Rabbis, Animals, and the Technology of the Political in Sifra Bahar and Tosefta Shevi'it

• In Event: Critical Animal Studies and The Study of Judaism in Late Antiquity: Animals as Technology/ Animals and Technology

Abstract

In this paper, I follow Donovan Schaefer and Donna Haraway in their critique of Deluezian animality to understand the ways in which the Sifra and the Mekhilta de-Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, 3rd century Jewish exegetical works, read Leviticus 25 and Exodus 23 as political calls to become with animals. By focusing on actual animals and their situated embodiment within Rabbinic discourse, I argue against the specter of an ahistorical Deleuzian interpretation, which would treat the animal as an abstract radical possibility standing against humanity, in favor of an interpretation, made attentive by Haraway’s and Schaefer’s perspectives of an emergent picture of a historically bounded Rabbinic human-animal assemblage. Haraway and Schaefer, when read together provide theoretical and methodological frames that bring the place of animals in Rabbinic discourse to the fore. Schaefer’s insistence on phenomenological embodiment highlights the ways in which these texts include animals in the political conversation through their migratory patterns, while Haraway’s work helps us to understand how in these texts animals are both political technology and moral subjects. For instance, while the Rabbis, in these texts, utilize animals for political and ritual purposes, they do not assume that the life and actions of animals are simply means for some transcendent or worldly end. To the contrary these texts portray animals as subjects and objects of care, and it is their suffering and lack that triggers Sabbatical year laws to go into effect. It is this very lack, coupled with the embodied everyday habits of animals, that triggers several communal-political-economic aspects of the rituals of the Sabbatical year as seen in Tosefta Shevi’it 8 and Yerushalmi Shevi’it 9:2. Haraway and Schaefer, help us see how central animal-human relationships are in the shaping of Rabbinic thought and practice. These Rabbinic texts in turn provide an opportunity to sort out what is at stake interpretively, and ethically, in Haraway’s and Schaefer’s critiques of Deleuzian affect and becoming-animal.

Author

• Alexander Weisberg, New York University