They said three things: Be deliberate in judgment (or law), establish many students and make a fence for the Torah.
Deliberate in judgment...
This first and the most essential teaching of the Assembly centers around halacha, or religious law. We have already discussed the emphasis of Torah study and the paradigm shift from inspiration to study. However, there is another component in that teaching. What needs to be explained is the stress on being deliberate, reflective, thoughtful - all these also being in their first teaching.
We start with the fact that the Men of the Great Assembly taught their generation a new perception of Judaism. Whereas before attaining prophecy was the supreme ideal of religious life, now the study of Torah supplanted it. It had to be this way. Once Prophecy was no longer attainable, seeking direct experience of God would not only be disillusioning and frustrating, it would send the seeker right to the doors of the mystery religions and idolatrous cults that still promised to deliver palpable spirituality. That is not to say that manifestations of Ruach Hakodesh were no longer to be found; on the contrary, Bas Kol and Giluy Eliahu abounded among the Talmudic Sages. It's just that they were no longer the goal and aspiration of religious life.
When Prophecy rules, the ideal servant of Hashem is a prophet. Since Prophecy descends via the subjective, the imaginative, the poetic within man, it is these qualities that defined the ideal. A prophet was not a philosopher; a prophet jumped into prophecy with all his being, without distinctions, with totality of commitment, with overwhelming passion. Everyone aspired to Prophecy. This is why you never find personalities in Tanach agonizing or deliberating overmuch - they are passionate in everything they do, for passion is the hallmark of prophecy. There were no distinctions between body and spirit, soul and mind, law and worship. All was to be purified in the fire of the direct experience of the Divine,or, at least, in the longing for it. The language with which the prophets describe prophecy in extraordinary. It is incendiary, consuming, all encompassing. It does not admit of distinctions.
If prophecy became impossible, what would take its place? How this question was decided was supremely important. A religion is defined even more by what it considers to be the ideal man than by what it thinks to be correct belief. The former moves and motivates every adherent, the latter is for the elite only.
With almost 3000 years of hindsight we know now that the Great Assembly was supremely successful in positing the Talmid Chacham as the ideal. What does it mean? On the most basic level it is the enshrining of calm rationality and reflection over feeling and passionate worship. It is it that emphasis that kept Judaism alive despite persecutions, disputations and dispersions. We know now that surely, Ruach Hakodesh was active in that Academy, for millennia passed but we, the disciples of the Men of the Great Assembly, are still here.They said: " A chacham is greater than a Prophet (B"B 12a).
When scholars displaced prophets, the entire tenor of religious life changed. Calm reflection, dispassionate thought, a way of service that elevated study over prayer and enshrined the distinction between body and its desires and reason and its ability to control the body - this now stood at the center of devotional life. It was not until the Besht and his followers that there was a partial correction back to the original prophetic ideal. Chassidus saw itself as drawing from the illumination of approaching redemption, as drawing again from the light of Revelation that has beeen dimmed by Exile (See on this David Nieto, The Rabbis' Advocate, Yashar Books, 2007, 135). It looked once again to the elevation of the entire being, body and soul together, through the absorption into spirituality, in intense clinging to the Divine, in what it called Deveykus.
What is the role of reflection in devotional life? There is much about it in existentialist writings, especially in Kierkegaard ( see, http://www.froyd.net/philosophy/philo10.htm). In our context, it means simply that thinking supplanted feeling, rational discussion of the law superseded passionate mystical pursuit (not that it disappeared but that it was displaced as the ideal), and study became better than prayer (see Shabbos 10). Deliberation and reflection was how one encounters the Divine in text, how one separated good from evil within, how one sanctified the mundane and led a life or commandments within the world rather than transcending it. This was a much more fitting approach for the world without prophecy and, once accepted, other tenets of the Men of the Great Assembly followed directly from it.
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