Season 1: Episode 8 -Hillel Prince of the Torah

Generated automatically from the audio and lightly corrected. It may contain errors; the recording is the authority.

Leo Tolstoy once said that all great literature is one of two stories, a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this week on The Jewish Story, we're going to see that a stranger comes to town in order to take us on a journey of the future. Episode 8, Hillel, Prince of the Torah. Hillel was born a poor young Babylonian. And though we don't know exactly when or where he was born, the Sifri, the Midrash Halacha, teaches us that he lived for 120 years. That at the age of 40 he went up to Eretz Yisrael. For 40 years he studied there, and the last third of his life he led the people. Who exactly he led is actually at the heart of our story. And no matter what you think of this 120 years, whether it's true or not, true meaning that pedantic attachment to literal factualism as the be-all and end-all of truth.

What the Sifri makes explicit is the parallel between Heddle's life and the life of Moshe Rabbeinu. And it's worthy of note that someone who plays such a foundational role in creating rabbinic culture is attached to Moshe Rabbeinu. By the way, not only rabbinic culture, but seeing as we're going to explore how Christianity arises out of Hillel's world of Beit Midrash, one could even say that he played a foundational role in the creation of Western culture at all. And that someone of such greatness only ever attained the title of Hazaken, the elder, is also worthy of note. Though, considering the lineage of such a title from the time of Moshe, it's not to be scoffed at. We can tie these 120 years of Hillel into our timeline through another rabbinic teaching in the Gemar and Shabbat, which says that the last period of his life, the period of his leadership, began 100 years before the destruction of the Second Temple, which would place it at 30 years before the Common Era through 10 years of the Common Era.

It also places it almost exactly parallel to Herod and his house. In fact, we're going to see how Hillel really guides Israel's transition toward a whole new concept of the kingdom of God, and therefore their need for a new model of leadership. But that's yet to come. As I said, Hillel's early life is a blank page, except for the emphasis that the sources place on his poverty. There is a critical contradiction in the classical rabbinic sources in regard to his lineage. Right? The Yerushalmi, in Kilim, in Ketubot, if you want to look it up, you can send me an email, I'll send you the details, says that his mother was from the tribe of Yehudah, Judah, while his father is from Benjamin. And while that might not be worthy of note, it's important as a foil for what the Babylonian Talmud will teach us in Ketubot, and as well as the Midrash Rabbah, who say that he is of paternal descent from King David.

Now that makes Hillel a contender for the legitimate kingship of Israel. But since during his time of leadership, Herod is in charge, and we know that he really doesn't make so much space for competition, and of course not long after Hillel passes from the scene, Jesus of Nazareth will be crucified under the title of the king of the Judeans. As far as I know, Hillel was wise enough never to directly claim the title. so Hillel was too poor to learn but too wise not to and the sages teach us that he came up to Israel seeking the Torah sometime in his early life the Kemar in Yoma by the way tells us that he lived in poverty so desperate that it became proverbial after Hillel no one could ever claim that they were too poor to learn it says that he gave half his daily earnings just to pass the doors of the Beit Midrash and hear the words of the living God from Shmayan of Talyon, the leading teachers of his day.

And apparently, his investment paid off. Because when Hillel is placed in the full context of the pantheon of Jewish leadership, the Gemara and Sukkah says it like this. For ancient times when the Torah was forgotten from Israel, Ezra came up from Babylon and established it. Remember Ezra? He led the return. And when we spoke about Ezra in his context, we touched on the fact that the Gemara said if Moshe Rabbeinu had not brought the Torah down from Sanai, that Ezra would have merited to do so. And in fact, we explored how Ezra really created the relationship to the text and the foundational structures of what we today know as religion. So here on the heels of Ezra and his restoration of the Torah, it was again forgotten, continues the Gemara, and the hill of the Babylonian came up and established it.

This theme of forgetting is going to be important for us later. But for now, just notice, Hillel is once again our link to Moshe, just as Ezra was. But Ezra, who came up from Babylon as Moshe went up on the mountain, even though he didn't bring down the Torah, Hillel will bring down the Torah in a way that will leave it available for every Jew who comes along to pick it up unto our very day. It's also critical to note that the fact that Hillel comes up from Babylon is the proof that the returnee's sense of entirety was not entirely accurate. If you recall, this idea of entirety worked together with exclusivity in order to forge the identity in the early days of the return, which was so critical for Am Yisrael to be able to relate to the great cultural challenges that lay ahead.

