 Many people have a knee-jerk reaction to simply reject the idea of an oral Torah. And that's because the whole concept of Torah Shibal Peh, of oral Torah, is really not well understood. And what I'd like to share is R, a number of insights, not totally comprehensive, but a number of insights to really take the idea of oral Torah and maybe explain it a bit more than people normally assume. At the simplest level, on the very simplest level, the oral Torah basically fills out God's revelation to us at Mount Sinai. The revelation of God at Mount Sinai was not completed, was not exhausted by the words in the five books of Moses. It's as simple as that. People, unfortunately, artificially make the barrier. There's an artificial restriction of revelation to writing. And there's an assumption that if it's not in the book, it wasn't given by God. And I would say, who says? Who says that God is not able to speak to us without putting it in writing? Now we'd have to think about why God does have some of his revelation in print and some in writing. That's a question worth asking. But just to say axiomatically that if it's not in the book, it never happened, is really artificial and absurd. Obviously, God is capable of communicating with us in many ways, not just in writing. So to artificially restrict God's revelation to what we see in the book, I would refer to as bibliolatry, bibliolatry. It's really making idolatry out of the Bible. It's saying that this is all we have. All we have is the Bible. It's putting an undue and appropriate limitation on God's revelation to simply the words in the Bible. The Oral Torah essentially is the complete revelation of God. And the simplest reason for this is that it should be very obvious to anyone who simply reads the text of the five books of Moses that that doesn't contain all the information. It's not a difficult premise to understand. For example, the Bible says over a dozen times that the Sabbath is one of the central institutions of Judaism and the Bible says numerous times we're not allowed to do any melacha on the Sabbath. The problem is that this word melacha is not a simple word to define. There's no cognate word in the Bible. It doesn't say in Hebrew, don't do any work. It doesn't say don't do any avodah on the Sabbath. And even if it did, what would that mean? What would it mean not to do any work? Would you define that the way you'd learn about work in a physics class? In physics, if you pick up a book and you carry it across the room, you've done work. Do you define work by not going to work on the Sabbath day? But anything else you do outside the context of having a paid job is permittable on the Sabbath? Does it mean you can't do anything that's laborious and difficult to do? So for someone that finds mowing their yard difficult, they can't do it. But for the person that loves taking care of their yard, they can do it on the Sabbath. So even if the Bible said don't do any work, we wouldn't know what in the world it was talking about. But the Bible doesn't say that. The Bible says don't do any melacha. And it's deemed a capital crime. It's a very severe mistake to do melacha on the Sabbath, but we have no idea what that entails. So when God says those words, which we find in the text, don't do any melacha, what does it mean? How do we understand it? We don't know. When the Bible says that on the Feast of Tabernacles, Sukkot, you're to take the fruit of a beautiful tree, what are you supposed to do? When the Bible gives penalties for violating the Torah, at what age do those penalties become meaningful? Meaning that when is the age of majority? When does a person become responsible for observing the laws of the Bible? At the age of 7, 10, 13, 15, 18, 20, the Bible doesn't say. What do we do? How do we know? And anyone that reads the Bible with any kind of sensitivity understands and realizes that we don't have all the information. The Bible explains how to get divorced. If your marriage comes to an end, there's a way of divorcing, and this is the way you do it. But the Bible never defines how to get married, meaning what do you have to do to enter in the kind of a relationship where if you want to end it, you've got to do it in the way the Bible defines? Do you do that if people are just living together? Or do you have to actually do something specific in order to be considered legally married? And that's not defined in the Bible. The Bible says in the book of Exodus and the book of Deuteronomy that we're supposed to put something on our arm as a sign and to put totafot between our eyes. Now anyone that comes from Mars and picks up the Bible and reads that, they're going to say, what sign do you put upon your arm? What is that sign? And when do you do it? And how long do you have to keep it there? And what in the world are totafot that you're supposed to put between your eyes? And again, these are just several examples, but there are thousands of such examples where it's very clear that the material, the information that's in the text of the five books of Moses is simply not adequate. It could not have been the entire revelation. The Bible says if you want to eat meat, God says you need to slaughter the animals as I have commanded you. There's no instructions in the five books of Moses how to slaughter an animal. So what are those words mean as I have commanded you? Where did God command us? So obviously it was a command not committed to writing. It is simply artificial to insist that God only communicates in writing. For example, when God instructed Moses to build a sanctuary in the 25th chapter of the book of Exodus, and later elaborated on in the book of Numbers, the written instructions were not enough. So the Bible tells us that God showed Moses a diagram of what the tabernacle is supposed to look like. I don't know about you, but my Bible, the Bible, the Torah and that arc doesn't have any pictures or diagrams in it. So obviously God gave Moses information. These diagrams were shown to Moses. It says so in the text, but we don't have those diagrams. There was information given to Moses that was not written down. A more important question, how are we to understand