The Oral Talmud: Episode 3 - Misquoting God
The rabbis must have been leaving us a message. It says, "Please do to us what we did to God and whoever put the Torah together. We played fast and loose with what they were saying directly, and we understand that that means you’re going to do that to us, and we want you to." - Dan Libenson
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
This week Dan & Benay unpack one of the most famous stories in all of Talmud: The Oven of Achnai. A disagreement between the sages develops in a power struggle with God! How can the ways that the sages “defeat” the Divine show us the instruction manual for overthrowing them in turn? Where do we see these debates play out in our Jewish world?
Plus some expansive conversation about how “The Oral Talmud” got its name, understanding our generation of learning as a third meta-Torah coming from the revelation at Mount Sinai.
This week’s texts: The Oven of Akhnai (Bava Metzia 59a-b), Deuteronomy 30:11-16, Exodus 23:1-3
Access the full Sefaria Source Sheet with additional show notes via this link. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation.
Further Learning
[1] "Rabbi Eliezar is a plastered cistern that doesn't lose a drop" (Pirkei Avot 2:8)
[2] "Lo Bashamayim Hi: It's Not In Heaven" - an animated song of our story, from Bim Bam's Studio Godcast (on YouTube)
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DAN: The Oral Talmud is our weekly deep dive study partnership, in which we try to figure out how voices from the Talmud – voices from 1500 to 2000 years ago – can help us think in new ways about Judaism today.
This episode starts with a bit of Oral Talmud history. We started recording this show very soon after the COVID-19 pandemic started, and we hadn’t really thought about whether there were other Talmud podcasts out there, and we quickly realized that we were using the same name as an existing Talmud podcast. So, of course we changed it, and we started this episode by talking about why we picked The Oral Talmud. In our last episode, we studied a Talmud text that re-imagined the revelation of Torah at Mount Sinai. The sages of the Talmud built on the Torah’s story of the revelation and imagined that two Torahs were revealed – a written Torah and an oral Torah. And here we begin to imagine a third Torah revealed at Mount Sinai, which we’re working on discovering by doing to the Talmud what the sages of the Talmud did to the Written Torah. We could call this Torah “The Torah of svara,” or moral intuition, which not coincidentally, is the name of Benay’s yeshiva.
The text we focus on this week is known as the Oven of Akhnai. It’s one of the most well known Talmud texts among people like us, who believe that the Torah is not something static bit rather something alive and evolving. And while it does provide a lot of support for that more radical view, it’s actually a more complex take than people often notice. So, our hope is that we’re bringing a fresh lens for those who have encountered this text before, while also providing a compelling entry point to Talmud study if this is your first time. We see this text – in part – as a classic example of how the Rabbis made radical shifts to Judaism and, at the same time, left us a blueprint for how to rewrite the rules they established. We’ll meet some important Talmud personalities, and also visit with the sources that the sages quote - and sometimes misquote - from Torah.
Each episode of The Oral Talmud has a Source Sheet linked in the show notes on a web site called Sefaria where you can find pretty much any Jewish text in the original and in translation, and you can follow along with the texts we discuss, share them with your study partners, or just listen to our conversation!
And now, The Oral Talmud…
Dan Libenson: Hi, everyone. This is Dan Libenson, and welcome to the show that we are now calling The Oral Talmud with Benay Lappe, who I think will appear in a moment. There she is. And me, Dan Libenson. We found out that our name that we had picked for this show–which was pretty random, Talking Talmud, it was pretty straightforward–turns out that that was the name of a Talmud podcast, so we immediately said, “We need to change the name.” We then tried to crowdsource the name, and asked our listeners or watchers what name we should have, and we got nothing. So we decided that we’re going to have to do this ourselves. What else is new? And we came up with the name after, I would say that I spammed you with many texts of all kinds of different names, and one of those names that stuck was called The Oral Talmud.
Benay Lappe: What I love about your having spammed me was that, you know how only a few of the texts that you get appear before you actually click on it, then you see all the texts one after the other? The only one that appeared on my telephone screen was “Oral Torah.”
Dan Libenson: Oral Torah, yeah.
Benay Lappe: And I thought to myself, “No! Oral Talmud! That’s it! Oral Talmud!” And then when I clicked on the phone, one of the subsequent texts you had already written said, “Oral Talmud.” How about that! So I think it was beshert.
Dan Libenson: By the way, that’s pretty much how the name Judaism Unbound came about. Basically I was spamming my team with all kinds of names, and they loved Judaism Unbound, and I said, “That doesn’t sound serious enough. Is that really?” And anyway. I guess that’s the way to do it. So the Oral Talmud it is. And I guess when I was spamming you with those ideas, the idea that was in my head was that the way that the Talmud characterizes itself is that, essentially–and we talked a little bit about the Sinai moment last week, we’re going to keep talking about it, because like we said last week it’s an important moment in the rabbis’ imagination in the Talmud. And they had this story that at the Mt. Sinai, not only was the ten commandments given, not only was the Torah given, whatever that means exactly, but they said that what we think of as the Torah, that’s the written Torah. There was another Torah that was given at Mt. Sinai called the Oral Torah. And that Oral Torah-
Benay Lappe: Genius.
Dan Libenson: -was oral. And you know, now, x hundreds, thousands of years later, people are going to forget it, it’s really important, we’re in exile. We better write it down. So that’s the story of the Talmud. It’s the attempt to write down the Oral Torah.
And where I was going with it was we’re very much inspired, you and I both, by Yitz Greenberg and his idea that we are on the cusp of, or have gone into, a third era of Judaism. There was the biblical era, then the rabbinic era, and now the post-rabbinic era. And it really feels to me–and we’ve been talking about this–that we’ve just undergone some kind of exodus, some kind of sudden exodus from where we were, and here we are milling around in the wilderness. And it seems like the third era is pretty close. And so if we were to do what the rabbis were doing back then, we would have to imagine that there was actually a third Torah given at Sinai! What would it be called? That was where my head was going. So there’s the written Torah, the oral Torah, and what’s the other Torah? And I think that what you’ve been saying all along, at least as I’ve understood it, is that the other Torah is what you call svara, which is a word from the Talmud that maybe you could explain a little bit.
