The Oral Talmud: Episode 1 - Rebooting Judaism
“If you pay attention to the folks for whom the system isn’t working, you’ll know how the system will eventually not work for everybody.” - Benay Lappe
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
Last week we celebrated and reflected on five years of our study partnership with a new “Episode Zero.” This week we bring you the original first episode, discussing a classic origin story within Talmud. What does the way the Talmud tells a story teach us, beyond the actual content of the story? What bold moves do we need at times of crash and upheaval?
This week’s texts: Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai Secures Yavne (Gittin 56a-b), Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai’s Deathbed (Berakhot 28b)
Access the full Sefaria Source Sheet with additional show notes via this link. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation.
Further Learning
BimBam's illustrated tale of Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai on YouTube. (Picture by Sam Grinberg)
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DAN: Welcome to The Oral Talmud, a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. I’m Dan Libenson…
BENAY: …and I’m Benay Lappe.
DAN: The Oral Talmud is our weekly deep dive study partnership, in which we try to figure out how voices from the Talmud – voice from 1500 to 2000 years ago – can help us think in new ways about Judaism today. Last week we celebrated five years of our study partnership by reflecting on how and why we started studying Talmud together with a public audience, and the surprising, wonderful gifts that have come from learning together.
This week we bring you the original first episode, in which we talk through a classic origin story within Talmud, how Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai escaped from the Roman Siege of Jerusalem and secured the small town of Yavne and its sages as a potential incubator for a new version of Judaism that could work for a time of great turmoil.
The societal crash that was forefront on our minds when we recorded this episode was the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, and we’ve found that these conversations continue to be relevant for the additional upheavals we’re currently navigating. We hope you find some solace and encouragement in this learning, and maybe some useful ideas.
Each episode of The Oral Talmud has a Source Sheet linked in the show notes on a web site called Sefaria where you can find pretty much any Jewish text in the original and in translation, and you can follow along with the texts we discuss or just listen to our conversation!
And now, The Oral Talmud…
Dan Libenson: Benay, I wanted to start out just by maybe your giving folks a little bit of an orientation about really what is the Talmud. What is it, what’s the story of it, why does it even exist, what’s the point of it, and also a little bit of your take on why maybe you take a little bit of a different perspective on what it is than typically.
Benay Lappe: Okay. So the answer to all of those questions could take hours and hours and hours. So this is just a really, really brief answer just to get the scene set for us. The Talmud is an enormous thirty-seven volume work, which others might describe as a compendium of lore and laws and history and stories. And it is all of that, but if you only see it as this collection of stuff, information, I think you miss what it also is and what it primarily is. And what I see in it, what jumped out at me as a queer person, is that the Talmud is for me, without a doubt, a handbook for how to respond to crashes, how to take a system that you live in that you’ve inherited that’s no longer working in this element or that element, and make it better.
And it came about in a point in our history when we had gotten over the most enormous crash of our history, the destruction of the Second Temple. And the rabbis were putting together this handbook to say to those who would come after them, “This is going to happen to you. This is not a once in history event. It’s going to happen in the future. Be prepared. Know that it has already happened, that we survived. Here’s how we survived. And you can stand on our shoulders and know that, even with the kind of radical changes you’re going to need to make to your system, you’ll know that that’s traditional, you’ll have lots of precedent to stand on. And the learning of this document will help you become the kind of person you need to be,” in order to be what I call crash-flex. In other words, resilient, creative, bold, courageous, and willing to take chances to create a system that might have been unrecognizable to those in the past, but that might work better to do what we’re ultimately in business to do, and that is to create a certain kind of human being. Okay, so that is a big picture of what I think the Talmud is.
Dan Libenson: Some people say the Talmud is really about the substance of what’s in the Talmud. It’s a bunch of rules and regulations as well as ways of thinking and understanding. You can think of it as a text book for lawyers, in this case Jewish lawyers, Jewish law lawyers. And there are ways in which you can say that that’s correct, and there are ways that you could say that that’s overly limited in a way of describing it, and there are ways that you can say, like I think you do, that you’re actually focused in the wrong place if you see it that way.
It may be similar to a law school text, in the sense that the main point of a law school text is to teach you to think like a lawyer, to think in a certain way, and what it happens to be, the subject that it happens to be about it very secondary. And if you open a law school textbook, as opposed to a code of law, if you open a law school textbook and it happens to be about contract law, or it happens to be about criminal law, that’s not the point. And those of us who have been to law school know that. In the first year of law school, the point is to learn to think in a certain way, and the topics that you’re learning are incidental.
Benay Lappe: That’s right.
