I’ll Take a Vowel Please

by Eliezer Segal

I was trained in the old-fashioned (and now unfashionable) discipline of textual scholarship, or philology. In that spirit, I have learned to focus very precisely on minute details of ancient texts in order to squeeze out from them every possible drop of meaning, interpretation or implication. I therefore derive much gratification from reading traditional writers who were able to focus their concentration on the tiny details whose clarification is so crucial to the accurate reconstruction of the historical and cultural past.

An investigation of this kind was conducted by an Italian Jewish writer in the late sixteenth century who wanted to determine the correct spelling of a single word in the Torah. There is some confusion about the precise identity of that scholar, and he might have been either Rabbi Judah Leib Saraval or Rabbi Menahem Moscatto. I will refer to him henceforth evasively as “Our Author.”

While it is customary for traditional Jews to speak proudly of the letter-for-letter precision of our sacred scrolls, we learn from this and other examples that the Jewish Torah, though it achieved an extraordinary level of textual precision, was never quite perfect; and in earlier generations, especially before the advent of printing, it was even more fluid, although the variants were confined to matters of spelling and did not usually affect the meaning.

As is well known, the normal practice in the Hebrew language, especially in biblical texts, is to write only the consonants. Notation systems for vowels were not devised until the Middle Ages and are not included in the scrolls that are read ritually in the synagogue. Nevertheless, some consonants did perform double duty as vowel indicators, including the letter vav (pronounced as a “v” consonant) that sometimes indicates an “o” or “u” vowel.

According to the traditional orthographic convention, the name of Moses’s brother Aaron is always written in the Torah without the vav that might otherwise have indicated the “o” vowel.

…Well, almost always. There is a lone exception to that rule. In an otherwise innocuous passage in Exodus 29:15, while relating the elaborate sequence of sacrifices and other rites for the ceremony of consecrating the priests to serve in the newly erected tabernacle, scripture states that “Aaron and his sons shall lay their hands upon the head of the ram.” A longstanding tradition among Jewish Torah scribes held that this particular instance of Aaron’s name should be written with a vav— making it the only such case in the entire Torah. A rule to that effect was included in the “Masorah,” the intensely detailed scholarly annotations that were compiled in order to preserve an accurate and uniform biblical text. This exception was confirmed by Rabbi Meir Hallevi Abulafia of Burgos, Spain (died in 1224) in his influential treatise on the correct writing of Torah scrolls.

Our Author relates that he had worked as a scribe in his youth (forty years prior to writing the current work), and had been instructed at the time to insert the vav in Aaron’s name. However, he discovered later that there was no consensus on this matter. In particular, the scribes in Turkey and in oriental lands were known to omit the vav.

Therefore, in his determination to come up with a definitive ruling on the matter, Our Author conducted an extensive survey of the rabbinic opinions on the question. The results were published as an appendix to the 1746 edition of Abulafia’s compendium printed in Florence. That brief investigation provides us with an intriguing glimpse into the issues and criteria that come into play in making decisions regarding the correct text of a Torah scroll. 

At the start, Our Author sets out an important principle that he will be following when choosing from among competing readings: the fact that a variant reading is cited in the Talmud or Midrash will not be accepted as evidence of its genuineness if it is contradicted by the majority of biblical texts. Rabbi David Nahmias of Salonica and Rabbi Menahem Azariah of Fano cited an observation found in the medieval Tosafot commentary acknowledging that the accepted readings of the Bible can at times conflict with the citations by the rabbis. Indeed, Jewish commentators had long been troubled by the contradictions between the versions of biblical texts that were cited in the the Talmud (including several that formed the basis for normative rulings) and those that were listed in the Masora.

In this connection Our Author cites several interpretations that were preserved in midrashic works but which were never accepted as normative by the copyists of biblical manuscripts. As with many statements in the Talmud, he suggests that those readings may reflect the individual opinions of their authors, but they were ultimately rejected by the authoritative majority. Our Author’s downgrading of the Talmud’s authority in this area stood in opposition to vocal objections of eminent medieval authorities such as Rabbi Solomon Ibn Adret (Rashba) that the talmudic versions should be given preference, at least in matters involving the derivation of religious law.

We now know that such discrepancies can stem from the fact that there were two competing systems of Masora: the “Eastern” one that was known to the ancient sages of the Babylonian Talmud, and the Tiberian one that eventually gained acceptance by the Jewish communities throughout the world. It has been suggested that the persistent supremacy of the Tiberian Masora might owe its tenacity to its endorsement by powerful guilds of Hebrew scribes.

Our Author believed that there was yet another kind of evidence that was to be consulted in such questions: local tradition. He reported that the rabbis of Budapest—or Budon, as it was then known—invoked the established practice of their community which strongly supported the inclusion of the vav in Aaron’s name. Their community’s authoritative traditions were embodied in a venerable tome that served as their exemplar for the copying of all their sacred scrolls, as well as in an oral tradition that was preserved assiduously among their local scribes.

However, local traditions also varied from place to place, and Rabbi Nahmias reported that in Salonica the unanimous practice among the expert scribes was to omit the vav. Several of the other rabbis who were consulted made a point of checking the Torah scrolls that were in use by their communities.

Does the decision to accept one reading imply that the alternative version is wrong and that the delinquent Torah scrolls must be corrected or disqualified? Our Author reports that there were differing positions concerning this question as well. The authorities of Constantinople were unbending on this point and would insert the vav into any scrolls from which it was found to be missing. However, the Hungarian rabbis in spite of their preference for the Masoretic spelling, advised that scrolls that read otherwise did not have to be emended as long as there was no clear consensus regarding the correct text. A similar approach was favoured by Rabbi Elijah Arbaro of Skopje, Macedonia, and by Rabbi Benzion Ṣarfati of the Ashkenazic community in Venice. Rabbi Menahem Azariah of Fano was resigned to the fact that “we have no basis for determining the correct text until the advent of the teacher of righteousness.” Therefore any scroll that in other respects is known to be accurate should not be disqualified solely on the grounds that it contains one of the controversial readings.

This degree of precision in preserving the most minute of orthographic details may be appropriate to a document that is imbued with religious sanctity. But in spite of my best intentions to keep my own writings free from errors, I could never aspire to such uncompromising standards of perfection. I therefore beg my readers’ indulgance if a few misteaks should nevertheless sneak past my vigilant editorial ayes.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, January 24, 2014, p. 12.

• For further reading:
  • Leiman, Sid Z. “Masorah and Halakhah: A Study in Conflict.” In Tehillah le-Moshe: Biblical and Judaic Studies in Honor of Moshe Greenberg, edited by Mordechai Cogan, Barry Eichler, and Jeffrey Tigay, 291–306. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1997.
  • Levy, B. Barry. Fixing God’s Torah: The Accuracy of the Hebrew Bible Text in Jewish Law. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
  • Ofer, Yosef. Babylonian Masora of the Pentateuch, Its Principles and Methods. Texts and Studies of the Academy for the Hebrew Language New Series 6. Jerusalem: Academy for the Hebrew Language and Magnes Press, 2001.
  • Ta-Shma, Israel. “The Literary Oeuvre of R. Meir Halevi Abulafia.” Kiryat Sefer 45 (1970 1969): 119–126.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Portable Holes and Rolling Stones

by Eliezer Segal

No self-respecting work of science fiction is likely to omit mention of a black hole, an astronomical object whose gravitational force is so powerful that it pulls everything into its irresistible grip, including light itself. In addition to endangering the lives of space travelers, the black holes can serve as convenient metaphors for an assortment of earthbound situations ranging from bad investments to emotionally draining romantic entanglements.

Ecclesiastes declared famously that “all the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full.” Some Jewish sages understood this as a description of the ocean as a whole and to the mysterious ecological balance that prevents its waters from inundating the land in spite of being continually fed by rivers and precipitation However, an alternative approach applied the verse to a particular place in the midst of the sea that acted as an eternally bottomless pit. Some expositions in the midrash noted that this was an apt metaphor for the intellectual thirst for learning, especially for Torah study, which can never be sated.

An entity matching this description is mentioned in one of the numerous tales about Jewish sages who succeeded in outsmarting the supposedly wise men of Athens. The hero of this story, Rabbi Joshua ben Ḥananiah, tricked the arrogant and reclusive Athenian savants into accompanying him on visit to the Roman emperor. En route, Rabbi Joshua made a brief stop at a “site of swallowing waters” where he collected a sample and placed it in a jar. Rashi explained that these were “waters from the ocean that swallow up all the other waters in the world that flow into it, draw them them down to the deep abyss, and then discharge them.” Later, in order to humble the conceited Greek wise guys, Rabbi Joshua assigned them busy-work, ordering them to fill a cask from the self-swallowing waters. Unable to complete this Sisyphean task, the Athenians dislocated their shoulders and collapsed.

According to a different version of the story in the Midrash, this was a purely scientific (but apparently non-Archimedean) experiment performed by Rabbis Joshua and Eliezer in order to demonstrate to the emperor Hadrian how the waters of the ocean can absorb infinite quantities without adding to their volume. 

Another concept from advanced physics that has found its way into popular discourse is that of the “wormhole,” a fast-track through the warped fabric of space-time that provides science fiction with a convenient way for adventurers to boldly traverse the vast light-years of the universe to visit galaxies far away.

A related visual image that has been drilled into my memory since childhood is the Loony Tunes concept of a “portable hole,” a flat circular, ostensibly two-dimensional object that can be placed on any surface to serve as a portal through which animated characters can burrow. (Hommages to that marvelous hole showed up in later cartoon classics like “Who Killed Roger Rabbit?” and “Yellow Submarine.”)

