Twenty-Four Objections

טוֹבִים הַשְּׁנַיִם מִן־הָאֶחָד אֲשֶׁר יֵשׁ־לָהֶם שָׂכָר טוֹב בַּעֲמָלָם

"Two are better than one, for they have a good reward for their labor." (Ecclesiastes 4:9)

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The Talmud is a book of arguments, and the sages who fill it argued in pairs. Hillel had Shammai. Rabbi Akiva had Rabbi Yishmael. And Rabbi Yochanan, the greatest teacher of the land of Israel in the third century, had a study partner who began as a bandit.

Their story is told on a single page of Bava Metzia, and it is one of the most painful pages in the Talmud. It begins with two men in a river and ends with two graves. In between it says more about friendship, about the words that cannot be taken back, and about what argument is actually for, than most books manage in their whole length. The sages who preserved it did not soften it. They let us watch two people who loved each other destroy each other. And they let us see exactly where the turn came: one sentence, spoken in the heat of losing an argument, that reached back twenty years for its weapon.

This is a story about the study partner, the chavruta. An earlier essay on this site ended with Rava's proverb, "either companionship or death." This page is that proverb, lived out to the letter.

The story

Rabbi Yochanan was bathing in the Jordan. Reish Lakish, at that time a brigand, saw him from the bank and leaped into the river after him. Rabbi Yochanan looked at the leap and said:

חֵילָךְ לְאוֹרָיְיתָא

"Your strength for Torah."

Reish Lakish looked back at him and said: "Your beauty for women." Rabbi Yochanan was famous for his beauty, and the answer is a jab: a man who looks like you should have better things to do than study. And Rabbi Yochanan said: if you return, I will give you my sister, who is more beautiful than I am. Reish Lakish accepted. He turned to jump back for his clothes, and he could not make the jump.¹

Rabbi Yochanan taught him Scripture and taught him Mishnah and made him a great man. He became Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish, Rabbi Yochanan's study partner, his brother-in-law, and the sharpest opponent he would ever face.

Years later, in the study hall, they were arguing a technical question: the sword, the knife, the dagger, the spear, the hand-sickle and the harvest-sickle, from when can they become ritually impure? From the time their manufacture is finished. And when is their manufacture finished? Rabbi Yochanan said: when they are fired in the furnace. Reish Lakish said: when they are polished in water. And Rabbi Yochanan said:

לִסְטָאָה בְּלִסְטְיוּתֵיהּ יָדַע

"A bandit knows his banditry."

Reish Lakish answered: "And what good have you done me? There they called me master, and here they call me master." And Rabbi Yochanan said: "I did you good, for I brought you under the wings of the Divine Presence."

Rabbi Yochanan's spirit was wounded, and Reish Lakish fell ill. Rabbi Yochanan's sister, Reish Lakish's wife, came to her brother weeping. "Act for the sake of my children." He answered her with a verse: "Leave your orphans, I will keep them alive" (Jeremiah 49:11). "Act for the sake of my widowhood." He answered with the verse's second half: "and let your widows trust in Me." Reish Lakish died.²

Rabbi Yochanan grieved for him beyond measure. The sages said: who will go and settle his mind? Let Rabbi Elazar ben Pedat go, whose traditions are sharp.³ He went and sat before him, and to everything Rabbi Yochanan said, he said: "There is a teaching that supports you." Until Rabbi Yochanan burst out:

אַתְּ כְּבַר לְקִישָׁא?! בַּר לְקִישָׁא, כִּי הֲוָה אָמֵינָא מִילְּתָא — הֲוָה מַקְשֵׁי לִי עֶשְׂרִין וְאַרְבַּע קוּשְׁיָיתָא, וּמְפָרְקִינָא לֵיהּ עֶשְׂרִין וְאַרְבְּעָה פֵּרוּקֵי, וּמִמֵּילָא רָוְוחָא שְׁמַעְתָּא

"Are you like the son of Lakish? When I would say a thing, the son of Lakish would raise twenty-four objections against me, and I would give twenty-four answers, and the tradition grew of itself. And you say: there is a teaching that supports you. Do I not know on my own that I spoke well?"

He went about tearing his clothes and weeping, "Where are you, son of Lakish? Where are you, son of Lakish?" and he cried out until his mind left him. The sages prayed for mercy on him, and he died.

The lessons

It is hard to read this page and not want to argue with it. Why does the Talmud tell us how the friendship began, with a leap and a strange bargain, when the story is about how it ended? What made one sentence, after twenty years of partnership, impossible to survive? And why does Rabbi Yochanan's grief take the form it does: not missing the man's company, but missing his objections? I think the answers belong together, because the page is one argument about what a person actually gives us when they argue with us.

1. What he saw in the river

The first thing Rabbi Yochanan says to a bandit who has just leaped a river at him is not a rebuke. It is an appraisal. Your strength for Torah. He looks at a man the whole world has filed under "criminal" and sees a quantity of force, magnificent and misdirected, and he bids for it. He does not ask Reish Lakish to stop being strong. He asks him to change what the strength is for.

