SERIES What is Talmud? Lecture 2, Prof. Christine Hayes

hello welcome back to our second second lecture in the series what is talmud uh i am michael balochel i'm a professor of talmud at the department of jewish thought at ben gurion university in the south of israel and i organized this lecture series with this in mind i wanted to introduce the talmud the babylonian tamil to a wide audience of people that not necessarily know what the talmud is or what it's about but at the same time i wish to introduce to our listeners to our audience the talmud's the newest development in the study of the talmud so not just introduce a very basic introduction to the talmud but in fact offer you the newest views about the talmud the newest question in research new avenues new methods that allow us scholars to look at the talmud from you and interesting and intriguing ways our first lecture dealt with the composition of this text you're welcome it was recorded and it's found professor muli vidas from princeton university and you're more than welcome to uh hear the recording of that lecture that's found on the website of the national library of israel and today is our second lecture and i am especially honored to introduce our today's speaker professor christine hayes from yale university i'll tell you why i'm especially excited because professor hayes was my dissertation advisor a few years back but professor hayes is as i said a professor of talmud in yale university in the department of religious studies she was actually recently been uh um given the highest faculty honor given to 40 professor which is the yale sterling professor of religious studies at yale uh she she deals with the literature and the history of the biblical and the talmudic text uh and i actually want to plug in she has an incredible course of introduction to tamu that's online at yale and you're very welcome to look it up it's free and available online and introduction to the to the bible uh she has written a few monographs award-winning monographs about uh impurity and about the the connection between the babylonian tamil and the palestinian talmud uh and her most recent book which is connected to today's talk is named is called what's divine about divine law and i invited her today to speak about our second uh topic in the series which is the content the long that the tamil deals with and how is it related to biblical law and how is rabbinic law different from other laws and how it relates to uh the divine uh so without further ado i'm letting chris uh begin her talk and uh what i wish what i want to invite you to do is while uh professor hayes give her give her talk to put any question you have in the chat i'll collect them and try to incorporate them uh in the second uh part of this conversation that will uh introduce question professor hayes in a more uh conversation fashion uh chris i'm giving you the floor thank you so much i just want to do a sound check to make sure that i have a thumbs up with the sound so thank you so much both to tedeo and also to professor barcher siegel i'm absolutely delighted to be a part of this wonderful series and as you all know the babylonian talmud is an enormous collection of the teachings and traditions of rabbis from the first to the seventh centuries living in both the land of israel and in babylonia and while the talmud contains narratives and legends and biblical interpretation it is especially famous for its extremely complex and lengthy discussions and debates for matters of divine law and it's the talmud's view of divine law that's going to be our topic for today i'd like to show you how the rabbis in the pages of the talmud developed a conception of divine law that resisted and rejected the hellenistic or the greek ideas of divine law that were prevalent in the surrounding culture and this rabbinic view of divine law was radical and counter-cultural in its day and it may even be radical and counter-cultural still in our own day now i'm going to divide my talk uh into three parts i'll be using a powerpoint and so i'm sharing my screen now and i will divide my talk into three parts first um i'm gonna and i'm gonna call these three parts the what the why and the how so i'll first show you what the rabbinic idea of divine law is and to do that we'll also have to consider what it isn't we'll have to ask what was the view of divine law in the rabbi's broader environment the view that they resisted and rejected and once we understand what the rabbinic conception of divine law was then we'll ask why why did the rabbis insist on this counter-cultural view and finally we'll ask exactly how is this view of divine law reinforced on nearly every page of the talmud so first for the what what was the conception of divine law that the rabbis rejected well it was the conception of divine law that emerged from the greek philosophical tradition and here i'm going to focus on the stoics because it was a popular version of their view that would pervade the cultures of the ancient mediterranean so what was that view well in ancient times people tended to think of nature as disordered and chaotic a kind of dog-eat-dog world of competing powers but certain greek philosophers began to argue that nature is not chaotic but ordered by a kind of natural law that's inherent in it the stoics who believed that god was nature and nature was divine were the first to use the term divine law most to refer to this natural law so according to the stoics the divine natural law governing the cosmos was reason itself or logos they called it which is just the word for reason and reason they argued is universal right what's rational here is rational in iceland and it is also um true always true and unchanging or immutable static in its perfection the stoics and greek political greek philosophy generally distinguished divine law from human positive law meaning the written legislation and rules of political states that are grounded in the will of a sovereign authority the positive laws of states are not universal they're particular to a given city or state and they're not necessarily rational or true i don't stop at a red light because stopping at redness is a universal rational truth but because we arbitrarily pick red to be the color we would agree we would stop at positive human laws are historically conditioned they're contingent they vary from place to place and from time to time changing in response to the ever-evolving circumstances of life they're not immutable and another difference the positive laws of states are formulated in words and sentences and may even be written down the divine natural law is unwritten because it's just reason itself so according to this greek philosophical tradition that would permeate the regions conquered by alexander the great including the land of israel divine law is an unwritten logos or reason embedded in nature that is universal true and unchanging and unwritten by contrast in the biblical tradition there's no real distinction between divine law and the positive laws of the community because the divine law delivered at sinai is the positive law for the ancient israelite community it's not an unwritten rational order in nature but a body of written legislation expressing the divine law giver's will for one particular people israel it contains both rational and non-rational commandments some laws of the torah are rational surely but some such as the dietary prohibitions and purity taboos are not in fact it's precisely because they are not universally recognized rational truths observed by all peoples that they can serve so well to distinguish