As with the black holes, ancient Jewish equivalents to the portable hole also tended to involve water. The most famous instance is that of “Miriam’s well.” According to the Talmud and Midrash, this vital source of liquid sustenance accompanied the Israelites throughout their forty-year sojourn in the Sinai desert. The rabbis noted that the wondrous well had many special associations with Moses’ sister: for example, she had burst out in inspired song at the Red Sea, and her death was immediately followed by a water shortage. (Rabbi Samson ben Zadok explained that this was the reason for the custom of spilling out water that had been in the same house as a corpse). Other midrashic traditions told that this well had existed since primordial times: it had been created along with other miraculous entities at dusk on the world’s first Friday; it imparted nourishment for Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; and it will flow from the gates of the rebuilt Jerusalem Temple in the time of the future redemption.

Some versions of this legend depicted the well not as a “portable hole,” but as a round, sieve-like rock, a veritable rolling stone that escorted the Israelites in their journeys through the Sinai wilderness. According to this understanding, Miriam’s well was the very same rock that Moses struck when it petulantly (and anthropomorphically) refused to pour out its contents because of its grief at the departure of its beloved patroness. A picture of this well streaming its waters to the tents of the twelve tribes was included among the beautiful biblical frescos that adorned the third-century synagogue of Dura Europos in Syria. 

Statements in the Talmud attest to the belief that the well could still be seen in post-biblical times, though the rabbis disagreed about its precise geographic whereabouts. Some situated it in the Sea of Galilee where the circular shape could be viewed from between the columns of a synagogue in Tiberias; others claimed that it lay off the Mediterranean coast where it could be observed from atop Mount Carmel. Several stories spoke of the well’s wondrous medicinal powers, especially their ability to cure leprosy—the same debilitating disease that had afflicted Miriam herself in the Bible. The Kabbalists of sixteenth-century Safed claimed to have discovered its location.

The Talmud commentary ascribed to Rabbi Gershom of Mainz cited a tradition that equated Miriam’s well with Rabbi Joshua’s “swallowing waters.” 

A medieval manuscript told of a woman who went out on Saturday night to draw water and unknowingly filled her jug from the waters of Miriam’s well. When she returned home, her husband, who was a leper, scolded her for taking too long, and in her agitation she dropped the jug, splashing water on her husband. Every part of his diseased flesh that came in contact with the water was instantly healed! 

Indeed, Jewish legends that were in circulation in medieval Europe related that the well’s waters were able to roam to far-away lands. A tradition ascribed to Meir of Rothenburg described how, in some inscrutable way, those healing waters were able to blend with a network of springs and wells throughout the world—but only during the twilight hours of Saturday night at the conclusion of the Sabbath. In some localities in Germany, this belief gave rise to a practice of actively seeking out drinking water on Saturday evening, in the hope that it might derive from Miriam’s well and bestow its benefits upon ailing bodies (as well as strengthening weakened memories)—in a manner reminiscent of the beliefs current among their Christian neighbours about the miraculous healing powers of water blessed by the Virgin Mary. For this reason, women in some localities would rush out to draw water at the very start of the Saturday night prayer service. In doing so, they were overriding a venerable tradition of refraining from drinking water at that time for fear of depriving the sinners in the next world of their last sips as they returned to their fiery punishment following the Sabbath reprieve.

A vestige of those old beliefs and customs surrounding Miriam’s well might be preserved in the familiar practice of introducing the Havdalah blessing at the conclusion of the Sabbath with the verse from Isaiah: “therefore with joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation.”

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, February 14, 2014, p. 14.

• For further reading:
  • Abramson, Shraga, ed. Nissim ben Jacob ben Nissim ibn Shahin: Libelli Quinque. Jerusalem: Meḳitse Nirdamim, 1965. 
  • Ginzberg, Louis. The Legends of the Jews. Translated by Henrietta Szold. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1909. 
  • Hachlili, Rachel. “The Dura-Europos Synagogue Wall Paintings: A Question of Origin and Interpretation.” Pages 401–18 in “Follow the Wise” (B. Sanhedrin 32b): Studies in Jewish History and Culture in Honor of Lee I. Levine. Edited by Z. J. Weiss, Jodi Magness, Seth Schwartz, and O Irshai. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2010. 
  • Lieberman, Saul. Tosefta Ki-Feshutah. New York and Jerusalem: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1995.
  • Shoham-Steiner, Ephraim. “The Virgin Mary, Miriam, and Jewish Reactions to Marian Devotion in the High Middle Ages.” AJS Review 37, no. 1 (2013): 75–91.
  • Ta-Shma, Israel M. “Miriam’s Well—French Customs Relating to the Sabbath Third Meal.” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 4, no. 3–4 (1984): 251–70.

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Haman among the Pyramids

by Eliezer Segal

Hopefully, our understanding of the Jewish past has by now transcended what the great historian Salo Baron dubbed “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history,” as little more than a ceaseless tale of persecutions and victimizations. Nevertheless, some of the dates in our festival cycle do promote such a perspective, to the point where the assorted villains who strove to harm us become interchangeable and are hard to tell apart without a program. 

Apparently this confusion is not limited to Jews. The Muslim and Jewish narratives diverge in their depictions of the wicked Haman.

For us, of course, the arch-villain was was active during the Persian era when his personal feud with the Jewish courtier Mordecai impelled him to plot the massacre of all the Jews in the empire of Ahasuerus. In the Qur’an, on the other hand, there is no mention of Mordecai, Esther or of the Purim story. And yet Haman is mentioned in a much earlier historical setting, in the company of the Pharaoh who enslaved the Israelites. In fact, in its version of the Exodus story the Qur’an routinely depicts Haman as Pharaoh’s [Fir‘awn] constant companion. 

In one passage, Moses is sent to teach correct religious beliefs to Pharaoh, Haman and Korach [Ḳarun], but they all dismiss the Hebrew prophet as a sorcerer and charlatan.

The plot becomes even more entangled when Pharaoh commands Haman to erect a giant tower that would allow him to behold Moses’s God, or at least show Moses up for a fraud. Of course this detail sounds suspiciously like the biblical account of the tower of Babel that took place centuries earlier and in a location far from Egypt.

In a manner reminiscent of Jewish midrash, Muslim interpreters expanded the brief passages in the Qur’an in order to make the stories more vivid and to elicit religious and moral lessons. Among the most important authors to deal with the episode were the tenth-century chronicler and geographer Al-Muṭahhar ibn Ṭahir al-Maḳdisi; Al-Kisa’i, the eleventh-century author of a volume of tales about the prophets; and the eminent Iranian polymath Abu Rayḥan al-Biruni. While these elaborations vary widely in their details, there are certain motifs that are shared by the diverse accounts.

Haman’s vile personality was closely tied to that of his crony, Pharaoh. Al-Kisa’i told how the future monarch had risen from humble origins and was ruined by gambling. However, he devised a scheme to recoup his losses by stationing himself at the entrance to a cemetery and extorting payment from grieving families for the privilege of burying their loved ones. When he tried to employ this tactic on the reigning king, he was almost executed, but managed to buy his way to freedom. Later, he assassinated the king and usurped the exalted Egyptian throne with its global empire.

This new Pharaoh was easily able to inspire the allegiances of the most depraved elements, from Satan down to assorted sorcerers. Prominent among his supporters was the arch-fiend Haman. Al-Maḳdisi knew of a tradition that Haman and Pharaoh (both of whom were of Iranian origin) had become very wealthy by introducing watermelon seeds to Egypt—and (as in Al-Kisa’i’s account) by forcing people to pay for the use of cemeteries. 

However, al-Biruni, a student of comparative religion who was explaining the Jewish festival of Purim, situated the story of Haman’s rise in Tustar, Iran, and in the company of King Ahasuerus. According to al-Biruni, Ahasuerus appointed Haman his chief minister because he was so impressed by his unscrupulous financial savvy.

Al-Biruni recounts that the Israelite elders also yielded to the villains’ demands to be idolized; however, Pharaoh realized that the priests, under threat of torture, were insincere in their prostrations, so he set about executing them nonetheless. At this point Pharaoh observed to Haman that his demise would ultimately come from among the Israelite ranks. This is reminiscent of the warning issued to the biblical Haman by his wife and advisors: “If Mordecai be of the seed of the Jews, before whom thou hast begun to fall, thou shalt not prevail against him, but shalt surely fall before him.” Hoping to avert that scenario, Pharaoh ordered Haman to appoint Amram, Moses’ father, as Prime Minister. In this way Haman was now made subordinate to a Hebrew superior, echoing a theme from the Bible’s story about Haman and Mordecai.

There is no question that the Muslim stories, when compared with their biblical counterparts, have their chronology and geography jumbled. Nevertheless, several of the elements that were added to the Islamic narrative, including items related to both Pharaoh and Haman, bear striking resemblances to details that may be found in the Bible or its midrashic elaborations. 

Take, for example, the traditions about Haman’s involvement in building the tower. This sounds vaguely reminiscent of the Bible’s statement about Haman building “a gallows fifty cubits high,” a device that would become the instrument of his own downfall.

So too, the Muslim traditions about the villains’ squalid origins and squandered fortunes echo stories about Haman in the Midrash and Talmud. One Jewish story claimed that Haman had once followed the ignoble profession of a barber. Another rabbinic tale described how Mordecai and Haman had once served as generals responsible for suppressing a war in India. Haman had carelessly squandered his budget (though not, as far as I know, by gambling) and was forced to borrow from the fiscally prudent Mordecai, but only after signing a document stating that he was selling himself to the Jew as a slave. 

