Symposium to Launch Dr. Hiyota Deutsch’s Trilogy

[Speaker A] We are honored to invite the four speakers. First, Chayuta, Chayuta Deutsch. She is a writer, and she also edited the trilogy. A great deal of what is there, it seems to me, I owe to her, including the dialogue that was mentioned here—it was her idea; originally there was no dialogue. Each of the speakers, it seems to me—I don’t know exactly what each one will say—but from what I’ve gathered, will deal with a different aspect. There are many aspects to this trilogy. Each will deal with a different aspect, usually in a critical direction, naturally enough, and that is perfectly fine; that’s what we’re here for. So, Chayuta, please.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Hello, good afternoon. I was asked to briefly review the trilogy, so I’ll start with a few words about that, and then I’ll move on to my topic as it appears in the notices. The first book, the first volume, is Faith: A Proof of the Existence of God. To explain the point of the first part, maybe I’ll quote a short passage from that dialogue that was just mentioned, between Hillel and Michael, the two speakers in the book. “They taught me that faith is above reason,” claims Hillel, Michael’s interlocutor. “I assume, then, that it cannot be proven. But precisely because of that, I don’t understand why I should accept it.” “You’d be surprised,” Michael replies, “but in my opinion it is possible to prove the existence of God. Before we try to prove that to you, it would be worthwhile to examine the concept of faith itself.” And in the sentence that follows, there’s really a kind of outline of what will later be included in the book. “Does faith mean certainty? Is it connected to emotion or to intellect? What is the difference between faith and knowledge? What is the relation between the philosophical God and the religious God? In addition, before the discussion it is important also to examine the concept of proof itself. What will count as proof for our purposes?” All these are important questions that must be asked when we enter this discussion—so Michael answers Hillel in the book. And indeed, the book enters exactly into that discussion. It is built from five conversations, each one dealing with a different type, essentially, of argument for the existence of God, and in its final part the book addresses the question of revelation—its validity and the question of why that revelation actually obligates us. That is the first book.

Now I’ll skip to the third, because about the second I’m going to speak a little more, to demonstrate from it and refer to part of it. The third book is called Walking Among Those Who Stand—I don’t remember the subtitle by heart—On the Need and the Possibility of Refreshing Jewish law, right. And actually I—notwithstanding the quotation—am not going to argue with someone who isn’t here, but I think Rabbi Miki really does give models there. He presents a toolbox from within Jewish law itself of how change is possible, why of course things require change, and what can be changed. Fine, that’s the third book.

And now I want to speak about the second book, whose title is No Person Rules Over the Spirit: Toward a Lean and Analytical Framework for Jewish Thought. So pay attention to the title, No Person Rules Over the Spirit. I think that is a very powerful statement, very essential to the book, which deals with the question of authority. These things have, after all, already been said by my predecessors here. “Jewish thought”—there’s no such creature, Rabbi Miki argues. Thought is thought, and the only question to ask about it is whether it is true or not. There is no point in checking its DNA to see whether it was born to a Jewish mother or converted according to Jewish law. Despite the difficulties—now I want to say something, because despite the difficulty, since I’m about to pick a fight in a moment with something within this whole framework—but I want to say that this morning, by chance, I opened Facebook as I do every morning, and its reminder feature brought up for me an article that I had once posted, written by Rabbi Menachem Froman, and with your permission I want to read a very short excerpt from it, forgive me for using this, and explain what the power is here. Before I attack, it’s very important to me to speak about the power and the freedom—or liberty, if you like, it’s a matter of semantics—that Rabbi Miki offers in his book.

So this article was written in eighty-six, and in that sense Rabbi Menachem Froman, of blessed memory, really was ahead of his time—as someone who returned to religious observance as well. He was very sensitive to such questions of liberty, of freedom, of creativity. And look what he writes. He writes as follows: “The Torah is the covenant with the Infinite. Concerning what is written, that the writing of the Torah was engraved on the tablets, our sages interpret: do not read ‘engraved’ but ‘freedom.’ Freedom Moses brought down to us on the tablets from Mount Sinai. But even if this is the ideal of the Torah, it does not necessarily become actualized in practice. It is very possible that a Jew living within a Torah framework will experience or live only the restrictions and commandments, without their meaning. It is possible, and indeed possible, that a person will observe the books of the covenant without awareness of with whom this covenant is made,” and so on. “The possibility that a religious Jew will feel the Torah as something that oppresses him is not theoretical or remote. Very generally speaking, one can of course say that the feeling of deprivation of personality, of blocked expression by senseless restrictions, is what caused most Jews to leave the religious framework and establish the free public. It is very difficult to speak in generalizations, but I feel that when I am in secular society there is more freedom, whereas in religious society I quite often feel more oppression—of the drives, but also of creativity and of life in general.”

