When Is a Rabbi a Wise Man, and When Is He a Heap of Walnuts?

Pick
Nov. 17 2014
About Philologos

Philologos, the renowned Jewish-language columnist, appears twice a month in Mosaic. Questions for him may be sent to his email address by clicking here.

The Yiddish phrase talmid hokhem denotes someone learned in Talmud. But, despite a common misconception, it does not contain the word Talmud. Rather, it comes from the Hebrew talmid hakham, meaning “student of a sage.” To unpack the origins and history of this phrase is to learn something of the history of the rabbinate. Philologos writes;

The distinction in the Talmud between a rav or rabbi and a hakham is one of degrees of knowledge. Although every hakham is a rav, not every rav is a hakham. Thus, a passage in the tractate of Gittin says that the late second- and early third-century rabbi Isi ben Yehuda ranked the sages [hakhamim] as follows: “Rabbi Meir was a sage [hakham] and a Torah scribe. Rabbi Yehuda was a sage when he wished to be. Rabbi Tarfon was a heap of walnuts. Rabbi Yishma’el was a store stocked with everything. Rabbi Akiva was a secret treasure. Rabbi Yohanan ben Nuri was a peddler’s box. Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah was a spice box.” All these hakhamim, in other words, were more than ordinary rabbis, but not all were on the same level.

Read more at Forward

More about: Language, Rabbi Akiva, Rabbis, Talmud, Yiddish

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society