With regard to the Hebrew—
The original text (and Torah scrolls today) had no punctuation, no word/sentence breaks and essentially no vowels.*
—Despite Robbie’s comments on the Masoretes, theirs was an attempt to create a standard text, e.g., by devising a set of vowel-points. There is no reason to accept their standardization as anything other than a beginning from which all the (continuing) wide-ranging rabbinical permutations remain valid. And it seems that a majority of Jews do not. It's useful for learning a standard pronunciation.
It is the attempt to honor the original text that rabbinical exegesis (including in the Talmud and the Kabbalah) insists on a “hermeneutic of openness”. The notion of a closed, singular, definitive (and doctrinally required) reading of the Torah is rejected as a form of idolatry (an “idolatry of the one right meaning”, as one scholar put it—Marc Alain Ouaknin, if I recall rightly). There is a kind of “apophatic limit”, in that, for example, a polytheistic reading would be rejected (non-dualist readings are, however, as opposed to dualist-theistic readings, are not rejected).
People who quote the Talmud as some kind of singular, defining reading of Torah do not, simply, understand Talmud either. When Jews study Torah/Talmud, they—argue; that is the traditional form of study, not rote learning. And agreement at the end is not required.
Needless to say, this is an ancient paradigm that is so different from that of (most) Christianity that (most) Christians “get it” even less than a narrowly dogmatic logician (who thinks that all discourse should be logical) might “get” poetry. To someone who wants their religion to entail rigorous, known, and set-for-all-time propositions—well, that is not Judaism (with perhaps some fringe exceptions), and never was. This is not to argue anything contra Christianity, per se; it is just to say that whatever early Christians understood about the Judaism of the “dual Torah” that as already the majority Judaism at the time of Jesus,** seems to have been mostly forgotten over time . . .
I wrote tons about this on here in the past; and this is just a recap. For those who want to understand more, the rabbinical dictum (from Hillel) is: “Go and study”.
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* There were consonants that could be used as vowels: yod (y), he (h), vav (v); as vowels, yod becomes “ee”, he becomes “ah”, and vav becomes “oh” or “oo”. Interestingly, the divine “name”—YHVH—could be all vowels, and pronounced something like “ee-ah-oh-ah”—Eeyaoah. One can see how this could become something like “Yahowah” (a number of Hebrew scholars reject the “Yahveh” pronunciation on the grounds that “veh” is not a known syllable in classical Hebrew).
** The oral part was still strictly oral. Reducing the Oral Torah to writing in the Talmuds was done for the purpose of preservation—it in no way put an end-point on the continuing dynamic of the Oral Torah, which continues to this day.
Lost in translation
10 Jul '11 00:31
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