The Oral Talmud: Episode 5 - Excommunicating Dissent
SHOW NOTES
“Is it inevitable and necessary to get the Rabbi Eliezers out of the room? Or is part of the story saying, ‘You actually need to keep him in the room. We understand that unity or progress or getting everybody rowing in the same direction is important, but you don’t take people out of the room.’” - 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 Dan & Benay pick up where they left off in the story of The Oven of Akhnai, reading the part of the story that is often neglected: the fallout from excommunicating Rabbi Eliezer. What morals did the sages intend for us to take from the narrative? What can each character symbolize when we map their stances and choices on to conflict in our present day? How should we respond to hurt and fracturing of community?
This week’s text: The Excommunication of Rabbi Eliezer (Bava Metzia 59a-b
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/donate.
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DAN: This is The Oral Talmud - Episode 5: Excommunicating Dissent. 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.
In this episode, we pick up where we left off before our interview with David Kraemer last week, where we were able to ask him some of our foundational questions about how and why and for whom the Talmud was brought together. If you’re wondering about any of those things, we suggest you go back and listen to last week’s episode.
But as I said, this week we’re back to the story known as The Oven of Akhnai and jumping into its second act. While the first part of the story, which we discussed in Episode 3, is better known, because it’s used to illustrate a foundational shift in human agency over Divine Revelation, the second part of this story is much less well known, in part because it shows that the situation may not be so simple. Even if you are familiar with the story of the excommunication of Rabbi Eliezer and the ensuing fallout, we hope that by learning with us, you’ll shake up what you think you know a bit and re-evaluate the lessons of the Oven of Achnai story as a whole, and the character of its characters. If the first part of this legend felt empowering, this second part, in its tragedy, asks us to be careful about how we innovate, how we wield our authority, and how we deal with disagreement.
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. If you like, 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 am here with Benay Lappe for the… I believe it is the fifth episode of this show, The Oral Talmud. Benay, great to be back with you.
Benay Lappe: So great to be back. Thank you so much.
Dan Libenson: So last week, we had our first guest, Professor David Kraemer of the Jewish Theological Seminary. And I just want to give everybody an update, I mean, I think we said it last time, but our second guest will be next week, Professor Barry Wimpfheimer of Northwestern University, who’s the author of the competing history of the Talmud that came out last year called The Talmud: A Biography. So I think it’s a good day for Talmud, Benay, when there are two competing histories of the Talmud coming out in the same year that are both meant for at least a somewhat popular audience, and it’s an exciting time.
So this is our alternative every-other-week show where we continue to explore these stories that are, I think.… We’ve chosen as these fundamental stories about the Talmud that I think are fundamental in the times in which we live, meaning this century, but even more so in this particular time in which we’re living, this coronavirus period. So just a little word of introduction, and then I’ll turn it over to you, Benay, that we studied last time the famous story of the oven of Achnai, which you’re going to recap. So anybody who wasn’t there last week are going to get a brief recap of that story. And today we’re going to look at the continuation of the story. This is found in the tractate called Bava Metzia, page 59b. And there is a Sefaria source sheet which is linked to on the website for this show, which is www.jewishLIVE.org/oraltalmud, and you can find the link to the Sefaria source sheet there. And in just a moment, it will also be in the description on Facebook, and so you can follow along with the text. You would scroll all the way down the source sheet, because we’re adding each new show’s text at the bottom.
So Benay, let’s start with a little recap. Actually, I just want to make one more bit of framing, that as we’re talking about this, one of the things that you and I have been talking about over the course of the week, or the two weeks, in terms of how we’re thinking about this text, is that we’re starting to feel like the characters of the rabbis in these stories matter a lot. Both in terms of thinking about them as historical figures, but also thinking about them as figures of myth, where maybe later people, hundreds of years later, were recasting them in certain ways to tell certain elements of the stories through these characters. And that’s a lens that we’re going to bring in today even more powerfully than we have before. And it’s just one thing that I wanted to say in terms of a framing before I turned it over to you for some framing and recap.
Benay Lappe: Okay, that sounds great. And my word or two of preface before framing is that it’s so difficult to talk about these stories. It’s a little bit like playing three-dimensional chess. Any time you talk about this story on one level, you’re not talking about it on another level that exists at the same time. So the framing that I’m about to give is really the most surface-level framing of the surface content of the text. And I think, like all texts in the Talmud, they’re not primarily there to convey their surface content, but rather meta messages.
But regardless, here’s the surface content. We’re in the tractate of Bava Metzia, which is generally about business law. And all of a sudden, the text says, “You know what? Just as there is wronging in business dealings–you can cheat someone in your buying and selling–so too can you wrong someone merely with words. And that wronging is just as real, and not only just as harmful but even more harmful.” And it gives a number of examples, like you shouldn’t go into a store and ask the price of an item from the shopkeeper if you have no intention of buying it. It unnecessarily raises the shopkeeper’s hopes. And it gives a number of examples of ways that we can use words to harm.
And the gemara, the explicating, expansive, challenging, complicating text that existed for four hundred years, five hundred years or so, after this first level of Mishnah, then finally reaches the statement that ever since the destruction of the Temple, the gates of heaven have been closed. And our access to God only exists through one channel, and that is through crying out to God after having been pained by someone harming us with words.
Okay, so that’s kind of the claim, after which follows this story. And the story begins with a legal discussion about a particular–about the question of whether an oven, which in their time was a clay, beehive-shaped thing that lived outdoors, was susceptible to ritual impurity or not, knowing that ritual impurity is only even possible for an item that is a vessel that is whole. Well what if, they ask, you take a vessel that was whole, and you chop it up in to pieces, and then you glue it back together? Is this now a whole item susceptible to ritual impurity, or not? That’s kind of the driving question, which is not completely relevant to the story, but it drives the action forward. And then we have this dispute between Rabi Eliezer and the other sages. And Rabi Eliezer tries to convince the other sages that such an oven is actually impervious to impurity, and no matter how many dead creepy crawlies crawl into your oven and land on top of your food, you can still eat your food because your oven’s not going to be impure, your food’s not going to be impure. And this is an impurity-proof oven. I’m sure it sold really well.
