Fifty Down and Many More to Go

by Eliezer Segal

As most of my long-suffering readers have probably noticed, an important landmark was recently reached in the history of Jewish journalism with the publication of my fiftieth article for the Jewish Free Press. For those of you who might not have been keeping count, my first contribution appeared in the Jewish Free Press‘s premier issue on November 15 1990 issue, while the Hanukkah feature in the Nov. 30 1994 issue was my fiftieth.

While I await the lavish surprise party that my editor is no doubt preparing for her most popular columnist, I have been devoting some thought to the purposes of my journalistic endeavours and how they have been received by my Esteemed Readers.

One of the greatest pleasures of newspaper writing is the challenge of adapting myself to the restrictions of the medium, especially the need to produce for deadlines (“We’re going to press in two hours. Make sure you have something ready”) and to compress my wisdom into finite chunks that can be squeezed between the advertisements.

On deeper reflection, I realize that there are some more substantial reasons that attract an academic scholar to the journalistic venue. Chief among my motives is my determination to infect people with own fascination with Jewish history and culture.

One of the most gratifying responses that I often hear from readers is that they had not realized that learning about Judaism could be so entertaining. Initially I found such reactions to be odd, but I have come to realize just how widespread this perception is. It is symptomatic of some immense gaps in what passes for Jewish education.

Indeed, I do take pride in the fact that most of the details and trivia that I assemble in my articles are not readily found in popular surveys or textbooks, and often have to be pieced together from works that are considered esoteric and scholarly; whereas the prevailing impression that emerges from so much popular writing on Jewish history is that Judaism is an arid and deadly serious system of laws and doctrines, which must be treated with such heavy doses of reverence that it becomes unapproachable to ordinary people.

This impoverishment of our cultural literacy flows naturally from the ideologies to which we have entrusted most Judaic teaching in recent generations, namely the Zionist movement and religious Orthodoxy. For all that these world-views might diverge over other fundamental issues, they are as one in their determination to erase any meaningful Jewish experience between Bar Kokhba and Herzl, implying that throughout this period Jews did little more than pray, study Talmud and endure persecution. This misrepresentation does a great disservice to the richness and vibrancy of our history.

In keeping with my own agendas I tend to emphasize a recurring set of themes. For example, many of my articles are devoted to finding parallels between recent events and topics that are described in Jewish sources from earlier eras. My underlying assumption is, of course, that our ancestors were very much like ourselves and dealt with issues very much like the ones that confront us today.

Another idea that often finds expression in my articles is that Judaism has never been static or monolithic. The tradition has made room for legalists, philosophers, mystics and others, each of whom has interpreted the heritage in their own distinctive manner.

As is inevitable amid such variety, our ancestors produced varying proportions of wisdom, virtue, eccentricity and folly. Though my attitude to the Jewish past might not always be a reverent one, it is usually affectionate. At any rate, it is our “family” and cannot be denied or disowned.

This attitude of amused distance, fueled by my academic dabbling in Religious Studies, also affects my treatment of other religious traditions. Rather than indulge in polemical diatribes on issues that defy reasoned verification, I enjoy tracing the manifold patterns of similarity, contrast and interaction that have characterized Judaism’s relations with both Christianity and Islam over the centuries. This exercise can lead to a clearer understanding of what is distinctive and what is universal in ourselves. 

There were times when I entertained doubts about my ability to continue coming up with original ideas for articles for each impending deadline. After all, won’t I eventually run out of novel things to say about each year’s festivals?

Experience has taught me that this is not likely to present a real obstacle. The Jewish religious and cultural legacy contains sufficient resources to keep me occupied for the next fifty articles at least.

---

• First Publication:  
• Jewish Free Press, January 19 1995.

---

My email address is: [email protected]

Looking for Lilith

by Eliezer Segal

The feminist critique of conventional values has not overlooked the Jewish tradition. Whether or not one acknowledges the validity of all the charges that have been leveled against the treatment of women in Jewish law and theology, it is hardly possible to ignore these issues.

As one who is normally sympathetic with feminist aspirations, I have often been disappointed with the scholarly standards of the debate, especially when it has been directed towards the classical texts of Judaism. In the course of polemical ideological exchanges, I find too frequently that sweeping generalizations are being supported by flimsy or questionable evidence, with a disturbing disregard for factual accuracy and historical context.

As an example of this sort of scholarly sloppiness, I wish to discuss an intriguing Hebrew legend that has found its way into dozens of recent works about Jewish attitudes towards women. 

The legend in question was inspired by the Bible’s dual accounts of the creation of the first woman, which led its author to the conclusion that Adam had a first wife before his marriage to Eve. Adam’s original mate was the demonic Lilith who had been fashioned, just like her male counterpart, from the dust of the earth. Lilith insisted from the outset on equal treatment, a fact which caused constant friction between the couple. Eventually the frustrated Lilith used her magical powers to fly away from her spouse. At Adam’s urging, God dispatched three angels to negotiate her return. When these angels made threats against Lilith’s demonic descendants, she countered that she would prey eternally upon newborn human babies, who could be saved only by invoking the protection of the three angels. In the end Lilith stood her ground and never returned to her husband.

The story implies that when Eve was afterwards fashioned out of Adam’s rib (symbolic of her subjection to him), this was to serve as an antidote to Lilith’s short-lived attempt at egalitarianism. Here, declare the feminists matronizingly, we have a clear statement of the Rabbinic Attitude Towards Women!

