Sea of Love

The first time I studied Tractate Bava Batra, I nearly developed PTSD. Following my graduation from high school, I, like many modern Orthodox students, spent a year studying in a yeshiva in Israel. Foolishly, I insisted on joining a class normally reserved for second-year students—a flex I thought would solidify my standing as one of the all-time greats to ever study in yeshiva. And then on the first day of yeshiva, we began studying Bava Batra. The rest is more or less a daze. We spent weeks—maybe even months—discussing one of the first tosafos, or medieval commentaries, in the Tractate, about a wall that falls down between neighbors. Honestly, that is the bulk of what I remember from that first year in yeshiva. And while I did go back to Israel and had another far more productive year of study, I never opened up Bava Batra again. I was still scarred, suffering from post-tractate stress disorder. But then came the Daf Yomi cycle, the practice of reading just one page of Talmud a day, and along came Bava Batra. It was time to face my fears. I needed to figure out what this tractate was all about.

Bava Batra is the last of the three Bavas—the tractates whose name all begin with Bava, meaning gate. Bava Kama, the first gate, is a tractate about damages. Bava Metzia, the middle gate, is about returning lost objects and the regulations of commerce. Bava Batra, the last gate, is the longest tractate in the Talmud by pages (176 in total!) and it is not entirely clear what it is about. The tractate begins by talking about boundaries between neighbors, public property, real estate transactions, infrastructure responsibilities, and a fairly detailed discussion of the laws of inheritance. Honestly, the contents of the tractate do not differ all that much from what I imagine would be discussed at a local government municipality meeting. There’s a reason why the tractate is known for being the longest rather than the most exciting.

Seventy-three pages into Tractate Bava Batra, however, something changes drastically. Gone are neighborly questions about property lines and public rights, instead, inserted within a mundane legal conversation about selling a boat, are some of the wildest, most outlandish stories in the entire corpus of the Talmud. At the heart of the stories are the sea travels of a third-century rabbi, Rabbah Bar Bar Channah, that feature confrontations with giant frogs, sea monsters, obese geese, and a few desert tales involving a mysterious Arab merchant. No wonder that Rabbah Bar Bar Channah is sometimes called the Jewish Sinbad the Sailor. And finally, after two Talmudic folios of wild stories, the Talmud abruptly shifts back to its typical legal discussions, like a demonic possession finally exorcised.

But the nautical tales aren’t merely a distraction. They are, instead, the key to understanding the whole tractate. If you want to unlock the mysteries of Bava Batra—and, really, you should—just consider the sea.

“One knows not what sweet mystery about this sea,” wrote Herman Melville in Moby-Dick, “whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath.” He wasn’t overdoing it; from a distance, the ocean looks like a cozy blue blanket covering our planet—a singular entity teeming with life. Talmud itself is compared to the ocean, a seemingly cohesive entity that obscures the raucous intergenerational debates that reside just beneath the surface of the page. The imagery of the ocean has also inspired countless analogies, from Einstein likening it to time, reportedly saying, “Time is like the ocean, always there, always different,” to President John F. Kennedy, who, in a speech in 1962, saw the ocean as our universal point of origin, remarking:

I really don’t know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it is because in addition to the fact that the sea changes and the light changes, and ships change, it is because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins, the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it we are going back from whence we came.

There are many ideas reflected in the imagery of the ocean, and, accordingly, there are many different approaches to interpreting the fantastical stories of Rabbah Bar Bar Channah’s sea adventures. And, as one would expect from the Talmud, there is no shortage of interpretations. For the Vilna Gaon, the preeminent 18th-century scholar, the ocean represents olam hazeh, this physical world. Each tale, according to the Vilna Gaon, offers a different method for preserving spiritual integrity amid this tempestuous existence. Rebbe Nachman, whose magnum opus Likkutei Moharan begins with explanations of these stories, understood the waves as an analogy for the evil inclination, the desires that have the power to drown a person. Rav Avraham Yitzchak Kook found in the waves allusions to Christian supersessionist theology, teaching that only the boat—Jewish law—has the power to protect the Jewish people’s integrity through exile. And in his 2021 honors thesis, Brian Chernigoff argued, quite compellingly, that the stories should be read as a polemic between the Jewish communities of Israel and Babylon.

