A Look at Torah and Torah Study – Lesson 14 – Rabbi Michael Abraham

Table of Contents

• Torah as poetry and an abstract corpus clothed in garments
• The meaning of study: abstraction, reinterpretive setups, and edge cases
• Observing commandments versus Torah study, and connecting to God’s will
• Halakhic ruling, analysis and synthesis, and the role of lomdus in reality
• “What” and “why,” the Briskers, and intuition in abstractions
• Beyond “Torah study”: Torah as object, Torah in the person, and two conditions
• Morality is not Torah and sometimes is not even study, yet its value remains
• Authority, appreciation, and learning: the topic of “this one benefits and that one does not lose,” and Rabbi Shimon Shkop
• Opening the discussion of Jewish law: Rashi’s first comment, hierarchy, and Sefer HaYashar
• The linguistic criterion: command versus description and the birth of Jewish law
• Verses that look like commands but are not counted as commandments: “You shall be holy” and the paradox
• The direction going forward: the meaning of command in study and observance, and the connection to David Hume

Summary

General Overview

The lecturer sums up the previous semester, in which the Torah was defined as “poetry,” in the sense that its message is not exhausted by its words, but is clothed in concrete garments in order to allow contact with an abstract corpus. From that it follows that dealing with oxen, cows, and extreme cases in the Talmud is a medium for investigating abstract principles, not an end in itself. He argues that Torah study is directed toward the abstraction behind the laws, explains the role of reinterpretive setups and the analogy to laboratory conditions, and distinguishes between connecting to Torah through study and connecting to Torah through observance of commandments. He then opens the new semester by moving from “Torah as object” to “Torah in the person” through the concept of “Torah study,” and sets out a framework according to which Torah study requires both that the subject matter be Torah and that the engagement with it count as study. He argues that morality is not Torah, and sometimes is not even study, though it still has value. Finally, he begins defining Jewish law through Rashi’s first comment on the Torah and distinguishes between verses that command and verses that describe, so that Jewish law is generated only from imperative statements and not from descriptive ones.

Torah as poetry and an abstract corpus clothed in garments

The lecturer states that the Sages call the Torah “poetry,” and poetry is a text whose message is not found in the words themselves but passes through them. He argues that the Torah too is not a collection of written words, but an abstract corpus that receives concrete expression in three stages: a transition from abstract ideas to a world of human concepts, and then another transition to a written pattern, which is the Written Torah we received at Sinai. He describes the angels’ engagement with Torah as engagement with that same Torah itself, just in different garments, and explains that “It is not in heaven” describes halakhic decision-making among human beings, even if there is no necessity to know how angels grasp it.

The meaning of study: abstraction, reinterpretive setups, and edge cases

The lecturer argues that the goal of study is not knowledge of the laws of the concrete case, but exposure of the abstract idea behind it, and therefore oxen, cows, ritual impurity and purity, and the like are only garments. He presents the reinterpretive setups in the Talmud as a process whose purpose is to raise the learner to higher levels of abstraction, and defines this as the essence of analytic study, not as the kind of hair-splitting people dismissively mock. He explains that extreme cases, or cases far removed from practical life, function like laboratory situations that isolate parameters in order to understand certain aspects, and illustrates this also through passages that look pathological to critics but are meant to sharpen abstract concepts.

Observing commandments versus Torah study, and connecting to God’s will

The lecturer distinguishes between connecting to Torah through study—a connection in intellect and speech—and connecting through observance of commandments—a connection in action and in the body. He attributes to the author of the Tanya the description that concrete engagement through the limbs connects a person to God’s will, whereas study connects a person to Torah through understanding. He presents both dimensions as movement toward the same abstract concept of Torah or God’s will.

Halakhic ruling, analysis and synthesis, and the role of lomdus in reality

The lecturer says that when he was younger he looked down on the study of Jewish law as memorizing details, but later came to see its essence as breaking reality down into aspects, analyzing each aspect with conceptual tools, and then returning to a synthesis that leads to halakhic rulings in real cases. He says that a ruling that amounts to nothing more than citing sources is dull and flat, whereas serious analytic halakhic ruling is a rare art that requires excellent lomdus together with common sense and a connection to reality. He describes this combination as the mark of a halakhic decisor of real stature.

“What” and “why,” the Briskers, and intuition in abstractions

The lecturer explains that the Briskers are drawn to Kodashim and Taharot in order to distance themselves from everyday intuitions and cling to the “what,” but he argues that this is a childish approach because there is no “what” without a “why.” He says that even in Kodashim and Taharot, the lomdus is full of assumptions about what is reasonable and unreasonable, and intuition touches abstract principles even if those principles are not explicitly formulated. He adds that in Choshen Mishpat too one touches an abstract world, and not the ordinary legal goals of regulating life, and says that this will require a separate discussion later on. He compares this in part to machine learning, in that examples update parameters, but stresses that in human beings the updating is also expressed in conscious understanding and not only in calculation.

Beyond “Torah study”: Torah as object, Torah in the person, and two conditions

The lecturer says that the previous semester dealt with Torah from the outside, and he moves in the new semester to dealing with Torah from the inside through the question of what we are doing when we teach and study Torah, and what the relationship is between Jewish law, morality, lomdus, aggadic literature, the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), Jewish thought, Hasidut, and Kabbalah. He defines “Torah study” as a concept that requires two tests: that the subject be Torah, and that the mode of engagement with it count as study. He states that Torah in its foundation is what was given at Mount Sinai, and that the corpus grows denser through the generations by way of interpretation and exposition, so that these products too are Torah, as part of a dynamic tradition and not as though the tradition were a hollow pipe.

Morality is not Torah and sometimes is not even study, yet its value remains

The lecturer argues that morality is not Torah because it is not produced as interpretation of what was given at Sinai. He illustrates this with moral discussion of Jacob, who lied to his father, where the view of lying as bad is already given in advance by conscience and does not change as a result of the study. He says that in such a case the engagement is not really study, because no new knowledge is being produced from the text, but at most the tension between morality and Torah is being resolved. This is unlike the prohibition of eating pork, where the learner for the first time derives the prohibition and its parameters from verses and Talmudic passages. He emphasizes that saying something is not Torah is a categorical claim, not a value hierarchy, and he cites Maimonides at the end of chapter 8 of Laws of Kings: “Anyone who accepts the seven commandments and is careful to observe them is among the pious of the nations of the world and has a share in the world to come—provided that he accepts them and does them because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded them in the Torah, and informed us through Moses our teacher that the children of Noah had previously been commanded concerning them. But if he does them because of rational conviction, he is not a resident alien and not among the pious of the nations of the world, but rather among their wise men. Or rather—not ‘or rather’; that’s a more precise version.”

Authority, appreciation, and learning: the topic of “this one benefits and that one does not lose,” and Rabbi Shimon Shkop

The lecturer brings Rabbi Shimon Shkop’s introduction to Sha’arei Yosher on the topic of “this one benefits and that one does not lose,” and explains that the ability to learn depends on appreciating the source of authority, because only then will the learner make the effort to understand a statement that at first seems absurd, instead of dismissing it. He describes how Rava rejects the attempted link to the Mishnah as “foolish,” whereas someone who apprenticed himself to and appreciated the sage can understand the deep reasoning behind it. He concludes that a text perceived as possessing Sinaitic authority is given the credit that enables real learning even when its words do not initially appear reasonable, and he parallels this to the idea that an argument teaches only when you lose it and change your position.

Opening the discussion of Jewish law: Rashi’s first comment, hierarchy, and Sefer HaYashar

The lecturer opens the definition of Jewish law through Rashi’s first comment on the Torah, which states that the Torah should have begun with “This month shall be for you,” because that is the first commandment. From here he infers that Torah in its essence is a collection of commandments, and everything else requires justification. He suggests that “He declared to His people the power of His works, to give them the inheritance of the nations” is not only a forceful argument but also an essential one, of the form “He gave it to whomever was upright in His eyes,” and he connects this to the fact that the Sages call Genesis “Sefer HaYashar,” the Book of Uprightness, which teaches ways of uprightness as a basis for entitlement. He leaves in place a hierarchy according to which Jewish law is the essence of Torah, while the non-halakhic parts have a place but are not the main thing.

The linguistic criterion: command versus description and the birth of Jewish law

The lecturer divides the verses of the Torah into imperative verses and descriptive verses, and argues that Jewish law is generated only from imperative statements and not from descriptive ones, even when the descriptive verse presents desirable conduct or a description of God’s will. He cites the Rashba in his explanations to aggadic literature on “Therefore the children of Israel do not eat the sinew of the thigh-vein” as a descriptive statement that does not fit the structure of a prohibition, which requires forms like “beware,” “lest,” or “do not.” He concludes that description does not constitute a prohibition. He emphasizes that “Do not murder” is not a sentence that reveals the divine will but a sentence that commands, whereas a description such as “Now the man Moses was exceedingly humble, more than any person on the face of the earth” may hint at a value but does not become a commandment in the absence of a command.

