The Scroll of Aḥima‘ats: Rabbi Silano

With the mercy of God, who made the earth with His might, who overlooks sin and carries away transgressions, I shall tell in eloquent prose the story of something that happened in Venosa. A man who was deeply learned in God’s law and thoroughly versed in the Torah (which God cherishes and in which he takes delight), came from the land of Israel and sojourned there for a period of days and weeks. Every Sabbath, he would deliver a sermon in the synagogue, preaching among God’s people; he would preach, and R. Silano would translate.

One day, some men came up from the villages to the town in carts, and they started to quarrel among themselves. The women came out of their houses, and men and women beat each other with the long, scorched poles used for scraping the ovens.

R. Silano devised and carried out a bit of mischief, something that was very wrong of him. He took the midrash on the biblical portion that the scholar was to explicate, erased two lines of the letters that were inscribed there, and in their place wrote the story just recounted. This is the text that was inscribed, inscribed by R. Silano:

On the Sabbath, when the scholar reached that passage, he held his tongue and withheld his speech as he stared at the letters and tried to make sense out of them. At length, after perusing them over and over, he read them aloud as they stood and explicated what he found written. Thereupon, R. Silano with a mocking laugh said to those present, “Just listen! The master is expounding the quarrel that took place among you just the other day, when the women beat the men and struck them with oven-poles and scattered them in all directions!”

When the scholar realized what had happened, he turned pale with rage. He went to the land of Israel and told the scholars who conducted their studies in the academy about the disaster that had come upon him and befallen him. They all became very angry and badly distressed, and they put the all-too-clever R. Silano under a ban.

He remained under the ban for days, even years, until R. Aḥima‘ats came to Palestine with the pledges¹ and cleverly secured his release from the ban. Listen to the skill with which he managed it. He arrived in Palestine during the Ten Days of Penitence. The scholars and the head of the academy begged him to stand before the ark and to lovingly lead the prayers before God, who is exalted in the mighty assembly of the angels. And so he did, in his humility and with the fear and awe of heaven that was in his heart. He began with penitential hymns and supplications [and included]² one by the faithful R. Silano that begins, “When God beheld false swearing and lying.” When he reached the line: “The ancestors proved worthy,” he replaced “ancestors” with “rabbis” and “they crushed the idolators” with “he crushed the heretics.” When he finished the service, they questioned him eagerly: “Whose is the loving mouth that calls the rabbis beloved? Whose is the holy mouth that loved and exalted the rabbis and rejected and despised the heretics?” He answered in reply: “It is the beloved mouth of R. Silano, whom you so despise.” Thereupon they all rose to their feet and released the ban and excommunication which they had pronounced against him; indeed, they invoked a great and lengthy blessing on him, well composed and well devised.

All raised their voices and chimed together, “Blessed be Silano forever and ever!”