 Rabbinic literature is all part of the oral law. Oral law is a rough translation of a Hebrew term, Torah Shaba'alpeh. The Torah, the teaching, as the words Ba'alpeh won't get into exactly what that means, but the unwritten teachings of Judaism. We're talking about literature. We're talking about unwritten that needs an explanation. If this is the unwritten teachings of Judaism, how do they get written? And what is their standing in the history of Judaism? Before we define the oral law, which is the word I'm going to be using for lack of a better word, living tradition, national legacy, well, before we could define the oral law, we have to define the concept of law altogether. Word is the concept of law, commandments, teaching, fit into our national history, our national destiny. We have to go back to the core. What does it mean to be a Jew? What does it mean to be part of a chosen nation? We stand as a chosen nation. We stand in a covenantal relationship with God. Every human being on earth has a personal relationship with God, whether he knows it or not. The fact that he's alive, the fact that he or she is breathing is God's expression of love towards that individual. Some people accept it, acknowledge it, reciprocate. Some people don't. But God has a personal relationship with every creature on this planet in the universe. The Jewish people, in addition to the personal relationship, stand in a communal relationship, in a national relationship with God. This is a relationship that the Jewish people aren't standing alone, but each individual Jew is not standing alone. But we Jews are standing together as a community in a relationship with God. Not only as a community of people who are here in the room, people who are here in the city, people who are alive today. This is an intergenerational community. It's an eternal community. It's a community that from the time that God sealed the covenant with His people at Sinai, you can go back to Abraham all the way into the future. We are one entity, one community, as one body standing before God. If you ask yourself when the Torah uses the word you, when it's talking to its audience, and it says you, who is it talking to? And if you'll think about it and you'll read, you'll realize that it is talking to this communal, this national entity in Deuteronomy 30. God says when it shall come upon you, all these things, the blessing and the curse that I've spoken in the end of days. In other words, it's speaking to people, you would think. And it used the word you, the pronoun you, to people who experienced the blessing and the curse, who were in the land of Israel, went through the exile, went through the sufferings of exile. It says, but it goes on to say, you will turn back to the Lord, your God, and obey His commandments according to all that I, Moses, in other words, command you today. So suddenly the you becomes the people standing in front of Moses. And it's obvious that the you is not one person, the you is not even one generation of Jews, rather it's all the Jewish people together, throughout the generations, standing as one before God. And actually the Jewish Bible spends a lot of time speaking about this relationship, the relationship that the Jewish people share with God as a community. This relationship is compared to a marriage, God considers the Jewish people His bride. A marriage is a relationship that changes the identity of the two parties that participate in the relationship. In other words, imagine if a man and a woman decide to enter into a relationship, but they don't want anyone in the world to know about that relationship. We would generally would not call that relationship a marriage. A marriage is a relationship where the man goes around telling people, this is my wife, I am the husband of this woman, and the woman goes around saying, this is my husband. I am now the wife of this man. Together we have a household. In other words, it's a relationship that redefines the identity of both parties, and that is the type of relationship that God shares with the Jewish people. He says, I will to be to you for a God. In other words, from this point on, this is an exodus before the redemption from Egypt, God is going to be known as the God of Israel. That's God's new identity. He's intimately associated with this nation. This nation is his wife, for better or for worse. And we are called God's people. You shall be to me for a nation, and that redefines us. The law, the teaching that we were presented is the framework for this covenant relationship. It tells us how we're supposed to live as God's spouse, how as a nation we're supposed to function, how our identity is supposed to change. What are we supposed to do differently now that we are God's spouse? What are we supposed to do differently now that we stand in this national relationship with God? The laws give us a means of expressing our loyalty and devotion to God. This is the way we express our devotion to God. We acknowledge our standing in the relationship. God is master, we are subject. He's the one that commands us and we obey. And that's how we live out the relationship. The law shapes our minds. In the book of Exodus, it tells us that you shall know. The commandment