Franklin's Faves

Tracy Picks a Franklin’s Fave: The Return of the Absent Father

Today’s post comes from Penn Press’s Marketing Operations Manager, Tracy Kellmer, continuing a blog series in which Tracy explores one of the books currently for 75% off in the Franklin’s Faves section of our website! The Franklin’s Faves selection will rotate on December 2, so be sure to pick up your copy of today’s featured book, The Return of the Absent Father by Haim Weiss and Shira Stav (or any of the other great books currently available) ASAP—and use code FRANKLINSFAVES to receive your 75% discount!

One of the perks of working at a university press, and especially Penn Press, is that I am exposed to excellent scholarly treatments of a wide variety of subjects. As a member of the Marketing department, I get to know a bit about every book we publish through my engagement with its metadata, such as keywords and subject codes, and its descriptive copy, which appears in everything from seasonal catalogs to online retail sites (we know the one you’re thinking of). But a marketer has short-lived romances with books on the front list: every six months I have a new season’s worth of books to get to know and a new seasonal catalog to publish. That’s why I love Franklin’s Faves! I get a chance to rediscover a book that intrigued me the first time around. I hope you enjoy my rediscoveries as much as I do!

What I picked:

The Return of the Absent Father: A New Reading of a Chain of Stories from the Babylonian Talmud by Haim Weiss and Shira Stav, translated by Batya Stein

Why I picked it:

I grew up very Christian and read both the Old and New Testaments of the King James version of the Bible frequently and regularly. I also did a lot of close reading in weekly bible study groups while a teen, and as a child I studied stories and parables during weekly Sunday school and in summer vacation bible school. As an undergraduate English major, I read literary texts with Christian themes, by authors such as Chaucer, Milton, and Donne. And as a graduate student taking philosophy classes I closely read sacred texts from other religious traditions, especially from Asia,. But I never encountered or sought out any ancient Judaic texts, and I don’t even know why. So I was glad that this book gave me the opportunity to read a brief selection from the Babylonian Talmud that focuses on the love of scholarship and the impact that love has on family dynamics. As the first person in my family to go to college, let alone earn a PhD, I know firsthand how a commitment to scholarship can affect your relationship to family and home, and I was curious to find out what this ancient text had to say about it.

What I learned

The Talmud is, after the Hebrew Bible, the central text of Rabbinic Judaism. It is a collection of writings that was compiled in the fifth century BCE and consists of 63 tractates. In the tractate Ketubot, there is a chain of seven stories that presents variations on what happens when a man—or sage, or rabbi—leaves his home and family to go to the beth midrash—a place of intellectual study and spiritual development—for a few weeks or up to many years. The Return of the Absent Father includes the text of these seven stories, translated from Hebrew, so I was glad to be able to read them.

As Haim Weiss and Shira Stav observe, these stories traditionally have been interpreted either from the viewpoint of the studying sage or from the perspective that the studying sage is the most important—even only—subject of the story. These readings typically portray the tales as shedding light or providing guidance on the conjugal relations between husbands and wives when the husband has intellectual and spiritual aspirations.

But Weiss and Stav do something different with their interpretations of the stories. First, they treat the wives, mothers, daughters, and/or daughters-in-law, as well as sons, fathers, and fathers-in-law, as characters with just as much importance to the story as the rabbi who goes off to the beth midrash. The second intervention they make is to apply insights gained from the writings of psychoanalysts such as Freud, Jung, and Lacan, and from the work of feminist writers such as Luce Irigaray, Jane Gallop, and Julia Kristeva, to their analyses.

As a result, Weiss’s and Stav’s interpretations of all seven stories undermine, exceed, or at least complicate the patriarchal structures of control and authority that the stories on their surface seem to confirm and reinforce. I was glad to have Weiss and Stav as a guide: the book led me through a close reading of each story and its conventional interpretation. Because of this foundation, I could appreciate better the new perspective on each story they provided by viewing the same details through a different lens.

For example, in the second story, a father-in-law sees a pillar of fire in the sky every Sabbath evening, when his daughter’s husband returns home from the study house. However, one Sabbath evening the pillar of fire fails to appear when it is expected to. The father-in-law believes that only death could have prevented his son-in-law from performing his conjugal duties, so he says to “lower his bed.” In the Jewish family, procreation is a duty to family and Jewish society and, in addition, lineage is ensured in a patriarchal system. The obvious, patriarchal interpretation of this scene, then, is that the father-in-law is exercising his authority and control over his daughter’s private, and sexual, life: since her husband must be dead then her role as wife and mother is dead, because there is nothing for her outside of procreation. So “lowering the bed” might as well be lowering the husband’s/son-in-law’s coffin into a grave.

But what if the pillar of fire did not represent God’s presence in the young rabbi’s life the way it did when it led the Jewish people out of Egypt? In Weiss’s and Stav’s reading of this story, the pillar of fire could just as easily be seen as a symbol of desire, and specifically, a very phallic fantasy. The father-in-law, incidentally, is the only one who can see this pillar of fire, and an alternative reading of this supernatural phenomena may be that it is a hallucination that results from his repressed, taboo desire for his daughter’s husband. He is so heartbroken by his frustrated desire when the fire fails to appear, he feels the death of his (imagined) lover as keenly as his daughter, who has been acting on his desires in his stead.

This reading reveals the father-in-law/patriarch to be in violation of the very norms he is supposed to be upholding. Because he harbors a non-productive desire for his daughter’s husband, he fails, in his mind and spirit, to enforce the duty to procreate.

Other details from the other six stories take on new meanings in Weiss’s and Stav’s hands and disrupt the straightforward interpretation. For example, in the first story, a single tear on a woman’s cheek, as she waits and waits for her husband to come home, can symbolize the fluidity and vitality of her sexuality threatening to overflow the role of celibate wife that has been imposed upon her by her husband’s prolonged absence. At the end of the story, the husband falls through the roof and dies. In a traditional reading, the rabbi is punished for failing to perform his conjugal duties, but I prefer an interpretation in which the woman is rewarded for her long suffering, and she, and her sexuality, are finally freed.

I can see how these kinds of alternative readings may not appeal to many scholars and readers: that to impose non-Jewish sources of thought to Talmudic texts feels inappropriate, or to apply twentieth-century reasoning to ancient traditions seems unfair. But I would argue that our modern era didn’t invent taboo desires or societal repression or gender dynamics or the patriarchy, it simply revealed them for what they were, how they operated, and how they affected individuals and those surrounding them.

I’m glad that both kinds of reading exist. On the one hand, we are all members of various communities, and it’s worthwhile to know what a community’s expectations are for belonging to it. On the other hand, it’s also worthwhile to see possible alternatives for the future of those communities and how they might become more fulfilling to the individuals that belong to it.

Favorite bit

There were a few stories where what happened to the wife simply felt unjust. In one story, a rabbi waited so long to come home that his wife was barren when he got there. In another, a rabbi surprised his wife so much by coming home after a prolonged absence, without any warning, that she died of shock. In both of these instances, the rabbis prayed, and God healed the first wife’s barrenness and brought the second wife back to life. It was as if the writers of the stories and the compilers of the Talmud couldn’t bear to not have a happy ending.