israel from other nations as god's covenant partner these laws are also not static and they are unchanged and not unchanging i'm sorry these laws are not static and unchanging but they are dynamic and responsive already in moses's own day some laws are said to be updated supplemented or modified to meet new historical contingencies three times moses has to go to god and and ask what the law should be for a case where there hasn't been any clear answer and on a fourth occasion uh the daughters of salah facade argue in the book of numbers that they should be allowed to inherit their dead father and god says you know you're right we really should change things so that daughters inherit when there are no sons moses make a note of that we're changing things new situation new rules deuteronomy 17 describes the process by which the law can be applied to new situations long after the death of moses so it should be immediately apparent by looking at this chart on your screen that there's a severe mismatch or contradiction between the greek and the biblical conceptions of divine law the divine law of biblical tradition possesses most of the features that hellenistic thought attributed to human law the items highlighted in blue ancient jews could not help but be aware of this mismatch and some of them found it very distressing those who admired hellenistic culture and admired its conception of divine law were eager to prove that the divine law of biblical tradition their own heritage met the hellenistic definition of divine law and so against the evidence of the biblical text they claimed that the law given to moses was divine according to the standards of the hellenistic culture that they so admired and emulated which means it had the characteristics on this side of the chart it was rational and universal and true and immutable we see this in the letter of aristeas this is a work written by a jewish author in the 2nd century bce and in this work philosophers ask the jewish protagonist how a divine law could include dietary and purity laws that contradict reason and nature and the jewish figure responds that the legislation was not laid down at random but with a view to truth and as a token of right reason orthos logos the dietary laws and the purity laws which appear unnatural and irrational are he says allegories for rational truths that lead to virtue but it's the first century jewish philosopher philo of alexandria who goes the farthest in repackaging the law of moses as the stoic natural law he declares that the divine laws delivered at sinai through moses attained to the harmony of the universe and are in agreement with the principles of eternal nature and that the laws and statutes are but the sacred words of nature he maintains that the torah is not particular but universal and someday each nation will abandon its particular ways and turn to honoring our laws alone he asserts that the laws of moses are immovable and unchanging like nature itself and most surprisingly that the torah is actually unwritten the written text we possess is just a copy of the true torah which is the unwritten law of nature these are very strong and surprising claims but not all jews were distressed by the contradiction between the hellenistic conception of divine law and the biblical representation of divine law the rabbis who flourished from the late first to the seventh century in both eretz israel pal and the land of israel and then babylonia bavell they were also aware of this contradiction and they were generally speaking unapologetic there are some exceptions but this is definitely the majority position they by and large resisted applying the hellenistic definition of divine law universal immutable true reason to the torah given at sinai so against prevailing hellenistic conceptions of divine law the great majority of the rabbis doubled down on the biblical conception of divine law as a written body of of legislation a written body of legislation for a particular community grounded in the will of a sovereign divine being containing both rational and non-rational commandments and by no means a single abstract unchanging rational truth and they did this through legal rulings and stories in which the torah is shown to be first of all is shown to deviate from reason and truth and secondly to require modification updating or revision on occasion for example on literally hundreds of occasions the rabbis will assert that some laws of the torah are contrary to reason and cannot be derived through logic the rabbis will say badin meaning according to logic the law the halacha should be x but the divine torah says it's why what can we do we must obey the torah even though it defies logic and reason because it's the will of god literally hundreds of times they do this on other occasions the rabbis will determine the law in defiance of empirical facts tolerating legal fictions and contrary to fact rulings if doing so will achieve humane and compassionate goals in one passage in the talmud women are presumed to be in a state of ritual purity when their husbands return from a journey even though this will not always be factually true but the facts are less important than promoting marital intimacy and procreation similarly when applying the law in judgment the rabbis hold that a pious judge will balance justice with other important values like compassion or modesty or peace or humility or charity and these might override strict truth neither do the laws of the divine torah necessarily align with the facts of the natural world in one famous case the rabbis established the calendar in defiance of astronomical reality as for modification of the law the rabbis resist the prevailing conception of divine law as static and unchanging the talmud contains a number of rulings that adjust the divine law adjust the divine law for the sake of the social order or the public welfare in many instances humans are god's essential partner in the project of torah they critique the law and improve it based on their human experience so i've talked now about what the rabbis did in the pages of the talmud and across the rabbinic corpus the rabbis reasserted the biblical view of divine law the divine law is not a static fixed immutable truth it's a body of written legislation grounded in the will of the divine sovereign regulating the life of a particular and concrete human community and responsive to the ever-shifting circumstances of life in an ever-changing world this is not the view of divine law that prevailed in the broader hellenistic culture it was a truly counter-cultural position so let's take a minute then to talk about why they did this before we look more closely at precisely how they did it the rabbi's view of divine law is connected to their view of the divine being the god of biblical and rabbinic tradition is not the philosopher's impersonal and unchanging first principle or the fixed and static order embedded in nature the god of biblical and rabbinic tradition is a living dynamic presence intimately involved in the unfolding and unpredictable human story responsive to human actions and needs a god encountered in the concrete and dynamic realm of history at sinai god did not give the israelites a lesson in abstract rational philosophy god did not give a fixed and immutable natural law god gave detailed legislation for the ordering of a concrete human community now if god is a dynamic and responsive responsive living presence then god's law they figured must also be dynamic and responsive to the challenges of living in a constantly changing world as we noted the dynamism of the law is seen