Christine Hayes Lecture at CNS: "The 'Truth' About Torah"

anyway I want to welcome all of you you're in for a great treat tonight I can tell you that now with a certain sense of confidence and surety that I didn't have before because I heard her this morning as well as many of us and it's really a treat to be introduced to the world of Jewish scholarship all I want to do is to thank the various organizations that had joined in sponsoring her visit to Portland in her lecture and they are the ecumenical ministries of Oregon and the Oregon Jewish Museum the Institute for Judaic Studies and congregation of a Shalom she's one of the great Bible scholars in the world and as I said this morning I felt personally very privileged to be the rabbi here when we invited what I regard as two of the most outstanding Bible scholars in the world how many of you were here number of years ago when James Google came here good number well I'm not introducing her but I'm gonna ask Jan Alvers the executive director of the ecumenical ministries of Oregon to present our speaker thank good evening it's nice to be with you tonight friends on this rainy January evening thank you for coming out it's a pleasure to be here with you all I thank rabbi Stamper for the invitation to introduce our speaker tonight thank you to Navy Shalom for hosting this event and I think we are going to have a real treat hearing from professor Christine Hayes tonight we just had a opportunity to have dinner together and what a delightful and humble and wise woman she is so thank you for coming to Portland for the very first time and we hope it won't be the last so I'll give you a little information about professor Christine Hayes who is graduated from Harvard University and UC Berkeley Christine Hayes is Robert F and Patricia our Weiss professor of religious studies in classical Judaica before joining the Yale faculty in 1996 she was assistant professor of Hebrew studies in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University for three years Hayes most recent book what's divine about divine law early perspectives received the 2015 National Jewish Book Award in in scholarship a 2016 prose award for best book in theology and religious studies from the American Publishers Association and the 2016 Jordan Schnitzer award from the association of Jewish Studies Hayes is active in professional and academic organizations serving for many years as an editor of the encyclopedia for the Bible and it's reception and for years as co-editor of the Association for Jewish Studies review she is the current vice president for program for the association of Jewish Studies it is my great pleasure and honor to invite professor Christine Hayes to the lectern thank you so much I think never has one speaker been sponsored by so many wonderful organizations and it's it's a tremendous community and I've been really delighted to meet so many people with the meals today and to hear about the incredible work and community that is happening here in Portland well a little bit more than 2200 or 2300 years ago some Jews began to think of the Torah as conveying an unchanging universal truth and other ancient Jews of course had to disagree and pushed back against this new way of thinking and the consequences of that debate reverberate to this very day in fact they continued to this day and I'd like to explore this debate with you tonight to understand why and when some Jews began to think of the Torah as immutable unchanging truth when and why others resisted we need to trace the history of the idea of divine law just the whole idea of divine law what it even means to say that a law is divine and what I want to show you is that two very different conceptions of divine law were created in the ancient world one in Greece and one in biblical Israel and I want to show what happened when these two radically different conceptions of divine law confronted one another about 2300 years ago and how that confrontation continues to influence us today well divine law can be described very briefly as the idea that the norms that guide human behavior should somehow be connected with the divine or somehow rooted in the divine realm and that's an idea that's common to Judaism Christianity and Islam but there's really nothing inevitable about this idea I don't know very much about Chinese culture but I've been told that it's not an idea that you really find in Chinese culture where law comes from the wisdom of elders and so on and it's not something we really find in the ancient Near East the gods would give kings and rulers wisdom and principles of justice but they wrote the laws Hammurabi's code is hummer nice coat right and he's very clear about that so the idea this really robust notion of divine law in which divinity applies in some manner to the law itself it first appears in Greece and in the Hebrew Bible and that's really where our story begins and this is exactly why it begins because to the extent that the ancient Greeks and the biblical writers conceive of the divine very differently they're going to conceive of divine law very differently their ideas are going to fur diverge dramatically and that is a fact that will have very serious consequences for those ancient Jews who felt compelled to negotiate the claims of these two very different ideas all right so what does it mean to say that law is divine when we say that what claims are we making about the law what traits do we suppose a lot possesses when we say that it's divine what's so divine about divine law so I'm going to spend a few minutes first thinking about the Greek tradition that came out of the Greek philosophers before I turn to the biblical tradition and then talk about how what happened when the two collided so first in Greek thought in a great deal of Greek philosophical thought divine law is divine because it expresses the permanent structures or the deep structures of a permanent natural order the Stoics were a group of philosophers who first used the term divine law and we could stay Austin almost to refer to the natural law which they understood to be a rational order or logos they said that's embedded in and governs the natural world and human nature and they were revolutionary at the time up until then the Greeks thought that nature was chaotic it was brutish and chaotic and civilization rescued us from it they said no Nature has a deep order and for them God was nature nature was divine and therefore the rational order or the eternal reason that's embedded in the patterns that govern nature and in patterns that we can perceive in human behavior these are the reason and an rational order of God himself nature is God and God is nature for the Stoics so for them the divine law is an unwritten rational order set of patterns a logos in nature cicero gives us the classic stoic theory of natural or divine law and that's the first text on your handout and this is how he describes what the Stoics thought of natural or divine law he says true law when we use the word law we're talking about true law it is reason right reason or at those logos it's an agreement with nature its diffused over everyone consistent and everlasting it's wrong to alter this law you can't change the law of gravity for example it's not permissible to repeal any of it it's impossible to abolish it that's not how this law works law is the rational order of the universe there there will not be a different law at Rome and at Athens or a different law now and in the future but one law everlasting and immutable will hold good for all peoples in all times so for the Stoics the divine law is rational you're gonna make a little mental checklist because we're gonna be going through these later with the Bible it's rational it's true it's universal must apply to everyone and it's eternal and unchanging static and it's perfection just like the philosophers God which was a static first principle and very important for them natural or divine law was unwritten it's not a set of rules or legislation conveyed