Sacred Trash (9 page)

and in Israel receive your inheritance …

And finally, if not quite consciously, Schechter may well have been alluding to the concluding verses of that same chapter when Ben Sira himself speaks out as a scholar-sage or “man of letters” and identifies in the deepest fashion with Wisdom, saying:

I came out like a brook from a river,

like a water-channel into a garden.

I said, I will water my orchard

and drench my garden;

and lo, my brook became a river,

and my river became a sea.

I will make instruction shine like the dawn …

and leave it to all future generations.

Wisdom in this scheme links humankind—through the Torah—to the divine and the eternal. It is a presence that survives through the ages, surfacing here through the detritus of history. Rooted in the fear of God, it involves not so much unusual insight, or cleverness, but a teachable, practical sort of knowledge that hones the ability to choose between evil and good, and helps one navigate the ethical, spiritual, and wholly ordinary challenges of living. This late expression of it—the Book of Ben Sira—culminates, some twenty chapters further on, in a great catalog of biblical heroes and the moral lessons their lives embody. The curtain call of exemplars opens with lines taken up by the American writer James Agee, who applied them to powerful effect in the title of the book he began preparing in 1936 with photographer Walker Evans about gaunt, dirt-poor tenant farmers in Alabama—radically altering the polarity of Ben Sira’s verse in the process:

Let us now praise famous men

and our fathers in their generations.

The Lord apportioned to them great glory,

His majesty from the beginning.…

There are some that have left a name,

so that men declare their praise.

And there are some who have no name,

who have perished as though they had not lived.

The paean goes on to celebrate the ethos and extension of Jewish teaching—from Noah and Abraham and Jacob through Ezekiel, Nehemia, and Shimon Ben Yohanan (Simon the Righteous), the high priest of Ben Sira’s age, installed in the Temple and likened to the “cypress towering in the clouds” and other glories of Creation. The scholar-sage in this all-encompassing vision is an essential part of the continuum of Jewish history and of Wisdom’s work in the world.

While the sensitive Schechter was, then, responding viscerally to matters of style, it stands to reason that his passion was also being stoked by a more fundamental concern: “It is one of the great tragedies,” Schechter wrote in another context, “that modern Judaism knows itself so little.”

S
o much for Schechter’s nobler aspirations and his long-standing enmity toward the higher critics. What had most recently gotten his Ben Sira goat involved something much closer to home.

In 1889, David Samuel Margoliouth, the son of a missionizing Jewish convert to Anglicanism and a man of massive learning, which he would come to hide behind a stiff brush of a mustache and a cliff-like face, was appointed the Laudian chair of Arabic at Oxford. His inaugural lecture, based on a prizewinning dissertation he’d completed two years earlier, was called “The Place of Ecclesiasticus in Semitic Literature.” Margoliouth had been reluctant to go public with his dissertation, he said, because he “felt that there was some secret about Ecclesiasticus which had not yet been explained.” (Little did he know.) But now, he
announced, he had the key and so was ready to release his thoughts on Ben Sira to the world.

(
Photo Credit 3.3
)

Margoliouth’s lecture examined the question of textual authenticity in Ben Sira and concluded that the true nature of the lost Second Temple book is best reflected in the less-than-perfect mirror of the extant Greek and Syriac versions and, curiously, that a Hebrew
replica
could be worked up so as to provide scholars with a reliable sense of what the original Hebrew conveyed. And this he proceeded to do. He’d later claim that the original was not in fact “lost” but deliberately “destroyed,” which is what he suggests is the true meaning of the g-n-z root that gives us the word
geniza.
(Margoliouth was known for having what one writer has called “the kind of beautiful mind that could see patterns where none existed” and who instead of telling his dog to “ ‘Sit!’ … would order it to ‘Assume the recumbent position!’ ”) “It is a strange feeling,” he told his Oxford audience, “after reading some pages in illustration of a peculiar saying or expression to find that that saying or expression never existed.”

The “key” that led Margoliouth to the convoluted argument of his lecture was his realization that the language of Ben Sira was, in all probability, not the “classical” Hebrew of the Prophets, but rather a mongrel and quantitatively metrical sort of “post-biblical language,” incorporating “vulgar” Hebrew as well as elements of “Chaldean [Aramaic] and Syriac.” The replicated text, Margoliouth asserted, showed that there was in fact a huge gulf between the diction and syntax (and thought) of Ben Sira and that of “the grave of the Old-Hebrew and the Old-Israel.” While Margoliouth was by no means a higher—or for the most part even
a Bible—critic (he argued aggressively for revelation and held wholly distinct theories of dating), he shared Higher Criticism’s tendency to disparage postbiblical Judaism and to see in the history of Hebrew violent disjunction and decline rather than continuity and organic evolution. (“What a descent!” he calls it in another essay.) And in coming to his conclusions Margoliouth pointedly dismissed the many Hebrew passages of Ben Sira that appear in early midrashic literature, which he snidely referred to as “the whole rabbinic farrago.” Needless to say, Hebraic hackles were raised. For Schechter in particular, Margoliouth’s lecture amounted to the casting down of a gauntlet.

