Q&A: The Status of the Sages
The Status of the Sages
Question
If I understood you correctly from what you said, that the Sages were not spiritually elevated people, meaning in terms of divine inspiration or spiritual powers.
But in your interview called “The Story from ’70,” at minute 49,
you said
that the Talmud, in your view, is an exemplary text, and people do not realize how amazing it is, and your whole life is conducted according to it — the secular, the logical, and the philosophical parts.
So please explain to me how the Sages are pictured in your eyes — as people who were geniuses in philosophy? But your attitude toward the aggadic literature of the Sages is also known, and toward some of their strange views (I don’t want to say childish). So how does it all fit together?
Thank you
Answer
What is the problem? I do not think they had non-human abilities, but that does not mean they did not have intellectual and other advantages. Beyond that, even ordinary people can in principle create a text like the Talmud. There is no genius here in some superhuman sense, and nothing in the content there is genius. It is a work with remarkable qualities in terms of its composition and more. I also do not think this was done intentionally in advance. That is simply how it came out, and in hindsight it turns out to be truly brilliant. Part of the brilliance is that this is a text that became canonical and binding as the framework of Judaism, which was not clear in advance to every speaker and certainly not to the editors either (since the editing continued for hundreds of years). It became that way retrospectively.
Discussion on Answer
A. Since when is the decline of the generations a principle of faith that one can deny? I have explained several times in the past that there is decline because of distance from the source, but not intellectual decline. In that respect it דווקא seems that there has been progress.
Your description of the figures and the talents is baseless. There is no decline at all.
B. The wonder stories do not impress me. They are meant to glorify them for educational purposes. Look at the wonder stories about the sages of the generations, including our own. The same goes for sayings like the ones you mentioned.
C. It does not show the brilliance of an individual. It is a collective brilliance that is expressed in the result. Just a figure of speech.
Okay, I understand better.
But what you wrote, “Your description of the figures and the talents is baseless. There is no decline at all.”
Do you hold that there is someone today who could understand the Babylonian Talmud, and all the more so the Jerusalem Talmud, without Rashi (or more accurately, without Schottenstein), just as all the medieval authorities understood it?
First, it is definitely possible that yes. Second, Rashi received a tradition. He did not decipher everything on his own with his talents. His tradition was passed down to us through his commentary.
That makes sense, considering that in practice they did not have the huge number of books we have today, which burden us and occupy us. They only had the Talmud, so they had all the time to try to understand it on their own. And presumably the lesson they heard from their teachers, and they from their teachers, and so on, was the explanation of the Talmud.
I am curious whether there is any precedent for a view like yours — that is, complete loyalty to the laws in the Talmud, while at the same time looking at those authorities in the Talmud as completely ordinary people, if not less. Even among the camp of Maimonides and Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch there are no such people. There definitely are such people among the Karaites and the Reform, but they are not loyal to the laws in the Talmud.
I have no idea. I think there are quite a few such people, for example in academia. But it does not really interest me.
Just forgive me, I want to understand your approach better.
Moses our teacher, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, King Solomon — what is your perspective on them?
It seems they were prophets who spoke with the Holy One, blessed be He.
Yes,
but what is your view of a prophet when he does not have prophecy?
Is it as Maimonides holds,
that he possesses intellectual perfection in all the sciences, and perfection of character traits (and also that his imaginative faculty is perfect),
or like others, that the Creator can grant prophecy even to ordinary people,
but specifically regarding Moses and the Patriarchs and Solomon, what is your view of them when they do not have prophecy?
I have no idea. I touched on this a bit in the previous column.
A. So are you basically denying the concept of “the decline of the generations”? I have to ask, because seemingly you can see it in reality (not only Jewish reality).
Weren’t Aristotle and Plato and Socrates and all sorts of such figures greater than those who came after them? (Aside from a few exceptions like Einstein.)
Do we have later authorities today like the later authorities of 300 years ago?
Is there anyone today who could do what Maimonides did without a computer, and he was not like a Haredi rabbi today who has all day free for learning.
Is there anyone like Rashi and all the medieval authorities who could understand the entire Babylonian Talmud and Jerusalem Talmud without a commentary?
B. Also, how do you understand all the expressions about the medieval authorities and so on, and in general the concept of the decline of the generations, and all the wonder stories about the Sages — even if they are parables (which is hard to say about all of them), they still came to say something along those lines, even if they exaggerated.
C. I did not understand your words at the end: “Part of the brilliance is that this is a text that became canonical and binding as the framework of Judaism, which was not clear in advance to every speaker and certainly not to the editors either (since the editing continued for hundreds of years). It became that way retrospectively.”
How does the fact that it became canonical after the fact show brilliance?