Ruth & Game Theory

 

As I was thinking through this sermon, I pulled this book off the Shelf, Matt Ridley’s The Origins of Virtue. It’s a book I read nine years ago.

It contains the story of an experiment in game theory – the study of the decisions we make.

Suppose, says the academic Douglas Hofstadter a dilemma in which 20 people sit, in a cubicle with their finger on the button. Each person will get £1000 after ten minutes, unless someone pushes his button in which case the person who pushed the button will get £100 and everybody else will get nothing.’

Even a fool knows, Ridley notes, that the best result is not to press the button.

But if you are a little bit more clever you will realise that there is a high chance that someone else will press their button, so if you are a bit clever you should probably press your button before they do.

As a matter of Games theory, pressing fast is the way to go.

The risk reward balance demands it.

‘Don’t get misled by your morality’ writes Ridley, ‘that fact that you are being noble in cooperating is irrelevant to the question. What we are seeking is the logically best action in a moral vacuum – it’s rational to be selfish.’

Ridley wants us to feel the power of the logic of game theory,

I’ll come back to Dr Ridley, or Viscount Ridley later.

 

I knew I wanted to share something about this book because I am still thinking about the single moment in the entire Hebrew Bible which most stands most fiercely against this kind of game theory.

The moment, in the entire Hebrew Bible, which looks at logic, calculation and the rest of it and hurls it all away because of a strange, most human quality we call chesed - kindness.

 

We read the Book of Ruth during the Festival of Shavuot – on Thursday, forgive me for still being held in thrall by its foundational uncovering of what it means to be human.

 

Story –

Naomi has two sons, they marry and then they die.

Leaves three women, devoid of economic possibility, devoid of the possibility of a future – without a child to carry the name of the family onwards.

Give up on me, tells Naomi, head back to your own families. And one daughter in law leaves.

But Ruth doesn’t leave.

Naomi attempts, for a second time to push away and Ruth stops her.

Do not entreat me to leave you, or to keep from following you;

For where you go, I will go

Where you stay, I will stay;

Your people shall be my people,

Your God my God;

Where you die, will I die, and there will I be buried.

 

I’m in, says Ruth, I’m with you.

And the reward for this fidelity – I disregard.

This is the key point, for an understanding of Ruth.

When we do something for someone in the expectation of reward, or if we do something for someone because they have done something for us, that is all called reciprocity.

What Ruth does for Naomi has nothing to do with reciprocity.

What can I offer you? Says Naomi, even if I were to be with a man tonight, it makes no sense for you to wait for me to have another son for you to marry.

Where you go I will go – says Ruth.

I have nothing to offer you - Naomi.

Where you stay, I will stay – says Ruth

 

This isn’t reciprocity.

It’s the inverse of reciprocity.

Doing something for someone not only not in the expectation of reward, but in wilful disregard of what one might get back from the relationship.

This is love.

Love is doing something for someone with no thought as to the return, the reward, the ‘what’s in it for me’

This is the meaning of Hebrew term Gemilut Hesed – doing things for others out of a sense of kindness – phrase perfectly encapsulated by the translation – wanton acts of kindness.

To be Gomel Hesed is to be gratuitously kind.

Doing the kind thing above and beyond any supposed call of duty.

 

The Rabbis understood precisely how the Book of Ruth carries this relationship with kindness at it’s very heart in a Midrash, a commentary which plays with this supposed challenge in the book.

 

The book of Ruth, says Rut Rabba, contains nothing about ritual, nothing about forbidden and permitted. Why then was it written? To teach how great is the reward for gemilut hesed – wanton acts of kindness.[1]

 

Why would you do something for no reward?

The Rabbis consider Gemilut Hesed not just a nice thing to do, but a religious, a godly, thing to do.

Here is another Midrash, another Rabbinic teaching on gemilut hesed, from the collection Yalkut Shimoni

Anyone who is Gomel Hesed, it is as if they accept all the miracles which the Holy Blessed One has done since bringing Israel out from Egypt, and one who does not Gomel Hesed is like one who denies the existence of the Divine.[2]

 

That’s a stunning idea.

The idea that if you do something for someone with no thought for what is in it for you, when you do something out of love, out of a sense of Hesed you are in some sense accepting the notion of God,

who placed this possibility of love in the human soul

who justifies all acts of love in ways beyond human fathom

and who demands from us these acts of love.

 

Try this as a definition of God – God is the begetter of the possibility of Gemilut Hesed –

God is that which elevates our lives beyond the level of reciprocity.

I think that’s stunning.

That’s the God I believe in.

 

I began by mentioning Matt Ridley’s book The Origins of Virtue.

Virtue in Ridley’s book has nothing in common with Hesed.

Rather the book documents a sort of evolutionary principle which explains how humans and animals alike end up doing things which appear to be non-selfish.

The book documents how doing which appear on the surface to be non-selfish ultimately rewards and turns out to be in our best interests.

Ridley’s virtue involves acting selfishly, but with a slightly longer term perspective than one might at first expect.

The book is not theological, it’s not about love, it’s not about Chesed.

I mentioned I would return to Matt Ridley, he came to prominence in 2007 when he resigned as Chairman of Northern Rock Bank. That’s right they made an evolutionary biologist who believed the pursuit of self-interest was the same thing as pursuing virtue the Chairman of a bank.

