The lions and unicorns of Kodshim were far more appealing to me than the detailed anatomical diagrams of gullets and gizzards that filled the back pages of the illustrated edition of Hullin that I’d purchased to help me make sense of the rabbinic conversation. Hullin deals with kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws stipulated in the Bible. Jews are permitted to eat many kinds of animals, so long as they are properly slaughtered in accordance with Jewish ritual law. It is not kashrut that dictates my vegetarianism, but rather a general minimalist tendency. I like to get by on less, and this has become not just a principle of economy but of aesthetics too. The laws of kashrut appeal to me because they limit what we can and cannot eat, reducing the overwhelming number of choices out there. Vegetarianism takes this one step further. The world is enough with beans and grains and chocolate; I do not need hamburgers too. Besides, at least according to Rav Nahman’s wife, Yalta, everything that is forbidden has a kosher counterpart that tastes just as good (Hullin 109b)—for every bacon there are bacon bits. Yalta gives several examples: it is forbidden to eat pig, but we can eat the shibbuta fish, which tastes similar (though one has to wonder how she knew what pig tastes like); it is forbidden to eat the blood of animals, but we can eat liver. The story ends when the ever-truculent Yalta insists that she wants to taste meat and milk together but can find no kosher equivalent. Thereupon her husband instructs the butchers, “Give her roasted udders.”
Vegetarianism is not kashrut, though many people confuse the two. “Oh, I’m so sorry, I should have cooked the potatoes separately from the meat,” our Shabbat host will apologize. But I have no problem eating potatoes that were cooked with meat; there is no issue of noten ta’am—of a forbidden substance lending its taste to a permitted substance—when it comes to vegetarianism. And I am far more flexible with my vegetarianism than with my kashrut. When it comes to vegetarianism, I have my own mental hierarchy of the increasingly permissible—from fish to chicken to beef. I try to eat the “most vegetarian” option available without inconveniencing myself or my hosts.
My notion of hierarchy is not entirely foreign to the Talmudic sages, who discuss how many “signs” various kinds of living things must have in order to be considered kosher. These signs are essentially anatomical elements that must be severed (Hullin 27b). The hierarchy reflects a primitive evolutionary theory: Animals, which the sages say were created from land, need two signs—both the trachea and the esophagus must be incised. Birds, which were created from swamps (and which the rabbis claim have scales on their feet like fish), need only one sign—either the esophagus or the trachea must be cut. But fish, which were created from water, need no signs; fish may be eaten even without ritual slaughter. My preference is always to eat the food with the fewest signs.
For me, there are so many gustatory pleasures that are not meat—or wine, for that matter, which I eschew for similar reasons. A dark chocolate bar or a steaming cup of coffee are infinitely more appealing than the most expensive cut of lamb. These are simple pleasures, I know. But the Talmud advises that a person should always spend less on food and drink than his means allow and honor his wife and children more than his means allow (Hullin 84b). And so perhaps the rabbis would be sympathetic to my restraint.
As for my children, I prefer to give them the freedom to elect to become vegetarian of their own accord, or not. When they are young, I care most that they see me modeling healthy and respectful eating. In tractate Menahot, which deals with grain offerings, the Talmud references Ben Drosai (Menahot 57a), a highway robber contemporaneous with the early Talmudic sages who was so impulsive that he would grab his meat off the fire before it was fully cooked. When I come home ravenous and I’m inclined to devour all the dried fruit and nuts readily accessible in the cupboard, I remind myself not to eat like Ben Drosai but to stop and sit down like a civilized human being and take pleasure in my food. “Food is kadosh [holy],” I will later tell my son when he tries to throw his supper or leave too much on his plate. I’ll repeat this so many times that when I then take him to synagogue and point to the Torah and tell him it’s kadosh, he’ll look at me earnestly and ask, “Can we eat it?” Still, I find it appropriate that the order of the Talmud that includes the laws of kashrut is known as Kodshim, holy things. The rabbis teach that following the destruction of the Temple, a man’s table resembles the altar (Menahot 97a)—a reminder that in a world without sacrifices, the food that we eat has the potential to bring us close to the sacred.
