Tradition says that when Moses received the written Torah on Sinai, he also received the "oral Torah". The oral Torah consists of the implementation details; for example, the written Torah refers to slaughtering animals in a kosher fashion but doesn't say how to do it; the orah Torah does. The tradition is that God told Moses, Moses told Joshua, and it continued in an unbroken and accurate line to the men of the great assembly, the sages who codifed it and ruled on questions of interpretation. Eventually, when there was a danger that this body of knowledge would be lost (due to things like Roman persecution), someone wrote it down. That initial document is called the Mishna. Later, sages who still had ties to the oral tradition elaborated on the Mishna and filled in more details; that work is called the Gemara. (Gemara means "completion".) The Mishna and the Gemara together form the Talmud.
There are principles by which you can derive how these laws apply to new situations. For example, Moses didn't know anything about electricity, but we have law now on the use of electricity on Shabbat, and it's derived from laws about fire, among others. (I'm over-simplifying.) There are rules of derivation that are vaguely analogous to rules of logic in formal proofs. (I have seen them but don't understand them all.)
From the point of view of an Orthodox Jew, the law has never changed but it has been clarified over the centuries. I am not an Orthodox Jew and do not agree with that claim, FYI. I think some of the original law has been massively distorted and some of the current intepretations are erroneous. There are multiple interpretations of the whole situation, and some of this forms the basis for the different movements (what you might think of as denominations).
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Date: 2001-10-31 11:30 am (UTC)There are principles by which you can derive how these laws apply to new situations. For example, Moses didn't know anything about electricity, but we have law now on the use of electricity on Shabbat, and it's derived from laws about fire, among others. (I'm over-simplifying.) There are rules of derivation that are vaguely analogous to rules of logic in formal proofs. (I have seen them but don't understand them all.)
From the point of view of an Orthodox Jew, the law has never changed but it has been clarified over the centuries. I am not an Orthodox Jew and do not agree with that claim, FYI. I think some of the original law has been massively distorted and some of the current intepretations are erroneous. There are multiple interpretations of the whole situation, and some of this forms the basis for the different movements (what you might think of as denominations).