Torah and Torah Study, Lesson 9

Table of Contents

• The Written Torah and the Oral Torah: the sanctity of wording, book, and content
• Neglect of Torah study in quality, and the status of reading the Megillah
• The author of the Tanya: the garments of the soul, the 613 commandments, and the parable of water and the king
• The aggadah of Moses and the angels in Sabbath 88 and the idea that the Torah is not identical with its garments
• The Zen parable: “Zen in the Art of Archery” as learning one idea through different media
• The stages of garbing: an abstract thing, thought, speech, and action, and the question of wording and eternity
• Moses in Rabbi Akiva’s study hall, interpretation, and Maimonides and Rabbi Chaim
• Kant, the thing in itself, Borges, and Leibniz: essence versus characteristics
• Perception, color, and sound: Russell, the falling tree, and the question of “limitation”
• Multiple descriptions in physics and feminine language: Gadi Taub, optics, quanta, and Doppler
• Torah in the object itself versus Torah in the person: relevance, oxen and cows, and Guide for the Perplexed
• Thought, language, and transmitting ideas: Rashba, Shaagat Aryeh, Rashash, Rabbeinu Tam
• Bialik and the miracle of communication: revelation and concealment in language

Summary

General Overview

The text sharpens the distinction between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah through the tension between the sanctity of the wording and the book, on the one hand, and the sanctity of the content, on the other. It goes on to discuss Torah as a reality “in the object itself” that clothes itself in different garments until it appears in the world of human concepts. It presents the author of the Tanya as a source for describing the chain of descent from above to below, and the aggadah of Moses and the angels in Sabbath 88 as an explanation that the Jewish laws and physical images are garments for one abstract idea that is also learned in other worlds. Throughout, it advances a broad philosophical claim: that perception always takes place through a system of concepts and language, and that what seems like a limitation is actually the very definition of perception and communication—to the point that it is a kind of miracle that we manage to convey thought through words at all.

The Written Torah and the Oral Torah: the sanctity of wording, book, and content

The speaker defines the Written Torah as having sanctity of wording and sanctity of the book alongside sanctity of content, and argues that translation or reformulation loses the sanctity of the wording and becomes similar in status to a commentary like Rashi or Rashbam. He defines the Oral Torah as possessing sanctity of ideas and content alone, without importance attached to wording or to the book, so that any translation or alternative formulation preserves sanctity as long as the content is preserved. He hesitates over how to define “sacred content” in the non-halakhic parts of the Written Torah and the status of “sacred facts,” and raises the problematic possibility that historical and archaeological findings would then become Torah study requiring the blessing over Torah study. He states that the sanctity of the wording and the sanctity of the book apply to every verse without exception, even to “Timna was Lotan’s sister,” even if the sanctity of content in certain sections remains, for him, an open question.

Neglect of Torah study in quality, and the status of reading the Megillah

The speaker brings the yeshiva joke attributed to the Chazon Ish about “neglect of Torah study in quality” in order to express a gap between engaging in content that yields spiritual benefit and engaging in content perceived as insignificant. He explains that the simple meaning in the Talmudic text of “suspending Torah study for the reading of the Megillah” is going out to read the Megillah, not the reading itself, but he argues that the idea in the joke expresses a serious point about the experience of deriving benefit from content. He describes a feeling that the details of the Megillah’s plot do not necessarily make you say, “What did this give me in life,” even if one can speak about “intrinsic values,” and from there he wants to move on to discussing Torah primarily as Torah “in the object itself.”

The author of the Tanya: the garments of the soul, the 613 commandments, and the parable of water and the king

The speaker quotes the author of the Tanya in chapter 4, who describes three garments of the divine soul—thought, speech, and action—as the 613 commandments of the Torah, the study of their laws, and grasping the Torah in pardes. He emphasizes the sentence: “The Holy One, blessed be He, contracted His will and wisdom into the 613 commandments of the Torah and their laws, and into the combinations of letters of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) and their interpretations in the aggadot and midrashim of our sages of blessed memory,” in order to describe a descent and clothing that enable the soul to grasp and fulfill. He brings the image that “the Torah is compared to water” as a descent from a high place to a low place, and the statement “The Torah and the Holy One, blessed be He, are entirely one, and no thought can grasp Him at all,” so that possible grasp comes through Torah and commandments. He interprets the parable of “embracing the king” as claiming that there is no difference in attachment whether there is one garment or many garments, because the king’s body is within them; therefore engaging in concrete laws like “my ox, damages, cows, liars” is embracing the king through his garments.

