The Oral Talmud: Episode 4 - Retelling the History - David Kraemer
SHOW NOTES
“What the sages had was imagination and boldness.They were deeply rooted in the inherited tradition, and, rather than rooting holding them back, it actually allowed them to go forward.” - David Kraemer
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 invite their first guest to the show, Benay’s own Talmud Teacher, David Kraemer! David is the Joseph J. and Dora Abbell Librarian and Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary and author of A History of the Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2019.) How does David’s history of Talmud deepen our understanding of the texts we’ve investigated so far? What does Kraemer believe motivated the sages in this great project? Who was the rabbis’ audience, and how has access to Talmud changed the role Talmud plays?
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.
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DAN: This is The Oral Talmud - Episode 4: Retelling The History. Welcome to The Oral Talmud, a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. I’m Dan Libenson…
BENAY: …and I’m Benay Lappe.
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.
Today’s episode features our first guest Benay’s own Talmud Teacher, David Kraemer! When we started the Oral Talmud in the early days of the pandemic, our plan was that we would frequently have guests to help us understand the bigger picture of the Talmud, and the rest of the time we would study texts together and develop our own thinking and theories. Over time, we did more learning together and had fewer guests, so don’t get too used to it, but we will have quite a few guests in the months ahead. Our guest today, David Kraemer, is the Joseph J. and Dora Abbell Librarian and Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary and author of a number of important books, including A History of the Talmud, published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. A few texts come up in our conversation, which we have linked on the Source Sheet that you can find in the show notes, but we mostly wanted to pick David Kraemer’s brain, since in many ways his take on Talmud is the foundation for our take, and we wanted to see what theories and conclusions he has come to about the goals of the rabbis who composed the Talmud – who was their intended audience, and what did they think they were doing when they based new law on obvious misquotations of biblical text? Check out our last two episodes for examples of the rabbis doing that! David Kraemer also discusses how approaches to Talmud have changed over the centuries based on access, and what it means to still be having new revelations about this fascinating document.
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. If you like, 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: Welcome, everybody. This is Dan Libenson. I am about to be joined by Benay Lappe and our guest for today here on The Oral Talmud, Professor David Kraemer from the Jewish Theological Seminary. We're really excited to welcome you today to this episode of The Oral Talmud, our show where Benay and I are exploring various parts of the Talmud that we find most intriguing and most important for our times.We've been promising you a structure in which, every other week, Benay and I will be studying a piece of Talmud and talking about it, and on the alternating weeks we'll be in conversation with somebody who knows a lot more than we do. Today, we're really super excited to have that be our first one, which is Benay's Talmud teacher, David Kraemer.
Let me give a few words of introduction. He is the Joseph J. and Dora Abbell Librarian and professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary. By the way, I would note that I'm friends with Joseph Abbell's granddaughter, so that's a very exciting thing for me to see. He is also the director of the library at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
Among his many writings and accomplishments, he has recently published a book called A History of the Talmud, published in 2019 by Cambridge University Press. Benay is holding it up there. As I understand it, that in addition to all that, your real passion as a scholar is the history of Jews and eating–Jews and food. A lot of your writing has been about that topic. Which I'm excited to talk to you about, I think, at a different time on Judaism Unbound, maybe.
Let's jump into this. We're so excited to have you, Professor Kraemer, to talk about the history of the Talmud. I guess that–first of all, I want to welcome you. I want our listeners to hear your voice.
David Kraemer: Thank you.
Dan Libenson: It's great to have you.
I thought we could get started by your giving us a little bit of a sense of–we have been here for three weeks, talking about some of what's in the Talmud. It would be great to do–what if we hadn't done that. Could you start by giving us a little bit of grounding about the story of how the Talmud came to be, and who wrote it?
David Kraemer: Would that we knew.
Benay Lappe: And what do you think it's trying to do? What's its project?
David Kraemer: That's a question that I can spend a little bit more time on. Who wrote it is a very difficult question. Let me step back to the history of it.
For those of you listening, let me just say that I will use the term Talmud and Gemara interchangeably. For those of you who think of Talmud as Mishnah and Gemara together, please know that I use the term Talmud as a synonym for the term Gemara.
The Talmud emerges, obviously, from a very, very long history of development. It is built upon the foundation that is the Mishnah, which itself is a document that went through generations of development following the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. We know that the rabbis were a very, very small group. They actually continued to be a very small group–not only during the period of the Mishnah, leading to about the year 200-ish of the Common Era, but rabbis, both in the land of Israel and in Babylon, continued to be a very small group with little, but increasing, influence over the course of the next many centuries.
On one level, we have access, in this material, to the musings and approaches of a group that wanted to take responsibility, but did not yet have responsibility. It's possible that this actually gave them a great deal of freedom. Some of the unexpected quality of the Talmud, its boldness, may be a product of the fact that these were people who had less to risk, at least in the short term.
Going back, this was a group who, like other Jews, had to figure out what it meant to live in a world where what had been central before their own period–that is to say, the Temple, sacrifice–and there's no doubt that this was a central part of what it meant to be a Jew during that prior period. What does it mean, now, to live beyond?
