The Oral Talmud: Episode 9 - Turning Around
SHOW NOTES
“That was the rabbinic genius, to say that that which is wholly new also is given from God at Mount Sinai. That’s a genius sleight of hand that allows you to feel a sense of continuity and connection and history and sacredness in what is absolutely new.” - Benay Lappe
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
This week we reach the end of the Rabban Gamliel story we’ve been learning for the past two episodes. After being deposed as leader of the study hall, and watching in awe the flood of new students to the academy, Rabban Gamliel visits Rabbi Yehoshua, the man he had embarrassed so much that the rest of the scholars impeached him. Does Rabban Gamliel really drop by to make peace, or are there other motivations at play? How does Rabbi Yehoshua’s response echo through the eons to call out/in leaders of today?
The episode does have a broad re-cap from the two of us, but of course we recommend listening to the previous episodes as well.
And then! For a special Shavuot text (we recorded this at the end of May 2020), we visit Mount Sinai, and follow Moses’s mystical time-traveling journey through the twists and turns of Torah interpretation to the back of Rabbi Akiva’s classroom. What are the metaphors of this story illustrating? What model is it building for teaching us how to connect our innovation to our history?
This week’s text: The Removal of Rabban Gamliel, Conclusion (Berakhot 28a), Moses in Rabbi Akiva’s Classroom (Menachot 29b)
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 9: Turning Around. 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 week we reach the end of the Rabban Gamliel story we’ve been learning for the past two episodes. Rabban Gamliel is an early head of the rabbinic academy, but he’s rather atrocious to a fellow rabbi, Rabbi Yehoshua when he disagrees with him. And because of how harsh he is, the rest of the academy deposes him as leader of the study hall. And when they did, the scholars also did away with Rabban Gamliel’s gatekeeping, and left him to watch in awe the flood of new students to the academy. So at the end of last week’s text, Rabban Gamliel visits Rabbi Yehoshua, the man he had embarrassed so much that the rest of the scholars impeached him. And this week we bring our discussion of that moment to a close. Does Rabban Gamliel truly visit to make peace or are there other motivations at play? How does Rabbi Yehoshua’s response echo through the eons to call out/in leaders of today?
If that all went by kind of quickly, the episode does have a broad re-cap from the two of us, but of course we recommend listening to the previous episode as well.
And then! Because we recorded this episode in May of 2020, we bring in a special Shavuot text. Shavuot celebrates receiving Torah at Mount Sinai, so we turn to a famous Mount Sinai midrash, and follow Moses’s mystical time traveling journey through the twists and turns of Torah interpretation to the back of Rabbi Akiva’s classroom. We’ve both encountered this text a number of times, but really surprised each other with some fresh interpretations that came from bouncing ideas off of each other.
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 we are here for another episode of The Oral Talmud. Benay, it’s great to see you again.
Benay Lappe: Great to see you! Hey, Dan.
Dan Libenson: Hey. I’m really excited to be getting going with this episode. This is the first time that we are doing a third episode in a row where we’re actually talking about the same text. It turns out that it’s extremely rich. And what’s funny about it is that the way that both you and I tend to teach this text is just with a much smaller chunk of the one that we, of the way that we’ve been exploring it. It’s interesting that it’s both the case that the smaller chunk is enough, and is a lot. And really, the bottom line is it’s the part about if you let everybody in, they want to come in, 400 to 700 benches, that’s the main rest of it. But there’s so much more to it. It’s an extremely rich text.
Just want to refresh people a little tiny bit about what’s happening, and then we can jump into the end of this text that we want to talk about a little bit, before we go onto another text, a different one altogether, which is an amazing text in its own right, and has a lot to do with the day that we’re recording this, which is the eve of the Shavuot holiday. Which, at least in rabbinic Judaism, is the memory or the reenactment of when the Torah was given at Mount Sinai, which in the rabbinic imagination includes also what they call the oral Torah, which is what becomes the Talmud.
The text that we’re looking at here is from the tractate Brachot, which means blessings, page 28a. The bottom line of it is it has to do with a situation where these two important rabbis, Rabban Gamliel, who is basically the president of the yeshiva of Yavneh, the, again, in history or legend the place where–the Constitutional Convention. The place where rabbinic Judaism was created. And he’s the Samuel Adams, I think, was the president of the constitutional convention. And the other guy is Rabbi Joshua, who was the more progressive voice, maybe James Madison. I don’t know. Really representative of the strong progressive voice in that world.
They have a fight about something, not critical what it’s about. And Rabban Gamliel is kind of mean to Rabbi Joshua, and everybody rebels against him and throws him out of office. And in the ensuing situation where he’s thrown out of office, they remove the guards from the gates, is what they say. Meaning, we talked about this that it’s kind of like they removed the admissions requirements to Yavneh–again, now mixing metaphors, but this university, this place of study. Anybody can come in. And it turns out that anybody wants to come in. It’s not like, “And then a few people trickled in.” It’s then they debate about whether they had to add 400 benches or 700 benches. But a lot of people were out there waiting.
By the way, the admissions criteria that Rabban Gamliel had was that the students at Yavneh should, their insides should look like their outside, whatever that means exactly. We talked about modern analogies of whether, would that look like sexual orientation, that if they really want to know if your sexual orientation is what we expect, is the right thing. And even if you look a certain way, they want to ask you probing questions about your insides. Whatever those criteria might be. Do you really believe in God? There are all these criteria.
And all these people flood in, and Rabban Gamliel has this moment of shock and distress, and he feels like, “Gee, wow, I was thinking that these people didn’t want this stuff, that these people, they weren’t interested. And it turns out that they were so interested! As soon as we let them in, they came flooding in.” And he has this moment of distress, where he says, “Maybe it was me and my rules that were keeping the Torah away from Israel.” We talked over the last two episodes about so many modern overlays onto that. But before we go onto the part where we are today, just wanted to see if you wanted to add anything to that.