The aggadah of Moses and the angels in Sabbath 88 and the idea that the Torah is not identical with its garments

The speaker cites the aggadah of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi about the angels’ claim regarding the “hidden treasure” and Moses’ answer through the verses of the Ten Commandments, where the argument keeps returning to the fact that the commandments are not relevant to angels: Egypt, Pharaoh, idolatry, labor and Sabbath, commerce, parents, murder, adultery, and theft. He points out that the answer is built almost entirely on Jewish law, and suggests that the point is not the ability to perform the commandment but “the atmosphere of the commandment” and the relevance of the world of human experience. He asks what the angels thought when they engaged in Torah “before it was given on earth,” and concludes that the aggadah is meant to teach that Torah is something abstract that is not identical with honoring parents or observing the Sabbath, but is rather an idea that appears in a different garment in every world. He argues that the angels engage in Torah through a garment suited to their world of concepts, whereas human beings engage in it through a garment suited to the world of action, and therefore “our garment is not relevant to you” and is not taken from them, while the abstract Torah itself “remains above.”

The Zen parable: “Zen in the Art of Archery” as learning one idea through different media

The speaker brings the example of Eugen Herrigel and his book “Zen in the Art of Archery,” in which a Zen master proposes learning Zen through flower arranging, archery, or fencing. He emphasizes that the choice of channel does not change what is being learned, because the medium is only a tool that conveys “some abstract something,” and the learning is not really about the technique itself. He uses the parable to explain that “an ox goring a cow” is not interesting in itself, in terms of the ox and the cow, but rather as a component in the language of our world through which abstract ideas pass—ideas for which we have no other language to describe them. He says that the Holy One, blessed be He, “clothes” the abstract in the garments of the human world so that we can grasp it, while the angels learn that exact same Torah without parents, Egypt, or Sabbath in their human meanings.

The stages of garbing: an abstract thing, thought, speech, and action, and the question of wording and eternity

The speaker distinguishes between stage one, Torah as an abstract thing that is not in the world of concepts and cannot be thought or formulated, and stage two, “thought,” as ideas such as honoring parents, then stage three, “speech,” in words, and finally “action” in practical halakhic details. He argues that even “honoring parents” is a garment and not the thing itself, because Torah can also exist in a world where there are no parent-child relationships, and the assumption is that studying the details brings into a person something that belongs to the higher abstraction. He returns to the tension between the eternity of Torah and the changeability of interpretations, and stresses that the sanctity of wording in the Written Torah is a “formal sanctity” that serves as bedrock, while every interpretation of the wording is a function of the person, the era, and the reasoning. He applies this also to the dynamic of transmission from rabbi to student, and presents a situation in which a student derives from his rabbi an intellectual garment that the rabbi himself would not have agreed with, and yet this is still “your rabbi’s Torah as it appears in you.”

Moses in Rabbi Akiva’s study hall, interpretation, and Maimonides and Rabbi Chaim

The speaker mentions Rabbi Kook’s reading of the contradiction in Rabbi Eliezer’s words—that he said something he had not heard from his teacher, and yet also said things no ear had ever heard before—and presents this in its straightforward sense: a student hears something from his teacher that takes on a new form within him. He argues that the fact that a lecturer does not agree with his student does not cancel out the lecturer’s influence, because the ideas “clothed themselves in a garment when they reached me.” He uses the image of Maimonides and Rabbi Chaim to argue that Maimonides does not have to agree with what later people read into his words, and that within a later conceptual system one can understand “better” what he meant, similar to the midrash of Moses in Rabbi Akiva’s study hall, where he was reassured when he heard, “This is a law given to Moses at Sinai.” He describes this as the difference between different conceptual “pictures” that express the same thing itself.

Kant, the thing in itself, Borges, and Leibniz: essence versus characteristics

The speaker presents Kant’s distinction between the thing in itself and the thing as it appears to us, and stresses that most statements refer to characteristics rather than to the “object itself” as such. He brings Borges’ story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” about a language without nouns in which only characteristics exist, and describes a situation in which any arbitrary collection of characteristics can constitute an “object,” because there is no unified “bearer of characteristics.” He discusses Leibniz’s principle of the identity of indiscernibles and Leibniz’s proof by way of negation, and presents the criticism that the proof begs the question, because “being not A” is not a property but points to an essence beyond properties. He adds an example from Ethics of the Fathers about “love that depends on something” as opposed to “love that does not depend on something,” in order to argue that love that is not nullified when qualities change is directed toward the bearer of the qualities, not toward the qualities themselves.

