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[DESCRIPTION] Touro Talks intro displaying photos of students and faculty across the university, fading into the Touro University logo.

[TEXT] Exploring Challenging Talmudic Narratives, October 18, 2021, Touro Talks is sponsored by Robert and Arlene Rosenberg

[DESCRIPTION] Rabbi Dr. Zev Eleff speaks to the camera from a library setting. A Touro University logo is on the bottom right of the screen.

[ZEV ELEFF] I confess that Rosh Chodesh Adar, I start to flip back to my own masechet megillah around [HEBREW], depending on how quickly I get to it. And I review the aggadah. That goes on for about seven daf in that section to prepare for Purim. That aggadah, though, is quite different than the aggadot that you, Dr. Sokol, review in your book. And we're going to get to thematically and periodization. That means the historical period, I mean to say, of what I wanted to discuss.

But first of all, it's just the question overall. Aggadah, the rishonim don't pay all that much attention to the acharonim. [HEBREW] notwithstanding. Why has it been that for so long, this is an understudied portion of our rabbinic tradition? And why ought to be studied better moving forward?

[DESCRIPTION] Rabbi Dr. Moshe Sokol joins and speaks to the camera from a library setting.

[MOSHE SOKOL] Well, that's a very good question. So our convener for the evening, Nahum Twersky is related to the famous Professor Isadore Twersky, a part of the ethos of that family. And Professor Twersky coined the term halakhah centricity to characterize our Jewish tradition, the argument being that Judaism has historically, at least up until the modern period, been centered around the halakha, and all works that correlate with explain, expand, develop the halakha. The backbone of traditional Jewish life was living a certain kind of life.

And if you were to take-- you were to go to the Jewish National University library and, somehow or other, create two piles of books, one pile of book being all books, all sefarim related to gemara, halakhah, a purim, I mean halachic parts of the gemara, chuvas, halakhah, and so on in one pile, and if you were to have another pile of books related to aggadah, related to hashkafa, or related to Jewish thought, it would be far, far smaller. And that reflects the historical halakha centricity of Judaism.

And that there are relatively fewer commentaries on aggadah reflects the hedaya, the overall intellectual, and behavioral, and ritualistic focus of Judaism. And that's really, in many ways, what has enabled us to endure and flourish over the millennia of exile. We have a certain way of life, and we study that, and we reflect about it, and we engage it. That's the pillar of pre-modern Jewish life. And reflected in that is a relative undertreatment of aggadic sources. But-- and here's the big but-- I am not a Buckian shas. I'm not an expert in the range of shas, but folks who are, several, have estimated to me that about 30% of shots is aggadahta.

There's different kinds of aggadahtas and I would just define aggadah for the time being as the non halachic portion of the Talmud. But 30% is a lot, just to say that the authors of those aggadic teachings and the editors of the gemara who included them, obviously took them really seriously and believed that they were very, very important. Otherwise, they would not have included so much of that material in shas. So it's understudied in part because of the halakha centricity of historical, pre-modern Judaism.

But I think that that is unfortunate, because the aggadah contains many, many riches of a whole variety of sorts. My book focuses on one particular species of aggadahta-- aggadah-- and that is aggadic narratives or stories. That's what I chose to focus on, and we can talk about why that is. But the genre of aggadah or aggadahta is much broader. It includes everything from midrashic commentaries on the Torah, ethical teachings, theological teachings. It includes medical teachings, advice about life. There's a lot of non-halakhic the material in gemara. And I chose to focus on the narrative portion for reasons that I suppose will become evident over time as we continue the conversation.

[ZEV ELEFF] Yeah. You bring up Professor Twersky, of course, for so many decades, the littauer professor at Harvard University. And he first develops, I think, develops the notion in his biography of the Raavad, the great rabbinic scholar of Provence. And there he compares this halakhic centricity to a powerful stream, to a river, I believe. And then there are deltas, and there are inlets, and they're outlets of all the other different areas.

[MOSHE SOKOL] Watch what you mean when you use the term delta.

[ZEV ELEFF] We'll take it. And so there's poetry that flows in and out, but just a bit, just a trickle at times, sometimes gushing a little more powerfully. Maybe in the time of the [HEBREW]. You have liturgy, you have parshanut, and each one, kabbalah, certainly, in the early modern period, even before then. What I'm getting at is, in all of these little offshoots of this major gushing river called the halakhic literature, as Dr. Twersky, how he puts it, you have something. You have at different points in time, various forces trigger a different body of water to come in and out. I don't want to belabor the point much further.

