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
their torah. But this is not how the contributor of units 4 and 5–7 understands the story. At stake for Rabbi Yohanan is not authorial
prestige, but a certain immortality as his traditions of torah live after him in continued association with his name. The Psalmist, David,
serves as the biblical archetype of one whose words bring him immortality as they are recited by worshippers after his death (5). A
second, more pertinent, example of immortality (6–7) is now associated not with the prophetic writings of David, but with the unwritten
traditions of the Sages.
The halakhic teachings of departed Sages confer upon them a kind of immortality. The words of torah, in the mouth of the disciple, are not
merely transmissions of information. They are, rather, bonds that link master and disciple—in this world during the master's life, and even
after the master departs for the world to come. The disciple in this world keeps his master's teachings in his mouth so that even the
master's earthly remains can, in a minor way, be restored to physical life through the sweet refreshment of his own teaching. As his
disciples transmit his traditions, the dead master enjoys a kind of postmortem participation in the revivifying life of learning. The life of the
study circle, at the center of which stands the Sage, is extended to him after his death by the very students to whom he gave the eternal
life of torah.
The statement of Gidol (unit 8) is entirely independent of the foregoing and seems at first a mere afterthought. But, from the perspective of
understanding the bonds linking master and disciple, it is perhaps the most telling. Why does one summon up the image of the teacher
while reciting his teachings? The prooftext from Ps. 39:7 at first seems to offer no help at all. Indeed, Palestinian Amoraic tradition had
already generated, in association with Gen. 39:11, the notion that Joseph derived the power to resist the allure of Potiphar's wife by
imagining the face of Jacob, his father. 84 That verse, or some other involving, for example, Moses and Joshua, would surely have been
more to the point in the present context. In any event, it is difficult to construct a more farfetched correlation of a rabbinic norm with its
scriptural warrant.
The apparent absurdity of the prooftext, however, dissolves when we reconstruct the sense that Gidol assumes his rabbinic audience will
supply to the Hebrew text of Psalms. As elsewhere in midrashic exegesis, much depends upon the sounds of words and the intertextual
reverberations they create in the ears of the scripturally literate. The present exegesis depends upon two radical resignifications of
scriptural meaning grounded in aural experience of the text. The first concerns the term lm (“shadow”), and the second focuses on the
term ythlk (“walk about”).
The Hebrew lm surely signifies insubstantiality in the setting of Psalms 39:7. But the midrashist is reading it intertextually with an eye
and ear attuned to the far more familiar sense the term bears in Genesis, where it refers to the divine image in which humanity is created
(Gen. 1:26–27). With lm heard through the intertextual filter of the creation of humanity, the term ythlk is then opened up to other
meanings
end p.150
that emerge in the Genesis account of human origins. There figures such as Noah (Gen.6:9) and Enoch (Gen. 5:24) “walk with God.” To
conclude: simply in terms of inner-scriptural intertexts, Ps. 39:7 is being read here to state that “In the image of God shall a person
conduct himself.”
But there is yet another aural-associative dimension to this scriptural quotation. In a rabbinic setting, ythlk reverberates with perhaps the
most ideologically rich usage of the verbal root hlk—namely, the term for rabbinic tradition, halakhah. The assonance of ythlk and hlkh in
a rabbinic setting conveys a message regarding the disciple's own effort to “conduct himself ” in accord with the tradition of halakhah
learned from the Sage. 85 Once we resignify the quotation from Psalms by hearing it with rabbinic ears, its relevance as a prooftext for
Gidol's observation could not be more direct. The disciple imagines his teacher while reciting his teachings because, as Scripture proves:
“only through the image [ lm] [of God disclosed through the being of the master] shall a person transform himself into an embodiment of
halakhic norms [ythlk 'yš ].”
In Gidol's midrash, then, we find a powerful claim about the role of the master's personal teaching in the spiritual formation and
transformation of his disciples. The discipline of textual memorization and behavioral transformation that defined the life of the disciple is
grounded in the living presence of the master. It is a presence that dominates not only in the moment of instruction, but even at a
distance, as it is internalized and associated with the memorized traditions so firmly lodged through oral performance. Just as the
disciple's recitation of the master's traditions revive the latter even after his death, it is the presence of the master, preserved in the
memory of the disciple, that empowers the latter to revive his mentor. Disciple and master constitute a mutually redemptive relationship
through the medium of orally performed tradition.
This insistence upon the indispensable presence of the master as the security of the disciple's learning finds a final reinforcement in unit 9
–10. Here the point is most direct. Rabbi Zeira is troubled, at 9, by the fact that the blind Rav Sheshet may have misassigned traditions
learned from one master to another, since he hadn't the mnemonic advantage of linking the heard words to the visage of the teacher. A
solution to his problem is provided at 10. Even if one hasn't learned directly from a master, it is possible to rely on the testimony of
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