Identity Crisis

by Eliezer Segal

We are becoming increasingly aware of the price to be paid for the technological conveniences of instant communication and on-line commercial transactions. In spite of the vigilance of security professionals, unscrupulous individuals continue to devise ways to steal the identities of innocent victims and spend other people’s money on extravagant shopping sprees. Sometimes it makes me nostalgic for the slow old days when most transactions had to be carried out in cumbersome face-to-face encounters.

The tragic consequences of a “phony ID” incident formed the basis of the bleak novella “And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight” by the Israeli Nobel laureate S. Y. Agnon. The story’s protagonist, the shopkeeper Menashe Hayyim, was reduced to poverty and had to try his luck as an itinerant beggar. Armed with a letter of reference signed by his rabbi, he succeeded quite well in his new craft and was persuaded to sell his letter to a fellow-mendicant.

Before he could return to his wife and home, Menashe Hayyim was robbed of all his cash and identifying possessions. Then the new owner of the letter died of starvation, and was erroneously identified as still-very-much-alive Menashe Hayyim. On the basis of that letter, his wife Kreindl Tsharneh was now presumed to be a widow and she received authorization to remarry. The new marriage, unlike her first, was blessed with a child.

When Menashe Hayyim returned unrecognized to his home town and found out what had been happening, he realized that if he were to reveal his true identity, then Kreindl Tsharneh would be placed in a state of adultery, unintentional though it might be, and her child would be declared illegitimate, a mamzer. Rather than shatter their chances for happiness, he quietly withdrew from the town and spent his remaining years as a beggar hovering around the cemetery. All because he had transferred an identifying document to another person.

In the earliest stages of its evolution, Jewish legal procedure usually gave credence only to the oral testimony of witnesses before the judge. This made it very hard to enforce agreements when the witnesses were located far away or were no longer alive. Accordingly, it was a major advance in the streamlining of commercial and other transactions when they recognized that a written signature could be accepted as a unique expression of a person’s identity and consent. When attached to a legal contract or a testimony, a certified signature serves as a substitute for the physical presence of the person.

Though in ancient times, as at present, a signature would usually consist of the person’s name, other symbols could also serve as acceptable identifiers. Thus, some rabbis would inscribe a single letter from their names, while others employed pictorial icons: Rav used a drawing of a fish, Rabbi Hanina drew a palm branch and Rabbah bar bar Hana a ship’s mast. 

When you think about it, the legal power embodied in a signature can be quite astounding. In rabbinic law, for example, if one of the original signatories to a document is no longer alive, then it can still be upheld if the signature is confirmed by valid witnesses or verified by comparison with an authorized copy preserved in a court archive.

You may be sure, however, that for as long as there have been signatures on bills and contracts, there has also been no shortage of greedy scoundrels ready to forge those signatures for their personal advantage. In diverse ways, Jewish religious law tried to fend off the forgers and identity thieves by setting out detailed procedures for how and where signatures must be placed on a document, how they should be interpreted when brought before a court, how to make corrections or deal with erasures, and so forth. For example, talmudic procedure states that one should avoid writing numeric sums next to the page margins, so as to prevent swindlers from adding digits to the numbers.

An extreme case of a forgery-proof document was the “bound deed” that was carefully folded and sewn into numerous pleats before being signed by at least three witnesses — convention that is much more secure than such contemporary practices as placing a signature on the sealed portion of envelope (as we professors are asked to do when submitting confidential letters of reference).

As in our times, it appears that the ancient criminals often kept a step ahead of the law-enforcement system as they devised their ingenious schemes for circumventing the law. The Talmud tells us of a forger who was caught signing the name of Rav Abba bar Adda to a bill. Rav Abba suffered from a severe shakiness and the judge asked the culprit how he was able to reproduce that quality so expertly in the faked signature. The forger retorted that he had copied the signatures while holding on to a quivering rope bridge or while standing on a vibrating irrigation hose.

The prevention of forgeries or misuse of signatures was a particular passion for the fourth-century Babylonian sage Abayé, as we can infer from some passages in the Talmud. On several occasions his sharp eyes noted subtle peculiarities in the the ways that certain letters or numbers were inscribed on legal documents–such as when there was either too much or too little space around a character. This led him to suspect that larcenous parties had altered the original texts in order to increase the sum or to misrepresent the identity of the beneficiary. When such questionable cases were brought before him, Abayé had the suspects taken into custody, where they eventually confessed to their wrongdoing.

In one instance, Abayé recommended that a person submit his signature for confirmation on a clay potsherd so that it could be authorized by the court. The Talmud notes that Abayé’s mention of a potsherd, rather than a more standard writing material like parchment or papyrus, was not incidental. He knew that if people get into the habit of leaving their autographs on blank sheets or paper, then they are inviting identity theft; as an ethically challenged miscreant could easily fill in the blank space before the signature with a declaration to the effect that the signatory owed him a large sum of money, or worse.

In a similar vein, Abayé recommended that a person who has occasion to register a signature on a paper or parchment document should make sure that it not be inscribed near the bottom of the document lest a swindler fill in the preceding space with damaging text. 

In connection with that ruling, the Talmud relates a story about a certain bridge toll collector who once approached Abayé offering toll-exempt status for the rabbis of his community–provided that Abayé sign the authorization. Abayé was happy to comply and kept trying to write his name near the top edge of the page, as the toll-man kept repositioning the page so that the autograph would end up at the bottom edge. The wily rabbi figured out what was going on and informed the unsuccessful con man that the rabbis had long ago anticipated the methods of scam artists and had imposed mechanisms to forestall them.

I have no doubt that if he were alive today, that toll collector would be busily at work sending out mass emails asking people to provide passwords and bank account information in order to claim their portions of Nigerian inheritances.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, January 15, 2010, p. 11.
• For further reading:
  • Aschkenasy, Nehama. “Biblical Substructures in the Tragic For m: Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge; Agnon, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight.” Modern Language Studies 13.1 (1983): 101-110. Print.
  • Band, Arnold J. “Agnon’s Synthetic Shtetl.” The Shtetl: New Evaluations. New York: New York University Press, 2007. 233-242. Print. 
  • Elon, Menachem. Jewish Law: History, Sources, Principles. A. Philip and Muriel Berman ed. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994. Print.
  • Segal, Eliezer. Case Citation in the Babylonian Talmud: The Evidence of Tractate Neziqin. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Tzeitel’s Dilemma

by Eliezer Segal

In Sholom Aleikhem’s familiar tale, when Tevyeh’s daughter Tzeitel insisted on taking a husband of her own choice, the incident was portrayed as a seismic crevice in the fabric of religious orthodoxy, and as the first in a series of skirmishes with modernity that would eventually culminate in the total breakdown of traditional Jewish life as it had been known for centuries.

Although we might be accustomed to regard the institution of arranged marriages as a hallmark of traditional Judaism, an examination of classical Jewish sources suggests that the practice, as it evolved in many medieval communities, really has a questionable status within the structures of Jewish religious law.

In fact, the evidence in the Talmud suggests that the practice of imposing marriages on brides was altogether prohibited, at least for young girls. The authoritative pronouncement on the subject was ascribed to the third century Babylonian scholar Rav who stated: “It is forbidden for a father to arrange a marriage for his daughter when she is still a child. He must wait until she is old enough to say ‘I choose So-and-So.'” In keeping with the usual rules of halakhic decision-making, Rav’s statement was adopted as the normative position of talmudic law.

However, the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages was marked by an extreme about-face on this topic. Whether in the Middle East, in North Africa or in Europe, the widespread practice was for Jewish parents to arrange the marriages of their children, often at very tender ages, and to compel girls to accept the husbands that were chosen for them.

The medieval rabbinic authorities were well aware of the discrepancy between their norms and the teachings of the sages in the Talmud. They proposed several different ways to reconcile the apparent contradiction.

In the eyes of some commentators, the Talmud’s insistence on obtaining the bride’s consent to her marriage was utterly unimaginable, a blatant violation of respectable standards of conduct. A medieval head of the Babylonian yeshivah expressed outright defiance of Rav’s statement when he insisted that an unmarried woman, if she was twenty years of age, ought to be residing in her father’s home and should be subject to his patriarchal authority when it came to choosing a mate. The eminent scholar did not mince words when he declared: “There is no greater insolence or effrontery to be imagined in a daughter of Israel than for her to voice her own opinion and to declare ‘I wish to marry So-an-So’!”

