Making Moshe Proud?

Hi! I'm Mrs. Block and I recently started helping out in Mrs. Knoll's gemara seminar class on Fridays. I look forward to meeting more Ma'ayanot students in the coming weeks!

Regarding Talia Friedman's question-- Do you think Moshe Rabbeynu would be ashamed at how Judaism is practiced today? Every time I read the Gemara and see how laws are derived I just think that Moshe Rabbeynu could not have intended the words to be interpreted the way they are.

There is a gemara in Menachot 29b that I think addresses this question head-on and describes how Moshe himself was concerned with this very issue until Hashem comforted him. The story goes as follows--When Moshe went up to shamayim, he saw Hashem tying crowns (ketarim--the lines over the letters in a sefer torah) onto letters. Moshe asked Hashem why He was doing that and what was missing from Hashem's word that He needed to add these lines? Hashem responded that there will be a person many generations later who would derive halachot from every line of every letter in the Torah. Moshe asked Hashem who and Hashem answered that his name is Akiva ben Yosef, referring to Rebbi Akiva. Hashem then sent Moshe to Rebbi Akiva's beit midrash to see what was going on there. When Moshe got there, he didn't understand a word they were saying and didn't recognize anything they were talking about. The gemara describes that Moshe was extremely depressed by this, until he heard one of the students ask Rebbi Akiva where he got a certain halacha from and Rebbi Akiva answered that it is a "halacha l'moshe m'sinai." After that, the gemara describes that Moshe was appeased and placated.

I think the point of this gemara is to show that Torah was meant to be alive and dynamic and meant to be interpreted (obviously, according to Hashem's rules of interpretation that He gave to us in torah she'baal peh) and analyzed and learned in every generation. All the interpretations and derivations of halachot are really all part of a mesorah (tradition) that started with Hashem giving the Torah to Moshe on Har Sinai.

If Rebbi Akiva were alive today, he probably wouldn't recognize many of the things that go on in our world--but that is just part of the beauty of Torah. We're all living the same Torah and applying it to the circumstances of our lives.