"The diffusion of writings and books which, through the invention of the printing press, has been infinitely multiplied in our days, has entirely transformed man. The great upheaval in the whole system of human knowledge and convictions which it has produced has, indeed, had on the one hand advantageous advantages for the improvement of mankind, for which we cannot thank beneficent Providence enough. However, like any good which can come to man here below, it has also had, incidentally, many evil consequences, which are to be attributed partly to its abuse, and partly also to the necessary condition of human nature. We teach and instruct one another only through writings; we learn to know nature and man only from writings. We work and relax, edify and amuse ourselves through overmuch writing. The preacher does not converse with his congregation; he reads or declaims to it a a written treatise. The professor reads his written lectures from the chair. Everything is a dead letter; the spirit of living conversation has vanished. We express our love and anger in letters, quarrel and become reconciled in letters; all our personal relations are by correspondence; and when we get together, we know of no other entertainment than playing or reading aloud." (trans. Arkush, Brandeis, 1983, p.102)
These words ring strangely in the ears of the 21st century reader, particularly their critical tone. In a world with television and the internet, many parents would be happy to have their children grow up in the environment that Mendelssohn describes. What many cultural critics today share with Mendelssohn, though, is the fear of a decrease in human interaction and communication. Throughout the rest of this essay, Mendelssohn shows why he claims that this change is so dangerous.
This statement by Mendelssohn serves as an introduction to his view of both the cause and perils of idolatry, and the solution in the monotheistic, ritual-based religion of Judaism. He claims that the way societies have attempted to portray language in writing, either through pictures and only later through phonetic alphabets, has profoundly affected the way they learn and believe. Mendelssohn blames the rise of idolatry on the confusion of symbols (like hieroglyphics or other pictographic images) with the ideas that they represent, akin to Saussure’s signified and signifier. Unable to comprehend the symbols and analogies used to describe God, idolatrous peoples began to confuse those symbols for the very God that they were mean to represent, says Mendelssohn.
With the development of alphabets, this problem is traded for another: Mendelssohn recalls the same concerns as the rabbis over the writing down of religious texts (the Oral Torah particularly):
דרש רבי יהודה בר נחמני מתורגמניה דרבי שמעון בן לקיש כתיב (שמות לד) כתוב לך את הדברים האלה וכתיב (שמות לד) כי ע"פ הדברים האלה הא כיצד דברים שבכתב אי אתה רשאי לאומרן על פה דברים שבעל פה אי אתה רשאי לאומרן בכתב דבי רבי ישמעאל תנא אלה אלה אתה כותב ואי אתה כותב הלכות א"ר יוחנן לא כרת הקב"ה ברית עם ישראל אלא בשביל דברים שבעל פה שנאמר (שמות לד) כי על פי הדברים האלה כרתי אתך ברית ואת ישראל
“Rabbi Judah bar Nahmani interpreted, from the spokesman of Rabbi Simon ben Lakish: “It is written ‘write for yourself these things’ and it is written ‘according to these words.’ How (should) this (be interpeted)? Words which are written you are not allowed to say by memory; things which are memorized you are not allowed to say [from a written text]. The House of Rabbi Ishmael taught: [both] may be written down, but you don’t write down halakhot. Rabbi Yochanan says, the Holy One who is blessed [only] made a covenant with Israel [for the sake of] spoken (memorized) words, as it say, ‘for by (at the mouth of) these words I made a covenant with you and with Israel.’"
-Bavli Gittin 60b.
Mendelssohn’s point is that texts, when they are written down, lose their flexible, living character, becoming, in his words a “dead letter.” In a way, this is no less idolatrous than confusing animals for God: the eternal truths present in the evolving set of laws are confused with the individual laws themselves. When these laws are recorded, they then become a fixed set, having a sense of authority on their own, outside of the greater values that they represent. So in Mendelssohn’s view recorded language, for all of the advantages that it brings, endangers greater human understanding of “eternal truths.”
Mendelssohn is not the last up to our day to note the challenges of sea change in the way we communicate and learn. Haym Soloveitchik, in his now famous essay “Rupture and Reconstruction” (Tradition, vol. 28, no. 4, 1994) notices the changes that occurred in Orthodoxy in the twentieth century. Starting with the Mishna Berura, a early 20th century commentary on the first section of Joseph Caro’s Shulhan Arukh, Jewish practice begins to be based less on learned behaviors passed from generation to generation (mimesis), and more based on the printed texts of halakha that were widely available. Before this time, so powerful was common Jewish practice (minhag) that the technical, recorded opinion was reread to incorporate the divergent custom into the law. However, the Mishna Berura, instead of accommodating these views, castigated those whose practice diverged from the norm as it was recorded in the codes, encouraging all God-fearing people to avoid such practices.
