Berakhot 015

Reuven Boxman (echoed by Jim Feldman) writes:

Reading from the beginning of these last two mishnayot, has raised in my mind a basic question of common sense. It seems that all agree that the law for saying Shema in the morning and evening is derived from Deuteronomy 6:7, where neither morning nor evening is mentioned, but rather lying down and rising up. It would seem that the biblical text is quite clear, and explicit, and gives an exact and simple recipe: say Shema when you lie down, and when you rise up. It seems to me utterly clear and unambiguous: "whenever you lie down or rise up, say Shema", be the activity in the morning, afternoon, or night. On what basis, then, did this simple and clear recipe become transformed into "say Shema in the morning and the evening"? The transformation is what has engendered the discussion in the mishnah, requiring definitions on the basis the optical measurement sensitivity and signal to noise ratio (distinguish blue from white, or perhaps blue from green), or astrophysical calculations (sunrise – 72 rabbinical minutes, etc.)

I respond:

I think that this question is one of the most perceptive and basic that one can ask concerning the whole system of Torah she-b'al-peh, the Oral Torah. I do not want, at this juncture, to open up the question of the origins of the Written Torah – not because of the question itself, but because such a discussion would take us far from our topic. Let us try to phrase as innocuous and inclusive a predicate as possible (however unacceptable it might be to purists of all schools of thought): "The remotest origins of the Written Torah are lost in the mists of Israel's ancient history and probably go back to Sinai". Rabbinic tradition always insisted that the Oral Torah is co-eval with the Written Torah, so I think that we can happily predicate the same about the remotest origins of the Oral Torah as we have about the Written Torah: they are lost in the mists of Israel's ancient history and probably go back to Sinai – if not beyond!

At any rate, when Torah she-b'al-peh gradually emerges out of the mists of time, certain basic presumptions have already taken root. The most interesting thing about these presumptions is that they are so ancient that they are never challenged, even by those who would most vehemently and most vociferously deny the legitimacy of the Oral Tradition itself! Let us take an example parallel to the one Reuven has raised. I bring here a translation into modern English of a couple of verses of the Shema made about 70 years ago by a non-Jew who was completely ignorant of the Oral Torah:

An educated Chinaman would probably see this last sentence as nothing but a hyperbolic metaphor. And yet from the very earliest times it was understood as requiring certain passages to be inscribed on little pieces of parchment and placed in leather boxes and bound with black leather thongs to the hand and head: tefillin. During the third century BCE there was a complete rift between the Pharisees (who were the ideological ancestors of rabbinic Judaism) and the Sadducees who denied absolutely the validity of the Oral tradition and insisted on a literal understanding of the Written Torah. And yet the Sadducees never doubted that those words in the Shema were talking about tefillin The arguments between the two camps were whether the boxes could be round or only cubic, whether the 'sign on the hand' was to be attached to the biceps or to the wrist, whether 'between the eyes' meant on the forehead or on the bridge of the nose. But that tefillin was the issue was never in the slightest doubt: that had been inherited from the 'remotest origins of the oral Torah that are lost in the mists of time'.

The same can be said for the interpretation of 'b^eshokhb^ekha uv^ekumekha: it was 'known' that these words referred to 'bedtime' and 'getting-up-time': the only question was how to define those terms. Thus the first parashah of the Shema affords proof substantial of the hoary antiquity of the Oral Torah itself.

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