Rabbi Joseph Telushkin Read online

  JEWISH ENCOUNTERS

  Jonathan Rosen, General Editor

  Jewish Encounters is a collaboration between Schocken and Nextbook, a project devoted to the promotion of Jewish literature, culture, and ideas.

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  THE JEWISH BODY • Melvin Konner

  RASHI • Elie Wiesel

  A FINE ROMANCE • David Lehman

  YEHUDA HALEVI • Hillel Halkin

  HILLEL • Rabbi Joseph Telushkin

  FORTHCOMING

  THE WORLDS OF SHOLOM ALEICHEM • Jeremy Dauber

  ABRAHAM • Alan M. Dershowitz

  MOSES • Stephen J. Dubner

  BIROBIJAN • Masha Gessen

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  ABRAHAM CAHAN • Seth Lipsky

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  SHOW OF SHOWS • David Margolick

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  DAVID BEN-GURION • Shimon Peres and David Landau

  WHEN GRANT EXPELLED THE JEWS • Jonathan Sarna

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  Copyright © 2010 by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Schocken Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Telushkin, Joseph, [date]

  Hillel : if not now, when? / Joseph Telushkin.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN: 978-0-8052-4289-8

  1. Hillel, 1st cent. B.C./1st cent. A.D.—Teachings.

  2. Jewish ethics. 3. Beth Hillel and Beth Shammai.

  I. Title.

  BM502.3.H55T45 2010

  296.1′20092—dc22 2010008277

  www.schocken.com

  v3.1

  If not now, when?

  —HILLEL, Ethics of the Fathers 1:14

  For Jonathan Rosen

  EDITOR EXTRAORDINAIRE

  AND

  For Carolyn Starman Hessel

  FRIEND EXTRAORDINAIRE

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Jewish Encounters Series

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Part I

  “While Standing on One Foot”:

  The Unique Teachings of Hillel

  1. Hillel, the Most Ardent of Students

  2. Hillel’s Rise to Leadership

  3. “While Standing on One Foot”

  4. Hillel and the Three Converts

  5. Repairing the World

  6. Five Traits

  Part II

  Hillel versus Shammai:

  The Talmud’s Most Famous Adversaries

  7. Hillel the Interpreter, Shammai the Literalist

  8. Thieves, Brides, and When Lying Is a Virtue

  9. Issues Regarding Women

  10. Shammai Beyond Stereotype

  11. Two Torahs: Deciding Between Hillel and Shammai

  Part III

  Hillel and Jesus

  12. The Jewish Sage and the Christian Messiah

  Part IV

  Lessons from the First Century for the Twenty-first Century—and Beyond

  13. “Teach Everyone”: Outreach in the First Century

  14. “The Highly Impatient Person Cannot Teach”: For Today’s Teachers and Parents

  15. “One Who Is Bashful Will Never Learn”: Why It Is Essential to Question

  16. “Do Not Say, ‘When I Have [Free] Time, I Will Study,’ Lest You Never Have [Free] Time”: The Eternal Challenge

  17. “If I Am Not for Myself, Who Will Be for Me? And If I Am [Only] for Myself, What Am I?”: Passionate Moderation

  18. Final Thoughts: Why We Need Hillel Now More Than Ever

  Appendix 1. “He Who Does Not Increase, Will Decrease”:

  Additional Teachings of Hillel

  Appendix 2. Hillel’s Seven Middot of Torah Interpretation

  Appendix 3. Hillel’s Teachings in Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers)

  Glossary

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  I was sitting with a rabbinic friend swapping stories about our lives and our work. He started talking about an encounter he recently had: “A Jewish man, probably in his early thirties, and his non-Jewish girlfriend came to speak with me. They want to marry, but his parents are dead set against their only son marrying a Gentile. I asked the woman what she thought about the parents’ attitude, and she was honest. She said it seemed primitive and ridiculous. But she also said that, if necessary, she’d be willing to convert. After all, she wants to be a good person, and Judaism, she assumes, wants people to be good and might well have something to teach her about goodness. That’s how she put it, ‘might well have something to teach her about goodness.’ ”

  “And what did you tell her?” I asked.

  My friend, a rather traditional rabbi, answered: “I told her that we’re in no rush to bring people in, that conversion to Judaism is a not a quick business: ‘Presto, you’re a Jew.’ There’s a lot to study, a lot of rituals to learn, and I certainly can’t convert you before you do all that studying and commit yourself to practicing all that you study.”

  “And what did she say to that?”

  “It was the boyfriend who spoke up. He seemed really annoyed. ‘I told you this was pointless,’ he said to the girl, and then he turned to me. “We’re getting married in six weeks, Rabbi. With or without your help.”

