SCIENCE, MEDICINE, AND THE TALMUD
This year we are living through both a shemitta year and a pandemic in Israel, and exactly 120 years ago these same conditions were also present as the Jewish inhabitants of Ottoman Palestine faced the threats of a shemitta year and a terrible wave of pandemic cholera.
To read a new essay published at TraditionOnline about how the Jews of the First Aliyah faced that terrible year, and how it differs from the present shmitta-pandemic conjunction, click here.
In the Torah portion (כִּי תִשָּׂא) to be read this Shabbat, we will read about the first census that was to be taken after the Exodus from Egypt:
שמות 30:11-16
וַיְדַבֵּר יְהֹוָה אֶל־מֹשֶׁה לֵּאמֹר׃
כִּי תִשָּׂא אֶת־רֹאשׁ בְּנֵי־יִשְׂרָאֵל לִפְקֻדֵיהֶם וְנָתְנוּ אִישׁ כֹּפֶר נַפְשׁוֹ לַיהֹוָה בִּפְקֹד אֹתָם וְלֹא־יִהְיֶה בָהֶם נֶגֶף בִּפְקֹד אֹת זֶה יִתְּנוּ כל־הָעֹבֵר עַל־הַפְּקֻדִים מַחֲצִית הַשֶּׁקֶל בְּשֶׁקֶל הַקֹּדֶשׁ עֶשְׂרִים גֵּרָה הַשֶּׁקֶל מַחֲצִית הַשֶּׁקֶל תְּרוּמָה לַיהֹוָה׃ כֹּל הָעֹבֵר עַל־הַפְּקֻדִים מִבֶּן עֶשְׂרִים שָׁנָה וָמָעְלָה יִתֵּן תְּרוּמַת יְהֹוָה׃ הֶעָשִׁיר לֹא־יַרְבֶּה וְהַדַּל לֹא יַמְעִיט מִמַּחֲצִית הַשָּׁקֶל לָתֵת אֶת־תְּרוּמַת יְהֹוָה לְכַפֵּר עַל־נַפְשֹׁתֵיכֶם׃ וְלָקַחְתָּ אֶת־כֶּסֶף הַכִּפֻּרִים מֵאֵת בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל וְנָתַתָּ אֹתוֹ עַל־עֲבֹדַת אֹהֶל מוֹעֵד וְהָיָה לִבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל לְזִכָּרוֹן לִפְנֵי יְהֹוָה לְכַפֵּר עַל־נַפְשֹׁתֵיכֶם׃
God spoke to Moses, saying:
When you take a census of the Israelite men according to their army enrollment, each shall pay God a ransom for himself on being enrolled, that no plague may come upon them through their being enrolled. This is what everyone who is entered in the records shall pay: a half-shekel by the sanctuary weight—twenty gerah to the shekel—a half-shekel as an offering to God. Everyone who is entered in the records, from the age of twenty years up, shall give God’s offering: the rich shall not pay more and the poor shall not pay less than half a shekel when giving God’s offering as expiation for your persons. You shall take the expiation money from the Israelites and assign it to the service of the Tent of Meeting; it shall serve the Israelites as a reminder before God, as expiation for your persons.
In this passage, the undertaking of a census is viewed as an inherently hazardous undertaking. It would result in a pandemic outbreak, but this would be prevented by the giving of the half-shekel.
Three further censuses were carried out when the Children of Israel were in the wilderness, and they are mentioned in the Book of Numbers (1-2, 26 [which follows a pandemic] and 31). Later censuses were commanded by Joshua, King Saul, and King David and these all passed without incident.
It is this obvious danger that King David was warned about when he commanded his military advisor Joab to “make the rounds of all the tribes of Israel, from Dan to Be’er-Sheva, and take a census of the people, so that I may know the size of the population.” But Joab was reluctant. “May the Lord your God increase the number of the people a hundredfold, while your own eyes see it” he told his king. “But” Joab asked, “why should my lord king want this?”
