Noam:Hey everyone, welcome to Wondering Jews with Mijal and Noam.
Mijal: I’m Mijal.
Noam: And I’m Noam and this podcast is our way of trying to unpack those really big questions being asked by all people, Jewish, non-Jewish, about Israel, about Judaism and the Jewish experience with the goal of leaving every episode in a better place than where we started from. Great to see you.
Mijal: Good to see you. So now, I’m actually like, I don’t know if you have this, but this is like a topic that I find really exciting.
Noam: Of course I have that. Like you and I teach about Judaism and Israel and Zionism. We get very excited about what we teach.
Mijal: Correct. But here I mean like, sometimes when there’s things that are like knotty and complicated and–
Noam: You don’t mean naughty.
Mijal: No, no, I have an accent, like a “knot.”
Noam: I was like, this is not a naughty topic. it’s a knotty topic. Yeah, yeah, I got you. got you. got you. Okay, speaking of which.
Mijal: I’m sorry. We are going to talk about Jewish law.
Noam: Yes Jewish law.
Mijal: But I have so many encounters with so many wonderful people and they will often be like, what is this thing? Or they would ask a question. Why do you make a blessing or why don’t you drive on Shabbat or this or whatever? And I actually find joy in taking a step back and saying, let’s understand the system. There is a system here. There is like a logic.
Noam: Yes, yes.
Mijal: There is an order to things like, like you don’t need to agree with it or follow it, like you, like it’s really good to understand.
Noam: Yes, yes yes.
Mijal: I’ll also just confess. I don’t know if you ever like had this, like, what would you have done professionally if you wouldn’t have become a podcaster? You know, I would have gone to law school. It’s just like so clear to me.
Noam: Same here.
Mijal: No, you can’t say that. was my answer.
Noam: I was going to law school, I got into law school, I withdrew from law school, I deferred from law school, then withdrew from law school to go into Jewish education.
Mijal: Didn’t love that.
Noam: Yeah, my in-laws on the Upper East Side loved when I went from going to be an attorney to being a Jewish educator. They were like, yes, do that. No they didn’t.
Mijal: That sounds lovely. My parents were actually genuinely happy when I didn’t go to law school.
Noam: I was being sarcastic.
Mijal: I know. I’m being earnest.
Noam: They were happy when you chose not to go to law school.
Mijal: Yes, they’re like, we need more Jewish educators at home.
Noam: Anyways. Can I say what I did though? Yes. The first thing that I did in Jewish education was I created a curriculum called Talmudic Jurisprudence.
Mijal: Of course, of course you did. Of course you did. But that’s the thing, if I would have gone to law school, I would have been the nerdy person who would have been in love with, like, constitutional law, and like trying to explain. Like we don’t just talk about paying taxes or stopping when the light is red. You want to understand like, you know, federal law and state law and different jurisdictions and different opinions and this and that. And I think it’s really exciting to apply those same muscles when thinking about Jewish law.
Noam: Yes.
Mijal: Okay, so let’s do that. So yeah.
Noam: Let’s go.
Mijal: First. I’ll just say so when we talk about Jewish law, halacha, that’s the word that we use, halacha, is like to go in the way and we can talk a lot about the meaning of halacha. But I want to first almost like do a little bit like history. so first, I just want to start almost with like an assumption or an assertion that according to the traditional telling of Judaism, we began as a people that is bound to law. So by this, I mean that according to the book of Exodus, when the Israelites stood at Sinai, it wasn’t just like a transcendent spiritual encounter. It wasn’t only about facing God. According to the Exodus and to traditional sources, part of that was to enter a covenant, so like a bilateral agreement in which the Israelites, the Jewish people, basically accepted a certain corpus of Jewish law. Yeah.
Noam: Yeah. A corpus of like meaning behavior, or what?
Mijal: Yeah, law. It’s law. Law. Right? The way that we think about law, like in the American context, we accepted law. Now again, we’re going to go back and forth historically today, right? When you talk to different Jewish communities, you will have some communities, let’s say like Orthodox or Conservative Jews that continue seeing themselves as like bound to Jewish law. You will have other denominations like the reform movement that developed an understanding that you are not bound to Jewish law, you are bound to Jewish ethics and Jewish values. So in the modern era, we have different understandings of how we think about it.
Noam: Sephardic? No, but Sephardic, is there that breakdown that you just said in terms of denominations?
Mijal: No, would say that Sephardic Jews broadly see themselves as bound to Jewish law. There is, though, you can really ask questions about whether… I’m trying to be careful here. You can talk about believing in Jewish law as something that Jewish people have to do versus thinking that every single person is to follow every single detail.