of Sabbath was given to the Jewish people. You shall know that I am the Lord that sanctifies Israel. The commandments sanctify us. It changes us. It changes our perspective. It gives us a different view of life. I will divert a little bit just to give one little illustration what I mean when I say that the commandments shape the way we look at the world. Going back about 100 years, here in North America, specifically in the United States, it was very hard for Jewish people to observe the Shabbos, to close their shops, not to work on the seventh day of the week. It was a six-day work week. Sunday was the only day off. There were no laws protecting religious rights and a boss would fire you if he didn't show up to work on Shabbos. And many people weren't able to hold onto the Shabbos and abandon the Shabbos. But many people held onto the Shabbos. They sacrificed for the Shabbos. They underwent poverty and suffering and tribulation in order to keep Shabbos. And even today, when we have laws protecting our rights, every Jew knows there are difficulties. There are times when a person has to give up a good business deal for Shabbos. There are times when a person has to not do things that he would otherwise like to do because of Shabbos. Of course, Shabbos is a joyous day. And we realize how great it is that it's really the greatest blessing, as they say, more than the Jew has kept the Shabbos. The Shabbos has kept the Jew. But every Jew knows, every Jew knows how much his people have sacrificed for the Shabbos. Now imagine yourself standing in an Orthodox synagogue on Shabbos. It's quiet. Why is it quiet? Because people are in the middle of the Amida, in the middle of Shemineser, when everyone's supposed to be silent talking to God. And everyone knows in an Orthodox place there are no phones on Shabbos, but suddenly someone's phone rings. And this guy stops what he's doing. He answers that phone. He's a member of the volunteer ambulance community group. And he hops off in the middle of Shemineser, in the middle of Shabbos. He hops into the car, even though it's a violation of Shabbos, to run and help someone out, he might be in a life-threatening situation. What does that tell a child about the value of human life? A child that grows up in such an environment, who sees that? No one had to tell him anything. That the observance of Shabbos, together with the observance of the sanctity of human life that we were taught, teaches people the value of human life. The Shabbos itself shapes our view of the world, because our view of the world is not just that God is God, but it tells us that everything on earth is equally subject to God. Shabbos tells us, without words, Shabbos tells us that the mastery that we have over the world, and as human beings, God granted us mastery over the world, as it says in the book of Genesis. God put everything into man in the hands of men. But on Shabbos, when we relinquish our mastery of the world, when we step back, we're telling ourselves, and we're internalizing the truth, that it's not our world. Our mastery of the world is not intrinsically ours. It's something that if God tells us to give it up, it's His, and we give it up. So in other words, this is just an example of how observance of the commandments shapes our minds. The observance of the commandments remind us of the foundational truth of Judaism. Like I just spoke about Shabbos, reminding us of the truth that God is master, observance of Passover reminds us of the Exodus. Putting a mazaza on your door reminds you that a Jewish home is a sanctuary. It's a place that's apart from the rest of the world, just like the blood and the doorposts in Egypt was a declaration that in this house, we don't worship the lamb. This is a place which is not Egypt. A Jewish home is not Egypt. And the blood on the doorpost in Egypt made that declaration. That's what a mazaza does on our door. It tells us that a Jewish home is not Canada. It's not United States. It's a Jewish home. It's a sanctuary. It's a place where God lives. And the commandments perform another function. They do something else in our relationship. Our relationship to God doesn't just tell us that we have certain things to do. We have a certain identity to maintain. There's a certain yearning in our hearts. There's a certain mission that we have. We say the Qadish every day that God's name be exalted. Being a Jew is not just observing commandments. Being a Jew also means looking forward to something, hoping to something, yearning for something. It means yearning for a day in which all of mankind recognizes the sovereignty of God. It's yearning for a day when there is no strife, there's no fights. Everyone recognizes that they are equally subject to God. And part of our covenantal duty to God is living with this yearning in our hearts. And the commandments remind us of this yearning. It moves us in the direction of the yearning. And it's the means through which we fulfill our mission. Part of our mission is bringing light to the world. And the way we do it is not by handing out pamphlets on street corners, but rather by obeying God. God's purpose is fulfilled through us by us observing His commandments, following His law, studying His