Mira Balberg, Fractured Tablets: Forgetfulness and Fallibility in Late Ancient Rabbinic Culture, Oakland: University of California Press, 2023, viii+278 pages, open access
The Deuteronomist (Deut 8:7-12) offers the Israelites the following admonishment:
“For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land [...] a land where you may eat bread without poverty (miskenût) [...] You shall eat your fill and bless the LORD your God for the good land that he has given you. Take care that you do not forget the LORD your God [...] when you have eaten your fill [...] then your heart will become exalted and you shall forget the LORD your God.”
The Deuteronomist is holding out God’s gifts of the land and its bounty as both a blessing and a curse: if the Israelites make sure to bless God when they are satisfied, that is good; but they need to take care that all of this goodness does not cause their “heart” to be “exalted” and make sure that they do not “forget the Lord.” Twice in this small pericope the Deuteronomist’s Moses admonishes the Israelites that they not “forget the Lord your God,” opposing this forgetfulness with the blessing to which God is entitled.
In the Mishnah (m. Ber. 8:7), eating, forgetting and blessing are juxtaposed as well, but this time the consequences of forgetting are significantly diminished:
He who ate, and forgot, and did not bless.
The House of Shammai say: He should return to his place and bless.
And the House of Hillel say: he should bless where he remembers.
Until when may he bless?
Until the food in his intestines is digested.
The Mishnah is offering an amelioration of the Deuteronomist’s admonishment: “You shall eat your fill and bless the LORD your God” is the source for the rabbinic obligation to bless after meals, and the rule that the blessing may be said until the food is digested corresponds to the Deuteronomist’s fullness. But where the Deuteronomist offers anger and warnings, the Mishnah offers gentle parenting, suggesting two differing paths to rectifying this forgetfulness.
How can we explain the shift from the Deuteronomist’s warnings “do not forget” to the Mishnah’s calm and collected treatment of forgetfulness? We might be tempted to attribute the difference to the genre of each work — the Mishnah is a practical manual with little pathos, and Deuteronomy is emotional and exhortatory. Conversely, perhaps the Mishnah is offering a quick fix to the problem the Deuteronomist is warning about, to avoid the harshness of the forgetfulness in Deuteronomy. Mira Balberg, however, points to the shifting attitudes towards forgetfulness and forgetting as a pivotal moment in the history of the rabbinic movement, and in Fractured Tablets she offers a fresh new reading of the rabbinic construction of forgetting. The rabbis shaped their subject as a fallible and often confused human being, bumbling around the world, trying to observe God’s commandments. Sadly, they are foiled by the intellectual limitations of their humanity—wich means the rabbis can offer him salvation in the image of the rabbinic movement itself. Balberg explains that at the same time that the rabbis made the cognitive demands of the Torah ever more complicated, they made confusion and forgetfulness an inseparable and totally understandable part of that same Torah itself. This is true, Balberg shows, both for observing the commandments of the complex and all-encompassing rabbinic Torah, and for retaining them in memory.
We are all victims of cognitive scientists working for corporations: some create software that is intended to help us work better; others create software that is intended to siphon off our attention and sell it to advertisers; still others create software to help us combat these assaults and help up rest. Furthermore, as internet searches get closer and closer to our own brains — Balberg and I are both of the generation that wrote high school papers without Google — we farm out more and more of our memories to the internet. I have no idea what my mother’s cellphone number is anymore, I couldn’t tell you any of my passwords, I have no idea what I will be doing three hours from now, but I know that every event in my calendar will beep with sufficient time to prepare. It is a small wonder we are all fascinated with cognition. Thus Balberg’s book is part of a cultural moment of increased critical reflection on cognition and memory, which includes — for antiquity — Jamie Kreiner’s The Wandering Mind (Norton) and her lucid translation of John Cassian, How to Focus: A Monastic Guide for an Age of Distraction (Princeton). Balberg spent serious time studying cognition as a Mellon New Directions fellow, and this has proved its worth in Fractured Tablets. Studies of ancient concentration and memory, once the province of book historians, are now farmed for insight on ways in which we can escape doom scrolling, train our minds and think our way to a better life.
In an emotionally fraught chapter of his letter to the Romans (7:6-12), Paul explains to his audience:
I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.
