Chaim Trachtman
In the second chapter of the first book of The Politics, Aristotle asserts that man is a social animal who only thrives in the presence of others. This claim has survived the passage of time. Human beings have always lived in groups, and this is evident even today when one sees how people organize their lives. At work or play, they define themselves by the teams that they belong to.[1] These teams take on greater meaning when they have direct competitors, rivals for their sense of identity and purpose – Yankees versus Red Sox fans, early risers versus midnight oil people, East versus West Coasters. We attribute opposing characteristics to these teams and then align ourselves according to our own self-perception. Strikingly, even the world of the Talmud is defined by teams of rivals – Rabbi Akiva versus Rabbi Yishmael, Rava versus Abaye, Rav versus Shmuel, Rabbi Yochanan versus Reish Lakish. By far the most famous of these competing teams are Hillel and Shammai, and the two schools of thought that they developed.
The depiction of Hillel and Shammai in the Talmud, and the common perception of these two men, fits entirely within the model of rivals as polar opposites.[2] Shammai, the contractor and builder, is depicted as an irascible disciplinarian and strict legal interpreter who is totally fixated on his mission, with nary a second to pay attention to anyone outside his focused field of vision. In sharp contrast, Hillel is portrayed as a patient, accommodating halakhist who welcomes outsiders warmly and with empathy. The picture of Shammai berating the wiseguy who asked to be taught the entire Torah while standing on one foot and chasing him off his property, while Hillel patiently responds and teaches him the Golden Rule, is indelibly etched in the Jewish consciousness. This view is reinforced by the conclusion of the Gemara (Eruvin 13b) that the law follows the rulings of Hillel because of the graciousness that he and his disciples displayed towards their halakhic interlocutors.
This picture jives with the image created when one stands back and looks at the big picture of Hillel and Shammai and their legal rulings. However, just as a closer inspection of an impressionist or Chuck Close painting reveals irregularities and uneven surfaces on the canvas, looking more closely at specific topics in halakhah, namely their rulings regarding the legal status of women and their financial dealings, demonstrates that Hillel and Shammai do not always align with the high altitude picture. In particular, close examination of their rulings about women do not match our preconceived expectations. My objective in doing just that is not to critique the specific views of Hillel and Shammai on this topic, as that has been done before. Rather, I hope to demonstrate that attention to details can complicate our initial assumptions about how others think and that the nuances can delineate areas of common ground for conversation and action.
In the ancient world, women were very unlikely to own property, have independent resources, or hold jobs outside the home. There were exceptions to be sure. There are talmudic descriptions of women of means and others who routinely entered the marketplace to sell their wares.[3] Women certainly worked hard, but it was usually their domestic interior labor centered around their role as wives and caregivers for the whole family that earned praise (see Mishlei 31). Thus, how a marriage could be consecrated, the nature of the intimacy between wife and husband, how to deal with marriages that did not work out, and what to do if a husband disappears without a trace, speak volumes about how the Rabbis viewed women. When examining these issues through the lens of Hillel’s and Shammai’s legal ideas, a surprising pattern emerges.
The first mishnah in Kiddushin discusses how women can be “acquired” in marriage. One of the three methods is with money. In this regard, Hillel and Shammai differ on the minimal amount required to actualize the marriage. Whereas Hillel only requires giving something worth a perutah, the smallest talmudic monetary denomination, Shammai requires the prospective husband to present to his prospective wife something with a value of at least a dinar, 192-fold more than a perutah. It would seem that Hillel allowed a husband to enter into a marriage with minimal financial stress, good from the man’s perspective. But it is equally plausible to assert that Shammai placed a higher value on women and wanted to be certain that men did not enter marriages frivolously, without setting aside real money and resources, thereby demonstrating a genuine commitment to their wife-to-be at the start of the relationship.