who God is? The whole Torah is about God and having a relationship with God and not worshiping other gods. But how are we to understand God? Did God send us a memo? This is my bio. This is my CV. If you want to find out about me here, you can read all about it. Is that how we know about God? Or did God communicate who he is in a different way to us? So when God sent Moses to redeem the Jewish people from Egypt, Moses had one question. Moses says to God, what if they ask me your name? Now, it's not simply a better name. It's not simply that I want to be able to tell the Jewish people his name is Fred or Bob or Joe. It's a bigger question. In the Hebrew Bible, the name implies or it describes the essence of something. When Adam and Eve named the animals, the Torah says, and what they named the animals, that's what the animal was. So when Moses says to God, what if they ask me your name? What Moses really is asking God is, look, I'm going to go to the Jewish people and say that God sent me to redeem you and they're going to ask me, who is God? And God answers Moses and says, I will be what I will be. I will be what I will be. What God is saying is, you want to understand me? You'll see. You'll experience me on the stage of history. God doesn't say to Moses, I'm going to write a whole chapter in the Bible explaining to you who I am. God says, I will be what I will be. You'll experience me on the stage of history. And that's why in the first of the Ten Commandments, God says, I'm the Lord your God, doesn't just say I'm God and God could have said who created heavens and earth. That's the biggest thing that God did. God created everything. God says, I'm the Lord your God who took you out of the land of Egypt from the house of slavery because you experienced that. You went through that experience of the Exodus. You saw the miracles in Egypt. You saw the splitting of the Red Sea. I demonstrated to you who I was. And in the book of Deuteronomy chapter four, God says to us again, Ataharae salladat, you were shown so that you should know. You were shown it was an experience you had. It's not something that was simply committed to text. God says, I gave you living experiences so that you should know who I am. And that's exactly why the Torah constantly emphasizes. Don't forget these experiences you went through. Don't forget that you were slaves in Egypt. Don't forget the Exodus from Egypt. Don't forget the days that you stood here at Mount Sinai and teach them carefully to your children. And every year you're supposed to have holidays that commemorate these events and relive these events. Because the way that God chose to communicate with his people was not simply in writing. It was by giving them experiences. And throughout the Bible, when God speaks about the God we're not supposed to worship, God says, do not worship a God that your fathers did not know. Again, it goes back to our formative experiences. Anything God says, any God that was not revealed to you at Mount Sinai, that's idolatry. Because you did not experience it. It's very clear that there's a human involvement in the makeup of the Torah itself. The truth is that we know very well why the five books of Moses should be in the Bible. The five books of Moses are in the Bible because each Jew heard God speak to Moses. We have no question about the authority of Moses or his legitimacy as a prophet. But how do we know that Isaiah was a true prophet? How do we know Jeremiah was a true prophet? And our sages tell us that there were 12 1.2 million prophets. We had 1,200,000 prophets. How do we know they were prophets? And which books make it into the Bible? How do we know that Jeremiah, even if he was a true prophet, why should his book be in the Bible? Who makes those decisions? So what God could have done, God could have said, look, I'm going to send you prophets. There's going to be prophets after Moses. And if you want to know for sure whether they're a prophet or not, I will speak to the prophet in the hearing of all the Jewish people. The same way I did with Moses. But God doesn't say that. God says that there are going to be prophets, both true prophets and false prophets. A false prophet you have to kill. So here we have a very weighty issue. Is someone a true prophet or a false prophet? How do we know who makes the decision? And again, God could have said, if you're not clear about it, pray to me and I'll show you what to do. Pray to me, I'll tell you whether this person is a true prophet or not. God doesn't say that. In the 17th chapter of Deuteronomy, God says if you have any question and it's not clear any issue in Jewish law, especially issues that are weighty like a capital crime, you have to go to the leading judges of your generation. They will tell you what the law is. So built into the Torah itself, the structure of the Bible is the participation of human beings that were given the authority and responsibility by God. The sages, the judges, the rabbis didn't aridate this responsibility. They didn't claim it for themselves. We see in the Bible that God gives them, these human beings, the authority to decide who is a false prophet. Who is a true prophet? That's the only way we know who's a true prophet because you know one thing for sure. Every false prophet claimed to be a true prophet. Every false prophet is claiming to be a true prophet. How do we know the difference? And God said that the people that will tell you who is who are the leading judges. So the reason that we know Jeremiah was a true prophet was that the leading judges of their generation accepted them as true prophets and didn't judge them to be false prophets. And at the end of the day, it were the same judges that determined that their books should be included in the Scripture. We didn't get a revelation from God coming out of heaven and telling us, yeah, you should put the Book of Amos in the Tanakh. That decision was made by human judges. At the end of the day, how do we really know that the Bible is true, aside from the five books of Moses? Today, how do we know that Isaiah was a true prophet? Because we know that the judges at his time accepted him as a true prophet. But we