Okay, so Rabi Eliezer brings all the arguments, all the rational arguments in the world, to prove to his colleagues around the table in the beit midrash that such an oven is, in fact, impervious to impurity, and they dismiss all of his arguments. Finally he resorts to supernatural proofs. “If I’m right, let God show you by this miracle that I’m about to invoke.” And in fact, he invokes all these miracles, and the rabbis deflect his proofs by saying, “No, we don’t take proofs from miracles.” No one denies that the miracles happen, but they’re now denying miracles, or God’s voice in the matter, as an inadmissible source of legitimate proof. And this act of our story culminates in the moment when Rabi Eliezer invokes God Himself, and God comes down and says, “What’s your problem with Rabi Eliezer? He’s right. He’s not only right here. Every time he makes a decision, he’s right. He’s conveying my will. So what’s the problem here?” And Rabi Yehoshua stands up, and he says, “God, sit down. You gave us the Torah. You told us it’s not in heaven, and we should do with it what we want,” which is his interpretation of what God said, “It’s not in heaven,” which is not at all what “it’s not in heaven” meant. “And you told us to go with the majority. We’re the majority. You and Rabi Eliezer are in the minority.” PS, he’s misquoting a verse from the Torah that says, actually, don’t go with the majority. And we get the postscript at this point in the story that says God smiled and was like, “Nice one, nice one.”
So we seem, the rabbis seem to have conjured a God who now approves of being cut out of the equation. And at this point in the story, we have the shift. It’s a snapshot of the shift in Jewish history from us following what God wants us to do to us saying, “You know what? Thanks, God, your job is over. We’re now stepping up to the plate.” Okay, that’s where we enter our story today.
Dan Libenson: Okay. And the one thing that I want to note from our conversation last time, which I think is really important, is that we have–we started exploring this idea that if the rabbis of the Talmud are saying that even if you hear the voice of God–meaning the voice that in the Torah is definitive, in the previous form of Judaism is definitive–that voice that says, “I myself am telling you what the truth is.” That there comes a time when we say, like you said, “Sit down. Thanks but no thanks. We’re ready for something else.” And that if we transpose that onto the rabbis’ own Judaism, that the version of the voice of God is the person who says, “But I looked it up in the book, and it says exactly what the halacha is. What to do. It says it right here in the book!” And we now, here in the twenty-first century, on the cusp of the third era of Judaism, coronavirus, whatever we want to call it, that we might say, “Well, thanks very much. I know that that’s what the halacha says. I know that that’s what the old way said was the right way. But there’s a reason why that’s not the right way anymore. And I’m not hiding that, I’m not saying, ‘Oh, I can explain to you a way why it’s wrong.’ No, no, I acknowledge that this is the voice of the past, and it’s telling us that the right decision is the opposite of what we’re doing. And we’re going to say, ‘Sorry, we don’t listen to that anymore.’”
And the reaction of God is, “My children, you got me,” and smiled. The reaction of these rabbis who wrote this story ostensibly to, under the right circumstances, what we might do would be to smile and say, “You got me.” Or, it’s even not so much “you got me.” It’s, “My children have overcome me. My children,” I mean, “nitzchuni banai, nitzchuni banai,” the Hebrew, you could translate it as, “My children have defeated me.” That’s how it’s usually. But it’s interesting to translate it a little bit like, “My children have overcome me,” or have advanced beyond me. There are ways that we might translate that in ways that say it’s not about a fight, it’s about a progression, it’s about my children have grown up. My children have, right… and so….
And I would also remind folks, I don’t think we talked about this two weeks ago, but we talked about it a month or two ago, when you were on the Judaism Unbound podcast where we were recording this pre-Passover episode. And we talked about that maybe there’s–there’s certain traditions like Shabbat that we have weekly, and there’s certain traditions, like Passover, that we have annually. And maybe there’s certain traditions, like remaking Judaism, that we have every two thousand years. And it’s a tradition! And we had it two thousand years ago, or 1,500 years ago, and they had it 1,500 years before that. And in those times, those are the times when it’s appropriate to have a situation like this, where we even hear, and we acknowledge that we hear, the voice of the past, and we choose not to do it. And the reaction is, “My children have grown up.” And it’s appropriate. I think this is a dangerous text, because if you use it all the time, it’s dangerous, and maybe not good. It’s chaotic, it’s–sometimes society needs to be stable. It’s destabilizing.
Benay Lappe: It’s destabilizing in a good way, and as you say, it’s destabilizing in a very scary way. It was my own teacher David Kraemer, who we had on last week, who pointed out how much this text is–this text is schlepped out all the time to say, “We can do anything we want. You see, rabbis, look what they did, therefore we’re kal vachomer to them. If they can do it, so can we.” And it’s really a text of terror, to use Phyllis Trible’s term. It’s a little bit scary to know that you can kick God out of the equation, and whatever you say goes. There’s a heavy responsibility and a danger and a scariness. And I think the second part of this story is really about the risk and the danger. What’s at stake, and what do we need to watch out for when we do act the way the first part of the story suggests we might.
Dan Libenson: Right. So let’s go into the text. I also want to acknowledge, Benay, because you, as my teacher, I both have the utmost respect for your feelings, and at the same time, I am a little bit doing the “I’m not listening to you” part. Because I know it causes you some pain to read the text the way that I wanted to, which is quickly, with no, not lingering over every word, and not in the original. And I want to say that I appreciate your take on the situation.
Benay Lappe: That, too, is traditional.
