Hermeneutic Biography in Rabbinic Midrash: The Body of this Death and Life [Reprint 2018 ed.] 3110150670, 9783110150674

Table of contents :
Preface
Table of Contents
Introduction
FIRST PROLOGUE: The Crisis of Will
SECOND PROLOGUE: The Fear of Nothingness
PART I. R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon ben Yohai and his Wife Or: The Body of this Death
PART II. The Ladder of R. Phinehas ben Yair Or: The Body of Life
FIRST EPILOGUE: The Temptation Unto Nothingness
SECOND EPILOGUE: When I Want, You do not Want
Bibliography of Primary Sources
Index of Rabbinic Sources
Index of Sages
General Index

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AHARON R. E. AGUS H E R M E N E U T I C BIOGRAPHY IN RABBINIC MIDRASH

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STUDIA JUDAICA F O R S C H U N G E N ZUR W I S S E N S C H A F T DES JUDENTUMS

H E R A U S G E G E B E N VON E. L. E H R L I C H

BAND XVI

WALTER DE G R U Y T E R • B E R L I N • NEW YORK 1996

HERMENEUTIC BIOGRAPHY IN RABBINIC MIDRASH T H E B O D Y OF T H I S D E A T H A N D L I F E By A H A R O N R. E. A G U S

WALTER DE G R U Y T E R • B E R L I N • NEW YORK 1996

© Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Die Deutsche Bibliothek — CIP-Einheitsaufnahme Agus, Aharon R. E.: Hermeneutic biography in rabbinic midrash / by Aharon R. E. Agus. - Berlin ; New York : de Gruyter, 1996 (Studia Judaica ; Bd. 16) ISBN 3-11-015067-0 NE: GT

© Copyright 1996 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Germany Conversion: Ready Made, Berlin Printing: Werner Hildebrand, Berlin Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer-GmbH, Berlin

For Iris

Preface The writing of this book unfolds along a bridge that spans at least two chapters in my life: Israel and Germany. The order of the parts of this book, however, does not mirror this chronology. While living in Haifa, RamatGan, and in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem and nearby, I taught mainly at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan. I would like to thank my colleagues in Israel whose friendship and learning I will always cherish. My father and teacher, Irving Agus, had much to do with my coming to Israel. He also, ironically, had something to do with my coming to Germany. My father was no friend of the Germans; but he planted in me, among other seeds, something that had to come to fruition through a long and twisting odyssey that includes this country. My Mother, Tema Agus, helped me by enabling different stations along the way. Jacob Taubes made me uncomfortable with my shortcomings and robbed me of the comfort of feeling at home. Professor Dr. Julius Carlebach, rector of the Hochschule fiir Jüdische Studien in Heidelberg, invited me, in the fall of 1992, to come as a guest professor. In 1993 Prof. Carlebach appointed me to a permanent professorship at the Hochschule. Many friends have helped to make my new address into a home, as well as often enriching and challenging me with their learning. Among them are Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann, Theo Sundermeier, and Hannelore Künzl and my other colleagues at the Hochschule. Prof. Dr. Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich, editor of the Studia Judaica, read my manuscript with much care before recommending it for publication in the series. Klaus Otterburig, from the Walter de Gruyter Publishers, rendered energetic and careful assistance in the technical preparations for publication.Without Iris Kiinzel I could not have imagined the bridging as taking place as successfully as I pray that it will. Heidelberg, 24 October, 1995

Table of Contents Preface

Introduction

VII

i

First Prologue: The Crisis of Will

4

Second Prologue: The Fear of Nothingness

12

Part I: R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon ben Yohai and his Wife Or: The Body of this Death

19

Part II: The Ladder of R. Phinehas ben Yair Or: The Body of Life

81

First Epilogue: The Temptation Unto Nothingness

202

Second Epilogue: When I Want, You do not Want

232

Bibliography of Primary Sources

233

Index of Biblical Sources

234

Index of Rabbinic Sources

238

Index of Sages

241

General Index

243

Wretched man that I am; who will deliver me from the body of this death? Romans 7:24

Introduction The term Rabbinic (with a capital R), as used in this work, refers us back to the authors of the Mishnah, the Talmudim (that is, both the Bavli, the Babylonian Talmud, as well as the Yerushalmi, the Palestinian Talmud), and the midrashim which are contemporary with these works. Any work that attempts more than a philological analysis and cataloging of Rabbinic sources, that is, that attempts to bring various sources together for the purpose of revealing a larger picture, involves serious methodologial problems. This is true already of the so-called halakha, the so-called legal parts of Rabbinic literature, the parts that could be referred to as Law. However, here I am dealing mainly with texts that belong to the so-called aggadah, the "non-halakhic" parts of Rabbinic literature. These texts have not undergone anything comparable to the various systemizations of the halakhic material and one can, therefore, discern their problems of system without polemicizing with the halakhasists. Besides, the problems of the aggadah are probably rather different from those of the halakha. In any case my remarks here refer mainly to the former. Rabbinic texts are too small and too large. Rabbinic sources create an illusion of largeness because they often come down to us in the form of large works. But these large works are mostly collections. They are put together, and often edited, out of very much smaller texts, texts thet are mostly only a few lines long. One can suppose that very few people could forever express themselves only in such very short texts. These texts must have been crystalized out of much longer lectures or discussions. Thus these very concise texts are mostly fragmentary, that is, they give us only a fragment of the information originally contained in the author's exposition. Although the quality of the literary crystalization of the individual text will determine just how incomplete the final result is, we must always reckon with a serious shrinking of content — considering the probable gap between the extent of the original discourse and the final literary artifact. Attempts to reconstruct the thinking of a particular Rabbinic author raise serious problems. The problem for the historian is the reliability of the traditions that attribute different sayings to the same author. The question for

2

Introduction

the interpreter is, How systematic were the Rabbinic authors? Or, better, Is their system anything like ours? But Rabbinic texts are too large. They are like a knitted garment: One pulls at a tiny thread, either because it annoys one or because it fascinates one; one is very careful to pull only on a very small thread; but, this is my perception, one inevitably finds that one is ineluctably on the way to unraveling the whole. Unraveling, that is, not necessarily in the sense of disentangling; more often than not one is in ever-more danger of losing the form of the whole the more thread one has in the hand. One of the primary characteristics of Rabbinic texts is their connectedness and inter-textuality. One begins with martyrdom, arrives at the Binding of Isaac, and discovers that one is long past having noticed that the central theme is already the Messiah. Academicians are experts at reducing things to their "parts". The Rabbis were not, certainly not the authors of aggadah. This is perhaps due to the reality of wholeness. Whatever the reason, it is well-nigh impossible to isolate Rabbinic "themes"; one limits oneself, rather, through the limits of one's indurance, or by the size of a book, or with the help of the given, artificial limits that history and chance often impose - an historical "period", a surviving work or collection, a manuscript, a "person", and so on. The present book is an attempt to overcome some of these difficulties, or to go beyond them. I try to break out of the boundaries of the individual texts by searching for the ever-larger patterns to which, in my perception, the texts belong. I try to overcome the boundaries of textual interpretation by returning to the texts from these patterns. I limit myself when the canvas of my own mind forces me to do so. The result of my efforts here tends to be a montage, or a montage made up of montages. The montage presented here is, I think, readable on at least two levels. One can read each chapter by itself. And one may take them altogether. "There is no before and after in the Torah", say the Rabbis. But here is a possible sketch of the structure of this book: The two "prologues" serve as the background against which my analysis has its verisimilitude. The first describes a "crisis of will". Since the being of "I am" is essentially a being of "I want", the crisis that I describe questions the very viability of the being-in-the-world of the sufferers of this crisis. The second prologue deals with what I consider to be a central characteristic of so-called monotheism: The Re-placement of Concreteness, to paraphrase Whitehead. The world loses its "solidity", its existence is, in a profound sense, called into question. Not only is the subject-world relationship in crisis, then, through the problem of will; the very objectivity of the world

Introduction

3

turns out to be a matter of deep anxiety. What remains, then, of both the subject, man, and the object, or objects, the world? And What is the resulting relationship between them? These are, of course, very large questions. The continuation of this book tries to get across the realization, at least, that these matters do indeed undergo a change through the unfolding of the crises. The first chapter deals with a particular kind of theological anthropology that "makes sense" against the background of the "prologues" as well as being an attempt to work them out, at least on the level of the perception of the "I" and the "you". The second chapter deals with a particular sense of a religious self and the resulting relationship to the world. It must be taken into consideration that these two chapters are built around two different, what I call "hermeneutical biographies" (that is, life-stories whose logic of factuality and unity is grounded in the interpretation of a [Rabbinic] personality; and whose theological-religious legitimacy is perceived in the hermeneutics of traditional material - biblical and Rabbinic - rather than in the mere givenness of the past) so that their relationship must remain, at least here, a montage (despite the fact that the two Rabbis who are the subjects of these chapters were brothers-in-law) - even without the problems described before. The two "epilogues" remain true to this montage-structure. The first describes a kind of "Theological Cosmography" - an ontological "mapping" of reality where what began, in this book, as a "fear" becomes an embraced perception of a different "worldliness". Or, one could call this "epilogue" "Cosmogeny and Cosmography". The final "epilogue" brings together some of the meditative moments which thus enclose the book as a whole in the axis of a phenomenological theology; albeight an axis that unfolds to an ontology that is different from that in which we originally set out — and for this reason the meanings of texts undergo a metamorphosis. If one begins the reading of this book with the final "epilogue" one can perceive a developing confrontation with the unexpected notion that religious man's knowledge of God wells up in an ambivalence where even terror and yearning cannot unravel the threads of being and not-being.

FIRST PROLOGUE:

The Crisis of Will "And He said: 'Thou canst not see My face'" (Exodus 33:20) - It was repeated in the name of R. Joshua ben Korha: Thus did the Holy One Blessed Is He say to Moses: When I wanted, you did not want. Now that you want, I do not want.1 T h e second century tanna is referring to two different theophanic dramas. T h e first, when Moses "did not want", is described in Exodus 3:1 to 4:17, especially 3:2 to 3:6. T h e second, when G o d did "not want", is after the breaking of the tablets, Exodus 33:12-23, especially verses 18 to 20. 2 This means that we must read these two scenes in order to understand the tanna's intention. T h e earlier story describes Moses's first encounter with the divine. Here Moses has only lately emerged in the divine history, his personality as the one called to lead the People of G o d has only just begun to unfold. When the man raised in the Egyptian royal household first saw the sufferings of his brethren, when "he saw an Egyptian smiting a Hebrew", he could not digest reality and could react in total negation alone. H e was unable to grasp the three-dimensionality of the social-political situation and could not foresee that the execution of the Egyptian would have to become public. A n d so the first biblical episode of his mature life-history must end in complete flight from the stage of Israel's drama (Exodus 2:11-15). But that aspect of his personality which is the unwillingness or inability to accept the judgement of power persists, yet without a vision that transcends the present situation. It is Reuel, the father of Zipporah, who is to take the initiative that turns the incident at the well, where Moses "delivered" the daughters "out of the hand of the shepards", into one that becomes part of the biography of the

1 2

BT Berakhot 7a. This is how the midrash was understood in the context of the Babylonian Talmud as well, see ibid..

The Crisis of Will

5

stranger (Exodus 2:15-22). And now Moses comes out, with the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, "to the farthest end of the wilderness", indeed "to the mountain of God, unto Horeb" (Exodus 3:1), without any intimation of the unordinary. It is to this unknowing Moses that "the angel of the Lord appeared... in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush" that "burned with fire, and... was not consumed" (Exodus 3:2). Moses reacts with innocent curiosity, and draws near to "see this great sight" (Exodus 3:4). And here the man is overwhelmed, with breathtaking unexpectedness, by the paradox of thrustupon theophany, of theophany that has not opened up through will and preparation: Moses is called by name, twice, to be told to "Draw not nigh hither", to tread the holy place with naked feet in dread (Exodus 3:4-5); and he is drawn into the intimacy of encounter where the divine identifies itself in terms where Moses is no longer a stranger, "I am the God of thy father, the G o d of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob" (Exodus 3:6). Drawing-back and being called are inexplicably bound into one, a mystery whose meaning Moses is to fathom only later in loss of innocence. While yet innocent, "Moses hid his face; for he was afraid to look upon G o d " (Exodus 3:6). So that when G o d "wanted", moses "did not want". It is essential to read this incident as the tanna does, that is, neither to hear only the biblical narrative nor to separate the homilist's commentary out of the biblical story. Only in this manner will the midrashic text eventually come to appear before us as that which it really is: A rabbinic reading of a biblical text or texts. In the reading discussed here, Moses is perceived as naive, as innocent; and it is this very Moses whom God wanted to do exactly what he, Moses, drew back from doing: T o look upon, to face directly, the divine as so immediately and pressingly present in the events of the burning bush (Exodus 3:6), a veritable "wanting" by God. For the tanna, had moses "wanted", he would have indeed "looked upon God": Will is here the vector in which the meeting with God is to have taken place. In the later story the situation is very different. Moses and the People of Israel had been partner to the theophany at Sinai. The mountain "was altogether on smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire... and the whole mount quaked greatly" (Exodus 19:18). God Himself had, as it were, come down to be with Israel, to consummate the covenant whose meaning was to be: The being of Israel as the People of God, through devotion to His Torah; and the being of God as the God of Israel, through His calling them out unto Himself, "I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage" (Exodus 20:2). But with the terrible sin of the golden calf this becoming-together of Israel and G o d is shattered. The will-to-God who had taken them out of bondage toward His Land, was now

6

First Prolog

a will to be merely led, '"Up, make us a god who shall go before us'" said the people to Aaron (Exodus 32:1). Israel lost the vision that had encompassed Moses; '"for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt'" (ibid.), he had become for them merely a leader through the wilderness, and as such was lost to them — '"we know not what is become of him"' (ibid.). Now all that was left was the will to struggle through for life, and that could be had in the person of a calf molded out of the gold off the people's ears (Exodus 32:2-4). Following this the divine perception is without compromise, only a new People can be with God, a People who can embody the singularity of Moses the bringer of the Torah (Exodus 32:10). It is the maturing Moses who begins to understand the complexity of the relationship between Israel and God. He perceives that the human reality need not disintegrate into chaos in faithlessness, that chaos is now to be held at bay in paradox: Do not these people remain the People of God even in sinning — '"Lord, why doth Thy wrath wax hot against Thy people, that Thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt...'" (Exodus 32:11). And Moses resisted the temptation that God would make of him '"a great nation'" (Exodus 32:10) because in that temptation the will-to-God would, of necessity, be mingled with the desire to become at the expense of others. So the People of Israel remained together with Moses, but the becoming-together of People and God was dissolved in the shattering of the tablets which were "the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God" (32:16), and which Moses hurled to the ground at the foot of the mount (Exodus 32:19): A shattering that could not but be felt in tremors of violence of brother against brother, in the ensuing battle in the camp in the wilderness (Exodus 32:26-29). Thus the scene is set for the second drama of will between man and God. The bountifulness of divine forgiveness, which is to become the second receiving of the Decalogue tablets (Exodus 32:14, 33:14-17, 34:1-10), creates an atmosphere in which Moses dares to ask of God, '"Show me, I pray Thee, Thy glory'" (Exodus 33:18). That this a far-reaching request by Moses is clear in the biblical story. Here Moses's leadership is at a peak. He has pleaded the People's cause before God, a plea that is a denial of the reasonability of total wrath that would be divine retribution (Exodus 32:11-13). He has replaced the threatened divine chaos with his own, human working-out of things, bloody as it was (Exodus 32:17-29). He has identified the fate of the People, terrible as it might be, as his own personal fate, "And Moses returned unto the Lord and said: 'Oh, this people have sinned a great sin, and have made them a god of gold. Yet now, if Thou wilt forgive their sin —; and if not, blot me, I pray Thee, out of Thy book which Thou hast written'" (Exodus 32:31).

The Crisis of Will

7

H o w different is this Moses from the Moses who stood at the burning bush! And now the leader dares to ask for himself, as the proven leader of Israel, the ineffable vision of the divine, the vision that is to seal the relationship between the People led by Moses and the divine — in grace. The import of God's answer seems to be, according to the biblical text, that Moses is to experience as much of the divine self-revelation as is humanly possible, and this as a positive answer to Moses's pleadings for grace, '"I will make all my goodness pass before thee, and will proclaim the name of the Lord before thee; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy'" (Exodus 33:19). But R. Joshua ben Korha reads the next verse with a peculiar emphasis, as follows: "And He said: 'Thou canst not see my face, for man shall not see M e and live'" (Exodus 33:20). In the tanna's reading of the story, Moses's will is to be denied, not because it is theoretically impossible, but rather because there is some terrible flaw in Moses's present stance: Before, at the burning bush, the will of Moses would have meant the flow of divine will into a meeting between man and God; now, albeit at the same place, as promised (see Exodus 3:12) — yet how different, Moses's will-to-God must be denied. The question that must be asked at this point is: In the tanna's understanding, is the negative divine answer a result merely in the context of the sinful golden calf? Is it that the meeting between man and G o d can no longer take place because the event of having-sinned stands as an impediment to the becoming of theophany? Or, rather, is there not something in the very dialogue of "When I wanted.... Now that you want" that precludes the possibility of man and God coming together in will? Midrashic interpretations come down to us, consistently, in very fragmentary and very concise forms. The only legitimate way of treating them is by taking their historically determined literary nature seriously. That is, we must let the so very few words really have their say, we must listen so very intently to them: Not for the purpose of confining them to the coffin of philological impossibilities, but rather in order to return through them to living readings of sacred texts. In this case that means taking the lyricism and pithiness of the words recorded in the name of R. Joshua ben Korha, their formulation, seriously: When I wanted, you did not want. Now that you want, I do not want.

T h e rhythm of wanting and not wanting, not wanting and wanting, the symmetry of the dissymmetry between the human and the divine, is stressed.

8

First Prolog

T h e inherent tragedy of a love that is to be mirrored in unrequitedness is starkly put forward. There is a fateful inner logic here that leaves the turning of man to God and God to man as unconsumated. It is precisely "now", when Moses "wants", that the divine "does not want"; in the very moment and event of Moses's wanting there is somehow embodied the calling-forth of the divine drawing-back, just as initially it is the absence of Moses's will alone that held back the happening of the divine will. W e are reminded of the unrequited love of the Song of Songs. What is the meaning of this here? The key to this midrash lies in grasping R. Joshua ben Korha's understanding of will in this context. For that we must turn to yet another text: R. Joshua ben Korha says: " A n d G o d spoke [unto Moses, and said unto him...]" (Exodus 6:2) - T h e Holy One Blessed Is H e said: Israel were not worthy to be given manna in the desert. Rather, (they should have sojourned) in hunger and thirst, naked and bare.3 But I complete, for them, the reward of Abraham their father w h o stood and did before the angels, as it is said, " A n d he (Abraham) took curd, and milk, and the calf which he had dressed, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree, and they did eat" (Genesis 18:8). A n d here I want (thusly) to take them out of Egypt - and you say to M e "'... send, I pray thee, by the hand of him w h o m T h o u wilt send"' (Exodus 4:13)!

4

The same R. Joshua ben Korha speaks here, too, about Moses's lack of will in his naive stage — at the outset of his being called by God. But here that lack of will is not only a lack of will-to-God: Here Moses's dearth of will is perceived as encompassing a total unwillingness to the calling — not only to the calling of leadership in the Exodus, but to the promised divine bountifulness altogether as well. This explains, for the tanna, the verse following Moses's attempted refusal of the call: "And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Moses" (Exodus 4:14). Moses's lack of will is not only a denial concerning his personal career as the leader of Israel, it becomes here a denial of the divine calling to bountifulness for the People of Israel — Moses included. So

3

Conjuring up Ezekiel 16:7. This association implys that not only were Israel brought into the covenant naked of desert, as in Ezekiel, and as the tanna reiterates, but also, reading out of Ezekiel, that this was the very essence of the state in which Israel is first loved by G o d . This state, therefore, had a logic of continuation into the sojourn of the desert, even after the Exodus and the covenant at Sinai, if not for the bountifulness of G o d towards Israel.

4

Mekhilta de-R. Simeon ben Yohai (ed. Epstein-Melamed) to Exodus 6:2 (p.5). A n d compare Genesis Rabba to Genesis 18:4 (ed. Theodor-Albeck pp.487-488).

T h e Crisis of Will

9

that Moses's naive lack of will-to-God is a lack of will for the promised eudaemonism as well. 5 Will, then, in this context, is - for the tanna R. Joshua ben Korha - a wholeness of will. Accordingly, when God "wanted", this was a will-to-Moses, to-Israel, and for a bountifulness for them as well. And when Moses "did not want", this was a lack of a will-to-God, and of the will for Israel's wellbeing that was to be worked-out in the desert. And when Moses "wanted", this was a will-to-God as well as a desire for leadership in the reception of God's goodness. And when God "did not want", this was a denial of that will which is whole as a wanting - a wanting of all that which is to be wanted: A wanting that is the hungering for eudaemonism, and a wanting that is the hungering to God. Unlike Paul, who dissociates the will-to-"good", to-God, from the will-to-"evil", to-"carnality", for R. Joshua ben Korha will is, here, undissociable; it is of the whole person, it is I-want. We can now appreciate the tragic paradox of will in R. Joshua ben Korha's perception. The way to God is to have been through the I-want of Moses. This is the way, but this is its impossibilty as well. The person is not a being isolated in the atomism of thisness, a person that as such is to come to God. Were that the case, "coming to God" would be a phantasy of stepping outside the bounds of I-am to the extent of threatening an undoing of the I-am even in mere yearning. Rather, the person is, or we should say the religious person is, an I-want-to-God just as he is an I-want-to-world (although one must always be able to distinguish the different distances of yearning, distances whose very quality changes in giveness and the lack of it!). Man, as a creature of will, unfolds a being-in-the-world because he is an I-want-toworld; and by virtue of that same will he may come toward God as an Iwant-to-God. It is precisely this perception of will, the very one that was to enable here the coming-to-God, that reveals the tragedy of man's distance from God. Moses in his naive, innocent state was lacking in will-to-world because his will could not encompass the vector toward redemption in the bountifulness of God in and through the world. His lack of will-to-God, then, was part of a weakness of will altogether. When finally, in maturity, will-to-God does develop, "now that you want", it is a flowering of I-want in the full sense: It is also will-to-world as the desire for redemption in and through the 5

Compare the neighbouring midrashim in Mekhilta de-R. Simeon ben Yohai ibid. (pp.4-5) where Moses's denial of his calling is viewed as impeding the impending redemption of Israel. But only in the words of R. Joshua ben Korha is the eudaemonism of the divine bountifulness here so manifestly stressed.

