A Quick Proof of the Karaite Idea

An Orthodox  Rabbi on youtube  has claimed that the Torah was all Oral Law, and was not written until the end of the 40 years in the Midbar, by Moses. By this he is claiming that Oral Law was there and extends beyond the Written Law.

A very quick proof from the TaNaKh can dispel such a myth:

Joshua 8:

 34 And afterward he read all the words of the law, the blessing and the curse, according to all that is written in the book of the law. 
35 There was not a word of all that Moses commanded, which Joshua read not before all the assembly of Israel, and the women, and the little ones, and the strangers that walked among them. 


The Sefer of Joshua states there was no law commanded by Moses, not one word, which was not read from the Book by Joshua. This means there was no oral law, nothing outside of the written Torah.

Any claim that a body of unwritten law was given to Moses and was not codified in the Torah is at odds with the words of Joshua, the Prophet, who was like Moses.   This implies that the claim for Oral law is in fact heresy, and denial of the TaNaKh.

Orthodoxy and the Gay Question

Recently, heated exchanges have broken out between Ultra-Orthodox Rabbis, and a Modern Orthodox Rabbi, who made a speech about accepting gay / homosexual Jews as long as they did not act homosexually. It is not quite clear what his intent was, but it was misconstrued by the Ultra Orthodox as being heretical and denying the entire Torah. Possibly , his remarks about homosexual love went beyond the pale.

There was an underlying current of mistrust between the parties, the Rabbi who attacked the modernist, wanted his own brother to get the prstigious job as head of the Sephardi congregation in London.

But from a TaNaKh standpoint, what can be said about this?

The Torah is quite clear in forbidding gay sex. Torah is quite explicit :

Lev: 18 וַיִּקְרָא

כב  וְאֶת-זָכָר--לֹא תִשְׁכַּב, מִשְׁכְּבֵי אִשָּׁה:  תּוֹעֵבָה, הִוא.

22 Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind; it is abomination.

Rabbi Joe Dweck was saying that as long as Homosexuals do not carry out homosexual acts, they can love each other. Rabbi Basouss opposed this, and said that he is worse than the famous Louis Jacobs, who was thrown out of the United Synagogue by then Chief Rabbi Brodie – for denying that the Torah was revealed to Moses.

I am not interested in these rabbis jockeying for power and position, but only in what the Torah says. The Torah forbids all sexual and intimate conduct between men. The apologists for gays say that having a gay constitution is not itself forbidden, as long as it is not put into practice.

The problem is, that gays cannot really be “converted” to become heterosexual. So welcoming them and investing time and energy in them to encourage them to be straight is a waste of time and energy. Furthermore, in the Western world, there are human rights that protect gays from discrimination (supposedly). In Russia and Islamic countries, it is still illegal to be a practicing homosexual.

So those who take a strictly Biblical approach, must still be careful about hate crimes, even telling jokes could be punishable offences in some jurisdictions. It is no mitzvah to be arrested or jailed by the secular authorities.

There is one last point - it is easy to hate or ostracize gay people, but I do not see this as a choice, it is an orientation that people are born with. So why does the Creator create such people and then tell them not to be that way?

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Questioning the Talmud

A Rabbi once said to me “far be it from you to question the Talmud”.

However, there is no logical reason to accept the Talmud, and not rational reason to accept concepts that are irrational.  So I will question some concepts of the Talmud which seem irrational to me, and it is not an attack on the entire Talmud, since there are many wise sayings  that can be found in that collection of rabbinic teachings.

One of the first pieces one will study in a yeshiva is the concept of “Ye’ush” – which is despair of ownership of lost goods.

The argument goes, that if a person loses something he owns, the title still belongs to him, until such point as he despairs.  If he despairs of ever finding it again, then when the property is found, he no longer has a claim to it.

This principal is used in rabbinic law  or halacha. It is quite a fundamental legal principle of Rabbinic Judaism.

