Mishnah Berachot 5:3

Mishnah Berachot 9:2

Mishnah Berachot 9:3

Mishnah Berachot 9:5

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TEXTing with Elana Stein Hain delves deeply into Jewish texts to guide and inspire us as we grapple with the concerns and meaning of this moment. Join Elana as she addresses the issues of our day through the lens of classical Jewish texts, in conversation with Hartman scholars Christine Hayes, Yonah Hain, and Leora Batnitzky.

TEXTing. Where ancient wisdom meets contemporary relevance.

Gratitude and Sorrow Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Elana: Welcome to TEXTing, where we consider issues relevant to Jewish life through the lens of classical and modern Torah texts. I’m your host, Elana Stein Hain. We are recording on Wednesday, November 6th, 2024. Yes, the day after the American presidential election.

If you’d like to follow along with today’s text, you can find the link to our source sheet in the episode description.

You know, about 10 years ago, a preschool teacher called me in the middle of the day. She just had to tell me about something that happened with my son, then around three years old. We had actually been teaching him to share at home, especially because his little brother was on the way. So this was going to be a really important skill for him, sharing mommy and daddy with the baby, sharing toys eventually, sharing attention, things like that. And he was getting it, but maybe a little too well. The preschool teacher called to tell me that the following had happened in school.

Our son was playing with a toy and another child came over and grabbed it out of his hand. Our son started to cry and said through his tears, “thank you for sharing.” He was trying to show gratitude, even though what had just transpired made him sad.

I kind of feel like that as Thanksgiving approaches. I’m saying thank you through tears with the knowledge that while I have much to be thankful about, there is also much in the world and in the Jewish world that, to put it mildly, does not inspire gratitude. What should Thanksgiving look like in a world like this? One response is obviously to count the blessings that we do have. And thank God there are many of those, as I mentioned. Another response is maybe to focus on the possibility of silver linings and positives emerging from negatives.

But I think there’s an additional approach that can be gleaned from thinking with some Torah from the end of Tractate Brachot, specifically the Mishnayot in chapter 9 about reciting blessings on both good and bad.

I’m really glad to be able to talk about this topic and these texts with Christine Hayes, because Chris, I know you to be a person who has many thoughts about both. Hi.

Christine: Hi, Elana, it’s good to be here.

Elana: Great to be with you. So let’s actually just dive in because it seems like while we’re going to be looking at the Mishnah sections in chapter nine, this whole conversation may start already in chapter five, Mishnah three of Tractate Brachod, because it says as follows. Haomer al kan tzippur yagiu rachamecha, one who recites when they’re praying, “just as your mercy is extended to a bird’s nest.” Right? Implying, your mercy should also extend to me. Ve’al tov yezacher shemecha. Or says, your name should be mentioned over good. Or, modim modim, or someone who says twice, give thanks, mishtakin oto, we quiet them down.

So here I’m already intrigued by the idea that if you try to say as a kind of supplication that over the good, God, your name should be mentioned, there’s already something being said about what people sometimes don’t want to mention God over, which is the bad. So what do make of this? Just to get us started.

Christine: Yeah. And just for context here, we’re talking about a prayer leader for the Amidah, for the prayer. And the concern is that somebody might insert extra petitions or insert extra statements into the prayer that aren’t quite kosher. And so they single out these three statements in particular that shouldn’t be allowed. The Gemara gives us the reasons why they shouldn’t be allowed. Silencing someone who refers to God, extending mercy to the bird’s nest, they give a couple of reasons it might inspire jealousy. It implies God’s extended mercy to the mother bird but not to other creatures, maybe not even to us. Maybe it implies that God acts out of mercy and there are some rabbis who would prefer to see him acting out of sort of a strict justice or issuing decrees.

But I think of real interest for us are the other two statements that are silenced and the Gemara also explains those so if a person says modim modim we give thanks we give thanks, he seems to be acknowledging two powers, right? Two gods, one good, one evil, a kind of dualism. And that’s not monotheism. And for the rabbis, that’s a big deal.

But I think it’s a mistake to suppose that the rabbis are concerned only about a kind of theological error. Because when we look at the third statement that they silence, we see that they’re interested in the way a person of faith handles the experience of evil. So in the Gemara there they explain why the third statement is also silenced and that’s if the person says, ve-al tov yezacher shemacha, because when you say that it implies that we bless God al tov, for the good only and not for the bad, and yet we learn in Brachot 9:5, which we’ll be coming to a person, chayav adam levarach al ha-ra’ah, a person must bless over the evil or the bad keshe’hu yevarech al ha-ra’ah.

