—HILLEL, Ethics of the Fathers 2:5
In the Torah’s opening chapter, God announces six times concerning His creation, “And the Lord saw that it was good.” The first thing God declares not good is aloneness: “It is not good for man to be alone” (Gen. 2:18). Because this passage is speaking in the context of the creation of Eve, people assume the verse is simply directed to marital happiness; it is not good for a man to be without a wife, or for a woman to be without a husband.
But the verse has far broader implications. It is not healthy for people to segregate themselves from their community, and it is also not right. It is particularly important not to do so when your community needs you. In the biblical book of Esther, Mordechai sends a message to Queen Esther, instructing her to intervene with her husband, King Ahasuerus, to cancel the order of destruction he has issued against the Jews at the behest of his adviser, Haman. The queen, who until now has kept her religious identity a secret, informs Mordechai that she can’t intervene because approaching the king without having been summoned will put her at grave, possibly life-threatening, risk. In response, Mordechai warns her: “Do not imagine that you, of all the Jews, will escape with your life by being in the king’s palace. On the contrary, if you keep silent in this crisis, relief and deliverance will come to the Jews from another quarter, while you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows, perhaps you have attained royal position for just such a crisis?” (Esther 4:12–14). Esther does of course intervene and saves her people.
Moses is an earlier example of a Jew who takes upon himself his community’s pain. Like Esther, he, too, could have remained in the king’s palace and concealed his Israelite origins. Yet, “he went out to his kinfolk and witnessed their labors.” When he saw an Egyptian overseer beating a Hebrew slave, he struck the overseer down (Exod. 2:11–12). This is one of only three incidents recorded in the Bible about Moses’ life prior to his being chosen by God to lead the Israelites out of Egyptian slavery.
In line with Hillel’s directive, the Talmud insists that Jews regard themselves as part of something bigger than their own lives: “When the community is in trouble, a person should not say, ‘I will go to my house and I will eat and drink and be at peace with myself’ ” (Ta’anit 11a). Rabbi Berel Wein recalls that during World War II, his grandfather Rabbi Chayyim Zvi Rubenstein contracted to have his house in Chicago painted. But shortly before the work began, Rabbi Rubenstein received a letter describing the horrible sufferings being inflicted by the Nazis on the Jews in Europe (herding Jews into work camps, ghettos, and worse). Rabbi Rubenstein immediately called up the painter, assured the man that he would pay him, but canceled the paint job. As he explained to his wife, “Ken men machen shein a haus ver yidden in der velt hoben azoi fil yesurim?” (“Can one beautify his house when Jews elsewhere in the world have so much suffering?”).1
This teaching applies as well to less extreme situations. As a general rule, Hillel wanted people to be at one with those around them: “Do not weep among those who are laughing, or laugh among those who are weeping. … The rule is, do not deviate from those around you” (Derekh Eretz Zuta 5:5).
Hyam Maccoby notes that Hillel’s teaching is a safeguard against selfishness, arrogance, and ingratitude: “Do not prize your own worth so much that you despise the community and withdraw from it, failing to realize how much you owe to it.”2
He who does not increase, will decrease.
—HILLEL, Ethics of the Fathers 1:13
There is no comparison between one who reviews his studies 100 times, and one who reviews it 101 times.
—HILLEL, Chagigah 9a
Think of tests you took in high school on which you might have scored 90 or higher. If you were suddenly asked to take those same tests now, how would you perform? Most likely, a lot worse, because it is natural for people to forget much of what they have learned, certainly material learned many years ago.
The only way to continue growing in knowledge is through ongoing study. When you acquire new information, your knowledge expands and your wisdom grows. But if you don’t continue learning and reviewing, your knowledge level will obviously decline, because you will not be adding new information and you will start to forget that which you once knew. As regards the second teaching, that you can’t compare one who has reviewed his studies 100 times with one who has reviewed it 101 times, Hillel obviously believed that we need ongoing repetition to ensure that material already learned will not be forgotten.
