Kiddushin 7a ~ Does Marriage Make You Happier?

קידושין ז, א

אמר ריש לקיש: טב למיתב טן דו מלמיתב ארמלו

Resh Lakish said: It is better for a woman to live as tad du than to live alone...

In a 1975 lecture to the Rabbinical Council of America, Rabbi J.B. ("the Rav") Soloveitchik,  quoted the aphorism of Resh Lakish found in today's page of Talmud.  The Rav went on to explain that it was "based not upon sociological factors...[but] is a metaphysical curse rooted in the feminine personality. This is not a psychological fact; it is an existential fact." Wow.  Is this statement of Resh Lakish really an existential fact? To answer this, we need to first answer another question - what do his words actually mean?

One way to understand the aphorism is as follows:  "A widow would rather live in misery than live alone." But that's not the only translation, which depends on the exact meaning of the Aramaic phrase טן דו (tan du).  There are a number of possibilities.

Rashi

Let's start with Rashi and his explanation to our text:

בגופים שנים בעל ואשתו ואפילו אינו לה אלא לצוות בעלמא

Tan Du: Two bodies. A husband and wife; even if he is nothing more to her than company.

This explanation of Rashi's does not suggest that married misery is preferred over a single life. This is a slightly different explanation that Rashi gave in when we met this phrase in Yevamot.

טן דו - גוף שנים. משל הדיוט הוא, שהנשים אומרות טוב לשבת עם גוף שנים משבת אלמנה

Tan Du: Two bodies. This is a common maxim, for women say that it is better to live as two than to live alone.

So according to Rashi in both Yevamot and here in Kiddushin, Resh Lakish never addresses living in misery. He just made the observation that women prefer marriage over a single life.

JASTROW'S DICTIONARY

Not so Marcus Jastrow, whose dictionary (published 1886-1903) became a classic reference text for students of the Talmud. Jastrow translated טן דו as a load of grief, an unhappy married life. This will become very important later, so make note. 

THE SONCINO TRANSLATION

Moving on, the Soncino translation of Kiddushin (first published in 1966) echoes Jastrow's translation: "It is better to carry on living with trouble than to dwell in widowhood".  This is similar to the Soncino translation of the same phrase when found in Yevamot 118: "It is preferable to live in grief than to dwell in widowhood." However, a footnote to the text in Yevamot notes that "Levy compares it with the Pers., tandu, two persons." (The reference here is to Jacob Levy's  German Dictionary Chaldisches Worterbuch uber die Targumim - Aramic Dictionary of the Targums and a Large Part of Rabbinic Literature.) Why did Isidore Epstein, editor of the Soncino Talmud, choose to use Jastrow's translation over that of Levy - and that of Rashi? Answering that will take us too far off track, so we will leave it for another time... 

MELAMED'S ARAMAIC-HEBREW-ENGLISH DICTIONARY

Melamed's Aramaic-Hebrew-English Dictionary (Feldheim: Jerusalem 2005) follows Rashi : "טן דו = two bodies." 

THE ARTSCROLL TRANSLATION

The ArtScroll Schottenstein Talmud basis its translation on Rashi: "It is better to live as two together than to live alone." However a footnote (note 18) brings its meaning closer to that of Jastrow and the Soncino: "I.e it is better to be married  - even to a husband of mediocre stature - than to remain single." 

THE KOREN STEINSALTZ TRANSLATION

In his Hebrew translation of the Aramaic text found in Yevamot 118, Rabbi Steinsaltz follows Rashi, and translates  טן דו as "two bodies." A side note points out that the true origin of the phrase is not known, though it likely comes from Persian.

The newer English Koren Talmud follows the same translation: "It is better to sit as two bodies, ie., to be married, than to sit alone like as a widow. A woman prefers the any type of husband to being alone."  Elsewhere in the Koren series, (Yevamot 118a) there is a note, (written by Dr. Shai Secunda), which is more definitive than the Hebrew note. Tan Du is from middle Persian, meaning together.  It's nothing to do with being miserable.

TESHUVOT HAGE'ONIM

I've left perhaps the strongest textual witness for last: how the words Tan Du were understood during the period of the Geonim (c. 589-1038). In 1887 Avraham Harkavy published a collection of responsa from this period that he found in manuscripts held in the great library of St. Petersburg. In this collection is a reference to our mysterious words:

  טן דו בלשון פרסי שני בני אדם. ארמלו יחידות 

טן דו in Persian means two people. ארמלו means alone.

Chronologically, this is our earliest source, and, therefore, perhaps our most compelling. Case closed.

VARIATIONS OF THE RESH LAKISH RULE

So far we have the following four versions of what we will now call the Resh Lakish Rule:

It's better for a woman to be...

• ....married and unhappy than single  (Jastrow)

• ...in a less desirable or mediocre marriage than no marriage at all (ArtScroll footnote).

• ...miserable and married than to be a widow (Soncino).

• ...with a husband than to be alone (ArtScroll, Koren, Melamed, Rashi, Teshuvot Hage'onim)

WHAT IF TAN DU MEANS MISERABLE?

It seems that the translation of  טן דו as miserable originated with Jastrow, and that those who translate Resh Lakish as saying "misery is better than being single" are following in the Jastrow tradition. If we were to evaluate the Resh Lakish Rule per Jastrow (and Soncino and an ArtScroll footnote), the question is, what, precisely, constitutes  a "miserable marriage"? One in which the woman feels physically safe but emotionally alone? One in which her husband loves her dearly but is  unable to provide for her financially? Or one in which she has all the money she needs but her husband is an alcoholic? Tolstoy has taught us that each unhappy family (and presumably each miserable marriage) is unhappy in its own unique way. The point here is not to rank which is worse. 

