From Brokenness, Multiplicity

 B”H

A man named Rabbi Yishmael ben Satriel came from far away. He told Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi three things about the place he came from.

The lettuce there has six hundred thousand leaves in its core.

A cedar fell there once. It was so wide that sixteen wagons crossed it side by side — across the trunk, not along it.

And an egg of the bar yokhani bird fell. What came out of it filled sixty walled cities and broke three hundred cedars.

The Gemara stops in only one place

It says nothing about the first two. It does not ask how a head of lettuce could hold six hundred thousand of anything. It does not ask how wide a tree would have to be.

It stops at the third, and only because of a verse. Job says this bird leaves her eggs on the ground. If she lays them on the ground, how could one of hers fall?

Rav Ashi answers with one word. מוזרתא — that egg would never hatch. So she carried it up and let it go.

Who is listening

Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi is about to do something nobody had done. He is going to take the Oral Torah, which had only ever lived in people's mouths, and write it down.

The man who answers at the end is Rav Ashi. He would later do the same thing to the Talmud.

The numbers are not nature

• 600,000 (6 × 10⁵) is the giving of the Torah: the number of letters, and the number of reviewers.
• 16 (6 + 10) is the six orders of the Mishnah and the ten commandments.
• 60 (6 × 10) is the tractates of the Mishnah.
• 300 (5 × 60) is the combinations of Written and Oral Torah.

So this is not a page about a bird.

The bird has a name

Bar Yokhani. Say it out loud. Bar Yokhani. Ben Yochanan.

Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai was carried out of besieged Jerusalem in a coffin. He came before Vespasian and was granted one request. He did not ask for the city. He did not ask for the Temple.

He asked: give me Yavneh and its sages.

He let Jerusalem go.

In the same scene he quotes Isaiah — Lebanon shall fall by a mighty one — and explains that Lebanon means the Temple. He is saying out loud that the Sanctuary is finished.

And he was blamed for it. The Gemara raises the obvious objection: he should have asked for Jerusalem to be spared. Then it answers with another verse — He turns the wise backward and makes their knowledge foolish. He was not a fool. His wisdom was taken from him, so that he would not ask for more.

Now read Job again, about the bird:

for God withheld wisdom from her.

The same charge, in the same words. Once about a bird who leaves her young. Once about the man who left Jerusalem.

So the egg is Jerusalem

And muzeret — it would never hatch — is Rabban Yochanan's own reasoning in one word. Vespasian would never have spared the city. There was no life in that request. So he carried it up and let it go.

What came out of it filled sixty volumes: Yavneh and its sages, and everything they built.

And the cedar is the Temple

The Temple is built of the cedar of Lebanon, and Lebanon is the Temple's name.

Now look at the two testimonies side by side. The second has one cedar. The third has three hundred.

That is not a slip. It is the same wood, before and after it is cut.

One tree standing. Three hundred beams afterwards.

A living cedar is one thing, and you cannot build with it. Cut it down, and it becomes three hundred.

Broken, or provided

The word for broke is שבר. The same word means grain — there is grain in Egypt. One root, because grain is what you break in order to eat it.

So the egg did not smash three hundred trees. It supplied three hundred beams.

The Temple's cedar was not lost. It was cut to length.

Where three hundred beams go

Ezekiel says it:

Though I scattered them among the lands — I became for them a small sanctuary in the lands where they came.

And the Gemara says plainly what a small sanctuary is: the synagogues and the study houses.

Read the order of the verse. The scattering is not the disaster that the sanctuary makes up for. The scattering is what produces it. Because they were spread out, there are small sanctuaries — in every place they arrived.

You cannot scatter a building. You can scatter beams.

One Temple could only ever stand in one place. Three hundred beams can stand in three hundred places.

The lettuce said it first

Six hundred thousand leaves, kept in the one organ that brings food back up to chew it a second time.

That is what Mishnah means: repetition. And the six hundred thousand are both things at once — the letters, and the people who repeat them.

One head of lettuce. Six hundred thousand pieces. Nobody eats a lettuce whole.

The three are one sentence

One becomes many, and only then can it be taken in.

• One lettuce → six hundred thousand leaves → one for every reviewer.
• One cedar → three hundred beams → one for every small sanctuary.
• One egg → sixty volumes → one for every tractate.

Nothing on that list was destroyed. Each one was divided into as many pieces as there were people who would need a piece.

She knew

From outside it always looks like loss, and it always will. Job says this bird is hard toward her young, as though they were not hers.

Rav Ashi's answer is that she knew. She knew which one would never hatch.

Rabban Yochanan let the city go, and the city became rooms. Rebbi let the spoken form go, and it became volumes. Both were accused of giving away what they were supposed to be holding. Both were handing it out.

And so

The Temple was one building. It could only ever stand in one place.

Broken, it became small sanctuaries, and they went wherever the people went.

You are sitting in one of them.

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Notes

The page is Bekhorot 57b. The verse quoted there is Job 39:13–14. The harder lines about the bird — hardened against her young, and God withheld wisdom from her — are 39:16–17.

Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai before Vespasian is Gittin 56b: the coffin, give me Yavneh and its sages, the citation of Isaiah 10:34 that Lebanon — the Temple — shall fall by a mighty one, and the verse applied to his request, Isaiah 44:25.

Mikdash me'at is Ezekiel 11:16. Megillah 29a reads it as the synagogues and study houses of Babylonia.

Mishnah is from ש־נ־ה, to repeat. Tanna is the same word in Aramaic — a Tanna is a repeater, and "reviewers" is the Mishnah's own word: those who repeat are shonim. Chagigah 9b measures learning in repetitions.

The lettuce is chazeret, from the root of chazarah, review. It sits in the beit hamseis, the omasum — the organ of ma'aleh gerah, bringing up what was swallowed to chew it again. That is also the Torah's own sign of a fit animal: the creature Israel may eat is the one that repeats.

The sixty are kerakhim, bound things, from a root meaning to wrap. The midrash on sixty are the queens (Song of Songs 6:8) reads them as the sixty tractates.

On cedars: Taanit 20b — soft as a reed, never hard as a cedar, because the reed bends and the cedar is torn out. Solomon's Temple is felled cedar (I Kings 5). Job 14:7 — there is hope for a tree: if it is cut down, it will renew itself.

שבר is to break; שֶׁבֶר is grain (Genesis 42).

The Talmud pairs the two redactors itself: Rebbi and Rabbi Natan are the end of Mishnah; Rav Ashi and Ravina are the end of instruction (Bava Metzia 86a).

Writing the Oral Torah was forbidden. One verse permitted it, read backwards: it is a time to act for the Lord, they have voided Your Torah — better that one Torah be uprooted than the whole Torah forgotten (Gittin, Temurah).

Two things to check. The identification of bar yokhani with Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai is a reading, not a received tradition, and the name is not an exact match — bar Yokhani is not ben Zakkai. The case rests on the role, not the name. And both Isaiah citations above are quoted here from memory; confirm them in Gittin 56b before relying on them.

On the numbers. The six hundred thousand stands on its own as the number at Sinai; the arithmetic under it is confirmation, not proof. Three small numbers and free choice of operation will fit many targets. The firm relation is 300 and 60, because it needs no choosing: they sit in the same clause, describing one event, and one is exactly five times the other.