Q&A: The Contribution of the Sages’ Work to General Culture
The Contribution of the Sages’ Work to General Culture
Question
Hey there,
It is commonly thought, and in my opinion rightly so, that the influence of the Sages on general world culture is extremely slight, if such an influence exists at all.
A. On the factual level, do you agree? If not, can you point to a real cultural influence that does exist?
B. I find this puzzling, because even an ignorant boor and self-hating Jew like me recognizes that there is enormous richness and depth in the Sages.
C. The question also has a theological dimension, and perhaps that itself is part of the answer: rabbinic theology (that is, theologies, in the plural…) is “weak,” both intellectually and in the practical sense of addressing human beings’ existential impulses. Therefore it loses much of its attractiveness.
D. Of course, for my question to be fair, a basis for comparison is needed, that is, a control group. If, for example, someone were to point to the meager influence of religious Islamic culture on general culture, that would challenge my assumption.
E. But in my view that is not really a serious challenge… There is no real basis for Islam’s claim to faithfully continue the original message, the one given at Sinai. Therefore one can say that Islam’s “appeal” is flawed from the outset (and I apologize in advance to this site’s Muslim readers…).
F. Not so with the work of the Sages. According to its own view, and in my justified opinion, it is faithful to the original message, a message that should have been more historically vital in a real sense. So the puzzle remains.
What do you think?
Answer
In my opinion this is mainly a question of accessibility. The Talmud is not accessible to the general reader, and it requires linguistic skill and halakhic knowledge that he does not have. Mythology is literature, and as such it is accessible to everyone. The fact is that even today the Talmud is barely known to the secular Jew and has almost no influence on him. So what do you expect from a Chinese or Native American non-Jew?
Discussion on Answer
Shai,
As for historical influence: as far as I know, Maimonides’ influence on Aquinas is only philosophical and theological. In any case, that has nothing to do with the part of Maimonides’ work that has a rabbinic-Sages character. Besides, I was talking about the work of the Sages proper, not about a figure who operated many centuries later in a different context.
The same goes for Kabbalah, which as you know only began to take shape in the 13th century in southern France / northern Spain.
The same goes for the Maharal.
As for your claim that Christianity and Islam are derivatives of rabbinic thought—you’re definitely telling me something new… Can you give meaningful examples of that?
Michi,
I agree that there is indeed an accessibility problem here, but that is exactly what I’m complaining about.
From a philosophical and theological standpoint, I would expect a body of work based on divine Torah to be much more “accessible.” What is missing in the rabbinic world is that Kookian “universality.”
And once again I’ll use a control group: Buddhism. Even though Buddhism was cut off from the West—the standard-bearer of general world culture—for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years, once physical proximity was created it began to seep into general culture. Why? Because it apparently has that universality which is a necessary condition for something to have value.
By contrast, the thought of the Sages literally spent the night in the alleyways of the gentiles’ houses in Europe, yet that proximity did not help it settle in their hearts at all.
Just to emphasize: I’m not claiming there is some problem with a culture that requires “specialization” and “professionalization.” I’m claiming that even such a culture has to ground its content in foundations universal enough for it to be “accessible.” As everyone knows, the gentiles are much stupider than we are, but even their stupidity has limits. If they had identified something of sufficient value in the Sages, they would not have been embarrassed to draw more from them.
They didn’t do that.
Doron,
Aren’t Christian values values that were taken from Judaism in the period of the Sages?
I assume that if Jesus had lived in the biblical period, Christianity would have taken on a very different character.
Doron,
Buddhist culture deals with man and with universal matters. That is why it is completely accessible, apart from the issue of linguistic translation. The Sages deal with redeeming a firstborn donkey and with the laws of ritual impurity and purity. What exactly do you expect a foreign reader to do with that?
Shai,
I wasn’t talking about “values” but about “creative output.” I mainly mean texts, the traditional topics they deal with, the literary and aesthetic loads they carry, and so on.
But even if we were talking about values per se… the central value of the work of the Sages is the development of the Oral Torah. Where do you see that value being absorbed outside Judaism? Even within Judaism itself it has not always found a home.
