Kelemen's ideas suffer greatly because there's no marketplace of ideas for his views to be subjected to scrutiny and thus refined against his will.
Sometimes, we really do need to agree to disagree, but often, that's just a nice thing to say. Kelemen offers ideas but he's not interested in arguing from first principles. He's a presuppositionslist who fails to justify even his initial claims and is here trying to posit 3rd or 4th generation claims on a house of cards built on sand.
But if you try to argue with kiruv rabbis, you'll find that they either complain about your tone or walk away quietly and set up shop elsewhere, disregarding critiques as coming from outside the מחנה and so undeserving of substantive response (in other words, they do not permit questions about their presuppositionalist perspectives).
"Chazal claim a comprehensive oral tradition which contained a complex legal system which survived fairly well for ever a millennium".
No they don't. Maybe yeshivish hashkafs does. Chazal claim there were principles that could be applied within reason by the judges, plus traditions on thenmeanings of various obscure words such as totafot, sukkah and pri etz hadar. Neither of these claims are particularly farfetched.
The sources in chazal if taken at face value clearly say otherwise as I elaborated in the first post in the series (even according to the rambam). Additionally, the are many traditions like the meaning of tefillin which are clearly considered to be ancient traditions which get far more complex. At the barest minimum this includes a lot more details about tefillin and other mitzvos which are called halacha lmoshe misinai, and taken to its logical conclusion this includes hundreds of details about every single mitzvah. Do the complexities of hilchos niddah, shabbos, kinyanim, korbanos, and gittin come from sinai, or were they simply cultic, cultural or traditional practices which evolved into technical legal systems such as that exemplified in halacha? And I'm not sure exactly what principles you're imagining that were transmitted that have the tools to transform simple biblical verses into a large corpus of halacha.
This is frankly ridiculous. Of course the details evolved. We even have a control group: mitzvos derabbanan. Do you think megillah was instituted with all these details? Obviously not, they evolved and got codified. Chanukah chazal explicitly admit to this. It was started as a minhag by the Jews themselves! Yet nowadays it has minutiae of halacha. That's how halacha works. It might be befuddle you why it's binding then - that's a different discussion - but we clearly see that most halacha did evolve from general mitzvos.
And to guage your position, do you believe that this article https://www.thetorah.com/article/do-not-cook-a-kid-still-suckling-its-mothers-milk which argues that לא תבשל גדי בחלב אמו orignally meant something completely different than the modern issur of basar b'chalav is 1. compatible with chazal's theology, and 2. compatible with your theology? If the answer to 2. is no, what about saying that during the first temple period (at least) it was understood to mean only cooking, but not eating, and the issur to eat arose from the fact that it was never relevant as it couldn't be cooked anyways, and chazal introduced the issur to eat it. Is that theologically acceptable?
There is no such control group according to the view that TSBP is from sinai. (although there may be according to the academic perspective which considers mitzvos d'rabanan to have evolved as well.) Your reference to the fact that chanukah started as a minhag is irrelevant, because it was niskan as a mitzvah at some point several years later (at least according to chazal). The process in general you are getting at from a traditional perspective is rather simple: כל דתקון רבנן כעין דאורייתא תקון, so when they institute a new mitzvah it works with normative halachic principles such as שומע כעונה, למעלה מכ' אמות לא שלטי בה עינא, and so on. Even if you want to point to certain discussions which are limited to cases of d'rabanans, such as הדלקה עושה מצוה או הנחה עושה מצוה, it's simply a debate what was the original צורת התקנה, which could either mean what was their intention, or in the lack of conscious intention it must take a specific legal form by default. On such questions I would concede that they needn't have been included in the original TSBP even according to the traditional view, however the principles in question must've been included (basically what you are saying about tefillin, but actually taken to it's logical conclusion to encompass hundreds of principles, such as מצות התלויות בארץ אין נוהגין בחו"ל, נשים פטורות ממ"ע שהז"ג, חרש שוטה וקטן פטורים מן המצות, קרבנות שלא לשמה כשרין ולא עלו חוץ מן הפסח והחטאת, מלאכת מחשבת אסרה תורה, לאו שאין בו מעשה אין לוקין עליו, לבוד גוד אסיק וגוד אחית, כל הקרבנות באין מחו"ל חוץ מן העומר ושתי הלחם, טו עריות פוטרות צרותיהן וצרות צרותיהן, etc. etc. etc. and interpretive traditions such as עין תחת עין, ואכלת ושבעת וברכת, וקדשתו כי את לחם אלהיו הוא מקריב, ופרשו השמלה לפני זקני העיר, זלל וסבא, etc. etc. etc.
