Hi friends, and welcome back to Talmud Daily, our 40-week tour throughout the entire Babylonian Talmud. And we are finishing this week of our tour of Tractate Sukkah. And there is a passage buried in the fifth chapter of Sukkah that if you’re not familiar with will really open up your eyes to some of the depth of Jewish thought, and particularly how Jewish thought kind of spills out into Jewish history itself, which is really what we try to do each and every Thursday on the tractate.
As we mentioned, Sukkah has a little bit of a redemptive undertone to it. You know, in this cycle of the three holidays of Passover, Shavuos, Sukkos—creation, revelation, redemption—just keeps on repeating itself.
So in the fifth chapter, the final chapter of Tractate Sukkah, on page 51b—and you can look it up—there is a story that is told from Tanach. Tanach, as we mentioned, is not the Talmud. It’s before the Talmud. Those are the three books of Torah, Nevi’im, and Kesuvim: Torah being the Five Books of Moses, Nevi’im being the collection of all the prophets, and Kesuvim being the kind of miscellaneous writings.
So there is a story from the words of the prophets in the book of Zechariah, where it says in the 12th chapter of Zechariah, we are told that the Jewish people in the future are all going to be crying at a funeral. This is part of the redemptive future that is foretold by the prophets to the Jewish people in the 12th chapter of Zechariah, and all of the Jewish people are crying. And the Talmud in Tractate Sukkah, on 51b, wants to know like, who are they crying for? Who in this future vision just died that the Jewish people are all crying?
And the Talmud actually offers two opinions. The latter opinion is that what got killed is our evil desires, our evil inclination. That so to speak it gets slaughtered, and now we are fully ready for redemption. The first opinion that the Talmud cites might be a concept that people are not familiar with, but I’ll tell you what the Talmud says, and then we’ll kind of unpack it.
The Talmud says this is the death of Mashiach ben Yosef, the Messiah that is kind of from the lineage of Yosef. What on earth is this about? Is there more than one Messiah in Jewish thought? So to understand this, we have to go back a little bit and understand who Yosef was, and what was happening. So Yosef was one of the children of the final of the forefathers.
We have three forefathers. See if they correspond to the three holidays. They do. They do, but you could figure that out, I think, even on your own. They’re in order: Avraham, Yitzchak, Yaakov; Pesach, Shavuos, Sukkos. For a different time. We’ll get there.
But Yaakov has 12 sons that eventually comprise the 12 tribes. And at the very end of the Torah, there are kind of two stories that are intertwined with each other. One is that Yosef is sold by his brothers, by the other brothers, and that’s how the Jewish people eventually make it to Egypt because Joseph becomes the viceroy in Egypt. Viceroy, what a weird word, but it’s like the second in command, like an officer. It’s an English word, but I’ve only heard it in the context of Joseph.
The other is the son Yehudah, and Yehudah also goes through a journey of his own in the 38th chapter of Genesis, where Yehudah has this inappropriate relationship, but it’s from that relationship that eventually comes, like many, many, many, many years later, but the lineage eventually leads to Dovid HaMelech, the first proper king of the Jewish people, and the symbol in many ways that we wrap up with the eventual return of the redemption: the Messiah has always been connected to Dovid HaMelech, King David, who is seen as the prototype of establishing a state for the Jewish people.
So it’s very strange that in Tractate Sukkah, we are told not about the Mashiach of Dovid, right, which we sometimes call Mashiach ben Dovid, the Mashiach that comes from, again, Dovid HaMelech, which eventually traces up to Yehudah. No, we’re told about a different Mashiach, and this is Mashiach ben Yosef, who kind of is the lineage from Yosef.
Now what’s interesting is to understand that, again, both Yosef and Yehudah were children of Yaakov, but from two different mothers. One is Rochel, and one is Leah. Yosef’s mother is Rochel, and Yehudah’s mother is Leah. Now they were two sisters, and for all of Jewish history, you’re not allowed to marry two sisters, so this is pre the giving of the Torah. And then they each…one has the tribe of Joseph, that come from the children of Rochel, and one has the tribe of Yehudah, which eventually leads to King David.
Now we usually think of Messiah in terms of King David, of thinking about that restoration of the Jewish state, and the Jewish people are at peace, and we’re able to study Torah, and really fulfill our mission and purpose in this world. We don’t really hear much, and people don’t speak at as much about Messiah of Joseph, but it appears in the very end of Tractate Sukkah, and we understand why, because Sukkah is kind of the end of this cycle where we ultimately are at peace and come to that redemptive state. After the creation, after revelation, we finally come to the redemption of Sukkos.
