Author Topic: Prof Rachel Elior explains how the sages invented Judaism  (Read 9925 times)

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Offline yahtruth

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Prof Rachel Elior explains how the sages invented Judaism
« on: March 26, 2014, 09:49:36 PM »
The scene could be out of the Haggada - a group of rabbis sitting on the floor in a circle through the night, probably reclining on pillows, scrolls scattered about them, engaging in heated disputation until the pale light outside signals that a new day is upon them.

The fact that this particular gathering, mentioned in the Talmud, is held in an attic (aliyat gag) might suggest to a modern reader that there is something clandestine about it, perhaps a desire to take distance from Roman ears or even from the surrounding Jewish population.

Clandestine or not, this meeting, and all the similar gatherings that preceded and followed, contained the seeds of revolution - the radical restructuring of Jewish religious thought and practice that followed the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. According to Prof. Rachel Elior of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the rabbis were involved in nothing less than "a reinvention of Judaism... They were closing an old world based on prophecy and angelic revelation and opening the sacred canon to human reinterpretation."

A glimpse into that intellectual ferment is provided in the brief depiction in the talmudic tractate Shabbat (13b) of the rabbinic gathering, perhaps in Yavne - which had become the major center of Jewish learning after the destruction of Jerusalem. "That man should be remembered with favor," the passage says in reference to one of the participants in the meeting, "his name being Hanania son of Hezekiah, for if it were not for him the Book of Ezekiel would have been suppressed and withdrawn as its teachings contradict those of the Torah. What did he do? They brought him jugs of oil [for lamps] and he sat in the attic and expounded upon the texts [through the night]."

What Hanania and his colleagues were engaged in was a culling of all the Hebrew religious texts composed until that time. The works they would choose from this library would constitute the Jewish canon which henceforth would be the only texts deemed to have divine authority. In the end, a consensus formed around 24 works, including the five books of the Pentateuch, which together would make up the Bible.

But what of the works excluded from the canon? Many were of comparable literary and religious quality to those chosen, says Elior, a professor of Jewish philosophy and Jewish mystical thought. "To many of the Jews of the first millennium BCE, all the texts had been equally holy," she says. "The [excluded] Book of Enoch or Book of Jubilees were certainly not considered less sacred than the [canonical] Book of Judges or Esther or Daniel." Yet the excluded texts - close to a dozen major works - were not just abandoned but excised as if they were a malignant growth. "Whoever reads them," declared Rabbi Akiva, one of the foremost sages involved in the process, "will have no place in the world to come."

Left to die, some of the expelled texts were rescued and adopted by another religion. Newborn Christianity, which regarded itself as the successor of Judaism, incorporated these texts into its own corpus of holy works along with the Tanach, as the Hebrew Bible came to be called. In time, Jewish scholars would rediscover the repudiated texts of their ancestors in Greek, Ethiopian (Geez), Syriac, Armenian and Slavic church translations.

These writings, known as Apocrypha ("hidden scriptures" in Latin) would never be reincorporated into the Jewish library but would remain for scholars to puzzle over as they tried to understand by what criteria the texts had been rejected.

HALF A century ago another lost library with a mystery attached surfaced on the shores of the Dead Sea, this one having been literally lost for 1,900 years after being hidden in the caves of Qumran. Many of these Dead Sea Scrolls would have been suppressed, says Elior, for the same reasons that the previously known apocryphal books were suppressed.

In her recently published (Hebrew) book, Memory and Oblivion - The Mystery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, she offers a bold and coherent narrative to explain events about which scholars have long held contrary views. The short reason for the canon/Apocrypha divide, she suggests, was a dispute over the calendar. The more profound explanation involves a power struggle between the old priestly order that believed its rulings to be divinely inspired and an emerging class of rabbis espousing a different narrative, one which gave human reason and laws a role in shaping the religion.

Elior demonstrates how mystic notions like cosmic calendars and heavenly chariots were part of a power struggle whose outcome would affect how Judaism is practiced to the present day. For centuries the Israelites had marked time according to a solar calendar drawn up by the priestly caste but regarded as divinely inspired. The calendar emulated the pattern set by God when He created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. The number seven would become a mystic measure of Jewish time.

