Jewish Folklore 5

An area that has been controversial for over a thousand years is the medical and scientific information in the Talmud. As I have pointed out in previous posts, there are some who regard the Talmud as a revealed work in its entirety, dictated to Moses on Sinai. They will go to great lengths to try to give an unscientific statement some "logical" reasoning. Moreover, they are sure that this view is THE view of Judaism, and those who hold different views are heterodoxic. Shmuel HaNagid (eleventh century), a leader of Spanish Jewry who wrote a commentary to the Talmud, still printed in scholarly editions, divides the Talmud into three parts. The first is the oral details of the Biblical laws. This is as authoritative as the Torah itself, as it records the information given at Sinai that is necessary for the fulfillment of the Mitzvot. The second is interpretation of verses beyond their literal meaning. He says that these are the rabbis' own understandings, which should be studied, as the rabbis were far greater than we in these matters; but these interpretations are by no means authoritative. The third division is statements on science and medicine, which simply reflect the knowledge of the time, and should be ignored. A century later, RAMBAM wrote of these areas, indeed, of the aggadic (non-halachic) areas of Talmud in general, that they should be understood as allegories. An example might be the assertion that the reason why women don't menstruate while pregnant is that the body transforms the blood into milk for the baby. This statement is widely used, especially in Hasidic literature, as a symbol of transformation of bad into good. Rabbi Nachman even saw the custom of eating dairy on Shavuot as symbolizing a repair of our character, and a repair of the Universe, through the counting of the Omer, leading from spiritual slavery to true freedom; blood to milk! When confronted with a statement that he believed to be less than factual, RAMBAM accepted later science over the Talmud. The Torah forbids a man with mutilated genitals from marrying. RAMBAM faithfully lists the types of injuries that, according to the Talmud, would render a man incapable of fathering a child. Then, he says that this is to be overridden by later medical advances, and we "accept the views of the great doctors".. MAHARAL, writing in the sixteenth century, simply calls the scientific statements in the Talmud "the best knowledge of the day". The fact is that in most yeshivot, these sections are skipped. But many have become matters of folklore. Some rabbis will say that these statements WERE valid, but "the human body has changed", and therefore they no longer apply. There is even a rumor that a ban of excommunication has been placed on those trying the remedies mentioned in Talmud, as they will no longer work, and this might cast aspersions on the Talmud in general. However, we search in vain for any such ban. Sometimes, on the other hand, a scientific statement in Talmud, which may have, at one time seemed ridiculous, has been proven to be accurate. For instance, the constellation Pleiades is called in the Tanach "kimah". Why, the Talmud asks, "kimah"? Because it has "about a hundred" (k'meah) constituent stars. This is very strange, as the unaided human eye can only perceive in this constellation seven, or at most eight, stars. With the invention of the telescope in about 1600, it was discovered that there actually were about a hundred stars in this constellation. That would be about a thousand years after the Talmud! Also, scientific and medical knowledge was sometimes better in Talmudic times than it was for the next thousand years. The Talmud discusses at length the matter of birth by Caesarian section and its halachic implications. RAMBAM, himself a physician in the twelfth century, dismisses this as folklore, as "it is totally impossible for a baby to survive such a procedure", and it is "highly unlikely for the mother to survive". Again, some would chalk this up to the "bodies changing". Others will grant that some things were known, forgotten, and then rediscovered. I will discuss some specific cases in my next post.