Pharisaism, Its Aim and Its Method

by R. Travers Herford

The practical application of this idea needed the acceptance of it on the part of the people, and further, a definite undertaking to make certain changes in their manner of life. And, before all, it was necessary that they should, so far as possible, separate themselves from the "peoples of the lands" in whose midst they found themselves, on returning from the Exile. This is, of course, the meaning of the putting away of the foreign wives, and the forbidding of such marriages for the future. The general programme of the reform is set forth in Neh. x., which is nothing more than the logical corollary of the acceptance of Torah. Among the points there specified, besides the prohibition of intermarriage with foreigners, are the observance of the Sabbath, the payment of the tax for the service of the house of God, and the duty of bringing first-fruits and tithes. Of course these provisions do not cover the whole duty of the Jew, and they were not intended to do so. Their purpose was to set up the Jews as a closed corporation, distinct from the surrounding peoples, and to provide for the maintenance of the Jewish cultus. Within the limits thus drawn, this enclosure marked off from the Gentile world, the Jew was to live his whole life, and the Torah was to be his guide in doing so. The limits were drawn in order to make it possible for the Jew to live up to the Torah. The limits themselves are not part of the Torah; and hence it follows that a Jew could live with complete loyalty to the Torah, and yet be but little conscious of the limits within which he enjoyed his spiritual freedom and privileges. Unless occasion reminded him of the fact of separation between him and the Gentiles, he could give his whole mind to the immediate concerns of his religious life—meditation, prayer, and the doing of his duties towards God and man. His thought was not taken up with a painful study of precepts, but was free to range over the whole relation in which he stood towards God. The Torah was his guide to the whole meaning of that relation, not merely to the performance of specified duties. And therefore, when Ezra prevailed on the Jews to become a separate community, he was not condemning them to a life of barren legalism, cutting them off from a free communion with God; he was providing for them a means whereby they could enjoy that free communion, defended against the dangers which, in the past, had been so disastrous to the religious life of the people. It is, of course, true that in doing so he was at the same time cutting the Jews off from free intercourse with their fellow-men of non-Jewish race, and thereby restricting their development as human beings. And the Jews ever since have paid a heavy price for that separation. But in Ezra's time free intercourse with non-Jewish peoples did not seem at all a desirable thing, if the Jewish people were to survive. It is indeed difficult to believe that they would have survived, if the policy of Ezra had not been carried out. And if they had not, what would have become of the Jewish religion? And how would the great spiritual treasure of the prophets (to say nothing of the Torah itself) have become available for those who, in a later age, were to depend so largely upon it? Whether the policy of separation is to be for ever kept up, is a question which the future must decide. But that Ezra saved the Jewish religion and the Jewish people is hardly open to dispute.

Ezra, then, provided for the Jews an enclosure, marked off from the Gentile world, within which to live their religious life; and he gave them the Torah, as being the full revelation which God had made through Moses, for their guide in the life they should thenceforth live there. Clearly, no one would enter that enclosure, or remain within it, unless he really and seriously meant to live on the lines of Torah. And that is why, from the time of Ezra, the importance of Torah becomes so marked, and insistence on it so emphatic; why, in short, from that time, the Torah dominates the whole field of religion for those who followed the lead of Ezra. They virtually declared that they would stand or fall by the Torah. For them, the Torah was the medium through which religion became real to them; as it were, the glass through which they viewed all the dealings of God with their own race in the past, and with mankind in general. This will be more fully seen when we come to what the Talmud has to say about Torah. But that is only the expansion in detail, as pious imagination dwelt upon the theme, of the idea which Ezra planted in the mind of his people, that of the supreme importance of Torah as the revelation which God had made, the perfect guide, the source of all that could be known or required to be known, by him who would "love God with all his heart, and with all his strength, and with all his might."