“[In the 1950s, a] bad marriage was usually a better option for a woman, especially if she had a child, than no marriage at all.”

— Stephanie Coontz. Marriage, A History.Viking 2005. p288

Today it would be utterly silly (and incredibly rude and insulting) to suggest that a woman is better off miserable than single.  But after our review, that does not appear to be what Resh Lakish ever said.  What he really said was this: a woman would be better off (טב) married than living alone (as a widow). Resh Lakish didn't explain what he meant by better off, so we will have to assume that what he meant was a measure of overall well-being, or what we call... happiness. What we want to know, is how this understanding of Resh Lakish stands up today. Was Rabbi Soloveitchik correct when he called this "an existential fact"?

MEASURING HAPPINESS & HAPPINESS INEQUALITY

Happiness inequality exists and has been well documented. University of Pennsylvania economists Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, (who live together, but not within the bonds of marriage), note that

“...the rich are typically happier than the poor; the educated are happier than those with less education; whites are happier than blacks; those who are married are happier than those who are not; and women—at least historically—have been happier than men.”

But why is this so? Don't we all oscillate around a set point of happiness, regardless of what life may throw at us? Some psychologists think so.

LOTTERY WINNERS & ACCIDENT VICTIMS: THE SET POINT THEORY OF HAPPINESS

According to the set point theory of happiness, we all revolve around our own, innate happiness point. When we are faced with adversity, we do, to be sure, become sadder. But we eventually bounce back to where we were before, back at our set point. Similarly, when met with some good mazal, we are, for a period, more happy. But then we return to our innate set point for happiness, wherever that was prior to the good fortune. The evidence for this comes from a classic study which found that "lottery winners were not much happier than controls" and that accident victims who were paralyzed "did not appear nearly as unhappy as might have been expected." (The problem is that this study used a tiny sample - there were only 22 lottery winners and 29 paralyzed accident victims - so we need to be very cautious in generalizing from it.) 

Married people are – on average – happier than those who are single, but perhaps this fact does not suggest causation. Some would argue that it's just a correlation. A grumpy person, unable to hold down a job and miserable to be around, is not likely to find another individual willing to marry him. So it’s not that marriage makes you happier –it’s that happier people are more likely to find a partner and get married. According to this set point theory of happiness, the Resh Lakish Rule would not be supported, since the act of marrying would have no overall long-term effect on happiness.

THE MORE IS BETTER THEORY OF HAPPINESS

However, evidence from a 15 year longitudinal study of 24,000 people suggests that "marital transitions can be associated with long-lasting changes in satisfaction."  This would support the claim that marriage is causally related to happiness. It's not that you went from being a happy person who was once single to being a similarly happy person who is now married. What actually happened was that the marriage had an effect on just how happy you became.  And data from other large cohort studies show that happiness increases when people marry. Just look at the happiness of women by marital status in the figure below. Was Resh Lakish onto something?

Mean happiness of women by marital status, birth cohort of 1953-1972, from ages 18-19 and 28-29. From Easterlin, RA. Explaining Happiness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2003. 100 (19): 11176-11183.

All this supports the Resh Lakish Rule that people are happier when they are married. (I say people because all the evidence applies equally to men too.) But we can get even more specific, because Resh Lakish used the word ארמלא, which most likely means widowed (and hence has a secondary meaning of being alone). There is actually data that applies to this more specific Resh Lakish claim about widows, and it comes from The Roper Center at the University of Connecticut. 

From Economics and Happiness, ed Bruni L. Oxford University Press 2005.

As shown in the table, 62% of women who are widowed want to be happily married.  (Of course this also means that about 40% of widowed women would rather not be married -  even happily. That’s a huge proportion. Still, the overall finding still supports the Resh Lakish Rule.) The women's perspective is the most important perspective in this conversation, and when women (widows) were asked, most wanted to be married again. Widows indeed wish to live as two rather than live alone. I don't think this amounts to anything like an existential fact, as claimed by the Rav. But the evidence from the social sciences would certainly support the Resh Lakish Rule.

What's Love Got To Do With It?

Today we will end our study of Ketuvot. This tractate addresses, in the words of the Koren Talmud, "matters that constitute the relationship between husband and wife: Conjugal relations, mutual obligations, and monetary arrangements between them. In a general sense it addresses the entirety of marital life."   Except it doesn't. There's one rather important part of the entirety of marital life that is not addressed at all. Love.  So as we turn the last page of Ketuvot, now is a good time to ask: what happened to that crazy little thing called love? 

LOVE IN KETUVOT

How often does the word "love" appear in Ketuvot, a tractate about the obligations of a husband towards his wife (and some of her obligations too)?  For those who've learned it as part of Daf Yomi, how often did you come across the word? For those who have not learned it, how often would you guess it appears in a talmudic volume of 112 pages? And you can't count the name of רב אדא בר אהבה - (though his name appears thirteen times).

I counted, and the answer is....six. Just six. (And don't look to מסכת קידושין for help. Love, or one of its conjugates appears there twenty-four times. Only one was in the context of spousal love - and that was a quote from משלי 9:9.) Here then, are the appearances of "love" in מסכת כתובות:

1-2.  Two of them are a quote from the ברכות  recited at the wedding.

