This Too

גַּם כִּי־אֵלֵךְ בְּגֵיא צַלְמָוֶת לֹא־אִירָא רָע כִּי־אַתָּה עִמָּדִי

"Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me." (Psalm 23:4)

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Two Hebrew phrases have carried Jewish optimism for two thousand years, and both come from a single teacher and his most famous student. The teacher was Nachum Ish Gam Zu, who met every disaster with the words gam zu letovah, "this too is for the good." The student was Rabbi Akiva, who compressed his teacher's habit into a rule: all that the Merciful One does, He does for good.

It would be easy to file both men under wishful thinking, and the phrases have suffered from their own popularity. Said glibly, they can sound like a refusal to look at the world. The Talmud's stories about them are the opposite of glib. One is set in a broken-down house where a man lies blind and maimed and explains, calmly, why. The other is set at night, outside a locked town, as everything a traveler owns is killed or carried off piece by piece. The tradition did not build its optimism in fair weather. It built it in these two rooms, and it is worth going inside to see how.

The story

The Talmud asks: why did they call him Nachum Ish Gam Zu? Because whatever happened to him, he would say:

גַּם זוֹ לְטוֹבָה

"This too is for the good."

Once, the Jews wished to send a gift to the emperor. Who should go? Let Nachum go, they said, for miracles happen to him. They sent him with a chest full of jewels and pearls. On the road he slept at an inn, and in the night the innkeepers emptied the chest and filled it with earth. When he saw it in the morning, he said: this too is for the good.

He came before the emperor, who opened the chest and saw earth, and wanted every Jew killed. This too is for the good, said Nachum. Elijah came, appearing as one of the courtiers, and said: perhaps this is the earth of Abraham their father, who threw earth that became swords and straw that became arrows. There was one province the empire could not conquer. They tried the earth against it, and conquered it. They filled the chest with jewels and sent Nachum home with honor.¹

That is the story everyone remembers. The Talmud tells another one first, and it is much harder. In his old age, Nachum lay blind in both eyes, both hands and both legs maimed, his body covered in boils, in a rickety house, with the feet of his bed standing in bowls of water so that ants could not climb up. His students, needing to move him out before the house collapsed, said: first the bed, then the furniture. He said: my sons, take out the furniture first and my bed last, for you are assured that as long as I am in the house, the house will not fall. They cleared the furniture, then carried out his bed, and the house fell.

His students said: our teacher, since you are so completely righteous, why has all this come upon you? And he said: my sons, I brought it upon myself. Once I was traveling to the house of my father-in-law, with three donkeys, one of food, one of drink, one of delicacies. A poor man stopped me on the road and said: my teacher, sustain me. I said to him: wait until I unload the donkey. Before I could unload it, his soul left him. I went and fell on his face and said: my eyes, which had no pity on your eyes, let them be blinded; my hands, which had no pity on your hands, let them be cut off; my legs, which had no pity on your legs, let them be cut off. And my mind did not rest until I said: let my whole body be covered in boils. His students said: woe to us that we have seen you like this. He said to them: woe to me if you had not seen me like this.²

And in Berakhot, the student's version. Rabbi Akiva taught: a person should always be accustomed to say, all that the Merciful One does, He does for good. He was once traveling, and he had with him a donkey, a rooster, and a lamp. He came to a town and asked for lodging, and no one would take him in. He said: all that the Merciful One does is for good, and he went and slept in the open field. A wind came and blew out his lamp. A cat came and ate his rooster. A lion came and ate his donkey. Each time he said:

כׇּל דְּעָבֵיד רַחֲמָנָא — לְטָב עָבֵיד

"All that the Merciful One does, He does for good."

That night, an army came and took the town captive. And Rabbi Akiva said to his students: did I not tell you? Had the lamp been burning, had the rooster crowed, had the donkey brayed, the soldiers would have found me.³

The lessons

These stories are told so warmly that it is easy to miss how carefully they are built. Why does Nachum say his phrase before anything good has happened, when the chest still holds nothing but earth? Why does the Talmud pair the jewel story with the unbearable story of the poor man on the road? And what should we make of the fact that Akiva is saved, that night, by a town's misfortune? The stories have thought about all of this, more rigorously than their reputation suggests.

1. The words come before the reasons

The detail that defines Nachum's phrase is its timing. He says "this too is for the good" at the inn, over a chest of dirt, with no Elijah in sight and no reason on earth to believe it. He says it again in the throne room, under a death sentence. The good, when it finally arrives, arrives afterward, and it arrives along the exact path the disaster opened: it is the earth, not the stolen jewels, that conquers the province. But he could not have known that. The phrase was not a conclusion drawn from evidence. It was a decision made in advance of evidence.

That is the difference between optimism and explanation, and everything depends on it. An explanation says: I can see why this is good. Nachum never claims to see. His phrase says something more modest and much stronger: I trust the One who runs the world, including the parts I cannot see, and I will say so now, in the dark, before the ending is known. Faith that waits for the happy ending to declare itself is not faith. It is commentary. The Talmud shows us the phrase working as a discipline, said at the moment of loss precisely because nothing yet supports it. And there is one practical fruit: because Nachum does not despair at the inn, he continues the journey, carrying the chest of earth to the palace, where it can become a miracle. Trust keeps a person in motion long enough for the good to have somewhere to arrive.

