| A profound tension exists between the opposing tendencies of preservation and innovation in the corpus of rabbinic legal literature. Certainly, the rabbis made tremendous attempts to safeguard traditions handed down to them from prior generations despite significant new challenges. Their very identity and authenticity as Jews depended on a strong diachronic anchorage in the sea of prior Jewish texts and experiences. And yet, these same religious thinkers boldly invented new practices or altered older ones to fit shifting circumstances, designing and utilizing a rich rhetorical vocabulary to allow such necessary innovation.; This study differentiates carefully between those cases in which the literature presents innovation implicitly and when it explicitly acknowledges an actual alteration in Jewish belief or practice. To precisely handle this distinction, this study focused on texts with definite literary markers indicating the rabbis' explicit admission of the particular changes they fostered. Thus, texts were selected from rabbinic legal literature (comprising Mishnah, Tosefta, the Halakhic Midrashim, and the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds) only when they utilized certain marker phrases: (1) Barishonah—“at first,” a rabbinic marker for reflective change of law; (2) Takkanah—“repair of the law,” a rabbinic indication (in most cases) of innovation in lawmaking; or (3) Gezerah—“decree,” a rabbinic term for radical yet conservative alteration of standing law to prevent a breach of its core principles.; Through critical examination of prior studies and upwards of 1,000 occurrences of these terms in printed texts and manuscripts, this study maps the contours of reported legal change during the rabbinic period: temporally, examining clusters of statements and actions attributed to authority figures in the Tannaitic and Amoraic periods, and geographically, examining the distribution of these words and their divergent usages in documents edited in Roman Palestine and Babylonia. It also provides significant insight on the rabbinic philosophy of legal change by exploring the various rationales deemed acceptable within the works studied. In this respect, it carries a relevant message for modern Jewish life in its consideration of the history of appropriate boundaries and reasons for legal change, questions that recur frequently even today. |