Entirety was that aspect of claiming sole legitimate ownership over the story. In a more graphic sense, you can remember that after the destruction of the first temple and the 70 years of exile in Babylon, the camera, so to speak, of our story shifted to Jerusalem with Ezra and Nehemiah and Zerubel and the returnees, who we noted are actually numerically the significant minority of the Jewish people. But in a driving narrative sense, they own the story. Now here comes Hillel, out of that murky background, steps into the foreground, up from Babel to Jerusalem, not once but twice wants to learn and wants to lead. And he is going to be a foreshadowing of the rabbinic culture which will go back down to Babylon and thrive there.

The Gemara does actually give us the story of Hillel's rise to leadership, unlike the details of his earlier life. And you can find it in the Gemara in Pesachim on 66a. It says that the sages taught that the law was hidden from the Bnei Beter. B'nai B'tera were the rabbinic leadership of Jerusalem in their day. And they had forgotten. Just as the Gemara in Sukkot told us that this was the problem which Hillel came to fix. Because B'nai B'tera really represent that school of learning, which is based on continuity of authentic tradition, and not surprisingly is always associated with Jerusalem. And the story that we're about to tell will highlight that the great weakness of arguing that the oral Torah is a literal inheritance from the time of Moshe, is that once something is lost, how could it ever be returned?

So B'nai B'ther didn't know what to do when the 14th of Nisan, the day of the Passover sacrifice, fell out on Shabbat. We're not going to go into the details of the halachic, the Jewish legal question there, but there's a complication which they didn't know how to solve. And they said, is there anyone who knows whether the Passover overrides Shabbat or not? And they were told, there's a certain man who's come up from Babylon, and Hillel the Babylonian is his name who served the two greatest men of his time so they summon Hillel and he puts them through the ringer because unlike their adherence to authentic received tradition as the sole standard of knowledge Hillel demonstrates the superiority of exegesis of textual analysis as a means of a driving law though the Gemara in Sakhim only gives us the local example of the way he solved the problem the Yerushalmi, El Surah will tell us that there were seven midot seven tools which Hillel the elder taught before the elders of Batera the Kalv Chomer, the Gezer Shavah, the Binyan Av and the General in particular these are things that if you've spent any time learning Gemara you realize these are the foundational tools which will replace a sole reliance on authentic tradition with the ability of the human mind to engage text and derive the will of God.

This is not a small shift in Am Yisrael and we will explore its significance more as we go on. But for the meantime, he blows them away. The Bnei B'tera are overawed. They immediately set Hillel at their head and appoint him Nasi over them. Ah, Nasi. Do you remember that title? He's the prince. And the question is, prince of what? Recall that Nasi was the title granted to Simon the Hasmonean way back in 142 before the Common Era, when he founded that first independent state since the destruction of the First Temple, which we are now seeing in the hands of Herod. The title Nasi disappeared when the Hasmoneans took the title of king, a title which Herod and his house kept even as they became a client state of Rome.

And now this title is re-emerging. The traditional perspective is that Hilla was the Nasi of the Sanhedrin, the high court of Jewish law which sat on the Temple Mount. Now, we've spent a little bit of time here and there tracing the development of this council. First appearance as the Gerusia, that council of Jews identified in the early Hellenistic period, which was granted the right to live by the Torah by Antiochus III, the Seleucid king who preceded the story of Hanukkah. We saw the first usage of the term Sanhedrin that came with Rome division of Judea back in the year 57 before the Common Era into five various regions each of which had its local council of Sanhedrin a Greek term. Furthermore, in the last episode, we spoke about the struggles in the Jerusalem Sanhedrin between the landed aristocracy, the priestly caste, and the Pharisaic nobility of the Torah, which played out through the stories of the judgment of King Yanni of the Hasmoneans and Herod himself before he was king.

and now in the rabbinic mind the Sanhedrin under Hillel will begin to forge an entirely new kingdom of which he will be the first prince, a kingdom of the Torah we're going to have to flesh out exactly what the boundaries of this kingdom are and how it is that it will rise from the ashes of the destruction of the temple and carry the story of Israel into the next phase of history but meantime, in looking at this Gemara After Hillel receives his position, he begins to rebuke his peers, saying, why is it that I came up from Babylon to mean nasi over you? Meaning, how did Jerusalem fail in leading the kingdom of Torah? It was your laziness, he said, because you didn't serve the two greatest men of the time, Shemaiah and Abtalion.