But in each of those cases, they have matured a body of literature that pedagogically, educationally, have taught us how to access this work. I would argue not so with aggadah, which makes her work so much more important. But it also calls into question how, not just curricularly how we should approach rabbinic narrative. And I like the non halakhic sections of the Talmud. 30% is quite sensible to me. Your work, I think, was born out of shiurim lectures at Lander College for Men in some of your shiurim, I believe, in your kehillah.

How do we approach? How do we start as a community of learners to build a scaffolding on how to approach, how to study aggadah in the first place? Do we just read it? I should make one caveat, of course, that aggadah is very often in the women's curriculum, of course. But for the broader Jewish community of learners, how does your work make a contribution educationally for how we should approach aggadic literature?

[MOSHE SOKOL] Well, that's a great question. And I'd say in several ways, at least in my opinion, first of all, in some communities, Jewish studies teachers have difficulty engaging their students in the study of classical gemara. It doesn't speak to them in a world of social media and smartphones and all kinds of distractions. Purely Halakhic discussions about [HEBREW] or various topics in the gemara, teachers find it challenging to engage those students.

And so at one level, I'd say that, while I certainly, absolutely have no intention of having aggadic narratives replace the [HEBREW] the bread and the meat of gemara study. It is an entree into the world of gemara for two reasons. First of all, it is gemara. So young students can get into it in ways that it's harder to get into a more technical halakhic or more abstract halachic discussion, because these narratives tell the stories of human beings, quite human beings, but human beings, and the challenges, the conflicts they faced.

And stories from time immemorial are gripping if you look at the Torah itself. There are far more narratives in the Torah than there are halachos in the Torah. And that's because we human beings, as many scholars have pointed out, are fundamentally storytellers. In fact, our own identity, Who am I?-- one answer to the question, Who is Moshe Sokol? is the story I tell you about my life. And so a very sense of who we are, ourselves, our identities, is woven up in our ability to think narratively, to think about stories. And we tell a story of our life. I am who I am. I'm born in such and such a place, parents, raised, and that constitutes who we are.

And we can identify with the protagonist in the stories because we're people. They're people. They struggle. We struggle. And they provoke in us empathy. They provoke in us our ability to enter into the lives of other people. So one portal into the study of gemara is through narratives. Again, I don't believe it should replace the [HEBREW] of Talmud study, but it's a portal for those who find it a little harder to get into it. That's point number one.

Point number two, I was recently discussing the book with somebody who is yeshiva educated and quite knowledgeable, and learns studies regularly. And he said, this book should be required reading for all people to learn. Well, it sounds like a great idea to me.

[ZEV ELEFF] I think so too.

[MOSHE SOKOL] Wasn't going to quibble. But he said, look. The tannaim and amoraim you write about are a part-- I didn't use this phrase-- but are a part of the wolf and the warp of the gemara. You can't open up a page or two of gemara and not meet up with Yohanan, or Lakish, or Rebbe Eliezer or Rabban Gamliel. These are the main protagonists of the gemara. And just gaining an insight into their lives, and to their dilemmas, and to their challenges brings one-- captures one's attention and enables one to feel, to experience the intellectual challenges of gemara study in a different way.

If you know a little bit about the great protagonist of the gemara, you can identify with them as human beings who struggle, who are deeply principled, who face difficult choices in life. And so even the more purely halachic material in the gemara comes alive in ways that it might not otherwise come alive if you're not exposed to the stories told about these amoraim or tannaim in these aggadic narratives. So I think that's another reason why it's particularly important.

But there's a whole other dimension as well, if you don't mind my expatiating a little more, which is that one of the questions is, who am I writing for? Who's the audience? I know something you've been thinking about it as well. And I have this naive, perhaps, hope that it would be read and could be read and enjoyed by a wide range of people. And in fact, as I was writing it, I gave chapters to read to many different kinds of people, to people who have spent 15 or 20 years and are still learning in Kolel to people who are academics in Jewish Studies, to folks who are not orthodox and not particularly learned, but certainly intelligent and Jewishly somewhat informed.

And they responded with great fervor. They really enjoyed it. Now, maybe that's because it's a select audience. So I gave it to people I thought might enjoy it. So this is not an empirical study, but the point is-- and this is really a key point-- these stories speak to our humanity. They speak for you. Any person struggles with choices, has goals, has values, has principles, sometimes feels, should they compromise? Should they not compromise? They're tested. They're not tested. We all have our personal histories. And this all comes out in a brilliant way in these stories.

And so human beings doesn't make any difference to me, orthodox, non-orthodox. It's so many riches here that anybody, whether you're a Kolel person or an [HEBREW] or you're not. There's just tremendous power in these stories by virtue of our humanity and the humanity of the amoraim and tannaim about who about whom the stories are told. So that's another way in which it engages and is, I think, valuable in terms of education.

