The Oral Talmud: Episode 2 - Voiding the Torah

“Maybe the reason they were undoing the original covenant was to give themselves a little breathing room, saying, ‘G🪀d actually gave us permission to play.’” - Benay Lappe

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

This week we’re exploring another foundational origin story in Talmud: a re-writing of the already dramatic scene of receiving Torah at the foot of Mount Sinai. The sages say that when scripture says we “under” the mountain, that doesn’t mean the mountain’s shadow; instead, the rabbis say “under” means that G🌄D had literally picked the mountain up and threatened to drop it on us if we didn’t accept Torah! What does it mean to reimagine our covenant as coming out of duress and vast power imbalance? How and where did the Rabbis ratify our obligation if not from Mount Sinai? Why make this radical move at all?

This week’s texts: “Beneath” Mount Sinai (Shabbat 88a), The Book of Esther (Chapter 9)

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 at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

• Transcript

  DAN: This is The Oral Talmud - Episode 2: Voiding the Torah. 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 – voices from 1500 to 2000 years ago – can help us think in new ways about Judaism today. 

  Last time we explored one of our favorite origin stories in 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. This week we explore what could be seen as a prequel to that origin story, which becomes one of the foundations of that new Judaism the sages were creating – their radical re-imagining of the biblical scene of receiving Torah at Mount Sinai, which makes them, and us, question the entire basis for the Torah being binding in any way. My background as a former law professor comes into play because we make some analogies to Anglo-American contract law, which I used to teach, and maybe we should have gotten a journalism professor involved too, as we discover that the rabbis are playing a bit fast and loose with quoting sources, or to be charitable, they are using an overly forced interpretation of a verse from the Book of Esther to try and salvage the Torah, or maybe to show those of us who see what they’re doing that they really aren’t sure the Torah is binding at all. This conversation is also an on-ramp to our next episode, which is about the Oven of Achnai story, another foundational story for the rabbis’ new Judaism, which places the power to say what Torah means into human hands. So today, we’re starting by looking at whether there even is a contract with God in the first place.  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, share them with your study partners, or just listen to our conversation! And now, The Oral Talmud…

  Dan Libenson: Hello everybody. This is Dan Libenson, and I’m here with Benay Lappe again. She’s going to come on in a moment. Here she is. Benay Lappe, welcome back to–you may still be muted, I don’t know. If you’re not then you can say hi.

  Benay Lappe: Hi.

  Dan Libenson: So last week, we studied the original story of the end of the destruction of the Second Temple, and how in some ways rabbinic Judaism was founded out of that when Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai asked Vespasian to give him Yavne and its sages, which was kind of the R&D center for rabbinic Judaism. Before we jump in, Benay, I just wanted to give you a chance to say hi, and also any reflections that you have over the past week.

  Benay Lappe: Hey there! It’s so great to be back. I’m not sure about reflections, but one thing that I just wanted to add to your introductory comments was that we’re not only looking at the Talmud to be looking at the Talmud, to be understanding the Talmud. We’re looking at the Talmud in order to find in it the blueprint that we might use again to respond to the times we’re living in, which we think the Talmud was for the times just previous to them. So I think our constant overall question, and it is mine when I read Talmud, is what is the instruction, what is the method that the rabbis are demonstrating for us? What’s the message for those who come later about how to respond to an enormous disruption, or the aspects of the tradition that aren’t working? So that’s always our meta-question. It’s always my meta-question.

  Dan Libenson: Right. And I guess I just also want to note, for people that are watching this for the first time, that this show, or whatever this is, is-

  Benay Lappe: [laughs] 

  Dan Libenson: -meant to be accessible to people who don’t know a lot about Talmud. We’re trying, and we’d love to get feedback if it’s not accessible. But it’s meant to be. We want it to be accessible to someone who really knows very little, if maybe nothing, about the Talmud, and also though hopefully interesting to people who do know quite a bit. If you’re a professor of Talmud, I hope it will also be interesting to you, but if not, we’re willing to sacrifice that audience. I would say Benay is a professional Talmud teacher. I am not, I’m more of a fan. And I’m also very interested in the Torah. And we talked last week about this idea that I believe that the story of the Talmud that you tell, Benay, which is the Talmud as this record of how to recover from a crash, how to rebuild Judaism when the previous version falls apart… I very much feel like that’s also the story that the Torah is telling, in particular in the book of Exodus and Numbers, and also Leviticus. I’m starting to get a better feel for Leviticus than I used to. So I think that there’s this rhyming, and actually it would make sense that there’s this rhyming, because it’s the same every time.

  And I’m reminded of a way that Leon Kass, Professor Leon Kass, put it in his book on Genesis. In the introduction, he says the question–something like, I’m paraphrasing, but something like, it’s not a question of whether or not these stories actually happened; the point is that this is the way it always happens. Meaning that mythology, wisdom, is saying that there are certain things that are always the case, and the way that we pass that wisdom along from generation to generation is through storytelling, and that’s because people learn best through stories. And you can also read it in nonfiction. You can also have it laid out. But it doesn’t quite have the same, I think, educational impact as internalizing these stories.

  And I’ve been concerned lately, as we’ve seen the Jewish community grappling with the COVID-19 situation, and the crash of economic, the crash of the world, the crash of Judaism–so many things crashing–that there isn’t as much talk as I would have expected, wanted, hoped for, that is saying, “Hey, guys, we know what to do. Our tradition tells us what to do now. You want to read it in the Torah? You want to read it in the Talmud? But we know what to do.” And it’s depressing to me, a little bit, that I’m not hearing that story, because it feels to me that it means that maybe we have done a lousy job of education about what Judaism really is, because if people aren’t seeing it as the toolbox that we have to deal with the situation, including the crash of Judaism itself, then we got to step up our game. You’ve been doing a great job for many, many years. I think we have to amplify your voice on that, and that’s what we’re trying to do here.

