How so? The husband’s insistence on two botzinei and Baba ben Buta’s parallel blessing of two children reveal the symbolism behind the lamps the wife brought: They were, we may suggest, Sabbath lights, intended to grant shalom bayit, or domestic peace, between husband and wife. The rabbis taught that anyone who lights them will be rewarded with sons who are scholars:

Although scholars are generally agreed that the custom of lighting two Sabbath candles postdates the talmudic period, in this case the story uses the two candles—as it did two lentils and two sons—to symbolize partnership in marriage.¹³ And that, we may presume, is the wife’s test: If she chooses the pumpkin, a swollen and hollow vegetable, it will be as a sign of emptiness, revealing her hollow understanding of the test to which her husband has put her. But she chooses the candles, making it abundantly clear that the purpose of her errors all along was establishing peace in the home.¹⁴

But if our suggestion is correct, that the story is about her attempts at communicating in a realm of no communication, then why, when the wife has made her intentions clear, does the husband send her to smash the lamps? And why, of all places, “on the head of the gate”? It would seem that the choice of the gate indicates not anger over yet a third mistake, but rather a desperate plea: Shatter, please, the locked gate to my locked heart; I need you to help me break through.¹⁵ His wife, responding to his plea, does something so extreme as to make clear to him just how far she is willing to go on his behalf. In a courageous act of love, and a desperate cry to the world for help, she bursts into the court and breaks the lamps on the head of the judge.

The wife’s choice of Baba ben Buta serves four purposes simultaneously. First, she continues to reflect his grotesque mode of communication by responding to his ambiguous demands with perverse literalness. Second, whereas the heroines of the previous stories in the anthology were sent by their husbands to the sage, here it is the wife herself who initiates the action, although her husband did not ask it of her. Indeed, whereas in the previous stories, the husbands sought to justify, at least de facto, their separation from their wives, here there is no hint that the husband seeks to rid himself of his wife. It would seem that our wife takes advantage of his willingness to play along to put up a warning sign to him, making it clear to what depths married life can sink if his type of communication is allowed to prevail. Third, through her willingness to go at his “request” to the court—again, it should be emphasized that in this case, even if her husband had intended to send her directly to the rabbi, he did not use his halachic prerogative to force her to do it—she makes it clear to him just how much she is willing to risk to preserve their relationship.

Fourth, and no less important, she expects, as in the previous stories, that the rabbi’s behavior will serve as a lesson to her husband, as a living demonstration of proper behavior toward one’s wife. This is hardly a far-fetched expectation: Throughout the Talmud, the character of Baba ben Buta is portrayed as a paragon of openness and attentiveness. Indeed, despite his origins in the strict academy of Shamai, he appears in the literature as someone who was always willing to listen to others and to change his mind, even when it meant ruling in favor of the more lenient school of Hillel.¹⁶ In one story, he spares no effort to rescue a wife from her husband, who is spreading slanderous stories about her.¹⁷ We may speculate, then, that the wife in our own story knew of Baba ben Buta’s reputation, and counted on it in choosing him for a target.

And indeed, Baba ben Buta ignores her flagrant act of contempt for the court and the Tora—the penalty for which, back then, would have been flogging or incarceration—and instead treats her with kindness. He stops the legal proceedings, and turns to the wife with a relatively gentle question: What have you done?

Upon hearing her tale, he responds that she “did [her] husband’s bidding.”¹⁸ In light of the above, it is clear that this is not a misreading of reality, but rather a plumbing of its depths. For when the rabbi speaks of what the husband wanted, he does not mean his immediate, apparent wish for a specific amount of lentils, but rather his desire, however ill-expressed, to be as one with his wife, as revealed in his choice of the married life—as opposed to that of bachelorhood—in the first place, as well as in his consistent use of pairs (“two lentils,” “two pumpkins”) in his requests. This, in truth, is the desire with which his wife did her utmost to comply, if in a roundabout way. It is for this that the rabbi blesses her with two wise sons like himself. For surely, a wife who is prepared to make such an enormous effort to break down the barriers that separate her from her husband is most likely to teach her children, in turn, the utmost importance of openness and sensitivity toward the other.

The inner meaning of the two stories presented here is clear: In the first story, the wife “takes” her husband in an act contrary to the normative marriage arrangement, in which the husband takes the wife. In the second story, the wife appears to rebel against her wifely duties, but is praised by the rabbi for trying her best to validate the marital space and to fill it with content. In both stories, the wife is presented as emotionally superior to her husband. And rather than fighting for independence, or choosing the path of aggression against the male establishment, her energies and wisdom are directed toward the attainment of a true and open dialogue with her partner. And in this the rabbis consistently encourage them, and seize the opportunity to teach their male audience an important lesson on the meaning of marriage and partnership.
 