The Israelites adopted a seven-day week, apparently the first people in the world to do so, and they too rested on the seventh day. Every seventh year was designated a shmita year when the earth itself rested and lay fallow. Each cycle of seven times seven years, 49 years in all, would be followed by a jubilee year, a new beginning when indentured servants were freed and leased land reverted to its original owners. The time between the exodus from Egypt to Moses's meeting with God on Mount Sinai would be remembered as seven weeks. Joshua would lead the Israelites across the Jordan in a jubilee year. There would be, until this day, seven days of mourning, seven days between birth and male circumcision, seven days of female menstrual impurity.

Elior terms the priestly calendar an exceptional mathematical construct that reflected a presumed cosmic order revealed to Enoch (Hanoch, in Hebrew), an intriguing biblical figure central to the priestly narrative but shunted aside by the rabbis.

In Genesis (5:18), he is mentioned briefly in the long list of descendents of Adam - the seventh generation of the patriarchs of mankind, and thus safely distanced from the incest that necessarily marked the earliest generations - but his listing is unique. As with all the others, it gives the number of years he lived - 365 in his case, not coincidentally the number of days of the year - and tells whom he begot - Methuselah, who lived 969 years and who in turn begat Noah. However, the thumbnail biography of Enoch does not end like all the others with the words "and he died." Instead, it says "And Enoch walked with God, and he was not; for God took him."

The Bible does not elaborate on this, but the Apocrypha does. Several versions of the Book of Enoch preserved by the church have been found in different languages. (Several scrolls of Enoch turned up in Qumran as well, in Aramaic.) They describe Enoch being brought up to heaven and granted immortality along with a two-way ticket. At God's direction, he is taught by angels to read, write and calculate numbers - the first human given this knowledge. He then returns to earth to share with humankind what he has learned, including the solar calendar.

The priests, wrote Elior in an earlier book, The Three Temples: On the Emergence of Jewish Mysticism, viewed this calendar as "a cyclic reflection of an eternal divine order." The priests were the calendar's guardians, privy to secrets imparted by angels and, like Enoch, would serve as conduits between the heavenly and the terrestrial.

It was members of the priestly caste and prophets, many of whom were priests, who wrote the books that would form the Bible, and they wrote the books that would become the Apocrypha as well.

Everything the priests wrote was considered sacred because they were, in effect, taking dictation from the angels. They regarded the angels as their heavenly counterparts and saw themselves as working with them to ensure a synchronization of the cosmic order in heaven and on earth.

THE MOST tangible earthly manifestation of the solar calendar was the priestly work roster on the Temple Mount. Twenty-four priestly families, the same number as the number of hours in a day, took weekly turns attending to animal sacrifices and other Temple rituals. Like army reservists today, members of one of these families would go up to the Mount on Sunday morning and officiate until relieved by the next family a week later.

These priestly "watches" gave a time frame to the life of the entire community, says Elior. From the time the Temple was built by Solomon in the 10th century BCE, the High Priest was chosen from a family line descended from the priest Zadok, who had carried the Ark of God in David's time and anointed David's son, Solomon, as king.

The last Zadokite (Sadducee) high priest was ousted during the political chaos that preceded the Hasmonean revolt in the second century BCE.

The Hasmoneans, a priestly family but not of the Zadokite line, cast out the Hellenizers from Jerusalem but instead of restoring the Zadokite line installed their own members in the high priesthood.

Some of the Zadokites and their followers challenged the legitimacy of the Hasmonean priestly leadership and seceded from Temple service. This conflict between the Zadokite "secessionists," as Elior calls them, and the Hasmonean usurpers is the theme of many of the most interesting scrolls found at Qumran.

Elior views the Qumran scrolls as a Zadokite library, not an Essene library as has been the consensus view.

Amid the chaos and intense religious ferment of the Hasmonean period (152-37 BCE), new voices began to be heard - those of scholars known as Pharisees who disputed the legitimacy of the Hasmonean priests and kings and who argued with the Zadokite priests about the solar calendar and their claims to possess an open line to the divine.

These scholars, who would become known as rabbis or sages, were unhappy about the exclusiveness of the priests and the power they had accrued through their claims to esoteric knowledge as confidants of angels. In a game-changing move, the rabbis declared that the age of prophecy had long since ended and that the priesthood had been severed from ongoing access to higher authority.

