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PDF FormatThe rabbinic legends remain true to the fundamentals of Hebrew narrative. Once again, we have a prose of action, always moving forward with concentrated economy. Like the Bible, the terse dialogues and descriptions amount to simply another type of deed, advancing the plot rather than delaying its development. And again, this is a “public” tale, told by a narrator whose own personality is completely invisible (“It was told of Nahum of Gamzu”). Moreover, like the biblical stories, the rabbinic representation is devoid of vivid naturalistic descriptions of people, places or things. The Sages, like the biblical narrator, focused their stories entirely on deeds, while dramatizing the decisions that led to them, as well as their consequences.
Just as the authors of the Bible did not disregard the pagan world, but borrowed its myths and transformed them, so too the Sages did not ignore the Hellenistic world, but instead incorporated many of its elements in their stories, while drastically altering their meaning. The rabbinic practice of describing God through use of the metaphor of the Greek or Roman “flesh and blood king” (and, similarly, to compare the ministering angels to the king’s commanders, governors and advisors44) exemplifies the polemical dimension of this literary form. The agadot, like the Bible, were not composed in a cultural vacuum. They reveal an awareness of what neighboring cultures had to offer, a familiarity necessary for anyone attuned to both the risks and rewards inherent in the mingling of these cultures with his own.
VIII
The path of Hebrew literature leads from the talmudic agadot to the popular Jewish folktales of the early medieval period. The following story, from the community of Salonika in Greece, offers a good example of Hebrew narrative prose as it was passed down through the centuries:
It once happened that a wealthy man abandoned his old father. The young son of the wealthy man found his grandfather shivering from the cold, and he went and told his father. The rich man said to him: “My son, take the torn and worn cloak that is lying in the corner, and give it to the old man, so that he may cover himself with it.” The child took the cloak, brought it out to his father’s courtyard, spread it out on the ground, and before all the members of the family and the guests, he took a pair of scissors and began to cut the cloak into two. The wealthy man was surprised by this, and he asked him: “What are you doing, my son?” The son replied: “I want to give half of the cloak to your father, and the second half I will keep for you, my dear father, for when you grow old.”45
At first glance, this appears to be a simple fable, aimed at teaching the importance of honoring one’s parents. A second look, however, reveals the story to be more sophisticated. In its few brief sentences, it delivers a complex, ironic message which defies expression through direct moral teaching of the sort that is expressed in the biblical commandment, “Honor your father and mother, that you may live a long life.” First, it is not the father who educates his son here, but the son who teaches the father by cutting up the cloak—a fact that turns the commandment of honoring one’s parents on its head. Second, the sarcasm in the son’s reply (“and the second half I will keep for you, my dear father, for when you grow old”) transforms the reward promised by the biblical command (“that you may live a long life”) into something of a punishment—of what value is longevity if old age is so miserable? Third, the son does not come out of the story blameless, either: Instead of running to his grandfather, who is shivering from cold, and bringing him the cloak he urgently needs, the boy remains in the house in order to teach his father a lesson. It is therefore not so easy for the reader to relate to him—or to the story as a whole—in an unequivocal manner. The subject of the story is clear, but it presents a “message” that is uncertain and troubling—a type of message that stories, unlike the claims of philosophy, are so well-suited to expressing.