  Benay Lappe: We talked about last week, there’s this sense when there isn’t utter physical destruction, and I’m not hoping that there is, but in the absence of utter physical destruction, there is the challenge of having a system that looks like it’s working, even though nobody is going to it, or very few people are really excited and using it, that we have to preserve and hold on to it. Because oh my God, what if we get it wrong, what if we lose this? And I’m reminded of actually my very first Talmud teacher, Danny Gordis, saying to me once, when I came to him with my anxiety about what if, “What if I mess with the tradition the way I’m thinking about, and what if I get it wrong?” This is before I even knew the Rabi Yochanan ben Zakkai deathbed story. And he said to me, “Benay, you’re not that powerful, and you’re not that smart.” And I found that very liberating, because I thought, “Okay, well if I don’t have to worry about being responsible for ruining this thing, then I’m going to roll up my sleeves and be bold.”

  But I think we’re feeling what some portion of every community in a crash feels, which is batten down the hatches, preserve what you can, put all your energy toward making sure those parts of our tradition that are falling apart don’t fall apart. And as you’ve always talked about, we should do some of that, but we should also have the venture capital approach as well.

  But I want to also get back to what you’re saying about Torah being a story about crashes. And even though I’m not a Torah person so much, in that I’m not an expert on Torah–I’m not an expert on Talmud, either.

  Dan Libenson: But you’re literally playing one on TV, so it’s okay.

  Benay Lappe: Exactly. We have this notion that the rabbis believed that the Torah was the word of God. I didn’t believe that for a minute. And I’m happy to debate that, and I’m happy to be disagreeing with scholars. But we have a pietistic relationship to the Torah that I think the rabbis never did. They understood that it was a retelling of a prior crash that we now have sort of solidified, and we make the Torah this Ur-original story, that I think they never believed that it was. And I think you’re absolutely right, that the Torah itself encompasses the mechanics of retelling.

  Dan Libenson: So I think today we’re going to explore some of that in the text that we want to look at today, which is one of my favorites. To me it’s fundamental. And there are a number of fundamental texts, including the one that we did last week, and including the one that I think we’re going to do next week, which is called the Oven of Achnai. It’s one of the most famous texts, let’s say, in liberal Judaism. It sort of stands for some of the principles that liberal Judaism tends to be about, so it’s beloved among a lot of Reform rabbis, Conservative rabbis, whatever. But this text that we’re going to do today, I think, I always teach it as–whenever I teach the text for next week, “Tanur shel Achnai,” the oven of Achnai, I always teach this text first, because I think that a lot of the ideas in “Tanur shel Achnai” are better understood in light of the text that we’re going to do today.

  It’s a text that comes from the Talmud tractate that officially is about Shabbat. It’s called Shabbat. And it comes from page 88a, or 88 alef. Which basically means the first side of the page. The pages in the Talmud are numbered based on the folio, meaning both sides of the page are called 88, and so we call them 88a and 88b, or 88 alef and 88 bet. So this is from 88 side A. And it is a text, it really doesn’t have much directly to do with Shabbat, it just happens to be in the book called Shabbat. The Talmud is full of all kinds of meanderings from one topic to another that you could probably explain how they ended up there, but in any event, it’s not really important for today. 

  What this story is is last week we, in a way, saw a story about the origins of rabbinic Judaism, the very beginnings. I mean, it wasn’t really, there were things that happened before, as we talked about, but it’s sort of an origin story of how did rabbinic Judaism get started as Second Temple Judaism was ending. And in many ways, this is a story that rhymes with that, because this is a story of how biblical Judaism started at Mount Sinai with the giving of the Torah. And there’s quite a few stories in the Talmud that we will explore on this show that are sort of situated at Mount Sinai, and that interesting things happen there beyond what the Torah says. And famously, the rabbis talked about there being both a written Torah, what we know as the Torah, and the oral Torah, which they then put into written form, called the Talmud, and that was their story.

  Benay Lappe: And they were sticking with it!

  Dan Libenson: And they were sticking with it. And we will definitely explore that on many levels. But there’s a lot of scenes in the Talmud that are situated at Sinai, and it’s not necessarily a question of the oral Torah or the written Torah, it’s just that that’s an important scene for them, just as the scene of the early days of Yavne is an important scene for us today. And so I think it’s not an accident that they are exploring that scene a lot.

  Today, we’ll set the scene here. This is a story about the very beginnings of the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. If we look at the way that that scene is depicted in the Torah, in the book of Exodus, it is an extremely dramatic scene. There’s thunder and lightning and sounds and visions, and the people ultimately are so afraid of all of this that they ultimately ask God to please stop talking. “It’s too intense for us to hear God talking. Please just tell Moses and he’ll tell us.” That’s the level of intensity that the Torah depicts in this scene. And I think it’s important because–we’ll show why it’s important to just understand that it’s not only what the Talmud is about to say, it’s the way the Torah depicts this scene is very, very intense.

  Benay Lappe: And one thing I want to add–and I hope I’m not giving away too much–but I want to amplify what you said about this being an important moment. The Sinai moment is important on many levels. Number one, we all know that’s when we received the Torah. Okay. It’s important for that reason. But it’s also important because it’s the moment we sign on to the deal between us and God. This is the covenant moment. This is the moment of God’s revelation, the beginning of a real relationship with God, and it determines how we see ourselves in relation to God, our relation to the tradition, our relation to Torah, the deal we made with God, and this commitment that every Jew who is ever born or becomes part of the Jewish people in any way sees as their origin story. So you’re born into this moment, whether you were actually there or not. It’s as if you were there and you were part of the deal that happened. Okay, so I just wanted to say that.

