You've got Strawberry Dreams, Blue Hawaiian Sunrise, and Vice Guava. And they all bring the Monster Energy punch. So if you've been living in the White can branch out. Ultra's got a flavor for every vibe, and every single one is Zero Sugar. Tap the banner to learn more.
- [00:30]
Rabbi Mark Katz
Toast.
- [00:31]
Dr. James Adam Redfield
The holidays in a new way and raise a glass of Rumchata, a delicious creamy blend of horchata with rum. Enjoy it over ice or in your coffee. Rumchata. Your holiday cocktails just got sweeter. Tap or click the banner for more. Drink responsibly. Caribbean rum with real dairy cream, natural and artificial flavors. Alcohol 13.75% by volume, 27.5 proof. Copyright 2025 Agave Loco Brands Pojoaaukee, Wisconsin. All rights reserved. Kids, they grow up so fast. One day they're taking their first steps and the next they don't fit into the tiny sneakers they took them in. You blink your eyes and their princess dress is two sizes too small.
- [01:14]
Rabbi Mark Katz
And their dinosaur backpack isn't cool anymore.
- [01:17]
Dr. James Adam Redfield
But don't cry because they're growing up. Smile because you can profit off of it for real. There are a bunch of parents on depop looking for the stuff your kid just grew out of. Download depop to start selling. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:36]
Rabbi Mark Katz
Hi, and welcome to the New Books and Jewish Studies channel of the New Books Network podcast. I'm your host, Rabbi Mark Katz, and today I'm here with Dr. James Adam Redfield, Associate professor of Jewish Anthropology and Hermeneutics at St. Louis University and also visiting Associate professor of Jewish Civilization at University University of Chicago. And today we're talking about his book Adventures of Rava and the Talmud's Strange Tales and their readers. And so welcome officially to the podcast. And we begin the same way with all of our guests. Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you ultimately got interested in writing about what amounts to about two pages in the Talmud of basically the weirdest texts that exist in the rabbinic canon.
- [02:24]
Dr. James Adam Redfield
Thank you so much, Rabbi Katz, for inviting me. I'm looking forward to this conversation and thank you for reading. Yeah, I mean, what I do is sort of write in my job title there. I'm really interested in two broad areas of Jewish thought and culture, one of them anthropology, the way we think about the human being and situate human diversity categorically and theoretically, but also in terms of how we study this actual phenomenon called human diversity anthropology. And then the other area, which is what this book is more about, is hermeneutics. How we interpret texts, how we derive meaning from textual traditions, and how those things transmit themselves over time. I have a background in comparative literature as well as in cultural anthropology, and I came to the study of the Talmud relatively late. I was actually already getting a doctorate in anthropology when I sort of stumbled into a Talmud class and was immediately captivated and kind of ended up leaving that program, going and starting over and doing a different PhD in different school to get the philological training I needed. But I think I bring a lot of those sorts of questions that I sort of started thinking about in anthropology to the study of traditional Judaism, which is to say, how do we think about other people? How do they fit into our worldview? And also what is meaning? How do we construct meaning as a culture?
- [03:36]
Rabbi Mark Katz
So if you had to kind of encapsulate what your book is about in a paragraph or two, generally, what is this book about?
- [03:44]
Dr. James Adam Redfield
So, as you mentioned, you know, there are just a few foliar of the Talmud that contain very, very strange stories, mostly attributed to this one figure, but also other voices who join him. And I'm interested in the history of how these have been interpreted over time and what we can learn about the art of interpretation in Judaism itself from that. So how do we study techniques of interpretation and look at this as a kind of laboratory for those techniques precisely because they are so difficult, they are so puzzling, they are so in some ways transgressive, difficult to reconcile with a sacred canon. How have they then inspired readers and audiences to make meaning out of them? And how do they share and also differ in terms of those techniques over time?
- [04:30]
Rabbi Mark Katz
So let's go almost word by word in your title and try to understand a little bit more about what the book is about. So you talk about adventures of Rava and friends like who is Rava Barbarhama?
