Disputes – Lesson 3

Table of Contents

• The development of the concept of dispute and the Oral Torah
• Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel, and the transition to Yavneh
• Strong-handed authority versus the democratization of Torah
• Custom, conservatism, and an ethos created by human beings
• The figure of Rabbi Eliezer under excommunication and the critique of dialectics without tradition
• The death of Rabbi Eliezer, the laws of sorcery, and excommunication
• “I learned much Torah” and the description of knowledge that was never learned
• Attributing the Jewish law to Rabbi Yehoshua: tradition versus reasoning
• Dialectics: thesis–antithesis–synthesis, and Rabbi Akiva as the father of the Oral Torah
• Another story from the day of his death: “Afflictions are beloved” and the reversal of roles
• Rabbi Kook on Rabbi Eliezer: deep hearing and innovation emerging from tradition
• The “hollow pipe” as an illusion, and ethos versus facts
• The stages in the formation of dispute: necessity, revolution, ideal
• “These and those are the words of the living God” and the limits
• A heavenly voice, “It is not in heaven,” and the majority of wisdom versus the numerical majority
• The Ritva on Eruvin: forty-nine facets for prohibition and forty-nine facets for permission, and the secret of the matter

Summary

General Overview

The text presents a historical and conceptual process in which the Torah moves from an ethos of transmission “like a hollow pipe” to an ethos of “a Torah of human beings,” and this process creates the institution of dispute and makes it necessary to build methods of decision-making. It describes the transition from the period of the Zugot and of Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel to the generation of Yavneh after the destruction of the Temple, and the struggle between an authoritarian, tradition-based approach that seeks to suppress disputes and a “democratic” approach that decides on the basis of arguments and reasoning. Through the stories of Rabban Gamliel, Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Yehoshua, and Rabbi Akiva, the text highlights the question of how disputes are decided, and what standing tradition has in relation to logical reasoning. At the end, the next chapter opens, where dispute itself becomes idealized through the rule “These and those are the words of the living God,” and the text raises the internal problems involved in that claim through the passage in Eruvin and the Ritva.

The development of the concept of dispute and the Oral Torah

The text paints a Talmudic picture of a transition from a divine Torah to a Torah also attributed to human beings, as part of the development of the Oral Torah. Shimon HaTzaddik is seen as the first among the fathers to whom “sayings” are attributed, and in the structure of Pirkei Avot an early conception emerges of transmitting Torah as faithful transfer without intervention or creation. At the beginning of the Second Temple period, an approach develops in which human beings add and interpret as part of the Torah itself, and later the first dispute appears, that of the “two Yoses” (Chagigah 16), as a natural result of the Torah being generated through human reasoning. The text argues that when Torah is conceived as a hollow pipe, there is no “Torah dispute,” but when human creativity is included within Torah itself, dispute becomes internal to Torah.

Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel, and the transition to Yavneh

Disputes take shape in the period of Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel, and Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai appears as someone who studied under Hillel and Shammai and is the last figure in Pirkei Avot described with the term “received.” He asks, “Give me Yavneh and its sages,” and during the time of the destruction a Sanhedrin is formed in Yavneh. The first generation of Yavneh is presented as the students of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, and in this portrayal Rabban Gamliel, Rabbi Eliezer, and Rabbi Yehoshua form one layer of leadership, with emphasis on the social and economic gaps between the “pampered household of the Nasi” and Tannaim who work for their living. The stories of the Oven of Akhnai, the humiliations of Rabbi Yehoshua, the deposition of Rabban Gamliel, and the excommunication of Rabbi Eliezer are all concentrated around the question of how to decide disputes after dispute already exists.

Strong-handed authority versus the democratization of Torah

Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Eliezer are described as advocating a strong hand that suppresses dissenters out of fear that Torah will split into study halls that no longer speak to one another. The text argues that the sages eventually understand that the forceful method does not work, and presents “on that day” and the adding of benches in the study hall as a dramatic turning point marking openness and broader participation. It describes a fundamental shift in which they stop testing whether “one’s inside matches one’s outside” and instead ask for arguments and reasons, with a rhetorically sharp formulation that even if a person is a “pathological liar,” that does not matter compared to the strength of the reasoning. The revolution is described as the removal of the “authoritarian party” and the rise of the “democratic party,” and the text defines the model of deciding by reasons as the product of a revolution that was far from self-evident but became a binding ethos down to our own day.

Custom, conservatism, and an ethos created by human beings

The text brings a principle that the students of revolutionaries become conservatives and preserve the revolution as though it came from Sinai, and attributes to Uri Weinberg of Yeruham the statement that custom is “the peak of conservatism.” It formulates a paradox in which a custom begins as a change that later becomes fixed and untouchable, and therefore “custom is the freezing of the revolution.” In parallel to the process at Yavneh, it argues that the ethos that Torah is decided by human beings became so absolute that anyone who disputes it is seen as denying a fundamental principle, even though the text insists that this very conception was “accepted in Yavneh,” not at Sinai. Interpretations such as “It is not in heaven” are seen as a new reading of verses that had not previously been understood that way, and the text presents this as recognition that even the frameworks of decision-making and the ethoses themselves are formed within history.

The figure of Rabbi Eliezer under excommunication and the critique of dialectics without tradition

Rabbi Eliezer is described as sitting under excommunication in Lod until the end of his life, a “plastered cistern that does not lose a drop,” a towering expert who has all the Torah up to his day within him, and yet nobody comes to ask him anything. The text emphasizes the tragic dimension of this: all the information is with Rabbi Eliezer, while in Yavneh they are “engaging in dialectics and innovating” and arguing, and it brings his criticism from Chagigah about “Ammon and Moab tithe in the Sabbatical year,” where he says this is “a law given to Moses at Sinai” and asks why they did not come to him. Alongside the criticism, it is said that the sages independently arrived at the truth of the law given to Moses at Sinai, and the message is that Torah scholars who operate “correctly” can reach the right results even when Torah functions through human reasoning. The text presents this as a limited comfort, מתוך recognition that human beings do err, but as a position that seeks not to panic over the very humanity of Torah.

The death of Rabbi Eliezer, the laws of sorcery, and excommunication

The text moves to two passages in tractate Sanhedrin dealing with the death of Rabbi Eliezer, and brings the Mishnah, “Two people gather cucumbers,” in the context of sorcery and the distinction between “deceiving the eyes” and “performing an act.” It presents an interpretive discussion according to which, for Maimonides, there are no supernatural powers and therefore everything is just deception of the eyes, and the question then arises how to explain the phrase “performed an act” in the Mishnah. The story describes the visit of Rabbi Akiva and his colleagues during Rabbi Eliezer’s final illness, their keeping a distance of “four cubits” because of the excommunication, and his painful question, “And only now—why haven’t you come until now?” along with their answer, “We did not have time.” Rabbi Eliezer curses them that they should not die “their own deaths,” and Rabbi Akiva asks, “What about mine?” and is answered, “Yours will be harsher than theirs,” reflecting a greater demand placed upon his student.

“I learned much Torah” and the description of knowledge that was never learned

Rabbi Eliezer laments, “Woe to my two arms, which are like two Torah scrolls being rolled up,” and says that he learned much Torah and took away from his teachers no more than “a dog licking from the sea,” and that he taught much Torah and his students took away from him only “like a brush from a tube.” He says that he taught “three hundred laws concerning a bright spot of leprosy” and they never asked him about them, and that he taught “three hundred,” and even “three thousand,” laws “about the planting of cucumbers,” and no one ever asked him about them except Akiva ben Yosef. The story describes how he taught Rabbi Akiva sorcery in actual practice, with a single word that filled the whole field with cucumbers and another word that gathered them up, and the Gemara resolves the prohibition of sorcery by saying, “It is different when done for learning,” on the basis of the verse, “You shall not learn to do… but you may learn in order to understand and to instruct.” The text emphasizes the dramatic power of the fact that questions of ritual impurity and purity are asked close to the moment of death, and that Rabbi Eliezer says, “Pure,” and on that word “his soul departed in purity,” and Rabbi Yehoshua declares, “The vow is annulled, the vow is annulled.”

Attributing the Jewish law to Rabbi Yehoshua: tradition versus reasoning

The Gemara asks how Rabbi Akiva can state the law of cucumbers “in the name of Rabbi Yehoshua” if he learned it from Rabbi Eliezer, and answers that Rabbi Akiva “learned it” from Rabbi Eliezer but “did not understand its reasoning,” and then went back and learned it from Rabbi Yehoshua, who explained it to him. The text reads this as explaining the whole focus of the story: Rabbi Eliezer represents Torah as authority and tradition that does not depend on the student’s understanding, while Rabbi Yehoshua represents Torah as something determined through reasons that a person reaches with his own mind. The attribution of the law in the Mishnah to Rabbi Yehoshua rather than Rabbi Eliezer is seen as a sign that Rabbi Akiva adopts the model of reasoning and give-and-take more than the model of authority, even though he received the substance of the law from Rabbi Eliezer. The text suggests that Rabbi Akiva marks a middle path in which tradition has weight but explanation is also necessary, and compares this to the tension between empiricism and rationalism.

Dialectics: thesis–antithesis–synthesis, and Rabbi Akiva as the father of the Oral Torah

The text proposes a dialectical structure in which Rabbi Eliezer is the traditionalist “thesis,” Rabbi Yehoshua is the radical “antithesis” of reasoning, and Rabbi Akiva is the “synthesis” combining tradition and understanding. It describes how revolutionaries tend toward the opposite extreme, but the truth is “in the middle,” and therefore Rabbi Akiva goes to ask Rabbi Eliezer in order to know the tradition despite the excommunication, and then returns to Rabbi Yehoshua in order to receive an explanation. It connects this to Rabbi Akiva’s status as the foundation of the Oral Torah, as the Gemara in Sanhedrin 86 says, “and all of them are in accordance with Rabbi Akiva,” and suggests that the reason is the balance he creates between tradition and reasoning.

