The Voice of Prophecy, Lesson 8

Table of Contents

• [0:20] The ancient parable and the nature of short sayings
• [2:29] Two ways of conveying an idea: systematic and aphoristic
• [3:54] A fundamental difference between hearing and seeing in learning
• [6:51] Television versus radio: the media experience
• [12:16] Literature versus philosophy: conveying an idea
• [16:16] The difficulty of defining dynamic concepts
• [19:14] The written Torah versus the heard Torah
• [26:48] Is the loaf forbidden, or do I forbid it upon myself
• [28:08] The aphoristic form in the Talmud and its implications
• [29:31] The technical division of Jewish laws for halakhic purposes
• [36:06] Black fire on white fire – the meaning of Torah
• [37:45] The intentional messiness of the Talmud – messages and connections
• [40:36] Copernicus and coordinate systems – changing perspective
• [52:50] Openness to hearing different opinions
• [54:05] Three sayings for understanding the laws of vows
• [55:47] The intention goes beyond the laws of vows

Summary

General Overview

The text presents the “ancient parable” as a short, obscure, compressed statement that does not lay out the idea in full and does not connect it to premises and logical consequences, but instead prompts the understanding person to complete the understanding “from his own knowledge and heart.” It argues that this is the pattern of Hebrew wisdom: there is no orderly deductive or inductive method, but rather scattered outlines, “there is no earlier and later in the Torah,” “there is no order in the Mishnah,” and “words of Torah are poor in one place and rich in another,” and therefore its subjects too are covered over and hinted at through parables. In contrast stands Western science and Greek logic, identified with sight, order, and system, while the text argues that the ancient sages are “hearers” of moral teaching and higher wisdom, with hearing understood as a more active and inward process. On the basis of this distinction, it also explains the difference between conveying ideas in a direct, philosophical way and by a literary, parabolic route, and builds the claim that the very lack of order and dispersal in the Talmud and the Torah are not stupidity or primitiveness, but are connected to the way certain messages are conveyed, sometimes without the possibility of full definition, while emphasizing the role of action and lived practice in understanding.

The Ancient Parable and the Pattern of Hebrew Wisdom

The ancient parable is a short, obscure, concentrated statement in which the idea is not expressed in full but is said “in half a word,” prompting the understanding person to complete the understanding from within himself. The idea is not presented by linking subjects together as premise or logical consequence, but is said on its own, “stripped of dialectical elaboration” that ties topics together. Hebrew wisdom is not presented as an orderly method from general to particular or from particular to general, but is stated in scattered headings here and there, and therefore it is said that “there is no earlier and later in the Torah,” “there is no order in the Mishnah,” and “words of Torah are poor in one place and rich in another.” The matters of Torah are covered over and hinted at by parables, and this seems strange to those trained in Western science, who see order and system as the essence of scientific thought.

Greek Logic and the Distinction Between Seeing and Hearing

The text attributes to the practitioners of contemplative Greek logic a view that places sight, order, and orderly discussion as the ideal, and links this to Aristotle as the founder of structured discourse and to Greek talk about “ancient things” that speak out of order. In contrast, it presents the ancient sages as those who “hear” words of ethical instruction and higher wisdom, and it emphasizes that hearing is active while seeing is passive. It explains that reading a book functions as hearing in this sense, because the listener or reader has to work in order to reconstruct the situation and the ideas from the representation, whereas sight places a picture “before me” and creates a sense of finality and clarity. It adds that hearing in this context is not hearing with the ear, but an inner apprehension of what comes “from within,” whereas sight grasps the outside and does not reveal the inside. So someone who tries to understand “what lies behind it” through sight is actually “hearing the sights.”

Media, Critical Activity, and Television versus Radio

The text uses the example of television versus radio to illustrate that watching tends to make a person passive, and that one has to “learn critical viewing,” whereas listening naturally arouses a more critical stance. It argues that television presents things with strong visual force, creating the feeling that “the work has already been done,” and sometimes forcing an immediate position, whereas description on the radio leaves room for judgment and for understanding the context of “what happened before” and “what happened after.” Citing Postman, it claims that the shallowness of television is “built into the medium,” and that one cannot give a philosophical lecture there in the proper way, because there is no added value except in the visual force, described here as “Greek force.”

Philosophy versus Literature and Conveying Ideas Indirectly

The text identifies a difference between philosophical writing, which explicitly states its message through argument and definitions, and literature, which arouses in the reader something that is not identical with the plot or with the overt verbal content. It ties this directly to the “ancient parable,” where half a statement is said in order to prompt the understanding person to hear from within it, and it presents the claim that philosophical ideas can be conveyed by a literary, parabolic path. It states that there are ideas that do not come across well through explicit description and definitions, and that a good proverb can be “worth a thousand pages,” because every definition may miss something of the thing itself. It criticizes a “Greek” and “positivist” notion according to which whatever is not defined does not exist, and argues that there are things that exist and yet do not pass through definitions.

The Limits of Definition: Process, Speed, and a Bill of Divorce

The text argues that dynamic concepts of process cannot be fully grasped through definitions, and brings the concept of speed and Zeno’s paradoxes as an example of what happens when one tries to define motion through static states. It gives the halakhic example of giving a bill of divorce, and explains how the Talmud brings “dozens and dozens of examples” in order to clarify what counts as a “valid giving,” and how the attempt to extract a clear definition leads to a definition that becomes more and more complicated until it hardly looks like a definition at all. The benefit, it says, is a process of negation and filtering out definitional illusions, so that what one gains is sharpening through “negative attributes” more than a complete positive grasp. It adds the example of the experience of reading, where a person feels that a book “added” something to him even if he cannot define precisely what he learned from it.

Written Torah, Oral Torah, Halakhic Ruling, and Public Acceptance

The text describes the written text as material that can be approached in two ways, “to listen” or “to see,” and argues that “the Torah in truth” is not only the text in the Five Books, but what is understood when one “listens” to it. It presents halakhic ruling as “Torah on a lower level,” in the sense of defined conclusions and approximations, and raises the question of who is responsible for making sure a person “hears the right things” in the Oral Torah. It presents the claim that public acceptance itself is an indication that a true thing was said, but does not itself constitute the truth. It distinguishes between cause and effect with regard to the authority of the sages. It connects this to the concept of “one who errs in judgment” as an innovation showing that judgment too has criteria of correctness, even if they are not formal proof, and sets this against the scientific view in which error is either contradiction to empirical data or else simply a legitimate opinion.

Dispute, “These and Those,” and Seventy Facets

The text acknowledges the existence of disagreements and cites “these and those are the words of the living God,” but says that there are also things that are “certainly mistaken.” It proposes a framework of a range that is not error, within which there are “seventy facets,” and expresses an inclination to view many disputes as different faces of one truth, in line with the Maharal and Rabbi Kook, where each side “has hold of” a correct facet.

Order, Dispersal, and the Claim Against Seeing the Mess as Primitive

The text argues that if the Torah had been given as an orderly book in the style of the Shulchan Arukh, this would have created a fragmented view of separate “topics and topics,” and a technical division with “no educational value at all,” only halakhic-practical value. It argues that the Mishnah is more ordered, but the Talmud is characterized by associativeness, the mixing of stories, and departures from the subject, and it says that the goal is not merely to convey information. It rejects contempt for the intellectual ability of the Amoraim and concludes that the lack of order does not stem from inability, but from other considerations. As part of that, it argues that the very connections between passages carry meaning beyond the content of the individual sayings. It gives as an example the juxtaposition of two sayings of Rav Tanchum bar Chanilai, and “our national sport on Hanukkah” of connecting them in homilies. It also points to the juxtaposition of passages in the Torah and to the interpretive principles by which Torah is expounded as principles of thought, according to the claim attributed to the Nazir, and not merely as an arbitrary system of rules.

