Hillel

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Hillel (ca. 60 B.C.-A.D. ca. 10) was a Jewish scholar and founder of a dynasty of patriarchs who were the spiritual heads of Jewry until the 5th century.

Sources of information about Hillel are meager and must be sifted from many legends which subsequent generations have spun about him. Hillel, known as Hillel Hazaken, or Hillel the Elder, was born in Babylonia and was said to have descended from the house of David. Impelled by a thirst for learning, he migrated to Palestine at a mature age (ca. 40 B.C.) and arrived in Jerusalem only a few years before Herod the Great ascended to the Judean throne. In Jerusalem, Hillel studied at the academy of two highly reputed scholars, Shmaiah and Abtalion, while earning a meager livelihood as a manual laborer. Half of Hillel's wages went for the support of his family, while the remainder was used for tuition at the academy.

Hillel devoted himself to his studies with great zeal and skill and succeeded in attaining the rank of nasi, prince or president of the Bet Din Hagadol, the High Court of ordained scholars known as the Great Sanhedrin. This was the supreme legal and judicial body in Judea.

Hillel's Teachings

Hillel appears to have laid great stress on the practice of Babylonian schools to derive doctrine and law directly from the scriptural text rather than merely relying on established tradition, memorized and transmitted orally from one generation to another. This method of textual deduction, called midrash, or exposition, involved the use of Hillel's Seven Rules of Logic. These rules enabled the rabbis in Hillel's and subsequent generations to apply the law to new conditions on the theory that the new laws were implicit in the Mosaic law.

Hillel was a man of saintly and noble character and disposition. A popular anecdote tells of the heathen who asked Hillel to teach him the entire Torah in the time he could stand on one foot. Unperturbed, Hillel answered, "What is hateful to thee, do not do unto your neighbor. This is the whole Torah and the rest is commentary; go and study it further!" This version of the golden rule is believed by many to be a less utopian and more practical precept than the affirmative one to love one's neighbor as oneself (Leviticus 19:18).

The sayings attributed to Hillel in the tractate Abot (Fathers) reveal his humanity and virtue. Hillel was a great lover of peace who urged his followers to "be of the disciples of Aaron [who was famed as a peacemaker in rabbinic lore]; loving thy fellow creatures and drawing them nigh to Torah." "Judge not thy neighbor till thou art in his place, " he urged. "If I am not for myself, who will be for me, yet if I am only for myself, then what am I?" he taught. He also preached the social tenet, "Do not separate thyself from the community."

For 2 1/2 years the Hillelites and Shammaites are said to have debated the question of the worthwhileness of existence, the Hillelites characteristically taking a positive viewpoint and the Shammaites the negative. On this basic issue the two opposing schools agreed that theoretically the Shammaites may be correct, but practically, since existence is a fact, man should live constructively and effectively. Life-affirming Judaism permits of no other attitude.

Further Reading

Solomon Zeitlin, The Rise and Fall of the Judaean State, vol. 2 (1967), offers a good sketch of the life and work of Hillel. Nahum N. Glatzer, Hillel the Elder: The Emergence of Classical Judaism (1956), presents a well-written, popular account of Hillel's life, works, and ideas. Recommended for a brief historical survey of Hillel's times is Judah Goldin, "The Period of the Talmud, " in Louis Finkelstein, ed., The Jews: Their History, Culture, and Religion, vol. 1 (1946; 3d ed. 1960). Louis Ginzberg, On Jewish Law and Lore (1955), contains an essay "The Significance of the Halacha." Hillel's doctrines are expounded in George Foote Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era, vol. 1 (1927).

Additional Sources

Blumenthal, Aaron H., If I am only for myself; the story of Hillel, New York United Synagogue Commission on Jewish Education 1973.

Buxbaum, Yitzhak., The life and teachings of Hillel, Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1994.

Neusner, Jacob, Judaism in the beginning of Christianity, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984.

(c.70 BCE-c. 10 CE). A leader of the Pharisees during the reign of King Herod and greatest sage of the Second Temple period; known as Hillel the Elder (or "the Babylonian"). Born into a family that claimed Davidic descent, Hillel first studied Torah in his native Babylonia, then in Jerusalem under Shemayah and Avtalyon. While perfecting his Torah scholarship in Jerusalem, he was forced to maintain his family and himself on whatever he could earn from manual labor, half of which went to the porter at the house of study. Once on a Friday, at the height of winter, Hillel lacked the fee and was unable to gain admission; he therefore crawled onto the roof so as to hear the lesson through a skylight. At daybreak, Shemayah and Avtalyon caught sight of his figure obstructing the light and had him brought down, nearly frozen to death under a blanket of snow. Although it was a Sabbath, they had a fire lit to revive him, declaring that he was worthy of the Sabbath's being profaned for his sake (Yoma 35b). After his masters' death, Hillel apparently spent some time either in Babylonia or Alexandria, or else with a sectarian group in the wilderness.