Dan Libenson: Right. So let’s look at it. This is the part of the text that comes immediately after the story. Immediately after the story is that basically Rabbi Eliezer has been defeated, basically, even though he brought the voice of God in, and the rabbis rule against him. And they basically say that the thing that he wanted to say was pure is impure. And then there’s this whole story about how did God react, God laughed, smiled, and said, “My children have deceived me, overcome me.” And this is what comes next.
And the Talmud says: “It was said on that day, or that very same day, the sages”–the same day that this all happened–“that very same day, the sages brought all the ‘ritually purified’”–in quotes–the things that Rabbi Eliezer said were ritually impure, but they actually weren’t, according to this ruling, “And burned them in a fire, and they reached a consensus about him and blessed him.” Which is a euphemism for they excommunicated him. I want to stop there.
Benay Lappe: Yeah, let’s stop there for a second. Because to deny the validity of everything that Rabi Eliezer declares to be one way is a very big action. That’s a big thing to do, to… I don’t know if I’m overly getting drashy-drashy here, but they’re basically overturning Rabi Eliezer’s word, kicking him along with God out of the conversation, and overturning his word. They’re basically saying, “Everything you did is invalid,” and they essentially excommunicate him. They banish him, which is a–they put him in a halachic category of, “You’re out of the conversation here.” It’s a big move.
Dan Libenson: Yeah. And it seems harsh. I mean, that’s the piece. It seems very very harsh. And that’s where I start. I mean–because I have–there are two ways that I’m reading Rabbi Eliezer, and this is part of what I wanted to discuss. This is why I framed it a little bit about the characters. Because this one is really–this is a very human story, what we’ve just read and what we’re going to read. That a man who made a mistake... I mean, maybe he didn’t even make a mistake. He was deemed by his colleagues to have been mistaken. But it was a legitimate point of view, for sure.
Benay Lappe: Not only legitimate! God says he’s right. It was the right with capital–he was right.
Dan Libenson: Right, he was right. There’s an important–I’m sure that we’ll study it at some point–but there’s an important story, it’s not a story, there’s an important, I don’t know what you would call it exactly, in the Talmud, where it explains why the law is always decided according to Hillel and not Shammai. The bottom line of it is, or part of the bottom line, is that they were both right. They were both the word of God. But there’s a reason why the law is decided according to Hillel. Okay, that’s fine. You want to decide the law according to one way for a certain reason. But it doesn’t say that Shammai was excommunicated. Didn’t say that Shammai, everything that Shammai declared was pure was burned in a fire. I mean, this is basically taking somebody and saying, “You didn’t make a mistake. God agreed with you, but we’ve decided to move in a different direction. So we’re taking basically everything that you’ve ever created, and we are burning it. We are stamp, we are getting completely rid of it.”
Benay Lappe: Yeah. And the traditional read of the story is that they did that in front of him. They did it right in front of him. Like they rubbed his nose in it.
Dan Libenson: Right. And not only that, but you’re out! You’re out–and this is a great man. I have a bias because I was the translator, but there’s a novel called The Orchard by Yochi Brandes which I think does an amazing job of humanizing the rabbis. Actually, for me, it changed my orientation completely towards the Talmud, because I was finally able to track these rabbis. When I was reading it before, they were just names, and I wouldn’t even realize that it was the same Rabi Eliezer that said this and that said that. And that story helped me put it all together.
And Rabbi Eliezer is just a tragic figure, because he’s actually a great figure. And he’s just completely excommunicated, shunned. And it just seems so tragic in the story. And then in real life, when you read a story like this, which I don’t think I was fully aware of until I started working on that. Everybody knows the first part of the story. It tends not to be trotted out, this latter part of the story. So it’s just shocking that–I mean, to the extent that I knew it, I knew that he was excommunicated. But the idea that they burned everything that he, they burned his life work, basically–it’s shocking.
Benay Lappe: This lower form of excommunication called nidui, this banishment, means you can’t come–he couldn’t teach anymore, his students couldn’t come close to him. It was a very emotional and physical and very real isolation of him.
Dan Libenson: He couldn’t even change his mind and say, “Okay, now I want back in.” He was out. He was thrown out of the whole project.
Now, here’s what I want to put on the table about who Rabbi Eliezer is, and who are the other characters. Because initially, my thought about Rabbi Eliezer–and you and I talked about this, I think largely off the air–but I was saying that Rabbi Eliezer is not the conservative intransigent, the person–he’s not a priest. He’s not a Sadducee, meaning a supporter of the priests. He is one of the rabbis. He’s, in fact, one of the two great students of the perhaps founder of rabbinic Judaism, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai. And he’s like Pete Buttigieg in the sense that he’s a Democrat, but he’s a more conservative kind of a Democrat, as opposed to Bernie Sanders, who’s also sort of a Democrat in the more liberally kind of a Democrat. So it’s kind of like… as opposed to George W. Bush or Dick Cheney or someone who is a Republican. It’s not that Rabi Eliezer is a conservative. He’s just a conservative-leaning liberal, so to speak.
Benay Lappe: He’s a conservative radical. He’s a radical with a different approach, actually. And I think part of his radicalness is he has literal reads which allow him to be more lenient than you could imagine. What he does is show the degree to which staying very close to a simple read of the text actually allows you more flexibility than you would imagine, a flexibility which you actually don’t need to depart from the text to do. Anyway. He’s just got a different radical approach.
