The Messiah Takes Manhattan

by Eliezer Segal

A useful rule of thumb in the teaching of Jewish history states that there is generally a correlation between the severity of the troubles besetting the Jews and the intensity of their yearning and expectations for the the coming of messianic redemption. Another rule holds that very few people at any given point in history believed that the world-as-we-know-it would continue for more than fifty years after the current date.

A corollary of all this is that Jews who lived in political and social tranquility were unlikely to be thinking very much about the advent of the redeemer or the restoration of the glory of Israel. This should apply to communities such as that of eighteenth-century America where the small congregations of Jews were being granted true civil rights and enjoying the prosperity that blossomed in the New World.

The fact is that we have relatively sparse information about what American Jews were thinking in those days. They had not reached a state of scholarly erudition that would generate learned tomes by home-grown religious scholars; and the feelings of average Jews in the street were unlikely to get recorded for posterity. In the present instance, however, we do have some fascinating testimony from a prominent American thinker who took a special interest in developments among his Jewish neighbours.

The witness in question was Ezra Stiles (1727-1795), an illustrious New England educator and theologian who served as President of Yale University and was a founder of Brown University. Like many of his Christian contemporaries, Stiles studied and taught the Hebrew language. He delivered some of his important academic speeches in Hebrew, and may have been responsible for emblazoning the Hebrew words “Urim v’Thummim” on Yale’s official seal. For more than twenty years he served as a Congregationalist minister in Newport Rhode Island where he maintained close ties with the city’s Jewish community. He studied Hebrew Bible and Kabbalah with Rabbi Hayyim Isaac Carregal during the latter’s brief sojourn in Newport as an emissary from the holy land, and they afterwards continued to correspond in Hebrew.

Stiles kept a “Literary Diary” which he continued to update with admirable diligence. In the entry for July 26, 1769 he wrote about a friend who “tells me that the Jews in New York expected the Messiah 1768, and are greatly disappointed.” It was explained that this messianic expectation had been inspired by a computation of prophetic numbers “by the Rabbins of the present day.” This episode seems to be linked to another piece of information that he tossed into the diary: “that two Jews from Constantinople visited New York last year.” We might recall that a century earlier, Constantinople had been a main hub of activities for the messianic movement of Shabbetai Zvi.

In his August 10 entry, Stiles recorded a more precise calculation that resulted in the proposal of a somewhat later year for the approaching redemption. A Jewish acquaintance showed him a computation by “one of the present Rabbins of Germany.” Like many such calculations, it was based on an enigmatic text from the book of Daniel in which it is stated that the period until the ultimate fulfilment of the great divine wonders will consist of “a time, times, and half a time.”
According to the unidentified Rabbi, this cryptic expression represents the time that will have elapsed from the destruction of the Second Temple until its restoration and the return of all the tribes of Israel. The unit by which it is measured is a “time”—that is to say, seventy sabbatical cycles adding up to 490 years. Thus, one “time” equals 490 years, “times” is double that or 980 years, while the “half” consists of 245 years, producing a total of 1,715 years. Add that to the date of the Temple’s fall (for the calculation to work out, they had to place the event at 68 rather than the accepted historical date 70 C.E.), and that brings us to the year 1783 C.E. The anticipation of the Messiah’s advent at that time became a major focus of the religious fervor of Jews in New York.
We may get a tangible picture of how intense this expectation was from another detail in Stiles’ diary. He wrote that during thunderstorms the Jews were accustomed keep all their doors and windows open for the coming of the Messiah. This was evident at the time of a violent hail-storm in Newport, during which the Jews “threw open Doors, Windows, and employed themselves in Singing & repeating Prayers, &c., for Meeting Messias.”

On the other hand, Stiles told of a conversation he had with a visiting Jew from Poland who, when asked to comment on the German rabbi’s messianic computations, simply smiled and said that they await him every day.

The strong impact of this messianic calculation is corroborated by a text written by Rev. Gershom Mendes Seixas, who served at the time as cantor in New York. In addition to a more detailed version of the “time, times and a half” computation, Seixas mentioned two additional calculations. One of them was based on the period of time that the biblical Israelites were steeped in idol-worship, fixed at 245 years. Scripture states that this grave sin is to be punished sevenfold, which produces the same total of 1,715 that served as the foundation for the previous computation. A third calculation mentioned by Ḥazan Seixas divides up the three numbers into distinct historical eras. The “time” of 490 years after the Temple’s destruction brings us to 558, marked by the appearance of “the Turkish empire” [that is: the advent of Islam]. Add to that the “times”—980 years—and we are now in 1538 and the Protestant Reformation. The subsequent “half-time” of 245 years should coincide with the Messiah’s arrival in 1783, which will bring about redemption for all humanity.

The American Jewish interest in redemption appeared to focus principally on the ingathering of the exiles (an interest that they shared with Christian neighbours). This was a natural sentiment for a community that was largely descended from Spanish and Portuguese exiles who must have felt acutely conscious of their geographic isolation from the centres of mainstream civilization. 

American Jews were quick to relate to any reports about “exotic” Jewish communities, which they viewed as harbingers of the reunification of the lost tribes of Israel; and they tried to initiate correspondences with coreligionists in far-flung lands like Malabar, India or Kaifeng, China. Their interest in the future ingathering was also sparked by frequent visits from emissaries and fund-raisers from the holy land who were adept at persuading the Jews of the diaspora that they would all shortly be led back to their beloved homeland.

Then as now, anticipating the messiah’s arrival was a job that could demand a high price in faith and in soothing the constant disappointments. 

But as the old quip has it: the work is steady.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, June 24, 2016, p. 13.

• For further reading:
  • Baron, Salo Wittmayer. Palestinian Messengers in America, 1849-79: [a Record of Four Journeys]. Edited by Jeannette Meisel Baron. America and the Holy Land. New York: Arno Press, 1977.
  • ———. Steeled by Adversity: Essays and Addresses on American Jewish Life. Edited by Jeannette Meisel Baron. [1st ed.]. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1971.
  • Chiel, Arthur A. “Ezra Stiles and the Jews: A Study in Ambivalence.” In Hebrew and the Bible in America, edited by Shalom Goldman, 156–167. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993.
  • Holmes, Abiel. The Life of Ezra Stiles. Boston: Thomas & Andrews, 1798.
  • Jastrow, Morris. “References to Jews in the Diary of Ezra Stiles.” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 10 (1902): 5–36.
  • Kohut, George Alexander. Ezra Stiles and the Jews: Selected Passages from His Literary Diary Concerning Jews and Judaism. New York: P. Cowen, 1902.
  • Mahler, Raphael. “American Jewry and the Idea of the Return to Zion in the Period of the American Revolution.” Zion 15 (1950): 106–143.
  • Sarna, Jonathan D. “The Mystical World of Colonial American Jew.” In Mediating Modernity: Essays in Honor of Michael A. Meyer., edited by Lauren B. Strauss and Michael Brenner, 185–94. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008.
  • ———. “Port Jews in the Atlantic: Further Thoughts.” Jewish History 20 (2006): 213–219.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Ladies of Letters

by Eliezer Segal

I suppose that as long as society requires people to submit letters for various purposes—applications, resumés, recommendations, business correspondence, requests for money or avowals of love—there will exist a market for expert guides to elegant letter-writing; including templates or sample letters. This was especially true in societies where “proper” correspondence was not written in the vernacular language, but in a special literary tongue. For pre-modern Jews this required considerable skill and erudition in Hebrew. This was not limited to mastery of grammar and vocabulary, but in keeping with the accepted conventions, it demanded an erudition that enabled frequent quotes and allusions to passages from the Bible, Talmud and Midrash.

One such collection of writing samples was published in 1533 by Rabbi Samuel Archivolti of Padua (c. 1530–1611) under the title Ma‘ayan Gannim [“Fountain of Gardens”]. This work was no mere utilitarian assortment of sample correspondence, but included some very specific content. It provided not only the texts of the letters, but also of replies to them. This would seem to imply that both parties to the correspondence were expected to be making use of Rabbi Archivolti’s manual; or perhaps, that at least some of the letters in the volume were records of exchanges that had actually taken place. It is also quite possible that the author was merely employing the epistolary format as a fictitious literary device for conveying his personal views.

The fifth and last section of the book was devoted to correspondence between men and women. And one pair of letters there takes the form of a request that was directed by a lady named Dinah to a knowledgeable man, asking him for for advice concerning her pursuit of advanced religious studies. In the flowery Hebrew typical of the era, the lady describes her desire to fulfill this supreme Jewish religious goal, although she is cognizant of the obstacles placed in her way by traditional religious law. 

The reply relates seriously to her dilemma. The advisor is impressed with her intellectual qualifications and the purity of her motives; but he cannot ignore the rulings of all those major halakhic authorities who upheld the strict position of Rabbi Eliezer in the Talmud, that “if a man instructs his daughter in Torah, it is as if he were teaching her “tiflut”—a Hebrew term that has been given a broad range of translations from ”frivolity” to “lewdness.” The correspondent is deeply aware of the frustrating contrast between the woman’s indisputable worthiness and the talmudic law’s abstruseness. In the end, he suggests that the prohibition was directed only at fathers teaching Torah to young girls who would treat the material flippantly, but not to responsible, mature ladies who are capable of coping seriously with the rabbinic curriculum. 

Rabbi Archivolti’s very specialized manual did not enjoy very wide circulation outside of Italy; and yet after centuries of virtual oblivion, it came to attract a renewed interest in the nineteenth century—this, at least was true for those two letters dealing with women’s education.

The best-known instance was in the popular Bible commentary “Torah Temimah” by Baruch Epstein of Lithuania. After citing the standard rabbinic rulings that the Torah’s instruction to “teach them to your sons” is meant to actively exclude daughters from Torah learning, the Torah Temimah brings Rabbi Archivolti’s ingeniously permissive interpretation. Interestingly, he cites it as a “responsum”—a formal legal ruling— without mentioning that it really originated in a letter-writing manual that carried no legal authority, even though it was written by a respected scholar. In fact, Epstein commented that he was really unfamiliar with that rare and obscure book or its author other than to note that Rabbi Archivolti had been cited as a grammarian in Rabbi Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller’s influential commentary to the Mishnah. 

All this is quite surprising, to say the least. Rabbi Epstein mentioned the same passage from Ma‘ayan Gannim in one of the most memorable chapters in his autobiographical memoir, Mekor Barukh. The chapter tells of his encounters with his remarkable aunt Rayna Batya Berlin, scion of a distinguished rabbinic dynasty and wife of rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin (known by his acronym the “Netziv”) who stood at the helm of the prestigious Volozhin Yeshiva in Lithuania in the nineteenth century. 