Dan Libenson: And they’re not unimportant, because yeah, those are the laws, okay, but they’re incidental to the task at hand, which is learning to think in a certain way. And I think that there are a couple of different ways that we can think about thinking in that regard, and I think that today we’re really going to be looking at a specific text from the Talmud that is about what we might call meta thinking. It’s about how to think about what the thinking is even about. Once you know what the thinking is about, then you say, “Okay, well, in our system we privilege,” for example, we might privilege precedent, whereas in another system they might privilege a source of authority, or something like that. But before we even get there, we want to talk about what is this endeavor even about. And I think that in America we’re used to, when we’re having that conversation, we are generally talking about the American constitution. We’re saying this is a country that was set up in a certain way for a certain reason with a certain set of principles. And now, once we’ve internalized all that, now we can go to law school and understand what to do when you come to court and how those goals, those visions that we see in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, how those are enacted. And with the Talmud, I think–and not only the Talmud, because by the way, I’ll say that I’m coming… you’re the Talmud expert here, I’m more of a…
Benay Lappe: Hardly.
Dan Libenson: I’m more of a casual fan that likes to talk about stuff. If anything, I’m more of a Torah expert, and that’s been something that I’ve taken a much deeper dive into than the Talmud. And what’s always fascinating to me is the way in which I see the Talmud and the Torah rhyming, and that there are ways in which I think in particular the story of the Exodus and the story that we’re going to look at today rhyme in very deep ways.
So I think when we’re looking at both the Torah and the Talmud, arguably, I think it’s similar to looking at the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, in that they are both founding documents of this enterprise that we’re in. And what we are trying to get at and trying to understand is, okay, what was the purpose that those founders put out there? The American founders said life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Okay. And we’ve heard about Hillel the Elder. “Tell me Judaism while I’m standing on one foot.” He says, “What’s hateful to you, don’t do unto others.” Are there ways that we can try to get at, okay, what’s the enterprise about, and then as we go on, we’ll get into some more of the details?
Benay Lappe: Yep.
Dan Libenson: So let’s look at this text. We want to jump quickly into a text, and I want to say again for folks that are new to Talmud, don’t worry about it. It doesn’t matter that you won’t necessarily get everything. We think that if you stick with us for about three or four weeks, you will not even be thinking about that any more. You’ll be totally in it. So we just want you to ride along right now. And if we say things that you don’t know about, we’ll try to explain everything, but things will become clear in the weeks ahead.
So the first text that we want to look at is from a tractate called Gittin, which technically has to do with Jewish divorce law, but for some reason this little, this story, it’s basically this story as told by the rabbis of the destruction of the Second Temple, that story is stuck in here. And we’re going to be looking at a particular moment from it. Benay, do you want to set the scene?
Benay Lappe: Sure. So this is a–it’s a kind of origin story. This is the story of how rabbinic, the shift, it’s a photograph of the shift from biblical Judaism to what came next, and what lasted for the next 2,000 years, rabbinic Judaism. So it’s an origin story, and as I learned from my primary teacher, Dr. David Kraemer, when you look at a story in the Talmud, you have to look not only at what it’s saying, but at how it’s saying what it’s saying. To ask yourself, “What does the way they’re telling the story teach us beyond the actual content of the story?” So I think we want to be looking out for that as well.
And the story is set in the first century. It’s probably the year 68 CE or something like that. The Roman siege of Jerusalem is in its late, late stages. Things are looking really bad for the Jews. And there was something of a civil war going on at the same time. While the Jews are fighting the Romans, there is conflict among the Jews as to how we should be responding to this assault. And the Zealots and those who are most invested in Temple Judaism are fighting the Romans, and others are saying, “You know what? This is a lost cause. We’re not going to win this thing. Maybe we should try something else.” And there’s a civil war in which the Zealots are trying to suppress any alternative responses.
And one of those who is not down with the revolt, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, calls his nephew. This is the son of his wife. And he calls his nephew, who is actually the head of the Zealot forces, and he says, “Come to me in secret, because I need some help.” So his nephew comes to him in secret, and he says, “Why are you trying to kill us all?” Because what the Zealots are doing is actually burning the storehouses of food so that no Jews who oppose the revolt can even survive. And he says, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai says to his nephew, “Tell your gang to stop doing this.” And his nephew says, “If I do that, they’re going to kill me! I can’t do that.” So Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai says, “Okay. Help me, give me some solution. How am I going to get out of here? Maybe I can save some small number of us. Because you all are going to go down with this Temple, and it’s going to be the end of all of us, unless some of us get out.”
So his nephew says, “Okay, do this. Pretend you’re sick. Put some putrid, decaying meat in bed with you so it will smell bad. Get the word out that you’re sick. People will come and visit you, and they’ll smell this smell, and they’ll realize you’re on your deathbed and you’re dying. And word will get out that you’ve died. Then have your students carry you. and by the way, be sure no one else carries you, because we know that dead bodies are heavier than light.” I don’t know, is that a thing?
Dan Libenson: I don’t think so, but I don’t know.
Benay Lappe: I don’t know. Anyway.
Dan Libenson: I have to say, by the way, on that score, my wife and I have been doing the daily Talmud reading, the daf yomi, which I know you have your issues with.
