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jackThis will probably be the last bluffer's guide for a little while. Obviously there's no standard for "famous Rabbi", but there's half a dozen or so that you often hear about when people recount little Talmud stories, and once I'd heard the names a few times I found it helpful to get them straight so you had an idea of who future stories were about. [This technique also works with actual alive people].
Most of these people are from 100BCE to 200CE, so are described in the Mishnah (?). AIUI they are actual people, but descriptions of supernatural fights between them may have been exaggerated. I've rounded the dates to the nearest century just to give the general idea
100BCE-1BCE Hillel and Shamai
Hillel and Shamai established competing schools of study and are responsible for a lot of the earliest stuff in the Mishnah. They are typically paired and contrasted in anecdotes, which go something like this:
Shamai: *demonstrates immense learning*
Hillel: *one-ups him with some deft rhetorical quip that makes or refutes his point in about three words and makes Hillel look like a genius*
Of course, this rather gives Shamai the short end of the stick, because hundreds or thousands of years of people polishing your words of extensive learning and hundreds or thousands of years of people polishing your insightful quips both hone them to perfection, but the learning of both contributed to the all of the learning in Mishnah which isn't attributed to anyone specifically, whereas in all the anecdotes, Hillel gets the quips.
A typical example is something like:
Shamai: *is busy*
Annoying guy: Hey!
Shamai: *is busy*
Annoying guy: Hey!
Shamai: *is busy*
Annoying guy: Hey!
Shamai: WHAT?
Annoying guy: Hey, Shamai. I insult you by breaching etiquette in ways that are subtle for modern readers to grasp and have to be explained with a footnote, also I interrupt you when you're in the middle of things. So, I bet you can't teach me the whole Torah while standing on one leg?
Shamai: *explains why that is stupid*
Students of Shamai: *chase off annoying guy with big sticks*
Students of Shamai: *they had the sticks, not the annoying guy*
Hillel: *is busy*
Annoying guy: Hey!
Hillel: *is busy*
Annoying guy: Hey!
Hillel: *is busy*
Annoying guy: Hey!
Hillel: WHAT?
Annoying guy: Hey, Hillel. I insult you by breaching etiquette in ways that are subtle for modern readers to grasp and have to be explained with a footnote, except that they can probably see they're the same as the previous example. Also I interrupt you when you're in the middle of things. So, I bet you can't teach me the whole Torah while standing on one leg?
Hillel: The Torah says, "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow." All the other stuff is footnotes.
Hillel: OK? Now go away.
1CE-100CE R. Elizier, R. Gamliel and R. Akiva
These were the Rabbis mentioned in the previous post about the oven. Elizier was the most famous at the time, Akiva his student, but probably the most famous now, and Gamliel the chairman who (a) was Hillel's grandson and (b) died of Elizer's grief in an unspecified way. [And by unspecified I don't mean "it doesn't say" I mean "I don't know enough about the story to try to describe it".]
200-300CE R. Yochanon and R. Resh Lakish
R. Yochanon: *is incredibly beautiful*
R. Resh Lakish: *is not yet a Rabbi*
R. Resh Lakish: *is a rough-and-tough highwayman*
R. Yochanon: *is a Rabbi*
R. Yochanon: *is bathing in the river*
R. Resh Lakish: Who is this beautiful woman?
R. Yochanon: Actually, I'm a rabbi.
R. Resh Lakish: A beautiful rabbi? Let me flirt with you in a totally homoerotic way, except not necessarily, because obviously lots of people would be offended by the suggestion.
R. Resh Lakish: Yes, I totally think you're all beautiful and unclothed and wet and glistening in a totally manly hetero way. In fact, you're SO beautiful and eloquent and unclothed that I am totally going to throw over my rough-and-tough highwaymanning ways and do whatever you say.
R. Yochanon: OK. Become a famous Rabbi. And the incredibly manly strength of your body will be matched only by the strength of your devotion to learning Torah.
R. Yochanon: And to cement our lifelong hetero "buddies" close friendship where we argue incredibly passionately all the time, why don't you marry my sister?
And that's what happened. I want to stress again that I may have interpolated the story a little bit, and made some of the subtext more implicit, but that is 100% totally what it says in the Talmud and I didn't make it up.