And then they throw one right back at him and ask him a new question about what happens if on this Sabbath day all the people have to bring their sacrifices up to the temple. There's an issue of Jewish law of moving things from one domain to another. Now the animals themselves could walk and therefore it wasn't a problem. But what about the knife for the slaughter? What would the people do? They asked Hillel and he said, I've heard this law, but I've forgotten it. Now, up till now, Hillel has embodied in this story the power of the human mind by engaging text through exegesis to derive the divine will. And one might expect him to go straight back to his strong suit. That's not the answer he gives. He says, I've forgotten this law, but hanach lehem le'israel, leave it to Israel, im lo nevi'im heim b'nei nevi'im.

If they're not prophets, they are the children of prophets. On the next morning, they looked and they saw that everybody who had a lamb had stuck the knife in the lamb's wool, so the lamb actually carried it, and everyone who had a goat had stuck the knife between its horns. And Hillel saw this and said, ah, that's how I received the tradition, from the mouth of Shemayanab Talyon, meaning he too is an inheritor of authentic tradition. And he too understands the great challenge which forgetting poses to making authentic tradition the basis for practice. But aside from the power of textual analysis, which Hillel really places at the center of the endeavor of unfolding the divine will, he recognizes that there's another extremely important element.

Because while the intellectual and spiritual elite are responsible for deriving divine will from text, the people are the authentic repository of lived tradition. just as literal prophecy is only expressed from within the land the embodied experience of the Jewish people as a whole so too the prophetic instinct of Israel living God's will through inherited behavior is embodied in the people thus these are not just customs not just what we do they are the authentic expression of divine will embodied in common practice as we say min ha'gisrael, Torah hi. What the Jews do is the Torah. And this actually speaks to the heart of what the Pharisees mean when they claim to possess the authentic traditions of the fathers, which were given together with the written Torah to Moshe at Sinai.

It doesn't necessarily mean that they've been preserving teachings which were never written down, although it likely means that as well. It means that they've been living authentically, that they are true Israel. Now, if we want to understand the fullness of Hillel's character, there are many statements of his which we could explore, because so much of what he said became foundational to how the Jews would come to know and live the world. I just want to take a peek at one or two. One is the story of, actually part of a series of stories, the particular one I want to pick out is, right, when a Nohri, a non-Jew, came and asked Hillel, said, teach me the whole Torah on one foot and then convert me. And what did Hila say to him?

He said, That which is hateful to you, don't do to your fellow. That's the whole Torah said, and the rest of it is commentary, go and learn. that which is hateful to you do not do to your fellow ought to sound very familiar. Of course, we're used to the formulation in the positive, which is do unto others as you would have them do unto you. So aside from teaching us that Hillel actually coined the golden rule, there are a couple of key points of context which this statement adds to the story of his life and therefore to the story of the Jewish people, the Jewish story. One is the question of whether Judaism was a proselytizing movement in the late Second Temple period. This is a big question. And there has been tremendous rivers of scholarly ink spilled on it.

And truth is, a full-on examination of it would take us too far outside of our story. But nevertheless, it's important to know that there is a live perspective that early rabbinic Judaism had an outreach posture, And that around the core of Israel that was congregating, not only at the temple, but at this point also in the synagogues, that Greek translation of Beit Knesset, a house of gathering, which was the combination of today's communal center, synagogue, and religious service institution, that around the core of the Jewish people was a broader network of Yirei Shammai, God-fearers. now many scholars actually believe that in antiquity there was a large class of Gentiles these God-fearers perhaps as many as millions at the height of the Roman Empire who stood somewhere between paganism and Judaism they were attracted to the Torah and its wisdom they were attracted to the ritual in the synagogue they were particularly attracted to the upright moral life that Judaism enjoined on its followers as opposed to the debased pagan life which they saw in the Greco-Roman world around them.