It also, in my humble opinion, is false, or misleading.   A story in the news recently reported that  man lost his falcon 8 years ago, it flew away and did not return. He lost all hope of finding it,  dead or alive. But it was found, and he was reunited with it.

Ye-ush is a psychological principle,  i.e.  the rabbis are deriving a legal principle from a psychological  reaction.  We differ in psychology, so some may despair, some may hold out.  But why should that change our entitlement to own something?

Indeed, in many areas it is important, psychologically to let go of something.  But that is psychology.   My argument is that ye-ush is irrelevant.  One can despair  of something and then find it, or the other way around. I can lose my keys and despair, but then I find them again. Does mean I no longer have legal rights to my keys?

This is a most irrational idea, which forms one of the fundamental teachings of the Talmud.  Unfortunately, there are other such teachings.

M'oray Ha'Aish Parshat Acharei Mot: The Inner Sanctum

M'oray Ha'Aish Parshat Acharei Mot: The Inner Sanctum: 'God spoke to Moshe after the death of Aharon's two sons, when they approached before God and they died: And

The Mitzvah of Loving Torah Scholars

For the rabbis of the Talmud, there is a source in the Torah to attach ourselves to Torah scholars  (Talmidei Hachamim).  http://halachipedia.com/index.php?title=Loving_Torah_Scholars_%28Talmidei_Chachamim%29

This is derived from the phrase  וּלְדָבְקָה-בוֹ   in Deut 11:
22 For if ye shall diligently keep all this commandment which I command you, to do it, to love the LORD your God, to walk in all His ways, and to cleave unto Him

 Although this in context refers to God, the rabbis claim it applies to the rabbis as well.  This is because it is they who are our guides in Torah practice.  The Karaites could object to this  a) on the basis of their differing views of the Oral law, and b) because the verse is speaking about God, and unlike Christianity, Judaism does not believe in intermediaries.

If we discount the first objection, since there is still a common area between the Karaites and Rabbanites, whereby the Karaites accept the Neviim and Kohanim as the Torah scholars, so we therefore would rely on the Neviim and Kohanim for our instruction.  Does the 2nd problem still pertain?

Whilst it is certainly correct to adhere to the Prophets and the Priesthood, the verse is still taken out of context.  There may be justification for adhering to the Prophets as spiritual guides, but it is only one of many ways of serving God.  The verse is perhaps more spiritual than personality oriented.

So it is certainly correct to respect Torah scholars,  but we do not see this verse as directly pointing to them.

Evolutionary Judaism

Further to my post http://tanakhemet.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/winners-and-losers.html
I wish to discuss the concept of Evolutionary theory when applied to Judaism  and religion in general.

The Winners and Losers post was a survival of the fittest type argument, namely that Rabbanism has maintained its force over the millenia, and is thriving now in the Jewish world, while other branches are falling apart, eg Conservative and Reform.   This is an evolutionary type argument. Another evolutionary argument is that a system survives and maintains its strength because certain factors of that (religious) system are able to capture the minds of followers, and replicate, whereas others are not so successful.   Some systems, such as Karaism , and Conservative, had their Golden age, but now are not as dynamic as Orthodox Rabbinic.

However, there are some logical flaws to this argument.  Firstly, there were times when Orthodoxy was in crisis, in the last 2 centuries, and has collapsed from  being perhaps representative of 90% of the Judaic world, to around 10%.  In the USA, Conservative has overall more numbers, but the numbers and synagogue members are in decline. Going back,  Christianity was originally a branch of Judaism. From an evolutionary perspective it was very successful, being able to branch out into a new religion of its own, and still have a significant number of "Messianic" Jewish followers.
Furthermore, in the TanaKh, we have a success of idolatry, in evolutionary terms, and a failure of the Prophetic Judaism of the Bible, in purely numerical terms.  This is to the point where the prophets bemoan the behaviors of the idolaters.
So evolutionary Judaism tells us nothing about the truth of a particular proposition. It does tell us about the the survival of a particular species over its competitors. Karaism can again enjoy a Golden age, but perhaps can evolve and engage with the wider Jewish world, especially the 80% who are not strictly bound to any particular halachic code.

