Tohu Bohu

This week we have a saying from Elisha ben Abuyeh. We have met him before, in a historical novel called As a Driven Leaf and on a trip to Paradise in Avot 4:1 a few months ago. I’ll quote my version of the story for those that missed it the first time.

There were four who entered Paradise. Ben Azzai was one, Ben Zoma the second, another was the third, and the fourth was Rabbi Akiba. Rabbi Akiba said to the others, he said, When ye arrive at the stones of pure marble, don’t cry out ‘water, water!’ says he, for he that telleth lies shall not tarry in my sight, that is, the presence of the Divine.

Ben Azzai took one look and died.

Ben Zoma took one look and went mad.

The other one became a heretic (which is why we don’t mention his name in the story, not to speak ill, although for a hint, his first initial is E and the second letter is lisha Ben Abuyah).

Rabbi Akiba departed unhurt.

That’s the whole of the story, which is written in the tractate Hagigah, page 14b. It is clearly a strange and unsatisfactory story.

So, before we even get to the verse, we have to ask: why are we including the saying of the heretical Other? Sure, he was a great and pius scholar in his youth before he entered Paradise, but surely his example is one to be avoided and shunned. Or, at least, taken as a warning. Now, let’s see what he says, in Irving M. Bunim’s translation:

Elisha b. Avuyah said: If one learns as a child, to what is it like?—like ink written on fresh paper. If one learns as an old man, to what it is like?—like ink written on erased paper.

On the face of it, this is just saying that it is easier to learn when you are young, and that when you are old, you have much to unlearn (or erase) before you can learn anything. It’s a warning not to put off your studies, and not to put off your children’s studies. This is good advice, of course.

On the other hand, Elisha ben Abuyeh himself was a great scholar as a youth, knowledge written on him like blank paper, and when he was an old man, he had erased it all. Is that what he is talking about? Was this a saying of his youth, when he was guessing at the difficulty of learning in your old age? That isn’t much of a wise saying, then. Or was it a saying of his heretical age, when he had learned and unlearned and learned and unlearned until his wisdom was full of holes?

I also wonder about this: was the audience of the time, the Rabbis of Late Antiquity, let’s say, who put this book together, all so familiar with writing on fresh and erased paper? Back in Chapter One, I wondered about the transmission of Wisdom via the Book rather than the Telling, the insistence within its pages of its authority. So perhaps this really is something that has powerful connotations for his audience. I’m certainly not an expert on the history of The Book. But I wonder… if, as I suspect from the little I know, fresh paper was not a readily available resource in the provinces of the Empire circa 100 CE, the distinction between new paper and old may have been one of value. New paper was expensive and difficult to obtain. Old paper was cheap(er) and easier to get hold of. You would never write a first draft on new paper—Roman edicts, I am told, were still written on wax first and then transferred to vellum.

Perhaps, then, we could interpret the sentiment like this: when teaching children, teach them the traditions as they were transmitted; that is not the place for experiments or advances. But when the old go to learn, rather than being bound by the tried and true, a certain amount of experimentation and searching is appropriate.

That, in fact, when the old go to learn, it is like a first draft: sloppy, new and… well, heretical, yes?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 7:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This week we have an unusual verse, in that Samuel ha-catan quotes Proverbs 24:17-18 verbatim, so I am using the King James Version rather than any of my usual translations:

Samuel the Small said: Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth: Lest the LORD see [it], and it displease him, and he turn away his wrath from him.

Here is a story about Samuel ha-catan: Rabban Gamliel needed seven sages to convene a Bet Din to declare a Leap Year. When he arrived in the meeting house, there were not seven but eight sages! Rabban Gamliel asked who had invited himself in excess of requirements, and Samuel rose, excusing himself for attending, but explaining that he was present only as a student, to learn the appropriate procedures. The Rabbis explain that this was a prevarication, actually, as Samuel wanted to make sure that no other present would be embarrassed and asked to leave. It is Samuel’s humility that got him his name, this story explains, although of course more likely it was just to distinguish him from some older Samuel with a similar patronymic. At any rate: humility, and not only refraining from schadenfreude but working to avoid letting your rivals stumble or fall.

On the other hand, another story about Samuel ha-catan: when the Amidah, the central prayer of the liturgy, came to be set down in its final form, Samuel ha-catan was in the committee who made the decisions. These decisions were, for the most part, defining the eighteen benedictions and placing them in order. One of the names for the prayer is the sh’monah esrei, the eighteen. There are actually, in the traditional liturgy, nineteen benedictions: the eighteen and another, negative benediction, the benediction against the heretics. This calls for the enemies of the Jews to be “cut off”, struck down and humbled: Blessed are you, Master of the Universe, who breaks enemies and humbles sinners. This blessing (called the birkat ha-minim) was written by Samuel ha-catan himself. Note, by the way, that the language is the same as our verse: enemies are oy’vim, so there’s no distinction there (although there is some distinction between stumbling, falling, breaking and cutting down, of course).

So, while Samuel ha-catan is known for quoting Proverbs about not enjoying the downfall of enemies, he is also known for writing and codifying the liturgy praising the Divine for the downfall of enemies. What do we learn from this? The sages tell us that only Samuel ha-catan could be trusted to write this blessing, as we could be sure he was not writing from anger or desire for revenge. Just as we spill wine from our cups at the seder to acknowledge that our celebration holds within it mourning over the deaths of the Pharaoh’s army—necessary but still losses, we recite the birkat ha-minim with the reminder from its author that we are (Proverbially) enjoined against glee at its fulfillment.

If we do recite it. The Reform prayerbook at Congregation Beth Bolshoi leaves it out, as do (I think) the Reconstructionist prayerbooks. I don’t remember if it is in the Conservative siddur these days; I should take a look. Anyway, there is precedent for leaving it out, which is, yes, a third story about Samuel ha-catan: a year or so after the Amidah had been finalized, Samuel ha-catan was called on to lead the prayers. He did so beautifully, it is reported, with one exception: he could not remember the birkat ha-minim. Think about why the Rabbis tell that story.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 1:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tell me, Gentle Readers, what is the secret to all great ethical behavior? Timing. This is Judah Goldin’s translation:

Rabbi Simeon ben Eleazar says: Do not appease thy fellow in his hour of anger; do not comfort him while the dead is still laid out before him; do not question him in the hour of his vow; and do not strive to see him in his hour of misfortune.

Timing!

The commentary are all pretty much in agreement that Rabbi Simeon is pointing out the (perhaps obvious) fact that it isn’t just what you do but when and how. I think there’s another point to it, which is that none of the four actions are of any tangible help. Perhaps what is implied is that these moments of crisis require more than speech. If your friend is angry with you, you need to do something to resolve the problem. Not just appease his anger—if you view his anger as the problem, then you aren’t looking to solve whatever is making him angry. When your friend is bereaved, the issue isn’t that he is sad but that he needs help with the day-to-day tasks that need doing even on days when you don’t want to get out of bed. In the hour of a vow (and vow-making is almost always a Bad Thing by the Sages), questioning your friend is, again, taking the vow-making as the problem rather than the root, which needs to be addressed with action. And in the hour of your friend’s misfortune, you can always be of material help to him without putting him to the trouble of a visit.

Not to be totally down on talking. I do a lot of talking myself. And I do think that talking, a lot of the time, is helpful when people are in a bad way. But I also think that people, well, that Your Humble Blogger is likely to start, first, with the talking, and only later think that it would have been nice to have, oh, done the dishes for them, or looked after the kids, or otherwise engaged in the kind of help that would be helpful.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So. Rabbi Jacob ben Kurshai had been telling us that this room was the vestibule for the World to Come. Does he have anything more to tell us about this world and the world to come? Yes, yes he does. Here is R. Travers Herford’s translation.

He used to say: Better is one hour of repentance and good works in this world than all the life of the world to come; and better is one hour of calmness of spirit in the world to come than all the life of this world.

This is worth breaking up into pieces. The first part, that it is good (yafah, which is sometimes used to mean fair, as in attractive) to spend a small amount of time (sha’ar achat, hour one, which Jacob Neusner translates as “a single moment”) in repentence (t’shuvah) and good deeds (ma’asim tovim) in this world olam hazeh). Then a mem, which is held to be the “mem of comparison” (as Mr. Herford puts it), but which could be the mem of causation). All the life of the the world to come, col cheiay olam habah.

Why is this? If the world to come is the dining hall and this world only the vestibule, how can we compare a part of this smaller world with all of the greater?

Because, the Rabbis say, that in the world to come, there is no repentance. No good deeds. No marrying and giving in marriage, no eating and drinking, no charity, no accomplishments or frustrations, no action of any kind. As the sage says:

Therefore, one hour—one minute—of repentance and good deeds is greater than all the life of the world to come, for in the world to come there is no repentance and good deeds, and what else are we made for?

Irving M. Bunim, in his commentary on this verse, tells the story of the Vilna Gaon, who was elderly and dying after a lifetime of piety, study, teaching and good deeds. The Gaon, on his deathbed, surrounded by his students, wept. His students sought to comfort him, telling him that he would soon be rewarded in Heaven; he but left this world for the World to Come. The old man took in his fingers the fringes of his tallis catan, saying to them: I wore this every day. I paid almost no money for it. A scrap of cloth, the strings tied into tzitzis to make the four corners. But every day I wore it, I fulfilled a commandment of the Divine. Now, I have fulfilled that commandment for the last time: in the World to Come, we don’t sleep, rise, dress for the day. We don’t fulfill the mitzvot. I have no more opportunities, even for such a simple mitzvah as this.

In one hour in this world, in one minute, we have opportunities that we will never have in the World to Come, just as I have the opportunity to straighten my clothes in the vestibule; you can only enter the dining hall once, and there is no second chance for a first impression. But then, if repentance and good deeds (only available in this world) are so great, how can the sages say that the pious will receive their reward in the world to come? What sort of reward is it when he can’t eat or drink, love or dance or even do good deeds?

It is the reward of karat ruach, peace of spirit, which (R. Jacob tells us in the second half of the verse) is better than all the life of this world. Nirvana, if you want to think about it like that. The end to troubles is also the end to aspirations. All part of the package.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today’s verse is another one that is, on the face of it, not only straightforward but wrong. Here’s Herbert Danby:

R. Jacob said: This world is like a vestibule before the world to come; prepare thyself in the vestibule that thou mayest enter into the banqueting hall.

Straightforward. The world to come is the real world; this is only the preparation for it.

So the metaphor is from buildings, and particularly from roman buildings: the banqueting hall is a t’rak’leen, the triclinium; the vestibule is a prozdor, the prothuron. My understanding is that the prothuron and the vestibulum were not exactly the same thing, but that the Roman vestibulum more or less took the place of the Greek prothuron, and from an eschatological point of view, I suppose it doesn’t make much difference whether we are just inside the outer doors or in a hallway through the wall. Plus, I should say, ancient architecture? Not my field.

But it turns out that while the Rabbis do use this metaphor to talk about the world to come, with admission to the outer and inner courts and the contempt for those rubes who mistake the waiting room for the throne room, what they really use this house metaphor to discuss is women’s bodies.

Not because they were a bunch of dirty old men, you understand. No, there are a bunch of very important and detailed questions about women and their reproductive systems that require the Rabbis to discuss in some detail the outer and inner chambers thereof. It’s not the only metaphor they use, but it is the primary metaphor, and they differ (according to a small amount of research) from the Greek and Roman physicians in how closely the stick to that metaphor and how far they are willing to extend it.

Of course, there is a more fundamental and all-encompassing idea tying the idea of wife to house; there is a quote in the Talmud (Shabbat 118a) about Rabbi Jose claiming to only ever call his wife bayit, his house. This is in the context of his sexual purity, after he claims to have only had sex with her five times (he had five sons). On the other hand, I came across a claim that a woman’s bayit was slang for what used to be called Down There. And of course the great Yiddish word baleboosteh, which indicates an almost fearful respect for a woman of great competence, dominant personality and force of will comes from the Hebrew for the master of the house, ba’al ha-bayit.

More seriously, there really is a fundamental (and of course patriarchal, restrictive and fortunately outdated) association of woman and house in the Jewish Tradition. This plays out in positive and negative ways, with the woman responsible for shalom ha-bayit, the peace in the house, and the man enjoined to submit for the sake of shalom ha-bayit. While women are not obligated to fulfill the mitzvot that would take them outside the house; they are responsible for the mitzvot that are within the house, which are the most important ones, particularly the preparation for the Shabbat.

The preparation for the Shabbat is also likened to the preparation for the world to come; as we cannot cook or do work on the Shabbat, preparation in advance is absolutely necessary if we are to celebrate with the three meals, or for that matter just dressing to go out to services. Just as Rabbi Jacob says that we must do the adequate preparation here, in the vestibule, so that we may enter the banqueting hall of the world to come, we must do the adequate preparation on Friday, so that our Shabbat will be a banquet and not a fast.

And, of course, one of the mitzvoth of Shabbat is for married couples to have sex. I leave further analysis of the metaphor of preparation and penetration to Gentle Readers as an exercise.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This week’s note will be even more incoherent than usual, I’m afraid. Your Humble Blogger has more questions than answers, of course, but this time the questions don’t even fit together on connected subjects. Ah, well. Let’s start with the words, in R. Travers Herford’s translation:

R. Mattithiah ben Harash said: Be first in greeting every man; and be a tail to lions and not a head to foxes.

OK, first the words. Because the way one greets someone in Hebrew is with the word peace, being first in hello-ing is being first in peace-ing. This has a happy connotation, but it doesn’t (so far as I can tell) mean anything more than greeting, as one cannot use peace as a transitive verb (and peace the other guy before the bastard peaces you). The lions, aryot, are clearly lions (lions having been native not only to North Africa but to Judea and the whole Mediterranean coast all the way up past Turkey to the Balkans) (and did you know that in the Twelfth Century, there were walrus as far south as Spain?), and I only bring up the Hebrew word because the way that A is for Apple, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph, is for aryeh in children’s abecedaries. Foxes are shu’alim, and appear to include both burrowing foxes and jackals in the term. There is some murkiness about the derivation of the word (of course), but it appears to be related to the digging, and therefore is possibly not altogether unrelated to she’ol, or the pit. Although, of course, it’s an utter fallacy to claim much meaning in the distant relationships of word origins.

Still, if we are willing to play along with that, we have a contrast not just between the lion and the fox, but between the aleph, or the beginning, and Sheol, or the end. Better to be the end of the beginning than the beginning of the end? That interpretation does connect to the first leg of the triple, which otherwise does appear to be connected to the other two. The emphasis would be on timing—be first in Peace, if you can, but better to be second in the beginning (that is, to respond in kind to continue the Peace) than to be first in the ending (that is, to break off Peace—or for that matter, simply to break off civilities and the connection that conversation brings).

Sadly, though, that interpretation does require ignoring the plain meaning of the words. R. Mattithiah pretty clearly is warning against being the head of foxes, yes metaphorically in the sense that foxes symbolize (to him) low cunning, deceit and slyness. And he praises being a tail to lions, where lions in Scripture tend to be associated with valor and trustworthiness, although they are also sent as Divine punishment, so there’s that. But the most obvious reading is of course that it is better to be a lesser part of a good enterprise than the head of a bad one, and not to let pride tempt you to bad enterprises simply so you do not suffer the indignity of being the tail&8212;and there, I suppose, is the connection to the first bit, with pride being presumably the reason one would wait to be addressed rather than being the first to greet.

Although, of course, one might also wait to be addressed out of diffidence, rather than pride. The Machsor Vitry (I think, I can’t track down the quote) points out that the lion holds his tail high, while the fox holds his head low. It is better to be part of a group that supports you than head of a group that undermines you. The Rambam points out that it is better to be a student than a teacher, to associate with those who know more than you rather than less, as simply being around people you respect helps you to your better self. In this case, it is not pride that might keep you from being the tail to lions, but rather a sense that you are not even worthy of tagging along with your betters. Rabbi Mattithias says that you should follow the lion, even if you are not worthy of being its mane, its claws or teeth or powerful legs, but only its tail.

Here’s the thing, though. How often in life have you had the opportunity to choose between being a tail to lions or a head to foxes? I mean, looking at the newspaper ads, I’m not seeing a lot of Lions seek tail, must be willing to wave proudly, three years experience as tail or in related fields, lions are an equal opportunity employer. Irving M. Bunin says that any time you join an organization, you should ask yourself first whether it is an organization of lions or jackals, and only then whether you will be a head or a tail—but are you seriously going to join the organization of jackals? I mean, if you are thinking about joining the Associated Brotherhood of Carcass and Dead thing Eaters, you probably are considering the organization to be a group of fine upstanding lions, trustworthy and valorous, or else you wouldn’t be filling out that form, right? Frankly, as practical advice, the whole lion/fox thing doesn’t seem to be all that useful.

And here’s another thing: Mattithiah ben Harash went to Rome after the expulsion, and although he does seem to have been in contact with the other sages of his time, he doesn’t seem to have participated fully in the discussions that become the Oral Law. That is, very few of his rulings are written down and attributed to him, and there are no disciples of his recorded. Is this verse a defense of his choice, that being a tail to the Imperial Lions of Rome was better than being a head to the clever foxes at Yavneh? Or is he expressing regret, that it would have been better to have stayed and been a tail to the Judean lions, rather than heading his own, lesser yeshiva in Rome?

And yet—he is one of the sages who in the famous story break down at the border of Israel and weep, saying that living in the Holy Land is equal to all the weight of all the commandments in the Torah. And he appears to have been buried in the Galilee. Did he return from Rome? The only good story about him (the weeping-at-the-border story is not really about Mattithiah ben Harash, as he just happens to be one of the group) is about him blinding himself to escape from temptation when the Devil appeared in the guise of a beautiful woman. Is this related to the preference for tail over head?

OK, sorry about that last. But really, in the whole question, I am reminded of the bit in Catch-22 where Nately is talking to the old man in the whorehouse, and insists that it is better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees.

“But I’m afraid you have it backward. It is better to live on one’s feet than die on one’s knees. That is the way the saying goes.”

“Are you sure?” Nately asked with sober confusion. “It seems to make more sense my way.”

“No, it makes more sense my way. Ask your friends.”

Nately turned to ask his friends and discovered they were gone.

Nately, of course, dies in his plane, but then the old man is killed by the MPs. And it turns out that being a head of lions is better than being a foxtail, and more useful, too.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 1:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This verse appears to be carrying on from the last bit of the last verse, which quotes Proverbs 3:5, the advice to “lean not unto thine own understanding”. At least, when I say it appears to be doing that, the traditional interpretation is that the verse is about understanding, although there are other ways to read it.

It has been a while since I have passed along a bunch of translations, so:

R. Travers Herford: R. Jannai said: There is not in our hands either the security of the wicked or the chastisements of the righteous.

Jacob Neusner: R. Yannai says, “We do not have in hand [an explanation] either for the prosperity of the wicked or for the suffering of the righteous.”

Irving Bunin: R. Yannai said: It is not within our ability [to understand or explain] the tranquil well-being of the wicked or the afflictions of the righteous.

Judah Goldin: Rabbi Yannai says: Within our reach is neither the tranquility of the wicked nor even the suffering of the righteous.

Herbert Danby: R. Yannai said: It is not in our power to explain the well-being of the wicked or the sorrows of the righteous.

Michael Rodkinson: R. Janai said: “Neither the security of the wicked nor the afflictions of the righteous are within the grasp of our understanding.”

The word in question is b’yadeinu, in our hands. There isn’t, in our hands, not the tranquility (or success or some such) of the wicked nor the suffering of the righteous. If you read this as picking up from the last verse, then it makes sense to figure the missing verb has to do with understanding, and that the point of the verse is that the whole issue of theodicy is beyond our human grasp, and that we shouldn’t worry about it.

The Machsor Vitry, in fact, states that this is the received interpretation, but suggests an alternate one: we don’t experience the tranquility that the wicked do, nor do we suffer as the righteous do. That is, unlike the wicked, who give no thought to what is right, we struggle with our shortcomings. And unlike the righteous, who are tested with suffering, our sufferings come as just punishments for our misdeeds. We inhabit the middle ground, subject to the evil inclination but also to the good one, veering between the extremes as our discipline holds. So, according to this view, the advice of R. Janai is to never consider yourself wicked, and thus complaisant about your end, but do consider yourself imperfect rather than wholly righteous, and take what miseries enter into your life as being your deserts. Desserts. What you deserve.

There is another interpretation, of course—it is not in our hands to grant (or to deny) tranquility to the wicked, any more than it is to give suffering to the righteous. My place is not to judge whether the tranquil man is truly wicked, to be responsible for shattering his tranquility. Nor is it good to say that a fellow suffers because he is wicked—perhaps his sufferings are the sufferings of the righteous. The poor are neither all humble wisdom oppressed by The Man nor all lazy parasites on the hardworking successful; the rich are not all wicked tranquility, either. If you think you have a handle on all of that, you are wrong—Rabbi Jannai quite rightly reminds us that is it beyond our grasp.

Another interpretation (suggested by Mr. Herford) is that R. Jannai was talking about the nation of Israel with is first person plural; the people of Israel is not fated to have the tranquil lives of the nations; the Pax Romana is not for us. And yet, our national suffering is not the suffering of the righteous; we suffer because of our failings, not our piety.

As Gentle Readers will guess, I prefer that there be multiple interpretations, and that not only do we need to work to choose one, but that choosing one does not invalidate the others. The question is which interpretation communicates to you at this moment, building on the tradition but not confined to it. And I am wondering about the plurality of it—our hands (plural) are empty of the tranquility of the wicked (plural) and the suffering of the righteous (plural). Who are we; which hands are ours? All Jews? All people? Our community? Is it all of our hands or each of our hands? Are we each trying separately to grasp, but in vain? Is Jannai talking about empty hands as the human condition, or is he talking to his generation—is it just that at the moment we have let slip through our fingers the solace of wickedness without replacing it with the attitude toward suffering that comes from tzaddik, from righteousness, justice and charity? It it, perhaps, a warning to the community not to wash our hands of the righteous sufferer or the wicked prosperous? Is it out of our hands because of Divinely ordained nature, or is it out of our hands because we have failed the Divine opportunity?

At the moment, of course, at probably at any moment, we slew between excoriating the prosperous wicked and shoring up her success; we sympathize with the righteous sufferer and pile on his head more woe. While the ultimate accounting for good and evil, of reward and punishment is certainly beyond our grasp, it is also true that we put our hands to help or harm, and that our hands are not altogether empty. We can afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, and we can afflict the afflicted and comfort the comfortable. And yet, for so much of the world, we each let our opportunities go, and we each look at our hands, so small and inadequate to the task, and think that there isn’t anything in them at all, nothing in them at all.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 2:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Your Humble Blogger has access once again to a variety of resources, but they are only making matters worse. Here’s the Judah Goldin translation of today’s verse:

Rabbi Nehorai says: Betake thyself to a place of Torah and say not that it will come after thee, that thy companions will set it up for thee to master; And lean not upon thine own understanding.

The first problem is that there is no Rabbi Nehorai. We have it on good authority that R. Nehorai is actually R. Nehemiah, and that it is one of those misheard name things that sometimes happens. We also have it on good authority that R. Nehorai is actually R. Meir, who was in fact named Nehorai, but was called Meir, both of them meaning light, more or less. And we have it on good authority that R. Nehorai is actually R. Elazar ben Arach.

The last of those is the best story, I think. You may remember Elazar ben Arach from verse 2:19 last summer, but I made a reference to his story as one of Yochanan ben Zacchai’s disciples before that. He isn’t the Eliezar, whose wonderful story I told at that time, but the Elazar ben Arach who I mentioned thusly:

It turns out that Elazar ben Arach, the ever-flowing spring, dried up, or the water ran foul; instead of going to Javneh with Rabban Jochanan ben Zakkai, he chose to go to Emmaus, where is wife’s family was from, and there he was cut off from the sages, where he forgot all his Torah. He turns up in the Talmud only here and as a warning not to separate yourself from the community (one f’r’ex for that fairly frequent warning), and only a handful of other places. Yet at the time, before the Destruction, he was famous.

There’s more to the story. Well, there are a bunch of versions of the story, and one of them connects him with this verse. It seems that when Elazar ben Arach went to Emmaus with his wife and her family rather than to Yavneh with the rest of the gang, he thought that he could study and increase his knowledge by himself. This proved extremely difficult. Then he thought that scholars might leave Yavneh and visit him in Emmaus, now and then, without his having to make the trip. Alas, this didn’t happen. When, as an old man, he finally gave in and went to Yavneh, not only did his colleagues find that his knowledge had failed to increase, not only did his colleagues find that he had forgotten much that he once knew, but evidently he had suffered a stroke of some kind (I am guessing), because even the task of reading the text was beyond him.

The story doesn’t end there, thank goodness, with Rabbi Elazar, the overflowing spring, staring baffled angry and uncomprehending at the scroll, because at the moment the assembled sages saw his plight, they were moved to pray for mercy, and he was miraculously cured. His memory came back to him all at once, as if a door was opened into a room that had long been dark. Thus he was called Nehorai, the light; the verses attributed to “Rabbi Nehorai” are actually those said by Rabbi Elazar after he had lost and regained his memory.

Well, and that story is obviously made up to illustrate today’s verse: go to Yavneh, rather than Emmaus, or face the fate of Elazar ben Achar—except of course that you may not be deemed worthy of a miracle.

Your Humble Blogger was talking with an alumna of Bryn Mawr some years ago, about libraries and learning, and she said that a Mawrtyr always felt that there was nothing she couldn’t learn, given access to a good enough library. I retorted that a Swarthmorean always felt that there was nothing he or she could not learn, given access to a good enough library and other Swatfolk. I have told this story before on this Tohu Bohu but not for more than a year, and if I’m not going to tell my stories more than once, I am going to have to pack up shop altogether. I mean. After a few thousand posts, there’s bound to be some repetition.

But the point of telling the story at this time is that I do think this is what Nehorai is getting at, and more than that: there is a certain attitude that comes from often persuading and being persuaded by people you respect that is actually a spiritual attitude, one of humility and community together.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So. Your Humble Blogger is on the road, so I don’t have access to my books and things, and besides am (a) not altogether healthy, and (2) spending time with family and friends. So this week’s Pirke Avot verse is getting short shrift. In fact, I’m typing it in from memory, so I may have some of the wording wrong. I was reading it from the Judah Goldin translation, but errors here are mine, not his.

Rabbi Simeon says: There are three crowns, the crown of priesthood, the crown of royalty, and the crown of Torah. But the crown of a good name goes with them all.

Or possibly ’surmounts’ them all, or perhaps ’supports’ them all. If I had all my translations with me, I could give you the variations, because I think the different English translations quite likely come from differences of interpretation of the verse.

One of the commentators (I think it was in the Machsor Vitry, but again, making it up, here) makes the point that the crown of priesthood is available only to the descendants of Aaron, and no amount of wealth or good works or piety can gain it for someone who is not a cohen by birth. And the crown of royalty belongs to the descendants of David, and again, you must be born to it or you cannot hope to gain it. But the crown of Torah is available to all.

This made me think of the crown in relation to claims on it—perhaps it’s all the Shakespeare this Spring, but there is a big difference between claiming the crown of royalty and ruling as monarch. Similarly (or it seems similar at the moment), one may claim the crown of Priesthood, but that’s a very different thing from actually getting to cut up dead things and put them on the altar at the Temple. Each of those claims must be recognized before they mean much of anything, and they have to be recognized by the right people. Is that what Rabbi Simeon is getting at with the Good Name Crown? The crown of Torah, then, while of course it is available to all, is only a crown if it is recognized by…the sages? The Bet Din or the Assembly or the Sanhedrin? Or the teacher? Or the student? I’m not sure.