Another story from the day of his death: “Afflictions are beloved” and the reversal of roles

In another passage from Sanhedrin, it is described that when Rabbi Eliezer fell ill he said, “There is fierce wrath in the world,” his students wept, and Rabbi Akiva laughed. He explains that he was happy because until now his teacher had not suffered, and he feared that he had already received his reward in this world, whereas now that he suffers, the World to Come is assured to him. Rabbi Eliezer asks, “Did I leave anything lacking in the whole Torah?” and Rabbi Akiva answers with the verse, “For there is no righteous man on earth who does good and does not sin,” leaving the “elephant in the room” of the excommunication and the unspoken sin. The four elders praise Rabbi Eliezer, but Rabbi Akiva says, “Afflictions are beloved,” and Rabbi Eliezer asks, “Support me and let me hear the words of my student Akiva,” and then asks him, “From where do you know this?” requesting reasons. The text emphasizes the reversal in which the traditionalist now asks for inquiry and reasoning from his student, and sees this as a revolution that occurs דווקא on the day of his death and explains “the vow is annulled” as annulment because he accepted change upon himself and understood that he had taken things too far.

Rabbi Kook on Rabbi Eliezer: deep hearing and innovation emerging from tradition

The text brings a letter of consolation by Rabbi Kook about the contradiction between the statement that Rabbi Eliezer “never said anything he had not heard from the mouth of his teacher” and the description in Avot de-Rabbi Natan that he said “things no ear had ever heard before.” Rabbi Kook explains that the mouth of his teacher, Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, spoke, but Rabbi Eliezer’s ear heard depths that others did not hear, and therefore he still did not say anything he had not heard from the mouth of his teacher. The text emphasizes that Rabbi Kook adds that his Torah was “entirely Torah renewed through the might of his holy intellect,” and interprets this to mean that the student can uncover within his teacher’s words contents that even the teacher himself was not explicitly aware of. From this, a general educational experience is established in which there is no transmission free of the student’s own coloring, and the text argues that this is not only a late ethos but an eternal reality.

The “hollow pipe” as an illusion, and ethos versus facts

The text argues that Rabbi Akiva’s synthesis is “a synthesis of ethoses,” because in practice there is no such thing as a hollow pipe, and even in the early period of transmission every act of passing on is an act of change and construction—not a “broken telephone” but a “constructive telephone.” It describes how people hold on to an ethos even when they know it does not match the facts, and brings examples such as the claim that rabbis “studied in Yiddish” or Hasidic conceptions about clothing, in order to show that an ethos can be “serious” even if it is not historically accurate. The text weaves in stories about “Hazon Ish people” who do what is written versus those who do what the Hazon Ish actually did, and about an admor who justifies changing customs by noting that his father changed his own father’s customs.

The stages in the formation of dispute: necessity, revolution, ideal

In summing up the introductory move, the text formulates stages: at first the Torah comes down from Sinai with an ethos of transmission without creation; afterward the Torah becomes human with the end of prophecy and with principles such as “It is not in heaven” and “a prophet is no longer permitted to introduce anything new”; then dispute arises inevitably; after that there is a forceful attempt to suppress dispute, which fails; and finally there is a revolution that accepts dispute as a necessity. In the last stage, dispute becomes an ideal, and the text cites Chagigah, “Incline your ear to hear the words of those who declare impure and the words of those who declare pure,” as an idealization and not merely a de facto compromise.

“These and those are the words of the living God” and the limits

The text presents “These and those are the words of the living God” as a foundational statement that cements the idealization of dispute, and describes how medieval authorities (Rishonim) and later authorities (Acharonim) expanded its scope beyond its original source in Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel. It notes that there is a limit to the domain in which one says “words of the living God,” and that outside the halakhic framework there are positions not included in this, but postpones clarifying that boundary for later. The text quotes Eruvin: “For three years they disputed… a heavenly voice went forth… these and those… but the Jewish law follows Beit Hillel,” and asks how “these and those” can coexist with a practical ruling like Beit Hillel, and why it was specifically Beit Hillel who merited to have the Jewish law established in accordance with them because they were “gentle and humble” and presented the words of Beit Shammai before their own.

A heavenly voice, “It is not in heaven,” and the majority of wisdom versus the numerical majority

The text cites Tosafot in Eruvin 6, who explain that the dispute between Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel was insoluble because it was a “meta-dispute” over which majority to follow: Beit Shammai argued for the majority of wisdom and Beit Hillel for the numerical majority, and therefore it was impossible to decide by voting about the very rules of decision-making. From this it is argued that the heavenly voice was required where the halakhic rules get stuck, whereas “It is not in heaven” obligates us to follow the rules when they are functioning. A parallel question then arises regarding the Oven of Akhnai, where a heavenly voice emerged and the sages did not accept it, and the text suggests that this points to a double revolution: rejecting the heavenly voice not only in the particular halakhic issue but also in the preference for traditional authority over human give-and-take.

The Ritva on Eruvin: forty-nine facets for prohibition and forty-nine facets for permission, and the secret of the matter

The text concludes with the famous Ritva, who asks how it can be that “these and those are the words of the living God” when one side prohibits and the other permits, and brings an answer in the name of “the rabbis of France” that when Moses ascended on high he was shown, regarding every matter, “forty-nine facets for prohibition and forty-nine facets for permission,” and the matter was handed over to the decision of the sages of Israel in each generation. The Ritva says, “And this is correct on the homiletic level, but in the way of truth there is a secret reason in the matter,” and the text presents this as a puzzle that troubles the Ritva and hints at the difficulty of how a ruling can be binding if the truth may be otherwise, or how there can be truth when both sides are correct. The text stops here and signals that the continuation of the inquiry will be developed in the next chapter.

