Philosophy of the Talmud

Hyam Maccoby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136117466
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This is a new presentation of the philosophy of the Talmud. The Talmud is not a work of formal philosophy, but much of what it says is relevant to philosophical enquiry, including issues explored in contemporary debates. In particular, the Talmud has original ideas about the relation between universal ethics and the ethics of a particular community. This leads into a discussion on the relation between morality and ritual, and also about the epistemological role of tradition. The book explains the paradoxes of Talmudic Judaism as arising from a philosophy of revolution, stemming from Jewish origins as a band of escaped slaves, determined not to reproduce the slave-society of Egypt. From this arises a daring humanism, and an emphasis on justice in this world rather than on other-worldly spirituality. A strong emphasis on education and the cultivation of rationality also stems from this. Governing the discussion is a theory of logic that differs significantly from Greek logic. Talmudic logic is one of analogy, not classification and is peculiarly suited to discussions of moral and legal human situations. This book will be of interest to those in the fields of philosophy, religion and the history of ideas, whether students, teachers and academics, or the interested general reader.

1

DOES THE TALMUD CONTAIN PHILOSOPHY?

The philosophical stance, as traditionally understood, is one of facing the universe without preconceptions. The philosopher refers to no texts or received doctrines. He even rejects all knowledge derived from science, at least at his starting-point, though his researches, as he progresses, may, or may not, provide a validation for science. The archetypal figure of the philosopher is Descartes, seeking to find the starting point of philosophy by stripping away everything that could possibly be doubted. But Descartes is the heir of the Greek tradition of philosophy, in which the philosopher is an instrument of pure perception turned on the world, which he examines from scratch, rejecting all received notions as hindrances to his quest. Just because philosophy emanated from the lone philosopher contemplating the universe without intermediaries, the focus of enquiry soon became one of epistemology: how reliable was the instrument, the philosopher himself? This is not a turning away from the world to the contemplation of the self but a critique of the self as measuring instrument or point of vantage for the contemplation of the world. He must strip away the fallible senses and find some mode of enquiry that gives undoubted truth; mathematics, perhaps. But wherein lies the the authority of mathematics? Does it all reduce to logic? But is not logic mere tautology? Does the sum of all human enquiry reduce to the proposition ‘A is A’? All this is very remote from the atmosphere of the rabbinic writings where instead of the lone philosopher, we have a crowded world.

Again, the process of philosophy, as generally understood, is one of ever-increasing abstraction. The real world, as the Greek atomists understood it, contained no colours, smells or sounds; only a concourse of tiny atoms, which by their combinations and divisions produced the illusion of the colourful, companionable world in which humans live. Greek philosophy turned into the modern science of physics, which contains entities even more remote from human concerns.

On the other hand, this process of abstraction, useful as it has been to science, has met with objections from philosophers who do not want to give up the colourful world as mere illusion. Even within the school of empiricism, a trend of phenomenalism developed, in which the realities were the colours, and the atoms were mere ‘constructs’. ‘There is no such thing as a millionth of an inch,’ said Berkeley manfully, and he was echoed by the physicist Ernst Mach, who denied the existence of atoms. (But phenomenalism again did not lead to the contemplation of the self, but rather to its disintegration as the merely notional locus of sensa, which took the place of atoms as the only real existents.) On the humanistic, literary side, a school of philosophers arose who questioned the abstractionist search for underlying ‘essences’ and affirmed instead what actually and palpably exists, more especially the self.

In recent times, philosophy has taken a turn that is more favourable to the view that rabbinic thought can be described as philosophy. Susan Handelmann has shown the affinity of the thought of the rabbis to that of the modern Jewish thinkers Bergson, Husserl, Derrida and Levinas; the latter indeed has acknowledged his debt to the Talmud. Jacob Neusner, in his way, has characterized the Mishnah as philosophical, but the resultant philosophy, as he describes it, seems to me very unrabbinic. Earlier, Max Kadushin had given an overview of rabbinic thought, showing it to be at least semi-philosophical in its distillation of ‘concepts’ from the biblical material; a long step towards generalization and abstraction and system, though still at the level of ‘tribal’ theorizing.