I remember reading once of a world-renowned pianist who, long after he had achieved international renown, continued practicing seven or more hours a day. When a friend asked him why he didn’t relax and take more time off, he answered, “If I miss a day of practice, I can feel the difference in my playing. If I miss a few days of practice, my manager will notice the difference. And if I miss a week of practice, everyone will notice.”
Knowledge is not static. If you don’t keep reviewing and adding, you decline. Which is why Hillel’s advice to the would-be convert, “Go and study,” applies to all of us, and at all times.
Eleven hundred years after Hillel, Maimonides responded to the question, “Until when is a person obligated to study Torah?” with the answer, “Until the day of one’s death” (“Laws of Torah Study” 1:10).
Because you drowned others, others drowned you; in the end, they that drowned you shall themselves be drowned.
—HILLEL, Ethics of the Fathers 2:7
This was Hillel’s comment on seeing a skull floating on the water’s surface. If Hillel recognized the body in the water as being that of a violent person, his words are self-explanatory: “You practiced violence, and eventually the violence you directed against others was turned against you.”1 The problem is that the text provides no context. If we assume that Hillel did not know the identity of the corpse to whom he addressed his words, then we can choose to see this teaching as a statement of faith, specifically Hillel’s faith in God’s justice. God would not allow someone to arbitrarily be drowned; therefore we must assume that the person suffering such a fate is being justly punished.
The problem of course is that such certainty seems simpleminded, and even mean-spirited—simpleminded because one does not need to have the intellectual capabilities of a Hillel to know that there are people who die violently who did not lead lives of violence, and mean-spirited because it seems cruel to blame a person whom one does not know and about whom one knows nothing of his or her own violent death. It is one thing to say, “He got what he deserves” of someone whom we know for a certainty did great evil, quite another to say it of someone whom we don’t know at all.
And so, I believe, we can only assume that Hillel did recognize the dead person and knew him to be a person of violence. That justice prevailed in such a circumstance would be reassuring. Hillel lived at the time of the murderous King Herod, who employed vicious people to carry out his often malevolent orders. Indeed, we know that he had two assassins drown his brother-in-law, the High Priest (see this page). That one of these people might have suffered the fate he inflicted on another would be just.
This explanation might well be wrong, but so far I have found none other of this enigmatic passage that is consistent with Hillel’s well-deserved reputation for love of humankind and for judging people fairly.
He who has acquired for himself a knowledge of Torah has acquired for himself life in the world to come.
—HILLEL, Ethics of the Fathers 2:8
Hillel is, it would seem, the first rabbinic sage to speak about an afterlife. The idea that the soul survives the death of the body is not explicitly stated in the Bible. The Torah cites God as exhorting the Israelites to follow His ways, to practice justice, and to obey His commandments. In Deuteronomy, the Torah’s final book, God warns the Israelites that if they worship other gods, He “will shut up the skies so that there will be no rain and the ground will not yield its produce, and you will soon perish from the good land that the Lord is assigning to yo
u” (Deut. 11:17).
But one looks in the Torah in vain for verses explicitly saying something such as, “If you obey My laws, you will live in eternal bliss,” or conversely, “If you disobey My laws, you will suffer punishment after you die.”
How does one account for this silence about the afterlife?* I suspect there is a correlation between the Torah’s non-discussion of this topic and the fact that the Torah was revealed shortly after the Israelite sojourn in Egypt. The Egyptian society in which the Israelite slaves dwelled was obsessed with death and the afterlife. The holiest Egyptian literary work was The Book of the Dead, and the major achievement of many pharaohs was the erection of giant tombs called pyramids. In contrast, the Torah is obsessed with this world, so much so that it forbids its priests (kohanim) from having contact with dead bodies (Lev. 21:1–2). The Torah, therefore, might be silent about the afterlife out of a desire to ensure that Judaism not evolve in the direction of the death-obsessed Egyptian religion. And it was not only the Egyptian religion that developed this obsession. Throughout history, religions that assign a very important role to the afterlife often permit other religious values to become distorted. For example, it was belief in the afterlife that motivated the Spanish Inquisitors to torture human beings until they announced that they were accepting Christ. The Inquisitors believed that it was better to torture people for a few days in this world until they “acquired” right beliefs and thereby save them from the eternal torments of hell.3 Unfortunately, the obsession with the afterlife continues to have awful moral consequences. Among extremist Islamists, “suicide bombers” are promised that in return for murdering innocent people whom the Islamists regard as enemies or heretics, they will immediately receive heavenly rewards, including the services of seventy-two virgins. In light of the evils to which an overconcern with the afterlife can lead, the Torah believed, I presume, that the task of getting its adherents focused on this world is preeminent.
