Author: Mayer I. Gruber

Mayer I. Gruber

First attested in the eleventh century Maḥzor Vitry, the following poem appears in most subsequent versions of the fourth benediction of the Sabbath amidah:2

attáh kiddáshta et-yom-ha-shevi’í lishmékha

takhlít ma’aséh shamáyim va-áretz

uverakhtó mikkól hayyamím

vekiddashtó mikkól hazzemaním

vekhén katúv betoratékha3

The poem consists of five lines, the first two of which contain four stresses each, and the last three of which contain three stresses each, as indicated by the accent marks in our transliteration. The metric pattern attested here is well-known from the Book of Jeremiah.4 Nevertheless, current prayerbooks print the five lines as though they were prose.5

The poem should be translated as follows:

You hallowed the seventh day for Yourself,

The end of the Creation of the heavens and the earth.

And You blessed it more than all the days,

And You hallowed it more than all the festivals.6

And so it is written in Your Torah.

As an introduction to the recitation of Genesis 2:1-3, this poem is a most ingenious interpretation of those verses. The biblical verses read as follows:

There were ended [the labors of making] the heavens and the earth and all their array.

God ended on the seventh day His work, which He had done, and He desisted on the seventh day from all His work which He had done.

God blessed the seventh day, and He hallowed it, for thereon He desisted from all His work which God created for doing.

The point of this passage is that the end, i.e., the culmination and the purpose of Creation, was the blessing and hallowing of the Sabbath, which took place on the seventh day. The centrality of the Sabbath in the Creation story found in Gen. 1:1-2:3 is obscured by those who emend Gen. 2:2 to read “God ended on the sixth day His work which He had done...”7 The emended text suggests that the crowning act of Creation was not the blessing and hallowing of the Sabbath but the creation of humankind on the sixth day.

The key word in the poem Attah Kiddashta is the Hebrew word takhlit, “end,” which, like the English word “end,” means both “completion” and “purpose.”8 This noun is derived from the same root as that of the verb forms vayekhullu, “there were ended,” and vayekhal, “He ended,” in Gen. 2:1-2. By asserting that the Sabbath was “The end (takhlit) of the Creation of the heavens and the earth” in a poem used to introduce Gen. 2:1-3, the poet indicates that he interprets vayekhullu, “there were ended” in Gen. 2:1, to mean “They found their fulfillment.” He likewise indicates that he interprets vayekhal, “He ended” in Gen. 2:2, to mean “He brought to fulfillment,” and he suggests thereby that the vav in vayyishbot, “And He desisted,” be taken as a subordinate conjunction rather than as a coordinate conjunction.9 Thus Gen. 2:2 is taken to mean “God brought to fulfillment on the seventh day His work which He had done when He sabbathed on the seventh day from all His work which He had done.” The final line of the poem, “And so it is written in Your Torah,” reminds us that the poet believes that he is paraphrasing Gen. 2:1-3.

Now the verb vayekhal in Gen. 2:1-2 may be taken as a pluperfect meaning “He had completed” or as a declarative verb meaning “He declared His work completed.” In any case the verb, which the author of Attah Kiddashta took to mean “He brought to fulfillment,” must refer to God’s inauguration of the Sabbath unless “on the seventh day” is emended to “on the sixth day.”10 This emendation is to be rejected for two reasons: (1) lectio difficilior praestat; and (2) Gen. 1:1-2:3 seeks to inform us that the seven­ day week culminating in the Sabbath is part of the primordial scheme.11 The alternative adopted by The Torah, (second ed., Philadelphia: Jewish Publi­cation Society, 1967), “On the seventh day God finished the work which He had been doing, and He ceased on the seventh day from all the work which He had done,” clearly implies that interrupting an uncompleted task for the sake of the Sabbath is not a divine virtue! Hence this translation is at odds with the ideology of Gen. 1:1-2:3.

In an era plagued by an ecological crisis brought about by humankind’s assumption that it is the crown of Creation, it is helpful to have the poem Attah Kiddashta remind us that Gen. 1:1-2:3 contradicts that assumption.

The biblical passage, as rightly interpreted by the poem, insists that the Sabbath, rather than humankind, is the crown of Creation.12

NOTES

1.I am grateful to my teacher, Prof. Robert Gordis, for his having read an earlier version of this article and for his having made some very valuable suggestions for its improvement. I alone am responsible for whatever faults remain.

2. A.Z. ldelsohn, Jewish Liturgy and Its Development (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1932), p. 132; see Simḥah ben Samuel of Vitry, Maḥzor Vitry, S. Hurwitz, ed. (Nuremberg: S. Bulka, 1923), p. 143. Philip Birnbaum, Daily Prayer Book (New York: Hebrew Publishing Co., 1949), p. 267 errs when he says that this poem “appears in the ninth century Siddur of Amram Gaon... “ While the poem is found in the Bodleian Library MS. of Seder Rav Amram, completed at Rhodes January 3, 1426, it is not found in the more reliable MSS. of Seder Rav Amram. The appearance of our poem in that MS. of Seder Rav Amram is one of the many instances where that MS reflects the influence of the French rite. See Tryggve Kronholm, Seder R. Amram Gaon, Part II: The Order of Sabbath Prayer (Lund, Sweden: CWK Gleerup, 1974), pp. xi-xii; 22-23.

3. For the Hebrew text in Hebrew characters see Philip Birnbaum, Daily Prayer Book, p. 267; Morris Silverman, ed., Sabbath and Festival Prayerbook (New York: Rabbinical Assembly of America and United Synagogue of America, 1946), p. 22; David de Sola Pool, ed. and trans., The Traditional Prayer Book for Sabbath and Festivals (New York: Behrman House, 1960), p. 65; Chaim Stern, ed., Gates of Prayer (New York: Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1975), p. 136.

4. See John Bright, Jeremiah, Anchor Bible, Vol. 21 (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1965), pp. cxxxii-cxxxviii.

5. See the prayerbooks cited in n. 2 above.

6. The author of this poem adopts the view that “blessed” and “hallowed” in Gen. 2:3 are synonyms. For this view see A.B. Ehrlich, Mikra ki-Pheshuto, 3 vols. (Berlin: H. Itzkowski, 1899-1903), I:4 (in Hebrew). Hence the poet is able to create two parallel clauses “And You blessed it more than all the days (of the week)// And You hallowed it more than all the festivals (of the year).” The basis for determining that “days” here means “days of the week” is the fact that throughout Gen. 1:1-2:3, which is the inspiration for our poet, “day” means “day of the week.” The basis for determining that zemanim “times” means “festivals” is the use of the term zemanim in other liturgical compositions such as the fourth benediction of the festival amidah and the festival kiddush.

7. So, Septuagint, Samaritan Version, Peshitta, 1111d New English Bible. Good News Bible: The Bible in Today’s English Version (New York: American Bible Society, 1976) renders “by the seventh day,” which amounts to the same thing as emending the number.

8. Chaim Stern, Gates of Prayer, p. 136, appropriately renders “goal.”

9. For numerous examples of biblical Hebrew vav interpreted as a subordinate conjunction see Harry M. Orlinsky, Notes on the New Translation of the Torah (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1969), index, s. v., waw. Construing vayekhal as the predicate of a subordinate clause and vayyishbot as the predicate of the main clause in Gen. 2:2, Bruce Vawter, On Genesis: A New Reading (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1977), p. 61, renders “Since on the seventh day God was finished with the work he had been doing, he rested on the seventh day from all the work he had undertaken.”

10. Cf. E.A. Speiser, Genesis, Anchor Bible, Vol. I (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1964), p. 7; Gerhard von Rad, Genesis: a Commentary, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Westminister Press, 1972), p. 62; Vawter, p. 61.

11. See commentary of Samuel b. Meir (c. 1085-1174), ad loc. in the Rabbinic Bible, and see now Vawter, p. 61.

12. Contrast Mark 2:27: “The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath.” The latter is distinct from the idea attributed to R. Jonathan b. Joseph in Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 85b: “It [the Sabbath] is handed over to you, but you are not handed over to it.” The New Testament assertion in its context challenges the Pharisaic view that the whim of humankind should be subordinated to the Sabbath. The talmudic assertion in its context means only that the saving of human life takes precedence over the Sabbath.

Mayer I. Gruber is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Bible Archaeology and Ancient Near East of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Shawn A. Weiss

Creation takes place in movement.

—Philo, On the Creation of the World

Somewhere in the long middle section of his treatise On the Account of the World’s Creation Given by Moses, Philo describes the life-cycle of shrubs and plants. “Now in the original creation of all things,” he says, “God caused all shrubs and plants to spring out of the earth perfect, having fruits not unripe but in their prime” (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 33).¹ Not only were these fruits nourishment for animals and humans, but they also, and just as importantly, served “for the perpetual reproduction of their kind, containing within them the seed-substances” (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 33). These seed-substances contain within them the hidden and imperceptible “principles or nuclei of all things” (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 33). By causing the shrubs and plants to spring out of the earth perfect—which is to say, producing fruit—God created a golden, self-perpetuating cycle: the seed creates the plant that creates the fruit that produces the seed that creates the plant, and so on into infinity. “For God willed that Nature should run a course that brings it back to its starting-point, endowing the species with immortality, and making them sharers of eternal existence” (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 33). This matters not just for nature itself, but also because Philo uses the image of the self-perpetuating seed-substance not only with regard to plants and shrubs in particular and nature in general, but also with regard to the creation and perpetual reproduction of humankind, as well as the creation of the cosmos itself, each aspect of creation mirroring and amplifying every other aspect. “For the sake of this He both led on the beginning speedily towards the end,” Philo says of God, “and made the end to retrace its way to the beginning” (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 33).

