The Talmud (7 page)

This principle crops up in the Talmudic discussion about whether it is better for a person to study Torah, or to go out and perform good deeds. Learning Torah is considered a holy task, and according to one source it outranks any good deed or act of charity.
20
The scholars debate the relative merits of a life of study or a life of good deeds – in their terminology the question is framed as ‘what is greater, study or action?’ It turns out that study is greater … because study leads to action.
21
In a nutshell this sums up the Talmudic dilemma about decision making. Decisions must be made, action is important. But even more important is why the decision is reached, and what other valid possibilities were rejected along the way. Alternative points of view can exist side by side. In the Talmudic world view there is only one absolute Truth, the rabbis never lost sight of the fact that their sole authority was the divine. In the face of that Truth everything else is relative to the circumstance.

It was their awareness of living in a created world which allowed the scholars of the academy to digress from discussions about the law without feeling they were being frivolous. The whole of nature is part of a coherent, divinely ordained and immaculately governed system, every aspect of which was revealed to Moses; it all fell within the scope of their investigation. And so about a quarter of the Talmud is not law in the accepted sense at all. It belongs to a category for which there is no adequate English word and which is usually referred to negatively and unimaginatively, as ‘non-legal material’. Technically it is known as
aggada
, which literally means story-telling, but although the
aggada
contains stories in abundance,
it is far more than just that. Much of the
aggada
is devoted to
explaining biblical texts,
either
to introduce new ideas or to make a theological point, but other sections contain fables, folklore or discussions of the natural or supernatural worlds.

On the face of it the
aggadic
passages are less challenging than the legal sections, and they have attracted far less scholarly attention. But while it’s true that to fully grasp the intricacies of the legal passages requires the ability to think logically, systematically and to keep several steps of an argument in one’s head at the same time, the
aggadic
content needs a different sort of mind. It appeals to people whose skills lie in grappling with ideas and abstractions, who are more interested in looking at a conceptual framework than the minutiae of an argument. Comparing the merits of the two types of material is a bit like comparing pure mathematics to philosophy. Our preference for one over the other depends on our interests, and our skills.

Compiling the Talmud

The debates carried on in the academies for generations. Sura continued to be a major centre but the city of Nehardea was destroyed in 259
ce
, a casualty of the frequent skirmishes between the Roman and Sassanian Empires. By the time the town was rebuilt its academy had moved further up the Euphrates, to the north-west. It would still be called the academy of Nehardea; but it was now located in a new home, in the town of Pumbedita.

New academies opened, notably at the wealthy city of Mehoza where the most well known of its heads was Rava, who was in charge from around 320
ce
onwards. Along with his contemporary Abayye, who headed the college in Pumbedita, Rava is counted amongst the greats of Talmudic scholarship.

Rava’s relationship with the townspeople of Mahoza wasn’t too good. On one occasion he applied the prophet Amos’s description of the people of Bashan ‘who oppress the poor, who crush the needy’
22
to the women of Mahoza ‘who eat without working’.
23
On another he criticized a prominent doctor’s family for not showing sufficient respect to the rabbis.
24

These character insights are unusual; generally the personal lives of the rabbis are only of passing interest to the Talmud, unless they can be used to
glean an ethical, religious or legal point. Such as the occasion when Rav Ashi, one of the last
amoraim
, broke a glass at a marriage ceremony,
25
a custom which still prevails in Jewish weddings today.

Rava has the further distinction of posing more problems than anyone else in which the solution is so finely balanced between two possibilities that neither can be preferred over the other.
26
These problems, which conclude with the word
teyku
, meaning ‘let it stand’, will, according to folklore, all be solved by the prophet Elijah in the utopian future. In the meantime both solutions to the problem are equally valid. There may only be one Truth, but there can be multiple realities.
27

Around about the year 500
ce
the debates in the academies gave way to a process of rounding up all the material from the preceding centuries, which circulated as verbal traditions, collating it and eventually editing it into the Talmud. A hundred years earlier harsh economic and political conditions in Israel had brought about a premature completion of the Jerusalem Talmud, but the completion of the Babylonian Talmud doesn’t seem to have been abrupt. There may even have been a long period of overlap during which the process of compilation had begun even though the final discussions were still going on.

The difference between the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds is glaringly stark, and not just because the dialect and terminology is different. The Jerusalem Talmud, which received very little editing and was almost certainly not constructed as a literary unit, is very terse, almost staccato in places, listing very little more than the basic outlines of its arguments. In contrast the Babylonian version is far more fluent, presenting its reasoning in greater detail.

But the two Talmuds are by no means independent of each other. Many of the discussions that took place in the academies in one country crop up in the Talmud of the other. So do the names of many of the rabbis. There was a continual ebb and flow of scholars between the two centres, creating a two-way flow of ideas, insights and information. There are numerous examples of
problems with which the Babylonian rabbis are grappling being resolved by a visitor from Israel who is able to provide a solution.
28

It had never been the intention of the
amoraim
to have their discussions collected into a literary compilation. They weren’t working to fulfil a grand project; they studied to clarify and explain the law, not to go down in history. Something must have happened around the year 500
ce
to make the scholarly elite feel it was necessary to draw the intellectual threads of centuries together, into a single, coherent form.