There is only one slight problem with this theory: The story of Lilith is not actually found in any authentic Rabbinic tradition. Although it is repeatedly cited as a “Rabbinic legend” or a “midrash,” it is not recorded in any ancient Jewish text!

The tale of Lilith originates in a medieval work called “the Alphabet of Ben-Sira,” a work whose relationship to the conventional streams of Judaism is, to say the least, problematic.

The unknown author of this work has filled it with many elements that seem designed to upset the sensibilities of traditional Jews. In particular, the heroes of the Bible and Talmud are frequently portrayed in the most perverse colours. Thus, the book’s protagonist, Ben-Sira, is said to have issued from an incestuous union between the prophet Jeremiah and his daughter. Joshua is described as a buffoon too fat to ride a horse. King David comes across as a heartless and spiteful figure who secretly delights in the death of his son Absalom, while putting on a disingenuous public display of grief. The book is consistently sounding the praises of hypocritical and insincere behaviour.

So shocking and abhorrent are some of the contents of “the Alphabet of Ben-Sira” that modern scholars have been at a loss to explain why anyone would have written such a book. Some see it as an impious digest of risqué folk-tales. Others have suggested that it was a polemical broadside aimed at Christians, Karaites, or some other opposing movement. I personally would not rule out the possibility that it was actually an anti-Jewish satire–though, to be sure, it did come to be accepted by the Jewish mystics of medieval Germany; and amulets to fend off the vengeful Lilith became an essential protection for newborn infants in many Jewish communities.

Eventually the tale of Lilith was included in a popular English-language compendium of Rabbinic legend, and some uncritical readers–unable or unwilling to check after the editor’s sources–cited it as a representative Rabbinic statement on the topic. As tends to happen in such instances, subsequent authors kept copying from one another until the original error turned into an unchallenged historical fact.

Certainly there are volumes of real texts and traditions that could benefit from a searching and critical feminist analysis, and it is a shame to focus so much intellectual energy on a dubious and uncharacteristic legend of this sort.

---

• First Publication:
• Jewish Free Press, February 6 1995.
• For further reading: 
• J. Dan, The Hebrew Story in the Middle Ages, Jerusalem, 1974.
• J. D. Eisenstadt, ed., Ozar Midrashim, Israel, n.d.

---

My email address is: [email protected]

---

---

Ketubbah Texts Reveal Clues of Ancient Values

by Eliezer Segal

At most of the Jewish weddings that I have observed in recent years, not much emphasis was placed on the reading of the Ketubbah, the traditional Jewish marriage contract. The prosaic legalisms that make up this contract do not always conform to the mood of sentimental spirituality that we consider appropriate to a wedding ceremony, and they are often mumbled cursorily from a standardized text that is written in an incomprehensible Aramaic dialect.

At the heart of the Ketubbah is the stipulation of monetary amounts to be paid by the husband in case of divorce. As practical as this matter might be, it is considered an awkward topic to be introducing under the huppah. Usually, the financial obligations are enumerated as a generic number of “pieces of pure silver”–though at Israeli weddings it is still common to mention (and haggle over) units of real currency.

Originally the Ketubbah‘s chief purpose was to deter the husband from impulsively divorcing his wife. However, since the medieval enactment that prohibits divorcing a woman without her consent, the institution of the Ketubbah has become something of a ritual formality.

Although stereotyped uniformity characterizes the wording of almost all current Ketubbahs, this situation has not always been the case. Ketubbahs produced in other ages and lands demonstrate greater flexibility and creativity in the formulation of the clauses and conditions of the marriage contract.

Indeed, texts of Ketubbahs have been unearthed in just about every important trove of ancient Jewish manuscripts. The earliest known Ketubbah dates from 5th-century B.C.E., and is contained in an archive from the island of Elephantine in the Nile, which housed a colony of Jewish mercenaries in the employ of the Persian emperor. From the Ketubbot and other records that were preserved there it is possible to reconstruct a vivid picture of the life of that lost society.

Other Ketubbah texts are included among the archeological remnants of Simeon Bar-Kokhba’s revolutionary headquarters, including that of the remarkable “Babata, daughter of Simeon,” a second-century Jewish woman who left us an invaluable purse full of assorted bills, receipts and other documents. Several marriage-contracts are also included among the tattered fragments of the Cairo Genizah.

Many of these documents reveal surprising departures from the versions that are in widespread use today. The Elephantine Ketubbot, for example, include separate clauses to deal with the termination of marriages at the initiative of either the husband or the wife. One such text contains the following stipulation of penalty clauses for the party that asks for the divorce:

“If at some time Ananiah should stand up before the assembly and declare: `I reject my wife Jehoshama. She shall not be my wife!’ then he is obligated to pay divorce money… And if Jehoshama should reject her husband Ananiah and declare before him `I reject you and will not be your wife!’ then she shall be obliged to pay the `divorce money’…” 

The prospect of the wife divorcing her husband would be considered impossible by later Jewish law. However, Ketubbah clauses that define the wife’s rights to compel the husband to issue a divorce are cited in the Jerusalem Talmud, and were written into most of the “Genizah” Ketubbah texts, which emanate from Egypt and the Land of Israel. The wording in those documents bears an uncanny resemblance to the formulas found in the Elephantine contracts, composed 1500 years earlier, and indicate a continuous evolution throughout that time.

