Hating Ezra

Many people walk away from my blog with the mistaken belief that I hate Ezra for corrupting the Torah. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ezra was a good man, and a prophet, who was faced with a bad situation (the Torah had been destroyed). He did the best he could with a very bad situation; he rewrote the Torah from the scraps he had, filling in the blanks as best as he could, and charging the people to wait for Elijah to come to reveal the truth. He also, as I understand it, gave the charge to the Sanhedrin to protect the Torah. Before Ezra, the Sanhedrin was a weak group that didn't actually do very much that got recorded. After Ezra they gained significant power over interpreting the Torah. They essentially became a Torah preservation committee; as it was put by later writers, their function was to "build a fence around the Torah." Unfortunately, this acted as a pill wrapped in poison; although they did preserve Ezra's Torah and the knowledge that a Tishbite, a stranger, would come and restore it, they took tremendous liberties with the Torah, eventually making the permissible forbidden and the forbidden permissible. I will come back and edit this with details of some of those rulings later.