On December 17th last, the Wall Street Journal had a first leader entitled "Hillel for President." It may be a comment on the Journal's regard for presidential candidates that even in jest it came to propose as candidate a Jewish sage who not only has been dead for almost two thousand years but was not even born in the United States. It does show that Hillel is pretty famous. He has Jewish schools named for him in many cities, appropriately enough, since legend says of him that, too poor to tip the porter to admit him, he used to get learning by listening at the window of the academy, and one winter day almost froze to death in so doing. Every Hillel House on every campus is named for him, for the same reason, I suppose. Individuals of lesser eminence are similarly commemorated. We have Solomon Schechter schools, Maimonides Hospitals, Albert Einstein Medical Centers. But can you name off the cuff something which commemorates Joseph Caro? I'd have difficulty, and I suspect you would too. Yet Caro, as the author of a vast commentary on Jewish law of lasting significance has had an enormous influence on day to day Jewish practice throughout the Jewish world. This Jewish year or last -- we don't know the exact date -- marks the five-hundredth anniversary of his birth in Spain, one of the last professing Jews to be born in Sefarad, Spain, until the twentieth century. Let me ask you another question. Listen to the following and consider whether these sound like Jewish principles, ones which you might hear expounded in a synagogue of whatever color:
If you find the last one in particular shocking, perhaps even obscene, I will not apologize, because I am seeking just the facts. And the fact is that these were notions that Joseph Caro held for himself, even if he did not particularly recommend them to ordinary mortals like you and me. Could this be why Caro is a little in the shadows? Let us see.
First, some basic facts. He was born in Spain or Portugal in 1488 just as the story of Spanish Jewry was staggering to its end. Four years later the Jews were expelled from Spain and five years later still from Portugal too, where many had taken temporary refuge. So, as a mere child, Caro suffered the trauma of uprooting from his good home, and he went to live in Turkey where he spent much of his life. His native language was Spanish, and in his works when he is unable to find an appropriate Hebrew word he uses Spanish. This causes a rather amusing situation when his works are studied in the Ashkenazi yeshivot, where these words are pronounced as though they were Yiddish. For example there is a word they pronounce pnadsh. I see the correct rendering on a stall near my home owned by a Mexican who sells them as a Latin American delicacy. How strange that these empanadas should remind me as I pass of a sixteenth century work written in the Levant. But such is the power of Hispanic culture. Despite his ascetic and abnegatory tendencies, or perhaps because of them, he seems to have been a man of strong constitution, living well into his 80's. He studied first with his father and after his father's death was brought up by a learned uncle whom he much admired. In his thirties he began a commentary on a famous code of Jewish law, and spent twenty years in completing it. He describes its intent as follows:
In the course of time the Jewish people has, as it were, been poured from vessel to vessel and we have been scattered.. and the verse has been fulfilled: The wisdom of its wise men shall perish. Our Torah which should be two laws, written and oral, has become innumerable laws on account of the multiplicity of books explaining it.. so I, the poorest among the thousands of Joseph, the son of Ephraim, the son of Joseph Caro have been zealous for the Lord, and concentrated my efforts to cast up a highway by composing a book containing all the laws which are practiced along with the explanation of their root and their source in the Gemara, along with all the various opinions so that not one is missing.
A very tall order, but he did it. It is a work of awesome proportions. He indeed does what he promised, cites all the sources and authorities and gives a final decision. Bear in mind that the first European printed book appeared only thirty-three years before Caro was born and so he had to rely mainly on manuscripts. In one case he refers to a book "written with a pen of iron and lead in a press", yes, he was using the new-fangled invention the printed book of which the Jews saw the utility very early on. One has to stand in humble amazement that one man without a word-processor, without a xerox machine, without even scotch tape and paper clips, was able to assemble, assimilate, arrange and articulate such an enormous mass of material. The work is modestly couched as a commentary, a common procedure in a world where reverence for earlier authority was assumed, but is a work in its own right and of unique standing. From this vast panoramic work he compiled a digest which the earnest student might use for a quick, ongoing run-through of the gamut of Jewish Law. He called it Shulhan Arukh, the Prepared Table, a buffet which you could approach with your metaphorical plate and spoon, and scoop up whatever legal dainties you needed at the moment, or better yet, you could swallow successively and with edification, from soup to nuts. Curiously, the fame and utility of this derivative work far outstripped that of its weightier parent and it has become the prime authoritative source of Jewish law, lore and tradition, something which the author probably never expected.
