The Sabbath World (26 page)

No text is less reader-friendly than the Talmud. Even the pages look like fortresses, with blocks of text nestled inside blocks of commentary ringed by more blocks of commentary. At the center of certain
pages lies the first word of the passage under discussion, set apart by an ornate fence. The Talmud is Law, but to read it as law is a mistake. Although it furnishes later rabbis with the raw material of legal rulings, it is not a law book. It offers no general principles, is not thematically organized, and makes no effort to sum things up. You analyze all the exceptions to a rule, for instance, before you find anything that articulates that rule, or you are forced to deduce the main principle from its exceptions.

Nor is the Talmud theology. Judaism lacks doctrinal discourse in the Christian mode, and Jews didn’t start writing expository prose until rather late in their history, when they began trying to fit into Christian society. Rather, Judaism embeds its values deep within unexpected places: in rituals, in legends, in arcane legal and ethical discussions. When you first encounter what passes for law and theology in the Talmud, it’s likely to strike you as scattershot and shockingly concrete (the anti-Semitic terms are nitpicky and hairsplitting). The rabbis fretted about matters of the utmost apparent triviality. The Sabbath tractate is consumed by the proper time for getting a haircut on Friday afternoon, the carrying of quantities of liquid that you could hold in your cheek on the Sabbath, how to deal with emissions of gonorrheal pus on the Sabbath. One result of this weird mode of transmission is that it’s left up to the Jew to derive the principles of a Jewish life for him—or herself. (The Jewish philosopher Max Kadushin says that Judaism doesn’t have ideas per se; it has “value-concepts,” which are by definition non-definable, because they are embodied in actions or statements about actions.)

What the Talmud does is ask questions. It’s an exercise in the confection of bizarre hypotheticals that probe the scope and limitations of every legal or ethical proposition. Why this and not that? If this is true, how do we know that it’s true? Is it true in this case, in that one, in both, in neither? If you approach the Talmud expecting something like, say, the United States civil code, you will be lost. The Talmud is more like the minutes of legal-study sessions, except that the hundreds of scholars involved in these sessions were enrolled in a seminar
that went on for more than a millennium, raising every conceivable aspect of life and ritual, in a free-form, associative order.

There’s something wonderfully literary about all this. You rarely find in the Talmud a statement that has not been placed (with historical accuracy or not) in some ancient rabbi’s mouth. And every so often you find parables—midrashim—like little jewels in the text. None is longer than a line or two and all are delivered with brusque non-explanatoriness, as if the rabbis had channeled Franz Kafka or Jorge Luis Borges (which they did if you believe, as Borges did, that every moment in history is pregnant with all those that follow it). Insofar as midrashim may be adduced to illustrate some legal principle, more often than not they contradict whatever law seems to be laid down. Professors in graduate history programs preach against the dangers of presentism, the habit of seeing the past through the lens of the present. There is no need to worry about that with the Talmud. It is the ultimate Brechtian instrument of alienation. You couldn’t assimilate it to anything you knew if you wanted to. This is one way in which reading the Talmud is a spiritual discipline. It tests your ability to survive complete disorientation.

The first passage that we studied happened to be the first passage of the Talmud itself. “From when should we fulfill the obligation to recite the
Shema
in the evenings?” asks the Mishnah, the oldest layer of the text, which was compiled in the early third century. “From the time that the priests came in to eat their portion.” Why start with the Shema? Why ask about the time? When did the priests eat their portion? Why were we talking about priests, anyway, when the rabbis did not codify law until after Temple worship had become a thing of the past? We asked these questions. Our rabbi told us to wait.

