Ruby Namdar: An Aggadic Jew

Liberate the Power of Jewish Storytelling

David H.— Anyone who has studied ancient rabbinic texts knows that they’re not just about legal arguments, or halacha. No less fascinating is the aggada, or storytelling—crazy legends about wild personalities, vindictive demons, quirky masters, and overzealous students. The rabbis taught us about comedy and tragedy, adventure and fantasy, loneliness and sacrifice and heroism. In this essay Ruby Namdar walks us through his personal journey through the Jewish story—and shows us why it’s as crucial today as ever.

Ruby Namdar is an Israeli-American author born and raised in Jerusalem to a family of Iranian-Jewish heritage. His latest novel The Ruined House (HarperCollins, 2017) won the Sapir Prize, Israel’s most prestigious literary award. He lives in New York City with his wife and two daughters.

New York Event: Join the author for a live Jewish Priorities event on March 3, 2024 at Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in Manhattan, featuring Roya Hakakian, Adam Bellow, Ruby Namdar, and David Hazony. For information & registration, click here.

The following is an exclusive reprint from the anthology Jewish Priorities: Sixty-Five Proposals for the Future of Our People, edited by David Hazony. Copyright © 2023 Wicked Son. Reprinted with permission.

An Aggadic Jew

Liberate the Power of Jewish Storytelling

Ruby Namdar

I’m often asked: “What kind of Jew are you?” Usually, the question is followed by a menu of options: “Religious or secular?” “Reform or Conservative?” and so on. And sometimes, in especially interesting cases, I’m also asked if I’m a “halachic Jew.”

These are the moments I particularly relish. I get a kick out of the surprised smile on their face, the curious wide eyes, when I offer my answer. “No,” I tell them. “I’m an aggadic Jew.”

As for the next question—“What does that mean?”—I answer in a typically Jewish fashion: “Let me tell you a story.”

More than forty years have passed since my first Talmud class, and I can still remember vividly how grotesque and absurd it was. I was a student in an ultra-secular middle school in Jerusalem. Even the name of the class was bizarre: Toshba. The unfamiliar, indecipherable term, which turned out to be an acronym for torah sheb’al peh or the “Oral Law,” all but proclaimed the pedagogical catastrophe I was about to endure.

The bell rang its jarring electric chime, and a short, bland-looking man drifted into the classroom. Round and balding, he had watery, bulging eyes and a small moustache laying claim to his upper lip. He was dressed like a caricature of an Old-World Jew: shapeless blazer, nominally white shirt yellowed from what looked like decades of ironing, black pants with frayed cuffs. This archaic apparition of a man had worn-out black leather shoes and a black kippa that looked like it had been cut from the same piece of fabric as his pants. It, too, had frayed edges.

The teacher’s soft voice and foreign accent contrasted sharply with the rowdy, sweaty, youthful disposition of the class, the school, and Israeli society as a whole.

The text that he chose to teach us, or was chosen for us by the supervisors of the Toshba curriculum, was also about as distant as possible from the concerns of these secular schoolkids—a choice could only be described as a chronicle of failure foretold. Without any warning, this little man thrust us into the thick (pun intended) of an unfathomably uninspiring halachic question regarding the thickness of a barrier erected by unnamed neighbors in a courtyard between their homes, which, by the time the matter had come to our attention, had been lying in ruins for many centuries in ancient towns with unpronounceable names and whose locations had been lost to the mists of time.

“In the case of the neighbors who wanted to build a barrier in the courtyard,” announced the Talmudic Tractate Baba Batra in a decisive tone, “they should build the wall down the middle. In places where it was the custom to build gavil gazit kepisin levinin they build all in accordance with the custom of the land. Gavil one gives three tefachim and the other gives three tefachim. Gazit one gives a tefach and a half and the other gives a tefach and a half. With kepisin one gives two tefachim and the other gives two tefachim. With levinin one gives a tefach and a half and the other gives a tefach and a half.”