The Talmud - The Greatest Proof of Karaism

The title of this post may sound  absurd and contradictory. After all, how can the central body of Oral Law, which is the basis of Phariseeic Judaism, and contains all the D'Rabbanan additions, in any way  prove the arguments of Karaism?

My answer to this is to look at the circumstances by which the Talmud, and the Mishnah came about as written forms.  The argument given by the Talmud itself is as follows - firstly they say anyone who puts the Oral Law into written form is as if they are burning the Torah.   However, due to the collapse of the Israelite State, and the roman conquest, it became hard to transmit the Oral Law orally, or to remember it. Hence the need arose to write it down.

This pedagogical principle, is in fact a central Karaite  argument - that the large body of information known as the oral law is impossible to transmit from verbal memory alone.  Thus, it would have been impossible to  do this for the 1700 years from the Sinai through to the end of the Temple era.

An additional argument would be to look at the TNK itself.  Even with the written records, there are some inaccuries within the NaCh ,  occasional errors, incomplete sentences here and there.  How could such a body of work have been memorised from mere repetition?  It was not memorised in Hezekiah's time.

So the Talmud's existence is one of the greatest testaments to the Karaite idea, and from the best source to prove it, namely the opponents of Karaism!

Karaites Who Add

It is usually the accusation of Karaites against their Rabbanite cousins that they are violating the Torah which says "Do not Add."

Leviticus 19 forbids  shaatnez -
יט  אֶת-חֻקֹּתַי, תִּשְׁמֹרוּ--בְּהֶמְתְּךָ לֹא-תַרְבִּיעַ כִּלְאַיִם, שָׂדְךָ לֹא-תִזְרַע כִּלְאָיִם; וּבֶגֶד כִּלְאַיִם שַׁעַטְנֵז, לֹא יַעֲלֶה עָלֶיךָ. 19 Ye shall keep My statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind; thou shalt not sow thy field with two kinds of seed; neither shall there come upon thee a garment of two kinds of stuff mingled together.

However, shaatnez is defined in Deut 22: 11 as   wool + linen

ייא  לֹא תִלְבַּשׁ שַׁעַטְנֵז, צֶמֶר וּפִשְׁתִּים יַחְדָּו.   11 Thou shalt not wear a mingled stuff, wool and linen together.

 Some Karaites have traditionally forbade all mixtures, eg silk and cotton, etc.  the same critique applied to Rabbinic additionas to the Law apply equally to this type of Karaite adding.

Thus the TNK emet view is that adding is forbidden for everyone, regardless of what label you wear (no pun intended) . 

Zionism

Zionism is the most controversial ideology of the past few hundred years.  It has faced opposition not only by radical Islam and secular Arabs, but also the left and right wing in the western politics. Above all, it was opposed by Ultra-Orthodoxy, to the point where Jews who were Zionists were banned and shamed by Ultra Orthodox. Even during the Holocaust, many Jews refused to cooperate with the Zionists, at their own peril.  The secular Zionist idea was modernized by Theodore Herzl, whilst the religious concept was championed by Rabbi Kook.

Today, the State of Israel is again the centre of the Jewish world. Although some still dissociate from it, there is no denying that this is where jewish life is growing and getting stronger.  But that is nto the whole story.   The Karaites were the early zionists.  They made the move to Israel and were at times friends with the Arabs, especially when the Land was invaded by the Crusaders.  When the great Rabbi  Nachmanides fled Spain and moved to Israel, many of the Jews he found there were Karaites. Indeed, it is possible that his commentary on the Torah was influenced by Karaites, since his understanding of the Torah is often closer to the plain meaning, and contradicts the views of Rashi.

Although the Karaites were not able to withstand the onslaught of the Crusades, the basis of Zionism is an essentially Karaite concept.  It couild be said that David ben Gurion was a secular Karaite, in that he accepted the TNK, but not the Midrashim.