Torah and Torah Study, Lesson 6
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
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Table of Contents
- General Overview
- Tradition as Interpretation and Not as a Hollow Pipe
- Halakhic Examples: Yom Kippur, Fasting as a Concept, and a Minor Who Comes of Age in the Middle of the Day
- A Parallel Example: a Minor Who Comes of Age in the Middle of the Omer Count and the Ba’al Halakhot Gedolot
- Prohibition and Positive Commandment, the Sabbath, and Maimonides in the Sixth Root
- The Dispute Between Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua: Awareness of Interpretation and the Authority of Tradition
- Changing Tools of Thought and the Modern Awareness of Change
- Returning to the Definition of Torah and Study: Interpretation Versus Creation and the Implications for Different Areas of Study
- Nefesh HaChayim: the Will of God Versus the Speech of God and the Hierarchy of Jewish law and aggadic literature
- The Concubine at Gibeah and “These and Those Are the Words of the Living God”
- Reciting Psalms Versus Nega’im and Ohalot, and Nefesh HaChayim’s Comment About King David
- Critique of Studying aggadic literature and the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) as a Source of Authority: Not Accepting Conclusions That Are Not Persuasive on Logical Grounds
- Derush, Pilpul, and New Systematic Tools in aggadic literature
- The Example of the Book of Ruth, Rabbi Elchanan Samet’s Lecture, and the Lesson That Is Not a Binding Innovation
- Reasons for Reading the Book of Ruth on Shavuot and the Claim of Non-Bindingness
- Conclusion: Troubling Implications and a Promise of Future Moderation
Summary
General Overview
The speaker continues explaining the meaning of Torah and Torah study through the concept of tradition, arguing that transmitting Torah from rabbi to student is not a “hollow pipe” but a process in which understanding takes on a new form even if the source would not have agreed with it. He illustrates this through halakhic analyses (Yom Kippur and the Omer count) showing how a change in concepts and tools of thought changes conclusions, and yet can still count as an authentic continuation of the earlier method. From there he arrives at a principled claim that Torah study in its full sense is primarily connected to analysis of Jewish law as an encounter with the will of God, and he contrasts this with the study of aggadic literature, the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), ethics, and thought, which in his opinion tend more toward creation than binding interpretation. He concludes by saying that the implications of this claim are troubling, and states that next time he will try to offer a more moderated picture, even though he himself is not sure he is fully at peace with that moderation.
Tradition as Interpretation and Not as a Hollow Pipe
The speaker states that transmitting Torah and tradition from rabbi to student is a non-trivial process in which a student can say, “Almost everything I think I heard from him,” and nevertheless arrive at conclusions the rabbi himself would not agree with. He cites Rav Kook’s words about Rabbi Eliezer, that “he never said anything he had not heard from his rabbi,” and on the other hand “he said things no ear had ever heard before,” and explains this to mean that Rabbi Eliezer heard from his rabbi things that even his rabbi himself had not consciously heard within his own words. He argues that tradition is not invention ex nihilo but “a pipe, just not a hollow one,” and that innovation is the product of absorption, processing, concepts, and analysis that produce a new result considered a proper unfolding of the earlier stage.
Halakhic Examples: Yom Kippur, Fasting as a Concept, and a Minor Who Comes of Age in the Middle of the Day
The speaker presents an inquiry into whether Yom Kippur is one unit or a collection of moments, and explains that the distinction depends on whether “fasting” means point-by-point non-eating or maintaining a span of time without eating. He argues that if a fast is defined conceptually as non-eating over a unit of time, then a minor who develops two pubic hairs in the middle of Yom Kippur and had been fasting until then for educational purposes can continue fasting, because in practice the condition of the fast—twenty-four hours—is fulfilled even if the first half of the day was not fulfillment of a commandment. He sharpens the point by saying that the requirement here may be a “conceptual requirement” in the definition of a fast, and not a “halakhic requirement” of one unified commandment, and concludes that the very same method that initially led to the conclusion that the minor should not continue fasting can, once the conceptual assumption is exposed, lead to the opposite conclusion.
A Parallel Example: a Minor Who Comes of Age in the Middle of the Omer Count and the Ba’al Halakhot Gedolot
The speaker compares the discussion to a minor who comes of age in the middle of the Omer count, in relation to the position of the Ba’al Halakhot Gedolot that if one misses a day there is no “completeness,” and argues that if the minor counted until then as part of his education, he may continue counting. He explains that the requirement is not that the counting is “one unit,” but that the concept of counting is a continuous enumeration of the days one after another, and therefore an act of counting took place even before obligation began. He presents this as a family of topics in which what appears to be a talmudic-halakhic requirement is really a factual-conceptual requirement, and the implication is that continuing the practice after the moment of obligation can indeed be required.
Prohibition and Positive Commandment, the Sabbath, and Maimonides in the Sixth Root
The speaker compares Yom Kippur to the Sabbath and argues that there too the positive commandment and prohibition can have identical content. He cites Maimonides in the sixth root of Sefer HaMitzvot, where the positive and negative commandments of the Sabbath are counted as two commandments even though their content is identical, while in the ninth root Maimonides says that when the content is identical one counts only once, and he concludes that the mere difference between a prohibition and a positive commandment is enough to count them as two even without different content. He notes that on Yom Kippur both the prohibition and the positive commandment come “to make sure that you fast,” and eating is understood as nullifying the duty of fasting and not merely as an independent act.
The Dispute Between Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua: Awareness of Interpretation and the Authority of Tradition
The speaker describes two types: Rabbi Eliezer as seeing himself as one who transmits tradition without adding to it, and Rabbi Yehoshua as holding that Torah was given to human beings and that there is room for decision by the power of understanding. He points to a practical difference: once Rabbi Eliezer has stated something, “he is not willing to hear another position,” because “I received this from my rabbi,” whereas Rabbi Yehoshua forms a view through arguments that interpret what was received, and is willing to be persuaded that he was mistaken. He disagrees with the statement attributed to Maimonides that “no dispute ever arose regarding something transmitted to Moses at Sinai,” and argues that the example of Rabbi Eliezer and his colleagues shows that dispute can exist even when one side appeals to the authority of tradition, because the other side questions the reliability of the interpretation or a corruption in transmission.
Changing Tools of Thought and the Modern Awareness of Change
The speaker argues that innovation in later generations may stem not from changed circumstances but from changed “tools of thought,” and gives the Brisker analysis of Rabbi Chaim as an example of a conceptual toolbox unavailable to earlier generations. He says that conceptualization allows even people who are not on Rabbi Chaim’s level to reach analyses that greater figures in the past could not have reached, because the tools themselves have improved. He argues that awareness that tradition includes interpretation is a modern phenomenon, because changes in the world become quicker and clearer, to the point that one can no longer go on imagining that the process is a hollow pipe.
Returning to the Definition of Torah and Study: Interpretation Versus Creation and the Implications for Different Areas of Study
The speaker returns to the questions “What is Torah?” and “What is study?” and draws practical implications for how one relates to the study of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), ethics, and thought. He declares that in his view studying the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), ethics, and thought “is not Torah study,” because it is “a collection of inventions,” whereas “studying Torah is, in principle, only Jewish law,” meaning analysis of halakhic topics. He recognizes a difficulty in that interpretation itself contains a creative component, and asks how to distinguish between creation and interpretation of one’s rabbi’s Torah through new conceptual tools.
Nefesh HaChayim: the Will of God Versus the Speech of God and the Hierarchy of Jewish law and aggadic literature
The speaker quotes from Nefesh HaChayim, Gate 4, and notes precisely that “to cleave with all one’s powers to the word of God—that is halakhah,” explaining that Jewish law is an expression of the will of God in the structure of “impure and pure, forbidden and permitted, liable and exempt.” He suggests that Nefesh HaChayim holds that Jewish law is Torah study in its primary sense because through studying the will of the Holy One, blessed be He, a person cleaves to Him, and he notes that the author of Tanya agrees with the basic definition that the study itself is the cleaving and not merely a means to an emotional experience. He explains that Nefesh HaChayim also validates the study of aggadic literature because it is “the speech of the Holy One, blessed be He,” since “everything came forth from His mouth to Moses at Sinai,” but Jewish law remains on a higher level because it is both the will of God and the speech of God.
The Concubine at Gibeah and “These and Those Are the Words of the Living God”
The speaker brings the story in Gittin about Rav Evyatar and Rabbi Yonatan regarding the Concubine at Gibeah, and Elijah’s statement that “My son Evyatar says thus, my son Yonatan says thus,” and interprets this through Nefesh HaChayim to mean that the Holy One, blessed be He, “literally repeated their words” while they were engaged in them. He suggests that the distinction between the will of God and the speech of God explains how “these and those are the words of the living God” can apply even when one of the opinions is not “correct” as the practical ruling, because both opinions receive the status of Torah as divine speech accompanying the study, even if there is not one truth in the sense of binding divine will. He adds that this may perhaps apply even to disputes among later authorities (Acharonim), in a metaphorical sense of granting legitimacy to the process of Torah study, even though the phrase appears explicitly in the Talmud only in certain places.
Reciting Psalms Versus Nega’im and Ohalot, and Nefesh HaChayim’s Comment About King David
The speaker cites from Nefesh HaChayim the midrash that King David asked that one who engages in Psalms be considered as though he were engaged in Nega’im and Ohalot, and emphasizes that Nefesh HaChayim concludes that engaging in the halakhot of the Talmud with analysis and effort is more important than reciting Psalms. He quotes Nefesh HaChayim’s remark, “And who even knows whether the Holy One, blessed be He, agreed with him in this? For we do not find… what answer He gave him,” and presents this as a close linguistic-analytical reading that sharpens the distinction between levels of study. He notes that this is “pilpul,” but also “a nice observation,” and continues using it to support the superiority of halakhic analysis.
