NEW YORK (VINNEWS/Rabbi Yair Hoffman) I am formed of two parts. My first part is known as the Mishnah. It is comprised of three elements: The first element is teachings handed down orally from the time of Moshe Rabbeinu; the second is takkanos – enacted by the Torah leaders of each generation; and the third element is comprised of debates around the first two elements.

This part of me preserves the teachings of the great Rabbinic figures known as the Tannaim – holy and learned men. My six sedarim are subdivided into tractates and sub-units called Mishnayos. Rabbi Akiva organized and arranged its contents. My final form was assembled by Rabbi Yehudah haNassi at about the year 220 CE.

This section of me was then studied by Torah scholars in both Eretz Yisrael and in Bavel. The products of that study are known as the Gemorah, and these discussions form my second half. The conversations were the fruit of the study houses – the Batei Midrashim and the Yeshivos of the great Amoraim. Sura, Pumpedisa, and perhaps a few more.

For generations, a question would be posed by one called the Makshan, the asker, and an answer offered by one called the Tartzan, the responder; at times they were one and the same. Often, the tartzan will impute an answer for the Amorah to answer for him.

The semi-final editing was performed by Rav Ashi, and later by Ravina – or perhaps the other way around as we are not quite sure which Ravina is referenced. The text was then settled by the Rabbanan Savurai, who lived somewhere between the years 450 and 550 CE, or perhaps somewhat later.  They continued to refine and tweak my wording.

I testify to this in Bava Metzia (86a), where I record that Rav Ashi and Ravina are the end of hora’ah – the close of an era of authoritative teaching. I need no modern theory to say how I came to be. I say it about myself, in my own words.

The Gaonim and the Rishonim received me with reverence and guarded my integrity. These were among the greatest leaders that post-Temple Jewish history has known: Rav Saadyah Gaon, Rav Sherira Gaon – whose famous Iggeres set down the very chronology of how I was formed. And, yes, there are two versions of that Iggeres.

Rashi elucidated me; the Rambam compiled my halachos; the Baalei HaTosfos all reconciled my apparent contradictions. Rav Yosef Karo and Rav Moshe Isserles decided which view contained within me must be followed, and the Vilna Gaon identified where within me these halachos were to be found.  Where they found difficulty, they assumed the difficulty lay in their own understanding, but never, never in me, being, well, gobbledygook.

But in the past fifty years or so, a different approach took hold among a certain school of academic readers. They came convinced they understood me better than the Tannaim who taught me and the Amoraim who debated me. They invented new categories and new actors – anonymous “redactors,” late “editors,” and a hidden class of yet unidentified composers – “Stammaim.” 

One of them writes: “[I] found no way to explain it other than to say that those who supplied the forced explanations lacked the complete version of all the relevant sources, or lacked the correct version of the text they were explaining, or lacked the requisite knowledge for understanding the text.”

They made the wildest of assumptions:  In their minds the Amoraim composed -read “made up material” and attributed it to the Tannaim. They further assumed the students of the great Yeshivos misunderstood their own tradition, and that only now, after so many centuries, has the misunderstanding been corrected.

Imagine a chess neophyte pontificating on the strategy of a grandmaster. This is far worse, because the speaker here lacks even that shared foundation, mistaking surface familiarity for the deep, hard-won command the subject actually requires. The result is not merely an amateur out of his depth, but confidence untethered from competence entirely.

And these chess neophytes did not come empty-handed. They arrived with a set of tools, and it is worth naming the tools, for that is how the murder was carried out.

The first weapon in their murderous arsenal lay in their declaration about anonymous passages – the give-and-take that carries no name attached – are reassigned away from the named Amoraim and from the tradition behind them, and handed instead to a hypothesized later class of nameless framers.

The weapon mistakes the absence of a signature for the presence of a forger.

No one ever argued against the fact that there were passages in me that did not have names associated with them. But to separate them into a different class that were never identified as such before? 

The shakla v’tarya – the back-and-forth of question and answer that form the very pulse of Torah sh’b’al peh– is recast as a literary device composed after the fact, rather than as the record of real argument in real study halls.

To claim that what reads as argument was never argument is an extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims require more than literary intuition.

The third weapon is source criticism turned against transmission. Where the same sugya appears in more than one place with variation, this is read by them as evidence of clumsy stitching by later hands.

The fourth weapon is the charge of pseudepigraphy – the assumption that baraisos and teachings attributed to the Tannaim were in truth composed later and assigned to earlier names. This is the gravest charge of all, for it accuses the transmitters not of error but of fabrication. It converts the chain of mesorah into a chain of invention. And it rests on the prior assumption that the tradition cannot be trusted to say truthfully who said what – which is precisely the question at issue, smuggled in as a premise.

