Episode #22 Forty Years of Instability

In this episode, Rabbi Reinman explains why the Oral Torah does not have a text and why there was such instability during the years in the wilderness.

Chapter Twenty-two

Forty Years of Instability

here are two parts to the Torah, the Written Torah and the Oral Torah. The Written Torah on its own is clearly not an adequate code of law. The Torah commands us to wear tefillin but does not tell us what tefillin are. The Torah states that the desecration of Shabbos is a capital offense, but it does not tell us what constitutes desecration. Clearly, there must be a second body of law that provides the details, an orally transmitted body of law of which there was no written record until over a thousand years later.

In fact, the Written Torah sometimes refers to the Oral Law. It tells us to “slaughter some of your cattle and sheep … as I instructed you and then you shall eat …”[1] The Talmud states that this tells us that Moshe was told all the details of kosher slaughter.[2]

The main Torah is the Oral Torah, because it can stand on its own. The Written Torah, however, cannot exist without clarifications of the Oral Torah. In brief, the Written Torah contains the entire Oral Torah through an esoteric system of hints and allusions. When we reach the Talmudic period we will discuss the relationship between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah.

During the Giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, the Jewish people were given a glimpse of a small part of the Written Torah and none at all of the Oral Torah. Afterward, until they entered Canaan, they were given the Written Torah piecemeal, and they studied the Oral Torah directly with Moshe and his closest disciples. At the end, the finished Written Torah, the Torah scroll, contained the basic laws, the narratives, the genealogies, the blessings and the admonishments given over their entire history up to that point. The Torah scroll was complete, but the Oral Torah was not recorded in it.

It is obvious that the Oral Torah could not have been incorporated into the Written Torah. A single scroll could not have contained all of it, but why was there no separate written record of the Oral Torah for over fifteen hundred years? Just as there are many volumes of law that supplement and elucidate the American Constitution.

There are several reasons. Having the Torah remain primarily oral ensures its exclusivity. There is no need for the outside world to know anything more than the Seven Noahide Laws. There is therefore no advantage to be gained from exposing the Torah to the critical and often hostile scrutiny of the gentiles who have been excluded. Only harm can come from such a thing. The Talmud considers the translation of the Written Torah into Greek during the post-Alexandrian period to have been a dark episode in Jewish history.[3] Certainly, the exposure of the Oral Torah would have been considered an even greater breach.

Furthermore, the absence of a written record ensured the integrity of the Oral Law, because it could only be learned from a living teacher and not from the pages of a book. The Oral Law is full of nuances and subtleties that are critical to a correct application of the law, and these finer points are often lost on the self-taught student who does not have the advantage of dialogue with a seasoned teacher and hands-on experience. For example, let us assume that two young people of equal talent decided to become surgeons. One of them went to medical school, while the other secured a full set of medical books and the use of a laboratory. Which one would we employ if we needed surgery? No answer is, of course, required. Application of the Oral Law is no less a fine art than surgery, and the absence of a written record guaranteed a tradition of teacher-student relationships.

The absence of a written record also helped reinforce the singular character of Jewish life. God had commanded the Jewish people to study the Torah “day and night,”[4] to plunge into its endless depths and extract its intellectual and spiritual treasures. The ideal condition of the Jew is to be connected constantly to the divine life force of the Torah, either through the direct conduit of study or through the practical performance of its commandments and the conduct of everyday affairs according to its guidelines. The absence of a written record of the Oral Law pushed the Jew in this direction, because every Jew had to spend a good portion of his waking hours studying, memorizing and reviewing the laws that governed all aspects of Jewish life.

Most importantly, however, it is simply impossible to have a written record of the Oral Torah, because it is infinite. The Torah is not a static thing. It has innumerable facets, and each of the facets has innumerable facets and so on ad infinitum. It is constantly growing, constantly expanding. It is a living thing. When we learn Torah, as previously discussed, we enter into the mind of God.

According to the Gemara, when Moshe went up to Heaven to receive the Torah, God gave him a peek into the future. He showed him Rabbi Akiva teaching Torah fifteen centuries in the future. Moshe watched and listened as Rabbi Akiva discussed many obscure and intricate matters, even discussing the significance of the crowns on the letters in a Torah scroll. Moshe couldn’t understand what Rabbi Akiva was saying, and he felt very discouraged. But then one of the students asked Rabbi Akiva for the source of his teachings. Rabbi Akiva replied, “It comes to us from Moshe at Mount Sinai,” and Moshe was relieved.[5]

Rabbi Akiva was saying that, although Moshe may not have said this particular thing, everything we learn and teach is an extrapolation of the essential Torah he gave to the Jewish people at Sinai and in the desert. A law he taught, for instance, was studied and discussed and argued, and new facets were introduced and considered and argued. And this process continued for many centuries, and continues today. The scope of the Torah is continually expanding, but it all goes back to the original Torah. It is a throbbing, living thing that is constantly growing and blossoming. And it is not only the great rabbis who expand the scope of the Torah. According to the Yerushalmi, even the opinion of an astute student traces back to Moshe’s teachings.[6]

The scope of the Torah is infinite. If there is a dispute between two rabbis, both opinions are considered valid. The Gemara states that “both these words and these words are the words of the living God.”[7] Although for practical purposes one side most be chosen as authoritative, both of them are legitimate Torah views, as long as they use the proper tools of Torah analysis.. The only exception to this rule is when there is a factual dispute. Did this happen or did that happen? They cannot both be true.[8] Otherwise, God’s infinite mind contains all legitimate views, and as Torah scholarship progresses, more and more is revealed. Forever.