And when it turned out that the Bank had done exactly what Ridley would have expected, and gone bankrupt and dragged half the city of London down in its wake, some were surprised.

Certainly MPs, leader writers and the rest of them were quick to point a finger at Ridley who resigned in disgrace.

But what else could one have expected.

If you confuse self-interest with virtue you can justify all sorts of economic lunacy.

I don’t mean to belittle self-interest. Of course it a necessary part of life.

And the book is certainly a terrific read.

 

It’s fascinating to understand why fish exist in schools.

It’s an extraordinary act of scientific discovery to unpack how meerkats work out how to avoid predators or how flocks of doves can fight off a hawk.

But these biological truths have nothing to do with virtue.

If you want to understand virtue you would do a lot better reading the Book of Ruth.

 

What can I offer you? Says Naomi.

Where you go I will go – says Ruth.

I have nothing to offer you - Naomi.

Where you stay, I will stay – says Ruth

 

The things we do for those we love.

The things we do for our children, for the members of our family, for our friends, even the things we do for mere acquaintances and most especially the things we do for the stranger in our midst, the things we do with no thought of reward, these are the markers of virtue.

 

This, Max, is the test of whether, as you grow and develop you will be a virtuous man.

Will you do things for others with no thought as to what is in it for you.

This is the test of virtuousness for all of us.

Gemilut Hesed is more than being nice.

Gemilut Hesed is the test of our humanity – the extent to which we, as humans -  beings created with a soul, beings created in the image of God -  transcend the life nasty brutish and short.

 

It’s one of the deepest and most central teachings of our faith.

When we look out at the world and you look to make decisions as to how to expend your energies and your resources, do we plot what is in it for me, or do we reach beyond the reciprocal, to the true level of virtue of love and Gemilut Hesed.

This is the test,

May we rise to meet it and triumph in the love and kindness we can pour into the world.

 

Shabbat shalom

 

---

[1] II:14

[2] Shoftim 64

Aharei Mot - The Spinoza Problem and David Hartman's Living Covenant

 

I read two books on holiday.

Both a great read.

Feel a bit like a school kids – doing a book report, but this is important.

Central to classic insight into the opening of this week’s Parasha

 

Acharei Mot – Aron called to go back in to the Holy of Holies, to perform divine service after the death of his sons.

Just a couple of weeks ago, after an unimaginable loss.

Divine response.

Get on with it.

Not allowed to mourn, not allowed to even show fear retunring  to the scene of every parent’s deepest terror.

Divine service trump personal emotion, personality.

Image of God as the oppressor, riding roughshod over the individual.

It ain’t easy to be holy, it takes sacrifice and surrender to some remote incomprehensible set of demands.

It ain’t easy, but actually it’s also downright unpleasant and if not immoral then resolutely unsympathetic in the most technical sense – uninterested in the pain suffered by the individual.

 

As a theology

At the heart of one of the most important works of C19 Christian and C20 Jewish thought

Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling.

Soloveitchik, Lonely Man of Faith, surrender

When God calls to Abraham to offer Isaac, Abraham’s role is to suppress his own feelings, whatever moral, ethical or certainly personal qualms and submit himself to his faith.

This is certainly what is requested / demanded of Aaron, but how representative is this tough, unsympathetic remote religious attitude as a marker of what Judaism is all about?

 

And this brings me to the first book I read on holiday.

Psychiatrist and author Irving Yarom – The Spinoza Problem

Novelisation of Spinoza’s life in Amsterdam, stunningly interwoven with the story of Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi ideologue.

Terrific book, but let me focus on this central idea.

For Spinoza, especially in Yarom’s hands, religion – Judaism, is just rough unsympathetic thing we recognise from demands made of Aron Acharei Mot – after the death of his two sons.

Remote, inaccessible, demanding with no attempt to meet or even care for the opinions of a mere mortal.

And Spinoza, in Yarom’s hands, rejects this Judaism. He rejects the superstition that locates religious obligation in some remote mystery.

Spinoza, in Yarom’s hands, believes that God couldn’t care less about so many of the things that the Rabbis of his own day demanded in the name of Judaism, he believed that the Rabbis were more interested in vouchsafing their own power and ability to control the mere mortals of the Jewish community they said they served, but in fact they manipulated to suit their own ends.

The Jewish community of Amsterdam in the mid C17 are subjected by Yarom to a Marxist read – they wield power for their ends, constructing a Judaism of strictness, closed-mindedness and demanding only submission.

Religion, Judaism, portrayed, by Yarom’s portrayal of Spinoza, is all about the remote, oppressive, unsympathetic imposition of expectations, riding roughshod over personal qualms, equivocations, morals and ethics.

 

I meet a lot of people who agree. And, perhaps not unsurprisingly the people who agree that the bleak picture painted by Spinoza is the nature of Judaism have very little to do with Judaism. Well they might turn up to Shul a couple of times a year. They might even keep current their membership of this community, but they will never let Judaism near their heart. Indeed why should they?

And if Spinoza could detect and reject the supernaturalism in the 1650s, then how much the more so we in this glitteringly post-modern, post-discovery of this that and the other contemporary society should also keep Judaism far from our souls.

If this is what Judaism is, then I reject it also.

But this isn’t what Judaism is.

Brings me to the second book I read on holiday.

Actually I reread it.

David Hartman’s ‘A Living Covenant’

He died only recently, just this year. This is Aharei Mot, so I reread the work as my own tribute Aharei Mot – after he passed away.