(שמח תשמח ריעים האהובים and דיצה חדוה אהבה ואחוה)

3. One is used in conjunction with the choice of the method of judicial execution 

(דף מ: ואהבת לרעך כמוך ברור לו מיתה יפה)

4. One is used to claim that women prefer jewelry to wine 

דף סח: אלכה אחרי מאהבי נותני לחמי ומימי צמרי ופשתי שמני ושקויי! דברים שהאשה משתוקקת עליהן, ומאי נינהו? תכשיטין

5.  One is a quote from  משלי א, to claim that the study of Torah protects the scholar against a weird parasitic disease. 

(דף עז: "אילת אהבים ויעלת חן" - אם חן מעלה על לומדיה, אגוני לא מגנא)

6. The final mention of love is a quote from the Torah (דברים ל)  to prove that marrying your daughter to a תלמיד חכם (or going into business with such a person) is a sign of loving God.

דף קיא: לאהבה את ה' אלהיך ולדבקה בו ... כל המשיא בתו לתלמיד חכם, והעושה פרקמטיא לתלמידי חכמים, והמהנה תלמידי חכמים מנכסיו, מעלה עליו הכתוב כאילו מדבק בשכינה

So all in all, love is kinda absent. But should we be surprised by this?

A (REALLY BRIEF) HISTORY OF THE INSTITUTION OF MARRIAGE

As the historian Stephanie Coontz points out in her fascinating book, for most of history, marriage was not primarily about individual needs. Instead it was about "getting good in-laws and increasing ones's family labor force."  In ancient Roman society "something akin to marriage was essential for the survival of any commoner who was not a slave...A woman needed a man to do the plowing.  A man needed a woman to spin wool or flax, preserve food, weave blankets and grind grain, a hugely labor-intensive task." Marriage was essential to survive. So it comes as no surprise that historically, love in marriage was seen as a bonus, not as a necessity. In many societies (including that described in the Talmud), a woman's body was the property first of their fathers, and then of their husbands. A woman had to follow, as Confucious put it, the rule of three obediences: "while at home she obeys her father, after marriage she obeys her husband, after he dies she obeys her son."  

This pattern existed for centuries. Here's a rather graphic, but certainly not isolated example.  In the 1440s in England, Elizabeth Paston, the twenty-year old daughter of minor gentry, was told by her parents that she was to marry a man thirty years her senior. Oh, and he was disfigured by smallpox.  When she refused, she was beaten "once in the week, or twice and her head broken in two or three places." This persuasive technique worked, and reflected a theme in Great Britain, where Lord Chief Baron Matthew Hale  declared in 1662 that "by the law of God, of nature or of reason and by the Common Law, the will of the wife is subject to the will of the husband." Things weren't any better in the New Colonies, as Ann Little points out (in a gloriously titled article "Shee would Bump his Mouldy Britch; Authority, Masculinity and the Harried Husbands of New Haven Colony 1638-1670.) The governor of the New Haven Colony was  found guilty of "not pressing ye rule upon his wife." 

“Marriage was not fundamentally about love. It was too vital an economic and political institution to be entered into solely on the basis of something as irrational as love.”

— Stephanie Coontz 2005. Marriage, a History, p7.

Coontz concludes that marriage for political and economic advantage was the norm for some five thousand years, and only started to change in the eighteenth century. And throughout, the husband was the owner of his wife. Love had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

““For most of recorded history, people married for logical sorts of reasons: because her parcel of land adjoined yours, his family had a flourishing business, her father was the magistrate in town, there was a castle to keep up, or both sets of parents subscribed to the same interpretation of a holy text. And from such reasonable marriages, there flowed loneliness, infidelity, abuse, hardness of heart and screams heard through the nursery doors. The marriage of reason was not, in hindsight, reasonable at all; it was often expedient, narrow-minded, snobbish and exploitative.

”

— Alain de Botton. Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person. The New York Times, May 29, 2015.

It is with this historical perspective that the attitudes of the rabbis in Ketuvot (and in the Talmud in general) should be judged.  Marriage was an economic arrangement, and so it required economic regulation.  For example (and there are dozens,) the Mishnah ruled that a widow may sell her late husband's property in order to collect the money owed to her in the ketuvah without obtaining the permission of the court.  This leniency was enacted, (according to Ulla) "משום חינה" - so that women will view men more favorably when they understand that the ketuvah payment does not require the trouble of going to court. Consequently (and as Rashi explains) women will be more inclined to marry. Which leaves the reader to wonder just for whom this law was really enacted. 

““Jews and Asians in their home cultures used arranged marriages, in which overt economic bargaining and kinship networks beyond the marrying pair played acknowledged parts....Chinese and Japanese parents regularly took the decisive part in arranging marriages for their children...often well in advance of the marriage date. These traditions did not ignore considerations of affection and sexual satisfaction, but considered them alongside economic and family stability.”

— Nancy Cott. Public Vows. A History of Marriage and the Nation. Harvard University Press 2008. 149-150.

LOVE, ACTUALLY

It is also with this historical background that the exceptions should be noted. Like the earliest record of love as a reason to marry, found in Bereshit 29:18. "ויאהב יעקב את רחל" - "Jacob loved Rachel" and for this reason he agreed to work in Laban's house for seven years, which "seemed to him but a few days because of his love for her."  

