Question

In honor of Rabbi Michael, greetings and abundant blessings,
 
I see that the Rabbi writes in several places that we accept the authority of the Talmud because it was accepted by all Israel. The Rabbi also once wrote to me that we try to be as close as possible to the speech at Mount Sinai, and the Rabbi also sometimes writes that the sages can err in Jewish law (which is of course clear from the laws of the guilt-offering in Leviticus, which comes for an error by the whole congregation). So the point is the acceptance of something worthy.
 
However, the Talmud was not accepted by the Karaites. According to the version of at least some of the Karaites, Karaism is a response to an attempt to sanctify the Talmud. Karaism was always there; the moment they tried to sanctify the Talmud, it had to define itself as separate. We define ourselves in relation to what is different.
 
That is also understandable, because the Pharisees and the sages were the Reform movement of their time. Ezekiel says that the priests, the sons of Zadok, will be the servants of God, and in the New Testament it says several times, “the Sanhedrin and the chief priests,” so the Sanhedrin, although at times Sadducees may perhaps have sat in it, was an institution that was not accepted by the whole people and seems to have been a Reform innovation.
 
Karaism was apparently the continuation of Sadducee groups and those close to them (Boethusians, Essenes, the Judean Desert sects…) that lost their power with the destruction of the Temple, which had been the center of activity.
 
And not for nothing. It says, “If a matter is too difficult for you… then you shall come to the Levitical priests or to the judge… in the place that the Lord shall choose.”
 
The Torah strongly emphasizes that the right to issue halakhic rulings is bound up with sitting in the Temple. The possibility of issuing halakhic rulings in exile is foreign to the Torah and amounts to Reform.
 
Reform is dangerous according to the words of the Torah. It says, “You shall not add and you shall not subtract.” Therefore, if one wants to be most faithful to the Torah, one must make the greatest effort and rule according to the Torah and the most minimal tradition possible, such as simply knowing the language and the agreements necessary for a community. But in the private sphere, everything should follow an attempt to come as close as possible to the Written Torah and not sanctify any other text (though one can certainly become wiser from the interpretations of the sages, but not sanctify them as binding, because that is adding and subtracting), especially when people recite, “who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us” over hand-washing, the Hanukkah lights, and the reading of the Megillah—this is like a declaration of intent as though God “commanded” the Reform or gave it authority.)
 
If you want to go by the spirit of the Torah and be Reform, you can be Reform all the way. There are many such people in America. You do not need to stop at the Talmud. Most of the Jewish people today are Reform (I mainly mean American Jewry), so it would seem that this too has been accepted by the nation. There is something very deep in Reform—an individual, autonomous encounter with God while being critical of religion. Spinoza was the first in this.
 
Therefore I see no escape—either to sanctify only the Written Torah and try to extract from tradition (which did not necessarily pass through rabbinic literature, but also through the popular language, the Sadducees, and the Karaites) the bare minimum necessary, or to be Reform all the way.
 
The acceptance of the Talmud by the nation for the sake of an administrative code also does not sound relevant, because many challenge it today anyway, which turns its acceptance into something arbitrary, at most meant to advance the political goals of rabbinic Orthodoxy.
 
What does the Rabbi think?