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 AHARON R. E. AGUS
H E R M E N E U T I C BIOGRAPHY IN RABBINIC MIDRASH

wDE

G
 STUDIA JUDAICA
F O R S C H U N G E N ZUR W I S S E N S C H A F T
DES JUDENTUMS

H E R A U S G E G E B E N VON
E. L. E H R L I C H

BAND XVI

WALTER DE G R U Y T E R • B E R L I N • NEW YORK

1996
HERMENEUTIC BIOGRAPHY
IN RABBINIC MIDRASH
T H E B O D Y OF T H I S D E A T H A N D L I F E

By
A H A R O N R. E. A G U S

WALTER DE G R U Y T E R • B E R L I N • NEW YORK

1996
 © Printed on acid-free paper
which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure
permanence and durability.

Die Deutsche Bibliothek — CIP-Einheitsaufnahme

Agus, Aharon R. E.:

Hermeneutic biography in rabbinic midrash / by Aharon R. E. Agus.
- Berlin ; New York : de Gruyter, 1996
(Studia Judaica ; Bd. 16)
ISBN 3-11-015067-0
NE: GT

© Copyright 1996 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-10785 Berlin

All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permis-
sion in writing from the publisher.

Printed in Germany
Conversion: Ready Made, Berlin
Printing: Werner Hildebrand, Berlin
Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer-GmbH, Berlin
For
Iris
 Preface

The writing of this book unfolds along a bridge that spans at least two chap-
ters in my life: Israel and Germany. The order of the parts of this book,
however, does not mirror this chronology. While living in Haifa, Ramat-
Gan, and in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem and nearby, I
taught mainly at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan. I would like to thank
my colleagues in Israel whose friendship and learning I will always cherish.
My father and teacher, Irving Agus, had much to do with my coming to
Israel. He also, ironically, had something to do with my coming to Ger-
many. My father was no friend of the Germans; but he planted in me, among
other seeds, something that had to come to fruition through a long and
twisting odyssey that includes this country. My Mother, Tema Agus, helped
me by enabling different stations along the way. Jacob Taubes made me
uncomfortable with my shortcomings and robbed me of the comfort of feel-
ing at home. Professor Dr. Julius Carlebach, rector of the Hochschule fiir
Jüdische Studien in Heidelberg, invited me, in the fall of 1992, to come as a
guest professor. In 1993 Prof. Carlebach appointed me to a permanent pro-
fessorship at the Hochschule. Many friends have helped to make my new
address into a home, as well as often enriching and challenging me with their
learning. Among them are Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann, Theo Sundermeier,
and Hannelore Künzl and my other colleagues at the Hochschule. Prof. Dr.
Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich, editor of the Studia Judaica, read my manuscript with
much care before recommending it for publication in the series. Klaus
Otterburig, from the Walter de Gruyter Publishers, rendered energetic and
careful assistance in the technical preparations for publication.Without Iris
Kiinzel I could not have imagined the bridging as taking place as successfully
as I pray that it will.

Heidelberg, 24 October, 1995

 Table of Contents

Preface VII

Introduction i

First Prologue:

The Crisis of Will 4

Second Prologue:
The Fear of Nothingness 12

Part I:
R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon ben Yohai and his Wife
Or:
The Body of this Death 19

Part II:
The Ladder of R. Phinehas ben Yair
Or:
The Body of Life 81

First Epilogue:
The Temptation Unto Nothingness 202

Second Epilogue:
When I Want, You do not Want 232

Bibliography of Primary Sources 233

Index of Biblical Sources 234
Index of Rabbinic Sources 238
Index of Sages 241
General Index 243
 Wretched man that I am;
who will deliver me
from the body of this death?
Romans 7:24

Introduction

The term Rabbinic (with a capital R), as used in this work, refers us back to
the authors of the Mishnah, the Talmudim (that is, both the Bavli, the
Babylonian Talmud, as well as the Yerushalmi, the Palestinian Talmud), and
the midrashim which are contemporary with these works.
Any work that attempts more than a philological analysis and cataloging
of Rabbinic sources, that is, that attempts to bring various sources together
for the purpose of revealing a larger picture, involves serious methodologial
problems. This is true already of the so-called halakha, the so-called legal
parts of Rabbinic literature, the parts that could be referred to as Law. How-
ever, here I am dealing mainly with texts that belong to the so-called aggadah,
the "non-halakhic" parts of Rabbinic literature. These texts have not under-
gone anything comparable to the various systemizations of the halakhic ma-
terial and one can, therefore, discern their problems of system without
polemicizing with the halakhasists. Besides, the problems of the aggadah are
probably rather different from those of the halakha. In any case my remarks
here refer mainly to the former.
Rabbinic texts are too small and too large.
Rabbinic sources create an illusion of largeness because they often come
down to us in the form of large works. But these large works are mostly
collections. They are put together, and often edited, out of very much smaller
texts, texts thet are mostly only a few lines long. One can suppose that very
few people could forever express themselves only in such very short texts.
These texts must have been crystalized out of much longer lectures or discus-
sions. Thus these very concise texts are mostly fragmentary, that is, they give
us only a fragment of the information originally contained in the author's
exposition. Although the quality of the literary crystalization of the indi-
vidual text will determine just how incomplete the final result is, we must
always reckon with a serious shrinking of content — considering the probable
gap between the extent of the original discourse and the final literary artifact.
Attempts to reconstruct the thinking of a particular Rabbinic author raise
serious problems. The problem for the historian is the reliability of the tra-
ditions that attribute different sayings to the same author. The question for
2 Introduction

the interpreter is, How systematic were the Rabbinic authors? Or, better, Is
their system anything like ours?
But Rabbinic texts are too large. They are like a knitted garment: One
pulls at a tiny thread, either because it annoys one or because it fascinates
one; one is very careful to pull only on a very small thread; but, this is my
perception, one inevitably finds that one is ineluctably on the way to
unraveling the whole. Unraveling, that is, not necessarily in the sense of
disentangling; more often than not one is in ever-more danger of losing the
form of the whole the more thread one has in the hand.
One of the primary characteristics of Rabbinic texts is their connectedness
and inter-textuality. One begins with martyrdom, arrives at the Binding of
Isaac, and discovers that one is long past having noticed that the central
theme is already the Messiah. Academicians are experts at reducing things to
their "parts". The Rabbis were not, certainly not the authors of aggadah.
This is perhaps due to the reality of wholeness. Whatever the reason, it is
well-nigh impossible to isolate Rabbinic "themes"; one limits oneself, rather,
through the limits of one's indurance, or by the size of a book, or with the
help of the given, artificial limits that history and chance often impose - an
historical "period", a surviving work or collection, a manuscript, a "person",
and so on.
The present book is an attempt to overcome some of these difficulties, or
to go beyond them. I try to break out of the boundaries of the individual
texts by searching for the ever-larger patterns to which, in my perception, the
texts belong. I try to overcome the boundaries of textual interpretation by
returning to the texts from these patterns. I limit myself when the canvas of
my own mind forces me to do so. The result of my efforts here tends to be
a montage, or a montage made up of montages.
The montage presented here is, I think, readable on at least two levels.
One can read each chapter by itself. And one may take them altogether.
"There is no before and after in the Torah", say the Rabbis. But here is a
possible sketch of the structure of this book:
The two "prologues" serve as the background against which my analysis
has its verisimilitude. The first describes a "crisis of will". Since the being of
"I am" is essentially a being of "I want", the crisis that I describe questions
the very viability of the being-in-the-world of the sufferers of this crisis. The
second prologue deals with what I consider to be a central characteristic of
so-called monotheism: The Re-placement of Concreteness, to paraphrase
Whitehead. The world loses its "solidity", its existence is, in a profound
sense, called into question. Not only is the subject-world relationship in
crisis, then, through the problem of will; the very objectivity of the world
 Introduction 3

turns out to be a matter of deep anxiety. What remains, then, of both the
subject, man, and the object, or objects, the world? And What is the result-
ing relationship between them? These are, of course, very large questions.
The continuation of this book tries to get across the realization, at least, that
these matters do indeed undergo a change through the unfolding of the
crises. The first chapter deals with a particular kind of theological anthropol-
ogy that "makes sense" against the background of the "prologues" as well as
being an attempt to work them out, at least on the level of the perception of
the "I" and the "you". The second chapter deals with a particular sense of a
religious self and the resulting relationship to the world. It must be taken
into consideration that these two chapters are built around two different,
what I call "hermeneutical biographies" (that is, life-stories whose logic of
factuality and unity is grounded in the interpretation of a [Rabbinic] person-
ality; and whose theological-religious legitimacy is perceived in the her-
meneutics of traditional material - biblical and Rabbinic - rather than in the
mere givenness of the past) so that their relationship must remain, at least
here, a montage (despite the fact that the two Rabbis who are the subjects of
these chapters were brothers-in-law) - even without the problems described
before. The two "epilogues" remain true to this montage-structure. The
first describes a kind of "Theological Cosmography" - an ontological "map-
ping" of reality where what began, in this book, as a "fear" becomes an
embraced perception of a different "worldliness". Or, one could call this
"epilogue" "Cosmogeny and Cosmography". The final "epilogue" brings
together some of the meditative moments which thus enclose the book as a
whole in the axis of a phenomenological theology; albeight an axis that unfolds
to an ontology that is different from that in which we originally set out —
and for this reason the meanings of texts undergo a metamorphosis. If one
begins the reading of this book with the final "epilogue" one can perceive a
developing confrontation with the unexpected notion that religious man's
knowledge of God wells up in an ambivalence where even terror and yearn-
ing cannot unravel the threads of being and not-being.
 FIRST PROLOGUE:

The Crisis of Will

"And He said: 'Thou canst not see My face'" (Exodus 33:20) - It was re-
peated in the name of R. Joshua ben Korha: Thus did the Holy One Blessed
Is He say to Moses: When I wanted, you did not want. Now that you want,
I do not want.1

T h e second century tanna is referring to two different theophanic dramas.

T h e first, when Moses "did not want", is described in Exodus 3:1 to 4:17,
especially 3:2 to 3:6. T h e second, when G o d did "not want", is after the
breaking of the tablets, Exodus 33:12-23, especially verses 18 to 20. 2 This
means that we must read these two scenes in order to understand the tanna's
intention.
T h e earlier story describes Moses's first encounter with the divine. Here
Moses has only lately emerged in the divine history, his personality as the
one called to lead the People of G o d has only just begun to unfold. When
the man raised in the Egyptian royal household first saw the sufferings of his
brethren, when "he saw an Egyptian smiting a Hebrew", he could not digest
reality and could react in total negation alone. H e was unable to grasp the
three-dimensionality of the social-political situation and could not foresee
that the execution of the Egyptian would have to become public. A n d so the
first biblical episode of his mature life-history must end in complete flight
from the stage of Israel's drama (Exodus 2:11-15). But that aspect of his per-
sonality which is the unwillingness or inability to accept the judgement of
power persists, yet without a vision that transcends the present situation. It
is Reuel, the father of Zipporah, who is to take the initiative that turns the
incident at the well, where Moses "delivered" the daughters "out of the
hand of the shepards", into one that becomes part of the biography of the

1 BT Berakhot 7a.
2 This is how the midrash was understood in the context of the Babylonian Talmud
as well, see ibid..
 The Crisis of Will 5

stranger (Exodus 2:15-22). And now Moses comes out, with the flock of his
father-in-law Jethro, "to the farthest end of the wilderness", indeed "to the
mountain of God, unto Horeb" (Exodus 3:1), without any intimation of the
unordinary. It is to this unknowing Moses that "the angel of the Lord ap-
peared... in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush" that "burned with fire,
and... was not consumed" (Exodus 3:2). Moses reacts with innocent curios-
ity, and draws near to "see this great sight" (Exodus 3:4). And here the man
is overwhelmed, with breathtaking unexpectedness, by the paradox of thrust-
upon theophany, of theophany that has not opened up through will and
preparation: Moses is called by name, twice, to be told to "Draw not nigh
hither", to tread the holy place with naked feet in dread (Exodus 3:4-5); and
he is drawn into the intimacy of encounter where the divine identifies itself
in terms where Moses is no longer a stranger, "I am the God of thy father,
the G o d of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob" (Exodus 3:6).
Drawing-back and being called are inexplicably bound into one, a mystery
whose meaning Moses is to fathom only later in loss of innocence. While yet
innocent, "Moses hid his face; for he was afraid to look upon G o d " (Exodus
3:6). So that when G o d "wanted", moses "did not want".
It is essential to read this incident as the tanna does, that is, neither to
hear only the biblical narrative nor to separate the homilist's commentary
out of the biblical story. Only in this manner will the midrashic text even-
tually come to appear before us as that which it really is: A rabbinic reading
of a biblical text or texts. In the reading discussed here, Moses is perceived
as naive, as innocent; and it is this very Moses whom God wanted to do
exactly what he, Moses, drew back from doing: T o look upon, to face di-
rectly, the divine as so immediately and pressingly present in the events of
the burning bush (Exodus 3:6), a veritable "wanting" by God. For the tanna,
had moses "wanted", he would have indeed "looked upon God": Will is
here the vector in which the meeting with God is to have taken place.
In the later story the situation is very different. Moses and the People of
Israel had been partner to the theophany at Sinai. The mountain "was alto-
gether on smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire... and the whole
mount quaked greatly" (Exodus 19:18). God Himself had, as it were, come
down to be with Israel, to consummate the covenant whose meaning was to
be: The being of Israel as the People of God, through devotion to His Torah;
and the being of God as the God of Israel, through His calling them out
unto Himself, "I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of
Egypt, out of the house of bondage" (Exodus 20:2). But with the terrible sin
of the golden calf this becoming-together of Israel and G o d is shattered. The
will-to-God who had taken them out of bondage toward His Land, was now
6 First Prolog

a will to be merely led, '"Up, make us a god who shall go before us'" said the
people to Aaron (Exodus 32:1). Israel lost the vision that had encompassed
Moses; '"for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land
of Egypt'" (ibid.), he had become for them merely a leader through the
wilderness, and as such was lost to them — '"we know not what is become of
him"' (ibid.). Now all that was left was the will to struggle through for life,
and that could be had in the person of a calf molded out of the gold off the
people's ears (Exodus 32:2-4). Following this the divine perception is with-
out compromise, only a new People can be with God, a People who can
embody the singularity of Moses the bringer of the Torah (Exodus 32:10). It
is the maturing Moses who begins to understand the complexity of the re-
lationship between Israel and God. He perceives that the human reality need
not disintegrate into chaos in faithlessness, that chaos is now to be held at
bay in paradox: Do not these people remain the People of God even in
sinning — '"Lord, why doth Thy wrath wax hot against Thy people, that
Thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt...'" (Exodus 32:11). And
Moses resisted the temptation that God would make of him '"a great na-
tion'" (Exodus 32:10) because in that temptation the will-to-God would, of
necessity, be mingled with the desire to become at the expense of others. So
the People of Israel remained together with Moses, but the becoming-to-
gether of People and God was dissolved in the shattering of the tablets which
were "the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God" (32:16), and
which Moses hurled to the ground at the foot of the mount (Exodus 32:19):
A shattering that could not but be felt in tremors of violence of brother
against brother, in the ensuing battle in the camp in the wilderness (Exodus
32:26-29).
Thus the scene is set for the second drama of will between man and God.
The bountifulness of divine forgiveness, which is to become the second re-
ceiving of the Decalogue tablets (Exodus 32:14, 33:14-17, 34:1-10), creates an
atmosphere in which Moses dares to ask of God, '"Show me, I pray Thee,
Thy glory'" (Exodus 33:18). That this a far-reaching request by Moses is clear
in the biblical story. Here Moses's leadership is at a peak. He has pleaded the
People's cause before God, a plea that is a denial of the reasonability of total
wrath that would be divine retribution (Exodus 32:11-13). He has replaced
the threatened divine chaos with his own, human working-out of things,
bloody as it was (Exodus 32:17-29). He has identified the fate of the People,
terrible as it might be, as his own personal fate, "And Moses returned unto
the Lord and said: 'Oh, this people have sinned a great sin, and have made
them a god of gold. Yet now, if Thou wilt forgive their sin —; and if not, blot
me, I pray Thee, out of Thy book which Thou hast written'" (Exodus 32:31).
 The Crisis of Will 7

