The Spines of the Murex | HaRav Yehoshua Inbal

The Spines of the Murex

Rabbi Yehoshua Inbal

The blunt-spined murex, which in recent years has become one of the better-known creatures in the Torah-observant world, stands, as is well known, at the center of the Tekhelet controversy.

The controversy is not only historical and research-based. It is also halachic and hashkafic, and therefore fits the category of “meta-halachah” — a broader, hashkafic way of looking at halachah itself and at the way halachic decisions are made.

My purpose in this article is not to try to decide this major question, nor even to take a side, but to try to frame the issue correctly and in a balanced way. Hundreds of articles and booklets have been written on the current Tekhelet controversy. At times, because of the excessive one-sidedness of the respected writers, they actually strengthen the opposing side by attempting to reject everything it says, without recognizing any complexity or conceding even a little where a point is reasonable. Others have piled up every possible sort of argument for one side, with no attention to its quality or weight, relying on any source, any sevara, and any diyuk they can find. Quite often, booklets of this sort do a poor service to the side they are trying to represent. Were it not that the two sides balance each other out by each producing literature that damages its own cause, we would not know whom not to choose…

Our discussion will lean somewhat toward the side that rejects the identification, particularly regarding the common presentation that “research has proven” this is Tekhelet and that the only remaining question is whether halachah accepts research or not. I will also address the tendency of some who regard Tekhelet as obligatory, or who strongly support it, to wage a sharp polemic against those who refrain from wearing it and portray them as irresponsible or inactive. That said, it seems to me that the opponents have gone even further than the supporters in attacking the other side — in the spirit of “once he became angry, he came to a heap of arguments.”

Since I am not a researcher, what follows is not being offered as original research, but only as ideas and observations by way of example. There is no new research here; I am only presenting existing and familiar points of discussion.

As for the arguments against the identification, I am not coming to explain what others mean or to present “the reason of the opponents.” My purpose here is simply to play the role of a Geviha ben Pesisa, so to speak: to show that things which are presented as certain are not necessarily so. I do not intend to decide these research questions, nor am I saying that it is more likely that the identification is wrong. I am only presenting additional sides to the issue.

On the Sources That Speak “Mesiach Lefi Tumo”

For people sitting in the beis midrash, exposure to the wealth of outside sources dealing with Tekhelet can be surprising and exciting. A new window seems to open onto the world of our ancestors, which until now we knew mostly through the Gemara and Midrashim. Suddenly we have the writings of Romans and Greeks who traveled through Eretz Yisrael in the very generations of Shammai and Hillel, Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai and Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel, in Yerushalayim and elsewhere, recording various details — remarkable testimony from a non-Jew speaking innocently, mesiach lefi tumo. Clearly, such a person had no interest in lying in order to mislead us. These sources can therefore help clarify and expand things that are sometimes stated only briefly or obscurely in our own sources. Names such as Pliny, Virgil, Theodotus, and others roll off the tongues of avreichim writing kuntreisim, as though these ancient witnesses faithfully reflect what their own eyes saw on the streets of Yerushalayim.

We are told that to brush aside clear data and facts merely because they come under the heading of “research” is contrary to truth and fairness. It is self-deception and narrow-mindedness — opposition to research simply because it is research. After all, the stated goal is only to clarify the teachings of our Rabbanim and of Torah shebe’al peh.

But a broader familiarity with the field teaches that what can be presented — and can genuinely look — like clear data and hard facts is often very far from clear-cut.

The same sources are also brought by the same researchers to contradict things that we received clearly from Chazal, whether in history and aggadah or even in halachah and the way mitzvos were practiced in ancient times. For example, many earthenware pots were found in Yerushalayim with man-made holes. At first glance this might be evidence that they were punctured in order to make them tahor and then continue using them. Yet the hole was in the side and smaller than motzi zayis. Does that prove that the vessel became tahor in that fashion? See Techumin 24, p. 505 onward. Would intellectual honesty require us here too, chas veshalom, to move away from Chazal?

Halachah says, “Kol milsa delo ramya alei deinisha — amar velo ada’atei” (Shevuos 41b): when a detail is not something a person has reason to focus on, he may say it without paying close attention. Therefore, even when a person changes a detail of reality in his claim before beis din, he is not necessarily considered a proven liar, because he is careful only about the details that matter to the issue before him.

A description of a mitzvah by someone who does not understand the mitzvah itself or its conceptual world can often be of very limited value. It is striking how true the rule of milsa delo ramya alei is: people describe accurately the part of reality whose meaning and importance they understand, while in other details they may slide over things even contrary to what their own eyes actually saw.

The Russian writer Dostoevsky, in Notes from the House of the Dead, describes:

“The Jew Isai Fomich… on Friday night, meaning Friday evening, people from the other barracks would come especially to watch how Isai Fomich observed his Sabbath… He would light two candles and wrap himself in his tallis while muttering mysterious words… He would tie both hands with tefillin straps, and to his head, above his forehead, he would fasten some little wooden box, so that it looked as if some ridiculous horn were sticking out from his forehead.”

These are, of course, gross mistakes. Dostoevsky mixed different events together. No Jew put on tefillin on Shabbos, certainly not at night. One does not wrap in a tallis while lighting candles. Tefillin were never made of wood, and they are not tied onto both hands.

For Dostoevsky, however, there was no difficulty in turning familiar reality into a literary description. Each detail reflects something real. One morning he saw the man put on tefillin; in the evening he saw him light candles. He had no reason to imagine that the separation between morning and evening was essential, just as he had no reason to understand the difference between one arm and the other in tefillin. Who would imagine that right or left, one arm or two, makes such a difference? To make the picture stronger he described both hands, and so on. א)

Accordingly, there is no reason to be surprised that Theophrastus, Aristotle’s student and successor, writes in his work On Piety that the Jews would offer honey to God, and then gives a fine explanation for the reason behind the honey offering…

There are countless examples of this sort, and more than once researchers turn them into “delicacies” on which to build imaginary theories.

This phenomenon is not limited to descriptions of mitzvos and halachic practice. Every description of reality is shaped by what the observer considers important. An ordinary person does not distinguish carefully among cleaning products. Even when speaking innocently about how a floor was cleaned, he may not name the exact product. After all, who cares whether the place was cleaned with bleach, Fantastik, degreaser, or floor polish? To a chemist, however, these substances are very different. Every chemist knows that some are bases and some are acids, that each acts differently, and that mixing them can cause a reaction or even an explosion. A chemist would never substitute bleach for Fantastik in his description, because he knows that in real life the difference can save lives.

To the layman there is no important difference between Acamol, Nurofen, and Advil; they are all things one takes for a headache. A person casually describing events has no reason to be medakdek among them. An expert, however, knows that there are two basic families of painkillers, that they work differently, that particular drugs are suited to different conditions, and that each family has its own side effects and risks. A person with a stomach ulcer must not take ibuprofen-family painkillers. For him, Acamol — like the rest of the paracetamol family — is medicine, while Nurofen can be poison. He is the one who cannot afford to confuse the two.

This must be kept in mind when analyzing testimony from non-Jews about details that did not really matter to them. There is a well-known letter attributed to a Roman describing the avodah in the Beis HaMikdash on Pesach, copied in Shevet Yehudah, the Siddur Yaavetz, and elsewhere. Many have wondered about details in it that do not fit halachah, and it is impossible to imagine that it is describing some alternate halachic system. For example, it describes the Kohanim as wearing red garments, even though the priestly garments are described clearly in the Torah and even a Sadducee beis din could not have changed them. Presumably the Roman did not attach importance to the exact color and confused Tekhelet with argaman. What impressed him was the grandeur, the order, and the speed. It never occurred to him that the Torah has a specific din concerning garments of Tekhelet, so he chose argaman, which to his eye belonged to the same world and had the same level of importance. This is all assuming, of course, that the letter is authentic. ב)

There is no doubt that even today, someone unfamiliar with the fine differences in clothing between different kehillos may not be able to tell a shtreimel from a spodik, or a chassidishe hat from a Litvishe hat, even though to us the differences in shape and color are obvious. We could tell them apart on a moonless night, even before the time at which one can distinguish between a donkey and an arod…

We are halachic people. We know that particular details carry halachic significance, and so we would never confuse them. Precisely for that reason, we also do not bother explaining them; the meaning is obvious to us. If someone asks to buy an esrog during Tishrei, he does not need to explain that he is not interested in an esrog grafted onto a lemon tree. He said “esrog,” and everyone understands. If it is Nissan and he obviously wants the esrogim to make jam, he likewise does not need to explain that he has no concern for the purity of the esrog’s yichus. Incidentally, the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, in the first century CE, “testifies” that the citron grows only in Persia and Media, although we know that esrogim grew in Eretz Yisrael for generations before him, and by Pliny’s own time had already become a Jewish national symbol appearing in inscriptions and documents. Pliny visited Eretz Yisrael. Perhaps one day someone will argue that our esrog is not the real esrog, based on Pliny’s innocent testimony…

If a Jew in ancient times wanted to build a mizbe’ach, or hired workers to build one, there were many halachos he had to follow. Indeed, in the mizbe’ach built by Yehoshua bin Nun on Har Eival, identified in our time, we see features of the mizbe’ach described in Maseches Tamid, even though the Torah itself says nothing about the yesod, the sovev, the two small ramps, and more. The halachah was transmitted orally. Yet when a source says that a Jew “built a mizbe’ach,” there is no need to spell all of this out. It means a mizbe’ach built according to halachic requirements. When it says that a non-Jew or a Sadducee built a mizbe’ach, it does not necessarily mean the same thing. And if halachic details were not something the observer was focused on, he might not distinguish between the two altars at all.

The same applies to Tekhelet. General descriptions of dye production, and even descriptions of colors in the purple range, do not necessarily enter into details that the observer considered unimportant. All the specifically halachic requirements may fall into that category. To a person describing the dye industry, the exact creature from which Jews produced their halachically valid Tekhelet may have made no difference. To him it was all one subject: making dye.

It is also possible that some of the Rishonim used the current name of a substance not because they had researched it or possessed a received mesorah regarding the halachos of Tekhelet and its identification, but simply because, in broad terms, it referred to the same general subject — producing blue or Tekhelet-colored dye from an animal source. Their intention was not to instruct us to translate the foreign term, identify the biological species, and produce dye from it, but only to give the common name then used for the concept.

Another very important principle in dealing with research into the distant past is that all the knowledge we possess, however extensive it may seem, is always very partial and one-dimensional. A written description can never fully revive a reality and convey the lived experience in all its layers. And the written sources themselves preserve only a small part of the reality that once existed. ג)

The complexity of reality causes the people operating within it to focus on whatever seems most important to them. A stranger reading speeches by world leaders from recent years could easily “prove” from them that there cannot be a war in Syria in which millions are being brutally killed, because the central subject in those speeches is the terrible injustice suffered by Palestinians at checkpoints. It would seem unreasonable that while millions are dying nearby, intelligent leaders would say the great problem of humanity, and of the Middle East in particular, is checkpoints in the territories. Likewise, the constant discussion about the Kinneret filling and emptying could lead someone to think it is Israel’s main source of water, while in reality most water in Israel comes from desalination. Many residents are not even aware of this, and their descriptions of the country could entirely omit its main source of water.

Not every Roman who bought Tekhelet in the marketplace knew where it came from, which colors and species counted as halachic Tekhelet, and which were comparable to a grafted esrog or a Canary Island date palm. Industry in general, and luxury products especially, often depended on guarded secrets and old tribal or ethnic traditions. A Roman writer could take bits and pieces he had heard and noticed, combine them, and present one coherent picture — but that picture need not reflect the complexity of the reality.

More generally, in research one must remember the limits of our knowledge even when we have no specific reason to doubt it. Our place within the research picture is always narrow and limited. Each generation’s expansion of knowledge allows it to understand things that earlier generations could not. When the Radzyner Rebbe succeeded in producing a blue dye from the cuttlefish, it never occurred to him that the blue color being produced before his eyes had no connection at all to the cuttlefish itself, but was created by a chemical process from ingredients he regarded merely as processing agents; the same color would have been produced even if the cuttlefish had been left outside the pot. What the eye sees, and even an apparently perfect fit with the data in our hands, are always incomplete.

A book that, two thousand years later, appears to the reader to “describe everything” may have been understood by people of its own time as a book concerned with only a certain type of information, in which case its silence on something else means nothing. We know newspapers today that, for political, business, or ideological reasons, are practically forbidden to discuss particular subjects, even while publishing hundreds of pages full of detail every day. The same applies to different types of books and writers. Even in science and technology — such as the Dead Sea Works, the natural-gas framework, or canal proposals — each source presents the world through its own outlook. A reader of one newspaper learns about one “world,” while a different source describes an entirely different one. Why should texts like these suddenly become worthy, two thousand years later, of fine diyukim about why the author did not write this, or why he remained silent about that?

