In the meantime, you might enjoy this truly outstanding article by Rabbi Shlomo Brody of Yeshivat haKotel. In it, he considers the role of the Zohar on Rabbi Yosef Karo’s formulation of the halakha, and appraises the author’s controversial Magid Mesharim as a treatise that testifies to his unifying of the two worlds:

Halakha and Kabbalah: Rabbi Joseph Karo’s Shulchan Aruch and Magid Mesharim
by Rabbi Shlomo Brody.

Amongst the great kabbalists and legalists produced in 16th century Safed, R. Yosef Karo clearly stands out as one of, if not the, most influential figure. Though his legal compendium Bet Yosef and code Shulchan Aruch, Karo helped shape the course of halakha for the next five centuries. Karo produced these works while the Zohar’s influence on the Jewish world greatly expanded, a process to which he contributed. In this essay, we will examine the impact of the Zohar on his halakhic jurisprudence. We will furthermore explore the influence of the personal revelation Karo received from his magid, as recorded in his spiritual diary Magid Mesharim.

[read more]

We spoke about Hardal: Haredi Dati Leumi (“Haredi Religious Nationalism”, for want of a better translation), which is modelled on the philosophy of Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook. The first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Palestine under the British Mandate, Rav Kook understood the State of Israel (even as a secular entity) as constituting “the beginning of the flowering of our redemption”. At least in theory, proponents of this philosophy serve proudly in the army and support Israel’s government, although the relatively recent withdrawal from Gaza did much to create a certain degree of factionalism within the Hardal camp.

At the other end of the spectrum, we looked at the breakaway group of Neturei Karta international, who split from Neturei Karta in Jerusalem after the death of its founder, Rabbi Amram Blau. Their very visible presence at Israel rallies, their vocal and financial support of Arab leaders who call for the destruction of Israel, and their attendance at Ahmedinajad’s Holocaust Denial Conference in Tehran have all done much in the way of fostering the misapprehension that Haredi Jews wish to see Israel disappear. (If you are interested, you can read transcripts of their speeches in Tehran on their website, where you can also find much information about their ideology.)

Between these two extremes, we spoke of a range of other groups: Shas, the two Ashkenazi political parties (chiefly Agudas Yisroel), the Edah haChareidis of Mea Shearim, and various groups (primarily Hasidic) who express views that align themselves with the Edah or with the mainstream faction of Neturei Karta. We looked at some historical background, particularly concerning the demographic nature of the Old Yishuv, as well as some of the religious Zionist settlement, but then followed the formation of key political groups and ideologies from 1912 until today. In so doing, one of the most important groups and ideologies centred on a key individual: Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, the former president of the Edah and the first Rebbe of Satmar.

Published in 1961, the Satmar Rebbe’s VaYoel Moshe (“And Moses Consented”, from Exodus 2:21) outlined his perspectives on Zionism and the State of Israel in the form of three essays, each of which had a formative impact on the philosophy of the Edah haChareidis. The second and the third deal with the impermissibility of returning to the land of Israel under the bureaucratic Law of Return (“מאמר ישוב ארץ ישראל”), and with the impermissibility of using the holy tongue for profane discourse (“מאמר לשון הקודש”). The first, and most important, essay is entitled “The Three Oaths” (“מאמר שלש שבועות”), and deals with his opinions concerning Zionism as a philosophy.

As with many religious Jews who opposed the State of Israel, the political philosophy of Zionism was understood by the Satmar Rebbe to have no basis within the traditional literature. An historically aberrant offshoot of the non-Jewish, post-Enlightenment philosophy of Nationalism, Zionism was seen to be a secular, European phenomenon that had no place within the hallowed halls of Jewish tradition, and no home on Israelite soil. What is more, its very existence was construed as being harmful to the continued survival of the Jewish people around the world. While these particular indictments do not necessarily impact upon apolitical Zionist models (such as the cultural philosophy of Ahad haAm), they were certainly related to the prevailing Zionist model, and the one that was formally instituted in 1948.

In demonstrating this idea, the Satmar Rebbe provided an exegesis on a midrash that is related in the Babylonian Talmud:

שלש שבועות הללו למה אחת שלא יעלו ישראל בחומה ואחת שהשביע בקדוש ברוך הוא את ישראל שלא ימרדו באומות העולם ואחת שהשביע הקדוש ברוך הוא את אומות העולם שלא ישתעבדו בהן בישראל יותר מדאי… בצבאות או באילות השדה אמר רבי אלעזר אמר להם הקדוש ברוך הוא לישראל אם אתם מקיימין את השבועות מוטב ואם לא אני מתיר את בשרכם כצבאות וכאילות השדה

This section, which occurs near the end of Tractate Ketubot, appears in the context of a discussion between Rabbi Zeira (who wanted to return to the land of Israel) and Rav Yehuda (who wanted to stop him). Rav Yehuda’s contention is that the exile can only end at such a time as God declares it to be over, and this is asserted in a back-and-forth fashion with the aid of various scriptural passages. The midrash that appears above, and that I translate below, relates to Song of Songs 2:7 – “I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles or the wild does: do not stir up or awaken love until it is ready!” (NRSV). Based on the idea that this poem represents a highly-coded love song between God and Israel, the rabbis present the following interpretation:

Why are there three oaths? [ie: why is there a reference to making an oath in Song of Songs 2:7, 3:5 and 8:4?] One is that Israel should not ascend [to their land] by force, one concerns the Holy One’s adjuring Israel that they not rebel against the nations of the world, and one concerns the Holy One’s adjuring the nations of the world that they not oppress Israel too much…

“By the gazelles or the wild does” (2:7). Rabbi Eliezer’s interpretation: The Holy One told Israel, “If you keep these oaths – good. But if you do not, I permit your flesh like the gazelles and the wild does.”

- Tractate Ketubot 111a

The nations of the world (according to the Satmar Rebbe’s utilisation of this midrash) are obliged to persecute the Jews, but they are obligated to do so only to a certain extent. That obligation, however, only rests upon them insofar as the Jews keep their side of the bargain: that they should neither attempt to reclaim the land of Israel by force, nor rebel in any measure against their host nations. Should they break their oaths then the nations of the world are absolved from theirs, and the flesh of Jews becomes as the flesh of wild animals: free for the taking.

It was the conviction of the Satmar Rebbe – and the opinion of the Edah haChareidis – that Zionism, insofar as it constituted an annullment of the two oaths imposed upon the Jews, was responsible for having caused the Holocaust. Nothing so devastating (nor so historically unprecedented) as the Shoah could have happened without the sanction of God, and no sin could have been so deserving of annihilation than the crime of prematurely terminating the exile. What is more, there were allegations made by the Satmar Rebbe that Zionist agencies were even financially and politically responsible for the fate of their coreligionists in Europe. You can see an example of such claims on this website, some of which constitute a bizarre internalisation of statements made by Hitler himself (see, for example, this page).

Where does this allegation originate?

As reported recently in Vos Iz Neias (and with a tip of the hat to Hirhurim), Satmar Hasidim from Kiryas Joel, NY, recently celebrated the 67th anniversary of Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum’s escape from Nazi-occupied Hungary in 1944. The anniversary of his departure is celebrated on the 21st of Kislev (which, in 1944, was December 7th), and was a key event in the formation of his own anti-Zionist philosophy, as well as in the philosophy of Rabbi Amram Blau’s Neturei Karta. Rather than see the fact that the Satmar Rebbe was saved by a Zionist committee as ironic, the very manner in which he was saved added fuel to his fiery hatred of Zionism. It is my contention that allegations concerning Zionist complicity in the Shoah all centre around the transport that saved the Satmar Rebbe’s life.

In order to understand how this could be so, it is necessary to consider the fate of Hungarian Jewry during the Shoah.

By the time that the Final Solution caught up with the Hungarians, the 750,000 Hungarian Jews were the last sizable Jewish community left in Axis-controlled Europe. In the east were the mass graves of Romania and the Ukraine; in the south, shipments of Jews from Serbia, Croatia and Greece were being sent by the trainload to Auschwitz; to the west, the Reich and its conquered territories were Judenrein; to the north were the killing centres of Poland. Prof. Raul Hilberg describes the situation as follows:

When the Hungarian Jews looked at a map of Axis Europe at the beginning of 1944, they could see that all around them Jewish communities had been attacked and destroyed… Conversely, when a German official looked at his map in Berlin, he could see that everywhere “the Jewish problem” had been “solved,” except in one relatively small area: Hungary. And when he looked at Hungary, he could see the largest concentration of Jews who still survived in the German sphere of influence. Truly, the Hungarian Jews were living in a land island, enclosed and protected by a political boundary. The Jews depended on that barrier for their survival, and the Germans had to break it down.

- Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Volume II (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1985), 796-797.

While Hungary’s government vacillated between being the willing and unwilling supporters of the Reich (both before and after the German intervention of 1944), the desperate Jewish community tried to bring their predicament to the attention of the West. In so doing, a Zionist committee was formed in 1943, known as the Aid and Rescue Committee (ועדת העזרה וההצלה). Headed by Dr Ottó Komoly, who was killed just before the arrival of the Red Army, and Dr Rudolf (Rezsö) Kastner, it aimed at rescuing those Jews who had escaped to Hungary from Poland, Slovakia and the Reich. These Jews, who were predominantly concentrated in the Carpathians, in Transylvania and in the countryside to the north of Budapest were all deported to concentration camps by July 1944. Ottó Komoly, who was the president, liaised with Hungarian sources in order to prevent their being sent to Auschwitz; Rudolf Kastner, his executive vice-president, liaised with the Germans.

Three distinct relief efforts were organised, each of which became legendary for different reasons: one for its failure, another for its implications, and the third for its success. As we shall see, the Satmar Rebbe owed his life to this third effort.

Their first plan was in consultation with the British, and involved the training of Hungarian Jewish paratroppers, living in Palestine, who could drop into Europe and form a partisan operation. The three paratroopers whom the British trained were Yoel Palgi, Peretz Goldstein and the poet, Hannah Szenes. They landed in Croatia on April 14th, 1944, and learning that Budapest was already occupied by the Nazis, the two men aborted their mission. Hannah Szenes continued on alone and was arrested on the 8th of July, tortured, tried for treason and then executed. She was 22 years old.