IO

First Prolog

world, in the sojourn in the desert with manna from God and into the promised Land of milk and honey. It is the will of a mature leader together with a whole people. And lo! the sin of the golden calf. '"This is thy god, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt'" (Exodus 32:4 and 8). The will-to-world, '"out of the land of Egypt'", remains, finally, without the willto-God. Will comes to be discredited in will-to-world; will cannot, then, be the way-to-God. R. Joshua ben Korha, then, recognizes will as a legitimate and major category in the person's stance before God. Man is not atomistically isolated visà-vis God, he may be an I-want-to-God. As such, the "space" between man and God is a vector, and as a vector it is part of the very I-am-in-motion-toward. So that, theoretically, the God-wanting-person can "come to God" through will, the crossing of that space is a streching-out of man through, in a sense, himself, through the I-toward-God: "When I wanted, you did not"; had Moses wanted, "then", he could have come to God in an event of "seeing". "Seeing", here, is to have meant a closening ofMoses's stance before God, a blurring, in some sense, of the "distance" between man and God. But will is also the will-to-world, and in the sin of the golden calf it becomes revealed in all its virility as a vector away from God as well, ifnot moreso. Thus the tragic paradox ofthe religious person's will is discovered. Man is to come toward God in yearning; without yearning man is a being of thisness, lost in the seperateness that mere I-am is. But as a yearner, man is fated into the world to which he is drawn no less, ultimately in a vector away from God. The very same virility of longing that is to bring the person toward God, turns him away. One may argue whether or not will-to-world is inherently evil, thus making will, as a way to God, inherently paradoxical. But speaking of will as after the golden calf uncovers a specifically religious aspect of the psycho-phenomenology of will, definitely putting philosophical discussion into a dim background. The key notion here is the sense of having-sinned. Whether or not the world is evil may be a speculative question. But knowledge of Rabbinic texts and liturgy, and many bilical texts as well, can leave us with little doubt that a major aspect of the person's standing-before-God, in these traditions, is the sense of having-sinned.6 This is not a matter of being able to enumerate and detail specific "sins"; it is a matter of the very standing before God. It is a matter of the finite self discovering itself as standing before the Eternal, and of reaching out through the abysmal distance of expectation thus revealed. That reaching-out is, firstly, a sense of guilt; a sense that involves 6

See, for example, Deuteronomy 31:29 and 32:15-43; I Kings 8:46 (and II Chronicles 6:36); Isaiah 43:16-28; Psalms 51:7; ibid. 78; ibid. 106; and Ecclesiastes 7:20.

The Crisis of Will

II

both the perceived distance as well as the vector one feels impelled to travel in order to cross that distance. As such it opens up the coming closer to God, it has a positive, moving-forward effect no less than a negative one. But it is an experience of being drawn backwards into having-sinned, in order to then move forward. So that the first vector is "backwards", away from God. Will-to-world, then, takes on a very definite configuration as viewed through the glass that is the sense of having-sinned. One's very being-in-theworld becomes ineluctably connected with the sense of having-sinned, and the conclusion is drawn that will-to-world has of necessity led to havingsinned. T h e point of the sin of the golden calf seems to become precisely this: Even at the high-point of Sinai, particularly at that point, man comes away both with the sense of having-received the Torah, a vector forward — closer to G o d and into the future of doing, and, inescapably and simultaneously, with the sense of having-sinned as well, a vector backward — away from G o d and into the past. So that in the sin of the golden calf will-toworld has been revealed, as it were in looking back, as a having-sinned. Indeed the breaking of the tablets of the decalogue can scarcely be seen as having any less of a dramatic meaning than a breach in the very possibility of the coming-together of man and God. Surely, then, N o w that you want, I do not want, as R. Joshua ben Korha has it. Will may indeed draw man "forward to God". But will certainly draws man toward the world. And if one has the memory that is the sense of having-sinned, then will-to-world can be experienced as a vector "backward", "away from God". That memory, that sense, of having-sinned is, initially, an opposite vector to that of the passion to rush forward to God. For the person as I-want, the love-to-God seems to be fated to remain an unrequited love, as we read in the Song of Songs; or at least to remain an exhaustion of dialectical energies. 7 7

This would mean that R. Joshua ben Korha's understanding of the events of the Golden Calf makes them into an expression of a breach in the very will of man. As such we would expect their meaning to partake of the far-reaching significance of a Fall theology where there becomes a flaw in the very anthropology. Indeed, this aura of a crisis of Fall is found in midrashic hermeneutics in connection with the Golden Calf. See, for example, Mekhilta de-R Ishmael to Exodus 20:16, in the name of R. Yose (ed. Horovitz-Rabin p.237), and Leviticus Rabba to Leviticus 15:2 (ed. Margulies pp.406-407), where death itself was to have been undone, were it not for the Golden Calf. And see also B T Shabbat I45b-i46a, and Yevamot 103b in the name ofR. Yohanan, where the event of Sinai is viewed as in some way undoing the anthropological crisis of sin initiated in the seduction by the snake of Genesis 3. Accordingly one could say that a crisis in the event of Sinai is a crisis that echoes, at least, the ogre of the Fall. Compare also B T Sanhedrin 102a, in the name of R. Isaac, and Shabbat 88a.

SECOND PROLOGUE:

The Fear of Nothingness Rav Hisda said to a certain Rabbi who used to present aggadah before him, Did you happen to have heard - For whom did David say these fifteen Songs of Ascents (Psalms 120-134)? He (the certain Rabbi) said to him, R. Johanan said the following: When David dug the shittin (the cavities, under the altar inside the temple, into which the libations drained) the subterranean waters welled up and threatened to flood the world. David (then) said the fifteen Songs of Ascents and (thereby) brought them (the waters) back down. If that is the case, (then instead of) fifteen Songs of Ascents they should be (called Songs of) Descents! He (the certain Rabbi) said to him (to Rav Hisda), Now that you remind me, this is the way it was said: When David dug the shittin the subterranean waters welled up and threatened to flood the world. David said, Is there anyone who knows whether it is permissible to write the (divine) name on a potsherd which we will then throw into the subterranean waters where it will settle down (and prevent the waters from welling up)? Nobody answered him. David said, Anyone who knows an answer yet is silent should choke! Ahithophel said, If, according to the To rah, (God said) My name that is written in holiness should be erased on the water (that is to be drunk by a Sotah, a wife suspected of faithlessness ) in order to make peace between a man and his wife (the immediate result of the ritual described in ibid, was to be the coming-together of the man and wife in a desire for a son - see verse 28), then how much moreso (should it be permissible to use the divine name) in order to bring peacefulness to the entire world. He (Ahithophel) said to him (David), It is permissible. He (David) wrote the (divine) name on a potsherd and threw it into the subterranean waters, and the waters went down to a depth of sixteen thousand cubits. Upon seeing that they (the waters) had gone down so low he (David) said, The closer they (the waters) are to the surface the better the world's irrigation. He (David) then said the fifteen Songs of Ascents and (thereby) brought them (the waters) fifteen thousand cubits closer to the surface; and he set them at a depth of one thousand cubits. (BT Sukkah 53 a + b) When David began digging the foundations of the temple he dug to a depth of fifteen hundred cubits yet did not reach the subterranean waters. And

The Fear of Nothingness

13

finally he come upon an earthen pot and wanted to lift it (and move it aside). It said to him, You cannot. He said to it, Why? It said to him, Because I am permanently set here over (the entrance of) the subterranean waters. He said to it, And since when are you here? It said to him, When God made His voice heard at Sinai, (saying,) "I am the Lord thy God" (Exodus 20 : 2), the earth quaked and began dropping down (into the subterranean waters); and (from that time on) I am placed here, permanently set over (the entrance of) the subterranean waters. Nevertheless David did not head its words. When he lifted it, the subterranean waters welled up and threatened to flood the world. And Ahithophel was standing there. He said (to himself), David will surely choke (through drowning) and then I will rule. David said, Whoever is wise enough to know how to still them (the waters) yet does not still them - he should choke to death. He (Ahithophel) said something and (thereby) stilled them (the waters). David began saying a song of praise, "A Song of Ascents" (Psalms 120 :1) - A song of one hundred ascendings: For every one hundred cubits (that increasingly seperated the surface of the earth from the subterranean waters, David) would say a song of praise. Nevertheless he (Ahithophel) choked to death.1 (PT Sanhedrin 10:2 ) 1 2

1

See II Samuel 17 : 23. Quoted in Yalkut Simeoni to II Samuel 6 : 7 + 8 (no. 142). A third version is found in Midrash Samuel 26 (ed. Buber p. 63a, quoted partially in Yalkut Simeoni to II Samuel 7 : 5). In the latter version the central moment of threateningness is not clearly identified. Like in PT, the digging of the temple foundations by David seems to be only the secondary occasion for crisis, but, unlike PT, the moment of Sinai is not openly recalled: "When the earth was broken up I (the potsherd) came down to here... behold the subterranean waters are placed beneath me." This recalls, rather, the flood in Genesis 7, "... on the same day were all the foundations of the great deep broken up ..." (verse 11 - the Hebrew word OTTO! "deep" (JPS translation) or "subterranean waters", as well as the verb "break up", are used in Midrash Samuel, as in the biblical verse.) Accordingly the purpose of the "potsherd" would be the overcoming of the Genesis flood. All of these versions thus connect us back to the original threat to the world, as the Bible describes it - even if BT and PT do not openly mention the original flood it is highly improbable that they could have meant to ignore this obvious conjuringup which in th e.Midrash Samuel seems to be more clearly articulated. PT, then, intends to perceive the revelation of "I am the Lord thy God" at Sinai as another meta-historical moment of the same threateningness, while for BT this second moment is incarnated in the founding of the temple in Jerusalem. Whatever the historical relationship between the three versions is, the intention of the PT and BT versions is unmistakable — they both come into their final literary crystalization within a similar theological framework. Rashito BT Sukkah 53b (top) writes that accordimg to "Aggadath de-Sefer Samuel"the "potsherd" was in place "from the six days of Creation". Accordingly the precariousness of the world is incipient in its very creation. Again we return to a metahistorical, mythological moment that defines the essence of worldly ontology - for Rashi's text this is even more dramatic than in the other versions.

H

Second Prolog

W e have here three versions of the same motif, two Babylonian versions — a shorter one and a longer one, and a Palestinian one. In the first Babylonian version the motif s structure is set out clearly and succinctly: There are three poles; the orderly world, the devistating flood that would leave nought but chaos, and the center of gravity around which these opposites fling in a terrifying tension. Neither the orderly world nor its opposite are stable, even the world as it is is not to be taken for granted. In the first version it is the event of the Temple's becoming that ultimately gives structure to this vast tension of opposites. But this is not merely structure a placing of the existing order as endangered by, yet victorious over, the encroaching chaos; it is also a structure of meaning, a meaning that reveals the structure as more immediate and fragile than might have been supposed. T h e fact that it is the event of the Temple's becoming, its grounding in the depths of the earth, that unleashes the chaotic power of the subterranean waters - thereby threatening to return the world to the dark womb of nothaving-become — means that nothingness opens up precisely at the point of the grounding of divinity: Before the House of G o d began to emerge into reality, all was still, the given worldly order unmoved; only now that the earthly depths are plumbed for a penetration that would be the founding of a divine placement in the material of the world is the reality of existence revealed to be an uncompromising clash between order and chaos, between being and destruction. It is the very specter of divine presence in the world that sets the terrible question mark to that world's existence; it is the comingnigh of the Creator that opens up the world to a primordial Flood, to an imminance of being not yet created. And because the moment of threateningness is one whose essence is of metaphysical ladenness, its threateningness is an energy that shoots through all the religious yearnings. The "victory" of the worldly order is not a final one: So long as the striving-toward the grounding of the divine in the worldly is dynamic, the threat of chaos, of nothingness, is real. The grounding of the Temple is ever fraught with danger: The moment of primordial crisis is as contemporary as man's reaching-out to G o d is vital. Or, put phenomenologically: The ogre of non-creation that becomes implicit in the theology of creation itself is, for man the creature, in this lexocography of fear, the ogre of not-being, the ogre of nothingness; epitomized precisely in the moments of divine realization-yearning; always a moment of the present. This is the meaning of this hermeneutics of Psalms 120-134. I t ' s the saying by David of the fifteen Songs of Ascents that calls the existence of the worldly order out of chaos. This is the meaning of the psalms; because when religious man prays the psalms he is calling deliverance out of destruction.

The Fear of Nothingness

IS

Or, placing this perception of the Rabbinic hermeneutics — as being the meaning of the psalms as prayers - within our entire structure: It is the very moment of being-before-God that opens up the fear of nothingness; just as it is this very moment that opens up the being-at-peace. But we will have to await the completion of our journey before this perception can become more meaningful. The first Babylonian version derives the immediate conviction of its reading in Psalms 122, 124, 127, 132, and 134, and carries their theme over to a frame for Psalms 120-134. Psalms 122 opens with: "A Song of Ascents; of David. I rejoiced when they said unto me: 'Let us go unto the house of the Lord'" (verse 1). In this psalm desire for the Temple is placed within a prayer "for the peace of Jerusalem" (verse 6). In the context of our midrash this is to give expression to David's desire to build the Temple, as well as to connect that building with a wider fragility of peacefulness and its opposite. In Psalms 132 David's yearning to "find out a place for the Lord, A dwelling-place for the Mighty One of Jacob" (verse 5) upsets his own at-homeness and restfulness into a breathless uneasiness that can settle down only in the "settlingdown" of G o d Himself (see verses 2-5). T w o poles are thus already made available for our midrash - restfulness and restlessness. But the author of our midrash denies the comfortable solution of this tension into a sequence where peacefulness is epitomized in the building of the Temple; rather, the latter brings the tension itself to a head, and the Temple as metaphore, as prayer — in this case the praying of the 15 psalms — becomes a limbo of restfulness that is ever delivered out of restlessness, never a coming-home that relinquishes the need for hope and yearning. In stressing the content of these psalms as part of a story in the personal biography of "David" the psalms are opened up (or kept open) for a reading that wells up out of other personal confrontations with the theme of home and homelessness, of restfulness and chaos. T h e complexity of unresolved tensions, indeed of tensions that explode in the very being-before-god, that now shoots through the 15 psalms, makes these prayers available to religious man in the richness of mature, and saddened, experience. Psalms 127, in its first half, speaks about the futility of all perseverance save that sustained by God. In the context of our midrash this makes the tension of uneasiness much sharper: Building-up and stability are real only with God, "It is vain for you that ye rise early, and sit up late, Ye that eat the bread of toil" (verse 2) - toil is unto life by the grace of God alone; but, in our story, the concretization of God-in-the-world itself is no less an occassion for the confrontation with the antithesis of human toil — chaos. And verse 1 of the psalm, "Except the Lord build the house, They labour in vain that

i6

Second Prolog

build it; Except the Lord keep the city, The watchmen waketh but in vain", by echoing, in our midrash, the fragility of the building of the house, the Temple, in the city, Jerusalem, comes to underline our theme's paradox: The uniqueness of the house sets its looming massivity in question, how much more is every house to be perceived as swaying in the uniqueness of being that would be before God. The pole of chaos, as our midrash focuses on these fifteen psalms, is perceived in Psalms 124: If it had not been the Lord who was for us, W h e n men rose up against us, T h e n they had swallowed us up alive, W h e n their wrath was kindled against us; T h e n the waters had overwhelmed us, T h e stream had gone over our soul; Then the proud waters Had gone over our soul. (verses 2-5)

The threat of nothingness is a total one, a being "swallowed-up", a flood, a primordial flood, we must add, in the context of our midrash. And in the chanting of the fifteen psalms as they are now orchestrated, this threateningness becomes a tone of dread that is somehow implicit in the standing in the Temple; "Behold, bless ye the Lord, all ye servants of the Lord, That stand in the house of the Lord in the night seasons (literally, "in the nights")": It is in the darkness of the night that the "servants of the Lord" become so special in their blessing of the Lord; it is the contrast between dark dread and praising that makes the assurance of order into so clear a prayer. And, again in the context of our midrash, dread and the standing before God are so connected because each is an energy that strains toward the other. In our midrash "David" is the center of the dramatic struggle. He leads the digging of the Temple's foundations, he perceives most acutely the danger of destruction, and he acts out the calming of the primordial flood waters. I take this as an opening-up of the perceived meaning of the fifteen psalms into a personal reading by each man or woman in suffering or fear. It is difficult to overlook the fact that a large part of the content of these psalms is indeed a personal one: In my distress I called unto the Lord, A n d H e answered me. (Psalms 120 : 1)

T h e Fear of Nothingness

17

I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains; From whence shall m y help come? (121 : 1 - 2 ) Unto T h e e I lift up mine eyes, 0 T h o u that art enthroned in the heavans. (123 : 1) O u t of the depths have I called Thee, O Lord. Lord, hearken unto m y voice; Let Thine ears be attentive T o the voice of m y supplications. 1 wait for the Lord, m y soul doth wait, A n d in His word do I hope. M y soul waiteth for the Lord, M o r e than watchmen for the morning; Yea, more than watchmen for the morning. (130 : 1-2 and 5-6) Lord, m y heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty; Neither do I exercise myself in things too great, or in things too wonderful for me. (131 : I)

The lonely man of prayer is a David in the poetry with which his yearning for G o d wells up out of his depths; and David who dreads and stills is the lonely man of prayer who is a quivering knight of God. T h e second Babylonian version seems to be an overweaving of the first. In this re-working the titles of the fifteen psalms, "A Song of Ascents" determines the structure of the midrashic story. But this is not merely a re-instrumentation of the older story. In the second version the seeming disharmony of the first is hightened. Not only is the founding of God's Temple in the depths of the earth the occasion for existential trembling; the name of God that is written down upon a sherd and cast into the deep, thereby rolling back the frenzied flood, is the very same name that brings the world unto another un-becoming — it causes the wetness of the earth to recede so far as to threaten all fruitfulness: The fear of G o d is a founding of order just as much as it is a terror of never becoming. Only the psalms, with their everpresent tension of dread and hope, are a structure of being-in-the-world where nothingness and fruitfulness are balanced in a standing before God; a balance that keeps both the surge of waters and the turning back into notbecoming at bay, yet always looming and swaying.

i8

Second Prolog

In the Palestinian version the starkness of the trembling of being is unmistakable. The threat of the subterranean waters is even more than a recall of the Flood of Noah: The earth itself quakes, its total solidity threatens to crumble in an unbecoming into the pre-creation state, before "And God said: 'Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear"' (Genesis 1:9): All differentiation can be undone, as this version has it, "the earth quaked and began dropping down" into the emptiness of the waters - at the moment of "Sinai". And when David founds the House of God the primordial fragility of the world threatens to become a reality where being is no longer possible; the threat of the subterranean waters wells up in the setting aside of the "earthen pot" that delicately and with fragility holds off the quaking of "Sinai" - the threat of the waters is a threat of the primordial moment, and afterwards only the mythical event of new Creation could present a world of being and order. The nowness of the primordial dread is revealed in the striving of "David". The knowledge of the keeping intact of worldly being remains a mystery in the ambivalent person of "Ahitophel". It is the praying of the "fifteen Songs of Ascents" that is a being-in-the-present in the awe before the dread and wonder of the still-retained precariousness of being-in-the-world. In the Palestinian version we can clearly see that in the matrix that nourishes all three versions the central moment of the confrontation with total undoing is the very same moment of confrontation with God — in the coming-near to Him. In the Babylonian versions this emerges in the founding of the "house of God". In the Palestinian version the primordial moment of dread is the revelation of "I am the Lord thy God" — at Sinai, that is, in the force of this revelation as a vast beginning yet an undeniable truth for always: A nowness that takes one's breath away in an almost inability to confront that nowness as a reality outside the memory of mythfulness. In the revelation of "I am the Lord thy God" all "amness" is called into question; it is the very appearance of the Creator — as a knowledge for man that He "is" — that sets the creation on the abyss of not-being. "God is" and "The world is" span a polarity of that creatureliness which trembles precariously on the chasm of opposites: The creatureliness of human "amness" - which is, for man, after all, the sole unmediated source of the category of "being" in general — which "is", yet can also "not-be".

PART I

R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon ben Yohai and his Wife Or:

The Body of this Death

i. Psalms 104:

Psalm 104 is a hymn to the world as cosmos; but within a very specific theological frame. Verse 1 that proclaims,

...Thou art very great; Thou art clothed with glory and majesty

is not merely an outer, poetic structure introducing the psalm. Rather, it belongs to the contextual structure of the psalm and sets its unfolding as well as its basic idea. It is no accident that the psalm begins with the praise of God and concludes penultimately with,

Let sinners cease out of the earth, And let the wicked be no more (Verse 35a).

Thus the psalm runs the gamut from the Most High, through His creation, down to those who the poet would have left out of the scheme of things altogether. This opens up the picture of the psalm's unfolding structure. Verse 2 proceeds from the "glory and majesty" with which God is "clothed" in verse 1, to the "light" with which He "covers" Himself "as with a garment". There is an undeniable hierarchy here from God, to "clothing" — in two steps, to "light", a hierarchy that one is tempted to view as one of "emenations", of continuously lower manifestations of divine unfolding. The theological explosiveness of this temptation was no secret to the Rabbis who, however, did not hesitate (some, at least) to follow its energy, fully aware of the dangers:

R. Simeon ben Yehozadak asked R. Samuel ben R. Nahinan, saying to him: Since I have heard that you deal with aggadah (I will ask you) - From where was the light created? He (R. Samuel ben R. Nahinan) said: The Holy One Blessed Is He wrapped Himself in it (the light) as in a garment and the glow

22

Parti of His, 1 majesty1 shone from one end of the world to the other.3 He ( R. Samuel) said (this) to him in a whisper. He (R. Simeon ben Yehozadak) said to him: It is a verse in Scripture, "Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment" (Psalms 104:2), and you say it in a whisper, why? He (R. Samuel) said: Just as I heard it told in a whisper, so I told it to you in a whisper. (Bereshit Rabba to Genenis 1:3, pp.19-20)

4

Although, in this midrash, there is no hint that the light was not itself a creation by God, it becomes finally an actuality which bridges the gap between, on the one side, the eternal and nothingness and, on the other side, the shinning of which the world can partake.5 This is a theologically dangerous direction because it opens up to thoughts of "partnership" with God in the creation, and that is why its Rabbinic promulgators "whispered" it: Perhaps they were more willing to confront the complexities of a notion such as creation, combining as it does such disasterous oppositions, unlike those who would anounce dogmas without appreciating their implications. Whether we follow this temptation or not, its recognition helps to open up the structure of Psalms 104. This is not a hymn to the world, it is a hymn to the structure, to the Order which is God-world-man-world-God. The psalmist descends, as it were, from the Creator, through the light, to the heavens (verses 2-3), to the layer of air, the atmosphere (verses 3-4), to the earth (verses 5 and onwards), and into the watery depths (verses 6-13). Then follows the creation of vegetation and the animals and man: Man playing a central role but not seperated from the frame of creation as a whole. There is an overriding sense of the individual parts, including man, as part of the

1

It is not certain whether the subject here is the "majesty" of God or of the "light". I have opted for the former based on the reading that seems to be echoed in the feminine form of the pronoun here, which then refers back to the feminine form of m i « , light, see variants in ed. Theodor-Albeck.

