A Poetic View of Torah Study and Halakhic Decision-Making (Column 162)
With God's help
In this column I wanted to touch a bit on Torah study and halakhic decision-making, but to do so through a reading of a poem written by my friend, Rabba[1] Tamar Dvadvani, entitled The Whole Torah on One Foot (her site is very interesting. I recommend it). This is an unusual column, since it does not present a systematic, orderly discussion but offers an interpretation of a poem. But to my impression it demonstrates very well the advantage that a poem sometimes has over a prose text (see my columns on poetry, 107–113). There is something in this poem that expresses with great force the experience I have as a learner, and I am not sure a prose description could have done so with the same power and sharpness.
I recommend not being overly captivated by the poetics and the analysis of the poem as such, but paying no less attention to the meaning of what is being said. There is a subtle idea here, but if you think about it, it is very true. The approach I will present may seem at first glance like a postmodern deconstructionist conception of interpretation, but it is in fact the complete opposite, and that very difference is the aim of the present column. It may be that many of those who define themselves as postmodern actually mean something like this. The difference is very subtle, but also very important for understanding and formulating the foundations of study and halakhic ruling in general. Let me say in advance that in my view this is one of the most important and foundational columns I have written.
The Whole Torah on One Foot
You thought I was your Torah |
Plucking you fig by fig |
A first look: study as union
This poem has an erotic cast, likening study to intercourse. It of course did not invent this, since the same thing is also found in the words of the sages, and perhaps for that reason it seems (to me) very natural. It is hard to ignore the association with biblical language, in which the root y-d-ʿ serves in both senses: on the one hand, it refers to knowing, to the acquisition of knowledge and understanding; and on the other, And the man knew Eve his wife, that is, knowing is intercourse, union. Biblical language is apparently hinting that knowledge (perhaps only in Torah, perhaps in general) is not something external to us, an addition of information to our storehouses, as though we had put one more item into the pack on our backs. True, foundational, deep knowledge is added to us and changes us ourselves, or at least something within us. After it, we are no longer the same person.
The book Orot HaKodesh by Rav Kook opens with the following well-known passage:
I – Sacred wisdom as an active force
The wisdom of holiness is exalted above all other wisdom in this: it transforms the will and the inner spiritual disposition of those who study it, bringing them near to that very sublimity in which it itself is grounded. This is not so with all worldly forms of wisdom. Although they portray lofty, beautiful, and noble ideas, they do not possess that active quality of drawing the essential being of the thinker up to their own level. In truth, they bear no relation at all to the other powers and dimensions of the human being, except for his intellectual faculty alone. The reason is that all matters of holiness come from the source of the life of all life, from the foundation of life that brings everything into being; and the sacred content has the power to bring forth innumerable creatures without end, to plant the heavens and found the earth, and all the more so to impress a new and distinct form upon the soul that contemplates it. But all secular branches of knowledge do not have this power, for they do not innovate or generate anything new מצד themselves; rather, they depict and present to the intellectual gaze that which already exists in reality. Therefore they also cannot make the one who studies them into a new creature, uproot him from the essence of his evil traits, and establish him in a state of new existence, pure and alive in the light of true life, which endures forever..
I am not sure he is right that this quality does not exist in other forms of wisdom, but I may perhaps agree with him under the definition that any wisdom that acts upon us in this way is Torah (at least in the gavra, the person-subject sense)[2].
This of course takes us back to my columns on Hasidism and on what study is[3] (I had long arguments with Tamar about this as well, independently of the poem), and I will not get myself back into those corners again. I will only say that I completely agree with this claim, and I see no contradiction between it and what I wrote there. Self-change as such is not study. But in study there certainly is, can be, and it is even desirable that there be, self-change as well.