Dan Libenson: Right. So one thing to point out about this, because I think that this rings true to me, and I don’t know that it’s happened yet in the world of what we call Jewish innovation, but it could happen. And I think that a story like this says that it’s likely to happen. Where at some future point, you start to get the internal fighting, and you say what is the–I mean, look, this happened in the American revolution. There were tremendous fights. I mean, Hamilton is about this. The show Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson versus Alexander Hamilton. Actually, that’s a pretty good mapping onto this, because Thomas Jefferson is Rabbi Joshua, Rabbi Yehoshua, and Alexander Hamilton is Rabi Eliezer. He’s the more conservative revolutionary. And the whole point of Hamilton, or one of the points of Hamilton, is this is what happens. We’re first all together fighting the British, and then when that’s over, we start to fight amongst ourselves. And that may just be human nature. And the question is kind of, okay, if we knew that that was going to happen, does that mean that we shouldn’t have had the revolution? Meaning that at the end of the day, Hamilton says, “I regret, I should have been a Tory, I should have stopped this whole revolution, because the truth is is that after it happened it went Thomas Jefferson’s way.” Or does Hamilton say–which I think is what we think Hamilton says–“Well, it was good that we got away from England, but at the end of the day it didn’t turn out to be exactly my vision.” Some version of nitzchuni banai.
Benay Lappe: Yeah!
Dan Libenson: Nitzchuni chaverai.
Benay Lappe: I love that!
Dan Libenson: My friends defeated me. So that’s one way to look at it. And I think it would be valuable–I don’t want to name names on this show, but I think it would be valuable for folks out there listening to map this on to various characters in our day, and to think about what might happen in the future, what could happen in the present to avoid that future. If internal fighting is the usual, then maybe there’s something that we can do now, in our early Yavne days, before that can come.
Benay Lappe: I think one of the questions of this text that is left unanswered is, is it inevitable and necessary to get the Rabbi Eliezers out of the room? Or is part of the story saying, “You actually need to keep him in the room. Yeah, we understand that unity or progress or getting everybody rowing in the same direction is important, but you don’t take people out of the room.” Or actually you do need to. I’m not sure , but I think that’s one of the questions of the text.
Dan Libenson: Well, and I think that will connect very well to what I believe is the next text that we’re going to do in two weeks, which has to do also with who’s in the room and who’s not in the room. So that’s going to be a great connection.
There’s another way that I want to potentially look at Rabi Eliezer, but I think it will make sense more in the next part. So maybe let’s move forward a little bit in the text. So they excommunicate Rabi Eliezer, and then they said, “Who will go and inform him?” All the rabbis are saying, “Who among us will go and tell him the bad news?”
Benay Lappe: Tova Hartman does an amazing analysis of this story. One of the things she points out is she’s like, “They’re sheepish.” It’s the next morning, and they’re confident they did the right thing, but they’re like, “Uh-oh, who’s going to.…” They have a certain ambivalence and maybe shame or fear about, “How are we going to do this. There really isn’t a good way to do what we think is right. We think we did the right thing.” But the emotion behind the “who’s going to tell them,” I think, is thicker than it even appears.
Dan Libenson: I also want to connect that to something that you talked about a lot when we were studying a few weeks ago–I think on our first episode, when we were talking about the story of Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai and the whole idea that he saves Yavne but not Jerusalem, and that he basically creates a new Judaism, and on his deathbed he has questions, he wonders whether he did the right thing. And there’s a version of that here. They just, in a way, killed somebody, and now they’re having some thoughts. Maybe we went a little too far. Or maybe we did the right thing, but we still do have an ethical obligation to him. He’s our teacher, he’s our friend, but man, that’s tough.
And so Rabbi Akiva says to them, “I will go, lest someone unsuitable go and inform him, and he would end up destroying the entire-”
Benay Lappe: Okay, let’s stop here for a minute. Oh my God! This line is so beautiful.
Dan Libenson: But wait. Before we go to that line, I think, I just want to make sure–Rabbi Akiva–just to point out two things about Rabbi Akiva going. Actually, there’s three things. One is that he was Rabbi Eliezer’s student.
Benay Lappe: His main student.
Dan Libenson: He was also Rabbi Joshua’s student. His main student, right. Number two, the way that we think about Rabbi Akiva, he’s even more progressive than Rabbi Joshua. He’s even more–he’s the most creative, the most, let’s say, unbound of the rabbis. Not of all the rabbis ever, but in this group of rabbis. And so the most radical–it’s Bernie Sanders going to tell the bad news to Pete Buttigieg.
Benay Lappe: I think it’s really interesting that Rabbi Akiva is so opposite Rabi Eliezer in his radicalness, in the way he approaches God and the tradition. He is infinitely, infinitely creative, and willing to say that when the Torah says black, it really means white; when it says yes, it really meant no. And Rabi Eliezer is like, “What are you talking about?” But that they’re teacher and student, I think, is really interesting.
Dan Libenson: Right. And we’ll explore all these things. But in the third point about Akiva is that he wasn’t involved in the previous story, which I think is worth pointing out. That he’s not part of the previous story. So all of a sudden, where did he come from? But those are the three things I just want to point out about Rabbi Akiva. And then let’s go to your reaction to this sentence.
Benay Lappe: This idea that if someone informs him in a way that I think the implication is that would be hurtful–although there’s a larger question in this story, which is what’s the hurtfulness that the story is naming. Is it Rabi Eliezer’s excommunication? Is it the way they handle the excommunication? I think that’s an open question. In any case, Rabbi Akiva knows that if someone informs him of his being banished in an overly hurtful way, or insensitive way, that can, that harm is tantamount to destroying the whole world. That hurting someone with words is so impactful, it’s as if the whole world is destroyed. And it wasn’t until I read your translation, or your tweaking of the Steinsaltz translation-
Dan Libenson: The Steinsaltz translation.
Benay Lappe: -that I connected the dots of the possibility. Now I think it’s actually what the text means. Where the text is actually now going back to that idea that the only gate to heaven, the only way to have God respond to us from our pleas to God, is when we cry out from having been harmed from words. Now I realize that the fear isn’t that we’re going to destroy the world. It’s that if we hurt Rabi Eliezer, he will cry out in pain, and as a result of that he will invoke God’s retaliation, and that will destroy the world. Anyway, I never really got the obvious actor.
