teresa wrote:Plenty of Jews don't study Talmud - but current Jewish practice is almost entirely a product of those discussions. And if you ask a typical Jew why they do something or other (like light two candles on Shabbat, or keep separate sets of dishes), they'll say: it's in the Torah.
It seems like the Talmud contains many restrictions regarding the Shabbat, but the Jewish practice today is to choose the ones that the individual (or individual's group) find meaningful, and not to worry about the rest. Am I right in thinking this?
Nope sorry - doesn't work like that. It's more like - Jewish practice today started with the Oral Law and continues through rabbinic decisions and the evolution of practice over the last 1500 years....nothing is abandoned, nothing is lost - it has to be, instead, RE-INTERPRETED for the modern day.
Only the Reform movement positively SAID that the Oral Law could be individually interpreted for 'meaningfulness', and that decision is a major scandal and point of 'difference' between Reform and orthodox, and even between Reform and Conservative. Conservative and orthodox are 'halakhic movements': that is, each acknowledges that the traditional Law (halakhah or 'the way') is authoritative, but those two differ on how modern rabbis (legal teachers, remember) are able to come to binding decisions TODAY. The Reform movement says the Oral Law is more advisory, rather than authoritative.
As an aside, apparently it was a violation of Shabbat observance to pluck grains on the Shabbat, as Jesus' disciples were reported to have done. Alfred Edersheim (whom you don't like, I know, but I am indicating my source) said that Jesus' response to this accusation was that it was lawful for his disciples to pluck the grain. And the reason it was lawful, is because Jesus' disciples were sustaining themselves in order to do the work of God, to follow Jesus as the chosen Messiah who would usher in God's kingdom reign. As Jesus saw it, the disciples were not sustaining themselves as a distraction from doing the work of God, but rather to enable themselves to do the work of God.
That's a good example of the early evolution of the Oral Law, actually. The Torah - the WRITTEN Law, says merely 'do not do any work on the Sabbath'. The ORAL Law, which developed along with the Written Law, or developed over time since Sinai to explain and understand the Written Law (Torah) had to take that 'do no work' and clearly explain and understand: what is 'work'? What sort of activity is forbidden on Shabbat? (remember this was before you had businesses and retirement programs and obvious 'work'. So what is 'work' that is forbidden on Shabbat, anyway?
The authorities - Moses, then Joshua, then the judges, then the prophets...and later the Sanhedrin (a body of - basically - religious legal scholars) made these decisions by discussion (such as the gemara) and - as usual - there were disagreements on the details.
In Jesus' time - the late Second Temple period - the basic rules of forbidden work were known (decided on and agreed to) but the details of specific activities - like 'plucking' for instance, involved a variety of forbidden work called 'harvesting'.
Everybody agreed that going out and harvesting your field was 'forbidden work'. But there was still some disagreement on whether simply picking one apple to eat that minute, was or wasn't harvesting. Is it? Or is 'harvesting' the deliberate collection of MANY apples (or a lot of grain) to accumulate for later sale?
What you might call 'strict constructionists' said ANY plucking of any produce was 'harvesting'. But there were schools that said 'no, harvesting is the collection of a large amount of produce for later use or sale, and casual plucking of small amounts while IN the field consumed RIGHT THEN was not harvesting at all.
So Jesus and his followers were holding by the more liberal position, and in their practice, casual picking of small amounts of produce, eaten immediately, was not a Sabbath violation. Any interpretation about 'sustaining themselves to do the work of God' is, in my opinion, putting words in his mouth which probably were never present, in order to illustrate a theological point important to the early Christian community. When you think about it, that's an amazingly arrogant statement, and not typical (mostly). He might easily have said 'it is lawful to pluck the grain' because he was following a legal opinion which said it was okay (and this is the opinion which prevailed, incidentally: I shouldn't tend the garden on Shabbat, but I can pick a tomato as long as I am going to eat it that day).
Jesus cited David as an example, when he was fleeing from Saul. By law, each Sabbath day thin loaves of bread were put in piles on the table in the tabernacle, and when they were removed the next Sabbath, they were eaten by the priests in the holy place in the tabernacle. The priest gave David this holy bread, because that was all he had available, and David gave some to the men who were with him. In eating this bread, David and his men were not in violation of the Shabbat, because this sustenance was for the purpose of David doing the work of God.
Well no actually - the sustenance was for the purpose of surviving another day. All laws of Shabbat observance (all laws, actually) are put aside in cases of actual dire need (to save life). Even so, David's decision to eat the show bread was controversial.
That's the same reason for the discussion and debate about Jesus' healing on the Shabbat. Healing somebody who was immediately dying, for instance, is CLEARLY okay. But healing someone who can just as well wait til the next day? That's possibly 'work', because it didn't need to happen right then: he could wait til Shabbat was over with no harm done.
In those cases, Jesus was taking the more lenient view (and the more human oriented view). But he wasn't invariably aligned that way. For instance, in the case of divorce, Jesus stated the far more stringent view (only adultery) of the School of Shammai.
Eating in the field on the Shabbat, and healing work - those were positions of the School of Hillel. Both those schools of legal training existed prior to Jesus' lifetime and both were 'Pharisaic', but they often disagreed on the practical application of the laws. Later opinion says that Shammai was more precisely correct in his interpretations, but Hillel observed the spirit of the law and was more generous in allowing leniences that aided the ordinary person. Later opinion also noted that Hillel's students invariably stated Shammai's opinions FIRST before stating their own and were gracious, and therefore the PRACTICE is almost always 'according to the School of Hillel' even though the decisions of the School of Shammai were sometimes more technically correct.
They were contemporaries, and apparently pretty good friends, although they weren't in the same social circles. Shammai was wealthy and Hillel was poor.
History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction. That's why events are always reinterpreted when values change. We need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices.
