Shabbos 34

“If competing prostitutes still apply makeup to each other to help one another look beautiful, all the more so that Torah scholars should cooperate with each other.”

The theme for today’s reading portion is boundaries and crossing them from the religious to the secular world, from day to night. 

Rabbi Shimon returns. He is a different person than the ascetic that we saw in yesterday’s reading and when he sees the light, he really sees the light. He has come to terms with the messiness of the ways of the world and instead of retreating into the solitude of his cave, we are told that he “took steps to improve the city.”  He undertook a mission to determine where the ground was ritually pure through a simple determination of where it was hard, and where corpses may reside deep underground. He marked the places that held corpses and we are told that in this way, “he purified the marketplace so that even priests could walk through it.”

Rabbi Shimon does not prove himself to be a man who is able to forgive easily or show compassion for his rivals. He encounters in the marketplace the “son of converts” who was responsible for his death sentence in yesterday’s reading. Rabbi Shimon “directed his eyes toward him and turned him to a pile of bones.” His thirteen years studying Torah in the cave buried in sand did not result in a willingness to forgive and forget.

We are provided with a description of twilight as a period were the borders between day and night are permeable. We are told that it is a period of uncertainty when “the eastern face of the sky is reddened by the light of the sun.” We are told that the “duration of the twilight period is the time it takes for a person to walk half a mil after the sun sets.” It is during these periods of uncertainty that the unexpected can happen.

The theme of borders is present in the discussion of the eruv which joins courtyards and creates a Shabbat border that allows carrying of objects from one domain to another. I am currently watching the four-episode series called Unorthodox on Netflix. The show resonated for me in today’s reading with the discussion of an eruv. The first episode begins with a broken eruv fluttering in the air during the Sabbath and a trapped Esty trying to escape her Brooklyn apartment building and orthodox life. 

Unorthodox is beautifully acted by Shira Haas, who was equally intense and wonderful in Shtisel.  Etsy, like Rabbi Shimon is emerging from the cave of the sheltered life she lived in Brooklyn and discovering the secular world of Berlin. She is at first fearful, hesitant and like Rabbi Shimon somewhat judgmental when she glimpses her mother kissing another woman while she waits outside her Berlin apartment. She has a struggle ahead of her with finding her place in the secular world just like the august Rabbi did who had the ability to turn people to bones.

Here is a link to the Netflix series Unorthodox: https://www.netflix.com/title/81019069