Dan Libenson: Okay, that’s what I’m a little–I’m interested in what–because when you first started talking, it sounded to me like you were interpreting that as a… the Talmud talks about how if you kill one person you’ve destroyed an entire world. And so by hurting Rabbi Eliezer, we are killing, destroying the entire world was your first take. I read it in much more literal way, which was Rabbi Eliezer is some kind of miraculous powerful person. And maybe because God will listen to him because God listens to the voices of those who have been wronged, but that he actually might have the power to physically destroy the world from his hurt, his rage. Are you saying it’s both? Are you saying-?
Benay Lappe: I think now what’s really going on is that Rabbi Akiva knows that one who cries out from having been harmed with words is heard by God, and God responds. And the response is going to be retaliation against those who did the hurting, or bigger. And that what Rabi Akiva is saying is if someone informs Rabi Eliezer in an insensitive way, Rabi Eliezer’s pain will invoke God’s destruction. Although I don’t know why that destruction would be against the whole world and not simply against those who had hurt him. Why is it not against the one who informed him in an insensitive way, or against those rabbis around… there’s something going on here.
Dan Libenson: Okay. This is where I have a kind of… I don’t know, a school of hard knocks take on this, and also a different view of who Rabbi Eliezer is, metaphorically, than the one that I articulated earlier on this one. Which is that the school of hard knocks one is that when somebody is hurt, they can potentially rage in a way that is incredibly destructive. Not necessarily to the whole world, but to–but far beyond those who hurt that person. So the idea that somebody who has been hurt, even if not wronged, even if the hurt was legitimate, was necessary… and I’m a little bit, I think what they did to him was extremely harsh, and yet I’m open to the idea that it was necessary, particularly in light of what I’m about to say.
I think that you, it’s right. And message in a bottle, we’ve been talking about our ancestors sending us these messages in a bottle, these hidden messages, the wisdom, hard-won wisdom. That one of those is that a person who is hurt is going to be so hurt and outraged and enraged that they have a tremendous destructive power, and if you want to make sure that they don’t act destructively, but nevertheless you have to do the harsh thing to them, you better make sure that you find a way to channel that incredible energy of rage and hurt, perhaps by sending somebody gentle to talk, whatever Akiva is doing here.
So that’s number one. That’s the easier one, the school of hard knocks. The other one is that I think it’s worth–this is where it really hit me that there’s another way to see the character of Rabi Eliezer, that he does stand, as a literary character stands for something, that he does stand for the old Judaism, for the previous Judaism. Meaning that in this look at it, he’s not Pete Buttigieg, the conservative liberal. He is actually the embodiment of the old way. And what is basically happening here is that they just ignored God. They just said, “The old way, we are completely moving away from that.” Rabi Eliezer was the one who invoked God, and so Rabi Eliezer stands for the person who is really still connected to the old way. And they’re saying, “We are moving away from that.”
If you think about it, that is excommunication of the old way. It’s saying we are putting that away. It is no longer part of us in any active way. We will remember it fondly. It was our teacher. Rabi Eliezer is Akiva’s teacher. It’s not that I hate you, but it’s that you are now–and we talked about Marie Kondo thanking the things that have accompanied us up til now, but nevertheless saying, “You cannot accompany me on my journey any longer.”
And so as a literary device, if we think of it as not a story, or if we understand that it’s a story about people, but it’s a representation of a relationship to the previous Judaism, that the idea that actually we burn it and leave it behind is…. Obviously we’re not actually going to burn it, we don’t want to burn it. But the idea is that we kind of say it’s no longer relevant, other than as a memory. We might take some of those memories forward and build new things out of them, but the thing itself has no more power as itself.
That’s where I think that there’s…. It kind of hit me that part of me wants to see this as a story about the internecine warfare among the revolutionary class after the revolution is over. There’s another valence of this that’s extremely powerful, to see it as the maybe more obvious version of the interplay of the old and the new.
Benay Lappe: Okay, now you’re raising something for me. I’ve always wondered how we’re supposed to understand the fact that Rabi Eliezer doesn’t immediately resort to miracles and invoking God. The text says he brings every rational argument in the world, but they refuse to accept any of them. Certainly the text doesn’t show them objecting to the content of this argument or that argument, which it typically does. And now given what you’re saying, I’m wondering if they needed Rabi Eliezer to get to invoking the miracles. They had to make him that person completely in order to make the point you’re making with the story. That it may be necessary to absolutely say no to the past. I don’t know, there’s something there. You know what I’m saying?
Dan Libenson: Yeah. So now we have two…. and I think that by the way, part of the reason I think there’s such genius in some of these texts…. I want to note, by the way, that–I said this before, my wife and I are doing the daily Talmud page, and I feel like there’s a lot of non-genius in the Talmud. I think it’s a mixed bag. But some of these things are such genius, such incredible storytelling, like I also think can be found in the Torah, where you can also find some good stuff and some pretty not so good stuff. A story like this, I think, is so subtle and so incredibly constructed that I think that it’s actually right on both of those layers.
Benay Lappe: Okay, so we’re only a couple lines in-
Dan Libenson: Should we go on?
Benay Lappe: We better keep going. Okay.
Dan Libenson: Yeah, we better keep going. So then the text says, “And what did Akiva do? He wore black and wrapped himself in black and sat before Rabi Eliezer at a distance of four cubits,” which is the distance that, I guess it’s sort of like social distancing. You have to stay six feet. It’s something that, this is the rule about someone who’s excommunicated. You can’t be in their close physical proximity.
Benay Lappe: That’s right. And I also want to point out, I think the beauty of, these are rituals that are not only expected of those in relation to people who are essentially excommunicated, but they’re also mourning. The black is a mourning ritual. It’s bringing up that idea that there is a loss, the loss of a life. And the way in which the tradition has us mourn for our seven relatives–mother, father, sister, brother, husband, wife, child–and one other. And who’s the one other person for whom you tear your garments and you do mourning rituals? Your primary teacher. And here’s Rabi Eliezer experiencing this excommunication as the death of his primary teacher, and he’s in mourning, personal mourning.
