Hatam Soferet

I forgot to post about the Halakha Yom Iyyun - a lot of the sessions were recorded, and you can download source sheets and watch the videos at http://www.mechonhadar.org/yomiyyun.

In particular, I heartily recommend the Opening Plenary: "Framing Halakhah: Law, Ethics, Philosophy or Values?" Professor Chaim Saiman, Villanova Law School - he had that kind of virtuoso skimming through his sources that you can only get away with when you know your topic ridiculously well, which is just good to listen to.

Don't remember the sugiya, exactly – something in Arbei Pesachim

but it went something like:

Statement, explanation, assertion A; assertion B; counter-example ¬B; assertion C; counter-example ¬C; assertion D; counter-example ¬D.

In terms of decisions based on the text, we had general agreement on A, and most people seemed also to think ¬C, but the Rambam thought C, and it was weird.

It looked as though it came from reading the sugiya two different ways, thus.

One way:
-> statement, explanation, assertion  A
<-   assertion  B  (challenging A)
->     refutation  ¬B  (accepting ¬B and reinstating A)
<-  assertion  C  (challenging A)
->       refutation  ¬C  (accepting ¬C and reinstating A)
<-  assertion    D  (challenging A) <-     refutation  ¬D  (accepting ¬D and reinstating A)

so you end up with A, ¬B, ¬C, ¬D.

Alternatively:

-> statement, explanation, assertion A
<- assertion  B  (challenging A)
     -> counter-example  ¬B  (with idea of reinstating A)
          -> in support  C  (supporting ¬B with idea C, hence supporting A)
               <- challenge  ¬C  (challenging C)
               -> refutation  D  (rejecting challenge to C using D)
          <- assertion  ¬D  (challenging C's ability to support ¬B, but ¬B still stands)

now you would pasken A, ¬B, C, ¬D.

Something like that. Not sure exactly, but you get the general idea? Sometimes things are ambiguous enough that you can break the assertion-refutation pattern in different ways such that each read is equally plausible.

The Story of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and the Cave.

You probably know this one, but you've never heard me tell it. It's Shabbat 33b, if you want to read the original, but I find a certain degree of paraphrasing makes for more vivid retelling.

Rabbi Yehudah, Rabbi Yose, and Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai were sitting, and Yehudah ben Gerim was with them.

Rabbi Yehudah said, Aren't the Romans great? They've done all this good stuff for us! Super markets, lovely bathhouses, and absolutely ripping bridges.

Rabbi Yose said nothing.

Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai said, Huh, they made markets so's they could find whores, bathhouses for pleasuring themselves, and toll-bridges for ripping people off.

Yehudah ben Gerim spread this around (Careless Talk Costs Lives) and the Romans weren't best pleased. They praised Rabbi Yehudah, exiled Rabbi Yose, and decreed that Rabbi Shimon should die.

Interlude on Yehudah ben Gerim, added in response to comments. Yes, this means "son of converts," and the reader is cautioned against dismissing this with a "ugh, disgusting attitudes about converts, rotten Talmud."

Remember "gerim" also means "strangers," and that the Jews are in a particularly insular mindset at the moment. We've just had the Bar Kochba revolt; Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai was a student of Rabbi Akiva, who supported the revolt and ended up being tortured to death. R' Shimon bar Yochai and his chums aren't so inclined to trust those on the outskirts of the community. Read it as dissing on converts if you will, but don't get too invested in that. We continue:

Rabbi Shimon went and hid in the beit midrash. (This was kind of silly, I mean where else would you look for Jews?) Then he decided that wasn't a good place and went and hid in a cave. (Caves are good places to go if you want to be terribly ascetic.) He and his son buried themselves up to the neck in sand (so they were totally disembodied and thus very intellectual), and studied all day, sustained by a miraculous carob tree.

Twelve years pass, and one day Elijah the prophet drops by saying hey guys, the Romans have calmed down, you can come out now. When they came out of the cave, they saw people doing agriculture, and Rabbi Shimon was jolly miffed that people would be doing such mundane and materialistic things as producing food, when they ought to be focused on spiritual things and learning Torah. He was so miffed that everything he looked at went up in flames.

A voice came from heaven and said HEY, don't do that! get back in your cave! so they went back into the cave, and they stayed there for twelve months, that being the amount of time the wicked spend in Hell. Then they came out again.