Although Jewish sources do not depict Haman and Korah as contemporaries, a midrashic tradition equates them typologically as persons of immense wealth who used their riches for evil purposes. 

Although I am not aware of any Jewish texts that link Haman or Pharaoh to the gouging of funeral costs, it is not hard to discern in this motif a satirical allusion to the ancient Pharaohs’ well-known obsession with exorbitant pyramids, mummies and other extravagant ways of honouring the dead.

Haman’s and Pharaoh’s insistence on people bowing to their leader is of course consistent with Haman’s behaviour in the book of Esther, which the rabbis also construed as a command to be worshipped. Some of the rabbis were not quite certain that the majority of Jews in Shushan were as resolute as Mordecai in their resistance to idolatry. 

As we learn from the words of the medieval Qur’an commentators, Muslims in earlier times were not particularly troubled by discrepancies between their version of Haman’s life and that of the Jewish and Christian scriptures. Presumably, they believed that their revelation was the accurate one and that errors had crept into the biblical texts. In recent years, however, there has been a more pronounced tendency to argue that the Haman mentioned in the Qur’an was a completely different villain, an Egyptian specialist in monumental construction projects.

It is reassuring nonetheless to be reminded that the Islamic scripture and tradition share our abhorrence for the nefarious Haman, a quintessential enemy of the Jewish people.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, March 7, 2014, p. 12.

• For further reading:
  • Geiger, Abraham. Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen? 2nd revised edition. Osnabrück: Biblio Verlag, 1971.
  • Ginzberg, Louis. Legends of the Jews. Edited by Paul Radin. Translated by Henrietta Szold. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2003.
  • Khalidi, Tarif. “Muʿtazilite Historiography: Maqdisī’s Kitāb Al-Badʾ Waʾl-Taʾrīkh.” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 35, no. 1 (1976): 1–12.
  • Reynolds, Gabriel Said. The Qur’an and Its Biblical Subtext. Routledge Studies in the Qur’an 10. London and New York: Routledge, 2010.
  • Schwarzbaum, Haim. Biblical and Extra-Biblical Legends in Islamic Folk-Literature. Beiträge zur Sprach- und Kulturgeschichte des Orients Bd. 30. Walldorf-Hessen: Verlag für Orientkunde Dr. H. Vorndran, 1982.
  • Silverstein, Adam. “Hāmān’s Transition from Jāhiliyya to Isl&#ispan> 34 (2008): 285–308.
  • Syed, Sher M. “Hāmān in the Light of the Qur’an.” Hamdard Islamicus 7, no. 4 (1984): 83–92.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Inscrutable Scrolls

by Eliezer Segal

Back in the days when rabbinic Judaism upheld a strict division between written and unwritten texts, their corpus of written documents was limited almost exclusively to the books of the Bible itself. There was however a lone exception to this rule: a short and enigmatic Aramaic work known as the “Scroll of Fasts” that consisted of a list of dates in the Hebrew calendar that were designated for rejoicing—and for which reason fasting was forbidden. Some of those festive dates represented victories of the Hasmoneans against their enemies, while others commemorated achievements of the Pharisees (whose spiritual successors were the rabbis of the talmudic era) against their sectarian rivals. All this indicates that the Scroll was composed during the latter centuries of the Second Temple era; but we still possess scant solid information regarding the Scroll’s authorship, purpose and influence.

The Scroll opens, appropriately, at the beginning of the Jewish liturgical year: “From the beginning of the month of Nissan until its eighth day the Tamid (the daily offering in the Temple) was established; therefore one may not fast then.”

This brief entry confronts the reader with a number of puzzles and obscurities. What is the religious significance of this particular eight-day period, and why was it singled out for celebration in a document that is, for the most part, rooted in the realities of Second-Temple Judaism?

The Talmud and the earliest commentary (known as the “Scholion”) to the Scroll of Fasts connected those dates to a dispute between the Pharisees and their opponents who are identified variously as the Sadducees or the “Boethusians.” This was a dispute that had profound implications for the nature of Jewish communal worship.

The Torah is not specific about who had the responsibility or privilege for providing the lambs for the Tamid sacrifices. The Sadducees, who identified with the values of the aristocratic high priestly dynasty, maintained that individual donors should be allowed to sponsor the communal offerings. They found support for their position in the fact that the Torah uses a grammatically singular verb to express the command.

The Pharisaic sages, on the other hand, pointed out that the precept was being addressed to the entire nation, and that the relevant biblical passage also contained a plural verb. In order to ensure that all Jews had an equal share in the Tamid and the other collective offerings, a fund was established in which every Jew in the world was required to contribute half a shekel—no more and no less—every year, as had been the procedure when contributions were first levied for the building of the Tabernacle, the portable sanctuary in which worship was conducted by the Israelites in the desert. That contribution became so crucial to the definition of Jewish national identity that the emperor Vespasian could find no more effective form of humiliating the defeated Jews than by redirecting it to the notorious “fiscus Judaicus” tax designated for the heathen temple of Capitoline Jupiter.

According to the interpretation of the Scholion and the Talmud, the expression “the Tamid was established” in the Scroll of Fasts should be understood in the sense of “the proper [that is: the Pharisaic] procedure for financing the Tamid prevailed”—though this reading requires taking some liberties with the semantic possibilities of the text.

The philosophical and moral issues that were implicit in this dispute were spelled out eloquently by the preeminent liturgical poet Eleazar Kalir:

It is fixed equally for the rich and for the poor,

the princes and the commoners are measured equally.

Let the prince not be arrogant before the multitude

to proclaim: My wealth has delivered me from snares.

According to Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, The Pharisees’ insistence that responsibility for the Temple be equally shared among all Jews demonstrated that the sanctuary is not an institution whose workings can be delegated to the priests and separated from the lifestream of the nation. On the contrary, “its purpose cannot be achieved without constant and ever fresh and lively participation of the whole nation.” Though the Torah provides plenty of opportunities to express individual generosity and initiative, at the fundamental level it is not the quantity of one’s financial contribution that determines a Jew’s stature in the community. As Rabbi Hirsch put it, “the dollars of the rich weigh no more than the pennies of the poor, and the pennies of the poor are fully equal to the dollars of the rich. The rich man can do no more and the poor man shall do no less than the half of a whole shekel.”

Remarkable new light was shed on the obscure dates in the Scroll of Fasts with Yigael Yadin’s publication in 1977 of the document known as the “Temple Scroll” from the ancient library at Qumran. In its paraphrase of the Torah’s order of communal sacrifices, the Temple Scroll inserted a special sacrifice to be offered on the New Moon of Nissan. It also stated that the week-long procedure for inaugurating the priesthood and the sanctuary—which takes up a considerable chunk of the Torah’s text—was not a one-time event, but was ordained to be reenacted every year; and it is likely that during those days the normal Tamid sacrifices were not offered (as they could not have been offered that first time in the desert, prior to the inauguration of the Tabernacle).

As it happens, the Torah speaks at great length about a seven-day ritual ceremony related to the construction of the Tabernacle and the consecration of the priests. It also identifies the first day of the first month (Nissan) as the date on which the tabernacle was built. Now, the predominant understanding in rabbinic tradition is that the process culminated on the eighth day, the first of Nissan; but there are commentators such as Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra who insist that the count commenced on first of the month and concluded on the seventh day, so that from the eighth day the Tamid sacrifices could be offered on a daily basis. This interpretation could form the basis of the Scroll’s eight-day no-fasting period. However, it is not immediately clear why the document should include a reference to an event that had not been observed since the time of Moses.

In light of this information, scholars have proposed that the passage in the Scroll of Fasts might allude to a victory of the Pharisees over their rivals on this issue. The theory supposes that at some point during the Hasmonean era the priests in charge of the Jerusalem Temple were following the practice described in the Qumran Temple Scroll of suspending the Tamid offerings for the first eight days of Nissan. Eventually, the Pharisees were able to impose their own practice; and they declared that their triumph should be commemorated annually as a time of rejoicing for the “establishment” of the Tamid.

We possess no precise data to tell us how or when such a decision would have been made. Considering the extreme rancor that characterized the frictions between the Jewish religious sects in those times, it is most unlikely that the Pharisees achieved their success by means of a peaceful democratic transition. A plausible theory dates the change in the reign of the Hasmonean queen Salome Alexandra who wielded her royal authority to aggressively support the Pharisees, following a prior period of Sadducee supremacy during the régime of her late husband Alexander Jannaeus.

Amidst all these questions we are reminded yet again how intricate were the origins of the Jewish religious calendar. Perhaps in time, newer scrolls will be unearthed that will fill in the many lacunae in our knowledge—but it is just as likely that they will add further to our bafflement.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, March 28, 2014, p. 12.

• For further reading:
  • Bickerman, E. J. “Some Observations on Megillat Taanit.” Zion 1 (1935): 351–55.
  • Erder, Yoram. “The First Date in Megillat Taʿanit in Light of the Karaite Commentary on the Tabernacle Dedication.” Jewish Quarterly Review 82, no. 3/4 (1992): 263. doi:10.2307/1454860.
  • Flusser, David. “Matthew XVII, 24-27 and the Dead Sea Sect.” Tarbiz 31, no. 2 (1961): 150–56.
  • Knohl, Israel, and Shlomoh Naeh. “Milluim Ve-Kippurim.” Tarbiz 62 (1993): 17–44.
  • Lichtenstein, Hans. “Die Fastenrolle: eine Untersuchung zur jüdisch-hellenistischen Geschichte.” Hebrew Union College Annual 8-9 (1931): 257–351.
  • Liver, J. “The Half-Shekel in the Scrolls of the Judean Desert Sect.” Tarbiz 31 (1962): 18–22.
  • ———. “The Half-Shekel Offering in Biblical and Post-Biblical Literature.” Harvard Theological Review 56, no. 3 (1963): 173–98.
  • Noam, Vered. Megilat Taʻanit: Versions, Interpretation, History with a Critical Edition. Between Bible and Mishnah: The David and Jemima Jeselsohn Library. Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi Press, 2003.
  • Urbach, Efraim Elimelech. The Halakhah, Its Sources and Development. Yad La-Talmud. Ramat Gan and Jerusalem: Masadah and Yad la-Talmud, 1986.

