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Rabbi Akiva said, jesting and lightheadedness
accustom a person to immorality. The oral transmission is a protective
fence for the Torah. Tithes are a protective fence for wealth. Vows are a
protective fence for abstinence. A protective fence for wisdom is
silence.
Last week we
discussed the concept of the oral transmission — the part of the Torah
given orally to Moses and not committed to writing. We explained why it
was necessary that a large part of our tradition remain oral. The world
is a vibrant and ever-changing place. There are an infinite number of
people and life situations. There is no way any one work, no matter how
wise and insightful, could ever put into writing how every person should
act in every possible life situation. And the Torah — man’s guidebook for
living in this world — had to reflect that same dynamism and vibrancy. It
had to be a living document. Rather than attempting to spell out all
proper human behavior for us, G-d provided us with eternal principles of
truth — as well as with the tools for properly interpreting and making
derivations from the Written Torah. Each succeeding generation would
study that same tradition and apply its same eternal truths to an
ever-changing world and our ever-changing lives.
We might even say
that the Oral Law was given to us orally because even after receiving the
Torah at Sinai man’s job was not complete. G-d gave us principles and
rules of Biblical exegesis, but He did not spell out for us every detail
of our lives. G-d was not interested in dictating to man step- by-step
how he must live his life. His “kingdom of priests” (Exodus 19:6) was not
to be an army of mindless automatons, each following a prepared script
and acting precisely the same way. G-d made each of us different. Each of
us must study the Torah and interpret its personal and individualized
message for him or her. Thus, we did not merely become recipients of
G-d’s Torah; we became G-d’s partners.
We would take the Torah, master it, and apply it to all life’s
situations.
And so, the Oral
Torah represents the fact that even after giving us the Torah, G-d’s work
was not complete. Only we can complete G-d’s sacred mission. Only we can
take G-d’s eternal messages, assimilate them, and apply them to our
lives.
There is an
important postscript to this discussion, one I felt central enough to
devote at least a part of this class to. One of my readers posed the
following question: Don’t we have the entire Oral Law in writing today —
in the forms of the Mishna, the Talmud and literally tens of thousands of
other works? Although Israel and the Torah endured well over a millennium
before the writing of the Talmud, today we possess our entire tradition
in writing — vast amounts of it translated into readable English (not the
Latin-English translations I grew up with). And if so, does this mean
either that we’ve lost the true vitality of the Torah — Judaism has
become dormant and ritualistic — or that there was really no reason for
it to have been given orally in the first place?
The answer is that
even after the Mishna and Talmud were recorded, they were in anything but
a complete and frozen form. Anyone who has had the privilege of studying
so much as one page of the Talmud knows that it is not a clear,
well-organized book of laws and customs. It consists of controversies,
back-and-forth debates, tangents (and tangents on the tangents), and
unfinished discussions. (This is apart from the large collection of
stories, ethical lessons, and Midrashic material it contains.) The Talmud
often seems to begin discussing a subject by jumping right into the
middle because, as the Talmud often says, “since [the case at hand] was
based on a rabbinic derivation, it was dear to the Sages” (see e.g.
Yevamos 2b). (As I heard R. Berel Wein once put it, the Talmud, the way
it throws cases, concepts and jargon around, seems to just assume that the
studier, opening to its first page, knows the entire Talmud already!)
The reason for this
is because the Rabbis, even though they recognized the need to write down
the Oral Torah, wanted to preserve its freshness and vitality. It would
still be a living document. Later students who would study it would not
just read dry decisions of Jewish law — almost as reading some dreary
handbook of constitutional law or of historical court proceedings. (My
eyes get heavy just at the mere mention.) They would relive the same
discussions the Sages had before them. They would see the devotion, the
energy — and the life — that went into the Talmud’s writing and become a
part of that same process. They would see the principles of the Talmud
being weighed and debated; they would come to appreciate the legitimacy
of a wide range of opinions.
Further, the great
personalities of the Mishna and Talmud would come to life for them. The
Talmud displays the religious life of our ancestors as vibrant, diverse
and zealous. In this manner, the Sages who recorded the Talmud achieved a
near miraculous feat. They did not merely record the words or the
information of our tradition. They captured its soul.
To state it
differently, if a seeking Jew wanted to find out how to observe Judaism,
if he were seeking simple answers to the how’s of Judaism — as if Judaism
were merely some collection of rituals — the Talmud would hardly be the
place to go. He would find an animated but confused collection of debates
and discussions, and of only partially- organized statements of law often
without clear conclusions. The purpose of the Talmud was never to define
Judaism in a ritualistic sense. If, however, such a person wanted to know
what Judaism is really
all about, he will turn to the Talmud. It contains the life-force of the
Jewish People, the power which has kept us strong and vital throughout
the ages. It tells the true story of what it means to be a Jew.
I would like at
last to conclude this discussion with one final point. (I hear that sigh
of relief coming from x-thousand readers.) 😉 There is an additional
reason why G-d gave us a partially oral Torah. It is in order to make us
the responsible party for its preservation. An oral tradition does not
endure on its own. It cannot just sit on a shelf — so that if it’s
ignored for one generation the next can come along and pick it up. If we
do not keep it alive, if we do not take what we know and pass it on to
our children, it will be lost. G-d did not make us recipients of a
tradition; He made us its bearers.
We must see ourselves as part of a tradition. We are links in a chain of
transmission, and we are obligated to pass it on to our children. If we
forget the Torah, corrupt it, or make light of it, our children’s lives
will be that much less enriched.
Even today, with so
much of the Oral Law recorded and even translated into English, Judaism
is not really a religion which can be picked up in a book. As many works
of law and commentary we have, Judaism’s essence can never be captured in
book knowledge. It is a living religion. If we live it, our children will
see what it is all about. If we consign our children’s education to
textbooks or the classroom, our children will see it as no more than a
course of study and far more likely, an unwanted burden.
I feel one of the
most poignant examples of Judaism’s attitude towards tradition is the
Passover Seder. When we sit at the Seder with children, family and
friends, we are reminded that we are the bearers of our tradition. The
Torah emphasizes that the story be passed from parent to child: “And it
shall be when your son asks you in the future saying, ‘What is this?’ you
shall say to him, ‘With a mighty hand did G-d take us out of Egypt from
the house of slavery…'” (Exodus 13:14). Our children are turning to us
for answers — something for better or worse they rarely do. Thirty,
forty, fifty years ago our grandparents and parents were telling us this
story. Now it is our turn, and we tell it anew to our children and
grandchildren. We realize that this has been done in our family — as well
as in any Jewish family which still remembers — literally every single
year for over 3300 years. Our tradition is real to us — and vibrant. It
came down to us through the millennia because our parents and their
parents before them and their parents before them took the heritage they
had received — the story of our people — preserved it, and passed it on
to their children.
And this is what we
tell our children on the Seder night. We do not come to nag, to argue or
to force religion down their throats, nor do we claim we always know
better or are ideal parents. But we come as bearers. We speak with the
full authority and backing of the hundred generations before us who
carried the same message — through exile, suffering and assimilation.
Parents do not lie to their children. The story of the Exodus has been
preserved, it has the same freshness and relevance because G-d told a
nation “You shall say to your son…” (ibid. verse 8), and we have done so
every year since. We, the “ordinary” members of the Nation of Israel,
have accomplished this through patience, memory, and perseverance. It is
our obligation — to our nation, to our forebears and to our children — to
continue the message of Judaism, to take the little we have preserved, the
little that has remained, and to bless our children with that same
legacy.
Text Copyright ©
2004 by Rabbi Dovid Rosenfeld and Torah.org.
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