It has been well observed that Johannes de Silentio offers in Fear and Trembling “his own version of a midrash on Abraham’s struggle,” and several scholars have explored the relationship between his reflections on this struggle and the tradition of rabbinic midrash, or scriptural interpretation. Yet there is more work to be done in this area, and not simply for philological reasons. In particular, I believe that the multiple narratives of the first chapter of Fear and Trembling, entitled Stemning or “Attunement,” can – and should – be read as midrash, and studied in relation to the very different versions of the Akedah (the scriptural narrative of Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac) that are recorded in the Jewish tradition. This chapter aims to show that reading “Attunement” as midrash can illuminate the problem of faith in Fear and Trembling, and perhaps even enrich our understanding of the Akedah itself.

In at least one essential respect, “Attunement” presents Fear and Trembling in microcosm: it tells the story of an anonymous man who – like Silentio – tries to understand the faith that Abraham displays in the Akedah, but is unable to do so. What is the point of Silentio’s story? To what is it supposed to “attune” the reader? What accounts for the interpretative failure of its protagonist (hereafter referred to as “the exegete”)? How might it be related to Silentio’s own failure to understand Abraham? These basic questions motivate the present inquiry.

In the preceding chapter, I described the Talmud and the Platonic dialogues as complex writings that draw readers into their argument and action, encouraging them to question the text, to uncover problems inherent in its surface, and to search its depths for solutions. I also asserted that the moral and intellectual capacity of sympathetic imagination is an interpretative key that can unlock the inner meaning of aggadic and Platonic storytelling. In this chapter, we shall begin to see concretely what these claims amount to as we start to think through the Mishnah and Gemara of Ta'anit 3.

Ta'anit 3 and Plato's Euthyphro exemplify a distinctive feature of both the dialogues and the Talmud: the employment of narrative and drama to explore central themes and questions and thus to develop, at least implicitly, an overall argument. While Ta'anit as a whole reflects on a set of related halakhic issues pertaining to religious fasts, Ta'anit 3 is unusually rich in aggadic material relating to the lives and deeds (many of them miraculous) of certain rabbis and other Jewish “holy men.” So, too, the philosophical argument of the Euthyphro is embedded within the story of an encounter that occurs at a defining moment of Socrates' life – the beginning of the legal proceedings that will soon result in his conviction and execution.

What has Plato to do with the Talmud? The question is more than fair. The Platonic dialogues and the Talmud are separated in time by a millennium, and in spirit by the immeasurable gulf between the orienting concepts of the world that is by nature and the Word that is revealed by God. Plato's dialogues are philosophical dramas centered on the speeches and deeds of Socrates, while the Talmud comprises a detailed yet economically constructed law code (the Mishnah) coupled with an expansive and remarkably free-wheeling commentary (the Gemara). Socratic philosophizing consists in the critical examination of human opinions before the bar of reason; Talmudic inquiry measures itself by the comprehensive revelation of God in the Torah. In origin, orientation, style, and substance, Platonic and Talmudic writing would seem to be worlds apart. Must not the fruits with which these texts reward their readers be equally disparate?

One might reply that Athens and Jerusalem are united by a shared devotion to the acquisition of wisdom. But because this devotion springs from fundamentally different experiences, Judaism and Greek philosophy embrace distinct conceptions of what wisdom is and how it can be achieved. In the view of Leo Strauss, these conceptions are radically incompatible. “According to the Bible,” Strauss observes, “the beginning of wisdom [ḥakhmah] is fear of the Lord; according to the Greek philosophers, the beginning of wisdom [sophia] is wonder.

In at least one respect, Ta'anit 3 is perfectly consistent with the whole of which it is but a small part: the Talmud repeatedly and continually asks readers to reflect on how they might best embody God's teaching in the Torah. The Talmud is able to frame the question of the best life in just this way because it can legitimately assume that readers are already united in the worship of the God of Israel, acknowledge the Torah as an essential and unique body of divine instruction for human life, and have at least a rudimentary appreciation of the subtlety and complexity of this instruction.

