The Relationship Between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah – Lesson 2

This is an English translation (via GPT-5.4). Read the original Hebrew version.

This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.

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An analogy between Torah and poetry: the text and the margins
The difficulty of defining poetry and its many forms
Defining it through kitsch: Tomas Kulka and the artist’s added value
Photography and the ability to see connections: Alex Levac as an example
Poetry versus an encyclopedic passage: form, content, and abstract structure
A demonstration of the failure of a technical definition: turning prose into a poem through vocalization and line breaks
The meaning of a poem as something beyond the words: the lone streetlamp and figurative meaning
The same form across different media and the question of a poem’s identity
Radical interpretation and its rejection: Derrida, Oscar Wilde, and poetic ability
Intermediate levels: narrative, psalms, and drama between encyclopedia and pure poetry
The Torah as poetry through the topic of the presumption that a person does not repay before the due date
Facts as a medium and norms as the essence: the Torah is not an encyclopedia
Holiness, Jewish law, and the Shulchan Arukh: studying prose versus studying poetry
The question of the validity of the margins: is interpretation creation or exposure?
The example of “You shall fear the Lord your God”: fear of God and reverence for Torah scholars
Rabbi Akiva and Moses: reformulation, not invention
Maimonides on exegetical derivations versus enactments: the verse’s DNA versus new legislation
The chain of transmission in Pirkei Avot and the disappearance of “received” after Hillel and Shammai
Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai, the heavenly voice, and “these and those are the words of the living God”
The Yavne stories: the deposition of Rabban Gamliel, the Oven of Akhnai, and the death of Rabbi Eliezer
Torah as tradition versus Torah as human decision: “It is not in heaven” as a turning point
The deposition of Rabban Gamliel and the multiplying benches: moving from reliable channels to opening the study hall
Tractate Eduyot and the need to decide disputes
The violence of the students of Hillel and Shammai and the danger of the people’s disintegration
The rehabilitation of Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Eliezer’s remaining under excommunication
“Incline after the majority” only in doubt: Rabbi Eliezer’s claim and the story about Rabbi Yonatan Eybeschutz
An open ending: moving “one step further” from seeing the Torah as poetry

Summary

General Overview

The speaker sharpens the analogy between Torah and poetry and argues that the relationship between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah is like the relationship between the written text and the “margins,” what lies between the lines, because the essence is conveyed through structure and abstract meaning, not through verbal content alone. He proposes a definition of poetry as something in which words serve as raw material for conveying an abstract “structure” or mood, unlike an encyclopedic text whose goal is information. From there he explains that studying Talmud is not the study of psychological or economic “facts,” but the extraction of normative principles conveyed through concrete examples, and therefore viewing Torah as an encyclopedia is a mistake. He then asks what status the interpretive “margins” of the Oral Torah have, and through Pirkei Avot and the stories of Yavne presents a historical revolution in which the question of Torah’s authority was decided between traditionalism, which seeks only to transmit, and a position according to which Torah is created through human decision, as in “It is not in heaven.”

An analogy between Torah and poetry: the text and the margins

The speaker states that the relationship between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah is embodied in the relationship between what is written and the margins around it, or what lies between the written lines. He argues that the essence lies in what is conveyed through structure rather than through the meaning of the words themselves, and therefore Torah functions like a poem and not like informative prose. He presents this as a continuation of his earlier remarks that the margins are the place where the main thing is revealed.

The difficulty of defining poetry and its many forms

The speaker says that on Shabbat Shira he once looked in the Hebrew Encyclopedia for an entry on “poetry” and did not find one, and concludes that the absence of such an entry is connected to the difficulty of offering a systematic treatment and definition. He describes how the material he found was ars poetica—that is, associative, poetic descriptions of poetry rather than an orderly definition—and mentions Maimonides, who says that every place where “song” appears in the Torah is related to measure. He explains that the difficulty stems from the fact that poetry appears in many variations and intermediate levels, and raises questions such as whether the Psalms are poetry or something between poetry and prose, and whether Shakespeare’s plays are poetry or not quite literature.

Defining it through kitsch: Tomas Kulka and the artist’s added value

The speaker brings an example from a series of articles by Tomas Kulka of Tel Aviv University on the question of what kitsch is and why it is bad art. He describes how Kulka examined various definitions of art and showed that kitsch meets them, including technical skill and the ability to arouse emotion in the viewer, and even proposed a mathematical formula. He presents Kulka’s conclusion that kitsch is considered low art because its artistic values derive from the content of the picture rather than from the way it was painted, so the excitement comes from the situation and not from the artist’s “added value.” He adds the opposite possibility—that the disappearance of the artist from the experience could be the height of artistry—but proposes defining the matter differently.

Photography and the ability to see connections: Alex Levac as an example

The speaker asks what happens in photography, and mentions Roland Barthes’s book on photography and the question of art within it. He brings an example from a photograph by Alex Levac in which two Arabs are repairing a sign at the entrance to Herzliya showing Herzl and some inscription like “Hebrew labor” or something like that, and argues that if he had simply passed by the situation he would not have noticed it. He says that artistic ability is the ability to grasp something in the whole, in the connection between things, and not merely to “convey a situation” as such; the art lies in drawing out something beyond the visible pose of the situation.

Poetry versus an encyclopedic passage: form, content, and abstract structure

The speaker defines the antithesis of poetry as an encyclopedia entry, not as a story, because literature and storytelling contain a poetic dimension and are therefore intermediate levels. He argues that in an encyclopedic passage the added value is the content of the words and the transfer of information, whereas in theoretically pure poetry the value is connected only to form and not to content. He rejects technical definitions such as vocalization, line breaks, rhyme, or melody, and says these are modes of presentation that developed around poetry, not what makes a text a poem.

A demonstration of the failure of a technical definition: turning prose into a poem through vocalization and line breaks

The speaker says that he wrote an opening post on an internet forum for a series about defining poetry versus prose and about intermediate categories like Psalms, and a journalist took the text, added vocalization marks, and broke it up “three words, three words” and supposedly turned it into a poem. He says that this move illustrated the problem, because if the definition is vocalization and line breaks, then his text is also poetry—but he argues that even after the graphic arrangement, it did not become poetry. He concludes that a poem is presented that way because it is a poem, not that being presented that way turns it into one.

The meaning of a poem as something beyond the words: the lone streetlamp and figurative meaning

The speaker gives the example “Once there was a lone streetlamp at the edge of a neighborhood” and argues that the poem is not trying to convey information about a lamp, a neighborhood, or edges. He says that the meaning of the poem is not its verbal content but something abstract conveyed through the words, and that the words are a necessary medium but not the content itself. He defines the poem in its pure sense as an abstract structure found “between the words,” and explains that this is figurative meaning, not verbal content.

The same form across different media and the question of a poem’s identity

The speaker argues that in principle one could create the same mood in a person through a different poem, and so one can think of form as a mood or atmosphere. He raises the possibility that a certain poem may do different things to different people, and that the same “thing” may occur from different poems, making the question of whether it is “the same poem” complex. He mentions a collection of essays by Oakeshott published by Shalem, containing an essay on what poetry is with an even more radical definition, and recommends it.

Radical interpretation and its rejection: Derrida, Oscar Wilde, and poetic ability

The speaker presents the suggestion that the listener is the artist because he receives the words differently, and connects this to Derrida’s deconstruction and to the idea that a text has no meaning other than what it does to the reader. He mentions Oscar Wilde and “the critic as artist” as a possible precursor to these ideas. He rejects these radical interpretations and argues that there is poetic ability in the creator, and that a real poem creates an impression whereas an encyclopedia entry does not.

Intermediate levels: narrative, psalms, and drama between encyclopedia and pure poetry

The speaker explains that the opposite pole of poetry is the encyclopedia, while story and belles-lettres stand in the middle because the structure of the story matters no less than the content. He ties this to the difficulty of defining poetry, because the abstract phenomenon appears in different dosages within concrete products. He says that Psalms, literature, and drama are intermediate stages between the two pure poles.

The Torah as poetry through the topic of the presumption that a person does not repay before the due date

The speaker brings the topic of “there is a presumption that a person does not repay before the due date” in Bava Batra as an example of how the Talmud is not trying to teach psychological or economic facts. He presents a scenario in which nowadays there may be an interest in repaying early because of interest rates or economic conditions, so the fact on which the presumption rests may change and the concrete example may become irrelevant. He says that the reason to study the Talmud is that it conveys an abstract principle—that presumptive evidence can extract money even from someone in possession even without witnesses—not the fact that people tend not to repay early.

Facts as a medium and norms as the essence: the Torah is not an encyclopedia

The speaker argues that facts can be learned from the world, from surveys, or from experts, and that the Talmud uses facts only as a medium for conveying norms. He says that the Talmud “does not deal with facts at all,” but uses them to convey principles, such as using cows, oxen, goring, loans, and time periods to convey ideas. He says that viewing Torah as an encyclopedic value that commits one to psychological facts is mistaken, and that Torah must be understood as poetry that conveys abstract ideas through concrete words.