Noam: Right, I mean, you and I have spoken about this before. I can’t remember if it’s on the podcast or not, but I can’t remember if it’s the thinker of Meir Buzaglo or somebody else who distinguishes between the way Ashkenazim think of law and Sephardim, that Ashkenazim think of law from the perspective of obedience and Sephardim think of law in terms of loyalty. And there’s a different way to have a relationship to Jewish law in that sense. It might not be Buzaglo and it might not be a perfect, I see your face.
Mijal: This is what I wrote my stuff.
Noam: Okay, so but you don’t like that articulation?
Mijal: No, no, no, I think it’s okay. I think that we can talk about that more, but I do think there’s something about the traditional Masoroti approach to law in which you have reverence for the law and you keep some of the main highlights, but you feel like it’s not a prerequisite for belonging to keep every aspect of the law.
Noam: Meaning, within Sephardic Judaism, it’s less common to say, we believe in one aspect of Torah, but not the other aspects of Torah, whereas in Ashkenazi Judaism, and let’s call it American Judaism often, the Reform movement that emerged out of Germany, and conservative movement which emerged as a reaction to the reform movement to conserve more of the Jewish legal aspects of Judaism, they still were reforming things. Whereas in the Sephardic world, that wouldn’t take place in the same sort of way. Is that right?
Mijal: Correct.And folks, if you’re interested, like really let us know. I’m happy to do like a whole deep dive in Jewish law and denominations and the Sephardic kind of like difference there.
But just going back to like the understanding of Jewish law. So we have this covenant at Sinai, which basically means, and we spoke about this in an earlier episode, Noam, there we’re not just like a religion in terms of faith. We are a group that has a certain like legal covenant with each other.
Now, according to rabbinic Judaism, which we’ll explain in a second what that means. But according to rabbinic Judaism, we received the written law, so let’s say that’s like the five books of Moses, and we received the oral law, Torah Sheba’al Peh.
Noam: Right, and that’s kind of fundamental to modern Judaism is this acceptance that both Torahs were given to the Jewish people.
Mijal: Yes, I would say that it doesn’t matter which denomination you’re in or whether you’re secular, the Judaism that you’ve inherited with and play with, accept or reject comes from this.
Noam: Yeah.
Mijal: Okay. So, but let’s just define them. So written law we said it’s like the five books of Moses. The oral law is a little bit more amorphous to describe, torah she’ba’al peh.
I would say it like this, and I’m curious how you would say it as someone who got into law school. The oral law is both a certain sets of like instructions and precepts that we believe Moses received orally at Sinai. So almost like here’s like an oral tradition and it’s also a system.
Noam: Yeah.
Mijal: Like what do I mean by this? Let me, the best metaphor that I have for this is that in American law we have the constitution and then we have Congress and we have the courts, right? And we have systems in which to interpret the law, in which to add new laws, in which to develop the law. So you both have certain original written legal materials, and you also have an entire system that allows the law to be alive and to continue to evolve and be interpreted. So when we talk about the oral law, we mean a whole system of live interpretation that allows the law to be alive.
Noam: Yeah, with you.
Mijal: So as a quick example, I’ll just give an example, Noam. So we celebrate Sukkot, the holiday in which we build a sukkah, a little hut, and in which we shake the four species.
Noam: Famous, this is a famous example.
Mijal: Of course, I only go for the famous ones. So if you say the four species, what are they? So most people would say, and you should help me with the English, you have the etrog, which is citrus fruit. There’s myrtle. Myrtle, there’s hyssop and there’s the palm tree.
Noam: The palm fronds.
Mijal: Sure. Now the question is like, doesn’t matter what the nomination, what country everybody uses like an etrog right to shake them. But the actual written Torah does not say it’s an etrog. It hints like a period. So there it’s like it’s a type of. All of us are shaking though.
Noam: You said it very quickly. The Torah says, pri etz hadar, which does not say etrog. It means the fruit of a tree that is of splendor.
Mijal: Sure. So that’s where like the oral law comes in, right? The rabbis look at that. They look at many other things and through a legal process, they come up with a definition of what it actually is. So that’s a good, I think, a good example to understand written oral law. Okay. So we have that. All right. I’m going to jump a lot right now with history. Is that okay?
Noam: Yeah, not doing this. This isn’t like exhaustive, thorough, you could sign up to take our master class on the history, philosophy of halacha.
Mijal: We should do one. I would love that.
Noam: Yeah, that’d be cool. But for right now, that doesn’t exist at all. Okay.