H o w different is this Moses from the Moses who stood at the burning bush!
And now the leader dares to ask for himself, as the proven leader of Israel, the
ineffable vision of the divine, the vision that is to seal the relationship be-
tween the People led by Moses and the divine — in grace. The import of
God's answer seems to be, according to the biblical text, that Moses is to
experience as much of the divine self-revelation as is humanly possible, and
this as a positive answer to Moses's pleadings for grace, '"I will make all my
goodness pass before thee, and will proclaim the name of the Lord before
thee; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy
on whom I will show mercy'" (Exodus 33:19). But R. Joshua ben Korha reads
the next verse with a peculiar emphasis, as follows: "And He said: 'Thou
canst not see my face, for man shall not see M e and live'" (Exodus 33:20). In
the tanna's reading of the story, Moses's will is to be denied, not because it
is theoretically impossible, but rather because there is some terrible flaw in
Moses's present stance: Before, at the burning bush, the will of Moses would
have meant the flow of divine will into a meeting between man and God;
now, albeit at the same place, as promised (see Exodus 3:12) — yet how dif-
ferent, Moses's will-to-God must be denied.
The question that must be asked at this point is: In the tanna's under-
standing, is the negative divine answer a result merely in the context of the
sinful golden calf? Is it that the meeting between man and G o d can no longer
take place because the event of having-sinned stands as an impediment to
the becoming of theophany? Or, rather, is there not something in the very
dialogue of "When I wanted.... Now that you want" that precludes the pos-
sibility of man and God coming together in will?
Midrashic interpretations come down to us, consistently, in very frag-
mentary and very concise forms. The only legitimate way of treating them is
by taking their historically determined literary nature seriously. That is, we
must let the so very few words really have their say, we must listen so very
intently to them: Not for the purpose of confining them to the coffin of
philological impossibilities, but rather in order to return through them to
living readings of sacred texts. In this case that means taking the lyricism and
pithiness of the words recorded in the name of R. Joshua ben Korha, their
formulation, seriously:

When I wanted, you did not want.

Now that you want, I do not want.

T h e rhythm of wanting and not wanting, not wanting and wanting, the
symmetry of the dissymmetry between the human and the divine, is stressed.
8 First Prolog

T h e inherent tragedy of a love that is to be mirrored in unrequitedness is

starkly put forward. There is a fateful inner logic here that leaves the turning
of man to God and God to man as unconsumated. It is precisely "now",
when Moses "wants", that the divine "does not want"; in the very moment
and event of Moses's wanting there is somehow embodied the calling-forth
of the divine drawing-back, just as initially it is the absence of Moses's will
alone that held back the happening of the divine will. W e are reminded of
the unrequited love of the Song of Songs. What is the meaning of this here?
The key to this midrash lies in grasping R. Joshua ben Korha's under-
standing of will in this context. For that we must turn to yet another text:

R. Joshua ben Korha says: " A n d G o d spoke [unto Moses, and said unto
him...]" (Exodus 6:2) - T h e Holy One Blessed Is H e said: Israel were not
worthy to be given manna in the desert. Rather, (they should have sojourned)
in hunger and thirst, naked and bare.3 But I complete, for them, the reward
of Abraham their father w h o stood and did before the angels, as it is said,
" A n d he (Abraham) took curd, and milk, and the calf which he
had dressed, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree,
and they did eat" (Genesis 18:8). A n d here I want (thusly) to take them out
of Egypt - and you say to M e "'... send, I pray thee, by the hand of him
4
w h o m T h o u wilt send"' (Exodus 4:13)!

The same R. Joshua ben Korha speaks here, too, about Moses's lack of will
in his naive stage — at the outset of his being called by God. But here that lack
of will is not only a lack of will-to-God: Here Moses's dearth of will is per-
ceived as encompassing a total unwillingness to the calling — not only to the
calling of leadership in the Exodus, but to the promised divine bountifulness
altogether as well. This explains, for the tanna, the verse following Moses's
attempted refusal of the call: "And the anger of the Lord was kindled against
Moses" (Exodus 4:14). Moses's lack of will is not only a denial concerning
his personal career as the leader of Israel, it becomes here a denial of the
divine calling to bountifulness for the People of Israel — Moses included. So

3 Conjuring up Ezekiel 16:7. This association implys that not only were Israel brought
into the covenant naked of desert, as in Ezekiel, and as the tanna reiterates, but also,
reading out of Ezekiel, that this was the very essence of the state in which Israel is first
loved by G o d . This state, therefore, had a logic of continuation into the sojourn of
the desert, even after the Exodus and the covenant at Sinai, if not for the bountiful-
ness of G o d towards Israel.
4 Mekhilta de-R. Simeon ben Yohai (ed. Epstein-Melamed) to Exodus 6:2 (p.5). A n d
compare Genesis Rabba to Genesis 18:4 (ed. Theodor-Albeck pp.487-488).
 T h e Crisis of Will 9

that Moses's naive lack of will-to-God is a lack of will for the promised
eudaemonism as well. 5
Will, then, in this context, is - for the tanna R. Joshua ben Korha - a
wholeness of will. Accordingly, when God "wanted", this was a will-to-Mo-
ses, to-Israel, and for a bountifulness for them as well. And when Moses "did
not want", this was a lack of a will-to-God, and of the will for Israel's well-
being that was to be worked-out in the desert. And when Moses "wanted",
this was a will-to-God as well as a desire for leadership in the reception of
God's goodness. And when God "did not want", this was a denial of that
will which is whole as a wanting - a wanting of all that which is to be
wanted: A wanting that is the hungering for eudaemonism, and a wanting
that is the hungering to God. Unlike Paul, who dissociates the will-to-"good",
to-God, from the will-to-"evil", to-"carnality", for R. Joshua ben Korha will
is, here, undissociable; it is of the whole person, it is I-want.
We can now appreciate the tragic paradox of will in R. Joshua ben Korha's
perception. The way to God is to have been through the I-want of Moses.
This is the way, but this is its impossibilty as well. The person is not a being
isolated in the atomism of thisness, a person that as such is to come to God.
Were that the case, "coming to God" would be a phantasy of stepping out-
side the bounds of I-am to the extent of threatening an undoing of the I-am
even in mere yearning. Rather, the person is, or we should say the religious
person is, an I-want-to-God just as he is an I-want-to-world (although one
must always be able to distinguish the different distances of yearning, dis-
tances whose very quality changes in giveness and the lack of it!). Man, as a
creature of will, unfolds a being-in-the-world because he is an I-want-to-
world; and by virtue of that same will he may come toward God as an I-
want-to-God. It is precisely this perception of will, the very one that was to
enable here the coming-to-God, that reveals the tragedy of man's distance
from God.
Moses in his naive, innocent state was lacking in will-to-world because
his will could not encompass the vector toward redemption in the bountiful-
ness of God in and through the world. His lack of will-to-God, then, was
part of a weakness of will altogether. When finally, in maturity, will-to-God
does develop, "now that you want", it is a flowering of I-want in the full
sense: It is also will-to-world as the desire for redemption in and through the

5 Compare the neighbouring midrashim in Mekhilta de-R. Simeon ben Yohai ibid.
(pp.4-5) where Moses's denial of his calling is viewed as impeding the impending
redemption of Israel. But only in the words of R. Joshua ben Korha is the eudaemonism
of the divine bountifulness here so manifestly stressed.
IO First Prolog

world, in the sojourn in the desert with manna from God and into the prom-
ised Land of milk and honey. It is the will of a mature leader together with
a whole people. And lo! the sin of the golden calf. '"This is thy god, O Israel,
which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt'" (Exodus 32:4 and 8). The
will-to-world, '"out of the land of Egypt'", remains, finally, without the will-
to-God. Will comes to be discredited in will-to-world; will cannot, then, be
the way-to-God.
R. Joshua ben Korha, then, recognizes will as a legitimate and major cat-
egory in the person's stance before God. Man is not atomistically isolated vis-
à-vis God, he may be an I-want-to-God. As such, the "space" between man
and God is a vector, and as a vector it is part of the very I-am-in-motion-to-
ward. So that, theoretically, the God-wanting-person can "come to God"
through will, the crossing of that space is a streching-out of man through, in
a sense, himself, through the I-toward-God: "When I wanted, you did not";
had Moses wanted, "then", he could have come to God in an event of "see-
ing". "Seeing", here, is to have meant a closening ofMoses's stance before God,
a blurring, in some sense, of the "distance" between man and God. But will
is also the will-to-world, and in the sin of the golden calf it becomes revealed
in all its virility as a vector away from God as well, ifnot moreso. Thus the tragic
paradox ofthe religious person's will is discovered. Man is to come toward God
in yearning; without yearning man is a being of thisness, lost in the seperateness
that mere I-am is. But as a yearner, man is fated into the world to which he is
drawn no less, ultimately in a vector away from God. The very same virility of
longing that is to bring the person toward God, turns him away.
One may argue whether or not will-to-world is inherently evil, thus making
will, as a way to God, inherently paradoxical. But speaking of will as after the
golden calf uncovers a specifically religious aspect of the psycho-phenom-
enology of will, definitely putting philosophical discussion into a dim back-
ground. The key notion here is the sense of having-sinned. Whether or not
the world is evil may be a speculative question. But knowledge of Rabbinic
texts and liturgy, and many bilical texts as well, can leave us with little doubt
that a major aspect of the person's standing-before-God, in these traditions,
is the sense of having-sinned.6 This is not a matter of being able to enumer-
ate and detail specific "sins"; it is a matter of the very standing before God.
It is a matter of the finite self discovering itself as standing before the Eternal,
and of reaching out through the abysmal distance of expectation thus re-
vealed. That reaching-out is, firstly, a sense of guilt; a sense that involves

6 See, for example, Deuteronomy 31:29 and 32:15-43; I Kings 8:46 (and II Chronicles
6:36); Isaiah 43:16-28; Psalms 51:7; ibid. 78; ibid. 106; and Ecclesiastes 7:20.
 The Crisis of Will II

both the perceived distance as well as the vector one feels impelled to travel
in order to cross that distance. As such it opens up the coming closer to God,
it has a positive, moving-forward effect no less than a negative one. But it is
an experience of being drawn backwards into having-sinned, in order to
then move forward. So that the first vector is "backwards", away from God.
Will-to-world, then, takes on a very definite configuration as viewed
through the glass that is the sense of having-sinned. One's very being-in-the-
world becomes ineluctably connected with the sense of having-sinned, and
the conclusion is drawn that will-to-world has of necessity led to having-
sinned. T h e point of the sin of the golden calf seems to become precisely
this: Even at the high-point of Sinai, particularly at that point, man comes
away both with the sense of having-received the Torah, a vector forward —
closer to G o d and into the future of doing, and, inescapably and simultane-
ously, with the sense of having-sinned as well, a vector backward — away
from G o d and into the past. So that in the sin of the golden calf will-to-
world has been revealed, as it were in looking back, as a having-sinned. In-
deed the breaking of the tablets of the decalogue can scarcely be seen as
having any less of a dramatic meaning than a breach in the very possibility
of the coming-together of man and God. Surely, then, N o w that you want,
I do not want, as R. Joshua ben Korha has it.
Will may indeed draw man "forward to God". But will certainly draws
man toward the world. And if one has the memory that is the sense of hav-
ing-sinned, then will-to-world can be experienced as a vector "backward",
"away from God". That memory, that sense, of having-sinned is, initially,
an opposite vector to that of the passion to rush forward to God. For the
person as I-want, the love-to-God seems to be fated to remain an unre-
quited love, as we read in the Song of Songs; or at least to remain an exhaus-
tion of dialectical energies. 7

7 This would mean that R. Joshua ben Korha's understanding of the events of the
Golden Calf makes them into an expression of a breach in the very will of man. As
such we would expect their meaning to partake of the far-reaching significance of a
Fall theology where there becomes a flaw in the very anthropology. Indeed, this aura
of a crisis of Fall is found in midrashic hermeneutics in connection with the Golden
Calf. See, for example, Mekhilta de-R Ishmael to Exodus 20:16, in the name of R.
Yose (ed. Horovitz-Rabin p.237), and Leviticus Rabba to Leviticus 15:2 (ed. Margulies
pp.406-407), where death itself was to have been undone, were it not for the Golden
Calf. And see also B T Shabbat I45b-i46a, and Yevamot 103b in the name ofR. Yohanan,
where the event of Sinai is viewed as in some way undoing the anthropological crisis
of sin initiated in the seduction by the snake of Genesis 3. Accordingly one could say
that a crisis in the event of Sinai is a crisis that echoes, at least, the ogre of the Fall.
Compare also B T Sanhedrin 102a, in the name of R. Isaac, and Shabbat 88a.
 SECOND PROLOGUE:

