Q&A: The Formal Rather Than Substantive Authority of the Sages
The Formal Rather Than Substantive Authority of the Sages
Question
Your position regarding the formal authority of the Talmud is well known. What do you do in cases where you disagree with the Talmud about what is halakhically right to do, given that they do not have substantive authority? In the private domain, should one act differently from the Talmud in order to achieve the religious goals of observing Jewish law? Is this at all a mode of thinking that occupies you while learning Talmud—that it is mistaken, but there is simply no choice other than to accept its authority? There may perhaps also be a practical difference in the public domain when the Talmud is lenient and you think one should be stringent.
Answer
No. The authority of the Talmud determines what is correct to do, not what is ideally correct to do, and that applies even in the most private setting. That is how one should conduct oneself.
It definitely occupies me, but precisely for that reason it happens only in very few cases. Usually I will choose an interpretation that fits my view, and in the overwhelming majority of cases I find one like that, whether in this passage or in another passage that disagrees. As is well known, it is preferable to strain the wording rather than the reasoning. Beyond that, even if I have not found such an interpretation, this would have to be a case where I have a firm position that the Talmud was mistaken—about Jewish law, not about facts. A factual mistake is of course not binding. This is a very extreme case, which almost never happens.
You can of course ask, then what is the significance of these statements of mine? I claim that they have significance not only for the rare cases I mentioned, but for the whole approach to learning. If in my view the Talmud is not necessarily right, then I am more at ease choosing an interpretation that is more reasonable even if it fits the wording and the text itself less well. People who have faith in the greatness of the Amoraim and nullify their own judgment before them will be less likely to seek out and adopt such interpretations.
Discussion on Answer
On the psychological level, it is hard for me to answer. A person does not see his own blemishes. Substantively, I do not think this is an irrelevant consideration. It does not happen because the interpretation of Jewish law is not connected to our moral level. On the contrary, in the moral realm I do in fact find quite a few disagreements between myself and the sages of the Talmud, and I do not think their moral instructions are binding.
You admit that at least they have no advantage over you on the halakhic plane when it comes to understanding what God wants from us. So again I ask: how is it that you disagree with them so little? I am asking on the philosophical level.
No, I do not admit that. Not at all. I do think that over the generations there is a distancing from understanding things at their source—for example, with methods of exposition. I definitely see them as a source that transmits the tradition to me, and they have an inherent advantage over me. That of course does not mean that I always accept them as right, or that this is absolute. But they certainly do have an advantage, and I need to be very convinced in order to maintain that I am right and they were mistaken. And when it is not in the moral realm, that is a rare matter.
So I will focus my question about their advantage. In what sense do they have an advantage over you just by virtue of being earlier? I know the analogies to learning a language in an ulpan as an adult versus naturally as a child, but that is not a valid analogy in our case. Our sages lived about 1,500 years after the giving of the Torah. What difference does 1,500 or 3,300 make? We know far more sources than they did. We have debated and sharpened ourselves through far more cases than they did. And I am not speaking only about our analytical advantage. Why do you disagree easily with Geonim and medieval authorities and skip over them when you issue a halakhic ruling, but heaven forbid you skip over and disagree with the Talmud? Is there really a difference in substantive authority between the 4th century and the 8th and 10th?
Do you really believe yourself when you say that when they read or studied the texts that we read, they understood more deeply and intuitively than we do what God wants?
I really do not disagree easily with the medieval authorities or the Geonim. Every period in the chain has an advantage over those that come after it. But the Talmud has formal authority in addition to its content-based, substantive advantage. On the content-based substantive plane, there really is no sharp line; it is a continuous and gradual decline.
You go back in time to learn as a study partner with Rav Pappa in tractate Bava Kamma. Clearly, in pilpul and analysis you run circles around him. But do you really think that when he thinks about conceptual reasoning—reasoning that of course he will not be all that good at distilling and explaining—he will see something in reality more clearly than you do? How did this magic happen? Is it different genetics? Maybe the form of education they had? I really cannot understand you. Obviously Moses our Teacher and his students had better intuition than we do. But 1,500 years later, when we know what textual sources they memorized and studied, why should there be any advantage?
This seems to me like plain stubbornness. So Moses our Teacher has an advantage over me, but Rav Pappa does not? Why not? Exactly where does the line run? I said that it is gradual. Do you want to claim that there is a sharp line that runs at Moses our Teacher? At Joshua son of Nun? Rabbi Akiva? Where?
It has nothing to do with genetics or with educational style. It is a game of telephone that becomes more and more distorted over the generations. Very simple.
And I ask: why is it such an extreme case, one that almost never happens, that you would disagree with the Talmud normatively on a matter of Jewish law? What advantage do the Amoraim have over you? Being closer to the giving of the Torah, with more accurate intuition, sounds to me like a very forced excuse. If anything, our knowledge today is much broader, including halakhic normative knowledge, and our moral norms are much more objectively correct—the generations have advanced.
Doesn’t the fact that you do this so very rarely hint that you are afraid of the practical implications without philosophical justification?