A Look at Prophecy and the Transmission of the Torah (Column 686)

With God’s help

Disclaimer: This post was translated from Hebrew using AI (ChatGPT 5 Thinking), so there may be inaccuracies or nuances lost. If something seems unclear, please refer to the Hebrew original or contact us for clarification.

Many thinkers (Maimonides among them) wrote about the nature of prophecy and how it arrives, about the prophet’s state while receiving prophecy, and more. I’m rather skeptical about such claims, mainly because an ordinary person cannot really understand states so distant from his experience (see this article and the end of Column 67), and even more so because it doesn’t seem that Tanakh provides sources that transmit this kind of information to us. So where did Maimonides get his claims about prophecy? I have no idea. It looks like his interpretation of verses (see especially his seventh principle regarding the prophecy of Moses, cited below), an interpretation that is certainly open to challenge. Still, I thought it worthwhile to examine the roots of Maimonides’ view of prophecy, because it illuminates an aspect that’s easy to miss regarding the essence of prophecy, the question of what the Torah is, and what “Matan Torah” (the Giving of the Torah) means. Over the course of a series of classes on dogmatics it became clear to me that there is a progression here weaving together four of Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles (from the sixth through the ninth).

The Sixth Principle

In his introduction to Perek Ḥelek, Maimonides presents his Thirteen Principles (foundations). In my classes on the principles of faith (Dogmatics series) we reviewed the principles and, for each, examined Maimonides’ source and why he considers it a principle. We must remember that there are quite a few true doctrines, but not all are doctrinal “principles.”

In the sixth principle Maimonides deals with the obligation to believe in the existence of prophecy:

The sixth foundation is prophecy. It is to know that within the human species there are individuals of very highly developed capacities and great perfection, whose souls become ordered so that they receive the form of the intellect, and that human intellect then cleaves to the Active Intellect, and an emanation of its abundance overflows upon them. These are the prophets; this is prophecy and its nature. To explain this foundation fully would take very long, and our aim is not to detail each foundation and the ways to know it—for that comprises the entirety of the sciences—but merely to state them by way of notification, and the verses of the Torah testify to the prophecy of many prophets.

Here too one can ask: why is this principle so central for Maimonides? The obvious answer is that without belief in prophecy there is no standing to the words of the prophets. In Lesson 12 in that series I argued that the principle is to believe that prophecy is possible, not that prophets actually existed. This is a belief in the superiority of the human species. Maimonides’ claim is that prophecy can be conferred only upon one who has special capacities that enable him to receive it. Prophecy is not merely God’s decision to pass information to just anyone.

Among other sources I brought there is Rashba, Responsa IV §234, where he discusses the inability of a person lacking such capacities to receive prophecy:

Here I have a point of inquiry: if the Rav’s (Maimonides’) view in this matter is that it is not impossible for the entire people, without the prerequisites required for prophecy, to hear in a prophetic voice such a matter. We know even one who is unfit for prophecy [can appear] as a prophet. And anything known by demonstration is not something I can fully conceptualize, for we are not discussing what is possible or impossible regarding the degrees of prophecy from the matter in itself, such that it be said to a prophet or to a dreamer or to a seer—meaning, matters that could be known by human inquiry—or not; rather it depends on the person to whom it is said in a prophetic manner, whether he is worthy of that degree by virtue of his perfection or not. And it is impossible for every person to attain, regarding the Account of the Chariot, what Ezekiel attained— even that which could be attained by human inquiry, per the Rav’s view and assumption that some parts of the Chariot are accessible to human inquiry. For even what is known by demonstration is not reached by all without study. And if they knew by the demonstration from which they learned those two roots, what did prophecy add for them? And if they did not know the path of demonstration, how did they attain it even not via the prophetic vision? Or shall we say that God miraculously informed the entire people of the intellectual prerequisites they needed so they could reach that bit of the prophetic degree—the entire people, wise and not wise, women as men? This is inconceivable according to the philosophers, who deemed it of the class of impossibles that one without the requisite intellectual and imaginative capacities should prophesy. They did not admit this as possible any more than they admitted that a donkey or a frog could prophesy. Likewise, it is impossible to say that they attained by prophecy any small portion of what is beyond the demonstrated knowledge accessible to human inquiry, and at most only the most perfected among them could, in proportion to their perfections.

