Towards a Rhetorical Poetics of the Mashal

In this talk I will further develop the ideas and approaches put forward in my article “Talmud as Novel: Dialogic Discourse and the Feminine Voice in the Babylonian Talmud,” (Poetics Today, 2019). There I argued that the relationship between the different strata of the Talmudic text as identified by source critics over last generation is best understood in terms Bakhtins theory of dialogic discourse in the novel. I demonstrated how the editors of the Talmud orchestrated a broad heteroglossia of “languages” and “voices” into a dialogic discourse. I focused on an example of how the Talmudic editors integrated a particular narrative and the feminine voice it expresses, into the Talmud’s dominant male discourse, creating a truly dialogic structure.

In the current lecture I will examine the place of another “marginalized voice” in the Talmud. This voice, which I call the “apocalyptic voice, ” presents accounts of heavenly mysteries often transmitted by angles. It stands in counterpoint to the Talmud’s dominant legal and ethical modes of discourse. I will analyze two sources which contain esoteric angelic traditions, R. Ishmael ben Elisha’s divine encounter in the Holy of Holies (b.Berakhot 7a) and the anglelic tradition transmitted by Yohanan ben Dahavai show how they were “naturalized” into the Talmud’s dominant discourse. Yet the editors of the Talmud did not neutralize these voices. They remain alive in the Talmudic discourse. In the medieval period these voices were “retrieved” from the text and became important sources in the post-Talmudic mystical tradition.