Honi Slept Seventy Years and Woke Up Forgotten

The Verse He Could Not Leave Alone

Psalms 126:1: When the Lord returned the captivity of Zion, we were like dreamers. The exile lasted seventy years. A whole people woke up and went home and looked back at the exile the way a person looks back at a dream, unable to fully account for the time that passed. Honi the Circle-Drawer read this verse and could not stop pulling at it.

He was not a casual reader. He was the man who had once stood inside a circle scratched in the dust and told God that he would not move until rain came for God's children. He knew that the world was responsive to human persistence. Psalm 126 offered him a different kind of puzzle. Rain can break a drought in an afternoon. Exile swallows names, houses, graves, and children. How does an absence that long feel like a dream?

The Carob Tree and the Old Man

On his way through the world with this question pressing against him, Honi saw an old man planting a carob tree. He asked the man whether he expected to eat from it. Carob takes seventy years to fruit. The man who plants today will not live to taste what he plants.

The old man's answer was precise and patient. "My ancestors planted for me. I plant for those who come after me." The logic was not optimism. It was responsibility understood across generations, the knowledge that a man is the heir of what others planted before he was born and the ancestor of those who will plant after he is dead. The carob tree was not for the planter. It was for someone else entirely.

Honi sat down under a rock to think. He fell asleep.

Seventy Years Later

He slept through a lifetime. When he woke, the carob tree the old man had planted was full and bearing fruit. A man was gathering carob from its branches. Honi asked him if he had planted the tree. "No," the man said. "My grandfather planted it."

Honi walked to his house. He asked for himself. They showed him his grandson. He told his grandson who he was. No one believed him. He had been asleep for the life of a man, and the world had gone on without him, and the world no longer had a place for him. He was Honi, but the Honi the world remembered was a figure of the past, a name associated with an event that had happened to someone else's grandfather.

He went to the house of study. He heard the sages saying: "this analysis is as clear as in the days of Honi the Circle-Drawer." He told them he was Honi. They did not believe him. Or they could not treat him with the respect that Honi deserved, because the Honi in front of them was a stranger, and respect requires recognition, and they did not recognize him.

The Prayer and Its Answer

The tradition preserves his response. Honi prayed. He asked for either companionship or death. "Either give me back the world I knew, the friends who knew my name, the context in which I was Honi, or let me go." The prayer was answered. He died.

The Talmud adds the commentary in the same breath: this is what people mean when they say, "give me companionship or give me death." The phrase was already a proverb by the time the Talmud was compiled. Honi's story was its origin.

What He Learned About the Psalm

Honi had asked how seventy years of exile could feel like a dream. The answer he received was experiential. He lived it. He slept through seventy years and woke to a world in which nothing he had known was available to him. The people who remembered him were dead. The relationships that had given him his name were gone. He was himself but he was not himself in any context that made selfhood livable.

Exile is like this. Not like sleep exactly, but like sleeping through the world in which you were known and waking into one that has moved on. The psalm is not describing a pleasant dream. It is describing the disorientation of a people who returned and found that the world they had left was not the world they came back to, that the addresses were the same but the names on the doors were different, that they were themselves but the context in which they were themselves no longer existed. Honi had wondered how this was possible. Heaven showed him.