[ZEV ELEFF] And they are about [HEBREW], and I do want to get to the substance of the stories. But before I leave that I do want to say a little bit in the abstract. For anyone who has an advanced level of learning, when you approach a sugyan shas, you get a sense of the tempo, the rhythm. What I mean is that a certain sugya call is a [HEBREW]. Another, you know the shock of attaria, you can anticipate that actually looking at the [HEBREW] are going to weigh in. When you start to get into the rhythm, that's going to be a [HEBREW]. You know that in mode it's the [HEBREW]. You know what you're going to anticipate. You have these tools that we called the [HEBREW].

But with aggadah, you don't have that. So to say a little bit in the abstract, to approach these stories, what are some of the tools in your toolbox was borrowed in many ways from your scholarly apparatus, the rules and regulations of not literary criticism, but literary scholarship. Can you say a bit about what tools you used to approach these sugyot, these rabbinic narratives? Aside from maybe the Maharashtra, one does not have the messori scaffolding to approach aggadah. I think that one of the key contributions of the work overall is that you provide a roadmap on how to approach chazal in a way that is both compelling, but also respectful. If we could explore it, if I could ask you to explore that roadmap a bit of what are the scholarly trappings, what in your toolbox did you use to approach the study of aggadah, that you continue to?

[MOSHE SOKOL] Right. Very good question. So I'll answer in several ways. First of all, for me personally-- and again, I can only speak at the moment for me personally-- I found it liberating not having the whole armature that one typically comes to a gemara with. In other words, I found that the field was relatively open. Now, as you very well Zev, and many of our listeners know, there is a safra called [HEBREW], which is a compendium of commentaries on the aggadah. A modern edition has even more material. There is the maral, and there are many commentators on the aggadah, aggadahta, the aggadah, which I consult, of course, as I study.

But none of them have the authority of typhus, or the raiban, or the Rambam, or whatever. In other words, they are all working to explain sometimes very, very difficult material. And their insights are invaluable, as our classical commentaries always are. But there's a little bit more freedom. First of all, you're not dealing with halakhah. So I found it-- I found it refreshing to be able to approach the sources in, for me, a fresher way, of course, after having consulted the classical sources.

Part of the issue for me-- and this was actually quite important to me-- is that I was struggling to interpret the aggadahta in ways that made sense to me. In that sense, it was self-serving. There are these stories. They're very, very puzzling. And the marshas comments, classical and important as they are, didn't always speak to me personally as I'm living in the 21st century with the kind of education that I had. The fact that I am probably more coming from the rationalist Rambam, Rebbe Avraham Rambam, even Maral interpreters of the aggadah. So I'm coming from a particular place.

And I wanted to develop an account of aggadahtas that satisfied me, not a hodgepodge of, he said this, he said this, he said this. I don't know. It doesn't really work so well for me, but let's go lighter. Let's move ahead. I didn't want to do that. And I felt that with aggadahta, I had that freedom to kind of work things out. But, and here's a point that's important to me, as well. This may sound odd. But I had wonderful rabbaim throughout my many, many, many years in Yeshiva, and they taught me that the way you learn gemara or rishon is to-- I remember one of my rabbaim once saying, want to know how to become a lomdan? Ask a kashon every single line of the rajbun. Disagree with the rajbun every line.

In other words, interrogate. Make sure you understand it. Why does it say this? Why this word? Why not that word? Why this question? Why not that question? How is it inconsistent with another? Every single word I was taught was selected with infinite care, has meaning, and needs to be interrogated to get to the bottom of it. And so I try to use that same methodology. And after you've read the book, constant questions back and forth. It's a very dialogical work because I'm constantly interrogating the text.

And what I try to do at the end of that interrogation, so to speak, is to come up with a theory of what is animating the text, what are the issues, what are the themes, in a way that resolves, to the best of my ability, all those many, many questions I ask, so that the story makes sense to me personally. Now, it may not make sense to some other readers. That's OK. You can work on it yourself and come up with your own solutions. That's fine. In fact, I will tell you, this never fails. Never. I don't think it's ever failed. When I give a share on these gemaras, I may have taught it multiple times. I've probably learned these aggadahtas 25, 30, 35 times as I worked over them, and worked over them.

