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A Rabbinic Ontology of the Written and Spoken Word: On Discipleship,

Transformative Knowledge, and the Living Texts of Oral Torah

Martin S. Jaffee

Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 65, No. 3. (Autumn, 1997), pp. 525-549.

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Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65 /3

A Rabbinic Ontology of the

Written and Spoken Word: On

Discipleship, Transformative

Knowledge, and the Living

Texts of Oral Torah

Martin S. Jaffee

INTRODUCTION

STUDENTS OF CULTURE ARE RECOVERING these days from arecent addiction to global theories about "orality" and "literacy" as essen-

tial modes of cultural being.' Where literary or ethnographic studies onceassumed a nearly ontological gulf d ividing cultures of the "spoken word"from those of "the book," those standing o n the recent side of the debateover the "Great Divide" have become accustomed to working with moresupple, sociologically-grounded models for understanding the implica-tions o f oral and literate forms of cultural transmission (e.g., Foley 1991,1995; Graham; Carruthers).

Martin S. Jaffee is Professor in a nd C hair of the Com parative Religion Program and P rofessor of Jew-ish S tudies at th e U niversity of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195.

' Influen tial representatives of the theoretical tendency t o hypostasize or ontologize orality and lit-eracy are the groundbreaking anthropological essay by Go ody and W att, the hermeneu tical work of



526 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

The hasty retreat from a misplaced ontologization of orality and liter-acy has, however, missed an im portant po int . The academy's enthusiasmfor positing a vast gulf between two hypostasized cultural form s was not

entirely wrong-headed. The plausibility of the ontological dichotomiza-tion of orality and literacy am ong culture theorists is grounded, after all, inthe empirical availability of cultures that posit precisely such a distinction.Scholars of orality and literacy merely missed what should have been obvi-ous . Academic socialization, dependent as it is upon the transm ission oftradition in sophisticated oral and written registers (Shils: 100-128), isitself a form of the very discursive dualism it hoped to cast in ontologicalterms. In this way, academic theory com mitted an elementary error-it

uncritically replicated in its own interpretive discourse the data it soughtto theorize, thus mistaking a contingent historical structu re for a universalontological one.

The following essay attempts to save ontological thinking aboutorality and literacy while avoiding the error of what might be termed"misplaced ontologization." Its primary contribution is to insist that westudy the ontolog ization of the written and spoken word as historically-and culturally-specific discourses without ethnocentrically projecting

ou r results on to a global anthropological screen. The key is to roo t onto-logical reflection upon orality and literacy as deeply as possible in thesocial structures and communicative svstems that sustain thesedichotomies in the first place.

Accordingly, I explore here some ontological dimensions of the writ-ten and spoken word in early Rabbinic Judaism (ca. third-sixth centuriesCE).2At the center of my interest stands the common Rabbinic juris-prudential distinction between written revelation of law from . ~ i n a i(Scripture) and orally-transmitted legal tradition from Sages (Rabbinicteaching).' This conception of the dual sources of Torah, I suggest,

'Because of the preliminary character of this study I have treated as a single "Rabbinic culture"what is in fact a highly complex family of cultures in Palestine and Mesopotamia. The most useful

survey of classical Palestinian (in fact, Galilean) Rabbinism is that of Levine. For Mesopotamia, see

Neusner 1978; and Gafni:177-204.

In light of the historical complexity of Rabbinic culture, I claim for my "ontology" no more than a

heuristic model that illumines basic aspects of Rabbinic thought as canonized in the Palestinian andBabylonian Talmuds and might enable more refined studies in the literature. In so doing I hope to

avoid the acontextualism of a pioneering theorist of the ontological dimensions of Rabbinic textual-

ity, Jose Faur (84-113).)This is thematized in two complementary ways in classical Rabbinic thought. In jurisprudence,

distinctions between laws derived from Scripture (deoraita) and laws instituted by Rabbinic scholars(derabbanan) identify the sources of the law and the consequent authority of specific rules. In addi-



527afee:A Rabbinc Ontology

extended beyond a theory of how the two form s of knowledge were trans-mitted and taught. It was more than a theory of legal or theologicalsources. The distinc tion estabished as well a hierarchical distribution of

ontological potency among the diverse textual embodiments of the tradi-tion. Three principal types of such embodiments will concern us here: thewritten scroll of Mosaic Torah, the orally-performed text of Rabbinicteaching, and the person of the Rabbinic Sage. Each embodiment ofTorah was distinguished from the others not only by the medium inwhich the text was transmitted and the skills required for decoding itsmessage. Each textual mediu m enjoyed its own distinct place in a largerconception of Torah as the ontological foundation of the w orld.

THE PUZZLE THE TORAH-TEXT RABBINIC CULTURE

There is, in one respect of course, no news in the announcement thatTorah in Rabbinic culture sustained an ontological weight. The classicalRabbinic literature of Late Antiquity is familiar with the notion thatTorah per se serves as a principal structure of cosmic order.4 Like manyHellenistic intellectual systems within and beyond the borders ofJudaism, the Rabbinic system rooted the being of the cosmos in an u lti-mately linguistic conception of mind (Boccaccini).My point, however, isthat the Torah's ontological significance extended as well to the media inwhich texts of Torah were embodied and transmitted.