Perception, color, and sound: Russell, the falling tree, and the question of “limitation”

The speaker argues that the interpretation that sees the inability to grasp the thing in itself as a “limitation” misses the fact that this is the very concept of perception, because perception means clothing the thing in our own system of concepts. He cites Bertrand Russell to argue that “the color yellow” is a phenomenon of consciousness and not an electromagnetic wave, and that the wave is only the cause of the sensation. He discusses the question of “the tree falling in the forest” and says that the answer is “of course not”: there is no sound without a perceiver, because what exists is an acoustic wave, and only when a perceptual system appears does awareness of sound arise. He concludes that things have no “real color” in themselves, and every description—even electromagnetic wave and wavelength—is stated within a conceptual system, while creatures with different senses and consciousness would describe that same thing itself in a different language.

Multiple descriptions in physics and feminine language: Gadi Taub, optics, quanta, and Doppler

The speaker cites Gadi Taub in “The Crouching Revolt” and radical feminist claims about “physics in a masculine language,” and rejects Taub’s reply that he would not want to fly in a plane built according to “feminine physics.” He argues that, in principle, one can describe the same physics in completely different systems of concepts and that there is no single necessary form, even giving the example of a creature whose eyes are connected to the auditory center, so that an electromagnetic wave would be perceived as sound. He notes that there are already equivalent descriptions in optics, such as Snell’s laws versus Fermat’s principle of least time, and in quantum theory “the position picture” versus “the momentum picture,” and he demonstrates measuring velocity through the Doppler effect and not only through distance divided by time. He connects this to the midrash of Moses in Rabbi Akiva’s study hall as a case in which the content is the same but the conceptual “pictures” differ, and he describes Torah as one abstract thing that clothes itself in different systems throughout the chain of descent.

Torah in the object itself versus Torah in the person: relevance, oxen and cows, and Guide for the Perplexed

The speaker states that anyone who sees involvement with bulls, oxen, and ancient utensils as anachronistic “doesn’t understand what Torah is,” because Torah is not dealing with those things themselves but with what is clothed through them. He emphasizes the distinction between Torah in the object itself, where the very engagement with the garment is “embracing the king” regardless of subjective benefit, and Torah in the person, where the value depends on what the person derives and understands. He places Guide for the Perplexed and the aggadot of the sages alongside Critique of Pure Reason as examples that may be equal in status as Torah in the person if they contribute to the person, but are not Torah in the object itself in and of themselves. He explains again the phrase “neglect of Torah study in quality” by saying that in the Written Torah the sanctity of wording gives a formal guarantee that one is engaged with the object itself, whereas in human creation without sanctity of wording, studying without deriving anything is “just plain neglect of Torah study.”

Thought, language, and transmitting ideas: Rashba, Shaagat Aryeh, Rashash, Rabbeinu Tam

The speaker brings the dispute in the Mishnah in Berakhot about “one who recited Shema but did not make it audible to his ear,” and the Talmudic discussion, “Hear—in any language that you hear,” and quotes Rashba, who explains that the exposition “in any language” leads “automatically” to the need to make it audible to the ear, because in mere thought “language does not apply.” He discusses the question raised by Shaagat Aryeh from the first Tanna and suggests that Rashba is not denying speech in thought, but claiming that when the law concerns thought rather than speech, the distinction of language has no meaning, because language is only the practical vehicle for the idea. He brings Rashash on Tosafot in Sabbath and the possibility of “thinking in a secular language” as a context in which language does have halakhic significance, and presents this as sharpening the distinction between the sentence in thought and the idea that the sentence expresses. He adds Rabbeinu Tam on vows and the laws of charity as proof for the notion of “speech in thought,” and presents language as an additional garment that both sharpens thought and also shapes it.

Bialik and the miracle of communication: revelation and concealment in language

The speaker quotes Bialik from “Revelation and Concealment in Language” about the illusory “feeling of security” in speech, as though thought passes “along an iron bridge,” even though the bridge is “rickety,” with an “abyss” beneath it, and there is “something of a miracle in every step taken in peace.” He connects this to the basic difficulty of communication, in which synchronization between human beings takes place only at the level of speech and not at the level of inner consciousness. He mentions “the philosophers’ palace” and the question of red and yellow in order to argue that there is no way to know whether inner experiences are identical, even when language is coordinated. He ends with the sense that the question of how synchronized the first garment is—and all the more so “the abstract thing” itself—remains open, and deepens the understanding of Torah as a reality that clothes itself in many garments.