Benay Lappe: Yeah. What I see in the tradition the rabbis essentially invented, but which they retrojected back into God’s mouth at Mount Sinai, which was a great, I think, sales technique, great marketing on their part. So that’s my theology. Was a radically new tradition that they gave themselves permission to create by expanding the places where they could reliably find God’s will. And this is an insight that I learned from my teacher David Kraemer, that the rabbinic revolution was actually a revolution in human thought, not just Jewish thought, which was that where you could go to find out what God wants of you is not just your scripture, but for the rabbis it was also svara. It was this inner sense of moral intuition which we all have the seed of, that we all have the ability to cultivate and refine, and they believe it can be refined in learning and lots of other ways. But that ultimately that could be a source of truth and of innovation and of retelling and of improving and upgrading the tradition that we inherited. So this “oral Torah” that they portrayed as having come down from God was really quite a radical retelling, one that I claim would have been unrecognizable to the Jews of the written Torah before them.
And as you really put it, I think, so beautifully, the rabbis want–and I believe it too, but you say it better–and that is that the rabbis want us to do to them what they did to God. In other words, or what they did to Torah. They are showing us the tools, the mechanisms, the fact that the tradition is about radically retelling in order to achieve our ultimate goals. And here, go ahead and do it where and when you see fit. And I think we’re there.
Dan Libenson: Yeah, and I think that the only piece that I want to add is that I think that…. What I was getting at was svara, the way that you just explained it, this deep moral intuition, I think that’s the third layer. Because if something is written and then something is passed down orally, the other thing is passed down almost meta-orally, by role modeling, by example. These ways that are other than oral, and that I think fundamentally make up what we know as intuition, what we know as wisdom. And so I think that that’s, some version of that is the third layer that we can say was also given at Sinai, for example.
Benay Lappe: Absolutely.
Dan Libenson: And that’s what I was trying to get at with the idea of The Oral Torah that ended up being The Oral Talmud. And I think that what I was trying to get at with the concept of the oral Talmud–I don’t know that it fully gets there; at least one layer of it–is that it’s an English translation of svara. It’s not quite, but there was something that I was trying to get at there that was saying, how do we say this really is… if the Talmud is the oral Torah, then the oral Talmud must be that intuition. So I’m trying to get at the same concept. At least that was what was going on in my mind.
Benay Lappe: Yeah. Svara is what drove oral Torah. And it’s the constant, actually, that remains. No matter what the tradition looks like when you bring your svara to bear on it, I think it’s what becomes the unchanging, eternal concept. Not that svara is unchanging. People can disagree about their svaras. But the idea that svara is where our truths come from, ultimately, I think is the eternal Torah.
Dan Libenson: Well, and you talk about–I think I got this from you, so I’m just trying to reflect it back to you, so you tell me if I’ve got it wrong. I think that what’s interesting is that you could critique this idea that, oh, the rabbis made up this oral Torah, it wasn’t really given. But no. I think that what they’re saying is that it’s almost fundamental to the written Torah, has to be some kind of oral Torah. We know even that the written Torah was an oral tradition before it was written down. So the point isn’t that it’s oral. The point is that it’s coming from a more, a deeper well of knowledge, wisdom, principle, intuition, and that that goes into different forms over time, including a written form.
And so you’ve explained to me that the rabbis, and I think David Kraemer explained too, and who’s our guest for next week, that the rabbis had this idea of svara, and that svara, meaning moral intuition, trumps even something that’s written in the Torah as a source of law. So if you have a deep sense that something–and we’ll study some texts of this nature later on–but if you have a sense that something is deeply wrong that is in the Torah, that it would offend your moral intuition on such a deep level, then actually at least the rabbis themselves said that svara, one’s moral intuition, can tell you to not do that thing in the Torah. I mean, in their case it was rare instances, but we can sort of amplify.
And what that means on a fundamental level, to my mind, is that svara is an even deeper well of source, of meaning, than the oral tradition, which was an even deeper well than the written tradition. And so it may be that we’re saying or adding a third layer on to what was given at Sinai, but actually we’re not adding a third layer, we’re actually almost digging up a third layer that was, of course, always there in both of the other layers. Something like that.
Benay Lappe: Yeah. I love that. I think you’re absolutely right. For the rabbis to say that that which comes out of your svara can trump Torah–they’re essentially suggesting to hameivin yavin, to those who can tolerate the radicalness of it, that Torah itself, the Torah itself, came out of svara. That it was a product of svara from the get-go. Yeah.
Dan Libenson: I want to raise one more valence of the oral Talmud before we move on to today’s text, because it was something that you were saying before we came on the air, and I actually, I’ve been mulling it over, and I think there’s something deep in it that we should bring forward to our listeners, to our watchers, and engage people in thinking about this. That in these periods of transition, whether it’s the wilderness in the desert after the exodus from Egypt, or the period after the destruction of the Second Temple, there’s this period between the exodus and the, let’s say, arrival in the promised land of some kind. There’s a period in between. And we could call that the wilderness period, we could call that–it’s a period of chaos and it’s scary, but it’s also a period of creativity towards this ultimate place that we’re going to get to.
In the myth, it’s either you could think of it as seven weeks in the wilderness before we get to Sinai. You could think of it as forty years in the wilderness before we get to the land of Canaan. Pick one, whichever myth drives you more. And in the Talmudic period, whether that’s a myth or historical fact–it’s a little closer to history, but also a lot of myth there–that it’s this period, maybe, from the destruction of the Bar Kochba revolt, which was a later period than the destruction of the Second Temple–between that period, which is about 135, I think, and the year 200, when Rabban Yehuda haNasi wrote down the Mishnah. And so he wrote down the Mishnah in the year 200. That was the first book of the Talmud. So what was happening in those sixty-five years in between? You, years ago, talked to me, “Well, he must have been traveling around the country and the world, saying, ‘What are you doing? What are you doing?’ This is such a crazy time. We need to find out.” And he kind of-
Benay Lappe: I actually imagine him collecting faxes. This was when faxes was the height of technology. I imagine him faxing all of his buddies in all the little yeshiva groupings, “Tell me what you do on Shabbos. Tell me what you do on Hanukkah. Tell me what you do when two people find a garment and they each claim.” Oh!
