The Oral Talmud: Episode 8 - Dreams and Discovery (Berakhot 28a - Part 2)
SHOW NOTES
“I don’t have to win; I don’t have to get the person to capitulate to me. I don’t have to hear the person’s apology – as long as I’ve gotten the world to be the way I need the world to be.” - Dan Libenson
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 continue discussing the story of Rabban Gamliel, this week focusing on his reaction to being deposed as the head of the study hall, and the massive influx of new students to the yeshiva that followed. The episode does have a generous re-cap from Benay, but of course we recommend listening to the previous episode as well. What lessons can we be learning as marginalized people trying to build spaces and find our voices? What do we do when the repentance we hope for from people who have hurt us just doesn’t come? How do we make sure we’re not withholding Torah from the world?
This week’s text: The Removal of Rabban Gamliel, Aftermath (Berakhot 28a)
Access the full Sefaria Source Sheet with additional show notes via this link. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation.
Further Learning
[1] Sarah Hurwitz's book "Here All Along" - for the story which Dan mentions about finally encountering "in the image of G!D" - find on her website!
[2] Devora Steinmetz, discussing Rabban Gamliel's fears that he "Withheld Torah from Israel"-- link
[3] Yitz Greenberg's theological description of the three eras of Judaism -- on Judaism Unbound Episode 100
[4] The story of Balaam and his talking she-donkey starts on Numbers 22
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DAN: This is The Oral Talmud - Episode 8: Dreams and Discovery. 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.
This episode is Part two of our journey through the conflict between two early sages, Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Yehoshua, or Rabbi Joshua, and what happened to the early center of reimagining Judaism, a placed called Yavneh, after Rabban Gamliel was deposed from his position as the Nasi, or leader. Once we get into it, Benay will offer a generous recap of where the story left us last week, but of course we do recommend you go back and listen to the previous episode first, where we went deep into the moments where the guards who were gatekeeping the study hall were sent home, and hundreds of students flooded in to fill the benches.
This week, as we read about Rabban Gamliel’s series of realizations about the impact of his restrictions, we reflect on our own encounters with authorities who we wish had had similar capitulations, and our relationship to different kinds of gatekeeping.
This episode was recorded in May 2020, so do remember that the still ongoing coronavirus pandemic was still very new for us in this conversation.
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 wish, you can follow along with the texts we discuss and 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 for The Oral Talmud. Benay, it’s great to see you again.
Benay Lappe: Great to see you again! So happy to be here. I’m excited about our text.
Dan Libenson: Great, yeah, me too. So just to let people know, we are continuing a conversation from last week, a text from last week. And next week also makes sense, because next Thursday is going to be the eve of the holiday of Shavuot, which basically reenacts the Sinai moment. Which, as we’ve talked about earlier on this podcast, is an important moment to the rabbis of the Talmud. And so we’re going to talk through another one of their texts that has to do with the time at Sinai.
Benay Lappe: Yeah. They love retelling that myth, and destabilizing it and undermining it and re-creating it to mean different things.
Dan Libenson: So it will be fun. Today we are continuing to talk about a story that happens in the tractate of Brachot, or blessings, although it doesn’t really have much directly to do with blessings, as the Talmud tends to meander. Or not. Or if we think of it as meandering, maybe we just aren’t seeing all the connections. But in any event, this is a text from the tractate Brachot, page 28a. And it has to do with–I actually ended up titling last week’s episode “Impeachment and Removal,” because it has to do with the impeachment and removal from office of Rabban Gamliel, who was more or less the president of the early rabbinic project in the years following the destruction of the Second Temple. And this is a story of why and how he was removed from office, and what happened next.
So before we move forward in the story, Benay, I thought maybe you could give us a little bit of a recap about where we’ve been.
Benay Lappe: Okay. We began the story at the moment when Rabban Gamliel commits the last-straw event of his characterization as this authoritarian, controlling, shaming person. And the last event has him having a disagreement with Rabi Yehoshua. And Rabi Yehoshua, knowing what it’s going to cost to dissent publicly in the beit midrash with Rabban Gamliel, remains silent and tries not to share his dissenting view. And when finally forced to, he’s basically told to stand up in the corner for the rest of the class, and is publicly shamed. And at that point, this is the third of these just demeaning, abusive encounters that Rabban Gamliel has specifically with Rabi Yehoshua. And the community of scholars says, “This is it. We’re done with him. Time to get a new leader and change our entire approach to dissent.”
So they depose Rabban Gamliel. Rabban Gamliel had set up a system of kind of an admissions test to the beit midrash. And his criterion was that if your insides are not like your outsides, you don’t get admitted to the beit midrash. And we won’t go back into thinking about what exactly does that mean, but there was some criterion. And I’m not sure if the problem with the criterion was that it was difficult to ascertain or evaluate, the fact that there was a criterion at all, or it was a bad criterion. But regardless, Rabban Gamliel and his admission requirements are outed. The guards who had been set up by Rabban Gamliel for the beit midrash are kicked out. And now anyone who wants to learn can learn.
And probably to the surprise of no one but Rabban Gamliel, hundreds and hundreds of people who come, who have no qualification except they want to learn, enter the beit midrash. And there’s a debate about whether 400 benches or 700 benches were set up. But regardless, there’s this enormous influx of learners. And the text then tells us that because they, all of these people who have been kept out enter, all of the hanging disputes and unresolved questions are finally and suddenly resolved in the beit midrash.
So I think that’s where we were last time. That’s where we left off.