  Dan Libenson: Okay, great. So here is the source sheet from Sefaria. And let me just start to read, and Benay, feel free to interrupt me if you have something to say in the middle. And I’ll also stop reading when I do.

  Benay Lappe: Okay.

  Dan Libenson: So the beginning is, it says, “The Torah says, and Moses brought forth the people out of the camp to meet God, and they stood at the foot of the mountain.” That’s from the book of Exodus, chapter 19. And that’s the usual translation, or the translation that you’ll see in most if not all translations in a Torah, is it says, “They stood at the foot of the mountain.” So a rabbi named Rabbi Avdimi bar Chama bar Chasa said, “The Jewish people actually stood beneath the mountain.” And I’m explaining here that the Hebrew word “betachtit,” which most translations translate as “at the foot of,” actually comes from the root tachat, or under. So you could–it seems obvious that of course it means that they stood at the foot of the mountain. But technically you could translate it as “they stood under the mountain.” And the Talmud here, Rav Avdimi bar Chama bar Chasa, is choosing to translate it that way. But “betachtit” means under.

  Benay Lappe: Let’s not forget that if you know Yiddish, your underside is your tuchus. That’s your tachat.

  Dan Libenson: And tuchus comes from the same root as tachat.

  Benay Lappe: Tachat.

  Dan Libenson: A lot of times in Yiddish, or in Ashkenazi pronunciation of Hebrew, what we pronounce today often as “t” is pronounced as “s.” And so tachat and tachas is the same word. And so your tachat is your underside or your butt. And that’s the root of this word. So they’re saying, “It’s not at the foot of, it’s actually under! Let’s not take the easy way out here.” They stood under the mountain. So what does it mean that they stood under the mountain? So Rav Avdimi bar Chama bar Chasa continues, he says, “And that means, the verse teaches that the Holy Blessed One overturned the mountain above the Jews like a tub,” or a barrel, we could translate it in different ways. And Benay and I have had long conversations about what it was, exactly, and why it matters. I think we don’t want to have that conversation now. But God picked up the mountain, turned it upside down, and held it over the people. And God said, “If you accept the Torah, very well. And if not, there will be your burial place.” Meaning that I’m going to drop it on you. If you don’t accept the Torah, I’m going to drop this mountain on you.

  Now, the reason I wanted to set the scene earlier and say that the Torah itself depicts this incredibly intense, scary scene with lightning and thunder and the loud voice of God that the people are so afraid of, is that this is a nice, this is a colorful image that God actually picks up the mountain and holds it over them. But this isn’t Rabbi Avdimi bar Chama bar Chasa making this up. This is a colorful way of describing exactly the scene that the Torah describes, which is a scene of great power and threat. So it’s like do you need the mafia boss to hold a gun to your head literally, and to say, “If you don’t give me the money, I’m going to shoot you”? Or is it obvious that if the big scary mafia boss comes and says, “Give me the money,” that the implication is, “Or I’m going to harm you.” So here he’s making literal, Rav Avdimi bar Chama bar Chasa is making literal what the Torah basically is telling us, which is there is a great power imbalance going on here. An incredibly powerful and intense God, on the one hand, telling you, “Here’s my offer to you. You guys want to do this, have this Torah?” And what, are you going to say no?

  Benay Lappe: But I want to point out that I’m not sure that that power imbalance is the only message that the Torah is giving us about what it was like. The Torah also portrays us as being very anxious and enthusiastic about accepting the Torah and meeting God. And the whole na’aseh v’nishmah. We’re portrayed as the people who were ready to accept the Torah. “We don’t care what it says. Give it to us, we’ll take it. Whatever it calls upon us to do, we’ll do.” And there are multiple stories interpreting that moment of us receiving the Torah with us being so… every other people refused the Torah. “What’s in it?” “Do not kill.” “Oh, no, we really love killing. We don’t want the Torah.” “What else is it?” And we said, “No, we’ll take it, we don’t care what’s in it. We want it, we want it.” So there’s a way that I think, I think you may be re-emphasizing or reading back into the story and lifting up that coercive element, which is not the story we tell about ourselves biblically, I think.

  Dan Libenson: Well, right. I mean, I agree with you, and I would also say, I would challenge our watchers, our listeners to go and actually read the story, because I think that there are two layers here. One is what does the story actually say, and the other is what has the traditional or what we perceive to be the traditional way of understanding that story been. And it’s clear that what you just said is absolutely true of the way that we have been taught that story. But the way that–we talked about last week, too, that we’ve been taught the story of the founding of Yavne, that Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai founded Yavne. But if you actually read the story, it’s pretty clear that he did not found Yavne. And similarly, I think that a lot of those ideas, saying, “Oh, we were so excited to receive the Torah,” are not really all that well borne out by the story that the Torah itself tells. They certainly are the way that we have been taught that story.

  And so many times, those of us–this is why I have also said that a lot of times, those of us who have a really good Jewish education are in the worst position. I mean, good Jewish education meaning what’s perceived to be a good Jewish education. We’re in the worst position to do some of this interpretive work, because we have been so colored by the way that we have learned the story that we almost can’t read it the way that it’s written. And so somebody coming to the story new and fresh–and we’ve talked a lot about the importance of early rabbis who didn’t come from a Jewish background, that they’re so important because they’re actually just reading and saying, “Wait a second, everything that you’re saying here, it’s not actually in the story. Tell me how - where are we getting this - This business that God went around and offered the Torah to everybody and only the Jews accepted it.” I remember when my son was in a Jewish day school, and he would come home with these stories about how heroic Abraham was, and everyone, and I would say, “Well, where did that story come from?” He says, “Well, it’s in the Torah.” And I would say, “It’s not in the Torah.” But he had been taught that it was in the Torah. Anyway. I’m not sure what’s actually in the Torah and what’s not. Meaning, we should look and debate and discuss.