Man and woman
The poem describes a relationship between the learner and the Torah. As a man, it was immediately clear to me that I am the one studying/penetrating it, and indeed the poem ends with the assertion that "you are mine" (A woman is acquired in three ways… and through intercourse – "a woman is acquired in three ways… and by intercourse"). But on a second reading I became somewhat confused. It is actually the Torah, or more precisely the page of Gemara, which is the masculine addressee of the poem, that penetrates the woman learner who is also his Torah (the page's? the learner's?). And yet the poem ends by saying that he is hers, not that she is his. By this point I was thoroughly confused.
One must remember that the poem was written in the context of women's Torah study, and therefore it is not entirely clear whether the author is standing here opposite the Torah or rather identifies herself with the Torah. On the face of it, it seems that the page of Gemara, the Oral Torah, is what penetrates the Torah (the Written Torah), with which and in which the woman learner identifies herself, and conquers it, that is, does with it as it pleases. This is a metaphor for the Oral Torah, which fashions from the verses of the Torah, in a kind of dough of plain meaning, homily, hint, and secret, whatever it wants. The takeover of interpretation and midrash over the verses is violent and total (rape), in a way not limited by what is written in the Torah itself, in the sense of For your husband is your Maker ("for your husband is your Maker"; Isaiah 54:5). And likewise the description of one who has intercourse with a woman as someone who he made her into a vessel ("made her into a vessel"; Sanhedrin 22b. And see also here).
It is no accident that this recalls Yeshayahu Leibowitz's claim that although we are accustomed to thinking that the Written Torah gives authority to the sages of the Oral Torah (you shall not deviate), in truth it is specifically the Oral Torah that determined what would be included in the Written Torah. Regarding Esther, the Talmud says that she sends a request to the sages: Write me down for future generations ("write me for generations"; Megillah 7a). And of course the Talmudic passage in Shabbat (30b) describes how the sages debated whether to conceal the books of Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, and in the passage in Hagigah (13a) this appears with respect to the book of Ezekiel. In the end they decided not to, that is, to include all these in the sacred writings. Thus the sages of the Oral Torah created the Written Torah.
But in the poem this ravishing of the Written Torah is presented as the penetration of the woman learner by the page of Gemara. The page of Gemara changes the Torah, and through it the learner as well, in the sense of For your ravishers are your Makers. It is not clear who here belongs to whom, who has possessed whom, and who has taken over whom. Who is the learner, what is the Torah, and what is the relation between them?
Back to the male perspective: a fuller elaboration
As stated, when I as a man read the poem, I actually identify with it very strongly. After reading the poem, I sent Tamar the following:
It was precisely the almost erotic-brutal dimension that the poem gives to the learner's relation to the Torah that appealed to me, because I truly feel that study is a kind of taking over the Torah and conquering it. As is well known, And the man 'knew' Eve his wife. This is not even a refined reciprocal relation, but a one-directional takeover. Whereas the slogan on which we are educated is to submit ourselves before the Torah, the truth is that I make the Torah submit to me. About this the sages said and he shall meditate on His Torah day and night – his own Torah, his own Torah. I submit myself to the Torah, but the Torah to which I submit is in my image and likeness, and there is no greater autonomy than that.
And I added:
For me this has practical and intellectual implications. I believe in autonomous halakhic ruling, in erasing the distinction between study and ruling. Whatever my reasoning yields in analytic study is also how I conduct myself in practice. And all of this applies specifically to halakhic study, not to the study of the aggadic teachings of the sages, which I usually skip.
I really do feel in Torah study something beyond every other kind of study (and I like studying quite a few fields). There is a dimension of real union here, not as a slogan. Truth be told, I do not find that the Torah is more sophisticated, or wiser, than physics for example. Physics is extremely wise (truly brilliant; it is not clear to me how human beings manage to reach such intellectual achievements) and immeasurably more sophisticated (my awareness of that is somewhat problematic for me, but Plato is dear, Socrates is dear, and truth is dearest of all). But in no other study do I have the feeling that every passage I have learned builds something within me, almost physically.