In general, the wording of the texts from the Cairo Genizah expresses a different approach towards marriage from the one that characterizes our conventional Ketubbot. The latter speak only from the husband’s perspective, as the one who is acquiring a wife and accepting obligations towards her, while the wife passively consents to the terms. The Palestinian tradition, on the other hand, placed an emphasis on the mutuality of the relationship. Thus, t he marriage is referred to not as nissu’in (literally: carrying, taking), but as a shutafut, a partnership, or a b’rit, a covenant. Some Karaite Ketubbot call the bride a h\averah, a companion. In addition to the groom’s commitment to “nourish, provide for, honour and esteem,” the wife in turn promised to “serve, attend, honour and esteem” her spouse.

The study of the Jewish marriage contract thus opens a fascinating windows into the lives and world-views of previous generations.

---

---

My email address is: [email protected]

---

---

Esther the Marrano

by Eliezer Segal

The book of Esther does not explain why Mordecai insisted that Esther conceal her Jewishness from Ahasuerus. The traditional commentaries suggest a variety of reasons for this tactic. After surveying several of these explanations, the 12th-century commentator Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra offers his own theory:

“Mordecai acted in this way so as to allow Esther to observe the Torah in secret, and not have to partake of non-kosher food. This would also enable her to keep the Sabbath without the servants noticing. For if her Jewishness were to become known, then the king might compel her to violate her religious traditions or have her put to death.”

As some scholars have observed, the vivid picture of Jews covertly practicing their religion, in constant fear of being unmasked by domestic servants, might very well reflect conditions during Ibn Ezra’s lifetime. At around the middle of the twelfth century, Spain and North Africa came to be ruled by a dynasty of fanatical Muslim fundamentalists known as the “Mu’ah\adin” who forced many Jews to convert to Islam. It was this development that forced Maimonides’ family to flee from Spain to Egypt, and Maimonides himself devoted a special letter to guide and encourage the Jews in the face of this crisis.

From Ibn Ezra’s description of Esther’s plight, we see that already under this early persecution, long before the rise of the Christian Inquisition, Spanish Jews had learned to evade the threat of forced conversion by publicly professing the legal religion, while doing their best to observe their Judaism in secrecy.

From the perspective of the halakhah, the phenomenon of “Marranism” or crypto-Judaism is difficult to justify, yet it was especially prevalent among Jews in Islamic countries. Under equivalent circumstances, German and French Jews were more likely to submit to martyrdom for their faith. 

Some historians have suggested that the roots of this attitude should be sought in the mind-set of Islam, which permitted religious dissembling in order to save the lives of oppressed Muslims. It is likely that the Jewish response to such situations was influenced by the religious attitudes that were prevalent in the Islamic environment.

Whatever our views on the above question, there is no denying that the figure of Esther, covertly practicing her Judaism in a hostile foreign world, bears a strong resemblance to the situation of the Spanish and Portuguese conversos of later generations. Therefore it should not come as a surprise that the story of Esther became a favourite source of inspiration to those Jews in their time of peril.

Significantly, the Inquisitional guidelines single out the observance of the “Fast of Esther”–even more than that of Purim itself–as a well-known indication of “Judaizing” activity. Because the Hebrew lunar calendar was not accessible to most Jews, the date of the fast–like those of all Jewish holy days–was calculated according to dates in the Christian calendar, and was to be observed on the full moon of February.

Because the fast could be kept through inaction rather than through any identifiable rituals, it became one of the most widely observed Marrano holidays, a substitute for Purim itself, whose observances were too visible to be safe. Furthermore, after generations of living as Christians, the Jews often perceived their Judaism in terms of Christian concepts; and since fasting was a favourite practice among pious Catholics, the Jews applied it wherever possible to Jewish contexts.

The Megillah of the Marranos was significantly different from our Hebrew text. The possession of Jewish religious books was of course prohibited by the Inquisition, and the Marranos obtained most of their limited knowledge of their tradition and history from reading the “Old Testament” of the Christian Bibles. The Catholic “Vulgate” text of the Bible derives from the ancient Greek versions which contained extensive additions to the Hebrew text. (Ironically, several of these additions also appear in the prohibited Jewish Midrashim.)

One of these “Catholic additions” to the Megillah was a moving prayer that Esther uttered before approaching the presence of Ahasuerus. In her entreaty she beseeched the Lord to deliver the Jews from the hands of the blasphemous oppressor into whose power his people had been given as a punishment for their sins. Esther herself proclaimed her disdain for the life she had been living among the heathens, compelled to eat at their tables and drink the wine of their offerings.

This version of the Book of Esther, which expressed so poignantly the feelings of the crypto-Jews of Spain, became one of their most beloved texts, and it was reported that at least one Jewish woman who was condemned by the Inquisition in Mexico (Women were prominent among the spiritual leaders and heroes of the Marranos) knew how to recite it both forwards and backwards!

Through such tragic associations Jewish history has provided continual fulfillment of the Megillah’s declaration that the days of Purim “should be remembered and kept throughout every generation…and these days of Purim should not fail from among the Jews, nor the memorial of them perish from their seed.”

---

---

My email address is: [email protected]

---

Days of Rest and Prayer

by Eliezer Segal

Some delicate legal questions have been raised by the current struggle of Ontario’s Jewish community to achieve an official status for Jewish schools. At the same time, Ottawa’s Muslims are campaigning for acknowledgment of their holidays in the public school schedule. 