This reflects a different attitude towards the conversational, human interactions of everyday lived Jewish experience, rejecting it for the precision, and inhumanity, of the written word. The reasons for this shift are complicated, and include the decreasing religiosity and education of many Orthodox parents and the increasing rancor of denominational politics. Whatever the reason, people started to learn how to keep kosher from manuals, and to learn how to daven from Artscroll (didactic, rather than mimetic). This attitude prevents not only a more fluid, flexible application of the law, it even proscribes anything new to be said about halakhic topics. One of my teachers insists that because of this trend, the period of Aharonim, later halakhic decisors, is over. The current period in which we are living should be called “the anthologies,” in his view, because of the tendency of almost all halakhic works (like Shemirat Shabbat k’Hilkhata and the Artscroll Halachah Series) to simply summarize and reorganize information, adding almost nothing to any halakhic discussion; essentially, the very dead letter about which Moses Mendelssohn wrote.
Isidore Twersky argues persuasively in his “Shulhan Aruk’: Enduring Code of Jewish Law,” (Judaism, 16, 1967, p.141-158) that this tension between codification and standardization on the one hand, and respect for the diversity and fluidity of Jewish practice on the other, is a historical pattern that repeats itself. He observes that throughout the period of the Geonim and the Rishonim there is a sort of accordion effect, where excessive diversity creates the need for codification, and when that codification is found to exclude long-standing customs of communities or other understandings of rabbinic literature, the leadership of those communities pushed for decision-making based on the more democratic responsa rather than codes. Many European rabbis before the advent of Caro’s code were hesitant to write a code, precisely over these concerns, and criticized his code after it was published. Once again, this is the fear of “Oral Torah” becoming “Written Torah.”
Mendelssohn believed that the solution for his linguistic problem, and this tension between Oral and Written Torah, is the religious or “ceremonial” law of Judaism. Rather than committing the instruction of greater religious ideas to the realm of books and knowledge (Written Torah), or to myths and symbols (which can lead to confusion and idolatry), religious instruction of eternal truths would be learned through acts (mitzvot):
"Man’s actions are transitory; there is nothing lasting, nothing enduring about them that, like hieroglyphic script, could lead to idolatry through abuse or misunderstanding. But they also have the advantage over alphabetical signs of not isolating man, of not making him to be a solitary creature, poring over writings and books. They impel him rather to social intercourse, to imitation, and to oral, living instruction. For this reason, there were but a few written laws, and even these were not entirely comprehensible without oral instruction and tradition." (p.119)
Here Mendelssohn is sensitive to the need for the mimetic (to use Soloveitchik’s language) learning of tradition to prevent it from becoming stagnant. Only when the law is practiced in community, through the continuous interpretation of the community can it continue to transmit the eternal truths of Judaism which transcend any individual law. Crucial here, too, is that Mendelssohn recognizes that even to the extent that there is a Written Torah, it will be interpreted through its being lived in real life, through the Oral Torah.
Mendelssohn had essentially three concerns about the way media (in his day the printing press) could affect our lives: 1)that the wide availability of print would cause meaningless speculation rather than meaningful conversation, 2) that the commitment of essentially fluid information to writing would cause stagnation the development of religion and 3) that we would miss greater spiritual truths by focusing on fixed texts that had a particular historical context. Considering our situation today, what would he say?
It is true that our smartphones, computers, and social media sites take a lot of our time that could be used for personal interactions. On the other hand, social media has allowed larger circles of friends to stay in touch more easily than ever before. Furthermore, the internet has democratized information in a way that books never could have. We have gone even further than Mendelssohn’s description of “poring over volumes” instead of asking someone, to simply typing our questions into a search bar. However, isn't it possible that the internet might actually represent the synthesis of the Oral Torah and the Written Torah that Mendelssohn wanted to achieve? The internet does record information with an almost frightening permanence (Written Torah), but that information is being constantly debated, commented on, and and reedited on wikis all the time; all this with a record of the changes and those who made them. The technology that we have provides unique opportunities to have a Written Torah with an essentially Oral, democratic method of transmission. Clearly we are not unique in having to deal with the challenges of new forms of communication, and we will adapt to the change. Hopefully we will take advantage of it to advance understanding of the mitzvot as they are lived in real life, and of the practice of Judaism as an expression of the eternal truths of the Torah.
As this site becomes more active, may it and its participants be a part of the transmission of Torat Hayyim, the living Torah, both written and oral.
כן יהי רצון
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