What Ilfa Had to Prove

רַבִּי יוֹחָנָן שְׁמַע, אִילְפָא לָא שְׁמַע.

"Rabbi Yochanan heard. Ilfa did not hear." (Taanit 21a)

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This essay is about a short story in the Talmud. It takes up a few lines in the tractate Taanit.¹ Two students leave the study hall because they are poor. Something happens to them on the road. One of them turns back and becomes the head of the academy. The other comes home later, is told that he could have been the head, and climbs the mast of a ship to make a public wager with his life.

The story is subtle, and it is easy to come away from it confused. So I will tell it first, step by step, and explain each step as I go. Then I will ask one question: what did Ilfa need to prove, to himself and to the people around him? The Talmud does not answer that question in so many words. But it gives enough details to build an answer, and I will try to build it in plain language.

One fact to keep in mind. The two men are not equal in fame. Rabbi Yochanan became the most important sage in the Land of Israel in the third century, and the Talmud quotes him thousands of times. Ilfa is quoted a handful of times. The story is told about a famous man and a nearly forgotten one, and that fact is part of the story.

The story

They decide to leave. Ilfa and Rabbi Yochanan were studying Torah together, and they were very poor. The Aramaic says "things were very tight for them," and Rashi explains: poverty.² They said to each other: let us get up, go, and do business, and so fulfill in ourselves the verse:

אֶפֶס כִּי לֹא יִהְיֶה־בְּךָ אֶבְיוֹן כִּי־בָרֵךְ יְבָרֶכְךָ יְהֹוָה בָּאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ נֹתֵן־לְךָ נַחֲלָה לְרִשְׁתָּהּ׃

"But there shall be no poor among you, for the Lord will surely bless you in the land that the Lord your God gives you as an inheritance to possess." (Deuteronomy 15:4)

Two things need explaining here. First, the verse in the Torah is a promise, and it comes with a condition. The next verse says: "if only you listen to the voice of the Lord your God." Second, the two men read "among you" as "in you," that is, in yourself.³ They took a promise about the nation as a goal for their own lives: we should not be poor. They set out to make the promise true for themselves by their own work.

The wall. They went. On the way they sat down to eat bread under a wall that was about to fall. Two angels came. Rabbi Yochanan heard one angel say to the other:

נִישְׁדֵּי עֲלַיְיהוּ הַאי גּוּדָּא וְנִקְטְלִינְהוּ, שֶׁמַּנִּיחִין חַיֵּי עוֹלָם הַבָּא וְעוֹסְקִין בְּחַיֵּי שָׁעָה! אֲמַר לֵיהּ אִידַּךְ: שַׁבְקִינְהוּ, דְּאִיכָּא בְּהוּ חַד דְּקָיְימָא לֵיהּ שַׁעְתָּא.

"Let us throw this wall down on them and kill them, for they leave the life of the world to come and busy themselves with the life of the hour!" The other said to him: "Leave them. There is one among them whose hour stands."

Rashi explains the terms. "The life of the world to come" means Torah. "The life of the hour" means this world, and here it means trade.⁴ So the first angel's charge is exact: these two have left Torah for business, and for that they deserve to die. "His hour stands" means, in Rashi's words, that he is destined to become great and it is not his time to die.⁴ The second angel's reasoning is practical. A falling wall kills both men. One of them cannot die yet. So the wall cannot fall, and both are spared. This has a consequence for the other man. He is spared only because he happens to be sitting next to his friend.

One hears, one does not. The Talmud now says the sentence at the head of this essay: Rabbi Yochanan heard, Ilfa did not hear. Rabbi Yochanan asked Ilfa: did you hear anything? Ilfa said: no. Rabbi Yochanan then reasoned as follows:

מִדִּשְׁמַעִי אֲנָא וְאִילְפָא לָא שְׁמַע, שְׁמַע מִינַּהּ לְדִידִי קָיְימָא לִי שַׁעְתָּא.

"Since I heard and Ilfa did not hear, I learn from this that it is my hour that stands."

