The Talmud, Judaism, and asceticism

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: Better To Suffer or Better To Live? Eating—and Not Eating—as a Meritorious Jewish Act. Talmudic rabbis debate Jewish solidarity in the face of misfortune, a communal imperative that still holds today.. Two excerpts:

Despite all these specifications, however, the Talmud is by no means enthusiastic about fasting for its own sake. Indeed, the very strictness of the rules for declaring communal fasts is meant to control the ascetic impulse, not encourage it. Here as always, Judaism stands in sharp contrast to Christianity in its attitude toward asceticism: There is no Jewish imperative to scourge the body in order to elevate the soul. Celibacy has never been a Jewish virtue—all Jews are bound by the commandment to be fruitful and multiply—and while the holiest Christians are those who withdraw from the world, the holiest Jews, the Torah sages, were businessmen and family men. The Judaism we have come to know in the Talmud is emphatically a religion for living in the world, not for fleeing or disparaging the world.

I would nuance the part about celibacy never having been a Jewish virtue. The Essenes, according to Philo and Josephus, as well as the Egyptian Therapeutae according to Philo, seemed to feel differently. But they are perhaps the exceptions that prove the rule.

Elazar makes this point with a striking and powerful image: “A person should always consider himself as though a sacred object is immersed in his bowels.” There is something sacred literally inside of us; our bodies are not just envelopes for our souls, but a kind of holy cargo that we have to treat with decency and kindness. Accordingly, Elazar holds that if you are able to fast without causing yourself bodily harm, you are “sacred”; but if a fast would damage your body, you would be a “sinner” to undertake it.

That made me think of the Buddhist teaching in The Questions of King Milinda that ascetics should care for the body in the same way that one cares for a wound. Compare and contrast.

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

About PaleoJudaica

ORIGINALLY AND FOR MANY YEARS I included an "About" page in the sidebar to introduce readers to me and to this blog. A few years ago when I had to update the Template (long story, which I'm not sure I even remember myself) the About page was automatically purged from the sidebar and later it evaporated entirely. I have always meant to put it up again, but have only just now gotten around to it. Look at the sidebar to the right where it says "Pages" in dark type. The first one, which just takes you to the front page, is "Home." The one below it, "About PaleoJudaica," will lead you to the blog's About page, newly revised, rethought, and updated. When you get a chance, go and have a look.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe's 20th yahrzeit

ANNIVERSARY: The Lubavitcher Rebbe Died 20 Years Ago Today. Who Was He? Two new biographies attempt to describe the Chabad leader, but can we ever fathom his ultimate aloneness? (Susan Handelman, Tablet Magazine)

PaleoJudaica has posted on many articles about the Lubavitcher Rebbe (start here and follow the links back to 2003) and noted his tenth yahrzeit here. My main interest has been phenomenological: here is a twenty-first century post-mortem Messiah, complete with rumors of an empty casket and resurrection appearances, as well as claims of occultation and apotheosis. This article touches on these issues, but it is mainly a personal account of the writer's interactions with the Rebbe and reflections on his life, while including in passing reviews of two new books about him. On the issue of messianism she writes:

The messianic idea indeed is one of the great gifts the Jews have given the world: an optimistic view of history; of the world, despite all its bloodshed and darkness, still moving forward toward a goal; of the human task as repair of the world in partnership with God. As Rabbi Léon Ashkenazi, a major postwar French Jewish thinker, put it: “Jewish history is dramatic, but not tragic.” But like all powerful ideas, messianism has also been twisted and distorted in dangerous ways.

The Rebbe’s entire life, I think, was a cry to God to bring the Redemption. For him, it had already been too long; there had been too much pain. As he got older and felt his own personal end coming, he further intensified that call, and a messianic controversy swirled around him. Some of his followers tried to proclaim him the Messiah, which pained him personally, and which he tried to stop time after time. A few months before his stroke, a Chabad rabbi sent him a letter referring to him as “King Messiah.” The Rebbe’s secretary witnessed him looking at the letter, throwing it down in frustration and writing on it, “Tell him that when the Messiah comes, I will give him the letter.” After his stroke, and the diminution of his physical and cognitive abilities, he was not able to control those extremists anymore.

