Swimming against the Current: Reimagining Jewish Tradition in the Twenty-First Century. Essays in Honor of Chaim Seidler-Feller 9781644693087

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SWIMMING AGAINST THE CURRENT REIMAGINING JEWISH TRADITION IN THE TWENTYFIRST CENTURY

SWIMMING AGAINST THE CURRENT

REIMAGINING JEWISH TRADITION IN THE TWENTYFIRST CENTURY

Essays in Honor of C H A I M S E I D L E R- F E L L E R Edited by Shaul Seidler-Feller and David N. Myers

BOSTON 2020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Seidler-Feller, Shaul, editor. | Myers, David N., editor. | Seidler-Feller, Chaim, 1947- honoree. Title: Swimming against the current : reimagining Jewish tradition in the twenty-first century: essays in honor of Chaim Seidler-Feller / edited by Shaul Seidler-Feller and David N. Myers. Description: Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2020000742 (print) | LCCN 2020000743 (ebook) | ISBN 9781644693070 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644693087 (adobe pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Judaism--History. | Judaism--21st century. | Jews--Civilization. | Bible--Criticism, interpretation, etc. | Rabbinical literature--History and criticism. | Seidler-Feller, Chaim, 1947Classification: LCC BM42 .S95 2020 (print) | LCC BM42 (ebook) | DDC 289.09--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020000742 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020000743 Copyright © 2020 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved. ISBN 978-1-64469-307-0 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-64469-308-7 (adobe pdf) Book design by Lapiz Digital Services. The cover art graphic, conceived by David Moss, features text from the famous story of the oven of akhnai (bBava metsi‘a 59a-b), in which Rabbi Eliezer is quoted as saying, “If the halakhah accords with my opinion, let the stream of water prove it,” upon which the stream flowed backward. Chaim Seidler-Feller’s Hebrew name, Chaim Shlomo, is superimposed thereupon, as though swimming against the current. The calligraphy was adapted by Shulie Seidler-Feller from National Library of Florence, Ms. Magl. II.I.8, pp. 188, 216, 230. The fish and boat imagery is © British Library Board: Ms. Harley 5794, f. 33r, and is reproduced here with permission. Published by Academic Studies Press 1577 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02446, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

Contents

Introduction: A Portrait of Chaim Seidler-Feller Shaul Seidler-Feller and David N. Myersix Bibliography of Publications by Chaim Seidler-Feller Part I The Sources of the Tradition: Bible and Talmud Order as Meaning: Juxtaposition in the Bible Isaac Gottlieb

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Behind Every Great Prophet Is a Woman: The Women in Exodus 2 in Talmudic Interpretation Shana Strauch Schick

26

Study of Torah as a Discourse of Violence: Milḥamtah shel Torah, Variations on a Theme Aryeh Cohen

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Discipleship in Rabbinic Literature Moshe Halbertal Secular Legal Paradigms and Talmudic Law: Rav Tsa‘ir on Legal Loopholes Elana Stein Hain Part II Jewish Thought and Theology Buber, Scholem, and the Me’or enayim: Another Perspective on a Great Controversy Avraham Yizhak (Arthur) Green On Not Finishing the Work: A Commentary on Avot 2:16 Michael Walzer

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115 117 143

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The Faith of Abraham Howard Wettstein

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The Ascent and Decline of the “Historical Jew” Moshe Idel

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Divine Command Theory in Jewish Law and Ethics Elliot N. Dorff

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Part III Modern Jewish History and Sociology

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Polio Season: Transformations of Philip Roth’s “Jewish Mother” from Sophie Portnoy to Marcia Steinberg Sylvia Barack Fishman

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Go to School, Work, Marry, Have Children, Be Jewish: Jewish Women and Jewish Men in the United States and Israel Sergio DellaPergola

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The Day of Reckoning: Max Radin and the Rule of Law in International War Crimes Eugene R. Sheppard

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Antisemitism: Reflections and Ruminations Deborah E. Lipstadt Part IV Zionism and Jewish Politics Sovereignty and Ethics in the Thought of Rabbi Ḥayyim David Halevi Suzanne Last Stone Rabbi Shlomo Goren on the Maimonidean Law of Siege: An Essay on the Ethics of Jewish Warfare David Ellenson

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267 269

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Invoking the Indigenous, for and against Israel Carole Goldberg

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Jewish Folk Art and Ideology: The Śimḥat Torah Flag through the Ages Shalom Sabar

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Student Tributes 

357

Meira Wolkenfeld 359 Adam Greenwald 363

Contents

Mayim Bialik 365 Jonathan Jacoby367 Colleague Tributes 

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Laurie L. Levenson 371 Edward Feld 379 David Berner 383 Saul Andron 387 List of Contributors

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Shaul Seidler-Feller, Hebrew University of Jerusalem David N. Myers, University of California, Los Angeles

Introduction: A Portrait of Chaim Seidler-Feller *

Any argument that is for the sake of heaven will ultimately endure. —Avot 5:17

This maxim from the Ethics of the Fathers, highlighting the principle of a maḥaloḳet le-shem shamayim, has served as both invitation to and justification for Jews to engage in passionate debate. They have, ever since, proven particularly adept at the art of argumentation. Indeed, Jews are a famously contentious lot, though few recall the original text from which this quality derives, much less the ancient actors—the sages Hillel and Shammai—who modeled it. Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller is the living embodiment of the principle of “an argument for the sake of heaven.” He loves a good debate but also understands the moral and political imperative of listening to and learning from the other side; he seeks to parry but also to absorb the perspective of his foil. This ability to live—and to live productively and happily—with maḥaloḳet, with dissonance, is a defining feature of his career. It is also a key source of his capacity for innovation, for crafting new alloys from old * This introduction-cum-biography, like the rest of the volume, was compiled without Rabbi Seidler-Feller’s direct involvement. Wherever possible, external sources are cited to buttress biographical details shared orally by him in various contexts. No claims of comprehensiveness are made by the authors of this essay.

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material. Indeed, throughout the course of his life, Chaim has repeatedly swum against the current, especially in striking a balance between tradition and modernity. He has alternately stimulated and annoyed adepts of either pole but never surrendered a claim to both—or to the possibility of a synthesis between them. Along the way, he has modeled a path that, in an earlier, golden age, went by the name “Modern Orthodoxy”—before that designation itself became a source of controversy and argumentation. One can say that he is equally, and rather uniquely, at home in the worlds of Talmudic debate, Maimonidean logic, Hasidic communion, Zionist polemics, modern psychology, political science, religious theory, social critique, and feminism. In Chaim, seeming opposites dissolve into a complex, but integrated, whole. He is a fully observant Jew and a fully modern man. He is a proud adept of the particular beliefs and practices of his people and an unreconstructed universalist who insists on the dignity of each human being. He has devoted almost the entirety of his professional career to one vocation, Hillel director, but is, by nature, a relentless multitasker (read: on two phones at the same time), ready to take on new challenges and explore new paths at every turn. He has the obsessive attention to detail of the experienced scholar that he is but also the tendency to leap from topic to topic with the enthusiasm of an excited college student. This unusual amalgam is the product of what would, at first blush, seem like a typical immigrant home in Brooklyn. Born in 1947 in Borough Park to Isaac and Peppi Feller, Chaim grew up in an environment committed to full Jewish observance, a love for Zion (in a Betar-Revisionist key), and a passionate embrace of the Hebrew language. Isaac Feller was born in 1914 in Sanok, Galicia (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), to a family of Belzer Hasidim and immigrated to the United States in 1927;1 Peppi Kleinman was born in 1920 to an Eastern European family living in Berlin but came to America alone in November 1938. Isaac was fond of recounting how he first encountered Peppi on Thirteenth Avenue in Brooklyn challenging the anti-Zionist ravings of an interlocutor. He admired her passion and idealism in that moment and remarked to his best friend Nachum Maidenbaum that she was the type of person he would be interested in 1 For background on the Feller family, see Susan Feller Siegel, ed., A Family History of the Descendants of Shimshon Yechiel Mechel Feller (Yorktown Heights, NY: Susan Feller Siegel, 2019).

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marrying some day—and so they did, in 1940.2 Together with his brother Milton, Isaac owned a clothing business known as Admiral Knitwear Corporation on Hall Street in Brooklyn; later, he and Peppi worked at different branches of a luggage store owned by a cousin. Isaac belonged to a small but identifiable coterie of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Not only was he a regular consumer of The New York Times and the Yiddish press (both the Tog-Morgn zhurnal and the Forverts); he was also a twentieth-century maśkil, an avid, self-taught Hebraist. In the 1935 words of American Hebrew journalist and educator Daniel Persky, he was shikkor-ha-ivrit ha-nitsḥi (perennially intoxicated with [a love of] Hebrew)—one who read the Hebrew journals that came out of New York, such as Hadoar and Bitzaron, to which prominent intellectuals such as Simon Federbusch, Abraham Halkin, Samuel K. Mirsky, and Simon Rawidowicz regularly contributed. Moreover, Chaim recalls that as a young boy he would go to the local kiosk on Saturday nights to pick up the newly arrived Israeli newspapers, including Davar, HaTzofe, Maariv, and Haaretz, for his father. It was through Isaac’s reading interests, as well as his membership in the Histadruth Ivrith of America and attendance at Hillel Bavli’s classes at the Jewish Theological Seminary, that Chaim was introduced to modern Hebrew literature. In short, the Feller home was a nurturing environment for Chaim to develop his love for Hebrew language and literature, as well as Zionism. As advocates of traditional Jewish education, Peppi and Isaac sent Chaim to local Orthodox day schools where Jewish studies and Hebrew were emphasized: Hebrew Institute of Boro Park (Yeshiva Etz Chaim)3 for elementary school (from which he graduated as valedictorian), followed by Yeshiva University High School of Brooklyn (BTA). In the summers, Chaim attended Massad Aleph in Tannersville, Pennsylvania, a non-denominational Hebrew-immersive camp where he expanded his knowledge of the language through such activities as Hebrew-only baseball, for which a separate glossary of terms was created.4 Throughout his 2 See Chaim’s “My Ima, Peppi Feller,” Jewish Journal (January 30, 2013), accessed March 10, 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20130204204552/http://www.jewishjournal. com/obituaries/article/my_ima_peppi_feller. 3 On the early history of the school and its “Ivrith be’ Ivrith” curriculum, see Moses I. Shulman, “The Yeshivah Etz Hayim[,] Hebrew Institute of Boro Park,” Journal of Jewish Education 20, no. 1 (1948): 47–48. 4 On the educational philosophy of the camp, see Dan Lainer-Vos, “Israel in the Poconos: Simulating the Nation in a Zionist Summer Camp,” Theory and Society 43, no. 1 (2014):

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high school career at BTA, which was characterized by his “zeal in the pursuit of excellence,”5 Chaim was involved in numerous extracurricular activities, including organizing Variety Nite, coordinating the daily student minyan and weekly mishmar learning sessions, serving on the Student Court, editing The Topics student newspaper and the Elchanite yearbook, heading the local Arista honors society chapter, and participating in the glee club, math team, tennis team, and track team, among others.6 “When asked about finding time for everything, Feller advised, ‘An amazing amount of work can be done if you don’t waste time.’”7 Of course, there are only so many hours in the day, and Chaim was sometimes forced to cut class to fulfill his other obligations. The oft-repeated refrain of the faculty—“Where is Feller?”—continues to accompany the perennially tardy Chaim down to the present.8

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91–116. For a brief history of the camp’s sporting program, see J. Mitchell Orlian, “Ha-pe‘ilut ha-sporṭivit be-maḥanot ‘massad,’” in Ḳovets massad, ed. Shlomo and Rivka Shulsinger-Shear Yashuv, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Irgun Maḥanot “Massad” be-Yiśraʼel, 1989), 177–83. The camp actually issued its own dictionary, including many neologisms, the first edition of which appeared as Shlomo Shulsinger and Hillel Rudavsky, The Massad English–Hebrew Dictionary: A Classified Listing of Everyday Words, Cross Indexed, ed. Daniel Persky (New York: Massad Camps, Inc., 1947). Many years later, Chaim would make a point of raising his own children in Hebrew; see Beverly Gray, “Talking the Talk,” Jewish Journal (July 12–18, 1996): 20, 22, and Chaim’s “Zionist Principles Can Drive Healing Process,” Daily Bruin (May 6, 1997): 15. Anon., “Daiell Awarded Mayor’s Citation[,] Grand Street Prize to Feller,” The Topics 11, no. 4 (May 1964): 1. See anon., “Feller, Novick, Kerstein, Shapiro Elected Editors of ’64 Elchanite,” The Topics 10, no. 2 (December 1962): 1, and Chaim Feller and Michael Novick, eds., Elchanite (Brooklyn: Students of Yeshiva University H.S. of Brooklyn, 1964), 22. Gary S. Schiff, “Meet One of the Fellas,” The Topics 11, no. 4 (May 1964): 3. Many years later, Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis would astutely observe that Chaim is “always teaching” due to his concern for biṭṭul ha-zeman (wasting time), a sensitivity engendered by his “yeshiva culture”; see “UCLA Hillel Honors Rabbi Chaim & Dr. Doreen Seidler-Feller,” accessed March 1, 2019, https://vimeo.com/13195592 (starting at approx. 1:49). See also Chaim’s 1968 letter of acceptance to Yeshivat Kerem B’Yavneh: “Whether you are in the Yeshiva Bet Midrash or elsewhere, at a study period or in a recess between studies, in the dining room or in your own room—[Torah study and its application] should occupy your attention and your time so fully that you will no longer find particular interest in those trivialities which previously occupied so much precious time.” Feller and Novick, Elchanite, 22; see also ibid., 34, 48, and the film Searching for Chaim, produced in 1998 by Marshall Goldberg.

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“For the Intellect Is the Glory of God” (Maimonides, Commentary on mH.agigah 2:1) Upon graduating high school in 1964, Chaim enrolled in Yeshiva College, where his manifold intellectual interests blossomed. It was at Yeshiva that Chaim began to assemble the foundations of his distinctive hashḳafah, or worldview. He deepened his knowledge of Talmud through shi‘urim (lectures) given by Rabbi Ahron Soloveichik and his brother, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (the renowned “Rov”), with the latter of whom he studied for four and a half years.9 In addition to his mathematics major (he had started college as a pre-med), he indulged his interest in philosophy by taking undergraduate- and graduate-level courses with the well-known scholar of medieval Jewish thought Arthur J. Hyman, the philosopher of language Sol Roth, the ethicist Walter Wurzburger, and the theologian Yehuda (Jerome) Gellman.10 Perhaps most influential among his teachers (aside from the Rov) was Rabbi Meyer Simcha Feldblum, a student of the yeshiva in Telz (present-day Telšiai, Lithuania) who survived World War II as a partisan and later immigrated to the United States. Having received his doctorate in Talmud from Abraham Weiss at Yeshiva University, Feldblum adopted Weiss’s historical-critical methodology in analyzing the development of the Oral Law and transmitted it, in turn, to his own students.11 For Chaim, this new way of looking at halakhah (Jewish law) and minhag (Jewish custom) as living, 9 For Chaim’s reflections on Soloveitchik’s thought and impact, including his personal experiences in his class, see “Jo[se]ph Baer Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith with Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller,” The VBS College of Jewish Studies (October 30, 2013), accessed March 1, 2019, https://vimeo.com/78668330. 10 Chaim was eventually inducted into Pi Mu Epsilon, the national mathematics honorary society; see anon., “Initiates,” Pi Mu Epsilon Journal 4, no. 8 (Spring 1968): 364. He would later remark that, given his interest in ideas, he should have majored in philosophy. 11 For an analysis of Weiss’s methodology, see Meyer S. Feldblum, “Prof. Abraham Weiss: His Approach and Contribution to Talmudic Scholarship,” in The Abraham Weiss Jubilee Volume: Studies in His Honor Presented by His Colleagues and Disciples on the Occasion of His Completing Four Decades of Pioneering Scholarship (New York: Abraham Weiss Jubilee Committee, 1964), 7–80. For appreciations of Feldblum as a scholar and teacher, see anon., ed., Ha-Rav Prof. Meyer Simcha ha-Kohen Feldblum z”l: divre hesped ṿehaʻarakhah (Ramat Gan: n.p., 2003), and Avinoam Cohen, “Meyer Simcha Feldblum: ha-ish ṿe-shiṭṭato ba-meḥḳar ha-Talmudi,” in Universiṭat Bar-Ilan: me-raʻayon le-maʻaś, ed. Dov Schwartz, vol. 2 (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 2006), 49–65. See also the double-issue of the journal Bar-Ilan 30–31 (2006), a volume of essays published in Feldblum’s memory.

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evolving traditions proved hugely influential in his thinking about the modern Jewish experience. Chaim’s time at Yeshiva was not only deeply rewarding for him; it was a fruitful period for the university’s guiding ethos of Torah u-Madda, with rabbis and professors such as Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, Aharon Lichtenstein, and Shlomo Riskin serving as mentors. Through his Talmudic and philosophical studies, Chaim came to embody the harmonious blending of traditional Jewish learning, on the one hand, and secular scientific and humanistic studies, on the other, to which Yeshiva College was dedicated.12 In fact, when Yeshiva President Samuel Belkin decided to separate the yeshiva from the university in 1970 in order to receive state funding without running afoul of church-state restrictions, Chaim and some of his friends protested (ultimately unsuccessfully) what they saw as a threat to the vision of “synthesis” that they so cherished. As in high school, Chaim was involved in a host of extracurricular activities in college that reflected his evolving interests. He was copyeditor of The Commentator and managing editor and editor-in-chief of the Hamevaser student newspapers, vice president of the Student Organization of Yeshiva (SOY), and president of the Yeshiva chapter of Yavneh, the National Religious Jewish Student Association.13 It was during these years of intense social upheaval in the United States that Chaim developed the core of his progressive political consciousness, shaped both by his parents and his firm conviction, imbued by Wurzburger and Soloveitchik, in the ethical values of Judaism. Chaim attended a protest against the Vietnam War at Columbia University and hung an anti-nuclear proliferation “mushroom cloud” poster in his dorm room.14 As the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ) movement took form, he went to meetings and demonstrations on 12 For an early formulation of Chaim’s Torah u-Madda philosophy, see his “We Believe” essay in the 1964 Elchanite, p. 89: “It is the belief of the truly religious intellect that one’s devotion to G-d will lead him to the ultimate perfection accompanied by the wealth of knowledge that civilization has uncovered.” (Below his signature appears the Hebrew of “Know Him in all your ways” [Prov. 3:6].) 13 See anon., “Miller, Sonneberg Win Religious Council Posts,” The Commentator 65, no. 6 (May 25, 1967): 1; Alan Rockoff, “Frimer Speaks on Prophecy at N.Y. Convention,” The Commentator 67, no. 1 (February 15, 1968): 6–7; and Ivan Michael Schaeffer, ed., Masmid (New York: Yeshiva University, 1968), 116. 14 See David Suissa, “Lonely Man of Faith,” Jewish Journal (April 21, 2010), accessed March 1, 2019, https://jewishjournal.com/opinion/78683/. Years later at UCLA, he would sign declarations calling for an immediate freeze on all nuclear weapons production; see the March 8, 1982 (p. 12) and June 3, 1982 (p. 6) issues of the Daily Bruin.

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Introduction    SHAUL SEIDLER-FELLER AND DAVID N. MYERS

and off campus. These causes, both Jewish and not, reflected Chaim’s deep belief that particularistic and universal commitments were not mutually exclusive. Following his graduation from Yeshiva College in 1968, Chaim spent about seven months (Elul through Adar) studying at Yeshivat Kerem B’Yavneh, the first yeshivat hesder (which combined Talmud study and army service) in Israel, under the tutelage of the school’s dean, Rabbi Chaim Yaakov Goldvicht. After his time at the yeshiva, Chaim came back to New York briefly before returning to Israel that summer to take classes at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: Bible with Baruch Margalit and the history of the State of Israel with Avraham Avi-Hai. These initial exposures to Israel, to which Chaim would return scores of times in the decades that followed, not only solidified his dual commitments to traditional and academic Jewish studies, but also concretized his Zionism as he connected to the vibrancy of spiritual and cultural life in the Jewish State.15 After the summer, Chaim began his formal studies at Yeshiva’s rabbinical school, the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS), as well as at its Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies. The RIETS curriculum at the time consisted of focused exploration of halakhah, with a special emphasis on the laws of kashrut, while in Revel, Chaim pursued a Master’s in Rabbinic Literature under Feldblum’s direction. Chaim also spent a year (1970–1971) of his time in the semikhah program in Lichtenstein’s afternoon kolel for advanced rabbinical students.

“Love the Work, but Hate the Rabbinate” (Avot 1:10) In 1971, the young Chaim left the familiar world of Yeshiva University and entered the rabbinate. Although he had not yet completed all of his requirements for ordination (or for his Master’s degree), he took a pulpit in New Bedford, Massachusetts, at Ahavath Achim (the synagogue previously ministered by Rabbi Zalman Schachter [later: Schachter-Shalomi], among others), a relatively small congregation with approximately two to three

15 He would later write: “Speaking for myself, Zionism is no mere ideological appendage but an essential feature of my Jewishness” (“Zionism Is Not a Racist Policy; It’s Just a Form of Nationalism,” Daily Bruin [January 15, 1992]: 18). See also his “Zionist Principles,” 15.

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hundred member families at the time.16 There, he not only taught Torah classes, but also served a number of communal organizations such as the local Jewish Community Center and Jewish Welfare Federation.17 From this early point in his career, Chaim evinced a characteristic quality: he regarded the quest for social justice, as well as his political interests more generally, as inseparable from his spiritual and religious mission as a rabbi. He served as chairman of the New Bedford Conference on Soviet Jewry, organizing a rally at a local park that drew three hundred participants and featured noted activist Rabbi Arthur Green as guest speaker. Similarly, on Rosh Hashanah 5733 (1972), Chaim devoted his sermon to a soul-searching discussion of the American bombing of Cambodia.18 In the days that followed, he noticed that a larger-than-usual crowd had gathered to pray the evening service one night. Sensing that something was amiss, he asked them whether they had come to speak with him; they said that yes, they were disturbed by his derashah on Rosh Hashanah and wanted to know what he was going to talk about on Yom Kippur. Though the topic on which he planned to speak, aging, gained his congregants’ approval, Chaim realized that he could not continue in his role as leader of a flock composed largely of conservative World War II veterans who would oppose his progressive leanings.

“Who Is Wise? He Who Learns from Everyone” (Avot 4:1) At around that time, Chaim’s friends Rabbis Yehiel Poupko and Joseph Polak began urging him to consider a career with the B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation. A 1973 meeting in Boston with Rabbis Samuel Fishman and Max Ticktin of 16 For two brief histories of the congregation, which ceased operations by the close of 2010, see Judy Farrar and Cynthia Yoken, Historical Tour of Jewish New Bedford (Dartmouth: University Library and the Center for Jewish Culture, 2005), 20, accessed March 1, 2019, https://www.lib.umassd.edu/archives/jewish-tour/ahavath-achim-1, and “The Story of Ahavath Achim Synagogue,” New Bedford Cable Network (2013), accessed March 1, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz_D58MKJQ0. See also Zalman M. Schachter-Shalomi with Edward Hoffman, My Life in Jewish Renewal: A Memoir (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2012), 87–88. 17 See anon., “Hillel Expands Staff,” Ohio Jewish Chronicle (September 20, 1973): 3. 18 Years later, Chaim would sign a letter, together with other alumni of the Hebrew University, protesting the American Friends of the Hebrew University’s decision to honor Henry Kissinger at their annual dinner in light of his role in the secret bombardment of Cambodia and in the ouster of its head of state, Norodom Sihanouk. See Ha’Am (November 27, 1979): 9.

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Introduction    SHAUL SEIDLER-FELLER AND DAVID N. MYERS

National Hillel proved to be fateful. Not only was Chaim offered a position at the Ohio State University (OSU), but Fishman would become a lifelong friend. After a visit to the campus, Chaim chose Columbus as his new home and settled into a new rhythm of life as co-director of Hillel (along with Aaron Jay Leventhal).19 He would later reflect: “I came to Hillel . . . because there was the sense that the university was the place where a new type of Judaism was going to [e]merge that was going to provide meaning for the future.”20 Indeed, the environs of the university were exceptionally hospitable to Chaim. He quickly befriended faculty and engaged students with his unusual combination of intellectual, cultural, and spiritual interests. Chaim also did not shy away from controversy. Shortly after his arrival, Chaim led a beginners’ service at Hillel, without a meḥitsah (the traditional partition between men and women), and invited anyone who wanted an aliyyah to the Torah to step up. One of those who approached the bimah on that Shabbat morning was a woman, and she was duly granted the synagogal honor.21 This act made clear that Chaim, raised as an Orthodox Jew, had evolved in his own thinking, favoring an inclusive approach to religious observance.22 Somehow, word made its way back to RIETS that Chaim Feller had sanctioned a breach of accepted Orthodox practice. In the fall of 1973, he received a phone call from someone he knew in the Yeshiva registrar’s office urging him to file for graduation as trouble was brewing. 19 For brief reflections on their time as co-directors, see Naomi Schottenstein’s interview with Leventhal on behalf of the Columbus Jewish Historical Society, accessed March 1, 2019, http://columbusjewishhistory.org/oral_histories/aaron-leventhal/. 20 Tessa Nath, “Celebrating 40 Years of Ha’Am,” Ha’Am (December 11, 2012), accessed March 1, 2019, https://haam.org/2012/12/11/celebrating-40-years-of-haam/. 21 See the later report on this incident in Bill Cohen, “History Made as Conservative, ‘Traditional’ Rabbis Call Women to Bless the Torah,” Ohio Jewish Chronicle (November 14, 1974): 1. 22 This shift in orientation grew in part out of Chaim’s exposure to the countercultural writings of contemporary Jewish feminist activists, such as Paula E. Hyman, “The Other Half: Women in the Jewish Tradition,” Response: A Contemporary Jewish Review 7, no. 2 (Summer 1973): 67–75, and Rachel Adler, “The Jew Who Wasn’t There: Halacha and the Jewish Woman,” ibid., 77–82. Before departing Ohio for California, Chaim would publish an article explaining the reasons for his position on women’s aliyyot, including his “commitment to the dynamic development of Halacha.” See his “Law and Changing the Law,” Ha’Am (May 20, 1975): 9, 13; republished with revisions as “The Public Invisibility of the Jewish Woman,” Ohio Jewish Chronicle (June 5, 1975): 4; ibid. (June 12, 1975): 2, 13. See also the impassioned responses the latter article elicited, as printed in the June 19 (pp. 3, 12) and June 26 (pp. 2, 15) issues of the Ohio Jewish Chronicle.

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He thereupon submitted the necessary paperwork for his Master’s degree from Revel. But when he called a different Yeshiva official to find out where things stood with his ordination, he was told that it was not forthcoming: “That’s what happens when you go off the deep-end.” And then there was silence. . . . About eight years later, having relocated to Los Angeles and worked as a rabbinic consultant to Barbra Streisand for the film Yentl (1983) starting in 1979, Chaim received a phone call from Rabbi Dr. Herbert Dobrinsky of Yeshiva asking if the institution’s president, Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm, could speak with him. Lamm had heard that Chaim had a personal connection with Streisand and asked if he would hand deliver a letter on his alma mater’s behalf asking her to endow a chair in Jewish studies at Yeshiva’s Stern College for Women. Chaim agreed, and when Lamm arrived in L.A. a few weeks later, the two met for an hour at the Century Plaza Hotel. During their conversation, they spoke about their mutual interest in Hasidism and its absence from the course offerings at Yeshiva. As he was getting up to leave, Chaim recounted to Lamm the story about his never having received his rabbinical ordination. Lamm’s jaw dropped, and he told Chaim to call his office the following Monday to check on its status. When he did so, he learned that the ḳelaf (ordination certificate) was already being processed.23 Back at Ohio State, Chaim threw himself into a host of activities. In his first Rosh Hashanah message to the OSU community, he laid out his view of an inclusive Judaism: “[W]e will strive to create community, to break the artificial barriers between groups and to educate towards commitment to an ideal rather than towards loyalty to an institution or to a building.”24 With typical sharpness, Chaim declared a month later that old forms of denominational affiliation may not speak to the contemporary generation of young Jews. He had come to recognize that “labels are irrelevant. They serve to divide people, and I look at religion as a unifying force.” At this point in his budding career, Chaim saw little value in defining himself as an Orthodox rabbi, even though he remained Orthodox in his observance. 23 This certificate was anomalous in at least two ways. First, despite the fact that it had been backdated to 28 Tishre 5735 (October 14, 1974), it was issued to “Rabbi Chaim Shlomo . . . Seidler-Feller”—even though Chaim had not yet married Doreen Seidler as of that date. Second, the document, although worded in the plural (as it was usually signed by two or three ordaining rabbis), only featured a single signatory, namely, Lamm himself. 24 Chaim Feller, “High Holy Day Messages,” Ohio Jewish Chronicle (September 20, 1973): 11.

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Rather, he declared that “I refer to myself as a Jewish Rabbi who serves Jewish human beings.”25 In addition to breaking down barriers between Jews, Chaim was also committed to traversing the boundary between the particular and the universal. In December, the Ohio Jewish Chronicle reported that he participated in a prayer vigil organized by the United Farm Workers as part of its ongoing boycott against the purchase of grapes and lettuce not picked by its members. He joined, he said, out of “a sense of responsibility for the Jewish community’s lack of involvement in anything that’s not strictly Jewish.”26 Already in the first few months of his time at Ohio State, Chaim had managed to leave an unmistakable imprint on Jewish life on campus: it would be religiously intensive, tolerant, deeply committed to social justice work, and egalitarian in gender terms. In fact, Chaim was an early pioneer—particularly as an Orthodox-trained rabbi—in pushing the bounds of inclusion for women in Jewish life. It was only a year earlier, in 1972, that Sally Priesand became the first woman to be granted ordination by Hebrew Union College, the Reform rabbinical school.27 Chaim, for his part, taught a number of classes at Hillel and in the Columbus Jewish community on themes relating to women, including “The Image of the Jewish Woman in

25 Bill Cohen, “New Hillel Rabbi Says Synagogue Movement Is Spiritually Dead,” Ohio Jewish Chronicle (October 18, 1973): 17; see also Jonathan Jacoby, “Chaim: Issues in Jewish Life,” Ha’Am (October 28, 1975): 10, and Tessa Nath, “Campus Rabbis: The Mensches and Martyrs of UCLA,” Ha’Am (December 19, 2014), accessed March 1, 2019, https://haam.org/2014/12/19/campus-rabbis-the-mensches-and-martyrs-ofucla/. Another term he used to describe himself in this period was “traditional rabbi”; see Cohen, “History Made,” 19. 26 Bill Cohen, “No Formal Stand from Jewish Community on Farm Workers,” Ohio Jewish Chronicle (December 13, 1973): 5. See also Jacoby, “Chaim,” 10, 12, and Chaim’s essay in I Am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl, ed. Judea and Ruth Pearl (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2004), 192–93, for his understanding of the relationship between his particularity and his universalism. In “Blacks and Jews: Troubled Times on the College Campuses,” Tikkun 4, no. 3 (July/ August 1989): 94, Chaim advocates the cultivation of “an identity that is composed of an intense particularity that is not separatist, and of a broad universalism that is not assimilationist.” 27 For Chaim’s perspective on the ordination of women, see his “Female Rabbis, Male Fears,” Judaism 33, no. 1 (Winter 1984): 79–84; republished with revisions as “Opening the Last Door . . . ,” Ha’Am (March 1984): 8–9. See also the Daily Bruin (February 20, 1980): 9; Ha’Am (February 21, 1980): 3; and Ha’Am (October 1983): 16.

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Megilath Esther,” “The Changing Role of the Jewish Woman,” and “Women in Judaism, Martyrs or Mentors?”28

“I Have Found the One I Love” (Song 3:4)29 Meanwhile, with the onset of the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, Doreen Seidler, a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at OSU with a strong interest in women’s psychology, found herself isolated and without anyone with whom to talk about her fears for the survival of the Jewish State. The daughter of a Holocaust survivor, she had grown up in Johannesburg, South Africa, with a strong Jewish identity and love for Israel and therefore acutely felt the urgency of the situation. Having heard about the new, dynamic Hillel rabbi on campus, she approached Chaim for a meeting.30 Struck by her ambition, intellect, worldliness, and progressive orientation, Chaim invited her to join his class on “Women in Judaism.” About a year later, they started dating, and in July 1975 they married. At that point, Chaim Feller and Doreen Seidler became Chaim and Doreen Seidler-Feller.31 28 See Cohen, “New Hillel Rabbi,” 17; anon., “Raanana Meet to Feature Rabbi Feller,” Ohio Jewish Chronicle (February 28, 1974): 9; and anon., “Twin Rivers BBW Announce Activities,” Ohio Jewish Chronicle (February 6, 1975): 8. Chaim recalls that, when he started out at Hillel, Max Ticktin encouraged him to teach classes, like “Women in Judaism,” about issues at the cutting edge of the Jewish communal agenda; see “The Seidler-Fellers Reminisce about 36 Years at Hillel,” Hillel at UCLA (April 2010), accessed March 1, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2hcyWwv9Kc (starting at approx. 1:15). Once he met Doreen, she, too, played an important role in inspiring him to explore questions at the intersection of Judaism and feminism. 29 This phrase graces Chaim’s wedding ring. 30 In a letter to the editor of the Ohio Jewish Chronicle (July 3, 1975): 2, 9, eight OSU students highlighted “some of the significant accomplishments that are a result of Rabbi Feller’s understanding of Jewish commitment: a group of students who daven every Shabbas and stay for an afternoon of chulent and discussion; opening his house on a number of occasions for seuda[h] shlishit and havdalah; a regularly attended Talmud class; teaching many other courses in the Free University; meeting regularly with individual students and providing instruction in specific Jewish subjects; the creation of a Jewish student journal; and advising and assisting the planning of various programs” (emphasis ours). 31 The story of their initial encounter and courtship is recounted briefly at the beginning of “The Seidler-Fellers Reminisce”; see also Danielle Berrin, “To Nudge and to Support,” Jewish Journal (April 27, 2010), accessed March 10, 2019, https://web. archive.org/web/20160323180714/http://www.jewishjournal.com/community/article/ chaim_and_doreen_seidler-fellers_marriage_nurtures_intellect_spirit_and_com. The first published instance of “Seidler-Feller” is likely that in the title of the announcement “Seidler-Feller Wedding July 27,” Ohio Jewish Chronicle (July 17, 1975): 6 (though in

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“Much Have I Learned from My Teachers and Even More from My Colleagues, but from My Students More Than from Them All” (bTa‘anit 7a)32 Earlier that year, Chaim had received an offer to become co-director of Hillel at UCLA. Sensing that “there is a more intense Jewish life” at UCLA and that its atmosphere “is more compatible with my goals,”33 he and Doreen left Ohio State, driving from Columbus to Los Angeles, where they eventually found an apartment across the street from the University Religious Conference (URC) building in which Hillel had its offices.34 For the first seven or so years, Chaim shared the director position with David Berner, a Conservative rabbi who later moved to Israel but would always remain one of Chaim’s close friends.35 UCLA would become Chaim’s most important platform. It was there that he met, taught, and inspired thousands of students through Hillel classes and programs, occasional lectures, and university courses, the latter of which he taught as an adjunct faculty member in the Departments of Sociology and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures.36 Shortly after arriving, as part of Hillel’s “Free Jew U” (sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles), Chaim began offering classes that reflected the vast range of

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that context it was not meant to convey that the newlyweds would take each other’s last names). See also “Doreen Seidler Is Bride of Rabbi Feller,” New York Times (July 28, 1975): 18. See “Tilly Shames Farewell Address for Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller,” accessed March 1, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zioWknkcrVQ (starting at approx. 4:27). Bill Cohen, “Hillel Rabbi Leaving for ‘More Intense Jewish Life’; Criticizes Jewish Leadership in Columbus,” Ohio Jewish Chronicle (June 12, 1975): 11. Chaim had already published his article on women’s aliyyot (above, n. 22) in the May 20, 1975 issue of Ha’Am, UCLA’s Jewish newsmagazine. See also Jacoby, “Chaim,” 10, as well as Chaim’s reflections from forty years later, as quoted in Moshe Kahn, “L’Chaim to Rabbi Chaim: Celebrating 40 Years of Service to Hillel at UCLA,” Ha’Am (May 31, 2015): 21, accessed March 1, 2019, https://haam.org/2015/05/31/ lchaim-to-rabbi-chaim-celebrating-40-years-of-service-to-hillel-at-ucla/. The first published mention of Chaim’s presence in Los Angeles may be in anon., “Synagogues of the Southland,” B’nai B’rith Messenger 79, no. 35 (August 29, 1975): 31. Interestingly, Berner had actually visited OSU on January 7, 1974, about a year before Chaim even entertained the thought of joining him in Los Angeles; see anon., “Hillel Happenings,” Ohio Jewish Chronicle (January 3, 1974): 13. See his Edah profile for titles of some of the courses he has taught, accessed March 1, 2019, http://www.edah.org/bios.cfm. See also Chaim’s UCLA Hillel profile for a list of favored lecture topics of his, accessed March 10, 2019, http://www.uclahillel.org/ rabbi_chaim_seidler_feller_bio.

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his interests and aptitudes: Talmud (Tractate Ḳiddushin), “Introduction to Judaism,” “The Woman in Judaism: A Historical Study of Jewish Attitudes,” and “A Study of Genesis: The Mythic Foundations of Biblical Judaism.”37 In subsequent semesters, the subject matter of these courses would change, but the intensity and erudition with which they were taught would not. From the first, Chaim gained a reputation as a brilliant, deeply passionate lecturer who conveyed a sense of excitement about Jewish tradition to his pupils. Many years later, a close student of his described Chaim’s teaching style thusly: [H]e continuously extrapolated on his previous statements, getting more enthusiastic as the threads of ideas spiraled out into a magnificently patterned web. He had worked himself into an intellectual frenzy—his usual demeanor when teaching, reflected in the whimsy of his tone and the wiggling of his hands. His whole body is wrapped up in his teaching; if he starts delivering his talk while sitting, at the peak of his excitement, he stands up, and if he starts while standing, then he ends up pacing. . . . He interprets the texts and weaves them together, expanding on the statements and ideas of others, going off on tangents and telling anecdotes that all play into one another, for as long as you will listen to him, and then some. Learning with Chaim is like watching an interpretive performance, but it is not a solo act. As Chaim drifts away further and further into the realm of ideas, he reaches out to the audience to make sure they are fellow travelers and not passive observers. He asks questions and even extends his arms, tapping those sitting next to him. When Chaim learns, he must be assured that you are learning too.38

As a committed pluralist and believer in what he calls “the God of possibilities,”39 Chaim has never sought to spoon-feed the answers to his students, 37 See the advertisements in the Daily Bruin (October 3, 1975): 19, and Ha’Am (October 28, 1975): 8. Doreen also taught a “Couples Workshop” within the same framework. 38 Kahn, “L’Chaim,” 21. See also “UCLA Hillel Honors” (starting at approx. 4:14); “TEACHER—A Video Tribute to Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller,” Hillel at UCLA (January 2016), accessed March 1, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kq9QHozQSVc; and David Suissa, “Chaim Being Chaim,” Jewish Journal (February 3, 2016), accessed March 1, 2019, https://jewishjournal.com/opinion/181956/. 39 See Chaim’s “Searching for God in Judaism: A Rationalist’s Theory of a Mystical Reality,” Orange County Community Scholars Program—Podcast Network (September 14, 2008), accessed March 1, 2019, http://podcast.occsp.org/wp/category/

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instead placing a premium on independent thinking, questioning, doubting, complexity, and nuance. He is fond of giving the parable of two rabbis standing on opposite street corners, one of whom announces, “Come to me—I have all the answers,” while his fellow calls out, “Come to me—I have all the questions.”40 This same approach has characterized his interactions with the university’s Jewish faculty,41 for whom Chaim organized a Bible study group that met monthly for many years. Aside from his primary role as teacher, Chaim also became an advocate, pushing to improve the quality of Jewish life at UCLA. He fought to bring kosher food to campus;42 worked together with Streisand to establish the Streisand Center for Jewish Cultural Arts at UCLA Hillel, which sponsored the annual Streisand Awards for Student Film Makers and the Festival of Jewish Plays, as well as various Jewish artistic programs, concerts, and panel discussions;43 and in 2001 helped found the UCLA branch

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seidler-feller-rabbi-chaim/ (starting at approx. 43:20), and Berrin, “To Nudge and to Support.” Relatedly, see his letter in the Jewish Journal (August 3, 2018), accessed March 1, 2019, https://jewishjournal.com/letters_to_the_editor/236846/letters-editor-weekaugust-3-2018/; the letter he coauthored with Aaron Lerner, Jewish Journal (October 30, 2013), accessed March 10, 2019, https://jewishjournal.com/letters_to_the_ editor/122913/; and “To Be a Religious Jew Is to Be a Pluralist!—Shmuly Yanklowitz Interviews R’ Chaim Seidler-Feller,” Valley Beit Midrash (November 2016), accessed March 1, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZfQbH5OD0Q. See Rachel Brand, “‘JAM’-Packed Campus Outreach,” Jewish Journal (February 27, 2003), accessed March 1, 2019, https://jewishjournal.com/culture/lifestyle/education/7513/; Shaun Bishop, “Seidler-Feller Promotes Religious, Political Dialogue,” Daily Bruin (November 6, 2003), accessed March 1, 2019, http://dailybruin.com/2003/11/06/ seidler-feller-promotes-religi/; “Searching for God in Judaism” (starting at approx. 1:13:03); and “Jo[se]ph Baer Soloveitchik” (starting at approx. 1:23:17). Relatedly, see Chaim’s “Freedom to Doubt,” OLAM Magazine (Summer 2002): 5, on “the excitement and innovative spirit generated by an openness to alternative explanations, by the indeterminacy of halakhic discourse, and by never knowing with certainty.” For Chaim’s reflections on the faculty as a largely untapped and underappreciated Jewish communal asset, see his “Between Assimilation and Identification,” Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Ideas 21, no. 405 (January 11, 1991): 38–40. See anon., “Food Service Sells Kosher Sandwiches,” Ha’Am (May 10, 1977): 3; Rebecca Flass, “Bruins Brew New Java Contract with Local Coffee Firm,” Los Angeles Business Journal (November 1, 2004): 13; Julia Erlandson, “Hillel Offers Kosher Lunch Program,” Daily Bruin (October 17, 2006), accessed March 1, 2019, http://dailybruin. com/2006/10/17/hillel-offers-kosher-lunch-pro/; and Kimberly Young, “Kosher Meal Plans Become Available,” Daily Bruin (September 26, 2007), accessed March 1, 2019, https://dailybruin.com/2007/09/26/kosher_meal_plans_available/. See Sally Ogle Davis, “Streisand Is Taking a Gamble, Bringing Singer Tale to Screen,” Detroit Free Press (May 2, 1982): 3C; Stephen J. Sass, ed., Jewish Los Angeles—A Guide: Everything Jewish under the Sun, 2nd ed. (Los Angeles: Jewish Federation Council of

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of the Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus, a partnership between Hillel and the Orthodox Union dedicated to providing resources to students interested in Jewish observance and learning. In addition to feeding the mind, Chaim also nourished the spirit, starting a weekly, traditional/egalitarian Shabbat morning minyan for students at Hillel in about 1984.44 Similarly, on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, members of the broader Los Angeles Jewish community would join him for services that, due to their popularity, had to be held in venues such as UCLA’s Covel Commons, which could accommodate more than eight hundred people. Clad in his white High Holidays ḳiṭl (ritual robe), Chaim transformed into an inspiring soul on fire, praying and preaching with extraordinary feeling and intensity—and adding his voice to the beautiful holiday melodies of cantors Judy Dubin Aranoff and Ruth Steinberg. He would don the ḳiṭl again for the Seder held at Hillel on Passover each year, an evening of singing, eating, and discussion that was likewise open to the community. Chaim’s and Doreen’s dedication was such that they would often bring Hillel home, not only regularly hosting faculty and students for classes, Shabbat meals, and Passover and Sukkot receptions, but even holding services—followed by dinner for about one hundred fifty students—in their house on the first Friday night of each quarter for many years.45 Moreover, at some point in the late 1980s, Chaim initiated the “Wellworth Minyan,” a Shabbat morning ḥavurah-like gathering at their home, which drew an eclectic mix of students, faculty, and community members who appreciated its impassioned daṿenen and erudite conversation. One participant Greater Los Angeles, 1982), 67, 69; and Reuma Ziskind, “Rav she-rosho ba-kokhavim,” Gever la-inyan 63 (October 27, 1986): 6–7. While the Center, founded in 1981, ceased programming by the end of the decade, some of its activities and functions were subsequently taken over by the Dortort Center for Creativity in the Arts, accessed March 1, 2019, http://www.uclahillel.org/dortort_center_for_the_arts. 44 See, for example, the advertisement in the Daily Bruin (April 4, 1984): 7. For Chaim’s thoughts on the decline and more recent resurgence of American Jewish spirituality, see his essay in “Jewish Spirituality in America: Listening to a Different Drummer: A Symposium,” Havruta 3 (Spring 2009): 10–12, accessed March 1, 2019, https://shiwebfiles.s3.amazonaws.com/Havruta_2009_Issue3_JewishSpiritualityInAmerica.pdf. 45 See Chaim’s “Judaism’s Womb,” OLAM Magazine (Spring 2000): 10. For Doreen’s reflections on the importance of placing limits on communal involvement and carving out family time, see her “A Counterforce against the Seductions of a Perfect Rabbinate,” Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Ideas 32, no. 584 (September 2001): 6; “UCLA Hillel Honors” (starting at approx. 9:30); and Berrin, “To Nudge and to Support.”

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described it as the place where one could talk to the people with whom one daṿened and daṿen with the people to whom one talked—an uncommonly special meeting point of the intellect and the spirit.46 Many remember these minyanim, which also featured a ḳiddush with ṭsholnṭ (both meat and vegetarian), as the best Jewish prayer experiences of their lives. Perhaps Chaim’s greatest achievement and most lasting legacy, institutionally, was the construction of the 25,000-square-foot Yitzhak Rabin Hillel Center for Jewish Life at UCLA, inaugurated in November 2002.47 Until that point, Hillel had shared space with other religious organizations in the shabby, cramped, and inconveniently located building of the URC at the corner of Hilgard and Le Conte on the southeast edge of the UCLA campus. The turning point came in the early 1990s, when Chaim came into close contact with Richard M. Joel, Hillel’s president, and the philanthropist Edgar M. Bronfman, founding chair of Hillel’s International Board of Governors. It was Joel’s and Bronfman’s dream to build new centers for Jewish life at major college campuses in North America. This vision coincided with Chaim’s own desire to create the space and infrastructure that would allow for a “renaissance of Jewish life at UCLA” and in the broader community.48 Bronfman, as well as legendary Hollywood studio executive Lew Wasserman and filmmaker Steven Spielberg, each pledged $1 million to the project, while UCLA Chancellor Charles Young helped secure the site.49 Meanwhile, Chaim shifted professional gears, mobilizing his charm, charisma, and boundless energy in order to raise funds for the new edifice

46 This upended the formulation attributed to various Jewish thinkers over the course of the twentieth century, most memorably David Weiss Halivni, who, in a letter sent to the Faculty Assembly of the Jewish Theological Seminary on the occasion of a vote to ordain women in 1983, lamented that “[i]t is my personal tragedy that the people I daven with, I cannot talk to, and the people I talk to, I cannot daven with. However, when the chips are down, I will always side with the people I daven with; for I can live without talking. I cannot live without davening.” See his The Book and the Sword: A Life of Learning in the Throes of the Holocaust (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 114. 47 Anon., “New Yitzhak Rabin Hillel Center Opens Its Doors,” UCLA Today (December 10, 2002), accessed March 1, 2019, http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/021210hillel. 48 Lawrence Ferchaw, “New Jewish Facility Will Provide Greater Cultural Services, Awareness,” Daily Bruin (November 1, 1998), accessed March 1, 2019, http://dailybruin. com/1998/11/01/new-jewish-facility-will-provi/. 49 Michael Weiner, “Jewish Center to Change Location,” Daily Bruin (June 11, 1998), accessed March 1, 2019, http://dailybruin.com/1998/06/10/billing-system-requires-more-s0/.

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and the substantially expanded programming that it would host.50 It was particularly meaningful for him that the building would be named after Yitzhak Rabin, the assassinated Israeli prime minister whose transition from warrior to peacemaker in the 1990s left a profound impression on Chaim. Given his tireless efforts on its behalf, the Rabin Center can safely be described as the house that Chaim built.

“Justice, Justice Shall You Pursue” (Deut. 16:20) Chaim, however, did not restrict his activism to Hillel, UCLA, Los Angeles, or even the United States. Together with Doreen, he remained heavily involved in the Soviet Jewry movement, traveling to the Soviet Union in 1976 at the behest of the Israeli government to teach and meet with refuseniks.51 Thereafter, in 1977, Doreen became chairwoman of an exhibit at the Los Angeles Convention Center on “Soviet Jewry: Six Decades of Oppression,” organized in protest of the Soviet National Convention’s exhibit entitled “Six Decades of Progress,”52 while Chaim addressed at least two Soviet Jewry rallies on campus.53 Likewise, each of them continued to write and lecture—sometimes at the same forum—on Jewish religious feminism;54 appropriately enough, the couple was featured on the cover of 50 Julie Gruenbaum-Fax, “A New Home for Hillel,” Jewish Journal (November 14, 2002), accessed March 1, 2019, https://jewishjournal.com/news/los_angeles/community_ briefs/6992/; see also “UCLA Hillel Honors” (starting at approx. 5:55), and Berrin, “To Nudge and to Support.” 51 See the letter they published in Ha’Am (April 19, 1977): 10, sent by a Soviet Jew they had met during their stay who finally made his way to Israel and wrote to thank them. 52 Beverly Beyette, “Detente (Sort of) at Dual Exhibits,” Los Angeles Times (November 15, 1977), pt. IV, 10; see also Los Angeles Times (November 16, 1977), pt. II, 9. 53 The rallies were held on February 23, 1984 and April 8, 1987. See Philipp Gollner, “UCLA Students to Rally for Soviet Jew,” Daily Bruin (February 22, 1984): 6; Louise Yarnall, “‘Refusenik’ Supported at Rally,” Daily Bruin (February 24, 1984): 7; Daily Bruin (April 8, 1987): 9; and Nancy McCullough, “Soviet Jewry Group Holds Rally to Encourage Support for Emigration,” Daily Bruin (April 9, 1987): 3, 10. 54 See, for example, Doreen’s “Synagogue Design Reflects Women’s Status: ‘Separate but Equal’—A Lie,” Ha’Am (May 25, 1976): 7, and her letter in Response: A Contemporary Jewish Review 10, no. 4 (Winter 1976–1977): 120–23. Doreen lectured on “Aspects of Jewish Feminism” on August 11, 1976 (anon., “B’nai B’rith Women to Meet,” Los Angeles Times [August 8, 1976]: W10); “The Dawning of a New Eve: Does the Jewish Woman Need Liberation?” on March 22, 1977 (anon., “Sisterhood Forum on ‘Mothers,’” Los Angeles Times [March 10, 1977]: W7); and “The Changing Role of Women in Jewish Life” on July 14, 1985 (Los Angeles Times [July 14, 1985]: 4). Chaim and Doreen were also featured speakers at a workshop/conference held in Las Cruces, NM, on May 23, 1976,

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Davka magazine’s 1976 issue on “The Jewish Woman” studying a page of Talmud together in their home.55 Another special interest of Chaim’s was working to achieve cohesion within the Jewish people, particularly between Americans and Israelis.56 This issue tended to come to the fore whenever religious political parties in Israel proposed legislation negating the legitimacy of non-Orthodox forms of Judaism and Jewish conversion. On one such occasion, Chaim formulated his concerns in moral terms: “The central question the Jewish community is facing is what kind of Israel are we going to have. . . . This new legislation runs contrary to the humanistic, open and tolerant Israel that we love.”57 After the Neeman Committee released its recommendations for how best to address the conversion problem in January 1998, Chaim signed a statement issued by Edah, a Modern Orthodox think tank, endorsing the Committee proposal and urging the government of Israel to implement it as national policy.58 In 2015, he likewise participated in the founding of

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lecturing on a range of topics including the Historical, Sociological, and Theological Role of Jewish Women; the Myth of Androgynous Creation and the Development of a New Jewish Theology; Jewish Feminism and Jewish Sexism; Women’s Ritual Status in Divorce, Aliya, and Minyan; and Secular Issues in Jewish Feminism (El Paso Times [May 17, 1976]: 5-B; Las Cruces Sun News [May 20, 1976]: B1). Likewise, in Winter 1978, Chaim and Doreen taught some of the sessions at a Hillel seminar on Jewish Women’s Studies (Daily Bruin [January 9, 1978]: 6). For context, see Sylvia Barack Fishman, “The Impact of Feminism on American Jewish Life,” American Jewish Year Book (1989): 3–62, and, more recently, Pamela S. Nadell, Feminism, American Style: Jewish Women and the Making of a Revolution (Haifa: The Ruderman Program for American Jewish Studies, 2017), accessed March 1, 2019, http://ajs.haifa.ac.il/images/ Nadell_Research_Paper_final.pdf. Davka 17 (1976), as distinct from the similarly titled and dated The Jewish Woman: New Perspectives, ed. Elizabeth Koltun (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), a publication which grew out of the aforementioned issue of Response (above, n. 22). For an early expression of Chaim’s desire to bridge the gap between Jews on opposite sides of the Atlantic, see Dialogue: New Jewish Leadership 1, no. 7 (Shavuot 1975): 2. John Kifner, “American Jews Protest Israeli Threat to Identity,” New York Times (November 21, 1988), accessed March 1, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/21/ world/american-jews-protest-israeli-threat-to-identity.html. See also Elaine Woo, “Beyond Politics,” Los Angeles Times (December 22, 1988), accessed March 1, 2019, http://articles.latimes.com/1988-12-22/news/vw-888_1_american-jews, and Laurie Goodstein, “Feeling Abandoned by Israel, Many American Jews Grow Angry,” New York Times (November 16, 1997), accessed March 1, 2019, https://www.nytimes. com/1997/11/16/world/feeling-abandoned-by-israel-many-american-jews-growangry.html. See, for example, St. Louis Jewish Light (March 18, 1998): 14. See also, more recently, the statement Chaim signed advocating greater pluralism in Israeli religious policy:

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Rabbis for Religious Freedom and Equality in Israel, a nondenominational network of Jewish clergy dedicated to fighting for change on a number of religion-state issues in the country.59 The question of Jewish continuity in America animated Chaim as well. Already in October 1974, he and Rabbi Dr. Marc Lee Raphael participated in an OSU Hillel forum on “Intermarriage and Jewish Survival,” and since then the issue has commanded much of his attention, even though his position on the matter was not always popular with fellow Jewish leaders.60 In a recent interview, he explained: “It is a disappointment that we don’t have a framework in which we can promote the value of marrying other Jews. . . . I’m not interested in criticizing people for their personal choices. I’m interested in promoting a value.”61 It was Chaim’s contention that, “[i]n general, intermarriage is a function of assimilation. And this generation of Jewish college students is the most assimilated and least Jewishly literate in history.”62 Indeed, Chaim is fond of quoting the variously attributed aphorism to the effect that, in the modern period, Jews have been transformed from am ha-sefer (the people of the book) into am ha-arets (the people of the land, that is, ignoramuses).63 A large part of

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Shmuly Yanklowitz, “Orthodox Rabbis Call for a ‘Truly Pluralistic Israel,’” Forward (June 27, 2017), accessed March 1, 2019, https://forward.com/scribe/375733/ orthodox-rabbis-call-for-a-truly-pluralistic-israel/. See the organization’s January 2015 welcome letter, accessed March 1, 2019, http://rrfei. org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/2015.01.25-RRFEI-welcome-letter.pdf. Anon., “Hillel Happenings,” Ohio Jewish Chronicle (October 17, 1974): 3. See also the programs advertised in Ha’Am (May 1983): 20, and the Daily Bruin (May 30, 1990): 36. On December 6, 1985, Chaim framed the question less in terms of survival and more in terms of communal unity. The title of his talk then was “Will There Be One Jewish People by the Year 2000?: The Growing Rift between Orthodox and Non-Orthodox Jews”; see Ha’Am (November 1985): 16. Jared Sichel, “Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller’s 40-Year Legacy at an Evolving UCLA,” Jewish Journal (January 27, 2016), accessed March 1, 2019, https://jewishjournal.com/ culture/religion/181673/. See his “Jewish Life on Campus Today, 3,” Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Ideas 20, no. 393 (April 27, 1990): 102 (emphasis in the original). See also Amanda Miller, “Embracing Ethnicity,” Daily Bruin (February 3, 1997): 18, 22–23, on the prevalence of the “Jewish assimilationist fantasy.” See, for example, Chaim’s “Exile: The Secret of Jewish Survival,” Drisha (May 2012), accessed March 1, 2019, https://drisha.org/search-podcast/?teacher=4098 (starting at approx. 38:50). See also Alouph Hareven, “Are the Israelis Still the People of the Book?,” The Jerusalem Quarterly 30 (Winter 1984): 3–16, and Jacob Kabakoff, “Introduction,” Jewish Book Annual 42 (1984–1985): 4. Chaim would often speak and write about “creeping Jewish mediocritization” as a consequence of assimilation. “[N]o longer do Jews pursue excellence with their characteristic vigor. Instead they are opting out of

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his work at Hillel—and in the community at large—then, was devoted to exposing American Jews to the depth and complexity of Jewish learning and values in the hopes that they would find positive meaning in being Jewish: “I was given the privilege of a very rich and textured Jewish education, and I think that my vision and my goal in life was to transmit as much of that as possible to my students. . . . That’s why it pains me to see when there’s a lack of interest.”64 “For rapid assimilation is already underway and the Jewish future is withering before our eyes.”65 Beyond addressing internal Jewish concerns, Chaim also invested much effort in improving intergroup relations. Guided by the Jewish teaching of humanity’s creation be-tselem E-lohim (in the image of God; Gen. 1:26–27, 5:1), he issued numerous joint statements together with fellow URC chaplains,66 signed the famous September 2000 “Dabru Emet” declaration on Jewish-Christian relations in a post-Vatican II world,67 participated in interfaith dialogue,68 and helped organize UCLA Freedom Seders.69

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fields of academic research that were once exclusive Jewish domains, and abdicating their place at the head of the class to the New Jews: the Asians” (“Jewish Life on Campus,” 102). See also Yoni Herskovitz, “Rabbi Chaim Addresses Trends in Jewish Academic Success,” Ha’Am (November 4, 2011), accessed March 1, 2019, https://haam. org/2011/11/04/rabbi-chaim-addresses-trends-in-jewish-academic-success/. Sichel, “Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller’s.” See Chaim’s “Jewish Life on Campus,” 103; see also Mathis Chazanov, “Back to the Fold: More and More Jews Are Heeding Call of Tradition,” Los Angeles Times (October 4, 1987), accessed March 1, 2019, http://articles.latimes.com/1987-10-04/news/ we-32932_1_orthodox-tradition/3, and Linda Perl, “Jewish Identity: Can It Survive in an Open Society?,” Ha’Am (February 1989): 3, 16–17. See, for example, Daily Bruin (June 3, 1982): 6; ibid. (October 24, 1994): 16–17; and ibid. (April 19, 1995): 8. The text and signatories list are available on the ICJS website, accessed March 1, 2019, https://icjs.org/resources/dabru-emet; see also Richard Clough, “Followers Mourn Passing of Pope,” Daily Bruin (April 3, 2005), accessed March 1, 2019, http://dailybruin. com/2005/04/03/followers-mourn-passing-of-pop/. See Paige Litz, “Finding a Common Ground,” Los Angeles Times (February 20, 2004): A8, and Easter Khaw, “Many Religions, Just One Message,” Daily Bruin (January 18, 2006), accessed March 1, 2019, http://dailybruin.com/2006/01/18/ many-religions-just-one-messag/. See also the photograph taken of Chaim at the Sixth Doha Conference for Interfaith Dialogue on May 13, 2008, accessed March 1, 2019, https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/ rabbi-chaim-seidler-feller-director-of-the-yitzhak-rabin-news-photo/81070033. See Shana Chandler, “UCLA Holds First ‘Freedom Seder’ for Passover,” Daily Bruin (April 26, 1989): 8, and Jennifer K. Morita, “Seder Gives Taste of Diversity,” Daily Bruin (April 13, 1995): 3, 15. Relatedly, see the advertisement in the Daily Bruin (April 13, 1995): 6: “People of Faith Gather to Pray for Peace.”

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In the late 1980s, Chaim embarked on a personal campaign to reach out to other minority groups on campus. Recognizing that Jews had come to be seen as belonging to the privileged, “oppressive” white majority due to their successes in American society,70 and especially at the universities,71 he sought to reopen a dialogue between Jews and African Americans, harking back to the interethnic cooperation that characterized the civil rights era: “I pledge to rededicate myself to rebuilding our family, to listening to your grievances, to fighting for affirmative action and to establishing the struggle for economic justice as a priority within the Jewish community.”72 Toward this end, Chaim participated in a UCLA Center for Afro-American

70 See Eric P. Rubenfeld, “Nothing in Common: The Reality of Black-Jewish Relations,” Ha’Am (June 1989): 3, quoting Chaim: “The Jewish community has come to be identified with the white majority, both in [the] view of others and their own selfassessment.” One way in which this newfound whiteness expressed itself was in “a rise in conservatism in the Jewish community,” including at the voting booth. See Chaim’s “Jewish Life on Campus,” 101, and Zahra Bazmjow, “Increasingly Conservative Jewish Voters to Hit Polls,” Daily Bruin (October 31, 2004), accessed March 1, 2019, http:// dailybruin.com/2004/10/31/increasingly-conservative-jewi/. 71 See Chaim’s “The Tension between Blacks and Jews,” Daily Bruin (March 4, 1988): 15; idem, “Blacks and Jews: Troubled Times on the College Campus,” Ha’Am (February 1989): 15; republished with revisions as “Blacks and Jews: Troubled Times on the College Campuses” (above, n. 26), where he discusses the preponderance of Jews in higher educational faculty and administrative positions. In Chaim’s view, Jews had integrated so successfully into the mainstream that they were no longer considered an ethnic minority by the university, even when they demanded such recognition; see his “Jewish Life on Campus,” 101; idem, “Response to Perry London and A[l]issa Hir[s]hfeld,” in Jewish Identity in America, ed. David M. Gordis and Yoav Ben-Horin (Los Angeles: Susan and David Wilstein Institute of Jewish Policy Studies, University of Judaism, 1991), 61; and Nath, “Celebrating 40 Years of Ha’Am.” It is in part for this reason that Chaim celebrated the founding of the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies: “Jewishness is the invisible identity on campus—Jews are supposed to be whites, they have no particularity. By creating the center, it’s an affirmation of Jewishness.” See Shani Pines, “Jewish Studies Center Arrives,” Daily Bruin (May 31, 1994): 14. 72 See Chaim’s “A Common Heritage,” Ha’Am (January/February 1987): 4. On a number of occasions, Chaim stressed the need for American Jews to accept Jesse Jackson as a legitimate American leader and to not oppose affirmative action policies at the universities. In return, he asked that blacks reject the “Zionism is racism” equation and work together with Jews to create entrepreneurial opportunities for blacks, sponsor trips to Africa and Israel, and help to reconstitute the Democratic party. See, for example, his “Blacks and Jews” (both versions); idem, “Jewish Life on Campus,” 101; Greg Krikorian, “Jewish Leaders, Jackson to Meet,” The San Francisco Examiner (May 7, 1988): A-12; and Dick Polman, “In U.S. Politics, an Old Alliance Faces New Stress,” The Philadelphia Inquirer (December 23, 1988): 1-D, 6-D.

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Studies panel on intergroup relations,73 joined the fight against racism in the aftermath of the beating of Rodney King,74 organized a series of events on campus meant to bring black and Jewish students and faculty together in dialogue,75 and signed a URC statement supporting affirmative action.76 While he recognized antisemitism when he saw it and made sure to object forcefully on such occasions,77 Chaim’s focus was always on promoting greater understanding, rather than engaging in “comparative victimology.”78 As he once wrote in a pre-Passover message: “The lesson we learned [from the exodus story] is that, since we suffered, we bear the special responsibility to make sure that others don’t suffer as we did.”79 73 See the advertisement in the Daily Bruin (October 19, 1988): 24. See also anon., “African Americans, American Jews Subject of New Exhibit,” Los Angeles Sentinel (October 14, 1993): A-15, for an announcement of a panel discussion including Chaim on the “wave of distrust” between blacks and Jews on American college campuses. 74 See Sandy Lee, “Leaders Urge Students to Fight against Racism,” Daily Bruin (May 4, 1992): 11, quoting Chaim: “When others are oppressed, (the Jewish community) must be with them in their oppression. . . . We will fight in humanity and unity until those who beat Rodney King receive due punishment.” 75 See Lisa Klug, “Jews and African-Americans Strive for Harmony at UCLA,” Los Angeles Times (March 21, 1993), accessed March 1, 2019, http://articles.latimes.com/1993-0321/news/we-13622_1_jewish-student-union. Chaim is quoted therein as saying: “The point is that the more you spend time with one another and learn about each other— not by reading about each other, but as a human being—the more the connections grow.” 76 See the notice in the Daily Bruin (April 19, 1995): 8. 77 For instance, Chaim signed a statement condemning the racist ideology of Louis Farrakhan on the occasion of his arrival at UCLA, printed in the Daily Bruin (March 3, 1988): 8; see also his “The Tension,” 15. Later that year, he published a letter in the Daily Bruin (May 19, 1988): 22, protesting a hateful speech delivered on campus by Macheo Shabaka. And following the infamous NOMMO affair, when the February 1991 edition of the UCLA black student newspaper featured a baldly antisemitic screed to which faculty and administrators were slow to react, Chaim and Department of Sociology Chairman Jeffrey C. Alexander penned a series of articles decrying the hypocrisy of the campus response: “NOMMO Affair: Double Standard Can’t Stand,” Ha’Am (April 1991): 17, 29; republished with revisions as “As Barriers Erode, Jews Face Unique Problems,” Daily Bruin (May 30, 1991): 24; “The Effects of Anti-Semitism on UCLA,” Jewish Journal (June 14–20, 1991); and “False Distinctions and Double Standards: The Anatomy of Antisemitism at UCLA,” Tikkun 7, no. 1 (January/February 1992): 12–14. See also Chaim’s “Insults and Insensitivity Weaken Campus Relations,” Daily Bruin (January 9, 1989): 22, replying to an article by a member of the UCLA Latino community that stereotyped Jews as controlling student life on campus. 78 See his “Blacks and Jews,” 15 (Ha’Am version); 94 (Tikkun version). 79 See Chaim’s “Strangers, Forever!,” UCLA Hillel (April 3, 2015), accessed March 1, 2019, http://www.uclahillel.org/passover_message_from_rabbi_chaim_seidler_feller. See also his commentary on “Notes for Symposium on Black Power[,] January 6, 1967,” in

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“Peace for Israel. Peace for Palestine. Share the Hope.”80 Finally, holding fast to the twin Hebrew maxims posted on his office door— “He who has the truth on his side is in the majority, even if he is alone” and “The rabbi whose community does not disagree with him is no rabbi, and the rabbi who is afraid of them is no human being”81—when it came to politics, Chaim was unabashedly progressive in his orientation, even if being so was deeply unpopular. For example, in 1974, he and three Columbus rabbinical colleagues signed a letter protesting the pardon by President Gerald Ford of Richard Nixon.82 On the international front, Chaim manifested a strong concern for peace in the Middle East. Inspired by the pragmatism of Israeli strategist Yehoshafat Harkabi and the humanism of politician Aryeh “Lova” Eliav, he expressed support in May 1974 for a statement by the Jewish Peace Fellowship that called for mutual recognition by Israelis and Palestinians of the right to self-determination83—long before the Oslo accords of the early 1990s would bring such a position more into the mainstream. Later that year, he signed a call issued by the pro-peace group Breira: A Project

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The Eternal Dissident: Rabbi Leonard I. Beerman and the Radical Imperative to Think and Act, ed. David N. Myers (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018), 138, as well as Rivka (Rebecca) Cohen, “Racism Anywhere Is Racism Everywhere,” Ha’Am (January 22, 2015), accessed March 1, 2019, https://haam.org/2015/01/22/ racism-anywhere-is-racism-everywhere/. See Chaim’s “Different Tack on Campus Challenge,” Jewish Journal (June 22, 2006), accessed March 1, 2019, https://jewishjournal.com/news/los_angeles/ community/13274/; abridged and revised as “Reconciliation and Renewal,” Jewels of Elul (August 28, 2006), accessed March 10, 2019, https://www.jewelsofelul.com/ jewels/2006-5766/. See also “UCLA Hillel Honors” (starting at approx. 4:10). Berrin, “To Nudge and to Support.” The original Arabic version of the first expression is attributed in various Muslim sources to Abdallah ibn Mas‘ud, a companion of the prophet Muhammad; see, for example, Daily Hadith Online for August 23, 2014, where the aphorism is rendered as follows: “The true community (jama‘ah) is that which adheres to the truth, even if you are alone.” The Arabic was later translated into Hebrew and printed on the title page of Arnold B. Ehrlich’s Miḳra ki-peshuṭo (Berlin: M. Poppelauer’s Buchhandlung, 1900). Several different versions of the second expression are attributed to Rabbi Israel Salanter, the great nineteenth-century leader of the Musar Movement; see, for example, Dov Katz, Tenu‘at ha-musar: toledoteha, isheha, ṿe-shiṭṭoteha, 3rd ed., vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Abraham Zioni, 1958), 308 (no. 16), and Phinehas Miller, Olamo shel abba (Jerusalem: Hod, 1984), 282. See the letter printed in the Ohio Jewish Chronicle (September 19, 1974): 2. See also Chaim’s “King David’s Greatest Victory,” OLAM Magazine (Winter 2001): 47, on speaking truth to power. See Bill Cohen, “Hillel Rabbi Backs Call for Compromise among Israelis, Arabs, and Palestinians,” Ohio Jewish Chronicle (May 7, 1974): 1, 16.

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of Concern in Diaspora-Israel Relations, again advocating for the right of Palestinians to their own state and urging the Israeli government to publicly affirm “its willingness to talk to the full range of Palestinian leadership, while at the same time demanding recognition of Israel’s right to exist.”84 Chaim’s involvement with Breira, one of the first national Jewish groups in America to critique Israeli governmental policy publicly,85 would not be the last time that he found himself on the margins of the Jewish community.86 Not only was he a liberal challenging a conservative American Jewish 84 The statement was dated November 4, 1974 and distributed at a “Rally against Terror” held that day in front of the United Nations building in New York that was organized by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. It is reproduced in, for example, Dialogue: New Jewish Leadership 1, no. 5 (December 1974–January 1975): 10–11. See further the call by Breira for the formulation of an Israeli plan that would cede the territories captured in 1967 in exchange for Arab recognition of Israel’s sovereignty and a mutual commitment to maintaining peaceful relations, reprinted in Congressional Record—Senate (June 12, 1975): 18552–53, and also signed by Chaim. Chaim would later describe himself as “a lifelong Zionist and long-time Middle East peace activist who has publicly supported a two-state solution since the early ’70s”; see his “Middle East: Keep the Proposals Realistic,” Daily Bruin (February 7, 1989): 15. 85 For some of the (at times partisan) literature on the short-lived Breira, see Jacques Kornberg, “Zionism and Ideology: The Breira Controversy,” Judaism 27, no. 1 (Winter 1978): 103–14; Paul M. Foer, “The War against Breira,” The Jewish Spectator 48, no. 2 (Summer 1983): 18–23; Jack Wertheimer, “Breaking the Taboo: Critics of Israel and the American Jewish Establishment,” in Envisioning Israel: The Changing Ideals and Images of North American Jews, ed. Allon Gal (Jerusalem: Magnes Press; Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 397–419; Michael E. Staub, “If We Really Care about Israel: Breira and the Limits of Dissent,” in Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, ed. Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon (New York: Grove Press, 2003), 89–105; and Alex Klein, “J Street’s Forerunner,” Tablet Magazine (March 23, 2012), accessed March 1, 2019, http://www.tabletmag.com/ jewish-news-and-politics/94906/j-streets-forerunner. For recent discussion of the appropriateness of criticism of Israel, see Havruta 8 (Winter 2012), entitled “Engaging Israel: The Limits of Criticism,” accessed March 1, 2019, https://hartman.org.il/ publications_view.asp?cat_id=310. 86 For two of the many attacks on Breira in the Jewish press, see Daniel Charles, “‘Breira’: Alternative of Surrender,” The American Zionist 67, no. 3 (November 1976): 12–17, and Rael Jean and Erich Isaac, “The Rabbis of Breira,” Midstream 23, no. 4 (April 1977): 3–17, the former of which made reference to a series of articles in Heritage, a Los Angeles-based Jewish newspaper, claiming to expose the work of Breira-affiliated UCLA Hillel rabbis (David Berner and Chaim) against the Zionist cause. See the open letter protesting this series in Ha’Am (October 26, 1976): 2, as well as the editorial in Ha’Am (January 18, 1977): 2. Years after Breira had folded, Chaim would reaffirm his commitment to the independence of Diaspora Jews and their right to “openly express their feelings (including their dissent from Israeli policies)”; see his “Rebutting Avineri,” Ha’Am (April 1987): 13.

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establishment; he was an observant Jew whose fellow travelers in political matters were, for the most part, Conservative and Reform (many of them fellow Hillel rabbis). Chaim’s pursuit of peace between Israelis and Palestinians has been a regular feature of his public persona throughout his adult life. It is important to emphasize that this commitment was born of his fidelity to the Jewish ethical tradition87 and his non-messianic conception of the meaning of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.88 In Chaim’s view, the great gift of the state’s establishment consisted in the opportunity it granted the Jewish people to “reenter history” and to apply the teachings of the Torah to the problems of everyday life in the modern world89—especially to a “central religious question[:] . . . How do we juggle the tension between morality and power?”90 It is for this reason that this loving critic of Zion never saw a 87 See Chaim’s “The Relationship between Judaism and Morality,” Ha’Am (November 1983): 13, where he is careful not to make any essentialist claims about the ethical superiority of Jews or Judaism, but instead to advocate “drawing on the wellsprings of moral teaching that is our heritage.” 88 For Chaim’s most in-depth published analysis of traditional Jewish attitudes to the Land of Israel and their modern-day political exponents, see “The Land of Israel: Sanctified Matter or Mythic Space,” Zionist Ideas 15 (Spring 1987): 6–31; republished with addenda about the meaning of exile in Jewish tradition in Three Faiths—One God: A Jewish, Christian, Muslim Encounter, ed. John Hick and Edmund S. Meltzer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 137–64. See also Ira Rifkin, “Outspoken Right-Wing Rabbi Gives Orthodox Jews a Voice,” Los Angeles Times (November 12, 1989), accessed March 1, 2019, http://articles.latimes.com/1989-1112/news/we-1856_1_orthodox-jews; Irena Auerbuch and Val D. Phillips, “Rabbis Debate Jewish Settlement,” Daily Bruin (November 29, 1989): 1, 9; and especially Chaim’s “Exile: The Secret of Jewish Survival,” and his “A Zionism of Power or a Zionism of Values? Toward a Renewal of the Zionist Idea,” Valley Beit Midrash (November 2016), accessed March 10, 2019, https://www.valleybeitmidrash.org/ learning-library/a-zionism-of-power-of-a-zionism-of-values/. 89 See Chaim’s “Yom Ha’atzmaut 1989,” Ha’Am (April 1989): 12; his essay in Rebuilding Jewish Peoplehood: Where Do We Go from Here? A Symposium in the Wake of the Rabin Assassination, ed. David A. Harris (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1996), 91–93; republished with revisions as “The End of Illusion,” Tikkun 11, no. 1 (January/ February 1996): 76–77; and idem, “Zionist Principles,” 15. Chaim is fond of citing Rabbi Naphtali Zevi Judah Berlin (Netsiv)’s interpretation of Num. 2:20, wherein he recognizes that God’s stewardship of Israel in the wilderness was miraculous, whereas the entry into the Land was “more inclined toward the natural order”; see Sefer Torat E-lohim . . . im perush Ha‘meḳ davar, vol. 4 (Jerusalem: El ha-Meḳorot, 1959), 7a–8a. 90 See Bishop, “Seidler-Feller Promotes”; see also Chaim’s “Yom Ha’atzmaut 1989,” 12, and “By Power and by Spirit,” The Jewish Spectator 48, no. 3 (Fall 1983): 26–27, in the latter of which he writes that “[the Israeli Labor party’s] humanistic interpretation of power may be more authentically Jewish than [Menachem] Begin’s.”

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contradiction between opposing those who would delegitimize the Jewish State and fighting equally hard for Israel’s compliance with international law in ending the occupation of the West Bank so as to make way for a future Palestinian state.91 The stress he placed on morality as the supreme Jewish (including halakhic) value made it obvious to him that the exchange of “land for peace” was the only just method of resolving the conflict.92 And when religious figures such as Meir Kahane,93 Baruch Goldstein,94 and Yigal 91 For Chaim’s most heartfelt published condemnation of the morally corrupting nature of the occupation—“the greatest catastrophe to befall the Jewish people in the aftermath of the Holocaust”—see “The Withering of the Zionist Dream: Reflections on the Occupation after 40 Years,” in A Rabbinic Guide to 40 Years of Occupation, ed. John Friedman and Aliza Becker (Chicago: Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, 2007), 18–19, accessed March 1, 2019, http://btvshalom.org/btvshalom.org/resources/rabbisguide.pdf; see also his “Omar Barghouti at UCLA: No to BDS, No to Occupation,” Jewish Journal (January 23, 2014), accessed March 1, 2019, https://jewishjournal.com/opinion/126296/. 92 See, for example, Anna Shen, “Mideast Problems Debated by Rabbis,” Daily Bruin (March 8, 1991): 3, 10, and “Perspectives on Partition Part II: Rabbi Chaim SeidlerFeller,” Olive Tree Initiative (May 29, 2012), accessed March 1, 2019, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=lC7mPl-giAo; see also the essay Chaim coauthored with David N. Myers, “Jews Shouldn’t Adulate Temple Mount,” Los Angeles Times (January 21, 2001): M5, accessed March 1, 2019, http://articles.latimes.com/2001/jan/21/opinion/ op-14982. Relatedly, see Myers’s and Chaim’s call for a return to “some of the most exalted ideals of the Jewish and Zionist traditions”: “These Rare Texts Will Remind You What Israel Once Aspired to Be,” Forward (May 9, 2016), accessed March 1, 2019, https://forward.com/opinion/340202/these-rare-texts-will-remind-you-what-israelonce-aspired-to-be/; republished as “‘Renew Our Days as of Old,’” Jewish Journal (May 26, 2016), accessed March 1, 2019, https://jewishjournal.com/opinion/185819/. 93 Kahane challenged Chaim to a public debate on at least two occasions; see Michael Ashcraft and Joseph Wolverton, “Kahane Speaks on Israeli Homeland, Draws Protesters,” Daily Bruin (February 3, 1987): 5, as well as the advertisements in the Daily Bruin (October 25, 1989): 13; ibid. (October 31, 1989): 4; and ibid. (November 2, 1989): 8. For Chaim’s denunciations of Kahane’s racist ideology, see his “Not by Might and Not by Power: Kahanism and Orthodoxy,” Tikkun 6, no. 1 (January/February 1991): 21–22, as well as Anna Hrachovec, “Kahane Denounced by Protesters for his ‘AntiZionism,’” Daily Bruin (February 3, 1987): 8; Kristine Lucas, “Rabbi Meir Kahane to Protest at UCLA Jewish Center Today,” Daily Bruin (November 2, 1989): 3, 17; eadem, “Rabbi Gives Views on Racism, Israel,” Daily Bruin (November 3, 1989): 3, 11; and Tina Anima, “Expert Says Kahane’s Followers Will Falter,” Daily Bruin (November 9, 1990): 1, 9. 94 See the letters written jointly by Chaim and David N. Myers printed in the Daily Bruin (March 3, 1994): 18, and the Los Angeles Times (March 4, 1994), accessed March 1, 2019, http://articles.latimes.com/1994-03-04/local/me-29773_1_settlerjewish-history-west-bank-and-gaza. See also Chaim’s highly critical “Look within for the Personification of Evil,” Los Angeles Times (March 14, 1994), accessed March 1, 2019, http://articles.latimes.com/1994-03-14/local/me-33777_1_hebron-massacre. (Impassioned responses to this article were printed in the Los Angeles Times [March

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Amir95 adduced traditional sources to promote hate and violence rather than tolerance and reconciliation, Chaim’s righteous indignation spurred him to protest loudly for the sake of Zion and of Judaism.96 With his arrival at UCLA, Chaim continued to promote his propeace agenda in various ways. He helped organize a “social action coffeehouse series” to raise awareness about contemporary political issues;97 gave public lectures and coordinated events relating to various aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict;98 and fought against what he saw as unfair

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23, 1994]: A10.) Chaim spoke at a Hillel-sponsored Jewish Town Hall Meeting held as a “Response to the Hebron Massacre” on March 20; see the advertisement in the Daily Bruin (March 17, 1994): 8. See Chaim’s “Rabin Deserves Respect for Transformation toward Peace,” Daily Bruin (November 13, 1995): 16, 19, and his essay in Rebuilding Jewish Peoplehood. Chaim wrote early on of the need to “work at modifying, refining and perfecting our tradition—sometimes by utilizing internal rabbinic ethics to humanize an oppressive law and at other times by adapting Judaism to the cultural norm” (“The Relationship,” 13). His formulations would, however, grow sharper with time, for example, “The challenge for all Jews is to reclaim their tradition and decisively uproot, once and for all, the Jewish teachings of contempt that have attracted so many followers to Kahane’s message” (“Not by Might,” 22); “Next comes the most difficult move for traditionalists: acknowledging that the sacred teachings of Judaism contain passages that, when presented uncritically, constitute incitement to violence” (“Look within”); and “Therefore, it is the special responsibility of religious educators in the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities to acknowledge the intolerance and prejudice that is embedded in some of their texts, to expose those teachings, and to denounce them as immoral in their simple form, while, at the same time, presenting layers of interpretation offered by the tradition as a filter for that particularly ignominious textual passage” (essay in Rebuilding Jewish Peoplehood, 92). Perhaps the shift in language was due in part to Chaim’s exposure to Swedish Lutheran theologian Krister Stendahl, who served as the second director of the Center for Religious Pluralism at the Shalom Hartman Institute. Stendahl taught that in confronting a Christian text that seems to be anti-Jewish, one must first be bold enough to identify it as such; second, one must contextualize it historically; third, one must attempt to reinterpret it; and fourth, failing that, one must declare it to be immoral. See Batya Silverman, “Hillel Initiates Social Action Coffeehouse Series,” Ha’Am (February 3, 1976): 3. Examples of lectures include one on “Gush Emunim: A Threat to Israel’s Survival?” (Daily Bruin [May 28, 1980]: 11); two on the topic of Chaim’s “The Land of Israel” essay (above, n. 88; see the Daily Bruin [May 11, 1984]: 4, and ibid. [April 27, 1994]: 14); one on “Pollard, Boesky, and Co.: What’s Happened to the Jewish Ethical Tradition?” (Ha’Am [April 1987]: 2); and another on the goals of Peace Now (Daily Bruin [November 20, 1989]: 20). For examples of events, including debates, see Tammy Peng, “Crisis in Israel Exposed to Discussion,” Daily Bruin (February 3, 1988): 4; Auerbuch and Phillips, “Rabbis Debate,” 1, 9; Shen, “Mideast Problems,” 3, 10; and John Digrado, “Jewish Leaders Discuss Peace Process,” Daily Bruin (May 9, 1996): 1, 14.

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anti-Zionist99 rhetoric emanating from members of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement and other groups on campus.100 99 Chaim believed that denying Jews the right to self-determination was tantamount to antisemitism: “It is known that anti-Zionism is a way of saying anti-Judaism” (Mike Timmermann, “Vandals Threaten Prof ’s Life,” Daily Bruin [May 21, 1981]: 15); “The selective support of one national movement—Palestinian nationalism—while, at the same time, denying the legitimacy of another national movement—Zionism—must be seen as a form of discrimination bordering on racism” (letter printed in the Daily Bruin [February 7, 1983]: 11). See also the advertisement in the Daily Bruin (February 20, 1985): 22, for a talk Chaim was scheduled to give on February 22 entitled “AntiZionism: The New Anti-Semitism.” 100 See, for example, Chaim’s letter printed in the Daily Bruin (February 10, 1987): 15; idem, “Zionism Is Not a Racist Policy”; idem, “Omar Barghouti”; the statement he coauthored with Aaron Lerner, “Increasingly Blurred Lines between Politics and Hate on Campus,” UCLA Hillel (February 27, 2015), accessed March 1, 2019, http://www. uclahillel.org/increasingly_blurred_lines_between_politics_and_hate_on_campus; and the essay he coauthored with David N. Myers and Maia Ferdman, “UCLA Must Take Action to Address Anti-Semitism,” Jewish Journal (March 11, 2015), accessed March 1, 2019, https://jewishjournal.com/opinion/164300/. See also Todd Belie, “Event Offers Students Insight on Conflict,” Daily Bruin (November 26, 2000), accessed March 11, 2019, http://dailybruin.com/2000/11/26/event-offers-students-insight/, and Marcelle Richards, “Swastika Sparks Emotions at Teach-In on Oppression,” Daily Bruin (May 24, 2001), accessed March 1, 2019, http://dailybruin.com/2001/05/24/swastikasparks-emotions-at-te/. Chaim argued that the image of Israel on campus changed from that of an underdog and champion of liberal values in the 1960s and 1970s to that of a powerful, even oppressive, force in the aftermath of the 1982 Operation Peace for Galilee, perceived by many as an offensive war on Israel’s part. See his “By Power and by Spirit,” 26; idem, “A Zionism of Power” (starting at approx. 24:33); and Sichel, “Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller’s.” Still, he was careful to point out that antisemitism posed a relatively minor threat to Jewish life at the university and could not possibly, on its own, sustain Jewish identity for the long term in the absence of any positive reason for young Jews to identify with their heritage. See his “Jewish Life on Campus,” 101; idem, “Response to Perry London,” 61–64; idem, “Judaism as a Choice in Our Materialistic Universe,” The Jewish Spectator 58, no. 2 (Fall 1993): 40; idem, “Reality for Campus Ills,” Jewish Journal (December 19, 2002), accessed March 1, 2019, https://jewishjournal.com/ opinion/7168/; idem, “‘Sense of Siege’ at UCLA Requires Strategic Response,” The Leader 3 (Spring 2003): 7–8; idem, “A Jewish Golden Age on Campus,” The Jewish Week (January 10, 2012), accessed March 1, 2019, https://jewishweek.timesofisrael. com/a-jewish-golden-age-on-campus/; and the essay he coauthored with Keri Copans et al., “The Truth about UC Campuses,” Jewish Journal (March 8, 2012), accessed March 1, 2019, https://jewishjournal.com/opinion/101856/. See also Udeitha Srimushnam, “Jewish Student Protection Advised,” Daily Bruin (April 5, 2006), accessed March 1, 2019, http://dailybruin.com/2006/04/05/jewish-student-protection-advi/; anon., “Ha-ma’avaḳ be-BDS: ‘iyyum asṭraṭegi al Medinat Yiśra’el,’” The Pulse (April 3, 2016), accessed March 1, 2019, https://thepulse.co.il/index.php/22742-2016-04-03-0439-51; Judy Maltz, “From the BDS Front Lines: How the On-Campus Brawl Is Turning

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Crucially, Chaim also worked with partners in the Muslim community (much as he had with black leaders) to foster intergroup dialogue.101 “By nature, I’m a boundary crosser. . . . I would like to demonstrate how the other and I are one.”102 In a particularly celebrated case, he and a Palestinian graduate student co-taught a Spring 2003 course in UCLA’s Department of Sociology called “Voices of Peace: Perspectives on Confrontation and Reconciliation in the Arab-Israeli Conflict” in order to “give the students a perspective on the necessity of compromise and the need to reject violence as an option.”103 Similarly, Chaim cultivated academic and personal relationships with Muslim intellectuals such as Sari Nusseibeh of Al-Quds Young Jews off Israel,” Haaretz (May 9, 2016), accessed March 1, 2019, https://www. haaretz.com/jewish/MAGAZINE-how-the-bds-brawl-is-turning-jewish-students-offisrael-1.5379256; and Liron Nagler-Cohen, “Ar[tsot] ha-b[erit] 2018: ‘Yiśra’el hafekhah le-mashehu ra‘il,’” Ynet (April 11, 2018), accessed March 1, 2019, https://www.ynet. co.il/articles/0,7340,L-5227227,00.html. 101 On the importance Chaim has imputed to dialogue as a step towards conflict resolution, see his “Zionist Principles,” 15; idem, “Reality for Campus Ills”; idem, “Different Tack on Campus Challenge”; and his letter printed in the Daily Bruin (January 24, 2007), accessed March 1, 2019, http://dailybruin.com/2007/01/24/letters_editor28/. (In his “Conflict as Mitzvah,” OLAM Magazine [Winter 2004]: 7; republished with revisions as “The Mitzvah of Conflict Resolution—on Campus,” 9 Adar [2015], accessed March 1, 2019, https://www.9adar.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/The-Mitzvah-ofConflict-Resolution-on-Campus-by-Chaim-Seidler-Feller.pdf, dialogue is presented as secondary to action.) See also Jacoby, “Chaim,” 10; the advertisement in the Daily Bruin (May 31, 1995): 14; Belie, “Event Offers”; Teresa Watanabe, “UCLA Muslim, Jewish Students Build Bridges,” Los Angeles Times (December 1, 2001), accessed March 1, 2019, http://articles.latimes.com/2001/dec/01/local/me-10252; and Roopa Raman, “Dinner Held to Encourage Dialogue,” Daily Bruin (December 2, 2001), accessed March 1, 2019, http://dailybruin.com/2001/12/02/dinner-held-to-encourage-dialo/. 102 Bishop, “Seidler-Feller Promotes.” Doreen also called him a “boundary crosser” (in a slightly different sense) in Berrin, “To Nudge and to Support.” 103 See anon., “Rabbi, Palestinian Teach for Peace,” UCLA Today (May 28, 2003), accessed March 1, 2019, http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/030528peace; see also Brad Greenberg, “Sociology 195D Provides Forum for ‘Voices of Peace,’” Daily Bruin (May 21, 2003), accessed March 1, 2019, http://dailybruin.com/2003/05/21/sociology-195dprovides-forum/, and Stuart Silverstein, “Small Steps toward Bridging Middle East Chasm,” Los Angeles Times (June 4, 2003), accessed March 1, 2019, http://articles. latimes.com/2003/jun/04/local/me-class4. Chaim had also taught the course previously in Winter 2001 without the participation of the graduate student; see Watanabe, “UCLA Muslim, Jewish Students.” For Chaim’s belief in the transformative power of education, as opposed to advocacy, in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, see his “Advocacy and Education as Divergent Strategies in the Effort to Support Israel on Campus,” in American Jewry and the College Campus: Best of Times or Worst of Times?, ed. Harold T. Shapiro and Steven Bayme (New York: Dorothy and Julius Koppelman Institute on American Jewish-Israeli Relations, American Jewish Committee, 2005),

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University, Khaled Abou El Fadl of UCLA, and Amir Hussain of Loyola Marymount University in an effort to increase mutual understanding.104 Because of his activism, Chaim was sometimes cast by his Jewish critics as beyond the pale of legitimacy and subjected to protests by those who objected to his liberal political orientation.105 In one case in the early 1980s, a pig was left by members of the Jewish Defense League (JDL) in front of the Seidler-Fellers’ apartment building on Kelton Avenue on the first day of Passover. In 1988, together with Yael Dayan, Richard Dreyfuss, and Betty Friedan, Chaim participated in a rally held at Roxbury Park in Beverly Hills by Friends of Peace Now—of which he was a founding member following the demise of Breira106—praising Israel’s negotiations with its Arab neighbors to end Palestinian unrest in the occupied territories.107 Egged on by a local community figure, counter-demonstrators became agitated and began to charge the stage, threatening to upend it. Chaim quickly gathered his wits, walked to the microphone, and started singing “Hatikvah.” At that point, the entire crowd, peaceniks and otherwise, stopped in its tracks and chanted the Israeli national anthem together.108 32–39, as well as his letter printed in the Jewish Journal (March 18, 2015), accessed March 1, 2019, https://jewishjournal.com/letters_to_the_editor/164915/. 104 On his relationship with El Fadl, see Gary Rosenblatt, “In Search of Moderate Muslims,” The Jewish Week (January 17, 2003), accessed March 1, 2019, https://jewishweek. timesofisrael.com/in-search-of-moderate-muslims/, and El Fadl’s online list of public lectures, accessed March 1, 2019, https://www.searchforbeauty.org/latest-lectures/alllectures-and-public-talks/. On the same in connection with Hussain, see the course description for their Spring 2010 class on Muslim/Jewish Theology, accessed March 1, 2019, http://faculty.lmu.edu/amirhussain/thst-398-muslimjewish-theology/, and “UCLA Hillel Honors” (starting at approx. 1:20, 3:35, 10:45). 105 Chaim had apparently been attacked for his views on Israel already during his Columbus period; see Cohen, “Hillel Rabbi Leaving,” 1, and Marc Lee Raphael, Jews and Judaism in a Midwestern Community: Columbus, Ohio, 1840–1975 (Columbus: Ohio Historical Society, 1979), 417 with n. 9. 106 See Chaim’s “Zionist Principles,” 15, and the website of the American Jewish Peace Archive (1967–2017), accessed March 1, 2019, https://ajpeacearchive.org/peacepioneers/. He would later join the faculty of the New Israel Fund’s Rabbi Harvey J. Fields Institute as well; see their website, accessed March 1, 2019, https://fieldsinstitute. nif.org/past-instructors/. 107 The rally was advertised in the Los Angeles Times (March 8, 1988), pt. V, 3, and covered briefly in Ann Wiener, “Demonstrators Scuffle at Mideast Peace Rally,” Los Angeles Times (March 14, 1988), accessed March 1, 2019, http://articles.latimes. com/1988-03-14/local/me-648_1_peace-rally-demonstrators. 108 In more recent years, Chaim’s position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems to have gained greater acceptance within the Jewish mainstream, to the extent that he was named AIPAC Advocate of the Year in March 2015; see Sichel, “Rabbi Chaim

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“Make for Yourself a Rabbi, and Acquire for Yourself a Friend” (Avot 1:6) In attempting to navigate between two poles, and as part of his own commitment to the possibility of a progressive Zionist vision, Chaim had an inspiring and influential mentor, Rabbi Dr. David Hartman. Hartman, who, like Chaim, had studied with Soloveitchik at Yeshiva, was the rabbi of Congregation Tifereth Beth David Jerusalem in Montreal and a professor at McGill University. When he visited Yitz Greenberg’s synagogue, the Riverdale Jewish Center, in 1969, Chaim and a small group of friends piled into a car to hear him speak. Hartman was a charismatic and impassioned teacher whose theology attempted to achieve a synthesis between tradition and modernity in a rationalistic key inspired by Rabbi Moses Maimonides, one of Chaim’s heroes. Taken with Hartman’s approach, Chaim reached out to him upon the latter’s visit to Los Angeles ten years later. (Hartman had moved to Israel in the interim and founded the Jerusalem-based Shalom Hartman Institute in 1976 in memory of his father.) The two arranged to meet in Hartman’s hotel room for what was supposed to be a fifteen-minute conversation but wound up lasting an hour and a half. When Hartman extended an institute fellowship offer to Chaim for the 1980–1981 academic year, he accepted the invitation and took a sabbatical from UCLA.109 From 1984 on, he would return to the institute every summer to learn with and teach fellow Diaspora rabbis and, eventually, laypeople as well. Later in his career, in 2011, he joined the faculty of the North American branch of the institute on a part-time basis by developing and running a program, the Hartman Fellowship for Hillel (or: Campus) Professionals, that focused on Seidler-Feller’s.” It may also be the case that his views have themselves evolved somewhat in light of the intensification of anti-Israel activity on and off campus; see, for example, Rebecca Spence, “Once-Quiet Campuses See Surge in Anti-Israel Activism,” Forward (March 9, 2009), accessed March 1, 2019, https://forward.com/news/103762/oncequiet-campuses-see-surge-in-anti-israel-activ/; Chaim’s “They’re Attacking Us with Missiles,” Jewish Journal (July 15, 2014), accessed March 1, 2019, https://jewishjournal. com/opinion/130880/; and his coauthored “UCLA Must Take Action.” 109 See Chaim’s “A Zionism of Power” (starting at approx. 29:17). See also the farewell wishes from the editors of Ha’Am in its October 1980 issue, p. 2. While on sabbatical, Chaim spent the first part of his days studying at the institute and then, after 1:00 pm, returned to his alma mater, the Hebrew University, to take classes in Jewish studies, particularly Kabbalah and Hasidism, with such luminaries as Rachel Elior, Moshe Idel, Abraham Malamat, Rivka Schatz Uffenheimer, Ephraim E. Urbach, and R. J. Zwi Werblowsky.

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“the complexity and challenges of the North American relationship with Israel and on other major issues facing the Jewish people.”110 Chaim’s time at the institute would prove decisive. It gave him a home in Israel, one that suited his heart, mind, and soul alike. There, he found a large cohort of scholars, rabbis, and thinkers who shared his tolerant form of observant Judaism and/or his progressive form of Zionism, including Moshe Halbertal, Donniel Hartman, Tova Hartman, Melila Hellner-Eshed, Yossi Klein Halevi, Israel Knohl, Menachem Lorberbaum, Yair Lorberbaum, Avi Sagi, and Noam Zion.111 He also taught and befriended a broad range of North American rabbis from across the denominational spectrum, making him a highly sought-after speaker at synagogues throughout the United States. Similarly, through his work as an instructor for the Wexner Heritage Foundation,112 which is devoted to providing serious training in Jewish history and thought to aspiring lay leaders, he also came into contact with a wide swath of talented Jewish community members. In recognition of his years of dedicated service to UCLA and the Jewish community at large, UCLA Hillel has sponsored a number of tributes to Chaim at various points in his career. The first was held in honor of the bar mitzvah, or thirteenth year, of his tenure there, when Hillel ran a symposium entitled “Passion and Scholarship: Reflections on the Problematics of Commitment,” which brought together the various religious and intellectual communities in which Chaim moved, including UCLA professors Arnold J. Band and Steven Zipperstein, as well as then-local Rabbi Daniel Landes and Rabbi Dr. David Gordis of the University of Judaism (now 110 Anon., “Fellowship for Hillel Professionals Established,” Shalom Hartman Institute (March 5, 2012), accessed March 1, 2019, https://hartman.org.il/SHINews_View. asp?Article_Id=910&Cat_Id=285&Cat_Type=SHINews. 111 For appreciations by Chaim of Hartman and his institute, see his “Hosting Dr. David Hartman: Hillel Welcomes Scholar, Philosopher, Rabbi: All in One,” Ha’Am (November 1986): 15; Marjorie Miller, “In Jerusalem, an Educator in Tolerance Gets a Campus,” Los Angeles Times (October 28, 1996), accessed March 1, 2019, http://articles. latimes.com/1996-10-28/news/mn-58698_1_hartman-institute; and “Jo[se]ph Baer Soloveitchik” (starting at approx. 10:00). It is important to note that the admiration was mutual; see Searching for Chaim (starting at approx. 14:27), where Hartman addresses Chaim as follows: “I am happy to call you my friend. You like to call me your teacher; I don’t think I deserve such a title from you. I prefer saying that you are a ḥaver . . . le-de‘ah [like-minded friend] who studies with me and energizes my own intellectual curiosity.” 112 See, for example, the program of the foundation’s July 5–12, 1992 Summer Institute, held in Olympic Valley, CA, at which Chaim was scheduled to speak about “Maimonides and Modernity.”

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American Jewish University).113 Chaim would be feted by Hillel on three subsequent occasions as well: in 1998, when he was presented with a booklet entitled Meḳor Chaim that reproduced a selection of his writings with Talmud-style marginal comments by scholars and friends;114 in 2010, when he and Doreen together were celebrated for their service to the UCLA community;115 and in 2016, when leading academics and rabbis—Elliot N. Dorff, Laura Geller, Carole Goldberg, Avraham Yizhak (Arthur) Green, Moshe Halbertal, Asher Lopatin, and Suzanne Last Stone—convened for “A Day of Learning” organized by David N. Myers, followed by a gala dinner, to mark Chaim’s retirement from the position of executive director of UCLA Hillel.116 At the last-named event, Hillel established the Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller Institute of Jewish Learning at UCLA to “organize and sponsor multidisciplinary avenues for Jewish study and spiritual growth” in perpetuation of Chaim’s distinctive work.117 As one might expect from a person of Chaim’s energy level and commitment, the distinction between his pre- and post-retirement schedules is not readily apparent. He continues to be involved in UCLA Hillel, serve on the faculty of the Hartman Institute, speak as a scholar-in-residence at various venues, and advocate for social justice causes that are meaningful 113 The November 13, 1988 program was advertised in the October 1988 issue of Ha’Am, p. 15, and covered in Marilyn Zeitlin, “Hillel Fetes Rabbi Seidler-Feller after 13 Years,” Jewish Journal (November 14, 1988), and Irena Auerb[u]ch and Shana Chandler, “Hillel Rabbi Recognized for 13 Years of Service,” Ha’Am (November 1988): 4. 114 See the film Searching for Chaim and Tom Tugend, “UCLA Hillel’s New Home,” Jewish Journal (March 19, 1998), accessed July 15, 2019, https://jewishjournal.com/ old_stories/806/. 115 See anon., “Seidler-Fellers to Be Honored in Los Angeles,” Hillel International (April 12, 2010), accessed March 1, 2019, https://www.hillel.org/about/news-views/newsviews—blog/news-and-views/2010/04/12/seidler-fellers-to-be-honored-in-losangeles, and anon., “Hillel at UCLA Gala Honors Seidler-Fellers,” Jewish Journal (June 23, 2010), accessed March 1, 2019, https://jewishjournal.com/news/los_angeles/ community/80715/. 116 See Jared Sichel, “A Night for Chaim,” Jewish Journal (February 11, 2016), accessed March 1, 2019, https://jewishjournal.com/news/los_angeles/182405/moving-andshaking-a-night-for-chaim-peachy-and-mark-levy-beit-midrash-and-more/, and anon., “A Day of Learning / A Night for Chaim Wrap Up,” UCLA Hillel (February 11, 2016), accessed March 1, 2019, http://www.uclahillel.org/a_day_of_learning_a_ night_for_chaim_wrap_up. See also the list of Chaim’s accomplishments over the course of his tenure at UCLA Hillel: anon., “Announcing Our New Executive Director,” UCLA Hillel (June 30, 2015), accessed March 1, 2019, http://www.uclahillel.org/ announcing_our_new_executive_director. 117 See the invitation sent out ahead of “A Night for Chaim,” dated November 10, 2015.

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to him.118 Moreover, his pastoral duties as a rabbi in the community who visits the sick, counsels those in need, and officiates at lifecycle events, whether weddings or funerals, continue unabated.119 Chaim and Doreen have also begun to spend more time in New York, where their children Shulie and Shaul live. There, Chaim is an active presence on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, teaching classes at B’nai Jeshurun, JCC Manhattan, and the Jewish Theological Seminary. He has also found in New York a pair of Orthodox institutions that suit his progressive religious orientation: Yeshivat Chovevei Torah (YCT), an “Open Orthodox” rabbinical seminary founded on principles of inclusiveness,120 and Darkhei Noam, a so-called partnership minyan that defines itself as halakhically observant while seeking to maximize the participation of women in prayer services.

118 See, for example, Chaim’s “Inequality: What Can Be Done? The Biblical Economics of Sufficiency,” Valley Beit Midrash (November 2016), accessed March 10, 2019, https://www.valleybeitmidrash.org/learning-library/inequality-what-can-be-donethe-biblical-economics-of-sufficiency/, and Eitan Arom, “Orthodox Rabbis Urge ‘Spiritual Resistance’ against Trump Policies,” Jewish Journal (March 7, 2017), accessed March 1, 2019, https://jewishjournal.com/news/nation/216168/orthodox-rabbisurge-spiritual-resistance-trump-policies/. Chaim put his money where his mouth was when he and other social-justice-minded clergy members were arrested in a protest of Trump administration immigration rules on April 13, 2017, which coincided with the intermediate days of Passover. See, for example, Ryan Carter, “LAPD Arrests 35 as Clergy, Immigration Activists Protest ICE Detention,” LA Daily News (April 13, 2017), accessed March 1, 2019, https://www.dailynews.com/2017/04/13/lapd-arrests35-as-clergy-immigration-activists-protest-ice-detentions/, and Veronica Rocha, “35 Demonstrators, Including Clergy, Arrested during ICE Protest in Downtown L.A.,” Los Angeles Times (April 14, 2017), accessed March 1, 2019, https://www.latimes. com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-ice-protests-arrest-downtown-los-angeles-20170414story.html. Chaim would later write about this experience in “Reclaiming Activism,” Sh’ma Now (March 2, 2018), accessed March 1, 2019, https://forward.com/shma-now/ returning/395525/reclaiming-activism/. Relatedly, see Chaim’s earlier piece, “Passover: A Taste of Freedom,” Daily Bruin (April 12, 1990): 27, as well as the statement of the URC clergy on a State of California anti-immigration bill printed in the Daily Bruin (October 4, 1994): 16–17. 119 For one example among innumerable others, see “UCLA Hillel 2012 Gala Video—Gail Katz & Bruce Wessel,” accessed March 1, 2019, https://vimeo.com/41381222. 120 See Sichel, “Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller’s,” on Chaim’s self-identification with the Open Orthodox movement, and Drew Kaplan, “Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller Gives Talk,” YCT Chevre (November 21, 2005), accessed March 1, 2019, https://yctchevre.blogspot. com/2005/11/rabbi-chaim-seidler-feller-gives-talk.html, for one instance of Chaim teaching at YCT. Chaim is likewise affiliated with two (approximately) Open Orthodox rabbinical organizations: Torat Chayim (http://www.toratchayimrabbis.org/) and the International Rabbinic Fellowship (http://www.internationalrabbinicfellowship.org/).

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“The Making of Many Books Is without Limit” (Eccl. 12:12) One of the most noticeable features of the spaces Chaim occupies, whether at home or at work, is the ubiquity of reading material piled up in mounds on the floor and table and crammed into the crevices of his bookshelves, which not infrequently house an additional row of books behind the front row. A photograph of Albert Einstein posted on Chaim’s office door at Hillel quotes the renowned physicist saying, as if channeling Chaim, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?” As a yodea sefer (scholar) and an ohev sefer (bibliophile), Chaim derives no greater delight than when showing visitors a recently purchased volume—perhaps a first-edition kabbalistic treatise, a facsimile of an illuminated Haggadah, or an early-twentieth-century collection of essays by a maverick rabbi.121 It was thus obvious to Chaim’s friends and admirers that the most appropriate way of celebrating his retirement would be to publish a book of scholarship in his honor. As recounted above, Chaim is an iconoclast who has forged his own distinctive path in life. Hence the title of the present volume: Swimming against the Current. The metaphor of swimming calls to mind the midrashic comparison of the Talmud to “the Great Sea” (Song of Songs Rabbah 5:14; see also Midrash mishle 10:17). As such, it is an eminently suitable image and habitus in which to consider Chaim’s impact. For while he swims in that vast sea of knowledge, he also strains against the force of powerful opposing tides, modeling for others the passion and courage necessary to chart one’s own course. But even as he follows the example of Abraham—who, the midrash explains, is styled ha-ivri (the Hebrew; Gen. 14:13) because the whole world was on one ever (side, riverbank; the words share a root) while he was on the other (Genesis Rabbah 42:8)—he builds bridges to everyone he meets by dint of his extraordinary personality and love for humanity. In that spirit, this festschrift brings together an array of scholars and thinkers whose essays swim against the current of intellectual convention in their respective fields. Part I of the book is devoted to “The Sources of the Tradition” and features a thought-provoking cluster of articles by Isaac Gottlieb, Shana Strauch Schick, Aryeh Cohen, Moshe Halbertal, and Elana 121 See Kahn, “L’Chaim,” 20. Unsurprisingly, Chaim actually cofounded a Jewish bookshop at OSU Hillel in 1974; likewise, soon after he came to UCLA, it was reported that “the staff has hopes of setting up a Jewish bookstore in the near future.” See anon., “Hillel Happenings,” 3 (above, n. 60), and Ha’Am (October 26, 1976): 6, respectively.

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Stein Hain offering new and innovative readings of the Bible and Talmud. Akin to Chaim, these authors point to the indispensability of these sources as the foundational texts of the Jewish religion, while also fulfilling the ancient interpretive injunction to “turn it over again and again” (Avot 5:22) in order to render Jewish teachings relevant to shifting contexts. Thus, they explore the place of women, biblical sequence, Torah study, and secular legal theory in Jewish thought ranging from antiquity to the modern age. Part II treats another major area of interest of Chaim’s: Jewish intellectual history and philosophy. Submissions to this section come from Avraham Yizhak (Arthur) Green, Michael Walzer, Howard Wettstein, Moshe Idel, and Elliot N. Dorff, who perform two key tasks. First, they revisit long-held assumptions about major modern Jewish paradigms of thought, and second, they explore the consonance between Judaism and ethics. The result is a fresh angle of observation on religious, historical, and moral questions that go to the heart of the Jewish tradition. Part III shifts our attention to the realm of contemporary Jewish culture and society. The papers in this section, by Sylvia Barack Fishman, Sergio DellaPergola, Eugene R. Sheppard, and Deborah E. Lipstadt, employ an eclectic combination of literary, sociological, and historical methods to push to the fore central concerns of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Jewish life, including feminism, Jewish continuity, the Holocaust, and antisemitism. Part IV explores the critically important issue of how to meld Jewish and democratic values into a coherent and just vision of Israel. The scholars contributing to this section—Suzanne Last Stone, David Ellenson, Carole Goldberg, and Shalom Sabar—address the phenomenon of Zionism from a variety of perspectives that highlight the status of minorities, the ethics of war, the question of indigeneity, and religious symbolism. The volume concludes with two sets of tributes to Chaim. (Though the number could easily have been multiplied many times over, considerations of space necessitated imposing a limit.) The first consists of short encomia written by former students from different periods of Chaim’s tenure who have gone on to pursue diverse, meaningful careers: Meira Wolkenfeld, Adam Greenwald, Mayim Bialik, and Jonathan Jacoby. The second includes essays by past and current colleagues of Chaim’s from the Hillel, Jewish communal, and university worlds: Laurie L. Levenson, Edward Feld, David Berner, and Saul Andron.

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This project could not have been realized without the generous sponsorship of Chaim’s friends: David and Karen Eisner, Jerry and Jean Friedman, Abner D. and Roslyn Goldstine, Joshua and Lisa Greer, Luis and Lee Lainer, David N. Myers and Nomi Stolzenberg, David and Gitel Rubin, and Alan and Lisa Stern. Additional thanks are due to Hillel at UCLA for providing institutional support for this volume—and for being a stimulating home to Chaim for over four decades. A particular debt of gratitude goes to UCLA Hillel’s executive director, Rabbi Aaron Lerner, for his assistance in bringing this book to press. Finally, we are grateful to Talia Graff and Lindsay Alissa King for their thorough editorial assistance; Sharon Liberman Mintz, David Moss, and Shulie Seidler-Feller for cover art conceptualization and design; Jacqueline Benefraim, Shulamith Z. Berger, Menachem Butler, Zev Eleff, Marshall Goldberg, Aryeh Kaplan, and David Suissa for making themselves available for consultation at various points in the editorial process; and especially Doreen Seidler-Feller for her wisdom and guidance all along the way. ****** At the conclusion of birkat kohanim (the priestly benediction), some recite a short prayer that evokes our honoree’s two Hebrew names, Chaim Shlomo. It reads in part: “May it be Your will to bestow upon us and upon Your entire nation, the House of Israel, ḥayyim u-berakhah le-mishmeret shalom [life and blessing as a safeguard for peace].” May these and many more blessings accompany Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller as he vigorously pursues the paths of life and peace for many years to come.