I want to finish what we left open last time, really the end of this introduction to the pages. Ezra—okay, just to get back into the topic. I spoke a bit about the development of the institution of dispute, or the concept of dispute, in its historical development. And I sketched some kind of picture from the Talmudic sources, meaning from the Sages, a picture of the transition of the Torah from a divine Torah to a Torah of human beings. Really this is a kind of development of the Oral Torah. Shimon HaTzaddik would say three things at the beginning of Pirkei Avot, there at the start; that implies as though he was the first one who would say things, meaning that the Torah related to him as a person. And I tried to show also within the structure of Pirkei Avot, the way the mishnayot are formulated there at the beginning, that there was some conception there of transmitting Torah as a hollow pipe, as something we are not supposed to touch but simply to pass on as faithfully as possible. And at the beginning of the Second Temple period, another approach develops, where people basically add to the Torah, or there are parts of the Torah that are attributed to human beings. Later, in the middle of the Second Temple period, a bit after Shimon HaTzaddik, the two Yoseis—that is the first dispute, Mishnah in Chagigah 16. And that is a result of the fact that Torah is created by human beings, from human reasoning, and so dispute naturally also comes into being. If you transmit it like a hollow pipe, what you transmit is what there is. Everything beyond that is speculation; no one even claims that it is Torah. So there can be arguments among people, but that is not a Torah argument, because what people say is not what we received. What we received is Torah; everything beyond that is something else. And once what human beings create or interpret also becomes part of Torah, then disputes begin to arise within Torah. And then, in effect, disputes begin, and this crystallizes in the period of Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel, which is the last pair, or the students of the last pair. Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai already studied under Hillel and Shammai; he received from them. He is the last one who appears in Pirkei Avot as one who received. After Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai there is no more “received.” The others after him no longer have “received”—received Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua and so on. And he asks, “Give me Yavneh and its sages,” which is really in the period of the destruction. And then the Sanhedrin is formed in Yavneh. The first generation of Yavneh is really the first generation of tannaim; these are the students of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai: Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua, say—that is more or less the first generation. They are about the same age; Rabbi Eliezer and Rabban Gamliel are brothers-in-law. They are basically in the leadership position, and Rabbi Yehoshua is the poor schnook, yes, the one they push around, the poor guy of the neighborhood, right? So… but he is also the same age; he also belongs to that leading layer, even though he is a blacksmith. We saw there in the Talmud that he is a blacksmith, and Rabban Gamliel did not even know it—that there are tannaim here who work hard for a living, and their Torah is Torah studied with great difficulty, not in the luxuries of the house of the Nasi, as it was for Rabban Gamliel or the dynasty of Rabban Gamliel. And the whole Oven of Akhnai, and the harassment of Rabbi Yehoshua, and the removal of Rabban Gamliel, and the excommunication of Rabbi Eliezer—we saw that all those stories somehow revolve around the same point, without going into all the details again. The point is: how do you decide disputes? Once dispute appears, we begin to wrestle with the question of what to do with it. At first, Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Eliezer advocate a strong hand, meaning: suppress anyone who doesn’t think like us, because dispute is terribly dangerous, and if we don’t impose our opinion there will be problems—that is, Torah will fall apart, it will split into several study halls that no longer speak to one another. And at a certain stage the Sages understand that this business doesn’t work. That when all the people added benches in the study hall and everyone comes to the study hall—beyond the nice hymn to openness and so on, there is really a dramatic description here of the significance of the revolution that happened there. Torah became more democratic. They no longer check whether a person’s mouth and heart are aligned, as Rabban Gamliel checked whether his inside matched his outside; rather, say what you think, and we will examine your arguments. We don’t care whether you are a faithful transmitter; as far as we are concerned, be a pathological liar. Give us the reasoning, and we will examine the reasoning—whether you are right or not. Why should I care now about your character and your nature and your traits? Regarding the creator—when a person creates Torah, is that like Einstein created the theory of relativity, or like, I don’t know, whoever created the rules of soccer? I’ll get to that later. I tend to think yes—it’s like Einstein and the theory of relativity. What, there is a true Torah and he discovers it; he doesn’t create it. It’s not like the rules of soccer, where we create the rules of soccer out of nothing. But I’ll get to that, I hope, later today. And then the question arises: okay, how do we deal with disputes? The strong-hand approach doesn’t work. Revolution. They remove the party of the strong hand and the authoritarian party, and elevate the democratic party. Not the traditionalist strong hand. Yes, yes, but with a strong hand—meaning, whoever disagrees with us, sabotage him; “come with your staff and your money on your shoulder”—in other words, they used force. Rabbi Eliezer blinds his student who came to visit him there in Lod. These people were not easy. When they went to tell him that he was excommunicated—Rabbi Eliezer—you know, they were afraid there; Rabban Gamliel too, same thing. The two stories say, in two different places, that they feared for their lives, that Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Eliezer were going to destroy the world. Now again, I don’t know whether the description means they really believed he had powers like that, to return the world to chaos, but clearly his anger, his rage, meant fear of harsh actions and maybe even violent actions. And the one who told him that was from the democratic party—Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah? No, Rabbi Eliezer. The version there says Rabbi Elazar, but I said—you have to read Rabbi Eliezer. Rabbi Eliezer was in Lod and he was under excommunication, and the whole story makes it clear that it’s Rabbi Eliezer. Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah was the opposite; Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah is the one who sat in Yavneh and they told what he expounded—when he was eighteen years old. Whose Sabbath it was. “Whose Sabbath it was” means the question whether it was Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah’s week or Rabban Gamliel’s, because Rabban Gamliel repented, accepted the new rules of the game, and they restored him in rotation to the presidency of the Sanhedrin together with Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah. But Rabbi Eliezer did not yield and remained excommunicated until the end of his life in Lod. By the way, that was the end of these traditionalists, the party… yes, yes, that generation. Again, it’s never black and white, but in the ethos of the development of dispute, I think yes—there they cut the matter off. “On that day” the entire tractate Eduyot was taught, meaning: they brought all the questions they had not managed to close in the traditionalist period, because by way of tradition you are stuck; you have no way to decide. Didn’t others arise after them who advocated this? Not in the same sense. In a moment I’ll show that there were also middle positions. And the conception took over—the one we ourselves grew up on. It seems somehow self-evident to us, but you have to understand that it is the result of a very non-simple revolution. I once mentioned that very often the students of revolutionaries are the greatest conservatives. The students of Rabbi Kook, the students of Rabbi Chaim of Brisk, the students of all kinds of people—the Chazon Ish—people who carried out an amazing revolution; their students are not willing to deviate one millimeter from what their rabbi did because they are sure it was from Sinai. They preserve the revolution. Yes, exactly. And Uri Weinberg from Yeruham once said that custom is the peak of conservatism—one must not change customs, right? But what is custom, how is custom created? Custom is the fixation of a revolution. What is custom? Something is created that in principle didn’t have to be done according to Jewish law, people didn’t do it, and suddenly they started. Meaning it begins as something that changes what existed, and after they changed it, now you mustn’t touch it because customs have to be preserved. Why didn’t the previous custom have to be preserved, when this custom was created and they went against the previous state of affairs? There is a paradox in this conservative attitude toward customs. So here too, the ethos that was created there after the revolution ultimately survived to our own day. Today, from our point of view, someone who says otherwise is a heretic, meaning he didn’t receive Torah from Sinai at all. This Torah was not received from Sinai; this Torah was received in Yavneh, meaning long after Sinai. That is, there was some revolution here. People took it on their own shoulders. Meaning this too was in fact created by human beings. This approach—that Torah is a Torah of human beings—was itself created by human beings. Because in the end they derive “It is not in heaven” and so on. There they derive verses that clearly, until their day, were not understood that way. Okay. And basically a new conception was created here. And then there is this sort of Rabbi Eliezer sitting alone in Lod. All in all, quite a touching story—sitting alone in Lod. The greatest Torah scholar, holding the entire Torah, a “plastered cistern that loses not a drop,” all of whose colleagues were his students, who would teach three hundred laws about the planting of cucumbers, as the Mishnah says in Sanhedrin. Meaning he had immense mastery; everything said up to his day he held. And nobody comes to ask him anything—anything. Meaning he holds the whole Torah, and in Yavneh they are engaging in pilpul and innovating teachings and arguing and all that, while all the information is with him. We saw the Talmud in Chagigah, where he got so angry that they were discussing there whether Ammon and Moab tithe in the Sabbatical year. He said to them, “This is a law given to Moses at Sinai—why didn’t you come ask me?” You are making pilpul and reasons and logic and “the majority decides” and all that. In the end they hit on the truth. It’s beautiful. The story there is beautiful because they show us Rabbi Eliezer’s criticism, but on the other hand the calculation they made on their own, from their own reasoning, arrived at what the law given to Moses at Sinai really says. Meaning there is a message in the subtext: don’t worry. True, Torah is a Torah of human beings, but if we take human beings—Torah scholars who work properly—they also arrive at the right results. Meaning don’t be alarmed and think surely everything here is error and so on. That too, of course, is comfort that must be taken with limited confidence, because obviously there are also mistakes. Human beings always err. But the point is that you shouldn’t be troubled by this. We do what we understand, and that’s it; we can’t do more than that. Now what remains for us to do is—I want to move to the end of the page, on its second side. There are two passages there from tractate Sanhedrin, and both deal with the death of Rabbi Eliezer. Eliezer sat under excommunication in Lod. We were there in Chagigah, where his student Rabbi Yosei came to him there, but really almost nobody comes to him. He sat excommunicated until the day he died. He sat excommunicated because he didn’t give in, and apparently he was no small stubborn man. He did not yield, and they did not yield to him. Meaning he sat excommunicated in Lod until the end of his days. And here there are two stories, really part of the same dramatic power we also saw in the previous stories. Rabbi Akiva says in the name of Rabbi Yehoshua—this is a mishnah—”Two gather cucumbers: one who gathers is exempt, and one who gathers is liable. One who performs an act is liable; one who merely creates an illusion is exempt.” This is in the laws of sorcery. “Gather cucumbers” means that you do various magical acts with these cucumbers, something like that. So the question is whether you are merely deceiving the eye or actually doing something. Okay? And by the way, the halakhic authorities, for example, say that all kinds of magicians and things like that are in principle only illusion—but in order not to violate the prohibition you also have to tell the audience that it is an illusion. Meaning if