Q&A: The Bnei Brak Custom
The Bnei Brak Custom
Question
Hello and blessings, and happy holiday!
In a lesson a week ago you mentioned that there are barbershops in Bnei Brak with a notice posted saying that during a haircut one should intend to fulfill the prohibitions of “do not round off,” “do not destroy,” “do not delay,” and so on—about 14 commandments in all, most of them prohibitions. You dismissed this custom and said that there is no point in having intention for prohibitive commandments.
First, I wanted to note that already in Sha’ar HaMitzvot by Rabbi Chaim Vital he writes that one should have intention during a haircut. In the introduction he says: “When a person cuts the hair of his head, it is not enough that he merely not destroy the corners, but he must intend that he is refraining from destroying them in order to fulfill the commandment of his Creator, who commanded him about this.” And in the section on Kedoshim: “When a person gets a haircut, he should intend that he is fulfilling two commandments regarding the corner of the head… and five commandments regarding the five corners of the beard.” So this is not just a “Bnei Brak custom.”
And in this matter, apparently one cannot bring proof that there is a rule that commandments require intention even for prohibitions. It could be that when he wrote that one should intend, it was for reasons of “service of God” (see there), and not for “halakhic” reasons.
But the Derekh Pikkudekha wrote in its introduction (the Sdei Chemed cites it in the system Mem, rule 74) that according to the view that commandments require intention, the intention is indispensable by Torah law, from the verse “And you shall keep and do them with all your heart.” And he adds that according to this, the same would apply to prohibitions. He brings support from the words of Sha’ar HaMitzvot. And the Sdei Chemed notes that the Sha’ar HaMelekh HaHadash disagreed, and therefore ruled leniently that there is no need for intention in fulfilling the commandment of marital duty, where one is warned only through a prohibition.
I brought all this as an introduction to the question: why are you so sure that the rule that commandments require intention does not apply to a prohibitive commandment?
Certainly the usual practical difference does not apply to a prohibition. That is, with a positive commandment one can say that if someone did not have intention he must go back and fulfill the commandment, whereas with a prohibition one cannot say that he should put himself again into that same situation and abstain with intention in order to fulfill the commandment. But one can still ask: perhaps there is no “commandment-act” here at all if he did not have intention.
I do not know whether for a prohibition that involves no action (such as marital duty) there is any practical difference at all if we require intention. The Derekh Pikkudekha writes that what the Sages said—if a person sat and did not commit a transgression, he is given reward as one who performed a commandment—refers only to one who refrained from the transgression with intention. My question is: do you hold that there is no law of intention at all for a prohibition, or only that intention has no practical effect in the case of a prohibitive commandment?
Second question: in your last post you wrote: “The analogy between leaven and the evil inclination can help people cope with the evil inclination or understand how it works (it doesn’t really help me, being the Litvak that I am. But nobody’s perfect). Still, at most this is an activity with value, a means of achieving a worthy goal, but not Torah study. Torah study is an attempt to understand the Torah and its contents in a systematic and critical way. When studying a text, the goal is to learn its content and understand it, not to be freely impressed by it. Free impression is not study of the text but at most personal work and self-discovery. The result of study should stand the test of plausibility so that we can assume we have indeed reached the desired result. It is hard to regard the kneading of a text at random in order to extract from it whatever our heart desires as Torah study.”
In your opinion, does someone who does not plan to study today anything but aggadah, books of Hasidism, and the like, become exempt from the blessings over Torah? That is, can one recite the blessing over such studies?
Many thanks,
Y.
Answer
Happy festival.
Just now I remembered that someone once showed me these words of the Ari. Even so, they are still puzzling words. Suppose someone did not violate a prohibition but did not intend it for the sake of a commandment—would he then have committed a transgression? Certainly not. Would there then be no commandment? That is true even if he did have intention. After all, there is no such thing as a “commandment-act” in the case of a prohibition. And as for the non-halakhic matter of intending, that exists in all of one’s actions regardless of prohibitions or positive commandments. One of the constant commandments is “I have set the Lord before me always.” In the end, these are puzzling words.
I have been unsure about the matter of the blessings over Torah for aggadah. The accepted practice is to recite them, and perhaps that is because there is also a blessing over Torah in the personal sense. But if so, then one should also recite a blessing when studying a philosophy book by Kant, or anything else that builds within me the matter of faith and the proper understanding of the world.
And it requires further analysis whether “These are the things that have no measure” is aggadah or Jewish law, since that is what we recite in the morning after the blessings over Torah.
Discussion on Answer
In my view, one should recite a blessing over that which is part of divine revelation in this world, and words of aggadah are part of divine revelation in this world. Kant, by contrast, is not, and so there is nothing to recite a blessing over.
Let’s sharpen the point. The same claim you make about aggadah can also be made about lomdut, and about anything that is not practical and direct Jewish law. They all express human reasoning and not actual law. Should we then not recite a blessing when studying analytical Torah works? Of course we should, because the blessing is over engaging in words of Torah as part of divine revelation. From another angle: should one recite the blessings over Torah on an analytical article by a non-Jewish female scholar on a Talmudic passage? (My father told me he once saw an article by a scholar named Christine, and he assumed she was not Jewish.) The answer is no, because she is not part of the divine revelation.
Divine revelation continues here and now through the Jewish people, and therefore when a Jew engages in Torah he should recite a blessing. By contrast, when a non-Jew engages in Torah, he is not part of the revelation, and so there is nothing to recite a blessing over. In my opinion, the weakness of books of faith does not stem from their being Torah study only in the personal sense, but from their dependence on contemporary intellectual fashion. The Guide for the Perplexed was written for the perplexed of its own time, and therefore it is necessarily dependent on what caused them perplexity in their day. That does not mean there is nothing to learn from it, because very often the same perplexity comes back around in another generation—but for most of us Aristotle in the plain sense no longer creates perplexity.
And if you ask what place homiletics has, I would answer that homiletics often does not teach us something new from the texts, but something new about ourselves. The parable of leaven and matzah teaches us something new about ourselves, not about the texts. In that sense, this is more ethics than a new insight regarding divine revelation.
(By the way, my wife asked me to convey her appreciation for your position on women’s prayer quorums.)
I have already written about this at length elsewhere. I will just note here that you did not answer the question of when something is considered divine revelation. What is the difference between Talmudic aggadah and a story/poem written by one of the Amoraim or by rabbis of our time (for example, a play by Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto)? Would we recite a blessing over that too? Is everything that comes from the pen of a Jew Torah? If not, then we are back again at the question of what a Jew must engage in for it to be considered Torah. That is, a content-based definition is required; an ethnic definition is not enough. But once there is a content-based definition, the question will immediately arise: what would the law be if a non-Jew engaged in that same content?
Pele Yoetz, entry “Shaving”:
“Rabbi Isaac Luria’s disciples wrote that at the time of shaving one should intend that he is not allowing the corner of his head to be rounded off nor the corner of his beard to be destroyed, in order to fulfill his Creator’s warning, and in this way it is considered as though he fulfilled the prohibition through positive action,” etc.
By contrast, when the Pele Yoetz speaks about intention in prohibitive commandments involving food in general (entry “General Principles,” section 2):
“When a person refrains from prohibited things, he should intend in his heart that it is because of the command of God, blessed be He, that he refrains, to do His will and bring satisfaction before His glorious throne,” etc.
And there he does not mention this idea that he fulfilled the prohibition through positive action.
So it could be that this applies specifically to shaving.
But I don’t know why. Maybe it has some connection to the biblical verb “destroy”—just a tentative thought.