in words or statements it's the rational order of the cosmos itself and following the divine natural law embedded in nature can lead humans to true virtue and happiness now the Greeks also thought in in a binary they thought that just as there is divine law then there's something called human law they separated those two things we'll see the Bible doesn't but they separated those two things so on the one hand there's the natural or the divine law and then separate and distinct from the natural law is human positive law the laws that humans posit right that's why it's positive law the laws of human societies create the actual concrete rules and prohibitions that tell you to stop at a red light or that you'll be fined for jaywalking these are posited by human societies they're written down they're delivered in words and sentences and they're enforced by coercive Authority positive law is not Universal as particular to a given state or political entity and it's subject to change an evolution over time naturally and it doesn't necessarily reflect truth or a natural reality I don't stop at a red light because there's something about redness that makes me stop I don't stop at a lot of red lights anyway but we stop at red lights because it's a convention we've agreed to do it but that's arbitrary there's nothing rational about that it's not something inherent and redness but we need the positive laws that humans create for their states because we lack the rational perfection to read the rational order of the cosmos and follow the divine natural law that's embedded in nature so according to the Stoics a truly rational person or philosopher and the Stoics were philosophers who can perceive the rational truths that are embedded in the universe well they would just conform their behavior to the natural order and they would live justly and virtuously and such a person would never need the laws of the state the Stoics really thought they were bothersome the laws of the state but the truth is they said most of us lack the rational perfection that we need to perceive the ideal form of justice or to perceive the rational order of nature that could lead us to virtue so instead we Institute these written laws that coerce us to a basic kind of obedience not true virtue but just obedience the positive laws of our cities and states are really a second best option Plato said Plato said that even the very best laws are not very good they're a sign of shame our failure to educate ourselves to perceive virtue and pursue it through rational perfection so if you were to meet an ancient Greek philosopher and ask what's so divine about divine law they would have answered that divine law is divine by virtue of certain qualities that it possesses first and foremost that is rational right the rational is what's to for them and that means that it's true rational things are true and that's it's universal and it's static and unchanging truth is always static and unchanging but by contrast 42 biblical tradition I'm focusing on the Hebrew Bible of course the law is divine not by virtue of any qualities in it but because it was given by a God it emanates from a God who is a master of history in the Bible in the Hebrew Bible divine laws divine because it's authored by it's the command of a deity it's not the expression of some impersonal natural or divine reason like the stoic said the rational order of the cosmos it's a body of actual legislation at Sinai God gave words and laws and concrete Commandments right not just the Ten Commandments but a whole bunch of others about everything from divorce to laws of guardianship and and theft and so on so it's actual Commandments according to the biblical story that expressed the deities will so its authority is grounded not in his character or quality but in its commanding source in your second text you see it pretty clearly Moses went and repeated to the people all the commands of the Lord and all the rules and all the people answered with one voice saying all the things that Lord has commanded we will do and Moses wrote down all the commands of the Lord first time in history we have a God giving actual black and white law black letter law and it doesn't happen in the ancient Near East doesn't happen anywhere it's black letter law from this God so this divine law is written it's not a rational order it's concrete legislation formulated in words and it's designed for a particular community indeed it's to separate them from other communities and it contains some sort of arbitrary or not particularly rational laws things that aren't observed universally precisely to mark this people as different and because the divine law is a positive enactment of the will with sovereign will of the deity it's changeable because something that comes from an act of will can be changed by a subsequent act we'll and so in the biblical story there are new rules and ordinances that are issued as long as there's continued access to God's will there are four times where Moses is presented with a case somebody's gathering wood and the Sabbath he doesn't know what to do people who are in poor for Passover he doesn't know what to do there are multiple times where we there's a question about what to do God says you know what I better go back and ask the law giver and he does so new rules are needed sometimes and they're given in Deuteronomy 13 we read that Moses says or God says to the Israelites you're about to enter the land and when you come into the land things are gonna be a little bit different used to be okay to offer sacrifices anywhere once you're in the land you need to do it in just one place Deuteronomy 17 also says the day may come when you want a king if you do these are the rules the king should follow new situation new rules numbers 27 the daughters of celebified come to Moses and they say you know it's really unfair that if a man dies and has no son the property goes to his brothers what about his daughters that should come to us and Moses's let me see what God says and God says you know they're right I think that's a good idea you should write that down we'll do it that way it's a new situation it was the biblical story has no problem with that right so in the dominant biblical conception of divine law it's not the only one but it's a dominant one the divine law expresses God's will for a particular community Universal humankind in the form of a written law that makes that people fit for life in a particular place and rather than expressing some fixed rational order of universal timeless static nature it is subject to change through historical time as the circumstances arise so ancient adherence to biblical tradition if you were to ask them what's so divine about divine law they would have pointed to its origin in a divine will a will that's expressed in history rather than a fixed structure in nature the attribution of divinity to the Torah by the ancient Israelites didn't necessarily or essentially confer upon it any special qualities such as rationality some of its arbitrary you'll do this just to be different from other people kind of the more weird it is the more different you'll be don't eat these foods observe these purity practices unlike others and be a people for me we talked about that today right be holy to me for I the Lord your God am holy so it has some of these non rational Commandments in it it doesn't necessarily conform to truth it's doesn't it's particularly it's it's for particular people it's not universal and it's certainly not immutable Moses himself goes back and changes some things as needed some of the laws of the Torah are rational absolutely if it's some or not most are particular to Israel and not Universal and they can be adjusted so very different conceptions of divine law the Greek philosophical idea that I started with of divine law is this natural order embedded in nature that's rational true and beautiful and so on and the biblical conception of laws instead of written laws and commandments given by a divine being