Temple Breasts, Parental Pleasure, and Jewish Thought

Mara Benjamin’s The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought (2018) reclaims parental caregiving as a way to rethink relationality in concert with the sources of biblical, rabbinic, and modern Jewish thought. The perceptive reader of Jewish texts, she suggests, may apprehend through the silver traceries of child-rearing deeper insight into the ways that biblical and rabbinic texts think about obligation, love, power, teaching, and kinship. By scoring maternal subjectivity into the catalog of Jewish thought, Benjamin sonorously interrupts “a cavernous intellectual silence [reigning] where centuries-long, voluble conversation ought to have been” (xvi). This paper takes up Benjamin’s invitation to plumb “the constructive possibilities latent within [midrash]” by weaving together the purported binary between abstract thought and embodied ways of knowing, exploring what becomes knowable about rabbinic conceptions of the Torah when we read rabbinic texts through the lens of chestfeeding parental pleasure.

Benjamin’s method in this chapter is one of tracing “intersections” and “resonances” between maternal obligation and the sources of modern Jewish thought. So, for instance, she notes how maternal breastfeeding is referenced in rabbinic texts. When Benjamin brings the two realms of embodied experience and textual metaphor together, she illuminates these sites of convergence to read parental care through rabbinic formulations. Thus, Benjamin cites rabbinic imagery of God as maternal teacher or a sage as mother who “feeds the disciple words of Torah” in order to invite us to “reimagine the daily work of intimate caregiving as Torah in the broadest sense, and the parents who perform it as the true sages” (64). She transposes textually-derived theological insights onto embodied care—but how might we read theoretical considerations of embodied parental care in ways that refigure our understanding of rabbinic texts? How might we reorganize our understanding of biblical and rabbinic texts if the parental pleasures of chestfeeding served as a site for reflection rather than coordination?

This leads us into the holy of holies, where manna-as-milk is stored in a bottle nestled between God’s breasts. An early tradition that sought to reconcile the seeming contradiction of 1 Kings 8:8, And the staves were so long that the ends of the staves were seen from the holy place, even before the Sanctuary; but they could not be seen without by way of Song of Songs 1:13 My beloved is unto me as a bag of myrrh, that lies between my breasts, to suggest that the poles upon which the ark of the covenant rested, and between which the Temple incense made of myrrh and other spices, pushed up against the curtain like the breasts of a woman. As Cecilia Haendler notes, b. Menachot reports a baraita indicating that this positioning was intentional, the staves could have been oriented east/west like all other vessels in the Temple, but only the ark and the staves supporting the ark were oriented north/south. This purposive orientation produced the imagery—intentional, desired—of an ark protruding as burgeoning divine breasts.

Rafe Neis details the erotic dynamics of this sugya as it is presented in b. Yoma 54a, where the straining ark stave breasts are also crowned with sculpted cherubim atop the ark, entwined in sexual embrace. Refracting numerous old midrashic traditions identifying the Tabernacle/Temple with the chuppah, or even marriage bed, of God and Israel, Neis reads the triplicate dohakin, boletin, and yotze’in, as a “teasing visibility,” with the ark curtain functioning as clothing that serves to “enhance the loveliness that lies behind and incite the spectator’s longing to gain close access.” These associations take on heightened erotic force when considered in conjunction with the following pericopes, which describe the sexual embrace of the cherubim as a model of the intimacy conjoining Israel and God, “like the love of man and woman.” This paper focuses on rabbinic descriptions of the ark’s staves as divine breasts that circulate independent of the sexual embrace of the cherubim. Pleasure remains a thread of this piece, but not eroticism nor the heterovisuality of divine breasts as the object of a desiring masculine gaze.

We take up Benjamin’s invitation to imagine constructive theological possibilities latent in midrash by envisioning the ark’s breasts as lactating. Analyses of breastfeeding imagery in rabbinic texts largely focus on how mother’s milk nourishes Israel, noting the liminality of Israel’s existence, sustained only by divine milk. If “milk is good to think with,” this piece focuses on lactating chests and not the milk. Benjamin considers the experience of the Divine, sometimes frustrated, sometimes raging, and we maintain this focus but reverse the gaze, not projecting divinity onto parenthood, but embodied parenthood onto the God of Israel. Pleasure—physical, emotional, intellectual—while chestfeeding is not a normative experience, does not constitute some intrinsic aim, and if pleasure is experienced while feeding, is often set within preceding or subsequent experiences of disappointment, anxiety, fragmentation, or exhaustion. And yet parental pleasure in chestfeeding is experienced by some people at some times. Attending to this embodied experience awakens deep resonances across midrashic texts from which we may craft an episteme of parental pleasure that suggests new ways of understanding rabbinic conceptions of Torah.