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The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan, translated from the Hebrew by Judah Goldin
- Abstract
The Talmud is generally considered a record of ideas, but few realize that it is also a great treasure house of portraiture. Without ever attempting full-length biography, the Talmud intimately describes the great men who flit across its pages. And of all the Talmudic works admitting us into the very workshop of its authors, none is more skillful in its characterizations than the Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan, a remarkable record of the ancient discussions which led to the formulation of the ethical norms contained in the Chapters of the Fathers (Pirke Abot) and to the commentaries on them. In this storehouse of history and wisdom, we hear of the early life of Rabbi Akiba and his teacher, Rabbi Eliezer; we see Rabban Johanan ben Zakkai in the camp of the Romans, face to face with Vespasian; we find Rabbi Eleazar ben Arak, the foremost scholar of his day, who abandoned the Academy and forgot his learning because his wife preferred a town with good water supply to Yabneh, which had only scholarship to recommend it; we come across a whole chapter (unique in Rabbinic literature) of maxims uttered by Elisha ben Abuyah, in his early years a colleague of Rabbi Akiba but later an apostate and informer for the Romans; we hear Judah ben Tabbai, threatened with removal from the presidency of the Pharisaic council, bluntly confessing: “When someone said to me before I entered high office, ‘Enter it,’ I had one wish; to hound him to death! Now that I have come into it, whenever someone tells me to quit it, I have one wish: to upset a kettle of boiling water on him!”
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