Bibliography of Publications by Chaim Seidler-Feller*1

Articles 1. “We Believe.” In Elchanite, edited by Chaim Feller and Michael Novick, 88–89. Brooklyn: Students of Yeshiva University H.S. of Brooklyn, 1964. 2. “High Holy Day Messages.” Ohio Jewish Chronicle (September 20, 1973): 11. 3. “Law and Changing the Law.” Ha’Am (May 20, 1975): 9, 13. Republished with revisions as “The Public Invisibility of the Jewish Woman.” Ohio Jewish Chronicle (June 5, 1975): 4; ibid. (June 12, 1975): 2, 13. 4. With Doreen Seidler-Feller. “Soviet Jew Writes from Israel.” Ha’Am (April 19, 1977): 10. 5. “By Power and by Spirit.” The Jewish Spectator 48, no. 3 (Fall 1983): 26–27. 6. “The Relationship between Judaism and Morality.” Ha’Am (November 1983): 13. 7. “Female Rabbis, Male Fears.” Judaism 33, no. 1 (Winter 1984): 79–84. Republished with revisions as “Opening the Last Door .  .  .” Ha’Am (March 1984): 8–9. *

Because this bibliography was compiled without the honoree’s knowledge, it likely does not represent the full extent of Rabbi Seidler-Feller’s published oeuvre. Nevertheless, it is hoped that it may serve as a starting point for those interested in exploring his thought and activism.

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8. “Parshat Va-etchanan: Sounds of Silence.” The Jewish Advocate (August 14, 1986): 6. Republished with revisions as “Vaetchanan: Attraction Based on Love, Not Magic.” The Jewish World (August 15–21, 1986): 5. 9. “Hosting Dr. David Hartman: Hillel Welcomes Scholar, Philosopher, Rabbi: All in One.” Ha’Am (November 1986): 15. 10. “A Common Heritage.” Ha’Am (January/February 1987): 4. 11. “The Land of Israel: Sanctified Matter or Mythic Space.” Zionist Ideas 15 (Spring 1987): 6–31. Republished with addenda in Three Faiths— One God: A Jewish, Christian, Muslim Encounter, edited by John Hick and Edmund S. Meltzer, 137–64. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989. 12. “Rebutting Avineri.” Ha’Am (April 1987): 13. 13. “The Tension between Blacks and Jews.” Daily Bruin (March 4, 1988): 15. 14. “Insults and Insensitivity Weaken Campus Relations.” Daily Bruin (January 9, 1989): 22. 15. “Blacks and Jews: Troubled Times on the College Campus.” Ha’Am (February 1989): 15. Republished with revisions as “Blacks and Jews: Troubled Times on the College Campuses.” Tikkun 4, no. 3 (July/ August 1989): 92–94. 16. “Middle East: Keep the Proposals Realistic.” Daily Bruin (February 7, 1989): 15. 17. “Yom Ha’atzmaut 1989.” Ha’Am (April 1989): 12. 18. “Passover: A Taste of Freedom.” Daily Bruin (April 12, 1990): 27. 19. “Jewish Life on Campus Today, 3.” Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Responsibility 20, no. 393 (April 27, 1990): 100–03. 20. “Between Assimilation and Identification.” Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Responsibility 21, no. 405 (January 11, 1991): 38–40. 21. “Not by Might and Not by Power: Kahanism and Orthodoxy.” Tikkun 6, no. 1 (January/February 1991): 21–22. 22. With Jeffrey C. Alexander. “NOMMO Affair: Double Standard Can’t Stand.” Ha’Am (April 1991): 17, 29. Republished with revisions as “As Barriers Erode, Jews Face Unique Problems.” Daily Bruin (May 30, 1991): 24. Also republished with revisions as “The Effects of Anti-Semitism on UCLA.” Jewish Journal (June 14–20, 1991). Also republished with revisions as “False Distinctions and Double Standards: The Anatomy of Antisemitism at UCLA.” Tikkun 7, no. 1 (January/February 1992): 12–14.

Bibliography of Publications by Chaim Seidler-Feller

23. “Response to Perry London and A[l]issa Hir[s]hfeld.” In Jewish Identity in America, edited by David M. Gordis and Yoav Ben-Horin, 61–65. Los Angeles: Susan and David Wilstein Institute of Jewish Policy Studies, University of Judaism, 1991. 24. “Zionism Is Not a Racist Policy; It’s Just a Form of Nationalism.” Daily Bruin (January 15, 1992): 18. 25. “Judaism as a Choice in Our Materialistic Universe.” The Jewish Spectator 58, no. 2 (Fall 1993): 40–43. 26. “Look within for the Personification of Evil.” Los Angeles Times (March 14, 1994): B11. Accessed March 1, 2019. http://articles.latimes. com/1994-03-14/local/me-33777_1_hebron-massacre. 27. “Rabin Deserves Respect for Transformation toward Peace.” Daily Bruin (November 13, 1995): 16, 19. 28. Essay in Rebuilding Jewish Peoplehood: Where Do We Go from Here? A Symposium in the Wake of the Rabin Assassination, edited by David A. Harris, 91–93. New York: American Jewish Committee, 1996. Republished with revisions as “The End of Illusion.” Tikkun 11, no. 1 (January/February 1996): 76–77. 29. “Rabin’s Legacy.” Jewish Journal (December 9, 1996): 14, 26. 30. “Zionist Principles Can Drive Healing Process.” Daily Bruin (May 6, 1997): 15. 31. “Unity with Diversity: The Hillel Path.” Jewish Journal (May 30, 1997): 15. 32. “Alternative Sh’ma Explanation.” In UCLA Hillel Siddur le-Shabbat, edited by Rachel Leslie Metson and Mayim Chaya Bialik, 35. Los Angeles: UCLA Hillel, 1999. 33. “Judaism’s Womb.” OLAM Magazine (Spring 2000): 10. 34. With David N. Myers. “Jews Shouldn’t Adulate Temple Mount.” Los Angeles Times (January 21, 2001): M5. Accessed March 1, 2019. http:// articles.latimes.com/2001/jan/21/opinion/op-14982. 35. “King David’s Greatest Victory.” OLAM Magazine (Winter 2001): 47. 36. “Israel’s Solid Case Doesn’t Need Exaggeration.” Daily Bruin (June 5, 2002). Accessed March 1, 2019. http://dailybruin.com/2002/06/05/ israels-solid-case-doesnt-need/. 37. “Freedom to Doubt.” OLAM Magazine (Summer 2002): 5. 38. “Reality for Campus Ills.” Jewish Journal (December 19, 2002). Accessed March 1, 2019. https://jewishjournal.com/opinion/7168/.

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39. “‘Sense of Siege’ at UCLA Requires Strategic Response.” The Leader [newsletter of the Wexner Heritage Foundation] 3 (Spring 2003): 7–8. 40. “Conflict as Mitzvah.” OLAM Magazine (Winter 2004): 7. Republished with revisions as “The Mitzvah of Conflict Resolution—on Campus.” 9 Adar (2015). Accessed March 1, 2019. https://www.9adar.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/10/The-Mitzvah-of-Conflict-Resolution-onCampus-by-Chaim-Seidler-Feller.pdf. 41. Essay in I Am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl, edited by Judea and Ruth Pearl, 192–93. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2004. 42. “Sadness in the Context of Illness: A Jewish Perspective.” The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine (February 5, 2005). Accessed March 10, 2019. http://yjhm.yale.edu/archives/spirit2004/sadness/ cseidler-feller.htm. 43. “Advocacy and Education as Divergent Strategies in the Effort to Support Israel on Campus.” In American Jewry and the College Campus: Best of Times or Worst of Times?, edited by Harold T. Shapiro and Steven Bayme, 32–39. New York: Dorothy and Julius Koppelman Institute on American Jewish-Israeli Relations, American Jewish Committee, 2005. 44. “Different Tack on Campus Challenge.” Jewish Journal (June 22, 2006). Accessed March 1, 2019. https://jewishjournal.com/news/los_angeles/ community/13274/. Abridged and revised as “Reconciliation and Renewal.” Jewels of Elul (August 28, 2006). Accessed March 10, 2019. https://www.jewelsofelul.com/jewels/2006-5766/. 45. “The Withering of the Zionist Dream: Reflections on the Occupation after 40 Years.” In A Rabbinic Guide to 40 Years of Occupation, edited by John Friedman and Aliza Becker, 18–19. Chicago: Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, 2007. Accessed March 1, 2019. http://btvshalom.org/ btvshalom.org/resources/rabbisguide.pdf. 46. Essay in “Jewish Spirituality in America: Listening to a Different Drummer: A Symposium.” Havruta 3 (Spring 2009): 10–12. Accessed March 1, 2019. https://shi-webfiles.s3.amazonaws.com/Havruta_2009_ Issue3_JewishSpiritualityInAmerica.pdf. 47. “A Jewish Golden Age on Campus.” The Jewish Week (January 10, 2012). Accessed March 1, 2019. https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/ a-jewish-golden-age-on-campus/.

Bibliography of Publications by Chaim Seidler-Feller

48. With Keri Copans et al. “The Truth about UC Campuses.” Jewish Journal (March 8, 2012). Accessed March 1, 2019. https://jewishjournal.com/ opinion/101856/. 49. “My Ima, Peppi Feller.” Jewish Journal (January 30, 2013). Accessed March 10, 2019. https://web.archive.org/web/20130204204552/http:// www.jewishjournal.com/obituaries/article/my_ima_peppi_feller. 50. “Omar Barghouti at UCLA: No to BDS, No to Occupation.” Jewish Journal (January 23, 2014). Accessed March 1, 2019. https:// jewishjournal.com/opinion/126296/. 51. “They’re Attacking Us with Missiles.” Jewish Journal (July 15, 2014). Accessed March 1, 2019. https://jewishjournal.com/opinion/130880/. 52. With Aaron Lerner. “Increasingly Blurred Lines between Politics and Hate on Campus.” UCLA Hillel (February 27, 2015). Accessed March 1, 2019. http://www.uclahillel.org/increasingly_blurred_lines_between_ politics_and_hate_on_campus. 53. With David N. Myers and Maia Ferdman. “UCLA Must Take Action to Address Anti-Semitism.” Jewish Journal (March 11, 2015). Accessed March 1, 2019. https://jewishjournal.com/opinion/164300/. 54. “Strangers, Forever!” UCLA Hillel (April 3, 2015). Accessed March 1, 2019. http://www.uclahillel.org/passover_message_from_rabbi_ chaim_seidler_feller. 55. With David N. Myers. “These Rare Texts Will Remind You What Israel Once Aspired to Be.” Forward (May 9, 2016). Accessed March 1, 2019. https://forward.com/opinion/340202/these-rare-texts-will-remindyou-what-israel-once-aspired-to-be/. Republished as “‘Renew Our Days as of Old.’” Jewish Journal (May 26, 2016). Accessed March 1, 2019. https://jewishjournal.com/opinion/185819/. 56. “Theo Bikel: A Memorial.” Jewish Journal (June 17, 2016). Accessed March 1, 2019. https://jewishjournal.com/culture/186480/. 57. “The Akedah Dilemma.” Jewish Journal (September 19, 2017). Accessed March 1, 2019. https://jewishjournal.com/culture/religion/high_holy_ days/224707/the-akedah-dilemma/. 58. “Reclaiming Activism.” Sh’ma Now (March 2, 2018). Accessed March 1, 2019. https://forward.com/shma-now/returning/395525/reclaimingactivism/.

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59. Commentary on “Notes for Symposium on Black Power[,] January 6, 1967.” In The Eternal Dissident: Rabbi Leonard I. Beerman and the Radical Imperative to Think and Act, edited by David N. Myers, 138. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018. 60. With David N. Myers. “Op-Ed: In Going after UCLA, the Trump Administration Is Attempting to Chill Free Speech about Israel.” Los Angeles Times (January 23, 2020). Accessed January 30, 2020. https:// www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-01-23/in-going-after-ucla-thetrump-administration-is-attempting-to-chill-free-speech-about-israel.

Letters 1. With Roger C. Klein, Marc Lee Raphael, and David W. Zisenwine. Ohio Jewish Chronicle (September 19, 1974): 2. 2. Dialogue: New Jewish Leadership 1, no. 7 (Shavuot 1975): 2. 3. With Joe Maizlish et al. Ha’Am (November 27, 1979): 9. 4. Daily Bruin (February 7, 1983): 11. 5. Ha’Am (May 1983): 3. 6. Los Angeles Times (July 29, 1984), pt. IV, 4. 7. Los Angeles Times (July 26, 1986). Accessed March 1, 2019. http:// articles.latimes.com/1986-07-26/local/me-173_1_san-diego. 8. Daily Bruin (February 10, 1987): 15. 9. Daily Bruin (May 19, 1988): 22. 10. With David N. Myers. Daily Bruin (March 3, 1994): 18. 11. With David N. Myers. Los Angeles Times (March 4, 1994). Accessed March 1, 2019. http://articles.latimes.com/1994-03-04/local/me29773_1_settler-jewish-history-west-bank-and-gaza. 12. Los Angeles Times (October 14, 2003). Accessed March 1, 2019. http:// articles.latimes.com/2003/oct/14/opinion/le-simantob14.1. 13. Daily Bruin (January 24, 2007). Accessed March 1, 2019. http:// dailybruin.com/2007/01/24/letters_editor28/. 14. With Aaron Lerner. Jewish Journal (October 30, 2013). Accessed March 10, 2019. https://jewishjournal.com/letters_to_the_editor/122913/. 15. Jewish Journal (March 18, 2015). Accessed March 1, 2019. https:// jewishjournal.com/letters_to_the_editor/164915/. 16. Jewish Journal (August 3, 2018). Accessed March 1, 2019. https:// jewishjournal.com/letters_to_the_editor/236846/letters-editor-weekaugust-3-2018/.

Isaac Gottlieb, Bar-Ilan University

Order as Meaning: Juxtaposition in the Bible*

The order of a text is not usually thought of as a key to its interpretation. In fact, it is usually not thought of at all. The natural flow of a story is invisible;1 it is the exceptional that catches our attention.2 On the face of it, the order of events in the Pentateuch is most natural. The Torah begins at the beginning and moves forward to relate the lives of the earliest generations, followed by the stories of the patriarchs, the enslavement of their descendants in Egypt, the exodus from bondage, and the subsequent wanderings in the wilderness. It concludes at the end, with the death of Moses, as the twelve Israelite tribes prepare to enter Canaan.3 This timeline is then resumed in the Early Prophets: the book of Joshua describes how the entering tribes conquered the Canaanites and settled the land, while Judges, Samuel, and Kings relate the evolution of Israelite leadership from local saviors to prophets and kings. The entire exposition thus

*

This essay is dedicated to Chaim, with whom I grew up sharing the same interests that made our fathers fast friends: a love for Hebrew, all things Jewish, and the Land of Israel. 1 “The unrolling scroll, then, was in one respect like the unrolling spool of a film projector, for time and the sequence of events presented in it could not ordinarily be halted or altered.” See Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 90. 2 This is similar to what James Kugel has pointed out about another literary feature: “An awkward poem, one that tramples rhythm and perhaps good sense in its struggle to rhyme, will have no difficulty in making the reader notice the fact of its rhyming; a more subtle poet will meet the requirements of form without letting them take over the poem, and unless we are looking for them, these formal elements will tend to recede.” See James L. Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 102. 3 Isaac Gottlieb, “Sof Davar: Biblical Endings,” Prooftexts 11, no. 3 (1991): 213–24.

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proceeds from earlier to later events. What further can be said about the meaning of order? In order to answer that question, we must note that there are various sorts of order in the Bible. Events in the biblical story as described above are impelled by the relentless march of time, hence a chronological arrangement is most natural. But entirely different considerations motivate the order of “timeless” material in the Bible, such as legal passages, ritual instructions, poems, psalms, and many prophecies. In normal speech, we use the phrase “the sequence of events” to describe the parade of actions that make up a narrative or story. In this paper, we shall use chronology to refer to the order of such events and sequence to refer to the arrangement of non-narrative material. A word that applies to both sorts of order is juxtaposition. It signifies two adjacent texts, whether chapters, paragraphs, or even individual verses.4 In addition, the word juxtaposed can imply unusual adjacency. So, for example, when we say that Genesis 38, the story of Judah and Tamar, is juxtaposed with two parts of the Joseph story (chs. 37 and 39), we mean to note that it seems to be out of place. In similar fashion, we might inquire why the prohibition against accepting Ammonites and Moabites into the assembly of God (Deut. 23:4) is juxtaposed with the prohibition against accepting bastards (Deut. 23:3) when they seem to have nothing in common. The first example is juxtaposition of a story, the second of legal caveats. In keeping with the genre of the texts, the explanation for each will be quite different.

The Order of Biblical Books To illustrate some of the implications of order, we begin with the question of the external arrangement of the biblical books, focusing here on one particular group. The Five Scrolls—the Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther—are listed by the Talmud together with Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah, and Daniel as comprising the unit called Writings (bBava batra 14b). All eleven books (Ezra and Nehemiah are counted as one) are arranged by the Talmud in chronological 4 The traditional biblical unit is the parashah, or paragraph. In the Masoretic Text of the Bible, parashiyyot are marked with a blank space in the text or by beginning the text on a new line. The numbered chapters in contemporary Hebrew Bibles do not constitute a traditional Jewish division and often include more than one parashah. In scholarly jargon, a literary unit is referred to as a pericope.

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order, and the scrolls are thus scattered among them. However, in current printed Hebrew Bibles, based on thirteenth- to fourteenth-century manuscripts, the Five Scrolls appear together as a subset of the Writings and in the order given above.5 Since they evince no unity of authorship, content, setting, or theme, why were they singled out from amongst all the compositions that comprise the Writings? The only common denominator, relatively late in origin, is the custom to read them in the synagogue on the Jewish holidays, one per holiday. It is this liturgical use that determined their adjacency within manuscripts and the printed Hebrew Bible. For this reason, the Five Scrolls in today’s editions are listed according to the Jewish calendar year, as opposed to the order given in the Talmud. The Song of Songs is read on Passover, in the first month of the biblical calendar, Nisan, and so is printed first. Last is Esther, recited on Purim, which falls in the twelfth month, Adar. In between come Ruth, Lamentations, and Ecclesiastes, in the calendar order of their liturgical reading on Pentecost (Shavuot), the Ninth of Av (Tish‘ah be-Av), and Tabernacles (Sukkot), respectively. Medieval Bible manuscripts from the tenth and eleventh centuries (such as the Aleppo and Leningrad Codices) reflect the Palestinian order, maintaining the Five Scrolls as a group but arranging them chronologically, according to their age. Traditionally, this is determined by the events described in them or by their authorial ascriptions. Ruth is first because it is set in the time of the Judges. Next come the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes, both attributed to King Solomon. Lamentations, the fourth, was composed by Jeremiah to lament the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple (sixth century BCE), while Esther, whose story took place in the Persian period (fifth–fourth centuries BCE), comes last.6 A third possibility for the order of the biblical books in general would be to arrange them according to their relative age, not as determined by information in the books themselves or by tradition, but by critical reasoning. 5 This order is apparent only if the Five Scrolls are printed in a single volume or, prior to the age of printing, written together on a single parchment scroll or in a single manuscript codex. For the earliest reference to the Five Scrolls as a group, see Yosef Ofer, “Munaḥ ha-massorah ‘ḥumshah’: ha-izkur ha-attiḳ be-yoter shel ḳovets ‘Ḥamesh megillot,’” in Niṭʻe Ilan: meḥḳarim ba-lashon ha-ivrit u-be-aḥayoteha muggashim le-Ilan Eldar, ed. Moshe Bar-Asher and Irit Meir (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2014), 309–20. 6 The ascription of the Song of Songs to Solomon is found in the first verse; Ecclesiastes is ascribed to “Koheleth son of David, king in Jerusalem” (Eccl. 1:1), identified as Solomon; and the Rabbis named Jeremiah the author of Lamentations (bBava batra 15a).

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Some scholars maintain that all the books included in the Writings, the last division in the Hebrew Bible, were authored or edited at a relatively late date.7 This would explain why Chronicles, a history book whose contents largely overlap with those of Samuel and Kings, was not included in the Early Prophets, for the division of Prophets had already been canonized or “closed” before Chronicles was completed.8 The same reasoning would also explain why Ruth was not placed after the book of Judges in the Early Prophets based on its opening verse, “In the days when the Judges ruled” (Ruth 1:1),9 and why Lamentations does not come right after Jeremiah.10 In sum, the external order of the Scriptures, seemingly an inconsequential matter, can provide us with information on questions of dating, composition, and the Rabbinic reception of biblical books. Returning to the internal order within the text of the Torah, interpreting the Bible from the eighteenth century on was largely dependent on the adoption of the historical-critical approach. The notion that the Bible was redacted, meaning that previous sources were arranged together in order to create a unified work, was central to the critical view. Unusual juxtaposition could now be seen as a sign of “splicing,” marking the juncture of disparate sources. Problematic chronology or sequence in the Pentateuch was considered by critical scholars to be the sign of such redaction or its outcome, investing the question of order with new significance. At the same time, for those who maintained a holistic view of the text, such as advocates of a literary approach, juxtaposition was looked upon as a source of additional meaning, a kind of added value to the contents. We might apply to it a memorable description penned by Martin Buber to characterize the phenomenon of Leitwortstil, or “leading-word style,” in which the repetition of keywords in a story serves as a source of meaning: 7 Biblical books are divided into First Temple and Second Temple writings, or pre-exilic and post-exilic (works written before 586 BCE and those written after). Second Temple compositions range from the Restoration period (early Persian period, fifth century BCE) until approximately the first quarter of the second century BCE, the Hellenistic Age. 8 Chronicles was not written before Cyrus the Great (ca. 576–530 BCE) ruled in Persia; see II Chron. 36:22–23. In the Septuagint, it appears in the Histories. 9 In the Greek Bible, Ruth actually follows Judges. Many scholars think that Ruth is a post-exilic composition based on certain late language features and their interpretation of it as a polemic against a prohibition on intermarriage promulgated by Ezra and Nehemiah in the fifth century BCE. 10 Here, too, the Septuagint has Lamentations in close proximity to Jeremiah, among the Prophecies.

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“one of the most powerful means for conveying meaning without expressing it.”11 Whether juxtaposition was an original authorial technique or a sign of editorial redaction depended on the exegete’s ideas about the formation of the Bible. In this paper, we wish to trace the history of juxtaposition, by which we mean the history of its understanding, from the Talmud and midrashic literature through medieval commentary. It is our belief that the changes that took place from the Rabbinic period to the Middle Ages in the understanding of juxtaposition mirrored larger developments in the realm of exegesis at that time. Further, certain modern approaches to order were foreshadowed in earlier exegesis. Hence, this survey of juxtaposition in the Rabbinic and medieval periods has, besides its intrinsic value, implications for Bible study in general.

Internal Order—Two Approaches The Rabbis usually resolved questions of order with one of two responses. Sometimes, they would cite the maxim en muḳdam u-me’uḥar ba-Torah (there is no “earlier” or “later” in the Torah). Taken literally, this means that there is no strict chronological order in the Bible; hence, one should not be troubled by unusual juxtaposition. In the second response, they inquired after the juxtaposition of seemingly unconnected units by asking lammah nismekhah (why was [one pericope] juxtaposed [to the other]?) and then tried to explain the unusual order. What is surprising is that the relationship between these two approaches was not discussed in the Talmud or midrashic literature, nor have modern scholars addressed the subject in a sufficient manner.12 Several supercommentaries on the Pentateuch com11 Martin Buber, Schriften zur Bibel (Munich: Kösel-Verlag, 1964), 1131, as translated into English by Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, 93. 12 Isaak Heinemann, Darkhe ha-aggadah (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1949), 141: Even though each and every portion should be explained in the context of the portion that preceded it, this does not mean that all of Scripture should be read as a single story that follows in sequence. Our Rabbis acknowledged and admitted that “there is no earlier and later in the Torah.” They also differed as to whether there is an internal connection between two adjacent portions. Rimon Kasher, “The Interpretation of Scripture in Rabbinic Literature,” in Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading, and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism

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mentary of Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac (Rashi; 1040–1105) addressed the issue when they found that Rashi sometimes took the first option and other times the second. The following responsum by Rabbi Asher ben Jehiel (Rosh; ca. 1250– 1327)13 gives us some insight as to how we might view the relation between the two approaches. The questioner cited a midrash which explained that the two sons of Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, died in the Sanctuary because they had attempted to perform the divine service while inebriated. This understanding was based on the juxtaposition of their story (Lev. 9:1–10:7) to the legal pericope which immediately follows (Lev. 10:8–11) and which prohibits priests from drinking wine when entering the Tent of Meeting. and Early Christianity, ed. Martin Jan Mulder and Harry Sysling (Assen: Van Gorcum; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 590–91: There are two categories of interpretation that relate to the significance of the order of biblical books. The first category is . . . ‘there is nothing earlier or later in the Tora’. . . . The second category . . . [apparently] reflects a concept different from the previous one. This category is formulated as ‘when any passage adjoins another, we may derive something from it’. Abraham Joshua Heschel, Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations, ed. and trans. Gordon Tucker and Leonard Levin (New York: Continuum, 2005), 240– 41, thought that one may interpret juxtaposed portions only if the Torah is indeed arranged chronologically: “There is no chronological order in the Torah” was a generally accepted axiom of the school of Rabbi Ishmael. It was fundamental for their determination of the peshat, the surface or plain-sense meaning of the text. . . . For this reason, Rabbi Ishmael rejected the exegetical technique used by some Sages of finding special meanings in contiguous passages. Rabbi Judah the Patriarch was of the same opinion when he said: “There are many passages linked to each other in the text but in actuality they are as far apart as east from west.” We note that while Rabbi Judah the Patriarch was explicitly of this opinion, ascribing such a view to Rabbi Ishmael is more problematic. Jonah Fraenkel, Darkhe ha-aggadah ṿe-ha-midrash, vol. 1 (Givatayim: Masada, 1991), 183, connected the two concepts without committing himself as to the nature of their relationship: “We will discuss two homiletical methods, which both oppose and complement each other— the juxtaposition of portions and ‘there is no earlier and later in the Torah.’” To my mind, the relation between the two concepts was best explained by Samuel K. Mirsky, “Middot ha-parshanut ha-miḳra’it,” Sura 1 (1954): 396–408, based on the dispute between a Sadducee and Rabbi Abbahu with regard to the order of Psalms (bBerakhot 10a; Midrash shoḥer ṭov 3). (Mirsky was the rabbi of the Young Israel of Borough Park, the synagogue in which Chaim and I grew up.) 13 Rosh emigrated from Germany to Toledo, where he served as rabbi. I thank Judah Galinsky for this reference to Rosh’s responsa.

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Since this prohibition appears only after the story, said the questioner, how could Nadab and Abihu have been held accountable for its violation? Rosh responded: As to your question: This is what is written in the midrash [Leviticus Rabbah 20:9]: “There are four reasons why Nadab and Abihu died: they entered [the Sanctuary] while in a drunken state; they did not wash their hands and feet; they were not garbed [in correct raiment]. . . .” You were perplexed by this, for they had not yet been warned not to be in a drunken state, as it only states, “Drink no wine or other intoxicant” [Lev. 10:9] after the incident. But this is not really a question at all, as there is no “earlier” or “later” in the Torah. Were not all the laws of the priesthood and the sacrifices, the deformities which render a priest or animal unfit, and the defilement of sacrifices given before they began performing the divine service? . . . All of the parashiyyot that were necessary for the divine service were transmitted orally before the parashah of the consecration offerings [Lev. 9] but were not written in [their proper] order. And though the midrash asks, “Why was the parashah about serving in a drunken state juxtaposed to [that is, placed after] the death of the sons of Aaron?” [and answers,] “It may be compared to a doctor who visits a sick man and says to him, ‘Do not eat a certain poison that so-and-so ate, so that you will not die’” [Sifra, Parashat aḥare mot 1:3],14 this is merely a midrashic interpretation of the juxtaposition, because surely everyone knows that anything that desecrates the service had to be known before the service.15

Rosh is inquiring into the order of the legal passages in the Torah: is there rhyme or reason to the way these legal discussions are interspersed within the scriptural narratives? He interprets the principle that “there is no ‘earlier’ or ‘later’ in the Torah” to mean that the laws in the Torah were written down within the same timeframe as the juxtaposed narrative, but this is no proof for when they were actually given. They were said whenever they were said but were arranged in the Bible independently. Since they are not in their proper place so far as chronology goes, there is no real historical value in understanding why they are juxtaposed. Therefore, the question 14 Just as the doctor who cites a concrete example known to the patient may convince him to act properly, so the story of Nadab and Abihu serves as a warning to other priests not to serve in the Sanctuary while intoxicated; see below, n. 16. 15 Asher ben Jehiel, She’elot u-teshuvot le-ha-Rav Rabbenu Asher z”l (New York: Grossman Publishing House, 1954), 17a–b (sec. 13:21) (emphasis mine).

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posed by the sages—why is the legal portion forbidding a priest to drink wine when entering the Sanctuary to be found right after the narrative portion of Nadab and Abihu?—receives an answer that is of homiletical-midrashic value only.16 In reality, the proscription against drinking wine must have been told to the priests before the consecration of the Sanctuary. According to Rosh, those who wish to explain the Torah according to the peshaṭ (the straightforward or literal interpretation) will not engage in the explanation of juxtaposed portions, as doing so is predicated on the belief that the Bible is arranged in a specific order, when in fact “there is no ‘earlier’ or ‘later’ in the Torah.” Therefore, according to Rosh, the frequent question in Rabbinic sources about adjacent passages, lammah nismekhah, must be understood as rhetorical license to expound midrashically. Rosh has thus placed the understanding of biblical sequence on two levels. “There is no ‘earlier’ or ‘later’” is a postulate of the peshaṭ; indeed, the Torah is not always arranged chronologically. When the Rabbis nevertheless inquire, “Why were certain portions put together?” the explanation given is always in the spirit of derash.

Derash and Peshat. It will serve us well to define these two seminal terms in Jewish biblical exegesis in order to tie them to our particular subject. Derash or midrash, both words from the root d-r-sh, which means “to seek out, expound,” is of two kinds: aggadic midrash expounds upon a biblical story or expands the narrative by reading between the lines and by finding additional meanings through wordplays and analogies; while halakhic midrash relies on certain rules of exegesis laid down by the Rabbis, such as ḳal ṿa-ḥomer (an a fortiori argument), gezerah shaṿah (analogy between verses based on a common word), and heḳḳesh (logical analogy), in order to flesh out biblical law. These rules were later codified under the title “The Thirteen Rules of Rabbi 16 On the basis of adjacency, the midrash ascribes to Nadab and Abihu the sin of drinking wine and therefore acting rashly during the dedication service. Rashi, in his commentary to Lev. 16:1, following the midrash (already cited above by Rosh), casts this juxtaposition as part of an educational homily in the form of a parable about a doctor who warns his patient against excessive indulgence in bad habits (such as drinking) by offering a tragic example of someone known to the patient who died because he did not heed the doctor’s orders. So, too, God commands Moses to tell Aaron not to enter the Sanctuary while inebriated by citing the unfortunate precedent of the deaths of Aaron’s two sons, thus giving teeth to the prohibition.

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Ishmael.” The aggadic exegesis which explicated biblical stories probably originated in sermons delivered in the synagogues of Palestine on Sabbaths and holidays and, as such, is indeed homiletic. By contrast, halakhic midrash was based on the dialectical exegesis of legal codes in the Rabbinic study halls. Both oral practices were eventually written down in aggadic and halakhic midrash collections. It is characteristic of both sorts of midrash that the individual word was all-important, the context of the entire verse not at all. The goal of midrashic exposition was to derive ethical and religious messages from the biblical narratives (aggadic midrash) and the precepts of normative Jewish observance from the legal portions (halakhic midrash). Neither history nor linguistics was essential to fulfill these aims.17 Midrash did not take into consideration semantic change over time; it was prone to explicate a word in Genesis by means of the same root used in a passage from Chronicles, irrespective of developments in the word’s meaning. These are the essential traits of derash exposition. Sometime around the tenth century CE, the midrashic approach to the Bible gave way to explanations that were based on grammar, semantics, and the context of the verse. Perhaps there was also an attempt to understand authorial intent.18 There was a name to describe this new approach: the peshaṭ. Peshaṭ was first evident among Jews living in Muslim lands—in the East, Iraq, and Palestine—sometime between 900 and 1000. Wherever Muslims held sway, the Jews witnessed the development of Arabic grammar and the learned study of the Qur’an. In an attempt to imitate the achievements of their neighbors, Jews applied Arabic grammatical thinking to Biblical Hebrew, the two being related Semitic languages, and composed grammars and dictionaries of Biblical Hebrew after the Arabic models. In addition, in these lands Greek compositions on rhetoric and philosophy 17 “Although there are a few significant exceptions, the point of departure for all rabbinic interpretation of the Pentateuch is the assertion, ‘There is neither early nor late in the Torah.’ Rabbinic exegesis therefore is fundamentally synchronic in its orientation and method.” See Bernard M. Levinson, “The Right Chorale”: Studies in Biblical Law and Interpretation (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 11. 18 This tendency was noticeable in Christian exegesis of the twelfth century. “Hugh of St. Victor (1096–1141) . . . heaped bitter ridicule on those who disparaged the literal sense in their hurry to teach allegory, and to substitute their own ideas for those of the divine author.” See Brevard S. Childs, “The Sensus Literalis of Scripture: An Ancient and Modern Problem,” in Beiträge zur alttestamentlichen Theologie: Festschrift für Walther Zimmerli zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Herbert Donner, Robert Hanhart, and Rudolf Smend (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1977), 83.

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were translated into Arabic and studied by Jews. Together, these works moved biblical interpretation in the direction of understandings that were more faithful to the text and less fanciful—in a word, towards the peshaṭ.19 The trend among Jews to explain the Scriptures according to the rules of language and the constraints of reason followed the Muslim conquests westward to Spain, reaching its apex in the Bible commentaries of Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra of Toledo (1089–1164). Ibn Ezra summed up the approach in the introductory poem that described his commentary on the Pentateuch: “It is bound by the ropes of grammar and finds favor in the eyes of reason.”20 However, the conditions that enabled the growth of such an interpretive approach were not to be found in medieval France and Germany, the lands of Ashkenaz. Here, Arabic was unknown and there was no developed Hebrew grammar. Furthermore, the medieval Ashkenazic study hall or yeshiva was entirely dedicated to the study of the Babylonian Talmud, a work replete with thousands of midrashic interpretations of biblical verses, both aggadic and halakhic. Consequently, belief in the literal veracity of Rabbinic homilies was almost an article of faith in France and Germany.

19 For the reasons behind this exegetical shift, see Menahem Haran, “Midrashic and Literal Exegesis and the Critical Method in Biblical Research,” Scripta Hierosolymitana 31 (1986): 19–48; for Karaism, see Meira Polliack, “Rethinking Karaism: Between Judaism and Islam,” AJS Review 30, no. 1 (2006): 67–93, and her other articles cited in the footnotes therein. Following the discovery of literal commentaries from countries under Byzantine rule, such as Greece and parts of Italy, the idea that the peshaṭ method was centered in Spain and Northern France may have to be altered. 20 For the history of Spanish interpretation, see Nahum M. Sarna, “Hebrew and Bible Studies in Mediaeval Spain,” in The Sephardi Heritage: Essays on the History and Cultural Contribution of the Jews of Spain and Portugal, ed. R. D. Barnett, vol. 1 (London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1971), 323–66 (reprinted in idem, Studies in Biblical Interpretation [Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2000], 81–125). More recent introductions to medieval exegesis can be found in the HBOT volumes: Magne Sæbø, ed., Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, vol. 1, pt. 2: The Middle Ages (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), chs. 25, 31–33, 37; ibid., vol. 2: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (1300–1800) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), chs. 2, 8. For an introduction to medieval exegesis, both Ashkenazic and Sephardic, see Edward L. Greenstein, “Medieval Bible Commentaries,” in Back to the Sources: Reading the Classic Jewish Texts, ed. Barry W. Holtz (New York: Summit Books, 1984), 213–59, which includes an English bibliography. Jason Kalman, “Medieval Jewish Biblical Commentaries and the State of Parshanut Studies,” Religion Compass 2, no. 5 (2008): 819–43, lists printed editions of medieval Jewish commentaries and provides a review of more recent scholarship on the subject.

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Why, then, did an interest in literal exegesis arise in France beginning with Rashi? Various reasons have been given, and these may be seen in the literature cited in the notes below. It is not entirely clear whether the peshaṭ method of exegesis as practiced by medieval Jewish commentators in Northern France beginning in the second half of the eleventh century should be considered “revolutionary,”21 or whether it was the extension of a trend that began as early as the ninth century among both Karaites and Rabbanites in Palestine and Babylonia (Iraq).22 Whatever the case may be, Northern French exegetes refined the straightforward mode of interpretation to include not only grammar and reason, Ibn Ezra’s twin pillars of exegesis, but also rudimentary literary considerations. These included issues of authorship and arrangement by someone other than the author, whom they called the mesadder; the establishment of a single context for all the verses in a pericope; and chronology. Of course, these terms did not exist then, but several exegetes evinced an awareness of one or more of these components.23 21 So Avraham Grossman, “The School of Literal Jewish Exegesis in Northern France,” in HBOT, vol. 1, pt. 2, 323: “In view of this great surge of exegetical activity, spread over two generations .  .  . it may not be inappropriate to speak of a veritable revolution.” Indeed, the title of this part of his chapter is “Introduction: The Revolution in Eleventh Century France.” However, Michael A. Signer, “Peshaṭ, Sensus Litteralis, and Sequential Narrative: Jewish Exegesis and the School of St. Victor in the Twelfth Century,” in The Frank Talmage Memorial Volume, ed. Barry Walfish, vol. 1 (Haifa: Haifa University Press, 1993), 203, questions whether the new emphasis on the sensus litteralis among Christians and peshuṭo shel miḳra among Jews was a bold revolution or actually a type of continuity with earlier developments. 22 “[T]he Karaites did not necessarily revolutionize Jewish biblical study so much as they deepened and consolidated a literal approach to the biblical text which was relatively dormant or marginal in Jewish thought until the rise of their movement.” See Meira Polliack, “Major Trends in Karaite Biblical Exegesis in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries,” in Karaite Judaism: A Guide to Its History and Literary Sources, ed. Meira Polliack (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 365. See also Miriam Goldstein, “The Beginnings of the Transition from Derash to Peshaṭ as Exemplified in Yefet ben ‘Eli’s Comment on Psa. 44:24,” in Exegesis and Grammar in Medieval Karaite Texts, ed. Geoffrey Khan (Oxford: Oxford University Press; University of Manchester, 2001), 41–64. Yefet lived in the tenth century. According to Israel M. Ta-Shma, “Parshanut miḳra ivrit-bizanṭit ḳedumah, saviv shenat 1000, min ha-genizah,” Tarbiz 69, no. 2 (2000): 247–56, peshaṭ in Northern France was preceded by its practice in Byzantium in the tenth century, probably in Southern Italy. 23 Many of these traits are to be found in the commentaries of Rabbis Joseph Kara (eleventh century), Samuel ben Meir (Rashbam; ca. 1080–ca. 1174), Joseph of Orléans (Bekhor Shor; twelfth century), and Eliezer of Beaugençy (twelfth century). For the term mesadder, see below, n. 41.

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Two Approaches, Two Examples Let us return to where we were before we cited the responsum of Rosh, which in turn led us to consider peshaṭ and derash. We have seen that the Rabbis dealt with chronology and sequence in one of two ways: either via the rule that there was no orderly succession in the text or, on the contrary, that indeed the juxtaposition had to be explained. Following are examples of both approaches. Genesis 10 lists the genealogy of the descendants of Noah and their distribution the world over. Beginning with Japheth, then Ham, and finally Shem, the list gets around to Peleg ben Eber, a descendant of Shem. His name is explained as follows: “The name of the first was Peleg, for in his days the earth was divided” (10:25).24 Earlier on, the chapter had named nations that had “branched out” (10:5) or “spread out” (10:18) over the face of the earth, “each with its language” (10:5). The reason for the dispersal of the nations “according to their clans and languages, by their lands, according to their nations” (10:31) was apparently the Flood, as the chapter itself concludes: “These are the groupings of Noah’s descendants . . . and from these the nations branched out over the earth after the Flood” (10:32). But the division of the nations and the distribution of languages could not have occurred as an immediate outcome of the Flood, for with the exception of those who had been in the ark, the world was then devoid of inhabitants. Rather, the worldwide division of nations and tongues seems to depend on the story of the Tower of Babel in the following chapter, which begins: “Everyone on earth had the same language and the same words” (11:1). As a result of events in that story, the Lord says, “Let us, then, go down and confound their speech there. . . . Thus the Lord scattered them from there over the face of the whole earth” (11:7–8). If the dispersal of nations and languages in chapter 10 is to be attributed to the Tower of Babel story in chapter 11, why does the list of nations in chapter 10 come first? On the face of it, this is an example of skewed chronology and faulty juxtaposition. Ibn Ezra pondered this question in his “second commentary” to Gen. 10:25 and reached the following conclusion: “The rule is: one can prove nothing from juxtaposition, and it is entirely possible that the episode [beginning], ‘Everyone on earth had the same language and the same words’ [Gen. 11], was placed later.” That is, the events of Genesis 11 preceded at least some of those recorded in Genesis 10, and one may not draw any 24 The Hebrew root p-l-g means “to divide.”

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conclusion about their history from the order of the text. Ibn Ezra was in fact claiming that chapters 10–11 are examples of the maxim en muḳdam u-me’uḥar ba-Torah. The next case clearly illustrates the second approach, which tries to explain juxtaposition. The book of Exodus places the story of Jethro the Midianite, father-in-law of Moses, before the story of the Ten Commandments given at Mount Sinai. Jethro had journeyed from Midian to meet his son-in-law Moses in the wilderness at a place called the “mountain of God” (Ex. 18:5). In the course of his visit, he attempts to ease matters for Moses, who is singlehandedly instructing the entire nation in “the laws and teachings of God” (18:16) by saying, “What is this thing that you are doing to the people? Why do you act alone, while all the people stand about you from morning till evening?” (18:14). Jethro then suggests that Moses appoint a judiciary to hear disputes and render judgment. This is followed by the giving of the Decalogue on Mount Sinai (chs. 19–20) and the legal code known as the Book of the Covenant (approximately chs. 21–24). Naming the place the “mountain of God,” presenting Moses as a teacher of the law, and appointing judges to render verdicts in accord with “the laws and the teachings” (18:20) all make sense if we assume that Jethro arrived after the giving of the Decalogue and the ensuing Book of the Covenant. The following passage from chapter 24 corroborates this chronology: “The Lord said to Moses: ‘Come up to Me on the mountain and wait there, and I will give you the stone tablets with the teachings and commandments which I have inscribed to instruct them.’ So Moses and his attendant Joshua arose, and Moses ascended the mountain of God” (Ex. 24:12–13; emphasis mine). Apparently, Moses began instructing the nation only after he descended from Mount Sinai with the law in hand, and that mountain was named the “mountain of God” on account of the revelation that had transpired upon it. Hence, Jethro’s visit to Moses must have taken place after the giving of the Tablets of the Law, not prior to it. Some Rabbinic sages state so explicitly: Now Jethro the Priest of Midian, Moses’ Father-in-Law Heard [Ex. 18:1]. What tidings did he hear that he came? He heard of the war of Amalek, reported in the preceding passage, and came—these are the words of R. Joshua. R. Eleazar of Modi‘im says: He heard of the giving of the Torah and came.25

25 Massekhta da-Amaleḳ 3, in Mekilta de-Rabbi Ishmael: A Critical Edition on the Basis of the Manuscripts and Early Editions with an English Translation[,] Introduction and

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R. Joshua understands the juxtaposition of Jethro’s visit to the preceding story of Amalek (Ex. 17:8–14) in its most straightforward sense: the incidents occurred one after the other. What R. Joshua adds to the text is that the first was the cause of the second—Jethro came because he had heard “all that God had done for Moses and for Israel His people” (18:1). “All” was referring to the victory over the Amalekites. By contrast, R. Eleazar places the revelation at Sinai immediately after the story of Amalek, but prior to Jethro’s visit. In R. Eleazar’s opinion, Jethro’s arrival was occasioned by the giving of the Torah, which is only related a chapter later (in ch. 19); hence, the Jethro story is not in chronological order. Perhaps R. Eleazar derived this from the expressions we cited above that seem to situate the visit after the revelation at Sinai. Furthermore, the encounter with Amalek took place at Rephidim (17:8), and Israel arrived at the wilderness of Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments after departing from Rephidim (19:2). This opinion, like that of R. Joshua, is founded upon a simple, straightforward reading of the text but differs from that of R. Joshua in that it supports the contention that there is no strict chronology in biblical stories. Both opinions, that the text is in chronological order and that it is not, can be justified as peshaṭ interpretations. However, R. Eleazar does not explain why chapter 18 was placed before chapters 19 and 20. For an understanding of the current juxtaposition, we turn to Ibn Ezra in his “second commentary” to Ex. 18:1: It would have been fitting for the parashah beginning “On the third new moon” [Ex. 19:1] to have been written right after the incident of Amalek [17:8–16], because there it says, “Having journeyed from Rephidim, they entered the wilderness of Sinai” [19:2].26 If so, why did the story of Jethro come between the parashiyyot? . . . In my opinion, Jethro did not come until the second year after the erection of the Tabernacle.  .  .  . And now I will explain why the parashah of Jethro was inserted at this point: since above we were told about the evil that Amalek perpetrated against the people of Israel, the Torah cites by way of contrast the good that Jethro did for Israel.

Ibn Ezra sees the juxtaposition as suggesting a contrast between the stories. In this case, the order is not chronological but thematic. In the first Notes, trans. Jacob Z. Lauterbach, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1933), 162. In the 2004 edition, the text is found in vol. 2, 271. 26 Since the battle with Amalek took place at Rephidim (17:8), the next event must have been the arrival at Mount Sinai and not Jethro’s visit.

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story, God tells Moses that Amalek is to be vanquished at some point in the future. Juxtaposing the Jethro story teaches that when that time comes, the descendants of Jethro, himself a member of the tribe of the Kenites who were part of the Amalekites,27 should be spared in light of the good counsel that Jethro gave Moses.28 To read juxtaposition as Ibn Ezra did is to see it as a key to meaning. Ibn Ezra’s idea was carried over into modern biblical literary interpretation. The Italian Jewish Bible scholar Umberto Cassuto (1883–1951) agreed that juxtaposition was a literary device that could help to explain, in part, the current shape of the Bible. As regards this specific case, he thought that the Jethro visit was juxtaposed to chapter 19 primarily to serve as an introduction to the revelation at Sinai: With fine artistic understanding, the Torah prefaces the account of the central theme of this part of the Book of Exodus with a prologue, the purpose of which is to prepare the reader’s mind for the narrative that follows. So far we have read stories about the travails of the journey and the difficulties encountered by the Israelites through natural causes and human hostility. But now, at the beginning of the second part, it was fitting that we should be told of a gesture of sympathy and esteem for the people of Israel shown by an important person, one of the leaders of the neighbouring peoples. . . .29

Cassuto sided with those who thought that the actual visit took place only after the revelation at Sinai.30 Nevertheless, he explains the current juxtaposition on the basis of a literary consideration: the Jethro story serves as a prologue to the Ten Commandments. Having a Gentile priest from Midian 27 This is based on a verse in Judges: “Now Heber the Kenite had separated from the other Kenites, descendants of Hobab, father-in-law of Moses” (4:11). Saul indeed spared the Kenites when he battled with the Amalekites, though they lived in close proximity, “for you showed kindness to all the Israelites when they left Egypt” (I Sam. 15:6). Ibn Ezra applies this verse to Jethro. 28 Ibn Ezra’s comments could also be read as an objection to collective punishment, especially when one knows that there are righteous people in the group. 29 Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Exodus, trans. Israel Abrahams (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1967), 211. 30 He bases this on Ex. 18:5, which reads, “Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, brought Moses’ sons and wife to him in the wilderness, where he was encamped at the mountain of God.” “. . . [O]nly later, at the commencement of ch. xix, is it stated that the Israelites journeyed from Rephidim and came to the wilderness of Sinai and encamped there before the mountain” (Cassuto, Commentary, 211). This means that Jethro had to have arrived after the Israelites had encamped to receive the Decalogue in ch. 19 and not before.

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sing the Lord of Israel’s praises is a fitting introduction to the universal laws given at Sinai. Furthermore, Cassuto believed that juxtaposition in the Bible was primarily associative and pointed to a number of words that are found both in the story of Amalek (ch. 17) and the story of Jethro (ch. 18). Presumably, he felt that the thematic contrast noted by Ibn Ezra was brought out through the use of common words in both stories.

Between Law and Narrative The two examples analyzed above, the Tower of Babel and the visit of Jethro, are both narratives. The entire book of Genesis is clearly narrative, and so is the beginning of Exodus. Yet, Exodus 19–24 introduce a large body of civil and religious law for which chronology is irrelevant. This is followed by the detailed blueprints for the Sanctuary and its vessels in Exodus 25–40, which also make no reference to specific dates or events, save for the story of the Golden Calf and its aftermath (Ex. 32–34) and the description of the Sanctuary’s completion at the end of the book (Ex. 40:2, 17). Where on the biblical timeline should this essentially non-narrative material be placed? How, in general, is the legal and religious material in the Bible integrated into the historical portions?31 Overwhelmingly, in the case of legal pericopae, it is the sequence that has to be explained: for what reason were two legal or ritual portions placed next to each other?32 Many such cases are noted in the Talmud, using the formula lammah nismekhah. By way of introduction to legal juxtaposition, let us cite one such case. Numbers 5 presents the law of the soṭah, or wife whose husband suspects her of adultery, followed by the law of the Nazirite in Numbers 6. The wife suspected of being unfaithful must 31 This issue runs through the entire Pentateuch. A good case study worthy of further exploration would be the integration of three pericopae in Exodus 12–13 that relate the laws of Passover within the story of the redemption from Egypt: Ex. 12:1–28 enumerate the laws of the Paschal lamb and attendant festival; 12:29–42 relate the story of the flight from Egypt; 12:43–49 return to the laws of the Passover offering; while 12:50–51 are in the form of a narrative. Ex. 13:1–16 return to the laws of Passover together with the consecration of the firstborn, and 13:17ff. revert to the story of the exodus at length. 32 Not everyone thought that the sequence of laws was significant. Samuel David Luzzatto (Shadal; 1800–1865), in the introduction to Perush Shadal . . . al ḥamishah ḥummeshe Torah (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1965), 21–22, notes that there is no connection between adjacent legal verses that deal with different subjects and that any connection made between such verses on the basis of semikhut should be seen as no more than a homiletical remark.

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undergo an ordeal to prove her innocence. The Nazirite is someone, male or female, who undertakes not to contaminate him/herself by ritual defilement (ṭum’ah), not to cut his/her hair, and not to drink wine. The Talmud inquires why the section of the Nazirite follows immediately after that of the suspected adulteress. Its answer: “To teach you that anyone who sees a soṭah in her disheveled state should completely abstain from wine” (bBerakhot 63a; bSoṭah 2a). The Talmud’s explanation of the juxtaposition of the soṭah and the Nazirite is a parade example of derash exegesis. The signs are clear. First, the end result of the juxtaposition is a moral teaching. The homily suggests that one restrain his or her urge to drink wine, for if intoxicated, his/her chances of involvement in illicit sexual activity are greatly increased.33 People who abstain from wine as Nazirite men and women are commanded to do stand a better chance of avoiding forbidden sexual relations. A Nazirite woman will not become a “wayward wife.” Second, in the way of midrash, the homily adds a scene to the ritual of the soṭah in order to intertwine the two chapters.34 Ish, the “man” in chapter 6 who becomes a Nazirite, is a hypothetical figure meaning “anyone,” but in the derash he materializes as flesh and blood. He steps out of his chapter, as it were, in order to observe the soṭah in her disgrace. Shocked by her appearance, with disheveled hair and swollen belly, and theorizing that it was probably alcohol that got her into trouble, he immediately forswears drinking wine and becomes a Nazirite: “If anyone, man or woman, explicitly utters a Nazirite’s vow, to set himself apart for the Lord” (Num. 6:2). This additional scene, the future Nazirite who observes the soṭah, dramatizes the moral teaching and makes it come alive. For these reasons, this explanation of juxtaposition is to be considered derash. Ibn Ezra, in his commentary to Num. 5:31, offers a different interpretation for this juxtaposition: “In my opinion, the two portions are juxtaposed in order to contrast the woman who abstains from wine with the one who commits adultery [ha-mo‘elet], as most sins involve wine.” The errant wife in the chapter of the soṭah personifies the licentious woman who defiles herself as a result of drunkenness. In contrast, the following chapter speaks 33 This is based on “Lechery, wine, and new wine capture the heart” (Hos. 4:11), which links zenut (lechery; lit., prostitution) and wine. 34 Neither the scene nor the “narrative plot” appears in the biblical text. The midrash constructs a “story” out of the soṭah pericope in order to connect it to the following legal unit regarding the Nazirite.

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of a woman who undertakes a vow of abstinence in order to be consecrated to God.35 One woman drinks wine and sins, the other vows abstinence and is holy. The units are juxtaposed to underscore the contrast that emerges: both the defilement and the sanctification revolve around women and wine.36 Whereas the Talmud constructed a new narrative scene to link the two chapters, Ibn Ezra simply compared the two texts without adding anything to them. Using a literary approach, Ibn Ezra arrives at the same moral teaching as the midrash: “Wine is often the root of evil.” To some extent, Ibn Ezra’s explanation is anchored in the Rabbinic passage cited above, for his comment that “most sins involve wine” underlies the midrashic homily as well. However, as we have seen, the midrash links the two passages of the soṭah and the Nazirite in terms of narrative cause and effect, whereas Ibn Ezra links them through a contrast of words found in the text. He coins the term mo‘elet (lit., a woman who commits a sacrilege) to describe the unfaithful wife, because several forms of the root m-‘-l are used in connection with the soṭah numerous times in chapter 5. The noun ma‘al (a sacrilege, a violation of the sacred) is the very opposite of ḳodesh (that which is holy). Since the word ḳadosh was used to describe the Nazirite as “consecrated” (Num. 6:8), Ibn Ezra “invented” its antithesis, the word mo‘elet, to describe the soṭah. Like Cassuto in modern times, Ibn Ezra put much stock in associative juxtaposition, that is, juxtaposition based on a common word, even if he had to coin one of the words himself. Further, in the present case, he found that the rare root p-r-‘ (to dishevel the hair; Num. 5:18), and its noun form pera (a shock of hair; Num. 6:5), were used both for the soṭah as well as the Nazirite. This, too, was reason enough for associative juxtaposition.

No “Earlier” or “Later”—An Alternative Meaning We have seen how Ibn Ezra declared that Genesis 10 and 11 were reversed and learned from this that, indeed, the narratives of the Torah should not be presumed to follow chronological order. The story of Nadab and Abihu 35 As stated in Num. 6:2–8: “If anyone, man or woman, explicitly utters a Nazirite’s vow, to set himself apart for the Lord . . . throughout his term as Nazirite he is consecrated to the Lord.” 36 Wine in the case of the suspected adulteress is implicit, while in the portion of the Nazirite it is explicit. Ibn Ezra was influenced either by the midrashic interpretation or by the verse in Hosea (see above, n. 33). In addition, he finds a linguistic contrast in the word niṭme’ah used of the soṭah—“if she has defiled herself ” (Num. 5:27)—and the word ḳadosh used to describe the Nazirite—“he is consecrated to the Lord” (Num. 6:8).

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Order as Meaning: Juxtaposition in the Bible    ISAAC GOTTLIEB

and the prohibition for priests to drink wine were considered by Rosh to have been juxtaposed for the midrashic lesson, but actually served as further proof that there is no chronological order in the Bible. Both of these commentators understood the principle “There is no ‘earlier’ or ‘later’ in the Torah” literally, as a rule of the peshaṭ. However, we would be remiss if we did not note that there was in Rabbinic literature another way to understand en muḳdam u-me’uḥar ba-Torah. Rather than taking it as a negative statement—“There is no order”—it could be understood to mean: “There are other ways of ordering a text besides the chronological.”37 This approach can be read into the Mekhilta, a collection of halakhic midrash on the book of Exodus, which presents seven places to which it applies the rule.38 We will describe two of them. The Song at the Sea begins with the climax of the splitting of the Sea and its outcome: “I will sing to the Lord, for He has triumphed gloriously / Horse and driver He has hurled into the sea” (Ex. 15:1).39 After this opening, the Song reverts to describing the events that led up to this victory, such as, “The foe (had) said, ‘I will pursue, I will overtake’” (15:9).40 The use of prolepsis (looking forward) in v. 1 and flashback in v. 9 prompted the Mekhilta to say, “There is no strict order as to earlier and later.” This may be understood in the following way: in poetic texts, straight chronology is not the only way to present events; flashing forward and backward are other possibilities. In the second example, Ecclesiastes begins his first-person narrative, “I, Koheleth,” twelve verses into the book (1:12). Prima facie, this should have been the opening verse. “There is no ‘earlier’ or ‘later’” as applied to this case means that the author or editor chose to preface Ecclesiastes’s thoughts with a précis or summary of the book’s arguments, which he then appended to the beginning of the book. This introduction was given

37 See Mirsky, “Middot ha-parshanut ha-miḳra’it.” 38 Massekhta de-shirata 7; English version: Mekilta, ed. Lauterbach, vol. 2, 54–55 (mistakenly called “Tractate Ṿa-yeḥi” at the top of the page in the 2004 edition, vol. 2, 139). 39 This verse actually frames the Song, for it is repeated by Miriam and the women (Ex. 15:21) and hence serves to close the poem. This underscores that it is indeed the climax of the poem. 40 New JPS translation: “The foe said.” Targum Onkelos uses the past perfect, which indicates previous time: da-haṿah amar ([the foe] had said).

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a title as well: “The words of Koheleth” (1:1).41 Although the Mekhilta uses Ecclesiastes to demonstrate that “there is no order,” once again the issue is not chronology but rather style: in effect, the Mekhilta realized that in a literary work like Ecclesiastes, there are many options for how to present the material, and this is the meaning of the rule “There is no ‘earlier’ or ‘later’” when applied to non-narrative texts such as psalms, poetry, prophecy, and wisdom literature. The Mekhilta’s observations thus open up the possibility for literary explanations of juxtaposition such as those found in modern literary analysis as well.

Nah.manides’s Approach Who explained the Mekhilta in this way? A figure of central importance to the subject of order in the Torah who was influenced by the Mekhilta was Rabbi Moses Naḥmanides (Ramban; 1194–1270). The way in which Naḥmanides understood the maxim en muḳdam u-me’uḥar ba-Torah in his Bible commentary differs from Ibn Ezra’s application of this rule. As we have seen above, Ibn Ezra accepted this statement at face value and even widened its application to additional pericopae and verses beyond those cited in the body of midrashic literature. Naḥmanides, however, restricted its scope as much as possible because he believed that the Bible does follow chronological order. This can be derived from his repeated statements on the topic: “The most likely explanation, it seems to me, is to follow the sequence of the Torah” (Ex. 18:1); “But why should we invert the words of the living God?” (Lev. 8:2); “But, in my opinion, the whole Torah is written in consecutive order” (Lev. 16:1); and many other examples. Naḥmanides maintains that the Torah is in the correct chronological order. Nature and reality function chronologically and so, too, do the contents of the Torah and its methods of expression. This is a fundamental principle, crucial for characterizing Ramban as a peshaṭ commentator, and quite removed from other, more mystical interpretations he is known to give elsewhere. Naḥmanides understood that the maxim en muḳdam u-me’uḥar ba-Torah is not meant to uproot the chronological principle, even though that is its simplest explanation. For Naḥmanides, it is rather meant to signal 41 Rashbam’s commentary to Eccl. 12:9 mentions a mesadder (arranger) who appended several verses to serve as the conclusion of the book, and we deduce from here that there was an editor’s introduction as well.

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Order as Meaning: Juxtaposition in the Bible    ISAAC GOTTLIEB

order of a different kind, an internal style found within a chronological framework. This is similar to what we saw above in the Mekhilta. So, for example, the Mekhilta had applied “There is no ‘earlier’ or ‘later’” to the Song at the Sea because of its use of prolepsis and flashback. Naḥmanides, in his commentary to Ex. 15:9, interpreted this as meaning that the Song at the Sea “in macro” followed chronological order. However, the Song’s style was such that the author reported the climax first and then went back to describe the details. It is this internal literary style that is referred to by the Rabbis as en muḳdam u-me’uḥar ba-Torah. This principle is thus able to coexist with the idea that the Torah follows chronological order overall. Another internal biblical style that Naḥmanides identified was the convention to complete the story of one biblical character before proceeding to the next. This was true even for narratives. The following, taken from his commentary to Lev. 16:23, is his chief statement on the subject: “Now, it is always the custom of Scripture to finish a subject which it began, even if this means including some material that is later.” Thus, if the Torah relates that Terah died before it begins the story of Abraham, it does not mean that Terah was not alive during the early years of Abraham’s activity. Biblical style dictated that the narrative complete the story of the father before telling that of the son. Once again, this style, as used in particular stories, is deemed by Naḥmanides to be expressive of the idea that “there is no ‘earlier’ or ‘later,’” while the big picture—the patriarchal narrative arc as a whole— remains chronological. With this approach, Naḥmanides is able to uphold the Rabbinic maxim en muḳdam u-me’uḥar ba-Torah while maintaining that the Torah is indeed chronologically arranged.

Summary We began with the juxtaposition of Nadab and Abihu’s death and the law prohibiting the priests to drink wine as explained by Rosh, followed by the case of Genesis 10–11 in Ibn Ezra’s analysis. The next example we cited was Jethro’s visit to Moses (Ex. 18) and its relation to the events of the surrounding chapters. The sages of the mishnaic period debated whether this was simply a case of chronological juxtaposition, with the Torah describing the incidents in the order in which they historically occurred, or an example of a chapter recorded out of place. If the latter were true, it would open up the door to explanations. Ibn Ezra understood that, chronologically, the

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chapter was placed out of order to serve an intentional thematic juxtaposition. In modern scholarship, Cassuto followed Ibn Ezra’s lead. However, each saw a different theme. Ibn Ezra read contrastive juxtaposition between the preceding story of Amalek (ch. 17) and Jethro’s visit, understanding the Torah to be drawing attention to the wickedness of Amalek versus the righteousness of Jethro (with consequences for his descendants in the times of Saul). Cassuto, by contrast, felt that Jethro’s visit was placed before the Decalogue (chs. 19–20) in order to serve as a kind of introduction whose theme was the applicability of the Ten Commandments to the Children of Israel and the nations alike. In a further example, the Talmud derived a midrashic lesson from the adjacency of the soṭah pericope and that of the Nazirite. Ibn Ezra instead saw a motif of comparison and contrast, as he did in the story of Jethro. We can deduce from what we have seen that Ibn Ezra thought there was no chronological order in biblical narratives, but there were numerous thematic juxtapositions, a few in the stories and many more in the legal texts. These were often accompanied by associative language links between the pericopae. For Cassuto, associative juxtaposition was a mnemonic device, in line with his theory that the Torah originated in oral recitation, since associative links made memorizing texts somewhat easier.42 The distinction between Rabbinic exegetes, medieval commentators, and modern interpreters can be explained in terms of their respective modes of interpretation, derash or peshaṭ.43 Rabbinic explanations of juxtaposition were always in the midrashic mode and sought to expand the story and elicit therefrom a moral teaching. The medieval Jewish commentators who adopted the methodology of peshaṭ, represented here by Ibn Ezra and Naḥmanides, differed substantially from the earlier midrashic traditions in their explanations for juxtaposition and sequence, considering their 42 See, for example, Umberto Cassuto, Biblical and Oriental Studies, trans. Israel Abrahams, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1973), 2: “Now the compilation of the Written Law was analogous to that of the Oral Law, for the former was also initially an oral tradition.” 43 Moses H. Segal, in his Mevo ha-miḳra (Jerusalem: Ḳiryat Sefer, 1967), thought that all exegesis could be subsumed under one or another of these terms. Indeed, some scholars speak of modern critical approaches as “the scientific peshaṭ.” However, Haran, in “Midrashic and Literal Exegesis,” differentiates between medieval peshaṭ and contemporary historical criticism. Current practitioners of literary approaches to the Bible might maintain that their explanations are in the mode of peshaṭ, but this is likewise debatable.

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Order as Meaning: Juxtaposition in the Bible    ISAAC GOTTLIEB

observations to be in the realm of straightforward exegesis. However, they often clothed their ideas in classical Rabbinic terminology. So, for example, they borrowed the root s-m-k from the Rabbinic phrase lammah nismekhah to express juxtaposition, even though their understanding of adjacency was literary and not midrashic.44 They did so in order to forge a link with earlier exegesis and thereby situate themselves within the tradition. Concealed behind archaic terms, the novelty of their explanations, which they considered to be peshaṭ rather than derash, was not always noticed.45 By citing examples from the midrash, Ibn Ezra, Naḥmanides, Rosh, and Cassuto, we have sought to demonstrate that the interpretation of chronology, sequence, and juxtaposition in the Bible was not limited to one particular period or to one mode of interpretation; indeed, ideas about the meaning of sequence were changing all the time. Rabbinic literature naturally served as the springboard for later attitudes, and medieval exegesis raised additional interpretive possibilities, some of which were adopted by modern commentary. In truth, the turn to peshaṭ by Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and Naḥmanides was nothing less than a revolution vis-à-vis the midrashic mode of explanation. But, so far as our subject is concerned, by using the classic Rabbinic terms for juxtaposition and sequence, en muḳdam and semikhut, and investing them with new meaning, the medieval commentators were able to innovate while still projecting a sense of continuity with the past.

44 While Ibn Ezra sometimes used the root d-b-ḳ (to cleave) to express his view of sequence, as in his comments to Isa. 43:8 and Eccl. 8:14, in the main he stuck with the Rabbinic term semikhut. 45 This point was made by Elazar Touitou, “Ha-peshaṭot ha-mitḥaddeshim be-kol yom”: iyyunim be-perusho shel Rashbam la-Torah (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2003), 29–30, regarding the Northern French school of exegetes: They sought intellectual freedom and progress, but at the same time they defined their progress in terminology drawn from the classics, even at the cost of removing those terms from their original sense. In that way, they preserved, as it were, the balance between their subordination to the traditional and their tendency to interpret in the spirit of the times. This study of juxtaposition supports Touitou’s observations in one area of interpretation that he himself did not investigate.

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Shana Strauch Schick, Yeshiva University

Behind Every Great Prophet Is a Woman: The Women in Exodus 2 in Talmudic Interpretation*

Introduction The Babylonian Talmud is noteworthy for its exemption of women from some key halakhic sugyot (pericopae) where parallel texts from the Land of Israel present multiple and/or more inclusive views. For example, regarding whether women are obligated in the commandment of Torah study, mSoṭah 3:4 presents two opinions: the positive view of Ben Azzai, who states that “one is obligated to teach his daughter Torah,” followed by that of Rabbi Eliezer, who famously counters, “Whoever teaches his daughter Torah—it is as if he teaches her lewdness.” The Babylonian Talmud sugya (pericope) in bSoṭah 21b almost exclusively discusses the parameters of R. Eliezer’s prohibitive view and engages the opinion of Ben Azzai (though not by name) only to the extent that it queries how he would interpret Prov. 8:12, which is used by R. Eliezer to exclude women from Torah study.1 Similarly, *

This article about Moses and his mother Jochebed is dedicated to Chaim and his mother Peppi, z”l, my great-aunt, who never forgot a birthday. 1 The parallel sugya in the Jerusalem Talmud (ySoṭah 18d–19a) is far less clear and requires more space than this article allows. On the one hand, it opens by remarking that the opinion of Ben Azzai does not accord with the prohibitive view of Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah, who both deduces from the commandment of haḳhel (Deut. 31:10–13) that

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The Women in Exodus 2 in Talmudic Interpretation    SHANA STRAUCH SCHICK

mYevamot 6:6 presents two opinions on whether women are included in the commandment to procreate, with the Jerusalem Talmud (yYevamot 7d) and Tosefta (tYevamot 8:4 [ed. Lieberman]) preferring the view of Rabbi Johanan ben Beroka that both men and women are obligated.2 Again, the Babylonian Talmud (bYevamot 65b–66a), in its lengthy discussion of the matter, evinces an overall preference for the position that obligates men and exempts women. This is also the case with regard to the commandment of tsitsit (ritual fringes). Texts from the Land of Israel, including the Sifre (Parashat shelaḥ 115), Tosefta (tḲiddushin 1:10 [ed. Lieberman]), and Jerusalem Talmud (yḲiddushin 61c; yBerakhot 6b), present the majority opinion as obligating women in tsitsit and relegate the opinion of Rabbi Simeon, which exempts them, to the minority. By contrast, the Babylonian women are not obligated to learn Torah and is cited as actually refusing to answer a woman’s intelligent question, saying that it would be better for the Torah to be burned than transmitted to women. While the sugya devotes much space to R. Eleazar ben Azariah’s hardline approach, the opening observation engages the opinion of Ben Azzai in a way that the Babylonian Talmud does not. Based on a cursory survey, I have found that the formula stating that “Rabbi X is unlike Rabbi Y,” used here, often appears in sugyot where the latter opinion is deemed incorrect because it contradicts the former (see, for example, bShabbat 141a; bḤullin 10b), though this linguistic pattern certainly requires more thorough investigation. On the other hand, the sugya understands the phrase ishah perushah (sanctimonious woman) mentioned in the same mishnah as a reference to a woman who mocks biblical characters by claiming to be more modest than them, an interpretation which might accord with R. Eliezer’s fear that women will use their learning to engage in illicit behavior. (It is interesting to note, however, that judgement is cast on the nature of her learning, not on the fact that she is learning per se.) A possible indication that there was at least discomfort with R. Eliezer’s opinion appears toward the end of the sugya, which gives an example of an incident involving the makkot perushim (blows of the Pharisees) mentioned in the mishnah. This account cites a ruling issued by (another) Rabbi Eleazar (presumably R. Eleazar ben Pedat, a second- to third-generation amora from the Land of Israel) that is distorted by male orphans in order to cheat the widow of Rabbi Shubbetai (a first- to second-generation amora from the Land of Israel) out of the monetary support due her. (Note, in its parallel in yBava batra 16d, R. Eleazar’s role is much more ambiguous.) The story ends with R. Eleazar protesting that this was not at all his intent. It is hard not to see the irony here: earlier in the sugya, R. Eliezer is concerned that women will distort Torah learning to engage in illicit behavior, whereas in this later passage R. Eleazar ben Pedat’s words are misconstrued by men to cheat a woman out of her money. 2 Although the rules are not the same in all respects, the Tosefta (tYevamot 8:5–6 [ed. Lieberman]) legislates divorce after ten years of barren marriage so that both spouses may have children. See Judith Hauptman, Rereading the Rabbis: A Woman’s Voice (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 130–46; Arnon Atzmon, “‘The Wise Woman from Saida’: The Silent Dialogue between Aggadah and Halakhah Regarding Women and Marriage,” AJS Review 35, no. 1 (April 2011): 23 n. 2.

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Talmud in bḲiddushin 33b–35a presents it as unanimous that women are exempt, and in bMenaḥot 43a–b discusses both views at length but seems to favor R. Simeon’s position, especially by citing a baraita (non-mishnaic teaching of the tanna’im) that supports the notion that women are exempt from time-bound commandments.3 Despite exempting women from such significant halakhic obligations, however, the Babylonian Talmud takes the opposite approach in several aggadic contexts. In these instances, female subjects are present even in cases where they are absent from parallel sources deriving from the Land of Israel and even in connection with commandments from which they are explicitly exempted.4 In this article, I will discuss one specific example of this phenomenon: an aggadic sugya devoted to interpreting the first two chapters of Exodus. The Babylonian Talmud’s version of the sugya highlights the roles of the female protagonists, particularly Miriam, in the narrative, whereas the Jerusalem Talmud parallel deemphasizes those roles. I conclude by reading these contrasting approaches against the backdrop of contemporaneous texts and their wider cultural milieus.

3 Elizabeth Shanks Alexander, Gender and Timebound Commandments in Judaism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 30 n. 14. In a related vein, Shanks Alexander describes how the principle that women are exempt from time-bound commandments evolved from a descriptive statement in tannaitic sources to a prescriptive rule used to exclude women from rituals only in the Babylonian Talmud; see esp. ch. 5. 4 For example, although, as noted above, the Babylonian Talmud bars women from engaging in Torah study, it nevertheless constructs a number of narratives surrounding Beruriah, a female Torah scholar. See David M. Goodblatt, “The Beruriah Traditions,” Journal of Jewish Studies 26, nos. 1–2 (Spring–Autumn 1975): 68–85; Tal Ilan, “‘Beruriah Has Spoken Well’ (tKelim Bava Metzia 1:6): The Historical Beruriah and Her Transformation in the Rabbinic Corpora,” in Integrating Women into Second Temple History (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1999), 175–94; and my “Ha-reḳa ha-Parsi shel sippure Beruryah ba-Talmud ha-Bavli,” Zion 79, no. 3 (2014): 409–24. Similarly, despite the Babylonian Talmud’s exemption of women from the commandment to procreate, aggadic passages acknowledge women’s biological contributions to embryogenesis where parallel texts from the Land of Israel do not. See my “From Dungeon to Haven: Competing Theories of Gestation in Leviticus Rabbah and the Babylonian Talmud,” AJS Review 43, no. 1 (April 2019): 143–68. This phenomenon is part of a larger trend I plan to discuss in book form.

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The Women in Exodus 2 in Talmudic Interpretation    SHANA STRAUCH SCHICK

Exodus 2 in Palestinian and Babylonian Tradition The second chapter of Exodus describes the birth of Moses, the future redeemer of Israel, and his rescue from the fatal decree ordered against all male Israelite babies. Although the story centers on Moses and his early years, only the women in the narrative are presented as active subjects.5 Moses’s birth, protection, and care are entirely attributed to the three women in his early life: his mother Jochebed, his sister Miriam, and the daughter of Pharaoh.6 Biblical interpreters in the Second Temple and Rabbinic periods have understood these women’s roles in numerous ways, ranging from subverting them to greatly expanding them beyond what is described in the biblical account. On one end of the spectrum, Josephus’s recounting in Jewish Antiquities greatly reduces and sidelines the active role of women. He rather presents Amram, Moses’s father, as the primary actor in the narrative. Not only does Josephus add elements that are absent from the biblical text, such as Amram receiving a vision in a dream predicting the birth of Moses and praying on behalf of his child, but he also attributes to Amram deeds, like fearing for the safety of the child, that in the Bible are assigned to Jochebed. Similarly, in Josephus’s retelling, Amram together with Jochebed prepare a wicker basket for Moses and conceal him in the river. Jochebed’s role is even diminished in the experience of childbirth; her pregnancy is described as wondrously painless and followed by a birth marked by “easiness of her pains,” in which “the throes of her delivery did not fall upon her with violence” on account of the special infant born to her. Moses’s extraordinarily easy birth is taken to confirm Amram’s received prophecy wherein God promises him that his future child will deliver the Israelites from slavery.7 5 See J. Cheryl Exum, “‘You Shall Let Every Daughter Live’: A Study of Exodus 1:8–2:10,” Semeia 28 (1983): 81–82. 6 The repeated use of the word “daughter(s)” in the first two chapters of Exodus (eleven times in total) likewise highlights the prominence of females in the literary realm of the narrative; see Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Exodus, trans. Israel Abrahams (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1967), 17–27. See also Alice Ogden Bellis, Helpmates, Harlots, and Heroes: Women’s Stories in the Hebrew Bible (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994), 99–103, for a discussion of the women of Exodus 2. 7 Flavius Josephus, The Works of Flavius Josephus, trans. William Whiston, vol. 1 (London: Lackington, Allen & Co., 1811), 162–63 (Ant. 9:3–4). bSoṭah 12a likewise records the statement of Rav Judah bar Zebina who posits Jochebed’s easy pregnancy and labor with Moses; a later parallel appears in Exodus Rabbah 1:20, attributed there to either Rabbi Judah (ed. Vilna) or Resh Lakish (ed. Shin’an).

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Although entirely absent from the biblical version, the motif of a prediction foretelling the birth of Moses is not unique to Josephus’s account. Almost all ancient interpretations, from the writings of the Church Fathers to midrashic texts, include this element; they differ only in terms of who receives the prophecy. St. Ephraem, in his Commentary on Exodus (1:2), attributes the prophecy to the royal counselors of Pharaoh. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan to Ex. 1:15 reports Pharaoh himself having a dream containing the prediction (as interpreted by his astrologers). In some Rabbinic traditions, his astrologers make the prediction (bSanhedrin 101b; bSoṭah 12b; Exodus Rabbah 1:18; Pirḳe de-Rabbi Eli‘ezer 48), while many others portray Miriam receiving a prophecy which she then relays to her father (Mekhilta de-Rabbi Yishma‘el, Parashat be-shallaḥ, Massekhta de-shirah 10 [ed. Horowitz-Rabin, p. 151]; Mekhilta de-Rabbi Shim‘on ben Yoḥai, Parashat be-shallaḥ 15:20 [ed. Epstein-Melamed, p. 100]; bSoṭah 12b–13a; Exodus Rabbah 1:22).8 Josephus is thus unique in attributing the prophecy to Amram. Moreover, the prominent role that Amram plays in Josephus’s account runs counter to the biblical narrative, in which Moses’s father is completely uninvolved in the protection of Moses.9 In fact, save for the act of marrying (Ex. 2:1), Amram is never presented as an active figure at all.10

8 See also Pseudo-Philo 9:2–5, trans. Daniel J. Harrington, in The Old Testament: Pseudepigrapha, ed. James H. Charlesworth, vol. 2 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1985), 315. For secondary literature, see James L. Kugel, The Bible as It Was (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997), 290; Harold W. Attridge, The Interpretation of Biblical History in the Antiquitates Judaicae of Flavius Josephus (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press for Harvard Theological Review, 1976), 94–96; Daniel J. Harrington, “Birth Narratives in Pseudo-Philo’s Biblical Antiquities and the Gospels,” in To Touch the Text: Biblical and Related Studies in Honor of Joseph A. Fitzmyer, ed. Maurya P. Horgan and Paul J. Kobelski (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 316– 24; Joshua Levinson, Ha-sippur she-lo suppar: amanut ha-sippur ha-miḳra’i ha-murḥav be-midreshe Ḥazal (Jerusalem: Magnes Press; Hebrew University, 2005), 262–65. The prediction motif also appears in Greek mythology; see Howard Jacobson, “Marginalia to Pseudo-Philo Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum and to the Chronicles of Jerahmeel,” Revue des Études Juives 143, nos. 3–4 (1983): 455–59. 9 Josephus’s account and its downplaying of female agency in the biblical narrative are contrasted with the Rabbinic tradition (bSoṭah 12a), which has Amram separating from his wife in order to prevent subsequent pregnancies and only returning to her following the exhortations of his daughter. 10 Josephus presents Miriam as she appears in the biblical narrative: she watches over Moses while he is in the river and procures her mother’s services as a wet-nurse for the daughter of Pharaoh.

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The Women in Exodus 2 in Talmudic Interpretation    SHANA STRAUCH SCHICK

Josephus’s general tendency to minimize the role of biblical heroines is well known11 and well attested in stories concerning the matriarchs.12 Moreover, it is entirely consistent with the heavily misogynistic tone of Hellenistic literature beginning with Hesiod13 and continuing into later Roman times.14 The account of Pandora as told by Hesiod in Theogony and Works and Days not only negates women’s role in procreation, but views Pandora, and by extension all women, as the cause of “anguishing miseries for men.”15 11 Levinson, Ha-sippur she-lo suppar, 265. 12 James L. Bailey, “Josephus’ Portrayal of the Matriarchs,” in Josephus, Judaism, and Christianity, ed. Louis H. Feldman and Gohei Hata (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 154–79. 13 A century after Hesiod, Semonides of Amorgos (seventh century BCE) deemed women “the worst plague Zeus has made”; see Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Females of the Species: Semonides on Women (London: Duckworth, 1975), 54. However, Homer and the lyric poets were decidedly less misogynistic; see Marylin B. Arthur, “Early Greece: The Origins of the Western Attitude toward Women,” Arethusa 6, no. 1 (Spring 1973): 7–58. 14 Some of the many studies which address this issue include Tikva Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture, and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth (New York: Free Press, 1992), ch. 19; Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (New York: Harper & Row, 1976); Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (New York: Schocken Books, 1975); Eva Cantarella, Pandora’s Daughters: The Role and Status of Women in Greek and Roman Antiquity, trans. Maureen B. Fant (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); and Froma I. Zeitlin, “The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in the Oresteia,” Arethusa 11, nos. 1–2 (Spring and Fall 1978): 149–84. 15 R. M. Frazer, trans., The Poems of Hesiod (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), 99 (l. 95); see also Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses, 205, and Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 84. Scholars such as Giulia Sissa, Greek Virginity, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), and Boyarin, Carnal Israel, 85, understand the jar which Pandora opens as a euphemism for her vulva, incriminating her for the first sexual encounter and exonerating man. In what was probably the “original” myth of Pandora, she is associated with the Earth-goddess in human form, necessary for life, to whom sacrifices are offered (Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 2nd ed. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908], 284–85). Pandora’s connection to the biblical Eve has long been noted, beginning with the Church Fathers; see Dora and Erwin Panofsky, Pandora’s Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol (New York: Pantheon Books, 1962). For a bibliography of scholarship on the subject, see John A. Phillips, Eve: The History of an Idea (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984), ch. 2. Scholars further describe how the Rabbis appropriated motifs from the Pandora myth into their retelling of the Adam and Eve narrative. See Samuel Tobias Lachs, “The Pandora-Eve Motif in Rabbinic Literature,” Harvard Theological

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In contrast to Josephus’s account, the Second-Temple-era book of Jubilees emphasizes the active role of the women in the story of Moses’s birth.16 Aside from recounting the care Jochebed provides for Moses that is detailed in the biblical version of the story, including hiding him after his birth, preparing a waterproof basket for him, and placing it among the reeds, Jubilees adds that Jochebed secretly nursed him every night for one week when he was concealed while his sister Miriam watched him by day. This is followed by Tharmuth (the name given to the daughter of Pharaoh in Second Temple literature) rescuing Moses and caring for him (Jub. 47:4– 6). Like Josephus, Jubilees elevates the active role of Amram, presenting him as providing for Moses’s education (Jub. 47:9);17 otherwise, though, the narrative centers on the three women involved in his early upbringing.18 Later, Rabbinic texts likewise discuss the birth of Moses and expound on the roles of the various women in his life. mSoṭah 1:9 describes the reward Miriam received for watching over Moses when he was an infant. This mishnah comes at the end of the first chapter of mSoṭah, which details the humiliating ordeal that a soṭah (wife whose husband suspects her of adultery) undergoes.19 In conclusion, the mishnah derives that “according to the measure with which one measures out [his actions]—with it, they measure for him: [the soṭah] adorned herself for sin, God disgraces her; she

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Review 67, no. 3 (July 1974): 341–45; Boyarin, Carnal Israel, 84–88; Tal Ilan, Mine and Yours Are Hers: Retrieving Women’s History from Rabbinic Literature (Leiden; New York: Brill, 1997), 148. See Betsy Halpern-Amaru, The Perspective from Mt. Sinai: The Book of Jubilees and Exodus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co., 2015), ch. 3; J. T. A. G. M. (Jacques) van Ruiten, “The Birth of Moses in Egypt According to the Book of Jubilees (Jub. 47.1–9),” in The Wisdom of Egypt: Jewish, Early Christian, and Gnostic Essays in Honour of Gerard P. Luttikhuizen, ed. Anthony Hilhorst and George H. van Kooten (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2005), 43–65, for a thorough discussion of the Jubilees account and a comparison to those in Josephus and Pseudo-Philo. In assigning the child’s education to his father and his physical care to his mother and sister, Jubilees certainly conforms to the gender norms of the time. See bḲiddushin 30a for a lengthy discourse on a father’s obligation to provide Torah education for his son and mḲiddushin 4:14 and bḲiddushin 82a–b regarding his obligation to teach him a trade. In contrast to Josephus’s works, Jubilees often features biblical women prominently in its narratives. See Kelley Coblentz Bautch, “Amplified Roles, Idealized Depictions: Women in the Book of Jubilees,” in Enoch and the Mosaic Torah: The Evidence of Jubilees, ed. Gabriele Boccaccini and Giovanni Ibba (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2009), 338–52. See Hauptman, Rereading the Rabbis, 20–22, for a discussion of the Mishnah’s treatment of the soṭah.

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The Women in Exodus 2 in Talmudic Interpretation    SHANA STRAUCH SCHICK

revealed herself for sin, God reveals her” (1:7). In this context, Miriam is cited as one of five biblical figures who exemplify this principle: two who were punished accordingly for their wrongdoing (Samson and Absalom) and three who received reward consonant with their good actions (Miriam, Joseph, and Moses).20 Aside from their relationship to the principle explicated in the mishnah, three of the male figures in the mishnah are connected in more meaningful ways as well. Befitting a tractate devoted to a woman suspected of committing adultery, Samson, Absalom, and Joseph all appear in narratives involving illicit relations. Samson marries Philistine women despite his parents’ disapproval: his first wife is given to another man in marriage, to which Samson responds by setting the Philistine wheat fields ablaze (Judg. 14–15), and his second wife, Delilah, causes his downfall (Judg. 16:4–21). In between his marriages, he is also reported to have slept with a prostitute (Judg. 16:1). Absalom shelters and avenges his sister Tamar after she is raped by their half-brother, Amnon (II Sam. 13:20–29). And Joseph refuses Potiphar’s wife’s advances to commit adultery (Gen. 39:7–20). Interestingly, Joseph, who is praised for his actions, is also the only one of these three to appear in a narrative in which the illicit intercourse is averted. Furthermore, these three are also associated with what are generally regarded as feminine attributes. The biblical text characterizes Joseph, much like it does his mother Rachel (Gen. 29:17), as being yefeh to’ar ṿi-yefeh mar’eh (well-built and handsome; Gen. 39:6); Absalom is likewise described as yafeh (II Sam. 14:25 states that “[n]o one in all Israel was so admired for his beauty as Absalom”). Moreover, Samson and Absalom both had long hair,21 a physical feature, usually associated with women, that is ultimately related to their deaths. Indeed, the mishnah considers Absalom’s vanity in caring for his hair to be the sinful deed that caused his downfall. A 20 The parallel passages in the Tosefta have a more extensive list. Among those punished in accordance with their bad deeds are the generation of the Deluge, the builders of the tower of Babel, the Sodomites, the Egyptians, the Canaanite general Sisera, the Assyrian King Sennacherib, the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar, along with Absalom and Samson (tSoṭah 3:1–19 [ed. Lieberman]). The mishnah, by contrast, includes only the two Israelites among this group. Added to the list of those rewarded in accordance with their good deeds is Abraham; Miriam, however, is absent (tSoṭah 4:1–9 [ed. Lieberman]). 21 Rabbinic traditions also associate Absalom with Samson by depicting the former as a lifelong Nazirite; see tSoṭah 3:16 (ed. Lieberman), yNazir 51b, bNazir 4b, and Numbers Rabbah 9:24, 10:17.

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remarkably similar portrayal is found with regard to Joseph. Genesis Rabbah 87:3 depicts Joseph adorning his eyes, tending to his hair, and walking with a gentle gait—in a manner that Joshua Levinson has noted conforms to Greco-Roman characterizations of effeminate men.22 Alongside this list of three feminized men (plus Moses) appears Miriam, the one actual female. Yet, she is the only one of this group with no connection to a narrative pertaining to illicit relations. She is noted for the good she does in watching over her infant brother and thus remaining devoted to her family, in contrast to the soṭah whose sin consists in having allegedly betrayed her husband. Nevertheless, implicit in the mishnah’s praise for the good deed Miriam performs may lie a tacit critique, which is likewise associated with both marital relations and betrayal; her reward is that the Israelites wait a week to travel until she recovers from the leprosy she contracts as punishment for slurring her brother Moses with regard to “the Cushite woman he had married” (Num. 12:1).23 In other words, in praising her, the mishnah simultaneously reminds us that Miriam is rewarded in the aftermath of her punishment for the sin she had committed by meddling in Moses’s marital affairs. It is therefore possible that the mishnah maintains a certain ambiguity in its attitude toward Miriam. This ambiguity is echoed in the Talmudic sugyot analyzing this text. The Jerusalem Talmud (ySoṭah 17b), usually terse, contains only one tradition on this mishnah describing Miriam’s protection of Moses, namely, a statement attributed to the second-generation Palestinian amora 22 Indeed, Rabbinic depictions of Joseph more generally cast him in “effeminate” gender roles; see Joshua Levinson, “Cultural Androgyny in Rabbinic Literature,” in From Athens to Jerusalem: Medicine in Hellenized Jewish Lore and in Early Christian Literature, ed. Samuel Kottek et al. (Rotterdam: Erasmus Publishing, 2000), 119–40. 23 Relatedly, midrashic tradition understands Miriam’s slur as critiquing Moses for separating from his Midianite wife Zipporah; see Sifre, Parashat be-ha‘alotekha 99, and Sifre zuṭa 12:1. Interestingly, Ishay Rosen-Zvi has explored the portrayal of women in the Testament literature of the Second Temple period as unknowingly yet innately sinful vis-à-vis the “female threat of sexual temptation” and how they are often perceived as the source of men’s inner struggles. He notes that Bilhah, and indeed all women presented in these sources, are deemed the instigators of sexual indiscretions by virtue of their gender— despite their passivity in the sexual acts in question. Rosen-Zvi writes: “Bilhah does not become temptress because she is being deliberately incriminated or in order to lessen Reuben’s responsibility. Her role is determined by the way in which T[estament of] Reuben constructs an all-embracing economy of gender.” See Ishay Rosen-Zvi, “Bilhah the Temptress: The Testament of Reuben and ‘The Birth of Sexuality,’” Jewish Quarterly Review 96, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 74.

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The Women in Exodus 2 in Talmudic Interpretation    SHANA STRAUCH SCHICK

(Talmudic sage) Rabbi Johanan, who understands the words of Ex. 2:4 as a series of references to either God or ḥokhmah (wisdom). Irrespective of whether R. Johanan actually means to say that God, not Miriam, watched over Moses, Miriam herself has been removed from the Jerusalem Talmud sugya. Her absence becomes even more striking when this passage is compared with the parallel discussion in the Babylonian Talmud. bSoṭah 11a–13a is comprised of an aggadic cluster expounding the first two chapters of Exodus.24 Though the mishnah centers on Miriam, the beginning of the sugya lacks any reference to women. As in the Jerusalem Talmud, the first tradition here, attributed to the fourth-generation tanna (mishnaic sage) Rabbi Isaac, removes the active role of Miriam entirely. R. Isaac, too, interprets Ex. 2:4 as a reference to the shekhinah (divine presence), not Miriam, watching over Moses (11a). R. Isaac’s teaching is followed by two androcentric traditions, which are lacking in female subjects: one by Rabbi Ḥama ben Rabbi Ḥanina (second-generation Palestinian amora), who describes Pharaoh discussing his plans to prevent the birth of the future savior of the Israelites, and one by Rabbi Ḥiyya bar Abba citing Rabbi Simai (both fifth-generation tanna’im), who names the three men who counseled Pharaoh in how to implement his enslavement of the Israelites. The sugya takes a turn with the citation of a tradition attributed to Rabbi Samuel bar Naḥamani (second- to third-generation Palestinian amora) in the name of Rabbi Jonathan (fourth-generation tanna), which interprets “hard labor” (Ex. 1:14) as follows: “The [Egyptians] would give men’s work to the women and women’s work to the men” (11b).25 The crushing labor imposed on the enslaved Israelites was an enforced gender role reversal, where men had to perform the tasks of women and women those of men.26 This tradition may merely be describing work that was difficult by 24 On clusters of aggadot devoted to one topic in the Babylonian Talmud, see Shamma Friedman, “La-aggadah ha-hisṭorit ba-Talmud ha-Bavli,” in Sefer ha-zikkaron le-Rabbi Sha’ul Lieberman, ed. Shamma Friedman (New York; Jerusalem: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1993), 120; Abraham Weiss, Al ha-yetsirah ha-sifrutit shel ha-amora’im (New York: “Ḥorev” Yeshiva University, 1962), 171–74, 194–281. 25 Note mḲiddushin 4:14, which prohibits a man from teaching his son a trade of/among women. 26 R. Jonathan does not explain what the tasks associated with each gender were. However, the tradition cited in Midrash Tanḥuma, Parashat ṿa-yetse 9 (ed. Warsaw), elaborates that women’s work included domestic chores like kneading and baking, while men’s work included more strenuous outdoor labor like drawing water, chopping wood, and gathering vegetables from the garden.

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virtue of its unsuitability: women find men’s work physically demanding, and men are not accustomed to women’s work. However, it may also be understood as denigrating gender reversals by deeming it the epitome of subjugation for a man to be reduced to women’s labor and vice versa; this may, in turn, be meant as a subtle critique of Absalom and Samson, whose sins are implicitly linked to their own effeminate behaviors. Whatever R. Jonathan’s intention, from this point on, the traditions recorded in the sugya present women as active subjects and in a highly positive light,27 marking a significant break from the trajectory of the Jerusalem Talmud. The very next teaching, cited in the name of Rabbi Avira (third- to fourth-generation Palestinian amora), famously states that “[i]n the merit of the righteous women of that generation Israel was redeemed from Egypt,”28 and goes on to relate how the women effectively seduced their husbands so that they would have babies despite the decrees of infanticide and harsh labor. The subsequent tradition discusses Ex. 1:15–17 concerning the midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, who defied Pharaoh’s orders to kill the Israelite baby boys, and quotes Rav and Samuel as identifying who the midwives really were: either Jochebed and Miriam or Jochebed and Elisheba (wife of Aaron). A baraita is then cited in accordance with the former view, explaining the midwives’ names as references to the care that they provided for the infants. At the end of the baraita appears a tradition which, as in Josephus’s account, describes a prophecy foretelling the birth of Moses. In this instance, however, it is Miriam who predicts the birth, rather than a male character in the narrative (11b).29 The sugya continues with several traditions concerning the midwives, including a digression which posits Miriam’s alleged marriage to Caleb and her relationship to the Davidic dynasty (11b–12a). It then goes on to assign responsibility for the birth of Moses to Miriam, citing Rav Judah bar Zebina 27 See, however, Devora Steinmetz, “A Portrait of Miriam in Rabbinic Midrash,” Prooftexts 8, no. 1 (1988): 35–65, who notes that even the positive portrayals of Miriam and other biblical women are relegated to the domestic and familial realms. It is worth considering the possibility that the shift in the depiction of women in the sugya is related to R. Jonathan’s teaching about them being forced to perform the jobs of men, who are usually cast in the more active roles. 28 In later parallels of this midrash, like Exodus Rabbah 1:12 (and its citation in Leḳaḥ ṭov, Ex. 1:14; Śekhel ṭov 2:10 [ed. Buber]; and Yalḳuṭ Shim‘oni, Parashat be-shallaḥ 245), it is attributed to Rabbi Akiva. The Vilna ed. of Exodus Rabbah ascribes the tradition to R. A., which could also stand for Rabbi Avira. 29 Miriam’s prophecy is referenced again in the sugya one folio later in the name of Rav.

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The Women in Exodus 2 in Talmudic Interpretation    SHANA STRAUCH SCHICK

(third- to fourth-generation Palestinian amora) who explains, based on Ex. 2:1 (“A certain man of the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman”), that Amram “went by the advice of his daughter.” A tannaitic tradition elaborates that Amram had divorced his wife to avoid the futility of having a child who would be killed in accordance with the pharaonic decree in Ex. 1:22, but at the behest (or rather rebuke) of his daughter, he remarried Jochebed and fathered Moses. In this Rabbinic rendering, not only is Miriam understood as the one who indeed watches over Moses, but her role has been substantially upgraded as well: she has gone from the concealed caretaker of her brother watching from afar to an active and vocal critic of her father’s actions who is ultimately responsible for Moses’s very birth. The sugya now turns to Jochebed. Rabbi Judah30 explains that Jochebed is referred to as the “daughter” of Levi (Ex. 2:1), despite being one hundred thirty at the time of Moses’s birth, because her physical vigor had miraculously been restored to her. Rav Judah bar Zebina is then cited again, depicting Jochebed’s pregnancy and labor as pain-free and inferring from this that righteous women are excluded from Eve’s curse of bearing children in pain (Gen. 3:16).31 As cited above, Josephus, too, depicts Moses’s birth as painless, yet in his account this miracle is directly related to Moses and a mark of his distinction. In the Babylonian Talmud’s version, by contrast, Jochebed’s painless labor is a result of her righteousness and is understood as something to which all righteous women can aspire.32 It thus constitutes a reflection on Jochebed and not on Moses. Following several traditions that describe how Jochebed concealed Moses, the daughter of Pharaoh becomes the focus of the sugya: how she saves Moses despite the warnings of her attendants in connection with disregarding her own father’s decree, the miracles God performs in order 30 Either Rabbi Judah bar Ilai (third-generation tanna) or Rav Judah bar Ezekiel (secondgeneration Babylonian amora). As this tradition is not introduced with the formal attribution of a tannaitic teaching and most of the tradents in the sugya are amora’im, the latter seems more likely. 31 This is followed by a baraita that focuses on Moses at birth and offers a number of readings of ki ṭov hu (how beautiful he was; Gen. 2:2). See my forthcoming article which discusses this tradition. 32 See the parallel in Exodus Rabbah 1:20. Leopold von Ranke, Weltgeschichte, vol. 3, pt. 2 (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1883), 12–33, suggests that the Rabbinic tradition derives from Josephus, while Louis H. Feldman, Josephus’s Interpretation of the Bible (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 380 n. 17, counters that the Rabbis never mention Josephus nor do they evince any awareness of his works.

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to aid her in rescuing Moses, and her unwitting prophecy. Turning to her conversation with Miriam, in which the latter offers to enlist a Hebrew nursemaid, the sugya draws to a close and comes full circle. It ends with a reference to Miriam and how she had watched over Moses. In a teaching attributed to Rav, it states: “Then Miriam the prophetess, Aaron’s sister, took,” etc. [Ex. 15:20]. “Aaron’s sister” and not “Moses’s sister”? Rav Amram said in the name of Rav, and according to others it was Rav Naḥman who said in the name of Rav: “It teaches that she prophesied while she yet was the sister of Aaron [only], saying: ‘My mother will bear a son who will be the savior of Israel.’ When Moses was born, the whole house was filled with light. Her father arose and kissed her on her head, saying: ‘My daughter, your prophecy has been fulfilled.’ But when they cast him into the river, her father arose and smacked her on her head, saying: ‘Where is your prophecy now?’ That is what is written: ‘And his sister stationed herself at a distance, to learn what would befall him’ [Ex. 2:4], in other words, to know what would be the fate of her prophecy” [12b–13a].

Like the mishnah, Rav’s version of the story, which concludes this sugya, references Ex. 2:4, ṿa-tetatsav aḥoto me-raḥoḳ, and thus represents another interpretation of this verse and the range of perspectives regarding the role of women in the Exodus narrative. The mishnah understands Miriam’s behavior reflected in this verse as the paradigmatic example of a good deed that merits reward. Both the tradition recorded in the Jerusalem Talmud sugya and R. Isaac’s teaching at the beginning of the Babylonian Talmud sugya remove Miriam from ṿa-tetatsav aḥoto me-raḥoḳ, and thus also from her protective role in Moses’s birth story. The concluding interpretation of Rav sees in ṿa-tetatsav aḥoto me-raḥoḳ additional narrative elements that find no basis in the biblical text, namely, Miriam predicting the birth of Moses and seeking to ensure that her prophecy is fulfilled. The story of Miriam foretelling Moses’s birth is quite ancient, having both Second Temple and tannaitic roots.33 Its placement at the conclusion of the sugya 33 See the tannaitic version of this account in the aforementioned Mekhilta de-Rabbi Yishma‘el and Mekhilta de-Rabbi Shim‘on ben Yoḥai passages, which is very similar to Pseudo-Philo’s account. The Babylonian Talmud narrative is likely derived from the Mekhilta or an earlier shared source. (Rav is cited several times in the Babylonian Talmud making statements that are actually originally Palestinian teachings; see J. N. Epstein, Mavo le-nussaḥ ha-Mishnah: nussaḥ ha-Mishnah ṿe-gilgulaṿ le-mi-yeme ha-amora’im ṿe-ad defuse R[abbi] Yom Tov Lippmann Heller, vol. 1 [Jerusalem: Magnes

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The Women in Exodus 2 in Talmudic Interpretation    SHANA STRAUCH SCHICK

seems to upend the first half of the discussion, which effectively disregards the role of women. In the end, Miriam is portrayed as an essential figure in the birth of Moses.

Cultural Context The absence of Miriam in the Jerusalem Talmud, though at odds with the biblical account, comports with other texts from the Land of Israel which similarly marginalize the active role of women, as well as with the misogynist tone of contemporary Greco-Roman literature more generally as described above. By contrast, the prominence given to women in the second half of the Babylonian Talmud sugya finds analogs in both Zoroastrian and Syriac Christian texts, especially the birth narratives of the Zoroastrian prophet Zoroaster34 and Jesus, respectively, which were prevalent in Sasanian Persia. The Dēnkard (hereinafter Dk.), or “Acts of the Religion,” is a compendium of Zoroastrian knowledge from the ninth century.35 Book VII, often Press, 1964], 166. See also Yaakov Elman, Authority and Tradition: Toseftan Baraitot in Talmudic Babylonia [New York: Yeshiva University Press; Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1994], 136–37, who notes that tannaitic sources [in the case Elman discusses, tPesaḥim] are often erroneously attributed to the Babylonian amora’im who transmit them in the Babylonian Talmud.) Several scholars have discussed the literary construction of this midrash in detail, demonstrating that the less-polished Mekhilta version was reworked considerably and greatly elaborated upon in the Babylonian Talmud. See Joshua Levinson, “The Cultural Dignity of Narrative,” in Creation and Composition: The Contribution of the Bavli Redactors (Stammaim) to the Aggada, ed. Jeffrey L. Rubenstein (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 369; Steinmetz, “A Portrait of Miriam,” 46. 34 Zoroaster/Zarathustra/Zardušt is the Zoroastrian prophet in Pahlavi literature from the Sasanian and early Islamic periods. 35 Dk. was originally comprised of nine books (though book I through the beginning of book III have been lost) of differing levels of importance. Books III–V deal with rational apologetics; book VI, with moral wisdom; and books VII–IX, with exegetical theology. See Philippe Gignoux, “Dēnkard,” Encyclopædia Iranica, vol. VII, pt. 3, 284–89, accessed March 1, 2019, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/denkard. It is difficult to date Dk. with any precision, since it was transmitted orally for centuries before being written down in the ninth century, after the Muslim conquest. Nevertheless, it contains teachings attributed to the pōryōtkēšān, or “ancient sages” (for example, The Complete Text of the Pahlavi Dinkard, ed. Dhanjishah Meherjibhai Madan, pt. 1 [Bombay: n.p., 1922], book III, 405), who date to the Sasanian period, along with material that is corroborated by ancient Greek works. See Shaul Shaked, trans., The Wisdom of the Sasanian Sages (Dēnkard VI) by Aturpāt-i Ēmētān (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1979), 225; Jenny Rose, The Image of Zoroaster: The Persian Mage through European Eyes (New York: Bibliotheca Persica Press, 2000), 35 n. 85; Albert de Jong, Traditions of the Magi: Zoroastrianism in Greek and Latin Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 118.

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referred to as the “Legend of Zoroaster,” constitutes the prophet’s biography. Its first section provides detailed accounts of Zoroaster’s birth, and it portrays Dugdōw, his mother, both in a positive light and as actively involved in caring for the child in her womb. Dk. VII.2.3–4 describes how Ohrmazd, the supreme god of the Zoroastrians, creates the xwarrah, a special celestial radiance,36 during the initial act of divine creation, intending it for Zoroaster. In order to have it penetrate Zoroaster, Ohrmazd first places the xwarrah inside Dugdōw at her own birth, where it remains until she gets married and becomes pregnant with Zoroaster. During Dugdōw’s pregnancy, demons attempt to injure her and her unborn child through illness in order to prevent his birth. She initially consults sorcerers to heal her but ultimately turns to Ohrmazd along with the Amahraspands (holy immortals), who instruct her to wash her hands and bring offerings to the sacred fire. She follows their advice and thereby saves her unborn child (Dk. VII.2.54). In utero, all of the elements that Ohrmazd fashions into Zoroaster, namely, his xwarrah, frawahr (pre-soul), and tan-gōhr (corporeal substance), are reunited in the body of Dugdōw. As a result of the xwarrah in Zoroaster, rōšnīh (light) radiates from her body both prior to and during his birth.37 Dugdōw is thus portrayed both as the passive site of Zoroaster’s divine creation and as actively involved in protecting him.38 36 D. N. MacKenzie, A Concise Pahlavi Dictionary (London: Oxford University Press, 1986), 96 (s.v. xwarrah). 37 The xwarrah of a special fetus is found elsewhere. Dk. VII.1.25–26 reports that by the power of the xwarrah which came to Frēdōn while still in his mother’s womb, he was able at the age of nine to defeat the dragon-like monster Dahāg (Avestan: Aži Dahāka) and to deliver Xwanirah from the ravages of the lands (dehān) of Māzandarān. See P. O. Skjærvø, Dj. Khaleghi-Motlagh, and James R. Russell, “Aždahā,” Encyclopædia Iranica, vol. 3, pt. 2, 191–205, accessed March 1, 2019, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/ azdaha-dragon-various-kinds. See also Bundahišn 35:10, which states: “Frēdōn was fuller of purr-xwarrahtar (glory) than them,” as well as ibid. 35:38. (Citations of the Bundahišn are taken from the Middle Persian Dictionary Project, English translation by Domenico Agostini, accessed March 1, 2019, http://mpdp.mpdict.com.) 38 As in most “birth of the hero” narratives, both Moses and Zoroaster are born into lifethreatening situations; however, while heroes are typically abandoned by their mothers, Moses and Zoroaster are unique in being saved by their mothers. See Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (London: Sphere Books, 1975); Alan Dundes, The Study of Folklore (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1965); Donald B. Redford, “The Literary Motif of the Exposed Child (cf. Ex. ii 1–10),” Numen 14, no. 3 (November 1967): 209–28; Athalya Brenner, “Female Social Behaviour: Two Descriptive Patterns within the ‘Birth of the Hero’ Paradigm,” Vetus Testamentum 36, no. 3 (July 1986): 257–73; Alwyn Rees and Brinley Rees, Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989). For a previous study comparing Jewish

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The Women in Exodus 2 in Talmudic Interpretation    SHANA STRAUCH SCHICK

Similarly, the Christian pseudepigraphic work Protevangelium of James, which scholars have dated to a period overlapping with the amora’im,39 is notable for its placement of Mary in an unusually prominent role—in contrast to the Gospels and other early Christian works. Highly popular among Eastern Syriac Christian communities in the Persian Empire,40 Protevangelium of James is unique in focusing on and detailing Mary’s birth, childhood, relationship with Joseph, and life of extreme purity. It also describes her immaculate conception of Jesus.41 Similar to and Iranian traditions about Moses and Zoroaster, see my “When Moses Was Born the House Was Filled with Light,” TheGemara.com (January 2, 2018), accessed March 1, 2019, http://thegemara.com/when-moses-was-born-the-house-was-filled-with-light/. Scholars have also pointed to the similarities between Abraham and Zoroaster. See Daniel Sheffield, “In the Path of the Prophet: Medieval and Early Modern Narratives of the Life of Zarathustra in Islamic Iran and Western India” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2012), 52–83; W. M. Thackston, trans., The Tales of the Prophets of al-Kisā’ī (Boston: Twayne, 1978), 136–50; James R. Russell, “Our Father Abraham and the Magi,” Journal of the K. R. Cama Oriental Institute 54 (1987): 56–67; Yishai Kiel, “Abraham and Nimrod in the Shadow of Zarathustra,” The Journal of Religion 95, no. 1 (January 2015): 35–50. 39 Many scholars assume a second- to third-century CE date based on the discovery of Papyrus Bodmer V, which dates from the third century. See George T. Zervos, “The Protevangelium of James and the Composition of the Bodmer Miscellaneous Codex: Chronology, Theology, and Liturgy,” in “Non-Canonical” Religious Texts in Early Judaism and Early Christianity, ed. Lee Martin McDonald and James H. Charlesworth (London: T&T Clark International, 2012), 178–80; Eric M. Vanden Eykel, “But Their Faces Were All Looking Up”: Author and Reader in the Protevangelium of James (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), 18–24; L. W. Barnard, “The Origins and Emergence of the Church in Edessa during the First Two Centuries A.D.,” Vigiliae Christianae 22, no. 3 (September 1968): 161–75. On its Syrian origins, see J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 49; George T. Zervos, “An Early Non-Canonical Annunciation Story,” in Society of Biblical Literature 1997 Seminar Papers, ed. E. Lovering (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997), 687–88. Lily C. Vuong, Gender and Purity in the Protevangelium of James (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 6–9, 40–44, has recently argued that the book’s concern for extreme purity, as well as its depictions of Jewish practice and the tension between ascetic versus family life, are indicative of a second- to third-century Syrian provenance. 40 Vuong, Gender and Purity, 16. 41 Peter Schäfer and Michael Rosenberg have demonstrated the likelihood of Babylonian Rabbinic awareness of Syriac Christian beliefs and have identified a handful of texts that either polemicize against Marian devotion or adapt Mariological ideas. See Peter Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 15–22; Michael Rosenberg, “Sexual Serpents and Perpetual Virginity: Marian Rejectionism in the Babylonian Talmud,” Jewish Quarterly Review 106, no. 4 (2016): 465–93; idem, “Penetrating Words: A Babylonian Rabbinic Response to Syriac Mariology,” Journal of Jewish Studies 67, no. 1 (2016): 121–34. See also Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, Early

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Miriam in regard to Moses, Mary received a prophecy concerning Jesus’s birth (11:5–7). While the Babylonian Talmud is certainly not unprecedented in highlighting the role of the women in Exodus 2, one cannot help but notice the glaring differences between the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds in this sugya and the latter’s affinity with the Sasanian Persian accounts. It is thus tempting to consider the wider cultural contexts of each work: the Jerusalem Talmud and Josephus seem to reflect their Greco-Roman milieu, whereas the Babylonian Talmud reflects its Persian surroundings. Although, as is often the case, the Babylonian Talmud here preserves what is found in its Jerusalem counterpart, it also takes a different turn, ultimately granting a most prominent role to Jochebed and Miriam, the likes of which the corresponding passage in the Jerusalem Talmud rejects. This shift could very well simply be reflective of the general tendency of the Babylonian Talmud to include multiple and competing opinions, yet it may also be in dialogue with a motif that was current in Sasanian Persia, according to which the mother of the founding figure of Zoroastrianism, the dominant religion of the empire, was granted a supreme role. This is not to say that the Zoroastrian myth influenced the Rabbis to create a new tradition but that its prevalence in the wider Persian culture could be what led to the resuscitation of an already existing current within Jewish biblical interpretation.42 While this theory remains speculation for the time being, viewing the Babylonian Talmud alongside comparable Zoroastrian texts lends another dimension to the study of the Talmud and the rich world which produced it.

Christian Monastic Literature and the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 42 See Shaul Shaked, “Iranian Influence on Judaism, First Century B.C.E. to Second Century C.E.,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism, ed. W. D. Davies and Louis Finkelstein, vol. 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 309, who describes this approach for understanding parallels between Zoroastrian and Rabbinic texts.

