Here is one of the most beautiful, mysterious, and compelling source texts in Judaism. I learned this text from my longtime teacher Rabbi Natan Margalit at Organic Torah. The translation below is my own:
| Ben Azai was sitting and expounding [exegeting, finding meaning in the Torah] and there was fire around him. They [ben Azai’s fellow students] went out and said to Rabbi Akiva [their teacher]: Rabbi, ben Azai is sitting and expounding, and the fire is blazing around him. He [Akiva] went to his [ben Azai’s] house and said to him: I heard that you were sitting and expounding, and the fire was blazing around you! He said to him: Yes. He said to him: Perhaps you were engaged in the Chambers of the Chariot [a tightly restricted mystical practice]? He said to him: No, rather, I was sitting and rhyming [corresponding, making a song out of] the words of Torah, and from Torah to the Prophets, and from the Prophets to the Writings, and the words were as happy as when they were given at Sinai. And they were as mixed as when they were originally given. For was their original giving at Sinai not given in fire? This is according to the text (Deut. 4:11) And the mountain was burning with fire. |
בן עזאי היה יושב ודורש והאש סביבותיו. אזלון ואמרון לרבי עקיבא, ר’ בן עזאי יושב ודורש והאש מלהטת סביבותיו. הלך אצלו ואמר לו: שמעתי שהיית דורש והאש מלהטת סביבך! אמר לו: הן. אמר לו: שמא בחדרי מרכבה היית עסוק? אמר לו: לאו, אלא הייתי יושב וחורז בדברי תורה. ומתורה לנביאים, ומנביאים לכתובים, והיו הדברים שמחים כנתינתן מסיני, והיו ערבים כעיקר נתינתן. וכן עיקר נתינתן מסיני לא באש היו נתנין?! הדא הוא דכתיב: (דברים ד) וההר בוער באש. |
In this text, ben Azai, one of Rabbi Akiva’s outstanding students, finds the joy of the original revelation at Mt. Sinai by stringing biblical texts together in new juxtapositions. Several examples of this method appear in the shiurim which begin each chapter in Growth through Governance. The present shiur, for Chapter 10, is as good an example as any. To the extent that we derive new religious meaning from the citations of Hosea, Isaiah, Deuteronomy, Exodus, and the Song of Songs within (what I hope is) a topically coherent essay, the words of Torah come together for us in ways we haven’t seen before, and it is as if those shades of meaning were just now being revealed. I don’t claim to be a prophet; to the contrary, the revelation of Torah meanings never before heard by juxtaposing texts to make a point is very much what Jewish biblical study has been all about for 2,000 years. This method is called stringing pearls, after Song of Songs 1:10, on which our text above is a rabbinic commentary: “Your cheeks are lovely with circlets, your neck with pearls.” The word for “pearls,” or “beads,” in the verse is חרוזים/charuzim, which is from the same root as “rhyming,” חורז/chorez. The idea of topically “rhyming” one text with another, deriving new meanings from them, is likened to making a beautiful string of pearls.
When we derive new meaning from our texts in this way, the words are joyful — as joyful as when they first appeared. In our excerpt above, the fire seems really to be of the original fire on Sinai. It is alarming to ben Azai’s fellow students, who mistake it for something dangerous. Even the great teacher Rabbi Akiva is taken aback, apparently assuming that such intense spiritual energy could only be the result of restricted mystical practices. But the beauty of Jewish biblical study is that there’s nothing at all restricted or secret about stringing pearls. Everyone can do it, by juxtaposing passages from different parts of the Bible which together seem to support a point. In this way, stringing pearls leads to the discovery of new meanings that may never have been heard before, and those meanings are as joyful to be heard as the words were joyful to be heard on Sinai when they were given.
Another twist here in ben Azai’s reframing of the appearance of God in fire on Mt. Sinai. We might very well read Deuteronomy as yet another text establishing God as threatening, forbidding, dangerous, alien to human experience, more to be dreaded than loved, and at the same time fantastical, improbable, utterly supernatural. The great theologian Martin Buber could not believe in this, calling it a “sacrifice of intellect,” and rhetorically asking, “What meaning are we intended to find in the words that God came down in fire . . . ?” (“The Man of Today and the Jewish Bible,” 1948). Buber, in his essay, focuses on his disbelief in the reported supernatural event, and suggests we glean from it that the Sinai incident may have been due to a naturally occurring volcano. But I prefer ben Azai’s experience of beauty in the text to Buber’s speculative geology as an explanation of the fire of Sinai. (In 2015 I gave a paper at a Tel Aviv University conference critiquing Buber’s view.) Ben Azai’s fire is certainly special, it is definitely magical, but its magic is accessible to all of us when we gain new insights of meaning during Torah study.
For much more on stringing pearls, click over to Organic Torah and read some of Natan Margalit’s writing. Natan teaches on this topic every so often; those classes are worth experiencing.
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