ETHICAL WILLS

Rather, they come to us as the distilled wisdom of one who has witnessed life and learned something of its secrets. Maybe its closest relative is the book of Kohelet in the Bible . To be sure, the authors often point out along the way that what they have to say is congruent with Torah or with philosophical deductions, but this is only an aside. The authoritative voice is not some other text, but the(presumably) dying author. As I suggested earlier, this is, of course, also what gives the literature its emotional power.

This genre has some other rather interesting aspects that may help explain its particular form. As it turns out, there are clusters of writers. The Asheri family in thirteenth-century Germany , for example, provides us with a number of ethical wills: from Asher ben Yehiel (d. 1327) and from his sons Judah ben Asher (d. 1349) and Jacob ben Yehiel(d. 1340).” Another cluster is associated with the Horowitz(or Hurwitz) family of Bohemia from whom we have three generations of ethical wills from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In both cases, these families were associated with ideologies or movements that were out of the mainstream. Asher ben Yehiel and his family, for example, were associated with the Hasidei Ashkena: This group was influenced both by Jewish mysticism and probably also by German pietism of the thirteenth century. The Horowitz family was associated with Kabbalistic circles, Isaiah ben Abraham having actually settled in Jerusalem in the early seventeen hundreds.

I would suggest at this point that the clustering of ethical wills in such families is not accidental. In a way, we can look at the form of the ethical will as suggesting a stream of tradition and av thority outside the normal channels. The ethical will was a way of passing along teachings and possibly some esoteric doctrines in a way that was on the surface thoroughly Jewish , if not quite rabbinic.”

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