Truth or Consequences

THE CONFRONTATION BETWEEN KARISM AND RABBINISM

In The Beginning

The Torah, the quintessential document of Jewish origin and creed, was delivered to a recently liberated people at Mount Sinai in the thirteenth century BCE. It did not appear in written form until the sixth century BCE.

It makes little difference whether the Torah was transcribed by the finger of God (as might be suggested in Exodus 31(18)( and Deuteronomy 9(10)), or is the composite historical recollection of several authors. It is the rootstock of Jewish identity and mission. The Written Torah prescribes the rules of conduct for civilized society. Virtually all written documents require some interpretation for proper application. The written Torah is no different, but it expressly rejects any additions, deletions or alterations to its text (Deuteronomy 4(2).

Through the process of interpretation alone, the true meaning of a phrase or document can either be identified, lost or distorted. The interpretation process requires a genuine desire to perceive the intent of the author and the restraint to withhold unintended construction. It would be a true contest, indeed, to determine whether the Torah or the United States Constitution was subject to more aggressive interpretive gymnastics.

Hermeneutics (Bible interpretation) started in earnest during the second Temple Period (516 BCE to 70 BCE) and continued through the Talmudic Period (200 CE to 500 CE). At first, it was an effort shared by all the dedicated sages of Israel.

Early Jewish Religious Philosophies

The introduction of the Written Torah during the second Temple Period generated several schools of thought regarding the Torah’s meaning and application. Ultimately, two major religious philosophies resulted:

• Pharisees:  The Pharisees were the spiritual fathers of

Rabbinism. They came from the middle or working classes of the Jewish community. Pharisees maintained that an afterlife existed and that God punished the wicked and rewarded the righteous in the world to come. They believed in a Messiah who would herald a new era of world peace. Pharisees were creative in their interpretation of the Torah and in the ritualistic observances that generated from their interpretations.

• Sadducees:  Sadducees represented an aristocratic,

wealthy, and traditional elite group within the hierarchy of Judaism. They were much more receptive to the influences of Greek culture that arrived with Alexander the Great and his successors. They were firm in their belief that man has free will and can choose between good and evil. They strongly believed that the soul is not immortal, that there is no afterlife, and that there are no rewards or penalties after death. They rejected the Pharisaic use of many observances which the Pharisees used to consolidate their power. Their rejection of afterlife was in direct opposition to emerging Christianity in which afterlife was an important element.

The Ultimate Political Struggle for Religious Dominance

Following the Maccabean victory (of Channukah fame) in the second century BCE, the descendents of Mattathias founded a dynasty which took control of the Temple’s High Priesthood and the leadership of the Hebrew nation. In 103 BCE, Alexander Janneus, the great grandson of Mattathias, was not content just to inherit the high priesthood. He wanted to be King of Israel as well. When the Crown was denied him, he ordered the slaughter of the Pharisee Priests.

Many of the Pharisees, including his brother in law, Simeon Ben Shetach, fled the country. Later, in contrition, Janneus invited the Pharisees to return and appointed his brother-in-law, a Pharisee zealot, as the head of the Sanhedrin. That appointment placed Shetach in a unique position. By use of discrete maneuvers, he changed the composition of the Sanhedrin from Sadducee to Pharisee. Although supported by the Essenes, of Dead Sea Scrolls fame, the Sadducees were outmaneuvered by the Pharisees and totally disappeared with the destruction of the second Temple in 70 BCE.

Thus, in the critical transition period, starting with the destruction of the second Temple through the beginning of synagogue worship, the Pharisees and their successors, the Rabbis, held sway. The Pharisees/Rabbis were deeply appreciative for Shetach’s commitment to their cause. To this day, on the 28^th day of Tevet, he is still celebrated for having successfully completed the expulsion of the Sadducees and having replaced them with the Pharisees.

Rabbi Shetach is the same individual who sentenced 80 women to death for having allegedly been involved in witchcraft.

The Beginning of the Talmud

As the Sadducees began to decline in number and influence, the task of Torah interpretation fell to the Pharisees and the Rabbis, their successors. Their opinions were varied and often differed from each other, leaving no distinct path through the Torah to be used by the Jewish community.

By the first century CE, it became obvious that the opinions of the Pharisees/Rabbis had to be assembled and codified, lest they be lost. In the first century CE, Yehuda HaNasi (Judah the Prince) undertook the effort to codify those opinions in a work entitled the Mishnah. His work was assisted by other rabbis who functioned under the title Tannaim. Later, during the Talmudic Period, a group of Rabbinical scholars known as Amoriam opined expansively on the subject matter of the Mishna, expressing their own views. The written transcription of those writings is called the Gomorrah.

The Mishna, Gomorrah, and a third work known as the Midrash (a collection of Rabbinical commentaries, homilies, insights and exegesis on the Torah) constitute the Talmud, also known in Orthodox religious circles as the Torah She Bial Peh (The Oral Torah).