Critique of Studying aggadic literature and the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) as a Source of Authority: Not Accepting Conclusions That Are Not Persuasive on Logical Grounds
The speaker argues that in the study of aggadic literature it almost never happens that a person reaches a conclusion that “offends him” and then retracts and adopts it because the text obligates him; rather, either one finds in the text what one already thinks, or one rejects the conclusion on the basis of other sources. He uses this as an indication that aggadic literature does not function as a binding source of authority, unlike Jewish law, where there is the possibility of “raising a white flag” and deciding that there is such a thing as “right and wrong.” He argues that pluralistic study halls “sit on beanbags” and tend to focus specifically on aggadic literature because there “everyone does whatever he wants,” whereas in Jewish law “what is written there is what is written there,” and if one does not accept it, then “I simply won’t say that that is Jewish law.”
Derush, Pilpul, and New Systematic Tools in aggadic literature
The speaker argues that in the past, the study of aggadic literature was mostly “vortlach,” devoid of value to the point of “wasting Torah study,” and he distinguishes between derush, to which one does not answer back because the conclusion is simply asserted, and pilpul, which is a riddle whose conclusion is “absolutely not correct in any way.” He says that in the last generation more systematic tools for interpreting aggadic literature have developed, mainly in academia, making it possible to show the movement of the text in a compelling way, but even then the lesson learned usually remains predictable and does not create binding content. He defines binding study as a situation in which one tries to understand the difficulty, the answer, and every stage in the text, and is prepared to raise a white flag if it contradicts one’s personal stance, and he argues that this almost never exists outside Jewish law.
The Example of the Book of Ruth, Rabbi Elchanan Samet’s Lecture, and the Lesson That Is Not a Binding Innovation
The speaker describes a lecture by Rabbi Elchanan Samet at Kfar Etzion on the Book of Ruth, where the scroll was presented as a story of “late return” that begins in tragedy and produces hope until the appearance of the Davidic monarchy. He says the literary analysis was “beautiful” and systematic in its use of key words and structure, but the lesson he himself comes away with is simply “you must not despair,” which in his eyes is “a bargain-basement ethics lesson” that one could say even without the scroll. He points out that people do not treat the study of aggadic literature as a field in which a binding contradiction arises between messages, and illustrates this with the question of Job versus Ruth, arguing that no one studies it as “two conflicting laws.”
Reasons for Reading the Book of Ruth on Shavuot and the Claim of Non-Bindingness
The speaker quotes Rabbi Medan as saying that there are “twenty-two answers for why we read the Book of Ruth on Shavuot,” compared with one answer for the Book of Esther on Purim, and concludes that when there are many answers “it means none of them is satisfactory.” He adds that Chabad does not read it on Shavuot, and mentions other customs as well. He argues that reasons supplied after the law has already been fixed are a characteristic example of aggadic study that does not create a new obligation, because without the prior law to read the scroll, no reason would have caused anyone to establish the reading in the first place.
Conclusion: Troubling Implications and a Promise of Future Moderation
The speaker concludes that the study of aggadic literature and the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) has difficulty meeting the two definitions he proposed: study as drawing something out of the text through binding tools, and Torah as a source of binding authority that requires raising a white flag when the conclusion runs against one’s personal will. He says that the first component has improved in recent generations, but the second almost never exists, and therefore he sees an essential difference between Jewish law and the other fields. He notes that the implications of this conclusion are troubling and that next time he will try to present a more moderated picture, though he does not know whether that moderation will be faithful to what he really thinks or an attempt to avoid going all the way.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Two sessions ago—really three sessions ago—I started talking a bit about the meaning of Torah and Torah study, and I tried to define the concepts of study and Torah, those two things, and from that to try to derive an attitude toward studying different fields. I’ll just briefly remind you, because today I want to continue with it a little. In the middle we made some kind of break in honor of Shavuot, but it’s really part of the same line of thought, because in that break I was actually dealing with the concept of tradition. Meaning: what does tradition mean, what gets passed from rabbi to student, what happens when there are crises. We talked about the first generation of Yavneh, what the dispute there was, and last time I concluded by noting that the transmission of Torah and tradition from rabbi to student is a very non-trivial process. That’s because I brought the example of what Rav Kook writes about Rabbi Eliezer: that on the one hand it says he never said anything he hadn’t heard from his rabbi, and on the other hand he said things no ear had ever heard before. So he said that Rabbi Eliezer heard from his rabbi things no ear had ever heard before, and I added: including his rabbi himself. Even his rabbi had not heard those things inside what he himself had said. And that’s not a joke, it’s completely real, and I tried to explain why, in my opinion, that really is so. I know about myself—and as I already mentioned this—my maggid shiur, the person from whom I really learned almost everything I learned from a human being and not from books, I’m sure that on some things I disagree with him, and on the other hand almost everything I think, I heard from him. Meaning, he wouldn’t agree with what I would explain to him or what I would claim, but I heard it from him. Meaning, there’s something about this whole matter: when you hear something from someone and it’s absorbed by you, it takes on some sort of form or analysis or concept, a mode of relating, that can receive a new form which even the source would not agree with. But that really is the proper development of the next stage after the previous one, and that is the essence of tradition. Tradition does not mean a hollow pipe. We talked about this—it was the dispute between Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Eliezer and their students who disagreed with them, about the question whether Torah should pass through a hollow pipe. The alternative is not that Torah has to be invented; rather, tradition is a pipe, but not a hollow one. And at the end I talked a bit—I brought that example of a few yeshivah-style conceptual inquiries where I tried to show that they seem completely different from the views we are trying to formulate. I spoke about Yom Kippur: is it made up of parts or is it one unit? And I tried to show that in one form of analysis the conclusion comes out one way and in another form of analysis it comes out differently, and still both forms of analysis are a continuation of one another. Meaning, someone will say that Yom Kippur is made up of parts—sorry, that it is one unit—and therefore a minor who comes of age in the middle of Yom Kippur does not need to continue fasting, because he already missed it; in any case he won’t be fasting the whole day. And I argued that if you ask why define it as one unit, and the answer is because fasting does not mean not eating. Not eating is defined at every moment: every moment that you didn’t eat, you didn’t eat, because the state of having eaten did not exist, so at that moment you didn’t eat. But that isn’t called fasting. Every day we don’t eat; nobody would call that fasting. To fast means to maintain a certain stretch of time in which you don’t eat—an interval, a segment of time, not points. The Torah determines that on Yom Kippur it’s a whole day. Never mind, one could have discussed an hour, two hours, ten hours, whatever. So the Torah says: a whole day. And once the Torah defines it that way, then the assumption is that fasting itself, or the obligation to fast on Yom Kippur, means to fast a whole day. That’s what leads to the definition that Yom Kippur is one unit and not a collection of parts. If the prohibition were defined as not eating, then it would be a collection of parts: every single moment on Yom Kippur, don’t eat. But if the prohibition is—or the obligation is—to fast, or the prohibition is not to avoid fasting, then you have to define the day as one unit. But if that’s really so, then the result comes out opposite to what I said at the beginning. Because if a minor who develops two pubic hairs in the middle of the day, and until now he fasted under the law of education—he also fasted, and he fasted under the law of education—then if he fasted under the law of education, he can continue fasting, what’s the problem? Even if he continues fasting, he is in fact fulfilling the commandment of fasting, because he did not eat over the entire twenty-four hours. It doesn’t matter that the first part of the day, his not eating wasn’t considered fulfillment of a commandment, because he wasn’t yet commanded, he was a minor. But as far as the condition that you have to fast, and not merely not eat, he fulfilled it. He fasted for twenty-four hours. By the way, there are several more examples of this. For example, yes, among all the parallel discussions, yes, about a minor who comes of age in the middle of the Omer count. A minor who comes of age between the two Passovers—that’s a Talmudic text—but a minor who comes of age in the middle of the Omer count, so can he continue to fast—let’s say according to the… continue counting? Or start counting? Yes, according to the Ba’al Halakhot Gedolot, that if you miss a day you can no longer continue because of completeness, the question is whether a minor who comes of age in the middle of the Omer count can continue counting or not. So apparently according to the Ba’al Halakhot Gedolot, no, that doesn’t work. And I say that’s not true. Because if he counted until now under the law of education, then there is no problem at all continuing to count afterward as well. And why? Because the requirement is not that counting the Omer is one unit, but that counting means enumerating these days one after another, not counting each day separately. Arranging them one after another—that’s what counting means. Now, even if you arranged the first ten or twenty days in a way that for you doesn’t count as fulfillment of a commandment because you were a minor, still, you counted. First day, second, third—so you counted, and you can continue counting, because the continuation too will be considered counting. If you start from the middle, that isn’t considered counting; but if you counted before, even if it wasn’t a commandment, still the act of counting you did perform. So in that case you can continue counting. Really, if we just add this to complete the example—it doesn’t actually relate to our main topic—this is really a whole family of issues where we present the requirements as if they were requirements in the analytic-halakhic sense, while in fact these are requirements in the factual-conceptual sense, not in the analytic sense. Meaning, in other words, when I require a person to fast an entire day on Yom Kippur, it’s not because the commandment is one unit, but because the concept of fasting is not eating for a unit of a day, over a unit of a day. That’s a definition within the concept of fasting, not within the halakhic requirement. It’s not how to define the commandment of fasting, but how to define the concept of fasting. If it were how to define the commandment, then someone who didn’t fulfill the commandment for half a day has no point continuing to fulfill the commandment, because the commandment is the whole unit. But if the definition is a definition of the concept, not of the commandment—the concept of fasting means not eating a whole day—then I don’t care whether in the first half of the day you didn’t eat not as fulfillment of a commandment. Bottom line, you didn’t eat. Once you didn’t eat, you can continue not eating, because the act you are doing really is an act of fasting. Okay? So the requirement is a requirement on the concept, not a requirement on the halakhic plane.
