Avot 6:6: Torah Opinion and Torah Theology

By Rabbi Alan Yuter
Posted Wednesday, August 2, 2006 • Modified Monday, December 11, 2006

"One cannot do good theology with bad scholarship"
— Rabbi Jacob Neusner

There are two currently popular but religiously incorrect doctrines that are based upon misrepresented statements in Pirke Avot. We are taught mAvot 1:1 that "Moses received the Torah at Sinai." [ArtScroll Siddur, 545] This rendering is wrong for several reasons. The Hebrew text of mAvot reads Moshe qibbel Torah mi-Sinai, Moses received an oracle, or Torah, at Sinai, which was transmitted orally in addition to the Written law, i.e., the Five Books of Moses. There is no definite article marker for "the" in the Hebrew of mAvot 1:1. The passage actually means that at Mt Sinai an oral Torah was oral, given to Israel, which happened to precede the Written Torah. This reading is not radical. A graduate of Yeshiva University's Stern College for Women told me that this interpretation contradicted everything she was told and taught. Maimonides' and Bartinora's classical commentary makes the same point, that the Mishnah is dealing with the oral Torah. The question at hand is why contemporary rabbis, in the name of Orthodoxy, actually misrepresent canonical Orthodox Judaism.

For Maimonides, The Written Torah was written down by Moses before he died and was not dictated by God to Moses as a whole book at Sinai. Only Deuteronomy among the Pentateuch documents speaks of the Torah as a book. The earlier Torah was oral and assumed written form only at the end of the Wilderness sojourn. The "from" of "Torah from Sinai" is to be understood as temporal and not spacial. From the moment of Sinai, throughout the wilderness sojourn, the oral Torah unfolded into being. The opening lines of Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy all explicitly testify to Torah events that occurred after the Sinai revelation. In his lucid commentary to Pirke Avot, Rabbi Jacob Neusner not only confirms this reading, he renders the Tractate as "Sayings of our Founders" and not "Ethics of the Fathers." The second, popular rendering is faulty on two grounds. The rabbis should not be confused with the Church Fathers. The latter defined doctrine with their intuition, the former transmitted traditions which were in their view the word of God called Torah. Second, "ethics" is apologetic. The signature sayings of Judaism's founders reflect not an "ethic" but an "ethos," a pervasive religious mood that informs all aspects of life.

Why did this mistranslation and misrepresentation, that Moses got the entire Torah, including the narratives that are post-Sinai, at Sinai? Among the forty eight qualities which make the acquisition of Torah possible, is emunat haHachamim, which is wrongly rendered by the Hareidi ArtScroll as "faith in the sages." The Hebrew form, semichut or construct, is means "faith of the sages." Hareidi religion teaches that the entire textual Torah was given to Moses at Sinai. Ibn Ezra's and Maimonides' understandings, that certain passages may have been added to the Torah after Moses died, and that the Pentateuchal text was committed to writing before Moses' demise and not at Sinai the place, are suppressed, as if these views are not part of Tradition. Since this Judaism maintains that faith must be placed in its rabbis, the truly religious Jew must submit to this rabbinic ideology and must maintain faith in its Traditions, intuitions, doctrinal proclamations and ritual rulings. According to the actual text of Avot and the religion of the canonical rabbis of Judaism, we must adopt the faith of the sages of the Mishnah. According to Hareidi religion, we are obliged, by dint of ideology and misrepresentation, to have faith in the virtual infallibility of its rabbinic elite.

According to the Judaism of the Written and Oral Torah canon, Israel is required to have faith in God and not in people. Torah is revealed at Jerusalem, according to Isaiah. [2:3] And this passage is referring to a post-Sinai reality! Only the Sanhedrin possesses this power to update the Oral Torah. This authority does not devolve to any synod of rabbis, Orthodox or non-Orthodox, Hareidi or modern Orthodox, in our own time. The authentic Jew is committed to thoughtful principles and not to misreadings of those who do not trust the God of Israel, who entrusted all Israel with the Torah.

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