He then contends that such inability depends on God and is not an absolute (logical) impossibility:

Therefore I find no reason to mix in the agreements of the philosophers and to place this among logical impossibilities. Why deem it impossible, when human souls have the capacity to ascend to the prophetic degree, as the holy prophets of Israel did? It is not impossible that the Holy One, blessed be He, should instantaneously grant wisdom to all the people who stood at that exalted station—namely, to bestow great effusion in the visions of God. As it says regarding Bezalel: “I have filled him with a divine spirit, with wisdom, understanding and knowledge, and with every craft,” though he was very young. And it is written: “Gather to Me seventy men of the elders of Israel, and I will draw upon them of the spirit that is upon you.” And regarding Solomon: “Wisdom and knowledge are granted to you.” And the Midrash says, “And behold, a dream”—he dreamed while a bird chirped upon his son and he understood its chirp. Our Sages also said: “A maidservant at the sea saw what Ezekiel did not see.” And there was no place there for visions of spheres and the four elements, only inward prophetic matters. This cannot be classed as impossible like saying one slept without wisdom, or like making an animal prophesy. Among other creatures speech is not found and they will not prophesy, but among the human species, prophecy is natural to it—it is fitting to go from potential to actual. The matter written about Saul teaches us this: he was not known to have the wisdom appropriate to the degree of prophecy, yet he prophesied among the band of prophets. Hence they marveled and said, “Is Saul, too, among the prophets?”—meaning, Saul, who did not engage in wisdom like the sons of the prophets, now prophesies with the prophets without the requisite prerequisites! And do not challenge me with what our Sages said, that “prophecy rests only on one who is wise, mighty and wealthy,” for that is said about what is proper for prophets; there is no difficulty if there is one person or many whom God wished should prophesy for a temporary need or for a matter. None of this is difficult for those who believe in creation.

He concludes with a general distinction between two kinds of impossibility:

In my view there are two categories of the impossible. One is inherently necessary and true of itself, like a rectangle’s side being longer than its diagonal, or that what has been should not have been, and many such. That is absolute impossibility of itself; no possibility can be conceived in it. The second is not of itself but of us and of the prevention of wisdom on account of what is taken to be “impossible by nature”: we have not found a rock bringing forth water, the sea splitting at one time and returning at another, the sun and moon standing still without revolving or moving from their place, or the sun going backwards, and many like these; and the resurrection of the dead is among them. All this is “impossible” for us only because of the paucity of the wisdom of created beings and the weakness of their power to change what is stamped by the seal of nature. But in the order of the Creator, blessed be He, it is not impossible; rather it is necessary in His wisdom, to which no deficiency or weakness can be attributed—for He and His wisdom are one, and we do not know His wisdom unless we know His essence. By this all the miracles that were and that will be are established, leaving no room for doubt in anything the Scriptures state where we require their plain meaning to establish faith and what follows from it. But where we do not require that, if you wish to take them according to [philosophical] wisdom (even when you do not need to) or by simple volition alone—this is what seems to me in general in these matters.

Some things are logically impossible—i.e., they entail a contradiction—and even God does not “override” those; and some are physically impossible (by the way nature runs), and here God can perform a miracle. His claim is that a person’s lack of prophetic capacities is not a logical impossibility but a physical one; therefore God can grant prophecy even to someone unworthy of it.

Either way, prophecy is not merely God transmitting information to a person by some channel. If that were the case, God would simply choose to whom to prophesy and no special capacities would be required. At least in the “natural” way, only one who possesses the relevant capacities can receive prophecy from God. The belief described in the Sixth Principle concerns the existence of such capacities among human beings—that is, the human potential to receive prophecy and be prophets.

This picture also implies that prophecy does not reach the prophet as words “implanted” into his consciousness. If that were the case, I don’t see why special capacities would be needed. Rather, an abstract message passes through, which the prophet apprehends, conceptualizes, and formulates. Hence the Sages say (Sanhedrin 89a):

Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 89a

R. Yitzḥak said: One theme ascends to many prophets, but no two prophets prophesy in the same style. Obadiah said, “The pride of your heart has deceived you,” while Jeremiah said, “The terror you inspire has deceived you—the pride of your heart.”

