The Key Under His Father's Head

צְאוּ וּרְאוּ מָה עָשָׂה נׇכְרִי אֶחָד בְּאַשְׁקְלוֹן, וְדָמָא בֶּן נְתִינָה שְׁמוֹ.

"Go out and see what one gentile in Ashkelon did, and his name is Dama ben Netina." (Kiddushin 31a)

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The sages asked Rav Ulla a question with an edge: How far does honoring a father and mother go? They wanted a limit. Every duty has one somewhere, and a teacher is supposed to say where.

The answer was not a rule. It was a place and a name. Go to Ashkelon and look at a man who was never given the commandment in the first place. The Talmud asks the question a second time, of Rabbi Eliezer, and his answer is the same man.

Ashkelon sat on the coast, outside the Jewish towns and under Roman rule. Dama ben Netina was a merchant there, rich enough to sit among the great men of Rome. He owed the Torah nothing at all.

The story is set while the Temple still stood. The sages come to him for stones for the High Priest's garment and, a year later, for a red heifer.

The story

The sages came to him to buy stones for the ephod, the garment the High Priest wore, and Dama had them. The profit on the sale was six hundred thousand gold dinars; Rav Kahana taught eight hundred thousand.¹

The stones were in a locked chest. The key was somewhere else.

וְהָיָה מַפְתֵּחַ מוּנָּח תַּחַת מְרַאֲשׁוֹתָיו שֶׁל אָבִיו, וְלֹא צִיעֲרוֹ.

"And the key was lying under his father's head, and he did not trouble him."

His father was asleep on it. Dama went back out to the sages with nothing, and the sale did not happen.

The Talmud gives no scene of struggle. There is no line about how long he stood in the room. He came out, and that is all we are told.

A year later:

לְשָׁנָה הָאַחֶרֶת נָתַן הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא שְׂכָרוֹ, שֶׁנּוֹלְדָה לוֹ פָּרָה אֲדֻמָּה בְּעֶדְרוֹ.

"The next year the Holy One, blessed be He, gave him his reward: a red heifer was born in his herd."

A red heifer, a cow needed for one of the Temple's rites, was the rarest animal in the country, and the Jews needed one. Dama now had the only thing his customers could not buy anywhere else. He knew exactly where he stood, and he said so:

אֵין אֲנִי מְבַקֵּשׁ מִכֶּם אֶלָּא אוֹתוֹ מָמוֹן שֶׁהִפְסַדְתִּי בִּשְׁבִיל כְּבוֹד אַבָּא.

"I ask nothing from you except that same money I lost for the honor of Father."

There is a third scene, and it is the hardest one to read. Rav Dimi, a teacher who carried reports from the land of Israel to Babylonia, told it this way:

פַּעַם אַחַת הָיָה לָבוּשׁ סִירְקוֹן שֶׁל זָהָב, וְהָיָה יוֹשֵׁב בֵּין גְּדוֹלֵי רוֹמִי. וּבָאתָה אִמּוֹ וּקְרָעַתּוּ מִמֶּנּוּ, וְטָפְחָה לוֹ עַל רֹאשׁוֹ, וְיָרְקָה לוֹ בְּפָנָיו, וְלֹא הִכְלִימָהּ.

"Once he was wearing a fine cloak of gold, and he was sitting among the great men of Rome. And his mother came and tore it off him and struck him on the head and spat in his face, and he did not shame her."

A midrash adds that his mother was not in her right mind and would strike him in front of his companions, and it records the only thing he ever said to her:²

דַּיֵּךְ אִמִּי.

"Enough, Mother."

Among these stories the Talmud sets down a comment from Rabbi Hanina:

גָּדוֹל מְצֻוֶּוה וְעוֹשֶׂה מִמִּי שֶׁאֵינוֹ מְצֻוֶּוה וְעוֹשֶׂה.

"Greater is one who is commanded and acts than one who is not commanded and acts."

