Sage Tales

Rabbi Burton L. Visotzky

Description

These ancient stories whisper truth to your soul.

Great stories have the power to draw the heart. But certain stories have the power to draw the heart to God and awaken the better angels of our nature. Such are the tales of the rabbis of the Talmud, colorful, quirky yarns that tug at our heartstrings and test our values, ethics, morality—and our imaginations.

In this collection for people of all faiths and backgrounds, Rabbi Burton Visotzky draws on four decades of telling and teaching these legends in order to unlock their wisdom for the contemporary heart. He introduces you to the cast of characters, explains their motivations, and provides the historical background needed to penetrate the wise lessons often hidden within these unusual narratives.

In learning how and why these oft-told tales were spun, you discover how they continue to hold value for our lives.

1 / Elijah the Prophet 1
2 / The Cast of Characters 13
3 / A Story Well Told Is Worth Retelling 31
4 / On Loan 40
5 / The Woman of Valor 48
6 / How a Boy Became a Rabbi 55
7 / Meanwhile Back at the Ranch 65
8 / Road Trip with Fireworks 74
9 / Anything He Can Do, I Can Do, Too 82
10 / I Had a Dream … I've Been to the Mountaintop 88
11 / Paradise Ain't All It's Cracked Up to Be 95
12 / The Siege 104
13 / Comic Relief 111
14 / The Rabbi Confronts Caesar, or the Three Wishes 118
15 / The Gnat’s Revenge 130
16 / Rainmaker 137
17 / Nicodemus and Buni—Uncensored! 146
18 / Rainmaker—The Sequel 157
19 / The Rabbis’ Rip Van Winkle 169
20 / Pretty Woman 1 and 2 176
21 / Pretty Woman 3, 4, 5 187
22 / The End: We Hope 196
Appendix 1: The Complete Texts 204
Appendix 2: Who’s Who 231
Glossary 235
Suggestions for Further Reading 239

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Jewish philosophy
• Judaism
• Religion
• Talmud

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 01 février 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781580235815
• Langue: English

Extrait

SAGE TALES
Wisdom and Wonder from the Rabbis of the Talmud

Rabbi Burton L. Visotzky
Sage Tales:
Wisdom and Wonder from the Rabbis of the Talmud
2011 Hardcover Edition, First Printing
2011 by Burton L. Visotzky
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information regarding permission to reprint material from this book, please mail or fax your request in writing to Jewish Lights Publishing, Permissions Department, at the address / fax number listed below, or e-mail your request to [e-mail] .
Grateful acknowledgment is given for use of the following: p. 22, Roman scale illustration, 2011 Leora Visotzky; p. 177, the Iudea Capta coin, Classical Numismatic Group, Inc., http://cngcoins.com (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File: Sestertius_-_Vespasiano_-_Iudaea_Capta-RIC_0424.jpg); p. 183, Roman matron with palla (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Matron_palla2a.jpg).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Visotzky, Burton L.
Sage tales: wisdom and wonder from the rabbis of the Talmud / Burton L. Visotzky. -2011 hardcover ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-58023-456-6 (hardcover)
1. Rabbis-Legends. 2. Jewish legends. 3. Talmud-Legends. 4. Talmud-Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title.
BM530.V57 2011
296.1'27607-dc22
2010053964
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Manufactured in the United States
Jacket design: Tim Holtz
Jacket art: Image- Ezra Reads the Law. Synagogue interior wood panel, Dura-Europos synagogue, Syria. Gill/Gillerman slide collection, adapted from Yale Divinity Digital Image and Text (commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: Ezra_Reads_the_Law_1.jpg). Curtains- iStockphoto.com/Billyfoto. Audience- Max Blain/Fotalia, modified by Tim Holtz.
For People of All Faiths, All Backgrounds
Published by Jewish Lights Publishing
A Division of Longhill Partners, Inc.
Sunset Farm Offices, Route 4, P.O. Box 237
Woodstock, VT 05091
Tel: [phone] Fax: [phone]
www.jewishlights.com
For David Daily with love Welcome to the family
Contents 1 / Elijah the Prophet 2 / The Cast of Characters 3 / A Story Well Told Is Worth Retelling 4 / On Loan 5 / The Woman of Valor 6 / How a Boy Became a Rabbi 7 / Meanwhile Back at the Ranch 8 / Road Trip with Fireworks 9 / Anything He Can Do, I Can Do, Too 10 / I Had a Dream I ve Been to the Mountaintop 11 / Paradise Ain t All It s Cracked Up to Be 12 / The Siege 13 / Comic Relief 14 / The Rabbi Confronts Caesar, or the Three Wishes 15 / The Gnat s Revenge 16 / Rainmaker 17 / Nicodemus and Buni-Uncensored! 18 / Rainmaker-The Sequel 19 / The Rabbis Rip Van Winkle 20 / Pretty Woman 1 and 2 21 / Pretty Woman 3, 4, 5 22 / The End: We Hope
Appendix 1: The Complete Texts
Appendix 2: Who s Who
Glossary
Suggestions for Further Reading