Black Fire on White Fire and the Intentional Messiness

The text interprets the principles “there is no earlier and later,” “there is no order in the Mishnah,” and “poor in one place and rich in another” as an “intentional mess,” with different kinds of disorder that are needed so as not to bind a person to definitions. It brings the expression “black fire on white fire” and explains that the “black fire” is the written lines, what can be grasped and defined, while the “white fire” is the motion and dynamism, “the spaces between the lines,” which one cannot put one’s finger on. It illustrates this by calculating speed from points of place and time as grasping approximations rather than grasping the process itself, and presents the goal as impression and the lighting of “a lamp inside” through connections that cannot always be formulated definitionally.

Action and Practice as a Condition for Understanding

The text argues that the need for action also stems from the need to improve learning, and not only from the principle that “study leads to action.” It gives the example of someone who does not live in the world of the commandments, like “a Norwegian” studying the laws of the lulav, who may understand the words and engage in analysis, but the definitions “won’t say anything to him,” and it concludes that halakhic and interpretive understanding is tied to living inside the concepts. It mentions examples such as the object-status and the person-status categories, and explains that the difficulty in understanding “what difference it makes” is not stupidity, but a lack of lived existence within the language of the concepts.

Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, and the Ordering of Jewish Law

The text presents a tension around Maimonides: on the one hand, division into subjects is seen as a technical division for the sake of halakhic ruling and orientation, and on the other hand, it is argued that Maimonides in the Guide for the Perplexed writes about the dispersal of ideas. It says that Maimonides in the Mishneh Torah arranges things for the sake of halakhic classification, but even there he does not always formulate principles, and instead presents cases. It is emphasized that even so, this still does not turn him into a “mere legislator.” It presents the view that Maimonides almost never derives “a line of thought out of a law,” and attributes to him an approach according to which the philosophical layer belongs mainly to aggadic literature, while noting that the Nazir may disagree with that.

Coordinate Systems, Western Analysis, and Awareness of “Foreign Fire in the House of God”

The text compares attempts at ordering and understanding to moving between coordinate systems in the style of Copernicus, and argues that bewilderment or simplicity depends on the coordinate system from which one is looking. It says that the work is an attempt to get closer to the coordinate system behind the arrangement in the Talmud by using Western tools of definition and comparison, while constantly correcting mistakes. It argues that the idea of reading “a hundred times” in order merely “to be impressed” is theoretically possible, but ignores the reality of people formed by Western culture. It adds that all of us are “completely captive” to Western logic and that the Greeks “have taken us over completely,” for better and for worse. It presents the view that one has to be aware that Western tools are, in a certain sense, “foreign fire in the house of God,” even if in practice they are the only way we know how to work.

The Editing of the Talmud, the Meaning of the Mess, and Deciding Between Indication and Cause

The text presents a difficulty in seeing the Talmud as a “random mess” produced historically, and argues that it is implausible to attribute it to stupidity or primitive writing, especially when even near-contemporary generations dealt with the meaning of juxtapositions and asked, “What does this have to do with that?” It rejects the explanation that the Talmud was written merely as a summary of a study-hall discussion that is no longer relevant, and conveys the sense that the text was not meant only to transmit information but also to preserve the meaning of the connection and the path. It is willing to allow the possibility that the mess is not the result of a single editor, but insists that the central question is what the mess means, not how it came into being historically. It raises the possibility that the advantage lies in conveying messages that cannot be conveyed in an orderly arrangement of “organized laws.” It concludes that the dispersal among tractates and the linking of different subjects stem from the fact that things “belong both there and here,” and therefore many systems of order are created, each with meaning, rather than one single axis from which everything becomes straight.