The Fear of Nothingness

Rav Hisda said to a certain Rabbi who used to present aggadah before him,
Did you happen to have heard - For whom did David say these fifteen
Songs of Ascents (Psalms 120-134)? He (the certain Rabbi) said to him, R.
Johanan said the following: When David dug the shittin (the cavities, under
the altar inside the temple, into which the libations drained) the subterra-
nean waters welled up and threatened to flood the world. David (then) said
the fifteen Songs of Ascents and (thereby) brought them (the waters) back
down. If that is the case, (then instead of) fifteen Songs of Ascents they
should be (called Songs of) Descents! He (the certain Rabbi) said to him (to
Rav Hisda), Now that you remind me, this is the way it was said: When
David dug the shittin the subterranean waters welled up and threatened to
flood the world. David said, Is there anyone who knows whether it is
permissible to write the (divine) name on a potsherd which we will then
throw into the subterranean waters where it will settle down (and prevent
the waters from welling up)? Nobody answered him. David said, Anyone
who knows an answer yet is silent should choke! Ahithophel said, If, ac-
cording to the To rah, (God said) My name that is written in holiness should
be erased on the water (that is to be drunk by a Sotah, a wife suspected of
faithlessness <see Numbers 5:i2-3i>) in order to make peace between a man
and his wife (the immediate result of the ritual described in ibid, was to be
the coming-together of the man and wife in a desire for a son - see verse 28),
then how much moreso (should it be permissible to use the divine name)
in order to bring peacefulness to the entire world. He (Ahithophel) said to
him (David), It is permissible. He (David) wrote the (divine) name on a
potsherd and threw it into the subterranean waters, and the waters went
down to a depth of sixteen thousand cubits. Upon seeing that they (the
waters) had gone down so low he (David) said, The closer they (the waters)
are to the surface the better the world's irrigation. He (David) then said the
fifteen Songs of Ascents and (thereby) brought them (the waters) fifteen
thousand cubits closer to the surface; and he set them at a depth of one
thousand cubits.

(BT Sukkah 53 a + b)

When David began digging the foundations of the temple he dug to a depth
of fifteen hundred cubits yet did not reach the subterranean waters. And
 The Fear of Nothingness 13

finally he come upon an earthen pot and wanted to lift it (and move it
aside). It said to him, You cannot. He said to it, Why? It said to him, Because
I am permanently set here over (the entrance of) the subterranean waters.
He said to it, And since when are you here? It said to him, When God made
His voice heard at Sinai, (saying,) "I am the Lord thy God" (Exodus 20 : 2),
the earth quaked and began dropping down (into the subterranean waters);
and (from that time on) I am placed here, permanently set over (the en-
trance of) the subterranean waters. Nevertheless David did not head its words.
When he lifted it, the subterranean waters welled up and threatened to
flood the world. And Ahithophel was standing there. He said (to himself),
David will surely choke (through drowning) and then I will rule. David said,
Whoever is wise enough to know how to still them (the waters) yet does not
still them - he should choke to death. He (Ahithophel) said something and
(thereby) stilled them (the waters). David began saying a song of praise, "A
Song of Ascents" (Psalms 120 :1) - A song of one hundred ascendings: For
every one hundred cubits (that increasingly seperated the surface of the earth
from the subterranean waters, David) would say a song of praise. Neverthe-
less he (Ahithophel) choked to death.1
1
(PT Sanhedrin 10:2 <29 a>)

1 See II Samuel 17 : 23.

2 Quoted in Yalkut Simeoni to II Samuel 6 : 7 + 8 (no. 142). A third version is found
in Midrash Samuel 26 (ed. Buber p. 63a, quoted partially in Yalkut Simeoni to II
Samuel 7 : 5). In the latter version the central moment of threateningness is not clearly
identified. Like in PT, the digging of the temple foundations by David seems to be only
the secondary occasion for crisis, but, unlike PT, the moment of Sinai is not openly
recalled: "When the earth was broken up I (the potsherd) came down to here... behold
the subterranean waters are placed beneath me." This recalls, rather, the flood in Genesis
7, "... on the same day were all the foundations of the great deep broken up ..." (verse
11 - the Hebrew word OTTO! "deep" (JPS translation) or "subterranean waters", as well
as the verb "break up", are used in Midrash Samuel, as in the biblical verse.)
Accordingly the purpose of the "potsherd" would be the overcoming of the Genesis
flood. All of these versions thus connect us back to the original threat to the world, as
the Bible describes it - even if BT and PT do not openly mention the original flood
it is highly improbable that they could have meant to ignore this obvious conjuring-
up which in th e.Midrash Samuel seems to be more clearly articulated. PT, then, intends
to perceive the revelation of "I am the Lord thy God" at Sinai as another meta-histori-
cal moment of the same threateningness, while for BT this second moment is incar-
nated in the founding of the temple in Jerusalem. Whatever the historical relationship
between the three versions is, the intention of the PT and BT versions is unmistakable
— they both come into their final literary crystalization within a similar theological
framework. Rashito BT Sukkah 53b (top) writes that accordimg to "Aggadath de-Sefer
Samuel"the "potsherd" was in place "from the six days of Creation". Accordingly the
precariousness of the world is incipient in its very creation. Again we return to a meta-
historical, mythological moment that defines the essence of worldly ontology - for
Rashi's text this is even more dramatic than in the other versions.
H Second Prolog

W e have here three versions of the same motif, two Babylonian versions —
a shorter one and a longer one, and a Palestinian one.
In the first Babylonian version the motif s structure is set out clearly and
succinctly: There are three poles; the orderly world, the devistating flood
that would leave nought but chaos, and the center of gravity around which
these opposites fling in a terrifying tension. Neither the orderly world nor its
opposite are stable, even the world as it is is not to be taken for granted. In
the first version it is the event of the Temple's becoming that ultimately gives
structure to this vast tension of opposites. But this is not merely structure -
a placing of the existing order as endangered by, yet victorious over, the
encroaching chaos; it is also a structure of meaning, a meaning that reveals
the structure as more immediate and fragile than might have been supposed.
T h e fact that it is the event of the Temple's becoming, its grounding in the
depths of the earth, that unleashes the chaotic power of the subterranean
waters - thereby threatening to return the world to the dark womb of not-
having-become — means that nothingness opens up precisely at the point of
the grounding of divinity: Before the House of G o d began to emerge into
reality, all was still, the given worldly order unmoved; only now that the
earthly depths are plumbed for a penetration that would be the founding of
a divine placement in the material of the world is the reality of existence
revealed to be an uncompromising clash between order and chaos, between
being and destruction. It is the very specter of divine presence in the world
that sets the terrible question mark to that world's existence; it is the coming-
nigh of the Creator that opens up the world to a primordial Flood, to an
imminance of being not yet created. And because the moment of threatening-
ness is one whose essence is of metaphysical ladenness, its threateningness is
an energy that shoots through all the religious yearnings. The "victory" of
the worldly order is not a final one: So long as the striving-toward the ground-
ing of the divine in the worldly is dynamic, the threat of chaos, of nothing-
ness, is real. The grounding of the Temple is ever fraught with danger: The
moment of primordial crisis is as contemporary as man's reaching-out to
G o d is vital. Or, put phenomenologically: The ogre of non-creation that
becomes implicit in the theology of creation itself is, for man the creature,
in this lexocography of fear, the ogre of not-being, the ogre of nothingness;
epitomized precisely in the moments of divine realization-yearning; always
a moment of the present.

This is the meaning of this hermeneutics of Psalms 120-134. I t ' s the

saying by David of the fifteen Songs of Ascents that calls the existence of the
worldly order out of chaos. This is the meaning of the psalms; because when
religious man prays the psalms he is calling deliverance out of destruction.
 The Fear of Nothingness IS

Or, placing this perception of the Rabbinic hermeneutics — as being the

meaning of the psalms as prayers - within our entire structure: It is the very
moment of being-before-God that opens up the fear of nothingness; just as
it is this very moment that opens up the being-at-peace. But we will have to
await the completion of our journey before this perception can become more
meaningful.
The first Babylonian version derives the immediate conviction of its read-
ing in Psalms 122, 124, 127, 132, and 134, and carries their theme over to a
frame for Psalms 120-134. Psalms 122 opens with: "A Song of Ascents; of
David. I rejoiced when they said unto me: 'Let us go unto the house of the
Lord'" (verse 1). In this psalm desire for the Temple is placed within a prayer
"for the peace of Jerusalem" (verse 6). In the context of our midrash this is
to give expression to David's desire to build the Temple, as well as to connect
that building with a wider fragility of peacefulness and its opposite. In Psalms
132 David's yearning to "find out a place for the Lord, A dwelling-place for
the Mighty One of Jacob" (verse 5) upsets his own at-homeness and restful-
ness into a breathless uneasiness that can settle down only in the "settling-
down" of G o d Himself (see verses 2-5). T w o poles are thus already made
available for our midrash - restfulness and restlessness. But the author of our
midrash denies the comfortable solution of this tension into a sequence where
peacefulness is epitomized in the building of the Temple; rather, the latter
brings the tension itself to a head, and the Temple as metaphore, as prayer
— in this case the praying of the 15 psalms — becomes a limbo of restfulness
that is ever delivered out of restlessness, never a coming-home that relin-
quishes the need for hope and yearning. In stressing the content of these
psalms as part of a story in the personal biography of "David" the psalms are
opened up (or kept open) for a reading that wells up out of other personal
confrontations with the theme of home and homelessness, of restfulness and
chaos. T h e complexity of unresolved tensions, indeed of tensions that ex-
plode in the very being-before-god, that now shoots through the 15 psalms,
makes these prayers available to religious man in the richness of mature, and
saddened, experience.
Psalms 127, in its first half, speaks about the futility of all perseverance
save that sustained by God. In the context of our midrash this makes the
tension of uneasiness much sharper: Building-up and stability are real only
with God, "It is vain for you that ye rise early, and sit up late, Ye that eat the
bread of toil" (verse 2) - toil is unto life by the grace of God alone; but, in
our story, the concretization of God-in-the-world itself is no less an occassion
for the confrontation with the antithesis of human toil — chaos. And verse 1
of the psalm, "Except the Lord build the house, They labour in vain that
i6 Second Prolog

build it; Except the Lord keep the city, The watchmen waketh but in vain",
by echoing, in our midrash, the fragility of the building of the house, the
Temple, in the city, Jerusalem, comes to underline our theme's paradox:
The uniqueness of the house sets its looming massivity in question, how
much more is every house to be perceived as swaying in the uniqueness of
being that would be before God.
The pole of chaos, as our midrash focuses on these fifteen psalms, is
perceived in Psalms 124:

If it had not been the Lord who was for us,

W h e n men rose up against us,
T h e n they had swallowed us up alive,
W h e n their wrath was kindled against us;
T h e n the waters had overwhelmed us,
T h e stream had gone over our soul;
Then the proud waters
Had gone over our soul.

(verses 2-5)

The threat of nothingness is a total one, a being "swallowed-up", a flood, a

primordial flood, we must add, in the context of our midrash. And in the
chanting of the fifteen psalms as they are now orchestrated, this threatening-
ness becomes a tone of dread that is somehow implicit in the standing in the
Temple; "Behold, bless ye the Lord, all ye servants of the Lord, That stand
in the house of the Lord in the night seasons (literally, "in the nights")": It
is in the darkness of the night that the "servants of the Lord" become so
special in their blessing of the Lord; it is the contrast between dark dread and
praising that makes the assurance of order into so clear a prayer. And, again
in the context of our midrash, dread and the standing before God are so
connected because each is an energy that strains toward the other.
In our midrash "David" is the center of the dramatic struggle. He leads
the digging of the Temple's foundations, he perceives most acutely the dan-
ger of destruction, and he acts out the calming of the primordial flood wa-
ters. I take this as an opening-up of the perceived meaning of the fifteen
psalms into a personal reading by each man or woman in suffering or fear.
It is difficult to overlook the fact that a large part of the content of these
psalms is indeed a personal one:

In my distress I called unto the Lord,

A n d H e answered me.

(Psalms 120 : 1)
 T h e Fear of Nothingness 17

I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains;

From whence shall m y help come?

(121 : 1 - 2 )

Unto T h e e I lift up mine eyes,

0 T h o u that art enthroned in the heavans.

(123 : 1)

O u t of the depths have I called Thee, O Lord.

Lord, hearken unto m y voice;
Let Thine ears be attentive
T o the voice of m y supplications.
1 wait for the Lord, m y soul doth wait,
A n d in His word do I hope.
M y soul waiteth for the Lord,
M o r e than watchmen for the morning;
Yea, more than watchmen for the morning.

(130 : 1-2 and 5-6)

Lord, m y heart is not haughty,

nor mine eyes lofty;
Neither do I exercise myself in things too great,
or in things too wonderful for me.