I’m not going to get into those things now; that part is important though not so relevant anymore, and today indeed, thank God, there is a lot of creativity and so on—we won’t get into that. But I think that what this paragraph formulates very well is the power of the title of the book and also of the contents of the book—that is, this idea that no person rules over the spirit. And it really does give a tremendous amount of freedom, this statement that no one can force you what to think. That statement, I think, runs like a thread through the whole doctrine expressed in the book. But I’ll move on.

So we said: no person rules over the spirit, and thought cannot be coerced, and there is no point at all in distinguishing between a thought that was born in a Jewish place and one that was born in a non-Jewish place, in quotation marks and so forth. Maimonides and the Kuzari receive no special privilege or discount; their words are judged on their own merits exactly like the words of Aristotle or Kant. They may be right and they may be wrong. But what about the sages themselves? Well, they too get no special privilege. Their power applies only to Jewish law—well, not “although,” rather, their authority applies only in Jewish law. In Jewish law, that is where authority lies—in the Talmud and in the Jewish law ruled from it and developed from it. But what about aggadic literature? And that is why I have gathered myself here. Aggadah is a different story. Real Lithuanian-style scholars tend to skip over it—and that is almost a point of pride for them, to say: we skip the aggadot, that’s for girls or something like that, and we study the real thing—or we study aggadot. But only when I edited the relevant chapters in the book did I understand the depth of the matter. I honestly almost didn’t believe my ears or my eyes, but okay. That’s what I want to talk about.

So then, as best I can judge, in terms of the text itself, aggadah is literature like any other literature; the lessons emerge from it. I’m skipping. “The study of aggadah has value in my eyes similar to the study of a literary work, a poem, or a philosophical text. And indeed you heard correctly, Hillel—for me there is no essential difference between a midrash of the sages and a literary work such as a book by Dostoevsky or Elsa Morante,” who, by the way, is an excellent writer. Okay—so Rabbi Akiva and Rava are equivalent to Dostoevsky when they appear within aggadot, yes? This sharp and forceful formulation, on the one hand, sharpens the aspect of freedom. Yes, you examine; you are allowed to think; you are allowed to weigh the matters on their own merits. So indeed Rabbi Miki offers in his method, in his theory and in his theology, a great deal of freedom, and in my view that is wonderful. I think he is right when talking about aggadah when it is separate.

I want to say here—I want to disagree with this view when it comes to aggadah that is an organic part of a halakhic / of Jewish law topic / passage. I want to argue that you cannot study, and even rule on Jewish law, without taking into account those aggadot that the editors of the sugya, the editors of the entire Talmud, wove into them—and not by accident. And in my view, to skip over that, as certain yeshiva scholars do, whose names we shall not mention here, is an act that imposes a defect and disability on the whole sugya and harms understanding of its broader context, its spirit, and its heart. In fact I almost don’t understand how one can issue halakhic rulings without the aggadic aspects scattered throughout the Talmud, along the various halakhic sugyot. My claim is basically simple: if we give weight to the Talmud, we must also give weight to its editorial shaping. And in general, the choice to insert aggadot among the halakhic sugyot—the ones who inserted those aggadot were of course the editors of the Talmud, whether they were Ravina and Rav Ashi, or the Savoraic sages, or others, perhaps even later, it doesn’t matter—but the authority the Talmud possesses in itself, and no one, including Rabbi Miki, disputes that authority, also belongs to the choice to insert those aggadot.