I can name, however, no passage that explicitly defines an ontologicalgrid for classifying the diverse linguistic and non-linguistic forms inwhich the Torah is conveyed as comprehensible hum an com munica tion.While medieval Jewish Neoplatonic ontologies richly reflect suchschemata (e.g., Scholem: 32-86; Matt; G iller: 59-79; Holdrege: 131-212;

Wolfson), I doubt that Rabbinic Sages would have recognized in theirown tradition anything corresponding to an "ontology of the written andspoken word."5 Nevertheless,I believe that my discussion, while framed interms foreign to Rabbinic discourse, sufficiently intersects it to enable auseful fusion of herm eneutical horizons.

Most of the evidence drawn up on here is well known to students ofRabbinic literature. The Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds, in particu-lar, are rich in materials-of a theological, historiographic, and legal

character-that portray the Rabbinic literary heritage as an exclusively

'The most frequently cited example is from the beginning of Bereshit Rabbah, a fifth-century




oral tradi tion, an "Oral Torah:' transmitted in a series of face-to-faceencounters between Rabbinic Sages and their disciples, beginning withMoses' instruc tions to his associates (e.g., b. Erub. 54b). Yet, as students

of Rabbinic literature increasingly recognize, written texts of Rabbinicteachings existed from a very early period (Stemberger:31-37). It is alsoclear, however, that such written texts did not until the early Middle Agescome to be regarded as authoritative versions of the orally-deliveredtexts they re ~ re se n te d .~here medieval Talmudic com mentators com-pared m anuscript readings in order to establish a correct text, their pre-decessors in Late Antiquity consulted colleagues who had memorized thetext (Lieberman:88-90).

This is a puzzle. Early Rabbinic circles produced written versions ofkey elements of the oral-traditional curricu lum , and the written versionsthemselves served as mnem onic cues aiding the memorization of texts forcitation in learned oral exchanges. But these written versions bore no tex-tual au thority over oral citations in the way that a written copy of thecanonical Scriptures would have controlled oral variations of its text. Anontology of the written and spoken Rabbinic text must begin in reflectionupon this situation. W hat is ultimately at stake in the privileging of the

voice over the page in early Rabbinic pedagogy?'In order to frame a context for addressing this question in its onto-logical dim ension it is best, perhaps, to take a rather substantial detourthrough sociology. Inqu iry into the Rabbinic ontology of oral and writ-ten linguistic texts is enriched by reflection upon the people who incor-porated such texts into themselves and came to be viewed as theirhu man embodiments. As I shall argue, the d istribution of oral and writ-ten texts of Rabbinic trad ition am ong overlapping ontological registers is

sustained by a particu lar paideic system, namely, a system of discipleshipto m en believed to image in their own being the Torah that, on tologi-cally speaking, sustains the world. That is to say, Rabbinic distinctionsbetween the written and spoken media of Torah are intimately con-nected to the social dom inance of the Rabbinic Sage as a symbolic repre-sentation of Torah.

"he entire question of the nature of Rabbinic comp ilations in Late Antiquity, particularly thedegree to which manuscript versions were viewed as closed or canonical "works," is hotly disputed.



529affee:A Rabbinc Ontology

DISCIPLESHIP IN THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS

Ontologies of the written and spoken word are thus boun d up with

systems of power relationships. This system of relationships is the socialframework in which texts bear not only meaning but the authority tocompel attention to their meanings. That authority, of course, is notwielded by the texts alone bu t by their hum an mediators (Asad:27-54,83-167; Valantasis 1995).We begin ou r inquiry into the complex ontology ofRabbinic texts, therefore, with som e general reflections upon the socialsource of textual au thority in religious societies tha t are, like tha t of theSages, grounded in systems of discipleship. These observations will help

contextualize the particulars of classical Rabbinic discipleship and placeus in a position to grasp the implications of Rabbinic culture's celebrationof the spoken word of Torah.

The institution of discipleship in R abbinic Judaism was, of course, asocial structure with a long Middle Eastern and Mediterranean pedi-gree-beginning well before the origins of Rabbinic Judaism (Gammieand Perdue; Arm strong), and ex tending past those origins in to classicalChristian (Hengel; Byrskog; Longenecker; Rousseau; Valantasis 1991;

Elm ), and Islamic (Schimmel:228-258; Malamud) patterns of religiousassociation. Moreover, this entire tradition of discipleship bears manyim portan t structural parallels with patterns of discipleship developed inSouth and East Asia both before and after the emergence of the Rabbinicmovement (e.g., Gold 1987; Tam biah). Yet I know of n o comprehensivephenomenology of discipleship in the history of religi~ns.~n light ofthis, I offer some preliminary reflections o n the phenomenon that willserve to focus attention on traits tha t are particularly salient in interpret-ing the particular discipleship-patterns developed in third-six th centuryRabbinism.