that's flexible particular and these two views of divine law collided head-on after again that young man I mentioned this morning Alexander who at the age of 23 decided to conquer the eastern end of the Mediterranean and Hellenistic ideas Greek ideas flowed in to the ancient Near East and this created a cognitive dissonance for Jews living under Hellenistic rule in the 300 years before 0 and why did they feel a cognitive dissonance because on the face of it the divine law of biblical tradition possesses many of the features that the Greek philosophers thought belonged to human law Greek thought attributes to divine law characteristics I've got a little chart on your handout right so you see the little chart there that's the Greek idea remember they're the ones who divide there's divine natural law and then there's human positive laws and for them divine natural law conforms to truth it's grounded in reason it's universal unchanging immutable eternal and it's unwritten human positive laws are necessarily true I stopped at a red light because we agree to do it it's grounded in the will of the sovereign Authority whether that's God or the King or whatever it's particularly a people and a state and a nation it can change as situations have change so it can be temporary and it's written down the divine law of the Torah didn't really have the features you see over there in column a and a whole lot of the features you see in column B and that mismatch between the Greek philosophical idea this is what a divine law should look like and the Bible's conception of divine law was obvious and troubling to ancient Jews and they responded to this cognitive dissonance in three main ways the first we're going to consider is the response of Jews who fully embraced Hellenistic philosophy Hellenistic values and that Hellenistic description of divine natural law and human positive law these Jews did not want to think of their precious and sacred Torah and they didn't want others to view their national heritage as anything less than the divine law according to the widely accepted definition of the culture that they so admired Greek culture and so they worked like crazy to shoehorn the Mosaic law the Torah given to Moses at Sinai in two column a right into the Greek definition of natural law attributing to at the characteristics of greco-roman natural law and the clearest example of that was the philosopher Philo who I also mentioned briefly earlier today Philo who died about the year fifty he was an a Jew who lived in Alexandria a Hellenized city in which there was a great amount of Hellenistic culture and philosophy and he studied philosophy he studied later in his life when he went to Rome he studied stoic philosophy in particular he believed that since the Torah of the Hebrew Bible was divine he absolutely believed that well then it had to possess the qualities of divine natural law that the philosophers the Greek philosophers are telling us that divine things should have so first of all he states outright that the law of Moses the Torah given at Sinai is in harmony with the principles of eternal nature this is text 3 the first passage there thus whoever will carefully examine the nature of the particular enactments by Moses will find that they seek to attain to the harmony the universe and are in agreement with the principles of eternal nature and he identified the Torah with reason with logos the natural law that governs the cosmos and once he had identified the law of Moses with the divine natural law he goes on to claim that it possesses the properties and qualities of Greek natural law it's universal it's rational it's identical with truth it's unchanging and believe it or not it's unwritten that one's really amazing the way he pulls that off so how does he establish these claims well first to claim that the Mosaic law is the universal law of the Cosmopolis of the world City he ignores the immediate story in which the Torah is given and God says at Sinai if you observe my laws then I you will be different from all other nations you will be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation holy to me he ignores that and he says what's important is that the story of the giving of the Torah begins with a story of the creation of the world and that narrative of the creation proves that the Torah really is intended for the entire world second he goes on to mock and scold all those who think that the Bible is literature or myth or history or drama or poetry which was the view that prevailed in the 4th century 5th century a 4th 3rd 2nd century until the Hellenistic period he says no no no it contains truth that's the next passage in the poetic work of God you will not find anything mythical or fictional but the canons of truth all inscribed well he has to deal with the Torah's written esteem ember in the Greek tradition that's an unfailing sign that something's human when it's written down it's it's laws that humans have created so final asserts that actually the written text of the Torah the mosaic code it's just a written copy of an unwritten law of nature and we know this because the patriarchs Abraham and Isaac and Jacob they observed the law before it was given at Sinai in writing how could they do that because it is the natural law and they were rationally perfect sages and as the Greek philosophers tell us the rationally perfect sage can read the patterns of nature can read the order in the logos of nature the cosmos and conform their behavior to it and be virtuous and so if the patriarchs followed the Torah and he's quite sure they did I'm not sure he read much of Genesis but then that's because the Torah is natural law they knew it from observing nature they didn't have to have it in writing we have it says what we have some copy just a copy of the of the turn and forth on the question of change he says in the passage that's next on your handout but Moses is alone in this among law givers that his laws firm unshaken immovable stamped as it were with the seals of nature herself remains secure from the day when they were first enacted to now and we may hope that they will remain for all future ages as though immortal as long as the Sun in the moon and the whole heaven and universe exist so Philo's answer to the cognitive dissonance that he felt between the greco-roman idea of divine law and the biblical representation of divine law was to refashion the Torah of Moses into natural law according to Philo the Torah was divine law according to the greco-roman definition of that term which means it's universal utterly rational true and immutable a second response to the cognitive dissonance I'm gonna have to mention very very briefly and it's Paul's I don't have time to go in at cuz Paul is is very complicated but Paul was a first century pharisaic Jew and I think he liked Philo had to evaluate his national heritage the Torah in the light of greco-roman understanding of the divine law but unlike Philo he took a look at column a and a look at column B and he said you know I think the Mosaic law doesn't possess the characteristic traits of natural divine law column a I think it has the earmarks of being the written constitution for one particular people some of its rules are pretty arbitrary and irrational they mark these people off as distinct it it can't really be identified with the universal unwritten law of nature that's inscribed on the hearts humans it lacks the features of divine law as the Greeks defined it and so the law of Moses and he does call it the law of Moses it's a particular human law for a particular Israelite community not Israelites don't need to observe that that's not what's going to give them a connection with the divine theirs it's more complicated than that but I'm going to set it aside because I want to get to the third response which is the Tom you to grab eyes and I spend most of my time with the Tom you to grab eyes so to sum those up let me just say that Philo and Paul are similar in one respect they accepted that Greek definition