Another introductory essay

Some of this may seem repetitive if you read the previous blog entry. Back last September, I started a thread called "Torah 101" on an online forum I'd been reading. You'll be able to see from the post itself why I started that thread, and if you like you can read through the thread itself and see where the discussion went. I've blocked out some of the names which appeared in the post, just as a courtesy.

So... over on the Theistic Cosmology thread, the subject of Judaism came up. It's come to my attention that a lot of people on these boards are Christians, and that some of them have opinions of Judaism that are based on sources other than Judaism itself.

I'd like to take this opportunity to give a brief (yeah, right ) overview of things.

Among the misconceptions I want to address are these:

quote:

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Originally posted by Occasional:
I think the question (or in her case pronouncement) starLisa brings up is if there is such a thing as the Jewish religion anymore, outside of historical relationships? I have heard it said, although where I am not sure, that modern Judaism is about questions and not answers. A not so nice way of putting that, and I have heard it in similar terms, is that Judaism is a spiritually dead religion as you can believe anything you want short of Allah and Jesus Christ.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Paul Goldner:
Judaism has always had a very rich tradition of questioning, and not settling on a specific answer to the question. The entirety of the Talmud is open ended debate, for example. There are no conclusions. No real, firm, established answers.

After Rambam's 13 principles, pretty much everything is up for debate.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Occasional:
I count "true Judaism" as Torah and Ritual. I am agreed that Talmud was a presidence for modern Jewish thought. But, for me the Talmud represents a loss of religious identity during the time of Roman conquest. Of course, I recognize that is partly my Christian beliefs showing. (edit: I'll go so far as to say that is partly my Mormon beliefs about Christian development during the Roman era showing.)

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These were the main quotes that made me think this was necessary.

Caveat: This is coming from the perspective of Orthodox Judaism. The various non-Orthodox ("heterodox") movements, such as Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Renewal and so on, are all variant groups that no longer accept Torah law as binding. These are the groups that Occasional probably was referring to when referring to "spiritually dead" religion.

So: Torah 101

Let's start with the word "Torah". When we use that word, it can mean different things, depending on the context. It can refer to the Five Books of Moses, or Pentateuch. It can also refer to the entire corpus of Law and Lore given to the Jews by God at Mount Sinai. Which was a lot more than just those five books.

I'm going to be using it in that second sense. When I want to refer to the Pentateuch, I'll refer to the Written Torah.

When God gave us the Torah, He gave it in two main parts. The Written Torah and the Oral Torah. Those of you who have heard the term "Oral Torah" may have heard it equated to the Talmud. This is not the case. The Talmud does contain discussions of Oral Torah, but it is not, itself, the Oral Torah.

The Oral Torah cannot, by its very definition, be committed to writing in its entirety. This is because it is not a book. In modern terms, it is most akin to an operating system. It is made up of information, and the system by which that information is to be used. The Written Torah can almost be seen as a reference guide, or a set of mnemonics that may be used to help recall information from the Oral Torah.

The Oral Torah is the primary corpus of law and lore in Judaism.

It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, "rabbinic commentaries" on the Written Torah. It is the source of all Torah law.

Let's take the most well known example of the lex talionis. "An eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth." I've seen written in any number of places that the rabbis modified this law to require only monetary damages. In fact, though, the law was always monetary damages. The various different terms in the verse "eye", "tooth", "burn", and so on, are used to help recall the various categories of monetary penalty that can come up in a case of damages. Time out of work, for example. Embarrassment. Pain. Loss of value as a worker. I don't recall them all, but I don't have to. It's not my job.

One of the reasons the Oral Torah cannot be written down is that it is a multiply redundant system that requires individuals to apply it according to principles, and according to current situations.

The fact that the Written Torah was written down allowed it to be co-opted by Christianity, for instance, and interpreted to mean something other than what Jews know to be the actual Authorial intent. I say this without intending to offend anyone. It should be fairly obvious that Judaism does not accept the various Christian and Christological interpretations of the Written Torah and the rest of the Tanakh (what is sometimes referred to as the Hebrew Bible).

The Oral Torah cannot be distorted in this way, because it is utterly dependent upon a continuous and multiply redundant chain of transmission, from teachers to students to their students, and so on.

During the course of our history, we've had some bad times. Times that interfered -- somewhat -- with the proper transmission of the Torah. Of course, God being omnicient and all, the Torah takes that possibility into account, and provides for what to do.

Among the things that were done were the compilation of the Mishnah, and later, the compilation of the Gemara. These two books together constitute the Talmud.

