It was just such a story that was read out in the Israeli parliament in February this year. Knesset member Ruth Calderon's minute long maiden speech began with autobiography, as she described her Zionist upbringing and the "void" she had felt at not being able to read the Talmud as a girl. Then came a gesture which Fine describes as marking a profound cultural shift in Israel - Calderon opened a volume of Talmud.
After reading the Aramaic, she embarked on a word-by-word textual analysis of a story about a rabbi who became immersed in his studies, and his wife who waited for him to return home. As a tear falls from the wife's eye, the roof that the rabbi is sitting on to study collapses underneath him and he falls to his death. Calderon says the story was a comment on the rifts in Israeli society, and that the self-righteousness demonstrated by the rabbi in the story was something everyone could fall into.
The key thing was the ability to see another's point of view - an ability central to being able to read the Talmud. Judaism does not belong to any one side. But the speech went viral and prompted frenzied editorials in the Jewish press - some of them critical. This is partly because Calderon is a figurehead for secular Judaism, and sharply at odds with Israel's ultra-Orthodox community. In the ultra-Orthodox yeshivas, scholars receive a stipend to study the Talmud, and are exempt from paying taxes and performing military service.
Calderon opposes this - she came to the Knesset as a member of the Yesh Atid party, which polled unexpectedly well this year on a policy of "sharing the burden" the burden of tax and military service. Equally unpalatable to some ultra-Orthodox, Calderon opened the first liberal yeshiva, where women and non-believers are welcomed to study texts deemed important to Hebrew identity.
It is said that about liberal study halls now operate in Israel. The Talmud is also making its mark in wider Israeli society in other ways. It increasingly appears in leadership courses, in newspaper columns and TV shows. A recent series of talks at the National Library, where Calderon used to be head of Culture and Education, asked a series of well-known personalities to discuss Talmudic passages.
Calderon points out that the increased popularity in Israel of Aramaic-sounding names like Alma is a testament to the resurgent popularity of the ancient text. While the Torah is more about wars and kings, the Talmud is domestic.
I want the best people - the writers, the poets, the scriptwriters for TV - the people who are making Jewish culture [to read it]. Gila Fine says that she wants the Talmud to be in every Jewish home and to be read by every Jew - male and female - but adds that there will always be a role for the Talmudic scholar who devotes a lifetime's study to the most complex and intricate tractates.
It's like saying: 'Do you want everyone to be dabbling in theoretical mathematics? Video by Anna Bressanin. Listen back to the two-part series The Talmud via iplayer or browse the Heart and Soul podcast archive. Clarification: An earlier version of this story did not make clear that the story about Einstein's regret at having failed to study the Talmud was drawn from a book by Rabbi Aaron Parry.
Yeshivat Chovevei Torah School. This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. At the Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem, scholars may spend years or decades in Talmudic study. Anatomy of a Talmudic page. Mishnah 2. The Gemara 3.
Rashi 4. Other commentaries 5. Pages and chapters. Image source, Getty Images. Around the year CE, the Mishnah , the earliest compendium of Jewish law, appeared. It became the curriculum of rabbinic instruction.
In approximately CE, the interpretive traditions of the rabbis of the Land of Israel were compiled, forming the Talmud Yerushalmi Palestinian Talmud. It presents digests of the various teachings of many generations of rabbis on issues of law and other subjects. Although it frequently fails to specify which cited opinion is authoritative, it nevertheless became the universally accepted arbiter of halakhah and the subject of many extensive commentaries.
In every age, outstanding Jewish teachers and thinkers emerged who became the rabbinic leaders of their communities. Individuals, including other rabbis, would send them questions about the proper observance of Judaism or matters of Jewish thought. This body of questions and responses teshuvot , or responsa , preserved through the ages, is also an important source of halakhah.