Once a couple gets married, sexual intimacy is a key component of a successful relationship. It is one of the three things that a husband must provide to his wife, along with sustenance and clothing, based on the rabbinic interpretation of the biblical verse in Shemot 21:10 (see Rashi ad loc.). However, marital relations, like everything else, are governed by halakhah. According to Jewish law, sexual intimacy is not permitted at all times, and it is expressly forbidden when a woman is menstruating, when she has the status of niddah, until she immerses in the mikveh. If spouses have sex when the wife is menstruating, it is punishable by kareit (Vayikra 18:19 and 20:18). The first mishnah in Niddah addresses the question of the timing of the onset of menstruation and the state of being niddah. Hillel and the Rabbis extend the period retroactively from the moment when a woman first sees menstrual blood back to the last time she confirmed her “clean” status based on the absence of blood on self-examination (Hillel), or to the last clean examination or 24 hours, whichever period of time is shorter (the Rabbis). In contrast, Shammai asserts that she only becomes a niddah at the moment she first sees blood without any backward look in time. In the discussion of this topic, the Rabbis make clear that this debate applies only to a woman’s status of niddah with regard to her transmission of tumah to other objects and food items, not to its impact on sexual intimacy (Niddah 2a-3b). R. Uri Brilliant offers an explanation of Shammai’s opinion that is direct and psychologically astute. Even though all agree that a woman’s retroactive niddah status has no impact on the permissibility of sexual intimacy that may have occurred during that period, Shammai wanted to go a step beyond this. By defining niddah as the first sighting of blood and refusing to add any rabbinic stringencies on top of this, Shammai wanted to make sure that there would not be any anxiety about potential tumah in either partner’s mind when couples engage in sexual relations.[4] The simple humanity of this approach, and how it encourages a healthy attitude toward sexual intercourse, flies in the face of the image of Shammai as a stern unfeeling patriarch.
The Rabbis valorized marriage and family. But they were realists and acknowledged that not all marriages succeed. A whole massekhta, Gittin, is devoted to elaborating the laws of divorce, a procedure that is mentioned cryptically in the Torah in Parshat Ki Teitzei. The first eight chapters and nearly all of the ninth chapter of Gittin deal with all of the details of the writ of divorce, how it should be written and delivered to the woman, and the nature of witnesses required to validate the procedure. Lastly, in the very last mishnah of the ninth chapter, the Rabbis finally get around to asking the question lurking in the background: what circumstances serve as valid grounds for divorce? Hillel states that a man is free to divorce his wife for even a minor flaw, e.g., if she spoils his soup. In sharp contrast, Shammai requires devar ervah, a concrete sexual or behavioral misconduct. Would any self-respecting man who at one time loved his wife feel justified in sending her on her way for something as trivial as faulty culinary skills? Did such a man ever truly respect his wife as a genuine life partner? Shammai does not prohibit divorce, and he does not force people to stay married under all circumstances. But he defines incompatibility upward, in a way that preserves the integrity of both the husband and wife, and tries to ensure that the decision to divorce is not an impulsive or cruel move on the man’s part.
Finally, husbands can die before their time. This must have been much more common in the times of the tanna’im. The Rabbis were ahead of their time in developing the ketubah and looking out for the wife’s financial wellbeing in such circumstances. But if the husband’s death occurred in a distant or isolated place and was unwitnessed, this could create problems for a woman who requests payment from her deceased husband’s heirs. Again, Shammai steps in on behalf of the woman, declares her a widow, and allows her to collect the ketubah based solely on her own testimony of her husband’s death (Mishnah Yevamot 15:2). Hillel demurs out of concern for rare events and intrafamilial quarrels.
It would be a mistake to present this picture of Shammai’s leniency towards women as totally uniform and consistent. Specifically, with regards to grounds for divorce, according to the legal position of Shammai, men might be trapped in failed marriages so long as their wives did not commit adultery, not a recipe for happy families and not a dignified approach to women – or men for that matter. In the last circumstance, although Hillel was strict in his ruling on payment of the ketubah, he was willing to accept indirect evidence of a husband’s death to allow the wife to remarry. Shammai adopted a harder line and required the appearance of witnesses with direct testimony to release the woman from her agunah status, potentially prolonging the woman’s agonizing limbo position. Nonetheless, the overall picture that emerges of Shammai vis-à-vis women is unexpected in light of the biographical sketch that most students of the Gemara have imprinted in their mind.
