Ketubot Chapter 2: The Book of Esther in the Written and Oral Torah

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so I was talking about the parallel between the place of Purim and the Book of Esther on the historical axis, between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah—at the end of the exile after the First Temple—and the halakhic expression of that in the laws of the Megillah, where there too you can see that this is something in between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah. Later on I hope to get to that and explain it a bit more. But in order to define the matter more fundamentally, I want to go back for a moment to some discussion—let’s call it philosophical, even—in a somewhat more abstract definition. It says in the Talmud in Sabbath 88, the Talmud says as follows: Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said: At the time when Moses ascended on high, the ministering angels said before the Holy One, blessed be He: Master of the Universe, what is one born of woman doing among us? He said to them: He has come to receive the Torah. They said before Him: That cherished treasure, hidden away by You nine hundred and seventy-four generations before the world was created, You seek to give to flesh and blood? “What is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that You think of him?” “Lord our Master, how mighty is Your name in all the earth, place Your glory upon the heavens”—meaning, You should leave Your glory in heaven. The Holy One, blessed be He, said to Moses: Answer them. Meaning, Moses says—the Holy One says to Moses our teacher: answer them, answer the claim of the angels, right, what do You mean giving the Torah to human beings? He said before Him: Master of the Universe, I am afraid lest they burn me with the breath of their mouths. Right, I’m no match for them—some kind of spiritual creatures and all that. He said to him: Grasp My throne of glory and answer them back, as it says, “He grasps the face of the throne and spreads His cloud over it,” but never mind. He said before Him: Master of the Universe, the Torah that You are giving me—what is written in it? “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt.” He said to them: Did you go down to Egypt? Were you enslaved to Pharaoh? Why should the Torah be for you? You angels want the Torah to remain in heaven and not be given to human beings, but the Torah says, “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt”—what does that have to do with angels? Were you in Egypt? Did anyone enslave you to Pharaoh? What relevance does the Torah have to you? And again, what is written in it? Moses goes on. “You shall have no other gods.” Do you dwell among nations who worship idolatry? What does “you shall have no other gods” have to do with you? The angels know the truth. And again, what is written in it? “Remember the Sabbath day to sanctify it.” Do you do any labor, that you need rest? And again, what is written in it? “You shall not take…” Do you conduct business dealings among yourselves? And again, what is written in it? “Honor your father and your mother.” Do you have a father and mother? And again, what is written in it? “Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal.” Is there jealousy among you? Is there an evil inclination among you? Immediately they conceded to the Holy One, blessed be He, as it says: “Lord our Master, how mighty is Your name in all the earth,” while “place Your glory upon the heavens” is not written. They gave in, and they said there was no need for the Torah to remain in heaven. Immediately each and every one became his friend and gave him something, as it says: “You ascended on high, you took captives, you took gifts among man”—as a reward for their calling you man, you took gifts. Even the Angel of Death gave him something, as it says: “And he put on the incense and made atonement for the people,” and it says: “And he stood between the dead and the living”—if he had not told him, would he have known? Right, he revealed to Moses our teacher how to be saved from death, how to solve the problem of plagues. This story is of course aggadah, but what is this aggadah trying to say? Moses’ argument to the angels is an excellent argument. What did they do with “Honor your father and your mother”? What does it mean that Pharaoh enslaved them? Are they murderers? What possible relevance does the Torah have to angels? So the angels conceded, understood, and everything was wonderful. But you understand that this is not the end of the story. So what did they think to begin with? Are they idiots? What were they doing with Torah before Moses came? Before Moses came, the Torah was in heaven—what did they do with it until then? Did they study “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt,” “Do not murder,” “Do not commit adultery,” “Honor your father and your mother”? That’s not serious. Again, I’m not claiming this was a historical event, right? But aggadah too is saying something. The question is what it is saying—why put such a claim in the mouths of the angels? By the way, I think that, as is the way of the Sages in aggadah, they have very winding ways of conveying the message. In my view, precisely what is missing here is the message of the aggadah. What’s missing here is the answer of the angels. What do the angels answer Moses? Great argument. I think what this is saying—and not for nothing is it told in the context of bringing the Torah down to earth, this midrash is said in the context of bringing the Torah down to earth—because it comes to explain the meaning of the matter. What does it mean that they brought the Torah down to earth? The angels also engaged in Torah; that same Torah is studied in heaven too. The Holy One, blessed be He, also studies Torah, it says in the midrash. And the angels too. So what does the Holy One study—“Honor your father and your mother”? What relevance does that have there? And the answer is no. He does not study that. And it is not written that way in the Torah there, either. In the Torah there all these things are not written. In our Torah they are written. So this is not called bringing the Torah down from heaven to earth; that would mean inventing a Torah for the earth and giving it to human beings. So what is the confrontation between Moses and the angels about? It turns out that it is the same Torah. Meaning, the ideas written in the Torah—let’s say for the sake of discussion, the laws, that’s what I’m speaking about now—the laws written in the Torah are some expression of conceptual layers, and those conceptual layers can find expression in different expressions in different worlds. In our world, the expression of those ideas is the obligation to honor parents, to remember the Exodus from Egypt, not to murder, to keep the Sabbath, and so on. In the world of the angels, either it has no practical expressions at all, I don’t know, and in any event even if it has practical expressions, they are expressions that belong to their world. But still the claim is that this is the same Torah. The difference is that the practical expressions are a function of the circumstances in which this Torah appears, in which this Torah operates, or—yes? I’ll maybe give an example of this, a story I’m very fond of. There’s a nice book called Zen in the Art of Archery. Do you know it? There was some German professor of philosophy from the beginning of the twentieth century named Eugen Herrigel, if I’m pronouncing that correctly—that’s how they write it in Hebrew. And at the beginning of the twentieth century he went to some friend of his who was a professor of law in Tokyo, in Japan, and he asked him to study Zen, to find him some master, some Zen teacher who would teach him; it interested him. The book is basically intended to describe the essence of Zen to a Western ear. That is the purpose of the book. So he describes there one of the first situations—if I… it was many years ago, but as far as I remember it really is one of the first situations in the book—he says that he connected him to some teacher, and this German fellow comes to the first lesson, and then that teacher asks him: what do you want to learn? He says to him: Zen. So he says to him: yes, but do you want to learn flower arrangement, archery, fencing? He says: no, I want to learn Zen. He says to him: yes yes, but flower arrangement, archery, fencing. He didn’t understand what he wanted from him. And then he explained to him that you can learn Zen through several channels—I think he says there four channels, if I remember correctly, something like that, three of them I think were fencing, flower arrangement, and something else—there are four if I remember correctly, at least in his case there were four—but in all of them you learn the same thing. What does that mean? You learn archery, they don’t talk about anything, there are no classes on Zen. He doesn’t write Zen ideas on the board. You practice archery, that’s all. You practice, or alternatively you practice wrestling or some, I don’t know, I no longer remember what—fencing, I don’t know what, flower arrangement, all kinds of things like that. That is what you learn. But through that, through that medium, some conceptual dimension passes through you—insights, experiences, I don’t know what you’d call them—and it is the same thing. It really makes no difference which of the channels you chose. In every one of the channels, the same thing passes through you. That is the claim. A very interesting claim. Because it basically says that when he studied archery with him—by the way he describes some pretty surprising things there. Meaning, he says that this teacher would hit the target from dozens of meters away with a bow and arrow, I no longer remember exactly from what distance, a large distance, without looking, and put it right through the target, without looking. Meaning, he had some ability—I don’t know what—to sense the world around him, to create some kind of interaction with the world around him without seeing. So that, for example, is an expression of some Zen capacity through archery. But that same capacity can come through flower arrangement, or music, or I don’t know, all kinds of things, it doesn’t matter. So what is Zen, really? So what is Zen? Zen is that same system of abstract insights which, when you apply it in archery, means this and that, and when you apply it in flower arrangement, means this and that—but it is the same set of insights. It just takes on a different form in each context where it appears. It receives a different practical expression. But it is the same thing. I think that this parable is an excellent parable for the idea of the midrash here. The midrash here is basically saying that the concept Torah is not what we think it is. It’s not the words we know from the Torah scroll with all the commands—honor your… it’s certainly not the words; in a moment we’ll talk about the words. It isn’t even the ideas described by those words. It isn’t the obligation to honor parents, it isn’t keeping the Sabbath, it isn’t the prohibition against murder—that is not Torah. That is the appearance of Torah, or the garment that Torah wears in our world. But that same set of insights itself, when it appears in the world of the angels or in the world of aliens or I don’t know exactly in what other world, will wear completely different garments according to the world in which it appears. But they are different garments of the same thing. It is that same thing itself appearing in each context according to the context. So Torah basically is—not only is it not the collection of words we know, it’s not even the collection of ideas that those words describe. It is something abstract. And when they want to speak to us about that abstract something, you can’t speak abstract things. You have to say it in some concrete form. How do you pass it from one to another—from the Holy One, blessed be He, to Moses, from Moses to Joshua, and so on? What is it that is passed? You can’t pass abstract things. So you do it through archery, or through flower arrangement, or through the system of commandments as we know it in our world. But through that medium some abstract thing passes. And that is basically what is called Torah. And therefore the answer that the angels do not give Moses—that the midrash leaves this answer sealed, it doesn’t appear in the midrash—I think that is the answer. The angels also studied that same Torah of ours. Moses asked them: tell me, do you have a father and mother? Do you murder? Do you work six days so that you need rest on the Sabbath? What does this have to do with you? And they are silent. Why are they silent? Because Moses would not be able to understand what they would answer him. It is not from his world. He would not see the connection at all between what they are talking about and the Torah he received. There is no connection. This is flower arrangement and this is fencing—what do they have to do with one another? He is like that German fellow who came to that Zen master; he won’t understand what you want from him, these are different things. But the angels themselves, who also know our world—we do not know their world, and they know ours—they understand that what they were engaged in is the same thing that Moses is receiving, only in the garment relevant to their world. So what is the argument about? Moses is basically saying to them—I don’t know whether in the end he understood the answer they gave him or the answer that isn’t described in the midrash, or whether he answered this out of lack of understanding, but the reader is supposed to understand it from the midrash. Right, it also didn’t happen, so there is no question what Moses thought when he said it—he didn’t say it. But the question is what this midrash says to us, not what happened with Moses. I think what Moses says to the angels is: I am not really receiving the Torah. Bringing the Torah down to earth means clothing the Torah in some garment that is relevant to our world, the world of human beings. That’s all. So what do you want? You will continue to engage in your Torah; we will engage in our Torah. It is the same Torah but there is no discourse between these two systems. There is the system as it appears among the angels, and there is the system as it appears among human beings. It is that same Torah itself appearing in completely different forms. It is that same thing itself appearing in each context according to the context. And therefore what do you want? The version that I receive is not relevant to you. What are you talking about? Do you have a father and mother? Do you work six days? Do you murder? What does this have to do with you? In a reverse kind of way, it could be that it is actually Moses who understands this and the angels who do not. Because when the angels complain, they are saying: what will this Torah do among human beings—as if our Torah is not relevant to the world of human beings. And Moses says to them: what do you want? I am not receiving your Torah. I am receiving the version relevant to human beings, which is not relevant to you. After all, you do not murder, you have no parents, none of that. And then it turns out that Moses is the one who understands this answer, and the angels are the ones who do not understand. You can read it either way. It is of course a literary game.

