The Talmud (2 page)

PART I

The Talmud in its World

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In the beginning

Why does every volume of the Talmud begin with page 2 and not page 1? To teach us that no matter how much we learn, we have not yet reached the first page!

R. Levi Yitzhok of Berditchev

White fire upon black fire

Round about three and a half thousand years ago, according to the book of Exodus, Moses descended from Mount Sinai carrying two tablets of stone. On it were engraved ten commandments. According to one legend the commandments were written in white fire, against a background of black fire. Another legend has it that the words were engraved right through the rock, yet the centres of the round letters, which by rights should have fallen out, remained miraculously in place and the writing was legible from each side.

These Ten Commandments were to become the centrepiece of the five books which Moses wrote during the forty years that the Israelites wandered through the wilderness. The books became known as the Torah, or Teaching.

The Five Books of Moses are amongst the most exalted works of world literature. They contain stories that have inspired generations, proclaim religious and ethical teachings which spawned three great faiths and lay out a complex system of legislation which was designed to animate the lives of the Israelite tribes for all eternity.

But for all their grandeur they are not easy books. The chronology can be confused, sometimes it is hard to fathom out the sequence in which events occurred. Most of the laws and regulations seem to be hazy, invariably they are not spelled out in enough detail. Several teachings appear distinctly cruel, even unethical to modern minds. Inspirational it may be. But the Torah often leaves its readers with more questions than answers.

For example, the Torah instructs the Israelites to keep the Sabbath. But nowhere does it explicitly say how this is to be done. It speaks of husbands and wives, but it does not detail how a marriage ceremony is to be conducted; or indeed, if one is needed at all. It explains that the Israelites are merely leaseholders in the Promised Land; that the earth is God’s and every fifty years all property is to be returned to the families to whom it was originally given. But it offers no guidance on how the inevitable property disputes are to be resolved.

Many modern scholars do not believe the Mount Sinai story. Nor do they believe that Moses was the author of the Torah. Literary analysis of the text of Torah suggests it was composed about two and a half to three thousand years ago, with material from several different sources woven into a more or less coherent whole. If that’s so, it’s not surprising that the book contains contradictions and repetitions. It’s what one would expect from documents stitched together by ancient editors.

But the origins of the Torah needn’t concern us right now. For most of its history, until the nineteenth century in fact, nobody doubted that the Torah was written by Moses in the wilderness (apart perhaps from the last few verses relating his death). If there were any suspicions at all about its composition, it was whether God had dictated the Torah for Moses to write down, or whether the Israelite leader had made it up.
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The Jews, without exception, held the first view. The Torah was the word of God, prescribing the way they were to live their lives. Every single letter was significant; the Torah contained all the secrets of the universe. More than that even, according to some it was the blueprint for the creation of the world. The mystics went as far as to claim that the Torah existed before the Creation, that God consulted it when he formed the heavens and the earth.

People likened the Torah to water. It was the source of life, it flowed everywhere, no earthly force could hold it back. And just as the flood covers the dry land beneath, so too the Torah conceals hidden depths, of knowledge, wisdom and understanding.

This meant that its inconsistencies and confusing passages would need to be resolved. People could only obey the frequent exhortations in the Torah that they live by its commandments, if they knew what this entailed. It stood
to reason that there had to be a system that would enable them to plumb the depths of the text, harmonize its wisdom and fathom its contradictions.

The interpretative tradition

To the believer, Moses’ lack of detail is deliberate. The Torah is perfect by definition, it’s inconceivable that it could be incomplete, or lack key information. The reason why parts of it are hard to understand must be that the Torah deliberately challenges its readers to enquire more deeply, to reveal its concealed meaning, to use their God-given power of human knowledge and learning to decode the God-given text.

