The Grandson in the Field

וְהָיָה מַעֲשֵׂה הַצְּדָקָה שָׁלוֹם וַעֲבֹדַת הַצְּדָקָה הַשְׁקֵט וָבֶטַח עַד־עוֹלָם

"And the work of righteousness shall be peace, and the service of righteousness quiet and confidence forever." (Isaiah 32:17)

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The last essay ended with a grave. Choni the Circle-Maker, who could make Heaven answer at once, woke into a world that had gone on without him and could not live in it. Either companionship or death. The Talmud lets that line stand for a moment, and then, without a break, begins a new story: Abba Chilkiyah was the son of Choni's son.

That is not an accident of arrangement. The Talmud is answering itself. Having shown us the miracle-worker who could not belong, it now shows us his grandson, who could, and who could still bring rain. The grandson is not famous. He has no circle. He is a day laborer hoeing a field, and when the sages come to him he does not even say hello. But the clouds gather, and they gather first over his wife's corner of the roof.

This is a story about the difference between holiness that stands apart and holiness that stays home. It is built like a detective story: a series of strange behaviors, then a series of explanations, each of which turns what looked like rudeness into a form of care.

The story

Abba Chilkiyah was the grandson of Choni the Circle-Maker, and when the world needed rain, the sages would send word to him; he would pray, and rain would come.¹ Once the world needed rain. The sages sent two scholars to ask him to pray. They went to his house and did not find him. They went to the field and found him hoeing. They greeted him. He did not turn his face to them.

Toward evening he gathered firewood. He put the wood and the hoe on one shoulder and his cloak on the other. The whole way home he walked barefoot; when he came to water, he put on his shoes. When he came to thorns and brambles, he lifted his clothes. When he reached the town, his wife came out to meet him, adorned.

When he reached his house, his wife went in first, then he went in, then the sages. He sat and ate bread and did not say to them, "Come and eat." He divided bread among the children: one piece to the elder, two to the younger.

Then he said to his wife:

יָדַעְנָא דְּרַבָּנַן מִשּׁוּם מִיטְרָא קָא אָתוּ, נִיסַּק לְאִיגָּרָא וְנִיבְעֵי רַחֲמֵי, אֶפְשָׁר דְּמִרַצֵּי הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא וְיֵיתֵי מִיטְרָא וְלָא נַחְזֵיק טֵיבוּתָא לְנַפְשִׁין

"I know the rabbis have come because of the rain. Let us go up to the roof and pray for mercy. Perhaps the Holy One, blessed be He, will be appeased and rain will come — and we will not take the credit for ourselves."

They went up to the roof. He stood in one corner, she in the other. The clouds rose first from her corner. He came down and said to the sages: "Why have the rabbis come?" "The rabbis sent us to the master to pray for rain." He said:

בָּרוּךְ הַמָּקוֹם שֶׁלֹּא הִצְרִיךְ אֶתְכֶם לְאַבָּא חִלְקִיָּה

"Blessed is the Omnipresent, who did not make you need Abba Chilkiyah."

They said to him: "We know the rain came because of the master. But let the master explain the things that puzzled us."

Why, when we greeted you, did you not turn your face to us? "I was a hired laborer for the day, and I said: I will not steal time from my employer."

Why the wood on one shoulder and the cloak on the other? "The cloak was borrowed. I borrowed it to wear, not to carry wood on."

Why barefoot the whole way, and shoes when you came to water? "On the road I can see where I step. In the water I cannot."

Why did you lift your clothes at the thorns? "A scratch on my skin heals. A tear in the garment does not."

Why did your wife come out adorned to meet you? "So that I would not set my eyes on another woman."

Why did she go in first, then you, then us? "Because I did not know you well enough to leave you alone with her."

Why did you eat and not invite us? "There was not enough bread, and I did not want to accept your thanks for nothing."

Why one piece to the elder child and two to the younger? "The elder is at home all day and can eat when he likes. The younger sits in the synagogue and studies."