The Jew who followed the lead of Ezra was, as before, a member of the community of Israel; but he was, in a far greater degree than before, aware of his own responsibility for the right living of his life in relation to God, the doing and the being of what was pleasing to Him. The Torah was given to Israel; but it was none the less addressed to each Jew. And that, not merely in regard to particular precepts but in regard to the religious teaching as a whole. It may be true that nothing in the Pentateuch rises to the height of spiritual grandeur attained by the great prophets. It may be true that their free inspiration denoted a power and fulness of religious life greater than could be developed by the Torah as a body of teaching, or even regarded as a final revelation. But however sublime the religion of the great prophets had been, the religion of the ordinary Israelite had by no means attained to the same degree of power and fulness. If it had done so, there would not have been the collapse of national religious life which brought about the Exile. The effect of making the Torah the guide of life, the seat of authority in religion, was to deepen the spiritual life of the ordinary Jew; it gave him a stronger sense of personal responsibility, and opened out to him regions of religious experience of which he had seldom if ever been aware. The effect of thus exalting the Torah was not, as it is so often said to have been, to cramp and harden the spiritual nature of the Jew, by confining it within definite limits and oppressing it by precise commands. I would not say that this never happened; because it is not wise to assert a universal negative. But it certainly was not the primary or the usual effect. The Torah made the religion of Israel personal and individual to a far greater degree than it had been before; and it did so by conveying to the individual Jew not merely the legal precept but the prophetic fervour, the joy and the inspiration of personal communion with God as well as the high privilege of serving Him. The introduction of the Torah was not the signal for a decline in the national religious life, but the beginning of a new and strenuous advance; and whereas, before, the prophets had towered high above the mass of the people, who had remained at a comparatively low level of spiritual attainment, henceforth there is a great development of the spiritual nature of the ordinary people, the individual Jew. There were no more prophets, because there was no further need of any prophets. Their work was done; and in respect of that part of their work where they had failed, Ezra and his followers succeeded. The prophets had declared the full meaning of the religion of Israel, its glorious hopes, its triumphant certainties, its boundless possibilities. The people had heard, but had too little heeded. Ezra, by means of the Torah, and expressly and intentionally by that means, drove all this home to the heart of the individual Jew, and so wrought it into the very texture of his religious nature that it has remained there ever since. It is high time to put away altogether, as one of the exploded errors of history, the notion that Ezra, by the exaltation of the Torah to the supreme place in Jewish religion, set that religion upon the down-grade. I believe it to be nearer the truth to say that after Moses, and Isaiah (or perhaps Jeremiah), Ezra is the third greatest man in the Old Testament.

It can scarcely be too often repeated that the Torah, as Ezra understood it, meant divine teaching upon all and everything that concerned religion. It was not confined to commands, positive or negative, but included everything that bore upon religion at all. This is evident on the face of it; because the contents of the Pentateuch (which is the written embodiment of the Torah) include much else beside precept. As a Rabbi pointed out, long afterwards, if the Torah had been only precept, it would have been sufficient to begin it at Exod. xii. 2, where the first precept occurs. "And why was it written (Gen. i. 1), 'In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, etc.'? To show the power of His might" (R. Jitzḥak, in Tanḥ 4ª). The meaning of which is that the Torah is a revelation of more than the divine will.

The view that the Torah, as recorded in the Pentateuch, is the supreme revelation which God made to Israel, and that it covers the whole extent of the religious life, theoretical as well as practical, is implied in the position which it held in Judaism from the time of Ezra onwards, and underlies all that the Talmud says about it. There is no point in the long line from Ezra to the closing of the Talmud, at which it can be said: "Here the conception of the Torah was narrowed into the meaning of mere legal precept." It was at no time thus narrowed. And if, as is often admitted, Judaism, after Ezra and before Christ, allowed of a considerable degree of spiritual attainment on the part of those who were under the Torah, there is no ground for denying the possibility of such spiritual attainment on the part of Jews in or after the time of Christ, because the conception of the Torah remained the same in essence. What change there was, between Ezra and the Pharisees and the later Rabbis in the Talmud, was in the opposite direction to that of restriction of its meaning. They realised far more than Ezra did, or could do, the fulness and richness of the Torah as a divine revelation; and while they took a delight in glorifying it on its imperative side, as embodying divine commands, they never dreamed of saying that the Torah was precept and nothing more.

In his well-known book, Die alt-synagogale Theologie, p. 24, Weber says: "If we have to admit that this praise of Torah (in the Talmudic literature) is entirely in accord with similar praise of Torah in the Psalms, we must nevertheless not forget that here (i.e. in the Talmud) the Torah is praised as Law, while in Scripture the conception of Torah is wider and includes all revelation, alike of law and of salvation."

The opposition here alleged does not exist; and the statement that it does is the cardinal error of Weber's mischievous book. For the right understanding of Pharisaic Judaism, the fact that Weber is the usually accepted guide is well-nigh fatal. It will be observed, however, that Weber admits the wider conception of the Torah in the later books of the Old Testament, especially in the Psalms; and that is all that matters at present. It is of importance to realise that the spiritual life of Israel not merely ought to have done, but actually did increase and develop under the influence of that Torah which Ezra had exalted to the supreme place. There are two very important indications of the truth of this statement; one is the rise of the Synagogue, and the other is the growth and completion of the book of Psalms. It will be no digression, but an appeal to evidence directly bearing on the subject, to speak at this point of both these.

