Maimonides: Born in 1138 in Córdoba, Spain, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, also known as Rambam (an acronym of his Hebrew name), was the premier rabbinic authority of his time and a towering figure in Jewish history. A codifier of Jewish law, student of Greek and Arabic philosophy, and royal physician, he wrote seminal books of Jewish law, philosophy, and commentary. His Thirteen Principles of Faith, which were written as part of his Commentary on the Mishnah (completed in 1168), include belief in the existence and singular unity of God, the eternity of Torah, reward and punishment, the coming of the Messiah, and the resurrection of the dead.
Mezuzah: A parchment scroll on which verses from chapters 6 and 11 in Deuteronomy are written. The scroll is rolled up and placed inside a case that is affixed to the entry doorposts of Jewish homes, as well as to the doorposts of some interior rooms, as commanded in Deuteronomy 6:9 and 11:20.
Mikvah: Ritual bath. In the time of the Temple, the mikvah was used by priests and all those bringing sacrifices. Since the Temple’s destruction in 70 C.E, the mikvah continues to be used by women after their menstrual cycles, by both men and women as part of the conversion process, and by some Jewish men before the Sabbath and certain holidays.
Mitzvot (singular, mitzvah): Commandments. According to Jewish tradition, there are 613 mitzvot listed in the Pentateuch. Colloquially, the word “mitzvah” is often used to mean “a good deed.”
Mussaf: Hebrew for “add on.” Originally the name for the additional sacrifice offered in the Temple on the Sabbath and holidays. After the destruction of the Temple, prayer services replaced the sacrifices, and Mussaf was the name given to the additional prayer service established for the Sabbath and holidays.
Nasi: “President” in modern Hebrew. The meaning of the word evolved from “important person” or “tribal chief” in the Bible. In the rabbinic period it referred to the leader of the Sanhedrin, a person who often also had significant power. For several centuries in Palestine, the nasi was from the family of Hillel.
Oral Torah: A term used for the corpus of rabbinic Jewish texts, especially the Mishnah and the Gemara, that explain and expand upon the commandments in the Torah. The Oral Law is traditionally believed to have been transmitted orally from God to Moses at Sinai, and thence through generations of leaders until it was written down between the third and sixth centuries C.E.
Pharisees: One of several Jewish groups vying for power and influence in the late Second Temple period. The Pharisees believed in the role of the Oral Law to explicate the Torah, and that the Oral Law empowered them to make emendations to Jewish law when necessary and to apply it to new situations. Contemporary Jews are heirs to the pharisaic traditions.
Pirkei Avot: The Ethics of the Fathers. One of the sixty-three tractates of the Mishnah, Pirkei Avot is a collection of ethical teachings attributed to generations of scholars who lived in the centuries just before and after the Common Era.
Responsa: The term for the continually evolving body of Jewish legal decisions developed as responses to questions posed to rabbis.
Sanhedrin: The “high court” in Jewish law. The Great Sanhedrin in Jerusalem, which was the ultimate authority in all matters of Jewish law, had seventy-one members. After the destruction of the Second Temple, the Sanhedrin was reconvened in the city of Yavneh, in northern Israel, and then in various other cities in the Galilee. It disbanded around 425 C.E.
Seder: From the Hebrew word for “order,” the seder is the ritual meal on the first night (in the Diaspora, the first and second nights) of Passover, at which the story of the Exodus is retold and ritual foods eaten.
Sephardi: From the Hebrew word for Spain, and referring to the rites and practices of Jews descended from the exiled communities of Spain and Portugal. Colloquially, it is sometimes used to refer to any non-Ashkenazic Jews, although Jews from the Middle East are more accurately referred to as eidot ha-mizrach, or Oriental communities.
Shema: An affirmation of faith in the one God, and one of the core prayers of the Jewish liturgy. It begins with Deuteronomy 6:4, “Hear O Israel, the Lord Our God, the Lord is one,” and continues through Deuteronomy 6:9 and with passages from Deuteronomy 11 and Numbers 15. The word “shema” means “hear” or “listen.”
Shulchan Arukh: Literally, “the set table.” This comprehensive, four-volume code of Jewish law completed in 1555 by the Sephardic rabbi Joseph Caro, and expanded shortly thereafter to include in italics Ashkenazic practice by Rabbi Moses Isserles, remains the authoritative legal code for observant Jews.
