Talmud Class: What Does Jewish History Ask of Me?

What does Jewish history—its incredible heaviness (Yom HaShoah and Yom HaZikaron) and its incredible inspiration (Yom Ha’atzmaut)—ask of me? Does the passage of time affect the answer to that question? We are 81 years from the Holocaust. We are in the midst of yet another war with Iran and its proxies. What is our current responsibility to the Shoah and to the State of Israel? If we choose to disengage from all this heaviness, if we choose to not make Jewish history our problem, if we choose just to live our lives in Greater Boston, send out kids to school, do our jobs, come home, call it a day, that choice is tempting. That choice is understandable. What is the cost of that choice?

To grapple with these hard questions during this season of the three Yoms, we will examine two Talmudic stories from Ta’anit 23A. The first is the story of Choni who sees a man planting carob trees and asks how long it will take for the carob to be ready to eat? 70 years. Will you still be here in 70 years? No. But I inherited a world that had carob trees that had been planted by my ancestors, and I want to leave a world that has carob trees for my descendants. The second, on the heels of the first, has Choni waking up from a deep sleep of 70 years. When he wakes up, he goes to his old haunts, his home, his shul, his study hall, and no one recognizes him. He cries out: “I am Choni.” But he is invisible. Unseen. Unrecognized. Everybody he knew is dead. Nobody alive knows him. He dies of a broken heart, prompting the climactic rabbinic teaching: oh chavrutah oh mitutah. Give me community or give me death.

So many questions:

• What is the meaning of each story?
• How do these two stories connect? The editors of the Talmud intentionally connect them.
• What do the two stories mean to the three Yoms and to our personal connection to Jewish history and to Jewish destiny?
• Can we plant for a future that we will not see?
• Can we live in a future in which we are not seen?