Book Recommendation: The Fragility of the Mind, by Yuval Fraenkel

Amidst preparations for leading services on the High Holy Days at SFCJL, the beginning of the semester at UC Law SF, and the opening of my final year at HUC, an unexpected COVID-19 bout found me bedridden and away from all my usual activities (not to mention isolating from my family). I’m not as ill as I was during my first COVID bout, in 2021, but I’m unwell enough to be mostly in bed. I try to work on various professional projects, but my mind flies in lots of different directions; I’m only grateful it happened now rather than three weeks from now, when I’m supposed to be on the bimah for Rosh HaShanah.

I don’t even remember how I came across Yuval Fraenkel’s new book The Fragility of the Mind (חולשת הדעת). But as a long-time fan of sage-fighting stories in the Babylonian Talmud, especially the ones about Resh Lakish and Rabbi Yohanan, I knew I absolutely had to read it. If you do not read Hebrew, Fraenkel published some of this interesting material in the AJS Review in English.

There is something spellbinding about these stories, because people that are presumably to be admired and respected for their interpretive and logical skills are portrayed as vulnerable, ego driven, lashing out, and sometimes stunningly violent. Take, for example, this stunning example from b.Megillah 7b:

רַבָּה וְרַבִּי זֵירָא עֲבַדוּ סְעוּדַת פּוּרִים בַּהֲדֵי הֲדָדֵי. אִיבַּסּוּם. קָם רַבָּה שַׁחְטֵיהּ לְרַבִּי זֵירָא. לְמָחָר, בָּעֵי רַחֲמֵי וְאַחֲיֵיהּ. לְשָׁנָה, אֲמַר לֵיהּ: נֵיתֵי מָר וְנַעֲבֵיד סְעוּדַת פּוּרִים בַּהֲדֵי הֲדָדֵי. אֲמַר לֵיהּ: לָא בְּכֹל שַׁעְתָּא וְשַׁעְתָּא מִתְרְחִישׁ נִיסָּא.

The Gemara relates that Rabba and Rabbi Zeira prepared a Purim feast with each other, and they became intoxicated to the point that Rabba arose and slaughtered Rabbi Zeira. The next day, when he became sober and realized what he had done, Rabba asked God for mercy, and revived him. The next year, Rabba said to Rabbi Zeira: Let the Master come and let us prepare the Purim feast with each other. He said to him: Miracles do not happen each and every hour, and I do not want to undergo that experience again.

How to read this shocking tale? Is this a serious warning against too much drinking (even though one is commanded to get drunk on Purim)? Is it a funny story? Is it a sarcastic story about the limits of drunkenness? How do we fill in the feelings and motivations of the parties in this pithy narrative?

Conventional readings of these stories have either assumed that they (or something like them) actually happened in real life or analyzed them in the context of life in the study hall. Fraenkel proposes, instead, to focus on theses stories as a literary genre. The stories, he explains, follow certain esthetic rules, and so we should look at them through a series of concentric circles. The first is the story as a unit of analysis: the background to the conflict, the plot of the actual conflict, the subject of the conflict (politics? worldviews? a halakhic dispute? a personal disagreement?), the characters, the narration. The second circle is looking at the whole corpus of conflict stories and find commonalities and variations. The third is the historical/comparative lens: figuring out when this genre emerged and how it connects to its temporal and cultural surroundings. And the fourth is trying to figure out how this illuminates the culture of the Talmudic sages, almost all we know of which comes from its literature.

Fraenkel illuminates the tension between situating these conflict stories within the halakhic context where they appear (e.g., the Achnai’s Oven story appears in the context of the purity of ovens) and reading them as individual, separate units, which only have a tenuous connection to the halakhic issue that surrounds them.

Many of these stories, Fraenkel explains, are honor stories, in which A injures B’s honor through some unintended, prosaic act, which seems innocuous to A but deeply injurious to B. The stories typically offer very little outside context and refrain from outright judging the characters.

Because Talmudic stories tend to be parsimonious and terse, the readers have lots of gaps to fill. Using the example of the famous Yohanan/Resh Lakish conflict, Fraenkel demonstrates how the choice of fillers depends on the genre classification of the story. The story, so that we’re all on the same page, opens with the two brothers-in-law/study partners/intimate friends arguing over the proper way to purify a knife: by searing it in fire (Yohanan) or by scrubbing it in water (Resh Lakish)? Yohanan responds to his friend: “well, a bandit knows about objects of banditry.” This incredibly offensive—and public!—sting leads to an angry response from Resh Lakish, and the ensuing conflict kills them both. But why would Yohanan say such a hurtful thing? Different people have different takes on this, depending on how they understand the story. Personally, following Ruth Calderon and perhaps going farther than her, I suspect that Resh Lakish’s opinion—a knife entering water, an image with deep erotic underpinnings, which he offers publicly around people who know both of them—embarrassed Yohanan and confronted him with his utmost private desires, so he publicly distanced himself from the friend of his heart by humiliating him publicly, a literary device I’ve seen in Moonlight, in Brokeback Mountain, and in Heated Rivalry. But that tells you more about my own genre preferences than about the original story, probably. Fraenkel chooses to read this story in accordance to the “honor stories” genre he identified: he thinks that Yohanan’s comment was unintended and innocuous, just a joke about Resh Lakish’s former profession, but to Resh Lakish, who was emasculated by his transformation from bandit to Torah scholar, it read as patronizing and hurtful.

