What Is Aggadata?

Two students, one teacher

Two students sat before Rabbi Yitzchak Nappacha. One said, "Teach us law." The other said, "Teach us aggadata." He began teaching law, and the second stopped him. Then he began teaching aggadata, and the first stopped him.

He told them: I am like a man with two wives, one young and one old. The young one pulled out his white hairs. The old one pulled out his black hairs. Between them he went bald.

So he taught them one thing that was both law and aggadata: The Torah says that if a fire breaks out and spreads, the one who lit it must pay.¹ As law, the verse teaches that a fire you light is like an arrow you shoot: it travels on its own, but the damage is attributed to you, as if you had done it by hand.

As aggadata, God says: I lit a fire in Zion, and I must pay for it. One day I will rebuild her with fire.²

This talmudic anecdote holds the whole subject of this introduction. The Talmud speaks in two voices. One argues the law. The other tells stories, consoles, warns, and inspires. The authors of the Talmud heard both as Torah and wrote them down side by side. The second voice is what we call aggadata.

The essays on this site each take one such story and read it slowly. Before the stories, a few words about the book they come from.

The book

The Talmud has two layers and is the central work of the Oral Torah (the oral tradition that interprets and completes the written Bible). The Mishnah is a short code of Jewish law in Hebrew, edited by Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi around the year 200 in the Land of Israel. The Gemara is three centuries of discussion of the Mishnah. It is written in Aramaic mixed with Hebrew, by the teachers of the academies of Babylonia, in what is now Iraq. They asked what the Mishnah means, what it is based on in Scripture, and how it fits with other teachings. Along the way they recorded what they thought about nearly everything else.³

The work closed around the year 500. It runs to 2,711 double-sided pages. At a page a day it takes seven and a half years to complete the Talmud.

None of it was supposed to be written. "Words that are oral you may not set down in writing."⁴ The Oral Torah was meant to live in teachers and students, not on parchment. The rule was broken twice, once for the Mishnah and again for the Gemara, on the strength of one verse read as an emergency clause: "It is a time to act for the Lord; they have voided Your Torah."⁵

Rambam (Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, Maimonides) explains: Students were fewer, persecutions kept coming, and the people were scattering to the ends of the earth. There was a real fear that the oral tradition would be forgotten.⁶ A book is a poor substitute for a teacher. But it outlives him.

That fact matters for our subject. If the aim was to save the tradition from being forgotten, the tradition included the stories. The editors (Ravina and Rav Ashi) could have kept only the law. They kept the whole conversation.

Two voices

Open almost any page in the Talmud and you find both.

Shma'ata comes from the root שמע, "to hear." It is the legal teaching one has heard from a teacher, and from there the whole legal back and forth: question, answer, proof, objection, answer, decision. In the yeshiva world today the word still means "the legal argument on the page."

Aggadata (in Hebrew, aggadah) is everything else: stories about the sages, readings of Scripture that teach faith or character, ethics, prayer, dreams, medicine, history, parable, consolation. About a third of the Babylonian Talmud is aggadah.⁷

The name comes from higgid, "to tell." "And you shall tell your child on that day"⁸ is why the Passover text is called the Haggadah, the Telling. The Talmud itself adds a second sense, from the Aramaic meaning of the same root, "to draw." On the verse "And Moshe told the words of the people to the Lord," the Gemara says:

וַיַּגֵּד מֹשֶׁה — דְּבָרִים שֶׁמּוֹשְׁכִין לִבּוֹ שֶׁל אָדָם כְּאַגָּדָה

"'And Moshe told' — words that draw a person's heart, like aggadah."⁹

So aggadah is what is told, as opposed to what is ruled. And it is what draws the heart, as opposed to what compels the mind. The oldest statement of its purpose says it plainly:

רְצוֹנְךָ שֶׁתַּכִּיר אֶת מִי שֶׁאָמַר וְהָיָה הָעוֹלָם? לְמֹד הַגָּדָה, שֶׁמִּתּוֹךְ כָּךְ אַתָּה מַכִּיר אֶת הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא וּמִדַּבֵּק בִּדְרָכָיו

"Do you wish to know the One who spoke and the world came into being? Study aggadah, for through it you come to know the Holy One and cling to His ways."¹⁰

Law tells you what to do. Aggadah tells you Whom you are doing it for.

