Author’s Musings: Bringing Down the Temple House

Author’s Musings
Bringing Down the Temple House: Engendering Tractate Yoma (Brandeis University Press)
Marjorie Lehman
Professor and Chair of Rabbinic Literatures and Cultures
Jewish Theological Seminary of America

In the fall of 2019, I left home to write about home. A fellowship at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania on “The Jewish Home: Dwelling on the Domestic, the Familial, and the Lived-In,” offered me the opportunity to move to Philadelphia, pushing household responsibilities aside to focus on completing my monograph. Ironically, my project was a feminist approach to the study of one tractate of the Babylonian Talmud (tractate Yoma) and its conceptualization of “house” (bayit).

This project began with my work on the Feminist Commentary of the Babylonian Talmud spearheaded by Tal Ilan of Freie Universität Berlin. She created a community of feminist scholars from across the globe who were committed to employing feminist methodologies in their study of Talmudic texts. The endeavor was brilliant: to work collaboratively on a series of commentaries using approaches long ignored in the study of Bavli tractates. Shared goals and shared spaces created a community where each of us inspired the other. Together, we were making inroads in moving feminist approaches into the mainstream of Talmudic scholarship, specifically with regard to the genre of writing Talmudic commentary. For generations, this genre had given voice to men alone and that includes the choice to comment on one part of a sugya as opposed to another. The idea of a feminist commentary meant that each of us would mine our assigned tractates for the passages that we thought would benefit from feminist analysis. At times, we would reconsider the commentaries that preceded us, but the freedom was ours to think about features of sugyot that were overlooked. Workshops and summer collaborations over the years that generated initial articles, first at Freie Universität and then at the Taube Center for Jewish Studies at Stanford University and the Katz Center at the University of Pennsylvania, sustained the conversation and made us all better scholars from listening to and studying with one another.

At some point while writing my commentary, I realized that a commentary-style book would not bring to the fore the redactional threads running through the tractate that I had discovered in my focus on tractate Yoma. A commentary-style meant that I would author many distinct comments ad locum without relying on the strength of the monograph, which itself required a narrative thread. Admittedly, it was thinking about my project as a feminist commentary at an early stage that led me to find points of cohesion in the overall tractate. It was this exercise that enabled me to see that some Babylonian tractates, like Yoma, possessed redactional arcs. There were messages that the tractate as a whole revealed, and, most excitingly, these were narrative threads that surfaced because of my focus on places where gender played a role.

Bavli Yoma’s focus on the Temple house set the stage. Rather than commenting on what Bavli Yoma said about the development of the Yom Kippur rite, a feminist investigation of this tractate captured the issues that arise when thinking about houses and the people who inhabit them. This meant considering everything from male priests serving in the Temple house to members of everyday households. Through the choices the redactors of this tractate made regarding their sources, I was able to see Yoma as a literary unit that reflected what it means to be housed in Babylonia without the Temple house. More to the point, I noticed that the rabbis’ exploration of their relationship to the Temple house was not only connected to the rabbinic association between “wife” and “house,” already present in the first mishnah of the tractate, but also to all that the household conjures--marriage, progeny, kinship, domesticity, and sexuality (including sexual purity laws). The relationships commonly associated with houses, including that of husband-wife (chapter one), father-son (chapter two), mother-son (chapters three, four, and five), and brother-brother (chapter five) functioned as literary tropes running through the tractate. While serving in the Temple, the priests emerged as a distinct group from the rabbis with respect to marriage, bodily purity, sexuality, Torah study (or the lack thereof), domestic responsibilities, and lineage.

The narrative thread that emerged in my analysis of Bavli Yoma was one of rabbis struggling with their relationship to the Temple house and the priesthood as they thought about the daily household where food and water and survival were always hanging in the balance. References to the Avodah (Temple service) in Bavli Yoma presented the Temple as a majestic space requiring all sorts of valued resources to make it run—water, animals, gold implements. This material was then pitted against the rabbinic version of Yom Kippur where the absence of such resources came to light via a discussion of the rite of innui (self-denial). In the end, it was not Torah study that saved the day. Rather, as Bavli Yoma draws to a close we are left with the idea that only progeny ensure survival. Unexpectedly, the final redactors embrace lineage through the male seed, which had been the focus of their critique of the priesthood in earlier chapters of the tractate. While the rabbis expressed discomfort with a priestly bloodline in these earlier chapters, hoping that the acquisition of Torah knowledge would be available to all, they end the tractate (chapter 8) by returning to the need to procreate for the survival of the Jewish people.