In the Middle Ages , the body of Jewish legal writing was so voluminous that great scholarly acumen was required to be able to determine exactly what the halakhah was on many points. Compendia of Jewish law were written to summarize the debate and render a decision. Supplemented by the comments of Rabbi Moses Isserles , the leading Polish rabbi of the time, the Shulhan Arukh became the worldwide standard of halakhah, authoritative even if not the final authority even now in the eyes of observant Jews everywhere.
Historically, in Jewish law, a majority view prevailed. While the majority opinion usually became the accepted practice, in certain circumstances later rabbis could rely on a minority view in deciding a difficult matter. By the high Middle Ages, most Jewish communities each recognized one rabbi as the arbiter of Jewish law in that community.
Most puzzling of all: not one of those court dockets ever refers to or cites CH—or any law collection—as a source of law. These complications raised two inter-related questions. If collections like CH did not contain the law, where could the law be found—where was it written?
And if texts like CH were not statutory codes, what were they? Where was the law written in Mesopotamia? A judge would render a decision by drawing on an extensive reservoir of custom and accepted norms. Such decisions would vary from locale to locale. One could not point to an accepted text of the law as the final word on what the law was or prescriptively should be. Philology here speaks volumes: in ancient Greece, the word for written law was thesmos and, later, nomos.
But, as we have seen, that was Greece. Nowhere in the cultures of the ancient Near East is there a word for written law. The concept does not exist. Both it and other such collections are anthologies of judgments —snapshots of decisions rendered by judges or perhaps even by the king himself. The domain of these texts was the ivory tower of old: the palaces and the temples, the world of the court-scribe.
The collections offer a model of justice meant to inspire: a kind of treatise, proceeding by way of examples of the exercise of judicial power. They are records of precedent, not of legislation. Nowhere does the Bible instruct judges to consult written sources. Similarly, as in CH, critical aspects of daily life receive no legal attention.
The Torah clearly endorses and sanctifies the institution of marriage, for example; yet, if you want to get married, it nowhere says just what you have to do, ritually or contractually. In a work of statutory law, that would be unthinkable.
David has slept with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, one of his soldiers on the battlefront. The prophet Nathan wishes to compel the errant king into an awareness of his misdoing. He brings up a fictitious case in which a man blessed with large flocks steals and slaughters the ewe of his neighbor, a poor man who owned nothing but the ewe, which he loved very much.
The king does not realize that the parable is a metaphor of his own lust for women, of whom he has had many. Asked by Nathan to adjudicate this hypothetical case, he imposes a punishment on the thief.
In addition to obligating the thief to four-fold restitution—as per Exodus—he also sentences him to death. The thief is not some poor person desperate to feed his family, while the victim is not only poor himself but has been brutally robbed of his only, beloved possession. From the perspective of statutory jurisprudence, David performs a miscarriage of justice.
My second example reaches deeper and wider, showing how common-law jurisprudence works across the Torah as a whole. This happens most saliently in the book of Deuteronomy, where many legal passages found earlier—in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers—are reformulated, in some cases changing the law outright.
Take the laws of debt relief, observance of the paschal sacrifice, and others. Not only do they occur in different forms in different books, but nowhere in Deuteronomy does God issue His standard command to perform the laws contained in that book. God had spoken at Sinai to a people just released from bondage. Now, with the people poised to enter the land of Israel, Moses interprets and reapplies the laws to accord with an array of challenges they will meet there.
The idea that divine law can be as malleable as human law no doubt sounds counterintuitive. This intuition, however, rests on a misunderstanding. The fluid nature of common law stems only partially from the limitations of the human jurist.
It also stems from the fluidity of society itself, a quality of human life to which even divine law must adapt. This position was forcefully advocated by one of the most creative rabbinic minds of the 19th century: Tzadok ha-Cohen Rabinowitz of Lublin , a great hasidic master. As against the many voices in the rabbinic tradition who have seen halakhah as a relatively static inheritance passed down through an unbroken chain of transmission, Rabinowitz adheres to an alternative view that emphasizes its changing and dynamic nature.
This alternative view is substantiated by the way Scripture itself approaches the law.
0コメント