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CHAPTER 1
The Surreal Sleeper
Among the most popular characters in talmudic stories is Honi the Circle Drawer, a mercurial figure who has enjoyed a long afterlife in Jewish folklore and still features today in legends and children's literature. The famous story that accounts for his nickname relates that, during a time of drought, Honi drew a circle in the ground and refused to move until God granted rain (Mishnah Ta'anit 3:8). For this reason he developed a reputation as a special type of "miracle worker," a divine favorite whose prayers — or demands — received immediate attention.
Though many Rabbis perform miracles of all sorts in numerous talmudic sources, the following Honi story stands out for its surreal quality.
Rabbi Yohhanan said: All his life that righteous man [Honi the Circle Drawer] was troubled by the Scripture, "When the Lord restored those who returned to Zion we were like dreamers" [Ps.126:1]. Honi said [to himself], "[How could they be] in a dream for seventy years?"
One day he was walking along his way when he saw a certain man planting a carob tree. [Honi] said to him, "Now a carob tree does not bear [fruit] for seventy years. Are you sure that you will live seventy years and will eat from it?" He said to him, "I found the world with carob trees. Just as my ancestors planted for me, so I plant for my offspring."
[Honi] sat down to eat his meal. Sleep [sheinta] came upon him. While he slept, a mound of earth [meshunita] encircled him and he was concealed from sight. He slept for seventy years.
When he awoke he saw a man gathering carobs from that carob tree. He said to him, "Do you know who planted that carob tree?" He said to him, "My father's father."
He said [to himself], "Certainly seventy years [passed] in a dream!"
He went to his house. He said to them, "Does the son of Honi the Circle Drawer yet live?" They said to him, "He is no more, but his grandson lives." He said to them, "I am he [Honi]." They did not believe him.
Honi went to the study house. He heard the Sages saying, "Our traditions are as clear today as in the years of Honi the Circle Drawer. For when he entered the study house, he solved every difficulty of the Sages." He said to them, "I am he." They did not believe him, and they did not treat him with the honor that he deserved. He prayed for mercy and his soul departed.
Rava said, "Thus people say, 'Either fellowship or death.'"
(Ta'anit 23a)
Rabbi Yohanan, the storyteller, begins this story in a somewhat unusual manner: Honi has difficulty understanding a biblical verse, "When the Lord restored those who returned to Zion we were like dreamers" (Ps. 126:1). While the Talmud and the books of midrash are filled with interpretations of verses — the term "midrash" essentially means "interpretation" — few stories feature the characters struggling to make sense of Scripture, especially stories not explicitly situated within the Rabbinic academy. One question to bear in mind is the function of this narrative opening.
Psalm 126 is among the better-known psalms today because of its prominent place in the Jewish liturgy. This psalm traditionally is recited prior to the Birkat ha-Mazon (Grace after Meals) on Sabbaths and festivals, on account of its joyous sensibility, and often sung to an upbeat melody. According to kabbalistic-mystical tradition, a copy of the psalm should be placed in the delivery room at birth or in a baby's crib, as these holy words stimulate God's mercy. In its biblical context, the psalm is part of a group of fifteen psalms (120–134) that all begin "A Song of Ascents"; these may have been sung by pilgrims when they came up to the Jerusalem Temple on the Shalosh Regalim (three pilgrimage festivals) in the Second Temple period. The talmudic Sages believed that the psalm was originally composed and sung by the Jews who returned to the Land of Israel in 516 BCE, after the first exile, as it mentions "those who returned to Zion." Having lived in Babylonia for seventy years after the Babylonians destroyed the First Temple in 586 BCE and deported much of the population there, the Jewish returnees ecstatically sung the psalms as they journeyed home.
Honi's problem stems from his awareness of this historical setting coupled with an overly literal understanding of the psalm's figurative language. The singers describe themselves with a poignant simile: "We were like dreamers." In context they mean that the experience of returning to Zion, to the Land of Israel, felt like a dream coming true. Is this wondrous event, for which they had hoped and prayed, really happening, or is it rather a delusion or a fancy, the type of incredible vision that only takes place in dreams?
Honi, however, takes the simile literally. How can the singers compare themselves to dreamers when a dream takes place during a single night's sleep but the return from exile occurred after seventy years? For the literal-minded Honi, the verse seems to imply that they must have been sleeping and (literally) dreaming for seventy years.
