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Since people seem to be a little fuzzy sometimes about what Jews have been doing since, you know, the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, a little basic (textual) history:
1/x Thread.
1/x Thread.
I'm not going to cover everything, Yidden, I'm trying to cover the last 2000 years in a handful of tweets, YES I am painting with a broad brush, YES I'm skipping stuff, YES this is awfully reductionist, so sue me, a little public education, OK?
First, a little history-history. So the Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 CE. Then there was the Bar Kochba Revolt, 132-136 CE, wherein we tried to rise up against the Romans and it didn't go very well--and the aftermath was a disaster for us.
We were killed, exiled, sold into slavery, etc.--this really marked the beginning of what we refer to as Exile, and a time when the Diaspora became the principal Jewish community.
OK, with that in mind:
OK, with that in mind:
OK. So most of y'all know Torah (5 Books of Moses), either given at Sinai or redacted probably somewhere 500-300 BCE, depending on your theology. The Hebrew Bible (all the stuff including prophets, writings, etc) is understood to be codified around the same time.
So. The Mishnah, often known as the Oral Torah, was either given by God at Sinai to Moses (along with the written Torah) or developed organically over time, depending on your theology. We DO know that the Mishnah was redacted around 150-200 CE by Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi.
You can see why, right? After Bar Kochba, things were really unstable. The decision to codify an oral textual tradition was a choice to make sure that things didn't get lost in the midst of everything happening.
The Mishnah (YES yidden BROAD BRUSH), among other things, helped Jews figure out how to live out the commandments in the Torah in a real-life way. So if the Torah says, "Keep Shabbat!" the Mishah was like, "here are the 39 categories of things you don't do on Shabbat."
(I mean, there are 6 orders containing 63 tractates total, each with a bunch of chapters and a bunch of mishnayot in each chapter, that's literally just one mishnah, one example. Dig?)
So then--remember, Diaspora--we find ourselves in what's now Iraq. There had been a Jewish community for a while there, but things got really major after Bar Kochba. There, what we call the Babylonian Talmud came into being, primarily in two major centers of learning.
Lots of scholars, lots of process, lots of public debate about how we understand and make sense of the Mishnah, lots of bringing prooftexts to make one point and decimate the other side's point, lots of recording of these debates, lots of diversions to tell funny stories or +
Offer the best way to zap demons or do some midrashic jamming, or go off on the best songs to sing when you see a bride or whatever. And then eventually the text makes it back to the mishnah we were discussing. But the idea being, how do we live out Torah AND Mishnah?
So, like, the Mishnah says we're not allowed to plow on Shabbat. If I drag a bench outside and it makes a furrow in the dirt, is that plowing (bad?) Or is it OK because I don't INTEND to be plowing? Each side makes its case. Etc.
We traditionally hold that the Talmud was done getting redacted ca 550 CE.
Then there were a few centuries of guys writing about the Talmud, answering questions from far-away countries about how to mange issues according to Jewish law (OK that never stopped tbh), etc.
Then there were a few centuries of guys writing about the Talmud, answering questions from far-away countries about how to mange issues according to Jewish law (OK that never stopped tbh), etc.
Here's a page of Talmud as we usually see it, and a guide by some nice person online. (No heading here, it's OK, roll with it.) Gemara is what we call those Talmudic discussions. Talmud = Mishnah + Gemara, basically.
Rashi, Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki, was a MAJOR commentator of both the Talmud and the Torah, 11th c., France, also made wine. He explained what the Talmud was doing, already a few centuries later people needed clarification.
The Tosafists were a couple generations later, they tried (again, Jews, BROAD BRUSH) to resolve seeming contradictions not within Talmudic discussions so much as between them, they took a more meta-level look at what was going on.
So look, it's already the 12th century! Lots to say about my man Maimonides, but for our purposes--besides the philosophy and the letters advising communities that sometimes burned HOT FIRE, he wrote the Mishneh Torah, a major step forward in Jewish law.