The Mishnah was compiled by Rabbi Judah the Prince around 230 CE (or thereabouts). It is an extremely terse composition, and is almost impossible to understand unless you learn it from someone who is part of the chain of Torah transmission.

Let me deal briefly with terseness in Torah literature. Consider a building. You're in this building, and you see a sign that says, "Exit building through rear door." What does it mean to you?

In the normal, very loose and easy way we talk nowadays, it seems simple. It means that when you're ready to leave, you should go out the back, rather than the front. At least, I think most people would read it that way.

Looking at that same sign through Torah methodology, here is a very limited list of questions that would immediately pop into mind:

• Does the sign mean you must exit the building through the rear door now, or can you stay a while before leaving?
• What if there are two doors on the rear side of the building? Is either one okay, or is there something that would indicate that only one of them is the "rear door" that was being referred to?
• Can you leave out a rear window? That is, does a window you use to exit a building have the same function as a door, and is it considered a door for that purpose?
• If windows never count as doors, what about a full size sliding glass door? Does it count as a door or a window?
• Suppose the entrance is on a side, and there are doors on the back (from the street perspective), and on the wall opposite the entrance? Which is considered the back door?
• Suppose the building you're in has a door in the back left corner, built diagonally? Is it considered a back door, a side door, both, or neither?
• Was there some reason you might have thought that exiting through the rear door wasn't allowed, and that the sign is not there to exclude the front door, but only to permit using the back door as well?

I could go on and on. And some people will find such questions to be incredibly annoying and picayune; I'm aware. But I point it out to demonstrate a key principle in the way Torah works.

If you use language loosely, you need a lot more verbiage to make yourself understood. You have to cover every situation explicitly, or just accept that there will be holes. But if you use language rigorously, you can convey a vastly greater amount of information much more tersely.

That's how the Mishnah and related works work. I remember the first time I was learning the Mishnah regarding the shofar (ram's horn) that we blow on Rosh Hashanah. One of the things it said was that there are straight ones and curved ones, and that the curved ones are not valid to be used for Rosh Hashanah. I was baffled. I mean, I know for a fact that every shofar I've ever seen used on Rosh Hashanah is curved.

After about an hour of banging my head against the wall, I went to one of the rabbis where I was learning, and asked him. He led me through the various possibilities, and as Sherlock Holmes says, once you eliminate all impossibilities, what's left has to be it. The resolution to my confusion was simply that the terms "straight" and "curved" as used in that Mishnah are not congruent to the mathematical terms I'm familiar with. And the curved ones that we use are "straight" in Mishnaic terms. Curved ones are... I don't even remember. Twisted even more, I think.

The Mishnah was compiled at a time when there was a bit of a let-up in Roman persecutions. Rabbi Judah the Prince was on extremely good terms with the Roman Emperor at the time, and this respite provided a moment in history when it was possible to collect all the various traditions that had diverged somewhat during the troubles, and compile them into the Mishnah. Some few that weren't included wound up in other contemporary compilations that are equally important.

The way the Talmud works is, we start with a line from the Mishnah, and start asking questions about it. Bear in mind that the discussions in question took part over about half a millenium or so. The ones that were compiled into the Talmud were those that would clarify things that were getting harder to clarify over the years. The respite during the life of Rabbi Judah the Prince was only temporary, and the level of redundancy we'd once had was dropping still some more.

The redaction of the Talmud took place, once more, in a time of respite, when some of the rabbis were on excellent terms with the Persian rulers. This was very shortly before the birth of Islam.

The Talmud is terse, like the Mishnah, but less so. At this point, it was necessary to include more detail. Furthermore, by showing the way in which the Mishnah was learned, it functions as a snapshot and a model for our own learning.

I think I'm going to stop for now. Later, I'll explain how Torah law was originally determined authoritatively, and why that system is currently in disrepair. But I imagine that what I've written here so far is very different from the image that most Christians have of it.

And to most Jews, I might add. Even to some Orthodox Jews.

What is the Torah?

This is reprinted from my website (http://www.starways.net/lisa/essays/torah.html) with some small modifications. It's extremely sketchy, and I hope to flesh it out a bit as we go on.

Torah is the term used for the body of knowledge revealed on Mount Sinai to the Israelites as they were on their way from Egypt to Canaan following the Exodus. It is made up of two parts: the Written Torah, which is more widely known as the Pentateuch, or Five Books of Moses, and the Oral Torah.

Contrary to various misunderstandings and mistranslations, the Oral Torah is not a commentary on the Written Torah. It would be more accurate (though still an approximation of the truth) to say that the Written Torah is a mnemonic device whose purpose is to make the vastly larger Oral Torah more manageable.