Rabbi Shimon's son was still somewhat overzealous and went around igniting people, but Rabbi Shimon healed them because he'd learned his lesson.

What a lovely story. Are you sick yet?

This is apparently a nice story about balancing learning and real life, often used that way by well-meaning teachers to stimulate discussion about which is greater out of study and action; famously, the answer is study-because-it-leads-to-action.

(I think this is a rather silly question, it's like asking which is greater out of chickens and eggs. I really hope that the rabbis of the Talmud were well aware of this, and hoped that their audience would be also, but I have never seen anyone else say so.)

Observe that the entire impetus of the story is this incident where the three rabbis are talking about the Romans. Without that, there would be no story, no lesson, nothing. What is the incident? Three rabbis sitting around gossiping.

They aren't doing any of that stuff where you bring prophetic verses and compare the Romans to evil Babylon or Assyria or Amalek. They're just sitting around chatting. This is not study, and it is not action. It is idle time-wasting.

Rabbi Shimon is cross with the farmers because they are not philosophising, yet surely sitting around gossiping is much worse than farming? Even if farming isn't study, it is at least action, so what gives?

What gives?

At some point, Rabbi Shimon went to a (Roman) bathhouse, and a chum of his bewailed the horrible state his body was in after spending twelve years in a sandpit (remember that, we'll come back to it). On the whole, he was pretty mellow, and decided to give thanks for the miracles which had befallen him by doing some good in the world. "What needs fixing?" he asked, and he went to the (Roman) city of Tiberias, where there was some issue with ritual impurity which meant the city's priests had to take the (Roman) long way round and it was annoying. And he sorted it out so the priests didn't have to go the long way round any more.

Some guy said Rabbi Shimon had been out of line, and Rabbi Shimon wasn't impressed, and killed him with his scary fiery eyes.

Then Rabbi Shimon went out to the (Roman) market and ran into Yehudah ben Gerim. Fancy meeting you here, he said, and turned him into a heap of bones.

Aha, obviously he hadn't learned his lesson properly, and we can leave this story knowing that it's jolly hard to overcome zeal and maintain a sensible study-action balance, etc. A message as sweet as it is utterly trite.

Naturally, I find triviality as irritating as saccharinity, so when people leave off at this point, as they do all too often, it makes me Sad.

Down with triviality! The Messianic arc

So let's ask what Elijah was doing there.

Elijah pops up (amongst other things) when Messianic figures are around. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai is one of the figures in his generation who had the potential to usher in the Messianic era, and in part, this is a story about how his Messianic potential trickles away. He starts off with unlimited zeal, terrific scholarship, super fiery eyes...and as twelve years pass in the cave, his scholarship becomes more concentrated (note, by the way, the suffering-of-the-messiah trope; twelve years in a wilderness, buried in sand, horrible physical affliction...), but his connection to the real world wanes. Messiahs need to be concentrated spirituality, but embodied - part of the real world. And he loses that side of himself while he does nothing but study.

Nonetheless, he emerged, and he could still have retrieved the situation, except that he was so out of touch that instead of having Messianic mercy on the world he burned it up. And when he came out of the cave a second time, he'd mellowed so much that he was pretty much just an ordinary person, and all the Messianic potential had trickled away. Instead of doing the Messiah's job of large-scale tikkun olam, fixing the world, he potters about fiddling with cemeteries and arguing with his colleagues. He even had to ask what needed fixing, so far removed from the people was he. A Messianic arc which fizzles out into obscurity.

This is one of the narratives in the story as it stands. Looking at the story as part of a redactional unit gives another picture.

The story beneath: tragedy and nostalgia *

The Babylonian Talmud contains many of these failed-Messiah stories. One might be excused for thinking that the Babylonian Talmud, redacted centuries after the messianic fervour of the first century had died down, after generations of Jews had lived and died never knowing the Holy Land, after all hope of a restored Temple had gone - that it might be a bit cynical as regards messiahs.

Indeed, that messianic stories such as these might appear to preserve good messianic values on the surface, but underlying them might be a current of tragedy, of nostalgia for the days when Elijah roamed the land and the salvation of the world seemed imminent. The Talmudic redactor is living at the end of the period of great sages, in an age of decline, when the great yeshivot are a fading memory and the Jews are so comfortable in Persia that they will never return to Jerusalem. This is the voice telling the story. He has to hold out messianic hope, but he's been waiting a long time.