Aryeh Cohen, American Jewish University

Study of Torah as a Discourse of Violence: Milh.amtah shel Torah, Variations on a Theme*

Talmud study is not coincidentally violent, but rather, in some way, essentially violent. This is the central argument of this essay. The very act of study is referred to as war, students are seen as soldiers, the process of learning material is described as sharpening swords, teachers and students are pitted against each other as enemies, and the valorized method of study is a violent confrontation that sometimes ends in physical harm and even death. Moreover, the power that enables violence within the study hall and during study seems to extend beyond the boundaries of the study hall and is deployed against political or religious opponents. What is at stake in this discussion? Exploring what it meant to study Torah—not the mechanics or the pedagogy but the significance of the activity itself—brings us closer to answering the larger question: what is Talmud? Thus, what is at stake in this essay is ultimately what the self-fashioning of the sages through the “war of Torah” can tell us about the study of Torah itself, as well as about the aim of Talmud—as text, as cultural document, as the product of a specific community of Jews at a specific historical time.

* I happily dedicate this essay to Reb Chaim, who has long been engaged in milḥamtah shel Torah, to the benefit of us all.

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There is also a more contemporary significance to this essay, one which goes to the theme of swimming against the current of scholarly thought. The sages and their realm of activity—the study hall—have been cited by some as a paradigm for an alternative mode of interpersonal interaction to the type of masculinity that developed in the West, or for the thinking that characterized modernity.1 Daniel Boyarin, for example, has argued that “the image of the ideal [Jewish] male as nonaggressive, not strong, not physically active is a positive product of the self-fashioning of rabbinic masculinity in a certain, very central, textual product of the culture, the Babylonian Talmud.”2 While the culture of Torah study might have evolved in this way in the early modern and modern periods, the argument of the current essay is that in the Babylonian Talmud the sages were anything but nonaggressive. The ability to describe3 the study of Torah based on the texts of the Babylonian Talmud as a cultural and religious activity depends on one’s understanding the impact and import of the metaphors of violence that abound in the depiction and performance of this act of Torah study. That violence might be an integral part of the myth of the Oral Law, as it was born in the fire of Sinai. This appears to be the correct understanding of bShabbat 88a: “The blessed Holy One held [Sinai] above [Israel] like a barrel and said to them: ‘If you accept the Torah, well and good. If not, there will be your burial.’” Walter Benjamin describes this type of connection between violence and law in his essay “Critique of Violence”: “[T]he origin of every contract . . . points toward violence. It need not be directly present in it as lawmaking violence, but is represented in it insofar as the power that guarantees a legal contract is in turn of violent origin even if violence is not introduced into the contract itself.”4 The Covenant—a contractual relationship between Israel and God—was entered into by a people standing 1 Cf. Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 2 Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 81. 3 In describing this cultural phenomenon, I am thinking of Clifford Geertz’s “thick description” as filtered through and by Robert Cover. See Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973); Robert Cover, “Nomos and Narrative,” in Narrative, Violence, and the Law: The Essays of Robert Cover, ed. Martha Minow, Michael Ryan, and Austin Sarat (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1992), 141. 4 Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 288.

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Study of Torah as a Discourse of Violence     ARYEH COHEN

under the mountain, whose lives were on the line in their decision whether to accept the covenantal Torah or not. This type of violence Benjamin calls “mythic violence,” as opposed to “divine violence.”5 In what follows, I will argue that the violence of bShabbat 88a and much of the violence of Torah study as portrayed in the Talmud fall under Benjamin’s former category of mythic violence—“mythical violence is lawmaking.” On the other hand, violence might be a result of the search for the Truth of Torah amongst competing truths: finding truth not in the mimesis of Torah, the outside world as reflective of Torah, but as a result of the generative power of Torah—Torah as what Robert Cover describes as “normative world-building.”6 Cover has prominently brought our attention to the violence of legal interpretation itself: Legal interpretation takes place in a field of pain and death. This is true in several senses. Legal interpretive acts signal and occasion the imposition of violence upon others: A judge articulates her understanding of a text, and as a result, somebody loses his freedom, his property, his children, even his life. Interpretations in law also constitute justifications for violence which has already occurred or which is about to occur. When interpreters have finished their work, they frequently leave behind victims whose lives have been torn apart by these organized, social practices of violence.7

Legal interpretation, which may seem on its face to be identical with literary interpretation proper, is involved in a web of actions that may produce violence. When a judge interprets a statute or law, a defendant may lose his or her freedom or life. In other situations, the interpretation is used to justify war or torture. Legal interpretation is never anodyne. Further, Cover writes, “If legal interpretation entails action in a field of pain and death, we must expect, therefore, to find in the act of interpretation attention to the conditions of effective domination.”8 If there is no effective domination, then legal interpretation reverts to being merely a style of literary interpretation, whose impacts on the world are superficial. “Legal interpretation must be capable of transforming itself into action; it must be capable of overcoming inhibitions against violence in order to generate its 5 6 7 8

Ibid., 296–97. Robert Cover, “Violence and the Word,” in Narrative, Violence, and the Law, 208. Ibid., 203. Ibid., 222 (emphasis in the original).

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requisite deeds; it must be capable of massing a sufficient degree of violence to deter reprisal and revenge.”9 I will argue that, for the Rabbis, Torah study, similarly, exists in a field of pain and death and that the study and teaching of Torah are deeply embedded in the recreation of the original site of divine pedagogy and transmission at Sinai.

The Metaphorical World of Teaching and Studying What is it that transpires between teachers and students, or between colleagues in the study hall? How are these relationships constructed? What are the metaphors of studying and teaching that shape and then control the understanding of learning Torah? In the world of Late Antiquity, a number of different options were available. Perhaps the most prominent was the agricultural metaphor, which goes back to Plato, of a farmer (the teacher) planting a seed (knowledge) in a field (the student). In this construct, the student is passive and the teacher is active. Taking the metaphor one step further, once the seed, knowledge, has taken, it develops an organic relationship with the student or the student’s soul.10 Another metaphor is that of procreation. The teacher is the father, the student’s soul is the mother, and knowledge is the offspring. The teacher impregnates the student’s soul, which then serves as the womb that nurtures knowledge. In this construct, the student is somewhat less passive than in the first. While the student is impregnated by the teacher—the student gendered female to the teacher’s male gendering, without regard for the actual physical gender (cf. Diotima and Socrates)—the student (or the student’s soul) functions as a womb and therefore has an active role in nurturing knowledge.11 Within this cultural web, the following text is striking. The text is generated by a reading of Deut. 6:7: “Impress them [ṿe-shinnantam] upon your children. Recite them when you stay at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up.” In this verse, the father (the masculine “you”) is literally, not metaphorically, the teacher. The words of Torah are 9 Ibid., 223. 10 See Denise Kimber Buell, Making Christians: Clement of Alexandria and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 50–67. 11 See David D. Leitao, The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor in Classical Greek Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), chs. 6–7.

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passed on along the biological route. The biological parent is also the parent in Torah (to paraphrase a sentiment of the Fathers). This superficially procreative setting is immediately and sharply subverted by the midrashic reading (bḲiddushin 30a): “Our Rabbis taught: ‘“Impress them,” that the words of Torah should be sharpened in your mouth. So that if a person should ask you something, do not stammer and tell him but tell him immediately.’” The anonymous midrashist exploits the semantic field of the root sh-n-n, which includes “sharp” like a sword (Deut. 32:41) but also “repeated teaching” as here (Deut. 6:7). Decontextualizing and then reading ṿe-shinnantam as an independent phrase, the midrashist generates a narrative of Torah study as combat. One must always have one’s Torah at the ready, to be drawn at the slightest provocation and without the slightest hesitation. This rereading seems to completely elide the children. The strategic break just before “to your children [le-banekha]” leaves the verb focused solely on “the words [ha-devarim]” of the previous verse; thus, the point is not teaching the children but sharpening the Torah. This strategic break allows for the insinuation of the martial into the organic filial metaphoric array. This reading also moves away from the hierarchical world of fathers and children or teachers and students (as fathers and children) towards the more egalitarian world of combatants.12 One’s enemy is neither inherently inferior nor superior. If one’s learning is sharpened, one will establish one’s position. At the same time, the intimacy of filial relationship is replaced by the alienation of combatants. This doubled interpretive move—reading the verse as egalitarian and the words of the Torah as its sole object—is reinforced by the first of the series of prooftexts that the midrashist cites (bḲiddushin 30b). At the same time, the intimacy is reintroduced, though its poles are shifted from father and son to lover and beloved: “For it says: ‘Say to Wisdom, “You are my sister,” etc.’ [Prov. 7:4].” “My sister, my bride” is a familiar refrain in Song of Songs (4:9–12, 5:1). Ḥokhmah (Wisdom) is similar in its effects to sophia and is identified Rabbinically with Torah. The citation of the prooftext from Prov. 7:4 deploys the eroticism of Torah study as part of the preparation or process of sharpening Torah. Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac (Rashi), the eleventh-century commentator from Troyes, in attempting to diffuse the 12 This is reinforced at the end of the passage by the use of the plural form oseḳin to describe studying Torah, thus giving both father and son, teacher and student, equal roles in the process of Torah study.

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eroticism of the sister-lover metaphor as it appears in this passage, actually underscores it. He comments: “You shall be as expert in her [Torah or ḥokhmah/sophia] as you are with your sister who is forbidden to you.” Rashi wants to read the verse as saying: “Say to Wisdom, ‘You are as clear to me as it is clear to me that my sister is forbidden to me.’” That this reading does not flow smoothly from the context is obvious to Rashi as the continuation of his comment suggests: “Or rather, [in light of] the end of the verse, ‘and call Understanding a kinswoman [moda],’ she [ḥokhmah] should be known [yadua] to you.” Rashi introduces the frisson of illicit sex and then leaves the biblical “knowing” undetermined. This prooftext and its erotic metaphorical economy serve as an introduction and a bridge to the series of quickly drawn prooftexts that reinforce the eroticism of Torah and color the eroticism of war. The next prooftext in this barrage is actually the previous verse in Proverbs 7: “And it says: ‘Bind them on your fingers; write them on the tablet of your mind’ [Prov. 7:3].” When connected with the prooftext that immediately follows it, this verse “obviously” refers to the binding and girding that are the preparation for battle: “And it says: ‘Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are sons born to a man in his youth’ [Ps. 127:4].” Resurrecting the children elided from the verse that generated this midrashic series, this prooftext makes the martial connection explicit. The children are the arrows. Arm yourself with the sharpened Torah, the arrows stored up from years of learning. The midrashist next makes the reading of sh-n-n as sharpening for battle explicit. The three verses cited in quick succession over-determine this narrative arc: And it says: “A warrior’s sharp [shenunim] arrows” [Ps. 120:4]. And it says: “Your arrows, sharpened [shenunim], [pierce] the breast of the king’s enemies; peoples fall at your feet” [Ps. 45:6]. And it says: “Happy is the man who fills his quiver with them; they shall not be put to shame when they contend with the enemy in the gate” [Ps. 127:5].

This leads to the question that is simmering under the surface of this exercise: if the sage is engaged in battle, who is the enemy? What [does it mean], “the enemy in the gate”? Said Rabbi Ḥiyya bar Abba: “Even the father and his son, the rabbi and his student, who labor in Torah

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in one gate become enemies to one another. But they do not leave there until they become lovers to one another. For it says: ‘Waheb in Suphah’ [Num. 21:14]. Do not read ‘be-sufah [in Suphah]’ but ‘be-sofah [in the end].’”

R. Ḥiyya bar Abba’s midrash presents the only possible answer to this question. The father and son, the rabbi and student, are constantly enveloped in a dialectical and confrontational relationship, which is both necessary and dangerous. When they speak at the gate, they become enemies—and one must fell the other. Yet, they do not leave until they become lovers. Lovers and enemies are two sides of this same coin. This understanding is found in one of the more impenetrable verses of the Torah. In a classic midrashic move—where the vocalization of a word is changed so that the unintelligible gains great meaning—the phonemes et ṿahev be-sufah are revocalized and reread as the words ohev be-sofah (lover in the end). The unintelligible phrase in a list of military encounters turns out to be the lovers’ end to the battle of Torah, as this verse links the end of the midrashic path to its beginning with the association between Torah study and combat. In this way, the Rabbis’ prowess and power—it is, after all, a list of military encounters—are evidenced in their ability to read meaning out of seemingly unintelligible verses.13 While the midrash attributed to R. Ḥiyya bar Abba ends on something of an optimistic note about the reconciliation of fathers and sons, teachers and students, the text as a whole is weighted against that possibility. The preparation for the war that is Torah study is detailed; yet, there is no discussion of the process in preparation for the peace. It is an almost soteriological hope, performed by midrashic reading. The equivocal inevitability of this happy ending is evinced by the Talmud in the continuation of this sugya (pericope) on f. 32a. Rav Ezekiel is teaching his son Rami a mishnah. Rav Judah, his other son, is listening in and when Rav Ezekiel finishes, Rav Judah weighs in: “Father, do not say that the law is thus. . . . Say it is otherwise. . . .” A dispute ensues between father and son over the proper reading of the mishnah. After the discussion comes to a close, Samuel, who was somewhere nearby, says to Rav Judah: “Shinnana, do not talk to your father in this manner.” The epithet shinnana means “long-toothed.” However, its usage in the context of this passage calls to mind the sharpness 13 In the Jerusalem Talmud (yTa‘anit 25a), as well as in later midrashim—Lamentations Rabbah 2:4 (ed. Vilna) and Numbers Rabbah 11:3—the connection between this verse and milḥamtah shel Torah is made explicit.

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of swords/arrows and learning that is generated by the midrashic reading of ṿe-shinnantam.14 Rav Judah is an arrow whose sharp edge draws blood from his father. It seems from this anecdote that the end of the story of those who are engaged in the war of Torah is not as predetermined as our original text might have hoped.

Filial Violence and Torah Study The text I have been reading here is embedded in a longer discussion of the study of Torah, which is itself imbricated in a thoroughgoing treatment of the obligations of fathers to their sons, and vice versa.15 One of the obligations of fathers (and not mothers) to their sons (and not daughters) is the obligation of teaching Torah.16 It is the mix of a father’s obligation to teach his son Torah with a son’s obligation to honor his father that proves potentially volatile. This volatility is heightened as the boundaries between respect for parents, teachers, and God are blurred and, at times, elided. This web of concerns produces the following text which follows immediately upon the midrashic reading of Deut. 6:7 cited above. Deut. 11:18 reads as follows: “Therefore impress [ṿe-śamtem] these My words upon your very heart: bind them as a sign on your hand and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead.” bḲiddushin 30b introduces the word ṿe-śamtem in order to read it phonemically and generate a narrative of Torah study that has little to do with “wearing” the words on one’s body:

14 Michael Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic of the Talmudic and Geonic Periods (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 1137 (s.v. shinnana), gives the translation “one having long teeth.” He cites ge’onim (post-Talmudic sages) to the effect that any translation which understands shinnana as meaning shoneh halakhot (one who teaches laws) or shenunim ṭa‘amaṿ (one whose interpretations are sharp) is wrong. Notwithstanding this opinion, I would still maintain that to ignore the literary resonance with ṿe-shinnantam is to be overly obdurate and literarily obtuse. 15 In this essay, I am not interested in the redactional issues from a historical perspective, but rather in the issues arising from the poetics of the sugya. Cf. Aryeh Cohen, Rereading Talmud: Gender, Law, and the Poetics of Sugyot (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), esp. ch. 5. On the redaction of bḲiddushin, see Noah Aminoah, Arikhat Massekhet ḳiddushin ba-Talmud [ha-]Bavli: siddur, arikhah, girsa’ot shel gemara, yaḥase sugyot, Bavli, Yerushalmi (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 1977). 16 The list of obligations is given in a baraita (non-mishnaic teaching of the tanna’im) cited in bḲiddushin 29a. It is this baraita that generates the sugya.

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Study of Torah as a Discourse of Violence     ARYEH COHEN

Our Rabbis taught: “Ṿe-śamtem [should be read as] sam tam [a perfect remedy]: the Torah is compared to a life-giving remedy. It is as a man who hit his son, wounding him greatly, and then put a salve on the wound. He said to him: ‘My son, as long as this salve is on your wound, eat what you desire and drink what you desire, bathe in either hot or cold water, and fear not. If you remove it, though, [the wound] will become infected.’ So, too, did the blessed Holy One say to Israel: ‘My sons, I have created the evil inclination, and I have created Torah as a salve. If you are engaged with Torah, you shall not be handed over to him. For it says: “Surely, if you do right, there is uplift” [Gen. 4:7]. But if you are not engaged with Torah, you shall be handed over to him. For it says: “[S]in couches at the door” [ibid.].’”

One is immediately struck by the dynamics of this relationship. The starting point is unprovoked violence by the father/God (“It is as a man who hit his son”). Torah is then the cure for the results of that violence. In the midrash, the original blow delivered by God is reified as the evil inclination,17 which must be dragged to the study hall to be defeated by Torah study. The profoundly disturbing conclusion of this text is that the “enemy in the gate” (who, aspirationally, turns from enemy to lover) is actually God. The war between teacher and student (or sage and colleague) is, perhaps, only a variant of the war between Israel and God.18

Demons in the Study Hall The study hall is also the site of a third type of violent confrontation that emerges from the “sharpened” study of Torah. The Talmud (bḲiddushin 29b) wrestles with the following question: When there are only enough resources to support either one’s own study or the study of one’s son, which takes precedence? The Rabbis are divided. One opinion holds that the father’s own commanded obligation takes precedence. Another adds the caveat that if the son is quick-witted, sharp, and retains his learning, then the son’s study takes precedence. As illustration, the following story is told of Rav Aḥa bar Jacob and his son Rav Jacob: 17 See Ishay Rosen-Zvi’s important discussion of the yetser ha-ra (evil inclination): Demonic Desires: “Yetzer Hara” and the Problem of Evil in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 18 Michael Satlow reads this text somewhat differently, placing it within the context of Rabbinic asceticism in his “‘And on the Earth You Shall Sleep’: Talmud Torah and Rabbinic Asceticism,” Journal of Religion 83, no. 2 (2003): 204–25.

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[Rav Jacob’s] father sent him to study with Abbaye. When [Rav Jacob] returned, [Rav Aḥa] saw that his teachings were not sharp. [Rav Aḥa] said to him: “I am better than you. You stay so that I will go.” Abbaye heard that he was coming. There was a demon in the academy of Abbaye; if people would enter in pairs, even during the day, they would be harmed. [Abbaye] said to them: “Let no person give [Rav Aḥa] lodging—perhaps a miracle will happen.” [So Rav Aḥa] went and stayed in the academy. [The demon] appeared to him as a seven-headed sea monster [tannina]. With every bow that he bowed down [in prayer], one head fell off. The next day, [Rav Aḥa] said to them: “If a miracle had not happened, you would have endangered me.”

Rav Jacob was sent by his father Rav Aḥa bar Jacob to study at the academy of Abbaye. When Rav Jacob returned home, Rav Aḥa discovered that his son had not lived up to his expectations. The Torah he had studied was not ready at hand, the teachings were not sharp, the understanding was not focused. Immediately, Rav Aḥa commanded Rav Jacob to remain at home while he, Rav Aḥa, would go off to study. Meanwhile, at the academy of Abbaye, all was not well. A demon had occupied the study hall, preventing anyone from entering. The demon was so ferocious that when students approached in pairs,19 even during the day (when demons do not usually cause harm), the demon would strike them. Interestingly, the reader has not come across this demon until now. Rav Jacob did not relate to his father that a demon was occupying the study hall. This might have been a sufficient excuse for why Rav Jacob had not excelled at his studies. The narrative logic of this text is the exact opposite, though: first, Rav Aḥa finds that his son’s study is less than perfect, then the demon appears. There seems to be a causal connection between the deficient study and the demon occupying the study hall. The demon is introduced once the scene changes to the place of Abbaye’s academy and to the point of view of Abbaye. Abbaye heard that Rav Aḥa was on his way. He ordered all in his community to refuse lodging to the approaching sage. Abbaye reasoned that, lacking other lodgings, Rav Aḥa would spend the night in the study hall and, because of his stature, a miracle would occur and the demon would be defeated.

19 Cf. bBava metsi‘a 86a. Rashi ad loc. (s.v. ashḳeh teren kasse) explains that there are specific shedim (spirits) appointed to cause damage to pairs. See also bPesaḥim 109b–110b.

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To this point, the story has almost perfectly drawn a picture of conflict that generates conflict. Only one of the two, father or son, Rav Aḥa or Rav Jacob, could study. When Rav Jacob came back lacking, it was not only the case that he had not studied well, but obviously his studying instead of his father created (in the narrative logic of the story) a situation of evil in the study hall. This is represented well upon Rav Aḥa’s arrival at the academy of Abbaye. Abbaye instructs the townspeople not to offer lodging to Rav Aḥa. This hermeneutical index points to two of the most disturbing intertexts in the Bible: the “refusal of hospitality” stories of Sodom (Gen. 19) and the Concubine of Gibeah (Judg. 19–21). In both of these stories, refusing hospitality to a newcomer results in massive tragedy. The reader is primed for conflict. Rav Aḥa arrived and found all doors locked to him. He went up to the study hall and bedded down. The original generic mazziḳ (demon or damager) is perceived or understood by Rav Aḥa to be specifically a seven-headed tannin. This sea monster places this story within the mythical context of Mesopotamia, where battles with great seven-headed sea monsters are found over a period of three thousand years, from the third millennium BCE to the first centuries CE.20 Further, the tannin points towards the original cosmic battle between God and the tanninim, which enabled Creation. This battle is recorded by the psalmist: “You smashed the heads of the tanninim in the waters” (Ps. 74:13). Michael Fishbane has argued that there was a myth of the destruction of the primordial sea monsters tannin and livyatan, known from Mesopotamian literary artifacts, which was constructed by and around the academy at Pumbedita. This myth is recorded in a detailed set of traditions in bBava batra 74b–75a. Fishbane argues convincingly that the myth recorded in bBava batra is not merely an anthology of ancient traditions, but rather a “composite myth” created from “a series of separate and distinct traditions.” This myth moves from Urzeit to Endzeit, from the original clash between God and the sea monsters—and the sea monsters’ defeat—to

20 See Shmuel Ahituv, “Tannin,” in Encyclopedia Biblica, ed. Haim Tadmor et al., vol. 8 (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1982), 621. Cf. Michael Fishbane, The Exegetical Imagination: On Jewish Thought and Theology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 41 and nn. 1–3.

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the ultimate consumption of the sea monsters by the righteous at the end of days.21 It is this “Pumbeditan myth” that our story is glossing with Rav Aḥa’s recognition that the “demon” was a tannin. This places the primordial theomachy squarely into the study hall with the sage as God’s “champion.” Acting here in imitation of God, Rav Aḥa’s performance recreates the world. The dramatic potential of halakhically pitting a son’s skills in Torah study against his father’s is incarnated as the epic theomachy of the Pumbeditan myth. Staging the myth in the academy adds another level to the war of Torah—it is a theomachy by proxy, and the stakes are the existence of the world. To learn Torah, then, is to be engaged in this battle, to be sharpening oneself to be a weapon in the ongoing mythic performance of the defeat of the tannin.

Naming the War of Torah Up till now, I have analyzed texts that all seem to portray the concept of the “war of Torah” without naming it. The midrash that names the “war of Torah” is articulated in bSanhedrin 42a. Rav Aḥa bar Ḥanina, a thirdto fourth-century Palestinian sage, relates an interpretive tradition in the name of Rav Assi, a third-century Palestinian sage, quoting Rabbi Johanan. The tradition is a midrashic understanding of Prov. 24:6, which reads: “For by taḥbulot [strategems] you wage war.” The word taḥbulot shares an apparent root, ḥ-b-l, with the Rabbinic Hebrew word ḥavilah (bundle). With this as fulcrum, the midrashic reader offers the following rereading and re-contextualization of the verse: “Who is the one who wages milḥamtah shel Torah?” the midrashist asks. “This is the one armed with ḥavilot of mishnah.” Rashi explains that the successful combatant in the war of Torah (of which the Talmud is a textual representation), that is, the sage, must be armed with knowledge of many specific legal traditions to back up his theories and insights. This midrashic reading was probably generated in part by the fact that the previous verse in Proverbs reads: “A wise man is strength.” The Biblical Hebrew ḥakham (wise man) is the Rabbinic Hebrew sage. The midrashic reader drew the conclusion that if the verse was referring to a sage, then the 21 Fishbane, The Exegetical Imagination, 41–55. Significantly, Rav Aḥa bar Jacob is one of the tradents cited in that text.

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war that was to be fought was not that of armies and generals, but rather that of sages and Torah. The logical continuation was that the taḥbulot with which the war would be won were not, obviously, the “stratagems” or schemes of soldiers but the ḥavilot, or bundles of law, that the sage had acquired.22 In any event, the study of Torah is a war. As we have seen, Torah study as war is a multivalent metaphor: a war between teachers and students or fathers and sons; a war between God and Israel; and a mythic war between sages (in loco Dei?) and the primordial tannin.

The Land of Israel and the Babylonian Rabbis In a fascinating sugya in bSanhedrin 24a, the Talmud characterizes the nature of the war of Torah in Babylonia and contrasts it with the supposed practice of the sages of the Land of Israel. Using terms derived from Zech. 11:7, the Babylonian rabbis name their own study practice “ḥovelim,” as in meḥabbelim zeh la-zeh ba-halakhah (inflicting harm upon one another in [the study of] halakhah), and the Palestinian practice “no‘am,” as in man‘imin zeh la-zeh ba-halakhah (being pleasant to one another in [the study of] halakhah). While at first glance this seems to be an obvious derogation of the Babylonian tradition, it is in fact a far more complicated gesture. The sugya has three parts and is explicitly tied back to the previous discussion by the introductory term gufa.23 The line introduced by gufa is a quotation of a statement by Resh Lakish from the previous sugya: “Said Resh Lakish: ‘Would a holy mouth make this statement? Teach [that is, emend the text to read instead] “his witness.”’” Resh Lakish’s comment in its original setting is directed at a statement attributed to Rabbi Meir. R. Meir is quoted as saying that each of the litigants in a court action might invalidate the witnesses (plural) of the other litigant. To this quotation Resh Lakish responds by questioning the accuracy of its transmission. Rather 22 In a variation on this midrash, bḤagigah 14a, commenting on Isa. 3:2, reads gibbor ṿe-ish milḥamah (soldier and warrior) as follows: “gibbor—this refers to a master of the halakhic tradition; ṿe-ish milḥamah—this refers to one who knows how to engage in milḥamtah shel Torah.” Other variants appear in bMegillah 15b and bSanhedrin 93b, 111b. 23 The question of the redactional importance and ramifications of the term gufa is insignificant for my present point. See Abraham Weiss, Le-ḳorot hithaṿṿut ha-Bavli (gufa ṿa-amar mar) (Jerusalem: Makor, 1970).

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than presuming that a tanna (mishnaic sage) had been mistaken—something that would contradict the rules of the game for an amora (Talmudic sage) such as the third-century Palestinian Resh Lakish—he engages in redaction. “R. Meir must have said ‘witness’ in the singular.” At our point of entry, the historical accuracy of Resh Lakish’s statement (which generates further conversation in its original setting) is itself challenged on the grounds that it apparently conflicts with what we know about Resh Lakish’s status as a Torah scholar: Did [Resh Lakish] really react this way? But did not Ulla say: “One who sees Resh Lakish in the study hall—it is as if he is uprooting mountains and grinding them into each other”? Said Ravina: “Is it not the case that all who see R. Meir in the study hall—it is as if he is uprooting hare harim [great mountains]24 and grinding them into each other?”

Ulla, a third- to fourth-century amora born in Palestine but active in both Palestine and Babylonia, supports the image of Resh Lakish’s powerful abilities, his virile stance in the study hall. The implication is that such a personality type would likely not adopt an attitude of subservience towards R. Meir. The fifth-century Babylonian amora Ravina responds by presenting a picture of R. Meir that is equally virile and violent (or more so, if we follow the reading of our printed editions). This would then explain Resh Lakish’s proper expression of humility. The stam (anonymous editorial voice) proposes an alternative reading of the sugya’s introductory question, according to which it was never meant to express doubt about Resh Lakish’s reverence for R. Meir: This is what [the question] meant: “Come and see how much [Resh Lakish and R. Meir] loved each other!” Just as when Rabbi was sitting and said: “It is forbidden to insulate [food on the Sabbath that is] cold [to warm it up].” Said Rabbi Ishmael ben Rabbi Yose before him: “Father permitted insulating cold [food].” [Rabbi] said to [his students]: “The old man has ruled [and I retract].” Said Rav Papa: “Come and see how much they loved each other! If R. Yose were alive, he would be bending over and sitting in front of Rabbi, for R. Ishmael ben R. Yose was taking his father’s place, and he was bent over and sitting before Rabbi. And still, Rabbi said: ‘The old man has ruled.’”

24 MS Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Magl. II.I.9, p. 138: harim (mountains).

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Rav Papa, a fourth-century Babylonian amora, generously interprets a story of Rabbi and R. Ishmael, in which Rabbi retracts his own ruling in deference to the ruling of one—R. Yose, R. Ishmael’s father—who would have been lower than him in status. Rav Papa attributes this to the great love of Rabbi for R. Yose. The stam uses this paradigm to read the sugya’s original question about Resh Lakish’s reaction, understanding that the question was meant to emphasize Resh Lakish’s love for R. Meir, given Resh Lakish’s own status as a great sage. In this short piece, there is a performance of the move from enemies to lovers, from warriors to companions that was spelled out in the text of bḲiddushin analyzed above. It is significant to note that the laudatory description at the start of the text is a violent one: Resh Lakish is perceived to be destroying mountains. As a note to be picked up later, it is a Babylonian amora (Rav Papa) whose reading allows the (Babylonian) stam to reread the sugya’s question about the Palestinian amora Resh Lakish’s statement in a convivial way. The second part of the sugya continues with a midrashic interpretation of a verse in Zechariah that sets up a dichotomy between Palestinian and Babylonian sages: Said Rabbi Oshaya: “What is [the meaning] of that which is written: ‘I got two staffs, one of which I named Favor [no‘am] and the other Unity [ḥovelim]’ [Zech. 11:7]? No‘am: These are the sages of the Land of Israel who are pleasant [man‘imin] to one another in [the study of] halakhah. Ḥovelim: These are the sages of Babylonia who inflict harm upon [meḥabbelim] one another in [the study of] halakhah.” “Then [the angel] explained, ‘They are the two anointed dignitaries [bene ha-yits′har] who attend .  .  .’” [Zech. 4:14]. “And by it are two olive trees” [Zech. 4:3]. Yits′har: Said Rabbi Isaac: “These are the sages of the Land of Israel who are as easygoing with each other in [the study of] halakhah as olive oil.”25 “And by it are two olive trees”: “These are the sages of Babylonia who are as bitter to each other in [the study of] halakhah as olives.”

In this doubled midrash, both R. Oshaya and R. Isaac construct in their respective readings a binary opposition between the culture of study in the Land of Israel and Babylonia. The sages who reside in the former are 25 Ibid.: she-meshammeni[n] zeh la-zeh ba-halakhah (who oil each other in [the study of] halakhah).

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supportive of and pleasant with each other; they are not combative or bitter towards one another. By contrast, the sages of Babylonia are violent towards each other. This latter interpretation is especially interesting, since it is generated by a reading of the semantic field of the word ḥovelim that lies at the far end of that field and even moves it into another word, according to some lexicographers.26 In the continuation of Zechariah 11, the prophet reports that he has symbolically cut the staff that he named ḥovelim “in order to annul the brotherhood between Judah and Israel” (Zech. 11:14). From its context, it is apparent that the word ḥovelim is related to binding (ḥevel, ḥavalim). The midrashist, however, reads it as deriving from the homonymous root ḥ-b-l, meaning “to ravage,” “to bring chaos.” In the second midrash, R. Isaac gives a creative interpretation to the phrase bene ha-yits′har. In Zech. 4:4, and then again in v. 11, the prophet had asked the angel to explain what the two olive trees mentioned in v. 3 meant. The angel replies here, in v. 14, that they were “the two anointed dignitaries.” The midrashist reads instead that the two bene ha-yits′har are the sages of the Land of Israel. They are nice to or easygoing with each other, or (reading with the MS) they oil each other—an image resplendent with sensuality. The sages of Babylonia, however, are represented by the symbol of the olives, since they are bitter to each other or make each other suffer bitterly, just as olives are bitter. It is important to note that these midrashim, attributed to third-century amora’im from the Land of Israel and apparently derogatory towards Babylonian sages, are only found in the Babylonian Talmud.27 This sugya does not stand alone. Its own rhetoric—the introductory term gufa—announces that it is referring back to the previous sugya. The discussion there addresses the question of how to form a court, the right of one side or the other to have a judge of his or her own choosing, and 26 See Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs, eds., A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), 287 (s.v. ḥovelim). 27 In fact, the dominant Palestinian tradition identifies the two bene ha-yits′har with specific personalities, for example, Moses, Aaron, David, and the messiah. Cf. Sifra, Parashat tsaṿ 18:1 (bene ha-yits′har = Aaron and David); Exodus Rabbah 15:3 (= Moses and Aaron); Avot de-Rabbi Natan, version 1, ch. 34 (= Aaron and the messiah). yMa‘aśer sheni 33a also cites midrashic readings of this verse attributed to Resh Lakish and R. Johanan. They identify the bene ha-yits′har either with those who come before God with power (ṭirunya = τυραννία) or with those who come before God with good deeds. See Jacob Sussmann, ed., Talmud Yerushalmi: According to Ms. Or. 4720 (Scal. 3) of the Leiden University Library with Restorations and Corrections (Jerusalem: The Academy of the Hebrew Language, 2001), 309.

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whether one side might invalidate the judge chosen by the other. The general model for Rabbinic civil court formation is one in which each side chooses its own judge and then those two judges together choose a third. The rationale for this (attributed to Rabbi Zeira) is that, “since this one chooses one judge, and this one chooses one judge, and the two choose another judge—the decision will come out truthfully” (bSanhedrin 23a). Rashi explains this rationale as follows: “The litigants will obey [the ruling], since the one found culpable will think: ‘Behold, I myself chose one [of the judges]. If he could have argued in my favor, he would have.’” So it is specifically because the litigants will rely on the assumption that “their” judges will fight for them that we are sure that they will obey the decision. Moreover, R. Zeira claims that this procedure assures that the decision itself will come out truthfully. Our description of Babylonian sages being ruthless to one another is thus embedded in a context in which that kind of confrontation is noted for its ability to produce truth. Is ḥovelim, then, inferior or superior to no‘am? The third part of the sugya continues with an ascription of excessive flattery and arrogance to Babylonia, based on a Palestinian tannaitic source. The sugya’s coda, however, is again conflicted: “What is ‘bavel [Babylonia]’? Said R. Johanan: ‘Belulah [mixed] with Scripture, Mishnah, and Talmud.’ ‘He has made me dwell in darkness, like those long dead’ [Lam. 3:6]. Said Rabbi Jeremiah: ‘This is the talmud [study] of Babylonia’” (bSanhedrin 24a). R. Johanan is reading the phonemes of the word bavel midrashically, as the Torah itself does in Gen. 11:9: “That is why it was called Babel, because there the Lord balal [confounded] the speech of the whole earth.” This mixing is what is done to the oil of the meal offerings. The latter is the predominant use of the verb balal in the Torah. R. Johanan, therefore, understands bavel as a place that is a mixture of learning.28 R. Jeremiah does not interpret the word bavel, but rather the place bavel. He cites an intertext from Lamentations which understands being sent into exile as being made to “dwell in darkness.” This darkness must be Babylonia, since that is where Israel was exiled. Bavel, then, is a place lacking in Torah study, a place that dwells in darkness, as it were. There is, of course, no resolution here. The sugya ends equivocally, with voice given equally to the praise and denigration of Babylonian study. 28 This positive reading of balal is present in the reception history of this sugya. See, for example, Tosafot ad loc. (s.v. belulah).

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What, however, are we to do with the praise given to Palestinian study solely in Babylonian texts and the fact that this whole sugya is generated by a halakhic discussion that valorizes the conflict that our sugya seems to denigrate? I would suggest the following. As I noted above, the first part of the sugya interpretively performs the move from enemies to lovers that is described in bḲiddushin 30b. The later Babylonian amora allows the stam to reread the question about the earlier Palestinian statement in a utopian way. This is the key. The Land of Israel stands in for the utopian vision of the end of days, or the ideal society. In the present broken world, sages must ravage each other in study in order to arrive at the truth, just as God birthed the world through the violent defeat of the tannin, and Israel, in accepting the Torah, continues in loco Dei the same violent battle that sustains the world. However, there will come an eschatological time when sages will be pleasant to and supportive of each other. Torah, then, will not be a salve for an unprovoked wound, but perhaps the ground for a new relationship with God akin to the Palestinian sages’ favorable relations with one another.

Sage-on-Sage Violence Perhaps not surprisingly, the violence of the sages in the context of Torah study does not remain in the academy, but is projected also onto the political realm. bGiṭṭin 7a records the following anecdote. The Babylonian Exilarch in the third century, Mar Ukba, sent a message to another sage in the Land of Israel, Rabbi Eleazar. His message was as follows: “Certain men are opposing me, and I am able to turn them over to the government; what is [the law]?” R. Eleazar answered by quoting a verse and adding a midrashic reading of it: “I resolved I would watch my step lest I offend by my speech; I would keep my mouth muzzled while the wicked man was in my presence [le-negdi]” (Ps. 39:2). R. Eleazar’s interpretation of the verse is: “Although the wicked man is opposing me [le-negdi], I will keep my mouth muzzled.” R. Eleazar, in his answer, reads the polysemic word le-negdi to mean “opposing me,” rather than the usual translation of “before me” or “in my presence.” This rereading renders the verse from Psalms as a statement of almost stoic forbearance in the face of evil opposition. In his next missive, Mar Ukba seems to be losing his patience:

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[Mar Ukba] sent to him: “They are troubling me very much, and I am unable to bear it!” [R. Eleazar] sent to him: “‘Be patient and hitḥolel [wait] for the Lord’ [Ps. 37:7]—be silent for the Lord, and He will cast them down as ḥalalim ḥalalim [many corpses] before you. Go to the study hall early in the morning and late in the evening, and they will cease to exist on their own.” The words left R. Eleazar’s mouth, and Geniba [the tormentor] was placed in chains [for execution].

R. Eleazar’s answer is again a midrashic interpretation of a verse from Psalms, which, in full, reads: “Be patient and wait for the Lord, do not be vexed by the prospering man who carries out his schemes.” The complex midrashic reading assumes that the context of waiting patiently for God is one of political strife—“the prospering man who carries out his schemes.” According to this understanding, the four-word phrase that heads the verse is read as if it were three clauses. Dom, contextually meaning “be patient,” is interpreted in the related sense of “be silent.”29 “And wait for the Lord” is understood to mean “it is up to God” or “let God take care of it.” Finally, the fact that the grammatical form of hitḥolel doubles the final lamed enables the midrashist to fancifully read the word as related to ḥalal (corpse),30 yielding the interpretation that God will “cast them down as many corpses.” The final line of the story shows that R. Eleazar’s advice was prescient: “The words left R. Eleazar’s mouth, and Geniba [the tormentor] was placed in chains [for execution].”31 Structurally, it is clear that R. Eleazar’s advice, that is, his reading the power of Rabbinic learning—going to the study hall—into the verse in Psalms, leads to Geniba’s death.32 The phrase

29 As in Ps. 39:3: “I was dumb, silent [dumiyyah].” 30 The medieval commentaries are split over the true root of hitḥolel. Rashi to Ps. 37:7 claims that it is related to the word toḥelet, meaning hope. Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra ad loc. dismisses this etymology and claims ḥ-y-l, meaning agony (as in Ps. 48:7), as its root. Brown, Driver, Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon, 297, side with Ibn Ezra in this debate and translate the word “wait longingly” (in anguish). (On p. 1063, they assign toḥelet the root y-ḥ-l.) 31 On the question of whether ḳolar necessarily implies execution, or merely imprisonment, Kalmin (see the next note) argues for the latter and I for the former. Literally, the word refers only to the chains of imprisonment, but see Rashi ad loc. and to bSanhedrin 7b (s.v. ḳolar talui), where imprisonment makes no contextual sense. 32 It is worth noting that the story of Mar Ukba and Geniba is the only story in the Talmud where sages effectively hand over a fellow sage to the authorities for execution. The only place, other than this sugya, where this story is alluded to is elsewhere in bGiṭṭin (65b). On ff. 31b and 62a, Geniba is referred to as palga’ah—one who causes arguments, or

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“The words left X’s mouth, and Y happened to Z” connotes just this type of causality.33 This mode of Rabbinic violence is reinforced by two more midrashic interpretations of verses that follow on the same folio of the Babylonian Talmud. In these additional midrashic readings of verses, Rabbinic intellectual prowess and Rabbinic power are paralleled: Rav Huna bar Nathan said to Rav Ashi: “What is the meaning of the verse, ‘Kinah, Dimonah, Adadah’ [Josh. 15:22]?” [Rav Ashi] said to him: “[The text] is enumerating towns in the Land of Israel.” He said to him: “Do I not know that the text is enumerating towns in the Land of Israel? But Rav Gebiha from Argiza extrapolated [from these names]: ‘Whoever has cause for indignation [ḳin’ah] against his neighbor and yet holds his peace [domem], the One Who abides for all eternity [ade ad] will do justice for him.’”

This exchange reads almost like Rav Huna is throwing down a gauntlet, which Rav Ashi picks up but fumbles. While this exercise of power is taking place, the performance of Rabbinic exposition itself—the midrashic reading—when successfully accomplished by Rav Gebiha, outlines a deployment of divine violence similar to that articulated by R. Eleazar above. Rav Huna initially asks Rav Ashi to explain the meaning of a segment of a list of cities in Joshua 15 that form part of the boundary of the land of the tribe of Judah. From Rav Huna’s response to Rav Ashi’s answer, it is one who is divisive. These are the only pericopae where anything bad is said about Geniba. There have been many attempts to extract the “historical kernel of truth” from this story. See Moshe Herr, “Rivo shel Geniva be-Mar Uḳba,” Tarbiz 31, no. 3 (April 1962): 281–86, and Jacob Neusner, A History of the Jews in Babylonia, vol. 3 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1968), 75–81. Neither of these authors notes the fact that the story of the execution is only mentioned in bGiṭṭin. Richard Kalmin, Sages, Stories, Authors, and Editors in Rabbinic Babylonia (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994), 27, following Herr, argues that “[t]he Mar Ukba tale .  .  . most likely derives from sources hostile to Geniva, as is indicated by its portrayal of Geniva’s imprisonment as divine reward for Ukba’s restraint.” This might be so; however, as I will show, the story is embedded in a longer sugya that has two more portrayals of rabbis reading violence midrashically into verses. Whatever the original intention for its creation, the story as embedded in this context is about violence through speech. 33 This type of violence through speech that results in death or injury (accidental or purposeful) is theorized as “an error committed by a ruler” (Eccl. 10:5). See bMo‘ed ḳaṭan 18a, bKetubbot 23a, 62b. This same locution is used to describe an instance of Rabbinic verbal violence which leads to death or injury several times in the Jerusalem Talmud as well (see, for example, yShabbat 76b).

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obvious that Rav Huna was not asking for a geography lesson or an explanation of the simple meaning of the verse. Rav Huna’s question was a challenge to Rav Ashi to derive significance from these words, to wrest meaning from this inconsequential phrase. Rav Ashi fails. The failure is highlighted by the fact that another sage successfully reads this verse midrashically. Rav Gebiha from Argiza, a little-known Babylonian amora,34 interprets the place names phonemically to midrashic advantage. He thereby extracts a narrative of divine vengeance from this seemingly insignificant text. The name ḳinah is read as if it were ḳin’ah, that is, “jealousy,” “indignation.”35 The name dimonah is read as if it came from the root d-m-m—similar to the root we saw used above—meaning “silence.” Finally, the name ad‘adah is read as if it were a phrase: “the One Who abides for all eternity” (shokhen ade ad). This produces the midrashic narrative: “Whoever has cause for indignation [ḳin’ah] against his neighbor and yet holds his peace [domem], the One Who abides for all eternity [ade ad] will do justice for him.” The power of Rabbinic exegesis constructs divine violence on behalf of the Rabbis. Immediately following this exchange, there is another one, which introduces a midrashic reading that again guarantees that divine vengeance will be visited upon the enemies of a sage who is silent when justifiably vengeful:36 [Rav Ashi] said to him: “On this basis, then, ‘Ziklag, Madmannah, Sansannah’ [Josh. 15:31] might also [be interpreted in a similar manner]?” [Rav Huna] said to him: “If Rav Gebiha from Be Argiza were here, he would expound it.” Rav Aḥa from Be Ḥoza’ah expounded it as follows: “If a man has just cause of complaint against his neighbor for taking away his livelihood [tsa‘aḳat legima] and yet holds his peace [domem], the One Who abides in the bush [shokhen ba-seneh] will do justice for him.”

34 He apparently appears twice in the Babylonian Talmud. There is a Rav Gebiha from Be Katil who appears several more times and usually with Rav Ashi. It is possible that these two are the same person. There is also a non-rabbinic Gebiha ben Pesisa who engages (successfully) in disputations on behalf of the sages with the “Africans” (Phrygians) and the “Egyptians” in front of Alexander the Great in bSanhedrin 91a. 35 As in E-l ḳanna (an impassioned God) of Ex. 20:5. 36 These midrashic readings are perhaps best thematized as a subset of Rabbinic violence under the heading of a statement cited in the name of R. Johanan, who attributes it to Rabbi Simeon ben Jehozadak in bYoma 22b–23a: “Any sage who does not avenge himself and bear a grudge like a snake is not a sage.”

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Here, Rav Ashi turns the tables, challenging Rav Huna to read a different part of that same list of boundary cities midrashically. Rav Huna retorts that Rav Gebiha from Be Argiza would have been able to expound the verse appropriately. The anonymous editor then supplies the reader with the information that the verse had been successfully read midrashically by Rav Aḥa from Be Ḥoza’ah. Again, using a combination of phonemic closeness and approximate similarity of roots, Rav Aḥa derives from this verse a narrative of divine vengeance, which is deployed so that there is no need for human vengeance. In both of these exchanges between Rav Huna and Rav Ashi, the principle of Rabbinic hermeneutic violence is established. The sage worth his salt is able to read divine vengeance out of a seemingly innocuous verse. That vengeance is employed against those who in some way wrong the sage, and the sage has proven his place in the hierarchy by his ability to read the verse midrashically in the first place.

Conclusion In The Sage in Jewish Society of Late Antiquity, Richard Kalmin deftly analyzes the famous story of the conversion of Resh Lakish by R. Johanan from banditry to the Rabbinic way of life, their subsequent relationship as student and teacher and then as colleagues, and their final fatal falling out, which results in first Resh Lakish’s death and then R. Johanan’s (bBava metsi‘a 84a). He says the following: “The passion which makes one a great brigand, the story teaches, also makes one a great Torah scholar. The study house and the battlefield are similar arenas. Debates in the study house are a matter of life and death, every bit as dangerous as a fight to the death between brigands.”37 This is all true. The question that I have attempted to answer is: why is it true? Following Maud Gleason in her study of the Sophists, Virginia Burrus argues that rhetoric was the favored mode of masculine self-fashioning through the fourth century CE—moving from the pagan to the Christian world.38 This masculine self-fashioning is also present in the Talmudic texts 37 Richard Kalmin, The Sage in Jewish Society of Late Antiquity (New York: Routledge, 1999), 4. 38 Maud Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Virginia Burrus, Begotten, Not Made: Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 18–23.

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I have presented. The notion of sharpening oneself as an arrow to engage in the war of Torah is deeply embedded in the fashioning of masculinity. It cannot go without notice that women are almost completely elided from these texts. In “The Ethics of Argument: Plato’s Gorgias and the Modern Lawyer,” James Boyd White mounts a vigorous defense of lawyers as rhetoricians. His claim, in part, is that the rhetoric of lawyers accomplishes much the same thing as Socratic dialectic does. As White reads it, the purpose of Socrates’s dialectic is to recreate language; to bring a person to an unfamiliar and, therefore, untenable position in relation to his or her own language and thereby force a crisis from which will eventually emerge a new language: “One comes suddenly to see both self and language as uncertain, as capable of being remade in relation to each other. The true aim of a dialogue that works this way, of the Gorgias among others, is nothing less than the shared reconstitution of self and language.”39 White’s lawyer/rhetorician does something similar. The lawyer uses, reuses, and questions the use of the language of truth and justice. This process leads to the refining of our ability to talk about these values as they are embedded in the culture. In White’s words: [L]awyers preserve and improve a language of description, value, and reason—a culture of argument—without which it would be impossible even to ask the questions that you think are most important, questions about the nature of justice in general or about what is required in a particular case. This is because “doing justice,” “arguing about justice,” and “deciding what justice requires” are never wholly abstract activities, but are always culturally conditioned.40

White’s lawyers are not merely rhetoricians. They are rhetoricians on a mission. They are “doing justice” and “deciding what justice requires.” Lawyers arguing all sides of a case enable a culture to use language to discuss justice, to discover justice. There is much in White’s argument that might be applied to our understanding of the culture of Talmudic argument. If one of the purposes of a Talmudic dispute is to destabilize language, thereby enabling it to be reinterpreted, vigorous and aggressive argument would be an effective strategy. 39 James Boyd White, “The Ethics of Argument: Plato’s Gorgias and the Modern Lawyer,” The University of Chicago Law Review 50, no. 2 (1983): 852. 40 Ibid., 880.

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Yet, this suggestion is not completely satisfying. It is because of this that I suggested a description of the cultural practice of the violent Talmudic dispute. The description is constructed by way of the narrative that makes sense of the cultural practice. Thematizing Torah study as the “war of Torah,” as the Babylonian Talmud does in the texts I have presented and in many others besides, puts the practice of study into narrative. The narrative at its highest level is the cosmic theomachy in which the sage studying Torah is standing in the place of God, fighting the encroaching tannin, warding off the destruction of the world. This is, as we mentioned above, Benjamin’s “mythic” and “lawmaking violence.” The violence of the practice of Torah study is, then, essential to its cultural role. In the Babylonian Talmud, if the continuation of the chain of study is a matter of life and death, each individual’s Torah study is then a matter of life and death as well. It is thus the overwhelming obligation of a sage to reproduce sages. It is similarly the overwhelming obligation of sages to take the study of Torah as a practice of the utmost seriousness. Perhaps in a utopian future, Torah study might be an activity of mutual pleasure; now, it is a battle whose stakes are the highest.

Moshe Halbertal, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and New York University

Discipleship in Rabbinic Literature*

Four Characteristics of Rabbinic Culture Rabbinic culture spanned roughly eight centuries, from the end of the Persian occupation of the Land of Israel at the beginning of the second century BCE until the advent of the Muslim conquest of the Land in the seventh century CE. It flourished in diverse geographical and geopolitical settings: under the Hellenistic and Roman rule of Palestine and as part of the Sasanian Empire in Babylonia. The literature produced during this long period consisted of radically different genres; its major canonical compilation—the Mishnah—which is organized thematically, is of a different nature than the midrash, which follows the sequence of scriptural verses and interprets them creatively. The Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud, devoted to meticulously complex interpretations of the Mishnah, differ dramatically from the Mishnah and the midrash as well, in style, modes of thinking, and language. Dozens of scholars were part of this immense creative outburst, and its diversity in geopolitical settings and literary genres is matched by the multiplicity of opinions and stances expressed in this vast literature. Nevertheless, there is justification for approaching this diverse collection of texts under the unified rubric of “Rabbinic culture.” The coherence of the thought of Ḥazal (the Rabbis) can be traced to four central features that are present in every page of this immense scholarly endeavor, features that distinguish Rabbinic literature culturally and religiously from that which preceded it in the biblical and Second Temple periods. * To Chaim, who knows how to question.

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The first feature is the emergence of the scholar as an ideal type. Unlike the biblical priest, who derives his authority from his pedigree and monopoly over ritual service at the Temple, the talmid ḥakham (scholar) achieves influence via his command of a body of knowledge, his capacity to interpret and argue, and his embodiment of the norms and ideals of the community. Unlike the biblical prophet, the talmid ḥakham establishes rules and laws not through claims of direct revelation but through his institutional role in the judicial court and his use of highly developed interpretive and argumentative skills. The emergence of the scholar as a preferred substitute for biblical ideal types is emphasized in Rabbinic literature in passages that directly address the clash between priest, prophet, and talmid ḥakham. In one such example, the Mishnah legislates that in a case in which only one life can be saved, priority must be given to a scholar who is a bastard with no lineage over an ignoramus who happens to be a high priest (mHorayot 3:8).1 In line with the first feature, the second feature is the rise of talmud Torah (the study of Torah) as a central religious value that stands above every other religious praxis. With such lofty status bestowed upon talmud Torah, the domain of the sacred was redefined and redirected. For the priest, the sacred is spatially defined: God resides in space at the Temple, which is the axis mundi. For the prophet, revelation is mainly manifested in time, in the historic, great upheavals of which he is shown a vision, which he must then interpret for the people. The scholar, by contrast, posits the Torah as the main medium of revelation, and every new insight and nuance gleaned from its verses serves as another intimate encounter with the Divine. In shifting the locus of revelation from space and time to text, the Rabbinic world managed to create an enduring religious life even when deprived of the Temple and in conditions of exile where God’s face had become hidden in history. The third feature, intrinsically related to the previous ones, is the centrality of a new institution—the bet ha-midrash (house of study)—in which scholars teach and expound the Torah. The intensity of the life of the bet ha-midrash is witnessed in countless narratives that provide us with a glimpse into the internal workings and drama of the site in which Rabbinic literature was created.

1 On the preference of sages over prophets, see, for example, ySanhedrin 30b and bBava batra 12b.

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The fourth feature is the emergence of controversy as a mode of transmitting the canonical teachings of the culture. From the first mishnah onward, Rabbinic literature presents itself as a series of debates recorded and then passed on to subsequent generations. Such an innovative form of canonicity was made possible by, among other factors, the shift from prophet to scholar. Debates among prophets might have existed, but biblical literature cannot take the form of the Mishnah and declare, “Isaiah said X while Jeremiah said Y,” because in such a case, one of the disputants would be considered a false prophet. Controversy as a literary mode is absent from the extensive literature that has come down to us from the Second Temple period, like the Dead Sea Scrolls; such a form, so familiar to any reader of Rabbinic literature—be it Mishnah, midrash, or Talmud—was a dramatic innovation of this particular culture. These common features took different forms in the variety of contexts in which they flourished. The bet ha-midrash in Babylonia was far more institutionalized than its counterpart in the Land of Israel,2 and the scholarly elite, its impact, and the nature of its privileges varied in the different periods and places in which it operated.3 One interesting indicator of the centrality of these features in Rabbinic culture is the way in which they themselves had become a focus of intense interpretive activity that resulted in collisions and debates concerning their meaning. Different positions were expressed about the virtues and proper dispositions of the talmid ḥakham, and a deep conflict emerged in Rabbinic literature over whether talmud Torah ought to be oriented to the world, or should it rather serve as a contemplative withdrawal from earthly reality to eternal life? Likewise, the meaning of controversy itself became a matter of controversy between the view that celebrated disagreement as anchored in revelation and the one that saw it as evidence of a state of fallen-ness from an initial ideal unity. In any event, the emergence of the scholar as an ideal type, the rise of talmud Torah as the most important religious activity, the advent of the bet 2 For the later institutionalization of the yeshiva in Babylonia, see David M. Goodblatt, Rabbinic Instruction in Sasanian Babylonia (Leiden: Brill, 1975); for a different account, see Isaiah Gafni, Yehude Bavel bi-teḳufat ha-Talmud: ḥayye ha-ḥevrah ṿe-ha-ruaḥ (Jerusalem: Merkaz Shazar, 1990), 177–203. 3 Catherine Hezser, The Social Structure of the Rabbinic Movement in Roman Palestine (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997). On the economic and social privileges of the scholarly elite, see Moshe Beer, “Talmud Torah ṿe-derekh erets (li-she’elat ḳiyyumam ha-kalkali shel ha-tanna’im),” Bar-Ilan 2 (1964): 134–62, and idem, “Yiśśakhar u-Zevulun: li-she’elat ḳiyyumam ha-kalkali shel amora’e E[rets] Y[iśra’el],” Bar-Ilan 6 (1968): 167–80.

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ha-midrash as a central institution, and the codification of controversy as a primary mode for the transmission of tradition are unique, distinctive features of Rabbinic literature and are present in all its vast variety of genres and contexts. In this world, the construction of discipleship became a central concern of religious life as a whole.4 How is someone initiated into being a student, and what does it mean to be a disciple? What are the rules that govern the status of a disciple, and how do they relate to the initiation, training, and shaping of a scholar? In particular, I wish to explore a tension at the heart of discipleship that emerges in Rabbinic literature: between the ideal disciple, his training, and his initiation, on the one hand, and the hierarchical protocol that regulates discipleship, on the other. Acute awareness of the vulnerability of the disciple and his condition shines through the Talmudic sources on the topic. A full explication of these themes must be introduced with a preliminary sketch of the disciple and his training and the protocol that governs his status and behavior.

A Taxonomy of Disciples Rabbinic literature provides us with an intricate taxonomy and classification of disciples, and a great deal can be learned about discipleship from the ways in which a culture describes, measures, evaluates, and ranks disciples and their qualities. Two of the students of Rabban Johanan ben Zakkai were characterized as very different from one another. Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus was described as “a plastered cistern that does not lose a drop,” while Rabbi Eleazar ben Arakh was praised as a creative student, “an overflowing spring” (Avot 2:8). In a further classification of students, a distinction is made not only between the well-versed student, who is a perfect recipient of traditions, and the creative student, but between the curious student and the indifferent one: “Rabbi Judah says: ‘A student who is of good quality is analogous to a sponge, for he soaks it all up. Second to him is analogous to a [semi-absorbent] compress, for he soaks up only what is necessary; this is the student who says, “What my teacher taught me is

4 On the centrality of discipleship in Rabbinic culture, see Martin S. Jaffee, “A Rabbinic Ontology of the Written and Spoken Word: On Discipleship, Transformative Knowledge, and the Living Texts of Oral Torah,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65, no. 3 (Autumn 1997): 529–33.

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enough”’” (Sifre, Parashat eḳev 48).5 In another, more detailed typology, we read as follows: There are four types among those who sit in the presence of the sages: the sponge, the funnel, the strainer, and the sieve. “The sponge” is one who soaks everything up. “The funnel” is one who takes in at this end and lets out at the other. “The strainer” is one who lets out the wine and retains the dregs. “The sieve” is one who removes the coarse meal and collects the fine flour [Avot 5:15].

The analogy between types of disciples and diverse sifting tools and containers serves to establish a gradation between classes of students and their capacity to assimilate and organize information. The student compared to the sponge absorbs all the information in an undifferentiated way, while “the funnel” is his opposite, retaining nothing that he is taught. The student who is like the sieve has an organizing and discerning capacity, distinguishing between what is essential and what is not, while his opposite resembles the strainer that keeps only the redundant and superfluous material and loses all that is precious.6 Absorbing and organizing are not the sole desirable qualities of a disciple. As the analogy of the “overflowing spring” teaches us, a student is praised for his capacity to generate new knowledge, not only receive it.7 In defining the strict conditions for the initiation of students to the esoteric realm of the study of the divine world, which is constrained and well-guarded, the Mishnah stipulates that the disciple’s capacity to expound such matters on his own constitutes a precondition for teaching him: “The subject of forbidden relations may not be expounded in the presence of three, nor the account 5 On the value of studying with different teachers, see Avot de-Rabbi Natan, version 1, ch. 3, and version 2, ch. 18. For an illuminating discussion of the Sifre passage in the larger context of education in Rabbinic culture, see Marc Hirshman, The Stabilization of Rabbinic Culture, 100 C.E.–350 C.E.: Texts on Education and Their Late Antique Context (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 31–48. 6 See the version of this typology in Avot de-Rabbi Natan, version 1, ch. 40, and version 2, ch. 45. In another classification of students, a contrasting pairing of qualities of grasping material and retaining it is made: “There are four types of students: Quick to learn and quick to forget—his gain is negated by his loss. Slow to learn and slow to forget—his loss is negated by his gain. Quick to learn and slow to forget—he is a sage. Slow to learn and quick to forget—his is an unhappy lot” (Avot 5:12). 7 On the ranking of the scholarly qualities of memory and creativity, see Saul Lieberman, Meḥḳarim be-Torat Erets-Yiśraʼel, ed. David Rosenthal (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1991), 568.

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of Creation in the presence of two, nor the account of the Chariot in the presence of one, unless he is wise and understands on his own” (mḤagigah 2:1).8 The ultimate praise of disciples in Rabbinic culture is the claim that they innovate ideas that were never heard before, due to their mastery of the techniques of argumentation and interpretation. In the narrative of the initiation of R. Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, his teacher R. Johanan ben Zakkai urges him to begin to expound publicly by himself. The text describes R. Eliezer’s teachings in the following way: “He stood and began expounding matters that no ear had ever heard. Following each statement that he made, R. Johanan stood on his feet and kissed his head. He said to him: ‘My teacher R. Eliezer, you have taught me the truth’” (Avot de-Rabbi Natan, version 1, ch. 6). Such creative force, nurtured and praised in the student, might occasionally lead him astray. Among the variety of students and their classifications, Talmudic sources discuss the one who has mastered the dialectical technique in a most impressive way yet misfires due to a lack of judgment and commonsense. “Rabbi said: ‘Rabbi Meir had a distinguished student who could argue for both the purity and impurity of a rodent in one hundred different ways.’ They said: ‘This student was unqualified to rule.’ Rabbi Jacob bar Dassai said that this student was cut off from Mount Sinai” (ySanhedrin 22a; see also bEruvin 13b).9 Mastering the dialectical technique to the degree that one could logically prove the opposite of what was the norm was considered a sign of great mental agility in the disciple that was necessary for ruling on matters of law (see bSanhedrin 17a). However, there is a fine line between using such skill to arrive at a better answer and merely marshaling the technique for the sake of showing off.10 8 tḤagigah 2:1 (ed. Lieberman) contains a delicate description of the way in which R. Eleazar ben Arakh begins to expound the esoteric matters on his own, only after his mentor R. Johanan ben Zakkai refuses to teach him such matters and he receives permission from him to expound the text by himself. See the fine analysis of discipleteacher relations as constructed in this narrative and its different versions in Jonah Fraenkel, Sippur ha-aggadah, aḥdut shel tokhen ṿe-tsurah: ḳovets meḥḳarim (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2001), 317–45. 9 The phrase ḳaṭua mi-ṭura de-Sinai (cut off from Mount Sinai) is interpreted negatively in traditional readings of this passage, but, in fact, it might be a positive statement that disagrees with the prior opinion, characterizing the student as hewn from the rock of Mount Sinai—an “authentic” sample, as it were, of revelation itself. 10 For an example of a disciple who aimed to unsettle a teacher with a frivolous question, see bḲiddushin 52b: Our Rabbis taught: After R. Meir’s demise, R. Judah announced to his disciples: “Let not R. Meir’s disciples enter here, because they are disputatious

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Rabbinic literature knows, too, of students who do not excel in their studies but are involved in doing good deeds in the world. Sometimes, praising their pious, saintly virtues is not meant as a compliment but is rather intended as an indirect way of pointing out that they are not particularly diligent, and in fact rank very low, as students. The following story demonstrates this point: Rabbi Abbahu resided in Caesarea; he sent Rabbi Ḥanina, his son, to gain merit in Tiberias [by studying Torah there]. They sent to [R. Abbahu] from Tiberias: “[R. Ḥanina] is doing good deeds.” He wrote and sent to his son: “Was it for want of graves in Caesarea that I sent you to Tiberias? They already ruled in the upper level of the House of Arim in Lod that study takes precedence over action” [yḤagigah 76c].

Caesarea, the bustling Hellenistic city, was a difficult place in which to raise a young son, so it is no wonder that R. Abbahu sent R. Ḥanina to study at the great yeshiva of Rabbi Johanan in Tiberias.11 When R. Abbahu was informed that his son was engaging in the performance of good deeds, he reproached him sarcastically. In the message he sent, he played on a verse from the book of Exodus which quotes the Israelites’ complaint to Moses for leading them into the wilderness to their death: “And they said to Moses, ‘Was it for want of graves in Egypt that you brought us to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, taking us out of Egypt?’” (Ex. 14:11). The burial of the dead is indeed considered one of the most praiseworthy deeds, but to do good works, there was no need to send R. Ḥanina to Tiberias. and do not come to learn Torah but to overwhelm me with halakhot.” Yet, Symmachus forced his way through and entered. Said [Symmachus] to them: “Thus did R. Meir teach me: ‘If [a priest] betroths [a woman] with his portion [of the Temple offerings], whether of the higher or of the lower sanctity, he has not betrothed [her].’” Thereupon, R. Judah became incensed with them and exclaimed: “Did I not say to you: ‘Let not R. Meir’s disciples enter here, because they are disputatious and do not come to learn Torah but to overwhelm me with halakhot’?! How, then, does a woman come to be in the Temple Court [in order for Symmachus’s scenario to practically come up]?” 11 The term mazke (lit., to gain merit), referring to the purpose of sending R. Ḥanina to Tiberias, extends ordinarily in the Jerusalem Talmud to performing good deeds. As Jonah Fraenkel pointed out, the use of this term at the beginning of the story introduces the possibility of R. Ḥanina acting on his own in choosing to do good deeds rather than study. See his Iyyunim be-olamo ha-ruḥani shel sippur ha-aggadah, ed. Meir Ayali (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1981), 97.

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Graves were abundant in Caesarea as well, but the opportunity to study in a great place is rare, and study takes priority over action. Another important and complex figure in the typology of students in the Talmud is the opposite of the pious but non-diligent student. This disciple is capable and studious but lacks in virtue and thus poses a danger: he might use the knowledge and the dialectical technique he has mastered to subvert the system. A warning is given in Rabbinic sources not to teach such a student: “Rabbi Zeira said in the name of Rav: ‘Whoever teaches a talmid she-eno hagun [student who is improper] is considered as if he had thrown a stone in worship of Merculis, as it is written: “Like a pebble in a sling, so is paying honor to a dullard” [Prov. 26:8]’” (bḤullin 133a). Such rebellious students are described in harsh terms: What does it mean “a child whose months [of gestation] were not completed”? Here, they explained it thus: It refers to a disciple who rebels against [the authority of] his teachers. Rabbi Abba said: “It refers to a disciple who has not attained the qualification to decide questions of law and yet decides them.” For R. Abbahu said in the name of Rav Huna, who said in the name of Rav: “What means that which is written: ‘For many are those she has struck dead, and numerous are her victims’ [Prov. 7:26]? ‘For many are those she has struck dead’—this refers to a disciple who has not attained the qualification to decide questions of law and yet decides them” [bSoṭah 22a; see also ySoṭah 19a].

Students who have gained Rabbinic knowledge and yet rebelled embody a combination of capability and resentment that might be channeled into founding a heretical countermovement. Talmudic sources evince an awareness that such a rupture might be precipitated by a teacher’s inability to contain and embrace rebels. In searching for biblical precedents for such a failure to both restrain and reproach an improper student, the Talmud creatively interprets the story of Elisha and his servant Gehazi, who belonged to the world of the prophets and their circles. In line with the Talmudic practice of turning biblical heroes into scholars, the Talmud relates to Gehazi as a disciple who was “a mighty hero of Torah,”12 and the breach that opened between Elisha and Gehazi is cast as a paradigm for the failure of the teacher to handle a wayward disciple. Elisha punished Gehazi by cursing him and his descendants with leprosy: “‘Surely, the leprosy of Naaman 12 See Gehazi’s description in ySanhedrin 29b.

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shall cling to you and to your descendants forever.’ And as [Gehazi] left his presence, he was snow-white with leprosy” (II Kings 5:27). Though the biblical narrative of the betrayal by Gehazi seems to justify Elisha’s response, the sages were critical of Elisha, and according to the Talmud, Elisha was punished, became ill, and died as a result of his harsh treatment of Gehazi: “Our Rabbis taught: Let the left hand reject but the right hand always invite back—as opposed to Elisha, who rejected Gehazi with both hands, and as opposed to Rabbi Joshua ben Perahiah, who rejected Jesus with both hands” (bSanhedrin 107b).13 The objectionable rejection of Gehazi, which pushed him further into the abyss of heresy, is followed by another tradition regarding the even more momentous rejection of Jesus by his teacher. In the eyes of the Rabbis, failure in the delicate handling of a rebellious disciple stood at the root of the foundation of the rival religion, Christianity.14 In the meticulous taxonomy of students in Rabbinic literature, the most cherished disciple is mentioned in Avot 6:6: “the [student] who makes his teacher wiser.” A Talmudic source quoted in the context of a critique of study in isolation describes and praises the power of the student to enlighten his teacher in the most striking terms: Rav Naḥman bar Isaac said: “Why are the words of the Torah likened to a tree, as it is written: ‘It is a tree of life to them that grasp it’ [Prov. 3:18]? This is to teach you that just as a small tree may set fire to a bigger tree, so, too, younger scholars sharpen [the minds of] older scholars.” This is in agreement with what R. Ḥanina said: “Much have I learned from my teachers and even more from my colleagues, but from my students more than from them all” [bTa‘anit 7a].

Rabbi Akiva, the ultimate hero of Rabbinic culture, is portrayed in the narrative of his paradigmatic discipleship as someone who enlightened his

13 See also bSoṭah 47a, as well as ySanhedrin 29b: “Rabbi Johanan said: ‘“No sojourner spent the night in the open; I opened my doors to the road” [Job 31:32]. From here we learn that while rejecting with the left hand one should invite back with the right hand—as opposed to what Elisha did when he rejected Gehazi with both hands. Two illnesses were inflicted upon Elisha, one by way of the world and one [as a punishment] for rejecting Gehazi.’” 14 For an extensive analysis of this narrative as a warning to teachers, see Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, Stories of the Babylonian Talmud (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2010), 116–49.

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teachers with his sayings (ṿe-he‘emidan bi-devarim) (Avot de-Rabbi Natan, version 1, ch. 6).15 This virtue of the disciple who makes his teacher wiser was inherently connected with the mode of training and structured dialogue in which study was conducted. A teacher presented a legal statement, either drawn from his received traditions or based on his own creative interpretation; his disciples examined and interrogated the statement; and he responded to their questions and their attempted rebuttals of his answers. In a precious, short description taken from an early source, we catch a glimpse of the way in which this study took place: “When R. Akiva arranged the halakhot before his students, he said: ‘Whoever has heard a reason for one of them should approach and state it.’” Following this call, Rabbi Simeon, one of R. Akiva’s disciples, presented an argument that R. Akiva rejected as inadequate: “The one who leaps forward is not praised unless he provides a [genuine] reason.” In response, R. Simeon offered a better, more compelling reason, and his argument convinced R. Akiva to revise his view: “R. Akiva retracted and taught according to R. Simeon” (tZavim 1:5–6).16 Another, later source from the fourth century provides a vivid portrait of the form of exchange between students and one of the rabbis in the house of study. This exchange includes a chain of questions and answers that lead to the clarification of a legal matter concerning the status of inadvertent sin: Rabbi Haggai asked the ḥevraya [group of students].  .  .  . They answered him. . . . He replied: “I still have a difficulty.” . . . They answered him. . . . He replied: “I still have a difficulty” . . . and they did not respond. He said to them: “I will provide the answer.” . . . [Afterwards,] Rabbi Yose entered the house of study. He said [to the disciples]: “Why did you not answer him [at the end]?” . . . They told him: “[R. Haggai] raised the question and he provided the answer” [yTerumot 45b].

In this account of the bet ha-midrash and its procedure, the questions were raised by the teacher and the answers were provided by the disciples. The 15 Adiel Schremer offered an interesting interpretation of the phrase ṿe-he‘emidan bi-devarim as referring to raising an unanswered question; see his essay, “‘Aḳshe leh ṿe-uḳmeh’: iyyun eḥad be-sugyat ha-Bavli, Bava ḳamma 117a,” Tarbiz 66, no. 3 (1997): 409. 16 See Eliezer Shimshon Rosenthal’s analysis of this source and its revealing quality in “Massoret-halakhah ṿe-ḥiddushe-halakhot be-mishnat ḥakhamim,” Tarbiz 63, no. 3 (1994): 325–26.

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dialogue progressed with each round, but finally, out of deference to the teacher, the disciples fell silent, allowing him to provide the concluding answer, which they could have given themselves. The mode of training and the way in which study was structured in Rabbinic academies centered around the question. The student enlightened his teachers by questioning them and answering their challenges in turn. This set of exchanges, in which the student’s independence was nurtured, was embedded within a hierarchical relationship between rabbi and disciple, highly regulated by a protocol that served as a source of both inspiration and vulnerability. In order to fully explore the vulnerability of discipleship, an outline of this protocol is needed.

The Protocol of Discipleship The rules and obligations of discipleship in Rabbinic literature are drawn from other realms of authority on the social map. “Rabbi Joshua ben Levi said: ‘All manner of service that a slave must render to his master a student must render to his teacher, except that of taking off his shoe.’ Rava explained: ‘This ruling applies only in a place where [the student] is not known, but where he is known there can be no objection [to him removing his teacher’s shoe]’” (bKetubbot 96a). The student is an apprentice and relates to his teacher as a servant. The term for teacher, rav, also means a master or owner. The verb commonly used in Rabbinic sources to designate the apprenticeship of the disciple is le-shammesh, which means “to serve.” “R. Johanan further said in the name of R. Simeon ben Yoḥai: ‘The service of the Torah is greater than the study thereof, as it is written: “Elisha son of Shaphat, who poured water on the hands of Elijah, is here” [II Kings 3:11]. It does not say “who learned,” but “who poured.” This teaches that the service of the Torah is greater than the study thereof ’” (bBerakhot 7b). Such service is compared to the relationship between a human and God: “‘Young Samuel was in the service of the Lord under Eli’ [I Sam. 3:1]. But Samuel was only in the service of Eli! This teaches that every service he rendered unto Eli, his teacher, was considered as if it had been rendered unto the divine presence” (yEruvin 22b). In addition to the reverential attitude that these rules engender, serving is also a mode of training. Since Rabbinic education consisted not only of passing on a body of knowledge, but also of reproducing a way of life, proximity to the teacher who was a

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living embodiment of the tradition was of crucial importance.17 In closely following the teacher’s ways, the student was better able to bridge the gap between knowing “what” and knowing “how.”18 Some of the norms defining discipleship are derived from the parental sphere. A student is not allowed to address his teacher by name, just as a child is forbidden to call his or her parents by name (bSanhedrin 100a). Likewise, upon the death of his teacher, the disciple has to tear his garment as a mark of mourning and rupture in the same manner that a child is obligated to tear his or her clothes upon the death of a parent (bMo‘ed ḳaṭan 26a). The parental analogy draws its vitality from the perception of the teacher as the person responsible for bringing his disciple to life. In cases of competing claims, the teacher as spiritual father takes precedence over the biological father: “Between a person’s own lost article and his father’s, his own takes precedence; his own and his teacher’s, his own takes precedence; his father’s and his teacher’s, his teacher’s takes precedence, because his father brought him into this world, whereas his teacher who instructed him in wisdom brings him to the world to come” (mBava metsi‘a 2:11). This rule, promulgated by the scholarly elite, attempted to establish the standing of the teacher over and above family loyalties and obligations, competing with the hallmark of the patriarchal authority structure. The choreography of the student’s movements is carefully crafted as well. A student is not allowed to pray at the side of or behind his teacher (bBerakhot 27a–b). While walking together with his teacher, he must locate himself at his teacher’s side and slightly behind him (bYoma 37a). Upon seeing his teacher, he has to rise until the teacher is seated (yBikkurim 65c).19

17 In early Rabbinic sources, the verb le-shammesh was given the meaning “to study”; see, for example, the story in yNazir 56a–b that records R. Akiva’s decision to serve scholars continuously after being mistaken about the law. See also the warning against autodidacts who end up misapplying the law in Avot de-Rabbi Natan, version 1, ch. 12. In bBerakhot 47b and bSoṭah 22a, an am ha-arets (ignoramus) is defined as someone who, though learned, did not “serve” scholars. 18 See the discussion in bBerakhot 62a that presents a set of stories of disciples following their teachers into some of the most intimate contexts in order to study their conduct. On the idea of the teacher as a living embodiment of Torah and its impact on the practice of discipleship, see Martin S. Jaffee, “Oral Transmission of Knowledge as Rabbinic Sacrament: An Overlooked Aspect of Discipleship in Oral Torah,” in Study and Knowledge in Jewish Thought, ed. Howard Kreisel (Beersheba: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press, 2006), 72–79. 19 See also the proper way to sit before a teacher in bPesaḥim 108a.

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The most powerful rule establishing the authority of the teacher and setting the bounds of discipleship relates to the restriction imposed upon a student handing down an independent, unauthorized ruling: R. Eliezer said: “[The sons of Aaron] died only because they issued a legal decision in the presence of their teacher Moses, and whoever issues a legal decision in the presence of his teacher incurs the death penalty.” It happened that a disciple once gave a legal decision in [R. Eliezer’s] presence. He told Imma Shalom, his wife: “[This student] is going to die by the end of the Sabbath,” and he died. After the Sabbath, the sages came to visit him. They asked him: “Master, are you a prophet?” “I,” he replied, “am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but I have this tradition from my teachers: Whoever issues a legal decision in the presence of his teacher incurs the death penalty” [Sifra, Parashat shemini—Mekhilta de-millu’im 32–33].

Recognition of the teacher as the one who holds exclusive authority over rulings in law is coupled with a death penalty, since an unauthorized ruling in the teacher’s presence is perceived as an open affront to him.20 R. Eliezer’s prediction that his student would die, a prediction that perplexed the sages, was itself grounded in a tradition that he had received from his own teachers. Thus, this detailed protocol regarding the norms of discipleship and the authority of the teacher draws upon existing hierarchical models governing the reverence that must be accorded the master, the father, and even God Himself.21 Yet, such an all-encompassing authority structure is in tension with the technique of training young scholars in Rabbinic houses of study. The initiation of the student, who is supposed to make his teacher wiser, centered on the questions he asked. The teacher, as we saw, presented the material to be discussed, inviting challenges from his students while challenging them in turn. It was a training method deemed essential to the ideals of talmud Torah, understood by this group of scholars as an ever-expanding process, and to the preparation of the student as someone capable of the highest mode of legal and interpretive argumentation. 20 For a more detailed expansion on the prohibition against students ruling, see yShevi‘it 37c; bEruvin 63a; bYoma 53a; bSanhedrin 5b. 21 See, for example, the series of statements characterizing disciples’ affronts to teachers as affronts to God in bSanhedrin 110a; see also bPesaḥim 22b, where the requirement to fear one’s teacher is understood as an extension of the obligation to fear God.

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However, questions have the subversive potential to undermine authority. Awareness of the risk posed by the question is manifested in another interesting rule regarding disciples: For Rabbi Ḥiyya taught: “‘When you sit down to dine with a ruler, consider well who is before you. Thrust a knife into your gullet if you have a large appetite’ [Prov. 23:1–2]. If a pupil knows that his master is capable of answering the question, then he may ask it; otherwise, ‘consider well who is before you. Thrust a knife into your gullet if you have a large appetite’—and leave him” [bḤullin 6a].

In another norm of discipleship, a student is not allowed to ask his teacher about matters that are not discussed directly during a given session, since the teacher might be unprepared and be put to shame by the revelation of his ignorance: “Said R. Ḥiyya to Rav: ‘Son of illustrious ancestors, have I not told you that when Rabbi is engaged in this tractate, you must not question him about another, as perhaps he will not be conversant with it? For if Rabbi were not a great man, you would have put him to shame, for he might have answered you incorrectly’” (bShabbat 3b).22 The painful predicament of the teacher confronted with a question that he is not equipped to fully answer is manifested in a short, moving Talmudic story: “Rav Shimi bar Ashi was regularly present before Rav Papa, and he used to ask him many questions. One day, he observed that Rav Papa fell on his face [in prayer], and he heard him saying: ‘May the Merciful One save me from the shame of Shimi.’ [The latter] thereupon vowed silence and asked him no more” (bTa‘anit 9b).23 The possibility of shaming a teacher reveals an inherent tension between the hierarchical protocol of discipleship and the manner in which the disciple is initiated and trained.24 One striking feature of Rabbinic literature 22 Posing questions that have no answer might be a further way of shaming: “Rabbi Simeon ben Eliakim said to R. Eleazar: ‘What reason is there for R. Meir’s opinion in [the case of] one tree and for that of the Rabbis in [the case of] two trees?’ He replied: ‘Do you interrogate me in the house of study on a matter about which the ancients gave no reason in order to shame me?’” (bBava batra 81a–b). For other sources on the requirement to ask only about the matter under discussion, see tSanhedrin 7:7 and Avot 5:7. 23 For a discussion of the theme of shame, see Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 73–75. 24 The duality of deference and assertion might be expressed as well in an interesting rule governing the choreography of the bet ha-midrash. As we saw above, deference and honor are shown by having students stand when they see their teacher and walk

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is its acute and penetrating self-reflection on the vulnerability and tension inherent in the teacher-disciple relationship. In exploring this awareness, as well as the potential tragic rupture that might plague the disciple who inhabits the aforementioned field of tension, we turn our attention to three Talmudic narratives, all of which relate to R. Johanan, the most prominent figure of the Talmud of the Land of Israel.

Three Talmudic Narratives on Discipleship The first story is taken from yBerakhot 4b: R. Johanan was leaning on Rabbi Jacob bar Idi; R. Eleazar saw him and hid himself from him. [R. Johanan] said: “Two things this Babylonian [R. Eleazar] does to me: one, he does not greet me, and two, he does not ascribe to me teachings that he transmits.” [R. Jacob] said to [R. Johanan]: “This is [the Babylonians’] custom—the inferior does not greet the superior, for they fulfill: ‘Young men saw me and hid’ [Job 29:8].” As they were walking, they saw a particular house of study. [R. Jacob] said: “Here, R. Meir sat and transmitted teachings in the name of Rabbi Ishmael but not in the name of R. Akiva.” [R. Johanan] said to him: “Everybody knows that R. Meir is the disciple of R. Akiva.” He said to him: “Everybody knows that R. Eleazar is the disciple of R. Johanan.” [R. Jacob] asked him: “Is one allowed to pass in front of an idol?” [R. Johanan] answered: “Why should you show the idol honor [by taking a detour]? Pass before it and blind its eyes.” He said to him: “R. Eleazar

slightly behind him when they are on the road. Yet, during the act of study itself, a parity between teachers and students is mandated: How do we know [that one may not read the Torah while seated]? R. Abbahu said: “Because Scripture says: ‘But you stand here with Me’ [Deut. 5:28].” And R. Abbahu said: “Were it not written in the Scriptures, it would be impossible for us to say it: as it were, the blessed Holy One was also standing [when He taught Moses the Torah].” R. Abbahu further said: “How do we know that the master should not sit on a couch and teach his disciples while they sit on the ground? Because it says: ‘But you stand here with Me’” [bMegillah 21a]. Based on a bold description of God’s teaching the Torah to Moses, R. Abbahu infers that while engaging in talmud Torah, teachers and students should be positioned as equals.

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behaved properly by not passing before you.” He said: “R. Jacob bar Idi, you know how to appease.”25

This exquisite narrative focuses on the protocol of discipleship and the vulnerability of the teacher. While leaning on a loyal student, R. Johanan, the aging master, accuses another student of his, R. Eleazar, of treating him disrespectfully. He refers to him disparagingly as “this Babylonian,” the nameless foreign student whose loyalty as an outsider is called into question. R. Eleazar was indeed among the scholars who first studied in Babylonia with Rav and Samuel and then moved to the Land of Israel to study with the local masters there, among them the great R. Johanan, but his efforts to come from afar to learn at R. Johanan’s feet are here turned against him. R. Johanan’s two bitter complaints against R. Eleazar—that he does not greet him and does not quote his teachings in his name—share a common element: they both reflect the teacher’s anxiety over denial and elimination by his disciple. R. Jacob’s responses aim at turning what R. Johanan considered to be hurtful and negating behavior into gestures of reverence. R. Eleazar’s hiding, R. Jacob claimed, was not an expression of denial and avoidance, but rather a sign of honor, as the quotation from Job makes clear. R. Johanan’s misunderstanding originated in his unfamiliarity with Babylonian custom.26 R. Eleazar’s foreignness was not a reason to suspect and disparage him, but rather the cause of R. Johanan’s false accusation: in Babylonia, the inferior do not greet the superior; reverence is expressed by avoidance of encounter. In the following two exchanges between R. Jacob and R. Johanan, the shift in R. Johanan’s perspective on and understanding of his disciple’s behavior is introduced subtly by R. Jacob. While passing in front of R. Meir’s bet ha-midrash, R. Jacob notes that R. Meir had quoted sayings in the name of R. Ishmael but never in the name of R. Akiva. R. Johanan defends that practice, arguing that in not mentioning R. Akiva’s name, R. Meir had affirmed the fact that he had been R. Akiva’s disciple. It would have been 25 A different version of this narrative appears in ySheḳalim 47a. 26 On this particular Babylonian custom, see Mordecai Margalioth, ed., Ha-ḥilluḳim sheben anshe mizraḥ u-bene Erets Yiśraʼel (Jerusalem: n.p., 1938), 151–52 (no. 33). See as well the following statement in bBerakhot 27b: “And it has been taught: R. Eliezer says: ‘One who prays behind his master, one who gives [the ordinary] greeting to his master, one who returns a greeting to his master, one who takes issue with [the teaching of] the yeshiva of his master, and one who says something that he has not heard directly from his master causes the divine presence to depart from Israel.’” See also Rashi ad loc.

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a sign of wrongful self-assertion had R. Meir attributed certain sayings to R. Akiva, implying that the rest of his teachings had not been inspired or derived from his master. R. Jacob was thus pointing out that R. Johanan had been blinded by his anxiety and anger and had not realized that the same logic applied to R. Eleazar. The latter’s avoidance of mentioning R. Johanan was not a sign of R. Johanan’s obliteration, but rather a marker of his all-encompassing presence in the life of R. Eleazar. The same indirect manner of leading R. Johanan to reinterpret R. Eleazar’s behavior as reverential appears in the last exchange between R. Jacob and R. Johanan. R. Jacob raises a question reflecting the complexity of a Jewish community’s existence in the midst of a Hellenistic city such as Tiberias, where pagan icons dominated the public space: should a Jew attempt to not pass in front of icons in order to avoid acknowledging their overwhelming presence? In his answer, R. Johanan reverses the meaning and logic of the suggested avoidance: it would actually be an expression of respect for the idols if a rule were made prohibiting passing next to them, since such a rule would itself constitute an acknowledgment of their significance. Rather, passing in front of the idols but treating them as if they did not exist would be the ultimate mode of their denigration.27 In that same manner, claims R. Jacob, R. Johanan should have interpreted R. Eleazar’s hiding from him as a sign of reverence rather than as an attempt to ignore him. The hierarchical structure that mandates distance between teacher and disciple can thus generate fraught, ambiguous moments in which gestures of reverence are prone to be read as expressions of avoidance and erasure. R. Johanan’s harsh denunciation of his foreign student was rooted in the anxiety of the aging master that his time had passed and that the younger generation of rising scholars had superseded him. In the way in which markers of reverence can be turned on their heads and interpreted as signs of negation, the narrative expresses the vulnerability at the heart 27 The phrase samme eneh, which in the story is suggested as an alternative to avoiding contact with the icon, literally means “blind its eyes.” Deforming idols in this way was a common method of debasing them and thereby annulling their presumed divinity; see, for example, bRosh ha-shanah 24b. In our narrative, however, it seems that the phrase is being used euphemistically to prescribe passing before the idol but making as if it were not there (blinding one’s own eyes, so to speak), since it would not have been an option for a Jew to deface an image in a public Hellenistic space. For another such euphemistic use of this phrase, see yAvodah zarah 43b (3:11 in the Vilna ed.) and the Pene Mosheh commentary ad loc.

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of the teacher-disciple relationship.28 The brilliance of this story is, among other things, that the reader remains uncertain whether R. Eleazar was not actually taking advantage of this ambiguity—perhaps R. Johanan’s fear was well-founded? The fact that “this Babylonian” does not himself participate in these exchanges, since he was avoiding R. Johanan and was hidden, helps to maintain a sense of ambivalence concerning his motivations, despite the appeasing words of R. Jacob.29 In the second narrative, which recounts R. Johanan’s confrontation with Rav Kahana, another of his Babylonian students, the vulnerability of the hierarchal structure of discipleship is brought into sharp relief. This rich and complex story, told in bBava ḳamma 117a–b, can be approached from a wide variety of angles;30 I do not intend here to conduct a full literary and historical study of it, but rather wish to focus on the concern of

28 In his book The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud, Jeffrey Rubenstein, who has contributed immensely to the analysis of violence, shame, and honor in the academy, ascribes these thematic elements to the later strata of the Babylonian Talmud. The long Jerusalem Talmud narrative under discussion, together with other texts (some of them tannaitic) analyzed in this essay, might help to prove that these themes are present in the earlier strata of Rabbinic texts as well and that they reflect an inherent tension within the structure of discipleship. For a critique of Rubenstein’s restricted historical claim, see Seth Schwartz, Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society? Reciprocity and Solidarity in Ancient Judaism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 150 n. 100; see also pp. 133–39 for Schwartz’s discussion of the present narrative. 29 It is interesting to note that the Babylonian Talmud (Ketubbot 25b) records an exchange between Resh Lakish and R. Eleazar, both students of R. Johanan, in which Resh Lakish, after hearing a teaching directly from R. Johanan, admonishes R. Eleazar for having cited it previously without ascribing it to their teacher. 30 Isaiah Gafni devoted a meticulous study to this narrative in which he exposed the Babylonian editorial layer of this story told about scholars in the Land of Israel. As he demonstrated, based especially on comparison with a shorter version preserved in a Genizah fragment, the added layer reflects unique practices of the Babylonian yeshivas that were inserted into the story. See Isaiah Gafni, “Ha-yeshivah ha-Bavlit le-or sugyat B[ava] ḳ[amma] 117a,” Tarbiz 49, nos. 3–4 (1980): 292–301; and see as well the comments on the story made by Schremer, “‘Aḳshe leh ṿe-uḳmeh,’” 403–15. For reflections on the later Persian influences on the story, see Daniel Sperber, “On the Unfortunate Adventures of Rav Kahana: A Passage of Saboraic Polemic from Sasanian Persia,” Irano-Judaica 1 (1982): 83–100. For a detailed attempt to describe the literary building blocks of the narrative, see Shamma Friedman, “The Further Adventures of Rav Kahana: Between Babylonia and Palestine,” in The Talmud Yerushalmi and GraecoRoman Culture, ed. Peter Schäfer, vol. 3 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 247–71. And for yet another exploration of the possible historical settings of the narrative, see Geoffrey Herman, “The Story of Rav Kahana (BT Baba Qamma 117a-b) in Light of Armeno-Persian Sources,” Irano-Judaica 6 (2008): 53–86.

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the narrative with the role of the question and its unsettling impact on the teacher-student relationship. The narrative begins with the circumstances that brought Rav Kahana from Babylonia to the bet ha-midrash of R. Johanan in Tiberias. Rav Kahana was a student of Rav, the most important scholar in Babylonia. On one occasion in court, a defendant refused to follow Rav’s order not to reveal the property of a fellow Jew to the Gentile authorities. Such a disclosure, prohibited by halakhah, would have resulted in the confiscation of the property and would have thus been considered an offense against the property rights of another Jew. Moreover, such an act would have been perceived as an attempt to undermine the autonomy of the community by appealing to the dominant Gentile powers to intervene. Rav Kahana, who witnessed the defendant’s pronouncement refusing to follow Rav’s ruling, preempted the offense by killing the defendant. Fearing that this episode would come to the attention of the authorities and that Rav Kahana would be executed, Rav ordered him to flee to the Land of Israel, which was then occupied by the Romans, and to join the yeshiva of R. Johanan. Rav added in his instructions to Rav Kahana that he should keep silent and not ask any questions in R. Johanan’s school for seven years. Such an order could be interpreted in two very different ways. It could have been intended as a punishment imposed by Rav on Rav Kahana for the murder of the defendant, an act that might have been seen by Rav as both reckless and disproportionate. Or, alternatively, it could have been an attempt on Rav’s part to protect Rav Kahana in this new environment, given his awareness of both the fragile ego of R. Johanan and the sharpness and boldness of Rav Kahana. This moratorium on questioning did not last long. In his first days at the bet ha-midrash of R. Johanan, Rav Kahana encountered R. Johanan’s famous disciple and colleague Resh Lakish: [When he arrived there,] he found Resh Lakish sitting and reviewing [R. Johanan’s] lecture of the day for the [younger] students. He thereupon said to them: “Where is Resh Lakish?” They said to him: “Why do you ask?” He replied: “This [point in the lecture] is difficult and that [point] is difficult, but this could be given as an answer and that could be given as an answer.”

Upon his arrival, Rav Kahana seemed eager to establish himself as a promising scholarly figure, and so he turned upside-down the teachings that were repeated by Resh Lakish in the house of study. Recognizing the great

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abilities of Rav Kahana, Resh Lakish warned R. Johanan that he should prepare himself well for his class the following day: When they mentioned this to Resh Lakish, he went and said to R. Johanan: “A lion has come up from Babylonia; let the master therefore look very carefully into tomorrow’s lecture.” On the morrow, they seated [Rav Kahana] in the first row of disciples before R. Johanan. [R. Johanan] made a statement but [Rav Kahana] did not raise any difficulty with it; another statement and [Rav Kahana] raised no difficulty; they then placed him seven rows back until he was seated in the very last row.

It was the custom in Babylonian Rabbinic academies that the students were seated in the order of their rank.31 The first row was reserved for the best students and the last one for the weakest. Rav Kahana, who observed the order of Rav to keep silent, was demoted to the last row, since good students were defined as those capable of raising serious challenges. Rav Kahana’s silence was interpreted by R. Johanan as a sign that he had been overwhelmed by the quality of R. Johanan’s teachings and was too weak to engage him: R. Johanan thereupon said to Rabbi Simeon ben Lakish [Resh Lakish]: “The lion you mentioned turns out to be a [mere] fox.” [Rav Kahana thereupon] whispered [in prayer]: “May it be the will [of heaven] that these seven rows be in place of the seven years stipulated by Rav.” He thereupon stood on his feet and said to [R. Johanan]: “Will the master please start the lecture again from the beginning?” [R. Johanan] made a statement and [Rav Kahana] raised a difficulty; he was then placed in the first row. [R. Johanan] made another statement and [Rav Kahana] raised a difficulty. R. Johanan was sitting upon seven cushions. Whenever he made a statement against which [Rav Kahana] raised a difficulty, one cushion was pulled out from under him, until all the cushions were pulled out from under him and he found himself seated on the ground.

R. Johanan initially mocked the new student who had arrived with such an impressive reputation and yet seemed incapable of engaging him: “The lion . . . turns out to be a fox.” Rav Kahana, who could not take the insult, found a way to set aside Rav’s order; he considered his demotion to the 31 As mentioned in the previous note, Gafni and others have pointed out that although this story is told about a yeshiva in the Land of Israel, some of the procedures and structures described were typical of the yeshivas in Babylonia.

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seventh row while maintaining his silence as fulfilling his commitment to keep quiet for seven years. The dramatic scene that then unfolded presents two contrasting vectors of movement. As Rav Kahana moved forward, R. Johanan, who was seated on seven cushions, was lowered; with each unanswered question, a cushion was taken away from R. Johanan. By the end, R. Johanan and Rav Kahana were facing one another on the same level.32 The repeated questioning served to diminish and equalize an initial hierarchical structure that was constituted spatially—the distant student and the elevated teacher. The unanswered questions moved the student forward and lowered the teacher. Questions defy hierarchy. The story goes on to report the lethal, tragic outcome of the unsettling of this structure: R. Johanan was an old man and his eyebrows drooped. He said to [his students]: “Uncover my eyes for me as I want to see him.” So they uncovered [his eyes] with a silver eye brush. He saw that Rav Kahana’s lips were parted and thought that he was laughing at him. [R. Johanan] felt aggrieved and in consequence [Rav Kahana] died. On the morrow, R. Johanan said to the rabbis: “Did you see how the Babylonian was making [a laughingstock of us]?” But they said to him: “This was his natural appearance.”

The immediate cause for the death of Rav Kahana was the misinterpretation of his parted lips as a smirk, but other factors were at play as well. R. Johanan, who had been warned of the sharpness of the newly arrived “Babylonian” and mocked him for keeping silent during the lesson, had, from the outset, approached the session with a competitive and suspicious frame of mind. He was adamant about preserving his stature as a teacher in the face of new, young, emerging talent. It is no wonder that R. Johanan interpreted Rav Kahana’s facial deformity as an expression of mockery by the victor; he projected his own attitude onto Rav Kahana. Realizing that he was mistaken, the guilty R. Johanan went to Rav Kahana’s grave:

32 On the role of argumentation in defining the student’s status in our story and others, see Rubenstein, The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud, 39–40. See as well Ruth Calderon’s reading of the literary and human qualities of the narrative in Ha-shuḳ, ha-bayit, ha-lev: aggadot Talmudiyyot (Jerusalem: Keter, 2001), 86–91.

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He thereupon went to the cave [of Rav Kahana’s grave] and saw a serpent coiled around it. He said: “Serpent, serpent, open your mouth and let the master go in to the disciple.” But [the serpent] did not open [its mouth]. He then said: “Let the colleague go in to [his] associate.” But it still did not open [its mouth]. “Let the disciple go in to the master.” [The serpent] opened up for him. He then prayed for mercy and raised him [from the dead]. [R. Johanan] said to him: “Had I known that the natural appearance of the master was like that, I would never have taken offense; now, let the master come with us.” He replied: “If you are able to pray for mercy that I will not die again, I will go [with you], but if not, I will not go [with you].” . . . [R. Johanan completely] awakened [Rav Kahana] and asked him all the questions about which he was uncertain, and [Rav Kahana] answered them for him. This is what R. Johanan meant when he said: “What I had said was yours [the Torah of the Land of Israel] was in fact theirs [the Torah of Babylonia].”

The narrative ends with the full reversal of the initial hierarchy. R. Johanan is able to enter the cave only after he declares that he is Rav Kahana’s student. Rav Kahana, who has already tasted mortality, has no desire to reenter the cycle of life and death; he resolves R. Johanan’s doubts but apparently does not return to his yeshiva with him. Finally, in the last scene of the story, the power of the question turns the teacher into the student. The protocol of discipleship, which in our narrative is manifest in the spatial structure of hierarchy, is completely overturned in the burial cave. At the heart of the unsettling of the hierarchy and the loss of life stood a question, a question surrounded by immense anxiety that eventually had a lethal outcome. The third story, which also concerns R. Johanan, has received its due among contemporary scholars; in line with the aim of exploring discipleship, then, I will focus on the way in which this narrative again represents a unique moment of Rabbinic self-awareness of the unresolved tensions inherent in the teacher-disciple relationship.33 The story, recorded in bBava metsi‘a 84a, begins with the initiation of Resh Lakish into the life of the bet ha-midrash. At the time, Resh Lakish was the head of a gang of robbers, and he encountered R. Johanan when the latter was bathing in the Jordan River. Resh Lakish leapt into the water in a way that might have had aggressive or sexual overtones; R. Johanan was known to be a strikingly handsome man. Cornered while bathing in the river alone with Resh Lakish, R. Johanan 33 See Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 215–19.

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urged him to channel his prowess to Torah, while Resh Lakish retorted that R. Johanan ought to use his good looks to attract women. Resh Lakish decided to change his ways, however, after R. Johanan promised to marry him off to his sister who was more beautiful than him. Upon accepting to devote his life to Torah, we are told, Resh Lakish lost his strength to leap out of the river; sublimation of violence and Eros had already begun. He became a disciple of R. Johanan, who made him, as the story describes, “a great man” and well-established scholar; with time, Resh Lakish emerged as an independent voice and became R. Johanan’s interlocutor and disputant. One dispute that seemed rather minor at first initiated a chain reaction that ended in tragedy: Now, one day there was a dispute in the house of study [with respect to the following teaching]: “A sword, knife, dagger, spear, hand sickle, and scythe— at what stage [of their manufacture] can they become unclean? When their manufacture is finished.” And when is their manufacture finished? R. Johanan ruled: “When they are tempered in a furnace.” Resh Lakish maintained: “When they have been scoured in water.” Said [R. Johanan] to [Resh Lakish]: “A robber knows his trade.” Said he to him: “And how have you benefited me? There, [as a robber,] I was called ‘master’ and here, [as a Torah scholar,] I am called ‘master.’” He retorted: “I have benefited you by bringing you under the wings of the divine presence.” R. Johanan felt deeply hurt [following this exchange, as a result of which] Resh Lakish fell ill. [R. Johanan’s] sister [the wife of Resh Lakish] came and wept [before him]. “Forgive him for the sake of my children,” she pleaded. He replied: “Leave your orphans with me, I will rear them” [Jer. 49:11]. [She pleaded again:] “For the sake of my widowhood, then.” “And let your widows rely on me” [ibid.], he assured her. R. Simeon ben Lakish died, and R. Johanan was plunged into deep grief.

R. Johanan’s reply—“A robber knows his trade”—might have been an expression of a long-simmering anger directed at Resh Lakish for his newfound independence.34 It aimed at putting Resh Lakish in his “proper place,” arguing that he should not forget his past; he was still, at his core, a robber. Resh Lakish’s response to this aggressive putdown affirmed bitterly that indeed nothing had changed. The promise of the sublimation of violence did not fulfill itself; the bet ha-midrash, too, had become a site 34 See Fraenkel, Iyyunim, 76.

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for aggression.35 Despite the pleading of his sister, R. Johanan, with a stubbornness caused by wounded pride, refused to retract and reconcile with Resh Lakish. And so Resh Lakish died. R. Johanan, who missed his beloved student-turned-colleague and felt burdened with guilt for his death, was deeply aggrieved: Said the rabbis: “Who shall go to ease his mind? Let Rabbi Eleazar ben Pedat, whose disquisitions are sharp, go.” So, he went and sat before him; and regarding every teaching uttered by R. Johanan, he observed: “There is a baraita [non-mishnaic teaching of the tanna’im] that supports you.” He complained: “Are you as the son of Lakisha? When I would teach a law, the son of Lakisha would raise twenty-four objections, to which I would give twenty-four answers, which consequently led to a fuller comprehension of the law; whilst you say, ‘There is a baraita that supports you.’ Do I not know myself that my teachings are correct?!” Thus, he went around rending his garments and weeping: “Where are you, O son of Lakisha? Where are you, O son of Lakisha?” He cried thus until he went insane. Thereupon, the rabbis prayed for mercy for him, and he died.

The new student, R. Eleazar, who was supposed to fill the void left by Resh Lakish’s death and provide some relief and comfort to R. Johanan, did not prove up to the task. Instead of challenging R. Johanan, he added support to his claims. He should have rather objected to his teacher’s sayings and raised challenges, thereby following the ways of the disciple who “makes his teacher wiser.” It is reasonable to speculate that R. Eleazar, who was praised by his colleagues, could have played that role. But witnessing what had happened to the former student, Resh Lakish, and grasping the fragility of R. Johanan’s ego, R. Eleazar opted to play it safe. R. Johanan was thoroughly disappointed; he had no use for a student who attempted to prove that he was right. He missed Resh Lakish’s challenges that moved the conversation forward, and his longings for his former student, whose death he himself had caused, drove him to madness. The rabbis, seeking to put an end to R. Johanan’s excruciating emotional pain, prayed for his life to end, and he died.

35 On the theme of violence in the story, see Rubenstein, The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud, 58–59.

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Discipleship in Rabbinic Literature     MOSHE HALBERTAL

This rich narrative is, among other things, a story about disciples and teachers, reflecting in a strikingly self-critical manner on the problem at the heart of this delicate relationship. The teacher wishes for his student to challenge him, the challenging student being classified in the Rabbinic world as the most cherished one. And yet, when a genuine challenge emerges, the teacher, protecting his standing, undermines the student. This deep, unresolved ambivalence ends in this story with the tragic deaths of both disciple and teacher. The three narratives surrounding R. Johanan were constructed and narrated by scholars about themselves and about the founding figures of their schools and world. They were edited, transmitted orally, and eventually written down not as part of a hagiography of great past leaders, but rather because they aimed at raising a deep concern about the violence and aggression situated at the heart of their praxis and life. These stories point to the inherent tension of discipleship. Disciples are bound in a protocol and ethos of reverence. The teacher, who carries and transmits Torah, is almost Godlike. His anger might be lethal, and a challenge to his authority by ruling in his presence might lead to death (see Avot 2:10). This protocol of hierarchy is fragile and vulnerable in a world that places the question at the center of the training of the student and at the core of what talmud Torah is about. The calibration of the balance between authority and challenge might be successful and productive, but it is extremely difficult to maintain. From the point of view of the teacher, the difficulty consists in navigating the fine line between feeling challenged and feeling threatened. Teachers, aware of their finitude, might be prone to interpret questions as threats, even to read gestures of reverence as signs of obliteration. From the disciple’s perspective, the calibration of the questions he poses is just as subtle and ominous. A question must be asked with the aim of creating progress, leading to what R. Johanan described as “a fuller comprehension of the law.” A question might also legitimately serve to demonstrate one’s skills and establish stature, but if left unchecked, it can cross the Oedipal boundary and become a tool of the desire to destroy the teacher and put him to shame. The lethal potential of the improper question that crosses this subtle, fine line is made evident in an early, short, blunt account of a disciple who met a tragic end. The student’s name was Judah ben Naḥman, and he presented his question to Rabbi Tarfon in the midst of a debate concerning the omer offering brought on the second day of Passover. It was a rebuttal that left R. Tarfon with no answer:

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R. Akiva looked at [Judah ben Naḥman], and his face was glowing. He asked him: “Judah ben Naḥman, is your face glowing because you have refuted the sage [R. Tarfon]? I doubt you will live long in the world.” Rabbi Eleazar ben Rabbi Judah said: “This occurred on Passover, and when I arrived on Atseret [Shavuot], I asked: ‘Where is Judah ben Naḥman?’ They told me: ‘He passed away’” [Sifre, Parashat Pinḥas 148].

R. Akiva was not opposed to posing unanswered questions. In fact, he was praised for raising such questions before the same sage, R. Tarfon, who was his former teacher (tMiḳṿa’ot 1:17–19). Nor was he provoked by the content of the student’s question, which was in fact a defense of R. Akiva’s own position and what subsequently became the main view of the Mishnah in the matter discussed. Instead, R. Akiva responded harshly to the look on the student’s face following the rebuttal, a glowing expression of victory at having silenced the teacher, which revealed the attitude that motivated his question in the first place. The question that the student is encouraged to ask, which moves the discussion forward, has to be carefully measured. It might bring the teacher to silence, but it should not be aimed at victory and subversion. The disciple’s task of properly calibrating his questions was complicated by the fact that it was perceived as legitimate that the student assert himself through his questioning and his capacity to debate. One vivid tradition regarding the question as validating the student’s standing appears in a Talmudic narrative that relates to the longest debate and exchange recorded in the Mishnah. This heated debate was carried on by R. Eliezer and R. Akiva, and it revolved around the violation of the Sabbath for the sake of sacrificing the Paschal lamb. Commenting on this debate, yPesaḥim 33b quotes a remarkable tradition: For thirteen years, R. Akiva used to enter before R. Eliezer [in his house of study], but [R. Eliezer] did not acknowledge him. And this was the beginning of the first argument he made before R. Eliezer. Rabbi Joshua said to [R. Eliezer]: “There is the army you sneered at; now go out and fight it!” [Judg. 9:38].

The debate recorded in the Mishnah, according to this tradition, was R. Akiva’s first in R. Eliezer’s presence after having been ignored by him for thirteen years. R. Joshua, who was known as an antagonist of R. Eliezer, challenged him to confront the questioning disciple whom he had marginalized. The challenge was expressed via quotation of a verse from Judges.

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Discipleship in Rabbinic Literature     MOSHE HALBERTAL

R. Joshua’s quotation is rather astonishing, but the verse’s context requires elaboration in order to fully grasp the depth of the reference. The verse is taken from the biblical narrative of a military clash between Abimelech and Gaal. Abimelech, with the aid of the people of Shechem, seized the crown after having massacred his seventy brothers. With time, however, a rift emerged between Abimelech and his supporters in Shechem. Gaal then offered himself and his gang to the people of Shechem as challengers to Abimelech. Having been well received in the town, Gaal declared: “Who is Abimelech and who are [we] Shechemites, that we should serve him?” (Judg. 9:28). Abimelech had an appointed officer in Shechem named Zebul who informed him of the developing insurgency. Following Zebul’s secret advice, Abimelech launched an offensive to quell the uprising. As Abimelech’s forces approached, Zebul stood with Gaal at the gate of Shechem and challenged him to face Abimelech’s army, which he had previously mocked and rejected. Gaal was ultimately defeated by Abimelech, against whom he had arrogantly arisen. It is this challenge posed by Zebul to Gaal that R. Joshua was quoting: “‘Well,’ replied Zebul, ‘where is your boast, “Who is Abimelech that we should serve him”? There is the army you sneered at; now go out and fight it!’” The biblical analogy made here by R. Joshua portrayed R. Eliezer as someone who had arrogantly disregarded a rival, R. Akiva, and was now being called upon to face the challenge. Anyone familiar with the continuation of the biblical story will understand that R. Joshua was predicting R. Eliezer’s defeat. The imagery of warfare in Rabbinic debates is well known; the new element in this short exchange is the way in which the marginalized but brilliant student might assert himself with a rebuttal. Thus, the disciple’s calibration of the challenge becomes even more nuanced, since now the question is not merely the student’s tool for moving the discussion forward, but also for moving himself forward, a way of forcing acknowledgment. At the same time, we will recall that R. Akiva himself predicted the death of the disciple with the glowing countenance who wished to silence his master. The line between self-assertion and humility is a fine one but one that, within the fraught war zone that is discipleship, might make all the difference between life and death. The bet ha-midrash is a space saturated with anxiety and competing drives, in which gestures, facial expressions, and tonality are no less important than content, and mistakes in reading these subtler signs can

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prove fatal. Each anxiety—the teacher’s over ruination and the student’s over influence—might be mutually reinforced, thus escalating an already fraught relationship.36 Discipleship is defined in Rabbinic literature by two poles. The first pole governs and constructs discipleship by a meticulous protocol of hierarchy, drawing its regulations from authority structures involving masters and parents. The second pole defines and directs the student’s training, locating the question at the center of the process and characterizing the prized disciple as the one who makes his teacher wiser. Given the potentially disruptive nature of the question, an arc of tension takes shape between the regulatory hierarchy and the student’s initiation. This tension is often what turns education from a mere repetitive act of transmission and sheer exercise of authority into a creative drama. But it locates discipleship within a field saturated with the anxieties and drives of teachers and disciples, anxieties and drives that can at times escalate lethally. Awareness of the delicate and vulnerable condition of the student, as reflected in the rules governing, and narratives concerning, discipleship, stands at the center of the Talmudic construction of, and reflection upon, the teacher-student relationship.

