Al Reguel Ajat

Despite the vast body of rabbinic literature, the process of interpreting the Torah continues. The Oral Torah is unfinished. And this process does not depend on new divine revelations. Now, trying to understand God’s will must be carried out in another way: by applying human intelligence to the commandments given to us at Sinai. This process can go as far as making decisions democratically by a majority of duly accredited scholars.

In the Talmudic tractate Bava Metzia (59 a-b) a discussion is recounted between R. Eliezer and a group of sages. The issue was whether the oven of Aknai was pure or impure. R. Eliezer said yes and the sages said no. On that day, R. Eliezer brought all the arguments imaginable, but the sages did not accept them. Then he said to them: “If the Halacha agrees with me, let the carob tree prove it!” So ​​the tree was uprooted 100 cubits from its place (others say 400 cubits). No proof can be derived from the carob tree, the sages answered. Again R. Eliezer said to them: If the Halacha agrees with me, let the stream of water prove it! Then the stream of water began to run backwards. No proof can be derived from a stream of water, they answered again. Again R. Eliezer said to them: If the Halacha agrees with me, let the walls of this school prove it. Then the walls leaned as if they were going to fall down. At that R. Joshua said to the walls: When scholars are engaged in a halachic discussion, why do you have to intervene? And the walls did not fall, in honor of R. Joshua, but neither did they straighten up in honor of R. Eliezer and remained bowed. Again R. Eliezer said to them: If the Halacha agrees with me, let the proof come from Heaven. Then a heavenly voice was heard saying: Why do you argue with R. Eliezer, who does not see that on all points the Halacha agrees with him? But R. Joshua stood up and exclaimed: (The Torah) is not in heaven! What did he mean by this? R. Jeremiah explains: The Torah was already given to us on Mount Sinai. We will not listen to any heavenly voice. Therefore the opinion of the majority prevails.”

There is something else that is added below to this legend. The day after the argument, Rabbi Nathan meets the Prophet Elijah. Rabbi Nathan asks him: “What was Ha Kadosh Baruch Hu (God) doing at that time?” Elias answers: “He was smiling and saying, My sons have defeated me, My sons have defeated me.”

By Marcos Gojman

Bibliography: The Jewish People, their history and their religion, by David J. Goldberg and John D. Rayner.

A problem that concerns every sensible Jew is the existence of Jews who observe many mitzvoth but are, nevertheless, unethical people.

To think that being religious automatically makes a person ethical is a mistake, for a Jew cannot be considered religious if he or she does not also observe the ethical commandments of the Torah.

The commandments between man and God, Bein Adam Lamakom, are only one part of Judaism and if correctly fulfilled, have very profound ethical implications. A large number of commandments and much of the rabbinic literature is concerned exclusively with those mitzvoth that involve actions between one individual and another, “Bein Adam Lechaveroh” and are as important as the laws of Kashrut, putting on tefillin or praying. “To love your neighbor as yourself” is the most well-known example, but there are many others, such as the laws on charity, speaking ill of others, proper conduct in business, and more.

Judaism is so concerned with this point that it considers a person who has not studied these mitzvoth and “is ignorant, cannot be considered a righteous person” and therefore is not really an observant Jew. A Chassid is one who is an upright Jew and who practices good deeds. The sages consider that God rejects those who observe only the mitzvoth Bein Adam Lamakom and do not fulfill the mitzvoth Bein Adam Lechaveroh.

People who are unethical and unkind to their neighbors, but who pretend to be religious, are equated by the rabbis with one who commits the sin of Chillul Hashem, profaning the name of God. It is written in the Talmud, Yoma 86a: “….if someone studies the Tanach, (the Bible) and the Mishnah….but is dishonest in his business dealings and discourteous in his dealings with people, what do they say about him? Woe to the person who studied Torah, woe to his father who taught that person Torah; woe to his teacher who taught that person Torah; This person who studied Torah: see how corrupt his deeds are, how ugly his ways are;”

By Marcos Gojman

Bibliography: “The nine questions people ask about Judaism” by Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin.

