It's been a New Yorker couple of days for me, most especially laughing and weeping my way -- twice so far! -- through Adam Gopnik's account of art historian Kirk Varnedoe teaching eight-year-olds to play football while he was dying of cancer. It's one of those stories that contain the meaning of everything in one small sketch. I also whiled away some time reading film critic David Denby's memoir of trying to make a million dollars on the stock exchange during the hi-tech boom of the nineties. I don't know any of these folks -- Gopnik or Varnedoe or Denby -- but I feel like I do by reading about them. There are few things that I care about less than football. Investing might be one of them. But still I'm now deeply attached now to these guys I've never met. Isn't that the great pleasure (or drag!) of reading, that somehow you feel the soul of the writer with you like a friend, so that it feels a bit intimate, almost like a visit? And you want more!
When I haven't been lying around reading magazines, I've been reviewing the five pages of Talmud that our little class managed to master together this past year. Five pages may not sound like much, but there are worlds on each page. (And, in fairness, five pages of the classical Talmud take up about thirty large pages of small print in the edition we've been using.) I took a couple of Talmud classes in rabbinical school, and I've read a bit now and then. I look at Talmudic citations all the time, a verse here and a verse there. But I don't usually get to read a good stretch in a row and to follow all the ups and downs consecutively. We began our class together last fall at the beginning of tractate Berachot, and I promised we wouldn't skip around, looking for the juicy parts. We would start at the beginning and get however far we got, and we'd try to figure out what the whole enterprise is about.
Reading Talmud, you can't help noticing how much it isn't like the Torah. Unlike the magisterial "God spoke to Moses, saying…" which introduces much of the biblical material, here you have Rabbi X arguing with rabbi Y, proofs and counter-proofs tangling in and out of each other, wild excuses because the same word happens to appear in two places or a rabbinic author happens to be connected with several otherwise unrelated topics. The tone of much of the bible is clean and spare, sometimes severe. The Talmud, by contrast, sounds like a day at the Knesset, or maybe a bit like Theater of the Absurd, with people shouting over each other, huge exaggerations, leaps of logic, comic stories and tons of what can look like truly maddening perseveration on tiny details. Our entire year was spent on the question, "What time must one say the Shema at night?" We got about a third of the way through the answer. Along the way we met angels and demons, a singing harp, Elijah the Prophet and a couple of faith-healing rabbis.
At the same time there is an overwhelming poignancy underneath all the leaps and spirals. Most of the Talmud was written and edited in the years following the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans, the "hurban," the "catastrophe" unparalleled in our history until the holocaust. You can feel the nostalgia for the Temple in every paragraph, in the meticulous way that its memory is reconstructed and brought to bear anachronistically on ritual questions. And you can feel the fear and despair, as well as the faith, of the rabbis in the face of so much chaos and destruction.
But what strikes me most forcefully this year, as I reread the first few pages of Berachot, is its intimate focus on the individual soul. While in Torah one will occasionally see an individual person addressed by God or rewarded or punished for a deed, the overwhelming sense there is tribal and cosmic. Individual deeds are important because they support or thwart the well-being of the people. By contrast, in our section of the Talmud there is great interest in the spiritual state of the individual person. Torah study and deeds of kindness lead to the forgiveness of sin. If one is afflicted by illness, she should examine her own soul. Perhaps she is deficient in prayer or study. Or perhaps she is beloved of God and chosen for the refinement of suffering. Certain kinds of losses shape the soul. The Talmud presumes that people pray. It imagines an inner life.
Today we take these ideas for granted in religious texts, Jewish and otherwise. But they are a huge departure from the spirituality of Torah and most of the rest of the bible besides (some of the psalms, which may themselves be later compositions, to the contrary.) That one has an inner spirit, that what we do affects the quality of our own experience as well as our outer fate, that there is a path of reflection and praise and self-examination -- the headwaters of all of these ideas, in Jewish tradition at least, is in Talmud.
It's interesting to me, reading Berachot at exactly this time in history, to note that in a time of upheaval and loss and chaos, the rabbis began to focus on the individual interior life. There might even be a bit of a challenge here, to think about souls as well as politics. It's always worth meditating on the mystery that is at the center of every person who walks down the street, and at the center of ourselves as well. It might be worth remembering that, at a time when one's thinking could go many different directions, the thinking of our tradition went to the spiritual. It went to the practices of study and prayer and kind deeds.
Every single person has an inner life, a tender place that tries to be healthy and strong, a private place that is affected by change and loss. That space is at least as different from one person to the next as are our homes. It's an honor when someone exposes that inner space, by writing, by saying something personal, by being near us. It's a curiosity, a wonder, to see another person's inner landscape. I think that there is a tendency in times of upheaval and tension to think the opposite way -- to think in terms of masses and parties and movements, to think that people move in huge herds. And at some level we do. But it seems welcome to be called back to the endless mysteries of the individual inner space and the ways that we glimpse these private places through each other's stories.
I was reminded, poignantly, at our community meeting last week of how beautiful and completely unique every one of us is, how hard it is to know another person deeply, how protected that inner place is and yet how very much each of us wants it to be known.
May we enjoy the beauty of each other's souls in this world we share.
© 2004 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Updated 09/09/2004 (rge)