Q&A: Rabbi Eliezer
Rabbi Eliezer
Question
Hello,
I reached the Talmudic passage in Sukkah 28a, where it is told about Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus that he never said anything he had not heard from his teacher.
I seem to remember that you wrote an article about this, and so I wanted to ask: after all, new doubts always arise in life, so what did Rabbi Eliezer himself do when he had a doubt in Jewish law that he had not heard from his teachers?
Best regards
Answer
I don’t remember an article I wrote specifically about that. I mentioned it in my article on “On That Day.”
As for the matter itself, what you are raising here is the application of Jewish law to new situations, not new laws. Be that as it may, it seems to me that Rabbi Eliezer really did say things different from what he had heard, but he lived with an ethos as though everything he said was a direct outgrowth of what he had heard from his teachers. Even today you can see halakhic decisors and commentators who think that way. They are not aware that there is a great deal of novelty and interpretation in what they say relative to their teachers.
Discussion on Answer
His words are quoted in my aforementioned article.
Thank you very much,
I found support for your words in the writings of Rabbi Kook, quoted on Wiki, in the entry on Rabbi Eliezer:
Rabbi Eliezer was seen as both conservative and innovative at the same time. On the one hand, he testified about himself that: “In all my days no person ever arrived before me at the study hall, and I never slept in the study hall, neither a deep sleep nor a nap, and I never left anyone in the study hall and went out, and I never engaged in idle talk, and I never said anything that I had not heard from my teacher.” (Babylonian Talmud, tractate Sukkah, folio 28a.) Yet elsewhere it was written about him: “He expounded matters that no ear had ever heard before” (Avot of Rabbi Natan, chapter 6, paragraph 3). Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook explains this contradiction by saying that Rabbi Eliezer understood things from his teacher’s words that no one else understood, and therefore his teacher indeed said these things, but still no ear had ever heard them before[12].