That seems to be a contradiction with that principle. But of course, that’s not an easy thing to do, right? To bless God for both good and evil things that occur. And I think maybe that’s why the discussion of it is left to the very end of Tractate Brachot. Chapter 9 is the last chapter in Tractate Brachot because the arc of the Tractate has really been to open with the easiest kind of speech to God. And that’s sort of, arvit, the prayer in the evening when the workday recedes we’re more tuned into a transcendent reality. We even can also feel very alone and vulnerable in the evening. It can be dark. They talk about danger there. So you more naturally turn to God to speak to God at that time.

The hardest kind of speech to God is to make a blessing over something we don’t feel inspired naturally to bless God for, evil things, you know? So I think there’s an interesting arc. They start with the easiest prayers in this tractate and end with, I think in some ways the hardest blessing.

Elana: Yeah, so in a way, if you’re learning through the tractate, when you get to chapter five, you see this little, if you’re the prayer leader and you say, God, your name should be mentioned, and by the way, it’s interesting, blessing, as mentioned, we’ll talk about that, your name should be acknowledged over good, it gives you the sense that, well, we don’t want you to just say that. But what do we want you to say? We’re not going to get to that for another four chapters because you need a little time. You need a little time to internalize what it means to acknowledge God in your daily life before we can get to acknowledging God in the hardest moment.

So let’s go to those hardest moments. This is the Mishnah in Brachot, chapter 9. You have three different sections of Mishnah that talk about this issue of blessing or acknowledging over bad. You’ve got Mishnah 2 in that chapter. You’ve got Mishnah 3 in that chapter. You’ve got Mishnah 5 in that chapter. That already tells me something, meaning we’re coming at it from different angles.

And I, actually, as in the intro, mentioning that I’m not looking to just restate what I think people often state, which is in times of bad, think of good, think of the possibilities, think of… I think that what we’re going to see actually does not do that.

Christine: Yeah, it’s little more complicated.

Elana: At least in the way the Mishnah expresses itself. Maybe the Talmud’s…you know, we’ll put that interpretation on it. But the Mishnah itself, it’s gonna see something else and I really want listeners to be attuned to that.

So let’s start with Mishnah Brachot 9:2, okay? And I’m just taking a snippet, okay? On good news, you say, baruch hatov ve-hametiv, right? Blessed is the one who is good and does good or makes good. But on bad news, you say, baruch dayan ha’emet, right? Blessed is the true judge.

Now, we’re used to this, blessed is the true judge, from, God forbid, when someone loses, you know, loses someone, right? They say it when they tear their clothes. We say it when we hear that somebody has passed away. But I want to talk about this a little bit. First of all, let’s just talk about bracha, right, because the concept of blessing, because before, in chapter five, it didn’t say “bless.” It said, your name should be mentioned, God. So let’s talk about bracha for a minute,

Christine: Right. Right. It’s a complicated concept. You’re right that we often think of blessing as affirming something good in English. Of course, it has that meaning. It comes from benediction, the Latin “good word.” So it’s really saying something is good.

But I think it’s more complicated range of meanings in the Hebrew text. If you look at the things that you say “Baruch Atah” about, we’ve had, if you see places where miracles were performed for Israel, or if you see places where idolatry was uprooted, or if you see wonderful things in nature, mountains or the Great Sea. And it’s kind of a way of recognizing that God is associated with all of those things, right? That’s what I think, yezacher of Brachot 5:3 was about. Mention, this is an occasion to mention and acknowledge God.

Sometimes that seems to be what Baruch is about when you say Baruch, it’s really acknowledging something. Sometimes it tends more towards an actual thank you. And we see that especially when they provide actual language for some of these Brachot. Sometimes the language is, modeh ani or modim anachnu, you know, that is the actual formula used. And so it can feel or seem that that is much more of an expression of gratitude for something more than just a simple acknowledgement.

But of course, the word in Hebrew, modeh comes from and is related to the word for acknowledging or confessing, right? So there is really a range of meaning. And I think the word blessing, a bracha, really lives somewhere between simple acknowledgement and acceptance of God, God’s presence, God’s involvement, God’s role in the world and in the ongoing events of the world, all the way up to gratitude for it.