As a student in his teens, Epstein spent much time in his uncle’s home, and his memoir describes Rayna Batya as a well educated lady immersed in tomes of religious scholarship and in general culture (and correspondingly inept in the kitchen). In their frequent conversations on scholarly matters, she took a particular interest in the sources that defined women’s roles in rabbinic law and culture, and was very displeased with those roles (which were inferior to those allowed to biblical women). As she stated bitterly, the most ignorant male could bless God for “not making me a woman,” to which intelligent, pious woman are obliged to respond “Amen.” In their last conversation, his aunt lamented that Jewish women are oppressed and disgraced, but there was no apparent alternative to accepting their regrettable lot in life. (Not unexpectedly, this episode has been heavily bowdlerized in the English version of Rabbi Epstein’s memoir issued by an Orthodox publisher, in order to harmonize it with the prevalent atmosphere of fundamentalism.) 

Epstein wrote that in one of those conversations, Rayna Batya Berlin cited the letter from Archivolti’s Ma‘ayan Gannim with its suggested solution to the prohibition of women’s Torah study; and Epstein relates that he tried to refute her by pointing out that the book was not an actual halakhic work. And yet this, we might recall, was the very same work that he would cite later on in his Torah commentary as a halakhic “responsum,” albeit an obscure one with which he was not familiar. 

At any rate it is now undeniably clear that neither the Rebitzen Berlin nor Baruch Epstein had access to the original text of Rabbi Archivolti’s work; and that Epstein was citing an excerpt that had appeared in the September 25 1895 issue of the Hebrew daily “Hazefirah” where the unnamed editor had introduced it as “a letter worthy of publication on account of the position it takes regarding the education of women.” This was much later than the alleged conversation with his aunt that Epstein described in his memoir.

Based on this and other evidence, recent scholarship has generally been quite dismissive about the historical veracity of the story, and has concluded that—though the basic description of Mrs. Berlin’s personality is probably quite credible—Epstein took extensive literary license in his narrative depiction.

Whatever doubts might arise with respect to the authenticity of Epstein’s use of the Ma‘ayan Gannim letter, it did have the result of introducing an otherwise forgotten source into the contemporary discourse about the schooling of women in Jewish traditionalist circles. 

Truly, when we observe the many excellent educational institutions that have been proliferating in recent decades offering intense programs in Torah study for religious women, we are reminded of the visionary words of our sixteenth-century Italian author who wrote:

Those women who are strongly motivated to approach this divine labour as a free and virtuous choice. They will ascend the mountain of the Lord and they will dwell in his holy place, for they are exemplary women. It is therefore fitting that the sages of their generation should praise them, encourage them, inspire them, direct them, strengthen their hands and fortify their arms.

And turning to his correspondent, the aspiring scholar Dinah, he urges (and we are tempted to join in): “Do it and succeed—and you will receive assistance from Heaven!

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, September 9, 2016, p. 16.

• For further reading:
  • Adler, Eliyana R. “Reading Rayna Batya: The Rebellious Rebbetzin as Self-Reflection.” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies & Gender Issues, no. 16 (2008): 130–52. doi:10.2979/nas.2008.-.16.130. 
  • Assaf, Simcha. Meḳorot le-Toldhot ha-Ḥinukh be-Yiśraʼel. Edited by Shmuel Glick. Revised and Expanded edition. Vol. 2. 6 vols. New York and Jerusalem: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2001. 
  • Bonfil, Robert. Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy. Translated by Anthony Oldcorn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. 
  • Epstein, Baruch. My Uncle the Netziv. 1st edition. Brooklyn, NY: Mesorah Publications, 1988.
  • Fuchs, Ilan. Jewish Women’s Torah Study: Orthodox Religious Education and Modernity. Routledge Jewish Studies Series. London and New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014.
  • ———. “Talmud Torah le-Nashim be-’Iṭalia bImei ha-Beinayim U-Vreshit Ha ’Et Ha-Ḥadashah: Sheloshah Diyyunim Hilkhatiyyim.” Massehet 8 (2009): 29–49. [Hebrew] 
  • Moseley, Marcus. Being for Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2006.
  • Dan Rabinowitz, “Rayna Batya and Other Learned Women: A Reevaluation of Rabbi Barukh Halevi Epstein’s Sources,” Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought 35, no. 1 (2001): 55–69.
  • Schwartz, Dror. “R. Samuel Archivolti: His Life, Writings, Responsa and Letters.” Asufot: Annual for Jewish Studies 7 (1993): 69–156.
  • Seeman, Don. “The Silence of Rayna Batya: Torah, Suffering, and Rabbi Barukh Epstein’s ‘Wisdom of Women.’” The Torah U-Madda Journal 6 (1995): 91–128. 
  • Shapiro, Marc B. Changing the Immutable: How Orthodox Judaism Rewrites Its History. Oxford and Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2015. 
  • ———. “Clarifications of Previous Posts” Blog. The Seforim Blog, January 16, 2008. http://seforim.blogspot.ca/2008/01/clarifications-of-previous-posts-by.html.
  • Zinberg, Israel. Italian Jewry in the Renaissance Era. Translated by Bernard Martin. A History of Jewish Literature. Cincinnati and New York: Hebrew Union College Press and KTAV, 1988.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Holy Day Hunger

by Eliezer Segal

What with the apples and honey, the diverse edibles that are nibbled in order to symbolize blessings for the coming year, and the lavish family repasts that are de rigueur on any self-respecting Jewish holiday—it is all but impossible to imagine Rosh Hashanah without conjuring up visions of food-laden tables and sated bellies.

However, this observation was not always as obvious as it may seem to us today. Over the centuries some Jews were convinced that the most appropriate way to observe the solemn day of judgment is by refraining from eating food. 

This approach was especially widespread among the residents of the holy land in the early middle ages. At that time, as the newly completed Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds were competing vigorously for acceptance by world Jewry, a Babylonian scholar named Pirḳoi ben Baboi composed a fascinating letter devoted to denouncing the religious practices of the Jews in the land of Israel. Among the customs that he singled out for censure was that of fasting on the two days of Rosh Hashanah as well as on the Sabbath of Repentance between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. 

Indeed, a responsum by a leader of the Palestinian rabbinate acknowledged that practice with perceptible pride, adding that his community also refrained from food on the seven days preceding Rosh Hashanah (even on the Sabbath that occurred during that week). He expressed his fervent hope that all Jews would do the same.

In support of this custom, the rabbi cited a passage from a midrash that enumerated the stages of atonement during the High Holy Day season: “Prior to New Year’s day the most distinguished men of the generation begin to fast, at which point the Holy One grants atonement for one third of the people’s sins. From New Year’s to the Day of Atonement individuals begin to fast, at which point the Holy One grants atonement for another third of their sins. When Yom Kippur arrives, all Israel fast—men, women and children …and the Holy One is now overwhelmed with compassion for them. He grants atonement for all their sins and accepts their repentance.” 

Ben Baboi now proceeds to to quote a well-known passage from the Babylonian Talmud that interprets the words of Isaiah “Seek you the Lord while he may be found” as referring to the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which are designated as a time that is appropriate for fasting. Those ten days include Rosh Hashanah itself—which, he claims, proves that the Talmud recommended fasting on the festival as well as on the intervening Sabbath!

Among the writings of the medieval Babylonian rabbis we find several attempts to refute the Israeli custom of fasting on Rosh Hashanah. Pirḳoi ben Baboi himself insisted that there was no basis for equating repentance with fasting; and as evidence for this, he cited passages from the Bible in which prophets castigated people who foolishly believe that they can achieve forgiveness by means of ritual fasting that is not accompanied by sincere moral repentance. 

Saadiah Ga’on amassed a rich collection of scriptural proof texts against fasting. He noted, for instance, that in the Bible, Rosh Hashanah is designated a feast  [ḥag] (according to the traditional rabbinic interpretation of Psalms 81:4), which implies that it is subject to the Torah’s command to “rejoice in your feast.” He also noted how, on Rosh Hashanah, Ezra instructed the exiles returning to Zion from the Babylonian captivity to “eat the fat, and drink the sweet…for this day is holy to our Lord.”

Even after the Babylonian custom became the normative standard, we find evidence that some Jews persisted in refraining from food on Rosh Hashanah. Thus, Rabbi Nissim ben Jacob, writing in eleventh-century Kairouan, Tunisia, cited a passage from the Jerusalem Talmud in which Rabbi Ḥiyya advised his nephew Rav that if he can observe the stringency of eating food in a state of ritual purity only seven days a year, they should be on the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur—but not on Rosh Hashanah itself, because one should not be eating anything at all then. Rabbi Nissim concluded that this counts as a valid precedent for those who are accustomed to fasting. In Provence, Spain, Italy and France, even authors who were themselves opposed to fasting were forced to concede that several great scholars and pious men did fast on the two days of Rosh Hashanah and on the subsequent “Shabbat Shuvah.” 

Rabbi Zedekiah the Physician of Rome, author of an influential compendium of Jewish liturgical customs, reported hearing from a young man named David who had received a tradition that anyone who originally observed the fast, but then ceased doing so, will not live through the coming year. That tradition was eventually incorporated into the authoritative Shulḥan Arukh code of religious law.

The rabbis of Germany were particularly divided on this question. Some drew an analogy from the fact that the important fast of the Ninth of Av must be postponed if it falls on a Sabbath. On the other hand, Rabbi Abraham Hildik of Bohemia cited the institution of “dream fasts” that are permitted even on shabbat in order to avert the fulfilment of an ominous dream. Even though the seriousness and source of the dream are altogether in doubt, Jewish law nevertheless allows a person to violate the joy of the sabbath for its sake. How much more, then, should this be true of Rosh Hashanah when we know that we are standing in judgment before the supreme and omnipotent judge of the universe!

This line of reasoning was rejected by Rabbi Abraham ben Azriel: after all, perhaps dreams  should be treated more seriously because they are sent down to sinners precisely in order to impel them to fast and thereby to merit forgiveness; whereas normal, decent Jews stand a good chance of being exonerated by the All-merciful on Rosh Hashanah—in which case fasting would be a superfluous violation of the rejoicing appropriate to a festival.

Rabbi Jacob of Marvege, the author of “Responsa from Heaven,” submitted the question to the Almighty in one of his visions. He was informed in no uncertain terms that it is proper to rejoice on the festival by partaking of food.