In the second part of the story Honi confronts a different sort of puzzle, not an enigmatic text but enigmatic behavior. A peasant plants trees that take so long to grow that he cannot hope to enjoy their fruits. Honi cannot understand such a selfless act — why someone would expend the time and effort in an enterprise that will bring him no personal benefit. The only explanation Honi can imagine is that the fellow believes he will live another seventy years — a rare event in antiquity, when life expectancies were much shorter than today. But the farmer gives Honi an unexpected answer: he plants for his descendants, for future generations, not for personal profit. His work, however, is not completely altruistic, as he benefited from the same contributions of his ancestors. The generations of humankind are thus linked together, participating in a type of "generational economy" in which they give and receive equally, only not from the same people. This becomes a beautiful lesson about the interconnectedness of human generations: our debts to the past and obligations to the future.
The story now enters the realm of the surreal. In talmudic stories, the Rabbis, like other Holy Men and Women in antiquity, routinely perform miracles and display the ability to summon divine intervention. In this case, nature itself spontaneously responds so as to teach Honi a lesson, although we should probably assume that God works behind the scenes. Honi sleeps for seventy years in an underground cocoon while two generations pass. He wakes up to a new age in a new world: the carob tree has grown to maturity, just as the farmer foresaw — and here in flesh and blood Honi beholds the grandson consuming its fruit! This child too knows the source of his sustenance; he tells Honi that his grandfather planted the tree, and presumably he in turn plans to continue the tradition by planting trees for his grandchildren. Honi thus witnesses and experiences in real life what most of us understand abstractly and take on faith: our present actions can create a better life for our grandchildren and grandchildren's children many years in the future.
Surprisingly, Honi remarks not about the continuity of human generations, but about the passage of time — that seventy years passed by while he slept and dreamed. This observation, of course, returns to the story's opening. Honi now understands the verse — that it is in fact possible to sleep and dream for seventy years, which justifies the simile "like dreamers." His (sur)real life thus exemplifies the truth of Scripture. The storyteller has invented a playful and entertaining plot by taking the figurative language of the verse literally.
Now, we can conceive of the opening section as a strategy to Judaize or "Rabbinize" a folktale that otherwise has little distinctly Jewish content. The account of Honi and his seventy-year sleep, which calls to mind stories of Rip Van Winkle and other famous "super sleepers" (discussed later), relates to a truth of common human experience, not to Jewish beliefs and practices. In fact we might have expected Honi himself to articulate the solution to the human behavior he is unable to comprehend. Couldn't he have realized, "Certainly it is crucial to provide for the generations to come!" or, "How true the farmer's words: just as he found the world full of fruit trees thanks to his ancestors, so his grandchildren enjoy a world full of all good things thanks to him."
Rather, Honi returns to the Scripture he did not understand and expresses his satisfaction that the verse indeed makes sense. This may imply that Honi has not appreciated the lesson about the interconnectedness of the generations and that his education remains incomplete. At the same time, the omission draws the audience into the world of the story, requiring us to decipher the moral of the "folktale" for ourselves.
The storyteller may also be inviting us to draw a connection between the farmer and the exiles who returned to Jerusalem. That generation dreamed of returning to the land of their forefathers — land that epitomized their connection to their ancestors and the traditions that their parents and grandparents had fostered over seventy years. Like the farmer who perpetuated the groves of carob trees for future generations, the Jews deported to Babylonia perpetuated Jewish traditions, customs, hopes, and dreams to sustain their posterity. Both were successful — the farmer in providing for his grandchildren and the exiles in maintaining a sense of peoplehood such that their descendants could return to the Land of Israel, rebuild the Temple, and reestablish the community. By this means both Honi and we the audience learn an important lesson about Jewish continuity.
Now the story takes a darker turn, a dramatic shift from success to failure: after the seventy-year interruption, Honi makes a futile attempt to resume his life. He tries to return to two houses, his family house and the house of study, but in both cases his efforts to identify himself ("I am he!") are met — understandably — with skepticism. Members of the two most important societies for a Rabbi, the domestic society of his wife and children, and the academic society of rabbinic colleagues and disciples, cannot believe that the Honi who has been neither seen nor heard from in seventy years has stepped out of a time warp and stands before them in flesh and blood.
In particular, Honi's inability to resume his former position and status in the house of study proves disastrous. The current occupants of the Rabbinic academy do remember Honi's brilliant insights, the Torah he mastered, and specifically his talent for resolving difficulties, which the Babylonian Talmud regularly portrays as the highest form of Torah. From other stories we know that the Babylonian academy was a hierarchically structured institution where the Rabbis competed for honor and status by displaying their knowledge of Torah, propounding questions, and expertly parrying objections in the course of lively, and often contentious, dialectical debate. Honi was apparently so brilliant a Sage that his disciples' disciples, or possibly even "third-generation" disciples, still remember his dialectical skills a full seventy years after he dazzled his colleagues. Alas, because these contemporary Sages do not recognize Honi for who he is, they do not honor or defer to him as would befit a Sage of such status. Honi consequently experiences unbearable, unspecified humiliation — perhaps students and other Rabbis not rising in his presence, not offering him a choice seat near the front of the academy, not granting him liturgical honors during daily prayers. He cannot endure this constant affront to his dignity, the persistent feeling of loneliness and shame. He prays to die.
