The Splendor of Space
An allegorical interpretation of an ancient debate.
The time: about the year 130.
The place: Palestine.
The people present: Three leading scholars and one outsider. The place and the people under the dominion of the Roman Empire.
Rabbi Judah ben Ilai, Rabbi Jose, and Rabbi Shimeon ben Yohai were sitting together, and with them was a man called Judah ben Gerim. Rabbi Judah opened the discussion and said:
—How fine are the works of this people (the Romans) ! They have made roads and market places, they have built bridges, they have erected bathhouses.
Rabbi Jose was silent.
Then Rabbi Shimeon ben Yohai replied and said:
—All that they made they made for themselves. They made roads and market places to put harlots there; they built bridges to levy tolls for them; they erected bathhouses to delight their bodies.
Judah ben Gerim went home and related to his father and mother all that had been said. And the report of it spread until it reached the government. Decreed the government:
—Judah who exalted us shall be exalted; Jose who was silent shall go into exile; Shimeon who reviled our work shall be put to death.
When Rabbi Shimeon heard of the decree, he took his son Rabbi Eleazar with him and hid in the House of Learning. And his wife came every day and brought him stealthily bread and a jug of water. When Rabbi Shimeon heard that men were searching for them and trying to capture them, he said to his son:
—We cannot rely upon a woman’s discretion, for she can easily be talked over. Or perhaps she may be tortured until she discloses our place of concealment.
So they went together into the field and hid themselves in a cave, so that no man knew what had become of them. And a miracle happened: a carob tree grew up inside the cave and a well of water opened, so that they had enough to eat and enough to drink. They took off their clothes and sat up to their necks in sand. The whole day they studied Torah. And when the time for prayer came, they put their clothes on and prayed, and then they put them off and again dug themselves into the sand, so that their clothes should not wear away. Thus they spent twelve years in the cave.
When the twelve years had come to an end, Elijah the prophet came and, standing at the entrance of the cave, exclaimed:
—Who will inform the son of Yohai that the emperor is dead and his decree has been annulled?
When they heard this, they emerged from the cave. Seeing the people plowing the fields and sowing the seed, they exclaimed:
—These people forsake eternal life and are engaged in temporary life!
Whatever they looked upon was immediately consumed by the fire of their eyes. Thereupon a voice from heaven exclaimed:
—Have ye emerged to destroy My world? Return to your cave!
So they returned and dwelled there another twelve months; for, they said, the punishment of the wicked in hell lasts only twelve months.
When the twelve months had come to an end, the voice was heard from heaven saying:
—Go forth from your cave!
Thus they went out. Wherever Rabbi Eleazar hurt, Rabbi Shimeon healed. Said Rabbi Shimeon:
—My son, if only we two remain to study the Torah, that will be sufficient for the world.
It was the eve of the Sabbath when they left the cave, and as they came out they saw an old man carrying two bundles of myrtle in his hand, a sweet-smelling herb having the perfume of paradise.
—What are these for, they asked him.
—They are in honor of the Sabbath, the old man replied.
Said Rabbi Shimeon to his son:
—Behold and see how dear God’s commands are to Israel …
At that moment they both found tranquility of soul.1
There is a mass of cryptic meaning in this silent, solitary story of one who, outraged by the scandal of desecrated time, refused to celebrate the splendor of civilized space. It symbolically describes how Rabbi Shimeon ben Yohai and his son went from exasperation and disgust with this world, which resulted in their actually trying to destroy those who were engaged in worldly activities, to a reconciliation with this world. What stirred these men was not, as it is usually understood by historians,2 mere patriotic resentment against the power that had vanquished and persecuted the people of Judea. From the development of the story, it becomes obvious that from the outset the issue was not only the Roman rule but also the Roman civilization. After they had spent twelve years in the cave, the scope of the issue expanded even further. It was not any more a particular civilization but all civilization, the worth of worldly living that became the problem.
Rome, in that period, was at the height of her glory. She was the mistress of the world. All the Mediterranean countries lay at her feet. Her commerce extended beyond the bounds of the Empire to Scandinavia in the north and China in the east, and her civilization attained a high degree of perfection in the technical arts. In all her provinces, signs of immense progress in administration, engineering and the art of construction were widely visible. It was the ambition of her rulers to express the splendor of their age by adorning with public monuments every province of the empire. Fora, theaters, amphitheaters, public baths, aqueducts and bridges constructed in many cities were often marvels of constructive skill.