[Speaker C] From a halakhic standpoint, if despite this interpretation he stops and doesn’t continue fasting, has he committed a transgression?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then obviously he did not fulfill the commandment of fasting.
[Speaker C] What do you mean? But if we say that until that point he didn’t have to, and therefore afterward too he doesn’t continue.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But afterward he does have to—that’s what I’m claiming.
[Speaker C] Only according to the interpretation you’re proposing.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course, according to that interpretation. Someone who doesn’t accept that interpretation, then fine, he won’t accept it. But according to this interpretation, I…
[Speaker C] No, but the question is not whether he accepts whether he should continue or not continue—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But the question is whether in the end he committed a transgression. Of course. Because according to this dispute, someone who didn’t fast committed a transgression. If I… on the assumption that I am right that he needs to continue fasting, then if he didn’t—
[Speaker D] fast, then he committed a transgression.
[Speaker C] That’s also—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] both a prohibition and a positive commandment, though on Yom Kippur it’s not entirely clear where exactly that comes from, but that’s already another discussion…
[Speaker D] The Talmudic text in Yoma talks about this all the time. According to everyone he committed a transgression? What?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] According to everyone he committed a transgression—the question is whether he’s under duress or not under duress. According to everyone he didn’t fast. No, that’s not called a transgression. If he isn’t obligated, he didn’t commit a transgression. In the morning of that middle-of-the-day point he wasn’t obligated, because the obligation applies only to the whole day as a whole. Once the day began he wasn’t obligated, so he wasn’t—
[Speaker D] obligated.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s not duress, because he isn’t obligated. If the claim is that… what is the Jewish law here, really? What? Is there an actual ruling on this? Look, it’s accepted by most halakhic decisors that Yom Kippur is an obligation at every single moment. Meaning that someone who missed a few moments still… Take a simple case: even someone who ate, a sick person who ate, or just someone who sinned and ate deliberately—the question is whether afterward, let’s say he wants to repent, Yom Kippur itself atones for him immediately, the very essence of the day atones for him—does he need to continue fasting? Or may he continue fasting? So it is generally accepted to think that yes. I said that the Avnei Nezer brings some Rashba… not the Avnei Nezer, Or LeTzion, in the responsa Or LeTzion, discusses this and brings some Rashba who says it explicitly, but beyond that Rashba it’s a dispute—it’s a discussion among later authorities (Acharonim).
[Speaker E] And consequently there’s also a prohibition. What? Beyond the positive commandment there’s also a prohibition.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Same thing, but still the prohibition is against not fasting, not against eating.
[Speaker E] Against not fasting—that’s what we said.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but the eating is understood as an expression of the duty to fast. In this simple understanding there’s no difference between the prohibition and the positive commandment. Both the prohibition and the positive commandment are two things about the same issue. Both of them are basically coming to make sure that you fast. If you eat, then you have nullified the commandment of fasting and also violated the prohibition of someone who did not fast.
[Speaker C] And eating also isn’t just one of the five afflictions.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but as for the other afflictions, there’s a dispute whether they are of Torah-level / of biblical origin or rabbinic / of rabbinic origin altogether. There’s no karet there.
[Speaker E] So why on the Sabbath isn’t it the same thing as “do not do labor” and cessation and the commandment of cessation?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it is the same thing, it’s also the same thing.
[Speaker E] That not doing labor means not refraining from cessation? Yes, I’m not exactly sure.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The Sabbath is exactly the same thing. On the contrary, and that’s the proof from Maimonides in the sixth root.
[Speaker B] Maimonides writes that the commandment—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] the positive commandment and the prohibition of the Sabbath are counted as two commandments even though their content is identical. And commandments whose content is identical—in the ninth root he says they are counted once. For example, the Torah commands observance of the Sabbath twelve times, but we count one commandment because it overlaps. So why in the case of a prohibition and a positive commandment do we count two? So he says in the sixth root: because this is a prohibition and a positive commandment. Now, if there were a difference between them, then maybe he wouldn’t have needed to say that it’s because it’s a prohibition and a positive commandment. It would simply be two commands with different content. Then it wouldn’t be because one is a prohibition and one is a positive commandment, but simply because the content is different. So his claim is that it’s identical content, just one is a prohibition and one is a positive commandment, and therefore nevertheless it is counted as two. Yes, so that was just parenthetically—I added it only to complete the example. The real question here is whether this requirement—that it be one unit, in the Omer count or Yom Kippur, and there are other examples of this—is a conceptual requirement in the concept of fasting or the concept of counting, or whether it’s a halakhic requirement. The concept of counting might be defined even without this, but halakhically you need to count the whole counting according to the Ba’al Halakhot Gedolot. Okay. Or halakhically you need not to eat all day, even though on the conceptual level not eating can also refer to a single moment. Or maybe not—on the conceptual level, to fast means not to eat the whole day. If it’s on the conceptual level, then I don’t care whether you didn’t eat as one who is not commanded but performs anyway, let’s say under education. It doesn’t matter, because in the end, factually, the concept of fasting took place, even if it didn’t take place as performance of a commandment. So here, and this is an example of analyzing a position—say someone from one generation would say Yom Kippur is one unit. You would ask him: tell me, does a minor who comes of age in the middle of Yom Kippur need to continue fasting? No, it’s one unit, of course not. Now I receive from him, and he taught me, that it’s one unit. Now I ask: what stood behind that idea? He’s already dead, I can’t ask him. Fine? So now I ask what stands behind the idea, and I say: what stands behind it is probably the conception that fasting does not mean not eating. Fasting means preserving a span of time in which you don’t eat. That is what it means to fast; it’s not merely refraining from the act of eating. Okay? But if that’s so, then the halakhic result is the opposite: a minor who comes of age in the middle of Yom Kippur does need to continue fasting. Now if you had asked him, he would have said not to continue fasting, and I claim that according to his own method, the minor should indeed fast. Okay? So did I receive from him the tradition, this thing that I invented something new? I claim that if he had thought it through fully, or if he had heard me and lived in my conceptual world, then maybe even if he heard me he still wouldn’t agree. That doesn’t matter. If he had lived in my conceptual world, then this is really the meaning of his method. That is what ought to emerge from his method. And therefore I claim that this is an authentic continuation of what he said. It really is a continuation of what he said. It’s not just some technical self-exaltation to show that I’m all excited by a great tree—look at me, getting all worked up around a great figure. So I brought other examples too, with Pnei Yehoshua there regarding the liability of a damager, where really if I had asked Pnei Yehoshua maybe he wouldn’t have said what I said, but in my opinion that is the foundation of his method. These examples are meant to show the concept of tradition in a deeper sense than: I pass you an item of information, you receive it, internalize it, pass it to the next generation, he receives it, internalizes it, passes it on. At root, this is not information. Tradition is a way of thinking, tradition is a way of relating, it is something much more flexible and fundamental perhaps than simply a collection of details of information. And therefore I said: this is Rabbi Eliezer, who never said anything he didn’t hear from his rabbi, and yet also said things no ear had ever heard before. It’s pretty obvious that he did not hear all the laws they asked him from his rabbi. There were things that had not come up in the previous generation. Clearly he did some kind of reasoning by analogy, that he made decisions, even though from the standpoint of his own awareness, the consciousness in which he operated was that he was simply transmitting what he had received from his teachers. He was not adding anything of his own. Now that’s not true. Clearly he did add things of his own. But from his point of view, clearly, he understood himself as simply passing on the baton in a relay race. Meaning, he is passing on the Torah of his rabbi, of his teachers, and passing it onward. Nothing is being added by him. But when you look from the side, it’s clear that yes, it is.
[Speaker G] We can’t really argue with that because there are things that weren’t there in the previous generation. So he didn’t—wasn’t it clear to him that these are interpretations?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, he claims everything was already there in the previous generation. That’s the whole “there is nothing new under the sun.”
[Speaker H] That everything was already there in the previous generation literally?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, exactly. From his point of view, whatever you ask him is really a clear conclusion from something said in the previous generation, even though they didn’t address the situation itself. But from his point of view he doesn’t see this as something that he himself added to tradition; for him it’s a clear translation. It’s just a question of… what?
[Speaker F] The Chatam Sofer said “the new is forbidden by the Torah,” and he was constantly innovating.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, correct. And I’m saying: people think that’s some kind of cynical trick, that the Chatam Sofer himself was such a sophisticated Jew that he knew he was innovating and still said “the new is forbidden by the Torah.” It’s not a cynical trick. He honestly and sincerely believed that in the essential sense he wasn’t innovating anything; he was simply drawing more and more things out of the tradition he had received. And when you look from the side it’s obvious that he added something of his own, because others understood it differently, and there are disputes. You can’t say that both sides received the same thing from their rabbi. Did they receive opposites from their rabbi?
[Speaker I] It’s like the broken-telephone game.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. But in broken telephone it’s a mistake, whereas my claim here is that it’s not a mistake.
[Speaker I] No, let’s say that what he says and what he transmits isn’t a mistake, but the next one after him who received it, or the one after that who received it—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I’m saying that too. I claim no. This is not a process of accumulating mistakes—that’s what I’m saying. It’s a process of accumulating interpretations. That’s not the same thing. Meaning, my claim is that what he draws out, even if his rabbi himself would not agree, what he draws out is really the true continuation of what lies in his rabbi’s words. Even though when you compare it verbally it doesn’t overlap—meaning it’s not literally what his rabbi said—but on the essential level it is really a translation of the same thing. So it’s not broken telephone; on the contrary, it’s a kind of thing that looks broken even though it isn’t broken.
