It was reported of Hillel the Elder that every day he used to work and earn one tropaik,* half of which he would give to the doorkeeper at the House of Learning; the other half he would spend for his and his family’s food. One day he found no work, and the guard at the House of Learning would not permit him to enter. Hillel climbed [to the roof] and sat upon the skylight to hear the words of the living God from the mouths of [Rabbis]* Shmaya and Avtalion. That day was the eve of the Sabbath, during the winter, and snow fell upon him from heaven. When the dawn rose, Shmaya said to Avtalion, “Brother Avtalion, on every day this house is light and today it is dark. Is it perhaps a cloudy day?” They looked up and saw the figure of a man on the skylight. They climbed to the roof and found Hillel, covered by three amot (cubits) of snow. They removed him, bathed and anointed him, placed him opposite the fire, and said, “This man deserves to have the Sabbath laws violated on his behalf.” (Yoma 35b)
There are a number of unusual, even odd, details in this story. For one thing, this is the first time we hear of a Beit Midrash, a center of learning, charging tuition to hear the teacher’s lectures; it is particularly strange that payment is collected on a daily basis, like attendance at a theater.
In addition, while it does snow every few years in Jerusalem, it is an unusual coincidence that Hillel mounts the roof on precisely such an inclement day. But what strains credulity even more is the amount of snow that covers Hillel; three cubits, or about four and a half feet. Even with winds, it is unheard of for Jerusalem to develop such deep drifts. The fact that Hillel remains on the roof for many hours in the face of what must have been a raging storm seems intended to underscore that this is a man who is literally willing to risk his life to learn Torah.
It also introduces Hillel as a man whose nose is pressed to the glass of Jewish learning, the sort of man who might well identify with the seekers who later come to him seeking conversion.
Yet another odd detail: we hear nowhere else of a yeshiva being in session on Friday evening (the Sabbath eve), and then apparently remaining in session throughout the night and into the morning. The general tradition in Jewish life is that formal school study is adjourned before the Sabbath begins. Hillel, like all married men, would have been expected to be home for the Sabbath with his wife and family.
The fact that the school remains in session enables the story to communicate, in passing, an important lesson in Jewish law. Hillel’s life is at risk by the time he is brought down from the roof into the study hall. There, a fire is carefully tended so that it will gradually warm him, and acts involving maintaining the fire—behavior that would normally be prohibited on the Sabbath—are performed on his behalf.
The two scholars heading the yeshiva, Shmaya and Avtalion, approve of doing all that is necessary to save Hillel, since “this man deserves that the Shabbat be violated on his behalf.”
This statement is puzzling because Jewish law requires the violation of Shabbat whenever life is in danger. Nowhere in Jewish legal writings is it recorded that one has to practice the extraordinary virtues of a Hillel to be entitled to have the Sabbath violated on his or her behalf.
Yet, Shmaya and Avtalion’s statement suggests a possibly different reality, that perhaps violating the Sabbath to save a life was not yet regarded as definitely permitted in Jewish law. Maybe the Sabbath, at least in some minds, superseded in sanctity the value of human life.
We know that there were in earlier times Jews who adhered to such a belief. Approximately a century before this incident with Hillel, Jewish life had been rocked by the Maccabean revolt against the Hellenist government of Antiochus Epiphanes, the Syrian monarch. The successful revolt, initiated by Mattathias and spearheaded by his son, Judah Maccabee, is commemorated to this day in the holiday of Hanukkah. Early on, at the revolt’s inception, there was a group of Jews known as Hasidim (pious ones), who encountered Hellenist troops and fought against them. They continued to do so until the Sabbath, when the Hasidim dropped their weapons and allowed themselves to be annihilated by Antiochus’s soldiers. At the time, Mattathias ruled with admirable common sense: “If we all do as our brothers have done … then [the Syrians] will soon wipe us off the face of the earth.” The book of Maccabees records that on that day, the Jewish revolutionaries “decided that, if anyone came to fight against them on the Sabbath they would fight back, rather than all die as their brothers … had done” (1 Macc. 2:32–41).
