This Gemara discusses a scenario where the first generation Amora, Shmuel, amends a beraisa deliberately. Although usually the Halakha is not in accordance with Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi when a majority of sages oppose him, here the halakha was in accordance with him even against the majority. Shmuel reworded the beraisa to “falsely” indicate Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi’s opinion as the “Rabbis”, as if he was a majority, so those who learn the beraisa subsequently will rule in accordance with the pseudo ”majority”, which really is Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi.

It is hard to understand such a strategy. To the modern mind it is scandalous to think of altering a historic record, let alone a holy record such as a mishna or beraisa. It feels like a breach of trust or manipulation.

The lesson for us is that when trying to understand a mindset that is 2,000 years separate from us, we must keep in mind the limits of our comprehension. There have been so many changes that affect attitudes toward historical record keeping that we cannot enumerate them. I’ll just give one example:

Shmuel’s words were recorded 1500 years before the invention of the printing press. What was the relation of the written word compared to the oral word in times when writing was expensive and scarce? There is no way that they considered the written word as the official record in the same way we do. In fact, the Talmud considers oral testimony far superior to written testimony (see Yevamos 31b). The most reliable record was the authority of the rabbi or leader of the Talmudic academy and whomever was his successor. In a society where even written matter was not a perfectly identical facsimile, but rather copied over by scribes, there was no reason to assume that a tradition from master to teacher is less reliable than the written word. After all, clay or parchment was subject to breaking, being ruined, falsified or copied incorrectly, while the oral memory could not be altered. To us, who rely so much on printed records, we consider oral testimony less reliable, but in ancient times, the opposite was true.  

Consider the digital revolution and its changes. Do you remember perhaps an old relative who refused to keep his records on a computer and insisted on keeping his bookkeeping by hand? To us this seems absurd, but to him, he couldn’t understand how you could trust vital data and have it put invisibly on a computer. Only in the last decade, are electronic medical records being trusted fully without hardcopy backups. This helps you understand what scrolls or clay tablets were considered by the ancients in comparison to oral traditions. Clearly, the written word to them was the unreliable data storage medium, instead of the reverse. While not the subject of today’s discussion, understanding this can also shed new light on the relationship between the written and oral Torah.  If we do not understand what orality and writing meant to the ancients, especially the likelihood that the written word was hardly seen as adequate compared to oral tradition, many conflicts between the oral and written Torah start to make sense.

By keeping these ideas in mind, it helps us cultivate a humble but also realistic way of assessing certain statements in the Gemara that seems to jar with our sensibilities. As we continue in our psychological studies of the Daf, we will see more of the instances. Contrary to what some yeshiva folk may wish to believe Sura and Pumbeditha were not suburbs of Lakewood and Benei Brak. They lived and thought differently in ways that are difficult to ascertain, and it is upon us to remain humbly curious and open to what we might discover if we stop imposing and projecting our wishes and fears on these great scholars and tzadikkim.