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My email address is: [email protected]

Crime of Passion

by Eliezer Segal

Alongside the memories of slavery and the thrill of liberation that define the moods of the Passover celebration, the story of the exodus involves a disturbing amount of collateral damage to innocent Egyptian bystanders. 

The traditional commentaries seem more likely to deal with this factor by disregarding it than by confronting it directly. There are nevertheless a number of texts that suggest that our sages could be distressed at the loss of Egyptian life, and that they raised some salient moral questions about the human price that was paid for the liberation of the Israelites. 

One such discussion arose in connection with Moses’ review of his life as he was approaching his final days. Our great liberator comes across as a most reluctant leader, flustered by the historic responsibilities that were thrust upon him. In his first encounter with God at the burning bush, he tried to refuse his burdensome prophetic mission, and much of his subsequent activity was filled with the frustrations of shepherding an unmanageable populace, and of repeatedly interceding on their behalf when they provoked divine wrath.

So worn and frazzled does Moses appear by the end of his life that it is easy to forget his beginnings as a wild and reckless vigilante who slew an Egyptian taskmaster for mistreating a Hebrew slave. The Torah itself does not pass judgement on Moses’s action, and the episode’s principal function in the narrative is to provide a reason for his flight to Midian.

That terse account of the killing of the taskmaster is open to many possible readings: Was Moses’ deed sparked by an impulsive flash of indignation, or did he arrive at his decision after carefully weighing all the options? Was the Israelite victim’s life in imminent peril, or was the mistreatment of a lesser degree? The Torah does not divulge sufficient information to base a cogent ethical evaluation of the episode.

Though the slaying of the Egyptian oppressor may have been passed over abruptly by the biblical narrative in Exodus, the incident seems to have troubled the consciences of later Jewish interpreters. Some extraordinary instances of this concern may be found in works that were devoted to retelling Moses’s final days. 

Several moving passages in the book of Deuteronomy are devoted to the great prophet’s heart-rending pleas to be allowed to enter the promised land. The dramatic poignancy of this theme, combined with the fact that Moses’s death is described in the closing verses of the Torah, inspired a special genre of literary creations whose authors imagined the dramatic dialogue that might have taken place between Moses and the Almighty. Some of these dialogues were included in the Aramaic translations (Targums) whose recitation used to supplement the reading of the Torah in the synagogues. Others circulated as separate volumes of “midrash.”

One of these works, stemming from the early medieval era, is known as “the Midrash about the Death of our Master Moses.” In it, Moses challenges God to justify the shabby treatment he seems to be getting. After all, in the larger scheme of things, would it really make any difference if his life were prolonged just enough to allow him to tread on the yearned-for soil of the promised land?

The Almighty appears hard pressed to come up with a persuasive answer. Initially he invokes the inevitable fact of human mortality. Moses, however, is unsatisfied with this argument, and produces a list of biblical figures who were no better than himself, but were treated with far more consideration. God, in turn, counters that even Moses cannot claim a life of untainted virtue. He was, after all, guilty of several sins of varying degrees of severity that were never deleted from his permanent record.

In this context, the Holy One blurts out “Did I ever order you to kill that Egyptian?”

Moses retorts with what might be excused as a chutzpah born of desperation: “You were the one who slew all the firstborns of Egypt— So is it fair that I should die now on account of a solitary Egyptian?”

The exasperated divine response is that such a comparison is inherently absurd: “You are comparing yourself to me?! I have the power to bestow both death and life. Are you really capable of restoring life?” 

Although God is given the last word in this argument (at which point he immediately diverts the conversation to a different subject), it is by no means obvious that his position is being accepted by the story’s author. There is something in the Creator’s tone that is reminiscent of an infuriated parent stalemated in a fruitless argument with an obstinate child and forced to fall back on the claim “I’m the adult and I make the rules!” 

An intriguing variation on this theme is contained in a liturgical poem (piyyuṭ) composed by the prolific eighth-century poet Phineas ben Jacob Ha-Kohen, intended to accompany the closing verses of Deuteronomy.

In Phineas’ reconstruction of the conversation between Moses and the Lord, the prophet suggests several possible incidents from his life that might have provoked the divine decree against his entering the promised land. Each of the suggestions, however, is rejected by the Almighty himself who condones Moses’ conduct in every case. Under multiple layers of obscure poetic allusions, the Israelite leader is arguing that, even if the blood of that slain Egyptian is demanding vengeance by means of Moses’s untimely demise, the Creator should not be deceived by that spurious argument. After all, Moses did not slay the evildoer until he was satisfied (presumably, through his prophetic insight) that not only was he irredeemably wicked, but no righteous person was destined to be descended from him for all future generations. 

The assumption underlying this exchange is that human life is so precious that even if the Egyptian himself was a depraved criminal, it would still have been wrong to kill him, if only on the remote chance that he might eventually produce a worthy descendant.

In this version of the discussion, the Almighty reassured Moses that the Egyptian had no redeeming virtues and was fit to be consigned to eternal flames. That particular act of violence had no impact on the decision to end Moses’ life, a decision which was determined by the inscrutable considerations of divine wisdom and human mortality.

Underlying this grappling with Moses’s violent youth is the premise that there are fundamental standards of morality that must never be ignored even in a struggle for national liberation. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks put it, “Freedom is not won by merely overthrowing a tyrannical ruler or an oppressive regime. That is usually only the prelude to a new tyranny, a new oppression. The faces change, but not the script.”

Rabbi Sacks made use of this insight to explain the vastly different outcomes of various modern revolutionary movements: only the English and American revolutions, which drew inspiration from the exodus narrative and the biblical conviction that all authority is subject to the transcendental demands of the moral law, produced free societies and political systems that honoured human rights; whereas the ideologists of the French and Russian revolutions, who arrogated supreme power to humans and to the state itself, could not restrain the ruthless exercise of their leaders’ ambitions, and hence degenerated into reigns of terror.

Seen this way, the lofty standards that were demanded of Moses may continue to define the ideals of freedom for future generations.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, April 11, 2014, p. 18.

• For further reading:
  • Blidstein, Gerald J. The Death of Moses: Readings in Midrash. Alon Shevut: Tevunot, 2008. 
  • Chazon, Esther G. “Moses’ Struggle for his Soul: A Prototype for the Testament of Abraham, the Greek Apocalypse of Ezra and the Apocalypse of Sedrach.” The Second Century: A Journal of Early Christian Studies 5 (1985): 151-164. 
  • Elizur, Shulamit. A Poem for Every Parasha: Torah Readings Reflected in the Piyyutim. Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1999. 
  • Elizur, Shulamit, ed. The Liturgical Poetry of Pinhas ben Jacob ha-Kohen. Sources for the Study of Jewish Culture 8. Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, 2004. 
  • Ginzberg, Louis. Legends of the Jews. Edited by Paul Radin. Translated by Henrietta Szold. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2003. 
  • Kasher, Rimon. “Two Targum-Tosephtas on the Death of Moses.” Tarbiz 54, no. 2 (1985): 217-224. 
  • “Midrasch vom Ableben Mosis.” Bet Ha-Midrasch 1 (1853): 115-129.
  • Stemberger, Günter. Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash. 1st ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992.
  • Walzer, Michael. Exodus and Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 1985.
  • Zulay, Menahem. “Contribution to the History of the Liturgical Poetry in Palestine.” Studies of the Research Institute for Hebrew Poetry in Jerusalem 5 (1939): 107-180.

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A Passage to Israel

by Eliezer Segal

When called upon to defend the Jewish claims to the land of Israel, it is common to point out how even in eras when circumstances forced most Jews to dwell outside the borders of their homeland, they continued to proclaim their desire to return there. Although that sentiment does indeed find frequent expression in the liturgy and other traditional texts, relatively few Jews actually took the initiative of severing themselves from their diaspora roots and setting out on the perilous journey to the holy land.

Probably the most prominent figure to act on his yearning for the homeland was Rabbi Judah Halevi of Tudela, the epitome of Spanish Jewry’s “golden age” who sang the praises of Zion not only in his poignant Hebrew poems, but also in his theological masterpiece the “Kuzari,” in which he argued that the land of Israel is imbued with a unique metaphysical aura that distinguishes it from all other localities and is therefore the only worthy setting for prophecy. 

The treatise closes with the protagonist–the Rabbi who serves as the author’s mouthpiece—affirming his determination travel to Jerusalem. His companion, the king of the Khazars, tries to discourage him from such a hazardous undertaking, arguing that a virtuous and spiritual person can approach the Creator anywhere. After the Rabbi presents his case that the holy land is the only place where he can truly fulfil his spiritual yearnings, the Khazar relents: “If it is indeed so, it would be a sin to hold you back.” 