Discipleship, at its foundation, is a social system that b inds at leasttwo persons (but normally more) into a specific hierarchical relation-ship. A central transaction in that relationship is the transmission of cul-turally privileged knowledge from the superior to the subordinate. Thenature of this knowledge will concern us m omentarily. For now, we focusupon the nature of the relationship itself. To grasp the relationship of

SIm port ant resources for such a study, in addition to the fundam ental work of Weber (46-94),

would include the helpful sketches of Wach, Katz, and Waldman and Baum. Unforunately, no oneseems to have taken up G old's challenge (1988) to apply his theoretical mod el of a "gram mar of reli-gious perception" to examples of religious leadership beyond the H indu sants who provide the pri-




discipleship, first of all, is to study n ot only the subordinate figure in thehierarchy but the superior as well. Discipleship is the system of com mu-nication that binds together the super ior and the subordinates, as well as

the relations that em erge among the subordinates. For this reason, whenthinking abo ut discipleship in the history of religions, I prefer to speak ofthe "discipleship community." My interest is not primarily in the psy-chology of the leader or the follower but in the social hierarchy thatenables them to discover and enact their roles.

Not all hierarchical relationships, of course , qualify as discipleship.Children are no t disciples of their parents, nor are pupils necessarily dis-ciples of their teachers. By discipleship in particular I mean a reconstruc-

tion of the parent-child relationship in a non-familial instructionalsetting analogous to th e school. The discipleship com munity is modeledupo n the school's capacity to transm it cultural traditio n, but it recon-structs the school into a kind of substitute for the family. Teachers are no tbiologically the mothers or fathers, the g randp arents, uncles, or aunts oftheir pupils, and they do not norm ally relate to their pupils as kin. But ina system of discipleship the teacher bears for each student a responsibilityappropria te to tha t of kin-particularly the father or mother-or even

replacing it. Correspondingly, the disciples bear to each other relationsderived metaphorically from the family's bro thers o r sisters. We have dis-cipleship, in other words, when affective relationships culturally ap pro-priate to elder kin and children are transferred to the educational settingof the school, ordering the relations of people who are not biological kin.

The disciple community, therefore, is neither a family in the bio-logical sense nor, in its educative func tion, quite equivalent to a school;bu t its coherence depends up on sharpening the functions of bo th. It is thesetting in w hich the school recapitulates at a m ore refined level the cul-tura l task of the family. In the disciple-com munity the disciple returns tothe psychological situation of childhood to be fundamentally re-formedas a hum an being. Whereas the child is formed thro ugh emulation of theadult kin, the disciple's task of emulation involves absorb ing the teachingof a master in such a way as to em body the master's own hum an achieve-ment.

What is the master's achievem ent? It is at this point that the questionof special knowledge arises. The master's achievem ent is greater than that

of the biological parent or other elder, who has merely become a partici-pant in the received tradition. The master, by contras t, has reached thatform of hum an perfection held ou t by tradition as the highest attainable.



Jaffee: A Rabbinc Ontology 53 1

Th e master is also more than a teacher, for a system of discipleship ismore than a school. Schools transmit the knowledge expected of func-tional participants in the religious tradition o r culture. Whether at a rela-

tively fundamental or at a more sophisticated level, they transmitformative knowledge, knowledge that shapes the cultural and autobio-graphical identity of the knower and enables him or her bo th to share inand contribute to creativity in the culture. In the setting of discipleship,however, students are trained to re-conceive their own human perfectionin emulation of the model presented by their parent-teacher-the master.The knowledge offered in the disciple system is no t formative but trans-formative. It holds out the promise that one might become in som e fun-

damental sense a new being.We are now in a position to offer a rough definition of the disc iple-

ship community tha t can be useful in the study of diverse religious tradi-tions. The discipleship-community is a setting for the transmission oftransformative knowledge in which emulation ofthe imparter of knowledgeis both a primary goal of knowledge and proof of its possession. Emulationmay involve imitating the master's actions, mem orizing the master's for-mal teaching, telling stories about the master's deeds. and so fo rth. It may

involve a psychological identification with the master to the po int of sub-mission to physical discipline or sexual intimacy. It a lmost certainly willhave as a consequence the form ation of very complex psychological rela-tions among the disciples themselves, as each struggles to appro priate theperson of the master.

The transmission of transformative know ledge thu s lies at the verycenter of the discipleship-community. This knowledge invariably is con-ceptualized as a kind of text. It may include writings received from thelarger religio-cultural tradition in which the discipleship-communityemerges. It may include writings particular to founders or leaders of thatcommunity. It may include texts transmitted only in the exclusively oralregister privileged by face-to-face encounter. In any case, texts of all sortsconstitute the principal medium of the exchange of transformativeknowledge. The master is master because of a perceived capacity toim part the essential meaning of such texts; the disciple is defined by th ethirst for the knowledge they contain and the will to submit to theirnorm s; co-disciples sup port and compete with each o ther in p ursuit of

such knowledge.The basic social and psychological elements of this s truc ture of mas-

ter, transform ative text, and disciples are, I suspect, rather stable from



-- - -32 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

and change the models of hu man perfection towards which those textspo int. Masters will model types of transformative knowledge un ique totheir own traditions, and disciples will discover their transformed per-

sonhood in culturally specific terms; but the communal structure thatenables such knowledge to reshape human lives in redemptive patterns isa relative constant. If, therefore, we would grasp the ontological dimen-sions of texts in Rabbinic discipleship-comm unities, we m ust pay closeattention to the simple fact tha t what m ade a text Torah was the convic-tion tha t, through it, the Sage worked a transformative influence on thelife of his disciple.