In the first iteration of that, in the Mishnah, they took an interesting approach. On the one hand, they offered a focus in the structure of the Mishnah, and in the way it expressed its law, that was deceptive. Even though the Mishnah came to shape 130 years or so after the destruction of the Temple, it actually devoted a lot of its attention to the Temple, to its service. The Mishnah, when it spoke about Pesach–Passover–or when it spoke about Sukkot, really focused, more than anything else, on the way those holidays were observed in the Temple.
With the Mishnah, the sages who composed the Talmud–and particularly the Babylonian Talmud, which, of course, is what we mean when we say the Talmud–they were far more comfortable in leaving behind, historically speaking, what was obviously not going to be recovered soon. When they spoke about Temple, they spoke on a level of theory. For them, this was an expression of God's command, of God's will, and that was independent of the physical reality. That was their approach to the Temple.
When they looked towards the rest of Jewish life, they laid out bold new paths. Jewish life could take place in Babylon–meaning, anywhere. It didn't rely upon life in the land of Israel at all, because the only thing that was tied to the land of Israel irreversibly was Temple and a certain sequence of agricultural laws. Again, those could be pure theory, because what mattered about our relationship with God was the study of Torah. Torah could be studied whether or not what the Torah described actually existed in reality.
For Jews who were not part of the rabbinic elite, what the rabbis laid out in the Talmud was a series of practices and new directions that would make Jewish life not only viable, but vibrant, in the coming generations. For those who could affiliate with the elite, who had the time and inclination to engage in the study of Torah–now meaning, not Torah in the old sense, but Torah in the new rabbinic sense–this meant that the exploration of God's will could take place anywhere. This was an important engine of what Judaism would be for generations.
I know I'm speaking more on myself now, I realize, on the level of theory than the generation-by-generation history. To me, that's what matters most.
Dan Libenson: Let's go all the way back. I'm curious what you can tell us about who the early rabbis of the pre-Mishnah period–right after the destruction of the Temple– who were these people? I guess my question is, were they people who were dissidents before that, when the Temple was there. Were they people–like in our time, we might think of the people that are doing earth-based Judaism, or whatever. They're out there, they're doing–they're really serious about Judaism, but they're doing something profoundly new and different from what–or maybe not new, but different from what is going on, let's say, in a synagogue.
Were there people out there who were, when the Temple was destroyed, they were like, I'm really sad about it, but the truth of the matter was, I didn't really like that kind of Judaism anyway. Versus, or were they priests, who were like, We're thrown out of our temple now, so we can't do that anymore, so I guess we have to come up with something new. What do we know about those early rabbis?
David Kraemer: We have to divide it into two periods. Immediately after the destruction of the Temple, I think it's fair to say that most people who would be called rabbis–and there were very few of them, as I said–along with most Jews living, certainly in the land of Israel–beyond as well, I suspect–hoped that the Temple would be rebuilt. They had a model for this, a historical, but also a sacred model. The historical sacred model was the fact that this was not the first destruction. The Temple had been destroyed before. With the realization of the promise of the prophets–which, remarkably, came to fruition within seventy years–the first Temple was–it wasn't completely rebuilt. The altar was rededicated. There was the renewal of the sacrificial service in Jerusalem. At the same time, Jews were able to return–not all Jews, to be sure, but the Jews who wanted were able to return–from the Babylonian exile. The patterns of history that the prophets used to explain the destruction, and predicted the recovery, actually came to be.
In light of the fact that all of this became sacred scripture, sacred history, when the Second Temple was destroyed, I have no doubt that most Jews looked to the Tanakh, to the several books that were, themselves, echoes of the first destruction, and said, This promises that if it happened once, it can happen again.
So it's no surprise that, in the seventh decade from the destruction of the Temple by the Romans, you've got–this is the 130s of the Common Era–you've got the emergence of a new Jewish revolt under the leadership of Bar Kokhba. According, even, to rabbinic reports, there were rabbis who believed that Bar Kokhba was the messiah. And so he should have been, because that would have been a fulfillment of the prophetic, the Tanakhic, promise of restoration in the seventh decade, after seventy years. Now, when that revolt failed–when Rome prevailed–then they knew for sure that they were living in a new world.
Did they see themselves as dissidents? No. I think they probably saw themselves as responding to a need which had no room for an alternative. Meaning, the Temple would not be rebuilt. You couldn't go back to that. You had to decide what would come next. For Jews whose only alternative was the rebuilding of the Temple, they had no future. That was the reality.
Interestingly, if the rabbis had a dissident sense, it may show up in the evidence we have in the Mishnah and other early rabbinic teachings in connection to their tension with the priests. There's no doubt that the rabbis experienced a tension with the priests. They made a claim that they were the legitimate heirs, even, of the priestly tradition. They know that priests could be the only ones to serve in a rebuilt Temple. But the experts of the service in the Temple would be sages, would be rabbis.