The ancient parable means a short, obscure, and densely packed saying. The idea is not expressed there fully and completely; rather, it is stated in half a phrase that touches on it, stirring the one who understands to hear it from his own knowledge and heart. And it is not presented in a connected chain of the matters related to it, as an introduction or a logical consequence, but is stated on its own, stripped of the dialectic that interweaves the issues with one another. And that is the form of Hebrew wisdom, which is not presented in the order of a method, in a deductive way, from the general to the particular, or inductively, from the particular to the general, as a complete topic in one place, but is stated in chapter headings scattered here and there. There is no earlier and later in Torah. There is no order in the Mishnah. Words of Torah are poor in one place and rich in another. Its matters too are covered and hinted at through parables. And this is what seems strange in the eyes of students of Western science, whose essence is bound up with order and systematic method, and they see this way, this parabolic way, as an unscientific form fit for ancient peoples at the dawn of their development, as the Greek philosopher already said in The Republic. What? He said that about the Torah? No, he said it about ancient things—I understand it that way at least—that what is fitting for ancient peoples is that they speak without order. Aristotle was basically the founder of orderly discussion. Aristotle in the book of Rhetoric probably said this, I don’t know. Indeed, so it appears in the eyes of the Greek masters of speculative, contemplative logic. “Speculative”—someone once remarked that it comes from the word for eye, from seeing. But not so for the sages of old, who hear the word of moral instruction, the supreme wisdom. Hearing—the hearers—yes, that’s the emphasis here. In contrast to speculative contemplative logic, the sages of old are hearers. Okay, so let’s see what’s going on here. First of all, there’s some claim here that there are two accepted ways of conveying intellectual messages. There’s the systematic form, what Western science arrived at, and Western philosophy at least; and there’s a form—this is often called aphorisms, meaning short sayings that… wait, can the Rabbi repeat quickly what Natan said? What are the two forms? Hellenistic and analogical? It’s parabolic, allegorical. So there’s one form that is systematic, scientific; modern philosophy likes to work systematically, and modern Torah study too, by the way—we already spoke about that in previous evenings. And in contrast there is a method by means of a certain kind of short, concise sayings, aphorisms, fragments. Meaning, there’s no full sketch here of the line of thought, but rather some short, concentrated statement. The idea is not brought in full, but is said in half a phrase, and that basically stirs the listener, the reader or listener, “to hear it from his own knowledge and heart,” as he says. If you remember when we spoke about the difference between hearing and seeing, we said that one of the differences is that seeing is in some sense passive and hearing is active. Meaning, when I want to reconstruct in my mind’s eye a situation described to me verbally—or reading a book, which we said is really hearing and not seeing, because it’s seeing the thing through its representation, not seeing the thing itself—then in order to reconstruct the thing itself I have to be active; I can’t be passive. Meaning, from what I hear, from what I read, I have to want and understand the situation, or what is being described there, the idea, whatever it is, but to extract from the representation, to work with my head and try to extract the information from it. Seeing is laid out before me; that means I am basically passive. When I see a situation, I see it—there’s nothing more for me to process. Meaning, what I saw is supposedly the thing itself. We talked about whether that’s really the thing itself or not, but as far as the event goes, it really is the thing itself—I see it and that’s it, I have nothing more to add. That’s very clear, that really is how it works. We talked a bit about how this is also the difference between television and radio, say, or between television and a newspaper. Newspaper and radio are always things that leave you more active. And television leaves you completely passive. On television you see; almost no one—unless deliberately and with effort—therefore they always teach critical viewing. Why do they always teach critical viewing and not critical listening? Because we naturally listen critically, or at least much more so than we view critically. Hearing doesn’t force itself on you so strongly. You hear something, and automatically you have to think in order to reconstruct from it what was described in that thing you heard. So automatically you are already involved in the matter; you are not passive. In viewing you are completely passive; you have to learn how to view critically, how nevertheless to be a partner in the process and not accept everything as if someone is feeding it to you with a spoon. So hearing is basically an active thing. Hearing is really understanding the process, not absorbing the process, not absorbing the information or the situation simply because it is being given to me, but on the contrary—the voice, or the thing being heard, and this can also be print, is only a catalyst for bringing the thing out of me. Meaning, from within me, or from within it, it doesn’t matter, maybe from both. But it is basically some sort of catalyst that causes me to work and thus create the understanding. It does not give me the understanding from the outside. That seems to me a very clear difference regarding hearing, even in the simplest sense. And this is not always true of everything—you can convey the same contents. No, no, no, this is something that passes on different frequencies. You can convey the same contents. You can describe a situation on the radio and describe it on television. Even if you’re referring to the same situation, when you hear it on the radio as opposed to when you see it on television, it’s a different world. Television is much clearer, much more clear-cut, and precisely because of that you feel completely passive—someone has already finished the job, you know everything. In hearing you have to pause and try to imagine the situation, try to understand what exactly happened there. Seeing imposes itself on you. The question is whether hearing is trying to attain what it lacks and what seeing has—the full picture of seeing. Hearing is always lacking, trying to complete something through seeing. People see hearing and seeing as senses. But didn’t we already say that hearing and seeing in his sense are not senses? Even sensory hearing is basically seeing according to these categories. So why does he use these metaphors of sensory hearing and seeing? Because even in the senses we do in fact see a reflection of the distinction. Radio doesn’t seem to me a good example in some sense. Why attain something beyond seeing? What? You can’t attain something beyond television. Of course you can. Unless you’re seeing the truth. Sometimes there are options where that’s not true. Basically the medium itself is supposedly really less good, because television gives you the whole thing—but that’s not exactly so. Because when you see something on television there is also something of the truth here, it’s not only a metaphor. Because when you see something, you are very unlikely—you can, but you are very unlikely—to try to understand what stands behind it; you feel the situation is completely clear to you. That’s not always so. On television, for example, I’ll give you an example: you see someone killing someone else. Okay? You won’t think, wait a second, maybe earlier he abused him, maybe he killed his father, I don’t know what he did, enraged him—you see something like that and it forces you immediately to form a position. That is basically television’s great disease, yes? They broadcast it to you at a thousand watts? Yes, because it’s much less strong. I think this is a very clear example. It’s much less strong; you don’t see it right in front of your eyes and get completely immersed in it, you only hear it, so you can still think. And that’s how it is. And when you hear on the radio a description of some event, however brutal, then yes, it’s less touching, less unequivocal, all of that is true, but on the other hand it leaves you some room to maneuver. You can stop and think: wait, I’m more balanced now, I can think—okay, but there are situations in which there are preceding circumstances; what happened before, what happened after. When you see the blood being spilled, you don’t think—you can’t think. And again, it’s clear that… you can call it a metaphor? Maybe I didn’t give a good example. Why not? Not a good enough example. More or less a good example. To give a philosophy lecture on television—that wouldn’t be called seeing, you understand? And in fact they don’t do it. Why don’t they do it? There’s nothing to see. No, they don’t do it because it doesn’t fit. I once saw this in an article by Postman. Postman? Yes. Because once when I read Postman’s article, he said something correct. Meaning, in a certain sense, we always have complaints about this medium called television, that it is shallow. In a certain sense, that’s built in. He says it doesn’t matter, it’s not because—or not only because—of who inhabits it or who operates it. It’s built in, because you can’t give a philosophy lecture on television. On television, if there’s radio—meaning, no, there’s no added value to this device. All its added value lies in its force, in its ability to present strong visual things—Greek, in short. Its strength is Greek strength. So you can’t expect there to be non-Greek things there. It’s obvious; it’s built into the medium. Maybe they are to blame here and there, but it’s built into the medium. And that really is so according to what you’re saying. There’s a lot of truth in it. On radio there are many times—maybe there too it’s lacking—but you can hear somewhat more serious things on the radio. The medium is built that way, as a fact. Now again, here I’m still speaking on the level of metaphor; I’m just explaining why it’s a justified metaphor. What he’s talking about, of course, when he says hearing, is not hearing