I mean, like Resh Lakish doesn't say "Let me flirt with you in a totally homoerotic way, except not necessarily, because obviously lots of people would be offended by the suggestion" but R. Yochanon does take all his clothes off and R. Resh Lakish does say he he is beautiful like a woman.
And they do have lifelong hetero "buddies" close friendship where they argue incredibly passionately all the time, and Resh Lakish does marry R. Yochanon's sister.
And incidentally Resh Lakish got all serious from studying Torah so hard and making himself the intellectual equal of Yochanon, and there are lots of anecdotes like "Someone asked all the rabbis that the day was good for Torah study[1], but what was the night for, especially? And all the other rabbis said things like 'sleep' and 'lots of sex' but Resh Lakish said 'EVEN MORE Torah study'"
But one day when they're old, R. Yochanon in a moment of anger, goes too far and insults R. Resh Lakish in a moment of anger curses R. Yochanon, and [mechanism unspecified] R. Yochanon dies. And later, Resh Lakish dies, probably of grief or something. The end.
The medieval commentators (Rashi, Maimonides)
And then, all this got annotated one and a half thousand years later by medieval rabbis, notably Rashi, who is by far the most notable commentator. And is written by someone European, within a few hundred years of now, so is generally much easier to read, and often gives helpful explanations of the earlier stuff.
Also notable, Maimonides was a Torah scholar, physician and philosopher living in Morocco and Egypt who said lots of insightful stuff I can't remember right now.
Footnotes
[1] Torah study is traditionally considered both prayer, and fun (and I can see why), so it's pretty much ok to do it any of the time. Well, not while having sex. Or while sleeping. In fact, it's disrespectful to combine it with any bodily functions. Come to think of it, you probably shouldn't do it at the same time as anything else. The point is, there's rarely a time when you're not supposed to do it, whereas if you want to do happy things, people will say you shouldn't do them on sad days, and if you want to do sad things, people will say you shouldn't do them on happy days. But if you want to study Torah, it's hard for people to argue. Although you shouldn't spend so long doing anything if you forget to pleasure your wife[2].
[2] Seriously. It's getting redundant at this point, but I want to stress, I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. It's right there in the Talmud, and in the marriage contract. So the other rabbis had a point. There are other marriage constraints, some of them incredibly problematical, but, "enjoyable, and plenty" is one of them.
Most of these people are from 100BCE to 200CE, so are described in the Mishnah (?). AIUI they are actual people, but descriptions of supernatural fights between them may have been exaggerated. I've rounded the dates to the nearest century just to give the general idea
100BCE-1BCE Hillel and Shamai
Hillel and Shamai established competing schools of study and are responsible for a lot of the earliest stuff in the Mishnah. They are typically paired and contrasted in anecdotes, which go something like this:
Shamai: *demonstrates immense learning*
Hillel: *one-ups him with some deft rhetorical quip that makes or refutes his point in about three words and makes Hillel look like a genius*
Of course, this rather gives Shamai the short end of the stick, because hundreds or thousands of years of people polishing your words of extensive learning and hundreds or thousands of years of people polishing your insightful quips both hone them to perfection, but the learning of both contributed to the all of the learning in Mishnah which isn't attributed to anyone specifically, whereas in all the anecdotes, Hillel gets the quips.
A typical example is something like:
Shamai: *is busy*
Annoying guy: Hey!
Shamai: *is busy*
Annoying guy: Hey!
Shamai: *is busy*
Annoying guy: Hey!
Shamai: WHAT?
Annoying guy: Hey, Shamai. I insult you by breaching etiquette in ways that are subtle for modern readers to grasp and have to be explained with a footnote, also I interrupt you when you're in the middle of things. So, I bet you can't teach me the whole Torah while standing on one leg?
Shamai: *explains why that is stupid*
Students of Shamai: *chase off annoying guy with big sticks*
Students of Shamai: *they had the sticks, not the annoying guy*
Hillel: *is busy*
Annoying guy: Hey!
Hillel: *is busy*
Annoying guy: Hey!
Hillel: *is busy*
Annoying guy: Hey!
Hillel: WHAT?
Annoying guy: Hey, Hillel. I insult you by breaching etiquette in ways that are subtle for modern readers to grasp and have to be explained with a footnote, except that they can probably see they're the same as the previous example. Also I interrupt you when you're in the middle of things. So, I bet you can't teach me the whole Torah while standing on one leg?