Let me say right away that the admiration I express here is not universally felt. The great Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz writes thus:
Only one (Turkish) rabbi left to posterity an epoch-making work..but even this work contained nothing new or original.. Religious impulses, mystical fanaticism, and ambition had equal shares in the making of this book. For Joseph Karo was subject to strange visions...He has embodied in his Code excellent precepts in regard to sanctity, chastity, brotherly love, morality, and honesty in business, drawn from the Talmud and the rabbinical writings; but they disappear in a sea of casuistical details and mere externals, in a patchwork of divisions and subdivisions, of "ifs" and "buts."In this work there appears an altogether different kind of Judaism from that revealed on Sinai, announced by the prophets, or even taught by Maimuni. But this Judaism thoroughly suited the ideas of the Jews of that period, and therefore Karo's Code was immediately hailed with delight...
Now you might call me a great-grand student of Heinrich Graetz. My history teacher Hirsch Zimmels, of blessed memory, had a history teacher who was a student of Graetz. Dr Zimmels told me that when his teacher referred to Graetz, he did not say "my revered teacher Heinrich Graetz, followed by "of blessed memory" as is customary, but "my revered teacher Heinrich Graetz, may God forgive him." The fact is that Graetz, like all of us, was a child of his time. He lived in an era when there was a great excitement with the achievements of modern science, and a widespread belief that it would put an end to all the ills of ignorance and deprivation to which the inhabitants of this planet are subject. Of course, it didn't happen, and we have come to see that there are large areas of human experience on which science impinges but little. Graetz felt that mystical-kabbalistic trend in Judaism was a dreadful impediment, a sore on the body politic of the Jewish people which he truly loved. And Caro was deeply involved in this trend. It led him to his ascetic, self-denying tendencies which for many of us may seem strangely unjewish. Moreover, as Graetz noted huffily, Caro was indeed subject to strange visions, another manifestation that offended Graetz's scientific propensities and what Professor Ettinger calls "his excessive and rather naive rationalism." For decades Caro was subject to mysterious visitations from a being which claimed to be a spiritual manifestation of the Mishna and spoke to and through Caro, encouraging him, criticizing him, and giving him, in Graetz's words (here we go again) "inelegant, mystical interpretations of scriptural passages." "It is melancholy," he declares, "to see what havoc the Kabbala played with the intellect of that day .. these predictions were .. the promptings .. of an excited imagination, such as is found in the warm, luxurious East oftener than in the cold, sober North." Breslau for example one supposes. The record of Caro's unusual inner life is preserved in a surprisingly explicit diary which, like Shakespeare's sonnets, was probably never intended for publication but appeared nonetheless less in book form named by the editor Maggid Mesharim. This volume and the unusual psychic phenomena found in it were subjected to an intense enquiry in H.L. Gordon's book The Maggid of Caro published in 1949. Gordon was a surgeon in the U.S. Marines and submitted his manuscript to various individuals who made some interesting comments. Dr Kaufman, professor of psychiatry at Columbia University writes as follows:
The problem of what is "psychopathological" or "normal" is at all times one of the most difficult tasks in psychiatry. At that period the universal belief in direct communication with God, spirits, divination and other mystical phenomena was an everyday one, and it presents the interesting question as to what is reality. An individual reared in such a culture has perhaps no choice but to accept the mores and customs and beliefs of that culture as reality. Therefore, there is no question in my mind that some of the phenomena described would fall into the so-called "normal" personality pattern of the time.
Two things need to be noted. First, that in his day to day existence Caro gave absolutely no manifestations of ill health, mental or otherwise. Second, he clearly never used these para-normal manifestations for his own benefit or to manipulate others, which clearly marks him off from charlatans who use supposed powers to feather their own nests.