Dan Libenson: Yeah, I think that’s where we left off. And I think that just to state the obvious–but maybe it’s not the obvious for those who don’t necessarily know you and your work, and ways in which our work is not specifically about Talmud, but it’s analogous–we talked about last week how there’s a certain degree to which we are trying to create batei midrash, houses of study, approaches to study, for our time that are profoundly open to whoever wants to come in.
Benay Lappe: And not just whoever wants to come in, but with a specific eye toward making sure those who had been on the margins come in. Not because it’s nice, not a pragmatic pluralism, as one of my teachers, Irwin Kula, used to distinguish. It’s not that we want everyone in because it’s the right thing to do. It’s a principled pluralism. Because we’re better off when they’re here. We need them. We need the insights that they’ve acquired davka from, precisely from their marginal experience. That experience gave them an insight. That’s the Jewish message, that we have something to bring to the world precisely because of our position on the outside.
This is the way, I think, all new leaderships begin. By those who had been on the margins bringing their prophetic experience to bear. And that’s what SVARA is about. It’s about bringing that new team on the field that has all the riches that we need.
Dan Libenson: Yeah, and not that–we talked about it some, and not that I want to necessarily talk about it now, but I do want to mark it as a struggle that I am feeling right now after the coronavirus crash, or whatever we might call it. The sense that all of a sudden, the world of, you would call option 1 Judaism, the kind of folks who were pretty happy with it before coronavirus, and all of a sudden all kinds of things are falling apart. I know that a little bit of where I’m sitting and struggling is not so much should we let the radicals into our house of study, but should we let the conservatives in. Will it somehow destabilize, damage our project if we allow all these folks who are different from us in? And I kind of feel like we’re facing the same challenge. And you could say it’s not the same, because it has to do with a power imbalance, et cetera. Although I’m not necessarily sure where the power is now.
I think there’s a question about letting in the, let’s say, more marginal voices. That’s the easy way to read this text. I think that’s the way to read the text in its own time. And that’s how we’ve been talking for the last decade, let’s say. We need a place where the more marginal people, the more marginalized people, can come in and feel whole, and feel welcome, and whatever.
Now I wonder how we read this text from the position of having established relatively successful forums, places where people come to learn about Judaism in different ways. Again, what we’ve done with Judaism Unbound or jewishLIVE, and what you’ve done with SVARA. That these are places where a lot of people who are feeling on the outs come to learn and to feel like part of something. And after a crash, after a destruction, all of a sudden there’s interest, there’s renewed interest in these new houses of study from folks who used to be on the inside, but now they’re kind of on the outside. How do we–who are we in this story? Do we want to be Rabbi Joshua–Rabbi Yehoshua. For people who don’t know, sometimes we’ll say Joshua, sometimes we’ll say Yehoshua. It’s the same person. We want to identify ourselves as Rabbi Joshua, but I kind of think that we should take seriously that the Rabban Gamliel character should speak, that we should think about how we relate to that, because we may be in the position of keeping people out.
Benay Lappe: Yeah. It’s something we struggle with at SVARA, to be honest. As you’re speaking, it’s reminding me that it’s probably a question for every marginalized group who is trying to find their voice. And as a queer woman who came of age in the lesbian separatist era, it was really important for us to have women-only spaces. This was the time of women-only coffeehouses and women-only festivals, and really exclusive spaces that I think were essential for comparing notes.
The early, the feminists who had consciousness-raising groups needed the space to talk to each other without the husbands, for those who had husbands, so they could tell stories about their husbands. One would tell a story about, “My guy boss, or my husband,” and the other one would go, “Oh my God, my husband does the same thing.” “Mine does the same thing too!” “Oh my God, this is not just my husband? Oh, it’s a guy thing.” That’s an important insight that you need a certain kind of… I hate to, I actually don’t love the term “safe space,” but a certain space of deeply shared experience that allows for the processing of that experience in a way that helps you make it less about yourself in an idiosyncratic or personal way, and realize the personal is political, the personal is spiritual.
So anyway, all that is to say, I think we’re actually not yet ready to let too many Rabban Gamliels in the beit midrash. What we’ve learned at SVARA is that the queer person in front of the beit midrash, leading the beit midrash, actually can’t create a queer-normative culture if the majority of people in the room embody a hetero-normative culture. And there has to be some quantive number of queer folk in the room to explore the realities of our insights as queer people and to develop a culture. And some small number of folks who aren’t comfortable in that culture can be integrated, but I think there’s some period of time that it takes, that is important for the development of those people who will be leaders to kind of be alone. And to have the queer-headed, or the feminist-headed guys, or the queer-headed straight folk, or the Rabi Yehoshua-headed Rabban Gamliels, to be there, but probably not too many for a while.
Dan Libenson: Something that we should mark and talk about.
The pieces that I think we want to start with here is where we kind of ended last time. There are a couple of things that happen after these students all come in. There’s pent up demand, there are all these people who… and I think we talked about this last week. Classically, they’re saying, “Oh, those people! They’re not interested. They’re not coming, they’re not interested.” And it turns out that they will come if you let them in. And what does that mean to let them in? Again, are the guards in the story–again, the guards, I think, are physical. But I mean, in our times, are the guards physical, or are there other kinds of guards at the gate that are saying, “To come in, you have to be a certain way. You have to….” What does that mean, exactly?
Benay Lappe: There are guards at the doors of the rabbinical schools. There are requirements that are more or less explicitly articulated in our communities. This is not going to be a place where you can come, depending on your views about Zionism, or your personal observance, or your status as a Jew. All sorts of doors that say, “This is for Jewish people, and this is how we define Jewish, and this is what a kosher Jew is.”