already in the bible when god has to fill gaps in the law and changes the law of inheritance for daughters for example and when god establishes procedures for determining what the law will be in new unanticipated cases the torah can only meet the challenges of life in human community if it is dynamic and responsive and that is the reason that the rabbis resist the greek conception of divine law as some fixed rational truth if the torah is to meet the complex and shifting needs of human life it must be endlessly generative open to new developments adjustments and even repair again this is why the rabbis refuse to attribute to the divine torah the qualities that the greeks attributed to divine law absolute fixity a single immutable truth because they are suspicious of dogmatic claims of absolute certainty they are suspicious of final answers they are aware of the dangers of a rigid absolutism for meeting the needs of a dynamic human community and so on nearly every page of the talmud we see a resistance to the idea that the divine law given to israel at sinai was a static fixed immutable truth on nearly every page of the talmud we find a demonstration of the idea that the torah is dynamic and responsive to the ever-changing circumstances of life but how precisely is the divine law's dynamism demonstrated on the pages of the talmud well to answer this question i suggest that we think of the talmud as a kind of play that cautions us against becoming too certain of ourselves play refers to a structured activity with an undetermined outcome that avoids coming to a final conclusion a dynamic activity that generates provisional meanings rather than unveiling one absolute truth or absolute truth one technique for avoiding the determinative conclusion is the endless multiplication of detail here's what moses mendelson an 18th century jewish thinker had to say about detail he said take any proposition you please and talk write or argue about it for or against it often and long enough and you can be sure that it will continue to lose more and more of whatever clearness it may once have possessed too much detail obstructs the view of the whole talmudic argumentation can be seen as a kind of play that employs an ever-increasing level of detail in a concerted effort to defer final answers and to keep the game going so that it doesn't freeze in a dogmatic rigidity and it is the anonymous voice of the talmud or the stum that runs this game like the ringmaster at a circus the stom seems to summon sages across two lands and four centuries to perform a variety of actions they speak they object they respond to objections they draw inferences they register agreement or disagreement the islam will introduce them with phrases like and haven't we learned of the following or what would rabbi so and so say or according to the one who holds this view wouldn't this action be permitted and in the process the stom adds complexity and hypothetical conditions and detail upon detail to keep the game going to demonstrate this claim i'm going to take you through two examples one patently funny and the other entirely serious and if your head spins that's okay because it will just prove my final point so let me describe one talmudic discussion in this discussion a certain rabbi says that a sukkah the ceremonial hut that's constructed for the observance of sukkot the festival a sukkah may be constructed using an animal for one of its three required walls now another sage rubbing mayor prohibits this why does he prohibit this two sages living two centuries later and hundreds of miles away suggest reasons one says rabby mayer fears the animal will run away and there goes your wall but another says rabbi metier fears it might die and there goes your wall the anonymous voice of the talmud islam puts these teachings into play and orchestrates the entire discussion that follows the stum begins by asking what difference it makes to explain robbie mayer's prohibition as due to a fear the elephant will run away or due to a fear that the elephant will die would these different rationales for robbie mayer's prohibition lead to different rulings in a particular case and if so what case what difference does it make and now the game is afoot the stem responds to its own question by suggesting that knowing the reason for abby mayor's prohibition would make a difference in the case of a sukkah that has an elephant tied to something stable as one of its walls if robbie mayer prohibits animal walls because he fears the animal will wander off well this animal is tied so robbie meer would presumably not prohibit this animal walled sukkah but if robbie mayer prohibits animal walls because he fears the animal will die well this elephant might die even though it's tied so rabby mayer would prohibit this sukkah but the stam isn't done perhaps robbie mayer's fear of the animal dying wouldn't apply in the case of an elephant because an elephant is so large that even when dead its carcass would still meet the minimum height required for a wall to be a valid sukkah wall so maybe reby mayor would permit the case of a tied elephant whether the reason for his prohibition is fear the animal will run away or fear the animal will die if knowing the reason for robbie mayer's prohibition makes no practical difference in the case of a tied up elephant wall perhaps it makes a difference then a difference than in the case of a non-elephant quadruped like a cow a cow is smaller and if it dies its carcass will not reach the minimum height required for a wall to be a valid super wall so robbie mayer's prohibition is based if ruby mayor's prohibition is based on fear that the animal will die and fall below the minimum height he would not permit this cow sukkah but if his prohibition is based on a fear the animal will run away this animal if tied will not run away so he would permit this sukkah well not so fast the stam says what if the owner suspends the cow from the ceiling then if it dies it will not crumple to the ground it will meet the minimum height required of a valid wall so even according to the view that rebbe mayor prohibits animal walls for fear that the animal will die and be too short maybe he would permit this sukkah because the suspended dead cow will be tall enough well that's possible the stem continues but if the owner suspends the dead cow then there will be spaces between its legs and a wall isn't a wall if it has large gaps so rubbing the air would prohibit the suspended dead cow wall well as stom notes the owner could stuff the spaces with palm and bay branches true the stum responds to itself but carcasses tend to shrink what if this dead cow's suspended carcass shrinks enough to create a gap between the animal wall and the ceiling now we generally say a gap of up to four hand breaths doesn't disqualify a wall and maybe the owner took shrinkage into account suspending the cow close enough that even with shrinkage the gap will be less than four handwrits well that's possible the stum responds but but what if the owner in good faith miscalculated the amount of shrinkage of a cow carcass and perhaps rebbe mayer's prohibition of an animal-walled sukkah was designed for and applies only to this specific bizarre case perhaps in every other case he would actually permit an animal walled sukkah now this discussion evinces a spirit of play not just because of the humorous subject matter but because of certain formal features we see in so many talmudic discussions the endless what-ifs that propose limiting limiting rebbe mayor's prohibition to certain increasingly detailed and specific situations and this kind of