As Jews we can readily appreciate how the “civil” or “secular” calendar that regulates our society is in reality a Christian one, and therefore creates conflicts with members of other religious communities. At any rate, the problems involved in the celebration of Muslim holidays are not fully comparable with those confronting traditionally observant Jews. In spite of some interesting similarities between the two religious calendars, there are also some fundamental differences between the festivals of the two faiths.

For Jews, the most striking parallels between the Jewish and Muslim calendars are in the ways they define their months and years: In both systems the months are determined by the phases of the moon, and hence the Jewish and Muslim New Moons normally occur on the same day. For both religions, twelve such months make up a year.

At this point we encounter the first of the important differences between the two systems. The Jewish calendar is periodically (as happened this year) adjusted through the addition of an extra month in order to keep it from lagging behind the solar year. In the Muslim tradition no such adjustment is introduced, and therefore their calendar annually falls eleven days behind the solar cycle.

This is not a mere technical matter, but derives from some essential differences in the characters of the respective religions.

We often take it for granted that Jewish festivals are closely associated with stages in the agricultural year. This is however not true about Muslim holidays. Although the Torah sees its “typical” community as consisting of farmers and peasants, living in harmony with the soil and the seasons, the Qur’an was addressing a society of merchants whose daily lives were removed from the cycles of nature.

This basic difference can be discerned in some other spheres as well. For example, the central occasion in the Muslim religious year is the holy month of Ramadan, during which the faithful are obliged to fast throughout the daylight hours. Though this type of fast makes exacting demands on physical labourers, especially when it falls during periods of intensive agricultural activity, it is less of a hardship for people whose work is carried out in shops and offices, or whose timetables are not determined by the seasons of nature.

This premise might account for the fact that the Islamic calendar contains a comparatively small number of holidays, and that none of them require resting from work. Once again, the “typical” Muslim is not perceived to be involved in physical work, and therefore does not require religiously sanctioned days of rest.

Ironically, it is likely that that original society of merchants for whom Muhammad designed his religion might have been composed largely of Jews, who were prominent in the first Muslim community of Al-Madinah.

The weekly Muslim holy day falls on Friday, which is designated in Arabic as “Yawm al-Jum`a,” the Day of Assembly, and is not defined as a day of rest. Saturday continues to be referred to in Arabic as the “Sabbat” though it is not observed as such by Muslims. Yawm al-Jum`a is a day of public worship in the mosque, accompanied by sermons and other spiritual solemnities, but it is not unreasonable for an observant Muslim to leave the mosque after services and head directly to work or school.

At the root of this difference in approach might lie a deeper theological issue. Remember that our Shabbat commemorates how God ceased from work and rested from the six days of creation. Now, the picture of a God who had to relax from his exertions is one that was unacceptable to the straightforward Muslim conception of divine omnipotence. As it states in the Qur’an: “In six days We created the heavens and the earth and all that is between them, and weariness did not affect us.”

Hence, for the Qur’an the institution of a day of rest was not considered a suitable way of celebrating the creation.

This theological difficulty was of course well known to the Jewish commentators. One ear

ly midrash explains that God had the biblical passages speak loosely of God‘s resting on Shabbat only in order to encourage humans to try to emulate the Creator by relaxing once a week.

Jews living in Muslim countries were sensitive to the implications of these issues, and echoes of the controversy can be discerned in Jewish commentaries that were composed in Muslim lands. Thus, Rabbi Saadia Ga’on’s important translation of the Bible into Arabic (10th century) was probably responding to Muslim criticisms when he carefully rendered all the offending references in the Creation account as if they said “God allowed the world to rest”–but the Almighty did not require such relaxation.

Of course, little if any of this has direct bearing on how Jewish or Muslim holidays should be treated under Canadian law. Hopefully though, it has enriched our understanding of some unappreciated dimensions of our religious calendar.

---

---

My email address is: [email protected]

---

---

The Great Passover Raisin-Wine Controversy

by Eliezer Segal

I don’t know whether you prefer to use wine or grape juice to fulfill the requirement of drinking “four cups” at the Passover seder. For most of us this question is more a matter of personal taste than a strictly halakhic issue. This however has not invariably been the case, and several testimonies from and about American Jews in the middle of the nineteenth century tell us about a widespread opinion that unfermented “raisin-wine” was the only acceptable beverage for Passover use, and that alcoholic wine was severely frowned upon by Jewish tradition. Some even went so far as to say that alcoholic fermentation was included within the prohibition of h\ametz.

Now the preference for raisin-wine is not completely unreasonable. After all, commercially produced kosher wines were a rarity at this time, especially in America, so that the only way to procure a ritually satisfactory beverage would be to make it at home. Though alcoholic wine cannot be easily manufactured by amateurs, raisin-wine can be prepared through a simple process of boiling the raisins in a pot. Admittedly, this was not strictly a Passover-related issue, but we all know how Jews often become especially meticulous in the observance of Pesah\ regulations even if they are lax about their dietary rules during the rest of the year.

We should also note that at this time a significant component of American Jews were descended from Sephardic refugees, and that the consumption of home-made raisin-wine was a well-known Marrano practice, designed to avoid the drinking of Christian sacramental wines, at least on solemn religious events occasions like Passover.

Whatever its origins, the Jewish preference for raisin-wine was to become a pivotal issue in the American public life of the era.

