Q&A: The Oral Torah
The Oral Torah
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I wanted to understand how the Sages got from the thirteen hermeneutical principles by which the Torah is interpreted, and several other Jewish laws that were transmitted orally,
to everything that exists today?……
Answer
It’s hard to answer briefly. That is almost the entire Torah. Even the principles were probably not transmitted from Sinai exactly as they are, since their number swelled over the years. Moreover, there are many expositions that are not based on the listed principles, but on other methods and principles. But overall, the interpretation of the Sages + expositions using the principles + rabbinic laws brought us to what we have today. If you want an example and a more detailed explanation of this process, see the second book in the Talmudic Logic series (available only on Amazon), on generals and particulars.
Discussion on Answer
Rabbi, with all the knowledge we have today, is it possible to do regression, (reconstructing backward from the information, conclusions, and analyses) and know really precisely what exactly we received from Sinai, literally, one to one?
Aside from commandments and Jewish laws, what do we need all the rest for? Seriously.
A suggestion—because of the repeated questions, maybe it would be worthwhile to open a “topic in matters of faith” called the Oral Torah, and put in there all the questions about tradition and the Oral Torah.
Moshe,
Yes.
Musha,
I don’t know how to do that. And it has nothing to do with the knowledge we have today. I don’t see how it could contribute to such a “regression.”
Technological knowledge, computing, etc.
I thought it would be worth it, since with everything they find they try to reconstruct what it was like so-and-so many years ago, what it was like at the beginning, and so on. So I said that if they worked backward they could reach the pure original source of the Oral Torah from Sinai.
The question is what the obstacles along the way could be, and how to get around them. And how much it would affect the results, and how long it could take, who would pay for it, and whether it would help us, and whether we would discover something different from what we expected. Or maybe the finding would be a filtered support, cleared of all the “dust” that accumulated on the Oral Torah, and we’d see what develops and who would advocate such a reconstruction, supervise it, manage it, and budget it.
Rabbi, maybe you know of a book that gathers together all the innovations from Moses our teacher and his generation until the First Temple and its generation, and from there until the end of the Second Temple, and from there until the innovations of the last authorities of the Sanhedrin, and from the Sanhedrin until the generation of the Amoraim, and from then until our own time.
How could there be such a book if the Oral Torah was not permitted to be written down? As for customs, see the book by Y. Shitspinski, in the first volume.
We already concluded in the past that innovations are permitted, because they are not laws and not laws given to Moses at Sinai. I’m talking about writing them nowadays, because the prohibition against writing down the Oral Torah has already been voided. (I wasn’t talking about customs.)
By the interpretation of the Sages, do you mean interpretation of the plain meaning of the verse?
Like “these words… shall be upon your heart” = the sections of the Shema?