In the beginning
The People of Israel were born with God’s selection of Abram, as their patriarch, almost 4000 years ago.
The Nation of Israel was born at Mount Sinai, in 1280 B.C.E., hardened by the contractions of 400 years of slavery, and nourished by the receipt of the civilizing statutes of Torah.
Until the Roman destruction of the second Temple in 70 C.E., the Hebrew People’s relationship with their God was that of a tribal deity. Worship was largely accomplished in the Temple by gifting and sacrificing food animals whose flesh was used to sustain the families of the priests and the Levi support personnel.
When animal sacrifices were no longer possible, Jews assembled in community meeting places for the purposes of reading the law received at Sinai and uttering devotions to their God. Learned men stepped forward to lead such congregations and to author communal prayers. Thus, out of Temple deprivation was born the synagogue, the rabbinate and a more organized form of a Jewish community.
Rabbis, as distinguished from the early sages, do not appear on the scene until about 200 C.E., and are the philosophical successors to the Pharisees. While this congregational activity resembled a religion, it was not simply accessible by the same kind of pledges of faith and formalities which opened the doors to both Christianity and the Muslim faith. Anyone could reflect and mimic classic Jewish religious procedures, but for one to actually practice Judaism, he or she must first be a Jew.
The laws which God requires of his people were delivered in the desert at Mount Sinai during the thirteenth century B.C.E. Historians believe that those laws, together with the narrative history of the Jewish people in the form of the written Torah, first appeared with Ezra upon the construction of the second Temple in the middle of the sixth century BCE.
It is axiomatic that no code, however explicit, can anticipate all of the circumstances to which it will be applied. For it to have universal application there must be a body politic that interprets and applies that code.
Analogously, for the United States Constitution, that body is the United States Supreme Court. With regard to the Torah, during the second Temple period, that task fell to The Men of the Great Assembly (Anshei Knesset HaGedolah), a group of 120 scribes, sages and prophets, and to the San Hedron. It was their responsibility to discuss, interpret and apply the Mosaic law. The Torah was quite explicit, in that such interpretations and applications must totally be within the spirit of the laws expressed. Under no circumstances was there authority to add or subtract from the law as given to Moses (Deuteronomy 4(2)and(13-32)).
Early Jewish Religious Philosophies
The introduction of the written Torah during the second Temple period brought with it several schools of thought as to its meaning and application:
- The Pharisees: The Pharisees were the spiritual fathers of Rabbinism (Rabbinic Judaism). They maintained that an afterlife existed and that God punished the wicked and rewarded the righteous in the world to come. They also believed in a Messiah who would herald a new era of world peace.
- The Sadducees: Sadducees represented an aristocratic, wealthy, and traditional elite 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 there is no fate and 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 were not written in the law of Moses and of the Oral Law created by the Pharisees to consolidate their power. Their rejection of afterlife was in direct opposition to emerging Christianity in which afterlife was an important element.
- The Essenes: This group emerged out of the dissatisfaction with the other two. They believed that the others had corrupted Jerusalem and the Temple. Their conclusions led them to the desert where they adopted strict dietary laws and a commitment to celibacy. It is from their collection of documents that the Dead Sea Scrolls were ultimately found.
- The Boethusians: This was a group closely related to the Sadducees. They did not believe in afterlife or the resurrection of the dead. While the Sadducees were politically opposed to the Pharisees, the Boethusians advanced the religious arguments against them.
Birth of the Talmud
The opinions and disputations of the scholars of the Men of the Great Assembly were at risk of disappearing into obscurity. Fearing that oral traditions might be forgotten, Rabbi Judah HaNasi in 189 C. E., undertook the mission of consolidating the various opinions of the sages into a code of law which became known as the Mishnah. It consisted of 63 tractates which codify Jewish law and which constitute the basis of the Talmud .
The Mishnah was followed by two different works, each called Gemara which comprised rabbinical analysis and commentaries on the Mishnah. One of them originated from the Babylonian Jewish community and the other from Jerusalem. These efforts involve the work of rabbinical scholars known as Amoraim.The Mishnah and the two Gemaras together with the Midrash, (a hybrid of commentaries on the Written and Oral Torah), constitute the Talmud also known as the Oral Torah. The Talmud, transcribed from 189 C.E. to 500 C.E., is uniquely a work of the rabbis.
