Avot171

נושא: Avot

BET MIDRASH VIRTUALI

Rabbi Shim'on says: anyone who is walking down a road repeating [his learning in his head] and says, "What a beautiful tree!" [or] "What a beautiful furrow!" is considered by scripture as having put his life in jeopardy. Rabbi Dostai, the son of Rabbi Yannai, quotes Rabbi Me'ir as saying: Anyone who forgets [even just] one part of his learning is considered by scripture as having put his life in jeopardy; for it says, "But take utmost care and watch yourselves scrupulously, so that you do not forget the things that you saw with your own eyes…" [Since] this could be [interpreted as referring to someone] who had a momentary blackout, the Torah adds "so that they do not fade from your mind as long as you live" – thus a person has not put his life in jeopardy until he sits down and [deliberately] removes them from his mind.

10:
This same inability to compromise concerning Torah study lies also at the heart of the teaching of Rabbi Shim'on in our present mishnah. In order to understand why Rabbi Shim'on excoriates those who interrupt their revision of their Torah learning with comments about what they see around them we must remind ourselves of the manner in which that learning was attained and preserved in his day.

11:
On many occasions, both when studying this present tractate and also during our study of previous tractates, we have noted the very nature of the intellectual milieu of the sages. At the very beginning of our study of this present tractate we explained the concept of two Torahs: the Written Torah and the Unwritten Torah [Torah she-b'al-peh]. The sages were absolutely certain that both the written and the unwritten Torah were coeval. However, they also knew that the method of transmission of these teachings was different in each case.

12:
They taught that the Written Torah was a document whose text had been delivered to Israel from God through the agency of Moses and that text was unchanging and unchangeable. (There is no need for us to digress here concerning modern conceptualizations of the origins of Torah: we have discussed this matter often. Those interested can review the topic in Sanhedrin 042 in our web archives, for example.) But the Unwritten Torah was just that: unwritten. It consisted of explanations of mitzvot, elaborations, and so forth. Truth to tell it is quite impossible to put the Written Torah into effect just as it is, 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: it cannot be done!

13:
From time out of memory and from generation to generation these amplifications of the laws of the Written Torah were passed on from sage to student orally. By deliberate choice it was left unwritten: the oral tradition of the sages must not be written down so that thus will be preserved the essential distinction between the Oral Torah and the Written Torah. The Written Torah must be studied from its text; 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.

14:
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, as we have said, 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. However, by the time of Rabbi Yehudah, the President of the Sanhedrin, 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.

To be continued.

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