LECTURE NOTES       

HUMANITIES CORE COURSE,

FALL QUARTER, WEEK FIVE

25-26 OCTOBER 2010

“Rabbinic Judaism: The Mosaic Covenant Complemented and Continued”

 

Quote of the Day:

 

“Behold! My word is like fire—declares the lord—and like a hammer that shatters rock!”

                                                                             --Jeremiah 23:29

 

 

First contextualizing review:

 

LN Week 3-1: relationship between the three related ancestral covenants and the three descendant covenants

 

Preliminary historical question-and-answer:

 

Q. You speak of Rabbinic Judaism as a descendant built around a new version of the Mosaic covenant, but is it really a descendant? Aren’t the Jews simply the continuation of the ancient Israelites and therefore doesn’t their religion therefore simply continue the ancient covenants?

 

A. Courtesy of Rabbi Firestone:

 

          “But what of that early monotheism that was represented by biblical Israel? What ever happened to it?

          “The short answer is that biblical monotheism died long ago. The religion of the Bible did not long survive the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple [70 CE]. In phenomenological terms, one could justifiably refer to both Christianity and Islam as heirs and successors to biblical religion. In fact, however, biblical religion did not produce only two heirs. It produced a third heir as well: rabbinic Judaism.

          “… Just as Christianity is not the same religion as that of biblical Israel, rabbinic Judaism—the Judaism exemplified by the Rabbis of the Talmud and that which is practiced in one form or another by virtually all Jews today—is also not the same as the religion of biblical Israel. Different worship (the use of synagogues instead of the Temple, no more sacrifices, different liturgy), different theologies, different behavioral obligations, and different expectations of the End of Days mark only some of the many significant distinctions; and of course, although unadvertised, an additional scripture in the Oral, as opposed to Written Torah of rabbinic Judaism. Such differences are the stuff that makes for a different religion.”

                                      --Chapter 3, pp. 52-53, Who Are the Real Chosen People?

 

 

 

Q. You use this phrase “Rabbinical Judaism.” Is there another non-rabbinical kind?

 

          A. There isn’t any more; but until as late as 200 CE, there were other ways, besides the rabbinic way, to be ethnically Jewish and religious.

 

          Q. What made the rabbinical way different?

 

          A. A synonym for rabbinical might be teacherly or scholastic or even academic inasmuch as the developed meaning of rabbi in Hebrew is “teacher” or “scholar.” All Israelites read or at least heard read (if they were illiterate) some of the sacred texts of their religion when they gathered for worship. A good many of the psalms were clearly written for worship use in the Temple, and from earliest times the Torah—whether on tablets or, later, on a scroll—was understood to bring God near to his covenanted people (cf. the Tent of Meeting, as encountered in Lecture 3-2, Exodus 24).

At a certain point, however, some Jews began to meet to discuss and debate Torah—the first five books of the Tanakh—with a new intensity of involvement. They developed a distinct new institution, the Study Center (beit midrash), in which to do this, and their fraternal relationship as focused on this new institution initially set them apart from other Jews. For various reasons, an estrangement grew up between these scholars and the hereditary priesthood that administered the Jerusalem Temple and, under centuries of foreign occupation, had assumed some of the duties of the vanished hereditary monarchy.

 

Q. When did this happen?

 

A. Let’s try a second contextualizing review as a historical answer to that question and then turn to a foundational text in the rabbinical tradition to appreciate the intellectual foundation that the rabbis placed under the Mosaic covenant as they continued and complemented it by creating an enormous new body of scripture.

 

Second contextualizing review:

 

LN Week 4-1: the timeline. Classroom exercise: On a piece of paper, jot down:

          1. Moses

          2. Joshua

          3. The Kings and the Prophets

          4. The two adjacent entries:

--Temple Rebuilt/Haggai & Zechariah;

--Ezra & Nehemiah/Malachi

5. Alexander.

 

 

 

Foundational rabbinic text:

 

Aboth (“the Fathers”). This proto-Rabbinic text constructs a genealogy linking the transmission of Torah (“the Law”) from Moses down to well-known rabbis of the first century CE.

