The Torah in relation to other wisdoms
Happy to be happy.
I am amazed by the power of the Torah, not its spiritual value, but its intellectual value.
Whether it’s analyzing a subject in depth with a deep dive into the first and last languages or simply reading a puzzling Rambam and the brilliant explanation of the Gracchi.
And there is a huge amount of material (I wonder if this is the field in which the most books have been written in the world), much of which is profound and ingenious. Every famous book like the Katzoch has been criticized upon criticized over the generations by our best scholars (there is a rumor that they never found an error in the Grek’a. But that doesn’t seem true to me), and it is amazing.
I didn’t get to study other wisdoms properly (only touches) and my question was, is the Torah above all others on an intellectual level or not?
In my opinion, absolutely not. It has qualities that I don’t find in other fields, but in terms of depth and complexity and difficulty it doesn’t compete with physics or mathematics, for example. At least for me, Torah is much less difficult and complex and awe-inspiring than these fields. The way it combines insights from different fields and creates a single fabric from them that also touches on life is truly fascinating and unique.
And when asked whether this is the greatest literature in the world, the Standards for the Study of Halacha at the beginning of its introduction claims that it is.
That's a personal question, and I don't know how he determines that. In my opinion, absolutely not.
What do you mean by insights from different fields?
Logic, philosophy, psychology, law, metaphysics, economics and society, etc.
What do you mean by “personal question”? Apparently it's completely empirical. (An encyclopedia with all the material accumulated in mathematics [even if we add to it all the books that have been published like Euclid, etc.] takes up much less space in a cupboard compared to the number of Maimonides”s commentaries alone). Do you mean the quantity and scope of ideas?
I understood that the ”greatest literature” is the deepest and most valuable literary meaning.
But even if the meaning is the scope of the material, I'm not really sure about that either. If you collect the ideas and not the printed pages, in my opinion there is no less in mathematics and physics. And even regarding the printed pages, I'm not sure you're right. It's also a question of sorting the fields (whether to compare geometry to halacha, or all fields of mathematics, or perhaps mathematics to taharat or och, or halacha Shabbat, or perhaps all branches of academia to all branches of Torah, etc., etc.).
In short, none of us have a way to answer this seriously. Even to the question of how many printed pages there are, in my opinion, you are very far from knowing the answer. Do you know all the mathematical material in Russian that was not published outside the Soviet bloc? And in Chinese? Should we consider all the textbooks? Solved exercises?
Leave a Reply
Please login or Register to submit your answer
