I heard in a talk:

A lowly creature that takes in and does not give out means that it has no power of differentiation between one thing and another, between food and waste. And that is a kind of connection that works for evil: joining bad and good. By contrast, the Temple is a connection that works for good: joining the world to the Holy One, blessed be He, joining the profane and the holy. And Titus fought against this Temple in order to prevent that connection, and according to the Sages he did this “for its own sake,” not for the sake of military victory over Israel. That is, Titus acted to separate the profane from the holy. And therefore the force of non-differentiation between falsehood and truth would come upon him, enter his brain, and blur it. Titus would become mentally confused, unable to distinguish one thing from another, between reality and imagination and between truth and falsehood — which is the whole issue with madmen, whose minds are deranged and mixed up and do not distinguish between reality and hallucination.

And by the way, the opposite of this is the children of Israel in the wilderness, who ate manna, “the bread of nobles,” bread that was absorbed in the limbs. There there was no need to separate food from waste, because it was all heavenly food, refined sevenfold. So they too were creatures that took in and did not give out, but they were not lowly creatures — they were nobles. And therefore they also saw at the sea what even Ezekiel son of Buzi did not see, which is a sign of apprehending truth in its purest form — exactly the opposite of Titus.

Here’s another suggestion: the mosquito takes in and does not give out, meaning it can digest everything and extract the precious from the worthless. It is the father of Hasidism, which believes in extracting sparks from everything, including filthy alleyways, and Titus symbolizes the opponents, who turn holiness into a means for enjoyment (from Lithuanian-style learning). Therefore a mosquito should come and confuse Titus.

If you want, I’ve got ten more sermons like that for a penny. I’ve written more than once that I don’t see any point in dealing with these little homiletic twists.

I have faith in the Sages, and I believe that the Sages were wise and understanding people who said things that contain real insight.

The Sages characterized the essential stance that Titus represents in his attack on the Temple (absolute materialism born of arrogance), and they characterized a problematic component in it (the absence of separation between holy and profane, between matter and spirit, between truth and narrative, between reality and imagination), and the essential consequences of it (madness = losing the ability to distinguish between truth and falsehood). And that is indeed what the “mosquito” symbolizes by eating ordinary earthly food that contains impurities, but not knowing how to identify them and reject them. That is an exact description of madness of mind (mental confusion), into which the symbolic Titus deteriorated. And the Sages see this as a consequence of an essential attack on the Temple.

Maybe Rabbi Michael Abraham has another ten such penny-sermons (the one he suggested here really isn’t worth more than a penny, unlike the one I heard and passed on, in which anyone who reflects will see deep and concentrated thought), and maybe someone else has another ten penny-pilpulim in some halakhic Talmudic passage. Rabbi Michael Abraham’s distancing himself from the aggadot of the Sages apparently stems from a lack of appreciation for their wisdom. People who preserve the Torah of God almost in its purity and are fairly close to the prophets, who grasped reality in an exalted way, are not the kind of people who sit in the study hall writing and discussing meaningless nonsense. What the most reasonable interpretation is — that one can argue about, each person according to the tendency of his soul.

Am Haaretz, what does appreciating the Sages have to do with far-fetched and bizarre interpretations of their words? Presumably the Sages meant the plain meaning of what they said as it stands, without all these little homiletic twists. Now if you want to say a true idea and dress it up in the words of the Sages, be my guest. But does your idea obligate anything, and can you claim that this is what the Sages meant and then draw conclusions from it, etc.? Absolutely not. Because just as you interpreted the Sages’ words this way, I can interpret them differently, and my conclusion will be the opposite. So dealing in these little homiletic twists produces no real understanding or new conception, because it’s all in the category of “mere wordplay.” So your comparison to halakhic and Talmudic topics is ridiculous, and has nothing to do with insulting the Sages of the Talmud. The only ridicule is for the preachers of cute twists who take these inventions seriously as though they were said at Sinai. Glad to help, Am Haaretz.

What does it mean that they intended the plain meaning of their words as they are? Did Titus really cut the curtain and blood actually spurted out? Did Titus really think that maybe in water the Holy One, blessed be He, could defeat him, but on dry land Titus would win? And does Abaye preserve an ancient tradition that the mosquito inside Titus’s brain, as it grew and grew, had “a mouth of copper and claws of iron”?

One of three things must be true: either the Sages are talking utter nonsense and making the effort to pass on meaningless traditions so the foolish masses will be satisfied, in which case they are generally not such serious and thoughtful people (why didn’t the Chazon Ish talk this kind of nonsense? Why does this take up such a large portion of the Talmud?), or they mean some simplistic message, or they mean a deep message. And in my opinion there is both a simplistic message and a deep message: “golden apples in silver settings.”

What is explicit in the words of the Sages is that Titus carried out a unique attack on the blessed Name and on the Temple, and his punishment was that his mind went mad, and this happened through a mosquito, which the Sages characterize with precision as “a lowly creature that takes in and does not give out.”

The fact that there are several possible ways to understand this (exactly as in any other passage) says nothing and poses no problem. If a real idea has been clothed here, what is bad about that? If you explain a reasoning of the Sages — like the reasoning “what makes you think your blood is redder?” — and you have an explanation that seems correct to you in its own right as well, then what happened? Is that explanation somehow worse because it merely dresses up an existing idea?

