Rabbi Harold Kushner’s son died of a genetic disorder at age 14 in 1977. Rabbi Kushner poured his grief into a book published in 1981 called When Bad Things Happen to Good People. The book sat on the New York Times best seller list for many months. Rabbi Kushner is highly respected. He co-authored the Conservative Movement’s official Torah commentary. Still, his explanation of evil is theologically controversial. At a very simplistic level, Rabbi Kushner argues that God cannot prevent terrible things from happening. In other words, Rabbi Kushner undercuts God’s omnipotence, which is a bedrock of traditional Jewish theology. Indeed, Jewish Mysticism teaches that we are all part of God’s unity and so is everything in the world. Of course, if you believe that God is omnipotent, then you still need to explain why a 14 year old dies of a genetic disease. Was the 14 year old actually evil? (Of course I don’t think that and I apologize to Rabbi Kushner for even writing it). Can we just not know why God does things? Was the teenagers’ death actually a blessing? A test of faith in God? All of these explanations are likely to ring hollow to someone who experiences a tragedy. Our Daf today dwells briefly on how we are to react when something truly bad befalls us.

Today’s Daf begins Chapter 9, the last chapter of Tractate Berakhot. Chapter 9 deals with prayers we say on specific occasions that are not part of our daily lives. For instance we learn the prayer we recite when we complete a dangerous journey or see a wonderous landscape. Like the previous chapter, chapter 9 gathers all the Mishnah’s to be discussed at the beginning of the chapter, rather than scattering them throughout the chapter as in Chapters 1-7. I sense that this was the miscellany chapter and there is a lot thrown in at the very beginning that the redactors of the Talmud wanted discussed, but could not find another logical place to put.

Our Mishnah begins with blessings we say in the following situations:

1. places where miracles were performed for the Jewish people;
2. places where idolatry was uprooted;
3. upon seeing natural phenomena like earthquakes, lightning, etc.;
4. upon seeing significant geographical features, like mountains, seas, rivers, etc.;
5. upon seeing the “Great Sea” (identity to be revealed later in the chapter);
6. upon receiving good tidings;
7. upon receiving bad tidings; and
8. upon buying a new house or new clothes.

At this point, we have an excursion about whether or not we say a blessing about things that happened in the past. The two examples given are we do not pray for a boy when we hear that our wife is pregnant and we do not pray that our house was not affected when we hear screaming in the city. It’s too late. These things have already happened and praying for a different outcome is moot at this point. Interestingly, the redactors knew that the sex of babies was determined at conception. Since they did not understand chromosomes, I am not sure how they knew this. I guess it goes without saying in Talmudic times that we would not pray for a girl.

The Mishnah then concludes with more miscellany, including:

9. prayers said upon entering and exiting a dangerous city;
10. why we say a prayer when something bad happens;
11. the proper behavior and dress for the Temple Mount;
12. the proper conclusion to blessings in the Temple; and
13. the requirement that we greet each other with the name of God (i.e., “May Hashem grant you peace”).

Before turning to the Gemara’s explanation of this list (and I do believe we will refer back to this list in all of the Daf’s of chapter 9), I want to focus on number 12 (the proper conclusion to blessings in the Temple). In the times of the Temple, blessings would conclude “until the World”. So, the standard blessing would have the standard formula, “Blessed are you, o Lord, our God, until the World . . .” Ezra and his colleagues changed the formulation to “from the World until the World.” Ezra and his colleagues did this in response to the Sadducees, which were a prominent sect of priests in the Second Temple era. The Sadducees only recognized the authority of the written law, not the oral law (i.e., the Mishnah and Gemara). Not surprisingly, the Rabbis of the Talmud (the source of oral law) consider them evil heretics. I should note that at one point the Sadducees were the dominant political and religious sect in Judaism, but they lost their power base when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 c.e. and the Rabbis of the Talmud supplanted them as the dominant belief in Judaism.

Surprisingly, in the written Bible their is no mention of an afterlife or a world to come. The Hebrew Bible contains hints and inferences, but the Bible does not rely on the rewards of an afterlife to justify suffering in this life. The Rabbis of the Talmud very much believe in a world to come. Accordingly, to fight the heresy of the Sadducees, Ezra instituted the formula in blessings of “from the World until the World” to indicate both this world and the world to come. Interestingly, Ezra is not mentioned in the actual text of the Talmud. The Schottenstein Edition indicates that Ezra was the source of this change. Professor Neusener’s translation, which is more literal, just says “they” instituted the change. Ezra predates the Sadducees by several hundred years. A note in the Schottenstein addition indicates that in Ezra’s time there were folks who maintained a similar philosophy as the Sadducees and the Mishnah just uses the term to identify the particular doctrinal thought. Indeed, in the Hebrew, the word “Sadducees” is definitely used. The debate demonstrates that reciting the proper words is as important to the Rabbis as the sentiment. Rabbinic Judaism is a religion of action as much as belief. The proper words said at the proper time in the proper place have been a focus of the entire Tractate Berakhot. Very little has been said about the actual intention or meaning of the physical actions.

The Gemara begins by investigating Item 1 from the Mishnah and its contours. Since the injunction is to recite a blessing at the place where miracles were performed for the collective Jewish people (e.g., the Red Sea), do we also say a blessing at a place where a miracle was performed for an individual? We then get a whole series of stories of Rabbis who were saved by a miracle from falling camels and other dangers and who recited blessings upon being saved. Since from this conduct we learn that we should bless a miracle that happens to an individual. Why then does the Mishnah only refer to miracles for the whole Jewish people? The Rabbis conclude that everyone is required to say a blessing at a place where a miracle was performed for the whole Jewish people, but only an affected individual has to bless an individual miracle.

