Rabbi Janet Marder

April 2, 2010

Seder in B’nai B’rak

Once upon a time there were two beggars – a Jew named Yidel, and a Russian, named Ivan. Both were always hungry, looking for a decent meal. One year, just before Passover, Yidel came up with an idea. He told Ivan that if he went into a synagogue and pretended to be Jewish, he would be sure to get an invitation to a Seder.

About a month later, Yidel ran into Ivan. He expected a warm embrace and a big thank-you, but instead, Ivan fell upon him with blows and curses. “What’s the matter?” Yidel asked. “Didn’t you get invited to a Seder?”

“You bet I did,” said Ivan. “I did just as you told me. I went into the synagogue, I sat in the last row, did everything the others did and played the deaf-mute. I got about a dozen invitations, and I went with the man who looked to be the richest.

“The table was set beautifully and his house was full of the delicious fragrance of cooked food. I sat down and waited to be served. You’ll never believe what happened! First they started chanting in Hebrew. After a while they gave me a cup of wine and a sprig of parsley and some salt water. A strange dish, but edible. Meanwhile, they kept on swaying and reading Hebrew. I was almost faint with hunger. I saw a nice bone on the table, but it didn’t seem to have any meat on it. Ten minutes, twenty minutes, an hour passed. I thought I would go mad.

“At last everyone got up and washed their hands. So did I. Then they gave me a flat, tasteless wafer and passed around a white vegetable I had never seen before. I took a huge bite, and all of a sudden my eyes started to water. I began to choke and my insides were burning up. They must have known I was a goy, and they poisoned me! So I ran away from the table as fast as I could. Yidel, I’m sure you put them up to it.”

It’s true – the Seder can look quite peculiar from the outside. All that reading and chanting and leaning to the left, the picking up the wine cups and putting them down again without drinking; opening the door and singing to someone who isn’t there; playing hide and seek with a cracker; and the consumption of ritual vegetables and strange foods like gefilte fish that don’t occur in nature.

And even if you’re on the inside and have been going to Seders all your life, there are some pretty odd aspects to this whole ritual feast, if you think about it. Why do we ask four questions that never get answered? Why do we say a blessing for the bitter herb and the matzah but not for the charoset? What is that roasted egg that we never mention doing on the Seder plate? Why do we invite all who are hungry to come and eat, but open the door much later, after we’ve already had dinner? And what does this annual pageant have to do with the real world where we live on all the other nights and days of the year?

When I was a little girl, having Seder with my family and using the good old-fashioned Maxwell House Haggadah, one aspect of the Seder that always used to puzzle me was the strange story of the Sages of B’nai B’rak. Who were they, these five guys with the hard-to-pronounce names, and what were they doing, plopped in the middle of the Haggadah with no explanation?

Here’s how the story goes: “Ma’aseh b’rabi Eliezer….A tale is told of Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Joshua, Rabbi Elazar ben Azarya, Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi Tarfon, who once reclined together at B’nai B’rak telling about the departure from Egypt all night, until their students came to them and said, “Raboteinu – Rabbis, the time has come to read the morning Shema.”

What is this story about? Some kind of strange slumber-party for grown-ups, I thought when I was a child. Five rabbis stay up all night, lounging around on couches, talking about the Exodus until the sun comes up. Could there really be that much to say? And why should we care about it now?

The point of the story seems to be that it illustrates the lesson that’s taught right before it: “Afilu kulanu chachamim…even if all of us were wise…all sages learned in the Torah, it would still be our duty to tell the story of the departure from Egypt. And the more one elaborates on the story of the departure from Egypt, the more one is to be praised.”

The Haggadah wants to teach us that no matter how old or how wise you are, you still need to talk about the Exodus every year. In fact, the Halacha says that even if you’re a Talmud scholar and you’re all alone on Erev Pesach, you’re supposed to ask yourself the Four Questions, tell the story and ponder its meaning. Leaving Egypt – leaving Mitzrayim, the narrow place -- is something we do over and over again in our lives. No one is too old or too wise to stop growing. Every year we keep working on ourselves, discovering new forms of Mitzrayim  -- fear, anxiety, addiction, entrapment -- that are still inside us

If we look more closely at this story of the Sages, some interesting things emerge. We know where it took place: in B’nai B’rak, a Judean village near Jaffa – today it’s a small city near Tel Aviv, populated mostly by Haredi ultra-Orthodox Jews.