Elana: But what you’re saying though is it’s not necessarily always gratitude, and it’s not necessarily if somebody’s saying the true judge, it’s not necessarily, in this version saying, I deserve this, and therefore this judgment is apt or correct. So if it’s not saying that, what is it saying?

Christine: Right. And I think part of the problem here is this word emet, which we do translate as true or truth. And it has that meaning, but it has the meaning of truth in the sense of faithfulness or fidelity. So emet is, you know, related linguistically to emunah, the word for faith or trust. And so when we say dayan haemet, I met we’re not saying you gave a true or an accurate judgment as if there was a false thing to do and a true thing to do, and God, the true thing to do was for this person to pass away, right, when you say it in the context of death or something. It’s not affirming that God judged correctly in taking this person’s life.

It’s really, and we, and I suggest that because we have elsewhere in rabbinic literature the idea that when judges condemn someone to death the family at some point says says to them that they are dayanim, they’ve given a true judgment, a din emet, not because they acknowledged necessarily that it was correct, but that they were faithful to the procedure, that they followed their duty, even though it grieved them or they did the best that they could.

Elana: That’s very powerful. That’s very powerful because I think, you know, I remember when my aunt of blessed memory was dying of cancer. And I remember a time where she basically broke down. I don’t even remember if it was with me or with my husband at this point. It was like, why is this happening to me? And obviously our answer was, we don’t know. And it wasn’t a, well, you know, God only gives things to those who can take it. And it wasn’t, there must be something, and it wasn’t, in some future life things would be better. It’s, but if you imagine your life right now without God, then where does it leave you?

And I think I came to that because I, you know, I grew up with a mother who had a number of miscarriages. And when I say a number, I mean, I can count them on one hand, but I need the whole hand for it. And she told us this from when we were old enough to start thinking, essentially, about this kind of stuff, that she said she distinctly remembers she and a friend had gone through a miscarriage at the same time. And the next pregnancy, the friend said to her, and this was a multiple miscarriage for her already, and the next pregnancy, the friend said, if I miscarry, I’m going to stop doing Shabbat candles. I’m going to stop doing Shabbat. I’m not.

And my mom turned to her, and I’m not saying that religion is the salve to make you feel better, my mom turned to her and said, how does that help your life to imagine that God isn’t with you right now? If anything, this is like the time when you need to be able to say, there is God out there somewhere, and I’m not totally abandoned, and I’m not totally faithless. So it seems like you’re giving that kind of interpretation here.

Christine: I think it’s an act of really of radical faith to affirm something when you don’t see it. You literally, I absolutely cannot see that in this moment. Now, I cannot see God in this. I can’t understand that this is in any way just or ordered or merciful or meaningful or making me stronger or any of those other things that people assert when they say everything happens for a reason. I can’t see that reason but I’m still going to see myself in a relationship with God.

And I think that it does mean that because notice that they do give us different language. It’s a different blessing that one says when you when there’s something good, when you receive good tidings, you say the God who is good and who does good. But you don’t say that when you have right, bad news or bad tidings. You don’t just repeat it and say, yeah, he’s good and does good. You don’t. There’s something different one says. And it’s something that affirms his emet, in the sense of emunah, that there is still a relationship. God can be trusted to show up even though I don’t see him now, but I know he’s gonna show up, right? So I think that’s the concept.

Elana: This is great. Yeah, it’s an interesting thing. One thing I would just throw in there, even as I’m very compelled by your explanation, is what does it look like to say, to acknowledge God as tov, good, versus to acknowledge God as dayan, as a judge, right? Meaning, when you talk about a judge, is that, I mean, tov is not value neutral. That’s obviously positive. What is a judge, right? Meaning, is a judge, is there an aspect of, you experience judgment or prosecution in some way? Is there an aspect of, no, a judge is impartial, and actually there’s something kind of objective about it in some way that gives you a little bit of distance from what’s going on? Meaning, I just think it’s worth thinking about the terms that are used, even beyond the word emet.

Christine: Yeah, it’s true. Yeah, and so often in rabbinic literature, of course, the rabbis will counterpose din, you know, with chesed. So right. And when, and we experience chesed as a good thing.

