Tale of the 'Ukbas: Inscribing and Undermining Patriarchal Norms (Dov Kahane)

Bavli Ketubot 67b:

A.

מר עוקבא הוה עניא בשיבבותיה דהוה רגיל כל יומא דשדי ליה ארבעה זוזי בצינורא דדשא יום אחד אמר איזיל איחזי מאן קעביד בי ההוא טיבותא ההוא יומא נגהא ליה למר עוקבא לבי מדרשא אתיא דביתהו בהדיה כיון דחזיוה דקא מצלי ליה לדשא נפק בתרייהו רהוט מקמיה עיילי לההוא אתונא דהוה גרופה נורא הוה קא מיקליין כרעיה דמר עוקבא אמרה ליה דביתהו שקול כרעיך אותיב אכרעאי חלש דעתיה אמרה ליה אנא שכיחנא בגויה דביתא ומקרבא אהנייתי

Mar ‘Ukba had a poor man in his neighborhood into whose door-socket he used to throw four zuz every day. Once [the poor man] said: ‘I will go and see who does me this kindness’. On that day Mar ‘Ukba was late at the house of study and his wife was coming home with him. As soon as [the poor man] saw them moving the door he went out after them, but they fled from him and ran into an oven from which the fire had just been swept. Mar ‘Ukba's feet were burning and his wife said to him: Raise your feet and put them on mine. He [Mar 'Ukba] became upset; She said to him, ‘I am usually at home and my benefactions are direct’.

B.

ומאי כולי האי דאמר מר זוטרא בר טוביה אמר רב ואמרי לה אמר רב הונא בר ביזנא אמר ר''ש חסידא ואמרי לה א''ר יוחנן משום רבי שמעון בן יוחי נוח לו לאדם שימסור עצמו לתוך כבשן האש ואל ילבין פני חברו ברבים מנא לן מתמר דכתיב (בראשית לח-כה) היא מוצאת

And what was [the reason for] all that [fleeing and hiding from the poor man]? As Mar Zutra bar Tobiah said in the name of Rab (others state it was Rabbi Huna bar Bizna who said in the name of Rabbi Simeon Hasida; while others state it was Rabbi Yohanan who said in the name of Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai): Better that a person throw himself into a fiery furnace than publicly put another person to shame. Whence do we derive this? From [the action of] Tamar; for it is written, 'When she was brought forth [she sent to her father-in-law, Judah, discreetly, so as not to embarrass] (Gen 38:25).

At face value, this story is being told as a panegyric to the patriarch, Mar ‘Ukba’s, anonymous giving. This practice appears to be an effort to prevent potential shaming of the poor man. The primary conflict arises when the poor man decides that he must know the identity of the benefactor. Mar ‘Ukba and his wife take great pains (literally) to avoid their unmasking. But this evasive action generates a second conflict: the still-hot oven burns Mar ‘Ukba's feet. His wife's practical solution to this issue seems to perturb Mar ‘Ukba, maybe even more than his hot feet, and the story ends with her explanation of their differences in pain thresholds. A few obvious questions emerge here: What is the moral of this tale? Is it the value of anonymous charity? Or is it the form of charity practiced by Mrs. ‘Ukba that the story wishes to highlight? Why does the poor man wish to unmask his benefactor? Why would revealing his identity be a breach of the high ethical standards that Mar ‘Ukba practices if the poor man himself wants to know? What is the connection between the different forms of charity practiced by Mar ‘Ukba and his wife and their respective pain thresholds?

To begin with it can be noted that while Mar ‘Ukba's anonymous giving may be laudatory it has certain drawbacks. The anonymity is unidirectional. It creates a hierarchical relationship that goes beyond just the simple giving and taking of charity. The very linguistics of had a poor man in the opening line already anticipate this hierarchy. Mar ‘Ukba has all the advantages - the financial means as well as the knowledge to whom he is giving. The poor man has neither. He depends on the largesse of his anonymous benefactor who may or may not be there to support him on the next day. This wholly dependent relationship is what is problematized here.^[1] The story attempts to concretize that conflict by revealing the poor man's thought: I will go and see who does me this kindness, and then when he has the opportunity through his action: he went out after them. Furthermore, one must ponder the resistance to resolving this conflict. Is Mar ‘Ukba concerned about the sense of indebtedness that revealing his identity to the poor man would create? Or is it a less altruistic desire to maintain this cold, disconnected relationship with its radical asymmetry that motivates Mar ‘Ukba? Is he now running from the direct confrontation and personal relationship that the poor man is seeking in order to preserve his own detached masculine persona? Is this ambivalent set of motivations what explains his throwing the money in the poor man's door socket? The door represents the liminal aspect of a person's domain, neither truly within the home nor fully outside. The use of the door socket as the receptacle for Mar ‘Ukba's charity - where the pin that allows the door to pivot in or out, rests - is a particularly poignant symbol. It is this liminal, pivoting nature of his desire to give of himself that characterizes his charity.

