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© 2016 John D. Brey.

  

Why did God's Word not just incarnate from the get-go rather than allegedly presenting himself in the written Tanakh, or the written-Torah, as it were, and then secondarily giving rise to the oral-Torah required to make heads, or tails, of the written text? -----Why present a written text at all, since the sages of the oral-Torah have authority over the written text, such that what they say it says has more authority than the author who profaned himself by trying to write what can only be understood orally:

Hence one of the fundamental doctrines of Rabbinic Judaism is that the written Torah is accompanied by an oral Torah, without which the written is incomplete and incomprehensible. The relation of the oral to the written is not that of inferior to superior. Since the oral Torah is the revelation of the deeper aspects of the written, it also has divine status. More accurately, one could say that the Torah has two parts: written and unwritten. . . For the Rabbis, the oral Torah is precisely what lies between the lines, so to speak: the explanations, the filling in of the lacunae, the elucidations of the enigmas, and the probing into what was not explicitly written: It is the text within the text.

The written Torah is something like a notebook in which every jotting condenses a whole train of thought  . . . the rabbis declare, "All that a faithful disciple will expound in the future in front of his master was already disclosed to Moses at Sinai" (Yer. Peah 6:2) they also assert, "The Torah is not in Heaven," but is revealed through the decisions of the judges and sages of every generation. . . Thus, while "all was already given at Sinai," the revelation was ongoing and mediated by the interpreters.

Susan A. Handelman, The Slayers of Moses, p. 39-41.

If everything was in the text at Sinai, then how do the good guys, the sages, get something out of the text that no one else can get out of the text? And if they say they got it out of the text, without showing us how, or that it was indeed in the text, how can we determine whether or not they've merely usurped God and taken control of his letteral vineyard, the written text given at Sinai, in order to lord their sageliness over we little folk?

This last question goes to the heart of an author's ability to hide his spirit in the lacunae of words. He must be able to hide his spirit from those he would not like to reveal it to, and yet reveal it in a manner that can justify that it was in fact in the text from the get-go, for the person who can go get it.

Jesus was tried and executed for the blasphemy of suggesting that God could dwell, in his fullness, in man, divine-incarnation. That was his primary blasphemy. In her book, The Slayers of Moses, Professor Susan A. Handelman examines some of the concepts that led to Jesus's conviction, and subsequent elevation in the Greek/Christian mind, versus the Jewish condemnation, and the rabbinic worldview from which it arose. One of her primary tools for distinguishing between Greek/Christian thought/interpretation versus Jewish thought/interpretation, is to point out the difference between the Greek/Christian concept of the "word" (logos) versus the Jewish concept of the "word" (davar).

Professor Handelman claims that for rabbinic Judaism, the "word" is not a "sign" or "symbol" of something real, that's merely represented by the word, but that:

The Hebrew word was not just an arbitrary designation, but an aspect of the creative divine force itself. Each word as Rabinowitz puts it, was the inner character or essence of it's respective reality. Names are not conventional, but intrinsically connected to their referents; the name, indeed, is the real referent of the thing, its essential character---not the reverse, as in Greek thought. One does not pass beyond the name as an arbitrary sign towards a non verbal vision of the thing, but rather, from the thing to the word . . ..

With that in mind, i.e., the inversion of the Greek concept of the word as a mere "sign" trying to "symbolize" what it’s not, in essence, Professor Handelman cuts to the chase:

With the above in mind, one can see how Christianity took the Hebraic concept of the word as essential reality and combined it with Greek concepts of substance and being, and developed the idea of the incarnation----the word-become-flesh, thing in a literal sense. Then a distinction had to be made between the incarnate word, and the "old" word, which had merely prefigured in a symbolic way the "fulfilled" word: thus a distinction between the "Old" and "New" Testaments. In Christianity, the Hebrew Scriptures then acquired the status which words had in Greek thought---mere signs, figures, shadows pointing to the true word, the word of flesh.

In the last two quotations, Professor Handelman makes two important points. First, that in rabbinic Jewish thought, a word is not a "sign" of something it merely symbolizes, but, in a sense, it’s linked, or united, in a fundamental way, to the reality it is and says, "As we noted, the Hebrew word, davar, is also the term for thing” (p. 31).

