Title: Talmud Reclaimed
By: Rabbi Shmuel Phillips
Mosaica Press/Feldheim
The first thing that intrigued me about Talmud Reclaimed by Rabbi Shmuel Phillips are the haskamos. Rarely does one encounter a book that is recommended by such a wide spectrum of individuals: well-known rabbis from the kiruv and yeshiva worlds (Rabbi Yitzchak Berkovits, Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz, and Rabbi Zev Leff), the rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese Sefardi community in London (Rabbi Joseph Dweck), and a law professor (Chaim Saiman).
The reason the book carries this range of approbations is because it cuts across typical boundaries, blending traditional approaches to the development of the Oral Torah or Torah she-baal peh with up-to-date historical and legal scholarship from the academy. Be forewarned though: the book is not an easy read. The reader should be prepared for a serious, novel, and often dense treatment of some of the most fundamental problems concerning the development and transmission of the Oral Torah. Talmud Reclaimed does not merely summarize prior approaches or affirm old platitudes. Phillips propounds a novel approach that at once reaffirms traditional Orthodox beliefs and challenges some of what you might have learned in yeshiva.
The book’s heftiest and most consequential arguments are laid out in the first 5 chapters (Part A). It’s here that Phillips explores what it means that the Oral Torah was given at Sinai, how we are to understand Chazal’s derivation of halachos from the text of the Torah, and the nature of halachic change.
Following the Rambam, Phillips maintains that the Oral Torah was not revealed in its entirety at Sinai, but that much of it was derived later from the Torah’s text by the Mishnaic and Talmudic Sages. (The Rambam rejects the view of the Geonim and others throughout history who believed that every law was taught at Sinai – and that dispute, machlokes, arose due to forgetfulness or students failing to listen adequately.)
The problem that every acolyte of the Rambam runs into is that Chazal’s methods of deriving new laws from the Torah – the 13 middos (interpretive principles) of Rabbi Yishmael – are often downright baffling. Derashos sometimes seem arbitrary; the same interpretive principle might be advanced to support a certain method of reading the text in one place and a contrary one somewhere else. For this reason, many have rejected the Rambam and argued that derashos never create new law but are simply clever ways to remember laws passed down from Sinai by tying them to a scriptural source. Yet one often must bend over backwards to explain the plethora of cases where it seems that Chazal do use derash to create new law.
Others defend the Rambam by arguing that there is an internal logic to derashos that is not readily apparent. For example, in the 19th century, Rabbi Meir Leibush Weiser, the Malbim, claimed that derash is a systematic way of reading the Torah based on principles of grammar and language that was apparent to Chazal but later forgotten until (conveniently) recovered by Malbim. But many, including Phillips, don’t find Malbim particularly convincing.
Talmud Reclaimed takes a third approach. Phillips accepts that derashos create new law but rejects the notion that Chazal’s 13 principles of interpretation uncover the one true meaning concealed in the Torah’s text. Rather, the 13 principles are a network of divine indicators that merely hint to how the Torah ought to be interpreted and leave open multiple interpretive possibilities.
Phillips posits that his approach accords with a “two-tiered” system in the Rambam. According to Phillips’s interpretation of the Rambam, at Sinai, G-d transmitted to Moshe core aspects of each mitzvah that reflect its Divine purpose, but then left it to later Rabbis to determine the mitzvah’s specifics. To Phillips, the general thrust of the Rambam’s discussion of the purpose behind mitzvos in the Moreh Nevuchim suggests that unlike the core transmitted at Sinai, the details of a mitzvah formulated by the Rabbis don’t necessarily have to be related to G-d’s purpose in legislating it. Once “no specific detail” legislated by the Rabbis “can be identified with certainty as being in accordance with G-d’s will,” the stakes are relatively low, and the Rabbis are granted tremendous discretion. Thus, “derashot cannot be seen as a rigid set of Divine instructions that bind Rabbinic legislators to formulate specific details. Instead, they may be best approached as looser indications from within the text, guiding the Sages in how to make use of their discretion when establishing Torah law.”
Phillips is not saying that Chazal were operating without Divine approval or that they could do whatever they wanted. Rather, the Divinely ordained system of derash gave the Rabbis flexibility to interpret within its boundaries, and their conclusions became part of Torah. Still, for Phillips, the subjectivity, flexibility, and even arbitrariness of that system is not a bug, but a feature. It allows “the details of commandments [to] remain fluid, to be revisited by future courts which take into account additional considerations such as the social sensitivities and broader needs of the generation.” Because details of mitzvos derived through derashos only reflect interpretive possibilities, they are also more malleable.