Verses that look like commands but are not counted as commandments: “You shall be holy” and the paradox

The lecturer raises the difficulty that verses such as “You shall be holy” and “You shall do what is upright and good” appear to be commands, yet the enumerators of the commandments do not count them as positive commandments. He presents Maimonides in the fourth root, who explains “You shall be holy” as a general principle that includes the whole Torah and therefore is not counted, and notes that Nachmanides in his glosses discusses the defense of the Ba’al Halakhot Gedolot and offers the interpretation of “a degenerate person within the bounds of the Torah.” He explains that the paradox of the degenerate person arises if this is counted as a commandment, because then the violation becomes an explicit transgression and no longer a category of degeneracy within what is technically permitted. Therefore the verse remains outside Jewish law in the sense of the formal count, even though its wording is imperative.

The direction going forward: the meaning of command in study and observance, and the connection to David Hume

The lecturer says that the continuation of the discussion will examine the meaning of command as the foundation of the halakhic domain, and its implications both for observing positive commandments and for the way one studies imperative verses as opposed to descriptive ones. He accepts the connection that was suggested to David Hume’s is-ought problem, and formulates the distinction between descriptive and prescriptive language as a linguistic expression of the logical distinction between truth and falsehood on the one hand, and validity and obligation on the other.

By the way, Cain, did you want to say something? Okay, gone. Okay, so I want to start. I’ll briefly summarize what we did last semester, just for the sake of completing the picture. If you weren’t here last semester, that’s totally fine. This summary is actually meant more for those who were here last semester, not for those who weren’t, so that the picture they form will be more complete. If you weren’t here, that’s fine too—you’ll just start from where we begin this semester.

So, last semester I basically talked about the definition of Torah as song: “Now therefore write for yourselves this song, and place it in their mouths”—and that “song” is the Torah. This is also one of the sources from which we learn the commandment to write a Torah scroll. In other words, the assumption of the Sages is that the Torah is called a song. And I started with the question: why? What is it about the Torah that makes us describe it as song?

And I said—we took a somewhat winding road in order to define the concept of song—but basically the bottom line was that song is a text whose message is not found in the words themselves. Meaning, yes: “There once was a lonely streetlamp at the edge of a neighborhood”—a very nice song, for those who know it and are of the right age. Obviously that song is not trying to tell us about streetlamps or neighborhoods. It’s trying to convey some message that passes through the words and sentences, but not the literal message contained in the words and sentences.

And in that sense—again, we did this at great length, I don’t want to go back into all of it, I’m being very telegraphic here—what I wanted to say is that Torah too, ultimately, is not just the collection of words written there. It’s something that passes through the words. And that led me to describe the unfolding of Torah as a movement from the abstract to the concrete.

And I said—I showed this through various rabbinic midrashim and so on—but in general, the claim was that Torah is some very, very abstract corpus. It isn’t identical with what is written for us in the Written Torah. Rather, it is some very abstract corpus which in principle could also belong to the world of angels, or to worlds not connected to ours at all—not oxen, not cows, not Sabbaths, not parents, not theft, not impurity and purity, none of that—but rather some collection of abstract ideas.

And these abstract ideas become concretized, in the sense that they become tangible when they enter contents that belong to our world—oxen, cows, thieves, impurity and purity, Sabbaths, parents, and so on. This is the discussion between Moses our Teacher and the angels: do you have parents, such that honoring parents would apply to you? Things of that kind.

The concretization—the second stage of concretization—is the transition of the things that were made concrete in the first stage, meaning the ideas that belong to our world, and putting them into a written form. And that is the Torah we received at Sinai. The Torah we received at Sinai is really the result, the third stage in the process of concretization. Therefore it is incorrect to see it as what is simply called “the Torah.” That’s not really what “the Torah” means. Torah is something that undergoes concretizations, and in the third stage it is the Written Torah that we received at Mount Sinai.

And therefore the claim was that when we deal with oxen, cows, malformed fetuses and placentas, and all those things, in the end these are garments through which we touch abstract things. But engaging in Torah is really touching those abstract things, with the medium that allows us to touch them—because they don’t belong to our world—being their clothing in the concepts of our world and in formulations from our language, and so on. Okay? And this is only a garment.

We saw—I think I mentioned the author of the Tanya and Nefesh HaChayim—that embracing the king in his garments is like embracing the king himself. In other words, this really counts as engaging with the thing itself. I gave the example of Zen and the Art of Archery. There’s a little book by a German professor of philosophy who went to Tokyo—some friend of his was a law professor at the University of Tokyo—and he asked to study Zen.

And when he describes it—he has a booklet describing his experiences and this process of studying Zen so as to translate it for a Western ear—he says that when he arrived at the master, the Zen teacher, the teacher asked him: Do you want to learn archery, flower arranging, I don’t know what, dancing—I don’t remember exactly what all the options were. And he said: No, no, none of those. I want to learn Zen. And the teacher said: Yes, yes, but flower arranging, archery.

In other words, his claim was that you can learn the very same thing itself, this abstract thing called Zen, through various media—“media” in the sense of an intermediary. You can learn it through the medium of archery, or through wrestling, or through flower arrangement, or various things of that kind. And in all those media we are really learning the same thing: some abstract orientation to reality, such that each time, give me the relevant reality and it will be translated into some collection of principles that apply to it. But the principles are only a translation of the abstract corpus.

And therefore you can learn it in archery, you can learn it in flower arranging, you can learn it in wrestling. It really doesn’t matter—you are learning the same thing. And for me that was a good parable for what I said before about the abstract Torah that clothes itself in ideas and concepts from our world. In exactly the same way it could clothe itself in ideas and concepts from the world of the angels. And when the angels studied Torah, they obviously did not study honoring parents, because they don’t have parents; not Sabbath observance, because they also don’t work during the six weekdays; and various other things that don’t belong to their world. Okay? And yet they studied the same Torah, only the Torah clothed itself in a conceptual system and a language that belong to their world. Okay?

And therefore the Torah they studied and the Torah we study is exactly the same Torah, even though they have no idea—they don’t know, they’ve never seen—the Torah we received: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” and all that. They didn’t see that. That doesn’t interest them. That is not Torah at all. It’s a garment that the same Torah put on when it descended into our world.

And then a discussion begins there: so who determines things? What is the meaning of saying that the Torah descended? Well, it didn’t really descend—it simply clothed itself also in this garment, just as it had a previous garment. So the claim was that somehow Jewish law is decided below; it is not in heaven. Meaning, the decisions of what is correct are made here. But that doesn’t change the fact that we study the same Torah that they study, and I’m not even sure that this very claim—that decisions are made here—necessarily binds the angels. That’s our narrative. And within our narrative, we determine things, everything is in our hands, the authority is in our hands, all is well. Because that is how we are supposed to see things. I don’t know how the angels see things, if they even do. So that doesn’t really matter. We study our Torah, not theirs.

In any case, that’s regarding the unfolding of the Torah and its being some abstract corpus. Now, as a result of that, I said that when we study Torah, this has implications. It isn’t just some meta-statement. It affects the subject itself too. Why? Because the question is: when we study Torah, what are we looking for? What are we studying?

And the claim that emerges from what I described until now is that we are studying that abstract thing which is embodied in the concrete things of our world. Which means, basically, that our goal is not to know the law of an ox that gored a cow, or impurity and purity. An ox that gored a cow, or impurity and purity, is the medium through which some collection of abstract ideas passes to us. And those abstract ideas are really Torah.

Now, we have no way of touching them directly. We do it through oxen and cows. But the oxen and cows are a means. That’s why, for example, we spoke at length about the subject of forced reinterpretations. When we study Talmud, one very troubling issue is: why does the Talmud keep offering all kinds of strange reinterpretations of Mishnah passages? And I explained that what lies behind this—and again I’m not going back into all of it, this is only to place things in context—what lies behind it is that we are looking for the abstract idea that stands behind the concrete law in the Mishnah.

If there is some concrete law in the Mishnah dealing with, say, an egg laid on a Jewish holiday, what we are really looking for is the abstract idea of some kind of preparation from a holiday to the Sabbath, or that things need to be prepared, and then one rises to a higher and higher level of abstraction. And that is really the point—not the law of an egg laid on a holiday.

And these abstractions—what some people tend to belittle and see as hairsplitting, as Rabbi Ovadia used to call it—I think that is the essence of study. Not only do I not belittle it, I belittle the rest. In other words, this is really the study itself. The laws and concrete principles are no more than garments or a medium through which I can enter into the abstract things, because I don’t know how to grasp the abstract things in themselves. “A judge who sees but is not seen”—you can’t see him unless he is clothed in garments. Right? I mean, I hope people know that one too, or maybe even that is no longer familiar—I don’t know, maybe that generation is gone too. But only if he is clothed in garments can he be seen. Yet that doesn’t mean that my engagement is with the garments. Through the garments I am engaging with the judge. Okay?