Elana: Judgment. Judgment versus kindness. Right.

Christine: We don’t always experience din as so good sometimes. So I think that they’re trying to just capture those two sides of the coin, that sometimes we feel that God is acting towards us more in the terms of chesed and sometimes we feel it’s more like din. But even so, if it’s a case of din, it’s still, there’s a faithfulness in that action.

Elana: Yeah, so this is not, it’s not going to fix it for you, but it is going to tether you to an affirmation of some reality. All right, let’s move to the next. Let’s move to a snippet from Mishnah 3 in that chapter, because I think it is more surprising in a way. Would you like to read it?

Christine: Sure. So in this Mishnah we have, mevarech al ha-ra’ah me’ein hatovah, difficult phrase we’re going to have come back to, me’ein hatovah al ha-ra’ah, one blesses over the bad, the evil. Shall we debate what that means, Elana? And over the good, as if, yeah, so what does this mean?

Elana: Yes, we should.

Christine: I mean, one translation that you often will see is that one should bless over the evil that is like the good, right? Or, and one should bless over the good that is like the evil. But this me’ein, and sometimes people say just as, but that would be ke-ein or ke-shem. And I don’t, that’s not really what’s being said here. Do you want to unpack it first?

Elana: Yeah, but I do want to say, because I know that you’re going to have a more novel reading, because when you told me you’re reading, I was kind of excited at how novel and how compelling it actually felt. But there are those who say no, no, no, no, no, no. Here’s the way you’re supposed to read this.

The next part of this Mishnah says, if you recite a blessing on the past, it’s a vain blessing, right? You can’t say I’m pregnant, I hope it’s, I pray that it’s a girl. If it’s a girl, it’s a girl. If it’s a boy, it’s a boy, right? So there are some who say this what we just read is connected to that and it goes as follows: one who recites a blessing for the bad as though it’s good, or for the good as though it’s bad, or one who prays to change the past—all of these are vain prayers.

Now why would you make a blessing on the bad as though it’s good? So the Talmud does give us some examples. It essentially says, well, we might be talking about a situation like the following. There’s a, I don’t know, there’s a flood because a dam is breached, and some water came onto my land. So that’s good for me, but to be honest, it’s pretty bad that there’s now a flood going on. And so I look at this thing that’s bad and I say, ooh, this is good for me. So I’m going to pray about it as though it’s good, right?

Or it may be something that right now seems good and is good, but may turn bad. And I’m already saying a blessing on the bad. I’m not even focused on the good here. So there are some who say that this is essentially you’re making a vain prayer. You’re missing what’s actually going on.

Christine: Yeah. And I think that’s a perfectly legitimate reading. You know, it’s this me’ein term that’s so hard. Mevarech al ha-ra’ah me’ein hatovah. Bless on the evil me’ein the good. And I think it’s possible, and this is actually not that different from what you just suggested, Elana, but this me’ein can sometimes mean, that is like, or in the same category of, or it has a similar character to. So I think what it might be relating, what it might be referring to is that you say a blessing over an evil thing that has some resemblances of good or some admixture of good. In other words, what we would call in English, a mixed blessing, right?

So the case of the field that they give in the Gamara is a perfect case. And it even makes a sort of a distinction by saying there’s a flood and it’s going to leave, it’s good for him and his field because it’s going to leave sediment on his field. But right now it’s actually disaster. Yes, when the flood waters recede, all the water goes away you’re going to have this lovely sediment but in the meantime we’ve got property damage and cattle are dying and people are are struggling to survive, so right now, it’s a disaster. You know that when the waters recede there will be sediment on your land, and that’s good, and you want to say hooray, what a wonderful thing, but there are people suffering all around you, right? A little bit like what we saw in the pandemic sometimes, right?

Elana: By the way, this is, I ask any friend of mine, if they would say the silver lining of COVID is, say, what are you talking about? There’s no silver lining. It’s not the same cloud. It’s not the same cloud, right?

Christine: Yes, yes, exactly. That’s right. That’s right. So, so this is sort of against silver lining thinking, right? If, when there’s a disaster going on, you don’t bless it because you know of some good aspect to it. And the same thing on the other half, which is that you don’t say about the good that has some admixture and bad in it. You don’t bless it for the sake of, for the bad part that’s in it, right. So that’s really, probably, the mixed blessing. The first one is more of the silver lining, but this is a case of mixed blessing.