Arguments from silence are often misplaced. For decades, for example, it was claimed that there was no evidence for camels in the period of the Avos and that their remains were absent from the major cities of Eretz Yisrael. Gradually, indirect evidence showed that domesticated camels did exist at that time. Even if we still have no explanation for the absence of camel remains at Tel Gamma, identified with Gerar, that does not prove there were no camels then. We cannot reconstruct the entire reality. Once we know from the Torah that Avraham and Yitzchak at least had camels, one can invent explanations as much as one likes — perhaps the people of Gerar opposed camels for some reason. The cat provides the reverse example: mummified and painted cats are known from Egypt from the Old Kingdom, long before Matan Torah, yet the cat is not mentioned even once anywhere in Tanach. The question is interesting, and explanations can easily be invented — perhaps because the Egyptians worshipped cats, Jews despised them — but the absence of mention proves nothing.

One of the clearest historical examples is Herodotus, the Greek “father of history,” who nowhere mentions Nevuchadnetzar, the great Babylonian king. Had his name not been found inscribed on thousands of bricks in the ruins of Babylon, we would have been forced to answer nineteenth-century German researchers claiming that the Jews invented the story of Nevuchadnetzar. How could such a central historical figure — a great conqueror and founder of a royal dynasty — be completely missed by the historian? These are the sorts of questions that are easy to explain only after the fact, and they should be remembered when similar arguments are made elsewhere. It is also worth noting the precision of the mesorah of Chazal: the name of his wife, “Shamiramis,” mentioned in Midrash, was also found inscribed among Babylonian remains; see Megadim 14, Dr. Chaim Cheifetz, “The Persian Period,” note 124.

The city of Lod is not mentioned at all in First Temple literature, and is mentioned frequently beginning with Ezra. Chazal said (Megillah 4a) that it had been walled from the days of Yehoshua bin Nun, was destroyed in the episode of Pilegesh baGivah, and was rebuilt in the return to Tzion. They were not troubled by the lack of earlier mention, because they had a mesorah from their fathers. Today we know that Lod already appears in the conquest list of Thutmose III as Rwtn.

The question of whether to rely on research, and on the specific kind of research we are dealing with here, is itself a meta-halachic question to be decided by poskim. It does not depend entirely on arguing each individual item of data. A father who tells his son, “The data is clear; there is no reason to doubt it. Rav Elyashiv and Rav Wosner, with all their greatness, simply were not open to research, and truth is more beloved than anything,” should not be surprised if years later his son announces that he accepts academic conclusions about the late development of halachah or Biblical criticism because “the data is clear; there is no reason to doubt it. You and your friends, with all your greatness, are simply not sufficiently open to research, and truth is more beloved than anything.” A research reconstruction is not the last word in our world. Every study rests on assumptions. The issue is not “openness to research,” but the value and reliability of a particular kind of research.

Supporters of the Murex identification are aware that the research does not compel the conclusion. Their position, rather, is that the straightforward reading of the evidence is that this is indeed what happened, and therefore the burden of proof lies on the person denying it. After all, in every safek — especially one where there is no possible issur but only a concern that one may be missing a chiyuv — we do not require absolute proofs that do not exist in this world. Once they consider the historical reality clear, they also assume that statements of Chazal and earlier authorities can be fitted to that known reality, as we do in other places where we do not deny what we see with our own eyes but interpret earlier statements accordingly. Still, this approach to halachah is certainly not self-evident, and there is room to reject it.

On the other hand, it should also be stressed that many such statements are not truly contradictions at all, for the same reason. Various descriptions of the chilazon by later authorities may have been written as interpretations or suggestions for understanding Chazal rather than from a received mesorah or actual knowledge of the details. This is something a Rav must weigh in light of the broader conclusions on the subject, but it is difficult to decide the identification itself from such sources. The central issue is the reality known to Chazal, who lived much closer to the relevant period and received the subject of Tekhelet together with the rest of Torah shebe’al peh and the explanations of mitzvos — not what much later writers offered as interpretation from a distance. There are many interpretations, opinions, and possibilities. It is certainly wrong to wave one explanation of an earlier authority as decisive while hiding the others. For that reason, most objections to the identification that are based on this type of source are not really decisive. In general, taking terms and descriptions absolutely literally — “black,” “resembles,” “blood,” “fish,” “wounding,” and so on — is not conclusive in questions of this kind. ה)

An exception is the sugya in Shabbos 75a, which clearly describes the way the blood is taken from the chilazon for dyeing, and at least on the straightforward reading not all of its details fit what we know about the Murex. Of course, almost anything can be answered, and the ancient processing methods may have differed from those known to us, so even this alone is difficult to make into a foundation. The Yerushalmi there (1:3) likewise says, “Does a chilazon have sinews and bones?” Some understand it rhetorically: can it possibly have sinews and bones? Again, we see how difficult it is to build a decisive argument even from an explicit statement. The issue of tzad should also be mentioned. The Gemara clearly treats capturing the chilazon as tzad, whereas with the usual way murex snails are gathered it is quite a chiddush to call the act “trapping.”

Questions such as whether a mesorah is required and what counts as a mesorah, how to treat a safek chiyuv, how halachic doubts are decided, and whether the disappearance of Tekhelet has halachic or hashkafic meaning are all halachic — or, if one prefers, meta-halachic — questions. There is no need to elaborate on why these are certainly matters for poskim, and I will not enter them here. Even if Acharonim wrote that if Tekhelet is found it should be restored, there is still room for a halachic discussion by the poskim of our generation. Once the sides have been clarified, there is little purpose in endless polemic. These are plainly not questions that research alone can settle with a simple yes or no.

Similarly, quotations from mekubalim and the like are certainly not material from which halachah can be decided, in either direction, as the Chasam Sofer famously said that one should not sow kilayim in halachah. The central question is whether the use of Murex documented in ancient sources and demonstrated by archaeological finds was also the source of the Tekhelet that our ancestors used for tzitzis and the Bigdei Kehunah. When we are convinced of a physical reality, we interpret Chazal in light of it, just as we explain statements of Chazal about the sun, its appearance, and its movement according to what we understand reality to be.

This question should be decided primarily from sources close to the actual period. First and foremost would be evidence from Chazal, who possessed both the practical knowledge and the mesorah, or from external sources describing what they themselves saw or what they heard from trustworthy people of their own time.

From the Particular to the General in Archaeology

The essence of archaeology is inference from particular findings to a broader picture. In principle, inference from particulars can become a kind of statistics. But reliable statistics require some knowledge of the whole and of the conditions under which it exists; only then can a sample stand in for checking every case. Archaeology necessarily relies on some idea of what has not been excavated in order to draw conclusions from what has. The finds are always only a small percentage of what once existed. Even in familiar modern reality statistics often mislead people — election polls and medical studies of the “new study finds” variety are obvious examples. It is very easy to be carried away by partial data without asking why the data may not represent the whole.

The dye workshops in which hundreds of thousands of murex shells were found are often mentioned as though they form a representative sample of the entire ancient industry. But one has to understand the Roman system and Rome’s disproportionate place in the archaeological record.

The Romans developed technologies and laid the foundations for large-scale industry, though in some measure the Greek conquerors before them had already begun doing so. In more ancient times production was based much more directly on what was naturally available; people did not reshape the landscape, and certainly not the market, on the same scale. Resources were distributed according to where nature put them. Consider water supply in Eretz Yisrael: almost all large waterworks found in the country are Hellenistic and, especially, Roman. Before them we have only a few major projects from the time of Shlomo HaMelech and earlier, such as in Yerushalayim and Gezer. This obviously does not mean nobody in Eretz Yisrael drank water between Shlomo and Pompey. Settlements were built around wells and cisterns, and water was carried in jars by donkeys. The Romans developed long-distance aqueduct systems, built cities where they wanted, and brought water to them.

The same is true of immersion pools. There are very few archaeological remains of mikvaos or specially built immersion installations before the Hellenistic period. Does that mean that from Matan Torah until the Hellenistic era Jews did not tovel and become tahor? Obviously not. Immersion was done in a river or water pit; special bath structures were not necessarily built. Presumably there were wooden constructions or reed partitions for tznius, but there was no architectural culture of bathhouses and mikvaos. Researchers likewise say there are no remains of synagogues before the Hellenistic period, even though Chazal state in several places that batei knesses existed earlier and understand “they burned all the meeting places of God in the land” in that sense. What changed in the Hellenistic period may simply have been the development of a recognizable synagogue building style; earlier a beis knesses may not have looked architecturally different from another house. The same may apply to an ezras nashim: researchers claim there is no architectural evidence for one before the Geonic era, but a later formal architectural feature may have replaced earlier temporary partitions or side rooms. Similarly, most surviving paved roads are Roman because Roman construction technology was distinctive. That does not mean there were no roads before Rome. We therefore cannot judge every phenomenon only by the form it took in the Hellenistic-Roman period and treat the abundance of remains from that period as the beginning, end, and totality of the phenomenon.

The same point applies when discussing dyes produced from sea creatures. We cannot begin with the Roman period. Tekhelet and argaman were known throughout the ancient world and are mentioned under these names already in Akkadian writings. The Bnei Yisrael leaving Mitzrayim obviously knew Tekhelet and argaman not merely because the Torah commanded their use; they actually possessed such materials, as the Torah describes in listing the donations to the Mishkan.

According to some researchers, the word Tekhelet may derive from taklu, meaning stable or reliable — a reference to a dye that stays in wool for generations without fading. There are also statements of Chazal that can be read as though “Tekhelet” is not primarily the name of a color but of a product: wool dyed with a durable dye. This would be the simple meaning of Yevamos 4b, “Tekhelet amra hu.” ט) A number of sources, discussed later, seem to show that the word Tekhelet could cover a broad range of colors. It is possible that hues in the red-burgundy spectrum and related shades were called argaman, while the rest were called Tekhelet. See Midrash HaGadol, Terumah §5: “Tekhelet is the sky, and argaman is the clouds.” The word argaman, according to one theory, may be related to urgu, used in Indo-European languages in the sense of “shining.” Ancient peoples classified colors differently from us: less by rigid categories and more by associations.

But that does not mean that everything called “Tekhelet” was halachically valid Tekhelet. Halachah is conservative in its basic structure: it preserves the concrete physical terms of the Torah as they were received. Kera kid’chsiv. A Sefer Torah is written on klaf; one cannot replace klaf with some high-quality modern material that happens to resemble it. Haza’ah with eizov requires the species called eizov, not merely any similar plant. An eizov with a modifying name is invalid — Greek eizov, Roman eizov, desert eizov, and so on (Parah 11:7). Matzah is the lechem oni of Mitzrayim; its definition does not change whenever poor people change what sort of bread they eat. The Torah itself says nothing about the physical form of tefillin, yet halachah says their received form from the days of Moshe is essential, and they are made from particular materials in a particular form and color. Torah measurements were fixed by measures and coins in use in the Torah world and do not change merely because the size of an olive or a finger later changes. So it is throughout halachah.

The general word totafos included an entire class of amulet-like ornaments known in the ancient world; the Mishnah even lists a totefes among women’s ornaments. But tefillin are only the particular form that Moshe taught Yehoshua to make. In the same way, when Maseches Ma’asros or Kilayim says “eizov,” it may use the common name rather than refer exclusively to the specific eizov valid for haza’ah. So too, the “Tekhelet” used by Achashverosh need not have been halachically valid. Halachic Tekhelet is the Tekhelet possessed by the generation that left Mitzrayim and regarding which the Torah gave its mitzvah.

One can certainly debate this. There are areas where Chazal treated the din as extending to a changed physical reality. For the ink of a Sefer Torah, for example, we follow the poskim who hold that gall-nut ink is not indispensable. The reality and processing of duchsustus, explicitly discussed by Chazal, changed, yet later forms have been accepted. The poskim discussed whether every bitter vegetable could be maror. See also Chullin 62b on a modifying name, Bechoros 7b regarding honey, Tosafos Zevachim 22b regarding water with a modifying name, and Sukkah 13a on whether a modifying name from before Matan Torah is different. But because we do not have proofs that allow a decisive conclusion, the matter is more likely to remain a safek. In any case, only after identifying the Tekhelet of the Torah and the difference, if any, between it and what we have today can we decide the next question. We cannot begin by assuming that whatever we find and would naturally call Tekhelet must be the Tekhelet of the Torah. Even where Chazal explicitly broaden a term — for example, the opinion in Rosh Hashanah 23a that hadas is among the species of “cedar” — that does not automatically make hadas valid for the cedar used in purification. The Yerushalmi counts twenty-four kinds of cedar, apparently because tall leafy trees could all be called “cedar” for that purpose, not because they all share the halachic din of cedar. This seems preferable to calling hadas a cedar with a modifying name. The Rash in Negaim 14:1 holds that purification may be performed with different cedar species; the case there is cypress, and it remains to be considered whether much more distant species such as hadas would be included.