2. The night in the field

Rabbi Akiva's story is the teacher's phrase put under a harsher lens, because here we watch the losses land one at a time. Refused lodging: for the good. The lamp dies: for the good. The rooster, then the donkey, killed in the dark beside him: for the good, for the good. By midnight the evidence says his rule is absurd. Every single thing has gone wrong, and each new loss makes the field colder and the night more dangerous.

Then the army passes, and the whole account turns over in an instant. A burning lamp would have been a beacon. A crowing rooster or a braying donkey would have been a signature in the dark. Every loss had been a rescue wearing a disguise. The town that shut its doors on him was captured. The field that was his rejection became his hiding place.

Two things should be said here, and the Talmud, to its credit, leaves room for both. The first is the lesson Akiva draws: the pattern was invisible until morning, and most of our judgments about our own misfortunes are made at midnight, with the army not yet visible. We simply do not know, at the moment of loss, what the loss is doing. The second thing is quieter and belongs to the story's edges: the rooster and the donkey are still dead, and the town is still captured. Akiva's night was for the good; the town's night was not, or not in any way a human being can see. His own teacher's phrase, remember, was coined by a man lying in a collapsing house. This teaching has never claimed that everything turns out pleasantly, or that we will always get the morning that explains the night. It claims that the accounting is longer than one night, and that the One keeping it can be trusted. Sometimes we are shown the morning, as Akiva was, and the stories hold up those mornings as evidence. For all the other nights, there is Psalm 23: even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, not because the valley is good, but because You are with me.

3. Woe to me if you had not seen me

Which brings us to the hardest scene, the one the Talmud insists on telling first: Nachum in the ruined house, and his answer to the students' question. Why has all this come upon you? My sons, I brought it upon myself.

His story deserves a second reading, because of what he actually did and did not do. A starving man asked for food; Nachum said "wait until I unload the donkey"; the man died in the waiting. By any court's standard he was guilty of nothing. He had three donkeys of food and every intention of giving. He asked for a reasonable delay. But Nachum did not judge himself by a court's standard. He judged himself by the starving man's clock, on which "wait" was a sentence of death, and he called down on his own body, limb by limb, the pity he had failed to show in time. It is a terrible prayer, and heaven, the story implies, granted it.

I do not think the Talmud tells this story so that we will imitate the prayer. It tells it so that we will understand the man, because the two stories explain each other. Here is the question the students could not ask directly: how can a man covered in boils, in a falling house, say "this too is for the good" and mean it? And the answer is that Nachum's trust in God's justice ran all the way down, even when the verdict fell on himself. A man who can say "I brought it upon myself" without flinching is a man for whom the world is never random, never meaningless, never out of the Judge's hands. That is the soil the famous phrase grew in. And his last word to his students turns his broken body into his final lesson: woe to me if you had not seen me like this. Do not avert your eyes, he is saying. This, too, is teaching. A man who wasted one hour of pity spent the rest of his life making sure his students would never need the lesson twice.

Coda

Of all the Talmud's sentences, "gam zu letovah" may be the one most often said aloud today, in traffic and in hospital corridors, by people who could not name the tractate it comes from.⁴ Three words, small enough to carry anywhere. But the stories are the keel beneath the phrase, and it is worth remembering what they actually contain: a chest of dirt on its way to a throne, a cold field filling up with losses, and a blind man teaching from a bed whose feet stand in bowls of water. The tradition's optimism was written in those places. That is why it can be trusted in ours.

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Notes

1. Taanit 21a. The story adds a grim epilogue: the innkeepers, seeing Nachum honored for a chest of earth, tore down their own inn and brought its earth to the emperor, announcing that this was the same miraculous soil. It was tested, it failed, and they were executed. The Talmud rarely lets a swindle end well.
2. Also Taanit 21a. The students' question, "since you are so righteous, why has all this come upon you," assumes suffering must mean hidden sin, an assumption the book of Job spends forty chapters demolishing. Nachum's answer neither confirms nor licenses it for anyone else; it is one man's private reckoning with one hour of his own life, which is perhaps the only jurisdiction such reckonings should ever claim.
3. Berakhot 60b. The Talmud presents Rabbi Akiva as Nachum's student in interpretation as well as in temperament: from Nachum, Akiva learned the method of expounding every "et" in the Torah (Chagigah 12a). He learned the phrase along with the method, and the Talmud places his field story on the page where it teaches the morning blessings, the daily thanksgivings said on waking: the story of a dark night embedded, forever, in the liturgy of daybreak.
4. The two phrases are not quite identical, and the difference is itself a teaching. Nachum's "this too is for the good" is said of the specific blow as it lands. Akiva's "all that the Merciful One does, He does for good" is a standing rule, adopted, as the Talmud says, as a habit: "a person should always be accustomed to say." The teacher had the genius; the student built it into a practice an ordinary person can carry.