Humor… Me? Rabbinic Wordplay, Playing on Rabbinics

Daniel Shlian

       I. Start of Play

Everyone loves puns.

To defend the above claim, let us posit the following: a pun is an intentional instance of wordplay, and it works best when both the pun-maker and the pun-recipient are intimately familiar with the played-with words. Many unfavorably associate puns with the specific genre of a long-winded story concluding in an unsubtle punchline, but the world of wordplay is much richer and more variegated than any specific joke template. Indeed, who among us does not relish a delightful repartee characterized by turning the meanings of words on their heads, perhaps in playful banter, or, in more contemporary media, a rap battle? Yet puns pervade more than just specifically humorous settings: they appear, sometimes unbidden, sometimes hidden, sometimes sharply written, in essentially any and every literary and oratorical setting.

The Jewish canon, in both its written and oral instantiations, is rife with wordplay, as one would expect and indeed hope for any significant corpus of text. There are innumerable articles that cover the use of paronomasia (a classically derived word for punning that is somehow both delightful and joyless) in Biblical and rabbinic literature, and I do not plan to survey them here, but let us highlight just a few brief examples to note the various forms puns can take in our traditional texts, before we examine our main sources.

Joseph’s conversations in prison in Genesis 40 can, in the outermost layer of interpretation, be understood largely as playful, providing fertile ground for wordplay to blossom. Far from a wizened oracular sage interpreting the dreams of supplicants, Joseph appears to simply be passing the time chatting with his fellow inmates, the butler and the baker, only occasionally growing wistful. In this interpretation, Joseph would be as surprised as anyone when his predictions of the butler’s rise and the baker’s demise come to fruition. But let us restrict our focus to two particular exchanges. In v. 13, Joseph predicts that

בְּעוֹד שְׁלֹשֶׁת יָמִים, יִשָּׂא פַרְעֹה אֶת–רֹאשֶׁךָ, וַהֲשִׁיבְךָ, עַל-כַּנֶּךָ

In another three days, Pharaoh will lift up your head, and restore you to your pedestal.

Employing an idiom of “lifting his head,” an idiom that finds a variety of meanings throughout Biblical literature, Joseph predicts that Pharaoh will reverse the butler’s fall from grace. Contrast this interpretation with the response he gives to the baker, in v. 19:

בְּעוֹד שְׁלֹשֶׁת יָמִים, יִשָּׂא פַרְעֹה אֶת–רֹאשְׁךָ מֵעָלֶיךָ, וְתָלָה אוֹתְךָ, עַל-עֵץ

 In another three days, Pharaoh will lift up your head from upon you, and hang you on a tree.

Joseph, predicting the baker’s death, begins with the exact same set of seven words, but then flips the idiom on its head. One can imagine Joseph pausing for a moment after “Pharaoh will lift up your head,” creating the expectation within his captive audience (pun intended) that the baker will emerge with the same fate as the butler, and then announcing, with a smile, “from upon you!” The audience would have presumably been darkly amused by the reversal, and thousands of years later, we readers can, if we try, have a similar reaction.

The above is an instance of a self-contained pun, as it were—linguistic, but not dependent on an external bank of knowledge. For a different sort of pun, let us hurry along in books and years to the Babylonian Talmud, specifically the first chapter of Tractate Pesahim (9b), to arguably the best-known instance of rabbinic wordplay. The Mishnah presented on the previous folio had declared that in determining the necessary extent of examining one’s home for hametz prior to Pesah, one need not concern oneself with the possibility that a weasel had dragged crumbs from one home to another, because such concerns would preclude any possibility of confidence in cleanliness: rodents could have carried hametz across courtyards, or even across a city. The rabbis are not content to leave this statement alone, however: the subsequent Mishnah, after all, maintains that any hametz that one maintains after doing the examination must be kept in a secure location, so as not to necessitate any further searches. Doesn’t that imply that we in fact are concerned about the possibility of crumbs spread by members of the order Rodentia?