It never failed that somebody will have an insight I never saw. Hey, you just got there. You're half my age. You saw something I never saw. And that's because there's so much, so many riches there, so many nuances that you can't really capture it all. And that's of course, part of the excitement of the study. So on the one hand, I try to use that gera, that approach of rigorous interrogation of the text. But anybody who's been educated in Yeshiva at an advanced level will know it's required at some point in their education to write what's called a chaburah. Rabbi Eleff, Dr. Eleff, you're familiar with that, I'm sure from your Yeshiva days, and many of our listeners.

You take a particular sugya, and you work it through, and you come up with a theory on it. So that's what I was, in effect, trying to do with these aggadahtas as a sugya, working it through in ways that make sense to me, living as I am in the 21st century, with the education I have, and the way I have of looking at the world. This works for me. It doesn't work for you, that's OK too.

But what tools do I use? Well, aside from consistently drawing on the classical function, who had great insights, who were very acute readers, and also had a vast array of knowledge that I didn't have, I used them for many, many, many wonderful ways. But I happen to have been educated in literature, and psychology, and philosophy. And these are all resources that I drew upon in trying to make sense for me of the gemara, on top of which I consulted academic scholarship.

There is a burgeoning field of academic scholarship and the study of Talmudic narratives. There are various professors here in the United States, especially in Israel, who work extensively on this. And I've drawn upon their insights, as well. I don't always agree with their presuppositions, but insights are insights, and I found them valuable. There's relatively little in English written for a intelligent lay readership, that's educated, that is traditionalist orientation, that is orthodox in its orientation. And my book is written not only for the orthodox, but I felt that the orthodox in particular lacked English language material of a sophisticated nature. Not that it doesn't exist. It does, but not as much as I would like.

And so it's designed to, in part, fill that lacuna, as well as, hopefully, work for many, many other different kinds of folks. Now, how does somebody else apply that methodology? Well, the methodology of interrogation works for everybody. The careful reading of the text, this word, this word, this word, why this, why this doesn't make any sense. This is weird. Why does this happen? That's really odd. Why did they do that? Those questions need to be asked. They shouldn't be sloughed over. And then different people will bring their insights to try to answer that question. The more broadly educated you are, and of course, the more knowledgeable you are in gemara, hopefully, your answers will be better.

But everybody should be studying aggadahta with the same care, I think, that they study any other part of the gemara. It's all the gemara.

[ZEV ELEFF] My habruas part on the Rambam, the habruas in this wonderful book aren't just about aggadah. They're specifically what we're calling Talmudic narrative. They are not [HEBREW]. You won't find analysis of Oag's attempt to shoo Avraham away or atop of an ark. You will find in, I think, all of these cases, rabbinic narrative about a particular tekufah of chazal, that being in the Mishnah, a formative period for basic historical initiation. These are the figures who are the rabbinic heroes directly after [HEBREW]. Why this period? Why did this period make so much meaning for you and your habruas?

[MOSHE SOKOL] So my answer to that question will not satisfy you as an historian in the sense, because I wasn't coming at this. I drew heavily, as you know, from the book, intellectual history and cultural history.

[ZEV ELEFF] I know the history of why that's important. But it seems to me that style of narrative, it's not about biblical figures. It's not about angelic figures. It's about this period, say, for maybe Reish Lakish, who's still part of this overall period of the tekufah the generations of chazal. So I don't want you to historicize.

[MOSHE SOKOL] But what I'm driving at is that I didn't set out to write a book on this period. The chapters in these books, in this book, as I say, this is maybe it won't make you, as an historian happy, but the chapters in this book emerged from many, many, many shiurim and lectures I've given on a whole wide array of aggadahta. And I selected from those dozens and dozens of lectures, shiurim that I gave, these because they ended up cohering in a way that I thought would make a powerful book.

[ZEV ELEFF] So we'll get our Oga book eventually.

[MOSHE SOKOL] Period. I went back. Look. I said, oh, you have this. You have this wonderful analysis of what I thought was a good analysis anyway, of this part of his life, and then later, and then the end of his life. Hey, that makes a trilogy of chapters. Well, you have the analysis on this. These were given over years, not together. You have analysis [HEBREW] here, and there, and there, and I kind of merge into a book. I have a second volume, which I'm just putting the finishing touches on it, which doesn't have that.

These are based on texts that I came across, either giving [INAUDIBLE] my shul or at Lander or wherever, that I said, this this is really rich material. I want to think hard about this and try to understand these mysterious stories. That's the way it emerged. Now, as it happens, you're right. It does speak to that historical period. But that wasn't my initial intent. It just emerged.