you present yourself as someone with real powers, even though you are not actually doing anything but merely deceiving the eyes, then you violate the prohibition. You also have to say that it’s an illusion, and then it’s okay, because you are only showing them. And that’s according to Maimonides? What? That’s according to Maimonides. I’m not sure that this is a dispute. It clearly fits; according to Maimonides it has to be like that. According to the other medieval authorities, or some of them, those not in Maimonides’ camp, it can be like that, but it doesn’t have to be. According to Maimonides, who says there is nothing else—there is no possibility of doing things that are not really according to nature, there are no other kinds of powers—then obviously the whole prohibition can only be in a case of illusion; there is no other prohibition. So what does “performed an act” mean here? The question is how Maimonides interprets this distinction in the mishnah, whether he performed an act or only deceived the eyes. According to the other medieval authorities, or some of them, those not in Maimonides’ camp, there is also the possibility of performing an act by other powers and there is illusion. There are two things. But according to that reasoning, if the reasoning is that there is also an actual act, then why say that if he doesn’t tell them it’s an illusion… Right, some of the halakhic authorities—it could be that also… I don’t remember right now again who says what; this needs checking. But in plain terms, it could also be prohibited, even according to them. Even if he is doing something that is just an illusion, but he doesn’t tell people, that could fall under the prohibition just like doing an actual act. Yes. Like sorcery. Yes. Okay, let’s get back to the mishnah here, right? So the question is how to interpret it, but in any case Maimonides also has to interpret this mishnah. What Maimonides says, he will say. Fine, we need to look, to check it—it’s hypothetical. Rabbi Akiva said, etc. The Gemara says: But didn’t Rabbi Akiva learn it from Rabbi Yehoshua? The mishnah says Rabbi Akiva says this in the name of Rabbi Yehoshua. The Gemara says, but it was not said in the name of Rabbi Yehoshua—after all Rabbi Akiva learned it from Rabbi Eliezer. Rabbi Akiva was a student of both Rabbi Yehoshua and Rabbi Eliezer. And it was taught: when Rabbi Eliezer fell ill, Rabbi Akiva and his colleagues entered to visit him. Fell ill means his final illness, meaning he was about to die. And he was sitting in his canopied bed, and they were sitting in his reception hall, and that day was Friday. And his son Hyrcanus entered—yes, named after his grandfather—to remove his tefillin. He rebuked him, and he left in anger. He said to his colleagues, “It seems to me that my father’s mind has become confused.” Meaning, I think he has already lost his sanity, as though—he’s about to die, he is really at the end. He said to them, “His mind and his mother’s mind are confused. How can they leave aside a capital prohibition and busy themselves with a rabbinic prohibition?” Meaning Rabbi Eliezer says that his son and wife are out of their minds, because they want to remove his tefillin in order to exempt him from the rabbinic prohibition of tefillin on Shabbat, but in doing so they are, it seems to me, going to carry the tefillin from a private domain to a public domain, which is a capital offense. Okay, so they will violate a capital prohibition in order to spare me a rabbinic prohibition. The Sages saw there—doesn’t matter now, it seems to me that is the intent—but the Sages saw there: when the Sages saw that his mind was settled upon him, meaning they saw he didn’t do this out of madness, but rather he was showing halakhic judgment, meaning the man is in full possession of his mind, they entered and sat before him at a distance of four cubits. Again, four cubits, as we already saw, because he was under excommunication; so they sat four cubits away from him. Sorry, with excommunication, does excommunication mean you can speak to him from a distance of four cubits? That is a major question in this whole story, in both stories and also in tractate Chagigah, because once he is excommunicated, one should not visit him at all, one shouldn’t speak to him, he is supposed to be ostracized. So I don’t know. Maybe it depends on the level of excommunication they imposed; maybe there are different levels. It needs checking; I don’t know. But the fact is, the Sages here—and in a moment we’ll see—Rabbi Akiva visited him even during the period, not only on the last day. He was the only one—we’ll see that later in the Gemara. Meaning there were visits. And I too asked myself how that fits with the matter of the excommunication. But here you see that they maintain some distance, yet still they come. It could be that here they came because they wanted to release him, to lift the excommunication, so then it’s not difficult. How did Rabbi Akiva get to him earlier? Earlier Rabbi Akiva came to tell him what? Earlier Rabbi Akiva—no, no, no. Here too he came—and in a moment we’ll see in the Gemara that he says Rabbi Akiva used to come to him. They entered and sat before him at a distance of four cubits. He said to them: Why have you come? What does “why have you come” mean? Until now you weren’t here. I’ve been here in Lod for years, none of you came, and suddenly you’ve come? They said to him: We have come to learn Torah. Yes—a Jew holding the whole Torah, yes. He said to them: And until now, why didn’t you come? Where were you until now? He pushed them into a corner a bit. They said to him: We had no time. They couldn’t find a better answer; they felt awkward. He said to them: I would be surprised if they die natural deaths. He basically cursed them. Meaning that’s exactly what they feared, after all—that when he gets angry he’ll return the world to chaos, he and Rabban Gamliel. Here you see it; he gets angry, he still… And then of course Rabbi Akiva says: what about mine? Why does he ask him? Because Rabbi Akiva himself did come to him. We’ll see that later; I’m just saying it in advance so the background will be clear. Rabbi Akiva did come visit him. So Rabbi Akiva asks him: me too? I also won’t die a natural death? We already know what happened to Rabbi Akiva in the end, right? He said to him: Yours will be harsher than theirs. You will die the most terrible death. Probably because Rabbi Akiva was his direct student, so toward Rabbi Akiva his claim was much stronger. Even though Rabbi Akiva did visit him, from Rabbi Akiva he expected more. So therefore he says: you, Rabbi Akiva—even though you came, unlike the others—not enough. Meaning from you I expect more, and yours will be worse than theirs. “More” meaning what, basically not accepting the majority’s decision about the excommunication? Apparently. Because Rabbi Eliezer did not accept it. Rabbi Eliezer did not accept that they excommunicated him; he thought it was a mistake. So he expected them not to honor it, apparently. That’s how I understand it, yes. He took his two arms and placed them on his heart and said: Woe to you, my two arms, for you are like two Torah scrolls being rolled up. This is Rabbi Eliezer speaking: I learned much Torah and taught much Torah. I learned much Torah and took away from my teachers no more than a dog lapping from the sea. I taught much Torah and my students took from me no more than a brush from a tube—yes, when you dip a brush into paint, that’s what you take from the paint, almost nothing—that is what my students took from me. Meaning Rabbi Eliezer says: I hold the whole Torah; you didn’t learn from me even the tiniest bit of what I know. You sit there in Yavneh and make pilpul, reconstructing laws, instead of coming to ask me. Everything is with me; I know. I think I mentioned this: what is the meaning of “I took from my teachers no more than a dog lapping from the sea, and you took from me no more than…” There Rashi senses it—you can see from his wording that he feels the difficulty. When I learn from someone, I don’t diminish it from him. Why is it called taking away? If I learned from him, does he forget it? It’s like the rebbe who buys the melody from the shepherd, and then the shepherd forgets it and the rebbe converts the melody. Meaning it’s not really like that. One candle can light a hundred; when you learn Torah it remains with the teacher and now you know it too. Why is it called taking away? And I argued once in an article in Techumin on aggadic passages—but I think here too the Gemara is speaking innocently, in passing—that the meaning of information is only when it is unique information. Meaning when information is only in your possession and not in others’, then the information is worth something. If everybody knows it, it has no economic value. I was discussing intellectual property rights there. Meaning the question is: if you take information that somebody has, what’s the problem? The information is still with him. Why is it called taking his information? The point, I argued, is that you are taking from him the uniqueness of the information. Meaning once it is no longer unique, that information is worth nothing. Now if everyone knows it, then an expert whose skill everyone knows how to do—nobody will pay him for what he knows. Okay? That’s just a side remark in parentheses. In any case, that is what he said. And furthermore, I can teach three hundred laws concerning a snow-white plague, and no one ever asked me about them. I have so many laws. You surely debated them in Yavneh, tried to reconstruct what the law is—I hold all these laws. You just had to come, and I would have told you yes or no. Then he continues: and furthermore, I can teach three hundred laws—and some say three thousand laws—about planting cucumbers. This is the part from our mishnah, remember, what Rabbi Akiva said in the name of Rabbi Yehoshua. And no one ever asked me about them except Akiva ben Yosef. Rabbi Akiva did come and ask me about the laws of cucumbers and sorcery. Once he and I were walking on the road, and he said to me: Rabbi, teach me the planting of cucumbers. Yes? It sounds just like agriculture, something you could hang in the kibbutz dining hall. “Planting cucumbers” means, of course, the sorcery of cucumbers. I said one word, and the whole field filled with cucumbers. Meaning I taught him sorcery, how to do sorcery. I was a master of sorcery. Meaning he also learned the practical side of sorcery, not only the laws of sorcery, because to diagnose sorcery you have to learn the craft of how it is done. Who is a sorcerer and who is not? Who performs an act and who merely creates an illusion? This is the distinction the mishnah makes: one who performs an act is liable, and one who merely deceives the eyes is exempt. So you have to see—how do you know how to distinguish? Who knows to distinguish when the magician is fooling us and when he really has power? Another magician. Right? Another magician can know whether this magician really knows how to do it or is only fooling us. An ordinary person can be fooled. So Rabbi Eliezer, as part of his expertise in the laws of sorcery, simply learned sorcery. So he said one word and the whole field filled with sorcery—cucumbers, sorry. Wait, but how is that—if he said one word and the whole field filled with cucumbers, then he also performed an act? Right, but didn’t the mishnah say apparently that it is only for the sake of learning? No, to perform an act in order to learn is probably not prohibited. Ah, so I understood the statement to mean that you are allowed to learn them only in order to teach, not in order to do. No, and also in order to teach; the statement is that you are also allowed to do these acts of sorcery if it is in order to teach. To teach as well, yes. No, what I said earlier wasn’t for teaching; it was only that you have to state that you are creating an illusion. No, that’s something else. No, from here that is at least what it looks like. Again, I don’t have other sources, but from here it seems that when you do it in order to deal with the relevant laws, then it is permitted. It’s a bit like what they say about Maimonides, right? The Tashbetz writes this in Magen Avot on Pirkei Avot. He explains there regarding “Do not stray after your hearts and after your eyes,” that one may not read the books of heretics and things like that. So they ask there: how did Maimonides read them? He himself brings this prohibition of “do not stray,” and he himself says that he read those books. So they say that one who studies them in order to know how to deal with them is not under the prohibition. Meaning the prohibition is when you study in order to identify with it, internalize it, adopt it. So here too, apparently, the idea is that if you do it as part of learning or teaching—when he teaches Rabbi Akiva—then apparently there is no prohibition. Fine. He didn’t perform an act, he said a word. Yes, but the whole field filled up. To “perform an act,” I think, does not necessarily mean a physical deed; it means that when you speak and you really produce sorcery, then you are not merely creating an illusion. The distinction from performing an act is not speech; the distinction from illusion is… That is illusion. What is written, one gathers and one gathers? Meaning, it sounds like it’s not one, I don’t know, says some incantation, and the other… No, but the