limitation what if what if we had this case or that case this kind of limitation is called an okimta what if his prohibition was limited to a certain kind of animal in a certain situation what if the animal runs away or dies or shrinks or is suspended or has gaps between its legs and on and on the game continues because as is true of any game the real fun the real purpose is in the playing although the talmud stops the discussion where it stops there's no genuine sense of closure in fact we don't find out which reason for reby mayor's prohibition is correct and there's nothing to prevent us from coming up with yet another contingent detail the debate is potentially endless because new particulars and contingencies are always possible notice how the detailed objections the hypothetical limitations or okintas reshape what we thought we knew we thought that all animal walled sukkahs were categorically prohibited by reby mayer and categorically permitted by his colleague rabiuta but it turns out that that may not be so and suddenly we're a little less certain of ourselves the talmud doesn't press to determine which view of rabimir's reason is right exactly which sukkas he would prohibit it's interested only in which views are possible now you might say ah this discussion is a parody surely serious talmudic discussions of the law are serious attempts to reach certain knowledge a single truth a final conclusion so let me make my case with an entirely sober serious example also typical of literally hundreds of tamudic discussions there's a passage in one track date in the talmud a called vava mitsia that discusses the legal acquisition of something that enters one's courtyard now our ringmaster the stem asks whether a minor girl legally acquires objects by means of her courtyard as an adult does right if you want to if you want someone to acquire something you can place it or throw it into their courtyard the courtyard effects acquisition for them but does it do so for a minor girl the third century rabbi ray schlakisch says a minor girl does not acquire objects by means of her courtyard and his colleague rabbi yochanan says she does so these seem to be clear categorically certain positions one prohibits and one permits to explain their disagreement the stam suggests that they must have different ideas of how a courtyard acquires perhaps rabbi yochanan thinks that a courtyard affects acquisition in a physical sense it holds an object like a hand since a minor girl can acquire things by taking and holding them in her hand he thinks she can acquire things with her courtyard because it is like her hand it physically holds or contains something perhaps reish lakish thinks that a courtyard effects acquisition also like my hand but in a more metaphorical sense maybe he thinks that my hand acquires things for me because it's like an agent that i commissioned to act on my behalf and if a courtyard acquires objects for me like my hand it's because the courtyard is acting like an agent commissioned to act on my behalf since a minor cannot appoint an agent reishlacky showed that a minor girl cannot acquire with her courtyard a lengthy discussion discussion ensues questioning whether a courtyard is like a hand in a physical sense or is it like a hand in a more metaphorical sense biblical verses are cited teachings by sages from different periods and from eretz israel and from bavel are abused the stum poses objections responds to its own objections and poses more objections defending first one view and then the other until it appears that rabbi yochanan will be the winner and the game is over but the talmud isn't interested in declaring a winner or ending the game with a single final answer and so the passage makes a sudden 180 degree turn three limitations or okimptas are proposed with that completely redefine the original dispute the first of our three proposed okintas suggests that the original disagreement may have been limited just to the case of a found object but in every other case the two stages actually agree that the girl's courtyard acquires things for her the second akimta suggests that maybe the original disagreement was limited to a different case the case of a minor boy a third akinta then combines the two previous okintas and says you know perhaps there was no disagreement at all perhaps reish lakish's prohibition of acquisition by a courtyard referred to a minor boy whose courtyard does not acquire a found object and rabbi yochanan's permission of acquisition by a courtyard referred to a minor girl whose courtyard does acquire a divorce document for her and poof the dispute which was enough to generate nearly three pages of detailed argumentation and a slew of ever more precise and detailed limitations simply vanishes like magic we thought that rabbi yochanan permitted a minor girl to acquire by her courtyard and reish lakish prohibited the same but it turns out that what we thought was so at the beginning is not necessarily so at the end and perhaps with a few more okies things would look different all over again and i emphasized this is an entirely serious legal discussion there are no bound elephants or cows with branches filling the gaps between their legs and yet it is play most scholars assume that the talmud's excessive argumentation and endless piling up of detailed distinctions is driven by a desire to achieve certainty to uncover a single truth but i disagree i believe it's designed to bring less certainty because as i've argued the rabbis believed god and god's law were dynamic and responsive to the details of human existence that arise anew each day the talmud style of argumentation reflects that belief now the ancient greeks saw a preoccupation with detail as an impediment to the acquisition of true and certain knowledge aristotle said that if you want to know what a horse is you have to ignore the particular details of particular horses there are different colors and sizes and speeds and degrees of strength and whether this this one has a bushy tail or a thin tail or crooked teeth or straight teeth those aren't important you have to abstract from these particulars the ideal form or essence of hoarseness that is shared by and defines them all if you get bogged down in the concrete material details you'll never see the abstract unity that transcends the diversity of material forms and you'll never have certain knowledge of what a horse is but perhaps that's the point perhaps keeping our focus on the details is the talmud's way of reminding us that when it comes to the divine law certainty is a dangerous illusion rabbi saw the vaichik joseph salavaichik is sensitive to the contrast between the greek philosopher's preference for locating the divine in an unchanging transcendent realm or in the abstract and fixed rational order of nature and the rabbi's conviction that the divine is to be found in the particular details of concrete material existence in his book halachic man he writes the common denominator of both the platonic and aristotelian views or the greek views is that the random and particular are not deemed worthy of being granted the status of the real and existent and remain in the realm of chaos and the void he contrasts this with the approach of the rabbinic he says halacha has a fixed relationship to the whole of reality in all of its fine and detailed particulars salvation goes on to point to talmudic passages that describe god as convening a heavenly academy to grapple with hallachic problems that are bound up with the empirical world the red cow which is a ritual for corpse impurity the heifer whose neck is to be broken in the