sing and
amending whenever they deemed it necessary. But in the course of time
the casuistic method, originally a mere pastime, became the approved
method of study, and produced what is known as pilpul. Scholars wasted
days and nights in heaping Ossa upon Pelion, in reconciling difficulties
which no logic could harmonize. Here the Gaon found the first and most
urgent need for reform. The Talmudists, he declared, were not
infallible. Every one may interpret the Mishnah in accordance with
reason, even if the interpretation be not in keeping with the
traditional meaning as construed by the Amoraim.[16]

His views on religion were equally liberal. The same process of
reasoning which, spun out to its logical conclusion, led to pilpul in
the schools, produced, when turned into the channel of religion, the
over-piety culminating in the _Shulhan 'Aruk_. This remarkable book,
with the euphonious name _The Ready Table_, prescribed enough
regulations to keep one busy from early morning till late at night. The
Jews found themselves bound hand and foot by ceremonial trammels and
weighted down by a burden of innumerable customs. The spirit of freedom
that had animated Slavonian Judaism during the Middle Ages had fled. The
breadth of view that had marked the decision of many of its rabbis was
gone.[17] Judaism was a mere mummy of its former self. Here, too, the
Gaon came to the rescue. Rightly or wrongly, he "established the
importance of Minhagim [religious ceremonies] according to their
antiquity or primitivism, regarding those which have originated since
the codification of the _Shulhan 'Aruk_ as not binding at all; those
which have been adopted since the Talmudic period to be subject to
change by common consent; while those of the Bible and in the Talmud
were to him fundamental and unalterable."[18]

But the Gaon's influence on the Haskalah movement by far surpassed his
influence on the study of the Talmud or on the ceremonials of the
synagogue. Many, in point of fact, regard him as the originator of the
movement. As he was the first to oppose the authority of the Talmudists,
so he was the first to inveigh against the educational system among the
Jews of his day and country. The mania for distinction in rabbinical
learning plunged the child into the mazes of Talmudic casuistry as soon
as he could read; frequently he had not read the Bible or studied the
rudiments of grammar. The Gaon insisted that every one should first
master t