Positivism in Halakha and in General, Lesson 7

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, a simulation. And it’s very expensive, very cumbersome, very large. Idan Segev in Jerusalem is enthusiastically involved in this, and on this issue others are skeptical—they claim it won’t help all that much—but that’s exactly the point: it touches the question of whether this thing will actually simulate a brain or not. That’s the question. Even if it turns out well and good, that itself I think is an important conclusion, because if it doesn’t simulate a brain, that too is a conclusion.

[Speaker E] But you could say that’s because they modeled it incorrectly for some reason.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, but that too is a conclusion—that this model is incorrect is also a conclusion. And overall, today there is also a way to model the brain.

[Speaker E] Meaning you’re saying, sort of, that the physicalist dichotomy is that the spiritual part of the person is also involved in thought, something like that?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Let’s say. Or even not. Or even that our neural network doesn’t actually work the way we imagine a neural network works. It could be there are some additional processes there that are infinite, I don’t know, physiological processes.

[Speaker E] Ours, that are statistical, that are infinite—there are all sorts of things there.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, today it depends how long it takes to do the computation, but in principle, in a finite network, if you have infinite time, you can do infinitely many computations. In the end it’s true that a person has a limited lifespan, so in the end everything will be finite, but the network in its essence could be an infinite network in nature. A kind of infinite network that you can’t make full use of.

[Speaker E] And just theoretically, over infinite time you could reach different conclusions. I didn’t understand what that has to do with anything.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s exactly what I’m saying, right. That’s why I’m saying that when something is finite, you also have to take the time axis into account. You can’t just say it has only a finite number of things it can do. In any case, okay—so the claim, basically, is that somehow we’re playing between the rules, between positivism and casuistry. I want to look at this maybe from another angle, kind of take two time-outs, and then I’ll come back one more time to loops and to logical thought a bit, and after that I’ll more or less wrap up this topic. The first time-out—I want to talk a little about, in a certain sense, an aggadic expression of this conception of the Torah, the non-positivist conception of the Torah, and that’s basically the view of the Torah as some sort of poetry. Right, after all it says in Deuteronomy—if you want, I brought pages here, this is one side; by the way it came out on draft paper, I printed it on two different pages, so look from the side: this is the second page and this is the first page, so they got switched.

[Speaker J] A fast algorithm for sorting pages. What? It’s a fast algorithm for sorting pages—you start from two ends and then…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, except then they get mixed up and you no longer know which page belongs where, especially since there are drafts on the back too. Okay. Basically, the distinction between—the part where people often hang the positivist and non-positivist poles of the Torah on the Written Torah and the Oral Torah. The Oral Torah, yes, “the words of the sages are like firmly planted nails,” as the Talmud in Chagigah says—it’s something living, something growing, something less fixed. The Written Torah is something very fixed—that’s how these things are usually described. I think that’s nonsense. The only thing fixed in the Written Torah is just the wording; beyond that, it says nothing. I mean, what does the Written Torah say? It says nothing until you give it interpretations, and its interpretations are the Oral Torah. There is almost nothing that the Written Torah says as long as you haven’t interpreted it.

[Speaker E] Because that’s the accepted interpretation. If it were possible to interpret it—if we started from the assumption that we understand it according to—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The plain meaning, then it would say things. The plain meaning—there would be a few things written in that plain sense, but that’s a negligible minority. Laws that the Sadducees agree with. Things the Sadducees agree with. Things the Sadducees agree with.

[Speaker E] Let’s say what was common. Let’s say what was shared. But it doesn’t have to be things the Sadducees agree with as against the rabbis. It should be everything shared by all the streams—the Karaites and the Sadducees that existed over the generations. Seems holy to me, assuming they knew each other. Seems holy to me.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not sure, not sure. In any case, relative to the Jewish law we have in hand, it’s completely negligible. Again, Torah-level Jewish law—and this is not rabbinic Jewish law. It’s clear that this is not unrelated to the Torah. Torah-level Jewish law—and it’s negligible.

