Thread by @levidmorrow

There’s an Aggadata in b. Temurah about 3000 halakhot forgotten by Yehoshua (and everyone else) after Moshe died. I’m a fan.
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I usually see it brought up in discussions of Moshe or Yehoshua’s leadership and... yeah, ok. That’s definitely there, but there’s so much more.
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The other main place I see it is discussions of Oral Torah vs. prophecy. It’s the other “Not in Heaven” text but it doesn’t have nearly as much drama as the Akhnai one
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In some ways I think it’s more important though! In the Akhnai story, “Not in Heaven” is at issue, in some sense under debate. In contrast, in Temurah it’s seen as an obvious part of the tradition since Yehoshua, and this presumably since Moshe himself.
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In Temurah, the everyone from Yehoshua to Rav Ashi is involved in fundamentally the same process. There’s total identity.
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But what really gets me about this aggadah is it’s location in Temurah. Temurah, in the broadest sense, is about the inapplicability of an economic mode of exchange and substitution to holiness and sacrifice.
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So this aggadah is about the impossibility of Yehoshua truly serving as a substitute for Moshe. Even if the 3000 halakhot can be restored indirectly, the damage has been done, the asymmetry is glaring and un-erasable.
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Notably, the basic structure of Temurah, where the new animal becomes holy while the old animal is unchanged, already exists in Bemidbar 11 & 27: with Moshe and his potential replacements.
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This also helps raise a radical question: it’s clear in the Torah that God is the one who enacts the “Temurah.” So in our aggadah, is God the “מימר,” the one who performs the illicit-but-partially-effective act?
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Perhaps most perfect of all, the immediate context of the aggadah is a technical discussion of what happens when the owner of the sacrifice dies, in dif instances. Instead of a Korban, what’s at issue is the Torah: what happens when it’s Giver dies?
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(Yes, the roles in the analogy to Temurah have been changed. Images are flexible and multivalent.)
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The technical discussion also includes the powerful and searing line: אין הציבור מתים—death doesn’t apply to the collective. As long as the community persists, there has been no “substitution.”
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@threadreaderapp unroll please