Pride of Lions

by Eliezer Segal

Many of our synagogues are adorned with decorations that are designed to enhance the experience of worship. The quality and scope of decorations will vary according to aesthetic taste or economic circumstances. Rarely do we hear of cases where the decision to commission a mural, stained glass window or ornamental embroidery is viewed as problematic for reasons of theology or religious law.

This situation was not invariably true in earlier times. Second-Temple Jerusalem appears to have been rigorously image-free, as were communities in Islamic lands. On the other hand, the archaeological remains from talmudic and Byzantine times include explicit graphic portrayals of biblical themes, and the artists were not above incorporating motifs from Greek mythology into the mosaics that adorned their synagogues. Indeed, the Jerusalem Talmud relates (in a passage that is missing from the standard printings but survives in a manuscript) that “in the days of Rabbi Yoḥanan they began to make images on the walls and he did not object. In the days of Rabbi Abun they began to make mosaic images and he did not object.”

The treatment of the topic in the authoritative Babylonian Talmud is not at all straightforward. The opinions recorded there represent a wide spectrum of opinions, and the relevant passages are constructed with a degree of complexity that allowed for vastly differing interpretations of what the editors intended as their definitive rulings. On the whole, the Talmud did not seem troubled by graphic images as such, but only by one very specific category: the four creatures whose faces were described in Ezekiel’s prophetic vision of the celestial “chariot.” These consisted of a lion, an ox, an eagle and a human. Even with respect to these four, later scholars advocated divergent positions about the extent of the prohibition: did it apply to two-dimensional pictures or only to carvings and statues? Did all four creatures have to appear together to be subject to the ban, or were they forbidden even individually?

As it happens, one of the most prominent items in classic synagogue iconography is the lion—usually a pair of them. As far as I know, they were seldom associated with their function in Ezekiel’s chariot. They were more likely to symbolize the royal tribe of Judah (reminiscent of the lions positioned on Solomon’s magnificent throne), or to illustrate Judah ben Tema’s exhortation to be “strong as a lion to do the will of your father in heaven.” I suspect that many artisans simply leaped at the challenge of portraying the fierce beasts with their dramatically flowing manes.

In the sixteenth century, Rabbi David Ibn Abu Zimra was consulted about an incident in Candia, Crete, involving a powerful community leader who insisted on placing a marble statue of a crowned lion as part of his family crest, in the most prominent position in the local synagogue.

Even if lions or other synagogue decorations did not technically transgress any specific ban against graven images, there were scholars who objected to them on other grounds. Thus, Maimonides had reportedly lamented that it is inappropriate to be facing illustrated tapestries or clothing during prayer because they create distractions. “We are accustomed to shut our eyes when we find ourselves praying opposite a painted garment or wall.” For this great theologian who equated Judaism with the intellectual grasp of an abstract deity who is utterly non-physical and indescribable, all graphic representations are impediments to proper spiritual meditation.

For similar reasons Rabbi Isaac Or Zarua‘ of Vienna related that when he (or perhaps his father) was still a young lad, he had protested against the decorative birds and trees that adorned the walls of the synagogue in Meissen, Saxony. In support of his position he cited the the Mishnah’s austere condemnation of people who interrupt their studies to admire an exquisite tree or a field. Beautiful distractions, he argued, place even greater obstacles in the way of prayer, when the artistry of a well-painted landscape is more likely to impede concentration.

Over the centuries, numerous conflicts arose in Jewish communities over the the propriety of artwork in the synagogues. One such altercation arose in the twelfth century with regard to the stained glass windows in the Cologne synagogue which featured images of lions and serpents or dragons. Rabbi Eliakim ben Joel of Mainz applied his immense erudition and ingenuity to marshalling all the talmudic texts that opposed the creation or preservation of images, while dismissing all those passages that appeared to warrant a permissive policy. On the other hand, his colleague Rabbi Ephraim ben Jacob of Bonn was satisfied that whatever problems the ancient sages might have had with such pictures had been rooted in their idolatrous associations; nowadays, however, nobody really worships the ornamental birds and horses whose likenesses adorn the synagogue windows.

A particularly intriguing episode occurred in seventeenth-century Italy. The Jewish community of Ascoli possessed a beautifully carved Torah ark that was borne by crouching lions carved with impressive realism out of walnut wood. The ark had been standing in the synagogue for generations and nobody thought to question its appropriateness to the sanctuary or to congregational worship.

In 1569 Pope Pius V issued a decree evicting the Jews from the territories under his control, which included Ascoli. The exiles were received graciously by their coreligionists in Pesaro and by Pesaro’s tolerant Christian rulers. The Ascolian emigrants made a point of bringing with them their beloved old ark which was given a new home in the Sephardic synagogue of Pesaro. It continued to be used and admired for its inherent beauty and as a tangible relic of the community’s glorious past. After a while, when it became too small to contain the growing collection of Torah scrolls, the ark was replaced by a larger one, but it was still kept on exhibit in the women’s gallery.

The time-honoured living tradition of the Ascoli Jewish community and its spiritual leaders was eventually called into question by a younger generation of rabbinical scholars. The expertly crafted lions were singled out for criticism, noting that they were among the creatures in Ezekiel’s chariot.

A scion of an old Ascoli rabbinic family, Rabbi Joseph Salomo Graziano, was impelled to compose an essay in defense of the ark, in which he demonstrated that there was no legitimate halakhic objection to the presence of the lions in the synagogue. Even if some previous authorities (like Rabbi Ibn Abu Zimra) had found reason to prohibit similar creations, it was because the beasts in those cases had occupied more conspicuous and distracting positions in the sanctuaries. The ones in Pesaro, however, were crouching humbly and inconspicuously underneath the ark, and therefore gave no grounds for complaint. 

It would appear that in Italy, as in most other Jewish communities, the people’s fondness for inspirational art prevailed over the stringencies of the austere nay-sayers. The evidence for this is readily apparent in the many stalwart lions of Judah that continue to stand guard over our synagogues, Torah arks and sacred scrolls.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, May 11, 2012, p. 11.

• For further reading:
  • Fine, Steven. Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World: Toward a New Jewish Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
  • Goldman, Israel M. The Life and Times of Rabbi David Ibn Abi Zimra; a Social, Economic and Cultural Study of Jewish Life in the Ottoman Empire in the 15th and 16th Centuries as Reflected in the Responsa of the RDBZ. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1970.
  • Kahana, Isaac Zev. Meḥḳarim BeSifrut Ha-Teshuvot. Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1973.
  • Kaufmann, D. “Art in the Synagogue.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 9, no. 2 (1897): 254-269.
  • Mann, Vivian B, ed. Jewish Texts on the Visual Arts. Cambridge, U.K. and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
  • Renate Segre, “Sephardic Settlements in Sixteenth‐Century Italy: A Historical and Geographical Survey,” Mediterranean Historical Review 6, no. 2 (1991): 112–137.
  • Shulvass, Moses Avigdor. The Jews in the World of the Renaissance. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1973.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Moses vs. the Angels

by Eliezer Segal

In reading the Bible’s account of the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, we observe that there were three principal participants in that event: God, Moses and the people of Israel. However, Jewish tradition added yet another important role to the cast: the angels. The Midrash, Talmud and liturgical poems populated the Sinai landscape with swarms of angels who heightened the drama of that memorable occasion.

Our ancient sages found support for this motif in the words of Scripture itself. In Moses’ final words at the end of Deuteronomy he sang of how “the Lord came from Sinai… and he came with myriads of holy ones. From his right hand went a fiery law for them.” A venerable tradition common to rabbinic interpreters and to the early Jewish Greek and Aramaic translations understood that those “holy ones” were hosts of angels who were present at the Torah’s revelation. A similar conclusion was inferred from Psalm 68:18: “The chariots of God are twenty thousand, even thousands of angels. The Lord is among them, as in Sinai, in the holy place.”

What was the function of all those angels at Mount Sinai?

Well, that depends on whom you ask.

A number of midrashic rabbis understood that the supernatural beings were instructed to give honour to the Israelites who had assembled to receive God’s law. “Said Rabbi Yoḥanan: On the day when the Holy One revealed himself on Mount Sinai to give the Torah to Israel, there descended with him sixty myriads of angels, each one of which bore in its hands a crown to place on the head of each individual Israelite. Rabbi Abba bar Kahana in Rabbi Yoḥanan’s name said: There were one hundred and twenty myriads. One of them distributed the crown, while the other adorned him with a waistband…”

Indeed, the rabbis strove to outdo one another in imagining the wondrous ways in which the angels bestowed glory upon the congregation of Israel. Homilies in that vein served no doubt to boost the collective egos of Jews suffering from persecution or distress, and to strengthen their appreciation for the Torah and their commitment to observing its precepts.