But for various reasons, they were unwilling to cross the threshold of conversion, in particular circumcision, something which we'll speak about in later episodes is a rather large move. Now, the standard view, even though, as I noted, it's a scholarly debate, the standard view is that these God-fearers would swell the ranks in particular of Hellenistic Judaism, that Judaism which is based down in Alexandria and up in Antioch, outside of the core culture in the land of Israel, and would ultimately serve as the primary growth medium for Christianity. Now this will bring us to the second point we can derive from Hillel's formulation of the Golden Rule. And that is that, of course, Jesus of Nazareth will declare this principle of loving one's fellow as second only to the love of God in many places in the Christian scriptures.

And we will take time for a direct discussion of the emergence of Christianity and its impact on Jewish consciousness, particularly when we explore the relationship between allegory and midrash in an episode or two. But for now, suffice it to note that Christian tradition places the birth of Jesus of Nazareth during the lifetime of Hillel. And we can see in this simple statement that there were foundational concepts which Jesus learned at the feet of the students of Hillel. And furthermore, we ought take notice that the struggle over who would lead the kingdom of God, over who was really king of the Jews, or Judeans, soon to be the Jews, can be seen as a contest between Herod, Hillel, and Jesus at this stage of history.

Now, in this context, it's worthy of one more element which will contribute to the formation of Christianity and which is once again associated with Hillel. This is a little bit of review for a second. You can recall that Josephus described for us four elements into which Judean society began to fragment at the time of Yochanan Hyrcanus, the height of the power of the Hasmonean kingdom. And they were the Sadducees, the Pharisees, the Essenes, and the Zealots. We've spoken of the Sadducees, that priestly aristocratic element which we last saw in their struggle against Herod's rising power and who were truly crushed, by the way, when he managed to take Jerusalem and the kingdom for his own. And we've learned much about the Pharisees who are really the emergent leader class and their embodiment in the person of Hillel as a full-blown rabbinic culture and therefore legitimate contender for leading the kingdom of God.

What about the Essenes? now the Mishnahh in Chagiga when it wants to teach us about the successive generations of spiritual leadership which span the transition from the Pharisees to the people that we clearly know as the rabbis it does so by telling us that each generation was led by a chief judge an av betin and a nasi, a prince I'm not going to pull you through the whole list but it's important to know that Hillel's partner classically is known as Shammai, and we will speak about the nature of their relationship shortly. But it was not originally so. Originally, the Av Beit Din, the chief judge in the time of Hillel, his partner and foil, was Menachem. Menachem the Essin And the Mishnahh says Yatza Menachem v Shammai Menachem went out Shammai came in and so the Gemara in Chegiga asks the Avos question Lehechen Yatza where did he go?

and it gives two answers Abayama Abay says Yatza L'tavud Ra he went out to an evil culture he became a schismatic Rava Amar Yatza L'tavudata Melech and Rava says no no he went out to the service of the king and then he brings a breita he says, Yacham went out to the service of the king and there went with him 80 pairs of students all dressed in white silk now, we could hypothesize about what it is really that Abayi and Rabbi are arguing about what is exactly the Tarbut Ra that Abayi says that Menacham went out to and what is it, the Abodat Melech the service of the king that Rav says, and how does this relate to the Essenes, but rather than hypothesize, we can also look at Josephus. Remember that Josephus, because he was writing in the first century of the common era, is actually a parallel to classic rabbinic texts, and therefore can often illuminate at least the context, if not the meaning, of their teachings.

He says in the Antiquities, Book 15, Chapter 10, Section 5, if you want to look it up, he says that now there was one of these Essenes, and I do want to say that we will speak about the Essenes as an internal group more when we speak about the rise of Christianity in its fullness, but for now there was one of these Essenes whose name was Menachem and he not only conducted his life after an excellent manner but he had the foreknowledge of future events given him by God also this man once saw Herod when he was a child and going to school and he saluted him as king of the Jews notice that phrase, king of the Jews But he, thinking, he being Herod, thinking that either this man did not know him or that he was just joking, put him in mind that he was just a private man.

But Menachem smiled and clapped him on the tush, he says backside, and said, however that be, thou will be king, and will begin thy reign happily, for God finds thee worthy of it. So Josephus goes on to tell us that afterwards, when indeed Herod became king, and he was at the height of his power, he sent for this Menachem and asked him how long he would reign. Menachem didn't want to tell him, and eventually he squeezes an answer out of him, and Herod was quite satisfied with these replies, and gave Menachem a hand and dismissed him, and from that time on he continued to honor all the Essenes. Now, notice this conclusion that Joseph has had. We've thought it proper to relate these facts to our readers, how strange soever they may be, and to declare what happened among us, because many of these Essenes have, by their excellent virtue, been thought worthy of this knowledge of divine revelation.