- [04:41]
Dr. James Adam Redfield
So Rabba Barbara is a sage from, from Babylonia who travels to the land of Israel frequently. And he's not listed officially by Sharira Ga' on in his catalog of these so called Nakhotei, the people who went down and carried traditions between the two regions. But he certainly fits the profile. One of these figures in the third century of a common era student of Rabbi Yochanan, the great Palestinian sage and Tiberius, but also a student in the Babylonian academies, although his institutional location is a little bit unclear. And he's often in fact portrayed as kind of an outsider Sort of shows up in the study house and doesn't necessarily fit in. And I think that's what's really interesting about him, about the way that he figures partly in halachic, but mainly in the Gothic traditions, which is as someone who is kind of an interloper, someone who's a traveler, someone who tells stories that are particularly bizarre, particularly grotesque or large in their proportions, sometimes mythical. And most of all, that he claims to have seen these things himself and experienced them himself with his own eyes, heard them with his own ears from witnesses. And so he comes to represent in the tradition the figure of someone who has that kind of knowledge to offer, the kind of knowledge that an ethnographer or a traveler sometimes claims to have to offer. And, you know, how does that get reconciled with the kind of, let's say, mainstream Talmudic discussions about, you know, the details of halakha, you know, what happened in the distant past and what can we know from Scripture? And it becomes kind of grist for the mill in a lot of ways, of the discussions that are already happening in the academies, but not always so easily integrated into those. And that's what I find interesting about the kind of tension between him and his audience that we find from the very beginning of the tradition.
- [06:29]
Rabbi Mark Katz
So give us an example of one of these, like, weird tales, and feel free to tell it in its fullness if you want.
- [06:37]
Dr. James Adam Redfield
Yes, thank you. And I would love if folks wanted to read the tales, just the tales themselves. There's a translation at the back of the book, and I've excerpted that on my website, so you can just, you know, read the stories themselves. There are 21 in total. As I say, most of them, but not all attributed to him. I'll give you an example of a story which dramatizes the kind of tension between Raba and his audience that I was referring to. He shows up and he's traveling in the desert with a group of people, some sort of caravan. And he's being shown these sorts of bones of the Jewish ancestors, perhaps, who are lying there in the desert. And there are other legends about these bones that his audience probably would have known. And the salient thing about them, as with many of the things that he reports, is that they're gigantic. So there are these bones that are so big that the Arab who is guiding him can ride underneath them with his spear held upright. And it still doesn't touch the backs of the knees of these supine figures. So that's how big they are. And as he is leaving, he takes A piece of the tallit that they're wearing, in which they are apparently buried. And he cuts it off to bring it with him, as a traveler will often try to do, sort of take a souvenir of some sort, right? And because of this, his camel is unable to proceed further. It's kind of frozen to the spot. And his guide says to him, did you take something from them? You should have it returned to them. And when he returns it, then the caravan can go on. So this is a story which has obviously familiar folkloric sorts of elements that we know from lots of tales. We can certainly think of lots of stories where the hero tries to take something from a realm that they're not supposed to. And this causes problems of various kinds. And you can see also that he has certain curiosity and perhaps even a desire to prove that all these stories that he's experienced are true by having some concrete evidence. But when he comes to the study house in Babylonian, he tells the tale, the reaction of his audience, his academic colleagues, is quite telling. They say, oh, yeah, tell us more about that little thread. How many threads and joints were there in it? And they try to connect it to a discussion in Tractate Malachot about how many there should be and how particularly this fringe is supposed to be made and basically dismiss the rest of the story and sort of say, well, you know, this was the kind of evidence that, in fact, you could have reported orally to us and given us some sort of legally relevant datum here. But instead, you've just told us this kind of preposterous tale and even lost the one piece of evidence that you could have contributed to the discussion. And so, you know, they kind of, you know, dismiss the whole thing, you know, out of hand, and it becomes kind of an interesting instance where you can see from very early on that people were trying to make sense out of these stories, and they were profoundly strange and sort of incongruous. And so they did so by almost reducing them to things that might seem totally counterintuitive to us. It's not at all about the things that seem to be the most prominent in the tale, but just about this little thing that they kind of have authority over. So this is just an example of the way that they're strangest kind of inspires interpreters to do creative things with them that may not fit into our own intuitions about how people interpret texts. And that's why I think it's important to kind of pay close attention to how they were actually interpreted, actually received. Over time. And then we really get a sense of the unbelievable diversity, you know, in Jewish interpretation that's brought to bear on the same set of sources.
- [10:15]
Rabbi Mark Katz
I love that tale so much. The very final postscript of that tale actually became, for me, at least, a sermon for Yizkor, which is the holiday. You know, during the holiday, it's when you remember somebody who died because he has forgotten the look. He actually doesn't have the answer to whether or not these fringes were three folded over or four folded over. And so I actually analogize that to the fact that often when we've got these relics of the past, we're not present enough in them to actually take from them what we need to. We try to take things we can't and miss, things that we should have taken, which kind of really lends itself to the fact that for generations, people. People have wrestled in very different ways with these stories. And one of the things you start out doing is you talk about kind of the problematic ways that people have read these texts. In a way, I would say more like simplistic ways. So you criticize certain schools of thought, reading these weird texts through an apocalyptic lens or just as tall tales. I'm wondering if you can talk about the pitfalls people have fallen in before you in the way that they've traditionally approached the way people have read these texts.