The plain sense is that the same content enters two prophets, but when it comes out of their mouths it emerges in different styles. In other words, the same prophecy uttered by two prophets will be formulated in two distinct ways—each prophet with his own style. If prophecy were a set of words implanted by God, we would expect all prophets to prophesy in the same style (what God “put into” them). Hence it follows that prophecy is conveyed to the prophet in an abstract manner, and it is the prophet who conceptualizes and formulates it—and that requires special capacities. An ordinary person would not understand such a message, certainly not conceptualize and articulate it.

Rashi there, however, explains it thus:

Rashi, Sanhedrin 89a

“Ascends to many prophets”—it enters their hearts, to this one in this language and to that one in that language, and it is all one.

“And no two prophets prophesy in the same style”—in the same language…

It seems, according to him, that God Himself does this in two different styles (as though it already entered their hearts in two different tongues). But, as noted, the plain sense appears otherwise.

The Seventh Principle

Immediately after this comes the Seventh Principle, concerning the uniqueness of Moses’ prophecy:

The seventh foundation is the prophecy of Moses our teacher. It is that we believe he is the father of all the prophets who preceded him and who follow after him; all are below him in rank, and he is the chosen of the Lord from the entire human species, who apprehended of Him, may He be exalted, more than anyone who has attained or will attain. He, peace be upon him, reached the ultimate elevation beyond humanity until he attained the angelic level and became like the angels; no screen remained before him un-rent, and no bodily impediment held him back. Nothing of deficiency remained in him, not little and not much; his imaginative and sensory faculties were silenced in all his apprehensions, his motivating power was awed, and he remained pure intellect. About this they said that he speaks with God without the mediation of angels. I wished to explain this wondrous matter and elucidate obscure verses of the Torah, and explain the meaning of “mouth to mouth” and that whole verse and others like it, were it not that I saw these matters are exceedingly subtle and require broad treatment, prerequisites, and parables—and that one must first explain the existence of angels and their ranks before the Creator, and likewise elucidate the soul and all its powers—and the scope would widen until we would reach the forms that the prophets ascribed to the Creator and to His angels, and even with extreme brevity one hundred pages would not suffice. Therefore I leave it for its place: either in the book of explanations of the homilies I promised, or in the book on prophecy that I began to compose, or in the book I will author on these foundations. I return to this seventh foundation and say that Moses’ prophecy differed from the prophecy of all other prophets in four ways: first, any prophet—whoever he may be—God speaks with him only by means of an intermediary, whereas Moses without intermediary, as it says: “Mouth to mouth I speak with him.” Second, no prophet receives his vision except at the time of sleep, as it says in many places “in a dream of the night,” “he dreamed,” “in a night vision,” etc., or by day after a trance falls upon the prophet, a state in which all his senses rest and his thought is emptied, akin to sleep. This state is called “vision” and “appearance,” of which it says “in visions of God.” But to Moses the speech came by day as he stood between the two cherubim, as He promised him: “I will meet with you there and speak with you,” and it says, “If there be a prophet among you, I the Lord make Myself known to him in a vision; in a dream I speak with him—Not so My servant Moses.” Third, when the prophet receives the vision, even though it is in a vision and by an angel, his powers weaken, his body trembles, and a great dread falls upon him as though he were about to die, as Daniel described when Gabriel spoke with him in a vision: “No strength remained in me and my beauty turned to destruction and I had no strength,” and “I was in a deep sleep upon my face, my face to the ground,” and “in the vision my pangs were upon me.” Moses, however, was not so. Speech came to him and no trembling befell him at all, as it says: “And the Lord spoke to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his fellow,” meaning: just as a man is not seized with dread from his fellow’s words, so was he, peace be upon him, not terrified by the speech, even though it was face to face. This was because of the strength of his attachment to the intellect, as we said. Fourth, all prophets do not receive the vision at their own will but at God’s will; some remain years without a vision; some are asked to tell a matter by prophecy and it comes only after days or months, or not at all. We have even seen some who prepared themselves by gladdening the heart and purifying thought, as Elisha did when he said, “Now bring me a musician,” and then the vision came. Yet it is not necessary that he will prophesy whenever he prepares. Moses our teacher, however—whenever he wished, he said: “Stand, and I will hear what the Lord will command you.” And it says regarding Aaron: “and he shall not enter at all times,” and our Sages said: Aaron “shall not enter” at all times, but Moses is not barred at all times.