[Speaker J] If that’s so, then why isn’t it correct to say that it’s just information transfer? What? What do you mean?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You can call it correct, but I’m saying you have to understand that information transfer, in the sense I’m defining now, is not information transfer in the banal sense of simply: what I tell you is what I heard from my rabbi. There is always an act of interpretation here. Once you accept this more complex or sophisticated definition of tradition, then yes, in principle nothing is new, but clearly a great many new things accumulate here, and there are disputes, such and such interpreters. That’s obvious. So again, Rabbi Eliezer, I think, in that sense—Rabbi Eliezer, if I… This isn’t a completely clear historical description that that’s exactly what was there, but for me as models, Rabbi Eliezer is the one who thinks this is a hollow pipe. He just acts with complete lack of awareness. From his point of view he thinks he is only taking from his teachers and passing it on. That is not what he is doing, but that is what he thinks he is doing. I told you that my uncle says Abaye and Rava didn’t study in yeshivah, so it’s the same principle. But those who disagreed with him—Rabbi Yehoshua and his students, say—they understood differently: what do you mean? Torah was given to human beings, and human beings have to decide by the power of their understanding.
[Speaker K] But that was already in the earlier generation, when Hillel argued with Shammai.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but it’s not clear that they were arguing about that there. Halakhic disputes are not always about this issue. The crisis that took place in Yavneh—that crisis in Yavneh was not just an ordinary dispute. There was a principled disagreement here: does Torah pass through a hollow pipe or not? It’s not certain that Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai were arguing about that.
[Speaker B] They say that Rabbi Eliezer was Shammuti.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The question is what Shammuti means, as I mentioned—whether excommunicated or of the school of Shammai.
[Speaker D] Don’t you think there’s a difference between Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua? What? The Rabbi’s understanding is that there’s a difference between Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua, that both of them are doing the same thing, and the only question is their awareness of their own action upon tradition.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Correct, but in the end a difference is created, a difference is created because from Rabbi Eliezer’s point of view, once he has said something, he’s not prepared to hear another position. Because what do you mean? I received it from my rabbi. Why should I listen to arguments here?
[Speaker D] Rabbi Yehoshua, in light of the arguments—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] will formulate his position. The arguments too will be based on what he received from his teachers. When we’re talking about some decree or something like that, there is “I received from my teachers,” and on top of that I raise arguments that interpret what I received from my teachers. Where do the arguments come from? They can come from my own reasoning, they can come from all sorts of places, or from other things I received from my teachers. It doesn’t matter. But in the end those arguments serve me in interpreting what I received from my teachers. It’s just that Rabbi Yehoshua is aware of this and Rabbi Eliezer is not aware of it.
[Speaker D] And the difference is that Rabbi Yehoshua can be convinced he was mistaken—if you raise counterarguments, he’ll say, okay, you’re right.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Same thing, because if his teachers can have erred in their interpretation of their teachers, then he can be convinced that his teachers too erred in their interpretation of their teachers, because after all what they said turns out to be mistaken. You understand? But in the end it’s the same thing. It’s not that Rabbi Yehoshua somehow cancels tradition. He doesn’t cancel it; rather, he doesn’t give it absolute value. I said that’s a big difference. From his point of view it’s possible to decide that something received in tradition is mistaken. And here—here’s the example. Rabbi Eliezer says everything he says based on tradition. And his colleagues don’t accept it. They have arguments, they raised every argument in the world and didn’t accept it. Right?
[Speaker H] Didn’t Maimonides write something that there was no dispute over what was transmitted?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, obviously. I said I don’t agree with that at all. That was exactly the example there. Rabbi Eliezer comes by the authority of tradition. Now they too—if they were convinced that this is what the Holy One, blessed be He, told Moses at Sinai, they would accept it, of course. The only thing is, they say: if what you’re saying isn’t reasonable, then maybe your tradition isn’t worth much. Some corruption slipped in there, you interpreted what you received, and really that isn’t it. Therefore I say that reliance on reason has active implications. Meaning, you give the same honor to tradition—what the Holy One, blessed be He, said is what is binding according to everyone. The whole question is: what did He say? So for Rabbi Eliezer, what I received is what He said. Like the Maimonides you’re mentioning here, although it’s hard for me to believe that Maimonides, a very clear-sighted Jew, really seriously thought what he wrote there. Maybe yes, maybe no. What did Maimonides say? That no dispute ever arose over anything transmitted to Moses at Sinai; no dispute in the world.
[Speaker F] Further on? No, only about things that are a law given to Moses at Sinai—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] because the other things are not technically called a law given to Moses at Sinai. No, he says that the other things simply won’t be called a law given to Moses at Sinai. Things that passed through tradition did not give rise to dispute. That’s what Maimonides says.
[Speaker F] In a tradition from Moses, not just any tradition. Yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But what is technically called a law given to Moses at Sinai is not only things over which there was no dispute in tradition; technically, something called a law given to Moses at Sinai must meet additional conditions. For example, that it have no anchor in Scripture. That’s according to Maimonides. It’s not enough that it was transmitted. The verses too were transmitted to Moses at Sinai, but we don’t call that a law given to Moses at Sinai. Only things with no textual anchor. And about that too Maimonides says no dispute arose, because that too was transmitted to Moses at Sinai, but that’s only a subset.
[Speaker C] And there’s some problem with this. Meaning, for example with the concept of Yom Kippur, then in effect the interpretation you bring after analyzing the concepts comes along and says: the previous generation lacked the intellectual capacity to understand this more complex thing.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not more complex—either it thought differently.
[Speaker C] Or it thought differently, because today what you’re explaining seems really logical—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And supposedly even today you can understand it differently. If this is a halakhic requirement and not a conceptual one, that can be discussed.
[Speaker C] If we were to say that the interpretation we give is because of changing times, changing concepts actually in reality, then you could understand why our interpretation is more correct. Why? Because the other person couldn’t have thought of it, because it didn’t happen in his world. But with something like Yom Kippur, there’s a problem here: we are nullifying their view and saying that we think just a little more correctly. I’m willing to accept that, but I’m saying…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I say that too. What? I mean it literally, I say that. Yes. The change is not a change in the circumstances, but a change in the tools of thought. Say, Rabbi Chaim’s analysis, the Brisker analysis as it’s called, is also an innovation. And what is an innovation? It’s not some technology that people didn’t know before, but still, it’s a new form of analysis. It wasn’t available to the generations before him. And that’s the advantage: they have advantages that earlier generations didn’t have. You use a more sophisticated conceptual system, with a more sophisticated system of thought, so you can reach better results. Yes, definitely.
[Speaker J] He also conceptualizes the innovations.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. And that’s part of the refinement—that he turns it into a kind of toolbox that’s available for your use. Once things are conceptualized, it’s easier to use them. Fine. The whole advantage is that even people who aren’t at Rabbi Chaim’s level of talent can today do analysis with tools that he himself invented, and then reach results that people far greater than they are wouldn’t have reached, because that toolbox wasn’t available to them. There’s a huge advantage in conceptualizing tools.
[Speaker B] It helps rabbis in making decisions. Yes, absolutely. It helps, it helps.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Rabbi Chaim himself—it helped them not make decisions, but fine. If you understand all the sides, you can’t make a decision; we talked about that once.
[Speaker H] Okay, in any case, there’s something here… So we said that in essence there’s no difference at all between Rabbi Yehoshua and Rabbi Eliezer except only in the way they perceive themselves, but there are—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That also has implications, I said.
[Speaker H] —in the world, what are the implications? It’s only with regard to practice. To willingness to correct mistakes. But we won’t be able to know exactly what happened with Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua, but I think that every transmission of tradition, unless they literally memorized it word for word, will also contain an element of interpretation. That doesn’t mean there will always be an element of interpretation in the same sense. There are people who will try to cling very, very closely to what their teachers said, and even in new matters imitate their ways of thinking as much as possible.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning there are several kinds of Rabbi Eliezers. Okay.
[Speaker H] And among them, and overall, they’re really very close. So it’s not only a matter of awareness.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] When I present—when I present two types, I always present them in a polarized form. Obviously there are lots of shades under each of them, and there are intermediate shades too. But on the principled level, I’m saying that the whole axis stretches between two poles. And across the whole axis, everyone is basically doing the same thing—that’s the claim.
[Speaker H] No, on that I’m not sure I agree with you. I mean this statement, that across the whole axis everyone is doing the same thing.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What does “the same thing” mean? The same thing in principle—any such statement is always simplistic. That’s obvious. I’m not claiming that the level of boldness in everyone’s interpretation is the same. Obviously not. I’m only saying that on the principled level, everyone is transmitting a tradition and also interpreting it. The question is how aware you are of that fact—that you’re not only transmitting tradition, full stop. And I think, by the way, that the closer you get to our generation, the more aware you become of that, culturally too. Even though it’s not certain that we do more interpretation than earlier generations. We’re more aware of the interpretive element within what we do than earlier generations were. I don’t think that today someone of the stature of Maimonides could even imagine writing something like that—that everything given to Moses at Sinai had no dispute fall into it. It’s simply an intellectual joke. But in the awareness of those generations, people simply didn’t think there were changes between generations. Meaning, if you asked people—and there are people you could ask even today—they’d tell you that Abraham our forefather studied Yiddish, yes. On the principled level. Rather, everything we do descended to Moses at Sinai; that’s obvious. Judaism didn’t change, we preserve the tradition of our forefathers, exactly what Moses our teacher did is what we do, aside from maybe various rabbinic additions, and even on that they’d probably agree. Obviously that’s not true, but awareness of this issue is a modern phenomenon. I mean, people didn’t—by the way, part of the reason we’re more aware of it is that with us changes happen at such a rapid pace and with such a broad range that you can’t ignore it. In your own lifetime, in the last five years, you already see what a difference there is in the world around you and in your ways of thinking, so you can no longer ignore the fact that these things are not a hollow pipe. Meaning, we say something, and five years ago they said something, and it’s already not exactly the same thing, even though ostensibly you’re saying the same words. Obviously I’m speaking here in a dichotomous and polarized way, but on the principled level it really does move between those two poles.