No less than their Middle Eastern colleagues, the rabbinic authorities of medieval Europe were also committed to the perpetuation of imposed marriages; however, they did not have the audacity to reject an explicit ruling of the Talmud. Their usual tendency when faced with such contradictions was to resolve the conflicts by introducing creative interpretations of the problematic sources.

Among the scholars who were most adept at this kind of learned virtuosity was the twelfth-century French scholar Rabbi Jacob Tam. He argued that, contrary to the impression created by an initial reading of the text, it was wrong to assume that Rav’s ruling was accepted by the Talmud’s compilers as normative law. Rabbenu Tam drew on his extraordinary erudition and halakhic ingenuity in order to demonstrate that Rav’s opinion was really an isolated one, and should be rejected in favour of other passages in the Talmud that adopted the contrary position.

An even more imaginative interpretation of the problematic talmudic text was put forward by Rabbi Menahem Ha-Me’iri, the distinguished thirteenth-century halakhic authority from Perpignan, Provence (southern France). Me’iri went so far as to interpret Rav’s words as if he intended to say: once a girl reaches adulthood, we may safely assume that she is so desperate to find a husband that she will agree to any man whom her father finds for her!

Other commentators were more frank when it came to confronting the contradiction between the talmudic precedents and their contemporary practice. They tried to justify the contemporary predilection for arranged marriages by pointing to mitigating historical and social factors that had given rise to the practice.

Thus, after surveying all the relevant talmudic quotations related to the topic, the Tosafot acknowledged nonetheless that “in our own times, we usually arrange our daughters’ marriages even when they are still minors. The reason for this is that with each day the burdens of the exile become more difficult for us; and even if today a man might find himself with the wherewithal to provide a dowry for his daughter, perhaps in a short time he will no longer possess those means, and his daughter will be forced to spend the rest of her days in spinsterhood.”

Some other medieval rabbis adduced an additional consideration that made it advisable to contract child-marriages: the difficulty of finding a suitable partner provoked the apprehension that, if people were to wait until their daughters were old enough to pick out their own husbands, the pool of appropriate mates might be depleted by then, especially in unstable times.

This concern found poignant expression in the words of Rabbi Elijah of London who wrote: “Our numbers are so diminished nowadays that we are worried lest somebody else might steal away the prospective mate. It is for this reason that we arrange marriages for young girls.”

It is natural for us to lump the practice of arranged child marriages together with other archaic institutions that combined to subjugate women and restrict their life choices. Surprisingly, many advocates of Jewish religious reform in nineteenth-century Europe viewed the matter from a decidedly different perspective.

For all their progressive ideas, the eastern European proponents of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, subscribed to an outlook that we would now brand as male chauvinism. Basing themselves on the dominant social and psychological theories of the time, they believed that a harmonious household required that the husband be the master of the house, with the wife ever subservient to his authority. Several of the Haskalah authors grounded their opposition to child marriage in the fact that the grooms were also likely to be very young. They found that such unions served to undermine the patriarchal ideal by placing the wife in a position of dominance over her husband.

The reason for this had to do with the discrepancies between the respective paces of physical and emotional maturation that distinguish males and females during their adolescent years. Accordingly, even if a teen-age boy were to be married to a girl who was slightly younger than himself, it is likely that her personality would be more developed than his, and that he would be at a disadvantage when it came to asserting his authority in the domestic arena. Opposition to enforced marriages was therefore linked to a belief in the subservience of women. The dysfunctions, traumas and family breakdowns that resulted from this state of affairs were described in intimate detail by some of the Haskalah advocates as they led the fight against the medieval social structure.

In our contemporary situation, with the average North American Jewish marriage age (at least in non-Orthodox circles) weighing in at thirty-one years, those tender marriages are starting to look more appealing. A bit of arranging, whether by the parents or by other helpful parties, might be the best way to get those unmarried children out of your basement.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, February 5, 2010, p. 13.
• For further reading:
  • Abrahams, Israel, 1969, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages, New York: Atheneum.
  • Biale, David, 1992, Eros and the Jews: from Biblical Israel to Contemporary America, New York: Basic Books.
  • Bartal, Israel, 1998, ‘Potency’ and ‘Impotence’: Between Tradition and Haskalah, in Sexuality and the Family in History: Collected Essays, edited by I. Bartal and I. Gafni, Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History.
  • Biale, David. Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
  • Falk, Ze’ev W., 1966, Jewish Matrimonial Law in the Middle Ages, edited by A. Altmann and J. G. Weiss, Scripta Judaica, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Freeze, ChaeRan Y. Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2002.
  • Goitein, S. D., 1967, A Mediterranean Society: the Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 6 vols, Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • Friedman, Mordechai A., 1974, The Ethics of Medieval Jewish Marriage, in Religion in a Religious Age, edited by S. D. Goitein, Cambridge, Mass.: Association for Jewish Studies.
  • Satlow, Michael L. Jewish Marriage in Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
  • Shremer, Adiel, 1998, ‘Eighteen Years to the Huppah‘? The Marriage Age of Jews in Eretz Israel in the Temple, Mishna and Talmud Periods, in Sexuality and the Family in History: Collected Essays, edited by I. Bartal and I. Gafni, Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Poëma de la Reyna Ester

by Eliezer Segal

The Spanish-language poet João Pinto Delgado (c. 1585-1653) is considered to by many to be one of the shining luminaries in the literature of the Conversos [or “Marranos”], the Jews who secretly tried to observe their ancestral religion under the malevolent eyes of the Spanish Inquisition while outwardly maintaining a facade of Christian orthodoxy. Delgado’s claim to distinction in the realm of Jewish letters stems primarily from a volume of poems that he published in 1627 on an assortment of biblical texts: including the Exodus from Egypt, Lamentations, Jeremiah, Ruth and his “Poëma de la Reyna Ester”–a retelling of the book of Esther in Spanish verse.

Delgado’s father had been born in Portugal and he returned there after a sojourn in Antwerp. He later migrated to France spending most of his creative life in the bustling commercial centre of Rouen where he declared his Judaism in a relatively open manner. He and his son the poet held distinguished offices in the civil administration of Rouen. Though the true religious allegiance of the city’s Conversos was a very open secret, they were generally left undisturbed in their Jewish observances until 1632 when an internal dispute in the local Spanish and Portuguese community led to official denunciations, forcing the family to flee to Antwerp. Eventually the crisis was averted as a few generous bribes succeeded in eliciting ecclesiastical certificates of their impeccable Christian orthodoxy–all this notwithstanding the fact that Delgado was publicly known to be a Jew, and he even answered to the recognizably Hebrew name of Moses.

His respectability as a poet is attested by the fact that his collection of biblical verse was introduced with a dedication to “the most illustrious and most reverend Cardinal de Richelieu.” In that dedication he humbly conceded that his literary treatment of scripture was not intended to compete with the deeply religious dimensions of the original holy scripture. Indeed, one of the author’s artistic goals was to refashion the biblical stories according to the currently prevailing standards of poetic elegance. Students of Spanish letters are convinced that he succeeded wonderfully in that mission–even while avoiding some fashionable stylistic devices that were inconsistent with Jewish sensibilities, such as the allusions to classical mythology that were so prominent in conventional Christian literature at the time.

From a Jewish perspective, one of the most interesting questions regarding his oeuvre has always been the degree to which it qualifies as authentically Jewish literature, especially when we bear in mind that it was published under the cloak of the author’s Christian orthodoxy. As long as they remained in Iberia, the crypto-Jews were denied access to Jewish texts other than the standard Christian translations of the Bible. Deprived of any knowledge of the Talmud, Midrash or classic commentaries, their understanding of Judaism was frequently quite shallow or skewed. Even after eluding the clutches of the Inquisition, familiarity with Hebrew was not very widespread in the Converso communities.

To be sure, the Latin “Vulgate” translation of Esther that was endorsed by the church contained extensive additions to the story that appears in our Bibles. These originated in the old Greek versions, and included explicitly “religious” motifs such as the protagonists’ prayers and a prophetic dream of Mordecai. Although these elements were excluded from the Masoretic text of the Bible that was accepted by Judaism, several of their themes did find their way back into our tradition through midrashic works and other Hebrew elaborations of scripture. Therefore it is not surprising that passages of that sort appear in Delgado’s “Poëma de la Reyna Ester.”

