Rav Avi: Welcome to Responsa Radio, where you ask and we answer questions of Jewish law in modern times. I'm Rabbi Avi Killip, speaking with Rabbi Ethan Tucker, Rosh Yeshiva at Mechon Hadar, a center for higher Jewish learning based in New York City. Alright, how are you today?
Rav Eitan: I'm doing great, how are you doing, Avi?
Rav Avi: I'm also doing well. I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that this question will be extremely relevant to many of our Responsa Radio listeners. Here's our question: "Can you listen to a Torah-related podcast while working out?" And we have an addition here, which is assuming that you get very sweaty in your workout.
Rav Eitan: This is fantastic. Avi, I feel like we've hit the Seinfeld stage of this show where we're making a show about this show! This is a real moment of maturity for us. Yeah, I think it's very relevant for a lot of people. I don't want to get too into how sweaty the various people are, but yes, that is important, and I want to come back to it. What's the premise here? The premise here is you can't do certain kinds of learning when you're gross. So where's that come from? It actually comes from an interesting place in the Torah, where the Torah is talking about the desert camp, and it's saying that among your weapons that you carry around, you also need to have a certain kind of paddle or shovel or stake, so that when you go to the bathroom, you can dig a hole, do your business, and cover it up. And why is that? So that your camp can be holy.
And that sets up this notion that certain bodily functions that are gross, basically, are meant to be segregated from that which is kadosh. There is a certain kind of creation of a holy space that demands distance from, in a very graphic way, urine and feces and the things that are discussed there, potentially more broadly discussing things more generally, though that's what we'll have to come back to. But the premise of the question is the person who is asking the question knows that there are certain kinds of gross activities that are potentially incompatible with learning and thinking about Torah, and the question is, how does that process work with the podcast in the gym?
Rav Avi: Right, so I'll use your technical term of grossness and say if holiness and grossness have to be separated, does a Torah podcast count as holiness, and does a sweaty workout count as grossness?
Rav Eitan: Good. Yeah, I like that. Let me start us with a story. It's a story from the Mishnah in Avodah Zarah, and it takes place in a bathhouse in Akko, between Rabban Gamliel and a certain Roman figure Proklos ben Plosfos, okay? The two of them are in this bathhouse in Akko, what's called merchatz shel afroditi, the Aphrodite Bathhouse. And the Roman figure says to Rabban Gamliel, hey, doesn't it say in your Torah that you're not supposed to have any connection, get any benefit whatsoever from idolatry in any way? How can you be bathing in this bathhouse which has a bust of Aphrodite here right at the top? And Rabban Gamliel's answer to him is you can't give an answer in the bathhouse. Okay? We're gonna come back to that line.
Rav Avi: Sneaky!
Rav Eitan: When they leave, he says to him, well, I didn't invade on her territory, meaning Aphrodite's; she invaded on my territory. We don't say hey, let's make a bathhouse that'll be nice for Aphrodite; rather, you say let's make Aphrodite as some kind of decoration, ornament on the bathhouse. Furthermore, he said to him, even if someone gave you all the money in the world, would you ever go into the place where your gods are naked and urinate right in front of that god? And yet, this bust of Aphrodite stands right above the sewage pipe here in the bath, and all the people pee right in front of it. The only ban on benefitting from idolatry is when it's treated as a god, but when it's not treated as a god, it doesn't matter.
Rav Avi: So for him, the presence of the grossness is by definition invalidating any holiness that could have been a part of that god, goddess?
Rav Eitan: So there's a lot of dimensions here. One is what you just said: you feel in his discourse with the Roman the sense of yeah, these two things are totally incompatible, and when you have urination and nudity present, that clearly indicates that something sacred is not going on at all, for the purposes of the laws of idolatry. Reflecting sort of on Rabban Gamliel's inner world, I think we see two things here that are important. One: just as a factual thing, we learn that the bathhouse was a place where people were naked and where they freely urinated. It was in that sense more like a locker room in our own day, and that's the reality that's being spoken about when we talk about at least the part of the bathhouse that Rabban Gamliel was in. And the other thing that we learn from Rabban Gamliel is when he says you can't give an answer in the bathhouse, he seems to project some notion that it's forbidden to speak matters of Torah in that space.
Rav Avi: Not just matters of Torah -- it's literally responsa!
Rav Eitan: Yeah, literally, exactly. Responsa Bathhouse -- just slightly less successful show. There are other sources that try to actually give a precise definition here. You have a Tosefta in Brachot that says someone who goes into a bathhouse, when they're in the outer room where people are still standing around dressed, that is a place where you can literally read verses, yesh sham mikra, you can study Torah there. When you already get into the place where some people are dressed and some people are naked, then you may no longer at that point study Torah, read verses. And that is already indicating that there is some important role, it seems to be, to nudity as being one of the barriers to studying Torah, in addition to in the first source a place where people actually go to the bathroom. Now, this is about speaking Torah and actually communicating it, either aloud to yourself or to other people. There are sources that seem to indicate that, you know, some rabbis did that in the bathhouse, and certainly that they might have thought about issues of Torah in the bathhouse.
