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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2015
This is a story; let us begin at the end.
They have come, Rabbi Akiva, Rabbi Joshua and their colleagues, this Friday afternoon to visit the dying outcast, to offer him one last chance to repent, to return. “Why have you come?” he asks them. “We have come to learn Torah, ” is their reply.
It is about time. For R. Eliezer is shammuta, excommunicated. Under the ban he has been forbidden to teach, forbidden casual social intercourse, unkempt and unshaven: like a leper, like a mourner. Hear how he expresses himself, the teacher cut off from students:
“Woe is me, ” he tells them. “I know three hundred laws concerning the bright white spot” - the mark of the condition we translate as leprosy - “but there is none to ask me questions.”
Now there are people to ask him questions about Torah, although not about the bright white spot.
“What is the law of a ball, a shoemaker's last, an amulet, a curative leather bag of pearls, and a small weight?” Are they succeptable to ritual impurity if they come in contact with a corpse? “And what of the shoe, just completed but still on the last?”
A version of this paper was delivered at Hamline University School of Law at the Sixth Annual “Great Trials in Jewish History” series, under the auspices of the Jewish Law Society.
1. The Babylonian Talmud, Nezikin, Order, Sanhedrin, Tractate68a (Soncino, ed, 1978)Google Scholar.
2. These questions from Sanhedrin 68a are explored in depth in Levinas, Emmanuel, Nine Talmudic Readings 153–161 (Indiana U Press, Aronowicz, Annette trans, 1990)Google Scholar.
3. Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin, 68a (cited in note 1)Google Scholar.
4. See especially Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969)Google Scholar.
5. A corpse, for example.
6. For example, a vessel.
7. Such as a live plant in the ground.
8. The Babylonian Talmud, Nezikin, Order, Mezia, Tractate Baba59b (Soncino, ed, 1978)Google Scholar.
9. Mishna, Mo'ed, Order, Hashana, Tractate Rosh, ch 2, numbers 8, 9 (Oxford U Press, 1933)Google Scholar.
10. Babylonian Talmud, Mezia, Baba59b (cited in note 8)Google Scholar.
11. Id.
12. Id.
13. For a rare example of a reading that does follow the story through to its end, see Edgerton, Dow, The Exegesis of Tears, 46 Theology Today 21 (1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14. Babylonian Talmud, Mezia, Baba59b (cited in note 8)Google Scholar.
15. Id.
16. The Babylonian Talmud, Mo'ed, Order, Eruvin, Tractate13b (Soncino, ed, 1978)Google Scholar.
17. The religious significance of the Temple as the intersection of the two worlds is explored in Levenson, Jon D., Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible (Harper and Row, 1987)Google Scholar.
18. Cohen, Norman J., She Khinta Ba-Galuta: A Midrashic Response to Destruction and Persecution, 13 The J for the Study of Judaism 147 (1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
19. The Babylonian Talmud, Moed, Order, Katan, Tractate Moed14b–15a (Soncino, ed, 1978)Google Scholar.
20. The Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin, 68a (cited in note 1)Google Scholar.