While I make no claims that my observations of the rabbis’ attitude toward the priests in Bavli Yoma can be found throughout the Bavli or throughout rabbinic literature, and I do not argue that there is only one thread in the tractate, I remain surprised by the ways that traditional Yom Kippur liturgy includes a recitation of rabbinic sources that describe the Yom Kippur rite in the Temple, effectively glorifying it. The experience (now turned into a prayer experience) is supposed to return us to the precincts of the Temple and the role of the high priest, even if only in our imaginations. But does Bavli Yoma not summon us to think more about what was wrong with the Temple—its patriarchal exclusivity, its need for scarce resources, its reliance on a male bloodline, as well as its absence of women. Should we keep referring to it, venerating it without critique? Yoma calls into question the feasibility of rebuilding institutions that are not ecologically sustainable and that continue to support hierarchical and patriarchal leadership frameworks. In fact, when the rabbis consider the character of the rabbinic Yom Kippur, they juxtapose the bounty of the Temple (chapters 1-7), with the scarcity and fragility that define daily life in the household (chapter 8). Self-denial on Yom Kippur is required of men and women, as the rabbis argue in the final chapter of tractate Yoma. In fact, this Yom Kippur bears no resemblance to and no sense of continuity with the Yom Kippur once performed by the priests in the Temple. The very nature of the rabbinic Yom Kippur is defined by what can occur to us all and the idea that together we can find a degree of control through our own bodies, surviving, despite lack.

I could not have known when I began this project that everything about home and household would be called into question in the wake of a pandemic in March of 2020. Who would have thought when I embarked on this project that I would be locked down at home, leaving Philadelphia in search of a modicum of safety and protection in this familiar space? If home evokes the familiar, there was nothing about the final months of writing this book that felt familiar. Home life, Jewish life, family life, and work life all changed in an instant. While writing about the gold-covered implements and sacrificial knives that were part of a well-orchestrated Temple rite detailed in Yoma, I could hear New Yorkers banging on their pots and pans at 7pm each night from their balconies and windows. I wrote about the Temple destruction and injurious treatments of priests and women while listening to people march down my block in NYC in the wake of the horrible murder of George Floyd. Rioting and curfews were a fact of home-life by early June of 2020 giving further reason to remain locked down. And as I spoke to my editor on January 6th of 2021, brainstorming titles for this book, finally seeing the project come to an end, the very symbol of the United States as a home to democracy seemed to be collapsing. In the months since, home continues to unravel amid political strains on my personal sense of freedom. My at-homeness in the United States feels like it is slipping away. Like the rabbis I live with a sense of loss. I am a woman wondering when home will feel like home again.  

This all makes me wonder whether tractate Yoma was right to conceive of a Yom Kippur rite defined by self-denial that bore no connection to the Temple service orchestrated by the priesthood. Maybe it encourages us to peacefully, and with an open-mind developed via teaching and learning, “bring down” the houses that are problematic. The hope is to construct something better, stronger, safer, and more equitable (although I readily admit that rabbinic Judaism generated its own patriarchal framework). As Gaston Bachelard has argued, the house is “one of the greatest powers of integration” not only for our thoughts and memories, but also for our dreams. This book, Bringing Down the Temple House: Engendering Tractate Yoma, continues to be a reminder to me of the need to stare into the fragility that is there in the crevices of every house and continue to believe that, like the rabbis in their relationship to the Temple, we can commit ourselves to thinking about ways to evaluate and reevaluate what is worth preserving and what needs to be replaced by something better. One day, I hope all of our houses will feel familiar because they uphold the core values central to feeling human.