The Talmud comprises two different works, one (Mishnah) redacted around the year 200 C.E. and the other (Gemara) around the year 600. The latter portion, presented as a commentary on the earlier, is arranged as a sort of dialogue among rabbis (known as amoraim) who frequently cite rabbis of earlier generations, who themselves sometimes cite even earlier opinions. Contemporary scholarship has tried to make historical sense of these various layers, often by isolating the contributions of the final generation of editors. Alan Brill and Moulie Vidas discuss the latter’s recent book, which offers a new approach to the problem. Brill writes:

The regnant approach to talmudic source criticism is that there is a pristine early amoraic layer . . . and the later layer was an addition that changed the earlier material, making the discussion more abstract, or creating dialectics and justifications. This approach is usually associated with [the scholars] Shamma Friedman and David Weiss Halivni who . . . seek to restore the earlier stratum since it represents a reliable corpus of traditions, unlike the conjectures of the later [editors].

In contrast, Vidas assumes that the entire talmudic argument . . . is one unit. . . . Vidas’s innovation is that texts that seem like earlier texts are literary devices [used] by the later [editors] to create a sense of distance from themselves and allow for a creative opening. For him, demarcating opinions as traditional “can be used to invoke discontinuity” by fossilizing them as the past. . . The Talmud [for Vidas] is no longer a conservative repository of traditions, [but] rather a literary “self-conception of its creators.” There is no earlier opinion, just a later text presenting the topic as if there were a later and earlier layer.

Contributing to the Jewish state’s current controversy over efforts to reform its judicial system, observes Peter Berkowitz, is its lack of a written constitution. Berkowitz encourages Israelis to seek a way out of the present crisis by looking to the founding document they do have: the Declaration of Independence.

The document does not explicitly mention “democracy.” But it commits Israel to democratic institutions not only by insisting on the equality of rights for all citizens and the establishment of representative government but also by stressing that Arab inhabitants would enjoy “full and equal citizenship.”

The Israeli Declaration of Independence no more provides a constitution for Israel than does the U.S. Declaration of Independence furnish a constitution for America. Both documents, however, announced a universal standard. In 1859, as civil war loomed, Abraham Lincoln wrote in a letter, “All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Something similar could be said about Ben Gurion’s . . . affirmation that Israel would be based on, ensure, and guarantee basic rights and fundamental freedoms because they are inseparable from our humanity.

Perhaps reconsideration of the precious inheritance enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence could assist both sides in assuaging the rage roiling the country. Bold and conciliatory, the nation’s founding document promises not merely a Jewish state, or a free state, or a democratic state, but that Israel will combine and reconcile its diverse elements to form a Jewish and free and democratic state.