Telling Tales, Rabbi-Style
When a trusted rabbinic sage tells you he has just seen a frog larger than a castle with his own eyes, should you believe him?
The rabbis have a deep distrust of individual authority, deferring to the rabbinic collective, for example, and not the inspired prophet. Even individual rabbinic authority is rhetorically mediated in the corpus through meaning-conferring, and meaning-controlling, layers of paideia and performed deference to previous authorities, inherited wisdom, and the sacred text.
This bias is reechoed in literary form as well. The rabbis prefer to express themselves through the more tempered form of the anonymous work than the authored monograph. Talmudic narrative itself is another way that the rabbis tell us how to contain meaning within the rabbinic whole. A new facet of their stance toward the individual and his epistemological and social value is explored in Eliyahu Rosenfeld’s latest essay in our pages. “Self, Narrative, and First-Person Narration in the Babylonian Talmud” looks closely at when and how the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud use the first or the third person when telling stories.
Rosenfeld finds some clear patterns. Overwhelmingly, he tells us, the rabbinic self and his knowledge is tacitly authorized by third person narration. On rare occasions, however, the first person appears, and a rabbi will be depicted telling a story about himself. Rosenfeld asks what sparks this shift to the first person, and how does the Talmud mean for its readers to understand it? Perhaps counterintuitively, the case of a sole witness speaking in the first person, even a rabbinic witness of great stature, is framed as a social and evidentiary red flag.
Texts that deploy the first person come to alert the reader that we are moving outside of the norm—away from rules of regular rabbinic thinking or from rules of nature. Revelation stories and tall tales are two examples. He argues that the form in itself is a way for the rabbis to invoke a hermeneutic of suspicion.
Rosenfeld’s deft and nuanced intervention gives us new ways to understand the culturally distinctive and deliberate forms of rabbinic storytelling: and if I hadn’t read the essay with my own eyes, I would not be able to recommend it this highly.
Read this innovative contribution to rabbinic narratology in the fall 2024 issue of JQR, and see what else in is current the issue here.