There is another commentary that makes the (restrospectively obvious) connection between the three crowns and the three pillars of torah, avodah, and g’milut hasadim in a different Simeon’s verse back in Chapter One. The crown of Torah is connected to the pillar of Torah, of course, and the crown of priesthood is connected to the pillar of avodah or worship/temple service, presumably. Which leaves the crown of royalty to be connected to the pillar of g’milut hasadim, deeds of loving-kindness. Which is not what I immediately think of when I think of royalty. But if I take that connection and tie in the idea of exclusivity, we open up the crowns quite a bit. The crown of Torah, of course, is available to everybody, as was pointed out below, but while nobody can be a priest but a born cohen, in these post-Temple days, anyone can engage in avodah. That word itself having changed over time from the temple services to the siddur liturgy seems to imply the opening up of the priesthood; this tells us we are on the right path, yes? And in these days when there is no King, is our path to the crown of royalty the path of g’milut hasadim? By being noble, or kingly, not in the sense of arrogance or privilege, but in the sense of taking responsibility for others, of providing for them, you can earn yourself that crown after all.

And now the fourth crown comes in, with the distinction between the claim and the crown; while Rabbi Zadok, not so long ago, warns against making knowledge of the Torah a crown for self-exaltation. All of these crowns are good things when sought for the sake of the Divine or when sought for the sake of others, or even when sought for their own sake. But when you seek these crowns in order to lord it over other people, they are not good things at all. So, the ambiguous relationship between that fourth crown, the crown of a good name, and the other three. Is this crown above them all, in the sense that someone who has a good name is not alienating people by pride and arrogance? Or is the crown beneath them all, in the sense that the desire for a good name in the negative sense, the desire to be set above other people, to be deferred to, to be crowned over them, negates the three crowns themselves?

I think I prefer to leave the ambiguity there. I would like to see Rabbi Simon as having mixed feelings about the whole crown business to begin with. Seeking crowns can be a good thing and a bad thing together, and is never an unmixed good. Remember that Bar Koziba was claiming the crown of royalty.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Today’s verse is a short one, only seven words in Hebrew (not counting the attribution), but a trifle longer in English, because, you know, different languages. Here’s Michael L. Rodkinson’s translation:

R. Jehudah said: “Be careful in thy study, for error in study counts for an intentional sin.”

In the legal code, if (for instance) someone is accused of causing another’s death, let’s say by pushing them off a roof, we are required to ask if it was intentional or accidental. Did the accused know how high the roof is? Did the accused know that people who plunge from the roof often die? Could the accused see where the edge of the roof was? The punishments are different; it is held that a fellow who kills somebody without understanding the consequences should be punished more lightly than a deliberate murderer. And so on for lesser crimes—the legal categories are shogeg, the accidental sinner, and mezid, the deliberate sinner. Rabbi Judah is saying that shigegat Talmud, the inadvertent error in Talmud, is not to be held as lighter or less serious than an intentional sin.

Once again, I think this has to be taken for exhortative value, rather than as a legal benchmark or observation. We should be so careful in study that we fear errors as we would fear sin (back to sin-fearing again, but I’ll try not to get distracted). That is, I should fear my own errors as I would fear sin. When it comes to someone else’s error, treating that as if it were a deliberate sin seems just crazy to me.

And yet— when talmud is used as a verb, there, it can mean either study or teaching. Or both, of course, as we have lots of sayings about how students teach the teacher and teachers learn from students. The distinction between teaching and studying is not a bright line. But it is fair to interpret this verse as applying most strongly to teachers, in effect saying that as a teacher, my inadvertent error in teaching will lead to my students inadvertent errors in practice, and that those will be attributed to me as if I had deliberately taught them the wrong practice. Again, that seems a bit crazy, but not as an exhortation on the importance of careful preparation for teaching.

And Irving Bunim suggests that an inadvertent error in teaching can lead the student not just to misinformation but to disillusion. So a bad Talmud teacher, through poor preparation or sloppy discussion or ignorance, can lead a student to reject the Talmud altogether and into deliberate sin. So the Talmud teacher is exhorted to be careful, as your inadvertent error in Talmud can lead others to deliberate sin.

Still, I couldn’t really adjust myself to this verse until I read a commentary in the Avot of Rabbi Nathan, an unattributed observation which turns the things around (as so many of the best commentaries do). The unnamed sage asks which is greater, punishment or reward? Of course, reward. Then, if it is the case that in Talmud study an error is counted as a sin, can it not be true that an inadvertent mitzvah be counted as if it were a deliberate good deed?

There are thoughtless kindnesses as well as thoughtless sins; when we make our habits good habits, they can come without intention. When we are learning or teaching (and when are we not learning or teaching), our errors are magnified, but so are our strengths. When I learn from a teacher who is in the habit of unthinking politeness, of interpreting with a great spirit rather than a mean one, who is not deliberately modeling reverence and respect for the Divine, the Scripture and the Creation but who is providing that model anyway, just because that is the way she lives, then my deliberate actions in imitation of her or to earn her praise are to her credit as if she had set out to teach them. And when I study, my caution against error is balanced against my deliberate and disciplined practice that becomes unconscious and habitual, and which is nevertheless taken to my credit.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week’s sage, Johanan Ha-Sandelar, was the friend and traveling companion of this week’s sage, Eleazar b. Shammua. They were the last disciples of Rabbi Akiva, and are credited with bringing forward into the tradition his decisions and thinking. They did not go to Yavneh after the Destruction and expulsion, but set up in Galilee, where legend says that Eleazar’s students crowded into tiny rooms, so crowded that when Judah the Nasi came to study (when he was the Nasi’s son, not the Nasi yet himself), they would not let him squeeze in to make it more crowded. Yet he stayed, and returned even after he had become the leader of the Sanhedrin, to learn from his old teacher some more. Here is the translation of Herbert Danby:

R. Eleazar b. Shammua said: Let the honour of thy disciple be as dear to thee as thine own and as the honor of thy companion, and the honour of thy companion as the fear of thy teacher, and the fear of thy teacher as the fear of Heaven.

Before I go into the language of it, I want to mention two notable moments that bookend his career as a rabbi. He had been a disciple of Rabbi Akiva, as I said, but Akiva had been imprisoned by the Romans and ordaining new Rabbis was prohibited in the wake of the Bar-Koziba rebellion. But then, how would the rabbinate survive? It is said that twenty-four thousand pupils of Rabbi Akiva had died between Passover and Shavuot, and the world was desolate and the Torah was forgotten. Rabbi Jehuda ben Baba, a man of great piety, declared that he would ordain the last of Rabbi Akiva’s pupils, in defiance of the ban. He took them out of town (so that the residents of the town would not killed in retribution) and had completed the ordination ceremony when the Roman soldiers came. The young rabbis escaped, but Jehuda ben Baba was slain. Eleazar ben Shammua, together with his companions, began their life as rabbis surrounded by death.

And ended it, too. Eleazar ben Shammua is one of the Ten Martyrs, who are supposed to be considered as if they had all died on the same day. This is not historically viable, of course, since Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Jehuda ben Baba are also among the Ten Martyrs, but we don’t necessarily have to take the poem literally. If we take it as evocation or as theme, though, we still have Eleazar ben Shammua dying in the midst of the deaths of the sages. I can’t help, then, looking at this verse as being fundamentally connected with death and the, well, the abbreviation of life. The mortality of mortality. All that.

And now to the language, because it’s a bit murky, to me (unsurprisingly). The first part is the ch’vod talmid’cha the honor of your student. Chavod can mean honor, or respect, or in the Scripture, glory. Fame, reputation, dignity, something like that. The reputation of your student is your own reputation, and that is pretty clear—the admonition is to remember it, which is always more difficult. This is more than just treat others as you would be treated, this is specific to the relationship of the teacher and the student, where there is (necessarily) a hierarchal distinction, a superiority of knowledge and experience and rank, but not necessarily of respect or honor. Eleazar carried with him the honor and reputation of his teachers, and knew that his students would carry his and his teachers after he had died, and treated them appropriately. It is said that Eleazar ben Shammua lived to be a hundred and three, and was never late to class once. You know?

But in the next part, there’s a turn, the ch’vod chaver’cha, the honor (or whatever) of your friend, should be as c’morah rabach, the fear of your teacher. There is a pun, here, at least in modern Hebrew: morah is the word for a teacher, and although (I believe) they are homonyms and have different roots (although I would be interested to know if they are connected—it seems as if the morah that means fear or awe is connected to the yir’ah that may be connected to guidance or instruction via the fellow who beats the animals for going off the path, but (a) I may be misinterpreting what I’m reading, and (2) what I’m reading may be wrong, as a lot of word origins are) one of the things about my own belief in Scripture is that I can accept that the wordplay is intentional even if Rabbi Eleazar ben Shammua didn’t use those words in that way. Because the words are there for me, and I can draw those connections.

Still, ignoring the pun, there’s a change from the honor of your friend to the fear of your teacher, and presumably the word change is intended to draw our attention to some significant change in meaning. The last bit continues with morah rabach being like morah shamayim, the fear of heaven, or rather, the Fear of Heaven. Right?

Now, almost two years ago, back when I was on chapter one, verse three, I wrote about the Fear of Heaven, comparing it to a fear of heights, not a rational fear of Divine retribution but an intuitive near-panic outside ordinary understanding. I said

I think this fear, when it is felt, is what takes us out of those metaphors of the Divine, not only servant-master but parent-child, defendant-judge, subject-king, and even sheep-shepherd, and into a dim understanding of the vast gulf that separates us from the Divine, a glimmer of the smallness of individuality in the vastness of Creation.

Digression: I had entirely forgotten saying that. I remembered, dimly, that I had said something about the Fear of Heaven, and couldn’t remember what, so I did a search and found this, which I do not remember writing. It’s clearly YHB’s writing; it’s not that I don’t think they are my words. And I haven’t come to disagree with it or anything; it’s not that I don’t think they are my thoughts. But I didn’t remember having those thoughts. Maybe I’ve been doing this too long. End Digression.

There was an excellent discussion in the comments, and I came around to a literal interpretation of fear of Heaven rather than fear of the Divine: Let the fear of Heaven be upon you because you could get struck by lightning tomorrow, whether you do good or not, so even if you do get what seems like material reward, don’t count on it lasting or take it as some affirmation of your service. Which, I think, is leading me back to where I started.

If I am to let the honor/reputation/dignity of my fellow be to me as the fear/awe/reverence of my teacher, it is not just an emphasis on the importance, but the kind of panicky clutch of the child faced with the mortality of the parent. Rabbi Akiva was killed, Rabbi Jehuda ben Baba was killed, and that is terrifying—and yet, it is part of the order of things for the student to outlive the teacher. But the fellow-students of Eleazar ben Shammua were killed under the Romans, thousands upon thousands between Passover and Shavuot, and that is terrifying and against the order of things. Our fellows, the people our age, are not immortal just because their parents and teachers are still around. Hold their honor dear, fear them and fear for them, because they, like your teachers, can be taken from you before you are ready.

And you won’t be ready. Let our fear of and for our teachers be like the Fear of Heaven, that they could be struck down at any moment, by disease, disaster, dishonor. Anything. Value them, value them enough, value them now, value them all, value them desperately, value them tremblingly, because…

Is this, then, the sense in which the Ten Martyrs were killed on the same day? Perhaps we are not supposed to learn a historical lesson from this story of history, but an emotional lesson. Eleazar ben Shammua was killed on the day that his teacher Akiba was killed, and on the day that his mentor Jehuda was killed, and on the day he was killed, and on the day Judah the Nasi died, as well. And on all those days between Passover and Shavuot. And perhaps having learned this verse was the secret to his long life, as much as anything.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Another tricky one this week. Here is Judah Goldin’s translation:

Rabbi Johanan Ha-Sandelar says: Every assembly which is for the sake of Heaven will in the end endure; but one which is not for the sake of Heaven will not endure in the end.

The reason this is tricky is that pretty much every significant concept in the verse is ill-defined and vague. What, exactly, constitutes an assembly? What does it mean for an assembly to be for the sake of Heaven? What is Heaven? What does it mean for an assembly to endure? To endure in the end?

This is where I come down on that: Nothing endures in the end. After the Roman Senate endured for a thousand years, it probably looked good to adapt and endure for another thousand. But it didn’t. The Zhou dynasty probably looked good after five hundred years, but that didn’t endure, either. The Egyptian New Kingdom looked back on time uncountable and forward to time even more uncountable; Ozymandius, King of Kings, lies in lone and level sands. Will there be someday a wilderness where London once stood? For how much?

So. Start with that: Nothing will in the end endure. Can we say, then, that there is no assembly that is for the sake of Heaven? We don’t want to reach that conclusion, do we? And yet—what assembly can we name with confidence that exists for the sake of Heaven? As an assembly, mind you. And as we aren’t counting a mere millennium or two on the one side, I don’t think we can count anything less than full and unanimous purity of purpose on the other. Were the sages assembled for the sake of Heaven? All of them? Was there no pride, no worldly purpose? Because the sages warn a lot about the perils of seeking money or fame or respect through scholarship, and I expect that was through experience. No, the stories of bickering and one-upsmanship in the house of the sages are too numerous and frankly too interesting to ignore in order to claim that the assembly maintained its purpose for the sake of Heaven continuously and in consensus.

So. When Rabbi Johanan Ha-Sandelar says that all assemblies which are not for the sake of Heaven do not endure in the end, what has he told us? There are no such assemblies and nothing endures. When he says that all assemblies which are for the sake of Heaven do endure, what has he told us? Not to give up hope.

When you enter into any project with anyone—a business, a marriage, a charitable foundation, a political party, a timeshare, a blog, a college course, a theatrical production, a cruise, a massively multi-player on-line role-playing game, a condominium, a date, a mural, a sex act, a city budget, a board game, a three-county killing spree, a reality show, a shul, a trial, a race, a madrigal, a hug, a nation—you can do it (or in the end choose not to do it) for the sake of Heaven, so that the project will endure. It won’t, of course, not in the end, and you can’t guarantee that the assembly will maintain its purpose, but there is a great deal in the choosing, not the chosen. If you enter into it for the sake of Heaven, if you seek out others to assemble with for the sake of Heaven, if you seek out projects for the sake of Heaven, then, even when they don’t really endure, they have achieved a great deal. Even if it’s just meeting for lunch.

Of course, the real difficulty (note: all the other difficulties are also real) is in knowing what it means for something to be for the sake of Heaven. But here, again, the value is in trying to know, rather than in knowing, yes?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This week we are looking at a fairly innocuous verse, so that’s a break. Here’s the translation by Herbert Danby:

R. Elizer b Jacob says: He that performs one precept gets for himself one advocate; but he that commits one transgression gets for himself one accuser. Repentance and good works are as a shield against retribution.

So, the question that comes immediately to YHB’s mind is what the advocate and the accuser do. I mean, there is a traditional representation that at the End of Days, when we are Judged, the Divine brings you before the Throne with an Angelic Prosecutor and an Angelic Defendant (and, presumably, an Angelic Stenographer and an Angelic Bailiff, and maybe other Angelic Officers of the Court—Oyes! Oyes! Oyes!), and presumably this verse is meant to bring to mind that final judgment, with an eye toward building up a good team of counsel on your side.

On the other hand, if the Divine is omniscient, if there is (as we are told) an Eye that sees, and Ear that hears, and all your actions in a book, then what purpose do the Prosecutor and Defendant serve? This is not a judge, this is a Judge, and all the evidence is presented to him the moment it happens. A mitzvah does not need an advocate to plead before the Divine if the Divine knows all about it already. No, I would rather think of the advocates and the accusers as being of this world, not the next.

There is a discussion of repentance in the Talmud that talks about these accusers and advocates as being angelic, but of this world: the pious man studies surrounded by invisible bodyguards, that sort of thing. They talk about the specifics of the angelic advocates and accusers as being affected by the spirit in which the person commits the act. A mitzvah performed slowly produces an advocate who moves slowly; a transgression performed with abandon produces an accuser with a loud voice. And so on. They point out that it is possible to have a whole crew of half-assed advocates defeated by a couple of kick-ass accusers, and thus we should make sure to do our good deeds with our whole attention and will, lest we produce deaf, halt, and blind advocates.

On the other hand, the sages go on to say, repentance (we are moving to the last bit of the verse now) not only makes the accusers no longer accuse, but turns them into advocates. The ba’al t’shuvah, the one who returns to the fold, is surrounded by hulking great muscular loud advocates, the transformed accusers of his sinful life. The meek man who has never sinned, but has put little effort into anything, may have a comparatively weak bench of counsel. The point, of course, not being to sin as much as possible before repenting, but ideally to have hulking great muscular loud advocates directly by doing a mitzvah in a manner that will produce them.

Now, see, YHB has gotten all distracted by the angels again. I could go on with this stuff all day, you know. Imagine the idea of the psychomachia applied to this verse, indicating that the more transgressions you do, more devils sit on your shoulder, while your good deeds produce a chorus of angels. But I didn’t want to talk about this verse as being in the realm of the supernatural anyway, invisible gremlins and guardian angels. I wanted to talk about accusations and advocates in this world.

While it is proverbial that no good deed goes unpunished, in fact a reputation for mitvot does advocate for a person. If you hear a rumor that somebody has done something bad, the good things they have done weigh in on your likelihood of believing it. No, there isn’t, empirically, a one-to-one relationship between actions and reputation, but we do carry with us, all our lives, the residue of our past actions, our advocates and accusers. My laziness and lateness, my kindness and cheerfulness, my study and my silences and my silliness, they all show up again. And if they aren’t in my actual reputation—if the employer or patron or acquaintance doesn’t actually know my history in detail—they are in my sense of my reputation, my worries about what people might know, which is more important than what they actually do know.

The Sages say that we should imagine that our past deeds, good and ill, are always at a moment of perfect balance on the Scales of Judgment, and that our next action will tip the scale to one side or the other. At that moment, performing one precept or committing one transgression carries with it the fate of the world. We always have that choice presented to us: life and death, blessing and curse. This is a powerful image, yes, and perhaps we ought to live like that, but I can’t. It’s too big, too much, too strenuous. Like the dieter who imagines that any variation from the daily regimen is a catastrophic failure, and so figures that once started on the ice cream, he may as well finish the quart. But this image of accumulated accusers and advocates may be more like it.

In fact, while not every mistake you make will be caught out and form the heavy foundation for a vile reputation, any mistake you make may be caught out, and you can’t tell which one. And while not every good deed you do will be lauded and loved, any good deed may precede you into a job interview or blind date, and you can’t tell which one. You are surrounded by your accusers and advocates, and you can’t see them—not because they are invisible angels with flaming swords, but because they are in the minds of the people around you, and the people you used to know, and their friends and acquaintances, and theirs, and theirs, to a distance where you can’t make out the details.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 2:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

How about some nice nineteenth-century English for a change? Here’s Michael L. Rodkinson, actually from 1918, but still with that old-fashioned idea of making the text magnificent, and spelling that is good enough for his grandfather.

R. Jonathan said: “Whosoever fulfils the Law in poverty will at length fulfil it in wealth, and whosoever neglects the Law in wealth will at length neglect it in poverty.”

So, I have talked before—right?—about how this sort of thing is just empirically false. There are people who study and observe in poverty who never obtain material wealth, and there are plenty of wealthy scoffers who will die with plenty of toys. And the other way, of course, too. Plenty of wealthy scoffers will, indeed, lose their money, and plenty of wealthy pious men will lose their money, and sudden riches can come to the pious and the dishonest alike. Economic mobility and stability do not accurately correlate with piety and impiety, not in any combination or direction.

Of course, you can claim that R. Jonathan is not talking about material wealth, but rather spiritual wealth—if you are spiritually impoverished and yet work to fulfill the Law, you will receive spiritual gain from it. This is a nice retort to the Christian criticism of Judaism as a law-based unspiritual discipline: the Law is a necessary (but not sufficient) groundwork for spiritual uplift. At least for Jews. And for the second half, well, this is the retort to those who say they are spiritual, but not religious; people who ignore the underlying discipline of the Law when they feel spiritual will not have it to guide them in their moments of spiritual poverty (and we all do have them).

Alas, if you want to interpret the verse that way, you have to ignore its plain meaning, and impose a meaning that is not only clearly counter to the intent of the Sage, but is a muddled sort of a mess to look into with any rigor. How do you know who is spiritually wealthy? Can anyone claim spiritual wealth, and if my claim is countered by some Rabbi who says that their spiritual wealth is but shallow posturing, how can you decide who is right? In fact, does the concept of spiritual wealth and poverty have any meaning, other than the vaguest and most subjective sense of enlightenment?

Your Humble Blogger would much rather disagree with a specific and concrete interpretation of R. Jonathan’s verse than adopt a view that is so vague that it is unhelpful. I think that R. Jonathan really is saying what he is saying: all people who fulfill the Torah in poverty will fulfill it in wealth, and people who fail the Torah in wealth will fail it in poverty. And I think that he’s wrong. Just observably wrong, as if he had said that Mars goes around the Earth, or that you can tell if someone is intelligent by his hat size.

And, in addition, I think it’s probably not true that all people who are pious in poverty respond to riches by sticking to their piety. I don’t really know anyone personally who has gone from pious poverty to wealth of any kind, but certainly the literary landscape is strewn with those who fulfill the dictates of piety in poverty, but when thrust into wealth, fame and Society succumb to Temptation. And the opposite narrative, the wealthy sinner who is ruined and then finds spiritual wealth (there we are again) in religious observance, well, R. Jonathan is saying that doesn’t happen, that all who ignore the Torah in their days of wealth will continue to neglect it in poverty. And I suspect that is also observably false, but perhaps more importantly, I think that it is false as a teaching.

What do you do with these? I think I’ve written before about verses that are empirically false but are nonetheless good verses—sometimes it’s a good idea to act as if something were true, even knowing it isn’t. I don’t think this is one of those cases, though. I mean, yes, if you just take it as instruction to fulfil rather than ignore the Torah whatever your material circumstances, then it’s good advice, but then there’s no reason for this verse to exist, as there are plenty of others with that advice. Nor, honestly, do I think it’s good advice to act as if everyone who ignores the Torah in wealth will someday do so in poverty. Isn’t better to act as if a change of heart can come to anyone, even yourself? Furthermore, most people don’t think of themselves as either impoverished or wealthy, but reserve those terms for other people, which makes it weaker advice.

No, I don’t know what to do with this verse. I do find it worth mentioning, however, that the various sages and commentators are in agreement that neither extreme poverty nor extreme wealth lend themselves to fulfillment of the Torah. Poverty, of course, and the toil and exhaustion that comes from living hand to mouth, leaves little time and energy for study or for ritual. And the wealthy, in addition to the many opportunities for temptation, must spend time and energy maintaining their wealth. The responsibilities of great wealth and many dependents are not compatible with the contemplative life (say the Rabbis), and of course it is difficult to participate in judgment when you have conflicts of interest in many areas, as the wealthy are bound to do. Now, they warn that the Divine will not accept poverty or wealth as an excuse, and give examples of piety among the rich and the poor, but it is clear that the comfortable middle class is the aspiration of the Sages: enough, and enough to share, but not a burden to manage. A living.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Your Humble Blogger had meant to post a note about Shavuot, but it didn’t seem to happen. Ah, well. Shavuot is the celebration of the gift of Torah at Mount Sinai, as well as of the first summer harvest, and one of the traditional observances is to study the Book of Ruth.

Going through the book again, this time I was not so much struck by the stuff I have been associating with it for some time (particularly the treatment of the ger, the non-Jew in the community of Jews, as well as some odd and interesting things about economics and women), but by its placement in the series of stories about substitute children. Or, more accurately I suppose, the non-genetic transmission of the Blessing, the leadership of the covenant community. I have talked about this before: Eli passes the leadership not to his sons but to Samuel, Samuel to Saul, Saul to David. In Genesis, there is a sequence of younger children: Jacob, Joseph, and Ephraim. But those are (at least in the text) children of the body, while the later sequence is explicitly about the leadership passing over the children of the body and to someone else.

Naomi and Ruth, of course, are not Judges or leaders. But Ruth and Boaz have are great-grandparents of King David (also a younger son, but never mind). I suspect that at some point there was trouble because King David had a Moabite great-grandmother, and the Ruth-and-Naomi story (which I assume was already around and not connected to David) was tied in to the Judah-to-Jesse line to make it right. I don’t have any evidence of that, of course, but that’s my instinct. I imagine that this was, oh, during the Return, when Ezra was on about exogamy—the Scripture is of course full of positive examples of intermarriage, but they became one of the great taboos of Judaism, alas. Ah, well. Some other year I will go into the idea of Ruth as convert or Ruth as foreigner; this year the thing that caught my eye is Ruth in the place of Samuel, not Hannah.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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In Judah Goldin’s translation, this time, and we are moving from Rabbi Yosi to the next generation.

Rabbi Ishmael his son says: He who refrains from judgment rids himself of enmity, robbery, and false swearing. But he who is presumptuous in rendering decision is a fool, wicked, and arrogant.

This seems to be addressed to people in a formal judgeship, probably as a member of a bet din. He goes on in the next verse:

He used to say: Do not act the judge’s part by thyself alone, for none may act the judge’s part by himself alone—save One. And say not “Adopt my view”—for they may say it, but not thou.

In the tradition we are talking about here, there is no independent and professional judiciary. There is a roster, more or less, of people held to be competent to give judgment. When there is a case in law to be decided, a bet din of three (or more) judges must be put together (in certain cases involving goods or money, a panel is not required. Rabbi Ishmael appears to be saying that even in those cases, do not accept the task of judging without a panel) in order to hear that case. In practice, as I understand it, in any place where there were many people on that roster, there would in fact be a regular rotation and the bet din would meet on Mondays and Thursdays or whatever, and whoever wanted to bring a case would do it then.

The audience for these verses, then, are people who have enough of a reputation to be considered eligible. Scholars, essentially. And the verses seem to be saying to avoid service in this manner as much as possible: avoid it altogether, or if you must do it, be on a panel, and even then, don’t try to make your judgement the one that is agreed on, but let the other two overrule you, if they do not happen to share your view.

This is, on the face of it, a nice lesson in humility. And I have always liked it on that basis. But this time through, looking for something to say about the verses on this Tohu Bohu, I started to wonder about responsibility. Because, of course, under this system, anyone who needs a judge is going to get someone who has not taken Rabbi Ishmael ben Yosi’s advice to heart. Or, perhaps, will get one of those and two of the other kind. And if you are getting judges who are ignoring Rabbi Ishmael’s sound advice, perhaps they aren’t very good judges…

When I was younger, childless, unmarried, somewhat irresponsible, somewhat of a jerk, I took a kind of pride in the idea that I avoided making the kinds of claims or commitments that would irk me to fulfill. I was not a role model. I was not a club president in high school, and although I was a club co-president in college, I made a point during the farcical election of declaring that I would be irresponsible and mostly absent during my tenure. I temped for quite a long time after college, partly because I was good at it and it suited me, but largely because I didn’t want to commit to working any particular place for any great length of time.

I was never really wildly, grievously irresponsible, I don’t think, but my point is actually that I took care for many years not to take much responsibility to be irresponsible with. I never, you know, babysat for anyone. I played no team sports. I did act in shows in high school and college, and I remember thinking to myself at the time that accepting a part was an unusually large commitment for me, and that I had better follow through on it.

My point is not that I was commitment-phobic; I did, in fact, attempt to turn most of my romantic attachments of those years into permanent commitments. The point is that I took the possibility of letting people down as a reason not to stand up with them, or for them. The number of times I said that I never claimed to be this or that positive thing during those years would be, well, probably a largish number, particularly if you included other ways of phrasing the same idea.

