There is little risk of the Jewish people in the Dispora disappearing altogether; there are strong centers of committed Jews who seem to be in no risk from either physical destruction or assimilation. But in many societies, Jews run the risk of becoming so small in numbers that they will become numerically insignificant and eventually inconsequential.* In the United States, where Jews have long numbered between 5 million and 6 million, they have exerted a great impact and are recognized as an important religious and ethnic group. But if the Jewish decline as a percentage of the population continues (along with a decline in numbers), and Jews eventually become 1 percent, or even a half percent, of the American people, their impact on society will obviously decline as well.
There are, I am aware, many Jews (overwhelmingly concentrated in the observant community) who strongly oppose a policy of encouraging conversion to Judaism, believing that it is forbidden to admit anyone who is romantically involved with a Jew and anyone who does not undertake a long course of study and a commitment to observe Jewish law “in toto.” Rabbi Marc Angel, a prominent Orthodox rabbi in New York (and a man who himself favors a somewhat more open approach to would-be converts), writes of a lecture on “practical rabbinics” given by a leading Talmud scholar at RIETS, the Orthodox seminary at Yeshiva University, in which the scholar instructed the soon-to-be-ordained rabbis not to perform a conversion unless they were willing to bet $100,000 of their own money that the convert would observe all Jewish laws. One student asked, “Since no one can guarantee absolutely the future of any convert, doesn’t this mean that Orthodox rabbis should avoid performing conversions?”* After hemming and hawing, the rabbi suggested that Orthodox rabbis should never, or only rarely, perform conversions.
It is in the context of such responses that it is so refreshing—and surprising—to turn to Hillel, the most traditional of Jews with the most untraditional of views, whose ideas on conversion resonate with twenty-first-century Jewish life more than with any century since he lived. When someone approached Hillel with an interest in becoming Jewish, his inclination was to bring the person in. Obviously, the goal of conversion is to generate a substantial commitment to Jewish values, traditions, and laws, as well as to the meaningfulness of the study of Jewish texts. Without that, Rabbi Saul Berman notes, “we run the risk of producing a people without the vision necessary to impact on the world, and it is hard to believe that this is what Hillel was promoting.” For long centuries, the inclination of rabbis has been to emphasize the difficulties of being Jewish, to teach that Judaism is not interested in non-Jews assuming a Jewish identity, and to discourage converts (some rabbis even insist that a person be strongly turned away three times).7 All that this strategy will guarantee today is that Jews will become a smaller and smaller people, much less capable of using Jewish tradition to make an impact on the world. Hillel did not want that, and neither should we.
* The Edomites were the descendants of Esau, the patriarch Jacob’s brother, and hence regarded as distant kinsmen of Israel. Another statement in Deuteronomy (23:4) forbidding Ammonites and Moabites from entering “the congregation of the Lord” likewise implies that members of other groups could join the Israelite community (see Louis Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World, see this page). As noted (see this page), a millennium after this biblical ruling, the Edomites were forcibly converted to Judaism by the Hasmonean king, John Hyrcanus.
* In the Gutnick edition of the Bible, a Torah translation and commentary published by the Lubavitch movement, the presumption of conversion is incorporated into the translation of verse 9: “Children who are born to them, in the third generation may (convert and marry a Jewish woman) and enter the congregation of God” (p. 1277).
* The two ritual acts Jewish law demands of converts are circumcision in the case of males, and immersion in a mikvah, a ritual bath, in the case of both males and females. The Talmud does not record Hillel’s performance of these rituals, but given the centrality of these acts (Abraham enters the covenant with God by circumcision at the age of ninety-nine and God instructs that all his descendants must be circumcised; see Gen. 17:9–27), their performance can be assumed. A Talmudic commentary assumes that Hillel was certain the man would become fully observant.
* Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
* The late Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits (chief rabbi of England), basing himself on a teaching in the Talmud—“If a heathen is prepared to accept the Torah except for one law, we must not receive him”—Bekhorot 30b—explained why a candidate who makes so provocative a statement should be rejected:
I believe … in laying down the basic condition that we want [converts] to accept the totality of Jewish law, just as I am expected to accept the totality of the constitution of the United States. If I say that I will not accept that totality, that I will make an exception, I will be rejected as [a candidate to become] an American citizen. If anyone comes to me and says that he cannot accept the totality of Jewish law—the Jewish constitution of life—then I must say, for precisely the same reason, that I cannot assume the responsibility for converting him.
(See Immanuel Jakobovits and David Max Eichhorn, “Shall Jews Missionize?” pp. 146–47). The article, a record of a debate between the Orthodox Jakobovits and the Reform Eichhorn, is reprinted in Lawrence Epstein, Readings on Conversion to Judaism.
* The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan records that the convert who initially wanted to be High Priest subsequently had two sons, one of whom he named Hillel and the other Gamliel (the name of Hillel’s grandson), and that these boys were known as the “proselytes of Hillel” (chap. 15).
* The nineteenth-century German rabbinic scholar David Tzvi Hoffman ruled that “if it is evident to the court that [the convert’s] motivation is for the sake of heaven, even though he has set his eyes upon a Jewish woman, it is permissible to accept him” (Melamed Le-Ho’il, 2:83).
* In India and China, for example, the world’s two most populous countries, Jews have long numbered in the low thousands and are barely noticed at all.
* A friend of mine, a physician and himself an Orthodox Jew, notes that, by this logic, no surgeon would ever operate, since if an operation doesn’t succeed to the extent the patient hoped and the doctor expected, the physician might well be sued for malpractice. The only way to avoid this is to never operate. Clearly, that would not be good.
5
Repairing the World
We can only speculate as to why Hillel was remarkably open to converts. We can guess about his upbringing, the example of his teachers—descended from converts—or the shaping influence of his own experience as an outsider, a Babylonian among Jerusalemites, a poor man among the wealthy. But we can only guess.
We do know that his view of converts was of a piece with his larger understanding of the primacy of the ethical treatment of one’s fellow human beings. There is a concept first identified with Hillel that offers a tantalizing glimpse of what might almost be called his theological philosophy. That concept is tikkun olam, a phrase that literally means “repairing the world,” although it is sometimes translated as “perfecting the world” or “bettering the world.”
Tikkun olam is one of relatively few Hebrew phrases that is widely known even among Jews whose knowledge of Hebrew is limited. But long before its absorption by contemporary Jews who have made it a kind of Hebrew analogue for what is sometimes called “social justice,” it was employed two thousand years ago by Hillel to justify one of the most radical moves ever made by a Talmudic sage. Hillel invoked it to argue successfully for an all but heretical act—the effective overturning of a Torah law in the name of compassion.
What makes this story so astonishing and even today vaguely controversial is that, then as now, the first place religious Jews looked for guidelines on how to bring about the world’s improvement was the Torah’s laws. What happens, though, when the Torah enacts a law to help people, but the law’s strict fulfillment ends up hurting them instead? This was
precisely the dilemma that Hillel confronted on two occasions, and it is he—and this is not widely remembered today—who first utilized the principle of tikkun olam as a rationale for modifying a Torah law.
The words of Paul in 2 Corinthians (3:6), “The letter killeth but the spirit giveth life,” has long echoed harshly in Jewish ears, and for good reason. What it came to mean in the Western mind is that law-bound Jews are soulless literalists, and Christians are animated by the spirit of God. Paul’s words were, in fact, a great outreach tool to pagans, who were invited to participate in the promise of the Torah unencumbered by Jewish law.
But the argument of letter and spirit fits firmly inside Jewish thinking—not as an either/or proposition but as a question of integration. Hillel, who took Jewish law with the utmost seriousness, was arguing for spirit over letter in a famous instance involving the sensitive issue of canceling debts, but never—as Paul did—for the abrogation of Torah law in general.
