“Yochanan’s Gamble”

I first met Mark Katz when he was a very bright and talkative 6-year-old in the First Grade of our Temple Habonim religious school. At that time, his teacher, Donald Solomon, of blessed memory, told me that Mark was destined to become a rabbi; Mr. Solomon’s prophecy turned out to be on target. Today, Mark, now aged 40, is the well-established and widely respected rabbi of Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, NJ – the only student in our religious school during my 33 years in Barrington to become a rabbi.

Rabbi Katz’s second book, “Yochanan’s Gamble,” (The Jewish Publication Society, 2024), subtitled “Judaism’s Pragmatic Approach to Life,” is wise, erudite and extremely well-written. The author dares to explore the continuing messy world we encounter in the gulf between Black and white, true and false. Katz supports his facts and his arguments with 37 pages of end notes, a 4-page bibliography, followed by a subject index, as well as indices to his sources in our Bible, Mishna, Jerusalem Talmud, Babylonian Talmud, and Midrash.

“Yochanan’s Gamble” is so well-written that the non-scholar can read, enjoy, and profit from the book without turning to a single note in its back pages.

The title of Katz’s book calls to the reader: Who is Yochanan? What did he gamble? Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai was an esteemed leader of the Jewish community during the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70 CE at the hands of Titus, son of Roman emperor Vespasian. There are many versions of “the foundational story of the Rabbinic period.” According to this founding myth, a group of Yochanan’s followers smuggled a very-much-alive Yochanan out of Jerusalem in a casket; once outside the doomed city, Yochanan somehow managed to find a way to meet with Vespasian and gambled on nothing less than the fate of the Jewish people.

As legend has it, by Yochanan’s promising not to support the bound-to-lose violent Jewish zealots, Vespasian agreed to grant Yochanan safe passage to the small village of Yavneh, where he was able to establish a small circle of rabbis who were able to “re-envision a new (post-Biblical) Judaism – one that does not rely on Jerusalem and the Temple as its basis, but one that…lays the groundwork for the living, viable, post-Temple Judaism of today.” It was the work of these rabbis in Yavne and their successors who, in both the Jerusalem Talmud and the even larger Babylonian Talmud, established the basis of Jewish law, halakhah, that endures to this very day.

From the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE until the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, the vast majority of Jews were spread throughout the Diaspora, living as a minority, often persecuted. As a result, Jewish law needed to be pragmatic, flexible; it needed to work in complex, difficult, and sometimes dangerous situations. As Katz writes in his preface, pragmatism is “the creative Rabbinic strategy that saved Jerusalem from Emperor Vespasian’s siege of Jerusalem…the Rabbis privileged compromise and subtlety over intransigence and stridency.”

The bulk of Katz’s book provides example after example of the tools of Jewish law which the rabbis fashioned to answer their fundamental pragmatic question: Will this particular law work? To consider but one of many tools, the early rabbis developed a principle called in Hebrew/Aramaic Lechatchilah-Bedieved, which takes account of the fact that all too often the initial ideal is contradicted by the after-the-fact reality. To cite a simple case from Jewish ritual life, ideally (Lechatchilah) the shofar blown on Rosh Hashanah needs to be curved; however, if the only shofar available for Rosh Hashanah worship happens to straight (Bedieved), that shofar is ritually permitted.

While the shape of a shofar would seem to be of little consequence, Katz points out that the conflict between the initial ideal and the after-the-fact reality “appears in almost every corner of Jewish law.” So often it turns out in Jewish law that the ideal must yield to a subsequent reality. Katz goes on to comment: “The dual concepts of lechatichilah-bedieved provide an avenue of leniency and forgiveness to those who have erred. Lechatchilah asks us to be our best. Bedieved gives us a cushion on which to fall short.” Let me add that especially when we live as a minority in a Diaspora community, circumstances may insist that we rely upon a cushion on which to fall short.

In his final paragraph of “Yochanan’s Gamble,” Rabbi Katz suggests what most of us know intuitively: we Jews are not primarily defined by what we believe or by the way we think, but rather by how we act, as the closing words of his book imply:

“Pragmatism matches the messiness of religious living. Without clear answers in front of us, we make a beautiful leap toward action, hoping that our feet land on steady ground.”

JAMES B, ROSENBERG is a rabbi emeritus at Temple Habonim in Barrington. Contact him at rabbi emeritus@templehabonim.org.