Torah and Torah Study, Lesson 3

Table of Contents

• Starting over and the need for conceptual definitions
• Defining “learning” as a conscious act carried out from a text
• Counterexamples: hypnosis, Rorschach, and drawing things that are not from the text
• A text generator in the style of Rabbi Kook as an argument about a “poetic” text
• Comparison to structured analytical writing and the claim that structure cannot be faked
• Homiletics versus pilpul and the definition of “serious learning”
• Criticism of Hasidism and of vorts as an activity that is not text study
• Prose versus poetry and the claim that “poetic” texts are not learning
• Defining “Torah” as binding authority and its implications for aggadic literature
• Torah as accepting a conclusion against one’s inclination: the example of “we do not say migo in order to extract”
• Practical implications: pluralistic batei midrash and learning without commitment

Summary

General Overview

The speaker goes back to reopen the topic of Torah study from the beginning through conceptual definitions, on the assumption that a correct definition saves halakhic arguments and filters out directions that do not “hold water” logically. He proposes distinguishing between the two concepts of “learning” and “Torah,” and defines learning as the conscious, deliberate, directed extraction of new insights that are actually found in the text itself, as opposed to inspiration, associations, or insights that the text merely triggers without requiring them. He defines Torah as a text whose content binds the learner as an authority, and argues that many common activities today—in aggadic literature, homiletics, Hasidism, and certain “poetic” texts—are not Torah study in the full sense, because they are like a “Rorschach blot,” do not produce a text-bound insight, and do not obligate the learner to change position or accept a conclusion against his inclination.

Starting over and the need for conceptual definitions

The speaker explains that the earlier detour into hidden and revealed matters came because of Lag BaOmer, and now he is returning to the subject of Torah study “from the beginning.” He presents the view that putting conceptual definitions before halakhic discussions can save “blood, sweat, and tears” and can show in advance that certain directions are simply not coherent. He states that Torah study requires breaking the matter down into two concepts: “learning” and “Torah,” and that each has to be defined separately before combining them.

Defining “learning” as a conscious act carried out from a text

The speaker argues that not everything that teaches or influences counts as “learning” in his context, because a person can receive impressions and insights from a bird, the weather, or a telephone pole without any directed act. He defines learning as an intentional activity in which a person takes a text and consciously tries to understand what it says, not a situation in which the text merely “acts on him” and stirs up autonomous content within him. He requires that the insights be new to the learner, while distinguishing that review is “low-intensity” learning because it reinforces insights that were once new and have already been learned. He adds a third condition: the insights must actually be present within the text, so reading a poem that inspires a person does not count as “learning” in this sense, because the content produced is not drawn from the text but from the reader.

Counterexamples: hypnosis, Rorschach, and drawing things that are not from the text

The speaker argues that a person does not fulfill the obligation of Torah study “while merely occupied,” and therefore learning by hypnosis that injects information into the brain is not Torah study but a state of “I was taught” without any act of learning. He uses Rorschach blots to illustrate a trigger that arouses content in the reader without that content actually existing in the blot itself, and says that even if the insights are interesting and new to consciousness, they are not learning because they are not present in the text. He claims that some Torah texts function like Rorschach blots, and therefore engaging with them is not “learning” but the activation of internal associations.

A text generator in the style of Rabbi Kook as an argument about a “poetic” text

The speaker gives an example from a text generator on Nadav Shnerb’s website (together with Harel Segal and another partner or partners he does not remember for sure), which produces four passages in the style of Rabbi Kook, one of them original and three computerized, and the goal is to identify the authentic one. He describes arguments in which people got it wrong and even claimed that more than one passage was “authentic,” and concludes that if one can produce similar insights from all four passages—including the fabricated ones—then the learner is not learning “what Rabbi Kook wanted to convey,” but is producing meaning from himself that can be attached to almost any style-like text. He distinguishes between a stylistic generator that imitates combinations of words and sentences without any binding conceptual structure, and a hypothetical depth-generator that would imitate the form of thought itself and could generate passages that really might fit the author’s content. He argues that in the stylistic generator the connection between the sentences is not meaningful on the generator’s side but is constructed by the reader, so such a text turns the passage into a Rorschach blot, and from this he concludes that some genuine passages function that way in practice as well.

Comparison to structured analytical writing and the claim that structure cannot be faked

The speaker argues that texts in an analytical style, like Rabbi Akiva Eiger or Kehillot Yaakov, are built out of a difficulty, an answer, and a practical implication, and therefore a stylistic generator will not manage to reproduce them convincingly, because the binding logical structure does not arise from gluing sentences together. He agrees in principle that with a deep learning network it may one day be possible to replicate even a complex mode of thought, and then analytical texts too could become indistinguishable, but he emphasizes that this is not the case in the example of the generator he mentioned. He says that the very ability to confuse an authentic passage with a stylistic one is itself a critique of the way certain texts are read, because the reader is not decoding a binding communication from the author but creating the connections creatively on his own.

Homiletics versus pilpul and the definition of “serious learning”

The speaker presents a distinction he coined at a celebration marking the completion of a tractate in this hall: homiletics is “a foolish inference that reaches a correct conclusion,” while pilpul is “an inference that is logically well-built, but the result is nonsense.” He explains that “one does not refute a homily,” because the conclusion is usually agreed with on the value level, so there is no point arguing about the inference, which is not really tied to the text. He argues that pilpul has educational value as a challenge that trains one to identify a “bug” in an argument and sharpens one’s tools, and he gives the example of an a fortiori argument that leads to the ridiculous conclusion that a four-cornered garment needs a mezuzah, and conversely that a doorpost needs tzitzit, to show how an inference that resembles the Talmud can still be problematic. He defines “real learning” as learning in which both the inferences hold water and the results hold water, so that the insight is taken seriously as a text-bound product.

Criticism of Hasidism and of vorts as an activity that is not text study

The speaker argues that Hasidism in the classical sense resembles homiletics and therefore is not learning in the sense he defined, because it produces vorts that are not required by the text but rely on remote associations. He suggests an indication: in classes of vorts one generally does not hear textual objections in the style of “how does that fit with this sentence,” because there is no textual commitment that allows for internal criticism. He says that when someone attributes an idea about serving God to a Talmudic topic such as “does placing perform the commandment or does setting down perform the commandment,” that is learning the idea itself, not learning the topic, and therefore “I didn’t study that text… I abused that text.”

Prose versus poetry and the claim that “poetic” texts are not learning

The speaker returns to the distinction between prose, whose purpose is to convey information through the direct verbal meaning of sentences, and poetry, in which the message is not identical with the literal meaning of the words and sometimes cannot be directly extracted from it at all. He uses the example, “Once upon a time there was a lone streetlamp at the edge of a neighborhood,” to show that a poem conveys an atmosphere and a human condition, not a factual report about a lamp, and he places on a spectrum, at one end of which is “pure” poetry that resembles a Rorschach blot. He argues that in poetry, to a large extent, meaning is created in the reader, and so it is close to a deconstructionist view in which interpretation resides in the reader; therefore, in the sense he defined, there is no “learning” here, because the insights are not drawn from a binding text. He concludes that when Torah texts are read as poetry, the act of reading is not Torah study but the production of inspiration.

Defining “Torah” as binding authority and its implications for aggadic literature

The speaker proposes a definition: Torah is a text whose content binds the learner, and in the religious sense this is authority as the word of God, which turns its study into a commandment. He argues that in aggadic literature one almost never finds a case in which a learner derives a lesson he does not agree with and then adopts it because “it’s written in the Talmud,” and therefore aggadic literature does not function for him as binding Torah but as a source of inspiration. He describes an argument with Hayouta, the editor of his books and someone with a doctorate in aggadic literature, and emphasizes that he did not receive from her an example of an aggadic teaching that changed her position against her values by force of the authority of aggadic literature. He argues that liberals find liberalism in aggadic literature, feminists find feminism, and others find chauvinism; and when something undesirable comes out, it is dismissed as historical context or offset through some other aggadic teaching. So, he says, there is no binding commitment here but rather selection and self-projection.

Torah as accepting a conclusion against one’s inclination: the example of “we do not say migo in order to extract”

The speaker presents a halakhic case in which he himself would have been logically inclined to think otherwise, but accepting the Talmudic rule that “we do not say migo in order to extract” obligates him, and for him this is a clear model of Torah as authority. He says that Torah is a situation in which a binding conclusion is accepted even if it does not fit one’s initial intuition, whereas in aggadic literature and homiletics there is almost never such a situation. He distinguishes between values and facts, and argues that in the realm of values, “no verse” will persuade him if he does not believe in the value, while facts can at most raise probability or possibility, but that is different from the value-based commitment he is looking for in his definition of Torah.

