Text study will not save Judaism

My good friend Friar Yid has an excellent post detailing a competition by Brandeis and the Bronfman philanthropies to find “the best proposal for a book that would transform the way Jews think about themselves and Judaism.” Sounds good, right? Except they settled on a book with a prescription of text study as the next best thing to save the Jewish People.

Text study. That is, studying the Torah and commentaries, the Mishnah, the Talmud, the Law Codes, and so forth and so on. Ad nauseam, really.

The Friar quotes me as saying, ‘The problem with [insert would-be revolutionary Jewish thinker here] is that they think text study is going to save the Jewish people. It won’t.’ Now, I don’t remember saying this in so many words, but it’s exactly the kind of thing I would say, because it’s true.

Repeat after me: Text study will not save Judaism.

By and large, nobody gives two hoots about anything said in, for example, the Talmud. When modern Jews are looking for guidance about an issue, be it ethical, moral, political, financial, whatever—the Jewish tradition is one of the last places they’ll look. To use the Talmudic jargon, la salqa da’atakh, it wouldn’t even come into your mind to consult the Talmud. When making these kinds of choices, people will follow the values of their society and their associates and friends, not their religious tradition’s. The Talmud, or any traditional Jewish text for that matter, is seen as so far removed in time and place from the modern world that most Jews simply don’t care. However, this is, of course, an oversimplification. The more Orthodox among us, and some of the more conservative among the Conservative branch, and possibly even some liberal Jews, genuinely believe in (a) the value of text study lishma, that is, ‘for its own sake’, and (b) the potential of such study to save the Jewish People. If you believe in the sanctity of the texts in question, or the potential to glean valuable life lessons from these texts, then I suppose (a) makes some sense. However, the vast majority of Jews cannot be arsed to care about texts. Texts are not going to save Judaism. Let me outline a couple of reasons why. There’s more than these three reasons, but I’ve already spent too long writing this essay:

1. Difficulty and inaccessibility. The Talmud is hard to read—it’s written in colloquial Aramaic with a highly technical and specialized jargon, for heaven’s sake, and the translations are uniformly awful. The commentaries are even more difficult. You have to be able to follow several different logical threads at the same time, the argumentation is very frequently obscure and arcane, and it’s not easy to figure out the function or purpose of much of what goes on in Jewish texts. Then, when you finally get through the difficulty of the text itself, you are still faced with the daunting task of making sense of the underlying argument, and in some cases this isn’t even possible.
2. Steep prerequisites. You can’t make head or tail of the Mishnah, much less the Gemarah (the two constituent parts of the Talmud) without a thorough grounding in the Torah. Not just the story-history bits of it, like Abraham sacrificing Isaac or Moses smashing the Tablets of the Law, but the Law itself, every precept, every nuance. You simply can’t approach any other text in Judaism without knowing the Torah. Then, the Talmud becomes the prerequisite for the commentaries, the Law Codes, the medieval philosophers, and everything else. It’s cumulative, and the learning curve is incredibly steep. They don’t call Jews ‘the people of the book’ for nothing.
3. Irrelevance. This applies both in time and in space. Much of the Talmud, and related writings, are about traditions thousands of years in the past, or places thousands of miles away, or both. Example: Deuteronomy 21.18–21 commands you to stone your son who is stubborn and rebellious (the so-called ben sorer umoreh). Do we do this anymore? Of course not. Did they even do it in the time of the Talmud? Of course not, and the Talmud itself basically admits as much: Chapter 8 of Tractate Sanhedrin (pages 68b and following) is obviously unhappy with this Torah law, so it institutes so many rules and regulations that it basically makes the ben sorer umoreh impossible to exist, thus legislating the Torah’s law out of existence. But the argumentation involved covers five pages of Talmud, concluding with ‘there never was one, and there never will be one’, but then Rabbi Jonathan says, ‘I saw one, and I sat on his grave.’ What the hell does this mean? And what relevance does the whole discussion have for our lives today, given that we are perfectly capable of coming to the conclusion that the Torah’s law is stupid on our own, without the help of the Talmud’s stipulation that to qualify as a stubborn and rebellious son, the boy in question must have drunk four log of Italian wine? Who the hell cares?

However, the assumption underlying not only this ’solution’ of text study, but the very question of ‘what will save the Jewish People’ in the first place, is that the Jewish People are, in some sense, fundamentally imperilled. I’m sorry, but it’s going to take more than scare-value stories about Americans’ willingness to change their religions, or the shocking levels of intermarriage, or what have you, to convince me that Judaism is in need of this kind of ’saving’. Another solution in search of a problem from the hallowed halls of academe. What a pity, when there are so many useful things we could be spending our time doing.