The Gemara proceeds to list the places where a miracle was done for the Jewish people as a whole, which seems to imply that this is a closed list and there will be no future miracles for the Jewish people as a whole:

• the Red Sea – (Exodus 14:22 “The Children of Israel came within the sea on dry land; and the water was a wall for them, on their right and on their left.”);
• the river Jordan – (Joshua 3:17 “The Kohanim, the bearers of the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord, stood firmly on dry land, in the middle of the Jordan, all Israel crossing on dry land until the entire nation finished crossing the Jordan”);
• the Canyons of Arnon – (Numbers 21:14 “Therefore it is said in the Book of Wars of the Lord ‘Waheb in Suppah, and the wadis – the Arnon'”);
• the Stones of Elgavish in the Descent of Beis-Choron (more to come);
• the Stone Og wanted to throw at Israel (more to come);
• the Stone on which Moses sat during the War of Amalek (Exodus 17:12 “Moses’ hands grew heavy, so they took a stone and put it under him and he sat on it, and Aaron and Hur supported his hands, one on this side and one on that side, and he remained with his hands in faithful prayer until sunset.”);
• the pillar of salt which was formerly Lot’s wife (Genesis 19:26 “His wife peered behind him and she became a pillar of salt.”); and
• the walls of Jericho (Joshua 6:20 ” The people cried out and the Kohanim blew with shofars. It happened when the people heard the sound of the shofar that the people cried with a great shout: The wall fell in its place and the people went up to the city – each man straight ahead – and they conquered the city.”)

The Canyons of Arnon begs for further explanation. If you don’t understand the quotation from Numbers, don’t worry, the Rabbis of the Talmud are also confused. The Rabbis refer to a legend that two men afflicted by Tzaras (a spiritual disease that seems to be like herpes) were walking in the back of the Israelites in the desert. The Amorites decided to ambush the Israelites in the Canyons of Arnon by hiding in caves in the canyon walls. The Ark of the Covenant was travelling in front of the Jews and flattening mountains as it went, including the canyon walls. The two men with Tzaras at the back of the Jewish camp saw the rivers of blood. This explains the similarly cryptic verse of Numbers 21:15 “the outpouring of the rivers when it veered to dwell at Ar, and leaned against the border of Moab.”

The Rabbis have to engage in some interpretive gymnastics to explain the Stones of Elgavish. “Elgavish” is a place name, but when broken into its constituent syllables it means “for the sake of a man”. The Rabbis then note in places where Moses and Joshua are referred to as a man “ish“. For Moses, the Rabbis turn to Numbers 12:3 (“Now the man Moses was exceedingly humble, more than any person on the face of the Earth!”) For Joshua, the Rabbis refer to Numbers 27:18 (“God said to Moses, ‘Take to yourself Joshua son of Nun, a man in whom there is spirit and lean your hand upon him.”). Since we have proved by scripture that both Moses and Joshua were “Man”, what does the place name “For the sake of a man” mean? Moses in Exodus prays for the plague of hail to cease. In response, God stopped the hail and the rain did not reach the earth (Exodus 9:33). Later in Joshua 10:11, God threw these suspended stones on the Amorites who attacked the Jews. This part of the Talmud relies on a common method of homiletical exegesis. Find where a similar word (ish in this case) is used in different places and ask why the same word was used.

Og was a king of the Amorites who attacked the Jews during their sojourn in the desert. According to an oral tradition, Og lifted a mountain that he intended to throw on the Jews to kill them. God sent ants to the mountain and they bored a hole through the center. The mountain then fell around Og’s neck like a necklace. Og’s teeth then grew very long and prevented him from removing the necklace from his head. We know this from Psalms 3:8 (“Rise O Lord! Deliver me, O my God! For you slap all of my enemies in the face; You break the teeth of the wicked”). The Hebrew verb for “to break” can be re-vowleized (and remember Ancient Hebrew is written without vowels) to be “to extend”. We then have a brief digression about how tall Moses was, since Og was a giant. According to the Talmud, Moses was approximately 17.5 feet tall. There are a lot of stories about Moses’ height, but given the density of the material in this entry, I am going to come back to them at a later time.

The Gemara is confused why the pillar of salt that was formerly Lot’s wife is a miracle performed for the Jewish people. The Rabbis conclude that we thank God for saving Lot because of the merit of Abraham. Lot was wicked. He was saved because his uncle was a holy person. When we see the pillar of salt, we remember the holiness of Abraham that could save his wicked nephew.

The Gemara then asks who must give thanks for deliverance from dangerous situations:

• seafarers;
• wilderness travelers;
• survivors of illness; and
• ex-cons.

All of these situations are derived from Psalm 107. From the same Psalm, we derive that we must give thanks for these situations in a Minyan, with at least two of the Minyan being Torah scholars.

There was a lot packed into today’s Daf. Turning back to Rabbi Kushner’s dilemma, traditional Jewish thought believes bad fortune comes from God, just like good fortune. Therefore, when we hear of a tragedy, we are supposed to say, “Blessed is the true judge.” We may not know why God chose an outcome, all we need to know is we trust God’s judgment. I have a lot of problems with this explanation. After all, why do we have an obligation to repair the world, if God judges on a level I cannot understand? Also, why should I try to follow the commandments if I cannot understand God’s judgments. On the other hand, perhaps I don’t really want to understand tragedy. If I had a simple explanation of why bad things happen to good people, then perhaps I would be more willing to accept those bad things.