[Speaker H] No, so I’m trying to understand why you see the difference between someone who is very closely attached to what his teachers said—even though fine, true, he too transmits something of his own that he didn’t receive exactly as he received it, and he’s very—and the change in someone who is fairly free and only takes what his teachers said as a starting point, as less significant than the question of awareness.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not less significant—it depends on the question of awareness.
[Speaker H] Why does it depend? Since as much as you have to add something of your own, you still try to reduce it to a minimum.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Depends—again, “depends” doesn’t mean a single correlation. “Depends” means that the more aware you are that there’s an interpretive component in what you do, the more you understand that you can’t avoid interpretation, and therefore it’s entirely plausible that you’ll also allow yourself to interpret further. By contrast, someone who thinks he’s just passing on the baton as is—then obviously he won’t allow himself to do anything that he understands to be interpretation. Now, how far each person goes—obviously that varies, and things can be of all sorts. And still, again, when describing processes, you need to use sharp distinctions.
[Speaker H] In the world it doesn’t appear that way in a conscious form. Can we say that the dispute was about what?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] About not agreeing to accept any excuse.
[Speaker H] Obviously. Meaning let’s say that if Rabbi Eliezer says that he received—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “I never said anything I didn’t hear from my teacher”—do you really believe that happened?
[Speaker H] Obviously that’s a declaration, and it’s not a matter of—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But why was it said as a declaration? Because it came to express an outlook. It came to express an outlook that I do not allow myself to add anything of my own; I am transmitting the teaching of my teachers. And such a statement is lack of awareness—by definition, lack of awareness. There’s no such thing. There’s always some interpretive element. Obviously there can be a restrictive policy and an expansive policy. I claim that even the policy of restriction or expansion is rooted many times, at least, in the question of awareness. The question is how aware you are that there is no such thing as without interpretation. Once you understand that there is no such thing as without interpretation, then you also—okay, so if it depends on interpretation, then I’m also willing to engage in more far-reaching interpretation, because I really think that’s the interpretation. Someone else says no, I need to pass things on as is. Anything beyond that is human teaching, it’s not Torah from Heaven. So of course he’ll allow himself less interpretation. I think that’s… Okay, so this claim now brings me back to the discussion we had in the previous two classes. Because now I’m returning to the definition of Torah and the definition of learning. Because the business is getting a bit complicated. Because now what happens is this: true, Torah ultimately is something given to Moses and then passed through some kind of interpretation, but in the end we’re trying to clarify what was given to Moses. But this interpretation is also something that can change the matter. And now the question is to what extent I can relate to that interpretation as creation or as interpretation, which is starting to become very similar. Because there’s a creative element in interpretation too. Meaning, when someone interprets the Torah he received from his teacher, he creates something a little different. How should we relate to such a thing? Is this creation, or is it interpretation of his teacher’s Torah, adapting his teacher’s Torah to new tools, to new conceptual tools?
[Speaker C] And what’s the practical difference?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’ll explain. I’m going to go all the way now in the explanation in order to sharpen why this discussion was important to me. What’s accepted today—take me, for example—I think that studying the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), studying ethics, studying Jewish thought, is not Torah study. It’s not Torah study because it’s a collection of inventions. Meaning, it’s not anything ad hoc, nothing in the verses of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh); it’s the interpretation we give. Studying Torah is only Jewish law in principle—that’s my claim. Jewish law means halakhic analysis. I mean halakhic topics, not specifically the Mishnah Berurah or Kitzur Shulchan Arukh. And why? I’ll try to explain why. My basic claim—and we spoke about this a bit, but now I’ll try to expand it in light of what we’ve seen—the basic claim is that… You know what, before I say the basic claim, look: in Nefesh HaChaim, Gate 4, he deals there with a very interesting issue. He discusses the question of the relationship between fear of Heaven and Torah study. How much should one devote to studying ethics, fear of Heaven, and so on, relative to Torah study? He says it’s like a measure of preservative—it’s some kind of preparation, it’s preparation for the commandment, fear of Heaven; it’s not the commandment itself. The commandment itself is Torah study. And then he says: “Therefore the truth is that this is the true path that He, blessed be His Name, chose: that whenever a person prepares himself to study, it is fitting for him, before he begins, to sit for at least a short time in pure fear of God and in purity of heart, to confess his sin from the depths of his heart, so that his Torah may be holy and pure, and he should intend to cleave in his study to Him in the Torah, to Him, the Holy One, blessed be He—that is, to cleave with all his powers to the word of God, which is Jewish law. And in this way he is truly cleaving to Him, blessed be He, as it were, for He and His will are one, as written in the Zohar. And every law and halakhic ruling from the holy Torah is His blessed will, for such was His will decreed: that the law should be thus when Scripture rules impure and pure, forbidden and permitted, liable and exempt.” Now, anyone who doesn’t read this carefully, I think, misses the depth of the claim here. I think what he’s claiming is what I said earlier. Only the study of Jewish law is Torah study. Because Torah study in its essence—and I think on this point the author of the Tanya agrees with him in the basic definition—means cleaving to the Holy One, blessed be He. How can you cleave to the Holy One, blessed be He? So he says: He and His will are one, as written in the Zohar. When you study His wills, then that is basically your way of cleaving to Him. Because if He and His will are the same thing, then when you study what His will is, you are essentially cleaving to His will, you’re bringing His will into your mind, you learn it, you understand it, and thereby you cleave to the Holy One, blessed be He. And the claim is even more… The author of the Tanya writes it in almost the same style. I once said that the similarity between them is astounding, considering two books written one against the other. His claim here, in essence—against Hasidism—is that the goal of study is not a means of creating a state of cleaving. The study is the cleaving. For the Hasidim, through study you cleave to the Holy One, blessed be He, but the cleaving itself is an experience of cleaving, some kind of—
[Speaker I] some feeling of religious emotion.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. By contrast, he says that study is not a means to produce cleaving—it is the cleaving. When you study “an ox that gored a cow pays such-and-such,” in that very act you are cleaving to the Holy One, blessed be He. You don’t need experiences for this, you don’t need any religious feelings and nothing else. Now look at the next sentence, which really sharpens what he has said until now: “And even if he is engaged in aggadic teachings.” If I hadn’t sharpened what I read earlier, I think this sentence would be incomprehensible—what question is he now coming to answer? Pay close attention. What he said above is that “to cleave with all his powers to the word of God—that is Jewish law.” People can make a mistake and think “the word of God” means Torah. No, no—it means Jewish law. Why? Because “the word of God—this is Jewish law,” only Jewish law. Why? Because Jewish law is the expression of the wills of the Holy One, blessed be He. Aggadah does not express the will of the Holy One, blessed be He, because Jewish law tells you: I want you to do this, I do not want you to do that, right? Positive and negative commandments—those are the wills of the Holy One, blessed be He. What is aggadah? Aggadah tells you stories, various ideas, this or that line of thought—we’ll talk about that in a moment. But those are not the wills of the Holy One, blessed be He, in the pure sense. The wills of the Holy One, blessed be He—that’s Jewish law. So Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin says: so what about aggadah? Are you going to tell me that someone who studies aggadah is not studying? So his answer is: true, it really is not study—but he’s unwilling to accept such a thing. So what does he say? “And even if he is engaged in aggadic teachings, which have no practical relevance to any law, he is nevertheless cleaving to the speech of the Holy One, blessed be He, for the entire Torah, with its general principles, particulars, and details, and even what a young student asks his teacher, all came forth from His mouth, blessed be He, to Moses at Sinai.” As our ancestors said at the end of chapter 2 of tractate Megillah—yes, what’s written there, “Write these words for yourself”: when the Holy One, blessed be He, revealed Himself at Sinai to give Torah to Israel, He said to Moses in order Scripture, Mishnah, laws, and aggadot, as it says, “And God spoke all these words,” even what a student asks the rabbi, until here. What is he saying? You have to be precise in the wording. In my humble opinion, he’s saying very novel things here. It sounds like some ethics book that people just keep passing along. He claims that someone engaged in aggadic teachings, in principle, is not studying Torah, because that is not the will of God. Studying Torah here means cleaving to the will of God. But that can’t be, right? So what do you have to say? That true, he is not engaged in the will of God, he is engaged in the word of God. The Holy One, blessed be He, spoke it. These are not things He wants—in the sense that they are not His wills—so you are not cleaving to the Holy One, blessed be He. But in order to turn aggadah into Torah as well, in order to turn that study also into Torah, the Holy One, blessed be He, speaks the aggadah, and by that He turns it into Torah. So now, when you engage in aggadah, that too is called cleaving to the Holy One, blessed be He, in some way. Now of course Jewish law is both His will and His speech, because He also said the laws, He didn’t only will them, right? So obviously the hierarchy remains. Meaning, the study of Jewish law is really Torah study. However, even the study of aggadah, after the fact, the Holy One, blessed be He, also made into Torah study.
[Speaker E] Look further on, he writes—maybe you’ll say that this too is the word of God because it’s basically the utterances by which the world was created?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In that sense, yes. I’ll say that in a moment. “Moreover, at the very time that a person engages in Torah below, every word that comes out of his mouth—those very words emerge, as it were, from His mouth, blessed be He, at that very same time.” Whoever says below, the Holy One, blessed be He, says—I hope also what I’m saying now. As we find in the first chapter of tractate Gittin regarding the concubine in Gibeah: “And his concubine played the harlot against him.” Rav Evyatar said: he found a fly in her; Rabbi Yonatan said: he found a hair on her. And Rav Evyatar met Elijah and said to him: what is the Holy One, blessed be He, doing? He said to him: He is engaged in the concubine in Gibeah. What is He saying? “My son Evyatar says thus, My son Yonatan says thus.” That’s what the Holy One, blessed be He, said. Fine? Meaning, He stated both Rav Evyatar’s opinion and Rabbi Yonatan’s opinion. And that is because Rav Evyatar and Rabbi Yonatan were engaged with one another in the matter of the concubine in Gibeah; at that very time, He, blessed be He, repeated their words exactly. And He, blessed be His Name, and His speech are one.