law, internalizing His law. So in a nutshell, that's the role that the law in general plays in the life of the Jewish people, in the life of this nation that stands in this covenantal relationship with God. There are commandments, 613 commandments, as they say. But the Torah gives us more than just commandments. The Torah gives us a view of life. The word Torah itself means guidance, teaching, a way to look at the world. And the law, or the Torah, doesn't just give us instructions of what to do. It gives us a way of understanding the world, a way of looking at the world, a way of looking at the world as God's spouse is supposed to look at the world. And all this is supposed to be embodied in the teaching that was granted to the Jewish people. So in short, this teaching that was granted to the Jewish people is supposed to enable us to live out this covenantal relationship that we share as a nation with the creator of heaven and earth. This teaching is encapsulated in the five books of Moses. Moses is the person authorized by God to transmit law to the Jewish people. No one else could do that. Moses gave us the law, as expressed in Deuteronomy, Torah tzivalanum Moshe, which means a teaching was commanded to us through Moshe, through Moses, Marasha, an inheritance, a legacy, kilat Yaakov, the congregation of Jacob. Moses is the only man authorized by God to give his law, to give God's law to the Jewish people. Moses told us that his law is complete, no additions, no subtractions, everything is here. That's what Moses told us. Why is Moses authorized by God? He's the only man in the history of mankind that had his prophecy validated by God in such a credible way. Let me just explain that in short. When we say that someone is a prophet, what do we mean? We mean simply that God talks to this person. God directly gives this person instruction, guidance, teaching, communication. Now, every other prophet that ever lived proved to us that he's a prophet. There are several different yardsticks that we use to measure the validity, the authenticity of a prophet, but one of the ways is if he predicts that something will come to pass and it comes to pass. He tells us that God is going to do the following miracle and it comes to pass. This is like a witness coming to tell us that God spoke to the person. In other words, it's a sign, it's logical. God wouldn't allow this prophet to produce this miracle, to have his prediction come true if God hadn't spoken to him. God wouldn't allow him to carry this mantle of credibility, but we still didn't see that this person is a prophet. When it comes to Moses, in Exodus 19, verse nine, God says that the Jewish people will listen. They will hear me talking to you. The Jewish people as a national unit heard God talking to Moses and they knew he's a prophet. They encountered that fact in the real world not because there's a sign, there's testimony to it, but rather concrete. They heard God talking to him. They know he's a prophet. It's not that they have some incidental proof. They see it. We wouldn't call that proof, we would call it knowledge. And that's how we know Moses is a prophet and he told us that any prophet that contradicts his word that produces a sign or a miracle is to be ignored. On what basis could he tell us that? It's because he had his credibility established in the most open way. If someone else comes up and has the nation of Israel gathered and has God talking to him as openly as we heard Moses, and on the contrary, Moses will have a problem, but until that happens, we have Moses and that's what we go with. So all of the law is given by Moses. Not only the commandments, but the ideals of Judaism, the outlook, the worldview of Judaism is encapsulated, is written down in the Torah. But we understand that Moses wasn't just given the words that are written in the Torah. He was given more information. He was given additional information than the words that are actually written in the Torah. Why was it so? Why was it that God didn't write all the information in the Torah? And the reason is very simple. The reason is because writing is not always the most effective way of communicating. There are many concepts, there are many ideas, there are many attitudes that we cannot convey in writing. Let me give you one example. To describe a person. To describe the personality of a person. You would have to write books and books to describe a person. But a person who grew up with the person you're trying to describe, a friend of the person, a relative of the person, knows the person. He knows the person better than someone who read 100 biographies on the person. He knows the person. King David in Psalm 119 describes the commandments as men of his counsel. He saw each one of the commandments as an individual with a personality, with a spirit. You can't encapsulate spirit into writing. Spirit is something that you need to encounter. You need to live it. So it's impossible to put the spirit, the personality of a commandment into writing. It has to be lived. It has to be experienced. Example, it is very clear from the Bible that God wanted future generations of Jews to know that the Exodus happened. It's foundational to the relationship that every Jew stands