The Spy Who Gave Himself to Protect Israel

The sages were gathered and they were frightened. For thirty years, Jews had been dying. When a member of the separatist sect saw a Jew, the tradition records, he would kill him. Tens of thousands had organized to prevent Israel from making the pilgrimage festival. The communities had been tearing apart in slow motion, and the worst part was how confused the lines had become. People could not tell, in some places, who belonged to which community. The sectarians had sent out twelve men through twelve kingdoms. These men prophesied and won followers. Many of the children of Israel went after them. The sages sat and wept and said: woe to us, for we have sinned, that this evil has come about in our days.

This is the situation the Aggadah of Shimon Kippa, preserved in the Otzar Midrashim and compiled by Judah David Eisenstein in the early twentieth century, places at the opening of its story. It is a story about a man who volunteered to do something terrible in order to save his people, and who did it so thoroughly that he never came home.

His name was Shimon Kefa, a righteous elder who had mastered the ineffable Name of God. When the sages asked who could go among the sectarians and draw an unmistakable line between the two communities, Shimon Kefa stood up. "If it is good in your eyes," he said, "I will separate these men from the congregation of the children of Israel, so that they will have no portion or inheritance among Israel." The elders said: do it. We take the sin upon ourselves.

He went into the Temple first. He wrote the great Name, cut his own flesh, and placed the writing inside the wound. Then he walked to the sectarian capital and announced himself as an emissary with the power to perform miracles. They tested him. He healed a leper with his hands. He raised a dead man. The sectarians fell on their faces and said: truly, you are who you say you are.

Now Shimon Kefa had their trust. He used it.

The instruction he gave them was strategic, not spiritual. He told them their movement hated Israel and its Torah, citing the words of the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 1:14). He told them the suffering of their founder had been for the purpose of redeeming the sectarians from Gehinnom, not for the sake of Israel, and that Israel should therefore be left alone. "From now on," he said, "you shall not do any more evil to any Jew. If a Jew says to you, come with me a mile, go with him two. If a Jew strikes you on the left cheek, turn to him the right cheek as well."

Then he changed their calendar. No more Passover. No more Shavuot. No more Sukkot. New dates, new customs, a complete separation of practice. The Aggadah of Shimon Kippa records each of these new observances in detail. He replaced the Jewish festival structure with dates tied to the history of the separatist sect itself. The communities would now be liturgically incompatible. No one would be confused about who belonged where.

The sectarians, convinced, asked him to stay. He agreed, on one condition: they would build him a tower in the city, give him bread and water daily, and let him live alone in it until he died. They agreed. He lived in that tower for six years. The text says he spent the time composing liturgical poems, which he sent throughout all the borders of Israel, so that Jews everywhere would have something to hold onto. He served the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in private, alone, in a stone tower in the city of his enemies, until the day he died.

They buried him in the tower. They built a magnificent building on top of it. The Midrash says this building still stands in Rome, and they call it by a name meaning "stone," because that is where he dwelled until the end.

The tradition preserved this story because it could not be explained away. A sage so righteous he mastered the divine Name, who used that mastery not to call down fire or part waters, but to go into exile among the people who were killing his community, draw a line they could never erase, and spend the rest of his life in a tower writing poems for people he would never see again. The Otzar Midrashim holds it alongside miracle accounts and legal discussions as a different kind of account: what it costs to protect a community when the threat is not an army but confusion.

The sages praised his sacrifice. The children of Israel kept singing the poems.