Apart from the authority of various scholarly proof texts, there are a number of different reasons that might account for the persistence of the custom of fasting on the festival. For one thing, we must bear in mind that the early forebears of German and French Jewry had migrated from localities such as southern Italy that accepted the authority of the Jerusalem Talmud which, as we have seen, encouraged fasting on Rosh Hashanah. 

We must also take into account the ascetic and mystical pietistic movement known as “Ḥasidut Ashkenaz” that evolved in the Rhineland communities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and exerted strong influences on the patterns of religiosity that defined the Jews in central and eastern Europe. The austere character of their piety is apparent in the way that they justified fasting on Sabbaths and festivals. Some argued that, for a person who is accustomed to fasting throughout the week, it would be too much of a shock to their systems if they were to suddenly start stuffing themselves with food on holy days!

As for the rest of us who are not quite so pious, we should probably just face the fact that our New Year resolution to begin a diet will likely have to be postponed until after the holidays.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, September 23, 2016, p. 19.

• For further reading:
  • Gartner, Yaakov. The Evolvement of Customs in the World of Halacha. Jerusalem: Shalem, 1995. [Hebrew]
  • Kanarfogel, Ephraim. Peering Through the Lattices: Mystical, Magical, and Pietistic Dimensions in the Tosafist Period. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000.
  • Urbach, Efraim Elimelech, ed. Abraham ben Azriel: Sefer Arugat Habosem. Jerusalem: Mekize Nirdamim, 1963. [Hebrew]

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Eve’s Other Fruit

by Eliezer Segal

One of those bitter-sweet Yiddish tales by Sholem Aleichem tells of a child whose parents were constantly admonishing him not to bite off the pitam—the bump at the tip of the etrog that the poor family had acquired at great expense. Although the child had no conceivable reason for doing such a deed (which would render the fruit invalid for ritual use on the festival), the repeated warnings transformed themselves into an uncontrollable pathological obsession that played itself out to its inevitable tragicomic conclusion.

The Christian orientalist Jakob Johann Schudt, in his 1714 compendium of Jewish customary practices, mentioned a “superstition” among pregnant women in Germany, of biting off the pitam as a charm to ensure a safe pregnancy and an easy birth. This report was confirmed by the seventeenth-century halakhic authority Rabbi Jair Bachrach in his commentary to the Shulhan ‘Arukh, and he expressed his personal satisfaction that the superstition was no longer being practiced in his own time. This might have been true in his locality, but was clearly not so in other places. 

The earliest explicit written source for this practice is the Tzena Ur’ena by Jacob ben Isaac of Yanov, the popular Yiddish exposition of the Bible first published at the end of the sixteenth-century. This work provided spiritual nourishment for generations of Jewish women who were unable to study the more scholarly Hebrew commentaries. The Tzena Ur’ena ntroduces this topic in connection with its narration of the Garden of Eden story. Eve (and her female descendants) would be punished for her disobedience by having to suffer the pains of childbirth. In recounting Eve’s unfortunate role in bringing mortality to the world, the Tzena Ur’ena cited a rabbinic dispute as to whether the fruit of the tree of knowledge was a fig, a grape, or an etrog.

In this connection, the Tzena Ur’ena points out that there exists a widespread custom for pregnant women on Hoshanna Rabbah (the last intermediate day of Sukkot on which the etrog is taken ritually) to bite off the stem and then to make a donation to charity, in keeping with the scriptural adage that “zedakah delivereth from death.” The ladies therefore pray that they and their fetuses should be safeguarded from death, and that they should merit an easy birth. After all, the Torah implies that, had Eve not eaten from the tree of knowledge, then all mothers would be giving birth to their children painlessly. 

It appears that the earliest versions of the tradition did not refer to biting off the pitam, but rather to removing the stem (the stalk that connects the fruit to the branch), presumably by hand. At some later stage, after biting had become the preferred manner of removal, the practice was transferred to the pitam, perhaps because it was easier to bite.

As we have seen, some writers objected to this practice because they felt that it smacked of magic or superstition. Several rabbinic authorities found problems with it from within the conceptual system of Jewish religious law. 

The prevailing opinion in the Talmud was that the etrog retains its sanctity throughout the holy day, and therefore it is forbidden to derive personal benefit from it during the entire day of Hoshana Rabbah, even after one has finished using it for the rituals of the synagogue service. For this reason, later texts recommend not eating the pitam or stem until Simhat Torah, when the festival of Sukkot is clearly over. 

There may, however, be a much earlier allusion to the custom in a record from 1252 that is preserved in the official archives of King Henry III of England. That royal document consists of a legal writ addressed to the Sheriff of Hampshire, urging him to deal with an accusation that a Jew named Cressus of Stamford had forcibly seized an “apple of Eve” from the local synagogue “to the shame and opprobrium of the Jewish community.” If the investigation should establish Cressus’s guilt, then the sheriff was authorized to distrain on the culprit’s property to extract a fine of one gold mark.

The term “apple of Eve” is unknown in any other source, and scholars have suggested various identifications. Perhaps the most persuasive of these is that it was referring to an etrog. The association with the biblical figure of Eve in the Garden of Eden would dovetail nicely with the exposition in the Tze’ena Ur’ena and other works; and it would, of course, be familiar to English Christians for whom the fall of mankind through which Adam and Eve introduced Original Sin to the world was arguably the most crucial event in their ”Old Testament.” 

Until quite recently, etrogs were very hard to come by in northern lands far from the Mediterranean climates where they grow; and it was quite common for a single etrog to be purchased by the whole community to be kept in the synagogue and shared by the townspeople. The theft of the community etrog would thus have far-reaching consequences for the beloved holiday observance, and it is understandable that the Jewish community might turn in such a case to the civil authorities to enforce the law and recover the fruit.

As to why the larcenous Cressus would want to steal the etrog in the first place, there is no limit to the possible motives that our imaginations could ascribe to him: he might have been trying to avenge a perceived personal insult by the community’s leaders, or perhaps he had an outstanding financial claim against the community. He might even have been very apprehensive for the health of his pregnant wife./p>

Several collections of Jewish laws and customs recommend that the following remarkable blessing, based on the tradition about the etrog in the garden of Eden, be recited by a pregnant woman when she bites the etrog on Hoshanna Rabbah:

Master of the universe: On account of Eve who ate from the fruit of the tree of knowledge, that sin became the cause of death in the world. However, if I had been there at the time, I would not have eaten it, nor would I have derived any benefit from it—just as I refrained from damaging this etrog during the seven days of the festival which have now passed. I have not disqualified it until today, at a time when the precept is no longer in force. Therefore, even as I take pleasure from this pitam, so should I have been worthy to see the tree of knowledge about which the Holy One commanded Adam and Eve “Thou shalt not eat of it.” I would not have transgressed that command. For this reason, please accept my prayer and my supplication that I should not perish from this childbirth. Protect me to give birth in comfort and without suffering; and let no injury befall me or my child. For you are the saving God.

What I find so enthralling about this prayer is that its author (and I do not know if it was a man or a woman) does not regard the present generation as fatally tainted by the disobedience of humanity’s first ancestors, nor does the text assume (as do so many Jewish penitential prayers) that we are all undeserving sinners who must beg submissively for God to bestow unconditional mercy upon us. On the contrary, the woman reciting the prayer is expected to approach her Creator from a position of moral assurance, confidently reminding him that she herself is secure in her faith and meticulous in her religious observance; a woman such as herself would surely never have committed Eve’s sin of eating the forbidden fruit, and for this reason she deserves to be spared from the perils of childbirth.

Indeed, such self-assured ladies deserve to be remembered and celebrated on Sukkot, “the season of our rejoicing.”

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, October 14, 2016, p. 13.

• For further reading:
  • Avida, Yehuda. “‘Segulah’ u-Minhag Nashim veha-Maḳor Hu ba-Halakhah.” In Beit Hillel Mugash le-Yovlo Ha-Shiv“im shel ha-Rav ha-Ga”on Hillel Posek, edited by Ephraim Tobenhaus, 75–80. Tel-Aviv: Va‘ad Ha-Yovel, 1951. [Hebrew] 
  • Marienberg, Evyatar, and David Carpenter. “The Stealing of the ‘Apple of Eve’ from the 13th Century Synagogue of Winchester.” Henry III Fine Rolls Project, December 2011. http://www.finerollshenry3.org.uk/content/month/fm-12-2011.html. 
  • Weissler, Chava. “Prayers in Yiddish and the Religious World of Ashkenazic Women.” In Jewish Women in Historical Perspective, edited by Judith Reesa Baskin, 169–92. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998. 
  • ———. “Women’s Studies and Women’s Prayers: Reconstructing the Religious History of Ashkenazic Women.” Jewish Social Studies 1, no. 2 (1995): 28–47.

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Rabbis, Rationalists…and a Remedy that Roars

by Eliezer Segal

Last year I experienced the excruciating agony of a kidney stone. Fortunately, I was in Jerusalem at the time and had access to capable Israeli medical professionals (as well as generous Canadian medical insurance), and by the time the first round of painkillers wore off, the stone was gone. 

If the stone had stricken me in thirteenth-century Europe, I might have sought a different form of treatment: namely, the application of a “lion medallion,” This procedure took the form of a specially prepared metal disk (crafted during a particular phase of the moon) engraved with the zodiac sign of Leo the lion. This medallion was strapped over the offending kidney in order to relieve the pain. The device was supposed to help by beaming down therapeutic forces from the stars. 

This procedure was widely recommended by physicians in the Languedoc region of what is now southern France. There were many distinguished Jewish rationalists and scientists in that age who believed in the efficacy of “astral magic”—the theory that the celestial bodies radiate energies whose effects can be calculated mathematically and astronomically. Advocates of the theory included respected scholars of the stature of Abraham Ibn Ezra. On the other hand, Moses Maimonides had famously discredited the pseudoscience, branding all astrology as intrinsically idolatrous–and the Languedocian Jews were stalwart in their adulation of Maimonides.

Nonetheless, the Provençal physician Isaac de Lattes was accustomed to preparing these medallions at the requests of his patients, though he personally was not a believer in astrology. Dr. de Lattes regretted employing this questionable treatment and he feared that it might be forbidden on religious grounds—even if somehow it were medically beneficial. He therefore addressed an inquiry to Rabbi Solomon ben Adret of Barcelona—the Rashba— perhaps the most respected halakhic authority of that generation, and the Rashba ruled that the treatment was permissible.

This arcane question concerning the medical use of the Leo medallions would soon became a contentious issue in a major ideological dispute between the rabbis of Languedoc and Catalonia over the spiritual directions of their Jewish communities. 

