Anon asked Staff ago As one who reads the Bible and who basically understands the meaning from a basic reading, I am having difficulty in understanding how the leaders of the Orthodox stream of Judaism managed to reach today’s Judaism. What is written in the Bible seems a mixture of history, folk tales, and laws that suited those days and times. My question is, how did they arrive at the nonsense of today, like that one is forbidden to pick one’s nose on the Sabbath, kippah, kissing the mezuzot, or all the other behavior?
jsadmin Staff answered 20 years ago
Hello.
It all began at the end of the Second Temple period, when the role of the Temple as the spiritual center was waning, and at the same time the power of the Pharisees (today’s Orthodox) was growing. What is interesting is that the Orthodox, that is, Chazal, managed this revolution which negated the role of the Bible while drawing upon the Bible as their source of authority. In other words, the Bible served the sages as a axe with which to chop away at the Bible. They took the verse “According to the teachings in which they will instruct you…do” (Deuteronomy 17:11) and interpreted it to mean “Even if they uproot, distort, and falsify the Bible, you — who believes in the Bible — must listen to and obey the words of the sages.” From here it is only a short path to determining detailed methods of educating the believers to obey: “A law have I legislated, a dictate have I dictated, and you are not authorized to think it over.” This means one must obey the sages even on matter which are not reasonable, and this is one example of the type of obedience which the sages used as a scaffold to power over believers, until they reached the absurd levels you noted. So that these absurdities would be accepted by the public, Chazal invented a method of interpretation which is called medrash (interpreting the verses out of their plain meaning) and claimed that their interpretation, their exegesis, was the interpretation given by G-d to Moses.
For more detail, see our words on the portions of Shoftim and Vaetchanan, and for more on how their interpretation changed the words of the living G-d, see the portion of Bo.
Sincerely,
Daat Emet