Torah in the Mouth.pdf

Torah in the Mouth, Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism, 200 BCE - 400 CE
Jaffee, Martin S., Samuel and Althea Stroum Professor of Jewish Studies, University of Washington
Print publication date: 2001, Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2003
Print ISBN-13: 978-0-19-514067-5, doi:10.1093/0195140672.001.0001
proffered.
The spectacle of a Sage forgetting his own words, however, is too much for the final tradent of this story, who has blunted its force with
the disclaimer at 2 and the apostrophe to memorization at 3. These stress the importance of memorizing and mastering one's traditions. In
the concluding contribution, Rabbi Aqiva speaks in the name of the Repeated Tradition itself, beseeching its human tradents to incorporate
it in their memories through song. 28
This point needn't be belabored any further. At the foundation of the earliest rabbinic compilations stands the assumption that literary
traditions distinctive to the rabbinic community are passed on in the medium of speech, from Sage to disciple. They are mastered in
memory through private reiteration and performed publicly in the process of being reported and examined. These traditions are already
framed as generic entities, with a distinctive taxonomy. Aggadic traditions, conveying their points through narrative, are juxtaposed with
halakhic traditions that specify forms of behavior. Text-interpretive traditions, conceptualized as midrash, are distinguished from halakhah,
conveyed in an oral-performative tradition of its own. Let us move further, then, and flesh out some relevant distinctions within the oral-
performative tradition of halakhah in particular.
end p.72
Halakhah as a Modality of Tradition
The term mishnah is only the most comprehensive label for a series of subcategories or tradition genres which often overlap in their range
of reference. 29 Our brief glance at T. Berakhot 2:12 above showed one example, and we will see more before long. It is surprising, then,
that terms corresponding most nearly to the Latin traditio and its cognates in other Indo-European languages are rare, and their usage
corresponds only partially to the semantic range of the English. Substantive nouns such as msrt (masoret: “that which is passed on”) 30
and qblh (qabbalah: “that which is received”) 31 are scarce and of restricted semantic range. The verbal forms of these roots—“to hand on”
(msr ) or “to receive” (qbl)—are more common and appear in the frequently cited passage of M. Avot 1:1ff that defines the rabbinic chain
of learned tradition stemming from Moses. We shall soon note a few other instructive examples.
While nouns formed of roots meaning “to transmit” or “to receive” have their place in the Tannaitic lexicon of tradition, a far more
prominent place is reserved for a noun derived from the root hlk, to go or walk. This is the term halakhah, usually rendered in translation
as “law.” 32 This rendering is not entirely inappropriate, but neither is it unproblematic. For the moment, it is enough to observe that
halakhah has a much broader usage within the Mishnah and Tosefta in particular, a usage that indeed proves instructive for this study.
For example, M. Gittin 6:7 records the opinion, in the name of Rabbi Meir, that a man who appoints three agents to deliver a bill of divorce
to his wife thereby bestows upon them the status of a court. Unlike mere agents, they are now empowered to delegate the writing of the
document to another person. There is a problem, however, since the tradition according to Rabbi Meir differs from other formulations on
the same subject that circulate within the community:
1. Now this halakhah [of Rabbi Meir's] was brought by Rabbi Haninah of Ono when he was released from prison: I have received [qbl] [as
Halakhah here is used in a manner analogous to the term mšnh, which we explored at M. Taanit 4:4. It is a report, orally delivered, of a
legal norm which is received by the reporter as tradition (qbl) from an authoritative source (here unspecified) and then transmitted. It is
possible, as in the present instance, to have conflicting reports, and these must be adjudicated. Unlike ben Azzai's challenge to Rabbi
Aqiva (M. Taanit 4:4), Rabbi Yose's response to Rabbi Haninah is not really about which version of a shared traditional text has been
correctly memorized and transmitted. Rather, at stake here is a question of larger theoretical approaches that, stemming from different
masters, have come into conflict in the discourse of their disciples. 33
One way of dismissing apparent conflicts among transmitted rulings from different sources highlights the degree to which the formulators
of Mishnaic and Toseftan traditions conceived of halakhah as a datum passed on within the medium
end p.73
tradition] that one who says before three: “Give a bill of divorce to my wife”—they may appoint others to write it, since he has
constituted them as a court.
2. Said Rabbi Yose: We reply to our messenger—We too have received [qbl] [as tradition] that even if he said before the High Court in
Jerusalem: “Give a bill of divorce to my wife”—they must learn to write it and then deliver it.
of oral-performative tradition. A valid objection to the authority of a halakhic report is a claim that it is based upon a misunderstanding of
the spoken word by one of its transmitters. As in the following interchange, such a claim yields an effort to reconstruct the original
halakhic report by identifying the element within it that misled the tradent who transmitted it from his teacher (M. Ohalot 16:1; cf. T. Ahilut
15:12):
1. All movable tools [that overshadow a corpse] convey the uncleanness [of the corpse] when [their diameter equals] the thickness of a
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2003 - 2011. All Rights Reserved.
Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details
see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/privacy_policy.html).
Subscriber: Columbia University; date: 20 September 2011