As a teenager, I spent a couple of summers at Camp Ramah, the camp of the Conservative movement. Most of the campers were, like me, raised in Conservative synagogues, but one summer there was a boy who had decided to become much more frum than his parents. As a result, he refused to eat the food prepared in the camp dining hall, since he had doubts about its standard of kashrut. As I recall, this act of teenage rebellion—and even then that’s how it seemed to me, though it was a rebellion in the direction of extra discipline rather than misbehavior—created serious headaches for the camp counselors, who didn’t want the boy to spend a month subsisting on packaged bread and peanut butter. The food, they insisted, had been declared kosher by the camp’s own rabbi—wasn’t that enough? But the camper insisted it wasn’t: He wouldn’t eat the food unless his own, Orthodox rabbi had given it his seal of approval.
This was one of my early exposures to the issue of Jewish denominational strife, and the memory resurfaced during this week’s Daf Yomi reading. One of the most frequent divisions mentioned in the Talmud is the one between Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel—the schools founded by the great pair of rabbis who lived in the first century B.C.E. These groups disagreed on many matters of Jewish law: For instance, Beit Shammai believed that on Hanukkah we should begin by lighting eight candles on the first night and then take one away on each subsequent night, while Beit Hillel believed in starting with one candle and then adding more. Back in Tractate Eruvin, we read about how a bat kol, a divine voice, pronounced that while both Hillel and Shammai’s opinions were valid—“these and these are the words of the living God”—the law follows the opinion of Hillel (with a few specific exceptions).
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