Aphrodite and the Rabbis

by Burton L. Visotzky

  The disciples’ zeal for their rabbis’ teaching was boundless. One rabbinic source tells of the early third-century Rabbi Kahana, who once slid beneath the bed of his teacher and eavesdropped while the teacher “conversed, and played, and met his needs” with his wife. Kahana let slip aloud this thought: “You would think that my master had never tasted this dish before!” The teacher hauled him out from under the bed and said, “Kahana! Get out of here. This is really not done!” Kahana blithely replied, “But this is Torah and I must learn.” Torah, indeed.

  Beyond the oral tradition, the rabbis were also deeply invested in the interpretation of Scripture. The rabbis struggled to interpret the Torah text for continued relevance. This almost obsessive rabbinic focus on the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible as the source of authority to replace the Temple was, oddly, yet another reflex of their broader Roman culture. Much as the Greeks and Romans wrote commentary and endlessly quoted from the twenty-four books of “the divine Homer,” so the rabbis quoted and commented on the twenty-four books of the Hebrew Bible. That the number of books is the same is not a coincidence; it required the rabbis to do some creative accounting in order to show that the rabbinic canon and the Greco-Roman “canon” were libraries with the same number of volumes.

  Despite this apparent affinity, in the first seventy years of the rabbis, beginning with the revolt against Rome in 66 CE, there were an astonishing three Jewish military clashes against the empire. The war of 66–70, and then what is called the Bar Kokhba rebellion, from 132 to 135 CE, both took place in the Land of Israel. In between there was a series of pogroms, if you will, in the Mediterranean and North Africa from 115 to 117 CE, which decimated the Jewish communities there. In every case of misguided rebellion or mismatched rioting, the outcome was clear. The only question was how much the Jews might suffer. And yet like a phoenix rising out of the ashes, to invoke a Hellenistic simile, from the remnants surviving those three wars, rabbinic Judaism arose, a Roman religion.

  In short, what is now called “Judaism” was invented in the matrix of Roman culture. Even as some rabbinic texts depicted Rome as the enemy, there is overwhelming evidence that Judaism took root in Roman soil, imbibed its nourishment, and grafted the good and pruned the bad from the Roman Empire, until a vibrant new religion—Judaism—arose from the wreckage of Israelite religion and the Temple cult, nurtured by the very empire that had destroyed it.

  Chapter II

  Like a Fish Out of Water? Stories of Judaism in Historical Context

  About two decades ago I appeared at New York’s 92nd Street Y on a panel about reading the Bible. My conversation partner was my friend Tom Cahill, author of the bestseller The Gifts of the Jews. We each spoke about Judaism as a religion of the book, how it was necessary to see the biblical canon as an anthology of Jewish religious writings, and the potential perils of using sacred Scripture as the sole source for history of the biblical period. The evening seemed to be going very well until the question-and-answer period following our presentation. The proverbial little old lady stood up and asked, “How much of the Bible is true?” Given the cautions we had just sounded, Tom answered glibly, “Fifty-six point four percent,” or some such number. Imagine our astonishment as that woman took a small pad and pencil out of her pocketbook and carefully wrote down “56.4%.”

  Tom shot me a look that said, “Now what do we do?” I stepped up to the podium and extemporized. I explained that we needed to make a distinction between what had occurred historically and what was considered “true.” Both were somewhat slippery categories. I relied on an old truism and pronounced, “History is written by the victors. It displays a bias, a point of view.” But then I blithely contradicted myself by asserting that if history is a record of what happened, if it is “just one damn thing after another,” then truth was something else entirely. I warmed to my theme. “The most important truths we learn in life,” I suggested, “we often learn through reading fiction.” I was proud of that distinction and remain so.

  In this book I am trying to offer some historical insight from stories that may be true but may not have happened exactly as they were told and then retold. The rabbinic texts I share here, often composed as commentaries on the Bible, are particularly difficult to read as straightforward historical accounts. It is important that we keep sight of the contexts in which these stories were told. Every tale the rabbis tell has a religious purpose and may be a well-crafted piece of didactic fiction. To offer you an analogy from Americana, I referred to George Washington in the last chapter. But do you believe he actually chopped down a cherry tree as a young man? Or was that story told to teach a lesson about the values our Founding Fathers held dear, and so to teach what we should aspire to be like as Americans? The stories we tell reveal who we are, even as they shape our own identities.

  In the world of Late Antiquity, from the first through sixth centuries of the Common Era, Greek and Roman pagans told stories of the gods, stories of historical characters, stories of their political leaders and philosophers. The Jews of that period told similar stories—sometimes even the exact same stories. What these stories and many other shards of evidence teach is just how thoroughly the Jews saw themselves as Romans, even as they shaped an identity somewhat apart. The Greeks and Romans were people of the book before even the Jews were. The difference was that for Hellenists the book was Homer, while for Jews, the book was the Bible.

