Atelier TenouaTalk23 May 2023

Is God a good marriage counsellor?

Name: Is God a good marriage counsellor?
Uploaded: 2023-05-23
Duration: 1 h 27 min
Description: A wedding-season atelier, on the eve of Shavuot, opened like a therapy session: "The session will now begin." Why two kiddush cups under the chuppah, why Passover betroths and Shavuot weds, what the word Baal says about jealousy, and the Talmudic tale of Rabbi Meir and the spit, overturned by the ghost of Bruria, the most learned woman of the Talmud. In French.

1h 27min

A wedding-season atelier, on the eve of Shavuot, opened like a therapy session: "The session will now begin." Why two kiddush cups under the chuppah, why Passover betroths and Shavuot weds, what the word Baal says about jealousy, and the Talmudic tale of Rabbi Meir and the spit, overturned by the ghost of Bruria, the most learned woman of the Talmud. In French.

Highlights

“The rabbis are not naive about couples. They live that couple, daily. […] They know that no couple lives on love and fresh tefillin alone.”
Translated from the French

“God would struggle to be a good marriage counsellor because he is far too involved. He cannot be both the spouse and the therapist. […] There is a conflict of interest there.”
Her first answer to the evening's question. Translated from the French

“When you say Baali in Hebrew, it means my husband. But literally it comes from the root of the word Baal, which means the owner. My husband, literally in Hebrew, is my owner.”
The pivotal wordplay of the session. Translated from the French

“The jealous one is the one who believes he can possess, the one who imagines he can be Baal.”
On El Kanna, the "jealous God," and the root of acquisition. Translated from the French

“The sacred, ineffable Name is ready to be literally erased, though that is a supreme halakhic prohibition. […] Except […] to bring about Shalom, as if God effaced himself, diluted his own honour.”
The point of the tale: household peace before divine honour. Translated from the French

“Bruria is a learned woman, perhaps the most learned in the Talmud. She has a first name, while the other women of the Talmud are simply somebody's daughters or somebody's wives.”
The ghost of the studied text: Rabbi Meir's wife. Translated from the French

“What happens in the Middle Ages? Bruria is assassinated in due form, dramatically.”
On the medieval legend built against women's scholarship. Translated from the French

The session

The session opens on the title question, admittedly a tease, and its two easy answers: the Garden of Eden and Abraham's harem argue no; the Midrash of the matchmaking God, busy since creation pairing couples, a task "as difficult as splitting the Red Sea," argues yes. A piece of ritual gives the key: the two kiddush cups of the Jewish wedding, betrothal and nuptials once held apart, then the calendar read as a courtship, Passover that betroths (the Song of Songs as serenade) and Shavuot that weds, Sinai for chuppah and the Tablets for ketubah. The tefillin wind around the finger like a ring to the words of Hosea, champion of the conjugal metaphor and its jealous crisis, where the pivot appears: Baal, the Canaanite idol that is also the husband-owner. The week's parashah brings the sotah of Numbers, the bitter waters and the dissolved scroll, the priest as the Bible's first couples therapist. The havruta studies the midrash of Rabbi Meir and the spit: the extinguished candle, the furious husband, the seven spits in the sage's face, and the ending where God accepts the erasure of his own name to restore peace to a household. The reprise replays the text in four acts, from the honour of the study house to the neighbours' gaze, before the twist: Bruria, the scholar with a first name of her own, whom a medieval legend drives to suicide to push women out of study, and her husband reread as sage and enraged husband at once. The return to Hosea announces the day when one will no longer say Baal but companion, and the session closes with Yehuda Amichai: from the place where we are right, flowers will never grow in the spring.

Texts studied

Hosea 2 (the betrothal of the tefillin, the repudiation, "you shall no longer call me Baal")
Numbers 5:12-31 (the sotah rite, the bitter waters)
The midrash of Rabbi Meir and the spit (Vayikra Rabbah, read in Aramaic and French)
Yehuda Amichai, "From the Place Where We Are Right"
Along the way: The chuppah and the two kiddush cups · Passover and Shavuot · the Song of Songs · Hosea 2 · Numbers 5, the bitter waters · Baal and El Kanna · Rabbi Meir · Bruria · Vayikra Rabbah · shalom bayit · Yehuda Amichai.

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