(131 : I)

The lonely man of prayer is a David in the poetry with which his yearning
for G o d wells up out of his depths; and David who dreads and stills is the
lonely man of prayer who is a quivering knight of God.
T h e second Babylonian version seems to be an overweaving of the first.
In this re-working the titles of the fifteen psalms, "A Song of Ascents" deter-
mines the structure of the midrashic story. But this is not merely a re-instru-
mentation of the older story. In the second version the seeming disharmony
of the first is hightened. Not only is the founding of God's Temple in the
depths of the earth the occasion for existential trembling; the name of God
that is written down upon a sherd and cast into the deep, thereby rolling
back the frenzied flood, is the very same name that brings the world unto
another un-becoming — it causes the wetness of the earth to recede so far as
to threaten all fruitfulness: The fear of G o d is a founding of order just as
much as it is a terror of never becoming. Only the psalms, with their ever-
present tension of dread and hope, are a structure of being-in-the-world
where nothingness and fruitfulness are balanced in a standing before God; a
balance that keeps both the surge of waters and the turning back into not-
becoming at bay, yet always looming and swaying.
i8 Second Prolog

In the Palestinian version the starkness of the trembling of being is un-

mistakable. The threat of the subterranean waters is even more than a recall
of the Flood of Noah: The earth itself quakes, its total solidity threatens to
crumble in an unbecoming into the pre-creation state, before "And God
said: 'Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place,
and let the dry land appear"' (Genesis 1:9): All differentiation can be un-
done, as this version has it, "the earth quaked and began dropping down"
into the emptiness of the waters - at the moment of "Sinai". And when
David founds the House of God the primordial fragility of the world threat-
ens to become a reality where being is no longer possible; the threat of the
subterranean waters wells up in the setting aside of the "earthen pot" that
delicately and with fragility holds off the quaking of "Sinai" - the threat of
the waters is a threat of the primordial moment, and afterwards only the
mythical event of new Creation could present a world of being and order.
The nowness of the primordial dread is revealed in the striving of "David".
The knowledge of the keeping intact of worldly being remains a mystery in
the ambivalent person of "Ahitophel". It is the praying of the "fifteen Songs
of Ascents" that is a being-in-the-present in the awe before the dread and
wonder of the still-retained precariousness of being-in-the-world.
In the Palestinian version we can clearly see that in the matrix that nour-
ishes all three versions the central moment of the confrontation with total
undoing is the very same moment of confrontation with God — in the com-
ing-near to Him. In the Babylonian versions this emerges in the founding of
the "house of God". In the Palestinian version the primordial moment of
dread is the revelation of "I am the Lord thy God" — at Sinai, that is, in the
force of this revelation as a vast beginning yet an undeniable truth for always:
A nowness that takes one's breath away in an almost inability to confront
that nowness as a reality outside the memory of mythfulness. In the revela-
tion of "I am the Lord thy God" all "amness" is called into question; it is the
very appearance of the Creator — as a knowledge for man that He "is" — that
sets the creation on the abyss of not-being. "God is" and "The world is"
span a polarity of that creatureliness which trembles precariously on the
chasm of opposites: The creatureliness of human "amness" - which is, for
man, after all, the sole unmediated source of the category of "being" in
general — which "is", yet can also "not-be".
 PART I

R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon ben Yohai and his Wife

Or:
The Body of this Death
 i. Psalms 104:

Psalm 104 is a hymn to the world as cosmos; but within a very specific theo-
logical frame. Verse 1 that proclaims,

...Thou art very great; Thou art clothed with

glory and majesty

is not merely an outer, poetic structure introducing the psalm. Rather, it

belongs to the contextual structure of the psalm and sets its unfolding as well
as its basic idea. It is no accident that the psalm begins with the praise of God
and concludes penultimately with,

Let sinners cease out of the earth,

And let the wicked be no more (Verse 35a).

Thus the psalm runs the gamut from the Most High, through His creation,
down to those who the poet would have left out of the scheme of things
altogether. This opens up the picture of the psalm's unfolding structure.
Verse 2 proceeds from the "glory and majesty" with which God is "clothed"
in verse 1, to the "light" with which He "covers" Himself "as with a gar-
ment". There is an undeniable hierarchy here from God, to "clothing" — in
two steps, to "light", a hierarchy that one is tempted to view as one of
"emenations", of continuously lower manifestations of divine unfolding.
The theological explosiveness of this temptation was no secret to the Rabbis
who, however, did not hesitate (some, at least) to follow its energy, fully
aware of the dangers:

R. Simeon ben Yehozadak asked R. Samuel ben R. Nahinan, saying to him:

Since I have heard that you deal with aggadah (I will ask you) - From where
was the light created? He (R. Samuel ben R. Nahinan) said: The Holy One
Blessed Is He wrapped Himself in it (the light) as in a garment and the glow
22 Parti

of His, 1 majesty1 shone from one end of the world to the other.3 He ( R.
Samuel) said (this) to him in a whisper. He (R. Simeon ben Yehozadak) said
to him: It is a verse in Scripture, "Who coverest thyself with light as with a
garment" (Psalms 104:2), and you say it in a whisper, why? He (R. Samuel)
said: Just as I heard it told in a whisper, so I told it to you in a whisper.
4
(Bereshit Rabba to Genenis 1:3, pp.19-20)

Although, in this midrash, there is no hint that the light was not itself a
creation by God, it becomes finally an actuality which bridges the gap be-
tween, on the one side, the eternal and nothingness and, on the other side,
the shinning of which the world can partake.5 This is a theologically danger-
ous direction because it opens up to thoughts of "partnership" with God in
the creation, and that is why its Rabbinic promulgators "whispered" it: Per-
haps they were more willing to confront the complexities of a notion such
as creation, combining as it does such disasterous oppositions, unlike those
who would anounce dogmas without appreciating their implications.
Whether we follow this temptation or not, its recognition helps to open
up the structure of Psalms 104. This is not a hymn to the world, it is a hymn
to the structure, to the Order which is God-world-man-world-God. The
psalmist descends, as it were, from the Creator, through the light, to the
heavens (verses 2-3), to the layer of air, the atmosphere (verses 3-4), to the
earth (verses 5 and onwards), and into the watery depths (verses 6-13). Then
follows the creation of vegetation and the animals and man: Man playing a
central role but not seperated from the frame of creation as a whole. There
is an overriding sense of the individual parts, including man, as part of the

1 It is not certain whether the subject here is the "majesty" of God or of the "light".
I have opted for the former based on the reading that seems to be echoed in the
feminine form of the pronoun here, which then refers back to the feminine form of
m i « , light, see variants in ed. Theodor-Albeck.
2 "Glory" might be the more auspiciously chosen word here but I wanted to keep
abreast of the JPS translation of the same word in the Psalms.
3 See Theodor's interpretation here, according to which the question is not how the
light was created, but whence. This would imply that already the questioner was
aware of the problematics of the interpretation offered here and that his question is
not a mere quest for information but rather more for confirmation of a particular
direction of thought. This is borne out by his ready quotation of Psalms 104.
4 See also the contextual material.
5 Compare Philo, On The Creation of the World, VIII.
 Eleazar ben R. Simeon ben Yohai and his W i f e O r : T h e Body of this Death 23

wholeness of Order; an Order expressed in the rule of the heavenly bodies

(verses 1 9 - 2 3 ) within which man himself is to order his life,

T h e sun ariseth, ...

M a n goes forth unto his work

A n d to his labour until the evening.
(Verses 22-23).

In verse 29, the psalmist stresses again that his theme is not the world but
rather the world within the order that descends from God toward the noth-
ingness that yet lurks behind, or beyond, before and after, the Creation:

T h o u hidest T h y face, they vanish;

T h o u withdrawest their breath, they perish,
A n d return to dust.

In verse 31 the circle is completed:

M a y the glory of the Lord endure for ever;

Let the Lord rejoice in His works!

The psalmist rejoices in God Who in turn rejoices in His world. The point
is neither the eternity of God without reference to the world, nor of the glory
of Nature without God. The point is a moral one, namely, that reality is an
order that encompasses ever so much, but one which nevertheless should not
legitimize evildoers;

Let sinners cease out of the earth,

A n d let the wicked be no more (Verse 35).

In an ever so biblical vane the psalmist could never say that evil "does not
exist"; it exists surely and, in keeping with a piety that so marks a large part
of the book of Psalms, the yearning that is prayer preempts any temptation
to thoughts of theodicy. Psalms 104 is indeed a wholeness without blindness
— when read as a whole, that is.
M Parti

1.2. "Tell Him to make me a spindle":

T h e complexity to whose opening-up Psalms 104, within a developing the-

ology, gives expression finds a metaphore befitting its darkness in the follow-
ing story:

Caesar's daughter said to R. Joshua ben Hananiah: Your God is a carpenter,

as is written in Scripture, "Who layest the beams of thine upper chambers
in the waters" (Psalms 104:3); Tell Him to make me a spindle. He (R. Joshua)
said (to her): Okay. He prayed for her and she was stricken with leprosy. 6
She was (then) seated in the market-place of Rome and was given a spindel. 7
For it was the custom that whoever was stricken with leprosy in Rome was
given a spindel with which he sat in the market-place and unraveled tangled
yarn, in order that people should see and pray for him. One day he (R.
Joshua) was passing there. She (Caesar's daughter) was sitting and unraveling
yarn in the market-place of the Romans. She said to him: Tell your God to
take what He gave me. He said to her: Our God gives, He does not take.

(.Hullin 60a)

"Caesar's daughter", offspring of the summit of imperial power and order,

reads Psalms 104 in character: G o d is praised as the "carpenter" of the world,
as the one responsible for its manifest power and order. Put differently, the
searching-out of God's manifestation is from "below", through the percep-
tion of, and awe at, the universe as met by confronting it in its giveness. G o d
"is a carpenter", the simply materialistic, given configuration of things re-
veals His nature. Psalms 104 would then be a song of praise by one enam-
oured by the artifacticity of the world, and "Caesar's daughter" thus de-
mands, sarcastically, that this "carpenter" indeed do what is so expected of
him, in the small and undemanding fashion of producing a simple wooden

P e g-
T h e "spindle" here becomes a symbol that opens up in two different
directions. For "Caesar's daughter" it bespeaks technology, that of its own

6 The root yiJ here means literally "stricken (with a sort of plague)". It is extremely
common for the verb to he used in Rabbinic Hebrew as a synonym for leprosy, and
that certainly fits the context here best.
7 The root "IT10 means to "undo", or more specifically - in this context - to "unravel".
Compare M Sotah 1:5, "... and he undoes her hair", that is, the priest undoes the
wayward-wife's hairdo. I have, therefore, translated the Aramaic noun formation
here as "spindel" in keeping with the sense of the continuation: The "spindel" here
is to be used as a peg on which "Caesar's daughter" is to unravel the "tangled yarn".
 Eleazar ben R. Simeon ben Yohai and his Wife Or:The Body of this Death 25

manufacture as well as its part in generating the manufacture of clothing, of

material production in general, perhaps even of fertility. But through R.
Joshua's prayer the spindel opens up to a far more convoluted symbolism,
even to a sinister symbolism: The "spindle" conjures up a sense of fate, as
Clotho, sister of Atropos and Lactesis, the three Fates "who give men all
good and bad", 8 holds the spindle of the thread of life that is measured and
cut by her two sisters.9 N o w the ruler's daughter is herself exiled from the
world of power and order, to sit by in the homeless flux and motion of the
tumultuous Roman market-place. Here she is to endlessly unravel the
unravable thread that is fated to her, to the horror of the passers-by who can
only pray for her. From the vantage point of the market place, always view-
ing people in their passing-by and in the outwardness and fleetingness of
their dealings, momentary montages of multiplicity rather than the warmth
and security of home, the outerness and aura of the world strike her in their
crumbling complexity. The world is not a cosmos, but a labrynth whose end
cannot be fathomed — as the yarn is never finished. Unraveling the thread
becomes an increasingly loaded spindel with never more order in the endless
skeins. In unraveling her own fate into leprosy and exile, anything but an
unraveling, "Caesar's daughter" is seen by R. Joshua as confronting a G o d
whose creation of the world can be praised in a paean to an artifactual, mani-
fest order and harmony only by those who are not exiled out-into it. The girl
may yet ask the Rabbi to pray for this terrible embodiment of knowledge to
be taken away from her; but R. Joshua knows that his God "gives, but does
not take". T h e dizzying descent from God into the labrynth of creation and
the dark, impenetrable nets of fate is a drawing-into a vast reality that is so
complex as to make it anti-thetical to anything divorced from it, any "world
of ideas", any Order that exists by itself. " G o d gives", man is indeed thrust
into being-in-the-world by the fate of God; but for man there is no "taking-
back", that would be a vector which man can never fathom, it would be
infinitely more unthinkable than Orpheus gazing back beyond death.
So it is that Psalms 104 is read as a paean to anything but the world, or
but to the world as Cosmos. Nor is it any longer a hymn to God as the
creator of the cosmos, of Order. Rather it has become a prayer with which
man, in his labrynthal exile, lost in the convolutions of a world whose order-
become-fate may be confronted in sickness and suffering, yearns to God in

8 Hesiod, Theogony, 904.

9 Virgil, Aeneid, X:8i4.
26 Parti

a fathoming, not a fathoming through the world which is impenetrable to

returning to God, but rather a fathoming that is prayer: Psalms 104 has
become a calling-out-of-the depths, an authentic prayer, in this Rabbinic
religiosity, quite a different melody from its origin as a paean.
Nevertheless, this rechanting of Psalms 104 has its seeds in the biblical
psalm. In both, the world is not merely the world that is an artifact of a
"carpenter", in both the Order of the world (in the Bible) or its labrynthal
nature (R. Joshua) make it into something that cannot be spoken of merely
in its artifactual giveness. For both, God is an inseperable part of the psalm:
In the biblical version because the world's Order is always a fathoming back
to the creator; and for the Rabbi because the pain of man-in-the-world is not
mere madness, man can always pray to God in the darkest labyrinth. R.
Joshua's reading of Psalms 104 is grounded in a profound perception of the
psalm's complexity, of the impossible questions its exuberance raises, and
unfolds out of the biblical chant nonetheless, though its coming-home could
never be repeated in a merely biblical translation of the psalm itself.

1.3. Order and Halakha-.

The Rabbinic readings of Psalms 104 are not monolithic and static. One can
detect the tensions which the psalm opens up already in itself in the different
directions in which Rabbinic readings go. An attraction towards deciding
those tensions by allowing the psalm's energies to concentrate on the order
of the things of the world rather than on the autism of that order, a return
to the psalm as a paean, finds an expression in the following:

Resh Lakish said: A day laborer returns home at the expense of his own time
(i.e. he must not leave his work before sunset if he wants his full payment);
while he begins work at the expense of his employer's time (i.e. he need not
set out from home before dawn, no matter how long the way to work takes),
as Scripture says, "the sun ariseth, they slink away, and couch in their dens.
Man goeth forth unto his work And to his labour until the evening" (Psalms
104: 22-23).
(Bava Mezia 83 a-b)

The divine Order needs halakha (Law) in order to make that order manifest.
But when men do follow the Law, they can be once again in harmony within
the created world described in Psalms 104 and whose creator the psalm there
praises.
 Eleazar ben R. Simeon ben Yohai and his Wife Or:The Body of this Death 27

1.4. Darkness and Order:

Resh Lakish might be following out the temptation of a halakhacism that

sees the Law as an ordering of the world. But a reading that brings us much
closer to that embedded in the story of R. Joshua ben Hananiah, that is
probably grounded in the genius released in the illumination that is that
dark story, would be the following:

R. Zeira taught publicly, and some say that Rav Joseph repeated (as a
baraitha): What is the meaning of that which is written in Scripture, "Thou
makest darkness, and it is night, wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep
forth. [The young lions roar after their prey, And seek their food from God.
The sun ariseth, they slink away, And couch in their dens. Man goeth forth
unto his work And to his labour until the evening]" (Psalm 104: 20-23)?
"Thou makest darkness, and it is night" - this is this world which is night. 1 0
"Wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep forth" - these are the evil
persons in it (this world) who are like "the beasts" that are "in the forest."
"The sun ariseth, they slink away, And couch in their dens" — the sun will
rise for the righteous, the evil persons will be taken away to hell. "And
couch in their dens" — there is no righteous man who does not have a place
(in the coming-world) to himself. 1 1 "Man goeth forth unto his work" - the
righteous will go forth to receive their reward." "And to his labour until the
evening" - he who has completed his labour until the evening.