Benay Lappe: Yeah. We’ll put a sticky on that, we’ll come back to that.
Dan Libenson: We’ll get back to that. But one of the things that we, in the first book, called Berakhot, that we’re reading, there’s a lot of concern about demons all the time.
Benay Lappe: Uh-huh (affirmative).
Dan Libenson: Demons, particularly in the bathroom.
Benay Lappe: Ah, right.
Dan Libenson: And you can read that on a casual way and say, “What ridiculousness. Demons. We know there are no demons.” But actually in our time right now, if you just translate “demon” as “virus,” or “demon” as “a germ,” then actually they were right! That there are these unseen, very powerful, dangerous things, particularly you should be concerned about them in bathrooms. So some of the things, some of the things that we might look at, like are dead bodies heavier than… my first response is to be dismissive and say, “I don’t think that’s scientifically true,” but there’s also probably something maybe there that we can investigate a little more closely.
Benay: Yeah. So his nephew says to him, “Okay, everyone will think you’re dead, and then have your students carry you out.” Interestingly, there’s no mention of a coffin, and knowing what Israeli burial practices are, people aren’t buried in coffins. So even though we always think of Rabi Yochanan ben Zakkai getting snuck out of Jerusalem in a coffin, I’m not sure there was actually a coffin involved. But regardless, his students carry him, and they get to the gates of the city, and now they’ve got a problem. Because at the gates of the city are guards. Now, they’re not roman guards. They’re actually Jewish guards. These are Jewish guards who are set up to prevent Jews who want to escape the revolt from doing so on penalty of death.
So Rabi Yochanan ben Zakkai is being carried. He’s faking being dead, and his students are carrying him out, and the Jewish Zealot guards are saying, “Hey, what’s going on here? Is this person really dead?” And they threaten to poke the body to be sure it’s a dead body, and the students say, “No, no, no, the Romans are going to say we poked our teachers,” and they start to push the body, and the students say, “No, don’t do it, the Romans are going to say we push our teachers.” Finally say, “Okay,” and they let Rabi Yochanan be snuck out by his students past the gates.
And Rabi Yochanan gets out of Jerusalem with his students, and he goes to the Roman camp. He gets to the Roman camp and approaches Vespasian. Now, Vespasian is the general of the Roman army. And he says to Vespasian, “Peace be unto you, king, peace be unto you, king.” In other words, he’s addressing the general as if he were the Caesar. And the general says to him, “That’s a capital offence, what you’re doing, because I’m not the king.” And at that moment, a messenger comes and says, “Caesar, the king has died, and Vespasian, you are now the king.”
And Vespasian is kind of blown away, “Oh my God, this guy predicted the future.” And he says, “Look, I need to go and fight. I need to go back to Rome. I’m going to set up someone who is going to continue to destroy Jerusalem and your temple, but in the meantime,” this is like the Aladdin moment, “you get three wishes.” Or, “What do you want? I’ll give you anything.” And this is the climax of the story, and this is when Rabi Yochanan Ben Zakkai asks for three things. One primarily–and this is the moment when he says, “Ten li Yavne v’Khokhmeha.” Give me Yavne and its Sages.
So Yavne is a city, is a town outside of Jerusalem, west of Jerusalem. And what my teacher Dr. David Kraemer pointed out to me that I had missed, and I think a lot of people miss, in this really subtle line, is it’s not just, “Give me a town where we can be free, where I can go and settle.” It’s, “Give me a town where others before me have already gone and settled.” There were sages already in Yavne before this moment.
Dan Libenson: And I think that what’s important to point out is that in the way that those of us–I mean, I often will point out that a lot of us who have been relatively well-educated Jewishly have been miseducated. Not intentionally, but it’s just that there’s a certain way that Judaism is taught, and it actually isn’t always correct, even when you look at the sources. And a lot of times the ways that we’re taught is that Rabban Yochanan Ben Zakkai, who you’re talking about, the rabbi who was smuggled out of Jerusalem, that he is the founder of rabbinic Judaism, because he established Yavne, and Yavne was the place, you can think of it as kind of the R&D center, where Rabbinic Judaism was developed over the next hundred years or so. And then it was codified in the Mishnah in around the year 200. And we’re talking about, like you said, the year 68, 70. And that’s how it’s taught.
And the surprising, the shocking thing about understanding that when he asked for Yavne and its sages, that actually belies that story, or it could belie that story. It says that Yavne was already up and running, it already had sages. Which also leads to the question of who is the real founder, who put them there, how did they get there. Which we don’t have to resolve, but the point is is that it was already up and running, and he was just joining an ongoing concern.
Benay Lappe: You know, what you brought to mind, the way we’re mistaught the Rosa Parks story. We’re told that it was a moment when a single individual stood up and said, “No, I’m going to resist,” and that the entire revolution, the civil rights movement, happened because of this one individual. And that’s actually not true. She worked for a civil rights organization, and there was a lot of organizing by a lot of people that happened before that moment, which was very much a planned moment. And I think it’s important to know that, because revolutions don’t happen when a single person stands up. Revolutions happen when a group of people organize, a group of people who understand what’s broken and what needs fixing organize. Of course, they need a leader, but.
