Love in the End
Amid the epic themes of Parashat Ḥukkat, it is easy to miss the significance of a short passage towards the end. It is brief, cryptic, almost unintelligible, and certainly does not seem to represent a major idea. Yet the sages gave it an interpretation that sheds brilliant light on the culture they sought to create in Jewish life after the destruction of the Temple and the loss of Jewish power.
The context is this. After reporting the episode of water from the rock, the Torah resumes the larger narrative of the journey towards the Promised Land. By now, the Israelites were close to their destination. They had left the desert and were moving towards the area that today forms the state of Jordan. They began to encounter the people of the region whose territory they would have either to pass through or to circumnavigate. Approaching Edom, they asked for permission to travel through the land. The request was refused and the Israelites accepted the decision (the Edomites were descendants of Esau, whose territorial rights the Israelites were told to respect). They then waged a battle against the Canaanite kingdom of Arad, and came to the vicinity of Moab. At this point the text says:
Therefore the book of the Wars of the Lord speaks of “Waheb in Suphah, and the wadis: the Arnon with its tributary wadis, stretched along the settled country of Ar, hugging the territory of Moab.” (Num. 21:14–15)
That is the Jewish Publication Society’s translation, but the text is so fragmentary and obscure that its meaning is largely a matter of conjecture.
To give just one example: What is meant by “the book of the Wars of the Lord”? According to Targum Yonatan, it was not a separate book at all; it merely refers to this section of the Torah. For Rashi it was a list of the miracles performed by God for the sake of Israel. Ḥizkuni holds that it was an actual book that existed in ancient times and was subsequently lost. Ibn Ezra says it was a record of the Israelites’ history begun in the time of Abraham. Abrabanel argues that it was a non-Israelite text. Some modern scholars suggest that it was a collection of epic poems telling of Israel’s battles. How we answer this question will affect how we understand the rest of the passage.
The sages, however, gave one midrashic interpretation that laid no claim to being the plain sense of the verse, but is nevertheless fascinating in its own right:
Even a teacher and disciple, even a father and son, when they sit to study Torah together become enemies to one another. But they do not move from there until they have become beloved to one another. Therefore it says “Waheb in Suphah,” meaning: there is love at the end. (Kiddushin 30b)
The rabbis read “Waheb” as a derivative of the root a-h-b, meaning “to love,” and “Suphah” as related to the word sof, “an end.” What makes this text so intriguing is the way the sages interpret the phrase “the Wars of the Lord” as a reference to the debates within the house of study, the dialogue and disputation about Jewish law and the meaning of sacred texts.
This, in and of itself, is testimony to the massive transformation of Jewish life after the destruction of the Second Temple and the collapse of the Bar Kokhba Revolt. By the time this interpretation was offered, Jews no longer fought wars on the battlefield. The wars they were familiar with were altogether different. They were intellectual, spiritual; they took place in the mind; their weapons were reason and tradition; their arena was the study hall; and their aim – to establish the meaning of God’s word. Seldom has a people been so transformed.
Yet there is more to the statement than this. There is an awareness of human conflict. We disagree. The sages do not speak of the house of study in eirenic terms, as an environment of peace and harmony. Even the word of God does not unite us, for though we know what the Torah says, we do not know, simply and uncontroversially, what it means. Hillel and Shammai, R. Ishmael and R. Yehuda, Rav and Shmuel, Abaye and Rava did not simply converse. They argued.
Indeed the Mishnaic, Talmudic, and midrashic literature are, for the most part, anthologies of argument: “Rabbi X says this, Rabbi Y says that.” There is no attempt to gloss over the differences. To the contrary: the texts preserve not the conclusion of the debate but the debate itself. And here, the exception proves the rule. In the twelfth century Moses Maimonides wrote the greatest of all codes of Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah. In so doing, he made a conscious editorial decision. He eliminated the debates and recorded only the final law. The Mishneh Torah is, as it were, the Talmud with the arguments edited out. History ruled, in this respect, against Maimonides. The Mishneh Torah attracted more dispute and debate, commentaries and counter-commentaries, than almost any other work of Jewish law.
In Judaism, argument is not an accident but of the essence. As we saw in an earlier essay, the sages gave this a name – argument for the sake of Heaven – and thus attached to it a spiritual dignity of its own.1See above, “Argument for the Sake of Heaven.”
They went so far as to portray God as saying about the protagonists and their divergent views, “These and those are the words of the living God.”2Eiruvin 13b; Gittin 6b.
God lives in the cut and thrust of the house of study. He does not say: “X is right, and Y is wrong.” He does not deliver the verdict; He empowers His sages to do that. The word of the Lord gives rise to the wars of the Lord – but wars without violence, bloodshed, or conquest.