with the ear. As we said, reading a book too is hearing. Hearing means not grasping only what is outside. After all, seeing—we already discussed this here—grabs what is outside; the inside you cannot see. By contrast, hearing is exactly what we said: you can’t hide it. Hearing always comes through; someone shouts from the next room. It is very hard to block his voice; I will always hear it. The thing that comes from inside—the way to grasp it is hearing. It is almost impossible to shut it out. Seeing is very easy to block: put up the smallest, simplest screen and you won’t see anything. But hearing is very easy to block—therefore the uniqueness of hearing is that it transmits things from within. And seeing is seeing the thing from outside; the inside you cannot see. Fine, if you try to reconstruct what is happening inside through sight, then you are basically hearing the sights. You can “see the sounds.” You try—and that really is hearing, it doesn’t matter that it’s with your eyes, because it’s not with your eyes, it’s with your head. You try to reconstruct from the seeing what lies behind it. That is exactly what I said people often do not do with television, because it is so strong that there is a feeling there’s nothing left to do, meaning you understand everything. Therefore I think that hearing in the sense he is talking about is not hearing with the ear, but inward perception. Meaning, a perception not of the thing as it appears before your eyes. Do you remember once at one of the tishes we spoke about literature? And we tried to define what exactly distinguishes literature from other writing, broadly speaking. So the claim we had there was that literature does not convey its messages visually, in the sense that you simply read it and through the content of what you read you know exactly what they wanted to convey. That’s philosophy, not literature. Philosophy tells you exactly what it means. Meaning, there’s an argument here; what you read, the words themselves, say exactly the message that is supposed to be conveyed. Literature is a different medium. Literature—there may be plots described there, people’s emotions, all kinds of things. That is not what they mean to convey to you. It awakens something in you, and that something is what they wanted to awaken in you. That’s what he’s talking about here. Meaning, “the ancient parable”—the idea is not brought here entirely in full, but half a phrase is said that touches it and stirs the one who understands to hear it from his own knowledge and heart. That is exactly the difference between literature and philosophy, basically. Meaning—but philosophy has to be philosophy; literature is not philosophy. His claim is that there are ways to convey philosophy in the form of literature. That’s the point. The advantage is that apparently there are things that do not come through in the form of philosophy. You can’t… even though you need philosophy from life, it cannot be conveyed. No, that’s exactly it. A somewhat Greek kind of idea—if you try to formulate it, put it into definitions, put it into context and present it in a complete way as philosophy does—you feel a loss there. Many times, when you hear a good aphorism, it is worth a thousand pages describing the idea behind it. There are things that do not pass well through detailed description. Any definition will miss it. And therefore precisely the literary way, the indirect way, does it better. It is hard to do it otherwise. What? That means words don’t succeed, that neither here nor there do they succeed in conveying it. Why? The idea you want to convey is, in principle, within you. You—not consciously of course; this is not a writer of propaganda, okay? It’s not a writer who has a set of ideas and goes around pumping them through some story he writes. But somehow we feel that we absorb something from the writer’s inner world, even if it is not some technology for transmitting a well-defined set of ideas. Usually it isn’t like that, I think. If it’s something—if I have an idea, then I can also define it. No, not true. That’s a common Greek mistake. Positivist. It says that anything not defined does not exist. No, it exists. What idea do you want me to define now as an example of an idea that cannot be defined? There are things that don’t pass through definitions. Like Kabbalah. For example, the concept of speed. From philosophy. We talked about that once, right? Process. We talked a bit about… about giving a bill of divorce and all that—did we talk about it? A bill of divorce? Maybe in first-year class, in Hevron? No? I never remember what I said to whom and when; I always feel like I’ve already said everything. So somehow I said it—last year, last year we talked about it. So the concept of speed, for example, you cannot grasp through definitions. The whole concept of process—not only speed—dynamic concepts, you can never define them. Every definition is only an approximation, and it always leads to paradoxes too. All of Zeno’s paradoxes about motion are all problems of trying to define speed through states. Speed is a change of place. Process is a change of state. But if you try to define the process itself, you won’t succeed. You try to define what the state was before it, what the state will be after it, and then you understand it as a process. We talked last year about giving a bill of divorce, that there are many attempts to try to define it—what is a valid act of giving? The Talmud itself brings dozens and dozens of examples to try to define what valid giving is and what invalid giving is. And when we try to extract from this a clear definition—we brought that paper that tries to do it—and it’s really illuminating to see how it tries one definition after another, and the definition twists and twists and twists, until you get to something that is no longer really a definition at all. And what he did was not pointless—it’s not criticism of him; on the contrary, he gave a classic example of what needs to be done. Because all we produced from this process was what we negated, not what we defined. What we arrived at was a basic idea. We reached a point where something became sharpened in us automatically—negative attributes, right? There are things that you can only negate. Meaning, the thing itself you cannot define, but you can try to sift out various definitional illusions. So one method of definition did not help him at all; it only showed him the move. Exactly, right. His definition won’t help at all—that’s exactly what we said before. Meaning, the definition grows more and more convoluted, and if you read only it you’d die laughing, you understand? But that’s exactly the point: it shows you—I don’t know if consciously, but as an observer—you can’t stop at anything defined. And why is that? Because all attempts to define… giving is, after all, a process, a dynamic thing. When you try to define it, you always take the state before and the state after. That always misses it. Because speed is not to be in this place now and in that place later; it is the very transition between the places—that is the speed. But that—we have no way to point at it. There are many more examples; a bill of divorce is a relatively distinct example. But I think anyone who is impressed by certain texts and feels various experiences—and I’m talking about intellectual experiences, not emotional ones—he feels that things were conveyed to him even though the text is a literary text, and he will not always manage to define it. Say you really enjoyed a book and feel you learned a lot from it, and someone asks you, tell me, what exactly was there, what exactly happened here? There is some experience here that at least I went through; I don’t know what to say it gave me, what exactly I derived from this book, but certainly I derived something. I feel it added something to me. There is a certain advantage to fiction, not only as recreation and entertainment, but because fiction is a medium that succeeds in doing things philosophy cannot. Yes. So in terms of form, then the ideas—or the visual thing—is that the oral thing, the text of the Written Torah itself? And the whole Oral Torah, whether that means halakhic midrashim or even years later already clear-cut halakhah? You mean the Torah, the text that we read in the Five Books of Moses? And the halakhic midrashim, or even more extremely, clear-cut Jewish law, the whole world of the Oral Torah? No, no, I think that even the verses themselves are in some sense only sight. It’s not sight—it’s the visible appearance. And if you listen to them, to all of it, it doesn’t matter—if you listen to them, you’ll understand what Torah really is. Torah really is not the text written in the Five Books. The text written in the Five Books is some kind of description. You can listen to it and you can see it—those are two ways of approaching it. So a book of rulings from the later generations, where there are already clear laws and there’s nothing to listen to there. Right, that’s basically Torah on a lower level. Simply here to listen. Right. Meaning, conclusions that are some result of things I somehow managed to define—and obviously all those definitions are approximations anyway. Right, right. But then the question arises: who is responsible for your listening to the right things? The whole question in the Oral Torah. Okay, and one of the reasons all positivism and modern approaches didn’t like this is exactly because of the apparent subjectivity of this process. But on the other hand—That is the Nazir’s central claim, that this is subjectivity. I don’t know if only apparently entirely, but at least apparently. Meaning, in some place we do have a way of understanding what is correct and what is not. Even though we don’t have formulas for verifying whether it’s correct or not—it’s a bit like what we often experience with him: someone says a sevara and you know it is correct. Of course there is an opposing sevara and it fits all the proofs; you have no… it’s not “mistaken in an explicit Mishnah,” but “mistaken in judgment.” Meaning, there is a concept of being mistaken in judgment, and that is a radical innovation. There is no such thing, really, in the world of scientific thought: mistaken in judgment. There is no such thing. Either you are mistaken because it contradicts some empirical datum, or you are not mistaken—it’s your right to think so. What does “mistaken in judgment” mean? It means exactly this: that