What they had was imagination and boldness. What's remarkable about it is, if we look at the Mishnah and its balance, they were deeply rooted in the inherited tradition. Rather than rooting holding them back, it actually allowed them to go forward. For people who are deeply rooted–and I think this is true more generally–it's people who feel tenuous who are afraid to look in new directions, and people who are confident with what they've inherited who are more likely to be bold going forward. We could discuss how that works out in our own world–there are other challenges–but I'm actually willing to stand by that claim.
Benay Lappe: Dan, this reminds me of your knowledge-chutzpah curve.
Dan Libenson: On our Judaism Unbound podcast, we've played around with this idea of the knowledge versus chutzpah curve, which is kind of a U-shaped curve. It suggests that the people who have the least knowledge and the people who have the most knowledge are potentially the most creative, whereas there's a place in the middle where, if you have a certain amount of knowledge, you think that we're not allowed to do it this way. Whereas if you learn more and more and more, you realize, That's a story that we tell, that we're not allowed to do it this way–but actually, we can do it this way, because there's a precedent that only I knew about, et cetera.
David Kraemer: I would have to think about the first part of your curve. We could discuss it. But the latter part of your curve, there's no doubt that it's true–that the more you know, the more you have access to the tradition, the more you can take advantage of. This gives you the confidence to go forward more boldly, if that's what conditions call for.
Benay Lappe: David, take us further from 135 to the creation of the Talmud, and how that's different from what the project of the Mishnah was.
David Kraemer: Of course, the Mishnah is also after 135. The Mishnah is the first product responding to the crisis of 135. Its balance and rootedness is what I just described. Again, it's important for us to bear in mind that the rabbis who produced the Mishnah–if you were to ask a Jew on the street of Sepphoris in the Galilee–even Sepphoris, where there were rabbis–we know there were rabbis in Sepphoris, let alone in other towns–"What do you think of the rabbis and their work, this product, the Mishnah?" They would have looked at you and said, "What are you talking about? I've never heard of–I know that rabbi means a master." As a generic term, it would have been known. But as a specific group of people, it would have been unknown to most Jews. Their Mishnah certainly would not have been known–there's no evidence of anyone outside of rabbis knowing Mishnah until centuries later.
That's if we're focusing on 200. What happens then? Now we've got something really interesting. This comes back to your curve, I think. You've got the development of a rabbinic movement, both in the land of Israel and in Babylonia. both of those movements produce things that we call Talmuds. Third century, fourth century rabbinic groups in Palestine and in Babylonia focus on this Mishnah, and they interpret it and they add their own teachings.
What's interesting, though, is the contrast. When you look at the Yerushalmi, the so-called Jerusalem Talmud or Palestinian Talmud, that is a much more reserved, I would say conservative document, reflecting a more conservative agenda. I feel something fearful in the Palestinian rabbinic community. They're not comfortable with doing or saying things with more chutzpah.
Where I first saw this, really, in some depth, is work that I did a number of years ago on responses to human suffering in classical rabbinic teachings. I wrote a book on that. In the Yerushalmi, there's always a warning. You can't express protests about human suffering and still be pious, as far as the rabbinic teachers of the Talmud Yerushalmi are concerned. You have to be accepting. You have to be affirming. Of course, God is just.
At the same time, when you look at the Babylonian Talmud, the Babylonian sages are thoroughly open to the legitimacy of expressing protest, of expressing complaint. They affirm the positions of whether it's Job or Ecclesiastes, biblically speaking. I remember one thing I found–this was just remarkable to me. There is a phrase which some listening–you folks certainly will know. The suffering of Rabbi Akiva, when he's being, in the stories, when he's being tortured, leading to his death by the Romans. Those observing, whether it be an angel or it be his disciples, say, "Zo Torah v'zo s'charah?" Rabbi Akiva, the great teacher of Torah–this is Torah, and this is its reward?
In the Yerushalmi, that phrase is attributed to the arch apostate, Elisha ben Abuya. If you say that, in the Yerushalmi, you're an apostate. But in the Bavli, you can be Moses and say that. That's the amazing thing.
It's a very different story. In the Bavli, in general, they're willing to experiment theologically, intellectually, in ways that the Yerushalmi is not willing to do. The Yerushalmi wants to arrive at answers. The Babylonian Talmud doesn't want to arrive at answers. When it begins with two opinions, it prefers to end with two opinions. Even if the opinions are diametrically opposite, the Babylonian Talmud believes that there's wisdom in all sides of serious Torah. If there's wisdom in all sides of serious Torah, then even if, in practice, you have to make a decision, when you're engaged in the exploration of Torah it's worth exploring all possibilities.
Benay Lappe: Sort of embodying the Rabbi Meir.
David Kraemer: Yeah, exactly.
We get to the Talmudic period itself. We've got, of course, the most prevalent voice in the Talmud, in the Bavli, is the anonymous voice–which some people call the stam or the stama. One of the most prominent voices, certainly the most prominent named voice, is that of Rava, who was an early first half of fourth century amora, rabbinic teacher. His teachings are extraordinary. The challenge, the questioning. He offered a model of interest in exploration for exploration's sake that predicts the broad approach of the Talmud as a whole.