Holiness, Jewish law, and the Shulchan Arukh: studying prose versus studying poetry

The speaker argues that holiness does not lie in the psychological fact that “a person does not repay before the due date,” but in the normative principles of what is proper and improper. He presents a yeshiva-world attitude according to which studying the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) is a waste of Torah study, and even studying the Shulchan Arukh and practical laws is “not really learning,” because that is knowing what to do and not Torah study in the sense of studying ideas. He explains the distinction through the discussion that women are obligated to learn the laws relevant to them and recite the blessing over Torah study, yet “women are exempt from Torah study,” because knowing practical Jewish law is not Torah study but knowledge of what to do.

The question of the validity of the margins: is interpretation creation or exposure?

The speaker asks how one gets from the lines to the margins, and what the status is of interpretation born “between the lines.” He presents the question whether the Oral Torah is a human creation or an extraction of what is already in the verses, and what validity attaches to what is drawn out of the verses. He connects this to the dispute between Maimonides and Nachmanides in the second root, where Maimonides sees exegetical derivations as branches emerging from roots and therefore as rabbinic, while Nachmanides sees them as exposing what the verse itself said.

The example of “You shall fear the Lord your God”: fear of God and reverence for Torah scholars

The speaker illustrates the distinction through the derivation from the verse “You shall fear the Lord your God,” from which Torah scholars are included. He describes this as the difference between the “line” of fear of God and the “margins” of reverence for Torah scholars, and asks whether the inclusion reveals something already in the verse or expands it through human creativity. He notes that many disputes in the Talmud over derivations show that not everyone reaches the same conclusion.

Rabbi Akiva and Moses: reformulation, not invention

The speaker mentions the midrash in which Moses sees Rabbi Akiva and does not understand, and argues that Moses is calmed when they say “a law given to Moses at Sinai,” because Rabbi Akiva reformulated Moses’ principles in the language and thought-pattern of his own generation. He compares this to the debate about Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin and Maimonides, and presents the possibility that Rabbi Chaim is not inventing but formulating Maimonides’ intent in the language of his own study hall. He says that in principle, if Maimonides were sitting in Volozhin and heard a lecture by Rabbi Chaim, he should say “amen” and recognize that this is what he meant.

Maimonides on exegetical derivations versus enactments: the verse’s DNA versus new legislation

The speaker explains that even according to Maimonides, who considers exegetical derivations to be rabbinic, there is still a difference between derivations and enactments or decrees. He suggests that derivations are an expansion with a direct connection to the verse, like a landscape growing from the trunk’s DNA, whereas enactments and decrees are legislation not dependent on a verse. He again connects this to the idea of “added value” linked to the medium from which meaning grows.

The chain of transmission in Pirkei Avot and the disappearance of “received” after Hillel and Shammai

The speaker analyzes the opening of Pirkei Avot and points out that the formula “received and transmitted” appears up through Hillel and Shammai, while with Rabban Gamliel and his successors it no longer says “received from them.” He notes that in chapter two there is a return to Hillel, and then it says “Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai received from Hillel and Shammai,” after which we read “he had five disciples,” without an orderly language of reception. He interprets this as describing a situation in which transmission ceases to be a single line and disperses, which fits the historical crisis around the destruction.

Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai, the heavenly voice, and “these and those are the words of the living God”

The speaker presents the first major dispute between Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai and the tradition that for three years the dispute was not decided until a heavenly voice came forth and said, “These and those are the words of the living God, but the Jewish law follows Beit Hillel.” He explains that the dispute includes a methodological question of decision, and therefore it was hard to decide it by a vote. He notes the tension with the principle “It is not in heaven” and emphasizes the connection to the crisis of the study hall in the period of Yavne.

The Yavne stories: the deposition of Rabban Gamliel, the Oven of Akhnai, and the death of Rabbi Eliezer

The speaker argues that stories like the deposition of Rabban Gamliel, the Oven of Akhnai, and the death of Rabbi Eliezer form a cluster of rare literary and spiritual power, and that all belong to the first generation of Yavne around Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai and his disciples. He recounts the Oven of Akhnai: Rabbi Eliezer gives “all the answers in the world,” brings proofs from a carob tree, a stream of water, and the walls of the study hall; a heavenly voice emerges, and Rabbi Yehoshua responds, “It is not in heaven,” grounding the decision in “incline after the majority.” He notes that Rabbi Eliezer is excommunicated and sits in Lod until his death, and asks why a halakhic event turned into such an extraordinary storm.

Torah as tradition versus Torah as human decision: “It is not in heaven” as a turning point

The speaker interprets Rabbi Eliezer’s position as a traditionalist view of the Oral Torah as something passed down only through transmission, and emphasizes his description as one who never said anything he had not heard from his teacher and as “a plastered cistern that loses not a drop.” He argues that Rabbi Eliezer brings proofs “about the person himself” to show that he is a reliable vessel of transmission, while his colleagues hold that Torah is created by human beings through reasoned decision. He defines “It is not in heaven” as a declaration that Torah is not determined even by a heavenly voice, but by human decision of the many.

The deposition of Rabban Gamliel and the multiplying benches: moving from reliable channels to opening the study hall

The speaker connects the deposition of Rabban Gamliel to a view similar to Rabbi Eliezer’s, in which authority is determined by the person and the chains of transmission rather than by argument. He explains the “multiplying benches” as meaning that Rabban Gamliel said, “Anyone whose inside is not like his outside shall not enter,” that is, he required reliable channels for transmission and excluded those who were not such channels. He presents his replacement by Rabbi Elazar ben Azarya as a structural revolution in the study hall, where participation was opened and the need for a decision not dependent on a single transmitting person was settled.

Tractate Eduyot and the need to decide disputes

The speaker argues that “on that day the entire tractate Eduyot was taught” because laws testified to had remained undecided as long as the traditional model prevailed. He says that in a world where “I received from my teachers” is the source of authority, there is no way to decide a dispute, because arguments and majority do not persuade someone who thinks the truth is already known to him through transmission. He presents human decision as a necessary response to the danger of splitting into “two Torahs” and a multiplicity of Torahs.

The violence of the students of Hillel and Shammai and the danger of the people’s disintegration

The speaker quotes a description in the Jerusalem Talmud that the students of Hillel and Shammai killed one another because of the dispute, and interprets this as the result of a situation in which there is no persuasive speech and no agreed decision. He presents the traditional model as one that prevents discussion and therefore leads to war, and describes a feeling that the whole business was “on the verge of falling apart.” He says that the sages of Yavne launched an all-out war against the traditionalist view in order to prevent disintegration.

The rehabilitation of Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Eliezer’s remaining under excommunication

The speaker describes how Rabban Gamliel accepted the verdict and returned to the presidency in rotation with Rabbi Elazar ben Azarya, while Rabbi Eliezer remained under excommunication until the day of his death. He notes that this happened in the context of a debate about an Ammonite convert, where Rabban Gamliel accepted Rabbi Yehoshua’s position because of the argument, showing a relinquishing of rigid traditionalism. He concludes that the fundamental dispute was whether human beings create Torah or merely transmit it without added value.

“Incline after the majority” only in doubt: Rabbi Eliezer’s claim and the story about Rabbi Yonatan Eybeschutz

The speaker explains Rabbi Eliezer’s position as follows: “incline after the majority” applies only when one does not know the truth, but one who knows the truth through tradition does not follow the majority. In this context he brings the story of Rabbi Yonatan Eybeschutz, who answered a priest that “after the majority” was said only where there is doubt, and illustrates this with the law of meat found in the market with a seal despite a majority of non-kosher butcher shops. He uses this to show how traditionalism claims certain knowledge that is not subject to majority rule.

An open ending: moving “one step further” from seeing the Torah as poetry

The speaker concludes by saying that he is about to move to the next stage after recognizing that the Torah is a kind of poem and that its essence lies in the margins, but he is still only at the beginning of that continuation. He ties what has been said so far to understanding the Oral Torah as the space in which what lies between the lines becomes clarified, and to the historical and authoritative question of how that space was created. He begins a sentence indicating that the continuation will open the next step from seeing the Torah as poetry.

Full Transcript

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Last time I spoke about the analogy people make between Torah and poetry. And I said that the relationship between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah is essentially embodied in the relationship between the written text and the margins around what is written, or what lies between the written lines. Maybe I’ll add a few words about the definition of poetry in order to sharpen this analogy a bit more. This is something one could go on about at length, but I’ll do it briefly. The first time I really tried to think a bit about this issue of defining the concept of poetry was on Shabbat Shira, when I once had to speak in a synagogue, so I looked in the Hebrew Encyclopedia for an entry on poetry. And I didn’t find one, yes. There is no entry for poetry in the Hebrew Encyclopedia. And that was pretty surprising. But when I kept digging around a little in order to find some definition of the concept, I realized that apparently there’s no entry because they had nothing to write in that entry. I didn’t find anyone who really gave a systematic treatment of the issue. Someone who defines it. Maybe there is, I didn’t do a full search and I didn’t ask people who are expert in it, but from the search I did, I didn’t find it. There were things I found there, all kinds of what’s called ars poetica. Meaning, some kind of poetic description of the concept of poetry. Poetry is like… what?