  Benay Lappe: I want to throw in another layer, which I learned from Barry Wimpfheimer. And he brings out the fact that this very midrash, the idea that tachtit, under, that they stood under the mountain, actually means that they literally stood under it, that God held the mountain over their heads, and said, “Accept the Torah, and everything will be fine. And if you don’t, this will be your burial place.” That this very midrash is a complete retelling of the exact midrash that appeared several hundred years earlier in a collection called the Mekhilta, a tannaitic source, a source from about two, three hundred years before, which says that God held the mountain up before the Jews arrived, and they walked voluntarily under it to show their enthusiasm and commitment to Torah. The very same author of the midrash, that that was the original midrash. And so this is now a kind of reworking that you’re saying is actually in line with the biblical story itself, and not the reworking that we all accept as what the biblical moment was.

  Dan Libenson: Right. And one of the themes that I hope that folks participating in this start to do is to really try to track those movements of these stories that get interpreted and reinterpreted back to the way they were, and again. And that’s fine. I’m not suggesting that somebody was doing anything wrong. I think that’s how culture works and evolves, but it also potentially frees us to do what we need to do in our time.

  Benay Lappe: That’s right. It’s definitely a playing with our central mythic moment. And as you say, you can decide which was the original myth and which was the reworking. And if we have, maybe we have several layers of reworking here, and maybe the ultimate meta message–although we’re not done, even–is you can rework your myths.

  Dan Libenson: Right. So let’s go on. So that’s the scene. So the mountain is literally being held over their heads, but again, I want to focus people who think, “Well that’s obviously just a story that this rabbi made up, or that was from the Mechilta, and they reworked.” Okay, but still, even just read the scene that the Torah itself portrays, and it’s a scene that basically is a power imbalance. Where really, did the Jews really have an opportunity to say no? That seems not really. That’s what’s being portrayed here. And this is being portrayed in a colorful way, but I think so does the Torah.

  So Rav Avdimi bar Chama bar Chasa goes on, and he says that basically what that means–or sorry, Rav Avdimi bar Chama bar Chasa gives a story, and then another rabbi, Rav Acha bar Yaakov, comes in and says, “From here there is a substantial protest to the binding authority of the Torah.”

  Benay Lappe: Okay, now we have to sit back and digest this.

  Dan Libenson: Right. So here’s where I feel like I have a little bit of a leg to stand on as a former contract law professor.

  Benay Lappe: Exactly.

  Dan Libenson: Which I did in my previous career. And I always taught–contracts are the first few days of law school, and we talked about last week how really what the Talmud’s agenda is is to teach you how to think in a certain way. And this is an amazing example of that. And there are some basic principles of contract law in American contract law, and in every contract law, which include the principle that a contract has to be–in order for a contract to be binding, the contract has to be voluntary on the part of both parties. And there are other elements as well. They have to each be receiving a benefit from the contract. But even if both are receiving a benefit from the contract, and it wasn’t voluntary, then the contract is, generally speaking, not binding. And so what Rav Acha bar Yaakov is saying here when he says, so if this is true, if the mountain was being held over their heads, and God said, basically, ‘If you don’t accept it I’m going to kill you, literally,’ then the contract is not binding, because it was a contract under duress. That’s the legal terminology. A contract made under duress is not a binding contract. And if this contract is made under duress, then it’s not binding. We, in Judaism, tend to call a contract by another name–a covenant. And if the covenant was made under duress, even with God, even in this sacred… you could say, “Oh, there’s an exception when it’s God, et cetera,” but Rav Acha bar Yaakov doesn’t say that exception. He’s saying, “No, if it’s under duress then it’s not binding. That’s just basic principles.”

  Benay Lappe: Yeah. And I want to bring in Barry Wimpfheimer again, because he says really beautifully that what the rabbis are doing here is they’re shifting a theological moment into a legal moment. They’re taking a relational God experience and they’re turning it into straight-up contract law. And I think that’s really interesting. And not only do they do that. They then find it faulty, as anyone who knows law does. The Talmud knows that everyone who’s reading this text and hears Rabi Avdimi bar Chama bar Chasa’s original midrash, as soon as they hear that they immediately go to contract under duress. So the covenant is no good, Jewish law is not binding. And Rashi clarifies what we know even before we get to this objection, “Hey, that’s duress,” that at any point in the future from that moment, if anyone is called to judgement, “Hey, you didn’t follow the law.” If God ever says to you, “Hey, you didn’t do this, you didn’t do that,” they’ll have a defense. They’ll say, “The halacha wasn’t binding on me in the first place. This whole covenant, this whole system, was never binding on me. So I’m okay.”

  Dan Libenson: Right.

  Benay Lappe: That’s enormous. I mean, that’s-

  Dan Libenson: That’s enormous.

  Benay Lappe: -enormous.

  Dan Libenson: And I know that I keep saying this, but I really want to stress it for those who say, “But that’s just a midrash, that’s just a story,” is that there’s another principle in contract law, which is that if it’s directly duress, you say, “I’m going to kill you if you do it,” then it’s not binding. But there’s basically an equally substantial principle in contract law, including ancient contract law, that when there’s a severe power imbalance between the parties, and the duress was not explicit, that nevertheless there’s grounds to undo the contract. So even if you read–what I’m saying is that Rav Avdimi bar Chama bar Chasa is orienting us with a sort of extreme version, to say that this is a contract under–if this is a contract under duress, then it’s not binding. But now let’s actually read the Torah story, and what we see here is a contract between two vastly unequal parties, which is probably, under the same principles, also not binding. Even if you don’t buy Rav Avdimi bar Chama bar Chasa’s story, it’s still pretty much the same principle.

