The Oral Talmud Episode 44: When Tradition Fights Back with Menachem Fisch
SHOW NOTES
“ I now read the Talmudic literature as a paradigm of rationality, where you realize that to be rational you have to be self-critical. But you can't be fully self-critical merely by talking to yourself.” - Menachem Fisch
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.
A philosopher of science walks into a Talmud conversation and everything shifts. In this episode of Oral Talmud, Dan & Benay sit down with Menachem Fisch, who didn’t grow up inside the Talmudic world and that outsider lens changes the read. What he sees isn’t a tradition handing down answers, but rather a system designed to generate argument, doubt, and transformation, where truth emerges not from agreement, but from friction.
But the story doesn’t stay clean. As Menachem Fisch traces this radical, dialogic vision, cracks begin to show. Some voices are welcomed in, even radically different ones. Others are shut out completely. The same tradition that thrives on disagreement also draws hard boundaries around who gets to speak. We follow that tension all the way through: between openness and exclusion, evolution and control, courage and comfort. This episode doesn’t tie it all up. It leaves you inside the argument, exactly where the Talmud wants you.
Menachem Fisch is the Joseph and Ceil Mazer Professor of History and Philosophy of Science Emeritus, and Director of the Center for Religious and Interreligious Studies at Tel Aviv University. He has published many books including Rational Rabbis: Science and Talmudic Culture, which serves as a launching point for this conversation.
Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. 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 at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.
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DAN LIBENSON: This is The Oral Talmud - Episode 44: “When Tradition Fights Back.”
Welcome to the Oral Talmud, a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. I’m Dan Libenson…
BENAY LAPPE: …and I’m Benay Lappe.
DAN LIBENSON: 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.
A philosopher of science walks into a Talmud conversation — and everything shifts. In this episode of Oral Talmud, we sit down with Menachem Fisch, who didn’t grow up inside the Talmudic world — and that outsider lens changes the read. What he sees isn’t a tradition handing down answers, but rather a system designed to generate argument, doubt, and transformation — where truth emerges not from agreement, but from friction.
But the story doesn’t stay clean. As Menachem Fisch traces this radical, dialogic vision, cracks begin to show. Some voices are welcomed in — even radically different ones. Others are shut out completely. The same tradition that thrives on disagreement also draws hard boundaries around who gets to speak. We follow that tension all the way through: between openness and exclusion, evolution and control, courage and comfort. This episode doesn’t tie it all up. It leaves you inside the argument — exactly where the Talmud wants you.
Menachem Fisch is the Joseph and Ceil Mazer Professor of History and Philosophy of Science Emeritus, and Director of the Center for Religious and Interreligious Studies at Tel Aviv University. He has published many books including Rational Rabbis: Science and Talmudic Culture, which serves as a launching point for this conversation.
DAN LIBENSON: Welcome back everybody. I'm Dan Levison, and I'm here as always with Bene Lapi for this week's episode of The Oral Talmud. And we're joined today by a very special guest, professor Achham Fish from Tel Aviv University. Uh, as I, as we've said when we have other guests, we'll give a more formal introduction in the podcast version of this show.
But for now, I'll just mention that he is the Joseph and Seal Maser professor, uh, emeritus of history and philosophy of science at Tel Aviv University, where he is also. The director of the Center for Religious and Interreligious Studies, and he is also a senior fellow at the Frankfurt University Institute for the Study of the Humanities.
Did I get that right? It's got a, it's got a long German name that I was excited to try to pronounce, but, uh, the better, better I idea was that I shouldn't try. So, um, he is also, uh, very important, especially in Bennet's, thinking about the Talmud, especially from a book that he wrote some years ago called Rational Rabbis.
And, uh, there it is. So, and the subtitle is Science and Talita Culture. So first of all, welcome Professor Fish Man. Welcome to the show. We're really thrilled to have you.
MENACHEM FISCH: Thank you. I'm, I'm thrilled to be here.
DAN LIBENSON: So, I wanted to start just with a question about, you know, I, I, I know that this is obviously a, not quite the same, but a lot of times we, we talk about, and certainly on the podcast that I, uh, host Judaism Unbound, we talk about the idea that.
In the time in which we live, more people than just rabbis should be invited into the process of thinking about our texts and our traditions. And, and really sometimes in specifically being not a rabbi, you're bringing a certain, a, a certain way of probing into these texts that may be rabbis tend not to have or tend to be untaught over time.
And so I was wondering if you could talk just a little bit about how you came to write about the what, the work of the rabbis in the Talmud since you were an ra philosopher of science.
MENACHEM FISCH: Well, uh, it started prosaically, um, uh, by accident and the accident was a happy accident. Um, my father, professor Harold Fish, who was a, a literary scholar, uh, and uh, rather prominent faculty member at Barry Land University, Barry Land in the late eighties decided to, uh.
To honor him with a sort of international conference, I think it was, to mark his retirement. And they were very, very eager for the son, uh, to read a paper on the father. And, um, although we were both in the humanities, dad was a literary scholar. He'd written on, on the Bible, on the impact of the Bible, on Western culture and so on and so forth.
And, um, but my, I I was then a, uh, a rather analytical, um, formal philosopher of science and I, I, I was very eager to honor my dad with a paper, but I couldn't find my way in. So to speak until I happened upon the very last chapter of a book he wrote, he wrote, called Poetry with a Purpose, which is about the Bible as literature and anti literature.
And the very last chapter of that book is called Kallet the Biblical or yeah, the Biblical Ironist. And it was by far the best paper I've ever read on Kohe. It was an eyeopener and, and the more I read it and my appreciation grew, I also found myself disagreeing with it, which was a wonderful and interesting combination.
I still believe it's, it's one of the very, very best contributions on Cry. So what I decided to do was to, was to sort of. Uh, make my, uh, uh, at the time Pappy Carl, Carl Poppa's philosophy, Pappy perspective. Look at Kallet from a diff very different angle from what he proposed and sort of honored my father with a critical engagement with his work.