have a bigger problem. When we open our Bible today, how do we know today that the words in our Bible were actually the words that were spoken by Isaiah? How do we know that these are the words that Isaiah spoke? We know one thing about a text. A text does not validate itself. If I come into a courtroom and present the court with an IOU that someone owes me a million dollars, it's not a slam dunk case. I don't walk out with the million dollars simply because I have an IOU. The person I'm claiming the money from is going to say, well, how do we know that this document is legitimate? How do we know that it's a real document? How do we know that it's valid? And the only way a document becomes valid is that we have witnesses that validate it. We have witnesses that testify. Yes, we saw this loan take place that's recorded in this document. Document by itself may not even be a real document. It could have been a forgery. So the document by itself, if all we had, was a Bible in front of us today, and we were just reading the words of Jeremiah, how do we really know that these words we're reading today were actually spoken by the prophet Jeremiah thousands of years ago? The only reason we know that is because we have witnesses that validate and testify to the accuracy of these writings. Who are the witnesses? So in the book of Isaiah chapter 43 verse 10, God says that Israel, the people of Israel, are his witnesses. That the Jewish people are the ones that testify. We today give testimony. We testify that, yes, we receive this book from our ancestors who received it from their ancestors. And first of all, we carefully preserve the accuracy of the text. We are testifying to the fact that these texts are accurate, and these are the texts that were actually composed by Jeremiah. And we can tell you based upon the fact that our ancestors ruled on the case of whether or not Jeremiah was a true prophet that he is a true prophet, not a false prophet. Reading the text by itself does not speak for itself. The text does not guarantee its own credibility. The text only works in conjunction with living witnesses that can testify about the credibility, the accuracy, and the authority of these documents. So again, the text by itself, a written document by itself, is certainly not sufficient. I want to share one more piece of this. A legitimate question could be, why didn't God just simply include all the information in a written text? Why did God divide the information between what was written in the five books of Moses and what was kept oral? Why not just put all of it in a book? There are many reasons. One reason which we're not going to spend much time on is the fact that having it oral ensures that you will have a teacher. You need to have a teacher. Otherwise, if all you have is a text, any Tom, Dick, or Harry can just seize the text and insist that I understand it. I have the true understanding. And one of the problems that our sages tell us is that if we didn't have an oral Torah, the nations of the world could just abscond with hijack our writings, our Torah, and claim that they're the real Jews and they have the real interpretation, which is exactly what happened in history. Christianity, at least many forms of Christianity, insist that the Jewish people got it wrong and now the true Israel is the church and they understand the scripture is not the people of Israel. So the fact that there's an oral Torah requires that you have a teacher that can ensure that you are reading and understanding the scriptures properly because the teacher has to have received it from their teacher. There's an unbroken line of teachers and students going back to the revelation of Torah itself. There's another important reason that the Torah is both partially written and partially oral. The fact that it allows us to have a stereoscopic revelation. A revelation and stereo. What do I mean? If all we had was a written text, that written text is basically flat. It's one-dimensional. Let me illustrate what happens when you have a written text that is supplemented by an oral Torah. The written text says that if you attack someone and in the course of your attack you chop off their arm. Let's say you have a machete with you or you take out one of their eyes. Pretty horrible crime. The Torah says very clearly an eye for an eye, an arm for an arm, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot. If all you had was the written text of the Torah, you would assume that God's intention is that if someone takes out someone else's eye, the court will take that as a criminal and the court will have this criminal's eye removed. Now I would propose there are three serious problems with this understanding. Problem number one is that it's barbaric. For us to take a machete and chop off someone's arm or poke out their eye is simply barbaric. That's not the biggest problem. The second problem is that it wouldn't help the victim. If someone was crippled or maimed and all the court is told to do is to maim the attacker, how is the victim being helped? And number three, it wouldn't be fair. It wouldn't be fair punishment because let's imagine the attacker was someone that was a one-eyed attacker. Here's this pirate with one eye. And he pokes out your eye and the court says, well, we're going to take out his remaining eye. Well, wait a second. You've got one eye left. You can see quite a bit with one eye. But if you take out this pirate's one remaining eye, he's completely blind. Is that equitable? Is that fair? Or let's imagine the attacker is an opera singer. This opera singer comes and chops off your hand or pokes out your eye and you are a pianist or a surgeon or a pilot. Well, you can't function anymore missing an eye or missing an arm. As an opera singer, they can do all those things. Or if you switch the roles and the person that was attacked and lost an eye or lost an arm was the opera singer and the attacker was a surgeon or a pilot. And that's what you do to the surgeon or pilot. Cut out their arm, take out their eye. They very clearly will not be able to function in those positions anymore. So an eye for an eye, an arm for an arm is not equitable. It's