Q&A: Writing Down the Oral Torah
Writing Down the Oral Torah
Question
1. How do you understand the reason for the prohibition against writing down the Oral Torah? (Whether it is Torah-level or rabbinic doesn’t matter.)
2. What was the concern that justified writing it down at the point when they decided there was no choice but to write? Seemingly, no unusual event happened in the time of Rabbi Judah the Prince or afterward.
3. Why is it permitted today to write down the Oral Torah even though the above concern has been removed?
4. What would Judaism look like today had the Talmud not been written down (that is, there would be no canonical text with normative authority), assuming we have no Sanhedrin?:
Answer
- The common claim is that writing fixes things in place, and we really do see that with our own eyes.
2. They saw that the Torah was being forgotten. It’s a process, and at some stage it ripens. No special event has to happen for that.
3. What concern has been removed?
4. It is very doubtful there would have been Judaism.
Discussion on Answer
Regarding 1: What is the downside of fixing Jewish law in place? Where do you feel the damage is most severe in Judaism today because of that fixation?
A general question that I don’t know how to answer. The entire form of halakhic thinking seems distorted to me. The use of second-order instead of first-order is a direct result of the writing.
But you demonstrate the use of first-order in several places despite the writing. I’m asking what was lost and cannot be restored.
I don’t think anything was lost. It created a problematic approach to Jewish law.
Regarding 4, it seems to me we would have gotten something like Ethiopian Judaism. But we would have been in a big muddle of different “Judaisms,” with great difficulty maintaining a unifying framework (other than the Written Torah)