Certainly we have to admit that the rabbinic philosophy lacks an overt system. There are no rabbinic philosophical treatises, unless the tractate Avot can be reckoned as one. This is really a ‘wisdom’ work, consisting of aphorisms, some of them of a philosophical kind, and almost all having philosophical repercussions, but not built into a systematic treatment beginning with first principles and progressing in a logical sequence. But how far is such a system a requirement for the definition of philosophy? We do not deny the title of philosopher to those Greek thinkers (such as Heraclitus and Protagoras) whose thought has descended to us only the form of aphoristic fragments or verses (such as ‘Man is the measure of all things’ or ‘We never step into the same river twice’). Even Plato is hardly a systematist, and preferred to put his thought into literary, rather than scientific, form. Modern thinkers who have expressed themselves in non-systematic ways (Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard) have been accepted as philosophers.

Even the fact that the thought of the rabbis took off from a text regarded as holy does not disqualify them from philosophical status if one takes into account the status of ‘text’ in modern philosophical thought as the indispensable ground of all thinking. Even in Greek thinking, as has been recognised recently, the role of exegesis of Homer as the stimulus of philosophical endeavour was indispensable¹.

However, it is not even quite true that all rabbinic thought is text-based. When the two schools, the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai met once for prolonged discussion, their topic was the question, ‘Was it better for man to have been born, or not to have been born?’ (b. Eruvin 13b). This is undoubtedly a philosophical question, though not one found in the pre-modernist Western repertoire (concentrating as it does on what is ‘out there’). After two-and-a-half years (!) of debate, the matter was put to the vote, and the majority decision was, ‘It would have been better for man not to have been born, but now that he is born, let him look to his deeds.’ This decision is stunningly independent of conventional understanding of the Jewish religion. Judaism is usually regarded as an optimistic faith, with an attitude of thankfulness for the mercies of God. Most rabbinic thinking turns its face away resolutely from negative assessments of the conditions of human and animal life. For example, the Grace after meals (a rabbinic composition) praises God ‘who feeds the whole world … gives food to all flesh, for his mercy is eternal’, no mention being made of the fact that God's merciful provision of food so often entails one animal acting as food for another. Yet the mask of rabbinic acquiescence is occasionally torn away, and we see the world as it is, a scene of ‘Nature red in tooth and claw’. Rabbinic optimism, humanism and rationalism appear not as sentimentalism but as a brave challenge issued against a cruel and irrational world. After the liturgical thankfulness for the chosenness of Israel and the blessed vision of Mount Sinai, the final sobering conclusion is ‘It would have been better for man not to have been born’.

We do not have a record, unfortunately, of the arguments that were presented at that debate, though echoes of them, perhaps, are to be found scattered in the rabbinic writings. It has been plausibly doubted whether the debate ever actually took place, for the other recorded debates of the schools of Hillel and Shammai are all on halakhic topics, where a decision by majority vote makes sense as the mode of fashioning a working rule. Did the Houses actually spend ‘two and a half years’ debating a theoretical topic that had no relevance to halakhah? Or is this story merely an echo of the philosophical or rhetorical exercises characteristic of Hellenistic sophists?² I suggest, however, that the debate did take place, and that it had a meta-halakhic function. After all the halakhic arguments, in which the rabbinic intellect took such delight, the nagging thought could not be quite stilled, ‘Is this all pointless escapism from an inexorably indifferent universe?’

It may be that in addition to empirical arguments from the conditions of human life, recourse was had, after all, to certain biblical texts which face the world in a stark, extra-covenantal fashion, namely the books of Job and Ecclesiastes (Qohelet). It is remarkable that these two books were included in the canon, for neither of them has much to say about the characteristic themes of Judaism. In one we have a non-Jew, Job the Uzzite, facing a world without Torah or chosenness or covenant, and finding himself overwhelmed with unintelligible suffering. In the other, we have a Jewish king, at the apex of the covenant in Jerusalem, whose main topic is the meaninglessness of human aspirations. He does, in the end, find some solace in the covenant, but only as a refuge from the overwhelming ‘vanity’ of human concerns.