Dan Libenson: So what’s fascinating is that when Rabban Gamliel sees the flood of students coming in, he has this feeling, it says he was distressed. This term, which we’ll see again next week, it’s hard to translate. But it gets translated as distressed, or he almost felt faint, or he somehow… I don’t know if you would translate it other ways. But somehow he lost his strength, he just kind of fell apart.
Benay Lappe: And, you know, this term is used elsewhere. Chalsha da’atei. It’s like his mind, which for them was the heart, his heart weakened. It’s typically used to describe an emotional distress rather than a physical distress. And it’s bigger than disheartened, it was like anguished. It was something like…
Dan Libenson: I like anguished, yeah. He was, he had a physical sensation of a mental anxiety. Angst.
Benay Lappe: Yeah. Exactly, and it comes with the realization that happens after all of these people come who he had let out. It’s such a poignant moment for me. I know I talked a little bit about it last week, but as someone who had to basically sneak past the guards in rabbinical school, and to know that so many queer and trans folk, and just so many people for various reasons were kept out of rabbinical schools… I had to hang on to the sense that I was doing the right thing, that I was kind of in the right, even though I was lying. At the very least, by omission, and misleading. It was hard.
I think I, I knew that one day, one day the dean, the chancellor, the folks who are keeping us, they’re going to get it, and they’re going to feel awful. And it’s not that I wanted them to feel awful, but I wanted them to eventually get it. And so this moment when Rabban Gamliel gets it, there’s a real satisfaction for me, but then as, we’re going to see what happens after he gets it, which is….
Dan Libenson: I think the question is also what does he get in this moment. Does he get that… the way that I read it initially is he, because the next line that he says is, “Perhaps, God forbid, I have withheld the Torah from Israel.” The way I read that is he’s saying, “I thought they didn’t want to come in. I thought they didn’t want this. There were guards at the gates. I thought…” I’m not sure exactly what he thought the guards at the gates were there for if people didn’t want to come in. But somehow I think it was, maybe it was just the numbers, maybe he just thought there would be a few people wanting to come in and make trouble or something. But then when they took away the guards and it was 700 benches, or 400 benches, that he said, “Oh my God, there’s, people are really interested in this stuff. And maybe there was something that I was doing and insisting that it be done a certain way, and they weren’t interested in that.”
I mean, that’s what I’ve been saying about Judaism for a long time. This idea that the Pew study shows us there’s huge numbers of Jews who are proud to be Jewish, and for whom being Jewish is important, and nevertheless they’re not coming to synagogue, they’re not going to day school, they’re not sending their kids to Jewish camps. And I think that tends to be read by the folks that are on the inside of that movement as either they’re not interested, or we didn’t market it correctly somehow. As opposed to, somehow our product is not giving them the Judaism that they’re looking for, and so they’re not interested in that. But if we somehow say, “Hey, we’re not insisting on that anymore, we want you to come in and just come in, just do what you wanted.” It doesn’t exactly translate into this physical metaphor here. But basically, there is a much larger demand for Judaism than most highly-involved Jews think there is. It’s just that the demand for Judaism is a different version of Judaism.
Benay Lappe: Exactly. And I love the way you explained it. It’s not just a requirement that keeps people out. It’s the way we portray it. The way we put the pieces together, and how we understand what the tradition really is and what it’s about.
I have a particular take on the tradition. And I call it a traditionally radical lens and approach. It just seems so obvious to me that the way the tradition works is really quite radical, and the rabbis are super courageous and willing to overturn Torah. And it’s always evolving. And that story of the tradition was never told to me as a kid. I went to a lot of Hebrew school. I went to a four-day-a-week Hebrew school for, I don’t know, six years. Why did nobody tell me that story of the tradition? They told me the story of a fixed, unchanging, immutable tradition. It’s always been this way. And all of those who tell the story in a way that is, it’s not just telling the story about, it’s not a marketing problem. It’s put the pieces together of the tradition in such a way that the tradition is this and not that. What I hear you saying is that, in and of itself, is what withholds the Torah from people. That keeps people out.
Dan Libenson: I think I might have mentioned this last week, but it just makes me think of Sarah Hurwitz’s book, Here All Along, where she talks in the introduction about how she went to Hebrew school, and she came to learn about Judaism as an adult. She came to some introduction to Judaism class, and she happened into it that it was being taught at a very high level, it sounds like. And it was the first time that she was exposed to this idea, I think that she wrote, that we’re created in the image of God, or that we should walk in God’s ways. I don’t remember. I think it was created in the image of God, in a serious way. And somehow that really spoke to her. She said, “Why did I never learn this? In all those years of Hebrew school, why did nobody ever tell me that the essence of Judaism was that humans are created in the image of God?” So she’s saying, “I wasn’t not interested in Judaism! I was not interested in the Judaism that was presented to me!”
Benay Lappe: That’s right. And why is nobody teaching the idea of svara? The idea that every human being has this moral intuition that is what has always driven the perception of inadequacy of our tradition, and who’s suffering. For whose benefit does the tradition need to be repaired? And as we learn, we refine that svara. My goodness, if I had learned that idea, I would have thought, “Oh, wow. The tradition respects me. It wants to hear my voice.” There are all sorts of ways of withholding Torah from Israel, like Rabban Gamliel. Not just by putting guards at the door.
Dan Libenson: Right. So let’s go to the next part of the story, which is kind of–I think initially when we talked about this we weren’t even going to talk about this part. We were just going to skip over it. I think it’s a little bit of a weird part. But then we changed our minds.
Benay Lappe: But actually, wait. Before we leave this line, it’s just such a beautiful line. Are we going to skip the dream?