[Speaker B] Maimonides says that everywhere it says “song” in the Torah it’s connected to measure.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Connected to what? Okay, fine. In any case, the treatments were not systematic, but very associative. And clearly there’s some methodological difficulty here—how to define this concept. I’m not going to talk here about the methodology; you could give a whole lecture on the methodology of how to approach defining such a concept. I think that would be an interesting move in itself. In any event, the problem in defining the concept stems from the fact that it appears in all kinds of variations. There are different kinds of things like this. Are the Psalms poetry or not? It’s some kind of thing in the middle, between poetry and prose. Meaning, there’s something there that’s in between. Shakespeare’s plays, or plays in general—is that poetry? No, not exactly. But it’s also not exactly literature. There’s also a difference between literature and just an encyclopedia entry. Writing an encyclopedia isn’t exactly the same as a story, as literature. There’s something here that appears in many forms, at many levels, and therefore it makes definition very difficult. And very often, when someone proposes a definition, they immediately say to him, “No, that’s simplistic; in the real world it’s much more complex.” And that’s always true. But that’s the point of a definition. The point of a definition is to try to abstract a phenomenon, make it simple, and afterward you can deal with the phenomenon as it appears in the world in a more complex way. So it seems to me that if I want to do this briefly, then I’d say the following. Maybe I’ll present it through an example. I once saw a series of articles by a man named Tomas Kulka, from the philosophy department at Tel Aviv University, kind of a café-sitter sort of guy. And he wrote a series of articles—no, that’s just what he was like, not that everyone there is like that. I just know, I have a friend who knew him. There he did the… yes,

[Speaker B] That’s where he prepared the…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In any case, he wrote a series of articles on the question: what is kitsch? Kitsch art. What is kitsch? How do you define the concept? And why is it bad art? Usually people think of kitsch as inferior art. Why is it inferior art? So he tried to propose various definitions of the concept of art, and he showed that kitsch satisfies all of them. Meaning, there can be technical skill there, even excellent technical skill. It arouses some kind of emotion in the viewer; there is some excitement when you see a kitsch picture, right? Usually there’s a lot of excitement. Very often an excess of excitement is itself a clue that we’re dealing with kitsch. So there’s a difficulty in trying to define the concept, and he proposed a definition there—he even got to some kind of mathematical formula for how to define it. But it’s very interesting. So the proposal he ultimately made was: why is kitsch low art? Because the artistic values in kitsch derive from the content of the picture, not from the way it was painted. Meaning, suppose we see—I don’t know—a crying child in the light of a sunset. Right? That’s classic kitsch. So why do people get emotional when they see such a picture? They get emotional because of the situation, not because of the picture. You could also just photograph an ordinary situation like that, and it would do the same thing. So what causes the emotion is the depicted situation, not the painting. There’s no added value from the painter. Meaning, the painter contributed nothing to the matter; the situation simply does the work. Now, the artistic value of a work has to be connected somehow to the artist’s added value. Meaning, if the artist didn’t add something of his own, then it’s not art. There are situations that do various things to us, that affect us in various ways—that’s not art. Art is when there is some added value in what the artist himself does, and that is what does not exist in kitsch.

[Speaker C] Maybe you need to argue exactly the opposite: the fact that you don’t see the artist—that’s more artistic.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why? That’s an artisan, not an artist. Meaning, it’s someone who is an expert.

[Speaker C] I mean, he can convey to you the experience of the thing without your feeling that he’s there—that could be the peak.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think maybe I’d define it a bit differently. Later I thought: what about photography? After all, photography is also a kind of art. There’s a book by Roland Barthes about photography—why it is art and what the art in it is. But photography is art too. So what’s the art there? There it could seem exactly the opposite: I simply take the situation and bring it to the viewer. But it’s not like that, because you see photographs like those of Alex Levac, for example. You look at one of his photos—the one on the cover of his book—there’s a photo there of two Arabs standing and repairing that sign at the entrance to Herzliya. Do you know it? There’s a sign with Herzl, with the beard, up there, and two Arabs are repairing the lower part of the sign where it says “Hebrew labor” or something like that. Now, if I had passed by that situation, I wouldn’t have noticed it at all. I would just have kept driving. Now his ability is to try to grasp that there is something in the situation beyond the fact that there are two Arabs here and a sign here and some writing here. There’s something in this whole combination that, if you’re not an artist, you won’t notice. You just don’t notice it. Meaning, the artist’s ability is to grasp the relationship between the things and not the things themselves. He wasn’t trying to convey to me that Arabs are standing there, nor that Herzl is there, but that there is something in the connection, in the combination of things—that is the art. And therefore I think the representation is not a representation of the situation. To convey the situation to me is not art; to find in the situation something that I, as someone who isn’t an artist, do not see in it—that is art. Meaning, he succeeded in bringing out something there beyond the pose that exists in the situation. Meaning, there is something there—that is the art. If I use this as an analogy for poetry—not really an analogy, actually, it’s the same definition of what poetry is—then I would say the following. Suppose the antithesis of poetry is, it seems to me, an encyclopedia passage. An encyclopedia passage, not a story. In my opinion a story is not the antithesis of poetry. Prose, what people usually call prose, because it has a poetic dimension. Meaning, in a story, in literature, there is something of a poem, and therefore it’s not right to place it as the antithesis. The antithesis is an encyclopedia passage, something that gives you information. What’s the point? And this really sharpens what the point of poetry is. Meaning, if in a prose passage—and again, when I say prose I don’t mean literature but encyclopedia—then prose, in practice, the meaning or added value of the words is simply the content of the words. Meaning, it says things to you in order to give you information. That’s the purpose of prose. Poetry—pure poetry, I mean right now, something abstract; there’s almost no such thing in reality, but theoretically, if one could have completely pure poetry—then it would be something connected only to form and with no connection to content. For example, when I asked people what poetry is, they often told me: it’s a passage with line breaks and vocalization, or with rhyme, or with melody. And that’s nonsense. None of those things is necessary, certainly not in modern poetry. Meaning, all those things are developments—when something becomes a poem, then it gets presented in that way, but that presentation is not what turns it into a poem. Meaning, it’s a poem not because of that. I’ll give you an example. After that Sabbath of Song, I gave some series of lectures about this on the internet, on some forum I participated in. Sort of lectures mixed with discussions and so on; it was very interesting. But I began it—I’ll read it to you. I’ll read you the sentence with which I began that whole series. I didn’t plan it as a series of lectures; it just developed that way. “And toward the upcoming Sabbath of Song I began to wonder what the definition of poetry is as opposed to prose, for example, and whether there are additional categories on that axis—yes, whether there are more gradations. For example, the Psalms seem to me to belong neither to prose nor to poetry, so what about psalms? Are they a third category?” Fine, and so on. Now look what the journalist fellow there did. He took the passage I wrote—you see it here in the frame? See? The passage I wrote is this frame here. He took the passage I wrote, added vocalization, broke the words up three words per line, meaning he arranged it in that form, and there—you have it, he turned it into a poem. What’s written here is what I just read to you.

[Speaker B] Okay?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Now that was beautiful. That itself, in my eyes, was poetry—not the passage. What he did, the act he performed, was very beautiful because he illustrated exactly the difficulty of defining this concept. Because if you define it by saying it’s vocalized and broken into lines and has some meter of one kind or another, then what I wrote is poetry. So who’s the poet here? Is he the poet? Am I the poet? What? Come on—that’s not poetry. Even after they wrote it in that form, it still isn’t poetry. The point is that people write a poem that way or present a poem that way because it is a poem; that’s not what makes it a poem. So what does make it a poem? They say, why yes—“Once there was a lone streetlamp at the edge of a neighborhood.” You know, there’s such a song, a nice everyday kind of song. An old song. I think it’s by Hatarnegolim or something, I don’t remember. In any case, what does that mean? The poem isn’t trying to tell me that once there was a lone streetlamp at the edge of some neighborhood. It isn’t talking about neighborhoods or streetlamps or edges. It’s trying to tell me something through the words. Meaning, the meaning of the poem is not the content of the words or the content of the sentences. The content of the words and sentences is the medium through which something abstract is conveyed to me. That abstract something—that is the poem. Only what? The only problem is that you can’t write a poem without words. If it were possible to write a poem without words, that would be ideal, but it isn’t possible. Meaning, you always have to convey it through something, so you use words. Words already have meaning, so of course the meaning also gets mixed into the matter and takes part in it, but the poem in its pure sense is really an abstract structure. That abstract structure is not connected at all—it’s what lies between the words. If I return to Torah and to the analogy between Torah and poetry—that it’s the margins, between the lines—that is exactly a poem. Meaning, a poem is exactly what is found in the structure and not in the words themselves. In principle, one could completely change the words into something else, and theoretically the poem could still be the same poem.

[Speaker B] So what is it, like an atmosphere?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, an atmosphere, or an idea, or some kind of mood-shape.

