Rabbi says: which is an upright path for which a person should opt? – One which is honourable for those who do it and which [also] brings honour from mankind. Be as careful with a simple mitzvah as with a serious one, since you do not know the reward for each mitzvah. Calculate the loss of a mitzvah against its reward, and the reward of a sin against its loss. Watch for three things and you will not come to sin: know what is above you – a seeing eye, a listening ear and all your deeds written in the book.
11:
It is so long since the previous shiur that it may be useful to give a short resumé of relevant information that has been raised so far:
Rabbi Yehudah, the President of the Sanhedrin, is better and affectionately known simply as "Rabbi". He succeeded his father, Rabban Shim'on ben-Gamli'el, to the presidency some time during the last two decades of the 2nd century CE. His dominating personality – and there is a difference between 'dominating' and 'domineering' – gave him a position of authority within the Sanhedrin that was unique until his time. He was very rich, which also added prestige to his position. He was extremely cultured and was acquainted with secular knowledge no less than he was expert in Torah learning in general. (In his mansion he would permit even the servants to speak only the two 'civilized' languages: Hebrew and Greek. How far we have come since the desperate fight against Hellenism waged by his ancestors three and a half centuries previously.) But, perhaps, his characteristic which is most pertinent to the development of rabbinic Judaism is the fact that he was extremely pragmatic as regards Halakhah: he would assiduously maintain all the rules and regulations that had accumulated "ever since Sinai", but when a halakhah or custom was, to his mind, patently in need of revision he had no qualms about using his position of authority and social ascendency to make changes – by ingenious logical reasoning where that would work and by outright abolition or innovation when it would not.
12:
But his greatest innovation was not as regards this or that halakhah in particular, but as regards the whole corpus of accumulated halakhah as an organic body. For centuries the material of the "Unwritten Torah" was passed from generation to generation verbally. It was permitted for individual sages to maintain a written version of new material that had come their way, but this Megillat Setarim ('secret document') [Bava Metzi'a 92a] was for private use only and could never be used for teaching purposes or for any other public purpose. This was because at the very outset it had been decided to maintain the essential difference between the Written and the Oral Torah by insisting that the Oral tradition should never be committed to writing:
That which is written you may not say orally; that which is not written you may not be put into writing [Gittin 60b].
Clearly the meaning is that the Written Torah must be taught from a written text and the Oral Tradition may never be committed to writing for posterity.
13:
However, by the time of Rabbi the corpus of 'oral Torah' was so great that there was a grave danger than some of it (much of it?) might be lost. So he decided to ignore the ban on writing which had been in force for centuries. In his classic introduction to Mishneh Torah Rambam writes:
Why did our saintly rabbi do this? Why did he not leave matters as they had always been? It was because he saw that scholars were depreciating, troubles increasing, the Roman Empire was gaining ascendency throughout the world, and Jews were dispersing to the ends of the world.
I am by no means certain that these were the reasons that persuaded Rabbi to undertake his monumental task. After all, Jewish scholarship was about to embark upon a new flowering – and he knew it because he had planted the seed and nurtured it. And the great man who hobnobbed with emperors would hardly have thought that Roman ascendency was a bad thing for the world. But even if these reasons might have been in his mind they were certainly not have been the only ones!
To be continued.
The hiatus between shiurim has been so great that some of the comments and questions that I have received will seem divorced from the original topic. However, I feel that if someone has taken the trouble to send me a comment or a question it would be churlish of me not to present it to you.
In Avot 077 we discussed the revolt of the Jews in the lands of the diaspora against the Romans [115-117 CE]. In Avot 082 Barak Rosenshine asked why these revolts came about and I gave an answer. Now Joshua Peri offers additional information:
The diaspora revolt started in the recently conquered Roman province of Babylon. The other revolts (Egypt, Cyprus, Cyrenia, Yavne) were apparently in response to, and support of, Babylon. As a result of the revolt (not only the Jews in Babylon revolted), the Romans were forced to abandon Babylon.
I would like to thank the hundreds of participants who recently have sent me emails wishing me well. Thank you for your support from the bottom of my heart. While I am still recovering my strength I hope to send out shiurim sporadically: your good wishes give me the will to do so.
