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
significance is designed to exclude Gentiles from covenantal consideration.
Clearly, the “Nations of the World” who seek to appropriate Israel's precious heritage of Torah are not the pagan conquerors of Israel, but
their Christian successors now ruling Byzantium. The passage counters Christian theological supercessionism, grounded in a
hermeneutical appropriation of Jewish Scripture, with the bold claim that possession of Scripture alone is no sign of covenantal partnership
with God. The midrashist claims that it is precisely the fact that part of the Torah is carried solely in the memory and the mouth, rather
than in a book, that preserves the uniqueness of Israel. The incorporation of Torah into the body through memorization and enactment
functions no less surely than that other mark on the body—circumcision—to distinguish Israel from those who would supplant it in God's
favor.
The same Midrash of Rabbi Tanhuma (ed. Buber, vayera 6, 44b), and a roughly contemporary Palestinian collection known as Pesiqta
Rabbati (ed. Friedmann, 14b), share a close parallel to this passage, glossing it in even stronger language. Since the
end p.145
Pesiqta Rabbati passage is slightly more ample, we will use it as our text. Hear how the conversation between the Holy One and Moshe is
reconstructed by Rabbi Yehudah bar Shalom into a dialogue between the Holy One and Byzantium:
The Blessed Holy One foresaw that the Nations would translate the [Written] Torah and read it in Greek. And they would say:
“They [i.e., the Jews] are not Israel!” 60 Said the Blessed Holy One to Moshe: “O Moshe! The Nations will say, ‘We are Israel! We
are the children of the Omnipresent!’ And Israel, too, will say, ‘We are the children of the Omnipresent!’”
And the scales are in balance!
Said the Blessed Holy Ones to the Nations: “What do you mean that you are my children? But I recognize only the one who holds
my mystery in his hands. He alone is my son!”
They said to Him: “What is this mystery?”
He replied: “It is the Repeated Tradition!”
Here the crucial word, translated as mystery, is the Aramaic mistoryn, a borrowing from the Greek mysterion. As M. Bregman has recently
demonstrated, this rabbinic appeal to the “mystery” of the Repeated Tradition is hardly a result of random chance. 61 It corresponds most
directly to a precisely parallel usage of the term “mystery” in the work of the late-fourth-century Christian bishop Hilarius of Poitier. In his
Latin commentary on the Septuagint's book of Psalms (Ps. 2:2–3), Hilarius puts forth the proposal that the guarantee of the Septuagintal
text's validity lay in the fact that its translators possessed a hidden oral tradition, a mysterium of Mosiac origins, that was preserved in
their translational work. As Hilarius'mysterium preserves the integrity of the Church's tradition of scriptural meaning, and thus its distinctive
relation to God, so the Rabbi's mistoryn, its Repeated Tradition, serves as a firm basis legitimating Israel as God's sole covenantal
partner.
In light of such passages, it would be easy to conclude that the rabbinic insistence on preserving the tradition of oral study was reactive
—an attempt by a subdued political and social minority to preserve its cultural autonomy from a hegemonic Christian civilization that had
stolen the Book symbolic of Judaic uniqueness. 62 We should not press this point too hard. After all, the privileging of the oral-performative
tradition in rabbinic culture predates the rise of Christian political dominance by at least a century, if not more. Rabbinic literature,
moreover, revealed little interest in Christianity until it became the state religion of the hated Roman Empire. Only at that point, with the
historical rise of the persecuted Christian minority to political domination, would the question of Christianity's legitimacy become a pressing
matter. 63
I want to suggest, therefore, that the Galilean Sages' ideological commitment to the concept of an oral-performative rabbinic tradition that
could not be transmitted in written form has its primary social significance much closer to the life of Amoraic society. While the concept of
Torah in the Mouth is a useful polemical weapon in the Amoraic theological confrontation with Christianity, that confrontation is not the
generative setting in which the unwritten nature of rabbinic tradition has its most compelling ideological force. Rather, the idea of Torah in
the Mouth elaborated within Rabbi Yohanan's circle is best anchored in the need to explain and celebrate the distinctive social form of
rabbinic community—the master–disciple relationship.
end p.146
Let us, then, consider the details of that social setting and its impact on Amoraic conceptions of the oral-performative tradition.
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