Last time I finished with an attempt to explain the difference between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah. I spoke about Torah in the person and Torah in the object, when regarding the Written Torah I said that the Written Torah has the sanctity of the wording and the sanctity of the book, and that’s not exactly the same thing, as we’ll see today. And in the Oral Torah, the sanctity is the sanctity of the ideas, of the content. The wording really isn’t important. Meaning, if you translate the Talmud into English, or formulate it differently, or whatever, there is no difference at all in the sanctity of the product, so long as the content is preserved. And of course not the book either. In the Written Torah, beyond the content—which the assumption is also exists there, although I raised some thoughts or doubts about exactly how to define the content, what holy facts are, the values we learn from the content, what exactly counts as Torah in terms of the sanctified content there—but one thing is clear: beyond the sanctity of the content in the Written Torah, there is the sanctity of the book. A holy book has sanctity. And it also has the sanctity of the wording. Meaning, there is a particular wording that is sanctified. If you translate the Torah into English or write it in a different formulation, even in Hebrew, it does not have the sanctity of the wording. It has the sanctity of the content. It will be considered like Oral Torah, like a commentary on the Torah, the way you relate to Rashi’s commentary, or I don’t know, Rashbam’s commentary, or any Torah commentary—so that’s how translations of the Torah would also be treated. If you reformulate the verses in a different way, then it takes on the meaning, basically, of Oral Torah in the senses I’m talking about here. And that is the distinction between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah. And within the Oral Torah—mainly within the Oral Torah—I spoke about all the distinctions I mentioned earlier, between Jewish law and aggadic literature, ethics, thought, and so on, and there I distinguished between Torah in the person and Torah in the object. In the Written Torah as well, the content distinctions are similar. Meaning, the non-halakhic parts of the Written Torah, it’s hard to define exactly what is sanctified in them at the level of content. But I don’t think anyone can argue that they are part of the Torah. The sanctity of the Torah certainly applies to all the verses, even “and Lotan’s sister was Timna.” So the sanctity of the wording and the sanctity of the book certainly exist in all the verses. About that there is no doubt. In terms of content, as I said, I don’t exactly know how to relate to it. The historical contents can also be learned from other sources, so if we treat those facts as holy facts, we can reach rather far-reaching conclusions. Meaning, studying all kinds of manuscripts and archaeological finds would suddenly become Torah study, and we’d recite the blessing over Torah study if we discovered there that Jacob, I don’t know, went to Paddan-Aram. What’s written in the Torah—this fact could also be revealed to us from another source, so would we then relate to that as Torah too? I don’t know. It’s difficult for me. Again, these are more question marks than exclamation marks; I don’t know how to define it. But it’s clear that the sanctity of the wording is there, and in that sense it’s clear that studying, say, the Written Torah is Torah in the object, even the non-halakhic parts—simply reading it, for that matter. But we already talked about that yeshiva joke—once I heard it attributed to the Chazon Ish, though I don’t know if that’s true—about neglecting Torah study in terms of quality. Right, I talked about that. If one neglects Torah study for the reading of the Megillah, right, then the question is: why is that neglect of Torah study? Reading the Megillah is also Torah. Why is it called neglecting Torah in order to read the Megillah? So yes, it’s neglect of Torah study in terms of quality. You could be studying Ketzot instead, and there you’re wasting time with the Megillah. Of course that’s not the plain meaning of the Talmud, right. Neglecting Torah study for the reading of the Megillah means going to read the Megillah, not the reading of the Megillah itself, where you’re not studying in depth. But fine, this joke says something that in my view is serious. The joke is a joke, but it says something that is more serious in itself: that indeed, in terms of the content or the benefit I derive from the matter—the benefit not in the sense of self-interest, but the spiritual benefit I derive from it, the benefit of Torah, the Torah that I learn from it—it really is neglect of Torah study in terms of quality. What did I learn from the fact that so-and-so said this, and Esther went here, and Ahasuerus said that? So what? What did that give me in life? You can talk about mystical inherent values, fine, maybe, I don’t know, I don’t understand these things, but.

