Elisha ben Abuja

Elisha ben Abuja (also: Elisha ben Abuja , Hebrew אלישע בן אבויה; epithet: Acher , "the other" , known to him as an apostate not to mention by name; * before 70 in Jerusalem ) was an as heretics disreputable Tannait the so-called 2nd generation.

Life

He was Rabbi Meir's teacher and friends with Rabbi Akiba . Elisa ben Abuja was considered one of the greatest experts on religious law, which he then no longer wanted to comply with, so that he became a free thinker. Therefore he was generally given the apostate name "Acher", "the other", "the apostate" ( bChag. 15a) by his contemporaries .

There are various assumptions about the reasons for his "apostasy": After dealing with mystical and gnostic questions, after his "penetration" into the PaRDeS (Hebrew פרדס, "paradise", paraphrase for the area of ​​mysticism) he had the "plantings of the Paradise garden destroyed ", a symbol for the turning away from the religious law ( Tosefta Chag. II., 3; bChag. 14b). It was generally accepted that penetrating Jewish mysticism was extremely dangerous and that only a few, like his friend Rabbi Akiba, survived without becoming insane. Elisha also studied Greek philosophy and, according to contemporary accounts, often sang in Greek.

Elisha himself asserted that his father Abuja induced him to study the Jewish scriptures out of ambition rather than out of pure love for the Torah . Abuja had already consecrated Elisha to study the Torah on the day of circumcision and for this pompous celebration the most outstanding scholars, Jochanan ben Sakkai , Eliezer ben Hyrkanos , Yehoshua ben Chananja and others, as well as the most prominent men of his time in social standing, Nakdimon ben Gorjon, Kalba Sabua, Ben Zizith Hakessass, all the rich in Jerusalem in general, were invited. Therefore the Torah could not bind him permanently to itself (jChag. 77b).

A third theory for his turning away from observance of the law suspects Elisha doubts about God's righteousness after his own considerations regarding retribution, reward and punishment.

Because of his free thinking, Elisha became more and more an outsider and despised among his colleagues. Only Meir remained steadfastly faithful to his former teacher, not least because of his extraordinary spiritual gifts, but gave the following justification in defense of his own behavior: "I found a pomegranate, I ate the inside, but I threw the peel away" (bChag. 15b). Even on his deathbed, Meir, who had not been able to let go of his teacher Elisha, tried to induce him to repent. Elisha died before he could have made a definitive statement. Meir interpreted Elisha's crying during this discussion as a turnaround at the last second and was very happy about it. Merit is attributed to Rabbi Meir for saving his teacher from punishment in the world to come. When Meir saw that Elisha's grave was on fire, he spread his suit over it and said, "If God won't save you, I'll do it."

In the traditional Jewish literature (e.g. Abot IV., 25), some sayings of an educational nature by Elischa have been preserved, which probably originated from the time before he became "Acher". After that, however, Elisha criticized the study of the Torah, even made fun of it, and became an ally of the emperor during the period of the Hadrianic religious persecution. During a tour of Jewish schools where the boys were studying, he is said to have exclaimed: "What are they doing here? Why all this studying? Should one be a carpenter, the other a carpenter, the third a tailor" (jChag . 1c).

Survival in literature

• Max Letteris (1800–1871) treated Elisa in a Hebrew drama (1865) as the " Faust " of Judaism.
• The Austrian writer Nathan Birnbaum chose in the early Zionist phase of his life (he later became a territorialist, Yiddishist and Aguda Torah faithful ) based on Elisa ben Abuja, the writer pseudonym Mathias Acher .
• Jakob Gordin (1853–1909) wrote a play in Yiddish in 1906 , Elisa ben Abuja , which was performed unsuccessfully in New York during Gordin's lifetime, but successfully performed several times after Gordin's death.
• The conservative American rabbi Milton Steinberg (1903-1950) wrote a controversial (fictional) novel about Elisa ben Abuja: As A Driven Leaf (1939).
• In 2007 the Iraqi-Israeli author Shimon Ballas (* 1930 in Baghdad , immigrated to Israel in 1951) published an English-language novel entitled Outcast , in which a figure similar to Elisa ben Abuja is described, a Jew who converts to Islam and himself in the end cannot find his way around his old or his new home and is abandoned by all friends. This novel - also translated into Hebrew ( we hu acher ) - was then misused for anti-Jewish propaganda during the Saddam regime.

literature

• Adolf Jellinek , Elischa ben Abuja , 1847
• MD Hoffmann, Tolĕdot Elischa ben Abuja , 1880
• Samuel Bäck , Elischa ben Abuja-Acher, illustrated by sources , Frankfurt am Main 1891
• Albert Assaraf, L'hérétique: Elicha ben Abouya ou l'autre absolu , Paris, Balland, 1991
• Alon Goshen-Gottstein, The Sinner and the Amnesiac: the rabbinic invention of Elisha ben Abuya and Eleazar ben Arach , Stanford University Press (California), 2000
• Bernard Barc, Les Arpenteurs du Temps , le Zèbre, Lausanne 2000
• John W. McGinley, "The Written" as the vocation of conceiving jewishly , 2006

Individual evidence

1. ^ Encyclopedia Judaica , Vol. 6, p. 669