Telushkin and Steinsaltz [the writers of the two abovementioned books] both spend considerable time discussing the controversy, explaining traditional Jewish notions of the Messiah, the Rebbe’s pronouncements, and how they were interpreted and misinterpreted. The key is the text the Rebbe himself often cited to define the Jewish Messiah, Maimonides’ authoritative Code of Jewish Law at the end of his “Laws of Kings.” Maimonides defines “possible candidates” in every generation. Someone from the lineage of the House of David, of great piety, Torah scholarship and observance, who prevails on all Israel to follow the paths of Torah and battles their oppressors can be “presumed” to be the Messiah [chezkat moshiach]. Nothing supernatural is needed. But only if such a candidate succeeds, goes on to rebuild the Temple on its ancient site, and the Exiles are gathered in, can he be confirmed as beyond all doubt the Messiah [moshiach vaddai]. Any “presumed Messiah” can fail or die and then is simply considered, in Maimonides’ words, like all the “wholehearted and worthy kings of the House of David who died”—but he is not the Messiah.

In this context, I, like Steinsaltz and Telushkin, and many others in the Chabad and non-Chabad world, considered the Rebbe as good a “candidate” as any for our generation. But he died, the Exile continues, the world still suffers. He was not the Messiah.

The Aleppo Codex, the Ezekiel Plates, and The Treatise of the Vessels

MATTI FRIEDMAN: The Continuing Mysteries of the Aleppo Codex. Developments in the saga of the missing perfect copy of the Hebrew Bible, whose future is still unknown (Tablet Magazine).

I am not sure I expected the story of the long-forgotten Aleppo Codex, the perfect copy of the Hebrew Bible, to occupy me for very long after the publication of my book on the subject in 2012. I thought I would soon be on to other things, which is the way journalism tends to work. But, as sometimes happens, the story has taken on a life of its own: a cover-up energized by the fallout from my book; the rejuvenated activities of a small group of codex loyalists ranging in age from 36 (me) to 82 (former Mossad case officer Rafi Sutton); and a recent edict issued against me by a prominent rabbi in New York. In short, the story of the Aleppo Codex is alive today as it has not been in many decades, and I believe an update on developments over the past two years is warranted for those who find themselves fascinated by the strange and ongoing saga of one of the most important manuscripts on earth.

[...]

I kept track of reviews etc. of Friedman's book and you can find the posts starting here and follow the links. The continuation of the story remains very interesting and this in particular caught my eye and made me think of another matter:

The second mystery, that of the missing pages, was long famous among a small number of people—Bible professors, Aleppo exiles, and a few others. The official version of the story, propagated by the academics in Israel who control the manuscript, claimed the pages vanished in Aleppo around the time of the 1947 riot. But we know now that the manuscript was seen whole as late as 1952, five years later. The first description of any significant damage to the codex dates, strikingly, only to 1958—after the manuscript reached the Ben-Zvi Institute in Jerusalem.

At around the same time, my investigation found, dozens of valuable books and manuscripts vanished from the library of the same institute. When I approached former officials at the institute with evidence of the other missing books, several went on record saying the man responsible for their disappearance was the institute’s director at the time, Meir Benayahu, a scholar who throughout a long and illustrious career studied, collected, bought, and sold rare Hebrew books. He left his post amid a legal battle over control of the institute in 1970.

Benayahu, who died in 2009, came from a powerful political family with roots in Iraq; he was the son of a Sephardic chief rabbi, Yitzhak Nissim, and brother of a senior Likud cabinet minister, Moshe Nissim. (As was common in those years, Benayahu adopted a more modern and Israeli-sounding last name.) This scandal has long been known in Israel’s small and insular academic world but was never made public. Legal proceedings were avoided at the time thanks to the direct intervention of Israel’s president, Zalman Shazar. Police were never summoned, no charges were filed, and no books were returned. Benayahu’s family denies any wrongdoing and says the accusations against him are a smear campaign aimed at covering up thefts by other people; they have asked, rightly, why no one went to the police at the time. Today Benayahu’s family owns a collection of Hebrew texts that is one of the world’s largest in private hands.

Whatever precisely happened at the Ben-Zvi Institute, the long-buried affair of the institute’s vanished books—whether it is connected or not to the disappearance of the codex pages—is arguably the worst corruption scandal in the history of the Israeli academy. Among the figures who have gone on record saying Benayahu was responsible for the institute’s missing books are Zvi Zameret, the institute’s longtime administrative director and subsequently one of the top officials in Israel’s Education Ministry; Joseph Hacker, professor emeritus at Hebrew University and a former deputy director of the institute; and the late Yom-Tov Assis, the professor who headed the Ben-Zvi Institute at the time of my own investigation.

Are the missing codex pages linked to the broader disappearance of books from the Ben-Zvi Institute? The scholars of the Ben-Zvi Institute have resisted any investigation while failing to produce any evidence to dispel the suspicion.

