Well, and shall we begin Chapter Two?
Rabbi (Jehudah the Prince) was in the habit of saying: “In choosing the right path, see that it is one which is honorable to thyself and without offence to others. Be as scrupulous about the lightest command as about the weightiest, for no man knoweth the result of his actions. Weigh the present temporal disadvantages of a dutiful course against the reward of the future, and the present desirable fruits of a sinful deed against the injury to thine immortal soul. In general, consider three things and thou wilt never fall into sin: remember that there is above thee an all-seeing eye, an all-hearing ear, and a record of all thine actions.”
Chapter Two begins with Judah the Prince, who is referred to as Rabbi, without a name, because of his paramount importance in Mishnaic and Talmudic Judaism. It does not state that he got this tradition from anywhere, and if we were following the generational ladder in Chapter One, we have skipped a couple of generations, which tells us that we are no longer concerned with chronology. And Judah, like Hillel, gets more than a simple triple. He gets what looks like a whole paragraph but reads as a long triple followed by a short triple.
It’s an odd thing about Rabbinic Judaism, which I have mentioned before. Growing up in a Conservative Shul, and now with my Perfect Non-Reader growing up in a Reform shul, we never read any of the Talmud, nor did we learn much about the sages. We got a couple of stories, mostly Akiba and Hillel, but we didn’t learn about Judah the Prince. We learned stories from the Five Books, and we learned the stories from the Megillahs (except the Song of Songs, of course), and we learned the liturgy, and we got a few stories of the Judges and the Kings and the Prophets (David and Goliath, of course, and Solomon building the Temple, and maybe Ezekiel and the valley of bones, Jeremiah at the riverside, and Esther and Ruth and Jonah and maybe Job; I don’t remember exactly), but the story of the council of Jamnia didn’t come up, nor did the work of Judah the Prince. Nor, of course, the Amoraim or Savoraim who wrote and redacted the Talmud.
And yet, the Talmud, with its models of disputation and adaptation, is in large measure the defining book of modern Judaism, including the Reform and Conservative branches. It’s a difficult book, so I suppose it isn’t much of a surprise, really, that the text of it isn’t taught to children in Hebrew School, but there are certainly legends and stories of the Amoraim that feel to me as important as the stories of Naomi or Samson.
I wonder, if you surveyed Jews about Jews In History who they felt were Important to Judaism as it is, asking them to name, oh, five, who they would come up with. Moses, certainly, but whether the next few would include Hillel and Judah the Prince and Rashi and the Rambam, I have no idea. I suspect David Ben-Gurion or maybe Golda Meir would be higher on the list. Perhaps King Solomon, which is a pretty good answer, actually. Now I’m curious. Well, I can’t do a survey, so I’ll just move on the the actual text.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.