THE DISCIPLESHIP-COMMUNITIES OF ORAL TORAH

Our detour has taken us now to the point at which we can begin toappreciate the way in which the early Judaic discipleship-communities inparticular shaped the setting in which texts of various kinds were tran s-mitted as transformative knowledge. It is well beyond m y scope to isolatehere the various threads of Greco-Roman discipleship-communitieswoven into Rabbinic patterns of d iscipleship in the th ird century CE andthereafter. It is sufficient to rem ind ourselves that, as the Second Templeperiod drew to a close, the Judaic landscape was dotted with a variety ofideologically diverse subcultures that, for all tha t, bore strikingly similarsocial-structural characteristics.

In another place I have tried to grasp this com mon feature by theterm "in tentional com munities" (Jaffee, 1997:133-163; see also Mason).Groups such as the Alexandrian Therapeutae, the Yakhad of Q um ran , thePharisees, and the primitive Jesus-comm unities, all appear to have beenconversionist associations form ed to pursue a collective transformative

discipline under the guidance of persuasive teachers. Am ong such teach-ers Torah referred no t simply to the nam e of the books they interpretedor to the substance of their teaching; more importantly, it seemed toexude from their very persons, taking form in the con tours of a humanlife. In such men a principle of being had become tangible to the sensesfor interpetation and emulation. Around such embodiments of truthgathered disciples, eager to draw by proximity and imitation from thefountain of Torah tha t flowed from its source in the supra-sensible, eter-

nal world of Heaven in to the sub -lunar world of becoming.The fall of the Temple in 70 CE, lamented bitterly in liturgically

transmitted memory, proved for some of these communities an insur-




one, found here an opp ortun ity to expand their com munal life beyondthe Jewish nation. Surely the distinctive disciple tradition we know asRabbinic Judaism, and which came to know itself as the tradition of Oral

Torah, emerged to self-consciousness in this period as well (Neusner1979a; Cohen). While its particular roots in the Second Temple milieu areprobably beyond clear identification, the Torah of the Rabbinic Sages wasby the beginning of the third century CE well on the path towards what itwould ultimately become by the end of the tenth-the Torah of virtuallyall who regarded themselves as Israel.

Not every male Jew, of course, could or w ould actually apprenticehimself to a Rabbinic Sage and take up the life of a disciple. Yet the life of

discipleship to the Sage had become the prim ary milieu for generating thetraditions of domestic custom, liturgy, and theological imagination thatmost Mediterranean and M iddle Eastern Jews would by the seventh oreighth cen tury regard as their own. These traditions, framed in texts ofvarious kinds, would become the substance of transformative knowledgeheld out to disciples for their personal appropriation. But at the center ofthat transformative life was the intense scrutiny of the words and deeds ofthe living Sage himself. Let us now explore som e of its characteristic con-

tours as they appeared in the classical period of rabbinic discipleship,beginning from the th ird century. This is the setting in which the distinc-tive ontological valuations of various media for the transmission of Torahshall emerge.

THE TEXTS OF ORAL TORAH IN CONTEXT

The third century marked a dram atic pedagogical revolution in theshaping of Rabbinic discipleship as a transformative project. At the heart

of tha t revolution lay a vast, comprehensive legal text whose very nam esuggests its significance. The name is M ishnah. Philologically rooted in astem that means "to repeat" ( r n h ) ,Mishnah often bears in the earliestRabbinic literature the semantic sense of "tradition m emorized throughrepetition" rather than denoting the title of a legal compilation. Accord-ing to Rabbinic historical memory, the particular recension of memo-rized tradition called "the Mishnah of Rabbi" was compiled in theacademy of the central political leader of early third-cen tury Palestinian

Jewry, Rabbi Judah the Patriarch. With Rabbi's Mishnah a conspectus oftradition com mon to all Sages and disciples replaced the diversity of tra -ditions that had earlier been linked to the personal authority of specific




It remains unclear whether Rabbi Judah the Patriarch himself pro-duced a written do cum ent of the entire Mishnah (Stemberger:133-140;Lieberman:83-99; Neusner 1994:21-25). Most contempora ry scholars of

the Rabbinic literature acknowledge that the w ritten texts of the Mishnahthat survive in medieval manuscripts are not simple transcriptions oftexts com posed in purely ora l circumstances. Rather, the Mishnah showsmany signs tha t writing was used in its composition (Jaffee 1994). Thepoin t, however, is that, whatever the man ne r of its textual com pos itionand preservation, the M ishnah was intended to be studied an d analyzedin a n exclusively oral interchange between master an d disciple. By the latethird century the oral setting in which the Torah of the M ishnah was

taught came to define its con tents as well. The Mishnah was regarded asthe primary repository of Oral Torah, and many of its traditions wereclaimed to originate in Sinaitic revelation supplem enta ry to the WrittenTorah of Scripture.'