continuation is: one who performs an act is liable, and one who creates an illusion is exempt. In other words, gathering that has an actual effect? Not that it has an act, but real gathering is liable and illusion is exempt. How do you do real gathering? It could also be by speech. Meaning the contrast here is between whether you actually did it or not, not necessarily in the technical legal sense of a prohibition involving an act. I don’t think so. By the way, speech too, at least in some places, counts as an act—blocking by voice, Talmud in Bava Metzia 90, where you restrain by voice and it is called an act. Yes, but they wouldn’t bring it as an example of an act where there’s no act, only speech, and you still violate it. Here, with sorcery… I didn’t understand. The Gemara brings conspiring witnesses, and I don’t remember from where else, but it doesn’t bring the example of a sorcerer. Sorcerer means one who does… in short, I don’t know exactly, but in plain terms it seems to me the distinction here is not specifically “act” in the technical sense of a prohibition requiring an act, because the contrast is one who performs an act is liable and one who creates an illusion is exempt—not one who does the thing without an act. It also sounds that way in Nazir 11, where the Gemara says there—wait, how does it go there? The Gemara says that anyone who says “on condition that” is like saying “from now,” because such a condition uproots the act. If the condition is not fulfilled, the act is uprooted. But Rabbi Akiva Eiger discusses there, in the Shitah Mekubetzet on Nazir, how speech can uproot an act. So they say there that naziriteship is not an act, because with naziriteship you only speak; therefore a condition can uproot the speech, because it is not uprooting an act. And to that the Ba’al He’acharon says: not true. If the speech effected the legal status of naziriteship, then that is called speech that uproots an act because it has a result. Meaning it doesn’t matter that the result was created by speech, but if some result was created—and here it is even a legal result, naziriteship, not a real physical result—that is called an act. And in our context an actual physical result was produced, not only a legal one, so certainly it is considered an act. But there is some dispute there between Rabbi Akiva Eiger and the Shitah Mekubetzet, I think; the Ba’al He’acharon in Nazir discusses it there. In any case, the whole field filled with sorcery. He said to me: Rabbi, you taught me their planting; teach me their uprooting. I said one word, and they all gathered in one place. In short, he played with this sorcery in every direction. They said to him: the ball, and the mold, and the amulet, and the little image, and the pearls, and the small weight—what is their status? Now they asked him halakhic questions regarding ritual impurity and purity; they asked Rabbi Eliezer. We have now returned to the story. Up to here it was only a description of how Rabbi Akiva used to learn sorcery from him, but now we return to the story of all the tannaim who came to visit him. They ask him, what is the ruling? He said to them: they are impure, and their purification is as they are. What about a shoe on the mold? He said to them: it is pure. And his soul departed in purity. When he said the word “pure,” he died; so his soul departed in purity because he said the word “pure.” Rabbi Yehoshua stood on his feet and said: The vow is released, the vow is released. On Saturday night Rabbi Akiva met him on the road from Caesarea to Lod. He was striking his flesh until his blood dripped to the earth. He opened a line of consolation over him and said: My father, my father, chariot of Israel and its horsemen. I have much money, but no money-changer to count it out. That is all of the story. Now the Gemara returns to the framing question. So it follows that he learned it from Rabbi Eliezer? We go back to the mishnah above. Rabbi Akiva says in the name of Rabbi Yehoshua: two gather cucumbers, one is exempt and one is liable. But there in the story we see that he learned the laws of sorcery from Rabbi Eliezer, not from Rabbi Yehoshua, right? So what does the Gemara do with his saying it in the name of Rabbi Yehoshua? The Gemara answers: He learned the tradition from Rabbi Eliezer but not the reasoning; then he learned it again from Rabbi Yehoshua, and Rabbi Yehoshua explained it to him. Ah—here the Gemara asks the question. I didn’t even remember that it came later. And how could he do that, if we learned in the mishnah that one who performs an act is liable? The Gemara says: for learning it is different. Exactly what you asked, Arik, and what I answered. As the Master said: “You shall not learn to do”—to do you may not learn, but you may learn in order to understand and to teach. To understand and to teach. But that is not important for our purposes. What is important for our purposes is this interesting ending with Rabbi Akiva. Rabbi Akiva actually learned it from Rabbi Eliezer and did not receive—he didn’t understand it—and he went to Rabbi Yehoshua, and Rabbi Yehoshua explained it to him. And what is nice is that in the mishnah he cites it in the name of Rabbi Yehoshua, not in the name of Rabbi Eliezer. Even though he learned the law from Rabbi Eliezer, only the explanation he received from Rabbi Yehoshua. Now that, it seems to me, sums everything up. And it is beautiful that this happens precisely on the day Rabbi Eliezer dies. Because on the day of Rabbi Eliezer’s death they are really explaining to us what the whole story was about. The whole story was whether Torah is given to you as a drop-down from above—that is how Rabbi Eliezer understood it. I learned from my teachers; I will tell you what the truth is, and don’t confuse matters by asking whether I understand it like you do. That is irrelevant. You need to accept what I say. And that is what he also said to Rabbi Akiva when he taught him the gathering of cucumbers. He told him: this is the law—one who deceives the eyes is exempt, one who performs an act is liable. Period. That is what I told you. Rabbi Akiva did not understand why. What difference does it make? And then Rabbi Yehoshua explains to him the reason. The explanation doesn’t appear here—it doesn’t matter—but Rabbi Yehoshua is the one who explained the reason. Because Rabbi Yehoshua belongs to the opposite camp. Rabbi Yehoshua was the one who says that Torah is what we arrive at through our own understanding. True, Rabbi Eliezer demanded from Rabbi Akiva that he accept this law because I said so; I don’t want to explain it to you. I don’t need to explain anything. Maybe I don’t even know how to explain it to you; it doesn’t matter. The explanation is irrelevant. Okay? You need to accept the law because I said so, because I am an authority. Again, the authoritarian, traditionalist approach. And he comes to Rabbi Yehoshua, who was also his teacher, and Rabbi Yehoshua of course belongs to the other camp. So Rabbi Yehoshua also explained to him why it is correct. In the end Rabbi Akiva states this law in the mishnah in the name of Rabbi Yehoshua and not in the name of Rabbi Eliezer. That is very interesting, although he learned it from Rabbi Eliezer. Meaning Rabbi Akiva basically adopted Rabbi Yehoshua’s conception and not Rabbi Eliezer’s, apparently. Even though he learned the law from Rabbi Eliezer, he states it in the name of Rabbi Yehoshua. And yet still, it seems to me that perhaps—I don’t know—either this interpretation is correct or it isn’t. I don’t think it is forced by the Gemara, but it seems to me a possible or plausible interpretation: Rabbi Akiva really does mark out some kind of middle path. Because the radical approach of Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah and Rabbi Yehoshua—that everything, everything is from reasoning—and Rabbi Eliezer knows everything. You can simply ask him. Why are you doing pilpul and trying to reconstruct laws? Ask him! The information exists. We don’t care, we don’t care—we’ll derive everything from our own minds. That is an extreme position. It is an extreme position characteristic of rebels. When you go against a dominant approach, you adopt the opposite dominant approach all the way, in an extreme form. But the truth is somewhere in the middle. There is an element of tradition in Torah; we don’t invent everything. And they too did not think they were inventing everything; obviously we are speaking here only of ethos, yes? Probably no one took these things fully to the end. But the ethos is this: Rabbi Eliezer is the thesis, Rabbi Yehoshua is the antithesis, and Rabbi Akiva is the synthesis. He is truly the student of both of them. He learned from both. So from Rabbi Eliezer he learns the law—there is tradition. But Rabbi Akiva learns the traditional law from Rabbi Eliezer, and he goes—and the fact is that, unlike all the others, he goes to ask Rabbi Eliezer. He does go ask him even though he is excommunicated. Why? There is Torah; I want to know the truth. Now there is a tradition about this, and Rabbi Eliezer knows. Why not go ask him? Why on earth invent the wheel from our own minds, from our own reasoning, instead of asking the one who knows everything, who is the teacher of all of us? Why not go ask him? So he goes to ask him. But he is not satisfied with that. Afterward he returns to Rabbi Yehoshua and wants to learn from him too. What does he learn from him? The explanation. He now also understands what he learned from Rabbi Eliezer. And therefore Rabbi Akiva, it seems to me, reflects this all along the way—not only in the ending, where they say that he learned from Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua explained it to him, but in all his conduct. All the others did not come to Rabbi Eliezer at all. They didn’t come, they didn’t come to ask. Rabbi Akiva did go ask, because he wants to know what the tradition says before he goes and understands things. He doesn’t trust his own mind to the point of saying that whatever his mind says is fine, there is no need for tradition, I can invent everything myself. It doesn’t work that way. You need tradition and explanation. Exactly this combination of Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua. Take the tradition and use your head to think why it is correct, explain it. Then of course you can also draw conclusions from it, you can clarify it. Maybe there is a tradition that got a little garbled, and then you can critique the tradition you receive. You combine reasoning and intellect with the tradition you receive, and that really is Rabbi Akiva. It’s a bit reminiscent of the dispute in science between empiricism and rationalism. Right. And there is also a Gemara that says the law follows Rabbi Yosei because his reasoning is with him. And that is connected to what is being said here, that the law needs to come together with an explanation—that that somehow strengthens the… I’m not sure, because first of all chronologically Rabbi Yosei is a later generation. But I think that statement about Rabbi Yosei is already said within this world of Rabbi Akiva. Within this world of Rabbi Akiva, meaning: the one with the more convincing reasoning is the one whose law is followed. But the assumption of all sides is that we are judged according to reasons. There is not necessarily a dispute here between the explainers and the simply informed, between the hollow pipe and those who use reasoning. On the contrary: in a world where one contends through reasoning, Rabbi Yosei had good reasoning, he was sharp, therefore the law follows him. If anything, there is Rav Acha bar Yaakov, whose mishnah is measured and clean—or Rabbi Eliezer ben Yaakov, whose mishnah is measured and clean. “Measured and clean” does speak a bit of traditionalism; he preserves, he had a good memory, collected all the traditions, checked them carefully, and holds verified things. And in that sense it may indeed be some remnant of traditionalism in a later period. But regarding Rabbi Meir they said the law does not follow him because they could not get to the depth of his mind. So that too is a bit of proof that even if you are right, the law still will not follow you, because even Rabbi Meir and those who did not rule like him are still all within the conception of reasons. Right? But that is the next stage; I’ll get to that in a moment. The next stage is not only that we follow reasons, but that reasons have such a status that even where we have indications that our reasoning is not correct, as long as that is what we think, we rule that way. That is already one step further. Meaning, in a case where I think—I have indications that my reasoning is not right—but truly this is what I think; ask me in terms of my understanding, and this seems to me the truth, and I have some indication that I am nevertheless mistaken. For example, exactly that Gemara about Rabbi Meir. What the Gemara says is that his colleagues did not rule like him because they could not get to the depth of his mind. But if he was so wise that you could not get to the depth of his mind, then it is obvious that he is right, and if you do not understand him then you are presumably mistaken and did not understand him, so you should rule like him. Why is that a reason not to rule like him, if you cannot get to the depth of his mind? The answer is: because it is quite possible that he is right, even more likely that he is right, but if this is what I think, then this is what I need to do. And that is already a more extreme conception of the status of reasoning. Because one could have said: the status of reasoning is that everything must pass through the crucible of the intellect. Fine; if I have an indication that I am mistaken, then I don’t just go with my own intellect. But here there is a statement: no, no—the intellect also constitutes the validity of the law. Meaning if this is what emerges from intellect, even if I have an indication otherwise—and that is really the meaning of “It is not in heaven.” A heavenly voice comes out and says that the law follows Rabbi Eliezer, and that is really what it is saying. It is saying that the truth is with Rabbi Eliezer, and nevertheless the Sages say: we pay no attention to a heavenly voice. And that is already written there. So it seems to me that if I can derive some structure from the Gemara we have just read, it really is this kind of dialectical structure that says that Rabbi Eliezer and Rabban Gamliel—and Rabban Gamliel the early one, yes?