So people began to study the Torah, seeking to uncover its hidden layers trying to understand what God really wanted from them. It wasn’t just a question of understanding the laws, they hoped to become wiser and elevate themselves spiritually, to become closer to their Creator and discover eternal Truth.
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The process of interpreting the Torah is one of the longest continuous fields of human scholarly activity. It has been going on for thousands of years. It has spawned a vast literary corpus and a curriculum of study that is virtually unbounded.

At the heart of this curriculum lies the Babylonian Talmud, a multi-volume compendium as big as an encyclopedia, covering topics as diverse as law, faith, spirituality, folklore, medicine, magic, ethics, sex, relationships, humour and prayer. It’s called Babylonian because it was composed in Babylon, part of modern-day Iraq, between the third and sixth centuries.

The Babylonian Talmud has a lesser-known, slightly older cousin, the Jerusalem Talmud, which hailed from Roman-occupied Israel. Generally when we talk about the Talmud, we mean the Babylonian version.

The Talmud might look like a book. But it is far more than that. It’s an institution. People devote their lives to studying it. No other book in history has made such demands of its readers. Its raison d’être is to explain the Torah.
But its explanations only raise more questions. It is not a linear work; it doesn’t start with an introduction and build to a conclusion. You can open it anywhere and you rarely have to turn back to find out what’s been going on. It’s often referred to as the Sea of Talmud, possibly because wherever you dive in, you’re swimming.

The Talmud is arcane and obscure. The Babylonian version is written in two languages, which it mixes together and moves between, seamlessly. Its logic is dense, the arguments it puts forward are often perplexing. It presents arguments but it is not preoccupied with finding solutions. Equally, it’s quite happy for a problem to have multiple solutions, ‘these and these are the words of the living God’
.
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If the Torah raised questions, the Talmud raises questions about questions.

And yet for all that, or perhaps because of it, no other book in the world has had a comparable history. A history that’s not always been happy. But a history which leaves us wondering almost as much about the book itself as the material it contains. It’s more of a biography than a history, really. Not so much the story of a book as the story of a life.

The Oral Law

Most of the Talmud is based on a record of discussions held in the rabbinic academies in Babylon between the years 230 and 500
ce
. Perhaps calling it a record is a bit misleading because the discussions are not set out formally, subject by subject, speaker by speaker. It’s nothing like Hansard or the Congressional Record, which give precise accounts of who said what, and when, in a debate.

Instead, the Talmud tends to weave several topics together, skipping seamlessly from one to the other, creating conversations between people who lived generations apart, switching languages as it goes; from Hebrew to Aramaic and back again with a few Greek words thrown in, fabricating a complex web of hypothesis, rejection, argument and counter-argument. It is a perplexing, confusing, and rigorously logical work. It takes nothing for granted and is not satisfied with anything less than absolute certainty.
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At the heart of the Talmud is an earlier work known as the
Mishnah
. Mishnah literally means repetition, both because it was taught through verbal repetition and because it repeats and explains the laws in the Torah.

The Mishnah sorts the laws in the Torah into topics and clarifies them, generally by giving short, practical examples. The book we call the Talmud is made up of short snatches from the Mishnah, with commentary in between. The commentary can be quite lengthy and shoots off at all sorts of tangents, making it easy to forget what was being commented on in the first place.

One of the sections of the Mishnah is called Chapters of the Fathers
.
It’s an unusual title; there are sixty three sections in the Mishnah and apart from this one they are all named after legal or religious topics, like Betrothals, Vows or Blessings.

But Chapters of the Fathers is not about legal matters at all, in fact it’s not really clear why it was included in the Mishnah. It’s a collection of motivational statements, ethical urgings and life advice from rabbis who lived during the first and second centuries. In modern terms, it’s like a collection of sound bites from leading business gurus, political orators, celebrity preachers and media personalities.