So here too: I am engaging with the abstract thing, even though of course it is clothed in concrete things, and only through them can I touch the abstract thing. So analytical learning—the attempt to define understandings, concepts, various theoretical distinctions, and a conceptual system that maybe we even invented, as happens in science in a scientific theory—all of that is simply attempts to grasp those abstract things that are clothed within the concrete laws.

And therefore it really doesn’t bother me that we are occupied with oxen and cows when I personally haven’t seen an ox or a cow in years—they’re not from my world. Others maybe do see them, but there are things in the Talmud that are completely not from our world. There are of course things that are entirely Platonic: wheat that descended in the clouds, a flying camel, a demon speaking from the mouth of a demon, and all sorts of things of that kind which are not drawn from our world at all. And it really doesn’t matter.

People mock this sometimes. I don’t know—someone who has intercourse with himself. There’s such a discussion, about someone who has intercourse with himself, very beloved by critics of the Talmud. And that’s a total misunderstanding. I am not trying to determine the law of someone who has intercourse with himself. Rather, “someone who has intercourse with himself” is a hypothetical case meant to illustrate or depict a laboratory situation through which I can discuss ideas such as: what is forbidden intercourse, what must be present there, what does it mean for it to be done within a relationship or outside a relationship, and things of that sort.

So I do that through some very extreme cases that don’t belong to our world, but that really doesn’t matter. In the end, the goal is not to determine the law of the case. The case is a means through which I clarify the abstract idea. Exactly as in a laboratory I create a situation that is very distant from the practical world.

Just a moment, Rabbi. Can I ask a question?

It comes out that the whole observance of the commandments that we fulfill is not really fulfilling the commandment but connecting upward.

You’re talking about observance; I’m talking about study. The observance of the commandment is some kind of connection in action to Torah. Study is connection in thought and speech.

Study—right, studying this subject causes me to connect upward.

Correct. And doing this thing causes you physical connection upward, in the way the author of the Tanya writes—I think we mentioned this—that through involvement with the limbs, you connect with your body to the will of God or to Torah. And study is connecting with your mind to Torah. But all of this is really connection to that abstract concept called Torah, or the will of God, or whatever you want to call it.

So these strange situations we often deal with when we study Talmud are no different from laboratory situations scientists deal with. Physicists talk about phenomena they measure in a lab where the temperature is almost absolute zero, there’s a vacuum, there are no bodies of certain kinds, they clear out the whole setup—so what connection does that have to our world? You created an imaginary world that has no connection to our world. But it turns out that examining these imaginary situations specifically helps us understand the practical situations in our world. Why? Because we isolate parameters.

We say: I can’t understand our whole world—it’s terribly complex and contains very many things. So what do I do? I clean out most of the things and leave a reality where there are only two aspects, or one aspect, and I try to see what that means or how to understand it. Then I’ll try to isolate another aspect, and a third. After I understand each one separately, I’ll also try to understand our reality itself.

The same thing happens in Jewish law. We construct cases that can sometimes be very pathological and very far from our practical world, but their goal is to try to understand one particular aspect of the practical world. Then I build another pathological case that isolates another aspect of the practical world. And after I understand all the aspects separately, I can try to combine them and really understand what happens in the practical world.

By the way, just a biographical-existential comment—I don’t know—when I was younger than I am today, I was very inclined to look down on the study of practical Jewish law. Analytical study was the height of my aspirations, and the study of practical Jewish law was this kind of memorizing of details, not interesting at all. I still identify with that to some extent today, by the way. But what changed for me as I got older is that studying Jewish law is not memorizing details.

There is something in dealing with reality that is much more fascinating than the abstract conceptual analysis. But what is fascinating about it is not memorizing what the Mishnah Berurah says about this case and that case and that case. Rather, it is to break reality down into its aspects, to carry out an analytical process, to break reality down into its aspects, to clarify each aspect separately using conceptual, theoretical, analytical tools, and then return and synthesize our reality using the theoretical constructions. In other words, to try to understand it through the theoretical constructions and reach a conclusion. And that’s amazing. To me, that’s the most fascinating field possible.

But it’s fascinating because even rendering a halakhic ruling should not really be done the way it often is—looking at what the Mishnah Berurah says and what this one says. That really is boring, insipid, and annoying. Not always unnecessary, because you need to know what to do, but it is not Torah study. It’s just knowing what to do. Rendering a halakhic ruling in the analytical sense involves a huge amount of conceptual learning, but in the end you also integrate it—you organize it and combine all the conceptual aspects you’ve examined in order to issue a halakhic ruling on a real case.

And knowing how to do that analysis and reconstruction, that analysis and synthesis, is an extraordinary art. And I think for that you need to be an excellent scholar, but also not detached from common sense and from connection to reality—which often does happen with excellent scholars. And that combination is what creates a decisor of real stature. You see a person who has analytical abilities, who knows how to relate to reality as it is, who does not force the analytical conclusions onto it, but uses those analytical abilities to break reality down, analyze each of its aspects, and then return and try to reach some conclusion about it. That, to me, is truly an amazing pursuit. I don’t think I know another pursuit like that in any other field—something so deep and fascinating.

Okay, that was just a biographical confession. Let’s return.

Can I ask another question?

Yes, yes.

About the idea. The question is how this comes to expression—the idea that there is some abstract idea we are striving toward—as distinct, say, from general law where we strive for social justice and arranging the world properly and all that. How does this come to expression in the fact that you are studying the case or the law? Because if, for example, you study civil law and the laws of damages and so on in Bava Kamma, you see that the underlying reasoning really is connected, and very similar to things having to do with justice, theft, and so on. So the bread and butter of Jewish law and all that really is social reasoning a lot of the time. It’s not that suddenly we say an ox that gored a cow is liable because the Holy One, blessed be He, imposed some decree on us or something like that. Am I right? How does this come to expression when you study? I can understand it maybe in laws between man and God, where there’s no place for social issues, but between man and man?

So first of all, you already began the answer. First of all, there are branches of Jewish law that have no connection at all to the legal world. Parts that are not civil law, not criminal law—even criminal law in Jewish law also concerns Sabbath desecration, not only ordinary crime. In areas like impurity and purity, agriculture, forbidden foods, or practical religious life—things like that—they are not connected at all to the legal world and social order.

My claim—and maybe we’ll get to this later in the semester if we have time, I don’t know—is that even in the context of civil law, that is the reality. It is not true that civil law comes to regulate life. That is a mistaken conception. The goals of civil law in halakhah are not legal goals in the sense of other legal systems. But that requires a detailed discussion of its own. I hope we’ll get there later in the semester; it’s in the plan. We’ll see if we manage.

In any case, what I want to claim is just: notice, let’s look at the first part of what you said. When we study sacrificial law—I think I mentioned this in some context, I don’t remember if here—the Brisker school really likes to study sacrificial and purity laws. And the question is why? And of course the answer is because their ethos is that we ask only what, not why. We want to know only what is written in the Torah. Why—that’s beyond us, we can’t understand it. We ask only what.

Now when you study damages, the why naturally demands itself, because you have a lot of intuitions there about what is right and what is not right. So anyone who wants to focus on the what without the why needs to take topics that are as far as possible from our everyday world and from the simple intuitions that accompany us. And therefore they deal with sacrificial and purity laws, because there it’s easiest to ask only what without needing the why.

But since this is a childish approach—because it’s obvious there is no what without a why—you can’t answer the what if you don’t understand the why. How will you determine what the what is? The why also determines the what. If you understand why it is like this, then you can understand that this is said and that is not said. But without understanding the why, how will you decide what is said and what is not? What will help you define the what?

And therefore it’s a childish approach. Obviously you are always also asking why. The only thing is that the why in the world of sacrificial and purity law is much more abstract. It is a why that in some sense is not connected to our everyday world of organizing life, morality, law, and so on. And still, notice: we have reasoning there too. Read little Brisker pieces on sacrificial and purity law—they are full of reasoning. “This doesn’t make sense,” “you can define it this way,” “you can define it that way,” “this definition is not plausible,” “this definition is plausible.” Where do you get that from? How do you know what is plausible and what is not plausible? Because my intuition tells me this is plausible and this is not.

In other words, our intuition has the ability to touch those abstract principles that we don’t know how to formulate. But it appears in us as the feeling that this can be said and this cannot. If you ask me why, I won’t always be able to explain to you why. But I do have an intuition that this is plausible and this is not. “This just doesn’t work”—something like that doesn’t make sense. You don’t say such a thing. Why not? Because it doesn’t sit right with the mind. And I don’t know how to say more than that, because I don’t have principles of why that I know how to formulate, as I do in the legal or moral world. But there too there is a why. And that is what the Briskers don’t understand. On the contrary: they are constantly occupied with the abstract why, a why that is even much farther from us than the why of morality and law.

