Halachic Traditions
Contradictory to the Oral Torah As We Know It
Halachic traditions contradictory to Rabbinic
Judaism have been preserved for centuries by certain Jewish communities. These
communities did not proclaim war on the Rabbinic tradition as did the Karaites;
they simply preserved their own Halachic tradition. Amongst these communities
is Ethiopian Jewry, frequently called Falasha. (Since many of them view the
term Falasha as derogatory, I will use the term Beta Israel --
House of Israel, which is what that community calls itself.) According to their
tradition they are descendants of the Jerusalem nobles who came to Ethiopia
with Menelik, the son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef's
halachic ruling of 1973 states that Beta Israel are descendants of the tribe of
Dan. In the past two decades, due to massive Beta Israel immigration to Israel
and their subsequent subjection to Rabbinical influence and due to the activity
of foreign Jewish organizations in Ethiopia, many Beta Israel customs were
abandoned and Rabbinic ones adopted; the information I give below describes the
original customs and traditions of the Beta Israel community in Ethiopia, as
given by Encyclopedia Hebraica (entry Falashim), and by Michael Corinaldi
in Jewish Identity: the Case of Ethiopian Jewry.
Beta Israel Torah scrolls, as well as their
Scriptures, are written not in Hebrew but in Ge'ez (the ancient Ethiopian
language); Ge'ez is also the language of prayer and of Beta Israel religious
literature. The Scriptural canon of Beta Israel also includes the Apocrypha.
Beta Israel synagogues are divided in two; one part, in which the Torah scroll
is kept, is called "The Holy of Holies." Entrance to the Holy of
Holies is permitted only to cohens and debthers (people who help lead
prayer services and who are engaged in religious education). Cohens are
heads of the local communities; one of them is elected to be chief Cohen.
To be a cohen one need not be the son of a cohen; all that is
required is to be a descendant of a respected family and to receive a special
education. Cohens lead the seven daily prayer services in the synagogue
and other religious ceremonies. They also bring sacrifices and perform the
regular shechitah.
The Beta Israel calendar is much like the Rabbinic
one; the year starts in Nissan. On Nissan 14 they bring the Passover sacrifice
on a stone altar situated in the synagogue courtyard. The feast of Shavuot is
celebrated 50 days after the seventh day of Passover. Blowing
the shofar on Rosh HaShanah -- a positive Torah commandment according
to Rabbinic tradition -- is unknown to Beta Israel. They do not celebrate Purim
and Hanukkah, but they have two Fasts of Esther a year -- in Kislev and in
Shevat. In Av they have a 17 day long fast in remembrance of the Temple's
destruction.
Beta Israel Jews observe the Sabbath; however,
they consider pumping water and having a sexual contact to be forbidden on
Sabbath, in clear contradiction of Rabbinic Halacha. They do not permit
circumcision on the Sabbath, while the Talmud (Shabbat 132b) learns from
Leviticus 12:3 that a child born on Sabbath should be circumcised the
next Sabbath.
Beta Israel have a tradition of monasticism,
and monks -- both male and female -- live in abstinence in monasteries or
(alone) in the desert.
The Beta Israel wedding ceremony includes the
groom's parents giving presents to the bride's (and vice versa) but these
presents do not signify an act of buying; the wedding does not include the
groom "buying" the bride at all. The divorce ceremony includes
writing a bill of divorcement, but it is not written as a get nor
given by the husband to the wife. The whole idea of writing such a document is
a relatively recent innovation; in 1977 it had not yet reached all the villages
(M. Corinaldi, Jewish Identity, p. 86, n. 158). Traditionally a divorce
was orally declared in the presence of the community elders and the marriage
contract was torn. In any case, the bill of divorcement is not what validates a
Beta Israel divorce, in clear contradiction with Rabbinic Halacha.
If, Rabbinic law, in fact, has its source at
Sinai and was transmitted orally, why should Ethiopian Jewry not possess these
laws? More significantly, why would they be missing a basic commandment such as
shofar blowing? Isn't it reasonable to conclude that the Oral Law and
traditional explanations of the Written Law were added at some later period of
Jewish history, after the Beta Israel had gone their own way?
Although you are correct that some
rabbis, like Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, ruled that the Beta Israel are Jewish, there
were other prominent rabbis, such as Rabbi Moses Feinstein, that disagreed, and
ruled that it was a halachik doubt if they are Jewish or not, and therefore required
them to undergo a conversion out of doubt (giyur misafek). There were still
other rabbis who believed that they are not Jewish at all, and surely according
to their opinion, your questions above aren’t really problematic.
see quote from wikepidia , in particular the quote from the Ridbaz:
ReplyDelete(regarding beta israel)Obadiah ben Abraham Bartenura wrote in a letter from Jerusalem in 1488:
I myself saw two of them in Egypt. They are dark-skinned...and one could not tell whether they keep the teaching of the Karaites, or of the Rabbis, for some of their practices resemble the Karaite teaching...but in other things they appear to follow the instruction of the Rabbis; and they say they are related to the tribe of Dan.[50]
Reflecting the consistent assertions made by Ethiopian Jews they dealt with or knew of, after due investigation of their claims and their own Jewish behaviour, a number of Jewish legal authorities not only in modern times but also in previous centuries have ruled halakhically that the Beta Israel are indeed Jews, the descendants of the tribe of Dan, one of the Ten Lost Tribes.[51] They believe that these people established a Jewish kingdom that lasted for hundreds of years. With the rise of Christianity and later Islam, schisms arose and three kingdoms competed. Eventually, the Christian and Muslim Ethiopian kingdoms reduced the Jewish kingdom to a small impoverished section. The earliest authority to rule this way was David ben Solomon ibn Abi Zimra (1479–1573), who explains in a responsum concerning the status of a Beta Israel slave:
But those Jews who come from the land of Cush are without doubt from the tribe of Dan, and since they did not have in their midst sages who were masters of the tradition, they clung to the simple meaning of the Scriptures. If they had been taught, however, they would not be irreverent towards the words of our sages, so their status is comparable to a Jewish infant taken captive by non-Jews… And even if you say that the matter is in doubt, it is a commandment to redeem them.[52]