- [11:32]
Dr. James Adam Redfield
Yeah. Thank you. I mean, I think it goes back ultimately to the observation that, you know, because we have this strong desire as scholars to make sense of things, that's our job. Sometimes there's a confusion between, you know, our own categories for making sense of them and the ways that people actually made sense of them in the past. And obviously, the point of a scholarly category is to get us closer to their point of view, to understanding some sort of translation between our perspective and their perspective. And each of those categories can be useful. But my overall criticism is that they tend to kind of pigeonhole these texts by parking them in a particular genre or another and then creating a whole interpretation that's rather too comprehensive and sort of static of what they mean based on that genre category. So if they are tall tales, then we know how to interpret them, and we also know how the audiences would have interpreted them. They would have thought that they were, you know, silly, deliberately parodic, exaggerated, you know, something that wasn't taken seriously and therefore was not something that belonged in the Talmud. And we need to think about the antagonism between these tales and their broader canonical or institutional context. If we think that they're apocalyptic, on the other hand, well, then presumably they contain some hidden message about, you know, the end of time or the judgment that we're all going to visit, you know, experience. And so even, you know, these little stories about the dead of the desert that, that from a tall tale perspective might seem ridiculous, are actually profoundly important. And if they weren't received that way by the audience, then that's because the audience must have had some problem with the genre of apocalyptic literature. And so we project our own categories onto the readers and we try to see ourselves in them. And I think the goal of the book is, and this is part of a broader conversation in the study of ancient Jewish literature that I'm certainly echoing here, the goal of the book is to say let's sort of build a method from the ground up to really try to understand over time how specific readers actually interpreted specific texts and what kinds of categories they used, what kinds of frameworks they used. And some of the scholarly terms that we use, like genre can be helpful to build up that framework, but they shouldn't be a one size fits all kind of all encompassing explanation because that obscures really the internal heterogeneity of the source itself. You know, some parts might have been read in one way, some parts might have been read in another way. Some parts spoke to one audience, some to another. And so, you know, just as the text is very diverse and the readers are very diverse, so should our apparatus for understanding the history of their interpretation be properly differentiated? So that's kind of how I proceed, is just to kind of start from scratch and try to establish a model for explaining the reader text relationship that will work even if we're looking at quite different historical and cultural contexts.
- [14:35]
Rabbi Mark Katz
One thing that I admire about your approach is that for you, there's kind of no right way to read these texts. If you read them through the lens of how the original hearers might have read them, that's good. But so is, for example, reading them through the eyes of someone who lives in medieval Europe. I'm wondering if you can. So let's go through some of those different readings. And I'm wondering if you can talk about the way that someone in the Talmudic era would have read these texts. You speak about it at length, actually, in your book.
- [15:10]
Dr. James Adam Redfield
Yeah, thank you. Absolutely. I think that, you know, that that's the basic premise is that this is an interpretive history in which, you know, I'm really just trying to not assume anything about a hierarchy of readings. And so one of the things that I do is try to establish, on the one hand, a critical vocabulary for all of the common denominators of the process of reading or interpreting the text that any given reader has available to him or her. And then we can show over time how those common denominators were emphasized differently by different readers, how they may have taken priority, some may have taken priority over others, or how they may have fit together in different ways. So that's the first move. And then the other move is to understand that interpretive frameworks or hermeneutics do change over time in a given culture or given period. Certain ways of reading, in general reading all texts become particularly salient. So that we should also periodize and take into account the gaps between sort of dominant and less dominant interpretive frameworks as they influence readers general perspectives. So when you mentioned the Talmudic era, for instance, I would and actually do break that up into three sub eras and three different chapters. In the book. Chapters two, well, I guess really two through five, really all four chapters. And in the first one, chapter two, I think the works were largely integrated into a kind of midrashic conversation about questions of origins, questions of divine power, questions of how God operates in the world. And we can see this by studying the interplay between the verses that are quoted or the proof texts that are quoted within the stories themselves and the content of the stories. And if we look at other midrashim which surround those verses, but also crucially, the images and the stories that we can see that there was probably some kind of oral conversation that was happening, a conversation that was happening already in the early Amharic period, not even in the late Taoitic period, about what does it mean when we say that there is a shoot of flame that projects itself from the head of a wave? How do we interpret this image of divine power, divine manifestation? Well, it turns out there's a big archive of discussions about God's arsenal, the weapons that God has in battle against fill in the blanks, evil, the Egyptians, all sorts of other characters that populate that imagination. And when we find those, then in Rabba's stories, and crucially, and when we find verses and tarkomim that sort of cluster themselves around the stories, we can imagine how a reader who is familiar with that whole body of literature would have then navigated these particular stories and sort of put them in that broader context. So there they become part of a kind of body of almost extended scripture, kind of a revolution, what I call re revelation of Scripture through the interpretation of the stories. We actually get to some deeper meanings of scripture through looking at these images. Right. In a sense, it is kind of an esoteric oral tradition that I'm imagining. Whereas once they become kind of clustered together within the Talmud as a unified literary collection, it's much more likely that an audience would have interpreted them in some sense as a whole and thought about, okay, well, how do the parts fit together? What are the repetitions? What are the verbal echoes which connect certain passages? What are the images that recur?
