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Avigdor Amiel, Who Was a Renowened Preacher, Be— Came Chief Rabbi of Tel—Aviv in 1936 and Died in 1946

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Avigdor Amiel, Who Was a Renowened Preacher, Be— Came Chief Rabbi of Tel—Aviv in 1936 and Died in 1946 A - 966v\.¥~¥ W «29; /2\. _, _. __ \ BEST OF A BAD BUNCH?/ sM—hm MGM"; ‘5' am. .188 {goincidences never cease! Yesterday morning I was doing what rabbis are supposed to do on Friday morning: I was studying today's Sidra and what our tradition has had to say about it. In one anthology I found a comment I rather liked, attributed to Rabbi 'Aleph' Amiel (Greenberg, Itturey Torah, I, 58). It was not a name I had ever .come across before, so I looked up the Encyclopaedia Judaicg and discovered, first that there was a family of that name in Morocco in the nineteenth century, and second- ly, that a Polish-born rabbi, Moses Avigdor Amiel, who was a renowened preacher, be— came Chief Rabbi of Tel—Aviv in 1936 and died in 1946. Since the ‘Aleph' might well stand for 'Avigdor', I decided that the comment must be by him. Then,1§suddenly real- ised that our papers had not been delivered, and that I had better go tg'the newsagents and get them, just in case the Jewish Chronicle contained something so startling that, §lg§g or no §lg§g, I simply must comment on it. Well, they had run out of JC's, but they did have a Times, and when I opened it the first thing my eye fell on was a .feature article about Margaret Thatcher's Christianity, and the name of the writer, who identified herself as a Jewess, was Barbara Amiel! ‘ Now I am sdre that you are not in the slightest bit interested in what she thinks, or what I think, about Margaret Thatcher's Christianity, but you are dying to know what Rabbi Avigdor Amiel had to say about our Sidra! So I will tell you, but it's a 4 , ,__»_,_ A-V\/~\~, _, ‘ bit of a long story.N V“/_ V~ 7-A‘_,-~_-__ - J Our starting point is the opening verse of/our Sidra, Which says: §9§g§_§§g tzaddik tamim hayah b'dorotav, g3 ha-elohim hit-hallech Noach, "Noah was a righteous and up— right man in his generation; Noah walked with God" (Gen. 6:9). Thatfihay sound very simple, but in fact {fizégiées a number of questions, ihe chief of which is: What significance is to be attached to the phrase 'in his generation'? Does it, for in-_ stance, mean 'relative to his generation'? In other words, was Noah merely 'the best of a bad bunch'? That is a very<péégibléfifipéfbiétatibfit_énd_i;wis well represqnted, in Jewish tradition[ as I shall show presently. But first I can't resist the tempt- ation to tell you what it reminds me of. Jfi35éiEEdSIhiofthe story of the rabbi who found himself in the embarrassing position of having to conduct the funeral of a man for whom nobody had anything good to say. After wréstling with this problem for some time, the rabbi began his funeral oration - 'eulogy' would hardly be the right word in the circumstaNCes - by saying: "Since our religious tradition demands truthfulness, I must honestly tell you that \the>mafi“we have come here to bury was an egotist, a miser, a scrounger, a swindler N _ 2}- and a scoundrel. However, our tradition also requires that we should always end of a note of praise. Therefore I will add that, compared with his brother, he was a saint!" ' question is whether Noah was righteous only in such a relative sense, and Sq1%re th%lfi;;t recorded opinion to that effect occurs in a little book entitled gfl?fiir;h;m; K by the great Jewish philosopher Philo, who lived in Alexandria in the first cefiéug; of the common era. There he wrote: "But Moses makes a good point when, after praising Noah as.possessed of all these virtues, he adds that he was perféct in_his generation, thus shewing that he was not'good absolutely but in comparison with the men of his time. For we shall shortly find him mentioning other sages whose virtue was unchalleng— ed, who are not contrasted with the bad, who are adjudged worthy of approval and pre- cedence, not because they were better than their contémporaries but because they possessed a happily—gifted nature and kept it unperverted, who did not have to shun évil courses or indeed comé into contact with them at all, but attained pre-eminence in practising that excellence of words and deeds with which they adorned their lives" h (E933 Classical Library, Vol. VI, pp. 21-23). A century later we find the same view expressed, according to B'reshit Rabbah, the Midrash on the book of Genesis, by Rabbi Judah bar Ilai£3one of the five Rabbis ordained by Judah ben Bava in an act of defiance of thé‘homén edict forbidding such ordinations f0? which he was hacked to death when caught. But by th t time the five newly ordained rabbis had escaped (Sanh. 1Aafg§ On our verseifludah bag Ila§]commented: "In his generation Noah was