Ancient Maror and an Antidote

A wise scholar once observed that the Talmud lacks a laugh track. You can’t tell when the Sages were joking.

I thought this applied to the incantation for the “kappa,” the poisonously acrid sap of ancient lettuce, which the Sages used as bitter herb for their seders.

Rabbi Chananel said it was a poisonous bug that lived in lettuce (since it never swarmed on the ground, it might be kosher).

The Talmud (Pesachim 116a) lists some antidotes, including an incantation: “Kappa, kappa, I know all about you and your seven daughters and eight daughters-in-law.”

Ha, ha, I thought; I can almost hear the hoary laughter of Sages slapping each other on the back with raucous laughter as they thought of the superstitious multitudes who’d try talking to their pain.

But we have a friend who suffers from shingles pain–she had shingles some years ago, and the pain returned, but the doctors could find no physical symptoms, so they suggested it’s in her mind. (Of course, all the reality we experience is inside our heads.) She found some relief with the Curable app, which prescribes activities including talking to the pain. Talk to the pain? Do I hear the laugh track?

Or do I hear a different idea. Perhaps if we face up to a problem such as pain, address it as a real entity and don’t try to ignore it, we can deal with it better. Tell the kappa you know it’s there, and what’s more, you know about its personal life and its trials as a parent and parent-in-law.

Early this morning, several of us clustered outside shul waiting (as we often do) for the sticky secured door to open. Repeated attempts to enter the correct electronic code had not been fruitful. I came up, gave the door and good shake to wake it up, and started to say a few sympathetic words. Before I could finish, the door opened.

I choke on maror every year, but this year I have a new strategy: “Maror, with your acrid stench, every year you make me choke, but this year your power I’ll quench for I’ll concede you’re not a joke.”

Moo, Say Cheese

We keep our dairy kitchen conspicuously kosher here at the Everett Jewish Life Center at Chautauqua, with a recognizable hechsher on all packaged food. The local markets have a limited range of kosher cheese (most of ours comes by courier from Cleveland) but Cabot cheese often has the shield-K, a symbol at which some people sniff with disdain.

Lately I’ve been thinking more and more about one of the wise remarks I heard from the much-missed Rabbi Eliezer Cohen. The U.S. Kashrut agencies, he said, often ignore the halachic principle that a kosher food with no more than one-sixtieth of treif  is still kosher. How, then, can they give their approval to milk?

Can milk be a problem?

Sure. Milk from a treif animal is treif. You don’t use milk from pigs, do you?

But how do you know a cow is kosher and not treif? When it’s slaughtered inspected, then you know. But you never really know if a live cow is kosher.

So if you’re worried about being super-kosher (if the standards established by the Sages of Blessed Memory are not good enough for you), then maybe you’ll worry that the cow from which your milk comes might be treif.

Don’t worry, the U-O has you covered. In their absorbing article on the topic of Milk from a Possibly Treif Cow,  you can see a lot of halachic leniencies for kashrut. Of course the cow milk is kosher, even if it comes from a possibly treif cow. Of course Jews in generations past who milked their cow for dairy products were eating kosher food, and those who don’t accept “min bemino” and “batul beshishim” and other principles aren’t following halachah.

So never mind the hechsher on cheese; if you think the milk is kosher, it’s hard to understand why you could think the cheese is not.

Not that I’m qualified to judge.

Off With the Yarmulke! Stop With the Mazeltov!

Sometimes it all comes together. I had a delicious poached pear yesterday and someone mentioned Augustine’s story about stealing pears. As a teenager, Augustine ran with a wild crowd and one day they stole pears, not because they wanted pears but just to steal.

This reminded me of the story toward the end of Masechet Shabbat (156b) about the child and the tree, a story about astrological predictions going unfulfilled.

The Talmud says אין מזל לישראל, There is no luck/constellation for Israel. This could mean that Jews never get any luck, so stay away from the casino, or that there is no constellation with influence on Jews–i.e., that Jews are not subject to planetary influence so the astrologers’ predictions simply don’t apply to Jews. This could be because our fate is determined by God, whereas ancient pagans might think fate is determined by the planets or constellations. As Shakespeare’s Kent says in pre-Christian Britain, “The stars above us govern our conditions” (King Lear 3.2.33)

The Talmud tells three stories to show that astrological predictions don’t apply to Jews. In the last of the stories, astrologers tell a mother her son will be a thief. So she makes him cover his head to remind himself of heaven above. One day he falls asleep under a tree and wakes up with a bare head. Overcome by his thieving impulse, he climbs the tree and steals fruit.

Apparently, the astrologers were right. The mother knew it since she made the child cover his head, but there was no getting away from the destiny ordained by the planets.

