The fictional character of Rip Van Winkle was most likely based upon the true account in the Gemara of Honi Hame’agel, who slept for 70 years.
Tuvia Cohen
Rip Van Winkle was a friendly but lazy farmer who lived in a village at the foot of the Catskills in the good old days when America was still a British colony. One day, while walking with his dog and his rifle in the mountains, he met an old man dressed in an old-fashioned suit. The elderly gentleman requested his help in carrying a barrel of wine. Rip accompanied him, and met a group of similarly attired strange old men. They gave him some wine to drink, whereupon he fell into a deep sleep.
Strange Awakening
Waking, as he thought, the next morning, he found his dog gone, and his rifle rusted. He was stiff in the joints, his clothes were ragged, and most interesting of all, he had a long grey beard. He descended to his village and found it completely changed, and that no one recognized him. He was a stranger in his own village! He had, in fact, been asleep for 20 years! Rip Van Winkle gradually got his bearings, and found himself a role as the oldest inhabitant of the village, forever telling stories of his strange experience, and what life was like before the big sleep.
Honi Hame’agel
This fictional story was claimed to be based on a traditional German tale. It is likely that both the American and the European versions of the tale were based on the true story told in the Gemara (Ta’anit 23a) of Honi Hame’agel, who slept for 70 years. When he awoke, he was so upset that not a single person recognized him, that he asked to be taken from the world.
Sleeping the Winter Away
The ability to sleep for such extended periods is a rare, even miraculous occurrence in humans. Animals, on the other hand, manage it extremely well, and with great regularity. Every year, as the temperature drops, different animals cope with the onset of winter in a variety of fascinating ways. One of them is by hibernation, in which the animal quite simply goes to sleep for months at a time. At the first sign of winter, Asian and American black bears find themselves a cave, a hole in a tree, or just a good deep pile of leaves and drift off to sleep until spring.
How do they survive without food for so long?
The Bare Necessities
Food is scarce during winter, so the bears eat as much as they can in the summer and autumn and convert the excess calories into body fat. For this reason, a lean bear in late autumn is usually dangerous. Feeling that he has not supplied an urgent need, he becomes irritable and often savage. In addition, the bears conserve energy by their big sleep. (Energy burns calories. The less energetic you are, the less you need to eat, and the less hungry you are. That is why during an extended yom tov period, with longer hours of praying, and extra hours of sleeping, you actually feel less inclined to eat than during a normal weekday.) In slumber, the bears’ body temperature may drop by as much as nine degrees Fahrenheit, and their metabolic rate by 50 percent.
Drastic Weight Loss
The mother polar bear does not eat a thing from November until about March. During this time, holed up in the Arctic snow, she gives birth to up to four cubs and nurses them. Her youngsters are utterly dependent on her rich milk for the first three months of their lives. To supply this life-giving milk, and to nourish herself, the mother bear subsists on the thick layer of fat beneath her skin, built up in the summer months when food was plentiful. Even when the bear family emerges from the den and the cubs start taking solid food, their mother has to share all her catches of fish and seals with them. So by spring, she is only half the weight she was six months earlier, at the end of the previous summer.
Intelligent Design
Let’s think about this for a moment. Who taught the bears to eat voraciously to prepare for the long sleep? Who arranged that excess food should be converted to fat (stored energy) rather than be eliminated through the digestive process? Who is it who trained them to lower their body metabolism and their temperature (remember that bears, like humans, are warm-blooded animals whose body temperature is automatically regulated to remain at a constant)? Who educated them to go to sleep for months on end? Who provided the mechanisms of these vital systems and the instincts that trigger them? It all points to a mighty Intelligence.
Natural Antifreeze
Up north in Canada, where the winters are long and severe, live the painted turtles. These turtles hatch from their leathery eggs in autumn. Once hatched, you would expect them to begin their active life immediately. That is what most people do, but not painted turtles. Before emerging into the world, they spend their first winter in the nest. Almost immediately after hatching they have to survive the cold, which they do by hibernating.
The Painted Turtle
Female painted turtles nest in midsummer in south-facing banks. (Having learned geography, they know which way is south…) Then, in the frigid cold, these turtles survive the winter the same way as so many mammals do, by hibernating. During the long winter months, the tiny turtles go into torpor (a state of physical inactivity), eating nothing and barely moving. Their bodies contain natural antifreeze that enables them to survive for long periods when the temperature in the nest drops below freezing.
Now isn’t that something? Here is a revolutionary method of saving money. Remove the central heating from your home, and this winter, program your body to produce antifreeze in your blood. However cold the weather, you’ll never feel cold. Go ahead – try it!
Mystery of the Fly
Many people wonder where all the flies go in the winter. Shortly after Sukkot, they all seem to disappear, and not one is to be seen throughout the long winter months. Six months later, after Pesach, out they come again. Are they the same ones, and if so, where do they hide?
The answer is that flies hibernate during winter, sometimes in large groups, in any available dry and warm space, such as an attic. They are fast asleep and out of sight. The reason there are so few houseflies in winter is that their eggs will hatch only at temperatures between 75 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Meanwhile, their numbers steadily diminish, owing to insecticides and natural causes. Since flies are often carriers of diseases, it is not a bad thing that their numbers diminish during their long sleep.
Sounds Batty
Honeybees, on the other hand, do not hibernate. They have their honey to live on, and they keep up their own temperature by closely clustering, constantly vibrating their wings to elevate the hive temperature.
During the period of suspended existence, not only does the hibernator’s temperature drop to almost half its normal level, but the heart slows down, and all functions of alimentation (nourishment) and excretion cease. Respiration is faint, and in some sleeps, respiration appears to wholly cease. Don’t try this, but a hibernating bat was once submerged in a bucket of water for an hour; when taken out, it was still asleep and perfectly healthy despite its ordeal.
A Deer’s Winter Coat
It is not only by hibernating that animals are able to survive the winter. Listen to this amazing fact. Everyone knows that when the temperature drops, fingers, toes, and ears freeze first. But it has been only within the last 200 years that we have understood that this is due to the ratio between the amount of body surface through which heat can be lost, and the body’s bulk and heat supply. (This explains why mittens are warmer than gloves; the fingers of a glove have more radiating surface than the mass of a mitten.)
About 100 years ago, physicists working on the kinetic theory of gases found that heat travels very slowly through still air. Applying this knowledge of dead-air space to our cold-weather clothes, manufacturers have developed coats and jackets with light, airy padding. Progress!
Now although you and I have been in possession of the above-mentioned information for a relatively short time, deer have been using these principles since they were created. With the first autumnal frosts, the deer shed their cool summer coat and grow a special one for winter. Each hair of this winter coat is hollow, like a small tube sealed at the outer end. This effectively covers the deer with a layer of still air, trapped within the hairs. Covered with this air blanket, deer can walk the winter wilderness almost without the need for shelter.
Divine Design
You knew nothing, and the deer knew much less than you, yet somehow, he knew that he ought to be growing a hollow-haired coat for winter. Where exactly did the deer obtain its knowledge of the laws of advanced kinetic energy?
All the wisdom inherent in the animals, their ability to survive a six-month sleep, to keep warm without clothes, antifreeze, and insulation, did not come to them by chance. Nor did it come from them. Wisdom and intelligence always emanate from a Higher Intelligence.