Fraenkel similarly uses the tropes of the “honor stories” genre to sharpen our understandings of the story of the conflict between Rabbi Yohanan and Rav Kahana. Conventional readings of this story see it as a metaphor for the conflict between the Eretz-Israeli and Babylonian scholarly communities; Fraenkel highlights the interpersonal dimension by identifying the prosaic background, unintended offense, and lack of judgment.

The structure of the “honor story” means that the dramatic effect stems from the cognition and understanding gaps between the two parties to the offense. Thus, one has to read the story twice, adopting the different perspectives. Fraenkel demonstrates this with the following story from b.Bava Metzia 33a:

קָבָעֵי מִינֵּיהּ רַב חִסְדָּא מֵרַב הוּנָא: תַּלְמִיד וְצָרִיךְ לוֹ רַבּוֹ, מַאי? אֲמַר לֵיהּ: חִסְדָּא חִסְדָּא, לָא צְרִיכְנָא לָךְ, אַתְּ צְרִיכַתְּ לִי עַד אַרְבְּעִין שְׁנִין. אִיקְּפַדוּ אַהֲדָדֵי וְלָא עָיְילִי לְגַבֵּי הֲדָדֵי. יְתֵיב רַב חִיסְדָּא אַרְבְּעִין תַּעֲנִיָּתָא, מִשּׁוּם דַּחֲלַשׁ דַּעְתֵּיהּ דְּרַב הוּנָא. יָתֵיב רַב הוּנָא אַרְבְּעִין תַּעֲנִיָּתָא, מִשּׁוּם דְּחַשְׁדֵיהּ לְרַב חִסְדָּא.

Rav Ḥisda raised a dilemma before Rav Huna: If there is a student, and his teacher needs him because he serves as his peer and study partner, what is the halakha with regard to precedence in a case where he finds a lost item belonging to his father and one belonging to his teacher? As Rav Ḥisda was Rav Huna’s disciple-colleague, Rav Huna assumed that Rav Ḥisda was referring to himself and said to him: Ḥisda, Ḥisda, I do not need you. On the contrary, you need me until you complete forty years of study before me. They grew angry with each other over the perceived insult and the harsh reaction, and each did not enter to visit the other. Rav Ḥisda was contrite and observed forty fasts due to the fact that Rav Huna was offended, although it had not been his intention to offend him. Rav Huna observed forty fasts due to the fact that he had erroneously suspected that Rav Ḥisda was referring to the relationship between them.

Let’s look at this story from Rav Hisda’s perspective: he’s making an innocuous halakhic remark in the context of lost items, asking about the priority in returning the lost item in cases in which one becomes a partner to one’s rabbi. But Rav Huna, Rav Hisda’s teacher, responds in an angry and personal manner. This compels us to read the story backwards, from Rav Huna’s perspective, and understand why he suspects Rav Hisda of implying that he no longer needs his teacher. We are left with the ambiguity: what did Rav Hisda actually mean? and there’s no resolution, because the two disengage from each other.

Alongside this kind of story, there are variations on the honor story in which the reader is invited to empathize with one perspective over the other, and some in which the reader is invited to partner with the omniscient narrator and gets a sense of how the offense happened because of facts that are known to the reader, but not to the protagonists.

One of the most curious things illuminated by Fraenkel is the Talmud’s tendency to refrain from obvious judgment regarding these stories, which is conveyed through the sparse telling, the multiple perspectives, the need to reread the story because seemingly irrelevant details might become central, and the abrupt, and often shocking, endings. As a 21st century reader—especially someone who has spent decades in academia and its honor-obsessed milieus (conferences, classrooms, etc.)—I certainly feel rebuke for people who insist on satisfying their ego by hurting others or by finding offense in innocuous slights. But having read Fraenkel’s interpretation of several of the more interesting “honor stories” in the series, I’m realizing that this is me imposing my own presentist morality on stories that deliberately refrain from this kind of interpretation. Indeed, the terseness of the stories and the intensity of the bad feelings described in them makes them more inscrutable and therefore more interesting than a pat pedagogical lesson.

Fraenkel also examines these stories comparatively, looking at conflicts in the Mishnah and other sources, finding that the Babylonian stories tend to feature interpersonal conflicts, whereas conflicts in other sources are thinly veiled allusions to issues of halakhic authority. I suspect some of the difference is Fraenkel’s choice to read them as such (Ishai Rosen-Zvi seems to think so), but I think Fraenkel justifies his choice to read the Bavli stories as personal by highlighting their extreme plots and terse narrative style.

The book has inspired me to use the genre lens on another category of stories, the “rabbi enters oven” stories, which I plan to write about this fall. Rather than rebuking myself and apologizing for dropping some pages of Tractate Hullin, I’ll share a few posts about these stories and walk y’all through how I think of them.