As I said at the outset, the impetus for writing this essay was not to formulate another brief in support of an expanded status of women in halakhah. Moreover, I am not the first person to call attention to the greater sensitivity that Shammai displays towards women’s predicaments and his respect for the individual autonomy of women compared to his contemporary Hillel.[5] Rather, this broader analysis of Hillel’s and Shammai’s respective positions on legal issues surrounding women is meant to guide the conversation when assessing the positions of rival teams, opposing schools of thought, and competing social identities.
The most powerful – and dangerous – configuration of teams is the in group, “us,” versus the out group, the “other.” These two teams, us versus them, in various guises, fuel most conflicts around the world. It is across this line of demarcation that the most intense battles are fought – for individual rights, personal status, allocation of resources, and the privileges of membership. Because the stakes are so high, there is a strong temptation to draw a two-tone picture of the teams – one black and one white, one right and the other wrong.[6] Examining the details blurs this sharp two-tone distinction.
Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai were powerful intellectual forces during the Second Temple period, and they exerted profound influence on the culture of their time. History and the Jewish legal tradition has declared Hillel the winner in their halakhic battles, and Hillel’s victory has been promoted by painting a particularly harsh and unyielding picture of Shammai and his followers. But close scrutiny of Shammai’s rulings on women reveal an unexpected openness to the reality of the lives of the women of his time and an effort to see them as autonomous human beings who warranted respectful treatment by the law. That is not to say that followers of Beit Hillel did not view women similarly. However, because Shammai is often portrayed as a conservative thinker versus Hillel’s more liberal approach, Shammai’s positions catch us off guard and give us reason to pause.
There is a dissonance between our rapid, global assessment of these two tanna’im and the in-depth evaluation of their views about women, a recurring feature in human reasoning. It has been highlighted by Daniel Kahnemann and Amos Tversky’s Nobel-prize winning research, which focused on the cognitive basis for common human errors that arise in judgements and decision making. They identified two encompassing mental processes through which people assess incoming data from their surroundings. System 1 is immediately triggered and is characterized by rapid, totalizing, and intuitive appraisal of the information. This is followed by the activation of System 2, which is a slower, more deliberative mode of thinking and which achieves a more rational analysis of the facts at hand. Applying this model to our thinking about these two competing legal schools, Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel, an initial assessment based on System 1 poses a risk that we will not appreciate the full breadth of Shammai’s social and legal positions on women. Activating System 2 and taking into account the nuances of all of Shammai’s and Hillel’s rulings makes us more aware that the big picture is composed of disparate facts that do not exactly fit with what we initially thought the big picture looked like.[7]
Details that play against type are a hedge against prejudicial thinking.[8] They alert us to the need to look past the simple banners that teams march under and find the unexpected positions and views that are against type. Attention to details is likely to reveal ideas that may be shared, attitudes that are held in common across declared lines of combat. The details create a shared space to talk and reconsider our ideas and received notions. No one has to switch their team, renounce membership, or change their allegiances. But people who can see the complicated and nuanced features of their opponents may be less likely to demonize the members of the rival team and be more likely to let them be, perhaps even to learn from them.
Acknowledgement: I would like to thank David Fried for his careful read of this essay and his thoughtful comments and suggestions.
[1] Howard Trachtman, “suPAR and Team Nephrology,” BMC Med. (2014): 12:82.
[2] Adin Steinsaltz, Talmudic Images (Maggid, 2011), 126. See also Gershom Bader, The Encyclopedia of Talmudic Sages (Aronson, 1988), 87.
[3] Gila Fine, The Madwoman in the Rabbi’s Attic: Rereading the Women of the Talmud (Maggid, 2024), 249.
[4] Uri Brilliant, Kol ha-Talmud al Regel Ahat (Dvir, 2019), 465-479.
[5] https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/bet-hillel-and-bet-shammai
[6] Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Vintage Books, 2013).
[7] Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2013).
[8] Robert Wistrich, Demonizing the Other: Antisemitism, Racism and Xenophobia (Routledge, 1999).
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