When I look out of the helicopter this is what I saw

I am in the airport in COB Speicher, Iraq, waiting for a ride back to work.  I just got off a Chinook, coming from a relatively remote FOB where I had some work to do for a few days. 

I don't get very emotional about places.  Well, maybe sometimes.  I am definitely not one of those people who is moved when I hear something like "Benjamin Franklin stood on this very spot over two hundred years ago!!!!"  "So what", I think to myself,  "I'm standing here now."  OK, perhaps once in a while a place moves me.  Checkpoint Charlie a few years ago got to me.  I was sad that Berlin was reunified.  I always thought of her division as a punishment.  But then again reunification was a symbol of the end of Soviet communism.  So I had mixed feelings.  Sitting on the Brooklyn Heights promenade reading Whitman, or in the West Village thinking about Alan Ginsburg's New York or the walls of Jerusalem with Judah Halevi and Judah Amichai sometimes make me misty as well.  But I already digress.  

In grade school, for the first few years of my education in Yeshiva Torah Temimah, we heard lots of biblical tales and let's face it, most of them are implausible.  And even if they were true, they were told of people whose lives had little resemblance to my own.  The characters conversed with God, saw and performed miracles, fought angels, and sired nations.  I never met anyone who got water from a rock, no one did.  So when I picked up some silly red string at Rachel's tomb in Hebron as a teenager or stood atop Mt. Nebo in Jordan a couple of years ago, I was somewhat nonplussed.  After all, who can really identify with Moses or a "matriarch"?  I know, I know "THIS IS WHERE JACOB FOUGHT THE ANGEL!!!"  Yeah yeah, but THIS is where I AM NOW standing around looking at sand on the floor!  Had the "patriarchs" really even been there or was all this mythology created by some ministry of tourism flunky to get me to buy local knickknacks?  Seriously, does this matter to anyone?  Did they even exist?  What could possibly prompt an emotional experience from these places?  

But then I grew up.  I progressed from fourth grade to fifth and story time was over.  My education got more sophisticated and everyone stopped pretending that Biblical stories were really true - no one denied them, but we stopped making a big deal of them.  To be sure, they were certainly nice morality tales or homilies.  From these fantastic tales I learned the value of not lying (yeah, I see the irony) and loving my neighbor and all that.  But truth?  Even the Rabbis gave up trying to convince us of these things once we hit nine whole years old.  Certainly these things might have happened, but you have to admit, they are hard to believe.  

By fifth grade my Jewish education switched from fables and myth to more real-worldly matters.  Who can forget their first Talmud lesson: What do you do if you find some fruit or money or packages spread out all over the floor of the market?  What if it is a ring of figs or fish or meat, or if it is flax or wool that you find?  Keep it?  Look for the owner?  The Talmud tells us: Rabbi Meir says that the owner must have already despaired of finding and getting back his unmarked figs. Just keep them.  

This was something I could use.  OK, growing up in New York in the 80's there were no farmer's markets yet, but still there was some principle there I can learn from.  Who said it?  Rabbi Meir.  Who was this Rabbi Meir?  He must have been real.  Did he perform miracles?  I doubt it.  He apparently had to get his figs from the market like everyone else.  They didn't fall from the sky for him.  We are told that he once prayed that some muggers should die.  Did they?  No.  He was a real person with real worries.  He worried about things like what to do when you are traveling from the old city of Jerusalem and go past Mount Scopus holding some consecrated meat that you forgot to burn.  (This is actually a walk I have taken a few times  - sans the consecrated meat.)  The rabbis of the Talmud actually did a lot of traveling.  Many of them traveled from Yavneh (near what is now Tel Aviv) to Falluja (a bit southwest of where I woke up this morning).  The trip was undoubtedly more dangerous and unpleasant for them than it was for me. 

And the rabbis knew of the dangers.  They were of a different breed of people than those who populate the pages of the Bible.  They all had jobs; they were butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, etc.  Did the biblical Isaac have a job?  Not that we are told.  Did Judah, Joshua, or Job have jobs?  Not that we know of.  They were all rich and busy serving the Lord.  But Rabbi Meir of the Talmud toiled away day and night being a scribe.  Just a regular job in the year 200.  