Dan Libenson: Then Rabi Eliezer says to him, “Akiva,” and I’m not sure this translation is the best, but he said, “Akiva, how is today different from other days? What is different about today from other days?” In the Hebrew it’s “Mah yom miyomaim.”
Benay Lappe: “What’s up with you? What are you doing?”
Dan Libenson: Yeah. What’s going on today? Something like that.
Benay Lappe: Why are you acting this way?
Dan Libenson: Weird, something is weird today.
And what’s interesting, by the way, I wonder how that accords to the traditional reading that Rabbi Eliezer was aware, that they burned it in front of him. Maybe they didn’t, and that would seem to be a little bit more kind. Here he just said, “I lost this argument,” goes back home to his wife, bad day at the office. But then the next day Akiva shows up in black, and obviously conducting himself in a way that I kind of understand something has happened here. What’s happened? What’s going on?
Benay Lappe: Or he really knows, and he’s like, “Akiva, what are you doing? Really? You’re taking their side? You’re my student. I didn’t expect this from you.” I don’t know, I don’t know.
Dan Libenson: So then Rabbi Akiva said to him, “My master, my rabbi, it appears to me that colleagues are distancing themselves from you.” Or, “It appears to me that the colleagues are distancing themselves from you,” at which point Rabi Eliezer too rent his garments and removed his shoes, as is the custom of an excommunicated person. That’s what Steinsaltz put. That’s also the custom of a mourner.
Benay Lappe: This idea that your chaverim, your colleagues are distancing themselves from you is supposed to be understood, although it’s never quite landed convincingly for me, that this is somehow a sensitive, nuanced, gentle way of saying, “We’re excommunicating you. We’re being withdrawn. We are withdrawing.” I don’t know, I’ve never been convinced that this is all that nice and gentle. But…
Dan Libenson: Well, there’s also that part about “it appears to me.” It seems a little wimpy. “It appears to me.” Maybe there’s something to that. What was I thinking about not too long ago? But this idea that we have euphemisms. By the way, there’s two euphemisms here, because the first euphemism was that they blessed him, which meant that they excommunicated him. And now there’s another, not exactly a euphemism, but kind of a word hedge. By the way, the fact that this is all about hurting with words, it’s probably relevant to all that. That there’s ways in which we know what’s going on, but we still, is it a nice thing to not use the direct words, or is it a nice thing to be more direct?
Benay Lappe: And by the way, the euphemism of “they blessed him,” I’ve always understood to be a self-censorship so that the non-Jews who are reading the text wouldn’t see that, wouldn’t see us washing our dirty laundry.
Dan Libenson: Interesting. There are things like that, by the way, also in the Torah, where, for example, in many cases the Torah changes names of characters who were named with a version of the name Baal, the god Baal in their names. For example, Saul, is it Saul’s son that was named–his real name was Ishbaal, a man of Baal, but the bible changes it to Ishboshet, which is a man of shame, which they’re both using it as an extra dig, but they’re also, it’s like they’re not willing–it’s like He Who Must Not Be Named kind of thing. So there’s a lot, there’s precedent for this kind of thing. And again, is it clear… in that case, it’s not clear that when they change his name from Ishbaal to Ishboshet that they’re actually being kind, or they’re being even meaner. And here, too, are the euphemisms, are they really kind, or are they even meaner? Are they even more…
And again, if we’re talking about these things as literary devices where really Rabi Eliezer isn’t Rabi Eliezer, he stands for the old Judaism, then I think it’s a question of maybe it’s kinder, maybe it’s better, more right. If so, then I’m certainly guilty of the wrong. But maybe it’s more right that if you have to do these things, you have to leave the old Judaism behind, at least don’t be so direct about it. At least be a little more gentle about it.
Benay Lappe: I don’t know.
Dan Libenson: So Rabi Eliezer tears his garments and removes his shoes and drops from his seat and sat on the ground, again, similar to the customs of mourners. And tears fell from his eyes, and the entire world was afflicted. Meaning the tears, his sadness. Tears fell from his eyes is not rage, it’s sadness. And the tears from hurt. The tears from his eyes cause one-third of the olives are afflicted. I mean, basically don’t grow, die, whatever. One-third of the wheat, one-third of the barley. And there are those who say that even dough kneaded in women’s hands spoiled. Some huge, miraculous in a bad way.
Benay Lappe: You know what’s jumping out at me that never did before, now that you’re retelling it? The fact that Rabi Eliezer accepts this banishment. He takes off his shoes, he sits on the ground. These are the symbolic acts required of one who is banished. So he doesn’t say, “Eff you, I’m going to start another whatever, I’m going to do whatever I want, I’m going to keep teaching, I’m going to redeclare….” He accepts the cease-and-desist order.
Dan Libenson: He accepts it, and then the next line is that the sages taught: There was great rage on that day, as any place that Rabbi Eliezer fixed his gaze was burned. And even Rabban Gamliel, the head rabbi, he was coming on a boat at the time, and a large wave swelled over him and threatened to drown him. And he said, “It seems to me that this is only for the sake of Rabi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus.”
Benay Lappe: Okay, so let’s remember that Rabban Gamliel, even he wasn’t named in the story up until this point, he was understood to be the head of the academy. So the decision to banish or excommunicate Rabi Eliezer was essentially his. Okay.
Dan Libenson: Right. And the buck stops here, even if it wasn’t. He was on a boat. I mean, that’s interesting too. First of all, where was he. Where was he coming from? By the way, very possible–I know in the book The Orchard, I don’t remember if it’s this specific story, but Rabban Gamliel goes to Rome to plead the case of the Jews to the Romans. So maybe he was doing… I don’t know. I wonder if there was some, there’s some piece of the story that there’s some, when we have more time we could explore, is there some value to the story that Rabban Gamliel is actually on a boat, meaning that he probably was away, and he probably–maybe it really is that the buck stops here. Maybe he knew. Did he somehow know that this had happened, even though he wasn’t there? But he knows that only Rabi Eliezer has that kind of power.