Abaye suggests a resolution to the seeming contradiction between the Mishnayot. Per Rashi’s construction of the resolution, on the fourteenth of Nisan, well in advance of the prohibition of hametz, we need not concern ourselves with the possibility of rodents carrying food away, because hametz is found in abundance, and weasels are not so desperate as to hunt down hidden bread. But on the fourteenth of Nisan, when the hametz ban is imminent, weasels will surely scurry around to scavenge whatever leaven they can. Rava, understandably, finds this resolution untenable: can weasels read the calendar? Why would a rodent know when Pesah is, and make plans accordingly? But Rava’s objection is not simply worded straightforwardly as above. Instead:

?וכי חולדה נביאה היא

Is a weasel a prophet?

Of course, a weasel is not a prophet. But Huldah (the Hebrew word for weasel, and also a given name) surely was, as we know from 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles, a prophet to King Josiah.

Note that in this second example, unlike our earlier instance in Genesis, the literary context does not inherently suggest or invite humor. This is an involved halakhic debate, yet amidst the discourse, Rava slips in a moment of whimsy. And it’s a learned whimsy as well: not that knowledge of Tanakh is gatekept from a common audience, but the pun draws on shared founts of knowledge to resonate.

It is this second sort of wordplay, a pun that derives from a corpus known to both the teller and the hearer, that I wish to probe in the remainder of this article. There is truly a vast body of literature focused on the multifarious ways that rabbinic literature makes punny use of Biblical literature, as in the example above. However, I am not aware of any commentary, either from the walls of the beit midrash or the halls of the academy, that specifically treats rabbinic wordplay on rabbinic sources. It is perhaps unsurprising that traditional Talmud commentators, typically concerned with explication of content and ideas, would refrain from making note of literary features like wordplay, and the phenomenon is perhaps not widespread enough to merit much academic attention. But I hope to draw the reader’s attention to two instances of Hazal punning on Hazal, if for no other reason than to highlight a specific instantiation of the percolation of the oral tradition in the minds and mouths of its own propagators.

       II. A Pun (Satisfaction Not Guaranteed)

The second chapter of Tractate Berakhot in the Babylonian Talmud contains, toward its end, a lengthy series of what might be described as rabbinic speech formulas. Under particular circumstances, whether ritual or temporal, various rabbis would orate particular speeches that, from the text itself, seem to have been carefully and artfully composed. One such example, on 17a, comes from R. Yohanan:

רַבִּי יוֹחָנָן כִּי הֲוָה מְסַיֵּים סִפְרָא דְאִיּוֹב, אָמַר הָכִי: ״סוֹף אָדָם לָמוּת וְסוֹף בְּהֵמָה לִשְׁחִיטָה, וְהַכֹּל לְמִיתָה הֵם עוֹמְדִים. אַשְׁרֵי מִי שֶׁגָּדֵל בַּתּוֹרָה וַעֲמָלוֹ בַּתּוֹרָה, וְעוֹשֶׂה נַחַת רוּחַ לְיוֹצְרוֹ, וְגָדֵל בְּשֵׁם טוֹב וְנִפְטָר בְּשֵׁם טוֹב מִן הָעוֹלָם, וְעָלָיו אָמַר שְׁלֹמֹה: ‘טוֹב שֵׁם מִשֶּׁמֶן טוֹב וְיוֹם הַמָּוֶת מִיּוֹם הִוָּלְדוֹ'”.״

Rabbi Yohanan, when he would conclude the Book of Job, would say as follows: “Man’s end is death, and the beast’s end is slaughter; all stand to die. Great is he who grew in Torah and whose labor is in Torah, and produces satisfaction to his Creator, and grew with a good name, and departs from the world with a good name. About such a person said Solomon: ‘A name is better than good oil, and the day of death from the day of his birth’ (Kohelet 7:1).”