I have a very different take on it now. Yes, I do use that kind of talk, now and then, and I can’t say that I am exactly eager to take on new responsibilities every day of the week. But I no longer take pride in that, nor in the sort of contrarian defiance that never promised to be good. I see it in myself as a weakness, as a kind of arrogance.

See, there’s a kind of arrogance that says that I am damn good at something, and that other people should get the hell out of your way and let you do it. And there’s a kind of arrogance that says that you don’t care if you are good at something or not, that other people should get the hell out of your way and let you avoid it.

So while it is true that ridding yourself of the responsibility to judge (using the instance in question) is avoiding the exposure to enmity, robbery and false swearing that are likely if not inevitable results of that position, it does not follow that ridding yourself of that responsibility is the right thing to do. Or the right thing for you to do. Or the right thing for you to do today.

Perhaps Rabbi Ishmael took that for granted; that he was saying to people who had taken up that mantle that they should keep in mind all that it entailed. That he was not encouraging people to shirk, but that he had nothing to say to the shirkers and was addressing himself to those who were willing to judge. And those, very likely could use the lesson in humility that is the simple and straightforward reading here—not to scare them off, but to teach them caution. Perhaps that is the connotation of the sequence: first the agreement to judge, then the warning against arrogance in decision-making (which surely only applies to those who were not previously scared off), then the warning against solitary judging (again, surely only applicable to those who are still at the judging thing), and finally the lesson in appropriate argumentation and persuasion amongst the sitting judges. That progression maybe has my concern in mind.

And yet, I worry about it. I have seen commentary that uses these verses to admonish the reader into blind acceptance of traditional authority. To giving up your own discretion to always follow Rashi, or follow your tzaddik, or follow your local traditions. And I do see that reliance on your own judgment is terribly dangerous, I see that. But ultimately that judgment is what you’ve got, and it was a Gift of the Divine, and refusing to use it may be as much of an arrogance as the other.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here’s this weeks verse in a translation by Irving M. Bunim:

R. Yose said: Whoever honors the Torah will himself be honored by people; but whoever dishonors the Torah with himself be dishonored by people.

So. Is this true? What does it mean if it is true? Should we honor the Torah in order to be honored by our peers, and if so, isn’t that making a crown for self-exaltation? Can we argue backward that whoever is honored by people must therefore be honoring the Torah, whether we observe that directly or not?

No. This is clearly not a verse that describes the world accurately, on the face of it. Lots of people dishonor the Torah and are honored by people, at least for a time. And if we don’t accept for a time, then can we not accept that I may sometimes act in a way that honors the Torah and sometimes in a way that dishonors it? Should I take that an act I may have done when I was twenty, or fourteen, or forty which is a shanda fur de goyim, and has led to my public dishonor, cannot be overwhelmed by further acts and years of honoring the Torah? Even more so, what if I have so far gotten away with having dishonored the Torah in my youth, and not suffered the public dishonor of my peers? Am I due for a fall? If so, is there any point in trying to reform?

Clearly, all of these questions must come from reading the verse wrong. Let’s start all over again, shall we?

Rabbi Yose ben Chalafta was one of the disciples of Rabbi Akiva, but the list of people he is said to have studied with includes Rabbi Judah ben Baba, Rabban Gamliel II (the grandson of Rabban Gamliel), Rabbi Joshua ben Chananiah, Rabbi Ishmael ben Elisha, Rabbi Tarfon, Rabbi Jochanan ben Nuri, and of course, his father, Rabbi Chalafta. He was brought up into scholarship. His teachings tend to emphasis agreement over disagreement, and the reconciling of contradiction over simply ruling for one side over the other. The impression that I get is of a somewhat conflict-averse guy who was intimately familiar with the divisions between scholars.

He lived through the Destruction and expulsion; he lived through his own home town being destroyed and rebuilt. Again, I’m just making stuff up here, but I would guess that his own history led him to think that scholarly arguments were a waste of time and energy, a squandering of a very fragile existence. But where that might have led a man to a kind of nihilism that eschewed things of this world, instead Rabbi Yose seems to have grown to value people, and to value the respect for people, the thing that makes people treat each other with dignity. To find that a respect for each other is a respect for the Divine, either the Divine within each other (as we are made in the Image) or simply for each other as creations of the Creator.

Now, what did he say? Whoever honors the Torah will himself be honored by people; but whoever dishonors the Torah with himself be dishonored by people. Only that isn’t quite right, or at least it doesn’t have the right connotations. We read that col ham’chabeyr et ha-Torah, all [people] [who] do honor to the Torah, gufo m’chubeyr al ha-briyot. That is, instead of saying that all [people] will do honor to him, we say— something not quite parallel to that. First of all, we flip the thing so that it is in what I think is the passive voice: instead of people doing honor to him, he is honored by people. And when I say he, Rabbi Yose does not use the pronoun, he uses gufo, which is a person specifically in the sense of a person’s body, a corporeal person. That person is done honor by ha-briyot, which is a way of saying everybody that derives from what you might call the born. The briyot are man born of woman, if you will, although it is evidently sometimes extended to animals as well, all creatures that have ever been born. When he says of the scholar (or other person who honors the Torah) that gufo m’chubeyr al ha-briyot, he is, yes, saying that people will honor that scholar, but in a way that emphasis the corporeality of the honorer and the honoree. It is not the spirit of the pious person that we honor, but the person him (or her) self. It is not our spirits that honor him (or her), but our persons, our selves.

Where I’m going with this. There is a tendency, among religious folk of various stripes, to divide the mind and the body. I don’t hold with that at all, and most (but not all) of Jewish tradition is with me on that one. I am not someone separate from my body; I am who I am, in part, because of the experiences I have had in and with my body. If I were unusually tall (to take one example), I would have had different experiences all my life, standing in lines, walking into rooms, dancing, buying clothes, whatever. Those experiences feed in to who you are in the same way as the books you read or the games you played. The self is part of the body and the body is part of the self; to describe a soul that is exempt from all that the body experiences is to describe something not human, not fully partaking in the Creation.

To take a point from Irving Bunin, when a scholar enters a room and we rise in respect (if we are, with Mr. Bunin, in that tradition that does so), do we stand before his wisdom? No. We stand before his body. Before his person. Indistinguishable. This means that if we want to honor a person who has done honor to the Torah, to fulfill the verse, we need to honor her as a person. A full person. And people, you know, are notoriously inconsistent.

Now we are getting to some answers to my earlier questions, yes? Is the verse true? It is not true as an observation, it is true as an obligation. Should we honor the Torah in order to be honored by our peers? Well, it isn’t great to do that, but it is very human. What if we have done some honor and some dishonor? That, too, is what people are like. Both the people (bodies) who are the object of the honor and the people (born) who are the ones who do the honor to them. When Rabbi Yose flips the verse around, we can read that we are all, all of us who have been born, all of us with bodies, both capable of honoring the Torah, capable of deserving honor from each other, capable of giving honor to each other, capable of treating each other as people, vulnerable, susceptible, mortal. As when the rebellion was put down, not only was the Temple destroyed but (of course) people were killed in the thousands, sages and young idiots, fighters and followers and innocent bystanders. Born and bodied and fully human, containing the possibility for honoring and being honored, containing the possibility of fulfilling the Torah or dishonoring it: and then, dead.

That is what I hear behind Rabbi Yose’s language. The harrowing of his own hell, the destruction of his home, and then, then, the life on the other side, and the importance of respecting it, while it is alive.

It is not in heaven, it is not beyond the sea, it is in your mouth, in your heart—in your body, in fact. Both the honoring and the deserving.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Last week, Rabbi Ishmael son of Rabbi Yose inquired as to the motivations for learning. Here Rabbi Zadok is also on about the motivation for acquiring knowledge in the Torah, although with a different slant.

Rabbi Zadok says: Do not make them a crown for self-exaltation nor a spade to dig with. So too Hillel used to say: “And he that puts the crown to his own use shall perish.” Thus thou dost learn: He that puts the words of the Torah to personal profit removes his life from the world.

Rabbi Zadok appears to have been the originator of the saying about the rain falling on both the just and the unjust fellow. Later sages have focused on the detrimental aspects of the rain, adducing that the just man got more sodden, as the unjust man more than likely made off with his umbrella. Rabbi Zadok, however, was addressing a mostly agrarian economy in the desert, or at least an urban community closely tied in to the harvest. The rain that causes the trees of the just to fructify also falls on the fields of the unjust, and the unjust doesn’t want to use his unjustly got umbrella to prevent it. The sun rises every morning, says Rabbi Zadok, as a gift from the Divine, not only a gift to the wise, the pious and the learned, but to the heathens and idolators. Therefore be humble; the Divine gifts you have do not redound to your credit but to the Divine’s.

Here he seems to be focused on a particular issue: teachers and scholars who charge for their services, making of the Torah a spade to dig with, a tool of their trade. This is a controversial issue over hundreds of years: The Rambam speaks very strictly about the inappropriateness of a Rabbi begging people for money; the Rashbatz dismisses the idea that teachers and scholars should be uncompensated for their efforts. The tradition gradually coalesces around the latter view, and now of course in America it is not shameful to be a professional Rabbi, taking a salary and extra for bar mitzvah lessons and the occasional honorarium for a speech. I’m not saying that the bimah is the path to riches. But people expect to pay for their children’s Hebrew school and (indirectly, through shul membership) for rabbinic leadership at services and rabbinic advice in the world.

I think Rabbi Zadok would be appalled. I also think Rabbi Zadok is wrong.

There is some question, of course, as to whether anybody really does use the Torah as a spade, taking it as a job rather than a calling. I don’t know. I have always had the sense, with the Rabbis I have known personally, that they have felt passionate about the Torah for its own sake—and that they also, most of them, have felt just fine about negotiating well-deserved compensation for their work. I think that’s largely true about secular teachers. And librarians. And sysadmins, many of them. And firemen, I’m sure, and probably chefs as well. The difference, of course, is that one of the tools of the Rabbi is Scripture, and Scripture is fundamentally different from everything else. That’s my view, and Rabbi Zadok’s as well, from what I can see. He would rather have fewer Rabbis, purer Rabbis, poorer Rabbis. Better Rabbis? Or perhaps he really thinks that if you take away the spade, the same people will choose the better path to the same goal, rather than a path to somewhere else. And, frankly, while I think there are a lot of people who just dig with whatever spade they can, I don’t think that applies to very many people in secular jobs that involve a lot of learning and teaching. People in those paths (or even people who think of themselves in those paths) likely see themselves as neither using their knowledge as a spade nor buffing it into a crown, even if that’s how they look to others.

My point, here, is not that Rabbi Zadok is giving bad advice. It’s good advice. Don’t turn the Torah into a spade for digging or a crown for lording it over people. On the other hand, take that advice to yourself; don’t criticize other people for violating it. Don’t begrudge them their pay, or their moments of fame or public respect, either. The rain falls on the just and unjust alike, and one of the lessons to be learned from that is that you can’t tell which is which by who is wet and who is holding an umbrella.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 2:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We have been learning from the Avot for—what—a year and a half, now. And why?

R. Ishmael, his son, said, He who learns in order to teach, Heaven will grant him the opportunity both to learn and to teach; but he who learns in order to practice, Heaven will grant him the opportunity to learn and to teach, to observe and to practice.

This is a fairly mild and straightforward note, right? I mean, yes, the purpose of learning the Law is to practice it, and people like YHB who type Scripture study on a computer while engaging in paid employment on the Shabbat are, in the words of the sages, doing it wrong.

It would be a much nicer note, I think, if it said that anyone who learns in order to teach would be led to practice inevitably by the power of learning itself. Not more accurate, but nicer.

I am, by virtue of our just having passed the Passover, reminded of the story of the Four Children which is in our haggadah. Do y’all know it? There are four children: the wise one, the wicked one, the simple one, and the one that cannot ask. The story gives us examples of the behavior of these children, and examples of appropriate paternal responses to them. It’s generally understood that the wise son wins; there is merit in his inquisitiveness. The wicked or rebellious son, who excludes himself from the story, is viewed as a lost cause: if he were with us in Egypt (the haggadah says) he would not have been saved. The simple son is treated gently, and the infant (or so usually we interpret the one who does not know to ask) is introduced to the story only distantly.

The wise son, though. Let’s see if I can find the quote.

What does the wise son say? “What are the testimonials, statutes and laws Hashem our G-d commanded you?” You should tell him about the laws of Pesach, that one may eat no dessert after eating the Pesach offering.

We see that the response to the wise son is in practice, not just in learning and teaching. But is that what the wise son expects? Is he learning in order to practice? The commentaries on the haggadah say yes: the wise son is specifically asking in order that he may fully participate in the seder without violating a commandment. The wise son is not learning in order to teach, but learning in order to practice. And the father in the story, who is also learning in order to practice, must teach as well, not only because the practice of the seder is teaching by practice and demonstration, but because your rotten kids will ask obnoxious questions, or worse, will screw the whole thing up by having the afikomen first and then another bite of Passover Dust Cake. So, and example of learning with intent to practice leading to learning, teaching, observing and practicing.

On the other hand, um. Well, I’m sure that there is another hand because there is always another hand. What would be the point of a verse without another hand? But I can’t think of one right now, so you will have to supply your own.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

R. Johanan b. Baroka said: he that profanes the name of Heaven in secret shall be requited openly: in profaning the Name it is all one whether it be done unwittingly or wantonly.

Profanation of the Name (by the way, this is the translation of Herbert Danby, D.D.) is the act of bringing the Name into disrepute, not taking it in vain. One strand of commentary focuses on the extra responsibility that a man of great learning and scholarship has to avoid profanation of the Name. Should such a man speak rudely to a shopkeeper (say the sages, more or less), people would say that’s what comes of so much Torah study, is it? and so the Name of the Divine would be profaned.

This brings up the question of how the Name can be profaned in secret at all? The answer usually is that secret things have a way of becoming public, and certainly the public punishment seems to imply that the profanation has become public, by the punishment itself, if not before. But surely not everything that is done in private becomes public. I mean, to take an example, let’s say I were to eat a forkful of pulled pork and rice right now. It is not kosher, not at all, but let’s just suggest I were to have a nice big bite right now. OK? Wait for a minute to read the rest while I heat it up in the microwave, actually.

Mmmm, Babe.

All right, now I’m going to go back and delete the last three paragraphs—heck, I’ll delete the whole document and begin a new one. So you won’t know, Gentle Reader, that I engaged in such a defiant violation of the dietary restrictions. Nobody is near my desk right now, and if somebody had come by at just that moment, she wouldn’t be able to tell that I had eaten something at all, my desk being set back a ways from the circulation counter, and if she did spot the fork to the mouth, she would not know that I was Jewish, likely enough, and would not know that it was a pork product I had just eaten and not some of that special beef brisket I had sent to me from my friend in Yefe Nof.

Note to GRs: I do not, so far as I know, have a friend in Yefe Nof, which is evidently a suburb of Haifa. I was just looking for a place with a funny name. My buddy in Bat Shlomo. My acquaintance in Ashqelon. My pal in Peta Tikvah. You know. Actually, this is leftover pulled pork from dinner a couple of nights ago, and was itself leftover from before Passover when my Best Reader slow-cooked three and a half pigs and froze the remaining tastiness. Now that Passover is over, out comes the oiker bits, and some newly made and especially tasty sweet barbecue sauce. She got the recipe from a friend of hers in Yefe Nof.

The point is that it is perfectly plausible that I could do something that would be a profanation of the Name if it were found out, and that never would be found out. But then, in what sense would it be a profanation of the Name? The whole point of the profanation of the Name is that it is about the reputation of the Divine (an excellent concept, and one worth going into at more length, I suppose—in our Scripture, the Divine seems very concerned about the Divine reputation, but is that because of the reputation itself, or because of the some effect that reputation has on us?), and so to speak of profaning the Name in secret doesn’t actually make sense.

In fact, this brings up the whole issue of shame and reputation, and the centrality of a Good Name in much of the teachings and Scripture. And when you have an ethics that trades overmuch on the idea of a Good Name, either your own name personally or the name of The Jews, or even the Good Name of the Divine, you do eventually run into difficulty with the idea that not every shortcoming nor yet every achievement is public or publicized, or even necessarily publicizable. And yet.

This is why I find R. Johanan b. Baroka to be giving a threat that is mostly empty, particularly because it is very easy to believe that this shortcoming, this forkful of pork and rice, this nosepicking, this infidelity, this laziness, this theft will be the one that goes un-noticed, because of course there are always a few. This is very different from the earlier and (to YHB) more powerful verse quoting Judah the Prince about the all-seeing eye and all-seeing ear and the record of all thine actions; the idea may be the same (not a sparrow falls without the Divine attention) but the emphasis R. Johanan puts on shame and reputation is very different from the emphasis Judah puts on the dangers of trusting your own judgment.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 2:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I suspect many of you have been to a seder, possibly this past week. For those that have not, the seder is a ritual meal for the holiday of Passover that traditionally involves the eating of certain symbolic foods and saying prayers over them, and the reading of some portion of a text. The text is fairly standard—or, rather, well, it’s more complicated than that, and deserves its own paragraph.

Most seders (as I understand it, not doing a survey or anything) use a haggadah, a sort of special prayerbook; there are many, many, many different versions of the haggadah, but most of the text in the haggadah is standard from version to version. There are some differences, but there is a core that is traditional. In addition to the slight differences from book to book, there are much larger differences in terms of what any particular group does or does not actually read. Most will read at least some of it, many will read highlights, perhaps bits of it in English and bits in Hebrew, or perhaps Hebrew followed by English (I am talking, here, about American Jews, of course, although the same will apply to the vernacular elsewhere), some will add songs or stories in various languages, some will neglect to do any part of the ritual after the eating is over. Some people take pride in how long the seder lasts, some in how quickly it is over. People are different one to another.

Anyway, the core of the seder, I would say, includes the following things: some blessings over the ritual food, which includes the statement that we are commanded to eat matzah and bitter herbs and so on; the mah nishtanah, perhaps translated best as what a difference!, in which the youngest attendee points out four differences between Passover and the rest of the year; an explanation that these differences are connected to the Exodus story; a recitation of the Ten Plagues; an explanation of three elements of the ritual meal: the shankbone, the matzah and the bitter herbs; the grace after meals (I think most seders include at least a small portion of this, but not the entire thing); welcoming Elijah the Prophet. Moses does not appear in the traditional text; the Exodus story is alluded to, but not, properly speaking, retold.

Many of the bits included in the hagaddah but often skipped are tales of the early sages, some of our friends from avot: Eleazar ben Azariah, Rabban Gamliel, Rabbi Yosi and Rabbi Akiva. There is, in particular, a tale of five rabbis having an all-night seder in a cave at Benebarak under the Roman occupation. I bring that up because it will become important later, I think. There are also lots and lots of songs and poems (including the many Psalms that make up the Hillel service, which most of us skip)

So. Are you with me so far? Those who attend seder regularly, please correct and clarify. Those who do not, please ask questions. Because the next bit is some musing on the seder, performative aspects thereof, and it will be easier for you to chime in if you feel like you know what the hell I’m even talking about.

OK, right. I’ve been reading Josh Waxman’s stuff over at the parshablog, most of which I’m afraid goes right over my head, what with my not understanding Hebrew, but oddly enough I have been finding lots of provocative ideas in the parts I do understand. Which is the case for his note on some thoughts on ha lachma anya. The reference is to the part in the seder, early on, where we uncover the previously covered matzah and say something quite like this is the bread of affliction which our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt. Rabbi Waxman is looking at some variants in the text which may imply that, at least in some versions, it would be closer to say this is like the bread of affliction…. He describes some possibilities of how this fits in to the question of re-enactment.

Which brings up another line I’ll need to quote: we are told that In every generation one must look upon himself as if he personally had gone out of Egypt. We often describe the seder as a reenactment in that sense: there are several points in the text where we say that we were slaves in addition to saying that our ancestors were slaves. We take up the rhetorical pose of continuity, in order to emphasize our gratitude for the miracles of the Exodus.

On the other hand (are y’all still with me? Because I’m getting to my point here, I promise), all of that stuff is in the text that we recite. That is, we don’t just say that we were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, we say that we should say that we were slaves. We recite the injunction to look upon ourselves as if we had been delivered from slavery; we recite an example (in the Four Sons) of those who violate that injunction. If we are reenacting the Exodus, it is a very Brechtian kind of drama, in which we effectively hold up placards saying that we are reenacting the Exodus, whilst reclining in our seats.

So. What is going on here? When we say This is the bread of affliction that our forefathers ate, or when we say This is like the bread of affliction… are we saying that this matzah exists in Scriptural time, that is, outside of chronological time, and is the subject of a kind of intertemporal transubstantiation, as we are ourselves taken back to the Exodus? Or are we saying, as we do with other ritual symbols on the table, that the matzah is a tool for us to remember? Because if it is the latter, as I think it is for us now (for various definition of usness), it is a mistake to think of ourselves as reenacting the Exodus.

But what are we doing? Are we simply engaging in a ritual-assistant mnemonic practice, where we keep the information about the Exodus in our active-use memory by way of these sayings and symbols? Are we cramming? Because I don’t think that’s it, either.

I think we are reenacting, but we are not reenacting the Exodus story. I think we are reenacting the seder at Benebarak. The rituals and text are made to imagine the ancient retelling of the Exodus, not the (even more ancient) Exodus itself. What we are saying, when we are saying the text, is not this is the bread of affliction, nor even this is like the bread of affliction, but rather Akiva called this the bread of affliction. As you read through the text, again and again we take on our roles, behaving as the sages did in the days of the Roman oppression. Or at least as they are recorded as doing, you know. We model for our children the proper behavior of Jews, and the proper behavior of Jews is not so much to be delivered from slavery but to remember that we were delivered from slavery. We are telling of the departure from Egypt, and we are telling it as they told it in Benebarak. In obvious and subtle ways, we enforce the important truth: that we are Rabbinic Jews, the inheritors of Judah the Prince.

I have said, here and elsewhere, that it seems to me that the Story of Judaism can be expressed in a sentence: We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, and the Lord brought us out with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. I have discussed how I became dissatisfied with that answer, but I had not really come up with a better one. And perhaps the better one is that Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Yehoshua, Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah, Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Tarfon once spent the first night of Passover in a cave at Benebarak, telling the story of the Exodus, until their students came to them and told them it was time for the morning Sh’ma.

The name of Moses does not appear in the Haggadah, but Rabbi Akiva’s name is prominent. That is something that bears thinking about, as our children ask why this night we do what we do how we do it.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

This is a short verse, anyway:

R. Levitas of Yavne said: Be very, very humble in spirit, for the anticipation of man is the worm.

That is the translation of Irving M. Bunim, whose work Ethics from Sinai I am very much enjoying. Mr. Bunim points out that when, in the verse, we are advised to be very, very humble, rather than using the Hebrew trick of repeating the word humble for emphasis (which might be translated as be humble with great humility or some such, although actually it’s just a different way of expressing emphasis, the way in English one might say be fucking humble, where the adverb is an otherwise meaningless intensifier), R. Levitas uses the separate Hebrew intensifier m’od, and in fact uses it twice: m’od m’od hevay sh’fal ruach. Why is this significant?

The word m’od is spelled mem, aleph, dalet. Who is mem? Moses, of course. And aleph is Abraham, and dalet, of course, David. A reminder, then, that if Moses, Abraham and David were humble before the Lord, surely you, too, should remember to be humble. But then, why m’od m’od? What else is mem, aleph, dalet? Well, m’od is an anagram for aleph, dalet, mem, or Adam, or more generally, man. So we can expand the verse by connotation, All men should be very, very humble as Moses, Abraham and David were humble, for the etcetera etcetera.

But what is this humility of spirit that all men are supposed to have, emulating Moses, Abraham and David? Is it merely the opposite of pride? How do we go about being humble, being very, very humble?

I had always read the verse as an exhortation for me to remember my own mortality: What is there for me to be proud of, when I will be buried, worm-eaten, and forgotten? This is simultaneously true and difficult to comtemplate: unless I have somebody standing a step behind me whispering “remember, thou art mortal”. Mr. Bunim points out, however, that it is not just the person attempting humility that is destined for the worm, but everybody else. What is the point in being one-up on somebody who is worm-bound? Where’s the pride in that?

This is a different conception of humility and of pride, and worth looking in to, I think. The first is focused on the mental state behind the action: keep in mind that your value is not so great as to justify acting like a prick. I struggle with this all the time, and have managed, on the whole, to control my rather serious arrogance—not that I have conquered it and am done, but that I recognize it as a problem and am often able to moderate for the moment. The second, which I have never really thought about before today is focused on pride primarily as interaction between the potentially-proud person and another, and only secondarily on the mental state. That is, pride is (in this view) fundamentally about placing yourself above another person, through word or deed, in order to show your superiority. Pride, then, requires another person to one-up. The mental state of the individual proud person is not at the heart of the definition; the relationship between the two people is.

To take my usual example of pride: cutting somebody off on the road. This stems, it seems to YHB, from the kind of pride or arrogance that says that wherever I am going, it is more important that I get there soon and that I not waste time on the road being behind somebody, and that while somebody else is going to be just a tad slowed by my actions, and that everybody else around me will be just a tad endangered by my actions, none of that is really very important, because it’s all about me. In the first formulation, the problem is that I am self-centered and arrogant, that I am not interested in what difficulties I cause for other people. In the second, the problem is that I have put myself in front of the other car, to show that driver that I can’t be cut off myself.

Now, this example seems to make my first formulation a better fit for the problems of pride, because, really, most of the time you really are not thinking about the other cars as containing actual humans, just as a kind of obstacle course. And this is just the problem, of course, by this formulation: by ignoring the humanity of other people, you enter into a mental state that puts yourself first.

On the other hand, the really egregious cases are when someone is trying to get back in the lane after passing in the shoulder during a construction-related slowdown, and I’m thinking Oh, yeah? Like hell I’m letting you in, you SOB. The most likely to cause accident, and the most likely to make me angry (and anger leads to all sorts of sins) are the ones where I am aware that there is a human fucker driving the car, and want the miserable bastard to pay. And in the second formulation of the idea, it reminds me that the fucker is headed for the worm, anyway, so let it go. Your revenge is that the driver of the other car is mortal, and so are you, so leave some room and keep driving.

The first happens more frequently, the second is more severe. Both ways of thinking about it are helpful, I think. But the second has a gentler undertone to it, particularly when combined with the m’od m’od idea up above. If you take a moment, when you feel the need to one-up somebody, particularly somebody who is really annoying, when you feel the need to put somebody in their place, think for a moment of Moses and Abraham and David, all dead, think of Adam and all his seed, food for worms, and think of the bastard you are about to pin to a card, and think, you know? Who needs it. We’re made for better stuff than that.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Let’s see. This is one of those verses that has a swing to it in the original that it is difficult to capture in English, so why don’t I try to transliterate the verse and perhaps embed a sound file, if I can figure out a good way to do it.

Hu hayah omer: al-t’hi vaz l’chal-adam, v’al t’hi mafleeg l’chal davar; sheh’ain lo sha’ah, v’ain l’cha davar lo makom.

21 words (depending on what one considers a word) Jacob Neusner translates it with 35 words:

He would say, “Do not despise anybody and do not treat anything as unlikely. For you have no one who does not have his time, and you have nothing which does not have its place.”

As an ethical precept, it’s pretty straightforward and unarguable, and in fact the commentary tends to leave it pretty much alone, other than giving some examples of sages either giving or not giving the due respect to a person who appears to be wicked or worthless, realizing or not realizing that that person, too, will have his hour. And some disagreement about whether the injunction is against dismissing unlikely things out of hand, with an implication that it is all right to dismiss impossibilities once you have put some careful study into their likelihood, or whether one should never dismiss a thing at all even after it is shown to be nonsense.