36 One possible response of a teacher seeking to preserve his superiority is to withhold knowledge from students. bNedarim 41a tells of such a case, as well as its fascinating outcome: When Rabbi had studied thirteen different versions of a halakhah, he taught R. Ḥiyya only seven of them. Eventually, Rabbi fell sick [and forgot his learning]. Thereupon, R. Ḥiyya restored to him the seven versions that he had taught him, but the other six were lost. Now, there was a certain fuller who had overheard Rabbi when he was studying them [himself]; so R. Ḥiyya went and learned them from the fuller and then repeated these before Rabbi. When Rabbi saw the fuller, he said to him: “You have made both R. Ḥiyya and myself.” Others say that he spoke thus to him: “You have made R. Ḥiyya, and he has made me.” Rabbi, who tried to maintain his advantage and superiority by not imparting all his knowledge to his student R. Ḥiyya, eventually found himself completely dependent on R. Ḥiyya, who could only partially reconstruct what Rabbi had known and forgotten. In the end, a complete inversion of hierarchy takes place when both Rabbi and R. Ḥiyya are saved (“made”) by the fuller, a lower-class worker, who was exposed to everything that Rabbi knew, since Rabbi had disregarded him and ignored his presence while he was vocally rehearsing his studies.

Elana Stein Hain, Shalom Hartman Institute

Secular Legal Paradigms and Talmudic Law: Rav Tsa‘ir on Legal Loopholes*

Legal systems are bound to have loopholes, both because language can be interpreted variably and because no statute can anticipate all future scenarios. Black’s Law Dictionary defines a loophole as “[a]n ambiguity, omission, or exception (as in a law or other legal document) that provides a way to avoid a rule without violating its literal requirements.”1 For instance, a law that prohibits only the sale of an item says nothing about giving that same item as a gift. Debates about the desirability of loopholes are as ubiquitous as loopholes themselves. Legal Realists, like Oliver Wendell Holmes, have argued that it “is none the worse legally that a party has availed himself to the full of what the law permits.”2 However, some Positivists, such as H. L. A. Hart, advocated judicial discretion to close, or at least to minimize taking advantage of, gaps in the law.3 Whether viewed positively or negatively, loopholes are fundamental to law.

*

This essay is based on a paper delivered at a 2012 conference organized by Suzanne Last Stone as an initiative of the Yeshiva University Center for Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. 1 See Bryan A. Garner, ed., Black’s Law Dictionary, 8th ed. (St. Paul, MN: Thomson/West, 2004), 962. 2 See Bullen v. Wisconsin, 240 U.S. 625 (1916), at p. 630 (Holmes, O. W., concurring). 3 According to Hart, judicial discretion is meant to deal with “legally unregulated cases in which on some point no decision either way is dictated by the law and the law is accordingly partly indeterminate or incomplete.” See H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 272.

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Rabbinic law4 is replete with loopholes afforded by narrow and literal readings. And while there is no term for Rabbinic dodges in general, the terminology used in dozens of instances of legal circumvention throughout Rabbinic literature is ha‘aramah (pl. ha‘aramot).5 Marcus Jastrow defines the active causative form (hif ‘il), he‘erim, as “to plan, act deliberately,” or “to act with subtlety.”6 Michael Sokoloff defines urma as “deceit.”7 As used in the Bible, the Hebrew root ‘-r-m first appears in describing the serpent that persuades Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge: “more arum [cunning] than any beast of the field” (Gen. 3:1). Likewise, a purposeful murderer is characterized in Exodus (21:14)8 as one who acted be-ormah, “with strategy.”9 On the other hand, the term is used throughout the book of Proverbs as a positive desideratum: shrewdness.10 Its checkered biblical usage is mirrored by the fact that Rabbinic ha‘aramah is at times accepted and at other times rejected. 4 Roughly 70–500/600 CE. The Bible contains examples of the loophole phenomenon as well: Judges 19–21 describes a civil war between the Benjaminites and the other tribes. After emerging victorious, the non-Benjaminite tribes swear not to give their daughters in marriage to any from the tribe of Benjamin. Realizing what havoc this will wreak upon that tribe’s prospects, they hatch a plan that provides for the Benjaminites to “capture” wives from other tribes without their parents literally “giving them” to the Benjaminites (Judg. 21:15–23). Thus, they observe the letter of their oath but certainly not its spirit. In his “Fraud on Law for Fraud on Law,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 1, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 51–60, David Daube examines the biblical proclivity for talion in cases of circumvention: those who use loopholes are usually punished through the use of loopholes. 5 Though some usages in ancient Rabbinic literature simply mean “deception”—for example, tMa‘aśer sheni 5:11 (ed. Lieberman); bSanhedrin 25a; yMo‘ed ḳaṭan 81b—most refer to a technical, definable legal circumvention. 6 Marcus Jastrow, A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1903), 1120 (s.v. aram II). 7 Michael Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic of the Talmudic and Geonic Periods (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 849 (s.v. urma). 8 For further negative uses in the Bible, see also Josh. 9:4, about the sly Gibeonites; Job 5:13, about those who cause their own downfall through craftiness; I Sam. 23:22—“he is a very cunning fellow”; and Ps. 83:4—“They plot craftily against Your people.” Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs, eds., A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), 791 (s.v. ormah), define ormah as “craftiness, prudence”: be-ormah as “craftily,” as in Ex. 21:14 and Josh. 9:4; and ormah in Proverbs as “prudence” in a positive sense, for example, Prov. 1:4; 8:5, 12. 9 See Naphtali H. Tur-Sinai, “Ḥakham, ḥokhmah,” in Entsiḳlopedyah miḳra’it: otsar ha-yediʻot al ha-miḳra u-teḳufato, ed. Eliezer Lipa Sukenik et al., vol. 3 (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1965), col. 128. 10 Proverbs opens with: “The proverbs of Solomon son of David, king of Israel: For learning wisdom and discipline; for understanding words of discernment; for acquiring the discipline for success, righteousness, justice, and equity; for endowing the simple

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Secular Legal Paradigms and Talmudic Law     ELANA STEIN HAIN

Ha‘aramah as Classical Legal Loophole The first type of ha‘aramah amounts to taking advantage of the classical legal loophole: One may act with cunning [ma‘arimin] regarding ma‘aśer sheni [the secondary tithe] to exempt it from the extra 25%.11 How so? One may say to with ormah [shrewdness], the young with knowledge and foresight.” See also Prov. 3:16; 8:5, 12; 9:25; 12:16, 23; 14:8, 15, 18; 22:3; 27:12. Michael V. Fox, Proverbs 1–9: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 61, asserts that ormah means craftiness throughout the Bible: “the ability to devise clever, even wily, tactics for attaining one’s goals, whatever these may be.” It is only in Proverbs that the noun and verb forms of ‘-r-m are used for cunning that is considered legitimate. See idem, “Words for Wisdom: tevunah and binah; ormah and mezimmah; etsah and tushiyyah,” Zeitschrift für Althebraistik 6, no. 2 (1993): 159. Fox observes what “an audacious move” it is for Proverbs to appropriate ormah as a virtue (see, for example, 1:4, 2:11, 5:2). In his words: “The Prologue wants the reader to know that the book of Proverbs (rather than, say, the wise guys down the street) is the place to turn if you want the prestigious skills of cunning and shrewdness. As Proverbs sees it, the promised skills must be applied to worthy ends . . .” (Proverbs 1–9, 61). The same theme of becoming “prudent” is found in the Wisdom of Ben Sira 6:32: “If you wish, my son, you can become learned; if you apply yourself, you will be prudent.” The Community Rule and the Damascus Document also use this language in discussing the point of view of the messianic figure known as the Master: With the counsel of salvation I will conceal knowledge, and with prudent knowledge [u-be-ormat da‘at] I will hedge (it) with a firm boundary, keeping faithfulness and strong judgment of God’s righteousness [1QS 10.24–25]. My eye beheld what shall occur forever: salvation which is hidden from humankind, knowledge and prudent discretion [u-mezimmat ormah] (which is hidden) from the sons of Adam, a fountain of righteousness and a well of strength as well as a spring of glory (hidden) from the assembly of flesh [1QS 11.5–7]. God loves knowledge. Wisdom and prudence he has set up before him, craft [ormah] and knowledge shall serve Him [CD MS A 2.3–4]. (All translations of Dead Sea Scroll material are taken from James H. Charlesworth et al., The Dead Sea Scrolls: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek Texts with English Translations, vols. 1–2 [Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck); Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994–1995].) Joshua Brand cites the ormah terminology as an indication of the ancient provenance of the Damascus Document. See his “Megillat ‘Berit Dameśeḳ’ u-zemannah,” Tarbiz 28, no. 1 (1958): 27–28. 11 In bBava metsi‘a 54a and elsewhere, the Rabbis explain that the biblical requirement to pay “one-fifth” does not refer to 20% of the original value; instead, the original value is divided by four, and one who pays “one-fifth” in fact pays a fifth part, that is, an added 25%.

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his adult children or to his Hebrew servants, whether male or female, “Take these coins and use them to redeem this tithe.” However, one may not say, “Redeem this tithe for me using them” [tMa‘aśer sheni 4:3 (ed. Lieberman)].

A man who redeems his own ma‘aśer sheni produce instead of transporting it to Jerusalem must pay a biblically imposed tax of 25% (Lev. 27:31),12 but one who redeems ma‘aśer sheni belonging to someone else pays no such tax. To avoid the tax, this passage suggests, the owner of the produce may (should?) give money to an economically independent adult to redeem it. So long as the person in possession of the money does not own the produce and is not legally the agent of the person who does, there is no tax. This is ha‘aramah based on a literal reading: the law says that a man must pay a tax when redeeming his own produce, but it says nothing about a man giving away his money for someone else to redeem that very produce. A concrete change in the legal facts of the case circumvents the law. The other party involved in this type of dodge was known in ancient Roman law as an interposita persona and today is referred to as a “man of straw” in Britain and a Strohmann in Germany, a “front man” in the United States, and a “dummy” in Australia.13 While this type of workaround is commonplace in secular legal systems, it is surprising to find it being tolerated and even advocated in a system that posits a Divine Judge. After all, this passage is not questioning whether someone is punished by human judges after the fact; instead, it offers prescriptive advice for how to subvert a divine mandate. How can the Rabbis take this position when an omniscient Overseer is still aware of the interested party’s true motives? Who is being duped here? For this reason, Rabbi Chaim Tchernowitz, a late-nineteenth- to early-twentieth-century scholar of Rabbinics trained in academic methods, suggests that ha‘aramah is actually directed towards the law itself. Chaim Tchernowitz (Rav Tsa‘ir; lit., Young Rabbi) was born in 1871 in the district of Vitebsk, Russia, where he was ordained at age twenty-five by Isaac Elhanan Spektor (1817–1896), the leading rabbinical authority of Russian Jewry. Seeking a more critical approach to the study of Jewish law 12 For a very straightforward explanation, see Moses Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot ma‘aśer sheni 5:1. 13 David Daube, “Dodges and Rackets in Roman Law,” Proceedings of the Classical Association 61 (1964): 29. For instance, Gaius Licinius Stolo, a Roman tribune, circumvented his own statute by emancipating his son and, together with him, holding more than the permissible acreage of public land.

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Secular Legal Paradigms and Talmudic Law     ELANA STEIN HAIN

and custom, he headed to Odessa the following year, where he founded14 a yeshiva that would eventually, in 1907, become a rabbinical seminary. The hallmark of his yeshiva was its use of the techniques of Western European Wissenschaft des Judentums in reading classical Jewish texts, like the Mishnah and the Babylonian Talmud, which had, up until that point, been viewed as hermetically sealed and free from outside influences within more traditional Eastern European yeshivas.15 Tchernowitz refers to the type of legal circumvention described in our first case as ha‘aramat ha-din: The Torah is portrayed in the aggadah as a tangible entity, and when Abraham said before God, “Who can testify against Israel that they have left Your Torah?” God replied, “Let the Torah come and testify against Israel.” Thereupon, the Torah came immediately to testify. Abraham said to her, “You are coming to testify against them, etc.?!” When the Torah heard this, she stood off to the side and did not testify against them (Lamentations Rabbah, petiḥta 24). And there are several such depictions. Based on this depiction, every law actually exists as though it were its own entity to whom people must fulfill their obligations. The locution la-tset yede ḥovat [to fulfill the obligation of] commandment X, more than meaning to fulfill an obligation to God Who commanded the fulfillment of said commandment, has the very real connotation of fulfilling an obligation to the commandment itself. And this is what is really meant by the methods of ha‘aramot. For instance, take perozbol:16 Its essence is that by writing a 14 Some suggest that he became the headmaster of the yeshiva but did not found it; see Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present (New York: Schocken Books, 1988), 35–41. See also Benjamin Hoffseyer, “Ha-Rav Chaim Tchernowitz, ‘Rav Tsa‘ir’, ṿe-ha-yeshivah be-Odessa” (PhD diss., Yeshiva University, 1967). 15 Other innovations included the teaching of the Hebrew language, as well as the unique teaching staff: famous Zionists and maśkilim (Jewish Enlightenment figures) such as Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik and Joseph Klausner served on the faculty of the yeshiva. These advances were popular in Odessa but ultimately had not gained sufficient acceptance among the majority of Eastern European Jews; consequently, the yeshiva folded (Gitelman, ibid.). Nearly a decade after receiving his doctorate from the University of Würzburg in 1914, Tchernowitz moved to America to teach at the Jewish Institute of Religion in New York, a rabbinical seminary founded by Rabbi Stephen S. Wise to train rabbis for Reform or traditional pulpits. This role allowed Tchernowitz to pursue his integrationist methods of Jewish learning. 16 Deut. 15:1–2 stipulates that creditors must forgive all debts still owed to them at the end of the sabbatical/seventh year. Realizing that people therefore refrained from lending money to one another, Hillel instituted the perozbol (from the Greek πρὸς βουλῇ [pros

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special contract, giving it to the court, and testifying such and such before [the judges], one is being cunning towards [ma‘arim al] the commandment of nullifying debts, which one is obligated to uphold. By doing so, he fulfills his obligation and is exempt from further responsibility toward it. It is as though he says to it—that is, to the commandment—“I am collecting no debts from individuals, as you have mandated that I nullify them; instead, all my debts are remitted to the court.”17

Holding aside the discussion about perozbol (it is never actually called ha‘aramah per se anywhere in Rabbinic literature18), Tchernowitz anthropomorphizes the law and indicates that when employing a ha‘aramah one must “convince it [the law]” of the legality of one’s actions. In a fascinating portrayal apparently based on Rabbinic homiletics, Tchernowitz argues that the party being duped is not the Divine or even a human court, but a given law itself. This perspective will prove quite useful as well with regard to another type of ha‘aramah discussed in the ancient Rabbinic corpus.

A Second Type of Ha‘aramah While in some instances ha‘aramah appears to be what we would call taking advantage of a loophole, in other situations, its application is slightly different. In these latter cases, ha‘aramah does not involve changing the empirical and external facts of the matter to circumvent the letter of the law; instead, it involves “misrepresenting” one’s intentions in order to redefine an otherwise illicit action as legal.19 (This is closer to the connotation boulē], “in front of the court,” or from the word προσβουλή [prosbule], “delivery”). The perozbol involved creditors delivering their deeds to the courts: instead of the creditors collecting their own debts, which is prohibited by the verse, the courts would collect for them, thus evading the literal meaning of the text. See bGiṭṭin 36a–37b. 17 Chaim Tchernowitz, Toledot ha-halakhah: kolel shalshelet ha-ḳabbalah ṿe-hitpatteḥut ha-Torah she-be-al peh mi-tokh shorasheha u-meḳoroteha me-reshitah ad ḥatimat ha-Talmud, vol. 1 (New York: n.p., 1934), 182–83 (emphasis in the original). 18 Solomon Zeitlin, “The Need for a New Code,” Jewish Quarterly Review 52, no. 3 (January 1962): 203, vigorously opposes any identification of taḳḳanot (Rabbinic decrees) such as perozbol with ha‘aramah: “The takkanah of Prosbol has no relation to Haarama. Haarama is a matter of individuals. When the law is ambiguous an individual had the right to use a loop hole [sic] to circumvent it. A takkanah [sic] was introduced by the sages who sought support for it in the Pentateuch.” 19 See the studies of Shmuel Shilo, who first shed light on this dichotomy and was perplexed by it: “Circumvention of the Law in Talmudic Literature,” Israel Law Review 17, no. 2 (1982): 151–68; “Evasion of the Law in the Talmud,” in Authority, Process

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of urma as deceit.) As Michael Higger writes in his “Intention in Talmudic Law”: “[I]n many cases in Jewish Religious Law where the commission of the act may involve purposes which are permitted or prohibited, it is the purpose proper that decides the validity of the act.”20 This is especially relevant to Sabbath and ritual purity laws. Where the status of an action21 or object22 is determined by one’s own subjective purposes, one employs ha‘aramah not by changing concrete facts, but by “changing” one’s intentions from illicit to licit. The following instance is paradigmatic: [Regarding] an animal and its offspring that fell into a pit [on a festival]: Rabbi Eliezer says: “Let him raise up the first on condition to slaughter it, and then slaughter it, and let him care for the second one where it is so that it will not die.” Rabbi Joshua says: “Let him raise up the first on condition to slaughter it, but not slaughter it, and let him act prudently [u-ma‘arim] and raise up the second. If one wishes to slaughter neither of them, one has permission to do so” [tBetsah 3:2 (ed. Lieberman)].

Per Jewish law, one may not handle animals on festivals (tBetsah 1:17 [ed. Lieberman]). One may, however, handle animals that one intends to slaughter, as food preparation is permitted on the festival (Ex. 12:16), even when it involves some23 otherwise prohibited labors. Therefore, when two animals fall into a pit on a festival, one may only retrieve them to slaughter them for the day’s meal. In the present case of a parent-child pair, though, one’s

20 21

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and Method: Studies in Jewish Law, ed. Hanina Ben-Menahem and Neil S. Hecht (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998), 171–229. Michael Higger, “Intention in Talmudic Law” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1927), 35. He later, p. 36, presents an exception to this rule: acts that are malum per se, such as idolatrous worship, “disregard purpose entirely.” This will limit its scope basically to the realm of Rabbinic prohibitions regarding the Sabbath and festivals, for example, hakhanah (not preparing on the Sabbath or festival for what will happen once the day ends), muḳtseh (not moving certain objects), nir’eh ki-metaḳḳen (not acting in a way that appears to be “fixing” something), uvdin de-ḥol (weekday-like activities). It does not, however, refer to situations in which an action is illicit regardless of one’s purpose for doing it. Arguably, for such cases, the first type of ha‘aramah is required; more on this below. For instance, much in the realm of ṭum’ah (impurity) and ṭohorah (purity), such as the status of certain objects as susceptible to ritual impurity, depends upon one’s plans for those objects. Higger, “Intention in Talmudic Law,” 20–21, points out that the term maḥashavah is used in Rabbinic literature to refer to this type of purpose. For specific parameters of which labors are permitted, see Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot yom ṭov 1:5–8.

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hands are tied due to another law: Lev. 22:28 prohibits the slaughtering of a parent-child pair on the same day: “However, no animal from the herd or from the flock shall be slaughtered on the same day with its young.” Though leaving either animal in an open pit for a day exposes it to danger—extreme weather, predators, or other injury—one may not retrieve both because one may not slaughter both on that day. While R. Eliezer walks the straight path in this instance, admitting that one is indeed limited to actively raising up only one of the animals, R. Joshua appeals to ha‘aramah. What is R. Joshua’s position? While he identifies a requirement for the initial intent to slaughter, the mental gymnastics appear insincere. First, a sincere change of heart would not actually be called ha‘aramah. Second, the case does not read like one of genuine intentions: R. Joshua does not use the usual term for intention, kaṿṿanah, nor does he require that either animal be slaughtered in the end. Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that someone who is knowingly using ha‘aramah will have genuine intention to slaughter the animal that he or she is trying to save, let alone a preference for which one s/he would rather slaughter.24

24 Samuel Atlas, “Ha‘aramah mishpaṭit ba-Talmud,” in Sefer ha-yovel li-kevod Leṿi Ginzberg li-melot lo shiv‘im shanah, ed. Saul Lieberman et al. (New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1946), 2 n. 3, suggests a justification for this practice, namely, that intention is not crucial to fulfilling the law because it is not as definitive as action: . . . One who acts upon [the ha‘aramah] is using it to follow the law and only transgresses in thought. . . . And therefore when Maimonides ruled on one of the practical cases of ha‘aramah, he emphasized “that this ha‘aramah is not observable by the onlooker,” in other words, one only transgressed the law in thought, and therefore it is permissible. . . . Atlas’s suggestion is surprising and unlikely, given the innovation of intention as an essential part of action in the Mishnah. On this point, see Higger, “Intention in Talmudic Law,” 15, and Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, The Human Will in Judaism: The Mishnah’s Philosophy of Intention (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986). Furthermore, this perspective will certainly not hold regarding ha‘aramah in the Talmuds, which offer several more cases in which intention is cited as a requirement; see Alona Lisitsa, “Kaṿṿanah u-maḥashavah ke-muśśagim hilkhatiyyim ba-sifrut ha-Talmudit” (M.A. thesis, Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, 2004). Moshe Silberg, Kakh darko shel Talmud (Jerusalem: Mif ‘al ha-Shikhpul, 1961), 30, offers a different justification, namely, that ha‘aramah is effective because no one can truly know what a person is thinking. However, this does not explain why ha‘aramah should be acceptable as an ante facto prescription, only why it is not punishable post facto.

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Another option in understanding R. Joshua’s position is to suggest that he is simply lenient with regard to the law of handling animals where the result of observing the law may be pain to the animal or monetary loss.25 However, to keep onlookers from being lax about this law, one must feign observance of it. In other words, the animal owner should deceive passersby: he or she should indicate a desire to slaughter the animal and then conveniently “change” his or her mind! So long as there is no mar’it ayin (appearance of sin),26 all is copacetic. This explanation, however, has at least three weaknesses: a) the passage does not indicate the presence of onlookers or passersby; b) it does not mention the term mar’it ayin or anything like it; and c) anyone watching will likely recognize the ruse if no animals are ultimately slaughtered. Also significant is the fact that this latter reading distances the two types of ha‘aramah—the first ha‘aramah, taking advantage of a loophole, which is actual circumvention of the law, and the second ha‘aramah, simply a superficial deception of onlookers but not an actual path around the law—from one another.27 In this second case, it turns out that ha‘aramah is a stricture rather than a lenient workaround. The law allows for an exception—one can save both animals to prevent pain or monetary loss—but one must use discretion in taking advantage of the exception and keep her/his actions hidden from others so that they not suspect her/him of wrongdoing. This is indeed quite different from the idea of a loophole and is unrelated to a literal reading of the sugya (pericope). The same case is later cited in the Jerusalem Talmud, where R. Joshua’s suggestion is radicalized by the addition of the following line: “Even if one [originally] planned [she-ḥishev] not to slaughter either one of them, it is permitted” (yPesaḥim 30a; yBetsah 62a). Rabbi David Fränkel (1707–1762) cites interpretations that soften R. Joshua’s position: “Although the owner had not thought of slaughtering the animals before they fell into the pit, once they have fallen into the pit, s/he may retrieve both of them so long 25 Both the Jerusalem and the Babylonian Talmuds discuss these motivations in their respective treatments of the issue. See yPesaḥim 30a; yBetsah 62a; bBetsah 37a; bShabbat 117b, 124a. 26 See mSheḳalim 3:2 for an early source explaining the logic behind mar’it ayin. 27 Shmuel Shilo, who was the first to identify these two different types of ha‘aramah, has trouble understanding this second type, as he writes: “It is difficult to define this category since it is very close to deception and fiction (though not legal fiction)” (“Circumvention of the Law,” 153).

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as s/he slaughters one of them.”28 Alternatively, the wording here is synonymous with that of the Tosefta: “Even if s/he thought not to slaughter either of them after [removing them from the pit, the action] is permissible.”29 However, the simplest reading of this line is that one may perform this ha‘aramah even without ever having really planned to slaughter either animal.30 Therein lies the deception. The Jerusalem Talmud in the same sugya in Pesaḥim compares this to a parallel instance of ha‘aramah: Mishnah: How should one separate raw ḥallah dough that is ritually defiled on the festival [of Passover]? R. Eliezer says: “Do not label it until it has baked.” Ben Betera says: “Place it in cold water [to prevent it from rising].” R. Joshua says: “This is not the leavened bread that one may not own on Passover; rather, one may simply remove it and set it aside until evening, and if it rises, it rises.” Gemara: .  .  . How should one act? Per R. Eliezer, one should use prudence [ma‘arim] and say: “I would like to eat this part, I would like to eat that part,” and thus one bakes the entire thing. And when one removes [the baked goods from the oven], he should use prudence [ma‘arim] and say: “I would like to put this part away, I would [not]31 like to put that part away,” and he leaves one [in the oven]. R. Joshua said to him: “Are you not burning ḳodoshim [sanctified foods] on the festival [which is forbidden]?” R. Eliezer answered him: “They are getting burned passively” [yPesaḥim 29d–30a].

Ḥallah, a portion of dough set aside for priests, must be taken from both ritually pure and ritually impure dough (mḤallah 2:3; tḤallah 1:9 [ed. Lieberman]), but only ritually pure ḥallah may be eaten by the priests.32 Impure dough, by contrast, is burned to keep anyone from eating it or making use of it. The mishnah here addresses taking ḥallah from ritually impure dough on a festival day of Passover. Because it is ritually impure, the priest who ordinarily would eat it may not do so. And because no one will be 28 David Fränkel, Sheyare ḳorban to yBetsah 62a (s.v. a[f] a[l] p[i] she-ḥishev she-lo li-sheḥoṭ eḥad me-hen) (emphasis mine). 29 See David Fränkel, Ḳorban ha-edah to yPesaḥim 30a and yBetsah 62a (s.v. a[f] a[l] p[i] she-ḥishev) (emphasis mine). 30 See Michael Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic of the Byzantine Period (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 216, where he defines the root ḥ-sh-b as “to think, calculate, plan.” 31 See MS Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek Cod. Or. 4720, vol. 1, f. 221r. 32 See the standard commentaries to mḤallah 2:7.

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eating the dough on the festival, it may not be baked on the festival, for only food that will be consumed on that day may be cooked or baked on a festival (Ex. 12:16; mShabbat 2:2; tShabbat 2:1 [ed. Lieberman]). Passover presents a further complication: leaving the dough aside and allowing it to rise will result in the subject of the mishnah owning leavened bread, a distinct prohibition on Passover. Here, it is R. Eliezer who suggests the ha‘aramah and R. Joshua who opposes it—a contradiction that the sugya itself attempts to resolve. But what is common to this instance of ha‘aramah and the one with the pair of animals is that all that is required is an indication of one’s intentions with no concrete actions to support those intentions. At first, the person baking wants to eat each piece, justifying the placement of all of the dough in the oven, but later s/he mysteriously changes her/his mind and effectively burns the ḥallah portion. The Babylonian Talmud offers an alternative ending to R. Joshua’s position in the case of the animal and its young: “One may slaughter either of the two animals” (bShabbat 117b; bBetsah 37a). In this version, R. Joshua requires that the owner ultimately slaughter at least one of the two animals, a requirement that makes the statement or indication of intent more related to one’s concrete actions. In glossing this type of ha‘aramah, traditional medieval commentators read it as merely misleading onlookers, rather than actually circumventing the law (as suggested above). Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac (Rashi; 1040–1105), for example, asserts that this ha‘aramah prevents zilzul yom ṭov (denigration of the festival): although the owner indeed has permission to remove the animals from the pit outright, either to prevent monetary loss or the animals’ pain, s/he must employ this ha‘aramah in order to keep onlookers from becoming disrespectful of the festival laws themselves.33 Rashi suggests that the owner find some excuse for why s/he rejected the first animal for slaughter and decided to remove the second animal from the

33 Rashi to bBetsah 37a (s.v. de-efshar le-a‘arume; s.v. aval hakha). Furthermore, in his commentary to bShabbat 124a (s.v. de-efshar be-ha‘aramah), he writes that the purpose of ha‘aramah, at least in this case, is le-dammuye le-hettera (to give the appearance of permissibility). See also the commentaries of Rabbenu Hananel and Rabbi Menahem Meiri to bBetsah 37a. Notably, Rabbi Asher ben Jehiel, in Tosafot ha-Rosh to bShabbat 124a, does not mention the presence of onlookers as a factor in defining a given ha‘aramah as permissible. Instead, he discusses the plausibility of actually changing one’s mind about the food as determinative.

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pit to slaughter it instead.34 However, as we discussed above, a number of elements are simply not accounted for by this explanation.

Returning to Tchernowitz As with the first type of ha‘aramah discussed above, here, too, Rav Tsa‘ir’s anthropomorphizing of Jewish law provides us with a creative way to understand the sugya: More conspicuous is the similar type of ha‘aramah implicated in the case of the animal and its offspring that fell into the pit .  .  . for, in truth, one is profaning the festival, since lifting an animal not for the purpose of slaughtering it is prohibited. . . . But here, the person is outsmarting the law, as though it were standing before her/him and s/he were saying to it: “I did not intend to transgress your commandment but to lift the animal in order to slaughter it, for this is, after all, permissible from your perspective.” And so there are many cases of ha‘aramah like these, which involve outsmarting the law and the commandment.35

In the above passage, a continuation of his comments cited earlier in this essay, Tchernowitz sees the law itself as the intended audience of the ruse. 34 See Rashi to bShabbat 117b (s.v. ṿe-eno shoḥaṭo); Meiri to bShabbat 117b does something similar in describing a person’s ha‘aramah to save fresh bread after having saved dry bread. In terms of the final practical ruling, medieval and even modern decisors have generally favored the Babylonian Talmud’s conclusion, namely, that one must slaughter at least one of the animals. See Meiri to bShabbat 124a, who says that most decisors reject the Tosefta’s version; Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot yom ṭov 2:4; and Isaac ben Moses of Vienna, Sefer or zarua 2:355. Rabbi Abraham Gombiner, in his Magen Avraham commentary to Shulḥan arukh, Oraḥ ḥayyim 498:10, offers a unique suggestion: that in the case of an animal and its offspring, one must slaughter at least one of the two, whereas in the case of two unrelated animals, one need not slaughter either of them. Rabbi Samuel Kolín, author of the Maḥatsit ha-sheḳel commentary, explains that this is because in the case of an animal and its offspring, the ha‘aramah would be obvious unless one of the two animals were ultimately slaughtered, whereas in the case of two unrelated animals, it would not be as obvious. There are, however, some outliers. Rabbi Solomon ben Adret, for instance, says that although one should ideally slaughter one of the two, one may decide to slaughter neither of them; see his Sefer avodat ha-ḳodesh (Warsaw: Nathan Schriftgisser, 1876), 74 (Bet mo‘ed 2:2). Likewise, based on the Tosefta and the Jerusalem Talmud versions, Rabbi Hezekiah da Silva (Peri ḥadash to Shulḥan arukh, Oraḥ ḥayyim 498:10) rules that one who acts leniently has lost nothing thereby. 35 Tchernowitz, Toledot ha-halakhah, 182 (emphasis in the original).

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This conception of the law as the agent’s interlocutor is powerful even as it contains an internal paradox. It is powerful because the notion of a living, breathing law stands in stark opposition to the charges of legalism often engendered by the use of legal loopholes. It also seems to indicate a respect on the part of the agent for the law, as the agent feels the need to direct her/ his explanation to the law itself. On the other hand, one might imagine that just as a human being would not wish to be deceived (or perhaps just as God cannot be deceived), so, too, an anthropomorphized law would not wish to be deceived (or perhaps should be viewed in some sense as all-knowing). And so, there is an undermining element here as well. Nonetheless, Tchernowitz’s decision to anthropomorphize the law does resolve several issues for this type of ha‘aramah. Firstly, there is no need to mention genuine intention or concern for onlookers. An omniscient God knows, and even simple human onlookers would realize, that this is a ruse. But given that these are not the agent’s intended audiences, these concerns are moot. Secondly, this interpretation connects the two types of ha‘aramah: one employs obfuscating actions to outsmart the law, while the other uses obfuscating intentions to achieve the same. In either case, this is a conversation between the legal agent and the law, and Tchernowitz indicates that the law is perhaps more easily fooled than either God or people. While I am not fully convinced by Tchernowitz’s read of ha‘aramah, and indeed I go in a different direction in my dissertation and forthcoming book on the topic,36 something about Tchernowitz’s understanding of Jewish law has always reminded me of Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller. For if anyone understands Jewish law as animated and animating, it is Chaim. And so it is worth delving into this aspect of Tchernowitz’s thought here in Chaim’s honor. Although Rav Tsa‘ir presents his metaphor of the law as a living entity as though it derived from pure, internal Rabbinic homiletics, its origins may in fact lie elsewhere, in nineteenth-century German jurisprudence. In what he considered the “work of [his] life,”37 Toledot ha-halakhah (The History of Jewish Law; first published in 1934), Tchernowitz engages the theories of his older contemporaries, Rabbis Isaac Hirsch Weiss (1815–1905), author of Dor dor ṿe-doreshaṿ, and Isaac Halevy (Rabinowitz; 1847–1914), author 36 Elana Stein Hain, “Rabbinic Legal Loopholes: Formalism, Equity and Subjectivity” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2014). 37 Tchernowitz, Toledot ha-halakhah, v.

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of Dorot ha-rishonim, about the development of Rabbinic law.38 Within this project, he makes clear that he is guided in his understanding by Historical Jurisprudence. The Historical School was founded in Germany by Friedrich Carl von Savigny (1779–1861) and had its roots in Hegelian Idealism, which had fostered a strongly metaphysical ideology.39 Historicism applied Hegel’s notion of the Volksgeist—“the separate spiritual essences of the diverse nations that characterized the present stage of human history”40—to law. It understood the law to originate in the life of the people and thus constituted a reaction to mid-eighteenth-century Legal Positivism, which saw legislation by an institutional body as the ultimate source of law.41 Savigny’s writings reflect this posture: The sum, therefore, of this theory is, that all law is originally formed in the manner, in which, in ordinary but not quite correct language, customary law is said to have been formed: i.e. that it is first developed by custom and popular faith, next by jurisprudence,—everywhere, therefore, by internal silently-operating powers, not by the arbitrary will of a law-giver.42

The second central element of the Historical approach is that law changes continuously, reflecting the ever-evolving spirit of the nation.43 Savigny writes: 38 He devotes the entirety of ch. 2 of the first volume to analyzing and criticizing the views of Weiss and Rabinowitz, as well as other modern scholars, including Nahman Krochmal (1785–1840) and Zacharias Frankel (1801–1875). 39 Roscoe Pound, “The Scope and Purpose of Sociological Jurisprudence: I. Schools of Jurists and Methods of Jurisprudence,” Harvard Law Review 24, no. 8 (June 1911): 592, 600. 40 Woodruff D. Smith, “Volksgeist,” in New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Maryanne Cline Horowitz, vol. 6 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2005), 2442. 41 See Hart, The Concept of Law, ch. 5. 42 Friedrich Carl von Savigny, Of the Vocation of Our Age for Legislation and Jurisprudence, trans. Abraham Hayward (London: Littlewood & Co., 1831), 30. This essay, originally written in German, was published in response to German professor of Roman law A.  F.  J. Thibaut when the latter suggested in 1814 that Germany adopt a civil code similar to that established by France in 1804. See Harold J. Berman, “The Historical Foundations of Law,” Emory Law Journal 54 (2005): 16. See further Hermann Klenner, “Savigny’s Research Program of the Historical School of Law and Its Intellectual Impact in 19th Century Berlin,” The American Journal of Comparative Law 37, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 67–80, for more on the connection between the Historical School and the Volksgeist. 43 It is for this reason that Savigny bitterly opposed Thibaut’s suggestion to draft a civil code for Germany: he simply did not wish for the law to become static.

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For law, as for language,44 there is no moment of absolute cessation; it is subject to the same movement and development as every other popular tendency; and this very development remains under the same law of inward necessity, as in its earliest stages. Law grows with the growth, and strengthens with the strength of the people. . . .45

Thus, Savigny’s method of change is subtle, gradual, organic. As Karl Mollnau writes, “Savigny pleaded only for changes in the law, not for changes of the law.”46 Rather than expressly overturn older laws or write new legal codes, legislators and jurists should introduce “new elements . . . into existing law by the same internal, invisible force that originally created law.”47 And this more tactful and natural way of modifying law, mirroring the silent inner forces of the nation, is, like many dimensions of Historical Jurisprudence, learned from Roman law: What, indeed, made Rome great, was the quick, lively, political spirit, which made her ever ready so to renovate the forms of her constitution, that the new merely ministered to the development of the old,—a judicious mixture of the adhesive and progressive principles. . . . In the law, consequently, the general Roman character was strongly marked,—the holding fast by the long-established, without allowing themselves to be fettered by it, when it no longer harmonised with a new popular prevailing theory. For this reason, the history of the Roman law, down to the classical age, exhibits every where [sic] a gradual, wholly-organic development. If a new form is framed, it is 44 As an aside, yet another element of the Volksgeist is to be found in the use of language as a model for law. In his Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 44, Benedict Anderson writes that the printing press was significant for the development of nationalism: because of it, [s]peakers of the huge variety of Frenches, Englishes, or Spanishes .  .  . gradually became aware of the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in their particular language-field, and at the same time that only those hundreds of thousands, or millions, so belonged. These fellow readers, to whom they were connected through print, formed, in their secular, particular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community [emphasis in the original]. 45 Savigny, Of the Vocation of Our Age, 27. 46 Karl A. Mollnau, “The Contributions of Savigny to the Theory of Legislation,” The American Journal of Comparative Law 37, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 89 (emphasis in the original). 47 Friedrich Carl von Savigny, System des heutigen Römischen Rechts, vol. 1 (Berlin: Veit und Comp., 1840), 41; translated in Mollnau, “The Contributions of Savigny,” 89.

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immediately bound up with an old established one, and thus participates in the maturity and fixedness of the latter.48

Gradual progression of law, a synthesis between the well-established and the original, would lend more credibility to the more recent emendations to the law. Tchernowitz explicitly discusses his use of this school of legal philosophy: Against this school [Legal Positivism], which sees in legislation the primary source of law .  .  . in the last century, the Historical School, whose main exponents are Savigny and Fichte,49 has arisen. This school’s most favored analogy is that between the law/its development and language/the general national character of the people: there is an organic, everlasting connection between the law and the identity and character of the nation. In this way, it is similar to language: just like language, law does not have even one moment of complete stasis. . . . Even the legislator who emerges from the nation—whether he is a lone ruler or a democratic institution—his activity [of legislation] is only formal; he draws his legal content directly from the spirit of the nation.50

He then goes on to apply this thinking to both biblical and Rabbinic law: It turns out that these two forms, the Written and the Oral [Law]—though one is revealed through the giving of the Torah from on High and the other through terrestrial creativity, and though they appear as two different [law] sources standing in a hierarchical relationship with one another—are, fundamentally, but two revelations that emerge from one unique source: from the creative faculty of the people and the general consensus of all parts of the nation; for, fundamentally, even the state, with all of its diverse forms, [ultimately] derives its power from the consensus and free will of the nation.51

48 Savigny, Of the Vocation of Our Age, 48–49 (emphasis mine). 49 Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) was a German idealist philosopher. 50 Tchernowitz, Toledot ha-halakhah, 129–30. 51 Ibid., 135. For fuller statements by Rav Tsa‘ir about his views on the theological significance of Sinaitic revelation (and about his opposition to biblical criticism), see Chaim Tchernowitz, Be-shaʻare Tsiyyon: ḳovets maʼamarim be-inyane Erets Yiśraʼel ṿe-ha-tsiyyoniyyut (New York: Schulsinger Bros., 1936), 12–13, and idem, Massekhet zikhronot: partsufim ṿe-ha‘arakhot (New York: Ṿa‘ad ha-Yovel, 1945), 257–62; see also

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Tchernowitz’s assertion here is radical. Even the Bible is an expression of the Volksgeist! While there certainly are ancient Rabbinic sources that describe the Jewish people consenting to revelation, these do not seem to be representative of the general thrust of early Rabbinic thinking on the topic.52 In fact, it is likely that the opposite is true, namely, that all law—both biblical and Rabbinic—was seen by the Rabbis as authorized by the Divine.53 In Rav Tsa‘ir’s view, by contrast, biblical law does not derive its validity solely from its divine authorship, but also from its acceptance by, and reflection of, the nation. As Efraim Shmueli writes: “.  .  . Tchernowitz attempted to confer upon the Talmudic concept of the commandments an ethical and rational autonomy; the acceptance of heaven’s yoke was made dependent upon the community’s consent.”54 This is Tchernowitz’s inspiration for his description of the law as a living being, a worthy interlocutor. The midrash that Tchernowitz adduces about Abraham addressing the Torah is merely a Jewish source buttressing a secular jurisprudential idea. For Tchernowitz, as a Historicist, hitching the law to the consent of the people does not weaken the authority of the law; it actually makes the law more difficult to change. The letter of the halakhah, not only its spirit, reflects the unique Volksgeist of the Jewish people. This becomes the reason for needing to change the law slowly and specifically for needing to use strategies such as ha‘aramah to make that change: . . . [The Rabbis] were just as concerned with the outer shell and dressing [of the law] as they were with its inner core and substance. For sometimes the outer garb, too—to the extent that it takes on the national form—is also important for maintaining the existence of the nation. Therefore, preservation of the external expressions of the life of the nation, so that they not be uprooted and forgotten from Israel, is itself significant. 55 Allan Arkush, “Biblical Criticism and Cultural Zionism Prior to the First World War,” Jewish History 21, no. 2 (June 2007): 121–58. 52 See bShabbat 88a for a discussion of Israelite consent, or lack thereof, at Sinai. 53 See, for example, bShabbat 23a regarding the benediction over the Rabbinically enacted commandment to light Hanukkah candles, in which one states, “. . . and [God] commanded us to light the Hanukkah lamp.” See also Yitzhak D. Gilat, “Issure shevut be-shabbat ṿe-hishtalshelutam,” in Peraḳim be-hishtalshelut ha-halakhah (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1992), 87–108. 54 Efraim Shmueli, Seven Jewish Cultures: A Reinterpretation of Jewish History and Thought, trans. Gila Shmueli (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 87. 55 Tchernowitz, Toledot ha-halakhah, 180.

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The essence of the Jewish people is to be found even in the external forms of halakhah, not only in the values that halakhah conveys. Consequently, these forms must always be maintained, even when silent forces such as ha‘aramah negotiate with them. As pressing circumstances, such as the need to prevent monetary loss and the suffering of animals, arise, the law can be both honored and challenged simultaneously through the double-face of legal circumvention, which preserves the authenticity of both the old and the new.56

From Chaim to Chaim Tchernowitz’s employment of the human-centered metaphysic of the Volksgeist, which he borrows from the Historical School of Law, constitutes an important contribution to the discussion of halakhah for several reasons. First, his approach responds strongly to the charges of legalism often leveled against Jewish law, especially in cases in which circumventions are used to justify violating the “spirit” of the law. Tchernowitz suggests that the distinction between letter and spirit is a false dichotomy. For in the notion of commandment, the letter of the law itself, he sees great vibrancy and vitality, a reflection of the history and character of a people that has a spirit of its own. Second, Rav Tsa‘ir engages here in a distinctly modern (religious) balancing act. In formulating his understanding of Jewish law, he proffers a theory that is weighted towards the human but is also defined by the Divine. On the one hand, he asserts that the Torah is from heaven, making God the ultimate source of halakhic authority. On the other hand, he states that even God’s commands are meant to reflect the character of the Jewish people. A harder version of this approach (which seems to be precisely the one Tchernowitz is taking) would stipulate that God’s commands must prescriptively conform to the character and will of the people. A softer version (which I discern in our own Chaim Seidler-Feller’s perspective) would suggest that God’s commands descriptively take into account the will and 56 Of course, there is an inherent tension between understanding Torah as emanating from the Divine and at the same time viewing it as reflecting the character and consensus of the people. What would happen if, for example, the people were to change to such a degree that their character no longer matched that of the Torah’s audience? From what I can tell, Tchernowitz does not address this issue in Toledot ha-halakhah (perhaps because that work is primarily historical in its focus), but the question would certainly have to be posed to him if he were alive today.

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character of the people. The former formulation casts the Volksgeist as a “constraint,” while the latter presents it as a divine priority or choice. And third, Tchernowitz applies a contemporary and interdisciplinary approach to the material. He uses the tools of his day to construct a legal theory for the Rabbis and, in so doing, asserts the ongoing relevance and potency of Rabbinic law. In his view, ancient Rabbinic law can—and perhaps must—be considered in light of the most elevated scholarly conversations of the present day. These elements of Tchernowitz’s thought lead me to dedicate this article to my teacher and friend, Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller. As mentioned above, Chaim is a person who sees in the commandments of the Torah anything but dry legalism: he discerns an energy and a dynamism that are bursting at the seams with the wisdom that humanity so desperately needs to make a better world. And when trying to understand the Torah, Chaim embodies the interdisciplinary: he mines the ideas of contemporary discourse and places them in conversation with a Torah that has traversed world history, holding onto both simultaneously—and so tightly. For Chaim, life is one continuous loop, and all experiences and ideas are somehow connected. All of this, I maintain, is because of Chaim’s ardent belief in a God Whose central occupation is an investment in the human experience, a God Who commands with an understanding of and profound care for all things human. Chaim expresses this deeply held religious belief both in thought and in deed, practicing his own imitatio Dei through his unwavering concern for the concentric circles of community—from nuclear family to humanity itself—and by sharing the teachings of the Torah in order to enlighten all who encounter him. For all this and more, Chaim, I thank you and try to learn from your shining example.

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Avraham Yizhak (Arthur) Green, Hebrew College

Buber, Scholem, and the Me’or enayim: Another Perspective on a Great Controversy

The purpose of this essay is to reexamine a key aspect of one of the most significant and much-discussed debates in the field of modern Jewish studies: that between Martin Buber (1878–1965) and Gershom Scholem (1897– 1982) regarding the proper interpretation of Hasidism. I hope to look at their divergent views regarding the Hasidic attitude toward the corporeal world through the lens of a particular volume of Hasidic homilies, the Me’or enayim (Light of the Eyes) of Rabbi Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl (1729/1730–1787). I shall explain presently why I consider this work to be particularly appropriate for an evaluation of this subject. Scholem first delivered his broadside against Buber in a lecture at the University College London Institute of Jewish Studies, headed by his erstwhile student Joseph Weiss. The attack was then published in the pages of Commentary magazine in 1961.1 Buber responded in a short essay that

1 Gershom Scholem, “Martin Buber’s Hasidism: A Critique,” Commentary 32, no. 4 (October 1961): 305–16. It was reprinted in his collected essays, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 228–48. For a complete discussion of the events surrounding this debate, see Maurice Friedman, Martin Buber’s Life and Work: The Later Years, 1945–1965 (New York: Dutton, 1983), 280–99.

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appeared in English under the title “Interpreting Hasidism,”2 to which Scholem replied with a brief rejoinder.3 This debate has been the subject of vigorous analysis and scholarly conversation ever since.4 The interest has revolved around several distinct axes, including the proper understanding of early Hasidism in its historical context, the implied question of Hasidism as a model for a contemporary Jewish spirituality, and theoretical issues in the interpretation of textual sources, including the very basic question 2 Martin Buber, “Interpreting Hasidism,” Commentary 36, no. 3 (September 1963): 218– 25. It was also published in German in his Schriften zum Chassidismus (Munich: KöselVerlag, 1963), 991–98. 3 This rejoinder was added as a postscript to the Messianic Idea reprint, pp. 248–50. 4 The vast literature surrounding the Buber-Scholem debate includes the following: Grete Schaeder, The Hebrew Humanism of Martin Buber, trans. Noah J. Jacobs (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973), 287–338; David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 165–70; Michael Oppenheim, “The Meaning of Hasidut: Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 49, no. 3 (September 1981): 409–23; Steven T. Katz, “Martin Buber’s Misuse of Hasidic Sources,” in Post-Holocaust Dialogues: Critical Studies in Modern Jewish Thought (New York: New York University Press, 1983), 52–93; Louis Jacobs, “Aspects of Scholem’s Study of Hasidism,” in Gershom Scholem, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), 179–88; Laurence J. Silberstein, “Modes of Discourse in Modern Judaism: The Buber-Scholem Debate Reconsidered,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 71, no. 4 (Winter 1988): 657–81; Maurice Friedman, “Interpreting Hasidism: The Buber-Scholem Controversy,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 33, no. 1 (January 1988): 449–67; Jon D. Levenson, “The Hermeneutical Defense of Buber’s Hasidism: A Critique and Counterstatement,” Modern Judaism 11, no. 3 (October 1991): 297–320; Steven Kepnes, The Text as Thou: Martin Buber’s Dialogical Hermeneutics and Narrative Theology (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), 32–40; Rivka Schatz, “Gershom Scholem’s Interpretation of Hasidism as an Expression of His Idealism,” in Gershom Scholem: The Man and His Work, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 87–103; Moshe Idel, “Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem on Hasidism: A Critical Appraisal,” in Hasidism Reappraised, ed. Ada Rapoport-Albert (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1996), 389–403; Barry J. Hammer, “Resolving the Buber-Scholem Controversy in Hasidism,” Journal of Jewish Studies 47, no. 1 (1996): 102–27; Seth Brody, “‘Open to Me the Gates of Righteousness’: The Pursuit of Holiness and Non-Duality in Early Hasidic Teaching,” Jewish Quarterly Review 89, nos. 1–2 (July–October 1998): 3–44; and Jerome Gellman, “Buber’s Blunder: Buber’s Replies to Scholem and SchatzUffenheimer,” Modern Judaism 20, no. 1 (2000): 20–40. Gellman mounts a particularly venomous attack on Buber, harsher than that of Scholem, who remained respectful toward his onetime mentor throughout.  As will become clear below, my conclusions are diametrically opposed to those of Gellman. See also discussions by Ron Margolin in Miḳdash adam: ha-hafnamah ha-datit ṿe-itsuv ḥayye ha-dat ha-penimiyyim be-reshit ha-ḥasidut (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2005), 40–54, 428–33, and by Tsippi Kauffman in Be-kol derakhekha da‘ehu: tefisat ha-E-lohut ṿe-ha-avodah be-gashmiyyut be-reshit ha-ḥasidut (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2009), 125–29, and passim.

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of scholarly objectivity itself. Standing in the background has always been the personal relationship between these two giants of the German Jewish intellectual milieu, stretching from the World War I era in Germany, when Scholem saw himself as a young cultural Zionist much influenced by Buber; to the period after Buber’s aliyyah (immigration to Palestine) in 1938, when Scholem was already established as a major figure on the Jerusalem academic stage; and extending into the early years following 1948, when their views on matters historical and academic, as well as those regarding Jewish nationalism and Israeli statehood, increasingly diverged: while Scholem eventually made a somewhat unhappy peace with Israel as a nation state and with emerging Jewish nationalism, Buber remained deeply at odds with both.5 Scholem attacked Buber on a number of fronts, including by questioning the legitimacy of using late-published and clearly highly embellished Hasidic tales as key sources for understanding early Hasidism.6 Buber, throughout his career, insisted that the tales best captured the real lifeblood of the movement.7 He admitted, however, that his versions of these tales were highly edited and “filtered,” even that his own personal understanding of and relationship with the texts often constituted that filter. But here, as I have said, we are interested in one major aspect of the debate: Scholem’s claim that Buber had misread the Hasidic attitude toward the corporeal universe, specifically around the key spiritual mission in Hasidic teaching of seeking out and uplifting sparks of divine light or holiness to be found throughout the world. Buber claimed this as evidence of a life-embracing and world-approving element within Hasidism, a certain 5 See the recent discussion of this relationship in David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Master of the Kabbalah (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 12–14, 186–90, and passim. 6 On the late publication of the tales, see Joseph Dan, Ha-sippur ha-ḥasidi (Jerusalem: Keter, 1975), 189–263. Of course, it is usually impossible to know when these lateprinted stories were originally collected or composed. Regarding the use of tales as a source for understanding Hasidism, see the useful summation of the debate by Karl E. Grözinger, “The Buber–Scholem Controversy about Hasidic Tale[s] and Hasidism—Is There a Solution?,” in Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism 50 Years After, ed. Peter Schäfer and Joseph Dan (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1993), 327–36. 7 Buber not infrequently took short excerpts from the homiletical literature of Hasidism, where the discussions are quite theoretical, and “restored” them to their original form as spoken words of the master, even creating for them a bit of narrative framework and thereby making them into “tales.” Buber freely admits as much in his preface to Tales of the Hasidim (New York: Schocken Books, 1947), 9–10: “The teacher, the zaddik, is asked to interpret a verse in the Scriptures or to expound the meaning of a rite. . . . In most instances I have reconstructed the questions and thus restored the dialogue form.”

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“earthiness” that made it unique among Western mystical movements (as a mysticism not afflicted with the anti-worldly spirit of Gnosticism) and that played a great role in its acceptance by the Eastern European Jewish masses. Scholem responded that, to the contrary, the quest for divine sparks was in fact an ultimately anti-worldly one. The lost bits of Divinity were to be uplifted from the material garb in which they had been imprisoned and returned to their source in the One. The material world would be annihilated by this process, falling away into nothingness once its life-energy had been “redeemed” from it. Hasidism thus essentially constituted a continuation of Gnosticism in its attitude toward this world, rather than its opposite. Buber replied in part by trying to draw a distinction between the original teachings of Rabbi Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov (the Besht; ca. 1700–1760), the inspirational founding figure of Hasidism, and innovations introduced by Rabbi Dov Baer, the Maggid (preacher) of Miedzyrzecz (1704–1772), whose disciples actually made the Hasidic movement into a historical reality. The difficulty of distinguishing between their views is complicated by the fact that both the Besht and the Maggid were essentially oral teachers. We know of the Besht’s thought primarily through brief quotations in the works of those who succeeded him, particularly his chief literary disciple Rabbi Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye (d. ca. 1782) and his grandson Rabbi Moses Ḥayyim Ephraim of Sudylkow (ca. 1740–ca. 1800), but also from other quotations scattered throughout early Hasidic writings. The Maggid has a significant body of written materials attributed to him, but none of it is known to come from his own pen.8 For both Buber and Scholem, the stakes in this debate were extraordinarily high, reaching far beyond the question of early Hasidic history itself. Buber sought to use Hasidism as a springboard toward a new understanding of religion in the broadest sense. He saw the true and necessarily spontaneous religious impulse as constrained by the institutionalized forms of religion, including ritual itself. In his early and more mystical period, the young Buber tried to break through those constraints in a burst of Erlebnismystik, a mysticism of experience, embracing a oneness that transcended all lines between self and other, or God, world, and person. The more mature Buber, 8 Important work on clarifying the literary legacy of the Maggid has been undertaken by Ariel Evan Mayse in his forthcoming book, Speaking Infinities: God and Language in the Teachings of Rabbi Dov Ber of Mezritsh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), based on his 2015 Harvard University doctoral dissertation completed under my supervision.

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Buber, Scholem, and the Me’or enayim    AVRAHAM YIZHAK (ARTHUR) GREEN

shifting toward what he called dialogic thinking (made most famous in his 1922 book I and Thou), sought to find the divine presence in the most ordinary of human deeds and moments. He viewed the truly religious person (“saint,” in his language) as one who was able to maintain that consciousness. While recognizing the strict traditionalism of Hasidism in the past, in prescriptive terms he considered the ritualized elevation of particular acts or moments among Hasidic sects over time to constitute a betrayal of the original Hasidic faith that the Divine was to be discovered everywhere, and specifically in the everyday, including in that which seems most profane. Despite his personal distance from the actual life-patterns of the Hasidim, it is fair to say that Buber’s relationship to Hasidism, throughout his life, was one of deep love for its teachings and heroes. For Scholem, Jewish mysticism stood as a deep undercurrent reverberating throughout the history of the Jewish people. The nation’s collective longing for redemption was given its most passionate expression in the garb of mystical devotion. Within this schema, Hasidism was in some ways the least interesting of the many stages of Jewish mystical development. Reacting to the Sabbatian debacle, which had deeply traumatized the Jewish body politic, Hasidism allowed the longings for redemption to lie dormant while offering a release of their pressures in the form of deveḳut, a personal and accessible attachment of the soul to God, obviating the need for collective or historic redemption.9 Those dormant longings would be awakened again in Zionism, an ideological lens through which Scholem saw all of prior Jewish history. As a religious philosopher writing for Jews and non-Jews alike, Buber was interested in presenting the broadest and most universal message that might be derived from the example of Hasidism as he understood it. This goal, he felt, demanded and legitimized a certain elevation and romantic transformation of Hasidism. But the resulting presentation served precisely 9 See Scholem’s essays: “The Neutralisation of the Messianic Element in Early Hasidism,” Journal of Jewish Studies 20 (1969): 25–55, and “Devekut or Communion with God,” Review of Religion 14 (1949–1950): 115–39, both also reprinted in The Messianic Idea in Judaism, 176–202, 203–27. For discussion of Scholem’s attitude toward Hasidism, see Haviva Pedaya’s essay, “Nispaḥ: he‘arot be-shule ha-ma’amar,” in the Hebrew edition of Scholem’s collected essays on Hasidism, Ha-shalav ha-aḥaron: meḥḳere ha-ḥasidut shel Gershom Scholem, ed. David Assaf and Esther Liebes (Tel Aviv: Am Oved; Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2008), 23–37, as well as Naama Zifroni et al., “Spiritual Awakenings: An Interview with Haviva Pedaya,” in A New Hasidism: Branches, ed. Arthur Green and Ariel Evan Mayse (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2019), 381–82, 392–93.

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to cut Hasidism off from its roots in Kabbalah, where the Gnostic element is very strong, as read by Scholem as well as Buber.10 That left a Hasidic message that was primarily about an idealized religious simplicity, a constant cultivation of awareness that God is present in the here-and-now. But if neither the pain of exile nor the longing for the messiah is to be deeply felt, and if the specificity of religious deeds is replaced by an embrace of all deeds as holy, nothing remains of the historical or religious particularity of Judaism. This was something Scholem could not accept, particularly in the era following the Holocaust and with the renewal of Jewish political independence. While both Buber and Scholem had been active in the prestate dream of Jewish-Arab cooperation, Scholem came, as already mentioned, to embrace Jewish statehood with more enthusiasm than did Buber. It was in part to undercut Buber’s positing of Hasidism as a universalist and world-embracing religious system that might serve as a rival to nationbased Jewish identity that Scholem attacked Buber’s reading of Hasidism so harshly. Three generations of scholars have now rehashed and refined this conversation. Among the most interesting discussions was that by my late and much-lamented student Seth Brody, published posthumously in 1998.11 (Unlike several other commentators, Brody had access to and discussed real Hasidic sources in the light of Buber’s and Scholem’s views.) He argued that the raising of sparks and absorption of the self into divine oneness needed to be viewed as the first half of a two-part process. The ascent of the tsaddiḳ (saint) into God led to a recharging of divine energy, which was then released into the world in an act of renewed blessing. The entire process was thus “a mystical dialectic of ascent and renewal.” The ascent, indeed having about it an aspect of annihilation, in effect emptied out the world so as to make way for new “irrigation channels” through which worldly existence could be recharged with divine presence. Brody placed his Hasidic sources into the context of a “theology of blessing” found already in early kabbalistic writings, a trend he described in his brilliant but sadly unpublished doctoral dissertation, “Human Hands Dwell in Heavenly Heights,” and in a brief article by the same name.12 10 This is a major focus of Idel, “Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem,” 392. 11 Brody, “‘Open to Me the Gates of Righteousness,’” 3–44. 12 Idem, “Human Hands Dwell in Heavenly Heights: Worship and Mystical Experience in Thirteenth Century Kabbalah” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1991); idem, “Human Hands Dwell in Heavenly Heights: Contemplative Ascent and Theurgic

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Buber, Scholem, and the Me’or enayim    AVRAHAM YIZHAK (ARTHUR) GREEN

The fact is, however, that the early Hasidic sources are quite complex and hopelessly inconsistent in the way they express these matters. Often, two seemingly contradictory attitudes are found side-by-side, and sometimes even intertwined, in the very unsystematic Hasidic homilies. Attitudes vary, not only from author to author, but even from one sermon to another or one line to the next within a single teaching. Neither the Hasidic preachers nor those who recorded them, of course, thought they needed to take care to conform to either Buber’s or Scholem’s point of view. We should also recall, as always, that the texts we have are abbreviated Hebrew transcriptions of originally longer Yiddish sermons. Like all such occasional talks, they were influenced by such factors as who was present in the audience, events that had taken place that particular week— both in the immediate community and in the broader spheres, all of which are lost to us—and perhaps also by the particular mood of the preacher at that moment. The transcriptions, most often made by disciples rather than the speakers themselves, are necessarily pale reflections.13 The writers’ command of Hebrew was generally weak, suffering from both very limited vocabulary and a poor grasp of grammar or syntax, often leading to confusing and imprecise formulations. The emphasis on the possibility of finding and serving God through all things and in each moment is certainly part of the legacy bequeathed by the Ba‘al Shem Tov to the Hasidic movement and is well aligned with his rejection of the ascetic and anti-worldly path. Furthermore, Buber’s distinction between the Besht’s thought and that of the Maggid is not without merit. Both of the Besht’s key disciples (R. Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, along with the Maggid) are said to have turned to him to heal their own ascetic leanings, attracted to his message of an alternative path. But both Power in Thirteenth Century Kabbalah,” in Mystics of the Book: Themes, Topics, and Typologies, ed. Robert A. Herrera (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 123–58. 13 For a fuller discussion, see my “The Hasidic Homily: Mystical Performance and Hermeneutical Process,” in As a Perennial Spring: A Festschrift Honoring Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm, ed. Bentsi Cohen (New York: Downhill Publishing LLC, 2013), 237–65. For further discussion of the transcription and editing processes of Hasidic sermons, see Ariel Evan Mayse and Daniel Reiser,  “Sefer Sefat Emet, Yiddish Manuscripts, and the Oral Homilies of R. Yehudah Aryeh Leib of Ger,” Kabbalah 33 (2015): 9–43; Ariel Evan Mayse, “Double-Take: Textual Artifacts and the Memory of Hasidic Teachings,” Kabbalah 37 (2017): 37–93; and Ariel Evan Mayse and Daniel Reiser, “Second Thoughts: Unknown Yiddish Texts and New Perspectives on the Study of Hasidism,” Zutot 14, no. 1 (November 2017): 88–98.

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continued to struggle with the pull of self-punishing practices and never fully overcame it.14 This is where R. Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl enters the picture. He is described as a disciple of both the Besht and the Maggid. He was already thirty years old at the time of the Besht’s passing and had visited him at least twice. Family traditions (only partially reliable) indicate a close connection between his family and the Besht. He was one of the older disciples of the Maggid but outlived him by twenty-five years. His book Me’or enayim (Slavuta, 1798) represents an amalgam of both masters’ teachings. My own careful study of this work leads me to conclude that its author is one among the Maggid’s disciples who in certain areas remains the most faithful follower of the Besht.15 R. Dov Baer himself, never having fully abandoned his ascetic leanings, formulated his mystical goal as one of biṭṭul (self-negation), also implying the transcendence of the physical realm as a whole. In this, he was followed by such diverse disciples as Rabbis Shneur Zalman of Liady (1745–1813) and Elimelech of Lyzhansk (1717–1787). But the Me’or enayim reflects, with surprising consistency, a Besht-inspired totalistic view of divine immanence, finding God even in the lowest rungs of existence. The book is colored by a deep religious optimism about life in this world, including the possibility of transforming all evil to good in the process of a loving return to God.16

14 In the case of R. Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, we know this from a surviving document, a letter in which the Besht appeals to him most strongly to turn away from selfmortification. That letter is translated in Immanuel Etkes, The Besht: Magician, Mystic, and Leader, trans. Saadya Sternberg (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press; Hanover: University Press of New England, 2005), 180–81. In the Maggid’s case, we are more reliant on the legendary tradition, but this is supported by his own writings. For bibliography and discussion, see Mayse, Speaking Infinities. 15 I have recently completed an annotated English translation of the Me’or enayim, forthcoming as The Light of the Eyes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020). The translations below are all selections from that work. A great deal can be learned about R. Menahem Nahum from Gad Sagiv, “Olamo ha-ruḥani shel R. Naḥum mi-Chernobyl ṿi-yesodotaṿ ha-te’ologiyyim” (M.A. thesis, Tel Aviv University, 2003), summarized in his book, Ha-shoshelet: bet Chernobyl u-meḳomo be-toledot ha-ḥasidut (Jerusalem: Merkaz Shazar, 2014). 16 This is expressed especially well in discussions of Eccl. 3:1–8, as well as of a passage in bYoma 86a, where it is taught that repentance undertaken out of love of God turns transgressions into merits. See Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl, Sefer me’or enayim al ha-Torah im Yiśmaḥ lev al aggadot ha-Shas, ed. Isaac Simeon Österreicher (Jerusalem: n.p., 2012), 125–29 (Mi-ḳets, no. 2), 338–39 (Ṿa-etḥanan, no. 7).

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Now we need to turn to the specific issue at hand, the question of the divine sparks and whether they indicate a positive view of the worldly or an attempt to transcend and thus ultimately to nullify it. The notion of “uplifting sparks” is derived from the well-known Lurianic myth of the breaking of the vessels and the scattering of sparks of divine light. Shevirah (lit., breakage) referred originally to the cosmic cataclysm that occurred as God sought to send His light into the empty space. The contrast between light and emptiness was so great that the vessels containing God’s light smashed; this breakage caused nitsotsot (sparks of light) to spread far and wide, but they were hidden behind the shards of the broken vessels known as ḳelippot (lit., shells), which took on a demonic character. Hasidic theology devotes little attention to the shevirah itself, not wanting to focus on the brokenness of existence.17 It takes great interest, however, in the nitsotsot that resulted from it. These bits of divine light are to be found scattered throughout the universe. In the Hasidic reading, they sometimes seem to be intentionally “sent” by God, Who wants us to go on a journey in quest of them. This is an expansion of the old Rabbinic notion that “the blessed Holy One desires the prayers of the righteous” (bYevamot 64a). It is divine love and desire for human worship that causes Him to hide His light, so that we may give Him pleasure in seeking it out. As God has hidden these sparks throughout the created world, so, too, has He hidden them throughout His Torah. Sparks are identified (already by the Besht) with letters. We are to look more deeply into both world and text in order to find the treasures of light that God has hidden there for us.18 We are thus not the repairers of a broken universe, but the children of a loving parent, one who wants to offer us the ability to choose good over evil, rejoicing as we 17 Hillel Zeitlin perceptively notes that this mythology belongs to the legacy of Hasidism’s origins in earlier Kabbalah. Had Hasidism been created from scratch, he speculates, these cataclysmic notions, alien to its essential spirit, would not have been part of it. See his comments in “The Fundaments of Hasidism,” in Hasidic Spirituality for a New Era: The Religious Writings of Hillel Zeitlin, ed. and trans. Arthur Green (New York; Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2012), 78–80, 97. In the Hasidic reading, tsimtsum (divine contraction), too, is understood non-literally and is taken to be an intentional kindness on God’s part meant to allow humans to conduct their lives on the material plane, an essential element of their service to Him. 18 The idea that the or ha-ganuz (hidden light), created on the first day, is concealed within the Torah is widespread. It is also reflected in the legends about the Besht, who was able to look inside a Torah scroll (or perhaps any holy book) and see “from one end of the world to the other,” as that light empowered one to do. See Avraham Rubenstein, ed., Shivḥe ha-Beshṭ: mahadurah muʻeret u-mevoʼeret (Jerusalem: R. Mass, 1991), 137.

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do so. In some Hasidic sources, the nitsotsot are in their present fallen state as a result of human sin, not because they were buried by a cataclysm seemingly beyond divine control.19 The Hasid seeks out these sparks in order to restore wholeness to the soul of Adam, present within every Israelite. This is indeed an act of restoration, but according to Hasidic teaching it is human frailty, rather than an inherent cosmic flaw, that needs to be repaired. Faith in the ubiquity of divine sparks also carries a distinctly Hasidic devotional message: “God wants (sometimes ‘needs’) to be served in all ways.”20 The well-trodden Jewish paths of studying Torah, fulfilling the commandments, and reciting one’s daily prayers are no longer deemed sufficient, as they leave vast realms of life untouched. These, too, must become places to seek and find God. Everything is to become an act of service. The Me’or enayim contains some of the most outspoken expressions of this ideal, referred to by scholars as avodah be-gashmiyyut, service of God through corporeal things.21 Sometimes, the author appears to make such pronouncements in an intentionally provocative way, telling us that we must serve God by means of “our study and our prayer, our eating and our drinking,”22 placing them all on a seemingly equal footing. If this kind of expression reached the eyes or ears of anti-Hasidic activists (and we have no sure way of knowing whether it did), it surely would have aroused their ire, and perhaps it was even intended to do so. This is why I claim that the Me’or enayim is the most “Buberian” of all the early Hasidic sermon collections. R. Menahem Nahum’s strong commitment to Beshtian anti-asceticism brings with it a worldliness that 19 The reading of cosmic brokenness as an intentional creation of God, in order to allow for the contrast between good and evil and the possibility of moral choice, can be traced back through kabbalistic sources preceding Hasidism. See Meir Ibn Gabbai, Sefer avodat ha-ḳodesh, vol. 1 (Warsaw: Samuel Isaac Peshes, 1883), 37–38 (Ḥeleḳ ha-yiḥud, ch. 19). These roots are developed by Rabbi Moses Cordovero; see the treatment by Bracha Sack in Be-shaʻare ha-ḳabbalah shel Rabbi Mosheh Cordovero (Beersheba: BenGurion University Press, 1995), 84–85. See also Moses Ḥayyim Luzzatto, Sefer 138 pitḥe ḥokhmah, ed. Chaim Friedlander (Bnei Brak: n.p., 1992), 139–42 (petaḥ 37), and idem, Sefer da‘at tevunot, ed. Chaim Friedlander (Bnei Brak: n.p., 1998), 84–85 (no. 96), 101–07 (no. 124). These sources are to be seen as alternatives to the classic descriptions of the Lurianic view, so well known from the studies of Scholem and his student Isaiah Tishby. 20 Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov, Tsaṿṿaʼat ha-Rivash (Brooklyn: Kehot, 1975), 1b (no. 3). See notes ad loc. for parallels in other texts. 21 See the thorough treatment of this theme, including the special discussion of R. Menahem Nahum, in Kauffman, Be-kol derakhekha da‘ehu, 467–99. 22 Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl, Sefer me’or enayim, 22 (Be-reshit, no. 5).

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chimes well with Buber’s reading of the Hasidic sources. This does not mean that there is no uplifting of the sparks in the Me’or enayim. There is indeed. Nevertheless, the tone of the work leans strongly in the direction of insisting that Divinity is to be found within the material world, that celebrating such presence is essential to the religious task, and that turning aside from the world is missing the point, practically even sinful. To illustrate this claim, we will call upon three texts, each of which will be followed by brief commentary.23

Parashat mat.t.ot “Moses spoke to the heads of the Israelite tribes, saying . . . ‘If a person utter a vow . . . forbidding a certain matter to himself, his word may not be profaned; he shall do all that he has said’” [Num. 30:2–3]. We must first consider our sages’ teaching regarding the Nazirite. On the verse “[The priest] will offer him atonement for his sin against the soul” [Num. 6:11], they asked: “Against what soul has [the Nazirite] sinned?” They replied: “His sin is that of distressing himself by abstaining from wine”24 [bTa‘anit 11a]. To understand this matter: The world and everything within it, both great and small, was created by the word of God. “By the word of the Lord25 the heavens were made, by the breath of His mouth, all their host” [Ps. 33:6]. That word also sustains them and gives them life. “You keep them all alive” [Neh. 9:6]. Were it not for the life-force within each thing, it would vanish from existence. But [external] things are in a broken state in this lowly world, having come about through the sin of Adam and the generations that followed. Sparks of fallen souls became encased in things of this world, including food, drink, and all other worldly things. There is nothing in this world that does not have a holy spark within it, proceeding from the word of the blessed Holy One, making it alive. That divine spark is the taste within the thing, that which is sweet to the palate. “Taste and see that the Lord is good” [Ps. 34:9]. This means that when 23 Due to length, these texts have been somewhat excerpted here. Scholars will want to examine each full text in situ. Emphases are mine. 24 Persons who took a Nazirite vow were forbidden wine and any other product of the vine; see Num. 6:3–4. 25 The rendition of Y-H-Ṿ-H as “Lord,” conforming to the standards of this volume, is accepted by the author under protest.

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you taste or see something good, it is the Lord, the holy spark garbed within that thing.26 Our eyes see that after a person partakes of food, the sustenance remains within, while the waste, which does not give life, is expelled. That is something worthless and negative, since the main purpose of food is that the person be sustained and given strength. The good taste one enjoys in that food or drink is a spark of the Divine. Therefore, when you eat something, the spark within it is joined to your own life-energy, and you become strengthened by it. When you have whole and complete faith that this spiritual sustenance is indeed God’s presence hidden within that thing, you will turn your mind and heart entirely inward. Linking both of those aspects of yourself [that is, the physical and the spiritual] to the sustenance coming from that spark, you will join them all to the Root of all, that One from Whom all life flows. Then you will bring that broken, exiled spark before God, causing great delight. The whole purpose of our religious life is to bring those holy sparks out from under the “shells,” those broken places, into the realm of the holy. Thus is holiness raised from its broken state. This is especially true because so much of our worship and study consists of speech, enabled by the strength and sustenance that we derive from the taste of food, which is the holy spark within it. As we unite our speech with the primal speech [of Creation], we raise up the spark [within that food], which is also the word of God, since all is derived from fallen letters. Therefore, everyone who serves God needs to look toward the inner nature of things, so that all our deeds, including eating and drinking, are done for the sake of heaven. Holy sparks are thus redeemed from their broken state, brought forth from exile or captivity, led into sublime holiness. This takes place in the blessings we recite, proclaiming God’s sovereignty over each item. Later, too, when we serve God with that energy, speaking further words and putting our strength into them, attaching ourselves to speech above, those fallen letters or holy sparks continue to rise upward. . . . Each one of us should turn both heart and eyes to this secret of [the verse] “Know Him in all your ways” [Prov. 3:6], as explained elsewhere. When we are mindful of this, we will know that our blessed Creator enlivens us [by giving us] His very own divine self, as Scripture says: “Not by bread 26 This may be seen as an unusual instance of what today is called “predicate theology”: the phrase “God is good” is turned around to mean that “the good”—in this case, “the tasty”—“is God.”

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[ha-leḥem] alone does a person live, but by all that comes forth from the mouth of the Lord” [Deut. 8:3]. This refers to the divine speech that is garbed in that leḥem, a term that includes all food, as we know from the verse, “[King Belshazzar] gave a great banquet” [leḥem; Dan. 5:1]. Therefore, anyone who distresses and punishes himself by refraining from taking pleasure in this world is called a sinner, following the Talmudic opinion [bTa‘anit 11a] that one who engages in fasting is called a sinner. [Eating,] too, is serving the Lord, like Torah, prayer, tefillin [phylacteries], and all the commandments. The blessed Holy One created and conducts the world through Torah, meaning that there is Torah in everything. Every believer must have faith that there is nothing that stands outside God’s service, so long as it is in accord with Torah, that which Torah permits us to eat and drink. He must just make sure to do these [acts] for the sake of their Maker, not for his own pleasure. In this way, they are all considered perfect devotion. That is why [the one who refrains from them] is called a sinner; he has prevented the rising up of the holy sparks dressed in that particular food from which he has abstained. . . . Now, this is the meaning of “If a person utter a vow . . . forbidding a certain thing to himself.” In doing so, he is forbidding his soul to approach that holiness, the soul encased in that object that might belong to the root of his own soul. He has the ability to draw it near and raise it up. But now he is forbidding himself and refusing to approach it! Therefore, the Torah said that “His [God’s] word may not be profaned,” referring to the spark that came forth from the mouth of the Lord. Do not leave it to be profane! Treat it like everything that comes forth from God’s mouth, as something exalted. Find the Creator’s intent in having clothed a spark in that food or drink. Act so as to restore it. This is why our sages say: “Whoever makes a vow [of abstinence] is like one who erects a [forbidden] altar, and whoever fulfills such a vow is offering a sacrifice upon it at a time when such offerings are forbidden” [see bNedarim 22a]. In fact, the raising up of sparks through eating is considered an offering, drawing the spark near and uniting it with its root. This is what they meant by “[Now that the Temple is destroyed,] a person’s shulḥan [table] atones for him” [bBerakhot 55a]. There is no greater offering than his act of total unification. That is why the table is called a shulḥan, derived from sheliḥut [lit., sending], because the sparks belonging to a man’s soul are sent to him. He is to raise them up by means of the foods that come his way on this shulḥan at which he is eating, called “the table that stands before the Lord” [Ezek. 41:22]. He is bringing it “before the Lord.” This is not true of the abstainer, one who does not bring this offering before

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the Lord. Even though his intent is for the sake of heaven, his offering is upon the forbidden altar, not “before the Lord.”27 Blessed is the Lord forever; Amen and Amen [Ps. 89:53].28

A careful reading of this text shows how complicated is the BuberScholem controversy when confronted with the Hasidic reality. Yes, there is an uplifting of the sparks here, returning them to their source. At the same time, the evidence for world-embrace is extremely strong in this text. The appreciation of the taste of food, the claim that rejection of this world is sinful, and the sense of divine energy radiating throughout ordinary physical reality all make it clear that we have anything but the spirit of Gnosticism before us. True existence is that of the divine life-energy that sustains all being; all creatures are enlivened by that spark of divine presence within them. Yes, it is the spark that is to be uplifted, removed from its outer garb and restored to its source. One has to note that there is a certain disdain for the physical realm in this text; it is compared to nothing more than the waste matter our body expels after it takes the true sustenance it needs from the food we consume! At the same time, the overall tone of the text is not anti-worldly. Its author appreciates the fine taste of the food, linking it directly to the spark that gives it life. There is no ascetic message telling a person: “Eat merely to gain strength, so that you may serve God with that strength,” as can be found elsewhere in Hasidic sources. It is rather: “Enjoy the good taste of worldly existence. It is nothing other than the presence of God. Take it into yourself with joy, and then use it to serve Him.” There is also a strong sense of outrage: “How dare you reject the pleasures of this world?! They are the gift of God, allowing you to pleasure in His service!” One could hardly call that anti-worldly.29

Parashat lekh lekha King David said: “I shall walk before the Lord in the lands of the living” [Ps. 116:9]. Corporeal matters like eating, drinking, and all other human 27 This is perhaps the most devastating critique of the ascetic path found anywhere in Hasidic literature. The Nazirite is avoiding service as God’s emissary in this physical world, building instead a heathen altar! 28 Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl, Sefer me’or enayim, 280–83 (Maṭṭot, no. 1). 29 Of course, it is clear that this enjoyment of the physical ultimately serves a larger redemptive, metaphysical goal, namely, uplifting the sparks. It is far from conforming to a hedonistic ideal of pleasure for its own sake.

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needs—if a man does them just for the sake of fulfilling his desires—have no life. But if he eats to sate his soul and raises up the eating, drinking, and other needs to God by his good intentions, then he fulfills [the verse] “Know Him in all your ways” [Prov. 3:6; understood by the Rabbis to mean] “Let all your deeds be for the sake of heaven” [Avot de-Rabbi Natan, version 1, ch. 17; see also Avot 2:12]. As a result, [the lands] are transformed into “the lands of the living,” for in his very earthliness the Life of Life comes to dwell. This, too, is [the meaning of] “to the land that I will show you” [Gen. 12:1]—that it be transformed into “the lands of the living.”30 “I will make of you a great nation” [Gen. 12:2]. Scripture says: “For then I will make the peoples pure of speech, so that they all invoke the Lord by name” [Zeph. 3:9]. Because we share our bodily nature with the nations of the world, as well as with the animal kingdom, our service of God through the body can wipe out all the evil in the world. Of this Scripture says: “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb . . . nothing evil or vile shall be done” [Isa. 11:6–9]. There will be no more evil in the world and, at that time, all the nations will serve God. This will be because of us, because we have served Him in all ways, including service through our own earthliness. Since the [other nations] are partners with us in this, we raise them up by our service; all their service of God will be on our account. Thus, “I will make of you a great nation”—for because of your righteousness, the Gentile nations will come to serve the Lord.31

In this excerpt from the Me’or enayim’s teaching on the beginning verses of Parashat lekh lekha, God’s original charge to Abraham, there is no casting away of the lower world at all, but rather its transformation and uplift. The land itself is enabled to become “the lands of the living” due to the fact that we serve God through and upon it.32 That this promise to Abraham’s

30 Here, R. Menahem Nahum offers a sense of the full presence of Divinity within the earthly realm itself, with no reference to a need to uplift or redeem the fallen sparks. 31 Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl, Sefer me’or enayim, 33 (Lekh lekha, no. 1). The fact that Israel shares the reality of bodily existence with other humans, but employs its bodily self as a vehicle for God’s service, ultimately will point the way for all human bodies to be used in this fashion, leading to the final and universal redemption. Our author bases this notion upon an impossibly ungrammatical reading of ṿe-e‘eśkha le-goy gadol as “through you, I will make the goyim great[!].” 32 This text would also militate against Brody’s reading, to which I have referred above. Here, there is no two-step process of uplifting sparks and retrieving blessing; the land becomes “living” in the immediate single act of worshipping God upon it.

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seed includes even the Gentiles among whom they dwell makes this homily truly remarkable and exceptional within the Hasidic corpus.

Parashat emor This Beshtian legacy of accepting worldliness and finding holiness within it is nowhere better expressed than in the following teaching regarding Yom Kippur. In advancing the argument that eating on the day preceding the great fast is as holy as fasting on the day itself, R. Menahem Nahum is making a larger point as well. God is to be found in feasting and joy as well as in mortification and self-denial: . . . “‘You shall practice self-denial on the ninth of the month . . .’ [Lev. 23:32]. But do we fast on the ninth? It is on the tenth that we fast! Rather, this is to teach you that whoever eats and drinks on the ninth—Scripture considers it as though he had fasted on both the ninth and the tenth” [bYoma 81b]. . . . Now, eating is called a sacrificial offering, and a person’s table is in place of the altar, as our sages taught: “Now that the Temple is destroyed, a person’s table atones for him” [bBerakhot 55a]. But we also find that fasting is considered a sacrifice, one in which a man offers of his own fat and blood [bBerakhot 17a]. How is it possible that these two opposite things could be seen as one and the same? It is as we have just said. There is a way of attaching oneself to the Root of all by approaching it from below. One brings up all the lower rungs, raising holy sparks out of things that have fallen. As a man ties them to the Creator, he, too, becomes linked to the Creator along with them. This is the way in which eating is considered a ḳorban [offering], which literally means “drawing near.” One brings forth all the sparks within that thing, all the sublime life-energy that has been garbed within it. This is the taste that one encounters in the food, for taste is a spiritual, not a physical, quality. It is that holy, sublime life-energy garbed within the physical food. When a man consumes it, that life-force enters into him; it is added and bound to his own life-force, the portion of God that dwells within him. He may then serve the Lord with that added strength and life-force, speaking words or fulfilling mitsṿot [commandments] in an attached and devoted way. All this has come about through the energy he derived from that food. In rising up and being attached to God by [the energy’s] power, he has given ascent to the holy sparks that lay within that food. The externals are pushed aside once the life-energy is separated from them. The beauty that

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made them so attractive previously was due to the life-force. Once it is gone, the rest remains dead and rotting. When a man eats, he is to pay attention to seeing the innermost, giving his full attention for the sake of heaven, fulfilling [the verse] “Know Him in all your ways” [Prov. 3:6]. This is the secret of da‘at [mindfulness], knowing that there is nothing separate from the service of God, may He be blessed. On the contrary, in this way he becomes yet more attached to Him above. It is then that eating is considered a ḳorban to the Lord, one that brings all parts of holiness upward from below, ḳarov [near] to their Root. This person adds a greater sense of attachment to the Divinity dwelling within him. This brings great delight to our blessed Creator, as he draws the lower rungs near to Him. Our messiah is held back, as we know, awaiting only the raising upward of all those sparks. The secret of fasting is having that divine part within a man drawn close to its Root by a movement reaching downward from above. Movement in the other direction cannot take place, since this person is not eating on the fast day [and therefore is not raising anything up]. But the broken heart with which he submits to God during that fast causes the Root of Holiness itself to be aroused towards him and draw him near. Now, not every person can reach the level where eating is considered a sacrifice, a way of becoming linked to God along with the life-energy being uplifted. Many may not have the awareness needed to do this; they eat only to fulfill their desires. Thus, they remain below, along with the new life-energy derived from that eating. This is in contrast to the tsaddiḳ [we have been describing above], who “eats [only] to sate his soul” [Prov. 13:25]. “Soul” here refers to the added holiness that comes about by this eating, through which he is attached to the Lord. Those people who are on a lower level, however, lacking in awareness—as in, “without awareness, the soul is not well” [Prov. 19:2]—gain no holiness through the act of eating. [In fact, eating] most likely pushes them even farther from their Creator. But the Lord desires compassion and thinks of ways to keep the lost from being utterly abandoned. Therefore, God seeks a way to have all the ordinary eating of all of Israel raised up to Him. So He decreed that there be one day in the year, the eve of Yom Kippur, when feasting and drinking were themselves commanded, even if done in a superficial way. On that day, even if we eat to fulfill our desires, it is considered to be a mitsṿah, just like that of fasting. This single day when eating is commanded allows for the raising up of all our nonconscious eating throughout the year, drawing it all near to holiness by means of the mitsṿah. . . .

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Afterwards, on Yom Kippur itself, we have our annual fast. According to the Torah, only this single day is declared for fasting. This Day of Atonement is the time when teshuvah [repentance] in its highest sense, binah [understanding], shines down upon all of Israel. This happens even to those who cannot awaken any teshuvah from within themselves without help from above. Being on such a lowly rung, they do not have the remaining goodness to arouse themselves to return. . . . Now, the approach that reaches upward from below has already been repaired on the preceding day, the eve of Yom Kippur. Had this not already taken place, the reaching from above to below could not happen [Zohar 1:86b]. But since the eve of Yom Kippur has done its work, the upper teshuvah can flow forth and shine below. Now, the two parts of the offering can be joined together: eating on the eve of Yom Kippur rises upward from below, taking with it all non-conscious eating throughout the year; and this is joined to the holy intimacy that comes down from above because of the fast. All the parts of holiness, those coming from above and below, are joined as one. In this way, Israel are made holy and drawn near to our Creator. That is why the day is called Yom ha-Kippurim [in the plural], for it atones for all their sins by joining together the parts of holiness that constitute the secret souls of Israel, [separating them from that which is] external. That is why [the person who eats on the ninth of Tishre] is considered as one who fasted on both the ninth and the tenth. The two aspects have come together as a single unity. . . . He has brought about the aspect of fasting [as well], the emanation of holiness from above.33

Here we again have a text that does quite explicitly talk about the separation of sparks from their material casing, after which “the rest remains dead and rotting.” But if we look at the homily in its broader context, we see an attempt precisely to redeem the ordinary human act of eating. Most people cannot eat just to release sparks or find Divinity within the food. God cares that these people have a path to Him as well, so He designates a day when just ordinary eating, with no special kaṿṿanah (intention), is itself a mitsṿah. This redeems such eating that takes place throughout the year and becomes a vital part of the Yom Kippur ritual. Here, too, despite the reference to the uplifting and separation of sparks from matter, the tone is one of embracing the worldly act of eating and the religious justification of an ordinary human deed. The Hasidim around the table at such 33 Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl, Sefer me’or enayim, 245–48 (Emor, no. 4).

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worldly gatherings as those of Sadagóra and Czortków, as well as those of Chernobyl and Talne, would have enjoyed such a sermon. However, neither Rabbi Arele Roth (1894–1947) nor Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum (1887–1979), prime examples of later ascetic Hasidism (both Hungarian; on which, see below), would have known quite what to do with it, and both probably would have worked quite hard to explain it away. Part of my message here is that Hasidism is a varied and nuanced movement and that it needs to be appreciated in that way.

Service through the Corporeal This view of the pious life that is so emphasized by the Me’or enayim calls forth a self-conscious attention to the joy and pleasure generated by it. The purpose of life is the joyous service of God. God created the world in order to derive pleasure from the devotion of human beings, specifically from the souls of Israel. Our author offers the most full-throated expression of this value found anywhere in the literature of Hasidism: One who engages in Torah desires only to be near to Him, bless His name, and unite the worlds, in order to bring sha‘ashu‘im ṿe-ta‘anug [delight and pleasure] to Him. This is the meaning of “Wisdom gives life to its masters” [Eccl. 7:12]. “Wisdom” refers to Torah, which, as it were, gives life to the blessed Holy One, Who is the Master of Torah. Thus, one brings ḥiyyut [vitality] and pleasure to the Creator by means of Torah.34

This sense of divine pleasure derived from the energy of human devotion often takes on a blatantly erotic character.35 Human worship is, of course, awakening the shekhinah (feminine aspect of God) to unite with her Lover and to arouse Him to pour His blessings upon the world. The author of Me’or enayim suffers from no shyness in saying this quite graphically. In the following passage, he fully identifies Israel with the shekhinah; the Jewish people are the female beloved who awakens His love: 34 Ibid., 383 (Liḳḳutim, s.v. ba-pasuḳ ṿa-amalle). Of course, the original meaning of the verse refers to the pleasure a person might take in becoming “a master of wisdom.” Here, that master is God. But this ambiguity is perfectly suited to our author’s theology, where the devotee indeed seeks only to bring pleasure to God but enjoys doing so at the same time. The verb teḥayyeh (gives life) is understood in the sense of the Yiddish a mekhaye (a delight). 35 On the erotic associations of the term sha‘ashua in earlier kabbalistic sources, see Yehuda Liebes, “Zohar ṿe-eros,” Alpayim 9 (1994): 67–119, esp. 81 n. 88.

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It is known, however, that everything depends on the arousal from below, the feminine waters, since it is the woman who first longs for the man.36 We, the Children of Israel, are “woman” in our relationship with God. We arouse ourselves from below to cling to our Creator; only then do we awaken in Him, as it were, a desire to extend to us His flow of all goodness. Then, we bring the flow down from above: blessing and compassion, life and peace. We, the Community of Israel, and the blessed Creator are a single whole when we cleave to Him.37 Either without the other is, as it were, incomplete.  .  .  . Now, when we begin the arousal by our feminine flow of longing for Him and desire to cleave to Him, we awaken His desire for us as well. When these two desires are brought together, there is one whole being. This is the meaning of “You must be tamim [lit., wholehearted] with the Lord your God” [Deut. 18:13]—you along with the blessed Lord are called one whole being.38

This awareness of eros as the animating force of the universe is characteristic of the entire kabbalistic tradition and is widely attested throughout early Hasidic literature, as well as in its even earlier sources. What is especially characteristic of the Me’or enayim, however, is the extent to which the worshipper is invited to partake of that cosmic pleasure. He begins with a 36 This notion that divine desire must be stirred first from “below,” within the human heart, is based on a spiritualized reading of Gen. 3:16: “Your desire shall be for your husband.” Borne aloft on the allegorical reading of the Song of Songs as a love song between God and Israel, it is taken as a commonplace assumption throughout kabbalistic literature. For one among many direct statements of it, see Zohar 1:235a. 37 The designation Keneset Yiśra’el (the Community of Israel) in Rabbinic sources, as here, refers to the earthly community of the Jewish people as a single unified body, that which was described in the generation of Solomon Schechter as “the ecclesia of Israel.” In Kabbalah, this same term was used as a symbolic designation for malkhut or shekhinah, the female partner of the blessed Holy One within the sefirotic realm, poised at the liminal point between the upper and lower worlds. She indeed was seen to be “a single whole” with God, the cosmic heh seeking to restore her union with Y-H-Ṿ, the rest of the Tetragrammaton. The Hasidic masters intentionally return to the old Rabbinic usage of the term, which now carries the additional mystical associations along with it. The oneness of God and the earthly Community of Israel are in no way separable from the inner unity of the divine self. This more complex view of the role of shekhinah is a key feature of the Tiḳḳune zohar, as Biti Roi has recently shown in her Ahavat ha-shekhinah: misṭiḳah u-poʼeṭiḳah be-Tiḳḳune ha-zohar (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2017), and it unquestionably influences the later tradition, including Hasidism. 38 Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl, Sefer me’or enayim, 26 (Noaḥ, no. 2). He is playing on the quasi-plural appearance of the word tamim, explaining that the verse is saying that the two partners, man and God, are “whole” when they are united as one.

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notion of the superiority of spiritual pleasure over any other sort of pleasure one might take in human life. This claim is found already in the Ba‘al Shem Tov’s letter to his brother-in-law Rabbi Gershon Kitover (1701–1761), one of the few actual texts written by the Besht that have come down to us.39 The pleasure to be found in the unification of worlds in prayer is depicted as greater than that of the union of two bodies. This theme is extended and celebrated by the Me’or enayim, who again seems to want to make a special point of preserving the Besht’s earthiness and anti-asceticism, standing out against the more cautious and other-worldly views that he sees in some of his Miedzyrzecz-generation colleagues: Scripture says: “Serve the Lord with joy” [Ps. 100:2]. But it also says: “Serve the Lord with awe” [Ps. 2:11]. The truth is as the Talmud teaches, quoting this latter verse—“Serve the Lord with awe; tremble in exultation”—namely: “In the place of exultation there should be trembling” [bBerakhot 30b]. To understand this comment, we begin by noting that awe is “the gateway to the Lord; the righteous walk through it” [Ps. 118:20]. “The beginning of wisdom is awe before the Lord” [Ps. 111:10]. The beginning of all one’s worship and speech needs to be from that arousal of awe before God. If a man then also has da‘at, which means pleasure, as we were saying,40 it will lead him to truly great pleasure in his devotion, coming to him from the World of Pleasure. Thus, he will start serving the Lord in joy, raising up the World of Awe and joining it in oneness to the World of Pleasure. This happens by means of awakening these states within himself, for it is the arousal below that causes arousal to take place above. Then true union takes place. But what sort of awareness draws a man to the World of Pleasure? It is that described by the prophet: “For the mouth of the Lord has spoken” [Isa. 58:14]. Anyone speaking words of Torah or prayer, having come through the gateway of awe and accepted its yoke, has to know in faith that his mouth, speaking those words, is truly the mouth of God. He is really a part of the Lord, Whose presence dwells within every whole person of Israel. He is speaking those words by the power of that part of the Divine [within him], as in: “O Lord, open my lips, [that my mouth might declare Your praise]” [Ps. 51:17].41 This is the World of Speech concentrated within the human mouth, 39 Multiple versions of the letter are translated in Etkes, The Besht, 272–81. 40 Referring to the context of yada (knew) in Gen. 4:1. The “World of Awe” is shekhinah; the “World of Pleasure” is binah. Da‘at, a “male” principle, connects the two. 41 This verse is traditionally whispered as an introduction to the amidah (silent devotion). It is widely read in Hasidic sources to indicate that the Lord or shekhinah is the true

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as we have said elsewhere. Once he knows this in complete faith, great delight will come over him immediately. This is the awareness that brings him into a state of spiritual pleasure. As his mental powers are widened, his awareness causes the awe that he had accepted earlier to be joined with the World of Pleasure.42

The great pleasure of devotion that so inspires the Me’or enayim in passages such as these is clearly of a spiritual nature. At the same time, we learn about it by analogy to the pleasure one finds in this world, including that of sexuality. In that sense, I believe this theology should be seen as deeply world-embracing, offering evidence of the spirit that Buber claimed to find in his reading of Hasidism. In light of these passages, the Me’or enayim stands out as a warning that the Scholemist reading of Hasidic sources may sometimes focus too narrowly on details of phrasing or the presence of a particular formulation, without seeing the broader context. It thus misses the richness of the Galician forest while too closely examining its trees. The attitude of a particular author, homily, or passage toward this world and the holiness within it has to be judged by a broader evaluation of his/its overall tone, not by the presence or absence of a specific way in which he/it discusses the uplifting of sparks. In some of these Me’or enayim passages, one even gets a sense that ḥomer akhur (despicable matter) has been blessed in having borne the divine life-force within it, giving it up willingly when called upon to do so, rather like the bee gives its honey or the flower its pollen. To see the world this way is hardly “Gnostic” or anti-worldly; rather, it appreciates nature for its greatest gift, the spark of divine light.

speaker of prayer that emerges from human lips. See, for example, Levi Isaac of Berdichev, Sefer shemu‘ah ṭovah (Warsaw: n.p., 1938), 80a, and the discussion by Rivka Schatz Uffenheimer, Hasidism as Mysticism: Quietistic Elements in Eighteenth Century Hasidic Thought, trans. Jonathan Chipman (Princeton: Princeton University Press; Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1993), 168–214. See also Louis Jacobs, Hasidic Prayer (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), passim. 42 Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl, Sefer me’or enayim, 298 (Devarim, no. 1). The terms “World of Speech” and “World of Pleasure” to designate shekhinah/malkhut and binah, respectively, are taken directly from the teachings of the Maggid. See the references collected in the index to Rivka Schatz Uffenheimer’s edition of Dov Baer of Miedzyrzecz, Maggid devaraṿ le-Ya‘aḳov (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1976).

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Buber’s and Scholem’s Own Experiences with Hasidim One more point needs to be mentioned that has not previously been made in portraying the divergent attitudes of these two men toward Hasidism. I refer to the actual contact they had with living Hasidic communities, regarding both the nature of those communities and the historical and biographical contexts in which those contacts took place. Buber had an essentially positive view of Hasidism; it was the form of Judaism that most gave him hope for the possibility of Judaism’s renewal in the modern age. Buber is, in this sense, very much the original neo-Hasidic thinker, especially in connection with this subject of the sanctification of daily life. Scholem was much more detached and judgmental (some would say aloof and condescending) in his attitude toward Hasidism. While he presented this as evidence of his own scholarly objectivity, standing in contrast to Buber’s admittedly subjective engagement with the Hasidic sources, there may also be biographical elements that need to be considered here. Buber met Hasidism in its original eastern Galician homeland, well before the great transformations of that landscape that took place during and after World War I. From ages three to fourteen (1881–1892), he lived with his grandparents in Lemberg (present-day Lviv, Ukraine), the major city closest to the very heart of the Hasidic “empire.” Although himself a Westernized scholar, Salomon Buber took his grandson regularly to pray in the prayer house of the Sadagóra Hasidim. Young Buber also visited Czortków, where the uncle of the Sadagórer Rebbe had his court. These rebbes were descendants of Rabbi Israel of Ruzhyn (1796–1850), a key representative of Ukrainian Hasidism who had been forced by historical circumstance to cross the border into Austrian territory and reestablish his court there in 1842. The Hasidic courts of Sadagóra and Czortków were indeed known for their worldliness. The rebbes of those towns lived in grand style, very much imitating the wealthy landowners of their district. While there was certainly a wide range in the economic status of their followers, they tended to include quite a few of the more comfortable and middle-class Hasidim. Food and drink were plentiful at their celebrations, as were song, dance, elegant garb, and storytelling. There was little that could be called ascetic about this sort of Hasidism in the late nineteenth century. In fact, the rebbes of Sadagóra and Czortków had already been denounced fiercely for this behavior in 1869 by the much stricter Rabbi Ḥayyim of Sanz (present-day Nowy Sącz,

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Poland; 1793–1876) and his followers, after the strange defection from Hasidism of their brother Rabbi Dov Baer of Leova (1820/1821–1876).43 There was also a gentleness and warmth that accompanied the elegance of style of the Ruzhyn-based tsaddiḳim. They were, above all, loving father figures to their disciples and saw their greatest task as one of radiating that love. Militancy in defense of emerging “Orthodoxy” was quite far from their way of being. Young Buber must have been a wide-eyed child witnessing all of this, taking it in and making of it what he did. This was a very rich diet of the sort on which youthful imagination could feast, and Buber, in whom rich imagination was combined with emotional neediness,44 was a ripe candidate for all the wonder and fantasy it had to offer. By contrast, Gershom Scholem was raised in Berlin, where there was no significant Hasidic community. He undoubtedly first learned of Hasidism through reading Buber, then through personal encounters with other Jewish intellectuals and writers who had come from a Hasidic milieu, including Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1888–1970) and Shneur Zalman Rubashov (later Shazar; 1889–1974). But he did not encounter a significant living Hasidic community until he arrived in Jerusalem in 1923, at the age of twenty-six. By then, the Jerusalem Hasidic community had become quite militant, standing in opposition to any sort of innovation, particularly in education. The protection of the traditional way of life was the chief interest of the Old Yishuv, the pre-Zionist Jerusalem community, much of which had a Hasidic tinge. This was a Hasidism fashioned in large part on the Hungarian model, where extreme pietism was cultivated specifically as a defense against the slightest crack in the anti-modern wall. Scholem, a member of the founding faculty of the Hebrew University, must have been quite appalled by this attitude. First appearing in the holy city shortly after Scholem’s aliyyah (and returning to Jerusalem after another period abroad) was R. Arele Roth of Beregszász, Hungary (at the time, Berehovo, Czechoslovakia), a Hasidic figure Scholem found particularly interesting to study, but with whom he could hardly identify in any way.

43 See David Assaf, Hetsits ṿe-nifga: anaṭomyah shel maḥaloḳet ḥasidit (Haifa: University of Haifa Press; Tel Aviv: Yedioth Ahronoth, 2012). 44 See the biographical introduction by Sam Berrin Shonkoff to the selections from Buber’s Hasidic writings in Arthur Green and Ariel Evan Mayse, eds., A New Hasidism: Roots (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2019), 51–64.

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I therefore want to suggest that the Buber-Scholem debate as to the nature of Hasidic sources was partially shaped by the actual contact these two men had with the living Hasidic community and the biases resulting from their impressions thereof. Young Buber saw Hasidism when it was still thriving as a religious force in its original homeland. Galicia in the 1880s was relatively untouched by modernization or industrialization, and the Hasidic courts of Sadagóra and Czortków were mostly unchallenged in their domination of Jewish life. Scholem met Hasidism of another sort and in a different geopolitical context. Rather than an impressionable youngster, he was already an adult quite committed to a very different type of Jewish life. This in itself may help to explain how these two men came to read the same texts through different lenses. Buber, inspired by warm memories of prayer and of the ṭish (rebbe’s table) at Czortków, read the texts through the eyes of the Hasidism of his youth. Hasidism as he had experienced it was indeed joyous, earthy, and world-embracing. By the time he encountered the more militant Hasidism of Jerusalem following his aliyyah, he was already an older man, and most of his writings on Hasidism were behind him. Scholem, however, read the sources with impressions of Jerusalem Hasidism—ascetic and ultimately world-rejecting—implanted in his mind. Moreover, the this-worldly existence they were rejecting was, of course, that of the new world that he and his Zionist colleagues were so eagerly seeking to create. ****** In the course of his debate with Scholem, Buber proposed a distinction between the teaching of the Ba‘al Shem Tov and that of the Maggid of Miedzyrzecz, among others. In response, Scholem emphasized the kabbalistic concepts discussed throughout the writings of all early Hasidic authors. But it would be a mistake to see these concepts as bearing a fixed meaning that would determine the interpretation of any other material in a given author’s oeuvre. Of course, Hasidic masters saw themselves as inheritors of traditions, including kabbalistic ones. However, as both their supporters and detractors commonly recognized, they were also interpreters of these traditions. Naturally, a central kabbalistic doctrine such as the raising of the sparks would find a place in their teachings. The salient question is not whether, but how, particular Hasidic authors or schools deployed these concepts.

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In this essay, I have offered several excerpts from the teachings of R. Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl that illustrate the author’s full-throated affirmation of the presence of the Divine in this world, which is encountered through physical pleasures, tastes, and joy. Rather than negating the significance of these formulations, we should see the prior doctrine of the raising of the sparks as that which the author wishes to interpret anew in the light of his worldview. His scathing critique of ascetic practices that were popular amongst many kabbalists constitutes further evidence of his position on this matter, as well as of his boldly taken role as creative interpreter of inherited traditions. The emphatic nature and sheer originality of the author’s affirmations demonstrate that a spirit closer to that which Buber found in many Hasidic tales is indeed present in Hasidic “theoretical literature” as well, at least in the case of R. Menahem Nahum. Scholarship must help us to appreciate the variation and individual voices that come through in Hasidic literature. This will come about through studies that are attentive to the historical contexts, flow of thought, and nuances of expression—including the varied readings of shared conceptual terminology—of particular Hasidic preachers.45

45 My thanks to three outstanding young scholars, Ariel Evan Mayse, David Maayan, and Sam Berrin Shonkoff, for several helpful suggestions reflected in this essay. All responsibility, of course, is my own.

Michael Walzer, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

On Not Finishing the Work: A Commentary on Avot 2:16*

“You are not required to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.” This maxim is a Jewish prescription for a good life—or so I mean to read it. My commentary has three parts. First, I will take up the general view of the right and the good that is implicit here; then, I will discuss the “work” that we are supposed to do; and finally, I will consider the implications of saying that we do not have to finish it. My commentary is meant to challenge and then expand the standard interpretations of this much-read text.

Moral Realism The maxim reflects a belief that we live “under commandment”—under divine commandment, the Rabbis would have said, invoking the moment of the revelation at Sinai; but I am going to leave it without the adjective: under commandment. You are not required to finish the “work,” but you are required to take it on. The moral world, on this view, is a world of requirements to which all men and women are subject. Now, Americans, especially liberal and leftist Americans, are opposed to subjection. We set a high value on individual autonomy, and rightly so: the choices we make shape our lives to a very large extent, and there are many things that we have to choose. In democratic politics, we choose the people who govern us and we help to choose the policies of our government. *

For Chaim. This essay is adapted from an article that appeared originally as “What Is a ‘Good’ Life?,” Religious Socialism 28, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 1, 3, 12–14.

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In the same way, in everyday life, we choose spouses, friends, projects, careers, professions, and all the associations that we join (or leave) in the course of our lives. Most liberal Americans would say that choice is crucial to a good life. But there are also things that we do not choose: most importantly, we do not choose our morality. When we live a moral life, we are living according to values and principles that are commonly expressed as injunctions—as in the biblical “Thou shalt not.” We can view these injunctions as God-given or humanly constructed; they are, in any case, inherited. If there is a construction process, it takes place over a very long period of time. We do not make up the moral rules for ourselves or by ourselves, as some postmodern writers, the virtuosos of individual autonomy, suggest. The moral world is not subject to our will; we are its subjects. We incur obligations by making promises, but here is something we never promised. We never promised not to murder, or lie, or rob—but we are bound not to do those things. The maxim about “work” suggests that we are bound not only negatively but also positively. Just as there are things we should not do, so there are things, or there is something, that we should do. I will ask in a moment what that something is. For now, I only wish to convey this sense of Avot’s moral world: it is really there. Morality is a given, and we have literally been given it, in our earliest childhood and again and again since then, in parental instruction, in schooling, in religious teaching, and in the socialization process more generally. This sense of an overhanging morality is specifically, but not peculiarly, Jewish. Consider the contemporary arguments about human rights: the idea that all of us have rights, simply by virtue of being human, not to be killed, or enslaved, or tortured implies that all of us also have obligations not to kill or enslave or torture. It does not matter that we never voluntarily accepted these obligations; we know that we are obligated. We experience the moral world as an imposed reality: we live “under commandment.” Right and wrong, just and unjust, good and bad: these are substantive designations. We can and do disagree about their precise references and applications, and the disagreements are very important. But, at the same time, we know that these moral terms refer to something real, and we know that they apply to us, to our everyday activities. We cannot do whatever we want. Similarly, we cannot refuse to do whatever we do not want to do. So, it is not an odd idea that there is some kind of “work” that we have to do, in which we must engage, even if we do not finish it. But note that

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this is a moral “must.” In fact, of course, we can escape the “work,” or we can disengage from it, whatever it is; neglect is easy. That is why we have to be told that we are “not at liberty.”

The Work We Have to Do What is the “work”? I will begin to answer this question by considering some of the things it is not. Presumably, it is not something like painting a picture or writing a novel; it is not artistic work, because that kind of work is optional—and it has to be finished. It requires some sort of completion before we can contemplate it as a work of art. A novel left unfinished at the death of a great novelist might be studied by students trying to understand the creative process, or it might be finished by another writer. But we would not tell novelists: you do not have to finish. In fact, they do have to finish—not only because it says so in their contracts, but also because we cannot appreciate the work or grasp its full meaning until it is finished. On the other hand, you could say to the architects and builders of a medieval cathedral: you do not have to finish (such structures often took centuries to finish), but you cannot walk away from the work. That example points us, perhaps, toward the kind of “work” that might be intended by the maxim (if we translate it across religious boundaries). What about other public works—the Great Wall of China or the ancient Egyptian irrigation system? The “work” might be more prosaic than these examples suggest. Still, it will not be anything like washing the dishes, cleaning out the basement, buying groceries, mowing the lawn, painting the kitchen, or fixing the leaking faucet. For this is work that we do and then, inevitably, down the road, we do it again. These are recurrent activities; they play a central part in every human life, and I suspect that they play a part in every good life. It makes sense to say that you “must” engage in some of them, at least, but it would not make sense to say that you do not have to finish them: at any given moment, you do have to finish them. But what about caring for sick friends or tutoring students who have problems with math? These are also recurrent activities, but they have a different feel to them: why? What is the difference? I do not think that making money, or seeking political power, or pursuing fame and glory qualify as the “work.” For one thing, the imperative hardly applies; we do not have to be commanded in any of these cases. We all need money, it is useful to have some degree of political power, and I

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suppose that most of us want our fifteen minutes of fame. The making, seeking, and pursuing can be endless, but it is also possible to get as much as I want in one or more of these areas and then, as the saying goes, “rest on my laurels.” It is also possible to drop out or retire; these are personal projects, and we can cut them short or give them up without making excuses. Getting and spending are not inconsequential human activities, but they do not constitute a good life. In Avot, the “work” is standardly taken to be the study of God’s law. That is what Rabbi Tarfon, who is credited with the maxim, almost certainly intended, and it is what most Orthodox Jews would say today. What would it mean to finish studying the law? Well, there are a finite set of texts—the twenty-four books of the Hebrew Bible and the sixty-three tractates of the Mishnah and Talmud—and, in theory, you could just begin at the beginning and work your way through to the end. But the work is slow and hard; it requires painstaking effort; and since you may not get very far, it is a good thing to know that you are not obligated to finish. Just get as far as you can; there will be other people studying, too, and some of them will get farther along. And there will be people coming after, and still others after them. In fact, finishing is not even a theoretical possibility. Studying the law also means interpreting and revising the law, since every legal system, even one that has been divinely revealed, has to be adapted to human circumstances. This is an ongoing process that you really cannot ever finish, even if you get through all the books and tractates. I am sure that interpreting and revising, not simply studying, is the real “work.” Still, study ranks very high on the Jewish list of valuable and virtuous activities, and it gives us further clues as to what qualities the “work” has to have. Studying God’s law is supposed to have consequences in the world. Avot does not describe a solitary pursuit of learning, a kind of self-perfection; rather, study for the Rabbis is a communal activity, the work of scholars and students together. The aim is to produce observance, the acting out of the law in the form of good deeds and lovingkindness, and these two, so we have been told, bring the messianic age closer. But study is not alone on the Jewish list—or on any other list. In the maxims of Avot, other activities are suggested that we can interpret (though the Rabbis themselves do not) as works that fit the formula “not obliged to finish, not at liberty to neglect.” These include helping other people (“loving acts of charity”; Avot 1:2); service to the community (“do not separate yourself . . .”; ibid. 2:4); and then, by extension, working to create a better community, which may be what

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interpreting and revising the law is all about. You will not be able to provide all the help that other people need or all the services that our common life requires, and the project of creating a better community is sure to be unfinished, however hard you work at it, since it is always possible to do better than better. So, it makes sense to say in all these cases that you do not have to finish, but you cannot walk away. Why not? Because “work” of these kinds is morally important, and we have been commanded to do it. I am now engaged in my central project: to reject the singular view of “work” and to increase the number of things that we are not at liberty to neglect. We need to think about the “work,” to find and defend alternative meanings, and to choose the good work or the good works that we do. If we multiply the meanings of “work,” then it will turn out that there are different ways, perhaps many different ways, of living a moral life; there are many good lives. What makes a good life is a project of a certain kind. I am sure that this project includes study, but study is not the only “work.” According to the Rabbis in Avot, even scholars are supposed to work on the side, as it were, to earn a living; they are not supposed to live off the Torah (2:2, 4:5). That work is not the “work” that the Rabbis envisioned, but I want to argue that it might fit their description. Teaching children, helping the sick and infirm, organizing a union, running a shelter—people should be paid for work of this kind (they will not get rich), and at the same time it is the kind of “work” that we do not do only for the money. The fact that this “work” does not have to be finished, or cannot be finished, means that it is not purely private or egocentric. It is interpersonally valuable work, which is why we can be sure that other people will carry it on with us, and after us. So, to go back to an earlier example, if building and then maintaining the Great Wall of China protected families and villages from violent attack (the people on the other side may have had a different view of the Wall, but let us stick with this one), then it was “work” of the kind that fits the maxim, and we can say of the workers that they were not free to neglect it. Indeed, an individual worker might take a vacation or simply quit, but only if he is not necessary for the “work.” Rousseau has a nice line about this: he says that the citizen can leave the republic at any time, “[p]rovided, of course, he does not leave to escape his obligations and avoid having to serve his country in the hour of need.”1 At that moment, he cannot walk away. 1 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract & Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd.; New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1920), 89 n. 1.