Now it turned out that nobody else did that. Uh, people, people presented very, very nice tributes to his work. Uh, some of his former students ran with some of the balls, but, but I was the only person very, very appreciative of, of what he'd written, um, and offering an alternative. And it was a very, very special moment for us.
And he was the first one to jump up and ask a question. But that sparked off because I was reading, I found myself reading Kheled through Talmudic a, a Talmudic lens. It was a sort of rather. Rather clumsy first attempt. But I, I, I sort of latched on to the mishna, uh, that claimed that, that, uh, tho those who insisted on, uh, uh, granting co biblical status with a Hiller lights and my dad's, my dad's reading of k uh, as a sort of negation of human wisdom with the very last verse, you know, a sort of a sort of prolonged argument, uh, about the futility of trying out on your own, so to speak.
Um, and, uh,
and ending with
fear God and, uh, and the behi mitzvah because that's. That's the measure of man, or that is all of that, that is not a hill orlike position at all. And I try to make sense of the book through a hill or light lens and came up with a very reading. Now Kitz has remained, um, very close to my heart since, and I've written a little about it, but, but what really opened up at that moment was, uh, was my interest in the Talmud, in Talmudic Dialogism in, in, in the Talmud's very notion, especially the Bley.
But it, it branched out to more, um, you know, the, the B'S very notion of intellectual achievement of what. The Baley was doing in its commentary on the mission. What was it trying to convey to its readers and so on and so forth. And, uh, to cut a very long story short, I'm now convinced, I mean, that doesn't, that doesn't come out in rational rabbis so much, but I'm now convinced in recent work that the rabbinic literature is the only major, uh, human undertaking I'm aware of that is fully rational.
I mean, if, if anything's happened since I finished Rational Rabbi is to flesh out the notion of rationality, philosophically, and, and appreciate the rabbinic literature even more than I did then as, as a, a, a, a paradigmatic, as a model of, uh, of, and self-aware model of human rationality in ways that.
Western science, which is my other, you know, sort of philosophical object of study is not so, um, so yeah. So that's a long
DAN LIBENSON: answer. Can you think more about what, what you mean by that and what you meant back then in rational rabbis and also how you've revised your thinking? What, what does it mean to be fully rational?
MENACHEM FISCH: Well, Colonel Pop was the first philosopher to insist that, that, and, and, and he said this about science, to, to insist that we are incapable of proving or even confirming any general statement about the work. Uh, but what we can do is to consistently question it. And therefore, he, he, he identified rationality or being rational with being critical.
Of being self-doubting of, um, you know, always to suspect, uh, that what you, what you are sure about, uh, could and should be questioned. Um, and, and, you know, that's, that's the sort of master idea of, uh, of, of, of rational rabbis in, in, in the first sort of philosophy of science chapter. I, I, I generalized the pap position a little and then, and then read the rabbis as a sort of critical and self-critical, uh, undertaking.
What I've realized since is something that papa and his follows followers never realized, and that is that there's a sort of normative glass ceiling to one's ability to criticize. Because, because criticism that. Let, let, let's make this simple to criticize is, is, is to try and prove that something is lacking, uh, to try and prove, uh, uh, that something is problematic, uh, that things aren't the way they should be, and so on and forth, so forth.
Now that whole vocabulary of, of, of problems, difficulties, uh, wanting and so on and so forth is normative and they're a function of the, of your normative commitments. And people who are committed differently will find problems in different places. Okay, so, so now. Uh, so most of the time, um, what we're doing is holding ourselves and holding others to the standards they're committed to.
You know, you are supposed to be a liberal, how could you do that? And so on and so forth. But rationality demands more than that. Rationality demands that we hold our normative commitments themselves in normative check, but that's impossible. Absolutely impossible. Because if my standards of propriety are the instrument by which I question the propriety of things, they can't be turned against themselves.
Um, the, I can't see the eye now. Now, how can a person create critical distance from the very normative framework to which that person is committed? Because it's by that very framework that he. Or she criticizes or, or put it slightly differently, I, a normative framework cannot impeach stealth and, and therefore you can never have.
So it seems a, a rational incentive, rational reason, um, to change your normative system. But that seems absolutely absurd. I mean, we would, we would very, very much like our political, our ethical, our scientific, our religious norms, um, to be able to say that they're not merely the standards of propriety to which we abide, but they are appropriate standards of propriety.
Right. Uh, and, and to be able to justify them. And, and of course we know that, that such, such systems change. I mean, Thomas Kuhn, uh, has written about paradigm shifts in science, but it's true about every single human undertake. Now, it turns out, uh, and this is for a different conversation, that the entire community, philosophers of mind, language, normativity, rationality, self, and so on and so forth, they're absolutely stumped by that question.
Um, you know, ranging from Wittgenstein to royalty and all the way up to, you know, the people, uh, with whom I converse like, uh, Robert Brand, John McDowell, uh, they have no way at all of accounting for the way in which we can be rational about. Are very norms. So, so my philosophical work, not tel work, my philosophical work in, in recent years has been to show that what we cannot do alone by talking to ourselves because we'll merely be referring back to that, to the sense of propriety to which we are already committed in dialogue with others in the echo chamber, of being exposed to the critique of people who are, who are committed differently.
We can't be convinced, again, we can't internalize their critique of self-criticism because we can't do that, but there's a way in which that eco echo chamber can render us ambivalent of two minds about the norms being criticized in ways we could never achieve by talking to ourself now. In other words, if you really want to understand a scientific revolution, um, and you don't want to, uh, you know, merely rely on what Kun says about scientific revolutions being gestalt switches, sort of a rational, even irrational changes of perspective.