  In the centuries following the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, once the canon of the Bible was fixed, other Jewish books and stories developed as well. I quote from these throughout this book. The Jews and Romans also shared a common stock of tales. To teach simple lessons, raconteurs both Roman and rabbinic loved to relate family-friendly fox fables. Tales of animals were apt for those wags who wished to express human dilemmas, morals, and received truths. No one could think these fox stories actually occurred as historical fact. These fables were a staple of Greek and Roman grammar schools, where the collections of Aesop and the moral lessons derived from them were studied. This well-known fox fable—recounted by the rabbis—tells us much about Jews, Romans, and the world they shared:

  A story is told about a fox that was walking by the riverside. He saw fish darting from place to place and asked them, “Why do you take flight?”

  They replied, “We flee the nets that men bring to catch us.”

  That wily fox said, “Why don’t you come up onto the dry ground where you and I can dwell together, just as my ancestors dwelt with your ancestors?”

  They said to him, “They call you the smartest of the animals? You are an idiot. If we fear in the place where we live, how much the more so shall we fear the place of our certain death!”

  This Aesop-like fable is told in the Babylonian Talmud (Berakhot 61b). It has no direct parallel in the Greek fable collections, so, lacking the traditional ending we would find in such anthologies, I ask: What is the truth taught by our fox fable? Perhaps the moral to the story is: Stay with the familiar. Your home is your safety. But if I take a step back, a different moral can suggest itself: Context is everything. Live within your context and although you may fear, you will be safe. But if you are unaware of your context, you will be like a fish out of water, assured of death.

  With that moral in mind, let’s consider the fox fable in its sixth-century Talmudic context. Why was it told? Reading the broader passage from the Babylonian Talmud, we will see that the fable was offered as an analogy, placed in the mouth of a famous second-century sage who was offering a biblical commentary.

  Rabbi Aqiba commented, “ ‘And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might’ (Deut. 6:5). ‘With all your soul’ means even if they take your soul.”

  It was taught by the early rabbis that once upon a time the Evil Empire decreed that Jews should not study Torah. When Pappus ben Yehudah came and found Rabbi Aqiba gathering crowds t
o study Torah in public, he asked, “Aqiba, are you not afraid of the empire?”

  Rabbi Aqiba replied, “Let me give you an analogy: The story is told about a fox that was walking by the riverside. He saw fish darting from place to place and asked them, ‘Why do you take flight?’

  “They replied, ‘We flee the nets that men bring to catch us.’

  “That wily fox said, ‘Why don’t you come up onto the dry ground, where you and I can dwell together just as my ancestors dwelt with your ancestors?’

  “They said to him, ‘They call you the smartest of the animals? You are an idiot. If we fear in the place where we live, how much the more so shall we fear the place of our certain death!’”

  Aqiba continued, “So it is for us, too. Now we sit and study Torah, of which it is written, ‘It is your life and the length of your days’ (Deut. 30:20). If we were to cease from it, how much the more so would we forfeit our lives?”

  In this context, instead of a warning to stick close to home and abide by the familiar, the fox fable becomes a call to defiance, even as it explains a verse in Deuteronomy. The fish of the fable offer the voice of an embattled minority against the dominant majority culture. Our hero Rabbi Aqiba invokes the fable to explain his resistance to Rome, even if he is fearful. For all that Aqiba’s fox fable encourages the study of Torah, when we read even further, it becomes ironically clear that Rabbi Aqiba does forfeit his life.

  They say that not many days passed before Rabbi Aqiba was arrested and imprisoned. And then they arrested Pappus ben Yehuda and imprisoned him, too. Aqiba asked him, “Pappus, what brought you here?”

  Pappus replied, “Blessed are you Rabbi Aqiba. At least you were arrested for teaching Torah. Oy to me, for I, Pappus, was arrested for trivial matters.”

  When they took Rabbi Aqiba to be executed it was the time of day to recite the Shema (Deut. 6). As they combed his flesh from his body with combs of iron, Rabbi Aqiba accepted the yoke of God’s kingdom upon him by reciting the verses of the Shema. His disciples asked, “Rabbi, shall you go even this far in your devotion?”

  He replied, “All my life I was troubled by the meaning of this phrase, ‘with all your soul’ (Deut. 6:5). I knew it meant ‘even if they take your soul,’ and I wondered when might I have the opportunity to fulfill this commandment. Now that the opportunity is upon me, shall I not fulfill it?”

  Aqiba pronounced “the Lord our God the Lord is one” (Deut. 6:4) and drew out the final word until his soul left him at “one.” A voice came from Heaven and declared, “Blessed are you Rabbi Aqiba who departed at ‘one.’ ”

  The ministering angels said to God, “This is his Torah and this is his reward?!” . . . A voice came from Heaven and declared, “Blessed are you Rabbi Aqiba, for you are invited to Life Eternal in the World to Come!”

  Wow! Context really is everything. According to the sixth-century Babylonian Talmud, Aqiba still swims in the waters of Torah, and though he might forfeit his life in this cruel world, he is granted life in the hereafter. Rome, the Evil Empire, cannot destroy his soul, even as they torture his body. Rabbi Aqiba’s martyrdom becomes exemplary for all Jews for all time. It is enshrined still today in the prayers recited on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year. Aqiba is granted the immortality of a tale we tell almost two millennia after his gruesome death.