that Greek distinction between divine natural law the unwritten national order of the cosmos and human positive laws rules and legislation written down to order society and they if you accept that definition then you've got to decide where to place biblical law and the two men just made different choices Philo was convinced this law was divine and therefore he identified the Torah with the greco-roman divine or natural law and he forced upon at all of the characteristics in column a and none of those in column B including that it is universal immutable truth and Paul on the other hand made the opposite move he said the law of Moses doesn't really seem to possess those characteristics it looks more like a human positive law system it's not eternal Universal and unchanging and like all positive laws it really can't bring you to virtue it can be set aside but a third response is the response of the rabbi's of the Talmud these are rabbinic sages who from the first to the seventh century developed the classic works of rabbinic literature the Midrash the Mishnah the Talmud and for their part the rabbi's by and large simply resisted the Greek idea of divine law they walked away from that little chart that I put on the front page they presented a portrait of divine law in defiance of that conception the rabbinic understanding of divine law or Torah challenges the very idea that a divine law has to be characterized by a conformity to truth or a universal rationality or immutability and I want to just consider each of those traits in terms in in turn truth rationality and immutability we'll spend a little bit more time on truth first truth which is so highly valued by the philosophical tradition there are many fascinating romantic texts in which the Torah doesn't necessarily conform to truth now there are lots of different ways that I could say that something is true I could say something is logically or formally true like two plus two equals four right that this logic leads you to that you don't really need to actually be counting anything in particular two apples or two chairs it doesn't matter two plus two is always four it's conceptual right so there's a logical conceptual truth there's also judicial truth right which is signs praise and blame or quits the innocent and and condemns the guilty there's judicial truth in line with strict justice also something can be true in the sense that it lines up with objective reality or empirical evidence and there's another form of truth we'll talk about too but it turns out that rabbinic sources are quite comfortable with the idea that the Torah deviates from all of these kinds of truth sometimes and consciously so it doesn't hide it that would be lying the Torah doesn't lie but it acknowledges the truth is over here but it wants us to do something over here so I'm going to give you some examples of each of these and the first one might seem a little strange if you're not familiar with the way the rabbi's read and interpret biblical text but the first is how the Torah can deviate from logical truth on literally hundreds of occasions and I really picked the one at random I could have picked any of hundreds the rabbis will take the time to point out that the divine law doesn't necessarily line up with formal truth or or logical correctness we wouldn't be able to logic our way to it so look at text number four this is going to be an interpretation of a verse from Exodus the verse is cited at the end of passage X's 2720 which is describing the way the sanctuary should be constructed and says you shall use pure olive oil Beaton for the light the menorah the light simple enough sentence but of course nothing simple to the rabbis and massage all kinds of extra meanings out of the biblical text so here's what they do they say meal offerings or cereal offerings right offered at the sanctuary meal offerings might logically be thought to require the purest olive oil for if the menorah which is not intended for consumption requires the purest olive oil then the meal offerings which are intended for consumption wouldn't be logical that they should require the purest olive oil did you follow that bit of syllogism that logical reasoning if I don't eat the oil in the menorah and yet I have to use the purest oil and surely when there's something I have to eat I would need to have the most pure oil and yet they say scripture says otherwise it says pure olive oil beaten for the light meaning not for the meal offering I'm not sure that exodus 20:7 is telling us not to use pure oil in the cereal offering and the meal offering the rabbi's are going out of their way to make the verse disagree with some logical principle they've come up with according to logic they say the law should be one thing but what can we do scripture comes along and says the law is something else logic would have led us to think as cereal offerings require the purest olive oil or the purest oil but exodus 20:7 20 prescribes it for the lamb and that implies that we don't use it for the cereal offering and again they've massaged that out of the verse but we have to follow scriptures dictates against the dictates of formal logic and that the rabbi's should take the trouble to do this and to assert over and over again that logically I would think I would behave one way but scripture dictates we behave in another way that's not logical is really remarkable Philo did the opposite he rushed at every opportunity to show the inherent logic and everything in in Torah how logical it was and even the dietary laws are strictly logical and rational and so on if you understand them appropriately in allegory clean and so on this distinction between the formally correct or logical law and what the Torah dictates one should do that continues in context of judgment as well what I call judicial truth where again the divine law can deviate from judicial truth when it comes to adjudicating the law in fact an overzealous and an uncompromising adherence to truth the single correct answer that would emerge from abstract study of justice is depicted in several texts as just dangerous in fact the Talmud says that Jerusalem was destroyed only because people gave judgments according to the stricter formal law Dean huh Torah that they have just what the law would suggest and they should have stopped short of that they should have sometimes waived their rights or been more merciful they should have acted the evening Misurata D and some of you might know that phrase just short of the law they should have considered the broader consequences of their rulings Torah judgments that are theoretically correct or true can be destructive in practice so the pious judge will apply the laws of the Torah with a consideration for a range of values not only truth which is certainly a value but once you sort out what the true law might dictate you then have to take into account other values such as compassion modesty peace humility and charity and sometimes these values should lead you to override or circumvent the true or strict ruling God - judges best when he doesn't focus solely on the truth there's a tradition in the Talmud in tractate avodah Zarah that describes how God spends his day the first three hours of the day he's studying Torah and you don't want your prayers to come before God in the first three hours of the day when he's studying Torah because then he's focused on the abstract truth of the law you want to wait until the second three hours of the day when he gets up from his seat of judgment and sits in the seat of mercy and then he's occupied with judging and judging is about balancing truth with other things and with other qualities so one always hopes that one's prayers will be heard in the second part of the day when God isn't occupied with truth but is sitting in the seat of mercy that's when you want them to hear your case and there are many ribbiting stories in which they describe the heavenly court with different figures appearing biblical figures appearing for judgment before God