Even at the heart of the covenant, in God's dealings with Abraham, there is a terrifying vacuum. Abraham has become ‘the friend of God’ and has reached such a pitch of intimacy with God that he can plead with Him to spare the Sodomites, and even upbraid Him for His lack of elementary fairness and compassion: ‘Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justice?’ (Genesis 18:25). Yet in the next chapter, everything suddenly changes. God demands the life of Abraham's beloved son, and Abraham has run out of objections; he acquiesces in a spirit of total submission, for the transaction is extra-covenantal, an assertion of God's unbridled will. The uncovenantal God rides roughshod over the promises of the covenantal God. The contradiction emphasizes that the covenant exists as an oasis in a frightening, unintelligible world. God is a ‘friend’ within the covenant, but outside it He is unsusceptible to human codes of morality. The covenant is a way of taming God. He voluntarily commits Himself to it, as a matter of ‘grace’, but it is not a true reflection of the universe, which may at times assert itself in all its horror. Judaism is a religion of covenant, but the obverse of this is a very stark vision of uncovenanted existence.

Thus we may conclude that rabbinic philosophy is equivocal and paradoxical, derived as it is from an equivocal and paradoxical Scripture.

But can we really speak of rabbinic philosophy when the rabbis have actually placed a ban on philosophical thinking? We read in the Mishnah:

The forbidden degrees [of sexual relationships] may not be expounded before three persons, nor the Story of the Creation before two, nor the chapter of the Chariot before one alone unless he is a Sage that understands of his own knowledge. Whosoever gives his mind to four things it were better for him if he had not come into the world — what is above? what is beneath? what was beforetime? and what will be hereafter? And whosoever takes no thought for the honour of his Maker, it were better for him if he had not come into the world.

(M. Hagigah 2:1, Danby's translation).

The passage forbids free and open discussion of sexual and mystical\philosophical matters, restricting such discussion to small groups. The two great topics of mysticism were Creation and Chariot, i.e. deep contemplation of the first chapter of Genesis and the first chapter of Ezekiel, and these two chapters, one might think, do engage in the very topics that the passage goes on to interdict: what is above, what is beneath, what was beforetime, what will be hereafter. But if these topics may be contemplated in small groups, though not in larger ones, why are they then totally condemned? Why would it be better for those who contemplate them not to have come into the world? Does this mean that philosophers and even mystics are condemned to wretchedness and ostracism?

The forbidden topics are just those that intrigued the pre-Socratic philosophers whose concern was for the constitution and dimensions of the observable universe and for the unobservable structures which lay behind or beneath it. Out of these philosophical concerns arose what came to be known as ‘science’, which hived off from philosophy when the emphasis came to rest on measurement rather than speculation. So the Mishnah's condemnation could be held to outlaw science as well as philosophy and mysticism. Modern science has focussed on the history of the universe over billions of years (‘what is before and after’, though some translate these words of the Mishnah in a spatial sense) and the dimensions of the universe over billions of miles. Does the Mishnah condemn Einstein, astronomy, and space exploration? Yet rabbinic mysticism, with its heroes travelling through all the heavens to reach the throne-room of God (in the heikhalot literature) could be be held to comprise the first imaginative experiments in space travel.

Clearly the Mishnah passage requires exegesis in terms other than mere condemnation of all thought rising above terrestrial experience. Such a plain interpretation would condemn many daring thoughts found in the rabbinic literature itself, including the Talmudic expositions of this very mishnaic passage. The well-known Midrashic speculation about what God was doing before he created the present world (‘He was creating other worlds and destroying them’, Genesis Rabbah III.7) would have to be condemned as a heretical, unlicenced exercise of the human intellect.

Again, what is the force of saying that the philosophical speculator would have been better off if he had not been born? Is this a threat of punishment, or is it a prediction of the psychological misery that will afflict the person who allows himself to sink into a morass of thought on matters beyond human comprehension (the condition of intellectual dislocation caused by philosophical reflection for which Hume prescribed backgammon)? And if the decision of the debate between the Houses is to be given weight (that it would have been better for all mankind not to have been born), how would the unfortunate philosopher be worse off than his fellows?

