From Hair to Eternity . . . But First, Let's Live!

So already, in this COVID-19 era of staying at home and raising cocktail glasses to computer web cams, I've been amazed at how much of the conversation of participating women has been about hair--their own hair. Every Zoom cocktail hour begins with hair-related apologies, anxieties, and tales of miraculous deliverance from near hair disaster. I'm among those women: I've pointed out to several online groups that the webcam on my computer points directly at that place on my hairline where my gray roots are most evident. Several women have bragged about how they successfully cut their own hair, despite so many online warnings against such audacity. They tempt the gods, I think.

The men seem decidedly less obsessed with and less worried about their hair. Which makes me wonder what they aren't sharing. I do know that had they been numbered among Rabbi Akiva's students (who would have been men only) back in the first and second centuries CE, they might have been worried about winning a zealous argument about the proper interpretation of some passage in the Torah.

So wait a minute. Who's Rabbi Akiva, and why am I bringing him up? Some of you know from my previous blog post that I've been counting the omer, or counting and paying spiritual attention to the days between the second day of Passover and another lesser known Jewish holiday, Shavuot. I'm still so new to this practice that I've chosen to place adjacent to this paragraph a graphic* meant for a Jewish child to use to keep track of the daily ritual of prayer and preparation.

I've found it really hard to understand this ritual, and just the other day, I came across some additional information that further baffled me. My imagination led me to expect that the time period between two holidays commemorating uplifting, defining Jewish events would emphasize excitement about both the newness of freedom (courtesy of Passover) and the imminence of revelation (courtesy of Shavuot). Instead, I learned it was a season of mourning. What????

Yes, mourning. With a set of traditions, including not having weddings or haircuts until the 33rd day of this 49-day period, which is the Jewish holiday of Lag B'Omer, this year celebrated on May 12. Hmmm . . .

Why the mourning, I wondered? Because of plague. As Michael Singer explains in "The Tragedy of Rabbi Akiva's Students," 

"One story in our history radically changed the nature of the counting of the omer from a joyous anticipation of a prosperous harvest and the yearly re–enactment of revelation at Mt. Sinai, to a time in which we mourn. In the Talmud we are taught that during the period of counting the omer, the 12,000 pairs of students of Rabbi Akiva perished on one day (Yevamot 61b). The initial reason the Gemara gives is that they did not have kavod (honor or respect) for one another. The Gemara then presents the opinion that they were struck down by a mysterious plague. I believe that both reasons for the death of Rabbi Akiva's students can be read harmoniously. It was precisely because of the breakdown of civil discourse and respect for one another that they were afflicted with the plague and died."**

Jules-Élie Delaunay's "Plague in Rome" (1869)

What????? After all those newspaper editorials connecting Passover plagues with the COVID-19 pandemic, here we were in yet another annual Jewish season in which plague was foregrounded--and at exactly the same time that all of us are still much afflicted by the scourge of the novel coronavirus. Not only is Kavod continuing to be absent from the national discourse, at least as we observe it nightly, but there's a dangerous absence of collaboration between nations--and the global, the national, the regional, and the local are utterly interconnected when it comes to COVID-19.

When I told my husband Scott about the story of the death of the 12,000 pairs of students, he wanted to know who Rabbi Akiva was and why the story had not simply said that 24,000 of his students died. I explained that Rabbi Akiva was a great Jewish teacher and that it was common for Jewish students to have study partners. After a further question about where all of these students studied--some big room somewhere, or in how many different cities in arenas, maybe--he asked an important question: "If he was such a great teacher, why did all of his students fuck up and die?"

I thought about his question after we both stopped laughing. Holden Caulfield might have asked that question in just that way. So might have my former colleague and good friend Betsy Grady, who, with her masters in anthropology and doctorate in education, is always ready to challenge assumptions about good teaching and learning. Maybe Rabbi Akiva really did bear some of the responsibility. Because let's face it, something really big went wrong here. Then again, whenever I've thought about teachers' responsibilities in the years since Donald Trump became president, I've wondered what lessons students were learning from the President that they brought with them to the neighborhood and the classroom. Teachers are only some of the people who educate students.

My Last AP Class on a Field Trip

I also did a little math. I taught for almost thirty-five years, and even when I estimated that I might have taught at most two hundred adult and student learners in each of those years, I calculated that I still would have taught only seven thousand students in my whole career. Rabbi Akiva must have had really large classes! Maybe class size was part of the educational problem: he just couldn't see the brewing kavod problem. [By the way, he had other students, too, after the twenty-four thousand died; one of them in particular is honored on Lag B'Omer.]

But this whole topic of how we disagree and why we choose to argue, try to persuade, and aim to win is really important. Too often, those engaged passionately in debate are not trying to win for the sake of the welfare of people and the world, even if that's their purpose at the start. Once they experience their opponents as attacking their integrity, not just questioning their conclusions and reasoning, their motivations for continuing to argue can change. Winners often gloat and dismiss. Resentments and divisions build. Things get personal that began as intellectually, spiritually, and socially responsible. Discourse may die, sides may get chosen, and revenge may even get plotted. People who have much more in common than not, who generally share common concerns and commitments, become bitterly estranged. And what they might have achieved together, given the power of their minds and the strength of some of their agreements, is lost, to the detriment of the community.

Rabbi Michael Singer puts it this way**:

"Could this have happened to the students of Rabbi Akiva? The Talmud could have easily only attributed the tragedy of Rabbi Akiva's students to a plague, whether natural or at the hands of the Romans. Instead our sages chose to first ascribe it to a loss of kavod as a powerful reminder of what can happen to us when we forget how to conduct discourse grounded in honor and respect. So divided and torn over their disagreement were the students*** of Rabbi Akiva, that they might have lashed out at one another with hurtful words, severing the dynamic unfolding of Torah, and leading only to polarization, defeat, and death."**

Scott's not Jewish. But because he refuses to pay more than $8.00 for a haircut, he really does need a good haircut right now--much more than I do, frankly. But I doubt any of us will be getting haircuts by May 12. Well, I hope not. 

Scott's Bad Hair Hidden

But some of us might, and that really scares me. I just watched the President's daily alleged coronavirus update. I'm sure Rabbi Akiva grieved over the deaths of his students. I can't say I believe our president grieves over the lives lost to date from COVID-19. I hope while he's busy making his nightly campaign speeches coronavirus updates, others in our government are talking constructively across their political differences because I do believe they--public servants from both parties--really do want Americans to live.

* https://www.chabad.org/kids/article_cdo/aid/377309/jewish/Countdown-to-the-Giving-of-the-Torah.htm

** Singer, M. (2006, May 13). The Tragedy of Rabbi Akiva's Students. Retrieved from http://www.jtsa.edu/the-tragedy-of-rabbi-akivas-students
*** Photo from Blog: S. (2011, July 3). That One Friend [Web log post]. Retrieved April 18, 2020, from http://snehabhatsepo.blogspot.com/p/about-me.html (Blog is entitled Rendezvous.)