Then look for, look for the, the, you know, the major scientific, um, uh, practitioner, A voice of standing who's entered the conversation with someone outside the field become ambulated sufficiently to produce ambivalent work within the community and thereby transforming it. But in science, I, I know of no philosopher and no scientist who, who render, um, this to be a norm, one of their norms of rationality.
In other words, uh, uh, um, you need to travel outside the community of physics, of the physicists in order to gain a perspective on, uh, on, on, you know, your, your sort of meta scientific, uh, commitments. Now, the tdic literature is the only literature I know, which is based on the idea that the way in which, and the badly, especially the way in which a system can be enriched, is only in dialogue with other systems.
So, I mean, it,
one thought is the following about the badly and any, I, I guess anyone who's, who's seriously studied a few pages of it would've asked him or herself, this. Unlike the entire rabbinic literature is totally diverse, okay? The madic literature, now everybody involved fully believes that the, you know, holy scripture comes from God and from God's prophets.
This is revelation, you know, in, in, in, in the simple full sense of the term. And yet the raik literature, including Halal ra, the raik literature, uh, is totally, but totally, um, indifferent to the question of the truth of that revelation. The, the most important, I like to say the most important, uh, uh, phrase in the raic literature is d.
Here comes another opinion, here comes another opinion. They're never adjudicated. They're never pitted against each other. They're just laid out to the reader with a sort of silent, in invitation to add your own voice. And, and, and this notion of, of receiving the word of God, not by, you know, trying vainly, uh, to second guess it, but to open it up to, to a very, very diverse conversation.
And, and again, this is for another conversation, but I, I can tell you a story about, about the Yeshiva bha, uh, in involved perhaps the only one David Guns involved in the scientific revolution. And, and you know, he was working with Kepler. He, he, he was at the CLOs of the Maal of Prague. And, and he pr, he, he, he.
He devoted his entire life to writing science to his fellow Jews. Um, and a real Yeshiva book. And, and he, he comes up with a midrash of the heavens, which, and he understands the mathematics and everything perfectly, and this is what Polo said, the great genius, and then come Copernicus, and he said that, and then came Kore and said something else.
And it's, and, and meanwhile, right back on the farm in Christian Europe, people are being burnt at the stake over the question of the one truth of, of, you know, God's second book, the Book of Nature. And, and he couldn't care less about who's right. It's not a question of who's right, it's a question of, of it.
It's a sort of proliferation of takes. Very, very intelligent, very exciting. He's very enthusiastic. This, this is sort of one sort. Talmudic moment in the history of science, which, which I'm, which I'm aware of. But, but back again, back again to the rabbinic literature. So, so both, both in Halakha and both in Aga and, you know, if you want to ask me about the mission Anta, you can in the moment, but they're, they're all, I mean, they're, they're diverse in the extreme, but the Baley adds something which we don't find in any other work.
The baley is the crowning achievement. I don't, you know, I don't have to explain that. And then, and it's also the larger, the largest by far of, of the rabbinic, um, undertakings. But what we find there is not merely a variety of takes on the mission
DAN LIBENSON: of, of
MENACHEM FISCH: sometimes radically different takes on. In, in, I'm, I'm talking now about the, the halachic project of, of, of, of the bli.
It's not merely a di uh, you know, a diverse set of understandings, but someone went to a lot of trouble to fabricate a very intense dialogue between these text, between rabbis who could never have spoken to each other, where they couldn't have been aware of each other. They couldn't have spoken. But this, this sort of fabricated seven gen squashed, seven generation, uh, uh, um, uh, imaginary BMI rash is engaged, uh, you know, with, with the help of the sta dema with the, with the help of the very, very active opinionated narrator in intense and.
Uh, you know, very, very pointed, very, very keen, very detailed dialogue. Um, and, and, and, and Danielle Borin should, excuse me, it, it's not a Socratic dialogue at all. There's no sort of Socratic figure, uh, who's not interested in anything. He doesn't learn anything, but, you know, prodding you and along to, to, to, to the way of truth.
No, this is, this is parliamentary. This is very, very different to, in Talmudic dialogue. All sides are enriched in ways they could never have been enriched unless challenged in that way. And this, this, this is an undertaking that, that is motivated by a deep sense that there's. There's a limit to what you can do by talking to yourself or by talking to same minded people, okay?
And, and therefore, it is absolutely essential to get a critical grip on your own, a grip, on your own position. And, and especially because we're talking about, you know, deep seated religious commitments and, you know, we, we, we can talk about I roofing, uh, uh, uh, 13 B in a second, but, but bele and be shamai for starters.
Uh, they don't have halachic opinions. Their carriers of halachic tradition, this is their way of life. This is their inherited, this is their second, this is their second nature, their second religious nature, that, that, that they're pitting against each other, right? So, so in that, in those conditions. The what, what the benley is, is telling us is to inherit Torah is not merely to do your best to come up with, you know, your, your personal take and, and, and understanding of what you've received.
But to be in horizontal dialogue, and I, I'm sorry about I'll, I'll be doing this a lot to be in horizontal dialogue with the vertical, uh, uh, uh, sources of, of, um, of religious authority. And, and the BA is of course, first and foremost about the, the Haik tradition. The Haik tradition is not a, a simple horizontal discussant.
Okay. It's something you inherited, you are committed to take seriously. But the way, but your understanding that this is, this is the Hill Orite insights of what the Bley understands is that in order to do that properly, you have to be, you have to invite, you have to be exposed to this, uh, horizontal, um, uh, uh, array of diverse discussions, especially, especially people who think very differently from you.
And, and this in the, in the ba extends out into the pagan world and silence. I mean, so, so, so this is the sense in which, you know, the TWA has become, for me not merely, uh, uh.
Somewhere to sort of exercise my philosophical sensibilities, uh, uh, gained from, you know, work in the philosophy of science, um, which, which is really what rational rabbis, um, tries to do, but much more than that now. I mean, I, I now read the DIC literature as, as a paradigm of rationality, where, where you realize that to be rational, you have to be self-critical.