[Speaker B] Like what he says to them—who’s staying here, and who belongs here?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, exactly. It’s a kind of literary game that can be played in both directions, but it’s not important what Moses intended and what the angels intended. What matters is the distinction itself. I think that distinction is the main message of this midrash. It doesn’t matter whether it comes through the silence of the angels or through Moses’ answer. And then it basically means that… Torah is basically an abstract thing. Not only is it not the collection of words we know, it is also not the collection of ideas described by those words. It is not the commandments to honor parents, to keep—it’s not that at all. It is some abstract something; I don’t know how to relate to it, how to describe it. When the Holy One, blessed be He, gives us Torah, what He does is not transfer to us the abstract ideas, because there is no way to transfer them. Just as that Zen teacher did not teach him Zen, he taught him flower arrangement or archery—in fact that’s what he chose in the end, archery. Okay? But clearly through that he is actually transmitting to him those abstract insights called, in that context, Zen, and in our case Torah. The goal is not the collection of practical instructions; rather, through the practical instructions some content passes, and it is transmitted through that medium—there is no way to transmit it directly. You have to embed it within contents that speak to us, that come from our world. So you transmit it through that. And actually I want maybe to sharpen this a bit more. Look, Kant distinguishes between things as they are in themselves and things as they appear to our eyes. For example, let’s say I see this table and it has a brown color. It is obvious that the brown color of the table is created only within my consciousness. In the world itself there is no color. Right, the famous question: if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, does it make a sound? Usually, when that question is asked, it sounds like a silly question. Obviously it makes a sound, so what if nobody hears it? Wrong, my friends—obviously it does not make a sound. If no one is there, a tree does not make a sound. Because sound is a cognitive phenomenon. Sound is not a physical phenomenon. In the physical world there is an acoustic wave, a pressure wave moving through the air. When it strikes our eardrum, a sound is created in our consciousness. That is the expression of the physical phenomenon called an acoustic wave, a pressure wave. So therefore in the world itself there are no sounds. The world itself is silent. There are no sounds in it and there is nothing. There are no colors in it, no sounds in it, nothing at all. In the world itself there are physical phenomena. We, through our consciousness, translate these physical phenomena into images, sights, sounds, tastes, sensations of various kinds—but all of these exist only within us. When a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, there is an acoustic wave moving through the air, a pressure wave moving through the air. But so long as there is no eardrum that this acoustic wave strikes, no sound is created. Sound is a mental phenomenon. Same thing with color. The brown color is not a color of the table—nonsense. The brown color exists only in our consciousness. In the world itself there is no brown color. In the world itself there is some crystalline structure of the table such that the light it reflects—brown is actually a problematic color in this context—but the light it reflects is of a wavelength that creates brown. There is an article by Nadav Shnerb, if you know him from physics—he once wrote in Techumin that there is no such thing as a wavelength of brown. Brown is a function of circumstances; there is no such color, brown is entirely an illusion. What? Because of the status of the color brown? Because he showed halakhic implications. And he brought it in order to show a phenomenon of stains, for example in the laws of menstruation—if it’s brown, red, right, all kinds of things of that sort—he showed there that there is no such color. There’s no such thing as a spicy taste either? What?