I last read this book in 1998 and re-encountering it I was struck by how much of what I still hold utterly central to my Judaism was inspired by Hartman.

 

Notion of covenant that interests Hartman is one which entails a meeting between God and Jew. God gets to make calls on us, and we get to make calls upon God. This isn’t a gift, it’s a sacred obligation.

Hartman reads the story of Noah against the story of Abraham.

Noah accepts God’s decree – God says will destroy, Noah should build an ark.

Noah builds the ark and watches on as God destroys.

For Hartman this is a failure.

Noah doesn’t get to be the father of Judaism.

The covenant made with Noah isn’t THE covenant which really, in Jewish eyes counts, determines and perpetuates the nature of Judaism.

Instead it’s Abraham who becomes the father and the one who defines Judaism. And it’s the covenant made with Abraham that defines the nature of Judaism.

Abraham who argues against destruction of Sodom and Gemorah

Abraham who walks in-front of God, in one Midrash cited by Hartman, Abraham who illuminates the way for a God who is stuck in darkness and can’t see without the leadership provided by the Jew.

Hartman collects a host of Rabbinic commentaries proving how dear this active, defining of what Judaism is, is to God.

Hartman takes his own teacher, Soloveitchik, to task. Soloveitchik who suggests that the offer of Isaac is the high point of Abrahams’ life – it’s more complex than that says Hartman, it’s not undiluted heroism, it’s dangerous and, if its possible to say such a thing, unJewish.

Hartman - The binding of Isaac ‘threatens covenantal adequacy because it seems to exclude ethics from religious consciousness’

And Judaism could never abandons ethics from the religious consciousness, it can never abandon the human, because Judaism is about a covenant – and that means humans and God meeting if not on equal terms, then at least both bringing of themselves to this conversation.

For Hartman, for me, Judaism is not narrowly about surrender to the remote supernatural at the total expense of the person.

It’s a debate, it’s an unfolding narrative, there is give and take on both sides.

 

Hartman tells the story of Tanor Shel Akhnai, God enters a debate between two groups of Rabbis and finds himself on the losing side.

This is what God desires

‘Talmud liberates the intellect’ says Hartman

It frees us to pursue the moral, the better, to keep refining and reshaping in search of ever more sophistication.

That’s what it means to be a Jew.

That’s what it means to be parties to a Covenant, as opposed to pansies,

The Jew is not some kind of Aunt Sally constructed to be the butt of divine capriciousness.

The failure of Soloveitchik is that he hasn’t taken enough notice of the human – the possibility, the insight, the potential which is surely God given – we are built this way for a purpose.

We are built this way to push, to improve, to create, innovate.

We are never to yield to the immoral, the unsympathetic.

The failure of Yarom’s Spinoza, by a similar token is he’s allowed Judaism to be defined by things he doesn’t believe in.

Judaism is great enough to handle Spinoza – to be fair Yarom captures this in a terrific scene when the Rabbi who is to place Spinoza in exile desperately tries to recruit him for a life of Talmudic study. It’s an attempt that failed, but it’s predicated on the basis that if Spinoza was able to find the space within Judaism for his own brilliance he could have been a force for renewal and growth.

 

Great problem Judaism has had with modernity is not that it can’t cope with modernity.

Of course it can cope with modernity, of course Judaism can thrive as it engages with modernity.

The great problem Judaism has with modernity is that hasn’t had faith in its own ability to cope.

This is what Hartman tries to address, time and time again.

Don’t allow Judaism to be painted as brittle, reliant on superstition and Marxist-style rabbinic power grabs.

Celebrate Judaism’s true soul – its innovative spirit, it’s power to regenerate in each and every generation, to remain current, vital and powerful.

That’s why we should let Judaism into our souls, to shape us and move us as we shape and move it.

That’s what it means to be part of what Hartman calls the Living Covenant.

That’s my message today.

Don’t allow Judaism to be painted as brittle, reliant on superstition and Marxist-style rabbinic power grabs.

Celebrate Judaism’s true soul – its innovative spirit, its power to regenerate in each and every generation, to remain current, vital and powerful.

 

When I took my fifteen year old copy of the book off the shelf I found a note I wrote to myself on the frontispiece.

I wrote it before I was a Rabbi, before I even began formal Rabbinic education, but I feel it as much today as I did then.

‘I am not prepared to have a theology which doesn’t allow me to be a Jew.’ I wrote in 1998.

That’s the point.

It’s also, for what it is worth, the life’s work of the founding Rabbi of this community, Rabbi Louis Jacobs of blessed memory.

It remains the core and heart of my own rabbinic endeavours. None of us should be ‘prepared to have a theology which doesn’t allow us to be a Jew.’

 

 

 

Shabbat shalom

 

To Be A Chazan / Hazan / Hazzan

In my weekly words, at this time, I am looking at the original meaning of three terms; Shaliach Tzibur, Hazan and Baal Tefillah. Last week's discussion of the Shaliach Tzibur can be found at http://rabbionanarrowbridge.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/how-to-be-shaliach-tzibur.html.