Benay Lappe: Well, I think what’s coming up for me as you’re recounting this story is the fact that this is another of those important snapshot moments of transition between one way of doing things–and “things” here including the idea of whose Torah is it, or who gets to play, or who gets to really be in on the conversation of what we think God wants of us. And we know that the rabbis made this enormous shift from a hereditary access to God through the priests to a democratization of access to Torah. But it was really only a theoretical democratization. It was a theoretical and partial, or partially lived out, democratization. Because yeah, you didn’t have to be born into the priestly class to come into the beit midrash, to really hear God’s voice and decide what God was really saying. But you had to be within a certain band of the people.
I keep thinking of the idea that all men are created equal was a great idea. It was a great theory. But it’s only great insofar as it’s applied to really all human beings, and not just, of course, as we know, all white men, landholders, and so on. So they’re increasing the number of people included in this democratization. And as we know, it really only goes so far for the next 2,000 years as including about one percent of the Jewish people. But it’s a moment in this shift.
Dan Libenson: Then we talked about last week this idea that the only, they say that once they admitted all these other people, they basically solved all the problems that were pending. But the one that they talk about is one in which they actually overturn the Torah in a clever kind of way. And we didn’t go into it as deep as we could. Maybe one day we should, because I actually think that when we talked about, some number of weeks ago–I think maybe our first episode or our second–when we talked about that story of the mountain being held over the heads of the people, and we actually looked at the sources that were being cited. And also in the oven of Achnai story, and we look at the sources that are cited, we see how they’re actually misquoting these sources in very clever ways. But we don’t think that they’re actually hiding the, we don’t think they’re actually doing something sneaky. We actually think that anybody who could read the stories knew what they were doing. And there was just a kind of rhetorical technique, or a way of actually trying to build a sense of continuity, even though everybody knew that it was discontinuous.
At the end of the day, here, too, they’re kind of playing fast and loose with these sources which they’re using to say that this person who is from the people of Ammon, which the Torah explicitly says can never become an Israelite, and they say, “But maybe this, maybe that,” and they’re citing all these different texts from all over the place, and ultimately concluding that he can come in. What they’re basically saying is that once you let everybody in, the very next thing they do is overturn the Torah. That’s at least my read.
Benay Lappe: You know what, something just clicked for me that you had brought up last week, but now I’m finally getting it. The fact that just before this dispute, they say every halacha that was teluyah, every unfigured out, hanging, undeciphered, every problem we had was solved. And then all of a sudden they come in with this dispute of a problem that’s not solved. And I just, it’s funny and it’s interesting. And I just realized that this piece, academic scholars of Talmud believe, was imported from some other place in the Talmud and is added here to construct this particular story. So it’s making me–and that makes sense, if in fact they solved all the problems, the original story probably wouldn’t then have had a problem for them to solve.
It makes me wonder what’s the message that the editor is trying to convey here–and I think it’s probably just what you’re saying–to then put in this particular problem to now be solved, which is something about who is at the table is really essential. And whoever is–and that we’re willing to overturn Torah itself when those at the table help us see that that’s necessary. Something like that, I don’t know.
Dan Libenson: Yeah, so much. There’s so much. So then-
Benay Lappe: So much.
Dan Libenson: -when we ended last week, we were talking about not quite the end of the story, but a critical point towards the end of the story, where Rabban Gamliel basically decides to go apologize to Rabbi Joshua. It’s not clear if he’s exactly apologizing. He’s appeasing him, whatever that means exactly.
Benay Lappe: It’s funny, because the transition from this dispute to Rabban Gamliel saying he has to go appease Rabi Yehoshua, it says, “Well, if that’s the case,” meaning, it seems to imply, “If Rabi Yehoshua is going to win that dispute, then I have to go appease him.” Which I think is odd, and I don’t quite get it. Because it seems that you don’t appease someone because they won an argument, because their decision stands, but rather because you really understand the harm you caused. So I’m not quite sure what to make of that transition.
Dan Libenson: Right. And it’s not clear from the language what the motivation is. In the translation that we are using here, which is based on the Steinsaltz translation, it says that Rabban Gamliel is saying, “Since this is the situation,” basically right after they allow the person to come in, the Ammonite, he loses this argument about the Ammonite, Rabban Gamliel does. And he says, “Since this is the situation,” and maybe it’s referring back to the fact that the 700 people came. Whatever it is. But he says, “Since this is the situation,” but really the Talmud says, “Since this is, because of this,’ whatever. “It would be appropriate,” this is the translation, but it says, “Since this is, I’ll go and appease Rabbi Joshua.”
Benay Lappe: Yeah, I think you’re right. I think it refers to the situation before this dispute, because the dispute gets stuck into the text. You’re right.
Dan Libenson: Maybe. I don’t know. It’s a good question, right. What’s the exact motivation? But it’s also like, remember that from the perspective of Rabban Gamliel, he’s out of his job. He’s now just one of the rabbis. What’s going on here exactly? Is he trying to get his old job back? Does he think, is what he sees here that Rabbi Joshua has more power than him, basically the power to command the people? The people defended Rabbi Joshua, not Rabban Gamliel. He’s kind of a leader who’s leading by, perhaps, his right. He descends from this family of Hillel, so this important family. Or maybe some other source of power. But not from the adoration of the people. The people adore Rabbi Joshua. They talk earlier that they can’t take Rabbi Joshua to take the position of Rabban Gamliel, because he was a party to the dispute. But really, maybe, they’re kind of saying he’s really, he didn’t get the support of the people. And is he saying, “The only way for me to get my old job back is to go back to Rabbi Joshua and try to appease him so that I’ll get my job back”? That’s actually what happens. Or is his motivation something else?