Meaning, according to Josephus, the Essenes are a last bastion of what we might call prophecy. Now remember, in our Gemarim Psachim, Hillel characterized Am Yisrael as B'nai Nidi'im, the sons of prophets, and I there explained it as his belief in the lived tradition as the authentic embodiment of divine will. But it has another possible explanation. And in fact, if you look for that term B'nai Nivi'im in the Tanakh, you'll find that what it means was the schools of the prophets. There were masters, people who had actually attained the exalted state of prophecy, and then there were the B'nai Nivi'im, the students who were their spiritual and intellectual children who were striving with all their might to reach that level.

So, perhaps, when Hillel made that statement, he was also referring to a broader movement within which he was moving. Because we've spoken a little bit in previous episodes about the rise of apocalyptic thinking and the abundant literature, the epigrapha, the pseudepigrapha, we even touched on the nature of the book of Daniel. All this abundant literature which was associated with the rise of apocalyptic thinking basically from the 3rd century before the Common Era all the way through the destruction and a bit beyond. And so let's just hone in once again on the difference between prophecy and apocalypse, because it might just be that the benane de vi'im, the people who aren't quite prophets, these Essenes who aren't speaking like Isaiah did, but are dealing in predicting the future, perhaps they lean more toward the apocalyptic than the prophetic.

Now, prophecy is concerned with the absolute nature of the divine will. Therefore, the events of history may be demonstrative, but they will not be definitive. The absolute nature of the divine will cannot be confined to particular events. And this is why the moral and theological messages of the prophets offers inspiration and instruction for all time. How is it that I, in the 21st century, in the 6th millennia, could open up the book of Isaiah and find myself there? The apocalyptic perspective, on the other hand, is concerned with the end of days. Meaning, how is it that the absolute divine vision will resolve itself in the world. And from that perspective, the specifics of history are of essential importance.

Hillel's lifetime was one in which Am Yisrael is undergoing even further fragmentation than these four general categories of which Josephus taught us. As each subgroup passionately pursued their teacher of righteousness in hopes that they would be the saving remnant left standing after the imminent judgment Day. And Hillel's association with Menachem, Menachem the Essene, and Menachem's leaving of the rabbinic fold, at least according to Avai, to join the schismatic religion, or according to Rava to join the Herodian kingdom, highlights the struggle occurring around him as to how to identify the true kingdom of God and therefore its true king. Now, there's another critical statement I want to look at, which is not actually by Hillel, but rather about him.

The Mishnahh in Pirkei Avot, in the Ethics of Our Fathers, says every argument that is for the sake of heaven is destined to endure. This is called Machloket L'Shem Shemayim, is destined to endure. But if it's not for the sake of heaven, it will not endure. And what's the example of an argument that is L'Shem Shemayim for heaven's name? The argument of Hillel and Shameh. And what's an example of the argument not for heaven's name? The argument of Korach. and all his congregation. Now, defining what exactly is meant by an argument that's not for the sake of heaven is relatively simple. At this point in human history, we're all well familiar with the divisive, power-hungry, self-serving side of ourselves that drives us to fight with others.

And in our story, we need look no further than the Civil War, which ended the Hasmonean Kingdom and ushered in the power of Rome to Judea. And of course, it will be the internecine struggles for power under the guise of realizing the destiny of true Israel, which will cause Jerusalem to burn before the Romans ever breach its walls. But machloket l'shem shamayim, the idea of an argument for the sake of heaven, is a little bit harder to understand. And since argument is so definitive of rabbinic culture, and rabbinic culture itself is such a base of Jewish culture, as we know it that no one even laughs anymore when I say, you know, two Jews, three opinions, no matter how funny or sad it may be. Since that's the case, we need to grasp this idea.

The Pharisees, who chose Hillel as their nasi, as their prince, and whose spiritual and intellectual inheritors are the rabbis, those in the Mishnahh, ultimately in the Gemara, who create Judaism as we know it, to a large degree, remember, define themselves through their claim to possess the authentic traditions of the fathers. These teachings given to Moshe, together with the text of the Torah, and not written down. At first glance, if they claim to be the inheritors of this authentic tradition, then they're going to have to offer some excuse, or at least explanation, for the existence of any argument. I mean, surely Moshe knew whether it was permissible to eat chicken with milk, or not. So why will the rabbis of the first century of the Common Era be arguing about it.