[Speaker E] Rules of thumb—say, that there is a Sabbath in the Torah.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, but what does Sabbath say? That’s exactly the point. Those are terribly general statements. What does Sabbath say? So in any case, this is an expression of that tension between what is accepted and what blossoms. People hang it, as I said, on the Written Torah and the Oral Torah. I really don’t agree. It’s interesting because in this context—I spoke about this once—this is a page I once prepared for some class I gave before Purim. And about Purim my claim was that Purim is some sort of seam between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah, both historically and halakhically. Look at the Talmud in Megillah 7a: “Esther sent to the sages: ‘Write me down for the generations.’ They sent back to her: ‘Have I not written for you in three parts—three parts and not four?’ 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 Deuteronomy; ‘memorial’—what is written in the Prophets; ‘in a book’—what is written in the Megillah.” Okay? In any case, what is this “Esther sent to the sages, ‘Write me down for the generations’”? In what sense is that called “write me down for the generations”? What was she asking? There is the Written Torah and there is the Oral Torah. The Written Torah may and must be written, and the Oral Torah may not be written. The Talmud in Gittin says: “Matters that are written you are not permitted to recite orally, and matters that are oral you are not permitted to write.” I think I brought that Talmud here somewhere. In any case, the Talmud says there that matters that are written you are not permitted to say orally, and matters that are oral you are not permitted to write. Rabbi Yehudah bar Nachmani, the interpreter of Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish, taught: “It is written, ‘Write for yourself these words,’ and it is written, ‘For by the mouth of these words’—how can that be? Matters that are written you are not permitted to say orally; matters that are oral you are not permitted to say in writing.” The school of Rabbi Ishmael taught: “‘These’—these you may write, but you may not write laws.” Rashi says: matters that I told you in writing, you are not permitted to transmit to Israel orally; and matters that are oral, you are not permitted to write. From here you learn that the Talmud was not meant to be written, except because the Torah was being forgotten. Right, “it is a time to act for the Lord—they have violated Your Torah,” that Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi decided to write the Mishnah because they were about to forget it. But how do you understand this principle that it is forbidden to write the Oral Torah and forbidden to say orally the Written Torah? I began with Esther’s “write me down for the generations.” Esther is basically asking to be attached to the Written Torah. That’s why she says “write me down for the generations”—in other words, make me too part of the Written Torah; write the Scroll of Esther; put it into the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh). That’s the meaning—that it should not be Oral Torah, it should be Written Torah. And if you look at it historically, Esther stands on the seam between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah, right? The end of the exile of the First Temple, the beginning of the Second Temple, which is exactly the end of the era of the Written Torah, the end of the era of the Hebrew Bible. The last prophets still sat in the Great Assembly, but that was the end, the end of the road, and then the era of the Oral Torah began. So Esther also historically stands on the seam between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah, and therefore Esther is basically trying to hold on for dear life and say, “Write me down for the generations,” meaning, leave me there—I still belong to the Written Torah. And then the sages answer her—yes, no, there are all sorts of hesitations, but we’ll get to those hesitations in a moment. First let me continue this introduction for a moment. So regarding the Written Torah and the Oral Torah, there are two rules: matters that are written you are not permitted to say orally, and matters that are oral you are not permitted to write. Now, matters that are written you are not permitted to say orally—Rashi told us why—no, sorry, not Rashi, Rashi said the opposite. Rather, matters that are written you are not permitted to say orally—that’s so you won’t get confused. How do I know that? Look at the Tur, Orach Chaim, siman 49: regarding reciting the passage of the daily offering orally, and similarly Pesukei DeZimra, even though we maintain that matters that are written you are not permitted to say orally, my uncle Rabbi Chaim wrote—yes, the brother of the Rosh—that anything commonly and fluently known by everyone is not included in “matters that are written you are not permitted to say orally.” Why? Because there is no concern that he’ll get confused. Meaning, he understands that the reason matters that are written are not said orally is so that you won’t make a mistake—read from the written text. My father, the Rosh of blessed memory, used to say that we only say “matters that are written you are not permitted to say orally” when doing so in order to discharge others of their obligation, but for each person privately it is permitted. And therefore the practice in Ashkenaz is that when the prayer leader reaches verses in the prayer, such as “Who is like You among the mighty, O Lord” and “The Lord shall reign forever and ever,” he and the congregation each say it individually. Okay, so there’s a dispute here about verses in prayer—whether you’re allowed to say them orally or need to say them from the siddur. So he says that things known by everyone you can also say orally, even though they are verses, despite “matters that are written you are not permitted to say orally,” because here there is no concern that you’ll get confused. Meaning, he takes the reason for not saying orally matters that are written to be the fear of confusion. According to that, it of course raises all the more sharply the question: then why don’t you write matters that are oral? The opposite rule. And that sounds more logical—matters that are oral will be forgotten; on the contrary, write them down and then they won’t be forgotten, wonderful. So indeed Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi, because he saw that the matters were about to be forgotten, made an enactment under “it is a time to act for the Lord” and decided to write it. But why was it forbidden to write it in the first place? What’s wrong with that? The accepted explanation for this—I don’t remember, Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner discusses it as far as I recall, I don’t remember that he invented it, this is the accepted explanation—you don’t write matters that are oral so as not to freeze them. Meaning, once we write matters that are oral, the Oral Torah turns into another kind of Written Torah, basically something binding that you can’t depart from, can’t interpret, that is no longer in our hands. Now again, even this has to be understood, because after all we also interpret the Written Torah and there are major disputes among commentators over verses and so on, and it’s written down. So what’s the problem? Writing doesn’t prevent argument and interpretation and so on. It turns out that nevertheless, in a certain sense, yes. The fact is that today, when so many things are written, people really do allow themselves less to disagree with what is written. I mean, it’s already written. Once it’s written, that obligates. There is still room for different interpretations both in the Talmud and among the medieval authorities (Rishonim) and the later authorities (Acharonim), but the more the matters are written down—and every written thing for us is sacred—the more it prevents the possibility of the Oral Torah developing. And therefore writing it was forbidden—that is the claim.