The controversy erupted when preachers in Montpellier, a community that was deeply devoted to Maimonides’ rationalist vision of Judaism, began to base their sermons on allegorical interpretations of the Bible that might be construed as denying the literal truth of scripture. Though no one was questioning the importance of philosophical and scientific study in the quest for theological truth, some of the community’s leaders were worried that rationalist ideas would be misunderstood by younger folk who did not yet have adequate background in the traditional Jewish religious curriculum. Therefore, conservative elements sought to issue a communal ordinance forbidding the preaching of allegorical sermons to the general public, and limiting the study of metaphysics to those above the age of thirty. 

With those objectives in mind, Rabbi Abba Mari ben Joseph Yarḥi turned to Rabbi Ibn Adret asking him to throw his considerable prestige behind such an ordinance. Rashba was known to be rather unsympathetic to Maimonides’ Aristotelian rationalism—he was in fact an exponent of the emerging mystical doctrine of Kabbalah.

In his initial letter of invitation to the Barcelonan sage, Abba Mari inserted what appears to be a completely irrelevant reference to the Leo medallions. Although the letter’s overriding tone was one of obsequious humility in which the writer was begging for a favour from his intellectual and spiritual superior, Abba Mari included a provocative question about how Rashba could ever have permitted the use of astrological medallions. 

The Provençal rabbi subsequently tried to explain that the two issues were indeed unrelated, but they happened to come to his attention around the same time. Historians, however, have generally preferred to see it as part of a deliberate strategy. Knowing that many loyal Languedocian Jews resented his turning to an outside authority to challenge the proud local culture, Abba Mari took advantage of this opportunity to demonstrate that he was not submitting meekly to the Rashba’s authority; where warranted, he was prepared to voice his opposition on an issue that was dear to the hearts of his community. 

Abba Mari boldly took Rashba to task for his permissive ruling on the medical medallions. He argued that this was an unmistakable transgression of a severe prohibition in the Torah: “Do not practice divination or seek omens,” which the Talmud interpreted as forbidding astrological computations.

Rashba was able to hold his own in the debate, in both his rabbinic erudition and his competence in scientific theory. He cited a passage from the Talmud that allowed the placing of engraved coins on foot calluses on the Sabbath, indicating that our sages did not object to the medical use of such engraved images. He also argued that there is nothing theologically unacceptable about the premise that the Almighty might have structured the cosmos in such a way that certain material objects possess healing properties (even though science cannot necessarily explain them). As long as one’s intentions when using the medallion are directed to its medical efficacy and not to any superstitious or idolatrous powers that are mistakenly ascribed to it, then there should be nothing objectionable in resorting to such treatment. As it happens, similar debates were going on at the same time among their Christian neighbours. For example, Paris’s Bishop William of Auvergne was careful to differentiate between cures that were founded on superstitious or demonic beliefs in the images, as distinct from therapies that had a real “scientific” basis. 

In discussing the sources for the Leo medallions, Rabbi Abba Mari mentioned the existence of a “Book of Forms” in Hebrew that contained diagrams and instructions for fashioning medallions of the zodiac signs. Scholars have expended considerable efforts in tracking down this volume.

In those days Montpellier was the focus of intense inter-religious cooperation and collaboration in medical science, and prominent Christian scholars were translating treatises from the Hebrew (many of which had in turn been translated by Jewish doctors from Arabic originals). Prominent in these circles was the prolific physician, translator and religious reformer Arnald of Villanova. Arnald was the probable author of a work known as “De Sigillis,” a detailed guide to the fashioning of medical medallions based on the twelve signs of the zodiac. The treatise specified the appropriate timing, materials, inscriptions and accompanying blessings; as well as which physical ailments could be treated by each sign. In July 1301 Arnald used a lion medallion to alleviate the pain of a kidney stone for no less a celebrity than Pope Boniface VIII, an episode that raised some eyebrows among the cardinals. Another Latin treatise about the medical uses of zodiac medallions was authored by the Montpellier physician Bernard de Gordon.

Both those texts stipulated that the medallion—preferably one fashioned out of gold on a sunny day and fumigated with mastic—should be applied to the left kidney, that the lion should have no tongue and that a veiled lady wielding a rod or bridle should be riding on it. 

These manuals were likely derived in turn from an Arabic original, the influential eleventh century compendium of magic and astrology “Ghayat al-Ḥakim” known in its European translations as “the Picatrix.”

I assume that most of us would not give much credence to any snake-oil peddler who tried to prescribe zodiac medallions as the remedy for what ails us.

But if the pain becomes unbearably acute, even some of us skeptics might become more receptive to such unconventional treatments. 

After all—like a dose of good chicken soup—it can’t hurt…

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, October 28, 2016, p. 13.

• For further reading:
  • Baer, Yitzhak.  A History of the Jews in Christian Spain. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1992.
  • Caballero-Navas, Carmen. “Medicine among Medieval Jews: The Science, the Art, and the Practice.” In  Science in Medieval Jewish Cultures, edited by Gad Freudenthal, 320–42. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
  • Delmas, Bruno. “Médailles astrologiques et talismaniques dans le Midi de la France (XIIIe-XIVe siècle).” In  Archéologie Occitaine, 237–54. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1976. [French]
  • Halbertal, Moshe.  Between Torah and Wisdom: Rabbi Menachem Ha-Meiri and the Maimonidean Halakhists in Provence. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2000. [Hebrew]
  • Klein-Braslavy, Sara. “The Concept of Magic in R. Solomon Ben Abraham Adret (Rashba) and R. Nissim Gerondi (Ran).” In  “Encuentros” and “Desencuentros”; Spanish Jewish Cultural Interaction throughout History: The Howard Gilman International Symposia, Harvard, Salamanca, Tel-Aviv, edited by Carlos Carrete Parrondo, 105–29. Tel-Aviv: University Publishing Projects, 2000.
  • Kottek, Samuel. “Le Symbole du Lion dans la Médicine de l’Antiquité et du Moyen Age.”  Revue d’histoire de la médecine hébraïque. 20 (1967): 161–68. [French]
  • Lang, Benedek. “Characters and Magic Signs in the Picatrix and Other Medieval Magic Texts.”  Acta Classica Universitatis Scientiarum Debreceniensis 47 (2011): 69–77.
  • Renan, Ernest.  Les Rabbins Français Du Commencement Du Quatorzième Siècle. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1877. [French]
  • Pingree, David Edwin, ed.  Picatrix: The Latin Version of the “Ghāyat Al-Hakīm.” Studies of the Warburg Institute. London: Warburg Inst, 1986.
  • Roos, Anna Marie. “‘Magic Coins’ and ‘Magic Squares’: The Discovery of Astrological Sigils in the Oldenburg Letters.”  Notes & Records of the Royal Society 62, no. 3 (September 20, 2008): 271–88.
  • Schwartz, Dov.  Studies on Astral Magic in Medieval Jewish Thought. Translated by David Louvish and Batya Stein. The Brill Reference Library of Judaism, v. 20. Leiden: Brill-Styx, 2004.
  • Shatzmiller, Joseph. “In Search of the ‘Book of Figures’: Medicine and Astrology in Montpellier at the Turn of the Fourteenth Century.”  AJS Review 7–8 (1982): 383–407.
  • ———. “The Forms of the Twelve Constellations: A 14th Century Controversy.”  Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 9 (1990): 397–408.
  • Stern, Gregg.  Philosophy and Rabbinic Culture: Jewish Interpretation and Controversy in Medieval Languedoc. Routledge, 2013.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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By the Time We Get to Phoenix

by Eliezer Segal

Among the multitudes of my devoted readers I suppose there are probably a few bird-watchers. And I would also hazard a guess that, however many species of winged creatures they might have seen—not one of them has ever sighted a phoenix.

Nevertheless, stories about this extraordinary bird can be traced back to the most ancient records of human culture. 

A fragment attributed to the Greek writer Hesiod who lived around 700 B.C.E. spoke of the phoenix’s impressive life-span—nine times that of the long-lived raven. Several centuries later, the historian Herodotus provided considerably more detail about the phoenix—though to be sure, he did not claim to have seen one (other than in a painting), nor did he guarantee the veracity of the tales he was repeating. Herodotus’ description contains most of the elements that subsequently became standard features of the “phoenix legend.” For example, the birds are dazzlingly coloured, with plumage of red and gold; and they are as large as eagles.

Herodotus’ phoenix makes only the very rarest of appearances to the inhabited world, at intervals of no less than five hundred years. Their arrivals coincide with the deaths of their parents. The young phoenix takes care of the funeral rites for its deceased parent, conveying the corpse from Arabia to the Egyptian temple of the sun at Heliopolis where it covers the deceased body in fragrant myrrh and performs a complex rite with an egg-shaped lump of myrrh. This later came to be perceived as a single process of resurrection in which the selfsame bird was restored to life in a newly regenerated body.

This quintessentially pagan legend, which probably arose out of the rich mythological traditions of Egypt, was well known to Jewish writers in the ancient world. Some Jewish Apocalyptic visions contain fantastic descriptions of phoenixes that were observed by their mystic heroes as they ascended toward the sublime throne of the Almighty. 

A Jewish playwright known as Ezekiel the Tragedian (second century B.C.E.) composed a Greek play about the Exodus (known as the “Exagogé”), portions of which have survived in quotations by later authors. One of those fragments relates to an obscure episode in the Torah, shortly after the parting of the Red Sea and the miraculous sweetening of the bitter waters at Marah, when the Israelites encamped at an oasis named Elim which provided them with twelve wells of water and seventy date palms. Ezekiel’s script contains a speech by the scout who reported to Moses on discovering this idyllic spot, and his description includes a sighting of a huge multi-coloured bird (the word “phoenix” does not actually appear in the text) twice the size of an eagle, with an exceptional voice, who comported himself like the king of the birds and was treated as such by the other birds.

Not enough of the text remains to let us figure out why the play’s author was impelled to insert this detail, one that does not seem to be suggested by the wording of biblical narrative. There are indications that a tradition existed about an appearance of the phoenix during the reign of the Pharaoh Amasis who was believed to have lived at the time of the Exodus. This would be consistent with the view that was widely held among the ancients, that great epochs and historical turning-points (and from the Jewish perspective, the Israelite liberation from slavery and the revelation at Mount Sinai would surely qualify as such) were marked by sightings of the phoenix. Indeed, a large portion of the literature about the phoenix was devoted to measuring its life-span and calculating the dates of its past and future rebirths.

Ezekiel’s insertion of the phoenix episode into the biblical story might also have something to do with the date-palms that flourished in Elim. The Greek word for date-palm is also “phoenix,” and this has given rise to several scholarly disagreements about the meanings of various texts in which the word appears.

