Q&A: The Authority of the Talmud in Our Time
The Authority of the Talmud in Our Time
Question
With God's help,
I heard a lecture by the Rabbi in which he discussed the idea that the authority of the Talmud and the Oral Torah stems from the public's acceptance of this supreme institution. Therefore, if there are mistakes, it is still binding nonetheless. But surely the authority of those people does not come from Sinai.
I wanted to ask the Rabbi why he thinks that nowadays this institution still has some authority. After all, the number of Reform and Conservative Jews is greater than the number of Orthodox Jews. And they are organized under a shared institutional framework that decides Jewish law for all those communities.
Wouldn't it follow, according to this, that the Rabbi ought to belong to the Reform movement?
Answer
This refers only to the Talmud. The authority of the Oral Torah comes from its having been given at Sinai. The question is: who is the sage whose Torah counts as Oral Torah—that is, who is authorized to interpret the Written Torah and create an authoritative Oral Torah? Here is where the sages of the Talmud come in: the public accepted them, and therefore they are the ones authorized to determine Jewish law.
Reform Jews are not committed to Jewish law, so they are not part of the equation. Conservatives are in fact not essentially different from the Orthodox, and therefore I think that overall they have legitimate standing. That does not mean I have no disagreements with them, but there are disagreements within the Orthodox world as well. And by the way, they are certainly not organized together, and not even separately.
As is well known, the priest asked Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschutz why he did not follow the majority—that is, the Christians—and Rabbi Jonathan answered him that following the majority is a rule of conduct in situations of doubt. He was not in doubt. The same applies to me. Since when does the majority determine matters like these? Even in Jewish law, a majority within a forum that did not convene and vote together does not decide anything.
And beyond all that, the authority of the Talmud was accepted, and annulling it now would require the opposite kind of agreement. At present there is no such agreement. Even the Conservatives, in their halakhic writings, are committed to the Talmud, though with an interpretation that is sometimes broader.
Discussion on Answer
Indeed. Both outrageous and question-begging.
But the Reform are the majority in the world, and they nullify the Talmud. I didn't understand your argument in the last paragraph.
The Christians are an even larger majority. Read the beginning of the verse.
It's just that from the answer it sounds like there are several rebuttals here ("beyond all that"), so really there's only one rebuttal here, namely that the Reform are outside the bounds when it comes to determining Jewish law.
By the way, can this fit with Rabbi Kook's view? He argues that sages can interpret the Torah however they want according to the time and the era, and the Sanhedrin were the Reformers of old, so according to his view it would indeed be hard to explain why not go with the Reform?
Not at all however they want, but rather however they understand. Pay very close attention.
(I'm not managing to post a long comment, so I'll split this into two comments:)
Not exactly, Rabbi. He argues that they have the authority to interpret the Torah according to how they understand *morality*, and not according to what straightforwardly emerges from the text. In other words, the authority is to subordinate the text to the moral principles that change in every generation.
The example from Rabbi Kook is that when the Sanhedrin is reestablished, it will obviously interpret the verses about sacrifices in a way that does not obligate bringing them, because morality today shows that the commandment of sacrifices is plainly immoral. That is really not interpretation according to "how they understand," but according to how they want to understand.
And in this respect the Reform are exactly like Rabbi Kook's Sanhedrin, because they too of course do not dispute that the Torah's commandment of charity is still relevant today, or the prohibition of idolatry. They only cancel the other commandments that, in their understanding, are no longer relevant today: there's no problem marrying non-Jews, since they are not idol worshipers nowadays; there's no problem doing labor on the Sabbath, since nowadays all labor is easy; there should be no circumcision, because nowadays it is immoral (like sacrifices according to Rabbi Kook).
In short, the Reform are doing exactly what Rabbi Kook argued would be within the Sanhedrin's authority to do, one for one. See his "Lenvukhei HaDor" on this.
Morality is part of the interpretive toolbox (see Halbertal's book, Interpretive Revolutions). I have no principled problem with a Reform interpretation that is based on moral rules, if they were committed to Jewish law. But they aren't. Beyond that, there are also considerations of authority (the Great Court, etc.) that they ignore. This comparison is disingenuous.
Against the argument that one should follow the mistaken majority, it is common to give Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschutz's answer.
This week I found an article by Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman called "Kovetz Ma'amarei Ikveta DeMeshicha," and there (on p. 5) he brings this answer in the name of Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschutz. He adds that this is also explained in Torat Moshe by the Hatam Sofer, and then he adds another answer at length there in the article—an answer that really annoyed me:
"But according to what was explained above, there is in any case no room for this question, for the verse 'follow the majority' was said regarding judges, all of whom are fit to judge, since they are not personally interested parties. But if the majority of the judges are interested parties and the minority are not, then we listen to the minority.
And in matters of faith and religion, it is impossible for a person to recognize the truth unless he is free of the desires of this world, and such people are found in no nation or language except among the holy sages of Israel, who are like angels of God. And even if among the sages of the nations there may at some time be people clean of the desires of this world, they are a tiny minority compared to our holy sages of blessed memory, who numbered in the thousands and tens of thousands, as they said: there were twice as many prophets in Israel as those who left Egypt… for without Torah study it is impossible for any person to free himself from the evil inclination, which bends his intellect toward his desires," end quote.
By the way, in the Haredi public one hears the claim that the "distortions" found in the Religious Zionist public—and all the more so in the secular public—are the result of the neveilot and tereifot they eat under the Rabbinate's "kosher certification," which dulls their hearts. (Which of course cannot be said about the local rabbi, who abstains from meat foods…)
Aside from the arrogance in those claims, they also contain a whiff of begging the question.