The Talmud is a thick book. It gathers what the rabbis said to one another over several centuries. Most of it is argument about law. But stories are wedged in between.
Those stories are called aggadah. They are the part this series reads. The first one begins on a roof.
Half of a Day’s Wage
Hillel was a day laborer. He carried wood and sold it and lived on that.
What he earned was very little. He left half of it at home and paid the other half to the doorkeeper of the study hall. To learn he had to pass the door, and to pass the door he had to pay.
One day he found no work. That day he had nothing to hand over. The doorkeeper did not let him in.
Hanging at the Skylight
Hillel did not go home. He climbed onto the roof of the study hall instead.
There was one window up there that let the light in. He pressed himself against it and sat, listening to the words going back and forth inside.
It was a Friday night, deep in winter. Snow fell and covered his body, and he froze where he sat.
Why Is It Dark Today
Dawn came. Inside the hall the teachers looked up.
One of them said, “Brother, the room is usually bright by this hour, and today it is dark. Is the sky clouded over?”
What they looked up at was not a cloud. It was a person. A body under the snow was blocking the window.
What Comes Before the Sabbath
The teachers climbed up and brought him down.
They washed him, rubbed him with oil, and sat him in front of the fire. It was the Sabbath. Handling fire was forbidden on that day.
כְּדַאי הוּא זֶה לְחַלֵּל עָלָיו אֶת הַשַּׁבָּת (kedai hu zeh lechalel alav et haShabbat) This man is worthy that the Sabbath be broken for his sake. (Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 35b, translated directly)
That sentence is the conclusion of the story. Saving one person comes before the rule.
Two Questions Are Left Behind
The story praises Hillel. He is the man who did not turn around at the door but climbed all the way to the roof. Later he founds the school quoted more than any other in the Talmud.
But the story does not stop there. It also leaves in what pushed him onto the roof in the first place.
It was the doorkeeper. More precisely, it was the arrangement that had the doorkeeper collecting money. So a story that praises hunger becomes, at the same time, a story that questions the threshold.
Today, What Is Your Own Threshold
Think of one thing you want to learn and are not learning.
What is blocking it. Money, time, or the embarrassment of asking? Who put that threshold there?
Then ask it from the other side as well. Whether you are standing as the doorkeeper in front of someone else’s door.