Dan Libenson: No. That’s what I’m saying. we were going to skip the dream, but we were saying that we’re not going to skip the dream.
Benay Lappe: Oh, okay. I wasn’t sure which part you were referring to. But this line, “God forbid,” he says, “Oh my God, God forbid I’ve withheld Torah from Israel.” Devora Steinmetz, a contemporary Talmud scholar, writes beautifully about this passage. And she pointed out something to me that I hadn’t seen before, which was there’s a double meaning here in “withheld Torah.” One is kept it away from people. and here are these hundreds and hundreds of people who now have it, and they didn’t have it before. So oh, Rabban Gamliel realizes he withheld Torah. But it can also mean, the root of withhold, mem nun ayin, it means also to restrict. Not just restrict Torah from them, but restrict Torah period. And we’re going to see this play out, and we saw it last week, that precisely because all of these people from their margins entered the project, all of the solutions to all the problems comes, and all of a sudden Torah is bigger.
And I think the rest of the story is going to also bring in, I don’t want to give too much away, but this idea that when you keep the people out, you actually diminish the entire Torah itself and the project of Torah. So that’s just a, I hope, a taster for where we’re going to go.
Dan Libenson: Before we get there, there’s this little part that’s added. After he says heaven forbid, “Perhaps, heaven forbid, I withheld the Torah from Israel.” They showed him in his dream–it’s interesting, they, but I guess they’re maybe angels that bring the dreams or something. But they showed him in his dream white jugs filled with ashes. And then that’s basically what the Talmud says. Then Steinsaltz, the translator here, is explaining that that alludes to the fact that the additional students were worthless idlers, meaning, that might be an overstatement, but he’s saying, at least Steinsaltz is saying that these white jugs filled with ashes somehow are related to those students that were now let in, that he hadn’t wanted to come in.
Benay Lappe: Yeah. Let’s remember that Rabban Gamliel’s criterion for admitting students to the beit midrash was that their insides matched their outsides. So now he’s got this dream, and he’s visualizing in his dream a white jug with ashes, which are dark gray, or black. White on the outside, black on the inside. Which is, that’s his embodiment of his fear of these students, or his criterion for what is legitimately an inadmissible student, someone who definitely shouldn’t be in on this project. Someone who’s got white on the outside but black on the inside.
Dan Libenson: Right. And then the Talmud says, “That is not the case, but that dream was shown to him to ease his mind.” So what do you make of that?
Benay Lappe: So first of all, he has this anguished realization that, “Oh my God, what have I done? What have I done? I kept all these students, who are wonderful, out of the beit midrash. We needed them. What they had on their insides was precisely what we needed to solve all of our problems.” And he realizes the tragedy of what he had done in keeping them away. And then he has this dream, which confirms that he was right, by showing, “Oh, in fact these white jugs do have black on the inside. Oh, I was right. They were bad.” His subconscious, or the angels, are allowing him to be comforted.
Which pisses me off, okay. I hate this dream, because, again, not that I want the former chancellor and dean of the rabbinical school to be suffering and in anguish, but they need to get it. They need to know what they were missing, what they continue to miss. And I don’t want them to have comforting dreams! Like, “It was okay, I did the right thing.” But he has this dream.
Dan Libenson: But is it okay–maybe what the text is suggesting, and we don’t have to buy it just because the text suggests it, but maybe what the text is suggesting is that all that matters is for the situation to be resolved in the right way. And maybe it’s actually better for the malefactor that was in charge before, and did all this damage, maybe it’s okay for that person to be somehow comforted, and maybe he doesn’t have to experience that. Because maybe connecting this also to last time’s, when we’re talking about Rabbi Eliezer and his rage at being cut out in this very harsh way when they overruled him, and then he got very enraged, including, by the way, killing Rabban Gamliel. That maybe somehow the text is suggesting that it’s better to let the, that guy, let him not have to suffer quite that way.
Benay Lappe: Maybe. Maybe. I-
Dan Libenson: Because maybe if he’s angry, he’ll undercut the project again. Maybe-
Benay Lappe: Okay, okay. I like that. I like that. And as we’re going to see, he eventually comes to do teshuva. I think I’m bothered by the fact that this dream seems to suppress his, the first step of teshuva, which is realizing what you did.
Dan Libenson: Teshuva, by the way, meaning repentance.
Benay Lappe: Meaning repentance.
Dan Libenson: Atonement.
Benay Lappe: Exactly. Again, I don’t want to get overly personal, but years after my experience at the seminary, I ran into the dean at the seminary, and I knocked on the door of his office. And I was hoping he would do teshuva with me. I was hoping he would say, “You know what, I feel so bad. I realize what I did.” And he didn’t. What he said was, “Those were the rules, and it was my job to enforce the rules.” That was highly unsatisfying to me, and really disappointing. But okay.
Dan Libenson: No, I’m just saying, I totally hear you. I have the same, I felt, I’ve had, experienced analogous things and felt the same way, and also not really gotten much apology or teshuva, repentance. But part of me is thinking maybe that’s more about me. Would I like the person to do it? Yeah, I would. But really, at the end of the day, what matters is the future, not the past. What matters is that the project is set right, and if the way to set the project right is to keep some opponents a little bit happy, even in an unjust way, or a false way, so that they won’t undermine the project due to their own ego issues, for example. I don’t know. I don’t love it, but I’m just saying maybe… part of the idea of a text and a religion, or a wisdom tradition, is to tell me things that I don’t like to hear, because they are learned through the school of experience and hard knocks. And maybe one of the–it’s registering for me that one of them may be, I don’t have to win, I don’t have to get the person to capitulate to me. I don’t have to hear the person’s apology, as long as I’ve gotten the world the way I need to get the world to be.