Grotesquerie and cynicism **

Recall that, amongst other things, this story appears to be assessing the relative merits of study and action. In that case, why on earth does it frame the story with two scenes having to do with neither? It starts with gossip, and it ends with petty venegance. If not precisely comedy, this can definitely be described as grotesquerie, in my book.

More wry humour: observe that Rabbi Shimon disses the Romans' markets, bathhouses, and civil infrastructure. When he emerges from his cave because the Romans don't want to kill him any more, he goes to the bathhouse, he goes to the market, he trots around on the infrastructure.

The Talmud isn't stupid. It uses grotesque humour to make points.

What's the point here? Think like the redactor again. He's distilling the learning of the past half-dozen centuries into narrative form, because there are no longer enough scholars to know all the learning. A vast mass of ancient traditions, creative exegesis, brilliant logic, communal history, laws, and customs, is all being cut and pasted into the form we know today, lest it be lost entirely as its teachers die out. If you'd said to the redactor "Judaism is in its worst-ever crisis and in imminent danger of total extinction," he would have given you an award for understatement.

And for what? Action? Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai is living in the period immediately following the Bar Kochba revolt, when the Jews tried to take action and failed miserably. The redactor is living in exile in immoral Babylon, the Temple has not been rebuilt, the Messiah has not come, the Jews are assimilating like nobody's business, and the poor old redactor doesn't see any action happening to make life any better. No, the merit of study has not redeemed the Jews, it has not led to action, neither study nor action has proved of any use - we might just as well have spent all our time sitting around gossiping, because we've turned into a heap of bones.

What gives, really?

We've redeemed this story from being sweetly inspirational, but in so doing it's become rather bleakly cynical. Merits of study and action? Messianic hope? Failed messiahs, idle talk, and heaps of bones.

Of course, you don't have to read the story all the time on every layer. Maybe just seeing that layer of pain is enough, and then you can read the story on its own terms and draw what lessons you like from it. Maybe bleak cynicism is more palatable than pious homily. Maybe just as one needs to maintain a study-action balance, and remember that they have a chicken-egg relationship, one needs to maintain a cynicism-piety balance, and remember that they too have a chicken-egg relationship.



* Cribbed from Limmud sessions with Daniel Landes
** Cribbed from Limmud sessions with Daniel Boyarin

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From Yeshiva University, a couple of useful reference sheets by R' Josh Flug:

Reading from a Sefer Torah That Contains an Error

Maintaining and Repairing an Invalid Sefer Torah.

This is jolly jolly good for two reasons: first, that he's collected up lots of useful source references and put them together neatly in an outline of the main opinions. Second, it's much better you should hear it from someone with more learning and experience and authority and suchlike than me. :) So print 'em out and take 'em away.

I went to see the Valmadonna Trust Library on display at Sotheby's. (Article and slide show of exhibition, courtesy of the New York Times.)

The display looked like a permanent exhibition, with stencilling on the walls and fancy lighting and all sorts. I was surprised at just how posh it all looked; I suppose this is good advertising if you are trying to sell something for forty million dollars. Interestingly, it didn't smell like a library (books, leather, dust) or like a museum (clean, dusted, polished), but like a school art room - poster paint, paper, glue.

( Lots more about that... )

Picture a room with a couple of soferim in it, writing Torah. A proto-sofer is practising letter samekh. The sound of a lecture on the weekly Torah portion floats in from down the hallway. Another proto-sofer takes a deep breath; she's about to start writing her first mezuzah. Her teacher is there, keeping an eye on her as she turns months of hard study into a real scroll.

A rabbinical student drops in with a megillah; he can't quite work out what he's doing wrong, but someone with more experience can get him back on track. Bolstered with good advice, he goes on his way, passing on his way out another proto-soferet who is coming from her Talmud class. Letter samekh is set aside and the two pull out books and tackle halakha. Mezuzah girl, taking a lunch break, helps them out when they get stuck.

They leave - they have Bible class now - and another student arrives. She's an expert on the Ancient Near East, a university professor and rabbi. She lives in the next state and studies on her own, and comes in every few weeks for an hour's lesson, after which someone is bound to get her into a discussion about texts from antiquity, and everyone will get very excited. After she's gone, work resumes, perhaps punctuated by occasional exchanges of advice or the sharing of a thought on the text. Someone will fetch some tea, someone will take a minute to look up a halakhic ruling. Letter by letter, their scrolls grow.