[ZEV ELEFF] But I think you're underselling it, with due respect, is that you point out in the introduction, for instance, that a theme that is called out of these various studies is that you are studying heroes. First of all, you hold them up quite high, to a very high standard. You will not accept other scholarship which have, let's say, a low floor. You give them a higher ceiling and and a higher floor, that is. But you also demonstrate that the [HEBREW] led sometimes very tragic but deeply principled lives.

Rebbe Eliezer knows what the consequences for standing up for that [HEBREW]. He knows that there's a harem looming, for instance. And that is a theme that you draw out. Can you say something about that analysis over this period? Again, not to say that this is a historical work. It is not. But what you learn from studying the aggadahs portrayal of principled people with principled stakes.

[MOSHE SOKOL] Right, so you're absolutely right. That is a motif in the book. And that is not a motif in the second book I'm working on. And that does provide a thematic superstructure to the book. And that's part of the reason why I chose various chapters, not only because they cohered into a biography, but because those biographies themselves cohered one into the other. Rebbe Eliezer, Rebbe Yohanan, Rebbe Ben Mahalalel, [HEBREW] all coherent to this larger question. I could have chosen others, too. And that is the cost of living a principled life and the impact our biography our lives have on how we make those choices, and the kinds of people we are and how we make those choices.

So yes, that is definitely, you might say, the conceptual architecture of the book. But it emerged really from below. And then once I had all these different shiurim that I wanted to put into a book, that was a part of the consideration in hanging them together, but not because I was writing about a particular historical period. Rabbi Eleff, Dr. Eleff, if you had written the book, that's probably the way you would have done it, being a trained historian. But that's just not the way.

[ZEV ELEFF] Now the different period, I like to say--

[MOSHE SOKOL] I know you're a different period.

[ZEV ELEFF] I research. I don't research--

[MOSHE SOKOL] Conceptually, and I think psychologically, I guess, but not--

[ZEV ELEFF] I'll say it to this one.

[MOSHE SOKOL] The history is you can't understand what's going on in the tensions and the conflict unless you know something about the history of the period. And so I had to read a lot about the history.

[ZEV ELEFF] No, no, no question. But I like to tell people I study heretics, not heresy in modern Jewish history. I want to interrogate for a moment. You've alluded to this, and I did, as well. Talk about presumptions when starting your experimentation, so to speak, of this literature. And I don't want to call it necessarily an orthodox point of view, but a point of view in which reverence is protecting your experiment, this idea of high ceiling, high floor. Can you say something for a moment? Because just some of-- and everybody should purchase this book. Dr. Sokol may not want to say this. Everybody should purchase this book.

And if you haven't read it yet and you haven't engaged in some of these sources, and we're talking about the Rabban Gamliels who lose their rabbinic position, Rebbe Eliezer, who is one of the leading scholars of the Sanhedrin, who was essentially summarily thrown out for his bold position taking. Reish Lakish, who his own brother-in-law-- there's a very mysterious tension going on there. [HEBREW] doesn't know what to do when he wakes up like Rip Van Winkle. Yet you refuse to give too much humanity.

Let me correct that. You allow your criticism of these historical personalities, these rabbinic champions, to only go so far. How do you control for that?

[MOSHE SOKOL] That's a fair point, and I agree with that, as I agree with your characterization of my approach. I'll make several points about it. First of all, there is no such thing as a tabula rasa when it comes to reading these texts. We all come with assumptions. And so somebody who is a cynic about rabbis or about rabbinic figures, or thinks that they're basically all not such big deals, well, it's not coming with a tabula rasa. It's coming with a particular set of presuppositions about amoraim tannaim, or any rap.

So we all come with assumptions. I think it behooves every author to be self-aware and to communicate to the reader what they're doing, and then the reader can say, I don't agree or agree. But I think what needs to be aware of one's assumptions, and I'm very conscious of that, and that's OK. In other words, as long as I'm not pulling the wool over anybody's eyes. I'm making very clear that I believe these are great people, not that they can't make mistakes. Every human being can make mistakes. [HEBREW] There is no righteous person who doesn't do wrong.

So I believe whitewashing is a bad thing. And I think that some sources, classical and otherwise, go to the other extreme. But I do make clear that I do hold these tannaim and amoraim with reverence. And my reason for that is, anybody who, like me, has spent many, many years studying in Yeshiva and has read and learned, not only the halachic teachings, but the moral teachings, the spiritual teachings of Rebbe Eliezer and Rebbe Yohanan, and Rebbe [HEBREW]. And so many of them, that's prima facie evidence of their greatness.

And their breadth of Torah knowledge, the extent to which they are described as consistently engaging in Torah study-- that, to my mind, is evidence for me that these were great people, not unflawed. As you point out, people were excommunicated. Bad things happen. Many tragic endings.