Fine, and I want to—I’ll run through this briefly, I don’t have much time left and I want to have time for my examples. I brought three examples here; we’ll see how many I manage. I want to say that I studied across the road here at the Academic Belt that’s here, but I also studied in the beit midrash. I studied here at Bar-Ilan the academic study of aggadah, and I also studied at the beit midrash of Beit Morasha, where I really learned this subject of aggadah in practice. I studied with Rabbi Yehuda Brandes, who is my colleague and teacher. And this point is a point of faith / belief; it is less academic, I think. In the end it also becomes academic, but this point really is that you simply cannot see—or simply learn—these sugyot from the perspective of Torah study without seeing the aggadot.

Fine, I’m skipping, skipping, sorry. I want to argue that the insertion of aggadah into a halakhic topic / passage contains a powerful statement: that Jewish law sits upon life, and in life there are nuances that will never come to full expression in the rules of Jewish law. And aggadah makes that life present, and plays a kind of game—sometimes it creates the tension: there is Jewish law, okay, and there is life, and in life there is a kind of inflection of nuances. I want to claim more than that: incidentally, by doing this it creates balance. Yes, we have rigid rules, but we also have life, and how all this gets specified within that life. I want to argue that aggadah is a kind of music. Someone even told me an interesting idea, that just as the song of the Levites—there are laws of the Temple, the laws of the Chosen House, right? The laws of the Temple—and among those things there is music. So why is there music? Why does it matter? There are laws for how one offers a sacrifice, right? Why do they need to play trumpets there over the offering of sacrifices, at least with some sacrifices? So I want to argue that aggadah is the music of the halakhic sugyot. And interpretation of aggadah is indeed broad, but it is not infinite. Today aggadah has fairly clear rules of interpretation; literary studies is a very sophisticated field today. There are rules: contrasts, recurring motifs, and so on and so on, I won’t elaborate.

Since these days, in a few days, they are finishing the Daf Yomi cycle of tractate Berakhot, most of the examples I bring will be from tractate Berakhot or in some way lean on tractate Berakhot. So, that’s that.

Now I want to talk about the topic / passage of zimmun and shared blessing in the chapter “Three Who Ate,” but not only there. The Mishnah states—and I want to talk about two aggadot that in my view are within the sugya of zimmun, of what counts to join a zimmun—and I want to say that through my demonstration I’ll try to say what they add to the halakhic sugya. So the Mishnah states: “Three who ate together are obligated to recite zimmun,” and the question is: what does “together” mean? What defines a group for the purpose of zimmun? The seating arrangement? The very act of sitting? How do people join a zimmun? And in the sugya there really are different opinions regarding the possibility of joining. It is worth noticing that there is indeed a halakhic question here that rests on a social question. What does it mean to be together? What does it mean to eat together? And we see that according to the Mishnah, “together” means reclining—we’ll see that later. I’m skipping. But indeed in different sections the sugya asks: what is a shared meal that also obligates zimmun and makes it possible for one person to bless on behalf of everyone? Does the menu need to be uniform? If everyone eats grain but one person eats vegetables, does that count? Is it important to maintain some numerical ratio between the group and the one individual? Must one specifically eat grain, or is a cup of wine enough? The laws will be determined however they will be determined—but among the other aggadot there are two which, in my view, converse with one another and with the very heart of the sugya. Together they form a kind of good framework for the technical issues of the rules for joining a meal.

So I’ll actually begin with the later aggadah in terms of the location in the sugya, and then I’ll go back to the first. “King Yannai and the queen were eating bread together, and he had killed the rabbis.” That is, King Yannai and his wife sat at a meal and ate, and the story tells us in passing that they had also killed the sages before this meal—in other words, King Yannai. Which is very interesting. “And there was no one left to recite the blessing for them”—there was no one to bless for them, why? Because they had killed everyone who could bless for them, right? Which reminds me—if you’ll pardon me—I think Woody Allen once said: why aren’t the Germans funny? Why don’t the Yekkes have humor? And he said: they killed all the funny people. So likewise King Yannai killed everyone who could bless, so there’s no one to bless.