During the Roman siege of Jerusalem (1st century CE) an old teacher, Yochanan ben Zakai, managed to slip away and with the permission of the invading army, established a Pharisaic academy at Yavneh, on the Mediterranean coast near Jaffa. At that time, the Jewish people were divided. On one side were the Sadducees, mostly priests, who recognized only the written Torah, especially the Temple service, the sacrifices, and the leadership of the Kohanim. A second group were the Pharisees, heirs to a broader tradition, who had expanded, interpreted, and applied the Written Torah in what they called the Oral Torah. Their followers were men skilled in the law and its interpretation. A third group were the Essenes, who also rejected the priestly hierarchy and lived in rural communes devoted to manual labor and strict religious discipline. A fourth group were the Zealots, revolutionaries who were close to both the Pharisees and the Essenes and who sought to free Israel from the Roman yoke. A fifth group were the Nazarenes, Jews who attended the Temple and observed Jewish laws, but who were followers of Jesus.

The war with Rome destroyed the Zealots, totally reduced the influence of the Sadducees, disintegrated the Essenes, and Christians ceased to be a sect within Judaism and became an external movement made up of non-Jews. The Pharisees, with their synagogues and houses of study, were the only ones who survived this hecatomb.

The merit of the Yavneh school was that it managed to demonstrate that Judaism did not depend for its existence on the Temple, now destroyed, nor on sacrifices, but on an inner religious life full of spirituality and good deeds. The teachers of Yavneh created a new way of practicing Judaism without sacrifices, without priests and without the Temple. They dedicated themselves to compiling the teachings of their predecessors, such as Hillel and Shammai. It is interesting to note, by the way, that they were more inclined to the more flexible and less literal style of Hillel’s disciples than to the rigidity of Shammai. The title of «Rabbi,» which means «my teacher,» began to be used to distinguish that wise man recognized by his colleagues. The title was conferred upon them with a certificate called Semijah, which gave them authority to teach and decide on legal matters.

At that time, the Sanhedrin, the highest assembly of the Jewish people, was made up of rabbis who came from the most diverse ways of life and who depended on a trade or occupation to generate their own income to be able to live. They owed their religious leadership to their expertise and wisdom in the interpretation of the Torah, which attracted followers who became their disciples. The heirs of the Pharisees led religion along the path of personal ethical responsibility and obedience to the commandments of the Torah. They were the founders of Rabbinic Judaism and laid the foundations for what we have today. And it all began in Yavneh.

By Marcos Gojman

Bibliography: “The Jewish People” by David J. Goldberg and John D. Rayner.

In the book of Exodus 33:13 Moses asks God: “…if I have found favor in your eyes, please show me your way, so that I may know you…” The question is one of those existential questions: Why do good people sometimes do badly and bad people do well?

In the Talmud’s Berachot 1:7, our sages try to explain it and in the first instance they tell us that depending on how the father of the person was, so will the son do. If the person is good and the father was not, then the person will do badly and vice versa. But the Gemara itself does not accept this answer: How can it be that a person’s fortune depends on the actions of his father? The Gemara tries to offer another explanation: perhaps that person is not completely good or not completely bad and that is why things are bad for the first and good for the second.

And the discussion between our sages continues until finally Rabbi Meir says: “In reality God does not give Moses an answer. In Exodus 33:19 God tells him, “I will favor the one I choose to favor, and I will be gracious to the one I choose to be gracious to,” meaning that even to the one who does not deserve God to be gracious to him, He can be gracious to him. This answer reminds us of what Rabbi Yannai says in Pirkei Avot 4:19: “We do not know how to understand why the wicked enjoy during their existence and why the righteous suffer during their life.”

In his book, “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, after learning of the diagnosis of the terrible illness of his three-year-old son Aaron, asks himself: “I thought I was following God’s ways and doing His work. How can this be happening to my family?” If God exists, if He were just a little fair, let alone loving and merciful, how could He have done this to me? And Kushner himself answers: “We should not ask, as Job did: “God, why are you doing this to me?” but we should say: God, look at what is happening to me. Can you help me? We should seek God not to judge us or forgive us, not to reward us or punish us, but to give us strength or comfort us.”

I have witnessed how people who call themselves religious, attribute the misfortune of others to their failure to fulfill the mitzvoth. Nothing could be more wrong. In reality, we do not understand why life is not fair, because to understand it we would have to know the ways of God. And not even Moshe Rabeinu knew them.

By: Marcos Gojman

Bibliography: Tractate Berachot, The Art Scroll Series, Mesorah Publications, LTD and Harold Kushnier “When bad things happen to good people”.