Mijal: Yeah. if you’re trying to kind of, so let’s just say you’ve got the Jewish people that have a certain understanding of the law, both in its written form, and they also have like a certain set of courts and institutions that are interpreting the law.
Noam: Yeah.
Mijal: The question that people might have is, wait a second, but this oral law that hasn’t been written down, like what happened to it? You know, like I know I’ve got the Torah, the five books of Moses. Right? How do we get from having an oral law to today when we don’t have the courts, we have other written books like the mishnah or the Talmud, how does that all work out? So again, a very almost summarized description of this is that in rabbinic times, and the term rabbinic times is like a modern terms for those times, so towards the end of the second temple, and towards the beginning of the exile, you had Jewish sages, especially one specific sage, Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, Rabbi Judah the Prince, who decide to take a lot of the oral law and to actually write it down.
Noam: It’s a major moment in Jewish history. It’s in the second century, era.
Right. So and the classical way to understand this, I’m not giving like the academic way because sometimes classical academic, you can have different opinions. The classical way to understand it is that it was at a time of so much instability. Yeah. Right. And potential dispersion that the sages said, you know what, like, we are not going to be able to keep this thing alive if it’s not written down in a clear and systemic way.
Noam: And the reason it was such a traumatic moment, and dramatic moment, is because the assumption was that it was actually totally forbidden to write down the oral law. Like that was not something that was done until then. And the way histories and legal systems in general at that time used to work was it was verbally. And that was a huge part. And when you think about memory, there’s a reason for that. One of the reasons that all of us really struggle with remembering things now is because we all have our phones. It tells us exactly how to do everything, how to think about everything. When the way the, and so you don’t actually know things often, you are reliant on the technology around you.
The written word used to be a form of technology. It is a form of technology. So the way the concept was, oral law really matters because you could actually deeply internalize all the ideas, and know it and live it in such a profound way that you can’t do when you’re just writing something down. So when Rabbi Judah the Prince, Rabbi Yehudah ha’Nasi, chose to write down the Mishnah, this was a moment that they declared, and it’s hard to translate these words exactly, they said, It’s a time to do something for God, either because they did not follow your Torah, depending on how you think about the translation, or now you have to go against what was said.
It’s a time, it’s very few times in history do we utilize that language. It’s a time to do something for God to go against what God himself, so to speak, declared that we should do.
Mijal: Right. It’s like transgression for the sake of protection.
Noam: Yes, exactly.
Mijal: Which is tricky. What’s the term in English? Antinomianism? We can get into that, but.
Noam: Antinomianism, But it was called a horat sha’a. The moment said, gotta do this.
Mijal: Right, but I would say it’s one of the moments that transforms how we think of Jewish law. Yes, absolutely. Because it goes from being something that is primarily transmitted orally and then suddenly it’s not just written, it’s codified. Codified means that you have like a canonized text that has like agreement. Now, just to be clear here,
Noam: So what is the Canaanite text that has agreement? The Mishnah and then later the Gemara, the Talmud.
Mijal: Right, but just to add one more thing, Noam, I argued earlier that the overwhelming majority of contemporary Jews, no matter how you practice or not practice, we’ve inherited rabbinic Judaism.
Noam: Exactly.
Mijal: Right, which is the Judaism that comes from like the Mishnah and the Talmud. Absolutely. Right? Even if you, even if you like, you know, don’t see yourself as bound to Jewish law or if you’re secular or this or that, we are, we inherited this world.
But just to give a little note here, and if there’s interest, can explore this at different time. Back then, there were also, surprise, surprise, disagreements amongst the Jewish people. Right? In terms of this rabbinic law. This is almost like the approach that survived. But when we talk about the, you can help me, Tzadokim, Tzadukis.
Noam: Sadducees, yeah.
Mijal: The Karaites later, all of these different groups actually argued tremendously over this, but we’ve inherited, rabbinic Judaism became the mainstream, kind of like total mainstream, very few Karaites rights today, Sadducees don’t exist anymore.
Noam: People who ask certain questions about the oral law, they don’t accept the oral law as being something that’s authoritative or that has any divinity to it. They think that it is a creation of the rabbis and this was a major divergence. And so when someone is acting Jewishly today, primarily what that’s come to mean is the acceptance of rabbinic Judaism, rabbinic law as not just, by the way, this is also here, but it actually defines the Jewish experience.
Mijal: Right, so I’ll give an example, Hanukkah or Purim. Those are like two really big holidays. So those are two holidays that are so consequential, right, and they are so popular and they are not in the Bible.
