Talmudic musings

Tonight’s readings for Rabbinic Literature have left me quite thoughtful. Prior to coming to HUC, I had always thought that Talmud = Mishnah + Gemara. (Mishnah is a compilation of laws redacted circa 220 CE, and Gemara is a compiled commentary on the Mishnah written a few hundred years later.) But after speaking with my professor after class today, I found out that many people often use the word “Talmud” when referring to the book I knew as “Gemara,” because they both mean the same thing, “study.” (“Gemara” is merely Aramaic while “Talmud” is Hebrew). “Talmudic” as an adjective is actually used generally in reference to early rabbinic literature, meaning anything from the 2nd-7th centuries (including Mishnah, Gemara, and Tosefta, an additional commentary on the Mishnah). In terms of content, Mishnah delineates specific laws, while Gemara broadens the Mishnah to form larger concepts; first came the particular, then came the abstract.

What’s most interesting to me is how it plays out in real life. Together, Mishnah and Gemara comprise a system that imposes legal boundaries on relationships. In the eyes of the ancient rabbis, the relationship between a person and another person, and a person and God, were one and the same. Both people and God were subject to the same obligations, since even God obeyed God’s decrees (e.g. according to them, God rested on Shabbat and put on tefillin, the boxes on the head and arm). The paradigm is hard to fathom today because it anthropomorphizes God to an unheard-of extent in today’s Reform Judaism. But the point is crucial: since there is no difference between people’s relationship to God and their relationship with each other, civil, ritual, secular, and religious law become embedded within the same structure. Religion and law are interwoven, to the extent that concerns of religious practice are not separated from what we today would call “secular” issues.

To quote one of my readings, Silberg in Talmudic Law and the Modern State: “The relationship between man and God, which, practically speaking, is the relationship between man and himself, between man and his own deepest moral and religious sentiments, is caught up in the network of juridical relationships, is integrated into the complex of juridical categories that were created by the lawgiver… [This outlook] renders impossible any division of religious and civil law into separate spheres. Both religious and civil law are cast into similar molds since both types of law involve the structuring of legal patterns of relationships, whether between man and man or between man and God. As a result of this obliteration of all boundaries, the entire range of religious practice is embraced within a network of purely juridical concepts.” (85, 83)

It’s really fascinating how the relationship with God is like that of people with each other, and how it underlies all daily transactions. In many cases God is even a character, a pseudo-person who has to be dealt with legally. For example, there is a law that says that if an ox of a lay owner gores an ox belonging to the Temple, or vice versa, then no one is held responsible or should pay damages. The reason, you ask? Turns out that God is the property owner of the Temple, and so technically owns the ox. Since, according to Exodus, liability can only found between “neighbors of a people,” and no lay person can ever be the neighbor of God, no one can ever be at fault.

One of the tenets of Reform Judaism is that is non-halachic, meaning it does not conform to Talmudic, rabbinic law. (That's a huge difference between Conservative and Orthodox Judaism, by the way, since they are halachic.) But even though Reform Judaism long ago rejected halacha’s normative quality, I think we still carry its essence with us. Religion and law is no longer the same thing, but our relationship to other people is still an inalienable part of our relationship with the divine. One cannot ask forgiveness from God on Yom Kippur before first asking forgiveness from other people. In the Amidah, the central prayer, we ask for wisdom and good leaders before asking for the Messiah. The relationships between us and God and us and each other are moral, not legal - but does that diminish the power of the Talmud? How much wisdom can still be gained from this antiquated rulebook/anthology if one looks at it through a strictly moral and/or spiritual lens and not a legal one? Then again, I wonder if it’s even possible to do that, because we might not be able to separate the legal from the moral without separating the religious practice from the secular - and in that case, we destroy the Talmud’s very foundation.

I’m sure that all these questions have been addressed and answered by someone else – I just need to spend some time in the library and read more books. I know that none of them are new to the world, but they’re still all new to me… and I have to admit, the process of asking them is just as much fun as finding the answers. :)