  Benay Lappe: And I want to sit back at this point and ask myself, “Okay, why would the rabbis be invested in retelling our covenant moment in such a way that undoes the obligation to follow Jewish law and to follow what they understood to be God’s will?” And for me, if you’re going to be radically playing with the tradition, and reworking it in ways that might have been unrecognizable to someone who actually received it at Mount Sinai, you might be invested in resetting that new system on a foundation which didn’t imply that you were obligated to some other system. Maybe the reason they were undoing the original covenant was to give them a little breathing room, a little space, that they’re retrojecting back into God’s mind, saying, “God actually gave us permission to play, because God knew that this was a contract under duress. God never could have held us responsible, and gave us this room to play.” It’s just a possibility.

  Dan Libenson: No, I totally agree with that. And this is going to come back around in our conversation, I think, a number of times. But a point hit me recently that I think is really important to underscore, which is that at the time that the Talmud was–certainly at the time that these early stories were composed, but even at the time of the redaction of the Talmud, the final editing of the Talmud in sixth, seventh century, around there–most Jews could not read, or certainly could not read in a very sophisticated way. So not too many Jews could read the Talmud at all. By the way, that was true for all of Jewish history until probably the last few decades, even. Not only was the Talmud translated into vernacular languages, but also with the advent of Sefaria and the internet, that now people can access it-

  Benay Lappe: And SVARA. And SVARA, let’s say. [laughs] 

  Dan Libenson: Well, and SVARA in terms of new ways of teaching people and of encouraging people to study. So there’s so many things-

  Benay Lappe: Sorry for the plug.

  Dan Libenson: No, I agree with that. I tend to focus on technology. I appreciate the focus on people.

  So my point is that very few people could read this. But everybody who could read it, everybody who could read at all… this is maybe a bit of an overstatement, but not a ton of an overstatement. Anybody who could read in a sophisticated enough way to read the Talmud–which is hard to read even today for people who are more knowledgeable, it’s a difficult slog–if you could read it, then you would understand it in a sophisticated way. So essentially, what’s going on here–but, by the way, this was not meant for the people. So the idea was that your average people were not reading this. Who was reading this was other rabbis. And so what’s going on here has to be understood as a conversation among an elite, among the rabbis, saying, “Here’s what’s really going on here.” Now what you end up telling the people, that might be something very different. It’s not–the Talmud here is not saying, “Hey, this is a sermon that you should all be giving in the synagogue.” The rabbis weren’t in synagogues in those days, whatever, that’s a whole nother story.

  So I think it’s important to understand that, within this particular group of rabbis, they were trying–why were they doing what you were asking. Why were they trying to establish this nonbinding nature of the Torah? And probably–we’re talking about the creative class during this period of crash, during this period of rebuilding. And they were saying, “At least among us creators here, we have a little bit more license than maybe you were educated to think that we did before you came to rabbinical school.” So I think sometimes we think in our time that going to rabbinical school is about telling people what the rules are. At least in that–I don’t think that’s true today, or shouldn’t be true today. But back then, it seems like going to a rabbinical school is, “Let’s tell you how it’s really working back here.”

  Benay Lappe: Yeah. And what I want to point out is the tragedy of modernity is that the Talmud is no longer taught in that way. The obvious moves toward radical reinvention of the tradition have been misread and misunderstood as a kind of pietism towards the biblical text. Where winks were meant to use the text in a playful way, they’ve been missed, so that the Talmud is now read–with the exception of at SVARA–in many yeshivot as a conservative document, not a radical document, and is not taught to the creative class, it’s taught to the conserving class. And I think these reads are being lost. I think you’re right that they were obvious originally, and to the original readers. Not only the creators of it, but the original readers of it. But the Talmud has done too good a job at camouflaging, just as all law does. But lawyers stay creative because their teachers teach them how to make the winks and the sleight of hands. But that’s-

  Dan Libenson: Sometimes they do. Sometimes they do.

  Benay Lappe: Yeah, okay.

  Dan Libenson: I think these are phenomena that are actually true across legal systems, across cultural systems, that…. And it’s something to think about, if we’re at a creative moment today in Jewish history, then we may want to think about how to follow some of the examples that the Talmud and the Torah give us, but we may also want to think about how to not make some of the same mistakes. Because it may be that it’s almost inevitable, maybe the mistakes are inevitable, because there’s just no way to provide a system like this and to make it impossible to screw it up in the future. But it’s a natural thing, especially when you put something in a text that… the conservative class will take it, and they’ll take it in a very conservative, in a very, in a way where instead of the text liberating our thought, which I think is what they were trying to do here, the text actually–and this is just the nature of text, that it has the capacity to anchor thought, and to unliberate it, and to bind it, and even if it was unintentional. So how do we solve that? I’m not sure. I hope it’s something that we’ll continue to talk about.

  In the interest of time, I think we should move on, just because we want to make sure that we complete this text in this episode, hopefully.

  Benay Lappe: Exactly.

  Dan Libenson: We can always pick it up a little bit next time. But having set the scene that everyone who could read this kind of understood what was going on here, let’s go on. Because I think what’s really, what happens next is really quite interesting as well. So…

  Benay Lappe: Okay. So before we jump into the text, just to recap, we now have a covenant that’s been undone. It’s been broken. The rabbis have established with this midrash, and the clarification of the implications of the midrash, that what happened at Mt. Sinai was, the Torah was received under duress, and therefore the Torah is not binding on us. We’re freed from it. Okay, good.