(Bava Mezia 83b)

Here the biblical paen to the Creator of the Cosmos and the sinister story
about R. Joshua ben Hannania meet in a circle circumbscribed by this read-
ing of Psalms 104. There is indeed an Order, whose Author can be praised
indeed. But the tensions elicited by contemplation of the psalm have be-
come, in the passage of history, far too powerful to be contained within a
this-worldly Order. H o w the energies involved explode, does the this-world
itself explode, what are the vectors of the blast — inward and outward, these
are very complex and far-reaching questions. W e will follow out a particular,
convoluted unfolding of readings of Psalms 104, readings that will be discov-

10 I have preferred the reading of MS Florence. The alternative reading, "which is like
the night", is probably influenced by Pesahim 2b (on Psalms 139), or Hagigah 12b and
Avodah Zarah 3b (in the name of Resh Lakish, on Psalms 42), as well as by the
following sentence.
11 Following MS Florence and Hamburg, and others (see DDS). The alternative read-
ing, "befitting himself', is influenced by Shabbat 152a (in the name of R. Isaac, on
Ecclesiastes 12:5).
28 Parti

ered to us as a phenomenological hermeneutics, that is, a hermeneutics that

reveals itself as embodied in a biography as told in tradition, perhaps even as
a hermeneutics that happens in that biography - a biography that is thus
itself an interpretation o f Scripture; perhaps not a hermeneutics o f Psalms
104 in particular, but o f the tensions whose threatened explosion is hidden
by singing the psalm as a paean with too m u c h enthusiasm, tensions that
become in the variegated revelations that constitute the Bible itself. T h i s will
be an organic unfolding grounded in what I have discussed concerning the
psalm and its interpretation: A n unfolding pieced together from fragments,
but organic nevertheless, descernable in its o w n inner logic that justifies
tradition's telling o f it as embodied in the "biography" o f a single m a n - R.
Eleazar ben R. Simeon ben Yohai.

2. The Hermeneutical Biography of R. Eleazar ben R.

Simeon ben Yohai:

2.1. R. Eleazar and Psalms 10:

R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon (ben Yohai) met a certain official who was arrest-
ing thieves. He (R. Eleazar) said to him: How are you up to (finding) them?
Are they (the thieves) not compared to animals, as is written in Scripture,
"[Thou makest darkness, and it is night,] wherein all the beasts of the forest
do creep forth" (Psalms 104:20) (i.e. how can one find those whose activities
are hidden by the night)? Some say that he (R. Eleazar) quoted rather the
following verse: "He lieth in wait in a secret place as a lion in his lair"
(Psalms 10:9). Perhaps you are taking in the righteous and leaving the evil?

(Bava Mezia 83b)

R. Eleazar's reading o f Psalms 104, while grasping the psalm's order as hap-
pening within a this-worldly creation, is nevertheless not a perception o f
C o s m o s . M a n is indeed part and parcle o f the divine system o f things about
w h i c h the psalmist sings; but man is so deeply a part o f it that humanity and
animality become entwined in the darkness o f the night. In the alternative
text quoted the tanna's perception emerges in another light. Psalms 10 is not
a paean concerning Order:

Why standest Thou afar off, O Lord?

Why hidest Thou Thyself in times of trouble?
Through the pride of the wicked the poor is hotly pursued,
They are taken in the devices that they have imagined.
(verses 1-2)
 Eleazar ben R. Simeon ben Yohai and his W i f e O r : T h e Body of this Death 29

T h e wicked, in the pride of his countenance

<saith>: " H e will not require";
All his thoughts are: "There is no G o d . "

(verse 4)

H e lieth in wait in a secret place as a lion in his lair,

H e lieth in wait to catch the poor;
H e doth catch the poor, when he draweth him up in his net.

(verse 9)

H e hath said in his heart: " G o d hath forgotten:

H e hideth His face; H e will never see."

(verse n )

This is a psalm that while upholding the belief that G o d can and should
author the unfolding of His Order in the world of humans, at the same time
gives expression to the blasphemous reaction that surely this world passes
under the hidden face of the Lord! The psalmist is very careful to put this
thought in the mouth of the evil; but the poet's exclamation at the outset,
"Why standest T h o u afar off, O Lord? Why hidest Thou Thyself in times
of trouble?" leaves no doubt as to his perception of the emptiness out of
which the evil person's boastfulness emerges.
In the context of the story about R. Eleazar, as we shall see, the tanna's
reading of Psalms 10 is nevertheless taken as a conviction that the divine
Order can be, in some way, at last partially restored in the world. In the
context of the story this becomes actually an apology for his behaviour, his
actions are seen as grounded in the same pain with which the psalmist cries
out for G o d to intervene in the world. It also means, as we shall see, a belief
that the Romans could be partners to that order, which returns us, perhaps,
to a more optimistic reading of Psalms 104. In anycase the opposition of the
two different scriptural quotations in talmudic tradition makes each alterna-
tive tradition of quotation into an interpretation of the other; and this is
made more probable by the similarity of the immediate contexts of the two
quotations. 1 2

12 T h e verse referred to from Psalms 104 is followed by, " T h e young lions roar after
their prey, A n d seek their food from G o d "(verse 21), T h e verse quoted from Psalms
10 speaks of a "lion" "who lieth in wait" (verse 9). It is therefore probable that one
tradition consciously replaces the other. T h e one according to which Psalms 10 is
being quoted is more apologetic and is thus the likely candidate for having replaced
the other, thus earlier, tradition.
 Parti
3°

Psalms 10 would then be "saying" of Psalms 104: An Order yes, but a

prayer nonetheless. The unsatisfied expections-become-tensions that arise
through Psalms 104 are perceived as undeniable. This does not contradict
the reading attributed to R. Eleazar according to which in Psalms 104 crea-
tion is so shot through with the fact of man's being thrust into it, or one
should say of not being able to escape it, that man and animal are sometimes
inseperable; Divine Order indeed! - the divine scheme has perhaps succeeded
too much? Or, as the evil would say, or as the psalmist would have them say,
be does not say it himself, ' " G o d hath forgotten'" (verse 11).

2.2. The Body of R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon ben Yohai:

T h e "biography" of R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon partakes of a very physical

aspect, as in the following:

Some donkey drivers passed through the town where R. Eleazar ben R Simeon
lived. They wanted to buy some things, when they saw him (R. Eleazar)
sitting by the oven. His mother kept on taking (bread) out (of the oven) and
he kept on eating, until he had eaten the entire dough (which she had pre-
pared). They (the donkey-drivers) said: Unfortunately this fellow has a
bad snake sitting in his bowels! He (R. Eleazar) heard their voices.... He
took their donkeys and carried them up to the roof. ... When he carried
them back down (at his father's behest) he carried them two at a time.

(Pesikta de-Rav Kahana, be-Shalah <ed. Mandelbaum pp.i94-i95>).

It is also related that R. Eleazar visited his father-in-law who prepared for
him a huge meal. When R. Eleazar unhesitatingly drained glass after glass of
the wine which his father-in-law poured from a barrel especially opened for
the occassion, the older man asked the younger laconically if he had heard
from his father R. Simeon ben Yohai what was the minimum size of a cup
for ritual purposes. The younger man repeated what he had heard from his
father, and added:

But the Rabbis did not take your cup, which is small, or your wine, which
is fine, or my belly, which is broad, into consideration.

(Pesikta de-Rav Kahana ibid. p.195-196).

And in a passage in the Bavli where R. Eleazar's huge physicality is unmis-

takably a part of the unfolding hermeneutics of his "biography", as we shall
see later, it is told:
 Eleazar ben R. Simeon ben Yohai and his Wife Or:The Body of this Death 31

When R. Ishmael ben R. Yose and R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon would stand
face to face, some oxen could pass between them (under their bellies) with-
out touching them.

(BT Bava Mezia 84a)

So we have R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon ben Yohai very much -in-the-world.

This sets the stage for the continued unfolding of his "biography" here:

He (the official) said to him: And what should I do, this is a royal order? He
(R. Eleazar) said to him: Come I will teach you what you should do. G o into
a tavern during the late morning. When you see somebody dozing with a
cup ofwine in his hand, inquire about him. Ifhe is a student of the Rabbis,
he has fallen asleep because he rose very early in order to study. If he is a
laborer, he rose early to work. And if his work is at night, (then if he is a
metal worker, for example) he (perhaps) has been doing fine work (so that
if even if his neighbors did not hear him at night it is no sign that he was
busy elsewhere). But if not (if none of these is the case), then he is (only
keeping himself by being a) thief and you should arrest him. The story came
to the attention of the authorities who said: Let the author of the idea be its
executor! R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon was drafted and he proceeded to arrest
thieves.

(Bava Mezia 83b)

R. Eleazar's scheme for identifying society's misfits may indeed be an inter-

esting reading of Psalms 104: T h e divine Order which places man so deeply
in the world may perhaps become muddled in an inability to distinguish,
sometimes, between humans and animals; but it is up to man himself, pre-
cisely because he is so steeped in that scheme of things, to nevertheless per-
ceive the order that is becoming ever dimmer and to restore its manifestation
and efficacy. T h e realm of society, as wilful as people might be, is yet a
network of structures that are grounded in the fact that creation is to be an
Order. One may have to be a kden observer in order to spy this out, but
finally even the slothful give evidence of an orderlines that they are ever
forgetting and they doze over their wine together with the student of the
Rabbis w h o gives evidence of an upside-down order, a mirror-image of the
everyday order. Indeed R. Eleazar's fascination with this searching for an in-
the-world order shows how much he himself is part of that being-in-the-
world; and he is so much a part of the wholeness of that world that even to
the Romans he can be partner in a social togetherness; and finally he is so
drawn into things that he himself becomes an executor for the at-large soci-
ety that seeks to convince itself of its ostentatious existence by supressing
those w h o undermine its material of being, its order. This is an unmistakable
32 Parti

statement by the son of a man who was reputed to have been sought by the
Romans for mocking the legitimacy of their polity. 13 The Talmud contin-
ues:

R. Joshua ben Korha sent him (R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon ben Yohai) a
message: Wine-vinegar (an unworthy, turned son of an illustrious father)!
H o w long will you go on handing over the people of our G o d to execution!
(R. Eleazar) sent him (R. Joshua ben Korha) in return: I am removing the
thorns from the vineyard. H e (R. Joshua ben Korha) sent him in return: Let
the owner of the vineyard come and remove his thorns.

(Ibid)

R. Joshua ben Korha does not seem to question the guilt of the victims: Even
if they are the "people of G o d " they may still be "thorns" who are to be
picked out by the "owner of the vineyard". 14 What is unacceptable to the
tanna is the acceptance of the legitimacy of Roman power, a legitimacy that
cannot go together with the "ownership" of the "vineyard" by God: If one
renders unto God, there is no rendering unto Caesar; In-the-world, perhaps,
but not to the extent of togetherness with the Romans. The Talmud contin-
ues:

One day a certain launderer accosted him (R. Eleazar), calling him: Wine-
vinegar! He (R. Eleazar) said: If he (the launderer) is so insolant, he must be
an evil person. H e (R. Eleazar) said to them (the authorities): Arrest him.
H e (the launderer) was arrested. After he (R. Eleazar) calmed down, he
followed him (the launderer) in order to free him, but could not. H e (R.
Eleazar) read, concerning him (the launderer) : "Whoso keepeth his mouth
and his tongue keepeth his soul from troubles" (Proverbs 21:23). He (the
launderer) was hung.

( B T Bava Mezia 83b)

R. Eleazar's sense of being part of the world, a feeling of being at home in the
world in a togetherness of human effort to bring order to the world, is a sense
of being at home with himself, a self-satisfaction, says our storyteller. When
the simple launderer dares to accost the Rabbi with a finger pointing more
than doubt concerning the Rabbi's person, R. Eleazar is infuriated. Even
when he admits error and tries to free the victim, he cannot face up to his

13 B T Shabbat 33 b.
14 In the parallel in P T Ma'asroth 3:8 (5od) there is no hint as to the Jewishness of the
victims — their status is not the issue.
 Eleazar ben R. Simeon ben Yohai and his Wife Or:The Body of this Death 33

own failure: T h e launderer himself is to blame, it is he that has opened up

the visage of chaos by disturbing order in his insolance toward the Rabbi's
authority, an authority upholding the Roman order together with the Jewish
order, as R . Eleazar here perceives their partnership. T h e launderer has be-
come, for the tanna, the "scorner" of the book of Proverbs, as in the verse
following the one quoted here, and R. Eleazar is the "wise man", as in the
verse prior to the one quoted here, in his double role of Rabbi and Roman
executor. But this worldly reading of Scripture, grotesque as it is, is too
much and, for the story-teller, is the final point that ushers in R. Eleazar's
terrible crisis of enlightenment:

He (R. Eleazar) stood under the gallows and wept. Some people said to him:
Rabbi, do not be saddened, because he (the launderer) and his son forni-
cated with a newly married maiden on the Day of Atonement. He (R. Eleazar)
put his hand on his innards; he said: Rejoice, my innards, rejoice! If your
uncertainties are so (are vindicated as well grounded), how much more so
your certainty. I am assured that worms will have no dominion over you.
Nevertheless, he (R. Eleazar) was not calmed. He was given a sleeping-po-
tion and was taken into a marble room where his belly was cut open. Bas-
ketfuls of fat were removed from him and placed in the sun during the heat
of the summer; and they did not putrefy. ... He read, concerning himself,
"my flesh also dwelleth in safety" (Psalms 16:9 b).