According to one rabbinic tradition, prophecy had ended with the destruction of the First Temple in the sixth century BCE. According to another, it ended when Alexander the Great and the Hellenizers arrived two centuries later. The priests vigorously rejected this downsizing.

The rabbis favored a lunar calendar, says Elior, because they saw it symbolically freeing the nation from dependence on a closed priestly caste locked into the solar calendar and claiming divine authority. They wanted to symbolize instead man's share in the determination of time and of his own fate. "They declared that human understanding of sacred writings was a legitimate source of authority." The month would now not commence according to a solar calendar precalculated for eternity but by mortals scanning the sky for the new moon, perhaps disagreeing about the sighting among themselves, perhaps even erring.

A MODERN-DAY reminder of the rabbinic victory in their epic struggle with the priests can be witnessed outside Orthodox synagogues one night a month, when the congregation emerges to pronounce the prayer for the new moon.

In choosing the works that would comprise the biblical canon, says Elior, the principle criteria of the rabbis was to exclude those which invoked the solar calendar and endowed the priests with ongoing divine authority. "They were saying by this, 'The old age has ended and a new age has begun.'"

Similar symbolic moves would follow the French Revolution when a radically new calendar, including a 10-day week, was adopted, and following the Russian Revolution when the Gregorian calendar used in the West was substituted for the Julian calendar followed by the Russian Orthodox Church.

The issue was less the measure of time, notes Elior, than the measure of man's sovereignty. Alongside the texts that the rabbis accepted into the canon, they created a parallel framework of oral law which they themselves - not the priests - would develop and which would become ever more relevant over the centuries to the evolving circumstances of Jewish life.

The first major compilation, the Mishna, would be completed by 200 CE. In the following centuries, sages in Palestine and Babylonia would complete the Talmud. These compilations would remain oral - the ancients having a capacity for memorizing enormous texts - until the eighth or ninth centuries when they were finally put into writing.

The sages represented a strongly democratic strain. Study was open to all Jewish men and was not a matter of dynasty and inherited privilege. Rabbi Akiva had been a shepherd. Other sages had been farmers and craftsmen. Resh Lakish was a reformed bandit.

The Oral Law, says Elior, was "open to study and interpretation by the entire male Jewish population." The meritocracy that emerged displaced the hereditary leadership of the priestly clans which had traced their dynasty, link by link, back to Moses's brother, Aaron. "The rabbis transferred the center of gravity," says Elior, "from a regular, priestly ritual, anchored in holy time and holy place, to an ever-changing order entrusted to sages from all classes of the population, who took charge of humanly declared time and taught a new perception of holiness."

The debate between the sages and the priests ended abruptly with the Roman conquest. Following the destruction of the Temple, the priestly order was shattered and the rabbis were free to reconfigure the playing field.

They not only discarded the apocryphal texts but, according to Elior, probably amended some passages in the books they would include in the Bible to minimize references to the solar calendar, to angels and to the story of Enoch. By doing so, the sages prepared the Jewish people for the long haul through the ages.

The conduit to the divine was no longer a monumental building in Jerusalem served by a priestly caste. As they went into exile, the Jews took with them the Sabbath and the Bible but were no longer dependent on a specific holy place or on priestly intermediaries. From now on a quorum of 10 ordinary Jews assembling in the humblest of rooms, or in no room at all, could, anywhere in the world talk directly to God.

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Offline Israel Chai

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Re: Prof Rachel Elior explains how the sages invented Judaism
« Reply #1 on: March 26, 2014, 10:44:36 PM »
This is absurd. The Rabbis didn't invent or change Judaism, there is no evidence or any Rabbi that talks about the Qumran, it's a machination from the dead sea scrolls, which were an insane cult, Jews never followed a solar calender, " by 200 CE. In the following centuries, sages in Palestine and Babylonia would complete the Talmud." there was no Fakestine in 200CE, or in the following centuries, and there wasn't one until Arafat invented it, the book of Enoch was taken by Catholic murderers, and original copies were burned, and what exists today has been so obviously and pathetically changed, that nothing in it is seen as divine, nor can be trusted, "They not only discarded the apocryphal texts but, according to Elior, probably amended some passages in the books they would include in the Bible to minimize references to the solar calendar, to angels and to the story of Enoch" The Rabbis didn't change the Torah. There are codes that go between chapters, are relevant to all the words, and in several cases have come true. This is a pure lie.

