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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Prologue

There is a kind of person every community needs and does not know how to keep. He is the one who can do what nobody else can do. When the wells are dry and the prayers of the ordinary have failed, the people go to him. He does not fail. And precisely because he does not fail, he lives at a strange angle to everyone else — needed, admired, and alone.

The Talmud knew 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 told in the Mishnah, and it is a story of power. The story I want to read here comes a few lines later in the Talmud, and it is a story of the price of that power. It begins with a man planting a tree, and it 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. It is also, I believe, one of the wisest things ever written about what a person owes to the generations before and after him, and about the one hunger that even a miracle-worker cannot pray away.

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The text

I. The circle (Mishnah Taanit 3:8)

The Mishnah first. Most of the month of Adar had passed — the last month of the rainy season — and no rain had fallen. The people came to Choni: "Pray that rain should fall." He told them to bring the clay Passover ovens indoors, so they would not dissolve. 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 arrived from Shimon ben Shetach, the head of the Sanhedrin. It is one of the most remarkable rebukes in the Mishnah:

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."

And Shimon ben Shetach closes with a verse: "Let your father and your mother be glad; let her who bore you rejoice" (Proverbs 23:25).

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

II. The carob tree (Taanit 23a)

The Talmud's story is told in the name of Rabbi Yochanan, the great third-century sage of the Land of Israel, and it opens not with an event but with a worry. All his life, Rabbi Yochanan says, "that righteous man" 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. Choni asked: Is there anyone who sleeps for seventy years in a dream?

Then, 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 saying 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 show him the honour 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 Jerusalem Talmud's version (Taanit 3:9)

The Talmud of the Land of Israel tells it differently, and the difference matters. There the sleeper is the grandfather of the circle-maker, and he falls asleep in a cave shortly before the destruction of the First Temple. He sleeps seventy years — through the destruction and through the rebuilding. When he wakes the land itself has changed: olive trees where there were vineyards, fields where there were olive trees. He asks the news of the world; 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 recognised and the story ends in light. In Babylon's telling, he is not, and the story ends in a grave. Both are the Talmud. We will need both.

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The history

Choni was real. He lived in the first half of the first century before the common era, in the last generations of Jewish independence under the Hasmonean kings, and he was a contemporary of Shimon ben Shetach, who led the Sanhedrin in the days of Queen Salome Alexandra. Josephus, writing a century and a half later, tells of a man he calls Onias — the Greek form of the same name — "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 all fit. Josephus also records his death, and it is not the death the Babylonian 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. He stood and prayed that God would not listen to either side against the other. And the crowd stoned him.

I mention this not to correct the Talmud — the Talmud is not writing history, and it says so by giving him a death made entirely of prayer and grief. I mention it because 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.

The other date that matters is not his but the story's. The Babylonian Talmud puts the tale in the mouth of Rabbi Yochanan and closes it with Rava, who lived in Babylon in the fourth century, some four hundred years after Choni and two and a half centuries after the Temple fell. By then the "seventy years" of the verse were no longer an arithmetic 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 carob-planter's answer had become the answer of a whole civilisation: I found carob trees in the world.

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The questions

On careful reading, this text leaves a list of things that do not add up.

Why does the story open with a verse about dreamers, and why is Choni, of all people, the one who cannot understand it? Why a carob tree — why not a vine or an olive, which bear in a few years? Why does the Talmud bother to tell us about the donkey? Why does Choni's own household not believe him — surely a grandson knows the family stories? Why does the study hall remember him as a standard of clarity and yet 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, the sober jurist of Babylon, close a story about a miracle-worker with a peasant's proverb?

The answers, I think, form a single argument about time, belonging, and the difference between being remembered and being known.

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The lessons

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

Begin with the planter, because the Talmud does. He is nameless, and he gets the best line in the story. Choni's question to him is the question of every clever man in every age: why do something whose fruit you will not live to taste? And the planter does not argue. He simply 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 had said this long before, in a verse that every Jew who entered the land was meant to carry: "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). Note the tense. Not "that you built" — that you did not build. The land is given as an inheritance precisely so that no generation should imagine it started from nothing.

This is what a civilisation is. Not a set of institutions, not a territory, not even a body of law, but 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 is chosen because it makes the point unmistakable. A vine bears in three years, 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 lifespan. Whoever plants a carob is planting, by definition, for someone else.

Choni does not understand this at the beginning of the story, and that is the point. He is the man of the immediate. He draws a circle and the rain comes today. He nags his Father and gets what he wants now. Shimon ben Shetach's image was exactly right, and it was not entirely a compliment: a son who pesters his father is a son who has not yet learned to wait. The planter has learned. Choni will learn it the only way the story can teach him — by being made to sleep through the waiting.