Imagine that the esrog species disappeared from the world and people tried to reconstruct it thousands of years later from descriptions written by non-Jewish growers. They would discover techniques of grafting citron onto lemon so that it grows properly and does not become diseased or fail to produce fruit. They might find remains of enormous numbers of such grafted trees. True, citron has almost no ordinary use today, but in earlier times it was widely used for seasoning and food. Researchers could then “prove” that the lemon-grafted fruit was what people called esrog, and could also show that early Jewish sources call the pri etz hadar an esrog. None of this would tell us which exact form of esrog was accepted for the mitzvah.

More than that, we ourselves use the Torah expression pri etz hadar for the entire citrus family. A few decades ago posters advertising “Jaffa oranges” carried the words “pri etz hadar.” The fruits obviously share many characteristics. The Chazon Ish even discusses why a lemon is not valid for the mitzvah, since it may belong to the same basic species. He writes in Kilayim 3:7: “Even if we say that esrog and lemon are two forms of one species, with regard to the mitzvah we received from our fathers that it is specifically the esrog.” By a loose reconstruction one could even argue from Chazal’s statement that if one has no esrog he might think of bringing a quince or pomegranate, that those are the only competitors to esrog and therefore all other citrus fruits must be valid. Obviously that would prove too much.

The same applies to hadas. Many different myrtle shrubs are all called hadas, including forms that do not resemble the branch used for the mitzvah at all but grow as thorny bushes. When the old man in the Gemara took two hadassim for Shabbos, or when non-Jews bought myrtle for decoration, fragrance, or its berries, they were all called hadas. Yet everyone understood that in Tishrei, when someone wanted a hadas for the mitzvah, he meant a particular three-leaved myrtle branch, not just anything in the botanical myrtle family. Today we speak of an entire “myrtle family.” Similarly, there are factories producing chametz matzos all year and even “matzah meal” from them, and we still call those crackers matzos for ordinary purposes. But in Nissan the person buying matzah seeks shemurah matzah, while in Tishrei someone buying matzah or matzah meal may simply want a chametz cracker. Residents of new neighborhoods in northern Yerushalayim call their location Yerushalayim, and they may follow Yerushalayim practice regarding music at weddings or not leaving a body overnight, while for Megillah many treat themselves as a separate city. Many terms have this kind of secondary halachic meaning.

As noted above, the fact that various earlier authorities used a foreign-language name now commonly connected with the Murex is not much of a proof. They were not writing in order to identify the chilazon, nor were they transmitting a detailed mesorah. They were simply referring to the concept by the name current in their own day, after the Jewish mesorah of actual Tekhelet production had already ceased. Clearly the Chavos Yair did not possess secret technical information about Tekhelet. Some authorities thought the chilazon was a kosher fish; see Toafos Re’em on Yere’im §401. Many Rishonim wrote that it was like a small fish, while the Rama MiPano in Tzvaos Hashem II §14 writes that it grows and is rooted in the ground, and there are many other such descriptions. י) There is therefore little value in collecting only the statements that happen to fit one proposed identification. In no area of physical reality is it possible to reconcile every statement in every source from every generation except by inventions and empty pilpul. This, incidentally, is also the “comfort zone” of some opponents of Tekhelet: one can always find an older source pointing the other way.

There is no mention in Roman literature or Roman law of the Tekhelet consumed by Jews, even though this must have represented an enormous market. Pliny, for example, takes the trouble to mention that Jews did not believe in the powers of dates that he himself believed in. Chazal likewise never state that Tekhelet and argaman came from the same species.

The central fact is the importance of the Murex to Roman industry. Its main use was for producing argaman, though sources also mention colors in purple or blue ranges; that point itself is debated and will be discussed below. But this does not prove that one of those hues was the specific shade of Tekhelet or that Murex dye was regarded as valid for the mitzvah. On the contrary, a number of details point more naturally to something close to what we call purple: for example, the purple textiles from Palmyra shown to have been dyed with purpura; see HaTekhelet p. 262. The same work, p. 267, describes the Acco finds as “blue-purple,” with similar findings from Tel Keisan (p. 270), Yamit (p. 286), and Ein Bokek, whose find is called “blue” (p. 290); the author’s conclusion on p. 304 is that Roman hyacinth was purple. יא)

Roman “hyacinth” was a consumer product within a particular culture, not an abstract scientific definition of a chemical substance or wavelength. Its color was shaped by fashion. Of the fourteen shades said to have been obtainable, some may have been prestigious and marketable, while others were only theoretical possibilities for which no one would waste an expensive raw material because there was no demand. The analogy would be modern denim. Denim is dyed with indigo and has a recognized fashionable color. A knockoff pair made noticeably more turquoise or more purple would look like a Purim costume.

All the descriptions I was able to find — through quotations in the Tekhelet literature and particularly in HaArgaman, p. 40 onward — speak primarily about the argaman industry, “Tyrian purple,” with descriptions long and short all under the heading of argaman or purpura. Chazal’s porforin generally belongs in the same group. The overall impression is that they are speaking about one broad type of luxury product. It could be produced in several shades, and the purple-blue shade may itself have been counted among the argaman colors. Someone who does not begin with the assumption that a lighter Tekhelet-blue shade is included will find it very difficult to connect all this directly to Tekhelet. Tekhelet and argaman are listed as two separate well-known products across ancient cultures. It is not very plausible that “argaman” means thirteen of the fourteen possible Murex shades, while “Tekhelet” means only shade number fourteen.

Professor Mendel Singer of Cleveland, in an English article published in Journal of Halacha and Contemporary Society, no. 42 (Sukkos 5761), edited by Rabbi Alfred Cohen and published by the Rabbi Jacob Joseph School, writes that there is no evidence the Murex was used for blue rather than purple, that archaeological evidence for Murex blue is lacking, and that this is theoretically impossible because the chemical composition of indigo and Murex dye is the same.

From the sugyos in the Gemara, it appears that the main counterfeit or competitor to Tekhelet was kela ilan. See, however, Sifrei at the end of Shelach: “I can put on colored dyes and kela ilan and they resemble Tekhelet — who will know?” This can fit the view that the Roman hyacinth produced from purpura was essentially purple, or simply the fact that purpura was much more expensive than Tekhelet יב) so there was no economic reason to use it as the cheap counterfeit. It should also be remembered that their kela ilan may not have been identical to what we assume today. We do not know precisely how it was produced or which plant materials were used. It is commonly associated with woad and indigo, but many other plants can produce dyes; Dr. Zvi Koren notes in his article “On Dyes in Antiquity” that some fifty are known to us. It is therefore difficult to reconstruct exactly which kela ilan Chazal had in mind when discussing tests to distinguish it from Tekhelet. This is especially significant because the Gemara’s tests are difficult to reproduce with modern indigo and Murex dye. Singer likewise notes that the blue components of Murex and indigo identified as kela ilan are chemically identical and cannot be distinguished by an ordinary chemical test. Supporters of the Murex therefore have to posit differences in the ancient dyeing process that made the test effective. That itself introduces some uncertainty when the reconstructed process is necessarily not identical to the original.

Must we assume, as supporters of Tekhelet often phrase it when answering objections, that “there were two chilazon species”? One of them writes:

“The conclusion from all of the above is that in order to assume that purpura is not the chilazon of Tekhelet, we would have to say that in their time there were two species of chilazon, both extremely expensive and both producing exceptionally durable color; both were used to dye wool a blue shade identical to kela ilan; both were hunted and dyed in the same places; and their characteristics were likewise similar, etc. By some remarkable coincidence, the chilazon of the Torah disappeared so completely that both its memory and its physical remains vanished from the world, leaving no archaeological record at all. Its very name disappeared entirely from all the books of all the scholars of that period, despite centuries of writing in which they discussed the mollusks of that region… Meanwhile the other, similar chilazon was recorded extensively by the scholars of the nations and left abundant remains in dye workshops proving its use for dyeing in those days… Chazal also never mention this second chilazon even in a single Midrash, nor do they warn against making tzitzis with it, despite the fact that it produces the same color and was found and dyed in the same region… This is a powerful sevara for which, in truth, there is no answer.” יג)

Another supporter writes:

“This alone is a proof for which there is no answer in the world, and it is impossible to overturn the identification with weak questions. After this introduction, it is already clear beyond any safek what Tekhelet is. If there is some Gemara discussing the chilazon, then obviously the true pshat must be the pshat that fits this chilazon.”

But in fact the situation can be viewed exactly the other way around. Tekhelet and argaman are mentioned many times, yet nowhere is it stated that they came from the same source. The straightforward impression from Chazal is that they are two different things with different functions. When Chazal discuss trapping the chilazon in connection with the Mishkan, they explain it in relation to Tekhelet, not argaman — even though argaman was also needed for the Mishkan. יד) Purpura is likewise mentioned many times in Chazal, generally as the name of an important or royal garment, including as the Targum for the Babylonian cloak and in many other examples, yet it is nowhere connected with the Torah’s Tekhelet. טו) See HaTekhelet, p. 247, which cites an early Midrash giving an extended derashah on the royal porfira and describing Yisrael as the Holy One’s porfira. Tekhelet, which would seem natural to mention there, does not appear at all.

Josephus describes the production of argaman from sea creatures (Antiquities 3:183), and also says that the stores of the Beis HaMikdash contained stocks of purple purpura (Wars 6:8:3), yet he never says that Tekhelet — so important to Jews — was part of the same industry. And all the detailed descriptions we possess are Roman descriptions of Roman industry. We do not have comparable descriptions from the Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Egyptians, Canaanites, Persians, or from the tribe of Zevulun, all of whom preceded Roman control in the region by many years. Even in various dye installations from the Israelite period found throughout the country — surveyed in HaTekhelet in the chapter on archaeological finds — there is almost no trace of the shells that became the hallmark of purpura dye works in the Hellenistic period. It is entirely plausible that halachic Tekhelet depended on knowledge already known in the era of Matan Torah among Egyptians or Akkadians and need not have been identical with the technique used by Roman industry. Discovery of Murex dyeing is traditionally attributed to the Minoans, ancestors of the Greeks. טז)

Singer, in the article cited above, brings long-term studies by experts on ancient textiles and dyes — including Dr. Irving Ziderman, relying on Franco Brunello, Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood, and others — who state that in Egypt, for example, no blue textile has been found whose blue came from Murex. In other words, insofar as Egypt possessed “Tekhelet,” it was not Murex Tekhelet.

Incidentally, not all non-Jewish sources mention tola’as shani either, even though according to Chazal it came from a “worm of the mountains” and was a familiar dye source both at Matan Torah and in the days of the Beis HaMikdash. Purpura became an international phenomenon practiced by many peoples, and its technical descriptions were therefore copied from one culture to another.

Julius Caesar, and Augustus after him, restricted the use of purpura to Roman nobles. Nero later prohibited the purpura shade called amethystina — generally identified with the blue or blue-purple range — to everyone but the emperor. These emperors lived while the Beis HaMikdash still stood, yet our sources record no clash over the Bigdei Kehunah or over the Tekhelet worn by the masses of Klal Yisrael throughout territories under Roman rule. יז) The more detailed decree often cited in Tekhelet literature, issued in 383 under the imperial government — in an era known for anti-Jewish restrictions — does not prohibit wearing purpura at all. It restricts production and sale to imperial workshops, evidently because the government wanted the profits of the industry. Purchase and use were not prohibited. יח) If the law had prohibited wearing it and if this were the same substance as mitzvah Tekhelet, there would have been no need for Chazal to tell us merely of some “pair” caught by an eagle; the entire Jewish people would have been unable to walk around with a thread of Tekhelet, and the penalty for violation would have been death.

According to Schmidt, cited by Rav Herzog (p. 369), the decrees may not even have included blue dyeing when the process used a mixture of vegetable ingredients, known as purpura conchyliata. The exact identity of the sammanim which the Gemara says were mixed into halachic Tekhelet was never explained. It is also possible that a lighter Tekhelet-blue simply carried no special status among Romans. The prestige of argaman was a Roman cultural tradition. Josephus describes the triumphal ceremony in which purple was worn “according to an ancient Roman custom” (Wars 7:5:4). Chazal too mention Titus’ fascination with the Paroches, which contained argaman. There is no point asking “why” about fashion. One Roman writer already mocked the “madness for purple,” while another observed that in some countries people did not risk their lives and labor so much over shellfish at all, but dyed with plants instead. It is like asking a woman why she spends a fortune on gold and natural pearls taken from mines and the depths when she could buy gold-filled jewelry with imitation pearls that looks almost the same.

