Burnt by the Rabbis: Lessons from the Supernatural Yeshiva
Yonah Lavery-Yisraeli
An ultra-rationalist post-University yeshivah student—one who prides herself on her nickname “the Vulcan,” anglo orbiter of a sober-minded Yemenite congregation, faithful (if middlingly competent) disciple of Maimonides—would warn the reader that the texts about to be invoked were never meant to be taken literally. These texts about learning Torah involve spontaneous combustion, killing with a glance, and necromancy— in short, magic. Such texts trouble people like her because, it seems, they cannot be true, yet as a religious Jew, she owes them respect. Thus, if she were here, she would be forced to advise that they were always intended to be metaphorical.
However, the Vulcan is not here, because she made the mistake of needling the Gemara instructor on just this topic. “Would you not agree,” she asked, anticipating God knows what response, “That the story about all the trees bursting into flame when R. Eleazar ben Arakh started teaching amounts to poetic overstatement?”
The instructor’s gaze was irate and conveyed the exact opposite of surprise. “Yoneleh,” he said, “I hope the day will come when you realize that if anything, it is poetic understatement.”
That day did come. In fact, I could give more examples than this piece can carry. With my own eyes, I saw the head of my yeshivah make the rain fall. A student of mine sat on a rickety chair to learn Gemara with me; we know that the process of learning Torah protected her, because the second we closed the book and turned to niceties, the chair collapsed beneath her. In a horrible argument with my teacher, I said “You wouldn’t know how it feels”; he quietly rejoined, “But I do,” and immediately my nose began to gush blood in response to the well-deserved psychic punch.
There is some danger that the reader will understand “poetic understatement” to be nothing more than “poetic overstatement” with an additional facade of spiritual dignity: that it remains more or less a redirection to consider the extraordinary in a metaphorical manner. But add an element of literalism back to the mix and what results enlivens the whole process of learning. When students and teachers have recourse to experience their joint work in magical or miraculous terms, they have access to the only language nimble enough to describe and regulate what is actually happening between them.
Is this utilitarian play-acting? Only in the sense that theater itself is an art with sacred origins, and in the sense that a post-modernist prankster shouting “None of this is real!” at Ophelia and Polonius has vandalized the truth rather than revealed it. One who inquires about the humidity level at the time my nose bled has simply not understood the mystic trouble that enwraps the transmission of wisdom.
Though the Talmud most frequently analogizes the teacher-student relationship to that of parents and their beloved offspring, it depicts a more melancholy reality, full of strange mentors and barely-tolerated students. Is that because life rarely lives up to an ideal? The wild, perpetually-renewed explosion of learning through generations of rabbinic scholars suggests that on the contrary, this zig-zag lineage of discontented step-family is an ideal all its own, one unusually suited to cultivating thought.
We know this is a plan, rather than a deviation, because the Talmud tells us so directly. When R. Yose says “Work on yourself to learn Torah, because it is not your inheritance,” he is bringing us face-to-face with the reality that we learn from a position of alienation. More dramatically, R. Eliezer warns, “Warm yourself before the fire of the wise, but be careful not to get burnt on their coals, because their bite is a fox-bite, their sting a scorpion’s sting, their hiss the hiss of a venomous snake, and all their words are flaming coals.” Yet the Talmudic term for a wise student is tsurba merabanan: literally, one burnt by the rabbis. Revealed here is a push-and-pull. The instinct of the student is to get closer to the human source of Torah; they sense that its location in a person is critical rather than incidental. The instinct of the teacher is to push away; they sense that Torah transcends their personal quirks, and that the student has something to lose from too close an association. What ensues is, inevitably, disaster. But the disaster itself creates a eucatastrophe of wisdom, because, impossibly, both sides are right.
Here are some case studies in the apparent dysfunction of rabbinic mentorship, which I argue is function in disguise. For their part, students’ interest in their teachers is intense to the point of prurience. It is a pattern which may predate the Talmud: Yehoshua, pupil of Moses, never leaves the latter’s tent, though Moses was disappointed to hear from God that Yeshoshua, not his own children, would succeed him. That said, Talmudic sages certainly up the ante. At least three follow their teachers into the bathroom, having rehearsed the justification (to be bleated out, one imagines, when caught by the ear): “It is a matter of Torah, and I have to learn.” One Amora, Rav Kahana, takes things even further by sneaking under the bed of his teacher to take notes on technique. No matter how often he gets evicted—many times, over the course of many stories—it never seems to occur to him to take notes on boundaries.
Let us resist any transformation of our bewilderment at their behavior into diagnosis. Such pretense of distancing and containment would only be a feeble attempt to ward off the avalanche of embarrassing memories from our own dubious youth. It is enough to note that one way or another, these students recognize themselves as stepchildren on the threshold, and with an undetermined mixture of bravery and insanity are pushing their way in. Everything they do demonstrates their belief that the inner chamber of wisdom can be nothing other than closeness to wise persons.