Inasmuch as the Torah was revered as having been originated from the revealed word of God, it was viewed as immutable and as a divine resource. The Mishnah and the Gemara, on the other hand, arose out of rabbinical opinions from the Jewish community, in service of the interpretation and application of the Torah. Occasionally the zeal of the rabbis, in trying to identify the outer limits of Mosaic law, resulted in creative endeavors. Consistency gave way to imagination, and the laws of the Torah began to change.
Countering those efforts were, however, elements of the Jewish community who were awed by the imaginative excesses of the Tannaim and the Amoraim and sought to restore the Torah to a more personal relationship with the people it served.
Karite response to Rabbinical excesses
By the middle of the eighth century, there arose Persian biblical scholars who took issue with the excesses of rabbinism and founded the Karite movement. Just as the rabbis were the philosophical heirs of the Pharisees, the Karites arose out of the ashes of the Sadducees who disappeared after the destruction of the second Temple.
While the Karites took no issue with the reasonable construction of the Torah, they rejected, out of hand, those man-made laws which repudiated portions of the Torah, or gratuitously added to it. The Pharisees/rabbis believed that the interpretation of a particular teacher was divine and elevated these teachings to the level of the Torah itself. After a time, these teachings were incorporated in the Oral Torah. The rabbis went so far as to claim that when two teachers taught diametrically opposed interpretations of the Torah that they both originated with God.
Despite efforts by the rabbinists such as the Saadia Gaon to eliminate all other forms of normative Judaism, the Karites have survived to the twenty first century. Some 40,000 are believed to reside in Israel with smaller communities in Turkey, Europe and the United States.
One People …One God … One Faith … One Torah
Rabbinism asserts that there is more than one Torah. It confirms the existence of the Written Torah, which contains the law given by God to Moses at Mount Sinai in the 13th century B.C.E. It then alludes to the existence of a second Torah which it refers to as the Oral Torah which includes the Mishnah, the Gemara, and the Midrash, together known as the Talmud.
It is difficult to conclude that the Oral Torah is a Torah at all, Since it is essentially an attempt to create a body of law based upon rabbinical interpretations of the Written Torah. Even the traditional rabbinate who seek to bootstrap the Talmud to the divine level of the Torah have their own, not so well concealed misgivings.
Traditional Judaism’s body language of distinction
In the Holy Ark of every synagogue appear multiple Torah scrolls, while the volumes of the Talmud are notably absent. To be kosher, the Torah must be handwritten by a sofer (a dedicated and knowledgeable scribe), while the Talmud appears in multiple commercially printed volumes. It is the Torah, and not the Talmud, that is lifted during the Hagbah portion of every Torah service. It is only the Torah that is kissed by the parishioners as it makes its way through the aisles of every synagogue. The traditional fasting imposed on those who have viewed a Torah drop is not imposed if a similar event occurs to a volume of the Talmud.
The authority to create is the authority to amend
The United States Constitution, like the Torah, is an instrument that incorporates a body of rules for the maintenance of a sustainable and orderly social structure. However, the two differ in the source of original authority by which they were created. The United States Constitution was an instrument created in 1789 from the authority, and by the will of ,those whose conduct was to be governed by that instrument. The Torah, on the other hand, originated from the divine authority of the tribal God of the Jewish people gathered at Mount Sinai in the 13th century BCE. Both documents are universal, inasmuch as their authority seeks to endure long beyond the time of their origination.
The United States Constitution provided for a manner in which it could be amended and it was, in fact, amended on 27 different occasions. The source of authority for authorizing the amendment was the very body politic of citizens that created it in the first place. They had simply reserved the right to make the document a living instrument which could be changed in accordance with social and physical changes which occur regularly within a community.
Since God was the authority for the creation of the Torah and since the Torah did not provide for the manner in which it could be amended to accommodate change, only God could alter its provisions. But God has not presented himself recently to assist with the modification of the Torah in order to accommodate a more modern society.