case of an unsolved murder leprosy rules and similar issues god and the heavenly academy do not concern themselves with transcendence with questions that are above space and time but with the problems and earthly lie of earthly life in all its details and particulars and we might add in all its contingency the multiplication of details of one okinta or limiting case after another introduces into the divine law an element of uncertainty and contingency the answers are contingent on the details dependent on the particular circumstances which means that when applying the law in any new situation you can't be lazy and whip out a fixed preset answer you have to roll up your sleeves pay attention to the details and figure out all over again what justice and equity look like in this case so i've argued that talmudic argumentation can be seen as a kind of play that employs an ever-increasing level of detail and what-ifs in a concerted effort to defer final answers and to keep the game going so that it doesn't freeze in a dogmatic rigidity the babylonian talmud's famously convoluted legal discussions remind us that the jewish god is not the static unmoved mover of the philosophers but a dynamic living presence that this god's divine law is likewise dynamic always in process that no interpretation of the law is absolutely final that every answer is provisional because there's always the possibility of a new circumstance an unanticipated detail that might demand revision that no position however well argued and supported is completely immune to further thought and inquiry that everything is always always in play thank you so much for your attention thank you so much chris for this wonderful wonderful lecture and and performative and uh and we have a lot of questions from the audience and and and i hope we'll get through most of them uh but before we start um i want to ask you about you described really it really ties in beautifully with our with our first lecture you describe the work of the talmud or the meaning of what it does in the tekken's kind of a performance right a play keeping everything all the balls in the air and and really using the details not to reach a conclusion but exactly the opposite right you to to to keep it to keep us thinking right to keep us a beautiful beautiful uh um description of that um but what do we do with the cases when there's an actual conclusion in the talmud because we have uh sugiyot we have passages in which we have achieved up right we have sometimes the talmud does give us an answer so what do we do with that right so how does it work with your you're keeping all the balls in the air yeah so um it's a great question um we do have um some discussions arguments where someone will introduce something and then they will and then it will be said that it's a teufta which often gets translated as a refutation the idea being not only that it's a refutation but a final refutation that's how people read it as if now there can be no going back and that's actually not true if you look up the arguments and that seem to end with the tufta they very often don't end someone will present an argument and someone will give something that and it's declared that it's a tufta and then islam will say yeah but really and they continue so i think that we have to take a lesson from that that tufta simply means chuva an answer but it doesn't necessarily mean a final answer or that the conversation is done and there still may be another way to continue as often happens in many cases that features you've done so i think that even in those cases where the stum doesn't pick up and continue i think we need to understand that it's a tuft in the sense that this has been answered for now but that doesn't mean it has been finally answered and the conversation can continue as it so often does in many cases of tutor so basically what you're saying is the composition of the text is has multiple levels and it really ties into really i'm trying to uh connect it to our uh conversation in general both the the composition of the text in the first lecture and i'm already plugging in our next uh talk which will be with uh professor sekunda in two weeks from today when we'll talk about uh the talmud in its non-jewish context and this is where i'm leading you to your to our next question uh and we had a few questions from the audience talking about uh dating really you suggest connection to uh greco-roman ideas and greek philosophy um and we had a few questions asking uh uh for example shulamite magnus asked isn't it more uh relevant to compare ancient mesopotamians or or contemporaneous roman law rather than greek philosophy uh and i'm looking at uh mishulem gottlieb's question that asked about um if the details work is being done by the stamma far away in time from the greek and influenced notion of divine law how can we talk about this as the background for what we see in the talmud so if you can expand a little bit more on the dating and how you how you see the non-jewish uh background to to what you just presented sure so um we do not have from mesopotamia a notion of um natural law that the view of natural law that has been bequeathed to the west really comes from the greek philosophical tradition and especially the stoics it's picked up by cicero who really gives us our definition of the stoic divine law since we don't really have the writings of too many stoics but we have cicero who tells us about the stoic position and defines it and this view of divine law as something that is a logos or reason that permeates nature is a governing power within nature and is universal rational immutable and true this spreads throughout the mediterranean world and is carried into the east right um and it becomes a defining at all levels of society we find this in rhetorical handbooks we find this in um we find this even reflected in epitaphs on tombs the way people talk about um the divine law um it's it's from high to low it is and i would say it continues to this very day if you ask someone and i know because i do this every year when i teach my course on divine law i ask my undergraduates you know if someone told you um that there was this divine law what what do you think it would be like what what would it be and the students will say well i mean it would have to be perfect and unchanging and and it would have to apply to everyone everywhere and and and it would you know make sense right i mean a divine law is not going to tell you that it's good to stand on your head 24 hours a day right it would have to be rational and and i put on the board and they give me the stoic definition of divine law which has become such a part of western culture through christianity right so this is the idea it enters pidea from greek pidea or education and enters christian thought and theology we see it already in the new testament we already see the distinction between the divine law and human law in the new testament when jesus says to the pharisees you are abandoning divine law to pursue just your human laws right this this permeates becomes part of the conversation becomes part of rabbinic self-consciousness both in the land of israel and in bavel it it doesn't matter that in bevel this is carried everywhere and as i say i think the rabbis are doing this countercultural radical resistance work of saying don't judge our biblical tradition of divine law by these standards that's not how we understand the divine being as some transcendent principle and who's you know operates and met in nature it's not how we understand the divine being it's not how we understand this divine being's