In the ahistorical universe of the Talmud, followers argue down through the ages, the living argue with the dead, and followers may at times appear to precede those who influenced them. For this reason, along with the paucity of historical detail, this book is not strictly speaking a biography. It is, however, the biography more truly of an aspect of Judaism, one beautifully embodied by Hillel, who represents one of the many faces of Judaism—a face that I feel is too easily eclipsed.
It says something about Judaism that both Hillel and Shammai, and many of their followers, remain revered figures within traditional Judaism, even when they embody opposite approaches to the law and to life itself. In this regard, Talmudic Judaism is anti-fundamentalist. It isn’t simply the answer that is prized, it is the argument itself, the culture of disputation, the wrestling with the truth.
Nevertheless, the differences in the approaches of these two great rabbis and of their schools of thought matter a great deal and are worth looking at in detail. The standard, oft-repeated impression of Shammai is of severity in demeanor and strictness in legal rulings (in the overwhelming majority of disputes between his disciples and those of Hillel, Shammai’s school does in fact represent the stricter approach).
Even the few stories told about Shammai as a father and grandfather reveal more of a legalistic rather than paternal inclination. For example, he wanted his son, while still a child, to almost fully fast on Yom Kippur. In the words of the rabbis, he wished to feed him “with just one hand,” until he was finally ordered to feed the boy more lavishly, “with both hands” (Tosefta Yoma 4:2).1 When his daughter-in-law gave birth to a son on the holiday of Sukkot, Shammai broke off a part of the roof over the mother and child’s bed and placed s’chach (the covering for a sukkah) over it so that this newborn could observe in some fashion the mitzvah of being in a sukkah (Mishnah Sukkah 2:8).
Some of this of course may be merely a difference of temperament. If life is an anxious business, fulfillment of the law will be an anxious business, and a request for extreme brevity from a Gentile would be an occasion for rage and resentment. But there is also an authentic religious difference between Hillel’s and Shammai’s views of the law.
A good place to begin examining the differences between the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai, before circling back to their emblematic difference of opinion over the welcoming of converts, is with a dispute over the Shema.
The Shema (“Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One”) is Judaism’s most important statement of faith and its most famous prayer. When recited in the prayer service, it is followed by three paragraphs, the first of which (the veahavta; Deut. 6:4–9) contains mention of many of Judaism’s most basic laws. In this paragraph, Jews are commanded, “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.” That is one of the Torah’s 613 commandments. The laws of tefillin and mezuzah are set forth here as well. And yet another verse enjoins us to “take to heart these instructions with which I charge you this day. Teach them to your children. Speak of them when you are at home and when you are on the road, when you lie down and when you rise up.”
These last words serve as the basis for the law requiring Jews to recite the Shema twice daily. But when and how must they do so? The answer hinges on how one understands the words “when you lie down and when you rise up.” The School of Shammai taught, “In the evening, everyone should lie down in order to recite [the Shema], and in the morning [each person] must stand, for it is written, ‘when you lie down and when you rise up.’ ” But the School of Hillel taught: “Each person recites the Shema according to his preferred manner [that is, one can do so while sitting or standing, while lying down or walking].”
The Mishnah, in which this dispute is recorded (Berakhot 1:3), asks how the Hillelites explained the Torah’s words “when you lie down and when you rise up,” and answers that they believed that the words were not meant to be understood literally. Rather, the Torah’s intention was to establish the proper time to recite the Shema, once in the evening, the hours when people lie down for the night, and once in the morning, when they arise.
Rabbi Tarfon, who lived a century after Hillel and Shammai, was more impressed with the School of Shammai’s reasoning (in general, he inclined toward Shammai’s positions). The Mishnah records his autobiographical recollection: “I was walking on the road and when the time arrived for the evening Shema, I lay down to recite it in accordance with the views of the House of Shammai, and I thereby endangered myself because of the bandits who might have attacked me while I was lying on the road” (Mishnah Berakhot 1:3).
At this point in time, the rabbis had already established that the rulings of Hillel and his disciples were the accepted Jewish practice, and Rabbi Tarfon’s colleagues were vexed by his behavior. They said to him: “You yourself are responsible for what might have happened to you, for [by deliberately lying down for the Shema] you violated the words of the School of Hillel.”
This passage, only the third ruling in the first of the Mishnah’s sixty-three books, foreshadows a common theme in the disputes between Hillel and his disciples and Shammai and his. Shammai’s innate, though not exclusive, tendency was to understand Torah law literally. Therefore, if the Torah says that the words are to be recited “when you lie down,” one must lie down to say this prayer. Hillel’s approach was geared more toward addressing the question, “What is it that the Bible wishes to communicate in this verse?” And the answer his followers came to, at least as I understand it, is that the Torah is instructing us to focus our attention on God and His commandments at least twice every day, once in the evening and once in the morning. What matters, therefore, is not our physical posture while doing so, but that we concentrate our minds and recite the prayer during the appropriate time periods.