In the book of Shmot (Exodus 24:12), it is written: “God says to Moses: Come up to me on the mountain and wait there, and I will give you the stone tablets with the teachings and commandments that I have written to instruct them.” Moses stayed on the mountain for forty days and forty nights. Much of what God told Moses was written in the Torah, but other commandments, our sages say, remained in Moses’ memory.

For example, in Devarim (Deuteronomy) 12:21, it says: “…you may slaughter any of your cattle or sheep…as I have instructed you….” But nowhere in the written Torah does it explain how to slaughter animals according to divine laws. Our sages interpret that these commandments are part of the Oral Torah that God gave to Moses.

The entire oral part of the Torah was eventually written down in the Talmud. The Talmud is the Oral Torah, an extraordinary work compiled by our sages over several centuries and continued by generations of scholars. One could even say that to this day, commentary is still being added to the original texts.

Now imagine that, before the invention of printing presses, the more than 2.5 million words that make up the Mishnah and Gemara (Mishnah + Gemara = Talmud) had to be transcribed by hand. It was the family of Daniel Bomberg, who were not Jewish, that produced the first large-scale editions of the Talmud in 1520 and 1523 CE.

Many editions followed this first one, and one of the most famous is the Vilna edition, published by the widow and the Romm brothers between 1927 and 1932. A page from that edition of the Talmud includes:

• In the center, the Mishnah text that introduced the topic, dating back to the year 200 CE.
• Below, the corresponding part of the Gemara from the year 500 CE.
• On the side, the commentary of Rashi, who lived in France between 1040 and 1105.
• On the other side of Rashi’s commentary are the Tosafot commentaries, written by sages who lived in France and Germany in the 12th and 13th centuries.
• Next to that are the commentaries of Rabbi Nissim Ben Jacob, a sage who lived in Tunisia in the 11th century.
• Nearly at the bottom of the page are notes from Rabbi Akiva Eiger, who lived in the Austro-Hungarian Empire from 1761 to 1837.
• Below that note is an anonymous one, probably made by the editor.
• There are also margin marks, references to medieval codes, other Talmudic passages, and corrections from the edition by Joel Sirkes, Poland, 1561-1640.

How amazing! On the same page, we have texts spanning from the year 200 to 1930. And since there wasn’t enough room for more commentary, at the end of each tractate, the comments of great sages such as the Maharsha and others were included. Thanks to all of them, Judaism remains vibrant and up to date. This is why every tractate always starts on page 2. It’s missing page 1, as a symbol that the work of commenting on the divine commandments is not yet complete.

By Marcos Gojman
Bibliography: The Talmud by Rabbi Aaron Parry.

Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, in his book It’s a Mitzvah!, tells us: “The language of Judaism is its mitzvot, the commandments through which a Jew makes the world a more sacred, more sensitive, more just, and more compassionate place. Some mitzvot seem to focus primarily on ritual, like the laws of Kashrut or Shabbat, while others focus more on ethical considerations, such as caring for the elderly or visiting the sick.”

The Encyclopaedia Judaica Jerusalem, in its article on the 613 commandments, groups them into 31 categories, 18 positive and 13 negative. Using the same logic and applying it to the list of 271 current commandments from the Sefer Hamitzvoth HaKatzar by the Chofetz Chaim, we could roughly group them as follows:

First of all, the largest group is the ethical commandments, with about 90 mitzvot. This includes, among others, honoring your father and mother, loving all Jews as you love yourself, loving the stranger who lives among you, helping the poor, paying employees their wages promptly, returning stolen or lost property to its owner, not swearing falsely, not lying, not killing any human being, not cheating in business, not coveting anything from your neighbor, not insulting your neighbor with words, not making widows and orphans suffer, not lending money with interest, not speaking ill of others, not shaming your companion, not cheating when measuring or weighing something, not taking revenge, trying to save someone in danger, rising before an elder, and not oppressing the righteous foreigner (ger tzedek) with words.

The second group, with more than 30 mitzvot, pertains to holidays: Shabbat, Pesach, Shavuot, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot. It dictates the days when work should not be done, what we should eat in each case, counting the Omer, etc.

Next are the commandments that prohibit idolatry and witchcraft, with more than 25, the rules related to food and agriculture with almost the same number of mitzvot, prohibited sexual relations with over 20, belief in God and prayer also with around 20, those related to judges, trials, and witnesses with nearly 15, those related to the Kohanim with about 10, marriage with 8, personal grooming also with 8, care for animals with 10, and others that are more difficult to group, such as not forgetting Amalek. The mitzvot of learning Torah, teaching it, gathering with Torah scholars and their disciples, and honoring them are particularly significant due to the emphasis placed on study.

