Second verse, second leg, which is the tricky one for translation. Since I started the first leg with the Hertz, I’ll keep using it for cut-and-paste convenience:
Simon the Just was one of the last survivors of the Great Assembly: He used to say, Upon three things the world is based: upon the Torah, upon Divine service, and upon the practice of charity.
The word here is avodah, which means… well, it means work, first of all, toiling in the fields sort of work, as in Exodus 1:14: And they made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in morter, and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field: all their service, wherein they made them serve, [was] with rigour. The word then comes to mean Divine service (as Hertz has it), first the observance of the Passover and the service of the mishkan and the service of the Temple. The word avodah then becomes the word for the entirety of the sacrificial rite. That’s the sense in which Simon would most likely have used the word, since he administered it. But wait! There’s more, so much more.
When the Temple was destroyed, and we replaced animal sacrifice with the siddur, we kept the word, so that avodah is one of the words we use for the prayer service. Avodah is used to mean prayer, specifically the communal prayers services, throughout the rabbinic period. But it is also used to mean meditative prayer, fervent devotional prayer, and is eventually used by the Chasids to talk about their emphasis on ecstatic prayer. And then the nineteenth- and twentieth-century kibbutz movement picks up that early meaning of avodah as work to link labor with the Divine, and ascribe a devotional nature to, for instance, planting trees in Israel.
Simple, yes? Labor, observance, the Temple ritual, the recitation of prayers, the act of praying, and labor. Any and all of those could be the second leg. And no, just because Righteous Simon predated the use of those words in a particular manner does not rule out our understanding them in that manner, which is part of the miracle of Scripture. This is, after all, a transmission of the Divine Revelation at Sinai, which contains a lot of events that happen after Sinai, because the Divine isn’t bound by linear time. So Simon could well have been talking about the kibbutz, and speaking to us two thousand years later, at the same time as he was talking to his contemporaries about animal sacrifice.
And with all of those meanings, we can get more meanings when we pair them up with the different possible meanings of torah. Are torah and avodah study and practice? Or are they the Law and the Ritual? Or are they the words and the feelings? Or are they the two great texts of Judaism, the unchanging Torah and the constantly revised siddur? Or are they the observance of the Mosaic law, strictly defined, and the Cohenic administration of the ritual in the Temple? Because there’s a line of interpretation which says that Simon is talking about the Law and the Temple, and here let’s go back to the wicket image, and when those two wickets go down, the whole world will be destroyed.
And it was.
And then, by this interpretation, the miracle of the Divine keeps the world balanced, with all the weight on the last remaining leg. Which we’ll be talking about next, right?
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
Hmm, so the conjunction of your paragraphs there is making me think about ritual prayer as work. Which is weird — a lot of ritual prayer happens at times when you’re also obligated to rest from your labor, so in that sense, prayer can’t be work. There is also “work” in the sense of, “things which you would put off and just play Snood instead if you weren’t required to do them.” And, in some sense, that’s how i think of ritual prayer, which is why i actually get to a synagogue approximately never these days.
But, okay, the sages presumably did not spend a lot of time fessing up to wanting to sleep in on Saturday morning and then sit around in their pajamas reading political blogs. So they must have some entirely different sort of opinion on the avodah == labor == prayer thing. No?
So, when I was crazy, which happened on again off again for years, I had a tendency to believe in the truth of a behavior pattern called “clanging,” where the meaning of unrelated words is conflated due to some similarity of pattern in the word itself. Thus, fashion = fascism under proper conditions to a schizo-affective undergoing a psychotic episode, for example.
Now, the secret is that having learned and practiced this behavior, although I don’t act on it much, my brain still does it from time to time, and what I get from avodah is the entirely-linguistically-unrelated word devotion.
Does that help?
peace
Matt
Chaos,
I think that to some extent, and for some Rabbis, ritual prayer is thought of in terms of labor, at least in that praying can be exhausting. And that it is an obligation, much as making a living is. Certainly one should rush to prayer with a glad heart, but in theory one should rush to work on Monday morning with a glad heart, too, right? And it doesn’t always happen. I don’t know anything written on the idea of work and rest as opposites, and where prayer stands in that (false) dichotomy. But I can tell you that the word for work that is forbidden on holidays where work is forbidden is not avodah. And that the resemblance between Snood heads and prayer beads is probably coincidental.
