Q&A: Contradictions Between Talmudic Passages
Contradictions Between Talmudic Passages
Question
Rabbi, does the Talmud have to be uniform? Sometimes there are contradictory things in different passages, and people really strain to say there is no disagreement between them, when it seems much simpler to say that these are transcripts from different study houses that disagree with one another… (Of course, you don’t create a dispute when there’s no need, but sometimes it really does seem necessary, and it’s clearly much simpler than the forced reconciliation attempts…) And if the reason people try to do this is that they think the redaction was supposed to produce a uniform document, then what do they mean when they say that there is in fact a disagreement between passages? That Ravina and Rav Ashi just missed that part?
Answer
This is known as a dispute between the Sephardic sages (who follow in the footsteps of the Rif), who hold that there is no necessity for coherence, and the Ashkenazic sages (the Tosafists), who “made the Talmud round like a ball” (in the words of Maharshal), meaning that they tried to create coherence.
The redaction of the Talmud was probably an ongoing process and was not done entirely by Rav Ashi and Ravina.
But in general, one should know that rules are never absolute. Even if you assume that the Talmud is coherent, sometimes you find that it isn’t—then it isn’t. And vice versa. This is only the default assumption. And so it is with all rules in Jewish law and in the Talmud. These are approximate rules or starting assumptions in the absence of arguments pointing in another direction.
Discussion on Answer
In my humble opinion, it is very hard to say that Tosafot actually believed the Talmud was coherent.
One can explain Tosafot’s approach by saying that since we accepted the Talmud upon ourselves as a single unit, it is coherent by virtue of that acceptance; and when we reconcile two contradictory passages, what we are really reconciling is our acceptance of both passages. (Using this kind of paradigm is very common with the Shulchan Arukh when people reconcile contradictions within it.)
According to this, the sages of Spain tend more toward the view of the Hazon Ish (in another context), that the acceptance of the Talmud is based on the truth of its contents (which fits the spirit of the Sephardic sages, who here and there dared to depart from the words of the Talmud), and therefore they do not accept the Tosafist approach.
Boaz,
I don’t know why it is hard to think that this is how Tosafot understood it. Most learners think this way even today, and it seems very plausible to me that this is indeed what the Tosafists thought.
As for our acceptance of the text, I did write along similar lines in the past (see my article on the hermeneutics of canonical texts), but that direction seems difficult to me. I don’t see much point in reconciling texts with one another unless that really is what they mean. The same is true of the Shulchan Arukh, and in my opinion there is really no point in reconciling contradictions in it unless the reconciliation is persuasive. If I remember correctly, I once saw an article in the journal Yad HaRav Nissim by Professor Benayahu (Rabbi Nissim’s son) that dealt with this. Seemingly, the Shulchan Arukh is a summary of the Beit Yosef and not a law book that intended to be coherent.
Ofer,
the base material did come from different study houses, but the Ashkenazic assumption is that the redaction did want to achieve coherence, and therefore wove the sources together and created a coherent text. The question is how true that is and how successful the editors were in doing so. In my opinion, as long as the reconciliation is acceptable, you can accept it—but when the reconciliation is forced, it is better to assume there is a disagreement between passages. Quite a few medieval authorities (Rishonim) did this as well, including the Tosafists in cases where they could not find a reasonable reconciliation.
To the Rabbi,
I think most learners today think the Shulchan Arukh was written in a coherent way, which really does not emerge clearly at all.
The Tummim, in section 25, was even driven to say that the Shulchan Arukh was written with divine inspiration, which proves that the Shulchan Arukh is not coherent and that therefore divine inspiration is needed. [No one, for example, assumes that Maimonides was written with divine inspiration; divine inspiration is an escape from the reality of disorder.]
My impression is that most later authorities build towering structures on top of the contradictions in the Shulchan Arukh, even though I assume, as stated, that no one really thought the Shulchan Arukh intended that. And it is commonly said among people in the study hall that they are not interested in what the Shulchan Arukh intended; and although this is a joke (along the lines of the famous quip, “What does Frenk understand about Maimonides?”), it is not detached from reality.
Thanks. Does the Rabbi know of any arguments either way? How am I supposed to know what to think? Is this a historical question about what the role of the redaction actually was? Did it create something uniform or not? After all, from what I understand, it’s clear that the base material comes from different study houses—and if so, then there really is no reason to assume coherence… right?