Must Read: People of the Book

[What does “Canon” mean? How was the Canon of the TNK chosen and put together?What part of the Canon of the Hebrew Scriptures are YHWH’s very words, and which are men’s?  This book endeavors to answer those and all other questions that come to mind such as reliability of the Canon, etc.  This book is downloadable as an ebook from amazon.com; as usual we will featured EXCERPTS from the Introduction as well as the Conclusion; reformatted for posting.]

The complete title:  People of the Book:  Canon, Meaning and Authority.  Author: Moshe Halbertal.

CONTENTS

Introduction:  Canonical Text and Text-Centered Community

I. Canon and Meaning

• The Uses of Canon
• The Sealed Canon
• Authority and Sealing
• The Meaning of the Canonical Text
• Canon and the Principle of Charity
• Textual Closure and Hermeneutical Openness
• Uncharitable Readings of Canons

2.  Authority, Controversy, and Tradition

• Authorial Intention and Authoritative Meaning
• Canon and Controversy
• Three Views on Controversy and Tradition
• From a Flexible Canon to a Closed Code
• The Institution and the Canon

3.  Canon and Curriculum

• Formative Text
• The Concept of Torah in “Talmud Torah”
• The Challengers of Talmudism
• Codification and Decanonization
• Esotericism and Censorship
• Kabbalists and the Talmudic Curriculum
• Strong Canonicity and Shared Discourse

Conclusion

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Introduction:  Canonical Text and Text-Centered Community

Years ago a teacher of mine introduced me to a new concept of heaven and hell.  “Don’t think that hell is where people are consumed by fire for their sins or that heaven is where they are rewarded with pleasures for their piety.  What really happens is that God gathers everybody in one large hall.  Then He gives them the Talmud and commands them to start studying.  For the wicked, studying Talmud is hell.  For the pious, it’s heaven.”  Clearly, the role of the sacred text in Jewish life is so profound that even the afterlife cannot be imagined without it.

The two main axes of this book are

• the canonical text
• and the text-centered community.

In particular, I seek to understand the Jewish tradition as a text-centered tradition, not in its ideas about life after death but as this centrality affects life on earth.  Rather than searching for the essence of Judaism in shared beliefs and practices that remain constant though they take superficially diverse forms, I have chosen to focus on the shared commitment to certain texts and their role in shaping many aspects of Jewish life and endowing the tradition with coherence.

In the Jewish tradition the centrality of the text takes the place of theological consistency. Jews have had diverse and sometimes opposing ideas about God:

• the anthropomorphic God of the Midrash,
• the Aristotelian unmoved mover of Maimonides and his school,
• the Kabbalah’s image of God as a dynamic organism manifested in the complexity of his varied aspects, the sefirot.  

These conceptions of God have little in common and they are specifically Jewish only insofar as each is a genuine interpretation of Jewish canonical texts.

Not only does the text provide a common background for various ideas and practices; text-centeredness itself has deeper implications.  Some of the major developments in Jewish tradition can be understood through the community’s notions of its relation to text, of what text is, and how text functions in its midst.  Text is thus more than a shared matrix for a diverse tradition—it is one of the tradition’s central operative concepts, like “God” or “Israel.”

The general classification of Judaism as a “book religion” is well known to students of comparative religion.  As in many other religions, among them Islam and Christianity, Scripture is at its center, but the function, development, and implications of the centrality of the text for the shape of Judaism are yet to be investigated.  As I hope to show, focusing on text-centeredness will highlight the main distinctions between rabbinic Judaism and biblical religion.  What made the Torah the main source of religious authority—the locus of religious experience and divine presence and the object of ongoing reflection– is what gave Judaism the form that persists to this day.

This book is not a full historical and chronologically ordered account of canonization within the Jewish tradition.  My discussion is organized thematically, referring to different historical moments and to the various canons as they relate to the theme at hand.

• The first chapter discusses relationships between canon and meaning.
• The second treats tensions and competing ideas about the notion of authority of texts and interpreters, while the problem of the value of text and curriculum is discussed in the third chapter.
• Each chapter deals with a different canon within the Jewish tradition:
  • The first focuses on the canonization of the Bible
    • and its effects on Jewish trends in its interpretation;
  • the second analyzes the canonization of the Mishnah
    • and subsequent codes in the Jewish tradition as they relate to the problem of authority and controversy;
  • and the third deals with the struggle accompanying the rise of the Talmud as the main text in the Jewish curriculum from the Middle Ages onward.