The latter half of the nineteenth century saw the rise of the Temperance Movement, which fought stubbornly for the limitation, or total prohibition, of intoxicating drinks. Although they were responding to a very real social problem in American society, the leaders of the Temperance agitation were drawn largely from the ranks of Evangelical Christians and were impelled by religious motivations. It was therefore a source of embarrassment to these Bible-thumpers that wine is mentioned so frequently in the Bible as the most common of beverages, to which no serious stigma or censure was attached. Even more painful to the Temperance cause was the story of the Last Supper where Jesus himself partook of wine and shared it with his disciples. According to the widespread view, the Last Supper had been a Passover Seder.

Another commonly held view among Christians naively regarded contemporary Jews as faithful preservers of a fossilized tradition that had remained unchanged since Jesus’ days. If it could be demonstrated that their Jewish neighbours drank non-alcoholic juice on Passover, then this could be considered conclusive evidence that the Bible itself was referring to the same beverage, and not to fermented wine. 

The upshot of all this was that the American Christian world in the mid-nineteenth century developed a disproportionate interest in the Passover drinking preferences of their Jewish compatriots, especially at the Seder, and Christian tracts would contain frequent interviews with Jews–though not necessarily the most learned or observant of them. Even when the Jewish informants took care to distinguish between their personal practices and the customs of Biblical Israel, the Temperance advocates had no qualms about quoting them selectively and out of context in order to prove their case.

American Jewish drinking habits were to take on a different significance after the Temperance lobby achieved its purposes and Prohibition became the law of the land in the United States with the passing of the Eighteenth Amendment in January 1920. Under the new law, the government was authorized to issue special permits for religious and sacramental consumption of wine, and these permits became a valuable commodity during the “Roaring Twenties.”

The proliferation of permit applications in the names of spurious Jewish “congregations” was given extensive coverage in the press, and the abuses (in which the criminal underworld sometimes had a hand) became a source of grave embarrassment to a Jewish community that was already under attack from antisemites and Nativist bigots.

Leaders of the Reform and Conservative movements responded by voluntarily forgoing their rights to permits, arguing that fermented wine was not really required by Jewish law. The Orthodox organizations did not follow suit, though they consistently declined to offer a halakhic justification for their position.

The wrath of the Orthodox was to be ignited to even greater ferocity when the Reform leadership appealed to the American Internal Revenue Department, asking for a total repeal of the religious exemptions for all Jewish groups. At this point a new controversy split the Jewish community, as Jews from all denominations began to feel serious reservations about the Reformers’ violation of the sacred separation of Church and State, and about their chutzpah in imposing halakhic positions upon Jews outside their own movement.

The divisions created by this controversy continued to affect Jewish communal life for a long times afterward.

We see then that even an innocent-looking choice between wine and grape juice for the Passover Seder can, under appropriate circumstances, become a focus for complex moral, political and religious issues.

---

---

My email address is: [email protected]

---

Two Thousand Years

by Eliezer Segal

“To be a free people in our own land,” proclaim the inspiring words of Israel’s anthem the Hatikvah, “is the hope of two thousand years.” I admit that I find the phrase very puzzling. The magic number of “two thousand years” is one that has become an ubiquitous cliché in Israeli conversation, where it is not at all strange to hear proud references to achievements like “the first Israeli basketball championship in two thousand years,” etc. 

Interestingly the original lyrics of the Zionist anthem as composed by the poet Naftali Hertz Imber did not specify the age of the hope, speaking merely of an “ancient hope.” The fact that the “two thousand years” did get interpolated onto the text bears witness to how central that number has come to be in Jewish consciousness.

What is the real significance of that time definition? In my experience, it has invariably been used to indicate a rough approximation of the time that has elapsed since the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. No doubt that was a national tragedy of terrible proportions involving not only the death, destruction, and suffering of a viciously suppressed rebellion, but also a traumatic crisis in religious life as the Jews found themselves without the sanctuary that had hitherto stood at the center of their worship.

There might have been more justification for using the phrase if its starting point had been in 63 B.C.E. when the Roman conquest of Jerusalem under Pompei brought a formal end to a century of Hasmonean sovereignty. In actual practice, however, it is the year 70 that is always singled out in the popular Jewish memory as the turning point in our political destiny. As one widely used Jewish history text puts it: “…Jerusalem fell and the Temple went up in flames. The Jewish state had ceased to be.” In truth, at the time of this disaster, Judaea had not been an independent Jewish state for well over a century.

As noted above, the words of the Hatikvah seem to imply that the destruction of the Temple marked the beginning of Jewish exile as well as statelessness. Though this perception seems to be a very widely held one, it is also devoid of factual foundation.

Jewish exile is a phenomenon that dates back many centuries before 70 C.E., to the captivity of the “ten lost tribes” of the northern Israelite monarchy, which was to be followed by the destruction of Judea and the first Temple, when masses of Jews were exiled to Babylonia. 

When the Jews returned to their homeland under Ezra and Nehemiah in the sixth century B.C.E., it was only a small group of loyalists who were prepared to leave their now-comfortable existences in Babylonia. The majority were of a less pioneering spirit, electing to remain in exile. Even those who did return to Jerusalem did not enjoy political independence, but passed through the hands of an assortment of foreign governments–Persian, Ptolemaic and Seleucid– until the successful rebellion of the Maccabees and the brief period of independence that ensued.

Through all periods of subsequent Jewish history there were more Jews living outside the borders of the Holy Land than within. The destruction of the Second Temple did not change that fundamental situation, though it did result in the expulsion of additional numbers of Jews, many of whom were taken as slaves to Rome. 

