* Perhaps the most famous rabbinic supporter of Shammai’s approach was Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, regarded as the greatest scholar of his age (though many of his rulings were rejected). Rabbi Eliezer, alone among the sages, argued that the verse “an eye for an eye” (Exod. 21:24) should be interpreted literally (see Bava Kamma 83b–84a), a point of view the Talmud uniformly rejects. According to the rabbis, one who puts out the eye of another is required to pay financial damages as determined by the courts, but physical retribution is outlawed.
* It is interesting that the School of Shammai seems to take no issue with this rhetorical question, though it is by no means self-evident (at least to me) that the Shammaites would sanction lying to someone who made a bad purchase and asked our opinion.
* Kant’s homeland, and the country in which he exerted his greatest influence.
9
Issues Regarding Women
Having argued against the literalism of Shammai, I need to add that although Hillel’s victories can look easy and obvious, Shammai and his school should not be mistaken for the Talmudic equivalent of the Washington Generals playing the Harlem Globetrotters—merely as foils to be defeated.
Both sages play for the same team; the battles between Hillel and Shammai should be seen as signs of health within the religion, for they are fights about alternate interpretive pathways to the same God. It is balance that matters to the health of a religion, and just as it is basic to the health of a democracy that there be opposition parties, so, too, is it basic to a religion’s moral and nontotalitarian underpinnings that there be critics of the status quo and alternative views and emphases.
One of the glories of the polyphonic lessons of the Talmud is that the literalism of Shammai can at times turn out to be the more liberal path. Looking at legal issues involving women is a good place to discover this. From previous chapters, you might assume that Hillel’s views regarding women would be more expansive than those of Shammai. But, you’d be wrong.
In a notable legal disputation about divorce, the School of Hillel takes a more conservative, patriarchal (one might argue, regressive) stance on the status of women than does the School of Shammai. The fundamental argument between the two schools on the legal grounds necessary for a man to divorce his wife hinges on how literally one interprets a biblical verse, “A man takes a wife. … She fails to find favor in his eyes because he finds something unseemly about her and he writes her a bill of divorce …” (Deut. 24:1; emphasis added).
In this instance, Shammai’s literalism inclines him to a view more protective of women. According to Shammai, ervat davar, the words translated as “something unseemly,” connote a forbidden sexual act. The School of Shammai, therefore, rules that the sole justification for divorcing one’s wife is sexual impropriety—most commonly, adultery. The School of Hillel chooses to interpret “something unseemly” as meaning “for any reason at all,” including, to cite the example the Hillelites offer, a man’s anger at his wife for spoiling his meal. A century after Hillel, Rabbi Akiva, the leading rabbi of his age and a man who stood firmly in the traditions of Hillel, argued that a man could divorce his wife if he found another woman whom he regarded as more attractive (see Gittin 9:10; Rabbi Akiva roots his position in the verse’s earlier words, “she fails to find favor in his eyes”).*
Another dispute between the schools concerned women’s testimony. Jewish courts generally rejected testimony offered by women on the grounds that the Torah did not consider them to be valid witnesses. But if a woman testified that her husband had died and that she should therefore be permitted to remarry, the Shammaites accepted her testimony as valid. The School of Hillel accepted her testimony only if there were other witnesses to the fact of her husband’s death who could be summoned if necessary; only then, they felt, could it be assumed that the woman would be afraid to lie, and her testimony, therefore, could be regarded as trustworthy.
Since the School of Shammai accepted the woman’s testimony in such cases, it also permitted her to collect the money payable to widows according to the marriage contract (the ketubah). The School of Hillel, because it did not generally accept her testimony as valid, did not allow her to collect this large lump sum, but, instead, restricted her to a budget taken from the estate to pay for her expenses.
The Mishnah records that in both these instances, the School of Hillel ultimately retracted its view and accepted the ruling of the School of Shammai (Mishnah Yevamot 15:2–3). We are, after all, shaped by our adversaries. Hillel, and the School of Hillel, needed Shammai and his followers, in most instances to define their own positions against, but also at times to absorb into, their own positions.
