The Disruption of Illness in Rabbinic Literature: Rabbinic Masculinity, Networks of Care, and Communal Borderlines

• In Event: Kinship and Networks in Antiquity

Abstract

This paper draws on disability studies to examine the imagined impact of illness on rabbinic identity and masculinity in late antique rabbinic literature. The medical sociologist Mike Bury developed the concept of “biographical disruption” arguing that illness, especially chronic and acute illnesses, is a “disruptive event” or “critical situation” where “the structures of every day life, its taken for granted features, and the stock of knowledge upon which they rest is profoundly disrupted.” Part of this disruption is the way that illness may reconfigure a person’s social relationships: as a person seeks care and support, they may be forced to interact with new persons and institutions and, with the new caretaking demands, their existing relationships may also change. Disability studies theorists have shown how this disruption is not a universal experince, but it is culturally specific. In fact, the degree of biographical disruption experienced might be seen as an indicator for the extent of a specific culture’s expectations around ablebodiedness.
Drawing on these theoretical frameworks, this paper examines a series of stories in rabbinic literature that describe rabbinic experiences with illness and seeking medical care. These stories depict the illness as a potentially “critical situation.” The rabbis seek care from non-Jewish healers, who enter into their homes, bringing in non-Jewish, potentially transgressive body practices into the rabbinic community. The rabbis are then confronted with choosing whether to seek healing through actions that—but for the extenuating circumstances— would violate rabbinic law. And, in each of these stories, it is family members who are torn apart by the question of how to proceed and the acceptable lengths one may take in seeking healing. Through my analysis, I will show that in Palestinian rabbinic texts there is a strand of rabbinic masculinity that both idealizes a form of self-regulation and control of the body and begins to fracture in the face of illness. I argue that these stories depict a self-critical reflection on the consequences of this ascetic ideal, especially in how it may warp the ability to empathize with others in physical pain and prevent one from attending to their responsibility to provide care for others.

Author

• Shulamit Shinnar, Florida State University