We can identify the people in the story. According to the Talmud, at least three of the Sages mentioned -- Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Joshua and Rabbi Tarfon -- were teachers of the fourth one, Rabbi Akiva. We also know from the Talmud that Rabbi Akiva lived in B’nai B’rak. So it seems that these great Sages decided to go visit their student for the Seder – which is rather odd, since the usual custom is for students to spend the holidays with their rabbi.

Not only that – we also have a statement from Rabbi Eliezer in the Talmud specifically recommending that Jews should spend the festivals at home, without traveling away from one’s family – true rejoicing is only possible, he says, when you’re in the bosom of your family. So why in this story does Eliezer leave home to visit Akiba for Pesach?

One clue to the meaning of the story comes from its date. We know that all of these Sages lived between 100 and 140 C.E., one generation after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple. This is known as the time of the Hadrianic persecutions, one of the most tragic and desperate periods of Jewish history.

The Bar Kochba revolt, a last-ditch attempt to beat back the Romans and recapture Judea, had been brutally crushed by the Roman army in the year 135. Its leaders, including Shimon Bar Kochba himself, hailed by many as the Messiah, were dead. Jewish casualties numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and hundreds of towns and villages were razed. Under the Roman Emperor Hadrian Jews were barred from entering Jerusalem, except once a year on Tisha B’Av, to mourn for their destroyed holy city. Those caught teaching Torah or circumcising their sons were tortured to death by Rome. Jewish sovereignty was dead – forever, it seemed – and all that lay ahead was a long and dismal exile.

And then came the 15th of Nisan, the night of Pesach, when Jews must gather to celebrate the feast of freedom. What kind of celebration could they possibly have in that dark time of persecution and despair?

We know what they did. The greatest Sages of that age congregated at the home of Rabbi Akiba and there they had their Seder.
Why Akiba? What made his home the center of Pesach at this desperate hour?

Akiba died almost 2000 years ago – but we have such a vivid sense of his character, of the kind of man he was, that he feels like someone we know. The facts of his life are remarkable. He was a poor man, says the Talmud, born to a convert named Joseph. For the first 40 years of his life he was an “am ha’aretz,” an ignorant man who had no formal schooling.

One day Akiva was standing beside a well and he saw a stone that was full of tiny holes and grooves. When he asked who had made the holes in the stone, he was told that it was the water that fell on it day after day. He thought for a while, and then said to himself, “Is my heart harder than stone? If drops of water can wear away this stone, then words of Torah can surely inscribe themselves on my heart." And there and then Akiva began to learn. What did he do? He took his young son and together they studied Torah with little children, beginning with the alphabet. And "he kept on learning until he knew the entire Torah” [Avot de-Rabbi Natan 6; B.T., Ket. 62b–63a, Ned. 50a].

This famous story is often told at adult education institutes in Israel –a famous Israeli ulpan, in fact, was called Ulpan Akiva in honor of a man who proved that you’re never too old to learn. Can you begin to picture who he was? Persistent; patient; a person who was not afraid to try. Above all, Akiva is a figure of hope; he believes that his life can be different and the future is his to make.

Akiva is also famous for his beautiful love affair with Rachel, daughter of a rich man, who married him when he was a poor shepherd working for her father. She saw clearly the potential and the promise in this illiterate but good-natured young man; she believed in him and she encouraged him to transform his life. In the end he became a great scholar who attracted a huge following of students.

Akiva’s story is in one sense a kind of fairy tale – the journey of a Cinderella figure from poverty and obscurity into a life of wisdom, fame and true love.  But of course this is a Jewish fairy tale, so these changes do not happen by magic but by dint of many years of hard, devoted labor. Nevertheless, Akiva was a man whose life was blessed by love and whose efforts were crowned with success.

Perhaps this was the source of his amazing resilience. Akiva is best known in the Talmud as a person who had the ability to laugh in the face of disaster and to meet the most desperate challenges with a confident religious response. When his students grieve over a death, he finds the words to comfort them. When a colleague is ill, Akiva finds a way to give him strength.