shares with God. This intergenerational community has to find out about the Exodus. But what means of communication? How did God tell us that we should pass on to our children that the Exodus actually happened? Did he tell us, tell your children to read the book from chapter A verse one through chapter B verse 10? No, nowhere in the Bible does it say that. What the Bible does say is, you should observe the holiday of Passover. You should observe the commandment of redeeming the firstborn. And that way your children will learn about the Exodus. It was important for God that the Jewish people learn about our journey into wilderness. We commemorate that and we pass it on to our children according to what it says in the Bible by observing the holiday of Sukkot of Tabernacles. And that is how the future generations will find out. In other words, God understood that written words alone cannot fully communicate the weight, the spirit, the impact of the Exodus event, of the journey in the desert. It has to be lived out. It has to be encountered in a living observance. And it's word, of course, it's not without the book. It's with the book. It's word and spirit. It's the written word and the testimony of the Jewish people, the living testimony of the Jewish people as they live out the commandments, as they live out the Torah. And that, together, communicates the future generations the content, the teaching that God imparted to Moses. Another example, another example of the importance, the centrality, and the function of the oral law. I mentioned before that Moses is the only man authorized by God to transmit his law to the Jewish people. But there's an exception to the rule. There is one law, one law, that Moses did not teach the Jewish people. This is a law that God himself chose to teach the Jewish people. And that is the law which prohibits us from worshiping idols. The first two commandments, I am the Lord your God. You shall have no other gods before me was transmitted directly from God to the Jewish people, not through the medium of Moses, but rather God himself imparted this truth to the Jewish people. And in the book of Deuteronomy, in the book of Deuteronomy, Moses goes back to that experience, the Sinai experience, and explains and gives the Jewish people to understand and to appreciate the weight of their experience, the weight of what it was that they learned at Sinai. And Moses speaks about the miracles of the Exodus, and he speaks about the revelation at Sinai and how God spoke from the midst of the fire and the thunder and the lightning. God didn't just convey words to the Jewish people, it wasn't just contained in words, it was a fiery experience. It was a deep experience. It was an experience which wasn't just limited to the Sinai revelation, the miracles of the Exodus, the experience of being slaves and going free, the parting of the Red Sea, the pillar of cloud, the pillar of fire, all that together, that the fullness of that experience imparted the truth to the Jewish people that there is no power and the heavens above and the earth below aside from the God with whom they stand in this covenantal relationship. And Moses encapsulates this with the words Deuteronomy 4, verse 35, unto you it was shown in order that you know. Doesn't say you heard the words that God speak, you read it in the book, you read it off the tablet, the first one of the two tablets which contained the Ten Commandments, rather he speaks of a living demonstration. It wasn't enough to just give words, it was important that the people go through an experience because you can't communicate everything through words. Experience gives you so much more than words alone can convey. Not only does Moses speak about in Deuteronomy 4 about the experience through which the Jewish people learned about the commandment, not to worship idols, but rather give their hearts completely and absolutely to God. But Moses also speaks about the means that this truth will be conveyed to future generations. And he doesn't say anything about future generations reading it in a book. He speaks about passing it on to your children. Deuteronomy 4, verse 9, he says, remember and guard yourselves lest you forget what you have seen and pass it on to your children and your children's children. He's talking about living testimony, being passed along along the most trusted root of parents transmitting to their children. The root, with all the love, with all the warmth that a parent and only a parent can give to a child, and that's the root through which God shows to transmit his truth to future generations and to pass it on. So it's not just a written law. It's not just a law which is contained in the five books of Moses. It's a law that passes on and travels on through the hearts and the lives and the observance of the Jewish people. Yes, the law of Moses is a complete law and perfect. And again, when we speak about the law of Moses, we're speaking about the complete oral and written. The written law contains all of the laws. Just like a rollbook of a teacher contains the names of all of the children in the classroom. But you don't know the children until you met them. So yes, the five books of Moses is a complete record. It