If you sit down and seriously study aggadah, you’ll see that there is a style of thought that works in many places, and a style of thought that doesn’t, and one can examine what is a plausible explanation and what isn’t. Exactly like the Brisker analytic approach of Rabbi Chaim, which was accepted because it simply shed light on things in a systematic way. And like the acceptance of the Arizal, which was accepted because it simply shed light on the Zohar in a systematic way. So too there are approaches to the study of aggadah. And what all these approaches share is faith in the wisdom of the Sages, who clothed their words in parables. And this definitely does generate new conceptions in subtle matters.

In Jewish law, authority is formal, and therefore there is reason to argue about what the Sages intended, because it has implications: Jewish law is determined according to what they held and said. Therefore it is fitting to engage in the analytic method of Rabbi Chaim and so on. Not so in aggadah, which is an area of thought. If the idea seems correct to you, then it’s correct, and if it isn’t correct, then it isn’t — with no connection to the question of whether that’s what they intended or not.
I agree that there are aggadot that can’t be interpreted according to the plain meaning, so perforce we interpret them homiletically. That still doesn’t mean there is significance to what they intended, because it’s impossible and pointless to decide that — unlike in Jewish law and Talmudic passages.

True, in aggadah there is no authority, but there are consequences: “Do you wish to know the One who spoke and the world came into being? Study aggadah.” Study of aggadah may not be practical, and therefore carries no authority, but it does build in the learner a general conception of creation and the Creator, saturated with the words of the Sages. In practice, that is what comes from studying aggadah — a comprehensive personal transformation mediated through cognition (study of aggadah and Kabbalah from fear of Heaven). And that is an entire construction of personality from a holy source. And that has value in itself.

And someone who studies aggadah seriously will see that even what “seems correct to him” changes. Just as in Jewish law, someone who studies a lot of Jewish law develops an analytic sense of “what seems correct to him” as an interpretation of the words of the Sages and of what truly lies at the foundation of their words.

As for your claim that there is no point in deciding in aggadah, how is that different from non-practical areas of Jewish law in which halakhic decisors have ruled and do rule — for example, the laws of the Sanhedrin? It’s funny that Maimonides rules on the laws of the Sanhedrin; if there is a Sanhedrin, it will rule what it thinks, not what Maimonides thought. Rather, the point is that this is part of Torah and truth, and there is importance in knowing Torah and understanding it even without any connection to practical implementation. Exactly the same is true in aggadah. And if you think you can put in whatever you want and dress up whatever you want, then in my opinion that is not true. Maybe on every specific detail there are several possibilities, but from every approach to aggadah (every school of study) a comprehensive interpretation grows.

I’m done. You can keep curling up inside the narrow shell and saying ha ha ha, it’s all nonsense, ha ha ha — or you can go in and study seriously. Every charlatan will tell you, “Study first and then we’ll see,” but that really is what’s required.

Your position is a classic and well-known one, and still there are those who disagree with it (among them, it seems to me, Rabbi Michi). Does that make him someone who invents things about Torah scholars, etc., as you described? I think not, and I also explained why. That was the argument here, without getting into the question of which position is correct. Have a productive summer.

With God’s help, 12 Av 5782

A glance at the Wikipedia entry “Titus” teaches that after his victorious return from suppressing the revolt, Titus suffered from a persecution complex in which he suspected “everyone who moved” of intending to kill him, and he cruelly oppressed the “traitors.” In 79 he was appointed emperor and calmed down from the persecution complex about traitors, but he was stricken with an illness from which he died two years later, at only 42 years old.

It may be that the “mosquito” pecking at his brain was the persecution complex, magnifying more and more his fear of the revenge of the God of the Jews for desecrating His Temple — something the Romans had not done in any other conquered land. And it may be that the mosquito describes a tumor that spread in his head, destroyed his health, and brought him to a tormented death.

It was not only in Titus’s brain that the God of the Jews planted a tormenting “mosquito,” but in the brain of the entire empire. The exiles of Judea brought everywhere their faith, which influenced the Romans, who came ever closer to Judaism, until Roman writers complained that “there is no house in Rome without a Jew in it.” Even a nephew of the emperor Hadrian converted.

To save himself from the “Jewish mosquito,” Hadrian decreed a ban on circumcision, which led to the outbreak of the Bar Kokhba revolt, which was brutally suppressed. Hadrian’s successors limited the ban on circumcision to gentiles alone, and thereby prevented conversion. But the “Jewish mosquito” developed a mutation of “Judaism without circumcision and without the 613 commandments,” which preserved monotheism and abstract values of love and conquered the empire by storm, until after about 200 years this Jewish “mutation” became the ruling religion of the empire.

Regards, Y. Tushinsky

Dor, it isn’t one’s position regarding aggadah that makes someone into something, but the analysis of what underlies that position: the view that the Sages of Israel, who received the Torah from Sinai by tradition, were not especially wise people, and aside from Jewish law they took no pains to pass on anything else. You can say that at the basis of this position there is merely a factual impression that students of aggadah just dress up whatever they feel like. I’m telling the story differently.

“A mosquito in the head” is also a French play, whose plot begins with a suspicion gnawing at the mind of a woman who suspects that her husband is not faithful to her. That was exactly the state of the “victorious” Titus, who became hounded by suspicions and saw conspirators and traitors all around him. Win he did, but peace of mind was taken from him.

Regards, Yidl Tushinkovsky Halevi