Although the intense production of different Jewish canons over such a long time span does not receive a systematic historical treatment, the accumulated total does serve as a continuous resource for dealing with problems of canons and their relation to meaning, authority, and value within the Jewish tradition.  The conceptual approach to issues of canonization within the Jewish tradition can also be of value to other fields of research such as law and literature, in which similar problems concerning canons arise.  It is essential therefore to clarify the two principal concepts:

• canonical texts
• and text-centered communities.

They are described in the sections below.

Kinds of Canons

“Canonical” as an adjective describing a text refers to the text’s special status, one that have many guises.

• Texts form a normative canon; they are obeyed and followed, as, for example, are Scriptures and legal codes.  They can also be canonical as a constitutive part of a curriculum; such texts are not followed in the strict sense but are taught, read, transmitted, and interpreted.  These texts establish a formative canon, and they provide a society or a profession with a shared vocabulary.  The importance of this kind of canonization is manifest in text-centered societies or institutions in which familiarity with certain texts is a precondition for membership.
• In yet another sense of the word, which will not be discussed in this book, canonical texts serve as paradigmatic examples of aesthetic value and achievement:  models for imitation which set the criteria for what is regarded as a higher form of art.  These constitute an exemplary canon.  In a much narrower sense of canonization, texts can become exemplars of schools and trends; they highlight the characteristics of the genre lucidly and forcefully, though they do not necessarily represent the best of that genre but rather what most typifies it.

Different kinds of canonization occasionally converge in a single text.  For example, the Talmud in Jewish tradition fulfills two canonical functions:

•  it establishes the norms of behavior in many aspects of life
• and serves a formative function as the fundamental text in the traditional Jewish curriculum, the focus of endless interpretations and debates.  (As we shall see, this dual nature of the canonicity of the Talmud was sometimes challenged by Jewish mystics and philosophers who maintained that the Talmud is authoritative in all matters of the law but is not a text worthy of exclusive, ongoing reflection and study).

Not all canonical texts enjoy equal status.  Legal tracts are meant to be obeyed but do not form a central part of the curriculum—they are not regarded as “cultural assets.”  the Talmud, although it is canonical in these two senses—it is meant to be obeyed and studied—is not paradigmatic and did not set a standard for the formation of future texts.  Few interpreters of the Talmud tried to imitate it; they did not write more Talmud; they just wrote about the Talmud.  Texts can therefore exert influence in many realms:

• they are followed and obeyed,
• studied and read;
• they are imitated and revered;
• and they set a standard and bestow value.
• They control action, thought, creativity.

It is this whole range of the power and function of texts that we wish to capture with the term “canonization.”

Canons are both exclusive and inclusive.  They create monopolies and define who is worthy of being heard and who is not.  In some situations disagreement about what is included in the canon can divide a community.  The connection between canon and censorship and canonization and crisis, as well as issues of authority and the authoritative interpreter, will be discussed in the 2nd chapter.

Canonization fulfills a demarcating function, as in the example of the fixing of the Christian canon in the 2nd century.  The historical background of the canonization of the New Testament is still debated.  Some scholars tend to see the process as mainly connected to internal developments in the early Church, others understand it as a powerful reaction to Marcion, a 2nd-century Gnostic.  Marcion claimed that the Old Testament and the Gospels alike distorted the true teaching of Christ.  These books were too “Jewish,” he said, and he excluded them from the authoritative body of Christian teachings.  In his view, holy Scripture contained only the Paulinian material of the New Testament and some parts of the Gospels. At the other extreme, the Jerusalem Church, which adhered at least partially to the Old Testament law, accepted the Gospels and challenged Paul’s authority because of his rejection of the law.