contains whatever a written record could contain, which is the name of every law, and perhaps a brief description, in some cases, not. But to get to know the law, to become acquainted with the spirit of the law, with the personality of the law, to be able to say like David did before you, the laws are my counselors. These are the men who advise me in life. You need to see the law lived out in the lives of your parents, in the lives of your community, in the lives of your peers. And that's the oral law. The Torah, the five books of Moses, when it presents the law to the Jewish people, it uses the template of an ideal community. It uses the template of a community that's standing in a perfect relationship with God. They have a temple. They have God's presence dwelling amongst them in an open way. And in ideal community, all we need is the five books of Moses and the living people. The teaching of the law will be contained in those two repositories, in the five books of Moses and in the hearts of the people. The book of Isaiah describes the Jewish people as a nation with my Torah in their hearts. That's the ideal community. We strayed from the ideal. We weren't the ideal community. We weren't that ideal spouse that always remains loyal to God. We sinned as a national unit, as a national entity, we sinned, we strayed after idols, we strayed after materialism, we strayed after our own lusts, our own desire for power, for material pleasure, and we strayed. So we aren't that ideal community. The destruction of the first temple came upon us. God destroyed the first temple and the people went into the Babylonian exile. At that point in time, what happened was the people lost their insularity. The people used to be living as a nation alone, Hain Amlavad Adishkain, which is a quote from the book of Numbers, which says that the Jewish people are a nation that dwells alone, and we dwelt in the land of Israel. We would meet together, the nation as a whole, in the Jerusalem temple, and we were separated from the nations. And that preserved the Jewish mindset. It preserved the unity of our observance. It preserved the integrity of the law that we're supposed to be passing on orally from generation to generation. But once we went into exile, we encountered the Babylonians. Not only did we encounter the Babylonians, but their language became our language, we strayed. We were no longer able to maintain the law in our hearts alone. Let me just say as an aside that the Hebrew language is a language which was designed by God to speak of these godly concepts and to shape our minds in a way that we could retain these concepts and identify these concepts and live with these concepts. Once the Jewish people took on another language that already created a barrier between themselves and the law. So the first body in history, the first body of rabbinic literature as I'm identifying it, post-biblical literature that's considered authentic and valid by the Jewish people were the Aramaic. Aramaic is the language of the Babylonians. The Aramaic Targumim. The Aramaic Targumim were designed for the public Torah readings, which since people now spoke Aramaic rather than Hebrew, people couldn't understand the Torah readings as they were able to understand it in past generations. So the leaders of the Jewish people designed and formulated these Aramaic translations, which were official translations of the text of the Five Books of Moses to be read in public. What we have today are basically three versions of the Targumim, of these Aramaic translations. We have the Unkulus, we have Targumionisyn, we have Targumur-shalmi. There is debate as to exactly when these Targumim were codified, when they were set into the format that we have today. And it was a process, it didn't happen all at once, but the process started back in the times of Ezra, back in the times of Babylonian exile. The next unit of rabbinic literature that we have are some of the prayers. The prayers were formulated while the temple stood. Not all of them, but some of them. Some of the prayers, the blessings before and after Shema were formulated while the second temple stood. These were composed by leaders of the Jewish people. Perhaps the Shema in Ezra itself was fully formulated in Yavna, which is post-temple, but the core of it goes back to the men of the Great Assembly, which was during second temple times. The entire concept of praying three times a day existed while the temple stood. And this entire concept of praying three times a day is a rabbinic innovation. It's a rabbinic innovation to help us remain loyal to our duty as transmitters of this oral law. While we were still in the land of Israel on the time of the first temple, before we were dispersed in many lands, while the community was completely centered in the land of Israel, it was not necessary for people to have set prayers. For the simple reason is that the communal offerings that were offered in the temple in the morning and every afternoon were times of focus for the people. The prophets, when they want to speak of a certain point in time in the afternoon, they speak of the time when the offering went up. This was a time when throughout the land of Israel people realized now in