Now what’s interesting is that he still asks—they killed all the sages, but it’s still important to him that a blessing be said at the table. He asks his wife; his wife says, I’ll bring you my brother, but promise that you’ll protect him. And then she invites Rabbi Shimon ben Shetach. So he is invited to the king’s table and asked—I’m skipping the wording here—asked to bless, to lead the zimmun for those dining there. Just picture a magnificent table, food fit for a king, except that in this case the king is the sworn enemy of the one making the blessing, yes, who is now going to lead the zimmun in his presence. Think about the togetherness, yes? The group of people eating together—they could hardly be more sworn enemies than this, because he has just murdered all his friends, and he himself is probably hiding for his life or something like that. So in a substantive psychological sense there is no element here of joining in the sense of friendship, unity, shared eating, all that this thing implies. And this is really highlighted by Rabbi Shimon ben Shetach’s cynical remark: what exactly am I blessing over? Over the fact that Yannai ate from his own food? I think there may even be a hint here—maybe this is a bit far-fetched—“the eater of such-and-such, the sword shall eat.” It could be that after he ate what he ate, I still can—well, anyway. But in the end ben Shetach, according to his own view, perhaps it is enough for him to drink two cups of wine and that’s it, he joins. They give him a cup of wine and he leads the zimmun. A separation between Jewish law and psychology—psychology over here and Jewish law over there. But still, I think that by making this aggadah present, there is here an interesting edge case for reflection, one that emphasizes: notice what the heart of the sugya is. The heart of the sugya is: what is partnership, what is unity.

A mirror image of that situation appears in an aggadah found in the previous chapter, which touches on the question of reclining and the ability to bless together. The Mishnah says: “If they were sitting, each one blesses for himself; if they reclined, one blesses for everyone.” In other words, there is something technical about the form of sitting. Reclining has to do with ease of mind, with time, with free people, and so on. The Talmud says: “If they reclined, yes; if they did not recline, no.” That is, only if they reclined can they bless together. And immediately the Talmud objects: “But wasn’t it taught: ten people who were walking on the road, even though all of them eat from one loaf, each one blesses for himself. If they sat down to eat, even though each one eats from his own loaves”—sorry—“one blesses for everyone.” It says “if they sat down,” even though the purpose was only to sit, and that’s enough—or is that only as proof of reclining? And then the Talmud says, Rav Nachman bar Yitzchak says: for example, when they say, “Let us go and eat bread in such-and-such a place.” That meal was preceded by some prior determination: let us go and eat in such-and-such a place. And that is the meaning of being a group, of gathering at one place to sit there and eat there.

Then comes the aggadah—the aggadah of Rav’s students after they had dealt with his burial. When Rav died, his students went after him; his students are following his bier. When they return from there they say, “Let us go and eat bread in such-and-such a place,” yes, by a certain river. And after they ate, they sat. “And they were uncertain”—the question arose: wait, are we considered a group for the matter of zimmun or not? Because according to the Mishnah, no—we did not recline. Now think also about reclining, which means free people; we are here in mourning for our teacher, it doesn’t fit. On the other hand, it seems that the feeling is: we could not be more together than this, we are all one fellowship, grieving the death of our teacher, mourning him. They don’t know the Jewish law. One of them even tore his garment again over the fact that—where is our teacher to issue the ruling for us here? One thing led to another, and an old man came and reminded them that it was enough that they had said, “Let us go and eat in such-and-such a place”—that is sufficient for zimmun, and indeed they recited zimmun.

So again, beyond being perhaps an example, really a practical case from which the Jewish law is built—from a historical act to something practical—the aggadah adds music, the music of the depth of the topic / passage: what is shared eating, what is fellowship, what is togetherness. And as I said, this is a story about a tightly bound group mourning their master. There, at Yannai’s meal, there is an inversion of this story, because there there is the appearance of sitting together—a king, perhaps one may even assume they reclined as was their way then—but the inside is missing, the essence is missing from the picture. So there really are two edge cases here, and this question—there is in some sense perhaps a slightly subversive role for aggadah here. That is: what determines things here, the technical halakhic framework, or the inner reality of separation—or of unity? These two extreme aggadot perhaps form a laboratory case, in your language, as you once wrote about the Talmud’s interpretive setups. That is, there are very extreme cases here of relationship and unity, and in the range between them the Talmud establishes the… that is, aggadot always raise the concern that rules will never cover all the abundance of nuances in reality. And the picture one gets from the combination of aggadah and Jewish law is a fuller picture. If you like, maybe it is like the difference between a black-and-white painting, or a one-dimensional, two-dimensional one, yes, and a three-dimensional, many-dimensional, colorful picture.