righteous, but if he had lived in the generation of Moses, or of Samuel, he would not have been considered righteous." But his View did not go unchallenged. His friend and colleague Rabbi Nehemiafi?3who was another of the five (EEQaipeqNbi‘Hggéfiffiéh:BavaE}argued, on the contrary: "I? Noah was righteous in his generation, how mucfi more would he have been righteous ih the age of Moses or Samuel" . (Gen. R. 30:9)- The point is fairly clear, bui let me spell it out. Noah's generation, the Bible tells us, Was so corrupt that God had no choice but to destroy it. If, then, Noah did not allow hifiself to be dragged down by such an evil environment, he must have been a man of quite extraordinary moral fortitude. Therefore, if he had lived in a more virtuous age, surely he would have risen té even greater heights! (SQ:§E<§§€f.7 that the matter be quite either fie can figued, plausibly, way. 'wu_~ ~ _.-,__,._l — _..,r\ U‘ \s\ {Anqn{§_was! In E§9{?ex€]century[Ethat is to say, the thirdyjkhe debate was re- newed, this time between Rabbi Yochanan ben Nappachd, who took the view that Noah _ 3 _ was righteous only relative to his contemporaries, and Rabbi Shim'on ben Lakish, known as Resh Lakish, who believed that he was righgggus without any such quali— fication. This debate, too,:?%corded in the Talmud§¥§anh. 108a%:was between close friends and colleagues, and as the story of their relationship is quite touching, let me briefly tell it to you. Rabbi Yochanan was an orphan. His father died before he was born and his mother in giving birth to him. He was brought up by his grandfather and grew up to be a tall and dazzlingly handsome young man. While still young, he met Resh Lakish, then a gladiator or a lion-tamer in a REman circus, and persuaded him to give up that 'déggading a§.jgll ashdangerous occupation, and take up instead the study of TOrah. 3w1£hin a few years Resh Lakish had become an outstanding scholar and married Rabbi Yochanan's sister, and a deep friendship developed between the two brothers-in-law, a friendship which, as our story illustrates, included many vehement-but amicable arguments- But it ended tragically. On one occasion Rabbi Yochanan, perhaps embittered, as well he might have been, by the loss of ten sons, all of whom died in infancy, forgot himself and made a scathing remark about his friend. What he actually said was, "A robber knows his trade," referring to his former dccupation. Resh Lakish was so hurt that he died of grief, and Rabbi Yochanan so overwhelmed with remorse that he died soon-after (B.M. 84a). Bdixbagkrp§rogf verséijlfiéSbglfgp;ggéjEiblevpgmmenflgfy? wrifien inLNprihefb fFranc§¥j§AEB§;éléventh céntuh§{f~ kifi£§:§9thi;nEérpr§pa£§§fi§ > ;‘§pp§p§qtly wighppt"; _ Eo‘ (gorhmitqtipfi girjsfe'i’i" eit‘bé’xj,”_bu§ _;gr‘1j's@*c‘fi Awéjf/iqyblizing two firefiglr‘iériiiest‘ghat later commentators guessed which side he was on. These are Réshi's words: "Some 6f our Rabbis interprefiiflfi phrase 'in his generation' to his credit, meaning how much more righteous still hé/fiould have been if he had lived in a righteous generation; others interpret the phrase to his discredit, meaning that he was righteous only by the standards of his generation" (gg 193.). Now let us jump a few more centuries, to the sixteenth, when Rabbi Moses Alshekh, formerly of Adrianople and Salonika, was living at Safed in Turkish Palestine. He, in his commentary, comes down heavily against Noah. For he fastens on the phrase, "Noah walked with God," and comments: "He walked with God, but not with his fellow human beings. He did not care for humanity, for his environment. Hi§§righteousness was directed only to himself and his family. Commanded by God to build ah ark, he builfi it, nail by nail, beam by beam, for a hundred and twenty full years, andiduring all that time it never occurred to him that it might be possible to prevent the _ 4 _ catastrophe and to save the world from destruction, whereas Abraham; by contrast, strove strenuously to save the people of Sodom“ (Itturey Igggg, I; 55). A pretty damning indictment! And not unjustified,‘perhaps, if you consider that, while the Bible describésLNoah as righteous, it fails to mention a single righteous deedfi on his part, otherwise than+ggugas family and, of course, the animals. But where Scripture leaves off, Midrash steps in, and there is a whole tradition in the ancient rabbinic literature, which Moses Alshekh, for the purpose of his homily, ignores, to the effect that Noah did all sorts of righteous things and, in particular, that he delayed the construction of the ark for 120 years[2 a good deal longer, in fact, than the construction of the new LJS is expected to take! :Sprecisely in order to give his contemporaries time to repent and so to avert the Flood (Louis Ginzberg, Legends 93 Egg gggg, Vol.
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