[Speaker B] I don’t know, yes, some completely abstract kind of thing. It comes from the words, but not in the literal sense, rather in the figurative sense?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. Meaning, it’s connected to the figurativeness of the matter and not to the content of the words. The words serve here only as some kind of raw material. They are not the content itself; they are raw material.

[Speaker B] Theoretically, the words are the paint for the picture.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but theoretically one could also do it with different words. It may be possible to do the same thing with different words. In principle. If someone expressed it differently with different words, maybe he could do the same thing. Not certain, not certain. Maybe it would be the same poem in the sense—not, not the other way around, it would not be the same content. It would be totally different content. But the atmosphere it creates, what it does to me, could be the same thing. It may be that what a certain poem does to me, and what another poem does to you, is the same thing. And the same poem that affects both of us might do different things to each of us. So is it the same poem or not the same poem? I don’t know. Interesting question. By the way, I just finished a fascinating book, there’s a collection of essays by someone named Oakeshott. It came out from Shalem Press. You know them, the conservative institute in Jerusalem. It reminded me that my sister once studied at some teachers’ beit midrash, Kerem, in Jerusalem. They had a lecturer who also taught at Bezalel, and many people there were Bezalel types. So she said to them, “Do you remember that right-wing guy from four or five years ago, that right-wing guy on the motorcycle who studied with us at Bezalel?” She reminded the students there of that case. Meaning, there had once been a right-winger at Bezalel five years earlier, and everyone remembered him. So yes, that’s the conservative institute in Jerusalem, the Republicans of Israel. In any case, they publish all kinds of interesting books that don’t come out through other publishers here, and that’s why they were founded. And among other things there’s Oakeshott, and Oakeshott really has an essay on what poetry is. There I found, for the first time, something really quite close—he has a definition even more radical than mine—but it’s interesting. I just recommend it to you, if you get the chance to read it. A wonderful collection of essays.

[Speaker B] Maybe actually—

[Speaker D] The artist is someone who absorbs the words, not someone who wrote the words, because I receive the words in a different way.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning, the listener is really the artist, not the writer.

[Speaker B] Yes, but that really is already—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Those are very radical definitions. That’s Derrida’s deconstruction, where he says that interpretation of a work of art is really what turns it into art. There isn’t really such a thing as art; there is no meaning to the text except what it does to me. This goes back earlier, it’s—

[Speaker B] Oscar Wilde’s “The Artist,” where Oscar Wilde talks in his criticism about the critic as artist.

[Speaker C] Okay, fine, so he—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Heralded deconstruction, maybe.

[Speaker B] But still, a poem written by a real poet will create a different impression in each of us, but it will create an impression, whereas an encyclopedia passage won’t.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, correct, and therefore I don’t accept those radical interpretations that say it’s all in the listener. There is something in the person who does it. Meaning, there is such an ability called poetic ability. It’s not that you can make anything you want out of anything.

[Speaker B] I want to understand—you’re saying things that, from what

[Speaker E] I heard from you, almost sound contradictory. Earlier you said that the difference between an encyclopedia entry and poetry is that an encyclopedia entry conveys contents, information, and it almost doesn’t matter which words it uses, unlike poetry where—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, on the contrary, it matters very much which words it uses.

[Speaker E] No, I mean if it uses a synonym.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, a synonym, yes, but the point is that the meaning it conveys to me is the meaning of the words.

[Speaker E] Yes, right. Whereas in poetry the form matters—the form and not only the meaning of the words. And at the same time, you just said that I can replace the words, but the words are the form, so I don’t understand.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I can convey the same form through a different medium, in principle. I can create the same mood in you with a completely different poem.

[Speaker E] But if that’s the mood—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then maybe the mood is the form. For example, I don’t know—form can be various things—but for example, the mood that it creates.

[Speaker E] So if that’s so, then why don’t you call prose that creates a mood, even without any artistic component of poetry, poetry? For example, a sad story about a child dying in Bombay—why don’t you call that poetry?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Listen, I call this poetry—I’ll get there in a moment. These are exactly the intermediate stages. I was talking about Psalms or literature or plays or all kinds of things of that sort. These things are precisely the intermediate levels between the two pure poles: the encyclopedia on one side, and poetry in the completely pure and abstract sense on the other. All the intermediate stages—for example, a story, I mean belles-lettres, literary fiction—that’s something in the middle. It’s not the pole opposite poetry, because a story has a poetic dimension. The structure of the story is no less important than the words or the content being conveyed. So a story is in the middle; a story is not the other side. Do you understand? Exactly this point: it has a poetic dimension, and that’s what makes it so hard to define. Because when you define something, you say, wait, this also fits a story, but on the other hand it doesn’t fit these poems—this one does. Right, because you’re defining something abstract. When it appears inside concrete things, it appears in different doses, in different forms, and that’s why it’s hard to define. Okay, fine, we could go on about this for a long time. I just wanted to sharpen this analogy here—that basically what I’m saying is that even when I relate to the Torah as a kind of poetry, what I’m really saying is that the Torah conveys things to me that don’t necessarily come through the meaning of the words. That’s the meaning of the margins around the lines. I once gave an example of this in another context. I gave this example regarding the presumption that a person does not repay before the due date. The Talmud in Bava Batra says that if someone claims I owe him a loan he gave me, and let’s say the loan is for thirty days, and he comes to me after a week, and I say to him, paid—I already paid you—I am not believed. Why am I not believed? Because if I could keep the money for a month, I wouldn’t pay it back after a week. There is a presumption that a person does not repay before the due date. Before the due date, a person doesn’t repay the loan; he waits as long as he can wait. Now suppose that nowadays that’s not true. Because nowadays there are plenty of people who do—because there’s interest, they don’t call it interest, never mind—the bank demands from me now, repay the mortgage within, let’s say it was for twenty years, and he comes to me after five years. I say, paid. So what will the judges say? There is a presumption that a person does not repay before the due date. Meaning, before the due date you don’t repay; you could have waited twenty years. But that’s not true. Money came to me, I happened to get money, and I wanted not to pay the interest I’d still have to pay for another fifteen years, so I repaid before the due date. Reality has changed. In this reality there are cases where people do repay before the due date, so there is no longer a presumption that a person does not repay before the due date. Now the question is: if I live in such a reality, is there any point in learning the Talmud? After all, the Talmud is no longer relevant. What is this presumption that a person does not repay before the due date? It’s simply no longer true. Today a person does repay before the due date. So what’s the point? This Talmudic passage is no longer relevant today.

[Speaker B] So then what is the point of saying a person does not repay before the due date—why is it there? Because if tomorrow the situation returns to what it was, when there was no interest—as today there is almost no interest. Today it’s preferable to take money and make money elsewhere. Okay. That was ten years ago.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So that’s just a hypothetical question—meaning, if the situation returns in which people don’t charge interest.

[Speaker B] It has returned, by the way.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it doesn’t matter, that’s technical, I don’t care. But yes, let’s suppose the situation comes back. There are principles. What does that mean, the principles? What are the principles? That’s exactly the point.

[Speaker B] The principles are the presumption; the principle of a presumption is that it determines—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, right, I said that. Meaning, the point is: the Talmud did not come to teach me the psychological principle that a person does not repay before the due date. I don’t need to learn facts from the Talmud. Facts—I can look at the world, ask experts, whatever, and know the relevant facts: whether a person repays before the due date or not. Ask psychologists—they’ll tell you whether a person repays before the due date. Or do some kind of survey and see. That’s not what the Talmud teaches. What the Talmud teaches is that if there is a presumption that a person does not repay before the due date, that presumption can extract money.

[Speaker E] And there is also another presumption.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. And therefore, what is written there in the Talmud really has nothing to do with repaying money, or with time, or with loans, or with anything. The Talmud is actually talking about some abstract principle. It’s talking about the principle that presumptions can extract money from the one in possession. So if there is a presumption against you, an evidentiary presumption against you, money can be taken from you even though you are the one in possession. Without witnesses. Usually, “by the mouth of two witnesses shall a matter be established,” so ostensibly you need witnesses. The Talmud comes to teach: no—even evidence that is strong, that too can extract money, not only two witnesses. Now this relatively abstract idea—it isn’t all that abstract, but still, this relatively abstract idea—the Talmud conveys to me through a very concrete medium. There are loans given for thirty days, and there’s a psychological assumption that a person does not repay before the due date, and all sorts of things like that. The Talmud has no intention at all of dealing with these things. They don’t interest it—not loans, not before the due date, not after the due date—that’s not the point. It’s not dealing with that at all. It uses these words, or these sentences, or these contents as a medium through which an abstract idea is conveyed. The abstract idea is that presumptions extract money from the one in possession. That’s it. This abstract thing—simply stating it in an abstract way, we once talked about this—I said the Talmud doesn’t really think in abstractions. So the Talmud does it through examples. But the examples—I also talked about forced interpretations—the examples are really there to serve as a medium, like a poem. Just as the words in a poem are a medium to transmit an idea to me, so too the Talmud uses cows, oxen, goring, loans, times, and all that in order to convey ideas to me. Whoever wants can ask a further question—why—and then he’ll reach higher abstractions. Meaning, why does a presumption extract money? Because there is something in a presumption that is stronger than possession; it resembles testimony. You can reach even higher abstractions. It depends how abstract we’re willing to go. And all of this reaches me through a text that is completely legal. Okay, here is a person who repays, does not repay before the due date, claims, the other one denies—what is the law? A very prosaic question. Ostensibly, that’s prose. But when I look at…

[Speaker D] Why does the Talmud bring this example? What? Why does the Talmud bring this example? It also comes to teach us about other things.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If—

[Speaker D] It uses this example, so you have to take the example too, not only the general idea.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but this example can change. If today a person does repay before the due date, then the example is no longer relevant, but the idea remains.