The Christian Church, not yet fully defined, was torn between radically different religious outlooks which expressed the inner tension of its own message.  Out of the existing sacred material a fixed canon was formed in response to both the Marcionites’ challenge and to the challenge from the more traditional branch in Jerusalem.  The establishment of a fixed Christian canon demarcated believers from heretics and erected boundaries between Christians and Gnostics.  The logic of fixing a canon as an act of creating boundaries requires the existence of groups that it excludes; canon and heresy are twins.

Since canonical texts have many functions, various arguments are advanced concerning their authority.

• A text can be authoritative because it claims origin from a unique source such as God, the king, or an expert in the field.
• Sometimes the authority of texts may be independent of the superior will that instituted them. . . .
• The authority of a text can also derive from its unique intrinsic merit, like that of a great book.
• These claims to authority can be challenged on several grounds.

If a text is authoritative, then the issue of who may interpret it is of enormous importance.  It is then necessary to explain what justifies the authority of the text and who is authorized to interpret it.  These issues are connected to the broader question of what sort of text becomes canonized and for what reason.  Is it the text as a potential source of meanings, a specific reading of the text, or is it an institution that defines the meaning of the text?  . . . .

Since the meanings of texts are sometimes undetermined, variant interpretations may be used to undermine the practices, beliefs, and institutions that are grounded by reference to canonical texts.  Thus canonical texts can easily become subversive texts. Consequently, they have often been kept safe and out of sight of the very people over whom the texts assert authority. . . . before the Reformation, the Church often argued that the public should learn Scripture from pictures, usually on the walls of the local church, while the texts themselves should be kept from the community.  Cardinal Newman defends the Catholic preference of traditional over nontraditional interpretation of Scripture as follows;  “being withdrawn from public view [the tradition] could not be subjected to the degradation of a comparison [with the text of the New Testament], on the part of inquirers and half-Christians.  The apostolic tradition was protected from the public eye in an effort to keep it pure and uncontaminated, unlike the New Testament in the hands of the Protestants.

In the history of many religious traditions the sacred texts have proved to be as much sources of heresy as sources of faith.  “No heretic without a text” is a proverb Spinoza quotes in his Treatise as he describes the widespread sectarianism of the 17th century.  The canonical text with all of its prestige and authority —precisely because of that prestige and authority—must be protected; its readers should be screened and its meanings controlled.

Conclusion

The movement toward text-centeredness has been conceptualized as the primary feature of rabbinic innovation and self-perception.  Three changes characterize this movement:

1. the scholar rises to become the main authority figure, thereby linking authority to textual expertise;
2. the Torah becomes the object of ongoing reflection and a locus of religious presence and experience; and
3. the boundaries of the community are shaped in relation to loyalty to a shared canon.

Such a text-centered community can only evolve through reinterpretation of the canonical text.  Major shifts within the tradition were accompanied by the emergence of new and bold conceptions of Torah and language; they provided hermeneutical strategies which integrated radically different world views into the tradition.  The emergence of both Kabbalah and philosophy as esoteric readings of the canon in the Middle Ages became possible through innovative conceptions of the canon and its language.  In turn, the possibility of redescribing the canon made it open to reading with greater flexibility.  Further, the legitimation of controversy between certain rabbinic schools through the detachment of authoritative meaning from authorial intention gave rise to new interpretative possibilities, portraying the text as open-ended and the interpreter as constituting its meaning.

Despite upheavals and changes in Jewish life, the rabbinic revolution lasted until the 18th century and succeeded in making the Jewish community a text-centered community.  One important consequence of the emergence of modern national identity among the Jews is that text-centeredness has been displaced by other features of commonality.  Loyalty to a shared text no longer marks the boundaries of the modern-day Jewish community, for the assumption that the values and norms of the community should be justified in reference to a shared text has lost its validity.  The formative role of the common text—the idea that the culture advances through interpretation of the canonical texts and that its achievements are interpretative—has also lost its power.  Powerful new ideologies no longer represent themselves as interpretations of the Torah or Talmud but question the very authority of the text as the source of norms and values.  As a natural consequence of this movement, the authority of the scholar has been diminished and leadership models have changed radically.