There was, however, one exception to Torah amendment authority. In Deuteronomy 18:(15-19), we are told that God will raise up from amongst the people a prophet and then God will put words in his mouth to which the people shall heed. The passage warns the nation to be aware of false prophets who can be identified when their prophecies does not come to pass. Of special note was the fact that the prophet would come from amongst the people through whom God could send a message to Israel. The passage presages the era of the prophets and is clearly not intended to create another deity or semi-deity in competition with God. The rabbis were in a quandary as to how to keep pace with both physical and social changes.
The Torah prohibited all additions, subtractions, or alterations to the rules in the original document. In the exercise of their authority to interpret and apply the law, the rabbis made a number of sweeping changes and additions, often tantamount to the rejection of portions of the Torah.
- From what might well may have been a political expedient, the rabbis created, out of whole cloth, L’olam Habah (the world to come). That is, if one faithfully obeyed rabbinical law, that person would be admitted to the domain inhabited by God, the Angels, and others who passed life’s tests to merit entry into this promised, joyful domain. The difficulty with this concept is that there is not one scintilla of mention of the world to come in the Torah. It is as if God were so tired on the sixth day, from creating our world that he forgot to mention the other world that he had created for afterlife. No doubt that those who struggled for a living with little reward in this world found such a promise hopeful and that they would be moved in the direction of rabbinism.
- For approximately 2000 years (from Abraham to the destruction of the temple by the Romans in 70 A.D.), the Jews were a patrilineal society. That is, the 12 tribes of Israel carried the names of Jacob’s sons; children were named by the origin of their father; and the laws of inheritance and those of religious hierarchy were patrilineally influenced. Most importantly, the Hebrew entitlement to the holyland flowed directly through the Zerah (semen) of the patriarchs and their male descendents. By the end of the second Temple, and in accordance with rabbinical fiat, the rabbis changed the required origin of Jewish children from a Jewish father to a Jewish mother. Certainly, it was then easier to identify the mother of a child rather than the father. Could that fact alone justify the rabbis to negate the Torah and overturn the underpinnings of the Hebraic social structure?
- Interpretation by the rabbis of a single statement in the Torah could result in distortion of its meaning beyond any reasonable concept. Classically, the rule concerning mixing meat and milk is one of the most egregious. Exodus 23 (19), 34(20), and Deuteronomy 14(21), all provide “Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk.” A reasonable construction of that provision would tell us that it prohibits the cooking of a kid in the milk of its mother. A more expanded, and perhaps ethical, interpretation would tell us that no animal should be cooked or eaten in its mother’s milk. There is no suggestion by the biblical text that all meat should be excluded from all milk, a statement that God could easily have prescribed should that have been his intent.
The very fact that it was limited to a mother-child relationship in one species of one animal attests to the fact that it was not a universal theme. To expand the restriction to the milk of one animal as relates to the issue of another animal, or the milk of one species and the meat of another, is a distortion and a violation of the rule against adding to Torah laws. Perhaps the most curious application of this law is the fact that chicken is considered meat and cannot be consumed with milk, even though chickens don’t give milk, and chicken and eggs may be consumed together.
Homemade Divine authority
To justify the conflict between the Torah, the revealed word of God, and the Oral Torah, a rabbinical product, divine authority had to be found or manufactured. In order to justify modifications to the Torah, traditional Judaism created a retrofitted bridge from the end of the Talmud era approximately 500 C.E. to God’s appearance at Mount Sinai in 1312 B.C.E. (1812 years). The Talmud was then identified as the Torah Shel Bial Pe Misinai (The Oral Torah that originated at Mount Sinai).
To accept the Oral Torah as divinely originated one must believe that:
- God deferred his instruction of the Oral Torah for over 1800 years, until it outed from the mouths of the Tannaim, the Amoraim and the rabbis at the conclusion of the Talmudic Era.
- God who spoke definitively and without equivocation in the Torah was now presenting multiple disputations on the law without conclusive mandates.
- God was amending and making additions to the rules He provided at Sinai at the very same time he was declaring those rules.
