Go Tell the Craftsman

מָוֶת וְחַיִּים בְּיַד־לָשׁוֹן

"Death and life are in the hand of the tongue." (Proverbs 18:21)

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Most of the Talmud's stories about sin are stories about anger, greed, or pride on a grand scale. This one is about a single rude sentence, spoken by a great man on a very good day. It takes up half a page of tractate Taanit, it has only two characters, and almost nothing happens in it: a greeting, an insult, a walk, an apology. And yet the sages chose to end it with a teaching that Jewish scribes have kept in their hands, literally, ever since.

The story is uncomfortable in a particular way. Its sinner is not a villain but a scholar fresh from his studies, full of Torah and full of himself, and the person he wounds is a stranger whose only offense is his face. Anyone who has ever said a cruel thing in a moment of feeling large will recognize exactly how it happens. The Talmud tells it about one of its own so that none of us can tell ourselves it is a story about somebody else.

The story

Rabbi Elazar, son of Rabbi Shimon, was coming from Migdal Gedor, from the house of his teacher. He was riding a donkey and strolling along the riverbank, and he was greatly happy, and his mind was swollen within him, because he had learned much Torah.¹

A man happened upon him who was exceedingly ugly. The man said to him: "Peace be upon you, my teacher." And Rabbi Elazar did not return the greeting. Instead he said: "Empty one. How ugly that man is. Are all the people of your town as ugly as you?"²

The man said:

אֵינִי יוֹדֵעַ, אֶלָּא לֵךְ וֶאֱמוֹר לָאוּמָּן שֶׁעֲשָׂאַנִי: כַּמָּה מְכוֹעָר כְּלִי זֶה שֶׁעָשִׂיתָ

"I do not know. But go and say to the craftsman who made me: how ugly is this vessel that you made."

When Rabbi Elazar knew within himself that he had sinned, he got down from the donkey and prostrated himself before the man and said: "I have wronged you. Forgive me." The man said: "I will not forgive you until you go to the craftsman who made me and say to him: how ugly is this vessel that you made."

Rabbi Elazar walked behind him until they reached the man's town. The townspeople came out to meet them, saying: "Peace be upon you, our teacher, our teacher, our master, our master." The man said to them: "Whom are you calling 'our teacher, our teacher'?" They said: "The one walking behind you." He said to them: "If this is a teacher, may there not be many like him in Israel." They said: "Why?" He told them what he had done. They said: "Even so, forgive him, for he is a great man of Torah." He said to them: "For your sakes I forgive him, provided that he does not make a habit of doing this."

Immediately, Rabbi Elazar son of Rabbi Shimon entered the study hall and taught:

לְעוֹלָם יְהֵא אָדָם רַךְ כְּקָנֶה וְאַל יְהֵא קָשֶׁה כְּאֶרֶז

"A person should always be soft as a reed, and not hard as a cedar."

And therefore, the teaching continues, the reed merited that the quill is taken from it to write with: a Torah scroll, tefillin, and mezuzot.³

The lessons

There are a few things in this story I keep coming back to. The insult does not come from hatred; it comes from happiness. The victim answers with one sentence and then refuses, for a long walk, to accept an apology, and the Talmud seems to be on his side. And the teaching Rabbi Elazar draws at the end is not "do not insult people," which is what we would expect, but something about reeds and cedars. Each of these is worth unfolding.

1. The insult came from a good day

The Talmud takes care to tell us Rabbi Elazar's state of mind before it tells us his sin. He is coming from his teacher's house. He has learned much Torah. He is greatly happy, and his mind is swollen within him. Nothing in the scene is dark. He is a man at the top of his form, on a beautiful road, on the best day of his month.

That is exactly the point. The stranger greets him first, with full respect: peace be upon you, my teacher. All Rabbi Elazar has to do is answer. And he cannot. At that moment the world, in his swollen mind, has divided itself into himself and scenery, and the man in front of him has landed on the wrong side of the line. The first casualty of feeling large is the ability to see other people at their real size.

Most of us guard our tongues when we feel attacked. Very few of us guard them when we feel wonderful. The Talmud is warning us about the second case, because that is when the cruelty comes out casual and unprovoked, the kind the speaker forgets in a minute and the hearer remembers for years. Success is not the reward at the end of the moral life. It is one of its tests, and on the road from Migdal Gedor a great scholar failed it in one sentence.