Benay Lappe: Yeah. Now that I’m realizing that this moment probably occurs right after Rabban Gamliel realizes what he’s done, and sees all the students come, and all the problems solved. He realizes that’s the harm he had caused, his appeasing dream notwithstanding. And I think now–I think he, I don’t think he’s looking for his job back. I think he’s really, he’s trying to express his regret for having withheld Torah from the people. But you’re right, it’s funny. To Rabi Yehoshua’s-
Dan Libenson: I don’t know. The truth is, I’m less sure than you are about that. Because Rabbi Joshua isn’t really involved in that question of the removing of the guards. The dispute with Rabbi Joshua–he has two disputes with Rabbi Joshua. One had to do with what time to say the prayers. There was three.
Benay Lappe: We can’t remember the third one. It was what time to say the prayers. It was on what day is Yom Kippur.
Dan Libenson: But that was an old one, I mean. But I meant in this particular interaction.
Benay Lappe: That was the only one in this interaction.
Dan Libenson: No, but also the one about the Ammonite convert. You’re saying that the scholars say that was brought in from somewhere else, but let’s at least accept it on the level of the story. He’s got two disputes with Rabbi Joshua here, neither of which has to do with this moment of reckoning that he has when they remove the guards from the gates, and the 700 or 400 benches worth of students come in.
So the question is, you’d think that if he really regretted–or the story tells us that he really did regret–the fact that he was keeping out all these students, that the move would be to ask forgiveness from the students, or from someone…. Why Rabbi Joshua? It feels like Rabbi Joshua’s role in this story is that Rabbi Joshua has power. Rabbi Joshua has the support of the people. So I’m more, maybe I’m playing the cynic here, but I’m more seeing this as he’s saying, “I see where the power is in this. I thought I was the one who was in power.”
By the way, I’m only raising this because of the potential that it matters for today, that there’s some wisdom here. But it feels like he's a good politician, and he has just done a power map of the rabbinic world. And he said, “It’s not me. I thought it was me, but it’s not me. It turns out that power is not in position, power is in influence. And that Rabbi Joshua obviously is the one who has the influence. So if I want to either, not get my job back, but if I want to just kind of be a player here, then I better make sure that I’m on his good side. If he hates me, if he’s resentful towards me….” And then the other is maybe he wants his job back. So I don’t know, but I would at least put that on the table.
Benay Lappe: I think I like it. I’m not sure if… for some reason, I’m really feeling a lot of rachmanus at this moment. I wasn’t last week.
Dan Libenson: You’re a Rabban Gamliel apologist!
Benay Lappe: Yeah! But I do love the idea of all the option 1 folks coming to the queer, radical, fringy, freaking option 3 folks who are starting new things, going, “Please can I have a job?”
Dan Libenson: Here’s the way that it’s that, but at this point in the story, Rabban Gamliel doesn’t know it yet. And maybe this is the hook. Maybe this is just for us to move forward is to say that when we were talking at the very end of last time, we were imagining that when he goes to see Rabbi Joshua, he finds that his house is full of black soot, basically. And he understands from that that Rabbi Joshua makes a living as a charcoal maker, and that basically he’s burning logs, and that’s making his walls sooty, and he makes charcoals out of that.
Benay Lappe: Meaning, he’s very poor.
Dan Libenson: He’s very poor, and he has-
Benay Lappe: A hard life.
Dan Libenson: It’s an unpleasant work. It’s kind of like working in the coal mines, it’s bad for your lungs, and it’s not a pleasant job. What we were talking about last time about that was that in a way, he’s seeing that Rabbi Joshua’s insides are not like his outsides. He’s seeing that he thought of Rabbi Joshua as this man who was presenting himself as a brilliant rabbi, his outer appearance was that he was one of us. And it turns out that he’s this poor person who I would have looked down upon, and he is actually dirty. When he goes home, he’s dirty, he must clean himself off to get to the yeshiva, whatever.
Somehow, we were talking about that that was analogous to this dean who doesn’t want to allow gay and lesbian students to come into the seminary, all of a sudden comes over to the house of his rival that he respects, and he finds out that he’s gay. And that all of a sudden he realizes that, “It’s not only that my policies were keeping out these students–my policies forced this guy into the closet. And I actually respect him.” I think we talked about that the statistics show that people supported same-sex marriage if you knew someone who you knew to be gay or lesbian or queer otherwise.
But what’s interesting is that before Rabban Gamliel comes to Rabbi Joshua’s house, he doesn’t know any of this. So one way, at least literarily, I was thinking about it is that okay, the way that it is connected to the point that we’ve been discussing, the guards at the gates, is that, in a way, Rabbi Joshua is the ultimate example of those students who were let in, because they were not the kind of people that Rabban Gamliel likes. And maybe one day they will be a Rabbi Joshua. But in terms of the story’s details, he doesn’t actually know that at this point, so I’m not sure that it fully holds together.
Benay Lappe: What you’re saying is paradoxically the very requirement that, for him, excluded and disqualified someone now is revealed to be what allows the most gifted. It’s a subversion. Someone who’s white on the outside and black on the inside is a bad thing is now being subverted, and it’s exemplified by Rabi Yehoshua. And that very example of white on the outside, black on the inside, now we realize can mean something totally different, and is what actually qualifies someone.
Dan Libenson: I think we want to wrap this up at least by the half hour. So I want to make sure that we talk about the other piece of the apology, which is basically that after he apologizes, or appeases… initially Rabi Yehoshua, it says he ignores him, I think. It says that he, he says, “‘From the walls of your house, it is apparent that you are a charcoal maker.’ Rabbi Joshua said to….” So before the apology, before the apology, Rabban Gamliel expresses this shock that he’s a charcoal maker. And Rabbi Joshua says to him, “Woe unto a generation that you are its leader, as you are unaware of the difficulties of Torah scholars, how they make a living and how they feed themselves.”
Benay Lappe: That’s such a poignant and beautiful line, I think.