Another version of the argument would have it that the significance of the “two thousand years” lies in the fact that, from 70 C.E. the land of Israel became almost emptied of its Jews. This is also an absurd notion. Literary and archeological evidence attest to the fact that Jews continued to be the dominant population in most regions of Palestine for many centuries afterwards.

This fact is amply demonstrated by the monumental literary creations of the era: the Mishnah, Palestinian Talmud and a rich assortment of other rabbinic works. It is also apparent in the dozens of of synagogues and other monuments to thriving Judaism that are continually being unearthed in Judaea and the Galilee.

The more we learn about our past, the longer we find that Palestinian Jews maintained a vibrant religious and cultural life. Not too long ago it was commonly held that Jewish life functionally disappeared from the region from the fourth century, with the advent of Constantine and the Christianization of the Roman Empire. Under the severe persecutions–so the theory argued–many Jews abandoned their homeland, and those who remained were unable to produce anything of lasting value.

This view has also been discarded in the face of the historical data: It was precisely during this period of persecution that Jews in the Land of Israel were producing some of the most impressive creations of Jewish literary history: the many volumes of midrashic commentaries to the Bible, the masterpieces of liturgical poetry, the intensive study of the text and language of the Bible (Masora), and much more.

An interesting by-product of this situation was noted at the beginning of the revival of Jewish settlement in Israel in this century. When names had to be assigned to Jewish settlements it often proved surprisingly simple to reconstruct the original Hebrew name of the place, because it had been preserved in the Arabic. This simple phenomenon is actually of profound importance. When the Arabs conquered Palestine in the seventh century, many of these localities actually bore “official” Greek names. The Arabs however did not use the Greek names, but the ones they picked up from their current inhabitants, who were mostly Jews. They of course referred to their villages by their original Hebrew names.

I suspect that the myth of “two thousand years of Jewish exile” owes much of its popularity to its use by Christians. For them there was a theological import to asserting that the Jewish situation was radically changed soon after the time of Jesus as a punishment for their rejection of him. This argument figures prominently in ancient polemics, and has apparently penetrated into the Jewish consciousness as well.

As it relates to the later periods (between the third and tenth centuries), it seems that there were Jewish parties who had their own motives for minimizing the achievements of Palestinian Jewry. This era was marked by a fierce rivalry between the rabbinic leaderships of Babylonia and the Land of Israel for dominance in the religious life of world Jewry. It was the Babylonians who ultimately prevailed, largely because they had the support of the the major super-power of the time, the Muslim Caliphate centred in Baghdad (which now became the home of the major talmudic academies of the region). 

This rivalry often expressed itself in intensely polemical utterances in which Babylonian Jews would try to delegitimize the traditions of their Palestinian cousins, arguing that the latter’s customs were not to be take seriously because they were nothing more than emergency measures adopted during times of persecution. The “persecution” theory proved very convenient, since it allowed the Babylonian rabbis to reject Palestinian traditions without actually showing overt disrespect for the revered citizens of the Holy Land.

A similar phenomenon arose in modern times with the rise of the Zionist movement and the State of Israel. Israeli curricula in Jewish history (especially in the secularist stream) tend to skip directly from the Bar Kokhba revolt in the second century to the rise of Zionism at the end of the nineteenth. Everything in between is an uninteresting saga of persecution and oppression that is the antithesis of the Zionist ideal. This image of “two thousand years” of Jewish passivity served the ideological interests of Zionism as well, by equating geographical dispersion with political powerlessness. The fact that a number of short-lived independent Jewish states did arise in various places during the Middle Ages, outside the Land of Israel, is another story altogether, and would make an interesting subject for a separate study.

For the moment it strikes me as a bit too late in the game to emend the accepted lyrics of the Hatikvah. But I shall always feel uncomfortable singing that line.

---

• First Publication:  
• Jewish Free Press, May 4 1995, p. 9.

---

My email address is: [email protected]

---

The Tragic History of the “Omer” Season

by Eliezer Segal

It is now the almost universal practice among traditional Jews to observe the season of counting the “Omer” as a time of sadness, by refraining from activities that are associated with gaiety and celebration. The mourning period lasts from Passover until the thirty-third day, known as La”g ba’omer.

The melancholy mood of the Omer season is usually linked to the well-known Talmudic tradition about how thousands of Rabbi Akiva’s students perished between Passover and Shavu’ot. The Babylonian Talmud states that they died of a plague, though many historians discern a reference to death in battle, in the ill-fated Bar Kokhba revolt (in 135) of which Rabbi Akiva was an active supporter. 

The earliest records we possess about mourning during the Omer are contained in the Responsa of the Babylonian Ge’onim, who observed the restrictions during the entire forty-nine-day period, with no respite on the thirty-third day. The only prohibitions that are enumerated in these early texts are the holding of weddings and doing work after nightfall. Not until the thirteenth century was the list augmented to include shaving and cutting the hair.

The cessation of mourning practices on La”g ba’omer is not mentioned before the twelfth century in Spain and southern France, and the original significance of this date remains shrouded in obscurity. The shortening of the period was justified by means of an ingenious new interpretation of the Talmudic passage about the deaths of Rabbi Akiva’s disciples, according to which the plague had come to a halt half a month before Shavu’ot, just after the thirty-third day of the Omer.

