Redeeming Yevamot Hermeneutically

I have been interested in learning Gemara since I took a Talmud class in college in the 1980s. I tried to learn daf yomi on my own, reading Nazir on my own in the last cycle and then starting Berachot when the new cycle began, but my daf yomi journey only successfully took off during the pandemic when I began learning Gemara in the South Philadelphia Shtiebel class led by Rabbanit Dasi Fruchter, in the middle of Masechet Shabbat. She is a great teacher and her shiur has been a wonderful experience. She welcomes questions, wrestling with problems in the text, and even my attempts to wring theological meaning out of dry halachic sections. She brings a feminist lens to the text, not hesitating to talk about problematic sections that do not treat women, lgbt folk, non-Jews, slaves, and others well.  Nevertheless, prior to Yevamot, I enjoyed the learning the various tractates. Eruvin was meaningful to me in the pandemic, living as I do two blocks south of the northern border of the Center City Eruv, because at a time when we were shut out of sacred buildings, it made my neighborhood feel like a sacred enclosure. I enjoyed the various festival tractates in Seder Moed, being intrigued in particular by the Kohen Gadol’s learning as he stayed up on the night of Yom Kippur. Chagigah’s mystical speculations and stories fed my soul. But as a gay man committed to full equality for women, Yevamot has been very challenging, apart from the sugya on conversion.

 

It is a central tenet of Judaism that the Torah contains G!d’s revelation to the Jewish people (and, at least to a certain extent through the Noachide laws, all of humankind) in the form of law to be followed in serving G!d and living a full human life as one made in the image and likeness of G!d (Gen. 1:26-27). This law is seen an expression of G!d’s love for the Jewish people, a gift for which G!d is praised twice a day in the blessing immediately before the recitation of the Shema. There are many differing views between movements about what exactly Torah means – and even about what constitutes the content, since Karaite Judaism holds only the Tanach as the authoritative revelations, whereas Rabbinic Judaism accepts the Talmud as the record of the Oral Law, also part of the divine revelation. As is always the case with scripture in any text-based religious tradition, the scripture must be interpreted. Judaism has a very long and rich tradition of interpretive commentary – indeed, the Mishnah itself is a systematic codification of the laws found in the Written Torah together with teachings of the Oral Torah, and the Gemara, also part of the Oral Torah, is the interpretive commentary on the Mishnah, often pulling psukim, or verses, from the Tanach (and especially the Five Books) to back up a position, with frequent discussion of the interpretive principles used to determine the halacha.

 

Discussions of interpretation of the Torah are central to the halachic deliberations of the Gemara. Indeed, these discussions occur in the first sections of Gemara in Yevamot. On Yevamot 4a, Rabbi Elazar gives verses from the Psalms to justify the principle of smuchim, of juxtaposition, as an interpretive principle, from which one can derive halacha – and Rav Yosef states that while Rabbi Yehuda rejects this principle for the most part, he does accept it when interpretations are derived from juxtaposition in Deuteronomy, with a lengthy discussion of why Deuteronomy is the exception. Interpretive principles are so important that the section of Torah study which precedes Psukei d’Zimra in Shacharit concludes with the recitation of the baraita containing Rabbi Yishmael’s thirteen interpretive principles.

 

Rabbi Yishmael’s principles involve logical ways to derive halachic interpretations from the words of the Torah. But I believe we can also ask if there an overarching interpretive principle that speaks to the purpose of the Torah. There is a beautiful text of the Kedushat Levi, the Berditchever Rebbe, quoting his teacher Rebbe Dov Ber, the Maggid of Mezeritch, that speaks to exactly this question. In his commentary on Exodus 34:6, the verse that begins G!d’s recitation of the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy, he comments:

 

[M]y late and revered teacher Rabbi Dov ‎Baer said that the 13 attributes the Torah mentions here are the ‎spiritual equivalent of the 13 principles of Rabbi Yishmael that ‎are considered as legitimate tools of exegesis of the written Torah. ‎For instance, the principle known as kal v’chomer‎, using logical ‎conclusions, is the counterpart of the attribute Kel, G!d‎, whereas the ‎principle known as gezera shava, replicas of the same word used for ‎apparently divergent subjects, is the equivalent of the Divine ‎attribute Rachum, mercy‎.