But during Hillel’s time, a period when there was much suffering in the Jewish world under the cruel hand of Herod, a suffering that later intensified under the oppressive rule of Rome, it became important to emphasize that Judaism does not believe that good people and evil people endure the same fate—nothingness—after they die. Hillel therefore enunciates the doctrine of a life beyond this life: acquire Torah, he promised people, and your life will be everlasting.
The influence of Hillel’s words, and the consolation and inspiration they have offered ever since, have been profound. The doctrine of divine reward and punishment and the notion of an afterlife became the eleventh of Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of the Jewish faith. And throughout centuries of oppression and deprivation, the belief in an afterlife and the survival of the soul enabled countless Jews to confront their oppressors with the assurance that there was an existence beyond this one.
Hillel’s Concern with Not Causing Suffering to Innocent People
Hillel’s trust in his fellow Jews’ common sense led him to overturn a ruling of his rabbinic colleagues that would have destroyed the lives of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Jewish residents of Alexandria, Egypt.
The issue that prompted the crisis was Judaism’s strict laws concerning the status of a married woman, and the point at which Jewish law defines a couple as married. Today, the Jewish wedding ceremony consists of two series of blessings, the birkat erusin (betrothal blessings) and the birkat nisu’in (wedding blessings). The rabbi recites the betrothal blessings, the groom places a ring on the bride’s finger, the ketubah (marriage contract) is read, and then the seven wedding blessings are recited. The entire ceremony generally occurs in a span of fifteen to twenty minutes.4
In the Talmudic era, the procedure was altogether different. A man and a woman formally signified their intention to wed a full year before the wedding, in the ceremony known as erusin, betrothal. At that time, the ketubah was signed, the two erusin blessings were recited, and the couple became betrothed. They remained in the state of erusin for about a year, during which time the woman was expected to assemble her trousseau and prepare for marriage, while the man readied himself financially. Unlike modern engagements, the erusin was regarded as legally binding, and could be terminated only by divorce. During the year between the betrothal and the wedding ceremony, the man and woman were forbidden to have sexual relations, and the woman was, of course, forbidden to any other man as well.
A serious problem among the Alexandrian Jews was brought to Hillel’s attention. It sometimes happened that a betrothed woman did not go through with the wedding ceremony, but instead married another man (the text speaks of another man running off with her) without first securing a divorce. In the absence of the divorce, the woman was still regarded as married to the man who betrothed her. Therefore, this new marriage was considered an act of adultery, and the children born from it were regarded as mamzerim (bastards), and forbidden by Torah law from marrying any Jew other than another mamzer. As if this was not bad enough, the stain of mamzerut was eternal, passed on from generation to generation.
The sages of the time (we are speaking of the late first century B.C.E.) were not pleased to impose the stigma of mamzerut on the couple’s children, but there seemed no way out. Hillel, as in the case of the prozbol, wanted to find a legal basis for not enforcing a law that would inflict great misery, particularly on the couple’s innocent children. The Talmud explains how Hillel proceeded:
“When the issue came before the court, Hillel the Elder said to these children, ‘Bring me the ketubah of your mother.’ They brought him the ketubah of their mother, and he found that it was written [in this ketubah and in all the Alexandrian ketubot] ‘When you enter the chuppah [the wedding canopy], you will be to me a wife.’ ” This innovative language, distinctive to the ketubot written in Alexandria, meant that the community did not regard (as did the rest of the Jewish world) a woman who participated in the ceremony of erusin as married. Rather, marriage was effected and finalized only when the couple went under the marital canopy and the seven marriage blessings were recited. Though the Alexandrian Jews had acted on their own in inserting new language and conditions into the ketubah, Hillel ruled that its language was clear and should be obeyed. In consequence, Hillel was able to invalidate the original betrothal, thereby validating the new marriage and releasing the children of this marriage from the status of mamzerut. This ruling was accepted by all the other rabbis (Bava Metzia 104a). Later, in medieval times, Jewish law was amended so that the betrothal and wedding ceremonies were conducted at the same time—instead of a year apart—thereby avoiding the problems that could ensue if a couple, subsequent to the erusin, decided not to marry.