Practical implications: pluralistic batei midrash and learning without commitment

The speaker argues that in pluralistic batei midrash, where people raise creative ideas but do not accept the binding authority of the text, there is no “Torah study,” because the Torah is treated as a source of inspiration rather than a source of authority. He claims that even a non-religious person studying Rabbi Chaim for intellectual enjoyment is not studying Torah, because the act of study does not end with accepting the conclusion as binding but only with cultural or intellectual understanding. He emphasizes that commitment is not binary but a matter of weight, and therefore even engagement with the medieval authorities (Rishonim) and with Jewish law has practical impact because the method has some authority, whereas a text with no binding weight does not enter the category of Torah study. He concludes that the definitions of “learning” and “Torah” together exclude many of the activities commonly accepted today, including Hasidism, Rabbi Kook, and similar things, though he notes that he will qualify this later on.

So last time we talked about—actually I finished the whole issue of hidden and revealed teachings and all kinds of things like that, which really wasn’t supposed to be the opening of this topic, but because of Lag BaOmer I decided to talk about that issue. And now I’m going back there and starting from the beginning. When we talk about Torah study, later on we’ll get to the issue of the commandment of Torah study—what it includes, what it doesn’t include, what exists beyond the commandment of Torah study, all kinds of halakhic and semi-halakhic discussions—but I want to start the way I often think one should start: with conceptual definitions. Because when you make the conceptual definition properly, that often saves a lot of blood, sweat, and tears in the halakhic discussion. Sometimes it shows that there are directions which, to begin with, simply don’t hold water at the conceptual-logical level, so there’s no point dealing with them. So I want to begin: when we talk about Torah study, we’re actually talking about two concepts—study and Torah. Okay? So first of all I want to define the concepts. I’ll start with study; that’s a bit easier to define. Though it’s not trivial either, and I had arguments about it on the site and elsewhere.

On the face of it, it seems that we can learn from anything on earth. Meaning, you can look at this lectern and suddenly understand something from it. You can learn about the structure of the lectern itself—that’s direct learning—but even just seeing it might suddenly trigger some insight you hadn’t thought of. Things of that sort, at least in our context, I would not call study. Because when I talk about study, I’m talking about an action in which I take—in our case we’re dealing with texts, so let’s talk about texts—I take a text and I actively and intentionally try to understand what it says. Okay? That sounds a bit trivial, but I hope in a moment you’ll see that it’s not so trivial, and a lot of people disagreed with me, to my surprise. I am actively trying to understand what the text says. Therefore I would say that study is really made up of several components. Here I wrote for myself—that’s it.

First of all, I want the extraction of the information from the text to be conscious. If the text is acting on me—not that I’m trying to understand what it says and then absorb it, but rather it acts on me—that I do not call study. Because things that act on me, as I said before, anything can act on me. Meaning, it’s not under control. You look at a bird, it acts on you; you look at the weather. Experiences act on you. Yes, exactly. Meaning, you can call that study—it’s of course semantics, you can also call that study—but I don’t think that for our purposes it is right to regard something like that as study. When we talk about our goal, it’s to arrive at Torah study. And study—isn’t it something that causes you to know more than you knew before? Something additional? In a minute—that’s the next stage, we’ll get to that too.

The point is that I think study is supposed to be something conscious. It can’t be that I’m walking down the street and I fulfill my obligation of Torah study because I looked at a telephone pole and it did something to me. Not that I intended it—not that if, through that telephone pole, some coin suddenly drops for me regarding some topic. Fine, no problem. But that’s exactly what you said before, no? When you walk down the street, you look at the lectern, and some idea comes to you from it. Not that some idea came to me—rather, it illuminates some topic for me. So I didn’t learn from the telephone pole; I learned the topic, the telephone pole just helped me. So is that called learning? I have no problem—I learned the topic. The fact that things help me learn is fine. Teachers help me learn too; that’s also called study, that’s perfectly fine. So that doesn’t bother me. But if I pass by a telephone pole and it somehow stirs things in me, somehow arouses various things in me—not that it makes some coin drop and I understand what the topic is saying, but that it affects me in some way—what? Ah, emotional things? No, even insights. But it stirs up things in me that somehow simply arise on their own; they are not drawn from the telephone pole and not from some other text, they just pop up. Okay? That thing—I would not…

What? It happens all the time. What do you mean? I think most of our learning is like that. I mean, you walk around, you’re constantly gathering impressions; those impressions act on you. You’re not aware of it, but they act on you. They shape all sorts of things in you. Most of the day we’re not engaged in conscious learning, but we’re constantly accumulating… insights, influences, being shaped by all kinds of things, and it happens all the time. Really adding knowledge as a result of things? Maybe knowledge, maybe an understanding of something, yes—or to know yourself better, all kinds of things, of all kinds, yes. I’m not speaking about something specific right now. So that’s why I say it seems to me that the first condition is that this be conscious.

Second: the insights I have accumulated—this is subtler—but in principle they should be new to me. Now that doesn’t mean review isn’t study. Suppose I review something, then I’m not accumulating new insights. True—I’m reinforcing the new insights I had accumulated before. So you can also call review study. My remarks are not directed against review. I’ll explain later what they are directed against. Okay? It’s true that review is not study in the full sense; it is definitely study at low intensity. It may be very necessary, but it’s not the hardcore core of the concept of study. Yes, it’s clear that it isn’t. But since it comes to fix in place those new insights that I did learn in the first stage, one can call it a continuation of that same learning, it just comes to internalize it more deeply in me, so I won’t forget. Therefore it is attached to the learning process. Okay?

And a third thing: those insights that I accumulate are located in the text. Because for example, when I read a poem, I don’t call that study, because I read a poem and all sorts of insights arise in me, it inspires me in all kinds of ways. I don’t think it is usually correct to say that I learned something from the poem. The poem taught me, but I didn’t learn something. When I speak in the context of Torah study at least, I’m talking about something where I draw information out of the text—but information that is in it. Not that the text, as I said before, acts on me and all sorts of things arise within me. That’s perhaps somewhat related to the first characteristic, but it’s not…

Studying Torah—or not studying? No, that’s not study, for our purposes. The act of studying. I’m defining the act of study now without connection. My goal, of course, is to get to Torah study. So clearly you can define study differently from the way I am defining it now. But if we look at this goal, in the end I want to understand what Torah study is. I’m only defining the concept of study because in this context I think what I’m saying is justified. What is the connection here between the text and the study? What do you mean? When I read, when I study Torah, I take a topic and study it, then I learn what is written there. But if I look at a topic and it arouses all sorts of insights in me—maybe interesting and new insights and everything—but they’re not written in the text; someone else looking at the text would have it stir up completely different things in him—to that I do not refer as study in the context of Torah study. Why? It’s study, but not from this text, no? Right, it’s study not from the text. That’s why I say: if I disconnected this question from the question of Torah study and just asked, what is study, then you would be right that one could also define that as study. That’s already a matter of semantics. But that’s why I say: I set the goal in the background, meaning I do want in the end to arrive at a definition of Torah study. Okay? So that’s why I say: when I speak about Torah study, clearly I mean learning from Torah. Okay? That is called Torah study. So for now, since in a moment I’ll define what Torah is, I’m separating the definition of study from the definition of Torah. But study is of course connected to study of something; by study I don’t mean enriching oneself in some fashion. Okay?

So in practice, if I summarize it in one sentence: it is the conscious extraction of new insights that are located in the text. Okay? None of those points was agreed upon on the site. In my view, maybe not even by most of the commenters. Not that all three were rejected together—each one of them was rejected. Even though to me, at least in the context of Torah study, this sounds very reasonable. Again, I said about study itself you can argue; you can define it this way or that. The point that it needs to be conscious, the point that the insight has to be new for me, and the point that it has to be located in the text—not that the text merely inspired me—that’s not called learning from the text. Maybe you can call it study in another context, but it’s not called studying the text. Many things can inspire me, but that’s not…

Maybe one could add another criterion: that it also has to be active, that you have to compare, examine, be critical, try to challenge the… That’s already a kind of study, but I don’t think it’s a necessary requirement. Everyone studies in his own way, as long as from his point of view it is a means through which he draws things out. So that’s why I say: those are already technical questions—the question of how information can actually be extracted. So those are the three things.

