Rabbi Yonah and Rabbi Mane (fourth-century Palestinian rabbis) explain that most Nazirite vows were not undertaken in a clear state of mind and were subsequently regretted.10 After defilement, which requires bringing a guilt offering and prolonging the term of the vow, the Nazirite is even more likely to regret his original commitment. That, according to those two rabbis, renders the sacrifices unconsecrated. According to R. Yona and R. Mane, this is why Simon generally refuses to accept them.11 Halivni concludes from their position that Simon did not oppose asceticism in general (as exemplified by the Nazirite vow),12 nor did he oppose the institution of the Nazirite categorically (how could he possibly second-guess such a revered biblical practice?).13 Instead, Halivni posits, he objected to “the practice prevalent in his time, and even more common in subsequent times, of vowing to be a Nazirite for primarily nonreligious reasons, and in some cases for no other reason than to prove an argument.”14 Accordingly, we may imagine that Simon’s a priori suspicion toward his contemporary Nazirites grows when their term is unexpectedly extended—an extension signified by the very same guilt offering that he refuses to accept.
From Self-Reflectivity to Midrash: Resolving the Hermeneutical Dilemma
The story is unclear regarding the meaning of the Nazirite’s guilt offering. While the narrative leaves the question of the guilt offering and the context of the lad’s defilement obscure, the text offers clues regarding the circumstances that drove the lad to become a Nazirite in the first place.15 Some modern readers suggest that the lad was already a Nazirite at the time of his encounter with his reflection in the water.16 However, it seems more likely, as suggested above, that it was precisely that encounter that drove the lad to take the vows and renounce his head of curls for “the sake of heaven.”17 Viewing the self-reflective scene as the trigger to the boy’s decision to become a Nazirite (and as the instant at which he explicitly utters the vow) provides a richer basis for the narrative’s complexity and the relationship between the characters involved, as well as for understanding Simon’s acceptance of the offering. Simon thus accepts the guilt offering because of the pure intention encapsulated in the lad’s decision to become a Nazirite and because of the explicit negation of vanity that he conveys. The lad’s story, where pure intention and the conscious negation of vanity play a key—and an explicit—role, answers Simon’s implied general critique of a practice that, to his mind, is too often followed out of vanity. If it was his beautiful locks that alarmed the shepherd to begin with, then by allowing his hair to grow wild for the prescribed term, and even for its unexpected extension because of defilement, his act becomes a deliberate self-reflective act aimed at mastering his vanity. Moreover, it is the shepherd’s conscious recognition of the seductive power of his hair that enables Simon to see him as a kindred spirit: they both recognize the dangers of vanity, and both seem excited by an erotic head of curls.
As Simon emphasizes, he is about to recount an exceptional tale, one that alludes to the apprehension with which he regards the practice of Naziriteship—at least, certain of its manifestations.18 The dissonance between practice and prescribed rules suggests that the Torah is flawed as a signifying corpus: it fails to produce the kinds of human beings it envisions. The Nazirite, then, exists in the text but not in the world outside the text. But this creates incoherence between the sacred law and its core assumptions regarding human action. Simon offers a moment of congruence between these two disparate elements by progressing from the (literally) self-reflective scene in which the shepherd is moved to become a Nazirite to Simon’s (self-reflexive) midrash. By midrashically identifying the boy with the general rule stipulated in Numbers, and not the common practice that he sees around him, he resolves his semiotic-hermeneutic dilemma by finding in the young Nazirite a particular signified person to whom the signifier—that is, the Torah—corresponds.
Narratological Reflections of the (Im)Possible Self
The rabbinic tale, like the Greek versions of the myth, is concerned with primal issues of knowledge, self-knowledge, and their epistemological premise. It also, as psychological theories have claimed, points at the fragmented, ambivalent qualities of what might otherwise be mistaken to be an all too coherent notion of the self. The self, the story tells us, must invariably rely on representation, on an externally projected image, to form a notion of itself. Narcissus, caught in the imaginary illusion of an unfragmented, undivided self, fails to recognize the reflection in the water for what it is—a representation, a mode of signification, of himself. The representational aspects of the self, of subjectivity,19 imply an inherent estrangement of human experience, in which the self is never identical to itself (to its represented self). Hence identity is, by its very nature, fractured.20
The “Other Within”: From Human to Textual Representation
Unlike the Greek doomed hero, the Nazirite from the south is saved at the exact moment of reflection, of self-reflectivity. What exactly happened at that instant, according to the doubly mediated recounting of Simon the Just? Simon tells us that the shepherd told him that, having seen his reflection in the water, he was attacked from within. His yetzer—the rabbinic term for the evil inclination that resides within every man21—sought to overcome him and remove him from this world.22 The manifestation of the yetzer thus, paradoxically, signals both the character’s downfall and his ultimate redemption. The yetzer is a remarkable rabbinic innovation. It should be viewed in light of the shift in rabbinic thought, in its treatment of biblical writings, from external to internal conflict in seduction narratives, and in light of the tendency in rabbinic writings to expand the internal human realm of conflict and intention.23 The psychological aspects of the rabbinic tale of Narcissus should be considered in the context of rabbinic notions of subjectivity in general.
The yetzer is an adversary that is the source of the narcissistic impulse. Yet it is also, almost paradoxically, the remedy to the very malady that it seems to provoke: the existence (or the identification) of the yetzer as a separate internal entity, one that facilitates articulation of an internally divided discourse, is the way out of narcissistic entrapment. The yetzer connotes, in this specific narrative, sexual transgression (presented here as Eros’s counterimage, Thanatos). The phrase paḥaz yitzri (my yetzer made me rash) clearly points to the Nazirite’s autoerotic fascination.24 In this highly intensified model, it is the recognition of that fascination as a reified entity that sets the beholder free. The victory is won in an internal battle and through an internal staged dialogue (although the yetzer is not allowed to speak for itself).
The recognition of an other within, a recognition that is effected by an internal quasi-dialogue, prevents the future Nazirite from misconstruing an image of himself to be an other, external to his unified self.25 Language, the archetypical signifying (or symbolic) system, provides a way out of an illusionary and fatal conflation of identity and sameness. Looking at the water, the shepherd understands that sameness is the ultimate fate that awaits all humans, when the very (external) features that mark the differences between them are erased by death. He then decides to become a Nazirite, which will require him to let his hair grow wild and, at the end of the term of his vow, to shave it off—a symbolic renunciation of power and control26 over that part of his body that is not eaten (at least at first) by maggots and worms. But his emancipation owes its success not only to the linguistic signifying system in general, and not only to the symbolic act of shaving his hair. More specifically, it is the legal (halakhic) discourse in which the words “I swear, I shall shave you” (agalḥakha) count as a Naziriteship vow.27