Джеймс Миченер - The Source

Two quotations from the groats maker concerned the wild life of the Galilee, as he had observed it on his trips: “Rabbi Asher told us: the hoopoe bird was walking along the ground and the bee eater was flying in the sky. Cried the latter, ‘I am closer to God.’ But Elijah, peering down from heaven, warned, ‘He who works in the soil is always in the arms of God.’ From which Rabbi Bag Huna deduced, This proves that the farmer is closer to God than the merchant.’ But Rabbi Asher replied, ‘Not so, Huna. All men who work are equal.’”

It was this Rabbi Bag Huna who offered the famous definition of a Talmudic scholar: “He should be able to concentrate so thoroughly upon the Torah that a seventeen-year-old girl could pass his desk completely naked without distracting him.” To which Rabbi Asher said, “I fear not many would pass that test.”

Rabbi Asher made three comments upon the Torah: “Get old and get gray, get tired and get toothless, but get Torah.” “The law is like a jar filled with honey. If you pour in water, the honey will run out and after a while you will have cheapened the mixture until there is no honey left.” “At the gate of the shop a man has many friends. But at the gate of Torah he has God.”

He is remembered principally, however, for the echo of laughter that hung over Tverya when he was present. “Rabbi Asher the groats maker said: A man who laughs is more to be cherished than one who weeps; a woman who sings, than one who wails. And God is very close to the child who dances for reasons which he cannot explain.” He argued for a God who loved even outcasts like Menahem, the stonecutter’s boy. He punctured sham, upheld the dignity of work, spoke for a happy marriage in which husband and wife shared equally, and bore constant testimony that God was a generous and a forgiving deity. “Rabbi Asher ha-Garsi said: Few have been tested as Rab Naaman of Makor was tested. When the Romans were about to destroy his town, Rab Naaman was offered safety through flight, and he deserted his friends. When he died he threw himself before God, crying, ‘The scar of that shameful act is still upon my heart,’ but God lifted him from the ground and said, ‘When you fled through the tunnel that night you took with you a new understanding of the law, and with Rabbi Akiba you saved My Torah. One shred of the law administered with compassion is more important than a hundred towns, and the scars on your heart I brush away.’”

Rabbi Asher’s final comment on the Torah was simple: “He who knows Torah and does not teach it to others is like a single red poppy blooming in the desert.”

His adherence to this last principle made it impossible for him to refuse when the rabbis asked him to instruct students in the yeshiva operated at Tverya for the training of young scholars. Classes convened in an old Roman building by the lake, and there Rabbi Asher would stand, a little old man in a white beard, talking at random about the joy he found in Judaism: “My guiding light has always been Rabbi Akiba. He saved the Mishna for us, and I love the memory of this man. From childhood I aspired to follow in his steps.” When students asked why he considered Akiba the greatest of the rabbis, he replied, “He cultivated a personal relationship with God, but he also directed himself to the problems of how his Jews could at the same time be faithful to God who controlled heaven and obedient to the Romans who controlled the earth. Today we could learn much from Akiba.” When his students, some of them hotheaded young men who were growing restless under Byzantine rule, brought the discussion down to the present, asking how he would behave toward the Byzantine invaders, he replied, without equivocation, “Study the final hours of Akiba. Every possible concession he made to Rome, but in the end he had to proclaim that when the will of God and the law of empire clash the former must prevail.”

It was therefore each student’s responsibility to ascertain God’s intentions, and to help them in this task Rabbi Asher proposed certain drills: “If our desire is to uncover God’s wishes, we must develop minds that can penetrate shadows, for the mists produced by living obscure the truth and you cannot discern it unless you sharpen your wits.” At this point he would unroll a scroll of Torah and read from Leviticus: “These also shall be unclean unto you among the creeping things that creep upon the earth; the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his kind, and the ferret, and the chameleon, and the lizard, and the snail, and the mole. These are unclean to you.” Having read this, he would say, “God Himself forbids His people to eat the lizard. I want you to find one hundred reasons why the lizard should be eaten.” When his students protested that this might be blasphemous, Rabbi Asher explained, “Again and again the great rabbis have warned us that when God handed Moses the sacred law, He placed it in the hands of men so that it might exist on earth and not in heaven, to be interpreted by men. The Torah is what we say it is, you and I in all our frailty, and if God made a mistake in forbidding us to eat the lizard, we had better find out about it.” He would crash his hands upon the table and cry, “The Torah exists only on earth, in the hearts of men, and it is what we say it is.” He always told his students of the day on which the Prophet Elijah came back to earth following a great dispute among the rabbis, who asked him fearfully, “Was God angry when we changed His word?” and Elijah told them, “No! God clapped His hands gleefully and cried, ‘My children have defeated Me! They live on earth and they know the problems of earth. O, My beloved children, always be as wise as you were today.’” Sometimes students would protest, “But you speak of God as if He were a human being, and yesterday you told us He is a spirit,” and the little rabbi would thunder, “Of course He’s a spirit. He has no body nor hands either. I’m telling you a story. Accept it as that.” And he would stomp from the room, stopping at the door to shout back, “Tomorrow! A hundred reasons why Jews should eat lizards.” Then he would add softly, “Imagine, perhaps one of you, in this little room in this little city, will correct the error of God, and tomorrow night He will clap His hands again and cry, ‘Once more My children have defeated Me! That blessed city of Tverya.’”

He had found that when a man was driven to construct a hundred sophistical reasons for denying Leviticus, the man had to consider the ultimate nature of God. Sometimes the yeshiva students contrived ingenious answers: “In Exodus it says that after God had created all the animals and before He created man, He reviewed His work and it is written, ‘And God saw that it was good.’ Since He made this judgment after the creation of the lizard but before He created man, the lizard must have been good in the abstract, always and forever, without reference to man. And it must still be good, and can therefore be eaten.”

Another student once argued, “God created first the earth, and as a father loves most of all his first-born, so God loves first of all His earth. Of all the animals that live upon this beloved earth, the lizard presses his belly closest to the earth and cannot live away from it. Therefore he is even closer to the earth that God loves than man, and as part of the earth he must be good, and Jews can therefore eat him.”

One year an especially clever student advanced an argument that would be retained in the Talmud: “We often have to choose between two precepts of our Lord that appear contradictory. Now listen. In the commandments He tells us, ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ yet He Himself stole a rib from Adam to give mankind its greatest blessing, woman. Now He tells us not to eat lizards, but if we did we might find them to be a blessing also.”