But you can't be fully self-critical merely by talking to yourself. So, uh, or you know, or or to like-minded people. So, so, you know, within a REDI Yeshiva, for any orthodox yeshiva, you can be, um, you can be very intense and very, very serious and so, and so forth, but if you are not, if you don't expose your basic understandings outside, you'll be, you'll be limited.
And, and so, and, and, and, you know, and that, that's, that's the great, that's the great m between the Hiller lights and the mite. Um, anyway, so again, a very long answer to a very short question, but there it is.
BENAY LAPPE: Man, and, and I should let our viewers and listeners know that you've given me permission to call you Manha.
Oh,
MENACHEM FISCH: sure.
BENAY LAPPE: Okay. Um, first of all, I want to tell you what an honor it is publicly, um, to be learning with you. As Dan said, you are one of my Talmud heroes, and I wanna tell you why that is. First of all, um, as, as a queer person who went into the closet, uh, to go to rabbinical school and to learn Talmud, because JTS uh, the only place that I really thought I could truly learn, Talmud didn't accept openly queer people.
Um, and a person who as a queer person, you know, had a long history of others pointing, you know, the verse pointers who have kind of a, a istic relationship to the Torah. As you know, we were all told this is what the Torah says, and. It's a, it's a, that's it. Um, and when I began to learn Talmud through the lens of my queer experience and knowing that they were wrong, knowing that folks who said, this is what God says, um, that God was wrong and that Torah was wrong, if that's what the Torah meant, um, I saw something in the Talmud that felt very powerful and I didn't see the rabbis relating to the Torah in that way.
Um, yet my teachers weren't talking about it. And I sensed something very radical and very powerful in what the rabbis were doing. But it doesn't look like they're doing anything radical. It looks very much on the surface, like they're, you know, having that same kind of istic relationship to the Torah.
And when I read your book, I began to have. Some language for describing what was really going on and to see that someone much smarter than me also saw what I was seeing in the town. What made me feel like I wasn't making it up or being overly, you know, um, personally invested or projecting what I hoped was going on and.
I've always been bothered by the word traditional or tradition, because typically folks who use it are claiming their particular, um, relationship to the tradition as authentic. And that's, you know, often, I don't know if orthodox is a fair term, but. It's a certain read, and I was fascinated by your use of the words traditionalism and anti traditionalism and how you explained maybe what's really going on in the Talmud, um, as a conversation between those for a certain purpose.
And I'd love, I'd love for you to talk about, um, those two terms and what you think is really going on, um, in the Talmud and what their project was and did they achieve what you think they were out to achieve. And I know, again, your thoughts have changed and a little bit we've gotten to the end of that story before getting to the beginning of it.
MENACHEM FISCH: Um, okay. So first of all, a question I've always been asked, and that is why, why on earth does an anti traditionalist like yourself. Go back to the rabbinic tradition in such detail and with such intensity. And my, and my answer has always been, if you want to convince the traditionalist that of an anti traditionalist option, you have to show that there's a long tradition of anti traditionalist.
So, so I, I mean that's, that's, that's the sort of quick, uh, quick and clean answer. Um. We mentioned Reuven 13 B. Okay. And, and I said something, uh, about, about the difference between which comes out there very, very strongly between the sort of Hilla light, uh, uh, Hilla light position and the mite position.
And, and as the talent explains, the Hiller lights were chosen, that they, their, their position was endorsed by the heavens, right? Because they were hin. And that, those are the two Hebrew terms. And, and for me, those are perhaps, you know, that that couplet, um, is perhaps the most important, um, little phrase in the entire rabbinic literature because hin means, uh, uh, flexible.
Um, in, in, you know, the, the epistemological sense of the term. In other words, willing to change your mind, willing to admit that you are mistaken. Um, and there's an etymology to that, which I shouldn't go into. And, um, and Vin means willing to be or, or willing to be criticized, willing to be proved wrong.
Now it's that combination between a person, a person who's willing to change his or her mind as a person who is very, the Hiller likes were very sure of their position, but there was that nagging doubt that they might be wrong, but the fact that they, that wasn't enough for them, that they opened themselves.
Two. The Shamai challenge is that realization I spoke about before, that you cannot get a critical grip. Uh, don't, you know, you can cast doubt from now till doomsday, but merely doubting won't get you anywhere you need, you need a critical argument. You need, you know, you need to be proven wrong and nobody can do that to themselves, okay?
So that, that's the basic setup of the cites who are not, that they stick to their traditions, um, they will not, you know, they will enter a wild, uh, uh, disagreement and so on and so forth, but not in order to con, to be convinced, but to convince that interlocutors, the Hiller lights enter a conversation in order to learn something.
And, but, but the Ian story is very problematic. And it's problematic from the point of view of the heavens. So endorsing the hilla like position is fine. Claiming of course if, if the Hilla like position is endorsed, then elu have to be the words of the living God. In other words, be because a hill orite has to have the opposition at the table in order to be a hill orite.
He, he has to have people who disagree with him, you know, significantly, profoundly disagree with him at the table. Therefore in order, if, you know, if pluralism, uh, uh, and real debate, um, or, or to put slightly differently if, if, if, if the way of real flesh and blood debate between people who disagree on fundamentals is the only way how laha can move forward, Halakha can be properly developed, then you have to be a pluralist, then you have to acknowledge the place of the mites at the table.
Fine. But the combination of which is pluralism and haha should go for all according to the alite, just can't work because no bonafide mite will, will, will, you know, will, will allow himself to sit at such a table. He could never, uh, uh, Hamite, could never accept Hill Orite rule, the idea that halal ha can be opened and decided for.