This is an inference, not a proof. Rabbi Yochanan assumes that the message reached the man it was about. The angel did not say which of the two he meant. The Talmud reports Rabbi Yochanan's reasoning and does not say whether it was correct.

Rabbi Yochanan turns back. He said to Ilfa: I will go back and fulfill in myself a different verse:

כִּי לֹא־יֶחְדַּל אֶבְיוֹן מִקֶּרֶב הָאָרֶץ עַל־כֵּן אָנֹכִי מְצַוְּךָ לֵאמֹר פָּתֹחַ תִּפְתַּח אֶת־יָדְךָ לְאָחִיךָ לַעֲנִיֶּךָ וּלְאֶבְיֹנְךָ בְּאַרְצֶךָ׃

"For the poor will never cease from the land. Therefore I command you, saying: open your hand to your brother, to your poor and to your needy in your land." (Deuteronomy 15:11)

This verse comes seven verses after the first one, and it says the opposite. The first verse says there will be no poor. This one says the poor will never stop. Rashi, following the ancient commentary Sifrei, explains how both can be true: when Israel does God's will, there are poor among other nations and not among Israel; when Israel does not do God's will, there are poor among Israel.⁵ Rabbi Yochanan applies the second verse to himself. In plain terms he says: poverty is a fact of life and it will not go away; I will go back to the Torah and accept it.

רַבִּי יוֹחָנָן הֲדַר, אִילְפָא לָא הֲדַר. עַד דַּאֲתָא אִילְפָא, מָלֵיךְ רַבִּי יוֹחָנָן.

Rabbi Yochanan went back. Ilfa did not go back. By the time Ilfa came home, Rabbi Yochanan had been made head.

"Made head" means he was appointed head of the academy. Rashi adds a detail that matters: the custom was that the community supported the head of the academy and made him rich, as the Torah requires for the High Priest.⁶ So by going back, Rabbi Yochanan received both things. He kept the Torah, and his poverty ended.

What the people said. When Ilfa came home, the people of the town said to him:

אִי אִתִּיב מָר וְגָרֵיס, לָא הֲוָה מָלֵיךְ מָר.

"Had you sat and studied, would you not have been made head?"

Rashi tells us how to read this. The people meant: if you had stayed and studied, we would have made you head, as we made Rabbi Yochanan, because Ilfa was more learned than Rabbi Yochanan.⁷ So the remark is not a general piece of wisdom. It is a specific verdict on Ilfa's decision. You were the better scholar. You lost the position by leaving. And because the head of the academy was supported by the community, you also lost the living you went out to find. Everything you left for, you would have had by staying.

The mast. Ilfa did not answer with words. He went and hung himself on the mast of a ship, that is, he climbed the tall pole that holds the sail, and said:

אֲזַל תְּלָא נַפְשֵׁיהּ בְּאַסְקַרְיָא דִסְפִינְתָּא, אֲמַר: אִי אִיכָּא דְּשָׁאֵיל לִי בְּמַתְנִיתָא דְּרַבִּי חִיָּיא וְרַבִּי אוֹשַׁעְיָא וְלָא פָּשֵׁיטְנָא לֵיהּ מִמַּתְנִיתִין, נָפֵילְנָא מֵאַסְקַרְיָא דִסְפִינְתָּא וְטָבַעְנָא.

He went and hung himself on the mast of a ship and said: "If there is anyone who asks me a teaching from the collection of Rabbi Chiya and Rabbi Oshaya, and I cannot show it to him from our Mishnah, I will fall from the mast of the ship and drown."

The terms need explaining. The Mishnah is the core text of the oral law, edited by Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi around the year 200. Many teachings of the same period were left out of it. Rabbi Chiya and Rabbi Oshaya, students of Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, collected those outside teachings.⁸ Ilfa's wager is this: name any teaching from that outside collection, and I will show you the passage in the Mishnah that already contains its rule. If I cannot, I die. Rashi states the meaning of the wager in one sentence: even though I went into business, I am more learned than he is.⁷

The old man's question. An old man came and put a teaching to him. A man on his deathbed said: give my sons a shekel a week. A shekel was half a sela, and the sons needed a sela a week to live. The teaching has three cases. If the father said only "give them a shekel," the sons get a sela, because he must have wanted them supported and misjudged the sum. If he said "give them only a shekel," they get only a shekel. And if he said "if they die, others inherit after them," they get only a shekel whether he said "give" or "give only," because he showed that he wanted money left over.⁹ Ilfa answered at once:

הָא מַנִּי — רַבִּי מֵאִיר הִיא, דְּאָמַר: מִצְוָה לְקַיֵּים דִּבְרֵי הַמֵּת.

