by Wex, Michael
Although we don’t know whether he made this statement before or after the destruction of the Temple, his comment on the nature of Jewish society at the time strikes a realistic, if not terribly hopeful note. “Swallow each other alive” implies that internecine troubles arise simply because they can; no excuse is necessary because an excuse can always be found. As long as people behave like cannibalistic children, they’re going to need to have a teacher in the room at all times, and if subjection to a foreign power is what it takes to make them behave—it’s bad, but it beats the alternative.
If Cain can kill Abel in a dispute over the location of a Temple that was nowhere near to being built when the population of the world numbered only four, just imagine how their descendants will act when they’re able to assemble armies. Chanina was saying what everybody at the time already knew: if we weren’t going to submit to Rome, we’d have to submit to whatever gang of criminals or ideologues was in power this week, wreaking vengeance on people for living in the wrong part of town, going to the wrong synagogue, or having different ideas of how to prepare for apocalypse. The guys who burned the food supplies were determining foreign policy. Imagine Jim Morrison in command of the Continental Army instead of George Washington: when “No one here gets out alive” is a recruiting slogan, you can’t place much faith in a lasting victory.
When a guy like Chanina, for whom peace ranks on a level with bringing the world into being, says that the thousands of Jews killed by the Romans during the revolt in Judea were a drop in the bucket compared to the numbers who would have been killed if they had had free rein to kill each other, you can probably take his word for it. Whatever the historical status of the story of Bar Kamtso and the banquet, Chanina’s contemporaneous remark confirms its picture of Judean society, especially the Judean elite at the time, and has plenty to say to us today.
If we’re all such shmucks that we’re better off as the subjects of despotic conquerors than as free members of an independent commonwealth—for the simple reason that our shmuckery makes community in any meaningful sense of the term impossible—then we’re doing something very wrong. The tragedy here is that there really was a remedy immediately at hand, in the hands, indeed, of the rabbis at the banquet, but everybody was so busy trying to get what he felt was coming to him—power, vindication, his own way—that the welfare of everybody else was quickly forgotten. No matter how dire the situation, the competing factions continued to commit the cardinal Jewish social sin, the one that marriage and procreation are supposed to make impractical, if not impossible: they kept on putting themselves and their own narrow—you could even say sectarian—desires ahead of the general welfare.
II
IF EVERYBODY INSISTS on being the cantor, there is no hope of a minyan: as long as having your way is the most important thing in the world to you, you can’t really help but feel resentful and envious of anyone who gets their way when you do not. Unless they hold public office and you’re able to wait four years and hope you can be elected to replace them, there usually isn’t much you can do about it except sit and stew and plot their demise.
In that sense, envy can be described as the egotistical sin par excellence, the most thoroughly selfish of all, because its sole meaning, its only goal, consists in harming someone else. Aristotle defined it as “pain at another’s good fortune,” and where most other sins—pride, avarice, lust, even anger—involve getting or taking something for oneself, the essence of envy lies in depriving someone else.
The obsession with the evil eye in so many otherwise disparate cultures bears witness to a deep appreciation of the all-too-central place of envy in so many human characters. Children, babies even, will cry and even hit to get something that they want only because someone else—often someone of similar or smaller size—has it. Perhaps it’s a legacy of Cain and Abel fighting over the location of the Temple, but the pleasure of depriving others of something is often far greater, and far more motivating, than whatever it is that they’re being deprived of. Just look at shmucks who cut others off and insist on nosing their way from lane to lane in traffic that isn’t moving at more than five miles per hour. They know that they’re not going to arrive any faster, they just can’t live with the idea of having someone come before them.
The Talmud takes up the near universality of envy in a very brief and slightly cryptic passage:
What should a person do in order to live? Put himself to death. What should he do to die? Bring himself to life.