In the context of the Platonic dialogues, no comparable assumptions are possible. The inquiry of the Euthyphro is consequently much broader and more rudimentary than that of Ta'anit. Its central questions have to do with who the gods are, and what they want from us. Are the gods selfish beings driven by violent passions, or are they guardians of justice? Do the gods demand unquestioning devotion, or do they encourage and reward critical reflection on the meaning of their communications to human beings? The dialogue poses these questions not because the Greek religious tradition fails to answer them, but because the answers it offers are not consistent. Those who explicitly claim knowledge of piety are therefore necessarily engaged in the activity of interpretation, even though they may not be fully conscious of the nature of this activity.

This book reads the aggadah of Ta'anit 3 alongside Plato's Euthyphro and Apology. A well-founded reading must begin by considering the nature of the texts at hand. The present chapter reflects on the literary characteristics of the Talmud and the Platonic dialogues with a view to establishing the fundamental interpretative assumptions of this study.

With regard to the Talmud, we must start by asking some basic questions. How do the Mishnah and the Gemara function as instruments of teaching and learning? What is the purpose of Talmudic aggadah? How does the aggadic material in the Talmud relate to its halakhic content? One way to address these questions is to inquire into the relationship between the literary genres of the Talmud and the earlier tradition of sacred writings. This approach leads us back to the origins of the Jewish literary tradition in the Bible.

SCRIPTURE, MIDRASH AND MISHNAH FORMS, AND ORAL TORAH

It is important to state at the outset that the beliefs and practices of Judaism were initially formulated and transmitted as an oral tradition, retained in memory and passed down through successive generations over the centuries. At some point, essential parts of this tradition – starting with the Torah proper, the Pentateuch – began to be committed to writing, presumably as a response to a crisis that caused its bearers to lose confidence in their ability to maintain the tradition in a purely oral form.

The accomplishment of Socrates in the Platonic dialogues is considerably less flamboyant than that of Ḥoni HaMe'aggel, but what he lacks in flash he makes up in depth. This seems to be the lot of all true teachers. Socrates is comparable to Ḥoni because he claims to do the greatest good for the Athenians, and to be a gift of the god to his city. But unlike Ḥoni's dramatic rainmaking, Socrates' deeds are generally not regarded as beneficial, and they are certainly not miraculous. Insofar as he does benefit the Athenians, it is by making them think about their lives and providing them with an example that is worthy of imitation. Ḥoni, on the other hand, is not a teacher, and the Talmud does not present him as someone who can, or should, be imitated.

While the Talmud works hard – somewhat too hard, in fact – to explain the merit it assumes Ḥoni must have possessed in order to win the favor of God, it concludes by drawing from his story a ­negative lesson about the overriding value of intellectual companionship. In doing so, the Talmud calls attention to the difference between Ḥoni's accomplishment as a miracle worker and that of the rabbis of the academy – including, at least implicitly, the accomplishment of the Talmud itself. The Talmud cannot bring rain, which, with the addition of physical labor, human beings can turn into food that will sustain their bodies.

Plato's Euthyphro, to which later editors appended the subtitle “On The Holy” (peri hosiou), is one of a sequence of eight dialogues that tell the story of the last days of Socrates. The conversation of the Euthyphro takes place immediately after that of the Theateteus, and shortly before Socrates' public trial in 399 bce; the Apology of Socrates comprises the defense Socrates presents at this trial. Just as the main ­intellectual drama of Ta'anit 3 arises from the confrontation of Shimon and Ḥoni, that of the Euthyphro consists of an encounter between Socrates and the young man for whom the dialogue is named. Socrates' interrogation of Euthyphro on the subject of piety – a subject about which his interlocutor, a self-proclaimed diviner, insists that he has special knowledge – is a timely and natural outgrowth of the immediate circumstances in which these men meet. Their conversation occurs at an Athenian judicial office (the Portico of the King Archon) to which Euthyphro has come in order to initiate legal action against his father, and to which Socrates has been summoned to respond to the preliminary indictment of three accusers, Anytus, Meletus, and Lycon. These men have charged Socrates with “corrupting the young and not worshiping the gods the city worships, but other, new and strange divinities” (Apology 24b–c). As even the most casual readers of Plato may be expected to know, the archon will allow the indictment to go forward, and, in the days ahead, Socrates will be tried, convicted, and executed.