However, there are sections in the poem that cannot be accounted for on that basis. A conspicuous example of this phenomenon relates to the aftermath of Queen Vashti’s defiance of Ahasuerus’s command to appear before the celebrants at the banquet. The Bible relates that the king consulted with his wise men about how to deal with his rebellious wife. However, in Delgado’s version it was the Jewish sages to whom he turned for advice. They, in turn, declined to offer counsel, pleading that they had been deprived of their wisdom after the destruction of Jerusalem. Therefore, they suggested, it would be more profitable if the king would turn to sages from Moab and Ammon who have never suffered exile from their homelands.

When Mordecai overhears Bigtan and Teresh conspiring against the king, the poem states that they were speaking in the Tarsian language, but that Mordecai as a member of the Jewish court was able to understand them because he was proficient in seventy languages. When Mordecai refused to bow to Haman, Delgado’s poem explains that the villain was presenting himself as a deity and the stalwart Jew was taking a stand against idol-worship.

Or, to cite yet another instance, in the biblical story Haman’s wife Zeresh warned her spouse against antagonizing Mordecai the Jew because he would “surely fall before him.” Delgado expanded the admonition as if to say that when the Jews fall, they descend to the dust, but when they rise, they ascend as far as the stars.

In all these cases, as in several other instances in Delgado’s biblical poems, we may easily identify the sources of his narrative expansions in the words of the talmudic rabbis. This would seem to prove beyond any doubt that Delgado, unlike many of his contemporary Conversos, had received a solid Hebrew education that allowed him to read rabbinic works. 

However, it is probable that his erudition stemmed from a different and more interesting source. The references can be traced to a manuscript now housed in the British Library whose Latin title-page identifies it as containing the comments of Rabbi Solomon Yarchi [=Rashi] to the book of Esther, as well as some excerpts from the Talmud and the Yalkut [=Yalkut Shimoni, an important medieval anthology of midrashic interpretations]. The editor of this collection was one Louis-Henri d’Aquin. As with Delgado’s book, this volume’s ostensible Christian credentials are vouched for by the fact that it is dedicated to Peyrissac, Canon of Bordeaux and Agent-General for Ecclesiastical Affairs in France.

The scholar who provided this selection and translation into Latin was a Jewish convert to Christianity who had immigrated from southern Italy to France. In composing works like this that were avowedly designed to serve the interests of Catholic scholarship, it is likely that d’Aquin’s true intention was to facilitate the access of Conversos to their lost heritage. Every single example of Delgado’s knowledge of rabbinic tradition can be found in d’Aquin’s anthology. 

There can be no question that authors like Delgado and d’Aquin, as well as their Converso readers, found profound guidance and inspiration in the stories about ancient Hebrew heroes who, in the wake of a historic catastrophe, concealed their true identities from a hostile foreign environment as they faithfully awaited divine redemption.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, February 26, 2010, p. 9.
• For further reading:
  • The Poem of Queen Esther. Translated by David R. Slavitt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
  • Fishlock, A. D. H. “The Rabbinic Material in the Ester of Pinto Delgado.” Journal of Jewish Studies 2, no. 1 (1950): 37-50.
  • Oelman, Timothy, ed. Marrano Poets of the Seventeenth Century: An Anthology of the Poetry of João Pinto Delgado, Antonio Enríquez Gómez, and Miguel De Barrios, Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. Rutherford [N.J.] and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Associated University Presses, 1982.
  • Roth, Cecil. “João Pinto Delgado–a Literary Disentanglement.” Modern Language Review 30, no. 1 (1935): 19-25.
  • Wilson, Edward M. “The Poetry of João Pinto Delgado.” Journal of Jewish Studies 1 (1949): 131-143.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Pop Goes Passover

by Eliezer Segal

The Passover Haggadah is sprinkled with names of some of the greatest rabbis of ancient times. In its pages we may encounter stellar figures like Rabbis Akiva, Eleazar ben Azariah, Gamaliel, Joshua and Tarfon. The illustrious scholars of subsequent ages also contributed commentaries in order to enhance the festival’s meaning and relevance.

Still, one rabbi who made a unique contribution to the Passover experience remains relatively unknown to the Jewish public. His name was Tobias Geffen, and his claim to fame and to our appreciation lies in a dearly valued achievement: it was thanks to Rabbi Geffen that Coca-Cola was certified as Kosher, for general use as well as for Passover!

Tobias Geffen was an old-style European rabbi in the traditional mold. The son of a lumber merchant in Kovno, Lithuania, he studied at the local Cheder and then at the Yeshivah of Grodno where he was granted his rabbinical ordination. As he was setting out on his adult trajectory of family and career, it was becoming increasingly clear that eastern Europe was not a hospitable place for Jews. As with many of his contemporaries, the bloody Kishinev pogrom of 1903 persuaded Rabbi Geffen to book steerage for himself and his family on a ship sailing to America. 

After an unsuccessful stint in the men’s clothing business, Geffen accepted a rabbinical post in New York City’s Lower East Side. The unsavory conditions in the crowded urban tenements soon induced him to relocate to a pulpit in Canton, Ohio in 1907; however, the chilling winters there proved hazardous to his health, forcing him to take up a position at Atlanta’s Shearith Israel congregation where he remained from 1910 until his death in 1969 at the age of 100. The humble Rabbi Geffen is credited with numerous accomplishments in the realms of religious scholarship, Jewish education, philanthropic activity and advocacy of Jewish causes.

His involvement with Coca-Cola began in 1935 in response to a question that was addressed to him about the kosher status of the popular soft drink. He was opportunely placed to study this question because Atlanta was the site of the corporation’s headquarters. Rabbi Geffen’s investigation revealed that Coke was composed of a mixture of vegetable-based flavorings whose precise combination was known only to the manufacturers. The only problematic item in the mixture was the glycerin oil that functioned as a preservative and solvent, and contained liquid fats derived from non-kosher animals. The proportions of this ingredient (as confirmed from analysis by a government chemist) were very minute.

Some initial methodological doubts arose concerning the trustworthiness of such scientific testimony for a halakhic decision, especially if it issued from a non-Jewish chemist. Rabbi Geffen concluded that in the present instance, where the assessment reflected on the expert’s professional reputation, it was reasonable to assume that the scientist would not dare misrepresent the findings.

In his responsum, the seasoned talmudic scholar demonstrated his erudition by heaping up various reasons for prohibiting the product: after all, the argument about the gentile expert’s professional reputation might not apply in a case such as this one that was only relevant to observant Jews; and the talmudic rule that sometimes overlooks minute quantities of forbidden substances does not necessarily extend to preservatives, to ingredients that can be separated from a mixture, or to solutions that are essential to the product’s nature or are created as an intentional part of the manufacturing process. And the rules might have to be applied more strictly if it turned out that there were Jews among the ranks of the company’s owners.

A separate problem was posed by the presence in the formula of a small amount of alcohol derived from leaven-based sources–which cast doubts about the beverage’s permissibility on Passover, when intolerance for forbidden ingredients extends even to tiny amounts.

At this point in his discussion, Rabbi Geffen was ready to conclude (at least for the sake of argument) that in his opinion “one should not allow this beverage to be drunk throughout the year, and all the more should be prohibited on Passover, since it contains alcohol which is clearly forbidden in the tiniest proportion.”

Fortunately for devotees of the beloved beverage, the matter was not allowed to rest there. The Coca-Cola company approached the good rabbi and expressed to him their desire to cooperate in extending their market base to include the discriminatingly observant Orthodox Jewish demographic. They assured him of their willingness to cooperate fully toward achieving that noble objective.

Encouraged by that offer (perhaps it was one that he “could not refuse”), Rabbi Geffen turned to the scientific community for assistance. His discussions with chemists revealed that it was possible without undue difficulty to replace the problematic ingredients with halakhically acceptable substitutes. He learned that glycerin oils can be derived from coconuts and other vegetable sources. By the same token, alcohol may be extracted from sources other than those problematic grains. 