[ZEV ELEFF] They're almost all tragic stories. They're all.

You do not choose--

[MOSHE SOKOL] It's such a tragic book. Could you do something else? I said, yeah, my next book is not so tragic. But as I point out, some of the most gripping drama in the history of Western--

[ZEV ELEFF] They're compelling.

[MOSHE SOKOL] --are tragedies. Compelling, right. So OK, that is true. And I do have reverence and that's--

[ZEV ELEFF] And it comes through. It absolutely comes through.

[MOSHE SOKOL] And I think as long as I'm open about it, and I do think these are great people. And somebody wants to think otherwise, then maybe this is not the book for them. But let me just say that I'll give you an example. You mentioned the Rebbe Yohanan-Echlokech debate. So the aggadah there tells the story of the making of Echlokech. He was abandoned at the time he went in to jump after Yohanan in the river. Rebbe Yohanan, after a kind of mysterious exchange which I try to unpack in the chapter, Yohanan convinces [HEBREW] to devote his life to Torah study.

He says, if you devote your life to Torah study, I'll marry you off to my sister, which is like-- I don't know if I would want to marry off my sister on the basis of a bandit jumping after me in the river. So that's another question that needs to be addressed. But be that as it may, Rebbe Ray Shlokech becomes the great man he became. There's this tension between Yohanan and Shlokech. There is a misunderstanding, where Yohanan thought that Shlokech was offending him and not taking his role as a teacher seriously. Yohanan or Shlokech thought that Yohanan-- or Yohanan thought that Shlokech was saying something else, or Shlokech thought that Yohanan was saying something else. There was this misunderstanding between the two of them.

And Ray Shlokech becomes terribly ill after all those years. And they were study partners. They were brothers in law. They were intimately close, as the story, as it unfolds, makes amply clear. And Rebbe Yohanan's sister Ray Shlokech's wife, comes and implores Rebbe Yohanan, please, I don't want to be a widow. My husband is going to die. How could you allow this to happen? Rebbe Yohanan says, don't worry, I'll take care of you.

And then she says, but I don't want my children to be orphans. How could you allow that to happen? And Yohanan says, don't worry, I'll take care of the kids. And eventually, Ray Shlokech dies. Rebbe Yohanan, in grief, loses his mind. [HEBREW] the gemara says, and he and his friends pay for his death, and everything ends in death.

Now, how are we to interpret Rebbe Yohanan's resistance to his sister's begging him to save her husband's life and to protect her children? So let's remember that biographically, Rebbe Yohanan himself was an orphan, and he lost 10 children. They all died in his lifetime. Now, how could Yohanan be so cruel as to resist his begging sister to save his chavrusa, his closest friends in life? How could he be so cruel?

And so for somebody who respects Rebbe Yochana as I do and reveres him, I was convinced that there needs to be something else afoot. It can't just be cruelty or moral failure, or just, how could somebody be so cruel as to sister begging on her hands and knees, and just ignoring, oh, don't worry, I'll take care of you, I'll take care of the kids? That's heartless. That's, to me, inconsistent with what I know and believe to be about Rebbe Yohanan, and not only his teachings, but also his own personal life.

So therefore, I sought to-- and based on many, many other teachings that Rebbe Yohanan offered, sought to explain why respect for a teacher was so important to his understanding of Judaism, of the future of Torah. And it was a matter of principle. He couldn't allow a student colleague like Ray Shlokech not to express the greatest respect for the man who made him into-- who taught him Torah, who made him-- transformed him from a brigand into a [HEBREW]. He felt that the future of Judaism was at stake If a student doesn't have that kind of respect for a Rebbe.

Now, some might say, and several folks who reviewed the book said, well, I would just say it's a moral failure. That to me doesn't work for biographical reasons, and because my sense of who Rebbe Yohanan the man was, and his moral teachings, his spirituality, his sensitivity, his own personal life. So there's an example of where I'm very explicit about the floor I start from. I think it's a more than defensible position, but defensible and not, that's where I am on the question of my conviction that Rebbe Yohanan was a great man. If somebody doesn't like it, OK.

[ZEV ELEFF] It's wonderful. It's striking in your whole dissertation was, you explain exactly your point of departure, your deeply held conviction on how to approach the story, both the literary and philosophical analysis of how far you're willing to go. I think it was just masterful in how we understood the contours of the book, just to that story. My favorite section was the opening section on Rebbe Eliezer Ben Hurcanus, one of these great champions.