[Speaker D] There’s disagreement about what is written, not only within what is written. What? About the Oral Torah we disagree about what is written—we don’t disagree with it. The Written Torah, sorry. If the Oral Torah had been written, then we too would disagree just as in the Talmud—we disagree about what is written in the Talmud, not about the Talmud itself as a body.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We don’t disagree with the Talmud; rather, we disagree about what the Talmud says. We disagree among ourselves about what the Talmud says.

[Speaker D] And there’s a difference. The Written Torah—once something is written, it’s harder to dispute it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, but today we dispute neither the Talmud nor the Torah. Not disputing the Torah—once you can interpret it the way you do, there isn’t so much meaning to disputing the Torah. I mean, that’s almost no limitation. But in the Talmud it’s more of a limitation. The fact that with the Talmud we can play less—there are still degrees of freedom—brings us back to what I discussed earlier about this tension between the rules, the framework, and my sense that in a certain place it is not right to operate with the rules. So from this perspective too, the Talmud is some sort of collection of rules. There are rules written there, but not necessarily—it is still some sort of collection of rules where you are constantly deliberating how far to go with what is written there, or whether in certain cases you understand that it is not correct to work that way and that the Talmud itself did not mean that—not to dispute the Talmud, but that the Talmud itself did not actually intend for us to apply the things to the case before us. In any case, the claim is that there is here a certain character that cannot be closed. Because if the sages’ conception of Jewish law was positivist—or of Torah, it doesn’t matter—then there would have been no problem at all writing the Oral Torah. What’s the issue? On the contrary, write it down: there will be a set of rules, everything will be precise, nothing will be forgotten, everything organized. Rather, it was clear that if you write it, you will ruin the system. Why? Because once you write it, you’ll have some kind of set of obligatory rules or obligatory examples or whatever we want to call them, and that will fix us in place. And so what if it fixes us in place? Isn’t that what the sages want—that we do what they say? Right, but what we think they say is not necessarily what they said. So when the sages do not want to freeze things, it is because they think that even what they themselves are saying cannot be formulated in the form of such a set of rules. They cannot convey the matter to us in that form—we will err if they give it to us in the form of rules. And we already talked about those examples from the beginning of Bava Kamma there, “the common denominator,” “one may not derive from general rules,” and things like that. Meaning, the sages have rather limited trust in rules. The sages prefer the give-and-take, cases, to give me some mode of thought, some way of looking, and trust that I will apply it correctly. I think that is closer to their conception. So if that is the difference between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah—the fixed thing as opposed to the thing meant to develop, to be dynamic—then it is all the more clear, and I return to Esther, that Esther asks, “Write me down for the generations”; she means, put the Scroll of Esther into the Written Torah. Put it into the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh). I don’t want this to be Oral Torah, I don’t want this already to belong to the Second Temple.

[Speaker E] Part of the Writings—basically to be part of the Written Torah.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. Written Torah means written Torah. And when the sages, by the way, answer her, they say, “Have I not written for you in three parts—three parts and not four.” They did not want to write it. They wanted to leave it as Oral Torah. Until they found a verse written in the Torah, “Write this for a memorial in a book,” they found some exposition and so on, and ostensibly they acceded to her. But the truth is they didn’t really accede to her. Why? Here, in order—but look at the Talmud in Megillah 19a. Do you have it? It’s already on the second page, yes. So the Talmud says as follows: Rabbi Chelbo said that Rav Chama bar Gurya said that Rav said: “The Megillah is called a book and is called a letter. It is called a book, in that if one sewed it with linen thread it is invalid. And it is called a letter, in that if one inserted into it three sinew stitches it is valid.” Rav Nachman said: provided they are evenly distributed. So basically, the laws of the scroll, of the book of the Megillah, are laws not entirely identical to the laws of a book. There are things in which it resembles the laws of a book and things in which it does not. Thus Maimonides, for example, writes in the Laws of Megillah—look at the next source: “The Megillah requires sewing so that all its sheets become one scroll, and it is sewn only with sinews, like a Torah scroll. And if one sewed it with something other than sinews, it is invalid. But it is not necessary to sew the entire sheet with sinews as with a Torah scroll; rather, even if one sewed with sinews three stitches at one end of the sheet and three in the middle and three at the other end, it is valid, because it is called a letter: ‘all the words of this letter,’ as it says in the Megillah. And the Megillah is called a letter.” What does “letter” mean? A letter, as opposed to a book. What is the difference between a letter and a book? A letter is something I write to someone; he reads it and when he finishes reading he throws it in the trash, right? A book I put on the shelf. A book remains permanently. I go back to it all the time. A book is not something that just conveys information and then you throw it out. Therefore, a letter is Oral Torah. I need to convey something to someone, so I write it and send it to him. But the writing is not in order to turn it into Written Torah; it is simply in order that it cross the distance from me to him. And that’s all—it’s only a medium. Like a telephone. If I say it over the phone, that doesn’t make it Written Torah. A letter was the telephone of those days—they didn’t have telephones. Okay? Therefore a letter is something I read and throw away. So the Scroll of Esther is called a book and is called a letter. And “is called a book and is called a letter” has two meanings. It is called a book and is called a letter, but also “is read”—when it is read, it is read as a book and read as a letter.