Rav Avi: Yeah, how can you have your best shower ideas if you aren't allowed to --
Rav Eitan: Yeah.
Rav Avi: -- to think in the bathhouse?
Rav Eitan: Yeah, it seems to be a lot of rabbis felt the same way. We have a number of stories where they do that. But what's interesting is at the end of the day the way the kind of thrust of the conversation goes in the Talmud, all these kinds of stories are explained away as exceptional in one way or the other -- well, they were talking about that because they didn't want somebody to do something forbidden. Or it was unavoidable in that particular circumstance. All explained away, and we're left with a controlling statement of Rabbi Yochanan, who says it's permitted to think about the words of Torah everywhere except in the bathhouse and in the bathroom.
And you have an extraordinary extension of that where Rav Huna goes so far as to say a talmid chacham, a scholar, is not permitted to stand in a gross place, because it will be impossible for him to be there without thinking about words of Torah. Right? It's like you have these scholars with a one-track mind that you gotta keep them out of these places because they're gonna clearly be thinking about Torah, and according to these traditions which become really dominant and controlling, it's inappropriate to even think those kinds of thoughts in those dirty places. Now, the question is, I think, right, what counts as being a bathhouse? And here I think we have to go back to that initial kind of graphic description that Rabban Gamliel gives of people being naked and freely urinating in that public space. And Rambam and later the Shulkhan Arukh really delineate what counts as a filthy or dirty place in this way. And it says it is a place where there are feces and urine.
That is what we're talking about here, in a way that very much brings us back to the Biblical archetypal text that produced all of this, which is about going to the bathroom and keeping it in a kind of covered-up and private way, and therefore what it seems Rabbi Yochanan is talking about in the Talmud is you pass through an alleyway -- you have to remember they didn't have indoor plumbing and a lot of places didn't have outdoor plumbing, right, so there wasn't any kind of necessarily public bathroom in any place. And they were alleyways and different places where think of the kind of places today where we're used to assuming that a dog might have gone to the bathroom. A lot of those places, people might have also gone to the bathroom.
Anyone who's ever spent significant time in Israel and knows of the concept of batzad, of kids who go over to, you know, the side of a field or a street and relieve themselves, this is what the Rambam imagines we're talking about. Those are the kinds of places where you can't study Torah.
Rav Avi: Although it also, in a modern American plumbing sense, is a similar definition to how I would define "bathroom" if you asked me to. A place where those things are present.
Rav Eitan: That's right. A bathroom is just a sort of place where we cabin that off, and we say that's a room where it's acceptable to go to the bathroom, to be naked, but you do it in private, and no one else is in there. So, if we think about those sources, right, the basic focus here is on either nudity or the presence of urine and feces. It would seem to me based on that, the gym would not be considered a filthy place, nor would it be considered the part of the bathhouse, that sort of further-in part, where people, some of them are dressed, but some of them are undressed. That is a place, the gym is a place, where people are dressed, and it's not acceptable, at least in any gym I would go to, to go to the bathroom in that workout room.
But it would be incumbent upon you to stop listening to the podcast once you get into the changing room, certainly when you go into the bathroom. That already takes you into a space that is like the bathhouse that's being described here, but I think the room with the treadmills and the weights doesn't rise to the level of what we're concerned about here, at least as the space is described. Though I do want to raise one more factor.
Rav Avi: Do you think it's an underlying assumption that the nudity is about being in public, or is that also a more personal, if you just went for a run and then you came home into your own home, do you, you know, do you have to stop the recording?
Rav Eitan: Yeah. It's a great question. There's actually a dimension of that I want to touch on in a second, which makes that distinction you're talking about between yourself and someone else. For the purposes of the nudity question, yeah, I think you count as well. That is to say, as soon as you get to the stage in your workout or your post-workout where you are stripping down, that is the time to take the earplugs out, do whatever else you have to do, and then you can join in afterwards. And that's really the traditional line of when you cross that boundary from something that's okay, you're not in such an impressive state, you wouldn't necessarily, you know, go in front of a king the way you're dressed when you're running on the treadmill, you wouldn't appear in public, but it's still appropriate for divrei Torah, until you actually get to the point where you are exposed or engaging in other kinds of bathroom activity.