[Speaker C] There’s no such thing as a spicy taste either. Right, spicy is a burning of the taste buds. No—burning is not taste.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, we translate it into taste. Fine. But there’s something that creates that burning sensation. And with the color brown, there’s nothing out there that creates that color. It’s a function of the circumstances, it’s a function of the observer—I don’t know, I don’t remember the details anymore, it’s a very confusing business—but never mind, brown is not a good example. Look at yellow, red, it doesn’t matter, the primary colors. Okay? So those primary colors just mean that in the world itself there is a wave with a certain wavelength. When it hits our eye, it gets translated into the color green or the color red. But that translation exists only in our consciousness; in the world itself there are no colors.

Now, this is a fact. It’s a physical fact, not some philosophical issue of Kant, as people often get confused about. It’s a physical fact. In the world there are no colors, no sounds, and nothing like that—the world is dead. All the images and sensations and experiences and phenomena that we know exist only in our heads. But of course, they are not an invention; this is not an idealist view. Idealism is a philosophical position that does not recognize the existence of an external world. I’m not talking about that. There is an external world, but in the external world there are things that are abstract: they have no color, no sound, no taste in themselves. Only when I create an interaction with them through the relevant sense do sensations of color, sound, taste, and so on arise in me. It’s all in me.

For example, “they saw the sounds” at Mount Sinai. If they were to connect my eyes to the center of—well, or my ears to the visual center in the brain—there’s no problem in principle, I would see sounds, obviously. Right? The sounds would hit the eardrum, some wave would be created that travels through the neurons, through the nerves, into the brain, but somehow in the wiring it would end up—say they did brain surgery on me and connected it to the visual center, not the auditory center as happens in a normal person. This has nothing to do with health at all. If it goes to the visual center, what would happen is that I would see sounds. That’s all. Yes, like on an oscilloscope, right? An oscilloscope shows you a picture of sounds. You put a tuning fork connected to an oscilloscope, and you see some visual wave there. Which is exactly the same thing. The fact that the ear is connected to the hearing center is simply a result of our physiology. If we were creatures built differently, then we would see sounds and hear sights or who knows what, or smell sights, or in general have some other kind of perception that we don’t know. In other creatures there may be perceptions we don’t know, like dogs that hear things at wavelengths we can’t hear, outside the audible range, okay? Or creatures that can see things beyond the visible range. Things we don’t perceive at all, someone else can perceive because their sensory system is built differently.

But again, I’m not making an idealist claim. I’m not saying everything is subjective and everything is basically our own viewpoint—not at all. On the contrary. I’m saying there is a world, and in the world there are clear, solid, agreed-upon data, but the ways we describe those data are a function of our sensory and cognitive system, our perception. Only because we are built this way do we have sounds and colors and sights and all sorts of things. If we were built differently, we wouldn’t see anything, hear anything, smell anything; rather, we would have perceptions of other kinds. And we would not be any more sick or any less sick than human beings—we would simply be different. We perceive things differently from human beings, that’s all. Not better and not worse.

Someone who sees what everyone calls a red light as a purple light—fine, maybe you’ll call him color-blind or something like that—but in fact color blindness is not an illness, he’s just built differently from other people, that’s all. That kind of color blindness. There is a kind of blindness where there are simply colors you don’t see, or you identify two kinds of color and see them as the same—that’s a limitation. But if you see color X as color Y and vice versa, you’re no more sick and no more healthy than anyone else, you’re just different, that’s all. Your sensory system is different. There’s no right and wrong here. It’s not that he’s wrong and I’m right. There’s no right and wrong here. I translate it; it’s like I speak Hebrew and he speaks English—two translations of the same reality.

That’s why there is often a mistake in understanding Kant’s philosophy. Once I had an argument about this with Rabbi Yoel Bin-Nun in Akdamot 10. He wrote an article and I responded in Akdamot 11, in a debate about this issue in a side discussion. But he argued that Kant taught us that we have limitations, that we cannot grasp reality as it is in itself. We always see it in terms of our own cognitive concepts. We cannot see reality as it is in itself. And I told him that I think he is mistaken—not only in his interpretation of Kant, but in reality. I don’t care what Kant meant; what he says is simply not true. We are not mistaken, and this is not a limitation. It’s not that in reality itself there is some particular color, but I see it as red because that’s how I’m built. The whole concept of color exists only in me. In reality itself there is no color. It’s not that there is some other color and I just can’t grasp it. The concept of color exists only within the perceiving consciousness. Therefore there is no such thing as a correct color or an incorrect color, and it’s not that I’m mistaken because I perceive things in color. That’s how I perceive them. I see an electromagnetic wave of a certain wavelength, and I see it in the form of light of a certain color. That’s how I perceive it. This is not a limitation. That is how one perceives.

If I had no sensory tools, then I wouldn’t have limitations? If I had no sensory tools, I wouldn’t perceive anything. I wouldn’t be able to perceive the world. Perception is always done through tools of perception. And the tools of perception always determine how that perception will be presented in the consciousness of the perceiver. That’s not a limitation. That’s how one perceives. And I perceive as correctly as possible. Nothing is missing from the information when I say that this table is brown. It’s not that there is some reality here that is in itself the correct one and I just can’t grasp it. There is nothing out there that I fail to grasp. I grasp everything perfectly well. In principle, again—I’m not claiming we are perfect—but this distinction does not express a limitation. There is no limitation here. Rather, this is how one perceives. That is the meaning of perception. Perception means that when I say there is outside a light of a certain wavelength, I am really expressing it in my language: there is green light out there. That is not a limitation. That’s just how you say it. Simply, instead of saying an electromagnetic wave of such-and-such a wavelength, I say there is green light there. That’s my language. Someone else says “green light” in English. So does he perceive differently from me? No. He uses a different language to describe the same thing. Okay?

So it’s not a limitation. I want to go back to the analogy, okay? That was the analogy. I want to return to the point being illustrated. When I say that the Torah is basically a collection of abstract ideas that receive expression in concrete ideas like honoring parents, keeping the Sabbath, the prohibition of murder, and the like, I do not mean to say that we are limited because we cannot grasp the Torah as it is in itself, in Kantian language—the Torah not as it comes to expression in our world. That is not necessarily a limitation. That is the Torah. The Torah, when I—and whenever I use some perceptual system—it will dictate the picture or the way I perceive the reality before me. That is not a limitation; that is how one perceives. That is what it means to perceive. To perceive means to take the thing and insert it into my cognitive system. That is what it means to perceive. Okay?