The terms Written and Oral Torah, it mus t be stressed, did n ot at firstdescribe the m edia in which texts were composed o r preserved. Ratherthey described the modes of the ir public performance as literature. Eachmode was designated by a formal term denoting the character of the text's

public declam ation. The Written Torah was "read" (qr')-in the sensetha t the text was sung aloud from a scroll in the course of its study an dexposition. The Ora l Torah, by contrast, was "repeated" (?nh)-quotedfrom memory, without recourse to the m nem onic crutch of a written text(Gerhardsson:28-29).

Both Torahs, then , existed in writing, an d both were transm itted inan oral declamation tha t comm only included com ment on an d exposi-tion of the text. W hat needs to be und erstoo d, then , is the significanceof referring to texts of Scripture as "Written Torah (despite the oral-performative setting of the written text's presentation ) and texts of theMishnah as "Oral T o r a h (despite the fact that they had been comm ittedto scrolls or other sorts of written surfaces). We can approach this puzzleby focusing more closely upon the entire question of the nature of textu-ality in early Rabbinic culture. As we shall sho rtly see, there is mor e tothe concept of text in Rabbinic discipleship-communities-and, thus,more to the concept of Oral Torah-than first meets the eye.

'It is imp ort ant to distinguish between oral tradition in Rabbinc Judaism and O ral Torah. The for-mer is a socio-cultural form to which m any forms of early Judaism may have contributed and fromwhich all drew; the latte r is a distinctively Rabbinic ideological constru ction of the h istory an d signif-



535affke:A Rabbinc Ontology

The Text of the Written Torah. In a scribal culture rich in textual pos-sessions, the scrolls of S c r i p t u r e a n d particularly those o n which wereinscribed the Five Scrolls of Moses-were subject to the most stringentrules of production and use. Its copies were produced in scrupulous con-form ity to precisely defined norm s that ensured a textual stability pre-served in Antiquity only for works regarded as cultural treasures(Lieberman:20-46;Smith:45-64). These norms, themselves deemed partof the received tradition of Oral Torah, governed the preparation of thetextual surface and inks, the shaping of the letters, the orthography of thewords, and the paragraphing of the text (Bar-Ilan:212-232).

The scroll of Written Torah produced under such discipline, of course,

com municated linguistically. Read in public ceremonies as a written mes-sage originally transcribed by Moses (o r a prophetic descendant) at divinedictation, it transmitted the content of the covenantal revelation preservedfor Israel's instruction, edification, and censure. The communicativepower of the scroll of W ritten Torah, however, was not confined to its mer-its as law, evocative narrative, or epic poetry-for the scroll was also acultic object. Cerem onially conveyed in a procession during the liturgicalrite of the synagogue, the scroll comm unicated meta-linguistically, mark-

ing the tangible presence of God an d serving as a relic of the reality ofcovenantal revelation (Green; Holdrege:359-383).

The W ritten Torah's communicative life as symbolic icon shall inter-est us later in another context. For the present we focus on its character asa verbal utterance, for it is precisely as utterance that we encounter oneother aspect of its cultu ral presence as a text. While the W ritten Torah wasundoubtedly read aloud , studied, and interpreted as a docum ent, it wasalso-especially for disciples of the Sages-a text that was carried in the

mem ory. The W ritten Torah was written, and the proper way of reciting itfor liturgical purposes was by reading out the written text; but it wasdeployed in the train ing of the disciple primarily in the form of proof-texts and testimonia that adorned the citations of Rabbinic homiletical orlegal teaching. And such testimonia had to be culled from mem ory, notfrom manuscripts.

We cannot read the surviving Rabbinic literature at all withoutencountering the Sages' stunn ing ability to sum mon apparently obscure

scriptural texts as rhetorical testimonia to various points of Rabbinic lawan d theology. This mastery of the scriptural text testifies to a comprehen-sive project of mem orization that yielded a Scripture known backwards




on Scripture reminds us that the Sages knew their Scripture with aphysical intimacy reminiscent of the Hebrew double entendre regardingthe word "knowledge" (da'at ). Scripture was first and forem ost known by

a possession as intimate as the taste in one's m outh, encountered textuallyas a presence lodged in memory, and brought to expression in thetongue's speech. In this crucial sense the Written Torah was an oral asmuch as a written text, a possession within the body as much as a materialobject in the w orld (Morris; cf. Carruthers:l89-220). With this in mind,let us turn to some reflections on that othe r body of memorized text, thetext of Oral Torah.

The Text of the O ral Torah. The Written Torah lived a crucial part of

its life in the Rabbinic community in the medium of memory andspeech. Yet, as pointed out earlier, its material presence in a scrollenabled it to serve, even unread, as an icon of the entire Judaic complexof cultural memory. In a mirror-like reversal of this pattern, the OralTorah of the Sages, no less a possession of memory, lived out a longshadow-life as a loosely arranged, textually polymorphous collection ofwritten sources with no discernible iconic significance (see n.6 ). Let meelaborate upon this, because it is precisely here th at I wish to make my

contribution to grasping the ontological dimension of textuality in Rab-binic culture.The question of most interest concerns the meaning of the well-

know n Rabbinic ambivalence towards the written text of O ral Torah. Theclassic expression of that ambivalence is found in an exegetical trad ition,transmitted in bo th the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds, that pro-scribes the study of Oral Torah from written versions. I reproduce thecrucial sections here from on e of the Babylonian recensions (b. Tem. 14b:cf b. Git. 60b; y. Pe'ah 2:6, 17a an d parallels). In this version, in whichmid-to- late third-cen tury Sages dominate, the question of writing is gen-erated by a report tha t one Sage, Rav Dimi, wanted to send by letter thecorrect wording of a Mishnaic passage to his colleague, Rav Yosef. Theensuing discussion speaks to ou r interests:

