We were interrupted by the newborn's father, a goat farmer, as he began giving a d'var Torah, an interpretation of a Bible passage.
The Torah reading is rotated among members.
Like other Jews, he debates the Torah's proper interpretation.
Appropriately, Hillel advocated an interpretation of Torah that was liberal for his time.
It was due to this progressive tendency of the Pharisees that their interpretation of the Torah continued to develop and has remained a living force in Judaism.
It originally evolved in the Middle Ages as a mystical interpretation of the Torah which aimed to reach a better understanding of the divine than could be attained by literal or metaphorical analysis.
Jewish theology in Alexandria Egypttookook up early rabbinical ideas and postulated that the will of God was to be discerned in the Torah and affirmed that the interpretation of law succeeded both the prophetic office and the role of sages.
In the following century, the Sefer ha-temuna ("Book of the Image") appeared in Spain and advanced the notion of cosmic cycles, each of which provides an interpretation of the Torah according to a divine attribute.
Religiously more circumscribed than the Pharisees, they rejected the idea of a revealed oral interpretation of the Torah, even though they had their own tradition, the sefer gezerot ("book of decrees" or "decisions").
The cessation of the daily sacrifice and other Levitical priestly ministrations in the Temple after the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans (70 ce) gave a new emphasis to and interpretation of the Torah in the synagogue and in domestic rituals.
But on Thursday, most ultra-Orthodox were united in protest against what they see as the state's meddling in their religious affairs and in their conviction that the religious law of the Torah — or at least their interpretation of it — transcends that of any Israeli court.