and God is depicted in many of these stories as urging the advocates to find ways to defeat his justice and to ensure that he'll be merciful to the person in front of him he doesn't want to rule with strict true justice not only does Torah sometimes deviate from logical truth or from judicial truth but the rabbi's tell us that the Torah doesn't always align with physical reality or natural facts as we observe them empirically and Greek thought of course that would make no sense the divine law was the rational order of nature divine law conforms with nature and physical reality but there's a great text from the 2nd century in the rabbinic literature it contains what's perhaps the most well-known example of the idea that the Torah the laws of the Torah can defy natural reality in this passage rabbi Rabban Gamliel knowingly accepts false testimony about the phases of the Moon when he's trying to set the calendar so you know people had to come to the court and testify I saw the moon in this position and they would then determine when the first day of the lunar month was and that was important because it said the festivals and then you knew when Yom Kippur was Rosh Hashanah was and so on so and one day one particular time he accepts what's clearly false testimony it's astronomically could not have happened you know someone sees the new moon and then the next night they say they see the old moon it's it just couldn't have happened but he accepts this testimony and he declares the calendar which establishes the dates of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and his colleagues object they say how can you say that this is the first of the lunar month we can still see the old moon in the sky you're going to lead people to observe yom kippur on the wrong day and then they'll end up eating when they should be fasting on the real yom kippur this is a sin that's punishable by death at the hands of heaven just read Leviticus 16 but rub and ganglia prevails the rabbinic court has the right to set the calendar in defiance of astronomical reality other considerations are taken into account the Torah doesn't have to conform to the truths of nature Rabbi Akiva said with justification for this in Scripture itself and that's text 5 there are three places in the Book of Leviticus where the text says that you shall establish or fix the holidays or fix the calendar and so on and so rebbi akiva says to Robby Joshua who's one of the figures who's worried very much about having a calendar that doesn't seem to line up with empirical truth and he says look the text says you you you three times three different verses that say you establish the calendar you Israelites three times you you you to indicate that you may fix the festival's even if you err inadvertently you even if you err deliberately you even if you're misled and Rabbi Joshua replied to him saying Akiva you've comforted me you've comforted me it's okay with God for us to not get it quite right there are three verses then that are used to sort of justify this position similarly the rabbinic interpretation of Torah tolerates rulings that are counterfactual and it tolerates legal fictions if these help to achieve humane and compassionate goals such as a very famous case of a woman who remarries after witnesses report that her husband has died and it turns out the report is incorrect when her husband returns one rabbinic Authority allows the court to employ a legal fiction and just to clear the man is not himself so the woman's new marriage is not disrupted you laugh but this happened in Ohio about 10 years ago a woman collected her husband's Social Security for 30 years he had disappeared he was declared dead and he came back and that court in Ohio decided to rule that he was not him and he had to have could not reclaim his identity because she couldn't pay back 30 years of Social Security so there you go it's not so crazy but fictive legal presumptions are also tolerated in the rabbi's elaboration of the divine law so for example all women are presumed to be in a state of ritual pure from their menstruation when their husbands returned from a journey now clearly that will not always be factually true but the facts are not the sole determinants of the law when a larger good such as promotion of marital intimacy or procreation can be achieved there's yet one more measure of truth that we should consider and that's authorial truth in other words the the true intention of the author in writing that law or the taurah in the rabbi's attempts to interpret and apply the torah law the question is are they bound by the meaning of the text intended by its author God or can rulings or interpretations of the divine law deviate even from the author's intention that's the question behind a famous story actually rabbi Stanford asked that I mentioned this story today so this is one of the reasons I am including it it's a famous story in the Babylonian Talmud here one rabbi Rabbi Eliezer locks horns with the other rabbinic sages over the purity status of a particular type of oven Rabbi Eliezer declares it pure and they say just say it's impure and this is a story in text 6 it has been taught on that day Rabbi Eliezer brought forward every imaginable argument but they did not accept them said he to them so he's exhausted his arguments now so now he's gonna turn to parlor tricks ok so he said to them it's the challah - if the law agrees with me let this carob tree prove it and thereupon the carob tree was torn a hundred cubits out of its place others say four hundred cubits no proof can be brought from a carob tree they responded again he said to them if the Halla half the law agrees with me let the stream of water prove it whereupon the stream of water flowed backwards they said no you know no proof can be brought from a stream of water it's not an argument again he said if the ha'la'tha agrees with me let the walls of the schoolhouse prove it so the walls of the schoolhouse inclined to fall but Rebbe Joshua turned around and rebuked them saying when scholars are engaged in a legal dispute what business have you two fear so they kind of froze they didn't know who to please they didn't fall in honor of Rabbi Joshua but they didn't go back upright in honor of Rabbi Eliezer and they're still standing stuck frozen like that today so again he said to them if the holotype the law agrees with me let it be proof from heaven now he's calling on the author of the text whereupon a heavenly voice cried out why do you dispute with Rabbi Eliezer seeing that in all matters the halaqa agrees with him but rabbi Joshua arose and exclaimed and here he's citing Deuteronomy it is not in heaven when Moses says the Torah is not in heaven it is here at hand right it is not in heaven what did he mean by this Rebbe Jeremiah said the Torah has already been given at Mount Sinai from heaven to us we pay no attention to a heavenly beliefs because God you have long since written in the Torah at Mount Sinai after the majority must one incline you might be thinking what did God think of all this never fear we can tell you rabbi Nathan met Elijah whenever the rabbi's need to have sort of a hotline to heaven to figure out what's going on Elijah will show up and let them know since he travels back and forth so Rebbe Nathan we're not on met Elijah Eliyahu and he asked him what did the Holy One blessed be he do in that hour when Joshua said the Torah is not in heaven we can overrule the heavenly voice about what the text means he laughed with joy and said my children have conquered me my children have conquered me after all the arguments have been exhausted Rabbi Eliezer resorts to these miraculous feats to prove his interpretation of the divine law uprooting carob trees causing the river to flow backwards making the schoolhouse walls tumble these miraculous deeds aren't arguments for the rightness and the goodness of a view and his colleagues assert that unless he can produce a convincing argument for his view the law will be decided in accordance with the