The Rise of Karism

The Karite movement surfaced in Baghdad in the seventh century CE in response to the Rabbinites deviation from the Written Torah. It arose to challenge what was viewed as a number of erroneous interpretations and unauthorized additions contained in the Babylonian Talmud authored in nearby Mesopotamia. The Karites did not reject the Talmud, but neither did they feel themselves bound by it.

The Karites insisted that the interpretation of the Torah should be limited to those conclusions that can honestly and reasonably be derived from the clear meaning of the language under examination, without rejection, addition, or subtraction, all of which are expressly prohibited by the Torah.

The term Karite is derived from the original name of the old Hebrew words for the Bible “Mikra Kara”. Karaism means scripturalists, as distinguished from Rabbis, who refer to themselves as Rabbonim or as the Talmidim (followers of the Talmud).

The Golden Age of Karism occurred between the tenth and eleventh centuries CE. Karite Jews obtained autonomy from Rabbinite Jews in the Muslim world, established their own institutions and held high positions in that environment. At one time, the number of Jews affiliated with Karism was as much as 40% of world Jewry.

Early in the 10^th century, the Saadia Gaon, head of a Babylonian Rabbinical Academy, took upon himself the confrontation between the Rabbinical and the Karite views, a battle that ended up permanently severing the two Jewish communities. Karaism in a weakened position continued in Iraq, Egypt, Persia, Lithuania and Poland to this day. Currently, it is estimated that there are approximately 40,000 Karites living in Israel, with smaller communities in Turkey, Europe and the United States.

Historians view the Karites as having channeled the views of the second Temple Sadducees in order to protect the integrity of the Torah delivered to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai. Like the Sadducees, they maintained that the Jewish people are patrilineal in origin and reject the biblically unauthorized change to matrilinealism.  They do not accept the notion of life after death in the world to come.

In the written Torah, God describes in great detail his creation of the world in which we live. Karites maintain that God in Genesis would not have inadvertently forgotten to mention a second world which he created. Could it be, they ask, that the world to come (Olam Habah) is a construct created by Rabbis to reward those who fastidiously follow the regimens of Rabbinical Halacha (law).

The interpretation of the written Torah during the latter part of the second Temple is largely responsible for the spirit and dimensions of modern day Judaism.

Examples of How Karism and Rabbinism Differ:

•  Torah as the Immutable Doctrine of Jewish Creed and Identity

Karism is especially aggrieved by the notion that the Talmud, also called the Oral Torah, is claimed to be of equal dignity with the Torah given by God at Mount Sinai. In order to provide divine authority to their Oral Torah, the Rabbis suggest that the Rabbinical disputations of the Talmud were revealed at Mount Sinai in 1280 BCE, only to be incorporated by the Rabbis in the Talmud more than 1500 years later. The Karites reject the treatment of the Talmud as a second Torah and view its conjured divine authority from Mount Sinai as a thinly veiled sham.

Two Torahs, like two presidents or two Gods, is an invitation to abject confusion and conflict. Under the Written Torah, a child born of a Jewish father and a Gentile mother is Jewish, since the child ascends through his father to the “Zera” (semen) of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, as provided in Genesis. Under the Oral Torah, that same child is a Gentile since his mother is not Jewish. Under the written Torah, God created one world while under the Oral Torah there is a second world, (L’Olam Haba’ah), the world to come. Under the written Torah there is no life after death while, under the Oral Torah there is reward and punishment in response to how you lived your life on earth. Under the written Torah, a chicken salad sandwich and a glass of milk is totally permitted, while it is an anathema under the Oral Torah.

Equating a written Torah, which is the transcribed word of God, with an oral Torah, which is the transcribed word of the Rabbis, is an assault on monotheism. Essentially, the Karites believe that the Rabbis, in labeling their Talmud as a Torah have bootstrapped themselves up to the level of a deity. It is vaguely similar to the Christian notion of Trinity (which incorporates the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit), which attempts to qualify as monotheistic.

Karism seeks to identify and emulate the original Judaism. It is a composite of the Judaism practiced by the Sadducees, Boethusians, Ananites and the Essenes. Its focus is on living a Jewish life within the reasonable parameters of the Torah without additions, deletions or alterations. They reject the notion of the Pharisees/Rabbis that the interpretations of the Torah by particular teachers were divine and are elevated to the level of the Torah itself.

• The Ritual Blessing over the Sabbath Candles on Friday Evening 

After the fifth century CE, Rabbinate Jews invited the Sabbath with the blessing of the Sabbath lights (generally two candles). Karite Jews have no such requirement or custom because there is no provision in the Torah for that procedure.

It is suggested, that the alleged “God-directed” blessing over the Sabbath’s candles was prescribed by the Rabbis for practical, rather than religious, reasons. In pre-electric homes, light was provided by candles. Karite Jews followed the biblical mandate to, “kindle no fire during the Sabbath”.