  But what happens if we look beyond the legend on the page of the Talmud? The Rabbi Aqiba martyrdom story is disconcerting for many reasons, not only to those praying on Yom Kippur, but also to the historian. Whether you focus on Jewish history or on Roman history, the facts don’t add up. Of course, the martyr’s tale has a place in mythic memory—it moves us to tears as we recall Aqiba’s cruel death at the hand of his oppressor. It sets the stage on Yom Kippur for remorse and devotion. But still you have to ask, sotto voce: did it actually happen?

  How likely is it that Rabbi Aqiba turned his torture session into a Torah lesson for his disciples? As our story begins, Pappus speaks with Rabbi Aqiba. Pappus is a Roman, not a Hebrew, name. I wonder if our narrator chose him as a warning against assimilation to the culture of “the Man.” Pappus contrasts Aqiba’s noble adherence to Torah study with his own trivial deeds. But Pappus vanishes from the narrative as Aqiba turns to teach his students. Aqiba’s comment, “All my life I was troubled by the meaning of this phrase,” is a commonplace in the Talmud to introduce a new interpretation of a verse or phrase of Scripture. It could easily have been put into Aqiba’s mouth by a narrator or editor who wished to offer an interpretation for the biblical text. Further, there is no other historical evidence that Rome prohibited teaching Torah in this period. Even Aqiba’s death by such cruel torture is suspect, because another rabbinic text (The Midrash on Proverbs, ch. 9) also tells the story of Rabbi Aqiba’s imprisonment but recounts a quiet death with no mention of such torments.

  The version of the story that recounts the gruesome torture is first told in the Babylonian Talmud, compiled over four hundred years after Aqiba’s death. To make matters worse, it was compiled in Sasanian Babylonia, which was not only five hundred miles east of Roman Palestine, where Aqiba lived, but was the Roman Empire’s chief rival. Maybe there’s more to casting Rome as the Evil Empire than meets the eye? Knowing this makes me doubt the historical accuracy of our tale. Dare I suggest that the famous story of the martyrdom of Aqiba is as much a fictional fable as the one he himself tells about the fox and the fish? And the emphatic opposition between Rome and the Jews is more than overstated. Is this Aqiba story a rabbinic equivalent of George Washington and his cherry tree?

  I do not relish playing the curmudgeon and bursting the bubble of the too-easy narrative of Us versus Them—foxes v. fish. But martyr stories are simple, even simplistic, while history is messy and complex. It’s bad enough that we tell a tale of a martyrdom that may not have happened; it is made worse when the tale is taken utterly out of context and the Talmud then pretends that Rome was the implacable enemy of Judaism everywhere in the empire and for all of its lengthy history. Indeed, I do you a disservice simply contrasting Jews v. Romans, for the Jews were Romans. Let me give you a different analogy, one that does not involve chatting animals—after all, are we really meant to learn Jewish cultural history from talking fish?

  In a twentieth-century analogy, I might say that Germany was the implacable enemy of Judaism for all time, throughout the reaches of all Germanic-speaking countries, as many Jews today, in fact, do say. But while this proposition certainly strikes a post-Holocaust chord, it also denies so much of the richness of German and of German-Jewish culture throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It might be emotionally satisfying to condemn all things German as simply being Nazi; but to deny German influence on the development of modern Jewish culture cripples our ability to understand Judaism in the twenty-first century.

  I ask you the same questions about the latter half of the first century that we ask about the second half of the twentieth century: What does it mean to be a Jew in the decades following the destruction of the center of Jewish life? How did they recover from the deaths of immense numbers of fellow Jews? Is it possible to go on and regroup? Can we conceive of a new type of Judaism rising from the ruins of the devastation? Could we imagine a revival of Judaism in the Land of Israel itself? Could a powerful Jewish community live comfortably in the Diaspora? Is it possible that the new Judaism that grew, nourished on the ruins of what came before, might reflect the values of the very culture that destroyed its earlier center?

  For almost a century, modern historians have debated these questions about the (re)birth of Judaism in the wake of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple cult by the Romans two millennia earlier, in 70 CE. The Greco-Roman culture in which rabbinic Judaism grew in the first five centuries of the Common Era nurtured the development of Judaism as we still know and celebrate it today. It is not coincidental that the Judaism of now, particularly American Judaism, w
hich flourishes as a minority religion within the Christian empire that is America, sees itself reflected in the development of the religion of the rabbis of the Roman world.

  We can look back on those leaders of the Jewish community and all too often see a version of ourselves. They, as we have done post-Holocaust, adapted to their surroundings, at first to ensure their survival. Eventually they flourished. Just as we bear witness to the horrors of the Holocaust and it shapes our idea of what it means to be Jewish, so the rabbis held firm to the memory of destroyed Jerusalem even as they built a very different Jewish life—no longer one of animal sacrifice, priests, and kings. Rather, the rabbis made Jews and Judaism into the people of the Book, a religion based upon the study and interpretation of the Torah—a Judaism that was Western, essentially Roman. Using the rabbis’ tales and other evidence, I retell their stories, which is their history.