The second attempt occurred in May of 1944, when the Aid and Rescue Committee received detailed information as regards the number and the routes of the trains that were shuttling Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. With the aid of a branch in Bratislava, the Aid and Rescue Committee had this information wired to Switzerland, with a request to bomb two or three railway junctions and disrupt the whole operation. While they were met with silence from the Allies, their tactic did succeed in temporarily slowing down the transports nonetheless. As Raul Hilberg notes, “history plays strangely with its participants”. Although the Allies showed no interest in disrupting those transports, the relaying of the message from American and British agencies in Bern to their respective countries was intercepted by Hungarian counter-intelligence. Not knowing where the message had originated, the Hungarians were nonplussed as to how its authors knew the exact location of all Hungarian and German agencies in Budapest, as well as the number of trains going to Auschwitz, and their respective routes. In fact, the Hungarians became so frightened of Allied bombing as a result of this interception that, for the next three months, their cooperation with the Germans could only be described as “reluctant”.

In October, however, the Germans deposed the Hungarian prime minister (the sixth, since the war began), and appointed the leader of the fascist Arrow Cross Party: a man by the name of Ferenc Szálasi. By this stage, Auschwitz was already in its liquidation stage, the train lines were no longer operative, and the remaining Jews of Budapest (itself, the only Hungarian Jewish community that was left) were either marched towards Austria, or ghettoised in the capital. By the time that Hungary surrendered to the USSR, over 180,000 of its Jewish inhabitants had been murdered. Almost all of the survivors were from Budapest.

That the number wasn’t higher is due to a number of factors: the fact that the Final Solution only reached Hungary at such a time as Germany had already lost the war, the concentration of Jews in the capital city, who – for various reasons – were saved until the end, and at least three wartime Hungarian prime-ministers who resented the Germans and whose intentions it was to delay the Final Solution of the Jewish problem as long as possible. Alongside these larger issues stands the heroic work of Raoul Wallenberg, who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews at great risk to himself. Among them were my grandmother and her mother, who were spared the fatal march from Budapest to Austria as a result of his “discovering” that they held Swedish passports. By all accounts, it would appear that Raoul Wallenberg perished in a Soviet prison.

Smaller in its overall importance than these factors was the third rescue mission conducted by the Aid and Rescue Committee, which succeeded in saving the lives of just over 1,600 Jews – one of whom was Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum. Organised by Dr Rudolf Kastner, who liaised with Eichmann, a trainload of Jews (“Kastner’s Train”, as it came to be known) was sent to Switzerland instead of Auschwitz. The question is: what was Eichmann given in return?

Answering this question has proven to be tremendously difficult. After the war, Rudolf Kastner composed “The Report of the Jewish Rescue Committee in Budapest” (“Der Bericht des jüdischen Rettungskomitees aus Budapest”), in which he testified that Eichmann had agreed to the release of 600 Jews in exchange for 6.5 million pengö (= approximately 4,000,000 RM), who would then all be given safe passage to Palestine. Subsequently, Eichmann raised the number to 1,600 Jews, and although he sent them all to Bergen-Belsen instead, many of them subsequently arrived in Switzerland late in 1944. It was hypothesised, during Eichmann’s trial, that he raised the number on the suspicion that he may one day stand before a tribunal. In April of 1944, that was hardly a prophecy.

In 1960, Adolf Eichmann was interviewed by a former Nazi journalist, Willem Sassen. In this interview, which was subsequently published in Time Magazine, Eichmann recalled the events of the Kastner Train differently: according to Eichmann, Kastner made the additional promise of maintaining order in the camps, the better to facilitate the regular deportations to Auschwitz that were already underway. The last thing that the Nazis wanted was a second Warsaw Ghetto uprising, so in Eichmann’s words, “it was a good bargain”.

After having escaped from Auschwitz in April of 1944, Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler drafted a report that described the layout of the camp and its use of gas chambers. Controversially, Rudolf Kastner has been accused by some of having suppressed the report, which would have otherwise led to tremendous unrest amongst the Jews and the possible escape of many. Indeed, it would appear that Rudolf Kastner received a copy of this report on the 28th of April, but that it was not something that he brought to the attention of regular Hungarian Jews. By the 7th of June, the Nazis had finished deporting the Jews of the Carpathians and Transylvania. Sturmbannführer Walter Höttl, who was one of the SS officers surpervising the forced evacuations of those two zones, describes them in the following way:

Without resistance and in submission, they marched by the hundreds in long columns to railway stations and piled into the trains. Only very few gendarmes were supervising the operation; it would have been easy to flee. In the Carpatho-Ukraine, which contained numerically the strongest Jewish settlements, the forbidding mountains and forests offered an opportunity for prolonged hiding. But only few removed themselves in this way from their doom.

- Raul Hilberg, Destruction, 841 – citing Walter Hagen (Höttl), Die Geheime Front (Zurich, 1950), 39.

Was Rudolf Kastner, in his efforts to release 1,600 Hungarian Jews, complicit in the Nazi atrocities? In 1953, an amateur Israeli journalist named Malchiel Gruenwald, accused Kastner (who was at that time a spokesman for the Israeli Ministry of Trade and Industry) of collaboration with the Nazis. What is more, it was revealed that several spaces on the train were filled with Kastner’s relatives and friends.

Some of the judges on Israel’s Supreme Court were scathing, accusing him of having been a knowing accomplice to the Nazi destruction of Hungarian Jewry, who acted out of desire for personal gain. While the overriding sentiment, on which the court decided, was that he had been an unwilling and unknowing accomplice, he resigned from his job in disgrace. A thorough and fascinating description of the case was composed by Akiva Orr: “The Kastner Case, Jerusalem, 1955″, in Israel: Politics, Myths and Identity Crisis (London: Pluto Press, 1994), 81-116. The book can be downloaded from this link.

In 1958, the courts overruled their former opinion and acquitted Rudolf Kastner, but it was too late for him. A year earlier, in 1957, Kastner had been gunned down outside his house in Tel-Aviv. His killers (Ze’ev Eckstein, Dan Shemer and Yosef Menkes) served seven years each.

While this is not the only instance in which Jewish organisations “bartered”, for want of a better term, with the Nazis, and while Raul Hilberg demonstrates innumerable instances of near-complicity in the interest of self-preservation, the very central nature of a Zionist agency in this particular incident, and the fact that it fell in the direct experience of the Satmar Rebbe himself, makes it a viable candidate for the origin story to the Satmar and Neturei Karta myth: that the Zionists were not only responsible for the Shoah on a supernatural level, but that they were directly involved in the machinations of the Reich.

So far as Kastner is concerned, for whom I cannot help but feel a weight of regret, I would echo the sentiments of Judge Benjamin Halevy, whose indictment of 1955 was so beautifully expressed. Quoting Homer Virgil, he declared that

timeo Danaos et dona ferentes (“I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts”). By accepting this present Kastner had sold his soul to the devil.

- Akiva Orr: “The Kastner Case, Jerusalem, 1955″, in Israel: Politics, Myths and Identity Crisis (London: Pluto Press, 1994), 81-116 (91).

For a start, and as I imagine that most people know already, Hanukkah is nowhere mentioned within the Hebrew Bible. Whether or not it appears within Christian Bibles depends entirely upon the denomination of Christianity: the two books of Maccabees, while make passing allusion to the festival, are deuterocanonical to Catholics and apocryphal to (almost) everybody else.

The following is the relevant passage in 1 Maccabees (4:36-59), dated to within the last quarter of the 2nd century (ie: 125-100) BCE. I have emphasised those parts of it that might resonate with traditional perspectives on the festival:

But Judas and his brethren said: ‘Behold, our enemies are discomfited; let us go up to cleanse the Holy Place, and re-dedicate it. And all the army was gathered together, and they went unto mount Sion. And they saw our sanctuary laid desolate, and the altar profaned, and the gates burned up, and shrubs growing in the courts as in a forest or upon one of the mountains, and the chambers (of the priests) pulled down; and they rent their garments, and made great lamentation, and put ashes on their heads; and they fell on their faces to the ground, and they blew the solemn blasts upon the trumpets, and cried unto heaven…

So they pulled down the altar, and laid down the stones in the mountain of the House, in a convenient place, until a prophet should come and decide (as to what should be done) concerning them. And they took whole stones according to the Law, and built a new altar after the fashion of the former (one); and they built the Holy Place, and the inner parts of the house, and hallowed the courts. And they made the holy vessels new, and they brought the candlestick in order to give light in the temple. And they set loaves upon the table, and hung up the veils, and finished all the works which they had undertaken.

And they rose up early in the morning on the twenty-fifth (day) of the ninth month, which is the month Chislev, in the one hundred and forty-eighth year, and offered sacrifice according to the Law, upon the new altar of burnt offerings which they had made. At the corresponding time (of the month) and on the (corresponding) day on which the Gentiles had profaned it, on that day was it dedicated afresh, with songs and harps and lutes, and with cymbals. And all the people fell upon their faces, and worshipped, and gave praise, (looking up) unto heaven, to him who had prospered them. And they celebrated the dedication of the altar for eight days, and offered burnt offerings with gladness, and sacrificed a sacrifice of deliverance and praise… And Judas and his brethren and the whole congregation of Israel ordained, that the days of the dedication of the altar should be kept in their seasons year by year for eight days, from the twenty-fifth (day) of the month Chislev, with gladness and joy.

- R.H. Charles (ed. and trans.), The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, Volume One: Apocrypha (Berkely: The Apocryphile Press, 2004), 81-82 – parentheses in the original; emphasis mine

This reference, while it might not exactly align with what we learn in Hebrew School, is not too far off. There is a reference to the name of the festival (Hanukkah meaning “dedication”), to the fact that it begins on the 25th of Kislev, the fact that it lasts for eight days, and the fact that it has something (something) to do with the repurification of the altar. There is no reference to the miracle of the oil.

There is a reference to the festival in 2 Maccabees as well but, like much of 2 Maccabees, it is rather strange. The text opens with a letter, containing an injunction to commemorate Hanukkah in Kislev, but refers to it as the festival as Sukkot instead, which is in the month of Tishrei. The second letter makes clear that we are speaking of the festival of the purification of the temple and that it should be celebrated on the 25th of Kislev, but it doesn’t name the festival, and it relates it to an event in the life of Nehemiah: approximately three hundred years before the Maccabees. The second chapter notes that Solomon had celebrated his dedication of the temple for eight days as well, so it is not surprising that certain scholars see the origin of this festival in a winter solstice that greatly predated the events to which it is usually attached.

Josephus mentions Hanukkah as well, but as with much of what Josephus says it’s unclear precisely what his sources are. For the most part, he relates a story not dissimilar from what we find in 1 Maccabees, but he adds a curious detail:

Now Judas celebrated the festival of the restoration of the sacrifices of the temple for eight days; and omitted no sort of pleasures thereon… They were so very glad at the revival of their customs, when after a long time of intermission, they unexpectedly had regained the freedom of their worship, that they made it a law for their posterity, that they should keep a festival, on account of the restoration of the temple worship, for eight days. And from that time to this we celebrate this festival, and call it Lights. I suppose the reason was, because this liberty beyond our hopes appeared to us; and that thence was the name given to that festival.