I won’t enter here into the question of where Maimonides derives all these distinctions from and whether his scriptural sources are convincing. In Lesson 13 in that series I raised a different question: why does Maimonides treat the uniqueness of Moses’ prophecy as a principle? We already know that believing in the possibility of prophecy and in the requisite capacities is a principle (the sixth). Why is it doctrinally essential to believe that Moses’ prophecy was of a different order? What would be lacking for one who doesn’t believe this? If Moses were a “regular” prophet, what would change for us? After all, there is a duty to heed an ordinary prophet as well.

The solution I proposed is that apparently the Torah too was given to Moses in some abstract form, and the wording is Moses’ wording, not God’s. Note: this concerns all Five Books, not only Deuteronomy. The claim is that the wording of the Pentateuch was set by Moses and not by God. The content was transmitted to him from above, but the formulation is his. This is why it is so important to believe in the unique prophetic level of Moses. Our relationship to the biblical text is one of exactitude—down to every letter, even the crowns on letters. That is not our relationship to the prophecies of other prophets. To justify the special status of the Pentateuch as “the word of God,” we must place full trust in Moses, who formulated it—that he correctly grasped the message conveyed from God and formulated it perfectly.

The Talmud in Makkot 23b–24a brings the following derashah:

R. Simlai expounded: 613 commandments were said to Moses—365 prohibitions corresponding to the days of the solar year, and 248 positive commandments corresponding to the limbs of a person. Rav Hamnuna said: What verse [alludes to this]? “Moses commanded us the Torah, a heritage” (Deut. 33:4). “Torah” has the numerical value of 611; “I am” and “You shall have no other gods” we heard directly from the Almighty.

We heard the first two commandments from the Almighty; the rest were conveyed to us by Moses. Now we can understand that the rest were also formulated by Moses, not only transmitted through him.

In other words (see, e.g., the responsum here and Column 381): the Oral Torah (Torah she-be’al peh) has no sanctity in its wording but only in its content. If we write the Talmud in English, it is equally sacred, since the content is the same. By contrast, the Written Torah (Torah she-bikhtav) has sanctity even in its wording (and it’s doubtful to what extent it has “content”; see the previous column). A translation or an alternative Hebrew wording would not bear the sanctity of the specific wording before us, even though the content is the same. Now we see that even in the Written Torah what comes from God is the content, not the wording. Nevertheless, our attitude to the biblical wording is different, and that must be based on faith in Moses’ special prophetic capacities by virtue of which he formulated it.

The Chain of Representation Through Which the Torah Passed

In Columns 379–381 I described a chain of representations through which the Torah passed as it was given—descending from God to us. I won’t repeat it all here, but the essence is important for our discussion. The claim was that the Torah given to us consisted of abstract messages that, on our end, took on a certain programmatic form via the 613 commandments and the various events described. The original abstract form was not the set of commandments and contents we know, but something more abstract. I showed there that, according to Midrash, the angels studied that same Torah even though they have no father and mother, they do not murder or steal, they do not eat and do not offer sacrifices. So what Torah did they study? An abstract set of messages that, for them, took on a certain programmatic shape; and when the Torah descended (was given to Moses), it assumed a form suited to human beings in our world. Thus arose the commandments and contents familiar to us from the Torah.

But that’s only the first stage of the chain. After that, there was a need to create a linguistic representation of those human contents. Only then comes the formulation known to us of the commandments and narratives—what we call today “the Written Torah.” As I argued here, that wording was likely produced by Moses and not by God. The Torah in its entirety was given to us by God at Sinai, but its letters and words were produced by the recipient (Moses). This exemplifies the principle we met in the Sixth Principle: prophecy is conveyed to prophets in abstract form, and conceptualization and formulation are done by them. In Moses’ case, unlike other prophets, one may treat the result as the very words of God—either due to Moses’ spiritual/prophetic level or because here he served as an almost “hollow conduit” for the divine message.

