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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 8 Epilogue Martin S. Jaffee This study opened with reflection upon a talmudic text, and reflection upon one text after another has been its substance. It might as well, then, close with a text. This one, drawn from the Talmud Yerushalmi, is about wine, wealth, and torah; their effects upon a person's outward demeanor are deemed, in rabbinic culture, too similar for complete comfort. Thus we are told (Y. Pesahim 10:1, 37c): 1 A. Rabbi Yehudah b. Rabbi Ilai drank four cups of wine on the Eve of Passover and had to bandage his head [for over six months] until the Festival of Sukkot. A certain Roman Lady saw him with his face aglow and said to him: Codger! Codger! One of three do I find in thee—either a drunk, a usurer, or a pig farmer! He replied: May Madam's breath fail her! Yet none of these be found in me! Rather, my studies inspire me, as it is written: “A man's wisdom sets his face aglow!” (Ecc. 8:1) B. Rabbi Abbahu came to Tiberias. Rabbi Yohanan's disciples saw him with his face aglow. They said before Rabbi Yohanan: Rabbi Abbahu has found a treasure! He replied: How so? They replied: His face is aglow! He replied: Perhaps he has heard some new torah? When he came before him, [Rabbi Yohanan] said: Have you heard some new torah? He replied: An ancient addition to the Repeated Tradition have I heard! [Rabbi Yohanan] applied this Scripture to him: “A man's wisdom sets his face aglow!” The Galilean masters who transmitted these stories shared, with anyone who had enjoyed or aspired to either, knowledge of the intoxicating potential of wine and wealth. But the intoxication of torah was something they believed only they could possess and understand. The Roman Lady, therefore, was completely wrong in her diagnosis of Rabbi Yehudah's glowing face, as we might expect; but even the disciples of Rabbi Yohanan, who surely should have known better, mistook Rabbi Abbahu's beaming countenance as evidence that he had found yet another source to add to his already considerable material wealth. end p.153 Baruch Bokser, a recent student of this text whose life was cut short far too early, has found a number of persistent apologetic themes of rabbinic culture submerged in these stories. 2 Roman observers of the Sages might suppose, for example, that their joie de vivre stemmed from wealth they had extorted from Jews under their guardianship (A). Even disciples might take the Sage's beaming face as a symptom of delight in some worldly good fortune (B). In fact, the perceptions of both hostile and friendly observers are wrong: the joy of the Sage in this world stems from the very thing that connects him to the other world—his torah. Bokser's reading has much to recommend it. Let me build upon it one further structure of interpretation. This text, first of all, is not merely about torah—it is in particular about Torah in the Mouth, as the interchange between Rabbi Yohanan and Rabbi Abbahu makes clear. Rabbi Abbahu's intoxication stems from a new word of Repeated Tradition—a tosefta—that (in ways the narrator conceals from us) he has managed to hear. Because he has absorbed it into his memory through repetition, it now affects him physiologically, transforming his face. Outsiders, noting the symptom, misinterpret its cause. The outward sign of the presence of Torah in the Mouth is similar to the sign produced by other stimulants—the glowing face—but the reality behind the sign is another thing entirely. Neither wealth nor wine has transformed the face of the Master—it is his torah at work within him. The master's glowing face, then, is an ambiguous sign that both reveals and conceals the presence of torah, depending upon who is interpreting it. Appearing as a sign of satisfied appetite to those who are dominated by appetite, torah is concealed in the sign of the glowing face. But to those who know the intoxication of having Torah in the Mouth, the glowing face recalls the other glowing countenance of Moses, whose face beamed light after his descent from Sinai. Let me now stretch the final text well beyond its original frame of reference. For I find within its meditation upon visual representation and the concealment of torah some pointer toward what I have tried to understand throughout this study: the rabbinic Sages' insistence upon the memorization and oral transmission of rabbinic torah. I am intrigued by the point that a single symptom—in this case, the glowing face of the master—discloses one meaning to those outside the range of rabbinic fellowship and quite another to those wholly within it. I am wondering if something like this willingness to embrace the ambiguity of the merely visible can help us get a final hold on the oxymoron so central to the classical rabbinic discipline of Torah in the Mouth: that its texts were no less readable in material representations than those of the Torah in Script, but they enjoyed their fullest being as torah only when memorized, internalized, and performed. The very writtenness of the texts of Torah in the Mouth was the ambiguous sign that enabled them to conceal what the Midrash Tanhuma 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