Dan Libenson: So one of the reasons that we wanted to start with this story was because in some ways it is the founding story of rabbinic Judaism, or at least a founding story of rabbinic Judaism. Or it’s understood as a founding story about rabbinic Judaism. We’re calling into question whether the founding actually happened earlier in some way that is not quite captured here. And/or it’s not necessarily the founding. I mean, there were other rabbis that came earlier, like Hillel the Elder, who were doing things that are seen as proto-rabbinic Judaism.
Benay Lappe: And by the way, who was Rabi Yochanan ben Zakkai’s teacher.
Dan Libenson: Right. So on the one hand–it depends what we mean when we say rabbinic Judaism, and we can talk about that. Another way these things are mistaught is to imagine that there was a pre-rabbinic Judaism, meaning a Second Temple Judaism, and boom! it was over, and then all of a sudden a new Judaism jumped up and was created, as opposed to seeing it as these things always are, which is one thing is in decline while the other thing is arising, and maybe that moment of collapse is when the other thing also jumps up, but it was already there.
And I say all this because the other reason that we want to start with this text is that we see some resonances to what we’re going through today, and I think that the connection there is that–and I’ve been making this in the Torah analogy to the Exodus from Egypt and the wilderness, is that all of a sudden there was an event that ends something, the Exodus, that all of a sudden you’re out of Egypt, and you end up in the wilderness, and after a while at Mount Sinai. And in a way I think that Yavne is what rhymes with Mount Sinai. It’s the place where the next version was kind of created. And so in our time, you could say, “Oh, we have this shocking coronavirus situation that has forced all of us not only online but also into this rethinking of Judaism in certain ways.” And-
Benay Lappe: Rethinking of so much of the larger world.
Dan Libenson: And so much of the larger world.
Benay Lappe: Rethinking of capitalism and healthcare and labor relations, yeah, and accessibility.
Dan Libenson: Right. But I think a lot of people who are coming here from the old world, who are, meaning who–in this case we’re talking about Judaism, but I agree that it can all be mapped onto the larger picture–that they’re very shocked. They’re, “Oh my God, what do we do now?! We have to start over, we have to build something new.” And there are a bunch of people that are out here already that are saying, “No, you don’t have to build something new. We’ve been out here for decades! Come join our thing. We welcome you.”
So that’s why I think I bring up this point about Yavne, I think your point about Yavne and its sages already being there, David Kraemer’s point, is so significant, is that I think in a time like ours we should be saying, “Where’s the Yavne?”
Benay Lappe: Right.
Dan Libenson: There’s possibly already a Yavne. Where is it?
Benay Lappe: Yeah. We don’t typically pay attention to Yavne because the Yavnes, the khokhmeha, those sages that are already out in Yavne, they’re raggedy. They’re a raggedy bunch. Even historically, what we know about the sages who were in Yavne, they were the largely middle class and working class. Those in power were the moneyed wealthier class. And these are the fringy radical folks who, they weren’t being paid attention to. They were the ones who were on the margins before, and were already catching on to the ways that the Jewish system wasn’t working for them and eventually would come to not work for everybody. But if you pay attention to the folks for whom the system isn’t working, you’ll know how the system will eventually come to not work for everybody.
So the Yavnes are happening out there in the world among the people of color and folks with disabilities and the queer folk and the trans folk and the working class folk. They’re already creating Yavnes out there. And they’re not getting funding, and they don’t have organizations, or they have little ones. Yeah.
Dan Libenson: In this particular circumstance that we find ourselves in, I keep quoting Isaac Asimov. I think he was incredibly prescient, and a lot of his science fiction books actually seem very prescient now. I’ve talked about one called The Naked Sun, which is a world in which people don’t come into contact with other people for various environmental reasons, and how does that world function. But in his Foundation trilogy, it’s about this idea that the empire is collapsing, and there’s going to be this, I think twenty thousand years of misery, but he has a way of making it only a thousand years. Which is itself just genius to think that a thousand years of misery would be a positive. It would be a positive if the alternative was 20,000 years, or whatever it is in the story.
But what he does is he, the guy who realizes this, his name is Hari Seldon, he’s kind of a mathematician psychologist, and he understands that this is happening, and he sets up what he calls the Foundation, which is this secret lab or this secret refuge where the people kind of know what the situation is, and they’re going to be working on it so that when it happens, they’re ready. And I think there are a lot of connections, a lot of overlaps here with what we’re talking about. And this question of the folks who, also in that book, you see as the fringy, the ones who don’t get a lot of respect in the old system might actually have the secret knowledge that’s needed when the system collapses.
