Orthodox Judaism and oral tradition

[mark a]

This statement appears in the March 2005 edition of This Rock.

In Orthodox Judaism, the Torah also can refer to the entirety of the law, both in written form (Scripture and other sacred writings) and in oral Tradition.

Can someone give me examples of oral tradition in Orthodox Judaism?

[yinekka]

Mark, you might need to go to an Orthodox Jewish site for the answer to your question. If you get one, post it here.

[bauerice]

I am a Catholic convert from Judaism. The biggest, but not only, description of the Oral Tradition would be the Talmid. Even the Term Torah has many meanings.

[Crumpy]

http://www.beliefnet.com/author/author_59.html

The above link takes you to a page that introduces the Rabbi who is well-known to avid viewers of all those Bible programs on the History Channel

Scroll down to the article on the Torah.

The upshot is, that the Torah is not complete and requires interpretation.

Elsewhere, there's a book Who's Bible is it? by Jaroslav Pelikan.

He tells a nice story about the bible. In particular, he tells how the Torah couldn't even be read, because it had no vowels, punctuation, or spaces between the letters.

So, an oral tradition was necessary even to be able to put in all those things to make sense of it.

Browse through the other writings of Rabbi Wolpe for some modern Jewish insights.

p.s. I was looking into something else, and came across Numbers Chapter 15. Somebody was supposed to be stoned to death, but nobody wanted to do it. That's an interesting confession about how people interpreted the Torah, even inside the Torah. God himself had to intervene to get the job done.

[Denis Laplante]

I don't know if having "oral Torah" meant that the written one was incomplete per se (other than "needed to be fulfilled", as we now know it did), but it certainly called for commentaries to help the faithful interpret the Scriptures correctly and properly... just as we need the commentaries from the Fathers of the Church to interpret he Bible verses in the context and how to apply them to our own spiritual lives...

[SolaFide]

Originally Posted by mark a

This statement appears in the March 2005 edition of This Rock.



Can someone give me examples of oral tradition in Orthodox Judaism?

I don't know where they got their information but the Torah ONLY refers to the first 5 books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy) period.

[Jordan Francis]

That's not true. Judaism has always had a significant body of oral traditions, which came to be known as the "oral Torah".

The Rabbis codified and organized this literature (as well as adding to it) over the centuries as they solidified their authoratative role in the Jewish world.


Following the destruction of Jerusalem, in the early common era there is written the Mishna.

By the 4th century, the Palestinian Talmud and later the Babylonian Talmud.

[Valke2]

The Oral Torah is what we believe was given to Moses at Sinai, in addition to the commandments. IT was passed on, orally until it was finally written down a few hundred years CE. The written part was called the Mishna. Because it was an oral tradition, the Mishna was very sparse. Often code words/shorthand were employed to aid memory.

Then over the next couple centuries there was commentary on the Mishna, and then commentary on the commentary. All this taken together constitutes the Talmud. So you have several centuries of rabbinic discussion over pretty much anything you can think of, to come up with jewish law, known as halacha.

If you want more detail, you might be interested in this thread a started a while back: http://forums.catholic.com/showthrea...ght=talmud+101

[Valke2]

Originally Posted by mark a

This statement appears in the March 2005 edition of This Rock.



Can someone give me examples of oral tradition in Orthodox Judaism?

As for an example of oral tradition, set forth in the Talmud, you can look to many of the dietary laws we have, all the laws regarding marriage and funeral rituals etc.

[Gloria1]

great quote! thanks very much for sharing!