 

Now jot down on your piece of paper the correspondences on this linkage to the four entries just above:

          1. Moses

          2. Joshua and the Elders. (For the Elders, see Exodus 24, p. 63 in Core Guide & Reader).

          3. The Prophets but not the Kings.

          4. The Men of the Great Synagogue

          5. In the second verse, the last survivor of the Great Synagogue, who, according to rabbinic legend, had conversed with Alexander the Great when passed through Judaea en route to his conquest of the entire Persian Empire.

 

In the founding generations of the Rabbinic Judaist tradition, the kings had corrupted themselves first by collaborating with the Romans and second by illegitimately taking over the Temple priesthood. For the Rabbis, monarchical or imperial authority was dubious, while community authority, as of elders, especially when receiving Torah in association with Moses himself, is glorious.

 

Something else absolutely critical about this chain of transmission must be underlined. Note how, throughout it, each sage mentioned is remembered for a remembered saying, not for anything written. The idea that was to empower the rabbis to found what was, in effect, a new religion was the idea that alongside the written Torah, there was an oral Torah that went all the way back to Moses and that spoke with the authority of “Sinai” even as it was continued down to the time of the rabbis themselves. The chain combines some historical figures with some legendary or entirely fictitious figures and in this regard bears a structural relationship to the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew 1 (Guide & Reader, p. 100). The two linkages have the same purpose—namely, to lay claim to the authority of God in making religious changes and in interpreting the entirety of inherited sacred scripture.

 

How did rabbinical interpretation proceed?

 

          Rabbinic Judaism would eventually produce an enormous literature, many times longer than the Bible. [We have included the table of contents of the Soncino edition of the Talmud in translation (Core Guide & Reader, pp. 139-143) to make this point.] Only some of this literature is called formally by the name midrash (interpretation, commentary), but the midrashic form of commentary is employed all but line by line in the writing of the whole of this literature.

Midrashic commentary proceeds on several bold assumptions that would prove influential in Christianity beginning with Jesus and, more frequently and obviously, with Paul but are have their fullest, most radical expression in Judaism. These assumptions include:

          1. The assumption that the biblical text is a kind of secret code. Alongside what it more obviously says, there is always a second meaning that can come to light in discussions that carry forward the deeper, ancient understandings of the oral tradition.

          2. Any part of the biblical text may be used to comment on any other part. The truth of the text is, in this sense, not contextual but “fungible”—that is, transferable from one context into another as one might transfer money from one account to another or convert currency for use in one country into currency for use in another without any loss of value.

          3. The truth of each part of the text is time-independent. An earlier text may be used to illumine a later, a later an earlier, and any text or combination of texts may be used to comment on the lives of the rabbinic commentators and the larger Jewish community.

          4. The written text may be expanded by the addition of details, new references, or supplementary narratives.

          5. There is no higher authority than the learned teacher. Moses himself—whom the Books of Exodus and Deuteronomy present as lawgiver, judge, charismatic political leader, and military commander—is transformed into moshe rabbenu, Moses Our Teacher, in rabbinic usage.

          The kind of prose that results from the free implementation of these principles is extremely difficult for anyone to read who does so from outside an intensely and continuously engaged interpretive community to read. Midrashic commentary typically takes the form of rapid-fire conversation among participants who know the Tanakh essentially by heart, can summon up a complex text in a split second through just a brief embedded allusion, and can then make a subtle point about another text with the summoned-up first text. Half sentences in this prose are the norm rather than the exception. The text reads as if the participants in a symposium are continuously and excitedly interrupting one another, completing one another’s thoughts, and competitively topping one another off. The antecedents of pronouns are often both crucial and not immediately evident. The cogency of an argument often depends on something that the text elides—that is, skips over—rather than spelling out with logical completeness. In effect, even though these discussions have been committed to writing by now for 1500 years, they remain effectively an oral tradition inasmuch as—more than any of the other primary texts we have considered in this portion of Humanities Core Course—a properly prepared teacher must complete them orally if a beginning student is to understand them.

 

What is the point of this kind of midrashic symposium? What did Jews get out of it?