Does this mean the pagans are right? When we cover our heads, are we confessing that the stars govern our conditions?

Oy, is wearing my yarmulke tantamount to acknowledging the power of idols?

And what about “Mazel Tov”? Does that mean, “May you fall under the influence of a beneficent constellation”? Some people say “Besha’ah Tovah” (At a propitious time), and that’s probably equally idolatrous.

The First Yiddishe Mamme?

Perhaps we’ll never know if accusations of conversion scandals are true, so you wouldn’t want to click this link.

But it’s clear that the process of conversion has changed over time, and the Talmud has some interesting information on practices of former times.

We have the stories of prospective converts who were rejected by Shammai but accepted by Hillel (Shabbat 31a). These teachers flourished at the beginning of Rabbinic times; but what about earlier?

Officially, many agree, the first Jews underwent conversion–immersion in a mikveh, circumcision for men, and acceptance of the commandments–at Sinai. By this reasoning, Abraham wasn’t the first Jew. Some say he was the first monotheist, but Adam came earlier. (So who invented polytheism?)

Juan Mejia describes some of the Talmud’s statements on conversion and Maimonides’ interpretation of them in an article that I found fascinating.

But the Talmud has an earlier case of conversion to Judaism: Pharaoh’s daughter. When she went out to “bathe” in the Nile, she didn’t just go for a swim. She immersed herself in the river as a mikveh in order to repudiate her father’s idolatrous practices. That’s why–although her name was “Bitya” she was known as “Yehudiah.” Anyone who repudiates idol worship is pretty close to being Jewish. You can argue about how close, and whether the distance is significant, but I must admit I was surprised to read this (Megillah 13a, with Rashi).

Could someone accept the commandments before they were given? Perhaps, as Einstein said, “the distinction made between past, present and future is  nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion” (quoted by Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons, 58).

We can also ask who raised Moses, the biological mother who nursed him or the princess who adopted him.

For me there’s one more question: can our prayer communities be more open to people who may not consider themselves Jewish but whose religion, like ours, obliges them to repudiate idolatry?

Afikomen on My Mind

I used to think that “afikomen” came from the Greek meaning something like “we went home” (first person plural aorist from ἀφικνεομαι), but it’s hard to be sure with Greek verbs since they are a tense and moody lot, and I was never entirely happy with my interpretation.

This year I said to myself: Look, the word comes from the Mishna, and the Mishna doesn’t have vowels; maybe different vowels fit the Hebrew consonants. אפיקומן:  you could begin with A or E followed by F or P, with a last vowel of A or E, perhaps even O.

Today I think it’s ἐπι κωμον, “epi komon,” a  noun from the Greek ἐπι (upon/extra) and κωμος (revelry, perhaps with processions and songs). Some people think that Greek banquets would sometimes end with tipsy revellers roaming the streets looking for another party to crash.

The Mishna says אין מפטירין אחר הפסח אפיקומן: they don’t start, after the Pesach sacrificial meal, אפיקומן.

The Hebrew root in מפטירין is delightfully ambiguous, meaning both start and conclude. You see it in Haftarah, the reading that follows the Torah reading (is it to conclude the Torah reading or to start something else?) And you see it in references to offspring that “open” the womb.

Both the Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud explain אפיקומן, but people who lived in Israel probably knew more Greek than those who lived in Babylon. After all, Josephus composed works in Greek, and the history of the Maccabees demonstrates the interaction between Greek and Hebrew culture.

So let’s see how the Jerusalem Talmud explains the word. We’re told, שלא יהא עומד מחבורה זו ונכנס לחבורה אחרת, “that one would not stand up from this group and enter a different group.” In Temple times, people would register with a group for the Passover sacrifice. This would ensure you’d have enough people to eat the lamb, and everyone would have enough. So once you’re registered with your group, after the sacrificial meal you’re not supposed to go and join another group: that would be “starting up (or concluding with) extra revelry.” אפיקומן ends with a “nun” because the Greek preposition ἐπι can take the accusative case and change the last letter of κωμος from ς (s) to ν (n).

We can learn from this that in Temple times, when everyone registered for a Passover sacrifice in advance, there would be no point inviting “all who are hungry” to our meal–except to pretend to be generous and welcoming, secure in the knowledge that nobody is around to accept the offer. We can also learn from this that a kill-joy who disapproves of singing after the Seder can cite a source.We can also learn from this that once you finish your Seder you shouldn’t go next door and see how they’re doing.

I remember once when we finished our Seder around midnight, we went next door to Rabbi Grubner’s house to bring good wishes; a kindlier neighbor you could not find. (The Grubner family were washing hands for the meal, so the conversation was one-sided, and they were in for a long night.)