At first glance, these remarks should have led me to study aggadah more than halakhic-analytic passages. After all, there the text is really like clay in the hands of the potter, and everyone does with it as he sees fit. But as I explained in my columns on Hasidism and study, that is precisely the problem. There one reaches the realm of postmodernism and deconstruction, that is, the approach according to which the interpreter has no commitment whatsoever to the text itself. He rapes the text so that it will fit his insights, values, and desires. By contrast, when I speak of taking over the text, I do not mean doing whatever I want, but feeling free to do and interpret according to what I understand in the text itself. After my interpretation I have arrived at the conclusion that this is indeed the meaning of the text, and therefore I am committed to it (not because it is what I want). A person who takes over the text and does with it whatever he pleases, without commitment to the meaning of the text itself, is not really studying. At best he is using the text, but he certainly is not interpreting it. As I wrote in my columns on Hasidism, this is usually what happens in the study of Hasidism and aggadah (which in most cases is not committed to the text and simply does in it whatever it likes).
That is, the takeover spoken of here does not mean annihilating the text and nullifying it before me, nor merely using it. Its meaning is union with the text. The interpretation I find in it is, for me, what it itself says. Perhaps I am mistaken (we are all human), but to the best of my present judgment that is what the text says, and therefore it binds me. That is why I will also try to convince others that I am right. One can and should bring evidence for interpretation in this approach and subject it to critical testing, for from my perspective it is the correct meaning of the text itself. This is unlike deconstructionism, which on its view has no real reason to deal in evidence for the proposed interpretation (though this is sometimes done there too. We are all human…). On my approach there is right and wrong in interpretation, and it strives to understand the text out of commitment to it, not to use it for my own purposes.
More accurately, despite the resemblance this is not postmodernity but autonomous interpretation. I am not bound by what others found in the text, or by what tradition says about it (except for sources that received formal authority). At first glance this looks like postmodern interpretive freedom. But no, because I am bound by what the text itself says, and what I understand in it is apparently (at least for me) what it says. Interpretation is a combination of textual considerations with my own reasoning and logic, since my own arguments and insights are also important interpretive tools (a worthy text by a worthy author does not say nonsense. If I have a sound line of reasoning, I will probably find it in the text as well).[4] This is really not interpretive freedom, but the opposite: it is subjection to truth (and freedom from the constraints of alien interpretations and interpreters). This is the true meaning of the metaphor of study as intercourse. In terms of my columns on liberty (see columns 126–131) one might perhaps say that this is liberty rather than freedom.
This may be the meaning of the expression in the poem, "You thought I was your Torah." The page of Gemara thinks that it is really doing with the Torah as it pleases, but the truth is that she molds it in her image and likeness. It feels that she is nullified before it, but in fact it is nullified before her. This is that same non-postmodern union of which I spoke above.
And about this I wrote to her:
Then there is an even greater mixing. In fact I penetrate the Torah, but it plucks me fig by fig. So who is taking over whom here? This is that same identity of I=Torah. It is not clear who is controlled and who controls. Who effaces himself and who is effaced. The conclusion is that this is union and not domination. This resolves the paradox above.
The Torah wraps me in shards of interpretation, and not I it. There really is submission to the Torah here, because what I feel – as though I am forming the Torah – is not true. It is forming me in its image and likeness. Again, the solution to that same paradox.
"Hints of self in old pages." The pages of the Torah are hints to my own self. Again, the submission of subject to object.
The learner's feeling is one of great freedom, but the truth is that this is total bondage: bondage to truth (mine?). Precisely those who do not approach the text freely but are bound to tradition and to alien interpretations deviate from the truth and from commitment to it. Freedom brings one to the highest interpretive truth.
I continued and wrote to her:
The expression "conquering within me an estate for the son of Jesse" seems to me not self-evident. Apparently the conqueror does this for himself. Yet he lives with the consciousness that he does everything for the sake of the goal, represented by the "son of Jesse" (=the Messiah, the destiny). This is exactly the paradox I pointed to above, that domination is bound up with self-effacement. I efface myself before the Torah as though it were something exalted, but I shape it in my image and likeness. The conquest is for the son of Jesse, but in a certain sense I myself am that son of Jesse.[5]
And finally:
Page of Gemara, you are mine
the Talmud says: you
are mine.