How do we explain, therefore, Rabbi Tarfon’s inclination to defer to the rejected opinion of the School of Shammai? The answer probably has much to do with Rabbi Tarfon’s own literalist inclinations. There are a series of questions and answers recorded at the beginning of the fourth chapter of the Mishnaic book Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers), the most famous of which is “Who is rich?” to which Ben Zoma answers, “One who is happy with what he has.” From Ben Zoma’s perspective, a person who has a great deal of money but is always worried that he does not have enough, or that he might lose what he has, cannot be classified as rich, because one of the presumed benefits of wealth is that you do not have to worry about money. Conversely, a person with little money who appreciates what he does have—instead of worrying about what he doesn’t—can be classified as wealthy.
This teaching, with its unique, unexpected definition of wealth, is among the best-known of all rabbinic aphorisms. Relatively few people know, however, that the same question was answered quite differently by Rabbi Tarfon. His response as to who is rich was, “One who has a hundred vineyards and a hundred fields and a hundred servants to work them” (Shabbat 25b).
Is it any surprise that a man who offers so straightforward and literal a response to such a question would also feel constrained to lie down at night in the middle of a road so as to satisfy the Torah’s command, “when you lie down”?
In arguing that Hillel and his disciples are interpreters and Shammai and his followers literalists (of course, this refers to general trends and not to every position they take), one might counter that even a literal reading of something may be an interpretation of it. What truly distinguishes the different approaches, and what may be a better term, is the metaphorical impulse behind the readings of the School of Hillel. “Moral imagination” is one of the traits we attributed to Hillel in the last chapter. Here the emphasis falls on imagination itself.*
The fact that Rabbi Tarfon offers up his understanding of how to carry out this commandment by telling this story (“I lay down in the road”) immediately suggests the limitations of so literalist an approach. One has only to picture the man lying in a road frequented
by bandits to realize he’s suffering from a dangerous lack of imagination. The Talmud does not merely say that he is wrong, it embodies the need for imagination by its very methods.
The notion that we sometimes need to read even the words of the Torah with an eye to the metaphorical is a great element of rabbinic Judaism, but surely was also an anxiety-provoking one for a group of men trying to hold a culture and a religion together. All the rabbis had to counter the dominance of the Roman Empire was the authority of the Torah and the force of their words. Imagination was needed, but there was always the anxiety that imagination would cross the line, exceed its authority, depart too fully from the literal, and end—as Christianity did—not merely reinterpreting the Hebrew Bible but metaphorizing it out of literal existence and turning it into the foundation of a new faith altogether.
This balancing act, between law and story, between legalistic literalism and imaginative freedom, is necessary to keep in mind when thinking about the disputations between the schools of Hillel and Shammai, and also when thinking about Judaism today. Our personal freedoms have never been greater but, in our post-Holocaust, assimilating world, anxiety about continuity has never been higher.
* As an alternative to the interpretation offered here, Professor Michael Berger of Emory University argues that “when you lie down and when you rise up” is not necessarily being read by Hillelites metaphorically, but as a literal reference to a time period. The Hebrew, as Professor Berger understands it, can be seen as ambiguous, either referring to posture (as Shammaites understand it) or time (as Hillelites understand it).
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Thieves, Brides, and When Lying Is a Virtue
The tension between the literal and the metaphorical interpretations of Jewish law is evident in several other disputes among Hillel’s and Shammai’s disciples and are worth looking at. For example, the Talmud asks, what should be the obligation of a thief who wishes to repent? The most obvious first demand is that he return to his victim the object he has stolen; indeed, this is what the Torah commands: “[and he] shall restore that which he took by robbery” (Lev. 5:23).
But then the Talmud asks: What if he stole a beam of wood and used it in the construction of a house? To the literalists of the School of Shammai, the answer is clear: “He must demolish the whole [building] and restore the beam to its owner” (Gittin 55a). To Hillel’s disciples, the answer is equally clear: he must restore to the owner the monetary value of the stolen beam.
Again, the rabbis ruled in favor of the Hillelites, concluding that the School of Shammai’s ruling would impose so great a hardship on the thief (forcing him to tear down his house) that he would decide never to repent. As Rashi (1040–1105), the foremost commentator on both the Torah and Talmud, expressed it: “For if you force him to destroy his dwelling and return the beam to its owner, he will avoid the act of repentance” (commentary on Gittin 55a). Here, Shammai’s literalism would lead to two unhappy results: the thief likely won’t repent and his victim, therefore, won’t be compensated.
This literalist tendency ends up making little sense. Is it logical to assume that the victim of the theft has so deep an attachment to the stolen beam that he will be satisfied with nothing less than its physical return? I suspect that any such victim would be motivated more by a spirit of revenge (the desire to force the thief to tear down his dwelling) than by any sentimental attachment to the beam. Ironically, letting the victim indulge his desire for his specific beam might well put the person in violation of a Torah commandment, “Do not take revenge or bear a grudge against members of your people” (Lev. 19:18). Vengeance is specifically prohibited by the Torah, yet why else would the victim insist on the return of this specific beam?1
In general, the question of what the Torah wants is one that particularly animated Hillel (see the discussion of the prozbol on this page). For Shammai and his disciples the question of what the Torah wants does not generally require a delving into the Torah’s motives. What the Torah wants is precisely what it says:* it wants people to lie down when they recite the Shema, and thieves to restore precisely that which they have stolen, whether or not such a demand causes fewer thieves to repent and fewer victims to be compensated.