Philo begins his essay on Moses’s account of creation with a discussion about lawgivers and the various methods used to articulate and communicate those laws. While “some have nakedly and without embellishment drawn up a code of the things held to be right among their people,” others, “dressing up their ideas in much irrelevant and cumbersome matter, have befogged the masses and hidden their truth under their fictions” (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 7). One method, Philo suggests, is too austere to be effective, the other too ostentatious. Moses, on the other hand, disdained both methods and “introduced his laws with an admirable and most impressive exordium” (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 7). Moses, we are to understand, got the laws just right:

He [Moses] refrained, on the one hand, from stating abruptly what should be practiced or avoided, and on the other hand, in face of the necessity of preparing the minds of those who were to live under the laws for their reception, he refrained from inventing myths himself or acquiescing in those composed by others (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 7).

What I find most striking in this description is that Moses refrained from inventing myths himself. Given that Philo refers to Moses as the human author who composed the five books of the Torah, his suggestion that Moses refrained from inventing his own myths is especially noteworthy. Philo is not saying that the laws and narratives contained in the Torah are not myths (perhaps just the opposite); he is merely suggesting that, even though Moses, an author and philosopher—a real human being who existed historically in the world every bit as much as Plato—somehow composed the myths of the Torah but did not invent them. This begs the question: How do you compose something, in writing, without inventing it? Dictation seems to be one way. But whom or what was Moses dictating? Philo would say “God.” After all, he says of Moses that “he had attained the very summit of philosophy” and “had been divinely instructed in the greater and most essential part of Nature’s lore” (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 9). For humans, it does not get much more authoritative than that. One might be forgiven for imagining Moses’s role vis-à-vis God to be anything less than a divine scribe, the chosen human vessel through which God’s Word coursed. In light of this, “dictation” seems too technical a term. The terms “divine inspiration” or “creative inspiration” more accurately describe how Moses came to articulate the myths surrounding not only the creation of the Law, but, Philo suggests, the Law’s necessary antecedent, creation itself.

Unlike other lawgivers, who flatly state the laws or go too far out of their way to make their laws seem compelling, Moses “excites our admiration in the highest degree” (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 7). He does this by prefacing the laws with an account of the creation of the world. According to Philo, this juxtaposition implies that

the world is in harmony with the Law, and the Law with the world, and that the man who observes the law is constituted thereby a loyal citizen of the world, regulating his doings by the purpose and will of Nature, in accordance with which the entire world itself is also administered (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 7).

Philo’s assertion is unambiguous. The Law cannot exist without the world and the world cannot exist without the Law. They are inseparable. This is reminiscent of the fruit that cannot exist without the plant that cannot exist without the seed, ad infinitum. The process of generation and regeneration is one movement, a single gesture. Philo says of the world and the Law that they are in harmony together, and the person who observes the Law becomes a loyal citizen of the world. I am tempted to go even further and say that the person who observes the law will enter into the preexisting harmony between the world and the Law, becoming in the process something like a harmonious being. I believe this is what Philo is pointing us to. But still, where does the world come from? Where does the Law come from? And where does the seed-substance, the starting point of all generative-regenerative cycles, originate?

It is important to remember that this is all a prelude to Philo’s account of the creation of the world as told by Moses. Philo has not yet approached the subject of creation directly. He must clear his throat one more time. And what a throat-clearing it is! “Now it is true that no writer in verse or prose could possibly do justice to the beauty of the ideas embodied in this account of the creation of the kosmos. For they transcend our capacity of speech and hearing.” Nevertheless, Philo adds—and this “nevertheless” happens to be the birth, or seed-substance, of Jewish exegetical literature—“they must not on this account be passed over in silence. Nay, for the sake of the God-beloved author we must be venturesome even beyond our power” (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 9).

As Philo approaches Moses’s account of creation, he acknowledges his, and our, inadequacy in the face of such perfect and perfectly rendered knowledge. To simply respond to such knowledge with silence would be tantamount to desecrating not only Moses, “the God-beloved author” (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 9), as Philo calls him, and the perfect knowledge he communicates, but also God Godself. Silence is therefore not an option. So, for the sake of God, for the sake of Moses, and for the sake of the Law, for which the myths and the narratives of Scripture, according to Philo, are its subject, we must be venturesome even beyond our power.

For those within the tradition who find Philo to be too much the Hellenist and insufficiently Hebraic, I would respectfully point to this moment as Exhibit A of, among other things, Philo’s fully-formed first century chutzpah, which forged a path for future acts of chutzpah—in other words, for philosophically-minded, Scripture-loving Jews to maintain a certain leeway or latitude toward the text that would allow them to take imaginative and philosophical and revelatory license with regards to God’s Word. I imagine this is what Philo meant when he said that we must be venturesome beyond our power. He seems to be speaking directly to us. But what does it mean to approach the holy texts with a combination of imagination, reason, and faith? What does it mean when we think we have something to say? And even more pointed: What does it mean when we believe we are obligated to have something to say?

This urgency to speak, to articulate in the face of the divine, I recognize as distinctly Jewish. It is based on the assumption that, when we do speak toward God, our words will somehow be heard, that our cries will register somewhere beyond ourselves and our earthly predicament. It is based, above all, on the belief that there is only one God, one ultimate source to which all existence owes its due. But still: How exactly are we supposed to do this?

Regarding our distinctive philosophical-exegetical approach to Scripture, Philo advises: “We shall take nothing from our own store, but, with a great array of points before us, we shall mention only a few, such as we may believe to be within reach of the human mind when possessed by love and longing for wisdom” (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 9). Pure invention, Philo suggests, is not the way. The point is not to invent something new out of nothing; rather, our job as scriptural philosophers is to select from the profound insights already arrayed before us.² In this sense, we are not so much artificers or inventors as we are choosers and arrangers of divine wisdom, free beings capable of infinite interpretation. But even this is not the most important consideration, Philo seems to say. The key of all keys is to approach God’s word when possessed by love and longing for wisdom. For it is only in this state that we may experience something like harmonious being, the necessary prerequisite for being in harmony with God.

But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, Philo needs to draw our attention, as he says, “to a matter which ought not be passed over in silence” (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 9). Regarding this, he writes:

There are some people who, having the world in admiration rather than the Maker of the world, pronounce it to be without beginning and everlasting, while with impious falsehood they postulate in God a vast inactivity; whereas we ought on the contrary to be astonied at His powers as Maker and Father, and not to assign to the world a disproportionate majesty (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 9).

If we had any question about Philo’s conception of God and the world, and the relationship between God and the world, this vital statement begins to fill in some of the gaps. If we hold the material world to be on equal or superior footing to God, we are already lost to confusion. In order to make this blunder, Philo says, we need to believe two things: that the world is without beginning and without end, and that God is inactive, unchanging substance. While Philo would agree that the world is, indeed, without end, to posit that the world had no beginning would make the world coequal with God—a nonstarter for many Jews. This would mean that God could not have created the world, since the world was always already created. And if God did not create the world, God would not have the same fundamentally beneficent relationship with the world. For, Philo writes, “it stands to reason that what has been brought into existence should be cared for by its Father and Maker,” because “it is a father’s aim in regard of his offspring and an artificer’s in regard of his handiwork to preserve them, and by every means to fend off from them aught that may entail loss or harm” (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 11). God, in other words, as the creator of the universe, is by necessity interested in the growth and well-being of God’s creation. Take away God’s role as creator, and you take away the underlying thrust of goodness permeating the cosmos.

Philo is equally bothered with the second, interrelated claim that God is a vast inactivity. If God were a vast inactivity, then God is mere matter. And if God is mere matter, even preexistent matter, then God is just one more thing amidst a vast cosmos of things. According to Harry Wolfson, in Studies in the History of Philosophy and Religion, Philo “could not accept the view commonly held by contemporary students of Plato that the pre-existent matter out of which, in the Timaeus, the world was created was eternal.”³ But given that Philo was a great appreciator of Plato, says Wolfson, he did not want to reject Plato outright and instead “solved the difficulty by the method of harmonization.”⁴ He did this by postulating that there is such a thing as preexistent matter, but that preexistent matter was itself created.

“There were thus to him two creations,” Wolfson says of Philo, “the creation of the pre-existent matter out of nothing and the creation of the world out of that pre-existent matter.”⁵ While this distinction, too, is reminiscent of some of Plato’s writings, the final and perhaps most important distinction between Philo and Plato with regard to the creation of the world and God’s relationship to creation is summed up by Wolfson thus: Whereas, for Plato, God’s creation of the world could not have been otherwise, Philo’s God, the God of Scripture, was and is “an all-powerful free-agent,” who “could have either not created the world or created another kind of world.”⁶ In other words, the world was not fated to exist. The world—this world, our world—was created on purpose because God chose to create it. To put it even more simply: Philo’s God possesses free will, and Plato’s God does not. For Philo, God is not created, God is the creator of all creation, and all that is created is a creation of God’s free will.

