conclusion seems inevitable that"no prophet is permitted to innovate in any matter from this time forth." If this is true of the prophets, then kal vahomer it certainly applies to the rabbis, because"the pronouncement that a veteran student will make in the future before his teacher has already been given to Moses on
Sinai."
It is this fundamentalist position that leads most Orthodox thinkers to reject the historical and scientific view of the developmental character of Scripture and rabbinic literature held by Progressive Jewish scholars.
Among the innumerable sources which support the developmental approach, we might refer to the famous Talmudic aggadah of Moses visiting the Academy of Rabbi Akiba , where he fails to understand the second century Tanna’s interpretations of Scripture. Only when a student asks Akiba for the source of his teaching and Akiba responds: halakhah lemosheh misinai, does Moses recognize in Akiba ’s midrash halakhah a continuation of his
own teaching.’
Louis Jacobs interprets this passage as meaning that"the Torah that Akiba was teaching was so different from the Torah given to Moses -- because the social, economic, political and religious conditions were so different in Akiba ’s day that, at first, Moses could not recognize his Torah in the Torah taught by Akiba . But he was reassured when he realized that Akiba ’s Torah was implicit in his Torah , was, indeed an attempt to make his Torah relevant to the spiritual needs of Jews in the age of Akiba ."
By analyzing this and many other passages, liberal scholars have reached the conclusion"that long before the rise of modern criticism some of the Jewish teachers had a conception of revelation which leaves room for the idea of human cooperation with the divine. How indeed is the divine will revealed in halakhah?
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