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Reuben Disguises Himself as a Roman to Save the Sabbath

The counselor's robe was not his. Under it he argued that Sabbath, the knife, and purity were injuries Rome should keep.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. Three Philosophers in the Ranks
  2. Give Back the Breath
  3. Three Laws Struck From the Books
  4. The Counselor Who Was Not a Roman
  5. They Tore the Paper in the Palace

Adrianus stood in front of his own army and told the men to worship him. Then he told them what the next three years would hold. He would take the Temple.

Reuben Disguises Himself as a Roman to Save the Sabbath Click for full size

Three Philosophers in the Ranks

Three philosophers came forward before the ranks broke up.

The first asked how a new king gets himself recognized inside the house of the king already sitting there. "Go out of God's house first," he said. "Then ask for a throne." The house he meant was the world, and the emperor was standing in the middle of it.

The second asked for a heaven and an earth. Not the ones already made. New ones, made now, in front of everybody.

The third named a ship that had gone down in deep water years before and asked him to bring it up.

The emperor did not make a heaven. He did not raise the ship. He did not walk out of the world.

Give Back the Breath

His wife finished it. She came to him with the smallest demand of the four.

"Give back what was left with you," she said. "The soul. It was put into you, and it will be taken out of you, and you had no say in either. Hand it over now, on your own authority, and I will call you a god."

He opened his hand and found only borrowed air in it. A man who wants worship has to give up the breath in his chest on his own authority. Every breath he had ever taken was on loan. He let the design go.

Three Laws Struck From the Books

The same kingdom came back at Israel later with a clerk's list instead of a claim to godhood. Three commandments went off the books. No Sabbath. No circumcision. No laws of purity.

Clerks posted the list. Workshops were to stay open on the seventh day. The knife for the eighth day was to stay in its cloth. Households were told their months were no longer their own.

Rest one day in seven and a people is not a tool. Cut the mark into a son and an older covenant sits on his body than any the empire can offer. Keep the purity laws and a household refuses to be common property. Take the three away and there is, after enough years, nothing left to point at and call a Jew.

The Counselor Who Was Not a Roman

Reuben the son of Astrobolus put on the robe of a Roman counselor, walked into the hall, and spoke to the men in power in the only language they trusted, which was their own advantage.

"You want them poor," he said. "Then let them keep the Sabbath. One day in seven with the workshops shut and the fields idle. Count the wages they will lose."

"You want them weak. Then let them circumcise the infants. Take the strength out of the boys in the first week of their lives."

"You want them few. Then let them keep the laws of purity, which keep husbands from wives for half of every month. Count the children that will not be born."

Every commandment he handed them as an injury. They wrote the permission and were pleased with themselves for the cruelty of it. For a while the lamps went up on Friday evenings again, and the knives came out on the eighth day, and the households ordered their months as they always had.

Then somebody in the hall learned that the counselor was a Jew. The decree came back, and it came back harder, because a court that has been made a fool of does not forgive quickly. The robe had been enough to save the Sabbath for a while. It was not enough to keep it.

They Tore the Paper in the Palace

Two men went up as messengers, Eleazar the son of Joseph and Simon bar Temalion, and they arrived at a palace with a crisis inside it. A demon had entered the emperor's daughter. She was screaming in a room the physicians could not help her in.

The sages spoke to it and it came out of her. The girl stood up quiet. Her father had nothing to pay them with that they wanted.

So they asked for the decree.

It was brought out to them, and they took it in their hands in the middle of the palace and tore it. The sound was almost nothing. Paper coming apart in a quiet room, while the men who had written it stood and watched, and the Sabbath went back into Jewish houses without a disguise on it.

RomeSabbathCircumcisionPurityDecreeReubenHadrianCunning
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From the tradition

Sources

2 sources

The texts behind this telling. Some cards carry a translation of the source; others are our own retelling of it, and each card says which. Every card links out to the original.

Exempla of the Rabbis, No. 19Exempla of the Rabbis (Gaster, 1924)

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.The Exempla of the Rabbis, Moses Gaster (1924) · Public Domain

The wicked kingdom, the Roman authority that crushed Judea after the Temple's fall, once decreed that the Jews should not keep the Sabbath, nor circumcise their children, nor keep the laws of ritual purity according to the Torah. These three commandments were no accident of choice. They were among the practices that most clearly marked Israel as a distinct and covenanted people, and so the empire aimed to erase them.

Reuben the son of Astrobolus, disguised as a Roman counsellor, frustrated the decree by speaking in the empire's own self-interest. He argued that the rulers should want the Jews to grow poor, so they should let them rest one day a week and lose their wages; that they should want them weak, so they should let their children be circumcised; and that they should want them few, so they should let them keep the laws of purity. By framing each mitzvah as a hardship, he won permission for the very practices the decree had banned. After a time the Romans recognized that he had been a Jew, and they renewed the decree.

Then two sages went as messengers, Eleazar the son of Joseph and Simon bar Temalion. A demon entered the daughter of the Emperor, and at the bidding of the sages it departed and she was healed. As their reward they were permitted to tear up the decree with their own hands. The tale teaches that Israel's survival often came through cunning advocacy and through sages whose holiness commanded respect even in the halls of a hostile empire.

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Exempla of the Rabbis, No. 3Exempla of the Rabbis (Gaster, 1924)

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.The Exempla of the Rabbis, Moses Gaster (1924) · Public Domain

The emperor Adrianus, the Hadrian of rabbinic memory, commands his army to worship him as a god and boasts that within three years he will capture the Temple. Three philosophers step forward to dispute the claim, and this tale from Gaster's Exempla of the Rabbis turns the confrontation into a test of what a god must be able to do. The first philosopher argues from propriety: how can a new king be recognized inside the house of the reigning king? Before Hadrian can claim divine honors, he must first leave God's house, the world itself, for two sovereigns cannot share one throne room.

The second sets an impossible task, asking him to create a new heaven and a new earth, the one deed that marks the true Creator. The third demands he retrieve a ship that has already foundered in the depths of the sea, a thing no mortal power can reach. Hadrian fails each challenge. Then his own wife delivers the sharpest argument of all. She tells him to first return to its owner the property that had been entrusted to him, meaning the soul, the breath of life that God deposits in each person and reclaims at death. A god gives life and takes it; a man only holds it on loan. Only once Hadrian can surrender and restore that deposit on his own authority could he be acknowledged as divine. Faced with these arguments, he relinquishes his design.

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