Honi's unfortunate death teaches a variation of the lesson of the first half of the story in reverse. In this account, Honi cannot establish a connection to the succeeding generations, both of his family — his genetic or biological children — and of his students — his intellectual or spiritual "children" who pass on his traditions to posterity. The channels of continuity have been severed; he now stands alone and apart.
And so it is that memories of Honi nurture his grandchildren and "grand students" and anchor them in the tradition of their forefathers, while the confidence that the coming generations, many years in the future, will benefit from his efforts sustains the farmer. But neither the satisfaction that Honi's line continues nor the knowledge of his intellectual legacy can replace real human connection. A fulfilling life requires both vertical relationships with the past and horizontal relationships with fellow members of one's community.
In this respect, Honi's predicament proves surprisingly modern. Many today have lost connection to their families, parents and grandparents, friends, and even to the wider society. Dr. John Cacioppo, a professor of social psychology at the University of Chicago, quoted in an ominously titled article "Chronic Loneliness Is a Modern-Day Epidemic," notes that 40 to 45 percent of Americans report feelings of loneliness today compared to 11 to 20 percent as recently as the 1970s. He observes: "We aren't as closely bound. We no longer live in the same village for generations, which means we don't have the same generational connections. That releases social constraints — relationships are formed and replaced more easily today." The psychologist Rebecca Harris explains that "changes in modern society" are the cause of contemporary loneliness: "We live in nuclear family units, often living large distances away from our extended family and friends, and our growing reliance on social technology rather than face to face interaction is thought to be making us feel more isolated." A review essay of seventy studies on the effects of loneliness concluded that social isolation can increase mortality risk by 30 percent. As Rava states in conclusion, "Either fellowship or death."
Aging and Indignity
Like Honi, many senior citizens feel themselves lost and adrift in a foreign world they do not know and that knows them not. Changing manners, fashions, values, speech, ideas, and beliefs can produce a sense of alienation and disconnection from one's own world, a feeling that one has unknowingly stepped through a looking glass and emerged in a bizarre age of the future. Today, the accelerated pace of technological development and innovation causes many to feel further removed from the way of life they once knew. While the "generation gap" is acutely felt on both sides, time inevitably sides with the young and skews the world in their favor.
The loss of dignity that accompanies growing older can be particularly distressing. In many cultures, the aging process in and of itself is associated with diminished self-worth. As a founder of a care center for the elderly put it: "There's so much shame in our culture around aging and death. When they're aging people feel that there's something wrong with them and they're losing value." Former patriarchs and matriarchs of a family, providers and caretakers, become dependent on their children and grandchildren in an uncanny reversal of hierarchies and roles. Former doctors, CEOs, business owners, directors, and other professionals, retired or removed from their positions, no longer receive the deference and respect they once enjoyed. Elsewhere the Talmud teaches that God instructed Moses to put the fragments of the broken tablets of the commandments in the Ark of the Covenant together with the new tablets, offering this striking lesson: "A scholar who forgets his learning due to unpreventable causes should not be disrespected" (Menahot 99b). In other words, although he no longer possesses wisdom and Torah, such a scholar retains his worth, just as the shattered fragments of the tablets retained their holiness. So too the prayers for the Day of Atonement invoke Psalms 71:9: "Do not reject me in my old age." When facing a respected human being now weakened or destroyed by mental decline, we are to show the respect he or she once deserved lest we compound this individual's suffering with demoralizing humiliation.
Aging always involves loss. As family, friends, and loved ones die, the world seems to be inhabited mostly by younger people. Those who reach extreme old age may outlive not only most of their spouses, siblings, and contemporaries, but also their children, nieces, and nephews. This is the world to which Honi awakens: his son is no more, and his colleagues in the academy have long passed away too. Precisely this lack of friendship, of collegiality, often causes the elderly to lose the will to live: "Either fellowship or death." The tragedy of Honi is the tragedy of human mortality; all of us may become "Honi" in the passing of the years.
Talmudic Environmentalists
Environmental ethics has largely developed in modern times as a response to pollution, industrial waste, toxic chemicals, and the devastation of nature. Ancient peoples simply could not have imagined these technological "advances" that give us the ability to destroy the earth on such a scale. For the ancients, the earth was a goddess — awesome, vast, infinite — whom neither humans nor human artifacts could integrally damage.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Land of Truth"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Jeffrey L. Rubenstein.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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