Therefore, when I say that when I perceive the Torah, the Torah is basically a description of Creation and an obligation to keep the Sabbath and a prohibition on murder and theft, all these things—that is the Torah. Because the practical expression of those abstract ideas in our world is like the practical expression of an electromagnetic wave of a certain wavelength as green in our consciousness. It is simply the conceptual system in which I describe the real thing. It’s not that I’m not describing the real thing. It is the real thing.

In that sense, the angels and Moses our Teacher not only study the same Torah; what they study is also the same thing. Even though if you look at it simply, Moses would not understand what they learned, and they are not supposed to understand what Moses learned. That’s irrelevant. Why? Because they don’t understand English and he doesn’t understand Hebrew. So what happened? Does that mean you are learning different things? Of course not. We are learning exactly the same thing. They just learn in English and I learn in Hebrew. Of course, English and Hebrew are only an analogy. They learn the applications or manifestations of that abstract system in the world of the angels, and Moses our Teacher learns it—or human beings learn it—the manifestation of it in the world of human beings. That’s all. But these are two languages for describing the same thing. Okay?

So that is the first abstraction. The process I’m now describing—the descent of the Torah to earth—is in the form of one concretization after another, or illustration after illustration. In the opposite direction, it is one abstraction after another. Abstraction means going upward; concretization means going downward, right? From the abstract to the concrete, or from the concrete to the abstract. In short, we’ve arrived at the point where there is some abstract system that we have no way to describe outside of some context. Human context, angelic context, or alien context. Doesn’t matter what. But there is no talking outside of a context. You need some context in order to speak. Okay? So that’s the abstract thing.

The next stage in this process—that is the top point of the pyramid—the next stage in this process is the concretization of that abstract thing. And of course there are several concretizations. There is concretization among us: do not murder, do not commit adultery, honor your father and your mother, and so on. And there are the concretizations of the angels. That is a different collection of things. So that is the second stage. The second stage is the concrete ideas, let’s say, the do’s and don’ts imposed on us. Fine? Let’s say the halakhic part of the Torah. These are the do’s and don’ts imposed on us. For the angels it is a different kind of concretization, and again, we are now at stage two. There is the completely abstract thing. There is the concretization of the ideas. Those ideas are still not described in words. You can describe them in words, but of course you can describe them in many ways, right? The verbal description of a thing can take many forms for the same thing, the same idea. Therefore the verbal description is already another stage…

You know what? I can even say the verbal description is yet another step further. That is, there is thinking about the thing—say, I think about this matter of honoring your father and your mother—and there is the verbal description of this idea of honoring your father and your mother. That is the third stage, the verbal description. There can be many verbal descriptions, for example: honor your mother and your father. That means the same thing, right? But the sentence is different. Which means that the verbal description is not in a one-to-one relationship with the content being described. A verbal description is another concretization. You take the content being described and concretize it in words.

Okay, so we moved from the abstract thing to ideas; the ideas are clothed in words. After the words there are interpretations, of course, which try to reconstruct the idea underlying the words. That is what interpretation does. Interpretation tries to go back upward in this process, that is, to understand from the words what idea the words are describing. But of course, since we can disagree in our interpretations and there can be several interpretations, and maybe several of them are also correct, we can treat that as the next stage—the stage of interpretations.

I’ll maybe bring an example of the third stage. The Talmud, the Mishnah in Berakhot on page 15—the Mishnah says: “One who recited the Shema but did not make it audible to his own ear has fulfilled his obligation. Rabbi Yose says: He has not fulfilled it. If he recited it without pronouncing its letters precisely, Rabbi Yose says: He has fulfilled it, Rabbi Yehuda says: He has not fulfilled it.” So the Talmud asks: What is Rabbi Yose’s reason? Because it is written, “Hear”—make your ear hear what your mouth utters. Yes, you have to make your ear hear what your mouth says. If you didn’t make your ear hear it, then you did not fulfill your obligation. And the first opinion holds: “Hear” means in any language that you hear. The first opinion says after all that you don’t need to make it audible to the ear, so what does he derive from the verse “Hear, O Israel”? That you can say it in any language you hear—not specifically, in the holy tongue, not specifically in the language of the verse. And Rabbi Yose? From where does Rabbi Yose derive that one may say the Shema in all languages? “Two things are learned from it.” Rabbi Yose hears both things from the same verse. “Hear, O Israel” teaches both things: both that you need to make it audible to your own ear and that it can be said in any language.

Many times the Talmud ends like that—“two things are learned from it”—or not many times, but there are a few times, because this ping-pong somehow has to stop. Meaning, yes, I say there is a dispute; one derives it from this verse, so what does the other one do with the verse—after all, he doesn’t derive the same thing? What does he do with the verse? He derives a different law. So from where does the first one derive that law—from the other verse? So wait, then what does the other one do with that verse? It never ends, by definition. In terms of logical structure, how can such a thing end? In one of two ways. Either one of the two sides learns two things from the same verse, okay? Or there are two disputes between them. That’s also a possibility, right? I learn from this verse, say, “in any language,” and he learns from this verse that one must make it audible to his ear. No problem; there it stops. They both derive something from the verse, each derives something else, and no one is bothered by “where do you derive what the other derived,” because I don’t derive it—I disagree with him. When there are two disputes between the disputants, between the Amoraim or between the Tannaim, then there’s no problem; that can also stop. Right? Those are, I think, the only two ways to stop this endless ping-pong.

But to stop it with “two things are learned from it” is strange. Both things are strange, by the way. Because usually we say, “we do not multiply disputes.” Why assume there are two disputes between Tannaim or Amoraim? If they disagree about one thing, does that force them to disagree about something else too? Why? Do disputes always have to come in pairs? That’s basically what comes out here. There is no such thing as a single dispute; disputes always have to arrive in pairs. That’s strange. But the other side is also strange—this is just a little logical timeout. Because the other side, which says that “two things are learned from it”—if you can learn two things from the same source, then why all the ping-pong? After all, this whole ping-pong is always built on the assumption that once a certain verse is occupied, you can’t derive anything else from it, so where do you derive it from? A different verse. But if there’s an escape hatch saying, what’s the problem, I derive two things from this verse—then forget it, erase half the Talmud. All these ping-pongs of what does this one do with the verse, and where does the other learn from, and what does he do with that one’s verse—they’re unnecessary. Just say, okay, he derives two things from it and that’s it. What’s the problem?

The Talmud’s assumption is that it doesn’t work like that. The Talmud’s assumption is that if I derive something from a verse, then it’s occupied. You can’t derive something else from it. If you want to derive something else, find another source. In short, both ways of stopping such a ping-pong are problematic.