Clearly, the Oral Torah cannot be confined to a text. Even when they ultimately decided a thousand years later, out of need, to create a written record of the Oral Torah, they only wrote the Mishnah, the very tip of the iceberg. Centuries later, they wrote the Gemara, a larger tip of the iceberg. And each generation that writes its discoveries is also still very near the tip of the iceberg, whose depth is infinite.

After the Giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, the Jewish people settled down at the foot of the mountain, and the process of studying and learning the Oral Torah directly from Moshe was set to begin. So this was the situation of the Jewish people at that point. They had just been extracted from bondage in Egypt with spectacular miracles. They had risen to the level of prophecy and had a prophetic encounter with God Himself. They were about to learn Torah from Moshe who had just received it fresh from God. They were smart and intelligent. Jewish tradition considers them the Dor De’ah, the Learned Generation. They ate manna from heaven and drank water from Miriam’s well. They were well-fed, well-protracted, without a care in the world and about to embark on the ultimate intellectual and spiritual adventure. How idyllic! How fantastic! What could be better?

At the same time, these fortunate people, these exalted people, were continually making trouble. They were continually rebellious, continually unruly and unmanageable. After delivering the Ten Commandments, Moshe went up to Heaven to receive the rest of the Torah, and he said he would be there for forty days. The people miscalculated and thought that the forty days had come and gone without him returning. Without even waiting a day or two, they reverted to their old pagan habits and made a golden calf and worshipped it.

How could such a thing happen? Of course, only a few thousand people actually worshipped the idol, and they were executed. But the entire population of hundreds of thousands and millions were considered guilty. They were dispirited and created an atmosphere where some would actually worship the idol. The Jewish people for all generations bear the guilt of that terrible sin. But how could it happen? Why didn’t the rest of the people cry out in horrified protest?

Again and again, they complained. They wanted this, they wanted that. They beleaguered Moshe to the point where he thought they were about to stone him.[9] When the time came to break camp and travel to Canaan, two years after the Giving of the Torah at Sinai, they demanded that Moshe send scouts on a reconnaissance mission to check out the land toward which God was taking them. The mission was a disaster. The scouts painted a slanderous picture of Canaan, and the people balked at going there.

How could all this happen? How could people who had attained the highest intellectual and spiritual levels on a mass scale behave like an unruly mob? How could the Learned Generation be so primitive?

Furthermore, how can we explain the severity of the punishment for the people who accepted the slander of the scouts? While the sin of the golden calf did not result in a death sentence and the prevention of entry into the Holy Land, these people were condemned to remain in the desert for an additional thirty-eight years until the entire adult population perished. Why was their punishment so severe? They had never been to Canaan. They didn’t know that the scouts were giving them a distorted picture. Of course, they should have trusted in God and in the leadership of Moshe, but was their sin more egregious than the sin of the golden calf?

Perhaps the Rambam in his Guide for the Perplexed provides a solution. He writes that God did not take the Jews of the Exodus directly to Canaan along the coastal road because they would have to fight their way through the land of the Philistines. At this point, the people were lacking courage, and they would have fled the battlefield. Instead, He sent them into the barren desert and led them on numerous, seemingly erratic wanderings in order to help them develop the courage they were lacking.

But why, asks the Rambam, didn’t He simply implant courage in their hearts? God never does anything to control human nature, the Rambam explains. He may put a person in situations where he may rise to the occasion and grow in character, but God will never directly mold a person’s character.[10]

The Jewish people emerging from Egypt after centuries of regimented bondage were burdened with slave mentality and character. They did not have boldness and initiative. They lacked courage. Therefore, although they rose quickly to exalted intellectual and spiritual levels, their responses to crises were visceral. Moshe is a few hours late coming down from the mountain? Panic! There is a shortage of food? Riots! A negative report by the scouts? Pandemonium! They were, of course, accountable for their inappropriate behavior, but it was understandable if inexcusable.

The divine decree that all the adult population would perish in the desert and only their children would enter the Holy Land can be seen as not entirely a punishment. Certainly, the sin of the golden calf was much more egregious and deserving of punishment. Rather, the decree acknowledged that the emancipated Jewish people had failed to develop courage during their two-year stay in the desert and that they were not likely to do so for the rest of their lives. Without divine intervention, they would never have the courage of freeborn people and would never be prepared to conquer Canaan on the battlefield without turning and running away. Therefore, the Jewish people were to remain the desert until the adults passed away in the natural course of events. Their children who would grow up free would fight for the Holy Land and conquer it.

[1] Devarim 12:21.

[2] Chulin 28a.

[3] Megillath Taanith, Epilogue

[4] Joshua 1:8

[5] Menachos 29b.R

[6] Peah 2:4.

[7] Eruvin 13b.

[8] Gittin 7b.

[9] Shemos 17:4.

[10] Guide for the Perplexed Part III, Chapter 32.