Now, how much time do I have? The moderator is signaling to me. Do I need to finish? Do I have ten minutes? Seven and a half? Excellent, thank you. Then I’ll manage to skim over the two examples.

The second example is an example about drinking wine. I’ll skip the peg that connects it to tractate Berakhot: a story about a matron, yes, where Rabbi Yehuda—the matron said to Rabbi Yehuda, “Your face looks like that of pig breeders and moneylenders.” He said to her, “By oath, for me both of those are forbidden.” Both are forbidden to me, of course—it is forbidden to lend with interest and it is also forbidden to raise pigs—“rather, I have twenty-four bathrooms,” and I won’t go into the context in the sugya. I’m moving on to what is apparently the source for this Babylonian Talmud aggadah, which is an aggadah in the Jerusalem Talmud. There are three wine sugyot in the Jerusalem Talmud. Where? Come on… where are there wine sugyot in the Jerusalem Talmud? Just stay with me—where are the wine sugyot? Sabbath, kiddush; Passover, the four cups; and Shekalim, Purim—we’re on the eve of Purim. The four cups and all that. So it’s a sugya that repeats itself, both its halakhic part and its aggadic part, to which I’ll refer.

For example: Rabbi Zeira asked Rabbi Yoshiya, what is the required measure of… a halakhic sugya. What is a cup of wine? What is the measure? Is cooked wine valid or invalid? Is one allowed to drink them in one gulp? Can one fulfill the obligation with Sabbatical-year wine? The kind of questions Jewish law likes, or tends, to deal with. Does the wine have to be specifically red wine? And so on and so on. Then the Jerusalem Talmud brings the story of Rabbi Yehuda and Rabbi Ila’i, either as the source of the story in the Babylonian Talmud or else both deriving from some earlier source.

Fine. Rabbi Yehuda son of Rabbi Ila’i would drink four cups on Passover night, and his head would ache until the festival. He would drink the four cups, but then he would have a headache and would have to bind up his head from pain until the festival. I suspect there is a version that says until Atzeret, meaning Shavuot. Whether from Passover until Sukkot or from Passover until Shavuot—but his head hurt terribly for a very long time, that’s the idea. Wine has that effect too, as is known.

“A certain matron saw that his face was shining.” She saw that his face was radiant. She said to him, “Old man, old man, one of three things is true of you: either you drink wine”—I’m translating directly—“or you lend with interest, or you raise pigs.” Notice that in the sugya in Berakhot there are only the latter two components, without the wine. He said to her, “May the spirit of that woman expire”—there is, by the way, a kind of fighting here that is unusual for relationships between matrons and sages, but that’s another sugya—“may the spirit of that woman expire. None of those three things is true of me. Rather, my learning has come to hand, and it is written, ‘A man’s wisdom lights up his face.’” Which is interesting. I learned something new, or my wisdom—it says, “my learning has come to hand”; I discovered some new Jewish law or some new point in Torah, and “a man’s wisdom lights up his face.” So the radiance of face that the gentile matron mistakenly thinks comes from some material thing, from rich food or from—I don’t know—very wealthy people, some physiological thing—he says, no, ma’am, you understand nothing about life. It is “a man’s wisdom lights up his face.” You don’t even have the capacity to identify the radiance that comes from wisdom.

By the way, it’s not only the matron who gets confused. There is another sugya later, immediately after the story of Rabbi Abbahu, who arrived in Tiberias and Rabbi Yohanan’s students saw that “his face was radiant”—with that same language, “his face was radiant.” So they told their teacher—they ran to their teacher, Rabbi Yohanan, and said to him—you see that this is a Land of Israel story, yes? They said to him, “We saw Rabbi Abbahu and he found treasure.” That’s how they translate it; they don’t say moneylending and all that, yes? He found treasure. He said to them, why? They said, “His face was radiant.” He said to them, “Perhaps he heard a new Torah teaching—perhaps he heard new Torah.” He went to him and asked, what new Torah did you hear? He said to him, “An old Tosefta”—I discovered some old Tosefta. And he applied to him the verse: “A man’s wisdom lights up his face.” And this same sequence repeats itself in the three wine sugyot in the three tractates, as I said. And what do we learn from this? Why do we need this story with the matron? By the way, as noted, not only matrons get confused, but also Torah scholars within the beit midrash.

