by Rabbi Mishael Zion
In the still of night, two students carry the body of their beloved Teacher through the streets. The city – besieged, burned, starved, crazed – has turned in against itself, and seems to be on an unstoppable downwards spiral to destruction. Zealots guard the gates, preventing anyone from leaving – exit is betrayal. Feigning death is the key to redemption. Once outside the walls, the Teacher brushes aside the ruse of his demise and goes off to establish a new city, in which he will teach his students how to take things apart and put them together again. Old rituals will receive new meaning. Tradition will be deconstructed and rebuilt in an unrecognizable way.
————————-
The Bronfman Fellowships summer – which started this week for the 27th time – is an experience in storytelling: a few basic stories that aspire to infuse the 26 North American Bronfman Fellows with fresh metaphors, new horizons and novel pathways through which to understand themselves and their surroundings. One of the best such stories is the tale of Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakkai leaving Jerusalem in the heat of the revolt against the Romans.
As always on Bronfman, this is not a history lesson, rather an exploration of human responses to life, an investigation into the ways people and communities create and innovate in the face of crisis. On Tisha b’Av we remember and lament the destructions, those at the hands of our enemies and those at our own hands. But it is also a time to revisit the moment when a leader stepped out and stepped up, the “Ben Zakkai moment” of Tisha b’Av.
A “Ben Zakkai moment” is the moment in which one realizes that the new reality is not a mere obstacle to overcome, but rather an opportunity to re-think the categories around which our lives have been organized. Ben Zakkai uses the crises to catalyze a paradigm shift. In his case it required a break and a betrayal of old institutions and allegiances, and even collaboration with enemy forces. Ben Zakkai’s about-face panned out, earning him a place of honor in the pantheon of Jewish leadership.
We’re living in a time in which old institutions – corporate, communal and professional institutions – are crumbling and losing their relevance, while new technologies and fields of knowledge are retaking the stage, establishing a world of fluidity. “Yavnehs” are springing up all around us. It’s a time of Ben Zakkais. But specifically as this time we need not only those with the courage to step out, but also the ones with the resources to reconstruct.
Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai is often considered the founder of Talmudic thinking, raising the generation of students that created the “Torah of the Mouth” needed to keep the “Written Torah” vibrant and relevant in a post-Temple world. In Yavneh he worked to redefine the most basic categories of Judaism in a post-Temple reality.
As we seek to inspire today’s Ben Zakkais, the image of computer programmers and hackers come to mind. Though the term often elicits images of anarchists, as is the case with recent news coverage, the “Hacker ethic” seems to me a great definition of what Talmudic thinkers also strove to be about. Steven Levy in his book describes it as follows:
“Hackers believe that essential lessons can be learned about the systems – about the world – from taking things apart, seeing how they work, and using this knowledge to create new and even more interesting things. This is especially true when a hacker wants to fix something that (from his point of view) is broken and needs improvement.”
Hackers who are only about destroying and disrupting betray this ethic. But students who are taught only to succeed at tests and miss out on the joy of taking things apart for its own sake – will lack the skills to create the new and interesting things that we are in need of today.
As for Bronfman Fellows – it’s the spark in their eye they get when taking something apart and creating something new – which often sets them apart. For me, that’s the spark of a Talmudic frame of mind, the spark which Yohanan Ben Zakkai lit in his students so many centuries ago.
Rabbi Mishael Zion is Director of Education at the Bronfman Fellowships, where he oversees the education of new fellows in the Israeli and American fellowships, as well as works with the global alumni community of nearly 1,000. In 2013 he was named as one of 10 “Rabbis to Watch” by The Daily Beast/Newsweek and blogs regularly at Text and the City.
Top
Painting a picture of renewal born of destruction from within, surely related to ferocious (Roman) threats from without, Mishael has posed a great challenge to the BYFI Fellows. The charge to start afresh and re-invent is powerful and alluring. At the same time, while many leaders through the last 20 centuries have introduced, refashioned and breathed new life into expressions whose time to pass has come, fewer of those leaders were embers from an all-consuming fire as was the case with Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai. To the degree that the courage to refashion new language is modeled on him – stating of our era that “it’s a time of Ben Zakkais” – we may run the risk of confusing the challenge of timely, respectful dissolution due in part to creeping organizational irrelevance and the ever-present need for evolutionary change that only refines essential meaning, with radicalism born of internal and external destruction and despair. Fortunately the latter, Ben Zakkai’s context, is not ours. Creativity born of structure in the miracle that is the State of Israel is very different from salvaging a structure’s destruction.
I also wonder whether the “hacker” language – perhaps due to our own dulled sense a result of its ubiquity – may subtly reflect let alone fashion a questionable ethic. Mishael grants that its destructive element is to be derided, but leaves open the possibility of learning from the genius of this activity. But “to hack” often implies an assault from the outside on someone else’s domain (“to hack into X”). To glorify said process in the pursuit of knowledge is to worship utopian ends while sacrificing moral boundaries. The Midrash Halachah on Leviticus 19:11 highlights in great detail that whatever the reasons for entering another’s domain and taking something from it (from “just kidding” to “it was mine in the first place” to “I will compensate you manifold”), they are all unjustifiable in the face of the stark, etnachta-rooted declaration of “one may not steal”. Is there a model of equally exciting and compelling knowledge acquisition, of whittling things down to their component parts and distilled essences, necessary to drive creativity and success, that need not access the imagery of a “hacker”?
The BYFI Fellows have proven over the decades to be a rich source of leadership for the Jewish community. Stepping up to that plate, modeled perhaps on Moses who felt the charge to take a stand when others turned away, and modeled on the deep tradition of forever-revisiting Torah (turning it over, and over, and over again – looking for a way in which its secrets can then be revealed in their kaleidoscopic brilliance and appeal) may be no less apt a framing for renewal than hacking might inadvertently imply. That perhaps can more wholesomely drive the “spark in their eye” that Mishael speaks of, and for which we all are indebted to him.