Wait—but the why—if you want to distance yourself from the abstract world, then deal with civil law, not sacrificial and purity law.

And therefore the claim I want to make is that there too, and also in civil law, we are actually touching a completely abstract world, not organizing life in the simple way that legal systems try to do. We do it through principles. Just as there are principles in sacrificial and purity law, so too there are principles of halakhic law, legal or pseudo-legal principles. But that is a whole issue we’ll still discuss, I hope.

Rabbi, if I may just make a comment—so you gave the analogy of training artificial intelligence models, and there they really don’t ask why. You give it data and it doesn’t ask—it has an algorithm, it trains on the outcomes, that’s what comes out. So that’s actually even better, even more fitting for those Briskers.

That’s true, exactly. But we are human beings and not artificial intelligence. And with human beings, when you organize the array of internal parameters, for us that gets translated into understandings.

Yes, but if you studied only impurity and purity all your life, theoretically, your head would already be programmed in such a way that later if you studied damages you’d know exactly.

Your head would be programmed, but unlike artificial intelligence, in your case that programming would express itself in understandings. In artificial intelligence, that programming is just the calculation of weighted sums of parameter values. For us, we do some cognitive work in parallel, so that analogy has only limited significance. We take examples, and those examples somehow organize our thought internally. Up to that point it’s like artificial intelligence. From there on there’s a difference. In AI it organizes the parameter values and then it computes and predicts the next token. Okay. In us it organizes the internal parameters, but we don’t just do technical calculations of…

So just for the sake of the example: if such a Brisker studied only impurity and purity all his life, and then suddenly you bring him laws of damages, wouldn’t his mind know how to unfold it the same way as impurity and purity?

I assume it would know exactly as mine would. He just doesn’t admit it. He doesn’t have a more…

He’s doing exactly—there’s no difference. The Brisker does what I do; he just doesn’t admit it. He’s not aware of it.

No, but I mean if he studied impurity and purity, he never knows the why, but now when he comes to this he does know the why?

He thinks he doesn’t know the why—that’s what I’m saying. In other words, he deceives himself. He knows what you and I know. He just doesn’t call it knowledge. He doesn’t want to admit that he is occupied with the why, because he has some interest in keeping it lofty above lofty. But practically speaking, he is doing what you and I are doing, in broad terms.

Now it’s true that there are also differences, maybe we’ll talk about them. There are differences, because I do ask questions of why beyond the why the Brisker asks. I do try to formulate the why, not only use it intuitively. I try to formulate the why; I try to ask why about the why. Meaning, once I arrive at some principle, I also try to ask why about that principle. Since I do it out in the open, I don’t leave it unconscious, in the sense that my intuition takes it into account but I don’t formulate it. No—I try to formulate it too. But that’s not a principled difference; it’s a difference of degree. It’s simply a question of whether you’re a Brisker or not—really just a question of how self-aware you are.

No, but the question is whether if he later comes to studying damages he won’t be sharper.

I think he will be sharper. He just won’t have an explanation for why.

Fine, why should I care why?

No, he won’t know how to explain to himself why he became sharper.

Ah, okay. But he doesn’t admit that he really is picking up some abstract things of the why. He thinks he’s occupied only with describing what. And then supposedly every subject he has to learn on its own; there’s no connection. He simply learns different corpora and learns what is written here and what is written there. But that isn’t true. Obviously, through what is written here he understands some abstract thing. And that abstract thing has implications in areas he did not study.

So really this is the climbing of levels of abstraction that I described at the beginning, which the Brisker does not admit exists, even though of course he does it too, just not consciously. Not consciously.

And I’m saying this has consequences too, because he doesn’t allow himself to ask why-questions, and therefore he’ll stop at a low-to-medium height. He’ll stop at the point where his intuition tells him yes or no, “this fits, this doesn’t fit,” but he won’t try to formulate the intuition, ask questions about it too, and so on. Okay?

So that took me too long, but no matter. After all, we did cover a whole semester. So what I want to do now is begin this semester, and here I want first of all to outline the framework so we don’t get lost as we go.

Until now, in the previous semester—in what I just summarized—I dealt with defining Torah, you could say, from the outside. I look at Torah and ask myself: what is Torah? What is this thing? To define this object. I now want to move into definitions of Torah from the standpoint of the person, from the inside. In other words, to look at Torah from within, not from without. Not what happened to Torah when I look at it from the outside, but to go inside and try to see what happens there on the inside.

And this will come to expression in the question: what are we doing when we study Torah? What is the relationship among the various fields of Torah—Jewish law, ethics, conceptual analysis, aggadic literature, the Hebrew Bible, thought, Hasidism, Kabbalah, and things of that kind. Are there differences among them? What are the relationships among them? To what extent are they all Torah? If so, is it really in the same sense, or maybe not all of them are Torah at all?

Those are things that already touch this subject of Torah from within. So that’s the outside versus the inside, or the object versus the person. I now want to deal with our relationship to Torah—what are we doing?—but of course that will also reflect back on the concept of Torah.

So when I want to speak—the title of the course was Torah and Torah Study. Until now we dealt with Torah; now I want to deal with Torah study this semester.

Now Torah study is a concept composed of two sub-concepts: study and Torah. Therefore, in order to define the concept of Torah study, we need to define the concept Torah and define the concept study. We’ll see later that this is a very important point. Because there are many fields that perhaps can be considered Torah, but engaging in them is not study. And therefore it still isn’t Torah study. In order to define something as Torah study, it has to pass both tests: it has to be Torah, and the engagement with it has to count as study.

Now we’ll see that there is a connection between these two discussions. The question of where one studies and where one does not study is inherently connected to the question what Torah is. Maybe I’ll say in one sentence what the connection is. I would say this: Torah, at least by my assumption, is the thing we received at Mount Sinai. That is called Torah.

Now of course the thing we received at Mount Sinai, as I said, is an abstract thing, and therefore it thickens over the generations. It thickens through interpretations, exposition, and so on. But all these activities of interpretation and exposition—say, interpretation and exposition—these are interpretations that actually draw more and more out of that very core that we received at Mount Sinai. Therefore what comes out of the interpretation and exposition is, for me, also Torah, because it is simply an expansion or specification of the material we received.

For me, that thing is really the foundation of the concept Torah: tradition. The tradition, the thing we received at Mount Sinai—that is what is called Torah. But the concept of tradition—and I’ll get to this at the end of the semester—is a dynamic concept. It does not mean that tradition is a hollow pipe, where what we received at Mount Sinai goes from rabbi to student and from student to his student and so on, and we’re just some sort of relay, passing along a closed corpus from generation to generation, and that is what is called Torah. No. Tradition is something dynamic. When we pass it on, we pass it on with interpretations, with expositions, with this kind of expansion and that kind of expansion—and we’ll still speak about the different types of expansions. And this whole large corpus is what is called Torah.

But it is very important for me to remember—and this is essential, really the whole essence of the semester—it is very important to remember that the concept Torah, at its foundation, is what we received at Mount Sinai. Why am I saying that? Because it has implications both for defining what Torah is and for defining what Torah study is. And I said these are the two subjects we will discuss here.

Because I claim that things that did not come as interpretation of what we received at Sinai are not Torah. For example, I claim that ethics is not Torah. Not Torah. Because ethics I do not derive through interpretation of the Torah I received at Mount Sinai. All this requires explanation—I’ll get to it. Right now I just want to lay out the framework. Therefore many things traditionally regarded as Torah, I will claim are not Torah. Or later I’ll soften that a bit—Torah from the standpoint of the person, Torah from the standpoint of the object—but for now I’ll define it as not Torah. Okay?

So that has implications for defining what Torah is. But it also affects the question what Torah study is. Because when I study things that in the end are not interpretations of what I received at Mount Sinai, then I’m not studying Torah. Even if I am learning something there.

More than that: often when I engage in those areas, I am not really studying at all. It isn’t even called study. Just to illustrate the general idea—we’ll come back to this—I’ll use ethics as an example. Let’s imagine I want to engage in some ethical issue from the Torah—I don’t know—Jacob lied to his father. Is that moral? Is it immoral? We are dealing with an ethical issue. Fine?

Here I want to claim that this may perhaps be Torah, but it is not study. Why is it not study? I’ll tell you why. Because when we come to this issue, it is obvious to us that lying is bad. We do not derive our attitude toward lying from this issue. Nor from any other issue. We derive it from our conscience. In other words, it is morally obvious to us that lying is bad.

Now when we see that Jacob our Patriarch lied, we have a difficulty. A problem of Torah and morality, right? We often have these sorts of tensions. But what is the result of this conflict, this tension between Torah and morality? In the end we will explain why Jacob was nevertheless okay, right? Or we’ll criticize him, it doesn’t matter. Fine. But we will never change our moral worldview as a result of our analysis of the issue. Our moral worldview is a given. Now the question is how the issue fits that, or doesn’t fit it—so then Jacob was not okay—or does fit it, so he was okay.