- [18:54]
Rabbi Mark Katz
Right.
- [18:54]
Dr. James Adam Redfield
How do we think about them as kind of a literary unit? So I think that probably took place at a slightly later stage in the Amhoric period, around the time that they were finally compiled, probably somewhere in the mid 5th century, we could say, and they started to circulate as sort of a set piece, let's say, that was selected from a larger body of Rabba tales. By the time we get to late Talmud, by the time we get to sort of the stamaim and the period of the editors of the Babylonian Talmud and their students, then it seems to me that the tales were actually connected to the following passage of exegesis of stories about the end times, of interpretations of certain images like the Leviathan. And all of a sudden they were fit into sort of the Talmud, that's to say, the larger literary context in which they circulated. And there was a way of interpreting between the two. Adjacent passages were edited in the book as part one and part two of the overall collection. And so all of a sudden they became sort of like a sugiya or a sort of extended pair of sugiyot that worked together in a new way. Right. So again, I think we should remember how long it took to put the Talmud together. How many different types of interpretation were in circulation, what sorts of frameworks were ascendant in certain areas, Palestinian versus Babylonian, earlier versus later. But also just culturally, that there are certain. Within this collection, there are certain hooks that might point a reader more towards Scripture or that might point a reader more towards another rabbinic text. And it's the intertextual relationships between those hooks create, right, between texts that leads to a certain dynamic interpretive process. So that's what those chapters try to sketch out.
- [20:34]
Rabbi Mark Katz
So one of the things you do in the book is you pay a lot of attention to language, right? Repetition, alliteration, wordplay. Where do you fall on the question of orality versus writing of the Talmud? Because the way I read your book, and feel free to correct me, is that there's such attention to language that it felt like Almost something that could exist only in a written culture, since orality allows a bit more freedom. And I'm curious what you think about, you know, when did these texts actually get compiled versus written? And how important was the language early on versus later? I'm curious where you fall on that debate. My name is Percy Jackson.
- [21:19]
Dr. James Adam Redfield
Getting in trouble is like breathing for me. The hit series returns to Disney plus and Hulu. The danger the camp is under is greater than you can possibly imagine. For the key to our survival, three of you must quest to the Sea of Monsters. Let's go do the impossible. I'm not going to let some stupid monsters stand in my way. Percy Jackson and the Olympians New season now on Disney plus and Hulu. Learn more at disneyplus.com whatson Starting a.
- [21:49]
Rabbi Mark Katz
Business can seem like a daunting task.
- [21:51]
Dr. James Adam Redfield
Unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing, to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like.
- [22:04]
Rabbi Mark Katz
Mattel, Heinz and Allbirds continue to trust and use them.
- [22:07]
Dr. James Adam Redfield
With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into sign up for your $1 per month trial@shopify.com specialoffer yeah, that's an interesting question. I mean, in terms of the historical debate about the medium in which the Talmud was transmitted and when it shifted from morality to writing and how the two media continued to interact throughout medieval period. Right. That's a, you know, interesting question. It's not one that's particularly germane to my analyses. I allow for both media to influence our understanding of the text. There's numerous cases, and I kind of provide, I believe at one point a list of the places where I discuss those, that a scribal intervention in the textual tradition in itself is evidence for some kind of interpretive process that's happening or even could point back to an earlier oral confusion or a relationship between oral texts. So the written medium, aside from the fact that obviously eventually these end up in the Talmud and they're collected and then even excerpted in works like En Yaakov and other kind of agada compilations, Right. The written medium is important, regardless of whether we think it's early, late, primary, secondary, et cetera. On the other hand, and I would say much more strongly, the book makes a case that the kind of oral style, the orality, the pervasive manipulation of every element of spoken language probably influence their performance, their reception and their interpretation quite substantially throughout their history. But I would say even more clearly, within the Talmudic period, there is a poetry to these stories, the way that they are performed. And I have a whole section where I kind of try to imagine the Gemara as a sort of poetry. What it would mean to apply those sorts of tools to our analysis of the stories, not just thinking about them as narratives, but thinking about them as combinations of sound, stress and sense. And how then this could affect our reconstruction of how audiences might have experienced them. Because if you just look at the content alone, sure, they might seem, you know, bizarre, even disgusting. But if you listen to them and you hear how they're put together, they might actually convey a sense of wonder or of amazement or even kind of awe at, you know, even as those images kind of come forward. So I think the sound dimension and the whole poetics of the stories points, in my view, to at least a predominantly oral setting in which Talmudic audiences are engaging them.
