Category Archives: Talmud

The Misleadingness of Descriptors such as “Rabbinic Theology” and “Rabbinic Mind”

While generalizations about “rabbinic theology” and the “rabbinic mind” can be useful as gross characterizations and for heuristic purposes, they can also be misleading precisely because they are unrefined.  It is far too common to speak of the “sea of Talmud” (and, by extension, Midrash) and, since the same exegetical and aggadic traditions appear in many documents, to glean illustrations and prooftexts from a variety of documents across the board without regard to their chronology or peculiar literary characteristics and integrity.  The anthological character of this literature as a whole may easily cause us to overlook evidences of redactional-editorial activity in shaping, recasting, or restyling materials to fit their literary context in a particular document.  But once we recognize such activity and take into account the distinct literary characteristics of individual documents, we simply cannot treat this complex literature as a single fabric.

Richard S. Sarason, “Toward a New Agendum for the Study of Rabbinic Midrashic Literature” in Studies in Aggadah, Targum and Jewish Literature in Memory of Joseph Heinemann, eds. Jakob J. Petuchowski and Ezra Fleischer (Jerusalem & Cincinnati: The Magnes Press, The Hebrew University and Hebrew Union College Press, 1981), 58.

,

Sages had Different Views

We tend to talk in collectives: Hazal—hakhameinu zikhronam liverakhah, “our Sages, blessed be their memory,” “the Sages”—plural, the nevi’im, the Tannaim, the Amoraim, the Rishonim and Aharonim, but on another level we are—or should be—aware that each one of our Sages was himself a treasure-house of Torah, and had shittot and darkei limmud of his own, some of which he had in common with other members of his yeshiva or beit midrash. We are also aware of the fact that our Sages’ words were spoken with great precision and express concepts and principles that are internally consistent. We all know that the Ramban has certain shittot that differ from those of the Rambam, for example, and this is true in areas of Halakhah, Aggadah and hashqafah. The Gemara already notes that that is true of the Tannaim, and, to some extent, it does the same for the Amoraim. If we want to understand the Rambam ki-peshuto, we cannot mix the Ramban’s kabbalistic teachings with the Rambam’s Aristotelian ones….

Yaakov Elman, “Rava as Mara de-Atra in Mahoza,” Hakira 11 (Spring 2011), 59.

, , ,

There is no Talmudic evidence at all in regard to any importance attached to Isru Hag

…there is no Talmudic evidence at all in regard to any importance attached to Isru Hag. There is, in fact, evidence to the contrary. The Talmud states: “The days that are written in the Scroll of Fasts the days before and the days that follow them are (also) forbidden; but as for Sabbaths and festivals, on them (on the very day of the Sabbath and festival) it is forbidden but on the day before, and on the day following, it is permissible.” It is evident thus that during Talmudic times, at any rate, the Isru Hag was not an established custom and that there is no convincing halachic foundation for observing the day after a festival, including Pentecost, as bearing some special significance.
It is noteworthy that neither Alfasi nor Maimonides nor R. Asher make any reference to the Isru Hag. The first of the codifiers to refer to it is the Tur. His reference to Isru Hag is however restricted to the day that follows the festival of Passover and has obviously its source in the Roke’ah.

J. Newman, “Isru Hag” in Essays Presented to Chief Rabbi Israel Brodie on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, eds. H.J. Zimmels, J. Rabbinowitz, and I. Finestein (London: Jews’ College, 1967), 304-305.

, , ,

Paul’s activity was to bring to people the good tidings that through identification with Christ a man could escape the destruction to come

Paul’s activity, reduced to simplest terms, was to bring to people, Jew or Greek, the good tidings that through identification with Christ a man could escape the destruction to come. His message is based on views of man, of life, and of the shortness of time left to this world – views which are poles apart from the views of rabbinic Judaism. The rabbis conceived of man, essentially noble and free, serenely doing God’s will in a world destined permanently to endure. Paul, on the other hand, exhibits not serenity, but charged emotion; the world is about to be destroyed, and helpless, sinful man needs to escape the destruction. God has made eligible for that escape those who believe that the death and resurrection of Jesus, the Christ, transformed them from evil, bodily persons into good, spiritual beings.