Dan Libenson: Right. And so it feels like if we’re in a similar time–this is not the written new Talmud yet, but maybe it is the oral new Talmud, in the sense that it’s this period where we’re going around. And I’m doing it with my friends, other people doing it with their friends. I’ve made some kind of internet video thing, so when I talk to my friends, other people can see it. But there’s probably all kinds of things going on elsewhere. And we’re really just going around to the people that we really respect, and that we respect what they were doing before this crisis, but we also really respect what they’re doing now. And we’re saying, “What are you doing?”
And so I just want to raise that as another valence that I was certainly not thinking about when I was spamming you the other night. But that’s also what happened with the name Judaism Unbound, was we started to see, “Wait a second, there’s really something in this name.” So those are some of the things that I’m thinking about.
Benay Lappe: I’m very inspired. You and I have been talking for years about, “Let’s finally start working on the Mishnah. What’s it going to look like? What does it need to say? How would we structure it if we were to write another one?” And all of a sudden, I realized that what we’re all doing in this moment right now is collecting, is what the new Mishnah will be edited from, I think.
Dan: Okay, so let’s jump into this text, because this has been a very fundamental text -
Benay: Okay, wait a minute, I’ve got another idea. Okay, if the Mishnah literally means 2.0. It was Torah 2.0. Great name.
Dan Libenson: Because it comes from the root of sheni.
Benay Lappe: Sheni!
Dan Libenson: The second thing, so it’s 2.0.
Benay Lappe: Right. So they called all this stuff they were collecting from their buddies, that was Torah 2.0. So we can’t call the next one Mishnah. It would have to be something like shlisha, or something like that. I don’t know.
Dan Libenson: Mishlish. I don’t know. We’ll think on that.
Benay Lappe: Right. I don’t know, what’s the noun form? Okay, we all have to work on that.
Dan Libenson: You’re the linguist. Okay, you work on that one. We’ll bring that back next week–no, next week we have David Kraemer, we’re going to be a little more serious. But the week after, we’re going to come back to that.
Benay Lappe: Okay.
Dan Libenson: Okay. This text that we want to study today and look at today and think through today is known as the oven of Achnai story. It comes from the tractate of Talmud called Bava Metzia. It starts on page 59a, but the meaty part is on 59b. And it’s kind of the most, one of the most famous texts in liberal Judaism, and we’ll see why as we study it. There’s reasons why liberal, by which I mean Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Renewal, rabbis like that, people at those events have liked this text for a long time. I think that there’s layers that those folks might not even like that we’re going to dig up some today. So I think this is a very potentially radical text.
The one framing that I want to give on that, which is not a framing that I have consciously used before in this text, but it does flow directly from our conversation last week, where, like you were saying earlier, we concluded that the rabbis must have been leaving us a message. It says, “Please do to us what we did to God,” in the sense that we took–or maybe not even God. Whoever put the Torah together. We played fast and loose with what they were saying directly, and we understand that that means you’re going to do that to us, and we want you to.
And we talked last week, you can go back to last week’s episode to dig deep into why we had that hypothesis. But I want to build on that and say in this story, reading it through our eyes, I think we have to at least give it a reading where, when God appears in this story, it’s not God, it’s the rabbis. And so I don’t want to give too much away, because we haven’t read the story, but we should read it on two layers. One is the layer as written, which is that God has a certain involvement, but the other is, let’s say it didn’t say “God,” let’s say it said “the tradition” or “the rabbis’ views,” or something like that. And I think it will be interesting to look at it in both of those ways.
So, Benay, you want to set the scene for us and give us a sense of what this text, where it comes from, what it’s all about?
Benay Lappe: Yeah. So before we dive into the text, I think it’s important, it will add another layer, just to get on the table where it’s sitting in the Talmud, and what just happened before it. So the tractate of Talmud that this story appears in is, as you said, Bava Metzia. And what’s funny about this story appearing in Bava Metzia is that Bava Metzia is about labor relations, employment law. It’s a lot of business law. But all of a sudden, out of many, many, many pages of discussion about business law and misrepresentation and cheating in business, comes this mishnah that talks about verbal wronging. And it basically makes the connection that just as financial wronging in business is very real, and punishable, and it causes actual harm, verbal wronging actually causes harm too. And don’t go around saying “sticks and stones.” Verbal wronging is for real.
And it gives a number of examples. You shouldn’t go into a store and ask the price of an item that you have no intention of buying, because it might cause the shopkeeper to get his hopes up and then be disappointed. And you shouldn’t remind someone who’s converted, or whose parents converted, what their life was like before they converted. And someone who’s done teshuva, you shouldn’t remind them of the thing they used to do. So gives a number of examples of verbal wronging.
And then the gemara after that, the elaboration on that mishnah goes into how bad hurting someone with words is. And the rabbis finally arrive at this idea that ever since the Temple was destroyed, the gates, all the gates to God, to heaven, have been closed, except for one gate. And there’s only one way now to really reach God and have God immediately respond, and that’s through crying out from the pain of having been hurt through words. And that’s really the setup to this story.
Leave that as a big frame, because in that context there’s another layer of understanding what’s really going on in the story, or why this story is particularly here in this book, this volume on this page. Okay.
Dan Libenson: So first of all, when those connections come up, please point them out to me, because I didn’t realize that, and I hadn’t been reading it in that light. So that will be very interesting for me, and hopefully for everybody.
Benay Lappe: Yeah, I think that’s the surface take of the story.
Dan Libenson: So just to set a little bit of scene setting, only in the sense of what are we even talking about. And maybe it matters a little. It doesn’t really matter, but at the same time–I mean, it doesn’t really matter for, I think, the main part of our discussion, but at the same time let’s make it clear. That there’s a bunch of rabbis here who are arguing over a matter of Jewish law. Matter of halacha, we could translate that other than law, but basically, it’s a legal question: whether a certain kind of oven is pure or impure or has the capacity to become pure or impure. And the fundamental idea, as I understand it, is that only, things can only be ritually impure if they are a usable vessel of some kind, a usable tool.