A fine illustration of this process appears in the Sages’ words about the last eight verses of the Torah. The Talmud (Menachot 30a; and likewise Bava Batra 15a) states:

It was taught: “So Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there” (Deut. 34:5). Is it possible that Moses was alive and wrote “So Moses died there”? Rather, until here Moses wrote; from here on Joshua bin Nun wrote—so says R. Yehudah (or some say R. Neḥemiah). R. Shimon said to him: Is it possible that a Torah scroll is missing even one letter? Yet it says, “Take this Book of the Torah and place it…”! Rather, until here the Holy One, blessed be He, would speak and Moses would speak and write; from here on, the Holy One, blessed be He, would speak and Moses would write with tears—as it says further: “And he said to them, ‘Baruch, read to me all these words from his mouth,’ and I am writing them in the scroll with ink.”

That is: the events described there had not yet happened when the wording was set, and the Talmud is unwilling to accept such a state. The conclusion is that Moses wrote it “with tears.” Why does that resolve anything? What’s the difference between the rest of the Torah—where God spoke and Moses wrote—and these eight verses? If he wrote them “with tears,” how does that make it clear that he could write something not yet happened?

R. Chaim Soloveitchik (the “Griz”) dwelt at length on this point. Here is a passage of his:

We can explain the distinction: in the rest of the Torah, Moses wrote what was told to him—like every prophet who writes his prophecy. This is the meaning of “Moses speaks and writes”: he would first speak it, for he was the prophet regarding it, and afterwards write it once given to him. But the eight verses: the Holy One, blessed be He, would say and Moses would write—meaning he wrote from the mouth of the Holy One, blessed be He, and Moses was not the prophet regarding this, but he wrote what the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded him to write. This is like Baruch who wrote even though he was not the prophet; Jeremiah, at the end of his life, was the prophet regarding Lamentations, and he commanded Baruch to write, and he wrote from Jeremiah’s mouth. So too Moses wrote the eight verses from the mouth of the Holy One, blessed be He, but he was not the prophet regarding them.

This is an interesting claim: Moses wrote those verses by divine dictation but was not the “prophet” regarding them—he served as a hollow conduit. Thus, in the rest of the Torah, where he did function as a prophet, it seems he did not merely write down what was dictated but had a role in it. This is precisely our point.

In Kol Eliyahu §133 it is brought in the name of the Vilna Gaon:

It is known that the entire Torah consists of the Names of the Holy One, blessed be He—through permutations of letters and words [see Ramban’s introduction to his Torah commentary]… Therefore it says that he wrote “with tears” (dim‘a), which derives from “your fullness and your mixture (dim‘a)” (Exodus 22:28)—meaning mixed/variegated letters. From here onward he wrote by means of permutations of words, which are the Names of the Holy One, blessed be He, and it was not read at all as “So Moses died there,” but rather as other words, according to the mysteries of the Torah… and Joshua wrote them according to the revealed sense.

“With tears” (bidim‘a) here means “mixed.” Moses wrote mixed letters, and Joshua arranged them into the text we know. The Vilna Gaon explains that Moses wrote the abstract matters that were in the primordial Torah (this appears here as if it were a jumble of letters), while their representation in events and in words (combining letters into words and sentences)—the last two representation stages in the model above—were produced by Joshua.

The Talmud there further cites a dispute regarding these verses:

In accordance with whom is this statement of R. Yehoshua bar Abba, who said in the name of Rav Gidel, who said in the name of Rav: “The eight verses in the Torah—an individual reads them [Rashi: i.e., we do not interrupt them among multiple readers]”? Shall we say not in accordance with R. Shimon? Even say it is R. Shimon—since they were altered, they are different [Rashi: since they were altered to be written with tears—they are different].

According to the Vilna Gaon there is a substantive difference between these eight verses and the rest of the Torah, and perhaps that is why even R. Shimon agrees that a single reader reads them.

