Q&A: In an Ideal World of Jewish Law Without Disputes
In an Ideal World of Jewish Law Without Disputes
Question
With God's help,
Rabbi, I wanted to ask you, as someone with relatively broad knowledge: if there were no disputes at all in Jewish law—say there were a Sanhedrin that ruled according to the majority—do you think observing Jewish law would become much easier and simpler?
It seems to me that quite a few of today’s laws stem from doubts and concerns for additional opinions. And in a world with uniform halakhic rulings, presumably things would be much clearer and easier to apply and remember.
Answer
That would not be an ideal world but a catastrophic one, in which people would not act according to what they themselves think, but according to instructions from above. I assume that even when there is a Sanhedrin, that will not be the situation. They would decide only on points where uniformity is important for the proper functioning of society (so that people can marry one another and eat in one another’s homes, and the like). Anything beyond what is necessary would remain for people themselves to decide.
But even hypothetically, if a Sanhedrin were to decide to close off all disputes, there would still remain a great many doubts that would be open to discussion: doubts about reality, and doubts about understanding the law and applying it. Only a not-so-large part of halakhic deliberation concerns the question of how to decide between halakhic decisors. From my point of view it is a tiny part, because halakhic decisors have no binding status. That small part would indeed disappear in that hypothetical and terrible world.
Discussion on Answer
No, he did not. The overwhelming majority of its laws and details were created over the generations. I’m not at all sure that observance of Jewish law in Moses’ time looked anything like it does today, with the accepted level of precision.
Were there disputes in Moses’ time? Didn’t disputes only begin in the time of Hillel and Shammai?
I didn’t write that there were disputes. What I wrote is that apparently Jewish law did not look as it does today, to the extent that there even was “Jewish law” in the sense commonly understood today. But I would guess there were disputes as well. The disputes existed before Hillel and Shammai. The Jerusalem Talmud and Rashi on Chagigah say that the first dispute was between the two Yose ben… figures regarding laying hands on a festival offering on a Jewish holiday, but it is clear that there were disputes even before that. I assume that Hillel and Shammai was the first dispute that split the people into two schools that disagreed on many varied issues in a way that made resolution impossible.
For example, regarding the dispute over whether one must put on tefillin on the Sabbath—did Moses receive that instruction from God? If so, how did a dispute develop about it? If not, how did people act at that time? How did they decide? Or did each person do whatever he thought?
I have no idea, but even if Moses received something, it can be forgotten, or someone can challenge it on logical grounds and the like (and then the challenger suspects that perhaps Moses never received it). But of course the overwhelming majority of Torah-level laws were not received by Moses at Sinai; they developed over the generations. Obviously, in periods when a dispute is raging, different groups practice differently. I’m not really managing to understand what the problem is here. What exactly is there here to discuss?
The problem is that if Moses received from God that one does not put on tefillin on the Sabbath, and he transmitted that to the people, and everyone practiced that way, and they passed it down from generation to generation—how does someone suddenly get up and dispute it?
I’ll say it again. Even if Moses received the way to put on tefillin and it was passed down from generation to generation, at some stage a sage can arise and say that it doesn’t seem right to him for this or that reason, and propose an alternative. Since it doesn’t seem right to him, he probably also won’t accept that this is a tradition from Moses, and will claim that it is an innovation that arose over the generations.
That’s it. I think we’ve exhausted this.
If one can claim that this is an innovation that arose over the generations, then one can make the same claim about commandments that are written in the Torah.
Indeed one can. And many in fact do claim that (biblical criticism). It’s only the inference “if… then…” that I didn’t understand. There isn’t the slightest connection between the two.
Are there critiques of the Bible in the Talmud? If there are, then I understand, but if not, then I don’t understand why the Tannaim would claim regarding certain laws that they are innovations that arose later, but not about commandments.
What was it like in the time of Moses our rabbi? Presumably he received and transmitted the Torah with all its laws and details.