This is not to say that God created everything exactly how it is! God may be the creator of all creation, but He is not the micromanager of all micromanagement. God’s mind may be the seed-substance from which all creation first grew, as Philo suggests elsewhere in his essay, but once the plant starts growing, once it starts flowering and producing fruit and thus the seed-substance from which it will regenerate, it is on its own. The self-regenerating cycle is the God-given piece; how or if any one particular plant survives is up to the plant and the habitat in which it exists. The same goes for us. Our species may be divinely created, and we may be endowed with free-will, consciousness, and two opposable thumbs, but how (or whether) we survive, thrive, or somehow manage to make our way back to the beginning—to God—is almost entirely dependent on us and how we choose to exercise our free will. It behooves us, therefore, to understand our place in creation as outlined by Philo, in which God is in harmony with the world, the world is in harmony with the Law, and the Law is in harmony with God. Where we exist, it seems to me, is somewhere in the middle of that generative-regenerative cycle, somewhere in the beginning, always speeding toward the end so that it, and we, may begin again. We find ourselves, right now, in the midst of creation. We are not above or beyond creation. Creation was not a one-time event, and we do not live in long aftermath of creation. We are creation. And, as a creation of God’s free will, we are co-creators even now. This seems as fitting an entrance as any for Rav Kook, who, a mere nineteen hundred years after Philo, declared somewhat counterintuitively that “the love of all creation comes first.”⁷

The love of all creation comes first? This simple, benign-seeming affirmation is more complex than it first appears. Should it not be the love of God comes first? After all, God is the seed-substance from which all creation first grew. Why does Rav Kook privilege God’s creation over God? That is exactly what Philo, via Moses, warned us against—that we should not hold the world in admiration rather than the Maker of the world. What I think Rav Kook means is that we cannot go from nonbelief to loving God in one easy step. That would be like skipping all particularities in order to go directly to the universal. And while it may be a good idea in theory to head straight for, and to live only in, the universal, the problem is that none of us lives in the universal. Each of us lives deeply embedded in particularity. Regarding this inconvenient truth, Rav Kook writes:

Great souls cannot dissociate themselves from the most universal concerns. All they desire and aspire for is the universal good, universal in its comprehensiveness, universal in its full width, height and depth. But the whole is constituted of numberless particulars, particular individuals and particular communities. The whole cannot achieve its highest fulfillment except through the perfection of its particular individuals, and the particular communities, whether small or large, of which it is constituted.⁸

I understand this as an order of operations, so to speak, regarding our material and spiritual life on earth. Start close in, Rav Kook seems to say. Begin where you are. Only then move outward, step by particular step. Rav Kook reminds us that we are creations, created by God, living in creation, which is to say that the particular dimensions and details of our lives matter urgently not only to the meaning of our lives, but also to the overall condition and thrust of the whole, of which we are also always a part. One of the commonalities among people I have known over the course of my life—including, first and foremost, myself—is that we are guilty of dismissing ourselves and our lives as mundane, inauthentic, unreal. This is more than a simple categorical error. It is a complete misunderstanding of the creation of the cosmos, the meaning of existence, and our place in it—not to mention the meaning of history, the nature of knowledge, and the presence of God in the world, among other not-so-minor considerations.

By holding Rav Kook’s directionality in mind, moving from the particularities of creation toward the universality of God, it becomes evident why he would suggest to us that the love of all creation comes first. If you cannot first love the particularities of creation as you experience it, how could you possibly love God? After all, creation exists because of God. More than that, God’s presence emanates throughout all of creation. Loving creation is loving God. “The higher unification,” says Rav Kook, “in which everything finds its completion, rests on the influence of the knowledge of God and the love of God from which it necessarily derives.”⁹ In other words, knowledge of God is the worldly precondition for resting in the love of God, from which (and from whom) we originate. To put it another way, knowledge of God is our ticket to universality, to the whole, which always already exists within us.

This notion is reminiscent of Philo when he says that the key when approaching the word of God is to be possessed by love and longing for wisdom. In order to become a harmonious being who lives in harmony with God, one must approach God with love and longing for wisdom. I suspect that approaching God with love and longing for wisdom is not something we could try to do. If we tried to live with love and longing for wisdom, we would not be living in love and longing for wisdom, we would be trying to live in love and longing for wisdom. Think of the difference between loving your children and trying to love your children. The difference is palpable. How we come to unselfconsciously live in love and longing for wisdom, Rav Kook suggests, is through the particularities of our worldly lives. This is because

when love descends from the spiritual realm to the created order, it descends by fragmentation into many particulars, to opposition and contradiction. It faces the necessity of confining the scope of the love bestowed to one individual for the sake of another, to many individuals for the sake of many other individuals, and to individuals in general for the sake of the all-embracing collective.¹⁰

This is perhaps the hardest of all the hard truths Rav Kook places before us. As human beings created by God, we are necessarily manifested into the world in opposition, contradiction, and fragmentation. These are not indications that something is wrong. This is the way it is supposed to be. We are born into opposition, contradiction, and fragmentation in order that we may grow our souls, expand our inner horizons, and finally, one hopes, come into love and knowledge of God, thus coming to the end that is also a beginning, so the cycle (and we) may begin again. This may explain how Rav Kook could embrace the secular Zionists all around him when he made aliyah to British Mandate Palestine in 1904. It seems counterintuitive that an Orthodox rabbi from Eastern Europe would, on a certain level, embrace not just secularism and atheism among Jews but the particular brand of Zionism those Jews produced and passionately advocated. Even though Rav Kook disagreed with the Zionist movement of his time spiritually, socially, and politically, he was able to recognize them as an authentic and necessary piece of the larger whole. Even still, when writing about those same Zionists, Rav Kook does not hold back:

The visible developments taking place before us here are set in a humble format, replete with material and spiritual poverty. Eretz Yisrael is returning to life through modest efforts, directed by confused thinking, notions shot through with ignorance and despair, soiled with religious nihilism and an inclination to evil. In all of these there is hiding the presence of the living God. “How great are Your works, O Lord, Your thoughts are very deep” (Psalm 92:6).¹¹

What I find so remarkable is that Rav Kook is able to articulate a deeply critical response to his fellow Jews, describing their spirituality as impoverished, their thinking as confused, their notions ignorant and despairing, soiled with religious nihilism, even going so far as to describe them as having an inclination to evil—yet, even still Rav Kook discerns beneath all of those less-than-savory Jewish behaviors and characteristics the presence of the living God. This is radically counterintuitive to how we usually think about the world. We usually think in dialectical, binary terms: good or evil, light or dark, friend or foe. We seldom think about our adversary as also, on another level, our ally. Yet this is precisely how Rav Kook challenges us to think. He is suggesting neither that we agree with people with whom we disagree, nor that we abandon our particular worldly perspectives, the very perspectives that give our individual lives meaning. What he is challenging us to do is to look beyond our subjective perspectives, to integrate into our thinking and doing a living awareness of divinity in creation. In other words, he is asking us to recognize the fact that we are all creations—atheists, secularists, Zionists, you name it—all of us created by God, living together in creation, as creation. The problem with denying humanity, integrity, or authenticity to people or groups with whom we disagree is that, by doing so, we denigrate not just those people or groups but creation itself, and, by extension, God and ultimately ourselves—sowing disharmony all the way.

Still, how do we get from the fragmentation and chaos of creation to the universal harmony of God? Compared to the harmony of creation as outlined by Philo, the creation of harmony as suggested by Rav Kook seems far more complicated. But maybe this is just an illusion. Maybe the creation of harmony is exactly as complex or as simple as the harmony of creation. Which is to say, maybe it is the same movement, a single gesture. Far be it from me to suggest how anyone could or should get from chaos to harmony; some days I can barely manage my own household affairs. Yet I can point to the fact that Philo and Rav Kook agree that the Law specifically exists in order to lead the observant Jew from the chaos of creation to the harmony of God.

I did not know that Philo and Rav Kook shared this vision when I decided to write about them. What initially drew me to this seemingly odd couple of Jewish thinkers, separated by one continent and two millennia, is their shared proclivity for digressive, personal, nonsystematic writing. As far as I know, we have no evidence to suggest that Rav Kook ever read Philo, and I am quite certain Philo never read Rav Kook.¹² Yet these two unclassifiable Jewish philosophers share much in common, not least of which is the abiding centrality of Moses within Jewish life. While Philo locates the laws, as articulated by Moses, as a necessary partner to harmony and creation, my first assumption regarding Rav Kook was that he did not hold the laws in quite the same esteem. Needless to say, my first assumption proved incorrect.

In his essay “The Sage is More Important Than the Prophet,” Rav Kook weighs the relative merits of the Jewish prophet against those of the Jewish sage, finding that the prophet, while better able to “describe the evils of life and to protest against them vigorously,” is less capable than the sage of probing the “particular conditions that preserve life and safeguard it from even the most minor defects that are due to generate very destructive consequences.”¹³ Among these destructive consequences include the “slow negligence” of the performance of the commandments, leading to a “process of erosion, destroying the vessels in which is stored the exalted spirit.”¹⁴ Notice the key role of the performance of the commandments. When we fail to observe the laws, we erode our capacity for spirit. While Rav Kook does not come right out and say it, I imagine he would agree that our capacity to live as harmonious beings, in harmony with God, would be severely diminished as a result.

The prophet Moses, however, “discerned simultaneously the claims of general principles as well as of the exacting demands of the particulars.”¹⁵ This is because, as Rav Kook and Philo both point out, God revealed this perception to Moses “from mouth to mouth” (Numbers 12:8). Moses was prophet and sage, sage and prophet. But, as we know, there was never another like Moses. Moses was a singular occurrence. It is not given to even the most learned sages or visionary prophets to know the full details of both the particular and the universal simultaneously. Regarding our built-in limitations, Rav Kook leaves us with a tantalizing, if inscrutable, provocation: “At the end of the present epoch, when the light of prophecy will begin to have its revival, as we are promised, ‘I shall pour out My spirit on all flesh’ (Joel 3:1), there will develop a reaction, a pronounced disdain for the particulars.”¹⁶ This will continue, Rav Kook says, “until the radiance of prophecy will reemerge from its hiding and reveal itself not as an unripe fruit, but as the first fruits full of vitality and life,” thus bringing us back to the image of the self-regenerating seed that creates the plant that creates the fruit that produces the seed, forever and ever, Amen. “This transcending of one-sidedness,” says Rav Kook, “will vindicate the vision of unity expressed by the psalmist: ‘Mercy and truth have met, justice and peace have kissed, truth will rise out of the earth and mercy will show itself from heaven; the Lord will also bestow what is good and our earth will bring forth its bounty’ (Psalm 85:11).” Rav Kook concludes his essay with these words: “The soul of Moses will then reappear in the world.”¹⁷ In the margins of my text, I scribbled: What does this mean? How would we know? I do not know what this means, and I do not know how we would know. But if Philo can imagine Moses to have been a real person, alive in the world, and if Rav Kook can see secularism and atheism as necessary pieces in the larger movement toward God, then we can imagine the reappearance of Moses’s soul, generating and regenerating itself, through us, within us, again and again.

