Overruled?

Last night's interfaith limud at B'nai Jeshurun, the third of four sessions on "A parting of the ways? Christians and Jews in the first centuries of the common era," was relatively calm compared to the first two. Perhaps it's because the 3rd century CE is pretty obscure. But I guess we've also gotten used to the emergence and weirdness of Christianity, and the Christian theologian has relaxed enough to crack a few jokes. Next week, as we end with Constantine, we'll be back in territory we know.

So what was newsworthy (that is, generated questions in the Q&A) this time was not Peter Bouteneff's account of Origen's understanding of scripture, but Seth Schwartz's sly suggestion that there was no such thing as "rabbinic Judaism" in this period - or for most of Jewish history, for that matter. And this from the Gerson D. Cohen Professor of Rabbinic Culture at The Jewish Theological Seminary! It was fascinating.

The main point was that after the destruction of the second temple and the suppression of the Jewish revolts, Jewish life was disorganized. Contrary to common belief, the rabbis didn't save the Jews because there weren't enough of them - barely a hundred by 300 CE - and because they had no authoritative role. It's not clear who they were - perhaps the descendants of mid-level bureaucrats from the temple, who had worked as arbiters on questions of law? But Roman law was now the law of the land. We don't know what they were doing; the idea that a synagogue needs a rabbi was many centuries away. Perhaps, Seth suggested, they were like those few leaders of Polish and Lithuanian yeshivas who survived the Holocaust and ended up working in factories and driving taxis because they had no other skills people would pay for.

Eventually a body of rabbinic texts emerged, but one of its most celebrated features takes on a different meaning when seen against this historical background - the recording and even glorying in disagreement, with Rabbi X saying one thing but Rabbi Y saying another. In late rabbinic texts, this is indeed consciously praised (well, dialectic is but not disagreement for its own sake, and not pluralism). The earlier texts, Seth suggested, probably recorded differing views simply because there was no authoritative way to settle a question. It was only later that the rabbis asserted the value of their quarreling, amongst themselves and even with G-d - as in the famous story of Eliezer and the carob tree where G-d approves of rabbis who have lost interest in divine approval - which Seth recounted, while noting also that the end of the story, less well known, is apparently less happy.

(Source: Howard Schwartz, Caren Loebel-Fried and Elliot K. Ginsburg, Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism [OUP 2004], 67, by way of Google Books.)