R. Yohanan’s teaching serves as an appropriate thematic cap for a book like Job, and ties in thematic connections to Kohelet, a book similarly dreary in certain ways. At the end of the day, concludes R. Yohanan, the important thing in this all-too-fleeting life is to live in a God- and man-pleasing way. But let us focus on the literary elements that give this teaching its form. Its parallel clauses—man’s death followed by that of an animal, growing up in Torah and with a good name—clearly demonstrate, along with the given context of R. Yohanan’s regularly teaching it, that this text is very intentionally composed, and intended, in its current form, to be taught publicly, if not, as became its fate, disseminated in written materials. One might even imagine that such a teaching is ripe, within its audience, for further reference, analysis, or skillful adaptation.

Such an adaptation appears in what would seem to be a wholly unrelated passage in Masekhet Shabbat (105b), concerning the prohibition of tearing on Shabbat. The Mishnah states that tearing a garment either in anger or in anguish over the death of a loved one, or indeed anyone who acts destructively rather than constructively, is exempt from a Biblical violation of the Sabbath laws. Immediately, the gemara challenges the Mishnah from an unspecified Tannaitic source, which indicates that, to the contrary, tearing in anger or in anguish does in fact result in violation of a Biblical prohibition (as well as sufficing, in the case of grief, for the obligation to tear a garment in response to a death). In seeking to reconcile the two sources, the gemara eventually turns its attention to the specific conflict that the sources present on the severity of tearing a garment in anger. The Talmud initially posits that the two Tannaitic sources derive from two broader, divergent schools of thought regarding intentionality in Shabbat violations: R. Yehudah maintains that a forbidden labor “she-einah tzerikhah le-gufah” (a category that we will define imprecisely as “unmotivated by its inherent purpose,” generally meaning that the labor was carried out for reasons unrelated to the typical outcome of the labor) is Biblically prohibited, whereas R. Shimon believes that such a labor is only rabbinically prohibited. Thus, the Mishnah is in accord with R. Shimon’s position, whereas the countertext is in accord with R. Yehudah’s.

Eventually, this framework is accepted by the gemara, but not before a further challenge: R. Yehudah’s stance on the severe prohibition of melakahah she-einah tzerikahah le-gufah is understood to apply to constructive actions: one’s intention was to produce a result separate from the typical result of that labor. But would it apply to destructive actions as well, where the actor has no constructive desired outcome? R. Avin finds another way to characterize the angry garment-rending in question that circumvents the question entirely:

.אָמַר רַבִּי אָבִין: הַאי נָמֵי מְתַקַּן הוּא, דְּקָעָבֵיד נַחַת רוּחַ לְיִצְרוֹ

R. Avin said: This, too, is a constructive act, because he produces satisfaction for his (evil) inclination.

The remainder of the passage, in challenging the validity of the presented resolution, goes even further than R. Avin, in comparing angry outbursts to idol worship, again drawing on the role played by the evil inclination. But for the purposes of this essay, let us focus on the final four words of R. Avin’s response: “he produces satisfaction for his (evil) inclination,” or, in an apparent combination of Aramaic and Hebrew, “דקעביד נחת רוח ליצרו.” This is, I believe, unambiguously meant as a direct reference to R. Yohanan’s phrase in Berakhot: “ועושה נחת רוח ליוצרו”, “he produces satisfaction for his Creator.” The phrases, after accounting for the translation of the Hebrew עושה to the equivalent Aramaic קעביד, are identical, save for the vowel in יוצרו (yotzero, his Creator) and יצרו (yitzro, his inclination).