But there's more.  These folks with ordinary jobs and annoying travel plans were not merely people whose lives and teachings we study.  These are the people who have shaped who we are today.  To be honest, no one learns what it is to be a Jew from looking at the life of Abraham.  (Again, there are some nice lessons about hospitality, but that's all.)  Jews wake up in the morning and put on T'filin, pray, go to the bathroom, make love, die, cry, eat, work and rest.  They find lost objects and they are involved in legal disputes whose principles we can still derive from Talmudic analyses of goring oxen.  What it is to be a Jew was shaped - for me anyway - not by King David's swashbuckling and lusty exploits, but by Rabbi Meir and his ordinary observations about life in his neighborhood.  

And this is where I finally get to the point.  My Chinook just passed over the neighborhood of one of Rabbi Meir's Babylonian colleagues, or one just like it.  There is a market where a few copper coins might have fallen on the floor and some rabbi might have wondered who they belonged to and what the owner must have been thinking about them.  And I'll bet anything that the improvised fire-pits the Arabs make to cook in the field are no different than those that the Rabbis of the Talmud saw when they were wondering about the quality of baked offerings. And, (this will amuse my brother) the way that the Arabs wrap their kafeiahs around their heads in a sandstorm is the same way that that Shmuel of the Talmud insisted we wrap our talis each morning.  Some things have not changed much.  

Certainly not the geography.  

By sheer coincidence a bit of Talmud I was I was glancing at the other day was somewhere at the end of Berakhot where the Talmud was discussing the blessing that one makes when seeing the Euphrates.  And it was clear that the rabbis knew well the cartography of the Tigris and Euphrates and the channels and the places where it was diverted by the Persians. . .  I just spent the last 25 minutes looking at the Tigris myself.  Many of the Rabbis spent their time in Mechuza - a wealthy town off the banks of the Tigris - talking about perfumes.   

Such is the Judaism that we recognize today:  The Judaism that is recorded in the Talmud that many of us spend a lifetime trying to master, the Judaism forged by hundreds of Rabbis toiling over hundreds of years to figure out what Judaism needs to look like in a post-Temple era, the Judaism that thrived and flourished for thousands of years from the Talmudic rabbis to the Ben Ish Hai - that is the Judaism that I grew up with.  It it hard to describe the feeling that one gets the first time he is in the place that Modern Judaism was conceived.  I don't know why some Rabbis thought the Euphrates required a blessing, but I know why I'd say one.  It is here that the details and protocols of modern Judaism were hashed out.  It is on these streets that the Rabbis argued over each detail and each theoretical principle that the Judaism of today stands on.  It is in these rivers that the Rabbis purified themselves and from these waters that they drew water and derived sustenance.  These are not people whose existence has ever been questioned.  These are not people about whom we tell fantastic tales.  These are people about whom we tell the most fantastic tale of them all: they created the document that shaped our lives for two thousand years.  They determined how we live, what we eat, who we marry, and what we say.  They made us who we are and they did it in a way that has endured and kept us enduring all this time.  What they worked out while talking in the markets and courtyards of Pumbeditha (now Falluja) was enough to spiritually and intellectually sustain Jews for millennia.  They make sure that Jews had a unique and special lifestyle that saw us through the inquisitions and crusades, the Holocaust and the pogroms, the industrial revolution the sexual revolution, and the internet revolution and the Copernican revolution.  The principles of law they worked out then work as well for camels (which are still around here in abundance) as they do for cars.  

It is sad that Jews, or anyone else for that matter, can't visit here today.  For a Jew whose every moment is guided by Jewish law seeing the tomb of Samuel pales in comparison to walking the same streets that the rabbis walked when they worked out what blessing one utters over cake.  When I think about the time I spent in yeshiva trying to understand what a "hatzer" - courtyard - must have looked like and I come here and see one, halacha - Jewish law - moves from an abstraction to a reality.  It is no longer some theoretical construction that exists only in some old book, but it is the way real people with real lives really lived.  And it is the way that many still live today.  

(Updated 4/20/10: Corrected a severe anachronism)