- [24:48]
Rabbi Mark Katz
Now, one other piece that you unpack. This is a topic that's dear to my heart. Something I've been looking into a lot, just across Jewish history, is the interplay between these texts and the texts on the outside non Jewish world. Greek texts, Persian texts. I'm curious if you can give some examples, because you speak about it in depth in the book. Book about the interplay between these cultures, how Jews picked up on outside cultures, how they. I think you use the word Talmudized them, if you can. If you can explain what that means to our listeners. Great.
- [25:19]
Dr. James Adam Redfield
Yeah. Certainly in terms of the Persian context, which I don't work on, but there is already literature on. I would point you towards the works of Reuven Kippurwasser and his collaborators, who have written a lot of essays contextualizing some or many of these tales in light of Zoroastrianism and light of the ambient culture. And they really do reveal some striking parallels between particularly a section of Azoroastrian cosmology on one hand and a section of Rava's tales on the other, which again, cautions us against assuming that just because they're about strange phenomena or big animals, that they were necessarily folkloric tall tales. Right. If in the surrounding culture those are mythical beasts and they have profound meanings for the priesthood, for the broader public, presumably his stories are at least engaging in all of that. But for the cultural history in the Persian context, I would certainly point you towards that. My contribution, I hope, is more in terms of the Greek contextualization and trying to understand that actually, as Greek culture moved eastward in late antiquity, there were at least three literary genres in which images like those that Raba circulated were transmitted and given new coherence and ultimately were interpreted by audiences. So it's possible, at least, that when we find not only the content but also markers of the same genres or same literary forms in this Talmud collection, we could imagine that Jewish audiences in the east were also asking these sorts of questions, were also looking at them along similar lines. And particularly the phenomena that I focus on are, on the one hand, eyewitness observation, the claim to have some sort of empirical knowledge of the world, and on the other hand, the theme of fiction, of stories that are just stories that are made up, that are not true. And I notice that in these Greek genres, which took a kind of large body of sources, which are basically collections of wonders, monsters, paranormal phenomena, and turned them into stories in the genres of fiction, let's say the novel, the romance featuring Alexander, and ethnography, discussions of strange peoples and lands, I noticed that in the Greek tradition there tends to be a kind of emphasis on critical inquiry, on critical knowledge. So you're supposed to see things with your eyes, use your own reason, analyze them. Sure, you're going to be dealing with authority, you're going to be dealing with tradition. But there is very productive tension between the figure of someone like Rabba who goes and looks and sees and knows, and then the way that that might, might land right with their audience or with their culture, which might be more conservative. Whereas when rabbis, as I call it, Talmudize, that's to say not only retell but recast and edit and modify and comment on rabbis stories in light of their own tradition, I often find that they do precisely the opposite. Is the same idea that this individual was there with his own eyes, he saw, he thought, he knew, and then he was profoundly wrong. He was actually completely misguided because as we were discussing before, he asked the wrong question, he didn't even know what to look for, he didn't even remember what he should have asked. But also perhaps because he forgot that in a way, it's not what you know, it's not what you see, but it's how you make meaning, it's how you make sense of it that really matters. And it's the interpretive framework of Talmud, of Midrash and of rabbinic authority that ultimately grounds all of these observations in some sort of sense of cultural meaning. Right? And so I look at some stories also, by the way, in the second half of the composition, not in Rabba's stories, but in the, in the exegesis section, where it seems that the editors are trying to kind of use him as a cautionary tale or as a kind of set piece for what not to do what not to look for. Now, of course, they also preserve the memory of his stories. They preserve the stories themselves and they kept them alive for people to keep asking these questions. So they didn't censor them out of the canon. They left them available for us to think about these questions. And that's why I think they're particularly indicative of a possible confrontation between so called Greek wisdom or Greek culture in the east and Jewish culture.
- [29:44]
Rabbi Mark Katz
So let's talk now about the end of your book, where you start taking us through not the way that this book was read in antiquity, but rather the way this book was read in the medievals, in the early modern period. Tell us a little bit first about the different ways that people read, and then we can go one by one and talk about Peshat and Rashbom and allegory and. And the Maharshal and things like that. But first, let's kind of take us broadly through what is the flow of the way readers have traditionally read this over time.