"Whose view is this? It is Rabbi Meir's, who said: it is a commandment to carry out the words of the dead."

That is, Ilfa named the Mishnah. In the tractate Ketubot, Rabbi Meir rules that a trustee must do exactly what a dying father told him to do, and the Talmud explains that Rabbi Meir holds it a commandment to carry out the words of the dead.¹⁰ The outside teaching followed from that Mishnah. Ilfa had won his wager, and the story ends there. It does not say that he came down from the mast, and it does not say that he was made head of anything.

The lessons

The first time I read this story I had more questions than answers, and I want to put them on the table before trying to answer any. Why did only Rabbi Yochanan hear the angels? Was his reasoning right? Why did Ilfa stake his life instead of simply arguing? Why did he choose that exact test and not another? And why did the Talmud record that particular question, about a dead father and his sons, as the one Ilfa was asked? I will take these in three groups.

1. Two verses, two decisions

Both verses are in the Torah, seven lines apart. The two men leave on the first verse. Rabbi Yochanan comes back on the second. So the story is built on a real tension inside the Torah itself, and each man resolves it in a different way.

The first verse is a promise about the future: there shall be no poor. Leaving on that verse means treating the promise as something a person must make true by his own effort. Ilfa's position, stated plainly, is: the Torah says I should not be poor, so I will go and earn. The second verse is a statement about the present: the poor will never cease. Coming back on that verse means accepting poverty as a fact of life and putting Torah first. Rabbi Yochanan's position, stated plainly, is: I cannot change the world, so I will live in it as a scholar.

Rashi's explanation adds a sharp edge that is easy to miss. The second verse, he says, describes the time when Israel does not do God's will. So when Rabbi Yochanan takes the second verse for himself, he is not claiming to live in the better world. He is saying that he lives in the world as it is. That is a modest thing to say, and an honest one. But it also means that Ilfa, who held on to the first verse, held on to the verse of the better world. He did not accept that poverty was a fact he had to live with.

The Talmud does not say which verse was right. It reports two results. The man who turned back prospered: he got the Torah, the position, and the income. The man who went on kept his Torah whole, and that is what the mast proves. Both results are true at the same time. A reader who wants the story to say "go back to the study hall" can point to Rabbi Yochanan. A reader who wants it to say "a man can earn his living and lose nothing" can point to Ilfa. The Talmud leaves both readings open. I will only add that Ilfa's choice is the ordinary one in rabbinic teaching. The Mishnah says that Torah study is good together with a worldly occupation.¹¹ Nothing Ilfa did was against the rules. That is what makes the angel's charge so strange, and what makes Ilfa's need to answer it so strong.

2. What it means to hear nothing

Rabbi Yochanan heard the angels and Ilfa did not. Rabbi Yochanan did not keep this to himself. He asked Ilfa whether he had heard, and then he told him what he had concluded and that he was going back. So Ilfa was told three things, secondhand. An angel wanted to kill us both for leaving Torah for trade. We were spared because one of us has an hour that stands. I heard it, so that one is me.

This is what it meant for Ilfa. By his friend's reasoning, Ilfa was the one with no standing hour. He was alive only because a wall cannot fall on one man and spare the man beside him. And the angel's charge, leaving the life of the world to come for the life of the hour, was now his alone. Rabbi Yochanan had answered the charge by going back. Ilfa had not.

Ilfa also had nothing to go back on. Rabbi Yochanan returned on the strength of a voice he had heard. Ilfa had heard no voice. He had only his friend's report and his friend's inference. He could accept the inference and turn back as the man who had been judged. Or he could doubt the inference, hold to his own verse, and go on. He went on. The Talmud does not tell us his reasons. It tells us only that he was the man who heard nothing and had to decide anyway.