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The “work” has to be valuable, perhaps even necessary, to others as well as to ourselves; otherwise, it would not be morally required. Think of the work of medical researchers looking for a cure for a particular disease. Before they begin their research, they could certainly choose a different project. It would not make sense to say that this particular work is the “work” that no one is at liberty to neglect. Still, it is “work,” and once they have chosen it, these medical researchers are no longer at liberty. They do not have to find the cure, but they cannot walk away from the search. What if they succeed? Can they stop then? Well, no—for the cure will have unexpected side effects, or the disease will reappear in new forms; in any case, there are other diseases. The “work” will not be finished, but it is the sort of “work” that other people will carry on. Some of my colleagues in political theory think that politics is the “work” that everybody has to do. As democratic citizens, we must be active in shaping and directing the common life, even if, or precisely because, the common life is never finished. Some of them think that political activity is the highest human calling: when the citizens of Athens met in assembly, argued with one another, and made decisions that determined the future of their city, they were living on the heights. Well, politics is certainly one way, perhaps the most obvious way, to make the community we live in a better place; it is, at its best, “work” of the sort the maxim enjoins. But it is not the only way of improving our community, and some people are much more readily drawn to it than others. Even if we all participate, as we should, in part-time fashion, by reading the newspapers, arguing with our friends, and voting in elections, politics is not everyone’s “work”—except, perhaps, as Rousseau suggested, when our country is in danger. So, I can continue to defend a pluralist position: even though politics is my own “work”—I do my best to advance a particular political position—my view of political activity is similar to my view of legal study. It is important that some people are fully engaged; it is probably required that all of us are engaged at least some of the time. But there are other valuable engagements.

On Not Finishing the Work Now I want to consider more carefully what it means to say “you are not required to finish the work.” This can be read as an argument against personal perfectionism. We do not have to beat ourselves up for not finishing; we do not have to work sixteen hours a day; we do not have to neglect our

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obligations to other people; we do not even have to sacrifice our creature comforts. Here are the words of a twelfth- to thirteenth-century commentator, Joseph ben Judah Ibn Aknin, on the maxim: Do not say: “I shall push myself exceedingly . . . the way workers do who have to finish a fixed task.” For if you act this way, you will in the end grow weak and sluggish and cease from the work altogether. He who tries to do more than he is able will ultimately do less, because he wears out his body, dulls the sharpness of his mind, and slackens his enthusiasm. . . .2

We have to do only what we can do within reasonable limits, and then we can pass the “work” on to someone else, to the next generation. There is an idea here that stands in radical opposition to the individualism of American society: the goodness of a single life is not complete in itself. Think of it as part of an ongoing goodness project: the “work” only works if other people work at it together with us, and after us. In fact, we need many workers if the “work” is to proceed, and there is something mad or obsessive or vainglorious in trying to finish it all alone. So, the maxim encourages a certain kind of humility, which leads people doing the “work” to look for helpers and coworkers. The maxim is not only an argument against personal perfectionism, but also—and perhaps more importantly—against collective perfectionism. This is an anti-revolutionary, anti-messianic, and anti-redemptive text. The central idea of revolution or of messianic redemption is that all of a sudden, in an actual historical moment, human life and human society will be transformed and perfected. The “work,” whatever it is, will then be over and done. Communism will be the end of history. The messiah will usher in the Kingdom of God. Human life will no doubt continue, but it is hard to see how “work” as I understand it will still be necessary.3 The ambition of revolutionaries and political messianists has always been to finish the “work.” What comes after that is radically unclear. Our text says no to all of this. Its argument is very much in the spirit of the old Jewish joke about a man who takes a job with the city: he sits at 2 Joseph ben Judah Ibn Aknin, Sefer musar: perush mishnat Avot, ed. Wilhelm Bacher (Berlin: Mekize Nirdamim, 1910), 84. 3 Admittedly, Rabbi Moses Maimonides, construing “work” in the sense of Torah study (Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot talmud Torah 3:6), does say that even after the messiah comes, we will still study God’s law; in fact, we will be delivered from the hard necessities of everyday life so that we will be freer to study than we ever were before (ibid., Hilkhot melakhim 12:4).

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the city gate and watches for the messiah, so that the people inside will have some warning before he (or she) appears. A friend asks him how he likes his job. “Well,” he says, “it does not pay very well, but it is steady work.” The “work” that I have been talking about is more important than watching and waiting, but it is also steady; it is never done; whatever it is, it is endless. You do not have to finish because the “work” in principle is unfinishable; there may be temporary endings, victories of one sort or another, but nothing like completion. Every human being has been and will be confronted by the same task or set of tasks. Someone might think that this is a Jewish version of the Greek myth of Sisyphus. A rebel against the gods, Sisyphus is condemned to push a boulder up a steep hill forever; he never gets to the top. Is that the human story? But pushing a boulder up a hill does not seem to be “work” of the sort I am considering; in fact, it is punishment. It has no goodness, no interpersonal value, whereas the reason we cannot disengage from the “work” enjoined by the maxim is precisely because it is a good thing to do; doing it makes the world better. But better and better somehow do not add up to best. In fact, doing better is better than doing best, because “best” implies a hubristic completion. It is like someone who claims to have produced the definitive account of God’s law: “This is it,” he says. “No one has to study it anymore; now we can just obey it.” The personal version of this is overweening and arrogant; the collective version is likely to be tyrannical. For the law is always there to be studied, adapted, and revised; other people will always need help; the world will always need to be improved. And to deny this, to say that the “work” is forever done or to try to organize all the people doing it, however they conceive it, and march them to a single conclusion—this is bound to be, and has always turned out to be, a nasty business. But isn’t that “always” depressing, and isn’t that the reason people continually try to finish the “work”? Remember the biblical verse about the poor always being with us (Deut. 15:11). We resist the “always” and seek to create a society and an economic system in which poverty would be abolished. We declare a “war against poverty,” and we want to win the war. And it is right to try to win; that is one version of the “work” I am talking about. When we think about the “work,” we think about finishing it as well as about not finishing it. Like Martin Luther King, Jr., we have a dream. We have a utopian idea of a society where wellbeing is universal. We have an idea of a society where every family and village is secure against violence.

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On Not Finishing the Work    MICHAEL WALZER

We have an idea of a legal system whose laws are so well understood and so just that they are obeyed without coercion. But it is a great mistake to think that there is a single road to the realization of any of these goals, and that we have the roadmap, and that we are marching forward with absolute confidence—because then, anybody with another idea about how the “work” should be done is going to seem like an enemy. And yet, we need other ideas, because there isn’t a single road; there is no absolutely correct roadmap; and this is a very long march—I imagine it being infinitely long. So, we should take the maxim to be comforting: do not worry if you do not finish—as long as you do not give up. But the maxim is also a caution, a restraint: do not be impatient, do not think that you know exactly what needs to be done, do not try to do it all, do not force the end.

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Howard Wettstein, University of California, Riverside

The Faith of Abraham*

The aḳedah is haunting. All three Abrahamic religious traditions take the story of the Binding of Isaac as foundational; it establishes Abraham as the father of these faiths, even the father of faith itself. It is not, though, a story one would read to a child before bedtime. A sensitive child might shiver at the apparent moral horror. Israeli author A. B. Yehoshua argues that Abraham’s blind obedience cannot have positive religious significance.1 Indeed, it is sometimes suggested that Abraham failed God’s test; commanded to murder, he was all too willing, no questions asked. Yet, there is something enormously powerful, even inspirational, about the story and about Abraham. In the earlier biblical narrative of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham boldly confronts God: Avraham came close and said: Will you really sweep away the innocent along with the guilty? Perhaps there are fifty innocent within the city, will you really sweep it away? Will you not bear with the place because of the fifty innocent that are in its midst?

* It is an honor to contribute to this volume in honor of Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller. Chaim’s teaching has been an important influence on many of us; one never hears him speak without learning something of significance. The apt title of this volume reflects Chaim’s independence of thought, as well as his integrity. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at a number of institutions and on https://www.academia.edu/. My thanks to the many participants who commented and especially to Jeff Helmreich and Joseph Almog for illuminating discussions. 1 A. B. Yehoshua, “Mr. Mani and the Akedah,” trans. Rivka and Amnon Hadary, Judaism 50, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 61–65.

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Heaven forbid2 for you to do a thing like this, to deal death to the innocent along with the guilty, that it should come about: like the innocent, like the guilty, Heaven forbid for you! The judge of all the earth—will he not do what is just?3

Commanded to sacrifice Isaac, where stunned incredulity seems much more in order, Abraham is strangely silent, even passive; then he arises early—the Hebrew suggests something close to eagerness4—and sets off toward Mount Moriah with Isaac. It is told that a student commented to Joseph Campbell, a giant in the study of mythology, that he was tired of the old stories and longed for new ones. Campbell reportedly replied that that was fine, “if you have a couple of thousand years to work at it.” The aḳedah is among the great gifts of the Hebrew Bible. Allusions to it and proposals about its meaning and significance abound: in biblical literature; in Rabbinic midrash and the tradition of commentary, philosophic and other; in Christian treatment of the story and in Christian thinking about God’s sacrifice of His own son; and in the Qur’an. The text, powerful as it is, is extremely spare. We are thus invited to provide midrash, to fill in the gaps, to make sense of the story and of its power. I propose that we resist starting with the hardest questions. There will be time later for wondering about God’s motives, for example. Abraham’s thinking—we are not privy to it—is difficult enough. What was going through his mind? Did he suffer with the decision? Indeed, was there a decision? What did he tell himself about Isaac, about his commitment to his beloved son, about God’s promise that he, Abraham, would be the progenitor of nations? Before making my proposal, I want to attend to unmistakably significant aspects of the story. Here is one: Abraham’s tenderness towards Isaac—and their bond—seem unaffected by the exquisite cruelty of their 2 Or, as in a tamer rendering, “Far be it from you.” Fox’s translation, quoted here (see next note), comes much closer to the Hebrew. If anything, the Hebrew is less tame than Fox suggests. See Fox’s footnote to the phrase “Heaven forbid”: “Lit. ‘May you have a curse.’” That seems to me too strong in the context. But the key Hebrew root is ḥ-l-l, to profane. 3 Everett Fox, trans., In the Beginning: A New English Rendition of the Book of Genesis (New York: Schocken Books, 1983), 68 (Gen. 18:23–25). 4 I am grateful to my wonderful undergraduate teacher, Rabbi Moshe Besdin, z”l, for alerting his students to the word ṿa-yashkem (Gen. 22:3) with its suggestion of an eagerness to take advantage of a spiritual opportunity.

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march. The text encourages us to feel their closeness. It reminds us that “the two walked together” (Gen. 22:6); the Hebrew yaḥdaṿ (together) is very strong—almost (but not quite) “as one.” Indeed, even after Isaac asks his father about the missing lamb for the slaughter and Abraham answers that God will provide the lamb—Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac (Rashi) suggests that at that moment Isaac realizes what is in store—the two walk together, yaḥdaṿ (ibid. v. 8). Additionally, Abraham refers to Isaac warmly as “my son.” Think about how strange and unlikely this is for a father who—as many would have us believe—has already made his decision to kill his son; all is fixed but the terror of the actual sacrifice. For real people—and more so for the emotionally and spiritually sensitive—such a commitment would naturally prompt a certain distancing of the father from the son. One of the overarching themes of the aḳedah is that of trust: Abraham’s trust in God and Isaac’s trust in his father (and perhaps also in God). But how are we to understand trust? It is often seen as an expectation that God will see to it that things turn out right, for the best. Many have read the aḳedah that way, and there are suggestions in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling that such is Abraham’s outlook. Although such an outlook would certainly be trusting, I think I see in the aḳedah a subtler, more profound sort of trust. I return to this below. Turning to Isaac, I picture him—in the manner of some teenage boys— as totally trusting in his father, his hero.5 Seen this way, the aḳedah is among other things a kind of buddy story, more accurately, a father-son saga— until the end, the actual binding of Isaac, and my imagination goes quiet. The Bible never again tells of any interaction between father and son (cf., however, Gen. 25:5); Abraham seems to return home without Isaac, who perhaps sets out on his own. The human costs of God’s test are inestimable. God’s initial command is the stuff of nightmares. Could the whole thing be a bad dream, a vision that takes possession of Abraham? It is certainly not presented as such. There are, however, other biblical passages that appear to report actual happenings, only to have some commentators, most 5 The text does not reveal Isaac’s age, licensing speculation, as if one could see the play with different-aged actors and reflect on which would come closest to the truth, “truth” as it were. See Jon D. Levenson’s The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 133, for a discussion of various possibilities, from thirty-seven to twenty-six to fifteen. My Isaac is perhaps fifteen.

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famously Rabbi Moses Maimonides (Moreh nevukhim II:42), take them to record prophets’ visions. Maimonides maintains that if an angel, a mal’akh of God, shows up in a narrative, the narrative should be understood as describing the vision of a prophet rather than as a record of actual events. Having announced this as a principle, Maimonides does not apply it to the aḳedah, at least not explicitly. Perhaps such an interpretation would be too stunning, too stark, given the central importance of the aḳedah in Jewish tradition. But others take this to be Maimonides’s view.6 In favor of the nightmare interpretation is this: Abraham, having left a culture in which child sacrifice was practiced, enters a new life, a new world. His God is the God of justice, the judge of all the earth, as Abraham calls Him. One night, he dreams that things are not at all the way they had appeared; God wants Isaac. This is a nightmare I can imagine having. And the way the story is told, its spare and dreamy quality. . . . Whether or not Maimonides sees the passage as describing a nightmare, this reading is certainly provocative, and in more than one sense. Of course, if the aḳedah is a mere vision, we need not worry about why God would issue such a chilling command. And we could happily bypass the horror of considering Isaac’s reaction (not to speak of Sarah’s) to God’s test. But some questions may remain:7 what would (or should) someone do if he or she actually received such a command from God? If one went along with it, would that be pious or impious? Where does one’s faith leave one vis-à-vis such a directive? Still, the above proposal is quite radical, and I want to explore what to make of the aḳedah as it is usually understood: as a narrative of actual happenings, one that is (somehow) fundamental to the faith. I begin by exploring Abraham’s puzzling silence.

6 See Marc B. Shapiro’s discussion in Changing the Immutable: How Orthodox Judaism Rewrites Its History (Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2015), 67–71. 7 Or perhaps not. Perhaps, as a matter of methodology, one need not and maybe should not confront such hypotheticals. Perhaps it is like asking, “If God’s motivation were evil . . . ?” (This is not quite as bad as, “If the number two were odd . . . ?”) The matter is confusing and may be related to Wittgenstein-inspired discussions, some years ago, about hypotheticals that change the initial conditions so radically that there is no settled way to resolve the questions raised.

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Abraham Joshua Heschel, throughout his many discussions of prophecy,8 denies that the prophets have what we might call propositional knowledge of God. The contrast is with Maimonides’s contention that the prophet is a philosopher, that the patriarchs, for example, had philosophic knowledge of God (Moreh nevukhim II:32, 36). Heschel points us in another direction, away from theoretical knowledge and towards a kind of personal familiarity with God. The prophet knows God in a way not available to the rest of us. He “gets” God somewhat in the way that we “get” one another. Indeed, the prophet is in the unique and, in many ways, uncomfortable position of being acutely sensitive to God and, at the same time, to Israel, to the people. The prophet is tuned in, understands, and empathizes with their pains and pleasures, their wants and needs—those of God, those of the people.9 Instead of reading Abraham as inconsistent—his boldness concerning Sodom and Gomorrah as opposed to his silence in the face of God’s command to kill Isaac—we might note the contrast and take it as an indication that Abraham sees or understands something that we do not. Surely Divine-human communication—whatever it amounts to—is nuanced no less than are our communicative interactions with one another. Something about the interaction with God—the details of which are in any case not available to us—says to him that this is not the time to challenge.10 8 See, for example, Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1962), where, among many such remarks, is this: “[T]he fundamental experience of the prophet is a fellowship with the feelings of God, a sympathy with the divine pathos” (p. 26; emphasis in the original). See also his classic work, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1955), chs. 24–27. 9 On knowledge of interpersonal nuance, Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1996), 244–96, understands autism—perhaps it is only one variety of autism—as an inability to learn by hanging around. When one reflects on how we learn so much of what we need for successful negotiation of experience, one realizes that we learn not by articulation of rules or principles or propositions, but simply by .  .  . and here it gets hard to say. How is it that a baby learns to speak? Not by mastering rules or instructions—that is certain. The baby, when things go well, has the equipment that, in the course of normal interactions with others, allows her to enter our linguistic practice. Or think about how one masters the countless nuances of social life, from the appropriate distance one stands from interlocutors to gestures that signify respect or disdain. One suffering from autism lacks the equipment to learn in this way; what is nowadays called “the autism spectrum” represents various degrees of such deficiency. I write, of course, as a non-expert. 10 Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering (Oxford: Clarendon, 2010), 258–307, addresses the aḳedah in the context of Abraham’s

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Abraham’s silence, then, does not indicate that he shies away from confronting God. Still, he arises early the next morning with eagerness and sets out with Isaac. Does this mean that he has, in effect, said “yes” to God, that he is committed to doing what God has commanded? If so, I am lost. My sense of Abraham as a giant of faith is at stake. Of course, if that is what the text says, that is what it says. Does it say that? God’s call to Abraham must have induced vertigo,11 the world turned upside-down, inside-out; a moment in which one loses one’s bearings. But Abraham’s action exhibits an almost peaceful simplicity—walking, one might say, in God’s tempo.12 How can that be? Earlier, I discussed trust in God and the way it is often understood, as the belief that things will turn out well, that God will see to it. I suggested that there may be a deeper kind of trust at work here. At the heart of trust— indeed, at the heart of faith—is a sense of being grounded in God. Abraham and God are intimates;13 that intimacy centers Abraham, he abides in it. It is more than likely that Abraham has achieved that level of intimacy that the Bible, in Deuteronomy (10:20, 11:22, 30:20), refers to as cleaving to God. Rabbi Moses Naḥmanides, in his commentary on Deut. 11:22, suggests that one so blessed is never without God. It is as if one has just fallen in love: one walks, as we say, on a cloud, never without a sense of the other’s presence. This, of course, is a very different matter than believing that God will make it right. It is not a trusting that (something is the case); rather, it is a trusting in (someone).14 One so grounded, so centered, may in fact harbor the thought that God will make it right, that God always makes it right.

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life and spiritual career. In a wonderful turn of phrase, she refers to Abraham’s silence as “eloquent” (p. 299). Her suggestion is that his refraining from objecting to God bespeaks Abraham’s understanding of the nature of, and reasons for, the test that God imposes. However, the idea that God has good reasons for this extreme cruelty is, for me, on a par with the idea that Job’s catastrophes are the product of some sound reasons, something far from the suggestion of the beginning of the book of Job or anything else in Job. However, I agree with and appreciate the idea that Abraham’s silence is eloquent. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg explores multiple occasions and dimensions of vertigo in her Genesis: The Beginning of Desire (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995). See especially her chapter on Parashat ḥayye Śarah, “Vertigo—The Residue of the Akedah.” Martin Buber, Two Types of Faith, trans. Norman P. Goldhawk (London: Routledge & Paul, 1951), 22, writes of acting in God’s tempo as an aspect of faith. The verb la-da‘at (to know) conveys intimacy, even sexual intimacy, as when the Bible speaks of Adam knowing his wife (Gen. 4:1). God speaks of Abraham, at the beginning of their as-it-were debate about Sodom and Gomorrah, as someone God has known (Gen. 18:19). So Jeff Helmreich suggested as the best way to put the distinction I am making.

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But not necessarily. Perhaps Abraham, like many of us, has seen enough of life to disabuse him of such optimism. Perhaps his trust, his faith, is more a matter of an unbreakable bond, born of intimacy: he and God together, come what may.15 Abraham’s commitment to God—whole and entire—stands alongside his wholehearted love for Isaac. It is difficult to imagine the two coming apart; they seem like interlocking aspects of a deeply religious, deeply human outlook. But God’s command rips them apart. We are not told that it threatens to do the same to Abraham. But to know a parent who has lost a child is to know something of what was at stake. The thought of losing a child by one’s own hand is so bizarre as to be unthinkable. Whence Abraham’s simplicity? It is, I think, generated by a faith that sustains a person in the midst of darkness. Abraham sets off, not knowing where the path will lead, but ready to follow it until the end. He marches, carrying both nonnegotiable loves in his heart, his teeth clenched, his head down, straight ahead, in a moment of transcendent faith. Abraham’s spiritual genius—the rules have been left behind—is, in part, a matter of not confronting the decision prematurely. That would be paralyzing, offering only obsessive anguish. In philosophy—perhaps in ordinary thinking as well—we tend to overemphasize the role of decision-making in voluntary or intentional action. Of course, people sometimes need to stop and think about what is to be done, to decide which way to go. But most of the things we do are, as it were, smooth, virtually automatic.16 We typically function more like welloiled machines than like creatures whose actions bespeak a discontinuity of choices made. Abraham’s faith—as I am suggesting that we understand it—renders his response to God’s command somewhat like the output of a well-oiled machine. Of course, Abraham could have refused God’s command; alternatively, he could have explicitly agreed to kill Isaac. I do not mean to challenge his freedom to do these things. But his way in the world—including his faith, inseparable from his character—moves him to proceed, clinging to both nonnegotiable loves, with the sense that with God’s help, as it were, he will know what to do when the time comes. Abraham’s way represents the epitome of practical wisdom in the face of excruciating choices. 15 Cf. John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1962), 21–22, for a parallel point about “moral faith.” 16 As Larry Wright has emphasized in many conversations.

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The Faith of Abraham    HOWARD WETTSTEIN

Ironically, with Isaac’s hand in his, Abraham unknowingly reverses the challenge; will God be silent, will He remain silent? God responds by calling off Abraham. Perhaps He has seen enough. Perhaps God’s tests—Abraham and Job come forcefully to mind—are tools by which God and the universe allow us to grow in ways otherwise unavailable.17 I will close with a reflection on a postponed question, perhaps the most difficult one: how is God’s command even remotely consistent with the character of the God of Israel? First, an approach that I mention primarily to put it aside. In the Exodus passages about the redemption of the firstborn, God sometimes sounds as if He wants the firstborn (Ex. 13:2, 12; 22:28–29; see also Num. 3:13); other times, the text speaks of the redemption of the firstborn, as if by right they belong to God but the remedy is symbolic (Ex. 13:13). And in a strange, one-of-a-kind passage, God, through Ezekiel, speaks of the firstborn and of the fact that God’s anger with the Israelites prompted Him to give them “laws that were not good” (Ezek. 20:25). The topic is vexed; the thought that the God of Israel was sympathetic to child sacrifice is inconsistent with many remarks in biblical literature (see, for example, Deut. 18:10; II Kings 23:10). Still, one might understand the aḳedah as depicting God working it out, both wanting child sacrifice and, in the end, rejecting the idea. The view is worthy of mention, but there is neither external, say archaeological, evidence, nor clear textual evidence, nor a preponderance of scholarly opinion to posit that Israelites practiced child sacrifice.18 What, then, motivates God to ask for Isaac? The cruelty of God’s command is breathtaking. It is not only the viciousness of asking a father to take his child’s life; Isaac is to be a burnt offering. Here is how a burnt offering was to be made: the flesh burned, the skin retained. Later in the Bible we are told of burnt offerings’ sweet smell to God (Ex. 29:18 and passim). All of this lends credence to—it is almost enough to make one accept—the nightmare interpretation, attributed by some to Maimonides. 17 Unlike Kierkegaard and many others, I do not understand Abraham’s central challenge to be moral. Were I asked to kill a child of mine, probably only (much) later would I think about morality. Abraham must be thinking: “How can I kill my boy?” I cannot imagine that he is thinking: “How can I violate morality?” To be primarily stunned by the violation of morality would be the proverbial one thought too many. What is at stake is rather in the domain of love. My thanks to Harry Frankfurt for the insight that the primary challenge is not moral. 18 See Levenson’s The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son, ch. 1, entitled “Child Sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible: Deviation or Norm?”

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There is something awful about comparing horrors, but the aḳedah makes the terror of martyrdom look relatively tame.19 Martyrs die in purity, with clarity of purpose and of conscience. Here, the world has turned upside-down. The Creator who appointed Abraham to bring light and justice to the world reminds Abraham of His fatherly love as He asks for Isaac’s flesh. Perhaps the reason for God’s command is not to be explained. Accounts in the spirit of theodicy are available, but they lack the scent of truth. There is a tendency among philosophers and theologians (and, no doubt, other theorists) to shore up theory, “pushing it,” defending their views by way of theses that, for all their brilliance, lack naturalness. Such answers pale in comparison with the questions that prompted them. As with conduct, so with thought: straightforwardness, straight-ahead-ness, is near the head of the table of virtues. In that spirit (or so one hopes), I want to transpose the question into a different key. Let us ask instead why the Bible is so little interested in protecting God from apparently just criticism, its extreme openness contrasting strikingly with the defensive posture of later apologists. Some of the reported doings of God are simply appalling. With Abraham of Gen. 18:23–25, quoted at the beginning of this paper, we wish to understand how this can be. It is one thing, bad enough, to hear of how God treats His (and Israel’s) enemies, as in the book of Joshua. But with the aḳedah, as with Job, we are speaking of God’s beloved. The Bible reports these matters apparently without hesitation, with no attempt to explain, or even to soften, the appearance of cruelty. The Bible does not seem to know about God’s “omni-properties,” His perfections, an idea that comes into semi-official prominence only later.20 In the biblical narrative, God’s ways lack perfection, and not only in the ethical domain. God changes His mind, becomes angry, almost petty, is jealous in a very human way, is subject to flattery, and the like. The biblical imagination seems to comport with a conception of worship at odds with later theory as well as with the sensibility of the other 19 Similarly tame by comparison is the tragedy befalling Job and his family. 20 There are, of course, biblical verses that suggest that God is perfect, without flaw, as well as others where a lack of perfection is plain. But the context of biblical literature suggests the sort of perfection that we attribute to our lovers and loved ones, our children, for example. During Talmudic times, perhaps with the increasing influence of Greek, then Christian, then Muslim thought, one finds increasing doctrinal attention paid to God’s perfection.

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Abrahamic religious traditions. The latter tend to see worship as the adoration of perfection. In the Hebrew Bible, the gap between here and there, between us and God, is certainly maintained, but there is also something of the flavor of domestic life, as if we were life partners, sharing good times and bad, triumphs and disasters, subject to anger with one another, sometimes severe, and falling in love with one another time after time. At the beginning of the book of Hosea (1:2), God tells the prophet to marry a whore, presumably to convey the sense of what it is like to be married to Israel.21 The Song of Songs is poetry of love, emphasizing longing for the other, including sexual longing, and the joys and aches of love. It was understood by the tradition to be a parable about God and Israel. Rabbinic midrash has God going into exile with the Jews after the destruction of the Temple (bMegillah 29a). God prays, in the Talmudic imagination, that His desire for strict justice will be overcome by His loving, nurturing side (bBerakhot 7a). God struggles as do His creatures. From the perspective of Perfect Being theology, such anthropomorphisms will seem to rob God of what makes Him godly. On the outlook I am eliciting from the Bible, it is the Perfect Being conception that robs God of what makes Him godly, including His love for His creatures; it also yields a very narrow understanding of worship. The flavor of the biblical conception is illustrated by the following comment on the mourner’s ḳaddish. One recites this prayer three times a day for eleven months following a parent’s death. Strangely, the prayer never mentions death or the deceased. Instead, it is a prayer glorifying God. A comment I came across when I was a mourner, one that transformed the recitation, was that ḳaddish is the mourner’s attempt to comfort God for His loss.22 There is something very comforting about comforting another. One shares a life with God. A very different side of Jewish religious sensibility: Elie Wiesel wrote a story about a trial held by three rabbis in which God is charged with crimes against His chosen people and is pronounced guilty. Right after the verdict, the group adjourns for the evening prayer.23 21 See also Jer. 2:2 for a striking image of the “couple” as newlyweds. 22 See Maurice Lamm, The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning (New York: J. David, 1969), 149. Lamm attributes the idea to S. Y. Agnon and expands on Agnon’s treatment but does not comment further on where Agnon addresses the matter. 23 See Elie Wiesel, The Trial of God (As It Was Held on February 25, 1649 in Shamgorod): A Play in Three Acts, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: Knopf, 1979). The story is apparently based on an incident that Wiesel witnessed as an inmate in Auschwitz.

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Seeing God in anthropomorphic terms, as with the interpretation of ḳaddish mentioned above, can be uplifting. And then one gets to Job or the aḳedah, or the Holocaust. To the extent that one allows oneself to let the story in, to feel it, one is horrified. That we attempt to repair the wound, to justify God with the suggestion that if it happens, there must be a reason—these understandable reactions nevertheless situate us a bit too close to Job’s comforters. The biblical texts are plain; they do not so much as hint at theodicy. Perhaps the Bible’s unembarrassed directness about God’s ways is testing us, but not in a way acknowledged by the theodicies. Just as Abraham was incredulous at the thought that God might destroy a city in which righteous people lived, perhaps we, too, should allow ourselves to taste the moral horror, to be stunned by these questions that can have no answers. Perhaps this is training in faith, in straight-ahead-ness. Perhaps such training and such faith is the point.

Afterword On September 11, 2001, the day of the catastrophe, my wife and I were flying home from London. Hours into the flight, I sensed that the plane had turned completely around. After a while, an announcement was made: the airspace over California had been closed and we were heading back to London. There was a buzz among the passengers, but since the air phones were not functional—what was that about?—no one had any idea what had happened. Later, we were told that the airspace over the entire United States had been closed. More suspense, but still no explanation. We landed in London and sat on the ground for perhaps a half hour; an airline representative appeared and told us about the New York and Washington, D.C. terrorist attacks. Our daughter had recently moved to New York City and our son was in D.C. Could we have lost one or both of our treasures? We were beside ourselves. With trepidation, we proceeded through a long corridor into the main terminal. Dominating my thoughts during the seemingly endless walk was Abraham’s march, with faith, with his head down, holding on to both loves, not thinking about what lay ahead. In the end, we learned that our kids were fine. It was more than gratifying to reflect on what I had learned from Abraham.

Moshe Idel, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

The Ascent and Decline of the “Historical Jew”

Introduction Though history is an ancient intellectual preoccupation, it played different roles in different societies at various stages of their development. In ancient Greece and Rome, it was hardly a central concern from the point of view of defining their respective cultures; it seems that mythology and philosophy in Greece, and law in Rome, were far more formative. The question as to the role of history, namely, sacred history, in Israelite religion is much more complex. In undertaking the present analysis, I pay tribute to my friend and former student, Chaim Seidler-Feller, who has a rare grasp of the differing modes of modern Jewish historical scholarship, ranging from the more mundane to the supremely theological. In one of the most widespread and influential phenomenologies of religion, that of Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), Judaism is conceived of as the “historical” religion par excellence, the prophets and priests active in Jerusalem being the specific elites who caused the shift from the archaic myths of the Near Eastern religions to history.1 This is a major understanding of Judaism in modern times, which was only very marginally qualified by Eliade in some later phases of his career while taking into consideration

1 Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959).

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some forms of later Judaism, namely, the mystical ones, which he had previously neglected.2 Eliade’s argument has much to do with the anti-Hegelian move that preached a return to the archaic as an ideal, in lieu of the theory of evolution of the spirit. However, there are more powerful reasons for advancing a modern understanding of Judaism as a historical religion than Eliade’s rather ambivalent theory.3 In my own attempt to swim against the current of Eliade’s thought, I distinguish between three main moves that installed history as the primary tool used by Jewish scholars for conceptualizing Judaism. The first move is the ascent of the role of history in German academic centers initiated by the so-called Wissenschaft des Judentums. This is basically a nineteenth-century phenomenon that situates the center of gravity in Jewish culture and that still reverberates in the academy to this day. The second move relates to the emergence of Zionism and the effort to craft an alternative narrative to the diasporic historical ones proffered by the Wissenschaft des Judentums. Within the framework of this type of history—which began in the early twentieth century and, naturally, is still current—lachrymose and non-lachrymose strains have developed, each with an emphasis on the social status of the Jews in the Diaspora. Last, but not least—and even more recent—is the historical turn engendered by the need to demonstrate the Jews’ attachment to the Land of Israel and their right to live there in a period when an alternative claim made by Arabs, who deny any historical connection of Jews to the Land, threatens that narrative. Of course, this third move represents a much more geographically focused type of history. (Whether histories of the Jews in America were intended to establish a connection between these newly created communities in the New World or not may be a matter of debate.) The three main moves outlined above are intertwined and support one another. 2 For an analysis of the emergence of Eliade’s views as to the shift that took place in ancient Judaism insofar as monotheism and history are concerned, see Moshe Idel, Mircea Eliade: From Magic to Myth (New York: Peter Lang, 2014), and idem, Ascensions on High in Jewish Mysticism: Pillars, Lines, Ladders (Budapest; New York: Central European University Press, 2005), 205–37, 241–61. See also idem, “Some Concepts of Time and History in Kabbalah,” in Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, ed. Elisheva Carlebach, John M. Efron, and David N. Myers (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England; Brandeis University Press, 1998), 153–88. 3 On this ambivalence, see Idel, Ascensions on High, 205–37, 241–61, and idem, Mircea Eliade, 135–56.

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While taking issue with some aspects of Eliade’s description of ancient Judaism as historically inclined, the renowned American Jewish historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1932–2009) resorted to the following portrayal of the relationship between ancient Judaism and history: “If Herodotus was the father of history, the fathers of meaning in history were the Jews.”4 Thus, there is a certain dissonance between the more descriptive version of history practiced by the Greeks and an oriented, or biased, exposition of history, which points to a certain, basically religious meaning—or, in other words, a sacred history. While Greek history is understood in much more immanent terms, the biblical type of history includes an incomparably more transcendent dimension, which infuses—or, as some scholars would assume, perhaps discovers—meaning in events by considering them to be expressions of the divine will and an ultimate, premeditated design. However, while the biblical Israelites were concerned with the “meaning” of historical events, such a concern dissipated, according to Yerushalmi, in the next major phase of Judaism, the Rabbinic one,5 and did not return as a major form of expression in Jewish literature until the sixteenth century. Though scholars have posited different explanations as to why historical writing became so ubiquitous precisely in this century— was it due to the influence of Renaissance historiography6 or perhaps to the impact of the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula?7—the very ascent of this genre of Jewish writing has, to the best of my knowledge, never been disputed in scholarship. However, important as this interest in Jewish history was, it never turned into a central focus of Jewish thought 4 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America; Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1982), 8. 5 Ibid., 18. 6 For a general assessment of the reasons for the emergence of Jewish historical writings in the sixteenth century, see Reuven Bonfil, “The Historian’s Perception of the Jews in the Italian Renaissance: Towards a Reappraisal,” Revue des Études Juives 143, nos. 1–2 (1984): 59–82; idem, “Some Reflections on the Place of Azariah de Rossi’s Meor Enayim in the Cultural Milieu of Italian Renaissance Jewry,” in Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Bernard Dov Cooperman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 23–48; and idem, “How Golden Was the Age of the Renaissance in Jewish Historiography?,” in Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, ed. David B. Ruderman (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 219–50. For a more general survey of Jewish historiography during the Renaissance period, see Reuven Michael, Ha-ketivah ha-hisṭorit ha-yehudit: me-ha-renesans ad ha-et ha-ḥadashah (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1993), 17–71. 7 See Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 57–75.

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in the Renaissance or premodern periods. Dominated by other types of speculative interest, such as philosophy and mysticism, and obedient to the Rabbinic regimen vitae, premodern forms of Judaism remained largely indifferent to the few chronicles or more critical books of history that had been produced up to that point.

The Transcendent Factor in the Perception of Jewish History in Scholarship Against the background of the above observations, it is interesting to note the flowering of historical studies in the last one hundred fifty years of the academic study of Judaism. The emphasis on history is especially prominent in the three centers of academic Jewish studies: Germany, Israel, and the United States. Just as German academe played an important role in shaping the consciousness of and unifying the German people in the nineteenth century, something very similar occurred among Central European Jews at that time. Indeed, we can describe the nineteenth century as the birth of a new type of Jew: the historical one. While previous generations of Jews had grounded their identity in ritual, in the biblical and Rabbinic forms of Judaism, in the belief in a certain type of philosophy, or in some form of mystical attachment to God or to the nation, it is in this century that large swaths of Central European Jewry became aware of the cumulative historical experiences of the nation. What was true for nineteenth-century German Jews has also been true for many Israeli and American Jews in the last two generations. In all three cases, a process that may be described as moving “from text to context” (to use Ismar Schorsch’s helpful phrase) has taken place.8 A typical Jew’s conception of his or her Judaism has tended to be based more on understanding the various historical backgrounds against which Jews lived and created, rather than on study of Jewish texts. This new emphasis can be found in some of the formulations adduced below and was backed by three main academically inclined groups: professors of history; other academicians, who were not professional historians but who nevertheless adopted a historical understanding of Judaism; and intellectuals, 8

Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England; Brandeis University Press, 1994). I would like to emphasize that the widespread understanding of Rabbinic Judaism as expressing the view of a people of the book is an exaggeration, since Rabbinism is, in my opinion, more of a text-and-ritual type of religion.

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who consumed the work of the two prior groups. Though numerically modest, these three types of authors have had a tremendous impact on the way in which much larger audiences, Jewish and not, have understood Judaism, and they constitute some of the main voices describing Judaism in modern times.9 Before adducing examples of some conceptions of Jewish history, let me remark on the transition from a transcendent understanding of history, known as historiosophy, to a secular, immanent one. This change hardly took place before the middle of the nineteenth century, despite the fact that some of the figures discussed below were affiliated with renowned (ostensibly secular) universities. In his introduction to the first volume of one of the most important journals of Jewish studies in the nineteenth century, the Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums, Zacharias Frankel (1801– 1875)10 outlines its aims: Judaism, which, seen from the outside, has but a history of passivity and knows only how to relate what has happened to it, displays in this very history a profound inner life, allowing it to perceive therein a manifestation of the Divine, a revelation of religion. History in its most basic form consists in the gathering together of scattered, changing, and transient phenomena to a single focal point, from which the ray of God illuminates those events, revealing the plan that had prevailed for centuries.  .  .  . [S]een from the outside, the Jew had no history; world events could only adversely affect him, and he could do nothing to participate in them. But even viewed internally, he had no real history, none of the change or transience inherent in the past; 9 On the adoption of the historical turn from the majority cultures in Central Europe, see Moshe Idel, “Transfers of Categories: The German-Jewish Experience and Beyond,” in The German-Jewish Experience Revisited, ed. Steven E. Aschheim and Vivian Liska (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 15–43. I am, of course, well aware of the anti-historicist approaches that developed in the interwar period in certain Jewish circles, especially in Germany; see David N. Myers, Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). However, since the mid-nineteenth century, historians of different sorts have been the ones responsible for shaping the ways in which Judaism is understood, as we shall see below. 10 On Frankel, see the introduction in Rivka Horwitz, Zekharyah Frankel ṿe-reshit ha-yahadut ha-poziṭivit hisṭorit (Jerusalem: Merkaz Shazar, 1984), and Schorsch, From Text to Context, 255–65. Some of the ideas that follow here appeared in more condensed form in Moshe Idel, “‘That Wondrous, Occult Power’: Some Reflections on Modern Perceptions of Jewish History,” Studia Judaica 7 (1998): 57–70.

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his inner life was religion, devotion to the Divine, for which the categories of space and time—within which history takes place—do not hold. As long as this divine spark lived, there could be no history; religion, an internal experience, made the life of the past like that of the present generation: only human beings as external phenomena changed, while the idea of the Divine remained unaltered throughout the generations and was borne by its tradents with the same uninterrupted enthusiasm. However, those tradents have [lately] grown weaker and that inner life has lost its intensity; and so, for some time now, Jewry has begun to approach the study of history, and present research seeks to discover the happenings of bygone eras. This research finds suffering and severe deprivations in history, and it would quickly and wearily set down the pen chronicling these ghastly occurrences were it not that it perceived in the radiance of the divine idea the worthiest subject for historiography. In the history of the Jews, this research comes to two great, outstanding conclusions: God assures the preservation of the Jews, and something internal and godly assures the self-preservation of the Jews. This periodical will attempt to acquaint the reader with these conclusions.11

This is a manifesto, and, like most documents of this genre, it does not actually describe what would eventually happen in practice, but the rhetoric is nevertheless interesting. What is fascinating about it, as about some of the other quotations below, is the author’s complete ignorance of the concept of understanding history in immanent terms. In fact, there is no great difference between medieval or Renaissance historical outlooks, on the one hand, and the view expressed here, on the other. A conception of history as the realization of a divine plan is not essentially different from a mystical one. I would go so far as to say that even the Renaissance Jewish historians do not espouse an immanent understanding.12 Let me put in relief the statement that Jewish history, on the surface at least, is made up of events in which the Jews are passive. According to Frankel, God alone plays an active role, though in a hidden manner. This type of worldview, stemming from a religious thinker, corroborates the Zionist understanding of Diaspora Judaism as passive, no better expressed than in the famous sermon of the anti-Diaspora Yudka, the central character in the short story “Ha-derashah” (The Sermon) by Israeli author Haim 11 Zacharias Frankel, “Einleitendes,” Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums 1, no. 1 (October 1851): 3–4. 12 Cf., however, Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 74.

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Hazaz (1898–1973). Though I would prefer not to generalize about Diaspora Judaism or Zionism as representing one type of approach or another, the assumption that the conceptualization of Diaspora Jews as passive was an invention of Zionist historiography is itself a historiographical invention, since such passivity is explicitly invoked in pre-Zionist sources like Frankel’s introduction.13 Frankel’s contemporary, the great Heinrich Graetz (1817– 1891), understood the Jewish community as the material expression of the monotheistic vision advocated by the Torah.14 This position was presented immediately before Frankel invoked the role of Wissenschaft des Judentums and of Jewish history as reviving dormant currents within Judaism. Thus, the study of history is far from a purely academic pursuit; it is, rather, part of a communal enterprise to revive a latent potential within the people. The multivolume Social and Religious History of the Jews, the most impressive Jewish historical project of the twentieth century—reminiscent of Graetz’s grand enterprise—was written in New York by an American Jewish academician, Salo W. Baron (1895–1989). In the first, three-volume edition of this survey of Jewish history, we read as follows: To put it in a nutshell: the interpretation and reinterpretation of the history of the people, a kind of historic Midrash, is now to serve as a guidance for the future. A new divine book has opened itself before the eyes of the faithful: the book of human and Jewish destinies, guided by some unknown and unknowable ultimate Power. This book, if properly understood, would seem to answer the most perplexing questions of the present and the future. It is over the exposition of this historical “Scripture” that sectarian controversies are already raging, and are likely to grow more intense and sweeping. The historical study of Judaism has long cut across all factional divisions. . . . It is in this field that the unity of Israel15 is still well preserved.16 13 On this issue, see David N. Myers, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 178–79. I would like to avoid entering here into the dispute between the Haredi anti-Zionists and Zionists, in which passivity insofar as historical changes are concerned is widely embraced in explicit terms by the former. See Aviezer Ravitzky, Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism, trans. Michael Swirsky and Jonathan Chipman (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), 11–13, 62–63. 14 On this issue, see Michael, Ha-ketivah ha-hisṭorit, 307–09. 15 On the issue of unity achieved by history, see also below for another quotation from Baron. 16 Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937), 457 (emphasis in the original). See also the discussion in Schorsch, From Text to Context, 156.

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It is surprising that a book that places such emphasis on the social and religious aspects of Judaism nevertheless sees a common history as its unifying element. In Baron’s words, a “historic Midrash” is intended to offer “guidance” for solving life’s “most perplexing questions.” Baron, who dedicated a number of studies to Rabbi Moses Maimonides,17 is playing here on two components of the title of Maimonides’s chef-d’œuvre, the Moreh nevukhim (Guide of the Perplexed). Maimonides felt that a particular brand of medieval Neo-Aristotelianism could serve as a guide for the “perplexed” Jews of his day, whereas Baron put forward history or the “historic Midrash” as a modern solution to perplexing “questions of the present and the future.” However, such a view could, at least in principle, be read in secular terms: history could be interpreted metaphorically as the source of inspiration for the future, without any religious dimension attributed to it. That would transform history into something much more immanent. However, Baron is quite explicit that the newly discovered book about which he writes is a “divine book” and that it represents the impact of an “ultimate Power.” From this point of view, Baron presents not only a textualized imaginaire of history, but also a more fundamental belief that the historical text reflects a divine intervention in human affairs. His vision is thus reminiscent of a classical version of historia sacra. We may legitimately ask whether Baron understood his monumental historical survey as a guide possessing a religious dimension. The relation between historiography and traditional Jewish literary genres is made explicit in the above passage: Baron resorts to the categories of interpretation and reinterpretation, and he uses the terms “historic Midrash” and “Scripture,” which fit perfectly within the framework of explicating the meaning of a divine book. Moreover, he claims that Jewish historical research “still follow[s] too slavishly the general historical trends in the outside world, not paying sufficient attention to the peculiar subject matter, which calls for a peculiar kind of investigation.”18 Only greater familiarity with the non-political aspects of Jewish history would help the historian to “reëstablish a sort of historical continuity in this field likewise, and would 17 See, for example, Salo W. Baron, The Economic Views of Maimonides (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941); idem, ed., Essays on Maimonides: An Octocentennial Volume (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941); and idem, “The Historical Outlook of Maimonides,” in History and Jewish Historians: Essays and Addresses, ed. Arthur Hertzberg and Leon A. Feldman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1964), 109–63. 18 Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 457.

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open the way for a truer understanding of the Jewish past.”19 Baron, the first professor to hold a chair in Jewish history outside of the Land of Israel, proposed sharing the task of forging the new methods of the science of Judaism with “scholars attached to the Hebrew University,”20 at the time a brand-new institution with quite a small faculty. However, it seems that in his later writings, this theologically oriented vision of history had attenuated. Already in an essay originally printed in 1939, Baron notes his uneasiness with the ancient and medieval “theocratic view of history,” which had been reverberating in a variety of idealistic approaches to Jewish history in his own time.21 Let me turn now to Jewish history as understood by three major representatives of the modern scholarly study of Judaism active at the Hebrew University: the historian’s historian Yitzhak F. Baer (1888–1980), the philosopher and theologian Martin Buber (1878–1965), and the eminent scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem (1897–1982). All of them, at least in the instances I shall cite below, conceived of Jewish history as an overarching narrative oscillating between exile and redemption. This dyad constitutes one of the central ways in which Jews understood their experience, but it, too, evinces a strong historiosophical valence. I begin by exploring the views of Baer,22 perhaps the most important Jewish historian at the Hebrew University from the time of its inception: Our history is the evolutionary process of a great power, and it is necessary to define and demonstrate the nature of this evolution even in those places and those ranks where this power, as seen from the outside, only continues to scatter and degenerates to a state of extreme baseness. We, who consider ourselves to be part of, and agents for, this wondrous and occult power [hakoaḥ ha-nifla ṿe-ha-satum ha-zeh]—we cannot escape such a recognition. . . . 19 Ibid., 458. 20 Ibid. 21 Idem, “Emphases in Jewish History,” in History and Jewish Historians, 76–77. The essay originally appeared in Jewish Social Studies 1, no. 1 (1939): 15–38. 22 On the historical thought of Baer, see, for example, Myers, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past, passim; Israel J. Yuval, “Yitzhak Baer and the Search for Authentic Judaism,” in The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians, ed. David N. Myers and David B. Ruderman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 77–87; and David Nirenberg, “The Rhineland Massacres of Jews in the First Crusade: Memories Medieval and Modern,” in Medieval Concepts of the Past: Ritual, Memory, Historiography, ed. Gerd Althoff, Johannes Fried, and Patrick J. Geary (Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute; Cambridge University Press, 2002), 279–309.

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Rather, through historical criticism, we penetrate and fathom the secret behind the occurrence [sod ha-haṿayah] of historical phenomena, which are similar to people who develop according to their own laws,23 which actually emerge from the depths of their souls.24

I wonder to what extent the “great power” mentioned in this passage is to be identified with the “power” that appears elsewhere in Baer’s oeuvre. At the end of his book Galut (Exile), he describes modern Jews returning home to the Land of Israel as having to come to grips with the “ancient Jewish consciousness of history.”25 What this ancient consciousness connotes is explicated, though in a veiled way, in the passage that follows immediately after the above statement: For us, perhaps, the final consequence of modern causal historical thinking coincides with the final consequence of the old Jewish conception of history, which comes to us from no alien tradition but has grown out of our own essential being: “Our eyes saw it, and no stranger’s; our ears heard it, and no others’.” If we today can read each coming day’s events in ancient and dusty chronological tables, as though history were the ceaseless unrolling of a process proclaimed once and for all in the Bible, then every Jew in every part of the Diaspora may recognize that there is a power that lifts the Jewish people out of the realm of all causal history.26

The quotation “Our eyes saw it, and no stranger’s; our ears heard it, and no others’” is not taken from a biblical verse but from a short passage found in Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot yesode ha-Torah 8:1, in which he describes the nature of the Sinaitic revelation. Thus, the “power” of which he speaks here, and perhaps also in the previous passage, must be the God 23 The particularistic stance expressed here is quite obvious and is reinforced by many other statements espousing an organic view of Jewish communities and their history. See Yuval, “Yitzhak Baer and the Search for Authentic Judaism.” 24 Yitzhak F. Baer, “Le-berur ha-matsav shel ha-limmudim ha-hisṭoriyyim etslenu,” in Meḥḳarim u-massot be-toledot am Yiśraʼel, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Israeli Historical Society, 1985), 16. The article originally appeared in Sefer Magnes: ḳovets meḥḳarim me-et anshe ha-universiṭah ha-ivrit, ed. J. N. Epstein et al. (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1938), 31–38. 25 Idem, Galut, trans. Robert Warshow (New York: Schocken Books, 1947), 119. The book was originally written in 1936. 26 Ibid., 119–20 (emphasis in the original). For an understanding of Baer’s thought as centered on exile and redemption, see Jacob Neusner’s introduction to Galut. For a different reading emphasizing the interaction between the Jews and their environment, cf. Yuval, “Yitzhak Baer and the Search for Authentic Judaism,” 78.

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of Israel. The history of the Jews differs, according Baer, from that of other peoples.27 The assumption that every Jew everywhere recognizes the intervention of the Divine is some form of Leibnizian monadology. This is a metaphysic of the national collective that is, to put it mildly, quite exaggerated. The return of the Jews to the Land of Israel in modern times is depicted as the recovery of the Mosaic revelation that had been lost during the exile. The causality implicit here is not due to an immanent view of history but (as I understand the text) to the intervention of the Divine in the form of a revelation.28 In staking out such a position, Baer relies, quite explicitly, on a mystical Jewish thinker of the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries, Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague (Maharal; 1520–1609).29 This figure had, no doubt, a strong propensity for discussing the cosmic order in terms of exile and redemption, and he is an appropriate source for Baer, as for many other thinkers in modern Israel. Elsewhere in his monograph, Baer describes Jewish history explicitly as “a process of exile and redemption.”30 In any case, it seems that the more neutral expressions regarding “power” refer simply to God intervening in history, namely, in Jewish history, as we learn from another discussion in the same book.31 This tendency to conceive of Jewish history in terms of exile—the very title of Baer’s book, Galut—and redemption is evident not only in the writings of this historian, which can be attributed to a professional distortion, but also in the thought of eminent scholars of Jewish religion and mysticism. Take, for example, the way in which Martin Buber, the most successful exponent of Jewish mysticism in early-twentieth-century Europe, portrays Judaism in his synthetic study of Hasidism: A unique event in world history is the phenomenon which appeared to us in the history of Judaism. The whole of the historical experience of a nation is there concentrated in the one fateful problem of exile and redemption. Out of this common experience of exile and redemption the nation was born. On the memory of this historical event, which the spiritual leaders of Israel 27 See the Epilogue added ten years after the original publication of the book, p. 122. 28 For the expectation that the return of the Jews to the Land of Israel would bring about some sort of revelatory experience, see also Gershom Scholem, On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time & Other Essays, ed. Avraham Shapira, trans. Jonathan Chipman (Philadelphia; Jerusalem: The Jewish Publication Society, 1997), 6–24. 29 Baer, Galut, 118. 30 Ibid., 20. 31 Ibid., 20–21.

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had declared time and again to be the work of God with the nation and a covenant between the nation and God, is founded the connection between the past and the future which is living in the nation’s consciousness in a way which is not to be found in any other nation.32

Buber identifies the uniqueness of Judaism in what characterizes it most: exile and redemption. I assume that the “redemption” mentioned here refers to the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, while “exile” connotes the much later experiences of Diaspora Jewry. This understanding underestimates the importance of rituals (performed for millennia) in defining the experience and the nature of the Jewish people. Buber takes for granted the biblical story of the redemption from Egypt as history, as an event experienced by the entire nation. Today, some historians doubt the historicity of this event. In my view, exile is neither a unified nor a homogenous experience, an issue to which I return later in this paper. Let me turn to another major scholar of Jewish mysticism and his attitude toward the historical aspects of Judaism. According to Gershom Scholem: The historical experience of the Jewish people merged indistinguishably with the mystical vision of a world in which the holy was locked in desperate struggle with the satanic. Everywhere and at every hour the simple and yet so infinitely profound fact of exile provided ground enough for lamentation, atonement, and asceticism.33

The affinities between this statement and Buber’s are quite evident. Both he and Buber resort to the term “historical experience,” and both see this experience in terms of the poles of exile and redemption. Scholem, however, assumes that historical experience radiated into and informed the kabbalists’ understanding of reality. In a different statement that may serve as an epitome of the lachrymose conception of Jewish history, we read that “[i]n all the expanse of creation

32 Martin Buber, The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, ed. and trans. Maurice Friedman (New York: Horizon Press, 1960), 202. 33 Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Schocken Books, 1970), 146. For a more expansive discussion of Scholem’s historiosophy, see Moshe Idel, “Academic Studies of Kabbalah in Israel: 1923–1998. A Short Survey,” Studia Judaica 8 (1999): 102–11.

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there is imperfection, flaw, Galut”;34 or, in even sharper terms, that “[a]ll that befalls in the world is only an expression of this primal and fundamental Galut.”35 This transformation of historical experience into a mystical vision of reality took place through a symbolic understanding of that reality: Scholars were perplexed and embarrassed by this world [of Kabbalah], which, instead of offering clear and simple concepts that could be developed, presented symbols of a very special kind, in which the spiritual experience of the mystics was almost inextricably intertwined with the historical experience of the Jewish people. It is this interweaving of two realms, which in most other religious mysticisms have remained separate, that gave the Kabbalah its specific imprint.36

The idea that a secret dimension to history may be detected through close inspection of events is also expressed in an essay composed in 1944 in which Scholem recommended, akin to Baer some years earlier, the praxis of “historical criticism” in an effort to discover the secrets of history: “Through its fruitful dialectic, through a radical breakthrough to its turning point on its way, which are the points of construction, historical criticism henceforth also serves as a productive decoding of the secret writing of the past, of the great symbols of our life within history.”37 Later on in the same essay, Scholem resorts once again to the imagery of decoding a secret language in describing academic research as he envisions it: “We went to the details: did we indeed develop them and resolve them, creating new combinations and reading their secret language?”38 The historian is called upon to act much as a kabbalist does: to break through, to create new combinations, and to decode a secret language. Methodologically speaking, Scholem recommended, like Baer, a synthesis between historical criticism and phenomenology: “A proper understanding of [the symbols] requires both a ‘phenomenological’ aptitude for seeing things as a whole and a gift of historical analysis.”39 Historical details are reflected, therefore, in a 34 Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 46. 35 Ibid., 45. 36 Idem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, 2. 37 Idem, On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism, 67; see also idem, Devarim be-gaṿ: pirḳe morashah u-teḥiyyah (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1982), 399. 38 Idem, On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism, 69. 39 Idem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, 3.

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secret language, which Scholem describes above as consisting of historical symbols. Again, in the same context, the intensification of the symbolic language is predicated upon the severity of the historical calamity: “The more sordid, pitiful, and cruel the fragment of historical reality allotted to the Jew amid the storms of exile, the deeper and more precise the symbolic meaning it assumed, and the more radiant became the Messianic hope which burst through it and transfigured it.”40 Consequently, a deep continuity between the historical experience of the Jews and their kabbalistic symbolism, or at least a part of it, is assumed to be crucial for the understanding of this branch of Jewish mysticism. The tears of a lachrymose history crystallize into kabbalistic symbols, which serve as lenses through which Jewish history gains its meaning. The mystic’s consciousness becomes a mysterious alembic for this alchemical transformation, as well as the agent that transmits, symbolically, the “meaning of history” of his generation. The historian is called upon by Scholem to decipher the meaning of these symbol-tears, which serve as a crystal ball for understanding the past. Moreover, according to another of his statements, difficult historical experiences can help the historian to understand earlier generations and their symbols. Speaking of his own generation, at the end of World War II, he wrote: “In a generation that has witnessed a terrible crisis in Jewish history, the ideas of these medieval Jewish esoterics no longer seem so strange. We see with other eyes, and the obscure symbols strike us as worth clarifying.”41 What, then, had recent history taught Scholem that earlier Jewish historians did not know? Addressing what he called the “original sin” of the nineteenth-century historians belonging to the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, he wrote: The removal of the pointedly irrational and of demonic enthusiasms from Jewish history, through an exaggerated emphasis upon the theological and the spiritual. This is the fundamental, original sin which outweighs all others. The frightening giant, our history, is called upon to render an accounting of itself—and this great creature, filled with explosive power, compounded of vitality, wickedness, and perfection, becomes limited and reduced in stature, 40 Ibid., 2. 41 Ibid., 2–3. See also idem, On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism, 70–71. Cf. also the very same idea expressed by Isaiah Tishby, Netive emunah u-minut: massot u-meḥḳarim be-sifrut ha-ḳabbalah ṿe-ha-shabbetaʼut (Ramat Gan: Massada, 1964), 22, quite surprisingly without quoting his teacher’s earlier formulations.

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and declares itself to be naught.42 The demonic giant is no more than an innocent fool. . . .43

I assume that the sudden appearance of the demonic imagery reflects the events that loomed so conspicuously in contemporary history and informed Scholem’s vision of the Jewish past. Therefore, concepts like those found in the above passages culled from the writings of Frankel, Baron, and Baer, who resorted, respectively, to terms like “divine,” “divine presence,” “ultimate power,” or “great power”—all reflecting a positive spiritual force that permeates history—are regarded by Scholem as being too “theological and spiritual.” From a historical perspective, they constitute for him an “original sin.” I agree with his view.44 What the nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians did not know, Scholem implies, was Kabbalah, with its worlds of demons. Properly decoded, these demonic realms could help in understanding the atrocities of the Holocaust. In other words, for Scholem, ancient and medieval history is encoded in the symbols of the kabbalistic systems, and it is possible to understand modern history better through study of kabbalistic literature. However, to turn to Scholem’s own proposal, is there in fact a categorical difference between a divine or ultimate “power,” on the one hand, and a “great creature,” on the other? Does not Scholem’s resorting to a “demonic giant,” rather than to divine powers, owe much (in my opinion, too much) to a theological orientation? Instead of the Divine revealing itself in history per Frankel, a demonic giant now personifies history. I can easily understand Scholem’s turn to a history governed by a demonic power against the backdrop of the Holocaust. But let us not ignore the fact that theological elements are latent in his formulations as well. No doubt, we see here a transformation of Walter Benjamin’s (1892–1940) angel of history, with its frightening dimension.45 The substitution of God, or the shekhinah (divine 42 As a result of the nineteenth-century scholars. 43 Scholem, On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism, 63 (emphasis in the original); idem, Devarim be-gaṿ, 396. I have corrected the English translation slightly. See also David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 3–4. 44 One might ask, if this was such a fatal flaw, why not also mention by name Baron, Buber, and Baer, people with whom Scholem was well acquainted? After all, the nineteenthcentury conceptions of Jewish history resembled views found in the writings of Scholem’s contemporaries and colleagues. 45 See Moshe Idel, Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 81–108.

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presence), with a smaller hypostasis—an angel or a demon—is quite interesting, and this phenomenon continues to reverberate in the titles of books written in the last decades, like Necessary Angels or The Angel of History,46 which substitute the interwar imaginaire of angels with the very thinkers who imagined those “historical” hypostases: Benjamin and Scholem. More perplexing in this context is the attribution to Scholem of a view that allowed Joseph Dan to include the words “the mystical dimension of Jewish history” in the title of his book about Scholem.47 Dan has aptly summarized Scholem’s attitude to Jewish history as follows: “[Scholem] believed that Jewish history was to be understood by events within Judaism, rather than by historical developments outside of it.”48 If the events of Jewish history are to be understood mainly in terms of inner developments, do these developments or their peculiar structure constitute a “mystical dimension”? Given the deep impact on some important processes in premodern and modern Judaism that Scholem attributed to Jewish mysticism, this affinity between history and mystical meaning may in fact be helpful for understanding Scholem. If Dan is right, then there is no significant difference between Scholem’s and his predecessors’ assumptions that divine or mystical factors intervene in Jewish history. But even if he is wrong about this specific point, it is indisputable that, in Scholem’s academic world, Jewish history is understood as possessing or expressing a “mystical dimension.” Secular as many of the scholars who belonged to this school of thought were, their conception of history and reality nevertheless evinced vestiges of religious viewpoints.49 “Historical criticism” designates the type of research Scholem described as characteristic of the school of scholarship he had established in Jerusalem.50 Unlike Baer, who apparently used the term “secret” to 46 Robert Alter, Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1991); Stéphane Mosès, The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem, trans. Barbara Harshav (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). 47 Joseph Dan, Gershom Scholem and the Mystical Dimension of Jewish History (New York and London: New York University Press, 1987). 48 Ibid., 325–26. As this statement is the final sentence of the book, I assume that here Dan offers what he believes to be the most comprehensive formulation of Scholem’s approach. 49 See Moshe Idel, “On the Theologization of Kabbalah in Modern Scholarship,” in Religious Apologetics—Philosophical Argumentation, ed. Yossef Schwartz and Volkhard Krech (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 123–74. 50 See Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (Jerusalem: Keter, 1974), 203.

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mean “hidden,” Scholem understood it much more concretely. Secrets are explicitly described, in his aforementioned postwar studies, as “great symbols of our life within history,” and the main task of the historian is that of “productive decoding.” Thus, the understanding or decoding of the symbols is tantamount to historical reconstruction of the past. The reverberation of Scholem’s view on withdrawal and exile is discernible, for example, in Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson’s (1914–1977) comprehensive study of Jewish history.51 I have attempted to identify above what I call “the historical Jews.” A person who adopts a historical approach to Judaism is no less Jewish or less authentic than one who adopts any other approach to Judaism. The “historical Jew” takes part in a process of assimilation into his environment, just as the medieval “intellectual Jew” incorporated aspects of the Muslim and Christian concerns with philosophy and theology in the Middle Ages. Graetz and Yerushalmi were, in my opinion, no less Jewish than any other expositors of Judaism. Maimonides’s scholarship provoked a great deal of criticism due to some of its revolutionary qualities, and yet, he nevertheless became part and parcel of many forms of Judaism. Given the assumption with which I work that “tradition” is a multifaceted concept—and, in fact, we should really speak of a constellation of traditions that are accumulative, flexible, and developing—“historical Judaism” may, should, or must become part of that constellation. This depends not on an abstract Jewish tradition but on the place that the tradents of historical Judaism will occupy in the general structure of the Jewish nation. There can be little doubt that the emergence of the historical Jew is one of the last great Jewish cultural mutations. Scholem’s interesting remark that in his classes at the Hebrew University he taught not reason but history is illuminating.52 His shift from Enlightenment and Romantic ideas to historical modernism expresses, in the words of Reinhold Niebuhr, “not so much confidence in reason as faith in history. The conception of a redemptive history informs the most diverse forms of modern culture.”53 This understanding of the connection between faith and history might 51 See Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, ed., A History of the Jewish People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 697. 52 Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 46. 53 See Reinhold Niebuhr, Faith and History: A Comparison of Christian and Modern Views of History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), 3 (emphasis mine); see also p. 203.

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have reverberated in Yerushalmi’s view that history is “the faith of fallen Jews.”54 In Israel, many Zionist thinkers would say that the new Jews are those who not only believe in, but also feel that they make, history. This is no doubt true with respect to the Jews of the last two generations, more so than for any other nation in modern times, and perhaps ever. We have here an example of what Pierre Nora called an “acceleration of history,”55 which in turn caused an acceleration in the research of history. As part of this acceleration, Jewish history has become a new form of identity in the Israeli academy, where new topics have been engaged. Especially noteworthy in this connection are departments dedicated to exploring the archaeology or history of the Land of Israel at some Israeli universities, as well as academic journals, such as Cathedra and Shalem, established in order to foster research in those domains.56 Moreover, the study of messianism, the importance of which was previously underestimated by non-Zionist scholars, has flourished in several subfields of Jewish studies. In a way, some Jewish historians—be they the “old” or the “new” Jewish historians—became not only observers of events in the past who sought to understand their details and greater meaning, but also participants in historical processes that influenced their professional approach. This burgeoning interest in the nature of redemption was evident both before and after the establishment of the State of Israel, as we read in a rather revealing passage penned by Scholem: “Historical research on the topic of messianism is itself new. Today, we are all wise, we all understand [this topic], we all read Zion, we all read books on messianic movements. . . .”57 Zion is the most important academic journal of Jewish history in Israel, and both Baer and Scholem contributed several articles to it. Whether many studies of messianism have been published in this journal is a good question. However, it is clear from the above that this is the topic Scholem testifies that “we”—the circle of his acquaintances—expected to find in the journal. 54 Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 86. 55 See the introduction to Pierre Nora, Les lieux de mémoire, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), xvii. 56 See Moshe Idel, “Messianic Scholars:  On Early Israeli Scholarship, Politics and Messianism,” Modern Judaism 32, no. 1 (2012): 22–53. 57 Gershom Scholem, Od davar: pirḳe morashah u-teḥiyyah (2), ed. Avraham Shapira (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1989), 240. See also another, quite open acknowledgement of the affinities between the national renascence and the concerns with history in Scholem’s foreword to The Messianic Idea, viii.

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This historicized understanding of Judaism has been projected onto a tradition that was much less concerned with, though surely operated within, history. Now, Judaism is no longer seen as a thoroughly ethical or rational religious system, as in the nineteenth century, but more as a religious culture defined by its history. The modern addiction to history has been further projected onto the self-understanding of traditional figures who were, in my opinion, quite indifferent to this type of thought. Maimonides’s remarks on history, in his commentary to mSanhedrin 10:1, as nothing more than parables articulate a Platonic understanding of events on the terrestrial level. A kabbalist like Abraham Abulafia (1240–1291) was concerned with more cyclical positions, which I call mesochronoi,58 or with what he called atemporal experiences,59 while many of his fellow kabbalists were more interested in the ritual microchronoi and cosmic macrochronoi.60 Thus, a modern historical imagination, understanding both exile and redemption in terms of either an immanent or transcendent causality, has presented itself as reflecting a much earlier interest, as seen above in the writings of Baer, Buber, and Scholem. What is most interesting is the fact that, following certain traditional understandings, some scholars have at times conceived of the dyad of exile and redemption as having a teleological propensity, and this is especially prominent in Baer’s Galut. Those two concepts were, however, part and parcel of a ritualistic understanding of religion, which assumed a strong transcendental dimension. Thus, we can see that the modern enterprise of historical scholarship at times seeks to assert its premodern roots in ways that complicate, it appears, the brightline distinction between history and faith.

The Decline of the Historical Jew The major exponents of Judaism in the generation following Baron, Baer, Buber, and Scholem were not historians, nor did they describe Judaism historically. This was manifestly the case insofar as such diverse thinkers as Emmanuel Levinas, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Joseph B. Soloveitchik, David Hartman, Harold Bloom, and George Steiner were concerned. I shall now 58 See Moshe Idel, Messianic Mystics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 79–82. 59 See idem, “‘Higher Than Time’: Observations on Some Concepts of Time in Kabbalah and Hasidism,” in Time and Eternity in Jewish Mysticism: That Which Is Before and That Which Is After, ed. Brian Ogren (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2015), 185–97. 60 Idem, “Some Concepts of Time and History in Kabbalah.”

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turn my attention to the ways in which historians and, to some extent, scholars like Buber placed an emphasis on what I see as a certain type of historiosophy. The crisis of history in recent times has relegated the field to a much more modest role than it had in previous decades. Today, other disciplines have drawn the attention of scholars, and those new academic lenses affect the ways in which Judaism is perceived. Specifically, Judaism is often viewed today much more in cultural, rather than ritualistic, theological, or historical terms. The ascent of hermeneutics in general turned the scholarly world’s attention to Jewish hermeneutics in particular. In this case, the situation is more complex: some of the leaders of this trend were Jews, like Jacques Derrida, Harold Bloom, George Steiner, Geoffrey Hartman, and even Clifford Geertz. While early- and mid-twentieth-century figures like Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and Claude LéviStrauss were also Jews, this type of trend is totally absent from their analyses of culture. This is less true of more recent descriptions of culture, however. The term “interpretation” plays quite an important role in the way in which culture is portrayed in more recent times. It is not only part of the title of Geertz’s most famous book, Interpretation of Culture, but is also featured in the title of Harold Bloom’s long series “Modern Critical Interpretation.” Likewise, we saw above the midrashic nature of Baron’s understanding of history. Derrida’s entire philosophical project was based upon the strict necessity of interpretation. The more recent emphasis on textual interpretation is, however, quite different from that in Rabbinic culture. In the modern version, Jewish non-textual rituals, like the performance of the commandments, disappear as the necessary corollary or main aim of study, on the one hand, while the scope of the relevant texts has been widened enormously to encompass any text, on the other hand. However, the emergence of the “cultural Jew” has not totally dislocated the “historical Jew,” just as the emergence of the “intellectual Jew” did not dislocate the “ritualistic Jew.” The various types of Judaism have increased over time, without dislocating—at least, not entirely, and sometimes not even significantly—the earlier types, and so a multilayered and variegated type of religion has emerged. The “historical Jew” is, therefore, a kind of identity ascending slowly and, I would say, quite hesitantly, as part of a rather precise and more comprehensive emphasis on history, and is dependent upon the vicissitudes of history related to the majority culture. With the more recent decline

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of history in the majority culture, the emphasis on history would tend to weaken in the Jewish context as well. No special historical genes are inherent in Jewish culture, certainly no more so than interpretive or ritualistic ones. The prominence of the role of history for the self-understanding of modern Jews in general, and of Jews in Israel in particular, is part of a process of staking out a place in a world in which the concept of God has been evacuated and the Jewish rituals emptied of vibrant meaning. The phrase “faith in history” only reflects the religious nature inherent in the adherence to history. Thus, a deep attachment to the history of the Jews may create another type of identity, which is based upon some form of knowledge of what some scholars wrote about events that are related to Jews in the past. However, unlike the ritualistic or the philosophical Jew, who dealt with some forms of ideals, performed or contemplated, the historical one has to believe in the formative role of a sequence of events that are rather tragic and hardly edifying. This is the reason it is more difficult to integrate this sort of history—even if we avoid the pitfalls of what has been designated “lachrymose history”—into a meaningful project for larger audiences. Even if one were to steer clear of the lachrymose emphasis on the negativity of exile alone, it would not make sense to avoid confronting the concrete tragic events that took place so many times throughout Jewish history. Unlike the unifying role played by history in the emergence of European forms of nationalism, in Judaism the emergence of historical writings is conceived first as a unification with, and then as a rupture from, the religious traditions of the Jewish nation. Though new understandings have been proposed for some basically Westernized groups within Judaism—in Germany and then the United States, on the one hand, and in Israel, on the other hand—the new sense of identity based on an acquaintance with Jewish history understood in immanent terms has been seen as dislocating the traditional common denominators of faith and ritual. Yerushalmi’s description of the belief in history as “the faith of fallen Jews” may be, at least to a certain extent, an exaggeration. I cannot dispute his own feeling that the career of a Jewish historian may represent a rupture, perhaps a tragic one, with traditional Judaism. But, if I am correct in the above, this rupture is not only one with the traditional faith, but also with the new versions of historia sacra put forward by other Jewish historians, including Yerushalmi’s own teacher Salo W. Baron. The impact of historicism need not induce some form of despair as to the possibility of belief in the traditional values, as David N. Myers mentions at the end of

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Resisting History.61 The opposition between history and belief presupposes some form of religiosity that alone is authentic and, at the same time, attributes to historical research an anti-religious effect. I would prefer a vision of a complex tradition as a possible way of solving what may be conceived of as a state of fallen-ness or despair. I would rather claim that despite the rupture related to the ascent of history, there are nevertheless moments of continuity, which may shed some light upon the existence of a Jewish historical modus. The question may also be asked from another angle: if Maimonides was able to propose a strong synthesis between Rabbinic Judaism and Greek philosophy that was subsequently accepted as one of the most orthodox Jewish theologies—and thereby initiated an intellectualistic reform, or what has been called a Jewish philosophy, within Judaism—why should not a historiography which assumes a spiritual power active in Jewish history become part of Jewish religion? If the Jews were the fathers of meaning in history, as Yerushalmi put it, why should the religious historian, who searches for meaning in history as related to divine or demonic intervention in human affairs, not be conceived of as continuing a broader Jewish religious enterprise? Are not some forms of medieval and modern philosophy, on the one hand, and modern history, on the other, sorts of culture with which Jews were confronted, some of which they rejected while accepting others by means of synthesis or adaptation?62 Is history, even when understood in immanent terms, so essentially alien to all possible forms of traditional Judaism that it cannot generate a new version of this religion that is less controversial than Maimonides’s philosophical reform was in the Middle Ages? Was the scandal that emerged after the publication of Azariah de’ Rossi’s (1511–1578) historical book Me’or enayim63 greater than that created by the dissemination of Maimonides’s philosophical or even 61 Myers, Resisting History, 172. I wonder to what extent the sense of rupture and despair found in the writings of the two aforementioned American Jewish historians is related to the American scene in which they operated, while the more optimistic view of Israeli academics like Baer and Scholem is related to their having adopted a Zionist approach to history as a sort of redemption. Baron, a European Jew, was more optimistic than his academic descendants in America. Or is it a matter of pre-Holocaust optimism versus post-Holocaust pessimism? To judge by the writings of many interwar Jewish authors, especially those of Franz Kafka, this seems to be a rather questionable distinction. On the interwar “desolates,” see Idel, Old Worlds, New Mirrors, 52–82. 62 See Schorsch, From Text to Context, 172. 63 See Joanna Weinberg’s introduction to Azariah de’ Rossi, The Light of the Eyes, trans. Joanna Weinberg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), xvii, xlii–xliv.

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The Ascent and Decline of the “Historical Jew”    MOSHE IDEL

halakhic writings? The answer to this question is quite clear: the intellectual reform of the “Great Eagle” (Maimonides) provoked a much sharper, fierier, and more prolonged debate than did the famous opus of the Italian Jewish historian. After all, some of the greatest Jewish historians, including Baron, Yerushalmi, David B. Ruderman, and Reuven Bonfil, have themselves been rabbis. Thus, we may describe a smoother transition between medieval religious thinkers, who held a transcendent view of history, and the first generations of modern Jewish historians, who were said to hold a decidedly modern view of rupture and despair. It seems that this issue has come to the fore only recently, when the basic training of historians has tended to take place much more in universities than in religious seminaries. As the reader may have discerned, I am among those scholars who do not assume that Jews had too strong a historical sense or interest in immanent explanations. However, I also do not see the vast and variegated literatures and forms of experiences collectively known as Judaism as being so monolithic and static that they cannot change and open up, at least for a while, to absorbing a wider historical understanding as part of a pluralistic type of Jewish tradition. Or, to borrow one of Baron’s formulations: “The Jewish religion has little to lose and much to gain from a thorough knowledge of the past. . . . In their subconscious, as well as conscious, historical feeling, modern Jews have much in common, both with one another and with their ancestors.”64 The assumption of a mysterious sense of union between the various generations of Jews that may be discerned by fathoming the secrets of their history is quite prominent and is reinforced by another quotation from Baron adduced above. Thus, while in the generation shaped by the interwar experience—Baron was an immigrant from Galicia, Poland—the history of the Jews is still understood as unifying, in the writings of his postwar followers in America it is conceived as corrosive. I would argue that much more has been written about the history of the Jews in America—which, at this point, is a short blip in the long series of Jewish diasporas—than about any other major chapter in Jewish history. This may be just another interesting effort to create a sense of local identity by resorting to the tools of history. In order to avoid any misunderstanding, let me clarify that I do not dispute the importance of historical tools. They are quite helpful and 64 Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 459.

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necessary insofar as understanding some specific aspects of culture and of Judaism (including Kabbalah) are concerned. However, historical understanding should not, in my opinion, involve an apotheosis of history, as reflected in historical material under scrutiny, if this material does not deal with explicit historical topics. Neither am I overly skeptical about the possible unifying, spiritual elements found in the grand schemes of transcendent history. Historians may create myths just as kabbalists and homilists do. I had occasion to identify an instance in which Graetz invented a meeting between Abraham Abulafia and the pope, even reporting what the former supposedly said to the latter.65 In more recent times, some historians have created a grand new myth, which can be summarized by the slogan-turned-title-of-a-book, “The Ways That Never Parted,”66 and which may give the (false) impression that strong interactions between Judaism and Christianity continued over centuries. The post-Holocaust situation has generated scholarly attempts to reread the past in such a manner that the Holocaust turns out to have been a pure historical accident. What concerns me is the resort to historical tools in order to frame modes of thought and experience that were not historically based. This is an anachronistic exercise that minimizes the differences in cultural norms and habits among Jews in order to highlight imaginary or real interactions that explain rather marginal aspects of more comprehensive phenomena. People tend to live much more in their imagination and in routine (traditionally shaped by halakhah), which are inertial, than in concrete historical situations. Halakhah has been developed by a flowering literature intended to describe ideal behavior in detail. Though this legalistic literature is also subject to ongoing changes, the issue, in my opinion, is: what is dominant—its static nature or its dynamism? Informed by the structure of halakhic behavior, on the one hand, and by a speculative and experiential understanding of concepts that was imported from ancient and late antique modes of thought, on the other, most medieval and premodern Jewish thinkers reinterpreted exile and redemption as referring to ideals

65 See Moshe Idel, “Avraham Abulafyah ṿe-ha-appifyor—mashma‘uto ṿe-gilgulaṿ shel nissayon she-nikhshal,” AJS Review 7/8 (1982/1983): 1–17. 66 See, for example, Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, eds., The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003).

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differing drastically from the political-historical understanding we today attribute to these two themes. However, new vectors operating in the creation of identity in the last generation are much less historically oriented. The obfuscation of the importance of the past for shaping new identities and the novel emphasis on the individual operating in the present are evident in New Age modes of thought, and they constitute powerful developments. The decline in the numbers of students in departments of Jewish history, and of history in general, in comparison with other university departments, may indicate something about the direction of the tide of interest in the younger generation. At least when considering the sharp rise in the numbers of students in my department at the Hebrew University, Jewish thought, a strong shift seems to be taking place. Can meaning in history be extracted from immanent-oriented research? Does history have a mystical—either theological or teleological—dimension that can endow a given religion with a specific spiritual cargo? These are questions to which I am strongly inclined to offer a negative answer.67

67 On the opposition between the two approaches, see Benson Saler, Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent Natives, and Unbounded Categories (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000). For a different type of association—between the historical approach and particularism, on the one hand, and structuralism and universalism, on the other—see the polemic between Jean-Paul Sartre and Claude LéviStrauss, especially the way in which the latter portrays the former as the historian of the tribe: Lionel Abel, “Sartre vs. Lévi-Strauss,” in Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Anthropologist as Hero, ed. Eugene Nelson Hayes and Tanya Hayes (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 1970), 235–45.

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Elliot N. Dorff, American Jewish University

Divine Command Theory in Jewish Law and Ethics

I have been blessed to know Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller since he first came to UCLA. In over four decades, I have learned much from him, I admire what he managed to accomplish at UCLA Hillel, and I truly enjoy his company. Any contact with him is full of Torah in the widest sense of the word, deep commitment to the Jewish people, and wonderful humor. How could you ask for more? In deciding what to write in his honor, I chose a topic that combines two aspects of his work: interfaith relations and Jewish law. One of the issues that has bothered me from my years of growing up in Milwaukee was that my many Christian friends always thought of Judaism as the religion of law and justice, while Christianity was the more enlightened and humane religion of love and mercy. That dictum was repeated in a “Great Books” course taught by one of my favorite college professors, whose Protestant background and perceptions could not be shaken, despite the many passages to the contrary in both the Old and New Testaments that I showed him. So this is not just a childhood mistake. This essay, then, is a response to that common misconception among Christians as to the nature of Jewish law. Unfortunately, many Jews, too—primarily among the Orthodox, but definitely not Rabbi Seidler-Feller—think that Judaism is simply a system of law enforced by God, and I will argue that that is equally false. In this essay, then, I intend to “swim against the current” of mainstream Christian thought and also that of much of Orthodox Jewish thought, although in very different ways.

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Divine Command Theory in Jewish Law and Ethics    ELLIOT N. DORFF

The Role of Divine Commands in Judaism In some ways, it is obvious not only that Judaism believes that God makes demands of the Jewish people, but also that those divine commands are embedded primarily, if not exclusively, in Jewish law. After all, in the Torah, the constitutional document of Judaism, God commands, by traditional count, 613 commandments, consisting of 248 positive commandments, instructing what must be done, and 365 negative commandments, instructing what must not be done (bMakkot 23b; Genesis Rabbah 24:5; Exodus Rabbah 32:1, 33:7; among others). However, Deut. 17:8–13 says that whenever one has a question of law, one must go to the judges of his or her generation to answer that question and then one must obey what they say. Thus, Judaism, while based on the Torah, is really more accurately identified with the way the Torah has been interpreted, applied, and amplified in both thought and practice by the Rabbinic tradition; just as Christianity, while grounded in Christian Scriptures, is actually based on how Christian authorities through the ages and in their various denominations have done the same with their Scriptures. In that sense, Judaism and Christianity—and Islam, too—are all traditions based on foundational scriptures. In all three cases, individual adherents filter what their traditions and leaders say in deciding what they themselves will do, with more latitude for individual conscience given in some denominations and cultural settings of these faiths than in others. Still, in all subgroups the very meaning of what the religion asserts has been shaped by its leaders’ definition of what constitutes its scriptures in the first place and by their interpretations and applications of those scriptures throughout the ages. As a result, divine law in Judaism includes not only the 613 commandments of the Torah, but also all of the directives that the rabbis of the last 2,500 years have added in interpreting those commandments. These precepts cover not only ritual and family law, which moderns living in Western countries commonly associate with “religion,” but also civil and criminal law, together with the court procedures to adjudicate crimes or civil disputes. Christians are used to Paul’s claim that, with the exception of the commandments that Jesus himself mentions—usually understood to be the Decalogue, the commandments to love God and one’s neighbor, and some sexual norms—the advent of Jesus freed humanity from all the other

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commandments so that everyone could live by the Spirit (Rom. 7–11). The Jewish tradition, however, maintains that all of the commandments of the Torah and of its rabbinic interpreters in each generation are binding on Jews. Thus, in Judaism—and in Islam, too—God’s commands take a legal form, while Paul’s writings set Christianity on a different trajectory. Furthermore, until the beginning of the twentieth century, Jewish law governed the majority of the world’s Jews. That is because until then the majority of the world’s Jews did not live in countries under the influence of the Enlightenment, where they had the rights of full citizens but were also required to obey the state’s laws and use the state’s courts to adjudicate their disputes. Most Jews lived instead under regimes that treated them as second-class residents, at best tolerated and often persecuted, but that allowed them to govern themselves as long as they paid taxes and (in some cases) provided men for the army. So until relatively recently in Jewish history, Jewish law was a full-service legal system for most of the world’s Jews, enforced by Jewish officials and courts as well as by God. Thus, it would seem that Judaism operates entirely through legal norms, where the primary, if not exclusive, tone is demand and enforcement. God demands and Jews had better obey—or else. That is certainly the theme of a number of passages in the Torah, including two complete chapters (Lev. 26 and Deut. 28) and the verses the Rabbis chose as the second paragraph of the Shema (Deut. 11:13–21), thus reminding observant Jews of this dynamic when the Shema is recited twice daily.

Law as an Expression of Love Several things must immediately be said, however, to give what I just claimed was “obvious” its proper nuances and explanations. The first is in response to the Christian understanding that I described above: Judaism is indeed a religion filled with laws and references to the consequences of disobeying those laws. Contrary to what the dichotomy between law and love suggests, however, Judaism sees God’s laws as His gift to the Jewish people, the gift of a loving parent Who provides wise and morally good laws to guide His children. Thus, Jewish daily liturgy in the paragraph just before the Shema in both the morning and evening services affirms and thanks God for His great and everlasting love for His people as evidenced by His giving them the commandments. The analogy to human parents and children will make this clear: parents who set no rules for their children are

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Divine Command Theory in Jewish Law and Ethics    ELLIOT N. DORFF

not loving; they are neglectful and maybe even self-centered, and they have abandoned their responsibilities to their children. In like manner, Judaism sees God’s commandments not as a harsh burden imposed by a nasty God, but rather as a gift given to the Jewish polity by a loving God Who is interested in their welfare. Thus, Judaism is a religion of law and love, or of love as manifested by law. Along the same lines, Judaism does indeed believe in justice. “Justice, justice shall you pursue” (Deut. 16:20) is a principle that rings through all of Judaism and, as a result, through all of Western civilization. That said, Judaism definitely does not lack the quality of mercy. The Rabbis even maintain that in order to create the world, God had to temper justice with mercy. The Rabbis interpret the Hebrew word E-lohim, translated “God,” to denote God’s justice, and they understand the four-letter name of God, translated “Lord,” to denote God’s mercy (Genesis Rabbah 33:3). Noting that Gen. 2:4 uses both when it says, “Such is the story of heaven and earth when they were created, when the Lord God made earth and heaven,” they comment: It may be likened to a king who had empty vessels. The king said: “If I put hot water into them, they will crack; if I put icy cold water into them, they will contract.” What did the king do? He mixed the hot with the cold, poured the mixture into the vessels, and they endured. Similarly, said the blessed Holy One: “If I create the world only with the attribute of mercy, sins will multiply beyond all bounds; if I create it only with the attribute of justice, how can the world last? Rather, behold, I will create the world with both attributes; would that it might endure!” [Genesis Rabbah 12:15].

Indeed, it was only because God’s quality of mercy prevailed at Creation that the human species was allowed to come into being: Rabbi Berechiah said: “When the blessed Holy One came to create the first human being, He foresaw that both righteous and wicked people would issue from him. He said: ‘If I create him, wicked people will issue from him, but if I do not create him, how can righteous people spring from him?’ What did the blessed Holy One do? He distanced the ways of the wicked from before Him, allied the attribute of mercy with Himself, and created the human being” [Genesis Rabbah 8:4].

So, contrary to what many Christians believe, Judaism is not solely a religion of law and justice; it is also a religion of love and mercy, and God’s

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commandments must be understood by balancing these attributes of God in Jewish interpretations and applications of the law.

Multiple Motivations to Obey the Law Second, the law is binding on Jews not only because God and human courts will punish them if they disobey it and will reward them if they obey it. The Torah certainly says that (see, for example, Lev. 26 and Deut. 28 for God’s enforcement; Ex. 21:12ff., Deut. 16:18–20, and Deut. 25:1–3 for human enforcement), but it also recognizes that reward and punishment cannot be the only motivations to lead people to obey a legal system, even if the system is authored and administered by God. After all, at Mount Sinai the Israelites were given the commandments—it is a theological dispute within Judaism as to whether God gave only the Decalogue or all of the laws in the Torah at that time—amid thunder, lightning, and earthquakes, and so if any group of people should have been impressed by God’s power to enforce His commandments, that generation of Israelites should have been. Yet, a mere forty days later they are worshiping the Golden Calf! It was thus clear to the authors of the Torah that reward and punishment alone would not suffice to motivate people to obey God’s commandments. Incidentally, the same is true for a human and clearly enforced legal system like American or Canadian law for, assuming that a police officer works eight hours a day, you would need three police officers for every citizen and then more police officers to enforce the law on the other police officers—if enforcement were the sole motive to obey the law. Enforcement clearly plays a role, especially in those areas of law where people are sorely tempted to disobey it since they do not see negative consequences, apart from punishment, for doing so (for example, speeding, taxes, and so on); but, as I shall argue below, in civil law, as in Jewish religious law, many other factors play a role as well, and if they were absent, the law would not be obeyed. To give an American Constitutional example of this, Prohibition, enshrined in the Eighteenth Amendment and therefore administered with the full enforcement faculties of the United States government, proved to be unenforceable in the face of its violation by members of the public (primarily in urban areas) as well as other deleterious results that it spawned, leading to its abrogation in the Twenty-First Amendment. Laws, in fact, fall into disuse in many areas of life, and when that happens sometimes they are simply ignored and sometimes they need to be changed in order

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Divine Command Theory in Jewish Law and Ethics    ELLIOT N. DORFF

to indicate that they not only cannot or will not be enforced, but that they should not be enforced (such as the laws banning marijuana use nowadays). So enforcement alone will not work to give the law authority. That is why the Torah provides many other motivations to obey the law. In the book I wrote on my philosophy of Jewish law, For the Love of God and People: A Philosophy of Jewish Law, I discuss in some detail all of the following reasons included in the Torah,1 according to which one should obey the law: 1) It is wise, that is, it is a smart way to live, a pattern of actions that will enable a person to live life without too many rough spots (see, for example, Deut. 4:4–8). 2) Each person promised to do so when not just his or her ancestors, but he himself or she herself was at Sinai (Deut. 5:2–4; 29:9–14). 3) The law sets the parameters for one’s ongoing relationship with God, much as the assumptions of one’s interactions with one’s family and friends are effectively the rules of the game that enable a person to have those relationships (see, for example, Deut. 6:4–9). 4) The law teaches a person how to be moral in mandating some basic ethical norms, such as “Love your neighbor as yourself ” (Lev. 19:18) and “Justice, justice shall you pursue” (Deut. 16:20), and also in giving a person guidance in specific situations, such as rules about how one must help the poor (see, for example, Ex. 22:21–26; Lev. 19:9–10; Deut. 15:7–11) and how one must and must not treat his or her parents (Ex. 20:12; 21:15, 17; Lev. 19:3; Deut. 5:15). 5) The law makes a person part of “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex. 19:6) and “a light unto the nations” (Isa. 49:6), for the law itself is “the light of peoples” (Isa. 51:4), and so it gives a person an ideal to which to aspire. 6) One should obey the law out of love of God (Deut. 11:1), much as one does many things one might prefer not to do out of love for members of one’s family or one’s friends.

1

Elliot N. Dorff, For the Love of God and People: A Philosophy of Jewish Law (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2007), ch. 4.

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The Rabbis added yet other motivations to obey the law, including the following: 7) The law distinguishes the Jewish people from other nations, much as football jerseys distinguish one team from another, thus granting a person a sense of identity (Sifra, Parashat be-ḥuḳḳotai 8:11 on Lev. 26:44; Exodus Rabbah 47:3; bBerakhot 61b). 8) The law “purifies” by distinguishing one’s behavior from that of the animals and of beastly human beings (Genesis Rabbah 44:1; Leviticus Rabbah 13:3; Midrash Tanḥuma, Parashat shemini 12:2 [ed. Buber]). 9) The law makes a Jew aesthetically beautiful (Song of Songs Rabbah 1:15). Thus, the biblical and Rabbinic traditions supply many reasons for why Jews should obey the law; it is not only because it will be enforced by God or human authorities. The authority of civil law shares some of these motivations, although in different forms. So, for example, most people in Western countries believe that their legal system should be obeyed because it spells out not only legal requirements, but also moral ones in laws banning murder, theft, rape, and fraud and in requiring people to care for their children. The desire to remain part of the community is a powerful motivation to obey the law, even if one’s misbehavior will lead only to being shunned and not to being legally punished. Patriotism and a sense that citizens owe their country for the ability to live there in reasonable peace and security add to the motivations to obey its laws, even leading some people to go a step further by serving their country in either military or civilian contexts. There are clearly differences between civil and religious legal systems in both the types and tones of these motivations, but the promise of enforcement alone does not give either civil or religious law its authority. In fact, already in the Bible, God’s enforcement of the law is called into question as a reason to obey it. Job and Ecclesiastes point out that the good are not always rewarded nor are the evil always punished; life simply does not work that way (see, for example, Job 9:1–35; Eccl. 7:15; 8:11–14; 9:2–3, 11). The Rabbis grapple with this in many ways, admitting openly that “the righteous suffer . . . and the evil prosper” (bBerakhot 7a) and formulating

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Divine Command Theory in Jewish Law and Ethics    ELLIOT N. DORFF

multiple theodicies in order to resolve the dissonance.2 The need for such justifications is even more evident to the Jews of today, who can look back at the Crusades, the Inquisition, the pogroms of the Middle Ages and modern times, and the Holocaust to cast doubt on the Torah’s assurances of just divine enforcement of the Covenant. Contemporary thinkers have created a number of “post-Holocaust theologies” precisely to respond to the challenges the Holocaust poses for this traditional tenet. Some theologians deny the connection between faithfulness and flourishing outright by repudiating the notion of a God Who acts in history and affirming only the God of nature (such as Richard L. Rubenstein).3 Others go in the opposite direction, trying to vindicate God by characterizing the Holocaust either as just punishment for those who sinned, as a surgeon must amputate the diseased part of a body to enable the rest to survive (such as Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh and last Lubavitcher Rebbe), or as vicarious punishment of the innocent to atone for the sins of the blameworthy, along the lines of Isaiah 53 (such as Ignaz Maybaum).4 Most formulate a response somewhere in between, struggling in various ways to define how Jews can have faith after the Holocaust, the God in Whom Jews can have faith, and the proper terms of the Jewish relationship with God in light of the Holocaust (such as Eliezer Berkovits, David Blumenthal, Emil Fackenheim, Irving Greenberg, Harold Kushner, and Harold Schulweis).5 2 A good summary of the Rabbis’ attempts to do this can be found in Abraham Cohen, Everyman’s Talmud (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd, 1932), 110–20. 3 Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966; 2nd ed.: Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 4 Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Madda ṿe-emunah (Kfar Chabad: Mekhon Lubavitch, 1980); Ignaz Maybaum, The Face of God after Auschwitz (Amsterdam: Polak and Van Gennep, 1965). 5 Eliezer Berkovits, Faith after the Holocaust (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1973); idem, Crisis and Faith (New York: Sanhedrin Press, 1976); idem, With God in Hell: Judaism in the Ghettos and Deathcamps (New York: Sanhedrin Press, 1979); David R. Blumenthal, Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993); idem, The Banality of Good and Evil: Moral Lessons from the Shoah & Jewish Tradition (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1999); Emil L. Fackenheim, Quest for Past and Future: Essays in Jewish Theology (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1968); idem, God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections (New York: New York University Press, 1970); idem, The Jewish Return into History: Reflections in the Age of Auschwitz and a New Jerusalem (New York: Schocken Books, 1978); idem, To Mend the World: Foundations of Future

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I myself have written about this issue in my book, Knowing God.6 Suffice it to say here that, like Job, Ecclesiastes, and the Rabbis, on some level I believe that we cannot expect a tie between good actions and good results, certainly as individuals and even as a community; that we instead should be satisfied with the fact that, as the Rabbis of the Mishnah said, “The reward of fulfilling a commandment is that you are prepared to fulfill another one, and the result of committing a sin is that you are more likely to commit another one, for fulfilling commandments leads to fulfilling other commandments, and committing sins leads to committing other sins” (Avot 4:2). At the same time, also like the Torah and the Rabbis, I believe that our actions have consequences, even if we cannot always see them or understand them. Smoking makes contracting lung cancer more probable; polluting our environment makes it unusable for our purposes. Beyond these pragmatic consequences, acting unfaithfully to the Covenant with God by violating its terms, and even failure to attend to that relationship by neglecting the positive commandments that nurture it, will weaken one’s relationship with God and with other human beings, thus distancing a person from the goals of the Covenant. Like all relationships, one’s covenantal ties to God and to other people become as deep or as shallow as one allows them to be through one’s actions. It is in these senses that I understand traditional Jewish language about God as Judge and Enforcer of the Sinaitic Covenant, the other laws that Moses stated in the Torah, and even subsequent Jewish law. Thus, even if I have more qualms about these divine roles than some of my ancestors did, the traditional depictions of God as Judge and Enforcer are powerful metaphors for my understanding of Jewish law.

Jewish Thought (New York: Schocken Books, 1989); Irving Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity, and Modernity after the Holocaust,” in Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? Reflections on the Holocaust, ed. Eva Fleischner (New York: Ktav Pub. Co., 1977), 7–55, reprinted in large part in Contemporary Jewish Theology: A Reader, ed. Elliot N. Dorff and Louis E. Newman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 396–416; Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (New York: Schocken Books, 1981); Harold M. Schulweis, Evil and the Morality of God (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press; New York: Ktav Pub. House, 1984); idem, For Those Who Can’t Believe: Overcoming the Obstacles to Faith (New York: HarperCollins, 1994). See also Steven T. Katz, Post-Holocaust Dialogues: Critical Studies in Modern Jewish Thought (New York: New York University Press, 1983). 6 Elliot N. Dorff, Knowing God: Jewish Journeys to the Unknowable (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1992), ch. 5.

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Divine Command Theory in Jewish Law and Ethics    ELLIOT N. DORFF

What is most important, though, is that love and the other positive motives to follow the law described above are by far the most compelling motives for me to do so; fear of punishment is only a backup mechanism to ensure compliance for those not motivated by all these other factors. There is much in the Jewish tradition to support my contention, including the assertion of Rabbi Moses Maimonides that love of God is a higher form of worship than fear of God (Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot teshuvah 10:5; Moreh nevukhim III:51–52). Furthermore, the very fact that the tradition includes multiple motives to adhere to its laws is wise, for all of one’s actions are often motivated by many different factors. Moreover, sometimes one of those factors is more dominant than others in determining what one does, and at other times another factor is the dominant one. So, to take a mundane example not connected to Jewish law per se, I show up to teach my classes for all of the following reasons (and probably many more): I promised I would in a contract; I love teaching; I feel an obligation to my students to teach them as an outgrowth of our relationship; force of habit also plays a role; and I want to think of myself and have others think of me as someone who fulfills his obligations. In the same way, one’s adherence to Jewish law in general and to a specific law in particular is often a product of multiple motivations, some of which work at some times and some at others to prompt a person to act in accordance with the law. These considerations, I would suggest, swim against the Christian understanding of the matter by demonstrating that Jewish law is not in opposition to living a life of love. On the contrary, Jewish sources understand God’s motivation to give Jews the law as an act of love on God’s part; moreover, love of God and of one’s fellow man is a primary motivation to carry out these obligations. Similarly, these considerations also swim against the idea prevalent among many Orthodox Jews and some Jews of other denominations that the primary, or even the only, reason to obey the commandments is to earn divine rewards and avoid divine punishments; many other motivations historically have been, and now should be, at work in prompting Jews to obey God’s commands.

Discerning God’s Will As indicated earlier, Jewish law consists of how the rabbis of each generation interpret and apply the Torah and the later tradition. This may seem

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odd, especially to Protestants, since from its beginnings Protestantism has stood for being guided by the Bible as stated (as in the case of Evangelical Christians) and/or as understood through each person’s conscience (as in the case of “mainline” Protestants). Church councils and leaders play a role in shaping a Protestant’s conscience and in his or her interpretation of the Bible, but the ultimate authority is the Bible and/or the individual’s conscience, for, they might ask, what gives any group of people the authority to speak for God? The Rabbis—and before them, the authors of Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, and Zechariah—were keenly aware of the problems inherent in prophecy, most especially of distinguishing true prophecies from false ones. Thus, Zechariah, writing in the late sixth century BCE, already says this: In that day, too—declares the Lord of Hosts[—].  .  . I will also make the “prophets” and the unclean spirit vanish from the land. If anyone “prophesies” thereafter, his own father and mother, who brought him into the world, will say to him, “You shall die, for you have lied in the name of the Lord”; and his own father and mother, who brought him into the world, will put him to death when he “prophesies.” In that day every “prophet” will be ashamed of the “visions” [he had] when he “prophesied” [Zech. 13:2–4].

But if God’s will cannot be known based on the words of prophets infused with God’s spirit, then how can it be known? The Rabbis’ answer, and the one of the Jewish tradition ever since, is that God’s will is to be discerned through rabbinic interpretations and applications of the Torah and the later tradition in every generation. That may sound self-serving, and it undoubtedly is, but the Rabbis understood God’s authorization of judges in each generation to indicate that that is exactly what God wants. Furthermore, as Deut. 30:11–14 says: Surely, this Instruction that I enjoin upon you this day is not too baffling for you, nor is it beyond reach. It is not in the heavens, that you should say, “Who among us can go up to the heavens and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?” Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, “Who among us can cross to the other side of the sea and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?” No, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it.

Thus, Jews are not to depend on a prophet or some other person with unusual experiences to tell them what God wants of them; they are, rather, to

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Divine Command Theory in Jewish Law and Ethics    ELLIOT N. DORFF

figure it out for themselves, based on what God has already stated in the Torah and their own sense of what is right and wrong in every generation. The Rabbis go even further. They maintain that Rabbinic interpretations and applications of the Torah are themselves the new form of prophecy through which God communicates His will (bBava batra 12a). Moreover, any supposed direct communication by God is not to be believed (bBava batra 12b) and is certainly not normative (bBava metsi‘a 59b). This is clearly unmitigated nerve—what Jews call “chutzpah”—but it was the way in which the Rabbis sought to make Jewish law relevant to each new generation. Rabbis, like all Jews, however, are not known for their penchant to agree. On the contrary, as the old saw goes, “Where there are two Jews, there are at least three opinions!”—and a man once asked me whether you need two Jews for three opinions! Thus, the Talmud is filled with one page of arguments after another. What was ultimately seen as God’s will, then, was what the majority of the rabbis affirmed, combined with what the general practice of the people was. That is, for Jewish law, as for American law and other religious and secular legal systems, the law has always been determined by the interaction of what the authorities of the law (in the Jewish case, rabbis) say and what the people do. This, of course, is a system that guarantees vigorous debate about what God wants of His people, with rabbis needing to persuade other rabbis and the Jewish community as a whole rather than simply dictate what they think is right, and with communal custom powerful enough to undermine rabbinic decrees and establish new norms. With all the chaos that that interaction may engender, it is the living legal system that, for Jews, is a major mechanism—but, as we shall see in the next section of this paper, not the only one—in defining God’s will. This nuanced method for determining God’s will clearly contrasts with Evangelical Protestant ways of doing so, where, as discussed earlier, the Scriptures (especially the New Testament) are inerrant. Jews, of course, would say that using the Bible to discern what God wants immediately requires interpretation of its verses; that, in fact, there are “seventy faces to the Torah” (Numbers Rabbah 13:16) in the sense that any verse in it (and, by extension, any other text) can be interpreted in multiple ways. Acknowledging that is anathema to Evangelical Christians because it undermines the divine authority of the text; after all, it is now no longer God directly communicating what to do, but rather human beings asserting how they understand God’s will. The Jewish tradition is much more

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aware of the plasticity of texts and of the need to pay attention to how texts gain their meaning, so that even Orthodox Jews cannot be fundamentalist in their approach to the Bible—in the way that Evangelical Christians are—if they want to be faithful to the Rabbinic tradition. That said, Jews in the past and today have differed as to the extent and ways in which biblical and Rabbinic texts should be understood in order to apply them to modern times. Orthodox Jews tend to insist on maintaining a more literalist interpretation of the Bible and tradition. The liberal movements, by contrast, are more willing to stretch classical Jewish texts and traditions, incorporating more directly some of the other factors that, in their view, should inform interpretation, including, among others, ethics, economics, sociology, and theology.

Law and Ethics Finally, in order to understand Jewish law properly, one must address the question of how Jewish law is related to ethics. This, of course, runs parallel to various debates in Anglo-American legal philosophy as well, including the arguments about the relationships between law and ethics of H. L. A. Hart and Lon Fuller in the 1960s and the more recent discussions of this subject between U.S. Supreme Court Justices Scalia and Breyer, as articulated in both their judicial opinions and their books.7 On the one hand, the Bible itself (for example, in Deut. 32:4; Ps. 19:8– 9; 119:68) and the classical Rabbis (Genesis Rabbah 44:1) assert that God and His law are moral, that they actually define morality and guide their followers to be moral. On the other hand, the Rabbis maintain that one must be attentive to what is moral beyond the letter of the law; that, indeed, the Second Temple fell because Jews obeyed only the law and did not act in accordance with the moral norms beyond the law.8 Moses Naḥmanides, a thirteenth-century rabbi, points out in his commentary to Lev. 19:2 that 7 H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law, 1st ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961); Lon L. Fuller, Anatomy of the Law (New York: F. A. Praeger, 1968); Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Gardner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts (St. Paul, MN: Thomson/West, 2012); Stephen G. Breyer, Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). 8 See bBava metsi‘a 30b. Other Talmudic sources on going lifnim mi-shurat ha-din (beyond the letter of the law) include bBerakhot 7a (where God “prays” that He can act beyond the letter of the law); bKetubbot 97a; bBava ḳamma 100a; bBava metsi‘a 24b; and bAvodah zarah 4b.

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Divine Command Theory in Jewish Law and Ethics    ELLIOT N. DORFF

one can be a naval bi-reshut ha-Torah (scoundrel within the limits of the law), so abiding by the law alone is clearly not enough for the Jewish tradition to ensure that one is acting morally in any given situation and that one is generally of good character. This, of course, muddies the waters yet further, for now God’s commands include not only the established law, however argumentative the process may be for determining that, but also a set of moral norms that go beyond the law and that should guide its development. Not surprisingly, this has led to sharp debates among Jewish thinkers, just as it has among secular philosophers, about the proper relationships between law and ethics—in the Jewish case, in order to define God’s will. Some Jewish thinkers (such as J. David Bleich and David Weiss Halivni) are legal positivists, asserting that God’s law is, by definition, moral and that there could be no moral critique of the law, for that would undermine God’s moral authority.9 Others, like Joel Roth, embrace a softer form of positivism in asserting that “extralegal” factors like morality (and economics, sociology, and theology) can influence the shaping of the law but can never supersede it.10 Shubert Spero and David Hartman are two Orthodox thinkers who seem, at least, to go further than Roth does, believing that ethics should inform our interpretation of Jewish law in order to ensure that the latter never conflicts with the former.11 That view is much more common in the Conservative/Masorti J. David Bleich, “Halakhah as an Absolute,” Judaism 29, no. 1 (Winter 1980): 30–37; David Weiss Halivni, “Can a Religious Law Be Immoral?,” in Perspectives on Jews and Judaism: Essays in Honor of Wolfe Kelman, ed. Arthur A. Chiel (New York: Rabbinical Assembly, 1978), 165–70. 10 Joel Roth, The Halakhic Process: A Systematic Analysis (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1986). 11 Shubert Spero, Morality, Halakha, and the Jewish Tradition (New York: Ktav Pub. House; Yeshiva University Press, 1983), passim; David Hartman, A Living Covenant: The Innovative Spirit in Traditional Judaism (New York: Free Press; London: Collier Macmillan, 1985), 3–15, 96–107. Aharon Lichtenstein also wrestled with the interaction of Jewish law and morality but did not directly assert, as Spero and Hartman did, that ethics should govern our interpretation of Jewish law; see his “Does Jewish Tradition Recognize an Ethic Independent of Halakha?,” in Modern Jewish Ethics: Theory and Practice, ed. Marvin Fox (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1975), 62–88. It must be noted, however, that most Orthodox writers do not recognize ethics as a source of authority independent of Jewish law; see, for example, Bleich, “Halakhah as an Absolute,” and the following passage from Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Man, trans. Lawrence Kaplan (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1983), 79: 9

[Halakhic man’s] most characteristic feature is strength of mind. He does battle for every jot and tittle of the Halakhah, not only motivated by a deep

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movement, with Robert Gordis, Simon Greenberg, Seymour Siegel, and others expressing a version thereof in the middle of the twentieth century.12 Carrying on that tradition, in my own theory of Jewish law, I assert that the law and morality are both parts of an organic system and that, like biological systems, every part of the organism of the Jewish tradition constantly and rightly influences every other part, but the specific way that that happens varies with the specific case.13 On the other end of the ideological spectrum, some, like the early spokesmen of the Reform movement, maintain that morality should replace Jewish law—or that only the moral parts of Jewish law are binding.14 In any case, because Judaism understands God to be moral and to require morality even beyond the dictates of the law as it has come down through the generations, discerning God’s will requires, for most Jewish thinkers, that morality be an important part of the discussion. For that to happen, one must achieve clarity on how to understand morality in the first place, such that one can then apply moral sensitivities in determining the law that should govern a given case. In recent decades, it is precisely these critically important but difficult questions that have influenced the development of Jewish law with regard to women, gay men and lesbians, and a host of contemporary issues affected by modern medicine and technology. Moreover, as I discuss at some length in the Appendix to another book of mine, Love Your Neighbor and Yourself,15 forming an ethical view of an piety but also by a passionate love of the truth. He recognizes no authority other than the authority of the intellect (obviously, in accordance with the principles of tradition). He hates intellectual compromises or fence straddling, intellectual flabbiness, and any type of wavering in matters of law and judgment. 12 See, for example, Robert Gordis, A Faith for Moderns (New York: Bloch Pub. Co., 1960), chs. 1, 3; idem, The Dynamics of Judaism: A Study in Jewish Law (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), esp. chs. 3, 5; Simon Greenberg, The Ethical in the Jewish and American Heritage (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1977), esp. chs. 7–10; Seymour Siegel, “Ethics and the Halakhah,” Conservative Judaism 25, no. 3 (Spring 1971): 33–40. 13 Dorff, For the Love of God and People, esp. chs. 2, 3, and 6. 14 Probably the most authoritative statement of Reform thinkers asserting that only morality and those rituals that accord with the spirit of the age are authoritative is the Pittsburgh Platform of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (1885), accessed March 1, 2019, https://www.ccarnet.org/rabbinic-voice/platforms/ article-declaration-principles/. 15 Elliot N. Dorff, Love Your Neighbor and Yourself: A Jewish Approach to Modern Personal Ethics (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2003), 311–44.

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Divine Command Theory in Jewish Law and Ethics    ELLIOT N. DORFF

issue requires not only reference to Jewish law, but also to Jewish stories, history, leaders, other moral models, moral values and theories, maxims, prayers, study, and theology. If law is to operate as an organic system, as I maintain it should, then all of these features of the system, as well as its economic and social contexts, must play a role in shaping how one understands what God wants of him or her. For example, the last of the factors on my list, theology, requires that Jews aspire to be “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex. 19:6) and holy like God (Lev. 19:2). This speaks to the divine goals of the law that should shape Jewish character, similar to the traditions of imitatio Dei and virtue ethics that have shaped some Christian theories of morality. As difficult as it may be, then, to discern God’s will, the Jew must remember that the struggle to do so is worth it for, if one succeeds, one will experience God’s commands as the psalmist did: The teaching of the Lord is perfect, renewing life; the decrees of the Lord are enduring, making the simple wise. The precepts of the Lord are just, rejoicing the heart; the instruction of the Lord is lucid, making the eyes light up [Ps. 19:8–9].