Now if I study some text in order to know it by heart, okay—not thinking, not in that sense—why not? Because it changes the form—what? Because it changes the form of the study? No. What you are learning—you’ll see—you can say, yes, I’m learning, because now I know a verse. No, I’m reviewing a little, yes, but now it’s entered me and I know it by heart. No, I’m reviewing a little, I’m reviewing a little. Meaning yes, I am learning—but I’m learning the verse, not the content of the verse. That is something new that I didn’t know before; now I know it. So I learned the wording of the verse. Now I know this text; I know it. Right, so therefore that does count as study under this definition. One can say that is study.

What is it about consciousness specifically? What? Why does it have to be conscious? Because I’m saying that in the context of Torah study, one doesn’t do this accidentally. Torah study means: you sit down, you study a text, and you try to understand what it says. Is there another way to do it? But I’m saying there is another way to do it—on the contrary, that’s exactly why I’m taking the trouble to define it. There is another way to do it. Suppose I go—not to sleep, but to a hypnotist. The hypnotist hypnotizes me and injects into my brain the entire collection of information, all the laws of mixtures, okay? Did I study Torah? I think not. Information was added to me, but I didn’t do it intentionally. I did not study; I was somehow studied. Right? That is not an action of my studying. It’s not an action I have to do. Exactly, yes.

Now again, I’m saying: if we were talking about the concept of study in general, one could argue about every one of these points, and indeed people did, as I said. But I think that when we are trying to understand what Torah study is, these really are the correct three criteria. Here it seems to me harder to argue with them. I’ll perhaps give an example. Before I give the example—look, psychologists show a person what’s called a Rorschach blot. They show you some inkblot and say, okay, what does this stir up in you? Fine? Now it may arouse all sorts of interesting insights in a person, and perhaps even new ones for him, though usually I don’t think that’s true; maybe something comes from the unconscious into the conscious. But I don’t think it usually introduces something really new. Still, let’s say it does. I don’t call that study. Why? Because it doesn’t meet the criterion that it be located in the text I’m studying. The Rorschach blot does not actually contain the contents that are aroused in me upon seeing it. Meaning, it’s not that I extracted them from the blot—it’s a trigger. Exactly. It’s a trigger that in the end acts on me. Therefore I don’t call that study.

I’ll jump all the way to the end in order to explain where I’m headed. I think some Torah texts are Rorschach blots. And therefore engaging in them is not called study. It is not called Torah study, at least in the context of a learning act. But studying the content—only the wording. Yes, as wording. But wording—if it’s in the Written Torah there is value to the wording; in the Oral Torah I think there is no value to the wording. I’ll give an example. This is what I wanted to print for you, so I’ll read it to you. I hope it will do the job.

Look, this is a beautiful Rorschach blot. On the site of my friend Nadav Shnerb there’s some random text generator. Good thing we have such things. He made it with Harel Segal, someone from economics, a doctoral student in economics—surely by now he’s finished the doctorate—and another person, maybe Moshe Koppel, I don’t remember who the third was. And they built some text generator that produces texts of Rabbi Kook, of Rabbi Nachman, and I don’t remember what else; I think there was a third. I don’t remember who the third was. Separately? What? Separately or all together? Separately. You have to tell it what you want. You want Rabbi Kook? No problem, hit enter. It gives you four texts. I see. It gives you four texts that are supposed to imitate a text of Rabbi Kook. One of them is original, and the other three are fabrications of the machine, the computer does it. And your goal is to discover which of the four is an authentic text.

Now look—even people who know Rabbi Kook well will have a very hard time identifying it. I’m not an expert on Rabbi Kook, so I’m not much of a measure, but listen—I spoke with people, showed them examples. Here, I pulled out an example of four texts. I remember actually looking at it and it had improved, because I remember that some years ago I saw it, and then even Dov Schwartz himself said it was right. No, I think it’s not easy to distinguish. I don’t know whether it improved or not improved, I have no idea. It’s not easy to distinguish. Listen, I put this on the site and an argument started. In a moment I’ll tell you which one is the real one, it doesn’t matter. But there is one that is the real one—again, that’s what the software said; I didn’t check. So that’s the real one. An argument started on the site. One person said he checked—actually the fourth isn’t right, the first is right. Interesting, it surprised me. Then he went and checked again: no, actually I got confused; no, this one is a bit similar to some real passage, but it isn’t. Then someone else checked and said: what, there are three real passages, not one at all—and it was the three that weren’t, which I think were exactly the three incorrect ones.

Now I say: regardless of the question, when you check in order to find which is the authentic passage—not that it matters right now who was right, and suppose there isn’t even any authentic passage here—the fact that people were able to think of each of these four passages that it could be authentic means that when they encounter a passage of Rabbi Kook they don’t learn anything. Why? But who said the passage the computer created is meaningless? For the sake of a simpler example, suppose I make a text generator of commands for a group of combat soldiers. One text will say: turn left, go right, straight for a hundred meters. It’s random, yes, but it will say: turn left, go straight a hundred meters, stop. A second text will say: go straight five hundred meters, turn right, and shoot ahead. You can make combinations like that, and all of them will—it’s not that they’ll have no meaning, they’ll all have meaning. It’s just that none of them was said by the commander.

That’s why I prefaced the definitions earlier. My claim is this: of course, the text itself can have meaning. By the way, that also depends on what sort of generator it is; I’ll talk in a moment about that too. We’re speaking about a sophisticated generator, not just a random drawing of words. Not just random words—there are many levels, it’s not only because… well, in a moment, in a moment I’ll get to this point of what kind of generator it is. The point is, look, in the end I want to understand what Rabbi Kook wants to convey to me. That is called studying Torah, right? Studying Torah means that through the text Rabbi Kook is trying to teach me something. Now if from these four texts I can draw insights, even though they actually contain nothing—meaning they’re simply not connected, some sort of combination, and right now I’m talking about a superficial combination of words. The style is Rabbi Kook’s style, not the content. This generator is a stylistic generator.

There are generators that can imitate Rabbi Kook’s way of thinking. That’s something else, that’s something else, because then it really could be that the generator created a text that Rabbi Kook himself, in terms of content, could also have taught me. So maybe he didn’t write this passage, but if he had written a bit more, maybe he would also have written this passage. No, but if it created content that has meaning, then you learned it. Yes, but this is a place where the text speaks only at the linguistic level, the stylistic plane, without entering the question of what the sentence means. That basically means that when I study a passage of Rabbi Kook, I’m not studying it. Why? But I’m saying, maybe you’re connecting in a way—what does “at the stylistic level” mean? You connect several meaningful words in grammatically proper form; in many cases that will have some meaning. Rabbi Kook would agree—or a meaning that may exist. One person will say it’s nonsense, another will say it speaks to him of sublime depths. What does that mean? That it means nothing. It’s a Rorschach passage. It does to you whatever you think. But if you can’t distinguish between it and a real passage of Rabbi Kook, then that means the real passage of Rabbi Kook is also a Rorschach passage. Not because Rabbi Kook didn’t invest things in it—I believe he did—but because he doesn’t succeed in conveying to me what he wanted to invest. He only succeeds in arousing things in me that are a function of me, a function of my forms of thought.

Come, let me read these passages to you. Too bad—it would be more effective before your eyes, but I’ll read them.

First passage: “And for him who goes out and comes in there is no peace. This is one who goes from yeshiva to yeshiva and from Talmudic text to Talmudic text, and all the more so, beyond all measure, from the outlook of the secular and impure to the outlook of the holy and pure. About this it was said: whoever adds, subtracts. The attribute of Joseph the righteous, the son of Jacob our father’s old age, whose beauty was like the beauty of Adam the first man, a wholesome man who includes everything, truth in the fullness of its glory, the faithful servant and the brother who acts with guile toward the deceiver. To stand his ground: ‘I lived with Laban and kept the commandments.’ Joseph, as his name indicates, does not subtract by his addition, and he mastered seventy languages through the addition of the letter from His Name into his name, the letter with which this world and all within it were created.” That’s the first passage. Okay? The first passage. I don’t know—we didn’t say it wasn’t the first, but it has meaning. One can argue whether it’s right or not. Wait, wait, wait. In my opinion it doesn’t, but hold on.