According to biblical law, every seven years debts due on personal loans are canceled: “Every seventh year you shall practice remission [i.e., forgiving] of debts. This shall be the nature of the remission: every creditor shall remit the amount that he claims from his fellow; he shall not exact it of his neighbor or kinsman, for the remission proclaimed is of the Lord” (Deut. 15:1–2). The economy of Israel in its earliest days was overwhelmingly agricultural (as was true of most of the world) and dependent on barter. In such societies, money was generally needed only for dire emergencies, and the people reduced to borrowing money were most often the poor. If the debts incurred could not be repaid, the results would be catastrophic, involving, for example, confiscation of the borrower’s land. The Torah’s concern was to prevent such occurrences and the creation thereby of a permanent poor class. Every seventh year, therefore, a person was given an opportunity to start over.
From a lender’s perspective, the cancellation of the debt was, to say the least, annoying. But in truth, at a time when there were no conventional charitable institutions such as soup kitchens, loaning money to the poor (and such loans were interest-free; see Exod. 22:24) was also one of the major forms of charity. Well aware that the cancellation of debts would alienate many potential lenders, the Torah warned people: “Do not harden your heart and shut your hand against your needy kinsman. Rather you must open your hand and lend him sufficient for whatever he needs. Beware lest you harbor the base thought, ‘The seventh year, the year of remission [of debts] is approaching,’ so that you are mean to your needy kinsman and give him nothing. He will cry out to the Lord against you, and you will incur guilt” (Deut. 15:7–10).
We have no way of knowing how well the Torah’s legislation and warnings worked in Israel’s earliest years in securing loans for the poor. Did people really refrain from allowing “base thoughts” to discourage them from making loans? Probably some tenderhearted people, realizing that those in need of cash were truly in desperate straits, went ahead and made such loans, but many others likely didn’t.1
By the time of Hillel, the economy of ancient Israel was becoming an urban as well as an agricultural one. In an urban, money-oriented economy, more people require loans. Unfortunately, not enough people were willing to lend money interest-free and, in addition, run the risk of having their loans canceled. Particularly as the seventh year of the cycle drew near, fewer and fewer loans were extended. This was the dilemma confronting Hillel. Now, because of this law, intended to help the poor, fewer people were willing to make loans, and the application of Torah law under these new circumstances was undermining the ethical purpose of the very law itself. In short, the Torah law in this instance was undermining the Torah ethic.
Hillel, the Mishnah writes, “saw that people refrained from giving loans one to another.” But what was he, as the leading rabbinic figure of his age, to do? To simply declare that the Torah law, though noble in intent, was now void was not an option; Torah law is understood in Jewish tradition as being eternally binding and not subject to abrogation. What Hillel did take advantage of—and in this regard his solution was both innovative and courageous—is that the Torah law canceling debts was never understood in Jewish law as applying to all debts. For example, if you owed money to a laborer, you were not freed from the debt simply because the seven-year cycle arrived. Similarly, debts incurred to a shopkeeper were still binding. And, most important from Hillel’s perspective, “payments fixed by court action [in other words, money due to a court] are not canceled” (see Mishnah Shvi’it 10:1–2).
Hillel therefore instituted the procedure known as prozbol, a document by which a lender transferred a debt due him into one owed to the court. The man would bring evidence of the loan before judges who would affirm the lender’s right, as agent of the court, to collect the debt, even during and after the seventh year.
In theory, the Torah law canceling personal debts in the seventh year was still applicable; in practice, though, it was no longer observed. Hillel’s rationale for doing so was tikkun olam: “Hillel the Elder enacted the prozbol to make the world better (mipnei tikkun olam) because he saw that people refrained from lending money to one another and violated what was written in the Torah, ‘lest you harbor the base thought’ ” (Sifri, Re’eh 113).
Hundreds of years later, sages continued to debate the audacity of Hillel’s enactment: “Is it possible that where the Torah requires a cancellation of debts Hillel ordains that there not be a cancellation?” (Gittin 36b; the commentator Rashi adds, “and thus uproots an injunction of the Torah”). One sage, Shmuel, feeling that this is exactly what Hillel did, went so far as to say, “If I am ever in a position to do so, I will abolish [the prozbol].” But Rabbi Nachman responded that the prozbol was a permanent feature of Jewish life, and that it now applied even in instances where no document was written. All debts, whether brought before judges or not, were automatically transferred in the seventh year to the courts, and remained collectible (Gittin 36b). But, according to Jewish law, the prozbol document still needs to be written, and observant Jews do so.