- [30:20]
Dr. James Adam Redfield
Yeah, I mean, the final chapter there is really about the concept of allegory. And in a way, I think it's useful to return to the example you gave. You know, you quoted one of these stories in a sermon and you use as an example the kind of moral lesson about, you know, how do we know what's important, how do we know what to look for? And it's important to remember to ask the right questions. Right. When we look at the past. And so you saw it right away as an allegory in a sense, or a potential allegory. And the interpreters that I deal with in that chapter, as we transition from shot commentary to a more allegorical model, they all do that in their own. Each does that in its own way. So what's interesting is that you would think this would be a very intuitive approach to the stories, because one way to kind of get control of a text about, let's say, strange monsters is just to turn the strange monsters into representatives of the devil or sin or what it may be. Right. And of course, when you look at parallels in Christian authorities, much earlier, they were doing precisely that. Jewish authorities don't obviously do that in late antiquity. They don't really do that until the high Middle Ages, when allegory becomes much more generally a kind of interpretive model that they're using. So the first thing I do in the chapter is to trace a shift between shot and allegory and show that it is possible to kind of read them in a so called shot, that is to say, contextually grounded, more literal kind of model. So Rashbom, Rashi's grandson, takes the tales and he basically tries to ask the. The keep shot question, which is, why does it say what it says in the context that it says it? What is it trying to convey?
- [32:13]
Rabbi Mark Katz
Right.
- [32:13]
Dr. James Adam Redfield
And he comes up with, you know, certain degree of totally defensible interpretations. They're not comprehensive enough, they don't cover enough of the content, and he doesn't try to make them do that.
- [32:28]
Rabbi Mark Katz
One thing that's important to note is that what Rashbaum was doing in like returning to, let's call it the plain meaning of the text was actually revolutionary for its time. Before that, there was a lot more creative readings that people were doing, and this was something that was like a turn in, let's call it, you know, 12th century or so, like German scholarship. Why did Rashbaum start looking at these texts and look at the world through that pashat lens before I then ask the same question about the allegory for later commentators?
- [33:02]
Dr. James Adam Redfield
That's a very interesting question, or the question might be asked of Rashi as well. How does that movement come about? Sarah Yafit's work is incredibly helpful in this regard, and I rely on it a lot. I think one of the dimensions that we find in Rash Baum's engagement, at least that points to the broader answer, or a broader answer to your question, is that but when he looks at these tales, he has to preserve a certain amount of their actual content, their literal sense, right? There's an obligation to not read, so to speak, beyond the text. And why is that obligation considered to be so important? Because they're in the Talmud, right? They're part of this canonical tradition that's become sort of unified and is all of a sudden being tackled, you know, as a whole. Right? So Rashi's project is to kind of, on the one hand, take a line by line, you know, kind of commentary approach to all of Judaism. But on the other hand, the crucial backing of that is that he's doing it to all of Judaism. He's not skipping, he's not leaving out, he's not editing, and he's not creating a new code, a new redaction, right? A new addition. He's just trying to preserve as much as possible. And so that means that Rabbi Barochana has to be teaching something. He has to be conveying some kind of significant insights. But we can't just impose them on the text. We have to find them in what's been given to us. So it's not a narrow literalism, in a sense of one to one correlation between words and meanings or something like that. It's very much creative in its own way. And I hope I show in that section of the chapter that it's very creative. It involves a lot of dialogue and a lot of questions, and not is quite original. But you're right that then in the next period that there is a significant breakdown, at least, surrounding these tales of the Peshat model. And we start to find that already in earlier commentators, both Sephardi and Ashkenazi, so Ritva, for instance, already undertakes an allegorical interpretation of them. Rashba also does that. But then, as you say in Ashkenaz, you end up with a kind of an attempt to create a new and comprehensive allegorical interpretation which really fits them into the Talmudic canon as a whole. And that means that in a way, these authorities return to what is, as you say, a very creative and more classical kind of rabbinic approach of midrash. That is to say, their allegory, as I trace in the next section, is quite midrashic. And what it's doing is it is seeking hidden meanings in the code of these tales, but it's doing so by creating an intertextual web where they speak to other rabbinic and even biblical texts as if they all shared that language of coded symbols. And if they all speak the same allegorical language, and if those symbols resonate throughout Judaism, then when we find them here, it should be no surprise that they also bear those meanings. And we can make sense of the stories in that light, right? So if we find in the Talmud's collection of dreams that some of the same images recur, but the Dream Book gives us a decoder ring for telling us, aha, when you see this in a dream, this is what it means. And then Rabbital's a story about the same image. Now we know what he's getting at, right? Because he's speaking the language of dreams. And there are even other clues that he might be speaking about dreams in particular, because he says, I have seen, and in a dream you say, I have seen such and such, and et cetera, et cetera, right? So there's a whole methodology which midrashic allegory, which kind of first takes hold as a sort of moving beyond the Peshat model and trying to say, let's Rewrite these into the canon. Right. And this is again, in its own way, part of the phenomenon that I think is, is central to the birth of peshat, which is the very idea of rabbinic canon as a kind of unifying horizon of meaning as a whole within which we can interpret all parts as connected to one another. Which is already, of course, true with scripture, but now is true with rabbinic texts as well.
