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The Torah and Rabbinic Judaism
Ryan Renfro
Religious Studies 5
February 4, 1998
“You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your
heart and in your soul; and you shall bind them as a sign upon
your hand ,and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.
” (Sacred Texts, p. 62) With these words, God
instructed Moses and the Israelites what it means to be a
Judaist. The words of God were the Torah, preexistent with
him from the beginning, which are roughly God’s instructions
of how the Judaist is to live and behave. In fact Judaism
means the way of Torah, thus it comes as little surprise that the
practice and study of Torah, both written and oral, are the most
important parts of life in rabbinic Judaism. The Torah is
the central aspect of Judaism because every element in Judaism
ultimately derives from it and the revelation thereof at Mount
Sinai.
If Judaism is the way of Torah, then it is vital that anyone who
wishes to understand Judaism also understand the Torah. Torah
is used in Deuteronomy as “a general term including not only
the laws and rules, but also the narrative, the speeches, and the
blessings and the curses of the Pentateuch.”(The
Encyclopedia of Religion, p. 556), but the term Torah itself
means instruction and is also used as a more general term when
referring to all of the teachings of God believed to have
originated from Moses’ revelation at Mt. Sinai in 1447 BC
and not just the Pentateuch. Yet Torah means even more than
this to Juadists. Torah is the living word of God, a divine
wisdom that existed in the beginning as a part of God himself and
which ascended in the Revelation at Sinai. The Judaist
therefore sees the obedience of the commandments as a way of
communing with God, since they are a part of him.
Unlike many fundamentalist Christian groups, the Jews believe
that the Torah or God’s word is passed on from Moses in two
ways: through the collection of writings now know as the
Hebrew Bible or the Written Torah and through the Oral
Torah. The Written Torah is divided into the Pentateuch or
the 5 books of Moses, the books of the Prophets or Nevi’im
and the Ketuvim or Writings. The Pentateuch is the most
important of these because it contains the 613 mitzvot or
commandments concerning everything from ritual, civil, and
criminal law to family and ethical laws which are the basis of
Jewish law. The Oral Torah is the teachings from
Moses’ revelation which were not written down in the
Pentateuch and provide a clearer understanding of the laws
contained within the Written Torah. It is comprised of both
the legal or halakhah and aggadah or nonlegal
rabbinic teachings written down between the 3rd
century bc and the 5th century AD. The Oral
Torah first manifested itself in writing in the Mishnah,
which was a collection of the laws organized by the rabbis as a
sort of reference book, which was then commented upon in the
Talmud. The Babylonian Talmud was the most important, and
in its 18 volumes it shows discussions between rabbis and the
process through which the law was made. But this was too
large and too far removed from the Biblical text, so the Midrash
was created as a way of commenting upon the Talmud and attempting
to link it back to the Written Torah. It is important to
note that none of the rabbis who worked on these books claimed a
divine revelation but rather were drawing upon the oral tradition
that was handed down from Sinai. By this oral tradition,
the rabbis are able to take the mitzvot, many of which may
seem outdated, and interpret their meaning and how they should be
applied to each time period within their salvation history.
It is through study of the Written and Oral Torah that the
Judaist may learn how God wills him to live.
One of the more unique features about Judaism is that it is
perhaps a religion of history more that any other. The
history of Judaism is a salvation history; a history of
God’s saving acts toward the House of Israel. The
central moment in this history is the revelation of Torah to
Moses in 1447 BC. So vital is this moment and so strong was
the covenant established with Israel that it is often referred to
in terms of a marriage between God and Israel by the traditional
rabbis. This was in one way a “once and only”
time for the Jewish religion, but it is also ritually relived
time and again ever since, in the festival of Shavuot or
Pentecost and in every time that the Torah is studied and
interpreted, allowing the faithful throughout the ages to
continue to hear God’s words.(Judaism, p. 15) The
Torah was the unique gift of God to the people of Israel because
they alone of the peoples of the earth accepted his word. As
the way of salvation, the revelation of the Torah represents the
moment in Jewish history in which they were given the means of
salvation and the Torah by which they could order their lives and
achieve this salvation.
As a religion with 613 commandments which came directly from God
and countless others which have been created in the spirit of the
originals throughout the centuries, it seems only fitting that
Judaism would be a belief system in which orthopraxy is more
important that orthodoxy. A Judaist may always have
unconventional views when it comes to philosophy or mysticism but
they must always practice the ways of Torah. The adherence
to the mitzvot is the way to live a holy life and to
please God by upholding his covenant with the people of Israel.
The Torah is a total system of guidelines for life, concerning
everything from murder to the most insignificant daily action,
but at the same time making every act one does a possible holy
action. It is the commandments of the Torah from which the
rituals and laws of Judaism derive and the observance of them
allows for the survival of the community. The rabbis see
their obedience to the laws of Torah
The traditional rabbis believe that only way by which the Judaist
can know the Torah and through the Torah know God is by the study
of Torah. The study and interpretation of Torah became
widespread in the 2nd Temple Period and along with the
sacrifices at the Temple it was the center of Jewish life. When
the Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD, Torah study
became a substitution for the sacrifices and thus the main
sacrament of Judaism. It is only through study that
the Jew may learn the myths, laws, scripture, and theology of
Judaism, and through which gain and understanding of its ethical
dimension. The study of Torah is not only vital because it
gives one a way of communicating by God by reading his Word, but
it is also how the teachings of the faith have been passed down
and kept alive throughout the millennia.
It should be no surprise that the Torah is the very essence of
Judaism when one considers that it is believed to be the word of
the living God. To peoples of other faiths it may seem a
harsh, sort of self-inflicted punishment, but it is what has kept
the people of Israel together for over 3 millennia. With
out these shared practices and this covenant with God, they would
have blended in with the surrounding cultures and faded away.
Torah has been the lifeblood of their very being as a culture and
religion, and according to their beliefs the very tie between man
and God.
Bibliography
Fishbane, Michael. Judaism.
HarperSanFrancisco: San Francisco, 1987.
Neusner, Jacob. “Judaism in the
World and in America” in World Religions
in America: An
Introduction. Westminister/John Knox Press: Louisville,
KY, 1994.
Smart, Ninian. Worldviews: Crosscultural
Explorations of Human Befiefs
Charles Scribner’s Sons: New York, 1982.
Smart, Ninian and Richard D. Hecht. Sacred
Texts of the World: a Universal
Anthology.
The Crossroad Publishing Company: New York, 1992.
Urbach, E.E. “Torah” in The
Encyclopedia of Religion, eds. Mircea Eliade,
et al. Macmillan:
New York, 1987