2

"Glory" might be the more auspiciously chosen word here but I wanted to keep abreast of the JPS translation of the same word in the Psalms.

3

See Theodor's interpretation here, according to which the question is not how the light was created, but whence. This would imply that already the questioner was aware of the problematics of the interpretation offered here and that his question is not a mere quest for information but rather more for confirmation of a particular direction of thought. This is borne out by his ready quotation of Psalms 104.

4

See also the contextual material.

5

Compare Philo, On The Creation of the World, VIII.

Eleazar ben R. Simeon ben Yohai and his W i f e O r : T h e Body of this Death

23

wholeness of Order; an Order expressed in the rule of the heavenly bodies (verses 1 9 - 2 3 ) within which man himself is to order his life, T h e sun ariseth, ... M a n goes forth unto his work A n d to his labour until the evening. (Verses 22-23).

In verse 29, the psalmist stresses again that his theme is not the world but rather the world within the order that descends from God toward the nothingness that yet lurks behind, or beyond, before and after, the Creation: T h o u hidest T h y face, they vanish; T h o u withdrawest their breath, they perish, A n d return to dust.

In verse 31 the circle is completed: M a y the glory of the Lord endure for ever; Let the Lord rejoice in His works!

The psalmist rejoices in God Who in turn rejoices in His world. The point is neither the eternity of God without reference to the world, nor of the glory of Nature without God. The point is a moral one, namely, that reality is an order that encompasses ever so much, but one which nevertheless should not legitimize evildoers; Let sinners cease out of the earth, A n d let the wicked be no more (Verse 35).

In an ever so biblical vane the psalmist could never say that evil "does not exist"; it exists surely and, in keeping with a piety that so marks a large part of the book of Psalms, the yearning that is prayer preempts any temptation to thoughts of theodicy. Psalms 104 is indeed a wholeness without blindness — when read as a whole, that is.

Parti

M

1.2. "Tell Him to make me a spindle": T h e complexity to whose opening-up Psalms 104, within a developing theology, gives expression finds a metaphore befitting its darkness in the following story: Caesar's daughter said to R. Joshua ben Hananiah: Your God is a carpenter, as is written in Scripture, "Who layest the beams of thine upper chambers in the waters" (Psalms 104:3); Tell Him to make me a spindle. He (R. Joshua) said (to her): Okay. He prayed for her and she was stricken with leprosy. 6 She was (then) seated in the market-place of Rome and was given a spindel. 7 For it was the custom that whoever was stricken with leprosy in Rome was given a spindel with which he sat in the market-place and unraveled tangled yarn, in order that people should see and pray for him. One day he (R. Joshua) was passing there. She (Caesar's daughter) was sitting and unraveling yarn in the market-place of the Romans. She said to him: Tell your God to take what He gave me. He said to her: Our God gives, He does not take. (.Hullin 60a) "Caesar's daughter", offspring of the summit of imperial power and order, reads Psalms 104 in character: G o d is praised as the "carpenter" of the world, as the one responsible for its manifest power and order. Put differently, the searching-out of God's manifestation is from "below", through the perception of, and awe at, the universe as met by confronting it in its giveness. G o d "is a carpenter", the simply materialistic, given configuration of things reveals His nature. Psalms 104 would then be a song of praise by one enamoured by the artifacticity of the world, and "Caesar's daughter" thus demands, sarcastically, that this "carpenter" indeed do what is so expected of him, in the small and undemanding fashion of producing a simple wooden P e gT h e "spindle" here becomes a symbol that opens up in two different directions. For "Caesar's daughter" it bespeaks technology, that of its own

6

7

The root yiJ here means literally "stricken (with a sort of plague)". It is extremely common for the verb to he used in Rabbinic Hebrew as a synonym for leprosy, and that certainly fits the context here best. The root "IT10 means to "undo", or more specifically - in this context - to "unravel". Compare M Sotah 1:5, "... and he undoes her hair", that is, the priest undoes the wayward-wife's hairdo. I have, therefore, translated the Aramaic noun formation here as "spindel" in keeping with the sense of the continuation: The "spindel" here is to be used as a peg on which "Caesar's daughter" is to unravel the "tangled yarn".

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manufacture as well as its part in generating the manufacture of clothing, of material production in general, perhaps even of fertility. But through R. Joshua's prayer the spindel opens up to a far more convoluted symbolism, even to a sinister symbolism: The "spindle" conjures up a sense of fate, as Clotho, sister of Atropos and Lactesis, the three Fates "who give men all good and bad", 8 holds the spindle of the thread of life that is measured and cut by her two sisters.9 N o w the ruler's daughter is herself exiled from the world of power and order, to sit by in the homeless flux and motion of the tumultuous Roman market-place. Here she is to endlessly unravel the unravable thread that is fated to her, to the horror of the passers-by who can only pray for her. From the vantage point of the market place, always viewing people in their passing-by and in the outwardness and fleetingness of their dealings, momentary montages of multiplicity rather than the warmth and security of home, the outerness and aura of the world strike her in their crumbling complexity. The world is not a cosmos, but a labrynth whose end cannot be fathomed — as the yarn is never finished. Unraveling the thread becomes an increasingly loaded spindel with never more order in the endless skeins. In unraveling her own fate into leprosy and exile, anything but an unraveling, "Caesar's daughter" is seen by R. Joshua as confronting a G o d whose creation of the world can be praised in a paean to an artifactual, manifest order and harmony only by those who are not exiled out-into it. The girl may yet ask the Rabbi to pray for this terrible embodiment of knowledge to be taken away from her; but R. Joshua knows that his God "gives, but does not take". T h e dizzying descent from God into the labrynth of creation and the dark, impenetrable nets of fate is a drawing-into a vast reality that is so complex as to make it anti-thetical to anything divorced from it, any "world of ideas", any Order that exists by itself. " G o d gives", man is indeed thrust into being-in-the-world by the fate of God; but for man there is no "takingback", that would be a vector which man can never fathom, it would be infinitely more unthinkable than Orpheus gazing back beyond death. So it is that Psalms 104 is read as a paean to anything but the world, or but to the world as Cosmos. Nor is it any longer a hymn to God as the creator of the cosmos, of Order. Rather it has become a prayer with which man, in his labrynthal exile, lost in the convolutions of a world whose orderbecome-fate may be confronted in sickness and suffering, yearns to God in

8

Hesiod, Theogony, 904.

9

Virgil, Aeneid, X:8i4.

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a fathoming, not a fathoming through the world which is impenetrable to returning to God, but rather a fathoming that is prayer: Psalms 104 has become a calling-out-of-the depths, an authentic prayer, in this Rabbinic religiosity, quite a different melody from its origin as a paean. Nevertheless, this rechanting of Psalms 104 has its seeds in the biblical psalm. In both, the world is not merely the world that is an artifact of a "carpenter", in both the Order of the world (in the Bible) or its labrynthal nature (R. Joshua) make it into something that cannot be spoken of merely in its artifactual giveness. For both, God is an inseperable part of the psalm: In the biblical version because the world's Order is always a fathoming back to the creator; and for the Rabbi because the pain of man-in-the-world is not mere madness, man can always pray to God in the darkest labyrinth. R. Joshua's reading of Psalms 104 is grounded in a profound perception of the psalm's complexity, of the impossible questions its exuberance raises, and unfolds out of the biblical chant nonetheless, though its coming-home could never be repeated in a merely biblical translation of the psalm itself.

1.3. Order and Halakha-. The Rabbinic readings of Psalms 104 are not monolithic and static. One can detect the tensions which the psalm opens up already in itself in the different directions in which Rabbinic readings go. An attraction towards deciding those tensions by allowing the psalm's energies to concentrate on the order of the things of the world rather than on the autism of that order, a return to the psalm as a paean, finds an expression in the following: Resh Lakish said: A day laborer returns home at the expense of his own time (i.e. he must not leave his work before sunset if he wants his full payment); while he begins work at the expense of his employer's time (i.e. he need not set out from home before dawn, no matter how long the way to work takes), as Scripture says, "the sun ariseth, they slink away, and couch in their dens. Man goeth forth unto his work And to his labour until the evening" (Psalms 104: 22-23). (Bava Mezia 83 a-b)

The divine Order needs halakha (Law) in order to make that order manifest. But when men do follow the Law, they can be once again in harmony within the created world described in Psalms 104 and whose creator the psalm there praises.

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1.4. Darkness and Order: Resh Lakish might be following out the temptation of a halakhacism that sees the Law as an ordering of the world. But a reading that brings us much closer to that embedded in the story of R. Joshua ben Hananiah, that is probably grounded in the genius released in the illumination that is that dark story, would be the following: R. Zeira taught publicly, and some say that Rav Joseph repeated (as a baraitha): What is the meaning of that which is written in Scripture, "Thou makest darkness, and it is night, wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep forth. [The young lions roar after their prey, And seek their food from God. The sun ariseth, they slink away, And couch in their dens. Man goeth forth unto his work And to his labour until the evening]" (Psalm 104: 20-23)? "Thou makest darkness, and it is night" - this is this world which is night. 1 0 "Wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep forth" - these are the evil persons in it (this world) who are like "the beasts" that are "in the forest." "The sun ariseth, they slink away, And couch in their dens" — the sun will rise for the righteous, the evil persons will be taken away to hell. "And couch in their dens" — there is no righteous man who does not have a place (in the coming-world) to himself. 1 1 "Man goeth forth unto his work" - the righteous will go forth to receive their reward." "And to his labour until the evening" - he who has completed his labour until the evening. (Bava Mezia 83b) Here the biblical paen to the Creator of the Cosmos and the sinister story about R. Joshua ben Hannania meet in a circle circumbscribed by this reading of Psalms 104. There is indeed an Order, whose Author can be praised indeed. But the tensions elicited by contemplation of the psalm have become, in the passage of history, far too powerful to be contained within a this-worldly Order. H o w the energies involved explode, does the this-world itself explode, what are the vectors of the blast — inward and outward, these are very complex and far-reaching questions. W e will follow out a particular, convoluted unfolding of readings of Psalms 104, readings that will be discov-

10 I have preferred the reading of MS Florence. The alternative reading, "which is like the night", is probably influenced by Pesahim 2b (on Psalms 139), or Hagigah 12b and Avodah Zarah 3b (in the name of Resh Lakish, on Psalms 42), as well as by the following sentence. 11

Following MS Florence and Hamburg, and others (see DDS). The alternative reading, "befitting himself', is influenced by Shabbat 152a (in the name of R. Isaac, on Ecclesiastes 12:5).

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ered to us as a phenomenological hermeneutics, that is, a hermeneutics that reveals itself as embodied in a biography as told in tradition, perhaps even as a hermeneutics that happens in that biography - a biography that is thus itself an interpretation o f Scripture; perhaps not a hermeneutics o f Psalms 104 in particular, but o f the tensions whose threatened explosion is hidden by singing the psalm as a paean with too m u c h enthusiasm, tensions that become in the variegated revelations that constitute the Bible itself. T h i s will be an organic unfolding grounded in what I have discussed concerning the psalm and its interpretation: A n unfolding pieced together from fragments, but organic nevertheless, descernable in its o w n inner logic that justifies tradition's telling o f it as embodied in the "biography" o f a single m a n - R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon ben Yohai.

2. The Hermeneutical Biography of R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon ben Yohai: 2.1. R. Eleazar and Psalms 10: R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon (ben Yohai) met a certain official who was arresting thieves. He (R. Eleazar) said to him: How are you up to (finding) them? Are they (the thieves) not compared to animals, as is written in Scripture, "[Thou makest darkness, and it is night,] wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep forth" (Psalms 104:20) (i.e. how can one find those whose activities are hidden by the night)? Some say that he (R. Eleazar) quoted rather the following verse: "He lieth in wait in a secret place as a lion in his lair" (Psalms 10:9). Perhaps you are taking in the righteous and leaving the evil? (Bava Mezia 83b) R. Eleazar's reading o f Psalms 104, while grasping the psalm's order as happening within a this-worldly creation, is nevertheless not a perception o f C o s m o s . M a n is indeed part and parcle o f the divine system o f things about w h i c h the psalmist sings; but man is so deeply a part o f it that humanity and animality become entwined in the darkness o f the night. In the alternative text quoted the tanna's perception emerges in another light. Psalms 10 is not a paean concerning Order: Why standest Thou afar off, O Lord? Why hidest Thou Thyself in times of trouble? Through the pride of the wicked the poor is hotly pursued, They are taken in the devices that they have imagined. (verses 1-2)

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T h e wicked, in the pride of his countenance : " H e will not require"; All his thoughts are: "There is no G o d . " (verse 4) H e lieth in wait in a secret place as a lion in his lair, H e lieth in wait to catch the poor; H e doth catch the poor, when he draweth him up in his net. (verse 9) H e hath said in his heart: " G o d hath forgotten: H e hideth His face; H e will never see." (verse n )

This is a psalm that while upholding the belief that G o d can and should author the unfolding of His Order in the world of humans, at the same time gives expression to the blasphemous reaction that surely this world passes under the hidden face of the Lord! The psalmist is very careful to put this thought in the mouth of the evil; but the poet's exclamation at the outset, "Why standest T h o u afar off, O Lord? Why hidest Thou Thyself in times of trouble?" leaves no doubt as to his perception of the emptiness out of which the evil person's boastfulness emerges. In the context of the story about R. Eleazar, as we shall see, the tanna's reading of Psalms 10 is nevertheless taken as a conviction that the divine Order can be, in some way, at last partially restored in the world. In the context of the story this becomes actually an apology for his behaviour, his actions are seen as grounded in the same pain with which the psalmist cries out for G o d to intervene in the world. It also means, as we shall see, a belief that the Romans could be partners to that order, which returns us, perhaps, to a more optimistic reading of Psalms 104. In anycase the opposition of the two different scriptural quotations in talmudic tradition makes each alternative tradition of quotation into an interpretation of the other; and this is made more probable by the similarity of the immediate contexts of the two quotations. 1 2

12

T h e verse referred to from Psalms 104 is followed by, " T h e young lions roar after their prey, A n d seek their food from G o d "(verse 21), T h e verse quoted from Psalms 10 speaks of a "lion" "who lieth in wait" (verse 9). It is therefore probable that one tradition consciously replaces the other. T h e one according to which Psalms 10 is being quoted is more apologetic and is thus the likely candidate for having replaced the other, thus earlier, tradition.

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Psalms 10 would then be "saying" of Psalms 104: An Order yes, but a prayer nonetheless. The unsatisfied expections-become-tensions that arise through Psalms 104 are perceived as undeniable. This does not contradict the reading attributed to R. Eleazar according to which in Psalms 104 creation is so shot through with the fact of man's being thrust into it, or one should say of not being able to escape it, that man and animal are sometimes inseperable; Divine Order indeed! - the divine scheme has perhaps succeeded too much? Or, as the evil would say, or as the psalmist would have them say, be does not say it himself, ' " G o d hath forgotten'" (verse 11).

2.2. The Body of R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon ben Yohai: T h e "biography" of R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon partakes of a very physical aspect, as in the following: Some donkey drivers passed through the town where R. Eleazar ben R Simeon lived. They wanted to buy some things, when they saw him (R. Eleazar) sitting by the oven. His mother kept on taking (bread) out (of the oven) and he kept on eating, until he had eaten the entire dough (which she had prepared). They (the donkey-drivers) said: Unfortunately this fellow has a bad snake sitting in his bowels! He (R. Eleazar) heard their voices.... He took their donkeys and carried them up to the roof. ... When he carried them back down (at his father's behest) he carried them two at a time.

(Pesikta de-Rav Kahana, be-Shalah ). It is also related that R. Eleazar visited his father-in-law who prepared for him a huge meal. When R. Eleazar unhesitatingly drained glass after glass of the wine which his father-in-law poured from a barrel especially opened for the occassion, the older man asked the younger laconically if he had heard from his father R. Simeon ben Yohai what was the minimum size of a cup for ritual purposes. The younger man repeated what he had heard from his father, and added: But the Rabbis did not take your cup, which is small, or your wine, which is fine, or my belly, which is broad, into consideration.

(Pesikta de-Rav Kahana ibid. p.195-196). And in a passage in the Bavli where R. Eleazar's huge physicality is unmistakably a part of the unfolding hermeneutics of his "biography", as we shall see later, it is told:

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When R. Ishmael ben R. Yose and R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon would stand face to face, some oxen could pass between them (under their bellies) without touching them.

(BT Bava Mezia 84a) So we have R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon ben Yohai very much -in-the-world. This sets the stage for the continued unfolding of his "biography" here: He (the official) said to him: And what should I do, this is a royal order? He (R. Eleazar) said to him: Come I will teach you what you should do. G o into a tavern during the late morning. When you see somebody dozing with a cup ofwine in his hand, inquire about him. Ifhe is a student of the Rabbis, he has fallen asleep because he rose very early in order to study. If he is a laborer, he rose early to work. And if his work is at night, (then if he is a metal worker, for example) he (perhaps) has been doing fine work (so that if even if his neighbors did not hear him at night it is no sign that he was busy elsewhere). But if not (if none of these is the case), then he is (only keeping himself by being a) thief and you should arrest him. The story came to the attention of the authorities who said: Let the author of the idea be its executor! R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon was drafted and he proceeded to arrest thieves.

(Bava Mezia 83b) R. Eleazar's scheme for identifying society's misfits may indeed be an interesting reading of Psalms 104: T h e divine Order which places man so deeply in the world may perhaps become muddled in an inability to distinguish, sometimes, between humans and animals; but it is up to man himself, precisely because he is so steeped in that scheme of things, to nevertheless perceive the order that is becoming ever dimmer and to restore its manifestation and efficacy. T h e realm of society, as wilful as people might be, is yet a network of structures that are grounded in the fact that creation is to be an Order. One may have to be a kden observer in order to spy this out, but finally even the slothful give evidence of an orderlines that they are ever forgetting and they doze over their wine together with the student of the Rabbis w h o gives evidence of an upside-down order, a mirror-image of the everyday order. Indeed R. Eleazar's fascination with this searching for an inthe-world order shows how much he himself is part of that being-in-theworld; and he is so much a part of the wholeness of that world that even to the Romans he can be partner in a social togetherness; and finally he is so drawn into things that he himself becomes an executor for the at-large society that seeks to convince itself of its ostentatious existence by supressing those w h o undermine its material of being, its order. This is an unmistakable

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statement by the son of a man who was reputed to have been sought by the Romans for mocking the legitimacy of their polity. 13 The Talmud continues: R. Joshua ben Korha sent him (R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon ben Yohai) a message: Wine-vinegar (an unworthy, turned son of an illustrious father)! H o w long will you go on handing over the people of our G o d to execution! (R. Eleazar) sent him (R. Joshua ben Korha) in return: I am removing the thorns from the vineyard. H e (R. Joshua ben Korha) sent him in return: Let the owner of the vineyard come and remove his thorns. (Ibid)

R. Joshua ben Korha does not seem to question the guilt of the victims: Even if they are the "people of G o d " they may still be "thorns" who are to be picked out by the "owner of the vineyard". 14 What is unacceptable to the tanna is the acceptance of the legitimacy of Roman power, a legitimacy that cannot go together with the "ownership" of the "vineyard" by God: If one renders unto God, there is no rendering unto Caesar; In-the-world, perhaps, but not to the extent of togetherness with the Romans. The Talmud continues: One day a certain launderer accosted him (R. Eleazar), calling him: Winevinegar! He (R. Eleazar) said: If he (the launderer) is so insolant, he must be an evil person. H e (R. Eleazar) said to them (the authorities): Arrest him. H e (the launderer) was arrested. After he (R. Eleazar) calmed down, he followed him (the launderer) in order to free him, but could not. H e (R. Eleazar) read, concerning him (the launderer) : "Whoso keepeth his mouth and his tongue keepeth his soul from troubles" (Proverbs 21:23). He (the launderer) was hung. ( B T Bava Mezia

83b)

R. Eleazar's sense of being part of the world, a feeling of being at home in the world in a togetherness of human effort to bring order to the world, is a sense of being at home with himself, a self-satisfaction, says our storyteller. When the simple launderer dares to accost the Rabbi with a finger pointing more than doubt concerning the Rabbi's person, R. Eleazar is infuriated. Even when he admits error and tries to free the victim, he cannot face up to his

13

B T Shabbat

14

In the parallel in P T Ma'asroth

33 b. 3:8 (5od) there is no hint as to the Jewishness of the

victims — their status is not the issue.

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own failure: T h e launderer himself is to blame, it is he that has opened up the visage of chaos by disturbing order in his insolance toward the Rabbi's authority, an authority upholding the Roman order together with the Jewish order, as R . Eleazar here perceives their partnership. T h e launderer has become, for the tanna, the "scorner" of the book of Proverbs, as in the verse following the one quoted here, and R. Eleazar is the "wise man", as in the verse prior to the one quoted here, in his double role of Rabbi and Roman executor. But this worldly reading of Scripture, grotesque as it is, is too much and, for the story-teller, is the final point that ushers in R. Eleazar's terrible crisis of enlightenment: He (R. Eleazar) stood under the gallows and wept. Some people said to him: Rabbi, do not be saddened, because he (the launderer) and his son fornicated with a newly married maiden on the Day of Atonement. He (R. Eleazar) put his hand on his innards; he said: Rejoice, my innards, rejoice! If your uncertainties are so (are vindicated as well grounded), how much more so your certainty. I am assured that worms will have no dominion over you. Nevertheless, he (R. Eleazar) was not calmed. He was given a sleeping-potion and was taken into a marble room where his belly was cut open. Basketfuls of fat were removed from him and placed in the sun during the heat of the summer; and they did not putrefy. ... He read, concerning himself, "my flesh also dwelleth in safety" (Psalms 16:9 b).

