Q&A: The Talmud, Jewish Law, Investigations
The Talmud, Jewish Law, Investigations
Question
Hello Rabbi Michael,
I have two questions:
1. I read in your book “Walking Among Those Who Stand” and understood it this way: in practice, the Talmud is a kind of “tradition from below” that essentially rests on the fact that the entire people accepted the Talmud, by virtue of our relying on them as the most trustworthy bridge and as our transmitters of the tradition back to the days of the Sanhedrin, which had authority to issue halakhic rulings and was the formal authority (the Sanhedrin). If so, my understanding is that the Talmud is a collection of the rulings and opinions of the transmitters of the tradition, who heard from the official Sanhedrin, but the Talmud itself and its sages (who appear in the Talmud and the Mishnah) are not actually the Sanhedrin. Did I understand correctly?
2. Regarding Maimonides’ Jewish law that God is not a body and has no bodily form, there he includes anyone who believes otherwise in the category of a “heretic and unbeliever.” My question is: where does Maimonides learn this from? Is there proof for it in the Talmuds? Personally, I do not believe that God is a body because of my own reasoning, but it is puzzling to me why Maimonides rules this way, and even more so—does a ruling of his of this kind, which does not appear in the Talmud or the Mishnah, have any binding force?
I had an argument with someone who claimed that according to his view I am a heretic simply because I cast doubt on Maimonides’ opinion on this issue. I am not casting doubt on the point that God is not a body (in my opinion), but do we have any obligation to heed this ruling of Maimonides in a hypothetical case where I thought otherwise? Especially since it has no basis in the Talmuds.
Answer
- I did not understand the question. Are you asking whether the Talmud contains no rulings of the Talmudic sages themselves, and that everything is just tradition from rulings of the Sanhedrin? Clearly it also contains their own rulings.
- In my opinion, there is no such obligation at all.
Discussion on Answer
I am asking this way:
If by the time of the Mishnah and the Talmud there was already no Sanhedrin, and yet the Sages still created Jewish laws of their own accord—that means, as I understand it, that they had no formal authority. And when there is no Sanhedrin, how could they create laws by force of the verse “according to what they instruct you”?
2. Also, even with laws and enactments that were transmitted by tradition (a law given to Moses at Sinai, for example), are we essentially relying on the Talmud as the most trustworthy transmitter of the tradition?
See the series of video lessons on the principles of faith.