This is a marvelous ending, because it begins as though I am speaking to the page and determining that it belongs to me. But in the end the page is actually speaking to me (in the very language of the Talmud itself, as though the speaker here is the Talmud) and conquers me. So who here belongs to whom?
And I concluded:
You know what? After the thought and the associations I really enjoyed it. It is genuinely beautiful. I just do not know whether this is really you (=what you intended, consciously or unconsciously) or me (=who imposed a form on the poem in my image and likeness).
So here we have it: explanation and interpretation [of the poem itself] are exposed to the same paradox or dilemma as the content of your work and as its referent (or what I think its referent is).
It is a fractal. In my opinion the poem speaks about a paradox or a tension between seeing interpretation as the creation of the interpreter and seeing it as the uncovering of the meaning of the interpreted text, and in fact about a dialectical union between them that, on the one hand, greatly resembles postmodernity, but is actually its complete opposite. And in the end it turns out that this same tension also exists with respect to my interpretation of the poem itself, between what I found in it and what is really in it (=what the author placed in it?). This of course recalls the story about Agnon sending his interpreters to ask Kurzweil.
Female perspective: a fuller elaboration
But we are not done. Up to this point I have described the male perspective generated by reading this poem. Yet, ironically, it turns out that the author is a woman. The metaphors used here suddenly reverse themselves, since the woman stands on the other side of the barricade of intercourse. She is the one who is "made into a vessel" and not the one who "makes a vessel." So what happens when a woman studies Torah? All these metaphors require renewed examination. And if a woman learner wrote this poem, then the entire discussion up to now demands a look from her side. Until now I had taken over the poem in a "masculine" way and imposed on it my point of view as an interpreter (a man). But as noted, I am not a deconstructionist, and I am indeed subject to the meaning of the poem itself, and it was after all written by a woman learner. So is that really what it says?
And here is what Tamar wrote to me:[6]
This is terribly interesting, because it is exactly the opposite of the place from which I wrote. That is – I am not the "learner" in masculine language, but the "female learner" in feminine language, and in a certain sense the "I" in feminine language is not the "Torah" but literally me, Tamar, a woman learner, and the object of study is in masculine language…
The truth is that one of the things that fascinates me most in the literature of the sages is their treatment of Torah study itself, and its erotic imagery always seemed to me incomprehensible: because of the gender reversal – I cannot relate to myself in masculine language, and therefore the image of 'a lover and his beloved' is not intelligible to me. At best I 'love my beloved man,' and that is something entirely different. And it was also about this reversal that I thought I was writing the poem.
And of course there is also the conjugal element here, which is likewise part of the poem in a fully conscious way, and the study is a kind of metaphor for it (and not only the reverse).
To be sure, one may ask whether the meaning of the poem itself is identical with the author's intention, or whether a poem has a meaning of its own (which the author wrote into it unconsciously). As is well known, scholars of hermeneutics, the structuralists, and the naïve school disagree on this (see my article here). Therefore it is possible that I in fact did hit upon the meaning of the poem, even if not the author's intention.
With compliments like that, who needs enemies?!
And then Tamar ends with a paragraph that was really not to my liking:
But all this only goes to say that your analysis is truly delightful, especially because you internalized the ideas and looked at them from your own place and gave them a completely new light from my point of view (the Torah being studied, which is also studying, and its relation to the one who studies it – it too is active in this relationship…).
This is a compliment that, in a certain sense, genuinely hurt me. There is more than a whiff of deconstructionism here (and I have told her more than once, critically of course, that in my view she tends in that direction). She is basically telling me that it does not matter what she intended; even if I interpreted the opposite, it is lovely. But that is not the truth! (the interpretive truth, insofar as the intention of the poem is concerned). Apparently in her opinion it does not matter.