Again, from a literary standpoint, I would say what does that stand for. So think about Rabban Gamliel is the head of the new Judaism, the head of the new, the revolutionaries. He’s George Washington. And something so terrible has just happened, and he knows that only Alexander Hamilton could have done such a thing, or only the British–probably more in this telling of the story, it’s not the fighting among the revolutionaries version, it’s the George Washington, something so terrible has happened, he knows it must be because of the British governor. Only the British governor could have had the power to cause all the lights of Boston to go off, or…
Benay Lappe: I don’t know. I think it could be that Rabban Gamliel is trying to suppress, as we’re going to see, he’s trying to suppress the internal fighting. He’s mister unity. I don’t know. Let’s see, let’s see.
Dan Libenson: Let’s keep going.
Benay Lappe: By the way, there’s something Jonah-ish about this story. Right?
Dan Libenson: Very much.
Benay Lappe: He’s on a boat, the big storm comes. He knows, “Okay, I get why this is happening. I see my role in this.” Okay.
Dan Libenson: So Rabban Gamliel stands up and, stood on his feet, and said, “Master of the Universe, it is revealed and known before you that it was not for my honor that I acted when excommunicating Rabbi Eliezer, nor was it for the honor of the house of my father that I acted.”
By the way, Rabban Gamliel is a direct descendant of Hillel the Elder, arguably the founder of rabbinic Judaism.
Benay Lappe: And King David.
Dan Libenson: And King David. So which exact–is he talking about Hillel, is he talking about David, is he talking about his actual father who is, I believe, Rabban Shimon? In any event, he’s from a very prestigious lineage. So he’s saying it’s not for my own–it’s not for my aggrandizement that I did this, and it’s not for the aggrandizement of my family, of my status. I did this–and by the way, we say did he really do it, or is he just taking responsibility? He was out of town, but he’s taking responsibility? It may or may not matter. But he says, “I did this for your honor, God, so that disputes will not proliferate in Israel.” And that’s what you said, that he’s the great unifier.
Benay Lappe: Yeah, and I think the role of unity in the beginning of a new era is scary and interesting, and for me I think it’s possible that that tradition is actually critiquing the impulse to unify in an early stage.
Dan Libenson: Interesting. Or I was thinking that it’s an interesting kind of unity that achieves unity by throwing out the troublemaker, especially when the troublemaker is not the most extreme, is not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He’s throwing out the old guy. He’s throwing out… and we’ve talked about, not on the air, but long ago, that there’s a text that you teach a lot, and it’s kind of like when the new people start calling the old people heretics for doing what they were always doing for thousands of years, and now I’m the heretic? That’s when you know that the tables have turned. And that’s kind of what’s going on here. So it’s unity, but not by a compromise. It’s actually unity by throwing out the voice that we can’t find a way to compromise with anymore.
Benay Lappe: Yes, and I think the tradition is going to be, in a number of places in the Talmud, holding Rabban Gamliel to critique for that approach. And maybe this story is the prime example, because we’re going to see what happens to him.
Dan Libenson: Yeah. Right. So in response, the sea calmed from its raging. Now, Ima Shalom, the wife of Rabi Eliezer and the sister of Rabban Gamliel. So she is now at home with her husband, Rabi Eliezer. And the Talmud says that Ima Shalom, the wife of Rabbi Eliezer and the sister of Rabban Gamaliel, from that incident forward, she would not allow Rabbi Eliezer to fall on his face, meaning to pray in any way.
Benay Lappe: Okay, so-
Dan Libenson: She stood guard to stop him, keep him in his chair –
Benay Lappe: Right. Just a couple things to point out. This is one of the few places you have a named female character, which is interesting all by itself. And in this case, she’s the character in the story who actually is the most… she’s holding a tradition, as we’re going to see at the end, that explains what’s going on in this story. Something that presumably Rabbi Eliezer doesn’t know, and he asks her, “How do you know what’s going on here?” So she’s this very well-educated, named female character.
Dan Libenson: And keep in mind that she is from the same lineage. She is the descendant of Hillel, and-
Benay Lappe: Absolutely.
Dan Libenson: -King David.
Benay Lappe: As Rabban Gamliel’s sister, absolutely. And what’s going on here is that there’s a certain prayer in the morning and the afternoon service called Tachanun. And it’s a very emotional, pouring-out kind of prayer. You lay your head on your arm, and there were words that help you begin to get at what’s hurting you, and then you are to–it’s encouraging you to just cry out from all the very real-life stuff going on in your personal life. It’s the opportunity to really access your pain and get it out. And she doesn’t want her husband, Rabi Eliezer, to have the opportunity to do that particular prayer. And the halacha is that if you become interrupted between the previous prayer and this prayer, you lose your opportunity to do this outpouring prayer. So she keeps wanting to interrupt him before he can say this prayer so he can’t lay his hand on his arm and do that anguished pouring-out prayer. Because she knows what’s going to happen, because she knows the gemara better than we do. In other words, she knows that tradition. All the gates of heaven are locked except for the gates of anguish from hurt.
Dan Libenson: Right. Okay, so I think let’s make sure, let’s finish, let’s read the rest of the text, and then we’ll have a few minutes to discuss, and then this is going to come back. Just to make sure that we get through the text before the end, let’s just read through it all, and then we’ll do what we can.