Dan Libenson: I want to hear what you have to say. The thing that for me it’s like… the resonance that I have from it are two immediate things. One is that you always say in your talks, you have a line where you say, “If your paycheck is coming from option 1,” meaning from the old system, “you’re not going to go option 3.” And so there’s this idea that where the money comes from makes a big difference, and that in our economy, thinking about today, all the money is in the existing world of Jewish institutions. And that means that if you are trying to actually do professional, Judaism stuff professionally for a living, it’s really hard to do it in a option 3, as a really paradigm-shifting way, because if you’re going to collect your paycheck, i.e. your funding, from option 1, you’re not going to go option 3. And so there’s that piece going on here.
And then the other piece is that, in a way, there’s an accusation here. That Rabbi Joshua is saying, “We are going option 3. This whole project is about a new Judaism. But if you as the leader, if you don’t understand that it’s not just about these ideas. We still have to live. And then you’re really a bad leader of this.” I’m trying to think about it, I’m trying to take it in, because to the extent that I or you are in some way in a position of leadership vis-à-vis this work that we’re advocating for reimagining Judaism…. What does that mean in terms of our responsibilities towards others who are engaged in this work? I think that’s where my mind is at.
Benay Lappe: I think Rabi Yehoshua is saying to Rabban Gamliel, it’s like, “Oh my God, what kind of leader do we have? The leader is supposed to be the person helping all, everyone else on the team see where the tradition isn’t working to make it better, to make the tradition work better.” In other words, whose suffering isn’t being recognized that needs to be recognized and addressed by the system, and whose suffering is actually being caused by the tradition as we currently have it, and where do we need to fix it?
“And I, Rabi Yehoshua, have been your partner in this renewal of Judaism, and you have no idea who I am. You have no idea me, and all the more so must you have no idea who the people are. I’ve been sitting next to you for years, and you have no idea what my life is like and what challenges and struggles and life situations I have to deal with. And our whole project is to make the tradition that helps people from their lived experience.”
So I think that’s-
Dan Libenson: No, I love this.
Benay Lappe: That’s what the, “Oh my God, poor us.” If we’re trying to help the world and trying to make a tradition that speaks better to people’s lives, you have no idea what my life is like.
Dan Libenson: Right. I think we should talk about–I mean, I think the economic dimension is really important in our present circumstances, but there are also other criteria. I’m thinking, I’m just transposing the story onto all kinds of different realities that a person might encounter when they come over to somebody’s house. And they find out that maybe they’re gay. Maybe they see pictures on the mantle, and they realize that the person is actually of mixed race, and they didn’t realize that. Or whatever it might be. And somehow they express shock. Part of the story is like, “Wait a second. Why are you expressing shock? It’s one thing that you didn’t realize, but it's another thing that you’re so surprised. Isn’t this whole endeavor for people like us?”
And it’s specifically the people–the reason why Rabbi Joshua is a charcoal maker isn’t because of the new era. It’s because of the old era. Meaning there are all these ways in which people who are poor today, people who don’t have health insurance, it’s because we still have–it’s still the old. And if we’re bringing a new system into place, ostensibly it’s there to correct the mistakes of the old system. If you don’t even realize that you’ve got all these people who are the marginalized of the old system, and they’re all here in your yeshiva studying, but they wanted to make a new system. And if you’re still locked into the old system, something’s wrong with you, and you shouldn’t be our leader!
Benay Lappe: Right. That’s beautiful. Yep. I love the insight that he’s poor not because option 3 is this grassroots bootstrap place. It’s because of the old system! He was in the crumble of the old system. He was one of those on the fringes who understood the inadequacy of the old system.
Dan Libenson: Actually, when we think about our times and the new system, then it’s interesting. A lot of times when I look back to the rabbinic period and I say… we have these questions. I have it about my own career, and certainly others. I certainly can’t afford to hire too many people, but I need a lot of help, we need a lot of help. So then we’re asking people to volunteer in different ways. And I wish for this day when we can all make a good living doing the new version of Judaism.
Part of me feels like that day is near, and part of me feels like that day is very far. And if it’s very far, then I look back to rabbinic Judaism, to these early days that this story is about, and I say, “Maybe most of the early rabbis, either they were wealthy,” Rabban Gamliel supposedly comes from a wealthy family, “or they had a different job.” Meaning that Rabbi Joshua was a charcoal maker. He wasn’t teaching Hebrew school. He was making his living doing a non-Jewish job, meaning a regular job. And he was doing this Jewish stuff on the side. I mean, Maimonides, in a way, is the ultimate example. He was a doctor. I don’t know how he had the time, but he wrote all these amazing books-
Benay Lappe: He had a rich brother who was supporting him!
Dan Libenson: Okay, there you go. By the way, again, my wife and I have been doing this daily Talmud study, and we’ve just recently read about some of the remedies of that time. And it made us think, “Hmm, I wonder what kind of a doctor Maimonides really was.”
I think I’ve said that in a kind of flip way sometimes. I’ve said, “Look, we’re going to have to,” as opposed to a way that says, “It’s not fair, it’s not right. It’s not right. It’s not right that somebody should have to make a living.” Meaning, I don’t know, meaning that the health insurance is so expensive that you can’t afford to even work for low pay in the Jewish community if you wanted to, because it still wouldn’t be enough just to have basic health insurance. So you end up being forced to either have a job outside the Jewish community that is so, taking up so much of your time, just to be able to get health insurance, whereas in another situation you might actually be willing to say, “Well, I’ll earn less, but I’ll do more meaningful work.” And so many people don’t really have that choice.
I think it bears a lot more thought about the economic… I don’t even know the right word. It’s more than inequities, it’s disaster. It’s something that really is holding us back from doing the Jewish re-imagination work, because we don’t have the right people at the table. And we don’t have the right people at the table because the poorer people can’t be at the table because they actually have to have a job.
Benay Lappe: That’s right. A hundred percent.