Now, I want to talk a little bit about how the figure of Joseph has been understood throughout Jewish history, because I actually think it’s very relevant to our listeners in this very moment. Joseph, we are told, is this figure who we will eventually mourn. He’s not going to be the figure that brings us actually through the threshold and enacts the state. That’s the Messiah of King David, from the lineage of King David. That’s what we call Moshiach ben Dovid. Ben means the son of—it’s not literal son—it’s from the lineage. Dovid comes from Dovid, which earlier comes from Yehudah, whose mother is Leah, married to Yaakov.
But there’s another Messiah, and that is Moshiach ben Yosef. Comes from the lineage of Yosef, whose mother was Rochel, who’s also married to Yaakov. What is unique about the Moshiach of Yosef? So to understand this, there is a fascinating incident in Jewish history that really opens up your eyes to what the role of these two Messiahs are and how, in Jewish thought, we really understand redemption itself.
Earlier commentators and Jewish thinkers have all said that redemption is a process, and each of these Messiah figures, messianic figures, play different roles in the process. Generally, we say first comes the Messiah the son of Joseph, and then the Messiah the son of David. Moshiach ben Yosef is first, and then Moshiach ben Dovid. But their exact roles aren’t really fleshed out, though we do understand based on a prophecy that is shared in Chapter 37 of Yechezkel that the eventual prophecy is going to be about bringing these two camps together.
But what is this actually about? So I want to share with you something really fascinating from Jewish history. And that is on July 3, 1904, Theodor Herzl died at the age of 44. Now, Theodor Herzl was the great Zionist visionary. He never lived to see the establishment of the State of Israel, but was the one who galvanized Jews around the world, particularly in Europe, to start making plans to kind of build this state. He even eventually had an audience with the Pope, which is absolutely amazing. Theodor Herzl, a journalist, somebody who was not a rabbi, who was not particularly learned, not particularly educated Jewishly, didn’t practice that much Judaism, but really felt this very strong conviction that the Jewish people also deserve a homeland of their own.
When he died on July 3, 1904, at the age of 44, so there was already a split between the religious community and the secular Jewish community in Israel. There was a sense that the Zionist movement, the real leaders, were not Jews who were deeply educated and pious in the way that we think of rabbinic leadership, and it led to a little bit of a split that we’re still feeling now within the Zionist movement.
There was, however, notably, one rabbi who got up, and with a little bit of controversy, gave a eulogy for Theodor Herzl, and that was—he had just arrived in the land of Israel—Rav Kook, who was a rabbi in Yafo. That was the first time that he was a rabbi before he became the chief rabbi of Israel. And Rav Kook actually came forward and gave a eulogy for Herzl. This is what’s known quite famously as the Hesped biYerushalayim, the Eulogy in Jerusalem. And Rav Kook gave a very moving speech where he actually did not mention Theodor Herzl particularly, but spoke about these two figures, and specifically about our passage in Talmud about the Messiah the son of Joseph.
And the way Rav Kook understands this is that the Jewish people really need two different salvations. We need a physical salvation, and we need a spiritual salvation. We need a physical salvation of bringing the Jews all together. We need the establishment of a state, roadways, an army, defense system. All countries and all people need this. The Jewish people need it too. We need the infrastructure of redemption. We need the container of redemption.
This, Rav Kook says, is the role of Moshiach ben Yosef, as opposed to Moshiach ben Dovid, the Messiah from the lineage of David, of King David. They have a different role. That is to restore the soul of the Jewish people. That is to restore the purposefulness, the mission-driven life of the Jewish people, to teach Torah to the Jewish people, to reinstate Jewish practice and excitement and inspiration.
So on the one hand, part of redemption is infrastructure, is getting there, is getting all the Jews together. Figuring out the roads. You know, we need roads, we need a subway system, we need piping. I mean, we need that. And Rav Kook says these are the roles of these two Messiahs. At all times the Jewish people really need two different types of salvation. We need a physical salvation and we need a spiritual salvation.
And each of these has prototypical leaders. And what Rav Kook is transmitting without saying it explicitly is this is the beauty of the project of the establishment of the State of Israel. That on the one hand, you have people without any background in Judaism. These were really most of the Zionist leaders. They didn’t spend that much time in yeshiva. They weren’t that committed to Jewish life and Jewish thought. But you know what? They built the infrastructure of the state. And now Rav Kook says we need something else. We need that final redemption to breathe the soulfulness, to breathe inspiration into this infrastructure.
And that is the ultimate complete redemption where we have the union of both the figure of Yehuda and Yosef, Mashiach ben David and Mashiach ben Yosef, coming together and giving the full and complete redemption of the Jewish people to re-establish the sukkah of David, hanofeles, the fallen sukkah, being re-established to be a home for the entirety of the Jewish people.
So thank you so much for listening, and let’s together keep making Torah sweet.