2. Go tell the Craftsman

The ugly man's answer deserves to be read slowly, because it may be the best single retort in the Talmud. He does not defend his face. He does not attack the rabbi. He files the complaint upward: I do not know whether my townsmen are ugly, but go and say to the craftsman who made me, how ugly is this vessel that you made.

The logic is simple and enormous. Every person is made. To sneer at the vessel is to criticize the workmanship, and the workman here is God. The Torah's claim that every human being is made in the divine image is easy to affirm in the abstract; this man turns it into an address. You have a problem with how I look? Take it up with the One who looked at me and called the work good. In one sentence, an anonymous stranger teaches the great scholar that contempt for any person is a theological statement, and a false one.

And then he does something almost as important: he refuses to make the apology easy. Rabbi Elazar dismounts, prostrates himself, begs. The man holds out, all the way to the gates of his town, and only forgives when his own townspeople plead, and even then with a condition: provided he does not make a habit of it. We might have expected the Talmud to scold him for hard-heartedness. It does not, and the silence teaches. Forgiveness is the victim's to give, not the offender's to collect. A wound to a person's face and worth is not erased by the discomfort of the man who gave it. When the forgiveness finally comes, its one condition looks forward, not back: not "grovel more," but "never do this again." That is what real repair aims at. Not the settling of this account, but the protection of the next stranger on the road.⁴

3. Soft as a reed

Then there is what Rabbi Elazar does with his shame. "Immediately," says the Talmud, he entered the study hall and taught. He does not wait for the sting to fade. He does not tell the story as having happened to someone he once knew. He walks straight from his humiliation into the house of study and converts it, while it is still hot, into Torah: a person should always be soft as a reed, and not hard as a cedar.

The image is exact. The cedar is the tallest thing in the forest, straight and magnificent, and it does not bend. So when the great wind comes, it snaps or it is uprooted. The reed is nothing to look at. It grows by the water, every wind pushes it flat, and after every wind it stands back up. The cedar was Rabbi Elazar on the riverbank, tall with learning, unable to bend even to return a greeting. The reed is what the ugly man asked him to become: someone who can be moved by the person in front of him.

Then comes the coda inside the teaching, and it lifts the whole story. Therefore the reed merited that the quill is taken from it to write a Torah scroll, tefillin, and mezuzot. Of all the trees, the instrument of Torah is cut from the one that knows how to bend. The cedar builds palaces; the reed writes the word of God. It is the Talmud's quiet answer to the question of who is fit to carry Torah at all, and it is the same answer the road taught: not the impressive, but the yielding. By this teaching, a scholar whose learning has made him hard has disqualified himself from the very thing he is proud of.

Coda

Somewhere today a scribe is bent over a parchment, writing the letters of a Torah scroll with a cut reed, because the law and custom of centuries prefer it so. Most of them could not tell you which page of Taanit the preference echoes. It does not matter. The scroll remembers. Every letter of it is written with the instrument of humility. The scribes are the heirs, in spirit, of a man who learned on a riverbank that all the Torah in his head was worth less, that morning, than the greeting he failed to return.

Death and life are in the hand of the tongue, says the verse. The Talmud's addition is a matter of timing: the tongue is at its most dangerous not when we are angry, but when we are pleased with ourselves.

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Notes

1. Taanit 20a–20b. Some versions of the story name the rider as Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar, and a parallel appears in Avot d'Rabbi Natan, chapter 41. Rabbi Elazar son of Rabbi Shimon is the son of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, and the Talmud tells other stories of his hard edges and his repentance (Bava Metzia 83b–84a); this one fits the man: enormous gifts, imperfectly governed.
2. The insult in the story is spoken in a strange grammar: "how ugly is that man," in the third person, as if the victim were not standing there. The Talmud's characters often speak of themselves as "that man" to soften an oath or a curse; here the rabbi uses it to speak about a person to his face as though he were an object. The craftsman answer reverses exactly this: the "object" turns out to have a Maker with opinions.
3. The teaching about the reed and the cedar is brought in the Talmud as a general baraita, and appears in a nearby form in Sanhedrin. Its attachment to this story is the storyteller's art: the law of the quill exists independently, but placed here it becomes a judgment on everything that happened on the road.
4. The condition "provided he does not make a habit of it" is the Talmud's realism about apology. A first offense can be forgiven as a lapse. A habit is not a lapse; it is a character, and forgiveness extended to a character that has no intention of changing is not mercy but license. The man forgives the deed and reserves judgment, sensibly, on the pattern.