Elijah Fixed a Marriage by Letting a Rabbi Get Spat On

Elijah the prophet, who never died but was carried to heaven in a chariot of fire, spent the centuries between his ascension and the end of days doing what the tradition says he has always done: moving through the human world, attending circumcisions, solving problems that human beings have made too complicated for themselves, appearing as a stranger at the moment when a stranger is exactly what is needed. The rabbis of the Talmudic period, whose accounts of Elijah fill entire tractates of the Midrash literature, understood him as operating in the gap between the law and its human consequences. The law could be clear and still produce a bad outcome. Elijah appears in the gap.

One such gap opened on a Friday evening in the town where Rabbi Meir had been preaching. Rabbi Meir, who lived in the second century CE and whose legal opinions fill the Mishnah more densely than those of almost any other sage, was known as a riveting speaker. People stayed longer than they planned to stay. This is what happened to the woman in question. She went to hear Rabbi Meir teach on a Friday afternoon and allowed herself to be detained by the sermon. By the time she walked home, it was dark. Shabbat had begun. She had been gone far longer than her husband expected.

Her husband was the kind of man who turned his anger into oaths before he had fully thought through what the oath would cost him. He swore that she would not enter the house until she had spat in the face of the highly-esteemed Rabbi. His words, the tradition notes, his actual words. He did not swear she had to apologize to the Rabbi, or explain herself to the Rabbi, or even simply see the Rabbi. He required that she spit in the Rabbi's face, an act of public humiliation directed at one of the greatest scholars of his generation, as the price of returning to her own home.

The woman, caught between her husband's oath and the impossibility of what he demanded, was in genuine predicament. Elijah appeared to Rabbi Meir and told him what had happened. A pious woman, Elijah said, had fallen into a sore predicament on his account. She had done nothing wrong. She had gone to learn Torah and stayed too long because the Torah was being taught well. The result was a domestic crisis that the ordinary mechanisms of reconciliation could not easily reach, because the husband had made a formal oath and oaths in Jewish law carry real weight.

Rabbi Meir's solution was immediate and required no negotiation. He announced publicly that he was experiencing trouble with one of his eyes and was looking for someone who knew the traditional remedy, which involved spitting into the eye of the afflicted person. The Ginzberg account of this story does not call this a pretense so much as a construction, a frame built precisely to allow the truth to operate inside it. The woman, designated by Elijah, came forward. She spat into the Rabbi's eye in the presence of witnesses. She had fulfilled, literally and exactly, what her husband had required. She had done so publicly. She had done so without actually humiliating Rabbi Meir, who had presented himself as requesting the service rather than receiving an insult. The husband's oath was satisfied. The woman went home.

Rabbi Meir's willingness to be spat upon is not the incidental part of this story. The tradition preserved it as the point. The Legends of the Jews, compiled from Talmudic sources that accumulated over four centuries before Louis Ginzberg organized them in the early twentieth century, understood this moment as a teaching about what scholars are for. Rabbi Meir did not have to do this. His standing was such that he could have found another way to help the woman, or could have addressed the husband directly, or could have ruled on the legal status of the oath through other means. He chose the way that required him to be the one who absorbed the cost. He turned his own face into the mechanism of her release.

Elijah, for his part, appears and disappears without ceremony. He identifies the problem, he finds the right person to help, and he leaves the resolution to human beings who have enough wisdom to act once they know what is needed. The legal traditions surrounding Elijah describe a figure who moves between the cosmic and the domestic with complete ease, who can argue about the laws of the firstborn in one context and arrange for a wife to come home safely in another. The tradition saw no contradiction between these scales. The God who issued the law of the firstborn is the same God who arranged for a woman in a village on a Friday night not to sleep outside because she stayed too long at a good sermon.