This is ridiculous. You really think when chazal instituted derabannons they included all the nitpicky details? The keyn deorayta is a retcon trying to figure out said details.
We see this in many places throughout torah. Kiddushin was clearly a modification of existing marriage rules (which rambam makes explicitly clear). Then, chazal said you can enter such a state via kesef but not chalipin. Some members said chupah worked too. Neither of these mattered in the time of the Torah and possibly both or neither worked then, When chazal dealt with the questions, they were discussing how to enter said state. Law evolves.
I agree with you that this is probably the way it played out historically, but I was just trying to present the conceptual process (which may have been applied retroactively) which effectively neutralizes your control group.
For the moment I am working with the position of the sifra that שתי תורות ניתנו בסיני and כל המצוות נצטוו בסיני עם כל כללותיהן ופרטיהן, or the shitta of the rambam that mishne Torah aside from some new drashos (which are a minority of halachos as evidemced by what he writes in shoresh beis, see also hilchos ishus 1:1). Even if you want to understand that minimally, there's a lot that is included. One random example would be bentching. This is a fairly simple mitzvah, but from the reading of the torah we don't see such a mitzvah, as in context it means when you come to the land and experience it's bountifulness you should bless god instead of forgetting him and then going to worship idols. The oral law created a ritual at the end of each meal, and adding several laws such as ברית ארץ ותורה. Don't even get me started on larger systems such as kiddushin. According to the rambam the concepts of shtar, biah, eidus lkyumei, kiddushei taus, and so on were all given at sinai.nof course this doesn't have to mean that every application was explicitly commanded, and sometimes there can be later rulings about the applications or the parameters of the principles, but nevertheless it's a large and complex system. Or what about basic legalistic distinctions such as the age of bar.mitzvah? Did that come from sinai? I'm sorry, just read through a perek of rambam and tell me what the barest minimum is, and tell me if you still think its a tradition that could survive better than other oral traditions or worse.
Are there Chazal that argue with that position that everything was said at Sinai? If so, Ash’s original point may stand that non-yeshivish communities might by large not accept the Chazal you mentioned.
If you want to reject the entire idea of a dual Torah, that's perfectly ok and I'm not arguing against that position. However, the second you want to introduce a concept called oral law which comes from Sinai (which is a universal belief in chazal, even as far to say that the megillah afah in Zechariah l which was larger than the sea cannot contain the whole Torah shbaal peh, see eiruvin 21b. For further references in chazal see temurah 16a, shabbos 31a, chagigah 3b, bava metzia 33a, gittin 60b, brachos 5a, and there are many more), at the barest minimum it's going to have to include laws such as עריות פטורות צרותיהן מן החליצה ומן היבום, לאו שאין בו מעשה אין לוקין עליו, מלאכת מחשבת אסרה תורה, מותר לאכול טבל באכילת עראי, שליחות, and לשמה בגיטין. Basically, tons of concepts related to biblical law aside from technical discussions in the parameters that Ash mentioned. Additionally, the basic interpretation of many many mitzvos are far from explicit in the verses, including ברכת המזון, קריאת שמע, תפילין, ד' מינים, בשר בחלב, פיגול, סיפור יציאת מצרים, ספירת העומר, טבילה במקוה, אב הטומאה וולד הטומאה, שחיטה, טריפה, עבודות הקרבנות, שופר בראש השנה, קידוש החודש, לט מלאכות בשבת, מצות זכירת עמלק, איסור מלאכה בחול המועד, תשלומי חבלה, מעשר שני, התרת נדרים, and many more that if just reading the verses literally would lead to very different conclusions that what the halacha is. Is all that from Sinai?