So I think what we want to do on this, in these studies is not only talk about the stories, but also look even more deeply into the stories to see if maybe there’s more in here even beyond the way that even the stories are told by folks like you and folks like us who are telling the story in a more progressive way. And one of them is let’s talk about the three wishes, because this vision gives Rabban Gamliel three–sorry, this vision gives Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai three wishes.
Benay Lappe: I was reading the story much more closely today, and Vespasian doesn’t say, “You can have three wishes.” He actually says, “Ask for anything. What do you want?” And Rabi Yochanan ben Zakkai takes upon himself the opportunity to ask for three things. So.
Dan Libenson: So the three wishes are–the second one is actually Yavne and its sages. The first wish is for the, what he calls I think the dynasty of Rabban Gamliel. Or how does he put it? Spare the dynasty of Rabban Gamliel, don’t kill them as if they were rebels. So we should-
Benay Lappe: Yeah, I think first he asks for Yavne.
Dan Libenson: Oh, first he asks for Yavne.
Benay Lappe: Right.
Dan Libenson: So first he asks for Yavne and its sages.
Benay Lappe: Right.
Dan Libenson: Second of all, he asks for the dynasty of Rabban Gamliel. We’ll talk about who that is. And then the third is he asks for doctors to heal Rabbi Tzadok. I don’t know about you, I’m not, I’d love to know more about the Rabbi Tzadok part and what he represents. I don’t know if you know…
Benay Lappe: I’m not sure. Yeah.
Dan Libenson: I think if you don’t, it’s for us to research, because I think it must be significant. But at least Rabban Gamliel, I think it’s significant, in the sense that Rabban Gamliel was the descendant of Hillel, and Hillel was kind of, I think, seen as a much more prestigious figure than Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai, who was the student. And he became great, but at the time, he was pretty great but maybe… but the grandson of Hillel, that was prestige. So I wonder if there’s something where he’s saying here, “I need that little rinky dink place Yavne and its sages. There’s some really cool fringy hippie stuff going on there that’s going to be the center of the new Judaism for sure. So I need that place. But I also need the guy who’s seen as the kind of big guy in the world. I need to rescue that guy, because somehow I need to bring him to the fringy hippie place. And he’s not going to like it so much there.” And we know that Rabban Gamliel does have his problems with what’s going on in Yavne, which we can talk about in a future time. There’s some great stories there. But he’s bringing the prestige. He’s bringing the name.
Benay Lappe: I like that. I like that.
Dan Libenson: I guess thinking about our time today, I’m thinking, yeah, on the one hand, all the fringy folks that you’re talking about–Jews of color, queer jews, atheists, people with disabilities, all kinds of people who have not been fitting into the Jewish community as it is–are now kind of saying, “Here, welcome to our wilderness, everybody. Great to have you. Can we show you around?” And at the same time, I wonder whether that means, whether what the Talmud is hinting at there, is that it would be also a good idea to try to get some of the leaders of that old school world to kind of be maybe the front man.
Benay Lappe: Maybe. I like that. I never thought about that.
Dan Libenson: So where else would you want to take us in this, in the story itself?
Benay Lappe: I think the parts of the story that for me are really important are the fact that here’s an origin story that says, “Know that it might just happen that your world, when it looks like it’s crashing, you have to know that that crash already happened before.” In other words, crumbles always happen before a crash. And the time you need to pay attention most is in the crumble. Because if you’re going to create a great system, and if you’re going to be a great leader, you want to be sensitive to who’s suffering right now. Because if you can tend to those folks, you will prevent everyone else from suffering down the line.
And the guys who went to Yavne before Rabi Yochanan ben Zakkai could have gone to the Temple. They had a temple to go to. But they didn’t want to go there. I think the mindset shifts, the way we think of what’s working shifts long before structure shifts. And the idea of standing knee-deep in blood and sacrificing animals to please God is... they were over that.
And I think you, like I said before, you want to look at the folks for whom the system isn’t working. It’s kind of ridiculous that the people who get accepted into rabbinical schools are the poster kids. The boy scouts for Judaism. We should be accepting as leaders the ones who are… there’s something seriously messed up here. This is not working.
Dan Libenson: The difference is, just to parse what you’re saying, the difference, it’s the difference between accepting someone as a leader and accepting someone into the category of leadership that existed in the previous system. So what I mean is that if we’re talking about the Temple times, you could imagine this conversation where somebody is saying, “Look, we really need to expand the category of who we’re having as priests here. The people that are becoming priests,” I mean, it was hereditary, but in theory, “The people who are becoming priests are these people who love the blood and the sacrifices. And turns out most of the people these days are grossed out and don’t want it. So we should be hiring people to be priests who hate the sacrifices. Those should be our priests.” That doesn’t really make sense, because the job of the priest is to do the sacrifices. So what you’re really saying is we should develop a new category of leadership, and we should respect the new category of leadership that’s going to be doing something other than bringing sacrifices.