At this point the book ends. It does not state explicitly whether or not the Rabbi carried out his intention, but it is hard to conceive of any other outcome. It is therefore understandable that the Kuzari’s author drew the same conclusion about his own life. Shortly after completing the book, he abandoned the thriving Jewish civilization of Castile in which he was a prominent personality, to set sail at an advanced age to a land that existed as an ethereal ideal in his poetic soul. Indeed, a recurring theme in all of Judah’s philosophy, poetry and letters is his frustration with his role as a public figure forced to curry men’s favour and waste his time on fundraising, his medical practice and on the interminable social niceties that are expected from a distinguished literary celebrity.

It was not so long ago that the progress of Halevi’s travel plans had to be pieced together hesitantly from a few indirect allusions in his literary oeuvre. As it happens, we now possess enough authentic documentation to allow us to reconstruct his itinerary—or at least, significant parts of it—in considerable detail. Most of this new evidence takes the form of letters that were preserved in that magnificent wellspring of historical information, the Cairo Genizah, where Egyptian Jews were long accustomed to consign any text written in the Hebrew alphabet. Appropriately, most of the surviving details relate to Halevi’s sojourn in Egypt between his arrival from Spain until his eventual departure to the promised land.

A letter penned by the Alexandrian merchant Amram ben Isaac, an acquaintance of Rabbi Judah, describes the excitement that overtook the Jews of his city in anticipating the arrival of the Spanish celebrity on board “the sultan’s new ship.” This was followed by veritable panic when the ship was delayed in appearing, and when the esteemed guest did not disembark right away, but was apparently held back for bureaucratic clarifications. 

After disembarking on September 8, 1140, a few days before Rosh Hashanah, Halevi was dragged into a flurry of social obligations of the kind that had annoyed him so much in Castile. The Who’s Who of Alexandrian Jewry were eagerly vying for the privilege of hosting their prestigious visitor, and trying to avoid the disgrace of being excluded from the a-list of eminent invitees. Judah did succeed in offending several people by failing to include them in his itinerary, and they reciprocated by accusing him of living a life that was too sensual for the devout pilgrim he pretended to be.

In view of our hero’s ardent yearning to tread the soil of the holy land, it is puzzling to learn that his sojourn in Egypt stretched out for more than half a year. We do not know the exact reasons for the delay, and it should probably be blamed on the inclement winter weather that confined the ships to the harbor.

Shortly before his departure from Egypt, Judah became involved in a perilous intrigue that could have cost him dearly. An Alexandrian Jew asked the rabbi to convey a large sum of money to his brother who was a convert to Islam. Halevi apparently tried to make use the gift as an incentive to entice the apostate to resume a Jewish life in Palestine (which was then under Christian Crusader rule). Unfortunately, the recipient was steadfast in his new faith and denounced Judah to the Egyptian secret police. Missionizing among the faithful was of course treated as a serious crime in a Muslim land, and Rabbi Judah narrowly escaped a sentence (or lynching) by disingenuously denying his involvement in the affair.

Whatever the reasons that prolonged his stay in Egypt, it was not until May 8 1141 that Judah Halevi finally boarded a ship in Alexandria harbour with the intention of resuming his travels to the land of Israel. Even now, however, uncooperative east winds kept the vessel in the harbour for almost a week until it set sail on May 14, on the festival of Shavu’ot, bound for the holy land. The appreciative poet was prompted thereby to compose two Odes to the West Wind.

At this point the historical documents stop speaking to us directly about Judah’s itinerary, though it is virtually certain that the ship completed its simple ten-day voyage to the Palestinian coast. A letter in the Genizah by Abu Naṣr ben Abraham mentioned in passing that Judah had died some time during the summer of 1141, leaving him several months in which to tour the pilgrimage sites.

It is not until the sixteenth century, in the notoriously unreliable chronicle “the Chain of Tradition” by the Italian scholar Gedaliah Ibn Yaḥya, that we read the well-known legend of how the poet, in the act of reciting one of his famous Odes to Zion while prostrating himself at the gates of Jerusalem, was trampled to death by an Arab horseman. If there were any truth to that tale, it would certainly have been hinted at in the earlier documents that record his death.

What was it precisely that impelled Rabbi Judah to travel to the land of Israel? Based on the praises of the holy land that figure in his poetry and in the Kuzari, it is evident that he aspired to the uniquely spiritual, mystical qualities that he expected to find in the place that was the abode of the holy spirit. 

However, modern scholars have imputed to him other motives, considerations of a cultural or political character. It should not surprise us to hear that Israeli and Zionist historians have tended to paint the twelfth-century author as a proto-Zionist pioneer who recognized that the Spanish golden age was giving way to fundamentalist régimes and anti-Jewish violence. Accordingly, Judah was hoping to persuade his coreligionists by his personal example to migrate en masse to the land where they could live in proud national independence. Writers of this orientation searched ineffectually for evidence that Judah intended to immigrate to Israel (perhaps with his family) and not just go on a religious pilgrimage. In a similar vein, other scholars, projecting their own antipathies toward modern Jewish assimilation, emphasized Halevi’s dissatisfaction with Spain’s cosmopolitan symbiosis, and of his desire to replace it with an authentically Hebrew culture.

I wonder how Judah would have reacted to the realities of the modern Jewish state: would he be elated at the restoration of a proud and independent Hebrew homeland; or would he be dismayed at the ordinariness of its day-to-day lifestyle and at the cheapening of the sacred tongue into a worldly medium for ordering groceries and announcing soccer matches? 

I suspect that he, like many of us, would just learn to live with the many paradoxes and contradictions that are Israel.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, May 2, 2014, p. 13.

• For further reading:
  • Baron, Salo W. “Yehudah Halevi: An Answer to an Historic Challenge.” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 3 (1941): 243–72.
  • Dinur [Dinaburg], Ben-Zion. “Rabbi Judah Halevi’s Aliya to Eretz Israel and the Messianic Fermentation of His Time.” Pages 47–83 in Rabbi Judah Halevi: Volume of Research and Tributes. Edited by Israel Zmora. Tel-Aviv: Maḥbarot Le-Sifrut, 1964.
  • Fleischer, Ezra. “Rabbi Judah Ha-Levi: Clarifications of his Biography and Oeuvre.” Pages 241–76 in Israel Levin Jubilee Volume: Studies in Hebrew Literature. Edited by Reuven Tsur and Tovah Rozen. Vol. 1. Tel-Aviv: Tel-Aviv University, 1994.
  • ———. “‘The Essence of Our Land and Its Meaning’: Towards a Portrait of Judah Halevi on the Basis of Geniza Documents.” Pe‘amim 68 (1996): 4–15.
  • Friedman, Mordechai A. “On Judah Ha-Levi and the Martyrdom of a Head of the Jews: A Letter by Ḥalfon Ha-Levi B. Nethanel.” Pages 83–108 in Adaptations and Innovations: Studies on the Interaction between Jewish and Islamic Thought from the Early Middle Ages to the Late Twentieth Century, Dedicated to Professor Joel L. Kraemer. Edited by Y. Tzvi Langermann and Josef Stern. Louvain: Peeters, 2008.
  • Gil, Moshe, and Ezra Fleischer. Yehuda Ha-Levi and his Circle: 55 Geniza Documents. Sources for the Study of Jewish Culture. Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, 2001.
  • Goitein, Shelomo Dov. “Did Yehuda Halevi Arrive in the Holy Land?” Tarbiz 46, no. 3–4 (1977): 245–50.
  • ———. “The Biography of Rabbi Judah Ha-Levi in the Light of the Cairo Geniza Documents.” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 28 (1959): 41–56.
  • Malkiel, David J. “Three Perspectives on Judah Halevi’s Voyage to Palestine.” Mediterranean Historical Review 25, no. 1 (2010): 1–15.
  • Scheindlin, Raymond P. The Song of the Distant Dove: Judah Halevi’s Pilgrimage. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Laying Down the Law

by Eliezer Segal

According to the traditional Jewish chronology, the Torah was revealed through Moses at Mount Sinai fifty days after the exodus from Egypt, on the first Shavu‘ot. Although the Ten Commandments were proclaimed with great fanfare, the revelation at Sinai also included the hundreds of additional laws and commandments that are set out in the subsequent sections of the Torah. Later, the Torah speaks of Moses instructing the people in those precepts from the “Tent of Meeting” in the course of their sojourn in the desert.

The rabbis of the Midrash posed the question of why was it necessary, after the entire Torah had already been given at Sinai, for Moses to repeat it all? The fourth-century teacher Rabbi Eleazar ben Pedat answered that the proclamation at Sinai was not yet completely binding on the people, but only had the status of a general statement of principles, a protective “hedge” to discourage them from committing sins. However it did not become fully enforceable until it was explained to them in detail in the Tent of Meeting.

The Midrash elucidates Rabbi Eleazar’s answer with the help of a parable: “This is analogous to a written and signed edict—’diatagma’—that has been brought into a city. The citizens of the city may not be punished for violating the edict until it has been promulgated in the public square.” 

The “diatagma” (or “prostagma“) is indeed a well-known term in the Roman legal vocabulary, designating an ordinance issued by a high government authority. The use of an institution from Roman jurisprudence to explain a biblical text, or even to derive a principle of Jewish law, should not surprise us; in the ample corpus of rabbinic parables, this was the the widespread rhetorical convention rather than an exception. In the most common type of rabbinic parable, relationships between God and his creatures are illustrated by means of tales about flesh-and-blood rulers and their subjects. The authors of those parables often demonstrate an intimate familiarity with the protocols and intrigues of the Roman imperial courts.

So too in this parable explaining the need for Moses’s repeated teaching of the Torah’s commandments, the midrashic reference to the diatagma is perfectly accurate and appropriate, and it attests to the author’s excellent grasp of Roman legislative procedures. 