The second passage: “The lower levels, such as the unified bond of Israel, fear of sin because of reward and punishment—all these, which stand on a lower level, are bound together with the ideal thoughts of absolute freedom. Not only because of their educational form, but because of the overall structure, in which every idea joins its fellow in a real connection of cause and effect, so that were those places of the lower ideas left empty, the structure would not be whole, and the soul would be defective in parts of its values. Then the spirit will return and inspect all its property, all its source, its joy and the gladness of its spirit, and it will find that the healthy parts among them are indeed the points which, in the state of spiritual immersion, remain in all their full form. Even when the things are not grasped together with their reasons and necessities. So too is the apprehension, and there will be clear knowledge that this light, so constricted in words and letters, in customs, in deeds, in laws, in dialectics and in reasonings, contains the supreme light exalted above all these; and one bathes in it and the two delight together.” That’s the second passage. It sounds authentic.

Third passage: “And the Jewish people is occupied with man, with his knowledge, with the essence of his will, in the way of the question through which it weaves: all is foreseen and authority is granted. And the storm of every desire of eternal love shall arise. And that the nation is the descent of a soul, and the living side that stood out in the wondrous nation shall make man, and he makes the idea without world and spirit. For all the righteous shall walk secure in eternal kindness; we too shall walk in an eternal foundation, weakness of strength and destruction of its world. That reality which exists in the spirit of a man’s soul and in the felt inner light, between divine faith and forgiveness and repentance, comes through love, through the name by way of—or God by a foreign way, four, I don’t know—which darkens the hands of souls and causes holiness to holiness. The more faith approaches the form of the spirit of Israel, within it faith, holiness, and divine nobility are united.” That’s the third.

The fourth: “And so he will go, going and going, until he merits to repair everything. The soul takes in that great life is inflamed for it in every soul; it is greater than everything. More than faith, it is greater than every content of Torah and of practical service. Divine cleaving, not to skip over the love of life, is a descent from characteristic perfection. The spirit of the world to bind the whole state of destiny, all the holiness of the land, to holy action. And from this, the person who separates the fundamental matters of ideas and counsel from one another—afterwards a great breach is formed in every value of greatness and place, and also throughout all the expanses of the world together.”

This is by him? I don’t know Rabbi Kook at all. Of the four, maybe the second. I also said the second. Before the question—I think there is a problem here in the method of analysis before the analysis. Wait, wait, before the analysis. Let’s just finish the experiment. Which is the real one? Which of these did Rabbi Kook write? I said the second. The third maybe, the fourth maybe, the third really seems the closest to actual speech, and all the rest I don’t know. The fourth. The fourth is from the original. That’s what the software says—again. I have to tell you one thing. This is a sort of style, really a sort of Rabbi Kook style, from what little I know, that is indeed very difficult. Yes, right. I can promise you with certainty: if you gave this generator to write a few essays of yours and write—I within two minutes could tell you. That’s the whole point. That’s the whole point, of course. That’s what I’m talking about. I claim that if there are texts or authors for whom you can do this with their texts, and it won’t be very easy to discover which is original, and each person brings something else out of it, that basically means those texts don’t teach us—or don’t teach us what was intended. From the text that you studied, I think the answer is no.

Is studying poetry study? No, I think not—usually not, not what he intended, though you can hear some interpretation. Right, it’s literature, but yes, the same idea. The point is—so this is what… Let me explain a bit before we get to the discussion. I’ll explain a little more. Look, a single sentence—I accept Arik’s comment. A single sentence: if you take Rabbi Kook’s word combinations, what he joins together, and you build from them some sentence, maybe even half a sentence from one place and half from another, then the sentence can have some content, even Rabbi Kook-like content. But the connection between the sentences—when you now tell me what the passage says, not what the sentence says—I have no doubt that this has no connection whatsoever to what Rabbi Kook intended to say. No connection whatsoever. Meaning, the sentence itself—it may be that somehow the computer managed to raise here some Rabbi Kook-like idea. It also connects between the sentences. No—precisely not. The connection between the sentences is already, in my opinion, really just you. Meaning, because it took typical sentences that are related in some way, that is really, really just you. Meaning that when I now explain to you what the connection is between the first sentence and the second, and how it develops the idea and what it is trying to derive—the computer didn’t do that, it didn’t think about that, it’s irrelevant. Meaning, it’s not…

I don’t know about the software, what lab built it so that it doesn’t connect sentence to sentence, only fits the sentence at an abstract level? It doesn’t look that way. I need to… I didn’t check the meta-details, but the point is that clearly the connection between the sentences is something totally different from the connection of a single sentence within itself. A single sentence I can understand—you can build it and somehow it will contain some Rabbi Kook idea or another. But when you build the structure of the passage and say what the passage says—here he posits this and then says this about it and qualifies it and shows the implication of it—he doesn’t do that. Meaning, that connection between the sentences is not a piece of software that… If this were a deep program, meaning a learner that studies Rabbi Kook deeply and produces this, I wouldn’t say what I’m saying here. It didn’t do that. No, it didn’t do that. No, that’s not the point. A program that really learns Rabbi Kook’s way of thinking—by the way, a program of that kind, that learns deeply, could also do my articles, and you wouldn’t recognize those either, if it were good enough. Again, I don’t know to what extent that can be done today; I’m not expert in the level of technology that has been reached. But it’s possible. Meaning, at some point they’ll get there. And therefore I’m saying: I’m not talking about a generator like that, because that would be a generator of ideas, not a generator of formulations. But this is a generator of formulations, not ideas.

Do you think it can’t be done differently? What? If you tried to do this with someone who writes in a… No, you won’t be able to. That’s obvious. If you take—leave Rabbi Kook and leave me—take a text of Rabbi Akiva Eiger, for example, or Kehillot Yaakov, you will never in your life be able to do this. Because in a text of Rabbi Akiva Eiger there is a difficulty, and then an answer comes, and then there is a practical implication. Meaning, he builds something there. A computer—no—this structure won’t be there. Meaning, maybe the computer will somehow manage to produce some difficulty that holds water, that really is a good difficulty—that’s hard. But then to also produce an answer and then an implication, and then a dispute among the medieval authorities (Rishonim) and a practical difference—no chance. A stylistic generator won’t do that. If there is a generator that learns Rabbi Kook’s way of thinking, then just build a generator for Rabbi Akiva Eiger. Build a generator that is a Rabbi Akiva Eiger, so to speak—a simulation of Rabbi Akiva Eiger—and it will study a topic and write a discourse on it. At the principled level, such a thing can be done. In principle. I don’t know—maybe there is some creative dimension; that’s always the debate, whether one can really get to everything a person does. I don’t know. But clearly, at the technical level—say, of difficulties and answers—you could write an intelligent text of Rabbi Akiva Eiger by means of a random generator, once you reached a good enough technological level and with a very strong learning network and fed it many passages of Rabbi Akiva Eiger. That’s not a random generator. What? That’s not a random generator. No, not random, right. That’s why I say: it’s a learning network, it just reproduces Rabbi Akiva Eiger in principle. Meaning, if you do it enough times, what is inside the network is simply Rabbi Akiva Eiger without breathing. That’s all. It’s simply Rabbi Akiva Eiger.

So I’m saying: but here they didn’t do that. That’s not the point. The network wasn’t fed at the conceptual level at all, only at the stylistic level. Meaning simply which words connect with which words. Therefore this is… Now, I think the line is not sharp, because if you feed the network enough style, some of the content is also there, of course—the network doesn’t know that, but still. The separation is not sharp. But clearly at this level, a passage of this length—there is no chance that the network can truly tell me a passage of this length that Rabbi Kook would really have said. Almost no chance. It would simply be impossible. And to make three passages out of four passages such that one can get confused among three of them—you know what, the third one seems to me nonsense. The three—still, this is a significant achievement, or a significant critique of Rabbi Kook if you like. Again, it’s not a critique of him because he wrote poetry, and he wrote, and it came from him, and he surely invested deep and beautiful things in it, and it’s clear to me that he didn’t intend to mislead everyone. But the fact is that he does mislead everyone, and he did not intend that. Meaning, in the end you take one of his texts, you hear some sublime lecture explaining the connection between things, and you understand that there is a lot of creativity in that lecture; it is not a simple decoding of the text. But if you are creative enough, from every text you can derive almost anything. Meaning, I think that if—not from every text. What? A stylistic text. Yes, yes, I’m talking about texts of this kind, obviously. A poetic text of that sort, or in that style, you can get whatever you want out of it.