BECHOROT / ERCHIN / TEMURAH / KERITOT / MEILAH / TAMID / MIDDOT / KINNIM
Poets & Gatekeepers
By the time of our first anniversary, I’d been working at the literary agency for nearly five years, and I was ready for a change. But it was only when I came to a passage in one of the many short tractates at the end of Seder Kodshim that I realized just what that change should be. Amidst a discussion of the roles performed by the various Levites who worked in the Temple, the Talmud (Erchin 11b) distinguishes between the m’shoarin (gatekeepers) and m’shorerin (poets). The gatekeepers were responsible for locking the gates of the Temple and, presumably, for other administrative tasks. The poets were responsible for the vocal music in the Temple: whenever the daily sacrifice was offered, they would provide musical accompaniment. The Bible describes the two as inherited roles that had to be kept distinct. A poet could not perform the duties of a gatekeeper, nor vice versa, as cautioned by the following tale:
A story is told of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hanania who went to help Rabbi Yohanan ben Gudgada with the closing of the gates. Rabbi Yohanan ben Gudgada said to him: My son, turn back! For you are one of the poets and not one of the gatekeepers! (Erchin 11b)
Both of the sages who figure in this story were Levites, members of the tribe of Israel biblically designated to serve in the Temple. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hanania was one of the poets, though in the Talmud he is better known for helping to smuggle his teacher Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai out of Jerusalem in a coffin on the eve of the Temple’s destruction (Gittin 56a). He then became the rabbinic leader of the academy at Yavneh, the site of the Jewish court in the immediate aftermath of the Temple’s destruction. It was he who asserted, “There can be no study house without novel teaching” (Hagigah 3b), perhaps a sign of his own creative bent. Rabbi Yohanan ben Gudgada was a gatekeeper who was known for his strictness about purity matters. Like any good administrator, he liked rules. He was responsible for keeping everyone locked into their particular roles, which explains his rebuke of Rabbi Yehoshua.
This story inspires a rather stern Talmudic injunction about the division of labor in the Temple, warning about m’shorer sheshier u’mshoar she-shorar, a poet who guards and a gatekeeper who composes. This brilliant conjoining of sound and sense—itself a poetic injunction about gatekeeping (or policing) who may do what—refers to someone who fulfills a role that is not his own and is consequently sentenced to death. The rabbis invoke a biblical verse in which the term “stranger” is used to refer to any non-Levite who encroached on the sanctuary. According to the rabbis’ creative interpretation, the term “stranger” may refer more broadly to anyone who is estranged from the labor that he is meant to perform. Someone like Rabbi Yehoshua, who was meant to be a poet, must compose and sing rather than engage in administrative affairs, which are the domain of Rabbi Yohanan and his fellow gatekeepers. The Talmud seems to be arguing for a clear division of labor, in which we all do what we were destined for. Otherwise we risk becoming estranged—from our destinies and from our true selves.
After I learned this passage about poetry and gatekeeping, I began to think more about these categories. A poet is preoccupied with content, whereas a gatekeeper is preoccupied with flow. A poet determines the quality of the material, while a gatekeeper determines who has access to it. While both roles are essential, I could not help but privilege the former over the latter. The poet is creative and original, and his work is one of a kind; no two Levites sang exactly the same way because no two human voices are identical. In contrast, the
gatekeeper’s work is important because of its precision, its replicability, and its reliability—anyone else would have to do that work in exactly the same way.
The Mishnah (Middot 36b) details exactly how the gates of the Temple had to be locked and unlocked, leaving no room for creativity. The main gate to the sanctuary had two smaller gateways, one to the north and one to the south. No one ever entered the southern gateway, per a pronouncement in the book of Ezekiel (though it sounds more like J. R. R. Tolkien): “This gate shall be shut; it shall not be opened, neither shall any man enter in by it” (Ezekiel 44:2). The gatekeeping priest would turn a key in the northern gateway and enter into a small chamber, which in turn led into the sanctuary, whose doors he would then unlock, in exactly that order.