Each of their tools begins by assuming that our own mesorah’s account of itself is unreliable, and then reads all the evidence through that assumption. The anonymity of a passage becomes forgery; the attribution of a teaching becomes a lie. In each case the same facts that the Rishonim explained with reverence are explained instead with suspicion. The method does not discover that I was assembled by late anonymous hands. It assumes it at the outset and then arranges evidence to fit.

The practitioners stand over me with instruments imagining themselves as coroners gleefully viewing me as a corpse to be dissected into its supposed layers and sources.

It is worth setting down, plainly, how recent the attempted murder of me really is, and how slowly it was assembled. It was done by a study partner of Professor Saul Lieberman, who unbeknownst to him had secretly adopted his young study partner.  Lieberman never studied the Talmud like that. 

The first stabbing occurred in 1969. And then, volume after volume, emerged over the decades that began to lay the charge against that which has been studied without pause for fifteen hundred years.

In their eyes, they make determinations based upon their own random observations. From this observation a whole history is built: that my anonymous layer was produced by a later class of men, and that these men were reconstructing a give-and-take that had been lost to them, badly, from fragments. That is the indictment.

The explanation is not a second piece of evidence. It is a story invented to fit the first. There is no manuscript that catches them at work, no outside witness to the two stages at all. The theory is built backward from the very thing it claims to explain.

Press further, on the hinge of the whole argument: the claim that my give-and-take was never transmitted – that the professional memorizers preserved only the terse conclusions, and that the argument itself had to be rebuilt later from scraps. This is asserted; it is not shown.

But they should realize that terseness is simply how memorized tradition travels – conclusions and reasoning alike are compressed for the memory to carry. Remove that one unproven premise and the late reconstructors have nothing left to reconstruct.

Their favorite illustration is the United States Constitution – debated and quarreled over for a whole summer in Philadelphia, while posterity, they say, received only the finished document and not the transcripts of the arguing.

The analogy is meant to show how a tradition can keep the conclusion while losing the debate. But press on it and it collapses in their hands. We possess the debates of that Convention. We have Madison’s notes, the ratification arguments, the Federalist papers – a documented record of formation. We know how that document was made precisely because the making left external evidence behind. And that external evidence is the very thing the case against me does not have and must invent.

The analogy does not support the theory.

It quietly exposes what the theory is missing. Where we can check a process of formation, we check it against outside records; here there are no outside records, only a process imagined to fit the text and then read back into it.

And there is of course the real, genuine, authoritative teaching in Bava Metzia that Rav Ashi and Ravina are the end of hora’ah, the close of authoritative teaching. One writer even dares to call this line in the Gemorah a “tyranny.” The sheer chutzpah.

Last, the alleged “forced explanation.” What reads as forced is not a fixed fact of the page. It is a judgment of a particular reader, in a particular century, about what counts as a smooth fit. For the Rishonim, the very same difficulty was not a corpse to be explained away but a door to be opened – and they opened it, resolving difficulty after difficulty without ever needing to suggest a group of late forgers. To take the modern reader’s sense of awkwardness and convert it into a date stamp – to say that because this fits roughly to me, it must have been assembled late by men who misunderstood – is to make one’s own ear the measure of fifteen centuries of study.

Ironically, the schools of reconstruction revise themselves within a generation. One scholar’s confident layering is the next scholar’s discarded hypothesis. The “assured results” of one decade are quietly retired in the next.

For more than fifteen hundred years I have been studied without interruption – the same daf, learned today the very same way in thousands of Batei Midrashim across the world, by men and boys who have never heard of their newly minted term “stammaim.” Their methodology declared me dead. But I am still here, and I am still being learned properly. That is my pulse.

There is a famous passage from Theodore Roosevelt, delivered in Paris in 1910, that has come to be known as “The Man in the Arena.” Roosevelt declared that the credit belongs not to the critic who stands at a distance and points out where the strong man stumbled, but to the one whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who actually strives to do the deeds, who knows the great enthusiasms and the great devotions, and who spends himself in a worthy cause. Let these academics open a a Rav Shmuel Rosovsky zt”l, a Mishnas Rebbe Aharon, or hear a shiur from Rav Asher Arieli, along with the thousand others who attend it daily.

These academic conjecturers picture themselves as bold, as fearless, as willing to overturn fifteen centuries of Mesorah. But they are not in the arena at all. They are seated high in the cold and timid comfort of their academic gallery, looking down upon the field, cataloguing supposed stumbles, declaring the strong man dead, and assigning his labors to phantoms they themselves invented. They have never strained in the dust of the contest. They have mistaken the critic’s chair for the combatant’s ground.

The author can be reached at [email protected]