His emergence as an authoritative teacher of Halakhah is described in a talmudic passage (Pes. 66a) indicating the way in which he found a solution to the problem of whether the paschal offering might be made if Passover eve coincided with the Sabbath. Hillel used his canon of Hermeneutics, seven rules of Bible interpretation (later expanded to 13 by Ishmael Ben Elisha) which appear to have been previously unknown and which were only accepted after he appealed to the authority of his teachers, Shemayah and Avtalyon. Though at first treated with disdain on account of his Babylonian origin, Hillel was eventually appointed Nasi (president or patriarch), an office which remained hereditary among his descendants for several centuries. Like his predecessors, he shared authority with a vice president of the Sanhedrin, the head of the rabbinical court (av bet din)---first with a certain Menahem, who resigned, taking with him many of his students, then with Shammai, who became Hillel's colleague and lifelong controversialist. In the face of Herod's reign of terror, Hillel seems to have adopted a quietist policy, but he did not hesitate to criticize the opulent life style of rich and powerful families in the Jerusalem of his time (Avot 2:7).

As head of the Sanhedrin, Hillel presided over the Jewish people's supreme religious and legal authority. Once his hermeneutical canon (Midrash) had been accepted, it provided greater adaptability, allowing both extensive and restrictive interpretation of Scripture. Oral tradition, received from his teachers, played an important part. Rabbinic controversies, which later multiplied between the schools of Hillel and Shammai (see Bet Hillel and Bet Shammai), were as yet few. In the legal sphere, Hillel introduced certain reforms (takkanot) motivated by social concern ---notably the Prosbul, an institution of Greek law which virtually abolished the Scriptural law canceling debts in the Sabbatical Year of release (shemittah; Deut. 15:1-18).

Above all, however, Hillel was a teacher of Torah. As one source puts it (Suk. 20a), Hillel---like Ezra before him---came from Babylon to restore the Torah when it had been forgotten in Israel, endeavoring to bring it closer to his fellow men. There was a tendency in his day (exemplified by Shammai) to discriminate in the choice of pupils, with good breeding and wealth as preconditions. Hillel rejected this kind of procedure emphatically, and he is described as teaching Torah to laborers on their way to work and receiving questioners at his home. He set high standards for his pupils. Torah should be studied unselfishly for its own sake and not for ulterior motives (Avot 1:12-13). Although a life of Torah study might involve hardship, as Hillel knew personally, the heavenly reward would be commensurate (cf. Avot 5:22). Learning, and learning alone, could refine the student's character and religious personality, endow him with the fear of God, and raise him to the level of a ḥasid, a genuinely pious man (ibid. 2:5).

Hillel's teaching methods were Socratic and peripatetic, most likely showing a Hellenistic influence: question and answer, enigmatic statements provoking a response and sharpening the student's mind. The teacher must be patient (ibid.) and teaching must be practical, through personal example; the concept of "serving scholars" (shimmush) has been a part of rabbinic pedagogics ever since. As for content, it was Scripture---both the Written and the Oral Torah---whose equal Sinaitic origin Hillel was the first to formulate (Shab. 31a). The Oral Torah consisted of immemorial traditions (Halakhah Le-Mosheh Mi-Sinai), Customs (minhagim), and, increasingly since Hillel, Midrash (see above). Popular wisdom, the result of cumulative human experience, was also taught by him, and supported by quotations from Scripture.

It was preeminently as a ḥasid, a man of pious action, that Hillel made his mark on his and all future generations. Every action of his was "for the sake of heaven," motivated by the desire only to serve God and do His will. Hillel believed in Divine justice. Seeing a skull floating in the water, he remarked: "Because you drowned others, they have drowned you; and, in the end, those who drowned you will also be drowned" (Avot 2:6).

On Sukkot, at the Water Drawing Festival, however, he would joyfully exclaim: "If I [meaning God] am here, everyone is here; but if I am not here, then who is?" (Suk. 53a).

The piety which Hillel evinced was bound up with a great measure of forbearance toward others. Asked by a would-be proselyte to teach him the whole Torah while standing on one foot, Shammai had angrily driven the man away; but Hillel finally replied with the adage: "What is hateful to you, do not do unto your fellow man; this is the whole Torah, all the rest is commentary. Now go and learn!" (Shab. 31a). Hillel considered this "golden rule" not only the best introduction to Judaism for a neophyte but also its sum total.

Of Hillel's pupils, traditionally 80 in number, 30 were said to be worthy of the "holy spirit" (prophecy); the youngest of his disciples was Rabban Johanan Ben Zakkai (Suk. 28a). A heavenly voice is reported to have declared that Hillel himself would have merited the "holy spirit" had his generation also been worthy. When he died (at the age of 120 according to Sif. Deut. 357:7), he was mourned for his humility and piety. Hillel played a decisive role in the history of Judaism. His hermeneutical rules expanded and revolutionized the Jewish tradition; his stress on the primacy of ethical conduct, his tolerance and humanity, deeply influenced the character and image of Judaism as well as the thought of Christianity's founders a generation or two after him. In modern times, movements of Jewish dissent have sought justification in his teachings. Hillel was the patron of what has been termed "classical Judaism": to the worship of power and the State he opposed the ideal of a community of the learned--- Jews who love God and their fellow man.

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Quotes:

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?"

"He who refuses to learn deserves extinction."