judgment too has criteria for being correct or incorrect, even though again, this is not a proof, because otherwise it would not be “mistaken in judgment” but “mistaken in an explicit Mishnah.” So it’s not completely subjective either. Right—there are still disagreements, one cannot be completely naive. There are disagreements, and they even tell us “both these and those are the words of the living God,” but there are also things that are certainly mistakes. And what I mean to say is: within the range that is not error, true, there are seventy facets; there are facets from here and facets from there. I am very inclined to think that all of this is facets of one truth. That’s how the Maharal and Rabbi Kook talk about it a lot. And then indeed it is not two conceptions, not really a dispute; rather each one managed to lay a hand on one facet—but the facets are true. So the reason that, say, those Tannaim and Amoraim who listened to the Torah, who expounded the Torah and listened to the things that followed from it—the reason specifically what they say is correct is because it was accepted, because it seemed right to everyone? Or because what? It seemed right to everyone—that is an indication that they heard correctly. If it wasn’t right, it would not have been accepted. That is an indication, right. It is true because he knew how to listen. But how do I know that he knows how to listen and the other one doesn’t? If his words are accepted. No, but who gave him authority—maybe I’m hearing correctly? After all, I say to him like this. Why is Hillel the Elder wiser than me? I tell you that in the Torah it says that a daughter’s rival wife is forbidden, okay? That’s what I say. Why do you believe Hillel? So there is some historical indication that Hillel knows how to listen better; causally, his justification is that he knows how to listen better. But how do I know that? I, as someone who does not know how to listen like he does. This is a bit reminiscent of the guidance regarding a prophet, yes? Where it says that a false prophet is flogged—not a false prophet, but one who suppresses his prophecy. One who suppresses his prophecy is flogged, the Talmud says in Sanhedrin. They ask there: how do we know that he suppressed his prophecy? Where was the warning? How do you stone him? Or perhaps only disciplinary lashes, no matter—but they say there that his fellow prophets can discern it in him. So someone who knows how to hear like Hillel does not need the indication that it is accepted around him. He understands that Hillel hears well. Someone who does not know that—then there are all kinds of historical indicators; meaning, if the thing was accepted, that is a sign that it is true, that it has a root. Something untrue cannot be accepted. That is only an indication. Meaning, public acceptance is a completely different notion; public acceptance does not constitute the truth. Exactly—it is only an indication that there is truth here. Good, again, there are confusions between cause and effect in many areas, and I think this is one of them. It is very common. Right now I’m reading some book by Sagi, another one in the series, speaking about autonomy and authority, yes. And there he really speaks about several mechanisms that establish the authority of sages, and one of them is acceptance by the public. Meaning, the fact that the public accepts the sage—that itself is the basis of his authority. In that principled statement there can be hidden—even if it is true and even if it is written in various places—you still have to understand what it means: whether it is a cause or an indication. And this is a question that, by the way, should accompany all scholarly work. We talked about this once, about the scholarly issue, right? Why academic research is irrelevant and pointless? Maybe we didn’t talk about it. I haven’t yet spoken about it somewhere, but I don’t remember where. Fine, we won’t talk about everything now; we’ll get to it. Our work of definitions, I think, usually comes to include, and not necessarily to exclude, as we spoke about Torah—definitions come to include, to define Torah. Right, there are places where it is very clear; there are places where you have some feeling that you did grasp the matter. I don’t know if what I’m saying is a general rule, but certainly there are such places. I tend to say it is always true. A definition never grasps the thing itself, never. It simply doesn’t—I feel that is never true. A definition almost never really seizes the bull by the horns and that’s it, now you know the thing. Right, that’s one of the reasons for practice. We talked about that last time. One of the reasons you need practice is in order to improve the learning. Not only “study leads to action,” because if you don’t wave a lulav, then study the lulav, fine, you will know it academically in a wonderful way, but you won’t understand what it means. You are not on that plane at all, the plane of definitions. On that plane, you won’t be able to identify with it fully unless you also live it. And then we won’t suffer all the… what are all these definitions that come… We understand it overall; we definitely have examples where we can understand it. Think of some Norwegian who comes here and starts learning the laws of the lulav. On the simplest level, I’m not talking about mysticism. I think it’s quite clear that these definitions will say nothing to him. The four handbreadths of the lulav—is that a measure or some aesthetic decoration? He’ll be able to argue, they’ll explain it to him, okay, he’ll be able to explain the words, but the words will say nothing to him. If you don’t live in that world and somehow it doesn’t say anything to you… lulav, I don’t know, but there is a lulav. And somehow it says something, it does say something. I think something is indeed being said; somehow you do feel at home with this thing. You do feel that this definition is not just some definition that popped up in thin air, where there is always this oppressive sense of disconnect that we’re constantly struggling with. Of course such a disconnect exists, and it is something built in stages and levels. Meaning, the more you are in the practice and the intentions, the more you will also understand the halakhic definitions, the halakhic concept. Many concepts—vow, prohibition. Yes, right, many things that if you describe them from outside—like object-based and person-based prohibition, for example—that already sounds to someone pretty clear. I’m sure many people who are no less intelligent than any of us would initially have difficulty grasping what exactly the difference is. What difference does it make whether the loaf is forbidden to me or I am forbidding myself with respect to the loaf? In practice it’s forbidden to eat it. Why are you confusing me with all this? And that’s not stupidity. He simply doesn’t live these concepts. So it doesn’t say to him exactly what it says to me, that’s all. It’s not that he’s stupider. I think this can be felt also in the deeper layers—not in the sense of illusory feelings, “yes, this says something to me and speaks to me and I feel at home,” but also in the sense of interpretation itself, of what the interpretation says to me. In that sense too there is an influence, I think, and that’s what he means here. Therefore, many times you have to pay attention: the fact that people write in a way that looks primitive, as he says here, in the eyes of students of modern Western science, is because they are trying to convey messages in a way Western science does not convey them. And it does not convey them because it is really dealing with a different kind of message. This type of message cannot be conveyed in a modern way. It’s not the inferiority of those who lived long ago; they dealt with a different kind of message. Therefore those messages have to be conveyed in this kind of way. Fine, that answers some of the problems, as it were, that Western science raises when it looks at this. It doesn’t answer why it appears in all sorts of different places and not on one page as an introduction to that book. I think it’s part of it. Until now we’ve only spoken about the aphoristic form. Yes, but look, he himself links several things. First, it is short, obscure, and isolated. The idea is not brought in full, but is said in half a phrase. It is not presented “in a connected chain of related matters”—which sounds like it is scattered, yes? “As an introduction and theological consequence,” but stated on its own, stripped of dialectic. Fine, that’s something else. Yes, and it is scattered. Fine, “this is the form of Hebrew wisdom, which is not presented in the order of a method and ranking,” etc., “but in scattered chapter headings.” I think that also… If you tried to formulate a Shulchan Arukh—if the Torah had been given like a Shulchan Arukh, in my opinion we’d be in terrible shape. Because we would grasp the whole Torah truly as separate topics. Meaning, we’d grasp: there are laws of Sabbath, laws of Jewish holidays, laws of prayer, blessings, impurity and purity, sacred things—all sorts of sets of laws. And you would not understand that there is a connection at the conceptual level. You could divide the whole world of laws according to a completely different division: object-laws, person-laws, laws of time, laws of space, laws of intrinsic combination, laws of neighboring combination—all these things span sacred things, Sabbath, blessings, everything. That division is a completely technical division for legal purposes only; it has no educational value. No educational value at all. It is for legal purposes only. Therefore this division into subjects began in the time of Maimonides. There’s a little of it in the Mishnah and Talmud too, but we see how quickly it disperses. Maimonides—Maimonides did it because the main value of classifying by subject, by commandments, is a simple legal value. I want to know what to do on the Sabbath, so the index is very convenient. The Mishnah is not Maimonides. The classification of Jewish law. Maimonides grasped things that way. Maimonides did not grasp things that way at all. I’ve said this several times already. Maimonides did not think there was a philosophical message behind the Talmud, except in the aggadah. His son writes that too. Unequivocally. The good Nazir can disagree with him. The Talmud itself is laws that express a more elevated intellectual, philosophical layer. It’s not that