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.