The question however remained: Would that bastion of the American national identity, the mighty Coca-Cola corporation, consent to introducing changes into their manufacturing process at the request of an immigrant Lithuanian rabbi and for the sake of a handful of Jewish religious fanatics?

Indeed they did live up to their promise, probably thanks to the efforts of prominent Jewish attorney Harold Hirsch who sat on the company’s directorate. Rabbi Geffen reported six months later that the Atlanta factory had switched entirely to vegetable glycerin oil and non-grain alcohols for the Passover run, using only vats that were certified with Rabbi Geffen’s handwritten signature. “And now,” he pronounced with perceptible satisfaction, “even the most meticulously observant can enjoy drinking the beverage Coca-Cola throughout the year as well as on the Passover festival. So I give thanks to the good Lord that I proved capable of making such a substantial contribution to benefit the community and to safeguard them from committing a grave transgression…” He noted that the urgency for this pronouncement was particularly glaring because the popularity of Coke in the United States and Canada was so great that it would have been impossible to wean Jews away from it.

The original Hebrew version of Rabbi Geffen’s decision was quite unguarded about identifying the troublesome ingredients by their English (or, at least, Yiddishized) names. However, a later English publication of the same document substituted cryptic code-words: glycerin oil became “moris” or “the M,” and grain alcohol was designated “anigron.” These were in fact talmudic terms that had nothing to do with the actual ingredients in Coca-Cola. The former word referred to “muries,” fish brine, and the latter to “elaiogarum,” a popular fish sauce.

Clearly, the reason for this adulteration of the recipe’s text was rooted in Coca-Cola’s notorious secret formula, reputedly stored in a vault and known only to a select cabal of high-echelon company executives. Even for purposes of an obscure discussion of Jewish dietary laws, the beverage’s manufacturers insisted on zealously guarding their precious mystery. 

The ability to drink Coca-Cola was regarded by many as a fundamental mark of full participation in the American ethos, especially in Georgia. Viewed from this perspective, Rabbi Tobias Geffen’s contribution in extending that privilege to observant Jews was a truly liberating achievement, worthy of being honoured on the Festival of Freedom.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, March 12, 2010, p. 12.
• For further reading:
  • Geffen, Tobias, ed. Lev Tuviah: On the Life and Work of Rabbi Tobias Geffen. 1st ed. Newton, Mass.: Rabbi Tobias Geffen Memorial Fund, 1988. 
  • Geffen, Tobias. Nazer Yosef: Crown of Yosef. Vol. 2. 2 vols. Atlanta: [by author], 1963. 
  • Graitcer, Philip. “Always Coca-Cola, Not Always Kosher: How Coke got its rabbinic stamp of approval.” MP3. Tablet Magazine. http://www.tabletmag.com/podcasts/1985/always-coca-cola-not-always-kosher/.
  • Hoffmann, Roald. Old Wine, New Flasks: Reflections on Science and Jewish Tradition. Edited by Shira Leibowitz Schmidt. New York: W.H. Freeman, 1997.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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In Search of the Perfect Haroset Recipe

Apples or Asphalt?:

In Search of the Perfect Haroset Recipe

by Eliezer Segal

Of all the exotic and challenging foodstuffs that make up the Passover diet, there is one menu item that everybody anticipates with pure delight: the paste known in Hebrew as “haroset.” There are innumerable recipes for configuring the haroset, each with its subtle nuances of taste and symbolism–but common to all of them is a sweetness that imbues it with a special charm amid the dryness of the matzah, the sharpness of the bitter herbs or the blandness of most other Passover foods.

The Mishnah mentions haroset as one of the dips that are eaten as hors d’oeuvres before the commencement of the main meal. It appears that the older custom was to use lettuce for both the pre-seder dipping (karpas) and for the mandatory partaking of maror, but most communities switched to other types of greens for the karpas segment, leaving the haroset for the maror. 

The Mishnah provides no description of the haroset’s ingredients or mode of preparation, nor is any specific reason adduced for its inclusion in the menu. There is a dispute regarding its status as a mandatory component of the seder–whether or not it is a mitzvah, a precept required by the Torah. 

The sages of the Talmud suggested several reasons why haroset is an appropriate addition to the Passover meal. 

One approach ascribed a utilitarian function to the dip, in that it serves to neutralize the adverse effects of certain vegetables. The Talmud states that dipping a green vegetable in haroset serves to remove the kappa, but the commentators disagree about what exactly “kappa” is. Rav Hai Gaon identifies it with the bloating and gas that are generated by lettuce and some other greens, and he notes that haroset has the medicinal quality of alleviating that discomfort. Other interpreters equate the kappa with some kind of toxic or acidic substance in the vegetable that is counteracted by haroset. Still others, including Rabbenu Hananel of Kairowan, understood that kappa is a species of worm that infests the maror unless it is killed or repelled by the haroset. Indeed, the ancient naturalist Pliny wrote about worms called kampai that are found in radishes, lettuce and cabbage. 

It follows from these approaches that haroset has no unique association with Passover, and that it would be a good idea to consume it whenever the offending vegetables are served. At any rate, if the dipping was instituted primarily for medicinal purposes, then it would become superfluous with vegetables that carry no offensive side-effects. Indeed, the Tosafot report that Rabbi Jacob Tam drew the conclusion that there was no longer any reason to eat haroset with the karpas as long as that ritual was being fulfilled with vegetables that were free from the dangers of gas, acidity or worms. Such was the power of the entrenched custom that it would take centuries before Rabbenu Tam’s approach was widely adopted.

Not all the authorities were content with such prosaic and practical explanations of a custom on a holiday that is brimming full of symbolism. 

Two rabbis in the Talmud proposed reasons why eating haroset might be specifically applicable to the themes of Passover. “Rabbi Levi says: as a reminder of the apple tree. Rabbi Yohanan says: as a reminder of the mortar.”

The Talmud does not explain Rabbi Levi’s association between apple trees and the exodus; but the commentators all agree that he was alluding to a poignant legend found elsewhere in the Talmud as an exposition of Song of Songs 8:5: “Under the apple tree I roused you; there your mother conceived you, there she who was in labor gave you birth.” The rabbinic homily applied the verse to the Israelite women in Egypt who heroically continued to bear children in defiance of Pharaoh’s edict that he would drown the male infants. In this connection, the midrash related that the women “went and gave birth to their babies in the fields beneath the apple-tree.” 

Aside from evoking that inspiring tale about our faithful ancestors in Egypt, Rabbi Levi’s explanation has the advantage of informing us about one of the ingredients in the haroset recipe: apples. 

According to Rabbi Yohanan’s interpretation, the haroset is supposed to resemble mortar of the kind used by the Hebrew slaves in their labours, and the name haroset was itself linked to “heres” meaning clay. Other traditions preserved in the Talmud associate the haroset with straw used for manufacturing bricks, or with the blood of the Hebrew victims of the oppression. Abayé concluded that when preparing the dish one should have in mind both explanations: because it is supposed to resemble mortar, it must be thickened, and because it reminds us of apples, it should be made tart (probably by adding some vinegar). Rabbi Moses Isserles records the Ashkenazic custom of adding red wine to achieve a blood-like coloration.

In several communities, Rabbi Levi’s association with the biblical apple tree grew into a more general tendency to fashion haroset from fruits that are mentioned in the Song of Songs and which were interpreted as symbols for the people of Israel. These include pomegranates, figs, dates and nuts. While some authorities were eager to include any fruit or nut that appears in the scriptural texts, others were insistent that the ingredients list be restricted to items that have favourable associations, or which were expounded specifically in connection with the redemption from Egypt.

By adopting such a narrowly literal attitude toward the components of their haroset, the scholars would at times find themselves in conflict with recipes that had become entrenched among the Jewish populace. Thus, the fifteenth-century German authority Rabbi Israel Isserlein was at a loss to account for the popularity of pears, which are not mentioned at all in the Bible, in the haroset mixture. His Boswell, Rabbi Joseph ben Moses, hazarded an explanation proposed by his father to the effect that the pear was added not because of any scriptural association, but rather because it lent the mixture a mortar-like colouring. Rabbi Joseph surmised that his literal-minded teacher evidently did not deem this an adequate justification for the custom, seeing how the Talmud spoke only of a mortar-like texture, but not about the colour. 