philosophy deals only with aggadah and Jewish law is only for knowing what to do, refining yourself, side circumstances, incidents—that is not the main thing. We talked about this in previous sessions. In Guide for the Perplexed Maimonides wrote it. Of course, and that’s why he wrote it, no? Because he writes this in many places, it’s completely clear that this is how he understood it. He almost never extracted a line of thought from a law. No, no, I mean that in Guide for the Perplexed, throughout the whole book, he wrote in this kind of way of scattering the idea—at least that’s what he claims in the introduction. He claims that in the introduction, right. I despite that, yes, right. There’s some academic-level scholar who argues that he didn’t do that. What? The Nazir argues it’s not connected. What? That Maimonides’ laws and… yes yes, the Nazir mentioned Rabbi Kook there too, I don’t know, but with Maimonides it seems to me clearly not true. I don’t know. We already discussed it. In Guide for the Perplexed—we’ll read in a moment—he cites this Maimonides, I think, somewhere in the Guide. Maimonides really writes that he did scatter things. But I don’t know whether that is really what he meant in Guide for the Perplexed… fine. In Guide for the Perplexed it’s the world of ideas, but in Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah the ideas… no, there it is for the classification, he’s right. To conceal. Right, he argues that the scattering is not for concealment. He says that in Maimonides. But with Maimonides I think it’s not only for concealment. I write this way so that… in order to be proficient. We’ll get to that in a moment. In section 14 he cites this Maimonides and discusses it. I think we said that even Maimonides, as orderly as he is, in the end also usually does not formulate principles, but simply states cases. And that too reflects… right. Meaning, Maimonides too had not yet really become simply a legislator. Meaning, that’s true. He too was still only on the way. It’s not yet… But this division into subjects—It contributes to understanding too, I think. If we only had everything as one big salad, then we also wouldn’t understand… You wouldn’t get orientation, obviously. And on the most basic level it’s simply practical for navigation. What would you say—go around now? Fine, now I want to know what to do, am I allowed to put the kettle on the fire or am I forbidden to move the kettle on the fire? I’m going to have to start analyzing what’s going on in order to understand what category of laws this belongs to. You’d need philosophy for that. And who says the arranger even arranged it according to the philosophy I have in mind? In Sabbath, the division is much more objective, according to the overt topics. So it is much easier to navigate, much easier technically. But I think that is the main advantage. In fact, many times you really do see the confusion in the Talmud, the wild associativeness, and the mixing in of a thought, then suddenly a story, then a sidestep. And it is obvious that the purpose is not to convey material. No doubt. That is not how one writes a text. They too, right, lived 1,500 years ago, but they were not at such a low level of development that they would not understand that in order to convey material you need to write like a human being. There is a limit to how much one can belittle the intellectual ability of the Amoraim, even if one does not accept them as possessing divine inspiration. I don’t know—I think it is excessive contempt to regard this as some kind of primitive writing. Clearly, that simply was not the goal. It is obvious that they were trying to convey some ideas. And the commentators speak a lot about connecting one passage in the Talmud to another passage in the Talmud. Yes, our national sport on Hanukkah is to connect the two statements of Rav Tanchum bar Chanilai, right? Even though they have nothing to do with each other at all. Joseph went down into the pit there—snakes and scorpions. “The pit was empty, there was no water in it”—water there was none, but snakes and scorpions there were. And Rav Tanchum said: if a sukkah is higher than twenty cubits, it is invalid, as with sukkah and alleyway. What in the world is the connection between those two? On the face of it there is no connection. But everyone now tries, and there are homilies and more homilies here. But why make such homilies at all? You can accept the homilies or not, but what is the idea here? The idea is that one thing was placed next to another in order to tell you that the connection itself is also saying something beyond the contents. Now what does he say—fine, some things are more convincing, some less. But they would do this all over the Talmud, like the matter of juxtaposition between two Torah sections. Juxtaposition. And that itself is precisely the Nazir’s claim. The juxtaposition between two Torah sections… and that is exactly the Nazir’s point, that the interpretive principles through which Torah is expounded are not just an arbitrary collection of rules for deciphering the messages that Torah wants to convey to us. They are principles of thought. That is exactly the point. The hermeneutic principles—because according to the approach of Gersonides or of Maimonides that we brought then, it is just some sort of axiomatic system. There’s nothing to learn from it; all you have to do is grind through it in order to extract the relevant information from Torah. That’s all. It teaches nothing. So does he really see an ideal in the disorder? Certainly, a great ideal, a great ideal. Meaning, I think one of the… I see in it one significance—I said this to myself without… and this is not “faith in the sages.” Fine. Also among abstract thinkers they often add that the main work of ours is every kind of attempt. Yes, these are negative descriptions, these definitions. We are there, constantly trying to draw near. Indeed, the definition is truly not there. We see, for example, that each time we get a little confused in a case like this—it doesn’t quite work out. We feel these are approximations; it doesn’t work that way. I don’t always feel it more than you do. I always hear from you how this business seems to you not to work. It’s not that because it can’t be it. It’s not it because here these are attempts at approximation. And there is black fire on white fire. Rabbi Yair told me two or three days ago, I think, that this is a bit of black fire—what is black fire on white fire? Black is when all the colors are together, one on top of the other; you mix them all together and you get black. White is when all the colors are spinning; then you see white. When you put all the colors one on top of the other and spin them quickly, you see white. So he says white is something in motion, and black is something at rest. The Torah is black fire on white fire. What does that mean? Torah itself—the thing itself—you cannot grasp it, you cannot put your finger on it. That’s the spaces between the lines. The written lines, the ink, the black fire—that is what you somehow managed to define out of all this living chaos. You cannot define it, as we said before; process cannot be defined. Dynamic things you cannot define. How do you define speed? You say this place minus that place divided by this time minus that time. You grasp the points, what can be grasped. Place and time can be grasped; they are points. But it is not enough that it moves. And out of that you construct speed, because you cannot grasp speed itself. Speed itself describes a process; it cannot be grasped. What? Time also flows? Time itself flows, but a point in time is a point. And “time flows” is also a somewhat paradoxical statement—it doesn’t flow anywhere. It doesn’t flow along some axis or something like that. Time is the axis, and we are not flowing along it. Time simply doesn’t flow; it is fixed, like an axis. So we see here that all these criteria—there are three here: there is no earlier and later in Torah, there is no order in the Mishnah, words of Torah are poor in one place and rich in another, fragmented—all this mess—this is intentional mess. And all the kinds of mess are apparently necessary. There are several kinds of mess here. If one tries to define—this is one of the roles of chaos in physics—to try to define the kinds of mess. You can try to define the kinds of mess, but basically the whole mess in all its types has the purpose of trying not to bind you too tightly to definitions, trying to let you be impressed. Associations work through all sorts of links that are not always formulable as definitions. If you see something next to something else, that can light some sort of bulb inside you in a way an explicit definition will not. Therefore it is intentionally built this way. And Maimonides, as the Rabbi explained Maimonides, sees this as the failure of an attempt to formulate things in Torah. Maimonides did not speak about the lack of order in Torah. How did Maimonides…? No, because what the Rabbi said creates a contradiction. If it’s only the law as such, and that’s what they want to convey to me, there’s nothing here beyond that, then I’m an unfortunate soul in the Talmud. You could say that even the laws themselves are hard to define. That is even before there is some conceptual layer behind them. There are two things here. Even the laws themselves, perhaps you do not succeed in defining—even the simplest law, to know what valid proper giving is. There is no definition for it. There are only… I’m not even talking about lofty thoughts. This itself. Look inside at all sorts of borderline cases. The Talmud itself brings dozens and dozens of cases so that you feel it is not succeeding in creating a definition here. It wants to give you some feeling, so that after you understand these cases well and remove all the attempts at definition, you have a formed intuition. When you see something, you’ll already know whether it is valid giving or not. Taking it to the extreme, then when we bring source sheets and various passages, we’re making a mistake; we should arrive at it in the context of the sugya there. No, but that’s true on one hand, but on the other hand our role is to build the black fire, and to be aware that it is black fire on white fire. Our way of grasping things is always through definitions. Yes, but to take it from its living place there, in the sugya in the middle of a law, and put it here… No, here you built