Eggs and Cheese: A Lesson in Hope

Shabbat Devarim 2020
Rabbi Stephen Weiss

Even when times are tough, God’s light is still shining into our lives, giving us the strength and the hope that we need.

I did not get to see the Cleveland Baseball Team play last night. Candle lighting time was not until 8:33, so it could have been possible to watch the first inning before Shabbat came in. But alas, we begin our Kabbalat Shabbat service at 7:00, and once I have davened Kabbalat Shabbat, Shabbat has begun for me. Our Men’s Club held an online watch party for the portion of the game that occurred before Shabbat, and I am anxious to hear their reports.

Meanwhile, I was able to watch a recording of the opening of the very first game of this entire season, in which the New York Yankees played at the Washington Nationals on this past Thursday. How very strange it was it was to watch that game, with thousands of cardboard cutouts of fans surrounded by tens of thousands or empty seats, and pre-recorded cheering and boos coming from the speakers instead of the stands. Perhaps it was fitting in its own way that the first pitch, thrown out by Dr. Anthony Fauci, landed so far away from home plate. Nothing felt right about this game. Even as we have begun to lap up baseball games this week like a hungry dog, we cannot help but feel the cloud of the coronavirus casting yet another shadow over our lives. Looking at those empty seats, I though to myself eicha yashvah badad… how does the stadium sit solitary, that which was once filled with people!

Perhaps, then, it was somehow fitting for the Major League Opener – and our Cleveland Opener – to fall during the Nine Days, the intensified period of mourning that concludes with the most intense of all, Tisha B’Av.

Tisha B’Av, which we will observe from this coming Wednesday night until Sundown Thursday, is the darkest day on the Jewish calendar. All of the most severe tragedies that we have experienced as a people happened on this day, including God’s decree that our ancestors spend 40 years wandering in the wilderness, the destruction of the first and second Temples, the defeat of the Bar Kochba Revolt, which was followed by the Romans plowing over the Temple Mount and establishing a pagan city there, the declaration of the First Crusade, The expulsion from England, The signing of the Spanish Order of Inquisition, The Chelmicki Massacres in the Ukraine, and the start of World War I. Scholars view the two world wars as one long war, so that date can be tied to Jewish suffering during the Holocaust as well.

During these days of pandemic, when are streets, restaurants, stores, theaters, and stadiums sit so empty, what can we learn from Tisha B’Av to help us get through our own period of darkness?

I think one answer can be found in an enigmatic tale told to is in the Talmud, which recounts a confrontation between sixty wise men of Athens and the Talmudic sage Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananya. In this lengthy debate, the Athenians attempt to demonstrate through logic that the Jewish people are doomed to perish from the face of the earth. The text is long. I just want to share with you one part of that debate that occurs near its end.

The Sages of Athens showed Rabbi Yehoshua two eggs, and asked him, “Which of these eggs came from a white hen and which from a black hen?”

In response Rabbi Yehoshua presented before them two pieces of cheese and asked, “Which of these cheeses is from the milk of a white goat, and which from the milk of a black goat?”

The Talmud indicates this response silenced the Athenians. They were defeated. But why? What were they asking, and how were they answered? They came with eggs, he responded with cheese. What’s going on here? Are competing to see who had packed the best lunch?

The 16^th century commentator known as the Maharsha – Rabbi Shmuel Eidels – writes that the Greeks observed that it takes twenty-one days for a chicken’s egg to hatch. The “life-span” of an egg, therefore, is three weeks.

The two eggs, therefore, writes the Maharsha, represented the two 21-day periods in the Jewish calendar.

The egg of the back hen in the Athenian’s challenge represented what we call the Three Weeks: from the 17th of Tammuz through Tisha B’Av. These three weeks mark the annual mourning period for the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem, a period in which we focus on our sins that brought about the destructions, a time filled with darkness, gloom, and pessimism.