Yes, but there you’d really have to—it would already be too over-pilpulistic, I think. A responsum, say, from Maimonides—that would be too overworked, nobody would buy it. Nobody would buy it. Like the example the Rabbi once brought in the name of Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev about the wheel of the wagon: is setting it down what fulfills the commandment or placing it what fulfills the commandment—meaning, is the main thing enthusiasm, or is the main thing the act? Yes—my claim is that Hasidism is exactly the same thing. Hasidism too is not called study. It’s not study. I’m saying, leave aside whether it’s Torah or not Torah—it’s not study. It doesn’t meet the first criterion. Even before asking whether it’s Torah or not, you are not studying. It inspires you; it gives you all kinds of little interpretations that come out of you not connected to the text in any necessary way. There is some remote association. Remote associations I can make from anything to anything.

What is the indication? The indication is that you generally will not hear, in lectures of that type, a question like: wait, that can’t be what you’re saying, because in this sentence it says such-and-such, and that contradicts what you just said. You won’t hear that. When you hear a Hasidic interpretation, there are no difficulties. “One does not raise objections to homiletics.” What? The Tanya? No, the Tanya is not… I’m talking about Hasidism in the classic sense. The Tanya is not a classic Hasidic book; it’s prose, basically written in a way that can be completely understood. This isn’t what we’re talking about. I understand this point. It may be that in contrast to the claim “is setting down what fulfills the commandment or placing it what fulfills the commandment,” the point is that the text here, even apart from the text again—if the text didn’t have the issue of “is setting down what fulfills the commandment or placing it what fulfills the commandment,” then he would say this idea even without connection to what the text says. It may be, and that’s exactly why: if he says it without connection to what is written in the text, then it’s not study—it’s his form of service of God. No—it was his learning, not the text’s. No problem. You’re learning him and he is the text. That’s perfectly fine. If you study him and he is the text, you’re allowed to study his text. But don’t tell me I studied that text. I did not study that text; I abused that text.

That paths in serving God are also part of Torah study. I have no problem with that—but it is Torah study of Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev, not of the Talmudic topic “is lighting what fulfills the commandment.” Levi Yitzhak took it before we’re even talking about what he said. He did not learn it from the Talmud that “is lighting what fulfills the commandment.” So he did not study Talmud; he reflected on service of God. Perfectly fine. That is why I prefaced the introduction I did: when you study a text, I call study only something that draws from the text insights that are in it, consciously, and that are new to me. Meaning, that it innovates something for me that is not simply already within me and therefore came up.

“New to me” is important—I said it not in order to exclude review, but because that is exactly what happens. What really happens in such situations? When you have a Rorschach blot, a text that is a Rorschach blot, then what basically happens is that the insights that arise in you are insights that were in you already—maybe dormant, maybe unconscious—but basically they are insights that were already in you. And therefore one of the characteristics is that usually you will not extract from such a text something new. It will illuminate some point in you that perhaps you were not sufficiently aware of; it was hidden somewhere inside you. And then this condition too is not met—you are not extracting something new; you are extracting something existing.

I once spoke about the relation between pilpul and derash. Right? Remember—I made a distinction between pilpul and derash? Here in this room, here, that’s where the coin dropped for me the first time. There was some tractate completion by Finkelstein’s group. They study every Sabbath, so every few years they finish a tractate and he invites me. At the completion—many times, they’ve done two or three completions by now—and Rabbi Lau was there too, and I don’t remember who else spoke there. So I spoke first, and that was better, and there I explained what I think is the difference between derash and pilpul. And I said that derash is a stupid inference that produces a correct conclusion. There—you derive, say, “is lighting what fulfills the commandment”—that’s derash, right? Is lighting what fulfills the commandment or placing it what fulfills the commandment—the question of whether enthusiasm is the main thing or I don’t know what is the main thing—and you discuss it, and there are these sides and those sides, and everything is very logical, everything is fine, only it has nothing to do with the text. The inference by which you derive it from the text is nonsense, a remote association, whatever you want to call it—it’s not the text, not connected. The product, what came out, makes sense; you can hear it, true or not true, but that can be discussed—the product. It’s not connected to the text. The inference is an irrelevant inference.

Pilpul is the opposite. Pilpul is an inference that is logically well built, and the result is nonsense. And therefore you understand that there is some bug in the inference itself, but it is hard to detect because the inference is well built. Artistic pilpul is a pilpul where you won’t be able to put your finger on what the problem is, but in the end the conclusion is that you need to put five corners on a fringed garment. Yes, okay, or something like that—meaning some result that is obviously not true, even though the inference seems very reasonable. By the way, that is often what paradoxes are. Paradoxes are inferences where you don’t know where to put your finger on the problem, but it’s clear that the conclusion is nonsense, not true. Zeno’s paradoxes, for example—he proves that there is no motion. We all know there is motion. Tzipi Livni’s “The Movement.” We all know, we all know. I once wrote on the site too—no, about “The Movement”—that was, in my opinion, a great insight. Why does she call her party “The Movement”? There’s the Labor Movement, the movement to reverse the withdrawal from Sinai—every movement has some goal, right? The movement for… hers is “The Movement.” To move in order to move. Yes—no goal, simply to be there. That’s “The Movement,” as it were. Not “the movement for…” just “The Movement.” Wherever you place it, it’s there. So that was wonderful. I liked that. Anyway, that’s a Hasidic little interpretation.

In any event, the difference between derash and pilpul, in short: real study, serious study, is study that uses inferences—I won’t say valid, because it doesn’t have to be strict logical deduction—but inferences that hold water, good inferences, and draws correct conclusions. Okay? If the inference is missing but the conclusion is correct, that’s derash. If the conclusion is nonsense and the inference is good, that’s pilpul. That’s the difference.

Now, what is derash? Someone gets up at a Sheva Berakhot meal and talks about the Jewish home and how important it is to, I don’t know, be considerate of each other and be modest and righteous and raise children for Torah and fear of Heaven. Fine. So he hangs it on all kinds of midrashim and strings them together, forcing an elephant through the eye of a needle—not connected to the midrash, not connected to anything. But who is going to argue with him about the result? The result is that one should be righteous and keep commandments and raise children for Torah and fear of Heaven. So everyone applauds—well done, may you merit commandments. Why? Because the conclusion is correct. Therefore they say, “One does not answer back to derash.” Why does one not answer back to derash? Because the result is correct—who cares about the inference? The inference is nonsense, fine. To answer back to derash is to raise objections. Why are you raising objections? Do you think one shouldn’t raise children for Torah and fear of Heaven? Of course one should! So why do you care that he hung it on that midrash that has no connection to the matter? Fine. That’s derash.

In my view, derash is really an insult to the intelligence. Why did you present the first as a criticism of preachers? Yes, presenting derashot like that is a little embarrassing, and Rabbi Lau felt it somewhat, so I felt uncomfortable. He thought I was saying it intentionally before he was going to speak. Absolutely not! No, I didn’t even know he was going to speak afterward. No. I just said it because we had learned the end of the tractate, it was a tractate completion, so I tried to explain the question of whether this was derash, pilpul, or what.

Anyway, so that’s derash. Pilpul is something of value—it is a challenge. Pilpul is a challenge. They present you with an argument, the conclusion is obviously not true, and now put your finger on what in the argument is wrong. That is a challenge. By the way, many times pilpul really arose in order to sharpen the students. Like when Rabbi Akiva says, why did Sarah live one hundred and twenty-seven years? Corresponding to Esther, who merited to rule over one hundred and twenty-seven provinces—because his students were dozing. Meaning, there are times when you… Is that derash? I think it’s pilpul. He made some sort of gezerah shavah that in the end is of course nonsense, just in order to wake the students up. But gezerah shavah is an existing halakhic inference, meaning… It doesn’t matter, one can argue. I’m only saying that often there is some value in it for educating students—educating them in ways of learned thinking. First, to know the methods of thinking, and second, to get used to criticism, to find where the bug is, which is also important training. But even apart from that, simply to get to know the form of the argument. Therefore pilpulim, in my view, have a great educational value. It’s not study, but it has value—it is preparatory to a commandment. It sharpens the tools of thinking and learning. Okay?

This is the example I thought I also brought then—the kal va-chomer that proves you need to put a mezuzah on a four-cornered garment. Do you know this one? The writers of methodological works always bring this example. “And if a doorpost, which does not have four corners, is nevertheless obligated in a mezuzah, then a four-cornered garment, which is obligated in fringes, is it not all the more so obligated in a mezuzah?” That’s a kal va-chomer like many that we find, no? So there—why are you laughing? This is a kal va-chomer you can see on every page of the Talmud. What’s funny here? There is a refutation. What’s the refutation? Everything is fine, no? What’s the problem? Why not? A marvelous kal va-chomer. There is only one problem here: I could have made the opposite kal va-chomer. I can prove to you that one has to put four corners of fringes on the doorpost. “And if fringes, which do not have a mezuzah, are obligated in four corners, then a doorpost, which is obligated in a mezuzah, is it not all the more so obligated in four corners?” And that is completely ridiculous.

