Live or Memorex?
25 January 2008 - 19 שבט 5768 by Huw
Here’s the rest of the earlier post “Is it really the Torah… I was on my way out the door when I got the email that led me to that post over on the Chabad website. It’s been a long day of car-related errands (Mom and Dad coming this weekend).
Here’s why that Chabad post is so important:
When I read the question - which was posted as “The Question of the Week”, I was 100% sure I new the answer. The standard Orthodox (and ultra-Orthodox) response to questions about the Oral Torah is “God Gave the Oral Torah to Moses at the same time as the written one.” Most flavours of Orthodox Judaism takes the same tack as Eastern and Roman (etc) Christianities: the Oral Tradition is an inspired part of the religion handed down to us by the Founder (Jesus or Moses, as the case may be). Yes, there are exceptions and not all parties accept these claims.
But it was a great (as in enjoyable, wonderful, awesome) surprise to see such a conservative group as Chabad say what most religion geeks imagine to be true: that “We the people” came up with the these things. It was also rather wonderful to read that, in fact, this was what God had intended.
The Maharal of Prague provided another parable.20 He likens our situation to a man who moves into a home built by a master architect. The man finds all in place, in exquisite design and order. Yet, in one place, it seems a door is missing. There is a lintel, there are doorposts, even hinges in place. Within is a room that needs to be shut off from the rest of the house. So the man fashions a door, in accordance with every other door in the house, to match the fittings of the open doorway.
So, too, says the Maharal, when the story of Esther occurred and the rabbis established the festival of Purim; when merchants began to trade on the Shabbat and the rabbis established the laws of muktzah; when Jewish society became primarily mercantile and the rabbis established the pruzbul. And in our day, as we deal in medical halachah and supervision of the food industry—at each step along the way, we find the lintel, the doorposts and the hinges awaiting our finishing touches.
And whose door are we placing? Not our own, says the Maharal, but that of the Master Architect. For all is His design, only that He has provided us the privilege of being His partner in completing His world.
This was precisely Moses’ intent: That Torah should come from within, not from without, from below, not from above. He recognized that, even though he had not been Divinely instructed so, this was the true intent. It’s just that you can’t direct a populist revolution from above, so it had to come from Moses himself.
This is, I think, what many mean when they say “living tradition”. A living tradition grows and changes as needed by the culture and times. And it happens at the hands of the *people* in the tradition. The “keep four sets of dishes” and no cheeseburgers rules weren’t handed down from Mt Sinai. The “no meat dairy, fish, eggs, wine or olive oil” fast wasn’t whispered by Jesus to St Andrew for future reference and God didn’t reveal Sunday as the new Sabbath. We made it up: it’s the action of our lives in response to God. Of course it lives and grows.
But should one turn around and say that exact thing, many pious Orthodox take exception.
The next step after that is to realise that very very little isn’t Oral Tradition and subject to interpretation.
That’s pretty much the explanation I do hear from pious EO. The one difference is the addition of the phrase “guided by the Holy Spirit”. But there’s a big difference between “guided by” and “dictated by”.
You and I know different pious Orthodox :-) as Father Ernesto and I remind each other often!
Maybe I should have written “uberfrum”? But I have actually heard that “a lot of what Jesus said wasn’t written down and this oral tradition was what was passed on to us.” This usually comes up right after a line about the EOC believing nothing but what the 12 Apostles taught - or getting her liturgical customs from the Jewish Temple (in ways other than parallel evolution).
I even know good pious conservative, “Bible-believing,” (wink, this is the South, after all) Orthodox priest, (born in the “old country”), who will say that some of the canons are purely disciplinary canons meant to apply to the situation at hand, and not meant to necessarily apply if the cultural situation changed. He will, however, insist that it is the hierarchs who make the changes, not the individual.
I’ve heard, however, that the Laity can totally diss the hierarchs if they (the Laity) sense that something is wrong - in other words, in the best of all possible worlds, it’s not top-down but 360 degrees. This is another parallel between Judaism and Christianity when both are functioning properly.
(The parallels when they are dysfunctioning are scary.)