the temple they are bringing the offering which represents all of us before God and they would pause, they would pause to focus on their national relationship with God and no one had to be told to do this and it wasn't an obligation to do this but people strayed from that ideal so the rabbis had to turn it into a law. This is something of a duty. This is something that we do or else people would fall away from the national understanding, the national self-identity. So these perhaps, these were the two earliest bodies of rabbinic literature if you will, targum and tafila, prayer, targum are the Aramaic translations and the prayers, again, these evolved, the format that we have today is not necessarily the format that existed then but certainly certain elements existed then and it was a process that began while the second temple was still standing. With the destruction of the second temple the dispersal became more pronounced, people were dispersed in many nations, it wasn't just while the second temple was standing it was primarily the Babylonian community and the community in Israel and even though we see from the book of Esther that Jews were dispersed amongst all the 127 provinces of King Achashveres' kingdom and this went on throughout the times of the second temple but they were still able to remain in contact with the unified leadership of the Jewish people with the central leadership of the Jewish people, this that leadership which by the way, that was the leadership that determined for the Jewish people as a whole the calendar, when the months and the years and how they calculated the months and the years and how it would play itself out but as the dispersal became more pronounced and as travel and communication between countries and regions became more difficult the people, the leaders of the Jewish people felt it was necessary to do more to unify the Jewish understanding of the law and to preserve its integrity and under the times of Rebbe, Rebeno Akkadish, Rebu Hanasi, Rebu Huda the prince, he codified the mission. He codified the mission, the mission was a body of literature which existed before his times. It was what people used to teach children the law. In other words, the law is more complicated than what's written in the five books of Moses. People would have little phrases that are easy to memorize and they would use them, these phrases, to teach their children various details of the law and these phrases became, certain phrases became popular and became sort of public usage and this is the way teachers would teach their students and parents would teach their children. What Rebu Huda and us, he did and he convened as much of the leadership of the Jewish people as possible, the scholars of the Jewish people, he convened and he gathered them to his place in northern Israel and he codified the mission. He set a central text which it's interesting that the historians are not clear if he actually wrote it down as a text or he just set down a formula to be memorized and it remained memorized for several generations in a memorized format but whatever the case is, he unified it and this embodied many of the laws, the commandments of the oral law. We move on to the Talmud and there are two Talmuds. There's the Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud and these, the Jerusalem Talmud didn't share the quality I'm going to talk about now and that is that the Babylonian Talmud was formulated and written also under a convention of unified leadership. This was the last time in our history that we had a unified leadership that was central, that everyone agreed upon all the communities of the Jewish people around the world agreed that these are their leaders and these people represent them and perhaps even sent representatives to this Academy of Ravashi in Babylon in Iraq and he codified the Talmud. The Talmud serves a different role, a different function than the Mishnah. The Mishnah is more rat-tat-tat, meaning to say is it tells you a law, it tells you another law, it might tell you an argument about a law but generally it's cut and dried information, boxes, this is the rule, this is the law. The Talmud is very different than that, in fact it's very different than any other book that I personally know. The Talmud reads like a run-on conversation and that is what it is, it's a run-on conversation. Now the Talmud does preserve law, it preserves details of the law that are absent in the Mishnah, it elaborates, it gives you more than the Mishnah but that's not the primary function of the Talmud. The primary function of Talmud is not to preserve law because if the primary function of the Talmud was to preserve law, that's not the format that Urvashi, the author of the Talmud would have chosen. He would have chosen something like the Shulkhon Aruch or the Mishnah which is one law after another. Instead he chose the format of a run-on conversation because he was primarily trying to preserve something else. He wasn't trying to preserve just laws, he was trying to preserve a mindset, a way of thinking. He wanted to unify the generations, he wanted that a Jewish child growing up in Toronto in 2014 could be on the same page like a rabbi in Poland 300 years ago, like a