[Speaker D] I’m asking, until when does he repay before the due date when the situation is static?

[Speaker B] You’re not losing on this and the other thing.

[Speaker D] Okay. But that’s psychology. The Talmud is not psychology. If there are additional parameters… No, it’s not psychology. On the contrary, it is psychology. It’s something economic. A person does not repay before the due date—when…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Psychology is something economic, psychology is something economic. The point is that these are facts. It doesn’t matter whether psychology or economics—these are facts. The Talmud is not interested in facts. The Talmud does not deal with facts at all. The Talmud uses facts as a medium through which to convey norms. What matters to it are the norms. We talked about this. And so this is only a demonstration of the way I look at the Torah as a kind of poem and not prose. It’s not an encyclopedic entry. There are people who perceive the Torah as an encyclopedic value. It says to me a person does not repay before the due date, so today if the bank comes and sues you and you say I paid the mortgage, and it says it is written in the Talmud that a person does not repay before the due date—pay up. But that’s an incorrect conception. To perceive this thing as prose is an incorrect conception. You need to understand that we are dealing here with poetry and not prose.

[Speaker B] By poetry that means there are abstract ideas here being conveyed through this medium—not the things that are written themselves. Okay, and that turns this idea into something that can and should be studied day and night.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Simply because it is the divine will. We talked about this when I spoke about the Torah—because it is the divine will.

[Speaker B] Learn what a person does in his day, whether he repays or not.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, the opposite, it is—

[Speaker B] Exactly no—the opposite—there’s no logic that a person…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. The prose in this really has no holiness at all. That’s exactly the mistake made by those who read this as an encyclopedia of facts. Fine, so we once talked in the series on Torah—I brought Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin and the author of the Tanya. But I’m saying, even if there is holiness, the holiness is not in the fact that a person does not repay before the due date. As a psychological fact there is no holiness there. A psychological fact can be this way, it can be another way. Check and see what happens, because you need to know what reality is, but that’s not the important point. The holiness exists in the normative principles, in what one ought to do, and in what is fitting and not fitting to do—not in the facts through which this is conveyed to me. Okay. You return the loan because of fear of—

[Speaker B] God, not because of a social contract.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s service of God, but I’m talking about when I study this topic of returning a loan, not when I actually repay the loan. When I study the topic of repaying a loan, then he asks what?

[Speaker B] By the way, holiness in that sense can also come from legal systems—you can also arrive at it from other legal systems.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, right, and that’s a big debate. For example, interpretive techniques or interpretive methods. Do you engage in purposive interpretation or not? Meaning, the question is how far you go from the example to the abstract principles, and whether you can change what is written in the law because the purpose of the law is different. So that’s exactly a kind of seeing the law as poetry, versus those who say no, this is prose. What is written is what is written. I don’t look at what the legislator intended or what he wanted to achieve and all those things. Obviously, the possibilities of interpreting in a more poetic way or a more prosaic way exist everywhere interpretation is done, not only in Torah.

[Speaker B] Aren’t you narrowing the concept of holiness too much? Meaning, if I sit and study Chayei Adam or Shulchan Arukh, that’s not something holy? Not that it’s less holy… lower holiness.

[Speaker E] No, really—a claim.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s exactly the yeshiva-world conception that people don’t understand the meaning of—that they disparage the study of Shulchan Arukh. Because even Shulchan Arukh, even Jewish law, is not really learning. Why is it not really learning? Because that is precisely the prose. Meaning, knowing Jewish law is not knowing what is written in the Shulchan Arukh.

[Speaker D] That’s the aspect of the Sephardic world, whose direction was basically halakhic ruling.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And about that—

[Speaker B] We talked—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I brought Rabbi Ovadia and his sons, and I said I don’t agree with them—what can I do. Wait, but what are you saying, even Shulchan Arukh—

[Speaker E] Meaning, not only is the Torah certainly not holy—even Shulchan Arukh isn’t holy.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What does “even” mean? Studying Shulchan Arukh rather than things from the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) and that kind of thing? It will be said that in the yeshiva world that’s what they engage in.

[Speaker E] The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) is certainly holy.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’m saying: in the yeshiva world, the conception is that Tanakh is neglect of Torah study. That’s the basic conception—and on this point I’m completely with them. And immediately they leave the… fine, we talked about this. But even in the yeshiva conception, where ostensibly Jewish law is the peak, Shulchan Arukh is not really learning. We talked about this once—that women are obligated to study, after all. Women are obligated to study the laws that pertain to them, and therefore they recite the blessing over Torah study. I brought the Mishnah Berurah and the Magen Avraham. And then the question arises: so why is this called that women are exempt from Torah study? Women are exempt from Torah study, right? All the halakhic decisors say so; it’s written in the Talmud—women are exempt from Torah study. So if they are obligated to study the laws that pertain to them, then why are they exempt from Torah study?

[Speaker B] Because that’s not Torah study.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Studying the laws that pertain to you is not Torah study. That’s obvious. It’s only knowing what to do. What does that have to do with Torah at all? It’s just knowing what to do. Torah is learning the ideas, learning the poetry. That’s exactly the point—it is the same conception. Meaning, the Torah is the poetry in the matter, not the details, which are the prose.

[Speaker E] I want you to know that all of us, or at least many of us, listen to you with admiration.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, I’m smiling because I know that’s how it sounds, but I am entirely serious. Great thanks to the Torah. I am entirely serious. Fine, of course everyone with his own opinion, what… Fine, so now this brings me to the next stage, because if I understand that the Torah is some kind of poem, then in fact the main thing, as we saw in the Talmud in tractate Shabbat, is in the margins. The main holiness. Basically the words are only the medium through which the real thing is conveyed to me. Rabbi Tzadok writes somewhere—I once heard this from someone, I haven’t seen it inside, but that’s what he said—studying Rabbi Tzadok is also neglect of Torah study, not only Tanakh. So he said that Torah is a way of looking. It’s not the details that are written, but… the way of looking is the Torah. So that’s saying the same thing. But Hasidim also say correct things. In any case, the question is how we actually get from the lines to the margins. I’m joking again even though I’m serious. Joking because I know how this is received, but I’m serious.

[Speaker B] Well anyway, what we’re doing now is excellent neglect of Torah study.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What—

[Speaker B] What we’re doing now is really neglect of Torah study.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know whether you grasp the essence—the Torah itself is—

[Speaker B] Understanding what we’re talking about, what it’s about.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And if you’re laughing, you’re allowed to laugh. We once talked—fitness to be kosher.

[Speaker B] Learning how to learn Torah.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why not learn what Torah is? That’s the essence. Meta-Torah. Fine. In any case, the question that comes up here is: what is the status of these things, of these interpretations that arise between the lines, or who is supposed to bring them out? Or let me phrase it differently: is what I derive as an interpretation of the lines—the margins, let’s say, what I’m saying—is that actually located in the lines, or is it my own creation? And what force does it have? Yes, and as a result of that, what authority does it have? Meaning, is it a creation of human beings—the Oral Torah, the poetry, what is created around these lines—or is it actually located inside the verses, and we merely extract it from the verses? Is this an interpretation that in fact reveals what is in the verses? I touched on this a bit when I dealt with Maimonides’ second root, and I argued there that the dispute between Maimonides and Nachmanides in the second root is on this very question. Maimonides views the derashot as branches emerging from the roots. Meaning, the derashah does not reveal what is inside the verse, but expands what is in the verse, and therefore Maimonides sees it as words of the Sages. By contrast, Nachmanides argues that the derashot reveal what is inside the verse. When I say, “You shall fear the Lord your God,” I include Torah scholars—but that inclusion actually reveals to me that this is what the verse itself said. I just need the derashah in order to uncover what was there. So in the bottom line, basically—let’s call it the margins—fear of Torah scholars is not what is written. What is written is “the Lord.” Yes: “You shall fear the Lord your God.” From this we learn, infer, to fear Torah scholars. So the line is fear of God, and the margins are fear of Torah scholars. Yes, so that is actually the poetry in the matter, and the prose is fear of God. And then I ask myself whether interpretation—the extraction of the idea from the prose—reveals what is inside the prose, meaning it was actually there and I just need to use interpretive tools to bring it out, or whether not: this is an expansion made by human beings; this is human Torah.

[Speaker B] And if everyone would reach the same conclusion when they dig?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s obviously not true. We know that there are… no, that’s a fact. We see in the Talmud there are lots of disputes about derashot. So obviously not everyone reaches the same thing. But never mind—even if not everyone reaches the same thing, that means one is right and one is wrong, and we have a dispute about what is written in the verse. It still may be that we understand our role as revealing what is in the verse. The fact that we have a dispute is because one of us is mistaken.