Josephus describes Kohanim trying to bribe the Romans by handing over treasures from the Mikdash, including argaman and tola’as shani from its storerooms (Wars 6:8:3), yet Tekhelet is not mentioned. This suggests that it had no comparable value in Roman eyes. The blue they prized may have been a purple-blue shade, while Tekhelet was simply another dyed fabric that did not especially interest them. יט) The familiar ancient pairing “Tekhelet and argaman,” found among other ancient peoples, does not appear in the relevant Roman passages quoted in the Tekhelet literature. Roman interest centers on argaman. The fact that a blue or purple-blue shade could be made from the same shellfish does not necessarily make that shade identical with the traditional “Tekhelet” known among other peoples; it may have been merely another shade in the Roman purple industry, culturally compared to the sea although fundamentally part of the argaman family. It is even possible that when the Romans discovered what we rediscovered in recent years — that purpura can under certain conditions yield a blue-purple shade — they used it as a substitute for an older traditional Tekhelet. כ)

The purpura dye industry continued for many centuries into the period of the Rishonim, yet Tekhelet was nevertheless treated as something that had been nignaz, lost from Jewish use, even though dyeing itself remained a distinctly Jewish occupation. כא) It apparently never occurred to them simply to investigate purpura. The Rif, who lived under Muslim rule, writes in Hilchos Tzitzis, “Nowadays we have no Tekhelet.” The Rambam, who certainly knew Aristotle’s descriptions of marine creatures, writes in his Peirush HaMishnah to Menachos chapter 4: “It is not found in our hands today because we do not know how to dye it, since not every blue-colored wool is called Tekhelet; rather it is a particular known Tekhelet which cannot be made today.” Rav Avraham ben HaRambam writes: “Because this fish was no longer recognized through an exact mesorah, later generations were prevented from making Tekhelet” (HaMaspik LeOvdei Hashem, R. G. edition, 5749, p. 273).

More than that: Rav Sherira Gaon, in describing the installation ceremony of the Reish Galusa, says that the throne was decorated with Tekhelet and argaman. Obviously he did not mean halachic Tekhelet, but commercially available blue material of the time, while people knew that the halachic Tekhelet was no longer in Jewish hands. Historians cited by Rav Herzog (p. 371) say that the purpura industry finally ended with the fall of Constantinople in 1453. כב) Yet the Radbaz, who lived in that general period, writes that perhaps the chilazon of Tekhelet still exists in the sea but we no longer know how to catch it. He never connects it with purpura, an industry that had survived until not long before his time. He also says that Bnei Yisrael caught it in the Yam Suf, while the blunt-spined Murex is not found there. Other murex-family species do occur in the Red Sea; see Amar, HaArgaman, p. 35. כג)

This proves one of two things. Either these authorities knew or understood that the familiar Murex industry existing in their own days was not the Torah’s Tekhelet, or they understood the status of Tekhelet as something nignaz — a practice lost in the weakened generations after the Churban which we were not expected to reconstruct on our own. It is true that during long stretches of the Rishonim’s era many Jews did not wear a tallis katan at all and did not regularly put on tefillin, but they did wrap themselves in a tallis for davening. From this developed the familiar tallis gadol, intended at least to ensure that during davening one says Krias Shema with tzitzis.

As stated above, words such as Tekhelet and purpura seem to have functioned as broad product names, not as exact biological definitions of the source of a dye. They certainly were not scientific species names. A Roman description naturally describes the industry Romans knew, much as most people who speak about or even work with “denim” are concerned with the fabric and its color without knowing where the dye comes from or how it is produced. Under broad names such as Tekhelet, argaman, and purpura there could have been many different production methods, not merely two competing species of chilazon. כד)

The Romans likewise ignored, or more likely confused, the iantina with Murex, as Gesenius later did. Some claim, in any case, that one cannot dye from iantina at all. And anyone who treats the ancient translation of Tekhelet as “hyacinth” as a precise species identification would also have to reject the Rambam’s view of argaman, because ancient translations render argaman as purpura, while according to the Rambam the Torah’s argaman comes from a worm or insect. We are therefore forced to say that such translations can refer to the general product or color family, not necessarily to the exact halachic production method. Compare Rambam, Hilchos De’os 5:9: “One should not wear royal garments such as garments of gold and argaman.” Kings wore purpura, yet for the Rambam that is not necessarily identical with Torah argaman. Singer likewise shows that the Septuagint’s rendering of Tekhelet and purpura is inconsistent and appears to use these words broadly.

In practice, many murex species are known today, although discussions usually mention only three principal Mediterranean species, and one of them more readily yields a blue shade. כה) But there is no need to assume that halachic Tekhelet had to be connected specifically with the blunt-spined Murex or even with a subspecies of the same genus. There may have been many other creatures containing natural dyes, and there is no reason they all had to possess shells. The relevant species may still exist, or it may have become completely extinct. Extinction is a regular process in nature occurring all the time and everywhere; thousands of species disappear. כו) Marine mollusks in particular are vulnerable and heavily dependent on environmental conditions.

Archaeological findings suggest that Romans cultivated Murex in pools near the shore (HaTekhelet, p. 273). It is entirely possible that the halachic chilazon also depended to some extent on human cultivation, and when cultivation ended it disappeared from the region. There are various creatures with blue blood that are not found in our region today; perhaps some once lived here, and perhaps some could have supplied dye. The major biological changes traditionally associated with the Churban and Galus may also have affected it through a chain reaction: the land ceased to be cultivated, large areas became desolate, food sources for particular animals disappeared, and other animals that depended on them migrated or declined. Tekhelet too became nignaz from Jewish eyes. Chazal use the word nignaz also of the tachash, an animal used in constructing the Mishkan and afterward no longer known. It would be strange to call a living, familiar species “nignaz” merely because the government prohibited its use. כז) As noted above, however, the government did not actually prohibit use in the simple way often claimed.

The famous account in Sifrei, VeZos HaBerachah §354, states:

“Rabbi Yosi said: Once I was traveling from Keziv to Tzor and I met an old man. I asked him, ‘What is your livelihood?’ He said, ‘From the chilazon.’ I asked him, ‘Is it readily found?’ He said to me, ‘By Heaven! There is a place in the sea where it lies among the mountains, and samamiyos surround it. There is no person who goes there whom the samamiyos do not bite, so that he dies and decomposes in his place.’ I said: ‘It is evident that it is hidden away for the tzaddikim in the future.’”

This sounds like a description of an endangered species. The statement that it comes up once in seventy years may likewise describe stages of its disappearance. כח) The Radbaz (II §685) also seems to imply that after the Churban it no longer came up. This entire picture is difficult for the Murex identification, since Murex is not a rare species. The place described may have been one of the islands opposite the modern Achziv coast. If Tekhelet had been produced from the common Murex, then in Rabbi Yosi’s time — and for many generations afterward — the entire northern coastline still contained dye workshops with millions of shells. One would expect the old man to complain about Roman law, not about mysterious samamiyos surrounding the chilazon at one very specific place. כט)

It seems possible that already in the period of the Tannaim the Tekhelet chilazon had become very scarce, though a few specialists who knew the trade could still obtain it. Unlike Murex, from which enormous numbers of snails might be required for a garment, perhaps this chilazon yielded dye more efficiently. The Romans may never have nationalized it either because the trade secret never reached them — such secrets were guarded by craftsmen, as with Beis Avtinas and Beis Garmu — or because its scarcity made it more economical for Rome to exploit the Murex available to them in great quantities. See Zohar Amar, HaArgaman, p. 10: “Because of the economic importance of this industry, many of its details were already in antiquity treated as professional secrets.” ל) The main point is that argaman was the color that aroused Roman passion and jealousy.

It is also possible that changes in clothing patterns described in Menachos 41a — “a linen sheet in summer and a cloak in winter” — meant that many people no longer needed a thread of Tekhelet at all. Or perhaps the reverse occurred: Tekhelet’s expense and difficulty pushed more and more people to adopt clothing that did not require it. See Bereishis Rabbah 38:18, “the Sanhedrin distinguished by a thread,” which may imply that already then it was practiced mainly by people of stature. This shrinking demand may itself have accelerated the decline and disappearance of the market.

It is painful to think that the Tekhelet the Torah commands us to wear may have disappeared and no longer exist in the world. But that too can be part of the tragedy of Churban and Galus. The land was taken from us, and many of its parts and resources have still not returned and cannot naturally return to what they were. Nations regarding whom the Torah gives various halachos have likewise disappeared as identifiable peoples, as the Rambam rules based on Chazal’s statement that Sancheriv mixed up the nations. Even with Leviim we treat lineage in certain matters as uncertain and therefore do not give ma’aser rishon to a Levi in the same unquestioned way. The research concerning the so-called Kohen gene has even been taken as some support for the idea that the lineage of Leviim became more dispersed than that of Kohanim, since present-day Kohanim show a stronger pattern of shared ancestry whereas Leviim do not show the same uniformity.

Tekhelet is one thread in a garment of royalty and kehunah, teaching that we belong to a mamleches kohanim vegoy kadosh. See Midrash Mishnas Rabbi Eliezer, p. 266: “One who occupies himself with Torah should come and wear the garment of the Aron.” לא) When we were exiled from our land, and no longer had Kohanim doing the avodah in their Bigdei Kehunah, Tekhelet too went into exile from us.

The reason Chazal speak of “chilazon hunters from Haifa to Tzor” may simply be that the coast from Haifa northward — in practice beginning some tens of kilometers south of Haifa, around Hof Tzviya and north — is rocky, indented, and full of lagoons and reefs, unlike the mostly sandy coastline further south. Sea creatures can therefore be trapped among its rocks by waves. But for precisely the same reason many other marine species will be found there as well. It is also possible that “chilazon hunters” here means hunters of argaman shellfish, which were valuable to Babylonians and other governments. לב)

More generally, one should know that the way ancient people divided creatures into kinds and species was very different from our taxonomy. Already in the Torah, a small number of names may include many forms that we today classify as separate species. Under the category of split-hoofed ruminants, the Torah names ten animals, whereas modern taxonomy counts many dozens. לג)

The halachah that “Tekhelet comes only from the chilazon” does not require that there be only one animal capable of producing dye. Its point may simply be to exclude vegetable sources. A listener who knew the reality understood that “the chilazon” meant the particular chilazon producing the halachic Tekhelet shade, just as shani coming from “a worm in the mountains” means a particular species and not any insect one happens to find on a mountain. The Gemara’s discussion of “how do you dye?” likewise sounds like a process particular to Jews, not merely a famous industrial technique practiced constantly by thousands of people throughout the world. There may have been a halachically required processing or dyeing method whose practical details we can no longer reconstruct.

Many arguments begin by asking: where do we see that a particular processing method is required? Where do we see that only one exact shade within the blue spectrum is valid? Where do we see that only one specific chilazon is valid? These questions assume that Tekhelet is something created from a written recipe in the Torah or Gemara, so that after extracting the requirements from the text we can ask, “Where does it say not to do something else?” One supporter puts it: “If a specific shade were required, the Gemara would have had to spell it out.” Really? לד)

The truth is the reverse. “Tekhelet” was an existing physical reality familiar in the era of Matan Torah. The Mishnah did not devote even one word to describing what it looked like because everyone knew what it was, just as it never gives us a full description of tefillin. The Gemara contains a number of statements about it. The text reflects certain facts about the existing mesorah, but Tekhelet’s essence was not created by the text itself. We would never say that because Chazal mention adding sammanim without identifying them, therefore any substance that can be called a samman may be used in making Tekhelet. This is precisely what Torah shebe’al peh means. And for that reason, because reconstructing a physical reality after thousands of years is extremely difficult, every such reconstruction deserves caution.

Let us imagine trying to reconstruct tefillin solely from the “simanim” Chazal gave us. We possess hundreds of ma’amarei Chazal and descriptions concerning tefillin, yet the reconstructed object could still be far from the original. Tefillin have a ketzitzah. We might interpret that “siman” from other uses of the word: perhaps from a cutlet on a plate, perhaps from a rounded sum of interest, perhaps from the broken barrel used in the ceremony for a woman who married improperly. We could then debate whether “every form of ketzitzah is valid.” The story of Elisha Baal Kenafayim might even suggest that tefillin were somewhat rounded, since he compared them to wings. לה)

Chazal say that round tefillin are dangerous. One could perversely argue the opposite: why would anyone make them round unless that resembled the original form? And what exactly is “round”? Perhaps it means something rounded with one sharp end, as may be implied by the Yerushalmi cited in Nachal Eshkol, just as an egg is rounded but has one narrower end. There is even an ancient image that could be interpreted as a person wearing somewhat rounded tefillin. Their proper position could perhaps be “proved” from old pictures of Gedolim showing tefillin near the forehead and not exactly centered. The requirement that the batim be perudos could be reconstructed from other uses of “separation” in Chazal, perhaps requiring merely enough room to insert something between one piece and another. The ma’abarta could be assumed to resemble a ferry, since the word sounds related, or perhaps to some other form of “passing over.” We could then say, “every ferry shape is valid.”