- Antiquities 7.7.323-325 (trans. W. Whiston)

That Josephus should have known of a tradition that Hannukah was in some way a “festival of lights”, but not known of any custom as regarded the actual kindling of candles, or of any miracle that related to the kindling of a lamp, is astonishing – and says much as regards what may be the late development of those traditions. To find them stated explicitly, we need to turn to the rabbinic literature next, and when we do we are hit with a resounding silence.

The following is the sum total of all references to the festival of Hanukkah within the Mishna, and I hope it explains everything you ever wanted to know about the festival:

Mishna, Tractate Bikkurim 1:6
הקונה שני אילנות בתוך של חברו מביא ואינו קורא רבי מאיר אומר מביא וקורא יבש המעין נקצץ האילן מביא ואינו קורא רבי יהודה אומר מביא וקורא מעצרת ועד החג מביא וקורא מן החג ועד חנכה מביא ואינו קורא רבי יהודה בן בתירא אומר מביא וקורא

One who purchases two trees from another’s [field], must bring [the first fruits to the priest], but he does not recite [the traditional formula, found in Deuteronomy 26:3, 5-10).
Rabbi Meir says, he brings them and he recites it.
Should the spring dry up or the tree be chopped down, he must bring [the first fruits to the priest], but he does not recite [the traditional formula].
Rabbi Yehuda says, he brings them and he recites it.
From the reaping [ie: from Shavuot] until the festival [ie: until Sukkot], he brings [the first fruits to the priest] and he recites [the traditional formula], but from the festival [of Sukkot] until Hanukkah he brings [the first fruits to the priest] but he does not recite [the traditional formula].
Rabbi Yehuda ben Beteira says, he brings them and he recites it.

-

Mishna, Tractate Rosh HaShanah 1:3
על ששה חדשים השלוחים יוצאין על ניסן מפני הפסח על אב מפני התענית על אלול מפני ראש השנה על תשרי מפני תקנת המועדות על כסלו מפני חנכה ועל עדר מפני הפורים וכשהיה בית המקדש קים יוצאין אף על איר מפני פסח קטן

There are six months on which emissaries would go out [in order to alert distant communities as to the sighting of the new moon]:
On Nisan, because of Pesach;
On Av, because of the fast [ie: Tisha b'Av, the ninth of Av];
On Elul, because of Rosh haShana [which occurs on the very first day of the following month];
On Tishrei, in order to align the festivals [of Yom Kippur, presumably, and Sukkot];
On Kislev, because of Hanukkah;
On Adar, because of the Purim.
And, when the temple existed, they would also go out on Iyyar, because of Minor Pesach (ie: the second Pesach, which is referred to in Numbers 9:10-11).

-

Mishna, Tractate Taanit 2:10
אין גוזרין תענית על הצבור בראש חדש בחנכה ובפורים ואם התחילו אין מפסיקין דברי רבן גמליאל אמר רבי מאיר אף על פי שאמר רבן גמליאל אין מפסיקין מודה היה שאין משלימין וכן תשעה באב שחל להיות בערב שבת

One may not establish a communal fast on the first of the month, on Hanukkah or on Purim, but if they began [fasting already], they may not interrupt it: the opinion of Rabban Gamliel.
Rabbi Meir says that even though Rabban Gamliel said that one may not interrupt it, he agrees that one may not complete it either [but that he must break his fast, one presumes, close to the hour at which it would otherwise be scheduled to end].
This is also the case with Tisha b’Av that falls on Erev Shabbat [- an unfortunate calendrical coincidence, which no longer occurs with the established calendars currently in use].

-

Mishna, Tractate Megillah 3:4
ראש חדש אדר שחל להיות בשבת קורין בפרשת שקלים חל להיות בתוך השבת מקדימין לשעבר ומפסיקין לשבת אחרת בשניה זכור בשלישית פרה אדמה ברביעית החדש הזה לכם בחמישית חוזרין לכסדרן לכל מפסיקין בראשי חדשים בחנכה ובפורים בתעניות ובמעמדות וביום הכפורים

If the first day of Adar falls on a Shabbat, one reads the section [known as] Sheqalim ["Coins", Exodus30:11-16]; if it falls on a weekday, one commences with the previous [Shabbat, reading the section then] and pauses on the following Shabbat [and leaves until the Shabbat following that one the order that, otherwise, would be as follows]:
On the second [Shabbat of the month of Adar, one reads the section known as] Zachor ["Remember", Deuteronomy 25:17-19];
On the third [Shabbat of the month of Adar, one reads the section known as] Parah Adumah ["Red Heifer", Numbers 19];
On the fourth [Shabbat of the month of Adar, one reads the section known as] HaChodesh haZeh laKhem ["This Month, to You", Exodus 12:1-20];
On the fifth [Shabbat of the month of Adar], one returns to the regular order [of haftarot, persumably].
For all [of the following] one breaks off [from the regular reading and reads the sections described in a subsequent mishna, Megillah 3:6]:
The first days of the months, Hanukkah, Purim, fast days, appointed times [when, according to the Mishna in Taanit 4:2, segments of the population would make their way to Jerusalem in order to be present for the regular daily offerings] and Yom Kippur.

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Mishna, Tractate Megillah 3:6
בחנכה בנשיאים בפורים ויבא עמלק בראשי חדשים ובראשי חדשיכם במעמדות במעשה בראשית בתעניות ברכות וקללות אין מפסיקין בקללות אלא אחד קורא את כלן בשני ובחמישי ובשבת במנחה קורין כסדרן ואין עולין להם מן החשבון שנאמר וידבר משה את מעדי יי אל בני ישראל מצותן שיהו קורין כל אחד ואחד בזמנו

On Hanukkah, [one reads the section known as] Nesiim ["Princes", Numbers 7];
On Purim, [one reads the section known as] VaYavo Amaleq ["Then Amalek Came", Exodus 17:8-16];
On the first days of the months [one reads the section known as] BeRoshei Chodsheikhem ["One the First Days of Your Months", Numbers 28:11-15];
At the appointed times [that were mentioned above, one reads] the work of creation;
On fast days, [one reads the] blessings and the curses [Leviticus 26]. One may not break up the curses [and divide them between more than one reader], rather one person must read all of them.
On Monday and Thursday [mornings] and on Shabbat afternoons, one reads according to the regular order and does not raise [?] them from the count [ie: one reads portions from that which is going to be read the following Shabbat morning, and makes sure to actually reread them that following Shabbat - acc. to R' Obadiah of Bertinoro], since it says: “Moses declared the set times of the Lord to the Israelites” (Leviticus 23:44) – their commandment is that they should read every section in its season.

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Mishna, Tractate Moed Katan 3:9
בראשי חדשים בחנכה ובפורים מענות ומטפחות בזה ובזה לא מקוננות נקבר המת לא מענות ולא מטפחות איזהו ענוי שכלן עונות כאחת קינה שאחת מדברת וכלן עונות אחריה שנאמר ולמדנה בנתיכם נהי ואשה רעותה קינה אבל לעתיד לבא הוא אומר בלע המות לנצח ומחה יי אלהים דמעה מעל כל פנים וגו

On the first days of the months, on Hanukkah and on Purim, women may cry out [in lamentation, during a funeral] and clap their hands. On each of these [days] they may not wail. Once the deceased is buried, they may neither cry out [in lamentation] nor clap their hands.
What is “crying out”? When they all cry out as one.
[What is] “wailing”? When one declares and they all cry out after her, as it says: “Teach to your daughters a dirge, and each to her neighbor a lament” [NRSV, Jeremiah 9:19; v20 in English Bibles].
But in time to come, it says: “He will swallow up death forever and the Lord God will wipe each tear from every cheek” [Isaiah 25:8].

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Mishna, Tractate Bava Kama 6:6
גץ שיצא מתחת הפטיש והזיק חיב גמל שהיה טעון פשתן ועבר ברשות הרבים ונכנסה פשתנו לתוך החנות ודלקה בנרו של חנוני והדליק את הבירה בעל הגמל חיב הניח חנוני נרו מבחוץ החנוני חיב רבי יהודה אומר בנר חנכה פטור

A spark that flies out from under the hammer and causes damage: he is obligated [to make financial restitution].
A flax-laden camel that is walking in a public place, whose flax [is so bulky that it] goes into a shop and catches fire on the shop-owner’s candle and sets fire to the establishment: the owner of the camel is obligated. [But,] had the shop-owner left the candle outside, he is liable.
Rabbi Yehuda says, he is exempt if it is a Hanukkah candle.

From the foregoing, we can determine the fact that Hanukkah is celebrated in the month of Kislev (Rosh HaShanah 1:3), that between Sukkot and Hanukkah one does not recite the traditional formula over the first fruits (Bikkurim 1:6), that communal fasts are impermissible on Hanukkah – or, at least, they must be cut short (Taanit 2:10), that the day features its own special Torah reading (Megillah 3:4, 6), that women may not wail on Hanukkah during a funeral, and must desist from crying out and clapping after the body has been interred (Moed Katan 3:9) and – most importantly! – that there is such a thing as a “Hanukkah candle”, and that it is supposed to be left outside the shopfront (Bava Kama 6:6). It’s not exactly the Shulchan Arukh already, but at least we’re getting somewhere.

Now, if this were to be an exhaustive analysis of Hanukkah in the early rabbinic literature (and it is most certainly not), I would next have to note all of the references to this festival in the Tosefta, the Palestinian Talmud, the halakhic midrashim, and maybe even some of the midrash aggadah. As it is, I’m going to skip straight to the Babylonian Talmud, and as much as I would love to append Rav Saadiah Gaon’s description of Hanukkah from his siddur (the first ever written, for all of the year), that will just have to wait for a later post.

So! What does the Talmud have to say?

The relevant passage can be found in Tractate Shabbat 21a-23b, and can be divided into four sections. The first section concerns the material from which the Hanukkah wicks and oil can be made, the second concerns the procedure whereby one lights the candles, the third concerns the nature of the festival itself, and the fourth constitutes a smattering of unrelated laws, found amongst discussions of other Shabbat-related and temple-related topics:

1. The substance of the wicks and the oil

The Talmud presents three opinions, together with rationalisations of all three. The opinions are those of Rav Huna, Rav Hisda, and either Rav Matana or Rav (the Talmud is unsure):

Rav Huna declares that the same wicks and oil that are forbidden on Shabbat (due, it would seem, to their inferior quality) are also forbidden on Hanukkah, whether the day in question is a Shabbat or a weekday;

Rav Hisda declares that the same wicks and oil that are forbidden on Shabbat are forbidden on Hanukkah, but only if the day in question is a Shabbat. On days of Hanukkah that are not Shabbat, one may use whatever he wants as a wick and as oil;

Rav (or Rav Matana) declares that the same wicks and oil that are forbidden on Shabbat are permissible on Hanukkah, both on weekdays and on Shabbat.