1.Now even if he had foun d som eone to write the letter, could he havesent it? For surely said R. Abba b. R. Hiyya b. Abba, said R. Yohanan:Those who write down legal traditions (halakhot) are like those who

burn the Torah. And anyone who studies from them receives no reward.2. R. Judah b. Nahmani, Resh Laqish's Announcer, expounded: OneScriptural clause says: "Write for yourself these things" (Exod. 34:27);



Jaffee:A Rabbinc Ontology 537

3427)-this tells you that things transmitted in memory you may notrecite from writing, and things transmitted in writing you may not recitefrom memory.

3.And a Tradent of the School of R. Ishmael reported an oral tradition:"Write for yourself these thingsn-these things you may write, but youmay not write legal traditions.

Despite the contentions of many scholars committed to an exclusivelyoral model of the transmission of early Rabbinic tradition, such passagesas this hardly constitute compelling evidence that Rabbinic texts were pri-marily unwritten.

Quite to the contrary, the passage's condem natio n of the use of wr it-ten copies of Oral Torah is predicated o n the fact that they were widelydisseminated-even through the mail. Othe r passages, in the PalestinianTalmud in particular, know of Rabbinic teachings preserved in notebooksan d on walls (y. Ma'as. 2:4 ,49d , y. K il.l :l, 27a; see Jaffee forthco ming). Aseventh-century synagogue in Israel's Bet Shean valley, moreover, has asection of the Palestinian Talmud reproduced in mosaic tile on its floor(Sussman).

So, to resume my a rgument, it is no t the proscription of written textsof Oral Torah that m ust be explained; rather it is the ambivalence abouttheir existence." For o ur passage reflects what is everywhere assumed innearly all Talmudic portrayals of Sages and disciples in study. That is,despite the existence of written versions, the M ishnah an d other texts ofOral Torah were learned in the course of a face-to-face oral interchangeinvolving the m emorization, recitation, comparison, a nd critical analysisof mem orized texts.

How do we interpret the preservation of written versions of OralTorah within a scholarly com munity refusing to make use of them in theformal education of its disciples? This paradox of Rabbinic pedagogyopens a window on to the Rabbinic understanding of the relation betweenthe written and spoken text of Torah. Behind that window, framed

I ' Cf. Alexander 1990. While preparing this article for press, my graduate colleague, Michael

Thomas, brought my attention to the following excellent exploration of an identical ambivalence

among medieval Damascene Muslim intellectuals in Chamberlain:133-151. See in particular 148-

149: . . . [Wlhat excited suspicion of books was not the texts themselves. The reason that books

were objects of such simultaneous esteem and disdain was that the transmission of 'ilm[sacred learning] was not entirely alienated from the ritual nature of its production. Books in




squarely in the center, stands the Sage as the comprehensive embodimentof Oral Torah, the model of the transformed individual. He, too, was atext. We well understand the Rabbinic ontology of the written and spokenword once we see how he was read.

The Master as Living Text. I will not speak here of disciples, such asRav Kahana, who hid beneath the conjugal beds of their m asters in o rderto observe the way of Torah in th e erotic arts (b . Ber. 62a). Such narrativesof the master-disciple relationship have been m ined for all they're worthby gender studies, an d I have no interest in violating my neighbor's bor -der (see Boyarin; Satlow). Nor can I possibly condense here all the ways inwhich Rabbinic narratives abou t the acts an d words of holy men assume

that the Rabbinic Master and the Torah were at some profound levelaspects of each other (Neusner 1994:566-568). But I would like briefly toreflect o n two typical stories abo ut M asters. Each in its own way offers usa powerful image of the Sage's embodied act as a text that the disciplemust learn to read and, ultimately, incorporate in to himself.

There is, for example, a well-known story ab ou t the legendary first-century Sage Hillel's unquenchable thirst for knowledge:

Our M asters repeated an o ral tradition:A pauper, a rich person, and a wicked person come to their judgment.

They say to the pauper: Why didn't you devote yourself to Torah? If hereplies: I was poor, and swamped by the need to find food-they say tohim: And were you poorer than Hillel?

For they said of Hillel the Elder tha t each day he would labo r and earna half dinar. Half of it he would give to the registrar of the collegium, andhalf went to suppo rt himself an d his dependents. One time he was unableto ea rn anything, and the registrar of the collegium denied h im entry. Sohe climbed up and sat against the opening of the skylight in order to hearthe words of the Living God from the mouths of Shemaiah and Avtalion.