I once got into the work of counterhistory, and then I promised the Lichtenstein family I would never do it again. Rebbe Ellezer represents an opportunity for counter history, of what would it have been like if the Mesorah would have passed through him, this great champion of Beit Shammai? I would guess, you talk about 30% of chazal as aggadah. More than 30% of this book is Rebbe Eliezer. What was so compelling, and I imagine, challenging of holding up your rubric for this particular mishnaic figure, this tana?

[MOSHE SOKOL] Well, you hit the nail on the head. Rebbe Eliezer was the greatest Tomlin scholar in his era, and it was a very important area. He was the mission in Pirkei Avot says that [HEBREW] says Rebbi Eliezer was the supreme-- according to one position-- supreme [HEBREW] of his era. It's just as if-- and there's really no analog. But it's as if all the rabbis in the United States got together and put Moshe Feinstein in [HEBREW]. It's like, what? How is that possible? It doesn't make any sense. [HEBREW]

So Rebbe Eliezer this unparalleled stature, and he was a person of incredible drive, and conviction, and principle. You see that from the first chapter as he cries, and cries, and cries his way into [HEBREW] Yeshiva, totally ignorant. And it's a compelling story. A man who starts from nowhere, becomes a towering figure, is unable to reconcile with his colleagues, is put in excommunicated place in the harem, and then, which to me, by the way, my personal favorite chapter-- I guess every author has a favorite chapter-- is the story of a tragic, tragic-- it's kind of a tragic-- well, not totally tragic. The final attempt on the part of his students to reconcile with him on his deathbed.

The trauma and what he's feeling, all those decades in which he had-- however long it was, we don't know that he was parted from his students. He was unable to teach the Torah that he had devoted his life to from the very, very early years. He gave up everything, his wealth, his family, everything to study Torah. And then he had nobody to talk to. Nobody to talk to. The son, in and out, gets angry at his son, and then his students come to reconcile on his deathbed. What a pathos-filled theme. Can they ever reconcile? Is reconciliation possible?

And then in the middle of that discussion, there are obscure questions of halakha. It's a leather pouch with stuffing. It has a hole in it. You can tell me, not tell me. They interrogate him, and he finally [HEBREW] at a particular object and says, oh, he's impure. They lift the ban, which, by the way, is the only non-tragic end, so to speak, in the whole book, I guess you might say, because the ban is lifted. But it's very pathos-filled. It's emotion-filled. It's intense. Can they reconcile after this enormous parting in the ways?

And then there's this mysterious dialogue. And what does it mean? And then Rebbe Akiva, his favorite student, isn't present at the funeral. Where did Rebbe Akiva go? And what happens to Rebbe Akiva and how Rebbe Akiva and Rebbe Eliezer are alike? They both started from as ignoramuses, I mean, artists. They emerged as great interpreters of the Torah, but a radical parting of the ways. Rebbe Eliezer, the traditionalists. Rebbe Akiva, the brilliantly creative interpreter of every little jot and tittle of the Torah. They're kind of alter egos to one another. Very powerful, powerful, emotion-filled and deep, deep stories that reflect men of principles that we can only--

Rebbe Eliezer gave up everything that mattered to him more than anything else, teaching Torah, students, because he had this view about what it means to be an authentic interpreter of the Torah. It's really just moving, moving the stories.

[ZEV ELEFF] And at various points in those chapters, you point out that there's much work been done on the theological implications of Rebbe Eliezer. [HEBREW] You are not allowed to make this decision based on miracles alone. And you're very careful to say, this is not a work of theology, but this is a work about-- that would teach us the importance of reverence, and also about authority. And there's a major statement to be made. After all, Rebbe Eliezer, his commitment to [HEBREW], the Torah study, distances himself from his own father. What are we to make about this account, and authority, and teaching, and teacher-student, parent-child?

[MOSHE SOKOL] Well, I can't answer that [HEBREW] because the stories are, in many ways, about exactly those themes and the way in which it plays out. The relationship between Rebbe Yohanan and Ray Shlokech. Did Yohanan make Ray Shlokech. And Shlokech concedes that, but said, hey, I also had something to do with the making of myself. How do you balance that? Rebbe Eliezer, the great, great, great teacher, but nevertheless, his colleagues and students can accept his approach to Torah studies. They place an unfair-- it's a very, very complicated dynamic. And each story has its own way of playing it out.

I didn't want to make one point, and I know we're going to end fairly soon. To me, it's an important point, maybe to some of the listeners, as well. I don't do psychobiography, because you're an historian, Dr. Eleff, so you may have a view about that. I'm not totally comfortable with that method of work. And we really can't know anything truly that Rebbe Eliezer or Yohanan, Ray Shlokech, because we can't get to them. What we have are stories about them which appear in the gemara, written often centuries after they lived, or compiled, or edited.

