The Man Who Planted for His Grandchildren

שִׁיר הַמַּעֲלוֹת בְּשׁוּב ה' אֶת־שִׁיבַת צִיּוֹן הָיִינוּ כְּחֹלְמִים

"A song of ascents. When the Lord brought back the returning of Zion, we were like dreamers." (Psalms 126:1)

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Sometimes, there is a special person who can do what nobody else can. When the wells are dry and the ordinary prayers have failed, people go to him. His prayers do not fail. And because he does not fail, he lives a little apart from everyone else: needed, admired, and alone.

The Talmud tells us about such a man. His name was Choni, and he was called HaMe'agel, "the circle-maker," after the most famous thing he ever did.

The story of the circle is in the Mishnah, and it is a story about power. The story I want to read comes a few lines later in the Talmud, and it is about the price of that power. It begins with a man planting a tree and ends with a proverb about death. In between, Choni sleeps for seventy years.

It is one of the shortest great stories in rabbinic literature, and one of the saddest. I also think it is one of the wisest things ever written about what we owe the generations before and after us.

The story

The circle. Let's begin with the tale in the Mishnah:¹ Most of Adar, the last month of the rainy season, had passed, and no rain had fallen. The people came to Choni: pray for rain. He told them to bring the clay Passover ovens indoors so the rain would not dissolve them. He was that sure. He prayed. Nothing.

So he drew a circle in the dust, stood inside it, and said:

רִבּוֹנוֹ שֶׁל עוֹלָם, בָּנֶיךָ שָׂמוּ פְנֵיהֶם עָלַי, שֶׁאֲנִי כְבֶן בַּיִת לְפָנֶיךָ. נִשְׁבָּע אֲנִי בְשִׁמְךָ הַגָּדוֹל שֶׁאֵינִי זָז מִכָּאן עַד שֶׁתְּרַחֵם עַל בָּנֶיךָ

"Master of the world, Your children have turned their faces to me, because I am like a member of Your household. I swear by Your great name that I will not move from here until You have mercy on Your children."

It began to drizzle. "That is not what I asked for. I asked for rain to fill the cisterns, the ditches and the caves." It came down in fury. "That is not what I asked for. I asked for rain of goodwill, blessing and generosity." Then it rained as rain should, and did not stop, until the people fled the streets of Jerusalem for the Temple Mount and came back to him: you prayed for it to come; now pray for it to go.

Then a message came from Shimon ben Shetach, the head of the Sanhedrin:

אִלְמָלֵא חוֹנִי אַתָּה, גּוֹזְרַנִי עָלֶיךָ נִדּוּי. אֲבָל מָה אֶעֱשֶׂה לְּךָ, שֶׁאַתָּה מִתְחַטֵּא לִפְנֵי הַמָּקוֹם וְעוֹשֶׂה לְךָ רְצוֹנְךָ כְּבֵן שֶׁהוּא מִתְחַטֵּא עַל אָבִיו וְעוֹשֶׂה לוֹ רְצוֹנוֹ

"Were you not Choni, I would decree a ban upon you. But what can I do to you? You pester the Omnipresent and He does your will, like a son who pesters his father and the father does his will."

Hold on to that picture, the son who nags his father and gets what he wants. The Talmud will come back to it.

The carob tree. The Gemara continues the story of Choni the circle-maker. It is told by Rabbi Yochanan,² and it opens with a worry, not an event:

All his life, Choni was troubled by a verse, the one at the head of this essay: "When the Lord brought back the returning of Zion, we were like dreamers." The exile in Babylon lasted seventy years, and the verse seems to call those years a dream, as if the people had slept through them. Choni took the verse at its word and asked: can anyone sleep for seventy years?

One day he was walking on the road and saw a man planting a carob tree.

"How many years until this tree bears fruit?"

"Seventy years."

"Are you so sure you will live seventy years?"

The man answered:

אֲנָא חָרוּבָא בְּעָלְמָא אַשְׁכְּחֵיהּ. כִּי הֵיכִי דִּשְׁתַלוּ לִי אֲבָהָתִי — שְׁתַלִי נָמֵי לִבְרָאִי

"I found carob trees in the world. As my fathers planted for me, so I plant for my children."

Choni sat down to eat. Sleep came over him. A ledge of rock closed around him and hid him from sight, and he slept for seventy years. When he woke, he saw a man gathering carobs from the tree. "Are you the one who planted it?" "I am his son's son." Choni understood: I have slept seventy years. He looked for his donkey and found herds upon herds of its descendants.

