lethargic_man | Searching for the quintessence of Jewish practice

Here's something I've been wondering about for going on for twenty years, but had (some) new insights into in the last year or two, as I shall explain. Orthodox Judaism of today portrays itself as being how Judaism has been practised for millennia (until the rise of the Reform in the early nineteenth century), but is that really the case? Today most Jews in most countries are middle-of-the-road; they observe some practices, but not others. One gets the impression that in the alte haym (meaning eastern Europe, where the haskala failed to reach) everyone was much frummer, and this was lost when our ancestors moved to emancipated western Europe and North America and started to assimilate, but is this an oversimplification? After all, we also think of Israel being secular because it was founded by Zionists from eastern Europe who wanted to get away from the stifling observance of their home communities, which means there were not-so-frum Ostjuden after all.

But of course eastern Europe is only part of the equation. What was the case in western Europe in the Middle Ages? Spain and Portugal? The Maghreb? Babylonia? The Talmud portrays, using the term עַם הָאָרֶץ, a large part of the population of Babylonia as being ignoramuses regarding religious obligations, so is it the case that the strictures demanded by rabbinical Judaism is not actually representative of what Jews actually practised down through the ages?

Sometimes I look at Judaism and think the fundamentalists took over the religion. This is not, however, I think a recent phenomenon. Looking at the literature in the Dead Sea Scrolls, it seems to be the case that the fundamentalists had taken over there too (for at least the Qumran sect). And even in the time after the return from the Babylonian exile, we see Nehemiah imposing much stricter standards on the returnees than they had themselves been adhering to.

Of course, there was a group of people who did take over Judaism almost two thousand years ago: the rabbis, whose movement represented the continuation of Pharisaism. The extent of their takeover is felt to this day, in that one is encouraged to study their writings—the Mishna, the Gemara and all later law codes and responsa—but the study of any earlier postbiblical material is left to academics (and the odd eclectic dilettante such as myself). Indeed, one could go through a traditional Jewish education and scarcely be aware that the rich literature of the Second Temple period existed at all.

Last Shovuos the topic came up in conversation with Rabbi Reuven Firestone of the kingdom of Ḥimyar in present-day Yemen, which was Jewish (or at least its royal family and much of its population) in the final century or two of its existence before its destruction in the sixth century. Why were there so many Jews there? Reuven told me that after the Mishna was written, it—meaning rabbinical Judaism in general—was generally accepted in the Land of Israel, but not in Babylonia. The rabbis sent emissaries to Babylonia to convert the Jews there to accepting the Talmud; thus the people the Talmud portrays as "ignoramuses" were actually not non-practising Jews but those practising a different stream of Judaism.

As the Babylonian community gradually became increasingly hostile to non-rabbinical Judaism, it is thought, so Reuven said, that Ḥimyar became a refuge for those who would not accept the authority of the Talmud. With the destruction of the kingdom however, the last bastion of pre-rabbinical Judaism came to an end.

This is, of course, not the story as it circulates in general Jewish circles, which is that with the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70, Saducceeism came to an end, and there was no non-rabbinical Judaism until the first Karaites reinvented it eight centuries later. (The Karaites, of course, claim differently.)

So what are we left with, when we manage to avoid looking at Jewish history through rabbinically-tinted glasses? Sometimes I think Judaism as we have it came "off the derech" centuries ago. But the corollary of Judaism having come off the derech is that there is a derech. The question is only one of how to find it, when the Torah doesn't give clear instructions on how to obey it.

For example, the Torah says one should do no manner of servile work on the Sabbath, but what exactly constitutes servile work? The Torah says "let no man go out of his place on the seventh day", and records that a man found gathering sticks on the Sabbath was desecrating it, but that (apart from Temple ritual) was about it (though there are a few scraps more detail in later books of the Bible). Only of course, that wasn't it; it wasn't for every person to interpret the law for themselves. There had to have been information what to do; it was just not written down. Or to put it another way, it was oral law.

Oral law, but not the Oral Law of the rabbis. Despite the rabbinic insistence that the Oral Law went back to Sinai, it's clear from reading the Mishna and the Gemara that the rabbis were in some cases working much of the detail out as they went along, and in others trying to come up with Biblical justification for pre-existing behaviour.

So now you've got me keeping a beady eye out when I read the likes of Josephus or the Book of Jubilees to see what of the Oral Law already existed several centuries before the time of the Mishna. For example, Josephus quotes Nicholaus of Damascus to the effect that the prohibition on travelling beyond the teḥum on Shabbos was already present in the second century BCE (this might be the interpretation of the "let no man go out of his place" above), and Jubilees gives a list of activities that are prohibited on Shabbos—but these activities only have partial overlap with those prohibited today.

The Talmud uses a hermeneutic rule to derive what is prohibited on the Shabbos: The commandment to observe the Sabbath occurs in the Torah (inter alia) immediately after the instructions to build the Tabernacle, so the rabbis deduced that the activities prohibited on Shabbos were those that went into the building of the Tabernacle.

But what the divergences from this in the accounts in Jubilees show is that this hermeneutical rule is ex post facto; it doesn't reflect the oldest interpretation of what keeping Shabbos involved.

So now you've got me struggling to find meaning in parts of Judaism as traditionally practised—meaning the parts that are harder to put into practice, particularly when one does not live in Frumville Central or surrounded by frummers—and feeling that Judaism has gone off the derech, but that there is, or at least once was a derech, now trying to find it.

I only recently discovered the remark of an early advocate for reforming Jewish law (his name was Jesus of Nazareth, you may have heard of him) that the Sabbath was made for people and not the other way around". I think there's a lot to be said for this. But the solution is not to simply junk three thousand years of tradition and just go with what you like (or not if you're not a Reform Jew at least, which I'm not). The solution is to pore through the evidence and try and find what Shabbos observance (or kashrus, or whatever) looked like before the fundamentalists got ahold of the religion, or to put it another way: what the essence of these practices is.

But that's not really possible because the earlier (i.e. Biblical) writers took knowledge of this all for granted, and evidence from the Second Temple period either suffers from a taboo on writing down oral law, or is sectarian (i.e. divergent from the path that led to modern Judaism. So what, then, am I to do?

The answer is of course keep grappling with the issue. After all, "wrestles with God" is what the name of my people, Israel, means.