Students of Talmud often skip over the aggadic (non-legal) sections. But as Moshe Sokol demonstrates in this illuminating book, these are often rich in meaning and ripe for philosophical investigation.
Sokol takes key talmudic characters, piecing together aspects of their lives and ideas from different places within rabbinic literature, to bring out some core themes. In this way, he illustrates the profundity of rabbinic thought, which uses narrative and symbolism to make its points, rather than philosophical analysis.
In one famous talmudic story, Rabbi Eliezer relies on several miracles and a heavenly voice declaring him to be correct in a debate about the ritual purity of a clay oven (the “oven of akhnai”). The rabbis were unmoved by such pyrotechnics declaring that “Torah is not in heaven”. That is, practical halachah is for the rabbis to decide by majority not for heaven to dictate. Rabbi Eliezer loses the argument and is excommunicated from the community of scholars.
Sokol looks beyond the (misplaced) tendency to view this story as favouring human autonomy over objective truth to link it to Rabbi Eliezer’s life and a wider debate about halachic creativity.