[Speaker D] I’d comment on that.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So you see here that it has some sort of intermediate status. Meaning, Esther sent, “Write me down for the generations”; she wanted it to be Written Torah. The sages did not fully comply. Rather, in some ways it would be like a book, and in some ways it would be like a letter. In other words, it’s some sort of in-between state, an intermediate state.

[Speaker L] And nevertheless it’s inside the Hebrew Bible. Yes, right.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In the end they found—the Talmud says—they found a written verse and expounded it and inserted it into the Hebrew Bible, but they left in it dimensions of Oral Torah. In other words, it is some sort of intermediate state between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah. Another example of such a law: missing words, for example, do not invalidate the Megillah. In a Megillah you can have fifty-plus-epsilon percent of the text and the Megillah is valid. We have no such thing in any laws of a book; with a Torah scroll there’s nothing like that. Any missing letter, any corruption invalidates the scroll. Why? On the other hand, when one reads the Megillah one has to be just as exact as when reading from a Torah scroll; you have to be fully exact. Hear every word, be fully exact. But the Megillah itself can be written only partially. So how are we to understand that? The claim is that the content of the Megillah is Torah, but the Megillah itself is not a book, or not entirely a book. Now also understand the idea here. Why establish such a law? It’s strange. If you’re already saying to write the Megillah, then write a proper book. Why should fifty percent of the letters or words be missing? Why validate such a thing? What logic is there in that? Clearly they established it deliberately. It is a law stated in order to show us that the Scroll of Esther is not a book, or not entirely a book. You write it on parchment, with sinews, everything, but not entirely. Fifty percent may be missing. But to hear it, you must hear all of it. The text itself is a text of Torah, but the bookness in it—that is Oral Torah, it doesn’t have to be a book. So the book element in it is not entirely a book: a little book, a little letter.

[Speaker K] And in all the other scrolls?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In all the other scrolls, that’s a question whether they have any such laws at all, because what is there in the other scrolls?

[Speaker K] Aren’t they part of the twenty-four books?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No—well, yes—but their reading, when you read them in public, what kind of reading is there for Lamentations? It’s not a formal reading, it’s a custom.

[Speaker K] For example the Scroll of Ruth—it’s true that it’s in a scroll, it’s a custom.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning, I think the law of Megillah applies mainly to the Scroll of Esther.

[Speaker D] Sephardim don’t—

[Speaker K] read—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] with a blessing?

[Speaker D] Sephardim don’t read?

[Speaker K] No, they do read. If you read it from a scroll of—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] parchment—the Vilna Gaon’s view is that all of them should be read from a scroll, and then one also recites a blessing, but okay, that’s custom. Only the Scroll of Esther is the one scroll that is really law, that has laws of a book, and the practical implication is that otherwise you do not fulfill your obligation. All the others—whether they are a book or not, the implication is for burial of sacred texts, I don’t know.

[Speaker I] But if you didn’t hear one letter, or one word, that applies only to the Scroll of Esther.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, not in Ruth, not in Lamentations, nowhere. There is no such law of reading. So that’s another example. The Megillah may be read in any language, for example. It can be in any language—you can translate the Megillah into English and read it in English and you fulfill your obligation. The Megillah may be read in any language. So again, why? Because it is not the wording that is sacred but the content that is sacred. The Hebrew wording, the holy tongue, is not what is sacred; rather, if you translate this content, the holiness is the holiness of the content. Now that is the difference between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah. In the Oral Torah, the holiness is the holiness of the content. Meaning, the laws themselves, the content of the Oral Torah, is what is holy. The book itself—the Talmud is not a sacred book.

[Speaker G] It doesn’t even require burial of sacred texts.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why can the Shema be translated?