There is also a somewhat more mystically oriented tradition that says that the purpose of the verse is to celebrate, not necessarily the person who has his time and the thing which has its place, but time and space themselves, which are the Creations of the Divine without which nothing could, you know, be. Therefore even if a person has no value in himself, showing himself by his own actions to be unworthy of respect, yet those wicked actions take place, by their nature, in time, the gift of the Divine, and are a window into it. And any thing, whether it be a thing of value or a thing of putrescence, is a thing by virtue of taking up space in the Divine Creation, and being a part of it, and is a window into it.

There’s another point I’ll bring up, for which I am indebted to Irving M. Bunim, that the word here for thing is davar, which also means word or communication. The Ten Commandments are the ten d’varim; a davar is the Word (or logos) for a thing, as opposed to the Name for a thing. There’s a fellow on the internet who claims that thing is always a mistranslation, and that there is always a connotation of communication involved with davar. See, for instance, Genesis 11:1, where before the Tower of Babel the whole world was of one language (safah) and one speech (davar), or in the RSV they had few words. As opposed to things, which presumably existed in the same profusion as afterwards.

Digression: Your Humble Blogger was going to attempt not to reference the David Ives one-act play Babel’s in Arms, which contains the immortal line Mankind is in its youth, and hath not a word for every fucker, but I am giving up and putting into a Digression. I saw a production of this brilliant little gem at the theater where we are putting on R3, and hadn’t connected the author with the reviews I have been reading of Venus in Fur. The Babel play is really tailored for me, though: bible humor, slapstick, excessive profanity. What could be better than that? End Digression.

Well, if it is not every thing that has a place but every word that has a place, and must not be rejected therefore, well, that makes things a bit different. Do not reject people, and do not reject their words; people will have their times, and words will have their—what? Their makom, which is very definitely place. But what would it mean for every word to have a place. The word makom is related to kum, to stand up (the word has liturgical significance, for when we are upstanding in the service), so every word will have a place to stand, to rise up. Or, if you will, every word has standing, in the legal sense.

But what is it we are not to do with people and words? We are not to mafleeg, to reject them or dismiss them or carp at them, depending on the translation. Mr. Bunim claims the word is connected via its root to the word for shatter or split apart. Do not split yourself apart from people and their words? For each person has an hour and each word has standing for you to judge?

The point, for me, in all of this, in expanding the possibilities of the text and its connotations, is that (a) this is yet another example of how this kind of Hebrew magnificently compacts these kinds of repetitive aphorisms in a way that English does not, and (2) while the usual translation and idea are straightforward, the application of them is not, and the expansion of connotations, I think, is productive in wondering what, exactly we should do about those people, things, texts, elements that seem to be worthless or a waste of time. It is, of course, not only easy but justifiable to avoid the avoidable and curse the unavoidable.

There’s a story about Abraham and a stranger. Y’all know that Abraham was the epitome of hospitality, that not only would he happily feed any stranger that came to his house, he would go out and seek wayfarers at the crossroads in hopes of being able to provide hospitality for them. Well, it seems that one day he brings home a rotten old man who eats all his cabbage and acts like a savage, swears and blasphemes and generally is a grade-A asshole. So when the old fart has eaten his fill and has been offered water and all, Abraham pretty brusquely gives him the old heave-ho and gets rid of him. And the Divine says to Abraham, saying nu, why in such a hurry? Not even a blessing or a go-in-peace? And Abraham says Lord, I thought I was gonna plotz. I couldn’t put up with that momser in my house for another minute. Says the Divine You couldn’t put up with him for another minute? I have put up with that bastard for seventy years, and you couldn’t put up with him for another minute?

Well, you see? Whatever else that old man was, he was in time and space—and time and space are the Divine Creation. The Divine not only puts up with us all, thank the Divine, but gives us each the gift of Time and Space, which fundamentally cannot be wasted, only misused.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

ETA:

Posted by Vardibidian at 1:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Ben Azzai said, Run to do even a slight precept, and flee from transgression; for one good deed draws another good deed in its train, and one sin, another sin; for the reward of a good deed is a good deed, and the wages of sin is sin.

I am using Joseph Hertz’s translation, because it so pointedly uses wages instead of reward. If you ask people what are the wages of sin? (or for that matter what is the wages of sin?) the chances are very good that the response will be the wages of sin is death (or are death). I don’t know what the response would be to what is the wages of a good deed?, but I suspect it would not be another good deed. But it should be.

I think that s’char mitzvah, mitzvah; s’char aveira, aveira is not only an excellent first principle to teach and live by, it’s a seriously accurate description of the universe (the one I perceive). Certainly more so than many other ethical precepts. I know that when Saul of Tarsus said that For the wages of sin [is] death; but the gift of God [is] eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord, he wasn’t talking about the death of the body but death of the spirit —but then, see, we’ve stopped describing any universe I recognize. I’m not saying it’s ineffective as inspiration, but when we are talking about how the world turns, Simeon ben Azzai seems to me to be simply telling the truth.

Do a mitzvah, do another, do another, and they start to come easy. Allow yourself to fall short once, fine, nobody is perfect. But the second time is easier, and the third easier yet, and then transgressions follow each other in a train until it seems impossible to stop them. Of course, transgressions of diet are the obvious ones to think about, but peculation, particularly stealing from the workplace strikes me as an even more powerful example. The first time you take a five out of the drawer, or walk out with something in your pockets, you may think you will pass out from the fear and shame. But you get away with it, because most of the time people do get away with it, and so you do it again, and again, and again, until somehow you think of it your right, inviolable, to walk out with a CD or an extra hour’s pay, and any enforcement is an outrage.

The first time you give a dollar as a handout, almost anything could happen. If you do it, though, and then you do it again, and then again, pretty soon you could have a habit, a dollar a day to help the homeless, and you will do it almost without thinking. Not entirely, but without misgivings or trepidation, and even without resentment. A bad habit is harder than a diamond to break; a good habit is more valuable than a diamond to keep.

Which is why we adopted the precept, which ben Azzai refers to as running to do a mitzvah, that any mitzvah should be done as early in the day as possible. Some are time-sensitive, of course, but still, if there is a range of time, it is better to do it at the beginning of that range, as if s’char mitzvah mitzvah you have time for the next one. Whether this applies to, er, marital relations is unclear; ben Azzai, for all his piety, did not run to follow that particular precept and remained unmarried and childless until the Romans killed him after the Bar Koziba catastrophe. Goes to show, doesn’t it?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We are at the beginning of Chapter Four, and one of the great sayings, here in the Chabad translation:

Ben Zoma would say: Who is wise? One who learns from every man. As is stated: “From all my teachers I have grown wise, for Your testimonials are my meditation.”
Who is strong? One who overpowers his inclinations. As is stated, “Better one who is slow to anger than one with might, one who rules his spirit than the captor of a city.”
Who is rich? One who is satisfied with his lot. As is stated: “If you eat of toil of your hands, fortunate are you, and good is to you”; “fortunate are you" in this world, “and good is to you” in the World to Come.
Who is honorable? One who honors his fellows. As is stated: “For to those who honor me, I accord honor; those who scorn me shall be demeaned.”

It’s a marvelous saying, and uses the reversal technique (which we have seen before) particularly well (although the proof texts are a little weak, frankly).

Unfortunately, Ben Zoma was insane.

It seems as if I may not have told the story of the Four Who Entered Paradise. Have I? Well, if I have already told it, settle down, I’ll tell it again. It’s worth telling again. It’s the inspiration (I think) for the novel As a Driven Leaf, and could just about be an inspiration for a play, if I could come up with a setting that worked for me. Anyway.

There were four who entered Paradise. Ben Azzai was one, Ben Zoma the second, another was the third, and the fourth was Rabbi Akiba. Rabbi Akiba said to the others, he said, When ye arrive at the stones of pure marble, don’t cry out ‘water, water!’ says he, for he that telleth lies shall not tarry in my sight, that is, the presence of the Divine.

Ben Azzai took one look and died.

Ben Zoma took one look and went mad.

The other one became a heretic (which is why we don’t mention his name in the story, not to speak ill, although for a hint, his first initial is E and the second letter is lisha Ben Abuyah).

Rabbi Akiba departed unhurt.

That’s the whole of the story, which is written in the tractate Hagigah, page 14b. It is clearly a strange and unsatisfactory story.

Why were the four of them going to Paradise? What is meant by paradise? Are they actually going someplace, or is the journey a metaphor for deep learning? Did the three get in to Paradise or just look in from the border, as it were. How did Rabbi Akiba know there would be marble that looks like water? What differentiated the four, as they were all known for both piety and learning before this incident? What was the nature of Ben Zoma’s madness? How did this terrible experience affect Rabbi Akiba, who was unhurt in some sense, but must have lived with the memory of it?

Most of all, why did the Divine allow the entire thing to happen? What is there to learn from the story? If the lesson is to stay the hell out of Paradise, what is Paradise for? If the lesson is Rabbi Akiba was extraordinary, then what are we to make of the teachings of the rest of the Four?

Wisdom is learning; Strength is restraint, wealth is sufficiency, and honor is in the honoring. These are terrific lessons. I love these verses, and in particular, I love the way that they allow anyone to be wise, anyone to be strong, to be rich, to be honorable, because those things are not gifts or circumstances but choices.

And yet, Gentle Reader, if you were to make the choice to find wisdom in learning, to find strength in restraint, if you were to find richness in what you have and honor in the way you treat your fellow man, if you were to do all of that, like Ben Zoma did, and then you were to enter Paradise…

Is it not enough?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 2:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Today is the Fast of Esther, in preparation for Purim. Y’all know the Purim story, yes? Well, in Esther 4:16, she says

Go, gather together all the Jews that are present in Shushan, and fast ye for me, and neither eat nor drink three days, night or day: I also and my maidens will fast likewise; and so will I go in unto the king, which [is] not according to the law: and if I perish, I perish.

We do not, of course, fast for three days and nights. In fact, most of us don’t fast at all—Your Humble Blogger certainly never has. I have mentioned here, probably most years, that Purim makes me uneasy, altogether. It’s possible that observing the Fast of Esther would help with that, somehow, although honestly I can’t see how.

Still, this is the first time in years that I have thought about the fast of Esther on the day of it, largely thanks to an attempt of mine to find blogs that write about Scripture from a similar standpoint to mine. This attempt has been largely unsuccessful, although I did discover some interesting things about the Purim traditions… anyway, to go along with the drinking and cross-dressing and triangular cookies, there’s a fast day. Which is probably pretty much over for all of you now. Ah, well.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A. R. Eleazar Hisma says, “The laws of bird offerings and the beginning of a woman’s menstrual period—they are indeed the essentials of the Torah.
B. “Calculations of the equinoxes and reckoning of the numerical value of letters are the savories of wisdom.

This is Jacob Neusner’s translation. Actually, this is an incredibly difficult verse to translate, without actually being a difficult verse to understand. Let me see if I can muddy things a bit.

First of all, there are at least three or four different explanations for Rabbi Eleazar being called Hisma. I’m not going to go into them, as I don’t think they are relevant to this verse, but I will tell one quick story about him, or at least a story that mentions him. When Rabban Gamliel was talking to Rabbi Yehoshua, he expressed wonder that Yehoshua had to travel in trade, since he was so knowledgeable. He replied to Rabban Gamliel, “Don’t worry about me, you have two disciples back home who can calculate the number of drops in the ocean, and they have neither food nor clothes.” One of those two was Rabbi Eleazar Hisma. There is no footnote explaining how one would know if that estimate were correct, but the point is that Eleazar Hisma is known for his skills at natural philosophy, and of course his poverty. So this verse isn’t coming from a scholar of Torah who spurned secular pursuits, rather from a polyglot, albeit one who eventually made a living as a religious official, rather than in secular work. OK, now the two things that are important are kineen and p’tuchay niddah. The words are the titles of sections of the Law. The word kineen means a bird’s nest, evidently, and the nest we are talking about in this case is an offering in the Temple. The laws concerning offerings are extremely complicated, and I know nothing about them (thank the Divine), but I understand that one of the situations in which a bird offering is appropriate (in case you are wondering, there are different circumstances for the offering of birds, goats, oxen, wheat, fruit, etc, etc, and different combinations thereof, with differences for thank-offerings, sin-offerings, free-offerings, offerings associated with holidays, etc, etc) is when a woman has survived childbirth. And we have seen niddah before, as it is the law concerning ritual purity and menstruation, more complicated than it sounds (and perhaps less misogynist than it sounds, although that depends on time and place and the hedge around the Torah).

These are a metonymy, presumably, but for what? Are kineen and niddah representing the complications of the Law? Or are the representing the laws concerning reproduction? Or the laws concerning women? Or, by virtue of their being the last sections of their tractates, do they represent completion?

As for the less important, the word is revolutions, meant as heavenly revolutions and so the equinoxes. This is sometimes translated as astronomy, generally, as nowadays the equinoxes are well-trained and come when people expect them. At the time, presumably, the prediction of the equinox, or of midsummer and midwinter days, would have been a matter of some difficulty, particularly for those using a lunar calendar. Or would it? Anyway, we are talking about the study of the stars, in some manner or other. And then gematria, which is a sort of numerology, could also be a Hebrew transliteration of geometry. Or it could mean the study of numbers more generally, either in connection with their mystical meanings and associations or in matters such as, oh, estimating the number of drops in the ocean, or the number of cuts in a knife.

Finally, there is some dispute over what the relation is between these less important matters and wisdom: they are the pripriyot of wisdom, which could be the dainties or side-dishes to wisdom’s entree, or they could be the circumference or outer edge or fringe of wisdom’s center. Or they could be the support or confirmation of wisdom, which would imply that the study of secular matters should not be neglected as they tend to support the Law, rather than detract from it. This word (along with, perhaps, his surname) seems to be a sort of hobson-jobson, a borrowing of Greek into Hebrew that changes the pronunciation to the point that it is difficult to go back to the original language. Which is not a problem for words that become commonly used (as somebody attempting to figure out what pundits are wouldn’t need to try to find his answer in Sanskrit. But when we don’t have a lot of other examples of the time, it gets tricky.

Ah, well. Despite all the confusion, the concept is actually pretty clear: Rabbi Eleazar Hisma is saying that the Law takes precedence over secular studies, while making it clear that secular studies are a good thing, too. While I generally agree with him, I think it’s worth noting during that agreement the difficulty of understanding this verse yields itself somewhat to the benefits of secular studies of philology. Isn’t the circumference as important a part of the circle as the center? Isn’t the side-dish the thing that brings out the quality of the entree?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 1:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We are still talking about Rabbi Eliezar ben Azariah, from last week. And his saying is not a new idea, but a new expression of Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa’s saying in verse twelve. Only… well, let’s look at the text, first.

He used to say: He whose wisdom is more abundant than his works, to what is he like? To a tree whose branches are abundant but whose roots are few; and the wind comes and uproots it and overturns it, as it is written, He shall be like a tamarisk in the desert and shall not see when good cometh; but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness. But he whose works are more abundant than his wisdom, to what is he like? To a tree whose branches are few but whose roots are many; so that even if all the winds in the world come and blow against it, it cannot be stirred from its place, as it is written, He shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out his roots by the river, and shall not fear when heat cometh, and his leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.

So, on the surface, yes, he’s just illustrating the bit about wisdom and deeds. But really, I don’t think he’s having a conversation here with Chanina ben Dosa, but with Jeremiah. When you look at the proof texts in their context, and then look at Rabbi Eliezar ben Azariah’s text, something very different emerges.

Let’s take the first one, the one who is all wisdom and no proverbial; From Jeremiah, he is like the ar’ar ba-aravah, the naked desert. Probably the naked plant, the tree without leaves. Our translator, Herbert Danby D.D., is either making his own translation of the Jeremiah or he is working from an untrustworthy one; a tamarisk is eshel, and this is clearly not that. The tamarisk is known for being shady and moist; Jeremiah is talking about something closer to this, I think. But that is not, clearly not, what Rabbi Eliezar ben Azariah is talking about, with abundant branches and few roots. The Rabbi is, in fact, talking about a tamarisk. Thus, I imagine, Dr. Danby’s confusion.

So we’ve got the tree backwards; but what else? Well, for Eliezar ben Azariah, as we have seen, the fellow who is like that tree is like that tree because his wisdom is more abundant than his works. But in Jeremiah, who is like that tree? The fellow who trusteth in man, and makes flesh his arm is like that tree.

And the other man?

The other man is like ha-aytz shatul mayim, the tree planted by the water. Because he trusteth in the Lord. That is the man who Eliezar ben Azariah describes as having more roots than branches, and having more works than wisdom.

I think Rabbi Eliezar ben Azariah has the whole thing upside-down. But—and here’s the fun part—I think he has it upside-down on purpose. Stick with me.

[YHB rolls out a large chalkboard with the Jeremiah verses on the left and the Avot verse on the right, and starts circling words and drawing lines between them]

The man who trusts in man but not in the Lord, who is he? How can you identify him? Not by his roots, which you can’t see. Not by the trust, which you can’t see. Not by his wisdom, which you can’t see. How can you identify the man who trusts in the Lord? By that trust? By his roots? By his wisdom?

The man who trusts in the Lord can be identified, not by the trust he places in the Divine, but by the active work, the tangible deeds, his relations with men and with the things around him. The man who fails to trust in the Divine cannot be identified by searching the Divine, but by searching the creation of the Divine, and seeing the absence of works.

In other words, the person who acts as if he is concerned about people, who works for the benefit of people, who doesn’t abandon people or exploit them or hurt them—if you are looking at it right-side-up, you think that that is the person who trusts in people. But if you are looking at it upside-down (that is, the correct way), you see that the person who spends time working for people, to alleviate their problems and bring them joy, that is the person who trusts in the Divine, the person whose invisible roots are even stronger than the visible branches.

But the other person, the one who acts as if the Divine Creation was made only for him, the one who does not have works to her credit, the one who builds up wisdom for its own sake and to show off and to lord it over the rest—that person does not trust the Divine but only in man; that is a person with weak branches and weaker roots, a person who will blow over in a storm, who won’t see good things in other people, or even, at last, in the self.

We tend to walk around right-side-up, because it’s easier that way. We look around at things right-side-up. The right-side-up simile is that visible deeds are like branches, and invisible wisdom like the roots that feed them. It’s good to have an upside-down simile, at least now and then, to say that the wisdom is the crown of the tree and the deeds are the roots that anchor it; to reflect that the things you can see are the things that count; to put your crown in the dirt and wave your roots in the air; to trust in the Divine by working for the Creation; to have a naked tamarisk and a leafy Joshua tree; to take things the wrong way around to get to the right answer at last.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This week we turn to Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah, who is Ezra’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson; he is known as an aristocrat whose vast wealth was exceeded only by his immense generosity, and whose immense generosity was exceeded only by his great knowledge.

Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah says: Where there is no Torah, there’s no right conduct, where there is no right conduct, there’s no Torah; where there is no wisdom, there’s no piety, where there is no piety, there’s no wisdom; where there is no perception, there’s no knowledge, where there’s no knowledge, there’s no perception; where there is no bread, there’s no torah, were there is no Torah, there’s no bread.

Four pairs. I hate pairs. Triples are good, pairs are bad. Hmph.

First pair is Torah and right conduct, or derech eretz, and the idea of the connection between them is not new. We talked about that in connection with Rabban Gamliel). Nothing really new here, except the negative phrasing. Where Rabban Gamliel suggests that that the pairing is fitting and is focused on the presence of both, Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah is focused on the absence of both. I’ll get back to that.

Second pair is wisdom and piety, or hachmah and yir’ah. The latter is sometimes called fear or perhaps better reverence. Joseph ben Judah ibn Aknin draws the connection between study of “the heavens and the earth and what is between them”, that is, secular study, and the fear of sin, as “when one perceives the genuine greatness of these things, he begins to understand ” the Divine Creator from the Creation.

Third pair is perception and knowledge. The difference between them is described by different commentators in different ways. The Machsor Vitry says that knowledge is what learned from another, whilst perception is your own ideas. The Meiri, on the other hand, says that knowledge is innate, whilst perception is learned. I have no idea, and probably have neither. Can we come back to this one?

Four and final pair is Torah and bread. Which is where we started, right? Only this time it’s bread, specifically, rather than derech eretz, which can mean either your occupation in the world or good conduct. If this is bread, and thus metaphorically breadwinning, then the other is conduct, yes? Or there is a double meaning, to make the whole verse circle around on itself.

So in the three verses that are reasonably clear, we have on the one hand secular aspects of life (conduct, wisdom and bread) and on the other religious (Torah, piety and, er, Torah). Does this help us differentiate perception and knowledge? Surely, here, one is meant to indicate something close to faith, the knowledge that the Divine exists and that Scripture is Scripture. A basic belief that is not based on evidence and is unshakeable. The other is the ability to judge evidence, to analyze, to perceive when the world is not how you think it is. The sage is here telling us that they are not opposed but complementary, both existing by virtue of the other’s existence. We start with an axiom or a bias. We also start with a world that exists independently of any axiom.

In other words, my belief in the Creator is not dependent on the Creation. But then neither is my belief in the Creation dependent on a belief in the Creator. I don’t think that’s what is meant by the if not x then not y formulation. I think it’s closer to this: if you reject [Torah, reverence, knowledge/axiomatic belief, Torah] in favor of [ethics, wisdom, perception, materialism], you are making a fundamental error. If, however, you are making the opposite choice, rejecting the pragmatic to embrace the spiritual, you are also making a fundamental error. Not in which one you are choosing. The error is choosing.

A world without bread would not be the world. A world without Torah would not be the world. If there is no Torah, there is no bread; if there is no bread, there is no Torah—not because you are too hungry to study or too sinful to be rewarded with food, but because without either of those things there is nothing.

I think that’s why Eleazar ben Azariah is repeating this idea in such a profoundly negative formulation. We cannot take the world a la carte. Rejection—of either side—is nihilism, the great shout of NO that keeps away both the Divine and the mundane, and yourself, too.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 2:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This is a long one, so I’m going to use Jacob Neusner’s fancy break-it-down style of translation:

A. He would say, “(1) All is handed over as a pledge,
B.“(2)And a net is cast over all the living.
C.“(3)The store is open, (4) the shopkeeper gives credit, (5) the account book is open, and (6) the hand is writing.
D.“(1)Whoever wants to borrow may come and borrow.
E.“(2)The charity collectors go around every day and collect from man whether he knows it or not.
F.“(3)And they have grounds for what they do.
G.“(4)And the judgment is a true judgment.
H.“(5)And everything is prepared for the meal.”

What do we learn from Rabbi Akiva today? That it’s OK to mix metaphors, that’s what we learn.

The main metaphor is that the world is like a store. Ha-Meiri says that this is because of the infinite variety of its goods—“some are bitter, some are sweet; some are hot, some are cold; some are moist, some are dry; some are hard, some are soft; and the choice is left to the purchaser to buy what he wishes, either the bitter or the sweet.” The shop is open, and not only is credit available, but it is available to everyone. On the other hand, the bill does come due, and there is no escaping the collectors.

And everything is prepared for the meal. Or the feast or the banquet, depending. What is this meal? How does that follow from the shopkeeper metaphor?

In the Machsor Vitry, they extend the metaphor: a shopkeeper, with so much on the AR ledger, may keep a sparse table for every day, as he spends his money on the goods and does not get all the income. What happens, though, when the money comes due? He plans a feast. Is the Divine planning a feast, for that moment when we all pay our debt to Creation? Is there a celebration at hand— and we are holding it up by being deadbeats? It’s a thought.

Other commentators have a different interpretation. Rabbi Meshullam bar Kalonymos says that the feast is death. Why is death a feast? Because, like when the dinner bell rings and everybody goes in to the feast, each to sit at an appointed place, at the head of the table or near the foot, so too when our time comes we much depart from the world, to sit at an appointed place in the hereafter. That doesn’t work for me, but the idea seems to be accepted that the feast refers either to death or to the judgment after death. Men are destined for reward in the world to come, says Joseph ben Judah ibn Aknin, unless they are driven away from the feast because they have not settled their account with the Divine in this world. Or, perhaps, the word feast is used as a kind of Schenectady for both reward and punishment, with Rabbi Akiva naturally reluctant to even name the possibility of unrighteousness.

Or, perhaps, as the Meiri says, this feast simply refers to the inevitable outcome of the shopping we have done at the store—if you have purchased meat and greens, you have meat and greens for your feast. If you have purchased nothing, you have nothing. Looking from that angle, everything is prepared for the meal seems to warn that whatever your actions have been, they have been a preparation for your meal, your deserts, if you will. It’s a warning that you may not get further preparation time, but have to eat what you already have in your pantry. You never know when it’s too late to go to the store for more.

Which brings us back, thematically, to the warning in the Machsor Vitry. The problem, my problem, is that I don’t like this eschatological End-is-Nigh stuff. And as much as I think it is helpful to keep the metaphor of the world as a shop, the Divine Creator as a provider of infinite splendor that does not demand payment up front but does keep strict accounts, as much as I do think that metaphor can be helpful in appreciating both the rich variety of life and the sometimes disconcerting gap between (perceived) benefits and burdens, I’ll just stretch it a trifle more to fit my own worldview with a very questionable translation of that last bit:

…
E.“(2)The collectors go around every day and collect from man whether he knows it or not.
F.“(3)And they have grounds for what they do.
G.“(4)And the judgment is a true judgment.
H.“(5)And look—free samples!”

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We are still on the sayings of Rabbi Akiva, who used to say (in the translation of Judah Goldin):

Everything is foreseen, yet freedom of choice is granted; in mercy is the world judged; and everything is granted according to the preponderance of works.

I love this verse.

To me, this verse is what makes it possible for me to be a believer in the Divine. This is a statement about the Divine mystery, the fundamental irreconcilability of the Divine as we accept it and the world as we learn it. The step is to accept this.

If I were the Divine, I could not make free will and foreknowledge compatible. Oh, there are some rhetorical tricks to get around the more obvious logical problems, but if you follow those out with the ruthlessness of logic, you still run into conclusions that are unacceptable, or that are seriously incompatible with worship. But the great and holy Rabbi Akiva is saying, what if you don’t follow them out? What if you accept that there is a logic that applies in the world, and that the Divine is not bound by that logic? If an essential attribute of the Divine is that the Divine is more than human, more than humanity, more than the world we can test and examine, more even than the world we can imagine, then much of the rest of it falls away, and we can judge ourselves and our worship by our own worthiness, not by the worthiness of the Divine.

All is determined and free will is given. It is a contradiction to us, but the Divine is not bound by rules or laws of any kind; the Divine is not a clockmaker or an attorney, the Divine is ineffable, and exists outside the universe, before it and above it and beyond it.

Now that is the part of the verse that is most often quoted, and is used (by YHB, fairly frequently) as an example of the difference between the Rabbis and the Church Fathers, between Judaism as it has come down to us and the other religions. It’s not that we reject logic. Our legal system is rigorously logic-based. It’s that we do not expect the Divine to be subject to it. And it’s not that we reject philosophical inquiry, either, although the nature of that inquiry tends to be more limited and more focused on the workings of the world and its dwellers. We begin those inquiries, when they reach the Divine, with the understanding that we will not be able to ultimately reduce the Divine to a formula.

More important, though, it seems to me at the moment, is the second half of the verse, the one that says that we are judged with mercy and by the preponderance of works. We know that the Divine is merciful—it’s right there in the Scripture. It’s one of the attributes (it’s the first of them, actually, in the liturgical List of Thirteen Attributes, and also several of the others), so we cannot doubt it. But then, if I were a Judge, I would find mercy in conflict with Justice; if punishment is the inevitable result of transgression, and the preponderance of acts determines the granting or withholding of reward, where is mercy? And if mercy is the first principle, then doesn’t it, logically, undermine judgment?