David was not persuaded, and the census was taken, but something – we are not told what – convinced David that he had made a mistake. “But afterward David reproached himself for having numbered the people. And David said to the Lord, “I have sinned grievously in what I have done. Please, Lord, remit the guilt of Your servant, for I have acted foolishly” (v. 10). God refuses to absolve David, and the prophet Gad gives the king a choice of punishment: “Shall a seven-year famine come upon you in the land, or shall you be in flight from your adversaries for three months while they pursue you, or shall there be three days of pestilence in your land? Now consider carefully what reply I shall take back to He who sent me.” David asks that he not fall into the hands of men, and here the Greek translation known as the Septuagint adds a line not found in the original Hebrew: “So David chose the pestilence. It was the time of the wheat harvest.” As a result of this choice, “God sent a pestilence upon Israel from morning until the set time, and 70,000 of the people died, from Dan to Be’er-Sheva.”
A different account of this story is found in the Book of Chronicles. In one of its versions it is Satan who entices King David to count the population. Joab then decides to count those under the age of twenty, in clear defiance of the orders for the census found in the Book of Exodus. “Joab son of Zeruiah did begin to count them, but he did not finish; wrath struck Israel on account of this, and the census was not entered into the account of the chronicles of King David” (1 Chronicles 27:24). In addition, there is no mention – in either version - of the giving of the required half-shekel. This is the basis for several medieval biblical commentaries who explained that the pandemic that followed was because the expiation (kopher) had not been given. Rashi believed that the counting invoked the Ayin Harah, the Evil Eye, and this was the cause of the pandemic that followed, though he doesn’t elaborate.
ולא יהיה בהם נגף. שֶׁהַמִּנְיָן שׁוֹלֵט בּוֹ עַיִן הָרָע, וְהַדֶּבֶר בָּא עֲלֵיהֶם, כְּמוֹ שֶׁמָּצִינוּ בִימֵי דָּוִד
for numbers (i.e. things that have been numbered) are subject to the influence of the “evil eye”, and therefore if you count them by their polls pestilence may befall them, as we find happened, in the days of David (II Samuel 24:10 and 15).
As a consequence of King David’s refusal to take a personal punishment for his crime of counting the people, a pandemic killed 70,000 of his subjects. This belief remained prevalent among the Jews of eastern Europe, who had a saying in Yiddish “When you don’t count, a blessing comes” [Az me tseylt nisht, kumt arayn di brokhe], and Jewish children would protect themselves when being counted while in Polish public schools by whispering “oyf di tseyn” - “on my teeth.”
The fear of taking a census is actually far older than the Torah itself. It can be found in the writings found at Mari, an ancient city in what is now northwestern Syria. The royal archives there contained thousands of letters which were first excavated in the 1930s, and include detailed written records of how the census was to be taken. Some of the words that appear on the Mari cuneiform letters are like the Hebrew constructs used in the Bible. For example, “to record” (paqadum) has the same root as the Hebrew root word p-k-d meaning “to count.” And the famous Jewish Assyriologist Ephraim Avigdor Speiser (1902-1965) noted that in Mesopotamian lore “the writing down of names could on certain occasions be a very ominous process…on periodic occasions, the higher powers made lists which determined who among the mortals was to live and who was to die.”
There must thus have been a time when the ancient Near Easterner shrank from the thought of having his name recorded in lists that might be put to unpredictable uses. Military conscription was an ominous process because it might place the life of the enrolled in jeopardy. The connection with the cosmic " books " of life and death must have been much too close for one's peace of mind. It would be natural in these circumstances to propitiate the unknown powers, or seek expiation as a general precaution. In due time, such a process would be normalized as a tebibtum in Mesopotamia, and as a form of kippurim among the Israelites… And such fears would be kept alive by plagues, which must have decimated crowded camps more than once.
Nergal. Fragment of impression of seal from Larsa. 2nd millenium BCE, Baghdadi Museum. From here.