[Speaker F] According to Nefesh HaChaim, in this story the Holy One, blessed be He, is doing something unnecessary. Why? Because these are aggadic teachings, apparently, right?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But He wants us to engage in them too, so He gives them the value of Torah as well; it’s not unnecessary. He’s not doing it just to accommodate us—He has an interest in it.
[Speaker F] Rabbi, on a number of levels you referred to the idea that a halakhic decisor acquires halakhic intuition from issuing rulings, from knowing the foundation of Jewish law and the history of Jewish law. So maybe that’s the role of aggadah? I just remembered a book on Midrash Ruth Rabbah that talks entirely about how the Sages who wrote the midrash put halakhic relativity and halakhic meanings into it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maybe I’ll talk about that later, because these are claims that came up in debates we had here on the site and beyond that. I’ll address aggadah as illuminating Jewish law later. But for now let’s just see what he says: “And He, blessed be His Name, and His speech are one. And as explicitly stated in the holy Torah, in Deuteronomy: ‘to love the Lord your God,’ and our rabbis of blessed memory explained in Nedarim, in the baraita, that this refers to the occupation with Torah.” In the book—that it refers to “and to cleave to Him.” Yes, so this is actually just a wonderful paragraph. “And therefore King David, peace be upon him, said: ‘Better to me is the Torah of Your mouth,’ for my heart rejoiced in my toil in the holy Torah with great strength, and I took it to heart that it is the Torah of Your mouth, every word literally…” No, not that. There’s some wonderful passage here about King David. Wait, let’s find it. Here, in chapter 2. He says: “Yes, the matter of engaging in Torah for its own sake—the clear truth is that ‘for its own sake’ does not mean cleaving, as most of the world now thinks. For our rabbis of blessed memory said in the Midrash that King David, peace be upon him, requested from before Him, blessed be He, that one who engages in Psalms should be considered before Him, blessed be He, as if he were engaged in tractates Negaim and Ohalot.” So Psalms is not really Torah, but David asks the Holy One, blessed be He, that it should be like Negaim and Ohalot. Real Torah?
[Speaker F] What? Aside from neglect of Torah study? Neglect of Torah study and—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, I already spoke about that, but one second. “Thus, engaging in the laws of the Talmud with analysis and effort is of a higher and more important matter before Him, blessed be He, than reciting Psalms. Yes, that’s neglect of Torah study in quality, what we said. And if we say that ‘for its own sake’ means specifically cleaving”—meaning, if learning Torah for its own sake is to attain cleaving, meaning an experience of cleaving—“then Psalms should have been the most Torah-like thing in the world.” So the opposite: Rabbi should have had to ask the Holy One, blessed be He, that one engaged in Negaim and Ohalot should be considered like Psalms. Right? So he says: “And upon this depends the entire essence of Torah study, and there is no cleaving more wonderful than reciting Psalms properly with all one’s heart.” Now look at this wonderful note: “And who knows whether the Holy One, blessed be He, agreed to him in this? For we do not find in the words of our rabbis of blessed memory what answer He, blessed be He, gave to his request.” King David asked that Psalms be like Negaim and Ohalot. Nice request. But did the Holy One, blessed be He, answer?
[Speaker F] In that midrash it doesn’t say that Negaim and Ohalot aren’t so relevant now.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] On the contrary, precisely because of that. Even though it’s not relevant, it’s still the will of the Holy One, blessed be He. It’s not at all a question of whether you implement it or not. Rather, it is a piece of the will of the Holy One, blessed be He. That’s why he says that King David asked that Psalms be like Negaim and Ohalot, but the Holy One, blessed be He, didn’t answer whether He agreed or not. What he requested is nice, but what proof is there? Who says the Holy One, blessed be He, granted it? And even if He granted it, that would be after the fact.
[Speaker H] Why? If the Holy One, blessed be He, granted it, then that’s it—it’s like Negaim and Ohalot. No, no—granted it, that this too should count as Torah.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not that this should be exactly like Negaim and Ohalot, but that this too should count as Torah.
[Speaker H] I didn’t understand that—where do we see that…? Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin says that. Why? Did he say that before that it didn’t count as Torah at all? I understood that Negaim and Ohalot are a more elevated matter than what David requested. So what? But that doesn’t mean they’re not considered Torah. They’re considered Torah, but on a lower level… He said they’re considered Torah on a lower level.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And King David asked that it be exactly the same thing. And what’s the answer? We don’t know. So now what did Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin want to say? So I don’t know—maybe fear of Heaven and Psalms are like Torah; I don’t know, there are doubts. No—he says it. It’s not the same thing; obviously it’s not the same thing. What the Holy One, blessed be He, didn’t answer—it’s not the same thing. Anyway—okay, no need to make hair-splitting arguments on his hair-splitting argument, but it’s a hair-splitting argument of course. Still, it’s a nice observation; I couldn’t resist saying it. Anyway, what does he say here? There’s a very nice precision here. In this chapter he really is precise with his words, and I think he truly meant it. I don’t think this is just hair-splitting on his words. When he brings this topic of Rav Evyatar and Rabbi Yonatan regarding the concubine in Gibeah, that’s one of the two topics in the Talmud about which it says “both these and those are the words of the living God.” Right? There are two topics in the Talmud where it says, regarding some dispute, “both these and those are the words of the living God”: either Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai in Eruvin, or the concubine in Gibeah in Gittin there—Rav Evyatar and Rabbi Yonatan. That’s the only place where the Talmud also explains what “both these and those are the words of the living God” means. He found a fly and wasn’t particular; he found a hair and was particular. Which means, apparently, that the two opinions complement one another. Leave that aside for the moment. The claim, the famous question of the Ritva, who asks: what does “both these and those are the words of the living God” mean? If this is right, then that one is not right, and vice versa; what kind of miracle happened here exactly? The Ritva is in Eruvin, of course. So I think Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin is offering an answer here. He doesn’t raise the question, but in my opinion he offers an answer. Not for nothing did he bring this topic after innovating the distinction between the word of God and the will of God. What does “both these and those are the words of the living God” mean? If it were the will of the Holy One, blessed be He, then if He wants this, He doesn’t want that. But “the words of the living God” are words, so it could be that this too He spoke and that too He spoke. “God spoke once, twice have I heard.” Meaning, words—you can speak both this and that, because in any case truth and falsehood aren’t the issue here. “Both these and those are the words of the living God.” Therefore, even in the halakhic context—and that statement there is in a halakhic context; here it’s an aggadic dispute—there, when it says “both these and those are the words of the living God,” it doesn’t mean that both are correct. “Both these and those are the words of the living God” means both count as Torah, not that both are correct. Only one is correct. But both count as Torah because the Holy One, blessed be He, is willing to speak—at least simultaneously together with them—both this and that, and thereby turn both of those things into Torah, even though it is not necessarily really what He intended. It’s the transformation of something into Torah, but not necessarily into something true. Two different things. I once spoke about how the arguments are valid but the ruling is not necessarily valid.
[Speaker C] Yes, so why wouldn’t this matter of “both these and those are the words of the living God” apply to every dispute?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If why wouldn’t it apply to every dispute?