Under Roman law, edicts could be issued by the emperors or by high ranking magistrates. Sometimes they took the form of ad hoc rulings intended to deal with a particular situation or emergency; however, a magistrate might also issue a “perpetual” diatagma at the outset of his term of office, which would set out the policy that would remain in force for the duration of that term. 

Of especial relevance for understanding Rabbi Eleazar’s parable is the fact, well known to subjects of the Roman empire, that the edicts did not take legal effect until they had been posted in a public place and made known to the populace. It was not enough merely to have the enactments issued and signed by the authorities.

We can therefore appreciate how that Roman legal convention provided Rabbi Eleazar with a useful key to understanding the need for two separate promulgations of the Torah’s commandments—first at Mount Sinai, and then later in the Tent of Meeting.

When a newly issued Roman imperial >edict was read out before a community, it was a very sombre affair that was attended by intense and respectful silence. The ancient Christian preacher John Chrysostom was most impressed with the solemn atmosphere that accompanied the reading of missives from the emperor: “There is complete silence, all din and tumult hushed, everyone standing with rapt attention and desiring to hear what it is the imperial letters convey; anyone making the slightest noise or interrupting the flow of the reading runs the greatest risk.” From this model, Chrysostom derived practical implications as to the appropriate behaviour of a congregation when listening to readings from sacred scriptures: “All the more so is there need to stand in fear and trembling, to maintain utter silence, and rid yourselves of any confusion in your thinking so that you may be able to understand what is being said.” 

Ancient Jewish preachers also turned to the reading of imperial edicts as a source of instructive parables for describing the Torah’s greatness. Commenting on the words of the prophet Micah “O my people, what have I done to you, and wherein have I wearied you,” Rabbi Isaac observed: This is analogous to a king who sent out his edict (“prostagma”) to a certain city. What did the residents do? They rose to their feet, uncovered their heads and read it in fear, trembling and agitation. In exactly the same way the Holy One said to Israel: The recitation of the Shema‘ is my prostagma, and yet I did not impose upon you any onerous obligations. I did not require that you recite it while standing on your feet, or while uncovering your head—on the contrary, you may recite it even ‘when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way.’” 

In blatant contrast to John Chrysostom’s homily, Rabbi Isaac’s remarkable exposition employs the comparison between the Torah’s commandments and the Roman edicts in order to demonstrate (disarming any gripes about the allegedly burdensome quality of Jewish observance) that the Torah is actually more indulgent than the emperor when it comes to the demands that it makes on its followers. 

Yet another rabbinic parable refers to a similar occasion in order to illustrate the biblical episode in which king Jehoiakim ripped up and burned the scroll that contained Jeremiah’s prophecy foretelling Judah’s imminent downfall at the hands of the Babylonians. The parable likens this episode to an incident when an edict was being promulgated throughout the empire. Every city in which it arrived greeted the edict with reverence and affection. Only in the king’s own hometown was the document insolently torn up and burned.

On the surface, this passage strikes us as contrived and arbitrary in the way that it concocts an unlikely-looking scenario to resemble the details of the biblical story about Jeremiah and Jehoiakim. However, ancient authors preserve records of an actual historical episode that precisely fits the facts of the rabbinic parable. An imperial edict denying civil honours to Christians was accepted obediently throughout the empire; when it arrived in Nicomedia, however, it was torn up. Nicomedia, the sole city to reject the edict, was at the time the capital of the eastern Roman empire, the residence of the emperors. The rabbinic parable is thus seen to contain a reference to a news headline that must have been common knowledge to many subjects of the Roman empire.

Our present world of democratic republics and parliamentary legislation does not easily provide apt metaphors for conveying the majesty of God or the reverence inspired by the Torah. Indeed, I wonder if the ancient Jewish homilists would have enough ingenuity to derive instructive theological analogies from the political wrangling, lobbying and deal-making that have become necessary ingredients for the enactment of so many of our current laws.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, May 23, 2014, p. 11.

• For further reading:
  • Appelbaum, Alan. The Rabbis’ King-Parables: Midrash from the Third-Century Roman Empire. Judaism in Context 7. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2010.
  • 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.
  • ———. “Roman Legal Institutions in Early Rabbinics and in the Acta Martyrum.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 35, no. 1. New Series (1944): 1–57.
  • Sperber, Daniel. A Dictionary of Greek and Latin Legal Terms in Rabbinic Literature. Dictionaries of Talmud, Midrash, and Targum 1. Ramat-Gan, Israel: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1984.
  • Tropper, Amram. “Roman Contexts in Jewish Texts: On ‘Diatagma’ and ‘Prostagma’ in Rabbinic Literature.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 95, no. 2. New Series (2005): 207–227.
  • Ziegler, Ignaz. Die Königsgleichnisse Des Midrasch: Beleuchtet Durch Die Romische Kaiserzeit. Breslau: S. Schottlaender, 1903.

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Partners in Crime

by Eliezer Segal

In many religions and philosophical systems, our world is perceived as a combination of two elements that are in fundamental opposition: the spiritual and the material. 

Jewish thinkers were not always in agreement when it came to defining the human personality. Are we fashioned of two separate elements, an earthly body and a divine spirit, each of which possesses an independent character and existence? Or is it more correct to understand that each of us is a unified entity in which the spiritual and physical faculties are but aspects of a single integrated essence?

Of course, such speculations were not unique to Judaism. According to an Indian tradition from the Samkhya philosophical school, our world was fashioned in such a manner that the opposing poles of “Purusha” (the conscious self) and “Prakrti” (the material world that is perceptible to the senses) were somehow brought together in order to allow the soul to contemplate nature from without. This paradoxical union is depicted metaphorically as a partnership between two disabled people: just as a blind man and a lame man will assist one another to get themselves out of a dangerous forest, so the mindless Prakrti and the immobile Purusha joined forces in order to produce a coherent universe.

This metaphor was also known to ancient European literatures. The compendium known as the “Greek Anthology” preserved four epigrams on the subject of “a blind man who carried a lame man on his back, lending him his feet and borrowing from him his eyes.” This image was understood to teach the lesson that the merging of two incomplete units can result in a perfect whole.

The theory of the dual nature of human personhood provoked some difficult moral questions, as suggested by the fourth-century Christian theologian Epiphanius of Salamis. Epiphanius cited a parable in the name of a lost “Ezekiel Apocryphon”—though it is more probable that his source was a rabbinic homily on Ezekiel’s famous vision of the valley of dry bones. Epiphanius regarded Ezekiel’s vision not so much as a metaphor for the national revival of Israel, but as a foretelling of the final judgment. He understood that since we commit sins as physical bodies animated by souls, justice demands that our ultimate judgment also be meted out to spirits that have been restored to flesh and bone. 

In order to illustrate mutual dependence of body and soul, Epiphanius made use of the metaphor of the lame and the blind men, into which he inserted several identifiably Christian motifs. In fact, Epiphanius (who spent some time in Israel and knew Hebrew) was probably adapting a very intriguing rabbinic source that has been preserved in the Babylonian Talmud. In one of their frequent convivial conversations, the Roman leader identified as “Antoninus” quipped to Rabbi Judah the Patriarch that both the soul and the body, when they stand in judgment for their transgressions, will be able to exonerate themselves with the plea that each is incapable of independent activity. The body without an animating spirit is no more than a motionless rock, whereas the disembodied soul can merely fly about like a bird but cannot affect material objects. Therefore neither of them was able to commit the sins with which they are charged. 

Rabbi Judah responded to Antoninus’ argument by citing the parable about a king who placed his orchard under the protection of two watchmen, one blind and one lame. Eventually the unscrupulous duo figured out that the lame one, by riding on the shoulders of the blind guard, could direct his accomplice toward the tastiest fruit, and afterward each could greedily eat his fill of the stolen produce. When their master accused each of them separately, each pleaded innocent—the blind one insisting that he was unable to find the fruit by himself, and the lame one that he could not have propelled himself to reach it. 

The king’s astute response was not to pronounce his guilty verdict until the lame watchman was mounted on the shoulders of his blind companion as they had been while committing their crime. In precisely this way, Rabbi Judah concluded, when the day comes for mortals to stand in judgment in the next world, the Almighty will restore their souls to their physical bodies so that neither partner will be able to wriggle out of its deserved sentence. This is suggested allegorically by the words of the Psalmist, “He summons the heavens above [that is, the soul], and the earth [the body], that he may judge his people.”

The Talmud incorporated this exchange between the Roman and Jewish leaders into a passage dealing with one of the distinctive dogmas of Pharisaic and rabbinic Judaism, the doctrine of bodily resurrection of the dead. During the era of the Second Temple this belief was opposed by the Sadducee sect—who argued that the scriptures say nothing about an afterlife—and by the Essenes—who (according to Josephus Flavius) believed that immortality is limited to the disembodied soul, not the physical body. Indeed, the concept of bodily resurrection was a difficult one to justify philosophically, and therefore the parable about the blind and lame watchmen furnished the rabbis with a compelling argument for why the body must be reunited with its spirit on the day of final judgment.

The talmudic tale contains at least one puzzling anomaly that it does not explain adequately: why would a king go out of his way (before the advent of “hire the handicapped” campaigns) to employ custodians with disabilities that would have prevented them from carrying out their duties efficiently? Epiphanius provides us with a plausible answer, one that may have been rooted in the realities of a Roman empire that was involved in constant warfare. He suggested that the lame and blind watchmen were the only ones available at that time because the able-bodied populace were all serving in the army.