But practically speaking, either way, I come out with the same conception of lying that I came in with. In other words, I did not learn the concept of lying from there. So where did I learn it from? From my own reasoning, from my own moral intuition, I don’t know from where—but not from Torah. It is not an interpretive process. Contrary to what people think, a great deal of Torah interpretation is not an interpretive process at all. Not at all.

And therefore I claim this is not Torah study. Not only is it not Torah study; it is not study at all. Because I don’t learn anything from it. At most I can justify what Jacob our Patriarch did, but I do not learn any ethical or halakhic value or principle from engaging with it.

By contrast, if you think about the prohibition of eating pork, that is certainly Torah, because without the Torah given at Sinai no one would have forbidden eating pork. But more than that, there is also study there. Why? Because were it not for the Torah’s prohibition, I would not refrain from eating pork. I refrain from eating pork only because I read in the verses and in the Talmud and so on that eating pork is forbidden, I clarified the parameters of the prohibition, and then I learned what is forbidden and what is permitted. That is called study. I derived a new lesson that I did not have before from engagement in the issue. That is called study. Study.

So notice—I’m doing this very telegraphically, but I want the picture to be clear. We’ll go into more detail later, but I want the picture to be clear. Notice that these two questions, which are seemingly separate questions, come together here. Because something that is not part of the corpus we received from Sinai, or an interpretation of it, is not defined as Torah on the level of the object. It is not Torah; it is something else. Not something worthless, by the way, but not Torah.

And on the other hand, often to engage in it is also not study. It’s not study because you are not really engaging in the issue and learning from it something, deriving from it something you did not know before. You are simply using things you already knew beforehand in order to justify the issue or something like that.

So why should I care whether Jacob our Patriarch lied or did not lie, if I already know that lying is forbidden with him or without him? Fine, maybe just “study it and receive reward.” But I am not learning from there which lies are permitted and which are forbidden. And therefore the questions that are seemingly different—what is Torah study from the standpoint of the person, and what is Torah from the standpoint of the object—are questions with a great deal of overlap. They are not identical, but they overlap a lot.

Very often the fields I will define as fields that are not Torah—you will see that engaging in them is also not study. And therefore Torah study requires two conditions: first, that it be Torah; and second, that when I engage in it, I am studying. But these two conditions very often—not always, but very often—come together. Very often when something is not Torah, I also am not studying.

Maybe I’ll bring an example of this. In the introduction to Sha’arei Yosher, Rabbi Shimon Shkop brings the Talmudic topic of “this one benefits while the other loses nothing.” In that discussion, Rami bar Hama is there, and Rava—I think—speaks with Rav Kahana, I don’t remember exactly. And Rav Kahana says to him: wow, you missed it—what wonderful things they learned in the study hall. And what did they learn there? He says: one who lives in another person’s courtyard without his knowledge—must he pay rent or not? The question of “this one benefits while the other loses nothing.” Okay?

Now there are a lot of very interesting things in that discussion, even apart from its halakhic contents—about the question of what Torah is at all, and how Torah is learned, and what analytical study of Torah is. This discussion is really paradigmatic for that issue.

Once there was a panel at the National Library that I participated in. There was a whole series of meetings on the Babylonian Talmud, with Tomer Persico and some TV host whose name I forgot, and Meir Buzaglo and me. And when we prepared for it, I told them: let’s deal with the discussion of “this one benefits while the other loses nothing.” And there we spoke a bit about the methodological aspects of the discussion, not its actual content.

Among other things, Rabbi Shimon Shkop in the introduction to Sha’arei Yosher explains that when Rami bar Hama hears from Rav Kahana what they were discussing, he says: fools of the world! That’s an explicit Mishnah. What did you waste your time on there? And then he cites: “If he benefited, he pays for what he benefited”—the Mishnah there in Bava Kamma.

Actually, before he tells him that, he says: What Mishnah is that? He’s surprised to hear it, because after all we debated this for a whole week, and now you come tell me it’s explicit in the Mishnah. And he says to him: first serve me, and then I’ll tell you. So he served him, and then he told him—he brought him that Mishnah, and he accepted it.

Then Rava comes and says: are you crazy? That Mishnah has nothing to do with the discussion. There, it’s “this one benefits and the other loses.” “She ate and benefited, so she pays for what she benefited.” If she ate, then he lost the fruit. That’s “this one benefits and the other loses,” not “this one benefits while the other loses nothing.” What connection does it have to the discussion? And the Talmud there gives some interesting conceptual answer.

Rabbi Shimon Shkop’s claim is: why did he say to him, first serve me? He said that because he wanted to see that you value me. Why? Because if you don’t value me, you’re not willing to serve me, so what good is it if I tell you something? If you agree with it, then you knew it already, so fine. If you don’t agree with it, you’ll just say: he’s talking nonsense, I don’t accept it. So when will you learn? How will you learn from me something? You can only learn something from someone you value.

Why? Because if he says something that does not sound plausible to you, you won’t reject it outright. Rather, you’ll think again and again until you understand the idea behind it. And then you learned something new. Because at first you thought it was foolish; you didn’t understand it. And after studying, you gained an insight that you didn’t have before. But you can derive that only if you value the person from whom you are learning.

Now what is beautiful there in the Talmud—and Rabbi Shimon Shkop doesn’t go into the details—you can see it throughout that whole discussion. It’s wonderful, because there he gives him some very strange answer in order to reconcile the Mishnah.

This really is artificial intelligence, Rabbi—it’s like that’s how you train models. If you don’t…

Yes, exactly. If you don’t let me verify it, then you won’t correct your parameters if you don’t accept my supervised learning. In other words, if you don’t accept me as the supervisor.

Right—if no one went over the data and said okay, verified it, then it won’t learn; it’ll learn nonsense.

And you trust him. You trust that person who…

Yes, exactly. So now the point is that the Talmud there brings some very forced answer about the Mishnah and how it nevertheless relates to the discussion, and Rava immediately jumps in and says: what nonsense, don’t you see, it’s not connected at all, an answer is not an answer, it’s irrelevant. But Rav Kahana accepted it completely and had no doubts. Why? Because when you think about it, you understand there is a deep reasoning here that really is correct. At first glance it looks foolish. But when you look into the reasoning—I explained all this in one of my columns—when you look into the reasoning, you see it really is sound.

Now Rav Kahana, who had served Rami bar Hama and valued him, when he heard this nonsense from him, he thought twice and reached the conclusion of what he really meant and understood that he was right. And Rava, who looked at the matter from the outside and had not served him and did not value him, said: forget it, he’s talking nonsense, that Mishnah is not the Mishnah. Therefore the “first serve me” is brought there precisely in a context that explains what follows, and what follows explains exactly why it was so important that he said “first serve me” there. Because in fact Rava, who had not served him, failed at exactly that point; and Rav Kahana, who had served him, understood it well, even though on the face of it it looked very strange.

And the point for our purposes is that something that descends from Sinai is something to which I give credit. I value it. The Holy One, blessed be He, said it. Moses our Teacher—from the mouth of the Holy One, blessed be He—I value it. What does that mean? That even if I encounter something there that does not seem plausible to me, I will try to understand it, and even if not, I’ll still accept it. I’ll accept it because I value this text, or the author of this text. And therefore I can learn, because only that way can one learn. Only in a place where you are prepared to adopt something that from the outset you did not think was correct—only there are you learning.

Now in a place where you do not see what you are doing as interpretation of Torah—as some engagement with your intuitions or whatever—fine, then you are just clarifying for yourself what you already know. You are not learning anything new. If someone tells you an ethical argument that doesn’t seem right to you, then you simply won’t accept it, because you don’t think that way. Okay? You don’t value him as if he were the Holy One, blessed be He, such that if he says it, it is probably true.

Therefore very often, what is not Torah—engaging in it is also not study, because you don’t… Every field in which you see that we…

What? Is Torah only the Five Books of Moses or also the Oral Torah?

I can’t hear you, your sound is bad.

One second—Is Torah only the Five Books of Moses or also the Oral Torah?

No, the Five Books of Moses, with their interpretation and exposition and everything that developed around them—the Oral Torah. We’ll get to that; I’ll define it properly. I just want you to understand that what I’m saying now is basically the framework for the whole semester. Later, all the points I discuss, you’ll be able to place within this framework. But in order for us to have the picture, I want to reach some bottom lines too.

Okay, so there are many fields that I won’t define as Torah, and you’ll see that part of the reason is because what people do there isn’t study. In other words, there is a connection between these two questions, even though they are different questions. Something that I do not accept because the text is not seen by me as a binding source of authority is not Torah. And engaging in it is not study, because if there is something there that I don’t agree with, I won’t accept it. So if there is something there that I do agree with, then I haven’t learned anything. You know, in an argument I’ve often said to students: when I’m arguing with someone, when have I gained something from the argument? When I lost, right? If I lost the argument, then I learned something new. What I thought before turned out to be wrong. So I learned something new. An argument I won is an argument in which it turned out that what I had always known was indeed correct. I gained nothing from it. In other words, an argument from which one gains, from which one learns, is only an argument one lost. I learn only where I accept something I didn’t know or didn’t understand, and now I understand that it is correct. That is called learning. Otherwise, if these are things I knew in advance, I learned nothing—I merely confirmed what I already knew. That is called review. It is not study; it’s only confirming something I already know.