(BT Bava Mezia 83b) R. Eleazar's condemnation of the launderer has given expression to an apex in his partnership with the Romans: It entails the Rabbi's power to judge, within this order of things, and the finality of Roman administration-cumexecution. As such it also reveals for R. Eleazar, the absurdity of his becoming toward being at home with the world at large. Being at home in the world must entail, for the Rabbi, a belief in the ability to bring order to the world and to distinguish between right and wrong in the world. This is the point here: For the Rabbi, God's Order can be in and of the world because he, the Rabbi, can discern through the chaos of the world a becoming order. H e can seperate the wheat from the chaff, the clean from the unclean, the good from the bad, and bring that discernment from a potentiality of order to an actuality of order. But this discriminating perception has degenerated into a huge conceit, into a blindness, into a judgement that becomes violence.

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2.3. Community and Body: In order to understand the complexity of the turning-point in R. Eleazar's "biography" we shall use the reading of Psalms 16 in order to reveal an adumbration of a chapter in the problematics of the dichotomy of "good and evil". We shall discern at least two readings; and the fact that the views to which the readings give expression meet around this single psalm will give conviction to the feeling that R. Eleazar's "biography" is really meant to tell of a turning-point in the issue raised in the interpretation of Scripture here. Verses 3 and 4 of Psalms 16 are problematic in their meaning.15 However they are understood, verses 5 and 6 set the theme for the readings I shall discuss here. O Lord, the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup, Thou maintainest my lot. The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; Yea, I have a goodly heritage. (Psalms 16: 5-6)

The subject here is the poet's thankfulness for his "lot", for the particular "goodly heritage" which has fallen to him, as opposed to that which is the share of others. These "pleasant places" are not merely worldly tracts of land or the like. The "Lord" is "the portion" of the poet's "inheritance" and "cup", we are concerned here with the very salvation of the person before God. The subject here is the delineation of the chosen, to which the psalmist believes that he belongs. With this subject as the heading, we have the following reading: R. Nehunya ben ha-Kanah used to pray, upon his entering the house-oflearning, and upon his leaving, a short prayer. He was asked: What is the nature of this prayer? He said: Upon entering I pray that I should not be the cause of an error; and upon leaving I give thanks for my share. (Mishnah Berakhot 4:2)

15

For various interpretations see B T Menahot 53a, Midrash Tehillim to Psalms 16 (ed. Buber pp. 6ob-6ia), Yalkut Shimonixa ibid, and to Isaiah 46:12, and Midrash Mishlei to proverbs 9:10 (ed. Buber p. 32a). And see also Ibn Ezra to Psalms 16:2.

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What does he say 1 6 upon entering (the house-of-Iearning): May it be desirable before Thee, Lord my God and the God of my fathers, that I should not lose patience with my friends, nor should my friends lose patience with me; that we should not declare the (ritually) clean to be unclean nor the unclean to be clean; that we should not forbid that which is permitted nor permit that which is forbidden; for then there would be shame in this world and in the coming- world. And what does he say upon leaving (the houseof-learning): I am thankful before Thee, Lord my God and the God of my fathers, that Thou hast placed my share among those who sit in the houseof-learning and in the synagogue, and hast not placed my share in the theaters and the circuses. For I labor and they labor. I persevere and they persevere. I labor to inherit the Garden of Eden, and they labor for the nethermost pit; as Scripture says, "For Thou wilt not abandon my soul to the nether-world; Neither wilt Thou suffer They godly one to see the pit" (Psalms 16:10). (PT Berakhot 4:2 )

The verse referring to the "nether-world" and the "pit" is chosen here from Psalms 16 precisely because the subject of that psalm is conceived to be under the heading of the differentation between the "they" and the "we". Accordingly the double theme of this prayer is clear: In the house-of-learning one is ever so careful to distinguish between clean and unclean, between permitted and forbidden, between good and bad; and it is precisely that ability, that discriminating perception, that seperates the community of those who "inherit the Garden of Eden" from those whose lot is the "nethermost pit" — the delineation of the chosen and the not-chosen in Psalms 16, as the author of this prayer connects himself, his community, to that psalm. The seperation of clean and unclean, of permitted and forbidden, is one of the most central themes of Rabbinic halakha. This is part of a religiosity where there can be no yearning to God without the perception of distinction. Not to perceive any distinctions of permitted and forbidden in the world would have meant, for the Rabbis, one of two things: Either a total rejection of the world, which is not the way the Rabbis went, generally speaking; or an embracing of the total world. The latter would have been, for the Rabbis, an everything that is nothing. A total embrace of the total world would have been, for them, a living in a world which does not crack open to

16 This verbal form implies that the following description is a prayer that was said in the time of the author of this source (see Bartenura and Tosfoth Yom Tov to M Berakhot ibid.). It is possible that the source was contemporary to R. Nehunya ben ha-Kanah; and in anycase seems to be connected, both in B T as well as PT, to the tradition concerning him.

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any otherness, an imprisonment. The discrimination of embracing and rejecting vis-à-vis the world means a world that can no longer lord it over man in the legitimacy of its giveness; it means a break in the megalithicity of the world through whose threatening and totalitarian and opaque oneness man may now peer; and it means an understanding of humaness where there is a wedge of estrangement between man and part of the world - at least. The religious person is thus freed vis-à-vis the world, he is not altogether part of its thrusting into its dictated living; and he is thus relatively free (relative to other people) for the self-identification as one who yearns toward God; he is the carrier of the burden of the knowledge of otherness — God's otherness — through the bellowing multitudes in the streets of this world. Distinguishing is, for the religious person, the discovery of a world - a world not at all manifest in mere day-to-dayness - that can indeed be said to be created: Created in the sense of somehow being connected to a meaningful Order, or at least in its grace of not denying man the pain of his memory as one created in the image of He who Himself is never merely a part of the world, nor even is He merely its whole. The world of discrimination, not the discrimination that manifests the natural or social order and thus raises those orders to a levai of sanctity, but rather a discrimination that belies the legitimacy of the given orders, a discrimination grounded in the perception of otherness, is the world in which the tradition of religiosity that I am trying to touch here can happen; A religiosity of "good" and "evil" where good is, finally, an ultimately messainic category, a category of yearning. The prayer that is meant to hark back to that of R. Nehunya ben haKanah connects the discriminating perception of clean and unclean, of permitted and forbidden, to the community of the house-of-learning and the synagogue. One is "saved", or "redeemed", by belonging to this community because within their social reality the world that is perceived through the revelation of Torah becomes a reality, it ceases to be phantasy by virtue of their energies and, it is to be added, by the energy implicit in the tensions between this community of Israel and the peoples of the world. The reality of the community and of belonging to it as an experience that proclaims the coming messianic deliverance, that perhaps even embodies a "realized eschatology", is a phenomenon that is indeed to be found in the historical neighborhood in which the Rabbis in Palestine lived. We may see this through a short analysis of a section from the Qumran Thanksgiving Hymns. This is part of the library that has survived, in caves overlooking the Dead sea, the Jewish community who viewed themselves as the "Children of Light" and who exiled themselves into the Judean desert where they perished. Their history spans a period beginning some time during the second

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century B . C . E . and ending toward the time of the destruction of the Second Temple which took place in 70 C.E.. The section discussed here, which Jacob Licht has designated as Qumran Hymn number 11, 1 7 begins on page 6, line 3, and continues until line 36 of the same page. A schematic summary of its contents would be as follows: 1 - The poet is separated out of the society of evil, of sinners: from the congregation of and from the assembly of violence; (line 5a)

18

2 - This is accomplished in the poet's being taken into the community which perceives itself as having broken away from sinning. Thou hast brought me into the council of... sin. (line 5 b) The community of the saved is to remain in its being set off from the world, and as a minority. Thou wilt raise up survivors among Thy people and a remmant within Thine inheritance. (line 8a) 3 - The vindication of the community is the vindication of God Himself. Thou wilt do these things for They glory. (line 10 b) 4 - The community will eventually flourish in a victory of cosmic import. They shall send out a bud like a flower , and shall cause a shoot to grow into the boughs of an everlasting plant. It shall cover the whole with its shadow (shall reach) to the ; Its roots (shall go down) to the abyss . (lines 15-17) 5 - And that flourishing will entail the total undoing of the wicked. A source of light shall become an eternal ever-flowing fountain, and in its bright flames all the shall be consumed; a fire to devour all sinful men in utter destruction. (lines i8-i9a)

17 Jacob Licht, The Thanksgiving Scroll, Bialik Institute, Jerusalem 1957 (Hebrew), pp. 110-119. 18 I am using here the translation of G. Vermes (Penguin Books 1987, pp. 181-184) because of its readability.

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Parti 6 - In lines 23-24 the poet discribes his own sufferings at the hands of the wicked. Thus he concretizes the theme of the hymn whose thankfulness wells up in the community's perception of the dichotomy of "we" and "they". This sense of dichotomy is strengthed through the remainder of the hymn, into its crescendo. 1 9 7- The poet experiences membership in the community in the present as a bastion of strength. This strength in the present will, in the eschaton, spell the actual downfall of the wicked in a real, actual war. Thus the experiences of the community's flourishing in the present manifests, in the present, the hopelessness of the wicked, their defeat: The experience of belonging as over against not-belonging is so real as to itself be a deliverance.10 In the "then" of the eschaton, of course, the actual downfall of the wicked will be the prophecy that expresses how real and legitimate the sense of belonging, in the present, is.

19 Licht (ibid, p. no) finds it difficult to grasp the unity of the hymn. Accordingly he comments on the poet's intense preoccupation, in the middle of the hymn, with the doings of the wicked and their fate: "In the meantime he (the poet) has forgotten, apparently, the sect as the main subject of the metaphore, because in the continuation (lines 18-22) he describes the wicked in their wickedness, and this is followed by a complaint concerning the author's own sufferings - perhaps these are the sufferings caused him by the wicked (lines 22-24)" (ibid. pp.109-110). Licht tries to solve this (seeming) lack of unity by suggesting that the "wicked" referred to here in lines 1922 are a group who revolted against the sect, that is, against the author of the Hymns himself. Accordingly, the hymn's unity is preserved because it "nevertheless deals as a whole with the business of the sect's community" (ibid. p. no). I myself find this interpretation totally unnecessary to the hymn's unity: The dichotomy of the "evil" and the "good", of the "we" and the "they", seems to me to be so central to the entire self-conception of the sect as the messianic community that I am rather surprised when it does not appear in the Hymns. I think that the importance of this dichotomy comes out in my discussion here. 20 See George W. E. Nickelsburg Jr., Resurrection, Immortality, and Eternal Life in IntertestamentalJudaism, Harvard University Press 1972, pp. 152-156, for a discussion of "Present Participation in Eschatological Life"; and also H.-W. Kuhn, Enderwartung und Gegenwärtiges Heil, Studien zur Umwelt des Neuen Testaments Nr. 4, Göttingen 1966, pp. 44-78. In their interpretation, since the initiate into the sect's community "already shares in the blessings of the eschaton and participates in eternal life", since "he has already been brought from death to life, there is no need to speak of a future death and of resurrection from that death" (Nickelsburg ibid. p.156). In my own discussion here I have stressed the actual experience of belonging to the community as, itself, an experience of deliverance that, in being so powerful vis-à-vis the sense of despair that has been experienced by the initiate in his relationship to the world at large, casts the eschatological expectations (such as the final overcoming of death) into an anti-climactic effort of belief. The actual experience of deliverance, as inter-

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So we have an historical example that can serve us as a paradigm for two phenomena: 1. An event of deliverance whose phenomenology partakes to a large extent of a far-reaching discriminating perception, an intense distinguishing, a seperation, a seperation that cracks the monolithicity of the world and a seperation from this or that aspect of the world; however interpretative these attitudes and stances may be. 2. An event of deliverance that crystalizes before us as a seperation in the form of "we" versus "they", of community versus world. The second phenomenon is one in which form manifests content. The community is necessary first of all because of the social nature of knowledge in general. It does not matter that the initiates into the community are not aware of this sort of sociological thinking; The point is that they certainly are aware of the experience of social belonging, as we have seen in the Qumran hymn. But the point is deeper than that: The community of deliverance as seperated out of the world gives expression to the discriminating perception that is the opening up of any messianism. The sense of reality in which the material of being is perceived as clean or unclean, as permitted or prescribed or forbidden, and so on, is actually lived out in the community's seperation from the world. In order to understand the second phenomenon more profoundly, we must understand the first phenomenon. The drive to seperation is grounded, firstly, in the innerness of man. People of a certain kind of radical sensitivity have the problem of the perception of evil. The world is not only crowded with all sorts of aspects and events that are often even frightening and really threatening, the world is perceived as, or parts of it are perceived as, malignant. It is difficult to get this sensibility across to someone who does not already possess it, it is a matter such as deafness and blind-

pretative as it may be, is, for the initiate, such an impressive overcoming of evil, a veritable victory over the death with which the powers of evil would have him embalmed, that a future resurrection is not a test for the believer's convictions. While the energy of the present is drawn in the expectation of the eschaton, the latter is "real" in the experience of the present, the " n o w " and the "then" are mirrored in oneanother. This analysis is, of course, strengthened in the discussion of Nickelsburg and Kuhn, but is not dependant upon on it. I have kept my review of the Qumran hymn within the bounds of this analysis because it affords the model which I think best unables an understanding of the Rabbinic texts to which I refer.

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ness, though the possessors of the two different experiences of the world would argue as to who is the blind and the deaf. But for one who perceives malignancy, evil, the threat drives infinitely deeper than any impact inflicted by, say, particles slamming into oneanother with whatever force. For the person I am describing here the perception of evil is a panic that wells up the spine of his very being, it has a reality that partakes of the stuff of innerness itself. This perception has two aspects: It is a huge sensitivity as well as a terror-full confrontation with the possibility of evil as being part of one's own very makeup. The very sensitivity which discerns evil in the world paralyzes the individual into an inability to conceal the accusation of his own participation in that malignancy; otherwise he is not really perceiving evil at all! Thus the perception of evil, as conceived here, is a powerful threat to the well-being of the person: It threatens to pulverize any hopes of the wholeness of his own person, let alone the world; it threatens order with chaos, being with the nothingness of indiscrimination and becoming dust. In order to fight off this encroaching chaos and nothingness the religious person generates that perception which returns the world to him — the perception of seperation. The world is not an indiscriminate chaotic mass where malignancy is so much a part of everything, including oneself, that good and bad, life and death, being and non-being implode into a cloud of meaningless dust. No, a line, a line that has length but dangerously little width, is drawn. It may be a tortuous line or a straight one, depending upon the complexity of personality. But it is a line that desperately seperates "good" and "bad", "clean" and "unclean", and so on. The greater the sensitivity to evil, the more desperately the line will be drawn, to the point of absurdity. But any absurdity is the sign of a pathology wherein one sees, not wherein one is blind; wherein one hears, not wherein one is deaf. I use the word "pathology" because those who do not share in these perceptions are seperated from those who do in a chasm of pathology; a chasm that is too often crossed by the powerful prescribing of a "healing" where radical cutting-out disposes of any evidence that might really raise the question of the pathology's vector, that might enable the question: Who is sick? In dualistic theology the line is often drawn between "body" and "soul", or between the "outer man" and the "inner man", and so on. Whether this holds back the rending-assunder of person is a question that I cannot answer — only those who take that road can have any hint of the truth in that way. In the phenomenological theology of the Qumran Hymn, that is, the phenomenology that can be grasped in the actual historical living-out of the Qumran community and that finds expression in the hymn, the line is,

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rather, drawn in a dualism of "we" and "they". 2 1 This decreases the danger of the disintegration of the person, despite the fact that the Qumran initiates undoubtedly retained a huge amount of tension within the experience of their own personal living-in-the world. But with the battle lines drawn between community and world the Qumran member could face up to his own energies of disharmony by his intense and energetic thrusting of himself into the messianic community of the eschatological "then": T h e Qumran initiate was in a flight of dispossession from the world and from the present. T h e present, too, did not anchor him in confusion because he was already on the move into the becomming eschaton, as strong as the category of yearning was. This displacement and dispossession, this movement in the grip of messianic time, into yearning, into the future, meant that any tensions of person, vast as they might be, could be grasped as tensions of the flight forward. Threatening insanity is then the growing-pains of becoming, a power and not a sickness. T h e forward vector is no less an organizing principle for the most diverse components as is any plane that orders things in a stagnant geography of place and status and class and function. A n d the Q u m r a n community itself partook of this latter tendency as well: In the reality of the community, a truly human togetherness and compassion must be a wholeness that can hold together the inner splinterings just as the web of the community, in its complex assignment of tasks to so many different talents and drives and weaknesses and hungers, succeeds in empirically existing as an organized harmony — if it works, that is. T h e seperation of the " w e " and the "they", as in the Qumran sect's living out of reality, mapped out a seperation of good and evil - a multidimensional mapping out in messianic place (the desert), in messianic community, and in messianic time — which delivered their world from chaos and nothingness until they perished in the Judean wilderness. While this is an extreme model, it does, in my opinion, enable an understanding of the mentality to which the prayer that is meant to recall that of R. Nehunya ben ha-Kanah gives expression. Some of those connected to the Rabbinic circles may have indeed gone, to some extent at least, in the direc-

21 The dualism of "body" and "soul" or "spirit" was certainly known within the circle of the Qumran authors in general, but is not the central experience of their seperation into the desert. For a distinction between the sect's dualism and the role it played in their overall theology, and that of Paul, see D. Flusser, Jewish Sources in Early Christianity, Tel-Aviv 1979 (Hebrew), pp. 346-358.

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tion of the Qumran sect, as for example the haverim,22 But our concern here is R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon ben Yohai, and the purpose of the model is to understand his "biography" as over against the backdrop of this model. T h e prayer connected with R. Nehunya ben ha-Kanah reads Psalms 16 so as to give expression to a chosenness grounded in a delineation of "good" and "evil", and "clean" and "unclean", in such a way as to find deliverance in membership in a community whose reality manifests the lines of distinction that are drawn in the experiencing of the world. T h e key theme here is community, as in the more paradigmatic model of the Qumran experience. R. Eleazar reads-lives out Psalms 16 in a very different vein. R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon ben Yohai reads Psalms 16, verses 9-10, 2 3 to mean: G o d will "not abandon my soul to the nether-world" is not manifested in one's belonging to a community; rather, for R. Eleazar, it is evi-

22 For a short discussion of this kind of sectarian dualism within Rabbinic Iudaism see A. Agus, The Binding of Isaac and Messiah, State University of New York Press 1988, pp. 292-293. 23 Bava Bathra 17a quotes a baraitha which counts seven persons over whom "worms had no dominion .... Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Moses, Aharon, and Miriam, and Benjamin the son of Jacob ... Benjamin ... as is written in Scripture, 'Of Benjamin he said: The beloved of the Lord shall dwell in safety by Him.' (Deuteronomy 33:12). And some say David as well, as is written in Scripture, 'My flesh also dwelleth in safety' (Psalms 16:9)." The reading concerning David is the same as that attributed to R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon here and is actually based on the following verse, "For Thou wilt not abandon my soul to the nether-world; Neither wilt Thou suffer Thy godly one to see the pit", where the condition of death is clearly spoken of. However, the verse that is read in connection with Benjamin, either by itself or in its context, gives no evidence of having to do with anything beyond the ultimate barrier of death. Rather, the midrash concerning Benjamin is most probably dependent on the one concerning David, the words "shall dwell in safety", in Benjamin's verse, being read to mean the same as "My flesh also dwelleth in safety" in David's verse - followed by verse 10 of the psalm. The first opinion in the baraitha, which does not include David in the list, is, then, without ground. It would seem that the view to which R. Eleazar's "biography" here gives expression, around the interpretation of Psalms 16, was highly controversial - to the point where any reference to such a reading was censored out in the tradition given as the first version in the beraitha of Bava-Bathra. For evidence of serious tensions between the personality of R. Eleazar, or of the traditions clustered around its interpretation, and more mainstream Rabbinic religiosity in the person of R. Judah ha-Nasi see Bava Mezia 84b where the latter's marriage-proposal to the former's wife is turned down with the comment, "should a vessel that was used by the sacred be used, then, by the profane?" and in the continuation, and ibid. 85a where the attitude of the two to suffering is contrasted; and see below.

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denced and lived out in the corporeality of his own being, in his fleshiness. But this is not because R. Eleazar sees his sins as disappearing in repentance, and it is certainly not because he sees himself as one who has not sinned — as we will see more clearly later on. Whatever the ultimate meaning of having his "fat" cut out of him may be, I think it would be wrong to escape the sacrificial meaning of this clearly traumatic and frightening scene that takes place in the "marble room" or house. T h e perception of his flesh as not rotting is too phantasmagoric to be an expression of a merely comparative lack of sinning - if even this is present. Rather, we are to see this trauma of the flesh as somehow becoming an ecstasy of the flesh that goes far beyond a mere self-perception as not-sinning. 24 W e shall see this in the following material. T h e questions that will follow us now, besides that of the confrontation with having-sinned, will be: 1 - Is there, in this "biography" of R. Eleazar, a working-out into a dichotamy of "good" and "evil", as we read in the Qumran hymn? 2 - R. Eleazar seems to withdraw into a circle of the self, where he alone is saved from "the pit" (Psalms i6:iob), as seperated out of mankind in general. This is very different from the dichotamy of "we" and "they" which is so manifest in the Qumran hymn we read. For R. Eleazar community does not seem to be the being-in-the-world within which deliverance becomes. Is there, then, any radiation of meaning from the trauma of R. Eleazar to the living of others, be it as a community or not?

2.4. The Flesh and Blood of R. Eleazar: In order to penetrate this opacity we will have to turn to yet another telling of this strange "biography". 24 In BT Bava Bathra 17a, following upon the motive of the "dominion of worms" over mankind (see previous note) is a baraitha that says, "Four died because of the snake's advice (i.e. because of the sin in the Garden of Eden and not because of their own having-sinned): Benjamin the son of Jacob, Amram the father of Moses, Jesse the father of David, and Caleb the son of David ...". If this source is taken as expressing an idea in conjunction with the previous baraitha then one can deduce the intention that those not mentioned in the second baraitha did indeed die of their own havingsinned — which, of course, would fit in with scripture's biography of at least Moses, Aharon, and Miriam, over whom nevertheless "worms had no dominion" . Thus the latter notion is not connected to a being absolutely free from having-sinned, unlike those listed in the second source. This would fit in with my interpretation of R. Eleazar's "biography" here.