attempt to regulate the moral norms of society so you know what i'll take you one step further and then ask you um so how do we move from this play all the bulls in the a air in this performance to a code of law as the talmud becomes a code in law what's the process in which you see uh if the text is not written and i think you're absolutely right it's not written as a code of law but we see that we have right right after its redaction attempt to make it into a code of law but what allows it to become a prac a praxis right so in a way what you really need is another series after what is talmud and a series that is what did the talmud become um because this the afterlife of the of the talmud is a whole story on its own just like the afterlife of the bible is a story on its own right when we think about the writings that went into the bible what they might have been or meant to those persons who developed those traditions is one thing what they became when they were all collected and presented as if they were one self-consistent book what they became is something different in the same way we can think about the talmud as having a reception history and that reception history is very much influenced by the intellectual currents of later times so in the post-tomutic period we have the domestication of hellenistic thought by the other monotheistic religions of the day christianity especially but also islam jews are living in islamic and in christian lands and it soon becomes important to some jews to reconcile their tradition with the canons of greek thought which are now seem to be universal and rational they're divorced from a foreign culture they're more they're understood now to be universal human cannons of reason and so there's a desire by certain jewish philosophers maimonides chief among them to show that in fact the tradition the jewish tradition the bible but also the rabbis the talmud that all of this is consistent with the highest reason and that to some extent reason is divine and it's this faith in reason as being in complete accord with revelation which tells the story of so much of the medieval period and some jewish thinkers will go down that path and they will begin to apologize for some aspects of both biblical tradition and the talmud that seem to push against that that seem to allow for multiple interpretations or that seem to valorize dispute this becomes more uncomfortable to them and they start to become apologetic and assert that there is in fact certainty or finality or one final voice behind the diversity of opinion or the diversity of opinion is a fact a product of our human failings but that in fact there is one truth if we were wise enough we would see it instead of celebrating the diversity and the dispute and feeling that uncertainty is in fact possibility which is the view of the talmud i often think sometimes it's really just a question of choosing the right words some people say that all of this leads to uncertainty and i want to say well just change the word uncertainty to possibility and suddenly you change from a negative to a positive right all of this means there's possibility there's work to be done there's an invitation to us to do that work and i think that the talmud um is trying to perform for us you know that leads me to to a very similar topic so you're not saying i or are you saying that there's no truth according to the rabbis is everything relative right so this is a real mistake that i think is so often made that people think that the refusal to sort of absolutize any one position or value is just as if there are no truths and no positions a kind of nihilism or that it's all relative just subjectively what i want or what i like or it's political right it's relativist of today i want this so i'll use that and today i want that that i don't think is what the rabbis are saying the rabbi's position is not a value-less position it is a value-rich position the rabbis praise many virtues many values truth is one of them and they will even hierarchize them on occasion this is more important than that if you have a choice between these two things you should go for that honoring honoring human life for example human dignity is more important than this particular ritual law for example or saving a human life is more important than faithfully observing the sabbath right we know this that they they talk about values and they talk about positions and they will say some trump others and some are more important than others but even though they will engage in those debates and hierarchies those um values and positions they refuse to install anyone as permanently and absolutely supreme because that would be idolatry that would be saying something is sacred and untouchable and only god is sacred and untouchable so they refuse to install any one position or truth or value as absolutely permanently supreme they recognize that every moment of of moral judgment requires us requires the dynamic activation and weighing and balancing of these strongly held values and positions to determine the morally best course of action now in any given moment and the moral reasoning that we engage in which is really what the talmud is doing in its argumentation it's doing moral reasoning moral reasoning doesn't prove that something is immutably true it argues that something is situationally good today and maybe often and maybe for a long time and maybe for 99.9 of cases but not absolutely and immutably because the circumstances of life are ever shifting and wouldn't a truly divine law one that you can rely on now and in the future have to be dynamic and responsive rather than absolute and immutable right wouldn't it have to be open to revision and critique as the circumstances require wow that was beautiful um i i'm i want to refer you to two people a few people asked about this and i'll quote arnold the freeze that wanted to know when you're talking about the stump what do you mean so this actually ties in beautifully with actually our conversation exactly conversation last week but i as i i offered last week um really i i'm i brought myself into hot waters by doing this series right because i chose specific uh speakers they're really bringing you to the floor the front line the cutting edge ideas and and the topic of of the the composition and the layers and who wrote them and who who are the people behind them is a hotly debated topic uh and i would i think i would want to use this even though your topic was not the compositional your sum really takes a big part in your argument and what it does to the so if you can we could take it take a step back and use this question as an opportunity to talk about this so how would you how would you chronalize it uh is it one person is it many people uh um were they aware of what they were doing when they're doing changes to the earlier uh so if you can address this as a more general view of what is the stam in the talmud yes i will and i also just see part of a question that popped up about the greek idea of phronesis which i didn't see the whole question but i just want to say very much the type of moral reasoning that i just described is the greek idea of phronesis however huge difference the greeks we use phronesis or moral reasoning about human laws because human laws are by definition imperfect and need to be constantly revised but the natural law never you would never use bernays to revise the natural law that's what's radical and counter-cultural about the rabbis they take this idea of phronesis and they apply it to divine law that divine law should somehow require is dynamic and require