And then there's this odd exception, found where you'd least expect it - in Rashi's discussion on Ketuvot 86b. There, the Talmud is discussing when a husband can make his wife - who is acting as his business manager  - swear that she has not taken anything of his.  The Talmud puts limits on a husband's suspisions that his wife is embezzling him, and she may claim: כיון דקדייקת בתראי כולי האי, לא מצינא דאדור בהדך – "since you are checking up on me to this degree, I can no longer live with you." This seems to be a fair: when one business partner has an unreasonable degree of suspicion about another, the partnership should be ended. But Rashi's explanation of this phrase adds in the aspect of love - or rather, a lack of it:

וקא דייקת בתראי - אינך אוהב ומאמין אותי ולא מצינא דאידור בהדך

Since you are checking up on me: [She claims that] you don't love or believe me - so I can no longer live with you.

Rashi's explanation suggests (at least as far as he understood marriage), love was, if not essential, then certainly highly desirable.  Without a wife feeling loved and trusted, the marriage is in deep trouble.  

Today of course, most of us believe that love is the only reason to marry. Economics should have nothing to do with it. And although this is a thoroughly modern (and western) idea, if you look carefully, soft echoes of it can be heard in our tradition. Although love has almost nothing to do with marriage in Ketuvot, it is in fact mentioned near the start of the tractate. There, we learn that seven blessings - שבע ברכות – are said for a week after the wedding. And in the text of the sixth of these blessings, the bride and groom are called "beloved companions" -ריעים האהובים -  or as Rashi explains it, "companions who love each other." 

The Business of Marriage

We should not judge the Talmud's business-like approach to the institution of marriage, because for thousands of years, and for the vast majority of those who entered into it, that's all it was. Business. One aspect of the business is even codified in the more recent Arukh Shulkhan, written by by Yechiel Michel Epstein (1829–1908). It is a commentary on the Shulkhan Arukh, the Code of Jewish Law, and was first published between 1884–1893:

ערוך השולחן אבן העזר סימן ב

אבל אם נושא אשה כשירה לשם ממון שאלמלא ממונה היה נושא אחרת אין בזה עון ואדרבא ראוי לעשות כן אם הוא ת”ח דעי”ז לא יצטרך להיות טרוד הרבה בענייני העולם וכן נוהגין אנשים ישרים ליקח ת”ח לבתו וליתן לה ממון הרבה ולהחזיקו על שולחנו כמה שנים שישב וילמוד ואין לך מצוה רבה מזה ובשכר זה מצליחים בעסקיהם

If a man married an upstanding woman just for her money - and if she did not have that money, he would choose to marry another woman - this is not a sin. On the contrary, if the man is a wise scholar (talmid hakham) it is good to do this, for by doing so he no longer needs to be focussed on business matters. Indeed, this is exactly how many upstanding fathers acted, and took a scholar to marry their daughter, and gave her a large sum of money. This would support the scholar for several years, during which time he could sit and learn, and there is no greater mitzvah than this. And in the merity of this he will be successful in his business ventures…

But western society has changed its beliefs about the nature of marriage, and so have we.  Still not convinced? Then answer this. Did your parents marry for love or money? If you are married - did you marry for love or for economic advancement (and how did that work out)? If you are not married, but want to be, what is driving you? The search for the love of your life, or the search for physical security? And if you have children - or grandchildren, would you want them to marry because they loved their significant other, or because it would be a good way to unite two families and ensure financial stability? If your answers were like mine, they were closer to contemporary secular values about marriage than they were to the models of marriages described in Ketuvot. And that's probably a very good thing.

  תם ולא נשלם, וברוך משדך שידוכים בעולם

NEXT TIME ON TALMUDOLOGY: HELIOTHERAPY.

Shekalim 14 ~ Love of The Other, The Drowned Duke, and Two People named Pinchas

On this page of Talmud we read about the miraculous recovery of a young lady who had drowned. It all begins with “a certain pious man who would dig pits, wells, and caves to collect water for passersby. Once his daughter was passing over a river for the purpose of marriage, and the river washed her away. And all the people came to console him, but he refused to accept their condolences.” The story continues:

שקלים יד, א

עָאַל רִבִּי פִינְחָס בֶּן יָאִיר לְגַבֵּיהּ בָּעֵי מְנַחַמְתֵּיהּ וְלָא קִבֵּל עֲלוֹי מִתְנַחֲמָה. אֲמַר לוֹן. דֵּין הִינּוֹ חָסִידֵיכוֹן. אָֽמְרִין לֵיהּ. רִבִּי. כָּךְ וְכָךְ הָיָה עוֹשֶׂה וְכָךְ וְכָךְ אִירַע

אָמַר. אֵיפְשַׁר שֶׁהָיָה מְכַבֵּד אֶת בּוֹרְאוֹ בַמַּיִם וְהוּא מְקַפְּחוֹ בַמַּיִם. מִיַּד נָֽפְלָה הֲבָרָה בָעִיר. בָּאָת בִּתּוֹ שֶׁלְאוֹתוֹ הָאִישׁ. אִית דְּאָֽמְרִין. בְּשׁוּכְתָּא אִיתְעֲרִײַת. וְאִית דְּאָֽמְרִין. מַלְאַךְ יָרַד כִּדְמוּת רִבִּי פִינְחָס בֶּן יָאִיר וְהִצִּילָהּ

Rabbi Pinchas ben Yair came to visit him to console him, but he refused to accept condolences even from Rabbi Pinchas. Rabbi Pinchas said to the people of that community: Is this your righteous man, who will not be consoled and accept God’s judgment? They said to him: Rabbi, he would perform such and such acts of righteousness, by supplying water, and yet such and such tragedy, the drowning of his daughter, occurred to him.