Dan Libenson: And how do we address that?
Benay Lappe: We could go off on this for a while. But you said you were hopeful, and you’re less hopeful. I know this is way off, but as we’re watching our current moment of crash happen, what we’re seeing is shifting of funding that used to support little option 3s now moving back to option 1s because-
Dan Libenson: Like rescue.
Benay Lappe: -there’s this enormous fear that the old mainstream, there’s this enormous fear. I don’t know exactly what the fear precisely is, but I’m also less optimistic in this particular moment.
Dan Libenson: Well, I guess the one thing though that I would say–and then we’ll move to the other text, but I think there’s a lot here that we want to return to at some point. By the way, that’s what you say at the end of every chapter of the Talmud, that we’ll return to you. So I think we’re going to return to this one.
One thing that I do think about is that there are a number of, let’s say, donors that are well-remembered in the Talmud. And sometimes certain negative stories are told about them, meaning it took them, it was a hard time getting there. So I think about Rabbi Akiva’s father-in-law as one of these examples.
Benay Lappe: Yeah, I like that!
Dan Libenson: His name was Kalba Savua. And initially he doesn’t want his daughter to marry Rabbi Akiva, not because he’s a third era guy, but because he’s a poor guy. But I think if he had really believed he was going to become a great scholar, he–but he doesn’t really believe. Anyway, long story short, he comes around in the end. And I feel like there’s some of these folks who really financially supported this endeavor, and they get remembered for 2,000 years. So I’d say if there’s any funders out there-
Benay Lappe: There’s our new pitch! We have to work that up. That’s fabulous.
Dan Libenson: Yeah. We don’t know. Who is funding the Second Temple? Who is funding the attempt to build the Third Temple, or the new Temple in Alexandria, wherever it was. Who were those funders? They’re forgotten. Those early funders of rabbinic Judaism, they did it.
Benay Lappe: That’s good. Okay, so let’s leave folks with the fact that Rabban Gamliel does in fact regain a shared position in the beit midrash, and he and Rabi Yehoshua share being the head. Three weeks, Rabban Gamliel gets to be the chief, one week, Rabi Yehoshua gets to be the chief. Okay.
Dan Libenson: Right. And there’s a whole part that we’re not going to have time to, we don’t really have time to get into it right now. But it has this echo of the last text, the end of the last text that we did, the oven of Achnai, where Rabbi Eliezer is excommunicated. And there’s this big question of who’s going to tell him. And here there’s this whole thing where they decide, you know what, we probably should put Rabban Gamliel back in office now that he’s apologized, which is also a whole thing, like, “Who’s going to tell the other rabbi?” It’s a great–I love the kind of… it’s very human. It’s like, okay, we’ve just done something really hard, and the obvious next question is who’s going to tell him. I don’t want to be the one to tell him.
Benay Lappe: Who’s going to let the straight guy back into the queer yeshiva? I don’t know. Do we really-
Dan Libenson: Actually-
Benay Lappe: -do we need to let him in? okay.
Dan Libenson: In both cases, it’s Rabbi Akiva who steps up and says he’s going to do it. So that’s a whole nother question that we should look at.
Okay. Because today is the eve of Shavuot, we want to really at least start and do a good chunk of this next text, which is one of… we’ve identified three key texts that the rabbis think of what happened at Sinai, or a version of that. We talked about one of them early on, where the mountain is held over the people, and there’s a threatening element of it. And then there’s this one, which is from the-
Benay Lappe: And the oven of Achnai is another one of those sort of Sinai moments, or remythologizing.
Dan Libenson: Right, because they talk about it’s not in the heavens. And also we talked about the beginning of Pirkei Avot is about the story of where the Torah was handed from this person to this person to this person, starting with Moses.
And here, there’s this other imagined story, a version of the story, where that involves… well, let’s read it. It’s the rabbis imagining what was happening on Mount Sinai. And I guess a little bit of a flip way to say why it is that they’re asking this question is because why did it take forty days. That’s kind of in a little bit the background here. It’s like, what was going on there for forty days? That’s a little bit what’s driving this question.
Here it is. Tractate Menachot page 29b.
Benay Lappe: I just want to add to what you just said. There’s always a textual hook, or a pretext, upon which a midrash seems to be based or motivated. And I think you’re right, that here it’s, oh, okay, Moses was up there for forty days. What was going on all that time? So I think on the surface, that’s motivating the story. But you always have to understand that a midrash–and this is essentially a midrash–a midrash is actually motivated by some crash, by some discontinuity in the world between what’s actually happening and what people have been told is the way things should be. So I think one of the questions I want to keep in my back pocket as we read this story is what’s really the crash that this midrash is in answer to. Okay.
Dan Libenson: Okay. There’s a lot of citation in the Talmud, so I actually, the translation that I have here doesn’t, left out the part that… it says that Rav Yehuda said that Rav said that… so basically, it’s a rabbi quoting another rabbi. This is a story that I was told, or that I learned, that originated from this other person. And the story is that when Moses ascended on high–meaning when he went up to Mount Sinai–he found the Holy Blessed One sitting and tying crowns on the letters of the Torah. Just to make clear what this is, if you open a Torah scroll the letters are decorative. There are these crowns on the letters, these flourishes.
Benay Lappe: Right. And we should note that on this very page of Talmud, they’re actually talking about the proper writing of the letters, and which letters need what kinds of crowns. So that’s an even more direct pretext for this midrash. What are these crowns doing there? Okay, this is how we do it, we’ve always done it. What are they about? Okay, here comes the story.
Dan Libenson: God was actually tying… it’s an interesting image, the tying the crowns on the letters. First of all, I don’t know, there’s so many levels to it. Is God tying as opposed to writing? It’s just an interesting image. The long story of it is it’s taking so long because God is spending all this time tying little, making little flourishes on every letter. Why, what is, why are you taking so long? And he says, Moses-
Benay Lappe: You have to assume that the Torah’s already done. God’s already “written” the Torah. The Torah’s done, and now he’s doing this.