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Parti And nevertheless 25 R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon did not rely on his judgement 1 6 . He accepted sufferings upon himself. In the evening sixty pads would be placed underneath him; in the morning sixty measures of blood and puss 2 7 would be taken out from underneath him. On the morrow 28 his wife would prepare for him sixty kinds of porridge which he would eat, and he would then regain his strength. And his wife would not let him go out to the house-of-learning, in order that he should not be caught in the crush of Rabbis and students. In the evening he would say to them (to his sufferings): My brothers and my friends, come to me! In the morning he would say to them (to his sufferings): Go away! - in order that he should not be kept from studying Torah. One day his wife overheard him. She said to him: You are bringing them (the sufferings) upon yourself! You have squandered my dowery! She left him and returned to her family. There then appeared sixty seafarers who sent him sixty slaves bearing sixty purses, and they would prepare sixty kinds of porridge for him, which he would eat. (Bava Mezia 84b)

With his story we are yet again within the rich associations of Psalms 16, as in the previous story. In verse 7 the psalmists says,

25 This refers back to the story before in Bava Mezia 83b. However, in my opinion, it does not follow the episode of cutting out the Rabbi's fat but rather parallels it, see my interpretation below. Accordingly, "And nevertheless" means - despite R. Eleazar's reception of the information concerning the fornication by the launderer and his son. And see the following note. 26 iTTlin literally, his "mind" or "knowledge" or "opinion". I have translated it as "judgement" in order to refer it back to the incident with the launderer (see the previous note). The variant reading (see DDS), "... on his judgement (or, "on himself' see DDS), saying: Perhaps, Heaven forbid, such a thing happened to him (R. Eleazar?) (or "he did such a thing")", seems to mean that R. Eleazar is openly entertaining the terryfying thought that he has been responsible for the murder of an innocent man. This would support reading the following story as paralleling the telling on 83 b and following immediately upon the incident with the launderer. 27 K T ] , literally, ulceration. One or two variants (see DDS) do not read this word. However it is undoubtedly correct and is meant to conjure up a definite sense of repulsiveness: See BT Shabbath62b - on Isaiah 3:24, "And it shall come to pass, that Instead of sweet spices there shall be rottenness; And instead of a girdle rags; And instead of curled hair baldness; And instead of a stomacher a girding of sackcloth; Branding instead of beauty"; "Rava said: That is the expression that people use, tQ'3 (Ulceration, ugliness) in the very stead of beauty". And see my discussion below. 28 The literal translation of the printed text would be "on the next day", implying a description of a one-time event. However, it is clear from most of the variants (see DDS), as well as from the context, that a daily series of events is being described. I have used, therefore, the continuous form throughout.

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I will bless the Lord, who hath given me counsel; Yea, in the night seasons my reins instruct me.

The poet is certain that God is the "portions of mine inheritance and of my cup" (verse 6) through the "counsel" which He has "given me"; and he experiences this counsel as welling up from his "reins", his kidneys. While the verb-form "instructs me" is parallel to "given me counsel", the Hebrew has the meaning "pained me", either in the sense of "chastened me" or, more radically, "tortured me". In this story the latter reading is unfolded and R. Eleazar embraces suffering in a hunger for salvation. The "blood and puss" which are taken from the Rabbi's bed every morning in such quantity are like the "basketfuls of fat" that were removed from him and "placed in the sun" in the previous story; in both stories this is an offering of the flesh, it is experienced as wilfull. Reading the stories as parallel 2 9 indeed opens them up through and in oneanother. In the second story the sacrificial experience of the flesh is one of suffering. It would be difficult to deny this aspect from the first story although there the salvational aspect of the sacrifice is the central point. In the first story the cutting out of the flesh is a sacrifice in a very specific sense: It is not a trauma of losing, of giving up the flesh; it is rather a trauma of gaining the flesh, it is an ordeal, a radical testing of the flesh in which R. Eleazar's very corporeality is manifested as not putrefying, as one that '"dwelleth in safety'". Here, too, in the second story, the loss of "blood and puss" becomes ultimately a re-becoming in the flesh; The Rabbi refreshes himself each morning with a luxurious meal of no less than "sixty kinds of porridge" which utterly deplete his wife's wealth and finally takes a massive undertaking by the miraculously appearing "sixty seafarers" to keep it going day after day. In both stories the ordeal or ordeals are a passage to either a knowledge (the first story) or an experience (the second story) of being, finally, however tortuously, in some sense at home with the flesh. Thus the sacrifice in the flesh, in both stories, is not an otherworldly salvation that is achieved through a grappling with the flesh as only a means; they both represent a salvation of and in the flesh. This is, of course, never a mere return to the givenness of the flesh and an embracing of its meaning without the terror of confronting creaturliness and mortality. In the first story R. Eleazar's embrace of himself in the body not only does not deny death, he dotes upon it: The perseverance of his body in not putrifying in the grave is the crucible through which his living is finally legitimated — as forshadowed in the trauma of the sepulchre-like "marble

29 See above notes 25 and 26.

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room" or house. And in the second story the Rabbi's dinning is ever following upon the embraced sufferings of the night and his dinning in the light of day becomes, finally, a dinning that would be impossible for him in his mere humanity if not for the grace of God who sends him the "sixty seafarers". Or, as the psalmist in Psalms 16, verse 2, says, "I have no good but in Thee". Both stories are about a living-on, they are not merely about an isolated event that coopts the continuation of life under the shadow of a "then": Neither a "then" of the past nor a "then" of the future; never a "then" that continuously slips out of the grasp of living into a miraculousness that can only sparkle in memory or anticipation. In both stories the ordeal or ordeals manifest the meaning of R. Eleazar's very living. Based on what we have discussed concerning R. Elezar's extreme corpulance, the version of our story in which R. Eleazar's fat is proven not to rot takes on an even sharper meaning. This comes out by contrasting it to the following: H e (Hillel the E l d e r ) 3 0 used to say: O n e who increases his flesh increases worms. (M Avoth

z:j)

One is tempted to comment that not only does R. Eleazar's increased flesh not "increase worms", on the contrary: There is an increase of humanity which is removed from rotting and worms. What conjures up, in the imagination of Hillel, a mess of rottenness, becomes for R. Eleazar a dimension that is not left behind in the quest for salvation. In the second story this aspect of R. Eleazar's corporeality is sharply, if fleetingly, referred to: R. Eleazar's nights are not only plagued by the sacrifice in blood — whose symbolism concerning life is obvious, he also oozes "puss" as well. I think that there is an undeniable conjuring-up of repulsiveness in connection with corporeality in this otherwise unecessary detail. Again, it is as if we are being referred back to Hillel's deprecating perception; except that here, as opposed to the first story, the rottingness of the flesh seems to be prefigured in the goriness of the Rabbi's night. But the continuation of this story denies an identity with Hillel's perception: Every morning R. Eleazar not only eagerly refreshes his corporeality but this is, as we have seen, finally 30 Despite the fact that Hillel appears here following upon a chronological listing of sages ending with R. Gamaliel the son of R. Judah ha-Nasi ( M 2), Hillel the Elder is meant. "Hillel says" in M 4 is the beginning of another series which continues in M 8 with R. Johanan ben Zakkai, a student of Hillel the Elder. Compare M 6 with B T Sukkab 53 a in the name of Hillel the Elder, and see Tosafot Yom Tov to M 4.

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afforded by the miraculous itself. W h a t is the meaning of this ambivalent story about the embrace of sickness and repulsion by R. Eleazar and about fabulous and miraculous dinning on the Rabbi's part?

2.5. R. Eleazar and Elijah: T h e solution to this riddle lies in yet more stories. R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon was appointed to be in charge of forced laborers. One day Elijah, remembered for the good, came to him in the person of an old man. He (Elijah) said to him (to R. Eleazar): Prepare an animal for me. He (R. Eleazar) said to him: And what do you have to load (on the animal)? He (Elijah) said to him: This, my worn-out water bag and this, my cloak, and (myself) - to ride. He (R. Eleazar) said: Look at this old man! I (myself can) carry him and bring him to the end of the world, and he says (to me), Prepare an animal for me! What did he (R. Eleazar) do? He lifted him (Elijah) onto his shoulders and began going up hills and down valleys and passing through fields of thorns and fields of thistles. Then he (Elijah) began to make himself heavier on him (on R. Eleazar). He (R. Eleazar) said to him: Old man, old man, make yourself lighter, otherwise I will throw you off. He (Elijah) said to him: And would you like to catch your breath a little bit? He said to him: Yes. What did he (Elijah) do? He brought him into a field and sat him down under a tree and gave him to eat and to drink. And after he (R. Eleazar) had eaten and drunk, he (Elijah) said to him: What does all this running-around give you, would it not be better for you to take up your fathers' profession (to study Torah)? He (R. Eleazar) said to him: And can you teach me (Torah)? He (Elijah) said: Yes. And some say that Elijah, remembered for the good, spent thirteen years teaching him until he (R. Eleazar) could say the Pentateuch.'1 And once he (R. Eleazar) was able to say the Pentateuch, so it is told, even his cloak was too much for him to carry. (Pesikta de-Rav Kahana, be-Shalah )

31 tTlD'O, literally, "the book". B. Mandelbaum, in his edition of the Pesikta de Rav Kahana understands this to refer to the Sifra - a tannaitic midrash to Leviticus. However, this is not necessitated by the context here. The parallel in Song of Songs Rabba (to Song of Songs 5:14) refers merely to "Torah" in general. The story immediately following this one in the Pesikta (p. 198) has a similar theme and also speaks of "the book": The context there clearly implies the meaning of "the book" as the basics of the Torah, that is, the book, the Pentateuch. The implication, here, then, is the tremendous effort that was necessary for Elijah to bring R. Eleazar to the basics.

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This version has, in a composite story, elements that are told elsewhere as three stories: 1. R. Eleazar's appointment by the authorities, "to be in charge of forced laborers", here, seems to parallel the story that we read in the Bavli (Bava Mezia 83 b) where the Rabbi is drafted to arrest thieves. In the Bavli's story R. Joshua ben Korha explicitly denies the legitimacy of this working-together with the authorities. Here there is also a distaste for partnership with the authorities although the denial of its legitimacy is not as sharp. Elijah indeed intervenes in the "biography" of R. Eleazar at this particular point, but it is not certain that this adventure in "administration" is anything more than a "final straw" — indeed here there is no mention of execution as there is in R. Joshua ben Korha's sharp statement in the Bavli. Here in the Pesikta the stress is rather on the idea that such a partnership with the authorities is totally antithetical to the "profession" of R. Eleazar's "fathers" — the learning of Torah. This is both because the authority of Torah is here conceived as delegitimizing that of the authorities who appointed R. Eleazar to his post with forced laborers, and even moreso because the whole dimension of strength and power is being reevaluated here. Thus while both the Bavli's story as well us the one here are concerned with R. Eleazar's finally aborted partnership with the authorities; the Bavli's interest is the continuation of the Rabbi's "biography" after facing up to his profound change of heart, while here we are concerned with the actual confrontation of two forms of strength: In his appointment R. Eleazar uses his prodigious physical strength both as hard labor and to feed the more enveloping strength that is the power of polity, while under the tutelage of "Elijah" the Rabbi turns that same strength to the study of Torah instead. 2. The description of R. Eleazar's physical strength is paralleled by another story found in the Pesikta de-Rav Kahana (ibid. p. 194-195). When R. Eleazar felt insulted by the comments of some donkey-drivers concerning his huge appetite he retaliated by single-handedly carrying their donkeys up onto the roof. Upon hearing their complaint, his father R. Simeon ben Yohai — after scolding the drivers for insulting his son — sent word to the young man to bring the donkeys back down. "When he (R. Eleazar) carried the donkeys up, he carried them one by one; but when he carried them down he carried them two at a time". In our composite story in the Pesikta this huge strength of the Rabbi is caricatured through the machinations of "Elijah" who is carried around and afar as if the Rabbi himself were a beast of burden. There is clearly a confrontation here of "before" and "after", of physical strength before the revelation of "Elijah" and its "weakening" in the labor of studying Torah after Elijah brings about change in the Rabbi. Thus strength

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is seperated from its connection to power — the Rabbi is no longer partner to the authorities, and that strength undergoes a transformation - it is used for Torah and is perceived as weakening in its aspect of muscle-flexing. 3. The story according to which R. Eleazar was seemingly completely ignorant of Torah as a young man is not known elsewhere. The Bavli, in fact, tells this about R. Eleazar's son: Rabbi (Judah ha-Nasi) happened to the the place where R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon (had lived). He said to them (the inhabitants): Did that righteous man leave a son? They said to him: He left a son; and prostitutes who themselves get paid two (coins), are willing to pay him (the son) eight! ... (BT Bava Mezia 85 a)

The Bavli goes on to tell how Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi arranged for the son's education so that finally he too become a Rabbi. Whatever the relationship of the two stories, it seems clear that the description of the young R. Eleazar as ignorant of Torah is, even if not influenced by his son's career, not based on the simple facticity of his biography. 3Z The story-teller in the Pesikta is rather continuing with interpreting R. Eleazar's life-story, with constructing his "biography" within the scheme of interpretation that we are discussing here. The meaning of Elijah's educating the Rabbi means, then, reeducation: R. Eleazar is perceived as going through so deep a trauma in his turning-away from an understanding that legitimates partnership with the authorities as to cast his career as one who studies Torah into such a new light that it were as if he were veritably starting anew. R. Eleazar is, in a sense then, becoming completely anew as a Torah scholar and as a righteous person out of the events that are interpretatively marked out in the stories we have discussed. And the fact that it is "Elijah" who brings this about adds, at least, to the sharpness with which this change is perceived. 4. Both the Bavli {Shabbat33b) and the Yerushalmi {Sheviit 9:1 ), as well as the Pesikta de-Rav Kahana (ibid, pp.191-193), preserve a tradition that tells of R. Eleazar's father, R. Simeon ben Yohai, sitting in a cave for thirteen years. While the Yerushalmi dots not mention R. Eleazar, the Pesikta — though representing the same Palestinian tradition as the Yerushalmi — does, as does the Bavli. The latter tells that throughout their stay in the cave the father and son studied Torah. Furthermore it relates that after twelve 32 There are clear traditions that R. Eleazar was considered to be a scholar already through the education he received from his father, R. Simeon ben Yohai. See for example PT Shabbat 10:5 (12 c), BT Sukkah 45b, and BT Bava Mezia 84b.

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years Elijah brought the information that "Caesar has died and his edict (sentencing R. Simeon to death for speaking out against the empire's legitimacy) is annulled". Whereupon the two leave the cave, only to be ordered back by a "divine echo" because their view of the world was so intolerant that "wherever they looked (with scorn) was immediately burnt". They remain in the cave for another twelve months, and then finally leave for good. Upon leaving, "whatever R. Eleazar would scourge, R. Simeon would heal. He (R. Simeon) said to him (R. Eleazar): My son, I and you are sufficient for the world." The Babylonian and Palestinian33 versions agree on the number thirteen, connecting the story of the cave to the one in the Pesikta where Elijah teaches R. Eleazar for thirteen years, despite the fact that the Yerushalmi does not mention the son - the Pesikta does; the Bavli connects the cave to the learning of Torah and to Elijah, strengthening the connection to our composite story; and it is not difficult to discern the mythological motif of death and rebirth in the story of emerging from a cave after thirteen years, which connects to the perception of R. Eleazar's completely new beginning after the events which Elijah thrusts into the past with so much effort — in our composite story. While it is difficult to determine, here, what in the story of the cave is woven around an interpretation of the remembered personality of R. Simeon ben Yohai, the father, and what around that of R. Eleazar, the son, we can at least interpret our composite story in the Pesikta with the aid of those associations that strike us upon comparing the related stories: Surely they are meant, in the story centering around the son, to relate to his "biography" as well, at least. This is not to say that the "composite" story is composed of, or based on, the other story or stories. I am merely taking as likely the assumption that the points of contact between the son's stories and the father's stories relate (also) to the son — providing these contacts light up what is actually in the stories concerning the son himself.

2.6. The Strength and Weakness of R. Eleazar: Thus it would seem that the personality of R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon ben Yohai is being adumbrated in tradition as one that is "reborn", or rebecoming

33

M S Munich 95 alone has already "thirteen" years for the first part of the sojourn in the cave. This, too, would be sufficient to connect the stories, but it would seem that this reading is late.

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51

in a turning-away from the world: The Rabbi turns his back on the partnership in polity with the at-large authorities, the "powers that be"; his strength turns to weakness; his identity as a scholar of Torah is begun anew in the tutelage of Elijah who has led him out of his errorful being-in-the-world, just as in the Bavli Elijah anounces the possibility of the father's and son's leaving the dark depths of the cave - for the son, at least, a re-becoming into a seeming rejection of the world. But this satisfactorily explains neither R. Eleazar's "offering-up" of his flesh in the stark sunlight that "proves" his metal as "not-rotting", nor his "calling upon himself the bleeding of the nights in order to dine splendidly on "sixty porridges" in the daytime. We have yet to complete our "biography" of R. Eleazar - for this we must turn to yet more stories. Immediately after the episode of R. Eleazar's cut-out fat, the Bavli tells the following: A n d the same thing happened to R. Ishmael ben R. Yose as well (he was drafted by the authorities to participate in policing, like R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon). Elijah accosted him (R. Ishmael), saying: H o w long will you go on handing-over the people of our G o d to execution! H e ( R . Ishmael) said to him (Elijah): what should I do, this is a draft by the authorities. H e (Elijah) said to him: Your father escaped to Asia (Minor), you escape to Laodecea (in Asia Minor). W h e n R. Ishmael ben R. Yose and R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon would stand face to face, some oxen could pass between them (under their bellies) without touching them. A certain lady said to them: Your children are not your own! T h e y said to her: Theirs (that of the Rabbi's wives) is larger (or greater) than ours. (The T a l m u d asks:) If so, then certainly! Some say that they (the two Rabbis) actually said to her (the certain lady): " ' F o r as the man is, so is his strength"' (Judges 8:21). Some say that they actually said to her: Love presses the flesh.

(BT Bava Mezia 83^843) Here again we are referred to the great physicality of R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon ben Yohai. The "certain lady's" facetious comment on the Rabbis' physique affords a definite opening-up of the erotic aspect of this bodilyness. The final answer attributed by some to the Rabbis, "Love presses the flesh", leaves no room for doubt as to whether the talmudic authors themselves could admit this aspect of the story. The context of the verse in the book of Judges points us to the manner in which eroticism and physicality are discerned at this juncture, in this "dialogue" as an interpretative incident in the "biography" of R. Eleazar: A n d he (Gideon) said unto Jether his first-born: " U p , and slay them (Zebah and Zalmunna, enemies of Israel)." But the youth drew not his sword; for

52

Parti he feared, because he was yet a youth. Then Zebah and Zalmunna said: "Rise thou, and fall upon us; for as the man is, so is his strength." And Gideon arose, and slew Zebah and Zalmunna ... (Judges 8: 20-21)

Accordingly, when the Rabbis answer "For as the man is, so is his strength", a virility of forcefulness, even violence, is conjured up. The key phrase for us, as we shall see, "Theirs is larger" or "greater than ours", as the Rabbis are to have said concerning their wives, takes on, then, a concomittant meaning. It does not mean, as the Talmud may initially have thought (see Rashi), that the wives' bellies were even bigger than that of the Rabbis, but rather that their sexual virility was greater. Or, to work out the meaning of the "dialogue": For the "certain lady" the huge proportions of the Rabbis' bodies were ungainly, they bespoke a negativity in which she could not picture them as functioning in a manner similar to her perception of humanity. The "certain lady's" aesthetics are those so brilliantly portrayed in the Greek, and Roman copies of the Greek, statues of the era where men and women are completely formed only insofar as they partake of humans as the upper class liked to believe that they themselves should be: Ideally proportioned in an exquisite balance of shape, size, and sensual fleshiness. Over against a Greek statue R. Eleazar and his friend R. Ishmael must have looked grosteque. The Rabbis' answer represents a very different conception of humanity. On the contrary: The fleshiness of man, in all its imperfection, in all the antitheticality of its actuality to the Greek notion of ideal, is precisely the reality in and through which the livingness of man so sensually and vigerously flows. The human flourishes, not despite ungainly fleshiness, but precisely in it — this is the person, he is not ungainly at all, he is rather this man or this woman, never a Greek statue. We have a sense here of man embracing himself in all his humanity, even in his most abject humanity: We are reminded of R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon ben Yohai who embraced the ugly gore and puss of the night, saying, "My brothers and my friends, come to me!" (Bava Mezia 84b). However, we cannot ignore the undertone (at least) of bawdiness in this scene of meeting between the two Rabbis and the "certain lady"; a sense of distastefulness that is underlined in the contextual reading of the verse in the book of Judges. The latter, as we have seen, conjures up an eroticism of force: We may suspect that this story has a double function: To contrast the anti-aestheticism of R. Eleazar and R. Ishmael with the aestheticism represented by the "certain lady", and thus to be taken as a positive aspect of our R. Eleazar — perhaps as a further distancing from the authorities with whom

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53

he had previously cooperated, and who could be assumed to be "Roman", that is, closer to the sensibilities of the "certain lady" who is negatively portrayed here; but also as inviting us to yet another contrast, whetting an appetite that is not immediately satisfied in the straight unfolding of the text in the Bavli. For the denouement of this particular expectation we have to skip to the following page in the Talmud; to return to a story, or series of stories, that we interuppted before: After R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon dined on the "sixty kinds of porridges", prepared by the "sixty slaves bearing sixty purses", sent by the "sixty seafarers", the following unfolds: One day, she (R. Eleazar's wife) said to her daughter: Go find out what your father is doing today. She (the daughter) came. He (R. Eleazar) said to her: Go say to your mother, Ours is larger (or - greater) than theirs. He read, concerning himself, "She is like the merchant-ships; She bringeth her food from afar" (Proverbs 31:14). (Bava Mezia 84b)

"Ours is larger (or greater) than theirs", rather than "theirs is larger (or — greater) than ours" which we read before (ibid. 84 a). This represents a further development in the "biography" of R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon. Is this a reversal of the vector of a human strength, a "victory" for R. Eleazar as a self, or is this a re-perception of the "ours" and the "theirs"? The context of the verse in Proverbs gives, perhaps, a clue: A woman of valour who can find? For her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, And he hath no lack of gain. She doeth him good and not evil All the days of her life. She seeketh wool and flax, And worketh willingly with her hands. She is like the merchant-ships; She bringeth her food from afar. She riseth also while it is yet night, And giveth food to her household, And a portion to her maidens. (Proverbs 31: 10-15)