Hillel: The Torah says, "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow." All the other stuff is footnotes.
Hillel: OK? Now go away.
1CE-100CE R. Elizier, R. Gamliel and R. Akiva
These were the Rabbis mentioned in the previous post about the oven. Elizier was the most famous at the time, Akiva his student, but probably the most famous now, and Gamliel the chairman who (a) was Hillel's grandson and (b) died of Elizer's grief in an unspecified way. [And by unspecified I don't mean "it doesn't say" I mean "I don't know enough about the story to try to describe it".]
200-300CE R. Yochanon and R. Resh Lakish
R. Yochanon: *is incredibly beautiful*
R. Resh Lakish: *is not yet a Rabbi*
R. Resh Lakish: *is a rough-and-tough highwayman*
R. Yochanon: *is a Rabbi*
R. Yochanon: *is bathing in the river*
R. Resh Lakish: Who is this beautiful woman?
R. Yochanon: Actually, I'm a rabbi.
R. Resh Lakish: A beautiful rabbi? Let me flirt with you in a totally homoerotic way, except not necessarily, because obviously lots of people would be offended by the suggestion.
R. Resh Lakish: Yes, I totally think you're all beautiful and unclothed and wet and glistening in a totally manly hetero way. In fact, you're SO beautiful and eloquent and unclothed that I am totally going to throw over my rough-and-tough highwaymanning ways and do whatever you say.
R. Yochanon: OK. Become a famous Rabbi. And the incredibly manly strength of your body will be matched only by the strength of your devotion to learning Torah.
R. Yochanon: And to cement our lifelong hetero "buddies" close friendship where we argue incredibly passionately all the time, why don't you marry my sister?
And that's what happened. I want to stress again that I may have interpolated the story a little bit, and made some of the subtext more implicit, but that is 100% totally what it says in the Talmud and I didn't make it up.
I mean, like Resh Lakish doesn't say "Let me flirt with you in a totally homoerotic way, except not necessarily, because obviously lots of people would be offended by the suggestion" but R. Yochanon does take all his clothes off and R. Resh Lakish does say he he is beautiful like a woman.
And they do have lifelong hetero "buddies" close friendship where they argue incredibly passionately all the time, and Resh Lakish does marry R. Yochanon's sister.
And incidentally Resh Lakish got all serious from studying Torah so hard and making himself the intellectual equal of Yochanon, and there are lots of anecdotes like "Someone asked all the rabbis that the day was good for Torah study[1], but what was the night for, especially? And all the other rabbis said things like 'sleep' and 'lots of sex' but Resh Lakish said 'EVEN MORE Torah study'"
But one day when they're old, R. Yochanon in a moment of anger, goes too far and insults R. Resh Lakish in a moment of anger curses R. Yochanon, and [mechanism unspecified] R. Yochanon dies. And later, Resh Lakish dies, probably of grief or something. The end.
The medieval commentators (Rashi, Maimonides)
And then, all this got annotated one and a half thousand years later by medieval rabbis, notably Rashi, who is by far the most notable commentator. And is written by someone European, within a few hundred years of now, so is generally much easier to read, and often gives helpful explanations of the earlier stuff.
Also notable, Maimonides was a Torah scholar, physician and philosopher living in Morocco and Egypt who said lots of insightful stuff I can't remember right now.
Footnotes
[1] Torah study is traditionally considered both prayer, and fun (and I can see why), so it's pretty much ok to do it any of the time. Well, not while having sex. Or while sleeping. In fact, it's disrespectful to combine it with any bodily functions. Come to think of it, you probably shouldn't do it at the same time as anything else. The point is, there's rarely a time when you're not supposed to do it, whereas if you want to do happy things, people will say you shouldn't do them on sad days, and if you want to do sad things, people will say you shouldn't do them on happy days. But if you want to study Torah, it's hard for people to argue. Although you shouldn't spend so long doing anything if you forget to pleasure your wife[2].
[2] Seriously. It's getting redundant at this point, but I want to stress, I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. It's right there in the Talmud, and in the marriage contract. So the other rabbis had a point. There are other marriage constraints, some of them incredibly problematical, but, "enjoyable, and plenty" is one of them.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-07 08:21 pm (UTC)