 

          1. Subjectively, for those who gave themselves deeply to what could (and still can) be, clearly enough, an intoxicating, even addictive undertaking, the exercise provided an experience of unending surprise and delight. (See quote of the day—a line often quoted to evoke the effect of midrash.) There was no end to the new wonders that the text could be made to yield by this method, yet the point of all of them was finally and cumulatively a consoling point. All real-world evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, the text thus interpreted showed again and again that nothing was more important to God than Israel. God’s undying love for Israel above all other nations was demonstrated anew with each plunge into what Jewish tradition would call “the Sea of the Talmud.” Each of these demonstrations was a proof to the pious Jewish student that the old covenants were all still very much in effect: the Noachic covenant was still there to accommodate the Gentiles, Israel’s “other”; the Abrahamic and Davidic covenants still promised fertility and, someday, sovereignty over a the Promised Land. Above all, the written Mosaic covenant, now twinned with an oral Mosaic covenant, had produced a massive new scripture and in the process turned ignominious Exile into providential Exodus. The fact that rabbinic, midrashic exegesis asks endless questions and never comes to a final answer is—or became as the tradition became more self-conscious—the very quasi-mystical point of the exercise, for God, too, was endless, was He not, and Torah was the mind of God opened to the studious eyes of his Chosen People.

 

          2. Objectively, rabbinic interpretation allowed bold, innovative, and authoritative leadership to take shape for a networked, international religious community on the basis of an oral tradition understood to be, in effect, of divine origin. There was precedent: Torah study had had to replace Temple sacrifice in the Babylonian exile (587-538 BCE). Gradually, that exile had become a large, voluntary Jewish diaspora, a second center of international Jewish life. And now, after the massive Roman victory and the obliteration of the Second Temple, the Babylonian exile was to be twinned by a new Roman exile that would evolve into a second diaspora in its turn. In point of fact, there was already in place a massive, voluntary Jewish diaspora in the Roman Empire. In this western diaspora, as dynamic Rabbinic Judaism absorbed an older, simpler “congregational” Judaism that had no study center (beit midrash) but only a community center (beit knesset or, in Greek, synagoga), the two diasporas became a single, networked, rabbi-taught and rabbi-led World Jewry stretching from Mesopotamia to Spain.

By the end of the 6th century CE, or just before the rise of Islam, the scholars of this Rabbinic network would produce the Talmud itself, a vast compilation of their work that by the 8th century CE would acquire the status and authority of a second Jewish scripture, complementing the Tanakh as the first. The earlier, smaller portion of the Talmud, called the Mishnah, was completed in 200 CE, written in neo-Hebrew by scholars still living in Palestine. The Mishnah was then complemented, twice, by the addition of the Gemara—once in Palestine and again at greater, more definitive length in Babylonia, both times in Aramaic, the language of Babylonia.

 Rabbinic literature as a whole contains other works besides the Talmud. Most notably, it contains Midrash Rabbah, the voluminous rabbinic biblical commentary that we sampled a moment ago. However, the Talmud—comprising the Mishnah and the Gemaras—have a unique status. Starting in the 8th century, the Talmud proper began to function as something like the constitution of a nation that was now, remarkably, living permanently and almost entirely abroad and under foreign rule that varied from place to place and time to time yet a nation that never lost its conviction that it remained a distinct people and, indeed, a Chosen People. This Talmudic constitution enshrined, especially in the Mishnah, the memory of a national way of life in an unforgotten land. However, especially in the Gemara (sometimes called simply “the Talmud”), it created an alternate mental location for an exiled and often abused people—rules for a way of life that became, in effect, a spiritual home away from home.

 

Third contextualizing review:

 

LN 4-2, the opening timeline to which we may now add:

 

600-700       Authority of Talmud approaches that of Tanakh

 

610-632       Qur’anic revelations; hijra 622; death of Muhammad 632

 

638              Caliph Umar conquers Jerusalem

 

644              Caliph Uthman establishes Damascus as capital, canonizes text of Qur’an

 

644-750       Ummayad caliphate at Damascus

 

750-950       Abbasid caliphate, capital Baghdad

 

700-800       Authority of Talmud equals that of Tanakh

 

800              Charlemagne crowned first Holy Roman Emperor;

                    classic birth date of medieval Europe, otherwise known as Christendom.