Benay Lappe: Maybe. I’m going to keep thinking about it. What you are bringing up for me is maybe this part of the story, the dream, is just simply descriptive, not prescriptive. In other words, it’s not saying it’s good that those who oppress others get comforted that they were right in their oppression, but just that that is what happens. I do love what the editor puts into the story right here at the end of the dream, which is the editor says, “And it wasn’t that way.” In other words, this dream comforted him, but not because he was right. And we know he wasn’t right. And it was a false comfort. This isn’t some sign from heaven that in fact the students were white on the outside, black on the insides. It was this, it was a false dream, and he was wrong. For now I’m going to hold on to that.
Dan Libenson: No, look, we don’t have to keep getting into this, but I’m just wondering that now that the Jewish Theological Seminary accepts gay and lesbian students, and there are so many of them. At the end of the day, does it matter whether that dean is sorry? Meaning, does it matter? I’m not saying I want him not to be sorry. I’m saying does it matter in the world. And what if that somehow prevented him from… I don’t know. We don’t have to…
Benay Lappe: I’ll think about it.
Dan Libenson: Right, okay. So let’s move on further. So what comes after that is there’s this dream now. We talked about this last week, because I didn’t want to leave it on a cliffhanger, that after the dream they talk about the tractate of Talmud that was being taught that day, or of mishnah that was being taught that day. And they mentioned that everywhere, I think my interpretation is right, that everywhere in the Talmud where you have the phrase “on that day,” they’re saying here that that refers to this day.
Benay Lappe: That’s right, that’s right.
Dan Libenson: Which is interesting. Because it does say “on that day” a lot in the Talmud.
Benay Lappe: It does, it does.
Dan Libenson: And the point is is that they’re saying, yeah, it does say it a lot in the Talmud. And the point here is that everything was resolved that day. That’s why it keeps saying “on that day, on that day, on that day,” because this is the day. Meaning, this is a kind of Sinai moment too.
Benay Lappe: That’s right, yes. Oh, I love that!
Dan Libenson: This is the day where everything in rabbinic Judaism got set down and resolved and figured out. We should probably go back to that.
Benay Lappe: I love that. I love that. And that happens when you open the doors to the beit midrash to all those folks who you thought shouldn’t be there, they thought they would never have a place there but wanted to. Yeah, I love it.
Dan Libenson: It makes me think about Yitz Greenberg’s theological description of the three eras of Judaism. He says, basically, that…. And here we’re talking about the first two eras, the biblical era transitioning to the rabbinic era. He says that theologically one way to understand it is God becoming less involved in the day-to-day of the world. And when God withdraws from the world, that leaves such a vacuum of responsibility that it requires more human beings to shoulder that responsibility. And so this is a story about how, until we got the more human beings to come–it’s not only that the priests were hereditary and the rabbis are more egalitarian and anybody can be a rabbi if they learn. It’s that we also need more of them. And the error that Rabban Gamliel was making was to say, “The difference between us and the priests is the priests were hereditary and we’re about learning. But we’re still going to be a small and mighty…” and they’re saying, “No, actually, we need a lot more people in this game.” And only when all the people show up and are able to shoulder the responsibility can we have the Sinai moment. And the first Sinai moment is Moses alone. The second Sinai moment, it’s only when the whole team is on the field.
Benay Lappe: I love it. I love it.
Dan Libenson: And it’s that day, it’s on that day.
So they say that the, there was no halacha, there was no matter of law or matter of practice, that was pending in the study hall that day that wasn’t resolved. And the Talmud says, “And even Rabban Gamliel didn’t even avoid the study hall for one moment.” Back to the question, if he hadn’t had that dream, maybe he wouldn’t have shown up, and maybe for some reason that’s significant. We’re going to get further…
Benay Lappe: Yeah. That was in the back of my mind as you were talking. Okay, all right, so he comes back.
Dan Libenson: I don’t know. I mean, I’m just… I want to make it really clear that what I’m trying to do with that is to, is that I really don’t like, I don’t like these ideas as much as you don’t like them, and I’m just trying to lean into the notion that maybe specifically because I don’t like it, it’s telling me something worth considering. So I just want to…
Benay Lappe: Yeah. I really appreciate that. And I think this moment that even Rabban Gamliel didn’t hold himself back. And it uses the exact same word, that mem nun ayin, mana, withhold or restrict. He didn’t hold himself back from coming into the beit midrash. That’s, you know, if JTS became run by, taught by, queer and trans folk, and this dean comes back to learn in the beit midrash, that would be something.
Dan Libenson: Right. That’s exactly, I think that’s exactly the story that we’re talking about. Something like that. So here’s the amazing part of this. And again, this is one of the ones that I think kind of tends to get skipped over. This is a long, what follows is a long Talmudic, halachic, what’s called pilpul. This whole thing with obscure Bible verses being brought in to prove this, to prove that. And so it’s kind of like, okay, there’s more to the story, let’s skip over this part and get to the other part of the story, which basically Rabban Gamliel goes to apologize to Rabbi Joshua, and there’s a whole great part of the story. So it’s like yeah, let’s skip over this part.
But when I was preparing this to think about doing this show, I was like, “Wait a second. I think this is the most important part of the story!” Or equally important. Because they say that every problem that was pending in the study hall was resolved that day. But the only one that they have here is this one. And it’s a story of a convert named Yehuda, interestingly, who is an Ammonite. He’s from the nation of Ammon, which is basically in Jordan, in what we know today as Jordan. Actually Amman, the capital of Jordan, is from the same word of Ammon. It’s where the Ammonites lived in Amman, Jordan, in that area.