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Sylvia Barack Fishman, Brandeis University

Polio Season: Transformations of Philip Roth’s “Jewish Mother” from Sophie Portnoy to Marcia Steinberg*

Introduction: Mothers of the Faith In the decades after World War II, American Jews—the children and grandchildren of impoverished immigrants—rapidly ascended the socioeconomic ladder. Jews who could afford to were leaving inner-city apartments, their homes for decades, and moving to the suburbs. These upwardly mobile Jews became the epitome of the American consumerist middle class to some observers. Primary among their values was helping their children to succeed; as sociologist Marshall Sklare pointed out, Jewish mothers and fathers were obsessed with giving their children “the best of everything.”1 To enable their children to get the best possible education and an advantageous start in life was their definition of the American dream. Capturing that socioeconomic transition, novelist Philip Roth burst onto the American literary scene in the decade from 1959 to 1968. Goodbye, *

I am delighted to dedicate this essay to Chaim Seidler-Feller, with respect and affection, in honor of his lively appreciation of edgy and revealing literature and the arts. 1 Marshall Sklare, America’s Jews (New York: Random House, 1971), 88.

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Columbus, Roth’s compelling novella and collection of short stories, published in 1959, received critical acclaim. By contrast, in 1968, his daring novel Portnoy’s Complaint achieved notoriety, shocking both Jewish and non-Jewish readers with wickedly satirical and often ribald wit. In these narratives, usually seen through the eyes of male protagonists, Roth’s Jewish mothers—rather than his Jewish fathers—were the signifying Jews in American Jewish families and American Jewish culture.2 Roth satirized Jewish mothers like Mrs. Patimkin in Goodbye, Columbus and Sophie Portnoy in Portnoy’s Complaint as the primary implementers and enforcers of Jewish middle-class values, while fathers were presented as breadwinners with little real presence or power. Roth was quickly hailed by literary critics as the rising poet of American Jewish assimilatory hunger—especially as manifested in Jewish men. However, many Jewish readers were outraged by these early Rothian portrayals of American Jews and Judaism.3 Both Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint skewered second- and third-generation American Jews who, by that point, were largely comfortable bourgeois, including a segment who were nouveau riche. Angry Jewish readers saw Roth’s portrayal of Jews as shallow and deeply unpleasant and his references to Jewish religious culture as reductive; it became common in certain circles to describe Roth as a “self-hating” Jew. Some Jewish women readers, including some feminist literary critics, castigated Roth for particularly repellant depictions of Jewish women.4 2 Portraying mothers rather than fathers as the representatives of the Jewish religion and religious culture, of course, reversed historical cultural patterns. In European, immediately pre-emigration antecedents familiar to most American Jewish families, male religious authorities organized public institutions like synagogues, rabbinic seminaries, and associated study halls, and pious, bearded Jewish men represented religious authority. Family life and social circles were shaped by rabbinic authority and also helped to support that authority: close-knit societies created strong social pressure to maintain religious norms that were established by rabbinic rulings. While women wielded considerable power in Jewish homes through their performance of religious tasks, enabling religiously prescribed interpersonal relationships as well as domestic celebrations of Sabbaths and Jewish holidays, when women had religious questions, it was male rabbis who answered those questions. Thus, Jewish homes, too, were important institutional supports of male authority. 3 I am indebted to Sarah Snider, my graduate research assistant at the Hadassah Brandeis Institute Summer Internship Program during the summer of 2017, for locating numerous responses to Roth’s writing in the critical and popular literature. Her capable and intelligent work enhanced this paper. 4 One of many examples of a rabbinic reader who dismissed Roth as a self-hating, sexobsessed, not-very-talented Jewish writer is Maurice Wohlgelernter, “Of Books, Men

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Transformations of Philip Roth’s “Jewish Mother”     SYLVIA BARACK FISHMAN

However, for many other readers, Roth is a prize-winning American literary giant. Especially with his recent passing, not only Roth’s brilliantly creative, prolific genius, but also the profundity of his Jewish insights, are clearly evident in his completed oeuvre. As this paper will show, tracing Roth’s gendered portrayals of Jewish and other minority mothers and fathers can be a powerful key to understanding the development of his treatments of Jews, Judaism, and the whole Jewish project. Roth celebrates Jewish distinctiveness and a particularly masculine active awareness of Jewish history in The Counterlife (1986). In The Human Stain (2000), Roth rejects American moral claims for male individualism and “singularity,” showing how these anti-maternal, anti-familial, and anti-tribal aspirations precipitate devastating human betrayals. He legitimates Jewish alertness to antisemitism and details the determination and courage of ordinary Jewish mothers and fathers in The Plot against America (2004). Finally, in Nemesis (2010), Roth comes full circle: athletic Bucky Cantor, felled by polio and his own masculine pride, responds to Alexander Portnoy, the petulant protagonist of Portnoy’s Complaint who had ridiculed his Jewish mother by saying that she “should have gotten medals from the March of Dimes” “during polio season.”

Can Jews Be Made Whole? Jewish Mothers, Fathers, and Sons in Roth’s Early Fiction As Sol Gittleman suggests, one can already discern the early seeds of Roth’s later fascination with the darkness of the historical Jewish experience in his powerful short story “Eli, the Fanatic,” published in the same collection as Goodbye, Columbus.5,6 Roth’s story empathetically portrays a group of male ultra-Orthodox yeshiva teachers and students, all Holocaust survivors, and contrasts their moving religious fidelity, even in the face of unimaginable suffering, with the ignorance and shallowness of Woodenton, an upwardly and Ideas: Mama and Papa and All the Complaints,” Tradition 10, no. 4 (Fall 1969): 70–87. An example of Jewish feminist literary analysis that reaches somewhat similar conclusions is Sarah Blacher Cohen’s “Philip Roth’s Would-Be Patriarchs and Their Shikses and Shrews,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 1, no. 1 (Spring 1975): 16–22. 5 Philip Roth, “Eli, the Fanatic,” in Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959), 261–313. 6 Sol Gittleman, “The Pecks of Woodenton, Long Island, Thirty Years Later: Another Look at ‘Eli, the Fanatic,’” Studies in American Jewish Literature 8, no. 2 (Fall 1989): 138–42.

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mobile Long Island Jewish community. His protagonist in that story, Eli Peck, is caught between the militant anti-Orthodoxy of his Woodenton friends and his seemingly irrational attraction to the dark yeshiva world. Eli is unnerved by the physical and spiritual injuries sustained by the yeshiva’s black-garmented Jews. One teacher’s black skullcap makes Eli think for a moment that “[t]he crown of his head was missing” (264). It is made clear to Eli that this motley little band of survivors has “nothing” (281). But in the end, rejecting the allure of the American “order” and “peace” that his friends want to protect (275), Eli becomes a “fanatic”—that is, he dresses in the yeshiva teachers’ black suit and he admits permanently into his soul the “blackness” of Jewish historical experience, which he does not yet understand but which he knows is somehow deep within his core (313). It would be years after the publication of “Eli, the Fanatic” before Philip Roth would return in his fiction to explore the link he saw between Jewish maleness and the Jewish historical experience. Rather, as we have suggested, in Roth’s early novels mothers are the signifying Jews, using emotional, economic, or social manipulation to compel loyalty to their versions of Americanized Jewish laws and customs. Mothers become family-based Jewish religious authorities in America where, under a strict separation of church and state, male religious authorities could no longer demand that young men follow religious rules. Roth’s typical American protagonist sons, like Neil Klugman in Goodbye, Columbus and Alexander Portnoy in Portnoy’s Complaint, struggle to free themselves from maternal characters representing Jewish society—rather than paternal characters representing Jewish religious mores and rules. These novels make the woman-centered Jewish home into the environment for a Jewish joke: “[T]his is my life, my only life, and I’m living it in the middle of a Jewish joke! I am the son in the Jewish joke—only it ain’t no joke!”7 Here is how Alexander Portnoy satirizes not only his mother Sophie, but also the entire Jewish religion that she represents: The hysteria and the superstition! The watch-its and the be-carefuls! You mustn’t do this, you can’t do that—hold it! don’t! you’re breaking an important law! What law? Whose law? . . . Oh, and the milchiks and flaishiks [dairy foods and meat foods] besides, all those meshuggeneh [crazy] rules and regulations on top of their own private craziness! It’s a family joke that when 7 Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (New York: Random House, 1969; reprint: New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 36–37.

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Transformations of Philip Roth’s “Jewish Mother”     SYLVIA BARACK FISHMAN

I was a tiny child I turned from the window out of which I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, “Momma, do we believe in winter?” . . . I couldn’t even contemplate drinking a glass of milk with my salami sandwich without giving serious offense to God Almighty [34].

There is no mistaking the female tone of these injunctions; in the American Jewish child’s world, as Roth portrays it in the 1950s and 1960s, biblical and Rabbinic law and Jewish customs and folklore have one thundering prophet—the Jewish mother. The Jewish mother’s religious remonstrations gain additional power when mixed with worries about the ravages of the infectious polio disease among American children during those years before the development of the polio vaccine. Concerned mothers in the 1940s and 1950s often encouraged their children to avoid crowded environments like movie theaters and swimming pools during the summer months—just when children most wanted to go, but also just when polio infections were most common. In Sophie Portnoy’s mouth, as recalled by her resentful son Alex, religious xenophobia is muddled together with health warnings, resulting in one clear, resounding message: stay away from “others,” “others” are dangerous. You should have watched her at work during polio season! She should have gotten medals from the March of Dimes! Open your mouth. Why is your throat red? Do you have a headache you’re not telling me about? You’re not going to any baseball game, Alex, until I see you move your neck. . . . Alex, polio doesn’t know from baseball games. It only knows from iron lungs and crippled forever! I don’t want you running around, and that’s final [33–34].

In Alexander Portnoy’s understanding, the effect of this xenophobic Jewishness, with its “terror” of a putatively unhealthful world outside, preached by the Jewish mother, emasculates resentful American Jewish sons. In turn, the son condemns and rejects the faith and experience of his Jewish progenitors, as taught by his mother. Jewishness is a kind of “sickness” of the soul, infecting the body. To be healthy and whole, Jewishness must be overcome: The guilt, the fears—the terror bred into my bones! What in their world was not charged with danger, dripping with germs, fraught with peril? Oh, where was the gusto, where was the boldness and courage? Who filled these parents of mine with such a fearful sense of life? . . . Doctor, what do you call this sickness I have? Is this the Jewish suffering I used to hear so much about?

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Is this what has come down to me from the pogroms and the persecution? from the mockery and abuse bestowed by the goyim over these two thousand lovely years? . . . Doctor, I can’t stand any more being frightened like this over nothing! Bless me with manhood! Make me brave! Make me strong! Make me whole! [35–37].

It is key to understanding Portnoy’s Complaint to remember that throughout his oeuvre, Roth planted his work firmly in the social-psychological context of the American setting, as well as the Jewish sociological setting of its times. Portnoy’s Complaint was set in an America that was in the midst of countrywide political, social, and cultural upheavals. The anti-Vietnam War protest movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and second-wave feminism—often called the Women’s Liberation Movement—swirled together and challenged and disrupted established American political, educational, and religious institutions. Indeed, for many American young adults the consumer-industrial-military “establishment” became the enemy. Portnoy’s Complaint gives a Jewish voice and a Jewish focus to this sweeping American anti-establishment sentiment among the youth. But when it was published many mature Jewish readers who were part of the American Jewish establishment read Portnoy’s Complaint defensively, with anger and outrage. They saw Alexander Portnoy’s indictment of materialistic, domesticated, tribal American Jewishness as Philip Roth’s final judgement on all of Judaism. Rabbis gave sermons and Jewish newspapers featured articles condemning the book and labeling Roth a “self-hating Jew.” For some American Jews, Portnoy’s Complaint was the last Philip Roth book they ever read, and they assumed that all his subsequent writing was nothing more than variations on a theme. Such readers paid little attention to signposts within the book itself that Roth’s satirical portrayal of Sophie Portnoy’s toxic stew of religious injunctions, xenophobia, and health anxieties was one opening foray into a lifelong serious interrogation of the Jewish experience. Moreover, few at the time made the obvious observation that Alexander Portnoy is, by definition, an unreliable narrator: the entire book is a self-indulgent rant to his psychiatrist, Dr. Spielvogel. Alex does have a serious spiritual goal—although he himself does not understand how complex that goal is. Portnoy’s plea is that he be made “whole.” In the context of this book, that yearning is sometimes understood to be, in some way, not Jewish: “Enough being a nice Jewish boy”

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Transformations of Philip Roth’s “Jewish Mother”     SYLVIA BARACK FISHMAN

(40). Portnoy, like many American Jews upon whom he was modeled, lusts for what seems like a kind of uncomplicated wholeness and health— “smooth and shiny and cool as custard” (151)—glimmering chimerically in the Christian world. Unlike Portnoy’s constipated, timid, neurotic Jewish father, Gentile “fathers are men with white hair and deep voices who never use double negatives” (145). Gentile boys Portnoy’s age are not being harangued by their mothers but instead know “how to take motors apart” (151) and are “engaging, good-natured, confident, clean, swift, and powerful halfbacks for the college football teams” (145). About non-Jewish young women—shikses in vernacular Yiddish—he wonders, “How do they get so gorgeous, so healthy, so blond?” (144–45). But as much as he would like to be made whole, Alexander Portnoy himself emphatically does not want to be part of an American Christian existence. Indeed, Roth’s portrayal of American Christianity in Portnoy’s Complaint is, if anything, even more savagely satirical than his portrayal of American Jewishness. Portnoy succinctly summarizes his problem— indeed, his true illness or “complaint”—as follows: “My contempt for what they believe in is more than neutralized by my adoration of the way they look, the way they move and laugh and speak” (145). Part of the evolution and change in Roth’s fiction is due to the fact that he is always pushing back against prevalent societal trends; he is always countercultural. In the 1950s and 1960s, when broader American culture celebrated the bourgeois nuclear family and Americanized family religious observances—“the family that prays together stays together”—Philip Roth’s fiction made fun of both. In Goodbye, Columbus, “Eli, the Fanatic,” and Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth’s satirical pen was at its most stinging. But as America became far less family-friendly and less pro-natalist, Roth never wrote another piece of fiction like Portnoy’s Complaint. Instead, his later work portrayed and critiqued emerging new orthodoxies of liberal American culture—many of them anti-familial in nature. In the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, broader American culture severely critiqued the previously normative family unit. Individuals were increasingly encouraged to define, develop, and fulfill themselves and to be very suspicious of family entanglements. Tribal, ascriptive identities were deconstructed and demoted to competing “narratives,” with no special claim on the loyalty of young Americans. Jewish young Americans, in particular, seemed susceptible to adopting life approaches that might be described as simultaneously universalist and self-absorbed.

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Roth’s fiction from the 1980s onward provided a social critique of the newly dominant model—the singular self. He continued to create within his increasingly complex pieces of long fiction ever-deepening explorations of what might be called quintessentially male and quintessentially female aspects of the authentic Jewish experience. For Jewish males, he argued in his postmodern novel The Counterlife, “There’s a world outside the Oedipal swamp”8—a world of history, where antisemitism is an enduring and inescapable fact of life. One of the core meanings of Jewish masculinity is entering through the Jewish male line into history, and into Jewish history. Jews should be especially leery of green thoughts in a green shade, the contemplative retreat from history, movements that urge people out of cities and back to the land, the serene escape celebrated in the English Christian pastoral vision and in white American and Jewish American popular culture in the 1980s, Roth’s fiction argued. That promise of wholeness, peace, and respite from daily strife was not only delusory but dangerously seductive. Rather, for Jewish men, destiny dictates immediate initiation into that very historical strife that defines human existence itself: The pastoral stops here and it stops with circumcision.  .  .  . Circumcision is startling, all right, particularly when performed by a garlicked old man upon the glory of a newborn body, but then maybe that’s what the Jews had in mind and what makes the act seem quintessentially Jewish and the mark of their reality. Circumcision makes it clear as can be that you are here and not there, that you are out and not in—also that you’re mine and not theirs. There is no way around it: you enter history through my history and me. Circumcision is everything that the pastoral is not and, to my mind, reinforces what the world is about, which isn’t strifeless unity [323].

The Doubleness and Duplicity Encoded in the Human Genome In later pieces of fiction, Roth continued to develop his vision of mothers and to powerfully explore the relationship between mothers and sons but with a very different interpretive framework. Mothers emerge as heroic and tragic figures. Their sons are defined and judged by how well they understand the debt they owe their mothers.

8 Philip Roth, The Counterlife (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 140.

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Transformations of Philip Roth’s “Jewish Mother”     SYLVIA BARACK FISHMAN

One of Roth’s most powerful indictments of a son who does not properly value his mother is delineated in the life of an ersatz Jew, the secretly African American Coleman Silk, who poses as a Jewish classics professor in The Human Stain.9 When Silk visits his dignified, loving, highly intelligent—and dark-skinned—African American mother for the last time in order to tell her that he will marry a Jewish woman and will reinvent himself as a Jew, Roth portrays Silk’s decision to abandon his birth destiny and his birth mother as the gravest personal betrayal. Indeed, Silk internally characterizes what he is doing as a kind of matricide, an original sin that will darken his life and his soul forever. But Silk also knows that only through the “brutality” of this “repudiation” (139) can the individual male achieve the freedom from family ties, the “singularity” (131)—the male individualism—that he craves: He was murdering her. You don’t have to murder your father. The world will do that for you. . . . Who there is to murder is the mother, and that’s what he saw he was doing to her, the boy who’d been loved as he’d been loved by this woman. Murdering her on behalf of his exhilarating notion of freedom! It would have been much easier without her. But only through this test can he be the man he has chosen to be, unalterably separated from what he was handed at birth [138–39].

Thus, in both The Counterlife and The Human Stain Roth critiques the male aspiration to be a “singular” man, to be essentially motherless, entirely of one’s own making, by freeing oneself from maternally transmitted ethnoreligious identity, as a delusional and dangerous chimera. When men insist on being independent of the history of the father and the loving tribal entanglements of the mother, they set into motion tragic developments. Just as Silk has betrayed his mother and lied to his Jewish wife Iris and his own children, Silk’s mistress Faunia lies to him, his colleagues betray him, and he is undone. The novel opens with an almost liturgical repetition of the number two over the course of numerous pages but ends with the image of one— one who is a deranged murderer sitting alone on a frozen landscape, fishing through a hole in the ice. In Roth’s cosmos, it is not good for man to live alone; purity is not an achievable goal; and the yearning for purity causes human beings to damage themselves and each other. The necessity 9 Philip Roth, The Human Stain (New York: Vintage Books; Random House, 2000).

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for human beings to be social animals is encoded in their genes, and they ignore that necessity at their own peril. At the same time, the inevitability that they will betray each other is written into their genes as well—the original “human stain.”

When Disaster Strikes, You Want a Jewish Mother Roth’s historical fantasy in The Plot against America creates a moral compass which insists that Jews live in history whether they wish to or not.10 Faced with the terrible reality of the unexpected, individuals desperately need the families into which they were born. In particular, these unforeseen tsunamis are combatted by Jewish mothers, clear-eyed and unflinching, who provide wellsprings of strength as well as compassion. In Roth’s dystopia, a happy Jewish nuclear family with two teenage sons, Sandy and Philip, is ripped out of its ethnically Jewish, lower-middle-class Eden of Weequahic, New Jersey, in 1940 by a Nazi-sympathizing American administration and forcibly relocated, both physically and psychologically. Sandy succumbs to Nazi blandishments that he abandon his family and his ethnicity and be retrained to join a superior cohort of boys. The father is appalled and outraged: “In Germany Hitler has the decency at least to bar the Jews from the Nazi party. . . . But here the Nazis pretend to invite the Jews in. . . . No! They have mocked us enough with what they are doing to Sandy! He is not going anywhere! They have already stolen my country— they are not stealing my son!” (185–86). Sandy, furious with his father for obstinately standing in the way of what he sees as a personal opportunity, flings back at him: “[Y]ou’re a dictator worse than Hitler.” His father is so hurt that he can only “turn away in disgust and leave for work” (193). But Bess, his mother, does not turn away; she fights fiercely for her child by reestablishing parental authority: [H]e was hardly out the back door when my mother raised her hand and, to my astonishment, smacked Sandy across the face. “Do you know what your father has just done for you?” she shouted at him. “Don’t you understand yet what you were about to do to yourself? Finish your breakfast and go to school. And you be home when school is over. Your father laid down the law—you better obey it.” 10 Philip Roth, The Plot against America (Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004).

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Transformations of Philip Roth’s “Jewish Mother”     SYLVIA BARACK FISHMAN

He didn’t flinch when she hit him, and now, all resistance, he undertook to enlarge his heroism by brazenly telling her, “I’m going to the White House with Aunt Evelyn. I don’t care whether you ghetto Jews like it or not.” . . . [S]he made him pay in full for his filial defiance by dealing him a second blow, and this time he burst into tears. And had he not, this prudent mother of ours would have raised her gentle, kindly mothering hand and hit him a third, a fourth, and a fifth time [193–94].

With courage, shrewdness, and wisdom, Bess the Jewish mother protects her husband, raises her own and other needy boys, and keeps a cool head in terrifying circumstances. Roth’s horrifying factual Postscript makes it clear that no country—not even America—is safe from the potential of antisemitic violence. In Roth’s fictional dystopia, Jewish fathers and sons are saved by a Jewish mother who does what non-fictional, historical Jewish mothers have done in numerous real dystopic locales and eras: maintain the warm integrity of their homes despite the pain and suffering caused by antisemitic geographical dislocations.11

No “Haven Devoid of Danger” Drawing closer to the apparent end of his writing career, Philip Roth wrote a series of short novels that he grouped together under the general title Nemesis, each of which explored several ominous destinies closing in on diverse protagonists.12 In this somber and elegiac collection, Roth returns to a theme that had played an abrasively comic role in Portnoy’s Complaint. We remember that Alexander Portnoy commented sardonically about his mother: “You should have watched her at work during polio season! She should have gotten medals from the March of Dimes!” In Roth’s 2010 novel, polio ceases to be a subject for juvenile satire and becomes instead—as it was historically—a fearsome and brutal opponent. But even more deadly, the novel suggests, are the unrealistic expectations human beings have of God—and of themselves—for durable reason and justice in the world.

11 Gurumurthy Neelakantan, “Philip Roth’s Nostalgia for the Yiddishkayt and the New Deal Idealisms in The Plot against America,” Philip Roth Studies 4, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 125–26, makes the point that the fictional Roth family in this novel is presented as a counterpoint to “the increasing dysfunctionality of the familial institution in contemporary postmodern America.” 12 Philip Roth, Nemesis (Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010).

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Roth’s genial and kindly protagonist, Eugene “Bucky” Cantor, is a hard-working, athletic, super-responsible young man who finds in “diligence and hard work the solution to all his problems” (154). Bucky learns how to be the decent, responsible fellow that he is from his grandparents, his surrogate parents. He knows that as a “boy who’d lost a mother at birth,” he “couldn’t have been more fortunate in the surrogates he’d inherited to make him strong in every way” (25). (Although, we must note that he in a way “kills” his mother by being born.) The description of his grandmother elegiacally sets forth positive characteristics of a traditional Jewish mother: His grandmother was a warm, tenderhearted little woman, a good, sound parental counterweight to his grandfather. She bore hardship bravely. . . . In the few hours a day when she was not assisting in the grocery, she devoted herself wholeheartedly to Eugene’s welfare, nursing him through measles, mumps, and chickenpox, seeing that his clothes were always clean and mended, that his homework was done, that his report cards were signed . . . that the food she cooked for him was hearty and plentiful, and that his fees were paid at the synagogue where he went after school for Hebrew classes to prepare for his bar mitzvah [21–22].

Similarly and equally elegiacally, his grandfather, the epitome of an immigrant-generation American Jew, impresses Bucky with the reality of Jewish history and what it means to be a responsible man in a very imperfect world—which, though it had tried, “could not crush him”: The grandfather, Sam Cantor, had come alone to America in the 1880s as an immigrant child from a Jewish village in Polish Galicia. His fearlessness had been learned in the Newark streets, where his nose had been broken more than once in fights with anti-Semitic gangs. The violent aggression against Jews that was commonplace in the city during his slum boyhood did much to form his view of life and his grandson’s view in turn. He encouraged the grandson to stand up for himself as a man and to stand up for himself as a Jew, and to understand that one’s battles were never over and that, in the relentless skirmish that living is, “when you have to pay the price, you pay it” [24–25].

Bucky is fortunate to fall in love with a beautiful and truly lovely young Jewish woman, Marcia Steinberg, and he joyously anticipates spending a lifetime together with her.

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Transformations of Philip Roth’s “Jewish Mother”     SYLVIA BARACK FISHMAN

But Nemesis relentlessly argues that even such a well-raised and well-prepared—though unbrilliant, humorless, and un-ironic—protagonist as Bucky Cantor carries within himself the seeds of his own destruction. Each protagonist has a different flaw at his core. This is the human condition, another Rothian version of the original sin. Like The Human Stain’s arrogant and ambitious Coleman Silk, who far more overtly tempted the fates, the energetic and caring Bucky literally becomes his own “nemesis.” When Bucky battles a polio epidemic tragically sweeping through the summer camps that he manages, his obstinate sense of responsibility gets in the way of many things, first and foremost, his alertness to the possibility that he may be a polio carrier. Once his culpability is finally revealed to him, it is not only the discovery that he personally is responsible for carrying and spreading the polio virus that undoes him; it is also part of his own pride that he cannot “look the other way and . . . rush to embrace the security and predictability and contentment of a normal life lived in normal times” (135). Crippled by polio, he is too “responsible” to remake his life by marrying his sweetheart, the still beautiful, loving, and supportive Marcia Steinberg who wants desperately for them to wed and build their lives together. Embittered, his behavior is in a way heartless, as he refuses to yield his manly responsibility in the face of what he sees as a malevolent God. In the end, Bucky rejects Marcia: [H]is last opportunity to be a man of integrity was by sparing the virtuous young woman he dearly loved from unthinkingly taking a cripple as her mate for life. The only way to save a remnant of his honor was in denying himself everything he had ever wanted for himself—should he be weak enough to do otherwise, he would suffer his final defeat [262].

Roth’s final vision in Nemesis is a fatalistic one. The protagonist lives out his “unavoidable” fate—undone by “the ideal in him. He never knows where his responsibility ends” (273). Bucky’s atheistic friend and fellow polio victim Arnie marvels that Bucky prefers to believe in a fiendish God rather than to believe in random chance and happenstance that frequently result in tragedy: “He has to convert tragedy into guilt. He has to find a necessity for what happens .  .  . he looks desperately for a deeper cause” (265). Arnie reflects on Bucky’s fatal flaw: “[T]here’s nobody less salvageable than a ruined good boy” (272).

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Bucky’s tragic mistake, in Roth’s telling, was to turn away from a generative, could-have-been future with Marcia Steinberg, with her capacity for maternal as well as wifely love, warmth, and strength. Still, Nemesis ends not with Bucky’s angry condemnation of his heartless God, but—unexpectedly—with a dazzling vision of his genuine leadership in his vigorous boyhood: You could see each of his muscles bulging when he released it into the air. He let out a strangulated yowl of effort . . . a noise expressing the essence of him—the naked battle cry of striving excellence. . . . His was the body—the feet, the legs, the buttocks, the trunk, the arms, the shoulders. . . . Through him, we boys had left the little story of the neighborhood and entered the historical saga of our ancient gender.  .  .  . [B]ringing the throwing arm through to release the javelin high over his shoulder—and releasing it then like an explosion—he seemed to us invincible [278–80].

Roth’s language here echoes a pair of biblical verses: “O youth, enjoy yourself while you are young” (Eccl. 11:9) and “Yours, Lord, are greatness, might, splendor, triumph, and majesty” (I Chron. 29:11). The biblical lyricism is especially remarkable because the image of Cantor’s glory is so classically Greek—so un-Hebraic—in its veneration of physicality. In fact, Bucky’s grandmother and Marcia Steinberg, the Jewish women in Nemesis, embody a Judaic commitment to loyalty and compassion in the face of physical frailty; indeed, Marcia’s core character value could be described as ḥesed (lovingkindness). In contrast, the tragic flaw that undoes Bucky’s life in this narrative is that he worships a kind of Greek self-sufficiency and manly responsibility and is unwilling to accede to Marcia’s more Hebraic raḥamanut, her loving, merciful tolerance for physical failings. When one considers the warm portrayals of Marcia Steinberg, along with the very different but equally positive depictions of Bess Roth in The Plot against America and Mother Silk in The Human Stain, one sees that Philip Roth’s later fiction radiates a transformed and positive attitude toward women, mothers, and Judaism, as well as the veneration due to mothers-of-the-tribe. In the concluding passages of Nemesis, the one reason that Bucky’s power endures beyond the failure of his physical and psychological strength is that it emanates from human social interaction, from the beneficial impact that he has on his campers, enlarging and transforming their lives. By leaving his readers with this spiritual vision of Bucky’s physicality

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Transformations of Philip Roth’s “Jewish Mother”     SYLVIA BARACK FISHMAN

and his genuine leadership, Roth invokes human mortality but also powerfully denies that a human being’s end is the sum total of that human being’s life. Despite Bucky’s tragedy, failure, and decline, the lives that he touched positively carry him—and Roth’s readers—forward in a redemptive way, reaching into the future.

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Sergio DellaPergola, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Go to School, Work, Marry, Have Children, Be Jewish: Jewish Women and Jewish Men in the United States and Israel*

In a review of gender differences among Jews in a variety of social and cultural contexts in Israel and across world Jewish communities, one important conclusion I reached was that over the course of decades, up to the 1990s, Jewish women had attained high levels of achievement in the socioeconomic sphere, in some cases surpassing their male peers in the same population.1 Women also played a leading part in maintaining Jewish continuity, not only in their exclusive roles as mothers, but also through a higher level of Jewish identification as compared with Jewish men. This was true for nearly all measures of Jewishness, with the possible exception of those related to philanthropy—an obvious consequence of lower female personal income. Still, I argued, the greatly enhanced share of achievement and responsibility I had documented had not yet found full expression in *

For nearly thirty years, Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller has been a warm, hospitable friend and a generous guide to the meanders of American Jewish culture and community. He has combined scholarship, spiritual counsel, and civic activism in exemplary fashion and has demonstrated how bridges can be built between the various sectors of a sometimes-divided Jewish collective. He is also a frequent visitor to our beautiful eighteenth-century Italian synagogue at 25 Hillel Street in Jerusalem, where he does not miss an opportunity to open the Holy Ark or to be honored with an aliyyah la-Torah. May long years of rewarding work lie ahead for Rabbi Chaim. 1 Sergio DellaPergola, “Jewish Women in Transition: A Comparative Sociodemographic Perspective,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 16 (2000): 209–42.

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the share of power exerted by women within the Jewish community and polity. Focusing especially (but not exclusively) on Israel, where many women have made it into the professions but fewer have been invested with significant political authority, I suggested the following as a way of capturing the inconsistency between these measures of women’s status and power: an Israeli woman is much more likely to be the surgeon in charge of the mayor’s heart bypass than an administrator in charge of the city-center traffic bypass. I also argued that the apparent incongruity between women’s levels of competency and commitment, on the one hand, and their power, on the other, should be solved either by encouraging and promoting the ongoing, gradual transition of women toward equality or through more active institutional interventions aimed at resolving the observed gender imbalances. Given that quite a few changes have taken place over the past several years, it seems worthwhile to assess the current state of gender differences in various Jewish contexts. This paper updates the facts concerning some of the more easily measurable aspects of Jewish gender gaps, in terms of Jewish population structure and ideational attitudes. Besides the more descriptive analysis, we pursue here two further goals. One is to provide a comparative context for the ongoing debate about social and demographic trends among U.S. Jewry, which is usually focused solely on the local community without much thought given to what happens to Jews elsewhere in the world.2 In the study of Jewish society, it is actually more helpful to look at local situations in a broader context. In the case of U.S. Jewry in particular, it is relevant to look at Jewish communities in other countries to determine whether or not, and in what measurable ways, America is different. The often-asserted uniqueness of American Jewry reflects, among other things, the impact of sizeable Jewish immigration in the past and the modes of its absorption into the broader national context. Among other countries that have absorbed large-scale Jewish immigrations, the leading case in point for comparison is Israel, where Jews constitute a majority of the total population, at least within the internationally recognized 2 See the comprehensive analyses by Harriet Hartman, “The Jewish Family,” American Jewish Year Book 116 (2016): 79–126, as well as by Sylvie Fogiel-Bijaoui, “Familism, Post-Modernity, and the State: The Case of Israel,” in Families in Global Perspective, ed. Jaipaul L. Roopnarine and Uwe P. Gielen (Boston: Pearson/Allyn and Bacon, 2005), 184–204.

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boundaries of the state. Although Canada, France, and Germany, too, might offer equally relevant comparative yardsticks, we focus here on recent comparisons between the United States and Israel, questioning the degree of exceptionalism in the demographic and socioeconomic structures of these Jewish communities. The second goal of this essay is to present data that can be used as a baseline for ongoing attempts to develop Jewish social, demographic, and cultural policy frameworks that seriously take account of gender, the family, occupational opportunities and mobility, and their relationship to Jewish identity. In a male-dominated society, as ours still tends to be, the expectation and mandate for women in general, and for Jewish women in particular, has grown over time from a rather reductive “marry, have children,” to a more complex and demanding “go to school, work, marry, have children,” and finally to the even more challenging “go to school, work, marry, have children, and don’t forget to be Jewish.” How some of these practices and norms are evolving in the two largest contemporary Jewish populations is described in the following pages. The data used come from several population surveys of Jews in the United States and population censuses and surveys in Israel taken at comparable points in time, including a short comparison between the more recent Pew surveys of 2013 in the United States and 2015 in Israel. The analyses that follow fall within the strict limits of the available possibilities to perform gender comparisons for the same characteristics and trends in the two countries.

Go to School Achievement in higher education can be measured based on the amount of academization of the younger generation. The proportions of those who attain post-secondary education and academic degrees have consistently increased over time. Table 1 shows the percentage of younger adults in their late twenties and early thirties who ever attended college and of those who completed at least a first cycle of university studies and received a B.A. degree. Of course, those who completed their academic training are part of the subset of those who ever went to college. In the United States in 1957, 23% of Jewish women vs. 38% of Jewish men aged twenty-five and over had ever attended college, and 10% of women vs. 26% of men of the same ages had received an academic degree. By 2001, these percentages had

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spectacularly increased: 89% of Jewish women and 88% of Jewish men had spent at least some time in college, while 67% of women and 71% of men had earned a college degree. Most of the increase had occurred by 1990, indicating that the trend of educational achievement had already by then reached its highest possible peak. TABLE 1. YOUNGER JEWISH ADULTS WITH HIGHER EDUCATION, BY GENDER—UNITED STATES AND ISRAEL, CA. 1960 TO CA. 2000—PERCENTAGES3 Age

ca. 1960

ca. 1990

ca. 2000

Women Men Women % Women Men Women % Women Men Women % differencea differencea differencea United Statesc College completedb

10

26

–62

63

College ever

23

38

–41

85

69

–9

67

71

–6

87

–2

89

88

+1

Israel

d

College completedb

2

6

–67

24

24

+2

35

33

+7

College ever

7

14

–49

54

50

+9

66

64

+2

 elative percent difference between figures for men and women in two previous columns. R Computed from percentages not rounded to the unit as in previous columns. b “College completed” refers to persons with four or more years of college. c 1957: age twenty-five and over; 1990: ages thirty to thirty-nine; 2001: ages thirty to thirty-nine. d 1961: age thirty and over; 1997: ages twenty-five to thirty-four; 2005: ages twenty-five to thirty-four. a

In Israel, the extent of academic studies among Jews has been expanding for years, but it has not yet reached the level of U.S. Jewry; thus, there remain wider margins for further growth. In 2005, 66% of Israeli Jewish women aged twenty-five to thirty-four vs. 64% of Israeli Jewish men had 3 Sources: Sidney Goldstein, “Socioeconomic Differentials among Religious Groups in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 74, no. 6 (May 1969): 612–31; idem, “Profile of American Jewry: Insights from the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey,” American Jewish Year Book 92 (1992): 77–173; Barry A. Kosmin et al., Highlights of the CJF 1990 National Jewish Population Survey (New York: Council of Jewish Federations, 1991); National Jewish Population Survey 2000–01 (author’s processing); Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, Census of Population and Housing 1961, vol. 15 (Jerusalem: CBS, 1963); idem, Statistical Abstract of Israel, vol. 49 (Jerusalem: CBS, 1998); idem, Statistical Abstract of Israel, vol. 57 (Jerusalem: CBS, 2006).

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some college, and 35% of women vs. 33% of men had a college degree. The respective percentages in Israel were initially much lower but grew much faster than in the United States. The growth in higher education was particularly impressive among Israeli women, whose rates ballooned from 7% exposure and 2% completion in the 1960s to 66% and 35%, respectively, around 2000. Additionally, Israel’s college exposure rates grew from onethird of those of American Jews in the 1960s to three-fourths in the 2000s. College completion in Israel grew from about one-fifth to nearly one-half of the respective achievement levels among U.S. Jews. Keeping in mind that the data refer to younger adult cohorts who tend to be better educated than older people, we observe here the edge of a continually evolving trend. To better appreciate the evolution over time of Jewish men and women’s exposure to, and completion of a degree in, higher education, we compare women’s achievements relative to men’s. In the beginning, there was a huge gap to the disadvantage of women, but with time a clear convergence occurred, and eventually women achieved greater levels of higher education. Interestingly, while the absolute levels of academic achievement of Jews in both countries were significantly different, the transformation over time of the gender differential was quite similar. During the 1960s, Jewish women’s college attendance lagged behind men’s by 49–50%, but around 2000 women surpassed men in this regard in both Israel and the United States. The path toward achieving educational equalization was even more impressive in terms of college completion, where women in both countries lagged behind men by 60–70% in the 1960s. However, around 2000, women had actually surpassed men in Israel, while in the United States Jewish women had reduced the gap to a mere few percentage points. Thus, over the last forty years, Jewish women have fully achieved equal opportunities to men in terms of college attendance and completion. The similarity of achievement paths in the two countries points to a more general trend in the promotion of women’s status and the disappearance of gender differences in academic contexts, rather than to factors that may be considered specific to each country. When it comes to graduate studies, such as master’s and doctoral programs, these trends are only further amplified. In fact, in Israel in 2004, for the first time, more women than men received a PhD.4 The internal Jewish gender gap regarding higher

4 Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, Statistical Abstract of Israel, vol. 57.

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Go to School, Work, Marry, Have Children, Be Jewish    SERGIO DELLAPERGOLA

education no longer exists, and Jews continue to fare better than the general population—the more so at higher educational levels.

Work Following a similar research path, we examine the evolution of Jewish gender gaps in occupational achievement. To reduce occupational data of different countries to a common denominator is far more complex an operation than is its analog in the realm of educational levels. The main classification differences concern various points along the spectrum between managerial and clerical jobs, as well as the position of sales and services within the overall occupational taxonomy. To make the data from the United States and Israel compatible, I reclassified the original occupational distributions, ignoring detail in order to formulate three broad occupational—or, rather, socioeconomic—categories. I termed these upper, including professionals and managers (who have generally achieved a higher education degree); middle, including lower managerial, clerical, sales, and services jobs; and lower, including crafts, operatives, and unskilled laborers. As expected, consistent with educational changes, there were visible variations over time in the distribution of Jews across the three major occupational groups, including a growing Jewish presence among the higher socioeconomic strata (Table 2). The upward mobility of Jews was particularly remarkable in the United States, where the proportion of women in the upper stratum, out of the total employed across all age groups, increased from 24% in 1957 to 63% in 2001, while the increase among men in the same occupational stratum was from 55% to 65%. In Israel, the progression was from 25% in 1961 to 38% in 2005 among women and from 17% to 38% among men. It should be noted that in Israel women’s participation in the labor force among those aged eighteen to thirty-four increased from 30% around 1960 to 70% around 2000.

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TABLE 2. OCCUPATIONAL STATUS OF JEWS IN THE UNITED STATES AND ISRAEL, BY GENDER—CA. 1960 TO CA. 2000—PERCENTAGES5 Gender and status

United States 1957

1990

Israel 2001

1961

1997

2005

Women Total

100

100

100

100

100

100

Upper

24

49

63

25

35

38

Middleb

63

47

34

51

51

51

3

4

3

24

14

11

a

Lower

c

Men Total

100

100

100

100

100

100

55

56

65

17

33

38

Middle

24

29

27

27

24

26

Lowerc

20

15

8

56

43

36

Upper

a b

Professionals, managers. Lower managerial, clerical, sales, services. c Crafts, operatives, unskilled laborers. a

b

Looking more closely at the unfolding of gender differences as measured by occupational status, we compared the changing achievement levels of Jewish women and their relative lag as compared with men in the United States and Israel. (Note that the absolute total numbers may be somewhat different for men and women, since labor force participation was not necessarily the same for both genders, and this is not unrelated to gender occupational distributions.) At the upper occupational level, women in the United States around 1960 lagged behind men by 60%, but by 2001 the gap had disappeared through women’s upward mobility. Some of this can be explained by higher female participation in the labor force and the entry of better-educated women into the labor force. In Israel, interestingly, at the upper level of professionals and managers, women were far more represented relative to men in the 1960s than in the 2000s. It is as if it was the men who were closing the occupational gap vis-à-vis women, contrary to the typical trend, but this, too, can largely be explained by noting the 5 Sources: Table 1, above, and Barry R. Chiswick, “Working and Family Life: The Experiences of Jewish Women in America,” in Papers in Jewish Demography 1993, in Memory of U. O. Schmelz, ed. Sergio DellaPergola and Judith Even (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1997), 277–87.

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Go to School, Work, Marry, Have Children, Be Jewish    SERGIO DELLAPERGOLA

enormous expansion and diversification of female participation in the labor force at the later date. At the middle occupational level of lower managerial, clerical, sales, and services jobs, Jewish women were overrepresented as compared with men in both countries at each of the three time markers. In the United States, this relatively large surplus rapidly decreased as women increasingly entered the upper occupational stratum. In Israel, the surplus of women at middle levels was smaller than in the United States in the 1960s, but it remained stable overall and ended far larger around 2000. In other words, the massive transition of Jewish women from lower-level managerial and clerical to higher-level managerial and professional posts that we saw in the United States did not occur in Israel. By contrast, relatively few Jewish women were found at the lower occupational level, including crafts, operatives, and semi-skilled and unskilled laborers. These jobs were largely filled by men and, in fact, the relative gender gap in these male-dominated fields was growing all the time. The trends in the two countries were very similar in this regard. Overall, the occupational configuration of Jews in the United States is unique, although other Jewish populations are following more slowly on the same mobility path. In both Israel and the United States, gender-based occupational gaps have significantly decreased, but the processes in the two countries have differed significantly. The United States has held a leading position in terms of upwardly oriented occupational stratification and mobility, but Israel has retained a slight edge in terms of achieving gender parity in the allocation of higher-quality jobs requiring a more advanced academic background—at least according to the rough categorization presented here. One interesting aside in the study of social mobility concerns the relationship between occupational status and Jewish identification (Table 3). In the United States, this can be determined by examining the 2000–2001 National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS) data classified according to the respondents’ Jewish status.6 The definitions reported here reflect NJPS criteria and distinguish between three groups within Jewish households covered in the study: Jews; Persons of Jewish Background (PJBs), that is, men and women who do not define themselves as Jews but have at least partial Jewish ancestry; and non-Jews. Interesting occupational differences appear, 6 See Laurence A. Kotler-Berkowitz et al., National Jewish Population Survey 2000–01: Strength, Challenge and Diversity in the American Jewish Population (New York: United Jewish Communities, 2003).

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though the differences are much more visible educationally than occupationally. Jews in the United States tend to fare somewhat better than the PJBs and significantly better than non-Jewish members of Jewish households. These differences are more visible among men than among women and are mostly related to marriage patterns that will be discussed below. TABLE 3. OCCUPATIONAL STATUS OF U.S. JEWISH POPULATION, BY JEWISH STATUS (UNITED JEWISH COMMUNITIES DEFINITIONS) AND GENDER—2001—PERCENTAGES7 Occupational status

Jewish

PJBs

Non-Jewish

100

100

100

Upper

66

50

53

Middleb

32

41

29

2

9

8

100

100

100

Upper

67

57

45

Middleb

27

28

25

6

15

30

=

=

=

–1

-12

+18

Middle

+19

+46

+16

Lowerc

–67

–40

–73

Women Total a

Lower

c

Men Total a

Lower

c

Women % difference Total Upper

a b

Professionals, managers. Lower managerial, clerical, sales, services. c Crafts, operatives, unskilled laborers. a

b

Given the small size of the Jewish minority and its overwhelming concentration in the upper social and occupational strata, Jews who marry out of the Jewish community because they find a shortage of suitable partners within their own ethnoreligious and socio-occupational group or for other reasons tend to “marry down,” at least somewhat. This appears to be much truer for Jewish women marrying non-Jewish men than the other way around. An interesting result follows concerning the size and composition 7 Source: National Jewish Population Survey 2000–01 (author’s processing).

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Go to School, Work, Marry, Have Children, Be Jewish    SERGIO DELLAPERGOLA

of American Jewry. The greater Jewish community of Jews, PJBs, and their non-Jewish household members—sometimes referred to as the enlarged Jewish population—tends to be significantly less educated and less represented in professional and managerial occupations than the smaller core Jewish population. Expanding the definitional net leads to higher population estimates but carries strong lowering implications for the social profile of U.S. Jewry.

Marry Marriage once was a universal imperative, but the propensity for, and pace of, family formation have diminished in more developed societies. Table 4 compares the proportion of Jewish men and women ever married at different ages in the United States and Israel. TABLE 4. JEWS EVER MARRIED AT SELECTED AGES, BY GENDER, UNITED STATES AND ISRAEL—1970S TO 2000S—PERCENTAGES8 Age

1970s

1990s

2000s

Women Men Women % Women Men Women % Women Men Women % differencea differencea differencea United States 25–29

85

75

+13

61

35

+74

30–34

95

93

+2

76

66

+15

35–39

98

96

+2

89

83

+7

40–44

99

96

+3

88

85

+4

45–49

98

98

=

92

93

64

48

+33

85

74

+15

–1

90

90

=

Israel 25–29

88

73

+21

73

50

+46

61

40

+53

30–34

96

93

+3

89

78

+14

84

74

+14

35–39

98

97

+1

93

90

+3

90

88

+2

40–44

98

97

+1

94

95

–1

93

92

+1

45–49

98

97

+1

95

97

–2

94

94

=

a

Relative percent difference between figures for men and women in two previous columns.

8 Sources: Usiel Oscar Schmelz and Sergio DellaPergola, “The Demographic Consequences of U.S. Jewish Population Trends,” American Jewish Year Book 83 (1983): 141–87; National Jewish Population Survey 2000–01 (author’s processing); Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, Statistical Abstract of Israel, vol. 22 (Jerusalem: CBS, 1971); idem, Statistical Abstract of Israel, vol. 49; and idem, Statistical Abstract of Israel, vol. 57.

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Since women tend to marry younger than men, the proportion of women vs. men ever married is higher at younger ages, though men may eventually catch up. However, the overall proportion ever marrying has been affected by marriage postponement. The assumption that the rate ever married will catch up despite later marriages is not supported by the data. It will take time, but eventually rates of late singlehood, that is, after age forty, will tend to grow. In the United States in 1970, 10% of Jewish women and 16% of Jewish men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four were never married, as against 36% and 52%, respectively, in 2001. At ages forty-five to forty-nine, the respective percentages had increased from 2% to 10%—the same for both sexes. In Israel, the initial percentage never married at twenty-five to thirty-four years of age was 8% for women and 17% for men—hence, quite similar to U.S. Jewry—but in 2005 it was 27% and 43%, respectively, significantly lower than in the United States. At ages forty-five to forty-nine, the proportion never married increased from 2% for women and 3% for men in the 1970s to 6% for both sexes in 2005. Again, while nearly universal marriage was the norm among Jewish communities in past generations, the current data point to a diffusion of non-marriage that is more visible in the United States than in Israel. The decline and delay in the propensity to get formally married is widespread in modern society, the more so across the Jewish world. Despite this, resilience of more traditional marriage patterns is higher in Israel than in the United States. Young adults who are lagging behind in family formation will probably not be able to catch up in later adulthood. Among the many people who are not yet married at thirty-five or forty, it is unlikely that enough of them will marry between forty and fifty to close the gap with the marriage rates of previous generations. The proportion never married is bound to further increase, significantly affecting the composition of the Jewish population. Choice of partner is a fundamental aspect of marriage patterns and one that has been related to the debate over the influence of intermarriage on Jewish demography. In general, a growing share of those born Jewish marry spouses who were not born Jewish and are not currently Jewish. In this connection, it is interesting to examine the evolution of gender differentials, which have not been very consistent. In the past, exogamy was far more widespread among Jewish men than among Jewish women. Over the last decades, however, there developed a trend toward greater equality in

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marrying out, consistent with women’s narrowing lags in educational and occupational attainment. Women have gained access to opportunities for interaction with others on campus and in the workplace that are basically on par with those of men. In 1970, based on the first NJPS,9 there was a significant surplus of Jewish men marrying out (Table 5). By 1990, however, the lower propensity of women to intermarry had virtually disappeared and had even reversed itself, with slightly more women intermarrying than men. And yet, data from 2001 show that relative exogamy rates between the genders had, by that point, reverted to a more traditional pattern. In fact, among the younger age group, fewer Jewish women were intermarried than Jewish men. Attention should be paid to the general frequencies of exogamy. In the United States, taking all age groups together, Jewish adults with a currently non-Jewish partner comprised 5% of women and 9% of men in 1970, 28% for both genders in 1990, and 29% of women and 33% of men in 2001. The figure for both genders together in 2013 was 44%.10 The great shift in Jewish marriage patterns occurred before 1990, but the 2001 and later data demonstrate that it had not yet run its full course.

9 See Fred Massarik, “The Boundary of Jewishness: Some Measures of Jewish Identity in the United States,” in Papers in Jewish Demography 1973, ed. Usiel Oscar Schmelz, Paul Glikson, and Sergio DellaPergola (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1977), 117–39. 10 See Pew Research Center, A Portrait of Jewish Americans: Findings from a Pew Research Center Survey of U.S. Jews (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2013).

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TABLE 5. JEWISH-BORN MARRIED WITH CURRENTLY NON-JEWISH SPOUSE BY YEAR OF MARRIAGE AND AGE GROUPS, BY GENDER, UNITED STATES AND ISRAEL—1970S TO 2010S—PERCENTAGES Country, age, and year of marriage

Total married, 2001 Thereof by age: 18–34 35–54 55+ Total married, 1990b Thereof by year of marriage: 1981–1990b 1971–1980b 1961–1970b 1960–1971c 1950–1959c 1940–1949c 1930–1939c Before 1930c Total married, 1970/1971c a

Women

Men

Women % difference

United States 29

33

–12

37 37 16 28

47 37 24 28

–21

47 34 17 10 3 7 2 2 5

45 36 24 20 7 5 4 2 9

+7 –6 –29 –51 –63 +48 –61 +47 –42

3

4

–29

= –33 =

Israel Total married, 2008d

Calculation method excludes persons born Jewish and no longer Jewish at time of survey and hence underestimates Jewish exogamy.11 b Source: National Jewish Population Survey 1990 (author’s processing).12 c Source: National Jewish Population Study 1970/71 (author’s processing).13 d Source: Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, Israel population census (author’s processing).14 a

11 Table data adapted from Kotler-Berkowitz et al., National Jewish Population Survey 2000–01. 12 Table data adapted from Sergio DellaPergola, “New Data on Demography and Identification among Jews in the U.S.: Trends, Inconsistencies and Disagreements,” Contemporary Jewry 12 (1991): 67–97. 13 Table data adapted from Schmelz and DellaPergola, “The Demographic Consequences.” As can be seen in the table, the NJPS 1970/71 and the NJPS 1990 reported slightly different figures for the period between approximately 1960 and 1971, most likely due to sampling errors. Still, the conclusion that men tended to marry out more often than did women in those years remains the same in both surveys. 14 See Sergio DellaPergola, “Ethnoreligious Intermarriage in Israel: An Exploration of the 2008 Census,” Journal of Israeli History 36, no. 2 (2017): 149–70.

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Go to School, Work, Marry, Have Children, Be Jewish    SERGIO DELLAPERGOLA

In Israel, the incidence of exogamy among the veteran population, inasmuch as it would have meant marriages between Jews and Israeli Arabs, was extremely small, far below 1%. However, with the arrival since the 1990s of a substantial number of non-Jewish immigrants mostly from the former Soviet Union in the framework of the Law of Return, the share of nonJews in Jewish households has grown to over 5%, and men significantly outnumber women in current exogamy rates. Most intermarried couples living in Israel were married abroad before immigrating to the country. The relatively low rate of intermarriage in Israel stands today roughly where it did for Jews in the United States before or just after World War II.15 In the Diaspora, the rates of interaction between Jews and others and the acceptance of Jews into non-Jewish contexts historically used to be associated with upward mobility. Associating with people of higher social classes could lead to hypergamy,16 wherein the female members of the socially inferior group “marry up.” (The biblical case of Queen Esther marrying the king of Persia is a poignant example of this phenomenon.) From the point of view of the Jewish minority, which used to be ranked very low on the social scale, this mechanism of admission into the club of the more privileged meant that marrying out came to be seen as “marrying up.” With the growing acceptance of Jews into the leading mainstream, the situation changed significantly and men had more opportunities than women to marry out of the group of origin. At the same time, the social standing of Jews improved so that eventually they came to be considered one of the groups with the highest socioeconomic standing, if not necessarily universal social acceptance. This was true, however, only on average: significant socioeconomic gaps still prevailed within the Jewish population. Since the turning point of the 1990 NJPS, intermarriage appears again to be taking place more often between a man of higher social status (now a Jew) and a woman of lower social status (now a non-Jew). By the same token, it also appears that intermarriage has become more frequent among those Jews with lower educational achievement and fewer financial resources—in other words, those who are downwardly mobile.17 One possible explana15 See Sergio DellaPergola, “Jewish Out-Marriage: A Global Perspective,” in Jewish Intermarriage around the World, ed. Shulamit Reinharz and Sergio DellaPergola (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009), 13–39. 16 Robert K. Merton, “Intermarriage and the Social Structure: Fact and Theory,” Psychiatry 4, no. 3 (1941): 361–74. 17 The evidence in the United States goes back to the early 1990s; see DellaPergola, “New Data on Demography and Identification.”

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tion for this relates to the high costs of Jewish life. Those who cannot or will not allow themselves or their descendants to pay for Jewish schooling, membership in a Jewish Community Center or synagogue, or other forms of Jewish participation related to social and identificational distinctiveness because they are too costly may eventually disassociate themselves from the mainstream of the community. They may consequently more often interact with and choose to marry others who are less Jewishly identified or are straightforwardly non-Jewish. The high cost of Jewish life may thus be at the center of a two-way causation, while the direction of the relationship between socioeconomic status and the strength of a person’s Jewish identity—after controlling for religious community of affiliation—seems to have changed from an inverse to a direct one. Today, weakening of Jewish identity goes down the social ladder, while a stronger group identity may be maintained thanks to the resources available to those moving up the ladder.

Have Children The number of children born to Jewish women has probably become the most crucial factor in the Jewish population equation—whether headed toward growth or decline—and in determining the differential pace of change of different Jewish communities. We may compare current Jewish fertility rates in the United States and Israel based on recent data. Family growth obviously affects the genders differently given the radical variance in time allocation and personal constraints incurred by women vs. men in the reproduction process. The average numbers of children ever born reported in Table 6 refer to the entire female population, regardless of marital status. Arguably, only a minimal share of total fertility comes from unmarried Jewish women, although it can be presumed, based on the situation in Israel, that it will slowly grow, especially among unmarried women approaching the end of their reproductive years. In Israel in 2016, these births constituted about 4% of the total Jewish birthrate.18 Clearly, births to single mothers are still exceptional in Israel, contrary to what can be observed in most Western

18 Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, Statistical Abstract of Israel 2016 (Jerusalem: CBS, 2017).

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Go to School, Work, Marry, Have Children, Be Jewish    SERGIO DELLAPERGOLA

societies. Among the United States total population in 2016, they constituted 39.8% of all births (28.5% among non-Hispanic whites).19 TABLE 6. NUMBER OF CHILDREN EVER BORN BY AGE OF WOMEN, UNITED STATES AND ISRAEL—2000S20 Age

United States 2001

Israel 2005

18–24

0.13

..

25–29

0.59

1.07

30–34

1.04

2.05

35–39

1.38

2.69

40–49

1.86

3.43

There is a clear differential between fertility levels in the United States as compared with Israel. In the early 2000s, Jewish women in Israel up to the age of thirty already had one child on average—roughly double the performance of their peers in the United States. At the end of their reproductive lives, the last measurable generation of Israeli Jewish women had 3.4 children vs. 1.9 in the United States in 2001. The same level of 1.9 children ever born was observed among Jewish women aged forty to fifty-nine in 2013.21 Israel is still the only place in the Jewish world—and, in fact, the only place in the developed world—where the prevailing level of fertility stands significantly above generational replacement (2.1 children), not only in general, but even among the most secular of Israel’s Jews.22 It should be noted that in Israel, within these higher fertility norms and behaviors, the preferred number of children is higher for Jewish women than for Jewish men. It might be reasonable to infer that low Jewish fertility in the United States is a correlate of socioeconomic promotion patterns as manifest in high levels of academic training, high employment rates among both sexes, 19 Joyce A. Martin et al., “Births: Final Data for 2016,” National Vital Statistics Reports 67, no. 1 (January 31, 2018): 31 (Table 9). 20 Sources: Kotler-Berkowitz et al., National Jewish Population Survey 2000–01, and Sergio DellaPergola, “Actual, Intended, and Appropriate Family Size among Jews in Israel,” Contemporary Jewry 29, no. 2 (2009): 127–52. 21 Pew Research Center, A Portrait of Jewish Americans. 22 Sergio DellaPergola, “View from a Different Planet: Fertility Attitudes, Performances, and Policies among Jewish Israelis,” in Love, Marriage, and Jewish Families: Paradoxes of a Social Revolution, ed. Sylvia Barack Fishman (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2015), 123–50.

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and significant occupational achievement. However, the case of Jewish women in Israel puts the lie to this deduction, given that they manage to have larger families despite high participation in the labor force and substantially similar upward social mobility. After controlling for religiosity, in fact, fertility in Israel tends to be positively, not negatively, related to social status. This finding calls for reorienting the explanatory discussion of fertility rates towards its cultural, no less than its socioeconomic, determinants.23

Be Jewish Patterns of Jewish identity are strongly related to gender. Some of this is inherent in the asymmetric gender roles established by normative Judaism. But no less significant in this regard than gender are factors relating to how Judaism is perceived and experienced: as a religion, ethnicity, culture, site of memory, and/or hub of social networks. The relevance and centrality of each of these options can be quite different in a Jewish majority context, such as Israel, as compared with a Jewish minority context, such as the United States. In Table 7, selected indicators of Jewish identification are given for Jews in the United States and Israel, based on the Pew surveys of 2013 and 2015, respectively.24 Frequencies of adherence to each normative statement are presented by gender, and the women’s percentage difference vs. men is also indicated. Markers of Jewish religiosity and peoplehood are arrayed in descending order according to the frequency recorded among Jewish women in the United States. “Proud to be Jewish” obtains the highest consensus both in the United States (93%) and in Israel (94%), followed by “Feel strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people,” which appears much stronger in Israel. The Israelis are also stronger on “Very important to be Jewish,” “Believe in God: absolutely certain,” and—though marginally so—“Religion is very important in life.” By contrast, American Jews are stronger on “Have a special responsibility to take care of Jews elsewhere.” Still, the ranking of the different Jewish identification markers is basically the same overall in the two countries.

23 Ibid. 24 See Pew Research Center, A Portrait of Jewish Americans, and idem, Israel’s Religiously Divided Society: Deep Gulfs among Jews, as well as between Jews and Arabs, over Political Values and Religion’s Role in Public Life (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2015).

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Go to School, Work, Marry, Have Children, Be Jewish    SERGIO DELLAPERGOLA

TABLE 7. JEWS BY SELECTED INDICATORS OF JEWISHNESS, UNITED STATES AND ISRAEL—2013 AND 2015—PERCENTAGES Indicator

United States 2013

Israel 2015

Women Men Women % Women Men difference

Women % difference

Main markers of religiosity and peoplehood: Proud to be Jewish

94

94

=

93

93

=

Feel strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people

75

61

+23

89

87

+2

Have a special responsibility to take care of Jews elsewhere

64

76

–16

53

57

–7

Very important to be Jewish

49

42

+17

53

54

–2

Believe in God: absolutely certain

36

32

+13

47

53

–11

Religion is very important in life

29

22

+32

25

35

–29

Leading an ethical life

76

61

+25

47

47

=

Remembering the Holocaust

75

70

+7

67

62

+8

Working for justice and equality

62

51

+22

27

27

=

Being intellectually curious

53

45

+18

16

16

=

Caring about/living in Israel

46

39

+18

31

35

–11

Having a sense of humor

44

39

+13

9

9

=

Observing Jewish law

23

16

+44

31

38

–18

Eating Jewish food

17

12

+42

17

20

–15

Essential components of Jewish identity:

Turning to eight propositions that were suggested as essential components of one’s own Jewish identity, U.S. Jews declare higher frequencies than do Israeli Jews on most measures (“Leading an ethical life,” “Remembering the Holocaust,” “Working for justice and equality,” “Caring about/living in Israel,” as well as two allegedly Jewish character traits: “Being intellectually curious” and “Having a sense of humor”). The Israelis show higher propensities only regarding the importance of “Observing Jewish law” and “Eating Jewish food.” While the two most popular markers of Jewish identity—“Leading an ethical life” and “Remembering the Holocaust”—are the same in both countries, the two allegedly Jewish character traits, “Being intellectually curious” and “Having a sense of humor,” are not considered

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particularly relevant in Israel. These data can be summarized as follows: Israeli Jews are generally more involved in Jewish religion, peoplehood, and ethnicity, while U.S. Jews more often stress Jewish ethical values, communal solidarity, and personal character traits. Gender differentials in relation to the intensity of Jewish identification vary significantly between the two countries. In the United States, women display substantially higher levels of Jewish identification, as measured here—namely, with respect to religiosity and ethnicity—with the exception of one marker: “Have a special responsibility to take care of Jews elsewhere.” In Israel, by contrast, gender-based identificational differences are generally much smaller or nonexistent, again with one important exception: regarding the core of religious values, Jewish women in Israel stand significantly lower than Jewish men.25

Conclusion From the limited, yet wide-ranging, set of comparisons presented here on the changing position of Jewish women in Israel and the United States, the two largest Jewish communities worldwide, there emerge clear differences but also important similarities. The main differences seem to reflect the respective Jewish majority vs. minority contexts and the influences of these contexts on the cultural and structural determinants of demographic behaviors. Social and occupational opportunities in Israel are markedly distinct from, but also much more constrained than, those in U.S. Jewish communities. The latter enjoy the benefits of being integrated into the much larger total population of one of the most advanced economies in the Western world. At the same time, over the last fifty years, processes of social structural change have evolved in quite similar ways in the United States and Israel. Both countries share common features with the more advanced regions of an increasingly globalized socioeconomic system. The upward adaptation of the genders to these changing circumstances and opportunities has been quite similar, notwithstanding the different contexts of the two countries. In both cases, significant convergence has occurred in the opportunities enjoyed and in the achievements reached by Jewish women 25 See also Landon Schnabel, Conrad Hackett, and David McClendon, “Where Men Appear More Religious Than Women: Turning a Gender Lens on Religion in Israel,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 57, no. 1 (March 2018): 80–94.

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Go to School, Work, Marry, Have Children, Be Jewish    SERGIO DELLAPERGOLA

as compared with Jewish men. Over time, women have become increasingly visible among the Jewish population’s better-educated strata and have enjoyed a growing share of that population’s economic and mobility achievements. While this process has not yet adequately expressed itself in the public sphere and the persistence of unequal opportunities still hinders full gender parity, there have been encouraging signs of change of late.26 Differences in demographic patterns of marriage and fertility are striking, pointing to very distinct experiences and constraints for Jewish women in Israel and in the United States. Great variance emerges in Jewish family formation and growth, beginning with age at marriage and choice of partner: Israeli patterns are still much more influenced by traditional norms and lifestyles than are American ones. However, Israel’s population—with some time lags and internal variation—is following the prevailing transformations of family demographics in many Western societies, namely, later marriages, lower marriage rates, and a general expansion of the social framework within which marriage partners are chosen. Marriage patterns are meaningfully related to social mobility. Of course, judgment in this connection should be expressed with caution, but if marrying out also means “marrying down” in many cases, at some point incorporating many non-Jewish partners into the Jewish community, or at least next to its cultural periphery, might result in a lowering of the average socioeconomic status of the community as a whole. Expressions of Jewish identification at the personal and collective levels still vary significantly between the two countries. Earlier observations indicated that within these variations, gender was an important factor.27 Women played, and still play, the lead role in Jewish socialization and intergenerational transmission of Jewish values and norms, although this seems to be truer in the United States than in Israel. Women in the United States and in Israel occupy increasingly significant socioeconomic positions in society while continuing to take the bulk of responsibility for both the shorter- and longer-term continuity of Jewish 26 One small example may serve to illustrate this point. Since 1992, the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry (ASSJ) has annually granted the Marshall Sklare Award to a scholar in recognition of his or her distinguished career achievements. During the period 1992–2010, only two out of nineteen awardees (10.5%) were women: Celia Heller and Deborah Dash Moore. By contrast, during the period 2011–2018, four out of eight awardees (50%) were women: Riv-Ellen Prell, Sylvia Barack Fishman, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, and Judit Bokser Liwerant. 27 See DellaPergola, “Jewish Women in Transition.”

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life. From the general perspective of current sociodemographic and cultural developments among world Jewry, family-oriented Jewish community policies and investments may take their inspiration from the appreciation of what is common and what is different in these two major contexts of Jewish individual and community life. To be effective, however, policy interventions must be gender-sensitive and must allocate a greater share of power and decision-making to women. What is worth stressing is that, perhaps contrary to one’s intuitions, differing sociodemographic trends among Jews in the United States and in Israel respond to a common logic dictated by globalization and by the increasingly transnational character of socioeconomic and cultural processes. This reality supports the development not of two worlds apart, one diasporic and one Israeli, but rather of a single continuum where some communities stand a few steps ahead and others stand a few steps behind. At the same time, while identificational patterns may have followed similar paths in the past, more recently they have tended to diverge, with an Israeli emphasis on nationhood and an American orientation toward more universal values.28 In both cases, gender represents a critical and sensitive juncture of continuity and change, where mutual influences between the United States, Israel, and other countries with a Jewish presence can and do intensively occur.

28 See Sergio DellaPergola, Ariela Keysar, and Shlomit Levy, “Jewish Identification Differentials in Israel and in the United States: Similarity Structure Analysis,” Contemporary Jewry 39, no. 1 (March 2019): 53–90.

Eugene R. Sheppard, Brandeis University

The Day of Reckoning: Max Radin and the Rule of Law in International War Crimes

Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller is a restless thinker and leader constantly returning over and over again to a vast body of Jewish texts not for the sake of affirming or assaulting received opinion, but as part of a particularly compelling mode of assessing and reassessing many normative notions of Judaism, politics, ethics, and religion. His legendary Talmud seminars at UCLA during the mid-1990s allowed me to experience firsthand how, under the deft tutelage of a misplaced humanist Hasid, classical Rabbinic legal dialectics could become the perfect complement, if not perfect antidote, to my steady diet of continental philosophy, historiography, and ever-fledgling Marxist reading groups. For Chaim’s unquenchable exegetical thirst pushed him to engage, rather than explain away, the most vexing and disquieting aspects of the Jewish canon. He certainly paid the price more than a few times for running up against established Jewish institutional authority, and I, for one, have always admired him for never straying from the dictates of his intellectual, spiritual, and moral compass. In thinking of an appropriate essay for this volume, I knew I had to address a remarkable aspect of the career of another figure who came to make his mark on the University of California, Max Radin. Though not well known today, Radin was certainly an important personality in his own time. In addition to writing legal dictionaries and guidebooks to areas of American and Anglo-American law, his legal scholarship covered the historical expanse of ancient Greece and Rome, medieval Europe, and America in fields from business and family law to criminal

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procedure, questions of citizenship, competing claims of national and international law, as well as the roles of judges and lawyers themselves. He also wrote semi-scholarly histories of the Jewish past.1 But for our purposes, it is striking to note his tireless efforts on behalf of the most vulnerable and despised figures in America during the first half of the twentieth century, populations subjected to the coercive American administrative and criminal apparatus: migrant workers, Japanese Americans, Communists, and African Americans in the southern states. He also wrote hundreds of letters to American law schools and universities attempting to secure refuge for European scholars who fell under existential threat during the 1930s and 1940s.2

Career of a Consummate Legal Scholar Born in 1880 in Kempen in Posen (present-day Kępno, Poland), Max Radin came to the United States at the age of four. His father, Adolph M. Radin, was a noted rabbi of the People’s Synagogue of the Educational Alliance (located on the corner of East Broadway and Jefferson Street).3 Max graduated City College of New York in 1899, taught high school, and earned his law degree from New York University in 1902. He then practiced law to support his doctoral studies in classical philology at Columbia University, which he completed in 1909. He also financially supported his brother Paul Radin’s pioneering anthropological-ethnographic studies of the Native American Winnebago Tribe of the Great Lakes during this time. The University of California, Berkeley’s School of Jurisprudence, which later became Boalt Hall (now Berkeley Law), hired Max Radin in 1919. He taught Roman law and legal history, comparative law, legal ethics, bankruptcy law, and common law at the University of California until his retirement in 1948.4 1 Max Radin, The Jews among the Greeks and Romans (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1915); idem, The Life of the People in Biblical Times (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1929); and idem, The Trial of Jesus of Nazareth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931). 2 Max Radin, Cartas romanísticas (1923–1950), ed. Carlos Petit (Naples: Jovene, 2001). See also Richard Hyland’s review in The American Journal of Comparative Law 51, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 457–70. I thank Courtney Booker for bringing this impassioned and heart-wrenching review to my attention. 3 Anon., “25,000 at Funeral of Rabbi A. M. Radin,” New York Times (February 8, 1909): 8. 4 See William O. Douglas, “Max Radin,” California Law Review 36, no. 2 (June 1948): 163–65, and A. M. Kidd, “Max Radin,” California Law Review 38, no. 5 (December 1950): 795–98.

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Max Radin and the Rule of Law in International War Crimes     EUGENE R. SHEPPARD

Radin challenged many of the fixed, inflexible, and increasingly outof-touch strictures of American jurisprudence when it came to adjudicating conflicts in real-world situations. Starting in 1924, he became engaged in the legal defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, the first of many criminal cases in which he interceded that involved immigrant and/or politically radical defendants who would not otherwise have received their rights to due process and fair and equal treatment under the law. By 1927, Radin had become known as a leading exponent of Legal Realism and by 1930 had established himself as an innovative theorist of statute interpretation.5 He continued to offer legal assistance to embattled Hollywood workers during the early Communist witch-hunts, as well as to dock workers and migrant farmworkers. Radin’s stature was such that his confidants included sitting members of the U.S. Supreme Court. Benjamin N. Cardozo’s letters to him opened “Dear and omniscient friend.” Felix Frankfurter and William O. Douglas regularly sought his counsel. While serving on the Ninth Circuit Court, Douglas dispensed with vetting his clerks himself and instead relied solely on Radin’s recommendations, a practice that continued when Douglas rose to the Supreme Court. Thurgood Marshall collaborated with Radin several times throughout the 1930s and 1940s when racial discrimination intersected with criminal legal procedure. Radin also developed an epistolary friendship with Orson Welles and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whom he had met in Paris. On a scholarly level, in 1957, Ernst Kantorowicz dedicated his magnum opus, The King’s Two Bodies, to Radin, his departed friend and colleague. Kantorowicz famously opens his book with an account of the origins of the project linked to a liturgical journal published by an American Benedictine Abbey that identified itself with the legal status “Inc.” How was it that a sacral order could have been identified via the economic legal marker of a corporation? A long discussion with Radin ensued, tracing the legal and metaphysical twists and turns that lay at the heart of that most bewildering 5 Radin’s essay, “Statutory Interpretation,” Harvard Law Review 43, no. 6 (April 1930): 863–85, is often discussed. See, among many others, Patrick O. Gudridge, “Legislation in Legal Imagination: Introductory Exercises,” University of Miami Law Review 37 (1983): 498; Richard A. Posner, “What Has Pragmatism to Offer to Law?,” Southern California Law Review 63 (1990): 1658; William N. Eskridge, “Interpretation of Statutes,” in A Companion to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory, ed. Dennis Patterson (Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 200; and William D. Popkin, Statutes in Court: The History and Theory of Statutory Interpretation (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 145.

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of legal fictions, incorporation: the separation between a royal body natural and eternal. The first is subject to every type of human and worldly imperfection and temporal limitation, while the dignity of the latter transcends all such constraints.6 Radin publicly criticized the internment of Japanese Americans, which for him constituted a shameful and intolerable trampling of the Bill of Rights. His support of union leaders in the mid-1930s prompted the district attorney of Stanislaus County to accuse him of engaging in Communist activities and to demand that Berkeley’s President Robert Gordon Sproul expel Radin from the university. Governor Culbert Olson instead nominated Radin to the California Supreme Court in the summer of 1940, but Earl Warren, the state’s attorney general and a member of the Judicial Qualifications Commission, blocked Radin’s confirmation. Warren’s official grounds were that Radin did not offer testimony regarding his political beliefs, thereby demonstrating a lack of judicial temperament. However, the reality may be more complicated; Radin had been critical of what he viewed as Warren’s overly zealous prosecution of immigrant workers in the 1936 Point Lobos case, in which the defendants were ultimately acquitted.7 Radin would soon have a disagreement with a federal Supreme Court justice, Robert H. Jackson, who served as Chief of the Counsel for the United States during the Trial of the Major War Criminals held before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg, beginning on November 19, 1945.

6 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), xxxiii–xxxiv. Kantorowicz was just one of many European refugee scholars to be appointed to a position in the United States; in this case, it was at Radin’s home institution of Berkeley. After retiring from Berkeley in 1948, Radin joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton from 1949 until his death in June of 1950. Following Kantorowicz’s dismissal from Berkeley during the Loyalty Oath Controversy of 1949–1951, he spent the rest of his career at the Institute for Advanced Study as a faculty member in the School of Historical Studies (1951– 1963). See Robert E. Lerner’s excellent biography, Ernst Kantorowicz: A Life (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017), ch. 24, for an account of this legendary discussion about legal theories of incorporation. 7 Kevin Starr, Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 256.

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Max Radin and the Rule of Law in International War Crimes     EUGENE R. SHEPPARD

The Day of Reckoning Over the last decade, there have been sea-changes in the scholarly assessment of two phenomena: American Jewish and non-Jewish awareness of the systematic mass violence perpetrated against European Jews, as well as postwar attempts to hold accountable Nazi perpetrators and their collaborators.8 It is now all but universally accepted that consciousness of the catastrophic magnitude of Nazi war crimes was widespread well before the war’s end in Europe, even though many specific details and methods of extermination had not yet come to light. In February 1944, Columbia Pictures released a film, None Shall Escape, which frames the trial of Wilhelm Grimm, a fictional Nazi officer, in front of an imagined postwar international tribunal.9 This remarkable film did not have any commercial success and has, until recently, largely gone unnoticed. But None Shall Escape was not the only American attempt to imagine how Nazi wartime criminal actions might come before a court of law following the defeat of the Nazi enemy. Max Radin wrote extensively about how Nazi war crimes might be addressed upon the war’s conclusion. Although, as an academic, he left several marks on American jurisprudence, the question of how to try Nazi criminals sheds special light on his principled commitment to adherence to the legitimate rule of law so that the processes of criminal justice not devolve into mere vengeance or spectacles of victor’s justice. Public and private discussions of this issue arose in the wake of an international conference held at St. James’s Palace, London, in January 1942. In the midst of the war, several Allied statements called for an international tribunal tasked with prosecuting criminals. But these rather loose discussions acquired a surprising new focus when, in 1943, Max Radin published The Day of Reckoning, a dramatic play/novel that imagined how such an international tribunal might run and the potential legal, political, and 8 See Hasia R. Diner’s excellent treatment of the widespread efforts of American Jews to memorialize European Jewry after the war: We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York; London: New York University Press, 2009). 9 The filming took place on a backlot of Columbia Pictures in 1943. The original story was co-written by Alfred Neumann and Joseph Than and was nominated for an Academy Award. For a critical account of the making and forgotten legacy of this stunning war film, see Thomas Doherty, “‘None Shall Escape,’ Hollywood’s First Holocaust Film, Was All but Unknown for 70 Years. Now It’s Been Rediscovered,” Tablet Magazine (November 1, 2016), accessed March 1, 2019, http://www.tabletmag.com/ jewish-arts-and-culture/216380/none-shall-escape.

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moral controversies connected with such a venture.10 The book deserves special attention as it opens a window onto how a noted legal scholar saw the mechanisms of a criminal trial of the Nazi leadership, even before the Allies had ratified a commitment to prosecute Axis war criminals as part of the Moscow Declarations on October 30, 1943. The work is all the more remarkable when placed in relief against Radin’s extraordinary career as a scholar, jurist, and historian of phenomenal range. Radin’s novel opens in 1945 at the Palais de Justice in Luxembourg after the Allies had won the war and occupied the Third Reich. An Extraordinary International Commission is tasked with trying the surviving Nazi hierarchy, including Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, Funk, Gastein, Milch, and Ribbentrop (Göring had been killed by an Allied bomb). Speaking through the Minister of Justice of Luxembourg Count de Brock, who presides over the trial, Radin weighs in on whether to charge these seven defendants with crimes against the peace: They are accused of having violated specific duties which fundamental laws of civilized society impose on all men, always, even in war. . . . These seven men are charged, I say, with specific and definite acts. . . . In this trial they will be dealt with as though they were unknown men accused of simple violations of a penal code. The fact that only recently they and their judges were members of states at war with one another will play no part in the decision. . . . It is not their opinions or their writings that are on trial, but their acts [12–13].

These seven are charged, not with a war of aggression, but with individual acts of murder of ordinary people in countries invaded by Germany: Jacques Dubosque, a hostage shot in Paris; Ian Nepomuk Studicka, hanged for insubordination in Pilsen; and Joseph Kolinsky, a Jewish soldier in the Red Army, beaten and bayoneted to death as a prisoner of war. At issue at each point in the trial is the assessment of individual criminal acts against specific individuals of other countries. This strategy of prosecuting war crimes allows for existing legal definitions of criminal behavior to operate and avoids imposing criminality ex post facto on actions—for example, initiating a war of aggression— which were not deemed illegal at the time of their commission. Moreover, using this strategy allows that standards of evidence and procedure relate to specific actions, rather than to a mass of collective violence. Thus, Radin’s 10 Max Radin, The Day of Reckoning (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943).

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Max Radin and the Rule of Law in International War Crimes     EUGENE R. SHEPPARD

view of the trial of Nazi leaders would not require—nay, actively excluded— testimony from historians, since such testimony was not pertinent to the specific acts of criminal violence at hand. Radin’s imagined trial therefore explicitly intended to treat war criminals by ordinary legal standards so that judicial procedure could retain its integrity even when those being prosecuted were the enemies of mankind. Moreover, it had the advantage that the victims of these crimes could regain their humanity as well, since individual identities were here restored to the criminal process.11 Most spectators and reporters in the imagined audience of the trial presupposed that the defendants were to be tried as “monstrous criminals” who had committed unspeakable offenses against “God and man in a way never before known, worse than the mad Caligula or the vicious Nero, worse than the sadistic despots of the Italian Renaissance. These men, unlike even Nero, were the enemies of all civilization as well as of all humanity” (68). These words could have been taken, of course, from Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, published twenty years later. The initial reaction to hearing the charges of “three single offenses, three little puny murders of unimportant and insignificant persons,” was one of having been cheated: What were these things compared with what could really be charged against Hitler, Goebbels, and their fellows, compared with the rape of Austria, of Czechoslovakia, of Poland, Denmark, and Norway, with the slaughter of civilians in Rotterdam, with the massacre of Lidice, the shooting of hostages by platoons, the systematic starvation of Greece, the methodical coldblooded murder of millions of Jews! What was it compared with the horrors of Dachau or any other concentration camp? . . .

11 This commitment on Radin’s part can be seen in his earlier domestic legal interventions such as “Enemies of Society,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 27, no. 3 (September–October 1936): 328–56. In this earlier piece, Radin deconstructs the ways in which the designation “enemies of society” constitutes a distorted projection of extralegal, moral, political, and religious passions and anxieties onto a group of people who then come to be seen as figures who are no longer considered to be eligible for normal protections under the law. He then compares the modern construction of this exceptional criminal category to Roman and Greek understandings. Those ancient conceptions attached no lasting moral animus to the “enemy of society” once he had received a punishment such as exile. In the modern case, for Radin, the normal rule of law under modern sovereign conditions is suspended when human beings are accused of specific crimes or suspected of presenting a moral and existential threat to state and society; the group bearing this designation could range from serial murderers on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list to political radicals such as Communists and anarchists.

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And yet it somehow appeared that these monstrous crimes were on too vast a scale to come within human justice as applied to individuals, even the individuals who had caused or occasioned them. They were the crimes of Lucifer, punishable by a kind of hell which human punishment could not create or fathom. It was all well enough to think of the defendants as supercriminals, super-murderers, vast and enormous evil beings, whose presence in this Court was little less than a plague. One could think that when they were names in books or papers, almost depersonalized except as objects of cosmic vituperation [68–69].

However, Radin, the jurist and historian, saw the need to cast the defendants as common criminals. For when the defendants appeared as all-too-ordinary suspects accused of concrete, specific criminal actions, “the huge scale of their crimes seemed somehow not to fit these very ordinary bodies” (69). Seeing these figures measured by ordinary standards of criminality took away the grandiosity of their standing as world historical actors: Not horror and rage and indignation, but a kind of disgust and contempt filled the minds of the audience when the seven walked in without dignity or impressiveness, the flat face of Funk, the jowls of the sullen Milch, Ribbentrop’s shifty eyes and foolishly pursed lips, the caricature of a goblin that was Goebbels, and the half terror-stricken, half arrogant glare on the face of Hitler himself.  .  .  . Stripped of their vast powers, they turned out to be ordinary thugs, men whose punishment should be proportioned to their persons. Instead of Adolf Hitler and Paul Josef Goebbels, they were Bill Sykes or Jack the Ripper or John Dillinger [69–70].12

In the course of the Luxembourg trial, there was an attempted assassination of the defendants by means of a bomb. This attempt spoke to the popular desire for extralegal vengeance against the accused. Beyond this feeble dramatic ploy, the plot of the novel is not exactly a nail-biter; the defendants are found guilty and sentenced to death. Radin’s final brief chapter offers an Associated Press description of the method of execution: “The execution had been carried out by administering cyanide gas. Whether this had taken place in a lethal chamber or otherwise was not disclosed” (144).

12 Later on in the book, the defense attorney, Dr. Scheering, raises the objection that they were disingenuously charged as “simple malefactors” when they were in fact seen as “the hated rulers of a defeated enemy nation” (109).

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Max Radin and the Rule of Law in International War Crimes     EUGENE R. SHEPPARD

Reaction and Controversy Among the notable readers of The Day of Reckoning were three sitting justices of the U.S. Supreme Court: Felix Frankfurter, William O. Douglas, and Robert H. Jackson. The book was reviewed in The Nation and in several law review and political science journals.13 The most substantive review was penned by Carl Friedrich for the Harvard Law Review.14 As Udi Greenberg points out, Friedrich was a key ideological guiding force from Harvard University’s Department of Government in the neoliberal articulation of the justification for U.S. Cold War foreign policy.15 Friedrich’s largely positive assessment nevertheless criticized Radin’s decision to have an international tribunal outside of Germany try the Nazi regime leaders with normal, common crimes against individuals who resided elsewhere, rather than with war crimes. For Friedrich, such a trial had to serve a didactic function, to judge publicly and hold accountable those criminals who wrought such wreckage against their own country and other victim nations. Radin’s imagined trial, as well as Friedrich’s critique of the prosecution’s constraints and strategy, anticipated later debates over the formal procedural grounds for trial as well as the prosecution’s changing tactical points of emphasis. Similarly, Justice Jackson argued for charging the Nazi leadership with initiating a war of aggression. In May 1945, following an earlier discussion, he wrote to his then-friend “Max.” The contents of the earlier discussion are not known, but Jackson’s letter quickly moves to the pragmatic problem of mounting an effective prosecution against Nazi war criminals: I really believe we can do something towards cultivating a greater sense of responsibility on the part of those who would resort to war as a policy. I do not expect that we can accomplish all that we would desire. I am, however, sure that unless the effort is made now, we might as well stop talking about 13 Rustem Vambery, “War Criminals,” The Nation 157, no. 15 (October 9, 1943): 413– 14; John K. Hagopian, “The Day of Reckoning—A Review,” Journal of the State Bar of California 19, no. 1 (January–February 1944): 51–56. 14 Harvard Law Review 56, no. 8 (July 1943): 1338–43. 15 See Udi Greenberg’s The Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), which offers an excellent account of how figures such as Friedrich had a fundamental impact on American geopolitical thought and approaches to the post-World War II occupations and reconstructions of defeated Axis powers, particularly Germany. See especially ch. 1 for the focus on Friedrich’s career.

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war criminals and the crime of making aggressive war and all that goes with it in the Nazi book.

Jackson closes the letter cordially, thanking Radin for “the good cheer,” and signs “Sincerely yours, Bob.”16 About a year later, Radin published an article that took stock of the unfolding International Military Tribunal and the trial of (at that point) twenty-three defendants who were classified as leading figures of the vanquished Third Reich.17 He carefully detailed the principles under international law by which the Allied Powers paradoxically justified these “unprecedented” proceedings. Radin’s piece provoked a great controversy, especially with his searing criticisms of Jackson, who ultimately chose to frame most of the prosecution in terms of “crimes against the peace”—a strategy Radin considered as amounting to victor’s justice. Radin expanded his polemic in a review of Jackson’s various public remarks regarding “the case against the Nazi war criminals” that appeared in Commentary the following month.18

Enduring Significance While The Day of Reckoning’s literary value may be limited,19 Radin’s hypothetical speculation about the near future, a forward-looking narrative of how events might play themselves out, addressed fundamental controversies relevant not only to the Nuremberg IMT, but also to subsequent 16 Robert H. Jackson, letter to Max Radin, May 15, 1945. The missive, written on the letterhead of the chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States, is held in the Max Radin papers, Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, Call # 76/165c, Carton 1. 17 Max Radin, “Justice at Nuremberg,” Foreign Affairs 24, no. 3 (April 1946): 369–84. 18 Idem, “Nuremberg’s New Precedents,” Commentary 1, no. 7 (May 1946): 92–94, a review of Jackson’s The Case against the Nazi War Criminals: Opening Statement for the United States of America (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1946). Other prominent critics of the IMT included Edwin Borchard, Leo Gross, Erich Hula, Franz Schick, and George Finch; see the discussion in Kirsten Sellars, ‘Crimes against Peace’ and International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 136–37. 19 Only one Hollywood talent agency, John McCormick, attempted to sell the film rights to Radin’s book. See William Herndon’s letter to Radin, delivered via the publisher Alfred A. Knopf on April 16, 1943, in which he sought representation for a movie based on the novel (Max Radin papers, Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, Call # 76/165c, Carton 1). Radin received several other letters in response to the novel as well, but most of these were written by lawyers and academics.

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Max Radin and the Rule of Law in International War Crimes     EUGENE R. SHEPPARD

prosecutions of alleged Nazi criminals and other war criminals up to the present. He anticipated numerous legal and political dilemmas bound up in trying Nazi leadership before an international tribunal at war’s end, as well as more general questions regarding the didactic function of such a trial and the role of testimony by victims, eyewitnesses, and historians as experts. Indeed, his book, and its public and private reception by scholars, judges, prosecutors, political theorists, and government lawyers, raised central questions that resurfaced during the actual postwar military tribunal: Should crimes be conceptualized according to the specific national and religious identities of the victims? Why must recognizable norms of procedural fairness be adhered to, rather than simply providing summary judgment followed by execution of the defeated culprits? Which tribunal should have jurisdiction to conduct such a trial prosecuting the crimes of a defeated regime? How and when are individual leaders to be held accountable for specific crimes? These questions underlay a more fundamental concern about the political aims and legitimacy of conducting such a trial to begin with. Radin’s work thus offered an astoundingly prescient preview of the legal, political, and historical debates that would arise before, during, and after Nuremberg. In Radin’s considered opinion, the purpose of establishing the postwar tribunal was not for the sake of either the victims or the perpetrators, but in the hope of developing a recognized rule of law that ensured humane treatment across national borders. This broadly internationalist perspective on the use of criminal procedure ultimately came into conflict with emerging Cold War-era conceptions of American foreign policy. In affirming and defending his own unique position in the face of high-profile opposition, Radin the maverick truly exemplified the principle of “swimming against the current” for which the present honoree is so well known.

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Deborah E. Lipstadt, Emory University

Antisemitism: Reflections and Ruminations*

This essay is written in honor of my friend of many years, Chaim SeidlerFeller, whose professional and personal passion encompasses everything that concerns Jewish tradition and the Jewish people. It is the essence of who he is. Ranking high among his passions is the wellbeing of innumerable generations of students whom he has nurtured. He has imparted to them his love for his heritage, even as he has tried to help them make sense of its challenging aspects. I write for Chaim’s students and my own. Many among them seek an explanation for antisemitism. “Why,” they wonder, “this hatred? Why is someone antisemitic?” What follows is my modest attempt to help them make sense of a matter that increasingly vexes. But I write not just for students, for they are not alone in being confused, if not dumbfounded, by what has been properly dubbed “the longest hatred.”1 On some level, it might be strange that we are still grappling with this issue. In the years following the Shoah, some observers believed that Jew hatred would no longer be a problem. Typical of this view was the observation of the French Catholic writer Georges Bernanos that “Hitler has discredited antisemitism, once and for all.”2 How could any thinking person Parts of this article are adapted from my book, Antisemitism Here and Now (New York: Schocken, 2019). 1 Robert S. Wistrich, Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991). 2 Georges Bernanos, Le Chemin de la Croix-des-Âmes (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), as quoted in Bruno Chaouat, “Antisemitism Redux: On Literary and Theoretical Perversion,” in Resurgent Antisemitism: Global Perspectives, ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013), 122. *

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wish to be associated with an ideology that had resulted in the deaths of millions? Sadly, today, while there are still survivors (and perpetrators) among us, we now know that this was wishful thinking. Antisemitism is alive and well. In this essay, I shall offer some reflections and ruminations upon both the antisemite and antisemitism.

Distorting Views of the Antisemite and Antisemitism One might think that, given the long history of antisemitism, there would be no trouble in identifying antisemites; we should be able to spot them easily. And yet, particularly in the wake of the genocidal effort to wipe out the Jewish people, picking out the antisemites has become more, not less, difficult. It has become so because people make a fundamental mistake about the antisemite. Since World War II, for many people “Hitler” has become the template of the archetypical antisemite. If someone does not present as a “Hitler” or a group does not present as “Nazis,” we often fail to recognize him, her, or them as antisemites. But to be an antisemite, one need not be a Hitler or Nazi equivalent. Of course, the ugliest and most dangerous of antisemites were and remain those who would engage in murderous or genocidal actions, and Hitler and his henchmen were the ultimate examples of this. Far more common nowadays, however, are those who hide their contempt for Jews behind a set of predictable pieties: “We abhor Hitler. We abhor what he did. We intend no physical harm to any Jew.” They may say all of that with perfect sincerity and yet be antisemites. Today, in other words, we are much more likely to encounter non-genocidal, Hitlerhating antisemites. We are often beguiled by them for they know how to camouflage their antisemitism. They even try to turn the tables on those who would accuse them of antisemitism, arguing that their accusers are seeing things that are not there and using the accusation of antisemitism as a means to smear them. This tendency to fail to recognize less extreme manifestations of antisemitism for what they are has been particularly evident on the left or more liberal end of the political spectrum. For example, when United Kingdom Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn was criticized for supporting Holocaust deniers and praising the work of Hezbollah, Hamas, and overt antisemites, one of his ardent supporters, the British trade unionist Len McCluskey, dismissed the charges of antisemitism against Corbyn as “mood music” designed to undermine the Labour leader. Another backer, the filmmaker

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Ken Loach, told the BBC that he could not condemn Holocaust denial because “history is for us all to discuss.”3 But this problem has a flip or converse side that is equally significant. There is an all-too-quick tendency, particularly among Jews, to brand actions, which may well be antisemitic, and individuals, who may well be antisemites, as harbingers of a Holocaust or the equivalent of a “Hitler.” There is a loss of proportion. Not every act of antisemitism means a genocide is coming. This kind of hyperbolic reaction was on display when a Los Angeles rabbi declared the college campus-based BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement to be “no different than the Nazis of the 1920s and 1930s who created a myth that all Jews were guilty of insidious crimes against the international community, and were intent on world domination.”4 The BDS movement may, at its foundational core, be antisemitic, but to compare it to the Nazis is to both diminish the Nazis’ heinous acts of antisemitism and to aggrandize the wrongs of BDS. Similarly, a lawyer working with segments of the Jewish community depicted the anti-Israel activities at a number of University of California campuses as reminiscent of the “incitement, intimidation, harassment and violence carried out under the Nazi regime . . . during the turbulent years leading up to and including the Holocaust.”5 As difficult as the situation of some students may be, it does not compare in any manner to what Jewish students faced during the Nazi regime. In fact, at one of the University of 3 Tom Moseley, “Labour MP Shocked by ‘1930s’ Anti-Semitism,” BBC News (September 25, 2017), accessed March 1, 2019, http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-41394265; Jonathan Freedland, “Labour’s Denial of Antisemitism in its Ranks Leaves the Party in a Dark Place,” The Guardian (September 27, 2017), accessed March 1, 2019, https://www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/27/labour-denial-antisemitism-party-darkplace; Yair Rosenberg, “This BBC Interview Perfectly Illustrates Britain’s Left-Wing Anti-Semitism Problem,” Tablet Magazine (September 26, 2017), accessed March 1, 2019, http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/245953/this-anti-semitic-bbc-interviewperfectly-illustrates-britains-left-wing-anti-semitism-problem; Robert Fisk, “‘Malicious Intent’: Jeremy Corbyn Supporting Hard-Left Campaign Group Refuses to Kick out Activist Jackie Walker over Holocaust Comments,” The Sun (October 4, 2016), accessed March 1, 2019, https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/1908519/jeremy-corbyn-supportinghard-left-campaign-group-refuses-to-kick-out-activist-jackie-walker-over-holocaustcomments/. 4 Pini Dunner, “BDS Is Not Pro-Palestinian, It’s Anti-Semitic,” Jewish Journal (August 25, 2015), accessed March 1, 2019, http://jewishjournal.com/opinion/177014/. 5 Neal Sher, interviewed by Jamie Glazov, “Berkeley on Trial over Jewish Student’s Assault,” FrontPage Mag (March 7, 2011), accessed March 1, 2019, http://www.frontpagemag. com/fpm/86968/berkeley-trial-over-jewish-students-assault-jamie-glazov.

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California campuses, student leaders of pro-Israel organizations vigorously complained about the tendency in the broader Jewish community to depict their school as a “deeply hostile” and “scary” place for Jewish students. They attributed the negative characterization of their school to “the parents and the community” who did not see, or chose not to take into consideration, the totality of campus Jewish life. They contended that the attempt by off-campus Jewish groups to cast their campus in a totally negative light “makes it look like we’re subject to something that is really not happening” and ignored the vast array of positive aspects of campus Jewish life. While the students did not diminish the problems they faced, they balked at the negative becoming emblematic of the sum total of their college experiences.6 I am not suggesting that we should not be vigilant about all forms of antisemitism, but if we react in a hyperbolic fashion to “more minor” expressions of antisemitism, we become like the boy who cried wolf and lose our clout when more serious instances do occur. This tendency to unduly magnify the antisemitism of an individual or event has been particularly evident on the right or more conservative end of the political spectrum, especially when its adherents are judging those on the left. The failure to recognize that the antisemite comes in many forms, not just genocidal ones, and the tendency to react to relatively minor developments as if they were harbingers of a coming catastrophe make it more difficult to address this problem in a strategic and efficacious manner.

Recognizing Antisemitism Instinctively There are those who argue that it is superfluous to try to come up with a “scientific” definition of antisemitism. This is certainly so, these pundits argue, for Jews, for whom the recognition of antisemitism is “implanted” in their bones. (The same might be said of other groups that have experienced long-term oppression, such as African Americans and homosexuals.) This approach might be compared to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous 1964 ruling. The court had to determine whether Louis Malle’s film, The Lovers, was obscene and, according to the law at the 6 Rambod Peykar and Simon Aftalion, quoted by Michelle Goldberg, “University of California at Irvine,” in Constructing Campus Conflict: Antisemitism and Islamophobia on U.S. College Campuses, 2007–2011, ed. Chip Berlet, Debra Cash, and Maria Planansky (Sommerville, MA: Political Research Associates, 2014), 61–62.

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time, beyond the bounds of protected speech. Stewart, in ruling that the material in question was not obscene, explained his decision by formulating what has become one of the most famous phrases in Supreme Court history: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [‘hard core pornography’], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”7 We should be grateful to Stewart for expanding the boundaries of free speech and artistic expression and for giving us this highly utilitarian concept. Sometimes, we cannot define something in a precise and scientific fashion, but we know it when we see it. A similar, though slightly less elegant formulation, is “Click!” This notion was introduced in the first issue of Ms. magazine, the publication that helped launch the women’s movement. In her pivotal article, Jane O’Reilly narrated various moments when women recognized that they had been subjected to sexist discrimination.8 For example, women in the corporate world often describe being gathered around a table with their colleagues in an attempt to find a solution to a vexing problem. A woman at the table will make a proposal that is not taken up by the group. A few minutes later, a male colleague might propose the same thing without indicating that he is reiterating her idea. She watches dumbfounded as her proposal is enthusiastically discussed without anyone acknowledging or possibly even noticing that she is the one who originally brought it to the table. O’Reilly dubbed such moments of recognition “Click!” If the woman who had proposed the idea would claim credit for it, her colleagues would be completely befuddled by her complaints. They might call her petty, overly sensitive, and even a bit paranoid, when, in fact, they are oblivious—possibly willfully so—to what has happened. Just like Justice Stewart who could not define something but knew it when he saw it or the woman at the conference table whose proposal was initially ignored but was later adopted when proposed by a man, Jews often recognize antisemitic sentiments even if they are wrapped in seemingly friendly veneers. 7 Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964), at p. 197 (Stewart, P., concurring) (emphasis mine). 8 Jane O’Reilly, “The Housewife’s Moment of Truth,” New York (December 20, 1971), accessed March 1, 2019, http://nymag.com/news/features/46167/. (Ms. originally appeared as a forty-page insert in New York magazine.)

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Antisemitism: Reflections and Ruminations     DEBORAH E. LIPSTADT

The Building Blocks of Antisemitism However, “knowing it when you see it” and “Click!” only work if we can identify antisemitism’s essential elements, its building blocks. If you cannot define something, you cannot address or fight it. The European Forum on Antisemitism offers a definition that may constitute a starting point in that effort: “[A] certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”9 This definition properly reminds us that antisemitism can encompass not just action, but speech as well. Too often, reports of incidents of antisemitism are limited to actions, but that distorts the true picture. Similarly, there are those who only consider something to be antisemitic when it is directed at Jews. But non-Jews can be victimized by antisemitism, too. The legendary American author Arthur Miller illustrated just such a situation in Focus, one of his earliest novels, which tells the story of a man who, suffering from blurred vision, begins to wear glasses. As soon as he does, his bosses and neighbors decide, based on his “new look,” that he must be Jewish. He is then subjected to prejudice at the office and physical violence in his neighborhood.10 The historical sociologist Helen Fein includes in her definition some additional important elements absent from the European Forum’s: [A] persisting latent structure of hostile beliefs toward Jews as a collectivity manifested in individuals as attitudes, and in culture as myth, ideology, folklore, and imagery, and in actions—social or legal discrimination, political mobilization against the Jews, and collective or state violence—which results in and/or is designed to distance, displace, or destroy Jews as Jews.11

Note the operative words here. Persisting: it does not go away; it continues; it is not a onetime event. Though it persists, it may not, however, always look the same. It is not unlike a staph infection: medication may seem to 9 European Forum on Antisemitism, “Working Definition of Antisemitism,” accessed March 1, 2019, https://european-forum-on-antisemitism.org (emphasis mine). 10 Arthur Miller, Focus (New York: Penguin Books, 1984). 11 Helen Fein, “Dimensions of Antisemitism: Attitudes, Collective Accusations, and Actions,” in The Persisting Question: Sociological Perspectives and Social Contexts of Modern Antisemitism, ed. Helen Fein (Berlin; New York: De Gruyter, 1987), 67 (emphasis in the original).

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cure it, but, in fact, it lies dormant and may reemerge, perhaps in a different part of the body, at an opportune moment. It is the same infection but in a new incarnation, a different “outer shell.” It has not only persisted but also adapted. So, too, with antisemitism: this nexus of charges is repeated, adapted, and massaged. Thus, the shape of the hatred changes over time, but the basic ideas or illusions that are at its core remain constant. Structure: it is not a bunch of haphazard ideas but has an internal coherence. In the first millennium CE and beyond, it was religious in structure. Jews were hated ostensibly because they refused to accept Christianity or Islam. In the modern period, the garb in which hostility towards the Jews was clothed changed: it became more political than religious. From the right end of the spectrum came the charge that Jews were socialists, Communists, and revolutionaries. From the left end of the spectrum, the charge was that Jews were capitalists. Late in the nineteenth century, the pseudo-science of eugenics (the “science” of race) posited that Jews were simultaneously inferior in their genetic makeup and superior in their ability to wreak havoc upon all aspects of non-Jews’ lives. Despite being a small people, they had the skill to bring down governments and control financial systems. Their superior skills notwithstanding, they had lowly genetic traits which, if mixed with those of whites—Aryans in Nazi Germany— could pollute the non-Jews’ genetic purity. That this was a contradiction in terms—simultaneously superior and inferior—presented no problem for the antisemite. This unhappy polygamous marriage of “science,” religion, and politics became the keystone of Nazi antisemitism.

The Christian Roots of Western Antisemitism The historical template for the aforementioned nexus of accusations is the death of Jesus as depicted in the New Testament. Despite the fact that everyone involved in the deicide story was Jewish, except for the Romans who carried out the actual crucifixion, the way it has been told by generations of church leaders is that “the Jews” forced the killing of Jesus, thereby depriving multitudes of his wisdom and glory. They did so because he demanded that the moneychangers be evicted from the Temple. Evicting them would have threatened the income of many of the members of the Temple’s hierarchy. In other words, “the Jews” had him crucified because Jesus threatened their financial wellbeing. It is from this story that virtually all antisemitic stereotypes in the West flow, even those that are areligious or anti-religious,

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Antisemitism: Reflections and Ruminations     DEBORAH E. LIPSTADT

for example, Marxist. Inspired by this notion, antisemites have argued over the course of millennia that Jews, irrespective of whether they live near one another or are separated by continents, have fortified an alliance that facilitates their evil plots to aid other Jews at the expense of non-Jews. Related historical building blocks in the evolution of this animus were the declarations by the apostle Paul that a “man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law” (Rom. 3:28) and that for Jesus “neither circumcision nor uncircumcision accomplishes anything” (Gal. 5:6). In other words, belief in Jesus replaced Jewish law and tradition. Eventually, that doctrine lead to supersessionism, the notion that the Christian Church had displaced the Jewish Synagogue and that its followers had supplanted Jews as the people of God. Christianity was the one true faith. Those individuals who continued to practice Judaism and refused Jesus as their savior were adhering to something anachronistic. They consciously repudiated the faith that emanated from, but superseded, their own. Their inherent maliciousness, the same maliciousness that led them to turn on Jesus, blinded them to the theological truth. This latter formulation rendered Judaism far more than a competing religion. It transformed Judaism and the Jew into sources of evil. It is this view that makes antisemitism different—if not unique—from other prejudices. It is not simply hate of the “other” or of something that one perceives as “foreign”; rather, it is hate of something that constitutes a perpetual evil in the world. Jews are not an enemy or an evil force. They are the enemy, the evil force.12 It is a hate that has persisted through different cultures and geographic areas, including those with no Jews in residence, and has spread from religion to politics to culture and beyond. Why, given the absurdity of antisemitic accusations, do they gain any traction? The answer, in part, is that they have been embedded in Western society for millennia. They have a staying power that is hard to eradicate. That is why “we know them when we see them” and why, while others may hear nothing, we hear the “Click!” Another reason antisemitism has a staying power is that those who spread it often do so as a means of making sense of an irrational or inexplicable situation. For example, in medieval Europe, during the time of the Black Death, Jews were accused of poisoning the wells and thereby spreading the disease. For societies schooled in centuries 12 Monika Schwarz-Friesel and Jehuda Reinharz, Inside the Antisemitic Mind: The Language of Jew-Hatred in Contemporary Germany (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017), 29, 32.

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of church-based antisemitism, it provided an “easy,” straightforward, and logical explanation for a baffling disease. So, too, economic downturns, political tensions, unsuccessful military actions, and myriad other events can be “explained away” by attributing them to the Jews.

Hating Jews More Than Is Absolutely Necessary There is a well-known characterization of the antisemite that hovers between a definition and a joke. It posits that an antisemite is someone who hates Jews more than is absolutely necessary. Its jocularity notwithstanding, this formulation, which is generally attributed to the late philosopher and intellectual giant Isaiah Berlin, provides a useful tool for recognizing an antisemite.13 When discussing this in class, I tell my students to imagine that someone has done something they find objectionable. They may legitimately resent the person because of his or her actions or attitudes. But if they resent those who have wronged them even an iota more because they are Jews or they attribute the wrongdoing to the fact that they are Jews, they are antisemites. Attempting to concretize this notion, I offer my students a hypothetical example. Imagine, I tell them, someone who has chosen a certain lawyer to defend him because the lawyer is Jewish and, therefore, supposedly cunning enough to win in court. But the lawyer’s efforts come to naught and the man is found guilty. Furious, the man then inveighs against his “Jewish lawyer.” The lawyer may have been incompetent. Alternatively, he may have been exceptionally skilled, but, his talents notwithstanding, the man was so irredeemably guilty that no lawyer in the world could have beaten back the charge. In either case, the lawyer’s identity as a Jew is irrelevant. The man’s anger at his Jewish lawyer is a form of antisemitism. It is important to recognize “hating Jews more than is absolutely necessary” as a Jewish joke, complete with its implicit derogation of Jews in the midst of its defense of them. Thus, “absolutely necessary” in Jewish hands

13 While I attribute this to Berlin, I have also seen it credited to both the comedian Jackie Mason and to Winston Churchill. My instincts say Mason was far more likely to have gotten it, however indirectly, from Berlin than vice versa. (But, then again, Berlin did have eclectic tastes.) As for Churchill, it is far “too Jewish” a formulation to have been crafted by a man who was the epitome of a WASP. That is why I am much more inclined to believe it came from Isaiah Berlin, a British Jew of Lithuanian extraction who knew well the subtle differences between self-mocking, self-loathing, and social climbing, as opposed to genocidal attempts to wipe out a people.

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Antisemitism: Reflections and Ruminations     DEBORAH E. LIPSTADT

means: “Of course we are annoying, but don’t get carried away and try to kill us.” Berlin or whoever first articulated this notion understood that antisemitism exists independently of any action by the Jew(s). Sometimes, the accusation made against a Jew or even a group of Jews may be correct. There are some Jews who are obsessed with money or mistreat their employees. And there are, of course, non-Jews who do the same. But instead of saying, “X is obsessed with money,” the antisemite contends that “X is obsessed with money because he is a Jew.” Antisemitism is not the hatred of people who happen to be Jews. It is hatred of them or justification of one’s hatred of them precisely because they are Jews.14

Antisemitism as Passion Despite the fact that antisemites, irrespective of their particular theological and political Weltanschauung, have consistently had recourse to the same nexus of charges, there are those who argue that we should not accord them the credit of possessing a unified field theory. When students ask me to explain how someone can be an antisemite, I tell them that, though I can offer them some answers, ultimately none of them will really suffice because antisemitism is an irrational phenomenon and the irrational cannot, by its very nature, be explained by the rational. Antisemitism is, of course, a form of prejudice. The very etymology of the word “prejudice” is indicative of its irrational essence: Latin praejudicium, that is, to prejudge. The person beset by prejudice has essentially declared: “Don’t confuse me with the facts. I have already made up my mind about this person or group of people. Based on someone’s religion, ethnicity, nationality, or sexual orientation, I know what kind of person he or she is.” Determining a person’s essential qualities without ever encountering him or her is the epitome of irrationality. To try, therefore, to explain rationally why someone is antisemitic is to attempt to append a rational explanation to an irrational supposition. For example, students often wonder why Hitler was such an antisemite. Is it true, they ask, that when his mother was fatally ill she was cared for by a Jewish doctor who could not save her and, as a result, Hitler hated not just this doctor but, by extension, all Jews? Even if the story of the 14 Charles Y. Glock and Rodney Stark, Christian Beliefs and Anti-Semitism (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 102.

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doctor were true (it is not), the question and the supposed answer make no sense. Imagine if the doctor had been Prussian. Would Hitler have hated all Prussians because of this one doctor? What if he had had freckles? We would think it insane for him to hate all Prussians or bearers of freckles. Thinking that he might have hated all Jews because of this doctor’s supposed failure to save his mother is equally ludicrous. As one pundit observed, to be prejudiced is to meet the stereotype coming down the street long before one encounters the person.15 It is an irrational thing to do and, consequently, no rational explanation will suffice. Foremost among those who viewed antisemitism as devoid of rationale were Jean-Paul Sartre and Anthony Julius. Sartre argued that antisemitism is not an empirical idea because it makes no intellectual sense. It is, in his eyes, a “passion,” an emotion, a feeling—but not an idea.16 Sartre’s notion of the irrational nature of antisemitism, while compelling, seems to discount certain of its historical and religious origins, as well as the possibility that antisemitism might be the flaw in some other theory—for example, Marxism, to which Sartre was partial—even if it is not itself a theory. Julius echoed, but expanded upon, Sartre. Unlike Sartre, he acknowledged the deep-seated historical lineage of this hatred. However, even after giving a lengthy account of this history, he argued that antisemitism must ultimately be seen as a “discontinuous, contingent aspect of a number of distinct mentalités and milieus. . . . It is a heterogeneous phenomenon, the site of collective hatreds, and of cultural anxieties and resentments.”17 Sartre and Julius add something important to our analysis. Consider the exchange I had with Julius shortly before I was due to stand trial for libel. I had been sued for libel by David Irving for calling him a Holocaust denier.18 Preparation for the trial was long and arduous. Shortly before the trial was set to begin, I told Julius, who was my lawyer, that this legal battle had consumed my life and I was intent on decimating Irving and his charges. Julius turned to me and said: “He’s not that important.” I was flabbergasted to hear this. Working pro bono for close to two years, he had 15 I wish to thank my colleague Jonathan Crane for this formulation. 16 Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken Books, 1948), 10–11; Joseph Sungolowsky, “Criticism of Anti-Semite and Jew,” Yale French Studies 30 (1963): 68–72. 17 Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), xliii. 18 Deborah E. Lipstadt, History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving (New York: Ecco, 2005).