That is the first thing Ilfa needed to answer, and he needed to answer it to himself before anyone else. A judgment had been passed on him, by heaven, as reported by a friend. He had no way to test it on the road. Then he came home, and the town passed a second judgment on him: you lost by leaving. Heaven and the town agreed. The mast is his reply to both.

3. The test he set himself

Ilfa made three choices at the mast: the place, the penalty, and the question. Each one is deliberate.

The place is public. A mast can be seen by everyone in the harbor. Ilfa had been judged in public, by the town's remark, and he answered in public.

The penalty is death. This is the strangest part of the story, because the page just before it says the opposite. In the story of Rav Adda bar Ahava and the house that fell, the Talmud quotes Rabbi Yannai:

לְעוֹלָם אַל יַעֲמוֹד אָדָם בְּמָקוֹם סַכָּנָה וְיֹאמַר: עוֹשִׂין לִי נֵס, שֶׁמָּא אֵין עוֹשִׂין לוֹ נֵס.

"A person should never stand in a place of danger and say, 'A miracle will be done for me,' for perhaps no miracle will be done for him." (Taanit 20b)¹²

Ilfa climbs to a place of danger and makes his life the stake. On the face of it, he breaks the rule. There are two ways to read this. One is that it was pride, and the Talmud records it without approval. The other is that Ilfa was not asking for a miracle at all. He bet on his own knowledge, which he could check, not on heaven's help, which he could not. On this reading the mast is the wall again, and this time Ilfa put himself under it on purpose. The angel had said: they deserve to die for leaving the Torah. Ilfa says: if I left the Torah, let me die now; if I did not, nothing will fall. He turns the threat he never heard into a test he can pass. I lean toward the second reading, but the text supports both.

The question is the most careful choice of the three. Ilfa did not say "ask me anything." He said: ask me any teaching from outside the Mishnah, and I will show it to you inside the Mishnah. That is a claim about completeness. It says: my Torah is whole; nothing is missing from it; the years in trade took nothing away. It answers the angel's charge exactly. The charge was that he had left the Torah. The reply is that he never left it; it came with him. There are two things Ilfa does not claim. He does not claim the headship, and he does not argue that the town was wrong to appoint Rabbi Yochanan. He proves the one thing that can be measured and leaves the rest alone.

Then comes the old man. The Talmud says "a certain old man," which in some other stories turns out to be the prophet Elijah.¹³ Our passage does not say so, and I will not claim it. But if it were so, it would fit. Under the wall, Rabbi Yochanan was given a message. At the mast, Ilfa is given a question. He is not told the answer; he has to produce it. That is the whole difference between the two men, repeated at the end.

Last, the content of the question. It is about a dead father and sons who need more than he said to give them. Ilfa's answer is that the father's words bind, because it is a commandment to carry out the words of the dead. So need does not override a clear instruction. Now remember why Ilfa left in the first place: because of need. Read one way, the only ruling the Talmud records from Ilfa's mouth cuts against his own life. But the Talmud in Ketubot does not stop there. It rules in the end that the sons receive all they need, whatever the father said, because a father who says "a shekel" is only pushing his sons to go out and earn.¹⁴ The law takes the father's words as a nudge toward work, not as a sentence of poverty. Whether the editors of the Talmud chose this question for Ilfa on purpose, I cannot say. I can say that the one question put to a man who left to earn his bread was a question about sons told to earn theirs, and that the law, in the end, took the sons' side.

Coda

So what did Ilfa need to prove? I think the answer has three parts, and the story supports each of them.

To the town, he needed to prove that he had lost nothing by leaving. The town said: you would have been head. He did not dispute it. He showed that his learning was complete, which was the only part of the town's verdict he could test.

To Rabbi Yochanan, who is not present at the mast and is not named there, he needed to prove that the headship had gone to the man who stayed, not to the man who knew more. He proved it without saying a word against his friend.