Unfortunately, we can't know, beyond the voice, what may have happened in order to establish the stage for that. We know very little about the specifics. We know a lot, actually, about the specifics of the progress of Palestinian history, and therefore Jews in Palestine, over the course of these centuries. We know very little about the history of Jews in Babylon during this period. We have general directions in Babylonian history, and we can assume Jews within it. We have almost no evidence of any hardship or persecution of Jews. There are isolated stories, but most scholars believe that they are genuinely isolated.
If anything–and I would stand by this thesis–I believe that what made the Bavli possible, in the end, was not Jewish hardship, but Jewish comfort. That by the sixth century, by the 500s, when the Talmud came to something approaching its final formation–additional work remained to be done even after, but we can speak of a Talmud in the sixth century–at that point, Babylonian empire was actually an empire at peace, with an imperial structure that was reconstituted and improved, and peaceful over the course of decades. Jews were able to take advantage of that.
What's remarkable about it is they produced this document which would function both for Jews living in peace and comfort in future diasporas, but also for Jews living in hardship. It was sufficiently abundant and open that it could serve Jews, whatever the condition in which they found themselves.
Benay Lappe: You're still muted.
Dan Libenson: Is there any way to know what the process was of bringing the Talmud into its final form, in the sense of even how long it took? For example, we have this daily Talmud page study thing called Daf Yomi, which takes seven-and-a-half years to study the page in a very cursory manner, one page a day. In a way, it feels like it's the work of more than one lifetime to even be able to do the final redaction. I'm wondering if that's the case.
If so, how do we–we're not even talking about multiple authorship the way we talk about the Torah, where there are these multiple documents that get put together. But multiple authorship in the sense more like that it's the project of one person, and maybe he dies and then his students take over. How did that process happen? But if there's more than one person involved, then potentially there's more than one agenda going on.
I'm wondering if we think about the, even what we call the stama, the final redactor of the Talmud–or more or less final. Is there a single agenda there? Is there a way to tell?
David Kraemer: That's a very good question. An answer is not easy. We have to divide the question into two halves. The first is the amoraic development of the material that would come to be included in the final Talmud, and then the anonymous voice which really defines the Talmud as a whole. We have no access to the amoraic voice, except through the context, and therefore the lens, of the anonymous voice.
There's no doubt–and whenever I use the phrase "there is no doubt," you can understand that to mean there's relatively little doubt. It's a slight overstatement–few people doubt that the amoraic period, the amoraic tradition, was a creation over the course of generations, obviously. Third, fourth century, into the fifth century, that involved multiple voices, the disciples, the memorizers. This was an oral tradition where a teaching of a master would be repeated by disciples and memorizers, formal, professional memorizers. The tradition led to accretions over the course of one generation, and then another, and then another. This came to the fifth and then the sixth century, and the people who created the final Talmud certainly had this vast body of material with which to work.
It has to be said that we know a lot about oral traditions. There's been a very voluminous scholarship on oral cultures, and the way traditions survive or are transmitted to change over the course of time. This needs to be said very definitively. Oral traditions, or oral preservation and transmission of traditions, changes what is being memorized, preserved, and transmitted. Those changes are unknown to the people who are making the changes.
This is crucial. When scholars speak about the way the rabbinic, this transmission changed earlier teachings over the course of time, it's not because the subsequent generation said, You know what, I don't like that, or, I'm going to change it to the way I prefer it, in any kind of conscious way. But when people memorize and then repeat over and over again, it's unambiguous that even when they say that, in repeated recitations of a teaching, they've repeated it in exactly the same fashion, recordings show that that's not true. That change just happens, and it certainly happens over the course of generations. We can see, from a careful examination of traditions, that the changes typically reflect the assumption and prejudices of the people doing the repeating, even when they're unaware of it.
When we compare the same story in the Yerushalmi and the Bavli–and there are always differences. The stories are never, and here I mean literally, never identical. When we compare them, we can see that there are certain ideological motivations that inform the final version we have in each of the two Talmuds. That doesn't mean that the people who repeated the stories those ways knew they were doing this. All of this was unconscious, as they repeated and the story changed. Again, they didn't even recognize the change.
What this means is that when we get to, say, the year 500, when we get to the early sixth century, you've got this vast tradition which, in certain respects, was an original tradition. Meaning there really were teachers named Rav and Shmuel and Abaye and Rava. They really taught things that were, to one extent or another, expressed in the traditions attributed to them. But we can never know the percentages.
We don't know whether a tradition repeated in the year 500 of Shmuel from 250–is it fifty percent accurate to what Shmuel said, is it eighty percent, is it ninety-five percent. By the way, there's–I wouldn't even suggest there's a general number. We just know that traditions change. As a scholar, my response to that is to say, I know there's a foundation here, but I don't know what it is. I've got to be careful in using all of those traditions, because one thing I know for sure is that there were changes.
Then you get to the early sixth century. Babylonian rabbinic sages–we don't know how many of them there were; we don't know how long it took for them to do this–but during that time, there was a group of these sages who said, We've got to put this material into a particular form. It represented their approach. This doesn't represent rabbinic assumptions or ideologies of the third century. It may represent assumptions and ideologies that had their roots in the fourth century and beyond. There's no doubt that these things developed. But the full-blown picture that we call the Talmud is the product of the fifth century–I'm sorry, the 500s, sixth century.