Margoliouth was Schechter’s foil in every way. Where Schechter was educated in patchwork if serious fashion in a variety of European institutions, including the yeshiva, hadn’t earned a doctorate, and was, as a non-Anglican, never granted a chair at Cambridge, Margoliouth, twelve years his junior, was an Orientalist whose prodigious learning (reflected in erudite publications examining texts in Persian, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Arabic, and Greek) earned him a prestigious professorship at Oxford and prize after prize—such that “he ceased to be quite human,” as one eulogist would put it. In Cambridge the impulsive Schechter worked away with an all-consuming, Hasidic zeal; at Oxford Margoliouth was known as a cold contrarian and serial debunker—of, for example, the authenticity of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry and the Elephantine Hebrew papyri. (“Never was a learned man less apt to wax enthusiastic over the value of learning,” observed Gilbert Murray, the well-known British classicist and translator.) And while Schechter sought throughout his life to demonstrate the unbroken line of Jewish vitality through the ages, Margoliouth saw Judaism through an apostate’s eyes, arguing for the relevance of Ben Sira not to Jewish continuity, but to the Greek New Testament.

A year after being appointed to his Cambridge post, Schechter published a pointed response to his Oxford colleague, though he mentions Margoliouth and his lecture only in passing. This study of rabbinical
quotations from Ben Sira was Schechter’s first published work as a lecturer at the university. His goal with the article was to show that Ben Sira may once have been included in the biblical canon; was not composed in meter; and that “the version of Ecclesiasticus known to the Rabbis was mostly written in pure Hebrew”—that is, Hebrew as it was used by a masterful writer of scripture in the second century
B.C.E
., not the motley pastiche of Margoliouth’s reconstructed passages, of which Schechter said: “I do not pretend to understand [them]. They are certainly not Hebrew.” Finding the original version of Ben Sira would, in other words, help Schechter build a case against both the likes of Margoliouth and the more properly Protestant higher critics, who were—obviously—still very much on his mind and under his skin.

In that early study, however, Schechter was working with only a handful of quotations scattered through numerous works and handed down from rabbi to rabbi. Now, bobbing up from the depths of history was a page from what appeared to be the work itself.

The find roused him to such a degree, then, because Schechter had from the start seen Ben Sira as a critical link in the chain of Jewish bequeathal through the ages—one that connected the
Beit haMikdash
(the House of the Shrine, or the Temple) to the
Beit haMidrash
(the House of Learning, a term that first appears in Ben Sira itself, though it didn’t yet denote a place of rabbinic study). That ancient house of learning was, Schechter believed, headed in spirit and possibly in fact by Ben Sira himself. Which is to say that already in Ben Sira’s day—with the Temple still standing and sacrifices being offered at its altar—young men were being taught the tradition of wisdom and ethics in an early form of the
Beit haMidrash.
So in a sense, the culture that we know as Judaism today has its foundations in that fragment passed on to Schechter by Agnes and Margaret. In any event, its relevance for Judaism as he was encountering it in England seems to have virtually leapt out at the uprooted Romanian, who—noting the social circumstances and educational ideals of the book, and its author’s sober assessment of
mortality—characterized Jewish life in Ben Sira’s time as “a world very much like ours.”

For one, there was the author’s grounded if not effortless attempt at absorbing elements of the surrounding Hellenistic society into his notion of Judaism. Wisdom in this Hellenized context meant “culture,” and what Homer and his poems were to the Greek notion of
paideia
(or the centrality of education in the formation of character), Moses and scripture were to the Jews (at least in Ben Sira’s “fantasy,” which is how one scholar has described his hymn to the tradition). Moreover, the “good” for Ben Sira included not only the moral good of a purer sort, but a proper appreciation, in both ethical and aesthetic respects, of the full range of life’s pleasures, subtleties, and trials: “What is life to a man without wine? / It was made to make men glad. / Drunk in season and temperately, / wine is … gladness of soul.… / A ruby seal in a setting of gold / is music at a banquet of wine.” Detailed and indeed still useful instruction is given about how to behave at such a banquet, or symposium. Apart from moderation in drink, the old are cautioned not to interrupt the music with their talk and not to show off their cleverness or erudition, and the young not to be presumptuous (“among the great, do not act as their equal”). More delicate problems are also addressed. The book is hardly calling for withdrawal from the world, notes one commentator: “[Ben Sira’s] godly man wears golden jewelry and bracelets on his right arm and appreciates meats and dainties. When invited as a guest, he should not greedily put his hand into the common dish. If, however, he should happen to overeat, he should leave the table, like a gentleman, and go elsewhere to vomit.” (Well, some of it involves a world like ours.)

Ben Sira’s consciousness of nature is also often utterly familiar and wonderfully concrete: “By His command He sends the driving snow / and speeds the lightnings of judgment. / Therefore the storehouses are opened, / and the clouds fly forth like birds.… The eye marvels at the snow’s whiteness, and the mind is amazed at its falling.” And moving
into an equally physical feel for the abstract, he writes: “A mind settled on an intelligent thought is like the stucco decoration on the wall of a colonnade.” At the same time the book’s defense of appropriate instruction betrays an underbelly of anxiety on the part of the author, who—his grandson the translator notes—composed the book “to help the outsiders” (Jews not trained in this tradition) gain access to these vital teachings. Their reputation as People of the Book notwithstanding, ordinary Jews of the early Hellenistic period absorbed scripture only at the remove of religious practice and through oral teachings passed down through the family. Torah readings were not part of the Temple service and the study of the Torah itself was reserved for specialists like Ben Sira and his pupils. And even Jewish intellectuals educated in the traditional texts were increasingly influenced by Greek-style learning. As another of the principal twentieth-century commentators on the book puts it: “These Jews [of Ben Sira’s period] had a gnawing, unexpressed fear that the religion of their ancestors was inadequate to cope with the needs of social and political structures that had changed enormously. To bolster the faith and confidence of his fellow Jews, Ben Sira published his book.”