Even though I have learned this passage many times over the years, I read it with new eyes. Would love to hear your thoughts. Rabbi Eliezer was a difficult guy. He lived albeit years ago, but the Talmud recalls his personality with such vividness that we can easily recognize the type β you know, the one who does not let up no matter what, the one who is constantly screaming about the same issue and you all just want him to go away.
We can feel in the text how much his colleagues and peers found him to be an annoying stickler. So much so that they excommunicated him. They ousted him, and they ruined his life, taking away everything that was dear to him β even as they knew that he was right about, well, everything.
Can you imagine? He may have been right, but he was very much alone. His wife was so worried about his depressed state following all this that she would not let him recite the prayer of supplication tachanun that requires bending over. He was so down that she was afraid he would never get up. That is how affected he was by the fact that his colleagues refused to see things his way. The story goes like this. According to the text in tractate Baba Metzia 59a , there was a dispute between Rabbi Eliezer and, well, everyone else, about the purity of a certain oven.
Rabbi Eliezer says that even though it is broken, it was put back together with sand and should be treated as pure as every other oven. That entire debate takes exactly one line of the Talmud. But then something happens. Something strange, mysterious, wild and crazy-making. Rabbi Eliezer does not take no for an answer. He continues to argue. He brings up every proof he knows. The other rabbis refuse to concede. He looks around. Some say meters. The aqueduct quickly complied, and began flowing backwards.
The rabbis were like, meh. Rabbi Eliezer was getting frustrated with his impenetrable peers. The walls started coming down, and only the intervention of Rabbi Joshua stopped them from landing on the entire study population. Legend has it that the walls stayed half-up, like the leaning tower of Pisa, till this day. And yet, despite all these supernatural I watched a captivating little video clip today about a man who has tried out six different religions β a few varieties of Christianity, two types of Islam, Hinduism, and currently Judaism.
