20th Century Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs

Tradition

Tradition Nathan Rotenstreich T radition is essentially a mode of generational relation, whose structure and meaning are inherently historical (hiStory understood here as a succession of events that affect and relate people living at different times). Tradition implies, therefore, a reality transmitted from past to present that demands of each succeeding generation that its formulated past be accepted by the generation that inherits it. Indeed, many of the most fundamental spheres of human activity depend upon the continuity of generations, most notably the reality of language and its employment. Language is neither created by those who use it nor generated by a single generation of those who first employ it. Language is rather a resource treasure transmitted from generation to generation, shaped and altered as each individual utilizes it. Clearly, however, communication as such presupposes common assumptions and historical community prepared in advance of the actual use of language. Linguistic tradition, in the most literal sense, is something passed from generation to generation. It may lack the physical immediacy of monuments of plastic art, which are, after all, 1008 TRADITION directly before one's eyes, insuring their endurance by their sheer physicality . This is not the case with language, which lacks physical presentness but whose continuity is nonetheless evident in that there is a palpable process of transmission and a clear substance transmitted. The issue of language is obviously critical to our concerns here, since the Hebrew word for tradition, masorah or masoret, means explicitly the process of transmitting texts from one generation to another. The nineteenth-century philosopher Franz Molitor observed that masorah is implicit in the biblical text because of the nature of the Hebrew language: it is written only in consonants. To read Hebrew texts aloud requires a combination of vowels and consonants and involves in this very fact the establishment of textual vocalization, which facilitates the transmission of an oral rendition of the written text. This characteristic of the biblical text suggests at most the visible aspect of its writing. Combined with it, however, is the reality of a special authority that imposes upon it a binding obligation, since the text is believed to be the word of God and to reveal God's commandments. The prophetic writings go beyond the Pentateuch in that not only do their texts reveal the word of God, but also the prophet himself-as messenger of God-transmits the words of the divine Other rather than expressing his own invention . The masorah is thus oriented toward the past insofar as it connects the generations, but it is also dependent upon a source that is above and outside the historical continuity of generations. The relevance of Gershom Scholem's observation regarding the historical and suprahistorical aspects of revelation and tradition1 is evident in the approach of this discussion. Clearly, the dialectical relationship between historical and suprahistorical dimensions of revelation and tradition does not result in an ontological harmony between them. It has been observed that traditions are beliefs with a particular social structure: they are a consensus through time. In contrast to such a view, traditional Judaism has proposed that any scholarly innovation was already implicit in God's communications with Moses on Sinai. This claim clearly is a major principle of any approach to text grounded upon revelation and transmitted in masorah. It is one of the means by which innovation is legitimized , by making it both immanently rooted in the past and derived from a suprahistorical source revealed in the past. The relevance of consensus is somewhat compromised because in this case the meaning of the past is not settled by a transmitted agreement, but by the acceptance of the authority of that which is transmitted. It is less a matter of the thematic core transmitted from generation to generation than of acknowledgment of the suprahuman authority underlying the process. TRADITION 1009 The observation of Hans-Georg Gadamer that the most genuine and solid tradition does not naturally persist in consequence of an inertial transmission , but rather needs to be affirmed, embraced, and cultivated, is surely relevant. No receiving generation is ever totally immersed in past generations whose heritage is transmitted, because generation is to be understood as a historical reality, not as a biological transmission. The process of acceptance undertaken by the receiving generation implies an activity whereby it consents to subdue itself in order to authenticate the authority of the transmitted . In our case that...