This argument did not phase Rabbi Eliezer Rokeah who recommended the inclusion of ingredients like calamus, cinnamon and ginger. He reasoned that those spices cannot be ground up completely, and therefore will leave stiff fibres that give the haroset a texture not unlike that of mortar mixed with straw.

And if you are not satisfied with replicating the colour and texture of building materials, you might be attracted by a recipe preserved by Rabbi Zedekiah ben Abraham Anaw of Rome, the thirteenth-century authority on liturgical customs. In his compendium Shibbolei Ha-Leket, he reports that some people place shreds of actual mortar or shavings from bricks in their haroset! 

Reading this report several centuries later, Rabbi Menahem di Lonzano was convinced that such fanatical literalism smacked of utter insanity. He preferred to speculate that a typographical error must have found its way into the text. 

I think that Rabbi di Lonzano underestimated the zeal for minute detail that takes hold of many Jews in their determination to observe the perfect Passover.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, March 26, 2010, p. 16.
• For further reading:
  • Kasher, Menahem. Hagadah Shelemah: The Complete Passover Hagadah. Jerusalem: Torah Shelema Institute, 1967.
  • Lieberman, Saul. Tosefta Ki-Feshuṭah. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1955.
  • Löw, Immanuel. Die Flora Der Juden. Hildesheim: Gd. Olms, 1967.
  • Tabory, Joseph. Passover Ritual Throughout the Generations [Pesaḥ Dorot: Peraḳim Be-Toldot Lel Ha-Seder]. Sifriyat “Helal Ben-Ḥayim”. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1996.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Three Cheers for the White and Blue

by Eliezer Segal

I am not the sort of person who gets emotionally inspired by flag-waving. Nevertheless, I can still manage a thrill at the sight of the Israeli flag, which began as the emblem of the Zionist movement and was afterwards adopted by the newly created state. My admiration is not diminished by the fact that its design is simple enough to be reproduced with reasonable accuracy by kindergarten children. 

It is especially important for me to appreciate that the flag’s design seems to have emerged from the grass roots of the Jewish people rather than from the fiat of an executive committee or institution. Since the time of its initial appearance, there has been an intuitive recognition that the banner is an appropriate one and should not be changed.

The closest thing we have to an official story of the creation of the Zionist flag comes from David Wolffsohn, Theodor Herzl’s protégé and successor to the presidency of the World Zionist Organization. Herzl was determined to endow the Zionist Congress in Basel with all the pomp and circumstance of a solemn affair of state, and decided that for that occasion it would be fitting to display a national flag. He assigned Wolffsohn the responsibility for choosing the appropriate flag. Wolfssohn later recalled his perplexity at this mission which was exacerbated, he felt, by the traditional Jewish antipathy towards visual arts.

However, a flash of inspiration came to him when he realized that there was a venerable Jewish ritual object that could serve as the prototype for the flag of the Hebrew national home. The prayer-shawl, talit, with its stripes of azure (tekhelet) had for centuries accompanied Jewish prayers and aspirations. Add the familiar “star of David” and you have the perfect decoration to impress the dignitaries attending the congress.

Like many such foundational tales, there is something about this one that seems just a bit too neat. Even if we were to accept that the early Zionists were so sympathetic to the religious sancta of traditional Jewish worship, the use of blue stripes was something of a rarity in the designs of prayer-shawls, for which black was the more common colour used for the stripes. Nevertheless, the tekhelet harks back to the original biblical precept of attaching a blue thread to the ritual fringes–a practice that was discontinued in antiquity because of the widespread use of artificial dyes. Rabbinic tradition had attached profound symbolism to that colour which serves to remind us of the sublime heavens and our duties to the God who dwells there. It is doubtful that such lofty spiritual ideas motivated the early Zionist leadership.

Wolffsohn’s story about the flag’s origin was later challenged by Morris Harris, an awning-maker and inventor in Harlem, New York. He claimed that it was he who devised the familiar banner for a reception that was given by the local chapter of the Hovevei Zion movement to welcome back one of their members from the first Zionist Congress in 1897. His mother, Lena Harris, was the Betsy Ross who did the actual sewing of the 6′ by 10′ flag, along with a dozen smaller versions that represented the twelve tribes of Israel. It was only after Harris’ design had achieved popularity that it was adopted at the second Zionist Congress in the following year.

An even earlier instance of the blue and white design can be traced to 1885 when the village of Rishon Lezion flew one (with the word “Zion” embroidered inside the star) in connection with its anniversary celebrations. 

In spite of the discrepancies between those testimonies, they attest to the consensus that surrounded the choice of the colour for symbolizing the Jewish nation. The notion that the blue and white prayer shawl embodies the Jewish national identity (“blue and white are the borders of Judah”) had already been expressed in a poem published in 1867 by the Austrian poet Ludwig August Frankel.

In fact, Herzl’s personal suggestion for a flag design consisted of seven golden stars placed on a white background. This would symbolize what he evidently regarded as the proudest achievement of his Judenstadt: the institution of the seven-hour work day! His surviving sketch for the proposed flag has six of the stars arranged as a hexagram, with the seventh hovering above them. A variation on this theme still survives in the municipal crest of Tel-Aviv.

When the Jewish state was established officially in 1948 it was natural, but by no means inevitable, that the established Zionist banner should now be adopted as the flag of Israel. There was however some concern that Zionist organizations and sympathizers abroad would be put in an awkward position if they were perceived to be expressing their allegiance to a foreign state. With the spectre of dual-loyalties accusations in mind, Israeli foreign minister Moshe Shertok (later: Sharet) commissioned a public competition for the design of a new national flag. The contest elicited 164 entries. Though the committee members themselves generally leaned toward a revival of Herzl’s seven-star concept or the substitution of a seven-branched menorah, many of the contest submissions were very similar to the existing Zionist flag, rearranging its blue and white star and stripes in different combinations.

The chief objections that were voiced by the various parliamentary committees were directed against the incorporation of the “star of David.” The eminent archaeologist Eliezer Lipa Sukenik charged that it was a dubious symbol that had no real historical associations with Judaism–though Yizhak ben Zvi pointed out that its fifty years of use as a Zionist symbol was itself of considerable historical significance. Justice Minister Moshe Shapira rejected Herzl’s seven-star model on the grounds that the stars would necessarily be reduced so much in size that their distinctive shape would no longer be readily visible to the eye. A visiting delegation from America protested that it would be a shameful slap in the face of diaspora Jewry if the new state were to abandon the beloved Zionist emblem.

In the meantime, Shertok surveyed some leading Zionist leaders from outside Israel to see how they felt about the need for separate Zionist and Israeli flags. Though they were not particularly perturbed by the dual loyalties question, the consultation did provide them with opportunities to submit their own ideas for a flag. Chaim Weizman, for example, proposed the addition of a lion of Judah clutching the tablets of the law. This was not (he was quick to explain) because he favoured the intrusion of religious clericalism into politics, but rather because the Bible was a recognized pillar of “human culture.”

When the official committee on symbols and flag issued its recommendations, they favoured a design that would differ as little as possible from the existing Zionist flag. Accordingly, after airing all the problems and tweaking the precise dimensions and colours of the stripes and star, the provisional government voted that the familiar Zionist flag should be adopted unchanged as the flag of the sovereign state of Israel.

And may that blue and white banner continue to wave over the land for many years!

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, April 16, 2010, p. 10.
• For further reading:
  • Eliav, Mordechai. “LeQorotav Shel HaDegel Ha-Ẓiyyoni.” Kivvunim 3. 49-59 (1979). 
  • Handelman, Don, and Lea Shamgar-Handelman. “The Choice of the National Emblem of Israel.” In Culture through Time: Anthropological Approaches, by Amigo Ohnuki-Tierney, 193-226. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.
  • “The History of Israel’s National Flag.” Cathedra 62 (1991): 155-171.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Extended Warranty

by Eliezer Segal

The Bible provides us with no definitive answer to the question of why God chose the nation of Israel to be the recipients of the Torah. At times we have the impression that this was another one of those arbitrary-looking decision by a deity with an inscrutable master-plan for history. On other occasions, our worthiness for this supreme gift is ascribed not to our own merit or that of Moses’ generation, but to the spiritual and moral virtues of our earliest forefathers, especially the righteous Abraham. 

