[Click here for PART ONE]

Once upon a time, some rabbis, a tree, God, and an oven walk into a bar.

Or something like that. I can’t remember exactly. I told that story last time. Click here to check that out first.

But long story short, a bunch of rabbis argue about an oven. Everyone agrees, except for one guy – Eliezer. Miracles keep happening to prove Eliezer right. Eventually, God Himself announces that Eliezer is right. And the rest of the rabbis tell God to go get stuffed.

The story I’m going to tell now… is about what happens afterwards.

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So, having finally ruled against Eliezer and officially overcome God, the rabbis got a little bit excited, and took things a bit too far. 

Since the debate was about the ritual purity of an oven, they collected everything that Eliezer had ever declared ritually pure… and burned them in a fire. Led by Rabban Gamliel, they then decided to ostracise Eliezer. They cast him out.

Now, Eliezer had a cherished, and subsequently legendary disciple: Rabbi Akiva. And Akiva volunteered to take the news to him. He feared that, if someone else were to go, and ended up showing Eliezer disrespect, then the entire world would be destroyed. More on that later. 

So Akiva wrapped himself in mourner’s black. He sat at four cubit’s distance from his teacher – you can’t get any closer to someone who has been ostracised. And when he spoke, he put it euphemistically. “Your colleagues, sir, are distancing themselves from you.” Rather than vice versa.

It is reported that, on that day, the entire world was afflicted. One third of its olives, one third of its wheat, and one third of its barley was destroyed. Everywhere that Rabbi Eliezer fixed his gaze burned. So good thing Akiva was the one to deliver the message, huh?

Rabban Gamliel, the leader of the Rabbis who had excommunicated Eliezer, was travelling on a boat at the time. A great wave rose up and threatened to drown him. “It must be because of Rabbi Eliezer,” he said, “because God punishes those who mistreat others.” He got to his feet and declared that he did not do it for his own benefit, nor for the benefit of his house. Rather, he did it for the unity of the nation: quote “so that disputes will not proliferate in Israel”. 

In response, the sea calmed its raging.

Now. It turns out that Imma Shalom, the wife of the ostracised Rabbi Eliezer, was also the sister of this Rabban Gamliel, who had ostracised him. From that day, she would not let her husband lower his head to the ground for the tachanun prayer. 

You see, after the set prayers of morning and afternoon, it had become customary to have a moment of personal appeal to God. A time to speak freely to the Almighty, one on One, and make known your hopes and grievances.

Imma Shalom feared that, were her husband to bemoan his fate at that moment of intimate connection to the Almighty, the Lord would heed his cries, and punish her brother. So every morning and every afternoon, she would hover around him as he prayed. And soon as he finished the obligatory rites and was about to prostrate himself, she would swoop in and stop him.

On one fateful day, however, she missed her cue. One report has it that she got the date wrong. Another says that a beggar came and stood at the door, and she went out to give him bread. In either case, for a moment, she left Eliezer unsupervised.

When she returned, she saw that he had lowered his head to the ground in prayer. 

She said to him: “Get up. You’ve already killed my brother.” 

At that moment, the sound of a shofar emerged from the house of Rabban Gamliel to announce that the leader of the Rabbis had died. 

Rabbi Eliezer said to her: “How did you know that your brother would die?” 

She said to him: “This is the tradition that I received from the house of the father of my father: All the gates of Heaven are apt to be locked, except for the gates of prayer for victims of verbal mistreatment.”

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And that’s the end of the story of the Oven of Akhnai. 

So we went from a debate about the ritual purity of an oven

To walking trees and rivers going backward, 

To the divine intervention of a heavenly voice

and a full-scale rabbinic rebellion on the authority of God Almighty… 

And it all leads up, and boils down, to this. The moral of the story is that God takes the grievances of the verbally abused more seriously than anything else.

If there’s an “actual point” of the story, it’s this. Because it’s not just the final word. It’s the reason the story was brought up in the first place. 

Quick word of explanation. The story of the Oven of Akhnai comes from a Jewish text called the Talmud. The Talmud works by taking a segment of a legal code (the Mishnah) and then discussing it at length (the Gemara).

In this case, the legal code was concerned with commercial exploitation. So let’s say I know something is really worth 50 bucks and I sell it to you for 100. Even if you buy it willingly, I’m exploiting you. So even if I’m not technically stealing or cheating or coercing you, it’s still wrong.

But then the Mishnah extends the point further. It says that money doesn’t even need to exchange hands for there to be exploitation. 

If I ask you “how much are you selling this for?” when I know for sure I’m not going to buy it, then the Mishnah says I’m exploiting you. Because I’m doing something that won’t help me at all, but might hurt you, when you inevitably fail to make the sale.

And then it keeps going. It lists two other ways to wrong someone by speech alone, that have nothing to do with material gain and loss. 

If someone genuinely repents of their past misdeeds, then it’s wrong to bring those actions up. 

If someone has converted to Judaism, it’s wrong to bring up what their ancestors did, even if it went against Jewish Law. 

And that’s what Gemara takes up for discussion. The rabbinic sages inquire about the logic here. Why is harmful speech so serious that the legal code would go from a discussion of business ethics to being rude to criminals and converts?

And so the Gemara discusses that… for pages and pages and pages. 

It declares that causing someone to be publicly humiliated is worse than adultery. Because, it reasons, the punishment for adultery is getting strangled to death… but that’s it. After that, you’re off the hook. But if you publicly shame someone, even someone who has committed adultery, you forfeit any share you might have in the World to Come. So you pay for that one forever.

