Q&A: Torah Study
Torah Study
Question
Hello Rabbi,
Following my reading of the posts on study (poetry, Hasidism, existentialism, and everything in between), I have a question that seems pretty basic to me.
To make sure I’m not missing something fundamental in my understanding, I’ll restate the gist of things as I understand them:
Study is deriving insights or information. For that to happen, the content being studied has to be conveyed from the teacher to the learner through some medium, and more specifically:
1. A teacher who intends to convey information to us.
2. A medium whose meaning is the teacher’s intention (of course, it could be that the teacher also conveys it by another route—beyond the plain meaning of the words—as a way of decoding his intention, and then that too would be valid; and that is why the thirteen interpretive principles are considered study).
3. A learner who extracts the content that the teacher wanted to convey.
In light of this, I want to sharpen for myself the issue of studying the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh):
1. There is no obstacle to study that is not the plain meaning of the content, so long as we assume that the mode of decoding was also conveyed by the teacher. From here it is a short step to the claim that since the Holy One, blessed be He, gave the Torah to Israel, and He of course created all our modes of “impression” or reception, then deriving impressions from the Torah is also study.
Of course one must be careful about intellectual honesty, and it makes sense to ask whether this is a personal impression only (in which case its weight is small) or perhaps one that other recipients of the Torah also shared.
This is similar to what the Rabbi mentioned, that many people “use” study of the Hebrew Bible as a basis for discussing their personal beliefs. In light of what I wrote, that is actually the giver’s very intention.
2. Studying the “plain sense” of the Hebrew Bible, in the sense of historiosophic clarification—a description of the history of the Jewish people as seen by the Holy One, blessed be He—or even study in the very simplest sense. The Rabbi accepts this as a possibility, but notes that there are technical problems with it.
3. Why there is a criterion of what and how much was newly discovered by the learner during the study (a point that came up in the columns, and was sharpened mainly in the comments to column 135). Even if I derive exactly the same thing again and again, I am still studying. In any case, even if most of the conclusions that arise from the Hebrew Bible are known and trivial, it is still study.
In addition, from my experience, when you study the same thing again, you see that it is not exactly the same thing. Even the next time, understandings are still added or sharpened.
Thank you very much,
and happy Festival of the Giving of the Torah,
Answer
Hello N.,
I hope you are well. I prefer questions through the site.
Your description is correct.
From your definition, one can indeed formally see this as study, but then it is completely emptied of content. You are not learning something from it, but creating something within yourself, and that itself is what He wanted. Beyond that, what is the point of it? What is inside me I know even without the Hebrew Bible, and usually it will not add anything new for me.
2. The problems are not technical, but rather that I do not see much value in this beyond its intrinsic value. If it is important to you to know who reigned before whom and who killed whom, then by all means. But it is neglect of Torah study in terms of quality. As long as I have not finished Ketzot, I see no reason to resort to that.
3. I wrote that formally you can see this as study, but I do not see any point in it. In the same way, I can go back over the alphabet and the basics of the four arithmetic operations, and that would be study. So what?
Indeed, things can become sharpened, but the Hebrew Bible is not the source of the sharpening, but the sharpener on which I shave. You can do that just as well by looking at an anthill, or from any other literature, or plays and movies, etc.