(BT Bava Mezia 83b)

R. Eleazar's condemnation of the launderer has given expression to an apex

in his partnership with the Romans: It entails the Rabbi's power to judge,
within this order of things, and the finality of Roman administration-cum-
execution. As such it also reveals for R. Eleazar, the absurdity of his becom-
ing toward being at home with the world at large. Being at home in the
world must entail, for the Rabbi, a belief in the ability to bring order to the
world and to distinguish between right and wrong in the world. This is the
point here: For the Rabbi, God's Order can be in and of the world because
he, the Rabbi, can discern through the chaos of the world a becoming order.
H e can seperate the wheat from the chaff, the clean from the unclean, the
good from the bad, and bring that discernment from a potentiality of order
to an actuality of order. But this discriminating perception has degenerated
into a huge conceit, into a blindness, into a judgement that becomes vio-
lence.
34 Parti

2.3. Community and Body:

In order to understand the complexity of the turning-point in R. Eleazar's

"biography" we shall use the reading of Psalms 16 in order to reveal an ad-
umbration of a chapter in the problematics of the dichotomy of "good and
evil". We shall discern at least two readings; and the fact that the views to
which the readings give expression meet around this single psalm will give
conviction to the feeling that R. Eleazar's "biography" is really meant to tell
of a turning-point in the issue raised in the interpretation of Scripture here.
Verses 3 and 4 of Psalms 16 are problematic in their meaning.15 However
they are understood, verses 5 and 6 set the theme for the readings I shall
discuss here.

O Lord, the portion of mine

inheritance and of my cup,
Thou maintainest my lot.
The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places;
Yea, I have a goodly heritage.

(Psalms 16: 5-6)

The subject here is the poet's thankfulness for his "lot", for the particular
"goodly heritage" which has fallen to him, as opposed to that which is the
share of others. These "pleasant places" are not merely worldly tracts of land
or the like. The "Lord" is "the portion" of the poet's "inheritance" and
"cup", we are concerned here with the very salvation of the person before
God. The subject here is the delineation of the chosen, to which the psalmist
believes that he belongs. With this subject as the heading, we have the fol-
lowing reading:

R. Nehunya ben ha-Kanah used to pray, upon his entering the house-of-
learning, and upon his leaving, a short prayer. He was asked: What is the
nature of this prayer? He said: Upon entering I pray that I should not be the
cause of an error; and upon leaving I give thanks for my share.

(Mishnah Berakhot 4:2)

15 For various interpretations see B T Menahot 53a, Midrash Tehillim to Psalms 16 (ed.
Buber pp. 6ob-6ia), Yalkut Shimonixa ibid, and to Isaiah 46:12, and Midrash Mishlei
to proverbs 9:10 (ed. Buber p. 32a). And see also Ibn Ezra to Psalms 16:2.
 Eleazar ben R. Simeon ben Yohai and his Wife Or:The Body of this Death 35

What does he say 1 6 upon entering (the house-of-Iearning): May it be desir-

able before Thee, Lord my God and the God of my fathers, that I should
not lose patience with my friends, nor should my friends lose patience with
me; that we should not declare the (ritually) clean to be unclean nor the
unclean to be clean; that we should not forbid that which is permitted nor
permit that which is forbidden; for then there would be shame in this world
and in the coming- world. And what does he say upon leaving (the house-
of-learning): I am thankful before Thee, Lord my God and the God of my
fathers, that Thou hast placed my share among those who sit in the house-
of-learning and in the synagogue, and hast not placed my share in the theaters
and the circuses. For I labor and they labor. I persevere and they persevere.
I labor to inherit the Garden of Eden, and they labor for the nethermost pit;
as Scripture says, "For Thou wilt not abandon my soul to the nether-world;
Neither wilt Thou suffer They godly one to see the pit" (Psalms 16:10).

(PT Berakhot 4:2 <yd>)

The verse referring to the "nether-world" and the "pit" is chosen here from
Psalms 16 precisely because the subject of that psalm is conceived to be under
the heading of the differentation between the "they" and the "we". Accord-
ingly the double theme of this prayer is clear: In the house-of-learning one
is ever so careful to distinguish between clean and unclean, between permit-
ted and forbidden, between good and bad; and it is precisely that ability, that
discriminating perception, that seperates the community of those who "in-
herit the Garden of Eden" from those whose lot is the "nethermost pit" —
the delineation of the chosen and the not-chosen in Psalms 16, as the author
of this prayer connects himself, his community, to that psalm.
The seperation of clean and unclean, of permitted and forbidden, is one
of the most central themes of Rabbinic halakha. This is part of a religiosity
where there can be no yearning to God without the perception of distinc-
tion. Not to perceive any distinctions of permitted and forbidden in the
world would have meant, for the Rabbis, one of two things: Either a total
rejection of the world, which is not the way the Rabbis went, generally speak-
ing; or an embracing of the total world. The latter would have been, for the
Rabbis, an everything that is nothing. A total embrace of the total world
would have been, for them, a living in a world which does not crack open to

16 This verbal form implies that the following description is a prayer that was said in
the time of the author of this source (see Bartenura and Tosfoth Yom Tov to M
Berakhot ibid.). It is possible that the source was contemporary to R. Nehunya ben
ha-Kanah; and in anycase seems to be connected, both in B T as well as PT, to the
tradition concerning him.
36 Parti

any otherness, an imprisonment. The discrimination of embracing and re-

jecting vis-à-vis the world means a world that can no longer lord it over man
in the legitimacy of its giveness; it means a break in the megalithicity of the
world through whose threatening and totalitarian and opaque oneness man
may now peer; and it means an understanding of humaness where there is a
wedge of estrangement between man and part of the world - at least. The
religious person is thus freed vis-à-vis the world, he is not altogether part of
its thrusting into its dictated living; and he is thus relatively free (relative to
other people) for the self-identification as one who yearns toward God; he is
the carrier of the burden of the knowledge of otherness — God's otherness —
through the bellowing multitudes in the streets of this world. Distinguishing
is, for the religious person, the discovery of a world - a world not at all
manifest in mere day-to-dayness - that can indeed be said to be created:
Created in the sense of somehow being connected to a meaningful Order, or
at least in its grace of not denying man the pain of his memory as one created
in the image of He who Himself is never merely a part of the world, nor even
is He merely its whole. The world of discrimination, not the discrimination
that manifests the natural or social order and thus raises those orders to a
levai of sanctity, but rather a discrimination that belies the legitimacy of the
given orders, a discrimination grounded in the perception of otherness, is
the world in which the tradition of religiosity that I am trying to touch here
can happen; A religiosity of "good" and "evil" where good is, finally, an
ultimately messainic category, a category of yearning.
The prayer that is meant to hark back to that of R. Nehunya ben ha-
Kanah connects the discriminating perception of clean and unclean, of per-
mitted and forbidden, to the community of the house-of-learning and the
synagogue. One is "saved", or "redeemed", by belonging to this community
because within their social reality the world that is perceived through the
revelation of Torah becomes a reality, it ceases to be phantasy by virtue of
their energies and, it is to be added, by the energy implicit in the tensions
between this community of Israel and the peoples of the world.
The reality of the community and of belonging to it as an experience that
proclaims the coming messianic deliverance, that perhaps even embodies a
"realized eschatology", is a phenomenon that is indeed to be found in the
historical neighborhood in which the Rabbis in Palestine lived. We may see
this through a short analysis of a section from the Qumran Thanksgiving
Hymns. This is part of the library that has survived, in caves overlooking the
Dead sea, the Jewish community who viewed themselves as the "Children
of Light" and who exiled themselves into the Judean desert where they per-
ished. Their history spans a period beginning some time during the second
 Eleazar ben R. Simeon ben Yohai and his Wife Or:The Body of this Death 37

century B . C . E . and ending toward the time of the destruction of the Second
Temple which took place in 70 C.E..
The section discussed here, which Jacob Licht has designated as Qumran
Hymn number 11, 1 7 begins on page 6, line 3, and continues until line 36 of
the same page. A schematic summary of its contents would be as follows:

1 - The poet is separated out of the society of evil, of sinners:

<Thou hast saved me> from the congregation of <vanity>
and from the assembly of violence;
18
(line 5a)

2 - This is accomplished in the poet's being taken into the community which
perceives itself as having broken away from sinning.
Thou hast brought me into the council of... <and hast purified me of> sin.
(line 5 b)

The community of the saved is to remain in its being set off from the world,
and as a minority. Thou wilt raise up survivors among Thy people and a
remmant within Thine inheritance.
(line 8a)

3 - The vindication of the community is the vindication of God Himself.

Thou wilt do these things for They glory.
(line 10 b)

4 - The community will eventually flourish in a victory of cosmic import.

They shall send out a bud <for ever> like a flower <of the fields>, and shall
cause a shoot to grow into the boughs of an everlasting plant. It shall cover
the whole <earth> with its shadow <and its crown> (shall reach) to the
<clouds>; Its roots (shall go down) to the abyss <and all the rivers of Eden
shall water its branches>.
(lines 15-17)

5 - And that flourishing will entail the total undoing of the wicked.
A source of light shall become an eternal ever-flowing fountain, and in its
bright flames all the <sons of iniquity> shall be consumed; <it shall be> a fire
to devour all sinful men in utter destruction.
(lines i8-i9a)