There would be no answers—not to the questions being asked, anyway. The Gemara, the next layer of commentary, seemed to acknowledge our confusion when it asked, “To what is this rabbi referring … and why does he teach the law regarding the evening first?” But all hope of clarification vanished with the next line: “Let him teach the law of the morning first!” This would not do. I wanted preambles,
introductory lectures, supplementary readings. All we were doing was translating and being baffled by what we found. On the other hand, I didn’t want to stop. As we homed in on the absurdly concrete points of dispute, we were drawn into a peculiar intimacy. It was as if we had entered a seminar room that had been cryogenically frozen millennia ago, its questions and answers still hanging in the air. Nothing could be mistaken for conclusive. Everything that had been argued could be defrosted and argued again. The room we studied in had a dusty, living-room feel; light sank in from the windows, and swept slowly across the dark wooden floor. We felt no pressure to hurry and finish as the Sabbath afternoons crawled on.

It was an innovation of the ancient rabbis to place the obligation to study above any other commandment. An early Mishnah outlines mitzvoth rewarded both in this world and in the next—charity, care of one’s parents—then declares that studying,
talmud Torah
, equals them all. The religious Jew is to study Torah for the sake of studying Torah,
Torah lishmah
. The ingenuity of the edict, I realized, was that it relieved you of the obligation to be qualified. You studied because you had to study, and those who taught had to take you as a student, and it didn’t matter whether you were an idiot or a savant. This is not to say that brilliance doesn’t matter in the Jewish world—nobody swoons over genius as deliriously as a Jew—but, at the same time, being unbrilliant was no excuse. Everyone had to study, and any day was a good day to start.

Indeed, the rabbis loved to tell tales of scholarly giants who never opened a book until well into middle age. One day, I found myself sitting cross-legged on the floor at another Saturday-afternoon study session. It was a
seudah shlishit
, the “third meal” of the Sabbath, a light dinner meant to compensate for the feast of Saturday lunch. We sat in a circle in the rabbi’s garden apartment in the North Slope. I sipped a glass of scotch. The rabbi, a strangely Victorian figure with a long red beard, came from Scotland, and loved to press single malts on his congregants. He was a young, shy man with a soft, singsongy voice. When he taught, his voice went up at the end of sentences, as if he wondered whether you had followed his meaning.

By then I had a crush on him and was jealous of any attention he paid to anyone else. I hogged the conversation, which was about a midrash. Its subject was Rabbi Akiva, who, the story goes, worked as a shepherd and liked to express an elaborate disdain for scholars. Then—at the age of forty—he was taken up by the daughter of a wealthy man who married him against the wishes of her father, but only on the condition that he go to a yeshiva and study. The father cut her off; she had to sell her hair to pay Akiva’s way through school. Twenty-four years later, Akiva had become the greatest rabbi of his generation.

I was starting to know better by now, but old habits persisted. I had quibbles to offer, exegetical subtleties to point out. The argumentative techniques of the ancient rabbis remained as obscure to me as hieroglyphics, but I felt as though deep in my body I already knew what they had to say. I wanted to communicate this sensation of déjà vu, but I didn’t know how. Instead, I raised my hand a lot. After a while, the rabbi began to ignore me with a gentle, congenial indifference. After a while longer, he refused to turn his head in my direction.

Some time after it finally occurred to me to put my hand back down, I closed my eyes and drifted into a daydream. I saw the group of us deep in a forest, floating in a boat on the surface of a lake that was small but deep. The rabbi cast down a bucket and brought up water full of weird plants and fish. He reached in and drew out, one by one, a plant, a fish, a stone. He showed them to us and told us about them. Their forms were not the least bit recognizable, and suddenly we understood that we had reentered an earlier period of evolution, a lost order of time. We were his followers; he was our leader—he might have been Jesus, or Akiva, or any other charismatic master. The Talmud was not a text, I thought. It was an umbilical cord. It linked us to a primordial scene of instruction.

This was surely no more than the self-protective tuning-out of a person who knows she has embarrassed herself, but I was also realizing something. The Talmud was not a text in the formal sense in which I had previously understood the word. The Talmud was an organism,
circulating blood between the present and the deepest past. It was the word received at Sinai—the Oral Torah, it is called, to distinguish it from Scripture, the Written Torah—carried forward in the flesh. “Moses received [Oral] Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, and Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets transmitted it to the men of the Great Assembly” is the opening verse of
Pirkei Avot
, the “Ethics of the Fathers.” Body carried the Oral Torah to body. It was no accident that the norms of Torah study involve physical proximity. Students study in pairs, in a
hevruta;
discipleship—
shimmush
—to a sage amounts not to apprenticeship but to a total recasting of the disciple in the mold of the mentor.