Rome herself towered in her glory as the city on which “the looks of men and gods were turned.” Even generations after that period, a poet could still aver “that Heaven could show nothing fairer; that no eye could see her immensity, no heart feel her beauty, no tongue sing all her praise.”3 The Colosseum with its overwhelming massiveness, the Pantheon with its lofty vaulting, and particularly the Forum of Trajan, a building of unparalleled magnificence and “admired even by the gods,” seemed to proclaim that the Empire and eternity were one. The ancient man was inclined to believe that monuments will last for ever.4 It was, therefore, fit to bestow the most precious epithet on Rome and to call it: the Eternal City.5 The state became an object of worship, a divinity; and the Emperor embodied its divinity as he embodied its sovereignty.
It was hard not to be impressed by the triumphs of that great Empire and to disagree with the mild and gentle Rabbi Judah ben Ilai who acknowledged the boon it had brought to many lands: “How fine are the works of this people! They have made streets, they have built bridges, they have erected baths!” And yet, to Rabbi Shimeon ben Yohai these triumphs were shocking, hateful and repulsive. He disparaged the calculating, utilitarian spirit of Roman civilization. He knew that all these splendid edifices and public institutions were not built by the Romans to aid the people but to serve their own nefarious designs: “All that they made they made for themselves.” 6
When Rabbi Shimeon ben Yohai abandoned the world of civilization to spend many years in a cave, sitting up to his neck in sand, he forfeited worldly life to attain “eternal life.” Yet this was an attainment which was hardly meaningful to his persecutors. To most Romans eternity was almost a worldly concept. The survival of the soul consisted not in being carried away to a superterrestrial and blessed existence. Immortality meant either fame or the cleaving to one’s home, to one’s earthly abode even after death. But Rabbi Shimeon abandoned home as well as the road to fame which is usually attained by one’s being active in the affairs of the world. He fled from the world where eternity was the attribute of a city and went to the cave where he found a way to endow life with a quality of eternity.
The Romans had no conviction that there was any after-life at all, certainly no conviction of an immortal felicity or retribution.7 The ardent longing for such a belief was something which the Roman spirit could not satisfy. “The body dies, the personality disappears, nothing remains alive except the remembrance of virtue and accomplishments of the deceased.”8 the term immortality became a metaphor, signifying one’s being remembered by the people; a metaphor which to this day holds many preachers in its spell. In an appeal to the Senate that to the soldiers of the Martian legion who had fallen in battle “there be raised a monument in the noblest possible shape,” Cicero said: “Brief is the life given us by nature; but the memory of life nobly resigned is everlasting … There shall therefore be erected a mass of splendid workmanship and an inscription cut; and—apostrophizing the fallen soldiers—in your praise, whether men shall behold your monument or shall hear of it, never shall the language of deepest gratitude be silent. Thus, in exchange for life’s mortal state, you will have gained for yourself immortality.” 9 He spoke at another occasion of a public meeting at which “the entire people of Rome accorded to me, not a vote of thanks which would pass with the day, but eternity and immortality.”10 Indeed, it was precisely the understanding of what eternity means that determined Rabbi Shimeon’s withdrawal from the world. It was the kind of an idea that would occasionally emerge in the minds of Stoic philosophers in Rome and that inspired Seneca to say that the gods order us “to prepare ourselves to join them at some future time and to plan for immortality.”10a
The rewards that most people woo were of little worth to Rabbi Shimeon ben Yohai. He was not captivated by the things of the earth, by all the world that is bound to decay. Or was the fame one attained among men to be considered eternal? What is the worth of being remembered by men?
All flesh is grass, all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field …
The grass withereth, the flower fadeth; but the word of our God shall stand forever.11
The world is transitory, but that by which the world was created—the word of God—is everlasting.12 Eternity is attained by dedicating one’s life to the word of God, to the study of Torah.
To this day, the idea of Torah being the source of eternity is proclaimed in our prayers. It is for the gift of perceiving the taste of eternity in dedication to the Torah that time and again we thank and say: “Blessed be thou … who has given us the Torah … and has planted within us eternal life.” 13 And when we go hence and rest in the world to come—what is the bliss that awaits the souls of righteous men? It is to begin to understand the deeper meaning of the Torah: “Things that are covered up from men in this world will become transparent as globes of crystal.”14
To Rabbi Shimeon eternity was not attained by those who bartered time for space but by those who knew how to fill their time with spirit. To him the great problem was time rather than space; the task was how to convert time into eternity rather than how to fill space with buildings, bridges and roads; and the solution of the problem lay in study and prayer rather than in geometry and engineering.