Noam: What’s so interesting about that is that we say a blessing. It’s not in the Bible. And we say a blessing when we start these holidays. say, Baruch HaTah Hashem lokeno melech ha’olam, asher kiteshanim p’vim sotah v’tzivanu, which means that we say a blessing that God commanded us to do this thing that doesn’t even show up in the five books of Moses. Right? It’s so fascinating that that’s the way we think about Jewish law. That even though it’s not mentioned explicitly, not mentioned explicitly because it didn’t happen in the Hebrew Bible at this point. we view it as divinely commanded to celebrate these days.
Mijal: Right, and it tells us a lot about the identity of the sages, the sages of the Mishnah and the Talmud, It’s funny because we tend to look at them and think, they were so traditional, so conservative lowercase C. But actually, they were so creative and innovative. There was like a certain like empowerment in which they felt like this is divine. When we interpret the Torah to mean the following, we believe that our authority is sourced in God and in the written Torah and there’s like a thread that comes from one to the next.
Noam: Yeah, it’s revolutionary.
Mijal: Right. And so much of the way that we think of things today, whether it’s Shabbat or kosher, again, if you open the Hebrew Bible, you can find mention of it. But I’ll give one more example here, which I think is helpful. Like I was talking to my son the other day, and I was actually trying, he mentioned the Mishnah to me, he’s eight. And I was like, Do you know what the mission is? He’s like, no. I’m like, okay, that’s it. We’re doing this. So I kind of, I didn’t force him, but the whole walk home, I’m like, I’m going to explain to you what this means. So when I was trying to give my son an example of the way to think about the mission and the Talmud, another example that I gave, because it’s very obvious to him, I asked him, like, do we eat like meat and dairy together? Right? Can we do a cheeseburger? Like in our family, he’s like, no, we don’t. I’m like, okay. I’m like, where does it say in the written Torah, right, that you can’t eat meat and dairy together? And he doesn’t know. He’s eight, does it say? I’m like, actually, it doesn’t say so at all. Instead, there are three mentions in the Bible that says you should not cook a kid.
Noam: a kid in his mother’s milk.
Mijal: meaning not a child. Like a baby goat. Yes. In its mother’s milk.
And then it’s the rabbis of the Mishnah and the Talmud that through the process of the oral law, they take these three mentions and they extrapolate in a way that is way more sophisticated than how I’m describing it right now. They legislate and they say this means that you cannot have meat and dairy together. And there’s three prohibitions. Right. You cannot cook it together, you cannot ingest it and you cannot derive financial benefit from cooking it together.
So that’s another example of the way that we think, where’s Jewish law from? It’s like, there’s this beautiful dance between the written law and between the way that rabbinic sages end up interpreting it and creating like a whole–
Noam: And there are mechanisms for how they came up with it.
Mijal: Right, it’s not random. It’s not like they were sitting there and being like, what are we going to with the three statements? Exactly.
Noam: And then the question that I always got when I created this curriculum all these years ago about Talmudic jurisprudence is, why is the Talmud authoritative? Why is it what they say? And there’s an idea that…
Mijal: Wait, did we explain what the Talmud is?
Noam: The Talmud then, to understand what the Talmud is well, and this is really important, is the Talmud is the combination of the Mishnah and the Gemara. And the Talmud is when the Mishnah and Gemara come together. And what the Gemara does is it’s really what it’s trying to do is explain the Mishnah, because the Mishnah has so many open areas for interpretation that even the Mishnah, which is interpreting the Torah and trying to expand upon the Torah and provide gaps, when there are gaps to provide explanations for those gaps, and then the Talmud, if you study Talmud well, it’s trying to explain the Mishnah. That’s what it does. And the Talmud is divided into two different categories. There’s Jewish lore and Jewish law. So the Talmud is divided between what’s called Agadah, which is Jewish lore and halacha.
Mijal: Lore, you mean like stories, narratives?
Noam: The lore is exactly stories that are there to, one of the way I think about the halacha and aggadah, and maybe this isn’t right, but halacha is about teaching to the head and aggadah is about teaching to the heart.
Mijal: So narrative, right. I’ll tell you how my dad explained this to me when I was young and it stuck with me because the Mishnah is an earlier text. The Talmud comes later and we also have two Talmuds. One that was written, the Palestinian Talmud, the Talmud Yerushalmi, which was written in the land of Israel. And one that was written in Babylon. That’s the Babylonian Talmud. It’s actually the more authoritative, popular one. And these were written over centuries. So the way that my dad helped me understand this is he said, imagine that basically you have like a university, okay? And you’ve got all of the students they have to get in through a process and they come in and they don’t just spend four years they might spend like 20 years and they are all hanging out and they are learning the Mishnah, right? And they are going back and forth and saying well, what does this mean? What and also the Torah? What could this mean? What is the law and and all opinions can come in. Fantastical ideas can come in. It’s a little bit like a stream of consciousness, like, what if this? I know I struggle with that. It’s very associative for someone like me. I’m so linear. It’s so hard for me.