Spanish Inquisition: Beginning in 1481 and not officially abolished until 1808, the Inquisition was an office of the Catholic Church in Spain dedicated to rooting out false Christians, including Jews who had outwardly converted to Christianity but continued secretly to observe Jewish law and rituals. The Inquisition routinely tortured those who came under suspicion in order to get them to confess and name other false Christians. Those who were convicted of being false Christians were burned at the stake.
Tahor: A term that indicates one’s positive status in matters of ritual purity. In the time of the Temple, only a person who was tahor could enter the Temple and participate in its rituals.
Talmud: From the Hebrew word for learn, and also known as the Oral Torah, the Talmud consists of collected oral teachings, commentaries, and anecdotes from the rabbis through the fifth century. The Talmud comprises the Mishnah, the teachings and commentaries collected and set down ca. 200 C.E. by Rabbi Judah the Prince, and the Gemara, rabbinic interpretations of the Mishnah developed from the third through fifth centuries and set down in the sixth century. Rabbinic academies in Babylonia and in Jerusalem each developed their own Talmud; the Babylonian version is more extensive and more definitive. Along with the Torah, the central text of Jewish law, the Talmud is printed on pages surrounded by medieval-era commentaries on its text.
Tamei: A term that indicates one’s negative status in matters of ritual purity. In the time of the Temple, one who was tamei could not enter the Temple or participate in its rituals. Ways of becoming tamei included, most commonly, contact with a dead body and a woman undergoing her menstrual period. To regain tahor status, one would immerse in the mikvah and, in certain situations, bring an offering to the Temple.
Tefillin: Phylacteries. Small leather boxes, one going on the forehead and the other on the arm, worn by Jews during weekday morning prayers. Inside the boxes are parchment scrolls on which are written the four biblical texts that outline the commandment for wearing tefillin.
Temple: The Temple in Jerusalem was the central site of Jewish sacrificial worship in ancient Israel as well as the major national gathering place. The First Temple was built by King Solomon in the tenth century B.C.E. and survived for approximately four hundred years, until Judea was conquered by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E. The Temple was rebuilt seventy years later, following the return of some Jews from Babylonian exile, and sacrifices were resumed. The Second Temple was greatly expanded by King Herod in the first century B.C.E.; it was destroyed by the Romans in 70 C.E.
Tikkun olam: Literally, “repairing the world.” The obligation, incumbent upon Jews, to be God’s partners in assuming the moral and ethical responsibilities that will make the world a more perfect and just place.
Torah: The Five Books of Moses, or Pentateuch, comprising the first section of the Hebrew Bible. Also used more generally to refer to Jewish learning and Jewish texts.
Tosefta: A collection of rabbinic teachings from the time of the Mishnah that was not included in it.
Written Torah: Another way of referring to the Five Books of Moses, or Pentateuch.
NOTES
Introduction
1. The one nondescendant of Hillel in this line of succession was Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai, Hillel’s great disciple. See the listing of Hillel’s descendants in Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, Rav Lau on Pirkei Avos, p. 95.
1. Hillel, the Most Ardent of Students
1. At the heart of The Book and the Sword, Talmudic sch
olar Professor David Weiss Halivni’s memoir of his Holocaust experiences, is the story of how he once spotted a Nazi concentration camp guard eating a greasy sandwich wrapped in a page of the Shulchan Arukh, the sixteenth-century code of Jewish law. Weiss Halivni was extremely moved by seeing this page, which brought back powerful memories of his Jewish learning in Hungary.
“I instinctively fell at the feet of the guard, without even realizing why; the mere letters propelled me. With tears in my eyes, I implored him to give me this bletl, this page. For a while he didn’t know what was happening. … He immediately put his hand to his revolver, the usual reaction to an unknown situation. But then he understood. This was, I explained to him, a page from a book I had studied at home. Please, I sobbed, give it to me as a souvenir. He gave me the bletl and I took it back to the camp. … The bletl became a rallying point. We looked forward to studying it whenever we had free time.
Like Hillel, Weiss Halivni risked his life to study Jewish holy texts because it wasn’t worth living without them (see David Weiss Halivni, The Book and the Sword: A Life of Learning in the Shadow of Destruction, pp.
