Q&A: Authority of the Amoraim
Authority of the Amoraim
Question
The question is general, but I’m focusing on a specific commandment: regarding wasting seed, there is the rationale brought in the Talmud, the Shulchan Arukh, etc., that the problem is murder—something that makes no sense at all, since in any case the overwhelming majority of drops do not produce offspring, and if the point is murder then they too “die.”
And there is also the discussion about the interpretation of the verses, where it seems there was a significant influence from the region where the sages of the Talmud lived—the Zoroastrian religion—where this was explicitly a central prohibition, and it seems to me that there too the rationale is murder.
The understanding is that the sages have authority to establish prohibitions even if it is not an essential authority, but what is the authority with regard to the Amoraim, when there was already no Sanhedrin? And it also seems that there is no immediately binding authority in the practical law of the Talmud, such as the size of a class. And if we assume that the sages also have interpretive authority, do the Amoraim have the power to derive their own interpretation from a verse that was not mentioned before?
If there is an article on the subject, I’d be happy to have it. Thanks.
Answer
I didn’t understand anything here. I’ve written quite a bit on the topic of authority, and you can search here on the site. The Sanhedrin and the Talmud have formal authority to interpret the Torah and to legislate decrees and enactments. The sages after them do not. Influences are not really interesting, since all of us are influenced by things. In the end, if you have substantive arguments for why this is a mistake, you can attribute it to influences, but why is that important? If it’s wrong, it’s wrong, regardless of influences.
As for treating wasting seed as murder, simply speaking, that is not really the rationale. At most one can say that there is some aspect of murder here (“as if he shed blood”). The source that seems more serious is “You shall not commit adultery,” meaning adultery by hand (Babylonian Talmud, Niddah 13b).
Discussion on Answer
Every person is influenced by all kinds of things. That is why we have different interpretations of things. Influence is part of who we are, so I don’t see any relevance at all to this discussion.
Besides that, your factual-interpretive claims themselves seem to me to be floating in the air. Typical humanities-style speculations (nonsense).
The point about influences is that there is no reason to rely on them if the argument is not a direct objection to the prohibition but only plausibility: if they were not influenced, there is no reason to assume that the prohibition came from elsewhere. And if so, if one does rely on them in an essential way, there has to be an assumption that they are not being influenced—certainly not to the extreme level of inventing a prohibition.
And what I mentioned about the rationale of murder was only to show that this is the same rationale as in the Zoroastrian religion, for the sake of the assumption that the prohibition indeed came from there. I would be very glad to get an answer to both questions. Thanks.