What is the logic? According to the Talmud, the dispute centres around two Hanukkah-related laws: whether or not it is necessary to repair the candle after it goes out, and whether or not it is permissible to use the light of the candle for something else – reading, for example.

We can therefore assume that Rav Huna permits both, and therefore forbids the use of low quality wicks and oil on a weekday (low quality means that they will go out easily, and one might forget to repair them), as well as on Shabbat (being allowed to use the light for reading might mean that you forget that it’s a Shabbat and fix them if they go out);

We can assume that Rav Hisda holds that it is not necessary to fix the candle if it goes out, and that he therefore permits the use of inferior products on the weekdays of the festival, but that he permits using the light for other activities, making them unsuitable for Shabbat;

Finally, we can assume that Rav (or Rav Matana) both denies the necessity of fixing the wick, and disallows the usage of the light for other activities. According to him, therefore, such products are permissible on Hanukkah irrespective of the day of the week.

What follows this discussion is a brief interlude, the point of which is that it is better to learn new things as a child than as an adult, followed by a meta-discussion on whether or not Rav’s (or Rav Matana’s) position is tenable. The overall conclusion of this section is… Wait, you were looking for a conclusion??

2. The procedure of lighting the candles

There are two discussions in this section, the first of which concerns the procedure by which the candles, themselves, are lit, and the second of which concerns the placement of the candelabrum (the hanukkiah):

The rabbis teach that the obligation of lighting candles on Hanukkah rests on the head of the household, who lights on behalf of his family. Nonetheless, those who are expedient (or those who beautify the commandments, depending on your favourite etymology of mehadrin) will light one candle for each member of the household. Those who are particularly expedient (mehadrin min hamehadrin) will do one of the two following things:

a) According to the school of Shammai, they will start by each lighting eight candles, then diminish the number by one every evening, lighting seven on the second night, six on the third and so on. The final night of Hanukkah, every member of the household lights a single candle;
b) According to the school of Hillel, they will start by each lighting a single candle, then increase the number by one every evening, lighting two candles on the second night, three on the third and so on. The final night of Hanukkah, every member of the household lights eight candles.

The Talmud goes on to discuss the nature of this particular dispute between the schools of Shammai and Hillel, and their respective philosophical views. Here, as in most instances, the halakha follows the school of Hillel (although the Talmud doesn’t say so, and we are left – again – without a clear conclusion. You might have to get used to that).

The second discussion in this section concerns the placement of the hanukkiah, which – as we saw in the Mishna (Bava Kama 6:6) – needs to be public.

The rabbis teach that it is necessary to place the Hanukkah candle outside the house, on the doorstep. Should one live in an upper storey, one places it at a window that overlooks a public space. In times of danger, when one doesn’t wish to advertise the fact that one is lighting Hanukkah candles, one is allowed to place the hanukkiah inside, on a table. In agreement with the view expressed above by Rav/Rav Matana (that the Hanukkah candles cannot be used for any other purpose), an additional candle is necessary if one requires light, but a fireplace is considered sufficient for all but an important person (אדם חשוב).

At this particular juncture, you’re probably wondering the same thing that I’m wondering, and it’s nice to know that the rabbis are wondering this as well. In amongst all of these discussions, we haven’t once answered the most basic question of all, which is the question that the Talmud asks next: “מאי חנוכה”

3. What is Hanukkah – or, as I prefer to translate it, “What the hell is Hanukkah anyway?”

Given the incredible importance of this particular question, I feel that it is worthwhile to present what the Talmud says directly:

תנו רבנן בכ”ה בכסליו יומי דחנוכה תמניא אינון דלא למספד בהון ודלא להתענות בהון שכשנכנסו יוונים להיכל טמאו כל השמנים שבהיכל וכשגברה מלכות בית חשמונאי ונצחום בדקו ולא מצאו אלא פך אחד של שמן שהיה מונח בחותמו של כהן גדול ולא היה בו אלא להדליק יום אחד נעשה בו נס והדליקו ממנו שמונה ימים לשנה אחרת קבעום ועשאום ימים טובים בהלל והודאה

The rabbis taught: On [ie: from] the 25th of Kislev, there are eight days of Hanukkah, on which it is forbidden to eulogise or to fast, since when the Greeks entered the sanctuary they contaminated all of the oil in the sanctuary, and when the Hasmonean monarchy prevailed and defeated them, they checked but could only find one container of oil, with only enough to burn for one day, lying with the seal of the high priest. A miracle occurred for them and they lit [the lamps] with it for eight days. A subsequent year, they established these [days] and they made them a festival with praise and thanksgiving [ימים טובים בהלל והודאה].

This, in a nutshell, has become the official Hanukkah story. We now have all of the key ingredients: the name, the date and the mythology. As with the story of the 72 sages who wrote the Septuagint, it is fascinating to see this one grow, but unlike that particular tale, we’ve very little to go on besides the sources that I’ve listed here. References within the Tosefta, the Palestinian Talmud and the midrash, as mentioned before, will have to wait for another time. Meanwhile, it’s worth noting the fact that the Talmud’s story doesn’t stop quite yet. So far as Hanukkah-related legislation is concerned, the Talmud continues by noting a variety of other laws, found over the next couple of pages.

These laws concern the placement of the candles (their height from the ground, as well as which side of the door they are to be placed at), the explicit impermissibility of using their light for any mundane activity (the example given is of counting money), the legality of using a Hanukkah candle in order to light another Hanukkah candle, the nature (and the number) of any blessings to be recited by those who are lighting them and those who are witnessing them being lit, and the extent of the obligation:

• Guests who are lodging overnight are obliged to light their own candles, according to Rabbi Sheshet, although Rabbi Zeira qualifies this assertion;
• Women are allowed to light their own candles, according to Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, as they also benefitted from the miracle;
• Deaf-mutes, people who are mentally incompetent and children are all disqualified – as they usually are.

So far as whether or not any or all of the laws mentioned here are still current, the development of the halakha is such that, were one to gain a true insight into the evolution of this festival, one would need to consult the traditional commentaries and meta-commentaries, compendia and responsa. That would best be left for another time, and to one with greater textual competence than myself.

From Panini to Ramanujan, India has had more than its fair share of brilliant individuals, although the feats performed by Dr R. Ganesh are sui generis. The only way that I can translate them into a culture similar to my own is by imagining the following:

A performer stands upon the stage; before him is his audience. As a feat, he must compose a poem on a theme to be determined by a random audience member, and do so in a strict metrical arrangement. What is more, he must compose this poem only one syllable at a time, and between each syllable, the audience member who suggested the theme must call out a syllable that he is not allowed to use next. He progresses in such a fashion until he has concluded the first line, at which point he is offered a new challenge. The new challenges mount up, between each of which (and without the aid of writing anything down) he must return to the original challenge and, in similar fashion, add another line to it. The challenges that are interspersed throughout include answering random questions from the audience, composing poems on specific themes (again, constrained by metre), adding lines to poems that are given to him, recognising the provenance of quotes that are called out from the audience, composing verse that contains specific sounds that are words in other languages but which must be included as morphemes in the speaker’s own tongue, and completing a magic square to certain specifications. This last challenge, like the first, is broken up and interspersed around others.

This all sounds like quite a mess, and I would have enough difficulty completing even the first of those tasks without being distracted by so much as one of the others. Apparantly, Dr. R. Ganesh is quite adept at this particular feat of memory, which is called an “avadhana“, and his ability to do it with one hundred parallel questions (a “shatavadhana”, instead of the traditional eight) has led to his being named a “Shatavadhani”.

Reading this got me to thinking about feats of memory in general, and it was but a small step from there to the world of the yeshiva in particular. I am reminded of a parlour trick, for want of a better term, that had some measure of popularity for a time. Known by many as “the pin trick”, it involved choosing a random tractate of the Talmud, opening it to a random page, and then placing a pin through one of the words: the person who was “performing”, so to speak, would be told the tractate, the page and the word, and would then disclose exactly which word it was going to go through on the other side of the page. In order to make the enormity of this feat clear, the Babylonian Talmud comprises a vast corpus of legal and dialectic literature, spanning almost 2,700 double-sided pages of unvocalised, unpunctuated Aramaic text. To perform a feat like this – and one which was looked down upon by many members of the establishment – it is necessary to have committed the entire Talmud to memory. Such a skill relies greatly on natural gifts, but is also an indication of an incredible time spent in the pursuit of Talmudic fluency.

While I am disinclined to minimise in any respect the performance of such a feat, if I were to say anything to its detriment I would note that it is uncreative. While it testifies to the practitioner’s incredible familiarity with the corpus, it says nothing at all for his comprehension. In that respect, more popular amongst many individuals (particularly in Lithuania) was the delivery of a pilpul: a Talmudic homily that linked together a large number of Talmudic discussions and meta-discussions, commentaries and super-commentaries. In many respects, this practice served the same purpose as the pin trick: to demonstrate the acumen of the “performer” by revealing his incredible feats of memorisation, and to show that he was possessed of a keen and analytical mind.

To demonstrate just how ingrained such attitudes are, within the Haredi world today, consider the following example. Just down the road from one of the yeshivot at which I studied in 2003 was a kindergarten. There were signs in the street around it, advertising it as a good place to send your children. Not one of the signs mentioned the conditions of the rooms, the quality of the equipment, the professionalism of the staff or even the rates. Instead, they all asked a simple question: “Do you want your sons to know Shas?”

Shas, which is an acronym for Shisha Sedarim (ששה סדרים, “six orders”), refers to the Babylonian Talmud. It is certainly no mistake to think that a young man need start (reasonably) early if he wishes to truly master this corpus, and must learn to work diligently in the process. While I applaud the enthusiasm of the parents, I do think that kindergarten might be a little bit too early.

During my time in yeshiva, I heard of young men who lived locally and who had completed Shas in time for their bar-mitzvah. While that was certainly rare, completing it in time for their twentieth birthday was not. What is more, there were a number of young men, ranged through their twenties and thirties, who appeared to know large sections of it off by heart. If I were to be cruel, I would say that they didn’t appear to know anything else.

