And it shall be, if the guilty one has incurred [the penalty of] lashes, that the judge shall make him lean over and flog him. … He shall flog him with forty [lashes]; he shall not exceed, lest he give him a much more severe flogging than these [forty lashes], and your brother will be degraded before your eyes. — Devarim 25:2–3

The Talmud discusses the identity of a Gavra Rabba — an exceptionally great person or Torah sage. It quotes a most remarkable observation made by the well-known sage Rava, who states: “How foolish are some people who stand up [out of respect] for a Sefer Torah, but do not stand up for a Gavra Rabba.”

When asked what is so exceptionally great about these men, Rava ignores their astonishingly vast knowledge of Torah, and even their outstanding ethical and religious qualities. Instead, he notes their power and courage to change the obvious and literal meaning of a commandment as mentioned in the Torah. This, they say, makes a man into a Gavra Rabba.

The example of a great man that Rava gives is very telling.

While the Torah commands the Bet Din to administer 40 lashes for certain offenses, the sages reduced them to 39. They recognized the power and authority vested in them to interpret the biblical text in accordance with the spirit of the oral Torah. This authority gave them the right, even the obligation, to change the literal meaning of certain biblical texts if it became clear that a deeper reading of these texts called for such a move. In our case, they concluded that the number 40 could not be taken literally and should therefore be reduced to 39 — or even less, in case of need.

For this reason, Rava maintains that these sages should be respected even more than the actual Sefer Torah –the biblical text. After all, the text is only the frozen aspect or outer garment of the living organism, the essential Torah. It is only in the oral Torah as explained by the sages that the real meaning of the text becomes apparent.

Still, this cannot be the full meaning of Rava’s statement. If the power of the sages is revealed in their willingness to change the meaning of a text, one should ask the following: why didn’t Rava quote the first case ever mentioned in the Torah where the sages changed the specific biblical number to a lesser number, and use that to prove that they are great people?

This happened during the Omer counting, when the Torah in Vayikra requires counting a full 50 days between the first day of Pesach and the festival of Shavuot, which would then fall on the 51st day. After carefully studying the text, the sages reduced the number of these days to 49, and stated that the 50th day, not the 51st, should be Shavuot. It is remarkable that in this case Rava does not state that their willingness and courage to reduce the number of days made them exceptionally great men. This is especially surprising since it is the Talmud’s custom to always bring proof for a specific teaching from the earliest biblical source possible, never a later one.

In our case, the proof of the sages’ courage is learned from a verse mentioned in Devarim, at the very end of the Torah. This is perplexing. Indeed, why didn’t Rava use the earlier verse in Vayikra? The answer is crystal clear: Changing the meaning of the biblical text, or reducing a number, is not enough for a sage to warrant the title of Gavra Rabba. One is a Gavra Rabba when one reduces the pain of fellow human beings.

When a sage finds ways, through biblical interpretation, to mitigate the legal punishment of another human being, only then can we speak of a Gavra Rabba, an extraordinarily great person.

This insight is crucial. The virtue and stature of the sages are not measured by their great learning, but by their courage — especially when dealing with human pain. Throughout Jewish history, the great sages were prepared to look for ways to change the meaning of the divine text because they believed that it is what God expected of them when dealing with human suffering. Apparently, they believed that the text was deliberately testing them to see how they would respond and find a good argument or loophole to reduce the devastating effect of a commandment.

Sometimes they nullified a commandment, as in the case of the ben sorer u-moreh, the rebellious son. They also abolished the death penalty, although the text required it. This approach explains many extraordinary cases where the sages even used far-fetched arguments to avoid the sometimes harsh pronouncements of the divine text, such as when they were able to free a woman from the status of aguna, or a child from the status of mamzer.

No one understood better than the sages the danger of an inflexible, immovable text — even one that is divine. They saw it as their task to unfreeze the frozen text of God, because that is what brings the text to life and makes it humanly livable.

Today, few things are as relevant as this principle. When dealing with so many new halachic problems that touch people’s lives, we are in great need of Talmudic scholars who will once again apply this remarkable approach of our sages. Those sages were proud when they found solutions to human suffering, because they were convinced that this was God’s will.

It was rabbinical courage — nothing less.

Rabbi Dr. Nathan Lopes Cardozo is the Founder and Dean of the David Cardozo Academy, as well as the author of 13 books and numerous articles in both English and Hebrew.

The opinions presented by Algemeiner bloggers are solely theirs and do not represent those of The Algemeiner, its publishers or editors. If you would like to share your views with a blog post on The Algemeiner, please be in touch through our Contact page.