Avot I: The Meaning of Tradition

By Rabbi Alan Yuter
Posted Friday, April 28, 2006

The Mishnah's moral tract, Pirqe Abot, opens with a chronology based on the magic number, seven. The first nine chapters of Chronicles tells the story of God's sacred human chain of culture to the threshold of the Israelite monarchy.

We find two virgin birth geneologies for Jesus' in Matthew and Luke, trying to connect Jesus' lineage to the Jewish Messianic office. This literary attempt to legitimate Jesus comes on the heels of the earliest Gospel, Mark, in which the virgin birth claim is absent but there is some embarrassment regarding Jesus's obscure origins .

The Judaism of the Dual Torah presents a chain of Tradition not out of whole cloth, but as a literary proclamation of a world view. For the late Priestly writer of Chronicles, preserving the History of ancient Israel from the Priestly perspective, with its concern for order, meaning, and right living was a sacred mandate. Relying on the Chronicler's precedent and the need to present Christianity's founder in a morally favorable light, the Matthew and Luke writers presented two claims that testify to Jesus's legitimacy, and indeed, Messianic background.

The Gospels were concluded around 90 CE, white Pirqe Abot was compiled between 200-220 BCE.. In a likely response to the emerging Jewish Christianity, Pirqe Abot offers the Jewish claim that truth resides not in a canonical person but a canonical written document and a canonical oral Tradition. Rabbi Jacob Neusner has shown that the divide between the ancient Christian and Jewish communities is not in the Hebrew Scripture that they share, but in the way that Scripture is read. For the Christian, individual is saved by faith in the Ressurected Jesus. For the Jew, the nation is sanctified by observance of the commandments, the content and procedure of which is preserved in the Oral Torah canon.

The chain of tradition begins at Sinai, not with Adam, Abraham, or creation. This Tradition at Sinai the and did not end at Sinai the When some Jews render our Mishnah "Moses recieved Torah at Sinai," with the definite article, they definitely make several serious errors. The books of Leviticus and Numbers relate post-Sinaitic information, Deuteronomy was articulate by Moses, and not God [making it the a written record of oral Torah. The accounts of the gather of wood, the daughter's of Zelofhad, and the profaner of God's name recall that Moses required oral updates from God regarding how he ought to respond, indicating that before Deuteronomy, the entire Torah was oral]. Indeed, God told Moses to write the book of Torah before he died, none of the first four books of the Pentateuch refer to itself, as a whole, as a book.

Those who claim that the entire Written Torah as we have it today was authored at and not later than Sinai make at least too additional errant claims. The oral Tradition of Pirqe Abot is confirmed by the Supreme Court of Israel, and is neither private not oracular. We often confuse the "tradition" of culture and the Tradition of Sinai. By affording the tradition of culture the valence of the Tradition of Sinai, we confuse the religion of real Tradition with the Tradition that is Jewishly authorative. And in Pirqe Abot 6:6, we speak of a doctrine called Emunat haHachamim, which means "faith of the canonical rabbinic scholars," and is translated improperly as "faith in the sages" today.

Unlike Christianity, Judaism's canon of commandments sanctifies the nation and does not canonize people. By denying the oral Torah's canonicity by assigning it to the right reverend rabbis who alone may parse the mind of God, we find a return to that rejected religion that inspired Pirqe Abot to come into being.

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