Layers: Of Text and Ourselves

--Gabriel Karger

Much of the Jewish world today studies Talmud in a “classical” way, reading lines of the gemarah with Rashi, and moving to other commentaries develop more conceptual and halachic understanding of the sugyot. Talmud at Maale Gilboa sometimes employs a more contextual focus, which aims to understand voices of tradition in a carefully historical mode. We'll sometimes spend a full week looking at psukim, comparing parallels in the Mishna and Tosefta and wondering which came first, going over the Yerushalmi, and occasionally checking different manuscripts of the Bavli. When I tell outsiders about this methodology I sometimes receive a rather horrified – or at least perturbed– look, and responses along the lines of “That's not how one learns Talmud” or “What is this, a university with kippot?” It's true, a historical kind of reading isn't the one employed by many Orthodox Jews, but I think it's worth explaining the power of 'academic' tools for a religious community, and the ways in which they do and do not threaten current practice.

            Though my morning class's Rav hates the term, the methodology of looking at different historical periods is often called Rivadim, meaning “layers.”  Let's take as an example of method the very first line from Sanhedrin, which we learned as a yeshiva the bulk of the year.  The mishna states that “monetary cases [are judged by] three, assault and robberies by three.” We have no reason to suggest the monetary cases here exclude loans between individuals, but that's exactly how the gemarah begins. It asks: “[Why separate between monetary cases and assault?] Aren't assault and robbery part of monetary damages?” R. Abahu is brought to give an answer, saying that “The monetary cases refer only to assault and mayhem, but not to loaning money.” In other words, instead of two categories, money and assault, money is turned into a category which contain the others.

            This isn't what the mishna means in its own context. Why the sudden change? As it becomes clearer later, later rabbis essentially saw that stringent requirements about the number and type of person doing the proceedings could make it harder to loan money, specifically to poor people. For the sake of “not locking a door in front of the poor,” they relaxed the requirements. So why does the mishna then require three judges at all? Perhaps it's protecting the integrity of the judicial system and its consistency. Maybe it's worried about the safety of these loans – if the loans aren't regulated strictly, no one will like his/her chances of getting back the money loaned out. This is when we pull out the laptops and start searching for parallels.

            I don't see this method of reading as always being radically different from a classical one. Just reading the gemarah without any historical periodization one can see the tension between those loaning and receiving loans, the priority of the poor, etc. We would, however, miss the temporal development of the law, which I'll get back to later. But first here's another short example: In discussing the institution of smicha, it seems that there's a split between authorities in Israel and Babylon about what to do with the practice. Rabbis in Israel were committed to an idea of judgment as coming from God, and continuing a chain of authority which enacts the divine law. A story tells of Rabbi Yehudah ben Bava who alone saved the institution of smicha from destruction in the land of Israel. On the other hand, Babylonian sources are more mixed about both smicha and knasot, a kind of fine leveled by these judges that exceeds the direct damage caused by one person to another. In the first and third chapters of Sanhedrin, the gemarah presents the notion that knasot can't be collected in Babylon.

            Why the difference? One possibility is the structure of authority that ruled in the land of Israel versus that of Babylon. Rabbis in the land of Israel may have felt more comfortable exercising political power over Jews that authorities in Babylon were wary of, or had no ability to enforce. In Babylon a less severe idea of equitable judgment developed that had to be more accommodating to what kinds of punishments individuals would accept, and so the notion of punishments above and beyond damages received was not enacted.

            This case raises all sorts of interesting questions about legal authority, pragmatism, equality, and so forth. But what does this method of reading give us that others do not?

            Once more, we can arrive at the same conceptual questions about justice and the law that we've raised by eschewing all this talk of Babylonian traditions versus Israeli ones. I don't necessarily need this framework where I differentiate between statements by Babylonian and Israeli sources. First and foremost, I could always pick up the latest works on ethics, jurisprudence, or religious thought on similar issues. But when I read Talmud I'm not interested in doing philosophy. I'd rather enter the world of the text in all of its difference, and that includes the historical layers from the Code of Hammurabi and psukim all the way to anonymous editors two thousand years later.

            The crux of the issue isn't really if we should be uncovering the layers of the text at all, but rather how many layers we should look at. Anyone reading a page of Talmud and relying solely on Rashi to understand that s/he is learning gemarah exactly like I do, except that his or her understanding of the text comes straight out of the 11^th century. There's nothing wrong with the 1000's – truly, they're an interesting period – but today we have electronic tools, manuscripts, historical knowledge and new methods that allow us to see into so many more worlds. Everyone uses the conceptual language and understandings of specific times in history, but when we read Talmud we can look at radical changes, progressions, and deep differences in approach all on one page.

            In my more pessimistic moments, I wonder if this method of learning has remained in universities because of the temporal aspect contained in historical reading. The most amazing moments in our shiurim sometimes occur when we realize that an individual or group has totally revolutionized an aspect of the law, or subverted a previous generation's ruling with an okimpta or reinterpretation. I imagine some people would rather read the Talmud as a document consistent across time precisely because they feel uncomfortable with the radical changes the text makes. They are those who will call bringing modern methodologies into a religious setting 'untraditional.' I'd say our readings of the text are vastly more traditional than others – we actually care about every voice in our tradition. And yes, perhaps there is an implication here that every generation should reverently add new layers to our tradition. I can't think of much more traditional than that.

            I would like to think that learning fundamentally changes a person – that an acquisition of knowledge or text makes a person different than the one before. When we ignore the contradictions and layers of our history we risk assimilating the text into something we already know. Most people have heard a drasha in a shul where the rabbi raises various questions about the parsha, immediately jumps from the psukim to Rashi, the Ramban or a chasidic tale, and says the whole issue really teaches us the importance of derech eretz. There's nothing wrong with this kind of motivation in a speech, but it would be rather disappointing if the greatest resurgence of Jewish learning in history amounted to an enterprise of assimilation of the familiar instead of an encounter with the unknown.  When we learn, we have the opportunity to truly become a different person, to step into another historical world, focusing on each voice of the text. Maale Gilboa has tried to seriously enter this world of the text in all its richness. I hope others will join us.