Dan Libenson: Moses says before God, “Master of the universe, who is preventing you from giving the Torah?” “Who is preventing you,” really, it says. But the idea is, who is stopping you? Basically, “Master of the Universe, who’s stopping you?” And the point is why not just give me the Torah here so I can take it.
Benay Lappe: It’s done! Give–you can imagine him pointing to his watch going, “Hey, if I don’t get back down there, we’re going to have some trouble.” And what’s funny about this moment-
Dan Libenson: And by the way, we know there was trouble going down there.
Benay Lappe: Exactly. And what’s funny about the wording of the text is you wouldn’t expect someone to say, “Who’s holding you up?” You’d expect them to say, “What’s holding you up?” Even-
Dan Libenson: Especially if it’s God.
Benay Lappe: Yeah, exactly! What human person could be holding up God? But Moses doesn’t say that. He says, “Who’s holding you up?” So it’s funny, because it turns out that it’s going to be a person. But how would he know that? Why is he saying who? It’s funny.
Dan Libenson: Yeah, it’s great. Okay. So God says, “There’s a man who is destined to be, destined to come, destined to be born, after several generations, and Akiva ben Yosef is his name.” So that’s Rabbi Akiva.
Benay Lappe: Right. Who, we’ll have to remember, is going to be born 1500 years in the future.
Dan Libenson: Right, yeah. 1500 years in the future, and just FYI, when he’s born, he’s a poor shepherd. He’s a poor guy from parents who converted, or somehow joined. There’s a lot of nuance to this idea that he’s going to be–I guess the text doesn’t actually say “born.” He just says “There’s going to be this man, Akiva ben Joseph.” “And he is destined to derive,” or his fate… I’m looking at the Hebrew. It really just says that he will in the future. It doesn’t say he’s destined. He says that in the future, he will derive–it says lidrosh, he will do midrash, he will…
Benay Lappe: Interpret.
Dan Libenson: Interpret. He will…
Benay Lappe: Draw out.
Dan Libenson: Draw out. And actually, lidrosh means to inquire, literally. It comes from this idea of to inquire. He’s going to make meaning, is probably the best way to say it. He’s going to make meaning out of every… and here it says from every thorn of these crowns. Meaning, the crowns have three little flourishes, or two. So it’s not only from the fact that this letter has a crown. He’s going to take every little piece of these crowns, these decorations on the letters, and he's going to make mounds and mounds of meaning out of this. Meaning, this is going to be… you don’t understand. It’s not just that he’s going to make a few little commentaries about this here and there. He is going to make so many commentaries, so many new laws, so many new interpretations out of these crowns that it’s a quantity that you can’t even imagine.
Benay Lappe: Right. At this moment, one’s theology has to come into play. Because you have to wonder whether God is inserting meaning into the crowns that Rabi Akiva will uncover. I don’t think that’s a plausible read at all. But I think that’s the “traditional” read, that anything-
Dan Libenson: Oh, that Akiva’s going to discover these hidden meanings that I’ve put in the form of crowns, and nobody’s going to discover them for 1500 years, but then he’s going to discover them. That they were there from the beginning.
Benay Lappe: That’s the traditional read. “Traditional” read. I would call it, actually, the anti-traditional read, but that’s a longer story.
Dan Libenson: But you mean it’s what you would expect to hear in an Ultra-Orthodox yeshiva today.
Benay Lappe: That’s right. But for me, it’s pretty clear that these flourishes are meaningless in and of themselves, and God knows it. And the Torah is already finished. The meaning has already been put in it. And now these are essentially excuses. These are visual props that God is purposefully putting here because he knows mounds and mounds of new meanings for the Torah will need to be made. And this will give those meaning-makers some excuse to claim that, ah, this was in God’s intention all along.
Dan Libenson: That’s a part that I think I didn’t quite see until you’re talking right now. This idea that if I didn’t make the crowns, then somebody would come along and say, “You’re just making that up.” It’s not, that’s… like we did. Meaning that when we looked at some of those texts a few weeks ago, and we said, “Well, it says follow the majority.” And we actually read the text, and it says, “Don’t follow the majority.” As opposed to, “Yeah, it says don’t follow the majority. But if you see here there’s a crown on ‘don’t.’” I don’t know if there is or not. But, “There’s a crown on ‘don’t,’ and that means that it’s actually the opposite, so it means ‘do.’” And then it’s still a little crazy, but you could be like, “Okay, at least there’s a hook for it.”
Benay Lappe: Here’s what just clicked as you’re talking. The crowns are the metaphor–I know this is obvious, but I just got it. The crowns are a metaphor for all of the midrashic rules and techniques that Rabi Yishmael and Rabi Akiva and their descendants will then utilize to make the argument that this new radical meaning was actually there all along. Because God really gave us these, you know, hints in the Torah, because there’s a vav here, there’s a vav there. There’s this redundancy. There are these thirteen, for Rabi Yishmael, and then infinite number for Rabbi Akiva, rules for deducing new meaning. So that’s what the “crowns” are.
Dan Libenson: In terms of our orientation towards, that we’re ultimately saying this is a time for us to do something like this again for the next era of Judaism. We should go into the next piece, because I wonder if… there’s two ways to look at this, potentially. One is that this is a later text being written about a guy who lived a long time ago, Rabbi Akiva. And who is obviously this extremely creative person who you could also say–more than creative, he created, he made a whole new Judaism. And we’re trying to justify that by saying he was a singular figure in history that was as great as Moses, basically, and God knew that at Sinai, and was just trying to make sure that Akiva… and we trace our lineage back to Akiva, and so we’re in this very kosher lineage. But we can’t do that kind of thing anymore. We can’t interpret the crowns of the letters. That was, only Akiva could do that.