Noam: That’s why Maimonides came along later.
Mijal: Thank God. Thank you, Maimonides. And then there’s like a note taker, like AI, let’s say on the side. And AI is like writing everything down and it writes down the little jokes.
And it writes down the consensus opinions and the minority opinions. And it doesn’t even write down, like, if you’re just a lawyer trying to figure out what to do, the Talmud is frustrating because you are not told, like, do this. You’re basically introduced to a conversation between law students and lawyers who are just like, well, what if the following? What if we apply it this way? That’s so interesting. And you can just sense the joy of the rabbis in the way that they are almost like spending so much time.
And the study of Talmud has taken over the world in many ways. You know there’s the study of Talmud that you’ve seen probably articles about this in South Korea. ever see any of
Mijal: Like to do like brain work?
Noam: They study Talmud in South Korea. When I was at Yeshiva University and I studied there, the cardinals, the Catholic cardinals, not the St. Louis cardinals or the Arizona cardinals, but the Catholic cardinals, they–
Mijal: Those are the only cardinals I know.
Noam: just wanted to make sure because you’re such a sports person. I am such a sports person, So they came to see how how Yeshiva University went about the study of Talmud. They were fascinated by that. And now we have this thing called Daf Yomi, which is not something that was created now, but it was created 80, 90 years ago or so. where so many people, hundreds of thousands of people are studying a page, a folio it’s called of Talmud every single day. it’s a seven, yeah, like a seven-year cycle. And now we should just note also the Talmud is a little bit harder to study because it’s not written in Hebrew, it’s written in Aramaic. Correct.
Noam: Well, this is a nerdy fact. Actually around 50% of the Talmud is in Hebrew. It’s Mishnah and then you have something else that’s called the Breita which is outside of Mishnah. they cite from… So, it’s, yes, it’s a combination of Hebrew and Aramaic.
Mijal: Right, right. So, but going back, because we can do this for hours.
Noam: I was going to say why the Talmud became authoritative. The Talmud became authoritative. Why? So Maimonides actually writes about this a few hundred years later. He asks why do Jews follow the Talmud? If you want to understand what halacha is and the Talmud and the conclusion of the Talmud is what the Jewish law is, then why? Why do you care what the Talmud says?
The answer that Maimonides gives is, very interesting line, he says a few words, hiskimu aleihem Yisrael, kol Yisrael. And the Jewish people agreed to it. That’s his answer to why the Talmud is authoritative.
Mijal: Yeah. Yes, the way that I learned it, I’m like, I’m sure Maimonides said this somewhere, but I don’t know. Is that it also had to do, like, if you think about it with like, okay, let’s go back to the constitution. The constitution says that certain changes can only happen like through the Supreme Court or through like a certain amount of states or like they actually, give the procedures for how things can change and evolve. So there’s something called like a great court in Judaism or a Sanhedrin. So the one way to understand it is that the last time that we had a great court that could canonize something was the conclusion of the Talmud. And that since then we have not had, at least according to, this actually is a place for different denominations
Noam: See, they see it differently?
Mijal:. I don’t, you know what? No, let me just, I can say this confidently. This is like, to have a Sanhedrin, a great court, that can canonize something like the Talmud in an authoritative way and seal it. We haven’t had that since. Okay. All right. So now we can, I love Jewish history. I think you love Jewish history. Okay. We can spend a lot of time on this. I’m going to try to like, get us a little bit on track. It’s like my, okay. So, so I guess what I want to just say again, very survey, quick kind of exposition.
Once the Talmud is sealed and the final reduction is somewhere around 500 to 550 CE in Babylonia, right? So after that, we have a lot of different types of Jewish legal scholars. We have the Geonites. How do say that?
Noam: Geonim, in Hebrew, I don’t know how say that in English.
Mijal: Okay, it’s like a category of a certain scholar that lived. We have them something called like the Rishanim, which is like
Noam: You skipped over what’s called the Savoraim, which is after the… It goes Tanahim, Amoraim, Savoraim, Geonim, Rishonim–
Mijal: So what Noam is doing right now is giving the Jewish descriptions for different legal scholars and rabbis in different generations, and they are called differently. So after the Talmud is sealed, you still have rabbis, and you still have like conversations instead of debates.