The Eighth Principle: Torah from Heaven

This returns again in Maimonides’ Eighth Principle, which deals with the Torah being from Heaven:

The eighth foundation is that the Torah is from Heaven. That is, we believe that this entire Torah that is in our hands today is the Torah given to Moses, and that all of it is from the Almighty—meaning, it came to him entirely from God in a manner metaphorically called “speech,” though none but he, peace be upon him, knows the quality of that “coming”; and he is like a scribe before whom one reads and he writes its dates, stories, and commandments—and thus he is called “lawgiver.”

Maimonides explains that the Torah’s arrival to Moses occurred in a way that only he himself knows. It is metaphorically called “speech.” One might read this trivially—that words were implanted in his mind, not through physical speech. But that is obvious, since God does not “speak” as humans do. It is more plausible to explain that abstract ideas were conveyed and Moses conceptualized and formulated them, producing the text we know. Hence he is called “lawgiver” (meḥoqeq); otherwise he’d be merely a scribe. On this reading we can understand what “the level of a scribe” means in Maimonides: the scribe merely writes what is dictated. What “elevation” is there in that? But according to our approach, such “scribeship” is an elevation, for God entrusts him to write and formulate the messages that reached him. As Maimonides adds at the end of the cited passage, this process applied to the dates and narratives no less than to the commandments. As suggested above, the final story about Moses’ death is the exception: there Moses wrote only the abstract message, and Joshua formulated and arranged the text itself.

The Ninth Principle: The Eternity of the Torah

In the last lesson of the Dogmatics series I noticed that the Ninth Principle continues the same arc formed by the previous three principles. Maimonides, in the Ninth Principle, deals with the Torah’s eternity and writes:

The ninth foundation is abrogation. Namely: that this Torah of Moses will not be abrogated, nor will there come a Torah from God other than it, and nothing may be added to it nor subtracted from it—neither in its text nor in its explanation—as it says, “You shall not add to it and you shall not subtract from it.” And we have already explained what needs explaining on this foundation in the introduction to this work.

The Ninth Principle seems very close to the Eighth, except that the Eighth looks backward and the Ninth forward. The Eighth says that the Torah in our hands is the Torah given to Moses; the Ninth asks what will happen to it in the future (will it change or not). Maimonides here rules that the Torah and its explanations cannot change at any time. Note that he speaks also of the Oral Torah.

But of course, in practice the Torah is constantly changing: interpretations are added; new situations arise that weren’t previously discussed; disputes arise and new rulings are accepted in various cases. Moreover, Maimonides himself notes in several places that the Oral Torah develops and changes all the time. It seems that, for him, what was given at Sinai was the biblical text and certain foundational principles (the hermeneutic rules and word-level interpretations). How does that square with his Ninth Principle about the Torah’s eternity? Apparently the “changes” he speaks of are not really changes; they are alterations that do not contradict the eternity of the Torah.

This is not the place to expand, so I refer readers to my series on Modern Orthodoxy (Columns 475–480), and in greater detail to my book Walking Among Those Who Stand. In the first column of that series I explained the logical framework of change in halakhah and distinguished between changes that preserve the spirit of halakhah and changes that alter it. The parable I used was the “bathing suit” parable.

Briefly: a group lives in a desert; their ancestors for generations wore bathing suits. When they reach a cold region, some demand to change their custom and wear warm clothing. Others claim that they are not faithful to the tradition, which requires continuing to wear bathing suits. Faithfulness to tradition has a price. I argued there that it’s incorrect to rule categorically that those who demand changing the clothing are unfaithful. It depends on their reasoning. If they say that fidelity to tradition isn’t worth the cold, there is indeed a lack of faithfulness (at least not absolute faithfulness). But one could argue for changing the clothing on different grounds: that the tradition doesn’t say “wear a bathing suit,” but rather “wear clothing appropriate to the climate”—thus, when they lived in a hot region they had to wear bathing suits, but now, in a cold region, they must wear coats. I argued there that this group is just as conservative as the conservatives who insist on bathing suits, except that the first group are peshat-conservatives (preserving the tradition in its literal form: “wear a bathing suit”), while the second are derash-conservatives (preserving the tradition’s meaning: “wear clothing suited to the weather,” which until now happened to be a bathing suit).