There is an underlying commonality in all these interpretations: They all teach us something about living with integrity amid chaos. Everything is subsumed within the ocean. Standing on the shore, the ocean’s majesty obscures the individuated existence of the life teeming beneath its surface. There is something both calming and terrifying about the ocean; looking into its unfathomable depth is a bit like contemplating nonexistence. When everything is subsumed in the ocean, it appears as though nothing is below. Only on land can we draw lines, demarcate borders, and carefully guard boundaries. When someone is overwhelmed, they say they’re drowning; when someone feels stable and secure, they call themselves grounded. The ocean represents the overpowering force that has the power to unify and overwhelm—everything is subsumed within the ocean. Land, however, is the world of precise boundaries, where each individual is clearly delineated. As Rav Yitzchak Hutner once pointed out, you can’t leave footprints on the ocean.

At the heart of these stories—and more broadly, at the heart of Judaism itself—is the negotiation between land and ocean, unity and individuality, selflessness and self. Mystics call this ani v’ayin b’vas achas, the simultaneous experience of “I” and “nothingness.” The tales of Rabbah Bar Bar Channah teach us how to integrate ocean with land—how to create boundaries for the self without losing the grasp of cosmic unity.

This, I believe, is what lies at the heart of Tractate Bava Batra. On its surface, this tractate is about how to get along with your neighbors—build good fences, create a solid charitable system, invest in infrastructure. It’s like reading the minutes from your town’s most recent zoning hearing. But that, of course, is just the surface of this ocean. On a deeper level, Bava Batra addresses coexistence, not just in a neighborhood but also the harmony between body and soul, the material and physical worlds, our personal identity and our global humanity.

“I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society,” wrote Henry David Thoreau. Bava Batra is where we learn to sit in these multiple chairs we call life, always mindful that our self does not encroach on the collective. Bava Batra teaches us that coexistence, in its most literal sense, is possible.

Each of the Bavas—Bava Kama, Bava Metzia, and Bava Batra—corresponds to one of the three Temples in Jerusalem, writes Rav Yitzchak Meir Morgenstern, based on the Zohar. Our tractate, Bava Batra, corresponds to the Third Temple, which we still long to see revealed in Messianic times. Why would such a seemingly mundane tractate carry such auspicious mystical symbolism? The Messianic era is not a supernatural break with the present world but, like the central theme of Bava Batra, a redemption rooted in actualized coexistence. Messiah will arrive when we learn to live together in this mysterious ocean of a world—different religions, communities, personalities, the Jewish people among the nations, the soul living within the body.

This may explain why Bava Batra spends so much time on the laws of inheritance. Through inheritance, we reconcile the ultimate neighboring nemeses—existence and nonexistence—allowing for the continuation of self even after death.

“One who has not seen Herod’s Temple,” says the Talmud on the fourth page of Bava Batra, “has never seen a beautiful building in their life.” In the first century of the Common Era, Herod the Great refurbished the Second Temple using stones of blue, white, and green marble. Herod momentarily considered covering them with gold, but the rabbis begged him not to. These stones are more beautiful than gold, the rabbis explained, because they resemble the waves of the ocean.

Why were the rabbis so captivated by the beauty of the waves? Rav Yitzchak Hutner provides a haunting explanation. From the moment the Second Temple was built, it was destined to be destroyed. Through prophecy, the rabbis knew the Second Temple would not last—it was merely the cornerstone for the eventual Third Temple. How could they experience any joy within the Temple knowing all the while it would eventually be destroyed? Here, explains Rav Hutner, lies the beauty and comfort of the ocean’s waves. Each wave in the ocean knows it will dissipate the moment it hits the shore, but so long as it is in the ocean, it storms like a tempest. This was the secret beauty the rabbis saw within the waves of Herod’s Temple: Even though it will eventually end, we can still feel as if it is just beginning.

“You rule the swelling of the sea; when its waves surge, You still them,” says the psalmist. Some read the Hebrew word teshabchem (stilling the waves) as shevach (praise)—the waves praise God. What is the unique praise of a wave? “Even though I know I’m eventually going to exhaust,” explains Rav Hutner, “so long as I am still at the table—I am storming.” Even though this moment will not last, we can still treat it as eternity. Even though the Temple will eventually be destroyed, we can still see beauty. Even though we live within society, we retain our private self. And even though we eventually die, our legacy will be inherited. There is nothing more beautiful than the waves of the ocean. In the space where land and sea kiss, existence and nonexistence coexist, and the unity of the eventual Third Temple can be glimpsed. And as long as it may take to reach that redemptive future, we’ll continue storming.

הדרן עלך מסכת בבא בתרא והדרך עלן