As a literary agent, my job was to be a gatekeeper for literature, responsible for what would be translated into Hebrew and by whom. Each day I received dozens of books and manuscripts, which I submitted to the appropriate Israeli editors. When multiple editors competed for the rights to translate a single work, I conducted an auction to determine who won the right to publish that book. I loved reading the books our agency represented, but editors rarely called to ask my opinion about literature; they turned to me because I controlled access to the books, and they wanted me to unlock the gates.
Unlike my own gatekeeping existence, most of my friends, it seemed, were poets. They were writing PhD dissertations, or sitting in cafes drafting short stories, or reporting for the local newspapers, or even (literally!) writing poetry. At the end of the day, they could point proudly to their own creative work with the confidence that no one else in the world would ever produce a final product identical to theirs. Whereas I, at best, could walk into a bookstore and point to a book I had edited or translated—both tasks that I’m sure many other competent people could have accomplished in my stead. Thrice an editor, never an author, I chided myself—though in my case it was more like five hundred times an editor. I did not feel proud or proprietary about my editorial work. Certainly I could not imagine ever reacting like Rav Sheshet, who grew furious when his student quoted one of his teachings without attribution and hissed, “Whoever stung me in this way—may he be stung by a scorpion!” (Bechorot 31b).
My attitude toward my work bothered me, and I wondered if my anxieties were the first signs of a midlife crisis. Maybe this happens to everyone in their thirties; suddenly they realize that their lives are no longer completely ahead of them. When we are young, the world seems open with possibility; but as we approach thirty-five—the age I was scheduled to finish daf yomi—we realize that the choices we have made have opened some gates but closed others. What was I doing with my “one wild and precious life,” to invoke the words of Mary Oliver1—since it is always the poets and not the gatekeepers whom we quote?
Perhaps not coincidentally, the passage about poets and gatekeepers appears in the tractate of the Talmud that deals with questions of self-worth. The name of the tractate, Erchin, comes from the Hebrew word for “value” and refers to individuals who consecrate their value to the Temple. As the Torah teaches, people as well as property could be devoted to God, and a person might elect to donate the monetary equivalent of his worth to the Temple as a show of thanksgiving. But it is impossible to evaluate the worth of a human life, so the Torah establishes set values for these vows that depend on the age and gender of the person: “If it is a male from twenty to sixty years of age, the equivalent is fifty shekels of silver by the sanctuary weight” (Leviticus 27:3). I wondered how much my own life would be worth and how I could make my time more valuable. Was I not destined for a more poetic vocation?
Until that point, I moonlighted as a translator. When I got home from the literary agency office I worked on translating a series of books about the rabbis of the Talmud. I spent my evenings traveling to Rome with Rabbi Yose to view the blood-stained ark cover held captive in the Caesar’s palace (Meilah 17b), or asking halachic questions in the meat market in Emmaus about men who have sexual relations with five menstruating wives (Keritot 15a), or enumerating the various musical instruments that can be made out of a dead sheep (Kinnim 25a). Absorbed in these musings, sometimes I would look at the clock and discover it was past midnight, and I’d have to force myself to take leave of the sages and go to bed.
The rabbis in tractate Tamid (32b) extol the virtues of learning Torah at night, claiming that the divine presence accompanies anyone who does so. I was lucky to be engaged in work that brought me closer to the divine, even if it did not necessarily draw on the divine spark within me. I learned so much from translating the rabbinic biographies that I often quipped that I was being paid to study and to spread Torah, a practice explicitly forbidden in the Talmud (Bechorot 29a): Since God taught Torah to Moses for free, teachers of Torah are forbidden to accept a fee for their work. Fortunately this statement is then qualified by later rabbinic authorities, who provide a convenient loophole: a person can accept payment for all the other gainful work he is unable to do because he is instead teaching Torah. In any case it was good to be remunerated, and I began to set my sights on other books about Talmud and rabbinic literature that seemed like potential translation projects. Soon I had enough work that I could support myself with my translations alone. So I stopped moonlighting as a translator and made it my full-time job, in fulfillment of the verse from Joshua (1:8), “And you shall contemplate it [Torah] day and night.”