The origin of the Synagogue is to this extent unknown, that no precise date can be assigned at which it was first instituted. But it did not appear in Palestine before the time of Ezra, and it was already ancient and immemorial in the time of the Maccabees. It is possible, and even probable, that it arose amongst the captives in Babylonia. It is certain that it spread through the whole Jewish community in Palestine when it was introduced. The Synagogue, Beth-ha-keneseth, "meeting-house," was a place where Jews assembled for religious purposes. It is reasonable to suppose that what first led to the establishment of such places, by the captives in Babylonia, was the fact that they were cut off for an indefinite time from their native land, and the Temple of their God. It was not only that they were prevented by distance from "going up to the Temple to pray"; it was that the Temple itself was destroyed, and its services no longer performed. There was thus no national worship of God at all. Yet God was still there, to be worshipped. Trust in Him had not died out from Jewish hearts when Jerusalem fell. What more simple and natural, for all that it was in fact an unheard-of innovation, than that here and there a company of brothers in exile should meet together, and pray to the God of their fathers? So far as I know, there had never been, in the world's history, any form of congregational worship till the Synagogue appeared. Till then, worship had usually been performed in some temple or local shrine, and consisted in the offering of some gift or sacrifice, usually through the medium of a priest, and accompanied no doubt by some prescribed prayer. This was done in the Temple in Jerusalem, while the Temple yet stood. And the Synagogue did not set out to do the same thing on a small scale, but to do something entirely different. The time came when the Temple service was restored, and the ancient sacrifices offered again with the fullest pomp of ritual. But the Synagogue did not on that account suspend its operations, or show the least sign of declining in popular favour.

The idea of the Synagogue was twofold; it was a place of worship, i.e. congregational worship, and it was a place of teaching, i.e. religious teaching. It has kept that twofold character ever since, or at all events kept it till long after the Talmudic period. For the Synagogue had come to stay, and it has continued down to the present day. Of all the institutions that man has ever devised, the one with the longest continuous history is the Synagogue. And that it answers to a real and permanent religious need is shown by the fact that the Christian religion took over both the idea and the form of the Synagogue, in organising its own meetings for worship, and has retained them ever since; except where sacrificial ideas, derived partly from the Temple worship and partly from pagan ritual, have interfered with and spoiled the simplicity of the Synagogue type of service. It is highly remarkable that the same elements which are familiar in Christian worship—hymn, prayer, Scripture reading, and sermon—are found in the earliest Synagogue services so far back as the records go. And the reason why they have been retained, practically unaltered, is surely this, that they have been found to answer their purpose so well that no change was felt to be needed. Whoever first devised the form of the Synagogue service came, no doubt unconsciously, upon one of the fundamentals of the spiritual nature of man, made one of the discoveries which determine the future development of the race for all time. The Synagogue perhaps grew up rather than was intentionally created; and it was accepted because it so exactly met the needs of those who first made use of it. During some twenty-three centuries it has served the purpose of common worship, both in its Jewish and its Christian form; and when it is considered how enormous has been the influence of the practice of meeting for common worship, such as the Synagogue first provided and made possible, then it becomes highly significant that the Synagogue appeared in close connection with the labours of Ezra and the new emphasis laid on the Torah. Whether, on the supposition that the Synagogue arose on Babylonian soil, it owed its origin to the conception of Torah as Ezra understood it, we have no means of knowing. But it is certain that its rapid spread in Palestine took place when the idea of Torah was already made dominant. And the Synagogue was naturally adapted to embody that idea. As the Torah was the revelation which God had made to Israel, the study of it and the practical application of it were both associated with the "house of meeting." To study it was to ponder the meaning of the revelation. And to practise it was, amongst other things, to worship the God who had given it. The Synagogue was intended to develop through religious fellowship the whole nature of those who met there, spiritual and moral, and by no means only intellectual. And even if the Torah which they studied had been nothing but precepts, yet these included a personal devotion to the service of God which was practically unthinkable without worship of Him. It was as natural that those who met in the Synagogue should join in prayer together, as that they should read or hear the book of the Torah, and should edify one another by expounding its contents. That is what they did; and the Synagogue did not fail to become a most important factor in deepening and strengthening the spiritual life of the people at large.