The Oral Torah has two parts. These are referred to today as Niglah ("Revealed") and Nistar ("Hidden"). The part known as Niglah is much more widely known and is divided into six subdivisions:

Zeraim ("Seeds")

Deals essentially with agricultural law. The first sub-subdivision is called Berakhot ("Benedictions") and is probably included in Zeraim because of the requirement to recite a benediction before eating.

Moed ("Festival")

Deals with the laws of the Sabbath and other holy days.

Nashim ("Women")

Deals with issues relating to marriage and divorce.

Nezikim ("Damages")

Deals with what has been termed "civil law." Business law, contract law, torts, etc.

Kodshim ("Sacrifices")

Deals with laws applicable to the Temple service.

Taharot ("Purifications")

Deals with laws of tumah and taharah, sometimes translated as "ritual purity" and "ritual impurity".

The part of Torah called Nistar is also known as Kabbalah. Contrary to wild fantasies on the parts of such academic "experts" as Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah is not "Rabbinic Mysticism." It is not mysticism of any sort whatsoever. It is a kind of advanced study that can be thought of as being analogous to the most arcane fields of physics being studied today. It is an area that is unnecessary for proper understanding of Niglah, and in fact, due to the various religions in the world that have incorporated bits and pieces of Nistar into them, it is extremely easy to be misled about the meaning of Nistar unless one has a thorough grounding in Niglah.

There are three subdivisions of Nistar/Kabbalah:

Theoretical

This is essentially cosmology. It provides a valuable picture of the way the world is put together. Again, it is thoroughly unnecessary, but in our day, when so many people are seeking deep and penetrating knowledge of the world around us, there may be some value to learning this.

The best (and only authorized) book on this topic for the layman is Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan's Inner Space, which can be purchased at most Jewish book stores.

Meditative

This deals with methods of attaining states of consciousness which permit a person to see past the filter of the world more deeply into the fullness of existence. Honestly, even though this sounds freaky, it's actually completely normal. Think of those Magic Eye pictures, where only by focussing in a particular way can you see past the stuff on the top to the underlying picture. Many people can stare and stare and never see the picture underneath. But with the correct instructions, most people can, eventually. Meditative Kabbalah is essentially the instructions necessary to see the "picture" of reality. The highest levels of this are what we call prophecy.

Practical

Kids, don't try this at home. Ready for more weirdness? This is basically magic. Don't laugh. Arthur C. Clarke wrote that, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." When we call this magic, it simply means that it is a method (methods, actually) of manipulating the reality one learns to perceive through the Meditative Kabbalah to achieve physical effects in the world. The Golem is probably the most famous example of Practical Kabbalah. But no joke: this is way too dangerous to even consider trying. As hokey as it sounds, people have spontaneously combusted trying it, and no reputable teacher will give you the time of day unless you are a serious master of all of Niglah and the beginning parts of Nistar.

This corpus of knowledge, not all of which is legal, but explanatory, was transmitted by word of mouth over the many centuries from the Revelation until the present day. There were phases of this transmission, which accounts for the difference between the way things are today and the way they were when the Torah was first given.

Up until the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians, Niglah was taught to everyone. The Sages teach us that at the time of King Hezekiah (a contemporary and son-in-law of the prophet Isaiah), even small children knew the most complex laws of ritual purity. It was just so much a part of the culture that everyone knew it. Nistar was taught in groups, or bands, of students. It was comparable to the difference today between simple arithmetic and quark physics.

The incredible and seemingly primitive and idiotic attraction of idolatry during the First Temple period was due to the fact that it actually worked. The "prophets" of crackpot religions such as Ba'al worship learned techniques that were part of Nistar and abused them in order to gain followers. Because of the role of idolatry in the destruction and Exile, the Sages of the time, known to us as the Men of the Great Assembly, decreed that Nistar could no longer be taught in public, and in fact, could not be taught to more than very select students, one at a time. This had the effect of damping out the plague of idolatry in Israel, but pretty much ended prophecy as well.

The Men of the Great Assembly also formulated the laws of Niglah into a set form, which were eventually collected into the Mishnah (and some other collections). The reason for this was that with the majority of the Jews living under foreign rulers, whose caprices could wipe out whole communities at any time, a slightly more rigid formulation could make the difference between the preservation or loss of the Torah. Even so, this Mishnah was only a further mnemonic device for the entirety of Niglah, and continued to be transmitted orally.