[Speaker C] Apply to every dispute. No, because you say it only appears twice—it appears only twice.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The accepted view in the world is that “both these and those are the words of the living God” refers to all disputes. Yes. There are those who claim it applies to all disputes, including the later authorities (Acharonim), including everyone. There I’m not sure, but I don’t know—maybe yes, maybe no. No, at least in this sense, why not? I think even with the later authorities (Acharonim)—why not? Anyone who is trying to study Torah sincerely, the Holy One, blessed be He, gives him at least the privilege that even if you erred and this is not at all what I meant, still I’m willing to recognize this thing as Torah, because it’s part of engagement in these matters and the formation of a position. So I’m willing to say this in a metaphorical sense only—that is, to give it a stamp of approval or the status of Torah. That’s what he says. So practically for our purposes, what Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin is basically saying here is that there is nevertheless a difference between Jewish law and other fields. Both are Torah according to him—this is the will of God, that is only the word of God, and Jewish law is both the will of God and the word of God. But on the essential level, Torah in principle is mainly Jewish law. And the question is why. So here I return to what I began with—and that was a parenthesis. In studying the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), ethics, Jewish thought, and all these things, there are several points that distinguish it from halakhic study. And here I find it very hard to convince people. I’ve already spoken with people about this issue quite a bit. It’s very hard for me to convince people, and the reason it’s hard, I think, is connected to the introduction I gave earlier—the difference between interpretation and creation. Because my claim is that when we study Jewish law we are engaged in interpretation. Even though there are arguments, and obviously there are new and renewed systems, and one won’t accept what the other says—there is no question, that’s obvious, that exists in the halakhic sphere too, certainly. And still, my claim is that at the base it is interpretation. When the Ketzot says something about Maimonides’ view, or the Rashba’s, I don’t remember exactly whose, he is trying to interpret what Maimonides and the Rashba said. Now true, the Netivot interprets it differently—that’s another discussion. But in their intention, in their awareness, they are engaged in an interpretive act. They are basically trying to understand what Maimonides really said. Even though you can be lucid enough to understand that even if you ask Maimonides, he may not agree with what you’re saying. But as I said earlier, that doesn’t contradict it. Meaning, even if Maimonides would not agree, in my opinion that is what lies at the base of his words. And I think Rabbi Chaim was convinced—and I brought this, the dispute between Rabbi Yehoshua Hutner and the Seridei Esh, yes—about Rabbi Chaim: did he really hit on what Maimonides said or not? So I claim he did hit on what Maimonides said, not in the sense that Maimonides would agree, but because that really is the correct interpretation, in Brisker tools, of Maimonides’ ruling. And in that sense he really uncovered Maimonides’ true view—not Maimonides the man, but Maimonides the ruling of the book. By contrast, when you study the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), ethics, Jewish thought, all these things, in my humble opinion you are not engaged in interpretation, you are engaged in creation. You are engaged in creation. Meaning, you’re fooling yourself if you also tell yourself the story that you’re operating with interpretive awareness. You’re not really operating with interpretive awareness. And again, I’m painting this black and white only to sharpen it. Obviously there are different shades here. In the end—and this is what I told you then, but now I think it’s sharper—in the end I don’t think anyone will derive a conclusion from an aggadic passage that is unacceptable to him on rational grounds. Meaning, I have never met anyone who analyzed an aggadic passage and reached from it some conclusion that, from his perspective, was outrageous—that is, completely unacceptable to him, he didn’t think that way from the beginning—and then said: okay, that’s what the passage says, so apparently that’s what’s true, I give up my own position, I retract, and adopt the passage’s conclusion. That doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen. What you do in such a situation is one of two things. Usually what happens is that the conclusion that comes out of the aggadic passage is what you think—that’s usually what comes out. In the very, very rare cases where some conclusion comes out that you don’t agree with, don’t accept—fine, okay, but there are other aggadic passages, and therefore in the end I still won’t adopt it. Bottom line, I will never adopt it. I will only adopt things I already agree with, or that I am prepared to agree with in advance. I’ll put it a bit more sharply: there are things where maybe I don’t have a definite position, but after I see it in the passage, I say: I find this within myself, I am able to identify with it. I will never accept a conclusion from an aggadic passage that outrages me, that I disagree with. There’s no such thing. In a halakhic passage, it’s obvious that it works that way. Meaning, if I discover in a passage—and usually I don’t have a priori positions on halakhic questions either, what is permitted and what is forbidden on the Sabbath—I study the passage and from that reach a conclusion about what is permitted and forbidden. So there the dilemma also comes up less. But practically, what comes out for me from clarifying the passage is the Jewish law, as far as I’m concerned. It’s not a matter of me planting into the halakhic passage what I think. In aggadah that’s usually what happens, and if it doesn’t happen, then I won’t accept it. Therefore one of my indications, for example, when looking at what are called today pluralistic batei midrash—all kinds of people sitting on beanbags and offering ideas about this midrash or that, “it seems like this to me,” “to him it seems like that,” and all kinds of things like that—in the end one of two things happens there: either you find in the aggadah what you think, or you don’t accept it. You find something else and you don’t accept it. In the end you come out with what you thought beforehand.
[Speaker D] In the second possibility, when I don’t accept the aggadah, I still learned something from the aggadic passage, even if I didn’t agree with it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But what do you mean, you didn’t agree? Here I return to the definition of Torah I gave in the first class. Torah is a source of authority. If Torah says something, in principle I’m supposed to accept it. You can argue about what it says, interpretations and so on, but if my interpretive conclusion is that this is what Torah says, I’m supposed to accept it. If you don’t accept it, that means that from your perspective it’s not Torah.
[Speaker D] Because you have—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] another source, because you have another source, and in the end you choose what you want. That’s not how it works.
[Speaker D] No, there are two sources and I say—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] what my reason says—you can decide between them, no problem. But you can’t just reject this source because “I don’t feel like it,” because “it doesn’t seem right to me.” There’s no such thing. That doesn’t happen in Jewish law. Fine, obviously reason enters into Jewish law too. I said that this is always the argument I often can’t get across with people. But even in Jewish law it’s like this—everyone does whatever he wants? Not true. In Jewish law not everyone does whatever he wants. There are disagreements, and you can argue, and obviously your reasoning has weight in the interpretation you give, certainly. I’m fully aware of that. And still, there is right and wrong, and there are situations where you raise a white flag, and situations where you say, okay, I was wrong, I understood that the passage says otherwise. In aggadah that doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen. And not for nothing—in all these pluralistic batei midrash they study aggadah and don’t study Jewish law. They don’t study Jewish law there. Why not? Because with all the variety of interpretations and interpretive possibilities, in the end what’s written there is what’s written there. If you don’t accept it, then you simply don’t say that it is Jewish law. And in aggadah everyone does what he wants. I’m not talking now—first of all, everyone does what he wants in the interpretive sense. For many generations, aggadah was a collection of little homiletic quips; it was simply something worthless—not only not Torah, just nonsense, neglect of Torah study. All those amusing interpretations—simply worthless; it’s hard for me to relate to it any other way. But in the last generation, maybe two generations, more systematic paths or working tools for interpreting aggadah have started to develop. By the way, that usually happens in academia, in the interpretation of aggadah. Then you really start to see somewhat more disciplined approaches, attempts to see what it really says, to explain every stage in the aggadah genuinely—not with clever quips. No—I spoke about the difference between homily and hair-splitting argument, yes? In the end, no one refutes a homily. Why? Because if the conclusion is right, who cares how I got there? Or with hair-splitting argument—the conclusion is in no way right; it’s just a riddle. These are exactly two forms of neglect of Torah study. Studying aggadah in a disciplined way means studying in such a way that I really try to understand what the text says, with all the implications. To try to understand what the question was, what the answer was, what this says and what that says. In the end to reach, in a disciplined way, a conclusion that I stand behind. And if it contradicts what I think, then I raise a white flag: that’s what it says. Even though I think otherwise, that’s what it says. For me, that is Torah study in its full sense. Okay? In places where that doesn’t happen—and in my opinion it doesn’t happen anywhere except in Jewish law—then it’s not really Torah study in the full sense. And I’ll explain in a moment why it still is, and where I do accept this Nefesh HaChaim distinction between the word of God and the will of God. But that’s the point. Maybe I’ll bring—
[Speaker H] The question is, aggadah is what… what… Maybe I’ll bring—when you say aggadah, do you mean specifically story-like material?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] For example. It doesn’t matter—things that are not Jewish law. But only those found in the Talmud?
[Speaker H] Say, midrashim, yes. I mean—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I know.
[Speaker H] There are many sayings in Judaism condemning the trait of arrogance. I’m thinking about it—why not say that at a certain point I hadn’t thought about arrogance at all, and then I heard that Maimonides, say, said that one must not be arrogant, and then I learned that it’s a bad thing. But over time, I think, over time you do end up seeing that according to Torah there’s a problem with valuing yourself too highly, say, even though I—and I’ll tell you briefly, I’ll say—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’ll tell you briefly: obviously there are several basic ideas also in the area of thought and ethics and so on that you can understand from the Torah or from rabbinic sources, whatever you want to call it, and that’s true. Obviously. But those are a few basic things that we all know. You don’t need to study aggadah in order to know those things. I already know that arrogance is not okay. Now true, once they knew it, they derived it from Maimonides—I don’t care. It could be that once there was value in learning it from Maimonides, or from the Torah, or from whatever. I’m talking about today, practically.
[Speaker H] But I think that even today, someone who doesn’t study it doesn’t arrive at… I mean… I don’t think so.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t think so.
[Speaker C] What you’re casting doubt on is… I mean, when Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi and Rav Ashi and Ravina edited all these things, I don’t know what to say about that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It could be—maybe I’ll return to that later. It’s somewhat connected to what I said to Aryeh, that maybe once the situation was different, and I’m speaking from the perspective of today. But I just want to complete the move first.
[Speaker H] The attitude once toward aggadah was that maybe people needed to study aggadah? No.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Once, up until a few generations ago, when they studied aggadah, they studied homilies. But when they studied the basic ideas, like not being arrogant—fine, once they needed Torah in order to understand that it’s forbidden to be arrogant. Today I already know, according to Torah, that it’s forbidden to be arrogant. I already know that. That’s not why one studies aggadah—to know that it’s forbidden to be arrogant. With all due respect, that’s not… If someone studies for that purpose, then fine, okay. I’m talking about the broader enterprise, the attempt to learn from aggadah this or that. In the end you don’t learn anything new there. In the end you learn from it the lesson you already knew beforehand. And if not, then you won’t be able to accept it. And that’s the point. Even when I hear feminists studying aggadot and you see a chauvinistic approach there—you can’t deny that. In all the upside-down readings that are common in our circles, you won’t succeed in extracting from certain aggadot the chauvinistic tone. Okay? So then what? Does that mean we need to change…? I meant those kinds of interpretations. The feminists I was talking about, yes—among them someone I knew, may she live and be well, with whom I had many arguments—did a doctorate in aggadah. And I showed her that there was nothing new she was getting out of aggadah. She spoke to me forcefully and passionately, and I said: give me one example. So she said: what do you mean? Here are aggadot that are astonishingly chauvinistic, and I protest against them. Okay, so it’s chauvinistic. So now you’re supposed to accept it, abandon feminism, and become chauvinistic? Because the Sages told us in the Talmud: be chauvinists? No, of course not. There are other aggadot that said… I said okay, so why are you studying this? In order to see that the Sages were chauvinistic? So what… what did you learn from that, from your perspective? It’s not that you didn’t decode the aggadah. Maybe you really did decode the aggadah using today’s tools—there are more systematic tools for decoding aggadah. It’s not the clever quips of the past. I think today we really have advanced in this regard. Not that I’m such an expert in it, but I’ve read a bit and I understand that it’s better. Still far from fully convincing, but better. Okay? But in the end you always see that the lesson, in the end, is the expected lesson. You won’t learn anything new there. At most what you’ll see is a nice interpretive innovation. Meaning, there are cases where they show you that behind this aggadah there’s some move you didn’t think was there, and suddenly they reveal to you that this aggadah is trying to tell you some particular idea. And suddenly you see that really every stage of the aggadah—amazingly enough—fits that idea perfectly. And that’s a wonderful interpretive insight. But then you ask: okay, and the idea itself—what did it tell me? Leave the interpretation of the aggadah aside; I understood that the entire interpretation is saying this. But that “this” that the aggadah came to say is always something you agree with. So fine, I understood what the aggadah said—but I myself didn’t derive something new from it. I understood that this aggadah entirely revolves around the trait of arrogance, even though on the surface it’s talking about ducks and I don’t know what, all kinds of other things. So it’s talking about the trait of arrogance. That’s a nice interpretive innovation. I didn’t understand this aggadah until they showed me that this really is the subtext, that this really is what… But in the end, when I take something with me that I learned from this aggadah, what do I take? That one must not be arrogant. Okay, I got it.