(TOMID 32A)
Rashi explains the real meaning of these answers:
Put…to death: Let him bring himself low. Bring…to life: Let him raise himself up. Doing so will cause people to cast an evil eye on him; they will envy him and he will die. Our sages have taught that a person who wishes to live should lower himself so that people will take pity on him and he will live for many years. Let him keep himself from pride lest his days grow short and he die before his time.
To hear Rashi tell it, in this passage at least, morals have nothing to do with it; humility and all the virtues associated with it are really about self-preservation. The fall that goeth after pride is the result of a swift kick from behind by a steel-booted evil eye.
That’s not what Rashi really means, of course; he’s speaking from the same strictly practical point of view as the Talmud in this passage. Nonetheless, we can see the importance of the evil eye here and the idea that there is almost no limit to human invidiousness. There’s a proverb in Yiddish—“Boday zikh eyn oyg, abi yenem tsvey, I’d gladly lose one eye, as long as the other guy loses two”—that says it all. And not just in Yiddish. The image goes back at least as far as Aesop and can be found in such unexpected places as John Gower’s almost endless fourteenth-century English poem, Confessio Amantis, and Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Joseph Jacobs’s rendering of Aesop gives the whole story in the form probably most familiar to readers of English:
Two neighbours came before Jupiter and prayed him to grant their hearts’ desire. Now the one was full of avarice, and the other eaten up with envy. So to punish them both, Jupiter granted that each might have whatever he wished for himself, but only on condition that his neighbour had twice as much. The Avaricious man prayed to have a room full of gold. No sooner said than done; but all his joy was turned to grief when he found that his neighbour had two rooms full of the precious metal. Then came the turn of the Envious man, who could not bear to think that his neighbour had any joy at all. So he prayed that he might have one of his own eyes put out, by which means his companion would become totally blind.
Vices are their own punishment.
The moral, such as it is, is the same on every occasion. Apart from the fact that there are plenty of shmucks out there who think and act in precisely this fashion and are happy to punish themselves, as long as they think that you’ve been punished more (many of them would deny doing so, and would actually believe their own denials), we’ve already seen that Jewish tradition would rather retrain such urges, send them to school, as it were, than try vainly to put them to death. As we are told in another Talmudic statement: “A man envies everybody except for his child and his student” (Sanhedrin 105b). Rather than waste our time trying to stamp out a fire that’s just going to reignite, we’re better off to take it and use it for something of some immediate benefit to somebody, if not ourselves then somebody else.
Well before the Talmud, the Bible recognized this problem and prescribed a way to treat the property of your enemy:
If the ox or donkey of your enemy has gone astray and you encounter it, return it to him. If you see your enemy’s donkey lying down beneath its load and would like to refrain from lifting it up, lift it up anyway.
(EXOD. 23:4–5)
Note that the idea of having an enemy is taken for granted. The context of the commandment makes it clear that the Bible isn’t talking about ex-Nazis or members of the Aryan Nations here; by enemy, it means a member of the same community as you, the kind of pe
rson who is called “fellow,” “brother,” or “sister” in more positive exhortations to benevolence, the kind of enemies who are so hard to distinguish from friends that they can end up with the friends’ invitations by mistake. We’re dealing with malevolence of feeling on either end here—unexplained and possibly inexplicable—and the biblical approach foreshadows the rabbinic realism that develops later.
Jewish ethics know a lot of things, but the thing that they know best is the Jews. Let’s not forget that many of the rabbis mentioned in this book, along with many more whose names have not come up, did not earn their living as rabbis, especially those who lived in ancient times. Hillel started out as a woodcutter; Rashi is said to have owned vineyards and made wine; Isaac Abarbanel was treasurer to King Alfonso of Portugal; many of the Hasidic rebbes mentioned had businesses of one sort or another, at least until they became established as rebbes (and often even afterward); and the Chofets Chayim ran a store for a time.
