In this episode, Rabbi Reinman explains why the Oral Torah does not have a text and why there was such instability during the years in the wilderness.
Chapter Twenty-two: Forty Years of Instability
There are two parts to the Torah, the Written Torah and the Oral Torah. The Written Torah on its own is clearly not an adequate code of law. The Torah commands us to wear tefillin but does not tell us what tefillin are. The Torah states that the desecration of Shabbos is a capital offense, but it does not tell us what constitutes desecration. Clearly, there must be a second body of law that provides the details, an orally transmitted body of law of which there was no written record until over a thousand years later.
In fact, the Written Torah sometimes refers to the Oral Law. It tells us to “slaughter some of your cattle and sheep … as I instructed you and then you shall eat …” The Talmud states that this tells us that Moshe was told all the details of kosher slaughter.
The main Torah is the Oral Torah, because it can stand on its own. The Written Torah, however, cannot exist without clarifications of the Oral Torah. In brief, the Written Torah contains the entire Oral Torah through an esoteric system of hints and allusions. When we reach the Talmudic period we will discuss the relationship between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah.
During the Giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, the Jewish people were given a glimpse of a small part of the Written Torah and none at all of the Oral Torah. Afterward, until they entered Canaan, they were given the Written Torah piecemeal, and they studied the Oral Torah directly with Moshe and his closest disciples. At the end, the finished Written Torah, the Torah ere, contained the basic laws, the narratives, the genealogies, the blessings and the admonishments given over their entire history up to that point. The Torah scroll was complete, but the Oral Torah was not recorded in it.
It is obvious that the Oral Torah could not have been incorporated into the Written Torah. A single scroll could not have contained all of it, but why was there no separate written record of the Oral Torah for over fifteen hundred years? Just as there are many volumes of law that supplement and elucidate the American Constitution.
There are several reasons. Having the Torah remain primarily oral ensures its exclusivity. There is no need for the outside world to know anything more than the Seven Noahide Laws. There is therefore no advantage to be gained from exposing the Torah to the critical and often hostile scrutiny of the gentiles who have been excluded. Only harm can come from such a thing. The Talmud considers the translation of the Written Torah into Greek during the post-Alexandrian period to have been a dark episode in Jewish history. Certainly, the exposure of the Oral Torah would have been considered an even greater breach.
Furthermore, the absence of a written record ensured the integrity of the Oral Law, because it could only be learned from a living teacher and not from the pages of a book. The Oral Law is full of nuances and subtleties that are critical to a correct application of the law, and these finer points are often lost on the self-taught student who does not have the advantage of dialogue with a seasoned teacher and hands-on experience. For example, let us assume that two young people of equal talent decided to become surgeons. One of them went to medical school, while the other secured a full set of medical books and the use of a laboratory. Which one would we employ if we needed surgery? No answer is, of course, required. Application of the Oral Law is no less a fine art than surgery, and the absence of a written record guaranteed a tradition of teacher-student relationships.
The absence of a written record also helped reinforce the singular character of Jewish life. God had commanded the Jewish people to study the Torah “day and night,” to plunge into its endless depths and extract its intellectual and spiritual treasures. The ideal condition of the Jew is to be connected constantly to the divine life force of the Torah, either through the direct conduit of study or through the practical performance of its commandments and the conduct of everyday affairs according to its guidelines. The absence of a written record of the Oral Law pushed the Jew in this direction, because every Jew had to spend a good portion of his waking hours studying, memorizing and reviewing the laws that governed all aspects of Jewish life.
Most importantly, however, it is simply impossible to have a written record of the Oral Torah, because it is infinite . . .