- God saved those disputations to be uttered from the mouths of rabbis who were not acknowledged prophets.
Ultimately, the ham-handed way in which divine authority was manufactured by the rabbis painted all of Judaism into a static corner. The rabbis could not again go back to the Sinai well and conjure more divine authority to accommodate changes after the Oral Torah (the Talmud).
From the sixth century onward, Jewish law was condemned to live in a sea made turbulent with the conflicting legal opinions of the Tannaim of the Mishna and the Amoriam of the Gemorah. Decisions, of necessity, were made by consensus. While the Written Torah spoke with one voice, the Oral Torah spoke with many. Worst of all, as time progressed Jewish law remained locked in the sixth century since the Sinai well remained closed.
A time to make choices
However, by the twelfth 12th century and the birth of Moses Maimonides, help was to come. The Rambam, as he was known, recognized the difficulty of rabbinical law with no specific accepted and acknowledged rules. In his masterful work called the Mishnah Torah, he selected from the multiple rabbinical choices on each legal issue one specific interpretation and rule which was to be followed and rejected the others. In the Mishnah Torah, he wisely omitted the names of the rabbis whose opinions were rejected. Since there was one accepted opinion for each issue of law in the Mishnah Torah it significantly reduced the study of the raw and conflicting opinions in the Mishnah and the Gemara. Sadly, the Rambam’s choices were of necessity rooted in the world of the sixth century, since there was no divine authority for real change beyond the Talmud.
A similar but less extravagant work was done in the sixteenth century by Joseph Caro who created the Shulchan Orach, a virtual handbook on the applicable laws and rules governing how a person should conduct himself in accordance with Jewish law.
Napoleon…Liberation and Fragmentation
While the chaos of disputations of the Talmudic era had largely been addressed, the basic rules of Jewish law were still sourced in the sixth century of the Oral Torah. In the ghettos and shtetls of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe, there was little personal or social contact with the Gentile community. That constraint was viewed by some as a gift that kept the Jewish people together in troubled times. However, those times changed with the onset of the Napoleonic era. The Royal houses of Europe were beginning to lose dominance.
The ghettos were opening and their residents given access to the urban communities of the host countries. In sites such as Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, England and Holland, Jews began to engage socially and commercially with the Gentile community. They acquired homes in formerly forbidden areas, competed in commerce, entered their school children in public schools, and sought parity with their Gentile neighbors. In doing so, they were hobbled by interpretations of the Torah rooted back to the sixth century. In Germany, especially during the early 1800s, Jews confronted multiple choices:
- Conversion
- Abandonment of the more restrictive rules of historic rabbinic Judaism
- Reinterpretation of the Torah so as to liberalize Jewish practices
- Retain traditional classic rabbinic Judaism
For the most part, conversion was not a popular choice. While it was recognized that one can change one’s religious practices, the convert cannot change his genetic identity, either in his own eyes or in those of his Gentile neighbors.
A number of German Jews chose to retain their identity but to abandon many of the trappings of traditional Judaism. This included the wearing of traditional Jewish identifiers, such as skull caps, beards,prayer shawls, sideburns, etc. It evolved into the abandonment of much of the Hebrew in- temple worship, and into the shortening of their services. The restrictions on Sabbath activity and the prohibition against eating non-kosher food were also significantly eroded.
Thus in 1818, Reform Judaism was born in Germany and ultimately was transported to other Judaic enclaves. As the process continued in the United States and other Jewish communities, it became even more liberalized by the creation of denominations, such as Reconstruction Judaism and Humanistic Judaism. All of this occurred while traditional rabbinic Judaism remained vital and active in Jewish communities throughout the world.
As some communities liberalized, Orthodoxy circled the wagons
Orthodox Jewish communities were not unaffected by the rigid and anachronistic nature of the Oral Torah. Those communities, however, dealt with it in three different ways:
1) Accommodation by relating current activity to an analogous circumstance in the early Biblical era
Orthodox communities related every new physical or social innovation back to a biblical origin. A cardinal rule in Jewish law is that the seventh day (the Sabbath) is a mandated day of rest. No work can be performed on that day since Jews are taught that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. But, what constitutes work? For a definition of work, early Jewish law looked to the building of the Tabernacle, the portable temple of God used by the children of Israel. The notion is that any activity necessary in the creation of the Tabernacle constituted work. One of those activities was the creation of fire, which in 1200 B.C.E., and assuredly required significant effort and constituted work. The idea that creating a fire was a work effort was further confirmed in Exodus 35(3) where the Jewish community was directed “Ye shall kindle no fire throughout your habitation on the Sabbath day.”