 

To understand the term Hazan, one needs to rewind to a time when Judaism was based around Temple service and the Priestly caste. In Mishnah Tamid ‘Hazan’ is the title given to the person responsible for assisting the Priests with their ritual garments and looking after the Temple utensils (some scholars say the term is related to the Arabic Khazin = treasure keeper). As Judaism evolves beyond Temple-based ritual, the role remains one of facilitation, rather than being the centre around and through whom all ritual service flowed. The Chazan was in charge of the lamps of the Synagogue (YT Shabbat) and was responsible for bringing out the Torah scrolls and rolling them to the correct place for ritual reading (M Sotah). 

 

The earliest references to the Hazan as prayer leader come in the post-Islamic Pirkei Rebbi Eliezer and the fringe/post Talmudic work Masechet Soferim (5th-6th Century). In its earliest and original  usage the term meant the servant of the community's ritual needs – it’s closer to the contemporary terms Shamash and Gabbai.

 

The point, I think, is this. The Hazan's job is to facilitate divine service performed by others. It's not to perform this service 'vicariously.' It's not to remove others from their own direct involvement in turning towards God. There are many different forms of leadership. The most holy of leaders, however, are not those who dazzle so mightily that they stun us into obeisance but those who draw out from those led more commitment, more integrity and more decency than we knew we possessed. The best leaders make us more than we thought we could be, not less. This is the quality of leadership we seek from our next Hazan.

 

 

How to be a Shaliach Tzibur

In honour of our guest Chazanim, this week and in two weeks time, I want to share what I understand by this beautiful and challenging role.

 

There are really three terms that are used in our tradition in describing this task; Shaliach Tzibur, Baal Tefilah and Chazan. This week I will focus on the first. Shaliach – from the Hebrew term for sending, or message. Tizbur – from the Hebrew term for community. The Shaliach Tzibur is the messenger of the community. The standards of a Shaliach Tzibur are detailed in the legal codes of our tradition.

 

The Shulchan Arukh (basing itself on a passage in the Talmud) states;

The Shliach Tzibur must be appropriate. What is appropriate? They should be free of sin, and there must never have been ugly gossip spoken about them, not even in their childhood. They should be humble and desired by their community. They must look nice and have a pleasant voice and they must regularly read from the Torah, Prophets and Writings.

The Mishnah Brurah adds:

They should be first into the Synagogue and last out, nor should they be foolish or frivolous, rather they should be able to speak of the needs of the community.

OH 53:5

 

It’s a list that is so impossible as to be almost humorous. Who could possibly cope with such a weight of expectation? ‘The Torah was not given to angels’ teaches the Talmud (Meilah 14a) in more understanding mood. An aim of perfection is a waste of breath. So it’s no surprise to see the Shulchan Arukh (following the Talmud) going on to say;

And if you can’t find one who has all these qualities, choose the best of the community in matters of wisdom and good deeds.

 

The point is that we should want to be represented by the best we can manage and being the best is not purely about singing prowess or even encyclopaedic knowledge of matters of ritual and liturgy. It’s about someone wise and kind and perhaps, most insightfully, ‘someone able to speak of the needs of the community.’ Rebbe Nachman of Breslav teaches that the Shaliach Tzibur has to collect up all the points of goodness in the community and array them before God. The Shaliach Tzibur has to become invested in the community as the community becomes invested in them.

 

As I wrote earlier this week, this is an important Shabbat for us. I urge the community to make every effort to come and be part of it; on Friday night and Sunday morning as well as, of course, Shabbat morning. Also, all are welcome at my home for the Seudah Shlishit – 5:30pm on Saturday. Then please share your perspectives on our candidates using the on-line survey, which will go live on Saturday evening, remaining open until midnight Tuesday.  http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/5STQFKR

 

Shabbat Shalom

 

Rabbi Jeremy

 

Yom HaShoah - No Place on Earth

'No Place on Earth' is a new film detailing extraordinary acts of heroism and survival. For over 17 months Sol Wexler, Ester Sterner and some 35 members of their families survived the Nazis by hiding in gypsum caves in the Ukraine. Their first cave was discovered, the second was almost impenetrable, but prone to cave-ins. A man would stand with an axe near the tiny hole where people would drop in. If they didn't say the password, their legs would be chopped off as they dangled. In this manner they survived observing Yom Kippur and struggling to differentiate Soviet and German shelling.

 

The film is the work of a caver who, thought he was investigating never-before visited caves, but found mundane articles, muddy keys and the like, in the cave he was exploring. These objects were nearly lost forever, just like the survivors. Frankly, just like all of us.

 

Sunday is Yom HaShoah.

I will be sharing some teaching in the name of the 'Warsaw Ghetto Rebbe' during the Shabbat morning services and we will have the memorial prayer, but we won't be holding a dedicated Yom HaShoah event this year. That's a source of shame, especially as it becomes ever more important to remember, educate and tell this and so many, many other horrific and sometimes even inspiring stories of loss and survival. I urge all our members to take a moment to pause this Sunday, to share reflections with other and to engage with other commemorations.

There is information on a number of commemorations, including the National Yom HaShoah Commemoration in Hyde Park at

http://www.yomhashoah.org.uk/events

 

There is more information on 'No Place on Earth' at http://www.noplaceonearthfilm.com/ I was alerted to the film by

http://www.timesofisrael.com/saved-from-the-nazis-in-the-caves-of-the-ukraine/

 

Song of Songs - On the Subject of Love

On the subject of love ...

 

My thanks to everyone who helped our Pesach celebrations be so wonderful. We go again, with Yom Tov services beginning Sunday night and through Monday and Tuesday (when we will have a Yizkor service). If there are members who can take this opportunity to support the praying community of the Synagogue at this time I would be grateful.