I had always read these verses as a frustration with the human condition: the body wants what it wants, the mind is not powerful enough to overcome the body’s desires, sin dwells within the body forcing it to do things which the mind does not desire, and actions end up being performed that the person is not satisfied with. But thinking about the sources in Fractured Tablets, Paul’s problem begins to sound much like the one the rabbis set out to solve: I am confused and bumbling, there are too many cognitive demands on me, I do not know which action to perform when and whether or not this apple is impure or heave-offering or idolatrous and really all I want is a snack. I want what is right, but my mind is being held captive by too many simultaneous demands and “I do not understand my own actions.”
While Paul needed the death of Christ and the end of the law to solve his problems, Balberg’s rabbis embrace the confusion. It is all fine, they say, people forget things, they get mixed up sometimes, it is the will to do what is right — and the willingness to consult rabbis about it — that counts. “The combination of cognitive omissions [...] with overall commitment [...] creates, I propose, a new model of Jewish piety and observance,” which centers on “determination to scrutinize and correct one’s imperfect performance” (32). The solution to forgetting observances is to adhere to rabbinic guidance and to want to do right even as a person’s feeble mind and limbs fail her — and the solution to forgetting Torah is that the rabbinic movement has the knowledge to reconstruct any morsel of forgotten Torah, such that collectively, no knowledge is lost.
The first four chapters of Fractured Tablets are about different kinds of cognitive failures discussed in early Rabbinic (=Tannaitic) literature, mostly Mishnah and Tosefta, and the ways to repair them. Chapter 3, “a Partial Eclipse of the Mind,” is an especially astute and innovative discussion of the rabbinic concept of העלם, based on Leviticus’s description of different sins as resulting from a matter which is נעלם, “concealed.” The final two chapters are about the retention of Torah knowledge, and the tradition that the Torah itself will be forgotten, respectively. In that latter chapter, Balberg reconstructs the second-temple era model of Ezra recreating and reconstructing the Torah, against which the rabbinic material about a non-cataclysmic, indeed almost regular and periodical, forgetting of the Torah, is best understood. It is a grounded and well-argued comparative and archaeological study. Balberg is able to weave all of these studies together deftly into a comprehensive theory of forgetting in early rabbinic literature, in which the rabbinic adherent is constructed as a forgetful and forgetting subject and the rabbinic hivemind is held out as his salvation.
Fractured Tablets is, as the blurb on the back of the book says, “lucidly written, lively and fun to read.” It is also an incredibly patient and pedagogically astute commentary on tens of rabbinic sources. Follow the index to have Balberg explain your favorite rabbinic purity texts to you and your students. Balberg’s work, however, also invests common rabbinic tropes with new meaning and significance, offering students of the humanities new opportunities to actually engage with them. For example, Balberg tells us to stop trying to underplay the significance of rabbinic logic-games about sex and incest.
“Readers of rabbinic texts,” says Balberg at the end of a chapter full of men sleeping with the wrong women, holy food being eaten by the wrong people, and babies being erroneously circumcised, “are trained not to see rabbinic debates on blatant sexual topics [...] as ‘really’ sexual, but only as mechanical treatments of abstract halakhic principles [...] I am also trained this way.” But then, rather than reassuring us that there is no there there, Balberg devotes the end of the chapter to thinking why this is so.
Why are transgression and sex good examples for teaching Torah? Balberg offers two possibilities. The first is that they are memorable. And indeed they are: one of the texts she chooses to illustrate her point is a conversation between three rabbis about how many sin offerings a man should bring if he slept, in one episode of “concealment,” with two of his aunts and his sister (m. Kar. 3:7), a question solved by an analogy with a man who sleeps with his five menstruating wives one after another. In polite company this is not appropriate conversation, but internet analytics prove that in the so-called privacy of our combined minds/devices we are all fascinated by similar scenarios — without the veneer of sin-offerings. The conversation happens on the way to Emmaus, where the senior rabbi, Gamaliel, is planning to buy an animal to serve at his son’s wedding, and Balberg’s idea that these are games, and a kind of playful conversation, might explain why this would have been appropriate conversation for these people at this time. They were joke-learning on the way to do some wedding shopping.
The second, says Balberg, is that discussing transgression is an opportunity to imagine the world outside of the Torah, to somehow disconnect from the matrix of halakha and play with a reality in which nothing is forbidden. What would it be like to inhabit a world in which “all things are lawful” as Paul says to his Corinthians (1 Cor 6:12)? The “concealment” opens a door to this bizzarro-world. Forgetfulness is like a dream: what if, thinks the rabbinic adherent, I one day open my mouth and find that I have inserted a cheeseburger into it?