Benay Lappe: Or whole.
Dan Libenson: Right, but it has to be whole, it has to be a tool. If it’s just a pile of stuff, it can’t become impure. It has to be something that could have been used, and then the question is if it’s pure or impure. So if it’s just a pile of garbage, then it’s not impure. And so the question is if there’s an oven that was impure, or could have been impure, and we say, “Hey, we have a clever idea. We don’t know if this oven is pure or impure. Could have been impure. Let’s actually take it apart. Then, when it’s in pieces, we know that it’s pure because nothing can be impure if it’s just a pile of junk. And then let’s put it together again, maybe in a different way, with a little bit of sand in between.” There’s all kinds of… but the clever notion is can we somehow transform it and make it into something that’s pure, or that maybe even couldn’t be impure, by somehow reconstructing it. So it still works just like an oven, it still does what an oven does, but some clever way we’ve made it.
So it’s almost actually, in a way, it does relate to the rest of the story. Because in a way, it’s saying can we fool God a little bit, by saying, “If we can just take this oven and take it apart and put it back together another way, then maybe we’ve kind of found a way around God’s rules about purity.” Something like that. Is that a fair description?
Benay Lappe: Yeah. For me, it’s about can you fundamentally change something which, from the outside, looks and functions and appears in its old way. And is this new thing now what it used to be, or what it appears to be? In any case, I think the issue isn’t so much is the oven pure or impure. It’s is it impurifiable. I always imagine that the backstory here is that there was this really clever oven inventor who thought, “I’m going to make a million bucks,” or whatever their money was-
Dan Libenson: A million dinars.
Benay Lappe: “I’m going to make a million dinars by selling an impurity-proof oven.” Everyone’s going to buy this oven, because everyone knows that if a creepy crawly dies in their oven, they’re going to have to break apart the oven and go out and buy a new oven, which probably was expensive. So if you buy this oven, which is going to be costly, but it’s going to be the only oven you ever have to buy, and it’s impurity-proof because it’s been chopped up and re-put back together, so it functions like an oven. Because it’s in pieces, though, it’s not impurity… it can’t be made impure. You’re going to buy that oven. And Rabi Eliezer is–we’re going to meet him in a minute. He’s the front guy for this oven. He’s the guy who says, “Yeah!”
Dan Libenson: He had stock in it.
Benay Lappe: Exactly! He’s got skin in the game. He’s an investor in this company. And he says, “Yeah, this oven is impurity-proof because it’s been chopped up, and it’s no longer whole.”
Dan Libenson: By the way, I just want to note. I don’t know if this is relevant at all, but I just had a… I just have ordered all this new coffee-making supplies because I figure I’m going to be stuck in my house for months, I might as well enjoy making coffee in new ways. So I don’t know if it’s relevant, exactly. I’m thinking about it was pretty expensive, and if there was one that it was sold to me like it wasn’t going to break or anything, it’s real value in a time like this.
Benay Lappe: Exactly. I don’t know what the analogy is, but I’m also getting Teflon. This is like the first Teflon. I don’t know, there’s something there.
Dan Libenson: Okay, so now I think it’s valuable just to introduce a couple of the characters quickly, because there’s two main characters in this story, Rabi Eliezer and Rabbi Joshua.
Benay Lappe: I’m sorry to interrupt you. Let’s remember that the first story we learned, the story of Rabi Yochanan ben Zakkai getting snuck out of Jerusalem to join the sages who are already in Yavneh, I don’t think we mentioned it at the time, but the two students of Rabi Yochanan ben Zakkai who held his coffin, or his body, were Rabi Eliezer and Rabi Yehoshua.
Dan Libenson: Right. So they’re the two main students of Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai. And-
Benay Lappe: Who have very different approaches.
Dan Libenson: -they sort of represent two different poles. Right. So first of all, Rabbi Eliezer tends to represent the more conservative voice, and Rabbi Joshua tends to represent the more creative, the less conservative voice. What’s interesting is that Rabi Eliezer is known in the Talmud as a plastered cistern that doesn’t lose a single drop. And I think that the way that we can interpret that in our language is his mind was like a steel trap. Nothing got out of his mind. He remembered everything. So a person who remembers everything most likely will be conservative, because he knows how it used to be. Whereas a person who has a less good memory might be more likely to be liberal, because, “I don’t even remember what it used to be, so why should I be stopped by these rules? I don’t even remember the rules.”
What was interesting in this story, though, was that at least as far as this… I mean, the reason why we might… I don’t want to cast aspersions on Rabi Eliezer, but the reason why we might imagine that maybe he owns stock in the oven company is because he’s coming up with a ruling that’s unusual for him. He’s giving this ruling that says, “This oven is super-can’t-be-impure,” and he would be the kind of guy that would more likely want to say, “No, no, no, we got to be careful about…”
Benay Lappe: Although I think him having stock in this company, and him fronting this oven, speaks to the way in which, if you’re extraordinarily stringent, there’s a way in which that actually becomes opening up. It’s a way that it becomes… you can be very flexible if you stay very, very close to the literal.
Dan Libenson: As long as I meet the letter of the law, and I know the details of it, I can tell you exactly. So I figured out exactly, that’s why I’m so impressed with this invention of Mr. Achnai, because he figured out how to make exactly the thing that gets around the laws.
Benay Lappe: Exactly.
Dan Libenson: Yeah, okay, good. So in any event, in the story Rabbi Eliezer is saying, basically, that this oven is good. It can’t be made impure, or it’s not impure. And the other rabbis, ultimately led by Rabbi Joshua, say that it’s not, no, you can’t do that, that’s a workaround that doesn’t work. And this oven is just like any other oven, it can be impure. And basically, Rabbi Eliezer gets very upset. And so they talk about this is the oven of Achnai.