So his thing is that he knew scholars would always study Talmud, but he wanted a guide for the regular folks to just know what the law is and to be able to do it, without getting lost in the debates.
And sure, like, this included when to say certain prayers and how to build a kosher sukkah but also how to be a mentsch and not show off in front of people, how to rebuke/call in someone, how much and how to give philanthropically. Your whole life, in service to God.
Here's a thread about Jewish law, the q in the first tweet is RHETORICAL, I probably should have said Eucharist, maybe, I dunno, if any of you comment on oreos without actually reading the whole thread first I will be grumpy. Don't miss the point, OK? https://twitter.com/TheRaDR/status/1094596840010461187
Anyway, Maimonides was hella controversial in his day, but now he's accepted as one of the greatest rabbis we ever had, and other major compendiums of Jewish law (the Tur, the Shulchan Aruch, etc) followed his.
Anyway, after Maimonides (born in Spain, did most of his work in Egypt, btw) ...I guess I should note that at this point we're all over the Middle East at this point, in North Africa, Europe, also in India, Ethiopia and lots of other places....
There are so many things happening, antisemitism as we know it now is getting born around this time in Christian Europe (more on that here): https://twitter.com/TheRaDR/status/1057333224538624001
The Black Plague happened, that wasn't so great for us: https://twitter.com/TheRaDR/status/1237470319008526337
But we continued to write and write and write and write, we looooove to write. Lots of the commentaries on Torah that are now in a Mikraot Gedolot getting written during this period. Thread on how we comment on, read, make Torah: https://twitter.com/TheRaDR/status/903650885317914625
BTW I am very disappointed in Past Me that I didn't choose to translate Mikraot Gedolot as The Big Read. Because come on. (Pedants, please don't come steal my little pockets of joy, let me just amuse myself, OK?).
Anyway, this is getting sooo long so I'm gonna jump to 1492, not a great year for us Jews nor Indigenous Americans (and definitely not for people who are both!) Torquemada's pet project was kicking the Jews out of Spain, and so on 7/30, 200,000 of us were expelled.
Spanish Jews wound up a lot of places--various places in North Africa, Italy, Greece, Turkey, the Balkans, etc. And the Middle East. Lots wound up (back) in the Land of Israel, including a kid named Yosef Karo.
Karo wound up in Tzfat, in the Galilee region, and was part of the great flowering of Kabbalah that happened there. (There was an earlier flowering in 12th-13th c. Spain, that's probably when we got the Zohar, and there were of course earlier and later mystical movements too).
Anyway, Rav Karo wrote the Shulchan Aruch, that other great law code I mentioned upthread (from the Sephardi legal POV), and then a guy named Moses Isserles, a Polish Rabbi, wrote his (Ashkenazi) gloss on it, and that's often the 1st place people go to check a Jewish legal q now.
OK, it's late, I'm running out of steam, here. Will pick this back up tomorrow or whenever I next get a minute.
Also! I did not make this clear when I was talking about Mishnah and Talmud so let me spell it out here.
1) the intellectual ancestors to the rabbis of the Mishnah and then Talmud (tannaim and and amoraim, you can google) are what’s called in English the Pharisees.
1) the intellectual ancestors to the rabbis of the Mishnah and then Talmud (tannaim and and amoraim, you can google) are what’s called in English the Pharisees.
The Pharisees were a strain of Jewish thinking in the Second Temple, they were wildly democratic compared to the Temple-focused Saducees. You can see how forgiving a path for worship of God not (just) through sacrifices in Jerusalem but in our everyday actions (prayer, eg)+
Had a profound impact on class, access, etc, yes?
Also reorient your antisemitism and learn what kind of conversation Jesus was really having—it was an in-group critique. https://twitter.com/TheRaDR/status/1093962230369058816
Also reorient your antisemitism and learn what kind of conversation Jesus was really having—it was an in-group critique. https://twitter.com/TheRaDR/status/1093962230369058816
AND when the Temple was destroyed, it was a crisis point not just for Jews, but for Judaism. What is Judaism if not Temple worship?? The Rabbinic era flowering and focus on prayer replacing sacrifices, centering Torah study, etc was a radical shift. Jewish law as part of our +
Everyday experience, as enveloping us and giving us a path to God even without sacrifices was profound, cannot be overstated. Each of the historical /textual moments I’ve mentioned & will mention is a shift, another stage in the evolution of Judaism. Growth. Change. Development.