  Dan Libenson: Right. We continue. So we have Rav Acha bar Yaakov explaining that if this story is actually true, then the Torah is not binding. And now Rava steps in. Now, I think it’s important to note about Rava that “rava,” in Aramaic, it’s not somebody’s name. “Ahh,” if there’s an alef at the end of a word in Aramaic, often it’s the same as a hey at the beginning of the word in Hebrew, and it means “the.” And “rav” means rabbi. So “rava” means “the rabbi.” Meaning this man is so important that he doesn’t even need a name. He is the rabbi. The rabbi said. And it’s sort of like people who called the Lubavitcher Rebbe, called him “The Rebbe,” the Rebbe of Chabad. We don’t need to tell you which. Which Rebbe? The Rebbe! You know which one that is. 

  And this Rava was so important that he is known in the Talmud as the rabbi, and arguably he is the hero of the Talmud. He is the most important rabbi in the Talmud. Relatively late rabbi. Or middle time period of the Talmud. And kind of a really very significant figure that we’ll explore many times over the course of this session. But just keep in mind there’s a very important rabbi, steps in.

  Benay Lappe: And I’ll point out that he is sort of the rabbi saint of SVARA. He’s our hero because he was the guy who expanded the notion of svara, of moral intuition, which we use as the driving engine for all innovation. Okay, I’ll just leave it there.

  Dan Libenson: I think it’s valuable to note that he’s actually on the liberal side, in our terminology.

  Benay Lappe: Absolutely.

  Dan Libenson: Meaning, Rava is saying something that seems conservative–maybe it’s not. That’s another thing to point out. So here Rava steps in, and he says, “Okay, Rav Acha bar Yaakov, you’re right. If this is….” Let’s not actually say. Rava does not question the story. Rava basically seems to be accepting that this actually happened, this duress happened. And if the duress happened, Rav Acha bar Yaakov is right, that therefore the Torah is not binding. And Rava says, “Even so, even though it’s not binding, they again accepted it willingly in the time of Achashverosh,” which means in the Purim story, “as it is written,” in the Megillah, in the book of Esther, “The Jews ordained and took upon themselves.” In Hebrew that’s “kiyemu v’kiblu.” “They ordained and took upon themselves and upon their seed and upon all such as joined themselves unto them.” This is from Esther chapter nine verse twenty-seven. And he taught, Rava taught that what that means, when they said the Jews ordained and took upon themselves, is that the Jews ordained what they had already taken upon themselves at Sinai.

  Meaning that it’s what is called in contract law–also in American contract law, and in general in all contract systems–the term is ratification. Meaning that if there is a contract that was not binding, but at some later time when we do have equal power, when there’s no more duress, and I voluntarily–and other terms of the contract are met, such as that both parties did receive a benefit, or what’s called in contract law consideration–then the person who was under duress can come back later and say, “Yes, I was under duress when I made the contract, but I now want that contract, and I’m now not under duress, so I want to say that the contract that I made when I was under duress is now binding.” And that is called a ratification. And all contract systems say a ratification is kosher. If a contract is ratified, then now it is binding. So what Rava is basically saying is, “You’re right. It wasn’t binding back then. Now it’s binding. If the-”

  Benay Lappe: Thousand years later. Let’s just point out.

  Dan Libenson: No, the Torah is given probably, I mean, grossly in the year 1200 BCE. The Esther story takes place, I don’t know, sometime around, let’s say, 500 BCE, or something like that. So in the realm of 700 years later, 1,000 later, whatever, it’s binding. So I feel bad for the Jews who lived 700 years or 1,000 years with all these laws that turned out, they thought they had to do these things or they were going to be punished, and it turned out it was completely not binding. They could have done whatever they want.

  Benay Lappe: It turned out that they did. It turned out that those guys actually mess with it for a thousand years, and it was like, “Great. We had a lot of freedom to do that. We had a carte blanche to do whatever we wanted. Now, now that we’ve got it down, now we’ll say it’s binding again.” Okay, now let’s look, first of all, let’s point out the rather ridiculous midrash that Rava is using, which had to be obvious to everyone around him, to establish this ratification. Go ahead.

  Dan Libenson: Let’s do that, and so then we can have a conversation for the rest of the time. So let’s go on, because I–we don’t hide the ball here, and so we are giving you, on the source sheet, the source from the book of Esther that is being cited here. And by the way, I would encourage you, strongly encourage you, that whenever you read a source cited in the Talmud, a Torah source, that you should go back and read the original source, and you’ll find some very interesting things there. Which, including that it often does not actually say what they say it says. And we’re going to encounter that again next week when we study the story of the oven of Achnai.

  So going to the source in the book of Esther chapter nine, let’s read it in context, because it does come from verse–the words cited come from verse twenty-seven, but we’re going to read twenty-six to twenty-eight so that we get the context. So this is at the end of the whole Esther story, where Queen Esther saves the Jews, et cetera. And everybody’s happy. And they say, “And for that reason that this all worked out, these days were named Purim, after pur, which means a lottery. In view, then, of all the instructions in the said letter,” telling people what to do, that Mordechai and Esther sent, “And of what they had experienced in the matter and what had befallen them, the Jews ordained and took upon themselves,” there’s the quote, “and upon their seed, and upon all the joined unto them to observe these two days in the manner prescribed at the proper time each year. Consequently, these days are recalled and observed in every generation by every family, every province, and every city, and these days of Purim shall never cease among the Jews and the memory of them shall never perish among their descendants.”

