I believe these texts to be the product of the schools and of the imagination and concerns of the rabbis. Thus, the issues, concerns, and values they project are those particular to the rabbis. This fact alone can serve as a reference point for the circle from which the texts originate. In the final analysis, the collective nature of rabbinic literature is itself an expression of the centrality of the Torah. It is not coincidence that much of the literature is anonymous.
Rabbinic culture is engaged in creating the supreme cultural value, the Torah.
The voice of the individual rabbi is im portant because it is the voice of the Torah. For the rabbis, it is the Torah that is the ultimate subject and author of their sayings. When they speak, they speak not from themselves but as representatives of the Torah. The individual sage is not merely assimilated into the larger collective, he is ultimately as similated into the Torah, and this sacrifice or assimilation of self to the larger value of the Torah may very well be the meaning the sages find in the study of Torah, in a process of ongoing human creativity that expands the mean ing of the Torah. In such a culture, where the individual voice is subsumed by the greatest cultural value, it is legitimate for this value to be projected onto the life of the individual and to shape how he is to be remembered by the collective.