So this, this, this, um, uh, happy heroism of, of the heavenly voice of a forum, of a centralist forum, which, you know, which goes according to, to, to Hill Aite, the Hill Aite method, and yet representatives of all factions are there, is, is, is, is a political absurdity. Now this is brought out in the other most read story in the DIC literature, which is the Hanai oven story, which nobody has read as our.
As I, I'll try to show and, and, and it, it's all about the inaugurating day of the yvanna of the mythical, sort of Blis notion of the Yavneh Center. And the Avner Center is exactly that. It's a Hilla light center, okay? In which the mites are at the table and by Hill Aite Center is that they take votes on the tradition.
And here Zo Benner, the, the Ark Mite, uh, finds himself in that very, very awkward, um, infuriating position where, where he's testifying his halachic traditions and the damn Hiller lights are, are, are voting against them. How can you vote against Torah? What is this? Um, from a mite point of view. So the only way he could make sense of this is that maybe he's doubted as a transmitter.
So, so he begins to perform supernatural miracles in order to prove his authenticity as bearer of Halakha. And that won't work either, because from the Halal Alite point of view, of course, what you are testifying to was the halakha and is the hal at the moment. But we have the legislative authority to vote against it.
And we're voting it down without doubting your authenticity as, as, as bearer of Halakha. And then, and of course this is something Elza can't understand and he turns to the heavens. And the heavens again, sort of not realizing what, what they got everybody into, uh, say, well, well, of course Azar is, is, is, uh, rabbi Azar is, is, you know, his testifying.
Is testifying to what is the haha, this is all Zo needs because if this is the haha, it must remain the ha and the alite and the Hill Aite, of course, continue to vote it. Then we're not doubting that this was and is the haha, but we have the legislative authority to decide on that. And that's what we're doing by majority vote, which is of course, uh, um, nonsensical from a mite point of view.
And then it, it, it's the story of the slow realization of all of the three parties involved. Rabbi Yeshua, the Zo, the mite, and finally the heavens of what they've got themselves into. And then, and, and so Rab Rabbi Yeshua makes a, a radical decision. And the radical decision is to go back to the way things were before the heavenly voice of 13.
Of, of a 13 b, you know, where the Shamas conducted their business and their communities, the way they saw, right. And we in hours and we read each other's newspapers, and once in a while, met for a, you know, a heated con, but, but without anyone trying to impose, um, their way of life on the other. Right. But, but, but they couldn't get za outta the, out, outta the avenue, uh, um, because now he was fighting the zealous fight of, of, of, of the Torah.
I mean, he was, he was burning. And so the only way to do to oust him was by the, not, the only nonviolent way to oust him was by excommunication, which really means go back, go back to Lida, go back to lad, where a Toor community, and you will not be part of Yavneh Yavneh will be a Hilla Light center. And when, and so in other words, what, what, what Rabi has decided is LA here we're not going to listen to the heavenly voice, which granted us, uh, uh, um, uh, authority for the, for all of Israel?
No, we're, we're going to do away with the Avnet as a sort of centralist institution. It will become a hill orite institution. The mites will continue with Rabil and we'll keep in touch and we'll keep in touch like before. Okay? But of course, Razel can't accept this and, and, and he won't understand it. And, and now he's fighting this zealous, uh, fight of Torah and he kills.
Uh, uh, uh, Gael, his, his, um, his his brother-in-law, and, and, and, you know, the, the, it's, it's a violent, uh, a violent end to the story, but contained in a certain way as far as rabbi comes. Now, the way I read the Babylonian Talmud and this, now I come to answer your question of the two voices. Unlike Rational rabbis.
Rational rabbis, I, I talked about two, two reading audiences and that that was too sophisticated. I, I think what I, I think,
BENAY LAPPE: and I'm gonna have to put, I'm gonna have to put Sorry to interrupt you. I'm gonna have to put all my students on notice because for years I've been repeating you. The, the answer which I loved in your book, which was the double speak, is really to speak to two separate audiences, to keep the more istic ones in the community, keep them in the project while winking and letting the more radical ones, sort of the ham and the ones who could tolerate the real radicalness of what was going on really in the mix and training them up to use.
You know.
MENACHEM FISCH: Well, I, I'm, I'm delighted you, you, you butted in now because, because you formulated, um, the solution of rational rabbis better than I could and, and as anticipating what I'm actually going to say now, and that is that, that if we view the Bley not as anticipated by the myth of Avni as we areen reads it and, and others, and I read it in the past, Avni is not an ideal, Yavneh is a disaster.
Okay. Yavneh is the, is the, is is, is is the sobering realization. That can't work. It just can't work. And the alite opt for pluralism rather than central control. Okay. That, that's the La Miami. In other words, this, this is a description as I read that story now, of the birth of the Baley, okay? Because between the pages of a book, which is a canon for both communities, they can live together with nobody jostling, uh, for, for, for power and control on one condition that nothing is adjudicated, okay?
That no votes to take, and therefore the BLI doesn't decide any. So once in a while it'll say, Alma, so and so and so, so once in a while it will say tta. In other words, you know, in, in the process of dialogue, he, he, he, this, this particular position hits a wall, okay? But there's no adjudication. The B doesn't produce a new mission at all.
So it views the mission as the way one generation passes on. Its, it, its temporary provisional decisions, halachic decisions with the dissenting voices all packaged together to the next generation. The B is about how to receive that type of halakah, receive it in dialogue, receive it critically, uh, and so on and so forth.
And of course, you need to make decisions, which are provisionary, but the mission has showed us how to do that. Uh, the baley itself, the discussion process is not, um, adjudicated by a hilla light point of view. Why? Because they need the mites inside there, therefore, the two voices are alive and kicking.
Okay, so, so this is now how I, uh, how, how, and, and, and you can see how this ties in with. With the sort of new turn my philosophy has taken, sort of building on and away from, from papa's sort of initial notion and on and away from, you know, the sort of traditionalist, anti traditionalist. It, it's also developed in a, in a, in an additional direction.