So here the Rashba notes this and asks: “And Rabbi Yose could say to you: from it one already learns that it is in any language that you hear.” Rashi explains: “Two things are learned from it, because once you expound from it also ‘in any language that you hear,’ one also learns from it that he must make it audible to his ear.” Both are learned from the verse. Apparently he had a different version in the Talmud, because in our Talmud it says, “two things are learned from it,” but according to the Rashba, the Rashba read this in Rashi.

“And this is not clear to me. For from where do we know that two things are learned from it? And furthermore, that is not what ‘automatically’ means.” Rashi says that the second thing is learned automatically, but it’s not automatic—it’s two independent things you learn from the same verse; that’s not “automatic.” “And it seems to explain that this is what it means: since you derive from it ‘in any language that you hear,’ automatically one learns from it that he must make it audible to his ear. For if not, why would the Merciful One need to permit it in any language that he hears? It is obvious! For if he need not make it audible to his ear, then even mere mental contemplation would be permitted, as is implied later regarding one who had a seminal emission, and in mental contemplation the concept of language does not apply. And automatically we hear that there is no insistence on the holy tongue as opposed to all other languages. Rather, certainly, from the fact that the Merciful One needed to permit it in any language, automatically we hear that he must make it audible to his ear.”

This is a brilliant answer. The Rashba says as follows: really, Rabbi Yose learns only one thing from here—that one may say the Shema in any language. But now Rabbi Yose asks himself, why do I need a verse at all to teach me that? If the Shema could be fulfilled without making it audible to the ears, just by thinking it, without saying it, after all in thought there is no speech. Thought is not done in one language or another. So wait a second: since thought is not done in one language or another, then if the Shema were recited in thought and not in speech, I would not need a source teaching me that I can say it in any language, since I can avoid saying it altogether and just think it. So what difference does it make whether I said it in Hebrew or in English? It follows necessarily that if I need a verse teaching me that the Shema may be recited in any language, then obviously it must be made audible to his ear. Obviously there has to be speech. So in fact from this verse we learned only one thing. The second thing, as Rashi writes, is learned automatically. It’s not just two independent things learned from the same verse. One thing is learned, and once it is learned, you understand that there is an implicit assumption—the second law. You can’t have one without the other.

And then he solved the problem, because when we learn two things from this verse, they are not two independent things. We learned one thing, and the second thing is an outgrowth of the first, so there really is no problem—it’s not two things.

Why indeed is the assumption that in thought language does not apply? That’s a very interesting question. By the way, this is also a question among brain researchers, psychologists, neurologists—they deal with it a lot, also in recent years. There is Damasio, the Damasio couple, very well-known brain researchers, Mary and Antonio—Mary and Antonio Damasio. So Antonio Damasio wrote Descartes’ Error, a book by that name, which among other things deals with this question: do we think in words? And here, apparently, this is a dispute among the medieval authorities (Rishonim).

Because Tosafot in tractate Shabbat says—there the discussion is about speech in filthy alleyways, in bathrooms. So the Talmud discusses there how exactly he spoke, and then the Talmud asks, wait, maybe he spoke in an ordinary language, in a foreign tongue, not in the holy tongue? So Tosafot says: “And even though it is forbidden to think, let us say that it is forbidden to think only in the holy tongue, and he thought in an ordinary language.” So the Rashash comments there in Shabbat 40 that this Tosafot disagrees with the Rashba. This Tosafot disagrees with the Rashba because Tosafot thinks language is relevant even in thought, and therefore one can think in Hebrew, one can think in a foreign language, in the holy tongue and in an ordinary tongue. And the Rashba assumes that language does not apply to thought.

[Speaker C] Where is that Tosafot?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In Shabbat 40. The Shaagat Aryeh really explains it that way, and the Chazon Ish in one of his explanations also explains it that way, and apparently the Rashash also understood it that way. But most of the later authorities (Acharonim) do not understand it that way, and the truth is… and the truth is that in reality it’s very hard to understand it that way. What do you mean? Obviously we think with language. What, language is not relevant to thought? What, can’t we think in Hebrew or think in English? There’s a song by Lidor, right—“Thinking in Spanish”… “Dreaming in Spanish,” right, sorry. Obviously we can think in a language. What, does he disagree with that reality?

I think the Rashba doesn’t mean that. The Rashba means to say that if there is something whose law is to do it by thought and not by speech, then Jewish law will not require us to do it in a particular language, because it does not matter in what language you are thinking. In speech, it could matter to the Torah—Jewish law—whether you say it in this language or that one, in the holy tongue or in an ordinary language. But if it is a law of thought, then even if one can think in the holy tongue or in an ordinary tongue, in thought it does not matter in which language you are thinking. And why not? Because something whose law is thought—what is really required of you is to think the ideas, not the words. The words are the instrument through which you may perhaps think about the ideas.

By the way, this is a more interesting question, and I don’t have a clear answer to it: can one think without language? The fact that one can think with language seems obvious to me; clearly we think with language. The interesting question is whether there can be thought without language—language-free thought. It’s a bit tricky; I’m not sure. It depends—what do you mean?

[Speaker D] For example, when I’m driving, I can imagine routes you can move along between places…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, imagining is something else. Then you’re using a visual language.

[Speaker D] Yes, of course,

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Obviously you can think visually. I mean thinking about ideas, not about pictures. Yes, visual. Yes, so that is representation. It doesn’t matter whether the representation is visual or the representation is audio, but it’s representation. I’m talking about thinking without representation.

[Speaker B] Babies think.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Think… let’s go back to the abstractions I talked about earlier. Can one think the thing itself—not its verbal representation or its visual representation—but the idea itself? To think the idea of honoring father and mother, but not the words “honor your father and your mother,” and also not some picture in which I honor parents, but the idea of honoring father and mother. I don’t know, interesting question, I’m not sure about it.

But one second—I just want to say that what the Rashba wants to say is this: I’m not sure one can think that way, but if I am required to think, then what matters is the idea I am thinking, not the representation I chose in order to represent the idea. It’s not… it may be that whenever I think, I always think with representations. But if I am only in thought and not in speech, then the representation is not what matters. That is basically what the Rashba is claiming. The main thing is that the correct idea is in my head; at the moment it doesn’t matter whether I represent it in Hebrew, in English, or in video. Okay? That, I think, is basically what the Rashba means, and not that it is impossible to think in language—that’s absurd. On the contrary, I’m saying I’m not sure it’s possible to think at all without language.

There’s a very nice example of this—just in parentheses a bit. In a few places anthropologists document societies that have primitive counting systems. Not legal in politically correct terms. There are languages… primitive forms of counting. Distinctive ones. Yes, different ones. There are some, for example, that have a one-two-many system. For example, the Pirahã tribe in Brazil—there was once an article in Nature; I had a big argument about that article with some friend—the tribe had three numerals, or three numbers, in its number system: one, two, and many. That is, one, two, and a lot. They had no three, no four, no five, nothing—certainly not negative numbers, complex numbers, real numbers, whatever you want, and transcendental ones. That’s what they had: one, two, and many.