And the sages taught that Rabbi Eliezer, who wanted the oven to be considered pure or good, he gave all the possible answers in the world to support his opinion. But the rabbis, the other rabbis, did not accept his arguments. And after he couldn’t convince them logically, he moved to miracles. And he said, “If the law is according to my opinion, this carob tree over here should prove it.” And basically, the carob tree gets up and walks across–I love how the rabbis are always like, “Well, the carob tree got up and walked.” I mean, that would be itself a miracle, but then they have to argue did it go one hundred cubits or four hundred cubits. And other texts that we’re going to look at with similar arguments. Yeah.
Benay Lappe: Yeah. I think that’s a really important point. Nobody disagreed about the fact that a miracle happened at Rabi Eliezer’s invocation of it. Everyone agrees a miracle happened. They’re only arguing over how far the tree went. And it’s a really important point, because no one’s denying–no one’s saying prophecy is over. Yet this text, as we’re about to see–I don’t want to give away too much–it’s a snapshot of the moment that, not that prophecy died, but the moment that the tradition said, “Yeah, but we’re not going to listen to it. Yeah, prophecy happens. God still tells us what he wants, and we’re not going to pay attention.”
Dan Libenson: Right. And what I had said was that let’s try to read this text on two levels. One is where God is God, and the other where God is the tradition, or the rabbis. The version of that that would be in our day would be if some genius of Talmudic knowledge–and not the kind that we’re talking about, because we’re talking more about meta ideas–but somebody who, the classic rabbi who could put a pin through the Talmud and know what letter it stopped on. I mean, that’s the legendary great rabbis of the old country, whatever. And so that guy comes and says, “I know, I could show you, it’s on page 42b,” and basically we’re going to…. So here it’s God making miracles, and in our version today it would be somebody claiming, “I know what the tradition tells, exactly, and I can prove it to you through this proof.”
Benay Lappe: Right.
Dan Libenson: So the first thing that Rabbi Eliezer does is that he has a carob tree walk around some number of cubits, and then…. And the rabbis say, “One does not cite proof from a carob tree.” Meaning, yeah, it was a miracle, but you can’t prove a legal argument through a carob tree. And so then Rabbi Eliezer says, “Okay, if the law is according to my opinion, the stream should prove it.” And the water in the stream turned backwards. And they said, “One does not cite proof from a stream.” Now, my question–I don’t know if this is worth a conversation, but at the point at which they don’t accept the law from a carob tree, why would they accept it from a stream? In other words, why does he keep trying with more and more miracles? But let’s just go through the miracles, and then we can discuss that.
So then Rabbi Eliezer said, “If the law is in accordance with my opinion, the walls of this study hall should prove it.” And the walls started to cave in. And then Rabbi Joshua finally pipes up, and he scolds the walls, and he says, basically, “If Torah scholars are disputing over the law, what is it your business?” And the walls then did not fall, because of deference to Rabbi Joshua, but they don’t also straighten up, because of deference to Rabi Eliezer. So it’s very interesting. And then it becomes one of these just-so stories. And that’s why the walls of the study hall are still slanted to this day, because of this episode. So by the way, again, in this critical–I wonder if there’s any kind of academic scholar who studied this story and can tell us, “Actually, there was a study hall in Mechoza,” I guess it would be in Yavneh, somewhere, whatever, that had these slanting walls, and probably there actually was a just-so story to try to explain that.
In any event, the walls stay slanted. And then Rabbi Eliezer tries one more miracle, which he says, “If the law is in accordance with my opinion, let heaven prove it.” And then a divine voice–basically, God–comes and says, “Why are you differring with Rabbi Eliezer? The law is always according to Rabbi Eliezer.” That’s a principle in the Talmud, that when Rabbi Eliezer expressed an opinion, the law is always according to what he says. Because he’s the plastered cistern that doesn’t lose a drop! How could it be possible that he would ever be wrong? And in this case, too, he’s right.
Benay Lappe: It’s important to remember this moment when God himself, God itself, says, “Rabi Eliezer is not only right here, about this oven matter. Every time he gives an opinion, he’s right! He is completely in line with me. Everything he says is what I want, is as I would want it, because that….” The rabbis let God put that characterization on Rabi Eliezer, and they then use Rabi Eliezer as a kind of symbolic carrier of God’s will, and they’re going to, in other places in the Talmud, reject what Rabi Eliezer says, or radically change what Rabi Eliezer meant, expecting you’re going to know that God, in this story, said that, “Rabi Eliezer is right and is doing what I want everywhere he says anything.” And so it’s a shorthand that the rabbis are going to use elsewhere in the Talmud to project this obviousness over their radical overturning of God and Torah.
Dan Libenson: So put those on the list. We’ll still making a list of future texts to look at. We should look at those. That sounds very important.
So basically, God says, “We always agree with Rabi Eliezer.” And so I guess before we get to the punchline, any more that you want to-
Benay Lappe: I love what you brought out. The fact that once Rabi Eliezer brings the carob trees, and they say, “No, we don’t take proof from carob trees,” why would he think that they’re going to accept proof from any other miracle? I love that, and I–we should come back to that, because I think that’s precisely at the root of why Rabi Eliezer is so dangerous, and why what’s going to happen to him happens to him, and why he’s so threatening to his colleagues. But finally, he says, “Okay, fine. You don’t believe in any of these miracles, signs of God’s will. Let God himself tell you with his own words that I’m right about this oven.” Okay.
Dan Libenson: I do want to say one thing, though, that I think as I reflect on… because I really feel we’re going through a time right now. I mean, we have been for a century or two. But it’s accelerating, and now this coronavirus period is a super-acceleration of it. But you see the Rabi Eliezers of our day who are saying, “What you’re doing is not Judaism. It’s nice, I can understand how your Zoom seder is nice, but that’s not the right way to do a Seder! That can’t be the new way to do a Seder! It’s not right.” And you’re like, “But wait a second, I really liked it. I was able to have my whole family together for the first time ever from every country, all these countries. What’s bad about that?”