The only thing we can say for certain is that everything came through the lens of that final product. You've got an opinion of Abaye and an opinion of Rava, and they're in opposition to one another. The comparison of their views ultimately comes through the anonymous voice. The challenge of the assumptions of Abaye, the defenses of Abaye and the challenges of Rava, the defenses of Rava going back to challenges of Abaye–all of that comes through the anonymous voice.
When I speak about the Talmud and what the Talmud says, I'm always referring to the final product. By final product, I have to be careful here. I don't mean with all of the technical vocabulary, the precise wording of this. There's no doubt that that continued to develop into the seventh and even the eighth century. There's very important work that shows that the precise formulations was actually the work of reception. The reception–and even the final authority of the Talmud, the Babylonian Talmud–is the product of the Babylonian Geonim. Not the Talmudic sages, but in this case, the rabbinic sages residing in Iraq and nearby lands in the context of early Islam. During that period, some of the technical vocabulary was added to the Talmud, but it was essentially a finished product already in the sixth century.
I hope that answers your question, and maybe a lot more. Tell me what else I need to respond to to make this clear.
Benay Lappe: My brain is exploding with so much joy and questions I want to ask. I don't want to step on you, Dan. Was there something that you wanted to ask right now?
Dan Libenson: No, go ahead, Benay. This is your area.
Benay Lappe: David, I wonder if you could talk about who you think the intended audience was. Who did the stama have in mind as who was going to be learning this? Dan and I have been in conversation for years, as I have been with my fellow teachers and students, over whether there are two audiences. The way Menachem Fisch talks about the Talmud speaking to two audiences, and it's winking to one and it's using the language that the other is going to be able to hold on to, but it's really telescoping a much more radical project than it seems to–but maybe one of its intentions is to make sure everyone comes along. Or is it really just speaking to those, the hamevin yavins–those who really get what's going on–and are really learning a technique for marketing radical change? I don't know. What do you think? Is there one audience? Are there two?
David Kraemer: That's a good question. It's funny, the way you express it. To me, it's obvious that–first of all, it's obvious that there's actually one audience, whatever happened to it later on. It's also obvious that it's a radical project.
The reason it's not obvious to many that it's a radical project is because they're reading it through later lenses. The way we see anything, obviously, is informed by the way we're taught to see it. What I try to do, or what I've tried to do, in my examination of Talmud, is to get rid of as many of those later lenses as possible, and take the Talmud, as much as I can, at face value.
Let me begin by responding. I've already given the short answer, which is it's obvious that it's a radical project, and it's obvious that it's one audience.
Benay Lappe: Can you flesh out what that radical project is?
David Kraemer: Yeah, I definitely will.
To specify the audience, the way I've characterized the Talmud, and therefore its audience, is that the Talmud is intended to be–it's the equivalent of a curriculum for a post-graduate theory seminar at an elite law school. I've chosen that characterization carefully. This means that the vast majority of people training to be lawyers won't be interested in this. More importantly, they won't be capable of really understanding it. Again, post-graduate theory seminar in an elite law school.
Now, back to the Talmud. To begin, again, to answer your question by reference to what we know through the sociology of knowledge. This is really crucial. A lot of people who have tried to answer this question have failed to account for what we know about knowledge and literacy in the ancient world. Even where there were written documents, manuscripts–there wouldn't be printed works for many, many centuries–there were very few. Which meant that most people–and this includes Jews, who prided ourselves on literacy–had, at best, very basic literacy.
It also means, by the way, that to be educated and to be literate are not the same thing. We equate literacy and education. For them, that wasn't the case. You could be relatively well-educated, actually, by, for example, hearing the Torah read in synagogue, but still not know how to read very well, let alone to write. There were people who could kind of decode writing without knowing how to write themselves.
But then, if access to any knowledge is either through the rare written medium or through a rare oral medium, think about it. Who is teaching Talmud or its related tradition in order that you could learn it, if there were almost no written documents? The answer was it was a rabbinic master. The rabbinic master needed to admit you to his circle. That meant that he had to know you first. There was no remote learning. It was all very intimate. If you weren't the kind of person that he wanted as a disciple, you weren't going to make your way in. We've got evidence of some gatherings of rabbinic disciples, but we're talking about hundreds of people, not more. Those were only occasional gatherings.
What all this means is that the Talmud is an elite document speaking to an elite few. It's an insiders' document. This is very important. It doesn't mean that the elite wants the lessons of the document to remain elite, but it means that this approach is an elite approach.
Let me suggest an analogy. Corporations produce glossy annual reports for shareholders. They've got really pretty pictures, and they offer the best representation of the bottom line, and all of that. But we all know that, behind closed doors, when the executive committee of the board and the upper echelons of the management meet, they're sharing things that aren't so pretty. They're willing to experiment with ideas, to admit flaws, to offer critiques that they're not going to make public.