We looked, stunned, at the little man with the black kippa, who explained in an infuriatingly patient voice all the assumptions, of both engineering and law, behind this bewildering passage.

The climax of the class arrived when the Hebrew text of the Mishna ended, and the Talmud switched over to full-blown Aramaic. “Mai mechitza?” one of the ancient Babylonian disputants asked rhetorically, before delivering an immediate winning retort: “Guda!” The final impenetrable word echoed pointlessly across the classroom.

After a few seconds of silence, my friend, Danny, a venerable wise-ass, whispered in my ear: “Gudagudagudaguda!” He cracked himself up over the comical, prehistoric ring of the word as it rolled off his tongue like a boulder tumbling down a mountainside.

I have no idea how we survived our Talmud class for the rest of the school year. It has been completely wiped from my memory. But I cannot forget the barrier that grew ever higher between us and the world of the Talmud with every twist and turn of the halachic discussion about walls, fences, building materials, and yard sizes—a discussion so irrelevant to our lives that it seemed to have been designed for the sole purpose of making sure nobody ever looked past it to see what else might be lurking in this strange, alien world.

***

Fortunately for me, the story does not end there, as perhaps it was supposed to end, and as it indeed ended for most people of my generation. Ironically, it was a different part of the Talmud—the part that had been relegated to the margins by many generations of uncompromising, humorless yeshiva methodology—that would capture my heart and magically rope me in. The same body of work whose halachic discussions had left me on the outside looking in would eventually open its gates of aggada—the creative, unfettered collection of stories, parables, and fables that were inexplicably interlaced among the legalistic, analytical discussions of the law. It lit up the dialogue, each time anew, with its wild imagination, impressive intellectual freedom, and blissful lack of inhibitions.

Like every serious addiction in my life, my taste for the exotic, intoxicating flavor of the aggada took time to acquire.

I didn’t grow up with a tradition of Torah study, and certainly not of Talmudic scholarship. I never studied in a yeshiva, and it’s highly doubtful that in the land of my forefathers, the city of Mashhad in northeastern Iran, there could be found even a single set of the Talmud. By contrast, the broadly expressive, sun-drenched words of the Bible had made a deep impression on me through the superb Tanach classes our ultra-secular Israeli schools knew how to teach. Even the poetry of the Siddur and other liturgy, which I encountered through our not-too-frequent visits to the synagogue, had from a young age pulled me into its magical beauty and mystery.

The Talmud, on the other hand, was a locked garden. For some reason, it always struck me as an old, dilapidated thing, twisting and convoluted, sealed with the mark of Otherness and alienation. Even the minimalism of the aggadic story, with its predilection for the extreme and the absurd, initially struck me as a bit perverse—not appealing in the least. It took me some time, driven by an inexplicable determination to keep going back and trying again, to develop a taste for its peculiar art of storytelling. I came to see it as a wild game of intellectual hide-and-seek, where text and reader are competing to dig up the subtext buried between the lines.

Another thing I understood, which took me some time before I could say it out loud, was that the aggada isn’t just not-preachy and not-self-righteous; it is genuinely subversive. No Talmudic sage or rabbinic superhero is cut even an inch of slack for the slightest moral lapse. Unlike the self-righteous pietists today for whom rabbis are infallibly holy and pure, the aggada goes out of its way, again and again, to show us the true human condition, which is never pure or morally perfect.

The pleasure I took from the aggadic mindset only increased the more deeply I understood this last point. It reached its peak when I encountered the darkest, boldest of Talmudic stories—such as the erotic-theological odyssey of Rabbi Elazar ben Dordia, the obsessive whoremonger who was determined not to leave a single prostitute on earth unvisited. The determination of this serial sex addict was not meant to be read only as a cautionary tale, but also as an inspirational story of conquest and repentance.

