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.
38:
We now come to the second of the statements of the Members of the Great Assembly: "create many students". Whether or not this was their original intention it is quite obvious that this statement is a necessity in the development and propagation of the Oral Tradition, the
Unwritten Torah. If the Written Torah is to be understood at face value, as the Sadducees taught (and as was the original proposal of the Karaites), then no formal teaching is required and certainly no discussion: there are no new insights to be discovered, no new 'takes' would be allowed. So once a child had been taught to read he could teach himself God's Law by reading the text of the Torah: the only possible meaning that text could have he would learn from watching the behaviour of his elders and betters.
39:
However, the Oral Tradition cannot be passed on in that manner. First of all, at the very early stage of the Members of the Great Assembly the Oral Tradition was not written down. By deliberate choice it was left unwritten. There were two major reasons for this. The first reason was the overt reason: the oral tradition of the sages must not be written down in order to preserve the essential distinction between the Oral Torah and the Written Torah. The Written Torah must be studied from its text, just as the Sadducees did; but the commentary, expansion and elaboration of that text which was being passed down through the generations must be handed on from teacher to student by word of mouth only.
40:
It has been suggested that in these early stages of the development of the Oral Torah the teacher and student would read a verse from the Torah and then the teacher would add orally the amplifications of the oral tradition. The teaching of Leviticus 23:40, for example, may have worked something like this:
On the first day – of the festival, not of the week.
You shall take for yourselves – this excludes using something borrowed or stolen.
The product of hadar trees – this refers to the citron [etrog].
Branches of palm trees – this refers to the lulav.
Boughs of leafy trees – this refers to the myrtle.
And so on. The student would be required to learn these amplifications by heart and, in turn, teach them unadulterated to his own students when the time came, before adding the new insights which had been added since he had learned the tradition from his own teacher.
41:
But there must have also been a covert reason for this insistence on not committing the oral tradition to writing. Whether this covert reason was known to the early fathers or just came with unconscious intuition on their part will never be known, but it is a fact that as long as the tradition is unwritten it is capable of change and development. Change, updating, re-understanding – all these would ensure that the oral teaching would never become static, even stagnant. This in its turn would ensure that the Written Torah itself would always be relevant. When a composition in the oral tradition is sanctified to such an extent that no further will real development of the Torah be possible we approach the end of the oral tradition. To a great extent this is what has happened over the past four hundred years or so with the gradual sanctification of the Shulĥan Arukh by the orthodox to such an extent that future development of the oral tradition is stunted. If the Shulĥan Arukh is the last word in the oral Torah what further meaningful updating will be possible? If there is one definition that can distinguish between Orthodoxy and Conservatism it would be that the orthodox are expected to live their life according to the dictates of the Shulĥan Arukh; the observant Conservative Jew should live his life according to the dictates of the oral tradition – all of it: as it was yesterday, as it is today and as it will be tomorrow.
42:
The more students there are the more discussion there will be, and the more discussion there is will give the truth a greater chance of becoming apparent. When the teacher stands on a pedestal and lectures and the student is passive this is the opposite of traditional Jewish learning, which requires the student to be actively involved with the study process. The rabbi-teacher traditionally does not 'teach' his or her students but 'learns with' his or her students. There is here an enormous difference. There is a verse [Psalm 119:99] which reads:
A wise sage once elaborated: from my teachers I learned much, from my colleagues I learned more, but most of all do I learn from my students.
To be continued.
