The Story of the Man, the Herb and the Lion

My son and I found the story one Shabbat when he was home from the army. We slipped out of morning services a bit early to study Vayikra Rabba, an ancient collection of midrash. If I hadn’t decided to make aliyah before he was born, he’d now be coming home for weekends from college, not the IDF. If we lived in America, perhaps his Hebrew wouldn’t be good enough to study midrash in the original, though that’s less certain. Sometimes I wonder about whether there’s a grand meaning to that choice I made years ago, before he was born, some significance an inch beyond the reach of words.

That morning, though, we were just reading a strange set of folk tales inserted into the midrash. In one, a man’s wreath of magical herbs protects him from a snake’s venom. In a second, a hoopoe wants to build his nest in a hole in a stump in a rabbi’s orchard. There’s a board nailed over the hole, so the hoopoe brings an herb that dissolves the nail. The rabbi hides the herb so thieves don’t use it to “destroy creation.” In another tale, a man sets off to make aliyah from Babylon. Along the road he sits down to rest and sees two birds fighting. One kills the other—and then brings an herb and places it on the corpse, which returns to life.

“He [the man] said, ‘I should take that herb and bring the dead of the Land of Israel to life.’ As he ran, he saw a dead fox on the road. He said, ‘I’ll try it out on this fox.’ He put the herb on the fox and it lived. He kept going till he got to the Ladder of Tyre [a ridge at the edge of the Land of Israel], where he saw a slain lion on the road. He said, ‘I’ll try it on this lion.’ He put the herb on it and it came to life, and stood and ate him.”

The midrash tacks on a moral, “Don’t do favors for an evil person, lest evil comes to you.” But we realized that this isn’t a Jewish addition to Aesop’s Fables. It’s an allegory on a different plane. At first, I saw it as a welcome rabbinic warning, written 1,500 years in advance, against the prevailing theology among religious Zionists today—the belief that Israel’s creation and its conquests show that God is bringing redemption. On second thought, I realized that the rabbis never speak in one voice. On third thought—but let’s get back to that story.

The man decides to walk from Babylon— then the greatest Jewish center in exile— to the Land of Israel. On the way, he sees a bird kill and resurrect another. The miracle is a bird’s remorse, teshuva, but the man sees only the mechanical means, the herb. He sets off at a run to bring the dead of the Land of Israel to life—to bring final redemption. He tests his herb on a fox, and it works. At the very edge of the Land, he tests it on a lion—symbol of the tribe of Judah, of the ancient kingdom of David, of Jewish power—and it consumes him.

The storyteller isn’t negating aliyah. He is warning against confusing a technical act for a spiritual process, against the hubris of false messianism, against the danger of trying to restore legendary ancient power. The fable could serve as an ultra-Orthodox argument against Zionism. But it also fits a pragmatic, anti-mythical Zionism: creating a state is a practical, this-worldly step, not a mythic transformation. It doesn’t free us from pragmatic or ethical restraints. See, I told my son, the rabbis sent a transgenerational letter against the ecstasy that swept Orthodox Zionism after 1967. Don’t pretend you hear the messiah’s shofar in a military victory. Don’t pretend that settling the Whole Land of Israel is God’s political program, and that trust in the Creator will miraculously eliminate the problem of ruling another people.

But the next Shabbat, studying by myself (my son had to stay at his base that weekend) I ran into a well-known midrash on Jacob’s dream of the ladder. Jacob, it says, saw the guardian angels of Babylon, Medea, Greece and Rome rise and descend, signifying that every empire ends. God told Jacob that if he climbed the ladder, he’d never come down. “Nonetheless, he was afraid and did not ascend.” Weak knees and a lack of faith prevented redemption, says this interpretation.

All right, I reminded myself, Jewish religious literature is a collection of unresolved arguments. To be fair, the holy texts of every faith contain ambiguity and contradiction. But Talmudic literature flaunts them. Very few certainties are on the menu. We get left with a choice between those midrashic interpretations, and a choice of how to interpret the hidden meaning of our moment: Seize the ladder, or beware the lion.

And so on third thought, I decided to forget about hidden meanings of history. “From the day the temple was destroyed, prophecy was taken from prophets and given to fools and children,” the Talmud says. To claim to know where God is steering the world is a sign of either madness or immaturity.

We’re left with the job of doing the right thing where we are now in the world, starting with basic tenets like, “Justice, justice you shall pursue,” and, “You shall not oppress a stranger…” The only and overwhelming significance of living in Israel is that with a country of our own to rule, those demands are pressing beyond measure. When I decided to live here, I was joining the people who have to choose just how to meet those demands. And I was giving that responsibility to a son who would one day come home for the weekend from the army instead of from college.

Gershom Gorenberg is the author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 and a senior correspondent for The American Prospect. He blogs at southjerusalem.com.