Those readers who have been following the daf yomi (“Daily Page” – a popular global Talmud study initiative) will have been having a good time recently. The program is currently working on the middle of Tractate Avodah Zarah, which deals with relationships between Jews and non-Jews generally, but has a lot of other good stuff thrown in as well. This past weekend, we were treated to an exposition on Talmudic medicine, ranging from pages 28a-29a. The passage contains statements like this (the translation is Soncino’s):
Said R. Safra: A berry-like excrescence is a forerunner of the Angel of Death. What is the remedy for it? — Rue in honey, or parsley in strong wine. In the meantime a berry resembling it [in size] should be brought and rolled over it: white [berry] for a white one, and black for a black one.
For all the prescriptive relevance that the Talmud and its intricacies have for Jews today, passages like this are seldom taken seriously, insofar as even many stringently Orthodox pay them no heed. I recall that during my time studying at an Orthodox yeshiva in Israel, I heard two of the brightest students engaged in heated debate over whether or not to “just skip the medical parts.” One argued in favor of skipping because the passages were didactically useless. One argued studying them anyway, despite their being didactically useless.
It is clear that scholars of late antiquity, and even medieval times, had a very different view of medicine than that espoused in Western countries today. For one thing, the absence of germ theory and ignorance of the nature of infections meant that the ancients made no distinction between diseases and symptoms. Therefore, a fever could be considered a disease per se, and always treated the same despite different attending circumstances. Likewise, scholars have always struggled to map the Biblical account of “leprosy” to any known ailment, because what the Bible describes is actually an accruement of many different maladies with similar symptoms (discoloration and/or rotting/peeling skin).
But the difference doesn’t stop there. Pre-modern notions of how medicine was learned and taught differed dramatically from today. Consider the following passage written by the famous medieval Islamic theologian and philosopher al-Ghazali in his work “The Deliverance from Error” (Section 122):
“Remedies for the body effectively procure health because of a property in them which men endowed with intellect cannot perceive by virtue of their intellectual resources, but rather it must be the object of blind obedience to the physicians who learned it from the prophets, who, because of the special attribute of prophecy, came to know the special properties of things.”
In other words, medicine, like religion, is a product of miraculous revelation. The job of the medical community is not to attempt to innovate and improve medicine, which we “cannot perceive by virtue of [our] intellectual resources,” but rather to strive to uphold the miraculous, original, revealed medicine, which is in danger of being lost with the wear and tear of generations.
Once we see that medicine and revealed, divine law are really of one cloth, it should not surprise us that the Talmud should use the exact same prescriptive, “legal” language to talk about medicine that they use to talk about Halakhah. Consider the following two statements, from the same page of Talmud (Avodah Zarah 29a), one medical,and one “legal”:
“Our Rabbis taught: One who has his blood let should abstain from … milk, cheese, onions and pepperwort.”
“Our Rabbis taught: When an Israelite is having his hair cut by a heathen he should be looking in the mirror.”
This parallelism should give us pause when we think about what constitutes Jewish Law, or law in general. When we hear the word “Law,” our minds naturally picture a set of imperatives erected by the state, backed by the threat of force, to regulate intercourse between human beings. When we imagine Jewish Law, we think in more or less the same terms, perhaps adding a category of ritual prescriptions and prohibitions (which some already find weird). But here we see the concept of law made broader still, till it encompasses advice on how to keep yourself healthy.
The word “Torah” is often instinctively translated as “Law,” but etymologically it comes from the root meaning “to teach,” characterizing it more accurately as a set of privileged knowledge and teachings – in any area – handed down through the generations. What’s more, given the parallel language between medical and legal prescriptions described above, I see no reason to suppose that Talmudic medical prescriptions shouldn’t be every bit as religiously and legally binding as the more intuitively legal prescriptions. Something within me revels in a religion that is every bit as meticulous in mandating the health, safety, and general well being of its members as it is in mandating its ethical behavior and rituals. As Ben Bag-Bag famously states of the Torah in the Mishnah Avot (5:22): “Turn it over and over, for everything is inside.”
That’s right. Everything.