How did this work? By means of an almost unthinkable intimacy. How intimate was this intimacy? Go and learn, as the Talmud says. “Rabbi Akiva said: ‘Once I went into an outhouse with Rabbi Joshua, and I learned from him three things. I learned that you don’t sit east and west but north and south; I learned that you defecate not standing but sitting; and I learned that it is proper to wipe with the left hand and not with the right.’ Ben Azzai said to him, ‘How did you dare take such liberties with your master?’ He replied, ‘It was a matter of Torah, and I was required to learn.’”

Even defecating in the company of your teacher didn’t go far enough. The Talmud describes this scene of ultimate education: “Rabbi Kahana once went and hid under Rab’s bed. He heard him chatting [with his wife] and joking and doing everything he was supposed to do. Kahana said to Rab: ‘You’d think your mouth never sipped this dish before!’ Rab said to him: ‘Kahana, what are you doing here? Get out! This is rude!’ Kahana replied: ‘It is a matter of Torah, and I want to learn.’”

Every level of the Talmud affirms the necessity of staying securely attached to your teachers—and I mean “attached” as in attachment theory, “attached” as infants are to their mothers. When I reread that first passage of Talmud, I concluded that the rabbis of the Gemara cared much less about parsing the Law than about making sure that the chain of oral transmission had not been broken. They asked not what but who. Who stated a certain dictum first? Who might have contradicted
him? How do we decide who’s right? Do their opinions have biblical warrant; that is, can they be defended by verses in Scripture, which, of course, would take them back to Moses? Those sages whose opinions are being quoted—how long ago did they live? Which generation of sages did they belong to? The first? Then their views have great weight. The fifth or sixth? Proportionally less weight. The fewer years that have lapsed between a rabbinic master and Moses, the more likely it is that he can be counted on to have known what he was talking about.

The Talmud, in other words, is like a giant game of Telephone. That umbilical cord does double duty as a telephone cord. When we study the Talmud, even when we don’t understand what we’re reading, we listen in on the crackles and the static and the distant heartbeats of something garbled and important that goes by the name of Revelation.

A
MONG ALL THE OTHER THINGS
that it is, the Sabbath is a scene of instruction. In Josephus’s histories and in the Gospels, we already find tales of scribes reading the To rah aloud to Jews in synagogues on Saturdays. But that’s just the most obvious way in which the Sabbath educates. The Sabbath is not just a purveyor of books (or the Book), though it’s that, too. It’s an all-encompassing educational technology, involving the body, the mind, and the soul. A religion, like any cultural artifact that is not genetically predetermined, needs a way to pass its beliefs and practices from one generation to the next. The Sabbath—daylong, regular, putting entire families in physical contact with figures of authority who can both speak about and personally embody the religious way of life—is that kind of mechanism. In fact, it may be the most effective machine for the reproduction of values anyone has ever come up with.

For it is a process of total immersion. The Sabbath addresses itself to the whole student, imparting not just knowledge or information but also moral edification, behavioral example, ritual training, and
religio-political consciousness. By keeping the Sabbath, or so it supposedly went in the olden days, we learned what to do and what not to do, how to carry ourselves, and how to relate to parents or authority figures, and from all these intangible lessons we could deduce notions of holiness or at least the good. The Puritan Sabbath, for instance, properly attended to, studious and decorous, was an exercise in self-control, and it was meant to effect a “reformation of manners” throughout seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and America. Rid the lands of sports, plays, alehouses, drunken revelries, and maypole dancing on the Sabbath, they thought; replace them with soberness, churchgoing, sermons, Bible study, self-scrutiny, time discipline, and acts of charity; and you’d soon find yourself in the holiest (and, as Max Weber would point out in
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
, the wealthiest) of nations, surrounded by the most dignified and reverential of fellow citizens.