Okay. Therefore—although of course one must work on one’s character traits—still, try once in a while to win an argument too. Don’t always insist on losing. Because that’s not nice; one should also allow the other person to gain something from the argument, not only us. But overall one must remember, after the jokes, that losing an argument is a good thing. Because if I lost the argument, that means I learned something. I learned something new.

Okay, returning to our subject…

What? You sound bad, Chaim. You sound bad. There’s some echo there. No, can’t hear. Try earphones, Chaim. Or maybe write it in the chat, in the Zoom chat. Or put in your phone earphones or something. You’re probably using your phone.

Well, he lives next door to me. I’m probably sitting on his internet. Apparently that’s the sign.

Sit together—why aren’t you together? “If there is no grain, there is no Torah,” yes.

Okay, so—this. I wanted to ask: I saw in some Talmudic discussion, and maybe it illustrates the idea, the question is whether I’m right. I saw that Rabbah and Abaye, I think, disagree about a case that begins with negligence and ends with an unavoidable accident.

Rabbah and Rava, sorry. You left the lake behind. “Begins with negligence and ends with an unavoidable accident” is an anonymous dispute in Bava Metzia 42. You’re talking about 36. That dispute appears several times, and I don’t remember in which case. Then he says—both of them say—if you don’t agree with me then apparently you’re not a Torah scholar and you’re worthless, something like that.

“In the name of Rabbah, according to Rava,” in Bava Metzia 36: “Any judge who does not judge like this ruling is no judge.”

Exactly. So I understand from that that in other disputes they’re saying: even if I disagree with you, you are still worthy, still a Torah scholar, and theoretically you are someone from whom I can receive. There are sides—there are valid aspects even in your position—except that in the overall balancing I think differently.

Yes.

And in this case, what is he really saying?

In this case there is no balancing and nothing. If this is your Torah, then it’s not Torah. He just doesn’t want to learn from him. You’re talking nonsense. I don’t see any positive side at all in what you’re saying. And they both say it to each other.

Right.

Yes. We learned that on Sunday. It really stood out to me.

Ah yes, on Sunday, on “begins with negligence and ends with an unavoidable accident,” right. I was just trying to remember where in the last two days I dealt with that discussion. On Sunday, yes, the day before yesterday. But the analogy to artificial intelligence is amazing, it’s just…

The analogy, not algorithm, yes.

Analogy, yes, or whatever, the comparison I keep making in my head. It’s like, how did they know this?

Totally, totally. The only difference is at the end. By the way, that’s a column I just uploaded to the site. Exactly on that point—the difference between a human being and artificial intelligence. In a human being there is also the conscious, cognitive aspect; in artificial intelligence it remains at the level of updating parameters. A human being has some additional cognitive layer, and then the question is whether it’s epiphenomenal or not epiphenomenal. I talk about that there. But that’s another discussion.

Anyway, that is the framework. I just want one more remark to finish the framework and then begin. When I say that something is not Torah—and again, I said that later I’ll soften this and define Torah from the standpoint of the person, Torah from the standpoint of the object, and not Torah at all—but right now I’m speaking in terms of Torah and not Torah. When I say something is not Torah, it does not mean it is worthless.

As I said before, for example ethics. I claim that ethics is not Torah. Studying ethics is not called studying Torah. Okay? Not necessarily “musar” in the yeshiva sense, but ethics in the sense we use in our world, not musar in the sense of swaying during prayer. So the claim is that ethics is not Torah, but that does not mean ethical behavior is worthless. It only means it is not Torah. This is a categorical determination. It is not a determination that necessarily establishes values or hierarchy—not even a hierarchy of value. I also don’t think ethics is less important than Torah. It is not Torah; it is a different category. Whether it is more important or less important is another question, somewhat related to the Wednesday lectures. But the point…

I’ll just give one example of this. Maimonides writes at the end of chapter 8 of the Laws of Kings. Let me open it.

Chaim, mute yourself. He wants to give merit to all of us.

Okay, so Maimonides says: “Anyone who accepts the seven commandments and is careful to perform them is one of the pious of the nations of the world and has a share in the World to Come. And this is provided that he accepts and performs them because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded them in the Torah and informed us through Moses our Teacher that the descendants of Noah had already been commanded in them. But if he performs them because of intellectual conviction, he is not a resident alien and not one of the pious of the nations of the world, but one of their wise men.” Or not “but”—that’s a more accurate version. In any case, that’s what he writes.

What does this mean? He is speaking in the laws of the resident alien. A resident alien is a non-Jew who formally accepts before a religious court to observe the seven Noahide commandments. Then there are various legal consequences: the prohibition of granting residence does not apply, one may let him dwell among us in the Land, obligations between man and fellow man apply toward him, and things like that.

Maimonides says: what is a resident alien? A resident alien is a non-Jew who keeps the seven commandments because he was commanded in them through Moses in the Torah. But if he does it because of intellectual conviction, because he thinks that’s the proper way to act, independent of divine command and the giving of the Torah at Sinai—he just thinks this is the proper way to behave—then he is not one of the pious of the nations of the world but one of their wise men.

What does that mean? Translated into our language, in my view: this has no religious value. He is not among the pious of the nations of the world. He is not pious; he is not serving God. But he is among their wise men, meaning it has ethical value. Maimonides’ Laws of Character Traits are laws of ethics. In other words, he is among the wise of the nations of the world in the sense that he behaves properly, morally, but it has no religious value; he has not fulfilled a commandment here.

Okay, we’ll still get to this shortly, but for our purposes, what I want to show from this Maimonides is that a field not connected to the religious world, to Torah, to fulfilling the commandments of the Holy One, blessed be He, is not necessarily worthless. The fact that he is not one of the pious—that he is not fulfilling a commandment here—does not mean what he did is worthless. True, he is not among the pious of the nations of the world, but he is among their wise men. In other words, he is actually acting properly, and there is value to his behavior.

And in that sense, this is true of behavior and true of study. When we study the field of ethics, even if I do not define that as Torah study—or if we engage in this field, study, whatever you want to call it—even if I do not define it as Torah study, if it is not Torah or not study or whatever, that still does not mean it is a worthless activity. To clarify for myself what I ought to do in various situations at the ethical level is something of great value.

Therefore when I say this is not Torah, it should not be inferred from this that I claim it has no value. That is not correct. Torah is a category statement, a categorical definition. There is a category called Torah and there are categories that do not fall under it. But it is incorrect to identify the category of Torah with the category of worthwhile activity. No—that is not correct. There are worthwhile activities that are not connected to Torah, at least not in its narrower sense. I said I will later refine these definitions.

Okay, so that is the general picture, and now I want to enter into more details. We’ll start step by step.

So first of all I’ll begin with the definition—the definition of Jewish law. I did some of these things in my Wednesday lecture, I don’t remember whether last semester, but no matter.

Okay, I’m going to share Rashi’s very first comment on the Torah. I assume everyone knows it, but still, seeing it is better.

“In the beginning.” Rabbi Yitzchak said: The Torah should have begun only from “This month shall be for you,” in the portion of Bo, which is the first commandment with which Israel was commanded. Why then did it begin with “In the beginning”? Because “He declared to His people the power of His works, in order to give them the inheritance of the nations.” For if the nations of the world should say to Israel, “You are robbers, because you conquered the lands of the seven nations,” they say to them: “The whole earth belongs to the Holy One, blessed be He; He created it and gave it to whoever was right in His eyes. By His will He gave it to them, and by His will He took it from them and gave it to us.”

So he says basically that the Torah should have begun with “This month shall be for you.” He has some initial assumption that the Torah should have begun there. And therefore he has a question: what are the first one-and-a-quarter books doing here? The question itself is interesting—more interesting than the answer, it seems to me. Why should the Torah have begun with “This month shall be for you”? Why is Rashi’s basic assumption that the Torah ought to begin there? He explains: because that is the first commandment with which Israel was commanded. In other words, Rashi’s starting point is that Torah is a collection of commandments. Anything that is not a commandment should not have been there, and needs explanation for what it is doing there. Torah is a collection of commandments. Okay?

And therefore, for me, this is the starting point for the entire discussion. It gives me the most important categorical distinction that will accompany us this semester: the distinction between Jewish law and Torah that is not Jewish law. Okay? Which is almost an empty concept, as I’ll claim later.

Give an example, give an example.

Here’s an example—what do you mean? “This month shall be for you” is Jewish law; “In the beginning God created” is not Jewish law. Excellent. That’s it.