Rabbi Pinchas said: Is it possible that he honors his Creator with water, and yet his Creator strikes him with water? Immediately thereafter, a report spread throughout the city: The daughter of that righteous man has arrived, as she did not actually drown. Some say she grasped a branch and pulled herself out of the river, and some say an angel in the form of Rabbi Pinchas ben Yair descended from heaven and rescued her.

It is a sad story with a happy ending. God could never let the daughter of a righteous person die. That was inconceivable. And certainly not by drowning, since her father was charitable with water. Let’s put aside for now the questions this passage raises about theodicy. Instead, let’s turn to another drowning event that occurred fifteen-hundred years later. It too involves the drowning death of innocent person, and by a remarkable coincidence, also involved a person named Pinchas.

Pinchas Hurewitz and his Sefer HaBerit

In 1797 a new Hebrew encyclopedia was published anonymously in Brno, which is now in the Czech Republic. It was called Sefer Haberit (The Book of the Covenant). It has a simple structure and is divided in two parts.  The first part, consisting of some two hundred and fifty pages, is a scientific encyclopedia, addressing what the author calls human wisdom (chochmat adam) and focuses on the material world. It deals with topics like geography, astronomy, biology and medicine. The second part, shorter than the first at only one hundred and thirty pages, is an analysis of divine wisdom (hochmat elohim), and focuses on the spiritual.  This part was written to explain a kabbalistic work called שערי קדושה (The Gates of Holiness) a mystical book written by the famous kabbalist Chaim Vital, who was himself a student of the even more famous Isaac Luria, known as the Ari.  

As we mentioned, the book was published anonymously, but in later editions the author revealed his name, though not much else. It was Pinchas Hurwitz, about whom few details are known. He appears to have been born in Vilna, Poland in 1765, and received a traditional Jewish education, but was forced to leave his studies at an early age as a result of both the dire economic situation and the physical threats then facing Polish Jewry.  He probably arrived in Frankfurt before his twentieth birthday and while there he met a number of maskilim and picked up a working knowledge of German. He then moved to Holland, where he must have endeared himself to many rabbinic leaders, before crossing to England, where again he met the leading Jewish religious intellectuals of the day. The most prominent of these was Eliakim Gottchalk Hart, an important Jewish intellectual and a wealthy jeweler, who provided financial support for Hurwitz during his time in England. Despite what appears to have been a comfortable time both physically and intellectually in London, for reasons that are not known Hurwitz returned to Poland, all the time working on his magnum opus.  In 1797 he finally published Sefer Haberit anonymously, and spent many years peddling his work from town to town.  It had taken a decade of travel and research, but Hurwitz understood the need of the hour and produced a work that was, and would remain, in great demand.

The Popularity of Sefer Haberit

In 1934, while studying at the famous yeshiva of the  Chofetz Chaim in Radon, Poland, a yeshiva bochur whose name is only known to us as Henech entered a competition in which he wrote an essay about his life. Here is part of what this twenty one year old student had to say:

I obtained a copy of the Book of the Covenant [Sefer Haberit]…and virtually committed it to memory, reading it in the bathroom for fear of being caught and confronted with a whole new series of accusations.  The Book of the Covenant gave me a sound foundation in anatomy, physics, geography and the like.  I had a weakness, however, for showing off my scientific learning to my friends (without telling them about its source). This led to my becoming known as a person of wide-ranging knowledge, and I was sought after by those who were drawn to the Haskalah.

Here then is testimony about the popularity Sefer Haberit as a work of science in pre-war Poland, over one hundred and thirty years after it was first published.  This book is still readily available modern Jerusalem. I bought my own modern edition of Sefer Haberit in a small bookshop in Meah Shearim in Jerusalem.  I had asked the owner if he might perhaps have a copy of the work.  Without moving from his position behind the counter he reached behind his shoulder and handed me a copy that had been published in Jerusalem in 1990. I not only appreciated the clear type and crisp pages of this modern edition, but was struck by the ease with which it had been obtained. 

In fact since it first appeared in 1797 Sefer Haberit has been published in over thirty editions. It was published in 1797, 1801 (twice, as bootlegged printings), 1807, and thirteen more times before the end of that century. It was published in 1900, 1904, 1911, 1913 (by three different publishers), 1920, 1960 and 1990. In addition it was published in Yiddish in 1898, 1929 and 1969, and in Ladino in 1847. This remarkable print run would be the envy of any modern author.

Isaac Bashevis Singer recalled that not only did he read Sefer Haberit as a child, but that his mother also was an avid reader of the work.

There were a number of holy books in my father’s bookcase in which I soulght answers to my questions.  One was The Book of the Covenant [Sefer Haberis] which I believe was already at that time a hundred years old and full of scientific facts.  It described the theories of Copernicus and Newton, and, it seems, the experiments of Benjamin Franklin as well.  There were accounts of savage tribes, strange animals, and explanations of what made a train run and a balloon fly.  In the special section dealing with religion were mentioned a number of philosophers. I recall that Kant already figured in there too.  The author, Reb Elijah of Vilna, a pious Jew, proved how inadequate the philosophers were in explaining the mystery of the world.  No research or inquiry, he wrote, could reveal the truth.  The author of The Book of the Covenant  spoke of nature too, but with the constant reminder that nature was something God had created, not a thing that existed of its own power.  I never tired of reading this book.