And the example they give in the Gemara is you find a treasure. Now that, you know, it could be a, it’s a good thing to find a treasure, but the reality of their time was that the king, if you find something like this, is going to take it from you. So what are you, what are they saying you should not do? You should not say, oh, curse my luck that I found this treasure, right? You should be happy and grateful or acknowledge the good of the treasure you found, despite the fact that ultimately, you’re going to have to maybe give it over.

I want to connect it to what you said before in terms of what follows. So what I think it is saying is don’t give a blessing that’s kind of counterfactual. And that’s why I think it does continue or does what continues does follow from this. When they say you’re pregnant, don’t pray that it be a son or a daughter because there’s already a fact of the matter. And so when you pray for something in a counterfactual way, that’s just sort of a waste.

Same thing. I’ve got a disaster going on and then I treat it as if it’s a good thing. I’m sort of giving a blessing in a counterfactual way, or if I’ve had the luck to find a fortune but I treat it as if I’ve been cursed and I see only the bad in it. Again, I’m denying reality.

Elana: Yeah, so, but I guess what I would say is I kind of walk away with this with three lessons. One lesson I think is very instinctive, which is don’t bless things that are good for you and bad for other people, right? Especially by the way, if the balance is so off kilter, right? It’s good for me in my little field, but it’s literally gonna create a community wide crisis, right? That, to me, is very instinctive.

The other two, I think, are a little bit less instinctive to me. So for example, I had an abdominal surgery and, to me, it was terrible. I mean, it was a terrible experience all around. It was an emergency. It was horrifying. And then afterwards, people looked at me and they were like, wow, you really lost weight. What’s your diet? What are you gonna? And I’m like, my diet is called NPO, nil per os. You’re not allowed to put anything in your mouth for a few days. You can’t ingest anything in your mouth for a few days after surgery.

Now, nobody was trying to make me feel like the bad stuff hadn’t happened, but their choice to focus on the good was really not welcome. It was really, really not welcome. And I think that for people for whom actually focusing on the good is what gets them through it, it isn’t instinctive to say, hey, you have something bad going on, recognize that it’s bad, lean into the fact that it’s bad, and be okay with that.

And then the other I would say is when you have something that’s good, if you kind of know that something bad is coming, it is really hard to appreciate the goodness of what it is, to be honest. You don’t wanna be pie in the sky. You don’t wanna pretend, you know, it’s like, I think about Ben Gurion seeing the Jews, know, the newly minted Israelis dancing when the declaration of the state happens, knowing that the next day they’re gonna have to go to war. it’s a little bit like, if you actually can see both of those realities, it’s very difficult to sit in the good there, right?

Christine: Right. It is. And it’s a question of holding those two things together. And I think but I think that’s why it connects very well with the idea of a blessing that is for shav. It goes against reality. They’re saying sometimes reality is complex and has two aspects to it. And we need to hold on to both of those or there’s just something that’s not real.

And psychologically can be difficult, right? I mean, the experience that I think of to illustrate this is my, again, we’re with the surgery model here, but my unexpected emergency cesarean. And I had had 26 hours of labor. And I was prepared for this labor. I knew exactly how I wanted it to go and what kinds of interventions I did and didn’t want.

Elana: I’m shocked, Chris, you had a plan? You had a plan?

Christine: I had a plan and it was going to be natural and all the rest of it. And boy, one by one, everything that I had said I absolutely do not want, I had to keep conceding and conceding. OK, I guess we’ll have to try that. OK. So and then ended up in an emergency cesarean as well. And all I felt was, I just felt such loss and such grief. It was just, it was very traumatic and you know, physically also very hard. And I felt like I had failed, but of course I had this wonderful healthy baby and all anyone could point out, except for my very wonderful understanding husband, but anybody who came to visit, you know, could you only focus on, don’t worry about, don’t focus on the, you know, have, you have this wonderful baby. And when I said, yeah, I just wasn’t quite what I was expecting. I just feel, I just felt sad.

I felt inexplicably sad and depressed and it felt frustrating to me that I wasn’t allowed to feel or express that grief. If I did, people felt uncomfortable but they also sometimes even were angry, as if I was being selfish and I was ungrateful. I had this great wonderful baby which I appreciated. In fact, having the caesarean, and an emergency one, which meant that I didn’t get out of bed for two weeks, it wasn’t a planned caesarean, so you don’t bounce back quickly, meant that I got to cuddle this baby for two weeks which was wonderful.

