Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law, by Chaim Saiman

This might be your story.

You grew up in an environment where Christian culture was the norm. Even if you weren't religious yourself, from an early age, you heard people contrast Jewish legalism with Christian spiritual freedom. You heard that the letter of the Law killeth and the Spirit brings life.

Even today, you dimly recall Bible stories where it sounds like Jesus is throwing off the chains that the "old covenant" put on the Jews. In the back of your mind, you wonder why the Jews stubbornly clung to their dried-up set of rules.

Then you read Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law, by Chaim Saiman, and it blew your mind.

Or this might be your story.

You grew up in a Jewish household. Your family celebrated the holidays and occasionally showed up at shul (especially if you someone you knew was becoming bar or bat mitzvah that day). 

But you never really considered keeping kosher, not driving or shopping on Shabbat, or praying multiple times a day. That all seemed liked Old World, black-hat sort of stuff. You vaguely knew there were rules about it in the Talmud. That seemed like reason enough to avoid the Talmud, and "Jewish law" in general.

Then you read Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law, by Chaim Saiman, and it blew your mind.

In this book, Saiman makes a convincing case that "Jewish law" is nothing like what people think it is. It's altogether strange, like a parallel universe. It mixes together stuff that clearly looks like "do this and don't do that" with storytelling, exegesis, parable, philosophy, and mysticism, as if there were no boundaries between them. 

Even the legal parts of the texts are eerie. They pay as much attention to situations that rarely occur, don't occur any more, or never did and never could occur (by the rabbis' own reckoning) as they pay to everyday issues of what to eat and drink and how to do business. They look at Bible stories and poetry as possible sources for legal reasoning (and vice versa!) 

Perhaps most strange of all: We are accustomed to thinking of "law" as something a government enforces. Halakhah was created--yes, beginning at the time when Jesus was still there to hear about it--in a situation where Jews did not govern themselves. 

So, when you get detailed rules about how to light the Shabbat candles at home, that's one thing. But when you get equally detailed and elaborated procedures for judging murder cases when no Jewish courts had jurisdiction over them...or instructions for how the priests should offer sacrifices in the Temple in Jerusalem, debated after the Temple had been destroyed and Jews weren't even allowed by the Romans to enter Jerusalem...then this is not "the Law" as we know it.

What is it? In a word, it's Torah.

Torah doesn't mean law. It means teaching: by God to us, about the right way to live.

That teaching can take all the different forms I mentioned above: storytelling, exegesis, parable, philosophy, and mysticism. Saiman makes a convincing case that in rabbinic Judaism, the primary way we learn how God wants us to live is through discussion of halakhah. He gives examples of how legal discussion is the entryway to profound questions like:

• Is pain a harsher punishment than disgrace, or the other way around?
• Is a human being primarily body or soul?
• What is it like to pay attention to God's commands at every moment?
• Is justice best served by strict enforcement or by compromise?

These sound like the questions a philosopher would ask. They are not questions that would be posed directly in rabbinic writings, however, and for good reason. Saiman points out:

...the Talmud bears greater resemblance to literature than analytic philosophy...The Talmud simply does not make any sense outside of its "plot"--the foundational claims of the world it inhabits. These include that God gave the Torah to the Jewish people and commanded them to perform mitzvot. (p.139)

The Talmud assumes that the story is always already going on, and that you are a character in it. You don't need abstractions. You need to know how to play your part.

So, here's the story you need to understand why anyone would study halakhah.

You are part of a people addressed by God and entrusted with the task of making this world the way it ought to be. There isn't a moment of your life that's simply just there. It's all there for you to lift it up and make it holy.

You don't have to do it alone. You always pursue holiness in community. 

You don't have to figure it out all by yourself. You are part of a tradition that's thousands of years old and still going strong.

You don't have to reason it out from first principles. You can turn to the first page, instead.

From what time is the evening Shema recited? "From the time that the kohanim [priests] enter to eat their consecrated food [terumah], until the end of the first watch." These are the words of Rabbi Eliezer. But the sages say: until midnight. Rabban Gamliel says: until the dawn rises.

If you decide to ask, "What is the Shema? Why is it said? Why is it said at set times? Why the evening? Who were the priests, what was their consecrated food, and when did they eat it? What were the watches of the night, and what was the first watch? Who was Rabbi Eliezer, and what do we know about his methodology? Who were "the sages"? Who was Rabban Gamliel? What were their methodologies, and how did they arrive at differing conclusions? What did later generations do to decide among them? What practical implications did this question have, the one about when you have missed your opportunity to say the evening Shema? What ethical implications does it have? What does it tell us about our relationship to God?"...then you are part of that age-old partnership with God.

And if you are not, at least you can now stop thinking of it as just a set of rules!