Sefer Haberit and LOve of the Other

Perhaps the most important section of this entire book is a long chapter – some 50 pages in all - called אהבת רעים – Ahavat Reim - The Love of Others.   In this section, Horowitz set out to re-teach a command that is, in his words עיקר דרך הקדוש ושורש כל התורה הקדושה - the entire point of attaining holiness and the foundation of the entire holy Torah.  In fact this section follows another called דרך הקדוש- The Way of Holiness, and was seen as the key to attaining religious heights that Horowitz had previously described. In this chapter he described a number of ways in which love of the other impacts our daily lives: in loving our families and in respecting the government, in being a model citizen and not cheating on our taxes, in treating our workers with the appreciation they deserve and by condemning domestic abuse, whether physical or verbal. 

The nature of loving others is for a person to love every kind of person, irrespective of their nationality or  language, but simply because the person is a human, formed in the image of God, and is someone involved in the development of humanity.  This involvement can be as a builder or farmer or businessman or merchant or or other kinds of job, like one who is an intellectual and investigate the world…for through these paths the world exists as it should, and is completed as God created it to be done, and as he made the Earth as “he saw that it was very good” for all of humanity…

 The Drowning Death of Prince Leopold

As any good teacher knows, stories have a far greater teaching impact than bland statements or impersonal statistics. So Horowtiz now gave an example of the importance of brotherly love. It was in fact the outstanding story of love of the other of his time, and it concerned the drowning death of Prince Leopold that had occurred in 1785. Here it is. Read it slowly. There is a lot to appreciate.

The question is whether we are naturally inclined to help others.  In answer to this, if we consider the nature of a person we will find that it is naturally inclined and desires to do good in the eyes of others, and tries to influence others to do so too; to have compassion on the poor, to rescue the oppressed, to release those who are imprisoned, to bandage the wounded , to heal the sick, to save those who are dying, share his knowledge with others, to teach students and instruct people in the correct way to behave and so on…

Experience has already demonstrated that on many occasions, even royalty and nobility have put themselves into mortal danger, battling fire and water in order to save others…as happened in Frankfurt on the Eder on the 17th of Iyyar 5545 (1785).

At that time the river bust its banks and swept away a number of villages and the houses in them.  In one village there were a number of wooden branches and window frames that were floating here and there, and a number of bodies of those who had drowned. Floating there was a tree trunk and on it was a person shouting to those on the shore to save him, but it was not possible to do so because of the strong current. 

When the nobleman Duke Leopold, Commandant of the city, noted this he immediately commanded any one who could do so to sail over to save the person. No one was able to reach the person, and they told the Duke it was not possible to reach him because of the strength of the current and the size of the waves.

And when the Duke heard this, he took it upon himself “I will sail over.” He put his life in his hands, and went over to save the life of that person. He had not reached half way across the river when his boat capsized and was swept away by the huge waves.  The righteous Duke was lost and could not be saved.  So we see that there is a natural inclination to help others.

The death of Prince Leopold gripped the imagination of Horowitz. It was the sine qua non of the love that one human being could and indeed should have for another.  Its importance was not only noticed by this Jewish author from Vilna. The great German poet Goethe wrote a poem about the incident:

Thou wert forcibly seized by the hoary lord of the river

Holding thee, even he shares with thee his streaming domain

Calmly sleepest thou near his urn as it silently trickles

Till thou to action art aroused, waked by the swift-rolling flood

Kindly to be to the people, as when thou still were a mortal

Perfecting that as a god, which thou didst fail in, as a man

And in the British Museum is this wonderful print called La Mort du Prince Leopold de Brunswick.

Remember we are talking about eighteenth century Europe, which was not exactly a paradise for the peasants.  The constitutional monarchy that had ruled France for three centuries had not yet just been challenged by the French Revolution, and the American War of Independence had ended barely two years earlier.   And yet here was a nobleman who, without hesitation, gave his life to save an unknown commoners. It was this example that led Horowitz to conclude that not only was Love of the Other a commandment from the Torah; it was also a חוב מצד הטבע, a natural law.

Horowitz not only learned from the action of this righteous Gentile.  He extended Love of the Other to include non-Jews in a radical re-interpretation of the word רעיך -the other.   Normally translated as your fellow, Horowitz took it to mean that all contemporary Gentiles were included in this description.  He ruled that Gentiles were not idol worshippers, and also reinterpreted the verse that we read from the book of Jeremiah towards the end of the Passover Seder: :  שפוך חמתך על הגוים אשר לא ידעוך -“Pour out your wrath on the nations who do not know you.”  On whom should God pour out his anger? Only on those “אשר לא ידעוך” - who do not know Him. 

Yes, all are created equal. or not

Having established this inclusivity, Horowitz wrote about the way in which we should behave:

     על כן איש מחוייב להתנהג עם כל אדם וכל משפחות האדמה בטוב וביושר ובאחוה 

And so every person is obligated to act towards every person and every group on earth with goodness, with honesty, and with friendship

Note this language-we are required – מחוייב – to extend our love to all of humanity, irrespective of their race or ethnicity. To see how different this approach is, let’s compare it to a Jewish text that was recently published in the USA, where the Declaration of Independence states as a self evident truth that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  The contemporary Jewish book I am referring to is volume two of the Rennert edition of The Encyclopedia of Taryag Mitzvoth. This Encyclopedia has excluded anyone who is not Jewish from love of the other.