The new practice and its historical rationale were accepted by most of the Sephardic halakhic authorities, including the Shulh\an Arukh. It is now followed by Jewish communities throughout the world.

Examination of early texts reveals that the older practice among Ashkenazic Jews was somewhat different from its current form. Instead of excluding the last third of the Omer period from the mourning observances, the Jews of medieval Germany used to commence the mourning customs two weeks into the Omer–at the beginning of the month of Iyyar–and continued them all the way through to Shavu’ot.

The reasons for the special character of the Omer season among Ashkenazic Jews becomes evident when we survey some of their synagogue rituals. From the beginning of Iyyar they would include special liturgical poems (piyyut) in commemoration of local massacres, and a memorial prayer for the souls of martyrs was recited on the Shabbat preceding Shavu’ot. This last-mentioned prayer was the familiar “Av Harah\amin” text that we still read on most Saturdays, and it is for this reason that we recite it during the Omer season even on festive Sabbaths (such as when Rosh Hodesh is announced), although it would have been omitted on equivalent occasions at other times of the year.

In the Ashkenazic custom, the intensity of the mourning was also increased by forbidding additional activities, such as wearing new clothing, bathing for pleasure and trimming fingernails.

It is possible to identify with precision the tragic events that were being commemorated by these practices. In the year 1096, bloodthirsty bands of Crusaders marched through the Rhine basin, mercilessly slaughtering Jewish men, women and children. The worst bloodshed occurred between the first of Iyyar and Shavu’ot. The Jewish populace of Speyer was attacked on the eighth of Iyyar, and the illustrious communities of Mainz and Köln fell to the marauders during the week preceding Shavu’ot.

It is hardly surprising that subsequent generations of Ashkenazic Jews came to focus their grief on the massacres that had occurred during that time of the year.

As always, our Jewish religious calendar maintains a living link between ourselves and the Jews of earlier eras. The rhythms of the Omer period, originating in the joys of the harvest and the associations with Passover and Shavu’ot, were transformed into monuments to national tragedy during the Bar Kokhba revolt and the Crusades. In recent times we have forged our own links to this living historical chain, by setting aside days to commemorate the momentous events of out times, the Holocaust and the sacrifices of Israel’s soldiers, as well as the elation of renewed Jewish statehood and the return to Jerusalem.

---

---

My email address is: [email protected]

---

Tradition or Compassion:

A Shavu’ot Controversy

by Eliezer Segal

An article in a previous] issue of the Jewish Free Press contained a concise account of how, owing to delays in notifying distant Jewish communities about the date when the new month had been declared in Jerusalem, extra days were added to what were originally supposed to be single-day festivals. Traditional Jews outside of Israel continue to observe the second days of the holidays even though their original reason became anachronistic with the adoption of a permanent calculated calendar.

There are in fact several exceptions and anomalies to the practice. For example, Rosh Hashana is observed even in Israel for two days (as noted [in that article]), whereas a two-day Yom Kippur fast was (thankfully) not considered a feasible option.

There is also an intriguing inconsistency in the observance of a second day of Shavu’ot, since the date for this holiday is not determined according to the day of the month, but by the counting of the Omer for fifty days after the first day of Passover. Thus, even in ancient times, there would never have arisen any doubts about the correct date of Shavu’ot.

Nonetheless, the halakhic tradition decided to add a second day in order to maintain consistency among the various holidays.

Under normal circumstances, the questionable status of the second day of Shavu’ot would not entail any practical consequences.

I recall, for example, the time when I was serving with the Israeli army in Lebanon and we were alowed to go home for Shavu’o. I tried to persuade my commanding officer that, since we were outside of Israel, we were entitled to two days’ leave. It is to the credit of Tzahal that they were not taken in for a moment by my specious argument. 

On a much more serious level, the status of the second day of Shavu’ot was the focus of a nineteenth-century controversy, which became a cause célèbre throughout the Jewish world.

The story involved a man in the Galician town of Brody who had taken ill and was deemed to have only hours left to live. The man had no children, and therefore his widow would become subject to the Biblical law of levirate marriage. This meant that she would be unable to remarry unless she obtained a formal release from her late husband’s brother, through the ceremony of “h\alitzah.” Since her brother-in-law lived in Italy, this would be difficult to accomplish, rendering the unfortunate widow an agunah, an “anchored woman.” Out of consideration for his wife’s fate, the husband proposed to divorce her in the last remaining hours of his life.

Unfortunately the timing of the events was problematic. It was Shavu’ot, when it would normally be forbidden to write a get. When the case was brought before the local halakhic authority, the eminent Rabbi Eleazar Landau, he cited the far-reaching leniencies that the halakhah had often adopted in order to ease the burden of the agunah, and ruled that in the present circumstances concern for the potential suffering of a widow should override the flimsy basis of the second day of Shavu’ot. He ordered that a scribe be brought on the second day and that the divorce be duly issued.

Not everyone was pleased with Rabbi Landau’s decision. A distinguished local sage, Rabbi Solomon Kluger, objected to his colleague’s tampering with an accepted Jewish ritual, and appealed to Rabbi Moses Schreiber of Presssburg (today’s Bratislava), the renowned “Chasam Sofer” who was considered that generation’s most distinguished spokesman for traditionalist Judaism.

The Chasam Sofer had often marshalled his phenomenal scholarship in an unrelenting war against the Enlightenment and Reform movements, opposing any innovations that might challenge or weaken the authority of traditional Judaism and the Rabbis who upheld it.