During the talmudic era, Jews were often called upon to justify the immense pride they took in their possession of the holy scriptures. Understandably, their pagan neighbours would insist that there were no actual grounds for that pride, since the Almighty might have equally elected to reveal his law to some other nation. By the same token, the Jews had no right to criticize the other nations of the world who had never been offered the chance to observe the Torah.

In all likelihood, it was as a response to these kinds of arguments that our ancient preachers formulated the familiar homiletic motif that described how God had in fact offered the Torah to other peoples, but they had refused it because its ethical principles conflicted with their own depraved values and practices. I trust that many of my readers are familiar with versions of that midrashic tradition.

Somewhat less famous is a variation on that motif which sought to answer the question of why God waited to reveal his Torah until that particular juncture in history. The Bible itself touched indirectly on this matter when God revealed his covenantal plan to Abraham, informing the patriarch that the plan called for the enslavement of his descendants in a strange land and the postponement of their return to their homeland until the “iniquity of the Amorites” has reached proportions that justify the expulsion of Canaan’s previous inhabitants from the land. 

Nevertheless, some interpreters sought more specific explanations of why earlier generations were not deemed suitable or worthy to receive the Torah. 

This theme was incorporated into two liturgical poems (piyyutim) by Rabbi Simeon ben Isaac (c. 950-c. 1020), a gifted poet who produced many creations that were incorporated into the early Ashkenazic rite. Among his beloved works were two poems that he composed for the morning services of the two days of the Shavuot festival.

The stanzas of Rabbi Simeon’s piyyut proceed through the generations of biblical history, building on the assumption that, from the beginning of time, the primordial Torah was ready and eager to be given an abode on earth. The Torah is depicted here as a cherished daughter whose doting celestial father was impatient to find her a suitable shiddukh among humankind. Toward that end, she was offered in marriage to the leading figures of each generation; however, she finds something inappropriate in each of those eligible suitors. In a manner similar to the familiar midrash about the nations rejecting the Torah, in this piyyut each one of the potential recipients is rejected because his behaviour has violated at least one of the commandments.

Adam, for starters, was guilty of coveting and theft when he craved and pilfered the forbidden fruit; and of bearing false witness, when he denied his responsibility.

Noah, disappointing his initial promise, developed a shameful drinking problem. 

Even the Hebrew patriarchs were not spared our poet’s censure: In Abraham’s case, it was for faithlessly asking God to provide an assurance of his promises to their progeny.

Isaac, in spite of his youthful readiness to offer up his own life as an unblemished sacrifice for his faith, was nevertheless guilty of faulty judgment in his old age, when he favoured Esau over Jacob and wanted to bestow his blessing upon him. Furthermore, when Isaac instructed Esau “take your weapons, your quiver and your bow, and go out to the field,” he was setting into motion a fateful pattern of violence that would eventually (according to rabbinic tradition) play out in Rome’s violent oppression of Israel. 

Jacob’s own family did not prove themselves much more worthy to be the recipients of the Torah after the brothers’ criminal treatment of poor Joseph.

Evidently, Rabbi Simeon’s outspoken criticism of Israel’s ancestral heroes was not to everybody’s taste. Though it was all rooted solidly in the scriptural narrative, many Jews were not accustomed to having their historical dirty laundry aired so explicitly. Hence, the poems’ more problematic verses were deleted by some indignant medieval copyists of the festival prayer books. Alternatively (since it was difficult to do away completely with the words of such a revered poet) the consonants were written without the necessary vowels, in order to diminish their readability. With the advent of printing, the publishers achieved only partial success in restoring the lost texts. 

The basic elements of the medieval liturgical poem were adapted from an ancient rabbinic midrash to the Song of Songs. In that text, as the Israelites were assembled at Mount Sinai, the Holy One assumed the personality of a bureaucratic credit manager who refused to release the Torah to them until they provided him with the names of trustworthy guarantors to ensure that they would observe it faithfully. When they proposed their forefathers as the guarantors, the Almighty rejected them all summarily, citing all the same objections that were mentioned in Rabbi Simeon’s piyyut, and he again confronted them with the demand that thy produce guarantors whose trustworthiness was truly above reproach. 

Left with no other alternative, the Israelites resigned themselves to the fact that their ancestors, no matter how illustrious they might have been in other respects, all suffered from some sort of blot on their records, and therefore the only option that remained was to invoke their faith in their as-yet-unblemished descendants. This arrangement was accepted gladly by God–with a grave admonition that any shortcoming in the accounts could now be collected from the future generations. 

That puts quite a burden of responsibility on the shoulders of us descendants. Speaking for myself, I can’t make any claims to exemplary virtue or sinlessness, but I am willing to make an effort to uphold the credit rating for our beloved Torah. 

And if my own application gets turned down, I can always follow the precedent of our wise politicians, and bequeath the obligation to my grandkids.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, May 7, 2010, p. 13.
• For further reading:
  • Fleischer, E. Hebrew Liturgical Poetry in the Middle Ages Sifriyat Keter: 5. Sifrut. Jerusalem: Keter, 1975.
  • Grossman, Avraham. The Early Sages of Ashkenaz: Their Lives, Leadership and Works (900-1096). Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1981.
  • Mishcon, A. “The Suppressed Parts of a Shabu’ot Piyut.” Jewish Quarterly Review 1, no. 4 (1911): 533-538.
  • Urbach, E. The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs. Translated by I. Abrahams. Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1987.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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The New Rabbi in Town

by Eliezer Segal

There are any number of different motives that might lure a rabbi to set up shop in a new locality. Some communities enjoy outstanding reputations as centres of Jewish culture and scholarship, and are likely to enhance the spiritual development and professional stature of their spiritual leaders.

There are, however, some rabbis who are attracted by the opposite considerations: they recognize that certain Jewish communities are grievously deficient in the qualities that are essential for thriving religious life and are therefore in need of somebody who–like Gene Wilder in “the Frisco Kid”–is prepared to brave the hardships of the spiritual wilderness to instill new vigour into the lives of the residents.

A prominent example of this type of rabbinic figure was the third-century sage known as “Rav” (Rabbi Abba Arikha of Kafri), one of the titans of talmudic scholarship. Rav was a native of Babylonia who had been pursuing his studies in the holy land. Eventually, he decided to return to the Babylonia to provide guidance to his coreligionists in the diaspora. His arrival was not greeted with universal enthusiasm by the existing rabbinical or communal leadership. 

When a position became available in the yeshivah at Nehardea, Rav turned it down so as to avoid friction with the other leading Babylonian scholar of that generation, the Nehardean Samuel. It was at this point in his career, apparently, that Rav experienced an innocuous-looking encounter that would have momentous results. While visiting the obscure neighbourhood of Tatalfosh, a suburb of the populous Jewish community of Sura, the rabbi overheard a woman asking her friend for some culinary advice: what was the recommended amount of milk in which to cook a pound of meat? So shocked was Rav at encountering such blatant ignorance of a basic Jewish law that he decided to prolong his sojourn in Tatalfosh and to enact a few stringent measures with a view to preventing further infractions of the milk-meat prohibitions.

The tenth-century Ga’on Rabbi Sherira, in his treatise on talmudic history, depicted this episode as a watershed in the lives of Rav and of Babylonian Jewry as a whole: “This was the reason why Rav abandoned Samuel in Nehardea, which was his home and a centre of Torah, and travelled to a remote locality that was lacking in Torah, namely Sura… which also had a large Jewish population who were not even aware of the prohibition of mixing meat with milk. Therefore he declared: I shall settle here until the Torah is strengthened in this place.” The academy that Rav established in Sura flourished to become one of the greatest centres of talmudic scholarship.

A fragmentary manuscript preserved in the Cairo Genizah and first published in 1942 introduces a new detail that significantly alters the story’s ramifications. The unidentified commentator reports that Rav’s encounter in the Tatalfosh marketplace that day was no random event–but on the contrary, it was carefully staged for his benefit. That ignorant woman who was ostensibly inquiring about a recipe for Beef Stroganoff was in reality the mother of one of Rav’s leading students, Rav Assi, and her question was strategically planted in order to ensure that Rav would settle in the Sura metropolitan area. She had heard that he was planning to take up residence in far-off Isfahan and she feared that her son Assi would accompany his teacher there unless she did something to convince Rav that he was needed urgently in Sura. 