R. Eleazar perceives himself as in some way crossing over the line of identity which seperates him and his wife. Is this a strengthening of himself at the expense of his wife, a sharpening of the enmity between the two, or does this

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perhaps pressage a new sense of identity that means their coming-together? T h e latter might seem unlikely at this stage in the unfolding of our "biography", but both here in the Bavli, in the continuation - as we shall see, as well as elsewhere we will discover that the story of R. Eleazar, the perception of his personality - by himself and by others - in relation to an other, his wife, or others, is indeed not yet completed. First we turn again to the Pesikta for yet another episode, and then we shall return to the Bavli for the further unfolding of its telling-interpretation. R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon became weakened and his arm was uncovered and he saw that his wife was laughing and crying. He said to her: By your life, I know why you smiled and I know why you cried. You smiled, saying, How good was my lot in this world, it was good that I cleaved to this righteous body. And you cried, saying, Woe that this body should be going to worms. And so it is, I will die; but worms - God forbid, they will have no dominion over me; except for one worm which will make a hole behind my ear. Because I was once entering the synagogue when I heard the voice of a certain man blaspheming; and it would have been possible for me to do justice with him, yet I did not. (Pesikta de-Rav Kahana ibid. p.198-199) T h e "uncovering of the arm" is a Rabbinic motif that points us in a direction of interpretation. Homa, Abbaye's wife, came (to court, following her husband's death) before Rava (who sat as judge). She said to him: Fix an amount of money for my food (to be paid out to her regularly from Abbaye's estate). Rava did so. (Homa then said:) Fix an amount of money for my wine. He (Rava) said to her: I know that Nahmani (Abbaye's real name) did not drink wine (and his wife could not, therefore, claim that the standard of living to which she was accustomed with Abbaye included wine). She (Homa) said to him: By the Rabbi's life, he (Abbaye) used to drink in drinking horns like this. As she was gesturing in order to illustrate, her arm was uncovered; the court-room lit up. Rava stood up, went home, asked Rav Hisda's daughter (his wife) to come to bed. Rav Hisda's daughter said to him (Rava): Who was in court today? He said to her: Homa, Abbaye's wife. She (Rava's wife) went after her (Homa), swinging a strap of a chest, until she had chased her out of all of Mahoza, saying: You have already killed three men (Homa's previous husbands), and now you want to kill another? (BT Ketuboth 65a) A n d we find this same motif in another context as well:

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55

R. Eleazar (ben Pedat) was weakened. R. Johanan come to visit him. R. Johanan saw that the house in which R. Eleazar was lying was dark. He (R. Johanan) uncovered his arm and the room was lit up. (BT Berakhot 5b) R. Johanan was well-known for the white beauty of his skin. 34 In both these stories — concerning H o m a and R. Johanan — the "uncovering of the arm" conjures up an intimacy of the flesh whose revelation is marvelous. That a similar association is aimed at in the uncovering of R. Eleazar's arm in the incident described in the Pesikta is clear from the continuation where the Rabbi's wife is to have recalled with joy her having "cleaved to this righteous body". However, R. Eleazar's "uncovering", while revealing otherwise covered fleshiness, does not cause the "room to light up", that is, he is not described as possessing the beautiful aura of skin that Homa and R. Johanan are said to have had — in a later time. W e have yet to complete the underlying network of meanings that are the substratum of this story in the

Pesikta.

It happened that Rabban Gamaliel 3 s, while standing on a step on the Temple Mount, saw a pagan woman who was very beautiful. He said: "How manifold are Thy works, O Lord! " (Psalms 104: 24). And R. Akiva, too, (had a similar experience,) he saw the wife of the evil Tinneius Rufus. He (R. Akiva) spat, smiled, and wept. He spat because she came from a stinking drop.36

34 BT Bava Mezia 84a, and see context! While Both the Babylonian Homa and the Palestinian R. Johanan lived generations after R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon, my assumption is that the literary tradition finally crystalizing after and around all these personalities coalesce in a neighborhood of similar and striking forms of description and expression: The inter-texuality of their memories seems to indicate a shared network of associations and meanings. My interpretation is borne out, I think, by the text in the Pesikta de-Rav Kahana itself - as far as R. Eleazar is concerned. As for the incidents with Homa and R. Johanan, this interpretation is unecessary. In any case my intention is at least to underline and to amplify, to draw out the strikingness of the meager Rabbinic text that might go unnoticed to an ear that does not echo with this intertexuality. 35 Following the reading in the parallel in PT Berakhot OT is used with the meaning of "to crush" in, for example, Psalms 89 : n , and 143 : 3, and Lamentations 3 : 34; and could be better translated as "to oppress" in, for example, Psalms 94 : 5, Proverbs 22: 22, and Job 22 : 9.The old JPS translation of "contrite" in Isaiah 57:15 is thus tendentious, implying an effect following upon an

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prophetic manner this togetherness is a nexus whose main thrust is to unsettle any easy placement of the "whereness" of God and man in this relationship. God is "high"; but the prophet's description of Him as dwelling "in the high and holy place" is no sooner set than it is undone into an indeterminacy of "With him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit". And the humble, too, is never left in a definity of his humble state, there is an undoing of any finality in social, in human status: God is "To revive the spirit of the humble" and "the heart of the contrite ones" into a togetherness with God Himself. Thus an exquisite indeterminacy of placement in, or out of, the world, is achieved; and it is precisely this sense of limbo, of an "exile" that is firmly at place and at home neither "here" nor "there", that enables the togetherness of God and man in the throes of not being really anywhere - a displacement and disinheritance that is a drawing-together of the human and the divine. The ambivalence of the movements, in the verse, of "down-to-man" and "up-to-God" is manifested, and projected into inevitable controversy, in the following: " With him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit (Isaiah ibid.) - Rav Huna and Rav Hisda; One of them said: (The verse means that) the contrite and humble shall be with Me (that is, with God). The other one said: (The verse means that) I (that is, God) shall be with the contrite and the humble. (BT Sotah 5a)

In the first reading the contrite and the humble are exalted in their togetherness with God and are no longer lowly; in the second reading lowliness itself is exalted precisely in its lowliness because God Himself joins precisely the lowly, He becomes contrite and humble. In the first reading the lowly rise up to God; in the second, God comes down to the lowly. In the actual living-out of religiosity the exquisite indeterminacy of Scripture here is a tension that is too intense to be borne; and the Rabbinic readers are forced to seek out the comfort of the humble in a togetherness with God that can be as tangible, as confrontable as the pain of the humble in this or that narrow subsistence. The midrash attributed here to R. Phinehas ben Yair unfolds the tension of indeterminacy in Isaiah 57:15 in a very special way. Saying that "holiness brings to humility", in connection with this verse, reads "I dwell in the high admission of sinfulness, a sense of shortcoming, rather than a sense of brokenness vis-à-vis the arrogance of the world. In the context of the midrash attributed to R. Phinehas ben Yair, however, "contrite" would be closer to the mark.

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and holy place" in such a way as to turn the verse in the direction of man already in the beginning — before "with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit": Otherwise the "holiness" of which, R. Phinehas is speaking — a "holiness" to which the person comes as a "rung" on the "ladder", not the holiness which is an attribute of God as by Himself — would find not even an echo in the verse. This midrash is reading the verse to say: God is to "dwell in the high and holy place" which includes the "place" which man is; and the person is holy because he has acquired the rung of "holiness", on the "ladder", by virtue of the complex that we have discussed - a grace. Thus, in a sense, the togetherness of man and God, here, seems to be accomplished in man's coming toward God. However, this is not the direction of this midrash. The continuation of the verse, "with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit", is herein read as pertaining to a "rung" that is to be positively sought and achieved in the odyssey of the "ladder"; and "To revive the spirit of the humble ..." is thus not taken to be a freeing from humility and brokenness at all. Thus, as far as "humility" is concerned, the tension of the verse continues to be unfolded in the direction of man, but no longer in a simple vector towards man. The person himself is not merely humble in the fact of his situation or ontology, he is to become humble as a "rung" on the "ladder", that is, he is to recognize that he is indeed really humble, lowly — otherwise this is not at all true "humility". Thus "descent" and "ascent" are in one and the same being-in-the-world: Man is really humble (in this religious self-understanding) - else there could be no room for "humility"; and man attains "humility" in the very embracing — in knowledge and acceptance - of his existential situation, and thus atains a new "rung" on the "ladder". And this complexity of the directions in unraveling the verse from Isaiah is a continuation of the reading of the previous notion of "holy" where God's very "name is Holy" and where He comes to dwell in the "holy place" which man himself is. To sum up: For this midrash, man becomes "holy", like God; yet God "comes down" to the "holy place" which man is, and to the humble and the broken — they remain so in their recognition of lowliness. We can thus say that, as man becomes "holy", so God becomes "humble" and "contrite", in some sense at least - in "spirit" and in "heart", at least, perhaps. The point here is, then: Man and God come together in an embracing of holiness and humility — where, for this midrash, the "higher rung" is that of "humility"; so that this is ultimately a becoming in the direction of that humility and brokenness which is ever so human, all too human. We will have to await the theology that infuses this anthropology with meaning, and in turn is informed by it, as it will emerge from yet other fragments that coalesce, in tradition, around the person of R. Phinehas ben Yair. But at the

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moment we can already say: The "ladder of R. Phinehas ben Yair" is a "ladder of Jacob" - where descent and ascent mingle in unison; but our "ladder" is also one on which, rather than "angels", man and God pass ever so close to each other in a mingling of descent and ascent, where the "ladder" remains very much that of the man laid out on the earth, his head on the hard stones of his own reality. The previous "rungs" of the "ladder", "agility", "cleanliness", "ritual purity", and "holiness", are, as we have seen, events of the ritualistic-cultic dimension, that is, they happen with a major sense of an "other" reality, outside of man alone, which contributes centrally to their "material", their efficacy; whatever their driving force might be. But "humility", as a rung that is achieved through the previous ones, is manifestly an inner event. It is not at all identical with being humble; humility here is an inner recognition. The ontological dimension of humility here is the person himself and no pretensions of cult and ritual can succeed in drawing its essence out to anything other than the human consciousness. Furthermore, true humility is a matter of will. One does not have to have a very wide experience to know that most of us, who are so humble in so many of our attributes and talents, have no humility whatsoever: On the contrary, humility is a matter of appreciating the greatness of events, something which requires a great deal of light; it is a consciousness of the lack of proportion between one's own energies and what is happening or being accomplished — an appreciation that is a deep talent of perception that marks its possesor as anything but base. True humility is a generosity of spirit that allows one's sense of being to take place, consciously, in a network of reality where the selfishness of the self does not determine the relative value of reality: Not because the other is more powerful, but because sensitivity becomes so exquisite as to enable an apprehension of reality where selves (one's own, as well as that of others as threatening vortices of virility) become secondary to the awe of being as otherness.This is so difficult to achieve because one has to want to achieve humility, that is, to recognize it as good; this is a matter of huge will-power, that is, of the ability of the inner conviction, to generate sufficient energies to enable one's sense and experience of reality to be informed by that conviction. If the previous "rungs" of the ladder seemed to be achieved in an energy that remains mysterious to us because of its cultic-ritualistic nature, a veritable grace, "humility" brings us to another point where the person himself becomes the substratum of the efficacious reality and its driving-force. One cannot start out on the rung of "humility" itself- this is the recognition that is the very stuff of humility itself. But we are also incapable of perceiving the

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starting point of the "ladder" in "agility" as a point to which one could orientate oneself in a decission of will and action, because we cannot discern there a driving-force that could become a vector of ascent for the would-be initiate. We can say, however, that the person who seeks the climbing of the ladder comes upon a palpable driving-force in the very striving for humility itself. That is to say, according to the "ladder": In the authentic achievement of humility as the "rung" of "humility" one finds oneself to have passed through the efficacies of "agility", "cleanliness", "ritual purity", and "holiness"; and by virtue of humility these are perceived as being indeed matters of pure grace. This, then, is the promise of R. Phinehas ben Yair: If one truly strives for, and achieves, humility, he willfind himself to be on a "rung" of the "ladder" where he has already ascended through the efficacies of the preceding four "rungs". Humility is not only the driving force that is recognized, in the achievment of the "rung" of "humility", as that which generates the efficacy of the preceding "rungs"; it is also the driving force to the atainment and meaning of the following "rungs" on the "ladder"; though in and of itself it is not yet the salvation which is the aim of the "ladder", as we shall see later.

2.2..6 "The fearing of sin" Humility brings to the fearing of sin, as is written in Scripture, "The reward of humility is the fear of the Lord" (Proverbs 22:4). (PT Shekalim 3:4 l62 163

164 164 164 . ^ i62f., 170

-31:38-39 -31:38-40

167 168

" 31:39 - 31:38-40

y « 9 163,165,170

Songs ofSongs — 5:1

83

Ecclesiastes

Proverbs - 2:4

138

- 2:5

96.143

- 3:4 - 21:23

93 32

- 22:4

95> 95- n 9> !20

- 23:6,7 -31:10

53

23:8,9

-104:3 -104:20-23 -104:21

-104:32

237

154 71,73

-7:20

10

-10:1 -10:2

213 214

II chron. -6:36

10

Index of Rabbinic Sources

Mishnah (M)

Sheviit^n (38d) - 10:3 (39c)

Berakhot 4:2

34

49f. 175

Ma'asroth 3:8 (jod)

32

Demai 2:2

177

Ma'aser Sheni 5:5 (56a)

161

Ma 'user Sheni 5:6

169

- 5:9 (96d)

Shabbatv.3

94

Bikkurim 3:3 (65c)

Yoma 6:4 - 8:9

hi 107

Shekalim 3:2 1:5 -9:iS

93.94 24 92. 94f-

Kiddushin 1:2

172

Sanhédrin 11:2

77

2:7 -3=1

46 55

Tosefta Yom ha-Kippurim 4(3):i2 -5(4):6

Ta'anioty.i (66b-c) - 3:4 (66c)

94.95.96,119 49 101 107 175 183,188

Shekalim 3:4 (47c) 93ff., 114-115,119,121, 127,138,142 - 5:4 (48d) 150, 215 - 5=3 (49a)

155

Sanhédrin 10:1 (29a)

13

Avodah Zarah 1:9 (40a)

55

hi 106

Talmud Yerushalmi (Palestinian Talmud, PT) Berakhot 4:2 (7d) - 9:12 (13b)

-Shabbatv.^ 10:5 (12c) (3c) Yoma (38b) 1:1 - 6:4 (43d) - (45c) (end of Yoma)

161

35 55

Demai 1:3 (2id-22a) 156 - 1:3 ("a) 149-152-. 154. 175. 176

Talmud Bavli (Babylonien Talmud, BT) Berakhot 5a - 5b

- 7a - 17a - 3ib-32a

215, 219, 220 55. 57

4, 232 220 185,186

Index of Rabbinic Sources - 60a - 61a - 62a Shabbat 12b - 32b -33b -55a - 62b - 88a - I45b-i46a - 152a Pesahim 2b Yoma 23 a - 66b - 67b - 86a Sukkah 45b - 52b -53a - S3a+b Rosh-ha-Shanah 12b

219 214 215 219 158 32. 49f219 44 11, 215, 220 11, 85 27 27 220 hi 104 106, 219 49 184,185,186 46 12,13 169

Ta unit j\> - 8a -9a

162 215 157.158

Hagiga 12a

83, 27

Yevamot 103b

11

Ketubot 65a

54

Nedarim 50b

56

Sotah 5a

116

Gittin^&o

220

Kiddushin 21b -33b - 40b

172 155 215, 219

Bava Mezia 83 a-b . 26, 27, 31-33, 44, 51 - 84a 31, 55, 60 - 84b 42, 44, 49, 53, 68, 70, 76fF. - 85a 42, 49, 215 -85b 143

239

Bava Bathra 17a

42, 43

Sanhedrin 38 b - 39a - 101a - 101b - 102a - 103a Avodah Zarah 3a -3b - 20a - 20b

83 220 215 219 11 77 227 27 56 92, 94,126

Menahotfta -53b Hullin 7a - 7b - 60a - 127a - 133a

34 219 144 146,154-156 24 149 161

Arakhin 16b

219

Targum Onkelos to Genesis 37:7 . . . 202 Targum Pseudo Jonathan to Genesis 4:1 (ed. Ginsburger p.8) 85,104 - 6:4 104 Targum to Micah 4:6

185

Targum to Job 31:39 -12:6

168 183

Mekhilta de-R.Ishmael to Exodus 12:41 (pp. 51-52) - 1 4 : 2 7 (pp.102-103) - 20:15 (p.237) - 20:16 (p.237)

221 148 85 h

Mekhilta de-R. Simeon ben Yohai to Ex. 6:2 (p.5) Sifra to Leviticus 16:1

8 101

Sifre to Deuteronomy 14:28 (109, pp. 169-170) 169 - 26:12-13 (302+303, pp.320-321) . . . . 169 - (not found in our Sifre) 158

240

Index of Rabbinic Sources

Midrash Tannaim to Deuteronomy 23:15 (p.148) 94 Genesis Rabba to Genesis 1:1 (pp.2-3) 203 - 1 : 2 (pp.14-15) 228 -1:3 (pp.19-20) 22 - 2:1 (pp. 101-102 and 104-105) 83 - 3 : 8 (p.178) 83 - 1 8 : 4 (pp.487-488) 8 - 24-32 (pp.648-649) 156 - 25:22-34 (pp. 682-700) 102 - 27:11 (p. 727) 102 - 27:28 (pp. 745-746) 227 Leviticus Rabba to Leviticus 1:1 (pp.13-16) - 1 5 : 2 (p.406-407) - 1 5 : 2 (pp.406-407)

128 n 85

Song of Songs Rabba to Song of Songs 1:1 (p- 21a) 138 —1:9 (p. 21 a+b) 94f. -5:i4 47 Pesikta de-Rav Kahana Hannukah, to Numbers 7, (pp. 1-2) - ibid, (pp.2-3) - 'aser te 'aser (pp.168-169) - ibid, (p.172)

83 90 i62f. 158

- ibid, (pp.191-193) -ibid, (p.194-195) -ibid, (pp.195-196) - be-Shalah (pp.196-198) - ibid. (pp. 198-199)

49f„ 47 48 30 33 54

- Shuvah (p.350) Midrash Samuel 26 (p.63a) Midrash Psalms to Psalms 4:5 —16 (pp.6ob-6ia)

107 13 107 34

Midrash Proverbs to proverbs 9:10 (ed. Buber p.32a) -15:33 (p.4ia)

34 94f.

Pirkei de-R.Eliezer chapt. 21 (ed.Luria, p. 48a) - 4 6 (p.ma)

85 102

Yalkut Sime'oni to II Samuel 6:7+8 -7-5

. . 13 13

- Isaiah 46:12

34

- Ezekiel 36:25 (374)

107

- Psalms 4:5 (627) -16 -89

107 34 128

—Job 12

184

Index of Sages

Abbaye 54 R. Abba bar Kahana 83,158,183,188 R. Abba bar Zevina 200 R. Aha bar Ulla 161 R. Aibu 83 Akavyah ben Mahalalel 55 R. Akiva 55,107 R. Ami 155 amoraim, two 155 R. Avin 128 bar-Kapara 202, 203, 223, 224, 227 R. Berekhiah the Elder 128 R. Berekhiah 183,188, 228 R. Eleazer ben Azariah 106 R. Eleazar 105 R. Eleazar (ben Pedat) 55, ¿6f. R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon ben Yohai 28, 30-33, 44, 47-54, 58, 60, 62, 68, 70, 76, 197, 215 - the daughter of 53 - the son of 49 - the wife of 44, 53, 58, 61, 62SF., 68,7off., 73E, 76ff„ 197 R. Eliezer ben R. Yose the Galilean 85 Rabban Gamaliel 55 R. Gamaliel (son of R. Judah ha-Nasi) 46 Gamaliel Zuga 93 R. Haggai 150 R. Hama bar Hanina 146,186 Rav Hana bar Aha hasid, a certain 150 Hezekiah 227 Hillel 46 Rav Hisda 12,116,162 - daugther of 54 R. Hiyya 94

- and his sons 143 R. Hiyya bar Abba 101 R. Hiyya bar Joseph HI Homa (wife of Abbaye) 54 R. Hosea ben Jair 183, 188 R. Hoshaiah 157 R. Huna 116, 202, 203, 223, 224, 227 Rav Huna bar Torta 149 R. Isaac 11, 83 R. Isaac bar Eleazer 95,119 R. Isaac Nappaha 155 R. Ishmael 106 R. Ishmael ben R. Yose 31, 51 - school of 104,158 R. Jeremiah 200 R. Jonah 161 R. Jonathan 93 Rav Joseph 27,161 R. Joshua ben Hananiah 24 R. Joshua ben Korha 4, 32, 70, 232 R. Joshua ben Levi 92, 99,161,169 R. Joshua ben Yair 182 R. Judah 85, 111,183 R. Judah ha-Nasi 42, 49, 68, 70, 76,143, 146,154, 155,175,176 R. Mana 200 R. Mattiah ben Heresh 106 R. Meir 94 R. Nehemiah 85 Nahmani (Abbaye) 54 R. Nehunya ben ha-Kanah 34 R. Osaiah 157 Rav Papa 77,186 R. Phinehas ben Yair 9iff., 138,144,146, 148,150-156,176,178,182,183,188, 200 Rabbi, a certain 12

Index of Sages Rabbis, the 85 Rav 77, 94, 203, 213 - school of 183 Rava 44, 54, 68 Ravin bar Rav Ada 183 Resh Lakish 26, 227 - son of 157 Samuel 213 R. Samuel bar Nahmani 70 R. Samuel ben R. Nahinan 21 R. Samuel bar Nahman 93,150 R. Simeon ben Gamaliel 70 R. Simeon ben Halfiita 162

R. Simeon ben Lakish see: Resh Lakish R. Simeon ben Yehozadak 21 R. Simeon ben Yohai 48, 49, 50, 77 R. Simeon ben Yosni 83 R Tanhum-the son-in-law of R. Eleazar ben Avina 83 R. Yohanan 11,12, 55, $6f., 77,, 85,157,186 - ben Zakkai 46 R. Yose 11 - bar R. Bun 93 R. Yose ben R. Hanina 202 R. Zeira 27, 200

General Index The words in quotation marks refer to "rungs" on the "ladder" of R.Phinehas ben Yair.