The advent of electricity and its many uses became challenging. Electricity was viewed as a form of fire and thus all uses of electricity constituted work and were prohibited on the Sabbath. The idea that the effort of making a fire, in the matchless world of thirteenth-century B.C.E. (Mount Sinai) was not the same as the Zippo lighter era of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, either was never considered or dismissed out of hand. Thus, the religious Jews of today live in an anachronistic world.
Today, it is not considered working on the Sabbath to walk upstairs to your apartment on the sixth floor, but it is considered work to press a button in an elevator to arrive at the same location. It is not considered work to walk, in a driving rainstorm, a mile to your favorite synagogue on the Sabbath, but driving your car to the same destination is a gross violation.
Orthodox homes or establishments often provide stacks of separated toilet tissues so that one is not obliged to tear sheets from a roll on the Sabbath day. Listening to a dissertation on the weekly portion of biblical law on an electronic device which requires an off and on button is equally a violation.
The restrictions of this relation back doctrine, analogizing modern life to laws or events that existed thousands of years earlier, exists in multiple other aspects of Jewish life today.
2) The prayer mantra
By the late 1400s, the Jews, as an itinerant, landless people, had traveled from host nation to host nation for centuries. With them, they carried their Torah scrolls, which was the source of the instruction they were to provide to their neighbors and themselves. In their synagogues, the reading of the Torah remained paramount. Nevertheless, prayer in a formalized fashion gained significant momentum.
The circumstances of the Jew in the diaspora was rarely favorable and thus there was much to ask of God. Eventually, the prayers, often in the form of poems and supplications, became formalized both with reference to language and time of presentation. Personalized prayer, as a means of communication with one’s God, took a backseat to prepared prayers, prescribed for specific times and dates. The advent of the printing press and the printing of prayer books accelerated the process. Those most devout demonstrated their devotion by how quickly they could read the prayer or recite it from memory. Spontaneity, in supplication, became a lost art. It has been suggested, undoubtedly in jest, that God’s failure to appear since biblical times may be as a result of boredom with the thoughtless and repetitious utterances of the rote daily prayers.
In addition to stylized prayers, traditional Jews have often adopted the dress of host countries (black hats, fur hats, long black coats, etc.). This dress would be more familiarly found in seventeenth-century Poland than in biblical Israel or elsewhere in the modern world.
3) Create a work-around that frequently has the appearance of a sham
In Exodus 16(28-29), God reproved the Jewish people for violating his commandments by leaving their home on the Sabbath day. He requires “let no man go out of his place on the seventh day.” That requirement represented a significant problem for rabbinic Judaism. How could the Jewish community attend services, if restricted to their home site?
From that quandary, the notion of eruv was born. It was an artificial way of extending one’s place or household beyond the normal household limits. The idea was that if one can create a confined area in which the household is located, it becomes part of that household. Virtually every traditional Jewish community has its own eruv. The eruv of the borough of Manhattan, New York, is constructed by eighteen miles of translucent wire around most of that community, essentially declaring that all homes in the eighteen mile circumference are part of a single residence. Any comment on how this might comply with the express words of the Torah appears superfluous.
To be sure, the Sabbath elevator was not an invention of the early sages of Israel. Nevertheless, it is a feature of many hospitals in which there are Jewish physicians and patients. To avoid having to press an elevator button, and thus create an electrical impulse, which has its religious origin in fire, Sabbath elevators in many hospitals are obliged to automatically stop on every floor. Curiously, how a Sabbath elevator that runs on electric avoids the criticized use of electricity on the Sabbath is a conundrum worthy of deep thought.