Understanding that following the strict letter of the law would impose an injustice, Hillel was able to avoid the harsh status of mamzer, which would have cut off such children and their descendants from the rest of the Jewish community forever.
The Talmud does not use the rationale of tikkun olam, bettering the world, to explain this ruling of Hillel, but obviously it is in line with the previous such rulings that he issued.
Ezra, Hillel, and Rabbi Chiyya:
Salvation Comes from Babylonia
At first, when Torah was forgotten from Israel, Ezra came up from Babylonia and reestablished it. Again it was forgotten, and Hillel the Babylonian came and reestablished it. Again it was forgotten, and Rabbi Chiyya and his sons came and reestablished it.
—Sukkah 20a
The Land of Israel is of course the Jewish people’s Holy Land, the country in which Jerusalem is located, where the Great Temples stood, and where the Me’arat Ha-Machpelah, the caves of the patriarchs and matriarchs, is located. But the Land of Israel is not the place where many of the greatest works of Jewish literature were written. The Bible itself records the giving of the Torah to Moses on Mount Sinai, outside Israel. Later, two editions of the Talmud were produced. The first, edited in Israel, is known as the Jerusalem Talmud. It occupies a distinguished place in Jewish life, but is certainly not com
parable in significance to the Babylonian Talmud, compiled and edited in what is now known as Iraq.
The importance of the Diaspora is underscored in this Talmudic reminder that it was three Diaspora Jews, Ezra, Hillel, and Rabbi Chiyya, who saved Judaism from oblivion. After the destruction of the First Temple by Nebuchadnezzar of Babylonia (586 B.C.E.) and the subsequent seventy-year exile, many laws were forgotten; Ezra came to Israel with the returning Jews and restored them. To cite just one example, the Bible records that the holiday of Sukkot, ordained in the Torah (see Lev. 23:42), had been totally forgotten, and was restored to observance by Ezra (Neh. 8:14–18).
During the time of the Second Temple, many other laws were forgotten, for example, the ruling as whether or not the Passover sacrifice overrides the Sabbath prohibition of slaughtering an animal (see this page). Hillel, who moved to Israel from Babylonia, is the one person who can teach the Bnai Beteira, the religious leadership, the correct thing to do.
The case of Rabbi Chiyya is less dramatic. He lived, after all, in the generation of Rabbi Judah the Prince, compiler and editor of the Mishnah (and a descendant of Hillel as well), so the situation could not have been as desperate as it was during the times of Ezra and Hillel. Nonetheless, Bava Metzia 85b demonstrates Rabbi Chiyya’s considerable ingenuity in motivating and educating many new students. He would go to villages where there were no teachers, find five children and teach each of them one of the five books of the Torah. Then he would take six other students and teach each of them the six orders of the Mishnah. Then he would tell them, “During the time that I return to my place and come here again, teach Torah to one another and teach Mishnah to one another.” In this way, Rabbi Chiyya concluded, “I make sure that the Torah is never forgotten from the Jewish people.”
A final thought. Though the subject of conversion to Judaism is not discussed extensively in the Talmud, all three of these figures had strongly demarcated views on this issue, the first negative and the latter two very positive. When Ezra moved to Israel, he confronted a Jewish community saturated with intermarriage, and he ordered Jewish men to end their relationships with their non-Jewish wives and to cast off the children born from these unions. No mention is made in the biblical book that bears his name of his raising the possibility of having the non-Jewish spouses and their children convert to Judaism.*
Rabbi Joseph Telushkin Page 15