The sages used these two words about themselves. Some were known as masters of aggadah; some kept away from it. Rabbi Abbahu taught aggadah and Rabbi Chiyya bar Abba taught law in the same town, and the whole audience left Rabbi Chiyya for Rabbi Abbahu. Rabbi Abbahu consoled him: two merchants came to town, one selling precious stones and one selling small wares. To whom do people run? To the seller of small wares.¹¹

It was a kind thing to say. Read it again and it also admits that the crowd knew what it needed.

They also drew a line. "One does not derive law from the aggadot."¹² A story may teach and inspire. It may not decide a case.

Why both in one book?

The editors could have made two books. Later generations sometimes did.¹³ The Talmud itself never made the split. I think there are three reasons.

First, that is what the study hall sounded like. The Gemara is not a code; it is a record of talk. The same teachers, in the same sessions, argued the law and told the stories. To cut the stories would have been to invent a study hall that never existed.

Second, law without its purpose occasionally loses its way. The law of fire tells you who pays. The story on the same verse tells you that God holds Himself to the same rule. So no one studies the liability of an arsonist without hearing, in the next breath, about the fire in Zion.

Third, the Talmud has no separate book of beliefs and no book of biography. What the sages thought about God, suffering, death, prayer, the Land, the nations, the world to come, and who Hillel and Rabbi Akiva were as human beings, all of it lives in the aggadah, in the gaps between the rulings. Take it out and you have a law code with no author and no God. The word Torah means a guide. The Book of Proverbs calls it a light. The aggadata is the light and soul of the Torah.

How the great commentators read it

Every generation asked the same questions of the stories. Are they literal? Are they deep? Are they binding? The answers stretch across a thousand years.

The Geonim, the heads of the Babylonian academies after the Talmud, were the first to be asked whether the strange stories had to be believed. Their answer was careful: each sage taught what came to his mind, and we accept what agrees with reason and Scripture.¹⁴ No law from a story, and no dogma from a story either. Rashi, a little later, simply explains the stories as he explains everything else, plainly, and rarely says whether to believe them.

Rambam sorted those who read aggadah into three groups.¹⁵ The first take every story literally and believe it. They think they honor the sages; in fact they shame them, by making wise men sound like fools. This group, he says, is most of the people he met. The second take every story literally and mock it, and mock the sages with it. Worse, because it is foolish and arrogant at the same time.

The third group is small: those who understand that the sages, like the wise of every age, spoke in riddles and parables, and that a strange surface hides something worth digging for. Rambam counted himself here.¹⁶

The kabbalists said the stories are garments. A fool looks at the garment and thinks it is the body; the wise look through the garment to the body, and through the body to the soul.¹⁷ The stranger the story, the deeper it probably goes.

The Maharal of Prague wrote the great defense of the aggadah, Be'er HaGolah.¹⁸ The sages, he said, speak of the inner nature of things, of causes and essences, not of physical surfaces. Read that way, the strange stories become a precise language, and he filled thousands of pages translating it.

His contemporary the Maharsha went through the stories of the whole Talmud line by line, on the assumption that every detail was chosen on purpose.¹⁹

The Hasidic masters added one more turn. The story is about you, now. The characters are forces inside a person; the plot is the soul's work today.²⁰

Are they literal?

It depends on the story, and the tradition says so itself.

The Talmud says, in its own voice, that it exaggerates: "The Torah spoke in the language of exaggeration; the Prophets spoke in the language of exaggeration; the Sages spoke in the language of exaggeration."²¹ A book that says this about itself, inside a legal tractate, is telling you how to read it.

Some stories are history and are meant so. The fall of Jerusalem in Gittin, the subject of the first two essays on this website, is told as fact, and the historians largely agree with it.

Some are plainly parable. Rabbah bar bar Chana says, "I myself saw a bird standing ankle-deep in the sea, with its head reaching the sky."²² For a thousand years the best commentators took his tales as parables. Almost no one read them as zoology.

And some do not fit either box. Moshe goes up to heaven and finds God tying crowns to the letters of the Torah.²³ He asks why the Torah needs them. "A man named Akiva will one day derive heaps of laws from every tip." Moshe asks to see him, sits in the back row of his academy, understands nothing, and is comforted only when Akiva says of one law, "It is a tradition from Moshe at Sinai."

Then Moshe asks to see Akiva's reward, and is shown his flesh weighed out in the market. "This is Torah, and this its reward?" "Be silent. So it arose in thought before Me." No one takes this as a page from Moshe's diary. Everyone takes it as true, about revelation and interpretation, and about the limit of what a person may ask. "Did it really happen?" is often not the interesting question.

