Dovid Campbell
Even though these forbid and these permit, these invalidate and these validate, the school of Shammai did not refrain from marrying women from the school of Hillel; nor did the school of Hillel from the school of Shammai.[1]
– Yevamot 1:4[2]
Ever since reaching the age when the female form began to request his attention with strange insistence, Natanel had known two great truths: first, that he must someday marry Rivka, daughter of Rav Elazar; and second, that Rav Elazar would never permit it. The first truth might have elated him, if not for the mysterious and immovable nature of the second.
Rivka had always been a cloud-like presence in young Natanel’s life—light, cheerful, necessarily beyond reach. He had watched her grow in the house across from his: once forming cakes and castles in the mud, now patiently scrubbing her younger siblings after their own muddy play. She laughed easily. She danced with the milk goat when she thought no one was watching. And now that they had both reached marriageable age, she suppressed a smile of greeting when they passed in the street, modest but unmistakable. There was no mystery to Natanel’s certainty that they belonged together, especially given their families’ closeness.
Rav Elazar and Natanel’s father often spent long nights in conversation, and Natanel as a boy would tuck himself just out of sight in the doorway, drinking in their voices. The evening would always begin with Torah—the exploration of some sacred subtlety of experience—and slowly dissolve into laughter, the two graying men trading memories from a shared childhood. If the hour grew late, a bottle of strong drink would join them at the table and invite a different sort of conversation: one of hopes, doubts, and tenderly silenced regrets. Rav Elazar would often leave in tears, his arm around his friend, the two men staggering gently into the sobering dark.
Those nights had laid the world before Natanel. They had mapped the topography of life with such delicateness and clarity that even a young boy could begin to trace its contours. He had absorbed their lessons quickly: the love of Torah, the sweetness of memory, the inevitability of error. Both men had watched his growth with approval. And yet, how to explain Rav Elazar’s sudden distance?
Natanel could still recall the beginning of it. He and Rav Elazar had just finished their morning prayers and were walking home. Natanel’s father, recently fallen ill, remained bedridden, and Rav Elazar was gently reassuring him.
“A very strong man, your father. Wouldn’t surprise me if we found him chopping wood by the time we got back!”
“Yes, of course,” Natanel replied. “It just makes me worry about my mother. I can’t imagine what she’d do without him.”
“Your mother’s twice as strong as your father,” Rav Elazar chuckled, ruffling Natanel’s hair and resting a hand on his shoulder.
“It’s funny,” Natanel said. “My brothers were teasing yesterday that Rivka is stronger than I am. They said I’ll be the one cooking while she runs the mill!”
Rav Elazar’s hand slipped from Natanel’s shoulder. For a moment, he opened his mouth, and an unseen force seemed to seize his jaw and throat. Then he recovered, breathed deeply, and the moment passed. The conversation drifted back to his father’s recovery.
Natanel had planned to speak to his father about the incident once he recovered, but the illness proved unexpectedly severe. By the time his father regained his strength, word had already spread: Rivka was in need of a husband. And yet no one had approached Natanel about the match. He watched helplessly as young suitors were welcomed into Rav Elazar’s home, each one vying for the bride that Natanel had always known to be his.
What had he done wrong? Had Rav Elazar taken offense—thought him too forward, too sure of what he had never been promised? Or perhaps he had judged Natanel’s Torah learning and found it wanting? On the day that Natanel was finally ready to pose his questions to his father, another voice, darker and more wounded, rose up inside him: It is Rav Elazar who owes you an explanation.
Natanel crossed the narrow road that divided their homes. At the far end of the lane, he spotted a young man approaching—another suitor, no doubt, arriving to take his turn. But there would be no more turns, Natanel told himself. Not until Rav Elazar explained.
Rav Elazar opened the door with a look of surprise—but his welcome was warm, even tender, and for a moment, Natanel forgot his resentment. His shoulders slumped, his gaze dropped to his hands, and he exhaled softly.
“I would like to marry Rivka,” he said.
Again, that strange tension took hold of Rav Elazar.
“But you—” he began, then stopped. A long sigh escaped him. “Please speak to your father,” he said at last.
Natanel nodded, his frame still folded in on itself, and turned to go.
“Natanel.”
He turned back.
Rav Elazar’s eyes were brimming now, some raw and unmendable wound breaking open inside him.
“I love you,” he said. “Like a son.”
Natanel turned—and found the new suitor standing just behind him, face flushed, eyes darting between Natanel and Rav Elazar. Without a word, Natanel stepped past him and walked home, while Rav Elazar wiped his eyes and gently beckoned the young man inside.
The explanation was short and technical.
“As you know, we follow the school of Shammai,” his father began, “and according to this school, your mother is permitted to me. But according to the school of Hillel, she is forbidden. And in their view”—he paused to swallow—“you are a mamzer.”
The words dropped into Natanel’s stomach with a terrible finality.
“And Rav Elazar follows the school of Hillel,” said Natanel, sparing his father the final blow. His father simply nodded, but when he lifted his eyes back to his son, they were red and shimmering.
And suddenly Natanel glimpsed what had been hiding within those nightly conversations of his youth—two old friends who could never become family. A vast and unbridgeable chasm, staring up at them each day in the faces of their children.
In a sense, nothing had changed—Rivka remained like a cloud, drifting high above the world. Only Natanel had been rendered earthbound, impure.
The next day, his father gently told him that Rivka was engaged. And many days after that—he had stopped counting—Natanel stood at her wedding, trying not to meet her gaze, sensing that it rarely left him. He turned to see Rav Elazar dancing with his father.
The two old friends clasped hands and began to spin—first slowly, then desperately—until only Natanel could see their wet cheeks. They whirled faster, their hands beginning to slip, the celebration threatening to hurl them utterly and irretrievably apart.
Then Natanel stepped forward, caught their hands, and joined the dance.
[1] The school of Shammai would notify the school of Hillel which women from among their own members were, according to the school of Hillel’s own legal rulings, prohibited for marriage. The school of Hillel did the same in return. This mutual accommodation made it possible for the two schools to intermarry, but only in cases where there was no conflict according to their respective standards.
[2] “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.
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