majority view Rabbi Eliezer finally appeals to a higher authority and this heavenly voice indicates that the divine author himself really doesn't read but the interpretation of Rabbi Eliezer of the divine law but even this is not proof of the rulings goodness or appropriateness for the rabbi's no miracle not even a heavenly affirmation of the author's intended mean can determine the divine law because even though the Torah may be from heaven it is divine it is no longer in heaven and so control over the interpretation and the administration of the Torah has been seeded by God - admittedly fallible human beings who must follow the best practices of an argumentation moral reasoning and majority rule and God has said to celebrate this bold assertion of rabbinic Authority even if it is at the expense of his own authority and even if it leads sometimes to error what God may have intended in the law is not the only factor in determining what the law should be or how it should be interpreted he's handed his Torah over to humans and now not even miracles or the divine voice can overturn an interpretation agreed upon by the majority right or wrong those who study and interpret Torah and good faith are free of control by the text author so we've seen that according to the rabbinic understanding of divine law it doesn't necessarily conform to some objective standard of unchanging truth logical truth judicial truth empirical natural truth or even the intended meaning of the author when a modification of the strictly true or correct ruling helps to achieve perhaps a social or a moral good in a specific situation nor do they think that the laws of the Torah are all rational you remember that the stoic definition of divine law is it is true it is rational it is reason and it's immutable I will just touch very briefly on those last two qualities they don't believe that the Torah laws are all entirely rational or accessible to Universal reasons some are murder that's a pretty rational one but not all of the laws that are rational and the rational ones are not the ones that make it divine because as the rabbi's say every society has those the ones that market as divine are the ones that aren't so rational so the purity laws the dietary laws other ritual laws that were commanded express God's will for Israel they're the ones that market is divine and while it's good to obey all of the commandments there's a special virtue that arises from observing the commandments that have no clear rationale that seem a little bit illogical or arbitrary or counter to our natural desires counter to our nature again the Stoics would be rolling over in their grave virtue comes from following your nature I didn't so look at text seven I think there's got another funny and interesting text rabbi elazar ben Azaria says how do we know that a person should not say that's all right I don't want to wear mixed fibers you know there's a prohibition in the Bible against wearing a mixture shaatnez right a mixture of fibers so how do we know that you shouldn't say oh that's okay I don't really want to wear mixed fibers anybody or that's alright I don't really want to eat pork or I don't really want to commit an incestuous sexual act rather you should say I do want to do those things but what can I do for my father in heaven has imposed his degree upon me non-rational divine decrees like the prohibition of pork that natural reason wouldn't necessarily dictate you've not many people would come up with that one on their own right or not wearing those to mix fibers you wouldn't sort of Reason your way towards that things that go against human nature these are opportunities to show obedience and loyalty to God and earn reward there are many passages in which the rabbis point to the non rational nature of a law and say what can we do it's the decree of a king and we obey it because it's the decree of a king an opportunity to show obedience to show who we are finally according to the rabbi's the divine law is not immutable unchanging on the contrary the Torah is susceptible to moral critique and modification and rather than being a sign of its deficiency that flexibility to them is the very mark of its divinity on many occasions the rabbis will state what the divine law is and then set it aside in favor of a better ruling better in the sense of morally better we see this in in a in a tractate of the talmud called guillotine or a couple of chapters there where they list a whole series of rulings of what the divine law would be and then they adjust it they say but we're not gonna do that for the sake of the social order or for the public welfare or because this is creating a hardship for someone so for example although by strict tower law a husband is empowered to annul a divorce document without informing his wife the rabbi's ruled that you know what we're just not gonna let him do that though for the sake of the social order that's that can create problems and difficulties for the wife although a slave can technically by torah law be freed by one of his two masters and technically be half free the rabbi's compel his other master to free him to for the sake of the social order otherwise the poor man cannot even marry a slave can't marry a free person favorite so he's stuck so in short for the rabbis the divine law doesn't always dictate the best and most desirable answer and humans are an essential partner in critiquing the law and making it better usually based on an intuitive sense that the law is just wrong or from their own experience they're like local informants god you don't know what it's like down here this is not gonna work you need to tweak and change the law in fact the rabbi's maintain that humans have enormous power to critique and modify divine decree some texts are quite explicit in their aggressive criticism of the divine Torah as as morally inferior and there are fascinating sources that describe God as being corrected by the moral insights and arguments arguments of humans there's a book that was just published by a young scholar it's called pious irreverence and he collects about a hundred and forty of these texts from her benek literature in which different characters expose some of the problems or imperfections of God and His law sometimes God rejects so critique or has a good answer ignores empaths sometimes he courageously admits his flaws and he adopts the more ethical stance that's proposed by his human partner and he modifies his behavior or he modifies a decree or a law and responds text number eight is a case where God concedes to Moses as criticism of the principle of intergenerational punishment right when the Holy One blessed be he said to him to Moses that I am the God who visits the guilt of the parents upon the children right in Exodus 34 that's how God introduces himself Moses said yet you know master of the world let's think about this how many evil people give birth to righteous people should they take punishment from the sins of their parents tear off worshipped idols Abraham his son was righteous Hezekiah was righteous his father it has was a wicked man and Josiah was right just his father I'm on was a wicked man is it appropriate that righteous people shall receive lashes for the sins of their parents and God said to him you know you've taught me something about your life I'll know if I might decree and I'll establish your word that's why later in Ezekiel we read that God says no from now on everyone dies for their own sin Moses expresses moral outrage over this principle of transgenerational punishment God learns from him he had no sister creevy establishes a new rule of individual punishment and another instance Moses teaches God that it's best to sue for peace before engaging in war and so God has said to change his policy that accounts for an interesting change in the Bible in the book of Deuteronomy there's no God changed his mind because Moses argued with them and before you declare war you should first try to sue for peace in another passage in the Talmud