The Talmud (3 page)

As their support grew amongst the working classes the scholars found their political voice. Their leaders started to vie for influence in the Temple and the Sanhedrin. Their numbers and popularity grew and the ruling classes could no longer ignore them.
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The Pharisees saw things very differently from the Sadducees. The written Torah had given the priests privileges which had enabled many of them to grow wealthy and complacent. The Pharisees argued that these privileges were being abused, that the written Torah had been misinterpreted. They quoted teachings
that had been handed down by word of mouth, teachings that regulated the power of the priests, teachings to which the Sadducees paid no attention. The Pharisees argued that these word-of-mouth traditions had the full authority of law, that they were in fact an unwritten Oral Torah.

It is not clear whether the Pharisees had always believed that their oral traditions were given to Moses on Mount Sinai, or whether this was a later idea which gained currency because it gave their position more legitimacy. The historical view is that the Oral Torah developed organically through family and social traditions, and connecting it with Moses was just a device to give it authority. The religious view is that it was divinely transmitted from Mount Sinai through Moses and the prophets to the leaders of later generations.

Either way, the Pharisees considered the Oral Torah to be the key to interpreting the written law. The Sadducees denied its existence altogether. The battle for religious and legal power was on.
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Notes

1
This question was being discussed at least as long ago as the second century. When the Mishnah in Sanhedrin 12.1 proclaims that someone who denies that the Torah comes from heaven has no portion in the world to come, it is referring to those who argued that the Torah was Moses’ own creation.

2
Bible study begins even in the Bible itself. Many of the psalms, which were written after the Torah, add detail and explanations to events first recorded in the Torah. Psalm 29, for example, is an expansion of the events at Mount Sinai and Psalm 104 is a poetic description of the Creation. Many of the psalms are in effect the earliest layer of interpretation of the Torah.

3
Eruvin 13b.

4
Steinsaltz, 1989, p. 3.

5
M. Avot 1.1.

6
Deuteronomy 33.4: ‘Moses commanded the Torah to us; an inheritance to the congregation of Jacob’.

7
Deuteronomy 31.9–19.

8
Freedman, 2009. Nor could they ignore another popular movement led by Jesus of Nazareth, but events led his followers off in a different direction and for now they only touch lightly on our story. The reason why Matthew rails so strongly against the Pharisees is that they rivalled the early Christians for political power. However, the political vision of the early Christians was centred on reforming the Temple. When it was destroyed they disappeared from the political scene and concentrated solely on their universalist religious mission, under Paul’s leadership.

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Although belief in the Oral Torah goes back at least 2,000 years we are only now beginning to understand the process through which the verbal traditions were handed down. In the 1930s Millman Parry, a scholar of oral literature showed that Homer’s great epic poetry relied on recurring phrases, metre and verse to be memoried (Parry, 1928). Elizabeth Shanks Alexander (Alexander, E. S., 1999) has shown that a similar process of ‘building blocks’ allowed the Oral Law to be memorized and transmitted. She gives an example from the laws of oaths:

[If a person took] an oath, [saying ‘I swear] I will not eat,’ and then he ate wheat bread, barley bread, and spelt bread—he is only liable [to bring a sacrifice] on one count {not one for each kind of bread].

[If a person took] an oath, [saying ‘I swear] that I will not eat wheat bread, barley bread, and spelt bread,’ and then he ate [them]—he is liable [to bring a sacrifice] on each and every count [one for each kind of bread].

Mishnah Shavuot 3.2

The two passages appear virtually identical but deal with two different oaths. The order of events are the same – someone vows not to eat, then eats and becomes liable to offer a sacrifice, to make amends for breaking his vow. The wording in each passage is the same, other than that the ‘plug in’ concerning the bread has changed. In the first formula the ‘plug in’ is included as part of the violation of the oath, in the second formula it is part of the formulation of the oath. People would find it easy remember the outlines of these passages because of the fixed, repeating ‘building blocks’. The only effort they had to make in memorizing the tradition was to put the ‘plug ins’ in the right places.

2

The origins of the Talmud

Rabbi Ila’i said: ‘By three things may a person’s character be determined: By his drinking and spending habits and by his anger.’ Some say: ‘Also by his laughter.’
1

The destruction of the Temple

The struggle for religious power between the Pharisees and Sadducees continued until the year 70 
ce
. By this time the military situation in the land had completely deteriorated. Guerrilla groups were launching attacks on the Romans on a daily basis; the mighty Roman legions had suffered considerable setbacks.

The Empire decided it was time to flex its muscles. Roman forces besieged Jerusalem, starved the population into submission then burnt down the city and destroyed the Temple. It is hard for us, two thousand years and as many miles away, to grasp the full impact of this event.