Now th at day was a Sabbath Eve in the dead of winter, an d snow fellupon him from Heaven. When the M orning Star rose, said Shemaiah toAvtalion: Avtalion, my brother, on most days the house is bright, buttoday it is dark-is it cloudy ou t? They glanced and saw the shape of aman in the skylight. They climbed up and found him covered in 3 cubitsof snow. They brought him down, bathed him, ano inted him , and sathim next to the fireplace. They said: This Hillel-for him it's worth dese-

crating the Sabbath! (b. Yoma 35b)This narrative's directness as a mo ral tale abo ut love of Torah masks

some puzzles. What, for example, would possess a registrar to expel a




light? I cannot solve these puzzles. But I do think I can help po int to thisstory's obvious power within the Sages' community of discipleship.

The key, I think , lies in the simultaneous centrality and absence of the

teaching of Shemaiah and Avtalion. Hillel, after all, ascends to the roof ofthe collegium only to hear an echo of the words of the living God pro-ceeding from the mou ths of Shemaiah and Avtalion. But notice that wenever learn what he heard-or if through the thick skylight he heard any-thing at all. The story's poin t as a transm ission of Torah, in fact, has no th-ing to do w ith what Shem aiah and Avtalion have to say; rather, it is abou twhat Hillel did.

The story's meaning, in fact, emerges in the way our attention is

deflected from the words of Torah uttered by the Sages to the embod i-ment of Torah represented by the disciple. W hat sinks into the imagina-tion of disciples who ponder this story is a lesson formed by a graphicimage: the hunched silhouette of Hillel's body, a black hulk against thepale, snow-filtered light of a winter morning. The words of the LivingGod may have proceeded from the m ou ths of Hillel's teachers, bu t theirmeaning is embodied in his own frozen form of devotion. This is what adisciple is, this is what m ust be emulated. More imp ortant than the O ral

Torah Hillel failed to hear is the Oral Torah he becam e by his desire tolearn. It is this trait of Hillel as disciple tha t makes him a powerful exam-ple of a Sage; for the Sage is nothing but the perfection of d iscipleship inthe form of perfect obedience to Torah.

A more prosaically narrated and certainly more obscure incident pro-vides a second example of the Sage as a text to be in terpre ted over andbeyond the words he can formulate as teachings. It concerns the peculiarspy-m ission of the early fourth-century Babylonian Sage, Rav Yitzhak b.

Rav Yehudah:Once Ula made a visit to Pum bedita. Said RavYehudah to RavY itzhak

his son: Go and b ring him a basket of fruit for the Sabbath, and make sureto watch how he makes havdalah, the concluding Sabbath bened iction.

Rav Yitzhak didn't go. He sent Abaye instead. When Abaye returned,RavYitzhak asked: W hat did he do ? Abaye replied: W hen he held the cuphe said "Blessed is the O ne who divides between the holy and the com -mon,'' and nothing more .

RavYitzhak came before his father, who asked him: So, what did he d o?He replied: Well, actually, I didn't go, bu t I sent Abaye. And he told metha t he said "Blessed is the O ne wh o divides between the holy and thecommon."




Let us reflect upo n this for a mom ent. A great Master, Ula, comes totown. At precisely tha t m om ent a question regarding the proper w ordingof the benediction of havdalah has plagued the scholars. All know that the

Master can answer the question. But nobody asks him. Is the proper textof havdalah a kind of trade secret generations after the first-centurydebates of the disciples of Shammai an d Hillel? In any event, Rav Yehu-dah-himself an acknowledged master of tradition-designs a cleverploy as a way of getting the answ er from Ula with ou t asking it. He sendshis son o n a mission that conceals, within a gesture of homage, a hiddenagenda. The son, above such nuisances, in turn deputizes a younger disci-ple, Abaye, who dutifully brings the fruit. It is Abaye-ultimately to

becom e one of the great Sages of Babylonia-who brings back the reportof what he has observed, the all-im porta nt formula for havdalah as Ulahas performed it.

This story, spare in its telling, is rich in the glimpse it offers of theSage as a living text. Ula could have reported in a second his form ula formaking havdalah. But the tradition he might have transm itted orally wasof lesser au tho rity in Rav Yehudah's op inio n tha n actually being in thephysical presence of the M aster as he realized the tradition in an act. The

Oral Torah was no t fully present in discursive language at all. Its fullnesswas m ost richly available only as Ula embodied Torah in the actual hold-ing of the cup and th e recitation of the benediction.

This is precisely why Rav Yehudah sent his son o n the mission; and itaccounts as well for his anger u po n learn ing of Rav Yitzhak's own failurepersonally to fulfill it. W hat Abaye gained was what Rav Yitzhak mightnever possess-the actual glimpse of Torah em bodied in the form of Ulaben t over his havdalah, the benediction on his lips. Of course, the story of

Ula's havdalah could an d would be transm itted as the verbal text of O ralTorah . Here it is, 1500 years later in the Talmud. But this text is no t th ewhole text, an d it was not the whole text even on the day of its formula-tion for transmission as a trad ition .

The whole text was there to be read only by those attending Ula. Andfuture readings of that text would depend entirely upon the disciples' suc-cess in transm uting Ula's wordless text into th e language of tradition. TheOra l Torah read from th e text of Ula's actions was ultimately reduced toverbal texts. These texts, on the page, were inert as Ora l Torah bu t capableof revival in the form of voiced narrative, informing the minds an d theactions of a chain of disciples and masters.