Chapters of the Fathers begins like this:

Moses received the Torah on Mount Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua; Joshua to the elders; the elders to the prophets; and the prophets handed it down to the men of the Great Assembly.
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It’s a simple statement and its meaning is quite obvious. The trouble is, it doesn’t fit with what the Torah itself says. The Torah is a text for the people, it says so quite clearly.
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Moses was instructed to teach the Torah to the Children of Israel.
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It’s a public document, the heritage of every Israelite. It’s not some arcane knowledge to be handed down in secret across the generations, through a succession of dignitaries to the men of the Great Assembly, whoever they were.

And this is where the story of the Talmud has its first encounter with politics. Because the Torah that Moses transmitted to Joshua and so on is not the Torah that God instructed Moses to write in the wilderness, the Torah that contains
the Ten Commandments. It’s another Torah altogether. It is in fact a Torah which explains the other Torah. It’s enough to make your head spin, isn’t it?

According to Jewish belief there are two Torahs, not one. One was dictated by God to Moses in the wilderness, placed into a wooden chest overlaid with gold in the sacred Tabernacle in the wilderness, transferred in due course to the Jerusalem Temple and copied by scribes onto parchment scrolls that today reside in places of worship. When people talk about the Torah that’s the one they mean.

But the other Torah wasn’t written down. It was delivered verbally to Moses by God, for him to transmit by word of mouth to his successor, Joshua, who in turn would pass it on, just as it says in Chapters of the Fathers. This second, unwritten Torah explains and clarifies the public Torah which God dictated to Moses.

It still sounds a bit like a power-play, doesn’t it? Moses is given some arcane knowledge which only the leaders of the people have access to. Whoever has it passes it to his successor (all the leaders were men). We don’t hear of anyone disclosing it to the ordinary people; in the sections of the Bible that follow the Five Books of Moses, which covers centuries of Israelite history, there is no mention of it. The first we hear of it is in Chapters of the Fathers about a thousand years after Moses received it,

It’s the stuff of blockbuster movies, the secrets of power, handed down directly by the All-Powerful to His representatives on earth, to be used to interpret the law to suit the needs of a powerful elite.

But it doesn’t mean that at all. The very fact that the Chapters of the Fathers mentions the transmission of this Torah, the Oral Torah as it became known, confirms that its existence was not meant to be secret. On the contrary, the verbally communicated Torah is as public as the written Torah, it was simply entrusted to the leaders of the people to ensure it was handed down and not forgotten. It was essential that it didn’t become lost; it was the key to the written Torah. It was needed to decode all the written Torah’s apparent contradictions and inconsistencies.

The Oral Torah is the guide to the written Torah, and it was the duty of the leaders to preserve and transmit it. But to ensure that ordinary people were aware of its importance, its existence was publicized in Chapters of the Fathers.

That at least is the religious view. It’s not the only one.

To understand the politics of this we have to go back to the period, roughly 100
bce
to 100
ce
. The world was rapidly modernizing. New trade routes
were opening up, the Roman Empire was facilitating communication between remote places; merchants, armies and civil administrators were coming and going. Change was in the air. New ideas were beginning to circulate, the world was becoming globally connected, in an ancient sort of way.

Like many Mediterranean lands, the Israelite nation was under Roman rule. Life was hard, people were poor (apart from the ruling elite) and generally demoralized. Bands of partisans would spring up from time to time roaming the countryside and launching occasional attacks on the Romans, but most people were too busy trying to scrape a meagre existence together to bother to become heroes.

Jerusalem was the religious and political capital of the Jewish nation. Power resided in its Temple, which the Roman puppet-king Herod was restoring to undreamed of magnificence. But the priests who ran the Temple, and most of the judges who sat in the Sanhedrin, which was both the Supreme Court and the legislature, were part of a patrician sect in Jewish society known as the Sadducees.

The Sadducees had done well under Roman occupation, and many of the ordinary people resented their wealth and privilege. The people found they had much more in common with a group of pious scholars who observed conditions of strict ritual purity, abstaining from forbidden foods and distancing themselves from objects that Moses had declared impure because they carried a taint of death or decay. They called themselves Pharisees, or Separatists. In due course their leaders would go by the title rabbi, or teacher.