So Rashi says, in essence, the Torah should have contained only commandments—or in other words, only Jewish law. Torah in the sense of instruction. The Torah is really supposed to instruct us what to do. Therefore it should contain only the legal verses. There are quite a few legal verses throughout the Torah. But I think most of the verses are not legal verses. Most of them are other kinds of verses. And the question of what they are doing there is not trivial. That requires explanation. Jewish law is the essence of Torah, the core of Torah. Everything beyond that requires explanation.

So that is the first point I want to put on the board. This is the starting point for all the discussion to come. Because I claim that this assumption of Rashi’s will also remain true in the conclusion. It remains true in the conclusion, again, with a certain qualification.

What answer does Rashi give? So really, why are there another one-and-a-quarter books? He says: “He declared to His people the power of His works in order to give them the inheritance of the nations.” What does that mean? Our right to the Land of Israel—to give us an answer to the nations if they say, what are you doing here, you conquered the lands of the seven peoples? No, the Holy One, blessed be He, created it and gave it to whoever was right in His eyes. He is the owner and can give it to whomever He wants.

So we have an answer—let’s say—I’ve seen better answers in my life. The nations are probably not terribly impressed by this argument. It seems to me we should have equipped them with better tools. But it seems to me that even the Jews are not impressed by this argument, not only the nations—many of them, at least.

In any case, even if I say I accept this strange answer, this answer explains chapter 1 of Genesis. The creation story: the Holy One, blessed be He, created the world, He is the owner, He can give it to whom He wants. What about the rest of the one-and-a-quarter books? You asked what all of that is doing here. What answer did you give? Chapter 1 I understand. Okay, what about the other fifty-something, sixty-something chapters?

It seems to me that Rashi’s wording reflects that. I don’t think this is hairsplitting. I think this is really what Rashi meant, but judge for yourselves. He writes: “He declared to His people the power of His works, in order to give them the inheritance of the nations—that if the nations of the world say to Israel, ‘You are robbers, because you conquered the lands of the seven nations,’ they say to them: ‘The whole earth belongs to the Holy One, blessed be He; He created it and gave it to whoever was right in His eyes.’”

What does that mean? One could understand this as a forceful argument: He is the owner and can do with it whatever He wants. “Whoever was right in His eyes” would mean: whoever He felt like giving it to. Okay? I don’t think Rashi means that. I think Rashi means: He gave it to whoever deserved to receive it. Not whoever He happened to feel like giving it to.

Or in other words, there is here not only a forceful answer—the forceful answer in the legal sense, meaning I’m the owner and can do with it what I want—there is also a substantive answer. Justice. So yes, you have power, you can give it to whom you want. Why don’t you give it to the Belgians? Why did you give it to the Jews? The answer could be: because I feel like it, I’m the owner, who are you to tell me? That’s the forceful answer. But the Torah is telling us no—there is also a substantive answer. Because they were upright in My eyes. This people is the people who were upright in the eyes of the Holy One, blessed be He, to give them the Land of Israel. That too is a substantive answer, not only a forceful one. It explains also why He used His power in this direction and not another.

What does “to whoever was upright in His eyes” mean? Why does that trigger that association for me? Because the Sages call the book of Genesis “the Book of the Upright.” And “He gave it to whoever was upright in His eyes” means that the whole book of Genesis is there—remember, the Netziv says in his introduction that it is called the Book of the Upright because it is the book of the upright. In other words, it teaches us how to conduct ourselves in an upright, moral way.

Okay, let’s say there too there are a few things I might question—but in general that is the direction of the book. Sometimes positively, sometimes negatively. Not important right now. But it comes to teach us upright conduct. And therefore the Book of the Upright is really embedded within Rashi’s words.

Why do we need the whole book of Genesis, not just chapter 1? Chapter 1 is needed for the forceful argument: I created the world, I have the right to do what I want with it, so I decided to give it to the people of Israel. The rest of Genesis comes to say: yes, but why did I choose the people of Israel specifically? Because they are the ones upright in My eyes. Look at the Book of the Upright and you’ll see why they are the ones upright in My eyes.

And therefore—but He gives it only to one who will do what the Torah will later require, not necessarily that they actually will do it.

Okay, that’s what he says there—that if they stray from their path they won’t receive it. That already appears later. But I’m saying: the first one-and-a-quarter books that Rabbi Yitzchak asked about—the answer is that this book comes to teach us who is upright in the eyes of the Holy One, blessed be He.

Now if we understand it that way, then Rashi’s answer changes a bit. Because not only does Rashi explain all of Genesis and not just chapter 1, it also isn’t true that it comes to give us talking points against the nations. That’s nonsense; that’s not the point. Rather, it comes to tell us what it means to be upright, to teach us a lesson—not to provide us with excuses against the claims of the nations. They don’t accept it.

Again, friends, there’s sound—please mute.

Okay. So the claim is that Genesis comes to teach us paths of uprightness, how to behave properly. That is what it comes to teach us. Now that may also serve as a response to the nations, maybe yes maybe no, but that’s not what matters. This book is for the Jews, not for the nations. It comes to teach us how to be upright.

But if so, then some kind of hierarchy remains here as a result of the question and the answer. The main body of Torah is Jewish law. That is Jewish law. The first one-and-a-quarter books—and maybe also later sections that are not legal—come to teach us other things that are not Jewish law. Fine, those too are meant to be in the Torah. Fine, the Holy One, blessed be He, also sees value in that. But Torah in its essence is Jewish law. I think that remains true in the conclusion. In other words, a certain hierarchy remains here, and that is the point.

Now what does this actually mean? This is a point I’ll expand on much more later; I’m going step by step. What this actually means is that we need to distinguish between two kinds of verses in the Torah. There are verses that belong to the legal corpus of the Torah, to the legal component of the Torah, and there are verses that belong to the non-legal component of the Torah.

Now what differentiates them is not only the content—that this is legal content and that is another kind of content. For example, “You shall do what is upright and good.” Does that belong to the legal part or the non-legal part? “You shall be holy”? That’s not legal. If you look in the enumerations of the commandments, you see that it’s not legal. They did not count these as commandments. But it is phrased in language that looks like a commandment, a positive commandment. “You shall be holy,” “You shall do what is upright and good”—that is no different from the formulations of positive commandments.

It should be understood that the difference between the legal and non-legal parts of Torah is twofold. Really it’s two sides of the same coin. There is a difference in content—whether the content is law or, say, a story. If it’s a story, then clearly it’s not law. And there is a difference in the tense—or mode—of the verse.

In grammar, we distinguish between four forms—unlike metaphysics, which has only three times: past, present, and future. In grammar there are four: past, present, future, and imperative. Right? When we study grammar, there are sentences in the past, in the present, in the future, and in the imperative. I don’t know why imperative is called a tense, but I think it’s meant to distinguish it from the first three kinds of sentences. The first three are factual sentences, sentences of fact. There are facts that were true in the past, facts that are true now, and facts that will be true in the future. All of these are kinds of facts.

An imperative sentence, a command sentence, is not a sentence about facts at all. It is a sentence that instructs you to do something. Think, for example, of the Aristotelian distinction between sentences and propositions. What is the difference between a sentence and a proposition? A sentence is a set of words that creates some content. A proposition is a sentence that can be judged in terms of truth or falsity. That’s called a proposition. When I claim something, the claim can be true or false. But there are sentences that are not propositions, even though they are sentences. For example, when I ask you what time it is, that’s not a proposition, right? You can’t say what I said is true and you can’t say it’s false. It isn’t measured in terms of true or false, but it is a sentence—a question sentence. Right? The same is true of imperative sentences.

When I say to you “Do not murder” or “Observe the Sabbath,” that is a sentence, right? But it isn’t a proposition. “Do not murder”—there’s no sense in saying that is true or false, because you’re not asserting some fact. You’re not describing a fact about which I can say this is true or false. It is not a declarative sentence; it is an imperative sentence. A sentence that commands, or a sentence that asks, performs a different linguistic function.

Factual sentences have the linguistic function of assertion. They are descriptive sentences. They describe facts. “Right now it’s day,” “Right now it’s dark outside”—even if I say “Right now it’s dark outside,” that is a declarative sentence, just a false one. It means—it’s a factual claim, but the factual claim is false. Factual claims can be true or false. They are descriptive claims; they describe some kind of fact.

But imperative sentences, or question sentences, are not about assertion. Their linguistic function is different, and therefore they cannot be judged in terms of truth or falsity. They are not propositions; they are sentences.

These sentences are not descriptive. When one says “Do not murder,” one is not describing the prohibition of murder. One is commanding you not to murder. There’s a difference between telling you “Israeli law prohibits murder”—though by the way I don’t think that’s actually how it’s formulated—but let’s say I say that. The sentence “Israeli law says that the punishment for murder is such-and-such.” I don’t think it literally says murder is forbidden, but let’s say I say: Israeli law prohibits murder. Is that a factual statement or a normative, imperative statement?