  My friend shrugged. “I told them that even if the two of them had come in with a more open attitude, six weeks was way too quick to do a conversion. Six months would be a stretch. They walked out with a book I gave them, but they’re not coming back, I can tell.” My friend shook his head a few times, his expression a mixture of sadness and annoyance. “What I was really thinking was that they’d be better off going to city hall and just getting their license. We don’t need converts like that. One day, if she’s interested in becoming a real Jew, she can come see me.” He shrugged and regarded my skeptical face. “I know, I know, that day’s never going to come.”

  I was quiet a minute, thinking about, of all things, a Talmudic sage who lived two thousand years ago named Hillel, and about an American-Jewish community that’s been getting smaller and smaller, and whose members have been intermarrying at a rate of 40 percent and higher for more than thirty years.

  “What about that comment she made to you?” I finally asked him.

  He looked puzzled. “Which comment?”

  “That Judaism might well have something to teach her about being a good person.”

  “Nice words,” he conceded. “But I would have b
een a little more encouraged if she had actually said something about religion. Like maybe she had read about Shabbat and wanted to observe it. Or she was willing to keep kosher. At least then I would have felt that I had something to work with. But this couple gave me nothing to work with.”

  Nothing to work with. His words reverberated in my head.

  At the time, I had already begun thinking that I would like to write a book about Hillel, and this encounter only heightened my resolve. Hillel, I am convinced, would have found absolutely wrongheaded my friend’s all-too-common and reflexively discouraging approach to conversion. In the same way, I find it hard to imagine Hillel approving of the strange limbo in which some three hundred thousand Russians of questionable Jewish—and sometimes non-Jewish—parentage are presently living in Israel, many of whom want to become Jews. I thought of Hillel because he is not only, arguably, Judaism’s greatest rabbinic sage, but also its most fearlessly inclusive.

  He is also the rabbinic figure most willing to give ethical behavior equal—or even greater—weight, along with strict adherence to the ritual laws. The story for which Hillel is best known, a story we will look at in greater detail in this book, involves a non-Jew who is open to converting to Judaism but who wishes to learn about Judaism not in six weeks, but while “standing on one foot”—that is, in a single sound bite. Having literally been driven away with a stick by another rabbi who is affronted by his request, the non-Jew comes to Hillel, who is open to converting him. Hillel offers the man a single precept that surprisingly mentions neither God nor the rituals of the Torah, only the decent treatment of one’s fellow man, along with the admonition to keep studying. If there is an essence of Hillel, it is in this story, in which he himself dares to offer an essence of Judaism.

  Writing a conventional biography of Hillel is, alas, impossible. All that we know of Hillel’s life comes from a variety of stories in the Talmud (and in related works, such as the Midrash). The Talmud is, along with the Bible, Judaism’s most important literary creation, a compendium of legal discussions,* interpretations of the Bible, and an attempt to decipher what it is that God wants of human beings. Add to this folklore, ethical maxims, and stories, many of them about the Talmud’s greatest rabbis. The Talmud was edited around the year 500 C.E.,* but its roots reach down to the oldest stratum of Judaism and, in the belief of the Talmud’s sages, many of its teachings go back to Mount Sinai itself. But though a formal biography is impossible, for reasons that will soon become apparent, I believe it is still possible to construct a very clear impression of a man whose message speaks more urgently to Jews and Judaism today than that of any other Jewish figure in the last two thousand years.

  Unfortunately, however, when it comes to details, we have considerably more biographical information about some of Judaism’s far more ancient figures. In the case of Moses, the preeminent figure of the Hebrew Bible, we know how he met his wife, the names of his sons, his father, mother, brother, and sister, even the story of a certain measure of ill will that Miriam and Aaron, his siblings, felt toward him at one point in the desert wanderings.

  The character who figures most prominently in the early books of the biblical prophets is Israel’s second king, David. The son of Jesse, he is the youngest of eight brothers. We know the story of his first love, Michal; indeed, she is the only woman in the Bible whose love for a man is recorded (“Now Michal daughter of Saul had fallen in love with David”). We even know the story of the fight that led to the end of whatever love remained in their sad marriage (2 Sam. 6:16–23).

  We move forward now to Hillel, perhaps the greatest rabbi of the Talmud. Hillel lived some twelve hundred years after Moses and about nine hundred years after David, and we should possess considerably more biographical information about him and his background than about theirs. But we don’t. A Talmudic passage refers to him as “Hillel the Babylonian,” from which we deduce that he was born in Babylon and subsequently came to Israel. The Talmud informs us that he went on to serve as nasi, the foremost religious leader of the community. Elsewhere, the Talmud traces his ancestry to King David, a touch of royalty that befits a man whose descendants would hold positions of religious leadership within the Jewish community for more than four hundred years. But we don’t know the names of his father or mother or, for that matter, his wife (though the rabbis tell a story that reveals her to have been a highly sensitive practitioner of charity). We know the name of one son, Shimon—we don’t know whether he had other children—and of his brother, Shebna, who is identified as a merchant. And because of the leadership roles many of Hillel’s descendants assume, we know their names. Among them are four Gamliels, two additional Shimons, three Yehudahs, and the final leader, known as Hillel the Second.1 We also know of the contemporaneous rabbi, Shammai—founder of his own school and the man who drove the would-be convert away—with whom Hillel and his disciples had numerous legal disputes. Surprisingly, however, there is only one story in which the two men actually appear together (Shabbat 17a). Nevertheless, they are a famous emblematic pair of adversaries who each uphold principles essential to Jewish tradition.*