The so-called Ezekiel Plates, a series of many stone tablets with most of the text of Ezekiel engraved on them, are also held in the Ben-Zvi Institute. I noted and discussed a Jerusalem Post article on them three years ago in my post Ezekiel plates—and a legend of the Temple treasures. The article did not seem to realize that the set had originally included two more tablets on which was inscribed the concluding verse and a half of Ezekiel and then a version of The Treatise of the Vessels, a legendary account in Hebrew of the hiding of the Ark of the Covenant and other Temple treasures just before the Babylonian destruction of the Temple. I published the first complete English translation of this work in Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures last year, and the text got some attention in the media and even led the Daily Mail to call me "a modern-day Indiana Jones."

Be that as it may, the interesting thing in this context is that the stone plates containing The Treatise of the Vessels are no longer with the Ezekiel Plates. I learned this in e-mail correspondence in February of 2008 with Michael Glatzer, the Academic Secretary of the Institute, who kindly checked the Ezekiel Plates housed there. The Jerusalem Post article linked to above gives the following background on the Ezekiel Plates:

In this case, the tiles were supposedly found over 100 years ago when visitors to the traditional tomb of Ezekiel in the small Iraqi town of Kfar al-Kafil, located about 50 miles south of Baghdad, noticed a stone tile had fallen off the inside of the burial chamber. Oddly, its back side contained an ancient lettering which had been deliberately hidden, facing the wall. Other tiles were removed and similar inscriptions were found on their back sides as well.

The entire set of Ezekiel plates were then taken to Lebanon, where decades later a Christian Arab widow, on the advice of her priest, wanted to place them in Jewish hands before she moved to France. She sold them for a mere two pounds sterling to businessman David Hacohen in 1947.

He smuggled the plates into Israel in 1953, and they were eventually acquired by Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Israel’s second president and a noted historian, who considered them a valuable national treasure.

After Ben-Zvi’s death, the Ezekiel plates became the property of the Institute in Jerusalem set up in his honor, which had them in storage until Zwebner convinced his wife’s parents, Max and Lombi Landau, to sponsor their public display.

The Ezekiel Plates were acquired by Ben-Zvi sometime after 1953 and became the property of the Institute after his death in 1963. The article does not say where they were housed during those ten years. At some undetermined point the plates containing The Treatise of the Vessels were separated from the Ezekiel Plates and vanished. As far as I could determine the missing plates were last seen by Jean Starcky, who photographed one of them in Beirut "a good number of years" before J. T. Milik published the photo in 1959. Now Friedman reports that sometime between 1952 and 1958 a large chunk of the Aleppo Codex also vanished, and around the same time "dozens of valuable books and manuscripts" also disappeared from the Institute. The timing is striking. Is the stone version of The Treatise of the Vessels one of these manuscripts? I don't know and I certainly am not making any assumptions or accusations. The plates could have been separated and lost before they came to the Ben-Zvi Institute. But still, the possibility of a connection between the missing stone plates and the other missing manuscripts is intriguing and potentially worth following up.

Another notable point is that journalist Owen Jarus has called into question the connection of the Ezekiel Plates with the Tomb of Ezekiel in Iraq and has indicated he has evidence that they were produced about a century ago in Syria.

It seems that we have not yet exhausted the mysteries surrounding the Aleppo Codex, the Ezekiel Plates, and The Treatise of the Vessels.

Schäfer to head Jewish Museum Berlin

CONGRATULATIONS TO PETER SCHÄFER:

Change at the Head of the Jewish Museum Berlin

As of 1 September 2014, Prof. Dr. Peter Schäfer will take over as new director of the Jewish Museum Berlin. The Museum's Board of Trustees today agreed unanimously to Schäfer's appointment. At the request of Federal Government Commissioner for Federal Culture Commissioner and the Media Monika Grütters and Peter Schäfer, Prof. Dr. Michael Blumenthal, the longstanding founding director of the Jewish Museum Berlin, will serve in an advisory capacity for a transitional period.

Federal Commissioner Monika Grütters: "I'm very happy that it was possible to gain Professor Schäfer, an internationally active and acclaimed expert of Judaism, as the museum's new director. I am confident in his commitment to continue the work of Professor Blumenthal and build upon the museum's success to date while making his own mark."

Commissioner Grütters emphasized further: "The unprecedented success of the Jewish Museum Berlin is a direct result of Professor Blumenthal's passion and energy. We are greatly indebted to him for his years of commitment – all the more so in light of his biography!"