I think the Talmud does the same thing. The Talmud is the rabbis sharing amongst themselves possibilities that I believe they would hesitate to share outside. To take something very basic–Benay, you know that I believe that the rabbis behind the Talmud believe that they do not know the truth–where truth means what God actually wants of us. They recognize that, as human beings, our access to the divine is limited by its nature. It's imperfect, it's flawed. The best you can do is explore God's will in our imperfection. That actually has radical implications.
Does that mean that the rabbis would have gone about on the street, let alone in the synagogue, and said, You know what, we actually don't know what God wants of us, and all we're doing in the halachah that we describe is the imperfect, best we can do. Would they have admitted that? I suspect they wouldn't have admitted that all that widely. That's what I mean when I say that this is an insider communication. Again, I have personally no doubt that that was the case.
What happened in later generations is that, for a variety of reasons, the Talmud became more and more popular. It became more popular, firstly, because it became more and more authoritative. People wanted access to this authoritative document. Interestingly, Maimonides, who was about the most elitist of the elite–and also pretty condescending, when he allowed himself to be honest, and he was honest more often than not–says that the Talmud, Talmud study, is not something for most rabbis, even. This isn't a general curriculum. He thought it was ridiculous for common rabbis, who, in his estimation, weren't all that smart, to study Talmud. Talmud is something for a very, very elite audience.
But later on, what happened? First of all, Ashkenaz had a different opinion of this. Opinions, both in Ashkenaz and elsewhere, changed when it became possible to actually get your hands-on Talmud. We know that only one full manuscript of the Talmud survives the Middle Ages. Only one.
Benay Lappe: Wow.
David Kraemer: The Munich manuscript. Part of the explanation for that is that Talmuds were destroyed, Talmuds were burned. That's part of the history of this. It is also a reflection of the fact that, in the manuscript age, how many Talmuds could there be. Both of those explain what we see in terms of survival.
This changed, of course, with the advent of the printing press. Movable type print changed everything. One of the first works that were printed for Jews was the Talmud, early in the sixteenth century. All of a sudden, rather than having a handful of copies, you could have dozens of copies, or hundreds of copies, in sizable Jewish communities. As the economies and technologies of printing improved–technologies leading to improvements of economies–you had more and more Talmuds that circulated.
Of course, that meant that people could get their hands on it, could study it. They could study it with the aid of these great teachers we know of as Rashi, for example. Think about it–before the printing press, Rashi wasn't on the page of the Talmud. If you wanted Rashi as a teacher, you needed a separate manuscript. Along comes printing, and Rashi, the great, great teacher of Talmud, is right there on the page. That leads to popularization.
We come into later centuries. You've got translations into vernacular languages of the Talmud in the nineteenth and the twentieth century. Then, in an age like ours, you've got electronic versions that are accessible to all. It's broken up into paragraphs, followed by translation. Anybody who wants can pretend to study Talmud, even though you and I, as teachers of Talmud, know that you can't really study Talmud without at least a preliminary teacher.
I remember well my first attempt to study Talmud. I was in high school. I did not grow up with this. At that time, there was a project to create a Talmud that would help students enter the world of Talmud. It wasn't merely a translation–it was an explanation. It was actually a product of the institution where I work, the Jewish Theological Seminary. It was called Talmud La'am. It was a ridiculous project. It failed before too long, because you can't do this. It just doesn't work. You need help. Even Steinsaltz, you need help to begin. After you've begun, then you can use these tools. You can. But you need the help to begin.
Dan Libenson: Can I ask you a clarification to what you were saying earlier about the one audience and the elite? Very specifically, in the last couple of weeks, Benay and I have been studying two particular stories. One, the story of where the mountain is held above the people. The other is the famous tanur shel Achnai story. In both cases, there is a quite obvious misquotation of the Tanakh, of the Bible, that is playing a fundamental role in the interpretation of the story.
What we talked about was the idea that, basically, anybody who could read this in a significant way–meaning, not just decoding the letters–but anybody who actually had the capacity to read this and understand what was going on would also have the capacity to read the Tanakh, and probably would know it very well. This misquotation would be obvious to them, or at least, pretty obvious to them, if they looked at it.
I guess the question is that, first of all, can you–what's your hypothesis about what's going on in the mind of the people who are doing this. When you say that it's the lessons that are meant for the people, but not necessarily the study of Talmud–what is going on there, where they're quite obviously misquoting? Are they saying to other rabbis, Hey, this is a game that we can play if we want the outcome to be a certain way.
I went to law school. This is actually part of what you learn. Not in the disgusting way that I just put it, but in the way that says, Look, there's some gamesmanship going on here. That's part of what it means to be a lawyer, is to learn how to do that. That's part of what you see the judges doing in the Supreme Court opinions. That's part of the game. That's why we have a bar exam.
David Kraemer: Yes, exactly right. I would even go one step further. If the Talmud is an insider document, it means that the radical misreadings that you find, both in those stories and in halachic discussions, they assumed that all the students of this knew the "violence," the chutzpah, that they were bringing to the reading of scripture. Anybody reading these rabbinic readings on the inside–basically, the masters were saying to the disciples, We're going to do some pretty bold stuff here. If you were uncomfortable, you're welcome to find the exit. I think that is exactly right.