I have come to see that translation can also be a sacred calling, not unlike gatekeeping in the Temple. When I translate Jewish books, my job is to enable words of Torah to reach a wider audience. I must remain faithful to the original text, especially in the age of mass production, when any error I introduce would be reproduced countless times in every copy of the English edition. In tractate Temurah (14b) Rabbi Yohanan declares that anyone who writes down Jewish laws is like someone who burns the Torah, and anyone who learns from written texts will receive no merit—perhaps to safeguard against error, or to maintain rabbinic authority, or to prevent these texts from falling into the hands of heretics. He then concedes that the Oral Torah may be written down if doing so will prevent Torah from being forgotten by the people of Israel. In translating books about the Oral Torah—as the Mishnah and Talmud are commonly known—I am doing my own small part to ensure that passages of Torah will not be forgotten, at least not by English-speaking Jews. Often I am filled with trepidation when tempted to exercise undue creative license as a translator. “Turn back,” I imagine Rabbi Yohanan ben Gudgada staying my hand, “for you are one of the gatekeepers, and not one of the poets.”
Much as I enjoy translating, it does not allay all my anxieties about creative labor. These anxieties come to the fore when I frequent the National Library of Israel, with its austere, stately Judaica reading room, where many of the greatest scholarly minds of our generation sit at the long rows of tables poring over ancient tomes. Some are rabbis who teach religious wisdom, but most are professors who employ critical methods to study Talmud academically in university departments. The Talmudic rabbis teach (Keritot 6a) that a student learning Torah should look upon the mouth of his teacher, in fulfillment of the verse, “Your eyes will behold your teacher” (Isaiah 30:20). But looking up from my laptop screen at so many Talmudic luminaries seems more intimidating than inspiring.
Whenever I enter the reading room I think of a passage from tractate Middot, which deals with the dimensions of the Temple. The rabbis consider the question of how it was possible to clean the Holy of Holies, a space so sacred that only the high priest could enter it, and only on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year. They explain that there were trapdoors in the upper chamber opening into the Holy of Holies through which workmen were let down in baskets “so that they would not feast their gaze on the Holy of Holies” (37a). I sometimes think about getting a part-time job in the library once again—perhaps shelving books, or sitting behind the reference desk—so that I can have an excuse to feast my eyes on its sights, without feeling so pres
umptuous as to think that I, like the high priesthood of academic scholarship, have a right to be there.
In these moments of self-doubt I identify with the figure of Bava ben Buta in tractate Keritot (25a), whose name incidentally means “gate.” Ben Buta used to bring a guilt offering to the Temple every day, convinced that he had done something wrong. I live my life much like Bava ben Buta, ever anxious about how I spend my time. And yet in the next tractate of Kodshim we are reminded that “the Torah was not given to the ministering angels” (Meilah 14b) but to fallible human beings who can only try their best. The phrase appears in the context of a discussion about whether the wood for the Temple is pre-sanctified, or built with and then sanctified. The sages rule that the wood should not be sanctified first because perhaps one of the workers will get tired and will want to sit down and rest on one of the planks. Were it already sanctified, he would be guilty of meilah, that is, of “stealing” benefit from the Temple, which is the subject of the eponymous tractate. The Torah was given to flesh-and-blood humans who sometimes need to sit down and rest. It is a message I wish I had internalized when I started out as a translator. In the next two years, I would give birth to three children. If only I could turn back the clock, I would encourage my insecure self to sit down, relax, and enjoy the quiet of the library while I still could.
If All the Seas Were Ink Page 20