The catalyst may have been turmoil within the Sassanian kingdom and upheavals in the local, social environment. An uprising led by a Persian priest, Mazdak, had led to the Sassanian king being temporarily deposed. At around the same time there was a briefly successful attempt by the exilarch, Mar Zutra to establish an autonomous state in Mahoza. None of these disruptions lasted long though; the Empire soon retook control, order was eventually restored and both the Exilarch and his grandfather Haninah, the head of the academy, were hanged on the bridge of Mahoza.
29
It was a very unstable time.

We don’t know who compiled the Babylonian Talmud, nor how they went about it. The early medieval view, which is set out in Sherira
Gaon
’s letter, is that the final editors of the Talmud were Rav Ashi, who died in 428
ce
, and Rabina, who lived until 499
ce
, both of whom are described in the Talmud as being ‘at the close of teaching’.
30
But it has long been recognized that this view is untenable, since they are both frequently mentioned in the Talmud, as indeed is Rav Ashi’s son, Mar, and indeed Rav Ashi’s encounter with the Angel of Death.
31
It seems pretty clear that the editing process was still going on long after their time.

Layers upon layers

For the last few centuries readers have become used to books which were written at one time, by one person, or occasionally a team of people, They begin at the beginning and end at the end. The Talmud is not like this. It contains layers of material from different places and different times, which have been woven together skilfully, almost seamlessly, in a more or less uniform manner. We can identify these layers by their language, for example a change in the middle of a passage from Hebrew to Aramaic, by their style and particularly through the use of ‘keywords’ such as ‘we learnt’ or ‘an objection was raised’ which flag up content that had been imported into the discussion.

There are at least four chronological layers of material in the Talmud, not counting over eight thousand biblical verses
32
which are woven into the narrative to explain, justify or clarify a particular point.

The base layer comprises quotations from the Mishnah itself or from other rabbinic literature of the same period, which we looked at in
Chapter 1
. The second layer, which makes up the core of the Talmud, comes from the study sessions in the Babylonian academies and is usually attributed to one of the scholars of the time. The third layer has no names attached, it is anonymous, connects everything together and provides the framework for the discussion. The people who wrote this third layer are the original editors of the Talmud.
33
Finally there is another stratum of even later material which was probably added after the first drafts of the Talmud were concluded. This layer tends to introduce a topic or to provide the logical conclusion to an argument.

A classic example demonstrating these layers occurs in a discussion on the laws of damages.
34
The section opens, as do all Talmudic topics, with a citation from the Mishnah (first layer). This enumerates four ‘principal categories’ of damages. An anonymous editor (third or maybe fourth layer) then points out that if these are called the ‘principal’ categories then there must also be ‘secondary’ or derivative categories. The same voice asks whether the derivatives have the same standing in law as the principal categories. A view from a Babylonian academy (second layer) is then cited: ‘Rav Pappa said “some of the derivatives are equal to their principals, whereas others are not.” ’ Finally the
editors (third layer) cite a number of
tannaitic
(first layer) and
amoraic
(second layer) sources to clarify which derivatives Rav Pappa considered equivalent to their principals, and which he considered were not.
35

The scale of the task facing the editors of the Talmud is hard to contemplate. Not only did they have vast amount of material to work with, most of it only existed orally. Yaakov Ellman makes out a convincing case that not only the first two layers, but even much of the third and fourth, were handed down by word of mouth, generation after generation.
36
This method of oral transmission is known as
gemara.
Printed editions of the Talmud use this word to separate the material that was composed in Babylon (second layer or later) from the introductory quotations from the Mishnah (first layer).

At least some of the Talmud was written down by the eighth century
37
but most of it probably circulated in an oral form for another three hundred years.
38
We don’t know exactly when it was given its literary form. We don’t even know if it was given a literary form before it was written down, or if that was a consequence of the transcription process. All we do know is that the process was carried out by editors who, whether deliberately or not, managed to successfully conceal their identity. Louis Jacobs points out that ‘nowhere in the Talmud is there any definite statement about the process of redaction, and how it was done and by whom’.
39

To pull all the material together the editors of the Talmud are likely to have worked in teams. Shamma Friedman suggests that typically there would have been an ‘arranger’ who fixed the early layers in place so as to construct the framework for the argument, and an ‘explainer’ who created the argument that linked the pieces together.
40
The teams would have worked together for an extended period of time, older scholars handing over to younger ones as the generations passed. The process may have gone on for centuries.

Yet, for all its complex composition the Talmud appears to the reader to be a seamless work. It’s not until we analyse it closely that we can see the joins between the layers. Although written in Babylon the Talmud can quote the
opinions of people who lived their whole lives elsewhere.
41
yet it will have us think they were standing in the same room as native Babylonians. We don’t know the names of the people who wove all this material together and the nature of their work is such that when studying the Talmud we are rarely aware of the scale or complexity of the task they undertook. But whilst the voices of rabbis who are quoted in the Talmud echo through history to the modern reader there is a second group of truly astonishing people, for there must have been many of them, who pulled the whole thing together but have altogether disappeared from view. The Talmud contains many paradoxes; but this is surely the greatest paradox of all.

Notes

1
Avot 2.20.

2
M. Sukkah 5.1.

3
Sukkah 51b–53b.

4
Jacobs, 2005.

5
Hullin 137b.

6
Bava Kamma 117a.

7
Bava Kamma 117a–b.