This was the first time I understood what the clever system of concealing the Talmud’s true nature had tried to hide from me: The Talmud in general, and the aggada in particular, is an extremely unorthodox text. The famous passing of wind unleashed in a moment of heated passion by the aggada’s most famous whore, for whom Ben Dordia had crossed seven rivers weighed down by a purse full of gold coins; the fart that had cleared the sinner-rabbi’s moral haze and sent him on a heroic, beautiful journey of repentance—that very same fart also awoke me from my own dogmatic slumber, born of the ignorance and prejudice imprinted from my youth. It opened my eyes to the subversive, bold, and infinitely refreshing nature of the Talmudic story and allowed me to appreciate its timelessness and relevance to our own contemporary human struggles.

Like a culinary connoisseur who moves on from popular drinks and foods to their more refined and purist versions, I, too, moved on, over the years, from modern Hebrew editions of the tales of the sages to their unmediated Talmudic origins. Aramaic, that mysterious ghost-language of my youth, became clearer and more compelling with every reading. The Talmudic craft of storytelling, too, the concise narrative that invites colorful, creative explication, started tugging more and more at my heart.

I look back today to that long-forgotten Toshba class about the thickness of a courtyard wall, and I think of how the Talmud once seemed to me so foreign, burdensome, and pointless, but has now become for me an object of intense intimacy—and I’m amazed at the journey I’ve taken.

***

I do not mean for any of this to come across as an attack on the world of halacha. Many Jews find in its study and practice a great source of meaning and inspiration. But for every “halachic Jew,” there are so many others for whom the demanding, analytical, practical universe of religious law is off-putting, and certainly not a realistic source of Jewish identity.

This is not new. As opposed to what is widely believed, the halacha was never the common denominator of Jewish identity. It never played the decisive, unifying role that rabbis and halachic educators claim it did. Jews lived and practiced in innumerable ways, according to a variety of ancient and new practices, some of which are known to us, but most have been lost to time. The halachic discourse has always been restricted to a small group of scholars, an intellectual elite talking mostly among themselves, a kind of meta-culture that hovered above the endless tussle of Jewish daily life in all its colors, flavors, and scents.

That same elite, over many generations, pushed the aggada to the sidelines, treating it like a kind of illustration meant to attract laymen too thick-skulled and crass to appreciate the nuances of the cerebral halachic argument.

Fortunately, the Talmud’s authors were much smarter than those who claimed ownership of it in the generations that followed. From the Talmud’s perspective, the aggada was no less important than the halacha. There is no indication in the Talmud that the aggada was a minor character in the Talmudic drama, a kind of decoration for the halachic text or folk entertainment for the ignorant.

The opposite is the case: The most important, inspiring moments in the Talmud, those in which the same rabbis who spent days and nights arguing about the law are suddenly made to stand historical, moral, and theological judgment—those are the moments of aggada, not halacha. Sometimes I wonder if the truth is even further from what is claimed: Maybe the cold, cerebral halacha is actually the substructure on which the sages built their most important discourse—that of the aggada. Some might want to stone me for making such a subversive claim, but I’m willing to stand behind it, at least as a possibility worth considering.

***

In modern times, when “identity” is something fluid and intensely personal, rather than being dictated from above, the aggada has become even more important. Today, the story is the central tool for any discussion of identity—both the individual story, as derived through the various forms of psychotherapy; and the collective story, as told by historians, sociologists, journalists, politicians, and ideologues who weave the fabric of meaning that unites us as a civilization.

Along these lines, the Jewish story—as is reflected in the narratives of the Bible, the aggada and midrash, as well as modern Jewish literature, which to me is a direct continuation of these ancient narratives—is the most important tool for identity available to us as modern Jews.

We live in a time when our search for meaning comes well before any search for norms dictated from without. The ancient Jewish texts, which tell our eternal story, are a gold mine of meaning which, despite their age, remain surprisingly relevant. The freedom of thought, boundless imagination, and disarming intellectual honesty of our sages offer an amazing source for inspiration and a wonderful model for us to imagine a Jewish future built on the same values, images, and compelling stories that were the bedrock of our ancestors’ Jewish identity.

The “aggadic Jew” may have never fully disappeared, but it is nonetheless vitally important to declare, loud and proud, his return to the center stage of Jewish identity in our time.