reality and imagination; that’s true. You also need to see it in its context there, you also need to see it in the context of the subject itself. We usually try, we usually arrange the topics in their technical order, not in their conceptual order. And therefore somehow we need to collect things from all sorts of places. There is some axis of its own; all this is not confused. We, on our own axes—every system, you look at the system of coordinates, every description—so what, are you Copernicus? Are you Copernicus? He merely changed the coordinate system, that’s all. Suddenly the whole picture looked simpler. Why did it look simpler? If we had a mind that worked according to the geocentric system and not the heliocentric one, then the picture would look completely simple and Copernicus would just have confused us. Right—if you look at this thing in one coordinate system, it looks terribly confused, and in that coordinate system it is completely orderly. But our coordinate system is not always that one. Maybe this is one of our tasks: to try to unify these coordinate systems, to somehow get a feeling for what coordinate system lies behind the Talmud’s arrangement. But we have no direct way of doing that; somehow we try, through our own coordinate system, to build and build and see where we’re wrong, tilt a bit here, adjust a bit there, slowly draw near. It’s an endless task. But we—I—as with your definition of time—we are trying, as it were, to learn in the wrong way. The Talmud—this is probably the only possible way for us. One could imagine a situation where, instead of trying to define every single thing and compare through analogies and all sorts of things and trying to learn in some advanced Western way, we would read the text a hundred times and try to feel. That would be some kind of ignoring of reality. I agree that in principle it sounds reasonable. But it would be an ignoring of reality. We are Western people, raised on Western logic. And by the way that includes all the great Haredi scholars too—there is no difference here. Everyone is Western; all of us are completely captive to it. The Greeks took us over all the way through. And we already said there are good aspects to this too, not only bad ones—we spoke about that in the evening session. And therefore there is no point in ignoring reality. Indeed Hillel and Rav Ashi and the Tannaim and Amoraim did not work this way; they did not work this way. They did not learn analytical study, meaning they did not bring source sheets from here and there and here and there. Rav Ashi was the prototype of logic, arranged the… Didn’t they see sugyot passing from place to place? Of course they did move passages around. Tosafot? There is a sugya that appears in one place, and in a sugya somewhere else entirely they bring the entire sugya from there—so they did move sugyot around. No, but on the contrary, they moved them exactly. No, according to what order did they move them? That order is mess; it’s the messy order. Fine, so there they learned analytically; you’re right. If it were arranged otherwise, then they built that order and for the Talmud, in that sense, that was their analytical study. Fine, okay—but this is the order that we are now trying to reconstruct in a clean way. Fine, so true, we have no choice. This is how we think, this is how we must act, we have a tradition from our rabbis that this is how one should act, everyone does it this way, and we have the indication—if this is how everyone does it, then apparently this is indeed how it should be done. But one has to be aware that this is a foreign fire in the house of God. Someone who succeeds more and more in approaching that kind of judgment, in returning to this form of learning—the kind of the medieval authorities (Rishonim), or of the Talmud, or of the Tannaim—that is a high thing, maybe even a desirable state. But we cannot ignore where we stand. And isn’t this a change that Rabbi Nazir is trying to introduce into the yeshiva world and Torah study? I don’t know. I’m not familiar with his methods regarding learning and his criticisms of the method of learning; maybe there are such things, I just don’t know them. Many times people try to jump, with “Torat Eretz Yisrael,” to jump too far. And jumping too far is also not good. Even if that really is the goal in the end, that still doesn’t mean you should now break all the Western tools and start anew. That still doesn’t follow. Even if that is the ultimate goal—though I haven’t said that; it could be that there is some inner refinement that may come out of this. But even if that is the goal, the question is how one gets there. Do you immediately begin reading the Talmud a hundred times and trying to be impressed, trying to hear what is written behind it? Still, look, I’m in this reality, this is how I think. Give me a way to use this logic in order to connect to the matter. Slowly, I assume, it will build me. The structure before… This thing makes me think, for example, about the Written Torah. It’s obvious that there, what’s there lacks order, and yet clearly there is some order there and some axis. There is some obvious order beyond our analytical learning, beyond collecting the laws of Sabbath from all kinds of places. That’s obvious, because otherwise they wouldn’t have written it that way. That’s completely obvious. Now let’s look for a moment at the Talmud—how does it look to the eye? The main issue in what happens in a tractate is that there are so many things, and why were these things suddenly shoved in, and why does a discussion of this or that suddenly get inserted in the middle of all sorts of things? I don’t know, it looks as though anything remotely connected gets dragged in, and then it rolls on. It never just rolls on; they veer off the subject without noticing. Exactly. And then they tell you, look at the wisdom of the Amoraim in that period—so they decide. Yes, what, were they stupid? They weren’t prophets? Then write like a human being. Didn’t they know what order was? This is not a book one person wrote; it’s an editing process spanning thousands of years. Who arranged it? Who was there? And why all the irrelevant stories? It makes our lives miserable. Does it make our lives miserable to write in a proper orderly way? It’s driving us crazy here. We take all kinds of things from all sorts of places, trying to understand: are these contradictory passages or not? What, didn’t he have the minimal intelligence to understand what contradicts and what doesn’t, and to write it out in an orderly Maimonides and be done with it? I think this is a bit disrespectful to those Jews. Meaning, you don’t have to believe they were on the level of our teacher, but at least on the level of Rav Ashi or Maimonides, I assume they weren’t beneath him. Is Maimonides capable now of taking the whole Talmud and arranging it? Maimonides also isn’t capable of writing the Talmud in a disorderly way. But if I know all this information, I can also write it in an orderly way. If Maimonides could, then those before him could too, right? After all, they are greater than him. No, but maybe there were other considerations. To me it looks foolish, but maybe there were other considerations. What? Why should the sayings of Rav Tanchum bar Chanilai be together? Why? What difference does it make? Because afterwards it was written down. Notice—if it was said orally, I can understand. If it was oral, then maybe it helps you remember. But now they decided to write it down, right? Meaning, to spare us the need to remember. So why do they keep writing this way? What are these considerations? The considerations don’t have to be that the sayings themselves must… And again, Metan’s question was how far to go with this. I really don’t know. But one thing is clear: all this mess cannot simply be stupidity. It simply cannot be. And if it really is stupidity on that level, then I don’t know what I’m doing here at all. In general, after all, the Talmud wanted to stay attached to the Mishnah. So it couldn’t write its discussions separately from the Mishnah. Why not? As was noted before, the Mishnah does gather topics in a not bad way. Granted, it is not a law book, but the Mishnah is very orderly. Now the Talmud wanted to stay attached to the Mishnah, and there’s no choice. Every time from a mishnah it reached all kinds of other sugyot, and it had no choice. Do you really believe there was no choice? Surely there was a choice. I could even have done it better. Arranged it better? Why not? Of course. More unambiguously. After all, the same Mishnah is more orderly, so what is all the chitchat there between the sugyot? What is that? Just the give-and-take itself—there are all sorts of forced explanations for why they wrote it, so that if one day you encounter this, you’ll know there was some tanna in opposition. It’s not like that; it doesn’t work that way. The whole text does not project that. It is not a text that comes to bring information—that is completely clear. That is not how one writes, unless they were total fools. To put them among total fools—that’s what it sounds like, no? But it’s not, it’s not a text written by some individual person. It was edited, edited, sealed. Various things have already been determined about it. What do you mean? Make some minimal arrangement. I don’t know, leave it to the researchers—it’s not clear. But it says there “the end of instruction,” the sealing… What do you mean “it says there in Torah”? I received from my rabbis what they received from their rabbis. What researchers usually forget to pay attention to is that there were people there who saw with their own eyes what happened. I don’t know—all the research found some hidden scroll in Antarctica saying that Rashi actually lived in the days of Pharaoh king of Egypt. Fine, so what can I do? I prefer that there be some rationale in the system, and they tell me that this thing was edited and some intention was invested in it. The generations that lived one meter afterward—not today fifteen hundred years later, but one meter afterward—thought as I do, right? So the Amoraim did not think as I do in the sense of justifying my life, but in the sense of relating to the text as though the connections too are meaningful, right? Clearly there is meaning; it’s not… clearly there is meaning. Suppose there was a sugya that they studied—that’s how they studied. There is… the simple meaning of the Talmud is a summary