And that is, uh, that rational rabbis is about the halachic tradition. And, and, and the way in which the, the sort of meta halachic dispute between traditionalism and anti traditionalism plays out in it. In a more recent book, which Alas came out early in Hebrew, um, called Bri Imu Covenant of, uh, confrontation, uh, I describe the rabbinic literature as, as, uh, a.
As harboring or manifesting a confrontational theology. A confrontational theology, which is, which again, is, is a debate between a sort of a more generalized version of traditionalism and anti traditionalism. So if you think now, not only of the halachic tradition, but of all four sources of religious authority, okay, uh, uh, scripture, the halachic tradition, the halachic authorities, and God himself, okay?
These are the four major sources, vertical sources of religious authority. And what, what I do in that book is to show that they, and now it's in inverted commas. The mite iLite dispute is alive and kicking with respect to each of these four. Okay. Now to be a HIA light, um, to be a HIA light, and we haven't said this today, but to be a HIA light, to be willing to change your mind, but it's not your mind because if you are a hi aite, you are a bearer of your Torah hia, light Torah.
So to be, to be willing, to be willing not to change your mind, but your to mind, right? That, uh, you know, to, to, to, to, to abandon a tradition and replace it with something else is not to change your mind about what the tradition is. It's about changing the tradition itself. Um, you, we get these two voices.
Uh, and of course I have to add, add an additional sentence is that you can only adopt a position like that. Okay. If you deny, now, read My Lips. If you deny that source of authority, uh, uh, um, moral perfection, if halal is perfect, you can't be flexible about it. You can't doubt it. The, the very, taking a critical position, uh, you know, against halakah be speaks willy nilly, a denial of that perfection.
Now, the case I make in, in the new book is that with, with regard to all forces, sources of, of religious authority, including the Almighty himself, we get that, we get those two positions. One position, which is, you know, shared by today. It's shared by all God-fearing. Um, almost all, all God-fearing, uh, uh, religious, uh, form monotheistic, uh, forms of life.
Um, and that is that God, God is perfection. That and by definition, right, the, the Talmudic Alite voice denies moral perfection from God and enters with God himself, not only with halachic tradition, not only with scripture, not only with the courts, but with, you know, with the Almighty Himself in critical dialogue.
And the almighty changes his mind and welcomes that. Okay, so what I've done systematically is to sort of expand and generalize the, the sort of iLite chaite dispute of rational rabbis to include all sources with a theology of imperfection and a religiosity of confrontational as opposed to submission.
And that's Talmudic Judaism for you. And your very last question, Benet was um, if I recall, was what happened to it and, and, and the answer is that it was killed. Judaism is no longer hill aite in that that sense. It's no longer confrontational, certainly not rabbinic Judaism in the traditional sense of the world because the Baley project was not continued by the Gerni at all.
Um, and, and you know, we can talk a lot about the temptation of traditionalism, the temptation of having a system to lean on the temptation of submission and just how difficult a nons, submissive, confrontational religiosity is. Um, you know, when Abram stands before God and questions his justice, he's trembling in his biblical sandals.
I mean, and, um, and, and again, it it's a sort of conta, it, it's contagious because both, you know, in, in, uh, Christianity sort of decided to go dogmatic, right? And, um, and Islam was from the beginning like that. And, uh, you know, monotheism developed, uh, in. In dialogue and Judaism became, uh, uh, a religion of divine perfection and, uh, all that vitality and, and dialogism and open-endedness and, and, and, and sort of, uh, uh, reluctance to adjudicate and decide, and so on and so forth have all vanished.
And, and what, what you get is the proliferation of, of codes, uh, and so on and so forth. But it's, it's remained diversified, uh, you know, into centers. But, but there's something about the Talmudic spirit in front, at least as I read it, that has, um, that has, this has fallen off the radar basically. I
DAN LIBENSON: mean, it strikes me as you're, as you're talking, it just strikes me that, uh, you know, Benet and I have talked a lot on this show about, you know, well, what changes when the, with the digital revolution, you know, what changes when the, the educational attainment of your average Jew is greater than in, you know, most rabbis in history we're not there yet in terms of what that means in terms of access to, to Jewish material.
But it's interesting to think and listen to what you're saying and say, well, maybe once the masses of Jews, to the extent that they can have access to the Talmud in a way that they've never had before in history, that that potentially opens up the possibility that that project of the Boly can be returned to, as opposed to the error, you know, what, what we might call an error made by the Goni and beyond to, to try to, you know, essentially create a different version of Judaism.
And actually the authentic one is not the one that we've inherited, but the one that we've forgotten.
MENACHEM FISCH: Then, what can I say in shall. But, but believe me, uprooting a a form of life, um, is very, very difficult. I mean, the fact that the Talmud has been studied, um, my dad used to say about, about the Bible, that it's a very, very Old Testament.
Well, the, the, the Talmud has been studied over the generations much more than the Bible within the Jewish world. I mean, we are the people of the book, but this is our book now.
BENAY LAPPE: Mm-hmm.
MENACHEM FISCH: And nobody's noticed this. And, and you, you really can't find anticipations of the reading I've proposed, and I would never have noticed that.
Unless I'd come from philosophy of science with a very different set of lenses and a very different set of worries. And, you know, I mean, I was brought up in the religious world, but I, I never spent, I, I went to a high school Yeshiva, but not to a higher Yes. And, um, you know, maybe this sort of erian um, connected critic coming with a perspective from the outside.
I was able to do that, but, but I, I don't know the, the, the, the, um, the uh, uh, the textual reasoning group. Um, and there's a journal of textural reasoning when, when rational rabbis came out, um, they took the opportunity of being, um, if I remember correctly, of being offered, um, not an off-Broadway, but a, you know, a, a a, a proper bonafide session at the, um, at the a a r.