Shawn A. Weiss is a rabbinical student at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies.

Marcelo Polakoff

No es tan difícil hablar de diálogo. Es más, retratar sus bonanzas es casi como un ejercicio cotidiano para quienes estamos inmersos en lo interreligioso desde hace tantos años, desde el mismísimo tuétano.

Por eso, tendemos a pasar de largo aquellos artículos o reflexiones que acarician lo dialogal como práctica, ya que sabemos de antemano qué es lo que se nos va a relatar. Pero no los salteamos por indiferentes, en absoluto. Lo hacemos en virtud de lo obvio, o tal vez por ese poder de anticipación que esta bendita experiencia nos brinda.

Siendo así, encuentro más desafiante plantearnos el fenómeno desde una perspectiva diferente, ya no haciendo hincapié en lo necesario del diálogo, sino buscando captar cómo justamente su ausencia es directamente proporcional al impiadoso despliegue de lo violento. Vale decir -y me animo a formularlo casi a manera de ley natural- que a medida que se exaspera el silencio, las ínfulas de lo delictuoso van cobrando mayor cantidad de víctimas.

 Es hora de evidencias, y las mismas serán aportadas gracias a un texto divino: la Torá.

El primer genocida

Se cargó a un cuarto de la humanidad, literalmente, y este atroz (y primer) genocidio está precedido tan sólo por el silencio.

Abran el texto bíblico en el cuarto capítulo del Génesis. Busquen el octavo versículo y léanlo en voz alta. En hebreo es clarísimo, pero muchas traducciones no son fieles al original, y más en este caso, ya que una traducción precisa parecería mal hecha. Bien leído, dice así: “Y le dijo Caín a Abel su hermano…y cuando estaban en el campo se levantó Caín hacia Abel y lo mató”. Los puntos suspensivos probablemente sean lo más importante del versículo. Lo que no está escrito, que es precisamente aquello que dijo Caín antes de asesinarlo.

¿Qué dijo? Aunque el Midrash1 lo imagine, no lo sabemos. La Torá, tal vez a propósito, nos dice que no dijo nada. Y entonces, lo que sí intuimos es que ante la matanza no hay palabras. Ni antes ni después. Nada hay que explique cabalmente, y menos aún que justifique, todo asesinato.

Ese silencio, esa falta de comunicación entre los hermanos es la que conduce al golpe. Lo que no se dice, lo que no encuentra lugar ni eco en las palabras -por más fuertes que sean- se convierte en acto, y en el acto, mata.

Lo que también está a las claras después de este relato fundante es que -en última instancia-todo homicidio es un fratricidio.

¿Y Adán y Eva? Se me aparecen tan responsables de la masacre como el propio Caín. Este último desde los hechos, y aquellos desde la ausencia, desde la omisión.

Otra lección no menos primordial. Ya que no alcanza con el verdugo para llevar a cabo la sentencia. Casi siempre se precisa de otro u otros que la apañen. Porque para que el mal se apersone, alcanza con que la “buena gente” no haga nada.

Una molesta y precisa ecuación, aplicable incluso a la más horrorosa maquinaria de destrucción que ideara el ser humano: la del nazismo.

Ya lo decía el rabino Abraham Joshua Heschel, el mismo que marchaba con el pastor Martin Luther King y del que el Papa Juan XXIII se consideraba discípulo: “La neutralidad es una ilusión. Al cabo de sus días el hombre siempre emerge como un sacerdote o como un pirata”2.

El sepulcral silencio entre Caín y Abel es la primera garantía que certifica con holgura la penosa ecuación que diera origen a estas notas: el silencio es la puerta de la violencia.

Vayamos por la segunda de las evidencias.

Genocida por omisión

“La paloma volvió a él al atardecer, y he aquí que traía una rama de olivo en el pico. Así entendió Noé que las aguas habían disminuido sobre la tierra. Esperó aún otros siete días y envió la paloma, la cual no volvió más a él”. (Génesis 8:11-12).

Lo digo sin tapujos: me disgusta profundamente el símbolo de la paloma con la ramita de olivo como símbolo de la paz. Y Noé tiene la culpa.

Este personaje bíblico, paradójico, por cierto, da origen a un segundo proyecto de humanidad. Es que el primero no había resultado muy alentador que digamos. Las 10 generaciones que separaban a Adán de Noé, comenzando por Caín, no hicieron más que llenar la tierra de violencia y corrupción. El escenario para su destrucción ya estaba montado. Si Dios no decidía el diluvio, seguramente los seres “in-humanos” lo habrían traído igual. Y quizá no hubiera quedado nadie vivo para recomenzar la historia.

Lo cierto es que Noé es elegido por ser “justo e íntegro en su generación”. Los sabios talmúdicos, siempre atentos a cualquier resquicio hermenéutico del texto, se preguntan si el hecho de que sea especificado que era justo e íntegro “en su generación” implica un piropo elocuente o una crítica sutil3. No es una pregunta menor. Porque se puede sostener que ser justo e íntegro entre una banda de forajidos es tarea fácil para una persona promedio, y que por ende, puesto Noé en una sociedad relativamente normal, no se habría destacado en absoluto. Aunque también es dable pensar que, si pudo permanecer así de justo y de íntegro en medio de un ambiente de tanto terror, era porque sus cualidades morales excedían las del común de los mortales.

Tiendo a apoyar la primera moción. Y aporto las pruebas.

En primera instancia, Noé es prácticamente mudo. En todo el texto bíblico tan sólo pronuncia unas pocas palabras dedicadas a sus tres hijos4, demasiado tiempo después del diluvio. Fíjense: se le anuncia que todo el planeta va a ser destruido y que sólo se salvará su familia, y él… en silencio. No le avisa a nadie. No intenta modificar la conducta de nadie. No busca soluciones alternativas para nadie. Pareciera como si no le interesara nadie, más allá de su esposa, sus tres hijos y sus tres nueras. Noé calla, y otorga.

¡Qué diferencia con Abraham, que va a estar dispuesto a pelearse con el mismísimo Dios para rescatar a los justos que podrían estar habitando Sodoma y Gomorra!

El segundo genocidio de la humanidad se produce, en gran parte, a merced del silencio cómplice del egoísta dueño de un solo arca.

Segunda evidencia. ¿Saben qué hizo Noé al salir del arca? Plantó una viña y se emborrachó5, quedando desnudo a la vista de su familia. Triste imagen para el hombre que había sido designado para salvar el mundo. Tan triste como honesta. Demasiada carga para soportar. O un remordimiento enorme por no haber intentado otra cosa. El lenguaje de la Torá es magistral: evidentemente quedó desnudo. Carente de humanidad, despojado de la responsabilidad por los otros. Vacío de compromiso. Pasivo.

Vayamos ahora por la paloma.

Fue la prueba cabal que tuvo Noé de que las aguas habían bajado. Y de allí en más, con su ramita de olivo, el ícono prácticamente universal de la paz6. ¿Qué paz?, me pregunto.

Si más allá de lo sucedido o de lo no sucedido antes del diluvio gracias a la inacción de Noé, es precisamente cuando bajan las aguas que quedan al descubierto la mayoría de los desastres. Aparecen las epidemias, la podredumbre, las pestes, la desolación más amarga.

Pobre raza humana. Hemos elegido mal una y otra vez. Y creo que hemos errado hasta en el símbolo. Porque la paz de la paloma de Noé es la de un arca muy chiquita, con lugar para muy pocos. La misma paz que todavía creen tener quienes viven en islas de armonía, rodeados de la ignominia más penosa, sin darse cuenta de que más tarde o más temprano las mismas aguas turbias nos sumergirán a todos.

Si queremos paz, pues entonces no nos sentemos a mirar por la ventana cómo van cayendo las primeras gotas, ni tampoco esperemos tranquilos que bajen las aguas si ya ha llovido demasiado.

A la paz no se la mira ni se la espera. La paz se persigue. Se construye. Se amasa y hasta se lucha por ella.

La paz es enemiga de la pasividad. La paz no se proclama. Se ejerce. Se contagia, y también se defiende.

Y casi nunca está sola. Porque si la paz es Paz con mayúscula, suele estar acompañada por la libertad, la justicia y la verdad. Tal vez sea por eso que la palabra “shalom” provenga de una raíz hebrea que significa “integridad, completitud”. Porque la paz que es parcial, tampoco es paz.

Noé no lo entendió. La paloma, afirma la Biblia, nunca más volvió a él7.

La escucha como antídoto para el desastre

Conozco muy bien el refrán que dice “ver para creer”. Pero no coincido con él.

Tiendo a priorizar más la escucha que la visión. Y no es por casualidad, sino más bien, por origen.