There are a number of different sociological factors that come into play here. Central, in many respects, is the sense of loss that follows in the wake of the Shoah. Whole communities of learned, Torah-observant Jews were shuttled by the trainload to Chełmno and Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor, Majdanek and Auschwitz. Libraries, like the famed collection at the Chochmei Lublin yeshiva, were put to the torch. Despite the fact that more people are learning Torah today than have ever been learning Torah in the past, the sense that one needs to rebuild something is pervasive.

Secondarily to that, although intimately connected with it, is the success of the Lithuanian approach to Torah study. Between the death of Rabbi Moshe Sofer in 1839 and the outbreak of the first world war, there were over two hundred yeshivot in Hungary. In the minds of many people, however, the yeshivot of Lithuania and Poland (institutions like the Mir, Novaradok, Ponevezvh and Volozhin) were rabbinic institutions par excellence. The differences between the two styles of institution are noteworthy: while Hungarian yeshivot featured holidays during the year, allowing students to spend time away from the study hall, the Lithuanian yeshiva system emphasised the need for perennial learning. While the Hungarian yeshiva system had a focus on tutelage and regular examinations, the Lithuanian yeshiva system placed its focus on individual study with a study partner (a chavruta). While Hungarian rabbis were renowned for their cogent responses to legal questions, Lithuanian rabbis were renowned instead for their dialectic analysis and their feats of memory. Heads of Lithuanian yeshivot, as a general rule, did not decide on matters of law.

[If you are interested in reading more about Hungarian yeshivot, I append links to two excellent articles that appeared in Jewish History (1997): "On the Hungarian Yeshiva Movement", by Rabbi Prof. Mordechai Breuer, and "Hungarian Yeshivot, Lithuanian Yeshivot and Joseph Ben-David", by Prof. Shaul Stampfer.]

To all things, of course, there is a limit. Defining the uppermost boundary of Lithuanian analysis is the school of Brisk: a method of intense dialectical analysis that is likened by its detractors to chemistry. Its origins can be found in a collection of discourses on the Rambam’s Mishne Torah, composed by Rabbi Chaim Soloveitchik (the Brisker Rav), who was the Rav at Brest-Litovsk in Belarus – “Brisk” in Yiddish. While the Rambam’s reliance on the Palestinian Talmud and other non-Babylonian sources is no secret, the Brisker Rav’s attempts to align the Mishne Torah with the Babylonian Talmud resulted in a tremendously conceptual presentation of the halakha, breaking individual discussions in the halakhic literature into their constituent components and aiming at a philosophical appraisal of the Torah’s underlying mechanics. Those who oppose such an approach nonetheless recognise the greatness of his work, and a conceptual approach in non-Brisk circles, while it is not the norm, is also reasonably common.

Supporters of this school may see its true origins in the writings of the Brisker Rav’s father, Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik (1820-1892), who penned a collection of analytical discourses on the Mishne Torah and on the Torah itself, entitled “Beis haLevi”. He was the great-grandson of Rabbi Chaim ben Yitzchak (“Chaim Volozhiner”), who founded the yeshiva in Volozhin and who was himself a disciple of the Vilna Gaon, Rabbi Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman (1720-1797). The methodology of the Vilna Gaon and of his disciples was one of extreme memorisation, and it is said of the Gaon (the Gra, as he is known) that if given the name of a Talmudic sage and the name of a chapter of the Talmud, he was able to declare the number of times the former appeared within the latter. In the school of Brisk, the two approaches of memorisation and analysis came to a head: two characteristics, while not always approved of in the extremes to which the Brisker Rav took them, that are admired and striven for in the Ashkenazi Haredi world today.

The intensity and the devotion of these people, and the limits to which they have succeeded in memorising so vast a body of literature, are most certainly beyond the norm. One individual in our own age who has accomplished such a feat is haRav Ovadiah Yosef, the former Sephardi Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel and the spiritual leader of the Shas party. He has attained a degree of memorisation and fluency across the vast bulk of Jewish legal literature to an extent unparalleled since the Rambam himself. Nonetheless, his lack of analysis is one of the several factors (according to Dr Marc Shapiro, one of the major factors) in his being so disrespected by the Ashkenazi Haredi establishment. For those who model their education system on the Lithuanian yeshivot, analysis is as integral as memorisation.

For my part, I fear that the analysis in which they take such pride is in many respects as uncreative as the pin trick that so many of them disparaged. While it contributes a great deal to certain philosophical conceptualisations of the halakha, it does nothing in the realm of advancing Jewish legislation in practice. Like the shatavadhana of Dr R. Ganesh, it is impressive to behold, and a true testimony to the brilliance of he who can execute such feats of memory and analysis. Like the shatavadhana of Dr R. Ganesh, however, it remains no more than a performance.

Social philosopher, political critic, agent provocateur, contrarian par excellence: a man who spoke his mind freely, refused to suffer fools gladly, and brought the full weight of his intellect into the formation of his convictions, behind which he stood until the end. Christopher Hitchens succumbed to esophageal cancer just two days ago. He was 62 years old.

Wikipedia is cruel. No sooner had Vanity Fair released the details of his death than verbs were changed to past tense and a new date was appended to his photograph: a flourish of finality that may have even borne a trace of satisfaction. We are all of us slain by time.

What can one say about the man? He never shied from an argument. When, after a long and colourful career as commentator on the major political events of his time (during which he was most famous for having moved from the left into the neoconservative camp), he reinvented himself as a horseman of the apocalypse. After writing God is Not Great, Hitchens went on a tour of America’s bible belt, engaging priests and politicians, evangelists and scholars in debate after scathing debate. It is fair to say that in the game of words, Hitchens was better armed than his opponents. I never saw him falter.

Unlike most people, Hitchens never tired of insulting those whom he despised, even after they were dead. When Jerry Falwell died (a man whom Hitchens labelled a “little toad”, a “faith-based fraud”), he quipped that if he’d only been given an enema first, they could have buried him in a matchbox. While the world mourned Princess Di, Hitchens declared her a childish degenerate, whose sordid relationships and reckless behaviour got her killed. Most famously, if only because he dedicated his The Missionary Position to her, he indicted Mother Teresa as a fanatic, a friend of poverty, a fundamentalist and a fraud.

Let us therefore not spare Hitchens in his own passing. Anything for him but tired platitudes. He was rude, he was self-righteous, he was conceited. He made racist jokes, smoked cigarettes by the carton, believed women incapable of being funny, and was never without a glass of scotch. He was erudite and exceedingly eloquent. An opinionated and highly-gifted raconteur, he was born to be a public speaker, a scholar who spoke truth to power, and in many ways a genius. He was witty, he was forceful, and he was proud. Most importantly, about so many of the issues to which he lent his tongue and his pen, he was right.

Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai, composed a variation on the El Male Rachamim (אל מלא רחמים, “God full of mercy”): a prayer, traditionally recited at Jewish funerals. Whether it is perfectly or imperfectly suited to the passing of Christopher Hitchens, I leave up to you. My faulty translation does not in any way reflect the beauty and the cleverness of the original.

אל מלא רחמים

אל מלא רחמים
אלמלא האל מלא רחמים
היו הרחמים בעולם ולא רק בו
אני, שקטפתי פרחים בהר
והסתכלתי אל כל העמקים
אני, שהבאתי גוויות מן הגבעות
יודע לספר שהעולם ריק מרחמים

אני שהייתי מלך המלח ליד הים
שעמדתי בלי החלטה מול חלוני
שספרתי צעדי מלאכים
שלבי הרים משקלות כאב
בתחרויות הנוראות

אני שמשתמש רק בחלק קטן
מן המילים במלון

אני, שמוכרח לפתור חידות בעל כורחי
יודע כי אלמלא האל מלא רחמים
היו הרחמים בעולם
ולא רק בו

God, Full of Mercy

God full of mercy,
If only God were not full of mercy,
There would be mercy in the world and not just in him.
I, who plucked flowers on the mountain,
Who gazed out over all of the valleys,
I, who brought corpses from the hilltops,
I can tell you that the world is void of mercy.

I, who was the king of salt beside the sea,
Who stood against my will before my window,
Who counted the footsteps of angels,
Whose heart lifted weights of anguish
In dreadful contests.

I, who use but a tiny portion
Of the words in the dictionary.

I, who am forced to decipher riddles,
I know that if only God were not full of mercy
There would be mercy in the world
And not just in him.

To a man who declared himself, not an atheist but an anti-theist, a man who believed the very notion of God to be inherently evil, who never despaired of the fact that death was to be nothing more nor less than what the naked logic dictates – a man for whom the very notion of a “deathbed confession” would be a slanderous insult – I wish him, in the strictly etymological sense,

Requiescat In Pace
ינוח בשלום על משכבו
≈ Isaiah 57:3

It’s always exciting to see artifacts that relate to material that we read in the biblical literature, but it’s also always entertaining to witness people getting carried away with their significance. Take, for example, Stephen Flurry. He is the executive editor of The Trumpet, which is a publication by the Philadelphia Church of God, but is also the president of the Herbert W. Armstrong College in Edmonton, which has been funding Dr Mazar’s excavation. His reaction to the bullae, while slightly more circumspect in 2008, was to declare that “we are honored to be involved in Dr. Mazar’s work. These tiny artifacts validate Jeremiah’s account and provide overwhelming proof of the accuracy of the biblical record.” [link] Overwhelming proof indeed! In fact, if you look at the bullae very closely, you might be able to make out the fine print that can only be seen by those of us who are truly pious, in which the coins refer to the tossing of Jeremiah into a well. You can’t see it? Pray harder.

But I shouldn’t tease. After all, this is how The Trumpet describes itself:

The Trumpet uses a single overarching criterion that sets it apart from other news sources and keeps it focused like a laser beam on what truly is important. That criterion is prophetic significance. The Trumpet seeks to show how current events are fulfilling the biblically prophesied description of the prevailing state of affairs just before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

They’re right about one thing. That really does set them apart from other news sources.

מופת רביעי מיום שנבראו שמים וארץ לא היה אדם חולה אלא אם היה בדרך או בשוק היה עוטש והיתה נשמתו יוצאת מנחיריו עד שבא יעקב אבינו בקש על זאת רחמים ואמר לפניו רבון כל העולמים אל תקח את נפשי ממני עד שאצוה את בני ואת בני ביתי ונעתר לו שנאמר ויהי אחר הדברים האלה ויאמר ליוסף הנה אביך חלה ושמעו הדברים כל מלכי הארץ ותמהו שלא היה כמותו מיום שנבראו שמים וארץ לפיכך חיב אדם לומר בעטישתו חיים שנהפך המות הזה לאור שנאמר עטישתו תהל אור

This section, which is taken from a midrash called Pirqei deRebi Eliezer (§52), contains a list of seven wonders that were wrought for various of the characters in the Bible. The first wonder was Abraham’s surviving being placed in a fiery furnace, which (according to a midrashic tradition) was where King Nimrod confined him. The second wonder was Sarah’s conceiving and delivering a baby at ninety years of age. The third wonder was in Abraham’s casting aside the appearance of great age, which is deduced from a midrashic tradition that has him appear physically identical to his son, Isaac.