So flash forward to our time. I’m saying I’m not sure that the rabbinical schools are wrong to be accepting the poster children for their kind of Judaism as rabbinical students. That seems to make sense. The question is whether we, as a Jewish community, should continue with this notion that the name of an authoritative leader within Judaism in the twenty-first century America is rabbi, is only rabbi.
Benay Lappe: Yeah.
Dan Libenson: And we need to have another category that would reflect, it would be a leadership category that would reflect leadership among those who don’t want that.
And I’m also thinking about the Temple times. I was thinking the mindset and the transition after the destruction of the Temple wasn’t like, “Oh, the Temple is destroyed, and so now, you know those sin offerings we used to bring? They don’t really make sense anymore for various reasons, so let’s not bring sin offerings anymore. But there’s a new kind of sacrifice that we could bring. It’s the loneliness sacrifice. And now that the Temple is destroyed, we can’t bring the sin offering, but now we’ll bring the loneliness offering.” We don’t do that. We got rid of all the sacrifices. Like we said, “Sacrifices is over.”
And I’m thinking in this time, currently, synagogues have crashed. Meaning, we can’t physically get together anymore. Now, that’s going to change, we know, and it’s going to be possible again, just as it was possible to rebuild the Temple. It was possible to build the Third Temple. It may not have been in Jerusalem. It may yes have been in Jerusalem. It’s possible after this is over to go back to the way things were.
Benay Lappe: And also, I’m sorry to interrupt you, but the text itself notices, “Hey, Rabi Yochanan ben Zakkai didn’t ask for the Temple to be spared!” He could have.
Dan Libenson: And he didn’t ask to be able to build another temple when the war is over.
Benay Lappe: That’s right.
Dan Libenson: So I just want to put out there. I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t aspire, that people shouldn’t aspire, to go back to regular synagogue life when this is over. What I’m suggesting, though, is that those who weren’t that happy there before might feel more empowered now to say, “Maybe this is a moment that suggests that we can try something new, and let’s play around with that.” And so rather than only having livestreaming synagogue services now–which I, by the way, have been loving, so I’m not at all against it. I think synagogues should be doing that. But I think it’s an opportunity to say what would be the next thing that would take the place of synagogue services, in terms of people’s soul experience, in their souls, but it wouldn’t necessarily just be mapping the old synagogue service into a digital version.
Benay Lappe: Yeah. And I’ve always been a little bit jealous of the guys in Yavne and Rabi Yochanan ben Zakkai’s moment, because for them it was like, “Hey, we got nothing to lose now. The Temple’s gone. We can either give up. Fighting for it obviously is not going to work anymore. It’s gone. So let’s just throw some spaghetti at the wall.” They didn’t have this fear in them like, “Oh my God, I might ruin it. Oh my God, I might be the end of it.”
Dan Libenson: Because it had already ended, is what you’re saying?
Benay Lappe: Because it already ended. And so I think they had a freedom. By the way, remind me to get back to the story of Rabi Yochanan ben Zakkai’s deathbed scene, because that’s important. But basically it was over, so I think they had a kind of creative freedom, like, “We have nothing to lose.” They were in a nothing to lose moment, and until this moment in history, this moment of this virus in the Jewish world, you could look at the temples down the block, and you have this illusion that they’re all working. Now, some are, some were working great. But there was this feeling like, “Oh, there’s something wrong with me personally, that it doesn’t work for me.” And I think there was a reluctance to try new things and to really understand the systemic reasons why it didn’t work for me. But we’re kind of in that moment now where it’s like, “Hey, let’s try some stuff.” And that’s very rich. I think it’s very exciting. And what you’re doing, for example, is like, “Let’s try some stuff.”
Dan Libenson: When we map this on to our own time, until this happened with the coronavirus, you and I would be having these conversations, and I don’t know how you were feeling, but implicit for me was an idea that, unlike previous crashes of Judaism, I didn’t really believe that there would be a destruction that would accelerate this crash. I thought that–and I didn’t know how to respond to that, exactly. I thought there’s nothing–back then, there was one temple in Jerusalem, and so it was easy to destroy one temple in Jerusalem. Now that the whole synagogue enterprise is diffused, nothing is going to happen that is going to destroy synagogue Judaism. And so the question in my mind was, is there a way for the new thing to come about when the old thing isn’t really destroyed in a sudden sort of way. And I never in a million years imagined something like this. And now I think that most people who are looking at what we’re experiencing now are not seeing it as a cataclysmic-level destruction. They are seeing it as a terrible, tragic, temporary situation that, after it’s over, we will go back to the way things were.
And I guess I wanted to explore with you a little bit this question of to what extent do you think it is a cataclysmic-level destruction event that actually potentially accelerates the new Judaism, the next Judaism, or not. And there’s one simple view, which we also see that there’s an economic crash going on here, and a lot of the individual Jewish organizations that we had on the map before will not be around on the other end of this. That’s quite clear. But a lot of them still will be. So again, it’s not necessarily a cataclysm like the destruction of the Temple. It is for the people who are members for those particular organizations, so maybe that’s how this destruction functions. But I think it’s also more than that. I have an instinct that it’s more than that. But I’m not yet sure I can fully put it into words why am I feeling like this is actually a crash moment.
