Facing Rabbi Ishmael on my Summer Vacation
Lynette Davidson

On misty country mornings, sleep still in our eyes, we went to morning prayers. Sitting in summer-camp rows on backless summer-camp benches we hunched our adolescent backs over our summer-camp prayer books knowing that we were expected to say and mean every word.

Almost the first text in the book, after we thanked God for returning our souls to us in the morning and after we forgave God for making us women, was a list of rules. The first rule was a fortiori: inference is drawn from a minor premise to a major one (or from a major premise to a minor one). Twelve more rules of analysis followed for a total of thirteen.

As the prayers went on, and as the girls with something to prove held their prayer books close to their faces and twisted in focussed devotion I would often be stuck at the beginning, staring vaguely at the thirteen rules of analysis proposed in the Second Century CE by Rabbi Ishmael ben Elisha. Not understanding them, mind you: if you’d asked me to repeat back the rules, I’m sure I’d have tried to hide in my enormous sweatshirt.

Jewish tradition has it that Rabbi Ishmael, the author of these rules, was very, very good-looking. Some authorities suggest that this was because his biological father was the angel Metatron. Because of one thing and another (for complicated reasons it involves a room filled with shoes) he was about to be executed by the Romans. When the emperor’s daughter saw him, she was so captivated by Ishmael’s looks that she begged her father to spare his life. The emperor refused, so his daughter begged her father at least to spare his gorgeous face. So the Roman executioners pulled Ishmael’s face off while he was still alive, and presented it to the emperor’s daughter before going on to kill him.

How do you hold these two versions of Rabbi Ishmael in your mind at the same time? How do you accept Rabbi Ishmael as a theorist of critical thinking and as the subject of a bizarre story of horror and lust?

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