There was, however, another very different understanding of the angels’ role at Sinai, which was expressed in a famous exposition by Rabbi Joshua ben Levi. According to Rabbi Joshua, the angels assembled in order to lobby before the Almighty and express their holy indignation at the temerity of the mortal Moses in ascending to the heights to lay claim to the most sublime of divine gifts, “a precious treasure that was concealed nine hundred and seventy-four generations before the creation of the world.” After hearing their complaints, God charged Moses to debate his supernatural opponents, and the prophet consented to do so only after receiving assurances that he would be granted immunity from being barbecued by their fiery breaths.

Moses won the disputation quite easily by pointing out that the ten commandments all presuppose quintessentially human situations and frailties, and have no real relevance for sinless angels who were never enslaved in Egypt, are not subject to idolatry, sexual temptation or covetousness, do not suffer from any weariness that would require a day of rest— and, in general, have no need for the discipline that is embodied in the commandments.

According to the Talmud, the angels were so impressed with Moses’s brilliant arguments that not only did they concede his point, but they were instantly transformed into his enthusiastic admirers.

Other variants on this legend have God himself arguing Israel’s case, and citing a different selection of Torah laws that are inapplicable to immortals—mostly in matters of impurity that derive from bodily functions or death.

While the principal theme of the debate seems to center on the angels’ reluctance to share the Torah with humans, we may discern an additional concern: a deep-seated opposition to a creature of flesh and blood ascending to a domain that ought to be exclusive to spiritual beings. This sentiment is found in many other works that were composed at the time, especially in the genre known as “apocalypse” where the mortal heroes are chosen to be the vehicles for delivering secret revelations about the end of days. In works of that sort, individuals like Abraham, Enoch and Elijah had to overcome the angels’ antagonism. The Talmud describes a similar struggle in connection with Rabbi Akiva’s mystical ascents; the ministering angels wanted to repel him, until the Almighty ordered them to leave him be because he was indeed worthy to partake of the divine glory.

The theme of angels pushing away unworthy humans who are striving to climb to spiritual heights is well known from ancient religious texts. It is most pronounced in the movement known as Gnosticism which encouraged its adherents to elevate themselves above their tainted physical lives and aspire to a purely spiritual state. The Gnostics believed in a scale of seven metaphysical levels, corresponding to the seven known planets. At each planetary level, the soul’s path to the transcendent realms is obstructed by hostile “archons,” powerful figures who inhabit the lower rungs of their elaborate hierarchy. According to a widespread version of gnostic doctrine, there were seven such figures in the employ of the inferior deity known as the Demiurge. Those archons were determined to prevent the souls from returning to their true celestial abodes.

In Hebrew texts from the early medieval era, mystics strove to ascend through seven “palaces” (heikhalot). At each level a fearsome angel stood ready to hurl down the unworthy if they did not produce the proper “seal”—a sort of password containing the angel’s secret name. Once that seal was shown, the horrifying guards would transform themselves into the mystic’s allies and hospitably assist him in his climb to the next, more perilous level—just as the hostile angels at Mount Sinai had been transformed from Moses’s enemies to his helpers when he ascended to receive the Torah.

Scholarship is uncertain how to characterize the relationship between Gnosticism and Judaism. Initially it was assumed that Gnosticism was an outgrowth of foreign religious and philosophical ideas that attracted a tiny following of Jewish fringe groups. After all, the movement’s impact was most pronounced among early Christians who adopted a distinctly anti-Jewish version of gnostic theology according to which the Creator who appears in the “Old Testament” was merely the Demiurge, a being steeped in materialism, and not the true spiritual God.

However, historians are now much more receptive to the thesis that Gnosticism originated among Jews, and that it formed the core of rabbinic mystical activity.

Accordingly, it is unclear whether Rabbi Joshua ben Levi’s retelling of Moses’s confrontation with the angels should be understood as an attempt to interpret the revelation at Sinai through the prism of Jewish mystical lore, or as an outright rejection of the gnostic view of the Torah. The latter thesis might explain, for example, why Moses focussed on the Torah’s prosaic moral, ritual and legal contents as opposed to presenting it as a work of metaphysical mysteries.

Other scholars have theorized that the Hebrew texts that speak about angels repelling who ascend through the celestial palaces originated among dissident Jewish groups who saw their mystical ascents as a kind of rebellion against the oppressive authority of the rabbinic “angels” who sought to suppress their spiritual adventures.

Now, these ambitious speculations about sectarian rivalries and mystical quests may provide fascinating intellectual challenges for a few learned scholars. For me, perhaps the most meaningful lesson of the legend is the appreciation that the full experience of Torah cannot be received passively, but is most effectively acquired through a process of ongoing debate, confrontation and struggle.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, May 25, 2012, p. 11.

• For further reading:
  • Altmann, Alexander. “The Gnostic Background of the Rabbinic Adam Legends.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 35, no. 4. New Series (April 1, 1945): 371-391.
  • Ginzberg, Louis. Legends of the Jews. Edited by Paul Radin. Translated by Henrietta Szold. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2003.
  • Halperin, David J. The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision. Texte und Studien zum antiken Judentum 16. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1988.
  • Marmorstein, Arthur. Anges et Hommes dans l’Agada. Paris: Libraire Durlacher, 1927.
  • ———. “Vikkuḥei Ha-Ma-Ma’lakhim ‘im Ha-Bore.” Melilah 3-4 (1950): 93-902.
  • Schäfer, Peter. The Hidden and Manifest God: Some Major Themes in Early Jewish Mysticism. SUNY series in Judaica. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992.
  • Scholem, Gershom Gerhard. Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1960.
  • ———. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. New York: Schocken Books, 1995.
  • Schultz, Joseph P. “Angelic Opposition to the Ascension of Moses and the Revelation of the Law.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 61, no. 4. New Series (April 1, 1971): 282-307.
  • Shoham, S. Giora. The Mytho-Empiricism of Gnosticism: Triumph of the Vanquished. Sussex Academic Press, 2003.
  • Wolfson, Elliot R. Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
  • Wolfson, Elliot R. “Review of: Halperin, David J., The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision.” Jewish Quarterly Review 81, no. 3-4 (1991): 496-500.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Stretching the Truth

by Eliezer Segal

When the Israelite scouts returned from their ill-fated reconnaissance mission to spy out the promised land, they gave an unnerving report about Canaanite cities that were “great and fortified in the heavens.” If understood literally, then it would appear to imply that the walls reached impossible heights, or that the cities were actually hovering above the earth as if in some science fiction scenario.

Many of us would likely dismiss this as a harmless exaggeration. Such expressions are not meant to be understood literally, any more than our modern use of terms like “skyscraper.” The same could be said about other cases in the Bible, such as the account of Solomon’s coronation at which the noise of the acclamation—like a super-amplified rock concert—was said to be so loud “that the earth split with the sound of them.” We have become very comfortable about reading the Bible as a masterpiece that utilizes literary techniques, including judicious sprinklings of hyperbole and other varieties of figurative imagery.

However, the “Bible as literature” approach can also be a source of discomfort for some religious Jews. Works of divine revelation, they would argue, are too serious to be reduced to our frivolous mortal standards of esthetics. If Picasso was correct in his observation that “art is a lie that makes us realize truth,” then art has no place in sacred scriptures that are devoted to uncompromising truth.

Nevertheless, our ancient sages appear to have felt less threatened by the presence of exaggerations in holy texts. Indeed, the Talmud quotes Rabbi Ami as declaring that the Torah, the Prophets and the sages were all accustomed to speaking in hyperbolic language.

Rabbi Isaac bar Ami noted three instances in which the rabbis of the Mishnah were also guilty of stretching the truth. His examples included: a description of the Temple altar whose mound of ashes was allowed to pile up until it reached a prodigious volume of three hundred kor; a golden vine to which donors would contribute leaves for the benefit of the Temple, and which became so laden with its precious foliage that it required three hundred priests to harvest it; and the Temple curtains that were woven so thickly as to require three hundred priests to immerse them if they became ritually impure.

According to A. J. Heschel, the claim that the languages of the sacred texts conform to human literary conventions was distinctive to the school of Rabbi Ishmael. However, the rival school of Rabbi Akiva insisted that scriptural language possesses a uniquely transcendent quality. 