The initial plot resolution comes with the pair finding refuge from their pursuer in the "safety" of a large oven. The single-chamber oven of antique Middle East consisted of a large chamber into which hot wood or coals was introduced. When the chamber walls were hot enough the coals were raked out and the food was placed inside to cook. The coals used to heat this particular oven, we are told, had just been removed and it was ready for cooking. Not exactly the most ideal spot to hide. By placing them in this "hot spot" could the author of this narrative be playing on the covert theme of the story - Mar ‘Ukba's desire to maintain his cold, detached anonymity? This would be ironic foreshadowing of the secondary conflict - Mar ‘‘Ukba's feet were burning. The feet which ran from the "heat" of the encounter with the poor man are now in pain from the heat of the oven floor. The expectation would be for the pair to flee this hot spot. Instead they remain and we learn of Mrs. ‘Ukba's unusual prowess - implied but never explicitly stated - she does not feel, or can handle, the heat! It is at this point that she suggests a solution to both conflicts - Raise your feet and put them on mine!, says she to her husband. Would it not be appropriate for Mar ‘Ukba, his feet no longer 'held to the fire', to then proudly declare that 'through the merit of righteous women we were saved' from the fiery furnace? Instead, he sulks. Is he upset because he did not merit the miracle to which his wife seems to be privileged? God has rejected his offering - his good deeds, his anonymous charity - in favor of his wife's. He is Cain to her Abel. In case we were unclear about this issue, the story concludes with her response to his crestfallen countenance: She said to him, ‘I am usually at home and my benefactions are direct’. It is not arbitrary. ‘My offerings have an advantage - my charitable giving is direct and immediate. I am at home in the kitchen (we can presume), preparing food for the poor folk. They come into my domain - past the liminal door socket - and I know them by name and they know me. I know their troubles, their darkness, their desperate hopes, and their unfulfilled dreams. I feel their pain directly and do not stay cool and detached from my beneficiaries’. In short, she is saying, ‘I can take the heat because I live in that heat’. Note that the place of their temporary 'refuge' is the oven, the central locus of the kitchen activity, the hearth, a place of warmth, of nurturing and - as she points out - sometimes a hot spot of real but difficult interpersonal connections.

The conclusion of the story might or might not resolve the apparent emotional conflict experienced by Mar ‘Ukba over his inability to withstand the heat relative to his wife. It does, however, bring the entire story to some measure of closure as the value of his anonymous charity is thrown in sharp contrast with the personal, direct dole that his wife was used to giving. There is a certain sense of chiastic structure with the exposition and the closure contrasting the charitable acts of Mar and Mrs. ‘Ukba.

What are we to make of Part B, the commentary on the story of Part A? Perhaps in order to make the story cohere with traditional norms the stammaitic editors engaged in the dialectic of both asking the question of the story's meaning (What was all that?) and providing an answer from an exegetical midrash: Better to cast oneself into the fiery oven than embarrass another person.

This midrash is found in two other sugyot in the Talmud. The two parallels differ in their proof-text. While bBrachot 43b uses the same verse, "When she was brought forth", as our text does in, the parallel in tractate Sotah utilizes another part of the biblical verse as its proof:

'She sent to her father-in-law, saying: By the man whose these are, am I with child' (Gen 38:25). She ought to have told them plainly! — Rabbi Zutra bar Tobiah said in the name of Rab — another version is, Rabbi Hama bar Bizna said in the name of Rabbi Simeon Hasida; and still another version is, Rabbi Johanan said in the name of Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai: Better for a person to cast himself into a fiery furnace rather than publicly put another person to shame. Whence is this? From Tamar.^[2]

The difference is small but may indicate that the editors of our text in Ketubot 67b had two versions to choose from and opted for the one they did for a particular reason. The proof-text they utilize reads מוצאת - she was brought forth. The word מוצאת is a homophone of the word מוצת - to start a fire burning.

The text can be read 'she was (to be) burned'.^[3] This reading is not only motivated by the immediate exegesis of the text. The choice of this version by the stammaitic editors may also be an allusion to the story of Mar ‘Ukba and his wife. Proof that a person should go to extremes - even to the point of immolation - to avoid embarrassing another is derived from the story of Tamar. They are, in a sense, contrasting her readiness to face death by fire with the character of Mar ‘Ukba's wife who does not face any damage from the hot oven. Mar ‘Ukba, on the other hand, is being compared favorably to the righteous Tamar, who becomes the exemplar of this supererogatory act. Thus a tale about charity has been transformed by the commentary into one about martyrdom.

This narrative of “Mar ‘Ukba in the Oven” lends itself to a distinctly gendered reading.