Aaron ioiff., 105 - the High Priest 95 — sons of 101 Abraham 8, 42, fyf., 128, 143 absoluteness abstention 92, 99 absurdity 64, I59ÎF., 222 - and meaning 161 accusation 217, 220, 223 acting out 71 and see: enactment active time 63F. activity 64 Adam 83, 89,198 Adam, fall off, see: Fall of Adam added-value 167 aesthetics 229 — physical 52 aestheticism, Rabbinic 52 aesthetics 64 - Rabbinic 59 Aggadah 1, 12, 21 Aggadoth ha Talmud 183-184 "agility" 92ff., 98-iooff, 119,125,179,192 agricultural produce 151,161 — work 172 Agus, A.R.E. 42,66, 90, 99,109,128,143, 150, 218 Ahab 146,153 Aharon 42ff. Ahaziah 146 Ahithophel 12,18 'Akhbarei (place) 76 Alexandrian Jews 111

alienation see: estrangement alms, see: tithes Alon, G. 161 altar, the 86 ambivalence 23if. ambiversion 210 amidah 143 Amos, the prophet 122 Amram 43, 90 anankasticism 229 and see: compulsion-neurosis ananke 229, 230 angel 150 - of death 155 angels 200 - fall of 104 anger 67 animal 28, 31, 47, 76 anointed 92, i34f. anorexia neurosa 217 anthropo-ecology 169 anthropocentricity 113 Anthropology 11, I4if. 213ÎÏ. - biblical 124 - new 180 - religious 83ÎF., 113, 117,123ff. - theological 66,134, 167, I82ÎF. 192 - and theology 176 and see: human humanity husband man

General Index

244 person self wife woman anthropomorphism 194 antinomy, religious existential anxiety 209 apocalypse 65, 66 - temptation o f apologetics 29 appetite 48

beauty

4, 52, 5 4 ^ , 56-59, 61, 63, 65

becoming

59, 61, 63-66, 69, 70, 75, 179,

185,188,193-199, 208-209,

I23f.

139

-

and being

-

and G o d

-

and not-becoming

-

and divine 188 limiting of own

-

pathology of 2i6f. surrendering o f 192

211

120 199, 229ff.

becoming, un-

199

65

58fF., 62ff., 65f., 69,72-75,

Arab 144, 148,149 Arabia 225

7 8 , 1 9 6 , 1 9 7 , 1 9 9 , 221, , 227, 229ff. beginning 203, 211

arm

being 18, 40, 59, 193-195, 199, 203, 208, 226

54ÎF., 58ff., 62, 67, 72

- uncovering of 54ÎF. arrogance 73, 202, 224 asceticism 217, 231 Asia M i n o r 51

-

before-God

-

behind G o d

229

-

dialectic of

229ff.

ass, wild 183 Assur 190

-

as an event o f G o d ' s grace

-

fragility of

atomism, psychological 228f. atonement i04ff., ii4f., i36f.

-

as gift from G o d 125 giveness of, see: givenness

-

Day of

-

humanization o f

33, 95, iooff., 179

I4if., 229ff.

-

and G o d

-

as grace 127,193, 196-197 in-grace-before-God 180 w i t h - G o d 208 hegemony 23of.

-

as human 196 and knowing 222

authorities,the 31, 64, 76 authority 33, 217

-

model o f 63 non i94f., 195, 199

-

109

- and man io8f. Atropos 25 audience, the i02f., 110 authentic prophecy 87 -

religiosity

108

23off.

-

autism 206, 208, 210, 222 Azael 104 Azazel I02ff., 113

and not-being 230?

-

and nothingness

-

as otherness 118 rather than becoming

Babylon

-

threat to

-

as self I24ff., 196 slavish 199

-

substratum of

-

and time

-

unity o f

-

unto-otherness

Rabbinic

74

225

Babylonians, the

77

Babylonien Jews

in

-

tradition

-

version

Balaam

i 4 f f „ 91ÎE, 97ÎF., 149 50

143

Bar-Kokhba revolt barley

88

152, 165, 178, 200

battle-arms

77

bawdiness

52, 57

bear, a fiery 143

i96f., 2i7f., 224f., 226126 120

195

220, 224

126 216

and see: becoming becoming, un- isttess

180

224ff„ 226-229!?.

207

General Index belly 30, 31, 33, 51, 52, 206 Benjamin 42C Bergson, Henri 75 Bible, translation of 210 biblical theology 88, 194, 218, 220, 226, 227 blood 44f., 60, 68, 70, 74, 95,103 bodilyness j8f. body 3off., jiff., 54, 58f., 70, 74, 217 - and soul 40 bones 206, 223 boundaries 35, 36, 39-41, 69, 2iif., 212, 214, 218 boy, shepherd- 77 bread 30, 153 Breaking of the Tablets 6ff. brook 153 burial 7of., 74, 76,162 burning bush, the 232 caesar 32, 50 - 's daughter 24f. Caleb 43 calf, the Golden 232 camels 152, 178 capital 167, 169, 170, 178 captives, redemption of 144,146,147 carefulness 92, 98, 99 caricature 48 Carmel, mount 151 casuistry 171, 181 catastrophe 87 cave, a 49f., 200 censoring in tradition 68, 7495, 96 certainty 113 Chaldeans 182,184, 185, 190 chaos I 2 f f , 40, 76, 122, I29f., 202f., 221, 223, 224, 226, 228 and see: tohu-va-bohu - theology of 2iiff. charity 169 and see: tithes childbirth 95 children 51 choice, free 226f., 230 chosen, a 69f. - one 92, I37f., 180

2.45

- the 34, 35, 78, i27f. 131,134f., 147, 211, 212Ì - people, the 87f., I74Ì, 211, 212 chronology 7iff. clay 226 clean (ritually) 35, 42, 68f. "cleanliness" 92ff., 98,99100,110-114,119, 125, 179, 180, 192, 197 clothing 47,145,166 Clotho 25 Cohen, Hermann 210 coming-world 27, 202 commandments 1 6 3 ® , 169,170 and see: boundaries Law, the - Rabbinic 71, 74 competition 195 compulsion-neurosis 217, 228f. community 36ff, 41-43, 69-70^ 78,108, 109,177,184,191, 211, 212, 214, 218 concrete person 63 confession 95,105 confidence 63®!, 65,120,137,160, i73f. - lack of 64f. - self- 125, 208 conflicts, inner 2i6ff. conquest 211 conscience 107Ì - discovery of 108 consciousness ii7ff., i2of., i2jf., 127,135, i36ff, 142,161,169,179,180-182,189,192193,196,198, 206, 216, 220 consolation 150 consummation, mystical 198 - of divine-human yearning i99f. contradiction 68 contrition 115Ì controversy 98 corporeality 43, 45f. cosmogony 135F. cosmography 123 cosmos 21, 25, 27-28, 76 court-room 54 covenant, the 125,128,133, i36f., 174,175 - and destruction 174 - new interpretation of I73ÎF. creation 18, 2130, 36,129,166, i82f., 188,

246

General Index

191,194,195,199, 202ff., 224, 226-229E — the "before" of 195, 196 — laws of 147 — new 197 — theology 226 creator 124, 136, 186, 188, 192 creditor 172 cripple, see: lame crying 54, 5556, 57, 62, 66 cult iooff. and see: ritual darkness 55, 203 daughter 71,150 David i2fF,42f., i27f., 129, I33f., I34f. — Caleb the son of 43 — the historical 136 — Jesse the father of 43 davidic scion 131, 137 Day of Atonement see: Atonement, Day of day-to-dayness 79f., 98f. day of the Lord, the 225 Dikdukei Soferim 17,44, 55, 56, 68,77,92, 107,149,157,162,183,186 dead, resurrection of the see: resurrection of the dead death n,38f., 42f., 45, 54, 56-58, 65, 67,70, 72, 74, 101, 139, 141, 146, 160, 162, 166, 170, 198, 201, 207, 213, 229, 230, 231 — angel of 85, 155 — -in-life 217 death and living 62ff., 75 death and life 103 death and rebirth 50 death punishmentio6 deathlessness 196 decalogue, the 85 decay 54, 56-58, 62, 67, 71-72, 75 and see:rotting deliverance I4f., 38, 88,131,198, 204, 205, 206, 210, 216 delusion 223 demai 156 demythologization no, i29f„ 176, 226 depression 63 — manic 2i6f.

derision 164 desert, the 90Ì, 95, 102, 105, 153, 212 deservingness of others 148 despair 63, 86, 153, 210 destruction i486, 87, 122, 136, i66f. 173, 174,185,189,195,196, 211-212, 215, 218., 221, 224-229^ - inevitability of 108 - theology of 212 destruction of the Temple 211 destructivness 216 Deus absconditta 83ff, 198 devision, the generation of the 89 dew 158 dialectic of yearning and fear 23off. discrimination 148 disinheritance see: estrangement displacement 169 dispossession 41, 8f., 91,159,160,161,164, 173,185, i98f., 199 and see: — — estrangement — exile — possession - invevitability of-for Israel 174 - promise of 174 dissociation 9, 40, 41 distinctions see: boundaries divination 87 divine - drive into becoming 188 - echo 50 - eroticism 83ÌF. - geography 83^, 90 - gesticulation 210 - grace, see: grace - guilt 189 - homelessness 105 - name i2f. - name, profination of 106 - narcissism I93ff. and see: narcissism, divine - order 31, i9of. - prerogative 199 - presence 14, 88, 89, 219,

247

General Index -

regret 182ft, 190 and see: G o d as regretting - regretting 185,191,196 - responsibility for evil 188 - sinfulness 199 - yearning into being 229ft donkeys 30, 48,152,156,178, 200 donkey of R. Phinehas ben Yair, the 200f. -

drivers 30, 48 and see: mules doorstep 70, 74 doubt 112, 230 and see: self-doubt

- benefit of the doubting 228 dowery 73

enactment 71,75f., 143, i45f., 147,149,151152,156,171,174,177,178,180-182,192, 196,198, 200 - and interpretation eternity 199

i8if.

enemies 218 enemy 206, 22of., 223, 225 Enosh, generation of 89 enrichment i58f. equality I47Í, 149 eroticism 51ft, 54f., 59, 72Í.

200

dream, a 70 dualism 38, 40-43., n o , 214, 216-217 dualistic antropology 136 - temptation 230ft dunghills 203 duration 75 dust 55-57 dwell 86 ear 54, 70 earth 203 eating 200 Ecclesiastes 160 ecology, theological anthropoeconomy 168 Eden, Garden of 35 editor 89 , 94

emenation 21 employee 26 employer 26

169

Edom 102,183 Eger, Akiba 219 egocentricity 207, 223 Egypt 225 Egyptians, the 223 eighteen 70 Ein Yaacov 183 Elijah 47-48ft, 51, 60, 92f., 9 5 ^ 137,140, 141-146, 150-153, 156, 176, 177-178, 181182,192 - becoming an I42f., i87f. - being as an 180-182 - calling as 146, i47f., i5of., i52f., i92f. Elisha 151,152

- divine 83f. - godly 230 Esau 102 eschatological chronology 139 - herald, the 142 - tension 209 - time-table 140 eschatology 41, 66, 137, i}8f„ 182, 209, 212, 215 - realized 36 and see: Elijah eschaton, the 38f., 140, 213 esoteric knowledge 21, 202 estrangement 36, 59, 64f., 88f., 116, 123, 136, 139, 164, i66f., 206, 207, 222, 224, 229Í -

crisis of in G o d promise and see:

181 230 of 174 - strangers

- dispossession eternal, the— and the ephemeral eternal 202

194

eternally existing matter 204 eternity 63Í, 64, 65, I93Í., 194, 195, 196, 198-199, 231 - negation of 199 ethic, of relinquishment 178 ethical competence 110 ethics and religiosity io8f. ethical numbness 216, 217 eudaemonism 9, 86f. euphemism 186

248

General Index

Eve 83, 89 - and the snake 85 evil 10, 23, 27, 29,34, )6ff., 68, 88,102,107, i3if., 155,163,177,183-184,187-192,195196,199, 207-210, 212-213, 215, 218-220, 222-224, 228-229 - eye 154 - and good n o , 113, 120, 179, 191, 195, 196, 211-212, 214, 218, 220-221, 226, 228 - and good, internalization of 2i5f. - and good, social definition of i07f. - inversibility of 229 - nature of man i82f., 184-191, 193-198, 2i3f., 219, 221 - whereness of 2i9ff. and see: also: wicked evilness of the world i59ff. execution 32 exile 87f., 90, 91, 169, 173-175, 184-188, 199, 211-212, 229 - in the Land of Israel 88f. - inevitability of 108 Exodus 32:1 122 experience 88, 215 - of reality 64, 65 eye 206 - evil 154 Ezekiel, the prophet i38ff. face 210, 218, 232 failure 112 faithfulness, God's i28ff. fall, the 91 - of Adam, 182, 197, i98ff. - of angels 104 - of man n , 83ff. - of man, chronology of 85 - of man, second 85 famine 161,164 fascism 229 fast- day 143 fat 33, 43, 60, 61 fate 25, 3 4 , 1 0 3 , 1 1 2 , 1 1 3 , 230 father 7 1 , 1 5 4 , 1 7 6 fear 230 - of sinfulness i2of. - and trembling 226

"fearing of sin" ii9f., 126, 136, 137, 141, 142,180,192 and see: sin, fearing of fed by God 153Ì female 68 feminine tradition 7if. fertility 25 fiftieth year 172 and see: Yovel figs 200 finitude i26f. fire 37, 5 0 , 1 4 3 , 1 4 5 , 1 4 7 , 1 5 4 first of the month 143 first of Nissan 101 flesh 45f., 51, 61,155,186 fleshiness 43, 58, 6jf. flood, the I2f. 225 - the generation of the 89 Flusser, David 41 fly, a 213 food 44ÌF., 47, 48, 54, 60, 67, 68, 69,146, 1 5 2 - 1 5 6 , 1 6 1 , 1 7 2 , 1 7 6 , 1 8 1 , 1 9 3 , 200 and see also: hunger forgetting 207 forgivenness 106 forty 153 fossil 204 fossilization 171 fossilized ritual 105 four 183 frailty 6of., 62f. freedom 36, 85, 88f., 136, 147, 179, 199, 217, 226f., 23of. - lack of 198 - negation of 199 freedom from sin 180 and see: "agility" Freud, Sigmund 60, 61 friends 2o6f. fruitfulness 17 future 59, 63f., 66, 69,74f. 75, 88,103,121, 126,139,140,182,185,188-190,193, 205, 212, 2l6f. and see: time Galilee, upper 76 garden 83ft, 197, 200

General Index — of Eden

83

— return to the I98fif garment 93,166 gathering-place I48f. Gender identity 53f., 7iff., 73f. genocide 229 geography, divine 83ff., 90 — of innerness 140 Gideon jif. Ginnai (stream) 144,147,148f. Ginzberg, L. 104 given, the 108,136,161 givenness 88, 98, 211, 218, 224, 226-228, 230 given-world, the 198 gnosis 127, i37f. 138,143,180,192 and see also: — consciousness — knowledge gnosticism 216 gnostic temptation goat 95

216

goats icuff. God 9 — absence of 123 — and becoming 188,195 — and being 180,194 — and being and non being 195 — being-before- 229ff — being o f 161 — biblical 193 — as Creator 2iff., 24, 27, I29f., 133, 136, 192 — as Creator of cosmos 76 — as Creator and the land 87!?. — as un-Creator 136 — and destruction 224ff. — discovery of I24f., 135,136 — embraces man in his wretchedness 63 — — — — — — —

efficaciousness of 218 as eternal i93f. and evil 183,186-191,195,197 existence of 218, 220 as father 124, 132 fear of 120 as feeder see: as nurterer of man

249

- and forgiveness 96 - and grace m f f . - and heroism of man 7jf. - faithfulness of 128ÎF. - and hierarchy 21 - immanence of 83ff., 89, 90,166, 208, 222 - immanence of - for Israel 212 - immanent and transcendent 124 - "innerness" and "outerness" of 218 - isness of 22of. - knowledge of 96 - and the land 88 - love of 196 - His love of man 76 - and man I4ff., 83ff, 196, 199 - as merciful 122 -

mercy of 123ÎF., 231 and nothingness 18,195 nutured by I52ff. as nurturer of man 161, i77f. ontology of 160 otherness of 36, 207, 210, 226, 23off. as owner of the land 170, 172Œ, 177 as owner of the world 32

-

People of 211 and perfection i26f. phenomenological ontology of 229ÎF. philosophical understanding of 194 and polity 165 and possession 199 power of I35ÎF., 218 as protagonist 113 and the psyche 216 questioning the existence of 165 reality of 171 as regretting i82ff., 185, 188-191, 194196, 199

-

as the righteous 202Œ, 221, 224 self-limitation of 65 self-love of I93ÎF. shame of 228, 230, 231 and sin 191 as sinning 223, 224, 230 spirit of 141 stance before 125 standing before 108

2JO

General Index

— as suffering 221, 222 — temptation of 221 — threat to being i8of. — threat to unity of 23off. — togetherness with 88, i8off., 182, 198, 205, 209 — transcendence of 83flF., 91 — as the transcendent other 124 — trembling before 103 — and un-becoming 229ff. — as viewed "from below" 24 — whereness of n6ff., 159, i6o2i9ff. and see also: divinegodliness 218 golden calf, the 5IF., 85,122, 212, 232 good 203 good and evil 102 and see: evil and good good deed 144, 147 goodness 209 grace 7, 69,79,93,95-96,115,117,119,122, 124,128, i3oif., 170,177-179,180-181,192, 193,196-199. 2I 5. 2.31 — absolute 231 — being in-before God i8of. — consciousness of 125 — and creation i33f. — efficaciousness of God's i36ff. — and power 178 — recognition of 126,141 — total 136 — two senses of I79ff. and see: "piety" graced-one, the 78 greed 59, 65, 70, 168, 177, 193, 195, 196, 198,199, 208,230 Greek aesthetics 52, 59, 64, 66f. Greek humanism and Rabbinic humanism 61 Greek sense of time 63f. group, social see: community guilt ioff., 98, 108,191, 223, 224 and see: sin hair 70, 74 hairy 102

halakha 26ff., 35,108,156 Hananiah, 87 Hannukah 83 hassid 79, i37f. - a certain 150 hassidim see: pious ones piety hatred 224 haverim 42 head 219 heart 186,187, 213 - new 211 heave-offering see: tithes heaven, the 129, 134, 203 - seven 8gf. hedonism, tyrannical 199, 218 hegemony of the given 136 Heilsgeschichte see: redemption-history hell 27, 35 here-and-now see: present, the hermeneutics 28, 86, 171, 194, 221 - and anthropology no - dissolution 135 - feminine 7iff. - of indeterminacy 116 - Rabbinic 88 - of ritual ioiff. - and rebirth 76 - seeds 135, 137 - theory 176 - and tradition 9iff., 98 and see also: intertextuality methodology hero, the 77, 78-80 hessed 79 Hesiod— Theogony 25 Hezekiah, King of Judah 87, 211 hidden face of God 210 hiding 209 hierarchy 203 - of sinning 107 High-Priest

General Index see: Aaron historical axis 141 - reality 136 f. - theology 134 history 184, 188,189, 211 - experience of 86 - meta 135 holiness 79f., 92ff., 99, 112, 114, ii$f. - aura of 108 and see also: spirit of holiness "holiness, the spirit o f " see: spirit of holiness holocaust 70 holy place ioiff., ii2f., 114 home 103, 114 homelessness 199, 229 honor 202 Horovitz-Rabin 221 house-of-learning 3 4 f , 44, 67ff., 70,149 humanism 65 - embrace of 52 - embracing of 6o-6zff. - loss of 229 - Rabbinic and Greek 61 humanization of atonement 109 humble 115,117,118,123,179,180,192,193 humbleness 135, 209 "humility" 92ff., 99, njfF., 118, 121, 125, 126, 127, 135-137, 141, 147, 179-181, 192, 197 - before God 135 - danger of 149 - and others 148 - as yearning 127 hundred, one 83 hunger 168,195,199, 200, 230 and see: food husband 53ff., 68, 69, 70, 7 2 ^ , 73ff., 78 Hyman, Aaron 146, 183 Ibn-Ezra, Abraham 34, 185 idea 59 ideal 52 identity 63ff., 64, 72 - inertial 211 - and magic 109 - self 89,106,136

251

- self- as one graced i37f. idol-worshippers 85 ignorance 216 ille- tempore 91, 113, 198 illness see: sickness illusion 228 imitatio Dei, inverted 63, 75 immortality 65 immutability of God 194 impeachable 93 imperfection 60, 62, 65, 88f., 99, 228 - embrace of 6if. individual, the 52,133, 141, 147, 184, 215 and see: self, the individuality 65 individualized 195 inertial identity 211 I-ness 178 infinity 123 inflation 158 inherit 86ff. inheritance 83, 86f. innards 33 inner dimension 189 - event 109, 118, 140 - man 40, 216 - this worldliness 199 innerness 39f., 89,103, 108,139,141,185, 187-190,194, 205-210, 214-224 - of man and of God 210 - universe of i35f., 211 - of world 218 insanity 41,166,171, 206,209, 2i6ff., 224, 228, 229 interpretation, re- 88f. inter-textuality 2, 55,122, 221 inversion 164 irony 57, 77, 78, 86, 160 Isaac 42, 89f., 143 Isaiah, the prophet 122, 225 Ishmaelites 182-185 isness 220 Israel, land of 189 - exile in 88f. - Israel, People of 87f., ijofF., 185, 195, 211, 212, 213, 218, 220, 226, 227

2J2

General Index

— and God 83E — God's love of 174 — justification of 186 — new 211 — as the vanquished and exiled People 174 Israelites 172 Jacob 42, 90, 102, 143 — ladder of 118, 199 Jastrow, Marcus 202 Jeremiah, the prophet 87, 122, 174, 211, 212 Jerusalem i5f., 77,169 — destruction of 211 Jesse 43 Jether jif. Jews, the 149, 154, 155, 211 and see: Israelites — non- 32, 5sf., 144,148,177,185, 211, 213 and see: Nations Jezebel 146, 153 Job i59ff., 162- i66f., i 7 o f f , i9of. — book of 170, 215 Jordan, the river 145, 147, 148, 153 Joshua 173, 211 joy 222, 230 JPS translation of the Bible 210 jubilee year see: yovel Judaism, mainstream 68, 7of., 74 judgement 73 justice 122, 159, i63ff., 170, 190, 191 — and dispossession 174 justification 164/., 186 — and accusation 174 — self- 167, i73f. — unviability of 175 Kafka, Franz 207 Kidneys 45, 214 Kilayim 163,167,168,170 King 203 Kingdoms, the. 85 Knowing and being 222 knowledge 142, 227, 230 — of God 96 — saving i26f.

