Two Bundles of Myrtle

אָמַר לוֹ: בְּנִי, דַּי לָעוֹלָם אֲנִי וְאַתָּה

"He said to him: my son, you and I are enough for the world." (Shabbat 33b)

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A father and his son hide in a cave for twelve years. They come out, and what they have become sets fire to everything they look at. They are sent back in. When they come out the second time, the father has changed and the son has not.

That is the story the Talmud tells about Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and Rabbi Elazar his son. It is one of the most famous passages in the whole Talmud, and it is usually told as a story about one great man. It is not. Almost every turn in it happens twice, once to each of them, and the distance that opens between father and son is the point.

The story

Three sages sat together: Rabbi Yehuda, Rabbi Yosi and Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. A man named Yehuda ben Gerim sat with them. Rabbi Yehuda opened and said how fine the works of Rome were. They fixed the markets, they built the bridges, they built the bathhouses. Rabbi Yosi said nothing. Rabbi Shimon answered:

כׇּל מַה שֶּׁתִּקְּנוּ, לֹא תִּקְּנוּ אֶלָּא לְצוֹרֶךְ עַצְמָן

"Everything they fixed, they fixed only for their own need."

Markets to seat prostitutes in. Bathhouses to pamper themselves. Bridges to collect a toll on. Yehuda ben Gerim repeated the conversation, and it reached the government. The Romans decreed: Yehuda, who praised, will be given honor. Yosi, who was silent, will be exiled to Tzippori. Shimon, who condemned, will be killed.¹

So he went, he and his son, and they hid in the study hall. Every day his wife brought them bread and a jug of water. When the decree grew harder he said to his son: women are easily pressed, they may cause her pain and she will give us away. They went and hid in a cave.

A miracle happened. A carob tree was created for them, and a spring of water. They took off their clothes and sat up to their necks in sand. All day they studied. When it was time to pray they dressed and covered themselves and prayed, and then took the clothes off again, so they would not wear out.

אִיתִּיבוּ תְּרֵיסַר שְׁנֵי בִּמְעָרְתָּא

"They sat twelve years in the cave."

Elijah came and stood at the mouth of the cave. He said: who will inform bar Yochai that the emperor has died and his decree is void?

They came out. They saw men plowing and sowing. They said: these people abandon eternal life and busy themselves with the life of an hour. Every place they set their eyes on was burned at once. A Voice came out and said to them:

לְהַחֲרִיב עוֹלָמִי יְצָאתֶם?! חִיזְרוּ לִמְעָרַתְכֶם!

"Did you come out to destroy My world? Go back to your cave!"

They went back and sat another twelve months. They said: the judgment of the wicked in Gehinnom is twelve months.² A Voice came out and said: come out of your cave.

They came out. And now, for the first time in the story, the two of them are not the same:

כָּל הֵיכָא דַּהֲוָה מָחֵי רַבִּי אֶלְעָזָר, הֲוָה מַסֵּי רַבִּי שִׁמְעוֹן

"Everywhere Rabbi Elazar wounded, Rabbi Shimon healed."

He said to him: my son, you and I are enough for the world.

Then it was Friday, near dark. They saw an old man holding two bundles of myrtle and running as the sun went down. They said to him: what are these for? He said: in honor of Shabbat. They said: would one not be enough for you? He said: one for remember (Zachor) and one for keep (Shamor) (referring to the two expressions about Shabbat in the Ten Commandments).

He said to his son: see how beloved the commandments are to Israel. And their minds were settled.³

The lessons

The strange part of this story is not the cave. It is the way out. Three things in it are hard to get past. Why should twelve years of nothing but Torah leave a man less fit for the world than when he went in? Why does the father come back healed and the son not? And why is the thing that finally settles them not an argument, not a voice from heaven, but an old man running with a branch too many?

1. What the cave gave and what it took

The cave is not a punishment. It is a rescue and it is a school. The carob and the spring are a miracle, so we are meant to understand that heaven wanted them alive. Twelve years of study, with nothing else in the day, is a gift almost no one is given.

But look at what the sand is doing. They are buried in it to the neck. They take their clothes off so the clothes will last. They are men who have arranged their bodies out of the way in order to make room for the learning. Nothing in the cave asks anything of them except learning. No crop, no debt, no neighbor, no sick child.

So when they come out, they meet a man behind a plow, and they see him correctly and judge him wrongly. He is choosing the life of an hour over eternal life. That is what a plowman looks like from inside a cave. What they cannot see is that the man in the field is feeding somebody. He may be feeding them.

The Talmud does not say their Torah was too great. It says their eyes had been taught only one thing to look for. Twelve years of pure study had given them a standard, and the standard was true, and they were now applying it to a world it was never meant to be used on alone. A measure that condemns every ordinary person who ever lived is not a measure. It is a wall.

And notice what the burning actually is. They did not argue with the plowman. They did not teach him. They looked at him, and he was gone. That is the exact opposite of what a teacher does.

2. The father heals, the son burns

The second stay is not more school. The Talmud tells us how to read it by giving the length: twelve months, the same as the judgment of the wicked in Gehinnom. Something was being burned out of them, not put in.

