Louis A. Rieser "RITES OF PASSAGE:RABBINIC AND PRIESTLY MODELS." Available online. (Cited Feb 2007).


THE TRADITIONAL LINEAGE
A number of passages describe a distinguished genealogy for Hillel. It is important to read these passages with an appreciation of the difference between a genealogy based on biology and onebased on a lineage of Torah. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz details the ways in which one’s Torah lineage supercedes even biological kinship ties.²⁵ “The rabbinic community thus formed a set of Torah ties that competed with and in some cases superceded kinship loyalties. Rabbis fathered“children” through teaching Torah.”²⁶

Eilberg-Schwartz cites a number of texts from the Mishnah in which attention to one’s teacher takes precedence over attention to one’s biological father. And he notes the teaching that one’s father brings one into this world, while one’s teacher brings one into the world to come. (M. Baba Metzia 2:11)27 Hillel’s impressive lineage of Torah contrasts sharply with the spare biographical details we are given about his life. A series of texts, some later and some early, situate Hillel at a criticaljuncture in the history of the transmission of Torah. He is linked with Moses, David, and Ezra going back and Rabban Yohanan b. Zakkai, Akiba and Judah Ha-Nasi going forward.

These connections tell us a great deal about the position attributed to Hillel in the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism.He is linked to Moses, as well as Rabban Yohanan b. Zakkai and Rabbi Akiba:And Moses was 120 years old: He was one of 4 who died at age 120, and these are they:Moses and Hillel the Elder, Rabban Johanan b. Zakkai and Rabbi Akiva. Moses was in Egypt 40 years and in Midyan 40 years and sustained Israel for 40 years. Hillel the Elder came up from Babylon at age 40, served the sages for 40 years and sustained Israel for 40years. (SIFRE DEUTERONOMY 357) He is descended from David:

²⁵ He develops this idea at length in two of his books: Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, The Savage in Judaism:An Anthropology of Israelite Religion and Ancient Judaism, Bloomington, In.: Indiana UniversityPress, 1990, pg. 229 ff., and Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, God’s Phallus and Other Problems for Men andMonotheism, Boston: Beacon Press:, 1994, pg. 211 ff.

²⁶ Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, God’s Phallus and Other Problems for Men and Monotheism Boston:Beacon Press:, 1994, pg. 212.27Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, God’s Phallus and Other Problems for Men and Monotheism, Boston:Beacon Press:, 1994, pg. 213.

"DESIGNING MEN: READING THE MALE BODY AS TEXT" By Philip Culbertson. In Journal of Textual Reasoning. Vol. 7. 1998. Quoted online.


An additional difficulty in reading men's bodies confronts Jewish and Christian men, whether gay or straight. Danna Nolan Fewell and David Gunn, (36) and Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, (37) have explored extensively the central gender problem of scripture: how can men and women understand themselves as created in God's image when God apparently has no body? Eilberg-Schwartz writes: Does God have genitals and, if so, of which sex? It is interesting that interpreters have generally avoided this question. This seems a particularly important lacuna for interpreters who understand Genesis 1:26-27 to mean that the human body is made in the image of the deity. By avoiding the question of God's sex, they skirt a fundamental question: how can male and female bodies both resemble the divine form? Since God's sex is veiled, however, any conclusions have to be inferred indirectly from statements about God's gender. But however this question is answered poses a problem for human embodiment generally and sexuality in particular. If God is asexual, as many interpreters would have it, then only part of the human body is made in the image of God. (38) The part of a man's body which is obviously not made in God's image is the penis. To read another man's body is to read the Divine Ambiguity. And this ambiguity, too, is read into men's penises--into the penises of others, and into one's own. Given how daunting all this is, no wonder that the heterosexual male gaze is never directed toward other heterosexual men. No wonder "the guys" only wanted to look at the whole package, if even that! If a man cannot read the body of another, what then is the effect when he turns his male gaze upon himself, upon his own body with all its strengths and weaknesses? 