In order to achieve light in their homes on Friday evening, Rabbinate Jews made the lighting of candles into a religious event (The Jewish Book of Why, p. 168). The blessing appears as a direction from God to light the Candles. Actually, no such direction ever existed. Why is this manufactured blessing not a violation of the third of the Ten Commandments, which requires that God’s name should not be taken in vain?                                                                                                                                          

• The Daily Donning of Tefillin by Post Bar Mitzvah Males

Jewish men who follow Rabbinical tradition are obliged to place tefillin (phylacteries which are constructed of leather straps and boxes containing recitations from Deuteronomy 6(5-9)) on their forehead and arm. Rabbinism does not require Jewish women to follow the same practice. The obligation comes from the scriptural provision, “and thou shall bind them for a sign upon thy hand and they shall be as frontlets between thy eyes”.

Karites are not obliged to put on tefillin. They reason that since words are normally not bound on one’s head and arms or upon the doorpost of one’s house, the mandates are simply figurative, metaphorical and aspirational. Karites apply the same rationale to affixing mezuzahs to the door posts of one’s house.

One can easily see the consternation and bizarre effect of taking biblically figurative language and applying it literally. For example, in Leviticus 26(41) and Jeremiah 4(4), reference is made to, “persons with uncircumcised hearts”.

• The Patrilineal Origin of Jewish Children

Karite Judaism historically follows patrilineal descent as was followed by the Jewish people for the first 2000 years of its existence. In the latter days of the second Temple, shortly before the birth of Jesus, the Pharisees, by fiat, simply changed the origin of Jewish children by requiring a Jewish mother instead of a Jewish father. In doing that, they effectively altered the composition of the Jewish people from that which is prescribed in

Genesis12(7), 17(6-8), 17(10-12), 26(2-4), 28(14) and Deuteronomy 34(4-5). In all of those provisions, God designs the Jewish people to be derived through the Zera (semen) of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. That process can only be achieved through paternal involvement and is the same genetic formula used today to identify Cohanim as direct descendents of Aaron, the brother of Moses. The Karite community still maintains patrilineal origin of Jewish children.

• The Laws of Kashruth (Permissible Foods for Consumption)

Both Rabbinical and Karite traditions follow the Kashruth laws of the Torah. While there are myriad small deviations, there is one major departure. Exodus 23(19) provides that, “thou shalt not seethe (boil) a kid in his mother’s milk”. From this provision, the Rabbis have derived the conclusion that all milk and all meat including chicken, must be separated from each other. Thus, the Rabbis conclude that milk, or its products, cannot be consumed together with any meat from any source.

The Karites deem this Rabbinical construction woefully overbroad and unjustified and thus a prohibited addition to the written Torah. They observed that, had God intended to separate all meat from all milk, he certainly could have so declared. They view the inclusion of chicken as a meat as gilding the lily, as chickens do not give milk. Accordingly, followers of Karite Judaism, with the exception of a mother animal and its offspring, do not require the separation of meat and milk, nor all the dishes and utensils required to serve them.

• Prayer Customs and Demeanor

Judaism, like the Muslim faith, was born and matured in the Middle East. In that locale, it is customary to remove one’s shoes in the holy place and to prostrate oneself before one’s God. Karite Jews follow that regimen. While that may appear strange to Ashkenazi Jews, it is not at all uncommon in many other faiths. Asians remove their shoes in their place of worship and Christians kneel in prayer. These actions are symbolic of humbling oneself in the presence of a deity.

Conclusion

Jews who follow the Rabbinic tradition (which includes Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, etc.) have much in common. They share the same recent matrilineal genetic origin, and a faith rooted in the Torah, as modified by the Talmud. The denominations vary, not as much in their articles of faith, as in their degree of practice and how closely they have assimilated into a Gentile world.

The Torah by its express terms rejects alterations, additions, and deletions and thus implies that it is fully able to handle the needs of all future generations through reasonable interpretation of its text. That view, however, seems to be lost on the Rabbinate, which has in a number of ways added to, subtracted from and grossly modified the clear language of Torah text.

In all fairness, the United States Constitution, which many have been brought up to believe is an immutable document, has been amended 27 times. The difference lies in the fact that the Constitution provides for and contemplates amendment, while the Torah does not. The Karites believe that life in the modern era is totally amenable to the reasonable interpretation of the Torah as originally written. They maintain that their existence today is a testimonial to that belief. The original concept of Karism was that each Jew had the right to personally interpret the Torah within its reasonable parameters. The Karite synagogues of today have their own doctrinaire views of what constitute such reasonable interpretations.

What appears to trouble the Karites is that the Rabbis, through their Talmud, have set themselves up as the sole arbiter of the meaning of the written Torah and that their interpretations have significantly changed the Torah. Perhaps what aggrieves them the most is that Rabbinical changes,  interpretations and expansions of the written Torah, as appear in the Talmud, are now being offered as an oral Torah, of equal dignity with that delivered at Mount Sinai.

 Two Torahs that have diverse provisions suggests that there is more than one God, a conclusion assuredly rejected by both Karism and Rabbinism.

Douglas  C. Kaplan.