2. Hillel’s Rise to Leadership
1. A century later, the Idumeans participated actively in the 66–70 C.E. Jewish revolt against Rome. Most of them sided with the Zealots, the most nationalist and militant of the Jewish rebels. During Titus’s siege of Jerusalem, the Idumeans formed a special division of about five thousand soldiers, and the Roman general Titus regarded them as an important element in the Jewish military forces (see Encyclopaedia Judaica 6:378). I mention this to underscore the point that, despite the inauspicious and very unfortunate way the Idumeans joined the Jewish people, many of them eventually developed a strong Jewish identity. Obviously, no Jew today has any way of knowing whether or not he or she possesses any Idumean ancestry, but at least some, perhaps many, Jews do.
2. Nahum N. Glatzer, Hillel the Elder: The Emergence of Classical Judaism.
3. Apparently, many years had passed since Passover had last fallen on a Friday night, and no one seemed to recall what had been done.
4. George Foot Moore, the early-twentieth-century Harvard historian of religion, argued that Hillel wanted to use logical principles to establish Jewish law, and not simply arguments from tradition, because arguments from logic allow Judaism to be more open to expansion and capable of being applied to new situations (see Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era, pp. 78–81). To traditionalists, however, the argument from tradition is always the superior argument.
5. The Talmud elsewhere praises the Bnai Beteira for their humility in appointing Hillel over themselves (Bava Metzia 85a). Two centuries later, Hillel’s descendant, Rabbi Judah the Prince, taught, “I am prepared to do whatever any person tells me except what the Bnai Beteira did for my ancestor [Hillel], in that they relinquished their high office and promoted him to it” (Genesis Rabbah 33:3; see Judah Nadich’s discussion of Rabbi Judah’s statement in Jewish Legends of the Second Commonwealth, p. 202).
6. A virtually identical version of the story is recorded in the Jerusalem Talmud, Pesachim 6:1.
3. “While Standing on One Foot”
1. Edward M. Gershfield, “Hillel, Shammai, and the Three Proselytes,” Conservative Judaism, 31, no. 3 (Spring 1967): 29–39.
2. The Torah’s commandment—with its emphasis on “neighbor,” implying a person whom we see often—suggests that this mitzvah relates to tangible behavior and not simply to abstract love, as would be the case had the Torah instructed us to “Love humanity.” That is why Jewish legal texts generally focus on the actions this commandment entails. In the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides’ fourteen-volume code of Jewish law, he describes as outgrowths of this command a series of additional Jewish laws (which are not specifically ordained in the Torah), including the commandments to visit the sick, to make sure that the dead are properly buried, to comfort mourners, to act hospitably, and to bring the bride and groom joy at their wedding. Maimonides understands the law of love of neighbor as meaning that whatever you want others to do for you, you should do for them (“Laws of Mourning” 14:1). In “Laws of Character Development,” he offers additional examples of how to practice this commandment. For example: “One should speak in praise of another, and be careful about another’s money [and possessions] just as he is careful about his own money, and wants his own dignity preserved” (6:3). These examples express two important components of loving behavior: emotional support for others (praising them) and material support (helping safeguard their money). In all the instances cited here, the commandment of love focuses on actions to be practiced, rather than on emotions felt internally.
4. Hillel and the Three Converts
1. In traditional Jewish law, a child of a convert is Jewish as long as the mother’s conversion occurs prior to the child’s birth. If the mother’s conversion occurs subsequent to the birth, the child must undergo a separate conversion.
2. Even subsequent to Ruth’s embracing the Israelite religion and peoplehood, the text speaks of her as “Ruth the Moabite” (Ruth 2:21), and one of Boaz’s workers refers to her as “a Moabite girl” (Ruth 2:6), suggesting that many Israelites at the time might not have been fully open to conversion. Hence, the stunning power of the story’s denouement, as the text reveals that this “Moabite girl” is the ancestress of Israel’s greatest king.