[Speaker G] Because you’re saying, as it were, that it’s the holiness of the wording.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Written Torah—but the Shema is not a Torah reading. The Shema is the unification of God’s name, acceptance of the yoke of the kingdom of Heaven. You can accept the yoke of the kingdom of Heaven in English—what difference does it make? The main thing is that you accept the yoke of the kingdom of Heaven. Torah reading is reading the Torah. So it is read in any language. And another thing: in the Megillah there is a special derivation that it requires ruled lines, the Megillah. The Talmud in Gittin 6b—yes, there is a Talmud that says there, “‘And when she came before the king, he said with the book’—some say, his evil thought, and so on. It should have said, ‘she said’—that should refer to Esther. Rabbi Yochanan said: He told her, what is written in the book should be said orally. ‘Words of peace and truth’—Rabbi Tanchum, and some say Rabbi Assi, said: this teaches that it requires ruled lines like the truth of the Torah.” The Scroll of Esther requires ruled lines like the truth of the Torah, like a Torah scroll. Okay? So here first of all we need a derivation from a verse to teach that the Scroll of Esther needs ruled lines like a Torah scroll. That’s not trivial. Again you see that the laws of a book are not automatically said of the Scroll of Esther—for every point you need a source. In principle, that would not necessarily have been the law for the Scroll of Esther. More than that: Rabbi Chaim and the rabbi of Brisk—in the yeshivot they deal a lot with this law of ruled lines, a favorite topic in the yeshivot. Rabbi Chaim and the rabbi of Brisk and his son wrote a similar principle: what does it mean, “it requires ruled lines like the truth of the Torah”? It requires ruled lines like a Torah scroll. What does “like the truth of the Torah” mean? The claim is that ruled lines are a law in the content and not a law in the book. One can bring all sorts of proofs for this, contradictions between sugiyot on the law of ruled lines—I’m not getting into all the details now—but ruled lines are a law in the content. To give some kind of honor to the content, that it should be straight—you draw ruled lines in order to write it—and it is not a law in the book, contrary to what we would usually say. And that is what Rabbi Chaim infers from the language of the Talmud here, that it requires ruled lines “like the truth of the Torah”—the truth written within the Torah, the content of the Torah, not like a Torah scroll. And that has various implications, which I’m not entering into now. But again we see here that the Scroll of Esther in essence is more about the content being Torah than about the book itself—in other words, Oral Torah rather than Written Torah. Likewise in Megillah 7, the Talmud there debates whether the Scroll of Esther renders the hands impure. You know, in Talmudic jargon, when they want to say that something is a sacred book, they say that it renders the hands impure. That is the halakhic implication of the fact that it is a sacred book—that it renders the hands impure. So they don’t say, this thing is holy and this thing is not holy; they say, this thing renders the hands impure and this thing does not render the hands impure. That is a rabbinic law, lest they place them near mice and so on; it doesn’t matter, there are various rabbinic reasons why they decreed that it renders the hands impure. But the Talmud there debates whether Esther renders them impure. “Is that to say that Shmuel holds: Esther was not said with divine inspiration?” Meaning, it does not render the hands impure and it is not a sacred book, in other words, so apparently he holds it was not said with divine inspiration. Esther—because if it was with divine inspiration, it is one of the books of the Hebrew Bible, it ought to render the hands impure. So it says: “But didn’t Shmuel say”—the same Shmuel, yes?—“Esther was said with divine inspiration.” Meaning, it was said to be read, but it was not said to be written. What is that? The wording was said, but the writing of it… that is Oral Torah. The writing of it in a book was not said from Heaven to be required. So the fact that the wording is sacred because it was said with divine inspiration—that is true. But for the book to receive holiness, for the book itself to be an object of holiness—the Talmud too is sacred wording, sacred content, but the book in which that content is written is not an object of holiness. So in that sense the Scroll of Esther is like the Talmud. Meaning, the wording written there is sacred wording, said with divine inspiration, but the book does not render the hands impure. So in all these places you basically see that the Scroll of Esther stands somewhere in between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah. So this is true both historically—end of the exile of the First Temple, beginning of the Second Temple, which is the end of the Written Torah and the beginning of the Oral Torah—and halakhically we also see expression of this point, that although Esther asks, “Write me down for the generations,” she was not answered fully; they did not fully agree to her request. So they wrote—but a letter, a book, something like that, something in the middle. And it seems to me that one can… well, that’s a topic in itself, but it seems to me that you can see this—I think it also appears on your pages, right? There in the responsa of Maharam Mintz. Do you have it?

[Speaker G] It appears, right?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And in the responsa of Maharam Mintz—we know that on Purim there are all kinds of very strange laws. That one may, for example, dress up with rabbinically prohibited mixed fibers. One may wear rabbinically prohibited mixed fibers. Or young men who caused damage in the joy of Purim are exempt. As there it’s apparently in any celebration—if one caused damage out of joy, that’s a Talmud in Bava Kamma—but it somehow appears as a law relevant to Purim. So look: “It is furthermore found in a responsum written by Rabbeinu Tuvia in the name of the Rivah that any food which the young men snatch because of Purim joy, even without permission, from the time of the reading of the Megillah until the end of the Purim meal, which are two nights and one day, does not involve theft, and they are not to be summoned to a religious court for this. Provided they do not act improperly according to the city leaders”—meaning, set some rules, so that a person won’t steal his fellow’s whole house under the claim that on Purim there is no theft. But under some sort of supervision, you can steal on Purim. A pretty far-reaching statement. “Thus he wrote that during the stated time it does not count as theft, but before and afterward it does count as theft and one violates ‘you shall not steal.’ In any event, at its proper time, because of the joy of Purim it is not called theft, since he does not act with intent to steal and profit, but rather because of Purim joy.” A kind of “unintentional act,” “an act not needed for its own sake” in theft—what kind of reasoning is that? “So too in our case it is no different, since his intent is not for sexual immorality but for Purim joy”—there he is discussing men’s apparel, whether a woman may disguise herself in men’s clothing. There is a Torah prohibition: “A man’s apparel shall not be on a woman.” So he says: “So too in our matter, since his intent is not for sexual immorality but for Purim joy, and just as they did not make a fence there regarding theft since it applies only for two nights and one day, the same is true here, for theft and sexual prohibitions have one inclination. And there is no need to lengthen this exposition, since my father, my teacher, a man after my own heart, of the tribe of Levi, already explained it.” Probably his father, I don’t know. But his claim is that just as—

[Speaker K] On a festival there is joy by Torah law, so is stealing also permitted there? What? Here, for Purim joy, he permits theft… on Sukkot?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. I haven’t seen such a thing.