What made disparate world views “Jewish” despite their diversity was their shared interpretative commitment to canonical texts.  With the decline in text-centeredness, Jewish thought and creativity can no longer be defined simply in those terms.  The modern conception of noninterpretative Jewish creativity and thought, which is considered Jewish only because it is produced by Jews, is symptomatic of the crisis in Jewish life.  Although freed from the burden of the text and the limitations that are supposedly imposed by the interpretative process, modern Jewish creativity has not yet flourished, for it appears to have lost its language and its main mode of development.

The rise of Jewish national identity not only loosened the bonds of text-centeredness but also affected the curriculum of Israel’s secular state schools, the Bible rather than the Talmud is regarded as the central Jewish text.  Although, strictly speaking, this development extends beyond the limits of our subject, it sheds interesting light upon it.  Until the 18th century, Jewish education consisted mainly of Talmud study.  At the preliminary stage, in the heder, the boys studied the weekly portions of the Pentateuch read in the synagogue, as well as the short sections from the prophets, the haftarot, which are associated with the weekly readings.  While the study of the Bible was connected to the liturgical practices of the community and aimed at integrating students into the life of the synagogue, the rest of the Bible—the books of the prophets and the writings themselves (aside from those included in the haftarot)—were not studied.  In Europe Jewish boys were taught to read the Torah, translate it into Yiddish and base its interpretation on Rashi’s commentary, that is, on rabbinic interpretation, since Rashi’s commentary is heavily based on rabbinic sources.  The student soon progressed to Talmud study, which from then on dominated the curriculum of the heder and more advanced institutions of learning.  The Hebrew language was not an independent subject but was part of the study of the Bible and Talmud.  Hence the Talmud occupied a far more central place than the Bible in the curriculum.

At the end of the 18th century, the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) offered another approach that diminished the formative role of the Talmud.  The spokesmen of the Jewish Enlightenment ((Maskilim) called for a return to the Bible.  This shift in the canon was tied to their new conception of Jewish identity already articulated by Moses Mendelssohn.  Jewishness, according to this view, is a layer of particularism built upon a more fundamental universal layer of humanity, and this universal dimension, shared by Jews and non-Jews alike, ensures civil equality and the participation of both parties in the same political unit.  The Jews were called upon the Maskilim to stress and develop their universal dimension and, surprisingly, the movement back tot he Bible played a major role in this scheme.

One proponent of the new conception was Naphtali Herz Wessely, a poet and educator who addressed a letter entitled “Divrei Shalom ve-Emet” (Words of Truth and Peace_ to the Jewish communities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, encouraging them to accept reforms in the educational system.  These had been proposed by the government as a measure for alleviating certain discriminatory measures against the Jews.  Among other changes, Wessely urged return to the Bible as an optimal bridge to the life of citizenship.  Since it is a book common to Christians and Jews, stressing its formative role would be more conducive to the goals of Enlightenment than was talmudic learning.  The exclusive study of the Talmud was identified by the Maskilim with ghetto life.  According to Wessely, it addressed only the particular dimension of the Jew.  He also advocated abandoning the Yiddish translation of the Bible in favor of Mendelssohn’s German translation and stressed the aesthetic, literary qualities of the Bible, which has yet another advantage over the Talmud:  it offers a model of complete political and economic life, dealing with agriculture, war, and government, and is therefore a better introduction to citizenship.

With the rise of Jewish nationalism, the relation of many Jews to the Bible and the Talmud took another turn.  The Zionists preferred the Bible to the Talmud as the national literature, for the Bible tells a heroic story of the national drama whose focus is the Land of Israel.  While they objected to the Haskalah politics of emancipation, Zionist thinkers also stressed the role of the Bible, but they thought of it as an element in building a particular national consciousness rather than as the basis of a shared Judeo-Christian heritage enabling the integration of Jews in Europe.  Unlike the Talmud, they held, the Bible had the potential to become a national epic.  Its drama unfolded in the hills of Judea, and it connected the national claim to the land with a historical past.  Nothing in the Talmud, in contrast, appeared to the romanticism vital to national movements.  It does not tell the glorious story of a nation; it has no warriors and heroes; no geography which arouses longing in the reader or a sense of connection to an ancient home.