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devoted significant portions of his time to this fight. He was even about to begin writing an extensive historical monograph on antisemitism in Britain. How could he say it was unimportant? Sensing my confusion, he explained what he meant. It was not antisemitism that was inconsequential; it was the antisemite. “Think of fighting Irving as the equivalent of what you must do when you step in dirt left by a dog on the street,” he said—except he used a far more graphic term than “dirt.” “The dirt has no intrinsic value. There is nothing interesting about it. Nonetheless, you must carefully clean it off your shoes prior to entering your home. If you fail to do so and track it into the house, then you face a serious and long-term problem.” Julius was right. He knew that the lies and prejudice Irving spewed had to be fought, and relentlessly so. Antisemites must be opposed, especially if their passion or ideology stands a chance of becoming part of national policy. As an exercise in counterfactual history, imagine if Hitler and his antisemitic ravings had been taken seriously in the 1920s: might things have turned out differently? Yet ultimately, while the fight against the antisemite is exceptionally important, the antisemite is not. Our challenge was, and remains, to fight the antisemite without elevating him or her in stature. Some of the aforementioned characterizations of antisemitism might seem to be mutually exclusive. Can something have a “latent structure” while being a heterogeneous passion? In the case of antisemitism, I would argue that it can. These definitions are, in fact, not mutually exclusive but are essential parts of a greater whole. Even as we identify the persistent elements—money, power, nefariousness—which are the building blocks of antisemitism, we must recognize it as an illogical passion and hatred that has never made sense and never will. We must try to identify it, passionately fight it, but not elevate it or its purveyors in importance.

Jew as Subject, Not as Object I have devoted this essay to reflections on antisemitism. While of exceptional importance, the fight against antisemitism constitutes a sidebar to the greater whole of our Jewish legacy and heritage. And that is the lynchpin of my friend Chaim Seidler-Feller’s Weltanschauung. Jews should not think of themselves or let others think of them as victims. They are a people that has far too often been victimized. But they are also much more than that. Chaim believes, as do I, that we cannot only think of the Jew as “object”—as someone to whom things are done—but must think of the

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Jew as “subject”—as someone who is the bearer of a unique heritage and culture and who does things with that heritage and culture. This notion constitutes the message he has transmitted to the legions of his students. While painfully cognizant of the toll antisemitism has taken on the Jewish people, Chaim has consistently insisted that we should not maintain our Jewish heritage and identity because of the efforts of so many to obliterate the Jewish people; rather, we should do so despite their efforts. We should celebrate and enrich our heritage, traditions, and legacy, even as we fight “the longest hatred.”

Suzanne Last Stone, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law

Sovereignty and Ethics in the Thought of Rabbi H.ayyim David Halevi

As friends and admirers of Chaim Seidler-Feller well know, Chaim’s relationship with Religious Zionist thought is a fraught one. Chaim is devoted to Torah and to Zionism, but attempts to put the two together have, by turns, exhilarated and frightened him. In Chaim’s honor, I wish to explore one facet of the thought of a Religious Zionist halakhic decisor whom Chaim has consistently admired for his universalist sensibility: Rabbi Ḥayyim David Halevi (1924–1998). Like Chaim, Halevi was deeply concerned with the relationship between Jewish sovereignty and Jewish ethics. Indeed, in an essay that Chaim and I have often co-taught, Halevi implies, or so I shall argue, that it is precisely the advent of Jewish sovereignty that has allowed us to finally perceive the moral dimension of halakhic norms previously viewed as merely pragmatic. The specific text I have in mind concerns “Paths of Peace in the Relations between Jews and Non-Jews,”1 a recurring topic in Halevi’s work. In this article, Halevi declares that, in the new reality of the State of Israel, norms of mutuality and social solidarity between Jews and non-Jews should be grounded in a general moral duty to recognize our shared humanity and not in the traditional Talmudic category of mi-pene darkhe shalom (pursuing paths of peace), ordinarily understood as a pragmatic principle rooted 1 Ḥayyim David Halevi, “Darkhe shalom ba-yaḥasim she-ben yehudim le-she-enam yehudim,” Teḥumin 9 (1988): 71–81.

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in the need to fend off Gentile hatred (sometimes also termed mi-shum evah). This text is by no means obscure and, indeed, Halevi’s entire oeuvre has been the subject of several academic works.2 It is hard to imagine one could derive any new insight regarding his thought that has not already been articulated; yet, into the fray I go because I believe that there has been insufficient attention paid to the resha and the sefa (first and last parts, respectively) of this specific text. In other words, it is worth examining more closely the precise way Halevi conceptualizes Jewish sovereignty in the Israeli state both at the outset of his article and in his conclusion, in which he states that norms of mutuality and solidarity are now matters of independent moral duty. How precisely does the fact of Jewish sovereignty engender this perspectival switch? This question is all the more puzzling given some of the more prevalent modern understandings of sovereignty. The Hobbesian conception of territorial sovereignty is concerned with legitimacy. Legitimate power over a defined territory is transformed into a centralized system of positive law. Morality and conscience may be equally obligatory domains, but they are political sovereignty’s rivals. Thus, modern centralizing conceptions of sovereignty, coupled with the positivist separation of morality from law and the legitimate exercise of power, help to shape a certain relationship between sovereignty and ethics in which moral obligations arise from domains of life other than sovereignty itself. True, the social contract basis of democratic sovereignty is understood to create a political obligation on the part of the sovereign to treat all citizens equally. One could therefore easily understand Halevi as asserting that the self-definition of Israel as a democratic state, together with the new reality of Jews holding sovereign power over others, obligate the state to treat all its citizens equally—Halevi certainly says as much (71–72). But this simple reading of the text still leaves two issues unexplained: first, how the self-definition of Israel as a democratic state is somehow halakhically binding, and second, why individual Jews in civil society now have a moral obligation of social solidarity with fellow non-Jewish citizens. The key to resolving this puzzle, in my view, lies in noting that Halevi offers a very different conception of Jewish sovereignty in the State of Israel than the one so prevalent in current statist, centralizing imaginations of sovereignty. 2 See, for example, Zvi Zohar and Avi Sagi, eds., Yahadut shel ḥayyim: iyyunim bi-yetsirato he-hagutit-hilkhatit shel ha-Rav Ḥayyim Daṿid Haleṿi (Jerusalem: Shalom Hartman Institute; Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 2007).

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As I will elaborate below, the underlying theoretical framework during the era within which Halevi was writing forged a crucial link between sovereignty and recognition. In this theoretical framework, recognition is understood in its constitutive sense and not merely as an acknowledgement or ratification of a preexisting state of affairs. Thus, Jewish sovereignty in the State of Israel is constituted by non-Jewish world recognition, and, as I read Halevi, that act of recognition also bestows a democratic identity on the state that permeates the sphere of normative religious law. Although Halevi, unlike several of his contemporaries, does not explicitly link Jewish sovereignty to world recognition, I argue that it is this new relationship between Jews and the world at large that stands behind Halevi’s radical attempt to ground social solidarity in the principle that humans are created in the image of God. The “reality of our lives in the State of Israel” (71) refers, in my view, to a new age of recognition by non-Jews of the humanity (and, hence, political agency) of Jews and not solely or even primarily to the new reality that Jews are now a majority ruling over a minority. Halevi’s understanding of Israel’s sovereignty as contingent on the recognition of others, according to this interpretation, has far-reaching implications, because it constitutes a stark departure from a significant strand of modern political thought about sovereignty, especially sovereignty in the nation state. To many, the concepts of political autonomy and agency imply a denial of any cause or source of the state outside of itself, as well as any external limitations on the power of the state to express and shape the identity of its members. In short, self-determination and self-realization are crucial components of the modern imagination of sovereignty in the nation state. Take, for example, Paul Kahn’s rich description of the ontology of American sovereignty and its entanglement with nationalism, which he summarizes as follows: “the modern nation-state . . . must free itself from others in order to realize itself freely.”3 In other words, political autonomy and agency mean consistently denying any cause or source of the state outside of itself, thus enabling the development of a distinctive national identity. Kahn goes on to argue that sovereignty understood as self-determination and self-realization fully explains the American attitude to international law as binding only insofar as it is incorporated into United States law, as expressed, for example, in the heated debate in the U.S. 3 Paul W. Kahn, “The Question of Sovereignty,” Stanford Journal of International Law 40 (2004): 260.

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Supreme Court over citing foreign norms in constitutional discourse and the Court’s refusal to follow Europe’s turn to universal reason as the key to the meaning of constitutional norms.4 To be sure, important elements of modern Zionist thought centered precisely on this drama of self-determination and self-realization. The rhetoric of self-determination in Zionist writings extends well beyond the arena of political agency because it, too, is entangled with nationalism and the question of the meaning of a modern Jewish identity. Ehud Luz offered the following summary of one prominent strain of statist Zionist theory: the awakening of Jewish nationalism would be accompanied by the awakening of Jewish ethical and universalist sensibilities through a joint internal process.5 In other words, political sovereignty and the formation of Jewish ethical identity would be manifestations of the same processes of self-determination and self-realization. Although Zionist theory is far too complex to be made to yield to one consistent line of thinking, this strand of statist Zionism was an important component of Zionism as revolution. In contrast, I understand Halevi to link his conception of Jewish sovereignty in the State of Israel to the constitutive role of world recognition, thereby deemphasizing self-determination and self-realization. This conception seems closer to contemporary theories of sovereignty that emphasize state interdependence and the crucial role mutual recognition plays in placing limits on the state. Diffusion of sites of power and interaction and engagement with others are critical components of new theories of sovereignty that espouse not only responsibility for the other, but a new understanding of the limitations on and finitude of one’s own self and state.6 Halevi was not a political theorist, nor was he, I would venture to guess, remotely steeped in the burgeoning literature on cosmopolitan theories of sovereignty or on the role of recognition in political discourse. And so the roots of his distinctive conception of sovereignty must be found elsewhere: in the pivotal role the presence of others—whether other governments or the watchful eyes of individual non-Jews—has played in rabbinic discourse. 4 Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551 (2005). 5 Ehud Luz, Wrestling with an Angel: Power, Morality, and Jewish Identity, trans. Michael Swirsky (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). 6 See, for example, Thomas W. Pogge, “Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty,” Ethics 103, no. 1 (October 1992): 48–75.

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I Because a variety of halakhic issues turn on the absence or presence of Jewish sovereignty, rabbinic jurists were forced to conceptualize whether the State of Israel is a manifestation of Jewish sovereignty in the halakhic sense. For in determining the applicability of various halakhic norms and the relevance of different possible analogies, halakhic decisors must first characterize the phenomenon in question. In the course of doing so, several rabbinic authorities, most prominently Halevi and Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi Isaac ha-Levi Herzog (1888–1959),7 proposed new conceptions of Jewish sovereignty. The question arose primarily in the context of group relations between Jews and non-Jews as a result of Maimonidean halakhic writings about the legal norms applicable when Jews have “the upper hand.” Rabbi Moses Maimonides famously wrote that the distinction between the unredeemed world and the messianic age is freedom from the subjugation of foreign sovereigns (Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot melakhim 12:1–2; based on bSanhedrin 99a). Talmudic tradition bequeathed a binary model that distinguishes between the days when Israel holds sway over other nations, implying exclusive or absolute dominion, and when it is powerless and suffering. Various halakhic rules governing conquest, conversion, group relations, and so on theoretically turn on this distinction. Thus, for example, Maimonides seems to hold that there will be no converts in the messianic age of Jewish sovereignty because the motivation for conversion would likely be instrumental: the attraction to power (see Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot issure bi’ah 13:14–15). Indeed, he rules that in “these days” of exile prospective converts must be warned that Jews have no political agency and are suffering (ibid. 14:1).8 The laws Maimonides codifies as part of his vision of the time of “the upper hand” are vivid examples of the ontology of sovereignty: the dedication of the king to the project of the perfection of the people. This requires purging the land of idolaters and, read straightforwardly, drastically

7 Isaac ha-Levi Herzog, “Zekhuyyot ha-mi‘uṭim lefi ha-halakhah,” in Teḥuḳḳah le-Yiśraʼel al-pi ha-Torah, ed. Itamar Warhaftig, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook; Yad Harav Herzog, 1989), 12–21. 8 See Moshe Hellinger, “Religious Ideology That Attempts to Ease the Conflict between Religion and State: An Analysis of the Teachings of Two Leading Religious-Zionist Rabbis in the State of Israel,” Journal of Church and State 51, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 52–77.

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restricting the rights of non-Jewish residents (Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot avodah zarah ṿe-ḥuḳḳot ha-goyim 10:6).9 Is Jewish sovereignty in the modern State of Israel equivalent to the Maimonidean age of “the upper hand” that is the condition precedent of these codified Maimonidean laws? Halevi and Herzog quickly dispel this illusion, each in slightly different ways, but, the way I read them, there is one common thread: Jewish sovereignty in the State of Israel came into being through an act of recognition by the United Nations; therefore, the State of Israel’s sovereignty is not only limited, it is shared. Herzog is quite clear on this point. His characterization of Israel as a partnership between Jews and non-Jews reflects a conceptual commitment to thinking about sovereignty in terms of state interdependence.10 Halevi is even more explicit: Israel was constituted, at its inception, as a Western democratic country and so Jewish sovereign power is limited by the principles governing such entities. He writes: “In the Western democratic world, to which we belong, society is founded upon equal rights for every person; there is no place in a democratic state for religious discrimination. Even were we a superpower, we could not practice such [discrimination].”11 In my view, Halevi is claiming here that Israel “belongs” to the Western world because it was brought into being by the United Nations no less than by Jewish efforts. For him, this is nonetheless a genuine form of Jewish sovereignty, carrying sufficient weight to penetrate into the normative sphere of halakhah by, for example, triggering a halakhic obligation to recite the hallel (psalms of thanksgiving) with a blessing on Yom ha-Atsma‘ut.12 Both Halevi and Herzog seem to have been operating from within a larger cultural understanding of sovereignty in their time that is attested in Israel’s Declaration of Independence. The shared assumption of the period was that the legitimacy of the state depended on recognition. In my reading, 9 See Gerald J. Blidstein, Eḳronot mediniyyim be-mishnat ha-Rambam: iyyunim be-mishnato ha-hilkhatit (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 1983). 10 Herzog, “Zekhuyyot ha-mi‘uṭim,” 20–21. 11 Halevi, “Darkhe shalom,” 72; translated in The Jewish Political Tradition, ed. Michael Walzer et al., vol. 2 (Membership) (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2003), 534 (emphasis mine). 12 See Ḥayyim David Halevi, Dat u-medinah (Tel Aviv: n.p., 1969), 99–103, esp. the footnote on p. 102. By contrast, Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef (1920–2013), though he held a by-and-large positive view of the Jewish State, ruled against reciting a blessing over the hallel; see his Sefer she’elot u-teshuvot yabbia omer, 2nd ed., vol. 6 (Jerusalem: n.p., 2015), 167–71 (Oraḥ ḥayyim, no. 41).

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Halevi goes a critical step further, however, by understanding recognition not merely as the ratification of an existing state of affairs but, instead, as constitutive of sovereignty. Recognition not only confers legitimacy on the state, but endows the state with its very identity. This point warrants elaboration. There is a longstanding debate in international relations concerning the practice of recognition among states and the conditions of statehood. While some theorists insist that states are states prior to their recognition as such, others argue that the recognition of a state is a constitutive act: it brings statehood into existence. This debate, as Patchen Markell has helpfully observed, captures the two senses of the term “recognition.” According to the first, recognition is an awareness of a preexisting state of affairs, of a status that already exists. According to the second, recognition is an act that brings something new into being or transforms the world in some way.13 The different senses of recognition, Markell goes on to argue, turn on differing conceptions of self-determination and political agency. Zionism (and the view incorporated in Israel’s Declaration of Independence) by and large relies on the political imagination of the first sense of recognition. International acceptance ratified a preexisting state of affairs: the national-collective will and identity of the Jewish people. But, pursuant to the constitutive sense of recognition, neither sovereignty nor political identity is the product of a singular will or self-determination in its fullest sense. This brings us to the heart of the matter: a central tenet of statist formulations of Zionism—that Jews have a natural, national-collective identity that must be acknowledged—is one over which Jewish religious thinkers are sharply divided. As other students of modern Zionist halakhah, like Arye Edrei, have already pointed out, it is useful to distinguish between Jewish existence as a national-collective one and Jewish existence as individual/ communitarian (that is, halakhah as a personal law derived from membership in a community).14 The Bible portrays Israel in national-collective terms: armed for practical political existence and possessed of territorial sovereignty and political institutions. The Rabbinic halakhic model, 13 See Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 14 See generally Arye Edrei, “Law, Interpretation, and Ideology: The Renewal of the Jewish Laws of War in the State of Israel,” Cardozo Law Review 28, no. 1 (October 2006): 187–227, and Shlomo Fischer, “Excursus: Concerning the Rulings of R. Ovadiah Yosef Pertaining to the Thanksgiving Prayer, the Settlement of the Land of Israel, and Middle East Peace,” Cardozo Law Review 28, no. 1 (October 2006): 229–44.

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however, transformed this picture. The impetus for this transformation was not solely the advent of the exile, as Shlomo Fischer has shown. Religious developments in late antiquity increasingly emphasized the individual as well as individual salvation, introducing new elements into the biblical picture of the ongoing existence or destruction of the people at the national-collective level.15 Rabbinic halakhah is framed primarily as a set of individual rights and duties incumbent on Jews individually by virtue of their membership in a collective. This viewpoint is closer to a liberal, rather than an organic, model of membership and is one of the core issues over which secular Zionism and ultra-traditionalists split. For the latter group, the law shapes Jewish collective identity, and allegiance to the Torah by and large defines membership in that collective. Zionism, by contrast, turns to a modern, and often organic, definition of national-collectivity while trying to reactivate in the present the biblical national-collective outlook. Some Religious Zionist rabbis who identified fully with this aspect of the Zionist project, such as Rabbi Shlomo Goren (1917–1994), created (or revived) new national-collective halakhic categories applicable to the state. By contrast, traditionalists, as Edrei and Fischer detail, continued to deny that there exist any halakhic rights and obligations separate and apart from individual rights and duties. Halevi’s position in this controversy, Moshe Hellinger argues, is an eclectic mixture of the traditional model with the thought of Asher Hirsch Ginsberg (Aḥad ha-Am) and of Johann Gottfried Herder, one of the iconic thinkers of romantic nationalism. According to Halevi, the Jewish nation has a natural reality whose external features include territory and self-rule, while language, culture, and spiritual qualities are internal. The latter are embodied by the Torah, the basis of national identity.16 Since the State of Israel is only a partial (external) expression of Jewish natural reality, its identity need not be determined exclusively on Jewish terms.

15 Fischer, “Excursus”; see also Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, “‘Humanity Was Created as an Individual’: Synechdocal Individuality in the Mishnah as a Jewish Response to Romanization,” in The Individual in the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean, ed. Jörg Rüpke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 489–521. 16 See Hellinger, “Religious Ideology,” 69.

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II So far, I have explicated Halevi’s distinctive conception of Jewish sovereignty in the State of Israel as shaped and limited by the world at large through the act of recognition. This secures the democratic nature of the state. But I believe his understanding also does significant work in grounding the ḥovah enoshit musarit (humanitarian ethical obligation) (78) of mutual respect and solidarity. Halevi notes that virtually the same practical results could have been reached by using older Talmudic paradigms addressing obligations of social solidarity in a mixed society; mi-pene darkhe shalom, for instance, would do. However, he refuses to follow this route. Mi-pene darkhe shalom, he insists, is only suitable to Jewish life in a minority context. Its logic is rooted in survival, not moral principle. Instead, Halevi argues that Jewish sovereignty demands a radical change in the mindset of Jews toward the rest of the world and that awareness of the new reality must penetrate the halakhic-normative sphere. One could easily interpret these words to suggest that it is the fact of power and majority rule that constitutes the new reality necessitating a radical shift in Jewish attitudes. But I believe doing so would miss a crucial dimension of Halevi’s writing that is best highlighted by first exploring a critical Jewish teaching. The teaching in question is the famous biblical depiction of humans as created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26–27, 5:1), which, according to Rabbi Akiva, is a/the cardinal principle of the Torah (Sifra, Parashat ḳedoshim 4:12). Anyone conversant with Rabbinic halakhah knows, however, that this principle received scant attention in the halakhic corpus. The remarkable under-elaboration of this concept in halakhic thought has much to do, to be sure, with diasporic conditions or even, perhaps, with the varying ontological, and not moral, meanings in which the idea of creation in the image was sometimes clothed.17 But the deeper problem is that the perception of the sacredness and inviolability of humans that gave rise in the West to a new secular vision of a universal human order and the idea of rights possessed by humans as such is in a certain tension with Rabbinic conceptions of justice in which merit and desert play a significant role. Within the 17 For a fuller treatment of these issues, see Suzanne Last Stone, “Religion and Human Rights: Babel or Translation, Conflict or Convergence?,” in Religion and the Discourse of Human Rights, ed. Hanoch Dagan, Shahar Lifshitz, and Yedidia Z. Stern (Jerusalem: Israel Democracy Institute, 2014), 524–46.

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Rabbinic schema, the value of humans lies in their fulfillment of commandments. That humans have value or possess rights by virtue of being human alone detaches rights from the idea of desert. The scant invocations of creation in the image within halakhic contexts attest to this tension. In my reading, Rabbi Abraham Isaac ha-Kohen Kook (1865–1935), for example, treats creation in the divine image as a comparative concept, a matter of degree. Jews are more fully in the divine image than non-Jews because they perform more commandments. The concept of creation in the image is a statement about the potential of humans to perfect themselves through observance of the law, a theory about human potentiality to become full moral and legal subjects through their actions. Thus, only when humans sufficiently realize their potential do they become rights holders under Jewish law. Kook, in emphasizing the ontological aspects of the ritual commandments, implies that only full observance of Torah suffices.18 But other stopping points might be posited as well. Rabbi Menahem Meiri (1249–1316) ruled, for example, that juridical equality was owed to the non-Jews of his time, because they, in contrast to the pagans of antiquity, were ummot ha-gedurot be-darkhe ha-datot (members of nations bound by the rule of a religious law).19 Furthermore, according to Meiri, societies bound by religious law occupy an intermediate category between the idolaters of old and Jews. Such societies have critically progressed toward perfection. Their final perfection, he writes, is in their conversion to Judaism.20 Thus, some notion of merit or desert seems implicit in the Jewish conception of the idea of creation in the image.21 Halevi is well within the tradition championed by Meiri, although his language is even more capacious, and so, I would argue, some measure of desert must underlie his articulation of a new obligation of human solidarity. Indeed, world recognition of Jewish political agency does precisely this work. In my reading, Halevi implies that one could not truly speak of a shared humanity before the modern period, given centuries of persecution 18 See Abraham Isaac ha-Kohen Kook, Da‘at kohen: teshuvot be-hilkhot Shulḥan-arukh Yoreh-de‘ah (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 2002), 383 (no. 199). 19 Menahem Meiri, Bet ha-beḥirah al Massekhet bava ḳamma, ed. Kalman Schlesinger (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1950), 320 (Bava ḳamma 113a, s.v. hayah). 20 Idem, Bet ha-beḥirah ha-shalem . . . al Massekhet sanhedrin, ed. Isaac Ralbag (Jerusalem: n.p., 1971), 178 (Sanhedrin 59a, s.v. ben Noaḥ she-re’inuhu). 21 For a fuller treatment of these issues, see Suzanne Last Stone, “Formulating Responses in an Egalitarian Age: An Overview,” in Formulating Responses in an Egalitarian Age, ed. Marc D. Stern (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005), 70–74.

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and Jewish disenfranchisement. Now, with the recognition of Jewish sovereignty, the immense distinction between Jew and non-Jew has finally been narrowed. In this context, it should be noted that Halevi authored a number of (other) halakhic opinions liberalizing Jewish relations with Christians in particular,22 and one wonders, in retrospect, how central a role Vatican II, whose Nostra aetate declaration constituted an unprecedented recognition by the Church of Jewish independent worth, played in his thought process. It is, then, the interplay of recognition and reciprocity that underlies this new moral duty. The moral obligation Jews owe to “the other” is based on ethical reciprocity, norms of mutuality, moral symmetry, and gratitude.23 In retrospect, it is the principle of reciprocity that may also underlie prior rulings extending solidarity beyond Jewish borders, including those of Meiri mentioned above. The nations who are under the sway of religion, Meiri implies, adhere to basic norms of morality that govern their behavior toward those with whom they share political space. Jews have a duty, in turn, to reciprocate. A fruitful comparison can be made to the invocation of reciprocity by John Rawls in his Theory of Justice. There, Rawls draws on principles of moral psychology, following Piaget, to argue that the sense of justice grows out of prior stages: first the morality of authority based on reciprocal love between parent and child and then the morality of association based on friendship. “Because we recognize that they wish us well, we care for their well-being in return.  .  .  . The basic idea is one of reciprocity, a tendency to answer in kind.”24 Genuine other-regard depends on receiving benefits, inaugurating the interplay of gratitude and indebtedness. Rawls expands this to include those who have only the potential to reciprocate; but there is a close connection between Rawls’s invocation of a well-ordered society and the reasonableness of expecting benefits from, and therefore extending 22 See generally David Ellenson, “Rabbi Hayim David Halevi on Christianity and Christians: An Analysis of Selected Legal Writings of an Israeli Authority,” in Transforming Relations: Essays on Jews and Christians throughout History in Honor of Michael A. Signer, ed. Franklin T. Harkins (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 340–62. 23 For an elegant defense of desert and reciprocity, see David Schmidtz, “What We Deserve, and How We Reciprocate,” The Journal of Ethics 9, nos. 3–4 (October 2005): 435–64. 24 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (revised ed.: Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 433. For an elaboration of Rawls’s theory of reciprocity, see Thom Brooks, “Reciprocity as Mutual Recognition,” The Good Society 21, no. 1 (2012): 21–35.

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respect to, those who have only the potential to reciprocate. Rawls’s logic lies, in my view, behind Halevi’s approach: a well-ordered society is presupposed when he writes that “contemporary non-Jews do not have the status of idolaters” (78). Given tangible evidence of an ordered world—“we recognize that they wish us well”—a moral duty of equal concern and respect is created.

III In an earlier responsum from 1985, Halevi takes on an interlocutor who asks a sharp question: does the concept of ḥillul ha-shem (desecration of the divine name) apply under conditions of Jewish sovereignty?25 Ḥillul ha-shem is a well-known vehicle for introducing ethical norms into the halakhah. The principle comes into play on occasions where there is a public, in the sense of a sphere of communicative action. Though this sphere may be exclusively Jewish, more commonly the principle is invoked in the context of mixed space in which the honor of God must be upheld before the watchful eyes of Gentiles. The interlocutor is disturbed by the Talmud’s comments on the difficult story of King David and the Gibeonites in which the latter, a people allowed to live among the Israelite polity, demand the lives of Saul’s seven sons to avenge the destruction of many of their compatriots by Saul, who is now dead. And David complies (II Sam. 21:1–10).26 The Talmudic Rabbis use the biblical narrative quite cleverly to pursue their own agenda (bYevamot 78b–79a). In marking collective (here, intergenerational) punishment as the exception and individual punishment on the basis of personal culpability as the rule, the Rabbis have recast biblical law around individual rights and obligations. But this leaves them with a dilemma: how to justify the actions of King David given the prohibition against intergenerational punishment (Deut. 24:16). The solution to this problem is to invoke the 25 Ḥayyim David Halevi, Aśeh lekha rav: me’ah ḥamishim ṿe-arba teshuvot li-she’elot be-nośe’e emunah, ḥevrah ṿa-avodat Eloḳim, vol. 7 (Tel Aviv: n.p., 1986), 288–91 (no. 70). See also David Ellenson, “Jewish Legal Interpretation and Moral Values: Two Responses by Rabbi Hayyim David Halevi on the Obligations of the Israeli Government toward Its Minority Population,” CCAR Journal 48, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 5–20. 26 This is not the place to elaborate, although let it be noted that all the elements of the ontology of sovereignty are on display in this biblical narrative, including the sacrifice of the representatives of the body politic for the sake of the unity of the polity, and more.

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ḥillul ha-shem that would result from the perception that ancient Israel had no regard for the minorities in its midst. “Better that one letter of the Torah be uprooted than that the divine name be publicly desecrated,” Rabbi Ḥiyya bar Abba says in the name of Rabbi Johanan. The Rabbinic exposition of this episode concludes with a fantastic scenario: Gentile passersby observe the meting out of justice even to princes of Israel in order to avenge a wrong done to a beleaguered minority population living on the outskirts of the Israelite polity, and one hundred fifty thousand of them immediately convert in response. Halevi’s interlocutor expresses amazement that the Talmud justifies the actions of King David—who is, after all, the prototype of the messianic king—on the basis of avoiding ḥillul ha-shem. Essentially, the interlocutor is asking: how can the opinion of the rest of the world matter when Jews have “the upper hand”? Needless to say, Halevi upholds the Talmud’s invocation of ḥillul ha-shem as the motivation for King David’s actions. In fact, he uses the question as an opportunity to turn the biblical narrative and its Talmudic gloss into a duty incumbent on “every progressive country” (read: the Israeli government) to provide national unemployment insurance for all minority groups under its control, no matter how hostile.27 The question remains a pointed one, however, because it underscores the structural persistence of “the other” in Rabbinic discourse. The fantasy of a future age of Jewish freedom, revolving to a significant degree around the question of who has “the upper hand”—the Jew or the goy—is, according to Ishay Rosen-Zvi and Adi Ophir, part of a larger conceptual construction in the early Rabbinic period that gave birth to an abstract, generalized 27 Halevi’s portrayal of the Gibeonites is striking. Though the Bible depicts them in sympathetic terms, their Talmudic portrayal is far more ambiguous. On the one hand, the Talmud recognizes the legitimacy of their claim to recompense. On the other hand, it insists that the cruel manner in which they sought retribution for Saul’s actions doomed them to exclusion forever from the religious covenantal community of Israel, which is characterized by mercy. Thereafter, the Gibeonites became symbolic of cruelty in Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot teshuvah 2:10, and whoever is cruel, Maimonides implies, is not of the “seed of Israel.” Halevi follows the implicit logic of the Talmudic discussion but shifts the focus somewhat. The Gibeonites’ cruelty, which he also mentions, consists in their failure to exhibit mercy, defined here as the relinquishment of even a just claim (that is, not standing on one’s rights). Significantly, however, while the Talmud considers the Gibeonites vis-à-vis their inclusion in/ exclusion from the covenantal community, Halevi is concerned with their status as members of the political community and therefore stresses their pain, which could only be assuaged through the mechanism of retributive justice.

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Gentile concomitantly with “the concealment of God as an active historical force.”28 Halakhic distinctions function, they argue, against the background of this conceptual construction, which is taken as a given. Rosen-Zvi’s and Ophir’s argument rests on the binary nature of the opposition, and they are at pains to show that the Rabbinic tradition, on this issue at least, tended to erase intermediate categories present in the biblical material. The accuracy of this thesis is open to question: in the Babylonian Talmud intermediate categories reappear,29 and this is certainly the case in the medieval period with Meiri’s introduction of the category of the ummot ha-gedurot. Indeed, it is precisely such a blurring of the boundaries that Halevi and Herzog, who shared the former’s basic orientation, are after. In analyzing the Jew-goy-God triad, Ophir also writes on the persistence of this conceptual model within Zionism: The Jewish state became a tool for defending Jews against Goyim, “without changing one whit the essential opposition and fundamental separation between Jew and Gentile.  .  .  . Zionism, in principle, adopted the negative definition of the Goy from rabbinic discourse, as well as his border-shaping role and his part in Jewish self-identification. It removed the essential difference between Jew and Gentile from its religious contexts and articulated it in national and historical terms.”30

Ophir glosses over the more positive aspects of this Rabbinic structure, including the ways in which “the other”—whether Gentile legal systems, Gentile observations and opinions, or Gentile actions—also became a stimulus for halakhic self-correction.31 But I think he and Rosen-Zvi are right to call attention to the triadic aspect of the model, according to which 28 Ishay Rosen-Zvi and Adi Ophir, “Goy: Toward a Genealogy,” Diné Israel 28 (2011): *112. See now Adi Ophir and Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Goy: Israel’s Multiple Others and the Birth of the Gentile (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), ch. 7. 29 See Saul Lieberman, Yeṿanit ṿe-yaṿnut be-Erets-Yiśraʼel: meḥḳarim be-orḥot-ḥayyim be-Erets-Yiśraʼel bi-teḳufat ha-Mishnah ṿe-ha-Talmud (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1962), 52–69. 30 Rosen-Zvi and Ophir, “Goy,” *72, quoting Adi Ophir, Avodat ha-hoṿeh: massot al tarbut Yiśreʼelit ba-zeman ha-zeh (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2001), 80–84. 31 See generally Shmuel Shilo, “Equity as a Bridge between Jewish and Secular Law,” Cardozo Law Review 12, nos. 3–4 (1991): 737–51; Suzanne Last Stone, “Sinaitic and Noahide Law: Legal Pluralism in Jewish Law,” Cardozo Law Review 12, nos. 3–4 (1991): 1157–214; and eadem, “Law without Nation? The Ongoing Jewish Discussion,” in Law without Nations, ed. Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 101–37.

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the goy first emerges when God disappears from history. Conversely, over seventy years ago, several prominent Religious Zionist rabbis, including Halevi and Herzog, saw God’s intervention in history not via the actions of Jews but, rather, via the goy, most especially via world recognition of Israeli statehood.32 This inaugurated a new chapter in halakhic discourse about a shared humanity.

32 See, for example, Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli’s (1909–1995) Sefer erets ḥemdah be-hilkhot Erets Yiśraʼel, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1982), 34–37 (sec. 1:6), where he writes that world recognition of the State of Israel released the Jews from the Three Oaths prohibiting Jewish statecraft before the eschaton (bKetubbot 111a). Similarly, Arye Edrei has suggested to me that one of the characters knocking on the door in Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s (1903–1993) famous essay Ḳol dodi dofeḳ = Listen, My Beloved Knocks, trans. David Z. Gordon, ed. Jeffrey R. Woolf (New York: Yeshiva University, 2006) is the nations of the world.

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David Ellenson, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and Brandeis University

Rabbi Shlomo Goren on the Maimonidean Law of Siege: An Essay on the Ethics of Jewish Warfare

In 1979, I came to Los Angeles as an Instructor of Jewish Religious Thought at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. One of the first people to greet me was Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller of UCLA Hillel. He welcomed me with a warm embrace, and I was duly impressed from the first day I met him with his amiability, energy, extraordinary command of Jewish textual traditions, familiarity with Western culture and thought, and deep commitments to social justice, the Jewish people, and the State of Israel. As we have encountered each other over the years, these first impressions have only been deepened and confirmed. In his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle observed that there are reasons for friendship, and all those qualities and values that I discerned in Chaim when I first met him have led to a lasting and cherished friendship. It is a privilege for me to contribute this essay to a volume celebrating his wide impact. This paper will present and analyze elements of the writing of Rabbi Shlomo Goren (1917–1994), the late Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel and founder of the Military Rabbinate of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), on “The Siege of Beirut in Light of Jewish Law.”1 In examining it, I 1 Shlomo Goren, “Ha-matsor al Beirut le-or ha-halakhah,” in Meshiv milḥamah: she’elot u-teshuvot be-inyane tsava, milḥamah u-biṭṭaḥon, 3 vols. (Jerusalem: Ha-Iddera Rabbah, 1983–1986), 3:239–65.

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will employ an essay Chaim wrote, “The Land of Israel: Sanctified Matter or Mythic Space,”2 as a framework for exploring the ethical thrust of the analysis Goren advanced in his article. In so doing, I hope to pay tribute to Chaim by indicating how his insights and understandings help to highlight the arguments Goren put forth as he struggled to articulate a Jewish ethic surrounding the issues of war and peace during and in the aftermath of the First Lebanon War of 1982.

Introduction In “The Land of Israel: Sanctified Matter or Mythic Space,” our honoree observes that Judaism does not accept a dichotomy between the realm of matter and the realm of spirit. Rather, Judaism regards the material realm “as a container for holiness” (9). Moreover, the concept of erets ha-ḳodesh (Holy Land) constitutes “the quintessential expression of this interpenetration of matter with spirit” (10). Seidler-Feller then demonstrates that the approach Rabbi Moses Naḥmanides (Ramban; 1194–1270) takes to the concept of Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel avoids moral considerations. To be sure, Ramban affirms that yishuv ha-arets (settlement in the Land) is a commandment, as he writes, “We are commanded to take possession of the land. . . . We should not leave it in the hands of any other people or allow it to lay waste as it says, ‘And you shall take possession of the land and settle in it, for I have given the land to you to possess it’ [Num. 33:53].”3 Indeed, Naḥmanides sees the commandment for Jews to settle the Land as modeled on the war of kibbush (conquest) in which Joshua engaged when he and the Israelites entered the Land in biblical times. Thus, even when Jews settle the Land peacefully, the halakhic mechanism by which they do so is one of kibbush. In sum, while Naḥmanides ties kibbush ha-arets and yishuv ha-arets to one another, ethical considerations are notably absent from his approach (13). Over against Naḥmanides stands Rabbi Moses Maimonides (Rambam; 1038–1204), who, Seidler-Feller notes, omits kibbush altogether from his list of 613 biblical commandments (prompting Naḥmanides’s comments to begin with). This refusal to admit conquest of the Land into the Maimonidean 2 Chaim Seidler-Feller, “The Land of Israel: Sanctified Matter or Mythic Space,” Zionist Ideas 15 (Spring 1987): 6–31. 3 Ibid., 12, quoting Moses Naḥmanides, Positive Commandments Omitted by Maimonides, in Sefer ha-mitsṿot le-ha-Rambam . . . im haśśagot ha-Ramban, ed. Charles B. Chavel (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1981), 244 (no. 4).

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body of divine precepts is no accident. From the Maimonidean perspective, Seidler-Feller maintains, the sanctity infused into the Land via military conquest lasts only as long as it remains under Israelite control; once it is conquered by an outside army, the sanctity vanishes. By contrast, “the authority of ‘peaceful conquest’ (settlement) is everlasting” (21). Moreover: [T]he sanctity [of the Land] of which the Talmud speaks is not an inherent sanctity but one that is conditioned on human dedication to the principles of Torah. The Land is not so much a sacred center as it is a center of sacred behavior. It is not the Land that holds the key to holiness but the human community inhabiting the Land, most specifically the Jewish people, that is charged with maintaining the Land’s holiness [23].

The sanctity of the Land is thus tied to the religious behavior of the Jewish people dwelling in it. Following the lead of his teacher Rabbi David Hartman, who was a foremost proponent of this Maimonidean perspective, Seidler-Feller maintains that “the sanctification of the Land of Israel is but a tool for the sanctification of the people of Israel” (26; emphasis in the original). In his view, the sanctity of the contemporary State of Israel is contingent upon the behavior of the Jews inhabiting it. As Seidler-Feller sees it, this requires a politics of moral aspiration. He asserts that only when such a politics is realized will there be a “further stage in the development of the sanctified body of Israel” (27). Seidler-Feller recognizes that there is no easy formula for achieving such a politics of ethical responsibility in the morass of moral complexities that inform the policies of modern Israel. However, such challenges do not lead him to avoid struggling with the questions the State of Israel ought to confront if it would be true to the highest principles of Jewish tradition. He therefore asks, “How does our consciousness of the Torah’s call for justice and righteousness influence our drive to correct the evils that derive from a modern state’s needs for security and power?” (27). And he concludes: “It is Israel’s historical task to confront these challenges by drawing from and applying the teachings of the entire intellectual and spiritual heritage of Judaism. Only then will her future as a dynamically moral society covenanted with God be vouchsafed” (27). The conclusion and ethical concerns that Seidler-Feller put forth in his article were paralleled and foreshadowed in the writings of Goren as he addressed a host of morally complex issues Israel had to confront as its

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defense forces engaged in the conduct of war. In a study of his rabbinical writings on the topic, Shifra Mescheloff notes that Goren acknowledged in a 1969 public address that the lack of continuity between the halakhic tradition and the political framework of a modern state posed grave challenges to modern Israeli expositors of Jewish law and ethics who would apply halakhic teachings to a contemporary political-military context.4 Yet, as Arye Edrei has noted, Goren grappled with this dilemma and insisted that Jewish law could meet these challenges. He believed that Jewish legal and ethical teachings could be applied to modern questions of war, peace, and state security despite the gap in Jewish sovereignty for over 1,800 years.5 The problem this position posed for Jewish law, as Edrei points out, was not simply the novelty of a Jewish state nor the halakhic justification for war itself. Jewish tradition certainly countenanced warfare in particular situations, and Israel had every right to defend itself through the application of force. Rather, the foremost challenges, as Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz maintained, “concern the manner of conducting that war,” for there are “ethical values that go beyond what is permissible or forbidden according to the law.”6 Goren shared the concerns of Leibowitz and therefore wrote a work, Meshiv milḥamah, which he conceived as “a Shulḥan arukh for the military,”7 to address these issues. In its pages, Edrei explains, Goren argued that “it is impossible to conduct a war based solely on law. War must be conducted on the ethical level as well.”8

4 Shifra Mescheloff, “Be-en ha-se‘arah: demuto ha-tsibburit ṿi-yetsirato ha-Toranit shel ha-Rav Shelomoh Goren ba-shanim 1948–1994” (PhD diss., Bar-Ilan University, 2010), 79–80, quoting from a lecture delivered to Diaspora Jewish youth. 5 Arye Edrei, “Law, Interpretation, and Ideology: The Renewal of the Jewish Laws of War in the State of Israel,” Cardozo Law Review 28, no. 1 (2006): 218–19. See also the Hebrew version of this essay, “Mi-Qibya ad Beirut: teḥiyyatam shel dine ha-milḥamah ha-hilkhatiyyim bi-Medinat Yiśra’el,” in Yosef da‘at: meḥḳarim be-hisṭoriyyah yehudit modernit muggashim li-Prof. Yosef Salmon le-ḥag yovelo, ed. Joseph Goldstein (Beersheba: Ben-Gurion University Press, 2010), 126–27, where Edrei explicitly observes that Goren directed his words against all who would claim that “the halakhah could not serve as a normative source [of military ethics] for a modern state.” 6 Leibowitz, quoted and paraphrased in Edrei, “Law, Interpretation, and Ideology,” 209–11. 7 Goren, Meshiv milḥamah, 1:xii. 8 Edrei, “Law, Interpretation, and Ideology,” 221.

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As we now turn to Goren’s aforementioned article on the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982 that is the subject of this paper and which was included in Meshiv milḥamah, we ought to remind ourselves that the security concerns of the State of Israel that led to war were surely of vital importance to him. However, Goren would not allow such concerns to blunt his view that Jewish law demanded ethical sensitivity even during times of siege, and he was prepared to dispute rabbinic colleagues who would ignore such requirements. Seidler-Feller’s essay helps illuminate why Goren insisted that the Jewish legal tradition and its teachings regarding the conduct of siege were informed above all by a moral sensibility. By presenting Goren’s instruction on this matter in light of Seidler-Feller’s understanding of the nature of Jewish law, I hope to pay tribute to Seidler-Feller and his powerful moral and scholarly voice.

The Context of the Goren Essay In discussing Goren’s writings on the topic of the Israeli siege of Beirut, some background on the events of those days helps to place his words in their historical context. On June 6, 1982, Israel launched the First Lebanon War. Called “Operation Peace for Galilee” by the Israelis and labeled “The Invasion” by the Arabs, the war aims of the former, according to Anita Shapira, were clear: to remove Yasser Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Headquarters and forces from Lebanon so as to forge a new political order in the Middle East. By employing military might to drive Arafat and his forces completely out of Lebanon, Israel—and particularly then-Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon—expected that an ally friendly to Israel, the Christian Phalangist leader Bashir Gemayel, would assume office as president of Lebanon. Sharon hoped that Jordan would thereafter become the State of Palestine and that Israel would then legally annex the entire West Bank.9 When Israel began its war in Lebanon, it did not envision a ten-week siege of Beirut. However, as Itamar Rabinovich has observed, it immediately became apparent to Sharon that the military success of this campaign and the achievement of his political goals were contingent on Israel successfully dislodging Arafat from his headquarters in West Beirut.10 This 9 Anita Shapira, Israel: A History (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2012), 381. 10 Itamar Rabinovich, The War for Lebanon, 1970–1985 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 138ff.

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could only be accomplished by employing “unlimited military and political pressure,”11 and this meant that Beirut had to be encircled militarily. The Israeli siege of Beirut began on June 13 and continued through August 21. While, as Sharon had envisioned, Gemayel was elected president on August 23, just two days after the siege was lifted, he was subsequently assassinated on September 14, and the violence in Beirut seriously escalated after the assassination. The IDF used his assassination as a justification to enter West Beirut and destroy elements of the Palestinian infrastructure in the city. Sharon also infamously permitted units of Phalangist militiamen to move into the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, where, in the words of George W. Gawrych, Phalange fighters, clearly intent on revenge for the loss of their leader, massacred innocent civilians from 16–18 September. Political repercussions were felt in Washington and Tel Aviv. Reagan, having guaranteed the safety of Palestinian civilians, now ordered the Marines back into [W]est Beirut to provide security.  The Israeli public demanded an investigation of the events.  The massacres at Sabra and Shatilla proved a tragic ending to the siege. As noted by a retired Israeli general, “These atrocities led to the loss of legitimacy of the entire campaign, to direct intervention by the U.S. and the U.N., and to the beginning of the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon.”12

“The Siege of Beirut in Light of Jewish Law” Goren, then serving as Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi of Israel, originally published his essay on August 6, 1982, while the hostilities were still ongoing.13 He began his argument by focusing on the work of Rabbi Moses Maimonides, who, in his Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot melakhim 6:7, rules: 11 Ibid., 139. 12 George W. Gawrych, “The Siege of Beirut,” in Block by Block: The Challenges of Urban Operations, ed. William G. Robertson and Lawrence A. Yates (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College Press, 2003), 224, quoting Dov Tamari, “Military Operations in Urban Environments: The Case of Lebanon, 1982,” in Soldiers in Cities: Military Operations on Urban Terrain, ed. Michael C. Desch (Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2001), 52–53. 13 Shlomo Goren, “Ha-matsor al Beirut, le-or ha-halakhah,” Ha-tsofeh (August 8, 1982): 3. The revised version that appeared first in Meshiv milḥamah and later, with variations, in Goren’s Sefer torat ha-medinah: meḥḳar hilkhati hisṭori be-nośe’im ha-omedim be-rumah shel Medinat Yiśra’el me-az teḳumatah (Jerusalem: Ha-Iddera Rabbah, 1996), 401–23, included the response of Shaul Yisraeli, a prominent rabbi in the Religious

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When [the soldiers of the Jewish army] besiege a city to capture it, they do not surround it on all four sides but, rather, on three. They leave such room so that any person who wishes to save his life can flee, as it is says: “They took the field against Midian, as the Lord had commanded Moses” [Num. 31:7]. According to tradition, God commanded [Moses] to conduct [the siege by encircling the enemy] as described [from three sides].14

Goren explained that Maimonides’s decision was based on a passage in the Sifre (Parashat maṭṭot 157), which quotes a teaching from the tanna (mishnaic sage) Rabbi Nathan that this law is meant to grant the besieged enemy an escape path. He noted, too, that the apparent reason for this halakhah is humanitarian, “for the Torah demonstrates compassion even toward Israel’s enemies not to kill them, but rather to allow them to flee for their lives” (239). Of course, Goren acknowledged that this law was also motivated by two military aims completely aside from any ethical or humanitarian concerns. First, the military resolve of those who were under siege would be weakened by those who fled; with a path that allowed for escape, it was less likely that the defenders of a besieged city would fight to the end. Second, the opening of a side for flight would encourage the indigenous civilian population to evacuate the city and thereby lead to its surrender (240). Zionist community in Israel, as well as Goren’s rejoinder to Yisraeli’s response (these latter two essays had originally appeared in Ha-tsofeh [September 17, 1982]: 7, under the titles “Dinam shel ha-meḥabbelim din rodefim mammash ṿe-en ḥiyyuv li-petoaḥ lifnehem derekh beriḥah” and “Ḥovah le-hash’ir ruaḥ revi‘it petuḥah kede la-tet la-oyev efsharut le-malleṭ et nafsho,” respectively). (Compare Yisraeli’s presentation of the exchange between the two in his Sefer ḥaṿṿot Binyamin: ma’amarim[,] berurim ṿe-iyyunim hilkhatiyyim, ed. Neria Guttel, vol. 1 [Kfar Darom: Mekhon ha-Torah ṿeha-Arets, 1992], 111–19.) Citations of Goren’s work in the present essay will follow the pagination of the version printed in vol. 3 of Meshiv milḥamah; they will also appear in the body of the text, not in footnotes. Interestingly, in his rejoinder to Yisraeli as printed in Meshiv milḥamah, 253, Goren notes that the original piece was written as a half-hour radio broadcast, without the intention of publication in newspaper format, and was therefore much more abbreviated than it could (or should) have been. 14 In employing the Maimonidean ruling to guide his deliberations here, Goren displayed the high esteem in which he held Maimonides and the Mishneh Torah—an esteem he imbibed from his youth learning in a Lithuanian yeshiva where the rulings of the Mishneh Torah shaped, to a certain extent, the way the Talmud itself was understood. See Aviad Yehiel Hollander, “Deyoḳeno ha-hilkhati shel ha-Rav Shelomoh Goren: iyyunim be-shiḳḳule ha-pesiḳah ṿe-darkhe ha-bissus be-ma’amaraṿ ha-hilkhatiyyim” (PhD diss., Bar-Ilan University, 2011), 127, 136.

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An Essay on the Ethics of Jewish Warfare    DAVID ELLENSON

An Objection to the Contemporary Application of Hilkhot melakhim 6:7 and a Response Goren then raised a separate concern that could have potentially obviated the discussion over whether the rule of leaving a fourth side open for flight from the city was obligatory in the case of the IDF siege of Beirut. He asserted that the purpose of this siege was not “conquest of the city.” Instead, the purpose of this war, as Goren saw it, was “the defense of Israel” against an enemy that sought their destruction. In an instance such as this, perhaps the laws of siege as prescribed by the tradition did not apply and the IDF was obligated, as Deut. 13:6 commands, to “sweep out evil from your midst”: to cut off all four sides and not allow even a single enemy to escape. Otherwise, as Num. 33:55 warns, “[I]f you do not dispossess the inhabitants of the land, those whom you allow to remain shall be stings in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they shall harass you in the land in which you live.” On the basis of Targum Onkelos’s Aramaic translation of this verse, Goren stated this could be understood to mean that a decision to spare the inhabitants of an enemy city under siege during a war of defense by leaving a side open would pose a potential danger to the Jewish people. The enemy combatants who escaped in this way might one day organize terrorist cells against Israel. One might therefore conclude that no side should be left unguarded in such a war so that the destruction of the enemy would be complete (240). Having raised this interpretation as a possibility, Goren then immediately rejected it as incorrect. He maintained that in every instance of siege conducted by a Jewish army, whether for conquest or defense, there was an obligation to leave one side open so that the people of the city who were under siege could escape with their lives (240). Goren stated that an exploration of the source for the Maimonidean halakhah would reveal why this was so. He noted that Hilkhot melakhim 6:7 was derived from lessons learned from the war with Midian, and he observed that the war with Midian was not a war of conquest, but rather a war of revenge against the enemies of Israel. Indeed, it was explicitly defined this way two times in the Torah. The first was in Parashat Pinḥas, where it states: “The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, ‘Assail the Midianites and defeat them—for they assailed you by the trickery they practiced against you . . .’” (Num. 25:16–18). The second was in Parashat maṭṭot, where it is written: “The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, ‘Avenge the Israelite people on

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the Midianites . . .’” (Num. 31:1–2). Hence, the rationale for the war was punitive; vengeance was its aim. As stated in Scripture: “Moses spoke to the people saying, ‘Let men be picked out from among you for a campaign, and let them fall upon Midian to wreak the Lord’s vengeance on Midian’” (Num. 31:3). As if noting the switch from “Avenge the Israelite people” in God’s command to “wreak the Lord’s vengeance” in Moses’s instruction, the halakhic-midrashic work Sifre stated that Moses said to Israel: “You are not engaging in an act of vengeance for the sake of flesh and blood. Rather, you are avenging the One Who spoke and created the world” (Parashat maṭṭot 157). And Rashi, in his commentary on Num. 31:3, explained: “For one who stands against Israel—it is as if he stands against the blessed Holy One” (240). Despite this understanding of the war against Midian as a type of “holy war,” Goren noted that God still commanded Moses to encircle Midian from three and not four sides. In this way, all individuals who wished to escape could do so and thereby save their lives. This law was unquestionably an ethical demand of the tradition that could not be compromised. To be sure, the conditions the siege imposed on the city and its inhabitants could be severe. Goren held that a Jewish army had license to prevent the besieged from receiving military reinforcements and could prohibit any other activities that would break or ease the siege, for example, allowing supplies of food, water, and ammunition to enter the city. In sum, the obligation to leave one side open during a siege allowed for the possibility of movement in one direction only—from the city outwards, not into the city (241).

Another Objection and Response Goren himself then raised another argument against applying Maimonidean law in modern-day contexts like the siege of Beirut. He noted that it might be possible to argue that the basis for this law was not ethical-humanitarian, but rather strategic-tactical, as mentioned above. If, then, military officials determined that hermetically sealing the city were more strategically advantageous in a given circumstance, Hilkhot melakhim 6:7 would be inoperative. Proponents of such a view could cite the siege of Jericho described in Josh. 6:1 as a prooftext for this position. There we read: “Now Jericho was shut up tight because of the Israelites; no one could leave or enter” (242–43).

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Yet, Goren discounted this prooftext and claimed it had no relevance to the question of whether the Maimonidean rule was applicable in this instance. Citing Targum Jonathan to Josh. 6:1, which understood that Jericho was “closed with iron gates and reinforced with copper bolts,” Goren noted that the verse referred to an internal closure of traffic into and out of the city by the city’s residents, not to an external siege imposed by Israel. By contrast, Hilkhot melakhim 6:7 addressed a situation where the Jews were the actors. While Goren felt that the precedent of Jericho was inapplicable for this reason to the siege of Beirut, he nevertheless conceded at this point in his argument that perhaps the basis of the Maimonidean ruling was in fact strategic-tactical, allowing for the possibility that military officials could decide to employ a different strategy, like surrounding the city on all sides (243).

The Continued Insistence on the Primacy of the Ethical as the Motivation for Hilkhot melakhim 6:7 In the course of countering this suggestion, Goren cited the discussion of this law by Rabbi Meir Simhah ha-Kohen of Dvinsk (1843–1926). In his Meshekh ḥokhmah commentary to Num. 31:7,15 R. Meir Simhah noted that Maimonides had omitted this commandment regarding the “fourth side” from his book-length tally of the 613 commandments in the Torah known as Sefer ha-mitsṿot, even though he had discussed it in his Hilkhot melakhim. The Meshekh ḥokhmah explained this omission by paraphrasing Naḥmanides, who argued that this commandment should be included in the tally; in his words: “[W]e were commanded that when we lay siege to a city we should leave one side of the city without a blockade, so that if they wish to flee they will have a way to escape, for in this way we learn to act with mercy even with our enemies during a time of war.”16 R. Meir Simhah related this ethical-humanitarian understanding of the law of siege to another law of war: “When you approach a town to attack it, you shall offer it terms of peace” (Deut. 20:10), apparently also meant to teach the Jewish people to have mercy on the lives of their enemies (243). 15 Meir Simhah ha-Kohen of Dvinsk, Sefer meshekh ḥokhmah: be’urim u-perushim, ra‘yonim u-derushim, he‘arot ṿe-ḥiddushim al Ḥamishah ḥummeshe Torah (Riga: Menahem Mendel Dovber Sack, 1927), 317–18. 16 See Naḥmanides, Positive Commandments, 246 (no. 5).

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In stark contrast, the Meshekh ḥokhmah wrote, Maimonides limited the rationale for this mandate to pragmatic concerns alone and took a purely tactical approach to the law of siege: if Israel’s enemies were given an opening for escape, they might choose to flee for their lives rather than fight heroically with all the strength at their disposal and thereby achieve an improbable victory “out of the depths of their despair [mi-godel ha-ye’ush].” It was for this reason, R. Meir Simhah explained, that Maimonides did not list the law of siege as a commandment in his Sefer ha-mitsṿot. He claimed that for Maimonides, the practice of leaving a fourth side open was, in Goren’s words, “not one of the Torah’s commandments but was simply meant to give us sound advice on how to hasten victory during a siege” (243–44). Goren, for his part, rejected R. Meir Simhah’s understanding of the disagreement between Rambam and Ramban, pointing up two inconsistencies within his argumentation. Part of Goren’s objection rested on his observation that Rambam applied the law of Deut. 20:10, the humanitarian character of which was not in dispute, to both a milḥemet mitsṿah (obligatory war) and a milḥemet ha-reshut (optional war) (see Hilkhot melakhim 6:1). Goren reasoned that the same was probably true with respect to the law of siege, even though Maimonides was not explicit on this point, and that both laws were motivated by ethical-humanitarian concerns (244).17 As Arye Edrei put it, “Rabbi Goren argued that just as the commandment regarding the ‘call for peace’ clearly applies to both permissible and obligatory wars, so too the commandment to leave the fourth side open applies to both.”18 As a result, Goren concluded by forthrightly restating his position: Rambam’s opinion is that this commandment [the law of siege] is obligatory nowadays as well. Thus, if we lay siege to the cities of our enemies, whether in a milḥemet mitsṿah or in a milḥemet ha-reshut, whether within the borders of the Land of Israel or beyond, it is forbidden to close off the besieged city from every side. Rather, we are obligated to leave one side open leading outward, so as to allow for anyone who wishes to flee from the besieged city to do so and thereby save his life. We only need to ensure that [the enemy] 17 Edrei, “Law, Interpretation, and Ideology,” 223–24 n. 89, interpreted Goren to be arguing that Maimonides did not list the law of siege as a distinct commandment in his Sefer ha-mitsṿot because he regarded it as included within the law of Deut. 20:10, which he did count. 18 Ibid., 223.

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An Essay on the Ethics of Jewish Warfare    DAVID ELLENSON

will not exploit this [open] side so as to bring in reinforcements, arms, or food supplies [245].

A path for escape therefore had to be provided to residents of a besieged city—including Beirut—who would choose this option (245). At this point in the piece, Goren cited the response of Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli (without naming him), in which the latter objected to his arguments and conclusions that a fourth side had to remain open to allow for escape during the siege of Beirut (246–52). After a lengthy exposition further unpacking the reasons he felt the Meshekh ḥokhmah was mistaken (253–58), Goren directly addressed Yisraeli’s claims, basing himself on passages found in various Rabbinic sources (Sifre, Parashat naśo 42; Leviticus Rabbah 9:9; Deuteronomy Rabbah 5:12, 5:15; Massekhet derekh erets zuṭa, Pereḳ ha-shalom 14) to assert that the commandment to offer a city peace prior to imposing a siege upon it was required because Judaism recognizes that “great is peace [mi-shum she-gadol ha-shalom].” It was not meant primarily to force the enemy to surrender to the army and Torah of Israel, as Yisraeli had suggested. As Deuteronomy Rabbah 5:12 stated: “Our Rabbis say: ‘Know how great is the power of peace. Even in wartime, when one goes out to fight with swords and spears—the blessed Holy One said that when you go out to wage war you must begin by offering peace [to your enemy].’” And Rabbi Yose ha-Gelili echoed this position in Pereḳ ha-shalom 14 when he said: “Great is peace, for even when one goes out to war, one must begin by offering peace” (259). Goren contended that the supreme value of peace, evidenced above as the basis for the command to offer peace before waging war, was also the basis for the command to leave the fourth side of a besieged city open. He buttressed his position by turning once again to the case of Midian in the book of Numbers. God Himself commanded Moses to allow those Midianites who so desired to escape, and God did this even though the Midianites were guilty of causing Israel to sin (see Num. 25:1–18; 31:14–17). Indeed, Goren observed that “history teaches us that the Midianites returned and regrouped [to wage] several arduous wars against Israel . . . as it says in the book of Judges 6:1: ‘The Lord delivered [the Israelites] into the hands of the Midianites for seven years.’” Nevertheless, the Holy One still commanded Moses to leave a side open for them to flee and save their lives. The commandment to show mercy to an enemy by allowing those who wished to escape to do so was absolute and had to be obeyed because it was God’s law (259–60).

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A Final Objection on the Basis of bSanhedrin 72a Goren noted that Yisraeli objected to his position here by arguing that the Talmudic principle of self-defense found in bSanhedrin 72a that allowed for preemptive force to be used against an enemy aimed at murder—im ba le-horgekha, hashkem le-horgo (if one comes forth to slay you, forestall by slaying him)19—surely trumped the law in Hilkhot melakhim 6:7. Goren countered by pointing out that the source for this rule, according to Numbers Rabbah 21:4, is precisely the episode of the war against Midian: “‘Assail the Midianites’ [Num. 25:17]. Why? ‘For they are assailing you.’ Based on this the sages taught: ‘If one comes forth to slay you, forestall by slaying him.’” Thus, the Israelites were actually commanded to leave open a fourth side that would allow the enemy who wished to escape to do so, despite the fact that im ba le-horgekha, hashkem le-horgo was the impetus for going to war in the first place! The text of the midrash itself undermined Yisraeli’s argument (262). To be sure, Goren realized that some of those who would escape the siege of Beirut would undoubtedly return and one day engage in war against Israel. Indeed, he had no illusions about the murderous intent of many of these persons (259–60). Nevertheless, he insisted that the commandment that obligates Israel to display mercy to the residents of a besieged city by leaving an opening for escape was operative here. As he stated in the final part of his article: I stand firmly by my previous position. There is not a shadow of a doubt that Jewish law as presented in the Sifre de-be Rav, Rambam, Ramban, and the Sefer ha-ḥinnukh regarding the obligation to leave a fourth side open during a siege to allow the enemy the option to flee for his life was applicable in “Operation Peace for Galilee” in Lebanon. In the opinion of all authorities, we are commanded to clear a one-way opening on one side of our enemies in order to allow them to escape from the city and save their lives. This is our goal and the officially declared goal of the government of Israel and the IDF. It is forbidden to seal off Beirut hermetically on all four sides.

19 For a discussion of this law, see David Ellenson, “The Talmudic Principle, ‘If One Comes Forth to Slay You, Forestall by Slaying Him’ in Israeli Public Policy: A Responsum by Rabbi Hayyim David Halevi,” in Studies in Mediaeval Halakhah in Honor of Stephen M. Passamaneck, ed. Alyssa Gray and Bernard Jackson (Liverpool: Jewish Law Association, 2007), 73–79.

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An Essay on the Ethics of Jewish Warfare    DAVID ELLENSON

The wanton destruction of innocents would be particularly intolerable. On Goren’s view, the Torah does not allow for the possibility that the guilty and the innocent can be slayed together indiscriminately (264–65).20

Concluding Word At the outset of this essay, I quoted Chaim Seidler-Feller, who wrote of the requirement that the State of Israel heed “the Torah’s call for justice and righteousness,” even as it strove to maintain its “security and power.” This call rests on a clear moral aspiration on the part of the people of Israel even in the most trying circumstances. Only a “dedication to the principles of Torah,” including the demand for “sacred behavior,” could assure the sanctity of the Land and State of Israel. Seidler-Feller’s argument for justice and morality as the foundations upon which Judaism is built and his insistence that the State of Israel adhere to these foundations are not always in the mainstream of rabbinic opinion today. But it is important to recall that his ethical demands are affirmed in the final section of Goren’s piece, where he observed: “And, to a certain degree, the obligation to put into action the quality of mercy embodied in the Torah and Jewish law is incumbent upon the rabbis of the Jewish people as well, particularly when the law is clear and binding, as it is in this instance, lest a profanation of God’s name result, heaven forbid” (264). The ethical sensibility Seidler-Feller displays in his essay thus provides a vital framework for comprehending why Goren assigned such primacy to ethical-humanitarian considerations in his explanation and analysis of Hilkhot melakhim 6:7. 20 Interestingly, in light of Goren’s insistence here that a fourth side remain open for escape during the siege of Beirut, Shifra Mescheloff observes that he seems to have taken a very different position a bit over a year later, in December 1983–January 1984. As civil war broke out in November 1983 in Tripoli between Arafat’s forces and Palestinian rebels supported by the Syrian army, the PLO found itself surrounded on land and at sea, with Israel imposing a naval blockade. However, in this instance, Goren held that because Israel was only responsible for the naval side of the siege, she did not have to lift it so as to allow the terrorists to escape. See Mescheloff, “Be-en ha-se‘arah,” 83. Robert Eisen, in his Religious Zionism, Jewish Law, and the Morality of War: How Five Rabbis Confronted One of Modern Judaism’s Greatest Challenges (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 231, makes the same point as Mescheloff when he states that Goren’s essays regarding the two blockades would seem to be “inconsistent” with one another. While reconciling these disparate rulings is beyond the purview of the present paper, the suggestion Eisen puts forth on pp. 232–33 is surely insightful and worthy of further discussion.

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Carole Goldberg, University of California, Los Angeles

Invoking the Indigenous, for and against Israel

Personal Observations Chaim is my witness. It happened at a meeting of Jewish faculty at UCLA, called by Chaim in Spring 2016, to discuss the campus response to the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement1 and the experience of pro-Israel Jewish students at UCLA.2 It was not a large group of faculty, no more than twenty-five, and most of those present were older and male. I was one of only two women in the room. In a loud voice, one of the men launched into a lengthy defense of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Israel’s policies were no worse, he insisted, than what the United States had 1

According to its website (https://bdsmovement.net/what-is-bds), BDS is an international movement aiming to pressure Israel to stop “occupying and colonising Palestinian land, discriminating against Palestinian citizens of Israel and denying Palestinian refugees the right to return to their homes” (accessed March 1, 2019). The University of California has officially refused to associate itself with this movement. See Jared Sichel, “UCLA Chancellor Gene Block: BDS ‘Isn’t Going to be Sustained on This Campus,’” Jewish Journal (March 18, 2015), accessed March 1, 2019, http://jewishjournal.com/news/ los_angeles/164934/. 2 Some pro-Israel Jewish and non-Jewish students have encountered resistance from pro-Palestinian students through student government and otherwise, experiences that some commentators view as a sign of pervasive antisemitism. See Richard Stellar, “UCLA: No Place for Jews?,” Jewish Journal (September 1, 2016), accessed March 1, 2019, http://jewishjournal.com/opinion/189501/. For a competing view that BDS is not gaining traction at UCLA and that Jewish and pro-Israel students are thriving there, see Aaron Lerner, “Keeping UCLA a Place of Thriving Jewish Life and Pro-Israel Activism,” Jewish Journal (September 7, 2016), accessed March 1, 2019, http://jewishjournal.com/ opinion/189597/. Rabbi Lerner is the current executive director of Hillel at UCLA.

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Invoking the Indigenous, for and against Israel     CAROLE GOLDBERG

done to Native Americans. Native Americans had been displaced and subordinated to the control of the United States, yet no one was insisting that their ancestral lands be returned to them, they be recognized as separate nation states, or they be given seats at the United Nations. There was no boycott of the United States. Singling out Israel for a boycott/divestment movement was hypocritical, antisemitic. I did not know the speaker, who I later learned was indeed a UCLA faculty member. As a scholar and teacher in the field of Native American law for more than four decades at UCLA, I understood immediately that his knowledge of Native American history was superficial and his use of the comparison polemical. Nonetheless, I listened patiently until he finished. My hand went up immediately thereafter, and Chaim called upon me to speak. Yet, only a few sentences into my response, the prior speaker interrupted me, attacking my arguments even before they were laid out. Unwilling to tolerate such behavior, I called him out publicly for the interruption.3 Then, I proceeded to make three points. First (as subsequent protests at Standing Rock have made abundantly clear),4 the speaker’s premise was incorrect. Implicit in his argument was the claim that U.S. mistreatment of indigenous peoples is widely viewed as “over with” and accepted. Although nearly all the dispossession of indigenous lands in North America took place more than one hundred years ago, Native Americans have not abandoned claims to those lands, to treaty rights, or to self-determination. The matter is not closed and behind us, despite hundreds of treaties that provided inadequate payment for land cessions,5 as well as various processes initiated by the United States to 3 Considerable research supports the claim that men are more likely to interrupt women than other men. See, for example, Don H. Zimmerman and Candace West, “Sex Roles, Interruptions and Silences in Conversation,” in Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance, ed. Barrie Thorne and Nancy Henley (Rowley, MA: Newbury House, 1975), 105–29; Adrienne B. Hancock and Benjamin A. Rubin, “Influence of Communication Partner’s Gender on Language,” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 34, no. 1 (2015): 46–64. 4 Protestors known as “Water Protectors” have been demonstrating against the construction of a massive oil pipeline that crosses treaty-protected lands and waters of the Sioux, severely threatening cultural, sacred, and burial sites, as well as the water supply for the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux reservations. The official website of the protest movement is http://standwithstandingrock.net (accessed March 1, 2019). 5 See Felix S. Cohen, “Original Indian Title,” in The Legal Conscience: Selected Papers of Felix S. Cohen, ed. Lucy Kramer Cohen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960),

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offer very limited compensation for lands that were taken.6 Even if the U.S. courts and Congress are largely unreceptive to Native American claims, Native Nations continue to pursue them through domestic legal and political processes, in international human rights forums, and through political/ social movements.7 Second, and focusing more on the present, Native Nations today possess a degree of sovereignty over distinct territories (reservations or, more properly, “Indian Country”) that Palestinians lack within Israel. They exercise authority that U.S. courts recognize as “inherent,” not delegated to them by the United States, making and enforcing their own laws with agencies of their own governments.8 Third, and most important, the United States (and earlier North American regimes) carried out the dispossession, suppression, and forced assimilation of Native Americans at a time when international law did not bar such activity and may have even justified it in the name of “civilizing” the “savages.” Today, however, and since the middle of the twentieth century, the system of international human rights has denied the legitimacy of such coercive activities in the name of “indigenous rights.” Under this still developing regime, only “free and informed prior consent” of indigenous peoples can justify activities within their territories by the dominant state, and indigenous self-governance is a controlling value.9 Should we judge the

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281–83; also, see generally Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). See David E. Wilkins, Hollow Justice: A History of Indigenous Claims in the United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). See generally Wallace Coffey and Rebecca Tsosie, “Rethinking the Tribal Sovereignty Doctrine: Cultural Sovereignty and the Collective Future of Indian Nations,” Stanford Law & Policy Review 12 (2001): 191–221. See generally The Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, The State of the Native Nations: Conditions under U.S. Policies of Self-Determination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Nell Jessup Newton et al., Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law (New Providence, NJ: LexisNexis, 2012), ch. 4. See, for example, G.A. Res. 61/295, annex, U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, October 2, 2007 [hereinafter UNDRIP]; International Labour Organization, Convention Concerning the Protection and Integration of Indigenous and Other Tribal and Semi-Tribal Populations in Independent Countries (No. 107), June 26, 1957, 328 U.N.T.S. 247, revised by Convention Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries (No. 169), June 27, 1989, 28 I.L.M. 1382 (1989) (entered into force September 5, 1991) [hereinafter Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention],  accessed March 1, 2019, http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/ en/f ?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO:12100:P12100_INSTRUMENT_ID:312314; Organization of American States, American Convention on Human Rights, November

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Invoking the Indigenous, for and against Israel     CAROLE GOLDBERG

actions of Israel today by the human rights standards of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries? Anyone answering that question in the affirmative would have to explain why that line of reasoning would not also justify enslaving the Palestinians. Had I thought of it at the time, I could have added one more point. The comparison of Israeli treatment of Palestinians with the United States’ treatment of Native Americans concedes the characterization of Palestinians as indigenous peoples. Did the speaker really intend that consequence? Did the speaker understand that acknowledging Palestinians as indigenous peoples opened the door to a whole host of claims the Palestinians might make for self-determination under contemporary human rights law, contrary to Israeli policy? Did the speaker appreciate how hotly contested the characterization of Palestinians as indigenous peoples has become, including provoking competing claims, less scholarly in nature, that Jews are the true indigenous peoples of Israel? Clearly, this exchange with the male professor had touched a nerve with me for multiple reasons, even apart from the interruption. As a Jewish woman long engaged in Native legal issues and married to a member of a Native Nation in the upper Midwest, I had come to understand my connection to the field, at least partly, as an outgrowth of my Jewish identity. Although the intellectual appeal was powerful and the social justice issues compelling regardless of one’s background, my upbringing as a Jew also figured into my lifelong commitment. The history of the Jewish people, I was taught, fit a pattern: some outside group (Greeks, Romans, etc.) tried to force us to give up our religion and culture, we resisted, and we survived. Native American experience neatly fit that pattern, too. Hence, the personal resonance. Notably, however, the account of Jewish history driving this resonance did not require Zionism. Survival as a people could take place in the Diaspora as well as in the Land of Israel. My exchange at the Hillel meeting exposed a potential analogy between Israeli policies and United States policies that situated Jews not as the Native American resistors/survivors, but as the perpetrators of forced assimilation. The other reason I was troubled by the exchange had to do with my own work on indigenous issues in Israel. On two separate occasions in the early 2000s, I had traveled to Israel with my husband, a professor of 22, 1969, O.A.S.T.S. no. 36, 1144 U.N.T.S. 123; Organization of American States, American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, June 15, 2016,  accessed March 1, 2019, http://indianlaw.org/adrip/home.

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Sociology and American Indian Studies at UCLA, to participate in conferences at the Center for Bedouin Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU). These conferences, focusing on comparative indigenous studies, had situated the Bedouin people in a closely analogous position to Native Americans—both groups being land-based cultures that had been hounded out of their traditional lands, partly on grounds that they were nomadic and had no real claims to those lands. I had seen the outcome of Israeli policies for myself: Bedouins forced to live in slum-like conditions in “authorized villages” and often preferring to live in more traditional fashion in unauthorized villages that were nonetheless deprived of power and sewage facilities under orders from the Israeli government. As Jews, could we abide such treatment? The literature generated by the conferences at BGU, as well as the notoriety of the case of Steven Salaita, who was denied appointment at the University of Illinois in the American Indian Studies Program because of antisemitic/anti-Israel statements, have made me aware of the frequency with which indigenous issues are raised in connection with Israel and the Palestinians.10 This festschrift for my dear friend and teacher, Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, has given me the opportunity to delve more deeply into these issues. Following his lead, I will be swimming against a variety of different, often contrary, currents.

Invoking the Indigenous, for Israel The male professor at the Hillel meeting offered only one of the two conventional (and logically inconsistent) arguments in support of Israeli policies toward Palestinians, drawn from comparisons with indigenous peoples generally, or Native Americans specifically. These arguments could be applied to Palestinians or Arabs living within Israel proper, but also to Palestinians in territories occupied by Israel after the Six-Day War. A shorthand version of the male professor’s argument could be phrased as: “No worse than the United States.” As noted above, the comparison between Israeli and U.S. 10 Salaita has examined the comparisons from a distinctly anti-Israel perspective. See, for example, Steven Salaita, Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 1–25. For a local Los Angeles illustration, see Laila Al-Marayati, “Will Palestinians Go the Way of Native Americans?,” Los Angeles Times (April 21, 2002), accessed March 1, 2019, http:// articles.latimes.com/2002/apr/21/opinion/op-almarayati.rtf.

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policy implicitly accepts the characterization of Palestinians as indigenous peoples. A second argument supporting Israel starts from a radically different premise, namely, that Jews are the true indigenous peoples of Israel. As such, Jews, not Palestinians, are entitled to make human rights claims to land and self-determination under current international indigenous rights protocols. The shorthand version of this argument I will call: “Jews are the Indigenous.” The “No worse than the United States” argument has adherents beyond the faculty group that met at UCLA Hillel. Notably, at an Israeli Knesset Interior Committee hearing in 2013, Knesset member Miri Regev responded to a question about the controversial Prawer Plan, since shelved, to move more than thirty thousand Bedouins out of unrecognized villages and resettle them in urban towns. “You want to transfer an entire population?” a challenger asked. Regev, Chair of the Committee, answered, “Yes, as the Americans did to the Indians.”11 Wealthy businessperson Ronald Lauder, President of the World Jewish Congress and Chairman of the Board of the Jewish National Fund, invoked a similar comparison when he asserted, “The United States had its manifest destiny in the West.  .  .  . For Israel, that land is the Negev. . . .”12 Implicit in Manifest Destiny—the nineteenth-century doctrine of a divinely ordained Anglo-Saxon imperative to spread its civilization—was the rightfulness of settling land then occupied by Native Nations. The fundamental weaknesses of the “No worse than the United States” argument have already been presented through my response to the male professor. To summarize, it misrepresents the history and current position of Native Americans in the United States in important ways, ignoring both contemporary tribal challenges to ongoing mistreatment, as well as ways in which that mistreatment has been partially mitigated through policies of tribal self-determination. Furthermore, the position is vulnerable to moral challenges, due to the “might makes right” rationale underlying U.S. seizure 11 Ariel Ben Solomon, “MKs Learn Beduin Did Not See, Agree to Resettlement Plan, Threatening Bill’s Passage,” The Jerusalem Post (December 10, 2013), accessed March 1, 2019, http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/MKs-learn-Beduin-were-in-thedark-over-resettlement-plan-threatening-bills-Knesset-passage-334502. 12 Ronald S. Lauder, “The Negev—Israel’s Manifest Destiny,” Jewish National Fund, accessed March 1, 2019, https://secure.jnf.org/site/SPageServer/;jsessionid=00000000.app205a? NONCE_TOKEN=5EF43E18FDA9DF5BD3BBD53D176A072D&pagename=PR_ Negev; see also Dave Schechter, “JNF Blueprint Not Yet in Full Bloom,” Atlanta Jewish Times 90, no. 3 (January 30, 2015): 13–15.

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of indigenous lands, as well as the argument’s reliance on outdated, thoroughly repudiated international norms. Finally, “No worse than the United States” is a dangerous rhetorical strategy for defenders of Israel, because the argument makes sense only if Palestinians are acknowledged as indigenous peoples, a concession that can easily be turned against Israel’s interests, as a later portion of this essay demonstrates.13 The other pro-Israel argument invoking indigenous rights, “Jews are the Indigenous,” takes a wholly different tack. Recognizing the legitimacy of indigenous rights claims, this argument positions the Jewish people as the rightful possessors of such claims, not the Palestinians. Notably, it has no prominent academic exponents. The argument seems to come almost entirely from journalists and other sources of popular literature. One journalistic commentator, for example, invokes the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) as the foundation of the right to a Jewish state, describing the declaration as asserting “the right of self-determination as well as the rights to maintain the culture, institutions, religion, and language for indigenous peoples.”14 Other rights mentioned by this author include living in peace and security—free from genocide, incitement to racial hatred, and expulsion from their native lands—and having access to religious sites. The author’s conclusion: “Zionism is the principle, justified by historical experience, that these rights can be guaranteed for the Jewish people only in a state under Jewish sovereignty.”15 The standard version of the “Jews are the Indigenous” argument focuses on the long-term occupation of Israel by Jewish people, the forcible nature of their displacement from the Land, and their continuous connections to the Land throughout millennia of Diaspora. As Israeli law professor Frances Raday stated succinctly, describing a position which she does not 13 See text at nn. 42–54 below. 14 Vic Rosenthal, “Is Zionism Colonialism or Indigenous Self-Determination?,” The Jewish Press (November 1, 2015), accessed March 1, 2019, http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/ opinions/is-zionism-colonialism-or-indigenous-self-determination/2015/11/01/. 15 Ibid. Other sources view the indigenous status of the Jewish people as the basis for entitlement to a state “on the site of [the Jews’] ancestral kingdom.” See anon., “Who Are the Indigenous People of Palestine?,” FLAME, accessed March 1, 2019, http:// factsandlogic.org/ad_153/; as well as Irwin Cotler, “The Gathering Storm, and Beyond,” The Jerusalem Post (May 14, 2008), accessed March 1, 2019, http://www.jpost. com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/The-gathering-storm-and-beyond: “Israel is the aboriginal homeland of the Jewish people across space & time. . . . [I]ts birth certificate originates in its inception as a First Nation, and not simply, however important, in its United Nations international birth certificate.”

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endorse, the Jewish claim to indigeneity “is based on the connection with the land as a self-governing people two thousand years ago, maintaining a minority habitation and spiritual connection ever since.”16 Israeli journalist Rachel Avraham elaborates: . . . [T]he Jewish people . . . made up the majority of the population in Israel up until 135 CE, when the Jewish people through massacres, brutal oppression, persecutions, and ethnic cleansing were forcibly made into a minority within their own country. Just like the Native Americans, the fact that Jews were made into a minority within their own country does not rob them of their indigenous status nor does it imply that they abandoned their country. In fact, Jews continued to live in Israel throughout history, regardless of which regime was in power. . . .17

Canadian historian and lawyer Allen Hertz has gone beyond demography, documenting the contributions of Palestine-based Jews to Jewish civilization over the past two thousand years and concluding: “Conceptually, the Jewish people is aboriginal to its ancestral homeland in the same way that the First Nations are aboriginal to their ancestral lands in the Americas.”18  Other publications emphasize the “ancient Jewish connection” to Palestine as confirmed by sacred texts of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims, as well as by archaeological finds and associated scholarly research, repeated references to Jerusalem in the Hebrew Bible and Jewish liturgy, and proven genetic ties between Jews of the Diaspora and Jews of biblical times.19 Continuity of “a distinct language, culture and religion that are linked inextricably to Palestine” is stressed as well.20 These ties are deemed sufficient to meet the U.N. definition of an indigenous people, paraphrased as requiring continuous occupation of ancestral lands, “common ancestry with original occupants,” “a distinct common culture,” “a distinct language,” “a religion 16 Frances Raday, “Self-Determination and Minority Rights,” Fordham International Law Journal 26, no. 3 (2002): 462. 17 Rachel Avraham, “Debunking the ‘Palestinians as Native Americans’ Myth,” The Jewish Press (April 29, 2013), accessed March 1, 2019, http://www.jewishpress. com/blogs/united-with-israel/debunking-the-palestinians-as-native-americansmyth/2013/04/29/ (emphasis in the original), citing statistics of Jews as 5,000 of a total population of 300,000 in 1517, and 9,000 of a total population of 423,648 in 1893. 18 Allen Z. Hertz, “Aboriginal Rights of the Jewish People,” American Thinker (October 30, 2011), accessed March 1, 2019, http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2011/10/ aboriginal_rights_of_the_jewish_people.html. 19 Anon., “Who Are the Indigenous People of Palestine?” 20 Ibid.

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that emphasizes spiritual ties to the land,” and “a genetic connection to a specific people.”21 Even some Native American activists have added their voices to the “Jews are the Indigenous” position. The most prolific of these writers is a Métis from the Canadian province of Alberta, Ryan Bellerose. As a child growing up in the harsh conditions of the Paddle Prairie Métis settlement, he took an interest in Jewish history, concluding that the “stubborn survival” of the Jewish people and establishment of the State of Israel could “serve as an example to indigenous people everywhere.”22 Elaborating on this point, he has pursued the comparison with the experience of his own indigenous group: The Jews also suffered genocide and were expelled from their homeland. They were also rejected by everyone and forced to wander. Like us, they rebelled against imperial injustice when necessary and, despite their grievances, strived for peace whenever possible. Like us they were given a tiny sliver of their land back after centuries of suffering and persecution, land that nobody else had wanted to call home until then. Like us, they took that land despite their misgivings and forged a nation from a fractured and wounded people.23

Summing up his views and revealing his motivation for support of Zionism, Bellerose later wrote: Israel is the world’s first modern indigenous state: the creation and declaration of the sovereign nation of Israel marks the first time in history that an indigenous people has managed to regain control of its ancestral lands and build a nation state. As such, this is incredibly important for indigenous people both to recognise and to support as a great example for our peoples to emulate.24

Further, according to Bellerose, to recognize as indigenous those groups that postdate the Jews, such as the Palestinians, would be to invite “conqueror” 21 Ibid. See also Ryan Bellerose, “Israel Palestine: Who’s Indigenous?,” Israellycool (January 9, 2014), accessed March 1, 2019, http://www.israellycool.com/2014/01/09/israelpalestine-whos-indigenous/. The U.N. definition of “Indigenous Peoples” is discussed below at n. 31. 22 Ryan Bellerose, “A Native and a Zionist,” The Métropolitain (March 13, 2013), accessed March 1, 2019, http://www.themetropolitain.ca/articles/view/1235. 23 Ibid. 24 Idem, “Israel Palestine.”

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regimes, such as the Europeans in North America and Australia, to make claims that they are indigenous as well.25 It is unclear whether those who argue for Jewish indigeneity in Israel make this claim mainly for affirmative reasons (that is, to justify Israeli statehood) or for defensive reasons (that is, to blunt Palestinian claims of indigenous rights). Notably, the “Jews are the Indigenous” argument commonly appears side-by-side with denial of Palestinian indigeneity.26 Conversely, those who argue for Palestinian indigeneity make a point of challenging Jews’ claims to peoplehood and ties to the Land of Israel. For example, political scientist Amal Jamal refers to the “doubtful narrative concerning the relationship between immigrant Jews and Jews who inhibited [sic] Palestine in the past.”27 Steven Salaita states that any claims of a Jewish presence in Palestine dating back to antiquity are “against available historical evidence.”28 The go-to source in support of such challenges seems to be Shlomo Sand’s controversial book, The Invention of the Jewish People,29 which claims to refute the idea that Jews are a nationality that can trace its origins to habitation in/expulsion from the Land of Israel.30 Sand’s work goes beyond challenging the characterization of Jews as an indigenous people, because it denies they are a “people” at all. I lack the historical expertise necessary to sort through empirical or theoretical claims about Jewish peoplehood, let alone Jewish indigenous 25 Ibid. 26 See, for example, Hertz, “Aboriginal Rights of the Jewish People”: Between the sea and the Jordan River, “the Jewish people” is the aboriginal tribe and “the Arab people” is the interloping settler population, including newer waves of Arab immigration in the 19th  and 20th  centuries.  Whether a thousand years ago or today, Jews returning to join other Jews in the Holy Land are not to be compared with the  17th-century Pilgrim Fathers who had neither antecedents nor kin in the New World. These arguments will be developed further below. 27 Amal Jamal, Arab Minority Nationalism in Israel: The Politics of Indigeneity (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 47. To the extent that all claims to indigeneity, including both Jewish and Palestinian, rest on self-definition, they very likely contain elements of historical memory of the sort Jamal dismisses—but only for the Jews. 28 Salaita, Inter/Nationalism, 18. 29 Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, trans. Yael Lotan (London; New York: Verso, 2009). 30 For an example of the criticism leveled at Sand’s book, see Michael Berkowitz’s review published by Reviews in History (October 2010), accessed March 1, 2019, http://www. history.ac.uk/reviews/review/973.

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peoplehood. As a scholar of indigenous rights, however, I can point out that the United Nations recognizes “self-identification” as an important component of establishing status as indigenous, a position that could negate Sand’s critique of Israeli claims to indigenous peoplehood.31 Further, I can provide some perspective on what the “Jews are the Indigenous” argument would achieve if all the empirical claims were resolved in its favor. Many knowledgeable commentators would say, “Not as much as they want.” The most robust statement of indigenous rights in international law today can be found in the UNDRIP, adopted by the General Assembly in 2007.32 The text of the declaration reflects several decades of debate and discussion among indigenous groups, NGOs, and representatives of nation states, including concerns expressed by recently decolonized states, primarily in Africa, about the potentially destabilizing impact of indigenous rights claims within their countries. This negotiation process yielded a declaration that is notable for its lack of a definition of “indigenous people,”33 as well as its pronouncement that indigenous rights do not include the right to secede from a surrounding nation state.34 As an outgrowth of the U.N.’s 31 See United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, “Indigenous Peoples, Indigenous Voices: Factsheet,” accessed March 1, 2019,  http://www.un.org/esa/ socdev/unpfii/documents/5session_factsheet1.pdf; “The Concept of Indigenous Peoples,” Background Paper, Workshop on Data Collection and Disaggregation for Indigenous Peoples, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, U.N. Secretariat of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (2004); and International Labour Organization, Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, 1989 (No. 169), Article 1(2): “Self-identification as indigenous or tribal shall be regarded as a fundamental criterion for determining the groups to which the provisions of this Convention apply.” 32 G.A. Res. 61/295, annex, UNDRIP (2007). 33 There is, however, a widely accepted definition that was put forward by José R. Martínez Cobo, the Special Rapporteur of the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, in his well-known “Study on the Problem of Discrimination against Indigenous Populations” (U.N. Doc. E/CN.4/Sub.2/1986/7 and Add. 1-4): Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing on those territories, or parts of them. They form at present non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, and their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions and legal system. 34 UNDRIP, Article 46(1).

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human rights activities, the declaration shoehorns indigenous rights into a framework of collective group rights, these rights being fundamentally subject to the power of the surrounding nation state. As Duane Champagne explained in his 2012 Presidential Address to the American Indian Studies Association: UNDRIP, by avoiding a definition of indigeneity and not recognizing political self-government from indigenous nations, has redefined indigenous nations into citizens and ethnic groups. This reclassification or redefinition of indigenous peoples and nations will not satisfy the claims to territory and selfgovernment that indigenous nations throughout the world generally uphold.35

In other words, advocates for Israel will not find a strong justification for the Jewish State in the internationally recognized pronouncements on indigenous rights. While there are many normative statements about the need for free and informed consent before land is taken or other assimilative measures are applied by the state to indigenous peoples, the nation state ultimately calls the shots.36 The declaration does not even affirm government-to-government relations between indigenous nations and nation states, a concept that is already embedded in federal Indian law in the United States, which supports the “inherent,” if limited, sovereignty of Native Nations.37 To support and justify the establishment and continued existence of the State of Israel, proponents should turn not to the rights of indigenous peoples, which are too weak to support claims of separate statehood, but the right of “peoples” generally to self-determination. United Nations recognition of the principle of self-determination predates that body’s recognition of indigenous rights by more than sixty years, dating back to the U.N. Charter of 1945.38 International law specialists are far better equipped than I to traverse the minefield of competing claims of self-determination in the Land of Israel, and especially to assess whether such claims support

35 Duane Champagne, “UNDRIP (United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples): Human, Civil, and Indigenous Rights,” Wíčazo Ša Review 28, no.1 (Spring 2013): 11. 36 Ibid., 17. 37 Ibid., 17–18; see Newton, Cohen’s Handbook, 212–13, and ch. 3. 38 U.N. Charter, Article 1(2).

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statehood or some other institutional arrangement.39 My point is simply that indigenous rights do not take the argument that far. Perhaps ironically, the “Jews are the Indigenous” argument could be most valuable to Jews if a one-state solution were to result in a Palestinianmajority nation state. At that point, Jews could assert indigenous rights to establish a semi-autonomous ethnic/religious political entity, enjoying government-to-government relations with that state.40 Although there is some debate over whether indigenous nations need to function as liberal polities, respecting individual rights as understood in liberal multicultural states,41 the general expectation is that indigenous nations will operate on the basis of traditional norms that may well differ from such regimes on the issue of individual rights. No one faults the Navajo Nation, for example, for privileging the Navajo language, Navajo ceremonies, and Navajo legal norms. One reason for that acceptance is that the Navajo Nation is embedded in a larger political entity, the United States, which functions as a liberal nation state. The other reason is the history of forced assimilation and suppression of Navajo language and culture by the United States. In any case, the kind of subordination to a dominant nation state that the Navajo Nation experiences as a Native Nation is hardly the objective of most proponents of the “Jews are the Indigenous” argument today.

Invoking the Indigenous, against Israel The body of literature, academic and otherwise, proclaiming Palestinians indigenous peoples far outpaces, in amount and depth, the literature advocating Jewish indigeneity.42 Although the claim that Palestinians are indigenous peoples—what I will call the “Palestinians are the Indigenous” argument—is a relatively recent framing, augmenting earlier advocacy for self-determination, it has the potential to cultivate alliances and support for the Palestinian cause among activists and supporters of indigenous rights 39 For a thoughtful analysis from an Israeli scholar that preceded the enactment of UNDRIP, see Raday, “Self-Determination.” 40 See above, n. 8, and accompanying text. 41 See Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 42 See, for example, Yousef T. Jabareen, “The Arab-Palestinian Community in Israel: A Test Case for Collective Rights under International Law,” George Washington International Law Review 47, no. 3 (2015): 449–80; Jamal, Arab Minority Nationalism in Israel.

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around the globe.43 As the movement to boycott and divest from Israel has sought endorsements and strength, connections to broader movements for indigenous rights reinforce the view of Palestinians as subjugated and oppressed peoples, engendering sympathy and drawing sponsorship for the movement.44 Advocates understand that if the Palestinians are seen as indigenous, Israel must necessarily be viewed as a “settler colonial state,” a characterization that has also been applied, with distinctly negative connotations, to the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, among other modern nation states.45 Unlike “conventional” colonial or imperial states, which aim for the exploitation of their colonies and colonial populations, settler colonial states are said to aim for the elimination (physically or culturally) of preexisting populations within their territories.46 Indigeneity has been the basis for Palestinian claims, both to statehood geographically apart from Israel and statehood within the current borders of the State of Israel.47 It has also grounded claims by Palestinians in Israel for a “special regime” that would counter the controlling status of Israel as a Jewish, ethnic state.48 43 See Rachel Busbridge, “Israel-Palestine and the Settler Colonial ‘Turn’: From Interpretation to Decolonization,” Theory, Culture & Society 35, no. 1 (2018): 91–115; Salaita, Inter/Nationalism, 3. 44 Salaita, Inter/Nationalism, 26–70; Justin Salhani, “The Struggle for Indigenous Rights Extends to Palestine,” ThinkProgress (October 10, 2016), accessed March 1, 2019, https://thinkprogress.org/palestine-israel-indigenous-216dddd16c59#.w9a1z6x4r. 45 A large academic literature has developed on the subject of “settler colonialism.” See, for example, Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London and New York: Cassel, 1999); Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); and Alyosha Goldstein and Alex Lubin, eds., Settler Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). This literature has turned its focus to Israel. See Nadim N. Rouhana, “Homeland Nationalism and Guarding Dignity in a Settler Colonial Context: The Palestinian Citizens of Israel Reclaim Their Homeland,” Borderlands 14, no. 1 (2015): 1–37, accessed March 1, 2019, http://www.borderlands. net.au/vol14no1_2015/rouhana_homeland.pdf; Busbridge, “Israel-Palestine and the Settler Colonial ‘Turn.’” As Busbridge points out, Israel has long been condemned by Palestinians and their sympathizers as a “colonial” enterprise. What is new is the framing of this activity as “settler colonialism,” a more recent concept. 46 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387–409; Busbridge, “Israel-Palestine and the Settler Colonial ‘Turn,’” 4–5. 47 Jamal, Arab Minority Nationalism in Israel, 49; Salaita, Inter/Nationalism, 66–67. 48 Jamal, Arab Minority Nationalism in Israel, 279 (discussing Palestinian “vision documents”); Rouhana, “Homeland Nationalism,” 1–2; Jabareen, “The ArabPalestinian Community in Israel.”

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Like their Jewish parallels, Palestinian claims to indigeneity have common themes of ancient habitation, common culture, ties to the land, and unjust dispossession. Amal Jamal writes: The Arab-Palestinian population in Israel is an indigenous community on account of its descent from the populations that inhabited the country at the time of colonization and the establishment of the present state boundaries, as well as on account of its self-perception as such. The Palestinians in Israel had lived in Palestine for thousands of years before the Zionist colonization of their homeland. . . . They did not invite what happened to them in the last 120 years.  .  .  . The new reality [Zionist immigration of Jews to Israel over this period] cannot omit the moral and legal bond that Palestinians have to their homeland for reasons related to the indigenous identity of the Arab minority.  .  .  . The emergence of the Palestinian national movement in the 1960s, the international recognition of the Palestinian right to selfdetermination and the growing connections between the various Palestinian communities in historical Palestine, bridging the geopolitical gaps between them, are sufficient indications of the the [sic] deep historical and cultural bond of Palestinians to Palestine, no matter where they live.49

Underscoring the “settler colonial” characterization of Israeli settlement, Hatem Bazian writes: Over a 50 year period, the indigenous Palestinians faced an emergent European nationalist movement that succeeded in dispossessing them and transforming their ancestral homeland into a modern nation state that locates its genesis in the biblical text. Not dissimilar to the Native Americans or Africans who suffered under “manifest destiny,” the Palestinians were relegated to a secondary role and possessed no rights other than those granted to them by the emerging colonial state. Palestinians are victims of a Zionist “manifest destiny” that functions to create facts on the ground and attempts to recreate the mythical past in the present through reenactment of biblical narrative.50

As this passage shows, noting similarities between the experience of Palestinians and experiences of indisputably indigenous peoples elsewhere in the world, such as Native Americans, is an important component of 49 Jamal, Arab Minority Nationalism in Israel, 47–48. 50 Hatem Bazian, “The Indigenous Palestinians: Twice Dispossessed by the Biblical Text,” Harvard International Review 35, no. 3 (Winter 2014): 40–43.

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claims to Palestinian indigeneity.51 Also noteworthy is the extent to which proponents of the “Palestinians are the Indigenous” argument draw upon the experience of the Israeli Bedouins, who represent approximately 10% of the entire Arab population in Israel.52 As tribal peoples and nomadic herders, the Bedouins have developed a culture and maintained a connection to land that most closely resembles that of many indigenous peoples globally.53 The displacement of Bedouins from their lands, their confinement in “authorized villages” that deny them any opportunity to maintain their long-established ways of life, and the harassment and punishment of Bedouins who choose instead to reside more traditionally on unauthorized sites all bring to mind the treatment of Native Americans and other indigenous groups.54 Not surprisingly, pro-Israel commentators push back against such claims that “Palestinians are the Indigenous,” contending that Arabs are relative latecomers to Palestine compared with the Jews, arriving in the seventh century and first becoming a dominant population in the twelfth century.55 Palestinians, these critics assert, “are Arabs who are mostly descended from recent arrivals from Arabia, Syria, Egypt, and Transjordan,”56 and did not claim a common culture or adopt the name “Palestinian” until the 1960s.57 They also note that Palestinians have no distinctive language or culture apart from Arabs generally, and unlike Native Americans, they have been able to maintain and expand their population since the onset of the Zionist

51 Politicjock, “Are the Palestinians Israel’s Native Americans?,” Daily Kos (July 17, 2014), accessed March 1, 2019, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/7/17/1314701/-Are-thePalestinians-Israel-s-Native-Americans; Salaita, Inter/Nationalism, 3. 52 See, for example, Jamal, Arab Minority Nationalism in Israel, 24, 113; Rouhana, “Homeland Nationalism,” 23. 53 See Ahmad Amara, Ismael Abu-Saad, and Oren Yiftachel, eds., Indigenous (In)Justice: Human Rights Law and Bedouin Arabs in the Naqab/Negev (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Law School, 2012). 54 See Duane Champagne, “Indigenous, Citizens’, and Human Rights: The Bedouins of the Naqab,” in Amara, Abu-Saad, and Yiftachel, Indigenous (In)Justice, 254–88. 55 Anon., “Who Are the Indigenous People of Palestine?” 56 Rosenthal, “Is Zionism Colonialism.” 57 Ibid.; anon., “Who Are the Indigenous People of Palestine?”; and Raday, “SelfDetermination,” 462: “. . . [N]o Palestinian demands to self-determination were made prior to 1948. Furthermore, at the time of its establishment in 1964 . . . the Palestine Liberation Organization (‘PLO’) made no claims to external self-determination as against Egypt or Jordan.”

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enterprise.58 Challenges to the “Palestinians are the Indigenous” argument extend even to the Bedouins, who are characterized by critics as newcomers to Palestine, their habitation dating only from the late eighteenth century.59 Critics of the “Palestinians are the Indigenous” claim also question the characterization of Israel as a “settler colonial state,” pointing out, among other things, that some number of Jews occupied the Land of Israel throughout the past millennia (as mentioned above), and many who settled Israel came not from Europe but from surrounding Arab-majority countries where they were mistreated or from which they were expelled.60 The “Jews are the Indigenous” argument serves a defensive purpose here. It is impossible, its proponents would argue, to be both settlers from the outside and an ingathering diaspora of a previously displaced indigenous people. Further, they argue, the establishment of Israel was part of an international decision to create states for both Jews and Palestinian Arabs, a settlement that would have afforded each group a homeland, had it not been dissolved by an Arab states-initiated war.61 As in the case of Jewish claims to indigeneity, I lack the deep knowledge of history and anthropology required to sort through the conflicting 58 Anon., “Who Are the Indigenous People of Palestine?” These critics seem to imagine a unity among all Arabic-speaking people who share the same Muslim religion, ignoring the fact that many indigenous peoples have primary tribal identities for purposes of political and social organization, even in relation to groups with whom they share language and ceremonial relations. See, for example, William Duncan Strong, Aboriginal Society in Southern California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1929; reprint: Banning, CA: Malki Museum Press, 1987). These groups may well migrate over a large territory, settling in different parts as seasons and resources allow. See, for example, Russel Lawrence Barsh, “Coast Salish Property Law: An Alternative Paradigm for Environmental Law,” Hastings West-Northwest Journal of Environmental Law and Policy 12, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 1–30. 59 Havatzelet Yahel, Ruth Kark, and Seth J. Frantzman, “Are the Negev Bedouin an Indigenous People? Fabricating Palestinian History,” The Middle East Quarterly 19, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 3–14. 60 They could also note that before 1948, Zionism, unlike European settler colonialism, was not a policy sponsored by nation states, but a social movement that relied significantly on charitable contributions. The paradigmatic cases of settler colonialism—the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada—all had strong nation state backing. Zionism did not. 61 Bennett Muraskin, “Is Israel a Colonial Settler State?,” Jewish Currents (December 10, 2013), accessed March 1, 2019, http://archive.jewishcurrents.org/israel-colonialsettler-state/. Like early Zionists, some of those who colonized North America were fleeing religious and political persecution. So that consideration does not fully distinguish Jewish settlement of Palestine from early European settlement of North America.

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claims regarding the indigeneity of Palestinians. I can, however, offer my assessment of the internal coherence of the arguments, as well as an understanding of what the arguments would achieve if their empirical claims were accepted as true. Many of my assessments of the “Jews are the Indigenous” argument apply equally to the Palestinian claims. For example, the fact that self-identification figures prominently in the international understanding of which groups count as indigenous62 weighs in favor of arguments for indigeneity on both sides. And the fact that international indigenous rights fall short of full self-determination63 means that they provide weak support for claims to Israeli and Palestinian statehood alike. The “Palestinians are the Indigenous” argument also has distinctive features, however. It can be confusing, insofar as it melds contentions about Palestinians within Israel, Bedouins within the Arab population of Israel, and Palestinians more broadly throughout Israeli-occupied territories, in refugee camps, and elsewhere in the Middle East.64 It is unclear how indigenous rights would be ascertained and implemented in relation to these different population sets, and arguments for the indigeneity of one set sometimes draw upon experiences of a different collectivity. Moreover, the analogies to Native Americans and other indigenous groups are strikingly decontextualized. Should it matter for purposes of the comparisons, for example, that Palestinians, unlike Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians, are situated in a state that is surrounded by populations and nations with whom they share language and religion?65 Should it matter that some of those surrounding nations are committed to resisting the existence of the State of Israel and have manifested that commitment in several earlier wars? These questions are occasionally raised by those who oppose the “Palestinians are the Indigenous” argument,66 but almost never by the proponents. Furthermore, the “Palestinian are the Indigenous” argument encounters questions or resistance not only from pro-Israel forces, but also from those supporting Palestinian rights.67 Some of the latter rightly acknowl62 63 64 65 66

See text at n. 31 above. See text at nn. 32–37 above. See text at nn. 52–54 above. See above, n. 58. See, for example, Muraskin, “Is Israel a Colonial Settler State?”; Raday, “SelfDetermination,” 498–99. 67 See below, nn. 68–70, and accompanying text.

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edge that the argument will not support Palestinian statehood claims because the international human rights framework expressly rejects indigenous rights to secede from existing nation states.68 Others observe that the most common indigenous comparisons, to native peoples in the “settler colonial” states of Canada, Australia, and the United States, understate the difficulties experienced by Palestinians in Israel. Whereas those other countries are formally multicultural “liberal” states, without state-sanctioned, privileged religious or ethnic cultures, Israel is an ethnic Jewish (as well as democratic) state. Although other democratic states around the world have official state religions,69 achieving indigenous rights in an ethnic state is a far heavier lift, both in theory and in practice.70 To a far greater extent than in a liberal, multicultural state, the dominant ethnic culture creates an alien social environment and exerts a pressure to conform that thwarts expression of other cultures, including indigenous cultures. In addition, some pro-Palestinian scholars express concern that invoking Palestinian analogies to indigenous peoples in North America and Australia may open the door to a “triumphalist” narrative, not unlike that inherent in the “No worse than the United States” position. For example, Nadim Rouhana distinguishes the Palestinian situation because the “settler colonial” project of Zionism “is still actively challenged and resisted by a nation that Zionism has defeated but failed to reduce to the status of indigenous populations in ‘triumphed’ settler-colonial cases.”71 As disputes over “Israel’s legitimacy as an exclusively Jewish state expand,” he theorizes “a homeland nationalism centered on politically reclaiming the homeland [not exclusively, though], as distinct from other minority nationalisms and legal and political claims of indigenous peoples elsewhere.”72 Such a vision goes beyond most global indigenous rights claims.

Conclusion I find none of the arguments invoking the Indigenous, either for or against Israel, entirely compelling, though there is a spectrum from weaker to stronger. At one extreme, “No worse than the United States” is a specious, 68 69 70 71 72

See, for example, Jabareen, “The Arab-Palestinian Community in Israel,” 464. Raday, “Self-Determination,” 481. See Jamal, Arab Minority Nationalism in Israel, 54–70. Rouhana, “Homeland Nationalism,” 1–2. Ibid., 2.

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distasteful position. At the other extreme, the treatment of the Bedouins in Israel has the markings of an international indigenous human rights violation. All of the arguments and positions suffer from lack of meaningful context that might dampen enthusiasm for the proffered comparisons. While these comparisons may well have political or polemical value to their exponents, they typically fail because of a lack of deep understanding, either on the indigenous side or on the side of the Israel/Palestine conflict. Serious comparative studies, where strategic agendas are tempered, can ameliorate this situation.73 Inspired by Chaim Seidler-Feller’s desire to see Israel fulfill the highest principles of Jewish law and morality, I struggled to find in the literature some way in which indigenous rights might point the way to a peaceful and just resolution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, both in Israel and the occupied territories. I found such a signpost in the writing of the late political scientist Iris Marion Young, who eschewed any pronouncements on the status of Jews or Palestinians as indigenous peoples, preferring instead to view “the situation and claims of indigenous people” as a “useful paradigm” for rethinking the concept of self-determination as “non-domination,” rather than the conventional understanding of it as “non-interference.”74 Young seems to have been drawn to indigenous rights claims because they arise in settings of frequently recurring conflict, where “groups often dwell together in territories; for this reason they often have shared problems, and the activities of those in one group often affect the possibilities of action for others.”75 She acknowledges that indigenous rights claims go beyond claims of national minorities to express and transmit national cultures within a liberal or quasi-liberal state framework, to include control over land and other resources, as well as appeals for “redistribution or subsidy of their governmental and social service institutions” to take account of histories of displacement and subjugation.76 In a spirit that accords well with indigenous philosophies that privilege interpersonal and intergroup relationships, she proposes a model of self-determination, 73 See, for example, Duane Champagne and Ismael Abu-Saad, eds., The Future of Indigenous Peoples: Strategies for Survival and Development (Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 2003). 74 Iris Marion Young, “Self-Determination as Non-Domination: Ideals Applied to Palestine/Israel,” Adalah’s Newsletter 12 (April 2005): 1–4, accessed March 1, 2019, https://www.adalah.org/uploads/oldfiles/newsletter/eng/apr05/ar1.pdf. 75 Ibid., 1. 76 Ibid., 2–3.

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which she calls “horizontal federalism,” that puts “the objective of mutual respect and the avoidance of domination more at the center” and views each self-determining entity or unit—often a local or municipal group—as “able to set its own ends and . . . able to act toward their realization, within the limits of respect for and cooperation with other agents with whom one interacts and with whom one stands in relation.”77 Conceiving of indigenous rights as a springboard for creative thinking about situations of conflict, rather than as a rhetorical point-scoring stratagem, is swimming against the current. I am grateful to have this opportunity to dive into that enterprise as a tribute to Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller.

77 Ibid., 4.

Shalom Sabar, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Jewish Folk Art and Ideology: The Śimh.at Torah Flag through the Ages*

A flag, what is that? A stick with a rag on it?—No, sir, a flag is more than that. With a flag one can lead men wherever one wants to, even into the Promised Land. For a flag men will live and die; it is indeed the only thing for which they are ready to die in masses, if one trains them for it. —Theodor Herzl, letter to Baron Maurice de Hirsch in Paris, June 3, 18951

This study of the Śimḥat Torah flag in Jewish history and culture is a suitable contribution to a volume devoted to celebrating the life and thought of Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, whom I came to know while pursuing doctoral studies at UCLA. Chaim is both a devoted student and discerning collector of Judaica, who understands the spiritual value and cultural import of fine works of art. Akin to the flag described in this article, he is deeply rooted in tradition, while constantly open and alive to innovation. The changing function of the flag in Jewish culture—for example, its shift from being a symbol of martial glory to its role as a spiritual marker associated with Śimḥat Torah—recalls the diverse features of Chaim’s own personality: * This paper is an updated and expanded version of an essay that appeared originally in Hebrew as “Le-toledotaṿ shel ha-degel le-Śimḥat Torah: mi-semel dati le-semel le’ummi u-ba-ḥazarah,” in Ha-degalim shel Śimḥat Torah: min ha-omanut ha-yehudit ha-amamit la-tarbut ha-ivrit-Yiśreʼelit, ed. Nitza Behroozi Baroz and Gania Dolev (Tel Aviv: Eretz Israel Museum, 2012), 8–27. It was translated in the same volume as “The History of the Simchat Torah Flag: From a Jewish to a National Symbol and Back,” pp. *8–*24, and the latter serves as the basis for the present article. 1 See Raphael Patai, ed., The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, trans. Harry Zohn, vol. 1 (New York and London: Herzl Press and Thomas Yoseloff, 1960), 27.

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spiritual, political, human, Jewish, and Zionist. The following is offered as a tribute to the richness of his persona and in recognition of his great contribution to Jewish life in Los Angeles and beyond.

Folk Art and Ideology Decoratively embellished objects, which commonly fall under the category of “folk art,” are generally treated as naive and pleasurable items to observe and use, with no “real” creative forces behind their production. Unlike works of art by the “masters,” they are generally believed to bear no meaningful or deep messages and are, as such, detached from any ideology and concepts that reflect the reality of the human condition. This perception is current not only with the general public, but also among leading art historians who, by and large, avoid the serious treatment of visual culture created outside the canon of art historical orthodoxy. The accepted view of the issue, especially among members of the past generation of art history researchers, was straightforwardly articulated by the noted Hungarian Jewish art historian Arnold Hauser (1892–1978), who actually advanced a Marxist approach to art history that emphasized the role of social structures in the development of art forms.2 Nonetheless, in discussing the nature of folk art, he expressed the following disparaging opinion: Serious, authentic, responsible art, which necessarily involves a wrestling with the problems of life and an effort to capture the meaning of human existence, art which confronts us with a demand to ‘change our way of living’, has little in common either with folk art, which is often hardly more than play and adornment, or with popular art, which is never more than entertainment and a means of passing the time.3

And what about Jewish art? Most of what we generally refer to as “Jewish art” can be classified as folk art. Thus, before the era of Emancipation and the advent of modern Jewish art and artists—and continuing in traditional 2 See his most important and voluminous (1022-page) work: Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, trans. Stanley Godman (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951). Interestingly, this study was one of the first scholarly art historical books selected by an Israeli publisher to be translated into Hebrew: Arnold Hauser, Hisṭoriyyah ḥevratit shel ha-omanut ṿe-ha-sifrut (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1971). It should be noted that since its inception in 1939 the Hakibbutz Hameuchad publishing house has mainly printed books on social issues and the Kibbutz movement. 3 Arnold Hauser, The Philosophy of Art History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959), 281 (emphasis mine).