I thought that a very common view among Orthodox Jews was that the rules of interpretation are from Sinai but the specific laws are not from Sinai. I don’t know Chazal well enough to understand how common that view is on Chazal.
Furthermore, there are many extremely right wing (and many merely somewhat right wing) members of Orthodoxy who maintain that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the 12 tribes (the sons/brothers, not the subsequent groups of families divided by ancestor) observed the commandments, and that Moses was taught was R' Akiva learned and devised.
Can you clarify what you mean by complex? Do you mean that it is difficult to parse apart and understand the concepts? Do you just mean that the quantity of the different nuances is very large? Do you mean something else?
I’m joy so knowledgeable about the amount of times ghazal say different concepts and laws are Halacha Moshe misinai. Is it a lot more than 100 different aspects of laws?
Its not specifically things that are called halacha lmoshe misinai (there's only a few dozen of them). Go through the rambam to see what his conception of what Torah shbaal peh is comprised of. (Even if you minus all the things that are drashos which according the rambams minority opinion does not come from sinai you're still left with a large percentage of yad hachazaka.)
Do you mind giving a short elevator explanation of how you understand the rambam and why oral law is complex as you describe it. Your previous replies had me thinking that you thought the complexity was the number of Halacha Moshe misinai as opposed to application of general principles of extrapolation.
“Oral traditions are notorious for their unreliability… However, when it comes to minor anecdotes, or even the details surrounding the major events, it is rare to find several traditions which converge unless they have known common source.”
Ancient written traditions are also very unreliable. It is unheard of to find ancient written histories from different sources which converge on all the details. The unreliability of oral history relative to written is only of degree, not of type.
“However, aside from the limitations in culture’s abilities to properly transmit facts, there is another major aspect which arguably corrupts the original traditions much more. Traditions are generally cultural icons which represent the common themes in a given civilization, and they aren’t transmitted simply for historical purposes, but rather are woven into national and cultural identities…Therefore, oral traditions are hardly preserved intact as the culture evolves, and just as the stories take on new meanings in each subsequent generation, the facts themselves are subtly distorted to reflect the updated values.”
Again, same objection applies to written histories. It is a difference of degree, not of type.
“Why is this so? How come we don’t find binding law traditions that were transmitted orally as we do histories? The answer seems to lie in the virtual impossibility in maintaining concrete legal systems without reference to a clear written code.”
But we do! What is the Mishnah if not a binding law that was transmitted orally for at least a century and a half? The Mishnah is a testament to this possibility. And how do you know there were no others? The only reason to think that there aren’t is that cultures that are sophisticated enough to possess an intricate legal system will generally also be sophisticated enough to discover writing. The reason the Jewish Oral Law was an exception to this was because of a prohibition/taboo on publishing a document of Torah laws aside from the Torah itself.
“Chazal claim a comprehensive oral tradition which contained a complex legal system which survived fairly well for ever a millennium; from the giving of the Torah in the mid-late second millennium BCE through the composition of the Mishna in the 2nd century CE. How plausible is this claim?…Is it possible that the complex halachos of a sukkah or yibbum remained intact?”
Very plausible, we know it for sure happened for at least a century and a half. We know that even later, the Gemara expected every Amora to have the Mishnah memorized. We know that even nowadays, there are people who know the entire Mishnah by heart. We know Rav Yitzchak Zilber memorized vast portions of Mishnah in the GULAG!!
Kelemen's ideas suffer greatly because there's no marketplace of ideas for his views to be subjected to scrutiny and thus refined against his will.
Sometimes, we really do need to agree to disagree, but often, that's just a nice thing to say. Kelemen offers ideas but he's not interested in arguing from first principles. He's a presuppositionslist who fails to justify even his initial claims and is here trying to posit 3rd or 4th generation claims on a house of cards built on sand.