The crumble–what I was going to say earlier when you were talking about the crumble, and you should be attentive to the crumble, et cetera, I almost was feeling like saying to you, “Yeah, that’s what we were talking about a month ago. We don’t need to talk about anymore. That’s, the crumble part is over. We’re now in the crash. So we don’t have to tell people to be sensitive to the crumble, the crumble happened. Now we’re in the crash.” But I’m not sure I know exactly why I think we’re in the crash.
Benay Lappe: Yeah. And I’m not sure either. I think none of us is going to know until we’re able to look back, and that might happen beyond our lifetimes. I mean, it probably will. At the very, very least, I think this virus is accelerating the crumble enormously. As you say, many, many Jewish organizations are going to fail. Some synagogues are going to fail, some which were doing a great job, some which were doing a crappy job. And it’s kind of good that the ones were doing a crappy job are not going to make it. I hate to say that. But I think this moment is going to settle the noise of, “Oh, but look, this is what the Jewish landscape looks like. It’s healthy. There are so many,” whatevers, fill in the blank. Hebrew schools, day school, fill in the… and there’s this illusion that they’re all working well, and what’s the matter with you if you’re not playing in them.
And I think this is going to clear out that landscape to some extent. I don’t think this is going to be the end of our crash, when this virus is over. I think it’s going to stretch out, just like the emancipation, enlightenment wasn’t the entirety of our current moment. We had to still have the Holocaust and the unprecedented power, wealth, and sense of equality that American Jews have in modernity that contributed to this moment. So I don’t know. But I have a feeling that just as, I think, in every crash the folks who are wanting to go option 1, there will always be some people wanting to go option 1, right. There are still folks who are gathering money and making the utensils and the keilim-
Dan Libenson: Right, for the Temple.
Benay Lappe: For the next Temple. I remember you telling me once that any technology that has ever existed…still exists!
Dan Libenson: There was something I read about innovation that talked about how no technology ever goes completely away, and there’s still people making bows and arrows, there’s still people making Morse code, telegraph machines. Everything, whether it’s a hobbyist or someone, they don’t fully go away. So the question is… this is not the right way to pose the question. The way to pose the question is what’s the dominant thing, or what’s the thing that’s really getting the job done that most people are trying to do in their lives.
Benay Lappe: So I don’t know. I think we’re either in the final stages of the crumble, or the beginning of the crash. I think this virus won’t be the end of the crash. I think…
Dan Libenson: On that score, I want to say that–and I think this is what you said earlier–that the crash of the Second Temple’s destruction is only seen as the final thing in the crash in retrospect. Meaning there were attempts to build a Third Temple. There was an attempt to build another, what would you call it, a state, basically. Bar Kochba’s trying to create another Jewish state. And so what was actually seen at the time as the final crash, maybe it never was seen. And really it was just that over the course of time–other people, including you, talk about how we now have this imagination that the Temple was destroyed, boom, all of a sudden there’s this new group of leaders, rabbis, and they’ve risen up, and everybody is following them. And that’s not how it was at all. There was a very tiny number of rabbis and a very tiny number of people who followed them for centuries, and maybe only after 500 years, and largely due to the intervention of Christian authorities, were these rabbis finally given this level of communal authority which allowed them to consolidate their leadership of Judaism, such that at a certain point you could say, “Yeah, the dominant form of Judaism is now rabbinic Judaism.” So even the one thing that was so obvious that we now think as the crash, the destruction of the Temple, it was still 500 years until that was really fully seen as yeah, that’s not coming back.
Benay Lappe: That’s right. And in the meantime, you have to remember that there’s a very messy period of many, many, many what I call option 3s, many really raggedy attempts to create some new kind of Judaism that existed in late crumble era and into option 3, when there’s nothing. So there are attempts to make, the Essenes create a monastic way of doing Judaism, and another group of radical folks create another way which eventually becomes Christianity. Super successful. So there’s going to be a period of time always after, pre-crash and after a crash, where there is no clear “the new thing.” It’s lots and lots and lots of small raggedy things, and that’s exactly what you want. That’s a really good thing. And I think they tend to be atomistic, and that each one does its own thing really well.
I would love to have, I’d love to take some of the monastic–I always wanted to be a monk. And right now, SVARA, SVARA’s great at what we do. We do this one little thing. And there’s an option 3 about Talmud, and there’s an option 3 about singing, and it’s amazing, and it’s singing communities, and there’s another thing that’s meditation. And eventually, these pieces coalesce into a more full-service, multivitamin, everything you need thing. That takes hundreds of years.
Dan Libenson: There’s also this option, what you call option 1, there’s also this desire to try to go back to the way things were that persists, I think, for a very, very long time, and that by the way, I would say is worthy of respect. Meaning you understand why people want to go back to the way things were, and you don’t judge them in any way. I think that probably it won’t end up that way.