I would like to follow Balberg’s steps — that there is something revealing in these conversations about forgetfulness — and suggest a third reason. Quantifying sins is central to rabbinic halakha, rooted in a much older metaphor of sin as a form of debt. Each liability (hov) adds on to others, and it is important for the rabbinic disciple to know which actions exactly compound this debt, how they are atoned for, and when. As rabbinic Torah became more and more robust and detailed, the scholarly acumen in finding multiple transgressions inherent in single actions became more vital for understanding and controlling it. It is also a memory aid, and definitely a form of play, but also a way to display mastery over the many ways in which rabbinic halakha overlaps with the visible world but does not entirely correspond to it: one sexual act embodies many transgressions, one furrow of one plow can compound a person’s debt so much more than another furrow. Fractured Tablets and its emphasis on rabbinic cognitive failures sets the stage for a much-needed reengagement with rabbinic notions of sin and atonement, ideas which formed the shared discourse both of the early Christian communities near which rabbis lived, and the rabbis themselves.
Sin as debt also features, I think, in a story Balberg discusses at the end of chapter 2, “remembering forgetfulness.” The Mishnah (m. Shab. 1:3) rules that “reading by candlelight” on the Sabbath is forbidden, and the Tosefta tells a story about that rule (t. Shab. 1:13):
Rabbi Ishmael said, “One time I was reading by candlelight and I wanted to tilt [the lamp]. I then said, ‘how great are the words of the Sages, who said that we do not read by candlelight on Sabbath eve.’
Rabbi Nathan said: he really [ודאי] tilted it, and it is written on his tablet [פנקסו]: ‘Ishmael ben Elisha tilted the lamp on the Sabbath, when the temple is rebuilt he will bring a sin offering.’”
Rabbi Ishmael decided that the rabbinic rule meant to prevent forgetting did not apply to him, but then almost forgot and veered dangerously close to an action that was tantamount to lighting a fire on the sabbath. Rabbi Nathan, using the exegetical term ודאי, “really,” for the story, says that Ishmael did in fact tilt the lamp and transgress. This is an unwitting sin, and Ishmael in this telling was required to offer a sin offering to atone for it. However, there was no temple. So his debt was recorded “in his tablet.” Balberg finds it interesting that Ishmael uses another memory-aid, the pinax or writing tablet, to help him record this obligation. A lapse of one kind of memory is repaired with a fortification of another kind of memory. But the pinax here is not simply the ancient equivalent of the iPhone notes app or the back of an envelope. It is a tool of the trade of the shopkeeper, holding the day’s balances (m. Shev. 7:1). Whether or not this pinax was an earthly tablet on which Ishmael himself wrote (as both talmuds believe) or a heavenly one (suggested to Balberg in a private communication by Avigail Manekin–Bamberger [p. 94n100], following e.g. Sifra Aharei 8:5, y. Ned. 1:1, 36d, Gen Rab. 81:1-2) — it is clear that the sin-offering it records is a debt. If Ishmael wrote down his debt himself, this practice may have served to mitigate heavenly attempts to collect on it: recording it in the ledger both acknowledges the existence of a debt and specifies a time for its repayment — when the temple is rebuilt. If God happens to want the offering, God knows how to get it. Ishmael’s admission and recording of guilt are then not only a “commitment to remember,” but a way of turning a dismembered feeling of personal dissatisfaction into a concrete and manageable obligation — and then taking the obligation and laying it at God’s feet, less like an offering and more of a challenge. He is saying: The sin offering is on the books, God, just come and pick it up.
Fractured Tablets is a great achievement of transatlantic scholarship, combining the heritage of disparate intellectual communities into an original and surprising reformulation of the rabbinic subject. In Fractured Tablets, as in Balberg’s other works, Hebrew-language scholarship is all over the footnotes. Pericopae from Tannaitic works which American scholars tend to overlook, such as the fragmentary Mekhilta to Deuteronomy and Sifre Zutta Numbers, receive a thorough philological and conceptual treatment — in English. No less important, Balberg’s oeuvre offers a way into contemporary humanities scholarship for students of the rabbinic tradition. Balberg shows us that while the Deuteronomist fears that God might be forgotten in the vicissitudes of life, the rabbinic adherent is, through forgetting his own obligations, able to find a way to God. Perhaps this is how we should understand the words of the non-mishnah appended to the end of Mishnah Makkot (3:16): “the Holy one wanted to justify Israel, therefore he multiplied Torah and commandments for them”: the rabbis believed that being subject to the thick network of almost impossible-to-manage cognitive obligations is itself a path to salvation.