3. Some Jews think it is, given that for so much of Jewish history, Judaism had little status and very few non-Jews expressed interest in converting. But in the Talmudic era, Jews were very open to influencing non-Jews with teachings from Judaism. The Jewish historian Josephus wrote in the first century: “The masses have long since shown a keen desire to adopt our religious observances, and there is not one city, Greek or barbarian, nor a single nation, to which our customs of abstaining from work on the seventh day has not spread, and where the fasts and lighting of [Sabbath] lamps and many of our prohibitions in the matter of food are not observed” (Contra Apion 2:39). Judaism had apparently become so highly regarded among segments of the Roman intelligentsia that Juvenal, the great Roman writer, composed a satire about Roman fathers who eat no pork, observe the Sabbath, worship only the heavenly God, and whose sons undergo circumcision, despise Roman laws, and study the Jews’ Torah. Yet a third example: The New Testament, in a passage highly critical of the Jewish religious leadership, nonetheless states that Jews would “sail the seas and cross whole countries to win one convert” (Matthew 23:15).
4. When Maimonides published the Mishneh Torah, his code of Jewish law, his intention was to compose a book that would guide Jews on how to behave in all situations just by reading the Torah and his code. Needless to say, this provocative motivation outraged Jews who felt that Maimonides was trying to obviate the study of Talmud, a work that cannot be replaced by a summary of the judgments it contains, or by any extraction of basic laws and principles. Three leading rabbis in France, outraged as well by Maimonides’ religiously rationalist approach (reflected both in sections of the Mishneh Torah and in his Guide for the Perplexed) denounced his writings to the Dominicans, who headed the French Inquisition, and who were only too happy to burn Maimonides’ books. And Maimonides was the greatest sage of the medieval period. Now imagine a first-century Gentile asking to be given the essence of an already ancient religion as if it were a pill he might swallow. No wonder Shammai was so outraged.
5. The Jewish sect known as the Karaites, generally distinguished by being biblical literalists, did not deduce from the words of the Shema the requirement ordained by the rabbis, and imposed no obligation on its adherents to wear tefillin.
6. In truth, as well known as the figure 613 is, the Torah never explicitly says that the Torah contains 613 laws. That figure appears in the Talmud (Makkot 23b), and serves as the basis for several major medieval works that delineated the commandments, most notably, Maimonides’ Sefer Ha-Mitzvot (The Book of the Commandments) and Sefer Ha-Chinnuch (The Book of Education), which records the commandments—a
long with a commentary—in order of their appearance in the Torah.
7. Supposedly in line with the three instances in which Naomi told Ruth to “turn back” and not accompany her on her return to Israel. It was only after Ruth pleaded with Naomi yet a fourth time that Naomi “ceased to argue with her” (Ruth 1:6–18).
5. Repairing the World
1. Still others made loans and, when the poor couldn’t pay back the money, sold off the debtor’s children as slaves. There is evidence from the Bible itself that such mistreatment of the poor took place. A woman, a widow of a pious man, appeals to the prophet Elisha for immediate assistance because the creditor to whom she is indebted “is coming to take my two children to be his slaves” (2 Kings 4:1). In this ninth century B.C.E. incident, Elisha performs a miracle that enables the woman to produce and sell sufficient quantities of cooking oil to repay her debt. The story is very beautiful and moving, but we can only imagine how many people who had no access to miracles had their children taken from them and enslaved. About a century later, the prophet Amos refers to some sort of immoral stratagem directed against the poor by which the “needy [are sold] for a pair of shoes” (Amos 2:6).
2. In Christian theology, Paul concluded that the laws of the Torah ultimately were a curse, since they could never be perfectly carried out, and Jews would be damned for any violation of any Torah law: “Those who rely on the keeping of the Law are under a curse, since Scripture says, ‘Cursed be everyone who does not persevere in observing everything prescribed in the book of the Law [that is, the Torah]’ ” (see Gal. 3:10). Paul believed, therefore, that humankind must be redeemed from the law, a redemption that can come only through belief in Jesus: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law” (Gal. 3:10). Elsewhere, Paul wrote, “We conclude that a man is put right with God only through faith and not by doing what the Law commands” (Rom. 3:28). Such a teaching flies in the face of the teaching of Jesus cited elsewhere, “Do not imagine that I have come to abolish the Law …” (Matt. 5:17; see p. 132). The Pauline idea that a person is cursed by God for breaking any law is a new one, and not found in the Hebrew Bible or in normative Jewish teachings. Hundreds of years before Paul, the Jews were assured that God recognizes that “there is no man so righteous who does only good and never sins” (Eccles. 7:20), and the Bible itself repeatedly tells of Jews who sinned (including Moses and David) and who—after repenting and returning to observance of the law—were restored to God’s grace, certainly without being eternally cursed (see Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin, The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism, pp. 78–83).
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