of how they studied in the study hall. There was a lesson in the study hall or something like that. But why should I care how they learned in the study hall? For heaven’s sake, why should I care? I don’t understand. If they want to convey information to me, let them write me an orderly Maimonides, and let their whole study hall go to hell. Why should I care at all? It never sat well there. Why didn’t it sit well? Why didn’t it sit well? To walk around with it through all the generations after you? No, really, I’m saying, this seems to me a somewhat absurd approach. Why did no one sit down and put order into this mess? And no one even shouted at them for not putting it in order. Meaning, everyone’s fine with it. Everyone has to live with this mess, they stamped it with approval, no one may dispute it, and then they yell at Maimonides for putting things into a bit of order. Doesn’t that sound strange? It’s a somewhat strange historical phenomenon. I’m speaking ironically, but I believe this wholeheartedly. It really is… hard to relate to this whole business as some historical caprice. It just doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make historical sense—I’m not even talking about faith in the sages. Therefore I don’t know—all the logical considerations are wonderful. It’s all speculation; I don’t know. The Rif said to Ri Migash, Ri Migash said to Maimonides, Maimonides said… everyone worked this way. In practice and in real life it is not written in Maimonides and not written in the Rif that this is an illusion. Fine, but the very relation to the text, the principled relation to the text, is preserved. I once saw another relation, as we said earlier, to the text among the medieval authorities (Rishonim). You see there that they ask, what does this have to do with that? You see there that they ask what… what? What do aggadot have to do with this? No, in neighboring sugyot, for example, or things like that. You see this among the medieval authorities—it’s not some invention of today’s postmodernism. Yes, of course it is there, what is this? Regarding this idea that it wasn’t edited… that say there were sugyot that developed and developed, and in the end developed—but in the end someone sealed them. There was some continuity up to a certain level and then someone stopped. Suppose someone did this—not that someone sealed it, meaning that is surely a historically mistaken way of describing it. It’s not that “someone” sealed it there. It could be true, but it doesn’t have to mean that necessarily some one person sat there. But it cannot be meaningless. I don’t understand—so what is happening here? We said it doesn’t have to be one person who sat down and edited it and wrote it. Suppose there wasn’t one person who sat and edited it—so what? So now this thing is indeed meaningless? After all, that is the question that interests us, not the historical one. It’s a pity that even that interests anyone at all. The question is what it says to us. Is there some message in this mess, or is it just mess that arose historically by itself and then somehow became sanctified through random processes? The question is what message is here. The question is whether this is a message you are supposed to feel, whether it is an intellectual message or an emotional one. On the contrary, I’m willing to hear. It really isn’t written anywhere; I’m willing to hear other views. If there is such a view, then please. Here I really don’t know. As for Rav Ashi, at least I’m not aware of ancient sources that speak explicitly about what this thing means, this mess. But it sounds pretty convincing to me. If someone has another explanation, let’s hear it. If it is equally convincing, then we’ll be convinced by all of it. Really—here I’m genuinely willing to hear, but I simply can’t think of anything more convincing than this. It really sounds reasonable. Meaning, there are things that cannot work in an orderly form. And it’s fun to believe it’s like that, because then it says a lot, but the question is whether… no, no—again, I say: “fun to believe” is another matter. First of all there is a first assumption: this mess is not accidental. Okay, that is the assumption. The question is whether we accept it or not. If not, fine, then the story is simply not difficult at all. It goes to the second possibility. Huh? It goes to the second possibility. Ah. Could be. You can also believe this, what he says here in the paragraph—that although on one hand there is mess, there is also some advantage in the mess even if you do not assume that this mess is really operating according to some particular order. There is a message you simply cannot convey in a Torah arranged that way. And that doesn’t mean every mess has its own order. But if you write it in such an orderly way, it’s not that… the fact that there are three sayings and I need to gather all three in order to know the law in a case of attaching a vow—fine? Why don’t you write them next to each other? Why did you write one—the same thing, you changed nothing—just give some hints that these three are really going in one direction, write them in one place. Why did you put one in Berakhot, one in Shevuot, and one in Nedarim? There’s no logic to that in the formalistic order, all very nice, but why do you write the rest? Apparently because it really belongs there and here, and that is exactly the point. So there are several ways of connecting the matters. And I think—I don’t know if this is related here—for example what Rabbi Kook writes about the Torah, in the introduction to Sefer HaMitzvot, as I vaguely recall: that Torah consists of testimonies, and that to convey things—both the laws and the events—to write what happened there in one single description is impossible. To receive the full picture you have to describe it in apparently contradictory ways, and describe it once from this angle and once from that angle, and only that way can a complete picture be formed for you. That’s how he explains it there. Sorry—so then what’s the problem here, no? So here that doesn’t mean that it’s not… it doesn’t mean it has to be in this form. But it doesn’t mean… well, if it has to be in this form, then clearly they wanted to convey something else too. If all they wanted to convey was the laws of vows, this is not how one writes. That is exactly the point. They wanted to convey something beyond the laws of vows. And that would not come out clearly if they collected everything into tractate Nedarim. That is exactly what I’m saying. No? I think we’re saying the same thing. There is something here beyond the dry laws that cannot be conveyed if you write it simply as organized laws, even if they each have their place. Therefore this mess—but again, a mess that has order. Therefore it has to be ordered. No, but it doesn’t have to be—exactly, that’s what we’ve been saying until now. Therefore specifically mess—you could have mixed it up however we wanted. Not however we wanted, but exactly as you said: why cut things up in that place? I don’t understand. Why cut things up in that place? How does that help you? I don’t get it. These three things are the things needed to understand the laws of object-status in vows. Put them in one place. Why do you put one here, one there, and one elsewhere? Because there’s no choice; because it is connected there too and not only here. That is exactly the point. So evidently there is also a connection of the matter to there. So we said that the only axis is not just the axis of vows. Maybe you can also see it through the Talmud there, which transfers ideas from subject to subject. The Talmud often brings ideas from Sabbath to terumah, from all sorts of such things. Why? Because maybe there is a connection between them not in the simple legal sense but in the conceptual sense behind the law. Just like here in the sugya that wanted to clarify: since it is considered a partition for Sabbath, is it considered a partition for sukkah? There is the same principle of: since it is considered a vessel for Sabbath, it is considered a vessel for muktzeh; it is considered a vessel for terumah. Right? Two principles that are basically similar, even though in different parts of the Shulchan Arukh—or of Maimonides—they belong to different sections. But the conceptual similarity between them exists. So basically that’s all I’m talking about—what is so sophisticated about that? It’s a simple thing, no? There is a conceptual connection between things. But the question is how much there is and to what depth. Fine, that’s another matter. But there are things—this principle that because it is a partition for sukkah it is a partition for Sabbath—you wouldn’t have grasped that idea if you wrote this in the laws of Sabbath and that in the laws of sukkah. You write them together in order to understand that an overarching principle is formed here, one that sometimes finds expression in Sabbath and sometimes in sukkah. And in Torah they should have made a whole section of “laws of migo,” just like in the Shulchan Arukh—not “migo because I could have lied,” but “migo because since this is a vessel for that, it’s a vessel for this; since this is a partition for that, it’s a partition for this.” You could also have written that as “laws of something.” Right? The question is according to what order you arrange. And there are many kinds of order, and this mess is apparently meant to present all sorts of kinds of order. It’s not that there is only one axis running through it and all you have to do is grab onto it, and then everything appears straight. If I understood you correctly, I don’t know. I don’t know, no… I said I meant it only as an example, as a metaphor, as an example. I didn’t mean to say that there is really some crooked axis here. I only described it as two coordinate systems. But I’m saying there are all sorts of systems of order here, but each of them has meaning. It is not some accidental and primitive mess. That’s the whole point. I’m not trying to say there is one axis that, if you grasp it—maybe there is that too, but that I don’t know. That already sounds beyond what needs to be said, at least. I don’t like Ockham’s razor—one shouldn’t assume more than what is necessary. So that much I know. Let the Torah come and tell us there is one axis through which everything is understood. But that does not seem to help us at all. At first glance it isn’t precise, and therefore it doesn’t help us at all.