All right, now I want to move one step further and talk a bit about Torah, mainly Torah in the object. And I want to talk a little about the unfolding of Torah from above downward, as perhaps I’ll begin with a certain formulation from the author of the Tanya. The author of the Tanya writes in chapter 4—just yesterday someone asked me if I’m a Chabadnik in Tel Aviv. In Tel Aviv some guy came up to me—some guy, apparently Chabad, that’s what he looked like to me, he looked like a Chabad type—and asked me if I’m a Chabadnik. I told him, absolutely not. He said, what, impossible. I said to him, as far apart as heaven and earth. He said, as far as east is from west. I said, no, no. He said, for sure, inside you’re definitely Chabad, you just probably don’t know it. So here we are, now we’re learning Tanya, so apparently he was right.

So the author of the Tanya writes in chapter 4: “Every divine soul also has three garments, which are thought, speech, and action of the 613 commandments of the Torah.” Notice that he is talking about the commandments of the Torah—that’s also an interesting point, because he too is talking about Jewish law here. We once discussed the similarity between the author of the Tanya and Nefesh HaChayim—that when a person fulfills in action all the practical commandments, and in speech he engages in the explanation of all 613 commandments and their laws, that is study, and in thought he grasps whatever he is able to grasp in the Pardes of the Torah, then all 613 limbs of his soul are clothed in the 613 commandments of the Torah, which are the 248 and the 365—that’s the 613—and specifically the aspect of Chokhmah, Binah, and Da’at in his soul are clothed in the comprehension of Torah that he grasps in the Pardes according to the capacity of his understanding and the root of his soul above. And the qualities, which are fear and love and their branches and offspring, are clothed in the fulfillment of the commandments in action and in speech, which is Torah study that is equal to them all. For love is the root of all 248 positive commandments, and from it they are drawn, and without it they have no true existence, for the one who truly fulfills them is the one who loves,” and so on. “And fear”—right, that refers to prohibitions—“and the Holy One, blessed be He, contracted His will and wisdom into the 613 commandments of the Torah and their laws, and into the combinations of the letters of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), and their interpretations in the aggadot and midrashim of our Sages, of blessed memory”—here he broadens it a little—“in order that every soul or spirit and life-force in the human body might be able to grasp them in its knowledge and fulfill whatever can be fulfilled of them in action, speech, and thought. And through this it will be clothed in all ten of its faculties through these three garments. Therefore the Torah is compared to water: just as water descends from a high place to a low place, so too the Torah descended from the place of its glory, which is His blessed will and wisdom, and the Torah and the Holy One, blessed be He, are entirely one, and no thought can grasp Him at all. And from there it traveled and descended in the hidden order of levels from level to level, in the unfolding of the worlds, until it became clothed in physical matters and the concerns of this world, which are most, indeed almost all, of the Torah’s commandments and their laws, and in combinations of physical letters in ink on parchment”—the aspect of the sanctity of the book and the wording—“the twenty-four books of Torah, Prophets, and Writings, so that every thought may grasp them, and even the lower levels of speech and action beneath the level of thought may grasp them and be clothed in them. But the Holy One, blessed be He, in His glory and essence, no thought can grasp at all, except when it grasps and is clothed in His Torah and commandments; then it grasps them and is clothed in the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself, for the Torah and the Holy One, blessed be He, are entirely one. And although the Torah has clothed itself in lower physical matters—oxen, pits, cows, liars, and the like—this is like embracing the king, by way of analogy. There is no difference in the degree of one’s closeness and attachment to the king whether one embraces him when he is wearing one garment or several garments, since the king’s body is within them.” When you embrace the king around his garment, that is also called embracing the king. And the Tanya says that thought, speech, and action are garments of the Torah, of the abstract king. “And so too if the king embraces him with his arm, even if it is clothed within his garments, as it says, ‘His right hand embraces me,’ which is the Torah that was given from the right side, which is the aspect of kindness and water.”