Benay Lappe: I never knew that.
Dan Libenson: Yeah. There were actually three peoples in the area that we call Jordan today. The Ammon and Moab, and they are traced to, in the Torah, they are the bastard descendants of Lot, Abraham’s nephew Lot, whose daughters get him drunk and sleep with him after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and they become pregnant, and their children are Ammon and Moab.
Benay Lappe: I never made this connection. Now you’re reminding me that this prohibition that you’re about to describe in the Torah is right next to the prohibition of allowing a child of a prohibited union–“bastard,” but not a child out of wedlock, a child from two people who are prohibited to have intercourse–to prohibit that child, the mamzer, from entering the community. I had never made that connection. Okay. Anyway, I interrupted you.
Dan Libenson: I didn’t make that connection either until you said it. Even though I actually reviewed it before this, and I kind of read. It’s one of those things where you’re just like, “Ah, yeah.” [inaudible] So I was reading it. There’s a bunch of prohibitions here. Now we got to the one where Ammon, and the Ammonites and Moabites. You’re right, they are the misbegotten children in the Torah, and it follows them.
The third group that lives in the Jordan area–and by the way, the point that they lived in Jordan is that they’re basically Israel’s closest neighbors, and you often have the worst relations with your closest neighbors. There’s a lot of tension between the Israelites, the Judeans, and these people, the Ammonites and the Moabites. And there’s another group, the Edomites, which are the descendants of Esau. I mean, in the story.
The Torah actually–so we’re talking here in the book of Deuteronomy chapter 23 is where there are these prohibitions on whether these people can essentially join the community of Israel. Today we might call it converting. And they say, actually, an Edomite can–sorry, yeah, an Edomite can join the people. Don’t oppress Edomites. But Ammonites and Moabites, they’re the worst. We can oppress them, definitely they cannot become part of us.
Benay Lappe: Right. And I think there’s a little bit of uncertainty to what does it mean to enter into the congregation. Does it mean can’t convert? Does it mean can’t marry into?
Dan Libenson: The bottom line is that the book of Deuteronomy has–I’m going to read it just because it could not be stronger. It says, “No Ammonite or Moabite shall be admitted into the congregation of the Lord. None of their descendants, even in the tenth generation, shall ever be admitted into the congregation of the Lord, because they did not meet you with food and water on your journey after you left Egypt, and because they hired Balaam, the son of Beor, to curse you.” This is the story of the “Mah Tovu,” that they hire a person to curse the Jews, the Israelites, and eventually he blesses them. Talking donkey. Look it up, interesting story.
“But the Lord your God refused to heed Balaam. Instead the Lord your God turned the curse into a blessing for you, for the Lord your God loves you. You shall never concern yourself with their welfare or benefit as long as you live.” That’s harsh stuff.
Benay Lappe: Ouch. Ouch.
Dan Libenson: These are the worst.
Benay Lappe: Never! You will never!
Dan Libenson: The Torah couldn’t be more explicit. Never ever ever can one of these people be a part of the congregation! In fact, you shouldn’t even be nice to them. And to the tenth generation, which means forever.
Two things. One of the interesting things is that this Ammonite’s name is Yehuda, which means Jew.
Benay Lappe: I never thought of it. That’s great.
Dan Libenson: So that’s interesting. It’s not clear, did he change his name to Yehuda, was he somehow an Ammonite whose given name was Yehuda? It seems unlikely. But it’s sort of an interesting little tidbit there.
So the basic story is that this guy, Yehuda, the Ammonite convert, came to the study hall and said, basically, “Can I enter the congregation of Israel?” And basically, Rabban Gamliel says… looking it up here, Deuteronomy 26…
Benay Lappe: Says right here!
Dan Libenson: Says right here. Sorry. I mean, it’s…. Again, this is not a hard question. Of course you can’t come in. The Torah says it right here! You’re not going to-
Benay Lappe: It’s black and white. Right.
Dan Libenson: Right. And Rabban Gamliel says that–sorry, Rabban Gamliel says that he cannot, and Rabbi Joshua says you can. So again, keep in mind that this is a debate between Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Joshua. This was the whole debate that precipitated the whole conflict in the first place. They were arguing over whatever they were arguing. Was it when the new moon is? Whatever it was-
Benay Lappe: The last debate was over is the evening prayer obligatory, or…
Dan Libenson: Oh, it was the evening prayer obligatory. Right. And he made-
Benay Lappe: Optional.
Dan Libenson: -Rabbi Joshua stand in the corner. So this whole situation happens. Rabban Gamliel’s removed, the students come flooding in, et cetera, et cetera. He’s sorry, he has a dream, he’s not sorry. This whole situation, he’s back–and we’re back. It’s Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Joshua. They’re kind of in the same, but now they’re peers. Rabban Gamliel isn’t in charge anymore. But it’s the same characters in the debate.
Benay Lappe: Right. And the debate is over the central issue of this entire passage, which is who’s in and who’s out.
Dan Libenson: Right. Well, that’s the thing. So the mechanism here is that once you basically say, “Okay, we’re letting in all the Jews,” that’s the first step. It doesn’t say that explicitly, but it seems clear that the people, adding the 400 and 700 benches, those are the people that nobody’s debating over whether or not they’re Jews. They just were questioning whether they were interested in the project in the first place. Turns out they are. They come flooding in.
The very first topic that’s brought up is should we bring in some more people, and should we bring in people that are maybe more questionable in their Judaism. And the most extreme case is brought here of the person who is, in a way, the least Jewish possible, but still is interested in wanting to be a Jew, because he’s actually from the people that are absolutely and 100% forbidden by the Torah from being a Jew. And so if he can get in, anyone can get in! That’s the story here.