[Speaker B] According to the midrash about Rabbi Akiva, where Moses saw Rabbi Akiva and did not know what he was talking about, then basically it reveals nothing—because if it were revealing, Moses would have understood.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I explained that too once. I don’t think that’s right. I said that Rabbi Akiva formulated those same things, and therefore Moses’ mind was put at ease in the end. Because he formulated Moses’ teachings in the language of his own generation. Like Rabbi Chaim—I brought Rabbi Chaim with Hutner and Seridei Esh and their debate about the relation between Rabbi Chaim and Maimonides. Whether what people always say—”What can Frank understand in Maimonides?” That’s the yeshiva joke. Maimonides comes and corrects the one studying him—”What can Frank understand in Maimonides?” meaning Maimonides himself. The point is that this is Kuzwell and Agnon—I mentioned that. The question is whether Rabbi Chaim actually invented what he said, or whether he uncovered from within Maimonides what is written there, only formulating it in the language of his contemporaries, of his study hall. And the claim of that midrash with Moses is, in my opinion, the latter: that when Moses sat there and they said, “A law to Moses from Sinai,” his mind was put at ease. What does that mean, his mind was put at ease? They explained to him that what he doesn’t understand there is simply because he doesn’t know the language, the mode of thought—not necessarily language but the mode of thought—and therefore they used a formulation suited to them for those same principles they received from him. It’s basically the same thing. If Maimonides had been sitting in Volozhin and heard a lecture by Rabbi Chaim, in principle he should have said amen. He should have said: right, that’s what I meant. Now I’m not saying that always happened, but in principle that’s what Rabbi Chaim is aiming for. Whether he succeeded or not, Rabbi Chaim is not inventing; Rabbi Chaim is formulating what Maimonides intended in the language of his study hall, of his generation.

[Speaker E] For Rabbi Chaim it’s neither revelation nor creation. Let’s say, for example, the shape of the canopy of a tree. Is that revelation? Is that revealing the genes of the seed? So there is development, but it is derived from principles that can develop.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I agree. I talked about this then too, because I tried to explain why even according to Maimonides, who says that derashot are words of the Sages, he still distinguishes between derashot and enactments and decrees. Enactments and decrees are legislation by the Sages, which is certainly a creation of human beings, right? In contrast, derashot—Maimonides also sees them as a creation of human beings, and therefore he calls them words of the Sages. So what’s the difference? The difference is this: in derashot there is something in the DNA of the trunk that brings forth the canopy. Even though, again, this is an expansion, there is a dimension in it that is an addition by human beings, by the interpreters, but it is not disconnected from the verse; it is directly connected to the verse. Without the poem, the message would not pass over me. Meaning, there is somehow a connection to the poem, to what I am saying. By contrast, legislation does not need the poem at all. Legislation—we create a new Jewish law. Okay. Now I want to look at this point from a slightly different angle, really to see what the meaning of the Oral Torah is. Is this a human creation, a creation in which everything actually comes from Sinai? I’ve also talked about this before more than once, but I want to show it through a few aggadic passages in the Talmud and in Pirkei Avot, so that there is a very interesting historical perspective on this question. There was, I think, a very great debate about this. I’ll perhaps begin with Pirkei Avot. Half neglect of Torah study, but sometimes it serves a positive purpose, so we do that too from time to time.

[Speaker B] Really leading you into sin.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, exactly—I mean, I’ll repent afterward. Don’t tell anyone. Okay. In the beginning of Pirkei Avot, the transmission of the Torah is described. It says: Moses received the Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets transmitted it to the Men of the Great Assembly. They said three things: be deliberate in judgment. Shimon the Righteous was among the remnants of the Men of the Great Assembly; he would say such and such. Antigonus of Sokho received from Shimon the Righteous; he would say: do not be… Yose ben Yoezer of Tzeredah and Yose ben Yochanan of Jerusalem received from them. And after that Yose ben Yochanan of Jerusalem says this, and that one says that. Joshua ben Perachiah and Nittai the Arbelite received from them. That’s the pairs, which brings us toward the end of the Second Temple period—or not quite, but toward the end. Judah ben Tabbai and Shimon ben Shetach, and the final pair Shemaiah and Avtalyon, and the final pair Hillel and Shammai. Those are the five pairs. After Hillel and Shammai it says: Hillel and Shammai received from them. It brings what Hillel said and what Shammai said. And then comes Rabban Gamliel, who would say: appoint for yourself a rabbi and remove yourself from doubt. Did Rabban Gamliel receive from them? It doesn’t say. That’s it. From here on it no longer appears. Meaning, until Hillel and Shammai it says this one received from that one and transmitted to this one, this one received from that one and transmitted to this one. With Rabban Gamliel—let me place this in historical context—there is none.

[Speaker B] Maybe they began writing it then, maybe they began transmitting… no, they wrote it under Rabbi Judah the Prince several generations later. But Rabban Gamliel no longer appears as one who received from them.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “Shimon his son says”—there too it doesn’t say he received from his father. It says he says and he says. The received-transmitted, received-transmitted ends. This chain no longer appears. Received-transmitted, received-transmitted is not the same thing.

[Speaker B] Each one received something and transmitted something else. Received and transmitted, transmitted. There’s no consecutive transmission. Who said? Who said? Only Joshua received; all the rest transmitted.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, received and transmitted. Yes.

[Speaker B] Why not?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I also don’t see—one can interpret it this way, one can interpret it that way; we’ll come back to that in a minute. After that, Rabbi—in chapter two. Rabbi says—we’ve already returned to the end of the period of the Tannaim. Rabban Gamliel the son of Rabbi Judah the Prince, yes, that’s Rabban Gamliel after several generations of Rabban Gamliels and Rabban Shimon ben Gamliels. Then suddenly there is an addition—now they go back to Hillel. Hillel says: do not separate yourself from the community—interrupting the chronological order. They return to Hillel. And then it says here: Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai received from Hillel and Shammai. Suddenly, in the middle of chapter two, it returns once. He received from Hillel and Shammai; he would say such and such. Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai had five disciples, and these are they: Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hananiah, Rabbi Yose the priest, and so on. Five disciples—and that’s it, it ends there. From here on it’s only he says and he says, and such sayings and other sayings.

[Speaker B] The five of them received, right? What? You’re reading it as though the five of them received.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, these five disciples, ostensibly yes, five—I don’t know if “received,” but again the word “received” isn’t written. But Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai had five disciples. There is some kind of description here, and I think it’s hard—hard—to ignore the difference, the change that there is in this description. The Mishnah is somehow coming to tell us that the Torah passed from rabbi to disciple, from rabbi to disciple: received-transmitted, received-transmitted, received-transmitted from Mount Sinai. But somehow with Hillel and Shammai that ends. From then on Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai still receives from them, and in a moment we’ll place this in historical context. After Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai, he already has five disciples; it doesn’t say that they received, and now it’s already five. It isn’t one person receiving from one person, or two receiving from two—it is already dispersing. Basically, the process is already dispersing. Now what is the historical context? The historical context is, first of all, in terms of actual history, the destruction of the Second Temple was in the time of Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai. Right? He asks, “Give me Yavneh and its sages.” Meaning, this is approximately the time of the destruction. The schools of Hillel and Shammai are something that was born a bit before the destruction and continued afterward into Yavneh. When the Sanhedrin went into exile to Yavneh, then the schools of Hillel and Shammai continued into Yavneh. Scholars estimate that this lasted some hundred and fifty years or so, this period of the disputes between the school of Hillel and the school of Shammai, or these two schools. And in fact the first significant dispute is created—the Maimonides talks about this—between the school of Hillel and the school of Shammai. And in this dispute the Talmud tells us they could not decide. Until a heavenly voice came forth. They said the school of Hillel and the school of Shammai argued for three years and did not succeed in reaching a shared conclusion, so a heavenly voice came forth and said: these and these are the words of the living God, but the Jewish law follows the school of Hillel. Meaning, they needed a decision from a heavenly voice because they were unable to decide on their own. I think I talked about this too once—that the dispute there was over whether one follows the majority in wisdom or the majority in number, and in a methodological dispute there is no way to decide. What would they do—take a vote on it? In that vote too, the majority in wisdom would be against the majority in number. There is no way to decide. And because of that, they needed a heavenly voice. And the heavenly voice in fact decided, despite “it is not in heaven,” and so on. That’s the historical context. But of course the destruction and the emergence of disputes are really a backdrop to a very great crisis within the study hall among the Tannaim. And these things can be seen in several stories that appear throughout the Talmud, where it’s very hard to miss the connection between them, even though nowhere is the connection explicitly mentioned. Because the literary and spiritual intensity that appears in these stories is almost unparalleled in the Talmud. Meaning, the deposition of Rabban Gamliel from the patriarchate, the oven of Akhnai, the death of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus—Rabbi Eliezer the Great—in Sanhedrin in two places. There are several such stories: Rabbi Yehoshua and Rabban Gamliel, the disputes between them, the replacement, the deposition of Rabban Gamliel, yes, when they put Elazar ben Azariah in his place. All these stories, first of all, speak about the same sages. Meaning, it’s quite clear this is the same generation. This generation is basically the first-second generation of Yavneh. The first of Yavneh. The first generation where Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai is still considered their rabbi, yes, who came out of Jerusalem. The first generation of Yavneh: the disciples of Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai were Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Eliezer, who were brothers-in-law. They were basically the main disciples of Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai, and this is the first generation of Yavneh. After that there is Rabbi Akiva—Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hananiah is still their generation, but Rabbi Akiva is already the next generation, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai is yet another generation after that. Meaning, that’s already the second generation. The transition between the first and second generation of Yavneh is basically the time when all these things happen. Now what happened there? So the Talmud—I may start with the story of the oven of Akhnai, which is certainly familiar to everyone. It was taught: on that day Rabbi Eliezer answered with every answer in the world, but they did not accept from him. He said to them: if the Jewish law is like me, let this carob tree prove it. Let the stream prove it. Let the walls of the study hall prove it. A heavenly voice came forth and said: why do you dispute with Rabbi Eliezer my son, seeing that the Jewish law is like him everywhere? Rabbi Yehoshua stood on his feet and said, “It is not in heaven.” We pay no attention to a heavenly voice, since You already wrote at Mount Sinai in the Torah, “Incline after the majority.” And then, of course, they excommunicate Rabbi Eliezer because he did not accept the ruling, and he sits in Lod until the end of his days until he dies. On the day of his death apparently the vow was released—at least in one of the passages it appears that the ban was lifted on the day of his death. And the question is: what exactly happened there? There was some dispute there about the ritual impurity and purity of an oven—an oven made of segments. Why is this such a stormy event? Why do they excommunicate Rabbi Eliezer? He doesn’t think like they do, so what happened? You took a vote, the Jewish law followed the majority, and everything is fine. What do you want? Why all this uproar? What happened there—what lies behind this for us—the Talmud says that every place where it says “on that day,” all of it happened on that one day. The Talmud, regarding the deposition of Rabban Gamliel, says that every place where it says “on that day,” it is the same day they deposed Rabban Gamliel. And here it says—yes, it begins, “On that day Rabbi Eliezer answered with every answer in the world.” I think this “on that day” too—by the way this isn’t mine; I once saw it in someone’s book, Menachem Fisch from Tel Aviv, in a book called The Community of Wisdom, on the epistemology of science in Ecclesiastes. He has a section dealing with these issues, and I basically took the idea from there. Harel Fish? Harel Fish—that was his father.