 

1. Tal Ilan, Jewish Women in Greco-Roman Palestine: An Inquiry into Image and Status (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1996), p. 226.

2. It is not my intention to argue that all agada is pro-women, just as it is difficult to argue that all halacha is pro-men. I merely hope to show that it is possible to find in this agadic material many sources that demonstrate the attitude of the rabbis toward women in a different light than the normally accepted one. If scholars do not relate to this material, as well, they will invariably form an incomplete picture of rabbinic thought.

3. This article is not groundbreaking in identifying the positive attitude of the sages toward women. Several scholars came before me, the most notable of whom are Shulamit Veller, in a book dedicated to the subject, Women and Womenhood in the Talmudic Stories (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 1993) [Hebrew], and Admiel Kosman, in numerous articles. See, for example, Admiel Kosman, “The Hero’s Name as a Literary Device in the Talmudic Story in Gender Contexts,” in Aaron Demsky, ed., These Are the Names: Studies in Jewish Onomastics, vol. 4 (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 2004), pp. 61-93 [Hebrew]. However, these scholars tend to describe the relationship between the pro-man halacha to the pro-women agada as the subversion of the agada to halachic injunctions. This article attempts to explain the relationship between the two parts of the text as complementary, picture and frame.

4. Song of Songs Rabba 1:31. This story engendered several interpretations in recent years. See David Zimmerman, Eight Love Stories from the Talmud and the Midrash (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Poalim, 1981), pp. 43-47 [Hebrew]; Dalia Hoshen, The Fire Symbol in Talmudic-Agadic Exegesis (Ph.D. diss., Bar-Ilan University, 1989), p. 148 onward [Hebrew]; Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California, 1993), pp. 54-55; Adiel Schremer, “Male and Female He Created Them”: Jewish Marriage in the Late Second Temple Mishnaic and Talmudic Periods (Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center, 2003), pp. 316-318 [Hebrew]; Neil Menussi, “The Opening of Hope of the Keeper of the Secret,” Makor Rishon, May 27, 2005. Some of these scholars see in this story the collision of halacha and human love, and some of them see various possibilities for the completion of each dimension through the other. This article continues on the path of the latter, while emphasizing additional elements.

5. Concerning the fact that marrying another woman was acceptable at the time, see Adiel Schremer, “Jewish Marriage in Talmudic Babylonia” (Ph.D. diss., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1996), pp. 236-305 [Hebrew].

6. The root h-f-tz appears in the Bible only as a verb with the meaning of wanting. In the works of the sages (as early as the Mishna) it appears as a noun.

7. Menussi, “The Opening of Hope.”

8. Song of Songs Rabba 2, 8.

9. Nedarim 66b. I would like to thank Rabbi Hananel Etrog for our joint studies, during which I first learned of the power of this story. Shmuel Faust dealt with this story in “She Does as Her Husband Wishes,” Makor Rishon, August 22, 2005. The interpretation that I provide for this story is close in spirit, but different in several substantial details.

10. This way of interpreting the text is offered by the Iyun Yaakov, Rabbi Yaakov Reisher, Prague (1670-1734), in his reading on the Ein Yaakov.

11. Rashi identified both possibilities. A precise examination of this story in light of linguistic knowledge was made by S. David Sperling, “Aramaic Spousal Misunderstanding,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 115:2 (April-June 1995), pp. 205-209.

12. Shabbat 23b.

13. See Yitzhak D. Gilat, “The Coming of Sabbath Eve,” Sidra 3 (5747), pp. 33-35.

14. In land-of-Israel sources there is another story that strengthens the connection between the Sabbath candles and domestic peace and to the indulgent sage who is willing to humiliate himself for domestic peace. See Jerusalem Sota 1:4; Leviticus Rabba 9:9.

15. It should be noted that in almost every rabbinic story in which a gate appears, it also acts on the symbolic level of a barrier between two different worlds—the world in the domestic setting, in which there are certain codes, and the external world, in which other norms prevail. On the symbol of the gate, see Ido Hevroni, “An Arrow in Satan’s Eye: Symbols and Domains of Significance in a Compilation of Temptation Stories from the Babylonian Talmud, Kiddushin 81a-b” (Ph.D. diss., Bar-Ilan University, 2005), p. 150 onward [Hebrew]. So, too, in this story, it seems that the gate functions in the same manner when the man asks the woman to break into his world and join him in the same domestic space.

16. Beitza 20a.

17. Gitin 57a.

18. It should be noted that the original story up to this point is told in Aramaic, whereas from this point, at which the wife replies, the story switches to Hebrew and continues in Hebrew until the end, thus symbolizing in its language the horizon of understanding that opens here for the first time before husband and wife.