  So the point to be made here is that the when they quoted, when Rava–again, remind you, the greatest rabbi in the history of the Talmud–said, “Ah, yeah, but there was a ratification because the Jews ordained and took upon themselves in the days of Achashverosh in the Purim story,” and you actually read the source, what they ordained and took upon themselves was Purim! They ordained and took upon themselves that we’re going to celebrate Purim every year! It doesn’t say anything there about that they ordained and took upon themselves the whole Torah. Now, you could come up with some very strange interpretation to say how by observing Purim, somehow they also… right, but it’s very much of a stretch, and there’s an equally plausible interpretation that this is a quote taken out of context.

  Benay Lappe: Right. And let’s also remember that I don’t think the rabbis were really under any impression that the Purim story ever happened. Okay, so if the Purim story never happened, and they knew it never happened, to root the reestablishment, the ratification of the covenant, and the bindingness of Torah upon us, in a story that never happened is like saying, “Okay, okay. Torah was never binding on us from Mount Sinai, but it was because in the Flintstones, or because in the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, when this dwarf said to that dwarf… that’s why it’s binding.” I mean, it’s just laughable.

  Dan Libenson: But then they don’t even quote- it’s a misquotation from the Flintstones-

  Benay Lappe: A misquotation! Right, of the dwarves. It’s both a ratification and a re-undoing. It’s saying, “Okay, everything’s nice, we’re tying it up. And by the way, I hope it’s obvious to you that it’s still wide open.”

  Dan Libenson: Right. And again, I wanted to point out–that’s why I want to point out to people that everybody who could read at this time knew this, because everybody who could read knew or could quickly check the Purim Megillah, and to see what the context was here. And they weren’t your casual readers who were picking this up and going, “Hmm, interesting,” walking away like a lot of people might today, because they can read the Talmud quote but they don’t necessarily know the Torah so well that they realize that there’s a misquote here, or whatever. So at that time, everybody who could read this knew this, is what I want to put out there as a, more than a hypothesis, as a premise. So nothing is being hidden here from people at that time. Maybe–we have learned it in a way that is hidden, because we’re not teaching it the way that they taught it back then. But none of this is hidden. So if you’re a rabbi hanging out in rabbinical school at this time, what you have just learned, if you studied this text, is that the Torah is not binding. Not necessarily because it was held over our heads, but because of the actual scene depicted in the Torah of the fear and everything. So the Torah is not binding, but we’re going to say that it’s binding based on this misquotation of a story that probably never happened. So the implication is, “Guys, it’s really not binding.” That’s what you’re picking up in rabbinical school in the seventh century. And the question is, what are they doing? What are they doing?

  Benay Lappe: Well, for me it’s a giant declaration that we are in charge of what the content of our tradition is. And I want to bring Yitz in here, because Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, also one of my teachers, has a beautiful understanding of this story, which is that after destruction, after the original, the destruction of the Second Temple, the rabbis knew that miracles weren’t going to happen anymore. Actually, they didn’t think miracles were going to happen–they just decided they were no longer going to heed miracles. And we’re going to get to this in our story next week. But they lived in a world where God hadn’t stepped in to save the Temple, and they knew that was going to be the reality in the future. They were no longer going to understand themselves as living in a world where miracles were going to save them, and they realized that their contract was with a God who was this overpowering, over-awing, miracle-making God. And if we were going to live in a world where God wasn’t going to do that, we were going to need to redo a covenant with a God who wasn’t going to do that anymore.

  And Yitz locates that redoing in Esther. He understands that it’s in Esther, because in the Esther story God never appears, and that’s when Jews stand up and say, “We better take care of ourselves.” And that’s why that’s the moment that should be our new myth. Our new myth is we have a contract with a god that wants us to step up as senior partner. And I think the question for us theologically might be, what kind of god do we believe in now, and what kind of myth story do we need to retell to ground us in that kind of god?

  Dan Libenson: So first of all, I want to reinforce. I love the idea that, which I hadn’t seen. And by the way, I should note to our folks that you asked me last night do I want to reread this stuff by Yitz, and I was like, “No, I like to come to these texts fresh.” That’s the difference–I’m glad that you’re doing research. By the way, I think that both are very laudable, and I want to encourage and model that you can come to texts and just read them and have an opinion, and that’s not–you get to also know, do research. I’m just saying that they’re all valid, and folks should just feel free to read texts and think about them.

  But I love what, among other things, what you’re saying about what Yitz Greenberg’s take on this is, is that he’s saying, he’s giving another level. He’s saying, “Okay, we can undo this situation. We can kind of do the wink by misquoting some TV show, whether it’s the Flintstones or the Simpsons or the Seven Dwarfs. We’re going to pick the one to misquote that actually has another layer of resonance here-

  Benay Lappe: That’s right. 

  Dan Libenson: And so you’re going to say, “Why did they misquote this book rather than misquoting that book?” Because we could have misquoted lots of different books and equally said it was ratified when something happened in the book of Daniel when he came out of the lion’s den. That was a ratification. Whatever. And they said, “No, Esther, because Esther is the one that doesn’t portray God directly,” et cetera.

  Beyond the theological, I want to explore also the implications for the time in which we find ourselves, because it’s not only the COVID-19 time, although as we’ve discussed, that potentially there’s a way to see the situation that we’re now in, post-COVID-19, as a version of a destruction of the Temple, where there is some cataclysm that we’ve undergone, and that we’re all here now in this transitional period, which some of us, you and I included, have been saying for a long time that we are in this period without maybe the cataclysm. And so it’s not just about a matter for the next couple of months, it's maybe using what we’re experiencing in the current period to refocus us on, “Hey guys, we’ve been actually out here in the wilderness for a century. Let’s really realize where we are.”