2. Time is not a dream if you live through it awake

Now the verse. Choni is troubled by "we were like dreamers." He takes it literally, as a statement about sleep: the exile lasted seventy years, and the verse seems to say the exiles dreamed their way through it. Could anyone really sleep that long? The story answers him with a bitter precision: yes — you can. The one man who found the verse impossible is the one man made to live it out.

But that is only half the answer, and the Jerusalem Talmud supplies the other half. There, the sleeper's seventy years are the seventy years of the exile itself: he falls asleep before the Temple is destroyed, wakes after it is rebuilt, and says the verse over himself. In Babylon, the seventy years are only the years of a carob tree; the exile is never mentioned again. Read the two side by side and a second meaning comes into view — one that Choni, at the start of the story, had not yet lived long enough to see. The verse does not say the returnees were dreamers — that they slept through the exile. It says they were like dreamers: they came home and felt what a man feels on waking from a long sleep, the dazed sense that the world had moved on without him. 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 what made the return possible: there was still a people to return, still a conversation to carry home. Choni is the opposite case. The returnees only felt as if they had slept; Choni really did. They came home with seventy years of life behind them — people they had raised, things they had built, a people that still knew them. He comes home with nothing behind him but the sleep. The years have aged him, but he did not live them, and that is why there is nothing for him to come back to.

The Talmud is drawing a line here 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: when you wait for the miracle and do nothing in the meantime. Choni's gift was that he could make Heaven answer 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 the same as being known

Now the study hall, which is the cruelest scene in the story and the one the Talmud lingers on. Choni does not walk into a hall that has forgotten him. He walks into one that is, at that very moment, praising him. "As clear as in the years of Choni." His name has become a standard, a byword for clarity. He is, in the most literal sense, remembered.

And it makes no difference. They do not know his face. They will not take his word. They do not rise for him. His teaching survived; he did not. And the Talmud wants us to feel the exact shape of that wound: that a man can become part of a tradition's language and still be a stranger in its house.

There is a hard truth here for anyone who has ever built anything. What survives of us is not us. The lessons outlive the teacher; the institution outlives its founder; the tree outlives the planter. That is as it should be — it is the whole point of planting. But it means that the desire to be known, to be recognised as the one who did it, cannot be satisfied by legacy. Legacy is for others. Recognition is for the living, and it exists only among the living who knew you.

Look again at the household scene, which prepares this one. "Is Choni's son alive?" No — but his grandson is. Choni's line has continued; the carob planter's line has continued; the donkey's line has continued to absurdity, herds upon herds. Everything Choni was part of has gone on 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.

4. "Either companionship or death" — belonging is not a luxury

Which brings us to Rava, and the proverb, and the strangest thing in the story: Choni's death.

Consider who this is. This is the man who stood in a circle and refused to move until God gave way. He does not lack for spiritual resources. If anyone could pray his way out of loneliness, it is he. And he does pray — he prayed for mercy — but what he prays for is death, and it is granted. Rava's comment is not a moral. It is a diagnosis. Either companionship or death. Rava is saying: this is not weakness. This is what a human being is.

The word is chavruta — the study partner, the friend one learns with. It is the smallest unit of Jewish life: not the individual, but the pair. And Rava, the towering legal mind of his generation, tells us 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.

Read this against the planter's answer, and the two halves of the story lock together. The planter has something Choni never had: he is content to be a link. He does not need to taste the fruit; he does not need to be there when it is eaten; he does not need his grandson to know his name. He belongs to a chain, and belonging to it 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 — and when the room moved on, he could not.

The Talmud is not condemning him. Notice that it never says he sinned. It grieves for him. But it sets beside him, in the same short story, the alternative: the man who planted for his grandchildren, ate his bread, and went home.

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Coda

Every generation thinks it is the first to be lonely, and every generation is wrong. But there is something in our own moment that gives Choni's story a sharper edge. We have never been more able to be remembered — recorded, archived, searchable, quoted — and it has not made us any 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 whether or not you do. Do not confuse the tree with the memory of the tree. And hold on, with both hands, to the people who know your face — because that, and not the miracle, is what keeps a person alive.

Choni could make it rain. He could not make anyone remember his face. The carob-planter could do neither. He simply put a seed in the ground for a child he would never meet, and in doing so belonged to something that would outlast them both. Of the two, the Talmud tells us — gently, by placing them side by side and letting us watch — which one was happy.