But if you try to argue with kiruv rabbis, you'll find that they either complain about your tone or walk away quietly and set up shop elsewhere, disregarding critiques as coming from outside the מחנה and so undeserving of substantive response (in other words, they do not permit questions about their presuppositionalist perspectives).
"Chazal claim a comprehensive oral tradition which contained a complex legal system which survived fairly well for ever a millennium".
No they don't. Maybe yeshivish hashkafs does. Chazal claim there were principles that could be applied within reason by the judges, plus traditions on thenmeanings of various obscure words such as totafot, sukkah and pri etz hadar. Neither of these claims are particularly farfetched.
The sources in chazal if taken at face value clearly say otherwise as I elaborated in the first post in the series (even according to the rambam). Additionally, the are many traditions like the meaning of tefillin which are clearly considered to be ancient traditions which get far more complex. At the barest minimum this includes a lot more details about tefillin and other mitzvos which are called halacha lmoshe misinai, and taken to its logical conclusion this includes hundreds of details about every single mitzvah. Do the complexities of hilchos niddah, shabbos, kinyanim, korbanos, and gittin come from sinai, or were they simply cultic, cultural or traditional practices which evolved into technical legal systems such as that exemplified in halacha? And I'm not sure exactly what principles you're imagining that were transmitted that have the tools to transform simple biblical verses into a large corpus of halacha.
This is frankly ridiculous. Of course the details evolved. We even have a control group: mitzvos derabbanan. Do you think megillah was instituted with all these details? Obviously not, they evolved and got codified. Chanukah chazal explicitly admit to this. It was started as a minhag by the Jews themselves! Yet nowadays it has minutiae of halacha. That's how halacha works. It might be befuddle you why it's binding then - that's a different discussion - but we clearly see that most halacha did evolve from general mitzvos.
And to guage your position, do you believe that this article https://www.thetorah.com/article/do-not-cook-a-kid-still-suckling-its-mothers-milk which argues that לא תבשל גדי בחלב אמו orignally meant something completely different than the modern issur of basar b'chalav is 1. compatible with chazal's theology, and 2. compatible with your theology? If the answer to 2. is no, what about saying that during the first temple period (at least) it was understood to mean only cooking, but not eating, and the issur to eat arose from the fact that it was never relevant as it couldn't be cooked anyways, and chazal introduced the issur to eat it. Is that theologically acceptable?
There is no such control group according to the view that TSBP is from sinai. (although there may be according to the academic perspective which considers mitzvos d'rabanan to have evolved as well.) Your reference to the fact that chanukah started as a minhag is irrelevant, because it was niskan as a mitzvah at some point several years later (at least according to chazal). The process in general you are getting at from a traditional perspective is rather simple: כל דתקון רבנן כעין דאורייתא תקון, so when they institute a new mitzvah it works with normative halachic principles such as שומע כעונה, למעלה מכ' אמות לא שלטי בה עינא, and so on. Even if you want to point to certain discussions which are limited to cases of d'rabanans, such as הדלקה עושה מצוה או הנחה עושה מצוה, it's simply a debate what was the original צורת התקנה, which could either mean what was their intention, or in the lack of conscious intention it must take a specific legal form by default. On such questions I would concede that they needn't have been included in the original TSBP even according to the traditional view, however the principles in question must've been included (basically what you are saying about tefillin, but actually taken to it's logical conclusion to encompass hundreds of principles, such as מצות התלויות בארץ אין נוהגין בחו"ל, נשים פטורות ממ"ע שהז"ג, חרש שוטה וקטן פטורים מן המצות, קרבנות שלא לשמה כשרין ולא עלו חוץ מן הפסח והחטאת, מלאכת מחשבת אסרה תורה, לאו שאין בו מעשה אין לוקין עליו, לבוד גוד אסיק וגוד אחית, כל הקרבנות באין מחו"ל חוץ מן העומר ושתי הלחם, טו עריות פוטרות צרותיהן וצרות צרותיהן, etc. etc. etc. and interpretive traditions such as עין תחת עין, ואכלת ושבעת וברכת, וקדשתו כי את לחם אלהיו הוא מקריב, ופרשו השמלה לפני זקני העיר, זלל וסבא, etc. etc. etc.