rabbi in North Africa 1,000 years ago, like a rabbi living under the boot of the Crusaders 1,100 years ago, like a rabbi living in Iraq 1,800 years ago and they should be all participating in the same conversation. He was trying to preserve a mindset, a way of thinking and he did that. We believe that there's no way that a human being could have done that by himself. It was God's help and God's intervention and God's spirit dwelling upon him that enabled him to succeed in uniting the minds of the Jewish people and that's actually what happens. What happens is that when people study the Talmud they're entering a world, they're entering a conversation they're speaking with Rashi, they're speaking with the Rambam, they're speaking with Ravashi, they're speaking with the rabbis and the people who live before them, they're participating in the conversation, the ongoing conversation of the eternal community and that's what the Talmud does and that's the purpose and the primary function of the Talmud. I will say the following. I know when I was studying in Israel that was the time when art scroll was in the process of producing their translation of the Talmud and one of the leading rabbis in Israel, he had reservations. He wasn't so happy with this. Why not? What's wrong with the art scroll? The art scroll and I'm saying this in all sincerity is one of the greatest blessings that the Jewish people have. It opened the Talmud to so many more people it would have been a close book to so many of our people. But what his reservations were, the Talmud is not a book that you're supposed to sit and read in your corner. The Talmud is supposed to be a difficult book. The Talmud is supposed to be a book that you struggle with. The Talmud is supposed to be a book that generates conversation. It's supposed to be a book that forces you to come to a class and argue with your friends, argue with your peers, argue with your teachers, listen to the questions of your peers, listen to the questions of your teachers. It's supposed to be a living book. It's supposed to be a book which encourages a living conversation, a living connection, and he feared that by making such a popular translation it will push people away from that. Yes and no, meaning to say is I think that most Jews understand that the Talmud is part of a living conversation, but sadly I was actually one time in the offices of art scroll and I heard one of the editors referring to the shot and steam edition of Talmud as the missionary edition. In other words, there are people outside our fold who read the Talmud and read the art scroll and say I know the Talmud. You're not gonna tell me what the Talmud says and this goes ties back to our discussion about missionaries quoting rabbinic literature. Let me move on a little bit into the history of rabbinic literature. At the same time that the mission and the Talmud was being codified, this was the time that the Midrashim were being written or being transmitted or being passed on and the Midrashim preserved not so much the law of the Jewish people but rather we spoke about the Jewish outlook on life, the Jewish way of looking at the world. That was a time that the same generations of rabbis that wrote the Mishnah participated in the Mishnah participating in the writing of the Talmud, they were the ones that formulated the Midrashim. Some of the Kabbalistic works date back to this time. We move on to the times of the G'aynim, there's a time following the period of Talmud, a period about six, 700 years where the leadership, the scholarly leadership of the Jewish people is basically centered in Iraq, a little bit in Israel, a little bit in Egypt, a little bit in Italy and most of the literature that we have from their times is Halachic Responza, in other words, they're responding to questions about Jewish law that people sent them. There's a little bit about the Jewish outlook on life. When you come to the closing periods of the G'aynim, you have Rosadia G'ayn who wrote Commentary on Scripture. He wrote a book called Emunot Videot which is a philosophy of Judaism. In the times of the G'aynim, many prayers were composed, p'yutim, additional prayers were added on to our liturgy. We move on from the times of the G'aynim to the times of the Rishaynim. We have Rashi, the French scholar who lived in an area which is sort of borderline France, Germany. He lived about a thousand years ago and he wrote a Commentary to Scripture, a Commentary to Talmud. In a certain sense, since the sealing of the Talmud, he's the greatest teacher we had. He's the one that's the most studied and the most learned. We had Maimonides, we had Nachmonides. Maimonides wrote a work, Yara Chazaka on Jewish law, a code of Jewish law. He also wrote Myron Avuchem, which is a philosophy of Judaism. At the same time, he had Rabbi Huda Halevi who wrote many songs, prayers. He also wrote a philosophy of Judaism which is actually considered more mainstream than Rambam's philosophical work. His book is called Khuzari. It's formulated as a conversation or debate between the king of the Khazars who converted to Judaism and the Jewish scholar. We move on to the Rishaynim who commented on Scripture like Ibn Ezra, Radaq, commented on Talmud, which