Noam: Conversation. It’s alive, it’s alive.
Mijal: The main difference is that after the Talmud, everyone looks back to the Talmud as authoritative. So you don’t have somebody who’s like,
Noam: And that’s why Maimonides said it’s authoritative because the Jewish people decided.
Mijal: Oh, you’re right. So you don’t have people who are disagreeing over what is the authoritative text you have people who disagree over how to apply. Yes. Okay, now I want to just
Noam: That is a very important sentence.
Mijal: Thank you. Now I want to mention a couple of big transformations. So if we mentioned the writing down of the oral law, right, or the canonization of the Talmud, I want to mention a couple of other moments in Jewish history that are really important.
One moment is actually Maimonides. So Maimonides comes, and he’s so great. What? He is!
Noam: Did you just fan girl over Maimonides?
Mijal: He He’s good. He’s good. He’s great. OK, so he, by the way, lived between 1170 and 1180. No, this is when was written. Sorry, that’s his book was written.
Noam: Yes, he’s 1138-1204.
Mijal: Thank you. And he was born in Spain, eventually ended up in Egypt. And one of the things he was brilliant in so many ways, but one of the things that he did without a computer, without AI, without anything, is he basically, I’m going to say it in my own words, I’m not saying he said he did this, but he looks as like the Talmud at the Mishnah, at all the writings by the rabbis that come afterwards. They’re kind of like all over the place. They scrolling. They don’t make a distinction in the page between the law, between here’s the law and here’s a conversation about a hypothetical behind the law. And Maimonides basically with his mind decides to codify the law. By that I mean he wants to get rid of anything that is not actually, what am I supposed to do according to the law?
Noam: He strips it from the agada, he gets rid of that, and he strips the minority opinions.
Mijal: Exactly.
Noam: He decides, he takes the final, his understanding I should say, of the final opinion of the Talmud and he says, and then makes a whole book.
Mijal: Yeah, it’s a book called the Mishnah Torah. Yeah. Okay. And basically,
Noam: Which is quite a gutsy name for a book.
Mijal: Right, which means like the second Torah, right? And it was also God’s authority. We didn’t put footnotes and say, he basically says, I single handedly will decide from the last thousand and so years.
Noam: Major Major moment.
Mijal: But it’s a major moment also because it becomes very egalitarian. You do not need to know the full Talmud to know what the law tells you to do. It’s in Hebrew. can open it.
Noam: He said, this is inaccessible to anyone and everyone.
Mijal: Yes. Okay. That’s one important moment. After him, many more people kind of like following this and everybody’s in conversation with him, even if they disagree with him.
Okay, the second moment I want to note comes later. It comes in 1565 in which Rabbi Yosef Karo writes the Shulchan Aruch. So Shulchan Aruch is a more
Noam: Set table in English.
Mijal: I don’t know if it’s more accessible, more easily organized book that helps a Jew know how to follow Jewish law in their life.
Noam: Yeah, and what he does is he takes three of the great medieval scholars, he synthesizes three, they’re known as the Rif, the Rosh, and Rambam, and he takes whatever the majority is of their opinions. That becomes what Rabbi Yosef Karo codifies as Jewish law in the Shulchan Arach.
Mijal: Right. Part of the reason that I love the Shulchan Aruch is what happens afterwards, which is Rav Yosef Karo was a major Sephardic rabbi.
Noam: And he was in Israel all the time.
Mijal: Yes, he was in Israel, but he’s a major Sephardic rabbi and he’s writing following the Sephardic approach to Jewish law. And then you have Rav Moshe Isserlis, the Ramah. What year is in? You know this by heart, Norm?
Noam: I don’t know exactly. Sorry. Got me. But he was in Krakow, Poland.
Mijal: Yes, but he wrote this in 1570. He basically took this book, I’m gonna be simplistic. It’s like the Shulchan Aruch is really great, right? But it’s Sephardic, which means like it may be like, I don’t know what percentage, but like in a bunch of the cases, there’s slight differences. So he basically said, I’m not gonna write a new book. It’s great to have a book for the entire Jewish people. I’m just gonna add something at the end and say, hey, we Ashkenazim, we do this a little bit differently, right? Like you eat rice, we don’t eat rice.
Noam: On Passover. Because Ashkenazim eat rice, plenty.
Mijal: Right. Correct. So that’s that’s Shulchan Aruch. I really love it, by the way, because I am a very proud Sephardic woman.
Noam: I, so interesting. I never viewed it through the heritage perspective as like why to love.
Mijal: No, but I didn’t finish my sentence.
Noam: Okay, fine. Sorry.