The color of tefillin is black by halachah leMoshe miSinai, but there are different sorts of “black.” Blood can be called black, and the blood of the Tekhelet chilazon is also called black. Perhaps every sort of dark color is valid. Since leather itself is dark brown, perhaps Chazal called that dark brown “black,” because why assume they required an added color at all? After all, a parah adumah is brown. One could even “prove” this from Elisha Baal Kenafayim by assuming he meant a brown dove common in his time, based on consultation with a frum expert. And in the familiar portrait of the Vilna Gaon, one could claim his tefillin look green. As for the letter shin embossed on tefillin, the word os often means simply a sign; perhaps it means the four separated compartments rather than a literal shin, especially since we have never seen an ordinary shin with four heads. And so on without end.

There is no limit to the nonsense that can be produced in this manner. All these ideas could make perfectly respectable historical reconstructions for museums. Precisely for that reason we must preserve mesorah, because sevara alone cannot recreate it. Once a real gap in practical knowledge has opened, this is no longer the normal path of Torah but speculation. It may be more honest to say that we simply cannot reconstruct the original.

Until fairly recently, many archaeologists and researchers assumed naturally that Tekhelet and argaman came from different sources. More recent discussions focus increasingly on the material we actually possess and try to explain halachic Tekhelet as Murex dye, though not all of these writers take every detail in Chazal equally seriously. Rabbi Zohar Amar writes that the identification of Tekhelet is not unequivocal and that the subject has not yet been exhausted; see the introduction to his HaArgaman and his remarks in HaMaayan, Tammuz 5773. On p. 33 he even suggests identifying the chilazon mentioned in Sifrei Devarim, often connected with Tekhelet, with the red-mouthed Hexaplex trunculus relative rather than the blunt-spined species. In note 12 he observes that Pliny’s species names are unclear and may sometimes be synonyms, and he likewise notes difficulty identifying the trumpet shell mentioned there.

The realization that not everything can be reconstructed is difficult for researchers to live with. Research into the past naturally focuses on what survives — the small amount we still know — and tries to build as complete a picture as possible. Usually we are not dealing with fools; researchers know that the result is a reconstruction and often only a hypothesis. But that is the job of research: to draw a picture from whatever can be known.

There is no doubt that if the people being “researched” — the members of the society whose culture and living conditions are being reconstructed — could rise from the dead, they would often laugh for seven days and seven nights at how we portrayed them. A complete way of life cannot truly be rebuilt from random fragments that happened to survive. So too with Tekhelet. If we release ourselves from the assumption that the original reality must be reconstructible, and that our only choice is whether to reconstruct Murex or iantina, or whether dyeing was done in a closed room or under open sky, another possibility becomes obvious: perhaps we simply cannot know.

If we could go to the grave of Achai bar Yoshiyah and present him with our research about Tekhelet, we might fulfill the mitzvah of gladdening those who sleep in the dust. He would probably first laugh heartily at the opportunity to teach us some mussar, because our research might sound to him much like the tefillin reconstruction above. Then he could rebuke us: the one who taught you Mishnah Berurah did not teach you Koheles? “That which was is far off, and very deep — who can find it?”

What is difficult for researchers, whose profession is to present hypotheses and support them as strongly as possible with references and footnotes, need not be equally difficult for us. We have long experience seeing impressive-looking reconstructions conflict with things we received through mesorah. In truth, every reconstruction can mislead. From our narrow vantage point it may look beautifully supported, while from within the full reality — whose countless details we cannot recover — the picture could look very different and our arguments could sound ridiculous. This can easily be illustrated from the complexity of our own lives. Someone who does not know the whole context cannot really understand what is happening. Even people living in Europe today, with the ability to access enormous amounts of information about events in Eretz Yisrael, often do not actually grasp what is happening or how it happens. All the more so when we are dealing with extremely partial and one-dimensional information from antiquity.

The Other Side

Everything said above about this kind of research applies just as much to those who categorically reject the Murex identification. What they are doing is also research — only counter-research. Those who actually tried to identify the chilazon and reproduce the dye invested in deep, broad, and serious study. Much of the opposing “research,” by contrast, consists of collecting objections out of the very material brought by the identifiers. Every avreich who writes a kuntres suddenly becomes an “anti-researcher,” determined to disprove Tekhelet at any price, and for that purpose is prepared to quote anything he finds from Pliny-Gesenius-Copernicus-Aristotle and anyone else.

Despite all the difficulties mentioned above — most of which are not arguments disproving the identification but only reasons not to treat its proofs as absolute — none of this constitutes a decisive refutation of the identification of Tekhelet with the Murex. Singer, it is true, writes that “the evidence against Murex is decisive.” But the identification in itself is certainly reasonable: we know that dyeing from these shellfish existed, and we know that blue shades were produced in the same broad period. Connecting the two is not unreasonable.

The absence of Roman discussion of Jewish Tekhelet can be explained by saying that Roman writers were interested in Murex only because of its importance to Roman culture and luxury. The silence of Chazal regarding an identity between Tekhelet and argaman can be explained according to the Rambam, who holds that the Torah’s argaman does not come from the chilazon at all. Josephus indeed calls the argaman of the Mikdash purpura, but perhaps precision on this halachic distinction was not something he cared about, and he described matters through Roman eyes.

The Roman restrictions are stated broadly for the empire, but it is possible that in the time of the Beis HaMikdash some arrangement existed between Jewish representatives and the Roman governor concerning Tekhelet needed for a mitzvah, especially if the main imperial concern was the prestigious argaman shade, as Rav Herzog suggests. Not every written law was enforced exactly as written. Roman law had its own “Torah shebe’al peh,” so to speak: a statute could sound severe on paper and be applied flexibly in practice. Tekhelet also lasted on garments for years and was presumably transferred from old garments to new ones. Nor is it impossible that clashes with the government under Augustus or others did take place but were not preserved in our sources. Chazal omit many large events of the period that are known from elsewhere; writing political history was not their purpose.

The fact that our Rishonim did not connect the medieval purpura industry with Tekhelet may likewise be explained simply: perhaps they did not know whether Torah Tekhelet had been made from purpura. Even though identifications of this kind existed in translations and other sources, they may not have considered them decisive, while practical experimentation was no longer readily possible.

Certainly every talmid chacham has the right to act according to his own understanding if, after studying the matter, he concludes that the identification is correct. There is no reason to label that yuhara, lo sisgodedu, or any other imagined problem. There is a real machlokes in halachah, and talmidei chachamim have both the right and the responsibility to form an opinion on a halachic question that has become practical.

In the end, the main dispute is not “research versus conservatism.” It is a machlokes in judgment and halachah among talmidei chachamim. Every position has difficulties, and every difficulty can be answered one way or another. That is how the dispute should be viewed. Research and conservatism may certainly influence the participants, but that is not the essence of the machlokes.

The position that seems to emerge from most of the poskim of the generation is not a categorical rejection of the identification, but “wait.” לו) The following section is in praise of waiting and moderation.

On Anarchy and Anarchists

Anarchy is a society that functions without an established system of law and judgment. The Torah, obviously, does not advocate anarchy. Its laws are not infinitely flexible, they are not left to every individual, and the Torah establishes a beis din in the Lishkas HaGazis whose ruling is binding. A scholar who rules against that court can incur the severe din of a zaken mamrei simply for defying its authority. The Torah also commands an enforcement system through officers.

This is not the place to trace the development of Torah shebe’al peh through every generation, including periods without a Sanhedrin. But the process of deciding halachah always had boundaries, and ultimately the main decisions were made by the Gedolim of each generation and place. Every serious talmid always had the right to question, argue, and engage the greatest teachers in Torah. Yet in the end, as has been said, “our Torah does not contain absolute proofs like geometry.” Someone still has to decide.

A situation in which every avreich determines practical halachah entirely from the conclusions of his own learning is, quite simply, anarchy. True, because Torah learning is complex and communities differ, one cannot force every person or group to accept every ruling of a particular posek, even a very great and elderly Gadol. But it cannot be that the Torah was given on the understanding that anyone who learns a sugya may simply do whatever seems right to him and then gather audiences to preach his personal conclusion as binding.

Within a certain framework and up to a point, this is of course exactly what masa umatan shel Torah means. Even a small talmid has the right and duty to present to the greatest Gadol a strong question or a new proof he has discovered. But anyone who belongs to the community of the Perushim, as opposed to the Tzedukim, must have some conception of a halachic decision-making system. The Torah cannot mean that beis din’s agents come to a person who, in their judgment, was mechallel Shabbos, and he replies with a kuntres proving that according to his chiddush there was no chillul Shabbos. Nor can a person conduct dinei mamonos according to whatever novel view he has developed and say kim li like my own chiddush.

We no longer have a Nasi who can order Rabbi Yehoshua to appear before him with his walking stick and money on the day that, according to Rabbi Yehoshua’s own calculation, is Yom Kippur. But we cannot preach and produce anarchy in halachah. For the reasons explained above, it is neither possible nor appropriate simply to coerce individuals into following the opinion of others, even of many great authorities. But those individuals must understand why many people see the matter differently: halachos, especially halachos touching central principles of pesak and the practice of Torah for the tzibbur, are in their view determined through the broad body of recognized morim and poskim.

We must understand that we cannot prove the historical question absolutely. The past reality was one reality, but we have no way to reconstruct it completely. In the end the disagreement therefore becomes a machlokes in sevara. And in a machlokes somebody must decide. It should not be surprising that just as you have decided in favor of side A, many serious people have decided in favor of side B. A person who follows them is doing what it is proper for him to do.

At this point, the “anarchists” claim that the other side refuses to investigate, does not understand the subject, is avoiding the evidence, and so on. In my view this is unfair and shows disrespect for the intelligence of the other side. The many poskim and morim who oppose renewing Tekhelet do not owe anyone an apology. They are not required to become historians, enter the research literature, and publish kuntreisim. They are entitled to state their halachic judgment without being dragged into an exchange of research booklets in which their literary or scholarly performance might be weaker. לז) The essential points in the dispute do not necessarily depend on translating passages from Pliny or compiling academic-style source sheets.

Stripping the other side of legitimacy is a new and troubling stage in the developing anarchy within halachic discourse. It is no surprise that the same pattern spills into other issues, such as ascending Har HaBayis and similar questions. The practical boundaries of halachic authority have always depended to some extent on time and place. Before the Haskalah, everyone understood that the local halachah was determined by the mara d’asra — not because he was necessarily the greatest scholar alive, but because someone had to decide. Communities had takanos, the Vaad Arba Aratzos had takanos, regions had takanos, and these did not deal only with administrative arrangements but with halachic matters as well. One who defied the accepted rulings of the place and its Rabbanim was considered a poretz geder and could be sanctioned by the community with the backing of civil law.

With the weakening of communal authority and the rise of emancipation, not only Haskalah spread; the halachic world itself became more complicated and decentralized. Sometimes the local rabbi was merely a government-appointed rav mita’am whose rulings carried little Torah authority. Yet boundaries still existed. Even in the battered Europe between the world wars, if the Chofetz Chaim, Rav Chaim Ozer, and other Gedolei HaDor broadly agreed on a halachah or even on an important communal practice, someone who deliberately separated himself from that position could be seen as separating from the tzibbur. לח) True, consensus had to be broader in such a decentralized world. If one famous Gaon disputed the great authorities just mentioned, there could again be room for d’avid k’mar avid. But every system has boundaries. Complexity is not the same thing as anarchy.

Even today we cannot claim that a broad consensus of contemporary poskim has the status of Torah miSinai. There are kehillos and communities with their own poskim who are not necessarily aligned with what our circle calls “the poskim of the generation.” But every functioning Torah community ultimately has some mechanism by which halachah is decided. Someone has to decide in the end. The Torah was not given so that every individual does whatever he personally thinks its words mean. That is the opposite of the very concept of Torah — a law and judgment operating through an ordered system.

A system in which halachah is determined simply by whoever has the better list of arguments is not really an orderly or sustainable system. There can always be another presentation of the evidence, another way of thinking, another set of reasons that turns the entire picture upside down. Presenting Torah as nothing more than a contest of arguments and personal conclusions is contrary to its nature. It approaches the Tzeduki idea of the Torah as a closed text lying before each reader to interpret on his own.

We cannot assume, for example, that the reasons we can articulate for Chazal’s interpretation of “mimochoras haShabbos” are necessarily more linguistically compelling or closer to pshat than the Tzeduki reading. The reason we remain with the Perushi interpretation is the authority the Torah itself gave to Chachmei HaTorah. This is apart from cases in which there is a mesorah transmitted person to person back to Moshe Rabbeinu, which the Tzedukim and those like them likewise denied.

Many contemporary academic researchers represent this Tzeduki-type posture when they present an alternate reading of a text — whether Torah, Mishnah, or even a Rishon — as equally legitimate or even “more correct.” But halachically, where two readings are possible, what determines practice is the reading accepted by the halachic authorities. There is no independently recoverable “objective truth” available to us in every such matter. The original reality was of course one reality, but we cannot completely reconstruct it; halachah is therefore fixed by the decisions of Chachmei HaTorah. The statement “there is no source for such-and-such rule” is not by itself meaningful. There is no mathematical proof for every halachic conclusion. The force of halachah comes from the authority the Torah gave Chazal and the chachamim who decide it.

