Selections from Hartman's, A Heart of Many Rooms
We anticipate God's moves through learning and interpretation. The Torah is now our property. It is ours. In other words, the rabbinic scholar talks about God and about God's role in administering Torah law, because, in this phase of the covenantal tradition, the word and judgment of God are mediated by interpretation. (32)
The third stage of the covenant began when Jews took responsibility for their own history and not only for implementing mitzvot (the biblical stage) or their intellectual, interpretive autonomy (the talmudic stage). (34)
Talmudic Judaism thus appropriated the word of God, internalized it, played with it, sang with it, made it its own. The rabbis became shapers of revelation. That is, they became an interpretive community. (33)
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But are we also an interpretive community? And if not, is it a failure of our Torah scholarship, or a failure of our ability to be a community? Do the current tensions and sectionalism among Klal Yisrael somehow delegitimize our freedom to interpret the Torah? Does our being an interpretive community in anyway threaten the respect we have for the Rabbis that went before us, their decisions and thoughts?
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