17 Jacob Licht, The Thanksgiving Scroll, Bialik Institute, Jerusalem 1957 (Hebrew),
pp. 110-119.
18 I am using here the translation of G. Vermes (Penguin Books 1987, pp. 181-184)
because of its readability.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
them presented his carbine at her—
“Off, mistress; blast my heart, if it were not for your pretty face, I
would send an ounce of cold lead through you. What the devil—
haven’t we spared your father’s life, and you would have us connive
at the escape of a murderer, to the risk of our own necks!”
“Do not distress yourself about me, my sweet girl,” cried Graham
—“farewell once more!”
And she turned back weeping, while the troopers held their way
towards the western outlet of the valley.
 Chapter III.
Mary was too generous to be happy in the safety of her father,
when that was bought with the life of his brave deliverer. When
Graham was taken away, she felt a pang as if he had been led to
execution. Instead, therefore, of indulging in selfish congratulation,
her whole soul was taken up in the romantic and apparently hopeless
scheme of extricating him from his danger. There was not a moment
to lose; and she asked her father if he could think of any way in
which a rescue might be attempted.
“Mary, my dear, I know of none,” was his answer. “We live far from
any house, and before assistance could be procured, they would be
miles beyond our reach.”
“Yes, father, there is a chance,” said she, with impatience. “Gallop
over to Allister Wilson’s on the other side of the hills. He is a strong
and determined man, and, as well as some of his near neighbours, is
accustomed to contest. You know he fought desperately at Drumclog;
and though he blamed you for not joining the cause, he will not be
loth to assist in this bitter extremity.”
Allan, at these words, started up as if awakened from a reverie.
“That will do, my dear bairn. I never thought of it; but your
understanding is quicker than mine. I shall get out the horse; follow
me on foot, as hard as you can.”
This was the work of a minute. The horse was brought from the
stable, and Allan lashed him to his full speed across the moor. Most
fortunately he arrived at Allister’s house as the latter was on the
point of leaving it. He carried a musket over his shoulder, and a huge
claymore hung down from a belt girded round his loins.
“You have just come in time,” said this stern son of the Covenant,
after Allan had briefly related to him what had happened. “I am on
my way to hear that precious saint, Mr Hervey, hold forth. You see I
am armed to defend myself against temporal foes, and so are many
others of my friends and brethren in God, who will be present on that
blessed occasion. Come away, Allan Hamilton, you are one of the
timid and faint-hearted flock of Jacob, but we will aid you as you
wish, and peradventure save the young man who has done you such a
good turn.”
They went on swiftly to a retired spot at the distance of half a mile;
it was a small glen nearly surrounded with rocks. There they beheld
the Reverend Mr Hervey standing upon a mound of earth, and
preaching to a congregation, the greater part of the males of which
were armed with muskets, swords, or pikes; they formed, as it were,
the outworks of the assembly,—the women, old men, and children
being placed in the centre. These were a few of the devoted
Christians who, from the rocks and caves of their native land, sent up
their fearless voices to heaven—who, disowning the spiritual
authority of a tyrannic government, thought it nowise unbecoming or
treasonable to oppose the strong arm of lawless power with its own
weapons; and who finally triumphed in the glorious contest,
establishing that pure religion, for which posterity has proved, alas,
too ungrateful!
In the pressing urgency of the case, Allister did not scruple to go
up to the minister, in the midst of his discourse. Such interruptions
indeed were common in these distracted times, when it was
necessary to skulk from place to place, and perform divine worship
as if it was an act of treason against the state. Mr Hervey made
known to his flock in a few words what had been communicated to
him, taking care to applaud highly the scheme proposed by Wilson.
There was no time to be lost, and under the guidance of Allister the
whole of the assemblage hurried to a gorge of the mountains through
which the troopers must necessarily pass. As the route of the latter
was circuitous, time was allowed to this sagacious leader to arrange
his forces. This he did by placing all the armed men—about twenty-
five in number—in two lines across the pass. Those who were not
armed, together with the women and children, were sent to the rear.
When, therefore, the soldiers came up, they found to their surprise a
formidable body ready to dispute the passage.
“What means this interruption?” said Ross, who acted the part of
spokesman to the rest. Whereupon Mr Hervey advanced in front
—“Release,” said he, “that young man whom ye have in bonds.”
“Release him!” replied Ross. “Would you have us release a
murderer? Are you aware that he has shot his officer?”
 “I am aware of it,” Mr Hervey answered, “and I blame him not for
the deed. Stand forth, Allan Hamilton, and say if that is the soldier
who saved your life; and you, Mary Hamilton, stand forth likewise.”
Both, to the astonishment of the soldiers, came in front of the
crowd. “That,” said Allan, “is the man, and may God bless him for his
humanity.”—“It is the same,” cried his daughter; “I saw him with
these eyes shoot the cruel Clobberton. On my knees I begged him to
sue for mercy, and his kind heart had pity upon me, and saved my
father.”
“Soldiers,” said Mr Hervey, “I have nothing more to say to you.
That young man has slain your captain, but he has done no murder.
His deed was justifiable: yea, it was praiseworthy, in so far as it saved
an upright man, and rid the earth of a cruel persecutor. Deliver him
up, and go away in peace, or peradventure ye may fare ill among
these armed men who stand before you.”
The troopers consulted together for a short time, till, seeing that
resistance would be utter madness against such odds, they
reluctantly let go their prisoner. The first person who came up to him
was Mary Hamilton. She loosened the cords that tied him, and
presented him with conscious pride to those of her own sex who were
assembled round.
“Good bye, Graham,” cried Ross, with a sneer;—“you have bit us
once, but it will puzzle you to do so again. We shall soon ‘harry’ you
and your puritanical friends from your strongholds. An ell of strong
hemp is in readiness for you at the Grassmarket of Edinburgh. Take
my defiance for a knave, as you are,” added he, with an imprecation.
He had scarcely pronounced the last sentence when Graham
unsheathed the weapon which hung at his side, sprang from the
middle of the crowd, and stood before his defier. “Ross, you have
challenged me, and you shall abide it—draw!” Here there was an
instantaneous movement among the Covenanters, who rushed in
between the two fierce soldiers, who stood with their naked weapons,
their eyes glancing fire at each other. Mary Hamilton screamed aloud
with terror, and cries of “separate them!” were heard from all the
women. Mr Hervey came forward and entreated them to put up their
swords, and he was seconded by most of the old men; but all
entreaties were in vain. They stood fronting each other, and only
waiting for free ground to commence their desperate game.
 “Let me alone,” said Graham, furiously, to some who were
attempting to draw him back; “am I to be bearded to my teeth by that
swaggering ruffian?”
“Come on, my sweet cock of the Covenant,” cries Ross, with the
most insulting derision, “you or any one of your canting crew—or a
dozen of you, one after the other.”
“Let Graham go,” was heard from the deep stern voice of Allister
Wilson; “let him go, or I will meet that man with my own weapon. Mr
Hervey, your advice is dear to us all, and well do we know that the
blood of God’s creatures must not be shed in vain; but has not that
man of blood openly defied us, and shall we hinder our champion
from going forward to meet him? No; let them join in combat and try
which is the better cause. If the challenger overcomes, we shall do
him no harm, but let him depart in peace: if he be overcome, let him
rue the consequences of his insolence.”
This proposition, though violently opposed by the women and the
aged part of the crowd, met the entire approbation of the young men.
Each felt himself personally insulted, and allowed, for a time, the
turbulent passions of his nature to get the better of every milder
feeling. A space of ground was immediately cleared for the combat,
the friends of Ross being allowed to arrange matters as they thought
fit. They went about it with a coolness and precision which showed
that to them this sort of pastime was nothing new. “All is right—fall
on,” was their cry, and in a moment the combatants met in the area.
The three troopers looked on with characteristic sang froid, but it
was otherwise with the rest of the bystanders, who gazed upon the
scene with the most intense interest. Some of the females turned
away their eyes from it, and among them Mary Hamilton, who
almost sank to the earth, and was with difficulty supported by her
father.
The combat was desperate, for the men were of powerful strength,
and of tried courage and skill in their weapons. The blows were
parried for some time on both sides with consummate address, and
neither could be said to have the advantage. At length, after
contending fiercely, Ross exhibited signs of exhaustion—neither
guarding himself nor assaulting his opponent so vigorously as at
first. Graham, on noticing this, redoubled his efforts. He acted now
wholly on the offensive, sending blow upon blow with the rapidity of
lightning. His last and most desperate stroke was made at the head
of his enemy. The sword of the latter, which was held up in a
masterly manner to receive it, was beat down by Graham’s weapon,
which descended forcibly upon his helmet. The blow proved decisive,
and Ross fell senseless upon the ground. His conqueror immediately
wrested the weapon from him, while a shout was set up by the crowd
in token of victory. The troopers looked mortified at this result of the
duel, which was by them evidently unexpected. Their first care was to
raise up their fellow comrade. On examination, no wound was
perceived upon his head. His helmet had been penetrated by the
sword, which, however, did not go further. His own weapon had
contributed to deaden the blow, by partially arresting that of Graham
in its furious descent. It was this only which saved his life. In a few
minutes he so far recovered as to get up and look around him. The
first object which struck him was his opponent standing in the ring
wiping his forehead.
“Well, Ross,” said one of his companions, “I always took you to be
the best swordsman in the regiment; but I think you have met your
match.”
“My match? confound me!” returned the vanquished man, “I
thought I would have made minced meat of him. There, for three
years, have I had the character of being one of the best men in the
army at my weapon, and here is all this good name taken out of me
in a trice. How mortifying—and to lose my good sword too!”
“Here is your sword, Ross, and keep it,” said Graham. “You have
behaved like a brave man; and I honour such a fellow, whether he be
my friend or foe. Only don’t go on with your insolent bragging—that
is all the advice I have to give you; nor call any man a knave till you
have good proof that he is so.”
“Well, well, Graham,” answered the other, “I retract what I said; I
have a better opinion of you than I had ten minutes ago. Take care of
old Dalzell—his “lambs” will be after you, and you had better keep
out of the way. Take this advice in return for my weapon which you
have given me back. It would, after all, be a pity to tuck up such a
pretty fellow as you are; although I would care very little to see your
long-faced acquaintances there dangling by their necks. Give us your
hand for old fellowship, and shift your quarters as soon as you
choose. Good bye.” So saying, he and his three comrades departed.
 After these doings, it was considered imprudent for the principal
actors to remain longer in this quarter. Mr Hervey retired about
twenty miles to the northward, in company with Allan Hamilton and
his daughter, and Allister Wilson. Graham went by a circuitous route
to Argyleshire, where he secreted himself so judiciously, that though
the agents of government got information of his being in that
country, they could never manage to lay hand upon him. These steps
were prudent in all parties; for the very day after the rescue, a strong
body of dragoons was sent to the Lowthers, to apprehend the above
named persons. They behaved with great cruelty, burning the
cottages of numbers of the inhabitants, and destroying their cattle.
They searched Allan Hamilton’s house, took from it everything that
could be easily carried away, and such of his cattle as were found on
the premises. Among other things, they carried off the body of the
sanguinary Clobberton, which they found on the spot where it had
been left, and interred it in Lanark churchyard, with military
honours. None of the individuals, however, whom they sought for
were found.
For a short time after this, the persecution raged with great
violence in the south of Lanarkshire; but happier days were
beginning to dawn; and the arrival of King William, and the
dethronement of the bigoted James, put an end to such scenes of
cruelty. When these events occurred, the persecuted came forth from
their hiding-places. Mr Hervey, among others, returned to the
Lowthers, and enjoyed many happy days in this seat of his ministry
and trials. Allan and his daughter were among the first to make their
appearance. Their house soon recovered its former comfort; and in
the course of time every worldly concern went well with them. Mary,
however, for a month or more after their return, did not feel entirely
satisfied. She was duller than was her wont, and neither she nor her
father could give any explanation why it should be so. At this time a
tall young man paid them a visit, and, strange to say, she became
perfectly happy. This visitor was no other than the wild fighting
fellow Graham,—now perfectly reformed from his former evil
courses, by separation from his profligate companions, and by the
better company and principles with which his late troubles had
brought him acquainted.
 A few words more will end our story. This bold trooper and the
beautiful daughter of Allan Hamilton were seen five weeks thereafter
going to church as man and wife. It was allowed that they were the
handsomest couple ever seen in the Lowthers. Graham proved a kind
husband; and it is hardly necessary to say that Mary was a most
affectionate and exemplary wife. Allan Hamilton attained a happy
old age, and saw his grandchildren ripening into fair promise around
him. His daughter, many years after his death, used to repeat to
them the story of his danger and escape, which we have here
imperfectly related. The tale is not fictitious. It is handed down in
tradition over the upper and middle wards of Lanarkshire, and with a
consistency which leaves no doubt of its truth.
 THE POOR SCHOLAR.

By Professor Wilson.

