• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2163 0

Rabbinic prescriptions for depicting human likenesses.1 They often contained mosaic floors with zodiacs with the god Helios clearly depicted in the center, driving his quadriga with four galloping horses. The sun was a necessary part of the annual clock because it tells the zodiacal month, the constellation sign that governed that time period. Lunar months were easy to distinguish by the phase of the moon. But solar months were governed by signs of the zodiac and so the zodiac was just as much astronomy as an astrological system.

As time proceeded, there was a tendency to efface the depiction of Helios as a god and to replace it with another, less idolatrous symbol like a column or a sun with blazing rays.2 By that time, aniconic Islam was already the government of the area. Exactly what to conclude from this evidence is hard to know. The Rabbis inexorably grew more respected within the Jewish community over the years, and it is reasonable to think that as they grew in power they would have gained some influence over the decoration of the synagogue, especially when renovations were attempted. As leaders of the community, they would have been circumspect about the desires of the land’s overlords too.

Although the Rabbis were legal specialists, they had keen theological interests, which they evinced in their Scriptural exegesis and also in their legal opinions. They did not write theological treatises but incorporated ethical and theological issues into their legal writings. As a result, many readers mistake the nature of Rabbinic literature: They think Rabbinic literature has a very legalistic theology when they should be appreciating the amount of theological discourse that appears in Jewish law.

The Mishnah is a rational code, resembling Roman law. As the Jews moved out of the inhospitable Christian Roman Empire, they moved more and more into considerably more tolerant Zoroastrian Persia. There, they found a religion that was similarly attuned to ritual and which was similarly interested in the moral actions of its adherents. It is no surprise then that the religious literature of the period, the Gemarah, has many similarities to the Videvdat and other Zoroastrian legal commentaries.

The Difficulty in Isolating Rabbinic Theology

GIVEN THAT IT is a legal literature, organized on legal lines, it is very difficult to isolate issues like Rabbinic views of the afterlife. There are a number of modern anthologies of Rabbinic thought but to use them, one must understand the modern organizing principles of the editors. For instance, the very helpful anthology of Rabbinic thought translated into English, put together by C. G. Montefiore and H. Loewe, betrays the modern Jewish impatience with traditional Jewish notions of the afterlife:

I propose now to close this anthology with some quotations concerning the Rabbinic views about the life beyond the grave. These extracts will not be very numerous because the Rabbis knew no more about the future than we, they thought about it in terms and conceptions most which have become obsolete and remote for us today, and so their ideas are of small interest or profit.3

Inherent in this statement is a modern liberal Jewish notion that the Rabbis did not have much to say about the afterlife and that afterlife was not very central to their thinking; nor should it be to ours. Judaism in the modern period has naturally gravitated toward rational discourse over against Christianity’s emphasis on mystery, this-worldly ethics over promises of salvation. Indeed, compared to Christianity, Montefiore and Loewe are right on the mark: In terms of the quantity of Rabbinic writings, very little of the explicitly legal material does deal with the afterlife. Why would it? There is no need to discuss law in the afterlife.

On top of that, unlike Christianity’s interest in theological debate, the Rabbis do not write systematic philosophical discourse. Their method is to compare legal rulings to try to discover legal principles. Each Rabbi attempts to find the principle that best describes the body of tradition.