So basically he describes here that the Torah descends in the hidden order of levels from above downward and somehow at the end becomes clothed in all sorts of laws we know—oxen goring cows, liars, miggo, presumptions, all sorts of things drawn from our world. They are garments that the Torah wears. And I want to talk a little bit about that process. It’s an interesting process. We can only talk about it; I don’t think we can actually grasp it itself. We’ll talk more about that. But I want to discuss a bit its meaning. I’ll maybe begin with a midrash in the Talmud in tractate Shabbat, page 88. The Talmud says this: “Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said: At the time when Moses ascended on high, the ministering angels said before the Holy One, blessed be He: Master of the universe, what is one born of woman doing among us? He said to them: He has come to receive the Torah. They said before Him: That treasured thing, hidden away by You 974 generations before the world was created, You seek to give to flesh and blood? ‘What is man that You should remember him, and the son of man that You should think of him? O Lord our Master, how mighty is Your name in all the earth—place Your glory upon the heavens.’ Place Your glory above. The Holy One, blessed be He, said to Moses: Answer them. He said before Him: Master of the universe, I am afraid lest they burn me with the breath of their mouths. He said to him: Grasp My throne of glory and answer them,” as it says, “He grasps the face of the throne, He spreads His cloud over him.” And Rabbi Nachum said: This teaches that the Almighty spread some of the radiance of His Presence and clouded it over him. Here the Holy One, blessed be He, protected him. Moses said before Him: Master of the universe, this Torah that You are giving me—what is written in it?” Right, that’s the answer he gave the angels. “‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.’” He said to them: Did you descend to Egypt? Were you enslaved to Pharaoh? That’s what is written in the Torah—what do you have to do with this Torah? Why should the Torah be for you? Again: what is written in it? “You shall have no other gods.” Do you dwell among nations who worship idols? He says to the angels: right, what relevance does this have for you? Again: what is written in it? “Remember the Sabbath day to sanctify it.” Do you do labor, that you need rest? Again: what is written in it? “Do not take…” do you conduct business among yourselves? Again: what is written in it? “Honor your father and your mother.” Do you have father and mother? Again: what is written in it? “You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal.” Do you have jealousy among you? Do you have an evil inclination among you?” Notice, by the way, these are all laws. There are no non-halakhic sections here. We said the first one, for example, “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt,” there is room to discuss whether “I am” is a positive commandment, but the Ten Commandments—fine. Yes, but what he is telling them they do not have is not just that they cannot fulfill the commandment, but that the whole atmosphere of the commandment is not relevant. Right. Okay. But most of it is Jewish law, the overwhelming majority is Jewish law. “Immediately each and every one became his friend and gave him something,” as it says, “You ascended on high, you captured captivity, you took gifts among man”—as reward for them calling you man, you took gifts. And even the Angel of Death gave him something, and so on.

In short, the interesting question is: what did the angels think? Of course this is aggadah; we don’t really have to say that this is what actually happened. But what is this story trying to teach? What did the angels think? He asks them simple questions, right? Up to now you studied the Torah before it was given on earth. So what were they studying? “Honor your father and your mother”? “You shall have no other gods before Me”? Sabbath, where you always do labor? Maybe you could understand that up to now the angels also had not received the Torah, they just saw that it was hidden away, and then said: if God is giving this to someone, let Him give it to us. And then what did they want? And then they discussed it and discovered—and then Moses told them, ah, we understand, now everything is fine. How did Moses know if he had not yet received the Torah? He already knew. And they didn’t ask.

Okay. What did the angels think? It seems to me that the story here is not what the angels thought, but what this aggadah is trying to teach. Perhaps this aggadah is trying to teach something that I began with earlier. Torah is not “Honor your father and your mother,” and not even “Observe the Sabbath day to sanctify it.” Torah is some kind of abstract something, and that abstract something is relevant to angels, to human beings, to everyone, to the Holy One, blessed be He. When Torah descends below, the Torah becomes clothed—this is exactly what the author of the Tanya described earlier—it becomes clothed in a collection of laws drawn from our world: honoring parents, Sabbath observance, idolatry, things of that kind. But that is not the Torah. Torah is not that. Torah is some kind of abstract idea, and the garment it wears in our world, as the author of the Tanya describes, is the 613 commandments. Okay? When the sages—when the angels—argue with Moses our teacher, they are not arguing with him about honoring father and mother. That is not the point at all, obviously not. When they engage in Torah, they are not talking about father and mother, or Sabbath, or anything like that. They are speaking about some kind of abstract idea. I have no idea what it is. And I assume that even among them they are not talking about the abstract idea itself, but about some garment that the abstract idea wears in their world of concepts. The world of formation—angels are generally associated with the worlds of formation and creation, corresponding to the throne of glory—whereas we are the world of action. So there are apparently garments that Torah wears which are relevant to the worlds of formation and creation, and the angels engage in that. And we engage in Torah through the garments it wears in the world of action, which is our world, our physical world.