Jafee: A Rabbinc Ontology 541

of the spoken and written text of Torah. Classical Rabbinic Judaism rec-ognized as Torah only two classes of texts. One, the text of the W rittenTorah, represented the physical relic of revelation, the written code by

which the structuring principle of the cosmos was reconfigured in lin-guistic signs. Each letter enjoyed its own unique power of significationwithin the closed code of verbal revelation. Each, therefore, was preservedinviolate according to the best efforts of professional copyists.

The second type of text, the word and deed of the Sage, representedthe plenitude of revelation in its existential concreteness. Its units ofmeaning were n ot encoded in linguistic symbols bu t rather in the inte-gration of thought, speech, and act that displayed the incorporation of

Torah in a lived life. The scroll of Scripture was Torah transform ed in tothe code of w ritten hu man language; the Rabbinic Sage was Torah trans-formed in to an embodied form of h um an being. Accordingly, even thetext of the Written Torah fulfilled the telos of its being only when its codewas lifted by the Sage's voice off the w ritten scroll and incorporated intothe O ral Torah of his own life.

Between these two sorts of ontologically rich texts of Torah-thecode of the Written Torah, and its teleological unfolding in the O ral Torah

of the Sage's thought, word, an d deed-existed a range of texts sufferingvarious forms of diminished o r derivative being. There were, for example,texts utterly devoid of ontological potency insofar as they were precludedfrom consideration as texts of Torah. Greek "books of Homerus" o r the"external works" of pseudo-Scripture excluded from the Rabbinic canonwould have fallen into such an ontologically empty domain. Such textscould never embody th e ontological fullness of Torah, for they originatedin the created order of derived being, rather than in the creative order in

which all being had its source.But what of the other manuscripts imprinted with the mnemonictraces of the Sage's words, disembodied from the personal presence ofthose who had received and transmitted them from the m ou ths of theirmasters? What of the texts of O ral Torah written down? Unlike the scrollof Written Torah, the written rendering of Oral Torah was not a holyobject. No professional scribe produced it, no legal norm s governed itsproduction or ensured its sanctity. In this it was like a secular book. But,unlike the secular book, it had a relation to Torah.

This relationship explains the unique ontological sphere occupied bythe m anuscript of O ral Torah. The conceptual content of O ral Torah mightbe confined to such a text, bu t the on tological fullness of Oral Torah was




Moses on Sinai, the w ritten texts of O ral Torah were inert traces of thatrevelation-of mnem otechnical value only. These mnemon ic traces ofrevelation could be restored to life as Torah on ly in the mou ths of Sages

and disciples. The written script of Mishnah and other renderings ofSages' traditions, that is, were uniqu e am on g all writings in that they hadonce been Torah, were not now Torah, but could again become Torah.

The texts of Written Torah were Torah even un read by virtue of thecoded revelation preserved on their parchment. Common texts couldnever be Torah no matter how they were read, for they were of purelyhu man origin. But the texts within which the m nem onic traces of OralTorah were preserved could be restored to existence as Torah even

though , in written form, they were co m m on books. The vehicle of thistransfo rmation was the voiced performance of the disciple or Sage, whocould sum mon the texts of Oral Torah from the internalized, imm aterialscroll of memory.

Herein lies the substantive correctness of the Talmud Yerushalmi'sassertion that oral traditions imp arted to M oses are somehow "imbeddedin the M is h n ah (y. Pe'ah 2:6, 17a). The me taphor of imbeddedness isimp ortan t. The scribal copy of the Mishnah was not itself Oral Torah, for

no w riting could conta in Oral Torah. Yet the copy retained the un iquecapacity to become Oral Torah. It became so in a distinctive twofold per-formance-the memorized delivery of the text in public acts of learningand, even more crucially, in the actual discipline of a life in com formitywith the norm s of the text (cf. Fraade: 69-75).

This last po int is crucial, for delivery in speech was only a pa rt of thetransfo rmation of texts into Ora l Torah. In tr ut h, Oral Torah was nevermerely a collection of words on or off a page. In the discipleship-

communities of the Sages Ora l Torah was a form of tradition that over-came anything written or spoken. Grounded in speech, it neverthelessabsorbed all discourse into something even more concrete. This, as Ihave explained, was noth ing less than the living presence of the M aster,whose very bodily motions were read as wordless texts disclosing theessence of Torah. The Sage, then , the person of the living Master, is o u rlast crucial text of Torah. And the code he embod ied could be read onlyby one devoted to his personal service.

In this sense, words-written o n surfaces or uttered in learned dis-course and formal performances of tradition-formed only on e elementin the com position an d com prehension of texts of Oral Torah. The com-pletion of texts, their genuine mobilization as a com munication of Torah,




compose texts with one's own life tha t oth ers might themselves learn toread.I2

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A Rabbinic Ontology of the Written and Spoken Word: On Discipleship, TransformativeKnowledge, and the Living Texts of Oral Torah

Martin S. Jaffee

Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 65, No. 3. (Autumn, 1997), pp. 525-549.

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A Rabbinic Onthology of Written and Spoken Dord