Jesus: Haggadah or Halacha?

Some people think that Jesus focused on the ethical-moral parts of Judaism (Aggadah, often also spelt Haggadah) and ignored the legal aspects of the religion (Halacha).  While untrue, it also misleads by contributing to the false divide between Christianity and Halachic thinking.  

I’ve been going through Dwight Pryor’s “Behold the Man” bible study series. It’s a beginner’s guide to the Hebraic background of Jesus. This week he looked at the parable of the Prodigal Son. 

First off he makes the point that Parables are not allegories. They are merely stories designed to illustrate a point and can only be understood in the context of the events and circumstances that led to their presentation.  The presentation touched on the Halacha and contrasted it with Aggadah (sometimes spelt Haggadah).  Pryor says that Jesus placed more emphasis on Aggadah rather than Halacha.  I noticed that some writers have even put forward the idea that Jesus never taught any Halacha at all but that’s untrue.  Just look at Jesus’ thoughts on what constitutes adultery. 

Anyway, it led me to find out what Judaism thinks of the relationship between Halacha and Aggadah.  I found this in Everyman's Talmud:

Torah, as understood by the Rabbis, touched life at every point.  It dealt with the whole existence of the human being.  Religion, ethics, the physical life – even his superstitions – in fact, nothing that pertained to man fell outside its purview.  Therefore, instructors and disciples could not restrict their discussions to questions of law.  They were in the closest touch with the mass of the people, and what the ordinary man and woman were thinking and saying penetrated the Schools and found a place on the Talmudic folios.  

The miscellaneous material which constitutes the subject-matter of the Talmud is divisible into two main categories known as Halacha and Haggadah.  The former term denotes “walking,” and indicates the way of life to tread in conformity with the precepts of the Torah.  It therefore comprises the Mishnah and that section of the Gemara which treats of law.  The Halacha is the logical working out by many generations of devoted scholars of the theory devised by Ezra for the salvation of the people of Israel.  It provided the community as a whole and its individual members with a distinctive code of action which fulfilled the purpose of keeping the Jewish consciousness alive.  The Halacha moulded the existence of the Jew.  It directed his steps so that he walked humbly with his God.  It also created a breakwater, behind which he found security from the alien influences that tended to sweep him from his racial moorings.  Its efficacy as a preservative force has been thoroughly tested and proved by centuries of experience down to the present day.  The Halacha is the regime under which the Jew lived qua Jew in past generations and still lives; and it supplies the answer to the questions why a minority has for such a length of time maintained its identity and not been absorbed in the surrounding majority.

Even if it were possible to isolate the Halacha from the other elements in the Talmud, it would still be a mistake to envisage it as a system of dry legalism devoid of all spiritual content, as its critics invariably allege.  A modern student of rabbinic literature has truly said:  “The Pharisees and the Rabbis were, before anything else, teachers; and what they set out to teach was practical religion, the doing of right actions for the service of God and man.  They sought to strengthen the factors which make for unity and peace amongst men – the sense of justice, truth, probity, brotherly love, sympathy, mercy, forbearance, and the rest – in a word, to raise the moral standard amongst their people from age to age.  They had this purpose mainly in view when they developed the Halacha and kept it from becoming a rigid system.  They made it a means of ethical training by defining right conduct in terms of a progressive morality, a standard which was raised and not lowered in course of time.”

But it is impossible to separate the Halacha from the other main constituent, the Haggadah, without creating a distorted picture of rabbinic teaching.  The Haggadah was the concern of the same teachers who pondered over the technicalities of the Halacha.  The two were imparted side by side in the same schools to the same pupils, and together they form the interwoven strands from which the Talmud was constructed.
Haggadah (Narration), therefore signifies the non-legal sections of Rabbinic literature, and is equally important as the other for a correct understanding of the world of thought which generations of teachers lovingly evolved.  Striking though the contrast be between Halacha and Haggadah, they complement each other, spring from the same root, and aim at the same goal.  If the Halacha pointed out the way of the guilty life, so did the Haggadah.  “Is it your desire to know Him Who spake and the world came into being?  Learn the Haggadah; for from it you will come to know the Holy One, blessed be He, and cleave to His ways” (Sifre Deuteronomy Sections 49; 85a).  They both grew from the same soil.  Exactly as the Rabbi strove to derive sanction for a legal decision from the text of the Torah, he likewise endeavoured to corroborate an ethical or moral lesson by a quotation from that source.  “As it is said,” or “as it is written,” followed by a Scriptural reference, is the ordinary way of presenting a piece of Haggadah.  One important point of difference must, however, be noted.  Whereas the Halacha remained the law to be observed to practice until it was abrogated by a competent authority.  Haggadah was always held to be nothing more than a personal opinion of the teacher.  It possessed no binding force upon the community as a whole or any part of it.

A Jewish scholar has happily defined the relationship of these two elements in the following terms:  “Halacha is law incarnate; Haggadah liberty regulated by law bearing the impress of morality.  Halacha stands for the rigid authority of the law, for the absolute importance of theory – the law and theory which the Haggadah illustrates by public opinion and the dicta of common-sense morality.  The Halacha embraces the statutes enjoined by oral tradition, which was the unwritten commentary of the ages on the Written Law, along with the discussions of the academies of Palestine and Babylonia, resulting in the final formulating of the Halachic ordinances.  The Haggadah, while also starting from the word of the bible, only plays with it, explaining it by sagas and legends, by tales and poems, allegories, ethical reflections, and historical reminiscences.  For it, the bible was not only the supreme law, from those behests there was no appeal, but also ‘a golden nail upon which’ the Haggadah ‘hung its gorgeous tapestries,’ so that the bible word was the introduction, refrain, text and subject of the poetical glosses of the Talmud.  It was the province of the Halacha to build, upon the foundation of biblical law, a legal superstructure capable of resisting the ravages of time, and, unmindful of the contemporaneous distress and hardship, to trace out, for future generations, the extreme logical consequences of the Law in its application.  To the Haggadah belonged the high, ethical mission of consoling, edifying, exhorting, and teaching a nation suffering the pangs, and threatened with the spiritual stagnation of exile; of proclaiming that the glories of the past prefigured a future of equal brilliancy, and that the very wretchedness of the present was part of the divine plan outlined in the bible.  If the simile is accurate that likens the Halacha to the ramparts about Israel’s Sanctuary, which every Jew was ready to defend with his last drop of blood, then the Haggadah must seem ‘flowery mazes, of exotic colours and bewildering fragrance,’ within the shelter of the Temple walls.”