I think we don’t have time, and it’s really, it’s very obscure to go line-by-line here for this whole section, but there’s a tremendous number of lines here that are basically the debate between Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Joshua. And basically it’s a kind of–Rabban Gamliel is basically saying it couldn’t be clearer in the Torah that they’re not, that Ammonites and Moabites are not allowed to become Jews, not allowed to join the congregation. And Rabbi Joshua keeps pointing out various reasons why, “Well this guy, he may not exactly be an Ammonite because there was an Assyrian ruler, Sennacherib, and he came in and he moved the populations around, and so maybe this guy wasn’t an Ammonite, and maybe he was just somebody whose population was moved to Ammon, and he’s really from another population.” And then Rabban Gamliel is like, “No, no, they came back! Don’t you remember? The original Ammonites came back!”
Benay Lappe: Right. And even if he is exactly an Ammonite, and we know for a fact he is, the majority aren’t. And we know this halachic rule in the system that we invented much later than the Torah, which is “a single representative from a large group is assumed to be a member of the majority, not the minority.” And this is the classic case of you’re walking down the street in a Jewish neighborhood, and you see a package of meat wrapped up in brown paper, and the question is is it kosher, is it not kosher? Can I take it home and eat it? Well, if you’re in a Jewish neighborhood, and the majority of the butchers are kosher butchers, this meat is now existentially kosher. Just based on the rule that the majority of the butchers–not all of them, but the majority. Okay, this is kosher meat.
So this guy’s kosher because now the majority of the population, so there are all these very creative ways to re-read Torah that Rabi Yehoshua is pulling out in order to overturn Rabban Gamliel’s verse pointing. And I think the meta message, beyond the topic of inclusion–and I know you’re going to get to another meta–but they come to the conclusion, through the process of dissent and machloket, that Rabban Gamliel had previously suppressed. So it’s precisely that process that allows for this new interpretation of Torah. This is what you helped me see when we were thinking about this a couple of weeks ago, that this is a story about what happens when the folks from the margins come in is that it’s not only that they get access to Torah, but Torah itself becomes re-understood, and sometimes overturned. And the Torah itself changes.
Dan Libenson: Right. In the sense.… I think that the most important thing here, and we could and probably should study it for much longer and more deeply, and go into everything. But at least from the surface, what it appears to me to be is a clear case of svara. A clear case of the overturning of Torah. Because, I mean, there’s not a line in Torah that could be more explicit than the fact that this guy…. If you’re just a rule reader, and you just say, “Let me look it up on page whatever,” the answer is absolutely clear, this person cannot be admitted to the Jewish people. And yet a few lines later it says he was immediately admitted.
So it seems that there is a mechanism here to overturn Torah. Now, you could argue that it’s not really an overturning of Torah, because what Rabbi Yehoshua, Joshua, is basically saying is look, there were these populations moved around, and we don’t know that this guy is an Ammonite. And so the Torah says-
Benay Lappe: Yeah, but he’s made–except that he is named an Ammonite.
Dan Libenson: Except that he’s named an Ammonite. Little matter. But he is named Yehuda the Ammonite, so maybe they’re saying…. But the basic idea is that yeah…. So I think if you’re a traditional, I’m sure if you’re studying this in a traditionally ultra-Orthodox environment, let’s say, you would read this and you would say, “Oh, Rabbi Joshua went through these proofs to show that he wasn’t clearly an Ammonite, and that there were these kind of principles that we can use to show that he was a doubtful Ammonite,” and whatever. But you could easily read the Torah as saying in a case of questionable Ammonicity, you should err on the side of not admitting somebody, because the Torah is explicitly clear that we don’t want to admit any Ammonites, so you better make sure to be careful to not even accidentally admit an Ammonite. So clearly, the answer would be sorry, mister, you’re named Ammonite, so you’re close enough. We’re not going to take you. That would have been the old approach.
And clearly what we’re seeing here is you want to make the argument, okay. but what’s really going on here is that they’re saying this is a new–I think–this is a new Judaism. We just lost our Temple, we’ve gotten a lot smaller here. We don’t have the luxury to be keeping people out that want to be in. We just did this thing where we took the guards down from the gate, and it turned out that there were all these Jews that were interested in our new approach here, so we embraced that. And it turns out that there are all these other people. And at the end of the day, do we want to go by this Torah hatred of Ammonites? That was a long time ago. Maybe things have changed, and maybe some Ammonites would be helpful to help us navigate this situation. Just like these Jews that just came in were.
Benay Lappe: And as you’ve pointed out, this early team of rabbis who were creating this new Judaism were disproportionately represented by converts and children of converts. And I don’t think that fact is incidental to the project of re-creating after a crash, or after an enormous disruption.
Dan Libenson: Here’s the thing that I want to just point out a little bit. To say that dean of JTS, I can imagine that there’s a thought that says, “look, I don’t really–at the end of the day, do I really mind to have some gay and lesbian rabbis? I don’t really, it’s not so terrible. But if you start having the gay and lesbian rabbis, the next is going to be the people who only have a Jewish father. And then are going to be the people that just… and soon enough, this is a slippery slope. Soon enough, everybody’s going to be able to come in here.”
My approach is kind of like, “Yeah, that’s great!” Meaning yes, I actually think that we should have a slippery slope. That this is a time of crash in which it’s time, there’s a lot of things that need to be turned upside down. And that starts with who’s at the table.
Benay Lappe: Absolutely.