Uh, they used that session for a, for a discussion of rational rounds. Uh, Peter Oaks was very excited and, and there was a lineup of, of people I, I taught to Sugi, um, um, to try and explain what this was about. And then, and then there were three engagements and, and basically all three of them complained that, you know, how.
How can this be? Nobody's ever read this before, uh, the, the sort of hidden, the hidden agenda. I mean, if, if this was the Bist program, why, why doesn't it talk about it? But of course it does. It's, it's right there on the surface, but you need, you need the eyes and lens and spectacles to see it that way. So the, the experience Benet that you describe is a sort of, you know, again, creating this sort of outsider insider view with coming at the text with a very, very deep sense that on, on, on, on, on, on the issue of queerness.
It's very, very wrong. And, and that's all you have to do in order to, you know, to, to begin to see, to begin to see this. Um, she mag wrote one of the responses and it's all about that. I mean, uh
BENAY LAPPE: mm-hmm.
MENACHEM FISCH: How can this be so it. What can I tell you? I, I, I, I've, I've now written a book on, on,
on, on the sort of the, the, the, the paradox of political Zionism, the way in which, uh, in Israel today, the zealous, um, uh, uh, supporters of Zionism, the people who believe they're carrying the flag are, have, are conducting a, a, a, a, a reaction against the Zionist values and the where this comes from. It, it, and it took me a long, long time to realize is that this sort of
anti-political politics of Ezra and Emia. Okay, well, there's nothing to do with, with sovereignty and, and coming back to Jerusalem is, is merely, uh, you know, sort of mite, uh, um, uh, you know, obligation to do our, to do our, um, vertical duties. Kpe may with no care at all for nation building and the people, and so on and so forth.
And with no political aim, this is, is, is endorsed by the prayer book. Okay. As the picture, the exclusive one and only picture of the return, the eventual return, uh, to Zion that we pray for. And, and it's this Pandora box, which is. Which is opening with, with all the xenophobia and you know, no strangers amongst you, and so on and so forth, which has come to the fore.
So, you know, trying to read the, uh, the counter tradition to that and the way Ezra and is a reversal of everything the, the toran, the Bible stand for in terms of Israel's political mission. Um, it's a book written, uh, uh, uh, with the explicit notion, which I, which I go back to all the time that, that even producing a different view, uh, a different mainstream view is, is is almost powerless to sort of uproot a deep set of convictions.
A deep normative system of, you know, how Israel is, is envisaged by the, by, by the ingrained vocabulary of of the du
BENAY LAPPE: Let's go back to your statement that it's very hard to change a way of, of life and understanding May Yeshiva, which is called s It is really in business to do just that. And I think we can do it.
I think we, it, it, its goal is to bring people to the table who have v very different perspectives, queer people and, but not only queer people. Um. Not so that they can have a chance to be at the table. It, it's not an inclusion project, it's a project of returning Judaism to, its what, what I would call radical roots, and I think you would describe as it, uh, I'm not sure how you'd describe it, but, but to return it to that, um, anti traditional dialogic expansion of our rationality and so on, which I think is what I call savara, but I'd love, we might have to put a stick on that.
Um, so would I be right in assuming that if you, if we could return Judaism to its radical roots, the way we have to do that is by bringing. Into the room. People who have these very different commitments and insights that can, uh, troubleshoot to use your term or upgrade or make the tradition better. And by doing so, what they're actually doing is restoring it to that, um, I don't even know what to call it, dialog the, the dialogical nature of its ultimate message.
And, and I wanna quote you, this is the last page of your article, uh, tell to commentary in the problem of normative self-critique. And I've got, you know, stars written all over. This last page just blew my mind. Okay, so here, here's this quote. It is a literature you're talking about the bubbly. Virtually bristles with tales of informative at times, transformative rabbinic encounters with all manner of gentile aristocracy and simple folk, a religious culture that is not merely open to other people and cultures, but religiously motivated to actively engage them.
Not because it believes Judaism has something important to teach them, but because it believes there is much Judaism can learn from them. So that suggests to me a Beit mid, not just of Jewish people, but that possibly Judaism won't become what it started out in the rabbinic era to be until the Beit Midrash is much broader than even Jewish.
Would that be fair to say
MENACHEM FISCH: that? That would be fair to say, but I, I, I have. I, I have to pour a little cold water. Okay. Over the enthusiasm of my own last sentence in that paper. And that is, I mean, we have to candidly admit that there's a whole array of voices which have, which don't find their way deliberately.
They're barred from Talmudic discussion. Paganism is fine. Idolatry isn't, isn't a barrier from that point of view. The Roman civilization with its legal systems and so on and so forth, that's fine. You engage that. Um, uh, you, you engage that openly. Just in the way I describe early Christianity does not have a voice or more general, more generally.
All other formations of Judaism don't have a voice within that can. Okay. Not Kuran, not the sadis. The sadis do appear, but only in the form of radi,
never as, as someone who asks a proper question and is given a proper answer. Um, listening to their engagement with, with Christianity is like listening to a long, long, long, uh, uh, uh, set of, of phone calls where you can only hear one side talk, and, and the other side is not given voice at all. And the reason is that the rabbis do not enter dialogue with, with whom they perceive to be at religious war with them.
This is not the case with the Roman, with the Rome. They're the others. They're ultimate others we can learn from. But engaging the enemy is very, very different. And I think we have, we have to admit to that my, all my work has been about teasing out the openness and the heroism and so on and so forth. Um, but it's also a literature that does a very cruel job of keeping out voices within Judaism, uh, which they viewed as, um, as threatening as at war.
Not merely as, you know, in dialogue as someone we could learn for. But, but, and they're very, very defensively cage with regard to that. And I think that, that we now have, of course, reformed Judaism and the kind of Beit mid rush you describe and there are bat mid rush like that. The Harmon Hartman Institute where I spent many years is very much like that.