If so, then what is the problem? What is the dispute? In other words, you engage in what you engage in, and the angels—Moses our teacher and the angels—will engage in what they engage in. The angels did not understand this point itself. The angels really did not understand, apparently. Again, the aggadah presents this message to us by depicting the angels as not understanding this idea—that Torah is both what they engage in and not what descends below. Torah is an abstract thing that was with the Holy One, blessed be He, and remains with the Holy One, blessed be He. It doesn’t— it remains there. It wears various garments, and each such garment lowers it one more level. So down to the level of the angels, that is one garment. Then it wears additional garments, and descends to our world, the world of action. And all these garments are garments within which the king is hidden. And one can embrace the king through the garments, and that is like embracing the king himself.

Now Moses our teacher, what he tells them is: what do you want? The Torah that you were engaged in remains with you. We are receiving some kind of garment of the Torah that is not relevant to you. That’s all. You will engage in yours and we will engage in ours. That’s all. And therefore this midrash comes, I think, to teach that all these things we engage in are indeed some kind of garments. They are not the Torah itself. There is… what? The angels didn’t know that. Yes, again, it’s all the Sages. Not angels, not Moses, not any of it—but the Sages use this to teach us this idea. The idea that what we receive is actually something abstract that lies beyond the 613 commandments as we know them. Those 613 commandments are a certain garment. He tells them: we receive—we do not receive the Torah. The Torah was above and remains above, in abstract form. You too did not receive the Torah. You engage in Torah through a garment that is relevant to you, and we engage in it through a garment that is relevant to us. Our garment is not relevant to you. What do you have to do with it? What do you do with it? I receive something relevant to my world. You remain with what is relevant to your world; it isn’t being taken from you. But you should know that even you are not really engaged in the Torah itself. You engage in Torah through garments that are relevant to your world.

I’ll give you an example I once mentioned. There was a German professor of philosophy named Eugen Herrigel, who wrote a book called Zen in the Art of Archery. Zen Buddhism, right. He tells how he lived in the early twentieth century. He had a friend who was a professor of law in Tokyo, at the University of Tokyo. He went to visit him during a sabbatical year, and asked him—he wanted to study Zen—to connect him with some Zen master, a Zen teacher, a Zen guide. Fine, so he connected him with someone, and he went to study with him, went to his first lesson. The book describes his study there. He comes to describe to a Western ear what he actually went through there. Very interesting. So he describes the opening meeting with this master, and the master says to him: what do you want to study? Flower arranging? Archery? Fencing? I don’t remember, maybe there was one or two more options. There were several options. So he says to him: no, none of those. I want to study Zen. Okay, yes, but flower arranging, fencing, or archery. It took him a little time to understand that it really didn’t matter what he chose. Meaning, you can study Zen, this thing called—or these ideas called—Zen, through any one of those channels. It really doesn’t matter which channel you choose. You learn the same thing. You can learn it through archery, or through fencing, or through flower arrangement. But you learn the same thing. So what is the thing one learns? It’s not how to shoot correctly, because what you learn has nothing at all to do with archery. The bow and arrow are a medium through which some abstract something passes over you. That abstract something is called Zen Buddhism. And the medium really isn’t important. Choose whatever you want, whatever speaks to you, your inclinations, I don’t know exactly what—but the medium really doesn’t matter. You learn the same thing in all these modes.

I think this is a very nice metaphor for what we are talking about here. Because basically the claim is that when we study an ox that gores a cow, we are not interested in the ox or the cow. That is not relevant. Again, we do deal with it, yes, it does interest us. We want to know what the law is when an ox gores a cow. But ultimately, what we are learning is the collection of abstract ideas that pass to us through this matter, through these oxen and cows. Because oxen and cows are our world. So we need—there is no way to speak to us in abstract language. We have no language to speak that abstract thing. So what happens? The Holy One, blessed be He, clothes these abstract things in garments drawn from our world. And in our world we see oxen and cows and neighbors and miggo and presumptions and impurity and purity, all sorts of things of all sorts of kinds. But these things are garments. They are garments through which—this is a certain medium, our world itself, our conceptual world, serves here as the medium through which some collection of ideas is transmitted to us. And the goal, when we study Torah, is those ideas. Like Plato? Yes, in a certain sense it is similar. Yes, it is similar. But I’m still one step before that. In a moment maybe I’ll get there too.