when Moses objects to the severity of punishing a certain certain sins with stoning with death God revokes that punishment and he Institute's corporal punishment instead so in these cases the rabbi's imagined modifications of divine behavior or divine law as a result of human input and revision and insight this idea of a morally evolving being whose law should be subjected to moral critique and modified if necessary stands at a great distance from Greek conceptions of divinity and the perfect static unchanging divine law of nature to modify divine law on the basis of practical reasoning or or considerations of mercy or equity it just would have made no sense to the Greeks that would be like saying you know I want to change the law of gravity because I really like to drop something without breaking it doesn't make sense right that the law the divine law for them was this uniform and flexible unchanging order of the universe it wouldn't make sense to talk about overruling it or modifying it to achieve some social good or moral good in fact for the Greeks the opposite is true they felt that human positive laws should be adjusted to conform to the dictates of the natural law but rabbinic sources flipped this they depict divine law as undergoing adjustment in order to conform to human experience and moral intuitions moreover for the rabbi's the ability of the divine law to change and evolve is not a mark of deficiency a rigid unresponsive law that would be deficient the laws divinity is not diminished in the eyes of the rabbis by the fact that it's particularly and dynamic and responsive rather than universal static and uniform its divinity and its greatness are constituted by those features and humans are the essential active partners that God needs in the divine laws ongoing evolution and revelation so to sum up I've argued that the rabbi's of the Tom utak period did not shy away they didn't shy away from lunch at all but they didn't shy away from attributing to the divine Torah features considered by others in antiquity to be unfailing indicators of a human positive law the divine law of the God of Israel is not necessarily allied with truth it's not entirely rational and universal it's not invariable and immutable and that respect the rabbi's resembled Paul a little bit more than Philo but unlike Paul the rabbi's continued to insist on the divine status and the enduring relevance of the Torah and in that respect they resembled funny low a little bit more than Paul but in a third respect they resembled neither Philo nor Paul in confirming the biblical nature of a divine law who's very divinity is enhanced rather than impugned by its divorce from truth it's particularly and sometimes arbitrary character and it's susceptibility to moral critique and modification in response to the shifting circumstances of human experience in that they were entirely unique and they were also entirely scandalous to those who accept the greco-roman or the Greek in the Roman conception of divine law and that was most of the people around them the idea that divine law is not self identical with truth it's not Universal and unchanging is shocking indeed laughable and I believe the rabbi's knew that theirs was a very self-aware choice because in dozens of upon dozens of texts the rabbi's explicitly represent their conception of divine law as inspiring mockery and ridicule on the part of various outsiders Greek philosophers or sectarians who laugh at them for their views of divine law depicting themselves as mocked by those who claim that a divine law must be true rational and unchanging the rabbi's show us that they were aware of that other view and they were consciously rejecting it in the medieval and in the modern periods the rabbinic conception of divine law would be overshadowed in the West and this Greek definition that we started the night with of a divine natural law law embedded in nature and then human positive laws that's kind of the bread and butter of our society these became controlling paradigms in the conception of law in general in the West and this idea was embraced by Christianity to some extent by Islam to some extent by some Jewish thinkers philosophers among them like Maimonides and we in the West are heirs to this tradition so most people today if you ask them what it means to say that Allah is divine they will tell you and I know this because I do this every year in my seminar on divine law I ask each student to tell me their name and tell me what they think a divine law would be like what would make it divine and they will tell you well I I guess it would have to apply to everyone it would be universal and it would have to make sense you know it would be rational and and it would be true and it would never change and so we to sort of somehow think that something divine must be universal rational immutable truth and so we bring that to our reading of the biblical text we map onto Biblical divine law or Torah the characteristic features of Greek the Greek conception of divine law and so for many modern leaders to the rabbinic construction of divine law can seem scandalous a law that's divorced from truth and subject to change revolution well that's that's surely human but who says perhaps our something to be gained from bringing the rabbinic conception of divine law out of the shadows from considering the possibility that a law and a text can be divine without being universal absolute unchanging truth so I'm gonna leave you with these provocative questions in a final text what if the rabbi's were right what if the Torah was given not to prescribe an eternal fixed truth of some kind what if the Torah was given so as to challenge us to think to consider what justice and equity actually are and not to settle for the claim that they're found in or confined to prescriptive and flexible rules what if the Torah was given so as to encourage us to reason to continually evaluate his claims to disagree with it and improve it what if the Torah was given on the assumption that immersion in it in its modes of argumentation and instruction were intended to create respectful sparring-partners for and critics of God what if the Torah was given so as to allow the human voice to eclipse the divine voice in its moral clarity and interpretive authority I think the ancient rabbis believed it was I think they believed that God did not give a fixed and inflexible law to be mechanistically and mindlessly applied but a set of teachings immersion in the subtleties of which should lead to the formation of autonomous and intelligent moral beings who can say it is not in heaven on this view God's greatest success and pleasure is found when humans take it upon themselves to serve as his moral critics and to create from what they've been given something new and something greater and one last rabbinic text illustrates this point so I'll close with text 9 this is a text where the rabbi's offer a parable to help explain their understanding of the nature of the Torah the divine law given by God and here is the parable - what can it be compared to a king of flesh and blood who had two servants and he loved them both in a perfect love he gave each of them a measure of wheat and each of undal of flax what did the wise servant do well he took the flax and spun a cloth he took the wheat and made flour he cleaned the flour and ground and kneaded and baked it and set it on top of the table and then he spread the cloth over it and left it until the King would come the foolish servant however did nothing at all and after some time the King returned from a journey and came into his house and he said to my servants he said to his servants my sons bring me what I gave you one servant showed the wheat still in the box with the bundle of flax upon it alas for his shame alas for his disgrace when the Holy One blessed be he gave the Torah to Israel he gave it only in the form of wheat for us to make flour from it and flax for us to make a garment from it thank you so much for your attention thank you