Torah from heaven תורה מן השמיים

The Mishnah in Sanhedrin lists those who have no share in the world to come, and among them is one who says the Torah is not from heaven. The line is hard, and it is worth understanding what it is about. Not that questions may not be asked: the whole Gemara consists of questions. It is about where the subject of the argument comes from.

What it means in practice. That the law is not invented but derived; that a sage is not a legislator but an interpreter; that a majority decides not "what suits us" but "what follows from what was received." Hence a thing strange to an outsider: an opinion rejected in law is written down and studied all the same—because it too is part of what was given.

And the Oral Torah. Rambam's eighth principle speaks not only of the scroll: with the written was given also its interpretation. Without it, "an eye for an eye" is read literally, and "you shall not boil a kid in its mother's milk" cannot be read at all.

Where the modern argument runs. Just here lay the main line of division in the nineteenth century: reform and critical scholarship began to read the Torah as a book that took shape in time; orthodoxy answered that then the foundation of the whole building falls. In this reference the argument is visible in the articles on Mendelssohn, Hirsch and Frankel, and we do not settle it—we show where it runs.