Sixteenth-century Italy produced Jewish humanists like Rabbi Azariah de Rossi, who was proud to acknowledge that the ancient Jewish sages adhered to the highest standards of classical rhetorical art, including the use of hyperbole. This sentiment would later be shared by Moses Mendelssohn and his team of translators and commentators in central and eastern Europe.

The Talmud’s observations about exaggeration and hyperbole created a theological dilemma for traditionalists in more recent times. It was one thing for Rabbi Isaac bar Ami and other holy sages in talmudic times to point out the Mishnah’s exaggerations. However, later generations came to ascribe to the ancient rabbinic works a sanctity that was barely indistinguishable from that of the Bible itself; and therefore for them it verged on blasphemy to suggest that the sages of the Mishnah had indulged in flights of fancy. And yet, to defend the Mishnah on this count would contradict an explicit statement in the Talmud!

The Babylonian Ge’onim had adopted a moderate position regarding this question. While defending their beloved Babylonian Talmud, Rabbis Hai and Sherira noted pointedly that the Talmud had carefully limited its list of hyperboles to only three items–thereby providing us with the implied assurance that there were no other cases., Therefore, we may safely assume that all other teachings in the Mishnah are to be accepted as literal truth.

In later times, the question of how to deal with the Mishnah’s alleged exaggerations became an ideological touchstone for distinguishing between the modernist and traditionalist camps. As a general rule, the traditionalists championed the Babylonian Talmud as the definitive interpretation of the Mishnah, whereas the modernists were calling for freedom of inquiry and the right to study the Mishnah on its own terms. However, not all Jewish savants could be neatly pigeonholed into these stereotypical categories.

Rabbi Elijah, the celebrated “Ga’on” of Vilna, comes across as a troublesome anomaly in this matter; though in most respects he was an archetypal religious conservative, he was at the same time a staunch advocate of the objective reading of classical texts. His distinctive approach comes to the fore in his explanation of the Mishnah’s tradition about the Temple curtain. With his characteristic affinity for mathematical explanations, Rabbi Elijah calculated that the curtain’s circumference added up to precisely six hundred hand-breadths, thereby allowing three hundred priests to grasp its edges if each of them placed both his hands side by side. This careful attention to arithmetical precision, even if it did not necessarily describe a practical or historical reality, demonstrated that the Mishnah’s’ incredible sophistication could not be dismissed as any trivial kind of hyperbole.

As clever as his interpretation might strike us, some major commentators, including Rabbi Israel Lifschuts of Danzig, found it problematic, and were impelled to remind their readers that it was the Talmud itself that had raised the charge of “hyperbole.”

In the nineteenth century, the methods of academic text-critical studies were being increasingly applied to rabbinic scholarship, producing novel readings of traditional texts. Some lesser scholars crudely tried to explain away the Mishnah’s difficulties by suggesting that they had originated in textual errors or misreadings of abbreviations. Skirmishes over the differing interpretations of the Mishnah and its exaggerations began to fill the pages of Hebrew periodicals.

One way out of the theological conundrum was to argue that the Talmud was not really referring to exaggeration and hyperbole, but rather to symbolism and allegory. Though the passages in question might not be “true” in the factual sense, they do convey profound spiritual truths. This approach was advocated by the Italian kabbalist Menahem Azariah of Fano (died 1620). In his opinion, each of the Talmud’s instances of hyperbole was carefully crafted to teach an important spiritual lesson.

A certain Jacob David Trachtman (in an article published in Odessa in 1865) proposed that the story of the golden grapevine, while perhaps not literally accurate, does evince a more profound spiritual truth if it is read as an allegory for the state of Judaism. Thus, the vine represents the core values and practices of the Jewish people, whereas the leaves and grape clusters symbolize the numerous extraneous customs and additions that have been allowed to accumulate on the original vine over the generations. Eventually those add-ons, precious though they might have been when they were originally affixed to the vine, became so burdensome that they threatened the vine’s vitality and had to be pruned by the “priests,” the spiritual leaders who were concerned for the tradition’s future sustainability. Clearly, Trachtman’s allegory was directed less at the bygone days of the Second Temple than at the religious malaise that he discerned in his own generation.

Indeed, the scholarly discussions about hyperbole in Jewish religious texts generated a stack of writingsr that reaches all the way to the stars.

—But wait! I must have told myself a million times to avoid such wild exaggerations.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, June 8, 2012, p. 9.

• For further reading:
  • Etkes, I. The Gaon of Vilna: The Man and His Image. Translated by Yaacov Jeffrey Green. The S. Mark Taper Foundation Imprint in Jewish studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
  • Gafni, Chanan. “Hyperbolic Language in the Mishnah.” Jewish Studies: An Internet Journal 8 (2009): 155-166.
  • Heschel, Abraham Joshua. Heavenly Torah: As Refracted Through the Generations. Translated by Gordon Tucker and Leonard Levin. New York: Continuum, 2005.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Some Footnotes to “Footnote”

by Eliezer Segal

You cannot begin to imagine the surprise and excitement that overtook me in May 2011 when I first heard about the Israeli film “Footnote” that was awarded the Best Screenplay prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Who could have envisaged an acclaimed dramatic production set in the arcane world of the Hebrew University’s Department of Talmud, where I spent a dozen years earning my graduate degrees! It took almost a year before I would actually get to view the Oscar-nominated film—a year in which I impatiently tried to fill in the details based on whatever descriptions, interviews and trailers I was able to get hold of.

Author/director Joseph Cedar stated that his choice of the film’s setting was a very deliberate one. The Hebrew University Talmud Department has always been notorious for its obsessive focus on the minutiae of textual study, as well as for a viciously competitive scholarly culture that often deterred people from publishing their research for fear that a colleague might find an error or omission and use it as a pretext for a savage review. “Footnote”’s chief protagonist Prof. Eliezer Shkolnik was described as just such a personality who was greatly admired by his colleagues for his painstaking research, but had produced no published output to show for it, and refused to pander to a lay readership.

Since the film’s release, just about every conversation I have with Israeli colleagues quickly turns to the question of which real-life professors served as the models for the movie’s main characters. Everyone has their own candidate about whom they are absolutely certain.

Initially I had my own indisputable candidate for the role. My graduate supervisor, though his publication record was not quite as sparse as Prof. Shkolnik’s, was legendary for his reluctance to make his discoveries publicly accessible. He went so far as to have his own doctoral dissertation, a brilliant study of a dozen leaves from the Babylonian Talmud, removed from the stacks at the Jewish National and University Library. Of the few articles he published during his lifetime, several appeared in obscure collections and their significance was hidden under vague titles like “Contributions to the Talmudic Lexicon.” Ultimately, most of his scholarly output was published posthumously.

After finally viewing “Footnote” and pondering the matter at length, I have resigned myself to the fact that its fictional anti-hero was not based on any single person, but is a composite creation incorporating traits found in several academic Talmud scholars.

Indeed, the values and priorities that came to characterize the Department of Talmud were implanted in the earliest phases of the Hebrew University’s inception, as far back as the 1920s when the institution’s founders chose to hire Professor J. N. Epstein, a textual scholar who was then attached to Berlin’s renowned “Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums.” Epstein’s contributions to Semitic and rabbinic philology were greatly admired by academic specialists, but he was little known outside narrow professional circles.

Epstein fought obstinately to uphold his vision of an exemplary university where Humanities research would be conducted with scientific objectivity, untainted by religious or political agendas. This ideal was a particularly difficult one to uphold in a nascent institution that was intended to promote the Jewish national revival, and in a discipline that was normally studied under religious auspices.

It made little difference that Epstein himself was both religiously observant and a committed Zionist.  He was horrified by the prospects of a respectable academic department being turned into either a rabbinical seminary or an American-style Liberal Arts college (as advocated by the University’s founding president Judah Magnes). He insisted that his discipline be officially designated as “Talmudic Philology”—as distinct from just “Talmud” or “Semitic Philology.”

In an incident reminiscent of Prof. Shkolnik in the movie, Epstein showed up late to the university’s gala opening ceremony on Mount Scopus in 1925, probably because of his conviction that true scholars should avoid the glare of publicity. In the film, Epstein is very thinly disguised as a “Prof. J. N. Feinstein,” the author of the volume where Shkolnik achieved his brush with immortality by being cited in the eponymous footnote

In the movie, Shkolnik’s life work focuses on his reconstruction of a text of the Jerusalem Talmud based on quotations from medieval authors. His efforts are ultimately frustrated when a rival has the good fortune to discover and publish the actual manuscript.