It may be possible to glimpse in the later controversy around Hillel’s invocation of tikkun olam—a controversy taking place long after the destruction of the Temple and the rise of Christianity—an aspect of what has made Hillel’s openness so uncomfortable for contemporary, post-Holocaust, traditional Jews. What ultimately separates Judaism from Christianity—aside from the glaring difference of opinion about the Messiah and about the divine status certain passages in the New Testament assign to Jesus—is the difference of opinion about the binding nature of Torah law. As more Jews drift away from observance of the law, anxiety about what keeps the two groups separate has only grown in some quarters. Hillel’s openness to converts may now be viewed as one more step toward eroding the distinctions, when of course it was born out of strength and confidence in Judaism’s ultimate power to transform those who join its ranks.
A second enactment of Hillel was likewise intended to protect the needy, this time from the hands of unscrupulous purchasers who used the letter of Torah law to thwart its intentions. A biblical law, widely unknown today, stated, “If a man sells a dwelling place in a walled city, it may be redeemed [that is, bought back] until a year has elapsed since its sale. … If it is not redeemed before a full year has elapsed, the house in the walled city shall pass to the purchaser beyond reclaim throughout the ages” (Lev. 25:29–30). In other words, the seller of the house has exactly a year to buy it back; otherwise, he loses ownership of it forever.
What was the reason for this strange-sounding law, allowing a seller to buy back his house within a specified time period? Nachmanides, the thirteenth-century Bible commentator, explains: “Inasmuch as the sale of a person’s house is an act of extreme gravity, and he is humiliated when he sells it, the Torah sought to have him redeem it during his first year.”
The Torah law is clear. As long as the seller can come up with the money to redeem his house within a year, he can take the sum to the purchaser and not lose w
hat is, in all likelihood, a long-standing family dwelling. But, the Mishnah explains, some purchasers would seek to evade this law by hiding themselves on the last day or days of the twelfth month, so that the seller could not find them to give them the money. Then, as soon as the day ended and the year elapsed, they would emerge from hiding and take permanent possession of the home. Thus, the house would have been acquired in a technically legal way, but in clear contravention of the Torah’s intention.
How to deal with this? Again, Hillel did not feel that he, or any one, had the right to simply declare that the Torah law restricting the seller’s right to buy back the house to twelve months no longer applied, and that the seller now had unlimited time in which to redeem his house. Such an enactment would not only have voided a Torah law, it also would have been unfair to purchasers, including those who were not tricksters, for it would mean that no matter how long they occupied the house, the seller would always have the option of coming with the money and taking back possession.
How, therefore, to be fair to sellers and purchasers alike?
In an innovative act, Hillel turned the treasury at the Temple into a part-time business office, ruling that the former owner could, within the year, take the money to redeem his house to the Temple. The Temple in turn would hold the money for the buyer. Meanwhile, the former owner, instead of having to go on an ultimately hopeless chase after the hiding purchaser, could now, in the words of the Mishnah, “break down the door” and reenter the house he had been forced to sell, but which was now his once more (Mishnah Arakhin 9:4).
There are unscrupulous people who use the full range of their intellect to figure out how to remain within the technical boundaries of the law while still being able to cheat people. Then there are those who throw up their hands at such behavior and say, “Of course what they are doing is disgusting. But it’s in the nature of law that there will always be some people who exploit it to their advantage, and there isn’t anything that we can do about it.” In Hillel, these sorts of unscrupulous people met their match—a man who could be sly as they, only in this case out of a desire to protect the innocent from oppression while abiding by the letter of the law. We see in this type of behavior a fulfillment of Hillel’s own dictum, “In a place where there are no men [willing to take action], try to be a man” (Ethics of the Fathers 2:6): Do the right thing, for if you don’t, people’s lives will be diminished rather than elevated by the Torah.
Rabbi Joseph Telushkin Page 5