The Chasam Sofer argued that the very fact that the second day of Shavu’ot could not be justified on normal grounds showed that it was an independent Rabbinic law, and not just a consequence of calendrical doubts. Basing himself on a Talmudic principle that Rabbinic ordinances must be defended more firmly than those of the Torah itself, he argued that any diminishing of the status of the second day of Shavu’ot would invite further challenges to the authority of the Rabbinic tradition, and eventually lead to a complete erosion of Judaism.

In the animated and often vitriolic controversy that ensued, it was the position of the Chasam Sofer that eventually gained the upper hand, and is most frequently cited by Orthodox authorities.

I admit that I find it easier to sympathize with the situation of the unfortunate widow, and with Rabbi Landau’s humane subordination of ritual to ethical considerations. However we must also appreciate the position of Rabbi Schreiber in its historical context. The Chasam Sofer was waging a desperate campaign against forces that, in his view, threatened the very survival of Judaism. The experience of the German Enlightenment, which over two short generations had brought about a massive defection from the Jewish ranks, certainly provided legitimate grounds for alarm; and the feared liberal ideologies had already made significant inroads in Brody, the scene of our controversy, which was strategically situated on the border between central and eastern Europe.

The issues that underlay the dispute are still too fresh for us to dispassionately apply the insights of historical hindsight. In the long run, we cannot yet judge whether the interests of Jewish continuity were best served by the intransigence of the Chasam Sofer or by the flexibility of Rabbi Landau in their differing attitudes towards the second day of Shavu’ot.

---

My email address is: [email protected]

---

Yasher Koach: May You Have Strength!

by Eliezer Segal

Enthusiastic handshakes, accompanied by the Hebrew greeting “Yasher Koach,” are the standard expression of congratulations for those who have had the merit of participating in the public worship of the synagogue, especially the reading of the Torah.

The words “Yasher koach” translate literally as “May your strength be firm.” A benediction of this sort is always timely, but it is a curious one to be introducing on these particular occasions. Are we really concerned that an individual’s powers will have been significantly drained after having mounted the lectern and mouthed some blessings?

The origins of this practice are linked to those of a similar blessing that is recited on rarer occasions; i.e., the congregational declaration “Hazak hazak venit-hazek” that follows the conclusion of each of the five books of the Pentateuch. The meaning of that Hebrew phrase is analogous to that of “Yasher koach”: “Strong, strong, and let us be strengthened!”

From various descriptions of synagogue customs from the medieval period, we learn that the original practice was to wish each participant in the Torah reading Hazak hazak upon the conclusion of his `aliyah. The reason for this, it appears, was a practical one. According to the ancient procedure, the Torah had to be read while it was standing upright and its text visible to the congregation. The reader therefore had to physically support it by taking hold of its posts. Sephardic Torah scrolls are normally housed in as special box that can stand safely on the reading table, but to keep an Ashkenazic-style sefer Torah straight and not allow it to fall demanded some serious exertion.

It is therefore understandable that by-standers would do their best to encourage the reader to maintain the requisite vigor.

As often occurs in the evolution of religious customs, certain routines stubbornly persist even after their original reasons have ceased to be applicable. Though the Torah is now allowed to lie horizontally on the lectern, we still insist that the reader “support” it by symbolically grasping its wooden posts, and the people next to him continue to pray that the reader’s strength will suffice for the task.

Thus we have found ways to preserve the remnants of two different customs: The saying of Hazak has been relegated to the ceremonious conclusions of entire books, possibly owing to a misunderstanding of an old instruction that it be recited “when one finishes reading the Torah.”Yasher koach, on the other hand, has been adopted as the informal congratulatory formula for the normal `aliyah.

The customs we are describing date back to Talmudic times, and are attributed there to the heroes of the Bible. When God exhorted Joshua to take over Moses’ mantle of leadership, he instructed him that “this book of the Torah shall not depart out of thy mouth… be strong and of a good courage.” Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai deduced that the wording “this book” implies that Joshua was actually holding a Torah scroll at the time. The Rabbis discerned in this episode a precedent for saying Hazak to anyone who is grasping a Torah.

Similarly, when Moses declared “Cursed be the one who does not uphold all the words of this Torah,” the Talmudic Rabbis understood this as alluding to the obligation to offer verbal support to the person who is holding up a Torah scroll.

Indeed the fear of inadvertently dropping a sacred scroll was not the only fear that troubled participants in the synagogue services. Midrashic tradition speaks of the grave perils that were felt to threaten a person–whether from a hostile Satan or from the person’s own carelessness–when he accepted the momentous responsibility of praying on behalf of the congregation.

An interesting twist on this theme is contained in a midrashic interpretation quoted by Rashi in his very last comment to the end of the Book of Deuteronomy. When God (in Deut. 10:2) spoke to Moses about “the first tablets which [Hebrew: asher] you broke,” the Rabbis read this as if God were saying to Moses “Yasher koach for breaking the tablets” in reaction to the people’s worship of the Golden Calf. 

This midrash takes on a powerful poignancy when we bear in mind that the normal meaning of Yasher koach is “May you have strength not to cause the Torah to fall.” In this midrashic exposition, the usage is ironically reversed, as God reassures Moses saying: You have done the right thing in showing the strength and courage to hurl the Torah before a people that has proven itself unworthy of it.

At any rate, we hope for the strength to uphold both the scroll and its contents.

---

My email address is: [email protected]

---

---