During the meeting of the Board of Trustees, W. Michael Blumenthal explained that he had been asking himself for some time when would be the right moment to pass the baton to a successor. When it became clear that Peter Schäfer, following his retirement from academic life, would be available, he knew he had his answer. "I realized immediately that we had to get this outstanding and highly distinguished academic on board. And this was reaffirmed by Culture Commissioner Grütters and our friends in politics, business and society at large," explained Blumenthal. "He will be able to give the museum key impulses like no one else I know."

[...]

HT Lawrence E. Frizzell.

More recent news about Professor Schäfer is here and links.

Warburg Library update

THE TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION: Warburg Institute: library saved from Nazis awaits its fate (Jack Grove). The fate of the library is still up in the air:

Four years after Warburg’s death, the collection of about 80,000 books, many rare Renaissance volumes, was moved to London as Nazism took hold in 1930s Germany. However, the University of London is now seeking to challenge the status of the deed of trust it signed in 1944 when accepting the collection.

That document promised to maintain and preserve the collection “in perpetuity” as “an independent unit” – a pledge that now appears onerous as the Warburg runs a reported £500,000 annual deficit.

Representatives for both the university and the Warburg Institute were due to appear in a court in London’s Rolls Building this week after efforts to negotiate a compromise over the past five years have failed.

Last week I noted an article about this in the New Yorker which turned out to be several years old. But this Times Higher article was published this month and indicates that the case has yet to be resolved. There is also a petition to Save the Warburg Institute!, brought to my attention by Timothy Michael Law on Facebook.

The DSS and the text of the Bible

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: The “Original” Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Can the scrolls help expose the original Bible language within the Masoretic Text and Septuagint?

Noah Wiener summarizes an article by Emanuel Tov in the current issue of BAR. The full text of the latter article is behind the subscription wall.

Schiffman on schisms

LAWRENCE H. SCHIFFMAN: Schisms in Jewish History. In two parts: The Limits of Tolerance: Halakhah and History and The Samaritan Schism.

Book reviews

THE FORWARD: How We Know the Bible Was Written by Human Hands. Three Scholars Face Truth Of Biblical History (Jay Michaelson). Reviews of:

● How the Bible Became Holy
By Michael Satlow
Yale University Press, 368 pages, $35

● The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis
By Joel Baden
Yale University Press, 392 pages, $65

● The Formation of the Hebrew Canon
By Timothy Lim
Yale University Press, 304 pages, $45

Cargill on Peleg

ROBERT CARGILL: On the passing of Yuval Peleg ז״ל.

"He died tragically, but he died doing what he loved: archaeology. And like soldiers, cowboys, and archaeologists of legend, he died with his boots on."

Background here.

Lapin on the Digital Mishnah Project

THE TALMUD BLOG: H. Lapin on ‘The Digital Mishnah Project’.

Background here.

Review of Calderon, A Bride for a Night: Talmud Tales

MARTY LOCKSHIN: Talmud stories from an unusual point of view (CJN). Excerpt:

Years before her political life began, [MK Ruth] Calderon, who has a PhD in Talmud from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, published a Hebrew book combining creative and scholarly readings of rabbinic stories. The book has now been released in a first-rate English translation by Ilana Kurshan, under the title A Bride for a Night: Talmud Tales.

The book’s 17 chapters all have the same three-part structure: the text in English of a very short story, usually less than one page long, found in the Talmud or in another collection of rabbinic texts; a creative retelling of the story; and a short analysis of the story’s significance and meaning.

The unique part is Calderon’s creative retelling. For example, after she presents the talmudic story from Kiddushin 40a about a rich Roman woman propositioning Rabbi Zadok (first century), she retells it in the first-person voice of the woman. Another story originates in Rashi’s Talmud commentary to Avodah Zarah 18b. In it, Rabbi Meir (second century) urges one of his students to try to seduce Rabbi Meir’s own brilliant and learned wife, Beruriah, in order to teach her a lesson. Calderon retells this disturbing story in the first-person voice of the student. Readers who are used to traditional ways of studying Talmud might find these retellings jarring, but they help to bring the stories and their characters to life in a new way.

More on Ruth Calderon here, here, and here.

UPDATE: Missing link now added. Sorry about that!

Yuval Peleg, z'l'

JIM WEST: Very Sad News: The Death of Yuval Peleg. Jim includes links to articles collected by Joseph Lauer which mention the accidental, on-site death of a senior archaeologist but do not yet give a name. Jack Sasson also confirms on the Agade List that he has received the same news "from Israel."

Yuval Peleg has been mentioned from time to time on PaleoJudaica, mostly, but not exclusively, in connection with his sometimes controversial excavation work at the site of Qumran. See, for example, here, here, and here, and links.

May his memory be for a blessing.