On yet another issue, the School of Hillel’s ruling comes across as more appreciative of women than that of Shammai. The first of the Torah’s 613 laws is “Be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28). But how many children must a couple have to properly fulfill this commandment? The School of Hillel rules that having two children, one of each sex, is sufficient (based on Gen. 5:2),* since by doing so, the couple will have replaced themselves. The School of Shammai rules that the couple must have at least two sons; it offers no ruling concerning daughters (Mishnah Yevamot 6:6).
It would seem to me that the School of Shammai’s ruling must have caused great pain to families to whom only daughters were born, and who were made to feel that the birth had no religious significance.
The Talmud, generally thin on biographical detail, does give us a glimpse into Hillel’s personal life—though only a glimpse. And just as it is unsurprising to find Shammai feeding his son on Yom Kippur “with one hand,” so it is perhaps unsurprising to find in the story of Hillel and his wife a tale of generosity and abundance. We know little about Hillel’s relationship with his wife—one story, to be precise (we have no stories concerning Shammai and his wife)—but the story casts him in a loving light and represents his wife as embodying his own devotion to strangers and to charity.
On one occasion, we learn, Hillel arranged for a friend to dine with him, but at just the moment dinner was to be served, a poor, hungry man came to the door, where he was greeted by Hillel’s wife (whose name, unhappily, is unknown to us). The fellow told her that he was to be married that day and had no food for himself and his soon-to-be bride. Taking pity on the man, she gave him all the food she had prepared, and then cooked a new meal, a painstaking and cumbersome process. For reasons unexplained in the story, she didn’t inform her husband that the meal would be delayed, and only when it was ready did she emerge from the kitchen. Hillel said to her, “My dear, why did you not bring the food sooner?” She told him what had happened, and Hillel said, “I really did not judge you critically, but meritoriously, because everything you did was for the glory of God’s Name” (Derekh Eretz Rabbah, 6:2).
Ethical behavior, in this story, trumps abstract expectations about the duties of a wife. Certainly the mood of the story is far from the ruling about the right to divorce a woman who displeases her husband by the way she prepares a meal.
But this sweet account of Hillel’s high regard for his wife’s character is not exactly proto-feminist. The Oral Law was, in Hillel’s day, still oral—not written down as it later was in the Talmud—and therefore it retained greater flexibility, enabling it to mediate more easily between shifting contemporary circumstances and abiding religious principles. After the cataclysmic events in the two centuries following Hillel’s death, particularly the destruction of the Temple and the two failed revolts against Rome (66–70 C.E. and 132–135 C.E.), the law, though still debated and argued, lost an element of its flexible character as it became codified. This codification, in turn, led to even less flexibility in the interpretation of the Oral Law.*
In Hillel’s time, the Gentile seeking instruction was a troubling source of disputation between battling schools of rabbinic thought. In modern times, women pursuing advanced religious study have often been in the role of the stranger, even when they come from inside the Jewish world. Apply
ing Talmudic lessons to the twenty-first century determined by an almost entirely male world two thousand years ago in itself requires an act of imaginative interpretation of just the sort that Hillel himself so often employed.
* These differing positions of the two schools might help explain the rationale behind the debate on how to praise a bride (see this page). Hillel ruled that at weddings all brides should be described as “beautiful and virtuous.” Given that Hillel granted a man the right to divorce his wife for any reason whatsoever, it makes sense that he would encourage all wedding participants to engage in great—and perhaps inaccurate and untruthful—praise of the bride; the consequences to the wife of the husband becoming displeased with her were so severe that it made sense for the Hillelites to insist that the husband hear only great praise of his wife’s beauty. But the School of Shammai saw no pressing reason to compromise on the biblical law to “stay far away from falsehood,” because even if the husband concluded that his wife was not attractive—and realized that others also thought so—there was nothing he could do about it. Divorce was not an option, unless the woman committed adultery.