The lessons

Three things here are strange, and they are strange in the same direction. The teacher answers a question about Jewish law by pointing at a man outside it. The tradition's other famous example of a son honoring his father is Esau, of all people. And Rabbi Hanina, with these stories in front of him, says that being commanded counts for more. It is worth asking why a tradition goes outside itself to find the measure of its own commandment.

1. The answer is a man, not a line

The question was about limits. How far. They wanted a number of steps, a sum of money, a point where the duty stops and ordinary life starts again.

Rabbi Eliezer does not give one. He sends them out of the study hall and down the coast to watch somebody.

That is a different kind of answer. A limit tells you when you have done enough. A man tells you what the thing looks like when nobody is measuring. Dama was not keeping a rule, because he had no rule to keep. He was not building a reputation among the sages, who were strangers to him. Nothing in the room was pushing him except the sleeping man on the chest.

The Talmud is careful to state the price. Six hundred thousand, and Rav Kahana says eight hundred thousand. The number is not decoration. It is the measurement the students asked for, and the passage gives it to them in the only form that means anything: this is what he was willing to lose.

And the loss was final at the moment he walked out. He did not know a heifer was coming. Nobody knows that.

2. He would not be paid for it

He understood money better than anyone in the story, and money is where the story keeps testing him.

When the heifer is born he has the sages in front of him with no alternative supplier, and he tells them so himself. He could name any price. He asks for the exact sum he lost, and not one dinar more.

A second version of the story sharpens it further. There the sages raise their offer while he is inside, thinking his silence is a negotiation, and when he comes out he refuses the raise and holds them to the first price. He will not take money that arrived because of his father.

That is a man drawing a line, but not where the questioners expected one. He is not limiting what he will give up for his father. He is limiting what he will take for it.

The third scene is the same refusal in a costlier currency. He is in his gold cloak among the great men of Rome, at the height of his standing in the world, and his mother destroys it in front of them. He does not stop her and he does not explain her afterward. He does not correct her, he does not apologize for her, and he does not tell the men watching that she is ill. Any one of those would have saved his standing at her cost.

He gave up six hundred thousand dinars without a word, and here he gives up something he cannot make back by selling a cow.

3. The other example is Esau

There is one more man the tradition holds up for this, and he is the last one anybody would expect.

כָּל יָמַי הָיִיתִי מְשַׁמֵּשׁ אֶת אַבָּא וְלֹא שִׁמַּשְׁתִּי אוֹתוֹ אֶחָד מִמֵּאָה שֶׁשִּׁמֵּשׁ עֵשָׂו אֶת אָבִיו,

"All my days I served my father, and I did not serve him one hundredth as much as Esau served his father."

The speaker is Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel, the head of his generation, a man from a family of leaders. He is comparing himself to Esau and saying he loses. Esau, in the same passage, is not softened for a moment: the fine clothes he wore to serve his father are the ones he took from Nimrod by killing him.³ He is a murderer in the clothes and he is faultless in the service, and the tradition says both in one breath.

Nothing else about Esau is softened either. He is the son who sold his birthright for soup, the brother Jacob spends twenty years afraid of, and the name the rabbis later use for Rome itself. The tradition had every reason to leave him out of a discussion about how to treat a father. It put him in, and put him above its own leader.

So the two great examples of this one commandment are a gentile merchant in Ashkelon and Esau. Neither of them was commanded. Both of them are held up in front of people who were.

There is a reason this one duty can travel that way. Honoring the two people who raised you did not need to be revealed. Anyone can see it, in any city, in any language. So an outsider's example fits without translation.

Which leaves the question of why you would bring that example home to your own students. Rabbi Hanina answers it, and he answers it by refusing both easy conclusions. He does not say the outsider has beaten them. He does not say the commandment makes the outsider's act small. He says the commanded person is greater.

That seems backwards. Surely the volunteer is greater. One man acts because he is told to; the other comes to the same act on his own, which is exactly what Dama did.