I confess to feeling some skepticism about this report. I suspect that its author, or the source from which he was copying, might well have been a Suran rabbi who was affronted by the suggestion that his hometown could have ever been guilty of such overt boorishness; and therefore, in order to uphold the honour of Sura and its academy, he fabricated the persona of Rav Assi’s mother and her predicament. [Sherira Ga’on, it should be noted, presided over the rival Pumbedita yeshivah.]

Another reason why a rabbi might relocate to a remote community is because he was abducted by pirates. In his historical chronicle “the Book of Tradition,” Rabbi Abraham Ibn Daud told of four prominent rabbis in the tenth century who were hijacked by the pirate Ibn Ruhamis who had the captives ransomed in various Mediterranean ports. Among the prisoners was the prominent talmudist Rabbi Moses ben Hanokh, probably from Bari in southern Italy, who was redeemed by the Jewish community of Cordoba. In order to lower his market value on the captive market, Moses took care to conceal his identity, so nobody in Cordoba had any idea that he was the scholarly superior of most contemporary Spanish rabbis, such as their current leader Rabbi Nathan the Pious who was proficient in the Bible, but less so in the intricacies of talmudic discourse. 

On one occasion, as Moses sat unobtrusively in a corner of the schoolroom, he pointed out an error in one of Nathan’s lessons and then demonstrated the correct interpretation. The assembled students now realized that this was an individual of extraordinary erudition and they set to asking him diverse questions that had accumulated in the course of their studies, all of which Moses resolved to their complete satisfaction. The humble Rabbi Nathan then submitted his own resignation and recommended that the newcomer be appointed the new judge of Cordoba.

Ibn Daud, writing with the characteristic pride of a Golden-Age Spanish Jew, portrayed this episode as a pivotal turning point in Jewish history that culminated in Spain’s supplanting Babylonia as the foremost centre of religious authority and rabbinic prestige.

Jumping ahead to the modern era, we find that in 1851, the 43-year-old Samson Raphael Hirsch occupied a cushy rabbinical pulpit in Nikolsburg and appeared to be in an enviable position. He held the impressive title of “Landrabbiner” (Chief Rabbi) of Moravia–or even “Oberlandesrabbiner”–and was the acclaimed author of important works on the principles of traditional Judaism. And yet, when an invitation was extended to him to take up a rabbinic position in Frankfurt am Main, he chose to forsake the prestige of Nikolsburg and attach himself to a posting that brought with it little honor. 

For all its past glories, the traditionalist faction in Frankfort in the mid-nineteenth century was small and beleaguered, a powerless minority within a larger community whose majority was committed to a more liberal version of Judaism.

It would appear that this was precisely what Hirsch was looking for at that time. His experiences in Nikolsburg had left him frustrated. That town’s venerable Orthodox populace had been vocally resistant to his attempts to impose own brand of “neo-orthodoxy” that advocated the integration of strict traditionalism with the embracing of European culture. He had reason to hope that the spirit of the traditionalists in Frankfurt was more amenable to his own brand of religious moderation. But even more important for him was the hope that in the absence of an entrenched Orthodox establishment, he would be able to fashion a community in conformity with his own ideals. 

As it turns out, he was correct about this. In significant ways Hirsch was provided with the opportunity to rebuild the Frankfurt traditionalist community from the foundations as a showcase for his personal religious vision. 

These cases from ancient, medieval and modern times inspire considerable confidence that the encounter between an accomplished Torah scholar and a far-flung Jewish community can generate unexpected blessings for both the community and the rabbi.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, May 28, 2010, p. 8.
• For further reading:
  • Assaf, Simha, ed. Responsa Geonica. Jerusalem: Mekize Nirdamim, 1942.
  • Cohen, Gerson D, ed. A Critical Edition with a Translation and Notes of the Book of Tradition (Sefer Ha-Qabbalah). London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1969.
  • Obermeyer, Jacob. Die Landschaft Babylonien im Zeitalter des Talmuds und des Gaonats: Geographie und Geschichte nach talmudischen, arabischen und andern Quellen. Frankfurt am Main: I. Kaufmann, 1929.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Windows of Opportunity

by Eliezer Segal

The Temple that King Solomon erected in Jerusalem was by all accounts a magnificent edifice, and the Bible describes its structure and measurements in meticulous detail. Some of the specialized architectural terminology consists of rare Hebrew terms whose precise meaning has become obscure with the passage of time. Scholars have done their best to fill in the gaps with the help of etymological research as well as by comparison with the building practices of neighbouring civilizations.

One of the more difficult passages in the description of the Temple is the verse that appears in 1 Kings 6:4 and is translated in the standard English version as “for the house he made windows of narrow lights.” Underlying the English are three Hebrew words: halonei shequfim atumim. A survey of the standard translations produces an immense range of diverse interpretations. 

The word halonei is not terribly problematic; it appears quite frequently in biblical Hebrew in the sense of “windows” and is derived from a root whose basic meaning is related to holes or hollowness. 

The second word “shequfim” is more challenging. Its root (Sh-Q-P) appears in Hebrew in two differing contexts: there is a verb that normally has the sense of viewing or surveying, generally from above and from a distance; and there are several nouns containing this root that have something to do with frames, doorways, lintels and the like. If indeed they derive from the same original lexicographic root, then their common denominator would appear to be an association with openness and the ability to pass through.

As for the third term, “atumim”–it has something to do with closing, sealing or obstructing.

Taken together, the three words confront the exegete not only with a thick fog of obscurity, but also with an implied contradiction. After all, windows are designed as openings for light and ventilation, and this sense is reinforced here by the word shequfim; and yet “atumim” designates them as sealed or stopped up.

What would appear to be a relatively simple solution to the paradox is the premise that the biblical author is speaking of glass window panes. These are open in the sense of being clear and transparent to allow the penetration of light, while at the same time they are resistant to the air and rain. This possibility was proposed by Rabbis David and Jehiel Altschuler of Prague in their Metzudat David commentary and has garnered some support among more recent scholars. If it is true, then it would mark a significant advance in the development and dissemination of glass-making technology. As generally understood, the methods for producing glass vessels remained confined in Solomon’s time to exclusive circles in localities like Egypt and Mesopotamia, and the manufacture of flat glass panes is not attested until well into the Roman era, more than a millennium after Solomon’s time.

The most popular explanation among Jewish exegetes is one that was brought in the Midrash and Talmud and found its way from there into the writings of many traditional commentators: 

“Rabbi Hanina said: There were windows in the holy Temple through which light would be emitted into the world. What is the basis for this? ‘And for the house he made closed-opened windows.’ They were both open and closed! They were narrow on the inside and wide on the outside in order to radiate light to the world. Said Rabbi Levi: According to the normal practice, when a person constructs a dining-hall he makes its windows narrower on the outside and broader on the inside in order to draw light inward. However, the windows of the holy Temple were not like that. Instead, they were narrow on the inside and wide on the outside in order to radiate light to the world.”

After citing this rabbinic interpretation, the celebrated fourteenth-century savant Gersonides dismissed it as nothing more than a pretty homily. He argued that it can be demonstrated with scientific certainty that, where light passes through a narrowing passage, the total amount of light in the house will thereby be increased.

This snide attitude towards rabbinic teachings rankled the sensibilities of Rabbi Solomon Aviad Sar Shalom Basilea of Mantua (c. 1680-1749) whose magnum opus “Emunat Hakhamim” (trust in the sages) was devoted to championing the inerrancy of rabbinic teachings in the face of alien philosophies and science. In this case, Basilea insisted, Gersonides’ science was not superior to that of our revered sages, especially if he is implying that the rabbinic homilies were less accurate than the teachings of the gentile scholars.

Basilea shared his reservations about Gersonides with Rabbi Jacob Aboab of Venice whom he regarded as the foremost Italian rabbi of his generation in his combined mastery of rabbinic and secular learning. Against Gersonides’ terse generalizations, Basilea proposed a more sophisticated theory of optics that distinguished between direct illumination–for which, it is true, the light expands as it shines through a broad aperture– and reflected light which becomes more intense in its brightness as it is refracted through a narrower channel. 

