IB World Religions 6.4.1. Where the Doctrines Came From: Torah, Oral Torah and the Jewish Enlightenment Notes

6.4.1. Where the Doctrines Came From: Torah, Oral Torah and the Jewish Enlightenment

Torah as the source

1. Jewish belief is drawn from the Torah rather than from a council or a creed. The tradition holds that God gave it at Sinai, an event called Matan Torah, the giving of the Torah.
2. The Torah does not define God. It reports what God is said to have done, creating the world, calling Abraham, bringing Israel out of Egypt and giving commandments, and Jewish doctrine is largely drawn out of those actions.
3. Belief therefore arrives attached to obligation. That God is one is stated in a passage Jews are commanded to recite, not in a proposition they are asked to endorse.
4. The founding events carry the weight a creed carries elsewhere. The Exodus teaches that God acts inside history, and the creation account teaches that the world has one maker.
5. The prophets extend the source without replacing it. Jews read Nevi'im as applying the Torah rather than adding to it, which is why prophecy is not treated as a second revelation.
6. Doctrine in Judaism is consequently inferred rather than declared. What a Jew is asked to believe is worked out largely from what a Jew is required to do.

Doctrine in the Oral Torah

1. A great deal of Jewish belief has no clear source in the written text, and the rabbis supplied it. The world to come, resurrection, angels and the Mashiach are developed mainly in the Oral Torah.
2. The Torah itself says very little about what follows death. It promises land, children and rain rather than heaven, and it uses the word Sheol for the place of the dead without describing it.
3. The rabbis filled the gap and read their conclusions back into scripture. They taught Olam Ha-Ba, the world to come, and the resurrection of the dead, finding both hinted at in biblical verses.
4. Doctrine can appear inside a legal text. The Mishnah tractate Sanhedrin opens a chapter by stating that all Israel has a share in the world to come, and then lists those who forfeit it.
5. Aggadah carries most of the theology. Stories of God's compassion, of God restraining the angels at the drowning of the Egyptians, and of God going into exile with Israel, teach doctrine without legislating it.
6. Because these teachings come through the Oral Torah, their standing follows from the account a Jew gives of it. Whoever holds the Oral Torah to be from Sinai receives them as revealed, and whoever does not reads them as rabbinic work.

The medieval systematizers

1. Jewish thinkers began to set belief out systematically only when they were pressed to answer questions from outside the tradition.
2. Living under Islamic rule and reading Greek philosophy in Arabic translation, they met arguments about creation, divine unity and God's knowledge that the Talmud had never framed in those terms.
3. Saadia Gaon, in tenth-century Baghdad, produced the first sustained Jewish work of the kind. He argued that reason and revelation arrive at the same conclusions by different routes.
4. Judah Halevi answered differently in the Kuzari. He held that Jewish belief rests on the shared experience of a whole people at Sinai rather than on philosophical proof.
5. Maimonides went furthest. In the Guide for the Perplexed he argued that scripture's talk of God's body and God's emotions must be read as figures of speech.
6. Other Jews contested all of this fiercely, and Maimonides' philosophical works were banned in some communities within a generation of his death.
7. What the systematizers added to the sources was a method rather than a new revelation. Doctrine could now be argued philosophically, and later Jewish thinkers had to answer their formulations.

The Haskalah

1. The Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment, spread through central and eastern Europe from the later eighteenth century, and it changed where some Jews located the source of doctrine.
2. Its programme was cultural before it was theological. The maskilim who led it urged Jews to learn the language of the country, to study secular subjects, and to write Hebrew as a modern literary language.
3. Moses Mendelssohn, who lived from 1729 to 1786 in Berlin, is its central figure. He translated the Torah into German and printed it in Hebrew letters, so that readers would acquire the language of the country through the text they already revered.
4. Mendelssohn kept the commandments himself and argued that Judaism is revealed law rather than revealed doctrine. He did not intend the movement that came after him.
5. Political change pushed the same way. Emancipation offered Jews citizenship in European states, and citizenship forced the question of how much Jewish separateness God actually required.
6. Wissenschaft des Judentums, the scientific study of Judaism, followed from 1818 under Leopold Zunz. It applied historical method to Jewish texts and showed that liturgy, law and custom had visibly changed over the centuries.
7. That finding was the hinge. If Jewish practice had demonstrably developed in history, some Jews concluded, then it could be developed further.

Reform's German emergence

1. Reform Judaism emerged in the German states in the early nineteenth century. It grew out of the Haskalah and emancipation rather than out of a quarrel about God's existence.
2. It began with worship rather than doctrine. Israel Jacobson introduced a German sermon, choral singing and an organ at his school in Seesen in 1810, and the Hamburg Temple opened in 1818 with a revised prayer book.
3. The theology followed the practice. Abraham Geiger argued that revelation is progressive, so that the Torah records an unfolding encounter between God and Israel rather than a single dictation at Sinai.
4. Rabbinical conferences at Brunswick, Frankfurt and Breslau in the 1840s worked through what that meant for Hebrew, for Shabbat and for the messianic hope.
5. This is the point at which the Jewish enlightenment led some Jews to reject the giving of the entire Torah, written and oral, at Sinai. Doctrine became something a generation could weigh and revise.
6. The reaction produced modern Orthodoxy as a self-conscious position. Samson Raphael Hirsch in Frankfurt accepted secular education under the phrase Torah im Derekh Eretz while insisting that the whole Torah was given at Sinai and stands beyond revision.
7. A third position came out of the same conferences. Zacharias Frankel walked out at Frankfurt in 1845 over the status of Hebrew, and his positive-historical approach became the ancestor of Conservative Judaism.

Sources after the divide

1. Every Jewish movement still draws doctrine from the Tenakh and the Talmud. What divides them is the account they give of what those texts are.
2. For Orthodox Jews the sources are revelation. The task is to understand what was given and to apply it faithfully to new situations.
3. For Reform and Liberal Jews the sources record a long encounter with God, so each generation is expected to weigh them and may set some inherited teaching aside.
4. Conservative Judaism, known as Masorti outside North America, holds the sources binding while accepting that they developed historically, which lets it argue for change from inside the legal tradition.
5. Reconstructionist Judaism, founded by Mordecai Kaplan in twentieth-century America, went further again and described Judaism as the evolving civilization of the Jewish people.
6. The shared ground is larger than the argument makes it look. All of these movements teach the oneness of God, the b'rit or covenant with Israel, and the binding force of ethical conduct.
7. A movement's account of the source shapes what it goes on to say about the Mashiach, about creation, and about who is entitled to decide a disputed question.