- [37:19]
Rabbi Mark Katz
Is, is there any emphasis or any, is there, is there any outside influence that's causing them to turn to allegory? I'm thinking, for example, of, you know, this sounds a little bit like an agodic version or the legendary version of kind of what the Tosaphot are doing with the, with, with law, that, you know, the Talmud is one unified whole and they're very influenced by scholastic scholars in the Christian world. That's causing them to do what they're doing.
- [37:51]
Dr. James Adam Redfield
100%. Yeah. I mean, all four layers of the so called pardes model of interpretation, right? There's the, say, shot commentary, esoteric commentary, midrashic commentary, and homiletic commentary. All four of those are paralleled in medieval Christian thinkers. And so there's surrounding the Song of Songs alone, there's lots of literature showing us how these traditions influenced one another in terms of the historical, broader context in which these particular stories were transmitted. I tend to focus more just on the limited cultural and pastoral context in which these particular interpreters are engaging them. We find enough material there to give us a sense of why they were looking for what they were looking for, who they were talking to and what they were doing with the material. So, for instance, when we move beyond the midrashic allegory and we get to a kind of more systematic, harmonistic, moralizing set of lessons that are drawn from them, all of a sudden we're in early modern Poland, Poland, Lithuania, and we're finding this authority who I read about a lot, Elkum Goetz, who is obsessed with demonology, and he's obsessed with the consequences of sin or unintentional transgressions for the possible conception of demons or the way in which this essentially folklore of cross cultural folklore comes home to roost within Jewish communities. And so he undertakes to interpret the stories as, you know, particular prescriptions for the way in which his students can combat their lustful urges, can tame their evil inclination, and can prevent demons from coming into the world. Right. And this is because the Lurianic Kabbalah has penetrated the culture so thoroughly by this point, and there is such a Strong investment in the whole notion of the Citra Akhra, the other side, the side of the demonic, that is so pervasive that it's quite natural for him to seek any clues that he can find to it in the stories and then draw those sorts of prescriptions out. So, you know, so I guess what I'm saying is simply that I do think that the internal Jewish cultural context is as much a key here as the broader, you know, Circumambian culture.
- [40:07]
Rabbi Mark Katz
It does lend an important question, which is something that circles your book as a whole, which is the question of authenticity. Right. If all of these texts are really dependent on the reader, and the reader is dependent on their cultural context, both their internal Jewish cultural context, and the outside cultural context of the non Jewish world, that's on them, and you can end up with readers as diverse as the people that you've spoken about in this podcast. You know, what does that actually say about, you know, the. Let's call it the quote, capital T truth of this text? Right. You know, is there. Is there a right way to read this text? Is the text just a blank slate to paint your present on? Is there anything innately tying all of these readings together? What do you think?
- [40:56]
Dr. James Adam Redfield
Absolutely, yeah. I mean, in a lot of ways, my interest in this project came out of biblical literature, studying biblical narrative and scholarship on biblical narrative. And of course, when it comes to scripture, you know, the stakes to these questions are, you know, extremely high. On the one hand, do we believe that it has some sort of innate meaning and it's just up to us to find it out? Or on the other hand, is it just a Rorschach law that we just project our own values onto? And so, you know, scholars have come up with different ways of threading this needle. And, you know, in the case of rabbinic literature, we have, in a way, I think, ducked the question to some extent, because we have our own methodology for coming up with kind of defensible interpretations of how other people looked at these texts in the past, mostly literary analysis and source criticism where we can kind of parse the text into layers. Look how it evolve over time, look at how it works together as a literary unit. These are all very valid and totally invaluable methods for thinking about how people made meaning from rabbinic texts. But it doesn't get at this question you're asking ultimately, which is, is there a text in this class? Is there actually something that it says at all? Right. Or are we even creating in our own minds the idea of what it says, and sort of reading past the words to project those beliefs and ideas onto it. And I don't have any kind of position on either or obviously, but what I do have is a commitment to letting readers speak for themselves as much as possible, to creating a framework, an interpretive framework for engaging their minds that exposes their creativity, their diversity, their conflicts, their relationships, and is not imposing our own worldview, our own categories onto them. Again, the kind of anthropological inspiration that stands behind this whole thing. So that's why I think we can say that, on the one hand, yes, as periods and cultures change, interpretive frameworks change, and what you ask a text for, what you look for, the questions you ask, they're going to change. The things that you consider to be relevant, valuable, the things you can even say, let alone things that can be counted as true, those change. On the other hand, these texts are about strange monsters. They have a particular storyteller who has a certain reputation. They have a certain order that changes, but also is eventually fixed and is accessible to all of us. They have words that sound in certain ways and not others, that connect to one another in certain ways and not others that engage us on all the levels that a text engages us. And those things also change, but in certain periods are held relatively constant, and everyone has access to them. And so every reader can actually do something with the text, even within the constraints of their own culture. Right. So I don't think it's a matter of their absolute truth or fiction at all, but I think it's just about appreciating how even within a culture, readers can differ from one another, can do different things, and that the reading process itself is just inherently somewhat chaotic. I don't think that we can create a methodology or vocabulary that's going to pin it down and just finally explain once and for all, you know, how meaning gets made or, you know, what. What is actually the right approach to a Talmudic source. Rather, just allow it to be a little bit chaotic, allow it to be a little bit messy, sort through all of that stuff later, and then come up with a model for explaining how it works after the fact. You know, that's kind of the best you can do in a way.