[Speaker K] So for Purim joy he permits theft…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, that’s the question, that’s the question. Where do we find that rabbinically prohibited mixed fibers, or men’s apparel on a woman, can be worn? A Torah prohibition even of men’s apparel on a woman. He says they don’t intend it, so maybe it’s only a rabbinic prohibition, and here they didn’t establish the fence. There are some, by the way, who say that even a Torah prohibition may really be transgressed. What is the meaning of this? Right, the Bach objects to him.

[Speaker E] Could it be that there are those who hold that any Torah prohibition that people observe in some place…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I don’t think I’ve seen a formulation of every Torah prohibition, but costumes or things customarily done, that are commonly bound up with a prohibition—there are those who permitted them. Here, look at the Bach: “And one should take note of the practice on Purim to switch clothing from man to woman and from woman to man, and no one protests. And according to what I wrote, in matters made for adornment and beautification it is forbidden according to everyone to intend to resemble, and Rema…” Mintz, yes, that’s what we just read, “responded to this as explained in his responsum, saying that since he does it not for that purpose but only for Purim joy, there is no prohibition in it, and it is comparable to removing underarm or pubic hair in order not to suffer”—where you’re doing it for other purposes. “And it seems in my humble opinion that his words here are rejected, from what Mahari Mintz wrote…” this is the Yerayim, “explicitly, that even at wedding feasts there is a prohibition.” Why? “For even what one does for the joy of a commandment is not comparable to one who does it to avoid suffering.” In short, he has all sorts of objections to this, to changing clothing on Purim and so on; he continues with all the objections. In short, it doesn’t fit the categories of Jewish law in the simple understanding. I mean, you saw the Rema there after the Bach—he brings it as practical law: “And regarding the practice to wear masks on Purim, and that a man wears a woman’s garment and a woman a man’s apparel, there is no prohibition in the matter, since they intend only for mere joy. And similarly with rabbinically prohibited mixed fibers. And some say it is forbidden, but the custom follows the first opinion. Likewise, people who snatch from one another by way of joy, there is no issue of ‘you shall not steal’ in this. And this is the custom, provided they do not do anything improper.” Yes, this is Maharam Mintz—he brings it as practical law. In Yabia Omer too, Rabbi Ovadia goes into this at length. In any case, what is the meaning of this? I think there is something here beyond the discussion of whether doing something for another reason—because of joy and not with sinful intent—this by itself doesn’t permit it, certainly not at the rabbinic level. So why did they permit it? Because on Purim there is something about transgressing prohibitions that matters, in my opinion. That’s what stands behind these permissions. Now they don’t want to go overboard, so they say rabbinic prohibitions, masks, rabbinic, lack of intent, all kinds of things of that sort. But basically the claim is that one somehow needs to break the rules a little on Purim, to commit prohibitions. “A person is obligated to become intoxicated on Purim until he cannot distinguish between ‘cursed is Haman’ and ‘blessed is Mordechai,’” and everyone asks about that: what on earth? Where do we find such a thing—to get drunk? And again, insofar as there is an actual prohibition in this, only in a case where one is a decisor of Jewish law or serving in the Temple is it truly forbidden, but just getting drunk? Many halakhic authorities treat it almost as a real prohibition—not to lose your reason. And where do we find such a thing? The claim is that on Purim there is some sort of idea of breaking rules. And I think that fits with what we’ve seen until now, that Purim is something in the middle between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah, between what is accepted and what is developing, dynamic. And therefore all the festivals will be annulled except for Purim, which will remain in the future to come, because Purim is not within the framework of the rules. The Scroll of Esther remains in the future to come, although all the books are annulled, because the Scroll of Esther is not really a book. Purim remains in the future to come because it is not really a festival. In other words, these are things that are like those things, but not exactly. So it’s not really a book and it’s not really a holiday. So what is it? It’s some sort of thing that works according to the rules of a book and the rules of a holiday, but not exactly, with exceptions. And those exceptions are not accidental, in my view. They established exceptions only in order to tell you that it’s not that. Because there is something in Purim—I think one of the themes, at least—is to get out of this way of thinking that everything works according to rules, positivist thinking. And therefore there is some value in breaking rules, even though rules are blessed, halakhic rules, rules from which one is not supposed to depart. But on Purim we are supposed to live, for one day, in the broader consciousness that the rules too are only some sort of framework; they are not the essence. They are not the essence, they are some approximation, and therefore in the future to come all these rules too will be annulled, because they are not really essential. In the future to come there will be no need for them. Right now there is, because we have no choice; we work with these rules. But they are not essential. So on Purim we live for one day a year what will remain in the future to come. And therefore I think that in some of the halakhic authorities it is written that the custom is to wear on Purim masks involving a woman’s apparel on a man and rabbinically prohibited mixed fibers—not that the custom was to permit them. The custom was to do it, even if it’s rabbinically prohibited mixed fibers or even if it’s men’s apparel on a woman. Not that if it turns out to be that they had a custom to permit it, but rather the custom was to wear a prohibition on Purim, specifically to wear a prohibition—not that someone who wears a prohibition hasn’t committed a transgression; the custom was to permit it if you want, but there is an idea, that’s how it sounds in some of the authorities, that the custom was to do this, not merely that the custom was not to forbid, but the custom was to do it. And why? Because I think there is some idea here of breaking these rules, this positivist thing. So that was briefly on Purim. I still want to finish this today, this first time-out. So look—go back to the first page. I think that in the end the way one can see this in aggadic terms—I began by saying that one can also see it from the perspective of aggadah—is why the Torah is called poetry. Look at the verses in Deuteronomy: “And now write for yourselves this song, and teach it to the children of Israel; put it in their mouths… so that this song may be for Me a witness among the children of Israel.” And it’s all “song.” Who is this song? Obviously this is the Song of Ha’azinu, right? It’s in the context of the Song of Ha’azinu. And then: “For I shall bring him to the land that I swore to his fathers…” and so on, “and he will turn to other gods and serve them and provoke Me and break My covenant. And it shall be, when many evils and troubles befall him, that this song shall answer before him as a witness, for it shall not be forgotten from the mouth of his offspring.” So far, it’s all Ha’azinu. From here they derive that this is not the Torah scroll. “And Moses wrote this song on that day and taught it to the children of Israel.” Fine, so far it’s all Ha’azinu. “And it was, when Moses finished writing the words of this Torah in a book, until their completion…” What’s that?