Another possibility is to read it and to say, “If Akiva could do it, why can’t I do it?” Meaning that maybe they’re saying to us–I mean, again, this is the message in a bottle piece–“You’re going to need an Akiva one day.”
Benay Lappe: I think that’s what it’s about, for sure.
Dan Libenson: I don’t know. I mean, I want it to be about that, too, and I don’t know what the original intent was. And I think both readings are powerful and valuable to us today. But they are different. I think it’s interesting to think about the potential differences among them. I don’t know that it makes a difference. I think that, in a sense, we may be looking for our Akiva today, and we may be all Akiva today. I don’t know. There are all kinds of layers to it.
Benay Lappe: Now the scholar that you turned me onto, Leon Kass at the University of Chicago, comes to mind. When he talks about the power of stories from your tradition being not that they tell you what happened, but that they tell you what always happens. And I just can’t believe that the Talmud is here to tell us what happened. I think it’s here to tell us what always happens. And if they needed an Akiva to make mounds and mounds of meaning at a time when the Torah as Moses received it wasn’t working well, that has to be more than what happened. It has to be what always happens when there is a crash. So yeah. I think it’s the latter.
Dan Libenson: I want it to be the latter, the latter, the former.
Benay Lappe: But that’s precisely the, what’s the word, I don’t know, the fallout point between the yeshivas on Devon–meaning, the Orthodox yeshivas–and the yeshivas that are, the very few ones, like SVARA, that are saying, “No, this isn’t here to tell us how they used to do it, and no one else can make Torah because we certainly, we’re so far from Mount Sinai,” that whole idea. But rather, “That’s how they did it, and that’s how we need to authorize ourselves in every generation.”
Dan Libenson: Okay, let’s go on.
Benay Lappe: Yeah.
Dan Libenson: God says that this guy, Akiva, is going to do this incredible stuff. He’s going to make all this new meaning from these crowns. And so Moses says to God, “Master of the Universe, show him to me.” And God says, basically, “Turn around.” And I imagine some kind of “doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo,” some kind of time warp. And all of a sudden, Moses is in the eighth row, meaning probably the back row, of Rabbi Akiva’s study hall. And he didn’t understand what they were saying, is what the Talmud says. Then it says Moses’s strength waned, although that’s the same word that is used in the Rabban Gamliel story that we just studied, where he says he was, where we translated it as he was distressed. And so it’s basically describing some kind of physical distress, some deep physical distress, or emotional distress. It’s at a medical level, I would say.
Benay Lappe: You know, the phrase came to me as you were talking that it’s like the blood drained from his face. He had such a visceral reaction of despair and shock, and he was so distraught, that he had this physical weakening. I think we have to ask, what was his reaction to? He had no idea what was going on. Obviously they’re talking Torah. This is a yeshiva, and they’re talking “Torah.” But Torah is now completely unrecognizable to Moshe.
Dan Libenson: This would be true of pretty much anybody from a past time in Jewish history that came forward enough time. I was just imagining somebody coming to our… maybe I was thinking about… this was literally when I was making my coffee this morning, I had this passing thought about a person from the days of, biblical times, a nomad kind of person, who saw themselves as a Hebrew. And came to visit me in my COVID lockdown here in Chicago, and wanted to see what I was doing Jewishly. And literally couldn’t understand–even the Hebrew. I think I was listening–oh, you know what was happening? I was listening to someone talking on a different podcast in Hebrew, and their accent was so American. And I was like, “This person wouldn’t understand a single word. They wouldn’t know this is Hebrew.” If you think about how Arabic sounds to our ear, that’s probably how ancient Hebrew sounded, something like that. And the way that Americans speak Hebrew sounds much more like English. You would have a hard time picking out the words, much less the practices.
It was just like, and how are we connected? We think that we’re connected to them. We see this as an unbroken chain in some way. But I think that anybody coming forward, seeing it, “This is bizarre, this is crazy. How could this possibly,” because they skipped the whole chain.
Benay Lappe: I think you put your finger precisely on what is about to comfort Moshe. Read this next line. Because it’s the directionality I now see that’s precisely the hard thing to understand. Okay, so read the next line.
Dan Libenson: The next line is that Moses’ blood drained from him. And when Rabbi Akiva arrived at the discussion of one matter, his student said to him, “My teacher, from where did you derive this? Where did you get this law from, or this idea from?” And Rabbi Akiva says, “It’s a law transmitted to Moses at Sinai.” And when Moses, and then the Talmud says, “When Moses heard this, his mind was put at ease.”
Benay Lappe: The student is asking for the source. It’s a technical question. What’s your source? Where exactly did this come from? And Rabi Akiva says, “Oh, it’s straight from God to Moses.” And Moses is like, “I have no idea what you all are talking about, but now I get that you see yourselves as connected to me.” So what you were saying, I think, really names the realization that comforts Moshe. Because I’ve never been totally clear about why he feels better. He still doesn’t know what they’re talking about. But once he realizes they think they’re in an unbroken chain, that alone is what makes him feel better.
Dan Libenson: Huh. Yeah, I hadn’t seen that before, too. I hadn’t made the connection to this text. That sounds right, that this idea that.… We see the connections in the backward-looking directions. In fact, we see them because we created them. I’ve always said jokingly-but-not-jokingly that I just don’t understand why American Judaism is so allergic to a Christmas tree. The idea, the way that Judaism works is that everybody would have a Christmas tree, and then we would tell a story where the Maccabees planted a tree outside the Temple, and that’s why we have a tree for Hanukkah, and it would be no problem. And then we’d just decorate it with Jewish decorations. That’s, every Jewish practice is like that.
When you’re looking backward, especially a generation after that practice was imported, you don’t see the importation anymore, because you’ve now inherited the story–the false story–of the long connection. And you just see this straight line to Moses or to Abraham or wherever. But from that person’s perspective, it’s a funhouse mirror. It’s bizarre.