Es claro que vivimos en una cultura visual. En términos del genial politólogo y ensayista italiano, Giovanni Sartori, pasamos a formar parte de una nueva categoría en la cadena de la evolución humana, la del “homo videns”8. Aunque esto, en realidad, no es nada nuevo.

Proviene de la antiquísima cultura griega, de la que tanto abrevamos. Tal vez lo novedoso esté en la tecnología que ha multiplicado hasta el infinito la capacidad de lo visible. Nuestros pobres ojos no dan abasto como para procesar semejante cantidad de estímulos visuales a los que somos pasiva e inexorablemente sometidos.

Sin embargo, tamaña mirada no es una mirada gratuita. La estética por sí sola tiene sus costos. Ya desde épocas del Partenón y la Ilíada se asociaba el ver con el conocer. Tan hondo era ese parentesco que la semántica rotundamente lo revela: palabras tales como “reflexión”, “enfoque”, “visión”, “evidencia” o “perspectiva” se suman a tantas otras que demuestran que el sentido de la vista era el sentido preferido del conocimiento.

Y nos quedamos solamente con ello. Una lástima, porque conocer es virtuoso de por sí. Pero suponer que por ver se comprende es un pensamiento de poca monta. Y en estas épocas de mostrar y de mostrarse, el tan pregonado “conócete a ti mismo” ha exacerbado tanto el sentido de la vista, que pareciera haber contribuido a cerrar en una mirada ególatra aquello que en un principio estaba más destinado hacia la apreciación de la belleza que se hallaba disponible en el exterior.

Pensémoslo como recurso metafórico de nuestros días. La imagen no discute, decreta. Es al mismo tiempo, juicio y sentencia. La pantalla, la de la televisión por antonomasia, simplemente no tiene interlocutores. En tanto que la asimilación de una palabra requiere del conocimiento de un lenguaje y de una lengua, la imagen -por su parte- se procesa automáticamente: se ve, y con eso es suficiente.

El arte de la visión no requiere de un otro. Es, en cierta forma, autosustentable.

Por eso, sin abandonar la vista, prefiero la escucha. O mejor, “escuchar para creer”.

Es que el núcleo de la fe judía, la expresión más cabal de nuestro credo, y a la vez la frase por excelencia con la que los piadosos dejan este mundo, es la que reza: “Shemá Israel…”, “Escucha, Israel, el Señor es nuestro Dios, el Señor es único”9.

Más allá de la declaración del monoteísmo que encierra este texto deuteronomista, la clave que despliega su sentido se concentra en el verbo “escuchar”.

Entramos aquí en otro plano. En otra dimensión. Porque es lo auditivo lo que caracteriza al pueblo hebreo, un pueblo que no puede ver a Dios, pero sí puede escucharlo.

Escuchar es prestar atención a lo que se oye. Es dar de mi atención al otro, otro con minúscula u Otro con mayúscula. Porque para que la escucha sea cabal y comprensiva se precisa de un otro que se exprese.

Escuchar, por ende, es hacerse presente en la existencia de un tercero, es acercarse e involucrarse en un diálogo que requiere al menos dos.

En la escucha se personifica un mandato, se vislumbra una demanda ética: hay alguien más a tu lado que necesita tu distinción. Porque a diferencia de la visión, que es masiva por definición, la escucha debe ser en esencia selectiva. Y aunque el mensaje sea compartido, escuchar se conjuga en singular.

“Ozen” es “oído” en hebreo, y de igual raíz es “izún” que significa “equilibrio”. Este varias veces milenario par dialéctico de la lengua hebrea ha sido corroborado no hace mucho por la ciencia médica, que ha descubierto que en el oído interno yace gran parte del sentido del equilibrio.

¿No es acaso maravilloso saber que en última instancia todo nuestro equilibrio depende de nuestra capacidad de escucha?

¿No es acaso evidente que el silencio -o la sordera recíproca- desequilibran al ser humano tornándolo en violento?

Por eso, hay que tener sumo cuidado con los silencios. Porque aunque a primera vista no se note, son muchas las víctimas de sus embrujos.

Rabbi Marcelo Polakoff, ordained by Seminario Rabinico Latinoamericano, has served as the rabbi of Centro Unión Israelita de Córdoba, Argentina, since 2002. He was twice elected President of the Latin American Rabbinical Assembly (2010–2014) and has been the Latin American Commissioner for Interreligious Dialogue for the World Jewish Congress since 2004.

Daniel Z. Siegel

Much has been written about the ʿeirev rav, or “mixed multitude,” that accompanied Israel in its exodus from Egypt. For the eighteenth-century Hasidic leader Jacob Joseph of Pollonoye, however, this is not solely a story of the past but a lesson of significant pertinence for the present. The tale of the ʿeirev rav, as presented in his seminal work, Sefer toledot Yaʿaqov Yoseif ʿal haTorah, (henceforth Toledot) is a call to his contemporaries, as to all would-be authentic Jewish communities, to engage in a process of self-reckoning and self-rectifying.

Jacob Joseph begins one of his primary discussions of the golden calf incident with a nod to the prevailing notion regarding the principal transgressors: “For it is known that the principal perpetrator of the calf transgression is the ʿeirev rav (iqar ḥet zeh shel ʿeigel yatsah meiʿeirev rav). As is noted in the Zohar, as well.”1 He then adds:

However, a small portion of Israel became psychological partners with the ʿeirev rav (shenishtatfu qetsat Yisraʾel bemaḥshavah)… And that which he (Simeon son of Yochai) said: “Israel could not have conceivably committed such a transgression (lo hayu Yisraʾel reʾuyin leʾoto ḥet),2 he means to say that they (the Israelites) of themselves could not have conceivably committed this transgression… For it was the ʿeirev rav who were the actual transgressors (befoʿal) and the fault (or blemish, pegam) adhered to Israel by virtue of their being interconnected and of one source (or root, shoresh ʿeḥad) with the ʿeirev rav; for Moses was their source (or root), as the Ari had written…and, thus, he (had) wanted to convert them.3

But it was not that the Israelites of themselves could have conceivably committed this transgression (causing one) to say this transgression extended from them to the ʿeirev rav, as I have written regarding the verse “The pious (ḥasid) are no more, the faithful (emunim) of humankind have vanished” (Psalm 12:2)—that one can interpret (this verse) from its beginning clause to its ending clause or from its ending clause to its beginning clause…4 But here it is not (the case that the verse can be interpreted in “either direction”).

For the Israelites could not have conceivably committed this transgression except to instruct with regard to repentance. I mean to say, in order that they don the garment (yilbeshu levush) of the ʿeirev rav, and then, when these few individuals, who in seeking the welfare of the faithful of Israel (shelomei emunei Yisraʾel) were (thereby) caught somewhat in this transgression along with those realms, repent, all the realms are raised with them… This is only that they should learn to include themselves with all the realms (levels, madreigot, of community) as Samuel the prophet did…

And this is the essential purpose of the human being, and from this may future generations, as well, learn the great way in the service of the Lord (ʿavodat Adonai). This is what I remembered and received from my master (the Baal Shem Tov), mouth to mouth, and it is not possible to explain in a book, but consider this and understand (Toledot, 476 [Naso]).5

Jacob Joseph’s remark regarding the interconnection and common root of Israel and the ʿeirev rav, which lies at the center of this passage, serves both a descriptive and prescriptive purpose. It is of descriptive import insofar as it indicates that the Israelites have the “blemish” of the ʿeirev rav’s transgression adhering to them. In prescriptive terms, this common bond, as he proceeds to explain, calls upon Israel to rectify the transgressing ʿeirev rav. However, what is deemed the fuller significance of this prescription is only suggested here by Jacob Joseph in his calling these few individuals, who elect to take upon themselves this required action, the “seekers of the welfare of the faithful.”

The expression “seekers of the welfare of the faithful” is applied in 2 Samuel 20:19 to a “wise woman” who intervenes to avoid the division and/or destruction of the Israelite nation upon the heels of a rebellion against David and his kingdom. If there are “seekers of the welfare of the faithful,” as there were among the few Israelites who took upon themselves rectification of the golden calf transgressors, then the people might be preserved.

In addition, by reminding us of the rightful action of the “wise woman,” this same expression, “seekers of the welfare of the faithful” (shelomei emunei Yisraʾel) echoes and further clarifies Jacob Joseph’s intent in citing the verse “The pious (ḥasid) are no more, the faithful (emunim) of humankind have vanished,” with his attendant observation that this verse can be interpreted from its beginning clause to its ending clause or in reverse fashion. Indeed, as Jacob Joseph’s following words indicate, while one may generally believe that the pious perish because there are no faithful to support them, in truth, the opposite might be the case:

I have heard from the deceased Rabbi Judah Leib Pistener, an explanation of the verse…“The pious are no more, the faithful of humankind have vanished” that (this means that) the pious are no more inasmuch as the faithful of humankind have vanished. For one has impact upon the other due to their (common) unity. However, it was told to him in a dream that perhaps the interpretation of the verse is the reverse: “Since the pious are no more, the faithful of humankind have vanished” (Toledot, 133 [Shemot]).

