Rational rabbis : science and talmudic culture PDF
Preview Rational rabbis : science and talmudic culture
Rational Rabbis Page ii Jewish Literature and Culture Series Editor, Alvin H. Rosenfeld Page iii Rational Rabbis Science and Talmudic Culture Menachem Fisch INDIANA UNICVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis Page iv © 1997 by Menachem Fisch All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.481984. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Fisch, Menachem. Rational rabbis : science and talmudic culture / Menachem Fisch. p. cm. — (Jewish literature and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0253333164 (cl : alk. paper) 1. Judaism and science. 2. Talmud Torah (Judaism). 3. Talmud— Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title. II. Series. BM538.S3F57 1997 296.3'75—dc21 977349 1 2 3 4 5 02 01 00 99 98 97 Page v To my father Harold Fisch who set this all in motion Page vii CONTENTS Preface ix Introduction xiii Part 1 Science as an Exemplar of Rational Inquiry The Problem 4 Heracliteans and Parmenideans 9 Science as Hypothesis 15 Problems and Progress 22 The Rationality of GoalDirected Criticism 28 Part 2 The Jewish Covenant of Learning 1. The Great Tannaitic Dispute: The Jabne Legends and Their Context 51 Traditionalism and Its Discontents 55 The Jabne Reforms 63 The Testimony of Eduyot 71 "It Is Not in Heaven" (Deut. 30:12) 78 Jabne's Antitraditionalist Manifesto 88 A Traditionalist Response: Hillel and b'nei Beteira 96 2. The Changing of the Guard: Amoraic Texts and Tannaitic Legacies 111 Discerning the Bavli's Point of View: A Schematic Overview 112 Introducing the Bavli's Paradigm: Berakhot 19b 119 The Logic and Rhetoric of Transgenerational Negotiation 128 Yerushalmi and Bavli Compared 133 Antitraditionalism for the Advanced 142 Giving away the Game, or The Gentle Art of Inaudible Instruction 150 Page viii 3. Understanding the Bavli 163 Problem One: Explaining the Bavli's DoubleTalk 163 Problem Two: Discerning a Role for the Mishna 166 The Mishna as a Formative Code 171 Rational Rabbis, or The Mishna as Textbook 180 "Turn Thee Around" (Bavli, Menahot 29b), or Back to the Future 188 Notes 197 General Index 251 Index of Talmudic References 258 Page ix PREFACE In conscious defiance of the wellknown prohibition against ever committing the Oral Torah to writing, the Judaic Sages of late antiquity compiled lengthy records of their learning. Commencing with the Mishna, the Tosefta and the tannaitic midrashim of the third century, the Mekhilta (to Exodus), the Sifra (to Leviticus), the Sifré (to Numbers and Deuteronomy), the Talmud of the Land of Israel, the Yerushalmi, the amoraic midrashic compilations of the fifth century, and culminating in the Talmud of Babylonia, the Bavli, the process of documentation inaugurated by R. Yehuda the Patriarch yielded the vast and unique talmudic canon of rabbinic Judaism. In no other collection of texts does one find as exacting an attempt by the authors themselves to reconstruct and record the plethora of debates and deliberations in which they participated. As such the corpus of talmudic texts is unparalleled in Western intellectual history. Given their enormous scope, there is no question that the rabbinic texts of late antiquity represent a unique record of a unique intellectual enterprise. It is no wonder then that the literature of the talmudic era has been researched so intensively. But the major portion of this effort until now has focused primarily on framing and answering philological and historical questions. Excellent analyses have been written of the language of the rabbis; of the various strata, architecture, and literary structure of their texts; of their attitudes toward halakha and aggada; and of the social, political, economical, and cultural context of their lives, work, and writing. But as good and important as much of this work has been, it is incomplete. Conspicuously absent is an analysis of these texts from a philosophical perspective. This absence is all the more conspicuous when one contrasts the academic study of the rabbinic texts under consideration with that of Western science, the one sustained intellectual endeavor of Western culture that rivals that of the rabbis in scope and duration. Students of modern science have devoted enormous energy, and to great effect, to analyses of the ontological and epistemic assumptions of scientists, the logical structure of their explanations and descriptions, and their theoretical and experimental methods. These analyses are fundamentally philosophical; they have advanced so far that today the philosophy of science is considered a freestanding and important academic discipline. This essay is a programmatic attempt systematically (if tentatively) to apply the perspectives unique to this discipline to the talmudic texts. Page x Originally subtitled: "A Preliminary Study of Talmudic Epistemology," Rational Rabbis is a first extensive, if hesitant attempt to take stock of an intellectual journey I embarked upon in earnest about eight years ago. It was initially motivated and given a particular direction by two essays I had read and was prompted by an invitation to participate in a conference organized by Bar Ilan University in honor of my father. The two essays were Jacob Neusner's "Why No Science in Judaism?" (which later formed the basis for his The Making of the Mind of Judaism: The Formative Age) and the last chapter of my father, Harold Fisch's Poetry with a Purpose entitled: ''Qohelet: A Hebrew Ironist." Neusner's paper argued that the "mind" of talmudic Judaism was so different from that of Western science and philosophy as to render the former incapable of producing the latter. My father's essay offered a reading of Qohelet's meditations on human wisdom as an ironic reductio ad absurdum of the very possibility of an anthropocentric, selfsufficient notion of rationality. I found the two essays equally intriguing and equally disturbing, and it occurred to me that they could be criticized jointly along the following lines. Contrary to the claim attributed by my father to Qohelet, science, I argued, provides a living example of a selfsufficient, humanly attainable, rational undertaking that is well aware of its own shortcomings. And, contrary to Neusner, the Talmud's manner of halakhic reasoning seemed to me to resemble quite closely the type of discourse I had learned to associate with the scientific method of trial and error. But if that is the case, one must assume that the talmudic sages allegedly responsible for the canonization of Qohelet could not have read it as ironically dismissing their very own position. I went on to propose a different reading of Qohelet better suited to their point of view. I summarized these initial thoughts first in my contribution to the volume commemorating the conference, and later in a short book published in Hebrew a year or so later.* The book was well received, although I knew even then that I had barely scratched the surface. The basic tripartite ground plan for the project—a claim about scientific rationality, a reconstruction of talmudic epistemology along those lines, and a reading of Qohelet that conforms the latter—remains unchanged, but it has become quite clear that it is impossible to realize within the boundaries of a single volume. Rational Rabbis attends exclusively to the first two parts of the project. With its completion, my earlier work on the talmudic *Menachem Fisch, "The Perpetual Covenant of Jewish Learning," in E. Spolsky ed., Summoning: Ideas of the Covenant and Interpretive Theory (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), pp. 91–114, and 'To Know Wisdom': Science, Rationality and Torahstudy (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1994).
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