This confusion extended to passages in the Bible. The familiar verse in Psalms that “the righteous shall flourish like the palm tree” was translated by some Christian exegetes (including the Latin Vulgate version) as “like the phoenix.” Indeed, in Christian art and homiletics, the phoenix became a favourite symbol and precedent for the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead.

Rabbinic tradition also discerned several references to phoenixes in the Bible. One of these texts was a verse in the book of Job in which the hero recalls his happier and more hope-filled days: “Then I said, I shall die in my nest, and I shall multiply my days as the sand.” The Hebrew word (ḥol) that is translated here according to its normal sense of “sand” was understood by some rabbis as the name of a bird; and in fact, an alternative Masoretic tradition read it with a different vowel, as “ḥul”; this interpretation is preferred by several modern scholars. The Alexandrian Greek translation translated the text as “the trunk of a palm tree,” using that ambiguous word “phoenix.” 

A tradition in the midrash teaches that when Eve ate the forbidden fruit, she also offered to share it with all her fellow-creatures in the garden of Eden, and the only one to decline the offer was the virtuous ḥolbird—for which it was rewarded with a blessing of longevity or immortality. In this respect it differed from the other, less disciplined creatures who were, like the humans, deprived of their primordial immortality. 

Rabbis from the early third century explained the phoenix’s immortality in terms that dovetailed with Greek traditions about its lifespan. They said that it lives for a thousand years, at the conclusion of which, according to one view, a flame emerges from its nest and burns it up completely, leaving an egg from which it regenerates limbs and springs back to life; and according to a second theory, the aged bird’s body simply decays without the sudden fiery conflagration, and is then recreated.

These two theories about the regeneration of the ḥol bird correspond precisely with the two dominant Greek traditions about the process of the phoenix’s rebirth. The egg motif had become a standard element of the myth since Herodotus. The image of the new phoenix arising from the flames of the old has of course become the most popular version and is frequently invoked as a metaphor. 

Some commentators also claimed that there was a phoenix on the passenger list of Noah’s ark. The Talmud quotes a conversation in which Noah’s son Shem chatted with Abraham’s servant Eliezer about the grueling workload faced by his father when catering to the individual needs of all the diverse denizens of that floating zoo. One of those creatures, designated by the (otherwise unknown) name “avarshana” or “urshana,” lay uncomplainingly in a corner of the vessel. When Noah tried to offer him food, the humble avarshana replied that he hadn’t wanted to trouble his host who seemed so busy with his other onerous chores. Noah was so impressed with its considerateness that he blessed the creature with eternal life. In this connection, the Talmud cited the verse from Job. 

Rashi inferred that the avarshana was none other than the phoenix—a thesis that achieved much popularity among subsequent commentators—even though the Babylonian Ge’onim, like most modern lexicographers, preferred to translate it as a more conventional type of bird, likely a dove or pigeon (albeit one capable of carrying on conversations with humans). Interestingly, some ancient Greek writers mentioned that no-one ever observed a phoenix eating.

In the Jewish work known as “the Apocalypse of Baruch,” we should note, the phoenix is said to be responsible for using its wings to screen humanity from the deadly rays of direct sunlight—a motif that would also resurface in rabbinic midrashic traditions. 

Perhaps its next appearance will bring a solution to global warming and the hole in the ozone layer. 

Hopefully we won’t have to wait a thousand years—or even five hundred—for that to happen.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, November 11, 2016, p. 10.

• For further reading:
  • Aptowitzer, Victor. “The Rewarding and Punishing of Animals and Inanimate Objects: On the Aggadic View of the World.” Hebrew Union College Annual 3 (1926): 117–55. 
  • Broek, Roelof van den. The Myth of the Phoenix: According to Classical and Early Christian Traditions. Études Préliminaires Aux Religions Orientales Dans l’Empire Romain 24. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971. 
  • Dahood, Mitchell Joseph. “Hol ‘Phoenix’ in Job 29:18 and in Ugaritic.” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 36, no. 1 (1974): 85–88. 
  • ———. “Nest and Phoenix in Job 29:18.” Biblica 48, no. 4 (1967): 542–44. 
  • Ginzberg, Louis. The Legends of the Jews. Translated by Henrietta Szold. Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1909. 
  • Gutman, Yehoshua. Beginnings of Jewish-Hellenistic Literature. 2 vols. Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1958. [Hebrew] 
  • Heath, Jane. “Ezekiel Tragicus and Hellenistic Visuality: The Phoenix at Elim.” The Journal of Theological Studies 57, no. 1 (2006): 23–41. 
  • Hill, John Spencer. “The Phoenix.” Religion & Literature 16, no. 2 (1984): 61–66. 
  • Hubaux, Jean, and Maxime Leroy. Le Mythe du Phénix dans les Littératures Grecque et Latine. Bibliothèque de la Faculté de philosophie et lettres de l’Université de Liège. Fasc. LXXXII. Liège, Paris: Faculté de philosophie et lettres et E. Droz, 1939. 
  • Jacobson, Howard. The Exagoge of Ezekiel. Cambridge, [Cambridgeshire] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 
  • ———. “Phoenix Resurrected.” Harvard Theological Review 80, no. 2 (1987): 229–33. 
  • Kohn, Thomas D. “The Tragedies of Ezekiel.” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 43, no. 1 (2011): 5–12. 
  • McDonald, Mary Francis. “Phoenix Redivivus.” Phoenix 14, no. 4 (1960): 187–206. 
  • Niehoff, Maren R. “The Phoenix in Rabbinic Literature.” Harvard Theological Review 89, no. 3 (1996): 245–65. 
  • Nigg, Joseph. The Phoenix: An Unnatural Biography of a Mythical Beast. University of Chicago Press, 2016. 
  • Petersen, Anders Klostergaard. “Between Old and New: The Problem of Acculturation Illustrated by the Early Christian Use of the Phoenix Motif.” In Jerusalem, Alexandria, Rome: Studies in Ancient Cultural Interaction in Honour of A. Hilhorst, edited by Florentino García Martinez and Gerald P. Luttikhuizen, 148–64. Leiden and Boston: BRILL, 2003. 
  • Slifkin, Nosson. “Sacred Monsters: Mysterious and Mythical Creatures of Scripture, Talmud and Midrash.” Brooklyn, N.Y: Zoo Torah, 2007.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Moo-sical Mystics

by Eliezer Segal

As the story is told in the Bible, the Philistines in the days of the Prophet Samuel thought they were neutralizing Israel’s most effective secret weapon when they captured the ark of the covenant that housed the original tablets of the ten commandments. However, when (not heeding the lessons of Indiana Jones) they found themselves cursed with a plague of tu­mors, rats, and maybe hemorrhoids, they decided to send the ark back to the Israelites. They placed it on a cart pulled by two milk-cows; and in order to test whether the process was truly being guided by the Hebrew God, they stood watch to observe whether the cows would steer a direct homeward course—and this was indeed what occurred.

According to traditions preserved in the works of Josephus Flavius and the pseudepigraphic “Biblical Antiquities” ascribed to Philo of Alexandria, the cows were placed at the intersection of three roads so that the Philistines could observe whether the heavenly GPS system would animals would direct them to the correct path toward Judea, 

Not content with the impressive miracle that was described explicitly in the biblical tale, several rabbis of the Talmud and Midrash looked for allusions to additional layers of supernatural involvement. They read the Hebrew verb “vayyisharnah” [= they went straight] as if it were from a similar root meaning “they sang,” and this conjur­ed up for them an image of cows singing the praises of the Lord as they pulled the holiest of objects on its way to its real home in the sanctuary of the Lord. 

But what does a cow sing while hauling a sacred ark? A diverse roster of sages spanning several generations of the talmudic era, in both the land of Israel and Babylonia, identified appropriate passages from Psalms and other scriptural texts as the bovine librettos. The suggestions included the song that Moses and the Israelites intoned after the splitting of the Red Sea, as well as uplifting thanksgiving hymns like “Sing to the Lord a new song,” “The Lord reigns, let the earth be glad,” “Sing to the Lord, all the earth, “The Lord reigns, let the na­tions tremble,” or “Give thanks unto the Lord, call upon his name.”

The Talmud’s playlist also included one selection of lyrics that were not quoted from a biblical source. It was ascribed to the Galilean sage Rabbi Isaac Nappaḥa; and a virtually identical tradition appears in the MIdrash Genesis Rabbah in the name of Elijah—presumably, the famous prophet himself. Elijah makes occasional appearances in rabbinic literature in his role as a figure who divided his time between the “heavenly academy” and periodic visits with worthy rabbis on earth. The current passage evidently belongs to a body of traditions known as “Tanna de-Bei Eliyahu,” some of which are cited in midrashic and talmudic literature, and which formed the basis for a remarkable and enigmatic homiletic compendium that was probably compiled around the tenth century.

The song of the cows, as reported by Rabbi Isaac Nappaḥa or Elijah, went as follows:

Exalt, exalt, acacia!

 Stretch forth in the fulness of thy majesty,

gir­dled in golden embroidery,

 praised in the re­cesses of the palace,

resplendent in the finest of ornaments.

And if that sounds to you like an obscure mishmash of cryptic verbiage, then we must bear in mind that this song followed the conventions of classical Hebrew liturgical poetry (piyyuṭ). A standard feature of that genre was that fundamental concepts and persons are never named directly, but only hinted at through the use of indirect expressions taken from biblical usage. Thus, in the current example, the mentions of acacia and gold serve as poetic code-words that are supposed to evoke the instructions in the book of Exodus: “they shall make an ark of acacia wood… and thou shalt overlay it with pure gold, within and without shalt thou overlay it, and shalt make upon it a crown of gold round about.”

The passage about the singing cows played a significant part in tracing the historical development of Jewish mystical schools. One of those schools, known as “Heikhalot” is known from texts that describe mystical ascents through a hierarchy of “palaces” and culminate in a sublime vision of the throne of God as it is borne on an chariot made up of angels. The authors and students of the Heikhalot texts claimed that the mystical disciplines described in them were the same ones that were practiced by the rabbis of the talmudic era. However, because the ancient sages maintained a high degree of reticence regarding this esoteric lore, we possess little explicit testimony about the matter.

Our knowledge of the Heikhalot school and its teachings derives only from documents that stem from the medieval era (though the texts are fictitiously ascribed to ancient rabbis). The normal scholarly policy for determining the dates for such traditions is to exercise maximal skepticism, which would lead, in this case, to the assumption that, until proven otherwise, the phenomenon of Heikhalot mysticism did not exist prior to the medieval documents in which it was recorded. 

