Q&A: Putting the Oral Torah into Writing
Putting the Oral Torah into Writing
Question
Dear Rabbi Michael, hello,
Once again, many thanks for your classes in Ra'anana.
I have a question/thought that I didn't get a chance to ask you this morning, following some learning I did on Shavuot. It is related and not related to the topic of the current series, "rabbinic law."
The general topic is the status of the Oral Torah after it was written down.
The Sages say: Matters transmitted orally you are not permitted to say in writing.
The Maharal explains the logic: Know that it is not fitting for the Oral Torah to be in writing, because the Oral Torah consists of the details of the commandment and its explanations, and this has no limit or end, for the details have no end. And it would not be a complete thing if one wrote down only part of it. Therefore the Oral Torah should not be written at all in incomplete form, because writing indicates completeness, that everything is here together, whereas in the Oral Torah that is impossible, as we have said. But with speech, the nature of speech is such that not everything is there together, for when one utterance is spoken and then the next, the first utterance has already passed, and completeness does not apply to speech. Therefore the Oral Torah should not be written at all. And the opposite is also true: the Written Torah is complete and whole… (Tiferet Yisrael, I think chapter 68; Maimonides says similar things in Guide for the Perplexed, part I, chapter 71).
In a vivid formulation, the Vilna Gaon says: "Come, eat of my bread"—this is the Written Torah, which is bread as mentioned above. Just as bread is fully prepared and lacks only being eaten, so too the Torah is already fully prepared. "And drink of the wine I have mixed"—this is the Oral Torah, because everything is blended together in it, as I explained above…
As is well known, later Rabbi Judah the Prince edited the Oral Torah on the basis of "It is a time to act for the Lord; they have voided Your Torah." People tend to think (perhaps) that this was a "small technical deviation" in the course of history, when Rabbi simply decided to put things in writing. But according to the Sages and the Maharal above, the Oral Torah today exists in a "state of aggregation" that it is not supposed to be in, which is not the right one. According to the Vilna Gaon's metaphor, we turned wine into bread; we turned something that is supposed to be breathing, alive, and developing into something fixed and inert. The very phrase "It is a time to act for the Lord" is a very חריף expression! In other words, Rabbi did what he did as a temporary emergency measure, but instead of restoring the situation to its former state, to the original form of the Oral Torah, we continued this after-the-fact condition throughout the generations.
The fact is that the quantity of "novel insights" up to the sealing of the Mishnah/Talmud and after that sealing is on a completely different scale. (You also addressed this in another context.)
Is this a historical coincidence or a direct result of writing down the Oral Torah?
Your opinion? Have you seen any discussion of this issue?
*By the way, the Maharal there also says something that reminds me of what you said today in the class, though not exactly the same thing (he does not distinguish between thought and cognition, but rather between divine intellect and human intellect):
And you should further know that it is fitting that the Torah that is written should specifically be in writing and not oral, and that the Oral Torah should specifically be oral and not written. For the commandment itself—such as the commandment of the Sabbath, not to do labor on the Sabbath day, "for in six days the Lord made…" etc.—the essence of the commandment is cessation, that a person should rest on the seventh day. This commandment is certainly a divine command that points to an intellectual idea. But the explanation of the commandment and the details of the commandment—how the recipient of the commandment is to carry it out—this does not point to an intellectual form in the same way that the commandment itself does, for the commandment itself points to an intellectual form. But the Oral Torah, which deals with how one is to perform the commandment itself, is not a divine intellectual form like the essence of the commandment. Likewise, not to eat leaven and to eat matzah: certainly the essence of the commandment points to a divine intellectual form, but the details of how the recipient is to carry out the commandment—how he is to guard himself from leaven—this does not in itself point to a divine intellectual form as the essence of the commandment does. A parable for this: a house—grasping its essence and its form means making something that shelters and protects him so that he may dwell beneath it, and this is the concept of what is fit for dwelling. But that it should be ten handbreadths high and have an entrance ten handbreadths high, so that a person can enter there and stand upright there—this is a separate matter, and pertains only to the recipient, not to the essential concept of the house…
Answer
It is fairly clear that originally this was a historical accident, but the generations have changed, and today it does not seem practical to restore learning to a truly oral mode. The material has already been written, and it is neither practical nor correct to erase and destroy all the books. Especially since nowadays, even though the material is written, there is a detailed and complex discussion around it, so it remains Oral Torah and can continue to develop, even if we do not do that enough. This is an accident that has become something positive, and it is not worth turning the clock back. Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner writes something similar about disputes. He argues that their origin lies in an accident—the forgetting of Torah, the students of Hillel and Shammai not having apprenticed sufficiently—but today they have value, because they reveal different aspects, all of which are true. It turned out for the good.
By the way, Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner argues that all the irregularities in the Mishnah (such as "something is missing here" or forced contextual interpretations, etc.) are there so that the Mishnah will remain in the category of Oral Torah and not something fully written down, so that one would need to learn with a rabbi in order to understand it.
As for the second passage you brought, I do not think the Maharal's words are connected to the distinction I made in the class. He is speaking about a distinction between the Oral Torah and the Written Torah, not between Torah-level law and rabbinic law. (Though in the coming classes we will see that Maimonides really does identify these two distinctions.) He argues that there is a difference between the command to observe the Sabbath and the general idea of cessation (= Written Torah) and the details of how to do this (= Oral Torah). It is like the difference between the idea of a house and the details of its construction.
——————————————————————————————
Oren:
It is worth noting a similar phenomenon in Plato's writings about the dialogues between Socrates and Phaedrus, where Socrates' concern about putting information into writing is described: people would begin to lose their memory once the information was written down.
——————————————————————————————
Rabbi:
Something like this happened when calculators came in—people lost the ability to do calculations. But it seems to me that in our context this is something a bit different. When things are written down, people will cling to what is written and will not use common sense and interpretation. It is not exactly a loss of ability, but rather a different attitude toward the material. Though as a result, an actual loss of ability may indeed also come.
Discussion on Answer
Dear Oren,
Well said. The Torah is aware of this, my brother; it knowingly commanded: "And you shall teach them diligently"… Whoever studies Jewish laws every day is assured that he is a son of the World to Come.
An amazing question. Even with the nice answer, it still isn't clear why they canceled—and still cancel—the temporary emergency ruling to write it down! Even if it's for the good, there's still a violation of a Torah prohibition here, because the Written Torah is supposed to be written, and the Oral Torah only oral!
I don't think the calculator prevents people from thinking and calculating, not at all, because the calculator was developed in order to shorten easy procedures and open the door to more complicated problems. So mathematics has deepened over the last few centuries. That's only a benefit.
If the Oral Torah is written down (the current situation), people will cling to what is written and won't use common sense and interpretation… but reading itself causes a person to reflect on what he is reading, so it does echo in the mind and does activate common sense. The clear fact is that for every book, ten more books come out, no? All of that comes from using the mind, of course (whether straight or not, I can't say—there's all kinds…). Loss of what ability?