means that they joined that conversation, that eternal conversation of the Talmud that brings us to the Taishvah, the Taishvah's schools of rabbis. It's not one person, it's not even one school who lived, some of these schools were founded by children and grandchildren of Rashi and son-in-laws of Rashi Rashi only had daughters and they established schools in which the Talmud was studied, debated and commented upon. We move on to the period of the Akhraynim. We have the Shulkhonaruch, the Beit Yosef who was actually four years old when his parents were kicked out of Spain and he followed them to, it was then the Ottoman Empire, Turkey but it was actually Bulgaria where he lived in. Then he moved to Tzvat, where he wrote the Shulkhonaruch. We have the Ramayesh Yisraelish who lived in Poland. We can move on to the Arizal, the Kabbalist who lived the same time as the Beit Yosef. We can move on to the Vilna Gaon who lived in Lithuania, the Baal Shemta who lived in the Ukraine. And these are people who wrote books, had made an impact in that eternal conversation. If we would look at this from a biblical standpoint using biblical terminology, how would we look at these people? How would we look at the books that these people wrote? We understand that even in the ideal community, even in a community which preserves its integrity and has the Torah in its hearts doesn't need books to preserve, to pass on the law of God, that oral teaching from one generation to the next. We still had people who stood out, people that stood out in their understanding of the law in their understanding of what it means to be a Jew. Moses was called upon, he was advised actually by his father-in-law and God agreed and told him to appoint judges over the Jewish people. Leaders of 10, leaders of 50, leaders of 100, and what was the process by which he chose the judges? Obviously he chose people that were qualified, wise people, people with integrity, but in the book of Deuteronomy, he describes them, v'yaduim le shivtechem. These were people that were already acknowledged by the people to be leaders, to be outstanding people, to be people that stand out in their behavior, in their living out the spirit of the law. When Moses was commanded by God to choose 70 elders, he said, choose men, asher yadata, that you know, this is Numbers 1116, that you know that these are the elders of the people and it's policemen and it's leaders. In other words, it's a natural grassroots process that tells us that these people are greater. And in fact, what gives authority? How come we attribute so much authority to Rashi, or to the Betiosafe, or to the Ramam, or to the Khafechayim who lived not such a long time ago? It's the consensus of the Jewish people. In other words, it's a natural process. It's not a process that may happen at once, but it's a process that happens over time. As the Jewish people attempt to live out the law, they realize, if I have a question, I don't understand how I'm supposed to take that next step. I have a dilemma. What should I do? Should I, in this case, be strict or should I be kind? These are two universal principles, justice and kindness, and they often clash and sometimes we have to make a decision between one and the other. In many cases, a person has to realize, listen, God put you in this situation, you have to make a decision. Of course, you have to humble yourself before God and pray for his help to make the right decision, but you also have to realize God gave you that responsibility and you have to step forward. But sometimes, you could realize that there are people who are wiser than you, who are more deeply immersed in the law than you, more deeply immersed in the spirit of God's law than you are, and you'll ask them, it could be your brother who's studying your sheave a little bit longer than you, or it could be your brother who's studying your sheave less than you, but you see he's a more moral person than you are and he might have deeper insight than you have. It could be your sister, it could be your wife, it could be your grandmother who knows how people did it in days gone by. You're gonna ask people who have a deeper insight than yourself, and with time people come to appreciate when they read Rashi, they realize, yes, this embodies what we are here for, what our mission is. When they read the Rambam, when they read the Ramchal, when they read the various works of the Jewish people, of our great leaders, they understand that these are the judges, these are the leaders of 10, these are the leaders of 50, the leaders of 100 that we have that our community is blessed with to guide us in our standing as a covenant nation before God, but the law remains an oral law. We remain, that means it's the written law, that's only the five books of Moses. All of rabbinic literature is only valid in the context of a living people. It's valid in the context of a people that has the law of God in their hearts that respects these people, that sees these people as their leaders, as their judges, as the people that express their outlook, and this outlook is the outlook of our people, and that's how we have rabbinic literature today, that's its authority, that's its role as a nation before God.