Hatam Soferet

I am proud of myself...

I'm doing some part-time academic editing stuff, such that my job today is to chase down references. In front of me, I have this:

ואשר לשרש מלה 'דמדומי' אין עניינה כלל אצל אדמדם כשפני הרקיע אדומים, כמו שפרשו הראשונים ר' יהודה חסיד בתוספותיו לברכות שם ורש"י בפירושו לשבת שם ונגררו אחריהם האחרונים אלא שהוא מן דום [שפירושו] נח, ובמנדעית דנדם, עיין דקדוק השפה המנדעית למורי נאלדעקע זיק"אד

He's talking about a Hebrew phrase "דמדומי החמה," and the classical commentators interpret it as being related to "אדמדם," reddishness, but my author wants to say that's not right at all, it's actually a word meaning נח, "rest," and he gives a reference. Which I now need to locate.

So first, I don't even know what מנדעית means. Google leads to Wikipedia which tells me it's Mandean, a species of Aramaic. Wikipedia gives as an external reference Theodor Nöldeke, Mandäische Grammatik, Halle 1875.

Ahah. That must be this נאלדעקע business. A clue!

And whaddya know, the Mandäische Grammatik is on Google Books, scanned in from the shelves of the Harvard Div School.

If Google Books could search on Hebrew characters, we'd be home and dry, but it can't.

If I could translate נח into German, I'd also be home and dry because then I could search in Latin characters. But נח can mean lots of things, Google Translate introduces a certain amount of variability, and Google Translate isn't necessarily going to include idioms from 1875 anyway. More efficient to skim through the pages and look for דנדם with my own eyes.

And lo, in the section about liquid consonants, we find it:



דנדם, he says, becomes דמדם, "still stehn" - to stand still, in Hebrew נח. This assimilating nun would be how the rabbis came to confuse it with אדמדם, see?

I could have guessed it'd be in that section if I'd been paying a bit more attention and been better able to understand the table of contents, I suppose. Still, I'm rather pleased.

So now I can write down Theodor Nöldeke, Mandäische Grammatik, p50 and move on to the next, having learned in passing that the phrase דמדומי החמה probably means "the setting of the sun" rather than "the reddening of the sun."

That was fun, and all without getting up from my seat! I like living in the future.

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

If you care to comment, please do at http://hatam-soferet.dreamwidth.org/439801.html.

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.)

...you might want to look away at this point.

Because.



I had a sudden wave of brilliance and invented Orders of the Mishnah Fridge Magnets. A steal at $7 plus postage.

While I was at it, I also invented the Yeshiva Student's Highly-Educational and Immensely-Useful fridge magnets. Because it was fun.

וילון <- velum (curtain, veil)
Vellum <- velin (O Fr) <- vel, vedel (veal) <- vitulus, vitellus (calf) (Online Etymological Dictionary)

=> not the same word, despite vellum sometimes being used as a cheaper alternative to glass.

Useful things to know

About the guys on the page:
אחרית דבר - list of manuscripts consulted, at end of מסכת נדה
In מסורת הש"ס, square brackets (חצאי רבוע) = additions or semi-parallels; ע"ש = something weird worth looking at; ש"נ = ושם נסמן, the list of parallels isn't here, it's over there

סמ"ג.
13-th century, ר' משה נקוצי, synthesising rulings of Tosafot & Rambam, gaonic influence

רש"ל
Glosses on Tosafot, printers' errors. Poland, contemporary of Rema. שלמה לוריא, חכמת שלמה. Bases for emending text.

גילון הש"ס
עקיבה עיגר - sort of concordance, interesting points.

About the guys in the back:
המתרגם - translates Rashi's Old French terms into Yiddish
רי"ף - distils gemara to germane points only (obviously highly subjective).
רא"ש - rulings based on baalei tosafot and Rif
קיצור פסרי הרא"ש - the Beit Yosef's notes on the Rosh
שדה צופים - on the gemara; if the Rosh doesn't talk about the subject there it tells you where he does talk about it
מהרש"א - ways of looking at sugiyot. Small letters aggadah, big letters halakah, "intermittently helpful."
רש"א - emended text
מהר"ם - bare-bones Tosafot structures
יפה עינים - parallels in Yerushalmi, Tosefta, midrash halakha
Rashi on Rif - isn't always the same as Rashi on the Gemara
מאור הקטן - "hardcore Provencale - youthful attack on the Rif"
מלחמת השם - the Ramban's smackdown of the Meor haKatan

On Shabbat, one may not carry objects in the public domain, but if a building is on fire, certain things may be carried into the public domain to save them. Holy books are one of the things which may be carried; you can carry a sefer Torah out of a burning building on Shabbat although you may not carry Harry Potter.

The Talmud asks, what constitutes a holy book? Is a translation of Torah holy enough that one may break Shabbat to carry it out of a burning building? What about one written in impermanent ink? Transliterated? Perhaps only Torah and Prophets, but not that frivolous section, the Writings?

( Read all about it! )

Is this good for the Jews? Discuss.


* You can look this up in the Beit Yosef, if you feel inclined. OH334.
** from a search on Bar-Ilan's database; if you happen to know a Rashba expert who knows the answer, do please tell me about it.

The Rosh has an interesting modification of the mitzvah to write a sefer Torah; he says that sifrei Torah aren't the issue so much, the point is to have books from which to learn, and so the mitzvah is to acquire Mishnah, Gemara, commentaries, and generally a Jewish library. Later decisors of halakha express some surprise at this - how could Rosh possibly have decided to throw out the mitzvah of writing a sefer Torah? and decide that Rosh meant that one should acquire a Jewish library in addition to one's sefer Torah.

It occurred to me last week that it makes perfect sense for Rosh to have made this innovation. Copies of the Talmud were scarce enough anyway - it happens when you have to write everything by hand - but Rosh lived in Germany in the period c. 1250-1300.

In 1239, the Pope decided that the Talmud was a Bad Naughty Book, and issued edicts that all copies of it should be collected and burned. In 1244 in Paris, an absolutely stupendous number of manuscripts - twenty cartloads - were destroyed, and this was repeated on a smaller scale throughout Europe in subsequent decades. Rosh was surely affected by this; the availability of Jewish texts must have decreased drastically, and this is pretty likely to have made any scholar's life rather difficult, not to mention distressing.

Rosh could see that some texts were in danger of being lost forever, and not any old text - the Talmud itself. The Talmud is the central text of rabbinic Judaism; it appears to have more authority than the Bible itself, which contributed to its being banned in the first place. Without the Talmud, the chain of rabbinic tradition would be permanently severed. In this context, one can see why Rosh would place every Jew under the obligation to copy the central texts of Judaism - they were in very real and immediate danger of being lost forever. Rosh chose to prioritise saving the Talmud from obliteration over the biblically-ordained commandment to write a sefer Torah, and given the circumstances, it's hardly surprising.

I should continue and discuss the significance of the mitzvah in our day, but it's bedtime and has been for some time.