Then a researcher came there, put down, say, three batteries and four batteries, and asked them where there were more. They didn’t know how to answer. They understand what “more” means, but they didn’t know how to answer. It looked the same to them, or at least they didn’t know which was more than which. With 10 versus 2, by the way, they did know. When the gap is very, very large, then they did understand; they could say that here there is more. This is very much and this is a little much, okay? Both are “many,” but there’s—like with infinities—after all there are several levels of infinity. For them, many is infinity. A plague of many, so to speak.

So the essence, yes—what we see there is that when you don’t have words to describe something, it’s hard for you to think about it. The question is what the cause is. What is the cause and what is the effect—that was my argument with that friend. Is it because I don’t understand it that I have no words for it? Or because I have no words for it, I can’t manage to understand it? What is cause and what is effect? I tended to think that because I don’t understand, therefore there are no words. Because why would they not have words and we do?

[Speaker D] So then say that if there are no words, it’s impossible to understand.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] How can it be that I produce a word if I didn’t first understand the idea? So how did I create the word? Obviously the understanding comes first and only afterward the word, right? On the other hand, it’s also obvious that those people weren’t stupid. After they were taught the numbers, they knew how to do what you and I know how to do. These are people with the same abilities we have, but they didn’t have the linguistic apparatus to… to think those thoughts. So there’s a pretty complex process here. You have to grasp it in some raw, undeveloped way, create a word, and once you’ve created a word, that sharpens your grasp of the thing, and then you can think about it and develop it further, and so on. In other words, it’s a kind of back-and-forth movement; it’s not a linear thing. It doesn’t go from thought to words, nor from words to thought; rather, it gets built in this back-and-forth way. That’s an example of the fact that it really is hard for us to think without having words that represent that thought. Okay? And therefore I think that Rashba also does not mean to say that it’s impossible to think without words. Rashba only means to say that if there is a legal rule stated about thought, then the words don’t matter. Maybe it’s always done with words, maybe, but it doesn’t matter which words you choose to represent it, because what matters is that the right idea be in your head. When there are legal rules about speech, then with speech it can be that some verbal formulations have to be said in the holy tongue and others not. Chapter seven in Sotah, the beginning of the first mishnah in chapter seven of Sotah: these may be said in any language, and these only in the holy tongue. There are things said in any language, for example the Shema, and that’s written there, and there are things said only in the holy tongue. Okay? Therefore, in speech, when the rule concerns speech, there are situations where it matters what language you use and situations where it doesn’t. But if the rule concerns contemplation, Rashba says, then by definition there will never be a requirement of language. And here Tosafot disagrees. And Tosafot argues that at least regarding contemplation in filthy alleyways, it may indeed matter in what language you think the thing. But even that is not an extreme disagreement, because Tosafot thinks that the prohibition in filthy alleyways is not about the ideas but about the words. And therefore the representation matters. So this is not really a fundamental disagreement with Rashba. It’s not a disagreement in neuroscience about how people think or what the meaning of thought is, but rather a dispute in Jewish law about what one is forbidden to contemplate in filthy alleyways: whether I’m forbidden to think things in Hebrew, or whether I’m forbidden to think certain ideas regardless of their representation. That’s the argument. Fine, that’s already less relevant to our issue. So if I go back, then basically what this says is that there is some gap between the idea and its verbal representation, its representation in words. And that is the transition from the second level to the third level that I mentioned earlier. There’s another point here in this process. First of all, there are several verbal ways to represent the same idea. “Honor your father and your mother,” or “Honor your mother and your father.” It’s the same thing in a different sentence. Okay? And so on. You know the paradox—I forgot its name, a nice paradox, mathematical—the guests paradox? No, no, think about it. You can describe numbers in all kinds of ways. Say, the smallest even number. Right? That’s a description of two. Okay? Or the smallest prime number. That too is a description of two. Two different descriptions of the same number. One is not prime—that’s for reasons best left with the mathematicians. But then both are different descriptions of the same number. I can also describe it as eight divided by four. That too is a description of two. Okay? And so on. I can describe it in all sorts of ways. Now let’s attach to every number its shortest description in terms of number of letters. Look at the descriptions of that number and choose the shortest description. Fine? And let’s take all the numbers whose shortest description is less than one hundred letters. Now two—less than one hundred letters, right? “The smallest prime number.” Count the letters; there aren’t one hundred letters there. Now let’s think about the next number: the smallest number that cannot be described in fewer than one hundred letters. The smallest number that does not belong to that group. Fine? Well now I’ve described it in fewer than one hundred letters: “the smallest number that cannot be described in fewer than one hundred letters.” I described it in fewer than one hundred letters. What does that mean? It means there are several bugs in the transition between the idea and its descriptions, or between the concept and its descriptions in this case. One is lack of uniqueness, and the second is that it’s not onto. In other words, one of them is that there are several different verbal descriptions for the same thing, and the second is that there are verbal descriptions that apparently do not describe what you think they describe. For example, they’re not precise in the description; if you check it, you’ll see that it’s not an exact description even though it seems to us like a good description. It can lead you into paradoxes or things of that kind. Therefore the transition from the idea to its verbal description is a very nontrivial transition. No more trivial than the first transition between the abstract thing and the idea. The transition from the idea to its verbal description is also not trivial. And therefore, for example, in the Written Torah there is a certain holiness to the verbal description. In the wording of the Written Torah, you may not change a single letter, a single word, right? Why? Because a particular description was chosen there deliberately. If you choose a description in other words that describes the same content, it won’t be the same thing. Because the Torah, as we relate to it as a halakhic concept—not the Torah I spoke about earlier, but as a halakhic concept—is the wording that appears before us. That is the Torah. If you translate it into English, that is not the Torah. If you write it in Hebrew with different wording, that is not the Torah. Those are the ideas of the Torah. That might be the Oral Torah. You’re interpreting the Torah; that too is some kind of Torah study, but it is Oral Torah. Written Torah as a book is only in this specific wording and no other. And therefore the transition between the ideas and the verbal description is not trivial. In the case of the Torah, the verbal description has significance in itself; it doesn’t only express ideas. It’s not only an expression of ideas. There is something about it that is specifically so. No other description will have the holiness of Written Torah in our world—I don’t know about the angels. Fine? By contrast, in the Oral Torah—Written Torah, by the way, is the wording, right? It’s the text before us; that is Written Torah, the specific text that we know. Oral Torah—not only are there many texts; leave aside the many texts, let’s say there is only the Talmud, only the whole Shas, okay? That is not the text. Even after it was written down, it is still not the text. It is the ideas that the text describes. If I write those ideas in another language or in a different formulation, even in Aramaic or in Hebrew but in a different formulation, that will be Oral Torah exactly like the Shas we know. There is no difference whatsoever. As long as it describes the ideas that are Oral Torah, the correct ideas. But what kind of description I chose is not important. In other words, in the Oral Torah the formulation does not matter. What matters is what is being formulated. The idea being formulated, not how you formulate it. And that is exactly the opposite of the Written Torah. In the Written Torah, what matters is the formulation. The ideas that this formulation expresses are not Written Torah. That is Oral Torah, since it always also involves interpretation. When you read a verse and tell me what it says, every time you do that there will always be an interpretive element in it. You can never tell me one-to-one what it says unless you simply say the verse. Fine? But every time you choose a different formulation in order to say what is written here in the verse, you have moved to Oral Torah. The commentators on the Torah, when they explain what a verse means—the interpretation of that thing is Oral Torah, not Written Torah. There is no holiness in Nachmanides’ formulation, right? If we formulate it differently, it is still Nachmanides. If I explain Nachmanides’ idea to you in another language or with a different formulation, it doesn’t matter. That is Oral Torah. Written Torah is only the Torah before us. So it turns out—look, this is interesting—the Arizal talks about this, though it already has roots in Hazal, that the Oral Torah is higher than the Written Torah. Why? Because in the hierarchy I described earlier, there is the abstract thing, there are the ideas, which is the clothing of it in the concepts of our world, and there is the verbal description of the ideas. Written Torah is the lowest level, the verbal description. Oral Torah deals with the ideas. More than that: as I said earlier, even the ideas described in the Written Torah—when you engage with them, you are actually engaging in Oral Torah. Because it will always pass through your formulation, your interpretation; it will never be the thing itself, and Written Torah is only that exact formulation. Changing a word invalidates the scroll, invalidates the formulation, right? It’s not the verse anymore, it is no longer Written Torah. Even though you can represent what you want to say with a different