Kripal, Jeffrey J., "Heroic heretical heterosexuality"  Quoted online. (Cited Feb 2007)

Howard Eilberg-Schwartz has convincingly demonstrated a similar thesis in the case of Judaism: there too God is male, Israel is imagined as his bride, and any male representative of that bride (and in such a patriarchal tradition, it is inevitably the male who represents the collective) becomes cast in an implicit homosexual role vis-a-vis the divine: "The primary relationships in Israelite imagination were between a male God and individual male Israelites, such as Moses, the patriarchs, and the prophets.... Men were encouraged to imagine themselves as married to and hence in a loving relationship with God. A homoerotic dilemma was thus generated, inadvertently and to some degree unconsciously, by the super-imposition of heterosexual images on the relationship between human and divine males." (5) But this can be a problem only for men who are heterosexually inclined and who want to give their love to real historical women, for "being a husband to a wife is in tension with being a wife of God." (6) Granted, such a symbolism is particularly rich for male mystics who are homosexually inclined or who feel drawn to a homoerotic spirituality, but the same structure tends to generate only anxiety and confusion for those who are not, Eilberg-Schwartz argues; hence the well-known injunctions against seeing God's body, particularly his front side (that is, his phallus), in the biblical texts. The homoerotic gaze focused on God's phallus is simply too much for a tradition that must generate a homoerotic symbolic structure and deny that structure at the same time

Ruether, Rosemary Radford. "Why Do Men Need the Goddess? Male Creation of Female Religious Symbols" In Dialog: A Journal of Theology Volume 44 Issue 3 Page 234 - September 2005. Cited online.

Margalit, Natan. "Priestly Men and Invisible Women: Male Appropriation of the Feminine and the Exemption of Women from Time-Bound Commandments." AJS Review 28:2 (2004) 297-316. See 299.

"Howard Eilberg-Schwartz’s book, God’s Phallus, discusses a theory of Israelite
religion in which the males were placed in a feminine position vis-à-vis
God, but he focuses almost exclusively on (hetero)sexuality, and thus on “the contradictions inherent in men’s relationship with a God who is explicitly male.”7
Thus, although Eilberg-Schwartz deals in depth with the feminization of Israelite
and rabbinic Jewish males, he does not concentrate on the factor of male envy of
women’s reproductive capacities. I argue that this greatly weakens the explanatory
power of his thesis. It does not take into account the centrality of fertility and
birth as metaphors in Israelite culture, nor does it take into account the possibility
of feminine aspects of God. Furthermore, anthropological evidence suggests, as
Boyarin points out, that the male envy of feminine powers of birth is very widespread,
perhaps universal.

Jay Geller, 2005. "Spinoza's Election of the Jews. The Problem of Jewish Persistence," Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society. 12:1, 39-63.

"In line with the large body of literature9 on Judentum, gender, and sexuality that has emerged as well as with the growing recognition of identity as always already gendered
and sexualized,10 this article examines how through direct citation
or unmistakable allusion—often through the use of gendered Jewish Social Studies
language to describe Spinoza himself—modern Jewish identities were articulated.


9 See, e.g., the work of David Biale, Daniel Boyarin, Christina
von Braun, Bryan Cheyette, Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, Sander Gilman, Klaus Hödl,
Jacques Le Rider, Laura Levitt, Ann Pellegrini, Miriam Peskowitz, Riv-Ellen Prell, and Naomi
Seidman.

Pamela Eisenbaum, 2004 "A Remedy For Having Been Born of Woman: Jesus, Gentiles and Geneology in Romans." JBL 123:4 671-702

"Similarly, the rabbinic rite of circumcision constitutes the boy as
a legitimate descendant of Abraham. The blessing pronounced at circumcision
(“Blessed art thou, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has sanctified us
by his commandments, and commanded us to admit him [the child] to the
covenant of Abraham our father”31) seemingly gives the father the ability to
make his son a descendant of Abraham, rather than having to rely on a preexisting
biological condition.³²" (page 682)

³² See the arguments of Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, who explicitly connects circumcision and
patrilineal descent in The Savage in Judaism: An Anthropology of Israelite Religion and Ancient Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 141–73; idem, God’s Phallus and Other Problems for Men and Monotheism (Boston: Beacon, 1994), 141, 200–202; and Hoffman, Covenant of Blood, 38–48. Interestingly, in the full form of the Orthodox Jewish liturgy of the hlym tyrb, “covenant of circumcision” (conveniently reconstructed by Hoffman in translation, pp. 69–72), the mohel (circumciser) recites the following blessing after performing the rite: “Blessed art thou, Lord
our God, King of the universe, who sanctified the beloved one from the womb, and set a statute in his flesh and stamped his descendants with the sign of the holy covenant.” This blessing obscures awareness that a genealogical relationship is being imposed by human action. Rather, it is as if the boy had been born circumcised! Although it differs somewhat from Hoffman’s academic reconstruction, a “handbook” Hebrew-English version of the liturgy (which includes the blessing just cited) for the hlym tyrb can be found in Eugene J. Cohen, Guide to Ritual Circumcision and Redemption of the First-Born Son (New York: Ktav, 1984), 51–55