It's built on, on, on, uh, on, on that kind of ideology. But what most orthodox, certainly ultra Orthodox Orthodox in Israel, certainly, uh, formations of Judaism have inherited that cous, uh, dogmatism barring of, uh, of the voices within Judaism. Uh, and, and they inherit that from the tone. Um, I, I, I was involved during my many years at the Hartman Institute in Interreligious dialogue, um, interreligious learning, and I, there was no perhaps one there.
There was no, there was no major rabbinic figure, a voice and standing who would agree. There was something meaning religiously meaningful in studying, uh, the Holy Text of Christianity and Islam with Christianity and Islam, and something to be gained in studying in a mixed avta, uh, your own sacred text.
And, and anyone who's engaged in that kind of interreligious learning, uh, it's unbelievable what, what you can learn, um, about your own text, not about other people's text, about your own text. Uh, but I, I just couldn't talk in including God rest his soul. Rabbi Lord Zachs himself, who, whom I repeatedly invited and he always found, found an excuse.
So, uh, I, I, I end one of my papers with, uh. I, I've ac I'm, I'm actually calling, uh, a book I am working on, um, the dig, not the Dignity of Difference, but the value of difference. And, and the, you know, that's, you know, you, you can, you can acknowledge the dignity of difference. The value of difference is that you need this diversity you need and can gain from engaging, uh, with otherness.
But, but there's a long tradition even within Talmudic anti Traditionalism that does not engage in religious or intra religious dialogue in, in, in that way. So. You know, you never know how, how the seeds you plant will, will, will, if they will sprout and how they'll sprout. I'm sure, um, just like with the Hartman Institute, that that, that, you know, a forum like you described can have a wonderful effect on, on those who experience it.
But we have, you know, we all have to be patient that this is a very, very slow, uh, um, very, very slow process, uh, specific even.
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah.
DAN LIBENSON: I mean, I, I just, you know, as we, as we wrap up for today, and I hope we will continue the conversation. I mean, I, I'm, I'm thinking about, uh, so many, so many threads. I mean, I'm thinking about Kuhn Thomas Kuhn and, and the idea of, you know, if this is hard, maybe within the existing paradigmatic community, well, maybe the way that it changes is a, it is a, uh, you know, marginal groups start doing it the new way, and eventually that sort of pulls the thing over.
So, you know, that's one thing that I, I'm leaving in my mind, you know, another, and then, and then just two Talmudic stories. You know, one is the story of rabbi's being deposed, which we've studied, and the idea that once they, they bring in new people into the, into the bmr, the very next thing that they wanna do is bring in more new people, you know, because the first subject that they take up is this question of who can be a Jew?
And they expand the category, you know? And so, so there's that and, and, and, and, and it just also, just the, that what you're talking about. You know, what you talked about in terms of that there was this project of the boly and it didn't, it didn't necessarily live up to its own ideals, right? In, in the way that you're talking about.
Like, it didn't really, uh, bring in, for example, early Christians into the, into that, uh, dialogue. So it, so it was a, an unfinished, unfinished symphony. Right. But, but I'm thinking about there, the, the end of that, the story of the, or not the end, really the middle, but where, where essentially, uh, what, what, uh, rabbi Joshua being, uh, you know, translated by somebody else says that, that, uh, you know, well, God, I, I, you know, I'm just, uh, just, you, you said this stuff, you know, I'm just, I'm just building on what you said.
Right. And then God's reaction is, you know, well, you got me, right. You know, my, like, you're right. You, you, you're call, you know, or like you said earlier, um, you know about, about, um, just using you, using, you know, the, your one's own logic to, to, uh, you know, be able to transcend. The originator, you know, and, and that, that, and so what's interesting to me is that if, if what you're talking about is that the project of the BLI kind of was, was, um, uh, you know, prematurely ended by the gni, you know, then, then it become, remains an open question for us to say, well, what would it have been like if it continued, you know, and, and then maybe some of what you're talking about would've happened, in which case we can see doing that now as a natural progression of, of what was started.
So, I dunno if, uh,
MENACHEM FISCH: I, I, I'll just add one, one very, very, uh, brief thought. What has continued is mid agata. There's no adjudicating. You get up in any shoe, any shoe and say, listen. I mean, the most ultra orthodox, if, if they let you in, but you, you know, if you get up and if you're asked to speak and you say, listen on this, Rashi says this, but it can't be, and you offer a different reading, they'll give you a yak if you say the Hal State.
So andSo, you can't be, you'll be stern. Okay. So, so first of all, so, so, so Talmudic Judaism that lives on, in, uh, in midrash in theology. Okay. The, but, but halakha is, is, you know, haha is the great, is is the great temptation, the temptation of submission. Mm. We can talk about that. We can talk about that more.
And, and then the, you know, the distinction, it, it's not merely unfinished business in the Bible. It's a distinction between engaging in religious war and being open and enjoying the challenge and enriching of your own position. And, uh, many people, many people, you know, view, view this in those terms. And then of course, uh, uh, Benet, I'm sure you've encountered, uh, you know, more orthodox people who are absolutely fascinated by the discussion.
And they nod their heads and Wow. And I've never read. Well, then they go back to their own ways of thinking and, and it's water off of ducks back. It's very, very frustrating. I mean, here, here in Israel, uh, I, I, I, I teach. For many, many years I've been teaching the same group. It's had no effect. They enjoy, they enjoy the adventure, they enjoy, you know, engaging and criticizing me and then that, but it
BENAY LAPPE: do, I have a new team for you.
DAN LIBENSON: Right. Well thank you for so much for this wonderful conversation and uh, thank you. Thank you. Hopefully it's just the first of many.
MENACHEM FISCH: Thank you, Dan. Thank you. Be this
BENAY LAPPE: has, thank you an
MENACHEM FISCH: absolute pleasure.
BENAY LAPPE: So much. Thank you.
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