 

Each of the festivals in the Jewish year is associated with a Megillah. For Pesach it is the Song of Songs and we will be reading Chapter 5 as part of our Shabbat services this week.

 

The Song of Songs – and chapter 5 most explicitly – is almost uncomfortably erotic, deeply sensual and laden with sexuality. It’s read, in the Rabbinic tradition, as an allegory of the relationship between God and Israel. God is the heroic male lover, ‘radiant and ruddy, his locks are wavy and black as a raven...  His arms are rods of gold set with beryl, his body polished ivory adorned with sapphires...’ Israel is the blushing female, ‘I am asleep, but my heart is awake. Listen I hear my beloved knocking.’  It’s a tale of youthful passion, full of lust and anticipation. What I want to do in this note is read the classic allegory slightly differently, less as a generalised relationship between Israel and God, and more as the Pesach-related moment in Biblical time, when God takes Israel out of Mitzrayim with a strong hand and an outstretched arm.

Pesach – and the first moments of journey into the Midbar - can certainly be read as an intense tale of youthful passion; there is heat aplenty, God leaps into action to defend the honour of his abused lover, showering the maiden with gifts and mighty demonstrations of His own prowess and might – wiping out Egypt, splitting the sea and so on. But this kind of love is the beginning of the relationship, not the end. In fact the relationship sours. Israel’s attention wanders off in search of sparkly golden idols and God becomes angry, violent and destructive. The relationship never settles into maturity. Jack Miles, in his wonderful ‘God: A Biography’ tells the story of God as the protagonist of the Bible, so hot-headed that, unable to accept the failures in His chosen lover, that He would rather simply retreat than stick around as a cuckolded – the Bible ends with God increasingly aloof and apart.

 

The psychologist and author Eric Fromm talks about the relationship between falling in love, which he derisorily labels ‘lust’ and being in love – which is deems far more significant. Fromm rejects that love is magical and mysterious and promotes, instead a love which is hard fought for through respect, taking responsibility, humility and discipline. It requires a certain self-love and self-knowledge and the commitment to accept the other in everything which they represent. It’s harder work, less immediate, less full of bright heat and more full of warmth.

 

Love takes work, whether it be God’s love of us or our love of God, whether it be our relationship with those we love, or their relationship with love. The passion and heat of the Song of Songs makes for great poetry, but not necessarily a life of commitment, mutual support and intimacy.

 

Shabbat shalom,

 

Moadim L’Simchah

 

 

Reish Lakish and Believing and Not Believing at the Same Time

So this is an article I wrote a while ago, published in Conservative Judaism, but HT Josh Yuter has just brought to my attention another case of Reish Lakish being able to both believe and not believe in something.

In Eruvin 19a he’s describing Gehinom, but in Nedarim 8b he says it doesn’t exist.

http://www.joshyuter.com/2012/05/23/podcasts/rabbinic-thought-and-theology/ep-68-rabbinic-thought-and-theology-3-gehenom-hell/

 

 

Reish Lakish, Truth & Meaning in the Rabbinic Period

 

The small child knows that the sky is blue. There is someone, with a brush and pot of blue paint, daubing the canvas of the heavens.

 

The teenager knows that the sky is, quite categorically, NOT blue, rather the sky’s colour is a function of reflection and refraction. With equal conviction the teenager knows that those who claim blueness for the sky are perpetrating a trick, a deceit on those who know no better. There are those who never leave the world of the teenager.

 

Then there are those who appreciate the blueness of the sky as a truth beyond the claims of science. These less literal souls claim that, through appreciating the blueness of the sky, we can come to understand other truths about the world. They are not drawn into the nit-picking atomistic tendencies of the teenager, they accept the scientific realities of the world, but science neither deadens their soul, nor leads them to treat other truth claims with cynicism. This is what James Fowler would call the Fifth Stage of Faith, one where a reader feels a ‘post-critical desire to resubmit to the [appeal] of the symbolic.’[i] Paul Ricouer called it ‘second naïveté’[ii] a willingness to appreciate poetic truth in myth, aware of scientific pulls in other directions.

 

Most readers of this journal surely recognize Fowler’s Fifth Stage. The adult, self-aware approach to truth claims is one the Masorti Movement, Conservative Judaism, has made its own; whether considering claims of Biblical ‘history’ or theology Masorti Jews are drawn to this adult stage of faith. But this paper is not concerned with whether contemporary Masorti Jews accept truth claims in a non-literalist manner, but whether the rabbis of our tradition did so. If we find that the rabbis believed with the literalist approach of a child (there is someone, with a brush and pot of blue paint, daubing the canvas of the heavens), their claims must surely be rejected as facile, disproved, childish even. However if the rabbis can be shown to have believed with a post-critical awareness, with a poetic approach to truth claims, their approach can remain valid and authentic even in the modern period.

 

At issue is the question of whether the Masorti Movement is doing something radically new in rejecting literal truth claims, or merely making explicit what the tradition has always known – that many truth claims should be understood as a poetic or mythic truths, not a literal ones. It is, of course, an impossible question, not least since any sentence that begins, ‘The rabbis believed X’ is doomed to collapse under the weight of different rabbinic opinions in different periods and places and even within one Bet Midrash. Moreover the rabbis simply didn’t reflect on their own literary output in the manner of a contemporary literary critic. They (almost) never defined or commented on the nature of their interpretive style, they simply got on with it.

