MICHAEL WYSCHOGROD
MICHAEL WYSCHOGROD Was the oral law given at Sinai 1 Agudath Israel authority charges Rabbi Steinsaltz with soft-pedaling Sinai origins. The good news, of course, is that the Steinsaltz edition of...
...He writes on Jewish theology, history and philosophy...
...Steinsaltz is sensitive to that interaction...
...This is the point that Steinsaltz, according to Elias, soft-pedals...
...But can Elias reconstruct this code...
...The Talmud: The Steinsaltz Edition, Random House, 1989...
...He is the author of The Body of Faith: God in the People Israel (Harper, 1989...
...One is the written Torah which, for Elias, probably means the text of the Pentateuch as we have it today...
...The bad news is that recendy Rabbi Steinsaltz has been criticized for holding unorthodox religious views...
...If God had revealed the written without the oral Torah, much confusion would have been inevitable...
...In short, wherever there is a fixed text, a non-fixed oral interpretation must help the text remain alive and prevent the text from succumbing to rigor mortis...
...As Elias understands it, God revealed to Moses two Torahs (which are really one Torah) at Sinai...
...What it does not do is accept the oral Torah, a mistake also made by the Sadducees and later the Karaites...
...The only plausible answer that occurs to me is that it was forbidden to write it down because it was the kind of thing that would be changed unalterably by being written down...
...It might even be argued that the oral law is more central to Judaism than the written...
...It is probably a serious error to think of it as a text at all...
...Both Steinsaltz and Elias deserve respectful hearings...
...But the written Torah was not all that God revealed to Moses at Sinai...
...When it was finally written down in the Mishnah and the Gemara, which together constitute the Talmud, the living process of interpretation continued around the Talmud...
...These two together (they are really not two but one, since the Torah and its correct interpretation constitute a unity) are Judaism...
...What was given at Sinai," writes Elias, "was a complete, specific and binding oral law code, explaining, in full and beyond possibility of misunderstandings, the teachings of the Written Law...
...If not, then at some time human beings must have applied established cases and principles to novel situations...
...The oral Torah revealed at Sinai was precisely not a text (written or oral) but a process that could only be harmed by being written down...
...Why forbid the writing down of a text that exists as a formulated document that must be committed to memory and not written down...
...I have used the expression "oral law positivism" to refer to Elias' concept of the oral law because he seems to envisage the original oral law as an actual document, much like a written document, except that it was oral rather than written...
...On the one hand, he charges that Steinsaltz never clearly affirms the Sinaitic origin of the oral law...
...The most elaborate critique of Steinsaltz is by Rabbi Joseph Elias in the January and November 1990 issues of The Jewish Observer, a publication of the Agudath Israel of America...
...Elias is a member of the editorial board of the journal and director of the Yeshiva Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch Beth Jacob High School for girls and the Rika Breuer Teachers Seminary...
...In addition, he revealed the oral Torah, which explains and interprets the written Torah...
...In any case, the traditional attitude has been that the text of the Pentateuch as we have it today is the text that Moses received at Sinai...
...Take the biblical verse "You shall not boil a kid in its mother's milk" (Exodus 23:30...
...He reiterates that the Jews at Sinai were given "a complete and specific law code regulating all aspects of the life of the Jew...
...On the other hand are such Steinsaltz remarks as "We know very litde of the origins and early development of the oral law...
...Many if not all passages in the written Torah lend themselves to various interpretations...
...That is why we cannot avoid speaking of the development of the halachah...
...These are questions which the ancient rabbis discussed and answered in various ways...
...For Elias, the very term "development" is suspect...
...The "text" of the oral law as given at Sinai cannot be reconstructed...
...His piece attempts to express a "right-wing" viewpoint in a coherent way that makes dialogue possible...
...Steinsaltz does not reject the rabbinic teaching but he likes to date things, and if the earliest recorded instance of the teaching under discussion is the middle of the Second Temple period, then Steinsaltz records only that date and leaves the rest open...
...Christianity, after all, also reveres the Bible as the word of God...
...Was it composed as a verse by verse commentary on the written Torah or in the more systematic form of the Mishnah and the later codes...
...Moses thus descended Mount Sinai with a written text and an oral interpretation, known as the oral Torah...
...What is the relation of that document to the "law code" of Sinai to which Elias refers...
...We have a written Torah that is fixed and an oral Torah in which the divine and the human interact...
...His English Talmud will enable many Jews to enter into a dialogue with an ancient text that has played a central role in preserving the Jewish people, 'fi> Michael Wyschogrod is professor of philosophy at Baruch College of the City University of New York...
...The good news, of course, is that the Steinsaltz edition of the Talmud" will make the Talmud accessible to English readers to whom this central work has been all but sealed...
...Why was it forbidden to write it down...
...They could not be identical because the Mishnah contains many differences of opinion and presumably the original Sinaitic "law code" gave only the correct view, that of God...
...It is the oral Torah, it can be argued, that is most characteristic of Judaism...
...Steinsaltz, he charges, makes it seem that "the Oral Law was a...
...Was it a linguistic document that Moses was forced to memorize because he was not allowed to write it down...
...The problem is the development of halachah (Jewish religious law...
...I agree with Elias that Steinsaltz is not comfortable with oral law positivism, an expression I will soon explain...
...No matter how elaborate, a code cannot cover all possible cases...
...Only God knew the right interpretation, which he did not withhold...
...The earliest code we have is the Mishnah (completed about 200 C.E...
...Did the original code deal with electric lights on Shabbat...
...The rabbis interpret this to mean that boiling any meat in any milk is forbidden and they conceive this as part of the oral law revealed to Moses at Sinai...
...In this process, interpreters can and will disagree: The Mishnah and subsequent Jewish literature is full of disagreement...
...set of vague traditions from ancient times that slowly evolved into the law we know...
...This itself raises all kinds of difficulties such as the fact that the Pentateuch describes the death of Moses which had not yet occurred at the time of Sinai...
...Unlike Elias, Steinsaltz respects historical method...
...How "complete and specific" could the original oral law code have been...
...The historian, not comfortable with statements of faith, seeks historical evidence...
...For this reason, biblical criticism that speaks of the evolution of a text as the result of a process of editing and combining diverse sources is not acceptable to most Orthodox Jews, even those more "modern" or "centrist" than Elias...
...Elias' evidence is both negative and positive...
...Elias' main complaint is that Steinsaltz does not take seriously enough the rabbinic teaching of the Sinaitic origin of the oral law...
...For Elias, it is a matter of faith that if the rabbis say this was the interpretation of the verse at Sinai, then that is how it was...
...While taking cognizance of this rabbinic teaching, the modern historian inquires as to the date of the earliest recorded instance of this particular interpretation of the verse...
Vol. 16 • April 1991 • No. 2