Or even more significantly–we were talking about this with Amichai Lau-Lavie earlier–that in Jewish law, traditional Orthodox, let’s say, Jewish law, there’s a requirement that you have to have ten men in a room, in a physical room together to be able to say the Mourner’s Kaddish. Well, that can’t happen anymore for a certain time. And people are, first of all, a lot of people are dying these days, and even if it was just the regular…. “What do you mean, I have to say the Mourner’s Kaddish! I need it for myself. I need it for the person I’ve lost and I’ve loved. You can’t tell me that I’m not going to say the Mourner’s Kaddish because of some arcane rule that ten people have to be in the same room. I never even heard that rule.” And they’re like, “well, you’re ignorant. You should have heard of that rule.” They go, “No, but it can’t be the rule!” And so you have the Rabi Eliezers of the world, I think, today saying, “But the rule of the book says this!” And the people of the world saying, “But I need it to be different.”
Benay Lappe: And the ones who say, “Hey, when we could have had ten men in a room, very few of y’all were recognizing how problematic that idea was when we could have done it! To have ten, what, cisgendered men in a room? You’re not even understanding men-ness.” That whole idea was a problem even when it was “possible.” That’s the crumble before the crash.
Dan Libenson: Right. But I think that the one thing about Rabi Eliezer and this question about why does he keep bringing another proof and another proof–that’s how the folks who were in the position of Rabi Eliezer would be and are today. And by the way, I don’t say that disparagingly. They really believe that this is right, and I respect them. But they’re saying, “It says it here! And it says it here! And it says it here! And it says it here!” And they’re like, “But I didn’t care that you said it the first time, so why do I care that you’ve told me five different places where it says it? I need to say the Mourner’s Kaddish.”
Benay Lappe: And they’re right!
Dan Libenson: They’re right. Absolutely.
Benay Lappe: They’re right! And what they’re saying is, “This is how it works.” And what the others are saying is, “Not anymore, it doesn’t. You keep quoting from the old manual–and you’re right, that’s what the old manual says. But the problem here is that you’re not recognizing that there’s a new manual.” And that’s what’s happening in this text. This is the story. This is the story of the creation of the new manual and what happens to those who say, “It says this in the old manual!”
Dan Libenson: The only slight thing that I would say about what you just said is that there isn’t yet a new manual. And that’s part of the problem. It’s that there’s an old manual versus a new something that-
Benay Lappe: Yeah.
Dan Libenson: -one day will become a manual.
Benay Lappe: That’s right, that’s right.
Dan Libenson: And for the people who love manuals, they’re like, “You can’t compare the two. I have a manual over here, and I have a bunch of chaos over here!”
Benay Lappe: That’s good. That’s right.
Dan Libenson: And you’re like, “Yeah, but this is a time for chaos.”
Benay Lappe: That’s right.
Dan Libenson: “And we’ll have a new manual. Don’t worry.” So something like that.
Benay Lappe: No, I really appreciate that. Because that’s what makes it so difficult to respond to the guys pointing to the old manual. Because they have something to point to! And we don’t have something to point to. And it’s very hard to say, “No, we think you’re actually wrong, even though we don’t have anywhere to point to except our svara.”
Dan Libenson: Right, except our svara.
Benay Lappe: And that’s why SVARA’s…
Dan Libenson: Exactly. So okay, so let’s go back into the story.
Benay Lappe: Okay.
Dan Libenson: I hope we’re going to make it. We have twenty minutes left. Okay.
Benay Lappe: I know. We’ve got a lot to go.
Dan Libenson: We’ve got a lot of good stuff here. We can come back to this. Okay, so now we’re back in the story, and the voice of God has said that Rabbi Eliezer is always right. It’s not just that he’s right here–he’s always right! And Rabbi Joshua stands up and he says, quoting the book of Deuteronomy, “It is written, ‘It is not in heaven,’” lo bashamayim hi. And the Talmud asks, “What did he mean when he said that?” because he just got up and he said, “Lo bashamayim hi.” He didn’t give a whole explanation. The Talmud then asks, “What was he saying? What did he mean?” And Rabbi Yirmiyah says, “Since the Torah was already given at Mount Sinai,” meaning a thousand-plus years before, “We give no regard to a divine voice. As you already–you, God–you already wrote at Mount Sinai in the Torah inclined with the majority.”
So the bottom-line here, as my first take on it, is–and then to ask you, Benay, to elucidate this more–but the take here is basically, “God, you had one chance to talk to humans, and that was called Mount Sinai. You wrote, you said, and then we wrote, or you wrote, it got written, it was oral, and then it got written. And you had one chance to say what your rules and regulations were. And you said, ‘Follow the majority.’ And here we have a majority saying different from what you say, and you don’t get to come and say, ‘Follow the majority except when God comes and says a different opinion.’ You said, ‘Follow the majority.’” We’re going to get to whether he really said that, but he’s saying that, “You said, ‘Follow the majority.’”
But basically there’s just two things. One is that basically the claim here is that, “God, you got one chance to speak. And if you didn’t speak the right way, if you made a mistake in how you spoke, tough luck.”
Benay Lappe: And the idea that we’re saying that when God said, “It’s not in heaven,” that what God meant by that–which is not at all what the Torah meant by it–is that the authority for what is truth isn’t in heaven, it’s down on earth. And here we are on earth. The authority is no longer with you, it’s with us. Okay, so that’s move number one. And then move number two is, as you said, in that Torah that you gave to us–which is now down here, to make authority, to drive authority from–you said in that Torah, “Go with the majority.” And we’re a majority, so all of us are on the table against you and Rabi Eliezer. It’s like–I don’t know, probably a dozen against two. We win. And we’re only following your rules.
Dan Libenson: And the one thing that I want to add to this from the perspective of, let’s say, again, we talked about contract law last week, from constitutional law, is this is a classic constitutional interpretation type of question that we have in the American legal system. It’s like, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, you had one chance to talk, and now we have to interpret what you said. And some people say, “Oh, but you see here in TheFederalist Papers, what he really meant was.…” And we say, “Okay, some people accept that, but there are other people who say no, the only thing that matters is the actual text of the Constitution.” Maybe we can try to interpret that text, because every text has to be interpreted, so it’s not just that there’s a dead hand of the text. But it doesn’t necessarily matter what Alexander Hamilton thought the text meant. It matters what we think the text meant.
