Why not sola scriptura?: Torah and rabbinical interpretation

"The Rabbis emphasized interpretation of the Torah as the way to know the will of God... because they were convinced that the Torah needs interpretation, that even the accepted revelation in the Torah could not stand alone. There are sects of Christians who are "fundamentalists." They try to make their decisions in life solely on the basis of the Bible. There also have been sects of Jews who have tried to do that, including the Karaites (who were strongest in the ninth and tenth centuries but who still exist today) and, to a lesser degree, the Sadducees. (Even though these sects tried to rely solely on the Bible, they themselves found it necessary to develop their own tradition of interpretation.) The Rabbis, however, claimed that living by the Bible alone was impossible since its verses are open to many different interpretations." Elliot N. Dorff, Conservative Judaism: Our Ancestors to Our Descendants.

Before I began my exploration of Judaism and started learning about the centuries (millennia, in many cases) of tradition linking the prayers and rites of the modern synagogue to the ancient practices, I carried a particular view of contemporary Jews as a people far adrift from the religious structure shown in the Torah. Of course, I couldn't have been more wrong, but my understanding was warped by my own fundamentalist Christian upbringing. To a Pentecostal, scripture is the only source for mediating the relationship of creation to the creator. Tradition is okay for the hymnal and church decoration, but when it comes to God, the Bible is the final and only word. Strange then, that we seemed to have no problem picking and choosing which parts of it we wanted to follow (all of the New Testament, of course... especially Paul) and which parts we could safely ignore (all of the Hebrew Bible mitzvot minus the ten commandments). Add to this a few heaping scoops of charismatic preacher cult, faith-healing, and One-True-Church-mentality and you can get a pretty fair idea of the kind of environment in which I was educated about the rest of the world. We were very insular, very suspicious, and very, very committed to our view of the inerrant English translations of God-breathed scripture. Jesus himself might as well have spoken in the King James vernacular.

So, given this background, as an outsider looking in (not very closely, mind you), the world of rabbinic Judaism seemed so far distant from the picture of the ancient Israelites that it was very easy to dismiss it as apostate (as we did with every non-Pentecostal version of faith). Certainly, Jewish rejection of Jesus as the messiah only sealed their fate in our eyes. In our understanding, WE were the new Chosen People - the new priesthood for a fallen world. Jews had missed the boat and have paid the price: exile and rootlessness. In our egotism, we were blinded to the hypocrisy that veiled our a la carte piety beneath that particularly insidious hood of Certainty. Never mind the contradictions, forget the irrationality, ignore the picking-and-choosing; we got it right... everyone else missed a few steps.

Though I have long since abandoned the Fundie perspective of spirituality, my ignorance of the rabbinical links between contemporary and ancient Judaism preserved my heavily-flawed understanding of Jewish spirituality. Things that seemed so un-scriptural to me - wearing kippot and tefillin, pious devotion to the Talmud and Responsa, orthodox prayers for the resumption of temple sacrifice - are, of course, heavily rooted in a long tradition of rabbinical interpretation of the written Torah woven through the Mishnah, Midrashim, and beyond. Therein lies a truth so profound that it has shaken me to my core: within our human desire to demonstrate our love for a thing by shielding it we sometimes stifle and smother it. The Fundamentalists (of every religion) so greatly fear for the security of their positions that in holding so tightly to the letter of the law they squeeze out the living spirit of the law. This spiritual bear hug tries to wrestle the ancient understanding of God onto the mat, to pin it to the ground, to keep it firmly under grip. But when imprisoned, living Truth dims and hardens - radiant color fades to black and white, organic dynamism and responsiveness stiffens and becomes scaly, eventually crumbling. 

What I have learned to appreciate most, thus far, in my first few moments with Conservative Judaism is the centrality of Torah interpretation. In following the train of interpretational tradition through history, we are able to link ourselves to the roots of faith in the Torah through generational vines that flower and blossom under careful touch. As we travel further down the vines we move closer and closer to the milieu of the Torah, unraveling its historical significance along the way much as we might follow the sequence of logic in a geometric proof. 

This is the same concept behind judicial precedent. Each generational interpretation emerges from the one before it, each is seeded by the previous and grows and yields its own seeds for the next. In this way, Torah is not uprooted and dragged along the generations as a lifeless husk to be carved and chopped for a shelter that will prove uninhabitable after so many years. No, Torah continues to live! It lives within the cells of its progeny - its tree descendants that have sprouted up in a forest of interpretation and devotion. This living, breathing forest not only shelters us eternally, but it yields fruit in abundance, feeding us, nourishing our minds, enriching our souls. Yet beneath the forest bed, the roots of tradition intermingle in the very same place as that original Torah mother tree and are fed by the very same spring. Torah is eternal and meaningful and resonant precisely because it is living. Only when we crush it for fear of losing ourselves in its abundance do we threaten its survival.