In the passage we are discussing, the sages took a further step. They said: “There is love in the end.” By this they were making a radical assertion. When two sides fight, not with weapons but with ideas, they recognise that their very disagreement presupposes an agreement – about the value of argument itself. Two sages who dispute the interpretation of a text disagree on a detail but agree on fundamentals: that the text is holy and binding, and we, who interpret it, revere both God and His word.
There are times when we read a rabbinic interpretation of a biblical text and wonder what exactly the sages were doing ascribing a meaning to a verse so far from its plain sense. Rarely, though, is this mere intellectual play, and the present instance is a fine example. The sages were well aware that the book of Numbers – especially the central section that comes to an end here – was about destructive arguments among the Israelites that cost an entire generation its chance to enter the land. They also knew that the fragmentation of the Jewish people in the late Second Temple period subsequently resulted in two of its worst catastrophes: the Roman destruction of the Temple and the persecutions following the failure of the Bar Kokhba Revolt. Yet there was never a serious attempt made to limit disagreement among Jews. They relished argument and debate and saw it as one of Judaism’s greatest strengths. What they were saying here is profoundly moving. If we can take disagreement into the house of study and reconceptualise it as “argument for the sake of Heaven,” then we can turn otherwise destructive conflict into the collaborative pursuit of truth, and make of it a spiritual experience that leads eventually to friendship and love.
There is a poignant Talmudic passage that tells of what can happen if we lose, even momentarily, the respect for difference implicit in the ethic of argument for the sake of Heaven. It concerns two third-century sages, R. Yoḥanan and Resh Lakish. The background to it is that, according to tradition, Resh Lakish was originally an outlaw, a highwayman, who was persuaded by R. Yoḥanan, the leading sage in the land of Israel at the time, to devote his life to Talmudic study.
One day, in the house of study, the question arose as to when instruments like swords, spears, daggers, and knives are considered complete, and thus capable of becoming ritually unclean. R. Yoḥanan said: They are complete when they have been tempered in a furnace. Resh Lakish said: They are not complete until they have been quenched in water. In the heat of the argument, R. Yoḥanan said, “Trust a robber to be expert in his trade.” Resh Lakish, wounded by the jibe, turned on R. Yoḥanan, and said, “What benefit have you conferred on me [by persuading me to give up robbery and become a rabbi]? There [among robbers] I was called master, and here [in the house of study] I am called master.” R. Yoḥanan responded, “I conferred on you the benefit of bringing you under the wings of the Divine Presence.” Scarred by this encounter, Resh Lakish became ill and eventually died.
R. Yoḥanan grieved for him so much that the other sages feared for his health. They decided that he needed another study partner, and sent him R. Elazar b. Pedat, known for his expertise in Jewish law. This is how the passage continues:
R. Elazar went and sat before R. Yoḥanan. To whatever R. Yoḥanan said, R. Elazar said, “There is a baraita, a rabbinic teaching, that supports you.” R. Yoḥanan said, “Do you think you are like Resh Lakish? Whenever I would state something, Resh Lakish would raise twenty-four objections, to which I would respond with twenty-four rebuttals, with the result that we more fully understood the tradition. But all you say is, ‘There is a baraita that supports you,’ as if I did not know on my own that my view was correct.” (Bava Metzia 84a)
Here in all its depth and pathos is the rabbinic ethic of the pursuit of knowledge as an extended argument between differing views within a fellowship of learning. The text is candid about the dangers. In the heat of the moment, R. Yoḥanan and Resh Lakish both say things they subsequently regret, with devastating consequences. But R. Yoḥanan remains insistent that the search for truth can be no less important than the truth itself, that scholarship thrives on challenge, and that, as the sages put it, “rivalry between scribes increases wisdom” (Bava Batra 21a, 22a). Merely to be told that you are correct adds nothing. Understanding – religious understanding – comes from the willingness to be challenged.
Reflecting on the many destructive arguments within the Jewish people, typified by the clashes in the book of Numbers, the sages nonetheless held unshakably to their belief in the dignity of dissent. That is what is happening in the great dialogues between Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah, and Job with God Himself. It is continued in the canonical texts of rabbinic Judaism, both halakhic and midrashic. Dismiss a contrary view, as R. Yoḥanan did to Resh Lakish, and you impoverish an entire culture.
The sages, in short, were articulating a principled form of what we would now call conflict resolution. Its rules were these:
1. Respect different perspectives.
2. Listen actively to your opponent and try to understand the logic of his or her position.
3. Never use force, physical or psychological. The only legitimate weapons are logic, argument, tradition, and persuasion.
4. Be open to the outcome. You may be right, but you must be prepared to be proved wrong.
5. See disagreement not just as conflict but as collaborative activity in pursuit of honesty and truth.
6. Accept it as a legitimate, even holy, part of life.
7. Keep talking.
For even though the participants may feel as if they are enemies to one another, “Waheb in Suphah” – there is love in the end.