It’s not an imperative statement, right? It’s a descriptive, factual statement.

Correct. It describes a fact—a legal fact—that in the Israeli law books such-and-such a sentence appears. That is a factual claim. It can be true or false—in this case probably false—but in any event, it is a factual, descriptive claim. It describes some kind of fact.

But when the law itself says “murder is forbidden,” that law is no longer a proposition. The proposition saying there is such a law is a proposition; the law itself is not a proposition, it is a command: “Do not murder.” Okay? Or in Jewish law.

Do you see? These are two different kinds of sentences. Now sentences that belong to Jewish law are only imperative sentences. Descriptive sentences are not included in Jewish law, of any kind.

The Rashba, in his explanations on aggadic passages, asks about “Therefore the children of Israel shall not eat the sinew of the thigh,” from which we learn the prohibition of the sciatic nerve. The Rashba says there that this doesn’t satisfy the rabbinic rule that in order for something to count as a negative commandment it must be formulated with “guard yourself,” “lest,” “do not,” and the like. The grammatical structure of this sentence does not fit a negative commandment. So from where do we learn the prohibition of the sciatic nerve?

What does the Rashba mean? It’s a descriptive sentence. A sentence describing what the children of Israel do or don’t do. But description is not command. Therefore this description cannot serve as the basis for a command, for a prohibition. So I’m not concerned now with the answer given there—probably tradition or something like that—but this is an exception that proves the rule. Command—that is, Jewish law—is only something that comes from an imperative sentence. Any descriptive sentence, even if it deals with something people do or don’t do, like the sciatic nerve, is not Jewish law.

In other words, the difference between the legal domain in Torah and the non-legal domain in Torah lies also in the structure or linguistic function of the sentence, not only in its content. The linguistic function of the sentence has to be a command sentence. Therefore it has to be “guard yourself,” “lest,” “do not.” Without that it is not a negative commandment. If someone says to you, “tsk tsk, it’s not nice to eat pork,” that is not a prohibition. If someone commands you, “Do not eat pork,” that is a prohibition.

What this really means is that when the Torah says “Do not murder,” that is not a sentence revealing the will of the Holy One, blessed be He—contrary to what people think. Because if it were a sentence revealing the will of the Holy One, blessed be He, it would be a descriptive sentence. It would describe what God wants, just as I describe what is in the law books.

For example, “Now the man Moses was very humble, more than any person on the face of the earth”—that is a descriptive sentence about Moses. But it also reveals to me that the Holy One, blessed be He, wants us to be humble, right? It reveals that too. But that does not turn it into a positive commandment to be humble. Why not? Because a revelation of the will of the Holy One, blessed be He, is not a positive commandment. It is a descriptive sentence. Something becomes a positive commandment only if the Holy One, blessed be He, commands it—not if He tells me that this is what He wants. If He tells me that this is what He wants, then this is not a positive commandment. It is something proper to do, but not a positive commandment. It is not part of Jewish law.

Jewish law exists only where the verse serves the linguistic function of command. Only a command verse creates Jewish law. A descriptive verse does not create Jewish law, even if its description is a description of the will of God—it is still description, not command.

Now if we want to distinguish within the Torah the legal part from the non-legal parts, we really need to ask ourselves what kind of verse we are looking at. If it is a command verse, then it belongs to Jewish law, whether positive or negative. If it is not a command verse, if it is descriptive, it does not belong to Jewish law. Okay, that is really the criterion.

Now as I said earlier, this criterion is not perfectly sharp. For example, “You shall do what is upright and good,” or “You shall be holy,” are seemingly command verses. They tell me to do what is upright and good, or to be holy. They are not describing something to me; they command me. Therefore in principle I would expect these verses to be part of Jewish law. So why do the enumerators of the commandments not include them among the commandments?

More than that: regarding “You shall be holy,” Maimonides says in the fourth root of the Book of Commandments that we do not count commandments that include the whole Torah, like “And you shall keep all My commandments,” and things like that. Even though “And you shall keep all My commandments” is seemingly a command—I’m commanding you to do something—he says this includes the whole Torah and therefore is not counted as a positive commandment. The example he brings is the verse “You shall be holy.” Why? Because in his view “You shall be holy” means: fulfill the commandments, and by that you become holy. That is how he interprets the verse. Therefore for him “You shall be holy” is one of the examples of commandments that include the whole Torah.

Now there he disagrees with the BaHaG, who does count it. And Nachmanides, in his glosses on the fourth root, defends the BaHaG. He basically suggests that “You shall be holy” really comes to command us something specific, not to speak of the whole Torah.

Chaim, please mute yourself at least if…

Sorry, sorry.

So the claim is that the BaHaG held there is some specific command here, not one that includes the whole Torah. Now Nachmanides himself does not interpret it that way; it’s only a defense of the BaHaG. Nachmanides himself—his words are famous at the beginning of the portion Kedoshim—says this means not to be “a degenerate with the permission of the Torah.” Right? Not to be a degenerate with the permission of the Torah by overindulging in food, sex, pleasures, and so on, even though they are in principle permitted. There may be no specific halakhic prohibition, but this is called being “a degenerate with the permission of the Torah,” and that is “You shall be holy.”

Now if you look at Nachmanides’ additions to Maimonides’ positive commandments at the end of the Book of Commandments, there are Nachmanides’ additions and omissions there. Nachmanides does not add “You shall be holy.” Why not? After all, now this is no longer a commandment that includes the whole Torah; it has a very specific content. So why not? And it is command language; the verse is not descriptive, it is imperative.

There the claim is that there is what I call the paradox of the degenerate. If we were to include this in the corpus of commandments, if this were a positive commandment to be holy, then anyone who overindulges in food and drink and sex and so on would be neglecting a positive commandment, right? But then he would not be “a degenerate with the permission of the Torah”; he would be a degenerate without the permission of the Torah. He would be violating a legal obligation; he would be neglecting a positive commandment.

If you want to preserve this as a category outside Jewish law—what’s called “a degenerate with the permission of the Torah”—you can’t count it as a positive commandment. If you counted it as a positive commandment, it wouldn’t be an extra-legal category. And because of that logical loop, Nachmanides says that although at the linguistic level the verse looks like a command verse and should have been part of Jewish law—counted as a positive commandment—it is not a command verse. And therefore it remains outside Jewish law. The same applies to “You shall do what is upright and good.”

So this means that we do have some fundamental criterion, there are exceptions that must be discussed on their own terms, and we have a basic criterion that helps us distinguish between the legal part of Torah—which, as Rashi says, is what should really have been there from the outset—and the other parts, which are stories, what happened, incidents, events, descriptions of what makes the Holy One, blessed be He, happy or unhappy, what He wants or doesn’t want, and so on. All those things are not connected to Jewish law. They are another category. Okay? And this is expressed in the fact that the verses have a different function: descriptive rather than imperative.

Now this has many implications, and that is really the starting point from which I want to begin the discussion. I’ll just say in one sentence what I’ll do next time, so you can see the continuity. I want to talk about the meaning of command. We see here that command is really what constitutes the legal domain. What belongs to the legal domain? What we have been commanded regarding, right? That is the definition. What we have been commanded regarding is what belongs to the legal domain.

So we need to understand this function of command, to understand it a bit better, and we’ll try to see two implications of it corresponding to the two implications I spoke about in the introduction. One implication concerns the question of how I approach fulfilling positive commandments. The fact that there is a command in the background has major significance. And the second implication is: what am I doing when I study command verses as opposed to when I study descriptive verses? In other words, observance and study as the two aspects I spoke about in the general introduction—I want us to see those two aspects also in relation to command, and from there we’ll continue on.

Okay. If there are comments or questions?

Can I ask maybe whether this connects to David Hume’s is-ought problem, that you can’t derive…

Completely, completely. Since descriptive verses are the is, you can’t derive the ought from them. It’s exactly the problem David Hume presents.

Exactly. That problem is the foundation of the distinction between descriptive verses and imperative verses. Because descriptive verses cannot generate ought and ought-not. In order to generate ought and ought-not you need a different kind of sentence—an imperative sentence. That’s exactly it. It is simply the linguistic expression of the naturalistic fallacy, of Hume’s is-ought problem. It is its linguistic expression: in language we need two sentences with two different functions, descriptive and prescriptive. Right? Command is prescriptive.

Okay.

One more question just to leave this as part of the principles…

Again?

I’m asking why you can’t because it’s part of the principles.

A norm is judged in terms of validity or invalidity, binding or non-binding. Those are two entirely different things, simply conceptually. It’s not accidental—it’s not that there could be some world where it would be otherwise. No. It’s a logical matter. It simply cannot be otherwise. These are two different categories. Okay?

Yes.

Good. So once again, I invite all of you to reach out about anything—if you know of anyone else who needs help too. And you yourselves, if there is something you can’t work out, then don’t hesitate to contact the office, or me, about anything at all. Good tidings. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Good tidings. Thank you very much.