In ancient Mesopotamia, there were several deities associated with plagues and pandemics. Nergal, the king of the underworld, was a god of war who was also responsible for plagues. Around the second century B.C.E his role was merged with another god, Erra, and the combined Nergal/Erra god-complex became responsible for both war and pestilence. Namtar (literally, “fate”) was another Mesopotamian deity associated with disease, whose role, wrote to John Betz, “was more similar to the that of the grim reaper of modern folklore” (A Tale of Two Plague Gods,” Biblical Archeology Review 47, no. Winter 2021). He is described in Sumerian texts as having “no hands, has no feet, [and] who takes away/goes about by night.” Nergal acted as a sort of judge to whom an appeal for clemency could be made, while Namtar had the role of judicial executioner, who could not be reasoned with. “In some ways” Betz noted, “this dynamic is not unlike that between YHWH and personified pestilence. As in Habakkuk 3, plague and pestilence are sometimes YHWH’s instruments, but elsewhere we find prayers to YHWH against plague and disease. Returning to 2 Samuel 24:10-25 and 1 Chronicles 21:1-30, we can see this distinction. The angel bringing the plague cannot be reasoned with, but YHWH can be. When YHWH is moved to compassion by his people’s suffering, he is the one who tells the angel to halt the plague.”
As the centuries passed, the census remained unwelcome, but less than it had been before. In biblical times it was still ominous to be counted, but it became possible to prevent any harm by paying a half-shekel to the Temple. Which is why we read in this week’s Torah portion:
so that no plague may come upon them through their being counted
וְלֹא־יִהְיֶה בָהֶם נֶגֶף בִּפְקֹד
[Excerpted from Jeremy Brown. The Eleventh Plague. Jews and Pandemics from the Bible to COVID-19. Oxford University Press, Fall 2022.]
On today’s page of Talmud Rav Yosef makes a radical suggestion. Sometimes death comes to those who do not deserve it.
חגיגה ד, ב
רַב יוֹסֵף כִּי מָטֵי לְהַאי קְרָא, בָּכֵי: ״וְיֵשׁ נִסְפֶּה בְּלֹא מִשְׁפָּט״, אָמַר: מִי אִיכָּא דְּאָזֵיל בְּלָא זִמְנֵיהּ? אִין, כִּי הָא דְּרַב בִּיבִי בַּר אַבָּיֵי הֲוָה שְׁכִיחַ גַּבֵּיהּ מַלְאַךְ הַמָּוֶת. אֲמַר לֵיהּ לִשְׁלוּחֵיהּ: זִיל אַיְיתִי לִי מִרְיָם מְגַדְּלָא שְׂיעַר נַשְׁיָיא. אֲזַל, אַיְיתִי לֵיהּ מִרְיָם מְגַדְּלָא דַּרְדְּקֵי
When Rav Yosef reached this verse, he cried: “But there are those swept away without justice” (Proverbs 13:23). He said: Is there one who goes before his time and dies for no reason?
Yes, like this incident of Rav Beivai bar Abaye, who would be frequented by the company of the Angel of Death and would see how people died at the hands of this angel. The Angel of Death said to his agent: Go and bring me, i.e., kill, Miriam the raiser, i.e., braider, of women’s hair. He went, but instead brought him Miriam, the raiser of babies.
Rav Yosef, a Babylonian sage who died in 323, developed this observation into a theological tenet: “Once permission is given to the Destroyer to kill, he does not distinguish between the righteous and the wicked. And not only that, but he begins with the righteous first, as it is stated in the verse (Ezekiel 21:8): “And will cut off from you the righteous and the wicked.” In Bava Kamma (60a) Rav Yosef applied his suggestion to include deaths that occur during a pandemic:
בבא קמא ס,א
תאני רב יוסף מאי דכתיב (שמות יב, כב) ואתם לא תצאו איש מפתח ביתו עד בקר כיון שניתן רשות למשחית אינו מבחין בין צדיקים לרשעים ולא עוד אלא שמתחיל מן הצדיקים תחלה שנאמר (יחזקאל כא, ח) והכרתי ממך צדיק ורשע
Rav Yosef taught a baraita: What is the meaning of that which is written with regard to the plague of the firstborn: “And none of you shall go out of the opening of his house until the morning” (Exodus 12:22)? If the plague was not decreed upon the Jewish people, why were they not permitted to leave their homes? Once permission is granted to the destroyer to kill, it does not distinguish between the righteous and the wicked. And not only that, but it begins with the righteous first, as it is stated in the verse: “And will cut off from you the righteous and the wicked” (Ezekiel 21:8), where mention of the righteous precedes the wicked.