sentence than the verse, that is already Oral Torah. The meaning of Written Torah is Oral Torah. Therefore Oral Torah belongs to a higher stratum than Written Torah, because it belongs to the second stage in this triple hierarchy, while Written Torah is the third stage. Okay, let’s go back for a moment. Among the medieval authorities (Rishonim) there is a dispute over the question of why the language of Scripture is called the holy tongue. Maimonides in Guide for the Perplexed, part three chapter eight, writes: “And I too have an argument and a reason why our language is called the holy tongue. And do not think that this is exaggeration on our part or an error—it is true. For in this holy tongue there was no original name at all for the sexual organ, neither of men nor of women, nor for the act itself that brings about procreation, nor for semen, nor for emission.” For all these things there was no original name at all in Hebrew; rather they speak of them with borrowed names and hints—yes, “relations,” they say “coming.” “Coming,” of course, is not really the proper term for sexual relations, right? These are parables and hints, metaphors. There is no word in Hebrew for this thing. And the intention was that these things are not fit to be mentioned with proper names assigned to them; it’s not modest, right? They are matters that ought to be kept silent about, and when necessity brings one to mention them, one should resort to euphemisms from other words, just as we hide ourselves when engaging in these matters whenever possible. Just as we need to conceal ourselves when dealing with these things, so too when talking about them one should speak in hints. There are no words for these things in the language, in the language of Scripture. Only through metaphors. That is why it is called the holy tongue, says Maimonides. Nachmanides and Raavad in Sefer Yetzirah, and the Kuzari, and several other medieval authorities (Rishonim) disagree with Maimonides, and they argue that it is called the holy tongue because the language of Scripture is fundamentally different from all other languages. All other languages, the claim is, are conventional. You can connect any word to any concept or object—it doesn’t matter, right? We call this a table; I could have called it “yekum purkan.” What difference does it make? The main thing is that we all know what we’re talking about. Fine? If I teach you from birth that this thing is called “yekum purkan,” then there is no problem; we’ll all call it “yekum purkan” and everything will be fine. Right? The relationship between signifier and signified in ordinary language is arbitrary. Kripke is a very well-known philosopher, a very well-known analytic philosopher; he’s an Orthodox Jew from the United States. He calls this “baptism.” It’s interesting that he’s an Orthodox Jew. He calls this connection between signifier and signified “baptism.” What does that mean? You baptize it, you connect the two things, and then the public declares that objects of this kind are called “table.” We agreed; it’s an agreement, a convention. Okay? The claim of these medieval authorities (Rishonim) is that in the holy tongue the connection between the signifying word and the signified is not arbitrary. There is an essential connection. It is called “table” because there is something in this t-a-b-l-e somehow connected to the essence of this object. It’s not just that we could have attached here any word we wanted. By the way, this is a distinction between—in ordinary language there is Bertrand Russell’s classic 1905 article, the same year Einstein published his three articles, the annus mirabilis. Bertrand Russell published the article considered perhaps the masterpiece of analytic philosophy, “On Denoting.” There he distinguishes between two kinds of denotation: when I refer to something I can refer to it by its name, and I can refer to it by a description of it—a name-based reference and a descriptive one. What does that mean? Say I can say David Ben-Gurion. That is a name everyone knows refers to a certain person, okay? “Bibi’s old man.” Another way to refer to the same person is to say “the first prime minister of the State of Israel.” That refers to the same person, but there is a logical difference between those two kinds of reference. David Ben-Gurion is a name; “the first prime minister of the State of Israel” is a description. What is the difference? A name could have been baptized with a different name and it would remain so forever; it wouldn’t change anything. It’s arbitrary. He could have been called Moshe son of Yankel, not David Ben-Gurion—or David Green exactly. In any case, that’s an arbitrary decision. But the description is not arbitrary. I couldn’t say, fine, then he’s the first prime minister of Canada. That’s not true. He is the first prime minister of the State of Israel. A description is bound to something; there is true and false in a description. It is not arbitrary. A name is arbitrary. Okay? The claim of these medieval authorities (Rishonim) is that in the holy tongue even names are not arbitrary. They are like descriptions. You can’t choose names as you please; otherwise it is an ordinary language. That also relates somewhat to the topic of substitute terms and handles at the beginning of Nedarim and the beginning of Nazir. In any case, these medieval authorities (Rishonim) basically understand—and I return to the Written Torah because that is our subject—that the Written Torah, its verbal formulation, is tied at the navel to the contents. There is no arbitrariness there in the use of particular words, because in the language of Scripture, which is the holy tongue, there is an essential connection between the words and what they signify. Any other description I give of the signified idea will not be precise; it won’t be exactly the description of the idea. Then I am describing some particular aspect that I see there or something like that, and therefore that belongs to the Oral Torah and not to the Written Torah. Now as I said, I return to the Megillah because I want to finish shortly. I showed here the difference between Written Torah and Oral Torah. Where does the Megillah stand in this whole business? So as I said at the beginning, first of all historically it stands between the Bible, Written Torah, and the era of the Oral Torah, the Second Temple. Also in terms of the laws of the Megillah, the Megillah stands in between Written Torah and Oral Torah. I already brought you the example, but let’s see it a little from the beginning. The Maharal, for example, says that “they fulfilled and accepted”—they fulfilled what they had already accepted. So there are various interpretations of that matter. The Maharal, for example, says that they accepted the Oral Torah. Not just a nice homiletic line, because Purim belongs to the Oral Torah; it is a festival instituted by the Sages, not a festival fixed by the Torah. Purim and Hanukkah are Oral Torah, right? It is rabbinic law. So in effect, what was renewed on Purim, what the Jewish people accepted on Purim, was the Oral Torah—it was the ability of the Sages to innovate Torah. Immediately after that came Shimon HaTzaddik, as I said, that words of Torah are attributed to a person, that he himself says something and that is called words of Torah. After that it says in the Talmud in tractate Megillah 7a: “Rav Shmuel bar Yehuda said: Esther sent to the Sages, ‘Establish me for generations.’ They sent to her: ‘You will stir up the jealousy of the nations against us.’ She sent to them: ‘I am already written in the chronicles of the kings of Media and Persia.’” Now she asks them for another thing, right? Esther wants this to enter the framework of the festivals of the Torah. Or in other words, that this become a Torah-level law. Fine? “Esther sent to the Sages, ‘Write me for generations.’” Now this is no longer about bringing Purim into the festivals, but bringing the Scroll of Esther into the biblical canon, yes? That it should become a book, a book that is part of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh). They sent to her: “‘Have I not written for you in three places’—in three places and not in four.” There is a mishnah there, a derivation from a verse that one cannot add, until they found a verse written in the Torah: “Write this for a memorial in a book.” “Write this”—what is written here and in Mishneh Torah; “for a memorial”—what is written in the Prophets; “in a book”—what is written in the Megillah. What does that mean? In the end they found some interpretive derivation, and that derivation allows them to bring the Scroll of Esther into the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh). First of all, the basis for this inclusion is a midrash. All the other books entered the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) because they are prophetic words, but Esther we know was said with divine inspiration, not with prophecy. Esther was said with divine inspiration. Therefore only a midrash brings it into the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh). What does it mean that a midrash brings it into the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)? You know Leibowitz always used to say that the Oral Torah determines what the Written Torah is. The Sages wanted to hide Ecclesiastes away; they debated whether to include Esther in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) or not. In other words, the Sages of the Oral Torah are the ones who determine what the Written Torah is. We usually perceive the opposite, as though there is Written Torah and then the Sages of the Oral Torah interpret it or expound it and so on. But no. What Written Torah is is determined by midrash. In other words, the Sages determine what Written Torah is. Oral Torah determines what Written Torah is. And it is not by chance that this happens with the Scroll of Esther, because the Scroll of Esther really is an intermediate stage, an intermediate link between Written Torah and Oral Torah. And therefore precisely there there is a midrash that brings it into Written Torah. But it does not bring it in completely. Esther asked, “Write me for generations,” and the Sages told her: partially. Not completely. And this is what I told you earlier: on the one hand, it really is considered a book and part of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), and there is holiness to the wording of the book. In that sense it is Written Torah. Every word must be heard in the reading; it is not enough to learn what was there, as we study Talmud. You don’t have to read the Talmud in order to fulfill an obligation. If you understand what is written there, you’ve studied Talmud, right? If you understand what is written in the Scroll of Esther, you have not read the Scroll of Esther. Reading the Scroll of Esther means reading the wording written in the scroll, because the Scroll of Esther belongs to the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), and that is Written Torah, where there is holiness to the words, to the formulation. But a full-fledged book it is not. Because the fact is that half of it may be missing. In no book may even one letter be missing. In the Scroll of Esther half may be missing. Half minus epsilon.