The fourth wonder: from the time that the skies and the land were created, no man had ever been sick. Rather, one would be walking on the road or in a market when he would sneeze and his soul would fly out of his nostrils. Then Jacob came along and requested mercy for this. He said, “Lord of all Worlds, do not take my soul from me until I have commanded my sons and the people of my household.” It was acceded to him, as it says, “And it was after these things that he said to Joseph, Look: your father is sick” (Genesis 48:5). All the kings of the earth heard these things and they were astounded, for there had been nothing like since the day that the skies and the land had been created. Therefore, one is obligated to say “Life!” when somebody sneezes, for such a death has been transformed to light – as it says [in relation to the Leviathan], “Its sneezes flash light” (Job 41:10; v18 in English Bibles).

The fifth wonder was the parting of the sea for the Israelites, the sixth was the stilling of the sun and the moon in the days of Joshua, and the seventh was the recovery of King Hezekiah. None, however, are so great as this: that in the merit of Jacob, our forefather, God caused people’s souls to cease flying out of their nostrils the moment they sneezed.

Bless you.

Depending on one’s understanding of Orthodox Judaism, the civil union of same-sex partners might be forbidden for one of two reasons. Either because it is something new (in the words of the Chasam Sofer, החדש אסור מן התורה בכל מקום), or simply because it is an innovation that is made in line with changing social norms and not one that is governed by religious sentiment. Strangely, however, these were not the reasons that were cited by Orthodox rabbis who were desirous to defend our sacred institutions from the hordes of homosexuals swarming at the gates. Instead, people complained that the Torah forbids homosexuality and that the rabbinic literature forbids same-sex marriage. Both of those arguments are completely false, such that the people who are making them are either lying or lazy.

The Torah forbids anal sex between two men. In fact, the word that is used to refer to “lying with a man as with a woman” is תועבה, which means “something disgusting”. It is a capital crime. The Torah does not speak anywhere of lesbianism (which is a famous enough omission that I don’t need to mention it), and there is not so much as a single passage within the copious reams of rabbinic literature that forbids non-sexual intimacy between two men or two women. Given that there is more to marriage than physical intimacy, more to physical intimacy than sex, and more to sex than anal sex, I see no reason whatsoever as to why people should get so upset at the prospect of homosexuals (who are already in relationships) being given the honour of having their partnership recognised by the state. Does it not make sense that they should be allowed the opportunity to draft a contract that makes their relationship legally binding? Even if only for the possibility that they may have to separate in the future?

There is nothing within the biblical or rabbinic literature to preclude two people drafting such a contract. There is nothing to preclude them throwing a party in order to celebrate having done so. There is nothing to preclude them using the word “marriage” (which is not a Hebrew word and which does not necessarily denote a halakhic reality). And there is nothing to prevent the broader community turning a blind eye towards whether or not two men may have anal sex as a result of all this (which they wouldn’t be doing if their marriage went unrecognised, obviously). So why should it be problematic? Because when it comes to homosexuality, a lack of explicit condemnation within the rabbinic literature is insufficient to allow for permissibility. When it comes to a whole slew of other phenomena, from cooking food on Shabbat to eating shellfish, there is nary a rabbi within our community who does not turn a blind eye. The reason they cannot do this with homosexuality is probably obvious to you now, if it wasn’t already.

On December 6th, The Australian published a letter from the Organisation of Rabbis of Australasia (an umbrella organisation that aims to represent Orthodox Jews in Australia and New Zealand), concerning our government’s recent decision to allow a “conscience vote” on same-sex marriage. There is much within the letter that I find sickening (not least the injured tone that the author adopts in the second paragraph), and I wonder why anybody would want to take a public and principled stand on something when they’ve already lost. Nonetheless, I include it here for your edification. Bearing in mind that this was written by Orthodox rabbis, see if you can spot a problem:

“THE Organisation of Rabbis of Australasia opposes any legislation to legitimise same-sex marriage. This is not intended to show any discrimination against the gay community, but simply to uphold the sanctity and purpose of marriage, which is the union of man and woman not only to express their love for one another but also to bring future generations into the world.

The institution of marriage and family life, as defined and practised for thousands of years as between a man and a woman, a father and a mother, respectively, is far too important and essential to the bedrock of society and civilisation as we know it to be undermined by those who presume to redefine its essence. Moreover, we are deeply concerned that, should any such redefinition occur, members of traditional communities like ours will incur moral opprobrium and may risk legal sanction if they refuse to transgress their beliefs.

That prospect is unacceptable to all people of good will on both sides of this debate. We call upon Australians to stand opposed to any attempt, whether judicial, legislative or religious in nature, to bestow the sanctity of marriage upon same-sex couples.”

Did you notice it? For people who are so committed to the halakha, this shabby little letter doesn’t even come close to making an halakhic argument. The reason for this is that there is not a single rabbi on the ORA who can. When it comes to any issue other than this one, that would be a decided loss; here, however, it’s almost advantageous. So deeply entrenched is homophobia in Orthodox Jewish society that nobody is even prepared to reconsider the nature of their attitude. It’s obvious that “Torah-true Judaism” forbids same-sex civil marriages, so if you bother opening a book and trying to find where that is the case, you’re only wasting everybody’s time. Much easier to refer to “the bedrock of society and civilisation as we know it”, and then just leave it at that.

Perhaps Rabbi Dovid Freilich, the president of the ORA, sees himself as the mara d’atra: the supreme rabbinic authority of these lands, who can therefore make general pronouncements and in the spirit of daat Torah be accepted at his word. Perhaps we have now entered into a period where the authority of the rabbinate is swelled only by the ignorance of the general population, who want an official body like the ORA to do their thinking for them. Or perhaps homosexuality is just a special case: any pronouncements made in favour of equal rights for gay people looks liberal, while movement in the opposite direction comes across as frum. Jewish law does deny two individuals of the same gender the right to an halakhic marriage (kiddushin), but there is only one problem with the acceptance of same-sex civil marriages and it cannot be found in any book: a prevailing number of rabbinic scholars hate homosexuality. Unfortunately, they haven’t yet figured out why.

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[Note: Rachel beat me to this one, and it's worth reading her take on the situation as well - even if only to remark upon the timbre of the comments, which reinforce the illegality of same-sex marriage without even attempting to base such arguments on the halakha.]

Well, what better way to usher in the new centumillennium than by inventing a word (thank you, yes) and by remarking on the current state of the five bookshelves in my bedroom. But first:

A Disclaimer.

I have been warned, by one whose opinion means much to me, that the following blog post is “incredibly boring”, and also that “nobody cares”. While a cataloguing of my books might have value for any future insurance claim, does it need to be published? A cogent critique! And yet, being the pedant that I am, I am going to publish it anyway. Feel free to simply look at the pretty pictures, skip to the Old and Rare Books section near the end, or else skip the whole thing altogether and wonder why you let yourself contribute to my slowly growing view count.

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Excepting the volumes on my desk (a mini-Shas and several journals: NAPH, JBL, Tradition, Hakirah, etc), the following are the five shelves in my bedroom:

This is bookshelf #1. It might not look like much, but it does fit snugly into its little niche. This is the first of my two academia shelves, and sorted only by the author’s last name. Included here are books that deal with biblical studies, Qumranic literature, rabbinic literature and Jewish history. Books are arranged from right to left and include the ABD, two volumes of the IVP Dictionary of the Old Testament (“Pentateuch” and “Historical Books”), David Biale’s (ed.) Cultures of the Jews, four volumes of the “Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum” series (Mikra, Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period, and Parts 1 and 2 of The Literature of the Sages), twelve volumes of The International Critical Commentary (Genesis, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah 1-27, Ezekiel, Amos and Hosea, Job, Daniel and Chronicles), and all four volumes of Menachem Elon’s Jewish Law: History, Sources, Principles.

Books on this shelf that either changed my life, my course of study or my mind include:

• Gedaliah Alon’s The Jews in Their Land in the Talmudic Age,

• Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative,

• Shaye Cohen’s The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties,

• Noah Efron’s Real Jews: Secular vs. Ultra-Orthodox and the Struggle for Jewish Identity in Israel,

• Michael Fishbane’s Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel,

• Theodore Gaster’s Thespis, and

• Norman Gottwald’s The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-Literary Introduction.

This is bookshelf #2: the second of my two academic shelves. From the fourth shelf down is material pertaining to the Hebrew language: Biblical, Rabbinic and, in one instance, Israeli (Ghil’ad Zuckermann’s Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew). In addition to other works of scholarship on Hebrew, I have a total of twelve grammars (Arnold and Choi, A. Davidson, B. Davidson, Gesenius, Joüon and Muraoka, Lambdin, Segal, Sperber, Spinoza, van der Merwe, Waltke and O’Connor, Weingreen and Williams).

After Hebrew, things are a bit of a mess. I have books (grammars, dictionaries, other scholarship) concerning Aramaic, Syriac, Coptic, Greek, Latin, Yiddish, Akkadian, Arabic, Ge’ez and Ugaritic, followed by a few works that deal with comparative Semitics. Between Syriac and Coptic, however, lie all of my linguistics and literary critical books. The shelf is pretty tight, and in order to make room for newcomers, I have been moving unwanted literary critical texts to one of the shelves in my living room, together with material pertaining to modern European languages. When I run out of space for new books, I’ll just have to get a bigger house.

Books on this shelf that have changed my life, my course of study or my mind include:

• Gary Knoppers and Bernard Levinson’s (eds.) The Pentateuch as Torah: New Models for Understanding its Promulgation and Acceptance,

• Allan Nadler’s The Faith of the Mithnagdim: Rabbinic Responses to Hasidic Rapture,

• Donald Redford’s Egypt, Canaan and Israel in Ancient Times,

• Jeffrey Rubenstein’s Talmudic Stories: Narrative Art, Composition, and Culture,

• Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism,

• Marc Shapiro’s Studies in Maimonides and His Interpreters,

• Baruch Spinoza’s Theological-Political Tractate,

• Meir Sternberg’s The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading,

• Isaiah Tishby’s The Wisdom of the Zohar, and

• Emanuel Tov’s Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible.