Taken together, the masters leave us a short method. Some stories are history. Some are exaggeration, and the text says so. Some are parable, and the strangeness is the signal. What the sages said about nature and medicine reflects their era. None of it decides law, and none of it is dogma on its own. And all of it was chosen on purpose, so the question worth asking is always: why this detail, this verse, this order? And more importantly, what did this come to teach us?

How these essays read a story

Each essay follows roughly the same order. Read the whole unit: the verses it rests on, the story, and the law around it, because the placement is part of the message. Find the verse the story is built on and ask what the sages saw in it.

Ask what is strange in the text before reaching for answers. Only then draw the lesson, and check it against the text. A lesson the text does not support belongs to the reader, not to the sages.

That is the discipline the Talmud's editors modeled when they set Rabbi Yitzchak Nappacha's two students on the same page. One verse, two voices, one Torah.

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Notes

1. Exodus 22:5.
2. Bava Kamma 60b, citing Lamentations 4:11 and Zechariah 2:9.
3. There are two Talmuds. The Jerusalem Talmud was made in the Galilee and reached its final form around 350–400; it is shorter and less finished. The Babylonian Talmud closed around 500. "The Talmud," without qualification, means the Babylonian one. The Talmud names its own end: "Rav Ashi and Ravina are the end of instruction" (Bava Metzia 86a). Rav Ashi headed the academy of Sura for some sixty years, and tradition says he reviewed the whole body of teaching twice in his lifetime (Iggeret Rav Sherira Gaon; compare Bava Batra 157b on his "first edition" and "last edition").
4. Gittin 60b.
5. Psalms 119:126; Temurah 14b: better that one letter of the Torah be uprooted than that the Torah be forgotten.
6. Rambam, Introduction to Mishneh Torah.
7. The Talmud is not the only home of aggadah. The Midrash, the collections in which the sages of the Land of Israel went through the Bible verse by verse, keeps the stories beside their verses, often in a fuller form. These essays use both.
8. Exodus 13:8.
9. Shabbat 87a, on Exodus 19:9.
10. Sifrei Deuteronomy 49.
11. Sotah 40a.
12. Yerushalmi Peah 2:4.
13. The Ein Yaakov (Salonica, 1516) collects the Babylonian Talmud's stories alone, and became one of the best-loved Jewish books ever printed.
14. Responsa of Rav Sherira and Rav Hai Gaon in Otzar HaGeonim, Chagigah. Rav Sherira called the aggadot "estimates," a sage's own reading of a verse; Rav Hai wrote that they are not like a received tradition.
15. Rambam, Introduction to Perek Chelek (Commentary on the Mishnah, Sanhedrin 10).
16. His son Rabbi Avraham made the position explicit in a short essay later printed at the front of the Ein Yaakov: in matters of nature and medicine the sages spoke with the knowledge of their age; in matters of faith they spoke in parable; a statement is weighed on its merits. Ramban, pressed at the forced disputation in Barcelona in 1263 with stories that seemed to concede Christian claims, said that the Midrash is sermons: "one who believes it, good; one who does not, no harm done" (Vikuach). In his own commentaries he reads the same stories with great seriousness. Both can be true: not binding, and not shallow.
17. Zohar III 152a.
18. Maharal, Be'er HaGolah (Prague, 1598).
19. Maharsha, Chiddushei Aggadot, still printed at the back of every standard volume of the Talmud. He first published his notes on law and on aggadah separately, then regretted the split, since it is all one Torah.
20. Rabbi Yaakov Yosef of Polnoye, Toldot Yaakov Yosef (1780), the movement's first printed book. Rabbi Nachman of Breslov built lessons of Likutei Moharan on the tales of Rabbah bar bar Chana, and then told thirteen tales of his own (Sippurei Ma'asiyot, 1815), on the ground that some truths can only be told as stories.
21. Chullin 90b. The Torah speaks of cities "fortified up to heaven" (Deuteronomy 1:28); the Sages say the ash-heap on the altar held three hundred measures. Neither is a measurement.
22. Bava Batra 73b. Sailors wanted to bathe there, thinking the water shallow, until a voice warned them: "Do not go down. A carpenter's axe fell in here seven years ago and has not reached bottom." The traditional commentators, from the Geonim to the Vilna Gaon, heard a lesson about depths one cannot judge from the surface.
23. Menachot 29b.