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
Written Word and Oral Word in the Master–Disciple Relationship
It will be helpful, as usual, to first make a comparative detour, back to the already familiar Greco-Roman rhetorical school. We noted
earlier, in a chreia attributed to Isocrates, that the bond of the rhetor and his student might be represented as displacing even that of
parent and child. The point is a common one in rhetorical literature, appearing in numerous contexts. 64 This intimate bond of teacher and
student was cemented through common devotion to a world of learning. Such bonds forged in study were not unique to rhetorical education
in Antiquity, in which paideia commonly represented a path of personal cultivation in the venerable ways of tradition. It was common as
well to a host of Greco-Roman instructional settings, collegia, in which the study of great works of the past served to solidify and shape
students' embrace not only of ideas but of the patterns of life that embodied them. The international Greco-Roman philosophical schools
were not bastions of unfettered intellectual curiosity. Rather, they placed a great premium on an emotional attachment to canonical ideas,
akin in its way to conversion. 65
Philosophical training involved, of course, intellectual mastery of the writings or orally transmitted teachings of philosophical founders. 66
But the primary goal of such study was not merely to master knowledge discursively. Rather, it was to be transformed by what one
possessed. The privileged path to such transformation lay in emulating the living embodiment of that knowledge in the writings and deeds
of one's teachers, and their teacher's teachers. In the person of the philosophical Sage, the instructional text came alive.
Pursuit of intimate discipleship in shaping a life of transformative piety played a crucial role as well in emerging Christian culture in the
Roman Empire. Writings in—and well beyond—the Christian scriptural canon routinely represent disciple communities, grounded in the oral
transmission of redemptive teachings, as the primitive form of the Church. 67 More important, the commitment to discipleship training in
the formation both of Christian intellectual elites and ascetic communities became even stronger in the Byzantine milieu in which Galilean
Sages shared living space—and intellectual traditions—with a growing body of Christian clerics and ascetic holy men. 68
Judaic traditions of discipleship in Second Temple priestly, scribal, or prophetic settings surely preceded the engagement with these
deeply Hellenized forms of discipleship. 69 Yet it is also clear that, by the turn of the Common Era, the social and intellectual forms of
Judaic discipleship communities were deeply colored by centuries of immersion in the Greco-Roman social and cultural milieu. 70 This
background of a culture-wide pursuit of life-transforming gnosis, bound up with an energetically embraced discipline of life, is the proper
setting for appreciating the fundamental traits of rabbinic discipleship in all of its diverse manifestations. 71
The early rabbinic literature, from the Mishnah on, is rich in depictions of learned fellowship as grounded in the personal relationship of
disciples and Sages.
end p.147
This relationship, at least in its ideal representations, supplanted and superseded even those of the patriarchal family. In a passage
strikingly similar to Isocrates' advice to honor teachers above parents, the Mishnah teaches: “Where a disciple finds a lost object of his
father's and of his master's, the return of his master's takes precedence, for his father brought him into This World, but his master, who
has taught him wisdom, brings him into the Coming World” (M. Bava Metzia 2:11/T. Bava Metzia 2:30). 72
The Yerushalmi, for its part, is no less preoccupied than its Tannaitic predecessors with representations of the life of discipleship. Among
these are such common narrative settings as interchanges delivered while sitting before the Sage in instructional session, in the course of
judicial deliberations, at meals, during a journey, while attending the Sage's personal needs, or at his deathbed. 73 A particularly
illuminating text is preserved in its fullest form at Y. Sheqalim 2:7, although, as the notes to the following translation indicate, its
component elements left their traces in numerous redactional settings throughout the Yerushalmi.
Stemming, significantly enough, from the circle of Rabbi Yohanan, the text offers a sharply etched portrait of the protocols of honor
assumed by the Galilean Amoraic disciple circles. Crucial among these is the expectation that disciples transmit traditions in the names of
those from whom they learned them. The disciple's mastery of the Master's words constituted a kind of transaction that not only benefited
the disciple, it also provided the Sage with an invaluable gift. In this gift we may well find a fundamental clue to the privileging of the oral
over the written text in Rabbi Yohanan's circle. Herewith, the text (Y. Sheqalim 2:7, 47a): 74
1. Rabbi Yohanan was leaning upon Rabbi Hiyya b. Abba as he walked. 75 Now, Rabbi Eliezer saw them and hid from before them. Rabbi
Yohanan noticed and said: These two things has this Babylonian done to me! First, he didn't offer greetings! Second, he hid!
Said to him Rabbi Yaakov b. Idi: This is their custom—the younger doesn't greet the elder. They do this to fulfill the verse: “The youths
saw me and hid, but the elders arose and stood” (Job 29:8).
2. [Rabbi Yaakov] asked [Rabbi Yohanan]: What's the rule? Is one permitted to pass before an idolatrous image? Said [Rabbi Yohanan]:
Why give it any honor? Pass before it but don't look at it! Said [Rabbi Yaakov]: Then Rabbi Eliezer was proper in not passing before
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