—go with traditionalism, with authority. Rabban Gamliel the later joins Rabbi Yehoshua and his camp, who go with Torah as give-and-take rather than Torah as tradition, a more democratic Torah of voting. And Rabbi Akiva makes some sort of synthesis. He takes the tradition and takes the explanations, the reasoning, from Rabbi Yehoshua; the tradition from Rabbi Eliezer; and creates from them something more balanced. More grounded and more balanced. With all due respect to our reasoning, reasoning can be mistaken, and tradition too has weight. So we now have to see how we balance weight plus tradition plus understanding. And in the end Rabbi Akiva is the one somehow considered the father of the Oral Torah. The Gemara says—I brought it here—yes, the Gemara in Sanhedrin 86: an anonymous mishnah is Rabbi Meir, an anonymous Tosefta is Rabbi Nehemiah, an anonymous Sifra is Rabbi Yehudah, an anonymous Sifrei is Rabbi Shimon, and all of them follow Rabbi Akiva. And the Gemara says that Rabbi Akiva is really the father of the Oral Torah as it is in our hands today. Meaning everything we know today ultimately comes from Rabbi Akiva. And I think the reason for that may be—again, this is a conjecture—but I think the reason for it is that Rabbi Akiva really expresses this synthesis between Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua. He studied with both of them. This synthesis says: listen, you are radicals, you are revolutionaries. Revolutionaries always have to be radical—but revolutionaries are mistaken. Meaning they went too far. The balanced approach is like Maimonides says—to go all the way to the extreme in order ultimately to arrive at the middle, yes, Maimonides’ middle path. All right? And the middle path is really what Rabbi Akiva expresses here, and therefore he is considered the father of the Oral Torah. Let me just finish maybe with the last Gemara there, also on the day of Rabbi Eliezer’s death—another story, elsewhere, about thirty-five pages later. Rabba bar bar Chana said: when Rabbi Eliezer fell ill, his students entered to visit him. He said to them: there is fierce heat in the world. They began to cry, and Rabbi Akiva laughed. It resembles the fox coming out of the Holy of Holies, yes, it is the same kind of story. They said to him: why are you laughing? He said to them: and why are you crying? They said to him: is it possible that a Torah scroll should be in pain and we should not cry? And the Torah scroll, of course, is Rabbi Eliezer. He said to them: that is why I am laughing. As long as I saw that my rabbi’s wine did not turn sour and his flax was not smitten and his oil did not spoil and his honey did not rot, I said: perhaps, Heaven forbid, my rabbi has received his world. Meaning he received his reward, his World to Come, in his lifetime. Now that I see he is suffering, that a Torah scroll is in pain, I understand that he is really taking what he needs to take in this world; as for the World to Come, he is already destined for eternal life. What lies behind this, of course? Everyone understands that Rabbi Eliezer deserves punishment. He did something very problematic; he represents a very problematic conception. He deserves punishment. Rabbi Akiva too agrees that he deserves punishment, except that he feared he would receive the punishment in the World to Come. Now that he sees him suffering in this world and receiving the punishment for what he did here, now I am calm, because the World to Come is already his. He said to him: Akiva, did I omit anything from the whole Torah? I know everything, yes? I learned everything. Maybe the question behind this is: why do I deserve punishment? Why do you think I deserve this punishment? He said to him: Our teacher, you taught us that there is no righteous man on earth who does good and never sins. Yes, everyone deserves punishment for something. Of course—there’s an elephant in the room here. No one is talking about it. Everybody obviously knows what they mean when they say Rabbi Eliezer deserves punishment. It is this excommunication he suffered because of his disputes over the Oven of Akhnai, but no one says it. Just as above they said to him: we had no time, therefore we did not come to you. You can’t say it to your teacher, right? By the way, here “did I omit” means “did I transgress,” doesn’t it? What? Here “did I omit” means “did I change.” I committed a transgression, not omitted—what does “did I omit” mean, what is “did I change”? Because he said: there is the Torah, and he didn’t change anything from what it is. He did not fulfill? I think the intention is observance. Therefore he says: there is no righteous person on earth who does good and does not sin. Not only did I know the whole Torah, I also fulfilled the whole Torah. So what do I deserve punishment for? Did I omit something? He says to him: yes, there is no righteous person who does not sin. The rabbis taught: when Rabbi Eliezer fell ill, four elders entered to visit him: Rabbi Tarfon and Rabbi Yehoshua and Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah and Rabbi Akiva. Yes, all the leaders of the revolutionary camp. Rabbi Yehoshua spoke up and said: You are better for Israel than the orbit of the sun, for the sun serves in this world, while my rabbi serves in this world and in the World to Come. Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah spoke up and said: You are better for Israel than father and mother, for father and mother are for this world, while my rabbi is for this world and the World to Come. Yes, that recalls the laws of honoring one’s father and mother and honoring one’s rabbi. If your rabbi’s lost item and your father’s lost item are before you, your rabbi’s takes precedence, because your rabbi brings you to the World to Come whereas your father only brought you to this world. Yes, this clearly echoes the Gemara there. Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah said… ah, we saw that. Rabbi Akiva spoke up and said: Afflictions are precious. Yes, Rabbi Akiva doesn’t go straight to praise, meaning he doesn’t praise Rabbi Eliezer even on the day of his death. He speaks to him directly. He says: afflictions are precious. Meaning, the fact that you are suffering is fine; that is how it ought to be. He said to them: support me and let me hear the words of my student Akiva, who said: afflictions are precious. Meaning, all of you are flattering me now after not coming to me all this time. Rabbi Akiva came to hear Torah from me. I had criticism of him—we saw that in the previous Gemara—but Rabbi Akiva is a man of truth. Why is he a man of truth? Because why did he come to me? He came because he knows I hold the facts. You are doing pilpul; truth does not matter to you. Rabbi Akiva comes to ask me because he knows that with me he will find the truth. Afterward there will be the pilpul; he’ll go to Rabbi Yehoshua to explain it to him. But first of all he wants to know what the law is. Maybe Rabbi Akiva’s approach of seeing something positive in everything—we see it… Something positive, or always the opposite of others? I don’t know. That is always an interesting question. What would happen if everyone saw something positive—would Rabbi Akiva then say something negative? In the story of the fox… Yes, there he wasn’t really against them, okay, he laughed. Yes. I don’t know whether he is always contrary-minded or always turns things positively. I have no idea. I think the Gemara says that when they visited, Rabbi Akiva learned from his teacher Nachum Ish Gamzu. Yes—who said “this too is for the good,” right. In Shevuot… no, but there it’s about hermeneutical principles. No, also? I remember the hermeneutical principles. The Gemara in Shevuot 26 says there that there is the school of Rabbi Yishmael and the school of Rabbi Akiva—this one learned by general and particular, and that one expounded by inclusion and exclusion. He studied under Nachum Ish Gamzu and he studied under Rabbi Nehunya ben HaKanah. But maybe he also got the “this too is for the good” from him—a nice connection. And then you are right that Rabbi Akiva was a kind of optimist. Yes, also… when he suffered and they executed him, he also looked at himself that way. So he said: support me and let me hear the words of my student Akiva, who said afflictions are precious. He said to him: Akiva, from where do you derive that? Very interesting, by the way. Notice the reversal. Rabbi Akiva is Rabbi Eliezer’s student. Rabbi Akiva comes to hear from Rabbi Eliezer the information, all the information he has. And now Rabbi Eliezer sits before him as a student and asks Rabbi Akiva; he is learning from Rabbi Akiva. That is an interesting reversal. But not only is he learning from Rabbi Akiva; he asks him, from where do you derive that? I’m asking for reasons. Don’t hand me a tradition, because your traditions I know—they came from me. Right? Meaning, this thing—that afflictions are precious—Rabbi Eliezer did not receive by tradition. He didn’t know it. This he learned from Rabbi Akiva. Suddenly Rabbi Eliezer discovers that one can actually learn from people things that came from them, things they did not receive by tradition, things from their own reasoning. And he starts to play this game with him. He says: from where do you derive that? Reasons—come, let’s discuss it and see. Because I understand that here there is something I can’t tell you; here I am already learning from you. He discovers a whole world. Exactly. And you understand that some kind of revolution is happening here on the day of Rabbi Eliezer’s death. And therefore, in a moment we’ll see at the end: the vow is released, meaning the excommunication is released on the day of his death. Not because he died, but because he accepted it upon himself. In the end he apparently understood—that is how I explain it, I don’t know, but that’s what I think—that the vow was released on the day of his death, otherwise it would not have remained in force until the day of his death. The vow was released because on the day of his death he understood that nevertheless he should have compromised a little—that he had taken it too far. Fine, he brings proofs. From where do you derive that? What verse do I expound? “Manasseh was twelve years old when he began to reign, and he reigned fifty-five years in Jerusalem, and he did evil in the eyes of the Lord.” Also: “These also are proverbs of Solomon, which the men of Hezekiah king of Judah copied.” And did Hezekiah king of Judah teach Torah to the whole world and not teach Torah to his own son Manasseh? Rather, from all the Torah with which he toiled with him, with all the labor he invested in him, nothing brought him back to the good except afflictions. As it says: “And the Lord spoke to Manasseh and to his people, and they did not listen; and the Lord brought upon them the officers of the army of the king of Assyria…” Meaning the afflictions accomplished in Manasseh what exhortation and teaching did not. Okay? So from there he learned this idea. And so you have learned that afflictions are precious. That is where we learn that afflictions are precious. That is really the point. And I think this story, again—there is a tremendous amount of subtext here. Behind every line there is this interesting reversal. It is a marvelous story. There is a lot here; in the layers of the story many things are hidden. It seems to me, at least, that there really is a process here that gives meaning to almost every line in these stories. In any case, for our purposes, the conclusion in the end is, it seems to me, that the final passage is really a continuation of that same statement of Rabbi Akiva, when he tells him that he thinks he has sinned. Meaning not only that he sinned and therefore needs atonement through punishment, but he tells him that these afflictions are intended to bring him to repent. Meaning he needs to repent. “And he humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers”—that is said about Manasseh. But Manasseh committed sins. And whether there are “afflictions of love” is a dispute in the Gemara. But here, if he learns that afflictions are precious from the fact that only this succeeded in causing Manasseh to repent, then in what sense are afflictions precious? They are precious in that they cause repentance. Could be, yes. Although the Gemara in Berakhot says there are