In doing so, the Rennert Encyclopedia was following one school of halakhic thought in which the phrase “your fellow” is interpreted as “your fellow - in observing the commandments.” But there are lots of Jewish texts available to explain the details of the biblical command to love the other. Why not choose one with a maximalist reading? Surely we would want that from other religious traditions? If so, we must demand it from our own.

We began with a story from the Talmud in which Rabbi Pinchas believed it was inconceivable that God could act in a way that was cruel or unjust. Today we know that cruelty and injustice are part and parcel of our fractured society. Racial and ethnic bias and discrimination are still all too common in a country in which all are supposed to have been created equal. We need more thinkers like the other Pinchas, Pinchas Hurwitz who read the command to love the other in a maximalist way. What better way to memorialize the death of Prince Leopold is there than follow this dictum:

     על כן איש מחוייב להתנהג עם כל אדם וכל משפחות האדמה בטוב וביושר ובאחוה 

And so every person is obligated to act towards every person and every group on earth with goodness, with honesty, and with friendship

Kiddushin 7a ~ Does Marriage Make You Happier?

קידושין ז, א

אמר ריש לקיש: טב למיתב טן דו מלמיתב ארמלו

Resh Lakish said: It is better for a woman to live as tad du than to live alone...

In a 1975 lecture to the Rabbinical Council of America, Rabbi J.B. ("the Rav") Soloveitchik,  quoted the aphorism of Resh Lakish found in today's page of Talmud.  The Rav went on to explain that it was "based not upon sociological factors...[but] is a metaphysical curse rooted in the feminine personality. This is not a psychological fact; it is an existential fact." Wow.  Is this statement of Resh Lakish really an existential fact? To answer this, we need to first answer another question - what do his words actually mean?

One way to understand the aphorism is as follows:  "A widow would rather live in misery than live alone." But that's not the only translation, which depends on the exact meaning of the Aramaic phrase טן דו (tan du).  There are a number of possibilities.

Rashi

Let's start with Rashi and his explanation to our text:

בגופים שנים בעל ואשתו ואפילו אינו לה אלא לצוות בעלמא

Tan Du: Two bodies. A husband and wife; even if he is nothing more to her than company.

This explanation of Rashi's does not suggest that married misery is preferred over a single life. This is a slightly different explanation that Rashi gave in when we met this phrase in Yevamot.

טן דו - גוף שנים. משל הדיוט הוא, שהנשים אומרות טוב לשבת עם גוף שנים משבת אלמנה

Tan Du: Two bodies. This is a common maxim, for women say that it is better to live as two than to live alone.

So according to Rashi in both Yevamot and here in Kiddushin, Resh Lakish never addresses living in misery. He just made the observation that women prefer marriage over a single life.

JASTROW'S DICTIONARY

Not so Marcus Jastrow, whose dictionary (published 1886-1903) became a classic reference text for students of the Talmud. Jastrow translated טן דו as a load of grief, an unhappy married life. This will become very important later, so make note. 

THE SONCINO TRANSLATION

Moving on, the Soncino translation of Kiddushin (first published in 1966) echoes Jastrow's translation: "It is better to carry on living with trouble than to dwell in widowhood".  This is similar to the Soncino translation of the same phrase when found in Yevamot 118: "It is preferable to live in grief than to dwell in widowhood." However, a footnote to the text in Yevamot notes that "Levy compares it with the Pers., tandu, two persons." (The reference here is to Jacob Levy's  German Dictionary Chaldisches Worterbuch uber die Targumim - Aramic Dictionary of the Targums and a Large Part of Rabbinic Literature.) Why did Isidore Epstein, editor of the Soncino Talmud, choose to use Jastrow's translation over that of Levy - and that of Rashi? Answering that will take us too far off track, so we will leave it for another time... 

MELAMED'S ARAMAIC-HEBREW-ENGLISH DICTIONARY

Melamed's Aramaic-Hebrew-English Dictionary (Feldheim: Jerusalem 2005) follows Rashi : "טן דו = two bodies." 

THE ARTSCROLL TRANSLATION

The ArtScroll Schottenstein Talmud basis its translation on Rashi: "It is better to live as two together than to live alone." However a footnote (note 18) brings its meaning closer to that of Jastrow and the Soncino: "I.e it is better to be married  - even to a husband of mediocre stature - than to remain single." 

THE KOREN STEINSALTZ TRANSLATION

In his Hebrew translation of the Aramaic text found in Yevamot 118, Rabbi Steinsaltz follows Rashi, and translates  טן דו as "two bodies." A side note points out that the true origin of the phrase is not known, though it likely comes from Persian.

The newer English Koren Talmud follows the same translation: "It is better to sit as two bodies, ie., to be married, than to sit alone like as a widow. A woman prefers the any type of husband to being alone."  Elsewhere in the Koren series, (Yevamot 118a) there is a note, (written by Dr. Shai Secunda), which is more definitive than the Hebrew note. Tan Du is from middle Persian, meaning together.  It's nothing to do with being miserable.

TESHUVOT HAGE'ONIM

I've left perhaps the strongest textual witness for last: how the words Tan Du were understood during the period of the Geonim (c. 589-1038). In 1887 Avraham Harkavy published a collection of responsa from this period that he found in manuscripts held in the great library of St. Petersburg. In this collection is a reference to our mysterious words:

  טן דו בלשון פרסי שני בני אדם. ארמלו יחידות 

טן דו in Persian means two people. ארמלו means alone.