  But in that period, I think that what I get out of this text is where you’ve been saying that you believe that the Talmud is a message being sent forward 2,000 years from the rabbis to us, a kind of a time capsule, where they’re saying to us, “We experienced a destruction, a crash of the Judaism that we knew. And we responded not by trying to build another Temple, or somehow figure out how to rebuild that Judaism again after the cataclysm, but rather by understanding that the time had come to build a new Judaism.” And I–by the way, I, my take now, it happens to be that we’re reading the book of Leviticus now in the Torah reading cycle, and all of a sudden I’m seeing the book of Leviticus with new eyes, because I’m seeing it also as a, from the perspective of the people that are hearing about all these sacrifices that you’re supposed to bring, and these priests, we never knew we had priests before, and all this stuff. It’s like a new Judaism that’s being told to these people who have just left Egypt, and God is saying, “Hey, there’s a whole new way to be Jewish now. You thought it was Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob–no, it’s all now about priests and sacrifices.” And that’s what was going on in the Talmud. 

  And if we’re in a position of that same kind of cataclysm now, whether the cataclysm is COVID-19 or the Enlightenment and the emancipation, or whatever it might be, that if we read a text like this, and we understand that here the rabbis are saying something very bold, which is they’re saying that even if we thought that, or accepted the idea that God gave the Torah, even if that, but we can find ways to say that it’s not binding, and therefore we’re not obligated to it, and we might say that we are with a wink. And that really tells all of us to know that maybe we’ll tell the people that we’re obligated to it, but really we can do a totally new thing, and just call it the oral Torah. And if they are as bold as that, then I think that the message that they’re sending us is, “You guys please do that to us. When the time comes-”

  Benay Lappe: That’s right. Yeah.

  Dan Libenson: “-please do that to us. If we can do it to God, you can do it to us.” So if we’re at a time where we now have to undo the Judaism that the rabbis built, they wanted that! And they, and that’s why I’m emphasizing so much that everybody then could read it, because now that we can all read it…. And another thing that Yitz Greenberg talks about is in the transition to this next era that is a massively expanded creative class. And so if we can all now read it, then we should accept that we’re reading it the way they read it, and that we can do this, and we can be bold about it.

  Benay Lappe: I agree completely, and you characterized my approach much better than I do, because you’re precisely right. When I’m talking about reworking the tradition, I’m not talking about reworking the biblical tradition. I’m talking about reworking the tradition that they created from their reworking of the biblical and proto-rabbinic tradition. I agree completely. And this is them saying, “Stand on our shoulders, and here are the techniques. We did it. It will be traditional when you do it too, and we know you’re going to rework what we gave you. What’s most traditional about our tradition is how to change it.”

  Dan Libenson: Right. For those conservative voices like you talked about, the folks who look at a text, and have been taught to look at a text, in the most conservative reading, that that is something that texts lend themselves to do. But another thing that texts lend themselves to do is the not-conservative reading. And again, this, any American lawyers out there I think understand. If you’ve taken a constitutional law class, you’ve experienced this with the American constitution. And if you’ve taken a statutory interpretation class, you’ve experienced this with statutory interpretation. And if you’ve taken any law school class, you’ve experienced this in a certain way. That there are all kinds of ways to look at a text, and sometimes it’s looking at the words of the text, and imagining that this text is trying to anchor us in a very particular view of what the law is, and we just should understand what it meant, and we should interpret it that way. But some texts are trying to anchor us in a certain way of thinking about the purpose of the law, or the purpose of what this is all about, and to say that there’s going to come a time when we don’t know the examples anymore, it’s too far away. And you can only imagine that 2,000 years ago, they couldn’t know what was going on in our time. They knew that they couldn’t know.

  And so if you’re a responsible person writing a constitution, which I want to believe that they were, and the redactors of the Torah were, that you put in there that kind of a message. And so anyone who’s reading that message in there, it was put there. It’s meant to be there. And this is a time for us to take that seriously and ask ourselves, “So what does that mean for us?”

  Benay Lappe: Exactly. Exactly.

  Dan Libenson: We’re out of time. So if you want to–if you have a closing thought, I’d love to get it, and if not we’ll just say we’ll be back next week.

  Benay Lappe: I just want to throw out that Moshe Halbertal, who is a critical Talmud scholar today, and a great Talmud scholar associated with the Hartman Institute in Israel, calls that conservative read anti-traditional. So that he names that what is most traditional is the willingness to radically retell the stories we received so that they work better at creating the kind of person the entire tradition was designed to create, and to add our insights into aspects of this personhood that the tradition never even glimpsed.

  Dan Libenson: It’s beautiful, and I think that it underscores the name of your SVARA, your yeshiva. You call it “a traditionally radical yeshiva,” and that’s not meant to say that it’s an oxymoron, it’s meant to say that radical is the tradition.

  Benay Lappe: That’s right.

  Dan Libenson: So I think that’s a great place to stop. I just want to remind folks that we’ll be back next week and we’ll look at the story of the oven of Achnai. If you’ve heard it before, I still think you’re probably going to get some new things from that, so that’s going to be great. And then the following week we’re going to be here with Professor David Kraemer from the Jewish Theological Seminary, who is Benay’s original Talmud teacher. So that’s going to be an amazing reunion that I can’t wait to be a fly on the wall for.

  Benay Lappe: [laughs] I’m looking forward to it. I can’t wait.

  Dan Libenson: All right. Thanks everyone for being here

  Benay Lappe: Thanks so much. Bye.

  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.

  Dan Libenson: Thanks so much for joining our chevruta today! We hope you’ve enjoyed learning with us… and with the Talmud. You can find links to the source sheets for all episodes in the show notes and on our website at oraltalmud.com. Your support helps keep Oral Talmud going. You can find a link on the website to contribute. 

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