Beyond that, the Sages place great importance on the holiness of the Land and the holiness of the Jewish people, or at least its uniqueness. Show me a non-Jewish culture in which those are central values.
Michi,
It’s hard, really hard, to do business with you, and stealing horses together would surely be impossible.
I ask about A and you answer me about P…
Even so, I’m actually fond of you, to your misfortune.
Happiness and health.
I answered exactly what you asked. The Sages were not trying to create literature, nor to influence the world. They were trying to build a halakhic Jewish people. Therefore they did not create texts meant to be accessible and influential. They cared about that as much as the peel of a garlic clove (and so do I).
Doron,
There is a lecture series about this in “Broadcast University” (published by the Ministry of Defense), “The Jewish Sources of Christianity.” The author of the book brings direct influences of the Oral Torah on early Christianity.
https://kotar-cet-ac-il.ezproxy.haifa.ac.il/KotarApp/Viewer.aspx?nBookID=25819309#1.0.1.default
A question of this sort is very tricky. It is very hard to define cultural and value influences. Almost anything created at some stage can be found to have earlier roots in different places. The question of who deserves the copyright on an idea or value is almost impossible to answer.
I addressed this in a lecture I once gave on the Pnei Yehoshua at a conference held at Bar-Ilan. I chose to speak about buds of Brisker-style thinking in his teachings. He really was not that, but there are quite a few places where he presents a distinctly Brisker idea. In the introduction I discussed the difficulty of locating and defining cultural influence and the emergence of an idea or mode of thought. Unfortunately I can’t find a recording of that conference or that lecture online.
Shai,
The attached link isn’t accessible.
If you brought this source, which I looked at years ago, as support for your claims, then you can surely also give two or three meaningful examples of the influence of the Sages on Christianity.
What are they?
Doron, for example: the concept of messianism and the focus on repairing the soul.
But in general, I don’t understand why it matters who influenced whom. The question that ought to interest us is whether it is true, not who the thinker was.
Quite apart from whether the two concepts you mentioned are a matter of “creative output” or of “values” — and I of course admit that the distinction between the two is not all that sharp — we still have to ask: do Flusser and serious scholars like him really testify to a deep connection between the work of the Sages and major historical phenomena in world culture?
As a layman in the field, all I can tell you is that on the face of it, the two concepts you mentioned, messianism and repairing the soul, appear in a very different context in the transition from the Sages to Christianity.
First of all, Christian messianism is carried first and foremost through a human figure, Jesus. That is not the situation with the Sages.
As for repairing the soul, it is roughly the same thing: basic Christian doctrine speaks primarily about redemption in the next world through faith in the messiah, the son of God. That apparently does not exist among the Sages. They are much more practical.
As for the fundamental question, you are right. It really matters less, because the main thing is the truth. But the road to truth also passes through different cultural prisms. And from that comes our ability to assess the strengths or weaknesses of those cultures, insofar as we think they have drifted away from the truth.
I pointed to a plausible possibility of interpreting the central trend in the work of the Sages as a deviation from the truth.
As I said, if professional scholars really do say something different from the impression I formed, then of course I will defer to them.
By the way, that same apparent flaw that I find in the work of the Sages — more precisely, in the background of the work, meaning its philosophical and theological assumptions — is, in my opinion, also supported by the Sages themselves. I mean the meta-halakhic conception that they themselves hold, and that is reflected in aggadic stories such as the Oven of Akhnai or the story about the “training tour” that God gives Moses in Rabbi Akiva’s study hall. At the moment I can’t recall any other meta-halakhic aggadot of that kind, but I’m sure that someone with your religious background — I assume you’re religious — knows others.
In any case, I always thought that these guys’ self-irony was much more problematic than they would dare admit.
Doron,
I think that the Sages’ literature (the tradition of rabbinic literature from the Middle Ages) did influence European philosophical culture.
In the Middle Ages, the theologian Thomas Aquinas was influenced by Maimonides; during the Renaissance, the philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who is commonly credited with inaugurating Renaissance philosophy, was influenced by kabbalistic literature (he says this explicitly in his writings); during the Enlightenment, Friedrich Hegel was influenced by the Maharal. And more broadly, Christianity and Islam are derivatives of rabbinic thought.