While I imagine that he would not like to know it, I’ve a huge debt of gratitude to Prof. Lawrence Schiffman, whose From Text to Tradition: A History of Second Temple & Rabbinic Judaism did wonders in getting me out of yeshiva.

Favourite linguistic or grammatical works include Sue Groom’s Linguistic Analysis of Biblical Hebrew, Paul Joüon and Takamitsu Muraoka’s A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew, and Peter Cotterell and Max Turner’s Linguistics & Biblical Interpretation. Most formative in this area, however, would be Bruce Waltke and M. O’Connor’s An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax and, of course, Kautzsch and Cowley’s Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar.

These are bookshelves #3 and 4. I couldn’t get a clear shot from the other side, which is the first of my three primary literature shelves. That one (the inverse of the side that you can see) contains material relating to the Hebrew Bible and to the period of the second temple. On the top shelf is my Miqra’ot Gedolot, to be followed by a Tiqqun Qor’im, a set of Torat Hayyim, a BHS, witnesses to the Hebrew Bible (MT, SP, LXX, Peshitta, Vulgate, Saadiah’s Arabic translation and some Coptic mss), a facsimile of the Geneva Bible, the KJV, RSV and NRSV, the Jerusalem Bible, Martínez and Tigchelaar’s Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, two editions of Ben Sirach (one, the official publication with plates; the other, a critical edition), Josephus, Philo, and critical editions of the Nag Hammadi library, the Apocrypha and the Pseudepigrapha. After that, I have a concordance (Even-Shoshan), an English Mishna (Danby), the BDB, HALOT, Jastrow, an excellent index of the rabbinic literature (arranged by scriptural source) and – because I like to “cheat” – both Kehati’s and Albeck’s commentaries on the Mishna, as well as Rabbi Steinsaltz’s Hebrew translation of the Babylonian Talmud. Next to that set is Frank’s grammar on Babylonian Talmudic Aramaic, and I have found that by assiduously avoiding everything he has to say about Biblical Hebrew (a waw that “converts the tense”! Indeed!), I have so far avoided throwing it at my wall.

On the side that you can see in the picture, I have my primary rabbinic literature: midrash, parshanut, chassidut and philosophy. From the top right, there’s the Etz Hayyim in four volumes, after which is all of my midrash aggadah: Midrash Rabbah, Midrash Tehillim (“Shocher Tov”), Yalqut Shim’oni, Midrash Tanchuma, Leqach Tov, Pirqei deRebi Eliezer, Pesiqta deRav Qahana, Pesiqta Rabbati, Seder ‘Olam Rabbah, Seder ‘Olam Zuta, Tana deVei Eliyahu and Sekhel Tov. After that is an English translation of Bialik and Ravnitzky’s Sefer haAggadah, and then all of my parshanut. That includes Mishnat haRosh (a compendium of Rabbeinu Asher‘s observations on the parsha, culled from his writings and the writings of his son), Gur Aryeh (the Maharal‘s 16th c. super-commentary on Rashi), the Meshekh Chokhmah of Rabbi Meir Simcha of Dvinsk (the “‘Or Sameach”), seven homiletic commentaries of Rabbi Yehonatan Eybeschütz (Tiferet Yehonatan, Chasdei Yehonatan, Ahavat Yehonatan, Divrei Yehonatan, Nefesh Yehonatan, Midrash Yehonatan and Tzefichat haDevash) and a collection of scriptural observations of the Vilna Gaon: Rabbi Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman.

Chassidut! The only work of “general Chassidut” that I have is the Noam Elimelekh. For Breslov, I have the Liqqutei Moharan, Shivchei haRan, Sikhot haRan, and an English translation of Rebbe Nachman’s stories. I have a haggadah with a commentary by Spinker Hasidim, the Sefat Emet of the second Gerrer Rebbe, Reb Arleh’s Shomer Emunim (in two volumes), together with a couple of works that were published by Toldos Aharon: Tiqvat haGe’ulah and Derekh Emunah. I have the Satmar Rebbe’s VaYoel Moshe, and number of works of Chabad: Liqqutei ‘Amarim (“Tanya”), Siddur Torah ‘Or, Seder Tefillot miKol haShanah, Torah ‘Or and Liqqutei Torah, two volumes of commentary on various ma’amarim of the Baal haTanya (Chassidut Mevu’eret), the Tzemach Tzedek’s Derekh Mitzvoteikha, and a few works by the Lubavitcher Rebbe, including his Hadranim al-haRambam veShas, Hilkhot Bet haBechirah, and ‘Inyanah shel Torat haChassidut. I did have the full set of Liqqutei Sichot, but until I figure out whether or not I want to sell it, it’s sitting on a shelf in my living room.

As for philosophy, I’ve the Rambam’s Moreh haNevukhim (trans. S. Pines) and R’ Yehuda haLevi’s haKuzari, as well as Reishit Chokhmah, Sha’arei Teshuvah, ‘Orkhot Tzadikkim, and the Ramchal‘s Derekh haShem, Derekh haTevunot and Sefer haHigayon. How I love those last two. I also have a variety of English books on this shelf, whether philosophical (Soloveitchik, Leibowitz, Jacobs, Hirsch and Heschel) or academic. For the latter, I have three works on prayer (R’ Seth Kadish’s Kavvana: Directing the Heart in Jewish Prayer, Jeremy Schonfield’s Undercurrents of Jewish Prayer, and Rabbi Prof. Daniel Sperber’s On Changes in Jewish Liturgy: Options and Limitations), as well as Marc Shapiro’s incredible The Limits of Orthodox Theology: Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles Reappraised. I also have an excellent and provocative work by a brilliant and highly underrated scholar: Judith Plaskow’s Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism From a Feminist Perspective. I have been greatly intrigued by feminist approaches to scripture ever since I encountered the works of Cheryl Exum and Phyllis Trible, and feminist (or at least, gender-based) approaches to rabbinic literature since I discovered Daniel Boyarin. Judith Plaskow’s work is the feminist approach to Jewish tradition par excellence. A must read for feminists, and for those who haven’t yet realised that that’s what they are.

You cannot see it in the photo, but buried on the bottom shelf, like an embarrassing neurosis, is material pertaining to the Holocaust. As with many of my interests, there is a thin line between analysis and devotion, and a confusion over whether or not there is a difference between the two. For that reason, I include here a slim volume of drawings and poems that were made and composed by children in Theresienstadt Concentration Camp (I Have Not Seen a Butterfly Around Here), a DVD that contains footage from Penig, Ohrdruf, Breendonck, Hannover, Arnstadt, Mauthausen, Buchenwald and Dachau, and the Piaseczno Rebbe‘s Sacred Fire: Torah From the Years of Fury 1939-1942 (trans. from Esh Kodesh), which could have been placed with parshanut, or even chassidut. Within this section of my fourth shelf, I also have Lucy Dawidowicz’s The War Against the Jews, Raul Hilberg’s Sources of Holocaust Research: An Analysis, his three-volume The Destruction of the European Jews, Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich, and Claude Lanzmann’s brilliant 9.5hr documentary, Shoah.

Ah, it’s bookshelf #5! This one is a continuation of my primary rabbinic literature, but this time with a decidedly halakhic and kabbalistic theme. Along the top is my Babylonian Talmud, followed by my Palestinian Talmud (in eight clunky volumes; I miss my single-volume Yerushalmi). The second shelf contains antique and rare books, recently rescued from the cabinet in my living room. The oldest of these books is from 1701, although some of them were published in places like Warsaw, Vilna and Berlin immediately prior to the Shoah. One of them (Avraham Mapu’s Ahavat Tziyon) was published in “Palestine”, 1948. The introduction notes that it was published “שבועים להכרזת המדינה היהודית” (two weeks after the declaration of a Jewish state)! Those that are in particularly poor condition (excluding a few that are at the book doctor’s as we speak) are sitting in the cabinet still, waiting to be looked after.

At the end of the Old and Rare Books section, the halakhic literature continues with my midrash halakha: Mekhilta deRebi Shim’on bar Yochai, Mekhilta deRebi Ishmael, two versions of Sifra (“Torat Kohanim”; one of them a critical edition), Sifrei on Numbers and Deuteronomy, and Midrash Tannaim. Next is my 13-volume Mishnayot Zekher Chanokh: a set of Mishna, published by Moznaim, with every conceivable commentary and super-commentary that you could poke a stick at. Following that is Sefer haChinukh, the Rambam’s Sefer haMitzvot, and the Rambam’s illustrious Mishne Torah. After those is Rabbi Yitzhak of Vienna’s ‘Or Zarua and the anonymously authored Sefer Kol Bo, followed by the Arba’ah Turim and the Shulchan Arukh, the Shulchan Arukh haRav, Hayyei Adam, Mishne Berurah, Kitzur Shulchan Arukh, Ben Ish Chai, the Arukh haShulchan and the Arukh haShulchan he’Atid.

Some “minor” works of halakha follow, some of them in English, after which I’ve placed my Sifrei haGeonim: Rav Saadiah Gaon’s Siddur, the famous responsum of Rav Sherira Gaon and the Sheiltot of Rav Achai Gaon. My favourite siddur follows (Siddur Vilna, if you’re curious, although I think that Siddur Torah ‘Or and Seder Tefillot miKol haShanah are both marvellous), the machzorim that I inherited from my grandfather and a couple of haggadot.

You cannot see the bottom shelf on this photo either, but it contains some “kabbalistic” siddurim with kavvanot included: one three-volume set in the tradition of Rabbi Shalom Sharabi, a single volume that purports to be the siddur of Rabbi Asher Margoliot, and two hand-written siddurim by a hasid of Shomer Emunim (one of them with a haskamah from Rabbi Yisroel Reizman of the Edah). I have a couple of copies of Sefer Yetzirah (one with R’ Aryeh Kaplan’s commentary, and one with commentaries by the Raavad, the Ramban, Rav Saadiah Gaon and the Vilna Gaon, amongst others), R’ Aryeh Kaplan’s translation and commentary of Sefer haBahir, and two versions of Sefer Raziel haMal’akh. Following those is a reference book on Jewish amulets, a nice three-volume set of Sefer haZohar al-haTorah, and the twenty-two volume “Matoq miDevash” commentary on Sefer haZohar (with Tiqqunei haZohar and Zohar Chadash).