Mijal: My sentence was, very proud of being Sephardic and I adore being part of the Jewish people. And I love the fact that we share the same book of law. Like, you know what I mean? Like, love that to me.
Noam: a major unifying moment. Yes. Like a major.
Mijal: Yeah. Because again, a different Sephardic and Ashkenazi, the original meaning of Sephar, Sepharad and Ashkenaz are centers of, there are geographical areas that are also centers of Torah study and Jewish law. So there is like a little bit of like a difference in terms of Jewish law and in terms of Jewish custom. Custom, the way, are things that are not mandated, but that different communities developed in different ways.
Noam: Yeah, they’re not mandated, but sometimes, I used to call this, I used to call this capital M minhag, capital, is the word for custom, and lowercase.
Mijal: What do you think is the most famous custom, Jewish custom?
Noam: But this, me wearing a yarmulke is a big one.
Mijal: Wouldn’t some people argue that that’s part of Jewish law?
Noam: Well, this is the whole thing. This minhag of wearing this head covering has taken on the force of Jewish law because it’s called minhag Yisrael.
Mijal: So what’s a good example of–
Noam: You know, a lower case, I would say eating latkes.
Mijal: Okay, eating latkes, it’s like a minhag, right? Or like eating hamentashen, oznei haman.
Noam: Lovely.
Mijal: We do havdallah, the ritual separation, the service between Shabbat and the rest of the week. We laugh after we say the blessing on the wine. That’s like a minhag, it’s a custom.
Noam: You just start laughing?
Mijal: We just start laughing, I love it.
Noam: What’s the reason?
Mijal: The whole reason is that you want to start the week with laughter. Oh my So you just say, like you know, Boreh Pri hagafen, and you say the blessing on the wine, and then everybody’s like, ha ha ha ha. You know, it’s like a custom and it’s beautiful.
Noam: Can we take on customs?
Mijal: Yes. Take it. I don’t believe in cultural appropriation issues with this kind of thing. I don’t want to get into that. different types. But there’s so many customs. so customs develop alongside Jewish law, but Jewish law tends to be a little bit more universal. What I mean by that is that customs can often be unique to a city. Right? So like, let’s say like Jews in a certain city in Syria develop a certain song, that becomes part of the Jewish behavior and ritual, but it’s not codified in law. You don’t have to do it.
Noam: Yeah, but I mean, again, the whole separate discussion about the way custom works, because there are times that a custom of a city could uproot, they say, even with the Jewish law is. That’s how powerful the collective experience can be for people.
Mijal: Right. We take customs seriously. So, Noam, let me just make some like, not random, but some like points about Jewish law today. Is that okay? Well, first I would say that like, like we mentioned a bunch of times, the overwhelming majority of Jews today, inherited the world of rabbinic Judaism. Now some of the biggest differences that exist today in contemporary time in America have to do with different denominational approaches to Jewish law. And we are definitely like, we both want to do like one like really in depth exploring.
Noam: in a four part series.
Mijal: Sure, if you’re interested in a four part series on Jewish denominations, let us know. We are actually curious to know if you’re interested in that. But denominations, one of the big differences that denominations, let’s say reconstructionist, reform conservative orthodox movement have has to do with the place of Jewish law, with, is it binding on people? Is it obligatory? Who gets to the side? Right? Can we have a rabbinical council today that disagrees with the Talmud in some ways?
Noam: Or disagrees with the Shulchan Aruch, which is a major…
Mijal: Right.
Noam: That’s like the major moment. Do you view… Some view it as like there was a chess game that was being played for hundreds of years and then that chess game got a glass encasing over it. And some people describe that that’s Orthodox Judaism’s approach to Jewish law that said there was this chess game being played. But once Rabbi Yosef Karo and Rabbi Moshe Isserlis wrote the Shulchan Aruch and wrote the Mapah and they put that together and that…got disseminated around the world and then all these rabbinic scholars started writing on the Shulchan Aruch. The same way Maimonides says that the Talmud became authoritative by the Jewish people accepting it, well then that became a glass case encasing the whole chess board. Whereas other denominations said, no no no the game keeps on being played.
Mijal: So a major disagreement is how much of Jewish law is quote-unquote frozen or cannot be played with and how much of it is continued to be played and other approaches that say we are not playing this game anymore.
Noam: Correct. Right.
Mijal: I would also say there is a disagreement between like within the Haredi which is…
Noam: Which should not be described as Ultra Orthodox.