afflictions of love. Maimonides claims there are none, in the Guide for the Perplexed, although the Gemara says there are. Here, though, it seems written that these are afflictions that repair, perhaps. Then again we return to what Rabbi Eliezer needs to repair—that the afflictions come for something he did, not for nothing. So that also fits in here. Could be. In any case, Rabbi Kook writes in a letter of condolence to the grandchildren of the Sochatchover. When the Sochatchover died—the author of Avnei Nezer and Eglei Tal—he wrote a condolence letter to his grandchildren, and he says as follows. The Gemara says that Rabbi Eliezer the Great never said anything he had not heard from the mouth of his teacher. This is a Gemara in Sukkah and in Yoma, in several places. Is that Rabbi Eliezer the Great? Yes, Rabbi Eliezer the Great. Meaning he never said anything he had not heard from the mouth of his teacher. And regarding that they say: a plastered cistern that loses not a drop. Meaning he was a traditionalist also in his mode of learning, also in his halakhic approach. He was a man who gathered all the information and was not willing to say anything unless he had received it from his teacher. That is exactly his traditionalism. Okay? By contrast, in Avot de-Rabbi Natan it says that he said things no ear had ever heard. That Rabbi Eliezer said things on his festival day—I don’t remember under what circumstances—that he said things no ear had ever heard. So Rabbi Kook asks: isn’t there a contradiction between these two statements? If he never said anything he had not heard from the mouth of his teacher, then how did he say things no ear had ever heard? So he writes as follows—I have a quote from that letter, part of it: “At first glance this contradicts the principle of Rabbi Eliezer’s way, that he never said anything he had not heard from the mouth of his teacher. And we must say that if it had said he said things never uttered by any mouth in the world, that really would contradict the principle that he never said anything he had not heard from the mouth of his teacher. But that is not what the Gemara says. It does not say that he said things never uttered by any mouth in the world. Rather, since it says that no ear had ever heard them, we understand that the mouth of the master, the father of Torah, Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, said them—but of all the listeners, Rabbi Eliezer the Great excelled in his deep listening, so that his ear heard from his teacher’s Torah what others did not hear. And thus in truth he never said anything he had not heard from the mouth of his teacher.” Meaning these are things he heard from his teacher. And on the other hand, no ear had ever heard them—meaning only Rabbi Eliezer’s ear. “And his Torah was a complete Torah, with an ancestral house, yet at the same time it was all a Torah renewed by the power of his holy intellect.” Now the ending is very interesting. Because until the last line I would say that Rabbi Kook is really taking these two passages in a traditionalist direction. Rabbi Eliezer heard so deeply that he truly heard from the mouth of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, who was the teacher of all these people, things that others did not hear—but still he really did not say anything he had not heard from his teacher, only others did not grasp it, did not penetrate the depth of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai’s mind, while he did. If it had ended one line earlier. But Rabbi Kook continues in the last line and says: “And his Torah was a complete Torah, with an ancestral house, yet it was all a Torah renewed by the power of his holy intellect.” Why? That is not renewed Torah; he heard it from his teacher, he just knew how to hear well. Therefore I think Rabbi Kook is saying something more. I think Rabbi Kook is claiming that even if you had asked Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, maybe he himself did not understand that that was what he had said. Not just the listeners. Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai said something. All the listeners heard nothing like that from him. Only Rabbi Eliezer managed to hear from him something special. But that special thing he heard—even Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai himself, if you had asked him, would not have understood it. Meaning the student hears from the mouth of his teacher things that the teacher himself is not even aware are folded into his own words. And that is what Rabbi Kook means here. Not that he hears better and gets his teacher’s intention better, but that he understands within his teacher’s words things that even his teacher himself does not understand are folded in there. That is really his own innovation—but it is an innovation based on what his teacher says. Which is exactly Rabbi Akiva, right? Meaning Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua—you take the tradition, but from the tradition you draw out with your own intellect something that even the one who passed you the tradition does not always know. By the way, this sounds like a homily; in my opinion it is just plain reality. Anyone who has a teacher, I think—anyone who has a close, intensive teacher—experiences this. I have no doubt about it. I know it from myself. There is one person one can more or less call my rabbi in Bnei Brak. I learned with him for five years, and even years afterward I stayed in contact with him. Really, everything I learned from someone, I learned from him. Everything else was from books and others—I didn’t learn from them at all. There were others who tried to teach me, but I didn’t learn, to my shame. And obviously in the end, even when I explained what he said, I didn’t explain it the way he said it, and he didn’t mean it that way. There were times when this came up—meaning I reminded him of things he had said, or we discussed things he had said, and I explained them differently from what he intended. And I claim that I’m right. Not really—I claim that I’m right. Meaning he was not precise. In other words, what is folded into his words is what I said, even though he did not intend it. He did not consciously intend it; in my opinion that is what is there. And what did he think after he heard it? I don’t remember the situations anymore, but I think yes, I think there were cases—if I remember correctly, it was many years ago—I think there were cases where he accepted it. Actually, one case I even remember. One case I do remember. There is a Pnei Yehoshua in Gittin 42, where he accepted it. Fine, but I think there were others. In my opinion this is everyone’s experience. Someone who really had a rabbi from whom he learned many things—not someone from whom he heard one lecture or something. A teacher-student relationship, do you understand? Bonds between teacher and student. In the end there is no study hall without innovation, and no two prophets prophesy in the same style. Whenever you learn what Rabbi Akiva Eiger says, what the Kehillot Yaakov says, or whoever it may be, you say what you say, not what they say. Meaning in the end it is always colored by your own color. Now even when you explain what they say and you do not feel that you are making some innovation here—we are modern people, so we have more reflexive self-awareness than earlier generations. So I think I am often aware that I am inserting some nuance here that I am not sure the writer intended. But I am sure that very often, certainly in earlier generations where there was less awareness of this, people explained what they themselves thought and were convinced that that was what the early authority wrote. Obviously. It never even occurred to them that it was really their own interpretation. They didn’t notice it was their own interpretation, but their interpretation was there. Clearly. There is no such thing—it almost cannot be otherwise. What I really want to claim as we conclude the process we’ve gone through up to here is that the difference between the hollow pipe and the second conception—the synthesis Rabbi Akiva produces—is a synthesis of ethoses; it is not a real synthesis. Because the truth is that it was always like this. Even in the period of the hollow pipe there is no such thing as a hollow pipe. When Moses received Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua did not hear what Moses heard—nothing can help. And when Joshua transmitted it to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the Men of the Great Assembly—each one is a broken telephone. It’s not broken telephone; it’s constructive telephone. Meaning each one learned it in some way that was not the same as the one who taught him. That is obvious. Only the ethos, the conceptual framework within which the whole thing was done, was an ethos of a hollow pipe. I said that too when I spoke about it. But I think here you really see it. Once you become aware of it, you understand that the hollow pipe is an illusion. There is no such thing as a hollow pipe. I mentioned my uncle—I’ve already mentioned more than once—that the Patriarchs and the rabbis learned in Yiddish. Meaning if they learned to learn, they learned in Yiddish. So what is that? He knows it isn’t true. But it is a kind of ethos, and the ethos is serious. He doesn’t mean it as historical fact, but he means the ethos with complete seriousness. It is obvious to him that someone who does not learn in Yiddish does not know how to learn. He doesn’t know what happened in Iraq five hundred years ago, but someone who doesn’t learn in Yiddish doesn’t know how to learn—that is obvious. So he says it through that story. Meaning many times you live within an ethos that you know perfectly well does not really fit the facts, but that doesn’t mean you don’t believe in that ethos. You believe in it completely. Hasidim who think the shtreimel came down from Sinai. Obviously they understand that it did not come down from Sinai and Moses our teacher did not walk around in a shtreimel and stockings. Right? But really they think he ought to have walked around in a shtreimel and stockings. Meaning the ethos is true—they are not arguing. There is a famous story that a maskil came to one of the Bobov rebbes in the nineteenth century and asked him, “Do you think Abraham our father walked around in these clothes?” So he said, “I don’t know what clothes Abraham our father wore; I only know that he looked at the Gentiles and did the opposite.” Yes? But today they do like the Gentiles, just the opposite—wearing Polish Gentile clothing. But at a certain stage it became different, and then it was preserved. Meaning if the Gentiles had kept wearing it, I assume it wouldn’t have continued. Yes. We talked about this, about two kinds of Chazon Ish followers. Yes, there are Chazon Ish followers who do everything written in the books of the Chazon Ish because they are disciples of the Chazon Ish. And there are Chazon Ish followers who do what they think, the way the Chazon Ish did what he thought—and those are the real Chazon Ish followers. That is Gedaliah Nadel and his circle. And there is also a Hasidic story like this, by the way. I once saw it in Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim. He brings there a story about Rabbi Noach of Lechovitch and Rabbi Mordechai of Lechovitch. I don’t remember which one is the father and which the son, two rebbes. The father died, and the son rose to be rebbe in his place and changed his father’s customs. So the Hasidim came to him and said, “What? How can you change the holy customs of your father?” So he said, “Just as my father changed his father’s customs, I too am changing my father’s customs—I am continuing my father’s path.” Meaning the question is whether one can change the very principle of change, do you understand, and remain conservative in order to be a changer. It’s like Monty Python. In Monty Python there is a very amusing scene where everyone says, “We are all nonconformists.” Yes, they all say we are all nonconformists, and one of them says, “Nonconformist? Actually I’m conformist.” Yes. Fine, in any case. So in the end the process concludes as follows. This is the introduction to the first chapter of this series, and the process ends with this: basically we have some process of the emergence of disputes built from several stages. First stage: Torah descends from Sinai—and again, we’re talking on the level of ethos, not practice. On the level of ethos, Torah descends from Sinai and passes through hollow pipes. Torah is the Holy One, blessed be He; it has nothing to do with human beings. At some stage a Torah of human beings begins to come into being. Prophecy ends, and there is no longer an option to rely only on divine Torah. The innovation of “It is not in heaven” was of course introduced only after there was no longer heaven and no longer prophets. As long as there were prophets, in my opinion, they never dreamed of the principle of “It is not in heaven.” Everything was prophets; Torah was from the Holy One, blessed be He; Torah was not connected to human beings. In the era of the Oral Torah, at the start of the Second Temple period—this is the end of the prophets, right? And the last prophets were in the Men of the Great Assembly: Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. And they were in the Men of the Great Assembly, and that was it. And after the remnants of the Men of the