17 Reliability of Our Tradition

Judaism has no mass tradition

Even saying that Judaism has a mass tradition and that this alone is an argument for the tradition's historicity is of no help. A mass tradition would involve many independent personal accounts containing varied details of those events, each from the viewpoint of that particular participant, as one would expect were hundreds of thousands of fathers transmitting the record of the events to their sons. Each account would thus add credence to the others. Yet we have no such mass tradition of the Exodus, the Sinai Revelation, and all the rest. All we have is the Scriptural text, the story of which fathers have told to their sons for many generations.

All that this testifies to is those fathers' acceptance of the story as true, but this may be because of religious devotion rather than because of any historical veracity to the account -- just as hundreds of millions of pious Catholics accept the story of the Immaculate Conception and Virgin Birth as historically true. If one is going to check the veracity of the Scriptural account, as I wish to, he surely cannot rely on it a priori. Even during the Passover Seder, the ritual enactment of our tradition's transmission from one generation to another, nobody tells his children his own ancestor's personal account of those events, transmitted in his family through the generations, for there are no such accounts. All that one does on that night is recite once again the text of the Passover Haggadah, set and fixed by the Sages in the 7th-8th centuries CE (Encyclopedia Hebraica, Haggadahshel Pesach, v. 13, p. 341). And even the text of the Haggadah itself is not an independent story of the Exodus, but a mixture of Scriptural verses and Talmudic-Midrashic homily on them. It simply cannot be treated as a historical account, merely a recitation of the same texts and traditions.

From the words of our Sages it is also obvious they had never heard testimony about the Sinai Revelation as a historic event from their fathers. In the Gemara (Shabbat 86b) two opinions of the Tannaim are brought: the Sages said that the Sinai Revelation happened on the 6th of Sivan, and Rabbi Yossi said on the 7th of Sivan. Then the Gemara brings three pages of discussion by Amoraim on when the Sinai Revelation really did occur. In all this lengthy discussion nobody brings arguments based on what he received through tradition (which would be quite expectable, had these Amoraim heard their fathers' testimony about the event). The only arguments they use are Scriptural verses and Tannaic statements, which are, in turn, nothing more than creative homilies on Scriptural verses.

The Rishonim, when they come to describe the Sinai Revelation, also use only Scriptural verses and the statements of Talmud and Midrash, which by that time were already written and had received their authority throughout most of Jewry -- and nobody makes claims based on testimony he received from his father. Thus, Rashi in his comment on Exodus 20:15 wrote: "See the voices" -- "they saw what is to be heard, that which cannot be seen anywhere else," that is, a physical seeing. On the other hand, Sforno and Chezkuni wrote that "see the voices" is a metaphor for knowledge and understanding, as in Ecclesiastes 1:16, "and my heart saw."

It is also unclear from the tradition exactly what G-d had revealed to the People of Israel at Mt. Sinai. On one hand, after the Torah again lists the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy it says, "These words the Lord spoke to all your public at the mountain from the midst of the fire, of the cloud and of the thick fog, with a great voice that did not cease" (Deuteronomy 5:19). From this one may understand that all the Ten Commandments were revealed by G-d to the whole people. On the other hand, the Talmud (Makot 24a) says that only the first two of the Ten Commandments -- "I am the Lord your G-d" and "You shall have no other gods before Me" -- were said by G-d directly to the people, and all the others were told to Moses alone. The last view may be supported by the account in Exodus 20. There the first two commandments speak of G-d in the first person while the remaining eight refer to Him in the third person ("You shall have no other gods before Me" vs. "Do not bear the name of the Lord your G-d in vain").

Nachmanides tried to explain this contradiction by stating in his commentary on Exodus 20:7 that all the Israelites heard all the Ten Commandments from the Divine, but they could comprehend only the first two, and therefore the last eight were repeated to them by Moses. But this is not all: Maimonides in "The Guide for the Perplexed" (part 2, chapter 33) wrote the following: "It has become clear to me that at the Sinai Revelation what reached Moses did not reach all the Israelites, but His word reached Moses alone...He, may he rest in peace, came down to the bottom of the mount and told people what he heard [from G-d], as the Torah said, 'I stood between the Lord and you at that time' (Deuteronomy 5:5), and it is also said, 'Moses spoke, and G-d answered him through a voice' (Exodus 19:19). And they interpreted it in [Midrash] Mechilta that each phrase he [Moses] told them as he heard it [from G-d]. It is also written in the Torah, 'So that that the people may hear when I speak [with you]..' (Exodus 19:9) -- and this shows that G-d talked to him [Moses], but they [the people] heard that loud voice, but did not distinguish the words. And it is also said, 'You hear the voice of speech' (Deuteronomy 4:12) -- but not, 'You hear the speech,' [which would mean] all that the speech means. But... they heard the voice, and Moses was that who heard the speech [of G-d] and told it to the people -- this is what comes out of the Torah and of the most of our Sages' words.

But there is also an opinion brought in many places in the Midrash and even in the Talmud, that when He said 'I am [the Lord your G-d]' and 'You shall not have [other gods before Me],' they heard it directly from the mouth of the Glory."