Death does indeed come randomly during a pandemic, and this teaching of Rav Yosef has been cited countless times in rabbinic literature.
Infectious diseases in the Talmudic world were often capricious, just as they are in our own. They might strike children or the elderly, or bypass them entirely and claim the lives of young, healthy adults. While those who were already sick and ailing from other causes were, and are, at an increased risk of death or disability during a pandemic, those who are perfectly healthy might die in a matter of a few hours. If there was no pattern or predictability, how was the talmudic mind to explain it all? “Be assured,” the Book of Proverbs taught, “that the wicked will not go unpunished, but those who are righteous will escape.” (Proverbs 11:21.) Pandemics tested the very notion of God’s divine justice.
The sages explained that natural disasters were not random events (for how could they be?) but were just chastisement for any number of sins. According to the Mishnah in Avot (5:8, 9) famine was the result of failing to tithe properly, attacks from wild animals were a punishment for swearing in vain or profaning God’s holy name, and plagues were the result of sins otherwise punishable by death, but which had not, or could not, be referred to a Jewish court for adjudication. They were the natural result of sin, even if the sin was unknown to others or mysterious even to the sinner. Plagues and pandemics might also be the result of a sin for which there was no court sanction at all; instead, it was left to God to exact the punishment (Yoma 66b).
But this strain of thought in which only the wicked perish in a pandemic was not the only approach taken by the rabbis of the Mishnah and Talmud. Indeed, as soon as this solution to the challenge of theodicy – that all deaths are deserved – had been suggested, it was challenged by everyday observation: bad things do happen to perfectly good people. The sages of Talmud took note of the innocents that lay buried around them and connected their deaths to a verse from Proverbs 13:23. “Some are swept away without justice.” This gave rise to a different approach in which it was no-longer assumed that all those who died in a pandemic were sinners deserving of their punishment. This is the teaching of Rav Yosef on today’s page of Talmud. In this new paradigm, perfectly innocent victims could be “swept away,” because once permission had been granted for the Angel of Death to go about his grim duty, everyone became a legitimate target.
This statement of Rav Yosef in today’s page of Talmud is the focus of an essay by Rabbi Rabbi Shaul Magid, a professor of Jewish studies who received several orthodox rabbinic ordinations, although he has since moved away from these roots towards a more egalitarian practice of Judaism. His essay appears in an important recent book called Torah in a Time of Plague: Historical and Contemporary Jewish Responses, edited by Erin Leib Smokler, which was awarded the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Modern Jewish Thought and Experience. Rabbi Magid noted that this passage “resists the notion of collapsing plagues into covenantal categories, whereby we can see them as acts of divine intervention to punish evildoers, Jews or non-Jews. Rather…plagues seem to be arbitrary occurrences.” Magid argues that plagues and pandemics are cases of what he calls a “covenantal exception.” This exception is a crucial theological category, for “without the notion of the arbitrary as extra-covenantal, Judaism becomes vulnerable to making all disasters, even those that equally affect non-Jews, the fault of the Jews, which could easily, and understandably, evoke negative reactions. Plague as the exception thus enables Jews to understand natural disasters outside the paradigm of reward and punishment.”
To support this suggestion, Magid cites the talmudic passage from today’s page of Talmud. In it, the Angel of Death was given permission to kill “Miriam the braider of women’s hair” but instead killed “Miriam the raiser of babies.” Rav Yosef, observes that pandemics do not distinguish between sinners and saints and developed it into a theological tenet: “Once permission is given to the Destroyer to kill, he does not distinguish between the righteous and the wicked.” Pandemic deaths are arbitrary. Magid notes that unlike the response to famine which includes penance, personal reflection is not mentioned in the Talmud as a reaction to pandemic deaths. The Talmud could have offered “a predictable response that would include both physical avoidance and acts geared towards nullification.” But it was silent.