Dan Libenson: And yet I also see the same fear that says, but wait a second, but if it’s a slippery slope, if you’re telling me it’s not only going to stop with gay and lesbian rabbis, but it’s going to all of a sudden be Ammonites, then I better hold the line at gay and lesbian rabbis. Before gay and lesbian rabbis.
Part of the question there, I guess, is also where do you think we are in Jewish history. Do you think we’re in a crash, or do you think we’re not in a crash? Maybe the real dispute between Rabban Gamliel and Rabi Yehoshua, or the dean and you, or me, is, “But I don’t really believe we’re in a crash.” And I don’t know if that’s enough to resolve–but it helps me resolve it a little bit with more empathy. Not empathy, that’s the wrong word. With compassion. Because I don’t have empathy, I have compassion, in saying, “I think this person just sees the world in a profoundly different way, and maybe, hopefully he’ll come around one day. But I’m not sure that I can force him into seeing the world my way now. If he’s in my way and he’s stopping me from making the world right, then I’m going to have to defeat him with power. But if I’ve been able to defeat him in some other way, do I need his capitulation?”
Benay Lappe: I appreciate that. I like that a lot. Getting back to how we begin, and my story of lesbian separatists, and women-only spaces. There is a time to keep people out. And your question of where are we in time, where are we in this process, makes me realize that there was a time for lesbian separatism, there’s a time when you can create a feminist space and have some male-identified feminists in the room, and that’s okay. And the time will come when a male-identified person can be in front of the room, and it will be a whole room of male-identified people, and still be a feminist space. We’re not there yet. And you’re right, maybe you’re right, that that dean, or Rabban Gamliel, they have a different idea of where we are in this process of who should be let in, and what the project is. I appreciate that.
Dan Libenson: Only in my trying to work through this text and see if there’s something here… and I know that I tend, just to be clear, I tend to be the opposite of what I’m arguing for here. I tend to want the capitulation. I tend to want the explicitly-stated admission that I was wrong. So I’m really just talking to myself here. I’m trying to wonder whether this is saying to me you don’t need that. That’s about your own satisfaction. That’s not about the larger project, which is making the world right.
Benay Lappe: Well, I think we need to take a look at the very–and we only have a couple minutes. But let’s get this last piece out, because I think Rabban Gamliel maybe wasn’t ready to realize that this is not just about the queer folk, it’s also about the people with disabilities, and the people of color, and people who are intermarried, and people who are not Jewish. That’s the cost of letting someone be comforted in their small-mindedness. That they don’t realize the extent to which this isn’t about the case at hand, but it’s about something much larger. But okay, let’s do the last piece of the story.
Dan Libenson: Okay, so the last piece of the story is, so they immediately admitted Yehuda into the congregation, and Rabban Gamliel said to himself, “Since this is the situation, I should go and appease Rabbi Joshua,” apologize to him or make nice to him. When he reached Rabbi Joshua’s house, he saw that the walls of his house were black. Rabban Gamliel said to Rabbi Joshua: “From the walls of your house, it appears that you are a charcoal maker.” Rabbi Joshua said to him: “Woe unto a generation that you are its leader, as you are unaware of the difficulties of Torah scholars and how they make a living and feed themselves.” We can go on, but let’s stop there. We’re going to, I think, pick this up again next week, but let’s just talk through that part first.
Benay Lappe: For me, what’s so beautiful about this is Rabban Gamliel finally has a glimpse into the life experience of Rabi Yehoshua. And he’s a charcoal maker, meaning he’s someone who, he’s not wealthy, he’s a relatively poor person, someone who makes a living through a really arduous process. He suffers, he lives in this smoke-filled, soot-coated house, and then the white with the black on the inside, we’ll leave that aside. And finally, Rabban Gamliel realizes, “Oh, it’s your….” Rabi Yehoshua is saying, “You didn’t understand my life experience. You didn’t realize this is actually where the richness of what I have to bring comes from.”
Dan Libenson: Another way to think about it is that Rabbi Joshua somehow, it turns out that Rabbi Joshua’s inside is not like his outside. Or something like that.
Benay Lappe: Yeah.
Dan Libenson: That it’s not, that you think it’s about these “thems”, these…. I guess it’s like you being in the closet. It’s that all of a sudden, what if the dean kind of realizes that this person he’s come to respect, or at least knows that this person has the majority, has the support of the community, but he, there was actually another thing about him that he didn’t know, which was that he violated his own criteria. His criteria. I guess the story would be what if the dean came over to a professor’s house that he had some respectful rivalry with, and it turned out he said, the male professor, male-identified professor said, “Let me introduce you to my husband,” and all of a sudden he has this shock. “You’re gay?”
And somehow, I don’t know. Now I’m thinking it’s sort of like that story of, when the support for same-sex marriage was so influenced by whether you knew somebody who was gay or lesbian or who was in a same-sex marriage. And somehow the notion that Rabban Gamliel realizes that Rabbi Joshua is one of these students that wouldn’t have been let in… I don’t know, but I think there’s something to pick up on there next week.
Benay Lappe: Yeah.
Dan Libenson: Next week, so I think what we’ll do next week is really pick up on this scene, the apology scene. And I think that there’s more to it than that, also, because there’s also this question of, I think what Rabban Gamliel is discovering about Rabbi Joshua is that he can’t make a living doing rabbi work. And I think that that in itself is an interesting story to look at for our time, and whether one can make a living doing post-rabbi work, doing option 3 work, and what do we make of that. So there’s a lot going on there, so looking forward to discussing it with you.
Benay Lappe: Me too. All right.
Dan Libenson: All right, see you next week, Benay. Okay, bye.
Benay Lappe: Bye.
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