In the late afternoon, a round-eyed eleven-year-old comes in with her bat mitzvah teacher. They're taking a break from a Torah reading lesson, and coming to see the Torah being written. A Torah scholar spends an hour working on her own calligraphy; she doesn't want to be a sofer, but she likes practising here with the scribes. Her Seeing Eye dog sleeps under the table; she's practically blind, but she finds calligraphy inspiring. Everyone else finds her inspiring.

Around suppertime, a sofer and a proto-sofer arrive from their day jobs. Over supper, they catch up, talk shop a bit, and then set to reviewing some of the basics. They'll almost certainly end up chasing a tangent through the rabbinic literature. Someone will bring an academic perspective, someone will share a midrash; they may finish the evening discussing practical concerns, or philosophy, or awed speechless by some particularly astounding idea.

Sounds nice, doesn't it? And the great thing is, it's not just a pretty dream. It happened last week, and the week before, and the week before, and God willing it will happen next week and the week after and the week after. Baby scribes and proto-scribes and getting-better scribes, people sharing what they know and what they've learned, writing and studying and listening together, and all the while the Torah grows and grows. It's very beautiful.

(I can be emailed for more info.)

Talmud which made me chuckle:

Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi queried the verse in Proverbs, All the days of the poor are evil* - but surely they have Shabbat and festivals?
Shmuel said pessimistically, Change of diet leads to indigestion...

(Sanhedrin 101a, Proverbs 15:15)

Talmud which made me sad:

(As a small point in a long discussion about something else entirely) The world cannot exist without both males and females; happy is he whose children are male, and woe to he whose children are female.

(Sanhedrin 100b)

Ouch. Way to feel really alienated.

More Talmud which made me chuckle:

Ulla was in Babylon, and he saw dates were on sale. He exclaimed, "A tub of honey for a quarter, and yet the Babylonians don't occupy themselves with Torah study!"

During the night he suffered hideously from overeating, and he exclaimed, "A tub of knives for a quarter, and even so the Babylonians occupy themselves with Torah study!"

(Taanit 9b, and okay he said zuz and not quarter, but I translated for meaning, okay.)

One thing I rather like about two-day festivals is that even after I've had all the sleep I want, I still have time to learn stuff I never quite seem to have time to learn in the usual way of things. Thus it is that now, festival over, my table is covered in books:

Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible.
Hebrew/English Tanakh.
History of the World.
Bible Handbook.
Torat Hayim on Devarim.
Steinsaltz' Sanhedrin - good for diving into unfamiliar material.
Jastrow's dictionary.
Vilna Sanhedrin - commentaries that Steinsaltz doesn't have.
Yerushalmi Sanhedrin - following up threads.
Soncino Sanhedrin in English for skim-reading.
Yardeni's Book of Hebrew Script.
Rambam, Ahavah - laws of sifrei Torah.
Tur, ditto.
Soncino English Taanit - more skim-reading.
Vilna Taanit - reading in depth.
Tikkun soferim.
Tikkun koreim.

Two bookstands.
Evidence of many cups of tea.

This I like very much.

Alefs in Wonderland wins my internets.

In particular, the half-inch paper scribe;

the articles, which are freaking amazing;

and Rashi's Cat, which I just like.

Lovely experience Wednesday night, thus:

I'm writing Torah at Drisha, because Student S is working on her first mezuzah and I want to be close at hand to field any questions. We have Scribal Zone going in the back of the beit midrash, very nice.

I'm writing parshat Metzora, around ch. 26 of Leviticus. Various sorts of impurities.

So happens that there's a learning session going on nearby; I'm vaguely listening to bits of their Torah floating over, and I realise that it just so happens they're learning parshat Metzora. So I'm writing this stuff with most of my attention, giving half an ear to the discussion going on nearby; precisely the same material I'm writing, but overlaid with traditional and modern commentaries tossed around by two very bright minds.

I've mentioned this before; I adore writing at Drisha, when I'm writing a piece of Torah and I hear people nearby talking about the same piece of Torah from the other side of thousands of years of rabbinic tradition. We're six feet apart and engaged with exactly the same thing, but in between us is the whole development of Judaism.

It blows my mind.