Thus, while the ʿeirev rav is initially presented as being “known” to be responsible for effecting Israel with its transgression, a closer examination that takes into account Jacob Joseph’s observations suggests that Israel might be responsible for the ʿeirev rav’s transgression and, thereby, their own implication in this transgression as well.6

While Jacob Joseph contends that one cannot read the verse both ways in the sense that it was the Israelites themselves who transgressed with the golden calf, and their transgression “extended” to the ʿeirev rav, this does not exclude our entertaining a dual reading of this verse in holding Israel accountable for the transgression of the ʿeirev rav. As he makes clear, Israel can and should be held responsible for not seeking the welfare of the ʿeirev rav. Thus, in considering Tosafot’s commentary to Rabbi Ami’s statement that “the red heifer (parah ʿadumah) effects atonement” (b. Moʿed Qatan 28a), Jacob Joseph writes:

And if you were to say, as Tosafot had written, that it (the red heifer) was to atone for the incident (ma‘aseh) of the calf, this is difficult (qasheh)—for (is it not the case that) whoever transgressed in the presence of witnesses and having received prior warning (hatraʾah) were killed by the Levites, and (those who transgressed) without prior warning were smitten by the plague, and (those who transgressed) without the presence of witnesses were examined (with the guilty being punished), as were the suspected adulteresses.7 And those who remained, of what need were they of atonement for the calf by means of the (red) heifer? …And it appears to me that (in essence) this question was asked by (Rabbi Moses) Alshekh: “Why is Israel in need of sheqalim as an atonement (ransom) of the soul (kofer nefesh) for the calf?” …And he responds “(it is necessary) for they did not protest (miḥu) (their making of the calf)…(which they should have done) inasmuch as they are fellows (ki ʿareivim zeh bazeh, responsible for each other).”8 So, too, here, with regard to the (red) heifer, it comes to atone for the calf incident, for they did not protest (or seek) to prevent it by virtue of (or as required by) fellowship (mitsad ha‘areivut) (Toledot, 542 [Ḥuqqat]).9

Jacob Joseph’s remark regarding Moses desiring to convert the ʿeirev rav, which appears in the midst of his presenting Israel and the ʿeirev rav as being “interconnected” and “of one source,” is significant in that it simultaneously indicates that both the leader and the people are connected to the ʿeirev rav and calls our attention to the critical and well-known midrash underlying his opening statement that it is “known” that the ʿeirev rav is the “principal perpetrator” of the golden calf transgression. The biblical text clearly portrays Israel as transgressing with the golden calf and makes no mention in this regard of the ʿeirev rav. However, in alluding to this midrash by means of this particular reference to Moses, and thereby having the ʿeirev rav rather than Israel committing the calf transgression itself, Jacob Joseph, as we shall see, effectively further exposes the unmet responsibility of Israel and of Moses as well.

We now turn to the midrash explaining that it was the ʿeirev rav, whom Moses sought to convert, that perpetrated the calf transgression:

“Go (lekh), descend (reid), for your people (ʿamkha) (whom you have brought up from the land of Egypt) has corrupted (shiḥeit) itself” (Exodus 32:7). It is not written here “the people” but “your people.” Moses said: “Master of the Universe, whence are they my people (alone)?” The Holy One Blessed be He said to him: “Your people, they are, for, when they were still in Egypt, I said to you (Exodus 7:4): ‘I will bring out My hosts, My people’ (the next words being ‘the children of Israel’). I (thereby) told you not to mix (leʿareiv) with them a mixed multitude (ʿeirev rav). (But), you being humble and noble (or fitting, kasher), said to Me: ‘(One) always accepts the penitent (hashavim).’ But, I, knowing what they would do, said ‘No.’ But I did what you wanted, and it was these very ones, being idolaters, that created the calf. (Moreover), they, having created it, caused My people (ʿami) to transgress.” Note, it is not written here “This is our God (O Israel Who brought us up from the land of Egypt)” but “This is your God (O Israel Who brought you up from the land of Egypt).” For the “proselytes” (gerim) who came up with Moses, they were the ones who made it (the calf) and who said to Israel, “this is your God.” Therefore, the Holy One Blessed be He said to Moses: “Go, descend, for your people has corrupted itself” (Exodus Rabbah 42:6).

The expression ʿeirev rav, which appears in the Bible on this one occasion—“and a mixed multitude (ʿeirev rav) went up with them” (Exodus 12:38)—hearkens back to the fourth plague, ʿarov (“mixture”). It is in this plague, denoting mixture, that separation between the Israelites and Egyptians, in terms of being plague victims, first occurs, thus implicitly encouraging the Egyptians to mix with the Israelites, or become converts.

Indeed, the words “your people” (ʿamkha) and “My people” (ʿami), which appear in the biblical verses cited by this midrash (“your people have corrupted themselves” and “I will bring out…My people”), are reminiscent of the verse constituting God’s warning prior to the onset of ʿarov: “For if you will not send My people (ʿami) then I will send the ʿarov against your people (ʿamkha)” (Exodus 8:17). In the very separation of “My people” and “your people,” as highlighted in the final words of the forewarning, “And I will make a distinction (pedut) between My people (ʿami) and your people (ʿamkha)” (Exodus 8:19), is an invitation to the Egyptians to mix with the Israelites, becoming converts in recognizing the Lord, as the immediately preceding verse suggests: “And I will set apart (hifleiti)… So you will come to know that I am the Lord” (Exodus 8:18).

While the biblical narrative suggests that the ʿeirev rav was a positive outcome of the Lord’s successful plan, this midrash (perhaps reflecting, to some degree, the people’s experience with converts at the time of its composition) presents the ʿeirev rav as a “project” gone awry undertaken by an accepting but short-sighted Moses. Not only did the Israelites (Moses) not successfully convert the ʿeirev rav, but the ʿeirev rav was capitalizing on this failure by converting the Israelites.

Still, considering Jacob Joseph’s comments regarding the Israelites failing to meet the requirements of ʿareivut (“fellowship”) in not protesting (or seeking to prevent) the transgression of the ʿeirev rav, we must ask: Is it the latter who was feigning fellowship with Israel? Or was the former engaging in a false fellowship with the ʿeirev rav? Moreover, unlike the midrash that presents the ʿeirev rav causing Israel to transgress with the golden calf, Jacob Joseph, as we have seen, does not present the Israelites as parties to the transgression itself. Indeed, those few individuals who did involve themselves in the calf incident in order to rectify the ʿeirev rav whose “welfare” they were seeking serve to implicate rather than exculpate the Israelites, most of whom, according to Jacob Joseph, did not assume the responsibility of ʿareivut. Thus, we are being asked to carefully consider in whom lies the fault of forsaking fellowship.

Even as a few Israelites stepped into the breach, one must ask, as did the ʿeirev rav (per the midrashic reading, which Jacob Joseph here adopts), where Moses was at this critical juncture: “When the people saw that Moses was long in descending (laredet) from the mountain…they said (to Aaron)…‘Come make for us a God who will lead us, for that man Moses, who brought us up (heʿelanu) (from the land of Egypt), we do not know what has become of him’” (Exodus 32:1).

Moses’s responsibility for the ʿeirev rav, as indicated by the midrash and Jacob Joseph’s statement that he sought their conversion, is also expressed in the latter’s following observation:

“(Jethro heard) all that God had done for Moses and for Israel His people” (Exodus 18:1). It (the text) means to say “his people”—belonging to Moses, that is, the ʿeirev rav, as it says “(Go, descend,) for your people (whom you have brought up from the land of Egypt) has corrupted itself” (Exodus 32:7) (Toledot, 179–80 [Yitro]).10

Accordingly, it is not without suggestion that Jacob Joseph uses the verse “The pious are no more, the faithful of humankind have vanished,” which he explains can be interpreted to mean either that the people cause the leader to fall or the reverse, when he expounds upon the verse “Go Descend!, for your people (whom you have brought up from the land of Egypt), has corrupted itself” (Toledot, 474 [Naso]). Indeed, the midrash presents a distraught Joshua, contemplating what will become of the people in the absence of Moses, crying and saying: “The pious are no more, the faithful of humankind have vanished” (Deuteronomy Rabbah 11:10).

As the rabbinic tradition contends that the leader of the community (or generation) who does not protest (or seek to prevent) the wrongdoings of its members is “seized” for its transgression (nitpas be‘avon hador), so Jacob Joseph recognizes the responsibility Moses needed to assume for the ʿeirev rav and its actions.11 The intervention of those few Israelites who “donned the garb of the ʿeirev rav” to “raise” them up, therefore, is generally ascribed to God’s chosen, mediating representative, as can be seen in the following parable Jacob Joseph was fond of citing:

The parable which I heard from my teachers that a minister (sar) went out (from the presence of the king) to return the prince (ben hamelekh) to the king after he had distanced himself from him. And he had to don the clothes of the people of the village (lehalbish bigdei anshei hakefar), where the prince now was, so he would have some connection (hitḥabrut) with the prince whereby he could enter into a conversation with him and raise him up (ʿalta lo) (Toledot, 397 [Emor]).

In assuming, if only for the sake of appearances, the corrupted character (roaʿ hamiddot) of the estranged prince, the loyal minister becomes what he is not in order to rescue one who is not what he has become.12 “The purpose of this,” Jacob Joseph concludes, is “to return him to the palace. And, this going (halikhah) of the minister, whereby he goes and distances himself from the royal manner (laws or customs, nimusei malkhut) is, at the same time, a coming (biʾah), so that he can return the prince to the King, the King of the Universe” (Toledot, 397 [Emor]).13

The presentation of this parable and his accompanying comments regarding halikhah and biʾah further elucidates for us Jacob Joseph’s reading of the midrash regarding Moses’s people. As halikhah for Jacob Joseph denotes yeridah (“descending”), and biʾah signifies ʿaliyah (“ascending”), the minister’s halikhah (“going”) from the King (or God) in yeridah (“descending”) among the people in need of rectification culminates in the minister’s biʾah (“coming”) to the King/God in ʿaliyah (“ascending”) and raising himself and the rescued individual.14

When, then, God commands Moses to “Go (lekh), descend (reid), for your people whom you have brought up (heʿeleita) from the land of Egypt have corrupted themselves,” He is reminding him of that great contingent in fellowship (ʿeirev rav) with Israel which he succeeded in bringing up but for which he must now descend yet again in order to raise up once more. God’s words to Moses can thus be seen to reflect what the ʿeirev rav already sensed, as presented in the biblical narrative: “When the people saw that Moses was long in descending (laredet)…they said…‘Come make us a God…for that man Moses who brought us up (heʿelanu)…we do not know what has become of him” (Exodus 32:1).