Chronologically, this is our earliest source, and, therefore, perhaps our most compelling. Case closed.

VARIATIONS OF THE RESH LAKISH RULE

So far we have the following four versions of what we will now call the Resh Lakish Rule:

It's better for a woman to be...

• ....married and unhappy than single  (Jastrow)

• ...in a less desirable or mediocre marriage than no marriage at all (ArtScroll footnote).

• ...miserable and married than to be a widow (Soncino).

• ...with a husband than to be alone (ArtScroll, Koren, Melamed, Rashi, Teshuvot Hage'onim)

WHAT IF TAN DU MEANS MISERABLE?

It seems that the translation of  טן דו as miserable originated with Jastrow, and that those who translate Resh Lakish as saying "misery is better than being single" are following in the Jastrow tradition. If we were to evaluate the Resh Lakish Rule per Jastrow (and Soncino and an ArtScroll footnote), the question is, what, precisely, constitutes  a "miserable marriage"? One in which the woman feels physically safe but emotionally alone? One in which her husband loves her dearly but is  unable to provide for her financially? Or one in which she has all the money she needs but her husband is an alcoholic? Tolstoy has taught us that each unhappy family (and presumably each miserable marriage) is unhappy in its own unique way. The point here is not to rank which is worse. 

“[In the 1950s, a] bad marriage was usually a better option for a woman, especially if she had a child, than no marriage at all.”

— Stephanie Coontz. Marriage, A History.Viking 2005. p288

Today it would be utterly silly (and incredibly rude and insulting) to suggest that a woman is better off miserable than single.  But after our review, that does not appear to be what Resh Lakish ever said.  What he really said was this: a woman would be better off (טב) married than living alone (as a widow). Resh Lakish didn't explain what he meant by better off, so we will have to assume that what he meant was a measure of overall well-being, or what we call... happiness. What we want to know, is how this understanding of Resh Lakish stands up today. Was the Rav correct when he called this "an existential fact"?

MEASURING HAPPINESS & HAPPINESS INEQUALITY

Happiness inequality exists and has been well documented. University of Pennsylvania economists Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, (who live together, but not within the bonds of marriage), note that

“...the rich are typically happier than the poor; the educated are happier than those with less education; whites are happier than blacks; those who are married are happier than those who are not; and women—at least historically—have been happier than men.”

But why is this so? Don't we all oscillate around a set point of happiness, regardless of what life may throw at us? Some psychologists think so.

LOTTERY WINNERS & ACCIDENT VICTIMS: THE SET POINT THEORY OF HAPPINESS

According to the set point theory of happiness, we all revolve around our own, innate happiness point. When we are faced with adversity, we do, to be sure, become sadder. But we eventually bounce back to where we were before, back at our set point. Similarly, when met with some good mazal, we are, for a period, more happy. But then we return to our innate set point for happiness, wherever that was prior to the good fortune. The evidence for this comes from a classic study which found that "lottery winners were not much happier than controls" and that accident victims who were paralyzed "did not appear nearly as unhappy as might have been expected." (The problem is that this study used a tiny sample - there were only 22 lottery winners and 29 paralyzed accident victims - so we need to be very cautious in generalizing from it.) 

Married people are – on average – happier than those who are single, but perhaps this fact does not suggest causation. Some would argue that it's just a correlation. A grumpy person, unable to hold down a job and miserable to be around, is not likely to find another individual willing to marry him. So it’s not that marriage makes you happier –it’s that happier people are more likely to find a partner and get married. According to this set point theory of happiness, the Resh Lakish Rule would not be supported, since the act of marrying would have no overall long-term effect on happiness.

THE MORE IS BETTER THEORY OF HAPPINESS

However, evidence from a 15 year longitudinal study of 24,000 people suggests that "marital transitions can be associated with long-lasting changes in satisfaction."  This would support the claim that marriage is causally related to happiness. It's not that you went from being a happy person who was once single to being a similarly happy person who is now married. What actually happened was that the marriage had an effect on just how happy you became.  And data from other large cohort studies show that happiness increases when people marry. Just look at the happiness of women by marital status in the figure below. Was Resh Lakish onto something?

Mean happiness of women by marital status, birth cohort of 1953-1972, from ages 18-19 and 28-29. From Easterlin, RA. Explaining Happiness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2003. 100 (19): 11176-11183.

All this supports the Resh Lakish Rule that people are happier when they are married. (I say people because all the evidence applies equally to men too.) But we can get even more specific, because Resh Lakish used the word ארמלא, which most likely means widowed (and hence has a secondary meaning of being alone). There is actually data that applies to this more specific Resh Lakish claim about widows, and it comes from The Roper Center at the University of Connecticut. 

From Economics and Happiness, ed Bruni L. Oxford University Press 2005.

As shown in the table, 62% of women who are widowed want to be happily married.  (Of course this also means that about 40% of widowed women would rather not be married -  even happily. That’s a huge proportion. Still, the overall finding still supports the Resh Lakish Rule.) The women's perspective is the most important perspective in this conversation, and when women (widows) were asked, most wanted to be married again. Widows indeed wish to live as two rather than live alone. I don't think this amounts to anything like an existential fact, as claimed by the Rav. But the evidence from the social sciences would certainly support the Resh Lakish Rule.