It was far more than the mere demolition of a building. It was more even than the razing of a city and the destruction of its population, horrendous as that was. The Temple was not only the centre of the Israelite religion, it housed the legislature and the judiciary. It was the commercial centre. The destruction of the Temple threatened to herald the end, not just of the religion, but even of the last vestiges of Israelite autonomy. Like so many before them, the Israelite nation was threatened with extinction.

Desperate times tend to produce remarkable people. The rebuilding of Judaism, and the emergence of Christianity, which was taking place in the same place at exactly the same time, can be directly attributed to the vision and skill of two people; Paul for the Christians and Yohanan ben Zakkai for the Jews.

Paul’s story is well known. Ben Zakkai’s less so. The legend
2
is that when the situation inside besieged Jerusalem became absolutely desperate, disease and famine having already decimated the population, ben Zakkai pleaded with the militants guarding the city gates to allow him to leave and negotiate a surrender. The militants would have none of it. Ben Zakkai was the leader of the peace camp, and the confrontational militants were diametrically opposed to everything he stood for.

However the leader of the militants, a man called Abba Sikra, or Red Father,
3
just happened to be ben Zakkai’s nephew. He vowed to help his uncle slip past the gatekeepers and reach the Roman camp. Abba Sikra told the rabbi to climb into a coffin, play dead and get his students to carry him out of the city on the pretence that he was being taken for burial. Abba Sikra then made sure that guards let the coffin through with the appropriate amount of respect.

Once outside the city walls, ben Zakkai climbed out of the coffin and went to see the Roman commander, probably Titus (although the legend says it was his father, Vespasian). According to the legend ben Zakkai, knowing that the city would fall, performed some minor miracles which endeared him to the Roman commander and allowed him to negotiate the safe passage of the Pharisee rabbis and their students out of Jerusalem. Titus granted him a refuge in Yavneh, a small town in the south-west of the country.

The Roman authorities probably didn’t think much about this. They couldn’t imagine that giving a refuge to Yohanan ben Zakkai, his colleagues and students would be of any great consequence. After all, a bunch of holy men and scholars could hardly present a threat to the rampant Roman Empire. Had they thought it through though, the Romans could have saved themselves a century or more of trouble. If they’d only realized what ben Zakkai and his colleagues were about to do for the national morale, and the faith of the Jews.

The destruction of the Temple was a tragedy for the nation but for the Pharisees some good came out of it. The Sadducees no longer had their power base and their priestly allies had virtually no role at all, since the whole of their religious mission had been to conduct the services in the Temple.

In Yavneh the Pharisees were faced with a stark reality. Unless they could find a way to save the religion that now lacked its Temple and sacrificial cult,
their civilization would disappear. The proud, independent Israelite culture with its rich biblical and prophetic heritage would be eradicated, their people would become just another subjugated nation under the Roman thumb.

The tools the Pharisees had at their disposal were the written Torah, the oral traditions and their perfect faith. That was enough. Under Yohanan ben Zakkai’s leadership the Pharisees were about to set in place a process that would eventually result in the composition of the Talmud and two thousand years of unbroken study.

The vineyard at Yavneh

The academy that Yohanan ben Zakkai established at Yavneh was known as the Vineyard. It’s not clear why. It’s possible that the discussions took place in a field amongst grapevines, or that whatever buildings they had were erected on the site of an old vineyard. One theory, however, has it that the scholars sat in rows, planted and fruitful, just like grapevines.
4

According to Chapters of the Fathers, after the Men of the Great Assembly received the Oral Law from the prophets they passed it to a pair of scholars, who passed it on to another pair, and so on, for five generations.
5
The names of the fifth pair were Hillel and Shammai, and although they were long dead by the time the Vineyard was established, their respective students would have been amongst those who sat in rows in the academy.

It is said of Shammai that a non-Jew approached him and offered to convert to Judaism if he could be taught the whole of the Torah while he stood on one leg. Obviously it was an impossible request and Shammai angrily drove him away. The man then approached Hillel and made the same proposal. Hillel replied, ‘That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. The rest is commentary. Go and learn
.
6
’
Shammai, who is also credited with saying ‘
Greet everyone cheerfully’
7
was no doubt having a bad day.

Hillel and Shammai held differing views on many issues. But the things they disagreed about are less important than the fact that they disagreed. Indeed,
their disagreements were considered by the scholars in the Vineyard to be not just valid, but essential.