Dan Libenson: So a certain day, it was a certain day around the time of the new moon, and she inadvertently substituted a full thirty-day month for a deficient twenty-nine-day month. Meaning, she was mistaken as to what day it was, basically. She thought it was Rosh Chodesh, the new moon, and that’s a day where you don’t say this Tachanun prayer. So some say a pauper came and stood at the door and she took bread out to him. Meaning, she thought this was the day Rabi Eliezer, he’s such a conservative, of course he wouldn’t say Tachanun on the day of Rosh Chodesh. So the pauper comes to the door, it’s fine for me to go and bring him some food, which is, of course, a great mitzvah, a great good deed. And when she returned, she found that he had fallen on his face. So in this case, he knew better than her what day it was. She knew better than him the rules, certain things she’d gotten from her family, but he was right about the date, and he did say Tachanun. And she said to him, “Arise, get up, you’ve killed my brother, Rabban Gamliel.”
Just then, the sound of the shofar emerged from the house of Rabban Gamliel to announce that he had died. It’s powerful. Yeah. I mean, chilling. Rabbi Eliezer said to her, “From where did you know, how did you know that your brother would die?” She said to him, “This is the tradition that I received from the house of my father, the father of my father.” Which the father of her father, if that’s literal, that’s the first Rabban Gamliel. But maybe it’s not literal. “All the gates of heaven are locked, except for the gates of prayer by victims of verbal wrongdoing.” So the implication is that Rabi Eliezer is a victim of verbal wrongdoing, that he was wronged. And because of his having been wronged, he receives this great power to destroy. So what do you make of it?
Benay Lappe: [sighs] This is where I began. There are so many layers that to say one seems to imply that the others aren’t really what it’s about. It’s about so many things. So on its surface, it’s problematizing the simplicity that the first part of the story presents, which is the shift in our history from listening to God, to we’ve now grown up and we don’t need to listen to God. And the heroes of that part of the story are the ones who kick God out of the conversation. And to kick God out of the conversation is to kick God’s mouthpieces, is to kick the Rabi Eliezers out. And maybe this second part of the story is saying, “But not so fast. Know what that’s going to cost you.” And not just in terms of hurting people, because it’s hard to do that and people will inevitably be hurt. But know the cost of cutting anyone out of the conversation. I’m not sure it’s saying you don’t do that, but it’s a costly move.
Dan Libenson: Right. Part of me feels like it’s, I mean, it is the… well, I think it could be both. It could be either. And part of me feels like the answer, it’s, I’m not sure. Part of me reads this as you don’t do that. I want to be really clear on how I read these texts. We’ve said it a million times, but I want to be super clear that I believe that wisdom is what we learn through the school of hard knocks, but when we learn it through the school of hard knocks, it’s too late. And when we learn something through the school of hard knocks and it’s too late, we take on a sacred duty to pass that wisdom along to our children and to others, so that they don’t make the same mistakes that we did. And I believe that these stories are, the authors of these stories, in this case some rabbis in the early, in the first few hundred years of the common era, that learned something tough. They learned a tough lesson, and they wanted to send it to us. And this is the tragedy of only teaching the first part of this story, is… because that first part of the story is trotted out all the time, like, “Hey, we can do whatever we want!” I read it that way. And I don’t think it’s wrong to read it that way. But at the same time, there’s this other, second part of the story. And it says, first… it says a bunch of things. First of all, be careful, because there’s people involved. Number two, it says when you, if you harm people… or actually I don’t think it’s only people, I think it’s also that systems have power. Especially ancient, old systems. If you just dismiss like that, then that system is going to have a, what do you call it, an echo–not an echo, but every action has an opposite and equal reaction. A reverberation. I’m looking for a different word. When it… a ricochet effect. When you shoot a gun at the wall and it bounces back to you. If you act callously, cavalierly, too smartly towards this ancient, powerful thing, that it’s going to come back to bite you. And in this case, the head of the new is killed because the old was not properly dealt with.
I think it would be a misreading of this text to say, “And therefore they shouldn’t have done that in the first place, and therefore they should have listened to God.” You could read it that way, and that would undo the entire liberal Jewish world’s use of this text. But I don’t think that that’s the right way to read it. I think the right way to read–because God does laugh. God does say, “My children have defeated me.” So it seems to me that that means that the text was saying that was the right outcome, but it was mishandled and caused incredible harm to the new itself. Could have even killed the new. Could have destroyed it, could have killed it. So maybe by the skin of its teeth, the new made it through this. But this could have been the story about how the old and the new were killed in the same action.
Benay Lappe: Wow. I think that’s a great note.
Dan Libenson: It’s a story of such power. Meaning, I just… I… yeah, we’re out of time. But I want to, I think it will reconnect to the story that we want to do, I think, in two weeks, which is the story, an earlier story, obviously, of when Rabban Gamliel was thrown out of his position. And we’ll keep this going, because they’re both powerful stories. I think you’re right, it’s the right note to end on, and we’re out of time. And yet I hope everybody watching this and listening to this will spend some time over the next week with this story, because it’s so powerful, and it has so much to instruct.
Benay Lappe: Yeah, thank you so much. So fun.
Dan Libenson: Thank you, Benay. This is so fun. We were doing something the other day, we were doing this program together, and somebody said, “It’s so great that you’re willing to do this together.” I’m like, you’re my chevruta in life. We’ll do anything together, this is great.
Benay Lappe: I feel the same way.
Dan Libenson: I would say–and just to remind folks that next week we’re doing a conversation with Barry Wimpfheimer, the author of the book The Talmud: A Biography, so we’re, it’s another exciting opportunity to get more background understanding of what the Talmud is, and what’s going on. We’d love to get feedback from folks, is this working. We hope this is working on multiple levels for folks who haven’t really encountered the Talmud, that this is a valuable experience, and also for folks who are very into Talmud that it is. And if that’s any different than what we’re trying to do, please let us know, send us an email or otherwise send us a note. We’re building this as we go.
Benay Lappe: We hope other people are having fun besides just you and me.
Dan Libenson: That’s right. But I think if we’re having fun people are having fun.
Benay Lappe: I hope so.
Dan Libenson: All right, see you soon.
Benay Lappe: Thanks.
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