It's actually interesting that you referenced lawyers and the Supreme Court. I use this as an object lesson in the way vibrant legal traditions have to operate in order to survive. I'm extremely impatient with originalist doctrine, which I think is scandalously naïve. Not only because we actually can't know what the original formulators knew–it's naïve to believe you could do that. But even if you believe you can, a legal tradition dies if you insist that it remain confined by the original intent. Rabbinic tradition is the best example of this. Jewish legal tradition has survived through the ages, vibrantly, precisely because it has been so bold in its rereadings of whatever God–whose intent we'll never know–may or may not have intended. I applaud the fact that the rabbis are comfortable with those aggressive rereadings. I think that is what made the survival of Jewish life possible.
Dan Libenson: Can I float another one of our little theories past you and see what you have to say about it? One of the things that we said that–by the way, not that I want to put Benay on the spot here, but Benay often will say she's drawing this from you. Let's see if this is true.
Benay Lappe: Hopefully I'm getting it right.
Dan Libenson: Not directly, not like you said it, but she's interpreting you. Let's see. Somebody, by the way, on Facebook here is commenting that it's wonderful to see multiple generations in conversation here. I consider myself Benay's student, so we really got three generations here. That's exciting.
David Kraemer: I consider myself to be Benay's student as well.
Benay Lappe: Oh, my goodness.
Dan Libenson: It's a circle.
Benay Lappe: Oh, my God. My heart is racing fast enough as it is. Please, David, don't push me over the edge.
Dan Libenson: The thought that we're exploring, and the relevance of this to our time–I think that you've actually made it even more radical than Benay usually does. You've said that–this is the way that I interpret what you just said–this is what always should be happening in the legal system. At least when we're in a time of upheaval, if we are in one now–it seems quite obvious that we've been in one for the last two hundred years, and maybe this current situation is an accelerant even more.
We were talking about the idea that if the rabbis–here we're talking particularly about the tanur Shel Achnai story, the oven of Achnai, where the rabbis, basically, in the story are saying that even if we hear the voice of God telling us this is the way to do it, but we don't agree, that we don't listen to the voice of God.
What we were talking about was that if we take our initial axiom–which is that anybody who could read at that time could read everything, and understood the implications–that there's inherently a message there to us to say that if a time should come where the outcome that we think is right–from what Benay calls svara, really deep moral intuition–that what we think is right is not what the rules would indicate.
That we have the potential to say to the person who is, effectively, the rabbinic version of the voice of God, which is the person pointing to the Shulchan Aruch and saying, I see it right here–the rule is right here. You're doing it wrong. We would say, "The rabbis said to God, Follow the majority"–in a misquotation–"and we don't have to listen to the voice of God." What's the mathematical principle of, where you say a=b, so b=c. That we don't have to listen to the rabbis in that voice. And that the rabbi's response would be, Nitzchuni banai, nitzchuni banai–you got me. Meaning, I accept that argument. There's actually, inherent in the Talmud itself, the methodology to undo the Talmud's approach, if and when such a time should come.
I'm curious how you respond to that.
David Kraemer: That's right, but. The but is that subsequent Talmudic societies, as it were, Talmudic cultures–including the traditional world in our own day–they've received the Talmud in a different way than the Talmud may have offered itself. There's the Talmud's approach, but then, the Talmud was used for multiple things.
I often say that if the Talmud were doing halachah–meaning, deciding halachah–then the rabbis of the Middle Ages wouldn't have had a job. But what that also means is that the rabbis of the Middle Ages were not doing what the Talmud was doing. Some commentators were doing, approaching this–Tosfot, for example, who explored, who were interested in far more than halachah. There were certainly commentators who were interested in, and actually replicated, the Talmudic approach.
Latter-day students of the Talmud, not so much. First of all, many in the traditional world are simply interested in what's the halachah. Through the numbers of the generations who they see as having a unified voice, ultimately, the authority is with the final decision, and you're not going to open that back up. There are also reports of the most brilliant teachers in traditional communities who have refused to do halachah, because they realize that this kind of exploration–meaning, what the Talmud actually models–is a bad model for halachah. The halachic community may actually have fences against this. For them, the Talmud may not be the right model.
Personally, my feeling is that the Talmud offers us a resource. Whatever communities have done in between, the Talmud is a resource for possibilities precisely when the age is changing. When we need to respect and learn from the wisdom of the tradition we inherit, but where we can't accept it in its final, packaged details, as it were.
Dan, the way you expressed your question, it reminded me of–and Benay, this goes to the ethical intuition of SVARA–this goes to a text that I think is a very important model for us. In the last chapter of Tractate Yoma, we find the law of pikuach nefesh–of the obligation to save life, and how saving life comes before the restrictions of the Sabbath or Yom Kippur, other holy days. The Mishnah states the principle pretty flat out–that where there's a doubt regarding survival of a life, saving that life takes priority.
But then the Talmud does something terribly interesting. What's interesting about it is it exposes the radicality of what the rabbis did. The Mishnah says you save a life. The Talmud then says, How do we know that you're supposed to save a life? It lines up the opinions of several rabbis, and the proof text from the Torah. You've got Rabbi Yishmael and Rabbi Akiva and so forth. They each give their proofs.