So there was a precedent for engaging in forbidden activities on Shabbat when life was endangered, but perhaps there were still those who questioned a blanket permission to violate the Sabbath to save a life. What Shmaya and Avtalion asserted now, in unequivocal terms, is that for a person such as Hillel the Sabbath laws should be suspended.
Although there are elements in this story that have a legendary cast to them, certain definite details about Hillel are still communicated. First, we learn of his extraordinary devotion to Torah study, a commitment that has characterized Judaism’s great religious teachers ever since1 (it was said of the eighteenth-century Lithuanian rabbinic scholar, the Gaon of Vilna, that he studied Torah* eighteen to twenty hours a day). Hillel, though, is the first to personify this trait. As such, he created the paradigm. Second, the story communicates that Hillel is a poor man with an iron will. The fact that he is a day laborer with no spare money, yet rises to become the greatest rabbi of his age, conveys the message that the Talmud doesn’t judge people on the basis of their wealth or societal status, but on the basis of their achievements.
Finally, the story exemplifies a principle Hillel would famously espouse: that acts of loving-kindness are what you begin with. Whatever the two Rabbis were teaching that day certainly mattered—it was their wisdom, after all, that kept Hillel there during a raging snowstorm. But even more significant was their behavior after class was over. Their actions—carrying a poor man down from the roof, tending to a fire on Shabbat, and recognizing, despite his poverty, Hillel’s worthiness of character and worthiness to be a student—are what have conveyed ever since that moral behavior trumps social distinctions and sometimes even determines how Jewish law is to be decided. The rest is commentary.
* A tropaik is half a dinar, not a large amount for a day’s work.
* The word “rabbi” was not yet in use as a title for religious scholars (it was introduced during the mid-first century C.E., and was first used to describe Hillel’s grandson, Rabbi Gamliel the Elder). I put the term here in brackets to underscore that these men were religious authorities, indeed the preeminent scholars and leaders of their time.
* The term “Torah” as used in Jewish life refers not only to the first five books of the Bible, but is also a descriptive term that encompasses all sacred Jewish texts.
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Hillel’s Rise to Leadership
We know nothing of Hillel’s life for many years after this event, much as if we learned of a poor student who, after a struggle, is admitted to Harvard and of whom we next hear many years later when he is appointed university president. In a sense, this is what happens now to Hillel.
While it is true that we know no details of Hillel’s life during these years, we do know something about the historical circumstances then prevailing in Judea, circumstances that affected Hillel’s promotion to a position of leadership. The most significant event was the rise to power of Herod, a vicious, though politically successful, monarch.
Herod’s kingship over Israel was the indirect result of a terrible wrong committed some seventy years earlier by the Hasmonean king, John Hyrcanus. Hyrcanus made a decision to augment the Jewish population of Palestine by forcibly converting to Judaism one of the peoples he ruled, the Idumeans, who occupied a small state south of Jerusalem.* Here is another form of conversion many Jews do not often contemplate and that is, in fact, unusual, even unprecedented, in the annals of Jewish history. It may even be that this event lies behind at least some of the anxieties stirred up by the stories of conversion involving Hillel—the fear that the con
version of any Gentiles, forcible or peaceful, is a perilous undertaking. Among those brought to Judaism by this forced conversion was Antipas, whom the Hasmoneans appointed to serve as governor of Idumea. Herod was his grandson.1
Herod took control of Jerusalem in 37 B.C.E., with the support of the Roman army. A vile person, Herod inaugurated his regime by murdering forty-five members of the Sanhedrin (the combined legislature and high court of Jewish law). Realizing that most Judeans felt a greater loyalty to the Hasmoneans than to him, Herod was obsessed with removing all vestiges of Hasmonean rule. He took the high priesthood out of Hasmonean hands and assigned this most important spiritual office to men whose primary qualification was loyalty to him (regarding the low level of some of these High Priests, see this page). After disempowering the Sanhedrin, Herod established his own council, thereby ensuring that no one with ties to the Hasmoneans and no religious figure who questioned the validity of his family’s forced conversion was a member. Herod was a Jewish nightmare, an insecure, tenuous Jew often in league with the enemies of Israel, and a violent reminder not merely of the consequences of forcible conversions, but perhaps to some of the consequences of Gentile conversion itself.
