The Bathing Beauty and the Strapping Bandit: A Queer Talmud Meet Cute

• In Event: Reading Different Genres for Gender

Abstract

The feminist and queer theorist Sarah Ahmed says, “queer happens precisely . . . when bodies meet that would be kept apart if we followed the lines given to us.” (QUEER PHENOMENOLOGY, 124) This is most assuredly what happens in the Talmudic story of Reish Lakish and Rabbi Yochanan found in MASEKHET BAVA METZIA in the Babylonian Talmud. This story of how lifelong Torah partners and friends meet is one that is rife with suggestion, tension, and humor. I analyze this passage from the Talmud by creating what Biblical scholar Gillian Townsley calls a “marginal zone of critical inquiry.” (THE STRAIGHT MIND IN CORINTH, 3) We are presented with the leader of the bandits, a most unlikely Torah scholar, and a young, beardless beauty bathing in the Jordan river. Normally, these are two bodies that would have been kept apart because of the societal roles that had been assigned to them. But because of a chance meeting we end up with a queer story. This story does not follow the assigned lines; it offers us oblique angles and lines which stray from normativity. I am Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick’s “perverse reader” (TENDENCIES, 4) as I explore this Talmudic text with a Queer theory lens. Phenomenologically this story is about the experience of meeting, connecting to, finding, loving, arguing with, despairing over, and grieving for your life partner. Ahmed describes queering phenomenology as “offer[ing] a different ‘slant’ to the concept of orientation itself.” (QUEER PHENOMENOLOGY, LOC 95) Through queering this Talmudic story of Reish Lakish and Rabbi Yochanan I will explore these different orientations. Sedgwick helps us to understand by broadening the category “’queer’ [which can] refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances, and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.” (TENDENCIES, 8) Along with Ahmed, Townsley, and Sedgewick, I explore this lifelong relationship between Reish Lakish and Rabbi Yochanan through a Queer lens with the additional theorists Foucault, Butler, Edelman, and Munoz.

Author

• Laura Fisher, Gratz College