Jacob Joseph’s concluding remarks, that the purpose of the individuals “donning the garment of the ʿeirev rav” is “to include themselves with all the levels, as Samuel the prophet did, and [that] this is the essential purpose of the human being…and the great way in the service of the Lord,” recall the intervention of Samuel on behalf of the people, as explained by the rabbis: “And Samuel said: ‘We have transgressed.’ Rabbi Samuel the son of Rabbi Isaac said: ‘Samuel donned the cloak (ḥalukah) of all Israel’” (y. Taʿanit 2:7). While the biblical text says, “And they came together at Mizpah and they said: ‘We have transgressed’” (1 Samuel 7:6), inasmuch as the previous verse cites Samuel as saying “And I will pray on your behalf,” Rabbi Samuel presents this prophet as taking upon and including himself in the transgression of Israel.15 Jacob Joseph’s reference to Samuel now serves to further our understanding of his presentation of Moses’s response to God.

And through this, the plea (taʿanat) and phraseology (melitsat) of Moses on behalf of (ʿavur) Israel can be understood: “Ana (generally denoting beseeching or bewailing), this people have committed a great transgression” (Exodus 32:31)…And “I” is inclusive of all of them. For Moses is the root of all of them. “(Thus), when I say the people have committed a great transgression it is fitting (ra’uy) to immediately forgive inasmuch as I confess (mitvadeh) in the name of all of them, as did Samuel” (Toledot, 477 [Naso]).16

As Samuel had admonished Israel for transgressing (1 Samuel 7:3) and then said “I will pray on your behalf” (1 Samuel 7:5), thus leading the rabbis to put the words “We have transgressed” into the mouth of Samuel in order to indicate that he was assuming (responsibility for) their transgression, so Moses, having said to the people “You have committed a great transgression and now I will ascend (eʿeleh) to the Lord, perhaps I can make atonement (akaprah) for your transgressions” (Exodus 32:30), is now, in Jacob Joseph’s reading of the word ana, in the (Aramaic) sense of “I,” intervening and assuming the transgression of Israel. Having thus descended in fellowship with the people, it is only fitting that we now find God saying to Moses: “Go (lekh), ascend (ʿaleh) from here, you and the people you have brought up from the land of Egypt” (Exodus 33:1).17

For Jacob Joseph, a student of the Baal Shem Tov and a pioneer of the Hasidic movement, the ʿeirev rav was a critical subject, as his above-cited comments reflect. Indeed, the ʿeirev rav held personal import both for him, as a Hasidic leader, and in terms of his contemporary community.

And we will seek to explain the calf episode, as written in the Torah, as being eternal. For, it is difficult to say “what was, was”…. For, indeed, it is recurring, as we see with our own eyes…because Israel was divided (nivdalin) and separated (mufrashin) from the ʿeirev rav in two ways: in eating, for they did not eat the same food (Israel alone eating the manna) and they did not mix but secluded themselves (with God, in prayer and study), without the ʿeirev rav, in the clouds of Israel (the “clouds of glory” that went before Israel). The calf was an outcome of this, with the claim “let us be fully included with you”…. And my own eyes, not those of a stranger, have seen this battle waged constantly against one who seeks to sanctify himself and to be separate, to pray in a minyan of his own, inasmuch as it is impossible to pray in a public community wherein the people perform the commandments in a rote manner (betsibbur sheʿosin mitsvot anashim melumdah) and for several other similar reasons. And, with regard to eating, I will not declare my generation ritually fit (lo akhshir dori),18 for everyone slaughters, even those who are not expert in the laws of slaughtering and are not God-fearing (Toledot, 459–60 [Naso]).

As Moses and Israel separated themselves from the ʿeirev rav, so did Jacob Joseph and his community. However, like Moses, Jacob Joseph did not see himself as abandoning the ʿeirev rav. The interpretation based upon Rabbi Pistener’s dream, in which it is the leaders who are responsible for the vanishing of the faithful, as explained in the following passage, reflects the reality of his time as seen by Jacob Joseph:

And as Moses was the leader for his entire generation…so in each and every generation the head, those who are (truly) fit (hakesherim), are from the sparks (are the reincarnated souls) of Moses our master, as it is written: “What was is what will be” (Ecclesiastes 1:9).19 …And as it was in the generation of Moses, so it is in every generation, for there is an ʿeirev rav in each and every generation…20 And, when the people (ʿeirev rav) saw that Moses, who is the fitting (kasher) rabbi in their city, “was long” in coming to attend to their needs…they rose up with cunning (betaʿaromet) and said: “Make for us a god who will go before us” (Exodus 32:1).

As in our time, there was an informing (or denouncing, mesirah) to the government saying: “We need a leader.” And they explained their words in saying “‘for this man (zeh haʾish) Moses we do not know what has become of him’ (Exodus 32:1)…for we need a leader with whom we can be included as one, in eating and in prayer.”

And, thus, (does the golden calf episode) serve as an intimation (remez) for generations that because a group of individuals creates its own minyan and does not at all eat with them, that this is reason for the ʿeirev rav to create a golden calf…the golden calf, which refers to the “gods of gold” (elohei zahav, Exodus 32:31) who were appointed by the government for gold. And because of this, now many are the rabbis in the city. And that which is written “[make for us a god (of gold)] who will go (yelkhu, plural) before us” is because they desired many gods (of gold) (Toledot, 461 [Naso]).

Accordingly, Jacob Joseph’s discussion of the ʿeirev rav is, at least in part, a message regarding the contemporary corrupt leaders and their rabbis, the “gods of gold.” Jacob Joseph’s personal involvement in the events described, which until this point is only intimated, is soon made explicit: “The above recorded events, from beginning to end, happened to me, the writer, and it is thereby indicated (merumaz) why precisely ‘this man’ (zeh haʾish) ordered the making of a house of study/prayer (beit hamidrash) in Szarogrod” (Toledot, 461 [Naso]).

Thus Jacob Joseph, seeing himself as the Tsaddik, the fitting (kasher) leader of the generation, and following in the footsteps of Moses (of whom he is the reincarnation, as indicated by the self-appellation zeh haʾish, Exodus 32:1), separates himself and his Hasidim from the ʿeirev rav in prayer, study, and eating, as did Moses. As the biblical ʿeirev rav, because of the separation, asked for a new leader and created the calf to replace Moses, so the contemporary ʿeirev rav, because of the separation of Jacob Joseph and his followers, proceed, together with their leaders, to reject and expel this Tsaddik and his Hasidim (this separatist beit hamidrash perhaps serving as the first such institution of its kind within the nascent Hasidic movement) in favor of their golden calf rabbis. In the words of Jacob Joseph: “to chase them (he and his adherents) from the city and to dissolve his minyan” (Toledot, 471 [Naso]).

Jacob Joseph had been progressively demonstrating his sympathies toward these “new Hasidim.” Thus it is related that, having been impressed by Rabbi Aryeh Leib (the Rebuker/Mokhiaḥ of Pollonoye), one of the Besht’s disciples, whom he allowed to assemble a Shabbat minyan in his house, Jacob Joseph proceeded to invite the Szarogrod community to a seʿudah shelishit of these visiting Hasidim. “(This action) was startling to them (the Szarogrod authorities) for they believed him not to be a Hasid, but when his intentions became apparent, the city members began to fight with him.”21 When, soon thereafter, he “ordered the making of a house of study/prayer” and maintained his own minyan, Jacob Joseph made clear his allegiance. Having entertained and engaged in what were deemed dangerous practices of the emerging devotees of the Baal Shem Tov, with whom he was evidently aligning himself, Jacob Joseph was rejected and ousted by the established authorities of Szarogrod.22

While more securely practicing Hasidism in Nemirov and then more actively propagating it in Pollonoye, where he was appointed the “Rebuker of Pollonoye” upon the death of Aryeh Leib, it was the appearance of his Toledot in 1780, the first printed Hasidic work, that served to further formulate and give voice to this movement’s teachings. Its publication heightened the polemic, placing Jacob Joseph at its center, and precipitated the ensuing Vilna ban of 1781 calling for separation from these “Ḥashidim” (“suspected ones”) and “their new book.”23 In the words of one “defender of the faith”:

And regarding the matter of the book, that has reached your land in the month of Menachem (Av), 1781, which was authored by the rabbi of the community of Pollonoye, Jacob Joseph. Its quality and character is one of moral instruction/admonition (musarim) and novel expositions (ḥidushim), which are expounded based upon his particular path in understanding the Torah, at the seʿudah shelishit. And it is a new way that he learned and received from their teacher, who is called Israel Baal Shem Tov. And, its (or his) aim is to entice and seduce all of Israel to walk in their path and to no longer walk in the path of the holy Torah and in the path of our predecessors, may their memory be blessed.24

Particularly inciteful, then, for these established authorities and their rabbis, was the Toledot’s dubbing them as corrupting leaders of the ʿeirev rav. Indeed, they believed, Jacob Joseph and his followers were not only seeking to subvert the traditional ways but also presenting the true champions of the faith, and not its dangerous detractors, as the ones seeking to mislead the people.25 Not surprisingly, the Toledot was reportedly (repeatedly) burned.26