Herod did not fall into the category of people who are cruel only to outsiders but nice to their own family. He had his wife, the Hasmonean princess Mariamne, executed on charges of plotting to murder him (Herod had likely hoped that this marriage would gain him acceptance by Jews loyal to the Hasmoneans); after her execution, he appears to have regretted his behavior. Later, he charged his two sons from his marriage to Mariamne with conspiring to overthrow him—which they well might have, given that he had murdered their mother—and executed them as well, thereby ensuring the elimination of potential heirs with “Hasmonean blood.” A few days before his death, Herod had yet another son, Antipater, from a different marriage, executed on the same charge, leading the Roman emperor Augustus to comment, “It would be better to be Herod’s swine than his son.” For good measure, he also murdered his mother-in-law and arranged to have his brother-in-law, the High Priest, drowned.
Herod tried to win over the Jewish population with an enormous and beautiful expansion of the Temple in Jerusalem, an effort that occupied ten thousand laborers and a thousand priests for nine years. But he also built an idolatrous temple in Shomron and turned Caesarea into a pagan city. He built a circus there, where, in addition to foot and chariot races, he presented gladiator fights and battles between human beings and wild animals. Ironically, it was this lackey of Rome who rebuilt Masada, which a century later served as the final outpost of the Jewish revolt against Rome.
We can only speculate on what Hillel was doing during Herod’s early years in power. It is possible that he returned for some years to Babylon, his native land (we have very little knowledge about Babylonian-Jewish life at this time). Or perhaps, as one Jewish scholar conjectured, he went to live in the Judean desert among the ascetic Dead Sea Sects.2 Alternatively, he may have remained in the area of Jerusalem and led a quiet, contemplative life of study during this time of persecution. This experience might have been behind his otherwise enigmatic epigram, “If you see a generation to which the Torah is dear [that is, appreciated], spread it … but if you see a generation to which the Torah is not dear, gather it and keep it to yourself” (Berakhot 63a).
What is striking is that Herod’s kingship (37–4 B.C.E.) overlaps for more than a quarter of a century with Hillel’s years of leadership (c. 30 B.C.E.—10 C.E.). But we find no stories—even apocryphal ones—recording contact between the two men.
During Herod’s early years, he apparently appointed the Bnai Beteira as the country’s new religious leaders. We know little about these men, though it seems that they (or their families), like Hillel, came from Babylon. Herod favored assigning high offices to Jews from the Diaspora, people whose loyalty would be to him and not to the deposed Hasmoneans.
The Bnai Beteira had their virtues (most notably, as we shall see, humility), but in-depth religious scholarship was not one of them. It is clear that they had not studied, and had no relationship, with Shmaya and Avtalion. An important question arose some time around 30 B.C.E. Passover was approaching and was due that year to begin on a Friday night. Today, of course, the primary association Jews have with the first night of Passover is the Seder. To this day, on the Seder plate, Jews place a shank bone, commemorating the paschal lamb that their ancestors brought to sacrifice in Jerusalem during the time the Temple stood. For Jews living during the time of the Temple, the bringing of the sacrifice was as important an association with the holiday as was the Seder meal that followed it. Jews would come to Jerusalem from throughout the country, and even from abroad, to sacrifice a lamb, and the family would eat the lamb while conducting the Seder meal.