This episode is based on an actual exploit in the annals of rabbinic scholarship: It had long been noticed that several medieval rabbis were citing passages from the Jerusalem Talmud that are not found in the standard versions, and were unlikely to have been authentic. The eminent Viktor Aptowitzer of Vienna propounded a theory that those scholars were making use of a compendium—which he dubbed the Sefer Yerushalmi—in which the text of the Jerusalem Talmud was supplemented by an assortment of other texts and commentaries. Aptowitzer proposed his own plausible reconstruction of the Sefer Yerushalmi, but his thesis could never be more than speculative as long as no actual manuscripts were known

By the 1980s, several manuscript pages came to light that fit the description of Aptowitzer’s hypothetical compendium. In addition to corroborating his theory, these pages contributed greatly to our knowledge of rabbinic studies in medieval Europe. The pages were recovered from bookbindings into which they had been embedded after being confiscated from their original Jewish owners in the early fifteenth century. Unlike the film plot, that discovery involved (to the best of my knowledge) no overt academic acrimonies.

As it happens, I was personally involved in a very similar scenario. For purposes of my Masters thesis I consulted (via microfilm copy) a manuscript containing sections the Babylonian Talmud, housed in a Spanish monastery. In the thesis I reported that the margins of that manuscript appeared to contain numerous quotations from the Jerusalem Talmud that warranted separate investigation. Shortly afterwards, my supervisor called me to a meeting at which he appeared very agitated; and he grilled me enigmatically about whether any of my other teachers might be using that manuscript in their research.

Within a few days, an article appeared in the Israeli press proclaiming with great fanfare his discovery of an important new Spanish manuscript containing a large chunk of the Jerusalem Talmud. Owing to the extreme scarcity of such manuscripts, his eventual (posthumous) publication of the edition and commentary was a major scholarly coup. The volume included a vague reference to the previous scholars who had made use of the manuscript but failed to appreciate its importance.

Come to think of it, my name did make it into one of Prof. Epstein’s books. In the preface to a posthumous collection of his articles, his son acknowledged my role in preparing the index. It’s not quite top billing, but I suppose that scholars must be content with such modest forms of immortality. 

I will wait patiently for an enterprising producer to turn it into an award-winning movie.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, June 298, 2012, p. 12.

• For further reading:
  • Aptowitzer, Victor. Mavo Le Sefer RABiYaH. Jerusalem: Mekize Nirdamim, 1938.
  • Epstein, J. N. Studies in Talmudic Literature and Semitic Languages. Edited by Ezra Zion Melamed. 3 vols. Publications of the Perry Foundation. Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, the Hebrew University, 1983.
  • Myers, David N. Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History. Studies in Jewish History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
  • Rosenthal, E. S. Yerushalmi Neziqin. Publications of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities: Section of Humanities. Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The Institute for Advanced Studies. The Hebrew University. The American Academy for Jewish Research, 1983.
  • Schwartz, Daniel R. “From Rabbinical Seminaries to the Institute of Jewish Studies.” In History of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: Origins and Beginnings, edited by Shaul Katz and Michael Heyd, 457–475. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1997.
  • Schwabe, Moshe, Chanokh Albeck, Simha Assaf, and Ezra Zion Melamed. LeZikhro Shel Prof. Ya’aḳov Naḥum Epstein Z”l. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1952.
  • Segal, Eliezer. Case Citation in the Babylonian Talmud: The Evidence of Tractate Neziqin. Brown Judaic Studies no. 210. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990.
  • Sussman, Yaakov. “J. N. Epstein and the Hebrew University: An Episode in the Formation of an Academic Institution.” In History of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: Origins and Beginnings, edited by Shaul Katz and Michael Heyd, 476–486. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1997.
  • ———. “Seridei Yerushalmi—Ketav-Yad Ashḳenazi: Liḳrat Pitron Ḥidat ‘Sefer Yerushalmi’.” Kobez Al Yad 12 (1994): 1–120.
  • ———. “The Ashkenazi Yerushalmi ms : ‘Sefer Yerushalmi’.” Tarbiz 65, no. 1 (1995): 37–63.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Jews Clues

by Eliezer Segal

Some of the most satisfying moments in literature are those episodes in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories where Sherlock Holmes meets a total stranger and proceeds to recount the person’s life history, personal habits, recent travels—and in some cases, what they are thinking. While the observers stand in jaw-dropping amazement, assuming that the detective has access to secret sources of information, or even a gift of ESP, he goes on to rattle off all the visible clues and straightforward deductions that led him to his conclusions.

The ability to peer inside a person’s soul and read it like a book—with special reference to previous reincarnations—is indeed an aptitude that was ascribed to great kabbalistic and Ḥasidic masters like Rabbi Isaac Luria or the Ba’al Shem Tov. However, Jewish tradition also knows of people with Sherlock-Holmesian talent for keen observation and inference. In fact, this ability was presented as a characteristic trait of the Jewish mind.

Let me illustrate this theme with a story that is preserved in rabbinic literature in two versions. The first version is found in the Midrash on Lamentations where it forms part of a sequence of encounters in which Jews, especially Jerusalemites (several of them small children) outsmart Athenians—who fancied themselves the wisest of nations. This specific tale involves an Athenian who journeyed to Jerusalem hoping to study wisdom, but failed in his quest (presumably because the Jewish academic standards were too demanding for his limited mental capacity). To assist him on his homeward journey he purchased a  one-eyed Jewish slave whom the seller had touted as remarkably clever and farsighted.

As soon as they left the city, the slave advised his master to try to join up with a party that was traveling ahead of them on the road. Given that no travelers were visible from their vantage point, the Athenian asked his slave for more information. The slave proceeded to provide a detailed description: the party included a one-eyed female camel, pregnant with twins and bearing packs on each side, one filled with wine and the other with vinegar. The camel-driver was a heathen and they were less than four miles ahead of them.

When the dumbfounded Athenian asked his slave how he had arrived at such precise conclusions, the lowly Jewish slave replied in true Holmesian style: that the animal was one-eyed is evident from the way it grazed from only one side one side of the road. The imprint of the twins in her belly was still visible to a discerning eye in the places where she had crouched on the ground. Evidence of the cargos of wine and vinegar remained in the spots where the liquids had dripped; the wine was absorbed into the ground while the vinegar could be recognized from the way it bubbled to the top. Traces of urine on the road proved that the traveler was a heathen, since Jews would not relieve themselves so immodestly. And everyone knows that camel tracks are no longer discernible beyond a distance of four miles. Elementary, my Athenian master! Elementary!

The same story was also recounted in the Babylonian Talmud, but with some interesting differences. Perhaps the most striking of these variations relates to the historical setting. The midrashic tale evidently took place while Jerusalem stood in its full glory, and it served to demonstrate the greatness of the city and the brilliance of even its lowliest citizens (exemplified by a half-blind Jew who was reduced to slavery). The talmudic story, on the other hand, was set on Mount Carmel in the aftermath of Jerusalem’s destruction, and it involved a pair of Jewish protagonists, prisoners whose conversation was overheard by their captor as he was following behind them. The captor seems familiar enough with the Bible to berate his captives for belonging to a “stiff-necked people”; but this insult takes on an ironic flavour as he comes to admire their extraordinary intellectual and deductive acumen.

The Talmud introduced its tale as an explication of the verse in Lamentations that bewails the destruction of the city that had been “great among the nations, and princess among the provinces.” Rabbi Yoḥanan expounded the latter expression as implying that “wherever they go, they become princes to their masters.” This lesson is spelled out explicitly in the concluding observation that the Talmud appends to the narrative. After their heathen captor verifies the accuracy of their deductions, he is so impressed with with their brilliance that he kisses them on their heads and honours the stiff-necked prisoners with a festive banquet. He personally dances before them while reciting “Blessed is the one who chose the seed of Abraham, bestowing his wisdom upon them so that wherever they may go they become as princes to their masters.” In the end he sets them free and allows them to return safely to their homes.

Some manuscripts and medieval citations include additional exchanges between the captor and the prisoners that further illustrate their keen powers of observation as well as their chutzpah. They notice that the master’s aristocratic bearing is concealing his less savoury paternity; his real father was an executioner. On questioning, his mother confesses that indeed her son was conceived from an illicit liaison on her wedding night. In a similar vein they perceived that the lady was serving him meat from sheep that had been fed dog milk as well as wine from a vine that had been planted over his father’s grave. 