And the last question:

וּמַאי טַעְמָא קְדֻים סְלוּק עֲנָנֵי מֵהָךְ זָוִיתָא דַּהֲווֹת קָיְימָא דְּבֵיתְהוּ דְּמָר לַעֲנָנָא דִידֵיהּ? מִשּׁוּם דְּאִיתְּתָא שְׁכִיחָא בְּבֵיתָא, וְיָהֲבָא רִיפְתָּא לַעֲנִיֵּי, וּמְקָרְבָא הֲנָיָיתַהּ. וַאֲנָא יָהֵיבְנָא זוּזָא, וְלָא מְקָרְבָא הֲנָיָיתֵיהּ

"And why did the clouds rise first from the corner where the master's wife stood, before the master's own?" — "Because a woman is at home, and she gives bread to the poor, and her benefit is immediate. I give a coin, and its benefit is not immediate."

Then a second answer, in Abba Chilkiyah's own voice: "Or else: there were some hooligans in our neighborhood. I prayed that they should die. She prayed that they should repent, and they repented."

The Talmud closes the family album with one more portrait. Chanan HaNechba, "Chanan the Hidden," was the son of Choni's daughter. When the world needed rain, the sages would send schoolchildren to him, and the children would take hold of the hem of his cloak and say, "Abba, Abba, give us rain!" And he would say before God: "Master of the world, do it for the sake of these, who cannot tell the difference between the Father who gives rain and the father who does not."

Why was he called "the Hidden"? Because he used to hide in the privy, so that people would not honor him.

The lessons

By now a few questions have probably occurred to you. Why does the Talmud spend most of a passage about rain on a man's walk home from work: shoes, thorns, a borrowed cloak? Why does Abba Chilkiyah pray on the roof, out of the sages' sight, and then pretend to be surprised that they have come? Why do the sages ask nine questions and save the rain for last? Why two answers to that last question? And why does the Talmud follow this grandson with another grandson who hides in the privy? I think the answers provide a new perspective about where holiness lives, very different from what we saw with Choni the circle-maker.

1. The whole of a life is the prayer

The walk home comes first, because the Talmud puts it first, and at length. Eight puzzles before the rain, eight explanations. Read together, they share one feature: not one of them is about God, and every one of them is about someone else.

The greeting he did not return: his employer's time. The cloak he would not load: its owner's property. The shoes and the thorns: his own body, which heals, against a garment, which does not, and which he may not even own. The wife who came out adorned: his own eyes, and her dignity. The order at the door: her safety with strangers. The bread he did not offer: the sages' thanks, which he would not take without deserving it. The two pieces for the younger child: who was hungry, and why.

This is a man who has thought about the moral weight of every ordinary act and decided each one in favor of somebody else: an employer, a lender, a wife, a guest, a child. That is what the sages walked into.

They came for a prayer. What they found was a life that is the prayer. The Talmud makes them, and us, sit through the whole walk home before the clouds appear, because the walk home is the point. The rain only confirms what the day already showed.

Choni was the opposite. His story is all one gesture: the circle, the oath, the demand, the answer. We know nothing about how Choni treated his employer, his wife, or a borrowed cloak. His holiness was concentrated in a single act of will. His grandson's is hidden so carefully and so evenly through a day that the sages, watching him, cannot see it at all, until they ask.

2. Do not take credit, even from yourself

Then comes the roof. Abba Chilkiyah knows exactly why the sages have come. He could pray in front of them. He could stand in the yard and let them watch the sky. Instead he takes his wife upstairs, out of sight, and says the sentence on which the story turns: perhaps God will be appeased and rain will come, and we will not take the credit for ourselves.

Then he comes down and asks them why they came, as though he had not just prayed. And when they tell him, he blesses God who did not make you need Abba Chilkiyah. It is not a lie. It is a refusal. He is declining, in the only way still open to him, to be the man they came for.

Choni had said, in the circle: Your children have turned their faces to me. He put himself in the middle, between the people and God, and swore an oath there. Shimon ben Shetach heard the danger in that and said so. Three generations on, Abba Chilkiyah has heard it too, and he has built his whole manner around not standing in the middle. He prays where nobody sees. He asks the sages what they want as if he did not know. He sends the credit upward before anyone can hand it to him.

And then the Talmud gives us the second grandson, Chanan, who hides in the privy so as not to be honored, and whose prayer is the purest in the passage: do it for the children, who cannot tell the difference between the Father who gives rain and the father who does not. Chanan is saying to God: they think it is me. We both know it is not. Answer them anyway.