The Passover sacrifice was so central a ritual that the Torah decreed karet, the cutting off from the Israelite people, for anyone who did not bring the Passover sacrifice at its appointed time (see Num. 9:13). And that is exactly what the source of the Bnai Beteira’s dilemma was. On the one hand, not bringing the sacrifice at the right time was unthinkable. On the other hand, slaughtering and preparing an animal involves activities that are normally forbidden on the Sabbath. Two of Judaism’s most important rituals, the Passover sacrifice and the Sabbath (the only ritual law specified in the Ten Commandments), were at odds, and the highly conflicted Bnai Beteira couldn’t decide which took precedence.3 The Talmud conveys the sense of anxiety and increasing panic that must have prevailed with Passover rapidly approaching, tens of thousands of Jews preparing to come to Jerusalem, and the religious leadership not knowing what to do:
On one occasion, the fourteenth of Nisan [the day on which Passover begins] fell on the Sabbath. The Bnai Beteira forgot the law and did not know whether or not slaughter of the Passover sacrifice overrode the Sabbath restrictions. They said, “Is there no man who knows whether or not the Passover sacrifice overrides the Sabbath?” They were told, “There is a man who came here from Babylon, and his name is Hillel the Babylonian. He served the two great men of the generation, Shmaya and Avtalion, and he will know whether or not the Passover sacrifice overrides the Sabbath.” They sent for him, and said, “Do you then know whether or not the Passover sacrifice overrides the Sabbath?” (Pesachim 66a)
Hillel was well aware of what Shmaya and Avtalion ruled in such a case, but he did not share the answer right away. He wished to use logical arguments to show the Bnai Beteira the correct way to act. Given the choice between relying on tradition (citing the ruling of Shmaya and Avtalion) or on principles of logic, Hillel’s instinct was to favor logic.4 He therefore responded with a rhetorical question: “But is there then only a single Passover sacrifice during the year that overrides the Sabbath? Are there not more than two hundred ‘Passover sacrifices’ during the year that override the Sabbath?” What Hillel was alluding to was the fact that throughout the year priests bring certain communal sacrifices on the Sabbath. For rhetorical purposes, Hillel referred to these offerings as “Passover sacrifices,” but what he really meant was that there are two hundred instances throughout the year in which Sabbath prohibitions are overridden in order to offer a sacrifice. For example, the Mussaf sacrifice is brought on Shabbat. Hillel argued that if the Mussaf sacrifice overrides the Sabbath, then certainly the Passover sacrifice, whose nonperformance is punished by being cut off from the Jewish people, obviously should do so.
In one version of this episode, the Bnai Beteira are convinced by this argument, and “immediately seat him at the head and appoint him as nasi (leader, or prince) over them” (Pesachim 66a). In another, however, the Bnai Beteira refuse to accept Hillel’s arguments and try to refute his logic. At one point, they even insult him, saying, “We have already said, ‘Is there something good that can come from the Babylonian?’ … Even though Hillel sat and expounded to them all day long, they did not accept the teaching from him until he told them [using the language of an oath], ‘May evil befall me [if I am lying]. Thu
s I have heard from Shmaya and Avtalion [that the Passover sacrifice overrides the Sabbath]’ ” (Jerusalem Talmud, Pesachim 6:1). According to this version of the episode, at that point the Bnai Beteira appoint him as leader.
Whichever version one accepts, this story is central, for from this point on Hillel becomes the leading religious teacher of his generation, a position he holds for some forty years. Yet the Talmud tells us of an uncharacteristic event that happens within hours of Hillel’s appointment, one of only two instances in the dozens of stories told about Hillel in which he speaks sharply, even a bit unpleasantly.* At one point in the discussion with the Bnai Beteira, he turns to them and says, “What caused this to occur to you, that I should come up from Babylon and become the leader over you? It was the laziness (atzilut) that was in you, that you did not bother to serve the two great ones of the generation, Shmaya and Avtalion.”5
This was, of course, a rather sharp, even mean-spirited, way to speak, particularly in public. The Talmud records that Hillel is immediately punished for his words. A question is posed to him: “What is the law if a person forgot and did not bring a knife [for sacrificing animals] to the Temple with him before the Sabbath?” What should the person do, since transporting a knife is not something one can do on the Sabbath? The suddenly abashed Hillel has to acknowledge, “I heard this law once, but I have forgotten it,” but he then goes on to say, “However, leave it to the people. If they are not themselves prophets, they are the children of prophets [and will know what to do].” The next day, the following occurred: “One whose Passover offering was a sheep stuck the knife into the animal’s wool [so that the sheep carried the knife to the Temple]. And one whose Passover offering was a goat stuck the knife between its horns and had the goat carry it to the Temple.” Hillel, observing these actions, remembered the law and said, “I received this very teaching from the mouths of Shmaya and Avtalion” (Pesachim 66a).6
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