Greek philosophy more or less begins," writes Hans-Georg Gadamer, "with the insight that a word is only a name, i.e., that it does not represent true being." Indeed, the Greek term for word, onoma, is synonymous with name. By contrast, its Hebrew counterpart ---davar---means not only word, but also thing.

Too many times to count it’s been pointed out that a word, or symbol, or ritual, is merely a fairly felicitous facade, or skene, hiding something behind it, so to say, that it’s not. You must, as has been constantly implied, go behind the skene, or fore-skene, to get to the thing it merely represents. . . You must [clearing throat] remove the fore-skene to appreciate the unity it's removal makes possible, or literally inevitable (since removing the foreskene reveals the unity hidden by the foreskene's presence.)

But Professor Handelman implies that it's not like that in Jewish thought. A word is not merely a semi-felicitous stand-in, or up, for what it’s not. They're united in a fundamental way that Greek thought doesn't appreciate.

And yet Professor Handelman correctly posits that in Jesus, Greek thought unites with Jewish thought. Jesus is fancied the Greek Logos, word, which unites symbolic and real in one unified incarnation. In other words, whereas in Greek thought, the "word" is only a sign for something it’s not in essence, in Jesus, and the Gospel, Jesus, the Word, Logos, becomes a Greek-Jewish unification of sign and essence, precisely as is the case with the Jewish understanding of the "word" as a unity rather than a sign/signified relationship with the sign being inferior to, or merely a tool (so to say) for what it would signify completely if that were possible.

Whereas Christianity is fancied Greek thought, in Jesus, the Logos, Christianity posits the first Greek instance of the Jewish unity between sign and signified. In Christian thought, Jesus is the union of sign and signified that justifies the essence of Jewish thought concerning the unity of word and thing, sign and signified, even God and man.

Rabbi's unite sign and signified as a holistic unity as though the paragon of that possibility either doesn't need to exist, or exists in every sagely rabbi. In other words, the rabbi unites sign and signified in every sacred word as though no singular paragon of that process is required: the rabbi has it in his power to do, himself, what Greek Christianity required Jesus to make possible through his incarnation of sign and signified, God and man, Jew and Greek.

Professor Handelman actually stumbles into this problem (for Jewish thought), i.e., the fact that if Judaism doesn't need a paragon like Jesus to unify the word and the thing, then every rabbi is able to do that himself, which makes every rabbi, within the Jewish conceptual world, equal to Jesus, able to unite word and thing single-handedly.

If the word and essence are truly united then there could only be one authentic interpretation of a word, since, in a sense, the word felicitously unites the whole essence in itself. Professor Handelman comes to this conclusion since it's inevitable. If the written Torah is the full unity of the world (creation) and the written text (she shows where Judaism posits that the Torah is not a thing in the world, but the source for the world), then why are they two things?

If the written word is not merely a sign of what it represents, but a unity, then why is there a "written" documentation, elucidation, of the creation that is real in its physical essence? What is the "written" Torah's relationship to the created world, if the created word was created according to the text of the written Torah.

In other words, why are there two things where a unity implies One? 

It seems the written word is not, after all, the full unity of thing and word. As Professor Handelman is quoted saying, it's merely a notebook, a jotting, an incomplete skene, or fore skene, that’s incomprehensible without the oral, intangible, incarnate, Torah. . . And whereas Professor Handelman claims that the oral and written are equal, on even this she corrects herself later, quoting the Talmud to say that the oral Torah is preeminent. It turns out that the written word, is, after all, an incomplete jotting, a mere skene, a tool (so to say) in the hands, if you will, of the oral Torah.

Professor Handelman appears forced to concede that there's a real problem with the idea of the unity of the "word" and the "thing" since the written Torah requires the oral Torah to even make sense.

In describing the oral Torah's relationship to the written Torah, she ends up describing the very distinction she initially claimed is Greek and not Jewish, i.e., the written Torah is merely a "jotting" down of abstract ideas, a mere notebook, containing the signs, that, in the power of the oral Torah, acquire the unity she formerly implied the written word --- davar--- has in itself.

