The story of the siege of Jerusalem and Rabbi Yoḥanan's escape during the First Jewish Revolt is the origin myth of rabbinic Judaism. Featured most prominently in B. Gittin 55b–56b and paralleled elsewhere, the story has been read and reread myriad times. From the Roman siege and the threats of radical rebels within the city, through a compromise with a rebel leader that allows Yoḥanan to escape, to a dramatic meeting between Yoḥanan and the soon-to-be-emperor Vespasian, who is besieging the city, the story moves from the temple to the rabbinic study house. In Sonja Pilz's study, Food and Fear: Metaphors of Bodies and Spaces in the Stories of Destruction, she returns to this foundation story to offer a new interpretation that focuses on the bodies and characterization of three individuals: Martha bat Boethus, daughter and wife of high priests and victim of the famine, Rabbi Ẓadok, a priest-cum-rabbi who survives the siege, and Rabbi Yoḥanan ben Zakkai, symbol of rabbinic Judaism. In this study, Pilz's methodological lenses draw the reader to the importance of bodies, bodily transformation, spaces, and spatial movement as key components of the story and its characters, and she envisions her study as a pedagogical tool, an introduction to rabbinic literature and literary approaches to the rabbinic corpus for novice and expert students alike.

The core of Pilz's study is a spatial and bodily analysis of three characters. Martha is wealthy and privileged, ensconced in the highest level of society. During the siege of Jerusalem, Martha suffers along with the rest of the city's residents, but the story Pilz analyzes focuses on how far she falls, before dying in the city streets. Pilz describes Ẓadok's story arc as liminal: he abandons his post as a priest, instead undertaking an extreme and debilitating fast in an attempt to forestall disaster. Yoḥanan is ostensibly the hero of the story, as he confronts Vespasian and is rewarded with a home for the nascent rabbinic movement. According to Pilz, the story “depicts the events [of the siege] as an organic process of change,” while Rabbi Yoḥanan, and the rabbinic Judaism he represents, “actively (even proactively) foresees [the end of the temple], evokes it, and embraces it” (175, emphasis original).

Thus, the transformation from temple to rabbinic Judaism Pilz describes is embodied by these three characters, from Martha, representing the past, temple-focused Judaism, through Rabbi Ẓadok in transition, to Rabbi Yoḥanan, who helps make the transformation happen, assuring space and bodies for rabbinic Judaism. Pilz's methodological approach is “that rabbinic storytelling must be read as a dialogue of ideas” (88), following Bakhtin, where each character of her study is a different “idea” about Judaism and Jewish life. Thus, Martha is the “idea” of Second Temple Judaism, corrupted by wealth, power, and femininity. Ẓadok is the “idea” of transition, focused on a priest's self-abnegation from the temple and its food. And Yoḥanan, who “dies” and is reborn by leaving Jerusalem and saving Rabban Gamliel's royal family, healing Ẓadok, and preserving “Yavneh and its sages,” is the “idea” of rabbinic Judaism. By analyzing these three characters, Pilz concludes that “nothing could be more apt than telling the story of evolving Rabbinic Judaism by means of metaphors of the body, of food (from meat to flour), of spacial [sic] movements (from the Temple to Yavneh)—and of literary characters that needed to be read as synechdotes [sic] for entire schools of thought” (179).

Pilz's study is not without its weaknesses, even as her methodological choices and her conclusions are illuminating. First, Pilz's claim that the story is one of transformation and replacement (from temple to study house) can lead to the impression that this movement is inevitable, even teleological, while neglecting the prominent strands of rabbinic literature that emphasize the temple and the priesthood. Eikhah Rabbah, for example, contains a wide variety of responses to the destruction of the temple, often with pain over the loss of the temple at the forefront. Second, and relatedly, a core component of Pilz's argument rests on the transformation of Ẓadok from priest to rabbi (accompanied by extreme bodily transformation), paralleled by the replacement of temple ritual with the rabbinic calendar of festivals and prayer services; again, the picture is more complex, with temple rituals continuing to be central to rabbinic argumentation and priestly bodies taking pride of place as an idealized form of masculinity in rabbinic texts. Third, at least one of Pilz's arguments is not fully explored. She argues that this origin myth contains a deeper theological argument—an argument about God Himself losing His power, abused by Israel's assumption that God is her servant (81–84). Pilz introduces this claim, that the transition from temple to rabbinic Judaism parallels a transformation of God and His power, but in the end leaves this argument as a possibility without satisfactory evidence and lacking a full conclusion. In my view, these weaknesses stem from the structural nature of Pilz's argument: she makes a strong claim that Martha, Ẓadok, and Yoḥanan each represent a distinct stage of the development of Judaism, from the temple to the rabbis. While this structural and character-based approach may well be appropriate for this story about the siege of Jerusalem, a great deal of nuance and continuity is lost, from the importance of “rabbinic culture” before the siege in some stories (see Avot de-Rabbi Natan 1–2, the origin myth of Rabbi Eliezer) and the importance of the priesthood for rabbinic Halakhah and memory after the destruction.

Notwithstanding these weaknesses, Pilz's study remains valuable, particularly in terms of her methodological foci. Her literary approaches, focusing on food, bodies, spaces, characterizations, and character transformations, open up useful possibilities for readers of classical rabbinic narrative. Pilz thus gives her readers an ample and important set of lenses for approaching rabbinic stories, lenses that allow one to consider how the rich stories embedded in classical rabbinic literature include spatial, bodily, theological, and ideological perspectives, and to explore how these stories are narratively driven by bodily processes (food and illness) and spatial orientations (movement and location).