Sometimes passages – and even entire pages – in the Talmud take the form of agadita, which has been defined as rabbinic texts that incorporate folklore, historical anecdotes, moral exhortation, and practical advice in various spheres. Presumably, these legendary interludes are included in the text of the Talmud because of the moral exhortations, the lessons or mussar, that we can derive from them. Sometimes they are characterized by exaggerations, but in two categories: exaggerations that might actually be realistic or close to realistic, or exaggerations that are so extreme that they may cross the line into fantasy and may only be satisfactorily understood if interpreted allegorically and with deep and creative rabbinic insight and hidden moral teachings.
The agadita in the Talmud differs fundamentally from the exaggerations of many of our contemporary politicians, who exaggerate to strengthen an obvious point or to intentionally distort a different point. The Talmud may distort a visual image or the size of realistic or seemingly otherworldly mythical creatures but with the obvious – or not so obvious – goal of making a moral point.
Sometimes there is a middle ground that might be an exaggeration but that can conceivably be – but is unlikely to be – interpreted literally. We all know the pedagogic declaration that there is no comparison between a person who studied something 100 times and someone who studied it 101 times. Less well known is the Talmudic discussion of Rabbi Preida – the quintessential goal-driven educator – who made a point of teaching a student the same thing 400 times, and then again, when this proved to be insufficient, another 400 times, earning a Heavenly offer of a choice of long life or a guarantee of a place in the world to come, and he chose one and was granted both.
Dapim 73-75 of Baba Basra in the Talmud, which were studied around the world last weekend, contain 21 examples of agadita “on steroids” – where there is no way that most of them can be interpreted literally.
One of the stories that is particularly intriguing is where Rabba bar bar Chana said: “Once we were traveling on a ship and we saw a certain fish upon which sand had settled, and grass grew on it. We assumed that it was dry land and went up and baked and cooked on the back of the fish, but when its back grew hot it turned over. And were it not for the fact that the ship was close by, we would have drowned” (73b). Clearly, sometimes things were not – and are not – as they seem.
One can’t help but speculate about what happened in Israel on October 7, which led many people around the world to conclude that they were safe only as far as they could get away from Israel and Gaza, yet the antisemitism that emerged in favor of Hamas and ironically in support of the genocide of Jews, G-d forbid (while of course claiming the opposite) since that date that will live in infamy has convinced many people all around the world that living in the Diaspora is like living on the back of a whale thinking that such a perch is as safe as living in the safest of countries – only to discover that the whale can suddenly turn over, at the drop of a hat, with no advance hint of a climate of hate and a reversal of fate, just as we in the Diaspora started to feel comfortable and to take root while many slid down into the diversity of the American melting pot.
There are those in the Diaspora who assumed that the way of religion is outdated, and the way of the universities is the wave of the future, the way of the intellectuals, only to discover that even the most prestigious, supposedly-enlightened Ivy League colleges have been perpetrating a whale of a distortion and have been perverting their educational mandates by teaching their students not to think analytically. A most glaring example of this failure to think rationally is the perpetration of a moral equivalence between torture and taking action to root out the torturers. On one hand there were unimaginable dehumanizing atrocities that are not spoken about or demonstrated against but that actually happened on October 7, as contrasted with what the IDF must do to uproot the weapons and missiles and drones and terror tunnels that would allow the atrocities to recur, G-d-forbid, all the while the Israelis take unprecedented care to minimize harm and death to innocent civilians put in harm’s way as human shields. The IDF’s unprecedented system of minimizing loss of life of enemy civilians has been described most convincingly and authoritatively by John Spencer, the West Point U.S. specialist in minimizing collateral damage to civilians in warfare.
Incidentally, before concluding the unusual string of mystical stories that dominate these three pages (73-75, supra), the Talmud expands on King David’s reference to the borders of the land of Israel (without expanding on the borders themselves) which incidentally do not refer to Gaza one way or another. The Talmud goes into a brief lesson in dry geography (actually, very wet geography, as you will see (74b). The Talmud provides some perspective relevant to Israel’s current wars with its enemies that now surround it, enumerating the seven “seas” and four rivers that surrounded and defined Israel proper! Many of the uninformed and/or misinformed people who chant nowadays “from the river to the sea” may know the mantra, but they have no idea of how historic and complex the geography really is, nor are many of them (especially American college students) fully aware of the consequences of the fulfillment of their superficially and mistakenly harmless chant for settling rights even though Israel expelled its own settlers and gave the Arabs all of Gaza on a silver platter back in 2005.
(For the record, the Talmud enumerates seven “seas” and four rivers that surrounded Eretz Yisrael as follows: the Sea of Tiberius, the Sea of Sodom (the Dead Sea), the Sea of Heilat, the sea of Heilata, the Sea of Sivkhi, the Sea of Aspamya, and the Great Sea (the Mediterranean); as well as the Jordan River, the Jarmuth, the Keiromyon, and the Piga (which are the rivers of Damascus) (74b).)
The country of Israel today seems to be willing to settle for what may be less than the area between the seven “seas” and the four rivers, although we can’t be sure since we are not certain of the locations and routes of some of these since-dried-up boundaries, but we are not counting on huge mystical or mythical monsters to save us. We pray for the help of G-d, by whatever means G-d sees fit to intervene, together with the military, and we pray as well for unity among our people to hasten the route to victory and redemption.
