Take for example, my favorite teacher from high school. Frequently he would say to me, “DovBear you’re a smart kid, but you’re like an ant compared to the great minds of this generation, and they, in turn are like ants compared to the great minds of the previous generation.”
And this is not a new idea, either:
Rabbi Zeira said in the name of Rava bar Zimuna, 'If we can think of the earlier ones as Children of Angels, then we can think of ourselves as children of human beings; however, if we consider the earlier ones to be children of human beings, then we must consider ourselves as donkeys! And not even like the donkeys of Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa or Rabbi Pinchas ben Yair [who were thought to share their owner’s sensitivities] but ordinary donkeys.'
We call this yeridot hadorot or the “decline of the generations" and the thought that our understanding of the mesorah, in 2006, is less clear than the understanding of the mesorah enjoyed by earlier generations is well established, and well accepted. So, why does the suggestion that our mesorah is currently incomplete, that it was muddled and confused during 3000 years of transmission, evoke such rancor?
Isn’t it obvious that whatever ideas God revealed on Sinai became altered the moment they were filtered through human understanding? Isn’t it obvious that these ideas became altered again and again, in ways both large and small, as they were passed from one human being to another?
I should note that my claim here is not that these alterations were made maliciously or deliberately. Rather, I say that they came about inevitably due to man’s innate limitations. Contingent, nature bound creatures like us simply can't perceive the entirety of something as monstrously vast as Absolute Truth. As my high school teacher said, human comprehension isn’t capable of perceiving and understanding everything. No mind is large enough to apprehend the entirety of an idea, or as the psalmist put it (119:96) “To every purpose I see an end; but Your commandments are extremely vast” that is infinite, and without end.
A second insurmountable problem is the fact that human perception, by definition, can't be objective. Every human perception occurs from a particular point of view and no two points of view are constant. Each of us is a unique perceiving center, and every perception is different. There is no absolute conformity of the knowing subject to the known object. Therefore, truth can only be known obliquely, and yes subjectively.
The important thing to remember, though, is that the God who revealed the Torah to us, is the same God who created us. He had to have known that men tamper and mess things up: That’s our reality. That's human nature. So the fact that his revelation was muddled, with parts lost and added due to human limits had to have been part of His plan.