[Speaker J] You could say that also means Ha’azinu.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do the words of the Torah mean when they refer to this part of the Torah—why don’t they call it “the song”? After all, all along they called it “the song,” so why here don’t they call it “the song”? That’s the first hint that here it’s not clear whether “the song” means the Song of Ha’azinu, or maybe it means the entire Torah. “And Moses commanded: Take this book of the Torah.” Again, here are all the phrases I emphasized: “Take this book of the Torah and place it at the side of the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord your God, and it shall be there for you as a witness,” “that it shall not be forgotten from the mouth of his offspring”—what is written above is “this book of the Torah”; it’s not Ha’azinu, it’s the whole Torah. And then, in the end, how does it conclude? “And Moses spoke in the ears of all the congregation of Israel the words of this song until they were completed.” Again: “song.” So did we go back to Ha’azinu? Or not? Or is he saying the words of the Torah, he finishes the book of Deuteronomy in full, and the “song” written here means the Torah?

Now in fact, as you already mentioned, the Sages really do derive from these verses the obligation to write a Torah scroll—that every person must write a Torah scroll for himself—from “Write for yourselves this song.” It says “song.” There are two approaches here. The famous and well-known approach on this issue says that the entire Torah is a song, and therefore “write for yourselves this song” means the Torah, and I think there is a hint to that in these transitions between the term “song” and the term “Torah” and back again. The Torah itself is hinting to us here that when it says “song,” it means the Torah.

And there’s a second approach, an interesting one—we won’t go into it here—but it wants to argue that really one needs to write the Song of Ha’azinu, not the Torah. But one may not write the Torah section by section; there is a prohibition against writing one section alone from the Torah—you have to write a complete scroll. So we write the whole Torah. Really, one should have written the Song of Ha’azinu, but you can’t write a section by itself, so you write the whole thing. So according to that, there actually is no commandment to write the whole Torah; there is a commandment to write Ha’azinu, and the only way—of course the question then arises: so why mezuzot? Why tefillin? There too we write sections from the Torah, and that is section by section. So why? Likewise here, if it says to write Ha’azinu, how is that different from a commandment to write the mezuzah passages? The Torah commanded us to write Ha’azinu. That’s a big question; never mind, I don’t have a good answer to it. But for our purposes, even if he is right, still in the end the Torah itself took that into account even when it said this, right? According to his view. So the Torah said to write Ha’azinu, but it knew that you can’t write section by section, and that we would have to write the whole Torah. So in the end it could be that even this way, the Torah wanted us to write the whole Torah. So it doesn’t matter how you derive it, because in the end it made that calculation and understood that this is what would come out, so maybe even this way the commandment is to write the whole Torah.

But for our purposes, what this basically means is that not for nothing—and if it wanted us to write the whole Torah, then why does it command us to write “the song”? Let it just tell me to write the Torah. So once again we arrive at the point that the “song” written here is actually the Torah. Meaning, the fact that the Torah is called a song—why really? Why is that so? I think the reason is that we once discussed the question of what poetry is. I wrote a whole series about it on the site. Briefly, I’ll say that unlike prose, where the content passes through the straightforward meaning of the words, in poetry the content passes through the words, not by means of the words. Meaning, the meaning of the poem—“there was a lone lamp at the edge of the neighborhood”—is not really meant to describe for you a lone lamp standing at the edge of a neighborhood. Rather, it uses words to convey some atmosphere to you, some mood, I don’t know, something much more abstract. In general, you could use other words too to convey the same message.