Benay Lappe: What’s really important to notice about the people who want to go back is they tend to preserve. And the impulse to preserve is actually great. I want some people on the project of preservation, and even though they’re doing it for reasons that I think are wrong-headed, they’re going to preserve things that I’m going to miss, that for me don’t seem obviously valuable, but that I’m going to benefit from when I’m creating all this new stuff out there. I’m going to look back and go, “Wow. They preserved some stuff that now I realize has enormous value, and I can bring into.” So the folks who are wanting to go back are really important as well.
Dan Libenson: Yeah, and I guess I don’t know if… now I kind of want to really try to figure this thing out about Rabbi Tzadok, because it’s interesting that when you go back to the text, there are these three things that he asks for. One is Yavne. “Give me that progressive, fringy place. It’s already going on. I want to save the fringy people, even though the other thing may be going down.” But another piece is, “I want to take the dynasty of Rabban Gamliel.” Maybe that’s, “I want to get the front man who’s going to give me the prestige or authority.” Maybe it’s that, “He somehow represents an old world, and I want to salvage that.”
What’s interesting is that, “Give me healing for Rabi Tzadok,” meaning, “Give me doctors to heal Rabbi Tzadok.” I wonder if, metaphorically, we can read something like that as saying, “Hey, this might be my moment. The whole old world that I’ve been opposing all this time is crashing down. You could think that I just want to go to the new place and really get this new thing going, but actually, no. I want to bring these two guys with me from the old place, one of whom represents the dynasty, the prestige, and the other one,” again, I don’t know if this is right, because I’m not sure who Rabbi Tzadok, what he did, exactly, but maybe he represents, at least metaphorically, the dying thing. “And I actually want to heal him. I want to,” something like that. If that’s right, then I think it’s actually a beautiful…
Benay Lappe: Ooh, that’s interesting. You know, you’re making me think about how in this moment there’s this heartbreaking and obscene dismissal, as we see this virus disproportionately hitting the elderly, by some people saying, “Oh, it’s just hitting the elderly.”
Dan Libenson: I think I’m hearing that in terms of Ultra-Orthodox people being kind of, “Well, they didn’t listen to,” as opposed to, “My heart breaks for that, and can I do everything to help them on the other side of this. Can I help them rebuild their world?”
Benay Lappe: What if the healing of Rabi Tzadok is saying, “We’re starting this new thing, and let’s start it with a sense of humanity, and let’s not get our, let’s not forget what we’re about as human beings. We have to be about valuing all life.” And the fact that Rabi Tzadok is part of the old, or the elderly…
Dan Libenson: Sick.
Benay Lappe: Yeah. The sick. “We’re not going to be anything if we don’t care about the Rabi Tzadoks.” I don’t know.
Dan Libenson: So we have five more minutes, and I think it’s now or never on the death bed, so let’s go there.
Benay Lappe: Okay, so I think it’s important in any crash moment to not only hold up the moment of courage and boldness, which this story represents, but to also remember this other story, which is sort of like a bookend to this story. And it’s elsewhere in the Talmud, and it’s a story of Rabi Yochanan ben Zakkai’s deathbed. And he’s surrounded by his students, and he’s crying. And his students, it’s one of those typical moments on a deathbed scene. “Why are you crying, rabbi? You were so great. You have nothing to fear. You led such a holy life.” And he says, essentially, “What if I got it wrong? What if I was wrong?” He was revolutionary. He created all sorts of new stuff, innovated Judaism beyond recognition, and now he’s saying, “But what if that was wrong? What if I got it wrong, and I actually was the reason that it’s going to end? That I hastened its demise.” And we look at that story from our point of view, and it’s so obvious that he saved Judaism. He’s the reason that we, as genetic or spiritual descendants of his, are Jews. And yet he didn’t, of course he couldn’t have known that that would happen. He gave it his best shot, he was as bold as he could be.
And what I love about this story is it says be bold, be courageous, play and do your best. And know that, if you’re not afraid on your deathbed that you got it wrong, you weren’t bold enough. That’s how bold you have to be, to know that, yikes, this is really risky. And that’s where you gotta go. And I think that story is a beautiful story. Those of us who are going to play like wild ought to also hold on to the fact that, yikes, what if we’re getting it wrong. But do it anyway.
Dan Libenson: I’m excited, Benay, we did it. We were nervous, it was an hour, but we did it.
Benay Lappe: It was a little raggedy, but we did it.
Dan Libenson: We did it, and the whole thing about the perfect being the enemy of the good is that we’ve been talking about doing it for so many years and not doing it. And I think to be doing it is better than to be not doing it, and there’s probably something about that in the Talmud, so look forward to talking about that story with you one day as well.
Benay Lappe: Thanks so much. This was fun.
Dan Libenson: Thanks Benay. We’ll see you next week.
Benay Lappe: Okay, bye.
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