Matt,
The idea of clanging is dangerously attractive. I can make a claim that the coincidence of sounds is not a coincidence but a pun, a spring-loaded pun buried linguistically for modern English to come into use, but—you know the phrase that way madness lies? I think your experience speaks to that. Unless I’m willing to admit that the difference between a schizo-affective undergoing a psychotic episode and a prophet is subjective, which is itself a dangerously attractive idea…
Thanks,
-V.
Yes, excellent points both of them, and the dangerous attractiveness you refer to makes it hard to give up on schizophrenic tendencies when one has them. When I perceive the difference between myself and a prophet as the thinnest of thin, white lies, it’s hard not to declare myself and profit.
peace
Matt
This is, after all, a transmission of the Divine Revelation at Sinai, which contains a lot of events that happen after Sinai, because the Divine isn’t bound by linear time.
Fascinating sentence. Is it describing something you personally believe, channeling the rabbinic position, or laying out a position that you don’t think is literally true, exactly, but useful and satisfying to think with?
I think all three, really. I mean, it is the traditional rabbinic position, and it’s clearly true that the Torah, even as narrowly defined as the five books, contains descriptions of events after the Revelation at Sinai. So if you believe in Sinai at all, it seems to me you are stuck with two versions: (1) what is revealed is the Law, which at some point is set down in writing, so that the Revelation is a subset of the Torah, or (b) stuff is revealed that hadn’t happened yet. There are lots of problems with the first one, in terms of belief and Scripture and text and all, whereas the second really just requires that the Divine exists outside of time as we understand it.
And once you accept that the Torah as revealed at Sinai includes, for instance, the description of the forty years in the wasteland that follow that revelation, it doesn’t seem problematic (to me) that it also includes the descriptions of the Judges and Kings, or the Exile, or even the sayings of the Sages. Or, for that matter, that the Scriptures are an ongoing miracle, the nature of which is that they can speak to people of different times and conditions and cultures and still carry the word of the Divine. Which is my take on the whole Scripture thing, and the difference (for me) between Scripture and not-Scripture. Certainly such a miracle would be within the power of the Creator of the Universe, and worthy as well.
Now, when you ask me whether it is something I personally believe, it is—but not in the same way that I believe that, f’r’ex, Christopher Columbus sailed to America in 1492, or that water is made of hydrogen and oxygen. These are evidential claims, and although I have not personally examined the evidence, I am satisfied that the evidence has been examined sufficiently for me to believe the claims on that basis. My belief in Scripture is not based on evidential claims. Nor would it hold up to normal evidential examination. But once accepting that Scripture is miraculous in nature, ontologically if you will, the fact that evidence shows scribal errors or multiple redactors or temporary political aims or whatnot doesn’t work against that miracle, as the Divine is perfectly capable of using scribal errors or multiple redactors or temporary political aims to create the Scripture as Revealed at Sinai.
Is that at all clear? Probably not. Clarity isn’t a big part of the Scriptural miracle, it seems.
Thanks,
-V.
No, that was all very clear, thanks.
So how does your belief in Scripture as entirely revealed at Sinai sit with the conclusions of historical/textual criticism? Do those two ideas live in different belief-spaces, as it were, or is that sort of biblical criticism not something that you’re interested in?
Must. Hold. Back. From comment!
peace
Matt
Oh, come on, Matt, you know you want to. And have another slice of pie! Mmmm, pie. Pie and blog comments.
I’m going to go with different belief spaces (to answer Kendra), although that’s probably too simple a response. As a f’r’ex, I don’t tend to focus heavily on the J/E/D/P stuff, but I’m happy to take them into account as a sort of Divine literary technique (multiple POV Scripture) when I think it’s helping me get into the text. The different belief-spaces come into play if I am attempting to do that kind of thing myself, using evidence at all that, rather than in the exegesis. Is that the sort of thing you are talking about?
Thanks,
-V.