We know rabbinic literature considers their belief correct because of the value it places on shimush talmidei hakhamim, attendance on sages. Shimush is described, not as fortuitous positioning in which one is likely to overhear clever remarks, but as a path to wisdom in its own right. In fact, one who has learnt all the right texts, no matter how expertly, is considered ignorant if they have not served their teachers. R. Akiva says that one who has not served their teachers deserves to die, a complex statement which illuminates, among other things, the life-or-death sense of emergency behind the students’ drive for proximity. The reason is not that nuance is inevitably lost through text alone, as texts in Talmudic days were always taught orally, face-to-face. I suspect the reason is actually that nuance is lost without affection. We need love to push us to work through the contradiction and difficulty posed by deep textual study, if we are to arrive at a place of clarity rather than convenience.
Of course, the question is: if it is necessary for students to ingratiate themselves into the lives of their teachers, why do the teachers themselves resist this? For their shoulders are firmly to the door, as they repeat the distancing mantra of R. Eliezer. Consider R. Yohanan, who had a student so profoundly irritating that he actually killed him through the sheer mystic force of his aversion. (However, he subsequently resurrected the student after learning that he had not meant to cause offense, but, as his colleagues put it to him, was “just like that.”) Perhaps evasion or harshness is necessary to counterbalance the intensity they encounter in their students to avoid fostering obsequiousness, and to build in their students a sense of self strong enough to carry affection rather than be carried by it. The paradigm for assimilating pushback must be the Tanna R. Meir. From an abundance of rejection by one of his teachers, R. Meir becomes so skillful at loving from a distance that he is able to track him down in the afterlife, where he rescues him from spiritual paralysis. On a level more mundane yet just as rare, during his lifetime he develops the emotional and intellectual expertise necessary to learn from those with whom he deeply disagrees. On account of this tender discernment of his, we read that God refers to R. Meir as “My child.” Had R. Meir not learned to disconnect when needed, the Gemara explains, God would not mention his name at all.
Additionally, teachers have reasons of their own for cultivating distance. How is it possible to have a genuine conversation, or to investigate any matter with honesty, if the student suppresses their thoughts in order to more effectively fawn? Only a student willing to risk the hard-won relationship by representing their own perspective with integrity is worth elevating to the status of colleague. Indeed, we see this play out in what might be the most famous episode in the life of R. Yohanan, when his original chief student—demanding and contrary in a way that will by now be quite familiar to the reader—is replaced by a sweet, obedient fellow, an expert in waiting his turn and dispensing affirmation. By the third polite “Yes,” it is already clear that the process of learning has lost its heartbeat. The resulting grief and madness kill R. Yohanan.
In too many modern educational contexts, both sides of this equation have been dampened, or lost altogether. A student who seeks the affection of their teacher is misguided, a victim of transference, because we no longer consider affection itself to be wise. On the other hand, teachers are increasingly hesitant in offering open rebuke. Is it really a coincidence that our lukewarm environment produces so little work of lasting value? Perhaps, for example, it would have been better for the current crop of rabbis to have received their ordination from openly ambivalent teachers, to have been given warning instead of praise, to mark the occasion alone with a tearful shot of second-rate whiskey rather than with public celebration. In the 18th Century, a young Reb Chaim Volozhiner carried bath water for the rabbi he hoped would mentor him, and wept on his doorstep like the protagonist of a silk-shirt soul ballad. Would he have have gone on to found his legendary yeshivah had he not been answered with a cold roll of the eye, and been called on the carpet for the outrageous humble-brags he used to beg for connection?
In thinking of the importance of moments of rebuke, I am reminded of a ritual much beloved of the Medieval Ashkenazi masters, in which participants cure themselves of bad behaviour by rolling naked in the snow. Certainly it clarifies like nothing else the step-mother nature of the world: practitioners break her rules and find out quick enough. After the misery comes the odd comfort of watching day by day how the undignified story spelled out in snowdrifts becomes softened by wind and overwritten by animal tracks. The core of the experience may not be the pain, but the opportunity to witness a context to one’s actions which grows gigantically as time passes, until the self is recognized as no more than a small if necessary ingredient, salt in the pot of the world.
I asked a Kabbalist teacher of mine if he knew the first textual mention of this ritual. With immediate suspicion, he responded that it goes back “As far back as the first obsessive neurotic” and proceeded to lecture me on all the great rabbinic authorities who have considered it brainless and counterproductive. I am sure that as I listened to this, I turned into a heap of bones. Though it is almost unbearable to be caught associating with something brainless and counterproductive, it is a rare and perhaps endangered relief to be opposed rather than enabled. Such relief is dynamic, inviting a redirection of inner strength to new and richer tasks.
Rabbi Yonah Lavery-Yisraeli learns and teaches at Bet Midrash Hukkim Hakhamim. Currently living in Queens, NYC, Lavery-Yisraeli is a writer, a Contributing Editor at Marginalia, and an internationally exhibited visual artist. She can be reached at yonah.lavery@gmail.com.