Maybe we learned that going next door was not a good idea; maybe we learned that midnight was a bit early for a neighborly visit; maybe we learned that one of the differences between our modern Seder meal and the ancient sacrificial meal is that neighborly visits are okay; or maybe we learned that everything I’ve said is plain wrong, it’s afikomen and not epikomon, and the rabbis of the Jerusalem Talmud didn’t realize how much enjoyment can be found in a dry piece of matza after a big meal.

And Not One of Them Comes to Visit Me

Have you ever wondered about Adam’s relationship with his children. Abel was dead; Cain was on the move; and Seth was presumably at home. What about his grand-children? Adam lived 930 years, the Torah tells us, long enough to see eight generations of descendants, down to Lamech.

Maybe Methuselah, Lamech’s dad, would sometimes tell his little son, “Hey, Lamech, why don’t go you and visit your great-great-great-(skip a few)-grandfather Adam? Look, you can bring him some shiny apples. Be a good boy.”

Now, you can imagine little Lamech perched on Adam’s wrinkled knee and asking his ancestor about the old days. Can Adam resist regaling him with tales of the Garden of Eden? “Oh, we had it mighty good in there, I can tell you. The weather was perfect, everything grew easily, the produce was delicious.” And then Lamech asks what happened, and Adam tells him, and Lamech slips off his knee and turns to his ancestor with a look of disgust. “You mean, I’d have been on Easy Street but for what you did? You’ve ruined my life! I hate you! I hate you! And I’m never coming back.”

I’ve often wondered why the Torah tells us Adam lived through all those generations: Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Yered, Enoch, Methuselah and Lamech. I used to think they had close family ties from generation to generation. But if Adam admitted what he did, and the consequences for humanity, I can’t imagine his descendants forgiving him. Maybe he lived out his very long years without a single loving visitor.

Ethnic Slur / Srul

After I outgrew my callow youthfulness I stopped laughing at ethnic jokes about Easterners saying Rimo for Limo (except funny ones, of course).

When I learned a bit of Thai, I found that L and R are close, anyway. A Thai man ends a statement with “krap,” but on my tape it sometimes sounded like “klap,” and the difference was minor. Notice what happens to your tongue when you say “bring” and then “bling.”

Some languages make little distinction between o and a, or a and e. At a poorly attended linguistics lecture in college, I learned that the secret to upper-class English is making all vowels sound like the uh in “turn.” Try it; you’ll sound like a chinless wonder.

English vowels and consonants are often barely intelligible, anyway. Does the song promise “there’s a bathroom on the right”?

So let’s not laugh at other people’s pronunciation as we look at a feature of the picture below. The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto displays some items relating to the Jews of Kaifeng, China. In the early 1700s, a presumably Christian observer sketched Torah reading in the Kaifeng synagogue, and someone wrote part of the Hebrew of the blessings. The second line looks like it’s intended to be “Baruch shem kevod, malchuto le’olam va’ed.” See the numbers over the words, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12? I presume those numbers are to help a left-to-right reader follow Hebrew right to left.

Now, please don’t snigger as I point out that 10 and 11 look like they use resh instead of a lamed, “mar’chuto re’oram.”

Kaifeng Jews are supposed to have been cut off from the rest of the Jewish community for centuries, during which their knowledge of Hebrew declined, and this could account for non-standard Hebrew spelling. But resh for lamed?

That, I suppose, is the Oriental articulation or Olientar alticuration. And no, it’s not funny, though it’s mighty intriguing.

 

Bed Bugs: Pests for Creationism. Pests for Evolution.

Really? Bed bugs only feed on human blood?

What a blow for Creationism.

They would have starved, waiting for Adam to be ready to eat.

Perhaps they evolved from an earlier mutation with a more varied diet, but can evolution be compatible with Creationism. What’s more, the Creationists I know of (from my one visit to the Creation Museum) believe that animals were vegetarian until the Flood, so Adam and Eve can sport with friendly dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden, without fear that Tyrannosaurus Rex will take them for an afternoon snack. But if dinosaurs were vegetarian, what about bed bugs? Did they feed on blood while lions and tigers and bears vented their savagery on the juicy orange?

What food did Noah provide for them in the Ark?

But wait: if we imagine evolution taking eons, and humans developing after bugs, how can we account for the bloodsucking bedbug? Surely, the bug and its food must have appeared at once, one to scratch and one to bite. Farewell, Evolution!

What a pest is the bed bug. It undermines Creation. It undermines Evolution.

Whither has thou gone, O Certainty?