One of the most compelling and puzzling figures in the Talmud's cast of rabbinic characters is Elisha ben Avuyah. Like most sages of that era, Elisha is known to us only through the Talmud and its associated texts. Likely born around the time of the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70 CE, he lived in the Galilee, where Jewish spiritual and intellectual life reconstituted itself in the aftermath of that great national catastrophe—a crushing event that, along with others similarly dire, is commemorated annually by Jews in the liturgy and 25-hour fast of the Ninth of Av, which this year is marked on Sunday August 11.
The Talmud cites the opinions of Elisha only a handful of times. But the most salient fact of his career is that, at some point, he became a heretic and forsook Jewish practice, earning himself the epithet A?er—the Other. And yet the redactors of the Talmud, rather than writing Elisha out of the tradition, as they might easily have done, chose to preserve a record of both his actions and his teachings.
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