To himself, he needed to prove that the judgment under the wall, which he never heard and received only by report, was not the truth about him. The angel had called him a man who left eternal life for the hour. He put himself in the angel's place of danger and let the Torah decide.

Did he succeed? He proved his learning was whole, and he lived. He did not become head, and the story does not say he wanted to. The Talmud quotes Rabbi Yochanan on almost every page. It kept Ilfa's story in two places, and in both of them it gave him the last word.

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Notes

1. Taanit 21a. Ilfa and Rabbi Yochanan were sages of the Land of Israel in the first half of the third century. Rabbi Yochanan (died about 279) headed the academy of Tiberias for decades and is the central figure of the Jerusalem Talmud. Ilfa (also spelled Chilfa) appears in a few scattered passages, this one and its parallel in Ketubot 69b among them.
2. Rashi on Taanit 21a: "things were tight for them: poverty."
3. Rashi on Taanit 21a: "there shall be no poor among you: in you yourself."
4. Rashi on Taanit 21a: "the life of the world to come: Torah. The life of the hour: this world, that is, trade. His hour stands: he is destined to become great, and it is not his time to die."
5. Rashi on Deuteronomy 15:4, from the Sifrei. The verse that follows, 15:5, states the condition: "if only you listen to the voice of the Lord your God."
6. Rashi on Taanit 21a, on "Rabbi Yochanan was made head": they appointed him head of the academy, and the custom was to support the head from their own money and make him rich, as the Talmud says of the High Priest in Yoma 18a, "the priest who is great among his brothers: make him great from what his brothers have."
7. Rashi on Taanit 21a: "The people of the place said to Ilfa: had you sat and busied yourself with Torah, we would have made you head, as we did Rabbi Yochanan, for Ilfa was more learned than Rabbi Yochanan." And on the wager: "that is, even though I did business, I am more learned than he."
8. Rashi on Taanit 21a: Rabbi Chiya and Rabbi Oshaya arranged the outside teachings according to the teaching of Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, who was their teacher. The Talmud elsewhere says that an outside teaching not taught in their schools is not to be relied on (Chullin 141b). That is why Ilfa named them: their collection was the authoritative one, so he was not choosing an easy target.
9. Taanit 21a; the same teaching is in Ketubot 69b. A sela was four dinars, a shekel two. Rashi explains the first case: if the father had meant to limit them to a shekel he would have said "only a shekel." He said "a shekel" to spur them on, so they would work and learn to earn (Rashi on Taanit 21a, citing Ketubot 70a).
10. Mishnah Ketubot 6:7: a father deposits money with a trustee for his daughter; Rabbi Meir says the trustee must do exactly what was entrusted to him. The Talmud, Ketubot 70a, explains that Rabbi Meir holds it is a commandment to carry out the words of the dead. The dispute between Rabbi Meir and the sages on this rule is set out in Gittin 14b.
11. Avot 2:2, in the name of Rabban Gamliel the son of Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi: "Torah study is good together with a worldly occupation, for the effort of both makes sin forgotten."
12. Taanit 20b. Rav Huna had wine in a house about to fall and wanted it carried out. He brought Rav Adda bar Ahava inside and kept him busy in a Torah discussion until the wine was out, trusting that the house would not fall on so righteous a man. When they left, it fell. Rav Adda was angry, because he held like Rabbi Yannai, whose rule continues: "and if a miracle is done for him, it is deducted from his merits." The Ilfa story follows immediately, and the wall the two students sit under is described with the same words as the wall Rav and Shmuel refused to walk past on the same page.
13. The Tosafot on Chullin 6a report an opinion that wherever the Talmud says "a certain old man" it means Elijah, and reject it as too broad, since it cannot be true in Shabbat 34a. Nothing in Taanit 21a says it, and the parallel in Ketubot 69b does not say it either.
14. Ketubot 70a. Rav Chisda in the name of Mar Ukva: the law is that whether the father said "give" or "do not give," the sons receive all they need. The Talmud asks: do we not rule like Rabbi Meir, that it is a commandment to carry out the words of the dead? It answers: that applies to other matters, but here the father would be content, and he spoke as he did only to spur them on.