The Oral Torah and midrash

The underlying change, perhaps the root of all the others, was to make the rabbi the authorized interpreter of Jewish tradition. The Bible knows three go-betweens between God and Israel: the priest with his Temple, the king and the prophet. Rabbinic literature aligns the rabbi with all three and, at the same time, puts him in their place. Without contesting the priests' privileges, the rabbis took over their function by turning Torah study into a substitute for sacrifice; without calling themselves kings, they reimagined David as a sage devoted to the Torah, and the patriarch claimed descent from him; without pretending to prophesy, they presented themselves as heirs of the Torah given to Moses. In one Talmudic story Moses sits in on a lesson of Akiba's, understands nothing, and marvels that God chose him rather than such a sage (Menahot 29b).3

One group was left almost entirely outside rabbinic circles: women. Rabbinic literature grants the learning of a handful, such as Beruriah, Meir's wife, but as a rule the rabbis did not accept women as teachers or students. The question of women rabbis was raised only in the nineteenth century, and the first women ordained as rabbis, in the twentieth century, came from the Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative movements.5

The rabbis created their own way of interpreting the Bible, midrash (from a root meaning 'to seek', 'to investigate'). The midrashic collections come from Palestine; in Babylonia, midrash was incorporated into the Talmud. Midrash fastens on small gaps and redundancies: even a deviation in a word's spelling hints at a message to be drawn out.2

Halakhic and aggadic midrash are distinguished. Halakhah (from the root 'to walk') is the study of law and custom; Aggadah (from the root 'to tell') covers stories, wisdom and non-legal teachings. Both use the same creativity to find in the text legal guidance and moral and cosmological lessons it does not make explicit.6

Midrash can seem fanciful to the modern reader: it turns Adam, Jacob and David into rabbinic sages and sometimes reverses the plain sense. The verse used in the Eliezer story to justify majority rule (Exodus 23:2) actually says: 'You shall not follow a majority in wrongdoing.' Even so, midrash had rules that gave freedom but also set limits.7

By the time the Babylonian Talmud was composed, the sages held that revelation to Moses had come in two forms: the Written Torah, that is, the Bible, and the Oral Torah, kept by the sages. The latter was put in writing only late, in the Mishnah and the Talmudic commentary; before that it passed from master to disciple through direct teaching. It may grow out of the unwritten tradition the Pharisees revered, but for the rabbis it was not merely ancestral heritage: it was the Torah itself, handed down at Sinai, as a midrash on Exodus 24:12 teaches (Berakhot 5a).1

The Written Torah was insufficient on its own: a commandment such as keeping the Sabbath is too vague to practice without supplements. The Oral Torah filled the gaps and let the rabbis create an ongoing revelation. Conservative, because it revered the biblical inheritance, and creative, because it valued innovation, rabbinic culture resolved the tension by understanding its creativity as part of the tradition.13