This is a classic–this is not some arcane Talmudic thing. This is a classic legal interpretation of a text with the binding authority of law, whether that’s a constitution or a statute, and that’s just how it is. That’s what happens every single day in the American legal system, and what’s going on here is they’re basically saying, you–in the Constitution, it says, “Congress shall make no law.” And so what do you mean, you’re trying to make a law abridging freedom of speech? It says, “Congress shall make no law.” And you’re like, “Well, but it doesn’t exactly mean that, it’s a little…” it’s like, well, then they should have written that. And that’s how it goes. And there are arguments against it, but that’s what’s going on here.
Benay Lappe: Right.
Dan Libenson: So just to put an endcap on the story, because it’s significant, is that basically this is what Rabbi Yirmiyah explains what Rabi Yehoshua was trying to say. And then the Talmud says, “Years later a different rabbi, Rabbi Natan, encountered Elijah the Prophet.” Elijah’s a character who’s always going around, because he didn’t die. In the Bible, he was carried off by a chariot, so that’s why he’s always available to show up at our seders and do other kinds of things. He’s always running into people in the Talmud.
Benay Lappe: He’s God’s right-hand guy, so he knows what God’s thinking all the time.
Dan Libenson: Yeah, and he’s wandering around. You run into him here and there. And Rabbi Natan-
Benay Lappe: I always imagine Rabi Natan running into Elijah in heaven. I like your thing better.
Dan Libenson: So here’s where I got the leg up on you, because I’ve been doing the daily Talmud page, and in Masechet Brachot there’s a scene where somebody’s just outside of a ruin, and they run into Eliyahu on the road. So like he’s all over. And so Rabbi Natan ran into Elijah the Prophet and said to him, basically, “When this whole situation happened, when God’s voice came down and said, ‘The law is always according to Rabbi Eliezer, so it should be here too,’ and Rabbi Yehoshua had this whole business where he said it’s not in heaven, and you said inclined with the majority.”
Benay Lappe: And we win, you lose, sit down.
Dan Libenson: Right. “What did God do? What was God’s reaction?” And Elijah says, “God smiled and said, ‘My children have defeated me. My children have defeated me.’” In Hebrew, it’s “nitzchuni banai, nitzchuni banai.” And it’s very, it’s a kind of, there’s a pride… I mean, you could read it in different ways. I read it as a little bit of pride and a little bit of melancholy. The repetition, nitzchuni banai, nitzchuni banai. You can read it as celebratory, but I sort of read it as, “They got me.”
Benay Lappe: I see it as a positive. I’m not the first one to make this analogy, and I can’t remember who shared it with me, but it’s the pride, actually, of when your kid beats you in chess. It’s, “Argh!”
Dan Libenson: I get angry when that happens. No, I’m just kidding.
Benay Lappe: Maybe that’s why you read God this way here. No, it’s like, “You got me! You totally got me! Nice one. I love it!”
Dan Libenson: Right. So I think we will make it to the end here. We’ve got fifteen minutes, and we want to talk about the two important quotes. Because this whole story–I think we actually, we’re going to make it to the quotes, I think we’re probably not going to make it to the big picture interpretation of this text. I think we will talk about that next week with David Kraemer, and we’ll continue it the following week. And basically it’s the theme of this whole show, whatever it is. Podcast, gathering, show, whatever. So we’re going to come back to this over and over again.
But let’s look at… there are two quotes here that are given. One is that Rabbi Yehoshua stands up and he says, “Lo bashamayim hi.” It’s not in the heavens. And he’s quoting the Torah there. And he’s basically saying, with his quote he’s implying that what is not in the heavens means is that the decision-making power is no longer in the heavens. We get to decide now. And the explanation that Rabbi Yirmiyah gives is saying that specifically what he was saying was that it’s not in the heavens. You gave all the rules, and now it’s our interpretation, our interpretation that governs. And specifically what we’re interpreting here is that there was one of the rules that you gave, God, in the Torah, was incline with the majority. Follow the majority. And clearly here there’s a majority, so boom, we win.
And God, by the way, we have to say two things. One, God admits defeat in this story. So it’s not like God is saying, “That was wrong to do that.” God says, “You got me.” And number two is that remember that we’re replacing God with the rabbis in, for our time, meaning that if we can use the same jujitsu on the rabbis, then ostensibly the rabbis would be saying to us, “You got me.” In a good way, in a positive way. And I was just saying, I wasn’t suggesting that it wasn’t positive. I was saying I think there’s a little bit of melancholy to it, and I think that probably would be there too. But either way, it’s, “You got me. You’re right.”
So I don’t want to spend too much time on the first text, the “it is not in the heavens.” But it’s in the source sheet, we’re not trying to hide the ball here. It’s from Deuteronomy chapter 30 verses 11-16. I’m going to show it here in context, just like we did last week, we showed the quote in context. And it’s not a complete misquotation like the next one is. What’s happening here is God is kind of talking about the Torah and he’s saying, the quote is, “Surely this instruction which I enjoin upon you this day is not too baffling for you, nor is it beyond reach. It is not in the heavens, that you should say who among us can go up to the heavens and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it. Neither is it beyond the sea.” Basically, but it’s in your power.
So I think the basic understanding that I have in reading this text is that what this text is saying is that this Torah, don’t worry, it’s not that burdensome. You can do it. It’s not all this complex. It shouldn’t be just for rabbis. It’s simple enough that even you regular people can–you can know what it is, and you can do it, and don’t worry. Something like that. It’s not saying, “I’m never going to speak again.”
Benay Lappe: Right. The interpretation that’s important here is what does the word “it” mean. In the context it’s clear that “it” means this instruction, this whole Torah system, all of my laws. All of this is not far from you, beyond your reach to do and to live by. The Torah isn’t in heaven. It’s right there, available, accessible to you. Okay, good.
Dan Libenson: You can make the argument that it’s saying… it’s entrusting human beings with a power to interpret, to decide, to really carry an important weight, which Rabbi Joshua is suggesting. So it’s not a complete misquotation. It seems a little bit not really what it is in context, but you could make an argument. But let’s look at the second quote, because it’s really the significant one. Because they’re saying, “Okay, but God, you gave us some rules. We take it seriously.” Meaning, if there’s a rule in the Torah, we don’t ignore that. In fact, we say if it’s a clear rule in the Torah, we don’t even have to worry, because it’s very clear exactly what it is. So you can’t come back and revise the rule! That’s the part where you had one chance to speak, God. You can’t write in the Torah, ‘Follow the majority,’ and then come down and say, ‘Don’t follow the majority.’ The Torah says follow the majority!” That is kind of what is being said here. So we say, “Okay, let’s check it out.”