Magid’s theory of covenantal exception might illuminate the passage in Bava Kamma, but it does not explain numerous other Talmudic references which teach that pandemics are the consequence of community sin or personal religious laxity. And there were other Talmudic sages who remained convinced that there could be no innocent victims before God. According to Rabbi Hanina (Hullin 7b) “a person injures his finger on earth only if they declare about him on high that he should be injured.” Neither does it explain the many rabbis who, over the fifteen hundred years since the closing of the Talmud, have continued to emphasize the same message: pandemics are caused by sin and may be extinguished by repentance. There was no covenantal exception when the Torah described the deaths of twenty-four thousand people in a plague that punished immorality. There was no covenantal exception in the Mishnah (Avot 5:8) when it taught that plagues were the result of sins punishable by death. And there was no covenantal exception made for the epidemic waves of diphtheria, called askara in the Talmud , that was described as the most painful of all deaths and was the punishment for eating foods that are not kosher and for speaking ill of others.
Magid’s approach is lacking because it does not account for these other cases. However, it uncovers a much larger theme. There has never been a single Jewish response to the problem of theodicy. In some locales, in some books and in some eras, a pandemic was understood to be divine retribution for religious offenses of one sort or another. And in other locales, eras, and books, pandemics were understood to be natural disasters that killed those who were entirely innocent of sin. Magid’s theory of covenantal exception can only explain the latter, and even then, it leaves unanswered the question of why pandemics kill the just and the innocent in a world that is supposed to exist under the watchful protection of a benevolent God.
To read more about pandemic theodicy see my recent essay “Why Pandemics Happen to Good People” published last month on The Lehrhaus, and available here.
On today’s page of Talmud we continue the discussion of pandemics, and one of Jewish responses to them, which is to fast. But in this passage of Talmud the victims of the pandemic are not human. They are pigs.
תענית כא, ב
אֲמַרוּ לֵיהּ לְרַב יְהוּדָה: אִיכָּא מוֹתָנָא בַּחֲזִירֵי. גְּזַר תַּעֲנִיתָא. נֵימָא קָסָבַר רַב יְהוּדָה מַכָּה מְשׁוּלַּחַת מִמִּין אֶחָד מְשׁוּלַּחַת מִכל הַמִּינִין? לָא, שָׁאנֵי חֲזִירֵי — דְּכמְיָין מְעַיְיהוּ לִבְנֵי אִינָשֵׁי
On one occasion, they said to Rav Yehuda: There is pestilence among the pigs. Rav Yehuda decreed a fast. The Gemara asks: Let us say that Rav Yehuda maintains that a plague affecting one species will come to affect all species, and that is why he decreed a fast. The Gemara answers: No, in other cases there is no cause for concern. However, pigs are different, as their intestines are similar to those of humans. Consequently, their disease might spread to people.
Rav Yehuda’s ruling became normative Jewish practice, and is codified in the Shulhan Arukh:
שולחן ערוך אורח חיים 576:2-3
היה דבר במדינה ושיירו' הולכו' ובאו' ממנה למדינה אחר' שתיהן מתענו' אע"פ שהן רחוקו' זו מזו
ואם היה דבר בחזירים מתענין מפני שמעיהם דומים לשל בני אדם וכל שכן אם היה דבר בעכו"ם ולא בישראל שמתענים
…If there was an outbreak in one area and those who escaped were able to flee to another, both places must fast, even though they may be far apart.
If there was an outbreak of disease among pigs, we declare a fast because their intestines are similar to those of humans, and certainly if there was an outbreak among idolators that spared Jews we must still declare a fast.
Jews are required to fast in response to an epidemic, regardless of whether it had spread in their own particular community. They also have to do so even if the disease remained within the animal reservoir.