The egg of the white hen represented another three-week period at the beginning of the Jewish year: from Rosh Hashana to the end of Sukkot. These are days are festive and purifying. We might call them “white” days. On Rosh Hashanah our souls are renewed and made fresh. On Yom Kippur we are cleansed and whitened from our sins. On Sukkot we dance and celebrate, and on the final day of Sukkot, on the 21st day, Hoshana Rabbah, we rejoice with the final judgment for a year of blessing. This three-week period is a time filled with God’s light, with purification, cleansing and hope.

Of course, the trick to the Athenians challenge was that the egg that was laid by the black hen is identical to the egg laid by the white hen. But the black hen’s egg, though it looks white, will still produce another black hen. By pointing this out, the Athenians were claiming that our twenty-one days of celebration and purification have been replaced by our twenty-one days of mourning and darkness. This, they said, demonstrates that there is no hope for Israel, that God’s love of the Jews is a thing of the past.

Unfazed by the challenge, Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananya responds to the Athenians’ eggs with two indistinguishable pieces of cheese: one from a black goat, the other from a white goat. The two goats alluded to the goats that were used in the Temple on Yom Kippur: One goat was an offering to God on the sacred altar. The other goat was cast off a cliff in the desert, a symbolic casting away of negative energy and sin. One goat is an expression of the deep bond between God and His people—an offering of repentance brought on His holy altar on the holiest day. The other goat, cast away to the wilderness, represents the darker side of this relationship, the capacity to betray God. And yet, that second goat also represents God’s forgiveness of and love for his people, God’s promise to renew us year after year. Not only that, but the milk from both goats, black as well as white, produces white cheese.

Rabbi Yehoshua’s message to the Athenians was that though the Jewish people had suffered at the hands of the Romans who had destroyed their Temple, God’s promise to us is that no matter how dark times may seem, God will always forgive us, purify us, wrap us in God’s light and renew and redeem us. Our covenant with God is forever. It is that promise – that God will never abandon us and that we wil always rise up even from the lowest points in our lives – that has enabled the Jewish people to persevere and survive through two thousand years of wandering and exile.

Rabbi Yehoshua’s analogy of the goats has a message not only for the Athenians but for us as well. In fact, I would say Rabbi Yehoshua has left us with two messages.

First, he reminds us that even when times are tough, God’s light is still shining into our lives, giving us the strength and the hope that we need to go on with our lives.

Second, he reminds us that even the black goats in our lives produce white cheese. That is to say that the trials and hardships we face are there to help us grow in some way, to learn from the experience and to rise up, purified and renewed, wiser, stronger, more kind, more forgiving, more upright because of our experience.  None of us want to encounter hardship and dark times in our lives. Still, when we do, it is our choice to see a black hen’s white-shelled egg, which – though white, still produces more darkness, or a black goat capable of producing white cheese. Rabbi Yehoshua says to us: choose the white cheese. Choose to learn from your low points and to learn from them to better yourself, and in the process draw down more of God’s light into your life.

Deep down, we know these truths. We have lived them in the illness that brings a deeper perspective in life, in the relationship breakdown that allows us to find true love and humility, in the passing of a loved one that gives us new appreciation of our short time in this world and the spirituality of life. We have also lived these truths in our experience of this pandemic. The coronavirus has increased for all of us our awareness of how our actions – even something as innocuous as our breath – affects others. It has taught us the importance of heeding science. It has lifted the veil on racial discrimination that is built into so many aspects of our society, even our health care system.

In our Torah portion, as Moses recounts our years of wandering, he says: “In the wilderness, you saw how God carried you, as a man carries his son, all the way until you came to his place.”

Like Rabbi Yehoshua, we can choose to find light even in this darkness by affirming its lessons. Like Rabbi Yehoshua, too, even in our hour of greatest despair over this pandemic, we should have faith that God is still with us, holding us lovingly and carrying us through the darkness to a time of light.