Now what happens? Once I have done that, it collapses the other kal va-chomer, because the relation of leniency and stringency there is based on the fact that here there are not four corners and there there are—so that is more stringent. Right? Now once I did this, it overturned the leniency and stringency. Therefore, a kal va-chomer built on two data points and not on three is a problematic kal va-chomer. But it’s not so simple, because one could still perhaps make some sort of binyan av from it, even if not a kal va-chomer, some comparison. So it’s still not so simple where exactly the thing falls apart. This is a wonderful example of pilpul, because here there is a kal va-chomer that is seemingly completely valid—it’s a kal va-chomer like those we find in the Talmud—the conclusion, we all laugh because it is obviously not true, but the truth is that when you think about it, it is really not simple to put your finger on why it is not true. That is an example of pilpul.

Now this thing is a highly valuable educational tool. Meaning, you teach people, first, how kal va-chomer works, and second, to notice that not every time someone tells you a kal va-chomer is it automatically right. Try to think what the problem is here in the kal va-chomer; put your finger on what is nevertheless problematic here. So it’s a riddle, a challenge for learners. In my opinion that is the value of pilpul. Derash has no value; pilpul has value.

Here you learn how to learn. Right—that’s what you learn. Right. It’s a means, preparatory to a commandment. You learn how to learn. That’s why I said: it is preparatory to a commandment. Just as when Maimonides writes on logic, or when the Ramchal writes Derekh Tevunot—it’s that kind of book. He also has a book on logic, I don’t remember its name, a little book. They say these are preparatory to a commandment, because one uses logic also to analyze topics. Fine. So that’s not Torah, but it is preparatory to the commandment of Torah study.

But real study is neither this nor that. Study of content—leave aside methodology or skill—is study where both the inference holds water and the result holds water. Meaning, I really accept the result; it is new. I cannot check whether it is correct or not because I’m, say, dealing with a creative midrash. So I create a new result, but I accept it because the inference is valid, and I don’t laugh and throw it in the trash after having made a valid inference. Okay? Meaning, in that sense I take the inference seriously. For me it is a tool to extract something from the text I am studying. That is called learning. But derash or pilpul, in my opinion, is not study. Pilpul is perhaps preparatory to a commandment, as I said earlier, and derash is just—derash is nothing. It is just a way of filling time.

Now what happens here, in texts of this kind, is basically a sort of derash. This is derash. Because in the end I say: not exactly, because sometimes the association is interesting—the association is not idiotic. It is not necessitated by the text; it does not emerge from the text. But it is an interesting association. The connection that Rabbi Levi Yitzhak makes there on “is lighting what fulfills the commandment or placing it what fulfills the commandment”—it is a nice connection, interesting. Not everyone would necessarily have managed to make it. It has nothing to do with the Talmud at all. The Talmud did not intend that, and it does not emerge from the Talmud. No connection at all. You did not study the Talmud. But I cannot say the inference is idiotic. Meaning, it is an inference with some intellectual level of some kind—I don’t know exactly what to call it. Okay? But clearly you did not study the text. That, no. Okay?

And the result is a correct result in terms of service of God—that there is a value to enthusiasm, there is a value to doing things precisely, both sides are correct; one needs to understand what overrides what. That is certainly a worthwhile discussion. Okay? But what does that have to do with the Talmudic topic of whether lighting or placing fulfills the commandment? So therefore, these things are an example of the limitations, or the result, of the definition I presented earlier. Meaning, the definition I presented earlier came to exclude this type of engagement, where we read a poem—as opposed to an encyclopedia entry. Yes, because the whole discussion began there with the columns on poetry. There I tried to distinguish between prose—not prose in the sense of belles lettres, but completely dry prose, an encyclopedia entry, literally something that, as you said, my essays or passages of Rabbi Akiva Eiger, it doesn’t matter—someone who simply writes what he says. You don’t need literary scholarship here in order to draw conclusions. He writes what he means. If you interpret the words, you will understand what he says. That is called prose.

And poetry lies at the other pole, as I tried to present there. Poetry lies at the other pole in the sense that the meaning of the poem has nothing at all to do with the verbal meaning of the words. That is not the meaning of the poem. When you hear the song “There once was a lonely lamp at the edge of a neighborhood,” it is clear that the songwriter did not mean to tell you that there once was a neighborhood that had a lonely lamp. What does that have to do with anything? Why would that interest me? Clearly he was trying, through that description, to convey to me some kind of atmosphere, some sort of—I don’t know—social condition. Right? Children playing and a mother calling them. It’s a wonderful song, by the way. And a mother calling them. So that’s beautiful—it conveys to you a very beautiful human situation. It has nothing to do with lamps and neighborhoods. Meaning, the meaning of the song is not found in… By the way, even that is still not fully a poem, because there is some connection to the meaning of the words. It’s true that the content of the song is not the literal meaning of the words, but it does pass through the literal meaning. You do need to think about a lamp, and loneliness in a neighborhood, and children playing, and so on. Of course the message is not that there were children and their mother called them and they said, “Just one more minute, Mom,” but that through this he comes to convey some sort of atmosphere, right, or something like that, a world of the old days.

There are poems that are much more abstract, that are more poetic under this definition. Meaning, poems in which, from the meaning of the words, you really won’t be able to extract the meaning of the poem—less so even than in “A Lonely Lamp.” These are those abstract poems where it’s not exactly clear what is going on there. Because I think that with “A Lonely Lamp,” quite a lot of people would agree more or less on what the poem says. Even though that is not the meaning of the words, everyone understands that it is trying to show some nostalgic poetic atmosphere of what once was—children who played soccer in the yard and not with a computer, things like that—and mother called them and “why are you bothering us, we want to keep playing.” There is almost a story here. As I said, what I wrote there was that it’s not prose; it’s somewhere in the middle between prose and poetry. So that song, for example, is a bit literary in that sense, but it is still not prose.

Now these texts of this kind are, in many senses, poetry. They are not prose texts. And poetry does not convey information to me in the same sense that prose conveys information. Prose says a sentence, and that is what it wants you to understand. Understand what the sentence says, and that’s it—that is what they wanted to convey to you. In poetry it is really not that. You can understand the entire sentence and still perhaps have no idea what the poem says. It does not pass through the meaning of the words and the sentences—not directly. Again, it creates something in you, but it is not that the message of the poem is the meaning of the words, the literal meaning of the sentences. That would simply be the wrong definition of a poem.

And then the question is: when I read a poem—and of course poems can arouse all sorts of insights in me, sometimes very deep and important and original, all fine—still, I claim that I did not study here. I did not study in the sense I defined earlier, because it was not in the poem. The poem is a Rorschach blot.

Now again, I’m trying to define something here that is hard to define, because the fact is that there are good poems and less good poems. At least, that is how people commonly think. Why? If it’s a Rorschach blot, then everything is in me; it’s not connected to the poem. What something arouses in me, it arouses. There are good readers and less good readers. So why are there better and worse poems? In the postmodern world, for example, the people who advocate deconstruction are people who believe that the interpretation of the text exists only in the reader. In poetry this is largely true—not fully, but true. That’s how many people interpret what they write. I didn’t understand. You’re saying I also have to interpret their texts that way? Okay. In any event, that’s what they claim. And I say: if that is really so, then it is not study. Because study is to draw out insights that exist in the text. Not to let it arouse in me insights that are a function of what is within me. So I did not learn from the poem; the poem only helped things already present in me to awaken. Therefore when I speak about study, by definition it is prose. Studying poetry is not study, according to the definition I gave earlier.

But why? I didn’t quite understand. If the text of the poem doesn’t say something directly, but hints—not that I simply pull things out of myself, but rather it hints at something specific. No. That’s why I said that in the case of, say, “There once was a lonely lamp,” it’s not entirely poetry in my definition. Let’s say pure poetry on this axis is not that. Pure poetry is really some collection of words as a Rorschach blot. Meaning, it brings things out of you. I have to define this in some pure way, and then of course all the practical phenomena are somewhere in the middle. So the poems we know are of course not entirely like that, because there is some connection between what the poem says and the… There are those who say that’s a vulgar term, “what the poem says.” One shouldn’t even talk about such a thing. But let’s say there is such a thing. There is some connection to the meaning of the words. It isn’t a connection like prose, where what the words said is what he meant to say. No. But there is some connection. And therefore with poetry one really can speak about a better poem and a worse poem.