The vernal weather, that had come so early in the year as to induce
a fear that it would not be lasting, seemed, contrary to that
foreboding of change, to become every day more mild and genial,
and the spirit of beauty, that had at first ventured out over the bosom
of the earth with timid footsteps, was now blending itself more boldly
with the deep verdure of the ground, and the life of the budding
trees. Something in the air, and in the great wide blue bending arch
of the unclouded sky, called upon the heart to come forth from the
seclusion of parlour or study, and partake of the cheerfulness of
nature.
We had made some short excursions together up the lonely glens,
and over the moors, and also through the more thickly inhabited
field-farms of his parish, and now the old minister proposed that we
should pay a visit to a solitary hut near the head of a dell, which,
although not very remote from the manse, we had not yet seen; and I
was anxious that we should do so, as, from his conversation, I
understood that we should see there a family—if so a widow and her
one son could be called—that would repay us by the interest we could
not fail to feel in their character, for the time and toil spent on
reaching their secluded and guarded dwelling.
“The poor widow woman,” said the minister, “who lives in the hut
called Braehead, has as noble a soul as ever tenanted a human
bosom. One earthly hope alone has she now—but I fear it never will
be fulfilled. She is the widow of a common cottar, who lived and died
in the hut which she and her son now inhabit. Her husband was a
man of little education, but intelligent, even ingenious, simple,
laborious, and pious. His duties lay all within a narrow circle, and his
temptations, it may be said, were few. Such as they were, he
discharged the one and withstood the other. Nor is there any reason
to think that, had they both been greater, he would have been found
wanting. He was contented with meal and water all his days, and so
fond of work that he seemed to love the summer chiefly for the
length of its labouring days. He had a slight genius for mechanics;
and during the long winter evenings he made many articles of
curious workmanship, the sale of which added a little to the earnings
of his severer toil. The same love of industry excited him from
morning to night; but he had also stronger, tenderer, and dearer
motives; for if his wife and their one pretty boy should outlive him,
he hoped that, though left poor, they would not be left in penury, but
enabled to lead, without any additional hardships, the usual life, at
least, of the widow and the orphans of honest hardworking men. Few
thought much about Abraham Blane while he lived, except that he
was an industrious and blameless man; but, on his death, it was felt
that there had been something far more valuable in his character;
and now, I myself, who knew him well, was pleasingly surprised to
know that he had left his widow and boy a small independence. Then
the memory of his long summer days, and long winter nights, all
ceaselessly employed in some kind of manual labour, dignified the
lowly and steadfast virtue of the unpretending and conscientious
man.
“The widow of this humble-hearted and simple-minded man,
whom we shall this forenoon visit, you will remember, perhaps,—
although then neither she nor her husband were much known in the
parish,—as the wife of the basket-maker. Her father had been a
clergyman—but his stipend was one of the smallest in Scotland, and
he died in extreme poverty. This, his only daughter, who had many
fine feelings and deep thoughts in her young innocent and simple
heart, was forced to become a menial servant in a farmhouse. There,
subduing her heart to her situation, she married that inoffensive and
good man; and all her life has been—maid, wife, and widow—the
humblest among the humble. But you shall soon have an opportunity
of seeing, what sense, what feeling, what knowledge, and what piety,
may all live together, without their owner suspecting them, in the
soul of the lonely widow of a Scottish cottar; for except that she is
pious, she thinks not that she possesses any other treasure; and even
her piety she regards, like a true Christian, as a gift bestowed.
“But well worthy of esteem, and, to speak in the language of this
world’s fancies, of admiration, as you will think this poor solitary
widow, perhaps you will think such feelings bestowed even more
deservedly on her only son. He is now a boy only of sixteen years of
age, but in my limited experience of life, never knew I such another.
From his veriest infancy he showed a singular capacity for learning;
at seven years of age he could read, write, and was even an
arithmetician. He seized upon books with the same avidity with
which children in general seize upon playthings. He soon caught
glimmerings of the meaning even of other languages; and, before he
was ten years old, there were in his mind clear dawnings of the
scholar, and indications not to be doubted of genius and intellectual
power. His father was dead—but his mother, who was no common
woman, however common her lot, saw with pure delight, and with
strong maternal pride, that God had given her an extraordinary child
to bless her solitary hut. She vowed to dedicate him to the ministry,
and that all her husband had left should be spent upon him, to the
last farthing, to qualify him to be a preacher of God’s Word. Such
ambition, if sometimes misplaced, is almost always necessarily
honourable. Here it was justified by the excelling talents of the boy—
by his zeal for knowledge, which was like a fever in his blood—and by
a childish piety, of which the simple, and eloquent, and beautiful
expression has more than once made me shed tears. But let us leave
the manse, and walk to Braehead. The sunshine is precious at this
early season; let us enjoy it while it smiles!”
We crossed a few fields—a few coppice woods—an extensive sheep-
pasture, and then found ourselves on the edge of a moorland.
Keeping the shelving heather ridge of hills above us, we gently
descended into a narrow rushy glen, without anything that could be
called a stream, but here and there crossed and intersected by
various runlets. Soon all cultivation ceased, and no houses were to be
seen. Had the glen been a long one, it would have seemed desolate,
but on turning round a little green mount that ran almost across it,
we saw at once an end to our walk, and one hut, with a peatstack
close to it, and one or two elder, or, as we call them in Scotland,
bourtrie bushes, at the low gable-end. A little smoke seemed to tinge
the air over the roof uncertainly—but except in that, there was
nothing to tell that the hut was inhabited. A few sheep lying near it,
and a single cow of the small hill-breed, seemed to appertain to the
hut, and a circular wall behind it apparently enclosed the garden. We
sat down together on one of those large mossy stones that often lie
among the smooth green pastoral hills, like the relics of some
building utterly decayed—and my venerable friend, whose solemn
voice was indeed pleasant in this quiet solitude, continued the simple
history of the poor scholar.
“At school he soon outstripped all the other boys, but no desire of
superiority over his companions seemed to actuate him—it was the
pure native love of knowledge. Gentle as a lamb, but happy as a lark,
the very wildest of them all loved Isaac Blane. He procured a Hebrew
Bible and a Greek Testament, both of which he taught himself to
read. It was more than affecting—it was sublime and awful to see the
solitary boy sitting by himself on the braes shedding tears over the
mysteries of the Christian faith. His mother’s heart burned within
her towards her son; and if it was pride, you will allow that it was
pride of a divine origin. She appeared with him in the kirk every
Sabbath, dressed not ostentatiously, but still in a way that showed
she intended him not for a life of manual labour. Perhaps, at first,
some half thought that she was too proud of him; but that was a
suggestion not to be cherished, for all acknowledged that he was sure
to prove an honour to the parish in which he was born. She often
brought him to the manse, and earth did not contain a happier
creature than she, when her boy answered all my questions, and
modestly made his own simple, yet wise remarks on the sacred
subjects gradually unfolding before his understanding and his heart.
“Before he was twelve years of age he went to college; and his
mother accompanied him to pass the winter in the city. Two small
rooms she took near the cathedral; and while he was at the classes,
or reading alone, she was not idle, but strove to make a small sum to
help to defray their winter’s expenses. To her that retired cell was a
heaven when she looked upon her pious and studious boy. His genius
was soon conspicuous; for four winters he pursued his studies in the
university, returning always in summer to this hut, the door of which
during their absence was closed. He made many friends, and
frequently during the three last summers, visitors came to pass a day
at Braehead, in a rank of life far above his own. But in Scotland,
thank God, talent and learning, and genius and virtue, when found in
the poorest hut, go not without their admiration and their reward.
Young as he is, he has had pupils of his own—his mother’s little
property has not been lessened at this hour by his education; and
besides contributing to the support of her and himself, he has
brought neater furniture into that lonely hut, and there has he a
library, limited in the number, but rich in the choice of books, such
as contain food for years of silent thought to the poor scholar—if
years indeed are to be his on earth.”
We rose to proceed onwards to the hut, across one smooth level of
greenest herbage, and up one intervening knowe, a little lower than
the mount on which it stood. Why, thought I, has the old man always
spoken of the poor scholar as if he had been speaking of one now
dead? Can it be, from the hints he has dropped, that this youth, so
richly endowed, is under the doom of death, and the fountain of all
those clear and fresh-gushing thoughts about to be sealed? I asked,
as we walked along, if Isaac Blane seemed marked out to be one of
those sweet flowers “no sooner blown than blasted,” and who perish
away like the creatures of a dream? The old man made answer that it
was even so, that he had been unable to attend college last winter,
and that it was to be feared he was now far advanced in a hopeless
decline. “Simple is he still as a very child; but with a sublime sense of
duty to God and man—of profound affection and humanity never to
be appeased towards all the brethren of our race. Each month—each
week—each day, has seemed visibly to bring him new stores of silent
feeling and thought—and even now, boy as he is, he is fit for the
ministry. But he has no hopes of living to that day—nor have I. The
deep spirit of his piety is now blended with a sure prescience of an
early death. Expect, therefore, to see him pale, emaciated, and sitting
in the hut like a beautiful and blessed ghost.”
We entered the hut, but no one was in the room. The clock ticked
solitarily, and on a table, beside a nearly extinguished peat fire, lay
the open Bible, and a small volume, which, on lifting it up, I found to
be a Greek Testament.
“They have gone out to walk, or to sit down for an hour in the
warm sunshine,” said the old man. “Let us sit down and wait their
return. It will not be long.” A long, low sigh was heard in the silence,
proceeding, as it seemed, from a small room adjoining that in which
we were sitting, and of which the door was left half open. The
minister looked into that room, and, after a long earnest gaze,
stepped softly back to me again, with a solemn face, and taking me
by the hand, whispered to me to come with him to that door, which
he gently moved. On a low bed lay the poor scholar, dressed as he
had been for the day, stretched out in a stillness too motionless and
profound for sleep, and with his fixed face up to heaven. We saw that
he was dead. His mother was kneeling, with her face on the bed, and
covered with both her hands. Then she lifted up her eyes and said, “O
merciful Redeemer, who wrought that miracle on the child of the
widow of Nain, comfort me—comfort me, in this my sore distress. I
know that my son is never to rise again until the great judgment day.
But not the less do I bless Thy holy name, for Thou didst die to save
us sinners.”
She arose from her knees, and, still blind to every other object,
went up to his breast. “I thought thee lovelier, when alive, than any
of the sons of the children of men, but that smile is beyond the power
of a mother’s heart to sustain.” And, stooping down, she kissed his
lips, and cheeks, and eyes, and forehead, with a hundred soft,
streaming, and murmuring kisses, and then stood up in her solitary
hut, alone and childless, with a long mortal sigh, in which all earthly
feelings seemed breathed out, and all earthly ties broken. Her eyes
wandered towards the door, and fixed themselves with a ghastly and
unconscious gaze for a few moments on the gray locks and withered
countenance of the holy old man, bent towards her with a pitying
and benignant air, and stooped, too, in the posture of devotion. She
soon recognised the best friend of her son, and leaving the bed on
which his body lay, she came out into the room, and said, “You have
come to me at a time when your presence was sorely needed. Had
you been here but a few minutes sooner you would have seen my
Isaac die!”
Unconsciously we were all seated; and the widow, turning
fervently to her venerated friend, said, “He was reading the Bible—he
felt faint—and said feebly, ‘Mother, attend me to my bed, and when I
lie down, put your arm over my breast and kiss me.’ I did just as he
told me; and, on wiping away a tear or two vainly shed by me on my
dear boy’s face, I saw that his eyes, though open, moved not, and that
the lids were fixed. He had gone to another world. See—sir! there is
the Bible lying open at the place he was reading—God preserve my
soul from repining!—only a few, few minutes ago.”
The minister took the Bible on his knees, and laying his right hand,
without selection, on part of one of the pages that lay open, he read
aloud the following verses:—
“Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.”
The mother’s heart seemed to be deeply blest for a while by these
words. She gave a grateful smile to the old man, and sat silent,
moving her lips. At length she again broke forth:—
“Oh! death, whatever may have been our thoughts or fears, ever
comes unexpectedly at last. My son often—often told me, that he was
dying, and I saw that it was so ever since Christmas. But how could I
prevent hope from entering my heart? His sweet happy voice—the
calmness of his prayers—his smiles that never left his face whenever
he looked or spoke to me—his studies, still pursued as anxiously as
ever—the interest he took in any little incident of our retired life—all
forced me to believe at times that he was not destined to die. But why
think on all these things now? Yes! I will always think of them, till I
join him and my husband in heaven!”
It seemed now as if the widow had only noticed me for the first
time. Her soul had been so engrossed with its passion of grief, and
with the felt sympathy and compassion of my venerable friend. She
asked me if I had known her son; and I answered, that if I had, I
could not have sat there so composedly; but that I was no stranger to
his incomparable excellence, and felt indeed for her grievous loss.
She listened to my words, but did not seem to hear them, and once
more addressed the old man.
“He suffered much sickness, my poor boy. For although it was a
consumption, that is not always an easy death. But as soon as the
sickness and the racking pain gave way to our united prayers, God
and our Saviour made us happy; and sure he spake then as never
mortal spake, kindling into a happiness that was beautiful to see,
when I beheld his face marked by dissolution, and knew, even in
those inspired moments (for I can call them nothing else), that ere
long the dust was to lie on those lips now flowing over with heavenly
music!”
We sat for some hours in the widow’s hut, and the minister several
times prayed with her, at her own request. On rising to depart, he
said that he would send up one of her dearest friends to pass the
night with her, and help her to do the last offices to her son. But she
replied that she wished to be left alone for that day and night, and
would expect her friend in the morning. We went towards the outer
door, and she, in a sort of sudden stupor, let us depart without any
farewell words, and retired into the room where her son was lying.
Casting back our eyes before our departure, we saw her steal into the
bed beside the dead body, and drawing the head gently into her
bosom, she lay down with him in her arms, and as if they had in that
manner fallen asleep.
 THE CRUSHED BONNET.

Towards the close of a beautiful autumnal day in 18—, when

pacing slowly on my way, and in a contemplative mood admiring the
delightful scenery between Blair Athole and Dunkeld, on my return
from a survey of the celebrated pass of Killiecrankie, and other places
rendered famous in Scottish story, I was accosted by a female, little
past the prime of life, but with two children of unequal age walking
by her side, and a younger slung upon her back. The salutation was
of the supplicatory kind, and while the tones were almost perfectly
English, the pronunciation of the words was often highly Scottish.
The words, a “sodger’s widow”—“three helpless bairns”—and
“Waterloo,” broke my meditations with the force of an enchantment,
excited my sympathy, and made me draw my purse. While in the act
of tendering a piece of money—a cheap and easy mode of procuring
the luxury of doing good—I thought the countenance, though
browned and weather-beaten, one which I before had seen, without
exactly recollecting when or where. My curiosity thus raised, many
interrogatives and answers speedily followed, when at last I
discovered that there stood before me Jeanie Strathavon, once the
beauty and the pride of my own native village. Ten long and
troublous years had passed away since Jeanie left the neighbourhood
in which she was born to follow the spirit-stirring drum; and where
she had gone, or how she had afterwards fared, many enquired,
though but few could tell. The incident which led to all her
subsequent toil and suffering seemed but trivial at the time, yet, like
many other trivial occurrences, became to her one fraught with
mighty consequences.
She was an only daughter, her father was an honest labourer, and
though not nursed in the bosom of affluence, she hardly knew what it
was to have a wish ungratified. She possessed mental vivacity, and
personal attractions, rarely exhibited, especially at the present day,
by persons in her humble sphere of life. Though she never could
boast what might properly be called education, yet great care had
been taken to render her modest, affectionate, and pious. Her
parents, now in the decline of life, looked upon her as their only
solace. She had been from her very birth the idol of their hearts; and
as there was no sunshine in their days but when she was healthy and
happy, so their prospects were never clouded but when she was the
reverse. Always the favourite of one sex, and the envy of another,
when not yet out of her teens, she was importuned by the addresses
of many both of her own rank and of a rank above her own, to change
her mode of life. The attentions of the latter, in obedience to the
suggestions of her affectionate but simple hearted parents, she
always discouraged, for they never would allow themselves to think
that “folk wi’ siller would be looking after their bairn for ony gude
end.” Among those of her own station, she could hardly be said to
have yet shown a decided preference to any one, though the glances
which she cast at Henry Williams, when passing through the
kirkyard on Sundays, seemed to every one to say where, if she had
her own unbiassed will, her choice would light. Still she had never
thought seriously upon the time when, nor the person for whom, she
would leave her fond and doting parents. Chance or accident,
however, in these matters, often outruns the speed of deliberate
choice; at least such was the case with poor Jeanie.
Decked out one Sabbath morning in her best, to go to what Burns
calls a “Holy Fair,” in the neighbouring parish, though viewed in a far
different light by her, Jeanie had on her brawest and her best; and
among other things, a fine new bonnet, which excited the gossip and
the gaze of all the lasses in the village. Having sat for an hour or two
at the tent, listening earnestly and devoutly to a discourse which
formed a complete body of divinity, she, with many others, was at
length obliged to take refuge in the church, to shun a heavy summer
shower, which unexpectedly arrested the out-door devotions. Here,
whether wearied with the long walk she had in the morning, or
overpowered with the heat and suffocation consequent upon such a
crowd, she began to feel a serious oppression of sickness, and before
she could effect her escape she entirely fainted away, requiring to be
carried out in a state of complete insensibility.
 It was long before she came to herself; and when she did, she
found that the rough hands of those who had caught her when
falling, and borne her through the crowd to the open air, had, amidst
the anxiety for her recovery, treated her finery with but very little
ceremony. Among other instances of this kind, she found that her
bonnet had been hastily torn from her head, thrown carelessly aside,
and, being accidentally trod upon, had been so crushed, as to render
it perfectly useless. The grief which this caused made her forget the
occasion which produced such disaster; and adjusting herself as well
as she could, she did not wait the conclusion of the solemn service,
but sought her father’s cottage amidst much sorrow and confusion.
When she reached home, she found her parents engaged in
devotional reading, their usual mode of spending the Sabbath
evenings. As it was not altogether with their consent that she had not
accompanied them that day to their usual place of being instructed in
divine things, the plight in which she returned to them excited,
especially on the mother’s part, a hasty burst of displeasure, if not of
anger; and the calm improving peace of the evening was entirely
broken. Sacred as to them the day appeared, they could not restrain
inquiry as to the cause of her altered appearance, and maternal
anxiety gave birth to suspicions which poor Jeanie’s known veracity
and simple unaffected narrative could not altogether repress. Thus,
for the first time in her life, had Jeanie excited the frown of her
parents, and every reproving look and word was as a dagger to her
heart.
Night came, and she retired to rest, but her innocent breast was
too much agitated to allow her eyes to close in sleep; and the return
of morning only brought with it an additional burden to her heart, by
a renewed discussion of the events of the previous day. This was
more than she was able to stand, and she took the first opportunity
to escape from that roof where, till now, she had never known aught
but delight, to go to pour her complaint into the ear of one who
seemed to love her almost to distraction,—her youthful admirer,
Henry Williams. Their interview, though not long, terminated in the
proposal on his part to relieve her from her embarrassed situation by
forthwith making her his own. Whether this was what she desired, in
having recourse to such an adviser, cannot be known, but, at all
events, she acceded with blamable facility to his wishes. She could
not endure the thought of being without a friend, and she knew not
that the friendship and affection of her parents had suffered no
abatement, though their great concern for her innocence and welfare
had pushed their reproofs further than they intended, or than
prudence under such circumstances would warrant.
Henry was little more than her own age, of but moderate capacity,
handsome in person, and ill provided with the means of making
matrimony a state of enjoyment; and too much addicted to the
frivolities of his years to be fitted for the serious business of being the
head of a family. Youth and inexperience seldom consider
consequences, and the desire of the one to receive, and of the other
to afford relief, under existing circumstances, made them resolve
neither to ask parental consent to their purpose, nor wait the
ordinary steps prescribed by the Church. The connection was
therefore no less irregular than it was precipitate, and Jeanie never
so much as sought to see her father’s house till the solemn knot was
tied.
In her absence many inquiries were made respecting her by the
villagers, who had witnessed or heard of what had happened to her
on the previous day. Her truth and innocence being thus put beyond
the shadow of a doubt, consternation at the long absence of their
child, and compunction for the severity of their reproofs, drove the
unhappy parents almost frantic. When the news of the re-appearance
of their daughter dispelled their direful apprehensions as to her
safety, though they felt a momentary gleam of joy, yet they
experienced nothing like heartfelt satisfaction.
Jeanie made as sweet and loving a wife as she had been a
daughter; but the cares of providing for more than himself soon
made Henry regret his rashness, and the prospect of these cares
speedily increasing made him more and more dissatisfied with his
new state of life. All Jeanie’s care and anxiety to soothe and please
him were unavailing. It is not in the power of beauty, youth, and
innocence, to check and control the sallies of ignorance and caprice.
Chagrined because his youthful wife had not prepared his morning
meal to his liking, on a day when he was to visit a neighbouring city
for some trifling purpose, he determined to free himself from the
yoke into which he had so heedlessly run, and returned home on the
evening of the following day somewhat altered in dress and