Maimonides, who was not averse to philosophical reflection, and indeed regarded it as the highest human activity, interpreted this Mishnaic passage as a warning against intellectual over-ambition. He relates it to the saying : ‘Do not inquire into things that are too difficult for you, do not search what is hidden from you; study what you are allowed to study, and do not occupy yourself with mysteries’ (quoted from Ben Sira in b. Hagigah 13a), and to the biblical saying, “Do not make yourself over-wise; why should you destroy yourself?’ (Ecclesiastes 7:16). Most people, Maimonides argues, would do well to leave philosophy alone, since it will reduce them to a state of miserable confusion; yet philosophy, for him, is the crown of all intellectual endeavour. While these sayings in Wisdom literature appear to counsel everyone to refrain from philosophical or mystical enquiry, Maimonides takes them to be addressed to the majority only (Guide, I. 32). There is some support for this interpretation in rabbinic literature, which portrays certain great persons (Johanan ben Zakkai, Akiva) as versed in mysteries without coming to harm, while simultaneously issuing warnings about the disasters that can occur to those (even persons of high attainment such as Elisha ben Avuya, Ben Zoma and Ben Azzai) who venture beyond their capacity. If the rabbinic warnings seem at times absolute, this may be because the rabbis were always concerned to advise and legislate for ordinary rather than for extraordinary people, though they remain fully capable of admiring the virtuoso.

Certainly the rabbinic writings contain some bold speculations about what is above and what is below, what was before and what will be after. For example, we have the following pronouncement by Rabban Johanan ben Zakkai:

From the earth to the firmament is a distance of 500 years' travel, and the thickness of the firmament is a distance of 500 years' travel, and such is the distance between each of the firmaments. Above them are the Holy Animals (Ezekiel 1), whose bodies are greater than all the firmaments. Above them, is the Throne of Glory

(b. Hagigah 13a).

This cosmological scenario, though it is intended to discourage would-be astronauts such as Nimrod, who allegedly planned to reach the Throne and destroy God (a rabbinic interpretation of Isaiah 14:14, applied in the Pseudepigrapha to the rebellious angel Satan or Mastema), shows a soaring imagination that belies its dampening intent. It recalls Neo-Platonic cosmological schemata, which eventually found Jewish expression in the medieval Kabbalah, with its vast universe of progressively condensing emanations. At the same time, this saying of Johanan ben Zakkai, with its panorama of huge distances, recalls the strange imaginings of the Shiur Qoma, the rabbinic work that gives dizzying statistics of the dimensions of God Himself.

I would suggest, however, contrary to Maimonides, that the ban on contemplation of what is above and below, before and after, is addressed not to ordinary people, but to the mystics themselves. The key word in the ban is ha-mistakel, ‘he who gazes’. Danby translates this as ‘he who gives his mind to’, but this is far too colourless a rendering. From mystical passages in the Talmud, we see that one of the dangers of the mystical ascent to the Throne was the temptation to ‘gaze’. Even though the whole aim of the ascent is to see the supernal mysteries, there is a right and a wrong way to look at them. An irreverent, immature, overcurious, voyeuristic type of looking can bring disaster to the mystic (see b. Sanhedrin 92a, ‘he who gazes on nakedness’). This is what is meant by ‘taking no thought for the honour of one's Maker’; the vision of God is not to be turned into a peepshow. The companions of Akiva in the heavenly ascent, made the mistake of ‘peeping’, though here the verb heitzit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Does the Talmud contain philosophy?
• 2 The Aggadah as a source of philosophy
• 3 The Talmud and moral theory
• 4 The Rabbinic Social Contract
• 5 Judaism and Revolution
• 6 Revolutionary Thought in the Rabbinic Writings
• 7 The Problem of Morality I
• 8 The Problem of Morality II
• 9 Transgressional Sacralism
• 10 Absolute Values in Talmudic Judaism
• 11 Political Theory in Torah and Talmud
• 12 Rabbinic Epistemology
• 13 The Day God Laughed
• 14 Talmudic Logic
• 15 Two Modern Talmudic Thinkers
• Appendix A Qal va-chomer in Aggadah
• Appendix B Talmudic Rectification of Abuses
• References
• Index of Quotations
• General Index