When Near Becomes Far: Old Age in Rabbinic Literature by Mira Balberg and Haim Weiss (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: When Near Becomes Far: Old Age in Rabbinic Literature by Mira Balberg and Haim Weiss Matthew Kraus Mira Balberg and Haim Weiss. When Near Becomes Far: Old Age in Rabbinic Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. x + 221 pp. “How terribly strange to be seventy.” (Simon and Garfunkel, 1968) Mira Balberg and Haim Weiss have beautifully written a monograph that captures the contradictions, ambiguities, and anxieties of old age through close readings of selected narratives from the rabbinic corpus. The title itself captures the essence of the authors’ subtle and profound treatment of the subject. Playing on a traditional reference to the declining eyesight of the elderly, they center old age as a reading strategy, “to shed light on . . . these rich texts” using “age as a primary lens . . . through which near can become far and far can become near” (11). Rather than focus on the legal and narrative selections that speak directly about old age, the authors examine stories in which old age plays a consequential, but not necessarily central part. In asking why a character is an old man, or why age is mentioned in passing, or why a generation gap is an element in a story, the authors reveal the conflicting cultural assumptions about the elderly and the corresponding friction laid bare when embodied in narrative. The authors do many things well in this book. Especially commendable are their sensitive and theoretically informed readings of texts and their use of parallel versions to highlight the unique relevance of old age in the Babylonian Talmud compared to Palestinian traditions. They also avoid essentializing old age and rabbinic literature. Even though they regularly refer to “rabbinic literature” and “old age,” one never gets the sense that these are totalizing and stable terms. The book is divided into seven sections: an introduction, five chapters, and an epilogue. Since the individual chapters center on analyzing specific texts, the introduction provides the authors’ general impressions resulting from their comprehensive survey of references to old age in rabbinic literature. They explain that the tension between ideal and reality productively frames the analysis of primarily narrative materials. Rabbinic literature contains both idealized representations of old age and “the psychologically, physiologically, and socially complicated realities of aging” (2). Statements and stories can refer to the idyllic notions of respect toward the elderly and irenic intergenerational interactions, as well as physical and mental decline, social marginalization, and resentful children. Here the authors also draw on anthropologist Haim Hazan’s distinction between the “ageless self,” whose wisdom remains intact, and the “selfless age,” where the self has fundamentally become lost along with the person’s physical and mental faculties. The authors consciously concentrate on literary texts and preempt any attempt to historicize old age. Rather, they “explore old age as an object of rabbinic imagination and as a subject of rabbinic artistic expression” (7). Their interest in going “beyond what the rabbis say about old age” and looking at how “old age is performed in rabbinic texts” (6) hints at how idealized representations of old age in narrative might translate to an understanding of quotidian social practice. The authors defend their focus on narratives because they are rich loci for social interaction, which tends to define old age more than a numerical designation. And in a kind of obiter, yet [End Page 448] essential dictum, the authors insightfully map the construction of gender on the construction of old age. Chapter 1 primarily consists of Bakhtinian readings of talmudic narratives about Abraham and Sarah (B. Bava Meẓiʿa 87a) and King David (B. Sanhedrin 22a). The readings, which highlight the grotesque as well as the unique orientation of the Babylonian Talmud compared to parallels in Palestinian traditions, are especially convincing. In chapter 2, the authors analyze B. Kiddushin 30b’s discussion of M. Kiddushin 1:7 to uncover rabbinic ambivalence toward “elderly parents’ gradual exit from the social order” (60). This section of the Talmud contains five stories (the widow’s son, Dama ben Netina, Avimi and R. Abbahu, R. Tarfon and his mother, and R. Assi and his mother) that share three motifs: the impossibility of sufficiently honoring parents, intergenerational violence, and the striking reversal...