According to Maimonides, from the Torah itself one can understand that during the Sinai Revelation the people heard nothing definite from G-d. All the commandments were revealed to Moses alone, who then told them to the people -- and the story that the first two of the Ten Commandments were told by G-d directly to the whole People of Israel is only a view of the minority of the Sages. Each commentator has his own view, but none of them claims a tradition he received from his ancestors and rabbis. All any of them attempt to do is to figure out what took place based on what is said in the Scripture, the Talmud, and the Midrash.

R' Abraham Ibn Ezra, in his commentary on Exodus 20:1, adopted the view that all the Ten Commandments were said by G-d directly to the whole people, and wrote that "I am the Lord your G-d" is the first commandment, and "You shall have no other gods before me" is the second. However, in his commentary on Deuteronomy 5:16 Ibn Ezra wrote: "Know that in the opinion of the Sages of previous generations the first commandment is 'I am'... But in my view, the correct meaning is that the phrase 'I am' is a foreword said by He who commands..." Thus, according to Ibn Ezra here, the first commandment is "You shall have no other gods before Me" (Exodus 20:3), the ninth is "You shall not covet your fellow's house" (20:14), and the tenth is "You shall not covet your fellow's wife, nor his male slave, nor his female slave, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything he has" (ibid.). Unfortunately, this is the view of which he said, in his commentary on Exodus 20:1, "It is nonsense," so Ibn Ezra's account of the Ten Commandments seems self-contradictory. In any event, his account is clearly not based on any historical tradition, but only on Ibn Ezra's own understanding of Hebrew lexicon and grammar.

In short, no tradition of the Exodus and the Sinai Revelation exists among the Jewish people save the Scriptural narrative of those events (and its elaborations in the Talmud and in the Midrashim). In that case, it is proper to speak not of a mass tradition, but rather of a single narrative popular among many people; this, however, is the case for many other stories told by other faiths which contradict ours.

First, I should make clear that the tradition referred to in the “Kuzari proof” is not the text of the Haggadah, but rather the separate idea, though perhaps, also told at the Seder table, that the parents tell their children that they heard from their parents, who were in turn told by their parents, who were in turn told by their parents, in a chain going all the way back to the beginnings of our nation, that they personally witnessed G-d speaking to Moses and giving him the Torah at Mount Sinai.

It can be well expected that after a tradition passes over great amounts of time, that only the kernel and core part of it is transmitted correctly, while all of the other details either become warped or forgotten. To give a modern example: although, unfortunately, a large percentage of our younger generation has ancestors that personally went through the Holocaust, and heard first-hand unique stories from their grandparents, I find it hard to believe that in two thousand years time, the descendants of those survivors will know all the details of what their ancestors went through, through oral transmission alone. At most, I might expect that they would only know that their ancestors personally lived through it.

Similarly, we do not know from the tradition alone, especially from the part of the tradition that is identical to everyone else’s, anything beyond the most basic details of what happened at Mount Sinai. However, that kernel, the main part of the testimony, is really all that we need – that G-d spoke to Moses and gave him the Torah, something that no Rishonim will disagree about. Once we must accept that Divine revelation as being true, which in turn means that the Torah is true, the Rishonim then turned to the Torah and used their understanding of it to re-color and re-understand the core tradition.

This is why Maimonides, who writes in his Guide to the Perplexed that the people only heard an unintelligible voice, also writes in his Mishne Torah, in the Laws of the Torah Foundations 8:1, that: “That our eyes saw, and not a strangers, and our ears heard, and not anothers ... the Voice speaking to him [Moses], and us hearing, ‘Moses, Moses, go tell them such and such.’” Maimonides does not disagree that the Jewish people heard a message directly from G-d, a message that they understood on their own – he cannot disagree with that, for by doing so, he would be rejecting the tradition that he received, together with many others, contrary to that. Rather, Maimonides’ approach is that once we accept that tradition, which in turn means that the Torah is true, we can then use the Torah to figure out how exactly the Divine revelation at Mount Sinai occurred. Since, according to Maimonides, it seemed unreasonable that all of the Jewish nation at that time were on a sufficient level to experience Divine prophecy, and because of the verses that imply that the people needed Moses’ assistance to understand the Ten Commandments (for example, Deuteronomy 4:12 and 5:5), therefore he came to the conclusion that with regard to the Ten Commandments themselves, the people only heard an unintelligible voice. Therefore, the separate tradition passed throughout the generations, that bears witness to the fact that the people heard G-d speaking to Moses, must be acknowledged as a message that was relayed separately (and prior) to the Ten Commandments.

Rashi and Nachmanides, however, based on other verses, came to the conclusion that the people heard the first two Commandments directly from G-d, while they needed Moses’ assistance with the other eight. Ibn Ezra, based on other verses, came to the conclusion that the people heard directly from G-d all of the Ten Commandments. But none of them disagree with the core tradition, which is that the people personally witnessed G-d speaking to Moses and giving him the Torah at Mount Sinai, which is really all that we need for the basis of the “Kuzari proof”, as I mentioned above.

Lastly, I’ll point out that these different opinions are not necessarily mutually exclusive. It could very well be that different people on different levels heard different amounts: those on a higher level heard all of the Ten Commandments themselves, while the majority of the people heard only two, and those on a very low level, only heard an unintelligible speech.