[Speaker B] Ariel Fish. Ariel Fish, the father.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] One of his sons is David Harel. David Harel. He was Ariel Fish. One son is Fish, the second is Ariel, like Jacob our father. Fine. In any case, the point is that this probably happens around the same issue. What is the dispute there? Rabbi Eliezer basically brings all the proofs he brings—these mystical proofs. Speak to the point. There are proofs that the oven is impure—say such and such and such. Give arguments, not carob trees and the study hall and streams and all sorts of things of that kind. Until a heavenly voice comes forth, yes, and then they say it is not in heaven. What is the idea? Rabbi Eliezer is known as someone who, as the Talmud says, never said anything he did not hear from his rabbi. Rabbi Eliezer—let’s call him a traditionalist. Meaning he basically held—and now I come to my opening point—that the Oral Torah is transmitted through tradition. It is not a human innovation. Human beings cannot innovate Torah. Torah is only from the Holy One, blessed be He. True, there is a part of Torah that is transmitted orally, but the part transmitted orally—I received from my rabbis and I pass it on. Received-transmitted, received-transmitted: the traditional, transmission-based conception of the Oral Torah. Now when he brings proofs that he is right, he brings proofs not at all to the substance of the issue. He does not need to bring proofs to the substance of the issue, because his rabbis said this. Why do I owe you any proof at all? My rabbis said this, therefore it is true, that’s all. Who are you anyway? Rather what? I will show you that I am a reliable vessel, a trustworthy vessel of transmission. So I show you that I am a person one can rely on. Here—the stream and the walls of the study hall and the heavenly voice—so you can see there is nothing to Rabbi Eliezer except that the Jewish law is like him everywhere. Meaning, Rabbi Eliezer proves ad hominem, concerning the person and not the issue. Because his whole conception was that we judge the person, not the issue. And why? There is nothing to discuss on the issue itself. Even if your reasoning says so, what, does that thereby become Torah? Torah is what we received from Sinai. That’s why it says of him that he never said anything he did not hear from his rabbi. And likewise it is written that I learned much from my rabbis and did not diminish from them even as a dog lapping from the sea—that’s how Rabbi Eliezer speaks in many places. Meaning, he held basically the entire Torah of his rabbis—he held it. He was a kind of plastered cistern that loses not a drop, as they say about him. Meaning, both ideologically and in temperament and worldview, he was a traditionalist. He saw his role as taking the Torah of his rabbis and passing it onward. The Haredi ethos? The Haredim are not like that, but they think they are. The dispute in the oven of Akhnai was about that. Because his colleagues, headed by Rabbi Yehoshua, who is his contemporary, yes, his disputant, saw things differently. They held that Torah is created by human beings. And if their reasoning says otherwise, then even if you transmit to us from your rabbis that such-and-such is the Jewish law, if our conclusion is otherwise, then we determine it. So they bring proofs to the issue itself, and he brings proofs concerning the person. And then they say—what do they say? It is not in heaven. What does that mean, it is not in heaven? That’s exactly the point. “It is not in heaven” means that Torah is created by human beings.

[Speaker B] Torah is not transmitted from heaven—that’s a very great novelty.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Even though heaven also says it, right—even heaven they don’t… all this is of course literary description, but it comes to sharpen this point: that even if heaven says it, I do not accept it. Meaning, there is no such thing—Torah is created by human beings. That’s basically what they said there. Now one has to understand what the significance of this actually was. Rabban Gamliel, the brother-in-law of Rabbi Eliezer, was deposed after he insulted Rabbi Yehoshua—yes, on Yom Kippur that fell according to his own reckoning. He told him to come with his staff and his wallet. What is the meaning of this? Rabbi Yehoshua did not accept his authority. Rabban Gamliel was head of the Sanhedrin. Rabbi Yehoshua did not accept his authority—Rabbi Yehoshua is the same one who argues with Rabbi Eliezer. He opposes him. What is the meaning of authority? He educated him. And then in the end the sages see that this business is not working. They depose Rabban Gamliel and put Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah in his place, the young man, yes, “as one seventy years old,” as is well known—they put Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah in his place. Then, the Talmud says, the benches in the study hall were multiplied, right? Why? Because Rabban Gamliel said: whoever’s inside is not like his outside shall not enter here. Why not? Because, just like Rabbi Eliezer, he checks the person, not the issue itself. I want faithful transmitters who will tell you what I told them. That’s what I need. As far as I’m concerned they can be tape recorders, but they have to tell you exactly what I put into them. Whoever’s inside is not like his outside shall not come here. Whoever is not a hollow pipe that transmits exactly what is inserted into it—let him not enter. Which is exactly Rabbi Eliezer—that is the approach of these two brothers-in-law. And both of them were thrown out. Rabbi Eliezer was sent off to Lod and excommunicated, and Rabban Gamliel was deposed from the patriarchate. And they put Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah in his place. On that day the entire tractate of Eduyot was taught—on that day when they removed Rabban Gamliel. What does that mean? What is tractate Eduyot? If you look, you’ll see there is nothing common to tractate Eduyot. Every tractate has some subject. Tractate Eduyot does not. What are “testimonies”? So-and-so testified that the Jewish law is such-and-such; so-and-so testified that the Jewish law is such-and-such. These were laws that remained in dispute and they could not decide them. As long as Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Eliezer dominated, they couldn’t decide these disputes. And why? Because in a Torah of tradition there is no way to decide disputes. You can’t. You say this, I say that; I received from my rabbis—what do I care about all your arguments? How will we decide? And if the majority is against me, so what? Because there’s a majority, I’m not right? My rabbis said so. A dispute cannot be decided in a world in which Torah is a Torah of tradition. Now what happened among the disciples of Hillel and Shammai? The Jerusalem Talmud describes that the disciples of Hillel and Shammai killed one another because of the dispute between them. How did they get to such a state? The problem is that two schools emerge, and then two patterns of thought emerge, two ways of looking. There is no way to persuade one another. Once there is no way to persuade one another, what has to be done is a vote. There is even a dispute about the vote—do we follow the majority in wisdom or the majority in number? The whole thing gets stuck. What do you do when there is no way to reach decisions, to persuade? War, right. They kill. Poetry, war. Who said that earlier? A heavenly voice. That poetry always appears when there is war. Uriel, yes. So here the war appeared. Meaning, when you can’t talk, you begin to kill. Again, I don’t know whether it literally meant killing there or whether it’s only a description, but the description comes to say—

[Speaker B] Well, but what?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It could be in another period, but that’s what the Jerusalem Talmud says.