* Most observant couples, in any case, have more than two children, but two is understood as constituting the minimum to fulfill the commandment.
* This point is developed in Eliezer Berkovits’s analysis of the development of Jewish law, Not in Heaven.
10
Shammai Beyond Stereotype
Isaac Bashevis Singer, the late Nobel Prize–winning writer, liked to say that an important feature of good characterization in a novel is that the characters are dimensionalized and are not all of one piece. Human beings, as Singer noted, have contradictions. For example, compassionate people will sometimes reveal a toughness that we would not have anticipated, while stern people often show surprising softer aspects to their personalities. Such, I would argue, is the case with Shammai.
Unlike Hillel, whose aphorisms are quoted extensively in Ethics of the Fathers, we have only a few teachings of Shammai, the best-known of which is “Receive every person with a cheerful expression” (Ethics of the Fathers 1:15). On the one hand, there is something almost humorous in hearing this suggestion proffered by the man who chased away two questioners with a stick and a third with an insult. On the other hand, this statement might well reflect a particularly impressive aspect of Shammai: he knew himself, including his weaknesses. Unlike Hillel, to whom calmness and pleasantness, it seems, came more naturally and without the need for reminders, Shammai knew he had an irascible nature and, to his credit, formulated this teaching to remind himself to behave amicably. To this day, I remain impressed by people who know their weaknesses and formulate strategies to guard against them.
Another statement quoted in Shammai’s name in Ethics of the Fathers conveys balanced and highly sensible advice: “Say little and do much.” In other words, don’t promise to do a lot for others; among other things, such promises excite expectations and often lead to disappointment. Rather, promise only a little, and then let your deeds exceed your words.
Such behavior is associated with the patriarch Abraham, who invites three travelers in the desert to dine with him in his tent. In extending his invitation, Abraham minimizes what he will do for his guests; he will “fetch a morsel of bread that you may refresh yourselves” (Gen. 18:5).* But he then serves an elaborate meal, complete with a young calf and cake. The Talmud sees Abraham’s behavior as emblematic of a righteous person, in contrast to that of Ephron of Hebron, who offers Abraham a gift of land on which to bury Sarah, who has just died (Gen. 23:11). But when Abraham insists on paying for the land, Ephron charges him a very high price,1 leading us to think that his initial offer of a gift was merely empty words. In the words of a later Talmudic passage, echoing Shammai’s dictum, “The righteous (tzaddikim) say little and do much, while the wicked say much and do not even do a little” (Bava Metzia 87a).
Shammai’s third teaching in Ethics of the Fathers is a practical dictum on study: “Make your study of Torah a fixed activity.” In other words, learn daily and set aside a fixed amount of time for study. From such fixed activities, great accomplishments will ensue, which would not be the case if one’s learning is spontaneous and unscheduled.
While Shammai’s reputation was one of stubbornness (we have instances of Hillel and his disciples retracting their positions in favor of Shammai, but we have at most one example of the reverse (see this page, fn.); one Talmudic tale shows Shammai as willing to concede, though grudgingly, the validity of another’s logic.
A man had sons who, in the words of the Talmud, “were not conducting themselves properly.” In consequence, the man bequeathed his entire estate to Yonatan ben Uzziel, Hillel’s foremost disciple. Yonatan divided the estate in three parts; one third he set aside for his own needs, one third he consecrated to the Temple, and one third he gave to the dead man’s sons. Shammai heard about Yonatan’s ruling and was outraged. He went to Yonatan and rebuked him for violating the deceased’s wishes: “The man wished to leave nothing to these sons, and you gave them back a third.” Yonatan replied: “Shammai, if you can find legal grounds for nullifying the third that I took for myself, and the third that I consecrated, then you can also nullify what I gave as a gift to the sons. If you cannot, then acknowledge that this is my property to sell or to sanctify, and it is also mine to give as a gift.” In other words, once the man bequeathed the estate to Yonatan with no strings attached, it was Yonatan’s to do with as he wished.2
Shammai had no answer to Yonatan’s argument, but also seems to have felt that the young sage had not addressed him with proper deference (perhaps Shammai didn’t like that Yonatan called him by his first name): “The son of Uzziel cast abuse on me,” was all Shammai would say, acknowledging by implication that Yonatan’s reasoning was irrefutable (Bava Batra 133b–134a).