For three years there was a dispute between Hillel’s students and Shammai’s students, the former asserting, ‘The law is in agreement with our views,’ and the latter claiming, ‘The law is in agreement with our views.’ Then a voice from heaven announced, ‘These and these are the words of the Living God.’
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Nothing illustrates the process of Talmudic debate better than the fact that different opinions can each be ‘the words of the Living God’
.
Even though the Talmud is concerned with laws, behaviours and beliefs, it’s less interested in reaching conclusions than in presenting different ways of looking at a problem. It’s not so much the final decision that counts as the process which leads to it.

The discussions in the Vineyard were not recorded in writing and anything we know about them comes from sources written long after. It’s clear that the immediate priority for Yohanan ben Zakkai and his colleagues was to make sure that their knowledge of the Torah and its oral interpretation didn’t get lost in all the national turmoil and upheaval. The Vineyard was the forum for transmitting their knowledge to the next generation of scholars.

But the Vineyard wasn’t just a school or an academy. Sure, it contained young students who learned at the feet of older, venerated scholars. But rather than delivering lessons according to a curriculum, it seems that the method of teaching was for the students to sit in on the discussions of the older scholars, who were collaborating to collect and clarify the entire body of Jewish law; creating a belief system and legal code that no future group of dissenters, whether Sadducee or anyone else, could come along and challenge.

The discussions would start with a senior scholar stating their memory of how a particular ritual had been performed, or legal matter handled. Others might disagree, if they had different memories. Someone might quote an earlier authority; to support their own view, or to challenge another. Whatever opinions were put forward had to be in line with the text of the written Torah; if the law that Moses had written in the wilderness couldn’t be interpreted in such a way as to underpin a point of view; it wasn’t accepted.

A key topic was how to deal with rituals that used to be performed in the Temple. Animal sacrifices had been abolished altogether; the Torah had confined the offering of them to the Temple. But many rituals had not involved sacrifices and the Pharisees believed in making the religion open to everyone. So wherever they could Yohanan ben Zakkai and his colleagues instituted new procedures that allowed ordinary people to perform those rituals that had once been in the exclusive domain of the Temple.
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But the most important task of all for the rabbis in the Vineyard was to inspire, enthuse and motivate their demoralized and traumatized nation; to encourage people to reconnect with a faith which seemed to have failed them so badly. In doing this they demonstrated a remarkable aptitude for creativity. Just as Moses’s Torah had woven together stories, laws and grand ideas, so too the Yavneh scholars engaged in flights of imagination, illustrating their ideas with parables, folk tales and imagery.

On
that
day
Rabbi
Eliezer
brought
forward
every
imaginable
argument
but
the
other
scholars
did
not
accept
them.
He
said:
‘If
the
law
agrees
with
me,
let
this
carob-tree
prove
it!’
Thereupon
the
carob-tree
was
torn
a
hundred
cubits
out
of
its
place.
‘No
proof
can
be
brought
from
a
carob-tree,’
they
retorted.
Again
he
said
to
them:
‘If
the
law
agrees
with
me,
let
the
stream
of
water
prove
it!’
Whereupon
the
stream
of
water
flowed
backwards
—
‘No
proof
can
be
brought
from
a
stream
of
water,’
they
rejoined.
Again
he
urged:
‘If
the
law
agrees
with
me,
let
the
walls
of
the
study
house
prove
it,’
whereupon
the
walls
began
to
incline.

But
Rabbi
Joshua
rebuked
the
walls,
saying:
‘When
scholars
are
engaged
in
a
legal
dispute,
what
right
have
you
to
interfere?’
So
they
did
not
fall,
in
honour
of
Rabbi
Joshua,
nor
did
they
resume
the
upright,
in
honour
of
Rabbi
Eliezer;
and
they
are
still
leaning
to
this
day.

Again he said to them: ‘If the
law agrees with me, let it be proved from Heaven!’
Whereupon a Heavenly Voice cried out: ‘Why do you dispute
with Rabbi Eliezer, seeing that in all matters the law
agrees with him!’ But Rabbi Joshua arose and exclaimed: ‘The
Torah is not in heaven!’

What did he mean by this? — Said Rabbi Jeremiah: That once the Torah had already been given at Mount Sinai; we pay no attention to a Heavenly Voice, because it also says in the Torah, You shall follow the majority view.
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Recording the Oral Law

The following century was amongst the most tumultuous in Israelite history. A series of rebellions by the Jews led to harsh reprisals by the Romans. The fighting reached a head in 132
ce
when a band of guerrillas under the leadership of Bar Koziba staged a successful revolt, put the Romans to flight and declared an independent Jewish state.

It didn’t last long though. Three years later the revolution was over and the Jews were subjugated once again. A harsh period of intense religious and personal persecution orchestrated by the Roman emperor Hadrian began.