Great Assembly, Shimon HaTzaddik is the beginning of the Oral Torah. Then all these things begin: Torah of human beings, and “It is not in heaven,” and “a prophet is no longer permitted to innovate anything from now on,” and all sorts of things of that kind. So Torah becomes human. As a result, disputes arise. Then arises the question of what to do with dispute. The emergence of dispute is forced on us; it simply happened. Once people’s reasoning is involved, people think differently. Now the question is what to do with it. This raises problems. We saw with the students of Hillel and Shammai who killed one another how far the fear went regarding what was going to happen, the disintegration that was going to occur there. The first response was a forceful response: we will suppress the dispute. At a certain stage they see it doesn’t work, and they make a revolution. The revolution says: if you can’t beat them, join them. Meaning dispute is a necessary evil; there is no choice. We cannot deal with it, we need to make peace with it. And the last stage is that dispute becomes an ideal, not merely a necessary evil—now it becomes an ideal. And in fact you can already see this in the Gemara in Chagigah: “Incline your ear to hear the words of those who declare impure and the words of those who declare pure.” Meaning there it is already an idealization of dispute. It is not only de facto acceptance, some after-the-fact resignation to the phenomenon of dispute; it is an idealization of dispute. And that is the point at which I want to move to our next chapter. It seems to me that I have spoken about this in one context or another in the past, but when the Gemara talks about the topic of disputes, the foundational statement of the attitude toward dispute is “These and those are the words of the living God,” which ostensibly reflects what? The point to which we have arrived up to now: the idealization of dispute. Because when you say “These and those are the words of the living God,” you are basically saying: I am not merely compromising with the phenomenon of dispute because I cannot cope with it, but rather I glorify this phenomenon. You are basically saying: words of the living God—how wonderful that there are disputes; the words of the living God proliferate like a flourishing planting, as we saw in the Gemara in Chagigah. So this is really an expression that fixes the conception, and that is basically the ethos that accompanies us down to this very day. “These and those are the words of the living God,” even though in its original context it was said about Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai, and in the aggadah there in Gittin it is also said about the dispute in the story of the concubine at Gibeah, an aggadic dispute. In the halakhic context it is said about Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai, but the medieval and later authorities already broaden this, and the accepted conception is that in halakhic disputes generally… we’re moving on. We’re done with the Second Temple period, the destruction of the Temple, the first, second, third generations of Yavneh; now we’re sailing onward to the Gemara, okay? The Gemara, and after that the medieval authorities, and after that the later authorities. In the end what accompanies us is really the conclusion of the end of this process that I described—the l’chatchila status of dispute, the positive view of the phenomenon of dispute—and the expression of that is “These and those are the words of the living God.” But there are limits to “these and those are the words of the living God”—you say, how far can you go, yes, somewhat—so we’ll talk about that. Meaning the halakhic tradition really does not accept that Christians too are “the words of the living God,” for example, or that heretics are “the words of the living God.” So clearly there is some domain within which this business operates, but there is some certain boundary. I’ll get to that later. In any case, this principle of “These and those are the words of the living God” actually appears in two places in the Talmud: one place is Gittin on the concubine at Gibeah, and the other is Eruvin. Abba said in the name of Shmuel: for three years Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel disagreed. These said, the law is according to us, and those said, the law is according to us. A heavenly voice came forth and said: These and those are the words of the living God, but the law is according to Beit Hillel. And since these and those are the words of the living God, why did Beit Hillel merit that the law be fixed according to them? Why did Beit Hillel merit that the law be fixed according to them? Because they were agreeable and humble, and they taught both their own words and the words of Beit Shammai. And not only that, but they mentioned the words of Beit Shammai before their own—as in that mishnah, one whose head and most of his body were in the sukkah. They bring some story there in which Beit Hillel put Beit Shammai’s view first, discussed it, and then formulated their own position. Now I remember where we talked about this. We talked about it a bit when we discussed quantity and quality. There I explained why there was a need here for a heavenly voice. Well, Tosafot asks how they could need a heavenly voice here, since the rule is “It is not in heaven.” Tosafot gives several answers: maybe this was earlier, maybe… he has all kinds of answers; it doesn’t matter. Or that this follows one side of the dispute among the sugyot whether one relies on a heavenly voice or not. He has three answers in Tosafot. But it seems to me that the simple explanation is different. I think so. There is a Tosafot in Eruvin 6 that says—and all this I said when we spoke about quantity and quality—Tosafot says that the dispute between Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel was an unresolvable dispute because there was a meta-dispute here over the question: why not just vote? After all, “follow the majority”—what is the problem? There is a dispute, so hold a vote. But the problem was that there was a dispute over which majority to follow. Beit Shammai were sharper, and Beit Hillel were more numerous—we talked about the pyramid of talent. Beit Shammai claimed that the decisive majority is the majority of wisdom, while Beit Hillel claimed that the decisive majority is the majority of people. And the argument was really over which majority one follows. Now that argument cannot be decided by a vote, because even in that vote you get stuck in the same knot again: do you follow the majority in wisdom or the majority in number? That is something that cannot be decided. Therefore they needed a heavenly voice. When they say “It is not in heaven,” they mean: don’t follow a heavenly voice or transcendent matters; rather follow the rules of Jewish law. That is what rules of Jewish law are for—decide according to the rules of Jewish law. But where the rules of Jewish law are stuck—if it is not in heaven, then what am I supposed to do? Here the heavenly voice came to save us from a knot that the rules of Jewish law could not get us out of. Therefore here the rule of “It is not in heaven” does not apply. All right? Is that perhaps also what teiku is? In the end, isn’t teiku that Elijah will solve unresolved questions and problems when you reach a dead end? A teiku in the Gemara means they failed to decide, but teiku remains in doubt. “Tishbi will resolve” is not the meaning of teiku; that is just a popular acronym. Teiku means it stands. In Aramaic, it means to stand. That the problem stood there; that’s it, we don’t know what to do with it. Then the rules of doubt apply, and the halakhic authorities discuss what to do with teiku. Meaning there are rules for what to do with teiku: whether possession is effective, a Torah-level doubt is ruled stringently, the burden of proof is on the claimant, all sorts of rules for handling a state of teiku. Seemingly, the dispute between Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus and the Sages—one could also say the same thing there, according to the way the rabbi explains it. What, whether one follows tradition or reasoning? Yes. And then according to that, there too one would have to explain why no heavenly voice came out there. A heavenly voice did come out. In the Oven of Akhnai. In the Oven of Akhnai—it is the same thing as Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel. Interesting remark, because then it comes out that the revolution was doubled. Meaning there was a heavenly voice that decided not only on the law of the oven, but also in favor of traditionalism and against Torah of give-and-take, the human Torah—and the Sages did not accept that decision either. If one explains Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel this way, one can say in both cases that not so; one can say in both cases that the decision is local. Yes, but look—what does local decision mean? It wasn’t a local decision. There were disputes for three years on very many issues, not one issue. Local to the matter of Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel—according to whom it is fitting… Why specifically there? Tosafot already says that the reason they failed to decide was this. By the way, that is in the Gemara; Tosafot only says that because of this they got stuck here. The Gemara says Beit Shammai were sharper, and Beit Hillel were not—in Menachot, I think, or Yevamot. But Tosafot says that is why they were stuck here. So I think one is led to conclude from that—again, this is my conclusion, but one is led to conclude, and I later saw it in one of the later authorities, maybe in She’elat David—that this is really why they needed a heavenly voice. So why not there too? Because apparently the Sages understood that if we listen to the heavenly voice, we are stuck again. Because once more we will be stuck with our inability to deal with disputes. Now what will we do? There are different interpretations and different traditions here, and we are stuck. In any case, for our purposes, the Gemara says that these and those are the words of the living God, and ruled that the law is according to Beit Hillel. And in the Gemara here there are three components, each of which requires explanation. The first determination is: these and those are the words of the living God. The second is: the law is according to Beit Hillel. How, if these and those are the words of the living God, can the law be according to Beit Hillel? If both are right, then what does it mean that the law is according to Beit Hillel? If the law is according to Beit Hillel, then in what sense are the words of Beit Shammai also words of the living God? There is some contradiction between the two parts of this statement. And after that there is the statement that Beit Hillel merited that the law be fixed according to them because they were gentle in spirit and put Beit Shammai’s words before their own—that too needs explanation. Maybe I also spoke about that once, I think. I’ll deal with that a bit next time. But here maybe I’ll end with the Ritva. The Ritva on Eruvin brings a famous Ritva. He asks on this Gemara: how can it be that these and those are the words of the living God? He says: “These and those are the words of the living God”—the French rabbis of blessed memory asked: how can it be possible that both are the words of the living God, when one forbids and the other permits? Does the Holy One, blessed be He, both forbid and permit? There is a kind of logical contradiction here. And they answered: when Moses ascended on high to receive the Torah, they showed him concerning every matter forty-nine grounds for prohibition and forty-nine grounds for permission. And he asked the Holy One, blessed be He, about this, and He said that this would be entrusted to the sages of Israel in every generation, and the decision would follow them. Now here there is a very interesting question. On the face of it, usually people seem to read him as saying that in fact the decision following them does not mean that this is the truth. On the contrary—”It is not in heaven.” In heaven maybe they think one thing, but the sages will decide, and you will follow what the sages decide even though it isn’t the truth. Okay? Or because there is no single truth, and both sides are right, and you make the decision according to what the sages think, but in fact both are right. Wait, I’ll stop here for a moment. Next time I’ll sharpen this a bit more. But he continues and says: “And this is correct by way of homiletics, but in the way of truth there is a hidden secret in the matter.” And this is an interesting mystery. I don’t know what he means. I don’t know why he calls this homiletics—that is, he doesn’t really accept this explanation. It’s some kind of derash, as though he does not really accept this interpretation. Why doesn’t he accept it? What is wrong with this interpretation? Maybe he doesn’t accept the idea that it can really be that we follow the sages even when they are mistaken? That seems unlikely—what would that mean, that Jewish law is not the truth? Maybe that troubles him. Or the other way around—if there is truth, how can the truth be on both sides? I don’t know. But something in this explanation bothered him, and therefore he says there is some secret in the matter. I don’t know exactly what he means. Okay, so next time we’ll continue.