I once talked about that fellow who went to Japan to study Zen—I told you that once, didn’t I? He said: you can learn this way, and you learn the same thing whether you do it through fencing, flower arranging, or I don’t know what, archery—bow and arrow. In every case you learn the same thing. So here too the claim is that the Torah is similar to poetry in this sense as well: in Torah too, it’s a mistake to think that the message is conveyed through the words in a literal way, through the meaning of the words. Rather, the Oral Torah actually envelops the words, and ultimately the message is found there. The words are only the furniture from which the Oral Torah grows. There’s an interesting halakhic expression for this idea—look at the Talmud in tractate Sabbath, in the chapter “All the Sacred Writings.”

You see? Sabbath 116. “They raised a dilemma before them: the margins of a Torah scroll—does one save them from a fire, or does one not save them from a fire?” The margins, yes, the parchment. “Come and hear: a Torah scroll that became erased—if there remains in it enough to gather eighty-five letters, such as the section ‘And it came to pass when the Ark traveled,’ one saves it. And if not, one does not save it.” A Torah scroll that became erased. “And why? Let this follow from its margin.” Why don’t we save it if it does not contain eighty-five letters? After all, the margin itself should still have to be saved, regardless of how many letters are on it. The Gemara says: “The place of the writing is not what I am asking about, because when it is sacred, it is sacred by virtue of the writing; once the writing is gone, its sanctity is gone. What I am asking about is what is above and below, between one section and another, between one page and another, at the beginning of the scroll, and at the end of the scroll.”

What does that mean? I’m talking about the part where there had been writing and it was erased. Its sanctity is only for the sake of the writing that would be written on it. The question raised above—whether one saves the margins from a fire—again, the question is whether they are sacred; that’s what it means. It’s like “they render the hands impure.” So when I ask whether the margins are saved from a fire, I’m not talking about what lies underneath the writing, but about what surrounds the writing. Why? Because what is underneath the writing is sanctified for the sake of the writing; once the writing is gone, its sanctity is gone. But the margins around it are not sanctified for the sake of the writing, because there is no writing on them. Therefore there, even if the writing is gone, their sanctity remains in place.

And that is a very strange thing. What sanctity do margins have? Weren’t they prepared only so that we would be able to write? Like the hole in a bagel. The sanctity of the bagel hole. I mean, why do you need the hole? Because there’s a bagel around it. In other words, the margins of the Torah scroll are also part of the way we write the text. Without them there would be no scroll. But from the Gemara it seems not. There is sanctity to the margins themselves—between line and line and around the lines—they have sanctity in and of themselves.

[Speaker E] It’s not just any margins; it’s specifically the margins of sacred writings.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The idea is that they constitute a certain kind of writing—you have to write the empty lines. Yes, but those empty lines have sanctity not for the sake of the writing; even when the writing has been erased, their sanctity remains in force, unlike the parchment on which one writes—where, if the words are erased, the sanctity is nullified.

[Speaker E] Yes, but I’m saying it’s not that the margins have sanctity in and of themselves, but rather the working assumption—or this initial thought—is that the empty lines that are written, that remain within the Torah, are part of the text, just as you have a space between two letters.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, exactly—what does that mean? But there’s no text there. What does that mean? So here the homiletic interpreters explain it. They say that there is really something here—this is aggadic, in an aggadic mode—the claim is that this is the Oral Torah. What lies between the lines. What we would say in modern Hebrew: what lies between the lines has sanctity in its own right. Not only the lines themselves; those are just the framework. Around them all kinds of things grow, within the spaces that we do not see—and that is actually the Oral Torah. And the sanctity of the margin reflects the Oral Torah, and the Oral Torah has sanctity that is not connected to the book. And if the book is not written, that doesn’t matter, like we discussed with “a letter is called a letter even when it is read.”

Therefore the claim that the Torah is called a song means that what is written is merely a means to generate everything around it, the Oral Torah. That is why it is called a song. And if I go back to the question of positivism, this basically means that the rules or principles that are written explicitly are only an initial infrastructure. In the end, you can’t see the whole picture in them—not in them, and not in what follows from them. Rather, these are some sort of expansions or generalizations, or I’m not exactly sure what to call it, but not things that are simply the straightforward application of the rules. That’s why I said: the Written Torah reflects the fixed, the positivistic; the Oral Torah reflects what lies beyond that. So perhaps the sanctity of the margins is some expression of this idea. And if I see a text as poetry and not as prose, then of course that means that the Oral Torah is its main element. And regarding the Written Torah, there is the Gemara here—I didn’t get to read it—that the covenant with the Jewish people was made only on the basis of the Oral Torah, the Gemara in Gittin there that we mentioned earlier.

Okay, I’ll stop here. This was just a kind of overview—I didn’t really proceed in a fully halakhic way on this issue. All right. Thank you very much.