In other word, Professor Handelman claims as the beginning of her examination that there's a distinction between Greek "word" and Jewish "word," and that the crux of the distinction, so to say, is that Greeks make the written word a mere "sign" symbolizing what it is not essentially, i.e., the real thing the written word merely symbolizes. But in her examination she's forced into the reality that in fact, no written word is thing (essence) and sign (symbol) in one unity since the written word is incomplete, impotent, powerless, without the interpreter, who, the interpreter, is always, flesh and blood.

The written word requires the flesh and blood, the incarnate word, the oral Torah . . . which . . . oral Torah . . . is forbidden, by God, to be "written" precisely so that the distinction between the sign, the written, and the fleshly, the living (oral, mouth, tongue), is never unified in a manner that creates the most monstrous meme the world has ever seen: a written word, or sign, or ritual, that, having no blood, no breath, no spirit, no truth, is treated as though it were the full-presence in the ink (rather than flesh), of a living idea, or thing. A zombie. Neither alive, nor dead; just a memetic unity of the idea of life and death mixed up in living-death.

Professor Handelman makes it clear that what’s known as rabbinic interpretation begins around the fourth century BCE, and is most fully developed with the writing down of the oral Torah in the first few centuries of the modern era. As the Talmudic scholar Rabbi Boyarin points out (below), this development of rabbinic Interpretation coincides with the advent of the Christian Messiah in the first century of the current era. The ideas the rabbis codified not only led to the events that are documented in the Christian Testament, but the existence of the Christian epoch, and Testament, feed into the nature of rabbinic interpretation.

The written-oral-Torah is something like the once living Christian Messiah who is now dead. . . With one important difference. The Christian heremeutic is based on a distinction between the "living" (breath, oral, tongue, carnate, flesh and blood) and the dead, ink, writing, written word, dead letter. The Christian hermeneutic, because it distinguishes between the living, breath, flesh, body, incarnate, versus the dead, the ink, the letter, the written word, thereby possesses a means for resurrection from the dead. The dead letter can be resurrected through a living breath.

On the other hand, the rabbinic hermeneutic, in not distinguishing between a dead-letter, and a living breath, a written-Torah, versus the oral (incarnate) Torah, but instead trying to unify them into one, creates a zombie-Torah that can’t be resurrected from the dead, since it's not dead, even in the letter, or alive, even in the body, the breath, the incarnate.

. . . because it was "unwritten," the Oral Torah became an ingenious instrument of change that facilitated evolution even as it sustained continuity. The tragedy of Jewish fundamentalism is that it turned the Oral Torah into a second Written Torah and thereby robbed Judaism of any capacity to transform itself.

Ismar Schorsch, Canon Without Closure: Torah Commentaries, p. 252.

The finally definitive move for the Rabbis was to transfer all Logos and Sophia talk to the Torah alone, thus effectively accomplishing two powerful discursive moves at once: consolidating their own power as the sole religious virtuosi and leaders of `the Jews,’ and protecting one version of monotheistic thinking from the problematic of division within the godhead. For the Rabbis, Torah supersedes Logos, just as for John [the apostle], Logos supersedes Torah. Or, to put it into more fully johaninine terms, if for John the Logos Incarnate in Jesus replaces the Logos revealed in the Book, for the Rabbis the Logos Incarnate in the Book displaces the Logos that subsists anywhere else but in the Book.

Border Lines, Daniel Boyarin, Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture, Berkeley. [Emphasis mine. Incarnation in a Book is zombification of the living in the dead, since a book has no blood, no breath, no life.]

When she's forced, or forces herself, into these conundrums Professor Handelman tries making sense of the problematic of the need for a written and oral Torah in opposition to the rabbinic idea of unity of word and thing. The thing, the written Torah, which seems thingy, in relationship to breath, air, spirit, thought, is impotent, meaningless, dead, without the living breath, the spirit, that exists only in the oral Torah, which, properly understood, exists only incarnate, in flesh and blood:

Thus, while "all was already given at Sinai," the revelation was ongoing and mediated by the interpreters. . . The boundaries between text and interpretation are fluid in a way which is difficult for us to image for a sacred text, but this fluidity is a central tenet of much contemporary literary theory. The elevation of later commentary to the status of earlier primary text is one of the extraordinary characteristics of Rabbinic interpretation, and involves a not so subtle power struggle.