not fair. So number one, it's not fair. Number two, it's barbaric. Number three, it doesn't help the victim. So the oral Torah tells us, the oral Torah tells us that if someone maims someone else, the punishment is they have to compensate the victim monetarily for the loss of their limb, for their doctor's bills, for the loss of their wages, for the pain they experienced, and for the embarrassment they're going to have to go through. The court will assess each of these five things. How much is the limb worth? How much are their doctor bills going to come to? How much are their wages they're going to lose? How do we assess the pain they went through and their embarrassment? The victim is compensated for those five things. So here, in practice, we do not poke out anyone's eye. We do not chop off anyone's hands. We compensate for these five things. And this helps the victim. It is not barbaric and it's equitable. We have a big problem now. If the law actually in practice is that you don't chop off anyone's hand. You don't poke out anyone's eye. You compensate for these five things. Why didn't the Torah just say that? Why didn't the Bible just say money for an eye? Money, you write a check if you take off someone's arm. And the reason would be that that would make the Bible crest. It would be crass to say if you chop off someone's arm, write them a check. Write them a check. Everything is hunky-dory. What the Bible is trying to teach us by writing, in writing, an eye for an eye is to teach us how disgusting and horrible and barbaric that action is. If you chop off someone's arm or you take out one of their eyes, that action is so horrible you really deserve on some level to have it happen to you. That's how terrible the act is. That would not be captured by the Torah saying write them a check. The Torah is trying to convey to us viscerally that the criminal should understand, the attacker should understand their behavior is so horrible that if they do that they deserve to have their eye taken out of their arm chopped off. But it's barbaric to do that. And it wouldn't help the victim. And it's not equitable. So in practice we compensate for them monetarily. So now the fact that we have a written Torah and an oral Torah is to have a revelation from God that's stereoscopic. The written text is trying to convey to us how heinous the crime is. The oral Torah is giving us in practice what we actually do. We have the same thing when the Torah says over and over and over again. If you violate the Sabbath you'll surely die. You read in the five books of Moses it seems that every Monday and Thursday the court's going to be executing someone because so many crimes have the death penalty. Is that really what God wants? A society where people are being executed routinely for violating the Torah? We know that our sages tell us that if a court executed one person in seven years and one opinion says if even in 70 years if the court killed one person in 70 years it was a bloody court. So the truth is that in practice we almost never killed anyone. And one of the ways that happened was that the Torah's laws of testimony were so rigorous that it was almost impossible to find someone guilty and culpable of a capital crime. So for example to be convicted of a capital crime you needed two people to actually warn the person that what they're about to do is a capital crime. The person had to be warned by two witnesses and the person had to say I know it might lead to my execution I'm going to do it anyway. Then there had to be two witnesses who observed them committing the crime and then these two witnesses were taken and cross examined separately by the high court. The high court took each one of them privately and asked them a million questions they would say well you saw this murder yes I saw the murder how far away were you? I was 25 feet away. Were there any trees behind the victim and the murderer when you saw it happen? Yeah there were a couple of trees. How tall was the tree? Do you know how many branches the tree had? How many leaves were on that small branch? I mean they would ask them minute little details about the scene of the crime and then they would ask the other witness the same questions and if their testimony did not match the witness was thrown out meaning that the laws of testimony were so rigorous they were over the top but they ensured that it would be virtually impossible to convict someone of a capital crime so if that's the case if the truth is that God does not really want criminals being executed left and right because we know in the 18th chapter of Ezekiel God says I'm not interested in the death of the wicked I don't care that the wicked person is to be killed God says rather I want this person instead to turn away from their wicked sins and their wrong behavior and turn back to me. That's the message of the Bible that God wants us to change and he gives us every opportunity to change so the truth is that God's will is not that people should be killed all the time for violating the Torah and that's why the laws of testimony are such a way that made it virtually impossible to convict and execute someone of a capital crime but if that's the case why does the Torah keep on saying if you do this you'll be certainly killed if you do that you'll be certainly killed so again the written text of the Torah is trying to convey to us how serious the crime is you should know that violating the Sabbath is not small potatoes that violating the Sabbath is. It's on some level an ultimate sin it is so bad that on some level you deserve to be executed but practically speaking the oral Torah tells us that's not what we do because God is not interested in just executing everyone so what happens is we have a dynamic relationship between the written text and the oral Torah which provides a much richer revelation than if we only had one. They work hand in glove where often the written text is giving us some ideal and the oral Torah modifies it to teach us what we do in practice and these two are critical and they work together and they each provide information and teachings that would not be available if we only had one of these two