Unfortunately, the new anarchists continue to speak in the language of “objectivity” while refusing to spell out their answer to the basic question: who decides? Some hide behind the slogan that “after the sealing of the Talmud no individual has authority to establish anything.” But most questions that actually confront us are not explicitly decided in the Talmud, and attempts to produce absolute proofs are often an illusion. The question therefore remains: without a mechanism of decision, there is no functioning Torah, no functioning halachah, no law and judgment. Even the poorest nations and most primitive tribes have some system by which communal decisions are made. Without one, they are not really a nation at all, merely individuals living near one another.

Handing everything over to arguments and “objectivity” leaves every question permanently open to anarchy, exactly as happens in academic research, where issues remain open to endless debate and are turned upside down every few generations. That is also how a Tzeduki Sanhedrin appears in the aggadic descriptions. “Every man with his own Torah in his hand” is not only a technical problem; it is a fundamental one. Human imagination and flexibility have no natural limit. Once Torah is pushed entirely into private interpretation and individual understanding, almost anything the human mind invents can eventually be placed inside it. We are an umah and a mamlechah, not a collection of individuals each giving himself his own Torah.

I certainly do not mean to accuse all supporters of Tekhelet of this. Some are great and outstanding talmidei chachamim. My remarks are directed only toward a certain agenda found among some polemicists in the subject: they ignore the unavoidable question of halachic hierarchy and authority, and sometimes claim that no such authority exists or that no one has the right to decide. And if there is a recognized authority who decides differently, they dismiss him by saying he did not read or understand the arguments.

The attempt to force mori hora’ah to play on the field of polemical articles and competing quotations — with the threat that otherwise the “anarchists” will rule that they do not understand the topic and are not participants in the discussion — is both mistaken and deeply troubling. A similar pattern appeared in the polemic against sheitels, where major mori hora’ah viewed the method itself as undermining basic structures of halachah and pesak. A serious talmid’s role is to offer his chiddushim to the Torah public. He cannot make all of Torah depend upon his personal worldview and conclusions while declaring the other side illegitimate.

The attempt to separate “halachah” from “meta-halachah” is itself foolish and undermines the legitimacy of the whole halachic system. A meta-halachic outlook necessarily grows from pesak and from the very role of a person who has become a posek accepted by many. The Rav to whom these same “anarchists” bring questions of mar’os damim, kilayim, agunos, and eruvin is the Rav from whom they should also be prepared to receive guidance on meta-halachic questions.

As stated, one cannot force every individual to accept the opinion of the majority of the great mori hora’ah. But a person who has not personally reached a settled conclusion and whose heart troubles him that perhaps he is neglecting a Torah mitzvah can be at ease. The mitzvos of the Torah, their interpretations, and their details are determined according to the rulings of the poskim — in the generation of Yehoshua and Pinchas just as in ours. If the accepted pesak is that one is not obligated to perform something, then he is not considered to be deliberately neglecting a chiyuv, and he certainly has great authorities on whom to rely.

It is difficult to escape the feeling that beyond objective arguments about identifying the Murex, there is also, among some who wear it, an impulse toward national and personal renewal. The same impulse expresses itself in areas beyond Tekhelet and can be connected with breaking out of the “old” Chareidi framework or with a stronger connection to Zionism and ideas of geulah. To them one may say: remove the beam from between your own eyes. Your beis midrash also contains plenty of meta-halachah and emotional considerations that are not dictated purely by objective discoveries. If the argument is really a meeting of ideologies, research papers should not be waved around as though only one side has values and assumptions. If, in their telling, conservatism becomes a mitzvah in itself for the other side, then for some on their side anarchy can also become a mitzvah in itself.

None of this criticism is intended to diminish the honor of great and exceptional talmidei chachamim who accepted the Murex identification. There is certainly substantial basis and strong logic for the identification. Not every reasonable decision has anything to do with anarchy or, chas veshalom, with something negative.

May the One Who declares the end from the beginning gather His scattered ones and renew a song for Him. When He returns to His Heichal, may He bring back His precious vessels and raise the Aron of His covenant from the depths. May He renew for us from His good treasure Tekhelet and argaman, the shemen hamishchah and the ketores hasamim. May the Refiner stand and purify, may a new Torah go forth from Him, and may the fire of the mizbe’ach descend from Heaven and rise before Him with favor.

♦ ♦ ♦

Notes

א) In the Hellenistic period in particular, clear categories such as “history,” “natural science,” and the like had not yet fully developed. Writers therefore did not always draw a sharp line between imagination and reality, even in matters they themselves had reason to doubt. They would complete a description with literary additions meant to satisfy and entertain the reader. The most famous examples are the speeches Hellenistic writers — Josephus included — place in the mouths of historical figures in various situations. Dostoevsky’s description is similar to some Greek and Roman descriptions of the Jews of their own time, many of which are quoted in Josephus’ Against Apion. Such accounts probably began with some genuine point of reality, but each copyist or writer added his own touch until the result became ridiculous stories.

ב) A well-known modern historian, Desmond Seward, similarly describes the Beis HaMikdash in his book The Traitor of Jerusalem, which presents itself as a historical study of Josephus and naturally relies on sources from the period. He writes, among other things, of guards who supposedly prevented people with dirty shoes, walking sticks, or bundles from entering in order to avoid tumah; ceremonial breaks in which Scripture was read and wine drunk according to ritual rules; animals whose throats were cut and whose meat was then carried to marble tables where it was burned according to ritual; and a huge cedar door concealed behind a Babylonian curtain. With “documentation” this precise, it would obviously not be advisable to reconstruct either the avodah of the Beis HaMikdash or its physical form from such a description.

ג) Rav Herzog writes (p. 428): “Had an entire ancient book survived whose purpose was to teach the various methods of dyeing with the blood of these shellfish, written by a craftsman expert in this trade, there would be room for such questions. But what has survived consists only of fragments, or at most short chapters that are not the main subject of the books in which they appear, but are mentioned incidentally, and were not written by an expert craftsman in this field but by a general scholar. Just as one cannot draw absolute conclusions from general rules, so too one cannot draw absolute conclusions from general scholars, but rather from specialists who became expert in their particular trades.”

ד) An even more surprising absence in the archaeological record concerns the rat. This very common animal has no known documentation in our region before the twelfth century CE. The choled of the Torah and the chuldah of the Mishnah and Gemara are, according to various opinions, different animals from what we today call a rat; some researchers identify them with the ferret. Researchers therefore once concluded that rats arrived in Eretz Yisrael only with the Crusades. Then a Roman statue of a rat from the first century CE was discovered, and afterward rat skeletons from much earlier periods were found. Apparently the European association of rats with disease, which produced so many references to them in Europe, did not operate in the same way in Eretz Yisrael and the surrounding region.

ה) I would also note what I wrote in my article “The Carob for Seventy Years.” There are at least two other places where Chazal use the expression “once in seventy years” without meaning an exact seventy-year cycle. Looking upward: the comet that rises once in seventy years (Horayos 10a) is Halley’s Comet, whose period is approximately 75.3 years. Looking downward: the Roman festival said to occur once in seventy years, at which they would say, “He who saw, saw; he who did not see, will never see” (Avodah Zarah 11b), is known from Roman sources as a rare festival but not one governed by a strict seventy-year interval; see BDD 8, p. 71. In other statements the expression is clearly just a way of describing something extremely uncommon. Bamidbar Rabbah 9:8, for example, says that “once in sixty or seventy years HaKadosh Baruch Hu brings a great plague and wipes out the mamzerim.” It obviously does not mean a fixed schedule, but that once in a generation or two major epidemics occur.

The Aruch LaNer on Makkos 7a similarly comments on “a Sanhedrin that kills once in seventy years,” explaining it through Shmuel’s statement in Shabbos 126b that people say “four or five” even when the true number may be greater: the same may apply here, where “once in seventy years” can also mean less frequently, and seventy is used as ordinary human speech. See also Knesses HaGedolah to Yoreh De’ah 42, discussing the case mentioned by the poskim of an animal lacking a gallbladder, with the gall attached to the liver, a condition said to occur “once in seventy years.” See what I wrote there concerning the carob as well.

ו) There is admittedly a striking parallel between the Gemara’s statement that the chilazon is wounded while alive “so that its color should be clearer,” and Aristotle and Pliny’s statement that the dye should be removed while the creature is alive. But the practical explanation in the Gemara for how and why this is done differs from the explanation in the Greek sources; see the quotations in HaTekhelet, pp. 248–250. Of course, each may simply have explained the observed practice differently, or perhaps this was a broad rule followed by ancient craftsmen when working with animal dyes.

ז) I will quote only what I wrote in my own Yoreh De’ah, §118:2: “It requires consideration what is meant by the statement that Tekhelet is forbidden with only one seal. Does this mean it may not be used at all, or only that one may not rely on it for a leniency, such as kilayim or Bigdei Kehunah and the like? Apparently those latter applications are not common, and the meaning is that one should not use it in his garment. The mefarshim explain that one may rely on a single seal where the issur is not inherent in the item itself, based on the Yerushalmi; thus one seal is in fact considered meaningful proof. With chiltis, where a Torah issur can arise through mixture, we rely on it. With kela ilan one commits no issur; he merely loses the mitzvah. Perhaps because the mitzvah is de’Oraisa, it makes no difference that he is not actively violating an issur, since in the end he is changing the form of the mitzvah. This resembles the statement in Sukkah 30a: could one bring a quince or pomegranate, so that the Torah of esrog not be forgotten?

“From here there is some support for our custom not to put Tekhelet into our tzitzis even though good proofs are brought for its identification. So long as the matter is not absolute, like the certainty represented by two seals, one may be changing the form of the mitzvah. In addition, here we are dealing with the entire community. If there were a mistake, it could become impossible ever to uproot. This itself is the strength of minhag: precisely because we are careful about its practice, it should not be uprooted lightly, not the reverse.”

ח) Today there are more private “tzimmer” vacation units in Eretz Yisrael than hotel rooms. A future archaeologist, however, might know only about the hotels, because many of the tzimmer structures are made of wood and will leave little or no archaeological trace.

ט) Even the Hebrew word kachol, blue, was originally not necessarily a pure abstract color name but the name of a product — the eye cosmetic known as puch. It is possible that the loose linguistic connection indicates that the substance smeared around the eyes — kechilah, smearing, from which machchol also derives — was itself similar to, or associated with, Tekhelet.

י) For example, the Zohar states that the chilazon was in the Kinneret. Some later interpreters tried to reconcile this by saying that originally it was in the Kinneret and after the Jewish people sinned it moved to the Mediterranean. If so, that itself would seem to reject the Murex identification, since the blunt-spined Murex is not known from the Kinneret. Incidentally, according to a source brought by Zohar Amar in HaArgaman, p. 42, a concentration of Murex shells from the Byzantine period was found in Kfar Nachum. Perhaps there is some connection between that phenomenon and the statement in the Zohar. The Byzantine period began around the era of the Amoraim, in line with those who date the editing of the Zohar to that general time. It is possible that dyeing experiments were conducted in the Kinneret region precisely because the coastal industry was under government supervision, or for some other reason. Perhaps such experiments were connected with the mekubalim of Eretz Yisrael in the period of Rabbi Yitzchak of Acco, about whom very little is known and to whom some scholars attribute the transmission of Zohar traditions, particularly according to Melila Hellner-Eshed and Ronit Meroz’s school of study.

Incidentally, Bechoros 38a mentions a chilazon as useful for hemorrhoids. Cuttlefish was in fact used for this, whereas Murex apparently was not. Is that a proof that the cuttlefish is the Tekhelet chilazon? Obviously not. Whether a detail happens to fit or not fit, it is difficult to decide the whole question from isolated points of this sort.

יא) Rav Herzog (p. 402) quotes Epiphanius comparing the hue of hyacinth — the blue obtained from purpura — to callainum, which is blue-green. Rav Herzog finds this difficult because he understands hyacinth as the shade of halachic Tekhelet, which is like the sky, as many witnesses from the period of the Beis HaMikdash state and as Rav Nachshon Gaon translates it, and which he understood as lighter. He therefore emended Epiphanius’ word to the Talmudic kela ilan. This is certainly a dochak.

Textiles colored blue and dyed with purpura have also been found, but these were generally not from the Mediterranean basin and often came from more distant regions. There is therefore no proof that in the time of Chazal this method of processing purpura was common in our area. Incidentally, the common conclusion that particular ancient blue textiles were dyed with Murex is itself based on tests that some researchers argue are not unequivocal, measuring the proportions of different dye components. Those proportions can be influenced by various conditions and are not necessarily uniform. In any event, one certainly cannot exclude the existence of another species that is simply unknown to us and not present for testing.

