Dovid Campbell[1]
Legal Fictions is a new creative project that explores how Mishnaic law shapes human experience and provokes deep existential questioning. Through the lens of storytelling, it seeks to deepen readers’ appreciation for the wisdom, beauty, and complexity embedded in the Mishnah’s implicit worldview. Readers interested in supporting or contributing to the project are warmly invited to contact the author.
“And there was another incident in Tzalmon, a city in the Galilee, where a particular man said: I am so-and-so, son of so-and-so. A snake bit me and I am dying. And they went and found his corpse but could not recognize him, yet they went ahead and allowed his wife to marry based on what he said in his dying moments.”
– Yevamot 16:6; Steinsaltz translation and commentary
These nightly walks through the hills of Tzalmon had become essential for Yosef, the last strong thread in a life quickly unraveling. The distance seemed to quiet the ghosts of all the things he could not mend. Just one step up the hill, and his wife’s barbed words, sharpened by hunger and frustration, began to lose their edge. Another step, and his children’s pale lips and plaintive eyes faded like figures in a fog. If he walked long enough, he could almost return to the life he’d once imagined, before poverty had claimed his family’s happiness and his tattered self-respect.
That night, Yosef found himself on an unfamiliar hill. He stepped around brambles and loose rocks, unable to find a path in the deepening darkness. His wife’s voice was still with him: I had so much more before I met you! Yosef began to walk faster, and then, suddenly, he felt fire. He jumped and scanned the ground, certain he had stepped on a smoldering coal. But he could see no embers in the dust, only the thin shadow of a long tail, disappearing beneath a rock.
The searing pain rapidly gave way to numbness as the venom traveled up his calf. Yosef stumbled to the ground. His leg felt like wood, and his diaphragm began to spasm as if something had been cut loose inside him. He was stunned by how quickly it was happening, but he felt strangely unafraid. The creeping numbness felt almost like slipping into a bath, the warm water climbing towards his chest.
He stared up at the sky, where the stars were beginning to swirl in undulating rhythms. His mind was unusually clear, his entire reservoir of memory pried open to his conscious mind. Yosef was surprised by what rose to the surface. It was not his childhood in a village on the outskirts of Jerusalem, where his father had been a successful carpenter. Nor was it the day his father had been murdered on the road by bandits, and Yosef was forced to enter the family business, with little success. It was not even the day he arrived in Tzalmon, when the locals greeted the young carpenter with enthusiasm — an enthusiasm that quickly waned once his poor craftsmanship became known.
What he remembered was the day he finished building their new home. Yosef had blindfolded his young wife, then pregnant with their first child. He led her carefully into the tiny structure as she laughed and felt her way along the warm clay walls. The roof had not yet begun to leak, and sunlight poured into the room through a well-placed window, illuminating his wife’s face. She removed the blindfold and turned slowly around. Do you like it? Yosef asked. Her eyes filled with tears as she wrapped her arms around her husband. I feel like I have everything, she whispered. I really do have everything.
And with the memory came a painfully lucid realization. He was dying, here, where the wolves and ravens would certainly find his body before his townsfolk could. His wife would be left an agunah, a woman incapable of remarrying because her husband’s death could not be confirmed, and there was nothing Yosef could do to save her.
It had become almost impossible to swallow, but Yosef somehow forced the saliva down his throat. There was one chance, he realized, but it would require him to free himself from the numbing waters that had enveloped his body. Yosef closed his eyes. He could still feel his wife’s arms around him, the morning sunlight warming his back. Somehow, Yosef rose to his feet.
He looked down at the small village of Tzalmon, a few fires illuminating the otherwise empty valley. The fires twisted and swirled just as the stars had, and Yosef wondered whether he was actually gazing at the heavens or the earth. But it no longer mattered. Drawing all the breath he could, Yosef shouted into the night:
“My name is Yosef…
…son of Dan!
A snake has bitten me, and…”
Yosef swallowed hard.
“…and I am dying!”
Below, in Tzalmon, two young men heard the ghostly voice booming out from the darkness. They assembled a search party in the morning, but it was two days before they found the body, mangled by animals and decay. The case eventually reached the ears of the generation’s great rabbis, who permitted Yosef’s wife to remarry based on her husband’s dying words. She married a wealthy tailor within the year.
One day, the tailor said to his new wife, “My dear, would you like me to have your old home repaired? If we fixed the roof, we could use it for guests. Or storage. I’m sure you must still feel some connection to the place.”
“Oh,” said his wife, considering. She looked around her new home. It was well-lit and beautifully furnished. Her three young children had eaten a full breakfast, and they now played happily on the floor. She turned to the window, where the sun was just rising over the surrounding hills, and began to pick at her sleeve until a thread broke loose.
Over the years, Yosef’s abandoned home sank quietly into the flourishing village of Tzalmon.
[1] “One of the most striking features of the Torah — and of the Judaic heritage generally — is insufficiently commented on, namely its combination of law and narrative. … Why then does the Torah contain both? The answer goes to the heart of the Judaic enterprise. Law is not, for Judaism, a series of arbitrary rules even though it comes from God himself. Nor is Judaism a matter of blind obedience — obedience, yes, but blind, no. Law is rooted in history and cosmology. It reflects something other and older than the law itself. It speaks to us out of the heart of the human situation.”
– Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Covenant & Conversation: Numbers (Maggid, 2017).
“Most legal texts tend to favor a single literary form or a small set of forms. These texts thus implicitly advocate a single position along the spectrum from narrative to apodictic approaches to law. The Mishnah, on the other hand, is one of the few legal texts that actively and aggressively mixes literary forms. This creates an open dialog between the various approaches to law. The Mishnah insists that law must emerge both from fundamental universal principles and at the same time from the idiosyncratic demands of a particular case relating to specific people and a particular time and place in history.”
– Moshe Simon-Shoshan, Stories of the Law: Narrative Discourse and the Construction of Authority in the Mishnah
(Oxford University Press, 2012), 227.
I would like to thank Yehoshua November for his guidance and support in my journey as a writer, and Rabbis Yitzchak Breitowitz and Akiva Tatz for encouraging me to pursue this project. I am also grateful to Lehrhaus editor Shayna Herszage for her thoughtful and careful editing of this piece.
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