This exercise in detection has the result of effectively making the Jewish captives the moral and social superiors of their ostensible overlord, even as the one-eyed slave in the tale from the Midrash proved to be more perceptive than his two-eyed master.

These ancient texts, which were composed long before the advent of the familiar murder mystery, nevertheless suggest that the classic detective story format provides an instructive strategy for Jewish survival under foreign oppression or in exile–if we learn to derive the appropriate lessons not necessarily from the hardboiled, two-fisted private eyes of the American genre, but from figures like Hercule Poirot, Nero Wolfe and other great sleuths whose sharply honed minds give them a decisive edge over the brawn and weaponry of their foes.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, August 31, 2012, p. 16.

• For further reading:
  • Hasan-Rokem, Galit. Web of Life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic Literature. Contraversions. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Singing from the Same Hymn Book

by Eliezer Segal

Far be it from me to belittle all the profound spiritual and moral themes that make the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur synagogue services so meaningful. And yet on a practical level, we cannot lose sight of the simple fact that this season, more than any other in the Jewish calendar, provides an ideal showcase for our cantors.

On these solemn days, even congregations who might normally do without the services of professional ḥazzanim to lead their worship are likely to hire trained vocalists to intone their rich repertoires of liturgical magic. Although some of the festival prayers have familiar melodies that are rarely tampered with, the cantors are also expected to inspire the congregants by introducing a few novel and exciting tunes.

The most enjoyable segments of a synagogue service may be those where the prayer leader adapts the words of the liturgy to popular melodies that lend themselves to congregational sing-alongs. While some of these tunes might be adapted from other Jewish musical contexts, it is not uncommon for a resourceful cantor to borrow a few melodies from non-Jewish sources. On initial reflection it is hard to see anything objectionable in a practice that promotes congregational participation, relieves tedium and generally enlivens the experience of prayer.

Nevertheless, the practice does raise some serious questions for Jewish religious law. For example, if we pay attention to the original words or settings of those foreign songs, some of them might be considered inappropriate to the Jewish religious purposes to which they are now being put. After all, the most common themes in the world’s choral repertoires tend to be romance, drink or (non-Jewish) religion; all of these are, to put it simply, unsuitable for the ideals of judgment, repentance and atonement that are evoked by the festival prayers.

And yet Rabbi Israel Moses Hazan reported that in the Jewish community of Smyrna it was customary in his day (the nineteenth century) for the foremost scholars to set off in search of musical inspiration prior to the High Holy Days by visiting Christian churches, where they would position themselves behind barriers in order to be stimulated “by those contrite and heart-rending tunes,” which they would then proceed to adapt for use in the synagogues.

Rabbi Hazan vigorously defended this practice, insisting that whatever protestations previous Jewish legal authorities might have voiced against foreign musical borrowings, those objections had been confined to problematic lyrics, but did not extend to melodies. 

One of his most intriguing arguments emerged from his extensive personal experiences of wandering through such diverse localities as Smyrna, Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, London, Rome, Corfu, Alexandria and Beirut. In the course of his many travels, Rabbi Hazan was struck by the immense differences that separated the musical traditions of those Jewish communities. From this fact he concluded plausibly that no Jewish community is preserving an authentically Hebrew tradition that can be traced back to biblical antiquity, “for in the lands of Ishmael all the liturgical tunes resemble those of the Ishmaelites, in Turkey they sound like Turkish songs, and in the lands of Edom [that is, in Christian Europe] they resemble ‘Edomite’ music.” 

In defending the use of non-Jewish music in the synagogue, Rabbi Hazan and his supporters had to take into account several earlier rabbinic authorities who, it would appear, had voiced the opposing attitude. The medieval author of the Book of the Pious had dealt with a reverse situation—of a Jew who sang an appealing melody in the presence of a Christian priest. The author’s concern there was that the priest might become so enamored of the catchy ditty that he would be inspired to use it in the worship of his own (false) deity. In admonishing the Jewish singer against such behaviour, the Book of the Pious also made a point of forbidding the inclusion of any Christian tunes in Jewish prayers, a ruling that was cited in subsequent codes of Ashkenazic religious law. The antipathy toward foreign liturgical tunes could be applied in a very restrictive manner, given that the issues related to such serious matters as idolatry and apostasy. 

As it happens, however, the predominant tendency of halakhic authorities was toward permissiveness. The tone was effectively set by the seventeenth-century Rabbi Joel Sirkes in an influential responsum. Rabbi Sirkes was dealing with what he himself described as a widespread practice in the synagogues of chanting tunes that were known to have their origins in the churches. Nevertheless, He argued that such tunes could be sung in the synagogue as long as their function in the church was not in an explicitly “idolatrous” context. As long as the Christians employed them for purely aesthetic reasons, then there was no objection to their inclusion in Jewish worship.

Rabbi Hazan took pride in the fact that he himself, at the urging of Rabbi Abraham Gagin of Jerusalem, had ventured to compose liturgical poems according the Arabic style. In this he was following a pattern established by the distinguished seventeenth-century scholar Menahem di Lonzano who had chosen to compose Hebrew liturgical poems to be sung to Arabic melodies ”not for the sake of entertainment by frivolous persons with drums and flutes and feasts of wine like the music of drunkards—but on the contrary, I chose the Ishmaelite tunes because I noted that their tunes express a contrite and broken heart, and I thought that perhaps through them I might be able to subdue my own wayward heart.” Rabbi Isaac Alfasi had declared centuries earlier that a cantor who is known to “intone Ishmaelite songs” with inappropriate lyrics should be immediately dismissed from his post. 

Some Ḥasidic masters were known to adopt folk tunes that they heard from the gentile peasantry. In their view, what appear to us as profane songs of erotic love and desire were in reality allegorical portrayals of the longing between Israel and the Almighty, in keeping with traditional Jewish interpretations of the Song of Songs. Some went so far as to claim that these tunes had originally been recited by the Levitical choirs in the holy Temple of Jerusalem; but as a result of the exile they had been lost to us and preserved among gentiles. For this reason, Jews who sing these melodies nowadays—even with their unemended lyrics—should not necessarily be condemned for indulging in frivolity—but quite the contrary, they are repatriating a profoundly mystical legacy of sacred music. 

In more recent times, the issue was addressed with his characteristic erudition by Israel’s former Sephardic Chief Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef. He noted that several distinguished Sephardic rabbis had themselves composed hymns designed to be sung to the tunes of profane love songs. This practice is particularly common with the “Baḳḳashot” hymns that are chanted early in the mornings of Sabbaths and festivals in many Sephardic synagogues. “Nearly all the songs of the oriental Jewish communities, which are sung on joyous occasions and religious feasts, were composed by holy and pure liturgical poets to the tunes of erotic songs.”

In addition to his exhaustive survey of previous discussions of the issue, Rabbi Yosef adduced an novel analogy based on a statement in the Talmud about how at the time of the future redemption, the theatres and circuses that were formerly the scenes of pagan depravity will be transformed into venues of prayer and Torah study. 

Notwithstanding the unease expressed by some commentators at the prospect of Jews praying in sites that were formally defiled by idolatry and corruption, Rabbi Yosef declared that the Talmud’s vision can actually be understood as a paradigm for how profane songs can be sanctified by including them in sacred worship. 

This is consistent with the inspiring words of the festival prayers that envisage a time of harmony when “all your creatures will bow before you, and come together to do your will with a whole heart”!

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, September 21, 2012, p. 20.

• For further reading:
  • Idelsohn, Abraham Z. Jewish Music: Its Historical Development. Courier Dover Publications, 1992.
  • Shiloah, Amnon. Jewish Musical Traditions. Jewish Folklore and Anthropology Series. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992.

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My email address is: [email protected]

Over the Rainbow

by Eliezer Segal

Living in a region known for its rapid changes of weather, where severe rainstorms are followed quickly (or even overlapped) by bright sunshine, we are privileged to witness rainbows with uncommon frequency. Some of us might still recall the explanation that we learned in our high school science classes: rainbows arise from the process of refraction of sunlight through the droplets of water that remain in the air after the storm. We may even have attempted to reproduce that process for a science fair with the help of lawn sprinklers and lamps.

The appearance of rainbows would therefore appear to be an invariable process that takes place whenever there is a convergence of the necessary conditions: moisture in the air, sunlight, and an eye that is capable of viewing it from the appropriate angle.