Again, it is true that in my opinion this is the truth with respect to the content, that is, this is a correct definition of the relation between the learner and the Torah, but it is not the interpretive truth with respect to the poem. In other words, she is basically telling me that what I did here was study Hasidism (to my shame), and that I even got a well done from her for it. Would he even assault the queen while I am in the house…? ("Would he even conquer the queen with me in the house…?")
I remind you of the distinction I once made here between derash and pilpul (see Column 52). Derash is a flawed argument that reaches a correct conclusion (as opposed to pilpul, which is a good argument that reaches a mistaken conclusion). In that terminology, what I did here was derash, since the interpretation was flawed (the opposite of the author's intention), but the conclusion is correct. Alas, what have we here: actual Hasidic study…
But, as stated in the previous section, I am not at all sure she is right (and perhaps she herself did not mean exactly this). I am actually inclined to think that my interpretation does hit the meaning of the poem (at least one of its meanings), even if not the author's intention.
A Jungian appendix
We concluded our exchange with a Jungian clarification (if we're already falling, then all the way):
One more question connected to the poem itself. As a woman learner, do you really have to conceive of the Torah as male? Does not doing so mean giving up the conjugal-intimate dimension? This is very interesting, because as for me I am not sure of the answer. There is such a dimension, as I wrote to you, but I am not sure that conceiving of the Torah as female is a necessary part of it.
We have now reached Jung (who speaks of the feminine part within the male and vice versa), so this is the point to stop.
***
And one more remark, touching on a discussion we once already had. It is very interesting that I did not even notice that I had reversed the roles, and really thought that my point of view was in fact what the author had in mind (=the female author). Unwittingly I did not take this gender aspect into account at all. This really transforms the whole discussion, since on your view the Torah is the conqueror and not the conquered, whereas I proceeded on the assumption that it is the conquered.
But on my view, where the conclusion is that there is an identity between them, perhaps the difference is not so great.
In any case, it is interesting whether the conception of the Torah as conquered characterizes a male learner, while a woman learner perceives the Torah more as conquering.
Oops, Jung again. It is already starting to become Freudian (grinning icon).
And Tamar answered me:
This is an interesting question, whether as a woman learner I "must" see the Torah as male. It seems to me that in order to understand the conjugal metaphor (which is more than a metaphor; it is really a kind of lens), then yes. Perhaps because I am heterosexual, and in another case perhaps not.
Because I found this metaphor-lens so fascinating, awe-inspiring, and creatively fruitful, at a certain stage in life I felt a deep need to identify with it, and I found no other way except to understand it as male (that was clearer to me than relating to myself as male). In that sense, the entire relationship between me, the woman learner, and the object of study really changes – I do not "penetrate" the Torah, nor "conquer" it, etc., because that is utterly contrary to my feminine experience within a relationship. Therefore I had to find a solution, and in a certain sense this poem presents one facet of it – "wrapping," "plucking fig by fig" (following the words of the sages, who describe study as the enjoyment of the fruit of the fig tree, which does not ripen all at once), etc.
In this context it is worth looking again at what I wrote in my article on Tu BiShvat, where I brought Suzuki's remarks on the difference between the Eastern gaze (Zen Buddhism) and the Western gaze, illustrated by comparing Bashō's Japanese poem with Tennyson's British poem.
As I already mentioned, in the end I am not sure that this is really derash. If every person has these two facets, then even if the author did this from a woman's perspective, the male reader can understand from here the relation between the two facets that exist within him. Precisely the reversal I discovered in my masculine interpretation, which ignores the fact that the author is a woman, helped me understand something real about the relation between the two perspectives. When one looks through both perspectives, of man and woman together, one discovers that in the process of learning/intercourse it is not clear who conquers whom, who is the conqueror and who the conquered, and what in fact is happening here, in the sense of Israel and the Torah are one…
An existential summary
I am often accused of declaring self-effacement before the Torah and commitment to it, and even attacking the "innovators," while at the same time actually constructing the Torah before which I efface myself in my own image and likeness. The claim is that my commitment is an empty declaration. I feel with my whole being that this is not so. There is something real here, and this poem helped me sharpen it.