The derash-conservatives preserve the tradition but apply it differently. They are, in fact, faithful to the spirit and essential content of the law, even if in practice they behave in a way opposite to past practice. I argued that this is an Orthodox change in halakhah. From here we can understand that to change halakhah without harming the Torah’s eternity, one must understand the spirit of the law. We must penetrate beyond the literal prescriptions (“wear a bathing suit”) and identify the essential content underlying them (“wear clothing appropriate to the climate”). That is the tradition according to the derash-conservatives; that is what they preserve and transmit to future generations.

In this view, the assumption of the Torah’s eternity presumes that the Torah is not the practical behavior we perform. That is only one garment of the Torah, relevant to a given time and place. But that same Torah, in different circumstances, should be applied entirely differently—and at the practical level it may look the very opposite. This seems to resolve the tension in Maimonides: on the one hand, he speaks of the Torah’s eternity; on the other, of the many changes it undergoes in every generation.

Thus the Ninth Principle continues the progression of the previous three. All are based on the claim that the Torah is not the text we have—not even the content of that text—but something abstract that undergoes conceptualizations, interpretations, concretizations, and linguistic representations: from the abstract to content, and from there to verbal formulation. It turns out that throughout the generations we continue the process Moses began—taking the abstract principles and applying them in changing circumstances. Sometimes we forget this and think we must be peshat-conservatives; but reality—if we trouble ourselves to attend to it—smacks us in the face. Changes in circumstance oblige us to face the challenge of exposing the Torah’s spirit—its abstract core—while striving to conceptualize and apply it correctly to new conditions.

I will now briefly present a few ramifications of the model outlined here.

The Meaning of “Tradition”

From the picture drawn thus far it follows that transmitting the Torah by tradition is not a mere transfer of information. It is the transmission of abstract messages and very amorphous modes of thought that, in each generation, should be applied differently (see more in Columns 622–626). These applications require abstraction, conceptualization, and verbal formulation—and all of that entails understanding the world and deep familiarity with its current state (see Columns 655, 682, 684, and elsewhere, on greatness in Torah). It follows that not every change in tradition indicates a flaw in the reliability of transmission or a corruption. Sometimes the change is precisely the proper continuation of the tradition—if we look at the essence and not its external façade.

I have often spoken about “decline of the generations” (mainly in Two Carriages, first section. To my surprise I could not find a systematic treatment of it on the site; perhaps I should fill that gap). I argued that this is not a decline in the sages’ cognitive abilities (if anything, those seem to rise), but a distancing from the source. Distancing from the source makes it harder to uncover the essence through the applications and practical directives, because we no longer “speak the language” as natives (as a mother tongue) but as ulpan students. Natives know how to speak properly even without conscious awareness of the rules, whereas ulpan students need rules. Rules approximate proper speech, and therefore native speakers are preferable: they intuit the essence that shines through the rules and actual speech. So too in the transmission of tradition. Proximity to the source means you speak the language as a native; therefore you grasp more of the inner essence, even if you lack rules to prove it. Again we see that what is transmitted by tradition is an abstract essence, not a set of normative directives—and certainly not their concrete applications.

Mary’s Room and Ruling Halakhah in Distant Situations

In Column 446 I brought the example of “Mary’s Room.” I distinguished there between apprehending the thing itself and apprehending it via its properties and characteristics. I explained that in halakhic decision-making—especially in extreme cases (such as during the Shoah) or in situations unfamiliar to us first-hand and far from our world—halakhic knowledge and analytical skill do not suffice; we also need first-hand acquaintance with the situation (see also my article here). The reason is that such rulings cannot rest on a simple application of halakhic rules, but on penetrating to the essence expressed by those rules. Applying that essence in very different circumstances may be the exact opposite of what we were used to deriving from the rules—and that can be known only from being within the situation and understanding it from the inside. Once again we see that the Torah, in its essence, is wholly abstract; the normative directives themselves are already a representation of it, and their verbal formulation is yet another step removed.