‎
When a wealthy person takes pity on a poor, destitute ‎person, he automatically begins to understand the pain and near ‎despair experienced by the poor so that he lowers himself ‎mentally to that level. He experiences the pain endured by the ‎poor and his feelings of being hemmed in from all sides. When ‎this happens, the wealthy person, - parallel to G!d -, extends pity ‎and mercy to the poor so that the poor and the rich have reached ‎the same level. A similar process occurs when G!d looks with ‎mercy on the Jewish people in distress. This is what Moses ‎referred to when he said in psalms 91,15: ‎ “I am ‎with him in distress;” this is what is meant by “equating” the ‎Divine attribute of mercy to the exegetical tool known as ‎gezera shava ‎, “establishing common ground based on identical words used ‎in texts speaking of different subjects.”‎ (Kedushat Levi on Exodus, Ki Tisa 14)

 

This beautiful teaching exhorts us to live out the divine attributes of mercy (because we are made in the image and likeness of G!d) as the way of interpreting the Torah in the living of our lives. I believe that we can conclude from this that we should use the interpretive principles to see the G!d of mercy in the text and construct the halacha accordingly – the Torah is the blueprint for the world, a world created as an expression of G!d’s love – and only by reading the Torah in this framework can we correctly interpret it.

 

We see the Talmudic sage Beruriah doing exactly this in an incident related in Berachot 10a – her husband is mugged by bandits and prays for them to die – and she reads Psalm 104:35, usually read as “let sinners cease from the earth, and the wicked shall be no more” – instead as “let sins cease from the earth” (a legitimate alternate reading of the Hebrew) through the repentance of the sinners, which will result in the wicked no longer existing because of their repentance and transformation into righteous people. He prays as his wife instructs him, resulting in the bandits’ repentance. If we adopt Beruriah’s model of reading the text of the Torah in ways that transform, the Torah can be “the tree of life to those who take hold it, and those who hold it fast are happy” (Proverbs 3:18, one of the verses sung as the Torah scroll is lifted after the Torah reading and after it is returned to the Ark).

 

I would like to offer three examples of the smuchim, juxtapositions advocated by Rabbi Elazar in Yevamot, taken not from the text of the Tanach itself but from the liturgy, whose structure is derived from the Oral Torah.

 

First, in the daily Torah study texts in Shacharit that end with Rabbi Yishmael’s thirteen interpretive principles, the first text recited after the blessing for Torah study is the priestly benediction, asking G!d to bless and keep the people and to grant peace, followed by passages from the Mishnah and Gemara that emphasized deeds of lovingkindness. Thus, the first sections of Torah one studies each morning are to be sections that emphasize G!d’s blessing – and our translation of G!d’s blessing into blessing others with acts of mercy. Perhaps the liturgy is telling us that all of Torah study is ultimately directed to this end – of extending G!d’s blessing to others.

 

The other two examples concern the verse from the Torah that prohibits a man “lying with a man as with a woman” (Leviticus 18:22). This verse, used to prohibit homosexuality, has been a source of great pain for the LGBTQ community. I find it interesting to see how the Haftarah indirectly comments on it by being juxtaposed with the Torah reading on Yom Kippur at Mincha, when it is read, and on Shabbat Acharei Mot when it falls on the day before Rosh Chodesh, as it did this year (5782).

 

The Haftarah for Mincha on Yom Kippur is the book of Jonah/Yonah. Yonah, “pigeon”, can be either a masculine or a feminine noun, introducing some gender ambiguity from the title of the book and the name of its prophet. He is swallowed by a fish that changes gender, first being a “dag,” a male fish, then a “dagah,” a female fish, and then a “dag” again. While the Midrash attempts to make them separate fish, the pshat, the plain meaning of the text, is clearly that the same fish alternates between genders. I read this as a subversive commentary on Leviticus, undermining the very concept of a sex/gender binary necessary for the prohibition in Leviticus 18:22 to exist.

 

The reading for the Shabbat that occurs the day before Rosh Chodesh, read in some years when Acharei Mot is read, contains the story of David and Jonathan, which can be read as a gay love story. I Samuel 20:41, in particular, gives support to this: “And as soon as the lad was gone, David arose out of a place toward the South, and fell on his face to the ground, and bowed down three times; and they kissed one another, and wept one with another, until David exceeded.” It has been suggested that the word “exceeded” refers to an erection, making this an explicitly sexual text. After Jonathan’s death, David laments his death in words saying that his love for Jonathan exceeded that of women: “I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan; Very pleasant hast thou been unto me; Wonderful was thy love to me, Passing the love of women.” Thus, we see the text of Leviticus given another subversive commentary with a gay love story in this Haftarah.

 

It is my hope that, as we continue to learn Yevamot, we may search for ways to read it subversively in ways that can bring blessing and tikkun.