The story references four loci: (1) outside the poor man's door, (2) the study-hall of the yeshiva, (3) the huge oven and (4) the ‘Ukba home. On a very basic level the first two are male domains; the last two are female. ביתו זו אשתו - his home is his wife reads a famous Talmudic exegetical saying.^[4] If the home is the traditional female space, then its antithesis - outside of the home in the public - is traditional male space.^[5] The door to the home delimits these spaces and serves to transition from this interior female space to the exterior male world. The door is also the liminal space that functions to allow Mar ‘Ukba the "safety" of not going inside the home of the poor man. He remains safely in his own "male" space. The house of study - the yeshiva - is the classic institution of rabbinic (male) power. The latter two loci - the oven and the home - are, of course, traditionally female spaces.^[6] It is Mar ‘Ukba's tarrying in the male space of the study house - reminiscent of the clichéd trope of the absent minded (male) professor, preoccupied with his work and indifferent to his family's needs - that creates the plot movement. Ever the obedient and loving housewife, Mrs. ‘Ukba comes to fetch him from the proverbial "office", presumably for dinner. On the way home, they proceed to the door of the poor man but flee from that liminal space just when it seems that Mar ‘Ukba might have to enter the ‘female’ space. Instead they take refuge in the enormous oven - ironically one of the classical metaphors for both the domestic as well as the anatomical female space.^[7] Here things get hot. She recommends placing his feet on hers. She is telling him to rely on her in places like this. Her implication is a threat to his masculine sense of superiority and he is dejected. She explains that this is female space. Like her kitchen she is intimately connected with the goings-on of this place and is used to the heat generated here. Furthermore, she says, the male space which you occupy, preoccupied as it is with power and status, does not get to the core of the human experience because it remains detached from humanity. Your benefits are limited there.

This interpretation of the story in part A is supported by the editorial intervention of part B which works as a response to the very critique that the story poses to Mar ‘Ukba's approach. "Better had a man give himself into a fiery furnace than publicly put another person to shame. Whence do we derive this? From [the action of] Tamar..." As we pointed out above, the subtle choice of the proof-text of this intervention implies an awareness that this intervention is at once an explanation of the bizarre events of Mar ‘Ukba and his wife, as well as a subtle critique of Mrs. ‘Ukba's approach and a support for Mar ‘Ukba. Tamar is held up as a paradigm of feminine virtue for her willingness to self sacrifice for the sake of preserving patriarchal honor and status. She is oblique in her self-defense even though it is Judah himself who has sentenced her to burn at the stake (About three months later Judah was told, “Your daughter-in-law Tamar is guilty of prostitution, and as a result she is now pregnant.” Judah said, “Bring her out and have her burned to death!”’^[8]). This exegesis has its own difficulty as Tamar does not actually remain passively silent but produces Judah's pledge. She does send it to him for identification and presumably - and Judah must have thought of this - someone would recognize these items and his anonymity would anyway be lost. Nevertheless, rather than expose his identity herself and enjoy the public revenge for her own humiliation, she presents her proof directly to Judah and lets him decide their fate. It is this "feminine passivity" that the midrash praises in its use of her example as proof to its dictum, Better had a man give himself into a fiery furnace than publicly put another person to shame. Or read in a gendered way: Better had a woman give herself into a fiery furnace than publicly shame a patriarchal figure. The value of preserving anonymity through silence where masculine honor is concerned is the common denominator of both parts A and B. In part B it is Judah's honor; in part A it is Mar ‘Ukba's!

It should be noted that while this appears to be a story about Mar ‘Ukba, he speaks no words in this narrative. Only the poor man and Mar ‘Ukba's wife - characters who are frequently not heard from in traditional storytelling - have spoken lines. Mar ‘Ukba is mute and passive, much like his charity which is without interpersonal communicative connection. It also should be noted that the anonymity of the poor person in this story does remain preserved in the sense that his name is never divulged to us. We also never learn the name of Mar ‘Ukba's wife, she is consistently called “his wife”. This namelessness highlights the fact that both are characters who are traditionally marginalized from the public ‘male’ space, from institutions of power and from the issues of public image and status.

And yet, the text is hard to pin down. Is her form of charity-giving superior or is his?

In Talmud As Novel (2019), Moshe Simon-Shoshan employs the linguist Mikhael Bakhtin’s framework of dialogism to read the Talmud. Bakhtin suggests that novels contain both an authorial voice that controls but does not fully eclipse other voices. Simon-Shoshan posits that the Stammaitic editors play that role of authorial voice in the Talmud, controlling the conversation but allowing for more marginalized voices to be heard. But he differentiates the relative scope of the dialogism between legal and narrative passages.

Most of the marginalized voices in the Talmud are part of the same social

and ideological world as the stam. They may reflect a different legal position

on a given matter or even a divergent overall jurisprudential or hermeneutic

approach. But they represent the same male rabbinic elite and its legally and

ethically oriented worldview. Their dialogue with the stam is thus relatively narrow in scope and tends not to undermine the collective rabbinic world-view. However, in more narrative and aggadic (nonlegal) passages particularly, there are also numerous other “secondary voices” inhabiting the Talmud which are socially and ideologically distinct from the dominant voice of the stam and the rabbinic establishment in general. These include the voices of common, uneducated Jews, women, heretics, and gentiles of all sorts… These voices are frequently woven into the discourse of the sugya, bringing them into dialogue with the stam and other more conventional Talmudic voices.^[9]

In sum, what we have in the Tale of the ‘Ukbas is the de-centering of the practices of the patriarch. Mar ‘Ukba is upstaged by his wife. Part B, the work of stammaitic editors, attempts to reinstate those norms exegetically. The text, then, functions as a multivocal, dialogical work that displays both an inscription and an undermining of the patriarchal norms.