very much but all I wanna say is for the first time in my life I heard a two-hour lecture in one hour right right um notorious for that it's true we told Munich rabbis did actually have right here the Talmudic rabbis actually did conceive of a universal law in the Noahide commandments and could you sure so um in the medieval period when certain Jews began to accept these Greek ideas about divine and natural law and they were a little nervous about the fact that Jewish tradition didn't have this idea and so in the medieval period we get this concept of the Noahide laws as being a universal law but that's very much a medieval development and the rabbi's talk about the Noahide laws first they talk about it in a work called it ACEF to which you're probably familiar with it is by no means a universal law the Noahide laws applied differently to Gentiles and Jews until Ceph to Sanhedrin and in the in the babylonian talmud in tractate Sanhedrin it gets even they are even further apart the laws of murder apply differently the laws of theft apply differently these were laws that were given by commandment they're not found in nature God handed them as Commandments just as he handed the tarda it's really handed 7 laws to Noahide so it's not a natural law comes from God and is given as written laws to the Gentiles but even so they're not Universal they're differently observed by Jews but but in the medieval period as part of this idea this cognitive dissonance and we had some Jewish philosophers who wanted to find some notion of a natural universal law in Jewish tradition and so they took those texts about the Noahide line they developed this idea but it's it's actually a mistake that's you read in the literature today all the time the scholarly literature about this but then you can read things I've written and a few other people that show that that's not true but it's a good question is it something that trips trips up everybody they take the medieval Jewish position on that but it's not the rabbi's view yes if you don't want to deal with this this is fine I'm always curious about the safe of Bava metzia 59 B which you shared with us because it it completely undermines it but I've never figured out how it what I love about this so what he's asking is about the end of the story where God laughs and says my children have conquered me my children have conquered me what happens after that is not is the lack of humility that is shown then by the state by the majority who have won because they turn around to Rabbi Eliezer and they punish him terribly and humiliate him they take everything that in his life he has ever declared pure and they burn it as if it's impure and he weeps and the story is in a section of the Talmud which is talking about the crime of ona of of shortchanging someone harming someone financially but they're saying there's also an ona of the spirit there's a way that you can harm people and this is the example so when they won they then lorded it over Rebbe Eliezer they didn't have the decency in the humiliate humility to say be won and they they humiliated him until he finally kind of a funny is a tragic and funny story his wife is the sister of Reuben Gamliel and they place him under a ban that's right they not only burn everything that he ever declared pure they place him under a ban no one's got to study but he's ostracized entirely his wife is the sister of Rabban Gamliel and she knows that her husband's being treated so harshly and that if he cries to God God will answer his prayers and mercy and will kill her brother Rabban Gamliel so she's trying to keep both of them alive so she does everything she can to make sure that he never has a chance to pray or cry to God she knows her her brother will be dead and so she constantly keeps him busy but one day a beggar comes to the door and once a some bread and she turns aside and her husband falls to the floor of tears and Robyn Gamliel is struck dead but I think that's telling us is there is no absolute truth and if you act as if when you win or you have the truth and then you absolute eyes you turn around then and crush somebody else stay humble and recognize that your truth today tomorrow you may be the one overruled tomorrow the interpretation might not work what you think is true today might be besten and and it might be the best law today but tomorrow is a new day and there's a new consideration and something you haven't thought of and maybe you need to for the best outcome change the law again and you can't lord it over anyone as if you somehow have found the truth and can crush other people so I actually think it's consistent God they did not do what God did when God was defeated he smiled and said they've conquered me but what did they do they turned around and crushed someone with their sense of their righteousness and their truth and they were punished for it so it's a really complex and wonderful story and a lot of people don't know the ending they stop there but it's a great story and it teaches I think another lesson about truth right your talk was the most delightful academic presentation of conservative judaism that i've ever heard sometimes and sort of beyond the question is where where we have gone as Jews yeah and in a sense we have really gone in the direction of the Greek of the Greek philosophers that there's this absolute even the point of those who who take the the stories of Genesis as absolute truth yeah but even within within the law that within our most traditional Contreras there is no flexibility or the flexibility is is so so minimal that in fact I think what we have tried to do is within the conservative movement is to bring back this the kind of kind of flexibility we're talking about we talk about women we talk about homosexuality we talk about so many other contemporary modern I think it's important though to know that the histor history or the lineage of those tendencies I remember when I wrote my book about divine law and sort of coming to the end and realizing that in an odd way the notion of the Torah is inflexible this is an idea that begins to grow in Orthodox circles in the nineteenth century in particular they start to speak about some rabbinic rulings as being written in heaven as being ontologically true meaning they have a real existence they were speaking in Greek terms and I remember sitting in my study and being struck by the odd a realization that the most Orthodox communities in Judaism today were the most Hellenized that's a claim they would never accept and it would repel them I think right there always the Hellenized was right what's Hanukkah all about you know the Maccabees who fought the Hellenized was the Helen Isis are the worst but the most Hellenized in Hellenistic form of Judaism today is the Orthodox community Oh to express on behalf of all of us our deepest thanks for your Rissa your enthusiasm your knowledge and your smile

Channel: Congregation Neveh Shalom

Views: 48,348

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Id: 4zBRLu_cNtc

Length: 67min 51sec (4071 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 30 2019

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[u/shinytwistybouncy]

Summary:

In this lecture - The 'Truth" About Torah - Professor Hayes asks, When and why did some ancient Jews begin to think of the Torah as conveying a single unchanging divine “truth” and when and why did other ancient Jews resist this new way of thinking? What was at stake in the truth wars of early Judaism and what lessons can be drawn for our own time? Professor Christine Hayes of Yale University is the leading biblical scholar of our time. Her most recent book, "What’s Divine about Divine Law?", received the 2015 National Jewish book Award and the 2016 Jordan Schnitzer Award from the Association of Judaic Studies.

[u/Ranae_Collus]

Christine Hayes is a great scholar. I don't expect orthodox to agree with everything she says here but it's silly to just downvote it. Would be interested in what people think she gets wrong here.