It turns out, however, that the “acacia” song ascribed to the bovine choir in the Talmud and Midrash bears an extraordinary resemblance to the hymns sung by angelic beings in the Hekhalot literature. The similarity extends to numerous literary qualities of the respective creations, including their vocabulary, their exalted style, and their poetic rhythm. 

In light of this extraordinary resemblance, it has been argued that Rabbi Isaac Nappaḥa or Elijah expected their audience to make the thematic association with the mystical Hekhalot hymns. If that is indeed true, then the mystical traditions of the Heikhalot must have been in existence centuries earlier than previously thought—at least as early as the late third century, during the generation of Rabbi Isaac Nappaḥa. 

In fact, the placing of a mystical hymn in the mouths of cattle would fit nicely with the central imagery of rabbinic mysticism, which is based largely on Ezekiel’s portrayal of the divine Chariot, drawn by inscrutable “holy living creatures.” Understood from this perspective, the cows who pulled the ark of the covenant—even though they had ostensibly been provided by the heathen Philistines—were mirroring the celestial creatures of the heavenly entourage.

And yet not all the rabbis were comfortable with the notion of singing cows. The great Babylonian sage Rav Ashi insisted that Rabbi Isaac’s hymn had nothing to do with the return of the ark from the Philistines; rather it had been chanted by the (humans) Israelites in connection with a different biblical passage about the ark of the covenant, as described in the book of Numbers: “And it came to pass, when the ark set forward, that Moses said, Rise up, Lord, and let thine enemies be scattered”—the verse that we still sing when removing the Torah scrolls from the synagogue ark.

We may speculate that Rav Ashi was uneasy with an approach that credulously accepted the existence of singing animals, and that it was for this reason that he chose instead to attach the whole discussion to a different (but comparable) context, the travels of the ark through the wilderness during the time of Moses.

Although the wondrous vision of musical cattle seems to have been accepted almost routinely by most of the rabbis who contributed to the discussions, we do find one expression of sheer amazement at the idea—perhaps uttered from the perspective of someone who was personally conversant with the pitfalls of teaching choirs to sing harmoniously. 

Thus, Rabbi Samuel bar Nahman addressed the talented cows in wide-eyed admiration and compared them favourably to the Levites who sang in the Temple choirs: “How much toil did the son of Amram [i.e., Moses] need to expend before he could teach the Levites how to sing—and yet you are able to intone the song all by your­selves! Bravo!”

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, November 25, 2016, p. 13.

• For further reading:
  • Aptowitzer, Victor. “The Rewarding and Punishing of Animals and Inanimate Objects: On the Aggadic View of the World.” Hebrew Union College Annual 3 (1926): 117–55. 
  • Bacher, Wilhelm. Die Agada der babylonischen Amoräer: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Agada und zur Einleitung in den babylonischen Talmud. Frankfurt a. M., 1913. 
  • Davila, James. Descenders to the Chariot: The People Behind the Hekhalot Literature. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2001. 
  • Elbaum, Jacob. “The Midrash Tana Devei Eliyahu and Ancient Esoteric Literature.” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 6, no. 1–2 (1987): 139–50. [Hebrew] 
  • Fleischer, E. Hebrew Liturgical Poetry in the Middle Ages. 2nd expanded edition. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2007. [Hebrew] 
  • Friedmann, Meïr, ed. Seder Eliyahu Rabah. Jerusalem: Wahrman, 1969. [Hebrew] 
  • Ginzberg, Louis. Legends of the Jews. Translated by Henrietta Szold. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 2003. 
  • Halperin, David J. The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision. Texte Und Studien Zum Antiken Judentum 16. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1988. 
  • Lindbeck, Kristen H. Elijah and the Rabbis: Story and Theology. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 
  • Mann, Jacob. “Date and Place of Redaction of Seder Eliyahu Rabba and Zuṭṭa.” Hebrew Union College Annual 4 (1927): 302–10. 
  • Scholem, Gershom G. Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1960. 
  • ———. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. New York: Schocken, 1961. 
  • Seidenberg, David Mevorach. Kabbalah and Ecology: God’s Image in the More-Than-Human World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 
  • Urbach, Efraim Elimelech. “The Traditions Concerning Mystical Doctrine in the Period of the Tannaim.” In Studies in Mysticism and Religion, Presented to Gershom G. Scholem on his Seventieth Birthday by Pupils, Colleagues and Friends, edited by Efraim Elimelech Urbach, R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, and Chaim Wirszubski, 1–29. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1967. [Hebrew]

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My email address is: [email protected]

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“A Joyful Mother of Children”

by Eliezer Segal

Alongside the military and religious triumphs that we celebrate on Hanukkah, there is an episode of moving personal tragedy that is also part of the festival narrative. I am referring to the story of the woman whose seven sons were cruelly murdered before her eyes by the heathen oppressors as they chose martyrdom rather than betray their religious principles. 

This story is attested in ancient writings in Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, and it continued to circulate in virtually every language spoken by Jews, including Ladino, Yiddish and Judeo-Arabic. In each setting in which the tale was retold it was adapted to reflect the values and realities of its locality—and regrettably, religious persecution and calls to martyrdom were recurring realities of Jewish history 

The earliest known version of the story is found in the Second Book of Maccabees [= 2 Maccabees], a work that was included among the scriptures of the Greek-speaking Jewish community of Alexandria, Egypt. In that tale, which was inserted in order to explain the motives for the Maccabean uprising, it was the emperor Antiochus Epiphanes himself who commanded the unnamed woman to eat pork. When she refused, the tyrant ordered that each of her sons be subjected in turn to sadistic mutilation, torture and death; yet they all proclaimed their faith in the God who will restore them to life and exact vengeance from their tormentors. After the Emperor failed in his attempt to entice the youngest child to betray his faith by promising him glorious rewards, the mother urged him to join in the collective martyrdom. Then she herself was put to death, but not before taunting the frustrated Antiochus’ for his failure to bully his Jewish victims into submission. In the work known as 4 Maccabees the mother puts an end to her life by leaping into a fire.

The books of Maccabees were not known to the talmudic sages; however, they were included in the Greek Bible that was adopted by the early Roman Catholic church. In fact, in standard Catholic parlance the epithet “Machabees” was applied not to the Hasmonean fighters who drove out the Greeks from the Temple, but to the martyred mother and her seven sons, who are honoured as saints on August 1. In Christian tradition she came to be known as “Salomona.” 

Nevertheless, much of the story’s content as found in 2 Maccabees was “recovered” by Jewish posterity in the early Middle Ages when it was incorporated into the “Yosippon,” a Hebrew account of the Second Commonwealth woven together by a Jewish author in southern Italy from the works of Josephus Flavius, the Apocrypha and some Latin chronicles. 

The tale also found its way, with significant differences of detail, into the Midrash and the Babylonian Talmud. In those accounts, the villain is an unidentified Roman “Caesar” or a generic “prince” or “king”, probably Vespasian or Hadrian (who is identified by name in one late midrash). As such it has no direct link to Hanukkah, but rather to the Great Revolt against Rome or to the Bar Kokhba uprising.

In the rabbinic versions, the act of apostasy that was demanded of the Jewish family is more blatant: not just the consumption of ritually forbidden meat, but the actual worship of idols. The grisly descriptions of torture and executions are missing from most of those texts. Each son is killed in an unspecified way, after he quotes an appropriate scriptural text that prohibits abandoning the one true God or worshipping idols. In the rabbinic traditions the youngest child (identified in the Midrash as a 2 ½-year-old) is offered—and rejects—the option of bending down to pick up the Emperor’s ring in a way that will merely appear outwardly as if he were bowing in worship.

A boldly poignant addition to the rabbinic tale has the mother instructing her children—or the youngest of them—that upon arriving in the next world, they should pay a visit to the patriarch Abraham and tell him: Don’t be so complacent, boasting how you erected an altar, prepared to offer up your son— Our mother erected seven altars and actually offered up seven sons in one day. You were only tested, but she carried it out!

The Talmud has the mother taking her own life by leaping from a roof. The Midrash, on the other hand, seems to have been bothered by this apparent endorsement of suicide, and therefore places that event some time later, when her anguish had driven her to madness.

In the Midrash to Lamentations the mother has a name: Miriam bat Tanḥum. Curiously, many modern retellings of the story speak of “Hannah and her seven sons,” a name which has no clear source in ancient texts. It does, however, appear in one of Maimonides’ letters and in some later manuscripts of the Yosippon. It was presumably inspired by the words of the biblical Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel, who sang “the barren woman hath born seven; and she that hath many children is waxed feeble,” a verse that was expounded by the rabbis in connection with this story.

It has been suggested that the increased prominence of the mother’s role in the rabbinic traditions might have originated as a competitive response to Christian portrayals of the virgin Mary who had to suffer through her son’s humiliation and death at the hands of the Romans. On the other hand, versions of the story that circulated in Arab-speaking lands significantly downplay—or completely eliminate— the mother’s role.

In the Midrash, the precocious youngest child (whose age is calculated as exactly two years, six months and six and a half hours!) participates in a sophisticated theological disputation in which he bests Caesar by quoting numerous biblical proof-texts to demonstrate the folly and futility of idol-worship. In a particularly ironic passage, Caesar turns down the mother’s plea to be executed prior to her youngest son by invoking the biblical precept regarding the slaughter of animals, “ye shall not kill it and her young both in one day.” The son retorts with a sardonic quip about the heathen’s very selective interest in Jewish religious precepts. 

It has been argued that the version of the story that was current in northern France in the thirteenth century reflects circumstances that were specific to that Jewish community. It emphasized the role of the mother while compressing the stories of sons #1 – #6 into a simple “and so forth.” It went on at considerable length to describe how the mother persuaded the youngest son to remain loyal to his faith (the story is brought to illustrate the second of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me”); and it stressed the specifically maternal aspects of her relationship with her children: pregnancy, childbirth and nursing. Similar themes were also common in Christian martyrological literature from that era.

Of course, the authors of those traditional Jewish religious works were not interested in presenting an objective historical record, rather, they wished to inspire their readers with spiritual values, including a readiness to submit to martyrdom in defense of their faith. As one version of the story concludes: “therefore all Israel are admonished to fear the Holy One so that they may partake of the merit of the righteous in Paradise.” 

Several scriptural verses were expounded to counterbalance the mother’s horrible tragedy with assurances of the glorious rewards that await her in the next world. A favourite proof-text was: “He maketh a barren woman…a joyful mother of children.” 