Yonatan’s behavior was in keeping with the ethos of Hillel, who, in his behavior toward those impertinent seekers of conversion, bestowed gifts on them that they had not yet earned but that he hoped they would become worthy of. Lurking behind these seemingly localized arguments is a larger principle of transmission: How does one pass material on from one generation to the next; who is qualified to receive it, and on what grounds?
Yonatan, in line with a ruling in the Mishnah, knew that a man has the right to disinherit his children, but he also felt, as does the Mishnah, that it is wrong to avail oneself of this right (see Mishnah Bava Batra 8:5). Therefore, like Hillel in the case of the prozbol, he found a legal way to circumvent a law whose enforcement, he thought, would lead to inequity.
There is a ruling by Shammai, which is infrequently cited, that seems to me to represent a more equitable solution than the more generally accepted view offered in the Talmud. The rabbis are discussing an instance in which a man has hired another to commit a seriously forbidden act, such as murder, and the hired man does so. Who is guilty in such a case? The dominant view in the Talmud is that legal responsibility lies exclusively with the one who carried out the deed, not with the one who hired him.
The Talmud explains this ruling with the statement, “There is no [such thing as a] messenger in a case of sin” (Kiddushin 42b). Normally, a messenger is not held responsible for his actions as a messenger, no matter how distasteful; instead, all blame is directed at the message’s sender. That is because a messenger is not regarded as an independent agent but merely as the representative of the one who sent him. But if a messenger is sent to perform an illegal act, he cannot defend himself by saying that he was acting only as someone’s agent. Because “there is no messenger in a case of sin,” he bears full and personal responsibility for any evil he does. Human beings are obligated to obey God’s laws, and it is the responsibility of one who is instructed or offered a bribe to do an illegal act to refuse to do so because it contravenes God’s will. If the person does commit the act, he cannot blame the one who commanded him. As the Talmud asks, rhetorically, “If the words of the teacher [in this case, meaning God]
and the words of the student [in this case, the man who is sending one to sin] conflict, whose words should you obey?”
But Shammai opposed this ruling, arguing that a person who orders or hires another to do an illegal act bears primary responsibility. His prooftext is the biblical narrative that recounts the story of King David’s brief, forbidden relationship with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, an officer in David’s army (see 2 Sam. 11:2–5). When Bathsheba reveals to David that she is pregnant, he summons Uriah to the palace, hoping that while in Jerusalem, Uriah will go home, sleep with his wife, and then, when a child is born seven months later, assume that it is a premature birth and that the child is his. But Uriah refuses to enjoy himself with his wife while his comrades are in battle,3 and David, fearing a scandal, sends a sealed letter to Joab, his army commander, ordering him to have Uriah killed in battle: “Set Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle and withdraw from him, so that he may be hit and die” (11:15). Joab does so.
According to the reasoning of the Talmudic rabbis, Joab should bear the responsibility for Uriah’s death, as he is the one who sends Uriah to his death. But, Shammai notes, it is David, not Joab, whom the prophet Nathan denounces for Uriah’s death (2 Sam. 12:1–10). In Shammai’s view, Nathan’s moral standard, that the one who orders another to kill someone (or, as in this case, to have someone killed) is the one who bears primary guilt. Of course, Joab shouldn’t have obeyed David’s order, but if not for that order, Joab would not have harmed Uriah. So why excuse from responsibility the person ordering, or soliciting the act?
Here, it is Shammai who is unwilling to follow the precise letter of Jewish law as it is understood by most of the rabbis4 (that only the one who carried out the forbidden act bears criminal guilt, not the one who ordered it), and it is his ruling that strikes me as more just.
Rabbi Joseph Telushkin Page 9