The most influential work of the Kabala, the Zohar, continued in its own way down the same literary path that began with the Bible and continued with the talmudic legends and popular folktales. Like the Sages of an earlier day, the author of the Zohar46 presents his claims not in the systematic fashion of the philosophers, with whom he was certainly familiar, but in that of the rabbinic storytellers. Using a midrashic style, he incorporates biblical verses and infuses them with new meaning, usually without regard for their original context, and in a manner that makes sense only within the new framework. To study the Zohar is to enter the world of the mystical journeys of R. Shimon bar Yohai and his nine disciples. The terms that recur throughout the Zohar—the “cave,” the “sanctuaries,” the “sparks” and the “masks”—have no “philosophical” standing; they cannot be exchanged for other, “clearer” terms. They are figurative symbols, metaphorical images drawn from a vision. To read them is to read literature. The Zohar does not lecture us regarding mystical enlightenment, but rather tells us of the personal, concrete experience of this illumination and the quest for it, as it was perceived by the heroes of its story:
As they were walking, night fell. They said: “What shall we do? How can we walk in the darkness of night?”... They turned away from the road and sat under a tree. They were sitting and speaking words of Tora, and they did not fall asleep. At midnight they saw under the tree a doe, which passed before them and was crying out and raising its voice. R. Hiya and R. Yose heard and were shocked. They heard a voice, proclaiming, “Students, arise. Sleepers, awaken. Worlds, appear before your master. This voice that went forth was painful to the heavenly doe and to the earthly doe....” R. Hiya said: “Now it is really the middle of the night. And this voice is the voice that goes forth and pains the heavenly doe and the earthly doe. As it is written, ‘The voice of the Eternal causes hinds to calve.’47 Happy is our lot that we have merited hearing it.”48
The “doe” discussed here can mean many things—including, most probably, a reference to either the Divine Presence (shechina) awaiting its beloved, or the community of Israel (knesset yisrael) awaiting redemption. Both the mystic-erotic meaning and the messianic-national meaning are represented in the “doe,” without taking away from its literal meaning as an animal which “passed before them and was crying out and raising its voice.” This is also the case for the other elements that feature in the narrative: The road, the tree, and the voice that awakens the sleepers are each symbols charged with mystical meaning, each one recurring frequently throughout the Zohar. The text, however, never exchanges these narrative “details” for general conceptual terms intended to explain them.49
The prose of the Zohar does not contain the kind of historical account presented in the earlier Hebrew texts, instead taking the reader to imaginary realms, devoid of any discernible historical context.50 And yet, the Zohar possesses its own kind of historical dimension, which it achieves through constant reference to earlier characters and sources. Many of the narratives of the Zohar are adaptations of rabbinic legends, and even its more original stories are by no means completely new. It is their meaning that is new, not the characters and events. R. Shimon bar Yohai of the Zohar is not really based on the actual historical figure by this name, but rather on the talmudic legend that relates how he hid from the Romans in a cave with his son Elazar.51 Thus, although the Zohar does not depict any chapter in the actual history of the Jewish people, it presents itself as part of the people’s textual history. Accordingly, the author decided to employ pre-existing legendary figures, rather than inventing a hero of his own.
IX
From the Zohar, the Hebrew literary tradition leads to the Kabalistic texts of R. Isaac Luria in the sixteenth century, and the Hasidic texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The teachings of Luria take the form of a story, which was committed to writing by his pupils, R. Haim Vital and R. Joseph ibn Tabul. Luria’s story depicts the creation of the world as the result of a great catastrophe, and history as a series of efforts to correct it. The terms it employs, such as “withdrawal” (tzimtzum), “smashing” (shvira), “the descent of the holy sparks (nitzotzot) into the realm of the outer skins (kelipot),” “the sin of Adam,” “the sin of Noah” and “the sin of the golden calf,” are all part of its dramatic story line. There is no theological doctrine here, but a mystical narrative, a mythical interpretation of cosmic and human history.
Much the same can be said of the two hundred collections of Hasidic tales by and about the masters of that movement. These present a wide range of narratives about the good deeds of the pious, which are referred to as tikunim, or “repairs” to the flawed cosmic order. What differentiates these stories from one another is the unique character of each of the main characters—the Ba’al Shem Tov, the Magid of Mezrich, the Rebbe of Kotsk and others. The close connection between plot lines and personae has to do with the fact that Hasidism, like the biblical and talmudic worldviews which preceded it, is in its essence narrative: Not a conceptual system interested in abstract, general truths, but the transmission of testimonies, whether fact or fantasy, about the specific deeds of specific figures.52