modification revision working process evolving and that that's a sign of its perfection not a sign of its imperfections so they flip the greek idea on its head it's not because it's human law that's imperfect we have to keep working at it it's divine law it's perfect which requires that we work at it right okay but the stum um the only thing i wanted to say about this time is i'm trying to be i just wanted to be agnostic and i wanted to um about the question of its composition it is as you say a very difficult composition a question i personally happen to think that the truly dialectic stem is a later orchestration of earlier materials especially those that are begin at the beginning of tractates that's where we see them at the most developed and that's where they seem to draw together traditions from a large range of time periods and so on so i think those tend to be probably later at the level of editing and redacting but not every anonymous unit within the talmud is necessarily late and there was probably some along the way but the truly dialectical what i call the ring master that i think is late but it doesn't matter because what i was trying to describe was the experience one has when one enters into the game when one joins the play so it doesn't matter to me who's doing it now individual rabbis may not have this view robbie mayer for all i know may have really believed he had one right answer and that was the only right answer i think that's unlikely because as i said the view of divine law that emerges from rabbinic literature as a whole is as a whole the way i described it very very little push back on that so i think it tends to be a view and a perspective that most of the rabbinic class shared right that there are positions and one argues for them but you can't ever be absolutely sure even if something is good or true 99.9 of the time but it still could be the case that individual rabbis resisted and we do see towards the end of the talmudic period and i've written about this we do seem to see some more we hear more voices that are a little bit uncomfortable with this with the idea that sometimes the divine law can be not completely rational or you know that it can deviate from truth and and that it can deviate from natural reality we start to see some later rabbinic voices pushing back on that and trying to sort of apologetically erase the tracks of that um so yes there are those individual voices i absolutely acknowledge them and they're there but the overall experience one has when one enters into a studio that is orchestrated by this anonymous voice that says hmm why did robbie meer say that maybe this was his reason maybe that was his reason this rabbi thinks this this rabbi says that but wouldn't this disagree with him there's this anonymous recounting or retelling of the disputes and the debates that puts people into opposition that's the experience i was trying to capture because i think that experience is a practical demonstration on every page of the talmud of the larger conception of divine law that i tried to describe as emerging from the um from rabbinic literature as a whole does that help answer that question it does i think you kind of avoided the yeah being committed to the thumbs up yeah no i mean i said i do think the dialectic is late i do i think that's the hand of the redactor who's really pushing that and who knows what individuals may have thought about the strength of their own positions but i think that the redactor is definitely trying to instill that demonstration of epistemological humility big fancy words for don't think you're right all the time right that that's dangerous and that we all have to have a certain humility that doesn't mean we don't have convictions about what we believe but we have to recognize that there are other legitimate possibilities um that could be just as strong as ours i have to say that works for scholarship modern scholarship as well uh i thought we were we received a few questions about maimonides this is not in the realm of what we do here but if you want to say a few words about that we had we received a few questions about maimonides uh maybe one or two sentences about that before we return to the talmud um yeah i don't know what questions you received but um for example esther berezin but maimonides state divine law accommodates itself to state received the guide and we had a few more people ask really how does the how does maimonides fit in in your overall picture of divine law my mom at ease maimonides very closely approaches the greeks and the stoics insofar as he divinizes reason um very famous passage i think it's in part 2 maybe 31 of the guide where he says there are some people who think that if you ascribe rationality to the torah to the laws that you are basically saying it's human right and that anything divine has to be transcend reason and that it's the irrational that is divine and he rails against this idea he says this is terrible this is an insult if someone were to say to you that you acted irrationally you would be offended and insulted and it's an insult to god to say that anything could be irrational every single one of the 613 meets vote he says has the tom amit's vote right this is not a talmudic practice determining reasons for the commandments is not a telemusic practice the phrase does not even occur in the talmud it is a medieval practice when reason has been elevated to a divine status following the greek model and the major philosophers of the three monotheistic traditions are are competing with one another to prove that their traditions are most rational and maimonides was among them every single one of the 613 commandments has a reason he tries to articulate them all he groups them according to 14 different categories all of these serve this rational purpose all of these serve this rational purpose he says there's a few that i haven't been able to figure out but i will and if i don't it doesn't matter they have a rational purpose i'm sure they do so he's absolutely dedicated to the near divinization of reason which i think the talmudic rabbis avoided as a kind of idolatry if reason is sacrosanct and the bl and end all then that's got then you know that's that's putting reason in place of god so wow see we even did my monitors here that's wonderful um we got a few questions asking something a little bit more um for people who believe that this text is uh sacred or once it was accepted and codified it it became it becomes a text that is uh for or for more authoritative we need to to follow it uh how does your description of what the purpose of this text influence people who see this text as something that they're committed to does it does it clash with that world view or can people still read your book and still uh absolutely not the text absolutely and i would hope that they would find it all the more empowering um to do so um because let's not forget the people producing this observe the halal they were right so i think it's interesting mikhail that you started your question by saying people who view this text as sacred so and my question immediately is yes and what do you mean by sacred if you mean the greek idea of sacred or holy that it's fixed and immutable well then you got a problem but if you mean what i think the bible means and what the rabbis mean when they talk about something as divine then you are talking about something which invites us in and asks us to step up and get busy roll up our sleeves and think morally about what justice and equity are as we attempt to apply the law every single day so i yeah i think um and i would hope that