יב) The wildly high price of argaman is itself some indication that the Tekhelet used by every Jew on his four-cornered garments was not made from this same luxury material. Nowhere is Tekhelet described as a mitzvah of such extraordinary expense, even though Chazal do say that its cost was high. Argaman, by contrast, was affordable only to the extremely wealthy — kings and aristocrats. In most periods its cost would surely have exceeded one-fifth of the average Jew’s possessions. HaTekhelet, p. 251, states: “Modern studies have shown that preparing one kilogram of purpura would today involve an expense of more than $6,000.” For most ordinary people in antiquity, a day’s earnings barely covered food, clothing, and basic needs. It is also difficult to imagine that the Torah intended to impose such a burden.

Similarly, Chazal would hardly say that Heaven punishes in a time of anger one who avoids wearing a four-cornered garment merely to escape the obligation, without ever discussing the far more common person who simply has no money for the dye — not someone scheming to exempt himself, but someone unable to obligate himself in something beyond his means. See also Amar, HaArgaman, p. 30, suggesting that the red karbalta mentioned in the Gemara as worth four hundred zuz was probably dyed with argaman.

יג) Incidentally, the writers of kuntreisim are not always troubled by the idea of two chilazon species when that helps defend the identification. See Lulaos Tekhelet, p. 27, which posits two chilazonim in order to reconcile the Murex identification. It says that the chilazon in the Sifrei near Keziv was a different mollusk collected either for the medicine called shakdei chilazona or for perfume. Again on p. 152 it introduces two chilazonim to reconcile the identification with Pliny, saying that Pliny’s deep-diving description concerns another species and that presumably the same fishermen caught both.

יד) It would seem from this that the Torah’s argaman was not required to come from one particular biological species, since Chazal never teach such a rule. By contrast, regarding tola’as shani they took the trouble to tell us that it is valid only from the particular “worm of the mountains,” and regarding Tekhelet that it comes from the chilazon. Argaman may therefore simply mean an argaman-colored dye. This would explain why the Rambam describes a different source and not the Murex. He was not moved by the fact that Murex was the central historical purple industry and that ancient sources describe it as the world’s source of argaman; perhaps he thought that Murex purple was a later industry and therefore could not automatically explain the argaman of the generation leaving Mitzrayim, as discussed below.

On the other hand, statements of Chazal elsewhere suggest that argaman dyeing was a familiar and well-known trade, distinct from the way they describe Tekhelet. See Tanchuma Naso 8: Rabbi Yehudah says that a person whose hands are stained with istis, ketzah, or puah should not duchan because people will stare at him. Rabbi Hoshaya HaGadol teaches that if most of the city’s inhabitants work in such a trade, he may duchan, “as there are in the south dyed hides” — some emend the text to “towns that dye argaman” — and most of their hands are stained. Thus there were places in southern Eretz Yisrael where most of the townspeople were involved in argaman dyeing. If the very same mollusk so common in those towns could readily produce Tekhelet, the silence about that fact is striking, especially at such a late period. This would support the Rambam’s distinction.

טו) An exception is a statement cited by the Raavyah, Berachos §25, explaining the Mishnah’s “between Tekhelet and green” as “between porfiri and perifinin.” Apparently foreign-language names were used to identify two neighboring shades, not to say that the Tekhelet of the mitzvah comes from porfiri. The Raavyah himself writes, “It is a cloak called in the vernacular porpura, and there is something somewhat similar to it.” It never occurred to him that this garment was itself mitzvah Tekhelet. Based on the Aruch under keres, the correct reading may be “between porfiri and keritinin.”

The simple meaning of the Mishnah itself is certainly mitzvah Tekhelet. But the Mishnah was taught in a time when everyone had Tekhelet in his garment and naturally knew when the light was sufficient to distinguish it from a neighboring non-Tekhelet shade. The later statement quoted by the Raavyah, which he attributes to the Yerushalmi, comes from a period in which Tekhelet was no longer commonly available and therefore explains the Mishnah by reference to then-familiar colors. The Rishonim sometimes attributed later statements to “the Yerushalmi,” and even referred to Zohar passages in their possession that way. Had actual Tekhelet been commonly available at the time of this explanation, there would have been little reason to explain “Tekhelet” by saying “porfiri,” since everyone would already have had Tekhelet on his own garment.

טז) Ancient legend attributed the beginning of this craft to the Phoenicians. More recently, however, researchers have concluded that there is no firm evidence that the Phoenicians originated it, and that older assumption has been largely abandoned. Still, the tradition could have originated in some other animal dye used by the Canaanites and peoples near Egypt. Eventually the Murex-purple industry may have overshadowed and displaced the earlier one entirely, just as happened with many Roman industrial systems.

Yechezkel 27:7 describes Tzor as obtaining Tekhelet and argaman from the islands of Elishah, generally identified with Cyprus. This suggests that at that time Phoenician Tzor was not necessarily the primary specialist in these products. Perhaps already with the Israelite conquest of the land, Canaanite dominance in this craft declined and Bnei Yisrael took over part of the “choice produce of the land.” Alternatively, “Tekhelet and argaman from the islands of Elishah” may simply describe a particular high-grade type produced there — perhaps the purpura product not yet common among the Sidonians. In any case, by Roman times there is abundant evidence that this industry flourished in Tzor. See also Rav Herzog, in the article printed in HaTekhelet, p. 358, who makes a similar point from II Divrei HaYamim 2, where Shlomo does not obtain Tekhelet and argaman from Tzor.

יז) Rav Herzog writes: “It is doubtful whether the decrees issued by them included Tekhelet… but even if they did, there is no doubt that these enlightened rulers exempted the Tekhelet of tzitzis required by the Torah” (p. 368). This sounds more like a prophecy than an argument. If these “enlightened rulers” wished to nationalize the dye industry, why would they care about Jewish mitzvos? Nor is any exemption for Jews preserved in the legislation or its records. Julius Caesar’s concessions to Jews, such as permission for religious gatherings, are documented and one can therefore call him relatively enlightened. Nero, by contrast, displayed no such enlightenment; his rule was one of madness.

יח) Rav Tavger writes (Collected Articles on Tekhelet, p. 70): “A private individual would have no control over the dyeing and distribution of purpura… this is written in the Justinian Code… these restrictions grew stronger until the days of the Ramban… the laws and decrees reserving this color for members of the royal family can certainly be called the hiding away of Tekhelet.” It appears that Rav Tavger is combining the decrees of Julius Caesar with the Justinian legislation centuries later. The Justinian Code does not speak of restricting use to members of the royal family; it restricts private control of production and distribution.

If the goal were to prevent people from wearing purpura, there would be no need to seize control of dye resources. One could simply prohibit wearing the garment, since expensive clothing is worn precisely to display it publicly. No such prohibition appears here, nor in the Ramban; see below, note כג. The same apparent mistake appears in Levush HaAron §§3–4, which describes people being tortured under Constantine for weaving Tyrian-purple cloth contrary to law. Yet there too the restriction concerns private production, not merely wearing the finished garment.

Only in the days of Theodosius do we find an express prohibition on the use of “fabrics dyed with purpura” (424). Even assuming this included Tekhelet, there is no evidence that the prohibition continued after the collapse of Roman power. The western empire’s collapse accelerated only a few decades later; Romulus Augustulus was formally deposed in 476, though that was largely symbolic because effective Roman control had been disintegrating for years and could no longer enforce such laws in places like Eretz Yisrael. The Theodosian law itself indicates that the restriction was newly intensified in his time, since people were ordered to bring in from their homes all fabrics containing the forbidden purpura color.

Even this law did not destroy the industry; it nationalized production and restricted use. It did not make the Murex or the knowledge of its dye disappear from the world. Justinian’s later compilation again uses the older Roman type of restriction: production and sale are controlled, while a general prohibition on possession and wearing is not stated. The industry belonged to the emperor. The earlier decrees from the Second Temple period itself likewise indicate that this was the nature of the Roman policy. Rav Herzog himself writes (p. 369): “The decree did not prohibit the sale to the public of either of the two forms of purpura; it prohibited only their production outside the imperial workshops.”

יט) Greek and Roman sources for some reason often treated red and purple as belonging to one broad color family, and they also connected purple with the description “like the sea.” This seems to have been a cultural and associative comparison, not necessarily a claim that purple and seawater looked almost identical. Just as Chazal can compare vegetation to the sky in a chain that includes more than a paint-chip color match, an ancient comparison could include emotional and visual association: expansiveness, darkness, brilliance, movement, or atmosphere.

This helps explain Homer’s famous repeated comparison of the sea to wine — the “wine-dark sea.” The comparison may reflect an associative link between red and purple, between purple and the sea, and the image of a dark, churning liquid containing ancient depths and treasures, perhaps especially the sea toward sunset. The Roman mixing of blue and argaman-like symbolism appears also in Josephus (Wars 5:5:4) and Philo (Life of Moses, p. 290), who say that the argaman element of the Paroches symbolizes the sea.

All this shows how cautious one must be with color descriptions across a major cultural distance. There are many similar examples. The modern Hebrew name for orange, katom, comes from ketem, gold, although orange is not actually the same color as gold. A modern color called “peach” likewise need not match the exact color of the peaches in front of us. William Gladstone, in his major study of the Odyssey, became so puzzled by Homer’s color descriptions that he concluded the strange system could only be explained by assuming that Homer and his contemporaries perceived the world’s colors very differently from us. Homer describes sheep’s wool and bulls’ skin as purple, honey as green, and animals such as lions and horses as red. Blue is almost absent. The sea is “wine-like,” and elsewhere compared with a violet flower.

כ) It should also be noted more generally that the desire for a broad range of colors is highly culture-dependent. Hellenistic writers describe the shock that seized Alexander and his soldiers after defeating Darius and entering the Persian royal residences. The abundance of magnificent, brightly colored fabrics in the Eastern style astonished men raised to think of Persians as “barbarians.” The Persian aesthetic is already visible in Megillas Esther: “white, green, and Tekhelet hangings, fastened with cords of fine linen and argaman to silver rods and marble pillars; couches of gold and silver on a floor of alabaster, marble, pearl, and precious stone” — all prepared for a feast open to the entire population. A Macedonian soldier had never seen anything like it.

Roman culture did not necessarily require this same explosion of color. Even today, clothing and decorative traditions in India or Africa often use many intense colors in combinations that Westerners might call loud or eclectic. Lehavdil bein hachol uvein hakodesh, the Mishkan commanded to Klal Yisrael was itself extraordinarily rich in color and texture: tachash skins, dyed ram skins, Tekhelet, argaman, tola’as shani, spun linen, silver, gold, copper, engraved stones, floral forms, Keruvim, and more. That was part of the accepted language of beauty and splendor in our nation.

Roman temples and other cultural spaces, by contrast, often leaned closer to what today would be called a “clean line,” certainly in comparison with Persian carpets, arabesques, and related Eastern styles. There is therefore no reason to be surprised if Roman writers showed limited interest in Tekhelet, tola’as shani, and other ancient dye materials. The height of Hellenistic sculpture is the nude or nearly nude human form, while Eastern art typically portrays important figures in many layers of varied and splendid clothing.

כא) The craft of dyeing remained in Jewish hands for many generations. The Ramban mentions Jewish dyers in Eretz Yisrael in his time. A ninth-century Genizah document mentions a Jewish dyer in Yerushalayim; see Y. Braslavsky, Tarbiz 13, p. 51. Medieval traditions also speak of dye industries in Lod and Ramla in which Jews participated; see HaArgaman, p. 43, citing Rosenfeld.

The same work states, based on Aelian, that during the Roman-Byzantine period Jews were employed by the imperial system in catching shellfish and extracting dye, difficult work requiring considerable skill (HaArgaman, p. 49). A settlement near Shikmona, by Haifa, was called Porphyrion after the purple industry, and a sixth-century traveler calls it “the city of the Jews.” See there as well the possibility that the Mishnah hints that Jews of Haifa worked as argaman dyers, and the evidence of Jewish tombstones in Asia Minor belonging to members of a purpura dyers’ guild.

Benjamin of Tudela describes Jewish dyers who came to work among the Druze, and mentions a Jewish dyer in Lod, another in Nov, another in Kiryaim, and two Jewish dyers in Yafo. Dyeing evidently required real chemical knowledge — meaning preparation of dyes, not merely spreading color onto cloth — and belonged to the same broad intellectual world as alchemy and medicine, both fields in which Jews were often prominent. According to one version of Benjamin of Tudela’s travel account, relied on by Rav Herzog, Jews in his period were involved in purpura dyeing in Tzor. Rav Tavger argues that this reading of the text is corrupt.

כב) HaTekhelet, p. 137, quotes Y. Braslavsky from “Zevulun on the Seacoast,” Maritime District Center Library, booklet 6, p. 81: “The fate of the craftsmen of Tekhelet and argaman may have been better than that of the chilazon fishermen; they apparently preserved this craft until the middle of the Middle Ages.”