This provokes a serious problem when we compare it with what seems to be the Torah’s explanation for the origin of rainbows. After the flood that wiped out the sinful humans of Noah’s time, God reassured the survivors that he would never again bring upon them a flood of such proportions. This pledge was then given symbolic representation by the creation of a rainbow that would henceforth appear in the heavens after rain showers, as if to remind the Almighty of his commitment. If we take the words at face value, they seem to be saying that prior to the great deluge there were no rainbows and that God did not introduce them until the time of Noah.

This premise was extremely problematic to Jewish commentators who took their science seriously, and it provoked many questions. Were the laws of light refraction in force before the flood? During the ten generations between the creation and Noah, what happened when the sun shone after a rainshower? The essence of science (and of the creator who produced them) is that its laws are eternally valid and reproducible, so it is inconceivable that God would change the rules in mid-play?

These questions vexed the illustrious philosopher, exegete and talmudist Saadiah Gaon in the tenth century, and he dealt with them in a terse comment. Where Scripture has God declaring “I set my bow in the cloud and it shall be a token of a covenant between me and the earth,” Sa’adia stresses that the operational verb should be translated in the past tense (exploiting an ambiguity of biblical grammar) as “I have set my bow in the cloud.” That is to say: the rainbow has existed since the six days of the creation, but it shall henceforth function as a token of the divine covenant. According to this reading, it is not the behaviours of light, moisture or their interactions that have changed, but the religious meaning that is to be attached to those physical laws.

Even among rationalist exegetes, not everyone was willing to accept Saadiah’s reading of the verse. Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra took issue with it, and insisted that the verb should be read in the present tense: “behold I am setting the bow now in the cloud.” He nonetheless alluded to the scientific theories advanced by the Greek scholars that rainbows are generated by sunlight, and he did not claim that the laws of physics or optics were altered in any way.

It is quite true that Greek philosophers and natural scientists were fascinated to the phenomenon of rainbows, and made ambitious attempts to provide scientific explanations that would account for their diverse and mystifying features. The most influential theory was that of Aristotle as he formulated it in his “Meteorology” and other works. He was not yet aware of light refraction, so his explanation focused instead on the reflection of the sun’s rays on water particles whose distribution through the air or clouds causes them to function as virtual flat surfaces. Aristotle also sought explanations for the sequence of the rainbow’s colours. He discerned three “primary colours”—red, green and violet—that he believed fell in a hierarchical sequence extending from light to dark. Those early scientists were particularly intrigued by the phenomenon of double rainbows; and they sought an explanation for why the order of the colours was reversed in the second rainbow. Aristotle also toiled hard, though not quite successfully, to calculate the relative angles of the sun, moisture and observer’s position that coalesce to produce different perspectives for viewing the differing arcs of the rainbows. 

Similar studies were undertaken by medieval Jewish scientists liker Rabbi Levi ben Gerson (Gersonides, Ralbag). Advances were also being made by Muslim and Christian scientists like Ibn al-Haytham, al-Farisi and Theodoric of Freiberg. The science was so impressive that even a mystic like Rabbi Moses Nahmanides (Ramban) who often took Maimonides to task for his reluctance to believe in miracles (that is, divine suspensions of the laws of nature), conceded here that we must accept the Greek science and, in the spirit of Saadiah, posit that rainbows had existed before the flood. 

Ibn Ezra, on the other hand, believed that though the laws of physics might have remained unchanged since creation, God did introduce some changes in the specific material conditions that prevail after the flood. Changes of that sort are certainly within the power of the Almighty and they do not fundamentally impair the foundations of the science. He claimed that the creator strengthened the light of the sun which—so he seems to assume—had not hitherto been powerful enough to produce rainbows. (We must bear in mind that Ibn Ezra’s pre-Copernican sun revolving around the Earth was a considerably smaller body than the heliocentric giant that we have come to acknowledge.) 

Ibn Ezra went so far as to explain that the essential conditions for producing rainbows—sunlight shining on clouds or water particles—are continually in operation, and it is only the limitations of the human perspective that prevent us from seeing them at all times. God, however, can behold them at all times, so that they serve him as an eternal token or “reminder” of his covenant with the human species. 

This last theme was developed in impressive depth by Don Isaac Abravanel who understood it as a source of consolation for humanity: even though we are not always able to see the rainbow from down here, we may rest assured that God above can see it and will always remember his promise not to inflict a second deluge. Unlike the days of Noah’s flood, when forty days of uninterrupted cloud prevented us from ever catching a glimpse of the sun, God will periodically thin out the cloud cover sufficiently to allow humans to behold the sun’s image.

Once again we see how, by shining their intellectual lights on a challenging text from the Bible, Jewish scholars have provided a metaphoric prism that allows us to appreciate the brilliant and variegated hues of their scientific and spiritual learning.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, October 12, 2012, p. 13.

• For further reading:
  • Klein-Braslavy, Sara. “Gersonides’ Use of Aristotle’s Meteorology in his Accounts of some Biblical Miracles.” Aleph-Historical Studies in Science & Judaism10, no. 2 (2010): 241–313.
  • Lee, Raymond L. The Rainbow Bridge: Rainbows in Art, Myth, and Science. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001.
  • Langermann, Y. Tzvi. “Acceptance and Devaluation: Nahmanides’ Attitude Towards Science.” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 1, no. 2 (1992): 223–245.
  • Meiron, Eyal. “Mathematical and Physical Optics in Medieval Jewish Scientific Thought.” In Science in Medieval Jewish Cultures, edited by Gad Freudenthal, 476–510. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
  • Sayili, Aydin M. “The Aristotelian Explanation of the Rainbow.” Isis 30, no. 1 (1939): 65–83.
  • Tirosh-Rothschild, Hava. “Kabbalah and Science in the Middle Ages: Preliminary Remarks.” In Science in Medieval Jewish Cultures, edited by Gad Freudenthal, 476–510. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Tensions in the Tent

by Eliezer Segal

In Jewish legend Abraham embodies the virtue of hospitality. The roots of this idea are contained in the Torah itself, in the story of how the aged patriarch and his wife jumped to welcome and care for of the three strangers who visited his tent. Although we later learn that these travelers were on missions from the Almighty, Abraham was unaware of that fact at the time, but that did not detract from the efforts that he insisted on investing on their behalf.

Our sages understood that hospitality, in addition to its own inherent virtue, also served as part of Abraham’s overarching mission of bringing humanity to the worship of the one true God. After the guests were well fed and ready to express their gratitude to their benefactor, the host would point out to them that he was not the ultimate source of their benefits, and that it would be more fitting if they were to direct their blessings to the creator of the universe.

A somewhat different version of this legend was cited by Rabbi Nachman Krochmal (RaNa”K, 1785-1840) of Galicia, one of the pioneering figures of modern Jewish philosophy and historiography. Entitled “a Moral Parable,” Krochmal’s story tells that Abraham was seated at the entrance to his tent at sunset when he caught sight of an aged traveler leaning on his staff. Abraham stood up and implored the wayfarer to spend the night before continuing on his journey. Only after repeated urging did he consent to come into the patriarch’s tent and accept a meal. At the end of the sumptuous repast, the guest was invited to offer up a blessing to the supreme Lord, creator of heaven and earth, who had provided for them from his goodness.

At this point the story takes an unconventional twist. The old traveler refused adamantly to acknowledge Abraham’s God, but insisted on blessing his own idol whom he had personally fashioned and upon whom he relied for his sustenance. Abraham was so indignant at this that he immediately tossed his guest out of the tent into the desert.

When Abraham reported this incident to God, the creator was not pleased. “I have suffered his transgressions now for one hundred and ninety-nine years, but I still continue to provide him with clothing and food in spite of his defiance of my spirit—and yet you, a lowly human steeped in sinfulness, have given up providing for him after a single night!” Abraham, realizing the error of his reaction, ran out to the wilderness to propitiate his guest and invite him back to his tent.

God responded to Abraham that he was pleased that the patriarch had now yielded to the divine will and behaved graciously toward the guest. As a result, he promised to uphold the covenant with Abraham’s descendants, to return them to their homeland after their exile, and to guide them as his people forever.