One tradition even appended a passage that depicts the protagonists’ situation as a precious religious opportunity. Although the story presumably took place in the land of Israel, the author of this addition found in it a lesson about the theological purpose of exile: “For this reason I have scattered you among nations who knew me not, in order that you should tell of my wonders and they shall learn that there is none other than me alone.”

It is to be hoped that sentiments of this sort provided consolation to the spiritual heroes whose sacrifices make it possible for us to continue celebrating Hanukkah as the “feast of dedication.”

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, December 16, 2016, p. 15.

• For further reading:
  • Baumgarten, Elisheva, and Rella Kushelevsky. “From ‘The Mother and Her Sons’ to ‘The Mother of the Sons’ in Medieval Ashkenaz.” Zion 71, no. 3 (2006): 301–42.
  • Cohen, Gerson D. “Hannah and Her Seven Sons in Hebrew Literature.” In Studies in the Variety of Rabbinic Cultures, by Gerson D. Cohen, 39–60. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991.
  • ———. “The Story of Hannah and Her Seven Sons in Hebrew Literature.” In Mordecai M. Kaplan Jubilee Volume, edited by Moshe Davis, Hebrew Section:109–22. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1953.
  • Doran, Robert. “The Martyr: A Synoptic View of the Mother and Her Seven Sons.” In Ideal Figures in Ancient Judaism: Profiles and Paradigms, edited by John Joseph Collins and George Nickelsburg, 189–221. Septuagint and Cognate Studies 12. Chico, Calif: Scholars Press, 1980.
  • Epstein-Halevi, Elimelech. Sha‘arei ha-aggadah. Tel-Aviv: Dvir, 1982.
  • Flusser, David, ed. The Josippon (Josephus Gorionides). 2 vols. Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1978. [Hebrew]
  • Goldin, Simha. Ways of Jewish Martyrdom. Lod: Devir, 2002.
  • Haber, Zvi. “Ha-’Ishah Ve-Shiv ’at Baneha.” Ma‘aliyot 18 (1996): 137–61. [Hebrew]
  • Hasan-Rokem, Galit. Web of Life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic Literature. Contraversions. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
  • Himmelfarb, Martha. “The Mother of Seven Sons in Lamentations Rabbah and the Virgin Mary.” Jewish Studies Quarterly 22, no. 4 (2015): 325–51. 
  • Schwartz, Daniel R. 2 Maccabees. Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature (CEJL). Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008.
  • Shepkaru, Shmuel. Jewish Martyrs in the Pagan and Christian Worlds. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
  • Young, Robin Darling. “The ‘Woman with the Soul of Abraham’: Traditions About the Mother of the Maccabean Martyrs.” In “Women Like This”: New Perspectives on Jewish Women in the Greco-Roman World, edited by Amy-Jill Levine, 67–81. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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A Tree Grows in Eden

by Eliezer Segal

There is something jarringly mythological about the biblical tale of the garden of Eden. The premise that taking a bite from a magical fruit will produce wisdom or immortality seems more appropriate to fairy tales or pagan folklore than to a sober monotheistic theology. The same goes for the image of a jealous, mean-spirited deity who blocks his creatures’ access to precious gifts because he is worried that “the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.”

And at the other extreme of the conundrum— if eating the forbidden fruit was indeed a crime, then the culprits seem to have gotten away with it. After all, the knowledge that they acquired was not taken away from them in the end, and they continued to exercise it afterwards.

Traditional Jewish exegetes, who strove to maintain a balance between the Torah’s sanctity and its rational morality, struggled to explain the true significance of those fateful trees that grew in the garden of Eden.

The difficulties in accepting the plain sense of the story impelled the ancient Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria to prefer an allegorical interpretation, in which the special trees symbolize, respectively, general goodness (life) and practical virtue (knowledge of good and evil). 

One of the most compelling symbolic readings of the story was provided by Rabbi Moses Maimonides at the beginning of his  Guide of the Perplexed. What provoked the great philosopher to suggest his interpretation was a query that had been posed to him by an unnamed person; and that challenge provided him with an excellent opportunity to outline some of his fundamental views about the human condition and the ultimate purpose of life.

Maimonides introduced his discussion of the garden of Eden story in connection with his assertion that the “form” and “image” of God that the Torah ascribes to humans are by no means referring to any physical resemblance, but rather to the rational intellect, which is the sole feature by virtue of which people can bear a resemblance to their creator. It follows from this that the only suitable way for humans to pursue our ultimate spiritual vocation is by perfecting our intellectual potential in the quest for absolute, eternal truth.

It is with reference to this premise that Maimonides tells us about the question he was asked about the story of Adam and Eve. The questioner understood the Torah to be saying that humans before their sin were lacking any faculty of moral discernment, and in that sense they were no different from any other animals. It was the eating of the forbidden fruit that bestowed on them the knowledge of good and evil. Thus it turned out that their sinful act of disobedience enabled them to successfully rise to a higher rung in the hierarchy! This, the questioner objected, hardly seems fair. 

After briefly maligning his interlocutor for the shallowness of his interpretation (which surely reflected the man’s morally dissolute life), Maimonides reverts to his original claim that when God first fashioned humans in his “image,’ what the Torah really meant to say was that he was endowing them with a pure, divine intellect—for after all, it would have made no sense to issue the command about avoiding certain fruits in the garden unless they possessed the intelligence to make choices about whether or not to obey. The key to a correct understanding of the story lies precisely in the fact that eating from the trees did not  elevateAdam and Eve to a superior state–but quite the contrary, it dragged them down from the loftier state of authentic rationality to a lower level of mere “fuzzy” discourse—turning them into beings who deal with subjective categories like “good” and “bad,” 

In their original state, as God really intended them to be, humans were wholly rational Spock-like beings, comparable perhaps to computers housed in robotic bodies of flesh and blood. As such, they were designed to think only in terms of “true” and “false,” to contemplate the unchanging laws of nature and the eternal verities of logic and metaphysics. In accordance with Maimonides’ philosophical ideal of religious fulfillment, it is only by directing our minds toward the contemplation of abstract concepts that transcend the ephemeral status of material or physical objects that humans can aspire to eventual immortality.

Thus, according to Maimonides’ interpretation of the biblical story of the garden of Eden, instead of fulfilling their authentic vocations as rational beings with knowledge of absolute truth, eating the forbidden fruit downgraded the human race to the inferior status of “knowledge of good and bad”; that is to say: they were now limited to the kinds of moral and aesthetic opinions that are contingent upon the vagaries of changing social situations. Our need to cope with such situations distracts us from contemplation of more crucial metaphysical matters. Contrary to the premise assumed by Maimonides’ questioner, eating the forbidden fruit did not lift the first couple to a God-like status, but rather it lowered them to an existence more similar to that of brute animals.

It should be noted that this assessment differed greatly from that of Philo, who argued for the superiority of ethical virtue precisely because of the way that it blends theoretical and ethical perfection into an integrated life.

Indeed, what impelled Adam and Eve to disobey the divine prohibition was their inability to resist the biological urges that were built into their physical bodies. Angels, according to the standard medieval understanding accepted by Maimonides, are “separate intelligences,” beings of pure thought without material substance. Humans, on the other hand, were fashioned as a hybrid of abstract intellect and physical body—and that combination did not initially function successfully.

In keeping with this explanation, Maimonides points out that prior to their transgression, Adam and Eve were not aware of their nakedness. Clearly they were not suffering from physical blindness, so they knew that they were unclothed; however, that fact was initially irrelevant to their intellectual lives. Unfortunately, their biological desires made them unable to resist the enticements of the savoury fruit. 

Ultimately, according to Maimonides—and contrary to the shallow reading of the scriptural tale—there was no magical ingredient in the fruit that expanded their minds to new levels of knowledge; rather, their failure to resist its allure was a symptom of the general inability of their minds to maintain control over their physical natures. The same realization now made it necessary for them to restrain their sexual desires by covering themselves with clothing.

How, then, according to Maimonides, are we to account for the statement in the Torah where the Almighty expresses concerns that after eating the fruit, humans will “be as God, knowing good and evil”?

In order to avoid this difficulty, Maimonides has to explain the text in an ingenious and unconventional manner. The Hebrew word “elohim” that is usually rendered as “God” can also have some other meanings. In rabbinic interpretations, the term is occasionally applied to human judges. In the present instance, Maimonides prefers this option. So instead of the theologically absurd scenario of an absolute God who feels threatened by the prospect of competition from puny human rivals, the Almighty was really expressing his disappointment in mankind for falling short of their sublimely philosophical potential as rational minds, and sinking instead into the illusory realm of mere “truthishness” or “alternative facts.”

And with all due respect to Maimonides, I must confess that—to judge from our recent political follies—I’m finding it distressingly hard to find any evidence that our species has fully digested the fruits of knowledge of good and evil.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, February 10, 2017, p. 14.