Yes, if it were human judgment. Or even natural judgment, that is, the working out of cause and effect, in which mercy plays no part and can play no part. But the Divine mercy, and the Divine judgment, are not like ours, nor are they bound by the laws of time and nature.

But—and here’s where we get to the really important part, the existence of Divine mercy, above logic and beyond the boundary, does not in any way invalidate the preponderance of works. The Divine foreknowledge does not invalidate free choice, and the results of that free choice remain our own works, our own world, our own legacy to ourselves. The Divine mercy is not a mercy that lets us off the hook, any more than the Divine foreknowledge is a foreknowledge that lets us off our free will. It is the prerogative of the Divine to be merciful; it is not the prerogative of humanity, or individual people, or for that matter the prerogative of animals and matter and the logic and laws of nature to presume on that mercy. We can accept the ineffability of Divine foreknowledge and logic only if we also accept our free will and our responsibility for our works. They are not separate matters. They are the same thing, in the same verse, in the same world.

That’s why I can accept that (for instance) the world was created in seven days, or that in the endtime we will be resurrected in the body, while simultaneously believing in, say, physics and biology. To the extent that bodily resurrection is true (and we are given that it is, just as we are given the Divine mercy), it is true beyond our understanding. We can’t accept it as invalidating physics and biology, not and be true to Rabbi Akiva. We can’t even accept it alongside physics and biology. To believe in bodily resurrection and be true to this verse, you have to be prepared to set aside your belief in bodily resurrection as part of the Divine prerogative and put your own mind to physics and biology and to the preponderance of your own works—not give it up, not at all, but give it up to the Divine as part of the Divine’s business, while taking care of your own.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is a long and complicated verse, so I’m going to cut and paste the Chabad translation, to spare myself the typing:

He would also say: Beloved is man, for he was created in the image [of G-d]; it is a sign of even greater love that it has been made known to him that he was created in the image, as it is says, You are children of the L-rd your G-d. Beloved are Israel, for they were given a precious article; it is a sign of even greater love that it has been made known to them that they were given a precious article, as it is stated: I have given you a good purchase; My Torah, do not forsake it.

The three parts here are each making the point that the knowledge of a thing is greater than the thing itself without the knowledge. Which is a true thing, of course, but in some sense a simple and true thing: how could the thing be greater than the thing plus the knowledge? He cannot be saying that the knowledge on its own is greater than the thing on its own, because the knowledge cannot exist without the thing being known—or—

Let’s play around with that for a few minutes. What if the valuable thing really is the knowledge, not the thing known? That is, let’s examine: what if we know that we are created in the image of the Divine, but we are not, in fact, made in the Divine image? Before we go on, let me add that my intention is to play around with it as a hypothetical, rather than determining in any sense whether humans are or are not made in the Divine image, whatever that would mean, physically or spiritually or whatever. Akiba takes it as a basic fact that humans were made in the image of the Divine, because they had been told it, and so it was true. That’s fine. But what would it mean that we are told it, if it is not in any sense true? Is the telling then a proof of Divine love?

YHB immediately goes to the idea of the Divine-Human relationship being like the Parent-Child relationship. When we tell our children that they are pretty, strong, brave or clever—is the telling a proof of our love even if they do not have those qualities? Is the proof of parental love that we see those qualities in our children even when they are hidden to other eyes? (I am of course reminded here of Coach and his daughter, played by the great Allyce Beasley, from about two minutes or so into this clip) Or is this another example of parents telling comforting lies to their children, well-intentioned but ultimately harmful? Or is this the thing where children find in themselves the thing they are told to find, whether it is bravery or beauty, or incompetence or uselessness?

And, of course, the Divine is not just telling children but telling adults that we are made in the image. I don’t like to rely too much on the Divine as Parent, because it infantilizes us as adults, as if we will never be ready to come into our own inheritance as humans. So if the Divine is just saying it, if we believe mistakenly that we are in the image, is this a contributor to our arrogance and recklessness? Or to our humaneness, our mercy and love for each other—and for ourselves, if it comes to that?

Whether we are made in the Image, we are made (somehow) able to believe that we are made in the Image. That is an astonishing thing about humans—we look at the universe and think that the Divine Creator must be in some way like us, and that we must be in some way like the Divine. We may or may not actually be made in the Divine Image, but we have the ability to conceptualize that we are, and perhaps being Created that way is the proof of extraordinary Divine Love that Akiba is getting at here.

For the others, well, I think that Chosen-ness has not been an unmitigated blessing for the people Israel, and I’m not sure that it wouldn’t have been better to have been Chosen without such a fuss being made about it. Still, in the words of the verse, the special love that Israel is shown is not being children of the Divine (which of course everybody and everything is a Created of the Creator), but in being told that we were children of the Divine. Not an unmitigated blessing, as I say, but there it is. Perhaps the evolution of Judaism is such that (as with human understanding of the Divine Image) we have become capable of understanding what it means to be children of the Divine—or what it could mean, anyway.

As for the special gift of our Tribe, well, it could be said that our special gift is not the Torah, which is available to everyone after all, and which (by certain stories) was offered to everyone, but our love for the Torah, our enduring habit of keeping it precious to us, in different ways for different generations, our secure knowledge that it remains ours, remains our Scripture, remains our gift, whatever its apparent flaws and irrelevancies.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 1:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, and we have got to Rabbi Akiba at last. For those who aren’t up on their great and holy sages, I will say that there are three sages that are the most prominent, the chief examples, legendary figures, and inner-circle Hall-of-Famers among them. Those are Hillel, of course, and Akiba and Judah the Prince. Just to mention: in Gershom Bader’s Encyclopedia of Talmudic Sages, there are 23 pages devoted to Rabbi Akiba, compared to 7 for Chanina ben Dosa or five for Rabbi Tarfon. I don’t know if non-Jews have heard of Rabbi Akiva, but I would say that most Jews who go to any kind of Hebrew School in America probably know the name and some of the sayings or stories (and don’t know Chanina ben Dosa or Rabbi Tarfon).

Rabbi Akiba says:
Merriment and frivolity accustom one to unchastity.
Tradition is a hedge about the Torah
Tithes are a hedge about riches
vows are a hedge about abstinence
a hedge about wisdom—silence

Again with the hedges (or fences, or whatever the translator decides). I want to quote R. Travers Herford here who says that the idea of the hedge “is open to abuse and misconstruction, and has found these in abundance; but in itself it is worthy of the profoundly earnest men who made it their rule of life.” I tend to focus on the abuse and misconstruction, because there is so much of it about. In fact, I am skeptical of the worthiness of the principle altogether. On the other hand, Rabbi Akiba was smarter, more pious and more learned than YHB (I think we can all accept that), and some deference is due. So let’s look at this verse with some deference, yes?

First of all, I’m not altogether against unchastity, but leaving that aside for the moment, I think it’s true that merriment and frivolity accustom one to it, or that (to switch from R. Travers Herford’s translation to that of Rabbi Hertz) they lead one on to unchastity. It’s fairly easy (in for instance, a room alone with someone to whom one is attracted but with whom unchastity would be a Bad Thing) to say that I’m just having a good time here, and we’re just friends, and nothing is going to happen—and it’s even easier for something to happen. This does not mean that merriment and frivolity are bad in themselves, or that one shouldn’t engage in them, just that it’s good to be aware of things. And, of course, even if nothing does, quite, happen, there’s a certain emotional cost involved, and therefore a certain ethical cost as well. Again, I don’t want to endorse the idea that because merriment and frivolity can lead to unchastity, or can break down one’s practical opposition to it, that you should avoid them altogether or even avoid them in Certain Situation. I’m just saying that Rabbi Akiba is right that you don’t get them without risk and for free.

Then there’s tradition being a hedge around the Torah, which is, I would think both obvious and profound. There’s a story—I don’t think it’s Rabbi Akiba, I think it’s Hillel, but I can’t remember where I found it—of a scoffer who goes to a sage and says Why should I learn from you, and all of your traditions? I can learn directly from the Scripture itself! The Rabbi, in response, draws an A (well, an aleph, but the story is the same) and asks the scoffer what it is. That’s an A, says the scoffer. The Rabbi nods and draws a B. That’s a B is the response. Again, the Rabbi draws and the scoffer responds That’s a C, I know the letters, I know the whole alphabet, A-B-C, yes, what’s your point? The Rabbi looks at him and asks how do you know these things, if it is not from the tradition?

In fact, aside from the alphabet, there are lots of things in the Scripture that are obscure or capable of a multitude of interpretations, and tradition protects the Scripture by guiding us to an understanding, so we don’t reject the thing altogether. On the other hand, tradition often guides us to the wrong interpretation—I would say an interpretation with which I disagree, which is usually what I mean by wrong, but also in many cases an interpretation which simply is wrong. The book of Wisdom was not written by King Solomon, that’s just not true. Tradition attributes to the Romans, the Egyptians and the local Canaanites habits and norms that they did not have. Tradition can be wrong. And even when it is not wrong as such, tradition can solidify interpretations that would be better served by flexibility; can engrave in the stories cultural biases that we now want to rid ourselves of, which may be worse.

A Gentle Reader recently wrote about the idea that Divine Right of Kings was widely prevalent (in one form or another) for very large chunks of human history in lots of the world, much not having to do with each other but overlapping in a sense that the ruler of the government partook in some sense of the Divine, to the extent that ruler, government and Divine are concepts that albeit ill-defined are recognizable and themselves have substantial overlap. She suggest that “probably 90% or more of the human population agrees that’s a bad idea”, which I think is overstating it, but certainly the idea of popular sovereignty has really remarkably overtaken that concept, and without claiming (and I don’t think she intends to claim) that it is going down without a pretty damned good fight, it does seem at the moment to be going down. I bring this up because that kind of major cultural shift—the concept of government, the idea of human rights and the dignity of the individual, the conceptualization of childhood, the relationships of humans to animals, etc, etc, etc, all really do vary over the centuries and continents. Tradition, by its nature, changes only very, very slowly, and when you want to change the mindset (without necessarily changing the Law), tradition is a hedge in your way.

Now, as for tithes being a hedge about riches, I have never had much experience with either. But the interesting thing for me that the parallelism of the verse makes it clear that (a) riches are a good thing, in and of themselves, and (2) tithes somehow protect that good thing, which would otherwise be in danger. I’m not sure how this works—except as a talismanic kind of thing, which is how it is often interpreted in (yes) the tradition. Rabbi Jonah ben Abraham and Simeon ben Zumah Duran both suggest that he who tithes or gives charity from his riches will, as this verse relates, increase rather than decrease them. Casting your bread upon the face of the water, you know, reassuring the ROI folk that it isn’t wasted. On the other hand, this is one of those cases where it is simply false—at least in any individual sense. Your contributions do not inevitably lead to riches; self-interest is not a good way to get people to tithe.

I will say, in a broader context, that the prosperity of a culture is (I maintain) largely dependent on its stability, which is (again, I maintain) largely dependent on the voluntary contribution of the wealthy toward its institutions and its people, that is, tithing. Tithing in the mass is a hedge around prosperity in the mass. While I don’t believe that an individual who refuses to contribute to anything larger than his family or his own business will necessarily be made poorer because of it, I do think that a society-wide negligence increases the chances of massive economic and political upheavals (not to mention plague, pestilence and war, which are profit drivers for some people, but high-risk for people who already hold riches). So there’s that.

Vows are a hedge around abstinence. Well, and we’re presumably talking about abstinence of various kinds, not just sexual abstinence. I have to say in my experience, trying to cut down on potato chips or other kinds of badformes, that vows and promises are not much of a hedge. And I think that’s all I have to say about that.

And wisdom? And silence? The Rabbis do praise silence, both actual silence and verbal reticence—Rabbi Jonah ben Abraham claims that this verse teaches us silence on the part of a student in the presence of his teacher or anyone greater in wisdom, but he can’t really be talking about silence, just about not blurting out answers, interrupting or holding forth without listening. My inclination is to say that silence is an effective hedge around a reputation for wisdom, but that wisdom is as likely gained as lost in active participation in discussion. But then I would say that, wouldn’t I?

As for the verse as a whole… I don’t know that I have any observations. I will add that I’m thinking that I should, in the new year, to try to keep these avot notes confined to one note for a verse, rather than breaking them up. The purpose of posting them in three or four parts was to facilitate discussion, which (as y’all have probably noticed) isn’t so much happening, so the actual outcome is just aggregator clutter. It may make for long notes, but we have enough pixels for that, don’t we?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

My Gracious Host points us to a page that Shmuel (sometime Gentle Reader here) put together some great links on a panel on Being Gay in the Modern Orthodox World that was held at Yeshiva University. Y’all know I have little patience with the whole idea of the Modern Orthodox—I feel that much of halacha is as destructive as much of the Temple ritual, and am glad I can be Jewish without participating in either. I should probably write much more about this in general, at some point, but for the moment, I’ll just acknowledge that I do not feel myself constrained by the law against seed-spilling or the law against anal sex. Or the one against shellfish. Mmm, shellfish.

Anyway, I read a transcript posted by a student at YU, and I found it fascinating, moving and provocative. And I wound up reading more posts by that student, who is clearly conflicted about the issue (not about the halacha, which is fairly clear in the middle notwithstanding a good deal of disagreement about how wide the hedge around it should be), and then read a bunch of comments, which was of course a terrible, terrible mistake.

It occurs to me that if I am going to talk about this at all, I should talk just a bit about the Law as it applies here, and not just make an off-hand parenthetical comment. I am not an expert in this, and I want to emphasize that I am not particularly observant as a matter of practice nor as a matter of theory do I follow the sages or the modern Rabbis and their applications. I am very much outside the fold. That will be important to keep in mind. Still, I know a bit about the Law and the traditions, and if any of y’all know more, it would be helpful for me to have any correction or clarification, and if y’all know less, then keep reading.

Here’s the core: Leviticus 18:22 says something like You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination. The most liberal interpretation of this within mainstream Jewish Orthodox thought is an absolute prohibition on male-male penile-anal penetration to ejaculation. That is like eating scallops wrapped in bacon. It may be wonderful, but it is a violation of the Law, and there is no way around that. The question is what else is a violation. This is in part an interpretation of the verse itself, and in part an interpretation of the hedge around the Law (which we have discussed before here). So, taking for instance the act of one male pleasuring another by anal penetration with a dildo or vibrator: is this sufficiently different from the proscribed act to be allowed? Probably not. With a tongue? Hm. What about fellatio? Or a hand job? My understanding is that almost all mainstream traditional rabbis consider all those acts to be forbidden, either directly by the verse or by the implication of the verse.

Now, when we are talking about the hedge, there are a couple of things that come into play. First, there’s a categorization of laws (both prohibitions and obligations) into things that make sense and things that are arbitrary. That is, the obligation to honor your father and mother makes sense, and therefore we are obliged not only to honor our biological father and mother, but an adoptive father and mother, and a stepfather or stepmother, or even by extension a teacher, mentor or elder. The prohibition against shellfish, however, is arbitrary, so although we must not eat crab meat, we can eat surimi (assuming it has been prepared properly). We may not be able to taste the difference (how would we, lacking the experience), but there is a difference, and we have avoided the infraction. So when deciding where the hedge is, that’s an important factor: is the prohibition against anal sex a sensible one or an arbitrary one? Unsurprisingly, opinions differ.

The other major factor in determining how big a hedge should be is temptation: if (going back to our topic for a moment) a gay couple are getting tremendous pleasure from their hands, mouths, cocks, asses and vibrators in all the variations they can think of except penile-anal penetration, will they be tempted to violate the prohibition, in a moment of frenzied passion? If so, it is generally considered admirable to avoid that situation (although of course there are stories of rabbis deliberately sleeping in the same bed as beautiful young women and conquering their yetzer ra, and although some commentary does criticize that behavior, the rabbis in question are not considered to have violated the Law and the majority strain of the tradition approves of them, as witness the inclusion of the stories). If the temptation is considered to be great and widespread, the hedge is not considered to be a matter of individual judgement, rather the rabbi can state where the hedge should be. If it’s a matter of leading others off the path, that is, where a person can without infringing the Law themselves lead others into a situation where they will infringe the law, either unknowingly or through overwhelming temptation, there is no question: it is forbidden, even if under other circumstances it might be allowed.

Furthermore (should I have skipped all this?) there is the matter of tradition: if there is a tradition prohibiting a particular thing as part of a hedge around the existing Law, the inheritors of that tradition are bound by it, unless positively released by an authority. The most common example of this is the difference in Passover observance between Ashkenazic Jews and Sephardim: the Sephardim eat rice (among other kitniyot) and the Ashkenazim do not. However, a Jew of an Ashkenazic family cannot simply declare herself a Sephard for the duration of Passover. She is bound by the minhag, the tradition.

Digression: I really shouldn’t add anything else to this note, but I don’t think I’ve ever made the point in this Tohu Bohu that in the case of a Sephard marrying an Ashkenaz, the new household should adopt the minhag of the woman, not the man. This is in part because the woman is assumed to be in charge of the house and particularly the kitchen, so it makes sense to use the traditional recipes that she would know rather than making her learn her mother-in-law’s recipes. It’s also for the same reason that our bloodlines are maternal: we know who the mother is. End Digression.

So where were we? Oh, yes. Orthodox Judaism generally has found that the prohibition against gay sex is sensible, and that tradition has made a very big hedge, and that anyway all that sex stuff is icky, and the hedge against straight sex (which is a mitzvah, after all) is about a mile high and six miles deep, so there. For a man to have a boyfriend, to hold hands and snuggle in the evening, to exchange loving words and looks, is all banned. Forget teabagging, they ban waltzing. Not a surprise, but it’s worth keeping in mind that they could make different decisions about the law. They are bound to keep the prohibitions in the Torah itself, yes, but they have some latitude to make the very broad interpretation of that prohibition much, much, much narrower without giving up that prohibition (the way that I feel free to do).

Good Gumby, this is a long note, and I haven’t got to the point of it, yet. Are y’all still with me? Because I did have a point, this time, and I’m getting to it soon. Well, soonish. Y’all know I tend to do the breaking-down-into-categories thing to think about topics, so that’s what came most clearly to mind, because some of the discussion I saw was so utterly confused about some things I find very distinct. So it seems to me that the Modern Orthodox community must decide how to treat:

A) Gay and lesbian people who grew up in the fold, and have decided as adults to leave the tradition, in part (at least) because it does not allow them to marry their loves and have sex with them. This might be fairly easy, as it is a kind of mutual expulsion, although of course that expulsion is heartbreaking for divided families and friends, and can lead people away from the path of righteousness altogether.

2) Gay and lesbian adults who are, like the panelists appear to be (to me, at any rate), passionate about staying in the fold and concerned with acting according to the Law, but who are certain of their orientation. This is very difficult. Very, very difficult. I tend to think that this panel and the discussion leading to it and from it will help people come up with some ways of thinking about it that are helpful. I do understand that many Rabbis will have a lot of trouble accepting that these people are good observant Jews that are perfectly naturally attracted to members of the same sex. The law may make it difficult on these people, but that isn’t their fault, and they should be treated with care and joy. As a side note, if anybody happens on this that could use the info, or could usefully pass it along, The Gay and Lesbian Yeshiva Day School Alumni Association seems to be a good source of information and links for people in this category.

γ) Young adults who are trying to figure out their sexual identity, preferences and orientation, being guided by the community and the Law. This seems less difficult to me, but it does require a kind of forthrightness about the existence of sexual passions of various kinds, which seems (from what I understand) to be present in the Law and the rabbinic discussion of the Law, but most often missing from conversations with actual children. At any rate, these young people should be able to know where the Law is clear and where it is not, what their obligations are and are not. Most important, they should all know that same-sex attraction is a natural thing, much like shrimp or roast pork, and that while a Jew may be prohibited from acting on it (or at least in acting on it in particular ways, depending on which authorities you follow), there is nothing disgusting about it.

iv) Kids who are ‘different’ and fail to act in exact accordance with gender expectations. The panelists tell stories that would be shocking if they weren’t so terribly, terribly common. I would have thought there would be a consensus of commentators and scholars that these kids have violated no aspect of the Law, and the behavior of the schools, camps, shuls, and families to them is a violation of the kind specifically stated (again and again, in Pirke Avot, by sages who agree on little else) to be outrages against the Divine and the Law, inconsistent with righteousness.

That’s what struck me most—these panelists were describing their histories with specific focus on the harm that they took before they identified themselves as gay frum Jews. Many of the responses (almost all the ones I happened to see) reacted to the question of how to treat gay frum Jews. Well, fine, that’s an issue. But it’s turning away from the harm that was done to those people, and that turning away is another harm, and is absolutely and unquestionably a violation of the ethics that we’ve been reading here at this Tohu Bohu.

Now, I took some grief, myself, as a child, for being different. I have been called effeminate (I have been called a great big poncy ponce, in fact, but not recently), and when I was a kid, I was hurt by the scorn of others on that topic as well as on others. But I wasn’t told, at the age of ten, that I was evil. The idea that anybody could react to this

the next day my parents were called in to Rabbi Monk’s office. And he takes off a book from the shelf by a rabbi who happens to be my father’s great-uncle and he says ‘there’s no natural desire for homosexuality. It must be that it’s only rebellion against God and it only happens after you’ve explored every other taivah’ and then he looked at me. I was TEN. Only ten! And it made sense to everyone in the room. Except me. And I was kicked out of camp.

by criticizing the man who tells the story is an outrage against Judaism’s ethical principles. Remember, the ten-year-old boy who is accused not just of an abomination but of every abomination has not been taking it up the ass. He has not even been holding hands. He said, when asked, that he liked boys. This is not a violation of halacha. And accusing him like that is.

And it is a violation whether the ostracized kid grows up to be frum and gay, or (like me) a straight man who likes showtunes and fancy clothes. You have no way of knowing which is which.

And, of course, it is a violation of ethics even if the kid grows up to eat scallops and bacon, take it up the ass, and charge interest on loans. No excuses. You don’t treat people that way.

Which is why it is so great for the panelists to come to Yeshiva University and say they were treated that way, and for YU, however reluctantly, to invite them.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Rabbi Ishmael says: be suppliant to a superior, submissive under compulsory service, and receive every man happily.

Rabbi Ishmael (ben Elisha) is the grandson of the High Priest, also named Ishmael; he is sometimes confused with his grandfather, and is sometimes himself referred to as a High Priest, although (the Temple having been destroyed) he never served in that capacity. He may possibly have been considered the High Priest in waiting, that is, should the Temple be rebuilt in his lifetime, he would have been chosen. Or, just as likely I feel, people just get confused over names.

Anyway, his relationship with power and authority are… interesting. He is supposed to have been imprisoned by the Romans as a child, and was about to be sold to a brothel when Rabbi Joshua ben Chananiah purchased him from captivity and restored him to learning. His lifespan (roughly contemporary with Rabbi Akiba) is under a Roman rule that went from harsh and oppressive in his youth rapidly downhill. He was an eminent and respected authority, but never held high office; he traveled back and forth to the great gatherings of scholars, rather than residing as a teacher. He must always have had in his mind the idea that, had the Romans not pulled down the Temple, he would have been wearing the jeweled breastplate and golden whatnots. And had the people not revolted against authority, would the Temple have still been standing?

In the second leg of the triple, there’s a word, tishoret, that is obscure, and that leads to two or three very different interpretations of the verse. Judah Goldin (who I’ve used above) sides with the Machsor Vitry; Herbert Danby sides with the Rambam, translating it “kindly to the young”. I have no idea, of course. On the one hand, if Rabbi Ishmael is thinking about power and hierarchies, it makes sense that the reference is to a royal official who enforces the law. On the other hand, it’s possible that he is not thinking about politics but about personal interaction and affection; having been treated roughly as a child himself, he may have wanted to emphasize the extra importance of being kind.

In fact, if one wants to view this apolitically, it is about being receptive: open to those above you and below you, as well as to absolute strangers. This is humility of sorts, putting others above yourself. These three, then, are a progression: of course you should work hard for someone who is in a position of power over you, but even for a youth, you should be helpful and not arrogant—and not only a child, but for every man, without condition.

I don’t know, though. I am inclined to the political reading, which advises against rebellion in favor of hard work. For the political superior, flexibility is required. For the outsider who is in power over you, he advises (in the translation of R. Travers Herford) patience. And for every man, a joyful greeting.

Is not the implication there that every man you meet may be (a) your superior, in the sense of learning and wisdom, in the sense of respect and community authority, in the sense of age and experience; or (2) an oppressor, a force of compulsion, a actor not from ethical authority but from power? If this is the case—and it is the case—how do you greet a stranger? With suspicion, with caution, with guards up and defenses down? No, Rabbi Ishmael is saying (it seems to me) that being aware of the potentials and possibilities, one must still greet every man with joy.

Of course, we already know, from Shammai, that we should receive every man with a cheerful expression of face, which is not so far from receiving the fellow with actual cheer. So are we learning anything new here? We are, of course: the sages are recognizing that there are reasons why a person would not have a cheerful expression of face, or happiness at heart, to meet a new person.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, and I’m still trying to think about the verse:

R. Elazar of Modim said, he who profanes things sacred, and despises the festivals, and puts his fellow-man to shame in public, and makes void the covenant of Abraham our father, and makes the Torah bear a meaning other than what is right, such a one, even though knowledge of the Torah be his, has no share in the world to come.

As I have said, I think this is a deliberate reference to the Chanukah story, and an attempt to connect the Roman situation to the Chanukah story, and an attempt to connect our current situation, whatever it is, to all of that.

I am, on the whole, an Assimilationist. Or, rather, I am in favor of the Jewish tradition of incorporating local traditions into our own traditions, flavoring them as seems good, interacting with the local non-Jewish population, adapting, living, growing, changing. I like having other Jews around, but I also like having non-Jews around.

I don’t want to be forced into an us-or-them situation. I don’t want to be part of an insulated enclave that manages to keep the festivals and the sacred things and the Torah all safe from outside influences. But I don’t want to make void the covenant, either. I know that the Maccabees were reacting to an hostile occupation; they are not a good model for how to live in a free and wonderfully heterogenous and hybrid country. Neither is the rabbinic reaction to the Romans, although a marvelous thing and a miracle in itself, more than a starting point for our own choices.

Every year at this time, I grumble (at least in my own head) about the contradictions of American Hanukkah. The commemoration of the fight against assimilation become the epitome of assimilation itself. More than that, the way that our celebration of Hanukkah becomes a half-assed secular Christmas—as if we are simultaneously telling our children that it’s all right that they are missing Christmas while implying that of course they are missing out on the real winter holiday. Or, worse, giving eight presents as a bribe to keep them Jewish—you see? Hanukkah is eight times better than Christmas, because you get eight presents! As if Christmas was nothing more than gift-giving, and as if the religious observances were spreadsheets. A new way of despising the festivals.

I get very cranky about it. If you hadn’t noticed.

Less so, I must say, since my own household has been observing both holidays, having both Jews and Christians in the house, and doing (I think) a pretty good job of it, so far. We muddle through. Eleazar wouldn’t like it, but there you are.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 9:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So. Eleazar of Modin and me, Hellenizers and Romanizers, Bar Kochba and the Maccabees, and the question of assimilation. This note is for going through the categories, with an eye on all of that.

R. Elazar of Modim said, he who profanes things sacred, and despises the festivals, and puts his fellow-man to shame in public, and makes void the covenant of Abraham our father, and makes the Torah bear a meaning other than what is right, such a one, even though knowledge of the Torah be his, has no share in the world to come.

Once you start thinking about Hanukkah, the profanation of the sacred is about the use of the Temple for pagan rituals. It’s also fairly simply the use of ritual objects for everyday uses (drinking wine from your Kiddush cup on Thursday, or using your t’fillin to strap your books together), or just irreverence generally. The sage is arguing for a clear distinction between profane and sacred, a kind of insulation from the World. Since Jews under Hellenic or Roman or American rule will have all of the instruments of government and power be almost by definition profane, that insistence seems to me a retreat from interaction, rather than a healthy mindfulness.

