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The Midrash as Marriage Guide

By Ido Hevroni

How the rabbis counseled communication between husband and wife.


 
Our story appears in the collection as the last in a series of tales about husbands who exert their legal authority and demand that their wives perform extreme acts of self-abasement before they can return home. In the first case, the wife—whose husband has apparently tired of what she makes in her kitchen—is asked to give R. Yehuda and R. Shimon a taste of her cooking. The husband confidently assumes that the rabbis, too, will be dismayed by the food, and will justify his request to put his wife out of the house. But instead they come down in favor of the wife, condemning the husband’s extreme behavior.
The second story describes an even more extreme case, in which a husband bars his wife from his home until she spits on R. Shimon ben Gamliel, the president of the Sanhedrin. The husband likely imagines that the grand rabbi, in the face of her act, will be more than willing to grant a divorce from a woman for whom he has no legal pretext for demanding a divorce. Yet here too, the rabbi shoulders the humiliation and decides in the wife’s favor.
In the third story, a husband forbids his unattractive wife to return home until she has convinced R. Yishmael son of R. Yose that there is something in her that is beautiful. This time, too, the rabbi reacts unexpectedly, and in a brilliant rhetorical exercise, proposes to consider her name—“Lichluchit,” which translates approximately as “Cinderella”—as incredibly beautiful, because of its perfect coherence with her outward appearance.
In these three stories, the rabbis act contrary to the expectation that they will take the men’s side at their wives’ expense. Indeed, despite the great power bestowed upon them by both the Jewish legal code and societal norms, they respond sensitively to the wife’s distress. Thus do they make clear to their male audience that the proper use of the power provided to a man by the halacha is not the arbitrary imposition of one’s will on another, but rather the ability to helpanother person, to bestow respect and kindness upon one’s spouse.
In our own story, as well, the wife is sent by her extreme husband to the local rabbinical court, which attempts to iron out the difficulties they are facing. On the face of it, the rabbi misunderstands the broader picture, praising her for doing “her husband’s bidding,” despite the fact that she appears to have done the reverse, misinterpreting each of his requests. A further question may be added: Whereas the sages in the previous stories were satisfied to rule in the woman’s favor, Baba ben Buta goes further, blessing her with two sons like himself—he was, after all, one of the great scholars of his time. Again, a close reading of the text may help explain his bizarre response to her.
The story opens by presenting the husband as a recent immigrant to Palestine from Babylonia. We know nothing else about him. He chooses to marry one of the local women, and we may assume the presence of a cultural divide between the two. The original story is in Aramaic, and it is possible that the four misunderstandings on which the story is constructed are based on differences between the vocabularies of Babylonian Aramaic and that of the land of Israel, or at least differences in dialect or usage.11 In any event, it is clear that the linguistic mismatch is symbolic of a more profound gap in their own communication, and possibly between men and women more broadly—that men are from Babylonia, in other words, and women from Israel. So our story takes the problem of the abuse of male power in the marriage and adds to it the subject of communication between husband and wife.
The story also tells us nothing about the couple’s married life before we hear the husband’s request for “a couple of lentils.” In the original Aramaic, as in our English translation, it is clear that he did not mean to be taken literally. The silence of the story about the husband’s previous life, and the request for the lentils, creates the impression that this is an introverted man, who does not indulge in small talk, and who makes little effort to communicate his intentions in a way that they will be understood—not even to the person with whom he should be most open and clear.
But at the same time, the wife does not work too hard to understand her husband, either. We should not be surprised at his anger at her taking him literally; her actions look more like mocking than naןvetי. We are immediately confronted with the question of what compelled her to respond in this way. Is this her subtle rebellion against his misanthropic behavior?
The next day, he asks for not two, but an entire se’a of lentils. Dutifully, or mockingly, the wife again takes him at his word, presenting him with a dozen pots of lentil stew. By this point it is hard to believe that either of them is acting in good faith; each, it seems, is taking a stand. If the mishap on the first day could be chalked up to misunderstanding, now it is clear that neither is being straight with the other. The husband, who yesterday was the victim of his wife’s literalism, could have made his second request in clear, simple language; his wife, in turn, could have learned from the previous day’s fiasco and worked a little harder to understand what her husband wanted. Why, then, does neither of them do just that?
An important clue may be found in the husband’s reaction to his wife’s second error. Having reacted in anger on the first day, we might have expected even greater anger on the second. Instead, he shows no signs of irritation. Yet, he indeed responds: Whereas the first time, he grew angry but waited until the next day to make his new request, this time, he responds immediately with a new demand. The content of his request is also different: If until now he has spoken in idiomatic hyperbole (“a couple of lentils” instead of “some,” and “a se’a” instead of “a lot”), now he asks for botzinei, a word that may be understood as either pumpkins or oil lamps. There is nothing in the context of his request to help his wife guess what he means. Is he looking for different food, or better lighting?
In any case, this time, too, the wife succeeds in misunderstanding her husband, and she is sent on yet another errand: “Go and break them [the oil lamps] on the head of the baba.” Again, the husband is not angry. He merely responds with yet another task. And this task is simple and clear: Again you got it wrong; go smash the lamps. This time, it requires a serious creative effort on her part to misunderstand him. But the wife remains true to form, and makes off for the city gate, the place of law and judgment, to where the sage Baba ben Buta dispenses the law in public. She bursts into the court and breaks both lamps on his head. The rabbi’s reaction is clearly the punch line of the story, but to grasp its meaning fully, we must also understand what preceded it.
As we saw, whereas the wife’s first mistake was just silly, the second time, she should have expected his anger in light of the previous day’s experience. This, combined with his unexplained failure to get angry on the second day, leads us to suppose that we are dealing not with either a slow-witted or a simply rebellious wife, but rather with a sensitive woman, whose every act is tailored to break down the walls that her husband has erected between himself and the world. Far from being a story about a hopeless couple, we discover the possibility of hope in difficult relationship. The husband is a closed, stiff person incapable of communicating effectively with the world. His wife does everything she can to create a channel of communication with her spouse. Whereas he views marriage as a power game in which the husband gives orders and the wife carries them out, the wife tries to ease him into a view of marriage as give-and-take, as a partnership in which each has to learn to listen to the other. With impressive determination, she holds up a mirror to his closed world. She tries to teach him that it is impossible to live with someone unless you can speak her language, unless you can listen to her and understand her world.
So, on the first day, she follows his request verbatim, showing him what his words sound like from the outside. He fails to get the point, however, and continues to issue orders with little regard for how they are understood. On the second day, however, he begins to suspect that his wife’s failure to comply stems not from a lack of understanding, but rather from an attempt to communicate with him. So, instead of getting angry, he puts her to the test: This time, he selects a word whose definition cannot be known from the outset. Finally, despite his order to break the oil lamps, which might appear to be a reaction to getting his request wrong, we may have reason to think that in choosing the lamps she actually chose correctly.


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