However, not all of the rabbis were prepared to assign equal responsibility to the lame soul and the blind body. An exposition cited in several midrashic compendia interpreted the Torah’s phraseology “If a soul shall sin…” (rather than “if a person shall sin”) as teaching that it is a person’s soul that bears the full responsibility for their sins. This teaching was also illustrated with the help of a parable about a king who came to pass sentence on two wrongdoers. In this story, however, one of the miscreants was a citizen of the metropolitan capital city while t1ahe other was a backward rustic from the provinces. The king pardoned the yokel while throwing the book at the urbane sophisticate. When challenged as to the apparent inconsistency of his rulings, His Majesty explained that there were grounds for exercising leniency toward a bumpkin who might not have been au courant with royal conventions, but this could not be said for a person who lives in proximity to the palace and is expected to know the rules. An alternative version of the parable draws its contrast between a professional soldier and a civilian.

Thus, the Midrash explains, the unsophisticated provincial symbolizes the human body that was fashioned from the dust of the earth, a substance that is inherently profane. By contrast, the cosmopolitan soul originated in the breath of God; it was produced by a pure divine source and therefore it must be held to a higher moral standard. Ultimately, the Midrash teaches, it is the soul that must bear the decisive responsibility whenever a person sins. This is confirmed by the words of Ezekiel, “It is the soul that sins.”

It is not altogether clear where the authors of this parable stood with respect to the union of our physical and spiritual components in the future judgment. Just to be safe, if you were contemplating a spree of theft or embezzlement—whether of material or intellectual property—it is probably advisable to cancel those plans, and make sure that both your spirit and your body avoid the eventual retribution.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, June 6, 2014, p. 9.

• For further reading:
  • Bauckham, Richard. “The Parable of the Royal Wedding Feast (Matthew 22:1-14) and the Parable of the Lame Man and the Blind Man (Apocryphon of Ezekiel).” Journal of Biblical Literature 115, no. 3 (1996): 471–88. 
  • Bregman, Marc. “The Parable of the Lame and the Blind: Epiphanius’ Quotation from an Apocryphon of Ezekiel.” Journal of Theological Studies 42, no. 1 (1991): 125–138. 
  • James, M. R. “The Apocryphal Ezekiel.” The Journal of Theological Studies os-XV, no. 58 (1913): 236–243. 
  • Malter, Henry. “Personifications of Soul and Body. A Study in Judaeo-Arabic Literature.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 2, no. 4. New Series (1912): 453–479. 
  • Meir, Ofra. Rabbi Judah the Patriarch: Palestinian and Babylonian Portrait of a Leader. Sifriyat Helal Ben-Ḥayim. Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1999. 
  • Moore, George Foot. Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era, the Age of the Tannaim. Schocken Paperbacks on Jewish Life and Religion. New York: Schocken Books, 1971. 
  • Mueller, James R. The Five Fragments of the Apocryphon of Ezekiel: A Critical Study. Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 5. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Pr, 1994. 
  • Scheftelowitz, Isidor. “Ein Beitrag Zur Methode Der Vergleichenden Religionsforschung.” Monatsschrift Für Geschichte Und Wissenschaft Des Judentums 65, no. 4 (1921): 107–130. 
  • Stone, Michael E, Benjamin G Wright, and David Satran, eds. The Apocryphal Ezekiel. Early Judaism and Its Literature no. 18. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2000. 
  • Wallach, Luitpold. “The Parable of the Blind and the Lame: A Study in Comparative Literature.” Journal of Biblical Literature 62, no. 4 (1943): 333–339.

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Donkey Devotion

by Eliezer Segal

The Jewish sages of ancient times were not only expected to be experts in their learned disciplines, but also paragons of unblemished virtue and holiness. It was widely believed that this entitled them to a special degree of providential guidance.

This belief had certain implications when applied to the rabbi’s most important responsibility, that of issuing decisions on matters of Jewish religious law, halakhah. Whereas a gaffe on an academic topic might produce a factual inaccuracy that can afterwards be corrected, a mistaken ruling on a halakhic question could have not only practical consequences (such as by imposing a penalty on an innocent party), but it might also lead people to commit religious transgressions. Some rabbis liked to believe that their saintly teachers were safeguarded against that daunting prospect. 

For example, it was reported that two distinguished third-century sages, Rabbis Yoḥanan and Assi, ate meat that had been slaughtered by Samaritans, though the court of the Patriarch Rabban Gamaliel had forbidden Jews to eat their meat. Now, the attitude of the ancient rabbis to the Samaritans was ambivalent, because they accepted the same Torah as the Jews (albeit with a few textual differences), but did not share the Jewish interpretations or oral traditions. 

Therefore, later students in the Talmud were uncertain how to understand Rabbis Yoḥanan and Assi’s apparent defiance of Rabban Gamaliel’s decree: was it because they disagreed with that ruling or because they were altogether unaware of it?

Rabbi Zera dismissed the latter option as a theological impossibility. It was obvious to him that divine providence would never allow a situation in which righteous persons would actually commit or bring about the violation of an accepted law, even out of ignorance or misunderstanding—as would have been the case if those two saintly rabbis had partaken of food that had been forbidden by an authoritative decree.

As the basis for his confidence in divine protection from erroneous halakhic rulings, Rabbi Zera cited the remarkable tale of Rabbi Phineas ben Yair and his donkey. It seems that that Rabbi Phineas, while en route to carry out the important mitzvah of ransoming some captives, left his donkey in the care of the staff at an inn, but they found to their consternation that the animal (possibly played by Eddie Murphy) refused to eat any of the feed that was offered it no matter how meticulously they tried to ensure its gourmet quality. When Rabbi Phineas returned from his mission, he separated tithes from the produce, and only then did the donkey gobble it up happily—prompting the rabbi to blurt out to the staff, “this poor beast was on its way to perform its creator’s will, and you wanted to feed it untithed food!”

From that story Rabbi Zera drew the conclusion: “If the Holy One prevented even the beasts belonging to righteous persons from committing transgressions, is it not obvious that the righteous persons themselves would never be allowed to cause a mishap!”

Indeed similar stories of Jewish saints and their religiously scrupulous beasts occur frequently in rabbinic lore. When Rabbi Ḥanina ben Dosa’s donkey was abducted, it refused to eat the food provided by its captors, until the miscreants had no choice but to set it free to return to its master. Another legend had it that Abraham’s camels would refuse to enter any premises that housed idolatrous images. And then there was the tale about the Jew whose dire economic straits forced him to sell his cow to a heathen, but the purchaser was distressed to discover that his new acquisition refused to pull the plough on Saturdays; until the former owner patiently explained to the beast how she was no longer entitled to a day of rest now that she was the property of a non-Jew. The heathen was so impressed by all this that he converted to Judaism.

Stories of this kind enhanced the aura of holiness that emanates from spiritual titans. We are reassured that they (and even their beasts) will invariably be sources of blessing, but never of any harmful consequences, even inadvertent ones. This is truly a comforting belief. 

However, further reflection raised problems with that rosy picture. After all, it not always dovetail with our real-life experiences in a world where even the finest people sometimes make mistakes that can cause real harm. Commentators cited passages from the Talmud that described the unfortunate consequences of errors committed by righteous people.

There was, for instance, the case of Rabbi Ishmael ben Elisha who ignored a rabbinic enactment that forbids reading by the light of an oil lamp on the Sabbath because of the concern that one might be tempted to adjust the light by tilting the lamp, thereby transgressing a Torah prohibition. In the end Rabbi Ishmael did forget himself once and committed the forbidden act.

And there was also an unfortunate dispute that arose in Tiberias over a certain point of talmudic law: it became so contentious that it resulted in the rending of a Torah scroll.

A most alarming case was when Judah ben Tabbai ordered the execution of a perjured witness who had sought to have an innocent man put to death through false testimony. Judah was most distressed to learn afterwards that capital punishment could not be imposed under these circumstances, and that his mistaken ruling had resulted in an unlawful execution. 

The Jewish commentators strove in diverse ways to account for these cases. Rabbi Jacob Tam, for instance, was impelled to limit the scope of Rabbi Zera’s statement. He suggested that the protective power of divine providence was only exercised to prevent the consumption of forbidden food. Somehow the prospect of ingesting al forbidden substance carries a special stigma that impels the Almighty to intervene to prevent its occurrence. This scenario was considered more repugnant from the divine perspective than the actual taking of a human life (which, after all, was allowed to happen in the story about Judah ben Tabbai). 

Rabbi Ḥayyim Ben ‘Aṭar cited a tradition current among the kabbalists, that those scrupulous donkeys housed the reincarnated soul of the heathen prophet Balaam. According to the account in the Torah, Balaam had been drawn into a notoriously humiliating spat with his talking beast, and he later prayed “Who can count the dust of Jacob,…? Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his!” In the eyes of the kabbalists, Balaam’s transmigration into the bodies of righteous Jewish animals was a fitting destiny for this penitent arch-villain. 

The Maharal of Prague, on the other hand, insisted that the virtue that attached to Rabbi Phineas  ben Yair’s donkey did not derive from its own personality or past life, but from its association with the great Rabbi Phineas who was the epitome of spiritual enlightenment, possessing an intellect that was capable of shedding light upon the most hidden and sublime mysteries. This quality was symbolized not only in his name (“ya’ir” in Hebrew means “he sheds light”), but in the virtuous act that he was performing in the story: “ransoming of captives” was an apt allegorical image for the liberating of unenlightened souls from their spiritual confinement. 

Accordingly, his donkey, although possessing no virtue of its own, partook of the holiness of its righteous master. Indeed, its finickiness about food was also an allegorical way of representing a powerful spiritual truth. Untithed produce, after all, consists of a mixture of sacred and profane components that have not yet been separated. As understood by the Maharal, this symbolizes the supreme attainment of Rabbi Phineas whose refined intellect strove to purify the holy light from the taint of ignorant darkness.