One sage lived inside this question. Rav Yosef, a head of the academy in Babylonia, was blind, and Rabbi Yehuda taught that a blind man is exempt from the commandments. On that view, everything Rav Yosef kept, he kept as a volunteer. At first he said he would make a feast if anyone ruled like Rabbi Yehuda, because then his whole life's practice had been a free gift. Then he heard Rabbi Hanina's rule and turned all the way around:⁴

דְּכִי מִפַּקַּדְינָא – אִית לִי אַגְרָא טְפֵי.

"Since I am commanded, I have more reward."

Now the feast would be for the opposite news: that he had been obligated all along.

Why should being under orders count for more? The commentators give two answers. First, the volunteer can always stop, and knows it, so his act rests on a feeling. The commanded person has no way out. Tosafot say he worries about failing and carries that worry into the act itself; the reward follows the burden.⁵ Second, a volunteer's deed, however fine, is his own idea. A commanded deed is done because Someone asked, so each time it is done, it is an answer.

The rule also keeps the story safe to tell. Dama is not competing with the students, and the students are not excused by him. A man with no obligation shows them how much room there is inside their own.

Coda

The reward in the story is worth looking at twice.

What arrives in Dama's herd is a red heifer. Of all the animals in the Torah, that is the one whose reason is never given. Its ashes purified people who had touched death, and the tradition itself treats the law as a law without a stated reason, kept because it was given.⁶

So the animal that stands for keeping a law you cannot explain is born in the herd of a man who kept a law he was never given. The passage does not point this out. It simply puts the two things in the same sentence and moves on.

And then Dama does the last thing you would expect a merchant to do. He takes back what he lost, exactly, and leaves the rest on the table.

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Notes

1. Kiddushin 31a tells the story twice. In the first telling the question is put to Rav Ulla and the sages want merchandise; in the second it is put to Rabbi Eliezer and they want stones for the ephod, the High Priest's shoulder-piece. The profit is six hundred thousand gold dinars, and Rav Kahana taught eight hundred thousand. The Yerushalmi (Kiddushin 1:7, and again in Peah 1:1) names the stone: the yashpeh, the jasper of Benjamin, lost from the choshen, the breastplate on the High Priest's chest. The breastplate was fastened to the ephod, and the two are commanded together in the Torah; the Bavli's own word is ephod, and this essay follows the text it quotes.
2. Devarim Rabbah 1:15 tells the whole story with different details: the father's leg is resting on the chest rather than his head on the key, the sages raise their offer from one thousand gold pieces to ten thousand while Dama is inside, and he refuses the raise. The Yerushalmi has the raise too, from one hundred dinars to a thousand, and gives Dama a sharper refusal: "Shall I sell you the honor of my fathers for coins?" It also says his mother was not in her right mind. This is a midrash on Deuteronomy, not the Talmud.
3. Bereshit Rabbah 65:16, on the verse about Rebecca taking Esau's fine garments. The same passage says Esau took those clothes from Nimrod after killing him, and that Esau said it was not his father's honor to be served in anything less than royal dress. Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel's line about serving his own father in dirty clothes appears there and again in Devarim Rabbah 1:15, beside the Dama story. Both are midrash rather than Talmud.
4. Bava Kamma 87a. Rav Yosef, the blind head of the academy of Pumbedita, states both positions himself: first the feast for being exempt, then, after hearing Rabbi Hanina's rule, the feast for being obligated. The same rule of Rabbi Hanina appears there and in Kiddushin 31a and Avodah Zarah 3a.
5. Tosafot on Kiddushin 31a and on Avodah Zarah 3a: one who is commanded worries constantly about failing, while one who is exempt can walk away whenever he chooses, so the commanded act carries more and is worth more. The second explanation, that a commanded act responds to the One who commanded it, is developed by later commentators.
6. Numbers 19. The ashes of the red heifer purified a person who had touched a corpse, and the same rite made the priest who prepared it impure. The tradition treats it as the standing example of a law whose reason is not given.