And they’re right. Actually, they’re right. Moses is right. We should get into it. But Moses is right in that it’s not actually a direct linear…
Benay Lappe: For sure.
Dan Libenson: …progression. And yet, we’re also right in saying that it is because we’ve constructed a story in which it is linear.
Benay Lappe: I think that was the rabbinic genius, to say that that which is wholly new also is given from God at Mount Sinai. That’s a genius sleight of hand that allows you to feel a sense of continuity and connection and history and sacredness in what is absolutely new.
Dan Libenson: That actually raises something that I hadn’t thought of before in terms of this text. I just wanted to read the last–not the last line, but the second to last, or one–it might actually be the last line that I have in this version here on my source sheet. I think it is, yeah. “Moses’ mind is put at ease, and Moses returned and came before the Holy One, the Holy Blessed One, and said before him: ‘Master of the Universe, you have a man like this and you give the Torah through me?’” And God said to him, basically, “Shut up,” that’s what I thought of.
Benay Lappe: Yeah, sit down and…
Dan Libenson: Sit down and shut up. Before we get to the sit down and shut up, what I thought until this moment, I’d read that line, “You have a man like this, and you give the Torah through me?” as that Akiva’s genius is somehow interpreting these laws out of the crowns. But that’s not Akiva. But now that I’m thinking about it, that’s not Akiva’s genius. Meaning that Akiva stands for the rabbinic genius. The Rabbinic genius–I mean, maybe it is, but it’s deeper than that. The Rabbinic genius is the doing of the new and claiming that it’s connected to the old. It's the retrojection of the reasoning into some hook, some traditional hook.
By the way, it’s interesting to say the word “hook,” because really that’s one way that we might interpret the word that means the tips of the crowns. That he’s going to use every point, or every hook, as a hook. Actually it’s great. It’s going to use the hook at a hook, right. But that’s the genius. And that actually I think is a more legitimate reason for Moses to say, “I’m just a dumb transmitter. God, you’re telling me, and I’m telling the people, and I’m not really contributing anything to this. Whereas Akiva and the rabbis, they’re geniuses, because they’re making this whole thing up, and then they’re finding a way to connect it to your word. And they truly believe it, and that’s amazing. And that is a worthier people.”
Benay Lappe: For me, it’s not so much worthier. It’s there are times when you need Moses leaders, and there are times when you need Rabbi Akiva leaders. And Moses is now so excited and turned on by Rabbi Akiva’s genius, but what he doesn’t realize is you actually don’t need Rabbi Akivas when life is stable. Although maybe sometimes you need, presumably this story is saying when Torah was given, we needed a kind of static, fixed tradition to start with. I don’t know. I don’t know. My mind is now questioning how I always understood this, which was Moses was the right leader for the time. On the other hand, it was a moment of upheaval, so why didn’t we also need Rabbi Akivas then. I don’t know.
Dan Libenson: Let’s put this maybe into Yitz Greenberg’s theology, and then I think that’s maybe a good place to pause and then come back to it. I forget if we’ve talked about it on this show, but I’ve always been really inspired by Yitz Greenberg, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg’s theology since I heard it for the first time. And he’s, in many ways, the originator of this idea that we’re on a new, on the precipice of a new era in Jewish history. He calls it the third era.
He says that in each era, God is differently present in the world. And in the first era, God is imminent, God lives among us, and we literally feed God with the sacrifices or with the odor of the sacrifice. And he’s much less, much more engaged with us in a bodily way. And in the second era, the rabbinic era, God withdraws from the world in a present sense. And Yitz talks about how in other ways God actually comes closer to us. But God withdraws from a day-to-day sense, and that that leaves more responsibility on human shoulders, and so you need a greater number of humans to shoulder that responsibility. And maybe we should add to that that you need a greater amount of human agency to supplement that responsibility.
In the first era, or before the first era, Moses is the figure before the first era, the transition from the pre-biblical era, that, well, God is right here, so God can just tell Moses. So Moses doesn’t need to be a Rabbi Akiva, because we have God. And then in the second era, though, God has removed Godself, so we need more people. So we don’t have one Moses, we have a team of rabbis. And not only–but they can’t hear God anymore, so they have to use their svara, maybe, their moral intuition, or at least their reason, and they have to figure out what to do. And among the things that they figure out what to do is this genius way of connecting their innovations to God’s word or to Moses’s word.
The question then arises for us on the transition to the third era, where Yitz Greenberg talks about God withdrawing even further. That might mean that even–we replaced the sacrifices with prayer, and now prayer needs to be replaced with something else, because prayer is not effective because God has withdrawn even further. So really, the maximum amount of God’s responsibility is on human shoulders. So we need an even larger group of humans to shoulder that. And ostensibly, we’re going to need an even cleverer group of humans. they’re going to have to be even more than Rabbi Akiva.
The way that I think about this text now from this perspective is I think it brings together the two things that I asked about earlier. It’s not only that we… it may be that there was a singular Rabbi Akiva for the transition to the second era. But in the transition to the third era, there wouldn’t be a singular Rabbi Akiva, because the whole idea is that the numbers expand. So we have zero in the first era, one in the second era, and now more than one in the third era. And also we have this larger expanded group. So it was the single Moses in the first era, the small group of rabbis in the second era, a much larger group of someone else in the third era. Maybe not everybody in that larger group is in the Akiva team. They’re the really creative, super out there creative types. That might be still a kind of vanguard. But it’s not one guy.
And it is where we really can say, just as Akiva did this incredible creation and also this incredible tying… It’s interesting about the tying of the crowns and the tying back to the… all the more so we need that in our time. Something like that.
Benay Lappe: I love it. It’s fabulous. I know we’re out of time. Maybe next time, before we start a new text, we’ll just give the postscript to this.
Dan Libenson: Yes, we absolutely should.
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