But we can’t make changes right now. Phillips cautions that any modification can only be made by a reconstituted Sanhedrin in the messianic era. Relying on a fascinating comment of the Meshech Chochma, Rabbi Meir Simcha of Dvinsk, Phillips maintains that in exile, the Oral Torah was made mostly unalterable to prevent assimilation and the loss of Torah knowledge. But this left halacha in a “stultified exilic state,” unable to fully meet the needs of modernity. In messianic times, the Sanhedrin will be able to modify the details of the mitzvos that Chazal derived.
Even the Sanhedrin, however, will not be permitted to touch the revealed core of a mitzvah that’s either explicit in the Torah or was transmitted orally at Sinai. Thus, Phillips suggests that someday, women might be obligated to wear tefillin (their exemption is derived from a hekesh, one of the 13 principles of interpretation, as well as a tannaitic debate over whether tefillin is really a time-bound mitzvah from which women would be exempt), but that the Sanhedrin would be unable to reverse the prohibition on homosexual intercourse (which is explicit in the Torah). Yet Phillips also realizes that many changes will be subject to debate because it’s often hard to determine what was transmitted at Sinai and what was derived later.
Phillips recognizes that the implications of his opinion on halachic change may surprise some. He writes, “The passage of over 1,500 years without a functioning Sanhedrin has led us to revere the halachic status quo to such an extent that descriptions of the court’s legislative powers, and suggestions of how these may once again be employed at an unspecified future time are likely to provoke considerable discomfort and even whispered claims of heresy.” Nevertheless, Phillips presses ahead with his thought-provoking view that at least some of the issues that irk moderns – such as halachic differences between men and women – may someday be revisited.
Yet, if derashos don’t uncover G-d’s will hidden in the Torah’s text, why was such a complex system created? One might imagine that G-d could have had Chazal interpret the Torah using simpler methods. Phillips suggests that derashos are instrumental, preparing the mind to contemplate and uncover esoteric divine truths that the Rambam sees as the goal of all study. Thus, for example, “the hermeneutical deliberations across the Talmud, with their recognition of quantitative and qualitative distinctions, further prepare the mind to compare and clarify concepts in accordance with Rambam’s guidance for budding students of Divine science.” Phillips argues that far beyond simply helping to determine halacha, Talmudic wisdom “trains a student’s mind to view the physical world from a more sophisticated – perhaps even Divine – perspective.”
I’m willing to accept this argument up to a point: the Talmud’s complex reasoning can train the mind, and abstract and farfetched cases can illuminate principles necessary for deciding more practical matters. Phillips provides many excellent examples on this front. Yet, it’s harder to see how Chazal’s sometimes unintuitive ways of darshening a pasuk lead one on a path toward G-d. I recall that once when I was in yeshiva, my chavrusa and I struggled to understand how the Gemara’s derivation of a particular halacha from a pasuk made any sense. But when we asked a rabbi in the beis midrash to help explain it, he suggested that spending further time on the matter might be bittul Torah. Although his comment was tongue-in-cheek, it’s not unreasonable to conclude that yeshivos are not particularly invested in training students to understand the deeper wisdom behind each of Rabbi Yishmael’s 13 principles of interpretation. Derashos are often seen as a black box that aren’t amenable to further study. Thus, at least in this day and age, a deep dive into derashos might not be a particularly fruitful road toward spiritual growth.
* * * * *
Talmud Reclaimed is quite a long book. We’ve only covered a third of it so far, and it already leaves a lot to digest. But the reader can’t stop yet, because in Part B, Phillips covers many of other fundamental topics related to the Oral Torah, including: the difference between the approaches of Sephardic and Ashkenazic commentators and poskim (Chapter 6); the distinction between traditional and academic approaches to Talmud study (Chapters 7 and 8); and the flexibility and non-binding nature of Chazal’s aggadic statements (Chapter 9), which are often as hard to understand as they are profound.
And there’s more. At 150 pages, the appendices in Part C are long enough to be a book of their own. Of note, Phillips engages in a remarkably candid discussion of the formation of the Talmud (Appendix C) based on academic scholarship, covering controversial issues such as what it means that the amoraim Ravina and Rav Ashi were sof hora’ah (the end of instruction) and to what degree the Talmud’s anonymous layer (stam) is post-Amoraic, or even Geonic. Appendix E in turn considers if Rabbi Yishmael’s 13 principles were handed down at Sinai in their current form or whether we can allow for some development over time and even Greek influence. (In this context, Phillips could profitably have mentioned the 19th-century view of the Netziv in his introduction to Ha-amek Davar who suggests that the 13 principles grew over time.)
Talmud Reclaimed is not an easy book. It demands to be learned, not just read. But if you do, you’re bound to come away with a more profound understanding of the Oral Torah, which is one of the pillars of our tradition.
