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
5 The Ideological Construction of Torah in the Mouth
Martin S. Jaffee
Torah—Mosaic and Rabbinic
The best-known example of the claim that all rabbinic teaching stems from a Mosaic source is, of course, the opening unit of the
Mishnah's tractate Avot (1:1–2:8). 1 Beginning with Moses, who “received (qbl) torah from Sinai and passed it on (msr ) to Yehoshua” (M.
Avot 1:1), the compiler of this list of teachers and their teachings links the words of successive Sages into a chain of tradition spanning
the First and Second Temple periods, covering the post-70 period of reconstruction under the disciples of Hillel and Rabban Yohanan b.
Zakkai, and culminating with the early third-century CE patriarch Rabban Gamaliel III, the son of the illustrious patriarch Rabbi Yehudah.
This compendium of wise sayings, amplified with the gnomic utterances of numerous Tannaitic masters—from the famous Rabbi Aqiva to
the obscure ben Bag Bag—enjoyed wide circulation in rabbinic circles. Recognized as an effective apologia defending the continuity of
rabbinic teachings with the teaching of Israel's greatest prophet, the collection as a whole was included by the close of the sixth century
within the larger curriculum of learning that came to be identified as the Mishnah per se. 2 Like other Mishnaic tractates, Avot also
circulated in an expanded, Tosefta-like compilation ascribed to Rabbi Natan. 3
Not all modern scholars have resisted the tendency to see in Avot's chain of tradition an allusion to a fully developed concept of a dual,
written and oral, revelation. 4 But the fact remains that M. Avot does not yet speak of the Sinaitic origins of Torah in Script and Torah in
the Mouth, but only of torah. M. Avot does not, therefore, offer a defense of the idea that the Mishnah or the Oral Torah originates with
Moses. Rather it extols the traditionality of rabbinic teachings, linking their authority to the greatest possible source of authority. In S.
Fraade's trenchant formulation, “disciples of sages, through their engaged study and hence interpretation of this text, might be empowered
to view the very activity of their study as part of an unbroken, living chain of Torah and tradition extending back to and deriving from Sinai,
with themselves as the latest links.” 5
end p.84
M. Avot's use of the term torah in particular—without the definite article that would denote Scripture—to indicate the teaching that Sages
receive from Moses is not accidental or ill-considered. Its roots go back to Second Temple usage and scriptural sources, in which,
complementing explicit divine revelation, torah can refer as well to “received tradition passed on most explicitly by teachers.” 6 There is an
implicit, if unexplained, connection between torah and what Sages call hatorah, “the Torah” of Moses. In order to get a better sense of the
connotations of Avot's usage of torah, and to gauge the relationship of torah to the Torah of Moses on the one hand and to the rabbinic
text-interpretive and oral-performative traditions on the other, we should survey some other illuminating materials from the early rabbinic
corpus.
Text-Interpretive Tradition as the “Essence of Torah”
As was pointed out in chapter 4, the Mishnah recognizes as a matter of course a distinction between the divine commandments found in
the Torah of Moses, which it calls m wt (mitzvot), and the patterns of life mandated by the various formulations of halakhic tradition. The
former, it was assumed, emerged organically from the Mosaic Torah itself. God's commandments might have required clarification by the
ongoing project of text-interpretive tradition cultivated in rabbinic circles, but those commandments had no taint of human construction.
The halakhic tradition, by contrast, emerged beyond the boundaries of scriptural interpretation. Its foundation lay in the teachings
associated with the names of important Sages that were transmitted in oral-performative settings of instruction. A pressing jurisprudential
problem, therefore, was to clarify the relationship between these two distinct sources of norms, to establish hierarchies of authority by
which sources within the system might be evaluated.
The matter is addressed most explicitly in a well-known observation about the relationship between the Sages' oral-performative tradition
of halakhah and scriptural commands. This observation appears in two textually related versions, one in the Mishnah and the other in the
Tosefta. Since they are complementary, we shall examine each on its own, beginning with the text of M. Hagigah 1:8: 7
1. [The Sages's power to effect] the release of vows flutters in the air with nothing [in Scripture] to rely upon.
2. The halakhot of the Sabbath, pilgrimage offerings, and sacrilege are like mountains hung by a hair, with little Scripture and many
halakhot.
3. [The halakhot] of judicial procedure, sacrifice, cleanness and uncleanness, and forbidden consanguinity have something [in Scripture]
upon which to rely.
4. And they are indeed (hn hn) 8 the essence of torah.
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