- [44:26]
Rabbi Mark Katz
It's like, you know, I run many synagogue book groups, and I walk away from that book group understanding the people in the book group more than I understand the book, often after I've had a discussion with them. Now I really get to know them through the way they read that book.
- [44:42]
Dr. James Adam Redfield
And that's to be the joy of doing what we do is that you really can be sitting in the library and you can be pouring over text and you feel like you are having a conversation with real live people who are right there. And of course, that's your own projection. That's your own fantasy. Right. But then we have to. Where the disciplinary aspect comes in, where the rigor comes in, is to say, well, is it just my fantasy? Right. Is there anything here? What kind of relationship is being established with this person in the past? And through what lens am I creating that? And what kind of relationship do I want to have? Yes, it is what you bring to it. Right. But it forces you to reflect on how what you bring to it creates the relationship.
- [45:25]
Rabbi Mark Katz
So we always end the same way, which is. Tell us about your next project. What are you working on now? Now?
- [45:31]
Dr. James Adam Redfield
Okay, so I'm going back to anthropology. And in a way, I'm actually. My next project is also a previous project because I'm going to turn my dissertation into a book, which I didn't do for this. I wrote a dissertation, I published some sections of it, and then I kind of left it and I worked on this. So I'm going to return to that. But it's not going to be just a sort of polished up version. It's really extensively overhauled and rethought in light of developments in the field since then. And also just the questions that have changed for me through teaching and reading. It's about the rabbis as anthropologists. It's basically a study of the way in which, in Tanedic particularly, but also in early Amharic Halakha, Jewish law in the land of Israel, the rabbis studied Jewish customs because, of course, in their broader Jewish culture, people were doing all kinds of things. And some of them entered rabbinic law as totally kosher or even normative practices. And others were considered to be, you know, radically transgressive, were forbidden. But there was a large number of them that were kind of in the middle, that could be allowed in certain contexts that were, you know, legitimate in certain regions. And I'm sure as a rabbi, you. You understand the ways that you have to thread another kind of needle here in dealing with actual people in their real lives. And, you know, how do you navigate this gap between your theory of what they should do and what they're actually doing? Right. So how did the rabbis do that in their legislation? And what kind of engagement between rabbis and Jews does the inscription of these Jewish customs in halacha categories indicate? Right. What does it teach us about the way that the two sides continue to have this kind of sometimes antagonistic, but ultimately very productive dialogue. And what I'm trying to get at here is how the rabbis draw the line between what we call culture and what we call religion. And this gets at the sort of broader question of do the rabbis have a religion? Do they believe in a religion in the sense that scholars use the term? Right. Some people say, no, it's all culture. Some people say, of course, they're religious authorities and everything else that doesn't have to do with God. That's just culture. Right? Well, I don't think it's quite that simple. I think that actually, rabbinic Judaism is a kind of attempt to think about which areas of cultural life are religiously salient and which can be left alone and which need to be be gotten rid of entirely because they have either a religious or cultural, you know, problem with them. And so it's a study of different halakhic categories in their engagement with these customs, where those lines get drawn, parsed, and contested over time.
- [47:59]
Rabbi Mark Katz
I love it. And, you know, small world. We have a lot in common. We've talked about it even before we started recording. But I've got two chapters on that topic in my latest book, Yohanan's Gamble, which I can send to you if you want to say.
- [48:12]
Dr. James Adam Redfield
I would love that. Thank you.
- [48:14]
Rabbi Mark Katz
So again, we've got Dr. James Adam Redfield, and the book is Adventures of Rava and the Talmud, Strange Tales and their Readers. Thank you for joining us.
- [48:25]
Dr. James Adam Redfield
Thank you so much. Rabbi Cast. It was a great conversation. And, Doug, here we have the Limu emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
- [49:00]
Rabbi Mark Katz
Cut the camera.
- [49:01]
Dr. James Adam Redfield
They see us. Only pay for what you need at Liberty Mutual, Comrade. Unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.