It also declares that it’s better to be burned alive than publicly humiliate someone. There’s a really funny story behind that, which I’ll put in the comments below. 

And only after ALL THAT does someone go, and I quote:

“…ON THE TOPIC OF VERBAL MISTREATMENT”…

….there’s this funny story about an oven… 

That’s the background to the story of the Oven of Akhnai. The reason it was brought up in the first place was to make a point about how big a deal it is to hurt people’s feelings.

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OK. So that’s enough context. What are we to make of all of this? 

Here we have this totally wild, extremely profound, game-changing story about the foundations of ethics and the nature of divine authority. And apparently, it was all a setup to say:

sticks and stones may break my bones,

but if I say mean words, God will personally fucking kill me. 

The story seems to remove God from the position of ultimate moral authority. It seems to spell the “death of God”. But no sooner does it do that, than it IMMEDIATELY brings Him back, more powerful, interventionist, Daddy’s-gonna-judge-you than ever. 

Why? 

And where does that leave us? Are we in charge here or not? Has God receded into the background? Left us to figure things out for ourselves? Or did he only pretend to? Is God a helicopter parent, hovering just out of sight, ready to swoop down and reassert his authority the moment we get something wrong?

What’s going on here? What does all this mean? What are we supposed to take away from this?

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This is what I’ll say about it for now. 

I think this story does have an overarching consistency, despite the apparent contradictions in God’s status. 

And that’s because ultimately (or, at least, for now), I don’t think this story is really about God.

So, it’s obviously not about the right way to build ovens. It’s not about whether walls have legal degrees. But it’s also not about some of the bigger philosophical questions it brings up along the way. Whether there exists a cosmic justice system which will punish wrongdoing in the end. Whether there is an objective fact-of-the matter about what’s wrong and right, and who decides that. Even whether God exists. 

All of that is secondary.

What I think the story is actually about is responsibility. It asks: who is responsible? And the answer is… us. In my case, me. And in your case, you. 

In the first half, it asks: who is responsible for making a decision before we act? And the answer is: we are.

In the second half, it asks: who is responsible for the action after it’s done? And the answer is: we are. 

It’s the same answer, but to different questions. And that’s why God takes a back seat in the first part and jumps right back into the front seat in the second. It’s because He is not the central theme. The axle of this wheel’s responsibility, and God sort of spins around it.

So if you invoke God to get out of the difficulties of thinking for yourself, then God’s gone – and He’ll go gladly. That’s the first part of the story.

But then the danger switches from complacency to arrogance. You might think “OK, because I’m the one who decides what to do, then whatever I decided is necessarily right”. And so the story switches tack. You’re not going to worm out of it that way either.

You have to be brave in taking charge, but humble in your imperfection.

And whether we get punished for it or not isn’t so much the issue here. 

The unavoidable punishment for slander is being a slanderer. 

The punishment for cruelty is being cruel. 

The rest is ultimately out of our hands, and thus, not our primary business.

Because here’s the bottom line.

You have to make the best decision you can. 

But having made the best decision you could doesn’t guarantee you’ll be able to sleep at night, or die with a clear conscience.

For better or for worse… that’s the way things really are.

You have complete freedom to choose what you do and why you do it… before you do it. And you have no freedom whatsoever to change what you’ve done afterwards. Or certainty you got it right.

You have to act on incomplete information, without an omniscient Jiminy Cricket to whisper the answers in your ear. And if there are negative side effects, or things don’t go the way you wanted… well, you can’t just throw your hands up and say we live in a moral vacuum, so no foul. The moral vacuum didn’t make the decision for you. The moral vacuum didn’t say the words that hurt that person. You did.

If we’re being honest, that’s the situation you’re in. That’s what you’re faced with in this life.

And that’s the picture which this story presents. I think it does it pretty effectively.

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And so, the reason behind the apparent paradox in the portrayal of God is because God’s not really that important here.

The constant fact of our moral responsibility makes the world –or in this case God– look different in different situations. Our cosmology is relative; our accountability is, on this account, absolute.

On the one hand, I think this is good theology. Whenever you try to say one thing of God, the dickhead flips on you and shows you his rear end. So any story about God should be contradictory and paradoxical. God’s just the kind of cat that makes Schrödinger’s look unambiguous.

And I think it also speaks wonderfully to the modern condition. Rationally, there’s a lot of stuff humanity used to take seriously that doesn’t make sense to us anymore. But the moment we try to throw it out, we realise that we just… can’t… seem to… get rid of it entirely. There’s something there that’s important, but which we can’t quite understand. So by and large, we’re sort of forced to hold it lightly, and live with the paradox. It has that basic structure of “it’s bullshit, but…” that we all seem to land in, one way or another.

But also, relegating God to the position of a side character, who comes in or out of the story depending on whether or not he serves the interests of the plot – that is, our ethical commitments – is just about as Jewish as you can get. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas talks about “Loving the Torah more than God.” In other words, it’s the idea that the details of Jewish law, and the inquiry into right conduct, are more important than our relationship to a perfect and transcendent being. 

Now of course, Judaism can be very spiritual too. It has its mysticism, its Kabbalah, which is totally focused on the nature of God and the higher realities and whatnot. But I think it’s fair to say that the mainstream of Judaism is adequately represented in the Talmudic tradition, and this story. At the end of the day, it’s about investing the most mundane decisions of daily life with deeper meaning. It’s all about how you tie your shoelaces… and how you treat your neighbour. And God either fits into that or He gets out of the way.

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So there we go. That’s the Oven of Akhnai. God is definitely dead. Or at least retired. So you’re the boss now. Congratulations! But… be careful. Because heavy lies the crown.