This requirement was ominously prescient, because one strain of influenza, the A strain, infects not only humans, but several other mammalian species, as well as some birds. The animal strains may pass from one mammalian species to another, sometimes gaining virulence as they do so. The 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed at least 50 million people, is thought to have originated as a bird virus which then passed through a mammalian host, most likely pigs, before infecting humans. In 1975, swine flu threatened the US and led the federal government to undertake an enormous – and very controversial – mass vaccination program. And in 2009 there was another outbreak of swine flu, which originated in Mexico. The Jewish requirement to fast in response to an outbreak of swine flu, is, medically speaking, spot on.
This sensitivity to zoonotic infections was not just theoretical; there is at least one example of a prayer specifically composed to save animals during a pandemic. It is a beautifully printed prayer sheet titled “A Prayer to End an Outbreak of Disease among the Cattle” and may have been composed in Italy in the late eighteenth century., but there are no further details of its origins. I am grateful to Sharon Hurwitz and Ann Brener of the Library of Congress for bringing this remarkable document to my attention. (The reference to it is Library of Congress Hebrew Broadside Collection, Hebrew Cage no. 21.)
A Prayer to End an Outbreak of Disease among the Cattle. Library of Congress Hebrew Broadside Collection, Hebrew Cage no. 21
Here is a flavor of the prayer:
Master of the Universe, Creator of the heavens who spread them out in the celestial sky and over the land, who bestowed a soul in the people that dwell on land and a spirit in those who walk on it!
You created all the animals, beasts, creatures, and birds of flight. What is humanity that you should remember it? What are people that you should visit them, that your divinity should pity them, that your honor and glory should crown them?…
You have made him master over your handiwork, laying the world at his feet. Flocks in their thousands, God’s creatures, the birds of the skies and the fish in the oceans, so that the poor may have food and be satiated. Let all who seek God speak his praises, may their hearts endure forever.
As a result of our sins [these animals] were smitten, and our sins prevented good for them. The disease has started to attack animals and birds. How the animals sighed, how the flocks despaired, for God’s hand afflicted them and scattered a plague in their midst...
Grant a complete cure and healing to all all flesh through your goodness and through your mercy, as it is written God is good to all, his mercy extends over all his creations.We beseech you, let your mercy be stronger than your justice. See our poverty and our burden, and accept our repentance and our prayers with pity…
Please God, please heal all the creatures with a heart, heal, turn away your anger, annul all the evil decrees for us and for all Israel with abundant mercy, and end the plague that attacks all the animals and the beasts in the fields…
Unusual though this prayer may seem at first, it was not a uniquely Jewish expression. As Alasdair Raffe noted in his excellent paper on the topic, in England the Anglican Church added a prayer for the relief of cattle mortality in 1748 which was used daily for the next eleven years. And when bovine disease recurred during an outbreak of cholera in 1865, three new prayers were composed for the Anglican service.
Still, these prayers could be controversial. “In 1754 a clerical correspondent of the London Evening Post complained that the prayer for the relief of disease in cattle had 'nothing of the Spirit of the Gospel in it’ and was an invitation to the congregation 'to be carnally minded,' though this probably says more about the state of mind of the correspondent than it does of the clerics who composed these prayers.
In 1866 Alexander Goss, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Liverpool wrote a series of prayers for cattle “whether presented to you in droves or in their stalls.”
Let us pray
O God, our refuge and strength, hear the pious prayers of thy church, thou, author of piety, and grant that we obtain speedily what we are asking for full of confidence. …
Let us pray
May these animals receive thy blessing, O Lord: may their bodies be saved and be delivered from all evil through the intercession of the blessed Antony. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Let us pray
We humbly beseech thy mercy, o Lord, and pray that thou mayst grant protection to these cattle and (other) animals from all the devil’s deception and power, as well as from any illness, through the power of the blessing with your name. Be thou, O Lord, their defense, their support in life and their remedy in illness, and multiply thy mercy and kindness, so that thy holy name will be glorified forever. Amen.[The priest then sprinkles holy water. ]
In Jewish law, we are to pray for others who are suffering in a pandemic, whether or not we ourselves are also affected. We are to pray for Jews, Gentiles, “idolators” and yes, even for pigs.