Before proceeding further, let us deal with the perhaps obvious question: which line came first, and which is the pun? I think a careful examination of the texts in question suggests that R. Yohanan’s is the referent and R. Avin’s is the reference. First of all, R. Yohanan’s statement, as we have demonstrated, is a carefully constructed formal one, and meant for public consumption. This would suggest that it is likely to have entered the cultural conversation, or at least would be more likely to do so than a line of discussion in the beit midrash, as R. Avin’s appears to be. Along these lines, the move from R. Yohanan’s fully Hebrew pronouncement to R. Avin’s partially Aramaic (and thus vernacular) statement would suggest that the latter is making reference to the former. Secondly, R. Avin’s statement is worded somewhat stiltedly: does the evil inclination truly draw satisfaction from anger? Presumably, the argument itself means that tearing a garment in anger is a way to calm oneself down, but R. Avin’s formulation, as veteran punsters can surely relate to, sacrifices some semantic coherence for some inspired wordplay. Finally, let us consider the personalities making the statement. R. Yohanan was a second-generation Amora, while R. Avin was not only a member of the third generation, but one of R. Yohanan’s students. It is surely to be expected that R. Yohanan’s statements, to borrow a rabbinic phrase, would be “gems in the mouth” of R. Avin. Arguably, there can be no greater show of respect for a teacher than to be so familiar with his frequent turns of phrase that the student uses and plays on them, with love and delight.

       III. A Pun – Intended?

The other instance we shall examine of wordplay with rabbinic texts, in comparison with the foregoing, is perhaps even more obvious in its directionality. The source text that carries the discussion pertains to the institution of hatra’ah, or explicit warning before commission of a particular sin, that the Talmud typically assumes is required for courts to carry out any punishment, and appears in five separate contexts, scattered across Tractates Sanhedrin (8b, 41a, and 72b) and Makkot (6b and 9b). Let us focus on the fourth such case. The Mishnah cited in Makkot 6b presents the opinion of R. Yosi, who maintains that in order for a murderer to be sentenced to capital punishment, both of the witnesses who saw him commit the crime must also have warned him about it, in keeping with the literal phrasing of Deuteronomy 17:6: “By the word of two witnesses […the condemned is to be executed].” R. Papa, in conversation with Abaye in the gemara, points out a contradiction: a subsequent Mishnah in Makkot cites R. Yosi making exactly the opposite claim! In the second Mishnah, R. Yosi opines that a murderer who is established as having hated his victim before the murderer is eligible for execution, because he is considered to have previously been cautioned and warned. Evidently, R. Yosi of the second Mishnah believes that explicit verbal warning is not necessary in all cases. Abaye deftly sidesteps the issue: R. Yosi of the second Mishnah is not the previously assumed R. Yosi ben Halafta, but in fact R. Yosi bar Yehudah! The latter of the two Tannaitic sages is cited by name, across Shas, as saying:

.רַבִּי יוֹסֵי בַּר יְהוּדָה אוֹמֵר: חָבֵר אֵין צָרִיךְ הַתְרָאָה, לְפִי שֶׁלֹּא נִיתְּנָה הַתְרָאָה אֶלָּא לְהַבְחִין בֵּין שׁוֹגֵג לְמֵזִיד

R. Yosi bar Yehudah says: a haver (learned person) does not require warning, because warning is only given in order to distinguish between an unintentional actor and an intentional actor.

In each of the five appearances of this phrase throughout Seder Nezikin, R. Yosi bar Yehuda’s explanation of the purpose of hatra’ah (warning) serves to evade a potential contradiction, either in the opinion of R. Yosi or in the details of capital case law where verbal warning appears to be absent from a scenario under discussion. The statement, which presents a less rigidly formal view of the institution of warning than that presented by other Tannaim, is surely familiar to those who study the laws of punishment by Jewish courts.

With this background in mind, let us examine a passage in Tractate Horayot, a relatively obscure volume that concerns itself with the processes around a court that issues a mistaken ruling, an event that generally triggers an obligation to bring a unique sacrifice. The Mishnah cited on folio 3b quotes a debate: If a court issues an instruction to the community, but subsequently recognizes that it was in error and retracts the ruling, how do we treat a community member who follows the initial, mistaken ruling? R. Shimon maintains that the individual is exempt from punishment, while R. Elazar holds that the answer depends on the individual’s opportunity to have heard the retraction. In the gemara, R. Yehudah in the name of Rav explains, perhaps unsurprisingly, that R. Shimon’s exemption of the community member is because the individual acted under the authority of the court. The gemara then presents an alternative version of R. Yehudah’s quotation of Rav:

