In this week's Daf Yomi reading, in Zevachim 48a, the Gemara introduced a concept that helps to illuminate the worldview of the rabbis. A certain teaching, we read, “is dear to the tanna”: he has a special attachment to a particular point of law. And the reason is that this point is “derived through interpretation”: that is, it is not stated explicitly in the Torah, but has to be worked out by the rabbis themselves. Evidently, the rabbis had a particular fondness for laws that they had to figure out on their own, and liked to teach such laws first, because they were “dear.” I found this a moving idea, since it shows how the rabbis invested their feelings (and their egos) in what might seem like an abstract or technical process of legal reasoning. A tanna who solved a problem must have felt a certain pride of ownership in it, the way a mathematician might feel about an especially difficult proof.
Just how difficult rabbinic reasoning can get was made clear in this week's reading, most of which dealt with the extremely complex rules governing Torah interpretation. There are a few primary tools that the rabbis use to deduce Jewish law from the text of the Torah, including juxtaposition (two matters taught next to each other are held to be similar); verbal analogy (the same word used in different contexts indicates that they are related); and a fortiori inference. Things get really complicated when the rabbis begin to wonder how these tools interact. For instance, can a matter derived from a juxtaposition then serve as the basis for a verbal analogy? There are many possible permutations, and the Koren Talmud tries to help the reader by summarizing the long rabbinic discussion in a chart.
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