Now, there's one other factor here, as long as we're getting a little graphic, and that is smell. And there is an issue, a notion of bad smells also being inappropriate for the context of learning. So here you have an interesting and quite frankly kind of gross Talmudic story, where Rav Sheshet is asked, how do we deal with a case of a bad smell that has no particular source to it, that is permanent? Meaning, when I'm dealing with urine or feces, there is, you know, there's material there that is emitting a smell, and it will continue to emit a smell. What about smells that kind of waft in the air and they don't necessarily trace back to a kind of permanent space? They ask Rav Sheshet, do we have to be worried about that when we are studying Torah? Like, do we have to stop learning Torah in the presence of those smells? And this is in the Talmud in Brachot -- and he answers, here's kind of the gross part, he answers, well, don't you see sometimes a whole bunch of scholars are sitting around and some of them have fallen asleep, and some of them are awake, and the ones that are falling asleep may be passing gas or emitting all kinds of unpleasant odors, and we see that the people who are still awake continue to study Torah. And his answer therefore is, in the context of learning Torah, when you're talking about kind of passing unpleasant odors, you don't have to worry about them. Okay? But then there's an interesting condition put on this, and then an interesting explanation.
The condition is, we only say this about Torah, but not about reading shema in the presence of such an odor. And even with respect to studying Torah, we only say it about odors of other people, but not about your own odor. Okay? Now, let's break down what this is about. Rashi kind of tries to explain what the Talmudi is getting at here, and he says two things. One: why does this only apply to words of Torah, but not to shema? Because with shema, the person could actually just get up and leave the space and read shema somewhere else. And so why shouldn't they do that? Why should we make an allowance for them to read shema in a less-than-ideal environment? But in the context of learning and Torah that's being described here, Rashi says it was not possible or plausible for people to leave the room.
And there seems to be some notion here of not really needing the printed books, because this is before that time -- by Rashi's time they have that, but in the Talmud's time they didn't, they didn't have printed books in the time of Rashi but they did have manuscripts they were using -- but, you know, there's also I think the sense of, like, you'll have to leave your chevruta, you're breaking the rhythm of your learning, and it's not something you do on your own. And what's important about that is it introduces the dimension of when thinking about the environments that we allow people to study Torah in, one of the factors is will this make their learning take a major hit, if I don't let them learn in that space?
The other thing I think is implicit in this question -- for many people today, the time that they have at the gym or things where they're doing certain kinds of physical activities might be one of the key times they can capture in order to advance their learning, and this reading of this Talmudic text is saying that actually matters for our calculus here. If it's a case of lo efshar, there's not gonna be a realistic other way that you can pursue your learning, then as long as it's a kind of low-level unpleasant smell, as opposed to actually a piece of human waste sitting there in the middle of the room, we essentially allow you to continue. And that's one factor I think is really important.
Rav Avi: When you get to the idea of unpleasant smell, I would say this could hit me very personally in that if you told me I couldn't listen to a daf yomi podcast on the New York subway, my learning would take a serious hit, because that's my primary time, and it's certainly not the most beautiful of smelling places to be learning.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. I think actually it's brilliant, I think the subway is probably like the exact analogue and translation of this Talmudic case, right? You're there, but like, what are you going to do? You need to use that time. And that's a strong argument for the gym being totally acceptable, even if, okay, there's some sweat coming in from other people and it doesn't smell great, we can overlook that. However, coming back to this final distinction, that doesn't make an allowance for you doing this when you yourself completely reek. When you feel that basically you are in a state of smelliness and unpleasantness that it's not about kind of noticing it on someone else but feeling it on your own body, then that, this text points to, that may start to become incompatible with relating to the experience of the Torah you're learning as having any kind of sanctity.
Because to the extent that your own bodily state is really kind of distracting you in a way that you're like ugh, I'm so gross, I need to take a shower, I can't even believe this, I can barely stand to smell myself, that may already simply not be an appropriate environment to engage in the consumption of Torah, which at the end of the day is not just about inhaling information, listening to some kind of podcast on a news topic, but is meant to actually have a spiritual effect on you and is a religious act. And that brings us back to the Torah's claim that religious, sacred acts require a certain degree of bodily cleanliness and hygiene that we have to make sure doesn't conflict with the sanctity of the activity we're pursuing.
Rav Avi: Yeah. It's nice and it's helpful. I want to mention that I also particularly appreciate that the posek, the rabbi that they came to in the story you shared, is Rav Sheshet, who I think is blind, right?
Rav Eitan: That's correct.
Rav Avi: So, he's by definition listening to this Torah in the same way that podcast listeners are listening to the Torah.
Rav Eitan: That's really nice. I'll close with one final source, which I think in the Seinfeld theme brings us to full self-reference: there is a marvelous source in the Talmud Yerushalmi which says what you are allowed to actually ask questions about and engage in the bathhouse are the halakhot that apply to the bathhouse. And that has an interesting and controversial history -- it sort of gets neutralized in a lot of later sources, but I think even if you ended up deciding you wanted to be very strict and never listen to Responsa Radio when you're in some horrible stinking sweat on the treadmill, this episode, I think you have a good case to be made, is fine.
Rav Avi: I love it. So we can close by wishing everyone a good shower.
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