What is this, required reading for becoming a priest of the Hebros?
The fear of the L-rd is the beginning of knowledge

Offline Tag-MehirTzedek

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Re: Prof Rachel Elior explains how the sages invented Judaism
« Reply #2 on: March 26, 2014, 11:57:44 PM »
  Didn't read the post but let's say this is true. If soo then woow, such brilliance, I am jealous. If it was men who invented "Judaism" meaning- Torah then we should admire them even more for their brilliance in making this.
.   ד  עֹזְבֵי תוֹרָה, יְהַלְלוּ רָשָׁע;    וְשֹׁמְרֵי תוֹרָה, יִתְגָּרוּ בָם
4 They that forsake the law praise the wicked; but such as keep the law contend with them.

ה  אַנְשֵׁי-רָע, לֹא-יָבִינוּ מִשְׁפָּט;    וּמְבַקְשֵׁי יְהוָה, יָבִינוּ כֹל.   
5 Evil men understand not justice; but they that seek the LORD understand all things.

Offline edu

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Re: Prof Rachel Elior explains how the sages invented Judaism
« Reply #3 on: March 27, 2014, 06:09:10 AM »
Once one holds heretical ideas, such as the ideas of this Professor Elior, there's no end to wild speculation and theories that one can invent to explain why Judaism is, what it is today.
But since her foundation assumptions are nonsense, I feel no need to waste time on her.

Offline White Israelite

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Re: Prof Rachel Elior explains how the sages invented Judaism
« Reply #4 on: March 27, 2014, 01:06:52 PM »
I'm really not too surprised, a lot of anti Semites have been making claims like this saying that modern rabbinical judaism is a recently revival, some will claim a bunch of Europeans started converting in the 1500s and will claim there is no mention of jews before that period, fortunately we have DNA evidence to prove that is not true at all and that most jews are infact the descendants of Israelites and follow traditional Torah judaism.

Offline Israel Chai

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Re: Prof Rachel Elior explains how the sages invented Judaism
« Reply #5 on: March 27, 2014, 03:18:46 PM »
I'm telling you guys, this lady is vile. At around 7:00, she says "oh there were all these people in Israel, we were wrong to come". At 8:00, she says there was no women writers, and that Judaism is against women, WRONG, there was a women in the Talmud who would beat all the other Rabbis in debates, at 9:30, she says she doesn't accept halacha, which is so cruel to women, at 12:00 she says that King David building the temple is just a belief, the mudrat version of an angel (they know nothing about) building it is equally valid, at 13:30, she continues the false claim that the dead sea scrolls were the "Qumran", which real historians have all been declaring was a false claim. She implies earlier that we should have "culture" that makes Jewish ideas spread, not "laws", meaning that Israel should be 100% secular. She's also completely vile.

From wikipedia: She is a member of the board of the international council of the New Israel Fund. She's basically the academic backing for the Femenazis of the wall and the Hebros.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Elior Of course Anat Hoffman gave a speech at the same ASF Symposium as her. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=VqyXAXRqInQ

She has other lectures in Hebrew, but I'm sure there is no need to investigate this traitor any further.



The fear of the L-rd is the beginning of knowledge

Offline Ephraim Ben Noach

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Re: Prof Rachel Elior explains how the sages invented Judaism
« Reply #6 on: March 27, 2014, 06:45:44 PM »
For her being a Professor. .. How did she come up with some of this? It seems she is trying to legitimize Reform and Karaites. How can she even come to the conclusion that the Sadducees were the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Sadducees didn't believe in anything the writers of Scrolls believed.
Ezekiel 33:6 But if the watchman see the sword come, and blow not the horn, and the people be not warned, and the sword do come, and take any person from among them, he is taken away in his iniquity, but his blood will I require at the watchman's hand.

Offline Israel Chai

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Re: Prof Rachel Elior explains how the sages invented Judaism
« Reply #7 on: March 28, 2014, 02:20:25 AM »
For her being a Professor. .. How did she come up with some of this? It seems she is trying to legitimize Reform and Karaites. How can she even come to the conclusion that the Sadducees were the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Sadducees didn't believe in anything the writers of Scrolls believed.