The dichotomy between effacing oneself before the Torah and deconstruction, which nullifies the text before me, in a kind of dialectical process, sharpens the difference and at the same time joins the two perspectives and creates something other than both. I will present the matter in terms of my article here.[7] Those who efface themselves before the Torah in the literal sense ("plain conservatism") are mistaken. They do indeed efface themselves, but before something that is not the Torah (because their interpretation is not correct. They efface themselves before one or another accepted interpretations or before precedents, and not before the Torah). Those who nullify the Torah before themselves (the "heretics," or perhaps "Reformers," in the terminology of that article), do not efface themselves at all but merely use the Torah. As against both of these, the dialectical synthesis I have described here offers a third mechanism ("midrashic conservatism," in that terminology), of union between the two sides. In my view it contains a wondrous combination of autonomy and self-effacement. I efface myself only before what I am convinced is correct.[8] In terms of halakhic ruling there is here a distinction between what I called in another place (and see also here) "first-order ruling" and "second-order ruling."
A final look at my Hasidic derash
I hope that beyond the poetic effusions and erotic connotations, even before people accuse me of Hasidism, existentialism, inspirational study, and above all contradictions with all my past negations of these things, what chiefly came through here was the message (and that there is no contradiction). Beyond becoming acquainted with the poem and its author, and beyond demonstrating the meaning of poetry and of Hasidic study, in the end the column's main value is the "derash" within it (whether or not it is in fact derash), that is, the conclusion. My aim was to clarify the relation between the learner and the Torah, and to present the two seemingly similar possibilities of interpretive freedom (deconstruction as against commitment to the truth of the poem in my interpretation), and to reject them both. So if I failed in my interpretation of the poem, I hope that at least I sharpened the meaning of Torah study and self-effacement before it as, in my view, it should be understood.
[1] It is much harder for me (not only psychologically but essentially) to call a Reform rabbi a rav than to call a Reform woman rabbi a rabba. Rav is a title that carries a long and fairly well-defined traditional freight, and in my opinion a Reform rabbi does not deserve it (I hope to address this in the next column). By contrast, the title rabba is interpreted according to the content put into it by those who created it, namely the Reform movement. With that I have almost no problem. It may be that if they had decided to call all their rabbis rabbot, the problem would have been solved to everyone's satisfaction.
[2] I am hinting here at my distinction between Torah in the gavra and in the heftza. See here and the references there.
[3] See columns 104–113, and also columns 134–135.
[4] The clearest example of this is the Shakh, whose method is to take an interpretation of a minority opinion among the medieval authorities (Rishonim) with which he himself agrees, and then prove with signs and wonders that all the medieval authorities in fact agree with this interpretation. At times this looks comic and not entirely honest, but I believe in the sincerity of the Shakh. On his view, that is what the reasoning says, and he assumes that none of the medieval authorities was a fool. Therefore he prefers to interpret them too in his own way. And as is well known, it is better to force the language than the logic.
[5] And no, Grandma Frida (of blessed memory), not because our family are descendants of King David, as you explained to us. In our family in recent generations there are chains of David, Solomon, David, Solomon. Her claim was that the first David in that chain was the son of Jesse. I did not trouble her with the disappointing statistical fact that today the entire Jewish people are descendants of the son of Jesse (through the daughters, of course).
[6] Her words are quoted here, of course, with her permission.
[7] The main points were published in an article here.
[8] One implication is whether someone who effaces himself in this way will sometimes also be stringent, that is, go against accepted lenient opinions. If, in his understanding of Jewish law, his conclusion is stringent, then he is not raping the text and forcing it to arrive where he wants it to go, but rather submitting to his conclusion. But the submission is to his conclusion. This also explains several "Haredi" stringencies that appear in my words/writings, and people wonder how that fits with the modernity and interpretive flexibility (the Religious-Zionist streak) they find in me, but this is not the place to elaborate.