This is the danger of greatness: the moment people start coming to you, you slowly become the thing they come for, without meaning to. The grandsons of Choni knew what that had cost their grandfather, and they arranged their lives so that it could not happen to them.

3. The wife's cloud rose first

The question the sages save for last is the most radical thing in the passage: the clouds rose first from her corner. The famous man's prayer was answered second. Abba Chilkiyah does not turn the question aside. His answer is a small lesson in charity: small kindnesses move Heaven.

She is at home, and she gives bread to the poor, and her benefit is immediate. I give a coin, and its benefit is not. Both give. But when a hungry man knocks, she puts bread in his hand and he eats. Abba Chilkiyah gives money, and the man must still walk to market, buy, carry, and cook. Her kindness closes the distance between the need and its relief; his leaves a gap. And Heaven, the story says, answers the prayer of the person whose kindness has no gap in it.

The second answer goes further. Faced with the same bad men, he wanted them gone. She wanted them changed. Her prayer worked, which tells us which one Heaven preferred.

Taken together, the two answers say something the Talmud rarely says at all: the person whose prayer is answered first is not the one with the reputation, or the one who does the most, but the one who is nearest to the need and softest toward the sinner. In this household, that was the wife. And her husband, the man the sages came for, is the one who tells them so. That is the last and largest of his courtesies to someone other than himself.

The Talmud placed the two stories side by side, and they complete each other. Choni draws a circle. It is a line between himself and everyone else. Inside it he is alone with God, and from inside it he can do what no one else can do. He is answered, and he ends his life unable to bear a world in which he is not recognized.

His grandson draws no line. He is in another man's field, on the road in a borrowed cloak, in a house with a wife and two children and not enough bread. When holiness is needed he goes up to the roof with his wife, comes down, pretends nothing happened, and sits down to a meal he cannot share. He has companionship, the story is thick with it, and he has rain. He has both of the things his grandfather could only choose between.

That is the Talmud's answer to itself. The circle is one way to reach Heaven, and it works, and it is lonely, and it kills. The field is another way, and it also works, and it is crowded with obligations, and it is where a person can live.

The Talmud does not say the second is easier. It shows us a man carrying a hoe on one shoulder and a borrowed cloak on the other, walking barefoot to save his shoes, and it lets us count what that costs. But it puts the clouds over his roof. And it puts them over her corner first.

Coda

We are drawn to the circle. Every age has its Chonis, the holy man, the one who can do what no one else can, the one the community turns to when everything else has failed. Every age honors them and, in the end, leaves them standing at the door of a study hall that remembers their name and does not know their face.

The Talmud does not tell us to stop honoring them. It tells us where to look for the rain. Not to the man in the circle but to the man in the field, and not even to him but past him, to the corner of the roof where a woman is standing who gives bread instead of coins and prays for hooligans to change.

The story sends two scholars all the way out to the countryside to learn this. It makes them sit through a whole evening of puzzles. Then it lets them go home in the rain, knowing what they had come to ask, and something they had not.

Choni's grandson could bring rain. He never once let anyone see him do it. And when the sages asked why the sky answered his wife before it answered him, he told them the truth. That is the holiness that stays home. It is the only kind that lasts.

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Notes

1. We know less about Abba Chilkiyah than about his grandfather. Choni appears in the Mishnah and in Josephus; the grandson appears here and almost nowhere else. If Choni lived in the first half of the first century before the common era, his grandson belongs to its second half or the turn of the era: the years of Herod, when the Temple stood in its greatest splendor and the countryside was full of landless men who worked other people's fields by the day. That is what Abba Chilkiyah is: a sechir yom, a day laborer, the lowest rung of the free working poor. He owns a hoe. He does not own his cloak. The title "Abba," father, appears in this period on a handful of men remembered chiefly for their piety. The Talmud does not call him "Rabbi." He is not one of the sages; he is the man the sages come to. Whoever wrote the story down as we have it lived centuries later, in a world of scholars, and chose to tell a story in which the scholars are the ones who do not understand. That choice is part of the meaning.