This is ridiculous. You really think when chazal instituted derabannons they included all the nitpicky details? The keyn deorayta is a retcon trying to figure out said details.
We see this in many places throughout torah. Kiddushin was clearly a modification of existing marriage rules (which rambam makes explicitly clear). Then, chazal said you can enter such a state via kesef but not chalipin. Some members said chupah worked too. Neither of these mattered in the time of the Torah and possibly both or neither worked then, When chazal dealt with the questions, they were discussing how to enter said state. Law evolves.
I agree with you that this is probably the way it played out historically, but I was just trying to present the conceptual process (which may have been applied retroactively) which effectively neutralizes your control group.
How does it neutralize?
How does it neutralize?
For the moment I am working with the position of the sifra that שתי תורות ניתנו בסיני and כל המצוות נצטוו בסיני עם כל כללותיהן ופרטיהן, or the shitta of the rambam that mishne Torah aside from some new drashos (which are a minority of halachos as evidemced by what he writes in shoresh beis, see also hilchos ishus 1:1). Even if you want to understand that minimally, there's a lot that is included. One random example would be bentching. This is a fairly simple mitzvah, but from the reading of the torah we don't see such a mitzvah, as in context it means when you come to the land and experience it's bountifulness you should bless god instead of forgetting him and then going to worship idols. The oral law created a ritual at the end of each meal, and adding several laws such as ברית ארץ ותורה. Don't even get me started on larger systems such as kiddushin. According to the rambam the concepts of shtar, biah, eidus lkyumei, kiddushei taus, and so on were all given at sinai.nof course this doesn't have to mean that every application was explicitly commanded, and sometimes there can be later rulings about the applications or the parameters of the principles, but nevertheless it's a large and complex system. Or what about basic legalistic distinctions such as the age of bar.mitzvah? Did that come from sinai? I'm sorry, just read through a perek of rambam and tell me what the barest minimum is, and tell me if you still think its a tradition that could survive better than other oral traditions or worse.
Are there Chazal that argue with that position that everything was said at Sinai? If so, Ash’s original point may stand that non-yeshivish communities might by large not accept the Chazal you mentioned.
If you want to reject the entire idea of a dual Torah, that's perfectly ok and I'm not arguing against that position. However, the second you want to introduce a concept called oral law which comes from Sinai (which is a universal belief in chazal, even as far to say that the megillah afah in Zechariah l which was larger than the sea cannot contain the whole Torah shbaal peh, see eiruvin 21b. For further references in chazal see temurah 16a, shabbos 31a, chagigah 3b, bava metzia 33a, gittin 60b, brachos 5a, and there are many more), at the barest minimum it's going to have to include laws such as עריות פטורות צרותיהן מן החליצה ומן היבום, לאו שאין בו מעשה אין לוקין עליו, מלאכת מחשבת אסרה תורה, מותר לאכול טבל באכילת עראי, שליחות, and לשמה בגיטין. Basically, tons of concepts related to biblical law aside from technical discussions in the parameters that Ash mentioned. Additionally, the basic interpretation of many many mitzvos are far from explicit in the verses, including ברכת המזון, קריאת שמע, תפילין, ד' מינים, בשר בחלב, פיגול, סיפור יציאת מצרים, ספירת העומר, טבילה במקוה, אב הטומאה וולד הטומאה, שחיטה, טריפה, עבודות הקרבנות, שופר בראש השנה, קידוש החודש, לט מלאכות בשבת, מצות זכירת עמלק, איסור מלאכה בחול המועד, תשלומי חבלה, מעשר שני, התרת נדרים, and many more that if just reading the verses literally would lead to very different conclusions that what the halacha is. Is all that from Sinai?