There is another facet of his personality that needs to be mentioned. He wanted to be a martyr. There were no gas chambers in his day, but there was the stake where many of our people similarly died by asphyxiation for offences as minor as changing a shirt on Friday. On its face this is an odd desire, but we must attempt to understand it, and in doing so we may perhaps cue ourselves in on some very contemporary issues. Martyrdom is a very potent symbol in many religious cultures. It stands at the heart of Christianity both in the central symbol of that faith and in the respect accorded to the early Christian martyrs. It is a central issue in the Bahai faith. And most important for us is the function it has in a minority but very import branch of Islam, Shiite Islam exemplified by the present Iranian regime and movements such as the Hizbollah in Lebanon. The festival of Ashura, based originally on the Jewish day of Atonement ("Asor"), commemorates the martyrdom of Huseyn the grandson of Muhammad. On that day plays are presented pantomiming the assasination and the faithful are cut deeply on the forehead with a razor so that blood runs down their faces and they march in procession constantly encouraging the flow of blood. It is this powerful concept of blood and glory that enables young men at this very moment to drive automobiles loaded with dynamite into carefully selected targets. Thereby they achieve martyrdom and identify spiritually with their hero and mentor. It offers an ultimate and imperishable kind of triumph. It is not enough to dismiss this as the activity of a few crazies. It clearly touches a very deep chord in the human psyche and shows up in many different guises. It is a difficult phenomenon when it touches your interests. Now Moses Maimonides, following Talmudic tradition, rules that there are indeed some situations where Jews must choose martyrdom. For example, if someone threatens to murder you unless you murder a third party, you must die rather than submit. This is the Jewish answer to claims by people such as Eichmann that they acted on orders. But if someone threatens to murder you unless you eat a ham sandwich, it is not only permissible to eat the sandwich, it is mandatory, and the person who dies under such circumstances far from being a martyr is a sinner because he brought about his own death where there was no need or cause to do so. For Maimonides, Judaism was a religion of life. Its commandments are ones which one shall do and live by them, not die by them. But this sane approach did not appeal to everyone. The seventeenth century poet and dramatist Daniel Levi de Barrios, a marrano who lived in Brussels and later Amsterdam, clearly had a perverse longing for a flamboyant end on the funeral pyres of the inquisition. De Barrios served in the Spanish Army in the Netherlands and eventually rejoined Judaism. In his play Contra la verdad no ay fuerza "Nothing prevails against the truth" he smells the smoke of the Inquisition fires with masochistic glee. Unnatural you say? Perhaps. De Barrios ended his life mentally unbalanced. Caro's mentor often promised him that he would eventually be a sweet savor to the Lord. It never happened of course, and we must, I think, see in it his own desire for martyrdom, the strange ambition to go out in a blaze of glory.
It is paradoxical that Caro who produced such an establishment work in his inner life should have been so different. But it seems to me that this is part of his greatness. His special, unusual situations, his contact with the heavenly mentor, however we interpret it, his desire for martyrdom, his propensity to excessive and undemanded acts of asceticism never spill over into his meticulous, industrious professional life as a jurist and a codifier. He is professionally appropriate while preserving his own idiosyncracies in his own inner life. In this, it seems to me, he strikes a surprisingly modern chord.
What can we learn from the life of this Sefardic Jew? First, we can appreciate his plea for unity among the Jewish people and his herculean efforts to establish a measure of uniformity that would make unity possible. He did not achieve his goal. Ashkenazic Jewry admired his efforts but often did not buy his solutions. Complete unity of purpose and ideals is clearly impossible in an imperfect world, but like him we can strive towards it. Second, he teaches us that there is room for the imaginative and irrational aspect of life at least in the background. Perhaps it was that imaginative, irrational streak in him which enabled him to carry out the laborious and onerous task of compiling a work which encapsulated centuries of Jewish spiritual endeavor and served as a guide to countless numbers of our people. We need both doers and dreamers, and Joseph Caro managed to be both. He is worthy of our thought and contemplation. And he really does deserve a building or two named for him. So if any of you have already adequately commemorated your relations and are looking round for a new name, I would propose that of Joseph Caro, jurist and mystic, dreamer and doer.