If we want to get to the bottom of this, it's always best to check in the words of the sages themselves. The Mishnahh in Hagiga, once again, traces the emergence of argument within the oral law as not long before the time of Hillel and Shammai. And a parallel statement in the Tosefta teaches that by the time Hillel and Shammai had died, they left behind them two opposing schools of thought, whose dedication to the teachings of their masters and their passion for argument threatened to create Shtey Torot, two different Torahs. Now this is a serious problem. And one which sadly we're familiar with today. Give a little shout out to Daniel Roth and his constructive conflict project celebrating the 9th of Adar as the day in which the battle between the students of Hillel and the students of Shammai nearly reached bloodshed and yet was resolved as ultimately a commitment to unity, check it out online, the 9th of Adar, constructive conflict.

But meanwhile, there are a few classic explanations of the rise of Machlokit, and they're actually rooted in our story. Now, Rav Shreira Gaon, the great 11th century teacher of the Gaonic period, please God, we'll speak about him in his local context when the time comes. But he, for now you just need to know, writes really the first work of what a modern historian would call historiography, in his attempt to explain to his students how it is that the formulation of the oral law in the body of the mission of the Toseft and the Gemara came about. When he addresses Machlokit, he blames it on the upheavals and persecution of exile which prevented the proper relationship between students and teachers which would allow for the handing down of authentic tradition Rashi by the way in his commentary on Baba Metziah, also agrees.

Meaning, what are we supposed to do? We lost authentic tradition due to the difficulty of exile. The Rambam of Moshe Ben-Baimah Maimonides, in his introduction to the Mishnahh Torah, a very important work of historiography as well, actually says something quite close, but slightly different. He said it was due to students being less diligent in their studies. I think what he's telling us is that if we'd been like him, that perhaps things would have gone astray. Nevertheless, both of these explanations assume that Mahlokit is an accident of history, a failure in transmission, that we're living in a broken world in which God's message has become muddled, and perhaps hopelessly so. and I think that many people relate to Machloket to this type of argument in this way but how do we reconcile these explanations with the argument between Hillel and Shammai that we mentioned in the Pirkei Avot in the Mishnahh of Avot whose Machloket L'Shem Shammai whose argument for the sake of heaven has kium says the Mishnahh it's going to last implying that it's not an accidental passing phenomenon but rather expressive of a more essential one part of the answer will lie in the nature of the rabbinic culture which emerges from the ashes of the second temple period because unlike Herod who needed to destroy any power base which he perceived as encroaching on his own in order to be king and unlike the sectarians whose violence will tear apart Jerusalem in their quest to fulfill its mission who can't imagine a kingdom of God inhabited by anyone other than themselves Hillel will preside over the emergence of a new consciousness in which there was a space for difference a space for difference not as an acceptance of the inability to enforce will on others but on the understanding that machlokit that word of argument means that we're all taking part in a larger whole.

Machloket is rooted in the Hebrew word chelik, which means portion. There's two ways to look at argumentation. One being, I'm right and you're wrong. In which case, in order to establish myself as right, I must eliminate your answer. The other to be, I have part of this picture and you have part as well. And if we each have a chelik, a piece of a truth, which is much larger than we can grasp, well then, our commitment to arguing and bashing those pieces together is exactly what allows a larger whole to emerge Hillel and Shammai differed so deeply so deeply on so many things and yet, the argument was for the sake of heaven it was for the sake of a kingdom of God which was large enough to hold them both it wasn't just large enough to hold them both it was so large that it had to hold them both and they needed each other in order to know exactly what it was.

Now we're going to pursue the power of this perspective as we follow the path of Hillel's students and their survival of the destruction and their creation of ultimate what we know as Judaism. But for now, Hillel's life, long and rich as it was, has to come to an end just like every other. And, you know, despite his humble beginnings, we know that Hillel founded a dynasty of princes. princes of the Torah. When Josephus in his life speaks of Hill's great-grandson, his contemporary, Shimon ben Gamal I, he speaks of him as belonging to a very celebrated family. It seems to me he was referring not to his possible lineage from King David, which frankly Josephus may not have known since it's a tradition in the Babylonian Talmud as we spoke of and not in the Roshami, but he was speaking rather of his status as Nasi, as prince of this newly emerging kingdom of God.