 

Instead of attempting the impossible this paper takes a very narrow perspective; one rabbi, and seeks to demonstrate that, at least here, there are strong grounds for seeing his truth claims as self-consciously Fifth Stage.  The approach is not without danger; it would be wrong to treat every recorded rabbinic utterance as an accurate historical record of a once-heard conversation, but despite this methodological concern and the narrow range of enquiry a picture emerges that is, nonetheless, worthy of remark.

 

Our story begins with the verses at the end of Parasha Va’yera:

 

And it was after these things that Abraham was told, ‘Milcah too has borne children to your brother Nahor: Uz the first-born, and Buz his brother, and Kemuel the father of Aram and … Bethuel.’ Bethuel being the father of Rebekah.[iii]

 

These Biblical verses are easily skipped over. Not only do they lack narrative punch of the tales of the binding of Isaac (immediately prior) and the news of the death of Sarah (immediately subsequent), they are also ignored by a significant rabbinic tradition that joins the two tales that surround them;

 

The death of Sarah is placed directly after the story of the binding because, as a result of hearing the news of the binding – that her son had been due for slaughter, even if he hadn’t been slaughtered – her soul flew from her and she died. [iv]

 

The straightforward intent of these oft-ignored verses is clear, they provide the genealogy that heralds the birth of Rebecca, who comforts the almost-slain Isaac after the death of his mother. But the rabbis notice something else, these apparently dull verses open with the words;

 

And it was after these things that Abraham was told.

 

The last time this phrase (or one almost identical to it) opened a Biblical passage Abraham was told to take his son and offer him as a sacrifice. Last time Abraham rose to the challenge, but now, in the eyes of the rabbis, he can’t take it any more.

 

There was a balking [hirhurei devarim hayu sham]. Who balked? Abraham balked... He was afraid of suffering. But the Holy Blessed One said to him, ‘There’s no need to worry, the one who is going to receive the suffering of the world has already been born, [as the Bible states in the midst of the genealogy that heralds Rebecca] ‘and his first born Utz.’

When was Job alive? Reish Lakish, in the name of Bar Kapara, claims in the time of Abraham, as the Bible tells us that Utz was born in the time of Abraham and the book of Job opens, ‘There was a man in the land. Utz Job was his name.’ (Job 1:1)[v]

 

‘Not again, God,’ one can almost hear the beleaguered patriarch, ‘haven’t I had enough suffering?’ ‘Not to worry,’ replies God, ‘you won’t have to suffer any further, rather Utz, also known as Job, will pick up the suffering that you are afraid of.’

 

The opening verse of the Book of Job is universally understood as ‘There was a man in the Land of Utz, Job was his name.’ This Midrash, however, flagrantly disregards such niceties. Instead Reish Lakish suggests that Job lived in The Land (i.e. Israel) and that Job was one of two names by which our protagonist was known.[vi]

 

Putting aside any concern as to contextual literal interpretation (pshat) – this statement of Reish Lakish launches a rabbinic game. A succession of rabbis conjure up a biblical verse and use it to locate Job in the generation of Dina, or the sons of Jacob, or Moses, or the Chaldeans or the Queen of Sheba or even the time of Esther. In a related text (TB BB 15a-b) there are yet more claims; Job lived in the time of the spies, in the time of the Judges, in the time of David …

 

From anything approaching a historical-critical perspective the proofs brought for these varied claims are laughable, but treating the rabbis’ literary proofs as literal or historical truth claims misses the point. The point is the literary game. This kind of midrash is a rabbinic workout, the rabbis are demonstrating their extraordinary familiarity with the Bible and are flexing exegetical muscles.[vii] Johan Huizinga coined the term homo ludens to refer to a ‘man [of ancient times who] seeks to account for the world of phenomenon by grounding it in … wild imaginings of mythology, a fanciful spirit … playing on the borderline between jest and earnest.’[viii] This, then, is rabbi as ish ludens, an investigator who pursues truth through a particular form of play.

 

Up to this point we have a not untypical midrash. We could perhaps make the claim, based on the playful way in which the rabbis treat finding an era for Job, that none of them considers they are dealing with a historical figure, but this midrash goes a good deal further.

 

Rabbi Shimon Ben Lakish claimed, ‘Job never existed, he was never created’ [lo hayah v’lo nivra]

 

It is almost as if a curtain has been pulled back. The mythical, poetic and literary truth of Job, in the minds of this Rabbi Shimon, has been made explicit. The truth of Job becomes the truth of fiction, the truth of Hamlet or Lear, not the truth of history or biography. And most shockingly the very rabbi who pulls back the curtain and announces the mythological nature of Job is the same Reish Lakish who, moments earlier, and with a slightly different appellation, opened the game by locating Job in the time of Abraham. The rabbis certainly point out Reish Lakish’s apparent contradiction and suggest that there was indeed a historical Job only his sufferings were not historical, but this seems half-hearted. Rather, it seems clear that Reish Lakish knew what he was doing and felt no compunction in doing it openly.