For all its similarities to themes from early Hebrew texts, Krochmal’s legend has no precise source in classical Jewish literature, especially when it comes to the character of the stubborn traveler who remained steadfastly loyal to his heathen deity. And in fact, Krochmal’s immediate source was not any standard rabbinic midrash, but a more recent authority: Benjamin Franklin. The spirit of religious toleration that emanates from the story is certainly consistent with the ideas championed by that great leader of modern enlightenment. One author reported that Franklin had invoked the legend while participating in a discussion in Paris about persecution and intolerance. In order to clinch his own liberal position, he asked for a Bible and proceeded to read the Abraham tale from what he dubbed as “Genesis Chapter 51.” After expressing some puzzlement at the unfamiliarity of some elements in Franklin’s quotation, the narrator of the exchange eventually realized that the book of Genesis contains only fifty chapters.

Now, Krochmal did not know English and it is to be assumed that his acquaintance with Franklin’s Abraham midrash came to him through the intermediary of a German biography of the American statesman. His enthusiasm for Franklin likely derived from one of his ideological heroes, Menahem Mendel Lefin of Satanow (1749-1826), a prominent advocate of educational reform and rationalism who is widely considered the “father of the Galician Enlightenment.” One of Lefin’s most influential works was a moralistic treatise titled “Ḥeshbon Ha-Nefesh [Accounting of the Soul]” first published in 1809. A central pillar of that work was the ethical system set out in Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. “Franklin societies” sprouted up in various communities in which earnest young Jews strove to emulate the ideals set forth by the great American thinker.

But Franklin was not the real author of the Abraham legend either. At the very least he had encountered it in the writings of an earlier advocate of religious toleration, the seventeenth-century English cleric Jeremy Taylor who, in his Discourse on The Liberty of Prophesying, had cited a version of the story that he claimed to have found “in the Jews’ books.” Taylor was not considered a profound theologian, but his writings and homilies enjoyed considerable popularity for their literary charm and elegance. Franklin was accused by his critics of intentionally plagiarising from Taylor.

At any rate, neither was Jeremy Taylor the originator of our midrash. He found it in a work that was indeed, in some sense, one of the “Jews’ books”—yet another work advocating religious toleration, this one by a certain George Gentius who (in a mildly ironic role reversal) recommended Abraham’s behaviour as a model for Christian missionaries trying to convert Jews; they are more likely to succeed if they do not act as Abraham did at first, but rather if they learn to present a congenial and welcoming attitude.

Now Gentius’ citation of the Abraham story appeared, as part of his tribute to the tolerant city of Hamburg, in the introduction to his Latin translation of Rabbi Solomon Ibn Verga’s Hebrew chronicle of Jewish persecution, the Sheveṭ Yehuda; though the legend was not part of Ibn Verga’s work. Technically, then, the story was to be found in “Jews’ books,” though not in the parts that were written by the Jew (though Taylor is unlikely to have made that distinction). 

In fact Gentius quoted the story in the name of “Sadus.” That reference was to the great thirteenth-century Persian poet Sa’di Shirazi, one of whose works Gentius himself had translated into Latin. 

The tale about Abraham and his heathen guest does actually appear in Sa’di’s “Bostan,” a collection of tales that exemplify desirable Muslim moral and religious virtues. Interestingly, the heathen is identified there as a “fire worshipper”—evidently a Zoroastrian, a detail that was included in Taylor’s version, but is missing from Franklin’s (that fact was of greater relevance to a Persian than to an American). Furthermore, in the earlier version, the old man was a hundred years of age, whereas Franklin for some reason doubled that. Sa’di’s tale does not contain the concluding discussion regarding God’s providential promises to Abraham’s children.

As with much early Islamic lore, it is not at all improbable that this legend drew from Jewish traditions that have not survived in their original forms. The wanderings and intersections of such traditions are always a fascinating topic of study.

In this case, it is especially fascinating to note how Abraham’s role as a paragon of hospitality and religious tolerance was shared by Muslim, Christian and Jewish authors over such a broad span of history and geography. Perhaps, after all, there is place for them all in the welcoming tent.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, October 26, 2012, p. 12.

• For further reading:
  • Chiel, Arthur A. “Benjamin Franklin, His Genesis Text.” Judaism 25, no. 3 (1976): 353–356.
  • Harris, Jay. Nachman Krochmal: Guiding the Perplexed of the Modern Age. New York: New York University Press, 1991.
  • Klausner, Joseph. “Mashal Musari Shel R’ Naḥman Krochmal.” Tarbiz 1, no. 1 (1929): 131–135.
  • Kohut, George Alexander. “Abraham’s Lesson in Tolerance.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 15, no. 1 (1902): 104–111.
  • Sinkoff, Nancy. Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2004.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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He Ain’t Got No Body

by Eliezer Segal

Every good Jew knows that God does not take on human form. This was a standard argument used by medieval Jewish polemicists to challenge Christianity’s status as a monotheistic faith. Maimonides went so far as to insist that any Jew who naively held to the belief that God could take on a physical body was guilty of idol worship. In fact, he argued that a conception of a God who had a body (referring to any three-dimensional entity) is a logically self-contradictory absurdity.

The sophisticated Jewish theologians who professed the doctrine of an incorporeal deity were of course aware that Bible, Talmud and Midrash were not always as scrupulous as they might have hoped about avoiding references to God’s hand, finger, eyes and other body parts. These images were dismissed as metaphors, unavoidable compromises with the limitations of human language, or as profoundly allegorical expressions of metaphysical truths. Even so, some texts seemed so explicit in their descriptions of a God in human form that they required more extensive justification.

One of these problematic texts was a passage in the Babylonian Talmud that described how God humiliated Sennacherib, the wicked Assyrian monarch who destroyed the northern Israelite kingdom and who tried unsuccessfully to besiege Jerusalem. Expounding the words of Isaiah “In the same day shall the Lord shave with a razor that is hired… by the king of Assyria, the head, and the hair of the feet: and it shall also consume the beard,” Rabbi Abbahu of Caesarea crafted an elaborate tale of how the nefarious king—terrified at the prospect of facing the parents of soldiers who had perished in the failed siege of Jerusalem—was advised to shave his head in order to avoid recognition. In the end (after he was reduced to performing menial labour in order to rent the razor, and after his hair and beard were singed off), Sennacherib’s own sons did not recognize their father and put him to death.

In some respects, this is a typical rabbinic homily in which an arch-villain suffers deserved punishment, and an obscure prophetic text is applied to a specific historical event. Some of the traditional commentators were uneasy that the Almighty appeared to be acting in a petty and vindictive spirit by inflicting excessive indignities on the Assyrian emperor; though similar narrative patterns are applied to figures like Pharaoh and Haman. 

However, what seems most extraordinary about this passage is the way Sennacherib is initially led to seek out the disastrous razor. “The Holy One, blessed be he, came and took the form of an old man” who provoked the king’s dread at facing his grieving allies, and advised him about borrowing the razor. 

Rabbi Abbahu was alert to the boldness of the image of a God in human guise, and he introduced it with the disclaimer “Had this verse not been written in Scripture, it would have been impossible to utter it.” In spite of the Talmud’s reliance on biblical proof-texts and the creative interpretations given by the commentators, the notion of God disguising himself as an elderly man was too much for some interpreters to swallow. Indeed, the folios of the Talmud contain many legends in which supernatural beings masquerade as mortals in order to entrap evildoers or to rescue the righteous from danger, but the impersonators in those stories were usually figures like the angel Gabriel or the deathless prophet Elijah. To have God himself assume this role was rare and uniquely discomfiting to accepted orthodox theology.

Rabbi Abbahu seems to have had a special interest in scriptural passages that ascribe audaciously human characteristics to the Almighty. Interestingly, he is also the author of the statement “If a person should tell you ‘I am God,’ he is a liar.”

We find surprisingly little discussion of the story of Sennacherib’s razor among the earliest commentators. Rashi glibly notes that the reason why “it would have been impossible to utter it” was because of God’s personal involvement in the story—a premise that Rashi does not question. Rabbi Meir Abulafia of Toledo, Spain, paraphrased the tale so that God merely arranged for Sennacherib to meet the elderly gentleman, or perhaps a supernatural figure who had taken on that role.

As we come closer to modern times, we find that increasing numbers of scholars are expressing their shock at the Talmud’s depiction of God taking on a human appearance. Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Chajes characterized the passage as one in which, God forbid, the surface meaning represents the Almighty in physical terms, and is therefore blasphemous and sacrilegious. We must therefore assume that our sages were using those images in order to express exalted spiritual secrets that can be appreciated only by the select few who have been initiated into the mysteries.