Along comes Rav–an amora, not a tanna. We're no longer in the Mishnaic period. He says, "My proof of pikuach nefesh, of the priority of saving, is better than all of yours." He gives his proof, which is v'chai bahem–you should live by them and not die them.
Then along comes Rava. Rava says, "All of the other ones can be easily refuted–except for Rav's." What Rava is saying is that the Mishnah gave us the law before it had a justification for the law. The law was you save a life. Before they knew the Torah would support it, they said, Of course saving life comes first–because that's what their ethical intuition told them.
If we look to earlier Jewish tradition, by the way, it's not obvious that saving a life comes first. Through the ages, to religious traditions it's not obvious that saving a life comes first. When the rabbis did it, they were doing something ethically radical. The Talmud makes sure that we recognize that.
Benay Lappe: SVARA students are learning that very passage right now.
David Kraemer: Great.
Benay Lappe: I have so many questions. We're not going to have time. One of which is I'm fascinated by what I think you said earlier, or suggested earlier, which is there's something about the popularization of access to this particular text which actually is a conserving, has a conserving force, rather than the opposite.
One of SVARA–SVARA, the yeshiva's–project is opening up the Talmud to particularly those on the margins who have insights that, I think, the tradition needs, and have the chutzpah and the boldness to reenact the way of moving through the world that I think the Talmud advocates. In this radical opening up of the Talmud that we're trying to do, now I'm thinking–are we inadvertently going to be creating a conservatizing effect. I don't know.
David Kraemer: What's the conservative force? What did I seem to say?
Benay Lappe: I think you were saying that the Talmud–once the Talmud became authoritative, and then there was a printing press, and then lots more people than the originally intended audience began to learn it. They were learning it through a new lens, and with a different intent, and using it for different reasons. That suffocated, a bit, its original goals, and camouflaged its original or obvious radicalness.
David Kraemer: I think, to some degree, it did. Both because by popularizing, by making study of Talmud broader, there were people engaged in it who didn't have the same kind of intellectual sophistication of earlier students. I think that's true. I think it's also related to the fact that the society that supported Talmud study became, for a variety of reasons, more and more conservative. It forced that upon many of the students. It was a feedback loop.
I think the Talmud wants to bring in students who will read it from the margins–whatever that means. The irony of the printed Talmud, of course, is that it's about the expansion of the margins. Regrettably, as you fill in the margins, there's less margins to place upon. I'm talking about the physical entity of the printed Talmud.
The Talmud wants new students with new insights, always. What the Talmud also models–and this is neither conservative, nor innovative, nor radical. Let's get rid of that dichotomy for the moment. It's not an either-or proposition. Benay, I know you well enough to know that you want people to go back to the Talmud for its radical possibilities precisely because it grounds them in the received tradition. But it's a received tradition which has got all kinds of possibilities that earlier generations haven't fully recognized.
I remember earlier on, when I began interpreting and writing about Talmud, and people would say to me, If what you're saying is right, then how come people didn't see it before? How come it wasn't characterized this way before? My response was, Because I saw it. So? What difference does that make?
People who begin from a different place have the possibility of insight that those who came before it didn't have. It's as simple as that. Since, as you've already heard, I don't believe in originalist–I don't know what any particular meaning of the Talmud, I don't know what they would have thought. I can defend my interpretations. In the end, it doesn't really matter, because what those who wrote the Talmud did was to create a document that made these possibilities. They may not even have appreciated fully what they were doing, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.
Benay Lappe: Oh, my goodness.
Dan Libenson: We're out of time. Benay, you want to give your final-
Benay Lappe: No, because I'm just–I'm kvelling. My heart is so full. I so appreciate having been your student, and having had the possibility to encounter, to allow me to see what I see in the tradition, and to have given me the space to have that be legitimate. I'm really indebted to you.
I hope we can continue this conversation. I have so many more things I want to ask you about. thank you so much for being my teacher.
David Kraemer: Sure. Let's do it again, both online and offline.
Dan Libenson: Thank you so much. I remembered it was the transitive property. By virtue of that, I am also extremely grateful. Especially what you said in the closing, of how you saw it.
I've told this story in other places before, but early on in my career, when I was teaching Torah to a person, and we were studying the story of Jethro, and I said, "I think that Jethro is critiquing Moses's leadership, not only through the management advice that he gives, but also that he throws a party and is more positive than Moses is when describing what happened." I said, "I think that's an implicit critique of Moses's leadership style." The person said to me, "What commentator did you get that from?" I said, "No, I just read it, and that's what I thought." She said, "You can do that?" I said, "I guess so."
I hadn't done it with Talmud until I met Benay, and that came from you. Thank you so much, from both of us.
David Kraemer: My pleasure.
Benay Lappe: Thank you, David, so, so much.
Dan Libenson: Benay, we'll be back next week, continuing our exploration of the second part of that tanur shel Achnai story that we started last week. We're looking forward to that.
David Kraemer: Bye bye.
Dan Libenson: Bye.
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