260 A History of Judaism
holding this world in abhorrence and curtailing desires. Another says that
abstinence is quietude of the soul and curbing its musings from everything
which only gratified the idle imagination. Another says that abstinence is
trust in God. Another says that it means limiting oneself to the minimum
of clothing required for decency, taking of food only as much as is needed
to still hunger, and rejecting everything else. Another says that it means
abandonment of affection for human beings and loving solitude. Another
says that abstinence is gratitude for benefits received and bearing trials
patiently. Another says that abstinence means denying oneself all relax-
ation and physical pleasure, limiting oneself to mere satisfaction of natural
needs without which one could not exist, and excluding everything else
from the mind. This last definition befits the abstinence taught in our
Torah better than any of the other definitions above set forth.
A similar sharing of religious outlook emerged in the celebration by
both Jews and Muslims of festivities surrounding pilgrimage to the
alleged tomb of the prophet Ezekiel on the anniversary of his death:
A lamp burns day and night over the sepulchre of Ezekiel; the light thereof
has been kept burning from the day that he lighted it himself, and they
continually renew the wick thereof, and replenish the oil unto the present
day. A large house belonging to the sanctuary is filled with books, some of
them from the time of the first temple ... The Jews that come thither to
pray from the land of Persia and Media bring the money which their
countrymen have offered to the Synagogue of Ezekiel the Prophet ...
Distinguished Mohammedans also come hither to pray, so great is their
love for Ezekiel the Prophet ...^28But the impact of Islam, Christianity and any other faith was still far
away in the unimagined future when Rabban Yohanan b. Zakkai and a
group of rabbinic sages met in Yavneh, a small town on the Mediterra-
nean coastal plain of Judaea, in the aftermath of the destruction of
Jerusalem in 70 ce.