The Holy Books
The early Israelites, the original receivers of the Torah, understood something lost to the majority even of today's believers in God. They understood the Torah as a shorthand record of God's word, and that in order to properly understand it a second document, called the Oral Law, also was given to Moses in order to amplify on that shorthand. This Oral Law later was written down as the Talmud, which includes the Mishnah (an expansion of the Law's details) and the Gamara (commentaries on the Law). The "Laws of Right Living" in the Torah, from the very moment of its giving, were not possible to understand and live by without the Oral Law. Fundamentalist non-Jewish traditions rarely have recognized this while non-Torah-observant Jews generally do not accept the complete Holiness of the Oral Law, if they consider it at all as any more than just an interesting historical document.
The Talmud is, according to the Traditional belief, the compilation and understanding of the Oral Law transmitted to Moses along with the Torah: the words of Torah made concrete for everyday living. Change in the way the Jew "should" live his life has not come whimsically and change has not come as the result simply of carefully reasoned legal debate by scholars and community leaders. The force of public debate has been less important an influence than the weight of scholarship combined with an exceptional level of spirituality and a sensitivity to the human condition that the advocate, the Rabbinic Sage, has brought to the issue. Change, while not eliminated, has come slowly and carefully. Change in Torah-observant Jewish practice, when it has come, has been the result of long, deep, and serious debate, discussion, reasoning and argument by deeply spiritual teachers, often over hundreds of years, following only the Torah's own rules for such change. The Talmud records more than their arguments, for in the process of one's studying the Talmud one can sense the very personalities of these Sages as living human beings in touch with God. Torah-observant Jews extend to the Talmud the same reverence as they do to the Torah and it has become their fundamental reference for Jewish living.
It is the unchanging nature and stability of the Holy Books that has sustained all Jewish belief throughout the millenia. Although much wisdom is attainable from the very earliest Books of the Torah, it is from the time of the recording of the covenant between God and Abraham that most answers for the Jew begin to flow. Commentaries and Responsa expand our understanding of the Law as introduced in the Five Books of the Torah and explained in the Talmud but these newer writings do not in any way change it.
There is a combination of holiness and openness which the practicing non-Torah-observant Jew professes. This "open-minded" approach to the study of the Holy Books, and the broadening of the Commentaries in our day, sustains the practicing non-Torah-observant Jew. For the Reform Jew wisdom and understanding and "right" conduct merely begins with the Torah and Talmud. For the Torah-observant Jew, the key to wisdom, understanding and "right" conduct is contained completely within the Written Law and the Oral Law.
As wrenching as change might be, change is understood by the non-Torah-observant Jew as the fruit of the search for understanding that we have been charged by God to pursue. One then advances, intensifies and more fully understands God's plan for His creations through unrestricted study and critical questioning. Honest change is recognized as a blossoming of understanding, with a "willingness to abandon a set of preferences when the world seems to work in a contrary way." [10] The Torah-observant Jew believes all elements of permissible change are already contained in the Torah. Torah itself does not change, merely our understanding of its messages. Thus, it is up to us to pursue a lifetime of study in order to uncover proper answers to those difficult questions about life in a modern society.