[Speaker B] And in the other scrolls, is it the same law?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. Only with the Scroll of Esther.

[Speaker B] So that somewhat takes it out of that category—so why do they call it a scroll and not—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no. Not because it’s called a scroll. I mean specifically the Scroll of Esther. For most of the other scrolls it doesn’t make much practical difference, because there is no law requiring you to read them, so what difference does it make whether it is erased or written? There is the Vilna Gaon who said that the scrolls should be read from a book, but in the plain understanding there is no law to read them from a book. The Talmud also says—well, I won’t get to everything now, but just this—the Talmud also says: the Scroll of Esther is called a book and is called a letter. What is the difference between a book and a letter? A letter—I receive a letter, read the content, and throw it in the trash. Right? A letter is a tool to convey information to me, to convey some content to me. A book—after I finish learning, I put it on the shelf. The book remains. The book is not only a medium for transmitting information. Fine? A letter is a medium for transmitting information. When you write down the Oral Torah, that does not turn the written thing into a book in the sense of the Written Torah. It is a letter. The Talmud is a letter. It is basically a book that conveys information to me; there is no holiness in the wording written there, and precisely because of that, in principle you could also throw it in the trash. It has no holiness that requires genizah, respectful storage or burial. Even though today people do not act that way. Why? Because the Talmud is ultimately just a letter. It is something that conveys content to me. It’s like—I don’t know—throwing ideas in the trash. I can’t, because that’s impossible, but there is no prohibition in that, okay? It is not an object of holiness, unlike a book of Written Torah. Okay? So that is exactly why the Scroll of Esther is called a book and is called a letter. The Talmud also says—and I won’t go into this now, in yeshivot they always deal with the issue of ruled lines, the law of ruled lines in Gittin and elsewhere—that the Scroll of Esther requires ruled lines like “the truth of Torah,” that’s what the Talmud says. “Words of peace and truth” teaches that the Megillah requires ruled lines like the truth of Torah. Rabbi Chaim already asks: what does “like the truth of Torah” mean? It requires ruled lines like a Torah scroll. What does “like the truth of Torah” mean? So Rabbi Chaim proves from here—ruled lines in a Torah scroll, by the way, there is a dispute whether one even needs to rule a Torah scroll, a dispute among the medieval authorities (Rishonim). But the ruled lines that are required—ruled lines meaning marking the lines when writing the script, so one has to mark the lines so it will be straight—ruled lines, says Rabbi Chaim, are a law in the content, not a law in the book. And therefore the Megillah requires ruled lines like the truth of Torah. Because the Megillah is not a book; the laws of a book do not apply to it. But ruled lines even in a Torah scroll are not from the laws of the book, because if they were from the laws of the book—as Tosafot already asks—if that were from the laws of the book, then by analogy between a Torah scroll and a Megillah, why didn’t they derive ruled lines, ink, gall-nut ink, and all the laws of a book from there? Why only ruled lines? Rabbi Chaim says they do not derive it from there because it is not one of the laws of the book. The laws of a book do not apply to the Megillah; what is learned from the Torah scroll is something else. Therefore ruled lines are not one of the laws of the book. Why does the Megillah require ruled lines? Because the content of the Megillah is Written Torah, the wording is binding, and ruled lines are a law in the content, but a book it is not. Fine? Therefore it is called a book and it is called a letter, and one could elaborate on this; there are many more practical ramifications of this matter, but okay, I’ll stop here.