He went home. "Is the son of Choni the Circle-Maker alive?" "His son is gone. His son's son is alive." "I am Choni the Circle-Maker." They did not believe him.

He went to the study hall. He heard the sages say of a lesson: "This is as clear to us as in the years of Choni the Circle-Maker, for when Choni came into the study hall, every difficulty the rabbis had, he would resolve." He said to them: "I am he." They did not believe him, and they did not give him the honor that was his due.

חֲלַשׁ דַּעְתֵּיהּ, בְּעָא רַחֲמֵי, וּמִית. אָמַר רָבָא: הַיְינוּ דְּאָמְרִי אִינָשֵׁי: אוֹ חַבְרוּתָא אוֹ מִיתוּתָא

His spirit weakened. He prayed for mercy, and he died. Rava said: this is what people mean when they say, "Either companionship or death."

That is the whole story. A few lines of Aramaic.

The other version. The Talmud of the Land of Israel (the Jerusalem Talmud) tells it differently.³ There the sleeper falls asleep in a cave shortly before the First Temple is destroyed and wakes after it is rebuilt. Nobody knows him. But they remember one thing about the man he claims to be: when he entered the Temple courtyard, it would light up. He goes in, and it lights up. And he says the verse over himself: "When the Lord brought back the returning of Zion, we were like dreamers."

In Jerusalem's telling the sleeper is recognized and the story ends in light. In Babylon's telling he is not, and it ends in a grave. We will need both versions.

Choni was a real man. He lived in the first century before the common era, in the last generations of Jewish independence, and Josephus tells of him too, under the Greek form of his name, Onias.⁴

The lessons

The story is short, but it leaves a lot to explain. Why a carob tree, and not a vine or an olive, which bear in a few years? Why does Choni's own family not believe him? Why does the study hall praise him and fail to know him? Why does the man who could force Heaven's hand with a circle in the dust simply lie down and die? And why does Rava, one of the giants of Torah law, close the story with a folk proverb? I think the answers teach us about time, belonging, and the difference between being remembered and being known.

1. A civilization is a conversation between the dead, the living and the unborn

The planter comes first, because the Talmud puts him first. He has no name, and he gets the best line in the story. Choni asks him the question every clever person asks: why do something whose fruit you will not live to taste? The planter does not argue. He describes the world as he found it. I found carob trees in the world. Somebody who never met me did this for me. So I do it for somebody I will never meet.

The Torah says the same thing to every Jew who entered the land: you will find "houses full of every good thing that you did not fill, vineyards and olive trees that you did not plant, and you shall eat and be satisfied" (Deuteronomy 6:11). That you did not plant. No generation is meant to imagine it started from nothing.

That is what a civilization is: a conversation carried on across time between people who never meet. The dead who planted, the living who eat, and the unborn for whom the living plant.

The carob makes the point impossible to miss. A vine bears in three years and an olive in seven or ten; a man might plant either for himself. A carob, in the Talmud's reckoning, bears in seventy, a full lifetime. Whoever plants a carob is planting for someone else.

Choni does not understand this at the start of the story, and that is the point. He is the man of right now. He draws a circle and the rain comes today. He nags his Father and gets what he wants now.

Shimon ben Shetach's picture was exactly right, and it was not quite a compliment: a son who pesters his father has not yet learned to wait. The planter has learned. Choni will learn it the only way the story can teach him, by sleeping through the waiting.

2. You can sleep through the years, or live them

Then there is the verse. Choni read "we were like dreamers" as a statement about sleep, and he could not believe it: nobody sleeps seventy years. The story answers him: yes, you can. The one man who found the verse impossible is the one man made to live it out.

But the people who came back from Babylon had not slept. They had lived every one of those seventy years awake, in exile: planting, burying their dead, teaching children who had never seen Jerusalem. That is why there was still a people to come home.

When they arrived they felt like people waking from a long sleep, dazed, as if the world had moved on without them. But they brought seventy years of life with them. Choni brought nothing but the sleep. The years had aged him and he had not lived them. That is why there was nothing for him to come back to.

The Talmud is drawing a line that runs through the whole of Jewish history. Exile can be survived if you live it awake: if you plant, if you teach, if you keep the conversation going with the people before you and after you. It kills only when you sleep through it, waiting for the miracle and doing nothing in the meantime.

Choni's gift was that Heaven answered him at once. His tragedy is that a man who is always answered at once never learns what to do with the seventy years in between.