He possessed deep reservoirs of a quality we can only describe as faith; he is optimism personified. Though he himself had been the spiritual inspiration behind the Bar Kochba revolt, Akiva refused to despair after the rebellion failed; he would not give in to cynicism or abandon hope.

Here is an amazing story about the extent of his spiritual fortitude. The Talmud records that one day Rabbi Elazar ben Azarya, Rabbi Joshua, and Rabban Gamliel were walking with Rabbi Akiva on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. You may notice that this group includes three of the rabbis who were also at the Seder in B’nai B’rak. As they strolled in the vicinity of the destroyed Temple, they saw a fox run out of the place where the Holy of Holies once was. The other Sages began to weep at the sight of Temple in ruins, with wild animals defiling the most sacred Jewish site. But Akiva began to laugh.

“Foxes run on the Temple Mount – how can you laugh at this?” they asked him. Akiva answered serenely that the presence of foxes in this place showed that the prophecies of destruction had come true. This means, he said, that the prophecies of redemption will also come true; some day our land and our people will be restored [Talmud Makkot 24b]. And so he laughed with joy.

We learn from the Talmud that Rabbi Tarfon wanted to conclude the Maggid, the Haggadah’s telling of the story of the Exodus, like this: “Blessed are You, Adonai, …Who has redeemed us and redeemed our forebears from Egypt” – that is, with redemption in the past tense. But Akiva argued that the passage should conclude this way: “So shall our God and the God of our forebears bring us to other festivals and celebrations for peace, rejoicing in the building of Your city and reveling in Your service…Blessed are You, Adonai, who redeems Israel [present tense]” [Talmud Pesachim 116b].

For Akiva, the best times were yet to come. Those around him – the realists, sophisticated in their sober analysis of a miserable situation – knew that the Jews were at the end of their road. The mighty wheel of Rome had rolled over them and they were destined to disappear. Akiva thought – Akiva knew – that the Jewish people had a future. His faith and his certainty never wavered.

It’s no wonder that his teachers and his colleagues gathered at Akiva’s home in B’nai B’rak on Pesach eve, clinging to his words about the liberation from Egypt – perhaps a coded message about their eventual liberation from all oppression. In the midst of terror and persecution, one man stood strong and unafraid. They wanted to be near him; they wanted to draw on his calm and steadfast assurance.

So it says in the Torah: “That you may remember the day when you came out of Egypt all the days of your life” [Deut.16:3]. Had it just said “the days of your life,” it would have referred only to daytime; but “all the days of your life” means the nights, as well. Even in the darkest hours, remember redemption; do not forget to hope.

Akiva finds a permanent place in our collective memory because of the way he died. He was captured by Rome, sentenced to death for refusing to obey the Hadrianic laws that forbade the teaching of Torah. The Talmud tells us what happened next: “When Rabbi Akiva was taken out for execution, it was the hour for reciting the Shema. And while they combed his flesh with iron combs, he was [reciting the words of Shema] accepting upon himself the sovereignty of God. His students were amazed. “Master,” they said, “Even unto this point?” Does your faith extend this far? And Akiva, moments from death, continued to teach them. “All my life,” he said, “I’ve never understood the command in the Shema to love God “with all your soul.” And I asked myself, ‘When shall I have the opportunity to fulfill that mitzvah?’ Now that I have that opportunity, shall I not fulfill it?” The words of Shema were on his lips as his soul returned to God. “Hear, O Israel, Adonai is our God; Adonai is One” [Talmud Berachot 61b].

The Shema, says Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, is a messianic statement. It utters the hope that someday Adonai, who is “Eloheinu – our God,” will be accepted by all the world as “Echad” -- the One God of all people. Akiva offered this hope with his dying breath. He came to the end of his life trusting that God was real, that his people would go on, that there was goodness and purpose at the foundation of existence.

Two millennia later, we remember Akiva and his long-ago Seder at our own Passover tables, here in the real world of the 21st century. Our world is a scary place – but not more frightening than his. How astonishing that Akiva found the strength to believe and hold fast. How amazing that he was right about the Jewish future.  How awesome his faith that the night always ends and the morning always comes. Perhaps that is why the story of his Seder ends like this:  “Come, Raboteinu,” said the young students. “Come, Rabbis. The night is over now; the time has come to read the morning Shema.”