UPDATE: Arutz Sheva: Archaeologist Killed in Samaria Cave-In. Yuval Peleg, 45, of Kfar Adumim, was a senior archaeologist in the IDF's Civil Administration (Ido Ben Porat, Gil Ronen).

Of the rains and the hellscape

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: In the Rains, Talmudic Symbols of Goodwill, Punishment, and a Deep Covenant. The Torah sages study and respond to natural phenomena in an effort to understand our place on Earth. Excerpt:

Still less empirical is Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi’s remark that “the entire world drinks from the runoff of the Garden of Eden.” But the Gemara not only accepts this idea, it uses it as the basis for a geographical calculation. Ordinarily, the rabbis argue, “from the runoff of a beit kor, a half-se’a can be watered.” The Koren Talmud helpfully explains these measurements, which boil down to the idea that a field is 60 times larger than the area watered by its runoff. By this logic, the Garden of Eden must be 60 times larger than the Earth. This equation reverses our usual sense of the Garden of Eden as a particularly choice region of the planet; rather, the planet itself is just a particular region of the much larger realm that is the Garden. The Gemara goes on to say that, just as the Garden is 60 times larger than the Earth, so Eden itself is 60 times larger than its Garden; and Gehenna, the Jewish Hell, is 60 times larger than that. Indeed, “the entire world is like a pot cover for Gehenna.” This is a disturbing cosmology, in which all of existence is just a tiny fragment of a much larger hellscape.

Jewish cosmologies of both heaven and hell are like that.

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

The fall of Mosul

ARAMAIC WATCH: PHILIP JENKINS, The Fall of Mosul (AINA). More bad news in the Middle East, especially for Aramaic/Syriac-speaking Christians.

Related stories here, here, and links.

Buth on Jesus' languages again

RANDALL BUTH: More on Why Jesus was a Hebrew speaker. This essay is in response to the essay of Seth Sanders noted here. And follow the links there for further background to the discussion.

Reinhartz on Jews or Judeans

MARGINALIA: The Vanishing Jews of Antiquity – By Adele Reinhartz. How should one translate the Greek term ioudaios? Excerpt:

I am all for historical precision and sharply attuned to potential anti-Semitism. Yet as a scholar and a Jew, I am alarmed by the growing invisibility of Jews and Judaism in English translations of ancient texts and scholarship about them. The use of “Judeans” to translate all occurrences of ioudaioi achieves neither the scholarly precision nor the ethical high ground that scholars claim. On the contrary, the proliferation of Judeans inadvertently creates confusion and misunderstanding and merely sidesteps the issue without addressing the anti-Jewish or even anti-Semitic potential of texts such as the Gospel of John.

I agree with Reihertz and I made some of the same points she makes in this essay more briefly in my post Jews or Judeans? a couple of years ago.

New UNESCO heritage sites

UNESCO, it seems, has been busy naming new heritage sites.

UNESCO names West Bank’s Battir a protected World Heritage Site. Both Palestinian villagers and Jewish settlers say stone terraces threatened by Israel’s plan to build separation wall (Renee Lewis, Aljazeera).

Battir (Betar) is the site of Bar Kokhba's last stand against the Romans. Background to this particular story is here and links.

Beit Guvrin-Maresha Caves Named World Heritage Site. UNESCO Calls Spelunker Paradise 'City Under a City' (JTA/The Forward).

The site of Beit Guvrin-Maresha featured in an earlier PaleoJudaica post here.

That John fragment and the GJW again

ALIN SUCIU: Guest Post: Stephen Emmel – The Codicology of the New Coptic (Lycopolitan) Gospel of John Fragment (and Its Relevance for Assessing the Genuineness of the Recently Published Coptic “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” Fragment).

Thus the reconstructed John manuscript is either an extraordinarily tall and narrow single-column codex, or it is a short and even more extraordinarily wide two-column codex. If its existence be accepted as a fact, it would appear to deserve to be acknowledged as the tallest (or widest) papyrus codex yet known. Among extant papyrus codices written in Coptic in particular, this hypothetical John codex would stand out as even more extraordinary.

Hey, we won the lottery again! Either that or the John fragment is a fake. And by implication, the Gospel of Jesus' Wife fragment is likely a fake too.

UPDATE (18 July): For some reason this post seems to have been trapped in draft form when I thought it was published. I just noticed this, and so it is finally posted. Apologies for the delay.

Jesus and Brian Conference report

MARK GOODACRE: Jesus and Brian Conference, Day 1.

As Mark notes in this post, the Twitter hashtag for this conference is #JesusandBrian.

Background here.

UPDATE: Jesus and Brian Conference, Day 2.