She's in the New Israel Fund. She's trying to legitimize pisslam. Excellent observation, and of course it's part of her giant antisemetic conspiracy online.

To start with, the meeting hall in the tiny village they excavated where the scrolls were found could fit 50 people shoulder to shoulder, so the idea of a "Qumran" from this is wistful thinking on the part of seemingly deluded Jews who wanted to pretend this was part of our history (though no Rabbi, sage or scholar ever mentions it) and xtians who were particularly fond of the beliefs of this cult, since they were against polygamy and all violence, and it was convenient to say that they are more Jewish than the Jews today. It is 100% intellectual and historical dishonesty.

She wants to prove that the "Rabbis invented Judaism" (and in the video, backs that up with some implied Lubavitch bashing) so of course she's going to sign onto that falsehood, and she uses it to say "look, the high priests believed this 100% anti-Jewish belief, so we should be able to make up beliefs".

I could go on as long as you like. This animal is almost as hideous as the mudrat terrorists that fund the kapo group she loves.
The fear of the L-rd is the beginning of knowledge

Offline Binyamin Yisrael

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Re: Prof Rachel Elior explains how the sages invented Judaism
« Reply #8 on: March 30, 2014, 01:15:01 AM »
I read about the evil Qumran sect at the Israel Museum at the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit. They had a solar calendar of 364 days (52 weeks). Anyone who knows anything about the solar year knows that such a calendar will rapidly get out of sync with the seasons, even more so than the Julian calendar which is what we use for solar dates (Birkat HaChama and Tal U'Matar outside of Israel). They did that so each holiday would be the same day of the week every year. I guess it has to do with what the evil author writes is their calendar based on multiples of seven. They didn't make up the number seven. The Torah uses it. Self-hating Jews are trying to misuse the Torah to claim what they want us to believe. So-called professors like Elior probably don't believe in any Torah. They think it's all made up and subject to what whatever group wants it to be.


Offline Binyamin Yisrael

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Re: Prof Rachel Elior explains how the sages invented Judaism
« Reply #9 on: March 30, 2014, 01:28:44 AM »
The Sadducees rejected belief in Olam HaBa. The Essenes believed in being only spiritual basically the opposite of the Sadducees. The Zealots wanted to bring the Redemption to This World, taking the valid point of each of the above groups and rejecting the invalid point (Not that they copied from the other groups but because that was the real Torah position.). The Pharisees were like the Zealots except less militant. The Pharisees can be compared to the Religious Zionists and the Zealots to the Irgun fighters that weren't all religious. I guess the infighting that caused the Destruction of the Temple can be compared to the infighting of the many splinter groups among the Right Wing Zionists (Such as Irv Rubin.). But the Zealots were real religious Jews as far as I know unlike phonies like Rubin.


Online Zelhar

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Re: Prof Rachel Elior explains how the sages invented Judaism
« Reply #10 on: March 30, 2014, 07:24:06 AM »
It's funny how some people have no problem associating with modern cults that use the Book of Enoch for their calendar in addition to using the New Testament, but then accuse Jews, whose religion can be traced back all through history to antiquity, of fabricating their own religion.  This comes from the Protestant obsession with the idea that no true believers were on earth for thousands of years until the time that their particular philosophy or reformer figured it all out.
The cult of Islam does similar thing. Annulling the Torah while at the same time claiming to be the continuation of it.

Offline Lewinsky Stinks, Dr. Brennan Rocks

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Re: Prof Rachel Elior explains how the sages invented Judaism
« Reply #11 on: March 30, 2014, 02:16:18 PM »
It's funny how some people have no problem associating with modern cults that use the Book of Enoch for their calendar in addition to using the New Testament, but then accuse Jews, whose religion can be traced back all through history to antiquity, of fabricating their own religion.  This comes from the Protestant obsession with the idea that no true believers were on earth for thousands of years until the time that their particular philosophy or reformer figured it all out.
That's nuts. I don't know of any mainstream Protestants that say that, albeit I would not be surprised if some exist. Of course most "Protestants" are mainline heretics.