[Speaker B] And the reason for it was—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That there was some concern there, some concern that the nation was falling apart. All right? There was a concern that the nation was falling apart. And as a result, the sages decided to wage total war against the conception of Torah as tradition. Because the conception of Torah as tradition tore us apart. Since if you are right because you heard it from your rebbe, and because you are the most righteous and heaven is with you and the stream and the carob tree and all these things—then there is nothing to talk to you about.

[Speaker B] You’re always right. How did we get back to this in our own time? Okay.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So maybe we need to study this so it won’t happen again. In any case, the feeling was that the whole enterprise was falling apart. And so, in effect, what the sages in Yavneh did—the first generation of Yavneh—was carry out a revolution. They removed the traditionalists. There’s nothing else like this anywhere in the Talmud. Right? They removed the head of the Sanhedrin. Why? Because he didn’t understand the Oven of Akhnai? Because he disagreed with them? Suddenly there was… the outlook was an outlook of Torah as tradition, and that outlook was destructive. This whole enterprise was on the verge of collapse. It was turning into two Torahs, and maybe more Torahs; everyone would have his own Torah. The whole thing would completely fall apart. There was no choice but to make a revolution. Rabban Gamliel, after they removed him, accepted the judgment and returned in a rotation with Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah. Rabbi Eliezer remained offended in Lod until the day of his death. And that is why he remained under excommunication. Rabban Gamliel was rehabilitated, but Rabbi Eliezer remained under excommunication until the day he died. Because Rabban Gamliel understood what the sages had done there and accepted the judgment upon himself. And when did this happen? When there was a dispute about an Ammonite convert. The Talmud says there was a dispute about an Ammonite convert, and Rabbi Yehoshua said that an Ammonite convert is a valid convert, and then Rabban Gamliel accepted his words because of the arguments, and they restored him to his position as nasi. Why? Because they understood that he had given up the traditionalist outlook and had accepted the Jewish law from Rabbi Yehoshua, who had said something on the basis of reasoning. So they brought him back. Meaning, the whole dispute in all these passages was really a dispute over the question whether human beings can produce Torah, or whether human beings are supposed to be a hollow pipe that passes Torah from one generation to the next without any input of its own, yes, any added value of its own. Torah cannot be created by human beings. That was basically the dispute between Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Eliezer on the one hand, and Rabbi Yehoshua and the younger students on the other.

[Speaker B] Surely at some stage, “follow the majority”—that certainly means that people create it. What does “follow the majority” mean otherwise?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So he says: “follow the majority” applies only when you don’t know what the truth is. But if I know what the truth is, then I don’t care who the majority are. That’s what Rabbi Eliezer says. And it’s like—we once talked about Rabbi Yonatan Eybeschutz, right? A priest came to him and said: you have to follow us; we’re the majority, the Christians. After all, your own text says, “follow the majority.” So he said: I follow the majority when I don’t know what the truth is. If I know what the truth is, I don’t follow the majority. If I find a piece of meat lying in the marketplace, and it has a premium kosher seal on it, but most of the stores in the city

[Speaker E] sell non-kosher meat, then I follow the majority and don’t eat that meat? Of course not.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That meat isn’t in doubt—I know it’s kosher. If I have a doubt about the meat, then I follow the majority of the stores. If I’m not in doubt, I don’t follow the majority. That’s what Rabbi Eliezer said.

[Speaker B] I know—I heard this Jewish law from my teachers. Why are you telling me stories about majority and not majority, and arguments and all kinds of things like that?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I know what the truth is. You go after the majority when you don’t know, but if we

[Speaker B] know, then there’s no such thing as

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] following the majority. Then I’m right, period.

[Speaker B] But what happened may be that Hillel and Shammai had no dispute in the tradition, and maybe they weren’t required to innovate Jewish laws in matters that had never come up before. Maybe, I don’t know. Maybe, I don’t know.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I have no idea.

[Speaker E] But at least in the description, reality is constantly changing, and new developments are required.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I agree, but at least in the Talmud’s description—I don’t know what happened in practice—in the Talmud’s description, until the two Yoseis, which is the first pair in which a dispute arose in tractate Chagigah, Rashi writes there that this was the first dispute in the Oral Torah: laying on of hands on a Jewish holiday, between Yose ben Yo’ezer of Tzeredah and Yosef ben Yohanan of Jerusalem. And that was during the Greek conflict, in the middle of the Second Temple period. At the end, at the very end, in the days of Rabban Gamliel, he is about to die, they come to visit him, he curses them, and says to Rabbi Akiva, “Your end will be worse than all of them.” I’ll get to that story too—not today, apparently—but I’ll get to it. But how is this connected to song? We’re talking here about song. No, no—I said that the idlers abolished the song. Leave it, this is much better. Until now we studied Torah; now we’re abolishing. Is this a continuation of the same idea? No, it’s a continuation—not of the same idea, a continuation one step further. I’m saying that the moment I see Torah as song, then…

The Relationship Between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah – Lesson 2

Table of Contents

Summary

General Overview

An analogy between Torah and poetry: the text and the margins

The difficulty of defining poetry and its many forms

Defining it through kitsch: Tomas Kulka and the artist’s added value

Photography and the ability to see connections: Alex Levac as an example

Poetry versus an encyclopedic passage: form, content, and abstract structure

A demonstration of the failure of a technical definition: turning prose into a poem through vocalization and line breaks

The meaning of a poem as something beyond the words: the lone streetlamp and figurative meaning

The same form across different media and the question of a poem’s identity

Radical interpretation and its rejection: Derrida, Oscar Wilde, and poetic ability

Intermediate levels: narrative, psalms, and drama between encyclopedia and pure poetry

The Torah as poetry through the topic of the presumption that a person does not repay before the due date

Facts as a medium and norms as the essence: the Torah is not an encyclopedia

Holiness, Jewish law, and the Shulchan Arukh: studying prose versus studying poetry

The question of the validity of the margins: is interpretation creation or exposure?

The example of “You shall fear the Lord your God”: fear of God and reverence for Torah scholars

Rabbi Akiva and Moses: reformulation, not invention

Maimonides on exegetical derivations versus enactments: the verse’s DNA versus new legislation

The chain of transmission in Pirkei Avot and the disappearance of “received” after Hillel and Shammai

Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai, the heavenly voice, and “these and those are the words of the living God”

The Yavne stories: the deposition of Rabban Gamliel, the Oven of Akhnai, and the death of Rabbi Eliezer

Torah as tradition versus Torah as human decision: “It is not in heaven” as a turning point

The deposition of Rabban Gamliel and the multiplying benches: moving from reliable channels to opening the study hall

Tractate Eduyot and the need to decide disputes

The violence of the students of Hillel and Shammai and the danger of the people’s disintegration

The rehabilitation of Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Eliezer’s remaining under excommunication

“Incline after the majority” only in doubt: Rabbi Eliezer’s claim and the story about Rabbi Yonatan Eybeschutz

An open ending: moving “one step further” from seeing the Torah as poetry

Full Transcript

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Table of Contents

Summary

General Overview

An analogy between Torah and poetry: the text and the margins

The difficulty of defining poetry and its many forms

Defining it through kitsch: Tomas Kulka and the artist’s added value

Photography and the ability to see connections: Alex Levac as an example

Poetry versus an encyclopedic passage: form, content, and abstract structure

A demonstration of the failure of a technical definition: turning prose into a poem through vocalization and line breaks

The meaning of a poem as something beyond the words: the lone streetlamp and figurative meaning

The same form across different media and the question of a poem’s identity

Radical interpretation and its rejection: Derrida, Oscar Wilde, and poetic ability

Intermediate levels: narrative, psalms, and drama between encyclopedia and pure poetry

The Torah as poetry through the topic of the presumption that a person does not repay before the due date

Facts as a medium and norms as the essence: the Torah is not an encyclopedia

Holiness, Jewish law, and the Shulchan Arukh: studying prose versus studying poetry

The question of the validity of the margins: is interpretation creation or exposure?

The example of “You shall fear the Lord your God”: fear of God and reverence for Torah scholars

Rabbi Akiva and Moses: reformulation, not invention

Maimonides on exegetical derivations versus enactments: the verse’s DNA versus new legislation

The chain of transmission in Pirkei Avot and the disappearance of “received” after Hillel and Shammai

Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai, the heavenly voice, and “these and those are the words of the living God”

The Yavne stories: the deposition of Rabban Gamliel, the Oven of Akhnai, and the death of Rabbi Eliezer

Torah as tradition versus Torah as human decision: “It is not in heaven” as a turning point

The deposition of Rabban Gamliel and the multiplying benches: moving from reliable channels to opening the study hall

Tractate Eduyot and the need to decide disputes

The violence of the students of Hillel and Shammai and the danger of the people’s disintegration

The rehabilitation of Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Eliezer’s remaining under excommunication

“Incline after the majority” only in doubt: Rabbi Eliezer’s claim and the story about Rabbi Yonatan Eybeschutz

An open ending: moving “one step further” from seeing the Torah as poetry

Full Transcript

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