כג) Rav Tavger (Collected Articles on Tekhelet, p. 55) quotes the Ramban’s words, “Even today, regarding Tekhelet, no man would dare raise his hand to wear it except a king of the nations,” and writes: “Who was that king of the nations to whom the Ramban refers, and what did he wear? Presumably this ‘king of the nations’ was the pope sitting in Rome… who wore purpura as a symbol of rule and kingship. The popes in the Ramban’s period maintained the idea that they ruled the world and intervened in the affairs of states… From these words of the Ramban we see the situation in his time. Although they knew how to identify Tekhelet with purpura, this had no practical value for fulfilling the mitzvah of tzitzis. Tekhelet had become the possession of a very narrow circle — the pope and those like him — and an ordinary person had no possibility of obtaining it.”

This interpretation seems forced. The Ramban does not speak about obtaining Tekhelet. He says that no one would dare wear Tekhelet in the sense under discussion there, and he is not speaking about a single Tekhelet thread in tzitzis but about an entire Tekhelet garment — a royal garment. There is no doubt that a commoner in the Middle Ages who wrapped himself in full royal dress could be punished as a rebel against the crown; there is no need to go all the way to the pope to explain that.

But there is no indication here that “they knew how to identify” halachic Tekhelet or that “there was no way to obtain it.” If anything, the passage implies that a Tekhelet-colored thread in an ordinary garment could exist. The Ramban says nothing about a pope or king objecting to a single blue thread woven into a garment, certainly where it was plainly understood as a religious mitzvah rather than a challenge to royal authority. Singer’s sources in his response to the article mentioned above likewise point in this direction. Despite actual use of blue or purple royal garments among non-Jews, Rishonim living at the same time — including outside the Roman and Byzantine worlds, such as the Rif and Rambam — wrote that we do not possess Tekhelet and do not know how to make or identify it.

The Ramban’s point is simply to explain how important and royal the Bigdei Kehunah were. He begins by explaining the kesones tashbetz of the Kohanim as related to the striped or special coat Yaakov made for Yosef, a style associated with royal children and princesses. Obviously that does not mean that a medieval princess’s clothing, or even Yosef’s own kesones pasim, would be valid as the Kohen Gadol’s garment. He then says, “The mitznefes is known today among kings and great officers.” Does this mean the pope’s headgear is literally the Kohen Gadol’s mitznefes, or made from the same materials? The same applies to his continuation: “The ephod and choshen are royal clothing, and the tzitz is the crown of kings.” In short, there is no proof here for the Murex identification.

The author of Levush HaAron supports his reading by noting that in the Byzantine period production was under imperial control. But government control of production does not prove that use was forbidden. If anything, the preservation of the industry by the authorities ensured that the traditional process of working Murex dye remained known, funded, and controlled by powerful institutions.

כד) How would we react to the argument that it is “unreasonable” to suppose that today there could be two species, one called “mint” and one called “nana,” both herbs with very similar flavors and appearances, both used in tea, chewing gum, and toothpaste, and most people in the world do not distinguish between them? This is not a remarkable coincidence. They are related species with related uses. There are several species of mint, all in the same botanical family. In other languages, what one language calls simply “mint” may be called a specific form of mint in another, just as “watermelon” is a kind of melon. A single name in one language can cover what another language treats as two distinct kinds.

The reverse also happens. In Hebrew, tapuach, tapuach zahav, and tapuach adamah — apple, orange, and potato — are three completely unrelated things that nevertheless share the same basic word. In the language of Chazal even the esrog can be called a tapuach. Names by themselves therefore cannot tell us the true biological relationship. The same is clear from a list such as “red pepper, green pepper, orange pepper, black pepper, allspice, hot pepper.” From the names alone we would never know that the first three are the same vegetable at different stages or colors, the fourth is a ground pungent spice from a completely different plant, the fifth is used to flavor a dish but is generally not eaten whole, and the sixth belongs to yet another category and can function both as a vegetable and as a spice.

כה) Rav Herzog (p. 423) reports that one researcher found a subspecies of Murex that “produces a pure blue color.” According to Zohar Amar in HaArgaman, there are approximately four hundred species or varieties in the broader Murex group.

כו) “According to the estimate of Richard Leakey, head of the conservation organization WildlifeDirect, approximately 50,000 species become extinct each year.”

כז) Rav Tavger (Collected Articles on Tekhelet, p. 70) interprets nignaz to mean that Tekhelet was placed under the control of the royal treasury. In doing so he does not address other Midrashic formulations such as “hidden away for the tzaddikim in the future.” In my view it is also difficult to describe Tekhelet as having been placed in a royal storehouse while the industry itself was still functioning at full strength, with the claim being only that restrictions existed on who could wear it.

כח) In the Beraisa deTzitzis the reading is “once in seven years.” From time to time waves or storms may have washed quantities onto the shore, but the frequency gradually diminished. People apparently did not know how to retrieve it from deep water.

כט) Indeed, some academic interpreters have suggested that the samamiyos in this passage are a coded reference to agents of Roman law. This interpretation is quoted in HaArgaman, p. 47.

ל) The existence of trade secrets is a very significant factor, and not only in ancient industry. Even today there are famous stories about the secret formula of Coca-Cola. Patents and processes are kept secret unless the law gives them protection. In a society with no effective intellectual-property law, the secret of production can literally be the guarantee of one’s livelihood and survival. I once asked an Arab who ran a soap factory how he made his soap. His answer was: “If I tell you, I have to kill you.”

It is possible that the description of Luz as a place where Tekhelet was made (Sotah 46b; Sanhedrin 12a) is partly literary, intended to conceal exact technical details from Roman authorities who were eager to control profitable industries, especially where doing so also restricted Jewish religious needs. This would fit other aggadic descriptions of Luz as a place of hidden things and secrets. Perhaps, based on Shoftim 1:26, any place whose entrance was concealed could be nicknamed “Luz.” It may also connect with the statement that Yaakov slept at Beis El while other places in Eretz Yisrael were miraculously folded beneath him, and with the Torah’s statement that the place had originally been called Luz. Benjamin Mazar writes that the root lud/luz in certain ancient languages can mean “to find refuge,” from which the place-name Luz may derive (Canaan and Israel, p. 19). The name of the bone called luz may also be related. In general, the descriptions of the chilazon are stated in a somewhat poetic and indirect style, and perhaps this is part of the reason.

This whole style of giving simanim and unusual descriptions can itself be used to argue that the chilazon was not the Murex. Murex was a universally known species standing at the center of political, governmental, and economic life; its form even appeared on coins. Such a creature would hardly require esoteric descriptions of the kind found in the Gemara. Surely Murex had a familiar vernacular name in every language and every place where Jews lived.

לא) There is some basis for suggesting that the kesones pasim Yaakov made for Yosef contained stripes of Tekhelet, symbolically marking him for royalty and thereby intensifying his brothers’ jealousy. Yehudah, who was likewise destined for kingship, is also associated in Chazal with a pesil or thread, through the derashah on “your seal and your cord.” Sancheriv’s inscription describing the tribute sent by Chizkiyahu HaMelech includes language translated as “striped garments, cloth of Tekhelet,” which fits the aggadah that Yaakov sent Yosef Tekhelet cloth with the wagons, reminding him of the royal dignity for which he had been destined.

Color images from Beni Hasan in Egypt, from approximately Yosef’s era, likewise show striped garments in blue and purple shades. The Tekhelet-colored textile found in Palmyra was also arranged in stripes in the garment; see HaTekhelet, p. 262. Roman aristocrats embroidered a stripe of Tekhelet or argaman along the edge of a garment because not everyone could afford an entire garment of such costly material; the wealthier the person, the more extensive the colored striping could be. A pesil Tekhelet in tzitzis is also, in a sense, a “stripe,” except that the stripe is placed within the mitzvah itself, among the tzitzis threads.

This may shed light on Korach’s claim. He argued that one wearing an entire garment of Tekhelet is like the Kohen himself. He was not satisfied that the whole congregation should be linked to a mamleches kohanim through the sign of a single thread; he wanted to make it possible for anyone — meaning himself — to become something more than an ordinary Yisrael. This idea, however, conflicts with the aggadah that Yosef’s kesones pasim was inexpensive and caused jealousy merely because Yaakov treated him differently. The Ramban on Shemos 28 already understands a kesones pasim as royal clothing, in which case it certainly was not cheap.

There was also a Jewish custom to place blue stripes on a tallis gadol as a remembrance of Tekhelet, perhaps preserving the older form in which colored stripes were woven directly into the garment itself. This is mentioned by the Eliyah Rabbah and Pri Megadim, Orach Chaim §9. In more recent times those stripes became black, possibly in reaction to the flag of the State of Israel — which itself took its blue-striped design from the tallis.

Incidentally, the Egyptian painting mentioned above portrays a group of Semitic visitors. Rav Herzog argues in his article (p. 364) that Tekhelet was not particularly common among Egyptians at that period, since when Yosef became viceroy he was dressed in linen garments rather than Tekhelet or argaman. See also Bereishis Rabbah, which says Yaakov sent him a “chilazon chamar.” Some interpret this as a chilazon producing red dye, meaning an argaman source common in Eretz Yisrael. In any event, when Bnei Yisrael left Egypt they possessed Tekhelet, and therefore Egyptians did as well, since much of the Israelites’ property came from the spoils or gifts of Egypt. It is even possible that the sons of Yaakov brought some of this dyeing knowledge into Egypt.

לב) The Yad Ramah, Sanhedrin 91a, holds that even within Chazal the word chilazon does not always refer to the same creature.

לג) The families Bovidae, Cervidae, Moschidae, Tragulidae, Giraffidae, and Antilocapridae would presumably all fall within the ten kosher split-hoofed, cud-chewing animals listed by the Torah. For details on identifying each Biblical animal and the modern zoological families that may branch from it, see Zohar Amar, Ram Bouchnick, and Guy Bar-Oz, “Identification of the Pure Animals in the Bible in Light of Archaeozoological Research,” Cathedra 132 (5769), pp. 33–54.

לד) Compare the person who asked: why did Chazal not warn us that by “chilazon” they did not mean the Murex?

לה) Since Elisha Baal Kenafayim has come up, let us say a word about that episode. It seems that when he said he was holding “the wings of a dove,” this may have arisen from the physical appearance of what happened. The moment he saw the soldier, he tried to hide the tefillin between his two hands. He had no time to roll up the straps neatly, so he crumpled the tefillin and straps into his hands, with tangled black strap ends probably sticking out.

Those tangled black ends could easily look a little like the wings of a dark dove. Elisha could therefore say that he was holding a dove he had just managed to catch and could not open his hands to show it, because the bird would fly away and all his effort in catching it would be lost. This would also explain to the Roman officer why Elisha had been running and why he was pressing his hands tightly against his chest as though hiding something. Perhaps he even moved his hands slightly as if the dove inside were struggling to get out. The whole scene could then appear perfectly real to the soldier. When Elisha stretched out his hand enough for the officer to see a bit protruding between his fingers, he could say, “Look, the dove’s wings.” Thus the innocent dove was saved from the predatory eagle.

This may explain why the Gemara asks, “Why specifically a dove?” It was in truth Elisha’s own feeling: he was like a dove fleeing a bird of prey. The officer too knew, at some level, that he was a predator chasing an innocent dove, and therefore he saw what Elisha felt.

Someone objected to this explanation because Chazal say that the tefillin “turned into dove’s wings.” But according to a literal miraculous reading, two miracles would be necessary: first the tefillin would have to become wings, and then afterward the wings would have to turn back into tefillin. The “new” tefillin would seemingly be pasul, since they had not been processed lishmah, the parshiyos had not been written in order, and they were not even made from animal hide. The meaning of “turned into” can therefore be that this is how they appeared to the observer. That itself was the miracle: in his eyes, they became something other than what they physically were.

לו) It is not impossible that actual Tekhelet threads may someday be found still attached to a four-cornered garment, in a context that shows they are not made from kela ilan.

לז) One supporter writes: “With all due respect, anyone who wants to clarify the subject completely has no choice but to get up and investigate and make the effort — to see how it is done, what the chilazon looks like, what the dyeing process is, what its changing colors are, etc.; and also to study the Rishonim and Acharonim and, lehavdil elef havdalos, the writings of the non-Jews, the dates, and so on. That is how one investigates seriously!” Is it really necessary, in order to pasken the question, personally to see the Murex and the dyeing process? Must one have mastery of the full corpus of Greek and Roman writings?

לח) Consider how the Gedolim of the Radzyner Rebbe’s generation related to his Tekhelet. Although they knew and understood that, in their view, his identification lacked a real basis, their refinement led them to walk carefully between the raindrops. They did not attack him for his ideas or dreams. They honored him as a great talmid chacham and answered him with wisdom and caution — neither delegitimizing him nor simply following him. An attitude like this allows Torah investigation and chiddush to continue. Perhaps, with patience and careful waiting, genuinely great discoveries can eventually emerge.