I thought that a very common view among Orthodox Jews was that the rules of interpretation are from Sinai but the specific laws are not from Sinai. I don’t know Chazal well enough to understand how common that view is on Chazal.
Furthermore, there are many extremely right wing (and many merely somewhat right wing) members of Orthodoxy who maintain that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the 12 tribes (the sons/brothers, not the subsequent groups of families divided by ancestor) observed the commandments, and that Moses was taught was R' Akiva learned and devised.
How can you have it both ways?
Can you clarify what you mean by complex? Do you mean that it is difficult to parse apart and understand the concepts? Do you just mean that the quantity of the different nuances is very large? Do you mean something else?
A large amount of concepts with a ton of nuance
I’m joy so knowledgeable about the amount of times ghazal say different concepts and laws are Halacha Moshe misinai. Is it a lot more than 100 different aspects of laws?
Its not specifically things that are called halacha lmoshe misinai (there's only a few dozen of them). Go through the rambam to see what his conception of what Torah shbaal peh is comprised of. (Even if you minus all the things that are drashos which according the rambams minority opinion does not come from sinai you're still left with a large percentage of yad hachazaka.)
Do you mind giving a short elevator explanation of how you understand the rambam and why oral law is complex as you describe it. Your previous replies had me thinking that you thought the complexity was the number of Halacha Moshe misinai as opposed to application of general principles of extrapolation.
A few comments on this post:
“Oral traditions are notorious for their unreliability… However, when it comes to minor anecdotes, or even the details surrounding the major events, it is rare to find several traditions which converge unless they have known common source.”
Ancient written traditions are also very unreliable. It is unheard of to find ancient written histories from different sources which converge on all the details. The unreliability of oral history relative to written is only of degree, not of type.
“However, aside from the limitations in culture’s abilities to properly transmit facts, there is another major aspect which arguably corrupts the original traditions much more. Traditions are generally cultural icons which represent the common themes in a given civilization, and they aren’t transmitted simply for historical purposes, but rather are woven into national and cultural identities…Therefore, oral traditions are hardly preserved intact as the culture evolves, and just as the stories take on new meanings in each subsequent generation, the facts themselves are subtly distorted to reflect the updated values.”
Again, same objection applies to written histories. It is a difference of degree, not of type.
In general, the idea that oral history is “notoriously unreliable” vs written reflects a biased preconception of Western historians that is mostly considered debunked and outdated now. See here https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12vcpj6/how_reliable_is_oral_history_are_some_cultures/, here https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2p0vtu/how_accurate_is_oral_history/, and here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_tradition#Criticism_and_debates. There are many counterexamples to the idea that oral history is notoriously unreliable (in the sense of reliable transmission, not in the sense of it being true) such as the Hindu vedas, the Homeric epics, and Icelandic sagas.
“Why is this so? How come we don’t find binding law traditions that were transmitted orally as we do histories? The answer seems to lie in the virtual impossibility in maintaining concrete legal systems without reference to a clear written code.”
But we do! What is the Mishnah if not a binding law that was transmitted orally for at least a century and a half? The Mishnah is a testament to this possibility. And how do you know there were no others? The only reason to think that there aren’t is that cultures that are sophisticated enough to possess an intricate legal system will generally also be sophisticated enough to discover writing. The reason the Jewish Oral Law was an exception to this was because of a prohibition/taboo on publishing a document of Torah laws aside from the Torah itself.
“Chazal claim a comprehensive oral tradition which contained a complex legal system which survived fairly well for ever a millennium; from the giving of the Torah in the mid-late second millennium BCE through the composition of the Mishna in the 2nd century CE. How plausible is this claim?…Is it possible that the complex halachos of a sukkah or yibbum remained intact?”
Very plausible, we know it for sure happened for at least a century and a half. We know that even later, the Gemara expected every Amora to have the Mishnah memorized. We know that even nowadays, there are people who know the entire Mishnah by heart. We know Rav Yitzchak Zilber memorized vast portions of Mishnah in the GULAG!!