Merry Christmas from an atheist Jew

My favorite religious story from childhood turns out, no surprise, to be a law story. I will tell it here from memory, without resort to sources or hyperlinks. Law and religion tend to get muddled in disputes over minutiae, and this is my story for today.

At the time Jesus was born, there were two leading “rabbis,” which may be a misleading term, but is meant to convey that they were both religious teachers and religious judges. Hillel was the one we would today call a liberal. Shammai was the strict constructionist. Two of their disagreements that I recall had to do with women and marriage. Shammai insisted that to call your bride beautiful on your wedding day if she was not in fact beautiful was a lie and therefore unacceptable. Hillel said instead that on her wedding day every bride is beautiful. Another point of contention was over the degree of evidence necessary to establish a husband had died in order that his widow could remarry. Shammai insisted that first-hand evidence of death had to be produced. Hillel held that circumstantial evidence would be sufficient.

But the story I remember best is of the non-Jew who came to Shammai and said that he would convert if, while he stood on one foot, the rabbi could explain to him the whole of the Torah. Shammai dismissed him in a huff, taking the question and the questioner as nothing but harassment. The man then went to Hillel and asked him the same question. Hillel responded:

What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and study.

And the man converted and devoted his life to study.