About Jewish Lights
Copyright
1 /
Elijah the Prophet
A third of a century ago, on the day I was ordained a rabbi, I went on a journey to save Jews from an oppressive government. I traveled to the city of Bukhara in the country of Uzbekistan, then part of the USSR. We had the name of a family there-let s call them the Goldbergs -who had applied for visas to depart the Soviet Union so they could move to Israel. But the Russian government refused them their visas and fired them from their jobs. My mission was to bring them blue jeans to trade on the black market so they could put food on their table, let them know they were not forgotten, and gather what information I could to help make their plight known to the Western world.
We had been carefully briefed before our trip not to get into a cab in front of our hotel. The intelligence was that the cabbies reported directly to the KGB and they would blow our cover. Instead, we set out on foot from our six-story hotel, which seemed to be the largest building in town, slowly sounding out the street names in Cyrillic script, looking for Ulitsa Zagorodnaya 8. Bukhara is an old silk-route town; it s been around more than a millennium, so its streets are not exactly on a grid. And although it was only the end of May, the temperature was 43 degrees Celsius (that s 110 degrees Fahrenheit)! To make matters worse, I was undercover, which meant I was without my yarmulke-my version of going commando. We got profoundly lost, wandering through the warren of winding lanes for an hour and more.
I was hot and thirsty, and my bald spot was bright pink. I gave up finding the address I was sent to visit and instead approached any and every passerby, asking in broken Russian where the hotel was. No reply. I showed them the hotel s card, conveniently given out at the front desk so a non-Russian or Uzbek speaker might stand a chance of finding his way home. No luck. It slowly dawned on me that no one would speak to me because I looked so conspicuously Western, maybe even Jewish. While I was on that trip, I was actually accosted in a posh St. Petersburg hotel by an old, hook-nosed Jew, who asked me in loud, shrill Yiddish, Du bist a Yid ? (Are you a Jew?). I m ashamed to say that after a terse reply, Wu den ? (What else?) I turned tail and fled. Maybe my Bukharan nightmare was comeuppance for my loss of nerve.
And then I saw a wizened old man dressed in a long, dusty, black caftan, carrying what looked to be a shepherd s crook. Gray beard down to his chest, he seemed as old as Bukhara itself. I approached him with the hotel card in my hand, but as I drew near to him found myself saying, Ulitsa Zagorodnaya? I didn t say the house number for two reasons. First, I couldn t count that high in Russian. Second, we were told to be vague about our destinations, lest we compromise the families we were trying to visit. With a brief nod, the old man signaled that we should follow him. In and out of the maze we went. He spoke now and then in what I assume was Uzbek, and I dutifully replied, ever so sagely in my limited Russian, Da, da, xorosho (Yes, yes, okay). I felt very James Bond, albeit the heat had left me feeling shaken, not stirred.
The old man stopped and with his staff, rapped on an arched wooden door. There, outlined faintly in chalk was the number 8. Was this the house we were looking for? Using mime, we gestured for the old man to stay put while we knocked on the door and stuck our heads in to ascertain that this was Ulitsa Zagorodnaya 8 and that the Goldbergs lived there. We stepped from the street into a scene right out of the Talmud: chickens pecking at the dust, children playing, a water pump, and a half-dozen shacks, which were the dwellings of the residents who shared the courtyard. We asked for Goldberg and were immediately informed, Da, da, xorosho . We had found the right place. The entire conversation took no more than twenty seconds. We popped back out into the street to thank our elderly guide; but he had vanished into the shimmering hot air! We looked down the street the way we had come. Not there. We looked the other way. Not there either. But we noticed that the street took a short dog s-leg bend, so we scurried down the road to see if our nice old man was yet there, just out of our sight lines. But he was gone, gone.
Perplexed, we went back to the arched doorway and peeked back inside. Through a bit more mime, a smattering of Russian, and a dash of dictionary work, we were made to understand that while the Goldbergs did live in the courtyard, they weren t there just at that moment. We were told to return in a few hours. I offered the hotel card in the hopes of getting directions back to the hotel, but the residents looked at me as if I were an idiot. I asked in bad Russian, Where Hotel X? At this point one of the children in the courtyard took me by the hand and led me down to the bend in the road. When we got to the exact place where we had sought in vain for the old man, the child pointed upward. There right in front of us was our hotel, not fifty yards away! We were dumbfounded. How was it possible that we had missed the street earlier? We were so close, and we were certain that we had read every street sign. We had. The small bend in the road had its own name, not Ulitsa Zagorodnaya. So we sounded out the Cyrillic script once more, this time in full, to be sure we would be able to find our way back to the Goldbergs later that day. The street was named Shchalomo Aleikhema, or as we would say in Hebrew or Yiddish, Shalom Aleichem ! Welcome to the Jewish neighborhood, coincidently right next door to our hotel.
As for our elderly guide, we were left wondering how he knew we were seeking door number 8. Perhaps it was obvious that the Western Jews were in Bukhara to visit the Goldbergs, who were already infamous for trying to leave for Israel and became refuseniks. Perhaps we were one of a stream of young Jewish visitors who made our way to that very street in Bukhara to offer assistance and hope. But, schooled in the stories of the ancient rabbis as I was, another possibility entered my head. Perhaps that old man was the biblical prophet Elijah, who much later in the Talmud appears to rabbis to help them perform good deeds and commandments. Maybe on my first week as a rabbi, I, too, had merited a visit from the legendary world traveler. It fit the pattern. Rabbi, on a mission to save Jews, seems doomed to failure. Elijah appears and leads him to the proper result. Shalom aleichem. Peace.
Elijah Stories
I am, of course, what my old English professor would have called an unreliable narrator. Although I will insist to you that I ve told the story exactly the way it happened, there are clues in the telling to let the careful reader know my memory is, shall we say, selective. First, it should set you on edge that I am the hero of my own narrative. I just can t be very reliable about that now, can I? And, I ve been c