As for despising the festivals, one of the things about growing up a Jew in America (unless you are in a real enclave, in which case you are only somewhat growing up in America) is the experience of missing school on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur or the first day of Passover. Or, potentially, any of the other days in which work is prohibited. Not to mention soccer, which practices on Saturday mornings—my Rabbi once told me that soccer is a graver danger to American Judaism than intermarriage. Not to mention that I am at work right now.

R. Travers Herford claims that the bit about shaming in public is an interpolation, and it certainly seems a bit off-topic for the list. But the sages felt very strongly about it. In this context, though, the question: who is the public? Fellow Jews? Fellow westernized Jews? Non-Jews? Surely it isn’t shameful to be outed as a Jew (either actually outed or to have attention drawn to it by conversation, mention of the holidays, conspicuous dietary accommodation, etc), but it can be a bit awkward. And there’s the shanda fur de goyim, the person who embarrasses all Jews by association. I think that this idea of public shame is connected, in a complicated web, with the whole question of assimilation and individuation.

As for making void the covenant, that is another reference to the Hellenizers, and refers literally to disguising the circumcision of the penis so that the Jew will not be visibly different in the bath or the gym. It has been used metaphorically to describe other visual differences (the payess, the yarmulke, or even the black hats and caftans). It is supposed to stand for the faith covenant, I suppose, of which the physical signs are only physicals signs, after all, but then it is difficult to judge anything but the physical signs, isn’t it?

As for making the Torah say what it doesn’t—here I will yield to Menahem ben Solomon ha-Meiri, who gave as an example the prohibition against the meat we get from pigs. He says that while it is possible to suggest that the prohibition is a metaphor for swinish behavior, it is not allowed to argue that it is purely a metaphor. That is, one who says that eating pork is forbidden and it is a metaphor for swinish behavior is all right. One who says that eating pork is forbidden because it is a metaphor is on dangerous ground, as kashrut is one of those laws which applies independent of any intent or context. But one who says that eating of pork is permitted, and that the prohibition really means something else, that one has no share in the world to come.

I provide Meiri’s gloss here precisely because it so clearly describes my own attitude toward kashrut. Not that it is a metaphor for behavior, but that it is all about endogamy and exogamy. Peculiar and difficult to understand dietary restrictions (of which the pork taboo is the easiest example) prevent members of the Tribe from eating meals with outsiders. At the time, and now, eating meals with people is one of the ways in which bonds are formed between people and between families. If you can’t sit down to a meal with your non-Jewish neighbor, you are much less likely to contract a marriage between your children, and your children are much less likely to elope even if you don’t contract such a marriage.

As an assimilated American Jew—a believing Jew, a passionate Jew, a Jew much in love with my own Jewishness, but not an observant Jew, not a traditional Jew, not a Maccabee by any means—I eat pork for dinner most Friday nights, with my Christian wife, who shares the blessings of the shabbos table with me and our lovely Jewish children. I reject the application of the laws of kashrut as thoroughly as I reject the application of the laws of the rededicated Temple. Well, perhaps not as thoroughly, as, you know, ew, animal sacrifice. But the point is that in both cases I take the laws immediate and obvious application as not pertaining to me, except as metaphor. In other words, as having a meaning other than what is (in halakhic terms) right.

And yet, I do not give up hope for the world to come. On the other hand, I am giving up hope for an adequate conclusion to this note, so I will let y’all (if you wish) talk about these details, and start again with a new page.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 1:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today is the first day of Hanukkah. Gentle Readers may remember my ambivalence about the holiday—I am forced to admit that in the experience of American Jews, it is a major holiday, but I would prefer to deny that particular minhag and adhere to the older tradition that treats it as a minor holiday. Plus, I have many problems with the story itself, and with the various versions of it as it is taught and told. On the other hand, fried foods and gambling. So. Today is the first day of Hanukkah, and we are looking at the saying of R. Eliezar of Modim. In the translation of Rabbi Hertz:

R. Elazar of Modim said, he who profanes things sacred, and despises the festivals, and puts his fellow-man to shame in public, and makes void the covenant of Abraham our father, and makes the Torah bear a meaning other than what is right, such a one, even though knowledge of the Torah be his, has no share in the world to come.

There could be some issues with the translation. This is one of the ones where the Hebrew seems to bear a particularly heavy weight of connotation, and the translator must do what he can. I don’t think I want to look at word choice, today; I want to talk about Hanukkah.

Why Hanukkah? Well, that’s part of the weight of connotation. Rabbi Eleazar is from Modim. Who comes from Modim? The Maccabees come from Modim.

OK, do y’all know the Hanukkah story? Mattathias (or Matisyahu, and can I point out how interesting it is that we use the Greek version of his name?) was a very devout and strict Temple priest who, when the Temple was profaned and Temple rites were forbidden under Antiochus IV Epiphanes, returned to the Modi’in valley (or Modim, or Modaim, or whatever). Even there, however, the Greeks insisted on the locals participating in the pagan rites. He refused, and when another Jew acceded, Mattathias slew the man at the altar in the middle of the sacrifice, and shouted something quite like All who are with the Lord, follow me!.

He was followed into the wilderness by his sons, including the famous Judah “The Hammer”, or Judah Maccabee. He was also followed by a growing army of Jews who were called Maccabees after their military leader. There was an insurgency, violence, terror, miracles, guerrilla warfare in the towns, forced conversions, wholesale slaughter, and finally—one might say miraculously, particularly if you believe that bit about the white stallion—the liberation of Jerusalem and the rededication of the Temple. Hanukkah is the observance of the rededication of the Temple, which (notionally) occurred on 25 Kislev, and thus the remembrance of the revolt against the Hellenizers and the Hellenized.

Now. That was all three hundred years or so before the Eliezar of this verse. But by identifying him by his hometown (rather than by his father or some attribute such as righteousness or wisdom), the verse calls to mind the Maccabees and the revolt. And, by bringing to mind that revolt, that celebrated and observed revolt, it brings to mind the contemporary revolt of Bar Kochba, who had Eliezar killed (presumably after he said that stuff) and the contemporary questions of interaction with the Western powers and Western ideas.

So, keeping that in mind, who is the one that Eliezar of Modin says has no place in the world to come? It is the Hellenizer/Romanizer; the one who says that it is all right to eat trayf, who works on the holidays because the goyim are working on the holidays, the one who says that the Torah is compatible with the modern world.

In other words, me.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

R. Dosa b. Harkinas said: Morning sleep and midday wine and children’s talk and sitting in the meeting houses of the ignorant people put a man out of the world.

One of the things that makes this set of four things a thematic whole, rather than simply four disparate things, is this sense that they are good things in the wrong way. Sleep at night, not in the morning; drink wine in the evening, not at midday; converse with adults, not children; and sit in the meeting houses of the wise, not the ignorant. While the phrase is couched in its negative aspect, it isn’t telling people not to sleep, drink, talk or congregate. It implies that we should be doing all those things, but doing them right. What the self-help books would call doing them mindfully.

On the other hand, it is an odd collection of things. And why four? Why not three? I don’t get a sense from the Hebrew that there were originally three and the fourth was added later, which sometimes happens with these. And if four, why not five? I mean, why not add something like dressing like a fop or hunting for pleasure or cooking with peppers? I want these to be triples, because I like triples, and also in this case because if you take out the one about my kids, I can agree with it. But that doesn’t seem to be what’s going on.

I should say that it’s possible that R. Dosa b. Harkinas really does mean the synagogues of the am ha’aretz. It would make some sense in the context. In fact, that could be the whole point of the thing, making it really a triple: morning sleep, midday wine and children’s talk are like a Reform Shul, they put a person out of the world. Except that of course it’s not a reform shul, which has its own well-thought out traditions, and knowledgeable rabbis and lay leaders, but a shul of ignorant people, who muddle along without leadership or knowledge. Four hours ago, I rejected that interpretation, but now I’m coming around to it.

On the other hand, maybe the sage is actually warning against a K’nesset of amoretzes, a Parliament of Fools. Not likely, but possible.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

R. Dosa b. Harkinas said: Morning sleep and midday wine and children’s talk and sitting in the meeting houses of the ignorant people put a man out of the world.

OK, here’s where the whole thing comes to the ground. How does children’s talk put a man out of the world? I should point out (probably should have pointed out before) that it is conspicuously this world out of which a man is put out of, not the world-to-come. Which is to say, these are not sins as such, not that there are sins as such in the modern sense within the tannaic conception, but that they reduce the connections between a man and his surroundings, his neighbors and family, the physical world, his work and his food and his life. And that is a Bad Thing. The Rambam’s comment is that these things prevent a man from developing a good character, and that in the end, he perishes from the earth; the threat of early demise is not, I think, meant literally, but metaphorically.

At any rate, however you take it, what’s the matter with children’s talk? And it is children, yeladim, and conversation, sychat; there’s no funkiness in the Hebrew to play around with. Are the children, like the wine and the sleep, Good Things but at the wrong time? In the Avot of Rabbi Nathan, this is explicated as an injuction to go and study in the library/shul, and not expect to get any work done at home when the kids are around. As advice, that’s good. As Scripture, not so much. And if it’s an injunction that children should be Seen and not Heard, then I can just reject it altogether, right?

Only, I hate doing that. So I search for something useful to take away. And what comes to mind, after a bit of searching, is to look for ways in which children’s talk could be a symptom of a deeper problem, all the same sleep and wine. And I suppose there’s this: if you, as a grown-up, prefer to spend your time with children, rather than with adults, perhaps you are doing it as a withdrawal. It could be symptomatic of either alienation from the grupp society, or of a dysfunctional desire to be in a position of unquestionable authority in your interactions. Or, possibly, pederasty, but I don’t go along with the mindset that anybody who likes spending time with kids should be viewed as a potential molester. I don’t think the verse has to be about that to be a warning, anyway.

Or am I stretching too far, here, to make useful sense of a verse? I am willing in theory to discard the views of the sages, who had views of childhood (and women, and (some of ’em) sex) that I do discard. But in practice, when it comes to typing a note about a verse, I’m looking for ways to keep it, not ways to kick it.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 2:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

R. Dosa b. Harkinas said: Morning sleep and midday wine and children’s talk and sitting in the meeting houses of the ignorant people put a man out of the world.

Important to note, here, that wine is a Good Thing almost throughout the history of the Jews. Wine-drinking is required by custom or statute for almost every holiday, including the Sabbath. It took a while, in fact, for Orthodox Rabbis to accept that alcoholics should be allowed to forego ritual wine-drinking as a matter of health, although of course lots of Jews have done without for whatever reasons. Of course drunkenness, or at least excessive, frequent drunkenness is a Bad Thing, but the Rabbis are not teetotalers, nor do they expect anyone else to be.

It is midday wine that R. Dosa says puts a man out of the world. This is a clear match to the first leg (of four, which is odd and I should think about) where sleep (a good thing) done at shacharit time (a good time) is bad, or at least puts a man out of the world. Here wine is a good thing, just not at midday. And I’m inclined to think that the first leg is a symptom of a particular kind of trouble (depression), and the second leg is also a symptom of a particular kind of trouble, alcoholism. It is (to R. Dosa) when you have wine in the middle of the day, rather than in the evening, that you are using it to put yourself out of the world.

The commentary on the verse is (from my quick perusal) focused on the idea that if you drink at midday, you become incapable of using the afternoon hours for either productive work or study. They connect the two legs as the frittering away of daylight hours, and that is certainly the straightforward and correct interpretation. But I think that viewing them in the light of symptoms of deeper problems is a more powerful, and in fact a scarier way of looking at the verse. More useful, past the first reading.

YHB is not a heavy drinker. A glass of wine with dinner, sometimes two. Maybe once a week I will have a third. Of course, my midday is different from R. Dosa ben Harkinas; when the sun goes down in the great green field, I just turn on the electric light and keep working. Or at least, as much working as I ever do. The hours between 2100 and 2300 are the most potentially productive for Torah study or writing, and the ones that my wine-with-dinner habit would most likely affect. But then, I’m not actually doing Torah study during those hours, I’m watching bad BBC corset series. Which is puts me out of the world in a different way, but is not (I hope) a symptom of some deeper problem.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

R. Dosa b. Harkinas said: Morning sleep and midday wine and children’s talk and sitting in the meeting houses of the ignorant people put a man out of the world.

That’s Herbert Danby’s translation, and it seems to pretty much nail it, for the English. There is a connotation that seems to be in the Hebrew, although of course I may be misreading it through my own ignorance, that the morning sleep is sleeping through shacharit, that is, through the morning service. And the meeting houses are the b’tay k’nessyot, where a bayt k’nesset is a synagogue, although (a) some manuscripts omit the b’tay, making it the meetings of the am ha-aretzes, and (2) it doesn’t seem from this as if R. Dosa means it in the sense of synagogue but in the sense of meeting house. But the point is that I think there may have been, in the original, an emphasis in the bringing together of disparate terms, or in the use of a positive thing (shacharit, bet k’nesset) in a negative context.

Anyway, to the content. Let’s take them in order.

Morning sleep is a good thing. Oh, how I love to sleep in. Mmmm, mm. Do you know the best part of sleeping in? Is when you actually do wake up at the usual time, and then realize you don’t have to get up at all, and you roll over and you fall back asleep. That’s the best. I mean, if you can fall back asleep. I’m good at that.

That said, I get what the Rabbi is on about here. The ingesleeping thing is about putting yourself out of the world, and although I do like to do that now and then (well, honestly, as often as I can), there is also putting yourself into the world, which takes precedence. And sleep in the mornings can be habit-forming.

And also, bye-the-bye, a sign of what we would now call clinical depression. Taken as a description, rather than a proscription, I think R. Dosa b. Harkinas is quite right. R. Travers Herford is down on this verse, saying it “is true so far as it goes, but it does not go very far. At least it leaves a good deal unsaid, which a wider and wiser charity would wish to say.” I disagree. That is, I think that it’s a wider saying than Mr. Herford gives it credit for, a wider and a warmer warning.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

R. Chanina, the son of Dosa, said, He in whom the fear of sin comes before wisdom, his wisdom shall endure; but he in whom wisdom comes before the fear of sin, his wisdom shall not endure.

He used to say, He whose deeds exceed his wisdom, his wisdom shall endure, but he whose wisdom exceeds his deeds, his wisdom will not endure.

He used to say, He in whom the spirit of his fellow-creatures takes delight, in him the Spirit of the All-present takes delight, and he in whom the spirit of his fellow-creatures takes not delight, in him the Spirit of the All-present takes not delight.

This is an odd triple, isn’t it? I mean, literarily. It doesn’t balance. The third doesn’t seem to quite go with the first two. The first two are about precedence—let’s take it for granted (he says) that wisdom is a Good Thing, but is it the Best Good Thing? Or, rather, while we pursue it as a Good Thing, should we pursue it single-mindedly? Of course, no. Good deeds and fear of sin take precedence, because they lead to wisdom and maintain it.

I should digress here a moment to acknowledge that it is not obvious that wisdom cannot endure without fear of sin or without good deeds, nor is it obvious the ways in which those things help wisdom endure. I think it is true, and the commentary has several convincing examples and analogies, but it isn’t obvious. And some of the commentary claims that it is obvious, but they do so by means of a tautology, such that the lack of good deeds is a sign of declining wisdom in itself. That doesn’t work. Wisdom, if the verse is to mean anything, must exist as something separate from good deeds. You can’t just say that anything good is wise and anything evil is folly—or rather, you can, but then you have lost the perfectly good words wisdom and folly, having made them synonyms for good and evil. No, wisdom is something else, having to do with study and learning and experience and sagacity and whatnot, and the argument that the lack of deeds diminishes wisdom over time does mean something.

The third verse is not about wisdom at all, though. Unless it is about wisdom by virtue of placing it with the other two, which is legitimate. But look at it: two are comparing wisdom (an assumed Good Thing) with another Good Thing, talking about people who are assumed to have both, but in different proportions. The last takes the assumed Good Thing (the Divine Delightability) and compares it with a thing of more questionable value (human delightability, albeit a sort of human spiritual delightability), and says that the two are found together or not at all.

That is, when we look at wisdom and good deeds, the text isn’t just saying that you should have both, which is obvious, and it isn’t saying you should have them in equal measure, it’s saying you should have more good deeds, or risk losing what wisdom you have. In the third verse, it is simply saying you should delight both your fellow man and your Creator, or risk doing neither. There’s no question of precedence involved.

Perhaps (now that I’ve written all that) this is because there is no question of precedence, but a more serious question of the nature of the thing itself. The precedence of human and Divine delightability is obvious. But unlike good deeds or fear of sin, there is no prima facie reason to think that him in whom the spirit of his fellow creatures take delight is beloved of the Divine. The other way, in fact. Or at least as plausibly, the prophet being without honor in his own proverbial. But what Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa seems to me to be saying is that (a) the does exist a thing that we can describe as spiritual delightability, human and Divine; (II) although we cannot tell for certain whether the Divine spirit actually delights in a particular person, we can probably tell whether a person is humanly delightable; and (3) the presence or absence of the observable, human, trait implies the presence or absence of the Divine trait. By what mechanism?

Can we say that the answer to this, problematic cap to the triple must be in the previous legs? The way that good deeds and fear of sin imply (or buttress) wisdom? How is this similar?

Jochanan ben Zakkai referred to wisdom and sinfearing as a craftsman’s knowledge and his tools. The fear of sin (or tool) is not well controlled without wisdom (or craft); wisdom is not productive without the fear of sin. Is it possible that the ability to delight other people is a tool? Similarly, Simeon ben Eleazar referred to wisdom and deeds as a horse and a bit. The horse is not well controlled (dangerous, even) without the bit, the bit is useless without the horse. Is it possible that the ability to delight other people is a bit? Is the issue one of controlling the spirit?

If so, we can take the person who does not worry about delighting the spirit of other people as uncontrolled. And then, as one loses (or never achieves) the control that comes from pleasing other people, what comes next is the arrogance to put yourself at the center of the universe. You may intend to put the Divine at the center, but if you lack our metaphorical bit or chisel, you will find that you have taken the center yourself. That pride, arrogance, an uncompromising temper, selfishness, bitterness and contempt have taken over your spirit, making it a thing in which the Divine can no longer delight.

If that is the teaching, it is a powerful warning. That would make the first two verses set-ups, the kind of Socratic trap where you agree to premises without really intending to, and then finding yourself at conclusions you didn’t expect. The spiritual unhealthiness of spiritual unpleasantness, the importance of people in the Divine conception, even the dependence of the Divine on human decisions about what pleases them spiritually. It’s easier, somehow, to accept that Hell is other people, than to accept that other people are a bit in your spiritual teeth. Isn’t it?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today, if I manage it, I will do all three of the sayings of Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa in Chapter Three. Chanina was a wonder-worker and mystic, a disciple of Jochanan ben Zakkai. He was Galilean, of course. There seems to be something in his position as geographical outsider; he doesn’t get involved in the Temple politics, the revolt, the Siege of Jerusalem or the destruction of the Temple, nor does he after the destruction join the community at Yavneh. He remains a poor stoneworker in Arav.

Before I get to the saying, let me relate a couple of stories about him, courtesy of Gershom Bader’s Encyclopedia of Talmudic Sages and book of Rabbi Nathan. My favorite is about tithing. It seems that Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa was obsessive about tithing. I mean, obsessive. This is attributed to a meal where the food in front of him suddenly disappeared—poof! like that. He went to his wife to ask if the tithe had been taken from the meal. His wife explained that their larder had been utterly empty, and that a neighbor had kindly provided; she assumed that the neighbor had tithed before sharing. Rabbi Chanina determined that one should not make that assumption, but should tithe from every meal, whether the food is grown in your field, purchased at the market, given as a gift, or received as charity. Having made the pronouncement, his meal miraculously re-appeared on the table, and he took the required tenth from it.

That’s not the story, though. That’s just to set up the story. The story is about his donkey. It seems that once thieves stole Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa’s donkey. When they got it back to their stable, they put hay in front of it, but the donkey would not eat. They offered tasty tidbits, they offered carrots and lettuce and sugar, but the donkey would not eat. Finally, they decided to return the donkey to the sage, who told them that the donkey also insisted on the tithe being taken before he would eat.

Isn’t that a great story? I need to go into the Avot of Rabbi Nathan and find out if the thieves repented them their sin and studied with the pious stonemason, or whether that just found a less scrupulous ass to steal.

Some of the other stories are less crazy, mostly healing stories and so on. One aspect of those is that he doesn’t heal by laying on of hands; a messenger is sent, sometimes at substantial distance, with a request for healing prayer, and is told (after the praying, of course) that the sick person is now healed, or would soon recover. The other interesting aspect is that the message sometimes comes from other pious and learned sages; he heals the Rabban Gamliel’s son and Jochanan ben Zakkai’s son, as well as the daughter of the pious well-digger.

And then, you know, there’s the scorpion who bites him and dies, and the queen of evil spirits who is terrified of him, and lighting the Sabbath lamp with vinegar. But they aren’t as good as the fastidious donkey. I do like the wood-stretching miracle, obviously a response to a similar one about the son of a carpenter, a generation or so before…when Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa stretches the beams so that the poor woman’s house will have a roof, he stretches them so far that they stick out a cubit on either side of the walls. This is all to the glory of the Divine, who of course could have made the beams fit properly, but then who would have known about the miracle?

All right, one last story, and this one isn’t about Chanina ben Dosa at all, but about his wife. You all remember the Chanina was a poor man? Well. Even a poor man’s wife must attempt to keep up appearances. Comes a Friday, all the neighbors are baking bread for the Sabbath, every chimney is smoking away like anything, what does Chanina’s wife do? She heats up the oven and puts in some straw to make a smoke, so that nobody will know that the great sage is without bread on the Sabbath. Now, comes in a neighbor, meddling and nosy, looking for trouble. Chanina’s wife (I wish the text gave names to these women, it is utterly unforgivable on grounds of respect and humanity, but it also makes it very hard to tell the stories) hears the knock, panics and runs upstairs. The neighbor pokes her nose into the kitchen, sniffs at the smoke and opens the oven. And sees… of course, she sees two beautiful, magnificent, immense loaves of challah. Not only are they perfectly formed, but they are just at the moment of being perfectly baked. The neighbor cries out, she says Come quickly! The loaves are ready, and if you don’t come quickly they will burn! At which moment Chanina’s wife comes down the stairs holding the thing, the thing like a flat shovel, you know, that you use for taking bread out of an oven. That thing. I can’t blame the sages for my not knowing what it’s called, I suppose, and it would really make the story run more smoothly if I did. Anyway, she comes downstairs holding that thing, saying Of course! Why else was I upstairs but to get the thing, you know, the implement, this thing, for taking the bread out, whatever it’s called.

I love that story, even if I tell it badly, but I also love the commentary on the story, because of course there is commentary. One rabbi asks how we know the neighbor is so bad? Are we being unfair to her? Perhaps she just came by to wish gut shabbos and smelled smoke? The answer is no, we were correct to say she was a bad woman, for if she were a good woman, why is she not bringing bread of her own to share? Had she come with food, we could say she is misunderstood, but she comes empty-handed, so we know she is up to no good. And what about Chanina’s wife? If she is so pious and so worthy of a miracle, why is it that she lies to her neighbor? She does not lie, is the answer, because her faith is such that she knows that Heaven will provide, so she does in fact go to get the implement. But surely, that raises another question, which is why that implement would plausibly have been kept upstairs anyway? To which the reply is, why not? They certainly weren’t using it to take bread out of the oven, since they had no bread to take out! In fact, it is suggested that the appearance of the bread was only secondary to the miraculous appearance of the implement itself, the one that has a name I don’t know, and which the household did not even own until that day.

The appearance of a needed implement is not unprecedented; there is another story about the miraculous appearance and disappearance of a golden table leg at her request, but I think this note has gone on long enough. In fact, it has gone on so long that YHB is going to put the actual text into a new note.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We are on about studying, still. This is the Chabad translation, and I’ll quibble after:

Rabbi Dusta’i the son of Rabbi Yannai would say in the name of Rabbi Meir: Anyone who forgets even a single word of this learning, the Torah considers it as if he had forfeited his life. As is stated, "Just be careful, and verily guard your soul, lest you forget the things that your eyes have seen". One might think that this applies also to one who [has forgotten because] his studies proved too difficult for him; but the verse goes on to tell us "and lest they be removed from your heart, throughout the days of your life." Hence, one does not forfeit his life unless he deliberately removes them from his heart.

The quibble is about the forfeited his life bit—it’s a bit of sagespeak that we’ve been coming across, and while people translate it differently (mortal guilt, guilt against self, guilt against soul) the connotation is that not only is it a Bad Thing, but it is the mental equivalent of a physical act that is a capital crime. As bad as murder. Only, you know, not actually as bad as murder, but rhetorically as bad as murder—we don’t enforce capital punishment, or any punishment in this world, for these soul-based acts. There is no body of law for them. But this whole ethical discussion takes place within a body of work that is primarily discussing the body of law for physical transgressions, and this idiom is comparing them, while keeping them separate. Am I making any sense? I’m just trying to get across that Rabbi Dusty is not saying that from a legal standpoint we should consider forgetting to be a form of suicide, he is saying that there exist transgressions of the soul as well as transgressions of the body, and that this is a very serious transgression of the soul.

What is? You might, with the backtracking, wonder who is capable of deliberately forgetting the Torah? That’s not how memory works, is it? In the backtracking, isn’t Rabbi Dusty letting everybody off the hook?

I don’t think so. The stated exception is for people who people who can’t learn in the first place, not for people who learn and forget. That is, if you learn a verse on Monday, and then on Tuesday it’s gone, that’s not a mortal transgression. If you learn a verse on Monday and can’t remember it on Tuesday, learn it on Tuesday and forget it on Wednesday, study it on Wednesday and can’t recall it on Thursday, that’s clearly a very sad thing, but not a matter of guilt. It was never really in the heart, so it wasn’t removed from the heart.

The warning is for people who study it on Monday, remember it on Tuesday, and figure well, that’s it, then, I don’t need to study it anymore. Then, when he ultimately forgets, it is as if he had forfeited his life.

A couple of comments from the tradition are important here. Rabbi Asher is quoted as saying that the heart of study is reviewing. When you find something you don’t understand, and you study it in order to understand it, that is for the sake of understanding. But when you study it a second time, that is studying for its own sake, and that is the heart of study. There is no pride in it, no self in it. I don’t altogether accept that, as I think that there’s always (particularly with Scripture) the opportunity to improve my understanding and my self; review is not just review. On the other hand, I haven’t attempted to memorize the text entirely, which would perhaps entail a different kind of review. On the other other hand, I know from running lines that memorization review can lead to new connections and new ideas. So.

The other thing I want to pass along is Rabbi Jonah’s emphasis that the guilt is in not accepting that forgetfulness is common among human beings. The guilt is in the pride that says I won’t forget, when people do forget. And then, when you give a decision that such-and-such a dispute is covered under such-and-such a precedent, that such-and-such a thing is permitted or forbidden, that such-and-such an obligation may be fulfilled in such-and-such a way, the decision is wrong, and not only does the scholar transgress, but he causes others to transgress as well.

I often describe myself has having a “trick memory”. It’s not photographic, it’s not perfect by any means, but in dealing with words (as opposed to pictures or numbers), it’s a lot better than most people’s. Both faster and more accurate. This is a gift that runs in my family; I set it to learning song lyrics and Jeopardy! facts, while my brothers and my father learned batting averages and ERAs. It’s not what it was in my youth, I’m afraid; I now have to actually work at memorizing lines, and, yes, review them to keep them in my head. And I have lost most of the plays I have ever been in. I couldn’t do To be or not to be… or recite This is the Place (which I took to tournaments in my high-school years) or even do the long monologue from Pyggie without putting in some work refreshing my memory.

