#16. What is the Source of Jewish law? God or Man?
This is a very interesting question because, like many areas of Jewish theology there was/will be two distinct phases in history. The Beis Halevy in Drush 18 explains that the original plan for the Jewish People in receiving the Torah was embodied by the first set of tablets given to Moshe at Sinai. The first set of Luchos contained –-miraculously—everything that anyone would ever need to know regarding Hashem’s will. All the answers to any questions that would ever be asked in the future were all written down in the first set of Luchos. Furthermore, Chazal say that before the sin of the Golden Calf, there would not have been any forgetting of any Torah that was learned. Very little effort would be necessary to retain the enormous amount of Torah information that were written on the Luchos. The Jewish Heart would be naturally attuned to the direct word of Hashem and the Jew would serve as a perfect vessel for living out the Torah in this world.
After the sin of the Golden Calf, all this changed. It was a form of re-enaction of Adam’s eating from the Tree of Knowledge and his subsequent descent from his lofty spiritual condition described at length in the works of the Ramchal.
From that point onward, there would be two levels of Torah—the Written and the Oral. The written is a fixed, static text directly dictated by Hashem to Moshe word-for-word, but not nearly enough detail is provided to make it stand alone and executable in the real world. For proper implementation, there was the necessary recourse to oral information. This information did not have any fixed text! There was no dictation word-for-word to Moshe from G-d to be preserved in Moshe’s memory, and to be retrieved later. The instructions and concepts and principles of the Oral Law were all given by Hashem to Moshe, (some say every fine detail and future development of halacha as well) but not in any fixed textual form. Now suddenly, man is allowed to play an essential role in the transmission of Torah law-- by having to formulate the instructions and articulate the concepts in his own language and his own human terms of understanding and comprehension.
To make this responsibility real, Hashem abstained Himself from the halachic process and foreswore any direct intervention in the decision-making of the Sages. (We do however believe that Hashem does have a powerful hand in the overall development of Torah understanding throughout the generations, but it is extremely subtle and mostly imperceptible at the time it is happening. Rabbis throughout history have pointed out this Providential influence after the fact when looking in hind-sight.)
This shows an amazing level of trust that Hashem put in the integrity of the Sages to properly receive and then convey the Oral Torah from one generation to the next. Those who question the trustworthiness of the Sages or consider them to be prejudiced towards some cultural or psychological preference are undermining the tradition and are considered blasphemers.
Some modern (really post-modern) philosophers assert that the minute any form of information gets filtered through a human being living in a particular time and place, it becomes distorted and its original intent cannot be accurately preserved--by definition.
We reject this view—at least regarding Jewish intellectual history as it applies to the transmission of the Torah. We say the Torah has a unique ability to connect its very essence to a person who properly prepares himself to receive it without personal agendas. This doesn’t mean that we would therefore expect every properly prepared individual to arrive at an identical or even compatible understanding! The wide ranging diversity of views within Torah comes from the multifaceted nature of the Torah itself-- as it is integrated into the unique constellation of traits of each individual. What we reject is the notion that extraneous influences of culture and historical contexts are strong enough to frustrate the attempt to transmit the Torah in complete faithfulness.
The fall from the lofty first set of Luchos to the second diminutive set is actually a mixed blessing. The fact that essential Torah information now resides within the intellect/instinct/personality of the human being and no longer exists externally on a fixed objective written medium, means the human being is capable of merging himself intimately with Torah than he otherwise could have. The Beis Halevy compares it to difference between a scroll contained within an ark and the ink written on the parchment. The human being is no longer an outer compartment containing a self-contained book but rather he becomes the very parchment upon which the words are written.
There are a few incidents reported by the gemara to illustrate this reliance on the human element for transmission of the Torah:
1) Tanur Shel Achnai
2) Yannai’s Hamelech’s heresy
3) Hillel’s response to the convert who rejected the Oral Law
There are some statements in rabbinic literature that go as far as asserting that the decision of a Torah sage actually alters and define the reality. The spiritual power of the Torah channeled through a Torah Sage is more compelling than the power of nature and forces of human history.