For the benefit of readers who might have difficulty grasping the underlying optical theory, Basilea recommended a simple experiment that can easily be reproduced using a cylinder with broad and narrow ends to shine light into an otherwise sealed and darkened room. 

If Rabbi Basilea’s science is valid, then his argument does indeed correspond with uncanny precision to the ideological lesson of the rabbinic homily: the religious values that are symbolized by the Temple are generated from within our tradition and they need not be imported from alien sources. The same would apply to scientific knowledge.

Of late, Rabbi Basilea’s quality of Emunat Hakhamim has become a rallying-call for many contemporary Jewish fundamentalists and I can think of several self-proclaimed guardians of the tradition who would cite this case to justify their total opposition to the teaching of science or secular studies. However, this attitude did not typify earlier generations of Jewish scholars. For all his religious conservatism, Rabbi Basilea was also an accomplished astronomer and mathematician with a solid training in optics. It was his thorough scientific background that led him to suspect that Gersonides’ theory of light, based on the old Aristotelian model, was outdated and had been superseded by more recent experimental studies in optics. Of course Rabbi Basilea derived immense satisfaction and validation from his discovery that the ancient Jewish sages had anticipated the findings of modern science.

Whether or not the sanctuary of Jewish wisdom is receptive to illumination from external sources, the midrashic metaphor remains an apt one. It is eminently fitting that the Temple windows should have been fashioned in a way that allows Israel’s spiritual light to radiate outward and to convey the wisdom and enlightenment of our tradition to the entire world.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, June 11, 2010, p. 9.
• For further reading:
  • Brand, Joshua. Kele Zekhukhit Be-Sifrut Ha-Talmud. Jerusalem: Mossad haRav Kook, 1978.
  • Feldman, Seymour. Gersonides: Judaism Within the Limits of Reason. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010.
  • Ruderman, David B. Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
  • Simonsohn, Shlomo. History of the Jews in the Duchy of Mantua. Jerusalem: Kiryath Sepher, 1977.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Fowl Play

by Eliezer Segal

In recent months, our local city council has been wrestling with the urgent issue of urban chicken-farming.

In order as to permit the raising of fowl in residential backyards, a contingent of homeowners petitioned the municipality seeking to emend the existing bylaws that forbid keeping livestock in the city. The request was dismissed by a subcommittee at City Hall who voiced concerns related to hygiene, noise, malodorous smells and potential conflicts with the feline populace. The urban poultry farmers were notified that their existing operations will be closed down. However, the petitioners are planning to appeal the decision, and are expected to plead that the current laws amount to a violation of their human rights.

This episode awakens a certain nostalgia for those quaint days when our frontier towns had not yet completed the process of urbanization, and farm animals were still considered a commonplace feature of the cityscape. Indeed, it was not so long ago in our own Jewish community (in those primitive decades before meat materialized spontaneously in sterile shrink-wrapped packaging) that the authorities would have to be summoned periodically to deal with complaints stemming from the local rabbi’s slaughtering kosher chickens in his garage.

The chicken occupies a rather ambivalent place in Jewish social history. The species is not mentioned by name in the Bible–apart from an obscure word in the book of Job (sekhvi) that later generations understood to refer to a rooster. And yet, chickens and roosters range freely through the pages of the Mishnah and Talmud, whether as alarm clocks, as food or as a source of eggs. The tractate in the Babylonian Talmud that discusses the laws of religious festivals came to be known as Besah, “eggâ” because it deals with the intricate legal technicalities that arise when a chicken lays or hatches an egg on a holy day. The egg of a chicken also serves as the standard unit of volume in connection with innumerable topics in rabbinic law. 

And yet, in spite of the chickens privileged status in ancient Jewish society, not everyone was favourably disposed toward them. A midrashic homily counts the rooster as the most stubborn and stiff-necked of birds, a dubious distinction that is deemed comparable to that of Israel among the nations of the world.

As for breeding them in urban settings, a rabbinic tradition declared that chickens could not be reared within the city of Jerusalem. The Talmud ascribed this restriction to the city’s special status as the site of the holy Temple and the centre of sacrificial worship, implying that the presence of chickens was incompatible with the sanctity of the milieu. 

Rashi explained the problem in greater detail, noting that chickens are accustomed to pecking about indiscriminately in dung-heaps where their beaks are likely to pull out all sorts of creepy-crawlers, including species that generate ritual impurity. Much of the food in Jerusalem was devoted to sacred use and had to be offered or consumed under strict conditions of purity. Therefore it was considered safer to ban the fowl from the city in order to prevent them from causing defilement to the holy foodstuffs and to the priests or pilgrims who needed to maintain their pure states.

Evidently, purity and hygiene were not the only factors that militated against urban chicken-farming. The birds can also be downright dangerous, capable of inflicting damage on property. The rabbis noted for example, that in the course of hopping from one location to another, a rooster could cause either direct damage with its body (for which full compensation would be demanded) or indirect damage by stirring up wind with his wings (for which its owner would be required to pay half-damages). 

Furthermore, the harm that could be inflicted by chickens was not restricted to the destruction of property. Their behaviour could at times prove deadly.

The Talmud preserved a testimony about a rooster in Jerusalem that was stoned to death because it killed a person. The Jerusalem Talmud adds some clinical detail to the account of the crime: the innocent victim was an infant whose fontanel had not yet closed, leaving a soft spot in its skull that the evil rooster could not resist pecking at. 

Evidently, it was necessary to record this gruesome fact because we might otherwise have reasoned that the biblical laws requiring the execution of beasts who kill humans were only meant to apply to those nasty goring oxen that are mentioned explicitly in the Torah. The rabbis therefore informed us that even the lowly chicken can be subject to the death penalty.

At any rate, this gives us yet another reason for keeping roosters at a safe distance outside city limits.

In light of these pernicious associations, it might not be so surprising that according to a talmudic tale, a hen and rooster became the inadvertent cause for a dreadful catastrophe during the Jewish war against the Romans. At a wedding that was being celebrated in Tur Malka (“Mount Royal”) in Judea, the participants observed the popular custom of releasing a pair of fowl in front of the happy couple as a symbol of fertility. When a patrol of Roman soldiers tried to snatch the birds, the townsfolk attacked them and subjected them to a beating. The hostilities escalated until the Romans called in a large military force to unleash a bloody massacre against the Jews of Tur Malka.

If normal garden-variety chickens can be hazardous, then what are we to do with a mythic Super-Chicken? This creature was well-known to ancient Jewish legend as the “wild rooster” (tarnegol bara)–though it is likely that the reference was originally to the hoopoe bird. The tarnegol bara was, on the whole, of a noble constitution. He makes appearances in the Aramaic translations of biblical books, sometimes in contexts that have no literal connection to the original Hebrew text. In those passages the wild rooster is depicted as being imbued with the wisdom to sing the praises of the Lord or to deliver sensitive diplomatic correspondence. 

A famous Talmudic legend tells of the tarnegol bara who was enlisted to guard the marvellous shamir (according to Rashi, a kind of rock-eating worm) that King Solomon needed to hew the stones for the Temple he was erecting. The super-rooster was faithful to his oath not to release the shamir, even to the king of Israel. In the meantime, the worm was being employed at splitting the rocks of craggy mountains in order to facilitate their cultivation. After being tricked by the wily Solomon into letting go of the worm, the dutiful super-rooster chose to commit harakiri because of his humiliation for betraying his trust.

Clearly, then, not all chickens are to be profiled as menaces to human society. Nevertheless, there are some good reasons for concern about allowing them unrestricted movement in urban environments. Further research is necessary before we may arrive at the definitive answer to the age-old question “Why should the chickens cross the road?”

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, June 25, 2010, p. 12.
• For further reading:
  • Bar-Ilan, Meir. “Fabulous Creatures in Ancient Jewish Traditions.” Mahanayim 7 (1994): 103-113.
  • Bodenheimer, F. S. Animal and Man in Bible Lands. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1960. 
  • Ginzberg, Louis. Legends of the Jews. Edited by Paul Radin. Translated by Henrietta Szold. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2003.
  • Nathan ben Jehiel. Aruch Completum [‘Arukh Ha-Shalem]. Edited by Alexander Kohut and Samuel Krauss. Jerusalem: Makor, 1969.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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