But both things were true that I felt deeply traumatized by it. I felt a grief and I had to go through the stages of grief that I did not have the birth experience I had planned on and wanted. And yet I also had this wonderful baby.

So I think recognizing the good end of something without acknowledging that sometimes there’s a traumatic path to it, is just not honest and it can make us feel somehow unrecognized, unseen. And it’s important to keep both sides of those things in view to remember that good things don’t always come to us easily, and it’s dishonest, and it really shortchanges the depth of our own experience to cover it up and pretend that because things ended well, it just doesn’t matter.

Elana: Yeah, but then at the same time at the same time even if things don’t end well, the Mishnah is pushing you to make a recognition and acknowledge the good, even if it doesn’t last, or even if you’re worried that it’s not gonna last, that’s, it’s a high bar, and I actually think it’s important to think about and to consider.

So I wanna go to the last Mishnah that we’re gonna look at here, which is Brechot 9:5. Now this is the longest of all of them, and to my mind, it’s a little bit of the safety net underneath. Because if I were to ask myself, why is the Mishnah insisting on the true judge over something bad that happens, even if it’s in the manner of just saying, God, I acknowledge that you’re here and that you’re still who you are, even if I don’t understand what’s going on here and I’m not gonna justify it as though I did something wrong, but I just don’t know and yet.

Or why does the Mishnah insist that you need to be able to see bad when it’s bad and see good where it’s good. And this Mishnah, which is Mishnah 5 in that chapter, seems to tell you what’s motivating this whole thing. And it goes like this:

One is obligated to bless over the bad, or the evil, as you said, the same way that one blesses over the good. And then it cites the verse that we say in the Shema, right? Love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your wealth, right? And it goes on to give you interpretations and one interpretation of with all your wealth is not with all your wealth, it’s a play on words. Bechol me’odecha is with every measurement that is meted out to you. Bechol middah u-middah shehu moded lecha, hevi modeh lo bimod me’od.

That whole thing is a play on words, right? With every middah, every trait, every trait, every measurement rather, modeh, acknowledge, me’od me’od, very much, right? And then the Mishnah goes on to tell us a number of other things, like we don’t want people acting in a lighthearted manner across from the holy of holies. We don’t want people to walk onto the Temple Mount with their staff and with their shoes on and with all their dust that’s on their feet.

We, by the way, used to say certain things in our prayers, but then we realized that people were becoming heretical because they were claiming that our prayers meant God is only this and not that. In other words, the Mishnah goes on to say we are worried that you are going to in some way deny God altogether when something bad happens. Whether it’s, there’s some other power that overtakes, whether it’s just, chaos reigns, and it seems like that’s the worry, the deep destabilizing experience, as a person of faith, that evil brings with it. It’s deeply destabilizing. They don’t want you to go there, and that’s what seems to be at bottom.

Christine: Right, and let’s sharpen that a little bit by noticing that the examples that, or there are not so much examples, but a list of halakhot that they give, right, after saying that whatever God deals out to you, receive it or accept it with blessing, right? And in the Gemara, Rava’s gonna say what that means, which is that you should receive it either way. Whatever is dealt out to you, receive it, b’simcha, you know, with the same equal acceptance.

Elana: With joy.

Christine: I’m not sure Simcha is really joy, but the point is,

Elana: Meaning do you think he doesn’t mean joy or you don’t mean joy? Yeah. Yeah.

Christine: He might. I don’t know. Yeah, I really don’t know what is meant there. But the point is don’t differentiate the way you meet them, which is a little different from what the Mishnah was saying, where in the one case you say, ha-tov ve-hametiv, and the other one you say, dayan ha-emet. It does allow us to have a slightly differently calibrated acceptance. One is a much more positive acceptance, the other is, I’m willing to accept God that you haven’t cast me out or abandoned me, and I’m not walking away from this relationship even though I can’t see you right now. I trust that you haven’t walked away too.