And it worked on one of them.

Everywhere Rabbi Elazar wounded, Rabbi Shimon healed. Read that sentence slowly, because it describes a walk. The son goes ahead. His eyes fall on something and it is ruined. The father comes behind him and puts it right. It happens more than once.

The father has come back able to repair. The son has not. Twelve months did for one of them what it did not do for the other, and the Talmud offers no explanation. It simply lets us watch a man walk behind his own child, quietly undoing the harm.

Then the father speaks, and what he says has been read many ways: my son, you and I are enough for the world. Whatever else the line carries, notice its grammar. He does not scold the boy. He does not tell him to stop looking. He does not separate himself from him and say, I have learned this and you have not. He says you and I. He puts the two of them on one side, together, at the moment when they are least alike.

That is a father's sentence. He has just spent the walk repairing his son's damage, and he answers it by naming them a pair.

3. The old man with a branch too many

Then comes the ending, and it is very small.

It is Friday afternoon and the light is going. An old man is running. He is holding two bundles of myrtle, which is a fragrant branch people brought into the house for the honor of Shabbat. They stop him and ask what they are for. In honor of Shabbat, he says.

The question they ask next is the question of two men who have just come out of a cave. Would one not be enough for you? It is a reasonable question. One branch discharges the duty. Two is more than required.

One for remember (Zachor), the old man says, and one for keep (Shamor).

The two words are the opening of the Shabbat commandment as it appears in each of the two places it is given. He is carrying one branch for each. Nobody asked him to. There is no obligation anywhere to hold two branches of myrtle, and he is running with them in the last minutes of the day.

This is the same kind of person as the plowman. An ordinary Jew, doing an ordinary thing, at dusk, in a hurry. Twelve months earlier they looked at exactly such a man and burned him. Now the father turns to his son and says: see how beloved the commandments are to Israel.

Nothing changed in the world between the plowman and the old man. The watchers changed. The old man was not defending himself and did not know he was being examined. He simply answered the question, and his answer showed that an ordinary person, with no cave and no twelve years, had found something in the commandments worth carrying an extra armful for.

And their minds were settled. Both of them. The son too. What the second twelve months had not finished, one old man with two branches did.

That is why the father says it out loud to his son instead of thinking it. He is teaching. He has his boy back in the world, and the first lesson is not a text. It is a man in the street.

Coda

The story began with three sages talking about Rome, and Rabbi Shimon saying: everything they fixed, they fixed for their own need. Markets, bathhouses, bridges. Built by people who build for themselves.

A few lines after the myrtle, the Talmud says that Rabbi Shimon said: since a miracle happened for me, let me go and fix something. He asked whether there was anything in the town that needed repair, and he went and repaired it.⁴

It is the same root. The sentence that condemned Rome and the sentence that ends his story are built on the one verb: to fix, to put in order, to repair for the public. He had said that Rome's markets and bathhouses were built for the builders. The Talmud, telling what he did after the cave, reaches for Jacob coming whole to the city of Shechem, and for the three sages who said what Jacob left behind him there: coinage, markets, bathhouses.⁵

The man went into the cave certain that public works are what the selfish build. He came out and built some.

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Notes

1. Shabbat 33b. The setting is the Hadrianic persecution after the Bar Kokhba revolt, in the middle of the second century, when Roman decrees against Torah study and Jewish practice were at their sharpest. Yehuda ben Gerim is called "son of converts", and the Talmud does not say whether he carried the words to Rome on purpose. The three-part sentence is exact and cold: the man who praised is promoted, the man who kept silent is exiled, the man who spoke is condemned to death. Silence was not treated as innocence.
2. The twelve-month measure is the Mishnah's (Eduyot 2:10). By naming it, the Talmud tells us what the second stay in the cave was: not further study, but the working off of something.
3. Shabbat 33b. The Hebrew is itiva da'atayhu, their minds were settled, in the plural. Both of them. The passage continues with Rabbi Pinchas ben Yair, Rabbi Shimon's son-in-law, who met him, took him to the bath, and saw that his body was full of cracks from the years in the sand. He wept and said: woe to me that I have seen you like this. Rabbi Shimon answered: happy are you that you have seen me like this, for had you not seen me like this, you would not have found in me what you find. The same passage records that before the cave, Rabbi Pinchas would answer each of Rabbi Shimon's difficulties with twelve resolutions, and afterward Rabbi Shimon answered each of his with twenty-four.
4. Shabbat 33b–34a. What he repaired was a place whose status in the laws of purity was in doubt, so that priests would not have to go the long way around it. The story of how he did it, and of what happened afterward with Yehuda ben Gerim, continues on the page and is a harder story than this one.
5. Genesis 33:18, "and Jacob came whole to the city", and the comment of Rav, Shmuel and Rabbi Yochanan on the words that follow: he established for them coinage, or markets, or bathhouses. The Talmud places this teaching directly before Rabbi Shimon's decision to go and repair something, which is how the reader is meant to hear the echo.