Already in the Talmud we find the perception that times have changed since those bygone days of heightened spirituality: “If those earlier generations were angels, then we are mere humans. If the earlier generations were humans, then we are but donkeys—and not even like the donkey of Rabbi Ḥanina ben Dosa nor like the donkey of Rabbi Phineas ben Yair—but like plain, ordinary donkeys.”

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, June 27, 2014, p. 12.

• For further reading:
  • Bokser, Baruch M. “Wonder-Working and the Rabbinic Tradition: The Case of Hanina Ben Dosa.” Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman Period 16, no. 1 (1985): 42–92.
  • Epstein-Halevi, Elimelech. Ha-Agadah Ha-Historit-Biyografit Le-or Mekorot Yevaniyyim Ve-Laṭiniyyim. Tel Aviv: Defus Niv, 1975.
  • Jacobs, Louis. “The Story of R Phinehas Ben Yair and His Donkey in B Hullin 7a-B.” In A Tribute to Geza Vermes: Essays on Jewish and Christian Literature and History, edited by Richard T. White and Philip R. Davies, 193–205. Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1990.
  • Meir, Ofra. “The She-Ass of R. Pinhas ben Yair.” Folklore Research Center Studies 7 (1983): 117–37. [Hebrew]
  • Moscovitz, Leib. “‘The Holy One Blessed Be He…Does Not Permit the Righteous to Stumble’: Reflections on the Development of a Remarkable BT Theologoumenon.” In Creation and Composition: The Contribution of the Bavli Redactors (Stammaim) to the Aggada, edited by Jeffrey L. Rubenstein. Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005.
  • Nissim, Rachel. “‘Demut He-Ḥasid’: ‘Immut Bein R’ Ḥanina Ben-Dosa Le-R’ Pinḥas ben Ya’ir Le-Or ‘Emdat ḤaZa”L Bi-Va‘ayat Ha-Gemul (‘Al-Pi Meḳorot Tanna’iyyim Ve-Ereṣ-Yisre’eliyyim Muḳdamim).” ‘Alei Siaḥ 12 (1982): 135–154.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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I’ll See You in Court

by Eliezer Segal

I have to confess that I derive a great deal of pleasure from civil litigation. It’s not that I spend any time in courtrooms—but I do enjoy studying the sections in the Talmud that deal with torts, liens, property claims and the interminable disputes between the generic “Reuben”s and “Simeon”s that populate the pages of rabbinic legal works. In that respect (and possibly only in that respect) I fit neatly into a stereotypical pattern of traditional Jewish religious scholarship.

Although there is no denying that intricate debates over goring oxen and contractual responsibilities have a firm basis in the Torah, not all Jewish thinkers were pleased with the prestige that was assigned to such topics in the traditional religious curriculum. Surely, they insisted, there must be more edifying matters to study than prosaic and academic disputes on civil law.

Medieval Jewish advocates of rationalism insisted that true religious perfection is achieved through the study of philosophy—that is to say, through a trajectory that progresses from the natural sciences and logic, until the intellect is so finely tuned that it can contemplate the most sublime and eternal of truths—that of a God who is completely outside the realm of time and space. They insist that this is the only way that the human mind can outlive the ephemeral existence of its physical body.

Viewed from that perspective, the study of law can never serve more than a secondary function in the quest for religious fulfilment. At most it might provide a blueprint for a well-ordered society, help discipline us in overcoming the distracting temptations of physical urges, or even guide us toward a grasp of the fundamentals of monotheism and the eschewal of idolatry. However, the ultimate path to perfection lies in metaphysics, not law.  

Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra dealt with this question in his “Foundation of Piety and the Secret of the Torah,” a short treatise on the significance of the commandments. In that work, he surveyed various branches of scholarship that serve as stages on the path to spiritual improvement. These include: the science of preserving the precise text of the holy scriptures (Masora), grammar, the written and oral laws, and the mastery of the Bible in its entirety. As for the Talmud—while it is undoubtedly essential for acquiring a practical understanding of how to observe the precepts of the Torah, people are seriously mistaken if they believe that it can suffice when it is not buttressed by the study of Masora, grammar and the full range of sciences.

At this point in his presentation, Ibn Ezra takes aim at scholars who devote all their time to the study of the order “Neziḳin,” the section of the Talmud devoted to civil and criminal jurisprudence. He describes scholars who take more pride in their studies of Neziḳin than any other section of the Talmud. Though such a person may be worthy of a slight reward for educating fools and eliminating some injustices, he has not really accomplished anything to boast about. After all, if the entire Jewish people were to become truly righteous they would have no further need for those kinds of laws. Although talmudic study may provide a beginner’s guide to basic theological principles, social harmony and the pursuit of a disciplined life-style, the essential path to meaningful spiritual fulfilment must pass through science and philosophy.

A very similar analysis appears in the treatise “Exalted Faith‘ by the pioneering twelfth-century Andalusian philosopher and historian Rabbi Abraham Ibn Daud. Ibn Daud compared the utility of talmudic civil law to that of medicine. Either of these professions may be pursued for financial profit, out of altruistic motives or in order to enhance one’s intellectual credentials. The cultivation of judicial expertise can also benefit humanity by curing society of some of its ailments. However, echoing Ibn Ezra’s observation, Ibn Daud observes that law is somewhat less crucial than medicine, since people are (at least in theory) able to live harmoniously without any disputes arising between them, in which case there would be almost no need whatsoever for the expertise of the jurists.

Now all this is true if one studies civil law with the goal of applying its principles in the real world. Ibn Daud was aware, however, that the typical scholar of talmudic law devotes much of his time and intellect to elaborate hypothetical constructions, formulating complex inquiries regarding “matters that have never actually occurred and will never occur.” The justification for this academic enterprise was the belief that it hones one’s mental acumen—whereas in actuality, he argues, those students are just wasting their time and they would be better advised to channel their energies toward more relevant objectives, such as the formulation of theological arguments that can be used to refute heretics.  

Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed illustrated the quest for enlightenment by means of a parable of people gathered around a palace in which the king resides. The mass of simple religious folk, who observe the Torah without knowing why, are likened to those who desire to arrive at the palace and to enter it, but have never yet seen it and have no idea what lies inside. “Those who arrive at the palace, but go round about it, are those who devote themselves exclusively to the study of the practical law.” Such people can at best parrot the religious dogmas that they picked up from their traditional upbringing, but they lack any meaningful intellectual grasp of their significance. Maimonides declared that he composed his magnificent codification of religious law, the Mishneh Torah, in order to spare Jews the need to study the Talmud, thereby freeing up more time for the pursuit of philosophical perfection.

The eminent Provençal philosopher and exegete Rabbi Joseph Ibn Kaspi followed closely in the tradition of Ibn Ezra and Maimonides. In his ethical will, he noted how the Torah states that “if there arise a matter too hard for thee in judgment… thou shalt come unto the priests the Levites and unto the judge” and comply with their instructions. The obligation is thus to act according to the judges’ rulings. From this he inferred that not every individual is bound to know all the details of the laws of “the four bailees, of pleas and counter-pleas, of loans and deposits.” These subjects may be delegated to specialists. A person who never gets involved in litigation will have missed nothing by remaining ignorant of the law; and gaps in one’s knowledge of civil law do not imply any defect in one’s spiritual development. In this respect, legal proficiency differs crucially from philosophical or theological truth, which each Jew is commanded to understand and internalize individually.

Now I would be the last person to discourage the study of sciences or of rational discourse. And yet it is clear to me that the abstract rational theology that was the ultimate quest of Ibn Ezra or Maimonides has lost its attraction to modern Jews. 

I am unrepentant about my fascination with the goring oxen and contract disputes that were argued by the talmudic sages and their numerous commentators across the generations. It is true that Moses himself realized that the nations of the world would be moved to declare: “What nation is there so great, that hath statutes and judgments so righteous as all this law!”

Nevertheless, speaking personally, I can’t always guarantee that my own predilection for Jewish legal dialectics arises from a high-minded sense of national pride, spiritual enlightenment or ethical improvement.

So sue me.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, September 12, 2014, p. 17.

• For further reading:
  • Abrahams, Israel, and Lawrence Fine. Hebrew Ethical Wills. Expanded facsimile ed. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2006.
  • Halbertal, Moshe. Maimonides: Life and Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013.
  • Hartman, David. Maimonides: Torah and Philosophic Quest. 1st ed. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1976.
  • Herring, Basil. Joseph Ibn Kaspi’s “Gevia’ Kesef”: A Study in Medieval Jewish Philosophic Bible Commentary. New York: Ktav, 1982.
  • Kohen, Yosef, and Uriel Simon, eds. Yesod Mora Ve-sod Torah: The Foundation of Piety and the Secret of the Torah. 2nd revised and expanded. Meḳorot u-meḥḳarim 11. Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2007.
  • Mesch, Barry. “Studies in Joseph Ibn Caspi: Fourteenth-Century Philosopher and Exegete.” Études sur le Judaisme Médiéval 8. Leiden: Brill, 1975.
  • Strickman, H. Norman. “Abraham Ibn Ezra’s ‘Yesod Mora.’” Hakirah 12 (2011): 139–69.
  • ———. The Secret of the Torah: A Translation of Abraham Ibn Ezra’s Sefer Yesod Mora Ve-Sod Ha-Torah. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1995.
  • Twersky, Isadore. “Joseph Ibn Kaspi: Portrait of a Medieval Jewish Intellectual.” In Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, edited by Isadore Twersky, 1:231–82. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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