Rabbi Samuel Sandmel, A Jewish Understanding of the New Testament, 3rd ed. (Woodstock, VT: SkyLight Paths Publishing, 2005), 75.

The study of different literary elements in rabbinic literature must be sensitive to the different philological strata of this great corpus

The study of different literary elements in rabbinic literature must be sensitive to the different philological strata of this great corpus. It is not that the rhetorical excludes the historical, or vice versa, but rather that rhetoric, including rabbinic rhetoric, always has its own history.

Azzan Yadin, “The Hammer on the Rock: Polysemy and the School of Rabbi Ishmael,” Jewish Quarterly Review 10:1 (2003), 17.

, ,

Rabbis thinking of the Gendering of the Body

Rabbinic legal thinking, which provides much of the structural framework of subsequent Jewish cultures, aims first and foremost at instituting a rather pronounced dual gender grid, imposed on the social organization of Jewish society as the rabbis envisioned it. Most of the individual laws of rabbinic halakhah apply to either men or women. Differently put, in rabbinic legal thinking it is almost always important whether the halakhic agent is a man or a woman.
…
Representations of the body are an important means for grounding gender, and for justifying the distribution of legal privileges and disadvantages. As theorists of gender have come to recognize, representations of the body often serve the aim of naturalizing and therefore legitimizing legal privilege. Hence, so the theory goes, almost everyone may agree now that gender differences are cultural constructs. Gender is variable, and gender differences are scripted differently in different social and cultural contexts. But the fact that gender differences exist to begin with is traditionally considered to be based in biological fact. Nature – or biology – has made bodies different, male and female, and different cultures only inscribe this reality with their specific ways of differentiating between genders. In the rabbinic case, this translates, for instance, into the prohibition of cross-dressing, inherited from biblical law (Deuteronomy 22:5), in order to uphold the clear distinction between the sexes. Or it famously translates into the general positioning of men as always “obligated” by Jewish law, while women are only sometimes obligated and mostly “exempt” (M. Kiddushin 1:7), a legal rhetoric that already early feminists have recognized as a way of privileging the male position in Jewish law.

Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, “Regulating the Human Body: Rabbinic Legal Discourse and the Making of Jewish Gender,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, eds. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Martin S. Jaffee (Cambridge & New York City: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 271.

Differing Roles of the Stam in the Sugya versus the Amoraim

…an appreciation of the role played by the stam in the sugya, which is distinguishable from that typically played by amoraim. The stam often takes upon itself tasks that affect the sugya or sugyot as a whole…. The tasks of the amoraim, in contrast, are localized, consisting of the interpretation of a particular tradition, stating the law, resolving or posing an objection, or answering or raising a question. … It is the way of the stam to offer artificial responses, sometimes to teach us why a particular argument was chosen over another, sometimes to increase the complexity of the argument, and sometimes to weave together independent traditions or discussions.

Richard Kalmin, “The Function and Dating of the Stam and the Writing of History”, in Melekhet Mahshevet: Studies in the Redaction and Development of Talmudic Literature, ed. Aaron Amit and Aharon Shemesh (Ramat-Gan, Israel: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2011), 40-41 (English section).

,

The Mishnah shapes a complex attitude towards evil

…the Mishnah shapes a complex attitude towards evil. When bad things are still avoidable, a person ought to fight them with all his strength. He should act on his own and petition God up to the last moment. But once the events have actually occurred, he has to shift from demand to acceptance.
…
If we understand the concept of vain prayer within the larger context of the obligation to thank God for the bad, it follows that the vainness of prayer for past events is not dependent on the argument that backward causality is impossible, logically or otherwise. The point of the Mishnah is not that by asking God to undo the past we request what is impossible or absurd. The crucial third mishnah that limits prayer deals with a different problem altogether. The basis for such a limitation on prayer is not the limits of logic but the limits of complaint. There is no need to take a stance on the deep metaphysical problem concerning the logical possibility of backward causality, since the point of the Mishnah concerns not metaphysics but the nature of the religious and human stance towards the world.

Mosha Halbertal, “The Limits of Prayer”, Jewish Review of Books (Summer 2010), 43, 44.