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communities to this day—the vast majority of decorative Judaica was/is primarily utilitarian and associated with the Rabbinic concept of hiddur mitsṿah (beautification of the commandment), rather than with pure aesthetic ideas and ideals. Whether in Christian Europe or in the Islamic East, the liturgical objets d’art that the “artless Jew”4 commissioned for the home and the synagogue were commonly produced by folk artists and craftsmen following local decorative trends and styles. As a result, it has become the common perception that Jewish ceremonial art, or traditional Jewish art in general, is very limited in what it can offer5 and accordingly can never compete, for example, with the depth of rabbinic texts. In this essay, I will attempt to show how misleading these prejudices can be by examining a Judaic object that is normally naively decorated, made of cheap materials, intended solely for children, and discarded immediately after the holiday on which it is used. Despite its humble nature, this particular object and its artistic development undermine traditional conceptions and demonstrate how folk art produced by anonymous amateurs can function as a vehicle for communicating and embodying changing ideas and new ideologies.

Art for Ś imh.at Torah Śimḥat Torah, which follows the festival of Sukkot, is not a biblical holiday, nor does it even date from the period of the Mishnah and the Talmud. It developed far from the Land of Israel; in fact, the central Śimḥat Torah custom of concluding the reading of the Torah and starting once again from the beginning contradicts the way the Torah was customarily read in the Land of Israel in antiquity (according to a triennial, rather than an annual, cycle). The holiday, whose basic format was fixed in Babylonia during the times of the ge’onim (late sixth to mid-eleventh centuries), spread throughout the Diaspora (and eventually to the Land of Israel as well), and its character and the way it was celebrated were largely determined by the many

4 The term was coined by Kalman P. Bland; see his The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 5 Another typical statement from the previous generation on this issue is that of Bernard Berenson, the noted Jewish connoisseur of Italian Renaissance art: “As a matter of fact Israel through the ages has manifested nothing essentially national in the plastic arts, neither in antiquity nor through the Middle Ages, nor to-day. . . . The Jews . . . have displayed little talent for the visual, and almost none for the figure arts.” See his “The Jews and Visual Art,” in Aesthetics and History (New York: Pantheon, 1953), 154–55.

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popular traditions that arose in various Jewish communities.6 (Among certain groups, such as the Bene Israel and Cochini Jews of India or the Jews of Afghanistan, Śimḥat Torah and the activities surrounding it were accorded special status in the Jewish calendar.7) Some of these customs were specific to particular times and places, while others diffused through various countries and communities and are known to this day. In many locales, the teachers of the day diligently attempted to elucidate the customs of the holiday and thereby accord them official sanction. As we will see below, the Śimḥat Torah flag is one of the most prominent examples of these efforts. The special status of the flag can easily be seen against the backdrop of the marginal place accorded the other material items associated with the Śimḥat Torah holiday. The main items connected to the holiday are, of course, the Torah scrolls themselves; indeed, on that day all the scrolls are brought out of the Holy Ark, and everyone in the community seeks to dance with them during the festive haḳḳafot (circumambulations), or at least to touch and kiss them. The Torah scrolls are also “dressed” in honor of the occasion in the finest ornaments created for them: silver finials with silver bells, crowns and breastplates, pointers for reading—each community according to its own style.8 However, none of these items is created specifically for Śimḥat Torah, and in principle they are standard Torah scroll ornaments. Thus, there are no “representative items” typical of the holiday that are known from either Eastern or Western Jewish communities along the lines of the Sabbath ḳiddush cup, the Hanukkah menorah, or the Seder plate. A few Jewish communities created special items that were unique to them and spread no further. A prime example of this is in Italy where, particularly in the Baroque period, a number of interesting accessories produced specifically for the holiday attest to the lifestyle of the community and the attempts of its members to enrich their aesthetic environment under the influence of the surrounding culture. For example, in some cities in Italy two magnificent chairs were crafted of finely carved, gilded wood in honor of 6

The history of the holiday, its rituals, and its customs among Jewish communities in the East and West are discussed in detail in Abraham Yaari, Toledot ḥag Śimḥat Torah: hishtalshelut minhagaṿ bi-tefutsot Yiśra’el le-dorotehen (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1964). 7 See Orpa Slapak, ed., The Jews of India: A Story of Three Communities, trans. David Louvish (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1995), 63; Ben Zion Yehoshua-Raz, Mi-nidḥe Yiśra’el be-Afghanistan la-anuse Mashhad be-Iran (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1992), 381–82. 8 For a description and analysis of a representative selection of Torah scroll accessories, see Rafi Grafman, Crowning Glory: Silver Torah Ornaments of the Jewish Museum, New York, ed. Vivian B. Mann (New York: Jewish Museum; Boston: David R. Godine, 1996).

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the two “heroes of the day”: the ḥatan Torah and ḥatan Be-reshit, the “bridegrooms” of the Torah and of Genesis who were chosen to read the last and first verses of the Torah, respectively.9 Similarly, the Italian Jewish community’s love and penchant for creating decorated documents for every occasion (such as illuminated ketubbot [marriage contracts] or magnificent parchment certificates for the ordination of a rabbi or graduation of a physician) led to the production by some of festive plaques to celebrate these two special Torah readers. Occasional poets would be hired to compose multi-stanza rhyming verses in honor of the men, which would be inscribed in fine square script on parchment sheets and then apparently be recited during the holiday.10 The documents would be decorated by an artist, their colorful illustrations featuring motifs such as coats of arms bearing the heraldic symbols of the “bridegrooms’” families, embellishments in the spirit of the period, mythological scenes, and allegorical figures that the Jews of Italy associated with Śimḥat Torah generally, and with the Torah specifically. The limited geographical distribution of Śimḥat Torah-specific artworks and the small number of extant exemplars serve to highlight the great popularity of the flag. In the beginning, use of the flag was limited to a few communities, but it gradually spread to many others. It continues to be popular, beloved, and accepted as a key symbol of the holiday in Israel and the Diaspora.

The Flag in Premodern Jewish Art and Culture While the origin of the Śimḥat Torah holiday is late, the word degel (flag or standard) is much earlier. In fact, the term is well known from the Bible, and 9 For some of the considerations factored into the selection of these readers in various communities (in some, the wealthy or community leaders were chosen, while in others the readings were sold to the highest bidder), see Yaari, Toledot ḥag Śimḥat Torah, 104–18. For examples of the types of honors bestowed upon these men, including the Italian chairs, see ibid., 119–37. 10 A collection of late-eighteenth- to early-nineteenth-century Italian certificates produced in honor of “Torah bridegrooms” is kept in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. For a discussion and photographs of some of these, see Grace Cohen Grossman and Richard Eighme Ahlborn, Judaica at the Smithsonian: Cultural Politics as Cultural Model (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 120–22. Although these documents do not include their place of origin, they appear to have been made in Rome, as can be deduced based on the similarity of their illustrations to those of contemporaneous decorated ketubbot produced in Rome. Musical instructions in Italian inscribed between the stanzas of the poem and noting the scale support the idea that these works were sung.

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even before the earliest flags were created for Śimḥat Torah, the biblical significance of degalim influenced Jewish visual culture. In Modern Hebrew, the word connotes a strip of fabric decorated with colors and figures that is affixed to a pole as a symbol of a state, association, or military unit. But in the biblical idiom, the meaning is more ambiguous. The noun degel and its derived forms appear fourteen times in the Bible, thirteen of them in Numbers and one in the Song of Songs. In Numbers, the term is always used in connection with the wanderings of the tribes of Israel and the way they encamped in the wilderness, for example: “The first standard [degel] to set out, troop by troop, was the division of Judah” (Num. 10:14). Scholars of the Bible and of the Hebrew language believe, based on verses like this one, that the word did not refer originally to an object, but rather to “a group of people, a military unit, a camp.”11 The ancient Aramaic biblical translation of Onkelos, both Talmuds, and the midrashic literature also adopted this interpretation. If the Torah had intended to refer to a flag (degel as it is used in Modern Hebrew), it would have had recourse to the word nes or ot, as it does in the verse: “The Israelites shall camp each with his standard [diglo], under the banners [be-otot] of their ancestral house” (Num. 2:2). Indeed, even as late as the Middle Ages, Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac (Rashi; 1040–1105), in his commentary to this verse, explained the terms thusly: “Every degel [here, camp of a tribe] would have an ot [flag], a colorful cloth hanging from it.” The midrashic literature provides details about the appearance of these otot, as well as their colors and symbols: “Under the banners”: Each prince had distinguishing signs in the form of a colored cloth, and each cloth was colored corresponding to the precious stones on the breast of Aaron. It was from these that governments learned to make for themselves flags of various hues. Each tribe had its own prince and its own flag whose color corresponded to the color of its stone [on Aaron’s breastplate]. Reuben’s stone was the ruby, so that the color of his flag was red, and embroidered thereon were mandrakes. Simeon’s was the topaz, so that the color of his flag was yellow, and embroidered thereon was [the town of] Shechem . . . [Numbers Rabbah 2:7].

The other mention of degel in the Bible occurs in an entirely different context: “He brought me to the banquet room and his banner [ṿe-diglo] of love was over me” (Song 2:4). To what does the “banner of love” refer? Here, 11 Gad Ben-Ami Sarfatti, “Mah hu ‘degel’?,” Leshonenu la-am 51–52, no. 2 (2000–2001): 67–74 (and cf. Naphtali H. Tur-Sinai, “Degel,” in Entsiḳlopedyah miḳra’it: otsar ha-yediʻot al ha-miḳra u-teḳufato, ed. Eliezer Lipa Sukenik et al., vol. 2 [Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1964], col. 625).

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too, opinions are divided, but in the traditional interpretations, this degel actually matches well the Śimḥat Torah flag of later periods, and the phrase digle Torah even appears here many generations before the first Śimḥat Torah flag was created: . . . What, then, is meant by “He brought me to the banquet room”? Said the Community of Israel: “The blessed Holy One brought me to a great cellar of wine, namely, Sinai. There He gave me digle Torah [banners of Torah] and commandments and good deeds, and with great love I accepted them” [Song of Songs Rabbah 2:4].

The Rabbis of old thus understood the term degel as it appears here in the sense of nes or ot. The shift is explained by Samuel David Luzzatto (Shadal; 1800– 1865) in his commentary to Num. 1:52: “Sometime later [that is, after the period of the Pentateuch], the term [degel] was borrowed to mean nes, because every degel had a nes.”12 Accordingly, the midrash understands the words of the bride (Israel) to her beloved (God) as expressions of thanks for the gifts He gave her at Sinai, first and foremost, banners of Torah and the commandments.13 As we will see below, the two meanings of degel—that of Numbers and that of the Song of Songs—would eventually merge and decisively influence the design of the Śimḥat Torah flag in later generations. But in antiquity and the Middle Ages, the degel was only represented in Jewish art to illustrate the Israelites’ encampments in the wilderness, as outlined in Numbers. In the only extant Jewish image devoted to the subject in antiquity, found in the ancient synagogue of Dura-Europos (244/245 CE), groups of Israelites are shown passing through twelve paths opened for them in the Red Sea (Fig. 1).14 The uppermost group includes twelve figures who are larger in size than the others, wearing fine Hellenistic-style robes and holding poles at the top of which are rectangular plaques of various colors. These are, without a doubt, the “princes of Israel,” and the plaques they hold aloft are the flags of each tribe, 12 Samuel David Luzzatto, Perush Shadal la-Torah, ed. Yonatan Bassin, vol. 4 (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2015), 7 (s.v. al diglo le-tsiv’otam). 13 For further discussion of, and selected additional sources on, the degel in the Bible, midrashim, and later and contemporary rabbinical resources, see Ari Chwat, Le-harim et ha-degel: degel Yiśra’el ṿe-ha-dibbur be-ivrit bi-meḳorot ha-yahadut (Jerusalem: Ari Chwat, 2014), 39–80. (Note that in the book’s detailed treatment of the flag in Jewish and Israeli history, the question of the Śimḥat Torah flag does not come up.) 14 According to some midrashim (for example, Midrash Tanḥuma, Parashat be-shallaḥ 10 [ed. Warsaw]), the Red Sea split into twelve paths, one per tribe. For a full description of the panel, see Carl H. Kraeling, The Synagogue: The Excavations at Dura-Europos (Final Report VIII, Part 1) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956), 74–86.

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designed according to the visual norms of the time in the form of Roman military flags (vexillum in Latin). Likewise, a medieval example of a degel can be found on the first page of Numbers in the early-fourteenth-century illuminated manuscript known as the Duke of Sussex’s German Pentateuch (MS London, British Library Add. 15282, f. 179v), in which four soldiers are depicted in the garb of European knights, holding the flags of the four tribes whose camps surrounded the Tabernacle: Judah, Reuben, Ephraim, and Dan (see Numbers 2).15 The symbols of those tribes appear on their flags (again, in accordance with the verses and the midrash)—the first instances of a motif that would become increasingly widespread.

Fig. 1. The Crossing of the Red Sea, wall painting, synagogue of Dura-Europos, Syria, 244/245 CE.

In later periods, portrayals of the encampments of the tribes in the wilderness with their flags would persist, especially among the Jews of Italy (for example, in the Venice Haggadah of 1609; Fig. 2). In the seventeenth century, the symbols of all twelve tribes appear for the first time in Jewish art, decorating ketubbot from Northern Italy. The layout of the symbols on these contracts is also connected to the setup of the biblical encampments: the flags of the tribes and their symbols are arranged in a square frame around the text, three on each side, as described in Numbers.16 But the Jews of Italy extended the meaning of the term degel to an additional sphere when they began using it 15 See Bezalel Narkiss, Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, 1969), 104–05 (pl. 32). 16 On the symbols of the tribes as they appear in ketubbot (as well as in the Venice Haggadah and other sources), see Shalom Sabar, “The Harmony of the Cosmos: The Image of the Ideal Jewish World According to Venetian ‘Kettubah’ Illuminators,” in I

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to denote personal family emblems decorated with heraldic imagery. The link between the two types of flags was undoubtedly made under the influence of the general culture, with some Italian Jews explaining, as had the abovecited midrash before them, that the idea of using flags and coats of arms for the armies and individual families of their own times might have been borrowed from, or had its source in, the flags of the biblical tribes.17 From this stemmed the custom among printers to include somewhere in their books a printer’s mark, which they sometimes called in Hebrew (playing on Num. 2:2) “a standard [degel] as an emblem of the printing family”—that is, a coat of arms bearing the symbol of the printer and serving simultaneously as a trademark or logo (Fig. 3).18 Such family emblems/coats of arms were also used on personal items: ketubbot, Esther scrolls, tombstones, and so forth.

Fig. 2. Encampment of the Tribes of Israel in the Wilderness, woodcut on paper, the Venice Haggadah (facsimile), Venice: Juan di Gara, 1609. Collection of Shalom Sabar, Jerusalem.

beni culturali ebraici in Italia: situazione attuale, problemi, prospettive e progetti per il futuro, ed. Mauro Perani (Ravenna: Longo, 2003), 195–215. 17 See, for example, Gedaliah Ibn Yaḥya, Sefer shalshelet ha-ḳabbalah (Amsterdam: Asher Anshel Ḥazzan, Issachar Baer ben Abraham Eliezer, and Solomon Proops, 1697), 4a. For quotations from this work and more information on coats of arms of Italian Jews, see Shalom Sabar, “‘The Right Path for an Artist’: The Approach of Leone da Modena to Visual Art,” in Hebraica hereditas: studi in onore di Cesare Colafemmina, ed. Giancarlo Lacerenza (Naples: Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale,” 2005), 255–90, esp. pp. 260–61. 18 For additional examples of printers’ devices with similar captions, see Abraham Yaari, Digle ha-madpisim ha-ivriyyim: me-reshit ha-defus ha-ivri ṿe-ad sof ha-me’ah ha-teshaesreh (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1943), 67 (no. 104), 73 (nos. 114–15), 91 (no. 150), 96 (no. 160), 104 (no. 175).

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Fig. 3. “A Standard as an Emblem of the Printing Family,” printer’s device of Eliezer Sa‘adon, Livorno, 1790–1805. Collection of Shalom Sabar, Jerusalem.

While the Jews of Italy used flags as personal decorative symbols, the flag as a three-dimensional or militaristic object did not gain currency among European Jews and was mainly associated by them with Christian society. Flagbearers were soldiers who were, by definition, not Jewish and who often, furthermore, assaulted Jews. Thus, the armed or flagbearing soldier was generally used in Jewish art to portray “the other”—the oppressor, the enemy, or even Evil itself. Prime examples of this are found in depictions of the wicked son in the Haggadot of the Middle Ages and the early modern period as a Christian soldier of the time and region where the Haggadah was produced.19 An exception to this rule, which essentially supports my contentions about the place of the military flag in the Jewish culture of the Renaissance generally, is the flag of a figure named Solomon Molkho (1500–1532) who apparently had calculated the end of days and came to see himself as the messiah. This flag, which is now housed in the Jewish Museum in Prague, is embroidered with calls such as “Pour out Your fury on the nations that do not know 19 On the evolution of this image (and those of the other sons of the Haggadah), see Mira Friedman, “The Four Sons of the Haggadah and the Ages of Man,” Journal of Jewish Art 11 (1985): 16–40.

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You, upon the kingdoms that do not invoke Your name” (Ps. 79:6) and “Oh, pursue them in wrath and destroy them from under the heavens of the Lord!” (Lam. 3:66), appealing to the “God of retribution” to appear soon and destroy Israel’s enemies (Ps. 94:1).20 Molkho’s powerful awareness of the militaristic symbolism of the flag and of his mission is also readily discernable in his signature, in which the ascender of the Hebrew letter lamed turns into a swallow-tailed military flag.21

The Earliest Evidence of Ś imh.at Torah Flag Customs and Their Meaning It was about this time that Eastern European Jews began to relate to the flag, though they looked upon it differently than their coreligionists elsewhere. First, while the Jews of Italy, for example, formed their attitude toward the flag under the influence of Christian culture in an attempt to emulate it, in Eastern Europe it was internal Jewish culture that determined the development of the flag and its decorations. Moreover, in contrast to the situation among Spanish and Italian Jewry, the Eastern European flag was associated specifically with the world of children, rather than that of adults. These differences would subsequently lead to the development of a special iconography for the Śimḥat Torah flag that was entirely different from what we have seen up until this point. The association by Ashkenazic Jewry of the biblical degel with children, and specifically in the context of the festival of Śimḥat Torah, was in fact logical and natural. As early as the beginning of the Middle Ages, children 20 For a photograph and brief catalog description, see David Altshuler, ed., The Precious Legacy: Judaic Treasures from the Czechoslovak State Collections (New York: Summit Books, 1983), 66–67, 272–73 (no. 282). See also Vladimír Sadek, “Etendard et robe de Salomon Molkho,” Judaica Bohemiae 16, no. 1 (1980): 64; Matt Goldish, “Jews and Habsburgs in Prague and Regensburg: On the Political and Cultural Significance of Solomon Molkho’s Relics,” in Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of David B. Ruderman, ed. Richard I. Cohen et al. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press; Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2014), 28–38. Recently, a monograph about Molkho, with the flag reproduced on the cover, has appeared; see Moti Benmelech, Shelomoh Molkho: ḥayyaṿ u-moto shel mashiaḥ ben Yosef (Jerusalem: The Ben-Zvi Institute and the Hebrew University, 2016), esp. pp. 333–34. 21 Reproduced in Isidore Loeb, Josef Haccohen et les chroniqueurs Juifs (Paris: Librairie A. Durlacher, 1888), 8, from a manuscript donated to the Alliance Israélite Universelle by Raphael Nathan Note Rabbinovicz; I was unable, however, to verify the present whereabouts of the manuscript in question.

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in various communities, whether in the Ashkenazic, Sephardic, or Islamic geo-cultural orbits, were given a key role in this holiday. Śimḥat Torah was considered a proper time to inculcate love of the Torah in children and educate them in the Torah and commandments. In many communities, children were allowed to hold the heavy Torah scrolls during the haḳḳafot processions, given aliyyot (public reading honors) to the Torah, and showered with fruits and sweets. Decorations and paper scrolls resembling Torah scrolls were prepared in the children’s honor, and youngsters were given special blessings. These practices were particularly strong in Ashkenazic communities, especially in Eastern Europe, where Śimḥat Torah became the main holiday of the children, whose official role in it was greater than in any other holiday, even Passover. Thus, customs came into being in various places intended specifically for children, such as burning the branches used in the roofing of the sukkah (booth dwelt in on the holiday of Sukkot) and organizing a special meal in honor of babies born that year.22 Among Eastern European communities and, to a lesser extent, among the Jewish communities of Germany and its neighboring countries, one of the most interesting modes of expression on Śimḥat Torah, specific to the world of children, was the invention of the Śimḥat Torah flag. Two centuries before the earliest children’s flags to have come down to us were created, we have literary evidence of the use of such flags on Śimḥat Torah. The first mention of these flags is found in community regulations enacted in 5432 (1671–1672) by Jews from Poland who had arrived in Amsterdam. Concerned that a fire might break out due to the burning candle affixed to the top of the flag’s handle (especially relevant at night when visibility was low and children were more likely to trip), the community’s leaders instituted the following rule: “On Śimḥat Torah, children with flags may not follow the Torah scroll, nor may they light any candles whatsoever on their flags at night, as above. However, during the day they may follow the Torah scroll and may also light candles on the flags, as above.”23 This early evidence reveals that, from the beginning, the flags were clearly associated with children and that their use was a custom that had been brought to Holland from Eastern Europe. However, the fact that the flag is first mentioned at this time is almost certainly not coincidental and seems to be connected with the diffusion and 22 For the place of children on the holiday in the traditions of various communities, see Yaari, Toledot ḥag Śimḥat Torah, 160–65, 231–36, 243–50. 23 Isaak Markon, “Taḳḳanot shel ḳehal yehude Polin be-Amsṭerdam mi-shenat [5]432,” in Tsiyyunim: ḳovets le-zikhrono shel Y. N. Simchoni z”l (Berlin: Eshkol, 1929), 175 (no. 60); and cf. Yaari, Toledot ḥag Śimḥat Torah, 246.

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acceptance of an even earlier custom, the haḳḳafot. Indeed, at the end of the seventeenth century and especially over the course of the eighteenth century, Śimḥat Torah haḳḳafot spread more and more and gradually became the main event of the holiday. To facilitate the participation of children in the festivities as the adults carried the heavy Torah scrolls, a symbolic item was created for youngsters that suited their size and that they could carry during the haḳḳafot with joy and dancing: the flag, topped by a candle. According to Yaari, the number of sources attesting to the use and spread of the flag indeed increased from the eighteenth century onward, and all of them come from Ashkenazic territory: Germany, Hungary, Moravia, and Eastern Europe (Poland and its neighbors).24 Particularly interesting is additional early evidence derived from a Christian source—a book on Jewish customs written by the German Hebraist Johann C. G. Bodenschatz (1717–1797), who, holding aside the antisemitic tone of his work, included in it highly valuable information about German Jewish life in his day. Indeed, Bodenschatz was the first to actually describe the custom of carrying the flags on Śimḥat Torah: When the children leave the synagogue, they hold in their hands flags on which are written the words . . . ‘Standard of the Camp of,’ followed by the name of one of the tribes of the Children of Israel, e.g., Judah, Simeon, Levi, and so on. They file out of the synagogue in orderly fashion, as if they were soldiers, shouting loudly and joyfully. . . .25

From these testimonies we learn of the prevalence, as early as the mid-eighteenth century, of the use of candles (possibly lit atop an apple inserted above the flag’s handle);26 of the linkage made between the flags and the symbols of the tribes; and that carrying the flags in an organized procession evoked an association with a parade of military flags. Further evidence of the production and use of the flags appears on illustrated postcards published in the early twentieth century in Warsaw and later also in New York. On one of these cards, designed for the Tsentral Warsaw 24 Yaari, Toledot ḥag Śimḥat Torah, 246–47. 25 In his book, Bodenschatz devoted a detailed discussion and an engraving to Śimḥat Torah, a sign of the increasing significance of the festival in his day. See Johann C. G. Bodenschatz, Kirchliche Verfassung der heutigen Juden, sonderlich derer in Deutschland, vol. 2 (Erlangen: Becker, 1748), 246 (sec. 17); for a partial translation into Hebrew, see Yaari, Toledot ḥag Śimḥat Torah, 246. 26 Though not mentioned explicitly by Bodenschatz, the importance of apples and their symbolism on Śimḥat Torah (on which, see below) are emphasized in various books of customs from this period (and in earlier sources).

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publishing house by the artist Haggai Goldberg and bearing the Yiddish words a fon oyf Śimkhes̀ -Toyre (a flag for Śimḥat Torah), the final stages of the flag’s preparation can be seen: a child sits on a table, holding a colorful (apparently printed) flag in his left hand and an apple in his right hand, while his father sits on a chair across from him whittling the handle to which the flag will be affixed with staples (Fig. 4). Indeed, contemporary accounts attest that many flags were made and painted by hand within the family, including those employing papercut techniques,27 though, as far as we know, no nineteenth-century papercut flags have survived (non-papercut examples are discussed below). Other postcards show a boy and a girl holding flags on

Fig. 4. Ḥayyim Goldberg, Making a Śimḥat Torah Flag at Home, Rosh Hashanah greeting card, Warsaw: Verlag Jehudia, 1910s. Collection of Haim Grossman, Tel Aviv. 27 Cf. Giza Frankel, Migzerot neyar: omanut yehudit amamit (Givatayim: Masada, 1983), 14. An attempt to revive this tradition was made by the late papercut artist Yehudit Shadur for an exhibit on contemporary Śimḥat Torah flag designs held at the Youth Wing of the Israel Museum in 1978. See Joseph and Yehudit Shadur, Traditional Jewish Papercuts: An Inner World of Art and Symbol (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2002), 84 (fig. 3.27); cf. also the papercut by the late artist Yehoshua Grossbard on p. 197 (fig. 7.8).

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their way to synagogue, as well as boys and girls proudly holding or waving them high during the haḳḳafot while the circle of men carry the Torah scrolls. A rare photograph taken in Warsaw before World War II shows a bearded Jewish man deliberating about choosing a flag a young salesman offers him from among a large selection in a wide basket.28 The significance of the children’s participation in the festivities can be gleaned from various sources. For example, on one of the earliest surviving flags (Józefów, 1873), an explanatory inscription appears: “It is a Jewish custom to bring the children to the synagogue to conclude the [reading of the] Torah / Thanks to which [those who bring them] will merit to raise them and to rejoice in the building of the Temple speedily in our time” (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5. Śimḥat Torah Flag, paper, printed, Józefów: Tip. B. Setzer, 1873. The Gross Family Collection, Tel Aviv.

The apple inserted at the top of the children’s flag adds further to the meaning of the custom. As already mentioned, in many communities fruits were tossed in front of the children on Śimḥat Torah; in Ashkenaz, these were generally apples. Woodcuts depicting Śimḥat Torah in eighteenth-century Ashkenazic books of customs show an adult man and woman distributing apples to young children, who leap to pick them up (Fig. 6). According 28 See Lucjan Dobroszycki and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Image before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland, 1864–1939 (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), 87.

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Fig. 6. Children Celebrating Śimḥat Torah, woodcut on paper, Minhogim (Yiddish Book of Customs), Amsterdam: Solomon Proops, 1707. The Gross Family Collection, Tel Aviv.

to custom, the man calls out to them, “Sacred flock!” to which the youth respond by bleating—a reference to a passage in Ezekiel (36:38) comparing the fullness of Jerusalem during the festivals to the bustle of cities in Israel following the future ingathering of exiles from among the nations.29 But why apples, of all fruits? While it is true that, according to some accounts, a potato was occasionally used instead, giving the impression that potatoes and apples were chosen simply because they were easy to insert onto the handle of a flag, and it was likewise easy to insert a candle into them; still, the apple was more commonly used and was doubtless chosen in part because of its significance in Jewish tradition. According to the allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs, the apple tree stands for Israel as the chosen people. In commenting on the verse “Like an apple tree among trees of the forest, so is my beloved among the youths” (Song 2:3), the Babylonian Talmud states: “Why was Israel compared to an apple tree? It is to teach you 29 For a description of the custom of tossing fruit, especially apples, in Eastern Europe (and other communities), see Yaari, Toledot ḥag Śimḥat Torah, 231–36, 249.

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that just as the fruit of the apple tree precedes its leaves, so did Israel proclaim ‘We will do’ before ‘We will understand’ [Ex. 24:7]” (Shabbat 88a). The candle inserted into the apple was also symbolic of the Torah itself, based on the verse: “For the commandment is a lamp, the teaching [Torah] is a light” (Prov. 6:23). Sefer maṭ‘amim, by Rabbi Isaac Lipetz of Siedlce (1830–1913), gives another explanation for the source of the candle custom: The reasons the children carry flags topped with candles during the haḳḳafot on Śimḥat Torah are based on that which is written: “Therefore, honor the Lord with lights” [Isa. 24:15], and in order to cause them to love the Torah and give them the desire to learn. And the reason for the flags is to mimic martial practice, according to which each camp carries its own flag when making war; so, too, we demonstrate in this way that our flags and our martial strategy are dependent on the Torah and those skilled in the war of Torah, [in accordance with the verse:] “and his banner of love was over me.”30

Here we see that the flag had received official rabbinic recognition as an unassailably Jewish item, thereby paving the way for the development of appropriate and varied decorations that augmented observance of the custom and the intentions and ideas with which it was invested.

The Early Flags of Eastern Europe The various descriptions and interpretations cited above are manifest in the earliest flags that have come down to us. Unfortunately, no flags from before the second half of the nineteenth century have survived, which comes as no surprise to scholars of Jewish art. Unlike, for example, the spice box used in the havdalah ceremony at the conclusion of the Sabbath, which was often fashioned of precious metal by a skilled silversmith, the flag was made for onetime use out of simple paper and other disposable materials, like the apple and the candle. As a result, before an awareness of the importance of collecting and preserving Jewish material culture and art emerged in a number of major Western European cities and centers of Jewish scholarship at the end of the nineteenth century, no one gave a thought to keeping the simple flags of the early years. The truth is that even today flags are casually discarded immediately after use. 30 Isaac Lipetz, Sefer maṭ‘amim: meḳorim ṭovim al minhage Yiśraʼel meḳuddashim (Warsaw: F. Munk, 1889), 65–66 (sec. 142).

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Thus, almost all of the earliest extant examples hail from Eastern Europe of the 1860s and thereafter. However, it should be noted that these are not flags that children actually used, but rather sheets from printing houses that miraculously survived before use, either bound together in binders (The Gross Family Collection, Tel Aviv) or preserved as one large sheet printed on both sides with rows of flags that were never cut (The Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York). The printing houses in which these flags were made operated in Vilna, the capital of Lithuania and one of the most important Jewish cultural centers of the day.31 One of the binders in The Gross Family Collection containing the earliest dated flags extant, from 1864, includes a group of three bluetinted sheets of flags printed on both sides by A. Dworzec Typography; a second binder, dated 1869, comes from the publishing house renowned for its production of the “Vilna Shas,” namely, the Press of the Widow and Brothers Romm, and contains a group of seven sheets of flags printed on one side only.32 Both binders feature a title page, the earlier one in Russian and the later one in Hebrew, emblazoned with the words: “Flags for Haḳḳafot on Śimḥat Torah” (Fig. 7). Additional early flags that have survived as singletons feature their dates and the names of their printers as well: two examples from 1865 and 1872 (Romm Press, Vilna) and one from 1873 (Chaim Kelter Press, Warsaw). All of these early specimens reveal that in this period flags took the form of rectangular sheets printed with either ordinary metal plates or woodcuts. The images on these flags were monochrome, usually black and white, though the pages of the binder from 1864 have a bluish tint, and the publisher used a reddish hue for the aforementioned singleton printed by the Romm Press in 1865. Without doubt, the blue or red color gave these flags a more festive air than those printed in black and white alone, though 31 The large sheet preserved in The Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary does not mention the name of the printer or the year, but the similarity of the items to the flags from Vilna leaves no doubt as to the origin of the sheet and its date. 32 On A. Dworzec Typography and the Romm Press in 1860s Vilna, see Pinhas Kon, “Le-ḳorot bet ha-defus shel Romm be-Ṿilna,” Ḳiryat sefer 12, no. 1 (1935–1936): 109– 15. It should be noted that the name of the publisher appears on the binder of flags as “The Press of Rabbi Joseph Reuben ben Rabbi Menahem Mann Romm.” Joseph Reuben himself had died already in 1858 and the name of the press was changed in 1863 to “The Press of the Widow and Brothers Romm.” However, the earlier name continued to appear on the title pages of books and other publications until 1871. See Haim Liberman, “Al defus ha-almanah ṿe-ha-aḥim Romm,” Ḳiryat sefer 34, no. 4 (1958–1959): 527–28.

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it cannot be ruled out that in the latter case children colored in these pages themselves when they fitted the flags with the handle, apple, and candle.

Fig. 7. Binder Cover for Seven Śimḥat Torah Flags, paper, printed, Vilna: Joseph Reuben Romm Press, 1869. The Gross Family Collection, Tel Aviv.

Toward the end of the century, colorful flags began to be printed using various techniques (see below). Of course, the development of popular printing for religious needs was not limited to the Jewish world and had parallels in Eastern European folk culture. The influence of the lubok (лубок), a popular Russian print characterized by simple graphics and religious motifs, folktales, and other subjects, is particularly apparent here. As was common in folk art, the pictures in the lubok prints were frequently accompanied by explanatory texts and, after printing, were sometimes tinted with striking colors.33 From this point of view, Śimḥat Torah flags can be seen as a kind of Jewish parallel to the lubok prints popular in Christian society.

33 See Elena Igorevna Itkina, Russkii risovannyi lubok kontsa XVIII–nachala XX veka: iz sobraniia Gosudarstvennogo Istoricheskogo Muzeia, Moskva = Loubok—Russian

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The images on the early flags confirm the brief descriptions of Bodenschatz mentioned above. On one of the Dworzec flags from the 1860s, the twelve tribes are represented by twelve naively drawn figures of small and bigger schoolchildren, led by a soldier-like adult (apparently, the teacher), marching together while proudly carrying flags (Fig. 8); on other flags, the inscriptions “Standard of the Camp of Dan,” “Standard of the Camp of Asher,” “Standard of the Camp of Ephraim,” and so on, dominate the flags’ layout. Still, in this period, the flags were decorated not with the midrashic emblems of the tribes but with the symbols of the holiday itself. On the flag of Gad, for example, is a schematic representation of a smoking Mount Sinai during the giving of the Torah, while on the flag of Asher appears a Torah scroll, surmounted by a crown and flanked by a heraldic deer and lion. Clearly, the designers of these flags had fully integrated the conceptual association between the flags of the tribes mentioned in the Torah and the holiday of Śimḥat Torah and its meanings.

Fig. 8. “Military Procession” of Schoolchildren and Their Teacher (?) Bearing Flags, Śimḥat Torah Flag, paper, printed, Vilna: A. Dworzec Typography, 1864. The Gross Family Collection, Tel Aviv.

Particularly prominent among the flags were those bearing the name of the tribe of Judah—the tribe of King David, the tribe whose descendants Popular Prints from the Late 18th–Early 20th Centuries from the Collection of the State Historical Museum, Moscow (Moscow: Russkaya Kniga, 1992).

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were exiled when the Temple was destroyed, the tribe from which the messiah will come to return the exiles to their land. The image of the lion, king of the beasts and symbol of Judah, was often deployed in visual representations of this tribe. While the symbols of other tribes were not overly prevalent,34 the lion appears on many flags accompanied by the words “Standard of the Camp of Judah” (Fig. 5) or “A lion has roared, who can but fear?” (Amos 3:8). The significance of the lion alongside other animals—the gazelle, the eagle (usually two-headed), and sometimes the leopard—increases in light of the association that had already been made in the Mishnah between these animals and optimal observance of the commandments: “Judah ben Tema used to say: ‘Be strong as the leopard, swift as the eagle, fleet as the gazelle, and brave as the lion to do the will of your Father in heaven’” (Avot 5:20). In fact, portions of this maxim, which had a great impact on many spheres of popular Eastern European Jewish art, are quoted verbatim on the early flags, mainly together with depictions of the lion and the gazelle (Fig. 9).

Fig. 9. “Fleet as the Gazelle and Brave as the Lion,” Śimḥat Torah Flag, paper, printed, Vilna: Joseph Reuben Romm Press, 1869. The Gross Family Collection, Tel Aviv. 34 However, it should be noted that the symbols of all twelve tribes are the main, and sometimes even sole, decorations on a few of the earliest German flags that have come down to us, dating from the beginning of the twentieth century. The creator of some of these flags was Rosa Freudenthal, who moved to the Land of Israel from Breslau in 1934. On Freudenthal and the flags depicting the tribes that she created, see Hannah Amit, “Rosa, Rosa,” Et-mol 30, no. 1 (177) (September 2004): 4–5.

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Alongside the representations of the tribes and animals on the early exemplars, flags printed from woodcuts in black and white feature biblical imagery familiar from general Jewish art, whether from Poland or from other communities. The most widespread scene was the Binding of Isaac (Fig. 10), due both to its connection to the Hebrew month of Tishre (in which Śimḥat Torah falls) and to the fact that it includes images of two of the central ushpizin (mystical guests) in the sukkah, Abraham and Isaac. The iconographic characteristics of the scene as it appears on the flags, such as Abraham dressed like a Hasid, are highly reminiscent of the popular depictions found on plates used in pidyon ha-ben (redemption of the firstborn) ceremonies and on silver buckles for Yom Kippur belts made in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century.35 Still, the woodcut used for these flags includes two motifs that do not appear on the above-mentioned items. On the right side is an image of a woman clapping her hands, facing a man with a tail who is wearing a helmet with horns. The latter is apparently Satan (Samael) who, according to the midrash (Pirḳe de-Rabbi Eli‘ezer 32), brought Sarah to the site of the Binding of Isaac in an effort to get her to stop the sacrifice.36 On the left, under the ram offered instead of Isaac, is the happy continuation of the story: Eliezer departing with his camels to seek a bride for Isaac (Gen. 24:10). By contrast, the image of the sukkah guest David playing the harp on another flag is based directly on a drawing by the convert Abraham bar Jacob featured in the 1695 Amsterdam Haggadah, which was, in turn, inspired by a manifestly Christian source (indeed, within the circle of mystic light to which David directs his prayer in that Haggadah, Bar Jacob inscribed the words “holy spirit”).37 While these images of the Binding of Isaac and of David nearly completely disappeared from later Śimḥat Torah flags, two ushpizin depicted on the earlier exemplars who became essential components of the flag down to the present day are Moses and Aaron, represented in the manner familiar from the title pages of hundreds of printed books and manuscripts: Moses 35 See, for example, Chaya Benjamin, The Stieglitz Collection: Masterpieces of Jewish Art (Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 1987), 132–33 (no. 102), 314–15 (no. 211). 36 It should be noted that this scene is rare in Jewish art. A precedent is found in a miniature included in the Regensburg Pentateuch from Bavaria, ca. 1300 (MS Jerusalem, Israel Museum 180/52, f. 18v). See Shalom Sabar, “‘The Fathers Slaughter Their Sons’: Depictions of the Binding of Isaac in the Art of Medieval Ashkenaz,” Images 3 (2009): 9–28, esp. p. 12 and fig. 2. 37 On this scene in the Haggadah and its source, see Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Haggadah and History: A Panorama in Facsimile of Five Centuries of the Printed Haggadah, from the Collections of Harvard University and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1997), pl. 61.

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the Lawgiver, with rays of light radiating from his head, the staff in his left hand, and the Tablets of the Law in his right; and Aaron the High Priest, dressed in his magnificent priestly vestments in the spirit of the biblical description, holding a censer in his left hand.

Fig. 10. The Binding of Isaac and Dancing Hasidim, Śimḥat Torah Flag, woodcut on paper, Lvov: n.p., ca. 1870. The Gross Family Collection, Tel Aviv.

Of special interest are those flags that depict scenes from the daily life of the Jews of Eastern Europe. These images bear authentic and frequently unique ethnographic witness to events associated with Sukkot and Śimḥat Torah. One of the early woodcuts shows a Hasid standing on a ladder at right and directing a young man laying roofing on a recently erected sukkah, while at left a pair of Hasidim recite ḳiddush in their sukkah, behind which is a monumental structure that looks like a typical stone synagogue from Poland (Fig. 11). Other flags depict Śimḥat Torah haḳḳafot with a row of Hasidim carrying Torah scrolls, lulavim (palm branches), goblets, and bottles, as well as children, who look like miniature adults, carrying flags (Figs. 10, 12).38 One of the flags in the rare Romm binder from 1869 even presents a kind of critique of Enlightenment-inspired secularization: three Hasidim, reveling in 38 It should be noted that the woodcut containing these scenes was not designed to take up the space of a whole flag, but rather was always printed at the bottom of a flag (whose upper portion could vary) using a long, narrow plate. Moreover, prints made using this woodcut appear on the earliest flags from Warsaw (Chaim Kelter Press) and Vilna (Romm Press), and it is unclear when the original woodcut was commissioned, and by whom.

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the holiday, hold goblets and bottles of wine, while a dandily dressed man— his jacket flapping, a top hat on his head, his hands in his pockets—observes them mockingly and, of course, eschews the festivities. The layout of the scene is apparently intended to evoke an association with the widespread depiction of the four sons in Passover Haggadot,39 and so it becomes clear that the man who has abandoned religion represents the wicked son.

Fig. 11. Building the Sukkah and Sitting Inside, Śimḥat Torah Flag, woodcut on paper, Ukraine: n.p., ca. 1870–1880. Collection of Dr. Moldovan, New York.

Zionism and the Transition to the United States and the Land of Israel The new winds that began to blow among Eastern European Jewry, particularly Zionism, influenced the development of Śimḥat Torah flags in a manner unexpected at first glance. The first harbinger of a connection between the flag and the longing for the Land of Israel in general, and for Jerusalem in particular, can be seen in an early exemplar, wherein above the familiar woodcut of the dancing Hasidim appears an image new to Poland: Moses Montefiore’s coat of arms, in which flags emblazoned with the word “Jerusalem” stand out prominently (Fig. 12). Montefiore’s mission 39 I refer mainly to the famous picture of the four sons in the aforementioned 1695 Amsterdam Haggadah, reproduced and discussed by Yerushalmi, Haggadah and History, pl. 60.

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to settle Jews in Jerusalem was of course well known, and the people of his day would no doubt have drawn a conceptual link between the streaming flags decorating his coat of arms and the Śimḥat Torah flag.

Fig. 12. Śimḥat Torah Flag with the Montefiore Family Coat of Arms, paper, printed, Warsaw: Chaim Kelter Press, 1873. The Gross Family Collection, Tel Aviv.

As the Zionist movement grew stronger, such meanings increasingly permeated the holiday flags. The ultimate association was made when the wellknown song “Carry the flag and standard to Zion—the standard of the Camp of Judah” was adopted by the early Zionists and became the anthem of the first aliyyot (immigrations to Palestine). All of a sudden, the “standard of the Camp of Judah” took on new significance, and, as early as 1902 (believed to be the year that the song was written by Noah Rosenblum), a publisher in Bobruisk, Belarus, produced a series of flags with the new song’s opening line on the front, accompanied by traditional imagery (Fig. 13). The words of the last two stanzas of the new song were printed on the back of the flag in large type, together with portraits of “Dr. Herzl” and “Dr. Nordau”—in an almost complete parallel to the images of Moses and Aaron on the front of some other flags (Fig. 14). On the back of another flag produced by the same publisher, we see Moses holding the Tablets of the Law in his left hand and in his right, the flag of the new national order, that is, a banner inscribed with the words of two stanzas from what would eventually become the “Hatikvah” anthem.

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Fig. 13. “Carry the Flag and Standard to Zion,” Śimḥat Torah Flag, paper, printed, Bobruisk: Litographia S. M. Sochora, published by Jacob ha-Kohen Ginsburg, 1902. The Gross Family Collection, Tel Aviv.

Fig. 14. Portraits of Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau on the back of Fig. 13.

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Flags with traditional iconography continued to appear alongside those bearing the new imagery, although there were innovations in the former as well, particularly thanks to new printing technologies. In the 1890s, colorful lithographs began to appear (mainly in Warsaw) and, through the 1930s, flags were also printed using offset technology, which allowed for a richer palette (Fig. 15). The outline of these flags was drawn with a tripartite swallowtail design on the left side, just like the flags of European knights and cities; in other words, the cut and form of these flags gave them a militaristic feel, and placing them on a wooden handle completed the look. This design reminded the Jews of Eastern Europe that the flag of “the Jewish army” is that of Torah and commandments, as opposed to the situation among non-Jews, for whom the flag represented war and bloodshed. Although all the early aforementioned flags were rectangular, it is reasonable to assume, based on the above association, that the swallowtail design in fact originated before the first decades of the twentieth century. It may be that the rectangular layout was the accepted format of printing houses, whereas the swallowtail design was typical of handmade flags. Indeed, the dancing children on one of the flags in the earliest-dated binder (A. Dworzec Typography, 1864) are clearly seen holding swallowtail flags. Moreover, in all the illustrated postcards from the beginning of the twentieth century,

Fig. 15. Śimḥat Torah Flag, colored lithograph, Warsaw: Lith. A. Tacma, ca. 1910– 1920. The Gross Family Collection, Tel Aviv.

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including those showing a flag being made by hand, the flags have the swallowtail design. For all of their technological innovation, however, the same key motifs appear repeatedly in the surviving flags of this type: Moses and Aaron flanking a Holy Ark, surmounted by a pair of lions rampant facing the Tablets of the Law in the center; the four animals mentioned in Avot; and sometimes also the symbols of the twelve tribes. The swallowtail design of the flag decorated with the images of Moses and Aaron and other popular figures came to the United States with Eastern European immigrants, and later to the Land of Israel as well. Before the massive wave of immigration, it may be assumed that flags in the United States looked different. An unusual example is a flag printed in New York at the end of the nineteenth century featuring a battleship and portraits of (non-Jewish) American naval heroes from the Spanish-American War of 1898.40 Another interesting specimen depicts the prince of the tribe of Judah sitting astride a lion and holding the “Standard of the Camp of Judah,” with the princes of the other tribes marching after him. By contrast, American Śimḥat Torah flags created after the arrival of Eastern European Jews usually preserved almost perfectly the iconographic traditions of the designer’s country of origin. In a particularly popular imprint, produced for the first time after World War II by Asher Scharfstein (1947), the main difference vis-à-vis flags from Poland is the more modern appearance and garb of the figures, consistent with the style of contemporary urban American Jewry (Fig. 16). In the Land of Israel, the process was much more complex. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Jerusalem printers continued to use the traditional motifs of the Old Yishuv, and their flags prominently featured small, stylized images of the Temple Mount and other holy sites (Fig. 17). The arrangement of the pictures in a circle, with the Dome of the Rock or the “site of the Temple” in the center, is also familiar from mizraḥ plaques (marking the eastern wall of a building), sukkah decorations, protective amulets for the home, and other items typical of popular Jewish art produced by Ashkenazic (and Sephardic) Jews in Jerusalem.41 At the same time, these flags also clearly exhibit Eastern European iconographic influence, 40 The flag was printed by a publisher who, judging by his name, J. Katzenellenbogen, was of German Jewish extraction, and the American war heroes depicted on it are Adm. William T. Sampson and Adm. George Dewey. The only known surviving copy of this flag is in the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life in Berkeley, California. 41 For a selection of examples, see Nitza Behroozi, ed., Tsiyyon ṿi-Yerushalayim be-ruaḥ u-be-ḥomer (Tel Aviv: Eretz Israel Museum, 1993), 22–25, 30–32, 43, 54, and passim.

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for example, the depiction of the four animals of Avot, although the creators displayed originality in their design and did not necessarily simply copy the models from Poland. The Eastern European motifs—Moses, Aaron, the open Holy Ark, and so on—became increasingly dominant in flags created from the 1920s onward and, to a great extent, can be found to this day even on plastic flags manufactured in the Far East.42

Fig. 16. Śimḥat Torah Flag, paper, printed, New York: Asher Scharfstein, 1947. Collection of Shalom Sabar, Jerusalem.

42 Surprisingly, the traditional iconography of the Eastern European-inspired flags resulted in a political accusation against the Jews of Palestine. Led by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini (appointed by the British authorities in 1921), Muslim propagandists of these years claimed that the open card doors that decorated the flags represented the Jews’ intentions to enter the Temple Mount and take the Western Wall shown behind them (on the back of the flag). See Yehuda Etzion, Alilot ha-mufti ṿe-ha-doḳṭor: ha-śiaḥ ha-tsiyyoni-muslemi be-nośe har ha-bayit ṿe-ha-miḳdash al reḳa peraʻot [5]689 (Jerusalem: Sifriyyat Bet-El, 2014), 46–49. The same accusation was made about other contemporary Judaic folk illustrations of Jerusalem featuring the Temple Mount (for example, on mizraḥ plaques). See Shalom Sabar, “The Binding of Isaac in the Work of Moshe Shah Mizraḥi: A Persian-Jewish Folk Artist in Early Twentieth-Century Jerusalem,” in Iran, Israel, and the Jews: Symbiosis and Conflict from the Achaemenids to the Islamic Republic, ed. Aaron Koller and Daniel Tsadik (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2019), 282–83.

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Fig. 17. Śimḥat Torah Flag, paper, printed, gold ink, Jerusalem: n.p., 1930. The Gross Family Collection, Tel Aviv.

Among the Jewish pioneers in the Land of Israel, flags incorporated a clearly nationalistic message already at an early stage. On a unique flag printed in Jerusalem in 1923 and designed by the artist S. Jedidiah,43 the most conspicuous element is not the familiar motifs but the central inscription: “For our nation, our land, and our Torah” (Fig. 18). Moreover, the heraldic crowned lions on this flag do not directly support a Torah scroll or the Tablets of the Law, but rather a Star of David in the center of which appears the word “Zion”—a Zionist motif that was widespread in the new neighborhoods of Jerusalem in those days. It is interesting to note that this flag was printed in the same year that the back page of the Zionist Jerusalem weekly Al Hamishmar (edited by A. Z. Ben-Yishai) featured “instructions for use” for the flag’s target audience: “To Hebrew children in the Diaspora! Like your peers in the Land of Israel, so should you in the Diaspora raise only the Hebrew flag on Śimḥat Torah.”44 43 Solomon Jedidiah was the Hebrew name of Salomon Seelenfreund (1875–1961), an artist who moved to Palestine from Hungary in 1921 and designed decorative items in his signature style, which was influenced by the Secessionism movement. His illuminated Haggadah, published in Cluj, Romania, in 1938, is particularly well known. My thanks to William Gross for showing me other items created by “Solomon Jedidiah of Jerusalem.” 44 See Rachel Arbel, ed., Blue and White in Color: Visual Images of Zionism, 1897–1947 (Tel Aviv: Beth Hatefutsoth, 1997), 124.

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Fig. 18. Solomon Jedidiah (Salomon Seelenfreund), “For Our Nation, Our Land, and Our Torah,” Śimḥat Torah Flag, paper, printed, Jerusalem: I. Halpern, 1923. The Gross Family Collection, Tel Aviv.

As in other realms of popular art, such as Rosh Hashanah greeting cards or Passover Haggadot, the Zionist experience in the Land of Israel penetrated traditional images created by local artists. From the 1930s on, the most prominent change was in the circle of figures rejoicing during the haḳḳafot. Instead of Hasidim dancing around the Holy Ark, as pictured on flags from Eastern Europe, the new flags featured children born in the Land of Israel or even children from various places in the Diaspora who had come to live in the Land. On some of these colorful flags, which appeared in many versions, sabra youth wearing the uniforms of the Scouts and Maccabi movements are shown holding Śimḥat Torah flags opposite a Yemenite boy with curling side-locks. The composition of the circle of dancing children continued to evolve and, like depictions of the four sons in the Haggadah, can be used to characterize the target audience of a given flag as well as the values of that audience. This trend gained ground after the establishment of the State of Israel. In a flag designed by David Gilboa (1906–1976), all the children in the circle have an unmistakably sabra-like look; furthermore, three boys are pictured dancing with three girls, a configuration that would not have been possible in Eastern Europe. Moreover, only two of the structures in each of the four corners—Rachel’s Tomb and the Western Wall—are “religious,” while in the

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parallel corners Gilboa drew buildings symbolizing the nation on its path toward renewal: the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus and the Knesset in Tel Aviv before its move to Jerusalem at the end of 1949 (Fig. 19). Other national symbols that sometimes appeared on the Śimḥat Torah flags of the young country included the Star of David, the seven-branched menorah, children holding the Israeli flag during the haḳḳafot, and sometimes even images that exalted agriculture, such as a farmer plowing a field with idealized furrows. Among the signs of the times were “technological” advances that improved the look of the flag and made it more attractive to sabras, such as movable figures, wheels that could be turned (the appearance of the Avot animals changing accordingly), and—a favorite—doors of a Holy Ark that could be opened to reveal Torah scrolls with all their accoutrements (Fig. 20).45 In the folk tradition of the early years of the state, children considered the opening of the doors of the Holy Ark before the holiday a desecration of the flag, almost like biting off the blossom-end protuberance of the etrog (citron) and thereby disqualifying it for use on Sukkot.

Fig. 19. David Gilboa, Śimḥat Torah Flag, cardboard, lithograph, Israel: n.p., after 1948. Collection of Shalom Sabar, Jerusalem.

45 Parenthetically, it should be noted that all the Holy Arks, Torah scrolls, and other traditional images on these flags are derived from the Ashkenazic tradition of Eastern Europe. The religious symbols of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry are completely absent. This phenomenon has changed somewhat in recent decades, and I hope to discuss it further in the future.

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In the 1950s and 1960s, in addition to the circles of children, the Holy Ark with its opening doors, and the figures of Moses and Aaron, flags began to feature pictures of buildings from the distant Jewish past, particularly the Western Wall, David’s Citadel, Absalom’s Tomb, and Rachel’s Tomb. While these elements were not new in Jewish folk art, the frequency of their use on Śimḥat Torah flags was a temporally delimited phenomenon that requires explanation. Without a doubt, these structures, which were then under Jordanian control and were thus inaccessible and invisible to the inhabitants of the young state, became a goal toward which they strove. Designers of flags in those years intentionally depicted these buildings within picture frames hanging on the walls flanking the Holy Ark or as far-off structures on the horizon, glimpsed through windows—in other words, as distant and disconnected from the circles of children or worshippers (Fig. 20).

Fig. 20. Zvi Livni, Śimḥat Torah Flag, cardboard, lithograph, Israel: n.p., early 1950s. Collection of Shalom Sabar, Jerusalem.

The eventual liberation of these sites during the Six-Day War once again dramatically changed the look of many of the flags produced at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s, before the Yom Kippur War.46 “Jerusalem of 46 The same thing happened in certain parallel fields of popular Jewish art, for example, Rosh Hashanah greeting cards. See Shalom Sabar, “Me’ah shenot karṭise ‘shanah ṭovah’: le-toledotaṿ shel ha-minhag ṿe-hitpatteḥuto ha-omanutit,” in Ba-shanah ha-baʼah:

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Gold” and the other holy sites had now become part of the immediate landscape and were depicted as such on the flags held by the dancing children. Israeli soldiers, the new national heroes, were now shown holding Torah scrolls together with the other celebrants even on flags bearing traditional iconography (Fig. 21). Other artists expanded on this theme, designing flags that incorporated images not usually found on these objects: military leaders—Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, Haim Bar-Lev, Ariel Sharon, and others—replace the Hasidim of previous generations; fighter planes and tanks are arranged in formations resembling seven-branched menorahs or Stars of David (Fig. 22); soldiers are depicted standing next to the Western Wall; and instead of the symbols of the twelve tribes appear the emblems of the various military units, accompanied by the inscription: “For instruction shall come forth from Zion” (Isa. 2:3).

Fig. 21. Arie Moscovitch (?), Śimḥat Torah Flag, cardboard, printed, Israel: n.p., early 1950s. Collection of Shalom Sabar, Jerusalem.

‘shanot ṭovot’ min ha-ḳibbuts, ed. Muky Tzur (Givat Haviva: Yad Yaari, 2001), 8–44; idem, “‘A Happy and Joyous New Year’: Jewish New Year Greeting Cards as a Reflection of Jewish and Israeli Ideals in the Modern Era,” in Each Year Anew: A Century of Shanah Tovah Cards, ed. Rachel Sarfati (Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 2015), 216–194; and Haim Grossman, “Ḥayyal ṿe-tsava shel ‘shalom u-biṭṭaḥon’: demut ḥayyal u-mar’eh tsava tsahaliyyim be-iggerot berakhah le-shanah ḥadashah,” Zemannim 81 (Winter 2002–2003): 42–53.

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Fig. 22. Śimḥat Torah Flag, cardboard, printed, Israel: n.p., late 1960s. Collection of Shalom Sabar, Jerusalem.

From an ideological point of view, we can say that the militaristically themed flags that flourished after the Six-Day War represent a dramatic inversion of the original symbolism of the Śimḥat Torah flag. For the rabbis of Eastern Europe, the power of the Śimḥat Torah flag stemmed precisely from the spiritual message it embodied, as the antithesis of the power symbolized by the military flag among non-Jews. It is difficult to imagine that the designers of these new flags thought deeply about this issue when they chose what to represent; rather, their flags faithfully reflect the spirit of the time, which permeated all areas of popular culture. And yet, even this development is but one more phase in the history of the Śimḥat Torah flag, as in the last decades of the twentieth century such militaristic motifs disappeared. The flags created from the 1980s onward became increasingly specialized based on the sector for which they were intended. At one extreme are the “secular” flags from Tel Aviv, depicting bareheaded Israeli children playing and even characters from animated American films. The entire front side of one flag, for example, shows the characters of the cartoon Popeye the Sailor flanking an open Torah scroll (Fig. 23). Another was used in November 2008 to promote the election campaign of the Russian Jewish oligarch Arcadi Gaydamak who was running for mayor of Jerusalem. On

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the other end of the spectrum are flags from various Jerusalem-based yeshivas featuring photographs of leading rabbis from previous generations. No female figures whatsoever are included on these flags, in striking contrast to their secular counterparts. In between are flags produced by the National Religious Party (succeeded in 2008 by the Jewish Home) for the children of its members featuring a boy wearing a knitted skullcap, a large Hebrew letter bet (the symbol of the party at the polls), and the party’s slogan, “You need to have faith in the state.” At the same time, the Shas Sephardic political party’s El ha-Ma‘yan educational movement distributed flags that, for the first time, bore photographs of Mizrahi Torah scrolls (scrolls set in wooden and silver cases, rather than the cloth-covered Ashkenazic specimens) and of Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri (1898–2006), Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef (1920–2013), and other spiritual leaders of the movement (Fig. 24). Yet another voice in this increasingly diverse field is a flag created in the studio of Israeli graphic artist Dov Abramson for the Masorti Olami (Conservative) movement. This “politically correct” flag portrays members of both genders, including an Ethiopian boy and a girl in a wheelchair, celebrating together; a woman wrapped in a ṭallit (prayer shawl) dancing with a Torah scroll; as well as the iconic figures of Moses and Herzl, but also of Miriam (Fig. 25).

Fig. 23. Popeye the Sailor Śimḥat Torah Flag, cardboard, printed, Israel: n.p., 1980s. Collection of Shalom Sabar, Jerusalem.

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Fig. 24. Shas Party Śimḥat Torah Flag, cardboard, printed, Israel: n.p., 1990s. Collection of Shalom Sabar, Jerusalem.

Fig. 25. Dov Abramson, Masorti Olami Śimḥat Torah Flag, cardboard, printed, Israel: n.p., 1990s. Collection of Shalom Sabar, Jerusalem.

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The new ideas about the visualization of “Jewish might” and its significance were finally also adapted by Chabad Lubavitch in a series of Judaic items it created for distribution to the children of the movement, most prominently in a military shield with the phrase “Army of Hashem [God]” written on it in Hebrew and English. On some items, the ultimate effort was made to bring the world of Israeli children closer to that of the European shtetl by invoking the Hebrew acronym for the Israel Defense Forces, Tsahal—Tseva Hagganah le-Yiśra’el, but changing the words whose first letters make up the acronym to ones with new significance: “Israel’s children are in Tsahal—Tseva Hakhanah la-Ge’ullah [Forces Preparing for the Redemption].” ****** In conclusion, the Śimḥat Torah flag as a purely Jewish concept and an item of folk art has come full circle. From the term degel as it is used in the book of Numbers, where it is strongly associated with marching configuration and military-like encampment, the flag eventually became a symbol of religious piety—an emblem of the preference accorded to spiritual power over earthly power in traditional Judaism. With the emergence of the Zionist movement and the attendant search for new symbols, this charming and “naive-looking” object was imbued with surging nationalistic significance. This process reached its zenith in modern Israel, where the decorative program of the Śimḥat Torah flag became a platform for the expression of military, social, and even political views, reflecting the dramatic changes in Jewish society in our times. Thus, Śimḥat Torah flags, like many other religious objects, are obviously much more than merely items of folk art, as the images chosen to decorate them offer historians refreshing, unexpected insights into the lifestyles, ideologies, aspirations, and beliefs of the communities for which they were created.

Meira Wolkenfeld UCLA ’10

I first met Rabbi Chaim at the “Hillel Welcome Back Beach Day” right before the start of my freshman year. He was standing on the beach, gesticulating with exuberance, inviting everyone to join his Introduction to Judaism class, JS 10. I was taken by his enthusiasm and rearranged my schedule so that I could enroll. In the next four years, I would also attend a UCLA course he co-taught on Avot, a Tanya discussion group he led at Hillel, numerous derashot, Friday night dinners, and an annual sukkah party at his home. You never knew who might show up at these events: sitting at his table, you might meet a dignitary from a small European country or the image of Lilith on a Jewish amulet he owns. You might hear a knock at the door: [T]he door opens, another old man walks in and sits down. He is older than I am. All the talmidim call me the Rav; he is older than the Rav. He is the grandfather of the Rav; his name is Reb Ḥayyim Brisker, without whom no shi‘ur can be delivered nowadays. Then, the door opens quietly again and another old man comes in; he is older than Reb Ḥayyim; he lived in the seventeenth century. What’s his name? Reb Shabsai Cohen, the famous Shakh, who must be present when dine mamonos are being discussed; when we study Bava metsi‘a, Bava ḳamma. And then, more visitors show up. Some . . . of the visitors lived in the eleventh century, some in the twelfth century, some in the thirteenth century, some lived in antiquity: Reb Akiva, Rashi, Rabbenu Tam, the Ra’avad, the Rashba; more and more come in, come in, come in. Of course, what do I do? I introduce them to my pupils, and the dialogue commences. . . .

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This is how Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik described teaching a Talmud shi‘ur in 1974,1 and I remember Rabbi Chaim acting this out, miming the door opening, Rashi slipping in to join the conversation. In Rabbi Chaim’s classroom, books came alive, and you never knew who might join: Milton Steinberg entered alongside Rambam, the book Does God Have a Big Toe? made regular appearances. Rabbi Chaim made you see both the life in books and their materiality, like the way words in one volume he owns were becoming visible again, reemerging from behind the fading strikethroughs of a censor. Everyone knows that Rabbi Chaim’s office is filled with books, but you might not realize that that is just the tip of the iceberg. One summer, he paid me to organize a library in his attic. It was filled with books that he was moving from Hillel’s boiler room, where he had stored overflow from the bookcases and piles of books in his Hillel office and home. Another time, he beckoned me over to a nondescript cabinet next to the Hillel Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. “Meira, I want to show you something,” he said, standing next to the cabinet that I had never noticed existed. “This is where I keep my Judaism and feminism library!” His enthusiasm for engaging tradition was contagious. He would stop you in the hall to share a new book or a source related to your interests. I was majoring in the study of the Ancient Near East and was interested in biblical parallels and biblical criticism. Rabbi Chaim encouraged me and showed me that I could find religious meaning in academic Bible study. In one Shabbat morning derashah, he compared the biblical Creation account to the Babylonian Enuma Elish, quoting A. J. Heschel’s The Sabbath along the way: the Creation story in the Enuma Elish ends with humans building a physical temple to serve the gods, while the Creation story in Genesis ends with humans and God sharing an eternal temple in time, the Sabbath. It meant so much to me to hear such serious derashot, addressing challenging questions with candor and creativity. From day one, Rabbi Chaim helped me see my UCLA experience as a time for religious exploration and learning. He showed me that academia and personal religiosity could be complementary by sharing a version of Judaism that could grow and respond. When I was thinking about what I wanted to share here, I opened the copy of Avot I used in Rabbi Chaim’s class and flipped through my notes. 1

A recording and transcript of the talk are available at YUTorah Online, accessed March 1, 2019, https://www.yutorah.org/lectures/lecture.cfm/753994/rabbi-josephb-soloveitchik/the-rav-s-famous-description-from-1974-of-how-he-experienced-themesorah-as-he-gave-shiur-as-an-old-man/.

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Student Tributes    MEIRA WOLKENFELD

A comment on Avot 1:4 seemed particularly relevant. The mishnah states: “Yose ben Joezer says: ‘Let your house be a meeting place for sages, dirty yourself in the dust of their feet, and drink their words with thirst.’” The word mit’abbeḳ (dirty yourself) is usually understood as a verb formed from the noun avaḳ (dust). “Dirty yourself in the dust of their feet” is taken to mean cleave to your teachers, sit by their feet, and hang on their words. However, Rabbi Ḥayyim of Volozhin, in his commentary on this mishnah, notes that it can also mean “wrestle,” as in Gen. 32:25, where Jacob wrestles with a man/angel. Rabbi Ḥayyim calls Torah study a milḥemet mitsṿah (obligatory war), involving challenge and debate. Rabbi Chaim (SeidlerFeller) invited us, his students, to enter the fray. Cleaving to his words, we gained entry into a rich dialectical tradition. R. Ḥayyim of Volozhin continues: “And so, too, we face off against our teachers, the holy ones who are in the ground but whose souls are in the heavenly heights; the famous authors whose books are with us—and through the books that are in our homes, our homes become meeting places for these sages.”2 The challenge, the give-and-take of Torah, collapses time, and “our homes become meeting places for these sages” when we wrestle with them and fill our homes with their books. (Rabbi Chaim’s house, of course, is chock full!) These ideas reverberate in the continuation of R. Soloveitchik’s speech, quoted above: The Rambam says something, the Ra’avad disagrees—and sometimes he’s very nasty: very sharp, harsh language he uses against the Rambam. A boy jumps up to defend the Rambam against the Ra’avad, and the boy is fresh—you know how young boys are fresh—so the language he uses is improper . . . so I correct him. And another boy jumps up with a new idea; the Rashba smiles gently. I try to analyze what the young boy meant; another boy intervenes; we call upon the Rabbenu Tam to express his opinion—and suddenly, a symposium of generations comes into existence.

Rabbi Soloveitchik concludes: “We belong to the same massorah community, where generations meet; where hands—no matter how wrinkled and parchment-dry one hand is and how soft and warm the other hand is— shake, unite, in a community where the great dialogue continues.” Rabbi Chaim, this, to me, epitomizes your Torah: offering your hand to invite everyone to join the conversation. You bring the dialogue to life with 2

Ḥayyim of Volozhin, Ruaḥ ḥayyim (Vilna: n.p., 1859), 14 (s.v. yehi betekha bet ṿa‘ad).

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your animated teaching. You taught me that tradition can sustain a challenge, and, in fact, by questioning we engage with tradition. In your classes, at your home, and at Hillel, I found a community of friends and a meeting place of sages. I have no doubt that your retirement will be filled with their camaraderie and the joy of learning that you shared with us. Todah u-berakhah!

Adam Greenwald UCLA ’06

Dear Rabbi Chaim, With the ironic awareness that I may be giving up my ḥeleḳ just for writing this, I’m not entirely sure about the whole idea of olam ha-ba. As a natural questioner and the son of a newspaper reporter who taught me from my earliest years that “if your mother says she loves you, make sure to corroborate with a second source,” the whole idea of a perfect place to which we go after we shake this mortal coil smacks a teensy bit of wish fulfillment. At the very least, I’m with Rambam (whom you first taught me to revere) when he says in his introduction to Pereḳ ḥeleḳ that trying to describe the spiritual pleasure of the next world while living in this one is like explaining color to the blind or music to the deaf. Certain things must simply be experienced to be understood. I can get behind that. However, despite my honest skepticism, if it turns out that there is a Paradise (and that I am allowed in, too), I sincerely hope that it will look much like the library in your home: books piled high to the ceiling, standing straight in columns, sprawled out half-open on your desk; leather-bound volumes printed in Venice five hundred years ago, as well as manuscripts direct from authors still waiting to be typeset; a whole world of thought, of commentaries on commentaries on commentaries—a learned conversation across disciplines and centuries and continents that anyone with a set of eyes in his or her head, a comfortable chair, and a decent attention span could launch him or herself into. I’m pretty sure I could spend a few eons in that room without getting too antsy. To be serious, though: you really can’t imagine what I thought when, at seventeen years old, you first showed me that room and explained to me

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that you had recently needed to reinforce the foundation beneath that part of the house, as it was starting to cave in from the weight. I was just a kid when I met you; an awkward freshman with a head of big and messy hair, coming to his first Shabbat service at the rabbi’s house hoping to make some friends. I had been one of the only reasonably active Jews in an enormous high school class of more than 1,200 and, as such, considered myself quite an expert on all things Jewish. How overwhelmed I felt, and how excited, too, upon peeking into your library and learning in a moment that I didn’t yet know anything at all. In many ways, the last eighteen years of my life have been midrash on that experience of revelation. Of course, that first look was just the start: with the ever-present promise of the world’s most mediocre, yet plentiful, kosher pizza (with occasional redemption in the form of a sublime Doreen Seidler-Feller feast), I came to nearly every class you offered over the next four years. I learned to love the profound texts, the arguments and dialectics, laid out over your messy, hand-annotated source sheets that still fill folders upon folders in my file cabinet. You taught me, welcomed me as a ben bayit into your home, and never made me feel inadequate because I was a new explorer in this world of tradition. When my time at UCLA was over, I went to rabbinical school largely because I could no longer imagine my life without being in conversation with those ancient teachers. It was an unexpected road, for me as much as for anyone else, and one that surely would never have opened up if you had not entered my life. Wow, what a gift! Thank you for sparking my curiosity, as you surely lit (and continue to light) the spark for countless other slightly lost college freshmen with unkempt hair over the past forty-plus years. Thank you for teaching me that our massorah is an ocean, vast and deep, and that it is a worthy, lifelong challenge for intelligent minds to explore. Thank you for ensuring that I would spend the rest of my life constantly needing to buy more bookshelves, in hopes that one day I will have a library worthy of showing my own students and telling them with a proud smile, “We had to reinforce the foundation under it, just as my teacher had to do for his.” With deep love and admiration, Adam

Mayim Bialik UCLA ’00, ’07

There is no way to adequately articulate what Reb Chaim means to me or what he has done for me and my family. And so, I will do what Reb Chaim does so well. I will tell you a story. It’s not a fancy story. It’s not particularly elegant or spectacular. It’s a simple story of girl meets rav. As an undergraduate at UCLA in 1995, I wandered into the Hillel building at the corner of Hilgard and Le Conte and asked if I could volunteer to help answer phones. I started spending a lot of time in the Hillel offices, and one day, a fuzzy-haired nebishy force to be reckoned with—Reb Chaim—shuffled into the building bearing books upon books in his arms. This force talked a lot and drew those around him into his space. I was mesmerized by this character. Reb Chaim was the very first Modern Orthodox human being I knew. When I first met him, I could not speak Hebrew, the holy tongue of our people, until he explained to me how and why to master it. I learned how to learn with him—I had never studied a Jewish text in my life, until Reb Chaim encouraged me to do so. At that time, I knew virtually nothing about Jewish history beyond the thirty years before I was born. I didn’t even really know what the various denominations of Judaism stood for. And now I am a “Chaim-ite,” as we call ourselves: I can converse and pray in Hebrew, and I love the richness and complexity of our global language. I can study a Jewish text, and I know the value of learning with a ḥavruta. I know about the pivotal events in our history that have occurred over the course of over three thousand years, and I confidently and joyously enter synagogues all over the world and feel the presence of Hashem everywhere.

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Over the two decades-plus since I met Reb Chaim, it has been made clear to me time and again that when I found myself a rav, I made myself a friend (see Avot 1:6). Reb Chaim taught me to argue, and he taught me how to know when not to argue. He was the rabbi who made the father of my sons part of the Covenant, and he helped us take marital vows and enter both of our sons into the Covenant. Reb Chaim is the rabbi who has seen the circle of life turn and turn again for so many families, including for mine; he held me up as my legs gave out from under me when I buried my father, z”l. And so, my story is, in fact, very simple. My life has a Divine purpose and an anchor in the Torah because of the guidance I have been blessed to receive from Reb Chaim. My life is governed by the principles of the faith, passed down throughout the generations, whose revelation I witnessed at Mount Sinai. Reb Chaim was there with me. We were all there together; Reb Chaim taught me that. Because of Reb Chaim, I am motivated by my faith, my God, my heritage, my children, and the possibility of inspiring young Jews to find themselves and their purpose in some way every day of my life. I get to repay what Reb Chaim has given me by living in accordance with the principles he has dedicated his life to. I hope for Reb Chaim that the next chapter of his amazing life will include all of the travels his heart desires, all of the rest his body needs, and all of the busy-ness his soul craves. I wish him ample valuable time with his family and with all of his books, his Judaica, and his thoughts. And I know that—just as he taught me to do—whatever he learns on every mountain he climbs, he will bring it all back down to us: to teach us, inspire us, and guide us yet again to renew our faith, our commitment to a life of meaning, and our desire to repair a world that needs our love just as we need his.

Jonathan Jacoby UCLA ’76

The first time I met Chaim, I experienced a way of being Jewish for the first time. An Orthodox rabbi who believes God couldn’t have meant for there to be sexism or misogyny. There is no reason that women and men cannot pray together. In the photo on Chaim’s desk, Doreen and Chaim are dancing their way to the heavens. In a photo of my first wedding, Chaim is there. My mesadder ḳiddushin. Bringing us all, from agnostic to Haredi, together. There were times I didn’t see Chaim because we lived in different cities. Still, Chaim remained my teacher, and he remains my teacher no matter where I live. Dancing, teaching, thinking, laughing, listening. Bringing the many parts of my world together.

Laurie L. Levenson*

Reb Chaim is brilliant. No one can deny that. However, there may be some debate about what makes him uniquely so. For me, the answer is clear. He has the courage to insist that we think in a different way. Regurgitating the lessons of past scholars is not enough. We must find our own way of thinking and then, most importantly, translate that thinking into action. It is a humbling experience being Reb Chaim’s student. As a young law student, I was quite impressed by myself. After all, I had graduated from a top undergraduate institution and I was attending another elite law school. As my peers pored over rules, I immersed myself in lunchtime Talmud study with Reb Chaim securely at the helm. If I could master the LSAT, I thought, I could certainly interpret the one line of text he had brought for us to learn! And if I did not know what the exact answer was, at least I had been trained as an undergraduate to take an educated guess at what my teacher wanted me to say. So I boldly raised my hand and answered Reb Chaim’s question. And then, I received the reply that changed my life. He answered my question with a question—a question that I pose almost daily to my own students: “Who taught you to think that way?” I was more perplexed by the response than crushed. What do you mean by “taught me to think that way”? I think the way that I think! Up to that point, the only question was whether I would get the answer right and others would approve of my position. Thinking had very little to do with executing. As I entered the legal profession, I naively thought my job was to win the case for my client. And my first client was the United States of America. * I am grateful to Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller for too many things to mention in this footnote, not the least of which are his love, guidance, and friendship. As a result of his inspiration, I founded Loyola Law School’s Project for the Innocent. Our mission is to help free the wrongfully convicted.

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After law school and a federal clerkship, I began my career as a federal prosecutor. My job, at least as I understood it, was to save our nation from the menacing criminal elements out to topple it. If I was assigned a bank robbery case, the defendant had to be convicted and serve his time in federal prison. If a person had been arrested for a crime, my job was to ensure that he be held accountable for his actions. In other words, like countless young prosecutors, I believed my task was to make sure people were punished for crimes they committed. Oh, how I wish I had been a better student of Reb Chaim! No, there was no problem with my trial skills; I was sufficiently adept at presenting a case in trial. I also knew how to investigate a case, present it to a grand jury, handle appeals, and defend convictions against challenges by inmates. These mechanical tasks were not difficult. The rules were set forth in books. All I had to do was follow them. But, that was precisely the problem. I had forgotten the cardinal rule of Reb Chaim. For each case, for each defendant, I needed to question myself more than I questioned my witnesses. I needed to ask myself, “Who taught you to think that way?” Why did I believe that just because someone was charged with a crime, he or she was guilty? And, even if I could skillfully prove that case to a jury, why did this person deserve to be punished? Those are the questions that challenge a prosecutor’s soul, not just her mind. I did not start to ask those questions until after I had left the prosecutor’s office and become a professor of criminal law. In an adversarial system, such questions are often confused with a showing of weakness or an inability or unwillingness to zealously represent one’s client. My job was not to question our side; my job was to challenge the defense. Twenty years later, Reb Chaim’s lesson caught up with me. Thankfully, I do not think that I had intentionally or accidentally prosecuted an innocent person during my time as a prosecutor. However, as I learned quickly from my students, I needed to think in a different way if I were really to pursue a life committed to justice.

Stumbling upon Justice: Creating an Innocence Project It was very odd. I had always been the voice of the prosecution in the press. Because prosecutor’s offices are often prevented by their own rules from commenting on pending cases, soon after I joined academe, I was able to accede to the many requests for comments on high-profile cases. From the

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Colleague Tributes    LAURIE L. LEVENSON

Rodney King beating case to O. J. Simpson to the Michael Jackson case, the media would ask me about the prosecution’s strategy and performance. And I would dutifully answer. My mind went into automatic pilot as I would share with viewers or readers the prosecution’s take on a case. My natural instinct was to believe that the defendant was guilty because that had been my experience with my own cases while still a prosecutor. However, it was during this time that two of my law students came to me. They were thinking differently. In their minds, and from their experiences growing up in their communities, far too many innocent people had been swallowed up by the justice system. Was there something we could do to help them? In that moment, I had to think differently, and that was the greatest challenge. I had to recognize that the criminal justice system to which I had dedicated my professional life was flawed. That was a scary thought for, if it was flawed, so had been my thinking for so many years. And so, I began. Back in that seat of a humbled law student, I had to start to think differently about criminal cases. I now had to learn from those whose mastery of basic principles of justice surpassed my own not because they had studied more rules or read more books, but because their very lives demonstrated that there was a different way to think about things.

Our First Client: Obie Anthony3 He was seen as disposable, another punk gang kid from South Central Los Angeles. If he did not commit this specific crime, he must have committed another. Obie was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for a murder he did not commit. Suffice it to say that the chief witness against him—a pimp at an inner-city whorehouse—and police officers not playing by the rules (for example, by suppressing exculpatory witnesses and physical evidence) did not come close to meeting the standards for criminal prosecution under Jewish law. Whereas Jewish law prohibits the conviction of a defendant on capital offenses without two witnesses (Deut. 19:15) and prior warning (see bSanhedrin 40b–41a), the American system often uses innuendo and stereotypes 3 A book was written about Anthony’s case. It covers the investigation and prosecution. However, it does not cover the post-conviction exoneration. See Miles Corwin, The Killing Season: A Summer inside an LAPD Homicide Division (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).

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to convict those in our community. Obie was convicted and spent seventeen years in prison before our Project for the Innocent joined the effort to exonerate him. And it was not an easy task. Now, rather than viewing every aspect of the case from the perspective of a prosecutor, I was challenged to think differently about the case. Thinking differently did the trick. I could now understand how evidence presented and witnesses testifying at the initial trial had concealed, rather than revealed, the truth. I saw how the supposedly strong testimony of an informant witness was only so strong precisely because that person was telling a rehearsed lie, rather than trying to recall truthfully a traumatic event. I saw that with the caseload pressures on them, police had barely had the time to pursue justice, let alone be careful and objective in their endeavors. I saw how very human our criminal justice system is. And, when Obie was released, I saw how the inspiration of Jewish law and thought influences more than just those who study them during a Talmud class. When Obie first visited my office after his exoneration, two things happened. First, on my wall was a poster in Hebrew featuring the words “Tsedeḳ tsedeḳ tirdof” (Deut. 16:20). This thirty-four-year-old man, who had never finished high school and was raised on the streets of Los Angeles because his only surviving parent was in prison, could easily read the Hebrew for me and translated it: “Justice, justice shall you pursue.” When he saw my astonishment, he simply remarked, “I had a lot of time in custody to study. A lot of time to learn. A lot of time to think.” Then, I looked at a word that Obie had etched on his body during his nearly two decades in prison. He had written “Yehoshua” in Hebrew. He believed he was imprinting God right on his body, even in the darkest of places. Obie freely admitted that the only thing that kept him going in prison when he knew he did not belong there was that God would provide justice. We are partners in God’s work, and no lawyer should think that justice depends on our efforts alone. Thus began the transformation of a former prosecutor into the head of an innocence project. It came about by learning to think differently. Who taught me to think that way? I am proud to share that it has been the people most directly affected by the justice system, not those in power, who have taught me how to think about justice. The lesson of treating the poor and rich alike (Ex. 23:3, 6; Lev. 19:15) is not a topic to be sequestered in the academies. It can actually mean the difference between life and death for many people.

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Colleague Tributes    LAURIE L. LEVENSON

Jewish Law’s Lessons for Innocence Projects There are many lessons that Jewish law has for those lawyers who are involved in innocence projects. First and foremost, Jewish law expects cases to be determined based upon evidence, not just the whims of the parties involved. Witnesses must be warned that giving testimony is a serious matter and that their claims will be probed on cross-examination (Moses Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot sanhedrin 12:5–9; ibid., Hilkhot edut 17:2). According to one study of eighty-six wrongful convictions undertaken by the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, about 33% of the cases involved problematic evidence, including witnesses who gave questionable testimony and relied on hearsay.4 The study found, further, that since 1972, forty-six legally exonerated defendants had been convicted and sentenced to death, in whole or in part based on apparently mistaken or perjured eyewitness testimony.5 Jewish law also condemns those who put their own self-interest first when called upon to testify on behalf of an innocent person: “When [a person] has heard a public imprecation and—although able to testify as one who has either seen or learned of the matter—he does not give information . . . he is subject to punishment” (Lev. 5:1). Yet, in America, witnesses routinely save their own skins by testifying against fellow defendants. Ours is a system of plea-bargaining, not trials.6 Trials are dominated by self-interested witnesses who will reveal just enough to satisfy prosecutors but will fall far short of the full and honest disclosure that should be required. One out of every four people wrongfully convicted but later exonerated by DNA evidence has made a false confession or incriminating statement.7 In fact, under American law, law enforcement can trick a suspect into confessing by feeding him or her false information.8 The late Justice Antonin Scalia referred to confessions as an affirmative good. As he wrote in his dissent in Minnick v. Mississippi, “While every person is entitled to 4 Rob Warden, with Shawn M. Armbrust and Jennifer Linzer, “How Mistaken and Perjured Eyewitness Identification Testimony Put 46 Innocent Americans on Death Row,” Death Penalty Information Center (May 2, 2001), accessed March 1, 2019, https:// deathpenaltyinfo.org/files/pdf/StudyCWC2001.pdf. 5 Ibid. 6 Missouri v. Frye, 132 S.Ct. 1399 (2012). 7 Anon., “False Confessions & Recording of Custodial Interrogations,” The Innocence Project, accessed March 1, 2019, https://www.innocenceproject.org/causes/ false-confessions-admissions/. 8 Leyra v. Dennis, 347 U.S. 556 (1954).

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stand silent, it is more virtuous for the wrongdoer to admit his offense and accept the punishment he deserves. Not only for society, but for the wrongdoer himself, ‘admissio[n] of guilt . . . [is] inherently desirable.’”9 Jewish law rejects confessions. The Babylonian Talmud states that “no man may call himself a wrongdoer” (Yevamot 25b; Ketubbot 18b; Sanhedrin 9b, 25a). There are at least two reasons for this rule. First, as noted above, Jewish law relies on witnesses, not the defendant, to prove a case. Second, confessing can literally be a way of committing suicide if a defendant is convicted. “All lives are [God’s]” (Ezek. 18:4); hence, no man may be allowed to forfeit his own life by his own admission, his life not actually being his own to dispose of but God’s.10 Finally, Jewish law does not put process over justice. Under the AntiTerrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) of 1996,11 there are nearly insurmountable procedural hurdles to overcome for a defendant who seeks review of his or her prior conviction in federal court. “When A.E.D.P.A. became law, it fell like an ‘atomic bomb’ on the federal judiciary.”12 No longer could the federal courts act as a safety net for defendants who were wrongfully convicted in state court. Moreover, justices on the Supreme Court have opined that simply claiming to be an “innocent person” is insufficient to avoid the death penalty. An individual must point to error in the trial procedures in order to seek redress.13 “[P]rocedural hurdles so dominate postconviction litigation,” I wrote several years ago, “that cases rarely receive evidentiary hearings and decisions on the merits.”14 Jewish law is about saving people (Num. 35:25; see also mMakkot 1:10), not queuing them up for execution. To “think the right way,” we must focus on how our laws affect people. There is no perfect legal system. Or, as Reb Chaim frequently teaches, “lo ba-shamayim hi [it is not in heaven]” (Deut. 30:12). As the Talmud explains, the Torah itself is to be uncovered by people involved in seeking justice, not through God’s miracles (bBava 9 Minnick v. Mississippi, 498 U.S. 146 (1990), at p. 167 (Scalia, A., concurring). 10 See Moses Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot sanhedrin 18:6, with the commentary of Rabbi David ben Solomon Ibn Zimra (Radbaz; 1479–1573) (s.v. gezerat ha-katuv hu). 11 28 U.S.C. § 2254. 12 Randy Hertz and James S. Liebman, as quoted in Lincoln Caplan, “The Destruction of Defendants’ Rights,” The New Yorker (June 21, 2015), accessed March 1, 2019, https:// www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-destruction-of-defendants-rights. 13 Herrera v. Collins, 506 U.S. 390 (1993). 14 Laurie L. Levenson, “Searching for Injustice: The Challenge of Postconviction Discovery, Investigation, and Litigation,” Southern California Law Review 87 (2014): 570.

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Colleague Tributes    LAURIE L. LEVENSON

metsi‘a 59b). The halakhic judicial process is one that rejects procedures for their own sake. The goal is to ensure a correct result, not just a lengthy, unproductive process to (hopefully) reach that result.

Swimming against the Current: Jewish Law’s Lessons for Prosecutors I could never have done the type of work I do now without Reb Chaim’s teachings and inspiration. He made me believe that what I do as a person matters. He also helped me realize that prosecutors dominate the American criminal justice system and are idolized by a public that practically worships them. An inordinate number of prosecutors occupy the bench as judges15 and often become our leading legislators. Prosecution is a ticket to power. No person is worshipped in Jewish law—not even judges. In fact, Maimonides said that the key qualifications for being a judge are wisdom, fear of God, humility, disdain of money, love of truth, love of people, and a good reputation (Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot sanhedrin 2:6–10; emphasis mine). Wrongful confessions occur because prosecutors want to win too much. They ignore (or, even worse, hide) evidence that might support the defendant’s case. Failure to disclose exculpatory evidence is believed to be one of the leading causes of wrongful convictions.16 Maimonides taught: “[O]ne should accept the truth from whatever source it proceeds.”17 Reb Chaim’s life has embodied this mission. He does not hide behind popular assumptions but pushes all to see the truth in every situation. That is what is required if prosecutors are going to do their duty in the criminal justice system. We cannot afford to wear blinders, even if shading the truth will give us an advantage in winning our case. Failing to reassess leads to a malignant cynicism that can overcome the best intentions of a prosecutor’s office.18 15 See sources cited in eadem, “The Problem with Cynical Prosecutor’s Syndrome: Rethinking a Prosecutor’s Role in Post-Conviction Cases,” Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law 20, no. 2 (Fall 2015): 342 n. 19. 16 Cynthia E. Jones, “A Reason to Doubt: The Suppression of Evidence and the Inference of Innocence,” The Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology 100, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 415–74. 17 See The Eight Chapters of Maimonides on Ethics (Shemonah Peraḳim): A Psychological and Ethical Treatise, ed. and trans. Joseph I. Gorfinkle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1912), 35–36. 18 Levenson, “The Problem,” 338.

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Conclusion Finally, Jewish law and Reb Chaim teach that it takes courage to see things from a new perspective. “Who taught you to think that way?” is a rallying cry to get outside of our comfort zone and start seeing the world differently than we did before. As a former prosecutor, I was taught to see the world of justice as “us” versus “them,” with prosecutors always having truth and justice on their side. Having participated now in nine exonerations, I think differently. I am no longer wedded to the adversarial model, because that model can cause people to skew the truth. I would rather bring prosecutors and defense lawyers together to investigate and problem-solve cases jointly, much as judges on the Sanhedrin did in antiquity. We have to think differently or we will continue to make the mistakes that have cost so many men and women their freedom. Reb Chaim has also embraced the “Mitzvah of Conflict Resolution.” As he wrote, “[T]he laws of [the] Torah, when internalized, condition its adherents to resolve their conflicts.”19 In my work, the thing that has been most difficult for me to understand is how my exonerated clients are able to move on with their lives and not stay angry at a system that wrongfully convicted them. The answer, of course, is that taught by Reb Chaim: I stay focused on what had happened to them, while they have moved on to pursue what they may yet become. Reb Chaim’s teachings inspire us to become something more than we were before—kinder, more committed, wiser, and more active. And it all starts with trying to think in a different way. Think like peacemakers, not lawyers. Think of those who do not have a voice, and help others think of those people differently. Change, grow, struggle, and reassess. Follow in the path of a great teacher—Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller.

19 Chaim Seidler-Feller, “The Mitzvah of Conflict Resolution—On Campus,” 9 Adar (2015), accessed March 1, 2019, http://www.9adar.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/ The-Mitzvah-of-Conflict-Resolution-on-Campus-by-Chaim-Seidler-Feller.pdf.

Edward Feld

We were a band of revolutionaries, rabbis who were outsiders to our movements. We shared a common vision, and though we were Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative, we had more in common with each other than with peers in our rabbinic organizations. Chaim was a critical member of our generation of Hillel directors, those of us who began our work in the 1960s and 1970s. We were out to change the Jewish community. We opposed the staid urban and suburban synagogues the Jewish community had birthed in the 1940s and 1950s; we thought them vapid. We wanted a religious life that engaged and enlivened people, promoted their participation, spoke to their inner lives, empowered them to create their own Jewish homes and communities; we wanted passion, not formalism. We believed the frontal, hierarchical religion represented in these synagogues could not excite a new generation. The movement for change emerged on many campuses across the country; a few of the most critical leaders were Max Ticktin and Danny Leifer, who created the Upstairs Minyan at the University of Chicago, and Richard N. Levy, who formed the Library Minyan in Los Angeles. Equally, we critiqued the organized philanthropic Jewish community, the federations. We wanted them to commit funds for Jewish education, underwrite day schools, and support alternative religious possibilities and, yes, Hillel. Many federations shipped 75% or more of their funds overseas. This made sense in the immediate postwar period, but now there were new realities, and it was American Judaism that needed support. We also felt that allocating large sums of money to Jewish hospitals was an anachronism in an age when healthcare was largely funded by insurance companies and governmental agencies. We wanted a new communal agenda. We aimed for a Judaism that was not filtered by cliched readings of the tradition but that went back to the sources and allowed the rawness of

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the tradition to speak. We taught primary texts, encouraged grappling with them, stirred vibrant discussions. We learned from each other’s Torah, each other’s readings of texts. We wanted to replace a “sermonic” Judaism with one that sponsored vigorous debate of Jewish and general concern. We expanded the range of Jewish literature that could feed us: Hasidic sources, Yiddish poetry, Zionist writing read alongside Talmudic passages and biblical teachings. And we wanted these sources to engage with the intellectual ferment taught in the academy; we reached for a synthesis of these sources and our contemporary impulses. We critiqued Sartre and Ezra Pound alongside traditional texts. We were activists. Chaim and Doreen, like several Hillel directors and their spouses, went behind the Iron Curtain to teach and to deliver supplies to Jews who were organizing underground. We debated with the PLO on campus and then with the Zionist establishment who would suffer no criticism of Israel. We joined in the movement to boycott South Africa. Our activism arose from love and commitment—love of the Jewish people, love of Jewish ideals, love of Israel, and a commitment to a fundamental humanism. We rejected simplistic political and national loyalties and demanded a politics with a moral backbone. As a result, many did not understand that Hillel directors like Chaim could simultaneously advocate an openness to Palestinians and yet hold their Zionism close and deep. We saw no contradiction between supporting Rabbis for Human Rights and at the same time just as enthusiastically encouraging students to study in Israel. Typically, Max Ticktin, the Associate Director of National Hillel, was investigated for supporting Breira, a peace organization, yet he insisted on students confronting Hebrew texts in the original and went on to teach contemporary Israeli literature. In a similar vein, Chaim both railed against the occupation and organized Hillel professionals’ summer study at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. We were educators. College students are of an age when they are trying to define themselves. Away from home, they desire and need mentoring. Many of them are seekers, looking for spiritual nourishment, and we felt honored and blessed to be able to speak to them at this critical moment in their lives. We modelled for them commitment to a set of values that represented an alternative to a materialist middle-class culture. We worked within the academy, but we were outsiders to it. We applauded the analytical study of texts but wanted the university to go a step further, asking how these texts might speak to a person’s inner life and

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Colleague Tributes    EDWARD FELD

help shape his or her values. We were thrilled to be a part of the intellectual inquiry that constituted the academy’s central activity, but we also thought the academy should deal with the ethical maturation of students and wanted our students to reflect on their personal values, to think about their behavior with each other, and to care about what was happening in the larger society. The academy could speak to qualities of mind; we wanted students to also plumb their souls. What kept us going was a certain camaraderie. We would meet each year at the annual Hillel conference, and there our love for each other, our mutual respect and admiration, was experienced in person. We attended each other’s study sessions; we talked endlessly about that year’s Jewish and global developments. We picked each other’s brains to decipher where students were at, what they needed most, how faculty and deans could help us in our work, and how we could structure and promote events that would intrigue our students. We knew we were a common band of entrepreneurial educators and that the movements that had ordained us had not given us the tools to meet the needs of the hour. We debated one another, kidded one another, joined in each other’s joys and felt each other’s pain, celebrated each other’s triumphs and succored one another. What bound us to one another so much more than to our colleagues in our rabbinic movements was our commonality of interests and the shared sense that we were engaged in holy work. And our vision flourished. Many of our graduates went on to become Jewish professionals or lay leaders of their communities. Many continued their Jewish education, some in lifelong learning. Students who had never experienced Shabbat in their homes growing up established homes where Friday night dinner, Shabbat candles, and zemirot were central to the families they created. Students from day schools discarded the rote religion they had learned and began a spiritual journey of personal commitment. We started out as outsiders to the Jewish community, but soon the Jewish community caught up to us. The lives of college students became part of the communal agenda and the community turned to aid us. The Washington office of Hillel began talking about million-dollar foundations—those which had developed endowments, multiple staffs, new facilities. We had moved from being revolutionary outsiders to being founders of institutions. As the institutions we birthed demanded more and more administrative skills and the time and energy for that began to take precedence over teaching, counseling, and student organizing, many of us left.

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Chaim stayed. Somehow, though, with all of his responsibilities—raising funds, building a new building, supervising a growing staff, starting new programs—Chaim never lost his primary self-definition as an educator. In holding on to his revolutionary fervor while building an institution that could outlast his tenure, Chaim became a model not only for our generation, but for the next generation of Hillel directors as well. In fact, his creativity, intellectual restlessness, and persistence in the public iteration of his values make him a model for what an American rabbi can be.

David Berner

About forty-five years ago, I was searching for an associate to join me in directing Hillel at UCLA. A young, energetic Orthodox rabbi at the Hillel in Columbus, Ohio, was highly recommended to me by the National Hillel office. My colleague, Rabbi Richard N. Levy, was very enthusiastic about him joining the staff. He had heard that Chaim held similar political opinions to his and was very bright, very deeply Jewishly learned, and open on women’s issues. Chaim flew in for an interview and my first impressions confirmed Richard’s. He reminded me of some of my friends from Borough Park with his slight yeshiva accent and fast-paced speech; he was absolutely not the Southern California type. And yet, I was taken with his desire to succeed, vast knowledge, candidness, and pleasantness. The night before I had to make the decision about hiring Chaim, around 10:00 pm, I received a telephone call from a Hillel colleague who knew him and wanted to give me some “friendly” advice. He said that Chaim was hard to manage, would give me a lot of tsores̀ (troubles), and would create controversy. I did not sleep well that night. In the morning, I decided that the risk would be worth the reward and that the students and faculty at UCLA would gain, even if I would have to learn to live with him. More importantly, I asked myself how I could turn down the opportunity to work with a person with his attributes. (I told Chaim about the telephone call only seven years ago but never mentioned the name of the caller.) To be honest, some of what I was warned about was true. Let me tell you about the first Yom Kippur I spent with Chaim in 1975. We alternated leading the services, and each of us selected additional “inspirational” readings. Chaim led the ne‘ilah service and handed out a passage by Mircea Eliade, the renowned historian of religion. The text would have been difficult to understand under the best of circumstances, but at the end of a day of fasting in a dimly lit auditorium it was nearly impossible.

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Why on this special occasion do I relate this anecdote from so long ago? I believe it demonstrates perfectly one of Chaim’s most basic character traits, namely, his insatiable drive to spread knowledge to others. Chaim is constantly excited about new ideas and theories. If he discovers a source that inspires or enlightens him, he feels compelled to share it with the students and faculty. His classes and shi‘urim have become the stuff of legend because of the exuberance of his teaching style, the wide and varied sources he uses, and his love of exploring daring approaches to thought-provoking questions. He always aimed high; and yet, with time, he also learned not to shoot over people’s heads but to raise their horizons, to tailor his talks to each group he addressed. I am always amazed by the wide range of thought to which Chaim exposes himself, even when the knowledge is painful. I would ask him: why do you bother reading papers and meeting people who will upset you and raise your blood pressure? He would answer that one can only fight against a reprehensible belief if one understands it and the people who subscribe to it. Chaim’s positions are clear and are consistently based on a deep, unique, humanistic understanding of the Torah informed by a wide range of viewpoints, as can be discerned from the piles of books that surround and sometimes seem to engulf him. First we find traditional Jewish sources, from little-known thirteenth-century commentators to treatises on writing amulets to contemporary responsa literature. Beyond these books we encounter feminist literature, placards of the Neturei Karta, the latest studies on radical anthropological theory, works by Protestant theologians, political analysis by Thomas Friedman, and pamphlets of fringe Israeli and Palestinian groups. Chaim and I were privileged to be working at Hillel at a time of growth in Jewish interest on campus. Jewish studies, including courses on Jewish history, Hebrew and Yiddish language, the Holocaust, and Jewish life and tradition (one of which Chaim taught), were flourishing. There were competing Zionist organizations with different worldviews. Ha’Am, the Jewish student newspaper, was active and presented multiple perspectives. The UCLA Bayit, a live-in co-op, was the base for Jewish student activism. And Hillel served as a hub for all these groups and more, even when their positions were very different from those of the directors. In support of Israel and in confrontation with anti-Zionist groups, Chaim spent endless energy mediating between, and talking to the hearts

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Colleague Tributes    DAVID BERNER

of, the various factions. Everyone knows his political and social stances, but few are familiar with his extensive personal efforts to make peace or with the pain he felt when he failed. A special contribution was Chaim’s role in convincing the university administration, faculty, and wider community of the importance of enriching and expanding the Jewish studies program on campus. Relatedly, he helped found the Streisand Center for Jewish Cultural Arts at UCLA Hillel with a major gift from Barbra Streisand. Among its programs were the visits and lectures of Elie Wiesel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Roman Vishniac, whose exposure to the campus was of great significance to the younger generation. Chaim, as I mentioned above and as we all know, is overactive. One of the ways in which this expresses itself is through the tsetlekh (notes) he is constantly writing to himself. I can readily picture Chaim in the middle of a conversation with a pen cap in his mouth (how many has he swallowed?) writing a note about something important he does not want to forget. Where have the thousands of tsetlekh gone? Is he assembling a new genizah? I don’t know if even the advent of the iPhone has cured him of his need for little scraps of paper. And yet, his memory is itself prodigious. He knows Hollywood personalities’ unlisted numbers in Malibu, Beverly Hills, and New York and remembers the contact information of rare book dealers in Brooklyn and Jerusalem. In his head are stored the numbers of friends, professors, politicians, student activists, university deans, and federation leaders. Chaim is a social creature. Every introduction to someone new is an opportunity to make a new friend or find a new student (or teacher), or alternatively to identify new talent to assist in a religious, political, or intellectual cause that he thinks is important. In each case, it is always the human side of the relationship that comes first. This has especially been the case for me personally. Chaim is a true ḥaver. I am proud that he is one of mine and that I am one of his. Though we are very different people, we worked together for seven years from 1975 to 1982, complementing each other. Sometimes we were at odds over the proper way to handle a situation, but our deep respect for one another always remained. It is now about thirty-eight years since Rivka and I moved to Israel. During this period, we never once missed a telephone call before the ḥaggim. In many ways, I feel closer to Chaim as the years go by, despite the physical distance. We always see each other when he comes to Israel.

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Our children are very fond of meeting him as well; he is an important link to their parents’ past. A special word about Doreen: Rivka and I learned to appreciate the depth of her humanity, her true caring and wisdom, her good advice and insight, and her keen sense of aesthetics (as expressed, for example, in the Seidler-Fellers’ collection of Judaica artworks). We also feel close to Shulie and Shaul and regularly look forward to our conversations with them. Chaim, I am happy I did not listen to the advice of our colleague all those many years ago. Your talents and contributions to Jewish life are well known. I want you to know how much you enriched my own life. Thank you for being such a valued friend.

Saul Andron

Let me paint a recurring, classic Chaim Seidler-Feller scenario: My cell phone rings and the screen notes an incoming call from an UNKNOWN source. My first instinct is to disregard these calls altogether as nuisance intrusions, but in fact, on most occasions, this UNKNOWN caller is indeed well known to me and I’m drawn to answer. It’s Chaim— or, as I endearingly call him, Reb Chaim—on the line from his car on some freeway onramp or in some remote Los Angeles canyon crossing from the city to the valley or vice versa on his way to a teaching gig or other engagement with students, colleagues, donors, or other supporters. Speaking quickly, if not frenetically, to sustain connectivity before totally losing reception, he shares with me his upcoming New York travel schedule and interest in finding time to get together. “We have so much to catch up on!” he notes urgently. Alternatively, though sometimes on the same brief call, Reb Chaim shares a devar Torah, a derashah in the works for an upcoming ḥag or Shabbat, or highlights from a future teaching presentation as a way to make the call also a meaningful Torah engagement. I’ve been put on alert! Reb Chaim is coming to town and I have some thinking to do regarding a ṿorṭ in progress that has been delivered in quick soundbites and enticing fragments. Always thought-provoking, intriguing, and challenging of traditional categories and boundaries, these snatches of ideas whet my appetite, so that I anticipate deeper engagement with Reb Chaim on the subject when we get together to explore the theme’s relevance to inyane de-yoma (issues of the day) and its implications for the North American Jewish community, Israel, and Jewish communities around the world. In celebration of our evolving close personal friendship spanning over fifty-six years—from our youth at Camp Massad, to our years in L.A. as communal professional colleagues, friends, and parents with children in

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the same day school, until today—I am honored to share words of admiration and my feelings of high esteem and affection for Chaim, along with his wife and partner Doreen and their two children, Shulie and Shaul, with whom my wife Susan and I cherish a warm and special close relationship. Chaim is a unique blend: a singular personality; an iconoclastic force; a multitalented communal professional; a bold, occasionally provocative and combative thinker and intellectual who often pushes the limits beyond the readily acceptable or feasible; a zealous proponent of progressive, activist Judaism, of creative inclusion and pluralism, and of Orthodox egalitarianism; an institution builder and innovator; a boundary spanner; a Torah-inspired community tummler; and an engaging storyteller. Or, put another way, Chaim often swims against the current, not fitting neatly into well-defined categories, comfortable in the often uncomfortable and uncertain—though admirable—position of living in the seams of Jewish life, willing to challenge norms, but always with unswerving passion, purpose, gusto, and deep concern for the Jewish people. Most significantly and of utmost meaning to his inner core, Reb Chaim is a gifted, dynamic, excitable, optimistic, energetic, enthusiastic, and passionate melammed who has taught and continues to teach, influence, and inspire Jews of all backgrounds, value orientations, and commitments. To create an inclusive, welcoming, and open community of thinking, questioning, and committed Jews without fear of challenge or the need to be embraced by all was Chaim’s mission at UCLA Hillel and continues to guide his teaching, mentoring, and other professional pursuits. For, indeed, Chaim preaches and practices the Rabbinic expression ṿe-talmud Torah ke-neged kullam—Torah study is equivalent to all of the other mitsṿot (mPe’ah 1:1). Torah study for Chaim, however, is not an esoteric, private endeavor removed from human interaction and contemporary life issues and challenges, but rather a living, dynamic, intellectually open experience that connects people of all backgrounds to one another, to their sacred texts and traditions, to ritual practice, and to the problems they face as individuals, global citizens, and Jewish community members committed to personal growth and meaning and to forging vibrant Jewish community life. For Chaim, any Jewish study, whatever the sources or subject matter—and his vast, overflowing library is a testament to his widely diverse reading habits—is infused with a sense of the sacred and represents a divinely inspired interactive activity that helps fuel dialogue among people and between people and God.

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Colleague Tributes    SAUL ANDRON

Allow me to expand a bit on this last point. While Chaim cherishes Torah li-shemah (Torah study for its own sake), always undertaken in a serious and sincere but also joyful and engaging fashion, I most admire Chaim’s ability to link textual Torah study to real-life issues and challenges confronting the Jewish world—however controversial they might be—because they matter so much to him that he is willing to take risks and go out on a limb (often by himself). For example, Chaim is deeply concerned about the decline in Jewish literacy, the distancing of American university students and faculty from Israel, the increasing dysfunctionality and fragmentation of Jewish religious movements and groups, and the challenges to fully integrating women into Jewish ritual and community life. His teaching on these and many other topics is meant to inspire creative thinking, mobilize interest, and catalyze change. Midrash that leads to ma‘aśeh, to concrete action (see Avot 1:17), is Chaim’s preferred style and outcome. Along with his strong traditional Jewish grounding, passion for study and learning, and activism, Chaim is ideologically bound to Hebrew as a living, spoken language and as a core, organic ingredient of Jewish peoplehood—a commitment we both share. Chaim has spoken to his children in Hebrew virtually from birth, a testament to his devotion to Hebrew literacy. We often greet one another and converse in Hebrew and exchange Hebrew written sources, both traditional and contemporary, to guide our teaching and learning endeavors. We both cite Camp Massad, a unique living laboratory for Hebrew to become a natural and organic part of our personal Jewish identities and of Jewish identity in general, as our inspiration. And finally, lest one think that Chaim is all business—teaching and engaging students, mobilizing groups, solving the big Jewish problems—I can attest to Chaim’s playful and fun-spirited side, which welcomes a witty joke, relishes a good conversation over French onion soup or cheesecake, lights up with enthusiasm when telling the story behind a newly purchased piece of Judaica, and loves to share accounts of his exotic travels together with Doreen and of the fascinating people they meet along their journeys. When I think about which Torah teaching best captures Chaim’s unique persona and his commitment to learning and to vibrant, creative Jewish life, I turn to Eccl. 2:9: “In addition [af], my wisdom remained with me.” The midrashic collection Yalḳuṭ Shim‘oni to Ecclesiastes (sec. 968) cites Rabbi Ḥanina bar Papa as interpreting this verse to mean: “Torah that I

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studied in a state of vexation [af] has remained with me.” Learning with Chaim is all about engaging in a passionate, if sometimes vexed, dance of sorts that beckons us to both grapple with and reach beyond the text to find meaningful linkages and applications to contemporary issues and challenges. This formula continues to captivate and inspire Chaim’s students and colleagues, leading to insights and wisdom that indeed withstand the test of time. I wish Chaim many years of good health, creative frenzy, fulfilling family life, and peace.

List of Contributors

Saul Andron is Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Silberman School of Social Work of Hunter College and Adjunct Instructor at Fordham University School of Social Service. David Berner is Director Emeritus of Hillel at the University of California, Los Angeles. Mayim Bialik is an actress, author, and neuroscientist. Aryeh Cohen is Professor of Rabbinic Literature at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies of American Jewish University. Sergio DellaPergola is Professor Emeritus of Population Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry, where he was also Director of the Division of Jewish Demography and Statistics and held the Shlomo Argov Chair in Israel-Diaspora Relations. Elliot N. Dorff is Rector and Sol & Anne Dorff Distinguished Service Professor in Philosophy at American Jewish University. David Ellenson is Chancellor Emeritus and former President of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, as well as the former Director of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies and Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University. Edward Feld is Director Emeritus of Hillel at Princeton University. Sylvia Barack Fishman is Joseph and Esther Foster Professor Emerita in Judaic Studies at Brandeis University and Founding Co-Director of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute.

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Carole Goldberg is Jonathan D. Varat Distinguished Professor of Law Emerita at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, as well as the university’s former Vice Chancellor for Academic Personnel. Isaac Gottlieb is Associate Professor of Bible at Bar-Ilan University. Avraham Yizhak (Arthur) Green is Rector of the Rabbinical School and Irving Brudnick Professor of Jewish Philosophy and Religion at Hebrew College, as well as Philip W. Lown Professor Emeritus of Jewish Thought at Brandeis University. Adam Greenwald is Director of the Louis & Judith Miller Introduction to Judaism Program at American Jewish University, as well as Lecturer in Rabbinics at its Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies. Elana Stein Hain is Scholar in Residence and Director of Faculty at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. Moshe Halbertal is John and Golda Cohen Professor of Jewish Thought and Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Gruss Professor at New York University School of Law. Moshe Idel is Max Cooper Professor Emeritus of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a senior research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of Jerusalem. Jonathan Jacoby is a longtime advocate for Israeli democracy and Mideast peace, including serving as the former Founding Director of both the New Israel Fund and the Israel Policy Forum. Laurie L. Levenson is Professor of Law and David W. Burcham Chair in Ethical Advocacy at Loyola Law School, as well as the Founding Director of its Project for the Innocent. Deborah E. Lipstadt is Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, as well as the Founding Director of its Institute for Jewish Studies. David N. Myers is Sady and Ludwig Kahn Professor of Jewish History and Director of the Luskin Center for History and Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. Shalom Sabar is Professor of Jewish Art and Folklore at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

List of Contributors

Shana Strauch Schick is a fellow at the Center for Israel Studies of Yeshiva University. Shaul Seidler-Feller is a doctoral candidate in Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Eugene R. Sheppard is Associate Professor of Modern Jewish History and Thought, Chair of the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, and Associate Director of the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry at Brandeis University. Suzanne Last Stone is University Professor of Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization, Professor of Law, and Director of the Center for Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. Michael Walzer is Professor Emeritus at the School of Social Science of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Howard Wettstein is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. Meira Wolkenfeld is a doctoral candidate in Talmud at the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies of Yeshiva University.

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