Trying to make sense of this "power struggle" between text and interpretation, Professor Handelman speaks of the conceptual idea of two "houses." The first "house" is the written Torah, and the second "house" is the oral Torah:

The Rabbis of the Second House, that is, freely reshaped and recreated the materials they had inherited from the First House, the written scriptures, in an interpretive battle born of the tension between continuation and rebellion, tradition and innovation, attachment to the text and alienation from it. . . The rabbis of the Second House, as part of this struggle, sought to elevate their interpretation to the same status as the text they came to interpret by asserting it had the same origin (Everything a student in the future will innovate was already given to Moses at Sinai, they said; and Moses, worrying that he could not understand Rabbi Akiba's interpretations, heard Rabbi Akiba claim that all his insights came from Moses at Sinai). The God of the Rabbis, furthermore, became a learner of their interpretations of the Torah He had given---a concept which seemed blasphemous to outsiders. The Rabbis' interpretation subtly takes primacy over the text in a way unprecedented in the history of religion: human interpretation becomes divine.

Every Jewish interpreter is Jesus: is divine; has authority over the written text. Every Jewish interpreter is the divine spirit incarnate in the rabbis' flesh. -----The blasphemy that got Jesus crucified, claiming he has authority, as the first Jew (word and flesh united), to interpret the text from his divinity, turns out, to Professor Handelman's chagrin, to be orthodox rabbinical doctrine: every Jewish sage, every meaningful rabbi, is Jesus.

  

Everything hinges on the relationship between written and oral. The written is tangible, visible, unchanging. It's either dead, or perhaps just inert. It doesn't move, or breathe. It has no blood, unless the blood on the wimple gets on it. . . You can't engage God through the written-Torah unless you interpret it yourself, or trust someone else interpreting it. Interpretation is done by living organisms. Without living organisms, the text of the Torah is inert, pointless, literally (since the bloody Masoretes aren’t there to point the text in the direction they would have it go). The oral-Torah, Mishnah/Talmud, are living interpretation. They're scripture. They're far more authoritative than the written text, the written Torah, even as God's breath is more important that Adam's earthen body.

The sages fancy the written text (the written-Torah) the incarnate (tangible) body of the oral-Torah (intangible, breath). -----God's breath (oral Torah) is joined to the textual body (written-Torah), to form the Living God. The Living God (El Chay), is not the same as the monotheistic other; i.e. the God who in his monotheistic essence is beyond the ken or reach of living creatures. On the other hand, the right hand, the Living God is the oral-Torah conjoined with the written-Torah forming an utterly new hypostasis not existing before the union. 

Since rabbinical Judaism was partly a preemptive strike, and then full attack, on the Christian epoch, it attacked the dual-nature of the new hypostasis, El Chay, the Living God (the unique, echad, hypostasis of body and spirit in the new divine species). Rabbinic Judaism needed a way to obscure the fact that El Chay, the Living God, is a new hypostasis, and not, after all, the monotheistic other, who is not approachable by Jews, as is El Chay (El Chay being the God Jews can touch, and love, and handle, and even manhandle, when they pass around the Torah-scroll, or lovingly wrap it in a wimple, or kiss it, or touch it, or perhaps nail it down with pointy addendums).

The rabbinical authorities were savvy concerning what this Living God could become in the hands of Christians. So they proffered the idea that for Jews, a word isn't a concatenation of the spirit (oral, breath, invisible) and the tangible (ink, pen, orthography, etc.), creating, when combined, a Living God, a truly new hypostasis, subject to being handled, and even manhandled, but, rather, a Jewish word was never dualistic in the first place. It isn’t really a “union” of referent and referrer, but the singularity of those kinds of concepts without the need for a union.