and see: consciousness Kohath 90 Korban ha-Edah 93, 175 Kuhn, H.-W 38 labor 167,169,178 laborer 26, 31 lactesis 25 "ladder, the" 137, i78ff., i8if., 192, 196, 197,199 - of Jacob 118,199 - of R. Phinehas ben Yair 91ft lady, a certain 51 lamb 95 lame 183-185,188 land 34, 83, 86ff., i62fF„ 165, 168, 174^ 181,191, 211, 218 - as belonging to God 170, I72ff, 174, 175 - of Israel, the 173 - ownership of 107, 173 - possession of 89 - promised 212 and see: world... landscape of innerness 210 language 64,164 Laodecea 51 laughing 54, 56 launderer, a certain 32, 67 Law, the 26ff., 74, 85, 98f., 97, 99, 108, 120,122,125,133,156, i(>3ff., 171,172-173, 177,181, 187, 217 - the giving of 122 law and order 159, i64ff. and see also: Torah commandements left side 214 legend 73, 128, 212 legitimacy i07f. legs 155 leprosy 24 Levi 90 Levites, the 161 Levites, offering for see: tithes Licht, Jacob 37, 38 life as grace 181

General Index light 2if„ 37, 54, 55, 208 - children of 36 limbo, in nrf. literary artifact 171 loan 172 longing see: yearning lonliness 207 losing 74 lots I02ff., 112 love jiff., 61, 62f., 6$ff., -ji., 74f., 76, 80, i23f., 191,192, 211, 210, 218 - between man and God 84ff, 196-197, 2I3f., 229ff, 23off. - -to-God 196,197,198 - mystical 23 off. - unrequited 8, 11 lying 208 ma'asrot see: tithes magic 109, 130 Mahoza 54 maidservant 162 mainstream Judaism 68, 7of., 74 males 68 Malter, H. 157,162 maming of animals man 155 - before-God 135,136 - as fed by God 161 - creation of 227 - creatureliness of 123?., 124 - the discovery of 61 - evil nature of see: evil nature of man - and God 196, 218 - inner 216 - narcissistic 195 - as nurtured by God i77f., 193 - 's obsession with God 195 - old 47 - outer 216 - religious 136, 207, 208, 230 - smallness of 84, 136, 138 - 's smallnes and God's greatness 135 - tragic flaw in 219 and see: person

253

Mandelbaum, B. 47, 168 manic-depression 2i6f. mande 145 Margulies, M. 128 market-place 24 marriage 56, 76ff. martyr 217 martyrdom 108 materialism 59 matter 148, 224, 229 — eternally existing 204 — pre-existing 228 matzot 147 meal 146, 152 meaning 14, 36, 59,182, 229 meaninglessness 217, 228, 229 meaning and absurdity 161 meat 153 mechanization 217 megalomania 223 memory 59, 60. 62, 63, 73, 74, 7jf., 211, 212 — and yearning 198 and see: forgetting merchant, Arab 144, 148 mercy 96,123!?., 125, i28f., 130, 231 Messiah, the 143 — non-historical i34f. — categories of 65 messianic time 41 messianism 36, 38, 39, 66 metaphore 15, i39f. 141,166,167, 214 metaphysical 196 — and physicality 23 off. methodology 1-2, 5, 7, 28, 29, 34, 50, 55, 93ff., 98, 104, 135, 144, 171, 176, i8iff., 193, 220 and see: hermeneutics Micah, the prophet 87, i88f. mice 151 minority 37 miracle i44f., 146, i47f., 153,176,181,182 — and humility 149 — and meaning I56ff. — as prosaic 148 — -worker 149, 152,156, 177, 193 miraculous, the - and radicality 47,177

2.54

General Index

Miriam 4zf. Moab 225 modernity 217, 229 money 93 month, first of 143 moon, the new 143 morality see: ethics mortality 151,16 6 mortification 217 Moses 48;, 42f„ 89f., 128,148, i54f., 232 - song of 211 mother 71 mountains 218 mourning 56 mules 154,176 — white 155 and see: donkeys mystery 210 mystical consummation 198 — love 23off. — temptation 23ofif. mysticism 196, 218 mythology 13,18, 50, 91, io2ff., 113,129f., 179, 198, 203, 204 and see: demythologization Naboth 146 nakedness 54ff., 58ff. narcissism 6if., I23f., 192,193, 196-199 - divine i93ff., 195-197,199 - non-pathelogical 195 nation see: community national self centeredness i73f. — self-criticism 174 nationalism 211, 212 nations, the 36 and see: Jews, nonnature 148, 167 ne'emanim 177 negation 179,196, 218, 221, 224, 226, 228, 229fF., 230, 232 - of eternity 199 see also: becoming, nonbeing, nonnothingness

destruction negative commandment 106 negative theology i93f., 211, 230 Nehemiah 212 neighbor 70 nether-world 87, 208 neurosis, compulsion 217, 228f. new heart and spirit 211 new moon, the 143 Nickelsburg Jr., George W.E. 38 Nietzsche, Friedrich 66f. hight 27, 28, 31, 45f., 200 nihilism 181 Nissan, first of 101 Nissim, R. 56 nocturnal emission 92 noise 222 noisiness 208 non-being I94f. and see: being, nonnon-Jew see: Jew, nonnostaligia 59, 113 nothingness i2ff., 23, 35, 40, 75, i23f., 124, 126,136,190,194f., 195-197,199,207,224, 226-227 - attraction of 202ff. - fear of 228 - fear and temptation of 229ff. - temptation unto 227 now, the see: present, the now, the-and then 209 numbers see: individual numbers numinosity 61, i02fF., 112 nurtured by God i52fif., I77f., 176,193 obsession 217 - neurosis 228f. - neurotic 217 - with God 195 official, a certain 28 oil 146, 152 old 164 - man 47 omnipresence of God 194

General Index one hundred 83 ontology 117,125,141, 217E, 218, 220, 228, 22^f. - theological 113 oppression 122 optimism 211 ordeal 45, 61 order 14, 17, 22ff., 26S., 36, 40, 64, 76, 108, i29f., 120, 122, 159, 160, 203, 217, 218, 220, 228, 229 - collapse of i64f. - illegitimacy of 160 - just i63ff. - social 36 orderliness, neurotic 217 orphans 159 orpheus 25 other, the 54, 61, 73,148,149,192,197-198, 205 - centered 65 - discovery of 65fF. - the embracing of 75 - and memory 75 - suffering of 151 - the transcendent 124 - worldliness 136 others 152,154, i76f., 178,195,196, 208 otherness 36, 88f., 8 9 , 1 0 8 , 1 1 8 , 1 7 9 , 1 9 6 - being-unto 207, 218 - divine 192, 193 - of God 210, 23off. - subjective 124 - theology of 122 Ovadiah Bartenura 35 ostentation 155 outcast 64 outer man 216 outerness 89 ownership 63, 65,107,154,156-159, i62ff., i63fF., i66ff., 1 6 8 , 1 7 0 , 1 7 1 , 1 8 1 , 1 9 3 , 1 9 8 , 230 and see:possession - critique of i6jff., 169 - and God 167if. - hesitation in 175 - illegitimacy of i77f. - of the land 178

- of land and redemption history - and needs 168 - limitation of 172 - personal attitude to 178 - phenomenology of 169 - realignment of 170 - stance of 155 - of world by God i66fF. oxen 31, 51 owner 169, 200 owners 167

2

55

I73ff.

pagan woman 55 pain 215 Palestine see: Israel, Land of Palestinian tradition I 4 f f , 49, 9iff., 97, 99ff., 126, 144, 149, 178 - version 50 paradox 9 , 1 6 , 1 2 4 , 1 2 6 , 1 3 6 , 1 9 4 , 1 9 6 , 1 9 7 , 199, 232 parable 201 paranoia 207 pariah 206 passing 57, 63, 65 passive experience of time 75 - time 64Î. passivity 63ff., 113 passover 144,147 past, the 59, 65, 69, 72-75, 88, 126, 139, 182,185,188,190,193, 203, 205, 211, 212, 215, 2i6f., 227, 228 - mythic 91 - mythical 198 - and sin 109 - time 62 and see: time pathology 40, 2i6f. Paul 9, 216 peace 12, 87,174, 209, 212 peacefulness 15 Penei Moshe 93, 175 people, the chosen 211 - of God 21 - of the world 21 - peoplehood 189 and see: Israel, people of

2 $6

General Index

perception

40, 61, 89, 220, 224, 229, 230

phenomenological hermeneutics

perfection

63, 64, 6 5 , 1 9 6

-

— revelation o f

126

persecution

224

person, the

9, 190 63f.

— o f despair

64f.

67, 69

— re-embracing o f

72

6${.

physical aesthetics

52

s8flf,

-

52

strength

-

weakness

48f., 5off., 60, 68, 7 4 54, 55, 60, 61, 62, 61, 7 4 jifF., 61, 79, 215, 217

and metaphysicality

piety

23off.

92ff., 99, i2i, 125-127, 134,136-137,

180

65 58

— a Rabbinic discovery o f

$%ff.

pilgrimage

169

pious, the

96

pivotal point in a psalm

205, 207f.

place, holy

63

— as "reborn" — passive

see: holy place

48ff.

— as "not rotting"

plagiarism

62f.

Plague

64f.

— self-centered

polity

j8ff.

-

— unity o f

-

self, the

107, I09f. 216

possession

77 106

34, 59, 63, 74, 75, 87,155, 160,

161, 163ft, 165, 176, 195, 196, 198, 230 -

as divine prerogative

199

and see: ownership

and see: self 144,148,151

211

dispossession potsherd

202

petrification

popular saying

108

98

personification

152

positive c o m m a n d m e n t

73^, 229

— fragmentization o f

persons see: tithes

i5ff., 135

— responsibility

— unity o f

159, 160, 1 6 1 , 1 6 3 , 1 6 8 , 1 6 9 ,

poor, offering for the

185,189, 214

— in m e m o r y

165

178

and see: m a n

personality

and G o d

poor, the

2i5ff.

— religiosity

48f.

3if., 48f., 51, 64, ic>7f., 147, i59ff.,

i63ff., 168,185, 229

65ff.

— as u n - b e c o m i n g

204, 205

political theology

58ff, 63

— as slipping away — as "thou"

64f.

202, 204

24

polemic

63ÎF.

— as not self-centered

phantasy

163

proportionality

-

62

— and the other

petihta

194

phoenix, the

-

53F.

— as to be loved b y G o d

pesimism

64

7

physicality

61

— and gender identity

personal

196, 205

22

philosophical, pre-

— embrace o f in his wretchedness

— as other

75

72f.,

75

— real

theological-

philology

— embracing o f in his un-becoming

— as mortal

psycho-

-

philosophizing

65

— as frail

-

Philo

63

— confident

62-60.,

14, 39, 59, 61, 64, 73,139,

180,197, 209, 220

— as b e c o m i n g — concrete

28

40, 84,193, 229ff.

phenomenology

6}f.

— active

theology

12

potter, the 171

181, 207

poverty power

186, 226

93 64, 65, 72, 78, 7 7 , 88f., 89, i07f.,

General Index 109, !36,168,179,181,198, 217, 218, 219, 222, 226 - politicai 48f. - promise of 174 - and grace 178 powerful, the 159 powers that be, the 108, 147, 164, 204, 227, 23of. and see: authorities, the Romans, the prayer I4f., 15, 17, 23-26, 30, 34, 36, 99, 143, 165, 190, 212 predecessors 200 prophetic theology 87 present, the 18, 38f., 41, 75, 91, 97, I02f., 113, 130, 139, 166, 185, 188-190,193, 194, 198,203-205,209,210, 212-215,2I9> 22i>> 228 - situation 108 and see also: time price 167 Priest, High 95, ioiff. priests 212 - offerings for see: tithes priestly reliogisity I07f. pride 202, 209 produce, the 161, 167 - agricultural 169,170, 177 and see: agricultural produce production 178 profane 78 progress 64, 227, 229 projection 192206 - and ontology 2i7f. property 34,155,165, 167, 171 - critique of 170,177 prophecy 127, 137 - authentic 87, 174 prophets, the 93,107f., 212 - the literary 211 proselyte 56 prostitutes 49 psalmic theology 135 Psalms, book of 214, 215, 218 - pivotal point in a 205, 207f. - of thanksgiving 210

2

57

psyche, the 194, 2i5ff. - pathology of 2i6ff. - phenomenology of 10, 75 psychological atomism 228f. punishment io6f., 185, 188, 190, 211, 213 purity, ritual- 92ff., 98 - and impurity, ritual 92 - non-priests' adherence to laws of 94 and see: ritual cleanliness puss 44ff. putrification 45f. quietness see: silence Qumram community

36ff., 41, 69, 78

Rahab i29f. rain 143, 146, 151, 153, 158, 225 Ramban 102 Rashi 13, 52, 56, 68, 78, 77, 168,183-185, 213, 227 rationality i2of. rationalization of sin I07ff. reaching-out 208 reading, tempting 207 reality 63f., 86, 88,103,122, 156,170,171, 176, 189, 201, 208, 210, 215, 218, 220 - expierience of 63ff., 65, 118 - and God 229ff. - historical 36f. - outer 139 - perception of 229 - self centered 63f. - sense of 36, 39, 40,109, 220, 228, 229 - and texts 171 rebecoming 50 Rebekah 102 rebirth 45, 48ff., 5of„ 53f„ 58ff„ 65-66, 7iff., 78,109,142,143, 17?, 180,192, 211 - and hermeneutics 76 recognition see: consciousness rectification io8f. redactor 204 redemption 9, 188, 213 and see: deliverance - of captives 144,146,147

258

General Index

- history 87, 142, 173, 184, 185, 189, 211, 212, 213, 227 - from sin - from suffering 147 and see: "agility" religiosity 36 - authentic 108 - feminine 7iff. - man 136, 178, 207, 208, 230 - person, the 40, 69,161 - phenomenology 205 - and ritual 171 remembering see: memory remnant 211, 212 repentence 97,106,109, 211, 215, 217, 228 repression 74 repulsiveness 46f. re-reading 210 responsibility 154, 176, 197, 217 - personal 107, i09f. resurrection of the dead 39, 65,92ff., 94ff., 137, 138, 140, 141, 143, 180-182, 192 Reuben and Gad, tribes of 93,100 revelation 108, 122,136, , 210 reward 27, 107,164 rich 93, and see: wealth righteous, the 27, 83, 86ff., 89f., 146,170, 190, 191, 199, 202, 204, 208, 209, 221, 224, 226 - death of 101 righteousness i63ff., 174, 202 right side 214 ritual 98, iooff., 167, 171, 179, 203, 212, 217, 228 - and the audience no - "cleanliness" 35, 42, 68f. - impurity 92 - metamorphosis of 180 - purity 112, 114, 123,197 and see: purity, ritual river 150 Romans, the 29, 3iff„ 48, 5of., 51, 53, 64, 68, 76 - order 33 - power 32

— rule 189 Rome 24, 106 Rome (Edom) 102 room, upper 70, 76 rotting 46, 61, 62, 6j, 200, 203, 213, 222 and see: decay royal order 31 R. Phinehas ben Yair 175 sabbath i74f. sabbatical cycle 169 — year i72ff. and see: shemittah sacrifice 43, 45, 51, 61, 95 sacrificial cult 105 salt 151 salvation 34, 37, 45, 46, 65, 80, 113, 138, 139, 180,191, 196-198, 222 — experienced 66 — and knowledge 127 and see: deliverance sanity see: insanity Satan 102 scapegoat, the i02ff. schizophrenia 216, 229 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 220 secret 143 — knowledge 138 seeing 10 self, the 9-10, 18, 40, 43, 63ff., 89, I07f., 109, 118, i35f., i42f., 179, 181, 185, 188189, 192, 196-199, 2io, 2i4ff., 215, 216, 220, 222-223, 229ff— -accusation 223 — becoming 195 — and being 218 — clarity of 69 — confidence 208 — consciousness 209 — criticism 2i2f., 216, 224 — definition 218 — denial 199 — disguist 222 — doubting 206, 224 — embrace of 61, 64-65, 75

General Index -

embrace of - in un-becoming 73 enervated 65 -estrangement of God 224, 230 and God 194 -hate 67, 123, 180, 191, 192, 206, 207 -identity 53f., 6o, 72, 7 3 , 1 4 9 , 1 8 0 , 1 9 2 -identity, blurring of 73ff., 78 -identity, loss of 74f. implosion of 2i6f. -justification 167 -knowlegde 220, 230 loss of 196 -love I23f. -mortification 217 -negation 218, 230-232 non- 196,197 as not self-centered 64f. as object 207 and other 54, 61, 6jf., 65,69,73ff., 78f., 178,197, 205 - -perception 62 - -punishment 217 - real 63 - -reproach 207 - softening of being as 178 - -sufficiency ij4f. , 176 - threat to the being as a i8of. - threat to unity of 215ft - un-becoming of 199 - -understanding 7iff., 212 - unity of 215, 216, 220 - virile 63f. - and world 2i7f. selflessness 196, 197, 199, 224 sense of reality 109 and see: reality, sense of sense of sinfulness 126 sensivity 39, n sensuality 59, 66, 69, 74 - fragmentary 75 seven heavens, the 8gf. servant of God 212 seventh year 172 and see: shemittah sewers 203 sexuality 49, jiff., 54, 76ff. shame 202, 204, 205, 206, 208, 210, 223,

259

228, 230, 231 shaving 154 Shemhazzai and Azzael 104 shemittah 169, 172-175, 177, 181 - controversy concerning 175 - and tithing 175 shittin I2f. sickness 54, 55, 56f., 61,150, 219 Stfra 47 silence 208, 209, 210, 222, 224, 230 sin ioff., 37, 43, 55, 69, 83f„ 89, 93, 95, 96, 98, ioo, 108,114, ii9f., 120-123,133,164, 174-175, 181, 185, 190, 191-193, 196-199, 206, 211-213, 2i5-2i9f., 223 - between man and his fellow io6ff. - between man and God io6ff. - cleanliness from iiiff., - demythologization of n o - fearing of 92ff., 99 - freedom from 100,179 - and grace i36ff. - hierarchy of 107 - invitability of 121 - neutralization of 105 - original 85 - original - rectification of 89ff. - rationalization of i07ff. - rectification of io8f. - revelation of 126 - socialization of 109 and see: "cleanliness" Sinai I3ff., 85 sinfulness I04ff., 180 sixty 44, 68, 69,143 skin 55 slavery in Egypt 21 slaves, Israelite 17 smiling 54, 55, 62, 66 Smith, Adam 169 snake, the 30, 43, 85 snow 158 social belonging 39 - cosmetics 229 - definition of sin I07f. - group, see: community - malaise 229 - order 229

i6o

General Index

socialization of sin 109 society 31, 107E, 112, 164, 178 - better 167 Sodomites, the 89 Sokoloff, M. 149 son 150 Song of Songs 8, 11 song of thanksgiving 210 - of Ascents nf. - of Moses 211 sotah 12 soul 40, 65, 217, 229 spindle 24f. spirit 217 - of God 141 - of holiness, the 92ff., 127,134,137,138, 142,180 spitting 55 splitting of the sea 148 spring, a 151 stain 85 stature of Adam 83, 89 stinking 55, 67, 200f., 203, 213 stranger 170, 173, 206 strength 87fF., 177, 230 - human 75 - physical 48f., 5off., 51, 60, 68, 78 student 31, 149 student of the Rabbis, a 70 subject and object 195 subjective otherness 124 subjectivism 228 sublimation 60, 61 success 86ff., 163 suffering 16, 25, 26, 38, 44,fF., 56f., 60, 63ff„ 64, 85, 88, 106, 159, 170, 185,188, 191, 195, 204ff., 206, 209-211, 213, 215, 219, 223, 229 - of others 147, 151 - theology of 212 - of the weak 160 suicide 23of. sukkah, a 210 summer 158 sun 33,45 suppression 74 suspicion 100

symbolism 24f. synagogue 35, 54 Tabernacle, the 83, 90, 95, ioiff. tablets, breaking of the 112, 122 tavern 31 technologization 229 technology 24f. teleology 203 Temple, the I2ff.,55,77,90,94,n2f.,ii4,179 - destruction of 211, 212 - as metaphore 15 - treasury 93,100 and see also: Tabernacle temptation 207, 209, 211, 228 - unto nothingness 227 tempting reading 207 tension of theology 211 terumah 94 and see also: tithes texts and reality 171 thanksgiving psalm 210 thenness 182 theodicy 23,113,185,188,190, 228 and see: God and evil Theodor, J. 22, 202, 204 theological anthropology 66,123ff., i82ff., 192 and see: anthropology, religious - anthropo-ecology 169 - phenomenology 194, 205 - psychology 192 - tension 211 - voyeurism 171 theology - as anthropology 176 - and being 156 - biblical 88,194, 220, 226, 227 - and casuistry 171 - of chaos 2iiff. - of creation 226, 228 - of destruction 212 - of development 211 - of exile, I74f. - mere 181 - of negation 229ff. - negative i93f., 211, 23off.

261

General Index — new — —

211

old 87 and ownership 173,175 phenomenological 193, 229ff. of suffering 221

- temptation to dualistic theophany 4, 5, 7

23off.

thief 31 thieves 28, 200 thighs 155 thirteen 47, 49f. thisness 195 threat 204, 209, , 211 threatening 222 threateningness 216, 218, 226-230 three 55,146, 182,186, 200 thou, discovery of 6jf£ tillers, the 167 time j8ff., i2of., 139, 203f., 228 - arrow of 112 - as becoming 63f. — condensation of 111 - displacement in 41 — as history 189 - inner 66 - and magic 109 - and memory 75 — "ownership" of 63 — passive expierence of 75 - and place 103 - and space i93f. - and space and the psyche 2i6f. - as survival 64f. — as un-becoming into the past 6$f. - as an unending cycle 63 and see: future, the past, the present, the timelessness, pathological 2i6f. Tinneius Rufus 55 tithe 157 - first 161, 169 — for the poor 163,169 — second 163,169 tithes 151, 158, 161,168,170,171, 200 tithing I56ff., i62ff., 167, 177, 181, 193 - and shemittah ij