.אָמַר רַב יְהוּדָה אָמַר רַב, אוֹמֵר הָיָה רַבִּי שִׁמְעוֹן: כל הוֹרָאָה שֶׁיָּצְאָה בְּרוֹב צִבּוּר – יָחִיד הָעוֹשֶׂה אוֹתָהּ פָּטוּר, לְפִי שֶׁלֹּא נִיתְּנָה הוֹרָאָה אֶלָּא לְהַבְחִין בֵּין שׁוֹגֵג לְמֵזִיד

R. Yehudah said in the name of Rav: R. Shimon would say: “Any instruction that was issued to the majority of the community, an individual acting in accord with that instruction is exempt, because instruction is only given in order to distinguish between an unintentional actor and an intentional actor.”

Regardless of any questions about how the second formulation of R. Yehudah’s citation of Rav’s explanation of R. Shimon substantively differs from the first formulation—it should be noted here that the editorial layers of Horayot are notoriously less seamless than elsewhere in the Talmud—the second formulation itself is, indeed, somewhat difficult to parse on its own merits. It is hardly true, after all, that a court’s instruction serves even primarily to elucidate the intentionality of an action. The fact that, in this case, the presence of a court’s instruction suggests that one following it in error is acting without intent to sin appears to be only a downstream outcome of the instruction in the first place.

Of course, as readers of the previous paragraphs, we understand clearly how this formulation unfolds: it is, without a doubt, a pun on the oft-repeated statement about the utility of warnings. The word for warning, התראה (hatra’ah) differs by just one letter from the word for instruction, הוראה (hora’ah). The remainder of the phrase, “A (warning/instruction) is only given in order to distinguish between an unintentional actor and an intentional actor,” is identical. Once again, we have a clear instance of wordplay between two sugyot, in a context of discourse which does not independently suggest humor.

The provenance of the reference in Horayot is, admittedly, slightly less clear than the others we have seen. R. Yose bar Yehudah, the authority behind the “warning” phrase, was a member of the fifth and last generation of Tannaim. R. Shimon (ben Yohai), who ostensibly formulated the “instruction” phrase, actually preceded R. Yose bar Yehudah, in the fourth generation of Tannaim. However, the gemara makes it far from clear that the punny formulation is in fact directly attributable to R. Shimon. For one, it is explicitly quoted through two layers of Amoraim, R. Yehudah and Rav. Secondly, the presence of the two different formulations of the explication of R. Shimon surely mitigates against a literally reliable direct quotation of the Tanna, or even the Amoraic summation thereof. Instead, it is much more reasonable to assume that the “instruction” phrase significantly postdates the “warning” phrase. Beyond the specific dating arguments, it is surely more straightforward to assume that the “warning” phrase, which appears in the Babylonian Talmud five times versus the “instruction” phrase’s single instance, is the referent for the glaring case of wordplay.

       IV. End of Play

The first instance we saw in this essay of rabbis punning on rabbis could, in a sense, be understood as a tribute from student to teacher. In the midst of a section of fairly dry halakhic discourse, R. Avin recalls the unrelated words of his teacher R. Yohanan, perhaps not terribly consciously, and weaves a punny reference to a statement he may have heard repeatedly into a separate Talmudic argument. But this second instance is harder, at first glance, to parse. Not only does the pun render the statement confusing, at best, but is there a direct personal connection between the Amora R. Yehudah (or his teacher, Rav) and R. Yose ben Yehudah?

Perhaps there is not, but for the most profound connection of all: the corpus of Torah. The layers of interpretation and meaning that accrete in rabbinic discourse, and have in fact been in the process of accretion through millennia now, are an ever-productive mine of profundity, concepts, and, yes, language. And where there is shared language, there is always shared humor, even in the least expected contexts. There are surely more instances of the phenomenon of Hazal using their predecessors’ words in humorous ways, and I look forward to seeing the identification of further cases with all due pun-ctuality.