3. Being remembered is not being known

The study hall is the cruelest scene, and the Talmud lingers on it. Choni does not walk into a room that has forgotten him. He walks into a room that is, at that very moment, praising him. "As clear as in the years of Choni." His name now stands for clarity itself. He is remembered.

And it makes no difference. They do not know his face. They will not take his word. They do not stand up for him. His teaching survived; he did not. A man can become part of a tradition's language and still be a stranger in its house.

And this is where the two tellings part. The Jerusalem sleeper is recognized, and his story ends in light. Choni is not, and his ends in a grave. The sleep is the same. The difference is whether anyone knows him when he wakes.

There is a hard truth here for anyone who has built anything. What survives of us is not us. The lesson outlives the teacher, the institution outlives its founder, the tree outlives the planter. That is the whole point of planting. But it means the wish to be known, to be recognized as the one who did it, cannot be satisfied by legacy. Legacy is for others. Being known happens only among the living who knew you.

The household scene, a moment earlier, prepares this one. Choni's son is dead, but his grandson is alive. Choni's line has gone on. The planter's line has gone on. Even the donkey's line has gone on, to the point of comedy, herds upon herds.

Everything Choni was part of has continued without him. The story is not about a world that ends. It is about a world that goes on perfectly well, and a man who has no place in it.

And so to Rava's proverb. Choni is the man who stood in a circle and refused to move until God gave way. If anyone could pray his way out of loneliness, it is he. He does pray, and what he asks for is death, and it is granted.

Rava's comment is not a moral. It is a diagnosis. Either companionship or death. The word is chavruta, the study partner, the friend you learn with. It is the smallest unit of Jewish life: not the one, but the two. Rava, the towering legal mind of his generation, is saying that a man without it, even a man who can bring rain, will not survive. Not "will be sad." Will not survive. Belonging is not a decoration on a life. It is a condition of it.

Seen beside the planter, the two halves of the story lock together. The planter is content to be a link. He does not need to taste the fruit or to be there when it is eaten. He does not need his grandson to know his name. He belongs to a chain, and that is enough.

Choni, who could do more than any man of his age, could not do that. He needed to be needed and to be known, in the same room, at the same time. When the room moved on, he could not follow.

The Talmud does not condemn him. It never says he sinned. It grieves for him. But it sets beside him, in the same short story, the other way: the man who planted for his grandchildren, ate his bread, and went home.

Coda

Every generation thinks it is the first to be lonely, and every generation is wrong. But our own moment gives the story a sharper edge. We have never been more able to be remembered: recorded, archived, searchable, quoted. It has not made us less alone. Being findable is not being known. A name that lives on in the study hall does not warm the man standing at its door.

The Talmud's answer is not to want less. It is to want the right things, in the right order. Plant, because you found the world planted. Live the seventy years awake, because they will pass either way. Do not confuse the tree with the memory of the tree. And hold on, with both hands, to the people who know your face. That, and not having unusual powers, is what keeps a person alive.

Choni could make it rain. And he could clarify a Torah discussion like no one else. But he could not make anyone remember his face. The planter could do none of that. He put a seed in the ground for a child he would never meet, and so belonged to something that would outlast both men. The Talmud puts the two men side by side and lets us see which one was happy.

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Notes

1. Mishnah Taanit 3:8. Shimon ben Shetach closes his message with a verse: "Let your father and your mother be glad; let her who bore you rejoice" (Proverbs 23:25).
2. Taanit 23a. Rabbi Yochanan is the great third-century sage of the Land of Israel. The story closes with Rava, who lived in Babylon in the fourth century, some four hundred years after Choni. By then the "seventy years" of the verse were no longer a puzzle about the Babylonian exile. They were a way of asking how a people lives through a long darkness without losing the thread, and the planter's answer had become the answer of a whole civilization.
3. Jerusalem Talmud Taanit 3:9. There the sleeper is the grandfather of the circle-maker. When he wakes, the land itself has changed: olive trees where there were vineyards, fields where there were olive trees.
4. Josephus, Antiquities 14. He calls him Onias, "a righteous man and beloved of God," who once in a drought prayed for rain and was answered. Most historians take this Onias to be Choni; no ancient source says so outright, but the name, the rain and the dates fit. Josephus also records his death, and it is not the death the Talmud gives him. When the two Hasmonean brothers went to war over the throne and one besieged the other inside the Temple, Onias was dragged into the camp of the besiegers and told to curse the men inside. He refused, prayed that God would listen to neither side against the other, and the crowd stoned him. The two deaths rhyme. In both, Choni dies as the man in the middle: the one everybody wants to use, and nobody wants to hear.