Poetry in its pure sense has no better and worse. Poetry in its pure sense—even a telephone pole is poetry. Because if it arouses all sorts of insights and thoughts in me, then it is poetry, because it aroused things in me. It is measured by the question of what it arouses in me, not by what is in it. Because in any case what is aroused in me is not drawn from it. Now it may be that something totally banal will arouse very deep insights in me, while sophisticated things, and so on, will arouse less good insights. So which is the better poem and which is the worse poem? In prose it is something else, because in prose there is indeed some connection between the… no, not prose—in literature there is some connection between the prose meaning of the words and the message of the poem. The connection is not one-to-one, as it is in pure prose, an encyclopedia entry. But there is some connection, and therefore there can be a better poem and a worse poem. To the extent that one can speak of a better and worse poem, I think it is only because of the prose element in it, and not because of the poetic element.

And this brings me back to us. The claim is that if I define study in this way, then a great many of the things people do today cannot be included under the category of Torah study. Because basically they are studying Rorschach blots. You say all sorts of little interpretations, you have this or that association, I could have made opposite associations. People accept it—why? Because it sounds reasonable to them. Fine, that’s derash. Since the product sounds reasonable, you accept it regardless of whether it is connected to the text, whether it is located in the text. So you didn’t learn it from the text. You are receiving what is already within you. It is also not taken from the text, and it is also not a new insight. Maybe it is new in the sense that it came into your awareness, whereas before it had been hidden. But it is not entirely new either, and it is not drawn from the text.

The purpose of the one who wrote this, just as the one who wrote the derash on this—and he said it in the name of the Rabbi of Berditchev—is that in order to give it authority? I don’t know. Good question. I think it is simply because people will accept it more if it is supported by some text. It’s not a matter of giving it authority in the sense that one must obey, because there is no question of obeying here—it’s not Jewish law. But yes, in order to turn it into something more significant, more Torah, more the word of God. If you say an idea of your own, I can give a lecture in philosophy—is that Torah? I don’t know. People generally won’t relate to it as Torah. One can argue, but generally they won’t. But say those same ideas themselves, only from Guide for the Perplexed—then it will be Torah completely, everyone will recite the blessing over Torah with devotion. Why? Just ideas, after all. It’s only that Maimonides wrote them and not I—so what? Yes, but Maimonides is already written in Rashi script, and that’s already Torah. Meaning, I think that’s the reason Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev hung it on Maimonides. What? The next books will come out nicely in Rashi script. Yes. Okay. Since I’m opposing this phenomenon, it wouldn’t be fair to print them in Rashi script. That’s among other things what I do in my books.

In any event, the point is that when we study aggadic literature, or the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)—well, the Hebrew Bible is more subtle; we’ll still get to the Hebrew Bible—when we go to aggadah, many times, not always, and modern study of aggadah has improved in this respect, academic study, meaning there is more commitment to the text. You can hear some difficulties: wait, then that can’t be the interpretation of the aggadah, because otherwise it wouldn’t have opened this way or continued that way. Meaning there is some desire to fit it to the text. Up until recent decades, that wasn’t the case. Study of aggadah was complete neglect of Torah study. In my opinion, only in the last few decades has it begun somewhat, maybe in a certain sense—though in a moment I’ll say why I think still not—but in a certain sense, yes, because it extracts. There is some commitment to making what you say fit what is written in the text—that is the indication. Because otherwise, if you say free ideas, then it doesn’t need to fit anything.

Now up to here that was the subject of study. Now what is Torah? After that we’ll see that there is a connection between the two. Torah—I’ll propose this definition: Torah is basically a text such that what it says obligates me. That is Torah. That’s the definition I propose. Okay? Now of course the laws of the state will not be Torah. They will be “teaching” in the conceptual sense of this, but not Torah. It is teaching in that sense, not God’s Torah in the sense of holiness. But when it obligates me in the religious sense as the word of God, then it is Torah in the sense we are speaking about here, whose study is a commandment and so on. This completes the previous definition.

And why? Because look, for example, why did I just say that modern study of aggadah is more like study than what there used to be? Once it was just derashot. Today it is a bit more like study; there is at least some attempt really to decode what the aggadah says and all that. It still doesn’t quite persuade me, but much better than before, that’s obvious. But I have almost never seen in my life—I’m not enough of a student of it because these things don’t speak to me, among other reasons because of what I’m saying now—but from what I’ve seen, and asked people to bring me examples and they didn’t, I have not seen an example where you take an aggadah and derive from it a lesson with which you do not agree, and then adopt it because it is written in the Talmud. I have not seen such a thing. Meaning, if in the end what you derive from the aggadah will always be something you agree with, then we are back again to the definition of study and the definition of Torah.

Torah is something such that if it says something, it obligates me. Okay? If I were to think that migo should extract from one in possession, and I studied the Talmud and the Talmud says, “We do not invoke migo in order to extract,” then that’s it. Nothing to be done. I might think yes, it is evidence—why not? One in possession, by the way, I really do think so: possession is a default state. If both sides are equal, leave it with the one in possession. But if someone brought evidence, why leave it with the one in possession? We talked about this when we discussed migo. “We do not follow the majority in monetary law?” Same question too—why not? Why not? But we don’t extract from… No, that’s what I’m saying. So my own reasoning would not accept this. But the Talmud says, “We do not invoke migo to extract,” so I accept it. For me that is called Torah—sorry, that is what I mean by Torah. And when I study it and the result is one I do not agree with, I accept it.

With aggadah, this never happens. There is no such example. In my opinion you won’t find one. Why? One of two things. Usually the lesson itself will already be a lesson I agree with. It won’t turn out to be a lesson I disagree with. That’s what usually happens. In the end, what comes out of the aggadah is fear of Heaven, or some psychological phenomenon or another, something I agree with anyway. And in the worst case, if something comes out… I asked Chayuta, the editor of the books—I had major fights over this because in the second book I devoted a section to the subject I’m talking about today. The fifth conversation in the second book deals with this. And over that I had terrible fights; she did a doctorate in aggadah, in aggadic Talmud, and she didn’t agree, and we fought over it. Editing that section was like the splitting of the sea. And I asked her for one example—bring me one example. To this day I have not received one. An example of an aggadah from which she understood some conclusion that contradicted her values or what she had previously thought, and she accepted it because it was written in the aggadah. She had no example.

Meaning, either the lesson itself is a lesson I already agree with—I basically use the aggadah like Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev, to push the… Say, feminists always find feminism in aggadah, liberal people find liberalism in aggadah, everyone finds in aggadah what he needs. And therefore that means he did not find it in the aggadah; he found it in himself. It is a Rorschach blot for him. And if some straight fellow finds chauvinism in aggadah—and there are quite a few such people—but he is a liberal egalitarian feminist, what does he do? He says, all right, fine, but it isn’t binding. That was in their period, but according to today’s values it doesn’t fit. Or he will bring another aggadah in which one sees liberalism or feminism. And therefore he will not accept it. So why are you studying it?

You could say it’s like in a derashah, where you combine the reasoning with the exposition and together they create Jewish law, but if there were only one and not both, it couldn’t create the Jewish law. So it’s the same with aggadah: if you have your own reasoning and the Sages also thought this way, then together… But it doesn’t happen. That’s what I’m saying—it doesn’t happen. Usually the aggadah says what I think. It doesn’t say something else. And if it says something else… I can’t even think of such an example. I haven’t encountered one. Something that by myself I’m not sure I would accept, and after seeing that the aggadah says it, now I’m reassured. Why? First, because I don’t have great trust in aggadah. After all, you can derive many things from it, and that itself means it’s a kind of Rorschach blot, as I said here. And second, if not, there are other aggadot. And other aggadot say something else. So then I am choosing whatever I want. So why are you doing this? Who cares? Why study?

Now here this combines the two aspects I talked about. First, it’s not Torah, because what comes out of it doesn’t obligate you. If anything comes out at all, you will always derive what suits you, and then there won’t be any conflict at all. And that takes me back to the claim that it is not study. Not only is it not Torah. Because if you can derive from it whatever you want, then it is a Rorschach blot. Right? And then it turns out that these two definitions together—of what study is and what Torah is—exclude from the category a very large part of the study we do today. Meaning, that’s what I think, and I really think that this is not Torah study in the full sense.