Following the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans, and the resultant chaos, the Sages of the time, known to us at the Tanaim, began to collect Mishnaic statements, with the intent of editing them into an authoritative corpus. The main force behind this effort was Rabbi Akiva, and the work was completed under the auspices of Rabbi Judah the Prince.

Once the Mishnah had reached all the various Jewish communities, it became a unifying force. But the situation continued to deteriorate. The Mishnah, and other collections of Mishnaic statements that had not made it into the final cut, continued to be discussed by the Sages of the time, who were now known as Amoraim. These discussion themselves did not add to the information contained in the Mishnah, but spelled it out more explicitly. The Amoraim knew that given current conditions, things would only get worse, and that each progressive generation would have a less certain understanding of the Mishnah. So they preserved their discussions, which were eventually edited into what we have today as the Gemara. The combination of the Mishnah and the Gemara is known as the Talmud.

All rabbinic literature subsequent to the Talmud (as regards Niglah) is commentary, explication, and the application of Talmudic principles to situations which arose from time to time. The Talmud itself is, with all its gaps, the essential corpus of Niglah. It must, perforce, be treated as if it is the living word of Hashem, as transmitted to Moses on Mount Sinai. And in fact, we have God's promise that the Torah will never be lost, and the chain of tradition never broken:

"And for My part, this is My covenant with them," said Hashem. "My spirit which is upon them, and the words I have set in their mouths, shall not be lost from their mouths, or from their children's mouths, or from their children's children's mouths," said Hashem, "from now until eternity."

The history of Nistar, due to its status as "hidden", was quite different. As with Niglah, Rabbi Akiva was one of the key players in its transmission. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, however, was responsible for compiling one of the most authoritative collections of Kabbalistic knowledge in his work, the Zohar. But the Zohar itself was transmitted orally until the 12th century, when the Kabbalist Moshe de Leon committed it to writing. It remains the least understood part of the Torah, except on the part of a handful of Sages alive today.

On the subject of Kabbalah, I want to note the comment of R' Adin Steinsaltz, who said that the connection between pop-culture Kabbalah and the real thing "is the relationship between pornography and love." So stay far away from cultie versions of Kabbalah.

Katonti, but when has that ever stopped me?

Let me start by saying that I have no authority other than that which comes from the accumulation of knowledge. The purpose of this blog is to explain, in terms that are likely to be easily understood, what the Torah is, and how Judaism works.

Why me? Why not? Hillel the Elder used to say: "Where there are no men, try to be a man" (Pirkei Avot 2:6). Leaving the issue of gender aside, what he meant was that if you see a need, don't sit around waiting for someone else to meet that need. Stand up and meet it yourself, to the best of your ability. Take responsibility.

Much of what has been written about Torah Judaism (what is commonly referred to as "Orthodox Judaism") is either phrased in such a way as to make it difficult to understand to the beginner, or just plain wrong. And it is not only the beginner who loses out. Modern-day Orthodox education is fundamentally flawed. Children are taught on a level which simply does not prepare them for a world in which they will be exposed to other systems of thought. Judaism is not inferior to those other systems of thought -- not by a longshot -- but what is often taught to Jewish children is.

I recall taking the bus home from Jerusalem back in the early '90s. I would ride home on Fridays with a neighbor of mine. She and I would talk about all sorts of issues, and once, the subject of the commandments came up. I was complaining that no one seemed to be interested in the basic question of why we should keep the commandments. In this day and age, where cultures and outlooks are constantly competing for our allegience, and at a time in history when Hashem doesn't make Himself obvious to all who look, it's a question that ought to be addressed.

My friend, who was raised in a Modern Orthodox home, and who is no intellectual lightweight, simply could not understand the question. And this meant as well that she simply could not understand anyone else asking it. Luckily, she lives in Israel, in a religious neighborhood. Because her children are growing up without the "educational antibodies" that they'd need in order to stay Jewish in a non-Jewish culture.

Ignorance abounds. And I don't spare myself, by any means. They say the more you know, the more you realize how little you know. I'm quite aware of how little I know relative to what there is to know, but I hope to share here some of what I do know, and in a way that is readily understandable.

Comments are open. I won't insist that you sign up for Blogger in order to post, at least not right now (though I've had to do that on another of my blogs), but I do ask that you use a name when posting comments. I may just delete comments that are from "Anonymous", unless they're really good comments. And I ask that you refrain from ad hominems, both against me and against others who are commenting. If you disagree with something that is said, make your case. If you correct me and show me that I'm wrong about something, it'll go into a blog entry. If you attack me personally (or anyone else) as a means of avoiding the actual subject of the entry you're commenting on, I'll just delete your comment.