And, of course, all of that is just entertainment. I should say just, as I’m a big believer in entertainment, but the point if that I put as much mental effort into Scripture as I do into things for my own amusement, I would still need to put a lot more in before I passed this test. Which, I suppose, is one reason why for so many years I did very little at all.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian

Posted by Vardibidian at 1:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This week we have a problematic verse, so let’s jump right in. The translation is Herbert Danby’s:

Rabbi Jacob said: If a man was walking by the way and studying and he ceased his study and said, ‘How fine is this tree!’ or ‘How fine is this ploughed field!’ the Scripture reckons it to him as though he was guilty against his own soul.

This is Rabbi Jacob who appears to have been the grandson of Elisha ben Abuya (the famous apostate who is the central character in As a Driven Leaf), and who appears to have been one of the early teachers of Judah the Prince. Taken literally, it is…well, R. Travers Herford points out that “no text is alleged” in as a proof, “… and it is hard to imagine what text would support such a thesis”. Joseph Hertz agrees that “no text is, or could well be, quoted in support of the statement”.

And, in fact, there are specific blessings for seeing beautiful trees, or for seeing any beauty of nature. There is plenty of Scriptural support for the idea that you are supposed to notice the trees and the fields. So why does Rabbi Jacob say that this is a mortal matter? One way of thinking is to attribute certain superstitions to him and his community: he is talking about someone who is traveling alone, and as such is vulnerable to attack by malign supernatural forces (particularly at crossroads). If someone needs to make such a trip, the best defense is to engage in Torah study on the way (as it is written, When thou goest, it shall lead thee;). In such a case, if a person were to be on defense, as it were, and then succumb to distraction and admire the view, the consequences could well be fatal.

Or, you know, that could be rubbish. Better off with a lamp, says I. And I am not convinced that the ooky-spooky interpretation is founded in any actual superstitions of the time—I don’t know much about the superstitions of the period, but this smells to me like a Medieval thing grafted onto the verse. I would want independent evidence that such a superstition and such a ward were common before that interpretation made sense.

Rabbi Hertz does refer to an argument of somebody named J.H. Kara, who says that the verse is not to be taken literally, but as a metaphor. The person who leaves off Torah study to devote himself to the study of Nature, or more specifically, the person who chooses to seek the Divine through the study of Nature, rather than through the study of Scripture, is the one who is guilty against his own soul. Now, as with the demon-ridden interpretation, this seems to require some sense this idea has some currency in R. Jacob’s community. But in first or second century Rome, the idea of seeking the Divine through natural philosophy, through Aristotle rather than Psalms, that seems like a legitimate fear for the Rabbis.

And, of course, it also is a useful interpretation for me, now, which the warding-off-demons, not so much. On the other hand, there’s good reason to be skeptical of this, too—why not seek the Divine through the Creation of the Divine? Why not admire the trees and the fields? No, the key to this verse has to be in ceased to study, that the man in question not only says good things about the Creation, but fails to go back to the Scriptures.

Seeking the Divine through the Creation is fine, then, as long as it doesn’t involve putting down the Scripture. What is at issue is the arrogance of thinking that the Scripture has no lessons that can’t be found in the trees and the fields, that the stars and the microbes are enough, in themselves, without the tradition and the text.

Or, at least, that’s how I read it. Because my gut reaction is still that Rabbi Jacob was a nut, and that this is one of those sayings that is just wrong. And where’s the lesson in that?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 1:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is another one that I don’t think bears tremendous weight, although the spirit is nice, of course. This is R. Travers Herford’s translation:

R. Eleazar of Bartotha says: Give to Him of what is His, for thou and thine are His; for thus in the case of David Scripture says For of Thee cometh all, and of Thine own have we given Thee.

There are stories of this Eleazar and his overwhelming devotion to charity, the theme of which is usually how little he kept for himself. There are anecdotes about the fund-raisers would see Rabbi Eleazar of Bartotha coming in the street and hide, not wanting him to empty his pockets to them and leave his wife and children with nothing. He found them, though.

One great story has the sage holding back but a single zuz to purchase grain for his family. This grain he carried home and set in his storeroom before hurrying back to the house of study. His wife, wanting to bake, went to look in the storeroom but had difficulty opening the door, because…the Divine had multiplied the grain until the room was overflowing. It’s a good thing it didn’t explode, but that isn’t the point of the story. The point of the story is that when the miracle was reported to Rabbi Eleazar of Bartotha, he rushed home from the house of study to gather up the miraculous grain—and donate it to the poor.

The rabbis, by the way, tend to view this kind of charity a bit warily; they aren’t against it, exactly, but neither do they think it would be a good idea if everybody engaged in it. A reasonable generosity is called for, taking care of your family first and then others. Hospitality, yes, excellent. But don’t get crazy.

One of the things I do like very much about this formulation, though, is that it presents charity (it is possible to interpret the verse as not having anything to do with charity, but that is the obvious interpretation) as being a matter for a person and the Divine, not for a person and another person. That is, the verse is not concerned with the rights of the recipients of the charity, nor of their moral worth. The question isn’t whether the poor deserve charity, or have a right to it, or will make good use of it. The question is whether you, with whatever wealth you falsely believe that you own, are willing to turn it over to the Divine, who is the true owner of everything.

Of course, that can certainly lead to trouble, what with it being difficult to make out a cheque directly to the Divine. It is always tricky to think that you (or YHB, or anyone else) knows what the Divine wants to do with all of those possessions. People make donations to televangelists because they believe that their money belongs to the Divine and that the Reverend So-and-So is the appropriate steward thereof. And sometimes, I should point out, the Reverend So-and-So is an appropriate steward thereof, but disappointingly often, not. And then, people believe that their Political Action Committee is the appropriate steward thereof. Or that they, themselves, and perhaps the boat builders are the appropriate stewards thereof. This verse is short on applicability.

But I do think that it’s helpful to get away from the I Me Mine mentality. Just as a political point of reference, much of the debate about taxes is spoiled by an insistence that certain money is mine. In fact, when I make my working agreement with my employer, that agreement says that the Employer will pay X amount to the Government and Y amount to me (and perhaps Z amount to various other things such as pensions, insurers, or uniform shops), and that I will pay W amount to the Government (and perhaps V amount to various other things). That W amount is not mine in any really meaningful sense of the word, any more than the X amount or the Z amount. Most of that W amount doesn’t even make a temporary appearance in bank account numbers, such as would constitute some kind of ‘ownership’. And yet, it is mine emotionally, and of course depending on other arrangements with the Government, other employers and whatnot, it could in theory ultimately be mine in practice, at least ultimately until I spent in on something. What I’m saying is that whether income or payroll taxes are appropriately high or low is overwhelmed by the sense that the Gummint is taking something of mine. Keeping in mind that everything that is mine is actually a gift of the Divine might help ease off the emotional response and allow for some more analytical thought.

It doesn’t necessarily follow that a person would want tax cuts any less fervently—the idea that the Gummint is taking something of the Divine’s to do Bad Things could be pretty emotional too—but it might help a little, right?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I think I’m going to whip through a bunch of verses today, because they are repeating previous ones:

Rabbi Halafta of Kefar Hananiah says: When ten sit studying the Torah, the Shekina resides in their midst, as it is said, Gd standeth in the congregation of Gd. How do we know that the same is true of five? For it is said, This band of His He hath established on the earth. How do we know that the same is true of three? For it is said, In the mist of the judges He judgeth. How do we know that the same is true of two? For it is said, Then they that feared the Lord spoke with one another; and the Lord hearkened, and heard. How do we know that the same is true of one? For it is said, In every place where I cause My name to be mentioned I will come unto thee and bless thee.

This is, of course, just a different version of Chanina ben Teradion’s saying a few verses back, with different proof texts and starting with ten rather than three. Although starting with ten makes it a bit more dramatic, there isn’t a surprise here: of course if the Divine Presence sits with three who sit and study Torah, the same is true for five and ten. Starting with a bigger number is just delaying the big payoff, which is with a single person.

The difference is in the proof texts, which are frankly a little weaker here; most modern translations of Amos don’t think that agudahis referring to a band of people at all. What is nice is the implication about the written word, as the Malachi verse continues with a reference to a sefer zikron, book of remembrance being written before the eyes of the Gd-fearers, and the Exodus quote is about all the places asher az’kir, where the remembrance is, and where az’kir is the same zkr root as zikron. And is not the Pirke Avot a sefer zikron? So I like that. Other than that, though, this is just a repetition. Good to have, but not worth a whole week, right?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We’re on the sixth verse of the third chapter of Avot, depending on how you count. Here’s the translation of Judah Goldin:

Rabbi Nehunya ben ha-Kana says: He who takes upon himself the yoke of Torah will be relieved of the yoke of government and the yoke of mundane matters, but he who removes from himself the yoke of the Torah will have imposed upon him the yoke of the government and the yoke of mundane matters.

This seems straightforward, and straightforwardly wrong. The yoke of government and of derech eretz, the paths of this world, are not lifted from Torah scholars, nor are they necessarily imposed on ignoramuses or the non-observant. If, as Maimonedes says, the imposts and extortions of the ruler are the yoke of government, and the necessity of providing for temporal needs is the yoke of derech eretz, then why was Maimonedes himself compelled to be court physician? Because he had insufficiently submitted to the yoke of Torah? Hard to believe. Nor is it hard to find idle rich who have thrown off the yoke of torah and submitted to no other yoke (but the eventual yoke of Death, of course, which comes to scholars, too).

In the Avot of Rabbi Nathan, though, Hanania the Prefect of priests is quoted as saying that we are not talking about a yoke in the sense of being compelled to action, but the yoke of thought. Or more accurately, the yoke of habits of thought. The person who takes on the discipline of Torah study develops habits of thought that prevent the other, less productive habits. “He who does not take to heart the words of the Torah is given to many preoccupations—preoccupations with hunger, foolish preoccupations, unchaste preoccupations, preoccupations with the evil impulse, preoccupations with an evil wife, idle preoccupations, preoccupations with the yoke of flesh and blood.”

To elaborate. I don’t think it is helpful to say to somebody who is suffering from a passionate crush, for instance, or who is unhealthily refreshing their political-junkie webpages, or who is jonesing for the corn chips that they cannot have, study Torah instead. The helpful thing, it seems to me, is for a person to develop the habit of Torah study without reference to any of that. And then, when that corn-chip jones hits you, you have something to fall back on.

Of course, that assumes that Torah study is (as it was for Nehunya ben Ha-Kana) a rigorous and well-defined discipline, not (as YHB does it) a matter of meandering around a text on your own, following your own thoughts. The only other place in the Mishnah that Nehunya ben Ha-Kana is quoted is in Berakhot, where it is mentioned that he would say a blessing on entering and on leaving the study room (or whatever one would properly call the place where colleagues meet to study together). He was asked what the prayer was, and he said that on the way in, he hoped that nothing bad would happen to anyone because of his rulings or teachings, and going out, he gave thanks that he could spend his day there. This is expanded in the Talmud (Ber. 28b):

I give thanks to Thee, O Lord my God, that Thou hast set my portion with those who sit in the Beth ha-Midrash and Thou hast not set my portion with those who sit in [street] corners, for I rise early and they rise early, but I rise early for words of Torah and they rise early for frivolous talk; I labour and they labour, but I labour and receive a reward and they labour and do not receive a reward; I run and they run, but I run to the life of the future world and they run to the pit of destruction.

What I think this points to, taken with the quote from avot, is that by accepting the yoke of the Torah, he has taken on a particular discipline and a particular lifestyle, to be contrasted with a lifestyle of the sinners, the scorners and the idle. When the concerns of the public good or of simply making a living come up, as they do for everybody, the person who has accepted the yoke of the Torah is able to accept those concerns without feeling them as a yoke; he addresses those that need addressing, ignores those that can be ignored, and returns to his studies. The street-corner idlers turn valid concerns about the government or the world into preoccupations and into occasions for frivolous talk and sinful action (or neglect); it is then that the world becomes a yoke.

That’s how I interpret this verse, anyway. Although, now that I have interpreted it that way, I think it’s overly optimistic. Great rabbis can fall prey to passions, political or sexual or avaricious. The habit of rigorous study is a Good Thing, surely, and it feels like a yoke when you adopt it, and it does protect you from quite a lot of temptation and error, but—

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It’s a beautiful autumn day, thank the Divine, clear and crisp and cool. Just right for…a translatiopalooza! Let’s begin with Michael L. Rodkinson:

R. Hanina b. ’Hakhinai used to say: "He who awakens by night, and he who is walking alone on the road and turns aside his heart to idleness, it is his own fault if he incurs trouble for himself."

And there’s Judah Goldin:

Rabbi Hananiah ben Hakinai says: If one wakes in the night, or walks by himself on the highway, and turns his heart to idle matters, he is mortally guilty.

and Joseph H. Hertz:

R. Chanina, the son of Chachinai, said, He who keeps awake at night, and goes on his way alone, and turns his heart to idle thoughts, such a one sins against himself.

…and R. Travers Herford:

R. Ḥanina ben Ḥachinai said: He who wakes in the night, and he who walks alone by the way, and he who makes his heart empty for idle thoughts, lo he is guilty against himself.

And Herbert Danby:

R. Hananiah b. Hakinai said: He that wakes in the night or that walks alone by the way and turns his heart to vanity, is guilty against his own soul.

And Charles Taylor:

Chananyiah ben Chakinai said, He who awakes by night, and he who is walking alone by the way, and turns aside his heart to idleness, is “guilty of death.”

And Jacob Neusner:

R. Hananiah b. Hakninai says, “(1) He who gets up at night, and (2) he who walks around by himself, and (3) he who turns his desire to emptiness—lo, this person is liable for his life.”

From the Chabad site:

Rabbi Chanina the son of Chachina’i would say: One who stays awake at night, or travels alone on the road, and turns his heart to idleness, has forfeited his life.

And from the Sharei Shechem site:

Rabbi Chaninah ben Chachinai said: He who stays awake at night and goes on his way alone and turns his heart to idle thoughts is liable for his life.

If you can’t tell, the reason I went nuts on these is that the original Hebrew is both unclear and evidently corrupt in an important point. Essentially, there are three actions described: waking in the night, walking alone, and idleness of the heart. It isn’t clear whether Hananiah is talking about one person who does all three, or three different kinds of people, or whether the first two are occasions for the third. Most of the medieval sources seem to have been working with a text that is a OR b OR c, but some using that text still interpret it (a OR b) AND c, and some have a text that is different by one letter and is thus quite clearly (a OR b) AND c, and some seem to have a AND b AND c. Some commentary points out how particularly sinful it is to be mentally idle at night, as during the day one is presumably compelled to be industrious with the body, and the night is thus the opportunity for study. Presumably this applies as well to stretches of solitary walking. I have some of my best thinking time whilst walking alone, certainly, although most of it is devoted to matters of idleness and vanity rather than Scripture.

Mr. Herford calls it “absurd” to condemn somebody for waking at night, or for walking alone, or even for walking alone at night; he insists that there are two types of people described, not three. And yet, I can easily imagine condemnation for someone who chooses to stay up nights; early to bed and early to rise makes a man proverbial, you know. Night wakefulness can lead to all manner of bad things, even if it’s due to insomnia. The deliberate choice to stay up at night would seem, particularly at the time, to be deeply suspicious, and (depending on the sage’s attitude) might well have occasioned the warning that the night-waker is violating his soul, and takes on responsibility for any sinfulness that follows. Similarly, the choice to walk alone, rather than in company—I prefer to walk alone, myself, but then, I live in an area that is frequented by neither footpads nor harlots. This could well be a warning similar to the Catholic statement that those who allow themselves to feel lust are liable on that account for the sin of adultery, whether the added matter of the actual sin is occasioned or not.

I should probably add, since I’ve segued so nicely, that waking in the night and having sex with a spouse is not a matter of idleness or vanity, according to tradition. Which is one of the reasons why the Rabbis are (with few exceptions) so adamant about the importance of marriage, and of living with the spouse and sharing a bed. When one wakes at night, it might be too much to expect contemplation of the Scripture (although good if it happens), but a little conjugal relations is a mitzvah and with luck will get them both back to sleep afterward. I suppose the same could be said for walking in the field, although only between May and September.

I find all of this interesting in itself, without reference to my own life, but when it comes to application, I have some difficulty. I am an insomniac, myself, and have much experience of waking in the night and having idle thoughts. Or delaying bedtime (and its expected sleeplessness) by playing Civ or reading erotica or soaking in the tub. And, as I have mentioned, I do enjoy a solitary stroll, and spend much of that time, when I get it, listening to music and thinking idle thoughts. So, in that sense, I do feel properly rebuked. I could use that time for contemplation of the Divine or study of the Torah. On the other hand, it’s not really ideal time for serious thinking, as I generally am tired (at night) or distracted (on the road).

Digression: I had for some reason never applied the walking verse to driving. In Hebrew it is clearly the walker, but if it applies to him who walks alone, should it not apply to him who drives alone? Although of course if R. Hananiah wanted to apply it to someone who rides a horse or a mule, or to someone who drives a cart, he could have done so. Still, if we make it travels alone, rather than walking, it is not just the solitude but the waste of resources that places the soul in jeopardy. End Digression.

Or I could feel myself rebuked simply for being wakeful at night. And it is true that I haven’t done everything I could to fight the insomnia. Because I’m too tired to bother. No, seriously, I know that people really do have success at falling asleep, trying one thing and another, and I have tried only a few things, which have worked only moderately well. And I’m not a bad case, really—most nights I lie awake only half-an-hour or an hour, and some nights less. The real problem are the nights that I fall asleep and then am woken up by something at one o’clock, as then I am likely to be up for an hour or more. On the plus side, I can sleep in perfectly well. My Best Reader can fall asleep in the evening as easy as anything, but rises at dawn or earlier, sometime much earlier, with no possibility of renewed snoozing. I can be woken at five and be back asleep in moments.

Well. The point is that it is likely enough that Hananiah is rebuking me not just for the idle thoughts but for being too lazy to fight my insomnia, giving myself an opening for the idle thoughts in the first place. And it may be that it is easier to fight the insomnia than to fight the idle thoughts. Hm.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 1:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week, we saw that Rabbi Chanina ben Teradion begins with two sitting together and concludes with one. The verse that follows appears to be going backwards.

R. Simeon said:—Three who have eaten at one table and have not said over it words of Torah are as if they had eaten of the sacrifices of the dead, as it is said For all tables are full of vomit and filthiness without Gd. But three who have eaten at one table and have said over it words of Torah are as if they had eaten from the table of Gd, as it is said: And he said to me This is the table which is before the Lord.

Now, this is the Rashbi, Reb Simeon bar Yochbai, who was an extremely pious, rather cranky wonder-worker and sage. There are many, many stories about him. Many, many, many. The Zohar is traditionally attributed to him, so all of the Kabbalah stories are the grandchildren of stories about the Rashbi. But even about Simeon himself, there are no end of stories. And his sayings are legion. Why this one? Why not the one about it being forbidden for a man to fill his mouth with laughter in this world? Or perhaps the bit about how croup is caused by neglect of study? Although not on the part of the croup sufferer necessarily.

Or in the tractate Sukkah, appropriate to this week, he is quoted by Hezekiah as saying I see the greatest men in the world are very few. If they are a thousand, I and my son are included; if they are a hundred, I and my son are included, and if they are only two, they are I and my son.

And those quotes are certainly saved and available for perusal and whatnot. But here in Pirke Avot, we get that three people should talk about the Divine when they eat.

When they eat. That’s what’s going on here, I think. Because I think (I think) that this verse is all about the table, the shulchan, which we now have on authority can be made the shulchan shel-makom, the table with a Presence, by saying words of Torah over it. And what is the Shulchan shel-makom? It is the shulchan asher liphnay adonai, the Table before the Lord, which in the first half of the Ezekiel verse is the mizbeach, the Altar. And in the first half of the Rashbi verse, it is the mizb’chay matim, the altar of the pagans.

There are two lessons here, both very important. First is this: The Altar in Jerusalem is gone; now we must take the kitchen table as an Altar to the Divine. The Machsor Vitry (compiled by Rashi’s students) makes this point: that in Temple times, we could atone for our sins with sacrifice at the Temple. Now, we achieve atonement at the table, by giving food and drink to the poor. The lesson about charity is very important, but it is Schenectady for the entirety of Torah (as well it might be) and our relationship to the Divine. Rashbi is telling us that we are not Temple Jews (thank the Divine), but that doesn’t mean we are to become synagogue Jews. We are to be kitchen-table Jews.

Digression: Speaking of charity and food, I know some Gentle Readers will be making charitable donations towards the end of the calendar year. There are always many, many things that money can help with, and you need to make your own decisions, and that’s all good. But y’all should know, and probably already know, that food pantries and direct food assistance are hurting, and hurting badly. Temple Beth Bolshoi does a food drive on Yom Kippur every year, and we have been filling two trailer-trucks in recent years. Not this year; our membership is hurting. And that meant less food for the pantries in Greater Hartford, which were already hurting, as I say. They are squeezing turnip juice from rocks, at this point. So if you are considering where to send money this year, please at least call over to local food pantries and see if they are hurting as badly as ours are. And think about diverting some of that money to the (very worthy) political, environmental, social, and educational stuff that is also hurting very badly. Not easy choices to make, eh? But remember the immortal words of the Fiddler on the Roof schnorrer, who said So you had a bad week, why should I suffer? End Digression.

There is a political metaphor of the kitchen table that my Party used to tremendous effect (I think) in the recent elections, and which I would like to see them continue to bang away at. There is something very powerful about the dinner table, whether it is in the kitchen or a dining room or a breakfast nook. And I think it’s fair to say that what you do (and with whom) at the dinner table says as much about what kind of person you are as what you do anywhere else.

And what, then, is the difference between a kitchen table that is a replacement for the Destroyed Temple and a kitchen table that is an Altar to profanity? Between the mizbeach l’adonai and the mizbechay matim? Or even a mizbeach mi bal’aday mizbeach adonai elohenu, an altar beside the altar of the Divine? Words. Just words. But not just any words. Words of the path of the Torah. Not the ritual blessings, although of course the blessings are words of the path of the Torah, but the precepts and regulations, restrictions and obligations.

Suitably revised for the world we live in, of course, says YHB, before he goes off to have pasta carbonara for lunch.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 1:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We were speaking of politics and Pirke Avot, and Rabbi Hananiah’s admonishing to pray for the Empire. This next verse is political, too, although not so obviously. Before I type in the text (and it’s longish), a little about the speaker.

Rabbi Chanina ben Teradion was a teacher who was chided by Rabbi Yosi ben Kisma (his former study partner) for endangering his life by continuing to teach under the Roman interdict. His friend was on his sickbed, and he was dismayed that Rabbi Chanina would put all his knowledge and tradition at risk. He spotted that the teacher had a forbidden book in his pocket at that moment, and predicted that he would be caught with it in his possession, and put to death. Rabbi Chanina said that the Divine would have mercy, and Rabbi Yosi responded that it was up to people to take care of themselves, not to rely on the mercy of Heaven.

Rabbi Yosi died of that illness a short time later, and his funeral was attended not only by Jews but by prominent Roman officials, who (according to the story) found Rabbi Yosi a congenial collaborator. Whilst returning from the funeral, the Roman officials came across Rabbi Chanina ben Teradion, teaching disciples from the forbidden Torah scroll. He was taken, condemned to death, and martyred by burning wrapped in the scroll itself; there are stories about that martyrdom that are less gruesome than one would expect. But the saying in Avot touches on this martyrdom only indirectly.

R. Hananiah b. Teradion said: If two sit together and no words of the Law [are spoken] between them, there is the seat of the scornful, as it is written, Nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But if two sit together and words of the Law [are spoken] between them, the Divine Presence rests between them, as it is written, Then they that feared the Lord spake one with another, and the Lord hearkened, and heard, and a book of remembrance was written before him, for them that feared the Lord, and that thought upon his name. Scripture here speaks of ‘two’; whence [do we learn] that if even one sits and occupies himself in the Law, the Holy One, blessed is he, appoints him a reward? Because it is written, Let him sit alone and keep silence, because he hath laid it upon him.

So. What’s going on here? This is Herbert Danby’s translation, by the way, and the square brackets are his, not mine, and as usual are a method of indicating in English that the Hebrew idiom allows the verb to be understood, and one hopes, understood correctly. None of my translations show really substantial differences; this seems to be fairly straightforward in its language.

We begin with two sitting together, and the admonition that such opportunities not be wasted. This is fairly common. The proof texts are appropriate and reasonable. The transmission of the tradition from one to another, the disputative tradition, are not possible if the Divine Presence does not sit between two people who exchange words of Torah.

Digression: this Divine Presence is the Shechinah. This is the presence that dwelt in the mishkan (a related word) and in the Temple. The Divine is everywhere, but the Shechinah dwelt in the Temple (dwelt to indicate temporary residence rather than permanence; we sing about the dwelling-places of Israel, mishk’enotecha yisroel, which are more than sukkot, booths, but not permanent homes). After the Destruction, the Shechinah was, if you will, cut loose, to dwell here and there amongst the people in Exile. Now, shechinah is a feminine word (that is, the noun takes feminine forms, plurals, etc, as Hebrew is a gendered language), so the Shechinah took on feminine attributes and became (in some parts of the tradition) a sort of Mrs. JHWH, in a mystical marriage where the male and female aspects of creation are both divided and together. For most of us who aren’t into that whole mystical kabbala business, this really only manifests itself in the Shabbat Queen or Shabbat Bride, who is said to visit every household where the Sabbath is kept, both to partake in and intensify the joy. The l’cha dodi is an invitation to this Presence, sung early in the Friday night service and a very popular hymn (with thirty different tunes). End Digression.

As I said, it is not remarkable that the Divine Presence should sit between two pious men that speak of Torah. Even under Roman persecution, Rabbi Chanina sat to speak of Torah, at great risk, and ultimately was martyred for it. After the martyrdoms, and the Destruction of the Second Temple, as the Rabbis sat to discuss their options, one of the concerns was the status of the written books of the Oral Law. Was it acceptable to write them? Was it acceptable to study alone? When the Law was entirely oral, it was not possible to study alone; it is of course possible to be alone and pious, but solitary study was actively discouraged. The sages that put together the Avot, and the Mishnah, were radicals, engaged in something new and dangerous: the transmission of tradition by the written word. Who died and left them in charge?

Rabbi Chanina did. This verse, to my eyes, is a justification for solitary study, from a sage who was martyred for possessing a book of the Law, and martyred while enfolded in the scroll of the Law. While much of Avot contains as subtext (or explicit text) the transmitted authority of the Sages, that is, the authority of the book itself and the Mishnah that contains it, this verse suggests the conceptual authority of learning your Torah from the book.

In addition to having a teacher of course, as we see explicitly stated several times. But still.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 2:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So my Perfect Non-Reader, now being a big third-grade kid, has progressed to the next level of Hebrew School. They are finally teaching her the aleph-bet with some seriousness, and they are teaching her the liturgical structure of the service, and they are brainwashing her with Zionism.

They gave her, in that first week of classes, a very odd thing: it’s a page out of For the Sake of Zion: Pride and Strength Through Knowledge, by Tuvia Book. This is a work specifically and explicitly devoted to indoctrinating passion for Zion. And it’s aimed at high-school students and college kids. From the press release:

Once Jewish students leave the protective bubble of school, home or intimate social group and enter the “real world” of a mixed college campus, sometimes hostile to Jews and Zionism, they often find themselves uncomfortable, on the defensive and unable to speak about Israel in partbecause they lack the passion for Zion.