[Speaker E] Meaning, that’s the innovation.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There’s a difference when you hear… I heard, there was… an example I brought you, I brought Aryeh here… I heard a beautiful lecture this Sabbath. Really beautiful. Rabbi Elchanan Samet from Kfar Etzion, and I was there on Shavuot. He gave a lecture on the Book of Ruth; he’s an expert in the Hebrew Bible, that kind of thing. So he gave a lecture there on the Book of Ruth, truly a beautiful lecture. He showed how this whole scroll is basically a literary element which, according to him, is well known in the world of literature, called a delayed return. A delayed return is some kind of pattern around which many literary works are built. So a delayed return is someone who thought to do something, didn’t succeed, entered a terrible crisis, and then returns to an earlier state or an earlier place in the hope that things will turn around, and it turns out he came back too late. In other words, it’s a kind of tragedy, he’s lost. And this is basically, for example, he says that in the Hebrew Bible there is no story at all of a delayed return. You won’t find one, that’s his claim. At the margins I don’t know, but in the Hebrew Bible there is no story of delayed return, that’s his claim, except for the Book of Ruth. Because the Book of Ruth was basically the departure abroad of Mahlon and Chilion and Naomi and Elimelech, and then a great crisis, disasters, tragedies, and things like that. Fine, I’ll return to the Land of Israel, we’ll go back to Bethlehem. Too late already. The sons died, she’s already old, she can no longer bear new sons. Right, she says to Orpah and Ruth there, “And Naomi said: Turn back, my daughters, why should you go with me? Have I still sons in my womb, that they may become your husbands?” It’s already over, it’s too late, we missed the moment, too bad we didn’t come back earlier, but now it’s already too late. “Turn back, my daughters, go your way, for I am too old to have a husband. Even if I said, I still have hope; even if I had a husband tonight and also bore sons, would you wait for them until they grew up? Would you remain bound to them and not marry? No, my daughters, for it is far more bitter for me than for you, for the hand of the Lord has gone out against me.” There, it’s lost for me, that’s it. So she returned there, to a miserable life, and with Ruth and this and that. But in the end, little by little, he also shows, in a literary way, in the scroll, that suddenly a new hope begins to emerge. Even this scroll, which is the only story of delayed return in the Hebrew Bible, even it ultimately shows: there is no missed opportunity. If you decide to act, there will be meaning to whatever you do. Now he shows this—I won’t go over all the details, I don’t remember all the details—but really in a beautiful way, in his textual analysis. How he shows that the whole scroll revolves around this issue. And he shows it across the chapters with key words that change from chapter to chapter, how this whole thing is built. Really beautiful. And from this, of course, comes the Davidic monarchy in the end, out of that very missed opportunity. Because if she had remained with the missed opportunity, nothing would have come of it. But she sends Ruth to the threshing floor, and they do all kinds of maneuvers so that she can get Boaz, and in the end out of that comes David, king of Israel. And it really is an amazing story. Now I asked myself, after that beautiful story—really, I was captivated by the lecture—in the end I ask myself: okay, what did I come away from this story with? I came away from this story with the lesson that you must not despair. You can always build something, even in a situation that seems hopeless. Okay. No, it’s very easy to despair. I’m not saying that’s a worthless lesson. It’s easy to despair. But on the intellectual level I’m saying: if that’s the intellectual lesson I got from it, then it’s some cheap moral lesson.
[Speaker C] You can always learn it
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] even from some poster from the electric company. Right, a cheap moral lesson. I could have told you that without the Book of Ruth: don’t despair, you can always make something out of your situation. Again, I’m saying, it’s easy to say, hard to live that way; I’m not claiming it’s a worthless lesson, that every person should do it. But on the intellectual level, what Torah did I learn from this? In other words, was there some insight I derived here, one kind of insight or another? Nothing. It didn’t innovate anything.
[Speaker F] There’s some Jewish point here.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Think whether there could have been a scroll whose lesson was: despair, there are situations that are lost to you. I assume not, right? Huh? Job. Job, yes. And I assume nobody… fine, so now there’s a contradiction between Ruth and Job. So what are you going to do now—two laws? Nobody even asks that question. It’s not only that it’s not… understand, we don’t study it on that level. That’s exactly what I mean to say. In other words, people offer interpretations and supposedly do interpretation, but it’s not really interpretation. In the end it’s more creation than interpretation. Because in the end you remain with what you came with. That is, you don’t learn. It’s not… when I began at the start with the definition of Torah as a source that, when I study it and reach a conclusion, for me that conclusion is binding—whether I agree with it or don’t agree with it, that’s what the Torah says. In Jewish law this exists, and I’m not claiming that in Jewish law people don’t do things based on their own reasoning and sometimes weigh considerations, of course, in line with their own reasoning. I’m the first to admit it; I do it all the time. But still, in the end there is also wrong in Jewish law. In aggadic literature, no. In the end there are people who will tear my position to pieces and I’ll have to raise a white flag in Jewish law. With all the desires and all the… that doesn’t happen in aggadic literature. It just doesn’t happen. And therefore I say that in the basic definition there is some difference between Jewish law and all the other fields. In all the other fields, look at interpretation of Torah—whatever it may be—even among Torah commentators, even when you find a brilliant interpretation, and by the way that’s fairly rare, when you find a brilliant interpretation of the Torah, usually the things are banal, all kinds of random things people find in it. But even if you do find some brilliant interpretation, it will be brilliant on the interpretive level. It will suddenly show you that these verses contain something you would never have imagined was in them. So it’s an exhilarating interpretive insight, but when you ask: okay, and what did this insight now teach me—not just in what light did it illuminate the verse, but what did I learn from it, did I learn a new lesson from it?—there will almost never be a new lesson. Almost never. Maybe, I don’t know, maybe someone will find that there is, but it almost never happens.
[Speaker F] And there’s a lot of nineteenth-century interpretation that pulls the interpretation in halakhic directions.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, I’m not
[Speaker F] talking, again
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m not talking about verses, I’m not talking about halakhic verses, there’s a great deal of interpretation that is… I’m not talking about halakhic verses, I’m talking about aggadic verses. Halakhic verses in the Torah are also Jewish law.
[Speaker C] What is the significance of the fact that… I don’t know whether it’s a binding law or not, but that on Shavuot one has to read the Book of Ruth, and every Sabbath one has to read the weekly Torah portion? So from the fact that there’s an obligation on you to read it, doesn’t that make this whole engagement into Jewish law?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’ll get to that. I said I still need to soften these formulations a bit. And speaking of the Book of Ruth, this is a story—I think I’ve said more than once—about Rabbi Medan, right, who said that he had heard twenty-two explanations for why we read the Book of Ruth on Shavuot, but he knows only one explanation for why we read the Book of Esther on Purim. When there are twenty-two explanations, that means none of them is satisfying.
[Speaker C] By the way, Chabad doesn’t read on Shavuot…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The Book of Ruth exists…
[Speaker C] Same with Sephardim… Sephardim do read…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In any case, so I’m saying that these explanations are exactly aggadic study. The explanations for why we read the Book of Ruth on Shavuot. In the end these are such-and-such explanations and other explanations, but you wouldn’t build anything on them. If there weren’t a rule to read the Book of Ruth, no such explanation would lead us now to establish that it should be read on Shavuot. After we know that one should read the Book of Ruth on Shavuot, everyone derives reasons from here and there. That’s exactly the point. That’s what people do in the study of aggadic literature. And therefore there’s some problem here; that is, there’s something here that doesn’t meet the definitions I spoke about in the first lecture, in both senses of the definition. Not in the sense of study, many times, less so… that is, here there are elements that do, yes, and not in the definition of Torah. About study, we said that it means extracting something from the text that exists in the text, okay? And extracting it with systematic, binding tools. And Torah means the authority of the text, that if it says something then for me that is binding. Meaning, if I thought otherwise, then I’m supposed to raise a white flag. Okay? Usually both of these things are not present in aggadic creation. As I said, the first element has improved in recent generations. The element of extracting things that I’m willing to be persuaded really are what the aggadah is saying. Until recent generations even that wasn’t there. It was just little homiletic quips. But I’m saying, when someone does systematic work and shows parallels and all kinds of things that really are done only in recent generations—or even only in the last generation, I would say—then I’m willing to be persuaded that this really is what the aggadah is saying. But what a wonder: what it always says is what I already thought was true even without the aggadah. And in the second sense, the sense of authority, I think it’s hard to see these texts as authoritative texts. Now of course the question arises: okay, so what, is it worthless? So there’s no point in studying them? Or maybe the Written Torah is basically the same thing too—there too, in the end, what I’m saying… so the Torah also isn’t Torah? The Written Torah too, that’s not Torah either? Only halakhic rulings are Torah? So there is something here that still troubles these definitions. I stand completely behind them, but the implications are troubling implications. And what I’ll do next time is try to suggest a somewhat more moderated picture, although I’m very conflicted about that picture. The question is whether that moderation is something I’d really say, or whether I’m simply not willing to go all the way with what I really think. I myself don’t know, I myself can’t say. Okay, we’ll continue this next time.