[ZEV ELEFF] But listen. These are not primary sources on Rebbe Eliezer, per se.

[MOSHE SOKOL] So what I try to do is to interpret the text. I can't imagine what Rebbe Yohanan was truly like, what Ray Shlokech was truly like. Who am I to figure out who they were like? None of us can do that. I certainly can't. But it behooves every one of us, as students of the gemara, to interpret the text. The text is teaching us something about Rebbe Eliezer, about Yohanan, Ray Shlokech, Komi, or whomever. And without getting into-- the text is written many, many years later. They wanted to teach the authors of the aggadahta, the aggadah, wanted to teach the readers an important lesson for them.

This was their lesson. Just like any sugyan shas, the authors of the sugya wanted to teach the readers halakha, insight, reading of a passage. So the authors of this gemara wanted to teach the readers of this gemara about their view of Rebbe Eliezer and Yohanan, and all the great-- now, they may well have had some kind of oral tradition going back, but they spun it. They put it together into the narrative that we have. And I think we as readers, students of the gemara, are obligated to figure out what the gemara is teaching, recognizing our own limitations.

We live millennia after Rebbe Yohanan and Ray Shlokech. How can we know what they were like? Totally different world, different religious heights. We can't really know that. But to my mind, it's a fundamental and grievous error to argue from that position to the view that we should be agnostic, because the gemara is teaching us a lesson. That's why it's there. And we need to figure out what the gemara is teaching us, recognizing the limitations of that effort. And there's a big, big difference between the two.

[ZEV ELEFF] So it's all the more appropriate that you should be able to generate. It should be generative. You should be able to identify themes throughout these rabbinic era narratives, because they are captured in a way that chazal would like to present it. So themes about authority, about reverence, the complications of relationships, and so many of these stories are simply, profoundly that how complex our relation-- they are freighted with baggage, with sometimes loaded with theological baggage, with principled baggage. And so it makes all the more sense, [HEBREW], that we should be able to generate and tie together these themes.

Wonderful. I think we have a few moments to maybe go through some of these questions.

[NAHUM TWERSKY] Only a few minutes.

[ZEV ELEFF] Only a few minutes.

[NAHUM TWERSKY] Right. Because we want to end around 9:00. So I think one of the questions towards the end might be appropriate, but your call.

[ZEV ELEFF] So I happily, I think, anticipated a number of these questions. One question that was asked about the connection between aggadah and kabbalah, which is interesting, and to me, it's a question of genre, and how Dr. Sokol is able to see his-- I think, really, a path breaking work. I don't think I'm understating it. What it allows us to map on different [HEBREW] onto one another and connect. So not necessarily about aggadah, but kabbalah. Excuse me. But how does this augment or merge curricula in Jewish studies?

[MOSHE SOKOL] So there are different interpreters of aggadah throughout the millennia, have applied the intellectual universe in which they live to, I believe, to their interpretation of aggadah. And so [HEBREW], that is often a kabbalistic interpretation of aggadah. It's wonderful, wonderful work, very important work. And the Hasidic thinkers have used kabbalah to interpret aggadah or aggadic narratives. It's one of the methods that advocates of that particular world, who live in that world of kabbalah, will use it to interpret gemara.

And then, of course, you have the philosophical method. And so people like the Rambam, or Rebbe Avraham Rambam, many others and many successors in that world will use philosophical ideas to interpret aggadah. Rambam speaks of a mashal, a parable, as a filigreed silver with a gold apple in the middle. And the gold Apple in the middle is partially covered by the filigree of silver, which is the [HEBREW], what the parable is about, in which Rambam was philosophical truth. Or the kabbalah would be kabbalistic truth.

And so if you're living in the world of kabbalah, then you will use kabbalah to interpret aggadah. The extent to which that is historically accurate is another question. The same is true for philosophical interpretations of aggadah. Is that anachronistic or not? That's a whole other question. But if you look at the history of the interpretation of aggadah, it flows into different streams, depending upon the intellectual universe in which the interpreter uses.

[ZEV ELEFF] So if we are to understand the intellectual universe of chazal in the way that they created these portraits of tannaim and amoraim, then the commentators on aggadah are doing the exact same thing using a certain template. And so it stands very well to reason then, to understand Dr. Moshe Sokol is to understand the prism in which you approach.

[MOSHE SOKOL] Exactly correct.

[ZEV ELEFF] Which I think is something that really frames our conversation. So I can't thank you enough. I learned a lot here.

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[TEXT] Touro Talks, Touro University, touro.edu/tourotalks

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