In a certain sense, the literalist approach is easier to follow because it can free a person from struggling with issues of intention. But this approach also can lead to suffering for those subjected to it, as yet a third dispute between the schools of Hillel and Shammai reveals.
In this instance, the focus of the discussion is proper etiquette at a wedding:
Our rabbis taught: “How does one dance [and what words does one say] before a bride?” The School of Shammai says, “The bride [is described] as she is.” The School of Hillel says, “[Every bride is described as] a beautiful and graceful bride.”
The School of Shammai said to the School of Hillel, “If she is lame or blind, does one say of her, ‘Beautiful and graceful bride’? Does not the Torah command, ‘Stay far away from falsehood?’ ”
But the School of Hillel answered the School of Shammai, “According to your words, if a person has made a bad purchase in the marketplace, should one praise it to him or deprecate it? Surely one should praise it to him.”*
Therefore, the rabbis teach, “One’s disposition should always be pleasant with people.’ ” (Ketubot 16b–17a)2
Though the practice of lying about the quality of a purchase may indeed be—at least sometimes—questionable, the notion that one’s disposition should be pleasant certainly accords with Hillel’s treatment of the Gentile seeking conversion. More than that, Hillel treats the Gentile not as he is but as he wishes he were or might become. And in a sort of magical optimism familiar to many Americans—by believing in the American dream it often comes true—the Gentile indeed becomes a devoted Jew, as do the others seeking conversion who are treated not as they present themselves but as they might become.
The crux of the Hillel/Shammai debate over the praising of a bride hinges on whether or not the Torah verse “Stay far away from falsehood” (Exod. 23:7) should always be understood literally. In fact, the wording of the verse seems so straightforward that it would seem that Shammai, on this occasion, must be more in the right than Hillel. But even in this case, Hillel’s disciples argue that truth, in and of itself, is not an absolute value.
Or is it?
Throughout history, the absolutist position suggested in this debate—that truth is always paramount—has also been expressed (in terms more extreme than anything intended by the School of Shammai) by religious and secular figures in other traditions. Saint Augustine, perhaps the most influential of the Church Fathers, argued that lying, even when doing so could save another’s life, was both unjustifiable and foolish: “Does he not speak most perversely who says that one person ought to die spiritually, so another may live? … Since, then, eternal life is lost by lying, a lie may never be told for the preservation of the temporal life of another” (“On Lying,” in Treatises on Various Subjects).
Catholic theology holds, therefore, that lying is always wrong. John Henry Cardinal Newman, one of the nineteenth century’s foremost Catholic theologians, argued against lying even more forcefully than did Augustine: “The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions who are upon it to die of starvation in extremist agony … than that one soul … should commit one venial sin, should tell one willful untruth, though it harmed no one.”
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the most influential secular moral philosopher of the modern world (Kant believed in God but excluded religious arguments from his philosophy), likewise argued that lying is always wrong. In his essay “On a Supposed Right to Lie from Benevolent Motives,” he stated that if a would-be murderer inquires “whether our friend who is pursued by him has taken refuge in our home,” we are forbidden to lie to him.
As I read these positions, I wonder if those pursued by murderers—as millions of people were
in Germany* in the 1930s and 1940s—would have thought it wrong to lie to them, or whether the millions of people who died of starvation during the nineteenth century in which Cardinal Newman lived would have denounced as immoral those who lied so that they and their children might eat. And perhaps, throughout history, brides might not have appreciated as moral heroes those who come to their weddings and who describe them as they are, warts and all.3
Whether or not a person is cruel by inclination, an attachment to literalism can lead one to advocate cruel behavior. Hillel’s and his disciples’ view of truth was a more instrumental one. Of course, being truthful is important, and the biblical verse, “Stay far away from falsehood” almost always—but not uniformly—applies. But sometimes, other values, such as saving lives and not hurting people, override it.4
Fifteen hundred years after Hillel and Shammai, the Shulchan Arukh, Rabbi Joseph Caro’s great sixteenth-century code of Jewish law, ruled, “It is a mitzvah [commandment] to gladden the bridegroom and the bride and to dance before them and to say that she is beautiful and graceful, even if she is not” (Even Ha-Ezer 65:1).
The essence of Hillel is embodied in that ruling. His feelings about how one greets a Jewish bride have endured within Judaism far better than his feelings about how one greets a Gentile seeking conversion, or his establishment of ethics as the bedrock demand of Jewish religiosity. Certainly there are many reasons for this, from the rampant assimilation following the Enlightenment to the treatment of Jews by Gentiles in the two thousand years since Hillel lived—treatment that has often accounted for the wariness and wrath of Shammai. But the time now seems ripe to ask whether American Jews of the twenty-first century might show the same openness, courage, and imagination that Hillel displayed in the first century.
Rabbi Joseph Telushkin Page 8