Jewfem Blog

There is a fascinating debate in the rabbinic literature about how far rabbinic authority goes. It is an argument over two words in a verse in Deuteronomy (17; 11) that admonishes the people of Israel not to deviate from the word of the Torah “right and left” yamin u’smol. The dispute sheds light on what some rabbis thought about their followers and themselves. This particular verse is very significant for the rabbis over the generations, because the Talmudists shrewdly manipulate the words in a way that constructs rabbis as exclusive agents of the word of God. “Do not deviate”, they argue, is a commandment meant for the mere plebian Jews who are too boorish to know what the Torah means. These run-of-the-mill Jews need rabbis to reveal God’s intentions. “Do not deviate” gave rabbis justification to invent a plethora of practices – such as lighting Shabbat candles or washing hands before eating bread – and claim that they are directly from God. Jews funnily recite the words, “…as God sanctified us and commanded us”, over some of these customs, even though they are not written in the Torah. The rabbis said, so it’s as if it’s from God. Do not deviate.    Rabbinical cleverness has often served us well. The rabbis created, for example, the notion of pikuach nefesh, that saving of a life justifies breaking Shabbat. Apparently in non-rabbinical Jewish communities, such as the Ethiopian Jewish community pre-Aliyah, the concept of pikuach nefesh doesn’t exist. So that, for example, years ago when a group of Ethiopian boarding school students in Israel watched the fire department extinguish a blaze on Shabbat – which is against the bible – the kids refused to return to the boarding school because in their view, putting out the fire was a violation of Judaism.   The idea of pikuach nefesh, the primacy of saving a life, may be a biblical fiction, but it’s a good one. The rabbis who invented it listened to their own hearts and understood right from wrong, and shared that with all of us. As arbiters of change, the rabbis have made many rules over the generations that radically alter the letter of the Torah, such as allowing Israeli banks to charge interest, allowing Israeli farmers to grow crops in the seventh year, allowing Jews to keep bread hidden in their closets over Passover, and more. They have changed everything except arguably (in Orthodoxy at least) the status of women in marriage and in leadership because, well, that is apparently just going too far. In any case, in a class this week with Rabbi Shlomo Fox at Hebrew Union College, we discussed these issues along with a particularly riveting set of rabbinic writings on these verses. We first read an interpretation by Rashi, Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, one of the primary medieval commentators on the Bible and Talmud. Rashi wanted to know what the Torah meant by “right and left”, and he wrote, “Even if [your rabbis] show you something that is...