And so here in 5, where there seems to be more of a sense that you need to respond to them equally kind of in the same way. Then they follow with a list of these halakhot that you ran through quickly. And what’s important, the common feature in all of those is that they all articulate situations that really cast doubt on God’s presence or activity in the world. So we have to assume it’s talking about the destroyed temple. You can’t act irreverently or conduct yourself irreverently opposite what used to be the eastern gate of the Temple Mount. This is talking about the time when it’s no longer there. It’s now a ruins. We know that for a while it was a garbage heap. That’s what the Romans did. And then eventually they built a temple on top of it, not to the Jewish God, obviously, to a Roman God.

Even so, even though it looks like it’s a place where God has been defeated and God is absent, God, you know, somehow didn’t show up to even defend himself, whatever it is, you can’t allow yourself to treat it that way. And the same thing with the Sadducees who are denying what for the rabbis was a critically important, you know, religious or theological principle. Don’t let that also be an occasion for you to swerve or to vary or to lose your connection with God.

So I think you’re right to point out that these are all part of a larger picture of the rabbis trying to find ways for people to remain in relationship with God in a way that survives all shocks to the system. The terrible things that happen to us, or the things that would seem to point to God’s own defeat, or those who hold views that seem to be opposite to the hopes that the rabbis have, the religious hopes that the rabbis have for meeting God in some other world or life.

Any of those things—don’t allow them to be a common occasion for you to sever the connection with God because he is a dayan ha-emet, he is still there.

Elana: So if I look at Thanksgiving this year, right, and I’m taking my cue from this, right, what I’m actually looking at is an attempt to maintain some stability in the face of something that’s pushing me to despair.

Christine: Yeah, to not despair.

Elana: And that’s different from hope of, or optimism of it’s gonna get better. It is actually a stability that then allows you to go and act, right? But it is trying to keep you from the despair. It’s trying to keep you on some firm ground. And I think that for this Thanksgiving, that is dayenu. That is enough.

Christine: That is dayenu and I think firm ground is really the key word because those who despair, who look at what’s happening and say there’s just no ground, right? So that’s one alternative. I give up, I despair, there’s no, or there’s no ground. Or people who look at it in too pollyannaish a way are on an illusory ground. They’re on a ground that’s not going to hold because it’s going to be fragile. It’s going to crack at the next thing that comes along to show that it isn’t the case.

So a realistic approach which holds both things to be true that there is a mix of good and not good, but they are all still placed on the firm ground of the relationship with God. That’s, that’s, hey, that’s a lot.

Elana: Can I tell you something? It’s a lot. Can I tell you something that, and maybe end with this, you know, I look at this and this is, I think about people similarly. In other words, when bad happens, people are often the purveyors of that bad. When good happens, people are often the purveyors of that good. The same people who can give you the best, can give you the worst; and the same people who can give you the worst, can also give you the best. And a certain degree of stability and realism is to say, we’re stuck with people, right?

Like with God, it’s, we want God. People, we’re stuck with them, right? We like them, we don’t like them, we hate them, we’re scared of them. Humanity is something that we’re stuck with. So I also take this as, like there’s a parallel in that secular life.

But I guess I would just say, this is coming out probably a week before Thanksgiving. So I’m going to wish everybody a stable Thanksgiving. Right? That’s what I’m going to wish you. It’s not a happy Thanksgiving. Or a stable, acknowledgement-giving. Something like that. What puts you on stable ground?

Christine: Right. No need to cut the roots or sever the relationships when things are hard.

Elana: Yes, right? Try to hold on. Thank you, Chris. I know that whether we were doing this with a text or without a text, you would have brilliant things to say, but with the text, it’s also pretty exciting to hear the brilliant things you have to say, so thank you.

Christine: Thank you so much. I love, love learning with you, Elana. It’s such a great synergy.

Elana: Likewise, really, really, So thanks everybody for listening to our show and special thanks to my chavruta this week, Christine Hayes.

TEXTing is produced by Tessa Zitter with production assistance from Gabe Scherzer. Our senior producer is Louis Gordon and our executive producer, Maital Friedman. This episode was mixed by Ben Azevedo at Bear Cave Audio with music provided by Luke Allen.

We’re always looking for ideas of what we should cover in future episodes, so if you have a topic you’d like to hear about, or if you have comments about this episode, please write to us at [email protected]. For more ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute, sign up for our newsletter in the show notes and subscribe to this podcast everywhere podcasts are available. See you next time and stable Thanksgiving everyone. Thank you for listening.