I think there is a statement here, and that statement is that wisdom and Torah have an effect similar to wine. There is here, in my view, a practical contradiction. On the one hand, wine lights up the face; it really causes the face to show joy, richness, all of that. On the other hand, if you are a serious Jew, then learning Torah will have that same effect. So that is—well.

I’ll finish very briefly, just skimming, with a sugya in tractate Niddah, not Berakhot. I studied this recently with my daughter around some assignment, and suddenly thanks to her I noticed a few things. The Mishnahs at the end of the second chapter of tractate Niddah and the Talmud on them deal with three issues of impurity and purity regarding the appearance of blood. And the sugyot basically set out a kind of color fan that is supposed to serve as a guide for the rabbi issuing a ruling on whether to declare the appearance pure or impure. And the tannaim and amoraim disagree among themselves throughout the sugyot on questions of the source of the blood, its appearance, the standard for comparison, various states of doubt, and so on. Now here I’m skipping, skipping, it doesn’t matter. From the discussion among the sages we learn that the answer to those two questions—what is the source of the blood, and what exactly is its color—is not always clear. But, as is the way of the Talmud, the sugya tries to establish clear solutions even here.

At the end of this sugya appear—and I apologize in advance for the feminism in this example, but I think this is not an agenda, although according to the paper of Arnitzki everyone comes to aggadah with his own world of opinions—I almost find it hard to see in this sugya how, within a whole sugya in which women are the object—they discuss, excuse me, the appearance of their blood—suddenly the sugya makes present three women who suddenly become the subject, and they have something to say. And in their different ways, these three women challenge—I’ll tell you very briefly—there are three women there. One is the wife of Rav Yehuda, who is also the mother of Rav Yitzchak; Ifra Hormiz, who is a colorful and interesting figure, the mother of King Shapur; and Yalta, the wife of Rav Nachman, who not long ago in the Daf Yomi broke four hundred barrels of wine. In all three stories, a woman in one way or another challenges the authority of the sage and his ability to judge blood appearances.

The mother of Rav Yitzchak, the wife of Rav Yehuda, teaches that there are things only a woman knows about her own body, and that an outside eye will not be able to see them. To the point that when Rav Yehuda hears his wife, he stops issuing a ruling. He says: she is right; I cannot issue a ruling on that matter. Ifra Hormiz, who gives Rava a kind of test with sixty blood samples, adds to her test a trick element—flea blood. And Rava succeeds in identifying the source of this blood, but only by complete chance or with heavenly assistance, not by means of the clear professional criteria that the sugya had laid out up to that point. Only by complete chance, divine intervention, heavenly assistance, did he manage to discover it. And the case of Yalta is the most interesting, because after Yalta receives a ruling that declares the blood impure, she insists on getting a second opinion. She goes to another rabbi—now this contradicts an explicit Jewish law that when one sage forbids, his colleague may not permit—and she insists. Yes, time is up, so I’m finishing. Fine. She claims that she saw that the rabbi who ruled for her had an eye infection. So she asks for another opinion and indeed receives one, and in the end it is declared pure.

So what do these aggadot add—and with this I’ll finish—what do these aggadot add, the ones I only mentioned in passing and didn’t fully get into? First, the music of doubt. Yes, ruling is ruling, Jewish law is Jewish law—but know that there are unclear cases, life is full of states of doubt. So first, it adds the music of doubt. And second, it makes present—and here forgive the feminism—the female factor, the woman’s point of view. There is a woman behind this laboratory. That’s it. And I claim in conclusion—this really is my concluding sentence—I claim that anyone who contents himself with the laws and misses what these aggadot add, then his learning, and consequently his halakhic ruling, will be lacking. Please do not skip the aggadot. It is aggadah, and it requires study. Thank you very much. This is only a short excerpt from a very large collection of arguments we had while working.