As long as we’re backtracking for a second: yes, this. https://twitter.com/AnneOAlbert/status/1328700194557464578
FORGING NOT FORGIVING
NB also prayer really probably started during the Babylonian Exile after the destruction of the First Temple, 586 BCE. but then we went back to sacrifices, except for the strain that developed the prayer concept into something more robust. https://twitter.com/TheRaDR/status/1328700727225708544
NB also prayer really probably started during the Babylonian Exile after the destruction of the First Temple, 586 BCE. but then we went back to sacrifices, except for the strain that developed the prayer concept into something more robust. https://twitter.com/TheRaDR/status/1328700727225708544
We’re self-aware abt this evolution. The Rabbis of Talmud said explicitly that prayer replaced sacrifice, Maimonides said humans originally needed sacrifice, then evolved & now can handle more abstract prayer, someday we’ll evolve & connection to God will be pure contemplation.
OK, back to finish this up. We've got about 400 years left. Gonna (try to) go fast.
Around 1698, in Poland, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer was born--better known as the Ba'al Shem Tov (Master of the Good Name) or the Besht (acronym of previous). He was a mystic and healer.
Around 1698, in Poland, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer was born--better known as the Ba'al Shem Tov (Master of the Good Name) or the Besht (acronym of previous). He was a mystic and healer.
He took some of the ideas from Kabbalah (until then a kind of elite, esoteric stream of teaching) and some of his own innovations, and taught them in a way that were more accessible to more people. A core teaching was about deveikut, cleaving to/seeking union with God.
He's considered the father of what we now call Hasidut (from hesed, lovingkindnes). Many of his students and grand-students went to found their own Hasidic dynasties, with nuances and differences in teachings, emphasis.
But overall (BROAD BRUSH, Yidden), some principles of Hasidut include bringing that intention to cleave to God not only in prayer, and not only in performance of mitzvot, but in all activities. It's a way of moving through the world with love, passion, God-centeredness.
Stories are a famous (& powerful) vehicle for passing on Hasidic teachings, and lots about, say, the guy saying morning prayers while fixing the wagon has better intention than the dude who went to synagogue and said them rote, or +
the person who only knows the ABCs & repeats with prayerful intention has better prayer than the person saying them rote, or the person who breaks down sobbing on Yom Kippur is a better prayer leader than the person who sings every word perfectly---seeing the pattern?
God wants your heart, not bloodless perfect execution. Needless to say, this rankled many of the other Jews of the day, who focused on deep intellectual penetration of Talmud & other texts--Hasidut was not uncontroversial. But it was a revolution.
(Needless to say if you're Christian and you're reading this thread and still can't believe that Jesus might have been having an in-group conversation with people with whom he shared a deep commitment to Judaism and an intent to preserve Judaism, reread the last few tweets.)
OK, now let's talk about the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. Moses Mendelssohn is considered the father of this movement (yes, so many dudes). We're in 18th c. Germany now. Move was to get Jews equal rights in German society.
It was a move towards assimilation--speaking German, not Yiddish, to give them access to new ideas and culture. Interest in secular studies, but also work on Hebrew & interest in developing Jewish philosophy, both traditional & critical approaches sorta-simultaneously. (Sorta!)
What we now call the Reform movement came out of this world--an attempt to reconcile Judaism with contemporary life, harmonize with secular thinking of the day. Big move was to regard Jewish law as non-binding, +
& the individual Jew as more autonomous, paralleling focus on the individual in the secular Enlightenment. Heavy focus on ethics, the prophetic tradition, etc. Of course the Reform movement has continued to evolve since then, but this was the origin story.
OK more soon