• For further reading:
  • Berman, Lawrence V. “Maimonides on the Fall of Man.”  AJS Review 5 (1980): 1–15. 
  • Borgen, Peder.  Philo of Alexandria: An Exegete for His Time . Leiden, New York and Köln: Brill, 1997. 
  • Fox, Marvin.  Interpreting Maimonides: Studies in Methodology, Metaphysics, and Moral Philosophy . Chicago Studies in the History of Judaism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. 
  • Haber, Zvi. “Ha-’Ishah Ve-Shiv ’at Baneha.”  Ma‘aliyot 18 (1996): 137–61. [Hebrew] 
  • Harvey, Warren Zev. “Maimonides and Spinoza on the Knowledge of Good and Evil.” In  Binah; Studies in Jewish History, Thought and Culture , edited by Joseph Dan, Volume Three: Jewish Intellectual History in the Middle Ages:131–46. Westport, CN: Praeger Publishers, 1989. 
  • ———. “On Maimonides’ Allegorical Readings of Scripture.” In  Interpretation and Allegory: Antiquity to the Modern Period , edited by Jon Whitman, 181–88. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History. Leiden, Boston and Köln: E J Brill, 2000. 
  • Halper, Edward C. “Torah as Political Philosophy: Maimonides and Spinoza on Religious Law.” In  Judaic Sources and Western Thought: Jerusalem’s Enduring Presence , edited by Jonathan A. Jacobs, 190–214. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 
  • Klein-Braslavy, Sara.  Emunot: Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah : Maimonides as Biblical Interpreter . Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2011. 
  • ———.  Maimonides’ Interpretation of the Adam Stories in Genesis: A Study in Maimonides’ Anthropology . Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History. Jerusalem: Reuben Mass, 1986. [Hebrew] 
  • Kreisel, Howard.  Maimonides’ Political Thought: Studies in Ethics, Las, and the Human Ideal . SUNY Series in Jewish Philosophy. Albany, US: SUNY Press, 1999. 
  • Leonhardt-Balzer, Jutta. “Philo and the Garden of Eden: An Exegete, His Text and His Tools.” In  Die Septuaginta: Orte Und Intentionen , edited by Siegfried Kreuzer, Martin Meiser, and Marcus Sigismund, 244–57. Tübingen: University of Zurich, 2016. 
  • Pines, Shlomo. “Truth and Falsehood Versus Good and Evil: A Study in Jewish and General Philosophy in Connection with the Guide of the Perplexed, I,2.” In  Studies in Maimonides , edited by Isadore Twersky, 95–157. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. 
  • Radice, Roberto. “Philo and Stoic Ethics. Reflections on the Idea of Freedom.” In  Philo of Alexandria and Post-Aristotelian Philosophy , edited by F. Alesse, 141–68. Studies in Philo of Alexandria. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008. 
  • Ravven, Heidi M. “Maimonides’ Non-Kantian Moral Psychology: Maimonides and Kant on the Garden of Eden and the Genealogy of Morals.”  The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 20, no. 2 (2012): 199–216. 
  • ———. “The Garden of Eden: Spinoza’s Maimonidean Account of the Genealogy of Morals and the Origin of Society.”  Philosophy & Theology 13, no. 1 (2001): 3–51. 
  • Stern, Josef. “The Maimonidean Parable, the Arabic Poetics, and the Garden of Eden.”  Midwest Studies In Philosophy 33, no. 1 (2009): 209–47. 
  • Winston, David. “Philo and Maimonides on the Garden of Eden Narrative.” In  Birkat Shalom: Studies in the Bible, Ancient Near Eastern Literature, and Postbiblical Judaism Presented to Shalom M. Paul on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday , edited by Victor Avigdor Hurowitz, Avi Hurvitz, Yochanan Muffs, Baruch Schwartz, and Jeffrey Tigay, 989–1002. Winona Lake, Ind: Eisenbrauns, 2008. 
  • Wurmser, Meyrav. “The Garden of Eden and the Origins of the West: Reading Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed.”  Perspectives on Political Science 43, no. 3 (2014): 133–42.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Party Lights

by Eliezer Segal

The sages of the Talmud and Midrash had ambivalent attitudes toward the lengthy feast that opens the book of Esther—180 days of festivities for the aristocracy, followed by a week-long event for the folks in the capital. In the context of the plot, the banquet functions principally as a means to set the stage for Queen Vashti’s disobedience, and hence for Esther’s crucial installation into the royal court. It also introduces Ahasuerus as a “party animal,” a trait that will have relevance for subsequent developments in the story.

Several statements by the talmudic rabbis present the feasting in a negative—even sinister—light. One tradition claimed that feast was convened in order to celebrate the finality of Jerusalem’s destruction. Ahasuerus calculated that seventy years had elapsed since the beginning of the Babylonian exile, and the fact that the Temple had not yet been rebuilt assured him that there was no reason to be concerned about Jeremiah’s prophecies about an imminent restoration.

The rabbis understood that the magnificent garments and dishes that graced the banquet were actually the sacred vessels of the Jewish sanctuary and that the heathen emperor blasphemously adorned himself with the robes of the high priest (in a passage that I find reminiscent of the scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” where the Nazi Belloq dons the priestly robes to open the Ark of the Covenant). Indeed, the Jews of Shushan could not resist the temptation to attend the lavish affair, an indiscretion that, in the view of some rabbis, was grave enough to make them deserving of Haman’s murderous threats—at least enough to to throw a good scare into them.

On the other hand, some midrashic embellishments to the biblical story attest that the rabbis were caught up by the magnificence of the occasion, as they admiringly elaborated and exaggerated the exquisite decorations and glittering finery. They analyzed the seating arrangements to show how wisely the monarch had placed the guests so as to avoid potential political slights or security lapses. It was not just a matter of skilful party planning, but seemed to reflect profound philosophical ideals of harmonious aesthetics.

Thus, the Bible’s incidental mention of “beds of gold and silver” led Rabbi Judah to suggest that the beds were assigned according to the guests’ social rankings. This provoked his colleague Rabbi Nehemiah to object that “if that were so, then you are casting envy into the feast.” 

This concern for avoiding divisive envy is singled out a praiseworthy virtue elsewhere in rabbinic literature. For example, the Mishnah orders the dismissal of a prayer leader who inserts the phrase “Your mercies extend even unto a bird’s nest,” referring to the Torah’s command not to remove chicks or eggs from a nest before chasing away their mother, a law that was perceived to arise out of compassionate sensitivity for her maternal suffering. In attempting to explain why the innocent-sounding phrase was considered objectionable, a rabbi in the Talmud suggests that, by singling out one particular species as the beneficiary of divine solicitude, we would be provoking the envy of other species.

That harmonious paradigm was consistent with the social and religious ideals that were promoted in Persian festivals that would have been familiar to Babylonian Jews; and it is quite natural that they would project them onto their portrayals of Ahasuerus’s banquet.

In describing the exotic decorations of Ahasuerus’s banquet, scripture employs rare and difficult words that were sometimes unclear to the rabbinic interpreters. For example, some of the pavings were made of “ dar” and “ soḥaret,” neither of which word was familiar to the commentators, though most lexicographers identify  dar as pearl (or mother-of-pearl) . 

One particularly intriguing explanation was proposed by the third-century Babylonian sage Samuel: “There is a precious stone in the maritime cities, and its name is ‘dura. He set it down in the middle of the feast and it provided them with light as at mid-day [ṣahorayim].”

Samuel seems to be saying that this particular jewel had a wondrous ability to illuminate the hall with non-re­flected light. Indeed, traditions about self-illuminating gems appear elsewhere in rabbinic texts, as well as in unexpected corners of ancient literature. A similar tradition is related concerning Noah’s ark. The Torah says that Noah was instructed to furnish the craft with a ṣohar, usually understood to refer to some kind of a window. However, Rabbi Levi in the Midrash interprets it as a pearl [Hebrew “margalit” = Latin “margarita”]. 

Indeed, this was no ordinary gem. As the rabbi goes on to relate: “For the full twelve months that Noah spent in the ark, he did not require the light of the sun by day, nor the light of the moon by night. Instead, he had a jewel which he suspended there. Whenever it became dim he knew that it was day-time, and when it gleamed he knew that it was night-time.”

Another rabbinic legend spoke of a similar luminous jewel that provided light for the prophet Jonah while he was enclosed in the belly of the fish.

Legends about luminous gems circulated widely in antiquity. A fifth-century Chinese account about the eastern Roman empire told of the “moonshine pearl” that was capable of emitting light by night. That report was confirmed by other Chinese writers in the eighth cen­tury. These exotic sources dovetail with a motif that is found in early Roman writers. The first-century C.E. naturalist Pliny the Elder wrote about a colourless stone that housed at its core a brightly shining star like the full moon. In the second century, the satirist and rhetor Lucian of Samosata reported that the statue of Venus in Hierapolis, Phrygia, carried on her head a stone that shone brightly in the night to illuminate the entire temple in which it was housed; whereas by day it glowed dimly, but had a fiery tinge. Aelian, an ancient collector of exotic nature lore, also wrote about a jewel that glows nocturnally. 

While all the Greek and Latin sources make ref­erence to an assortment of luminous jewels, it is only in the rab­binic traditions that the gem in question is identified as the pearl (durra). Nevertheless it is the pearl that is singled out in the Chinese ver­sions of the story. 

This would support the premise that the traditions regarding nocturnally glistening stones traveled across a remarkable trajectory through the ancient world. They first became known in the Roman realms during the first centuries C.E. in the eastern sector of the empire, in localities extending from Italy (as attested by Pliny and Aelian) to Syria and the banks of the Euphrates (Lucian). During that period knowledge of this legend reached the Jews, in both their western habitation in the land of Israel and in the eastern diaspora of Babylonia (where Samuel lived). Reports about these glimmering pearls were transmitted by merchants—presumably from eastern Persia—to China at the end of the fifth century. It was these re­ports which gave rise to the Chinese tradition that in Ta-t’sin (the old Chinese designation for the Roman empire) are found pearls—”chu”—which sparkle and glimmer in the darkness of the night.

The school of Rabbi Ishmael proposed yet another explanation based on a word-play with the terms “dar” and “soḥaret,” which they connected to “d’ror”—freedom—and “saḥar”—commerce; that is, the king used the gala feast as the occasion for issuing an executive order removing tariffs and instituting a general free-trade pact.

Perhaps the new regulations were also applied to the exchange of incandescent pearls—legendary or otherwise—with the Far East.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, February 24, 2017, p. 12.

• For further reading:
  • Berlin, Adele, ed.  Esther: The Traditional Hebrew Text with the New JPS Translation . The JPS Commentary. Philadephia: Jewish Publication Society, 2001. 
  • Boyce, Mary. “Iranian Festivals.” In  The Cambridge History of Iran: Seleucid Parthian , edited by E. Yarshater, 2nd ed., 3:792–816. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 
  • Clines, David J. A.  Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther . New Century Bible Commentary. Grand Rapids : London: Eerdmans ; Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1984. 
  • Fox, Michael V.  Character and Ideology in the Book of Esther . 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans, 2001. 
  • Ginzberg, Louis.  Legends of the Jews . Translated by Henrietta Szold. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 2003. 
  • Laniak, Timothy S.  Shame and Honor in the Book of Esther . Dissertation Series / Society of Biblical Literature 165. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998. 
  • Moore, Carey A., ed.  Esther . 1st ed. The Anchor Bible 7B. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1971. 
  • ———, ed.  Studies in the Book of Esther . The Library of Biblical Studies. New York: Ktav, 1981. 
  • Segal, Eliezer. “Justice, Mercy and a Bird’s Nest.”  Journal of Jewish Studies 42, no. 2 (1991): 176–95. 
  • ———.  The Babylonian Esther Midrash: A Critical Commentary . Brown Judaic Studies, no. 291-293. Atlanta, Ga: Scholars Press, 1994. 
  • Sperber, Daniel. “Gilgulei avanim.” In  Studies in Rabbinic Literature, Bible and Jewish History , edited by Y. D. Gilat, Ch. Levine, and Z. M. Rabinowitz, 261–67. Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1982. [Hebrew] 
  • Spoelstra, Joshua Joel. “The Function of the משׁתה יין in the Book of Esther.”  Old Testament Essays 27, no. 1 (2014): 285–301.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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