 

In the parallel Talmudic attempt to answer the question, ‘When was Job?’ this second statement of Reish Lakish is rendered, ‘one of the rabbis sitting before Rabbi Shimon Nahmani said, “Job never existed, was never created, rather he is a parable [mashal].”’(BT BB 15a) In Bereishit Rabba the drawing back of the curtain is announced with a change in appellation (from Reish Laksih to Rabbi Shimon), in the Talmud the identity of this bold almost-heretic is excised altogether, but the statement nonetheless receives the imprimatur of inclusion in the rabbinic canon. The anonymous editorial voice of the Talmud attempts to demonstrate that Job cannot be a parable since his name and that of his town is mentioned, but, again, the rejection is hardly convincing and Reish Lakish’s claim retains its power.

 

Reish Lakish seems comfortable in Fowler’s ‘Fifth Stage,’ able to make playful claims about the truth of Job, without feeling constrained by historicity or notions of literal reality. And there are other moments which come close to the sort of explicit acceptance of the Fifth Stage position taken in Bereshit Rabba. He can be considered the Talmud’s archetypal ish ludens.[ix] Most noticeable is a short passage, in the continuation of the passage in Baba Batra referenced earlier.

 

Reish Lakish said; ‘Satan, the Evil Inclination and the Angel of Death are one and the same.’[x]

 

It is as if our protagonist is trying to arrest a charge towards some kind of childish theological pilpul – sophistry. The reader is not supposed to distil the various chaotic forces active in this world into different quasi-historical characters, rather these bogeymen are to be considered symbols, each pointing at the same darker force within the Universe. According to Reish Lakish the existence of Satan and his colleagues is real, but only in a symbolic sense, they have no literal intrinsic reality. By acknowledging this poesy, the reader is urged to channel their energies into combating the deeper reality Satan and company represent. We are drawn away from worrying whether any literal foe might be hiding under the bed ready, like a cartoon character, to pounce on an unsuspecting fool. It is fashionable to dismiss poetic truths as somehow weaker, less powerful, than literal ones. But, in this instance, Reish Lakish’s explicit disavowal of a literal Satan, as distinct to a literal Angel of Death, feels more powerful than the theological pilpul he seeks to arrest. The poetic understanding is more truthful than the literal one.

 

An awareness of Reish Lakish’s sense of poesy also helps unlock a potentially confusing moment of Halachic discourse in, perhaps, his most famous Talmudic appearance. Our hero is a brigand, a man of violence. According to Talmud Bavli Gittin 47a he ‘sold his soul to the Ludai’ (some scholars suggest that the use of the root LUD, refers to the Latin, ludo suggesting not that his masters came from Lydia but rather they hired and trained gladiators),[xi] only to subsequently kill his captors with a makeshift brass knuckles and make good his escape. He is turned towards a world of Torah study by Rabbi Yohanan in a dramatic encounter in the Jordan River. Time passes and Reish Lakish becomes a great rabbi. The Talmudic narrative, however, continues immediately with the following exchange;

 

One day [Reish Lakish and Rabbi Yohanan] were arguing in the Study Hall.

‘When do swords, knives, daggers, spears, hand-saws and sickles become susceptible to receiving ritual impurity?’

‘Once their manufacture is completed.’

‘And when is their manufacture completed?’

Rabbi Yochanan said, ‘when they come out of the furnace used for smelting.’

Reish Lakish said, ‘when they come out of the water used for polishing.’[xii]

 

 

The shift to Halachah feels sudden, coming, as it does, directly after the high drama of Reish Lakish’s epiphany in the waters. Moreover it is redundant; both parties seeming to miss the authoritative Mishnah (Kelim 14:5) which gives a different answer to either rabbi.[xiii] It is surely fair to ask what could lead Reish Lakish to feel that a sword is only ‘completed’ if it emerges from the water as a weapon of violence? With our understanding of his poetic sensibility it is clear that Reish Lakish sees himself as the violent weapon, but not one that was ever ‘completed in its work.’ In other words Reish Lakish believes that individuals with dark pasts, violent weapons, are always capable of being redeemed by water. He is arguing about his own life journey. Again, understanding the poetic nature of Reish Lakish’s truth claims strengthens the power of his contributions. Rejecting the notion that this is literally an argument about metalwork, at least for Reish Lakish, helps us understand why he is so mortified by Rabbi Yochanan’s response to his claim.

 

            ‘Trust a brigand to know the ways of a brigand’

 

Rabbi Yochanan has missed the point. He thinks Reish Lakish is arguing from a position of expertise about literal swords, knives and daggers. Rabbi Yochanan can’t understand Reish Lakish’s sense of poetics and in doing so he drags our hero’s sense of self out of the Bet Midrash and back into the company of thieves. Reish Lakish’s entire rabbinic identity crumbles away, he ‘is weakened’ the Talmud tells us, and shortly thereafter ‘his soul passes away.’ Poetic truth claims have tremendous power; they cannot be disregarded as the playthings of a wordsmith.

 

Finally we come to Reish Lakish’s understanding of the moment of Sinai. Was revelation, for Reish Lakish, a literal or a poetic moment? In the context of what has come before the answer seems obvious.

