Tikkun Magazine, March/April 2010
The God of a Talmudist
by Aryeh Cohen
The Babylonian Talmud (Menahot 29b) says that when Moses arrived at the peak of Mount Sinai to receive the Torah, he found God attaching the flourishes to the tops of the letters of the Torah scroll. Moses demanded to know why, with all of Israel waiting for the Torah, God was tarrying with this bit of rococo. God replied that in the future there would arise a sage by the name of Akiva who would derive great wisdom from these jots and tittles.
In this telling, the Torah that Akiva teaches is way beyond Moses's grasp, and God's decision to use Moses as the lawgiver is inscrutable.
The practice of Talmud -- the documentation and interrogation, reading and constructing of legal difference and distinction -- is not mythic storytelling, but it is grounded in this mythos. This practice, which splits hairs and has caused the hair-pulling of many mystics, is exactly what Akiva taught. The practice is grounded not only in the mythic encounter of Moses with God and Akiva but in Creation itself. Creation is separation and distinction -- light from darkness, upper waters from lower waters, land from sea. This is the practice of law -- distinguishing categories, creating new categories, creating the world of pure and impure, forbidden and permitted, just and unjust. It is in the practice of the shakla ve-tarya (the give and take of legal and intellectual discourse) that the Kingdom of Heaven, the province of the just and The Just, is created. The God of a talmudist, or at least this talmudist, is the God that generates and is claimed by law, the God that is implicated in and is therefore open to be judged by the categories of law writ large.
The God of the Talmud is also God in Exile -- mourning, unable to end the Exile, living in the brokenness. God's absence is very present. It is in this space that justice can happen -- that people can act justly and create just societies. These are the four cubits of the law. This is the space within which one not only responds to the Other in front of one, but also in which, with the mediation of the institutions of law, one responds to the call of the Stranger whom one has never actually met.
In the final scene of the talmudic myth of Sinai recounted above, Moses asks God about Akiva's reward for all the Torah that he has studied and taught. God sends Moses forward in time again to the marketplaces where they are weighing out Akiva's flesh after he has been martyred. Again Moses challenges God: "This is the reward for teaching Torah?" Again God refuses to explain.
Torah was destined for and is needed in a broken and unredeemed world in which we are commanded to create just societies. It is in the practice of justice that God exists and that redemption may happen. There are no promises. God could not keep Akiva from martyrdom, nor did this bother Akiva, whose lust for Torah I embrace as the desire to do the quotidian and sublime work of justice for its own sake.
Aryeh Cohen teaches Talmud at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies of the American Jewish University. He is currently writing a book on the just city as it is portrayed in rabbinic literature.
Cohen, Aryeh. 2010. The God of a Talmudist. Tikkun 25(2):42 http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/mar2010cohen
