Tuesday, April 4, 2017

Is halacha still binding if one accepts biblical criticism?

theTorah.com has a symposium on this very question with various learned answers. I have to say that IMHO all of the answers made no sense to me at all for the following reasons.

Anyone who learns Gemara knows that the basis for almost all halachos min hatorah is some kind of derasha, whether it is an extra letter or word, a different word, a גזירה שוה, etc. The underlying assumption of all of these is that the text is divine and therefore we can make derashos from them. The moment the text is no longer divine but rather, written by humans, all of these derashos fall by the wayside. This is even more so when considering teh documentary hypothesis. According to the DH the text we have is an amalgamation of a number of different sources edited to be a single document. Based on that, we certainly cannot ask why do we have this extra letter/word, etc. to make a derasha. Therefore, if all of the derashas are invalid/go away what are we left with? What is the halacha based on?

4 comments:

  1. Your description of how the gemara decided laws is pretty party-line, and I don't think anywhere near accurate based on the text of the gemara itself. Waht is clear to me is that the basis for the laws is absolutely not from derasha of various aspects of the Torah, rather the basis of the laws is from the opinions or practices of various Rabbis, and the derashot given are the required justifications for those laws.

    The place where derashot come into play for actual law making usually revolve around contradiction resolution. And in most of these cases, the gemara's resolution is to special-case one of the verses so it's pretty much entirely inapplicable in any reasonable real-world situation. Even then, it's pretty clear, to me at least, that the main driving motivation is the sentiments of the Rabbis themselves, and the verses are twisted into the required support.

    I should also step back and say when I mean the Rabbis themselves, I don't just mean the Tana'im and Amora'im, but rather the entirety of societal development over the last 1000 or so years. Some of it was canonized in texts, some was overruled later (either in texts or in the talmud).

    Anyway, now it's possible to understand why one could consider Halacha valid even if the Torah is valid. If the main impetus for halachic creation was Jewish society, and if the Rabbis of the Talmud mainly codified the current societal values (which really is what I think the Talmud is all about), then you can consider Talmudic Halacha valid even if the texts of the Tanach are of questionable merit. In other words, you think that the society the Rabbis envisioned, and lived in, is worth emulating today, even though their (sometimes perfunctory) justifications were on shaky ground. The real justification is not in Tanach.

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  2. 1. I agree with A Kefirah. The gemara doesn't derive halacha from Tanach, it combs through Tanach looking for something to hang extant halachos on. This is something peculiar to the gemara. The mishnayos mostly don't bother with mekoros, and rely instead on the authority of the person it's quoting or the stand-alone authority of TSBP.

    2. It is possible to accept biblical crticism and still hold the Torah is divine. You can't then say that the chumash was dictated to Moshe by Hashem, but the Torah never says that anyway. Tradition already accepts that Nach was written by people, with divine inspiration. Give the chumash the same origin, and most of the issues raised by biblical criticism go away.

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  3. Even if you guys are right, it just moves the question. It turns the Gemara into a joke. There is no question that the Gemara takes these derashos very seriously and if the Torah is man made then these derashos are just silly and a waste of time.

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    Replies
    1. I'd claim that there are cases where I'm not sure that the gemara authors take the dreashot all that seriously, but that's not the main point. The point is that the claim is that there could be a good reason to follow the laws that does not depend on the gemara having the correct justification. (what this reason is for most of halacha, I don't know.)

      As an example. Let's say I told you that you shouldn't steal, because if you do steal, the "thief avenger" will come in the night and take twice as much as you stole. It's probably a good idea for societies to make laws against stealing, but not for the complete malarkey reason I just gave.

      So in this view, the mishna and gemara are useful in that they catalog the laws of the nascent Jewish society. But they're not so accurate in describing why those laws came about.

      I do admit that once you start down this path, it is very easy to find reasons to start eliminating problematic laws, and justifying radical interpretations. However, I'd argue that this is actually in spirit of the Talmud!

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