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 terms a “mystery” that might be shared only within the closed circles of discipleship to the Sage. For, as anyone who has entered rabbinic literary culture from beyond the circle of those raised in its traditions will attest, the written texts of Torah in the Mouth—even those that have benefitted from fine printings in scientific editions—are composed of simple words that add up to incomprehensible thoughts. The words are there on the page for anyone with a dictionary to decipher. But their meaning—simply with regard to end p.154 their subject matter, and more crucially with regard to their claim to constitute torah—is somewhere else entirely. That “somewhere else,” of course, is within the circle of the master. Without him, the written words of Torah in the Mouth may be decipherable as language, but they remain unintelligible as teaching. They lie there inert before the eyes, endlessly repeating themselves as scanned, disclosing nothing more than their syllables. Only the master can give them life as he repeats and explains them, drawing out invisible connections and unintuited contextualizations, linking them back toward tradition already known and forward to horizons of interpretation scarcely discerned. Thus, in a comment on the imperative to “make for yourself a master” (M. Avot 1:6), Avot de-Rabbi Natan A8 [ed. Schechter, p. 18a–b] supplies the following elaboration: How so? This teaches that he should make for himself a single Master and study with him Scripture and mishnah, midrash, halakhah, and aggadah. In this way an insight neglected in the study of Scripture will reappear in the study of mishnah, an insight neglected in the study of mishnah will reappear in the study of midrash, an insight neglected in the study of midrash will reappear in the study of halakhah, and an insight neglected in the study of halakhah will reappear in the study of aggadah. So he remains in one place and is filled with goodness and blessing! The master is a fountain whose torah overflows from one vessel of tradition into another, eventually reaching the cup of the disciple. It is that fountain of language that the disciple drinks and absorbs into his body. To switch metaphors, only the master can guide the disciple along the path that promises, at its end, to reproduce in the disciple what the master has experienced: the blending of memorized, fully mastered torah, into one's personal subjectivity; the self-overcoming that transforms a person of flesh and blood into a servant of the Creator and an echo of His revelation. The written texts of Torah in the Mouth, that is to say, are not torah at all as long as they remain merely written on inscribed material surfaces; the real inscription of Torah in the Mouth must be in memory, as memory is shaped by the sounds of the teacher's own rendition and, as the Amora Gidol insisted, by recalling the beaming face of the master as he taught. This, I take it, is the simple meaning behind the insistence of Rabbi Yohanan and his school that Torah in the Mouth could not be learned from written texts. It is not that there were no such texts; rather, the texts themselves, precisely in their written form, were not torah and should not be confused with such. The challenge of Rabbi Yohanan's circle was precisely to those who might have grasped the written text of rabbinic torah and thought thereby, without the transformative experience of serving the master, that they too had acquired torah. I have argued elsewhere, in one of the preliminary studies that led to this volume, that the written texts of the Mishnah and other compilations of Torah in the Mouth were distinguished, in the Sages' imagination, from two other sorts of writings. 3 One class of writings, the holy Scriptures, were torah by virtue of their being records of revelation preserved in writing. They were torah simply as physical objects prepared in accordance with halakhic specifications, even if no one should read them. A second class of writings, what moderns would call “literature,” could never end p.155 be torah, since they came solely from the musings of human tradition. Within this category of texts fell not only the writings of the Greco- Roman literary tradition, but also much of the quasi-scriptural literature recorded by Jewish scribes of the Second Temple period. But the writings of Torah in the Mouth fell between these two classes of text. As written, they were not torah. Accordingly no traditions regarding the rules for producing the physical scrolls of such texts had been transmitted. As material objects, they were equivalent to “literature.” Nevertheless, the fact that the words of these texts stemmed from Sinai enabled them also to serve as signs that pointed beyond themselves to torah. When performed from memory, in the setting of the discipleship circle before the Master, these writings were retrieved from the derivative status of the sign and became the very thing toward which they pointed. Reconstituted as torah in performance, they infused the being of the person who gave them voice, brought beams of intoxication to the face, and reproduced the moment at which Moses himself received his chapter of Repeated Tradition from the Omnipotent and taught it, as he had heard it, to Aaron, and from him to all Israel: Moshe was sanctified in the cloud and received the Torah at Sinai. . . . Said RabbiNatan: Why was Moshe detained for six days until the Word came to rest upon him? So that his innards would become emptied of all food and drink prior to his sanctification, 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
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