I’ll perhaps qualify this a bit later, but yes. If I study, say, some one of the books of the medieval authorities (Rishonim) in Jewish law, something completely clear, simple, everyone understands it and so on—but it doesn’t really obligate me because I don’t need to rule that way. Obligate is not all or nothing. Obligate is not all or nothing. But obligate can mean it has weight for me. Meaning, there is not Jewish law like Maimonides everywhere, but when I clarify Maimonides there is practical significance for me in that. Because if that is Maimonides’ position, okay, that already says something. It doesn’t mean I automatically accept everything written in Maimonides, but it has weight. It’s not an all-or-nothing question. You can say maybe not with Maimonides, but with some smaller, more marginal book. Presumably there the weight would be less. The weight would be less, but still there would be weight. And a book that has absolutely no weight for you—even in Jewish law I wouldn’t regard that as Torah study. No, I think it does have some weight. It may be that if a case comes up where I’m uncertain, and this happens to be the ruling… And my own view has none? No—that’s exactly it, it has none. You won’t see such a thing anywhere. There is no such thing. I didn’t find it. I’m telling you, I looked, I asked, I requested examples on the site as well. Look, there are lots of responses there. In my opinion there was not a single convincing example. None.

But you say the same thing also about verses of the Torah. I’ll get to that. I’ll get to Torah verses. But the Sages themselves interpreted them in exactly the way you’re talking about—that they had a reasoning plus a verse, and it became Jewish law. I’ll still talk about Torah verses; I’ll still talk about Jewish law. I haven’t gotten to all of that yet. Right now I’m only laying out the concepts. That comes next, yes.

I think I can… just an interesting example. But the Rabbi also said this about the Prophets, so this example is about things I thought about, that the Rabbi said in various forms in the past. And I thought about it, and it does seem to me that one can think of examples of things that, say, opened possibilities. For example, there is a midrash that in the messianic era, or after the messianic era—I don’t know, there are various interpretations about exactly when this is aimed at—there will be a state of “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb,” where predatory animals will not prey upon other animals. And I know that there is another interpretation saying that the intention is, for example, that the wicked will not harm the righteous or something like that. And if the second had seemed to me completely far-fetched, then I would say that certainly that is the meaning. But since it does not seem to me completely far-fetched, I hold it as an option—something I would not have seriously considered if not for this midrash. I would not have thought that it was… as if it’s just speculation.

Again, I can agree that there may be a situation where, as Oren said, it combines. Meaning, a bit of my own reasoning plus a bit from the Prophet or from aggadah or something like that, that somehow combine. I think this is so rare that even this example is hypothetical. Meaning—because what… In any case there are two interpretations. So what are you suggesting? I wasn’t uncertain beforehand, and I’m not uncertain now either. Either the interpretation is such-and-such or it is such-and-such. So what did I really learn there? No, because before this prophecy I would not have thought of it. Even now I don’t… I have no idea. So what did I really learn there? Before this prophecy I would have said that this is just some thing… just an invention. Now I say it’s not an invention, but I don’t know whether it’s true. Okay, so fifty-fifty. So you learned that it’s fifty-fifty. Fine. You understand that it’s not… No, to me that seems worlds apart. I don’t think so.

And I’ll say more than that—there’s another point. You are talking about facts. I’m mainly talking about values. Facts are something else. If it says in the Hebrew Bible that in the future something will happen—true, one can interpret it otherwise, but I understand, I learned, okay, on your fifty, fifty percent—it’s learned that there is a certain fact that may be true; at fifty percent it is true. That is more than the zero I had thought. But those are facts. With values it happens even less. But wait—with values, if there is some value I don’t believe in or think is wrong, no verse will persuade me of it. No verse and no aggadah. And therefore for me that’s basically what matters. Because to learn facts—again, we had some argument about that too, and it can be discussed. I think that in general learning facts is not Torah study. Facts are facts, what? It’s true that I can’t know these facts about what will be in the future. So I’ll wait, and then I’ll know. What’s the difference between knowing facts about the past and knowing facts about the future? Facts.

Also about the past—if I learn that… what? Come on, even in my view that’s not… Jacob our father worked seven years. He worked seven years. If you found some papyrus describing that Jacob worked seven years, would that be Torah study? In principle you could find it in papyri too. I don’t think so—again, it’s hard for me to justify. But if it was written in the Torah, it’s Torah study. Why? Why? Because it is study of the text of the Torah. No, wait. I’ll get to the Written Torah. That was Oren’s comment earlier, and I’ll still get there. The Written Torah has a different status. It’s no accident that I haven’t gotten there yet. By the way, Prophets too—that’s why I haven’t spoken about them yet. For now I was talking about aggadah. Okay, regarding aggadah we agree that if we learn facts from it, okay, that I can understand. Meaning if we learn from aggadah just facts about human life. As for Scripture, I’ll talk about that separately. That is a somewhat complicated issue in itself.

So in short, since we’re already finishing, I just want to summarize. From this definition of the concept of study and the concept of Torah, several things emerge. For example, study—even of halakhic topics, by the way—in a pluralistic study hall, as they call it today. There are these pluralistic study halls today, where everyone sits and raises ideas—secular, religious, doesn’t matter who—all kinds of nice ideas come up, all kinds of creativity, everything is fine. Of course, an idea never comes up there that is unacceptable to those sitting there. That’s obvious. If one happens to come up, then all right, the Torah is chauvinistic, but that doesn’t interest us. Since we’re also dealing generally with secular people, they’re not bound by it. So they’re not studying Torah. They’re not studying Torah because they are not studying something that, from their point of view, has binding authority. They are holding a book that I call Torah, but I cannot call their learning Torah study. Because one who sees Torah as a source of inspiration and not as a source of authority is reading poetry.

Someone who goes to study, for example, topics of Rabbi Chaim—he once studied in yeshiva, today he’s not religious, smokes on the Sabbath with a good book of Rabbi Chaim. Right? He enjoys the intellectual side of the matter. Is that Torah study? No, in my opinion it is not. Why? He is doing exactly the same action as everyone else. No, he’s not doing the same action either, by the way. Because when I study Rabbi Chaim, the endpoint of the act is to adopt the reasoning into myself and accept it. And he doesn’t end there. He only studies Rabbi Chaim. No, that means nothing. There is no implication for him. He won’t act according to it; he won’t adopt it; it doesn’t interest him. He studies the intellectual issue in the thing. If he studies Rabbi Chaim on the laws of sacrifices? Doesn’t matter—the laws of sacrifices too. That is Jewish law that is binding for me. The fact that it is not applied today—so what? It is Jewish law that is binding for me. Today I believe that one should sprinkle the blood in such-and-such a way. That is a halakhic fact, let’s call it that. That is a conclusion I drew from my study, regardless of whether I implement it in practice.

What Maimonides writes about wiping out Amalek. Maimonides asks, in commandment 156 I think, regarding the commandment to wipe out Amalek and, more generally, the commandment to wipe out the seven nations—I think regarding Amalek he writes—he asks why people might ask why I counted this commandment, since it is a commandment not practiced for generations. And a commandment not practiced for generations is not counted according to the third root. So Maimonides says: whoever asks this does not understand what it means for a commandment not to be practiced for generations. The commandment of wiping out Amalek is practiced for generations. Only what? Amalek is finished, so one can no longer implement it. But I am bound by it even today. According to Maimonides, he says that in the future, should the situation arise that Amalek appears… Yes, but it doesn’t need to happen in practice. It’s enough that in principle, hypothetically, it binds me. The son of Maimonides also has a long responsum on this. It doesn’t matter. I’m just saying it’s enough that in principle it binds me. The fact that, say for argument’s sake, I already finished the task and now it isn’t practically applicable at the moment—that doesn’t matter. It binds me. So studying it is studying Torah. Because I understand that this is the Jewish law, and that Jewish law binds me.

It’s not just the discussion; that is exactly the point. Therefore I define Torah as something authoritative with respect to me. Studying something that, for me, is authority—so that if I studied it and this is my conclusion, then it is binding for me. And someone who does not relate to the matter this way—he may be studying, though it is doubtful whether he is, because in the end he does what he wants with the conclusion—but he certainly is not studying Torah. Because the text is not authoritative for him. Meaning, what it says does not bind him. So fine—he can study Indian culture, or he can study Jewish culture. For him there is no difference between them. So—therefore I say this has all kinds of implications, both for forms of study and kinds of learners, and also for the various branches of study—Hasidism, Rabbi Kook, and all sorts of such things—which in my opinion are highly doubtful whether they can be considered Torah study at all. Now I will qualify this a little bit later, but…