Rabbi Moses Isserles of sixteenth-century Cracow offered the most thorough attempt to confront the problems engendered by the talmudic story about Sennacherib and the razor, about which he lamented “it is as hard for me as a rock.” From the outset he declared that the literal sense of the passage is obviously “as far from the truth as the distance of east from west.” Moreover, he found the story to be packed with theological heresies and with inappropriate representations of God’s conduct. “’The heavens are the Lord’s, but the earth he has given to the children of men,’ so the transcendent deity cannot, God forbid, don a physical body and descend to the earth.”

Rabbi Isserles therefore proposed five alternative explanations that would obviate the need to accept the text’s literal meaning: (1) The whole episode might have been revealed to Sennacherib in a quasi-prophetic dream (a favourite tactic of Maimonides). (2) It was only the heathen Sennacherib who crudely ascribed divine status to a wise human elder. (3) The verse should be read in the sense of “the Holy One [caused an angel or Elijah] to appear to him as an old man. (4) The story was not about the historical figure of Sennacherib, but about the celestial representative of Assyria whose downfall was being decreed by the heavenly tribunal, in keeping with a well-known rabbinic motif. (5) The story is a philosophical allegory in which the old man represents the “acquired intellect” through which (according to Aristotelian metaphysics) the properly trained human intelligence can connect with eternal truth; accordingly, the defeat of Sennacherib’s armies brought the monarch to a realization of God’s absolute power, so he now was setting out on a systematic study of religious truth.

As fascinating as all these theological dialectics might be, I personally am uncomfortable when mortals claim the right to decide which appearances God is or is not allowed to assume. 

And I would definitely think twice if a strange old man advised me to shave my head with a razor.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary,November 9, 2012, p. 12.

• For further reading:
  • Ben-Sason, Yonah. The Philosophical System of R. Moses Isserles. Texts and Studies in the History of Jewish Thought. Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1984.
  • Epstein-Halevi, Elimelech. ʻOlamah Shel ha-Agadah. Tel-Aviv: Dvir, 1972.
  • Shapiro, Marc B. The Limits of Orthodox Theology: Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles Reappraised. The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. Oxford and Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2004.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Lady of the Flies

by Eliezer Segal

The Torah is not very informative when it comes to explaining the role of the angels who were going up and down the ladder in Jacob’s famous dream. Most rabbinic interpreters understood that they were there to provide protection or reassurance Jacob as he fled alone from his brother’s wrath. However, in some midrashic texts we encounter a different approach one that depicts those angels in a negative light and contrasts their role in the story to that of the Almighty. 

It was in this spirit that the Midrash Genesis Rabbah discussed an apparent inconsistency in the narrative, as from one verse to the next the angels disappear and the stage is taken over by God. Rabbi Abbahu explained the transition by resorting to an odd parable: It is analogous, he expounded, “to a king’s child who was asleep in a cradle with flies on him. When his nurse arrived, she bent down over him to nurse him, which caused them to flee from him.”

This audacious analogy compares the angels on the ladder to a swarm of tormenting insects! Indeed there are some interpretations in the midrash that depict the angels as taunting Jacob, or as celestial representations of the heathen empires who, as they rise and fall through history, will oppress Jacob’s descendants until the final redemption.

Whatever it was that was motivating the angels’ behavior, Rabbi Abbahu understood that they were irritating Jacob, and that he required divine intervention to fend off the swarm of supernatural nuisances. For that reason, God’s entry onto the narrative stage coincided with the angels’ withdrawal. God, as it were, swatted or waved them away out of solicitude for his beloved Jacob.

Rabbi Abbahu, as it happens, did not invent the simile of the baby and the flies. It was a very well-known image that made its first appearance in Homer’s epic of the Trojan war, the Iliad. The Greek bard used it to describe how Athena deflected an arrow that had been fired by the Trojan Pandarus while it was on its trajectory to kill Menelaus. When the goddess of wisdom intervened to redirect the arrow to a less vulnerable part of Menelaus’s body, Homer wrote that she was behaving “even as a mother sweeps a fly from her child when he lies in sweet slumber.”

Rabbi Abbahu, a resident of the hellenized city of Caesarea in the fourth century, was well-known for his intimate acquaintance with Greek language and culture, so it is not at all surprising to find that he was familiar with this quote.

There are actually some differences between Homer’s simile and Rabbi Abbahu’s, though it is not obvious how significant they are. For example, The midrashic child is the son of a king, whereas the one in the Iliad is not (though King Menelaus of Sparta was of royal blood). There might be a good theological reason for the rabbis to stress that Jacob (symbolized by the infant) was a prince, especially if we understand the angels to represent empires who will deny Israel’s sovereignty. On the other hand, since the vast majority of rabbinic parables are about kings (referring of course to the supreme sovereign of the universe), it might well be nothing more than a rhetorical cliché.

A similar interpretation of the episode is brought in the Babylonian Talmud: “…They [the angels] wished to do him harm—when ‘behold, the Lord stood beside him’! Rabbi Simeon ben Laḳish said: Were this not written explicitly in the scripture, we would not have dared to utter such a thing: he [God] was like a man who was fanning his son with his hand.”

The very outrageousness of the scenario of God performing menial tasks like waving or fanning for the comfort of an infant makes it rather hard to suppose that the two statements (Rabbi Abbahu’s in Genesis Rabbah and Rabbi Simeon ben Laḳish’s in the Talmud) arose independently of one another. If the authors or editors the two parables were familiar with each other’s versions, then it is possible that they sensed something problematic that they wanted to correct by proposing a different analogy.

A likely suspect for the problematic element is Rabbi Abbahu’s depiction of God in a quintessentially female role, a phenomenon that has few parallels in ancient rabbinic literature. After all, that humble wet-nurse served as a poignant poetic link between the Greek goddess of wisdom and the paternal God of the Bible. 

On further reflection, however, when we take into account the broader cultural and religious contexts of Judaism at that time, it is not too difficult to come up with a number of alternative explanations for why someone could have wanted to find a replacement for Rabbi Abbahu’s analogy of the wet-nurse. 

For one thing, wet-nursing was a domestic function that in Hellenistic and Roman society was frequently performed by slaves; and in spite of the rabbis’ occasional assurances that the Lord is ready to forego his majesty to minister to the needs of his creatures, our sages lived in a world that took social class very seriously. Hence the attribution to him of a menial function that was so far beneath his dignity might well have exceeded the bounds of theological propriety.

The symbolism also involved some thorny religious questions that emerged from the ongoing rivalries between Judaism and paganism. Cults whose imagery depicted goddesses nursing their children enjoyed much popularity in the Roman empire. The best known of these was the Egyptian Isis cult whose icons showed her holding her son Horus at her bosom. These cults were well known to the Jewish sages and objects portraying their cultic images were prohibited by rabbinic law. 

Moreover, since Egypt’s empress Cleopatra VII declared herself to be the reincarnation of the goddess Isis, that cult took on an additional negative dimension as a form of emperor-worship. This distasteful mixture of politics and religion provoked the rabbis’ vehement opposition even though they might have been inclined to feel less threatened by other vestiges of traditional mythological polytheism.

We see, then, that there was no dearth of adequate religious and political factors that would warrant the removal of the wet-nurse from Rabbi Abbahu’s parable, without requiring us to assume that the rabbis were objecting to the use of a feminine image to describe God’s treatment of Jacob and the angels. 

In any case, the texts of the Midrash and Talmud contain no indication that anyone was particularly bothered by Rabbi Abbahu’s exposition, neither by the feminine imagery itself nor by the use of Homer’s Iliad in a Jewish religious homily.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, November 23, 2012, p. 16.

• For further reading:
  • Bacher, Wilhelm. Agadat Amoraʼe Erets-Yisraʼel. Translated by Alexander Siskind Rabinovitz. Vol. 1. 3 vols. Tel-Aviv: Dvir, 1925.
  • ———. Die Agada der palästinensischen Amoräer. 3 vols. Strassburg i. E: K. J. Trübner, 1892.
  • Lieberman, Saul. Hellenism in Jewish Palestine: Studies in the Literary Transmission, Beliefs and Manners of Palestine in the I Century B. C. E.-IV Century C. E. Texts and Studies of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America v. 18. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1950.
  • Sperber, Daniel. Greek in Talmudic Palestine. Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2012.
  • Ulmer, Rivka. Egyptian Cultural Icons in Midrash. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009.
  • Urbach, Efraim Elimelech. “The Rabbinical Laws of Idolatry in the Second and Third Centuries in the Light of Archaeological and Historical Facts.” Israel Exploration Journal 9, no. 3 (1959): 149–165.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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