The medical interests of the Talmudic rabbis are complex and far-reaching

The medical interests of the Talmudic rabbis are infinitely more complex and far-reaching than those of the Jews in Biblical times, and only with the formulation of the Talmud can one speak of a Jewish medical science. Perhaps the most impressive achievement of Talmudic medicine for the student of Hippocratic and Galenic science is rabbinic pathology. It is no exaggeration to state that the Talmudists invented the science of pathology, a direct consequence of the need to examine slaughtered animals that were to be used for food…. In the course of such investigations, the Talmudists made the remarkable discovery that disease may be associated not only with morphological changes in tissues, but may manifest itself in functional abnormalities and external symptoms and morbid alteration of tissue appearance. For the Greek doctor, disease was simply the result of a condition termed plethora by the Hippocratic school, that is, an excess of one or more of the four bodily humors isolated by the Hippocratics, namely black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm. Health is defined by the Hippocratic physician as a proper balance of these humors. An external circumstance, like a fall or even a sudden change in the weather, can cause a humor to rarefy or condense, rushing to a particular part of the body and rendering it diseased. Ironically, the Hippocratic theory of humoral imbalance became the accepted explanation for the origin of disease in the Middle Ages, while the sound Talmudic pathological anatomy had no influence on medieval medicine.

Stephen Newmyer, “Talmudic Medicine: A Classicist’s Perspective,” Judaism 29, Issue 3 (Summer 1980), 362.

,

The priesthood does not play a part in Avot’s succession list

Unlike the role of the priesthood in I Clement, the priesthood does not play a part in Avot’s succession list. The elders, the prophets, and the men of the Great Assembly are all explicitly denoted in Avot and thereby assume a role in Avot’s list. The Second Temple Leaders, the House of Gamaliel, and the tannaim also feature in Avot’s list since the members of these groups are listed together and in succession. In contrast, priests (like shoemakers (4:11)) only appear as individuals, and the priesthood as a result is omitted from Avot’s chain of transmission. As M.D. Herr has shown, however, priests were important teachers and officials during Temple times and therefore their omission from Avot requires an explanation. Consequently, scholars like Herr, who attribute the early portion of Avot to the Pharisees, hypothesize that the Pharisees omitted the priests from their chain of transmission sometime during the late Second Temple period in order to undermine other sects, such as the Sadducees, for whom the priesthood (so it is alleged) was a central element (see Finkelstein, Introduction, 9-11; M.D. Herr, ‘Continuum in the Chain of Torah Transmission’, Zion 44 (1979) [Hebrew], 44-56). It is questionable, however, whether the Pharisees actually viewed the priesthood as a vehicle for the Sadducees (see also above, Ch. 6 n. 36)). According to this hypothesis, one might suggest that Clement, unlike the Pharisees, was free to envision the Christian leadership as the heirs of the priests because he was not threatened by priesthood-oriented Jewish sects. It is questionable, however, whether this hypothesis (even if correct) can explain how the omission of the priests in the final edition of Avot was understood in the third century. Perhaps this omission was not understood polemically but as a natural derivative of rabbinic legal theory. As expressed in Avot 4:13, certain tannaim assumed that the Jewish polity was ruled by the crowns of Torah, of priesthood, and of kingship. These three crowns, moreover, were ‘the governmental extensions’ of the pillars of Avot 1:1: Torah, temple service, and correct civil behaviour (see Cohen, The Three Crowns, 19). Thus, according to this theory of the division of powers found in Avot, the priests did not belong in the chain of Torah transmission because their responsibilities were limited to officiating in the temple. Perhaps both priests and kings were omitted from Avot because the editor wanted to stress that only the rabbis were the true Torah authorities. In contrast, the Christian penchant for allegorizing and spiritualizing possibly led Christian authors such as Clement of Rome and Cyprian to view the Christian leadership as the spiritual counterpart to the Jewish priesthood of old (see E.W. Benson, Cyprian: His Life, His Times, His Work (London and New York, 1897), 31-34).

Amram Tropper, Wisdom, Politics, and Historiography: Tractate Avot in the Context of the Graeco-Roman Near East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 213-214, n. 11.