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Authors: Adina Hoffman
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forth from the mouth of the most High,
and covered the earth like a mist.
I dwelt in high places,
and my throne was in a pillar of cloud.
Alone have I compassed the circuit of heaven,
and walked in the bottom of the deep.
In the waves of the sea, and in all the earth,
and in every people and nation, I have gotten a possession.
Schechter was almost certainly thinking, too, of Ben Sira’s turn at this point from the universal toward the particular, as he asks:
Among all these I sought a resting place—
[but] in whose inheritance might I abide?
Then the Creator of all things
gave me a commandment,
and He who made me
assigned a place for my tent,
and said: Make your dwelling in Jacob,
and in Israel receive your inheritance …
And finally, if not quite consciously, Schechter may well have been alluding to the concluding verses of that same chapter when Ben Sira himself speaks out as a scholar-sage or “man of letters” and identifies in the deepest fashion with Wisdom, saying:
I came out like a brook from a river,
like a water-channel into a garden.
I said, I will water my orchard
and drench my garden;
and lo, my brook became a river,
and my river became a sea.
I will make instruction shine like the dawn …
and leave it to all future generations.
Wisdom in this scheme links humankind—through the Torah—to the divine and the eternal. It is a presence that survives through the ages, surfacing here through the detritus of history. Rooted in the fear of God, it involves not so much unusual insight, or cleverness, but a teachable, practical sort of knowledge that hones the ability to choose between evil and good, and helps one navigate the ethical, spiritual, and wholly ordinary challenges of living. This late expression of it—the Book of Ben Sira—culminates, some twenty chapters further on, in a great catalog of biblical heroes and the moral lessons their lives embody. The curtain call of exemplars opens with lines taken up by the American writer James Agee, who applied them to powerful effect in the title of the book he began preparing in 1936 with photographer Walker Evans about gaunt, dirt-poor tenant farmers in Alabama—radically altering the polarity of Ben Sira’s verse in the process:
Let us now praise famous men
and our fathers in their generations.
The Lord apportioned to them great glory,
His majesty from the beginning.…
There are some that have left a name,
so that men declare their praise.
And there are some who have no name,
who have perished as though they had not lived.
The paean goes on to celebrate the ethos and extension of Jewish teaching—from Noah and Abraham and Jacob through Ezekiel, Nehemia, and Shimon Ben Yohanan (Simon the Righteous), the high priest of Ben Sira’s age, installed in the Temple and likened to the “cypress towering in the clouds” and other glories of Creation. The scholar-sage in this all-encompassing vision is an essential part of the continuum of Jewish history and of Wisdom’s work in the world.
While the sensitive Schechter was, then, responding viscerally to matters of style, it stands to reason that his passion was also being stoked by a more fundamental concern: “It is one of the great tragedies,” Schechter wrote in another context, “that modern Judaism knows itself so little.”
S o much for Schechter’s nobler aspirations and his long-standing enmity toward the higher critics. What had most recently gotten his Ben Sira goat involved something much closer to home.
In 1889, David Samuel Margoliouth, the son of a missionizing Jewish convert to Anglicanism and a man of massive learning, which he would come to hide behind a stiff brush of a mustache and a cliff-like face, was appointed the Laudian chair of Arabic at Oxford. His inaugural lecture, based on a prizewinning dissertation he’d completed two years earlier, was called “The Place of Ecclesiasticus in Semitic Literature.” Margoliouth had been reluctant to go public with his
and covered the earth like a mist.
I dwelt in high places,
and my throne was in a pillar of cloud.
Alone have I compassed the circuit of heaven,
and walked in the bottom of the deep.
In the waves of the sea, and in all the earth,
and in every people and nation, I have gotten a possession.
Schechter was almost certainly thinking, too, of Ben Sira’s turn at this point from the universal toward the particular, as he asks:
Among all these I sought a resting place—
[but] in whose inheritance might I abide?
Then the Creator of all things
gave me a commandment,
and He who made me
assigned a place for my tent,
and said: Make your dwelling in Jacob,
and in Israel receive your inheritance …
And finally, if not quite consciously, Schechter may well have been alluding to the concluding verses of that same chapter when Ben Sira himself speaks out as a scholar-sage or “man of letters” and identifies in the deepest fashion with Wisdom, saying:
I came out like a brook from a river,
like a water-channel into a garden.
I said, I will water my orchard
and drench my garden;
and lo, my brook became a river,
and my river became a sea.
I will make instruction shine like the dawn …
and leave it to all future generations.
Wisdom in this scheme links humankind—through the Torah—to the divine and the eternal. It is a presence that survives through the ages, surfacing here through the detritus of history. Rooted in the fear of God, it involves not so much unusual insight, or cleverness, but a teachable, practical sort of knowledge that hones the ability to choose between evil and good, and helps one navigate the ethical, spiritual, and wholly ordinary challenges of living. This late expression of it—the Book of Ben Sira—culminates, some twenty chapters further on, in a great catalog of biblical heroes and the moral lessons their lives embody. The curtain call of exemplars opens with lines taken up by the American writer James Agee, who applied them to powerful effect in the title of the book he began preparing in 1936 with photographer Walker Evans about gaunt, dirt-poor tenant farmers in Alabama—radically altering the polarity of Ben Sira’s verse in the process:
Let us now praise famous men
and our fathers in their generations.
The Lord apportioned to them great glory,
His majesty from the beginning.…
There are some that have left a name,
so that men declare their praise.
And there are some who have no name,
who have perished as though they had not lived.
The paean goes on to celebrate the ethos and extension of Jewish teaching—from Noah and Abraham and Jacob through Ezekiel, Nehemia, and Shimon Ben Yohanan (Simon the Righteous), the high priest of Ben Sira’s age, installed in the Temple and likened to the “cypress towering in the clouds” and other glories of Creation. The scholar-sage in this all-encompassing vision is an essential part of the continuum of Jewish history and of Wisdom’s work in the world.
While the sensitive Schechter was, then, responding viscerally to matters of style, it stands to reason that his passion was also being stoked by a more fundamental concern: “It is one of the great tragedies,” Schechter wrote in another context, “that modern Judaism knows itself so little.”
S o much for Schechter’s nobler aspirations and his long-standing enmity toward the higher critics. What had most recently gotten his Ben Sira goat involved something much closer to home.
In 1889, David Samuel Margoliouth, the son of a missionizing Jewish convert to Anglicanism and a man of massive learning, which he would come to hide behind a stiff brush of a mustache and a cliff-like face, was appointed the Laudian chair of Arabic at Oxford. His inaugural lecture, based on a prizewinning dissertation he’d completed two years earlier, was called “The Place of Ecclesiasticus in Semitic Literature.” Margoliouth had been reluctant to go public with his
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