


There’s a story along these lines in the Talmud:

About two thousand years ago, there were two great sages in Israel: Shammai and Hillel. A certain gentile came to Shammai and asked, “How many Torahs do you have?”

Shammai answered, “Two. The Torah that is in writing, and the explanation of the Torah that we know by tradition.”

So the gentile answered, “About the written Torah, I believe you. About the oral Torah, I don’t believe you. Make me a Jew on condition that you will teach me the written Torah.”

Shammai responded with wrath and deprecation, chasing the man away.

So, the gentile went to Hillel. And Hillel performed the conversion. Then came time for the first lesson.

“This is an alef,” said Hillel, “and this is a bet.” And so Hillel taught the new convert the Hebrew alphabet that he would need to read the written Torah.

The next day, the man returned for his second lesson. But this time, Hillel reversed everything. “This is a bet,” he said, pointing to the alef. “And this,” he said, pointing to the bet, “is an alef.”

“Hold on a minute!” cried the convert. “Yesterday you told me the other way around!”

“And you trusted me?” said Hillel.

“Well . . .”

“So, why not trust me about the oral tradition as well?”





The Torah says three times, “Don’t boil a kid in its mother’s milk.” Is it referring to a kid goat, or to a calf as well? What about a lamb? And is it only talking about boiling, or cooking with cheese too? And what about if the milk and kid are boiled separately but eaten together? And why does the Torah repeat this three times? Could it be some sort of idiom of speaking that everyone understood in those days? Who knows what their traditions and understandings were back then, and in what context they took these words?

There are many other examples, all around the same idea: The Torah is given within a certain context. Moses put the content of the Torah into writing. The context, however, we know only by tradition.

What does the context include? It includes the knowledge that an alef is an alef and a bet is a bet. It includes the meaning of the individual words, and how they are to be grouped as sentences. It includes the traditions of the Jewish people, many of which were in place long before the Torah was given, to which the Torah was simply giving G‑d’s official imprimatur. It includes explanations of the commands and stories that Moses wrote. Because when Moses taught us the word of G‑d, he explained it and elucidated it for us. But in the written form, he wrote only the bare basics.



Are the words of the sages also Torah? How do they make their decisions? How do we know that G‑d approves of these decisions? How do we know that the interpretation we have today is correct? There are these and many more such questions. My advice is: go and learn. Adin Steinsaltz wrote a very good introductory work, The Essential Talmud, that covers many of these issues. It’s a small book, and makes good reading.

On our site, you’ll want to read Is it really the Torah, or just the rabbis? There’s also a nice series of four oral presentations on The Oral Tradition by Rabbi Lazer Gurkow, for listening to on that long commute to work.


Let me know if this helps . . . or raises more questions (questions are also part of the oral tradition) . . .

Rabbi Tzvi Freeman