And so the quote that is being quoted here, that says follow the majority, is from the book of Exodus, chapter 23 verse 2. And so here it is in context. “You must not carry false rumors. You shall not join hands with the guilty to act as a malicious witness. Do not follow the crowd to do wrong, and when you give testimony, do not follow the majority. Do not incline with the majority to intervene in a dispute, to pervert justice. Nor shall you show deference to a poor man in his dispute.” So two things. One, the context here is talking about, basically, criminal law and bearing false witness. It’s a completely different context from what’s going on here, in terms of pure ovens. And the other point, and probably the more significant one, it says, “Do not follow the majority.” It says do not follow the majority to do wrong. “Do not follow the majority to intervene in a dispute and pervert justice.” Now, you could say by implication that means follow the majority in everything else. But it certainly does not say that, and the quote is basically “…follow the majority.” And the “…” is “do not.” That is the worst possible form of misquotation that you could imagine. I mean, you would get an immediate F in college for a piece of work like that.
Benay Lappe: Right. And the funny thing is, they’re quoting God. They’re misquoting God to God, as if God doesn’t know what God said! It’s funny.
Dan Libenson: And God says, “You got me.”
Benay Lappe: Yeah. Nice one. Nice one! He’s like, “Go with that,” I think he’s saying. That’s great.
Dan Libenson: So I think, though, that there’s two key points. And the one where… under normal circumstance, I think we would spend the next hour talking about, “Well, what’s up with God here? Why is God saying that you can misquote God to God, and it’s still okay?” And that’s an important conversation. We should have that conversation. But I think that to return where we were last week about the previous text, if we’re saying that what’s really happening here is the rabbis saying, everybody who can read at the time that this is written knows that this is a misquotation. Everybody who can read has read. There’s very few people who can read. So everybody who can read is highly educated, highly knowledgeable, and knows that this is a misquotation, and knows what is going on here in every respect. And that means that in a time two thousand years into the future, when lots more people can read, there isn’t an attempt to hide anything here. So what we discover in the text now is what they were trying to say. And what they were trying to say goes as much for them as it goes for God. And so I think that what this has to mean is basically that they are saying, “If a time should come in the future where you feel that what we have written explicitly in our book here doesn’t work for your society, for whatever reason, and you need to go in another direction, and you even have to go as far as misquoting us in order to get there, you got us.” That has to be the message of this text, right?
Benay Lappe: Yeah, I agree. I agree completely. It’s the moment of not only shifting to a new way of doing business. Let’s not forget that what happens right after this point in the story is that they excommunicate Rabi Eliezer, which is why this story on its surface is located here, because it causes him enormous pain, and…
Dan Libenson: Well, they excommunicate him because he becomes destructive, and so… right?
Benay Lappe: Yeah. His insistence on following the old set of rules. To us, it’s old. To them, it’s the current set of rules, as you point out. He’s recognized as so fatal to the future, so dangerous to the future that they envision and that they want, that he has to be eliminated. They have to create a future without him.
Dan Libenson: Which is tragic on many levels, including the fact that Rabbi Eliezer is not, he’s not from the old guard, actually. That’s a really significant thing. Like you said, he’s one of the two students of Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai who’s-
Benay Lappe: It’s not like he’s a priest! He’s not a priest!
Dan Libenson: He’s not a priest, he’s not a Sadducee. He’s a… he’s the, on the conservative end of the progressive wing. He’s, I don’t know, Pete Buttigieg. He’s not a conservative. He’s not a… he’s a conservative end of the progressives. And again, I think it’s interesting to look around our world today and see where do we see that. We’re already talking, the Temple’s already been destroyed. This is actually long after that. We’re looking at a time in which the liberals have already won, in a way, in the sense of…
Benay Lappe: You know what you’re reminding me of? You and I are always asking ourselves, “Are we option 3? Are they option 3? Who’s option 3?” And the Jewish world has caught on to the necessity for and the positiveness of innovation. There’s a lot of funding for innovation. And Rabi Eliezer was an innovator too!
Dan Libenson: Right, absolutely.
Benay Lappe: He definitely was in on the innovation. But those who were further on the cutting edge were saying to him, “You know what? Your innovation just, it’s not bold enough, and it’s not going to allow us to go as far as we want.”
Dan Libenson: And that at the point at which we start going bolder, and you try to pull us back from that, and then…. First of all, we’re going to do some stuff to not let you win. And God approves of that, and ultimately it means the rabbis approve of what we might do in our time. But then you’re going to go crazy, and you’re going to start being destructive. At that point, with a heavy heart, we have to cut you off, because you’re going to destroy what you actually were part of the creation of.
So I think that we’re out of time for this, and I want to respect that time. I think you and I, we’ll figure out whether we want to come back to this text, and maybe also talk about that text of what happened with Rabi Eliezer. I think it’s a great text. We were going to have a different text next time, but maybe we should have this one in between. We’ll figure that out.
We’ll continue to pick this up with David Kraemer next week. We’re both super excited that next week’s guest is Professor David Kraemer from the Jewish Theological Seminary, who is Benay’s Talmud teacher, has written a number of important, important books about the Talmud, including the just recently published History of the Talmud, which we’re going to talk about some next week. And we’re really excited about that. And then we’re going to, the following week, which is I think April 30, we’re going to be back with, continuing a session like this with an important text. And then the week after that we’re going to have another guest, et cetera, et cetera. Any last words, Benay? I mean, for tonight?
Benay Lappe: Not for today. I’ll let you take us home.
Dan Libenson: All right. Well, thank you everybody for watching with us. We are so, I don’t know, I’m loving doing this with you, Benay, and I hope that this is something valuable for folks. So Benay, thank you so much for spending another hour with us.
Benay Lappe: Thank you, this is fun.
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