Tsippori (Sephoras)

As part of our Rabbinic literature class (a course designed for the Rabbinic and Education students as an exercise in contextualizing the whole corpus of Rabbinic literature, including Mishnah, Talmud, Midrash, written in the first millennia CE), we took a day-long tiyul, yesterday, to Tzippori, the site of an ancient, Roman and Byzantine era Jewish city in the south Galilee.

Why Tzippori, you might ask. Well I’ll tell you. Tzippori was, for about 30 years in the 2nd century CE, the seat of Jewish power in the Galilee; Rabi Judah Ha’Nasi, the compiler of the Mishnah, made Tzippori his home as well as the seat of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish court system. Tzippori is also really fascinating, archeologically, because of what was uncovered there. Much of the city has been unearthed, and especially many mosaic floors depicting various types of Greco-Roman imagery, including a series of panels showing a Dionysian Baachanal, many portraits of paces, and a Zodiac.

What! A zodiac? On the floor of a synagogue? Pagan imagery in a Jewish, religious site? How is this possible?

There are many historical explanations for this, and it gets complicated and confusing (and, in my nerdy, budding Jewish professional opinion: really fascinating), but basically it runs down as follows. Tzippori was a mixed city, where Jews and pagans (and later, Christians) co-existed and lived side-by-side and all of the cultures mixed. It was a first-century CE example of Los Angeles. Rabbinic authority, where in Talmud etc it has strong polemics against idolatry etc, didn’t really exist as “authority” until close to the end of the first millennium CE, and by that point Tzippori had digressed to a historical ruin.

The tiyul itself was a lot of fun. It was a very windy day, and so everyone looks super hot with their sunswept hair, but the sun was out and we did some nice text studies and a chevruta session. For dinner, we stopped at restaurant a little south of Jerusalem (it was a bit out of the way), which was fine and tasty. But the exciting part of the restaurant is the spice store that’s annexed, which had the most amazing array of spices, teas, granolas, grains, dried fruits, rice mixes, spice blends, etc. It was like a rainbow of smells and tastes. I spent waaayyy too much money on tarragon, an onion-almond-raisin rice mix, pecan granola, dried chamomile tea, rose hip green tea, and a spice mix for hummus. Again, we travel, and I end up coming home with delicious food.