That is worth sitting with, because it is not how respectable people usually meet an outlaw. The respectable response is distance. Rabbi Yochanan's response is recruitment. And the Talmud marks the cost of the turn with one physical detail: the moment Reish Lakish accepts, he turns to jump back for his clothes, and the jump is gone. A man cannot take on a new life and keep the old body of skills exactly as it was. Something is paid at the border. The page will end in tragedy, but it begins with one of the most hopeful scenes in the Talmud: a teacher looking at a dangerous man and seeing a colleague, and being right.

For twenty years he was right. The bandit became a master of the law whom the study hall could set against Rabbi Yochanan himself. The two of them, question against answer, built the traditions that fill these pages.

2. One sentence, aimed at the past

Then comes the argument about knives, and it matters that it is about nothing. When does a blade become finished, at the furnace or at the polishing? No one's life turns on it. It is an ordinary day in the study hall, and Rabbi Yochanan is losing an ordinary exchange, and he reaches for the one weapon that twenty years of friendship had taken off the table. A bandit knows his banditry. You would know about blades. You used to use them.

The same chapter of the Talmud, a few pages earlier, teaches the law of wounding with words, and its first example is exact: if a man has repented, do not say to him, "remember your former deeds."⁴ Rabbi Yochanan knew that teaching. He may have taught it. And in one hot moment he did the precise thing it forbids, to the person whose whole second life he himself had built. That is what makes the sentence unbearable. It does not say "you are wrong about the knife." It says "you were never really one of us." It hands back twenty years.

And Reish Lakish's answer wounds in the opposite direction: what good have you done me? There they called me master, here they call me master. It is a terrible thing to say, and both of them know it is not true. He is saying that the study hall gave him nothing, to the man who gave him all of it. Two sentences, one in each direction, each aimed at the foundation of the other man's life. Neither of them takes the step back. The sister stands weeping between them with her children, and even then the step is not taken. The Talmud has shown us elsewhere that heaven's gates stay open to tears. Here the gate that stays shut is a human one, and the page lets us watch it stay shut until it is too late.

3. Twenty-four objections

The last scene looks at first like a story about grief, and it is really a story about what a friend is. The sages, wanting to comfort Rabbi Yochanan, send him the best replacement they have: a scholar with sharp traditions who supports every statement Rabbi Yochanan makes with a source. He is doing everything right. He is respectful, learned, and agreeable. And he is unbearable.

Are you like the son of Lakish? When I said a thing, he would raise twenty-four objections, and I would answer twenty-four answers, and the tradition grew of itself. Rabbi Yochanan is telling us, in his grief, what he had actually lost, and it was not admiration. He had plenty of admiration left. He had lost resistance: the one person in the world who would take his idea seriously enough to attack it from every side it could be attacked from. The supporter tells you that you are right. The opponent finds out whether you are right, and in the finding out, the Torah itself grows. Agreement, Rabbi Yochanan discovers, is a kind of loneliness.

There is a deep teaching here about love, and it runs against the grain of what we usually want. We think we want to be agreed with. What we need is to be answered. The proof is what the absence of each does to this man. Flattery from a brilliant colleague drives him out of his mind. The silence where the twenty-four objections used to be is the thing he cannot live inside. An earlier essay on this site told of Choni, who woke to a study hall that praised his name and did not know his face, and of Rava's verdict on such a life: either companionship or death. Rabbi Yochanan had the honor of the whole generation. Without the one man who fought him, it kept him alive for exactly as long as it took to understand what was gone.

Coda

The Talmud could have given these two men a gentler ending, and it refused. It also gave them a monument, and the monument is the Talmud itself. Open almost any tractate and they are still at it: Rabbi Yochanan says, Reish Lakish objects, Rabbi Yochanan answers. The objections were not the interruption of their friendship. They were its substance, and they are what survived it.

Two are better than one, says Kohelet, and the verse gives its reason: if they fall, the one will lift up his friend. On this page each finally fell where the other could not, or would not, lift him. The sages told the story anyway, about two of their greatest, so that every pair of students who ever sat down to argue would know both halves of the truth: that the person who objects to you twenty-four times is the person holding you up, and that one sentence about a man's buried past can bring down what twenty years of Torah built.

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Notes

1. Bava Metzia 84a. Reish Lakish, Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish, appears elsewhere in the Talmud as a man with a hard past; in one place he is remembered as having sold himself to the gladiator games (Gittin 47a). The commentators discuss the lost leap: Rashi explains that from the moment he accepted the yoke of Torah upon himself, his strength was diminished. The bargain over the sister is not presented as courtship; it is Rabbi Yochanan staking the thing dearest to him on the conversion of a stranger's life.
2. The verse he cites, "Leave your orphans, I will keep them alive" (Jeremiah 49:11), is spoken in Scripture about Edom. Spoken here, the verse of faith closes the conversation: the sister leaves without what she came for. The Talmud reports the exchange and adds nothing, and the silence weighs on the page.
3. Rabbi Elazar ben Pedat was a great scholar in his own right, and later headed the academy of Tiberias. The failure of the visit is not his failure. He was sent to comfort, and he comforted the way most of us comfort: by agreeing. The page's point is that for a mind like Rabbi Yochanan's, agreement was not comfort but confirmation that the argument was over for good.
4. Bava Metzia 58b, in the same chapter: "If he was a penitent, one may not say to him: remember your former deeds." The law of ona'at devarim, wounding with words, is the frame of another essay on this site, "The Gates of Tears," on the oven of Achnai.