It is said that a religious person is one who fulfills the mitzvot. Some mitzvot are highly visible, like observing the holidays and eating kosher. Others, like those related to idolatry or prohibited sexual relations, are followed by almost everyone. But ethical mitzvot, those that are Bein Adam Lechavero (between a person and his neighbor), the ones that cannot be easily verified if someone transgresses them, are less visible. So the question is: How religious are you?

By Marcos Gojman
Bibliography: The works cited in the text.

We all know the story told in the first chapters of Genesis, where God, after finishing Creation, tells Adam and Eve that they can eat from any tree except for the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Then comes the scene with the serpent, Eve eats from the forbidden fruit and gives some to Adam, they realize they are naked and feel ashamed, God questions them and punishes them by expelling them from Paradise, lest they also eat from the Tree of Life and become immortal.

Eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil gave humanity the ability to make ethical or moral decisions and thus the power to act rightly or wrongly. After eating the apple, humanity’s relationship with God changed entirely. In Paradise, humanity was indifferent to moral issues; there was no possibility of choosing between good and evil. Outside of Paradise, humanity became a being that could choose, that could decide. And that decision was influenced by the Yetzer Hara, the impulse toward evil, and the Yetzer Hatov, the impulse toward goodness. God helps us choose the latter through the Mitzvot. Fulfilling them is the path He would like us to take.

To say that you know all the good and all the bad of something means that you know it completely. Eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil also changed us in an intellectual sense. From that moment on, humanity has the need to know, to understand everything about everything. We want to comprehend Divine Creation and also create on our own. The apple made us want to imitate God.

The apple also awakened our sexuality. It was part of the divine plan. If Adam and Eve had stayed in Paradise, they would eventually have eaten from the Tree of Life and become immortal. By being expelled and being mortal, the only way to perpetuate the species was through procreation.

Scholars ask: Did God really want Adam and Eve to stay in Paradise? What did God want from humanity: complete obedience or potential defiance? A moral automaton or a free spirit? Ultimately, by being expelled from Paradise, humanity was condemned to nothing more and nothing less than to become a human being. And all for an apple.

By Marcos Gojman
Bibliography: “The Torah, a Modern Commentary,” edited by W. Gunther Plaut.

In Pirkei Avot, our sages say that we must be as careful in performing a minor mitzvah as we are in performing a major one. All mitzvot should be fulfilled equally.But what happens in those moments when two commandments conflict with each other, or when both mitzvot need to be fulfilled at the same time, and we can only fulfill one? We are forced to choose. The underlying question is: are there options within the Torah?

Our sages speak of two types of mitzvot. A person can perform a mitzvah that is only for their own benefit, but does not benefit others. For example, the mitzvah of putting on Tefillin or eating matzah on Passover. No matter how much someone strives to perform these mitzvot, the fact is that they only benefit themselves and do not benefit anyone else. Their devotion should be acknowledged, but it cannot be compared to someone who, by fulfilling a mitzvah, benefits others, such as the mitzvot of charity and hospitality—caring for and being concerned about others.

The mitzvot that only benefit oneself are known in the Mishnah as commandments between man and God, “Bein Adam Lamakom.” The mitzvot that benefit others are known as commandments between man and his fellow, “Bein Adam Lechavero.” Our sages clearly indicate that if we must choose between a “man-God” commandment and a “man-fellow” commandment, we should choose the latter.

Some examples of man-God mitzvot are:

• Reciting the Shema in the morning and evening.
• Loving God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.
• Fasting on Yom Kippur.
• Not eating taref (non-kosher food).
• Not cooking meat in milk.

Some examples of person-person mitzvot are:

• Honoring your father and mother.
• Showing kindness to a stranger (Ger).
• Not bearing false witness in denying a monetary debt.
• Paying a worker’s wages on time.
• Not deceiving others in matters of buying or selling.

Our sages explain it very clearly: in the case of having to choose between God and man, we must choose the human being, because God does not need us, but people do.

By Marcos Gojman

Bibliography: “Understanding Judaism, the Basics of Deed and Creed” by Rabbi Benjamin Blech.