Written in Aramaic on the shores of the “rivers of Babylon” the Talmud also had little to offer toward the revival of Hebrew as the national language.  For some Zionist thinkers the Talmud was an emblem of Diaspora, the past they sought to reject.  They maintained that the minutiae of Talmudic discourse and its restrained style represented Diaspora qualities—timidity and small-mindedness.  In their attempt to change the Jewish ideal type, some Zionist educators and leaders chose different role models:  King David rather than Rabbi Akiva, for the courageous warrior was preferable to the pale Yeshiva boy.  In 1910, Ben Zion Mossinson, an educator and the first Bible teacher in the Hebrew Gymnasium at Jaffa, wrote:  “Let it [the Bible] be laid as the foundation of our children’s education, and then our youth will not turn their backs to their people; and a new generation will arise sound and strong, a generation striving toward renaissance, a generation loving its people and its land—a Hebrew generation!”

Some early Zionists objected strongly to this approach.  The distinction between “Jews” and “Hebrews: seemed too radical, and the attempt to return to the Bible, overlooking the rich Diaspora creativity in order to forge the Hebrew identity, seemed to be a denial of something constitutive to Jewish identity.  After his visit to Mossinson’s school, Ahad Ha’am wrote:  “If you remove the middle links from the chain of history then its beginning and end will never fit together.  The Jewish child of our time, in Eretz Israel as well, is the fruit of the historical life of all generations; and in order for him to know himself and his people, he ought to know our national riches—including the Bible—not only in their alleged original form but in all the forms in which it was clothed over the generation, becoming a living force in the lives of the people.”  This tension between Mossinsons’ formulation and Ahad Ha’am’s accompanies Israeli culture to his day.  Nevertheless, a major shift has occurred in the conception of the formative canon.

In 1953 David Ben-Gurion, then Israel’s prime minister, responded critically to Avraham Kariv, a writer who claimed that the Bible should be read through the lens of the Midrash and the Talmud.  “The Bible,” wrote Ben Gurion, “existed before there was a Midrash and is not dependent on the Midrash.  We should not understand the Bible through the Midrash but in and of itself . . . . I reject with all my moral and Jewish force the statements of Kariv that ‘every verse in the Bible began to live its universal and eternal life only in the epoch after the Bible.’  If I [Ben Gurion] did not know who Kariv was I would say that his words are blasphemy.”  The return to the Bible was regarded as a sort of national Reformation, and Ben Gurion linked that tendency to the return from Diaspora:  “In 2000 years of Diaspora our creativity did not completely disappear, but the light of the Bible was dimmed in the Diaspora, since the light of the people of Israel was dimmed.  Only with the renewal of Hebrew independence we can understand the true and full light of the Bible.”  In his next lines Ben Gurion addresses educators:  “Rashi’s interpretation to the Bible is very important but it is Rashi’s interpretation alone.  The Bible shines in his own light, and this light should be exposed to the eyes of the young generation.  This is the task of educators, teachers, writers, scholars, poets and artists—to envelop our people, in the Land of Israel and the Diaspora, with the dazzling light of the book of books in a manner that our redeemed generation can see it.”  The otherworldliness and rootlessness of Jewish existence in the Diaspora did not suit the earthly quality of the Bible.  Zionism, a movement of return to the Land, exemplifies the return of the Jews to the body.  Only once back in the Land can Jews rediscovery the true nature of the Bible and its deepest meanings.

Two important issues are at stake in the modern-day return to the Bible as national literature and the concomitant decanonization of the Talmud.  

• The first concerns the shift in Jewish identity, from a group defined by its adherence to Halakhah and the Talmud as its normative canon, to a definition based on characteristics typical of national groups such as shared history, language, and territory.
• The second issue is related to the effect of Jewish nationalism on the characterization of an ideal type.  This ideal type was founded, as were those of many other 19th-century national movements, on the tales of the ancient epics.

In the Jewish case, the reversal of the curriculum from Talmud to Bible represents a major shift in political awareness and identity, alongside the weakening of the text-centered nature of the community.  We recall that in the Middle Ages there was an attempt to decanonize the Talmud as a formative text while keeping its normative authority intact.  For many modern Jews, the situation is reversed.  The Talmud has lost its normative status; the question now is whether it can still serve a formative role and become an integral part of the language, associations, concerns, and mode of thought of present-day Jewish culture.