|
Moses received Torah from Sinai and passed it on to Joshua; Joshua to the elders, the elders to the prophets and the prophets passed it on to the Members of the Great Assembly. They said three things: Be moderate in judgement, Create many students, and Make a fence around the Torah.
9:
We can now turn our attention to the content of the first mishnah of chapter 1. It clearly tries to establish an unbroken chain of tradition, starting with Moses at Sinai. The Torah referred to in our mishnah is not the Torah which we read in our synagogues every Shabbat. Rather, it refers to the 'other' Torah.
10:
It was axiomatic in the Pharisaic movement that concomitant with the written Torah Moses was given the Oral Torah as well. This was perhaps the most important element in the ideology of the Pharisees and it was bitterly contested by their major opponents, the Sadducees. Since the Sadducean movement more or less died out with the destruction of the Bet Mikdash in the year 70 CE, it was the Pharisaic ideology which became the uncontested ideology of rabbinic Judaism. (It is by no means clear whether there is any connection between the last Sadducees of the first and second centuries CE and the first of the Karaites in the eighth century CE. A direct ideological heritage seems most unlikely, though obviously there must have been some kind of indirect transmission of ideas and concepts.) All modern forms of Judaism (with the exception of the few remaining Karaites) are the heirs of the Pharisaic ideology and therefore all modern forms of Judaism accept the basic premise of the Oral tradition – be they Ultra-orthodox, orthodox, Conservative, Reform or Reconstructionist.
11:
Our mishnah cannot be referring to the Written Torah because there was no need to ensure a chain of tradition with regard to the Written Torah. According to the Torah [Deuteronomy 31:24-26], as his life approached its end Moses took steps to ensure that a fair copy of the Written Torah would be available so that later copies could be compared with it:
When Moses finished writing the words of this Torah in a scroll, Moses ordered the Levites who carried the ark of God's covenant: "Take this scroll of the Torah and put it next to the ark of God's covenant, where it shall be a witness."
The midrash [Deuteronomy Rabbah 9:9] expands on this text:
Once Moses realized that he was to die on that day what did he do? Rabbi Yannai says that he wrote thirteen Torahs. Twelve he gave to each of the twelve tribes and one he placed in the ark so that if anyone should try to falsify something they would find the one in the ark…
Be all this as it may, it is quite clear that the sages did not believe that the Written Torah required any chain of transmission: it was written down for all to see, write and read.
12:
As I have already written, the sages believed that concomitant with the written Torah Moses was given the Oral Torah as well. In his introduction to his commentary on the Mishnah, Rambam writes:
You must understand that every commandment that God gave to Moses was given him together with an explanation. God would dictate to him the written text and then tell him what it meant and all that was implied in that carefully worded text.
He then goes on to quote almost verbatim from the Gemara [Eruvin 54b] the account of how Moses taught the Torah to Israel. His account ends as follows:
Thus all the people heard that text four times: once from Moses, then from Aaron, a third time from Aaron's sons and a fourth time from the seventy elders.
However fanciful (and impractical) this midrash may seem to us it does convey the conviction of the sages that the Written Torah is accompanied by an Oral Torah – a traditional interpretation of the written text. And, indeed, it is almost impossible to put the Written Torah into any kind of meaningful effect without some guidance from amplification. In his book "The King of the Khazars" Rabbi Yehudah ha-Levi [1075-1141] says that he defies anyone to mete out justice based on a literal understanding of the laws in the Torah section Mishpatim that we read last Shabbat: it cannot be done!
13:
Indeed, there must have been some kind of tradition that explained some of these laws. The Sadducees, as I have written, were bitter opponents of the very idea that there was an "unwritten Torah" as well as a Written Torah.
When we were studying Tractate Berakhot I wrote:
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 [the Oral Torah] 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… 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: "These words you must learn by heart, this charge of mine; you must impress them on your children, you must talk about them when you are sitting at home and when you are on the road, when you lie down and when you rise up. You must tie them on your hands as a memento, and wear them on your forehead as a badge…" 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'.
To be continued.
|