Mijal: Correct. Okay. Within the Haredi community and like, other observant communities that see themselves as bound to the law, there’s also a major disagreement. I’ll say it like on one foot, which is, does an individual have the ability to review the books and then being like, okay, that’s what the law tells me to do. Or should an individual just always go to the rabbi who knows the law more?
Noam: to the h- The decicer it’s called.
Mijal: So that’s like, I’m just naming it as like a major disagreement of how people approach the law. There’s another disagreement, which basically says, what’s the balance between your personal moral intuition? Like if you believe that the following demand by Jewish law is immoral, okay?
Noam: Listening.
Mijal: Is your sense of morality, is it allowed to override what Jewish law tells you to do?
Noam: That’s another episode!
Mijal: I’m just mentioning all of the debates that we have about whether it applies, how it applies, how much…
Noam: How do they interact with each other? Does one supersede the other? Yeah, this is what we’ve been dealing with in society about how to think about all this.
Mijal: Yeah, so those are all things.
Noam: Yes.
Mijal: Those are all questions. The one thing I would say is like, I have had the great, great privilege of accompanying wonderful students who have chosen to convert and join the Jewish people. And some of the most insightful conversations that we’ve had has been moments in which we don’t just think, well, what does Jewish law say about eating meat and milk together? But it’s like, how did this evolve and why and who do I listen to and who do I have to listen to and do I even have to listen at all and what’s the difference of opinions here and why another big question that often comes up it’s like Jewish law is exhausting if you like singular answers. Yes. Like if I ask you there’s some things that there’s consensus upon so like most people agree that if you are healthy you should not eat on Yom Kippur. Okay. That’s like is that a fair way of saying it?
Noam: I think so, I can accept that.
Mijal: Okay great. But then there’s areas where like you got questions and there’s so much grain. Yes. Right. Business ethics, ethics around how to eat and what to eat and how to set up your home. And Jewish law can affect every aspect of your life. One more thing I want to add. No, I’m cool. It’s important.
Noam: I’m gonna say something about this also. Yes. But you go.
Mijal: No, no, go first.
Noam: I think that what’s so cool about Jewish law is engaging with Jewish law. Meaning, I love studying it. I love learning it. And I think when people either choose to observe certain things or not choose to observe other things, that’s a very personal decision. But the engagement with it in Judaism, the engagement with the Jewish text and being part of it, there’s a great writer who once said, I don’t remember the exact line, atheism doesn’t put you out of the bounds of Judaism. Like, if you’re atheist, you’re an atheist, but if you want to be part of the intergenerational conversation then you have to be able to engage in the text to engage in the history of to engage in all of these different books. So like it’s the whole engagement intergenerationally that allows Judaism to continue to not survive but to thrive to be interesting to be engaging in all of our lives.
So it’s the it’s the study of Talmudic Jurisprudence, the study of Jewish law, that’s so riveting for me. I love it. I love it.
Mijal: We’re so much fun!
Noam: It’s fun. It’s fun. It’s a fun thing to do. And personally, it’s meaningful.
Mijal: I’ll add one more thing here that I think for me it’s important just to name in this moment of so much rising antisemitism and just questions that come up, but nobody who follows Jewish law thinks it means you don’t follow the laws of your country. you live in… Actually, Jewish law asks that you follow the laws of your country.
Noam: Right. It’s called dina d’malchuta dina, the law of where you live is the law.
Mijal: So cheating on your taxes is not okay. But not only make that stronger, it’s not okay according to American law and according to Jewish law. Because Jewish law believes that if you live in a country and it’s a fair country, like it’s not like a dictatorship, whatever. You can ask real questions there about following the dictates of a dictator. But when you live in a country and you have the law, there’s a Jewish obligation to keep it.
So it’s important for me just to name that we are patriotic, abiding Americans who also inherited a world of Jewish law that goes with that as well.
So Noam, we did a lot today. I’ll just say we kind of asked big questions about, what is Jewish law? What is the early beginning? The difference between the written law and the oral law. We looked at some moments that transformed Jewish law, like the writing of the Mishnah, the codification of the Talmud.
Noam: Maimonides.
Mijal: Maimonides, in the Mishneh Torah, Reb Yosef Karo and Reb Moshe Isserles and their writing of the Shulchan Aruch. And then we also, instead of saying that there’s consensus in everything and instead of resolving things, we also just brought up some very big questions and divergences that exist today for Jews around the world in terms of how we think about Jewish law, whether we follow it, how much is it open to change, how much your moral intuition can come in and many other questions. And I hope we continue to cover some of this.
Noam: We will. There’s so much there.
Mijal: Yeah, it’s fun. Okay, thanks, Noam.
Noam: Thanks, Mijal.