  We also know that Hillel was a disciple of two rabbis, Shmaya and Avtalion, who were the religious leaders of their age, and who were both descended from converts to Judaism. We know that Hillel assumed his position of leadership during a period of great instability and ignorance in Jewish life, in all likelihood related to the megalomaniacal kingship of Herod, who persecuted many of the era’s religious teachers. While the Talmud ascribes to Hillel a life span of 120 years (as was the case with Moses), it would seem that his years of religious leadership ranged from approximately 30 B.C.E. to 10 C.E., which would mean this book is being published, coincidentally, on what is possibly the two thousandth anniversary of his passing.

  What we do possess about Hillel are many stories—stories scattered throughout the Talmud and Midrash along with many of his legal rulings and those of his disciples (Beit Hillel, the School of Hillel) that are recorded in the Mishnah, the Tosefta, and both the Jerusalem and the Babylonian editions of the Talmud.* It is from these stories and rulings that Hillel enters the Jewish mind as so great a rabbinic sage, a man beloved for his legal daring, passion for learning, remarkable openness to converts, and imaginative acts of kindness.

  It is both in stories and in legal discussions that we encounter Hillel’s willingness to define—in one extended sentence, no less—Judaism’s essence, his openness to determining Jewish law not only on the basis of tradition but also on the basis of his keen understanding of the Torah’s intention and his loving confidence in the instincts of the common man.*

  But as familiar as Hillel’s teachings are in the Jewish world (and were repeatedly affirmed—by a heavenly voice, no less—as valid and fundamental), many of his most important ideas have been ignored, sometimes profoundly so. Who was this man whose teachings can feel as radical today as they must have been in his own time, and yet who sits, or ought to sit, squarely at the center of normative Judaism? And how have we moved so far from his vision? Understanding why this has happened—and why Hillel’s vision must be reclaimed today—is what motivated me to write this book.

  * Sometimes we are told what the final ruling is, but often we are not.

  * I am writing here of the Babylonian Talmud. The shorter and somewhat less authoritative Jerusalem Talmud (the Yerushalmi) was edited about a century earlier.

  * And, of course, Jews are reminded of Hillel each year at the Passover seder, when they eat the famous sandwich he created, consisting of matzah, the bitter herb, and charoset, the mortar-like substance that symbolizes the mortar the Israelite slaves were required to produce for their Egyptian masters.

  * See the glossary for an explanation of these terms. Because the schools of Hillel and Shammai so closely represent the views and personalities of their founders, their views and rulings are cited in later chapters in which Hillel and Shammai are compared and contrasted. As Adin Steinsaltz comments: “Even after mo
re than a hundred years of disputes, during which the ideas changed and developed, the personalities of Shammai and Hillel were still the formative factors of each House” (Adin Steinsaltz, Talmudic Images, p. 17).

  * It is also from these stories that I came to believe that Hillel might have responded quite differently to the young couple who came into my friend’s office.

  PART I

  “While Standing on One Foot”: The Unique Teachings of Hillel

  1

  Hillel, the Most Ardent of Students

  Rabbi Israel Meir Kagan (1838–1933), popularly known in Jewish life by the title of his first book, Chafetz Chayyim, founded and headed a yeshiva in the Belarus (White Russia) town of Radin. Students streamed to the yeshiva from throughout Europe. During World War I, a student from Germany was arrested by the czarist police and charged with spying for his native land. The defense lawyer asked the Chafetz Chayyim to appear in court as a character witness. Before summoning the rabbi to the witness stand, the lawyer, it is reported, approached the judge and said, “Your honor, the rabbi who is about to testify has an impeccable reputation among his fellow Jews. They tell a story that one day he came home and saw a thief rummaging through his living room. The frightened thief climbed out a window and ran off with some of the rabbi’s possessions, and the rabbi ran after him, shouting, ‘I declare all my property ownerless,’ so that the thief would not be guilty of having committed a crime.”

  The judge looked at the lawyer skeptically. “Do you believe that story really happened?”

  “I don’t know, your honor,” the lawyer answered, “but they don’t tell stories like that about you and me.”

  The story with which Hillel enters Jewish consciousness presents him like an angel suspended above the heads of the two sages who were to become his greatest teachers. Nevertheless, it is an earthbound story that tells us that Hillel was poor, that he was hungry for learning, and that he knew what it was like to be, literally, an outsider looking in: