Twenty Years After

Abstract

One of the greatest monuments to the human intellect is the Babylonian Talmud, compiled, we are told, about the year 500. In it the two chief compilers congratulate themselves, with understandable pride, saying, we are no mere woodcutters in the swamp. The chief compiler is characterized elsewhere in that vast work as a master dialectician — evidently with his consent. He was, it is said, one who would raise a whole palm-tree and then take an axe to it. The question, what good does it do put all the labor required into the act, what is gained by raising a palm-tree and then cutting it down, this question could not possibly occur to him. He knew that preoccupation with the law is the highest form of activity, the best form of life. The idea of progress was alien to him, if not actually distasteful. Echoing Plato, the Talmud says, if the former generations were angels we, the later ones, are merely human; if the former were human, we the later ones are asses. Yet, clearly, these humans or asses saw in the corpus that was compiled an achievement. How does one reconcile the idea of progress with a static system of thought? I do not know. I do not think it possible.