These rabbis formulated their ethical ideas on the basis of personal observation and experience, and many of them had plenty of experience on which to draw. They had both personal and business dealings with the descendants of the people who kvetched their way through the Exodus, and they thus had no difficulty in accepting the idea that there are probably a lot of people out there that you don’t like and who aren’t really wild about you, either. These rabbis had seen enough to know that no command, no legislation, no promise of eternal bliss or threat of endless punishment was going to change what, reluctantly or not, they had to admit to be human nature. If Eve could be afraid that Adam might start playing footsy with a rival who didn’t exist; if Cain could kill Abel over a piece of real estate that wasn’t going to be developed for another couple of millennia—if there were three different enemies when there were only four people in the world, for God’s sake, there doesn’t seem to be much hope of changing the basic character of humanity. All we can do is decide where to place the emphasis.
Enemies, then, are a given. We’re going to dislike and be disliked, and the Jewish people have distinguished themselves on both sides of that “and.” The one thing that we understand, until it’s time to start dealing with other Jews about Jewish communal politics, is that nobody has ever really benefited from refusing to adopt a live-and-let-live attitude to “enemies,” people and groups whom you might not like, but who have no intention of acting on their personal enmity or of marching toward your house in a uniform that bodes you no good. Just because someone is your enemy is no reason to hate him. The book of Leviticus commands us to love our neighbor, and we have to pause to figure out what that means; in the book of Exodus, which comes before Leviticus, we receive a much more definite command: Do not be a shmuck to your enemy.
And let’s not forget the donkey. He’s the one doing the real suffering, and it is your responsibility to do whatever you can to help alleviate that suffering. As a donkey, he isn’t responsible for the misdeeds or bad attitudes of his owner, not even if he’s Francis the Talking Mule and his master, Donald O’Connor, has taken a sudden turn for the bad. Talmudic tradition places a very high value on kindness to animals, and general directions for their care crop up alongside the laws of saying the Grace After Meals or greeting a heathen during a sabbatical year:
It is forbidden for a man to eat before he feeds his beast, as it is written (Deut. 11:15), “And I shall give grass in your fields for your cattle,” and only afterward, “and you shall eat and be filled.”
(BROKHOS 40A; GITIN 62A)
We’re told in Proverbs that a just man looks out for his animal (Prov. 12:10). Since your enemy’s donkey can’t look after itself, you—as somebody who can care for both yourself and the donkey—are obliged to look after it, no matter whom it belongs to. Indeed, you have a greater obligation to your enemy than to your friend: “If your friend’s donkey needs unloading and your enemy’s needs loading [because it has fallen], your enemy’s takes precedence, in order to make sure that you rein in your evil inclination” (Bovo Metsiyo 32b), even though your friend’s donkey is in a more painful position than your enemy’s. Since your inclination in all matters would be to let your enemy and his donkey ride straight to hell together, this ruling actually overrides the Torah’s teaching on the suffering of animals in order to make a point about the need for humans to get along.
This occasional tendency to place morality ahead of revelation is one of the nicest features of the Talmud. Anybody who’s read the duller parts of the Pentateuch—the laws, the begats, the architectural specs for the Tabernacle—is aware that biblical religion had no problem with capital punishment. People could be put to death for all the usual crimes—murder, adultery, kidnapping, and so on—and also for some that only Jews can commit: gathering sticks on the Sabbath, unauthorized manufacture of anointing oil, consumption of leaven on Passover, and similar offenses against cultic rules. Yet the Mishna tells us:
A Sanhedrin that kills one person every seven years is said to be callous with regard to human life. Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah said: Make that every seventy years. Rabbi Tarfon and Rabbi Akiva said: Had we been on the Sanhedrin, no one would ever have been killed.