The Platonic dialogues offer several different versions of Socrates' understanding of things divine. In the Republic, it is the Good that inspires in him a sense of sacred awe. In the Symposium, Socrates relates that the priestess Diotima described philosophy to him as an initiation into the mysteries, not of the Good, but of the Beautiful (to kalon: 201d–12a). Like the Ideas, the Good and the Beautiful are intelligible beings that are accessible to the human mind through philosophical inquiry; as such, they are distinct from the other divinities of which Socrates regularly speaks – the gods. In the great myth Socrates tells in the Phaedrus, the gods serve as a model for the ascent of the soul through philosophy. They journey to the roof of the cosmos, where they “contemplate [theōrousi, lit. ‘theorize’] the things outside the heaven” and feast on the spectacle of “being that really is, [which is] observable only to intellect, the steersman of the soul” (247b–c). But as Socrates' recourse to myth suggests, his ­understanding of the divine beings is both indefinite and provisional. In the Euthyphro, Socrates develops certain philosophically attractive hypotheses about the nature of “the gods”; in the Republic, he seems unable to decide between the alternatives of polytheism and monotheism, and even switches from the plural (“gods”) to the singular (“the god”) in midsentence (380c). In the Theaetetus, he speaks of “the god” who “compels me to midwife” (150c); in the Apology, of “the god” he serves by philosophizing.

Who is Plato's Socrates? Who are the rabbinic sages? The Platonic dialogues and the Talmud address these questions by mimetically representing the deeds as well as the speeches of these men. By telling stories about their experiences and reproducing their arguments in the form of “live” debate, these texts attempt to give readers a concrete and vivid impression of the inner being of Socrates and the sages. But the rewards of reading the dialogues and the Talmud are commensurate with the efforts of the reader, for only the combined work of logical analysis and literary interpretation can open up the depths of significance in the thoughts and actions represented in these writings.

This book has attempted to answer the two questions just posed by way of a comparative analysis and interpretation of selected Platonic and Talmudic writings. The preceding chapters have brought to light a number of analogies between both the form and the content of Ta'anit 3 and the Euthyphro and Apology. The most important of these fall naturally into three categories: the conceptual and practical spaces in which Talmudic and Socratic inquiry unfold, the main ideas that allow Socrates and the rabbis to negotiate these spaces, and the role of the texts in mediating the reader's relationship to these ideas. While this synoptic framework is too schematic to incorporate every significant detail of the texts we have studied, it will serve to bring into focus the main points of contact between them.

Ḥoni HaMe'aggel, as we saw in Chapter 2, poses a kind of Talmudic riddle. Presented in Ta'anit 3 as a curious combination of prophet and rabbi, he is both a “son” to God and a “father” to his disciples and to the people Israel – a protector and savior of the community because of his mysterious closeness to the Lord. But for all its praise of Ḥoni, the Gemara makes clear just what is missing in his life: the genuine partnership and friendship that can take root and grow only between equals. This is the lesson the Gemara draws from Ḥoni's inability to make himself known to the rabbis of the academy, a detail that stands as Ta'anit's last word on this heroic but ultimately lonely man. “Either companionship or death,” Rava brusquely concludes (23A, II.121) – implying that a solitary life is not worth living, and that it is in the academy that the human potential for meaningful friendship is most fully realized.

For the rabbis, academic life binds human beings with each other and with God in relationships that have distinct filial and paternalistic elements. At the highest level, however, the rabbis are – or aspire to be – a community of equals. This is the community of sages jointly engaged in study. To become a sage, one must first have learned at the feet of a master; to be a sage means also to be a master to one's own disciples.