For Jacob Joseph, it was their preoccupation with Torah study that separated these ʿeirev rav rabbis from, and caused the dissolution of Torah among, the people. Thus, he explains:

When he said “that he (the rabbinic scholar) should not habituate himself to this,” (he meant that) he should not be diligently engaged in his study (of Torah) all the time. Rather, he should intermingle (or enter into fellowship, yitʿarev) with the general populace, as well…. By this, he will understand that the Holy One Blessed be He is to be found among all levels (madreigot) of people, and he can intermingle (or enter into fellowship, lehitʾarev) with all human beings. Then he (the rabbinic scholar) will not become arrogant (yagis daʿato) but, on the contrary, he will judge them (the general populace) meritoriously (Toledot, 88 [Vayyeitsei]).27

Seen neither as caring for the people nor as moral exemplars, these rabbinic “leaders” were variously depicted by Toledot as “wise for wicked purposes” (ḥakhamim lehara), “Jewish demons” (shidin yehudaʾin), or “foxes destroying the vineyards” (shuʿalim meḥablim keramim).28 Yet Toledot’s author argued that he was seeking not to forsake these wayward leaders, and the ʿeirev rav, but to rectify them. Thus, for Jacob Joseph, the Toledot was not a polemic to further a schism but a vehicle for returning the community to wholeness. Indeed, it was not despite but by means of this harsh criticism that the Toledot sought to achieve this end.29

As Moses, the fitting (kasher) leader of his generation, did not abandon the biblical ʿeirev rav but, descending, “raised them up” once again, so the Tsaddik Jacob Joseph, the reincarnated Moses of his time, was that fitting individual who would not forsake but, likewise descending, restore the ʿeirev rav of his day.30 Jacob Joseph’s title, the “Rebuker of Pollonoye” reflects how, according to his Toledot, this “fitting individual” can best accomplish the task of restoring the fallen ʿeirev rav. “There are,” Toledot explains, “two types of fitting individuals (kesheirim)”: “One who isolates/focuses only upon himself (mitboded bifnei ‘atsmo) and one who seeks to benefit (lizkhot) others” (Toledot, 288 [Tsav]).31 Identifying these individuals as the “Torah scholar (talmid ḥakham) who rectifies (meiyasher) only himself” and the “Torah scholar who rectifies (himself and) others, as well, by means of rebuke (tokhaḥat musar),” respectively, Jacob Joseph, making reference to the counsel “Better open rebuke than concealed love” (Proverbs 27:5), indicates which of these two “fitting individuals” is to be preferred.

“Better open rebuke (tovah tokhaḥah megulah),” these are (the individuals of) the second category mentioned above, who openly rebuke (megaleh tokhaḥat musar) to rectify them (the transgressors). They are better (tovim yoteir) than (the individuals of) the other category, who (referring to the second part of the verse: “than hidden love,” mei’ahavah musteret) are beloved (’ahuvim) inasmuch as they are hidden (mustarim) and do not openly rebuke (Toledot, 288 [Tsav]).

Indeed, in proceeding to offer a more felicitous reading of this verse, Jacob Joseph suggests that his very criticism of the contemporary ʿeirev rav and its enablers constitutes an expression of his love for them. The biblical verse is best understood as not presenting us with a disjunction of rebuke and love, for silence (as maintained by the present-day rabbinic scholars) betrays a lack of love, while rebuke (such as that offered by Toledot) is a sign of its very presence. Thus, Jacob Joseph adds: “Furthermore, one can interpret the verse as ‘good is open rebuke when it flows (nimshakh) from hidden love.’” Reading the prefix letter mem as a preposition (“from”) instead of a conjunction (“than”), the ʿeirev rav and those who sanction them are to understand that the rebuke of the Toledot emanates from the love of its “fitting” author.

Pertinent to the point this “Rebuker of Pollonoye” is making when he cites these words from Proverbs is his comment on the subsequent verse, which appears elsewhere in Toledot.

And by means of this will be understood the talmudic (passage in which) “Rabbi Samuel son of Nahmani said: ‘What is the meaning of the verse “faithful (neʾemanim) are the wounds of a friend (oheiev), but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful” (Proverbs 27:6)? Better the curse with which Ahiyah the Shilonite cursed Israel than the blessing with which Balaam (the evil one) blessed them.’” For Ahiyah the Shilonite was of the category of the “faithful” rebukers, but Balaam the evil one was of the (category of the) dissemblers (hatsevuʿim) (Toledot, 576 [Balaq].32

Further insight as to the significance of this comment is afforded the reader when he finds mentioned, in the same context, that Ahiyah is the “source” (shoresh) of the “faithful rebukers,” who “received” his way (or teachings) from Moses, served as a judge in King David’s court, and was the teacher of Elijah the prophet as well as the teacher of “my teacher” (the Baal Shem Tov).

Like Ahiyah, who brooked no association with idolatrous worship, dealing harshly with Jeraboam when he, as did the ʿeirev rav at Sinai, set up golden calves and proclaimed, as did they, “Behold your God, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt” (1 Kings 12:28), so Jacob Joseph, the (intimated) inheritor of this fearless rebuker’s teachings, would not constrain himself from criticizing the ʿeirev rav and golden calf rabbis of his own day. Yet, as the curse of Ahiyah, the prophet whose harsh words inaugurated the division of the Israelite kingdom (1 Kings 11:30–36), would ultimately serve as a blessing, so Jacob Joseph’s admonishments, which widened the schism between his emerging movement and the established Jewish community, in the end, would bring healing and unification.

Jacob Joseph’s opponents understood well the import of this “Rebuker of Pollonoye” claiming legitimacy by presenting himself as heir to, and maverick in the mold of, Ahiyah the prophet. Particularly telling, however, was the insinuating message in the Toledot’s explanation of how Ahiyah’s curse was, in truth, a blessing. Commenting upon this curse, (“And the Lord will strike Israel as a reed is shaken in water,” 1 Kings 4:5) in light of the talmudic exposition, Jacob Joseph explains that this onslaught will result in a new stock replacing the old (gizʿo maḥalif) and lead to a further strengthening of the roots (shorashav merubin) and attaining of new heights (madreigot yoteir elyonot).33 Thus, there will be a future restoration and unification of the people, but under the new leadership of the present-day “fitting” representatives of the Mosaic tradition.34

Jacob Joseph’s message was clear. The words he uttered regarding his expulsion from Szarogrod, lo akhshir dori, indeed, are to be understood as “I will not declare my (corrupt) generation fit”! However, they also mean “Will I not render my (corrupt) generation fit?” Like his biblical namesakes, Jacob and Joseph, the hated younger brothers who were estranged from the family only to return as rectifying forces in the lives of their older brothers, the beleaguered Jacob Joseph, who was ousted from the community because the authorities deemed him usurpacious, was now being called upon to restore the true outsiders to the fold of the faithful. As the Moses of his generation, however, Jacob Joseph might have seen himself playing a unique role beyond that of the leader engaged in the recurring pattern of descending to help the ʿeirev rav of his time ascend.

While noting that the verse “what was will be” (Ecclesiastes 1:9) indicates “as it was in the generation of Moses, so it is in every generation, for there is an ʿeirev rav in each and every generation,”35 Jacob Joseph might have seen his leadership as part of the final redemptive stage in which dor holekh vedor ba would cease to mean “the generation that goes will be the one that comes again” and no longer signify the recurring generational cycle of needing to rectify the ʿeirev rav and its enabling leadership. The golden calf episode, observes Jacob Joseph, “occurs throughout time, until the coming of our Messiah (meshiḥeinu).”36 Not long thereafter, referring to his generation’s ʿeirev rav and corrupting forces that had forced him out of Szarogrod, Jacob Joseph writes: “‘They banded together against the Lord and His messiah (or, anointed one, meshiḥo) (Psalm 2:2),’ immediately devising counsel against the Lord regarding prohibited foods, removing good butchers and appointing bad ones…as my eyes have seen and (devising counsel) against His messiah (or, anointed one)…how to expel them from the city and to dissolve his minyan” (Toledot, 471 [Naso]).37 Thus dor holekh vedor ba (or hador sheholekh hu sheba) may now come to mark the end of the cycle, the messianic period in which the generation that descended (holekh) will now permanently ascend (ba).38

For Jacob Joseph, as for Moses, the task with regard to the ʿeirev rav was, therefore, a formidable and critical one. The early separation from the ʿeirev rav by Moses and Jacob Joseph, together with their communities, was only temporary, necessitated by the formative period of the nation (or movement).39 As the “fitting” leaders of their generations, however, they could not abandon the ʿeirev rav. Indeed, the rebuke being offered by Toledot, by means of which he sought to raise the ʿeirev rav of his day, was aimed, like that of Moses, at reconciliation rather than rejection. Thus, in the passage wherein he equates his Szarogrod experience with that of Moses, Jacob Joseph writes: “The tablets (of the ten utterances) were broken…(and later) God returned and sent Moses who ground the calf into sand…and they returned and accepted him as the Rabbi (larav)” (Toledot, 471 [Naso]). Jacob Joseph’s hope lay, then, in ultimately fostering rather than forsaking fellowship, so that after “descending” with the new tablets (Exodus 34:29), the ʿeirev rav would join the new way of this Tsaddik and his Hasidim and it could again (and, perhaps, for the last time) be said: “and the ʿeirev rav too ascended with them” (Exodus 12:38).

Rabbi Daniel Z. Siegel has served as head of Jewish studies and Jewish life programs in Australia, Canada, and the United States. He is a lifelong educator, teacher, and student of our Jewish textual tradition. His recently published book is Jewish Journeying: A Textual Trek.