Many religious Jews are disinclined to leave lights or air conditioning on from before the Sabbath on Friday so that it may be used on Saturday. To avoid that dangerous and expensive alternative, they turn to the use of what has traditionally been called “the Shabbos goy.” That is a Gentile who is procured to come during the Sabbath and initiate the electrical system that provides the light, air conditioning or heat. The rationale is that inasmuch as he is not a Jew, he is not prohibited by doing work on Sabbath. It is as if the introduction of a Gentile third party to perform a Sabbath violation insulates the person who acquired the service. Nothing could be further from the truth in any civilized society. The act of the agent is the act of the principal. Otherwise one could, with impunity, hire a hitman to do in an adversary.
Some observant Jews are owners of business establishments that need to be open on Saturday in order to be viable. It has become a popular device to create a sales contract wherein the business is sold to a Gentile on Friday afternoon, only to be repurchased by the original owner on Sunday morning. The rationale here is that it is not owned by the religious Jew during the Sabbath, when it is open for business on that day. This shameless sham, which purports to be a bona fide transaction, would be fully revealed if the weekend owner set fire to the business on Saturday afternoon.
Conclusion
After the destruction of the second Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. and the futile revolt against the Romans by Simon bar Kokhba in 132 CE, the control of the Jewish people passed into the hands of the rabbis as successors to the Pharisees.
The Torah had no provision for alteration or amendment in order to accommodate to physical, environmental or social changes. God no longer appeared directly or through prophets to accommodate to the changing circumstances of the people. Essentially, the rabbis had two choices in order for the Jewish people to keep pace in a changing world:
- The rabbis could broadly construe the Torah to accommodate the changing times in such a manner as to stay true to the spirit, focus and intent of the Torah.
- The rabbis could depart from portions of the Torah by rejecting them, out of hand, and/or by adding rules and regulations that were alien to the original provisions.
Whether by design, frustration or misadventure, rabbinical law (Halacha) began in part to depart from the Torah and to establish a jurisprudence of its own in direct violation of the provisions of Deuteronomy 4(2) and (13-32).
There obviously came a time when the rabbinate realized that they could not offer the Torah as the revealed word of God and then depart from portions of it at will. There had to be some divine authority which would authorize rabbinical departures from the strict letter of the Torah. In what may have been an act of desperation, the rabbis reached back more than 1800 years from the completion of the Talmud (500 C.E.) to the delivery of the Torah at Mount Sinai (1320 B.C.E.) in order to “borrow” divine authority for its Oral Torah, the Talmud.
As a result of rabbinical creativity, the Judaism of today is significantly different from that of our ancestors. The rabbis created their own world, their own people and their own Torah.
The New Rabbinical Jewish World
In the Torah we find only one world, the world created by God, in which all of his creatures dwell. From the rabbinate, we have acquired a new world, L’Olam Habah, the world to come. It is a world that promises afterlife and benefits for living a life mindful and in compliance with rabbinic halacha. Has anyone consulted God?
The New Rabbinical Jewish People
For approximately 2000 years from God’s selection of Abram, a Jew was an individual who is born of a Jewish father (a patrilineal society). By rabbinical fiat, that rule was changed to replace the requirement of a Jewish father with the requirement of a Jewish mother (a matrilineal society). The change constitutes a direct rejection of the Torah and is an alteration of the composition of the Jewish people. Who are we?
The New Rabbinical Jewish Torah
The Torah was given to Moses and the Jewish people in the fourteenth century B.C.E. The Written Torah, from the days of Ezra the scribe, serves the Jewish people today as the sacred and disclosed word of God. The rabbinate has provided the world with the Mishna, the Gemoras, and the Midrash, together the Talmud. They are the writings and opinions of multiple rabbis, often in disputation with each other with regard to the interpretation, and application of the Written Torah. The rabbis have chosen to elevate the status of the Talmud to that of an Oral Torah, albeit it is a series of rabbinical texts and opinions in service of the written Torah. Both God and his Torah are singular. Even under the guise of service, no one claim equivalency with the Creator or the divinity of his teachings.
May the Jewish people and their Torah wander no more.
By Douglas C. Kaplan