by sort of i think there's much to be gained by bringing the rabbinic view of the divine and the rabbinic view of the divine law out of the shadows where it has been you know lying dormant covered by many many years of thinking about the divine law as something rigid and fixed to bring it out and to to consider the fact that maybe the divine torah was given in order to activate us dynamically to think and live and not simply given as a set of preset answers and prescriptions that we can sort of automatically do like robots wonderful answer thank you for that uh so we have a question that's uh if we already turn into uh uh less academic and more but but actually i think i would like to hear that answer as well uh we have a question from alan j weisbard that asks when you're when you start to look at the text when you sit down at your table right as a scholar and you start to look at those texts what are the thinkers or even scholars that that influence your approach to this issue what what what what motivates you what you know what inspires you when you look at the text or is it the other way around you look at the text and then you you know whatever comes out of it you know inspire you to connect it to some thinkers so what's the process when you reach when you when you compose this beautiful lecture you just gave us what's your process who are you the thinkers that inspire you how do you work wow that's the question that's going to stump me i am not sure how to answer that question i mean i and i'm not sure that we're always self-conscious or aware of the various influences or inspirations that we bring to things if i had to describe the way i work and this might not be true but i hope it is i really like to think that i um i make every attempt possible i'm one of those people who read scholarship last second it's the last thing i do that i i tend to just go swimming in the texts i tend to just i i will sit down and read a bunch of i read a biblical text or a law or a narrative and think well what happened to that and then look up how it was translated into aramaic by the targums and then look at every place in rabbinic literature that talked about that particular verse or that particular story and what did they make of it um i did this recently with the book of ruth it was just so great you know reading ruth and then i went to look at ruth rabba and i just read the entire midrash from beginning to end i didn't go to the scholars and say well what do they because you know what turns out they were wrong so i just read ruth rabba from beginning dead and i thought wow this is interesting they really understand ruth in a very in a way that i think is really unusual and different and when i would look up the scholars they would say here's what the rabbis think about ruth and they would quote one passage from ruth rabba the one passage which is atypical of the entire midrash and presents her in a certain way and i thought to myself but they obviously didn't read the whole midrash they just read the part that kind of made sense to them so i guess it's a bit of a dialectic i really think there's no substitute for just living with the sources they are so fertile and so rich and a million questions pop into your head then i will go and look to see what other people might have said mostly i find i disagree with what other people have said and that's interesting too though because i try to figure that out like why why why do i see things differently or what has influenced people or led them to not be able to see some of the things that i think are really patently obvious or there why are people scared of seeing what's there maybe you know sometimes that's what it is people don't want the text to say what they what they want to say i think we just need to get out of the way of the texts and and let them talk for themselves good uh we have another question from stephen there's many many many questions i'm really having a hard time choosing which ones but we have a stephan core asks can you talk about the role of president in the talmud does the royal president imply a formal immutability of so you know obviously you don't want to every day start all over again from zero right why why reinvent the wheel and this is true for almost everything we do in life um so of course there are there's accumulated wisdom my point is simply that nothing is ever completely beyond um revision as the circumstances um might require and that's one of the reasons an aquita is so important because the rabbis may have a very clear precedent but if you can make a distinction what they call a distinguishing um right this and we do this in modern law right if there's some way to distinguish a case from another then then you have released yourself from the tyranny of the precedent right so we saw that even in the two passages that i went through ruby mayor prohibits and rabiohanan permits but if i make a distinction then i can end up with a rebbe mayor who actually permitted all sukkah walls except for one really bizarre case that probably never happened in all of the universe i've limited his precedent to a very remote case so you know precedents are are found in all legal traditions and legal traditions have ways of of employing them when it's important to do so but also of marginalizing them when it might be important to do that i hope that answers that question good um we have a a few more questions but i think we should stop here because i think we it's a good place to stop and uh i i suggest chris that you stay uh towards the end a little bit after we're done and read all the questions and comments because you got a lot and i didn't do them justice and it just shows i think how uh engaging your talk was how was thought-provoking and and i'm grateful for all the people who wrote them down and it really makes us feel like we're in conversation with uh our audience as speakers and and we're really grateful for that and for all of you and thinking with chris about uh questions of divine law and the talmud as we're presenting the rabbinic view uh and i i'm sure you're all joining me in thanking chris to for this wonderful wonderful lecture and thought provoking and and grand scale and and bird's eye view and seriously wonderful wonderful lecture um and i invite you to talk about uh to join us uh in next week uh uh not not next week in two weeks from now uh in two weeks from now when we meet with professor shai sekunda to talk about the non-jewish background of the babylonian talmud the persian the christians all the people who lived around the talmud and did they have anything to do with the composition or their their culture and their tradition did it have anything to do with the authors of the talmud and the tradition of the talmud so that's the question we'll ask in two weeks and but we come armed with those two wonderful lectures that we started our series with and uh thank you all for uh joining us and we'll see you again in two weeks dad yes thank you very much chris thank you very much mikhail for uh wonderful moderation and christopher really wonderful great lecture thank you for joining us and have a good evening or afternoon uh ted please don't hang up yet let's stay online thank you all thank you thank you so much for doing this ted it's such a great um co-op collaboration thank you very much and have a good evening or good afternoon there in the states terrific

Channel: NLI Cultural Events - אירועי תרבות בספרייה הלאומית

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Id: zQy7DQr5k7Y

Length: 65min 46sec (3946 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 16 2022