 

Reish Lakish said that at the time Moses wrote the Torah he received a facial radiance [lit. ziv hapanim, see Exodus 34:29]. How did this happen? Reish Lakish said that Torah was given to Moses on a scroll of white fire and was carved with black fire, and the Torah was fire enwrapped with fire. While writing [Moses, at a certain point,] dried the reed on his hair, and from this he received a radiance.[xiv]

 

This text, about Sinaitic revelation,[xv] has to be poesy, indeed even to say so courts redundancy. Did Reish Lakish believe in revelation as a moment of

divine dictation? Yes, but equally clearly the way he believed was as a poet, not as a journalist or historian. There is nothing in this captivating and provocative text that suggests it should be understood as a literal truth claim. Indeed given what we know about Reish Lakish’s relationship to poesy one might even argue that to understand this midrash as a literal truth claim betrays a certain childishness. After all when an adult takes a poetic claim as a literal truth they demonstrate not piety, but foolery.

 

According to Reish Lakish Moses did indeed take dictation from the Holy Blessed One, but only as a matter of poetry, not history. But that doesn’t make the claim nonsense, rather it functions as a challenge; the reader is asked, ‘what is the deeper truth the symbol of Moses’ penmanship points towards?’

 

Rejecting poetic truth claims as if they are childish errors is an erroneous and ultimately sad contemporary response to a proud and ancient religious tradition. A person who rejects self-consciously poetic truth claims on the mistaken basis that they were meant to be literal claims risks losing the vibrancy and texture of their spiritual inheritance. Without poetic truth claims the sky can seem very drab indeed.

 

Rabbi Jeremy Gordon was ordained and received a Masters in Midrash at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He is rabbi of St. Albans Masorti Synagogue, England, and teaches Midrash at Leo Baeck College in London.

 

---

[i] James Fowler, Stages of Faith (San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1981), p.187.

[ii] See  inter alia, The Symbolism of Evil, (New York, Buchanan Beacon Press, 1969), pp. 351-352.

[iii] Genesis 22:20-23. Based on the NJPS translation, all other translations are author’s own.

[iv] Rashi, Gen 23.2

[v] Bereishit Rabba 57:4. The latter part of this translation is non-literal, to aid comprehension.

[vi] I am grateful to Yuval Keren of Leo Baeck College for this insight.

[vii] The flexing of exegetical muscles was not just a regular practice of the rabbis, but a divinely sanctioned one.  For example: ‘The Rabbis accused Ben Azzai of mystical speculation and he responds, ‘I am connecting [lit. mahriz] verses from the Torah to the Prophets and from the Prophets to the Writings,’ and a flame was burning all around him.’ (Vayikra’ Rabba 16:4, Margoliot ed. p.254 and notes there).

[viii] Homo Ludens: The Sociology of Culture, (London, Routledge, 2003, first published 1949) p. 4-5.

[ix] There is something fitting in it being Reish Lakish who steps forward as the clearest example of ish ludens in the rabbinic period, after all ‘Reish Lakish sold himself to games’ players [ludai]’ (BT Gittin 47a). This last text will be given a related but slightly refocused read infra. Other possible candidates for this title of ish ludens include Rabbi Yehudah and Rabbi Nehemia. It is Yehudah who, in discussing the re-awakening of the dry bones (Ezekiel 37) comments, ‘It is truth and parable’ [emet mashal hayah]. Rabbi Nehemia responds, ‘If it’s a truth why call it a parable, and if it’s a parable why call it truth, rather a parable is like truth.’ [k’emet mashal hayah] (TB Sanhedrin 92b). Subsequently, however, Rabbi Yehudah ben Bateyrah attempts to reject the claim that Ezekiel is best understood as poesy, ‘I am one of their descendents,’ he claims, ‘and here are the tefilin that were left for me by … one of them.’ This pattern is reminiscent of the rejection of the historical application of the stubborn and rebellious son, the idolatrous city and the affliction of a house, and the subsequent rejection of these rejections by Rabbi Yonatan who claims to have sat on the grave of a stoned child and among the ruins of a destroyed city (TB Sanhedrin 71a).

[x] TB Baba Batra 16a

[xi] See Jastrow, Dictionary ,p. 695, see also Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p.128 f3 where Rabbi Bun's remark in Talmud Yerushalmi Kilayim 27a, ‘and here Rav Kahana spread his net over Reish Lakish and caught him’ is understood to refer to a gladiatorial fighting style.

[xii] Talmud Bavli BM 84a, the last part of the translation is non-literal to aid translation. See Jastrow, Dictionary p.1273 entry tzachtzach. The author is indebted to Boyarin, loc cit, for his insight into this well-known story.

[xiii] See however ad loc. Tosafot DHM Hasakin and Hidushei HaRitba ad loc. citing Tosefta Kelim, BM 3:10 which rescue this seeming oversight with a deft piece of rabbinics.

[xiv] Devarim Rabba 3:12, Ekev 12 DHM beit hahi. References to a Torah of fire can also be found in statements of Reish Lakish in TY Shekalim 6:1 49d, with parallels TY Sotah 8:3 22d and Shir Rabba 5:15. The image of Moses wiping the fire of Torah on his hair also appears, again in the name of Reish Lakish, in Shmot Rabba 47:6.

[xv] In TY Sotah the specification ‘to Moses’ is absent, but it is clear from context that this text, like all other parallels in the rabbinic period, refers to revelation – Sinaitic Torah. In the rabbinic period the image of black and white fire is not used to refer to the cosmological Torah – blueprint for the Universe – described in Bereshit Rabba 1:1. It is only in the Geonic period that the late collection Midrash Tanhuma applies the image to the cosmological Torah  (Bereishit 1). It may be that the image is more widely encountered in the context of creation than revelation, but creation is a secondary locus for this, primarily Sinaitic, image.