From Web 1.0 of the Mishnah to Web 2.0 of the Talmud

In our last post on the topic of how the Rabbis invented Web 2.0 before its time, we learned that the major innovation that grounded the Jewish people through Diaspora was the use of prooftexts to connect ideas and values to the Written Law. Rabbis continued responding to scripture, creating a new genre of literature, known as the Mishnah, meaning “to repeat” or “to review” (from “sheni,” meaning “two.” Enter the binary Torah, written and oral.)

Building upon the written Torah, the Mishnah set forth specific laws regulating ritual and civil life. But many of these issues were already remote from a Jew’s daily life. There was no longer a Temple for sacrifices, or an independent judiciary governing civil law, or priests (kohanim) enforcing laws of ritual purity. So why did the Rabbis spend over a century compiling a rulebook for so many obsolete practices?

The Rabbis recognized that continuity was needed to avoid destabilizing a society already at risk. By connecting the Mishnah back to the Bible, the Rabbis kept together both the original posts and the later threads, and so created an algorithm of authority. Thanks to the Rabbis’ brilliant insight, the Bible has remained the text most often cited by Jews, staying at the top of the Jewish search engine for 2000 years.

The Mishnah was the Rabbis’ first attempt to expand beyond the Bible, but it fell short because it was a closed system. In effect, it was Web 1.0: top-down, non-participatory, read-only, and designed for repetition, as its own name suggests. The Rabbis’ next effort, the Talmud, was a much more dynamic system. In fact, the Talmud has dominated Jewish practice and study for almost 1500 years. It also represented a leap from Web 1.0 to 2.0. The Gemara (rabbinic threads responding to the Mishnah)consists of a 300+ year conversation among dozens of Rabbis, socially networked through a string of academies in Babylonia and Israel.

The Talmud is built upon the content architecture of the Mishnah. Each discrete Talmudic discussion, called a sugya (Aramaic for “a walk” or “path”) begins with a short passage from the Mishnah. It then proceeds to walk the reader through a meandering conversation about what the passage means, what it doesn’t mean, and how many permutations various rabbis can dream up to read it in different ways.

Navigating through a sugya makes web surfing look positively linear. A typical sugya might begin with a debate about determining the legitimate owner of an ox, and then veer off into a discussion about dreams that feature various animals and what they symbolize. Then the discussion might turn to to the animals that comprise the Zodiac, which in turn might lead to a debate about the plausibility of astrology, and whether or not astrology is idol worship. And then suddenly, one of the rabbis will bring the conversation back to the original topic of the ox and its owner, perhaps citing a prooftext from the Torah about the owner of an ox that gores. Before long, they’re off again, following that ox down winding country lanes and through dark woods until they’ve discussed each word in the initial passage that began the sugya.

Sometimes the rabbis reach a conclusion by the end of the sugya; sometimes they don’t. Occasionally, they simply end with the acronym TEYKU, which means that the prophet Elijah will reveal the final answer when the Messiah comes. The truth is that many people study the Talmud not so much because it provides answers, but because it’s so much fun chasing after the questions. In many ways, the Talmud, like the Internet, is all about serendipity, chance discoveries, associative logic, and mash-ups. The pleasure is in the journey, not the destination.

As the Talmud continued its development over the centuries, the conversation expanded to more and more rabbis in more and more places. A wide range of interpretations began to share intellectual space and real estate on each page of the Talmud. In our next post we’ll look at the ins and outs of this rabbinic blogoshpere and how it presaged the Web 2.0 world that we now live with.