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The following is a catalogue of my Old and Rare books, arranged in chronological order by date of publication:

• Amsterdam, 1701. A small Hebrew Bible (Biblia Hebraica), with no vowels or accents, and with the qere/ktiv written in the form of a list at the back;

• Magdeburg, 1720. A large Hebrew Bible (Biblia Hebraica), with text-critical apparatus in the margins and at the bottoms of the pages. The volume features a Latin introduction, and a dedication to King Frederick Wilhelm I (“Friderico Wilhelmo”). The title page features an illustration of five men, one of whom wears a crown and has a harp at his feat. They have Isaiah 8:20 open before them, with the words לתורה ולתעודה (“For teaching and for instruction”, NRSV) on display. They are gazing in wonder as the heavens above them open: a celestial temple can be seen through the clouds, above which is a triangle which features three yods, and which radiates light over the whole scene. A banner, beneath the lowermost cloud, features a (slightly truncated) quote from Psalm 36:10: כי] עמך מקור חיים באורך נראה אור (“[For] with you is the source of life; by your light we will see light”):

• London, 1843. Moses Margoliouth, The Fundamental Principles of Modern Judaism Investigated; Together with a Memoir of the Author, and an Introduction: to which are appended a List of the Six Hundred and Thirteen Precepts: and Addresses to Jews and Christians;

• Prague, 1856. A machzor for Yom Kippur, acc. to the tradition of Poland, Bohemia, Moravia and Hungary (כמנהג פולין בעהמען מעהרן ואונגארן), with German translation. The front page features an illustration of Abraham, knife-drawn, holding the hand of a young Isaac, who clutches a bundle of sticks and looks innocently at his father. The inscription: מי שענה לאברהם אבינו בהר המוריה הוא יעננו (“He who responded to our father, Abraham, on Mt Moriah – he will respond to us”). If you look carefully, you can see a ram in the thicket behind them:

• Prague, 1860. Selichot for the entire year, acc. to the tradition of Poland, Bohemia, Moravia and Hungary (כמנהג פולין בעהמען מעהרן ואונגארן);

• Warsaw, 1863. The first volume of a three-volume Zohar al-haTorah;

• Vienna, 1863. The liturgy for Tishah b’Av, with Lamentations. The title page boasts the presence of large letters, nice paper and black ink (באותיות גדולות ובנייר יפה ובדיו שחור);

• London, 1864. A King James Bible, originally gifted by a mother to her son in 1881;

• London, 1864. A siddur in Hebrew and English, acc. to the Polish tradition;

• Berlin, 1866. The third and fourth volumes of a Mishne Torah (being the fourth and fifth books: נשים and קדושה) – in need of rebinding;

• London, 1868. W.M. Thomson, The Land and the Book; or, Biblical Illustrations drawn from the Manners and Customs, the Scenes and Scenery of the Holy Land;

• Lemberg, 1870. Rabbi Chaim ben Shlomo of Chernowitz, סדורו של שבת (Sidduro Shel Shabbat, “The Order of Shabbat”). A Hasidic discourse on the laws and customs of Shabbat;

• Vilna, 1873. A machzor for Rosh haShana, Yom Kippur, Pesach, Shavuot and Sukkot, acc. to the Ashkenazi tradition – currently being rebound;

• Vilna, 1874. Rabbi Bahya ibn Paquda, חובות הלבבות (Chovvot haLevavot, “Duties of the Heart”);

• London, 1874. Reverend A.P. Mendes, The Students Prayer Book: A New Interlinear Translation of the Daily, Sabbath and Festival Prayers, with the Blessings, Prayers for Children, &c., &c., to which is prefixed A Compendium of the Hebrew Accidence, Designed to Serve as an Introduction to the Study of the Sacred Language;

• Unknown, 1881. A large English King James Bible with embossed wooden covers and metal clasps. Extensive commentary, copious illustrations (both black-and-white and colour), and introductions dealing with flora, fauna, weaponry, architecture, etc. Apocrypha included:

• London, 1886. Frederic W. Farrar, History of Interpretation: Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year MDCCCLXXXV;

• Vilna, 1887. The first volume of a Midrash Rabba (being Genesis Rabba and Exodus Rabba) – in need of rebinding;

• Vilna, 1891. Seder Zeraim in the Mishna, together with the commentaries of Rabbi Ovadiah of Bertinoro and Rabbi Yisroel Lipschitz (“Tiferet Yisrael”), and selections from the commentary of Rabbi Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller (“Tosafot Yom-Tov”);

• Philadelphia, 1891. Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews. Volume 1: From the Earliest Period to the Death of Simon the Maccabee (135 BCE);

• Vilna, 1895. A Siddur in the Ashkenazi tradition;

• Vienna, 1896. A Hebrew Bible;

• Vilna, 1898. Rabbi Yaakov Tzvi Yissachar Shapira, תפארת יעקב (Tiferet Yaakov). A super-commentary on the תפארת ישראל (Tiferet Yisrael: Rabbi Yisroel Lipschitz’s commentary on the Mishna). This volume contains an approbation by the Rogatchover Gaon, Rabbi Yosef Rosen;

• Vilna, 1898. A collection of poems by the maskil, Yehuda Leib Gordon, cleverly titled “שיַרי השירים” (Shayarei haShirim, “Remnants of Songs”);

• Tarnów, 1904. Rabbi Elimelekh of Lizhensk, נועם אלימלך (Noam Elimelekh). A Hasidic commentary on the Torah. This volume contains an approbation by the Shinever Rov, Rabbi Yechezkel Shraga Halberstam – currently being rebound;

• Vilna, 1911. Selichot for Rosh haShana – currently being rebound;

• Braunschweig, 1907. C. Diercke and E. Gaebler, Schul-atlas für höhere lehrenstalten (“An Atlas For High School Students”) – in need of rebinding;

• Berlin, 1912. A Hebrew Bible;

• Vilna, 1913. Chaim Meir Heilman, בית רבי: תולדות הרב (Beit Rebi: Toldot haRav, “The House of Rebbe: Generations of the Rav”). The text constitutes an early history of Chabad, dealing with the lives of Rabbi Schneur Zalman (“the Alter Rebbe”), Rabbi Dovber Schneuri (“the Mitteler Rebbe”) and Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn (“the Tzemach Tzedek”);

• Pietrkov, 1913. A machzor for Rosh haShana and Yom Kippur, acc. to the Ashkenazi tradition;

• Vienna, 1921. Moses Rath, שפת עמנו: A Hebrew Grammar and Reader for Schools and Selfinstruction – currently being rebound;

• Leipzig, 1922. Chaim Brody (ed.), מבחר השירה העברית: Anthologia Hebraica: Poemata selecta a libris divinis confectis usque ad iudaeorum ex hispania expulsionem. A selection of Hebrew poems, composed between the years immediately following the formation of the canon until the exile from Spain. The oldest poems in the text are by Ben Sirach, and the latest are by Rabbi Shlomo ben Reuven Bonfid;

• London, 1922. Hillaire Belloc, The Jews – first edition;

• Warsaw, 1922. Shmuel Leib Gordon, עשרים וארבעה: נביאים אחרונים – דברי ירמיהו (‘Esrim veArba’ah: Neviyim Acharonim – Divrei Yirmiyahu, “Twenty-Four: Latter Prophets – The Words of Jeremiah”). The third volume of an illustrated commentary on the twenty-four books of Tanakh;

• Berlin, 1924. A beautiful facsimile of a handwritten Shir haShirim;

• London, 1926. A Hebrew Bible;

• Berlin, 1927. Rabbi Yaakov ibn Habib, עין יעקב (Ein Yaakov). Originally composed at the end of the 15th century, the work constitutes a presentation of the aggadic passages in the Babylonian Talmud, together with the author’s commentary;

• Warsaw, 1927. A small siddur in the Ashkenazi tradition, titled שפת אמת (Sefat Emet, “Truthful Speech”);

• Vienna, 1930. A haggadah for Pesach;

• London, 1933. A haggadah for Pesach;

• Vienna, 1934. A two-park machzor for Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur, acc. to the Polish tradition;

• Vienna, 1937. A haggadah for Pesach;

• Cairo, 1940. A haggadah for Pesach, acc. to the Karaite tradition. Written in French and Hebrew, with a disclaimer in Hebrew and Arabic to the effect that anybody who reproduces a Karaite siddur without it being stamped with the offical stamp of the Karaite bet din in Egypt will be penalised in accordance with local law;

• Jerusalem, 1948. Abraham Mapu, אהבת ציון (Ahavat Tziyon, “Love of Zion”). First published in 1853 (בשנת תרי”ג, as the introduction innocently points out), Ahavat Tziyon was the first novel ever published in the Hebrew language. This version was published in “Eretz-Israel (Palestine)”, two weeks after the declaration of the Jewish state (שבועים להכרזת המדינה היהודית);

• Unknown, 1952. A haggadah for Pesach, acc. to the Karaite tradition. Written in Arabic;

• Unknown. A siddur in the Ashkenazi tradition, of unknown provenance. The binding is strong, but the pages are in poor condition. My guess is that it is either early 20th century, or very late 19th.

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Facsimiles:
• The Aleppo Codex, or כתר ארם צובא (Keter Aram Tzova, “Crown of Aleppo”). The earliest Hebrew Bible in codex form, dating from the 10th century. The full extant manuscript (severely damaged after the synagogue that housed it was set alight in the 20th century) can be viewed online. The original is housed in Jerusalem, at the Shrine of the Book;

• The Leningrad Codex. After the damage accrued by the Aleppo Codex, this is now the oldest most complete Hebrew Bible in codex form, dating from the 11th century. According to the colophon, the text was completed in the month of Sivan, of the year 4770 – almost exactly one thousand years ago (1010/11 CE). The date is also given as 1444 since the exile of King Jehoiachin, as 1319 from the “dominion of the Greeks” and the cessation of prophecy, of 940 since the destruction of the second temple, and of 399 of the “reign of the small horn” (ie: Hijrah). The full text can be downloaded from this link. The original is housed in the National Library of Russia, under “Firkovich B 19 A”;

• A haggadah from Prague, 1527. It would appear that the original is kept by the Religious Council of Efrat, although I have not been able to determine where, and under which classification:

• A (very) small Birkat haMazon from Hungary, written and illustrated by a Polish scribe named Meshullam, who went by the name of Zimel (נעשה ונכתב ע”י הסופר משולם המכונה זימל פאלין). Acc. to the title page, the booklet was commissioned in 1751 as a gift from Koppel, son of Rav Yirmiyahu Broda, to his bride, Gittel, the daughter of Rav Savel Leidersdorf. There are colour illustrations throughout the text, some quite gruesome. Alongside the additional prayer said on Purim is the hanging of Haman and his sons. Alongside the additional prayer said on Hanukkah is Judith holding the severed head of Holofernes aloft, the stump of his neck protruding bloodily from the sheets of his bed. In the background, a boy lights a hanukkiah, and in the foreground stands a girl who waits to receive his head in an open sack. The original is housed in the Jewish Museum in Budapest, No. 64.626:

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