You can't do it alone

In a comment to a previous entry, David wrote:

So, if I understand you correctly, the "hints" in the torah are meant for an elite group of scholars who, alhough able to forget some halachas once in awhile, have enough knowledge to understand exactly what the "hints" are referencing to in case they forget.

I thought it would be worth addressing this generally. Even though David seems to be putting an extremely negative spin on what I was saying previously, it's a valid question, and deserves an answer.

If you want to learn physics, you can do so without taking classes. Granted, you'd need to be pretty bright to manage it that way, but there are books, and you can use them to educate yourself to the point where you have absorbed the information.

Torah doesn't work that way. Oh, you can do the same sort of thing, but what you wind up with won't be Judaism. Hashem gave us the Torah in written and oral parts for a very good reason. Numerous reasons, presumably, but one that I'm thinking of right now is that it requires us to learn communally. To learn within a living context, rather than simply words on a piece of paper (or electrons rearranging themselves on a monitor).

On Gittin 60b, it says:

Rabbi Yehudah bar Nachmani, translator of Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish, explained: It is written "Write these words for yourself" (Exodus 34), and it is written "According (by the mouth of) these words" (Exodus 34). How does this work? Words that are written, you are not permitted to communicate them orally, and words that are oral, you are not permitted to communicate them in writing.

It may seem, on the face of it, that this is no longer the case. After all, the Mishnah is written. The Gemara is written. And the Sages do discuss the matter, and explain why it was necessary to write these things down. Nevertheless, even with all that has been written down, the Oral Torah remains essentially an oral tradition, and requires immersion in its context in order to gain a proper understanding of what it says.

Some people complain that it is obscure. That there are things that are difficult to understand, or, as David put it, that there seems to be a kind of elitist attitude involved, where the average guy on the street isn't privy to all of the information.

That's true.

What's more, I think it's good. It's contrary to modern attitudes that demand full access and full equality for anyone who has the merest whim, but those attitudes have never been a part of the Torah. We have a tiered system of knowledge. You learn one level before you go on to the next. Oh, sure, these days, with all the books around, you can get sneak peaks of material that's more advanced than you're prepared for. I've read R' Aryeh Kaplan's Inner Space, along with some other books he wrote, which gave me a brief overview of certain Kabbalistic concepts. I'd be an utter dolt, though, to assume that reading those books made me a "Kabbalist". Or that I had a solid grasp of the concepts involved.

But why is it so important to maintain such a proprietary attitude towards the Torah?

The Sages declared a fast at one time because of the translation of the Torah into Greek. Go figure. Why would that be grounds for a fast? The Temples being destroyed and our people sent into exile and slavery. That's something to fast about. But a book being translated?

But here's the thing. Look at what's been done with the Torah outside of the halakhic system. Christianity. Some of the garbled passages in the Qur'an. Mistranslations like "Love thy neighbor" and "love the stranger" and "abomination" being used to misrepresent Torah ideas. The written Torah, divorced from its context, is a disaster. A disaster that we used to mourn by fasting.

When we treat texts of the Oral Torah as though they are Written Torah, when we learn rabbinic texts divorced from their context, we wind up with the same kind of disaster. The Conservative Movement is a classic example of this. Back before they decided to uproot actual d'Orayta commandments altogether, like the prohibition of a Kohen marrying a divorcee, or lighting fire on Shabbat (internal combustion engines), they were actually fairly zealous about sticking with the texts. But the context was out the window. They'd pore through old manuscripts, and if they could find a single rabbinic opinion that permitted something, however minority and overruled that opinion was, they used it to permit that thing. If anything was permissible b'dieved (after the fact), they permitted it l'chat'chila (before the fact). They would defend their decisions by pointing to the texts, but that's the whole issue, isn't it? They ripped those texts out of the context of the Living Torah, treating oral Torah as though it was written Torah, and created a disaster, where their own adherents have an enormous rate of intermarriage, and the average Conservative Jew has never even heard of concepts such as taharat hamishpacha.

So getting back to David, yes, David, if you want Torah, you have to go to the rabbis. You can't just get books from a library or Jewish bookstore and have that be the end of it. I hope you can understand now why that's not a bad thing.