We've only touched the surface of Hillel's teachings, which are in truth his most enduring legacy, but they exist along with the lives of his students. And this is perhaps where we ought to end. Because the sages teach that Hillel had 80 students, 30 of which were fit to the level of receiving the divine presence that Moshe merited, 30 of which would have merited to have the sun stand still for them just as it did for Joshua and 20 of which were just so-so and as a last note to bring us back into the flow of time it's important to note that not all of these students were willing to confine themselves to this new kingdom of God that was meant to exist in parallel to and perhaps even subject to Rome and its puppets because Josephus tells the story of an abortive rebellion right at the end of Herod's life.

If it was at the end of Herod's life, then it was at the height of Hillel's reign. You can look in the Antiquities, Book 17, Chapter 6, Part 2. Josephus says there was one Judas, the son of Seraphius and Mastiao, the son of Magolathus. They were two of the most eloquent men amongst the Jews, and the most celebrated interpreters of the Jewish law. They were students of Hillel. These men, when they heard that the king's sickness was incurable, because as we mentioned, at the end of his life, Herod was plagued by terrible diseases, which wracked him with pain, contributed to his paranoia to the point of insanity, and really incited him to monstrous acts of murder. But word got out that he was on his deathbed, And they excited young men that they pulled down all those works which the king had erected contrary to the law of their fathers.

For the king had erected over the great gate of the temple a large golden eagle and had dedicated it to the temple. We mentioned this in the last episode in that question of to whom exactly was the glory of the temple dedicated? To God? To Herod? To Rome? Either way, that golden eagle was a finger in the eye of the pious. And Josephus notes that the common calamity of dying cannot be avoided. He puts these words into the mouths of the teachers, inciting their students to action. This common calamity of dying cannot be avoided by our living so as to escape any danger. Therefore, it is a right thing for those who are in love with virtuous conduct to wait for that fatal hour by such behavior as may carry them out of this world with praise and honor, and that this will alleviate death to a great degree.

If you want to live forever, says Josephus in the voice of these great teachers, then you have to act righteously without regard for the consequence to life and limb. And indeed, these students, under the watching eyes of their teachers, climb the gates of the temple with axes and heavy poles, tear down the eagle and smash it to pieces which leads Herod to a vicious massacre once again in the center of Jerusalem. Aside from the drama, this episode introduces into our story the fourth social division of which Joseph has taught us, the Zealots. This will be the faction in Am Yisrael which is convinced that in order to bring about the kingdom of God we must have absolute sovereignty over specific geography, and in particular, over the Temple Mount.

And we'll speak quite a bit more about the consequences of such a perspective. Now, the Boreita that told us about Hillel's 80 students also tells us that the least amongst them was Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai. And it says that Rabbi Yohanan left no stone unturned in his effort to unfold the Divine Will into the world in which he lived, right? This is the great power of these seven principles of the Torah which he inherited from Hillel. It's the great power of the posture which believes that the human mind, by engaging with text, can actually derive the will of God. It means, really, that the revelation at Sinai never ended. Because as long as there's a soul and a mind and a heart that are willing to engage the text with integrity and to live in the world as it actually is, well then, a new will can emerge.

And as we'll speak of in the coming episode, Rabbi Yochanan also left no stone unturned in his efforts to save a remnant of Israel from the coming destruction, and in particular, he was going to struggle against the violence of the zealots. So what better closing could there be to such a life than the words of the Tosefta reported upon the death of Hillel? oi l'chassid oi l'anav oi for the pious oi for the meek one oi to the disciple of Ezra because the sages teach us that one day Hillel and his students were all assembled at Yericho and a heavenly voice came out and exclaimed one amongst those present here is worthy for the Holy Spirit to rest upon him if his time were worthy of it. And all eyes turned to Hilo.

I just want to thank all the people involved in making this happen. I want to thank Pardes Institute, that's P-A-R-D-E-S dot org dot I-L for giving the opportunity to reach such a broad swath of Am Yisrael. I want to thank all the people at the Land of Israel Network for putting their energy into helping to bring my dream to so many diverse people. I want to thank Sulem Yaakov, Sulem Yaakov.com for giving me a home and all the individuals who gave of their hard-earned time and money to help make my dream happen. I'm Rav Mike Foyer and this is The Jewish Story.