The puzzling rabbis

Religion is one of the cultural systems that attempts to deal with human puzzlement. This paper uses the metaphor of the puzzle to make sense of what has always been a disconcerting feature of rabbinic Judaism, namely, the rabbis’ (200–600 C.E.) blatantly ad hoc manner of interpreting Scripture. The rabbis seem to know in advance what a verse must mean and go to great lengths to find a legitimation of that reading in the verse in question. Typically this ad hoc quality of rabbinic interpretation is explained as a means whereby the rabbis provide ‘prooftexts’ for new practices without Scriptural warrants. But what from one perspective appears as an attempt to find prooftexts is from another perspective an attempt to solve a puzzle. Conceptually speaking, solving a puzzle and finding prooftexts are worlds apart. This paper treats the rabbis as an inter‐generational community of puzzle solvers involved in the quest to discover how the oral Torah is already contained in the written Torah. Like all matching puzzles, this one is necessarily ad hoc.

The intellectual seeks in various ways, the casuistry of which extends into infinity, to endow his life with a pervasive meaning, and thus to find unity within himself, with his fellow men, and with the cosmos (Weber 1925, 1978 p. 506).

Analysis into parts is not really so important in these societies as is the periodic construction or reconstruction of the whole. The whole is what is truly edifying, and its reconstruction is a purpose which puzzlement can subtly serve (Fernandez, 1986, p. 179).