Covered in the Dust of Your Rabbi: An Urban Legend?

Some months ago, pastor-blogger Trevin Wax posted an article called Urban Legends: The Preacher’s Edition.” There he lists several “urban legends” that he’s heard floating around lately in sermons. Like Internet rumors that people forward on ad infinitum, these preaching illustrations don’t have much grounding in fact.

One potential fallacy on his list caught my eye. It’s the saying, “be covered in your rabbi’s dust.” Trevin writes:

This is one of the most pervasive and fast-spreading stories to flood the church in recent years. The idea is that as you walked behind your rabbi, he would kick up dust and you would become caked in it and so following your rabbi closely came to symbolize your commitment and zeal.

I heartily agree with Trevin’s much-needed reminder to double-check your facts. But I’ve written about this idea myself. If you haven’t heard it from me, you may have heard a sermon about “getting dusty” from preachers like John Ortberg, Ed Dobson or Rob Bell, or watched Ray Vander Laan’s DVD, “In the Dust of the Rabbi.”^[9] It seems reasonable, then, to explore the historical background of being “covered in dust.” Is it just a faddish fairytale? Let’s take a closer look.

• ^[1] Pirqe Aboth 1:4 (Charles Taylor, trans.) ↩
• ^[2] For more on the use of the term "rabbi," see my article, "Can We Call Jesus ‘Rabbi’?" ↩
• ^[3] In Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus (Zondervan, 2009), we discuss this on page 14. (I was fully aware of this debate as I chose the title for my next book, Walking in the Dust of Rabbi Jesus. (Zondervan, 2012)) ↩
• ^[4] See Shmuel Safrai, The Jewish People in the First Century (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976) 958-69. Safrai was an acclaimed Jewish scholar who won the national Israel Prize for his research on early Judaism in 2002. David Bivin explains more fully in New Light on the Difficult Words of Jesus (Holland, MI: En-Gedi Resource Center, 2005), 14. ↩
• ^[5] Mekhilta, Shabbeta 1, on Exodus 31:13. Interestingly, Jesus has this same debate with some Pharisees (about putting aside Sabbath laws) when he’s walking with his disciples and they pluck some grain to eat (Luke 6:1-5). ↩
• ^[6] The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature (C. E. Fonrobert, M. S. Jaffee, eds), 58-74. The author, Jeffrey Rubenstein looks at the social context of rabbinic sayings. He also discusses the difficulty of using later rabbinic sources to determine earlier historical reality. ↩
• ^[7] Comment on Avoth 1:4, the Soncino Talmud, Soncino Press. ↩
• ^[8] Martin Sicker, The Moral Maxims of the Sages of Israel: Pirkei Avot (iUniverse, 2004), 29. ↩
• ^[9] Ray Vander Laan is the author of the Faith Lessons DVD series, which is based on his years of leading study trips to Israel, Greece and Turkey. Ray was actually the first to preach widely about the idea of “becoming dusty” as a disciple of Jesus. When I spoke with him about it, he said that he first heard this saying being used in conversation when he was enrolled at an Orthodox Jewish university. It was not uncommon, he said, to hear fellow students and professors quote Avot 1:4 to stress the importance of studying intensively from a teacher. ↩