The Man Who Bet He Could Make Hillel Lose His Temper

Someone once bet four hundred gold coins that he could make Hillel lose his temper. He lost the bet. What he got instead was an education he had not paid for.

The story is recorded in the Talmud in Shabbat 31a, compiled in the Babylonian academies but drawing on traditions from the first century BCE and CE, the period when Hillel the Elder led the Sanhedrin. It is told immediately before three famous conversion stories, and the juxtaposition is deliberate: the patience Hillel demonstrates against a man trying to irritate him is the same patience he deploys with three difficult converts. The same quality of character produces different results depending on what the person in front of him needs.

The Questions Designed to Annoy

The man with the wager chose a Friday afternoon for his test, knowing that Hillel would be in the middle of preparing for Shabbat, bathing, arranging meals, mentally shifting from the week's legal work into the sacred pause that the day of rest required. The interruption was designed to catch Hillel in a moment of practical stress.

He called out: "Who among you is Hillel? Who is the Nasi?" Hillel wrapped himself in a robe and came out to answer. The question: "Why are the heads of the Babylonians oval?"

Not a legal question. Not a theological question. An anthropological provocation, the ancient equivalent of asking a distinguished scholar why people in a distant city have a funny accent.

Hillel said: "Because they have no skilled midwives." He answered as though the question deserved a real answer, and then he went back inside.

The man waited an hour and came back. "Why are the eyes of the people of Tadmor bleary?" Because they live among the sands and the dust affects their eyes. Hillel answered. The man left. The man came back again. Why are the feet of Africans wide? Because they live in marshy ground and develop wide feet for walking in it.

At some point the man said: "I have many more questions but I am afraid you will get angry." Hillel sat down, wrapped himself with care, and said: "Ask everything you need to ask."

What the Patience Was For

The man revealed the wager. He had four hundred gold coins riding on Hillel's anger. Hillel told him it was better that he lose four hundred gold coins and another four hundred after that than for Hillel to lose his composure. The calculation was not about the money. It was about what kind of man Hillel was going to be when he was being deliberately tested.

The eighty students who studied under Hillel, preserved in the record of Bava Batra 134a, were learning from him every day not just the legal traditions but the way a person carries those traditions in public. A teacher who lost his temper at a stupid question on a Friday afternoon was teaching something about Torah, just not what he intended to teach. Hillel refused to give that lesson.

The Three Converts

The story the Talmud places immediately after the wager story involves three converts who had each been driven away from Shammai's door and came to Hillel instead. All three had come with impossible demands. The first wanted the entire Torah taught while standing on one foot. Shammai raised a builder's measuring rod against him. Hillel accepted him and said: what is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah. Everything else is commentary. Go and learn it.

The second wanted to convert while accepting only the Written Torah but not the Oral Tradition. Shammai drove him away. Hillel began teaching him the Hebrew alphabet, then reversed the letter order the next day. When the convert protested that Hillel was teaching differently from yesterday, Hillel made his point: you are already relying on me to tell you what the letters mean. You must also rely on me for the Oral Torah.

The third wanted to convert in order to become the High Priest. Shammai drove him away. Hillel accepted him and gently led him through the relevant laws until the man discovered on his own that even King David could not have served as High Priest. The position required descent from Aaron. The man stopped wanting what he had originally wanted, because a patient teacher had let him find the answer himself.

The Method Behind the Patience

What Hillel understood that Shammai did not, or at least did not consistently apply, was that the person in front of you is not the person you wish had come to your door. The man with the four hundred gold coins was not a serious student. The first convert was probably a provocateur. The third convert had grandiose fantasies about priestly garments. None of them deserved, by the strict standards of the learned, the patience Hillel extended.

But Hillel did not evaluate them by what they deserved. He evaluated them by what they might become given the right conditions. The man with the wager walked away without his money and with a lesson about composure he had not expected to receive. The three converts walked away as Jews, shaped by a teacher who had decided that the form of Torah teaching was itself part of the teaching's content.

You cannot teach a person that what is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow, while treating that person with contempt. The message and the delivery are one thing. Hillel knew this. He practiced it on Friday afternoons in front of a man trying to win a bet, which is the most honest place to practice anything.