In order to respond effectively with a sense of self-respect and to be proactive, students need a sense of commitment and pride, as well as knowledge and tools.

The sheet they gave the kids is a list of statements, and a space to respond whether the reader agrees or disagrees (on an A-E scale, oddly enough). I’m going to type in the whole thing, because—well, because I find it interesting and a trifle disturbing.

• The Jews are a nation like the French or the Germans.
• The Jews are a religious group like Muslims or Christians.
• All Jews should live in Israel.
• Jewish life in the Diaspora is vital to the continuation of the Jewish people.
• Jewish life in the Diaspora can never be fully safe or satisfying.
• Self-determination is the basic right of all peoples.
• The Jewish claim for national independence is based on Divine promise as recorded in the Torah.
• The Jewish people have an absolute and singular right to the Land of Israel as their national homeland.
• The Land of Israel is the national homeland of both the Jewish and the Palestinian Arab people.
• The State of Israel should be a model of Western liberal democracy.
• The Torah is the national constitution of the Jewish people and should be the national constitution of the State of Israel.
• The State of Israel belongs to the entire Jewish people.
• The State of Israel belongs to the citizens of the State.
• Israel is primarily a refuge for Jews fleeing oppression and a response to anti-Semitism.
• Israel is primarily a creative expression of the Jewish people’s will to be an independent community.
• All citizens of the State of Israel, regardless of religion or national-cultural identity, should share the same rights and privileges.
• Zionism demands personal fulfillment through Aliyah.
• Any support of Israel is Zionism.
• Zionism does not end with Aliyah, but continues through personal work to create a better society in Israel.
• A person living in Israel has to serve in the IDF to be considered a Zionist.

Well, now. As a conversation-kicker for grupps, or perhaps even more so for college kids, there’s a lot there. I could probably write a note about each of those twenty items (or more accurately, I could begin the project and then peter out after eight or so, despite having plenty to say about the rest). If we all (Gentle Readers and myself) just did the A-E response that the worksheet calls for would generate a wide range of responses. Giving it to a bunch of eight-year-old kids— My Perfect Non-Reader has an immense vocabulary, and I think is able to more or less understand the sentences and what they mean. Or, I should say, what they mean on the simplest level; I don’t claim to fully understand what Self-determination is the basic right of all peoples means, or what national independence means, or personal fulfillment or Western liberal democracy, for that matter. These are not well-defined terms. That doesn’t mean that they have no meaning, or that they can’t be used to communicate effectively, just that there is a limit to the extent that I am willing to say that I understand them. But that limit is very different from the limit experienced by an eight-year-old, who may or may not know what, for instance, the word refuge means. My Perfect Non-Reader does know that word, and its relation to refugee, because her parents are that way.

So I think her trouble is the greater one, close to the one that I have with the list. On the other hand, I have had lots of these conversations before. I have some experience with the tricky parts. It’s fairly easy for me to say it’s more complicated than that to pretty much anybody. I’m thinking not so much for an eight-year-old in class.

And then there’s this: I am an anti-Zionist myself, in the sense that I think Zionism was an error, although I have no solution to offer myself. Certainly I don’t think that immediate abolition of the State of Israel is a good solution, but given a range of solutions, I would rather work toward a future without a Jewish State, if that could be done without making things worse for lots of individual people. It’s hard to see how that would happen. So in terms of practical policy preferences, I am probably in line with, oh, J Street, despite their “support [for] Israel and its desire for security as the Jewish homeland”. I desire security for Jews, both in the Holy Land and elsewhere, but I do not in principle support the State’s desire for security as the Jewish homeland. But then here I’m reminded of the book-dialogue between Michael Lerner and Cornel West, when they are talking about Zionism, and it turns out that neither of them believe in the nation-state as such, so of course the whole concept of Zionism is suspect. I, too, have trouble with the idea of the nation-state, and that puts me in the corner with the guys with the funny haircuts who make trouble, but has almost nothing to do with anything practical.

But practically speaking, I am a Diaspora Jew. I identify myself as a Diaspora Jew, and I practice Diaspora Judaism. When we discuss Jewish matters (which happens fairly often around the house, as you can guess), I respond as a Diaspora Jew. And as an American. And that rubs off. My Perfect Non-Reader filled out this page as a Diaspora Jew, and as an anti-Zionist, to boot. I suspect that she was one of the few people to strongly disagree with the absolute and singular right stuff and give a shrug of a C to The State of Israel belongs to the entire Jewish people. Not that I would fill the paper out exactly the way she did, but on the whole, she wrote a paper as YHB’s daughter.

And that worries me. Not, in this instance, because I am worried about my own indoctrination, pace Akabya b. Mahaleel. But because I think it will be difficult and unpleasant for her to hold such unpopular views. Because she will be torn between loyalty to her Old Dad, who she loves (thank the Divine, although I embarrass her so) and respect for her teacher and the respect of her classmates. This is not like growing up a Yankee fan’s son in Boston. This is like that kid whose dad sued to have the Pledge of Allegiance returned to its original secular text.

I grew up in a New York Liberal Jewish household in a Southwestern town. My dad remains an old Trotskyite, at heart. When the Soviet Union fell apart, I was in college, and at that point I heard echoed in my community his response that this was the best possible news for advancing socialism. But when I was in high school and we read Animal Farm, I caused a major ruckus by making a similar point about Marx and Stalin. And that was high school. When I was Brynnen’s age, more or less, Jimmy Carter was running for President, and I was aware that our household was an Democratic island in a sea of Republicans. I heard dozens of Jimmy Carter jokes from my classmates. Not that I cared, particularly, about politics at the time. And I associated the political thing with the religious thing; we were supposed to be outsiders, after all.

Now I live in a town with seven synagogues. The local A&P put out a huge display of round challah right by the entrance last week, together with raisins, apricots, figs and those sticky nut-honey things that the Sephardim eat. And on the right day, too. The schools are closed on Monday for the Yom, not particularly out of sensitivity but out of logistical necessity, with so many students and teachers out. Being a Jew is not being an outsider in this town, and I am reminded almost every week of how different that is from my own childhood.

And yet, it seems, I am bringing my daughter into an outsider status of her own. I am, how do you say, conflicted about this. I am proud of her and worried about her. I feel guilty for having put her in this position, and I feel good about having protected her against the indoctrination I disagree with. I am frustrated by the whole weight of history that has made it seem almost reasonable for my shul to indoctrinate the kids in their school in Zionism, even while I think it’s a wrong-headed idea. And I want, in the words of the press release for that book, for my Perfect Non-Reader to respond effectively with a sense of self-respect and to be proactive, drawing on a sense of commitment and pride, as well as knowledge and tools. Only, I think I want her to do it in 5777, not this year.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Rabbi Hananiah, prefect of the priests, says: Do thou pray for the welfare of the Empire, because were it not for the fear it inspires, every man would swallow his neighbor alive.

Wow.

That’s Judah Goldin’s translation, by the way, of the second verse of chapter three of Pirke Avot, if you are just joining in at this Tohu Bohu. The only major disagreement amongst my translators is on the welfare question, as the word is more closely related to peace. Which could make a difference in connotation, and I’ll try to look into that, but I don’t think the raw political point is much different.

And it is raw. Rabbi Hananiah is a leader during the last years of the Second Temple and the first years following. That is, during the First Jewish-Roman war. It’s not altogether unlike a Sunni religious leader in, say, Afghanistan saying that his followers should pray for the welfare of the American Empire, because etcetera etcetera. It’s one perfectly valid political position, but make no mistake about it being a political position, and as much about his fellow mullahs as about the Americans. It is said that R. Hananiah later changed sides and joined the Zealots, but that isn’t here or there for this statement, except to underline that it is this verse, from this moment in his political and institutional life (he is a sort of vice-Priest, standing by to take over if the High Priest cannot fulfill his duties), that is put into the Avot.

I think that inclusion must be meant to say something about the importance of political disagreement and dissent. I mean, on the face of it, R. Hananias seems to be almost in step with the neo-cons of our own day. But by the time the redactors put the Mishnah together a hundred years later, R. Hananias is understood to be speaking in a minority within the Jerusalem community. Although, of course, the Jafneh community is protected by Rome, and Judah the Prince himself is on good terms with the Emperor. But that relationship is protecting the Jews from widespread persecution; the Mishnah and this chapter are committed to paper because of the fear that the Romans will utterly wipe out the tradition.

So there’s tension.

So, as I say, I think the thing I take from this advice is not so much to follow the advice itself, but to value the political discussion and dissension. And, I suppose, to value the religious obligation to participate in politics and government. Not to mix the synagogue and the state, not to have the state support the synagogue or the synagogue support the state, but that individuals are obliged to participate, and that Jews are obliged to participate both as individuals (with their own judgments and decisions) and as Jews (with the community tradition and Law). That’s a heavy burden. And we don’t all do it well all the time. I have my complaints about Rabbi Hananiah and his verse, but I have to give him credit for taking sides.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A few notes about the Rosh Hashanah service, and not enough time or energy to arrange them in an essay, or to make a theme and figure out which ones fit the theme and which get discarded—

When people recently were asking why are Jews liberals, my answer, as it always is, focused on the Seder. One reasonable working definition of Jewishness is that Jews are people who every year in the Spring tell ourselves the story of having been slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, and the Lord brought us out with a strong hand, and an outstretched arm. And while that does not necessarily make us liberals, I think the repetition is a big influence in that direction, at least within the American spectrum of right/left. But when, at the service, we were singing Avinu Malkenu, and I thought, hmmm. The song Avinu Malkenu, which is one of the Big Songs for Rosh Hashanah, and is the conclusion of a part of service unique to Rosh Hashanah, translates roughly like this: Our Father, our King, have mercy on us in your answer, although we are without merit ourselves. Treat us with charity and kindness, to save us. So influencing the idea of merit for Jews is the statement, repeated every year at a moment of heightened ritual meaning, that we have none. On the other hand, I have this tendency to romanticize the importance of the meaning of words within the ritual. After all, one of the advantages of praying in a dead language is that you don’t have to think about what you are saying.

Speaking of the Avinu Malkenu, traditionally we do not say it when Rosh Hashanah falls on a Saturday. But I guess we do say it in the Reform shul. This is a minor matter (mostly because the Reform machzor has a version that is substantially shorter than the Conservative one), but the major thing about Rosh Hashanah falling on Shabbat is that traditionally the shofar is not blown on the Shabbat. So I went through the disappointment of realizing that I wouldn’t hear the shofar, and then discovered that they did blow the Shofar on Shabbat at my (Reform) Shul. And was somehow also disappointed by that. Of course, for Conservatives, it mostly means deciding to go to services on the second day of Rosh Hashanah so you can hear the shofar; we eschew that whole second-day business for the most part.

Another thing I like about the Rosh Hashanah liturgy: zachrenu l’chaim, melech chafetz bachaim, v’chat’venu b’sefer ha-chaim l’ma’an’chu, elohim chaim. Remember us to life, king of life, and inscribe us in the Book of Life, for your sake, Lord of life. I don’t have anything particularly profound to say about it, I just like the line. Life. You know.

Back to this idea of how repeated rituals have an influence on people’s character, and how that might have some effect on the political leanings of those people (many of them, you know, in terms of statistics and trends, not conclusively), I was struck by the way we put a crown on our law book. An actual crown, a great big silver crown, with bells on. There’s something there about our understanding of regality and legality, of the place of people and laws, of the structure of society, of what is worthy of reverence, that is all wound up in that bit where we put a crown on our law book. And then kiss it. OK, we’re a little strange.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What day is it? It’s International Daven like a Pirate Day, of course! The day when Pirates everywhere hope to be inscribed in the Log of Life for a good year, a year of peace and a year of mercy, and a bucket of rum. The First of the Ten Days of Arrrrrrrrr, during which we look back on our last piratical year and the ways in which we fell short of the mizzenmast: running before the wind to do evil; sinning with words, with actions, and with eighteen-pounders; avarice, blasphemy, cowardice and double-dealing; sinning by omission, commission, and nailing that man’s foot to the deck that one time.

And we will be observing tashlich, where we sink the boats of the British Navy into running water, letting our sins float downstream with the rest of the flotsam.

For those of ye who will be observing today, a good year to you, and the Mercy of Heaven be upon ye—not the HMS Mercy of Heaven, which is a fine ship, lads, but no match for the Blue Peter. Er, yes, not a great name for a pirate ship, but…avast ye! The next man who snickers will be leyning Jonah in the belly of the great whale itself!

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 7:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Let’s start the third chapter of Pirke Avot with yet another translation, this one by Herbert Danby, D.D. Residentiary Canon of St. George’s Cathedral, Jerusalem, back in 1933.

Akabya b. Mahaleel said: Consider three things and thou wilt not fall into the hands of transgression. Know whence thou art come and whither thou art going and before whom thou are about to give account and reckoning. ‘Whence thou art come’—from a putrid drop; ‘and whither thou art going’—to the place of dust, worm and maggot; ‘and before whom thou art about to give account and reckoning’—before the King of kings of kings, the Holy One, blessed is he.

Well, that’s cheerful.

Can we talk about about Akabya b. Mahaleel? We learn about him in the Talmudic tractate on witnesses and testifying. When Shammai died, Akabya b. Mahaleel was offered his position (Av Bet Din, the head of the court of judges) on condition that he retract some positions that he held on fairly obscure issues. He refused. He said he would rather to hear people call him a fool than to hear people say he sold his principles for high office. He was then excommunicated, although it isn’t exactly clear why; the story is obscure in a bunch of places, and what is most clearly recorded is the protest of R. Jehudah some time afterward that it was somebody else entirely who was excommunicated, and that the record is wrong.

Anyway, there’s a story about Akabya b. Mahaleel as he lay dying. His children all come to him, and he says nu, who’s minding the store? No, wait, that’s a different story. His son comes to him, and he says to the son, about those rules that I held against the majority—you should accept the majority viewpoint. I took my judgment from many people speaking on both sides, but you have heard everybody on one side, and then just me on the other. And if you have to judge between a one-person minority and the majority, you should choose the majority. If you were to side with me, it would only be because I am your father; that is no way to make legal decisions.

And then, after he died, the Bet Din threw rocks at his coffin. (Unless it wasn’t him, of course.)

I want to note that in the Rabbi Nathan collection, the quote is substantially different, saying that we come from darkness and go to darkness. The version here in avot is more physical, less existential. We come from a putrid drop, we go to dust and worms and maggots. And if you keep this in mind—what? You will not fall into transgression. Why not?

After all, if you come from putrescence (and not everyone would agree with the characterization of semen as putrid; the description of semen in the rabbinic literature could itself be the topic of fruitful discussion, pardon the pun) and go to maggots, why wouldn’t you transgress? Wouldn’t keeping that in mind be an encouragement to transgress, rather than an encouragement to piety?

Or is the point that in between the putrescence and the maggots, there is something that is not disgusting?

In the commentary, R. Simeon b. Elazar asks if it wouldn’t be nice if, you know, people pissed perfume instead of piss? I mean. But as proud and haughty as we are, even with the foulness coming out of our body every now and then, if we didn’t have that, we would be utterly beyond everything.

On the other hand, I think this bracketing of your life in putrescence and maggots could highlight just how wonderful your physical body is. I mean, if at some point you are cranky about your bad knee or your sore back, remember that you came from a drop and will be eaten by maggots, but for a few magnificent years, you are something else.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last year at this time, Benjamin Rosenbaum wrote that Maurice Sendak is my spiritual leader. Well, not YHB's. His. Well, mine too, as I'll get to in a minute. Mr. Rosenbaum took as his text Pierre: A Cautionary Tale, and explained the concept of teshuvah, turning back to the Divine, which happens to Pierre in the belly of the beast. Since then, though, I have been thinking about a different book, and a different aspect of Yom Kippur and teshuvah.

There is a metaphor, much used in the tradition and occasionally discussed here in this Tohu Bohu, of everybody having two parts to their nature—the nefesh elokit, or the Divine spirit, and the nefesh behamit, or animal spirit. Your Humble Blogger does have problems with this (not least because of the implication that the actual beasts are utterly without Divine nature), but it can be a useful metaphor, so long as we remember that it is a metaphor, rather than a literal description of the universe.

And what better way to remind us of the metaphor than a picture book?

Do you have a copy of Where the Wild Things Are? Get hold of it. Look at it closely, because there's a lot of detail here. If you don't have one in your house, you can go to your local public library, or to your local bookstore. They will have it. And I'd like to get us all on the same page before somebody makes some sort of dreadful movie from it. OK?

So. Where does it start? It starts when Max puts on a wolf suit. When Max leaves his better nature and adopts an animal nature. Instead of self-control and kindness, Max covers himself with rage, instant gratification and impulse. It's all good fun, of course, but I wouldn't tell that to the dog he is chasing with a fork. His Mother enrages him further, when She fails to encourage him in his behavior. She calls him wild thing, which I'm going to go ahead and translate as nefesh behamit; he is doing what his animal nature tells him, rather than tempering that instinct with the Divine. How does he react? As a nefesh behamit. He says, “I'll eat you up!” This is the nature of the nefesh behamit. It devours what stands in its way. It does not think; it eats. It does not communicate; it threatens.

Of course, it threatens beyond its means. Max can't eat his Mother all up. And, in fact, by wanting to eat everything, instead he gets nothing. The Mother does not respond well to threats.

Ah, but Max does not take off his wolf suit, and he is not chastened. Well, if he is a nefesh behamit, then he is happy (says he to himself, says he) being apart from the Presence. He will make himself a new world, without any Presence at all. He will devote himself to being a wild thing.

And he goes to the place where the wild things are.

I don't know if you have ever gone to the place where the wild things are. Most people, I think, or at least many people I have known, have decided somewhere along the line that it's all about the animal nature. That there isn't any better nature, or that if there is, it isn't really them. Have decided to live in their wolf suits, and make mischief with the rest of the wild things. And the thing about wild things, is that they do have terrible roars, and terrible teeth, and terrible eyes, terrible claws, and yet they are quite easily tamed, if they think you are wilder then them. And if you are the wildest thing of all, then you get to be king of all the wild things, and they will dance with you, and carry you on their shoulders, and swing with you.

But they don't know when to stop.

How could they? How could a nefesh behamit know when to stop? Stopping is not in the animal nature. Self restraint is what they rejected when they put on their wolf suits.

Max discovers, after three double pages of glorious rumpus, that it is time to stop. I don't think at that point he knows why. He knows he is missing something. When the rumpus ends, he doesn't yet know that it is his Mother. But (and this is interesting) he sends the rest of the wild things off to bed without their suppers, trying (unconsciously, I think) to mimic his Mother. And that is the pivotal moment.

Max, the king of all wild things, is suddenly lonely, and wants … what? Not more rumpus, wilder things, more instant gratification. No. He wants to be where Someone loves him best of all. And then the smells of home come to him. At the right moment, when he is receptive, it is comfort and love and familiarity, habit even, that bring him to teshuvah, to return.

The rest of the wild things react just as wild things do react: they want to eat him up, to devour him. True, they call that love, and there is certainly passion in it. But it's nefesh behamit love, if it is love, and it's still eating someone up. And Max, in his teshuvah can simply say no, and step into his private boat, and sail back.

Return, or teshuvah, is what we will be looking to do this month as we head into Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. And as I try to say good-bye to my own wild things, and sail back in my own private boat, I will keep in mind the end of the book. I know a lot of people interpret the end of the book as a surrender, that they would like to see Max stay as king of all wild things. Not me. I want to push back the hood of my metaphorical wolf suit (although, beautifully, Max is still half inside it, even at the very end, as we all are), and come into the night of my very own room, and find my supper waiting for me.

That's the real miracle of Max's story. After all the rumpus, after rejecting his nefesh elokit and giving in to his appetites, even after being sent to bed without any supper, there is always teshuvah. His supper was waiting for him.

And it was still hot.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Your Humble Blogger has always particularly liked Rabbi Tarfon's sayings. I think that the last saying in this chapter was the first line from the avot that I quoted in this Tohu Bohu, albeit in another context. Anyway, here's R. Travers Herford's translation of verses twenty and twenty-one:

R. Tarphon said—The day is short and the work is great, and the labourers are sluggish, and the wages are high and the householder is urgent.

He used to say—The work is not upon thee to finish, nor art thou free to desist from it. If thou has learned much Torah they give thee much wages; and faithful is the master of thy work who will pay thee the wages of thy toil. And know that the giving of the reward to the righteous is in the time to come.

This continues the metaphor from R. Elazar ben Arach. The first verse is just a description, but of course in a work like this one, it's not just that R. Tarfon thinks that the world is like that, but that he thinks that there is a benefit to you if you adopt that view of the world. That is, if you think of yourself as an employee for the Divine, in a job that is frankly lousy a lot of the time and certainly difficult and dangerous but well-compensated, then you will be more likely to behave ethically than if you think of yourself as, f'r'ex, a child of a loving and Divine Parent. I'm inclined to agree, but then, my idea of the Divine is largely formed by this book, so why wouldn't I?

The bit that I quote—I'll be coming back to the whole metaphor, I promise— is the beginning of the last verse: the job is too big for one person, you won't finish it, but doesn't excuse you from doing all you can. I was arguing welfare policy at one point with a Conservative who brought out with a sense of triumph the argument that welfare payments would not eliminate poverty. Of course not, said I, nothing will ever eliminate poverty (until the end time, I might have said), but that doesn't mean we have the right to stop paying them. I think he was baffled. I didn't reach him, at that point, and it was pretty much the end of any of our conversations (for a variety of reasons, his Conservatism and my Liberalism not least of them) so I never will at this point. But in the spirit of the staircase, I want to attempt to clarify: if eradicating poverty is beyond us, we still have to reduce it and to alleviate it and to measure it and to own it.

Conservatives often think that Liberals believe in the perfectibility of human nature. This is not true; no liberals I have read or talked with think that humans will become perfect (by their own understanding of perfection, much less a Conservative's understanding) in any span of time that can be held in the mind. What Liberals believe in, for the most part, is that human society can be improved—not perfected, not completed, not finished. Not ever finished. But always improved. We can alleviate more misery, provide more opportunities for greatness to more of the population, promote the general welfare better and more generally, provide a little better protection to those who need it and diminish a bit the next generation's need for it. We can, Liberals believe, avoid a few mistakes that our parents made and bring forward a generation able to avoid a few mistakes we made. And another after that, we hope, and another after that. Have more happiness in more places.

We won't finish the job. We won't ever be finished washing dishes, either, or doing laundry; as long as we wear clothes and eat from plates, those jobs won't be finished. But if you neglect them, things get worse.

The work is great, and I am often sluggish. And often enough I feel like quitting altogether. But fortunately this metaphor of employment is not a complete metaphor, and we are both employees and family, both sheep and subjects. We can't quit. But we can't be fired, either. We are freelancers of the Divine Creation, whether we filled out the paperwork or not, and we will be rewarded for what work we do, whether we stand up to it first thing in the morning or slack off until we've finished reading the Internet.

And the reward? Well, the reward is in the world to come, Rabbi Tarfon tells us, and as much as I generally dislike too heavy an emphasis on the eschaton in my religious whatnot, the good thing about the world to come is that it is, like Orphan Annie's tomorrow, always coming.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We are nearing the end of Chapter Two at last. This is the last of the section about the five disciples of Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai. Hm. The five disciples… wouldn’t that make a great musical? No? OK, onward, beginning with Joseph Hertz:

R. Elazar said, Be eager to learn Torah; know what answer to give the unbeliever; know also before whom thou toilest, and who thy Employer is, who will pay thee the reward of thy labor.

Jacob Neusner has constant instead of eager; R. Travers Herford has alert; Judah Goldin has diligent (as does the Chabad website); and Michael L. Rodkinson has zealous. I’m afraid I have no idea. It seems as though there’s a lot of guessing. I think Rabbi Hertz is probably the loser here, as eagerness has little connotation of persistence that is common among the others, but then, they might well be reading that in from their own biases. Very difficult.

And what is more difficult about it, what makes it difficult for me to shrug it off and move on from it, is that it seems to be a separate leg of the triple. Unless we bail on the whole idea of the verse matching form and being a triple, which I am reluctant to do. If we break the thing into two parts, instead of three, we can suggest that we need to be [eager/constant/alert/diligent/zealous] in study so that we can respond to the unbeliever. And that is clearly part of it. But if we split it into three, as is our custom and the tradition, we need each part to make sense on its own as well as informing the other two parts. On its own, the admonition to be [eager/constant/alert/diligent/zealous] in study does spark any real interest in me, I’m afraid.

And speaking of translational difficulties, the unbeliever in the second bit is the Epicuros or Epicurean; the Hebrew is a transliteration of the Greek. Or it is a coincidence, but that seems a bit much. Anyway, I do like Rabbi Hertz on this one, as there is some problem with associating the Rabbinic epicuros with the actual Epicureans. Much like talking about skeptics and Skeptics, really. The word came into Hebrew and Rabbinic discussion to mean people who did not believe that the traditions of the tribe were compulsory; it also encompasses people who don’t believe in the Divine miracle of Scripture, or people who don’t believe in a Divine Creator at all, or people who hold beliefs about the Scripture and tradition that differ from the person using the word. Everyone who is more traditionally observant than me is frum; everyone who is less traditionally observant than me is an epicuros.

The distinguishing mark of the epicuros, though, as it is used here, is engagement with the tradition, rather than departure from it. As such, the term is used for non-Jews who argue about the tradition as well. R. Elazar insists on the need to answer the apikorsim (plural, switching now to a transliteration) rather than cutting them off from the discussion. I think that’s tremendously important for the Jewish tradition, particularly now in the modern Diaspora, when we’re all apikorsim to somebody.

Digression: the really frum consider us apikorsim to be the most dangerous group around, much more so than the goyim, worse than the Islamo-fascist Menace, scarier than the Neo-Nazis. I feel bad for them. A little. I wish I could consider them to be the biggest danger to Judaism, but honestly? I would have to stretch it. The argument would presumably go frumkeit to Shas Party to settlers to continuing occupation and oppression to discrediting of Zionism to Anti-Semitism. But then, there are plenty of apikorsim who support the settlers and that particular brand of Zionism, and plenty of Anti-Semites without discrediting Zionism anyway. So, you know? When I pass y’all on Saturday morning, driving to work while you walk to shul, and I shake my fist at you, that’s not because you are dangerous to me and my tradition, that’s because you make women sit behind a fucking curtain. End Digression.

So the first two parts are about, more or less, the relationship of the believing Jew to the Scripture, and the relationship of the believing Jew to the non-believer. And then there’s the relationship of the believing Jew to the Divine, which, it turns out, is like the employer-employee relationship.

Can I say that even as a metaphor, that seems really radical? I am used to the Parent/Child metaphor, which is of course natural, and the King/Subject metaphor, which has its problems but is, again, obvious if those are terms you are used to thinking in, and there’s the potter/clay metaphor, which I like a lot, and there’s the shepherd/flock one, which I don’t. But employer/employee? And yet there’s a lot of that language in the tradition. Which tends to back up Douglas Rushkoff’s idea of Judaism as being radically centered around worker’s rights, with the core stories of Exodus and the Creation/Sabbath as being about working conditions. I tend to view that skeptically, myself, but more because I think it’s incomplete than because I think it’s wrong.

But. I have to wonder, coming to the end of the triple here, what the relationship of the apikoros to the Divine is supposed to be. Is the apikoros an Employee? Is the apikoros considered to be unemployed, fired, on probation? Maimonides said that the have no share in the world to come. That seems to imply a fundamental breach of contract, that the unbeliever is, in essence, no longer working for the Divine at all. I can’t see that. I think there’s got to be a good deal of freelancing going on, is what I think.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)