It is written in the first verse of the tractate Pirkei Avot (Chapters of the Fathers): “Moses received the Torah on Mount Sinai and transmitted it to Yehoshua. He transmitted it to the elders of the people, who in turn passed it on to the prophets, who passed it on to the men of the Great Assembly.” With this verse, the rabbis, that is, the men of the Great Assembly, created a chain of continuity that linked them directly to Moses, to whom at that time they had already added the title of Rabeinu, our rabbi, our teacher, thus trying to make him the origin of the rabbinic tradition. We are not surprised that the verse did not mention the kings and the priests, who were the main authority in the time of the two Temples. The fact that they were not included was a sign that leadership was passing from the traditional figures, the monarchs and the priestly class, to the houses of study, to the rabbis themselves.

By arguing that Revelation and Prophecy had ended, that God no longer spoke to anyone, the rabbis removed God from the stage of history and devoted themselves to interpreting His Message as expressed in the Holy Scriptures. They said that their interpretations of the Torah were not something new, but that Moses had received them at Sinai, in the form of what they called the Oral Torah and that it was transmitted from one sage to another. Jewish literary creation moved from the Bible, a book that narrated the history of the Jewish people, including the acts and presence of God, to another book, the Talmud, the Oral Torah, where new historical events were no longer narrated and therefore God no longer appeared and what was narrated were the rabbis’ comments on the texts of the Bible. In the Bible, God and the people of Israel are the main characters; in the Talmud, the rabbis are the main characters. Now, contact with God was indirect, through the rabbis who interpreted His Commandments.

Clearly, the change of leadership was due to the destruction of the Temple. It had functioned as the political and cult center of the people of Israel and when it was destroyed, the void left by the priests and kings was filled by the rabbis. Even the president of the Great Assembly, a rabbi elected by his colleagues, received the approval of the same Roman authorities, which made him the head, not only religiously, but also politically, of the People of Israel.

The destruction of the Temple in the year 70 and the failure of the Bar Kochba uprising 60 years later (132-135), was a devastating event for the Jewish People. The Roman response to the Jewish rebellion was tremendous. They wanted to wipe Judaism off the face of the earth. The rabbis knew that the Jewish people did not have the military, political, or economic strength to confront the greatest power of that time. The only thing that could save them was to turn them into something different. They replaced the Temple, the priests, and the sacrifices with the synagogue, the study of the Torah, prayer, and mitzvoth. The solution was a new Judaism, Rabbinic Judaism.

By Marcos Gojman.

Bibliography; “Jewish Culture in Greco Roman Palestine” by Eric M. Meyers, part of the book “Cultures of the Jews,” edited by David Biale.