(MAKKOS 1:10)
Despite the fact that the Sanhedrin ruled on many cases for which death in one form or another was the biblically ordained punishment, we are told here that it was so loath to apply the death sentence that an execution every seven years was considered a sign of unbridled cruelty. Rabbi Akiva, who along with Rabbi Tarfon would effectively have abolished the death sentence altogether, is the single most important figure in the Talmud, and could credibly be described as its leading man. What Moses is to the Bible, Akiva is to the Talmud: the hero—a modern biography is subtitled Scholar, Saint, and Martyr. His importance and prestige were not even diminished by his claim that Bar Kokhva, the leader of a revolt against the Romans, was also the Messiah. Yet here he is, stating explicitly that judicial executions are always to be avoided. Although capital punishment remained on the books, it was rarely carried out. The opinions of Elazar, Tarfon, and Akiva all indicate the way in which morality can sometimes trump revelation in the world of the Talmud, the last place where people unacquainted with it might expect to find mentsh-hood conquering halacha.
The main point behind helping your enemy is that the animal shouldn’t be made to suffer for something that has nothing to do with it. Just as important, though, is the heuristic, the educational, effort of restraining your evil impulse in a situation where the right thing to do is clear. If you should thus find yourself confronted with a less cut-and-dried dilemma, you’ll know what to do and will recognize the evil impulse when it comes to you in the guise of a lawful and sometimes even laudable activity.
There’s a story about how a poor widow once went to Rabbi Aaron of Karlin (died 1772), saying that her daughter had been engaged for two years already, but her fiancé was about to break off the engagement because he still hadn’t received the fifty-ruble dowry that he had been promised. Rabbi Aaron, yet another great Hasidic leader (there aren’t many edifying tales about the crummy ones), went over to his dresser, took out fifty rubles, and gave it to the woman.
An hour later she was back. The wedding had already been arranged, but the poor girl had no wedding gown and her mother didn’t have the five rubles to get her one. Rabbi Aaron went over to his dresser, much more slowly this time, took out five rubles, and gave them to her:
A Hasid who happened to be present asked, “The fifty rubles I understand; providing for a bride is one of the biggest mitzvahs there is. But the five rubles for the dress? Wouldn’t it have been a bigger mitzvah to buy ten pair of shoes for orphans?”
“I had the same idea,” said Rabbi Aaron. “Better to buy ten pair of shoes for poor orphans than a silk wedding gown. But then I started to wonder where this thought was coming from—the good inclination or the evil one—and I decided that it was the evil. If it’s coming from the good inclination, I thought, why was he silent about it until now, when
the woman came to beg for money for the gown? Why didn’t he tell me to buy shoes for the orphans yesterday? So I figured that this must be coming from the evil inclination, and I don’t take advice from the evil inclination.”
There are two matters to consider here. Providing for the bride without providing her a gown is only doing half the job. There’s a well-known axiom to the effect that once you start on a mitzvah, you’re supposed to see it through to the end, and though Aaron doesn’t mention it explicitly, this is the basis on which the girl’s mother has had the apparent chutzpah to come back so soon for a second donation. On a less obvious level, Aaron is self-aware enough to know that if he doesn’t pay for the dress, he’s not going to use the money to buy shoes for the orphans: he’ll think about it, put it off, think about it some more, put it off again, and then forget all about it.
In the usual scheme of things, shoes for orphans will always outrank a fancy dress, even if it’s a bridal gown. In the present context, though, the shoes are a distraction, a way of not fulfilling an obligation that you’ve undertaken by convincing yourself that you’re wriggling out of your duty for the sake of something better; that you’re cheating in a kosher way.
In Yiddish, this is called a kosher khazer fisl, a kosher little pig’s foot, the legitimate-seeming enticement to something that really isn’t kosher at all. The idea goes back to the description of the pig in the eleventh chapter of Leviticus: “And the pig, because it parts the hoof and is cloven-footed, but does not chew the cud, is unclean to you” (Lev. 11:7). If you look at it the right way, the pig can pass for kosher. A well-known Midrash talks about how the pig lies on its back, to make sure that you can see its hooves, and says, “Eat me, I’m kosher” (Genesis Rabbo 65:1).