Basically there is here some abstraction of a collection of ideas that we have no language to speak about. Because all the concepts in our language are concepts drawn from our world. So the Holy One, blessed be He, clothes these abstract things in our language. That is basically what we study. That abstract thing, clothed in our language—that is what is called Torah. Okay? When we say we study Torah, of course we mean the study of the things we usually study, but what we are really studying is some abstract something that is clothed in the things we study, and that is what is called Torah. And the angels learn that exact same Torah, exactly the same Torah we learn. Even though they have no father or mother, they did not leave Egypt, idolatry has no relevance for them, and they do not work six days and rest on the seventh. None of that exists for them, and yet they learn exactly the same Torah we learn. Exactly the same thing. It’s just that we learn it through fencing and they through chapter-singing—whatever. That abstract thing hidden within the garments is the same thing itself. Okay, that is the point I think this midrash is trying to teach.

Now we have to understand that even this idea—for example, the idea of honoring parents—the idea of honoring parents is itself also some kind of idea that then undergoes a kind of concretization, as opposed to abstraction. Concretization is kind of the opposite of abstraction. Meaning, taking something abstract and making it concrete. Okay? Through various details of law. But those legal details express ideas. Those ideas are how to honor parents in this particular case, okay? But that is already a stage—the transition from stage two to stage three. I’m talking about the transition from stage one to stage two. Even honoring parents is itself a garment. It is not the thing itself. Meaning, the Torah can exist in a world where there are no parents and no children, no parent-child relations, and still they would study the same Torah. Like the angels—they would study the same Torah. That is why I’m speaking here of a higher abstraction than the abstraction from the idea to the practical details. I’m talking about an abstraction that addresses something I do not even know how to speak about. At the level of ideas, I know how to speak about honoring parents. What is the idea? We’ll try to understand, through the details of the law, what the idea of honoring parents is, what exactly it means. I need honor and awe, and through that reach the legal definitions. And one can study in depth the legal details of honoring parents and arrive at the abstract ideas of honoring parents. But that is already stage B. That is getting from stage C to stage B. I am talking about stage A. Stage A we have no way of speaking about. I don’t know what it means. It is not… But the assumption is that if I study the laws of honoring parents, somehow something enters into me that belongs to that higher abstraction, to those abstract ideas, which is really what is called Torah. Okay? And this is that descent in the order of levels that the author of the Tanya speaks about, that Torah clothes itself in different garments of thought, speech, and action. Thought is stage B. It is not stage A. Torah itself is stage A. Torah itself is something completely abstract. About it we also cannot think, or speak, or formulate. It simply is not in our world of concepts. It becomes clothed in ideas. That is called thought. We clothe that thought in words. That is another garment. We clothe it in words. And now we begin to see details, legal details that can be carried out. That is already action. Thought, speech, and action. But thought, speech, and action are three garments, says the author of the Tanya. So what is the thing itself that is clothed in these garments? That is what is called Torah. Torah is not even thought, because thought is a garment.

Comes to teach—the aspect of Torah’s eternity, of the thing, the thought, the speech, and the action. What do you mean? Like Torah is eternal, it cannot change. The ideas can change, the actions can—everything can change. Say, but not the wording. Not the wording. So what then? What do we do with that wording? That wording, after all, says nothing. Try to get something out of the Torah—you won’t succeed. Nothing. What you derive from the Torah is a function of the person, the period, the reasoning, a hundred thousand things. That is why I said: the sanctity of the wording is a formal sanctity that basically says nothing. The moment you translate it into the world of ideas, it already becomes a function of your conceptual world. That is why I said I also don’t see to what extent one can really relate to what I derive from that wording in any concrete way. How is that different from the aggadot of the Sages? Everything I said about the aggadot of the Sages is also true of the halakhic parts of the Torah. The only difference is that in the halakhic parts of the Torah there is something that is indeed the rock, and that is the wording. That’s all. But every detail, every interpretation you give to that wording, is already a function. We discussed what Rav Kook wrote to the sectarians of socialism in a letter of consolation, where he says there is a contradiction: Rabbi Eliezer says something he did not hear from his teacher, and elsewhere it says he says things no ear has ever heard before. So he says that he heard from his teacher things no ear had ever heard before. And I think that is the straightforward meaning, not a homiletic reading. And it’s entirely true. Meaning, there are situations—I spoke about this—where you hear something from your teacher that he himself does not understand what he is saying. Meaning, only in you does it take on the form it takes in you. In him it took a different form. He may not agree with what you say, and still it is your teacher’s Torah as it appears in you. It came in some garment. I told you, my lecturer in the Babylonian Talmud, he agrees with almost nothing I say. And still I got these things from him. There’s no way around it. He can argue until tomorrow. Really, because fine, that is the garment those things wore when they passed to me. And it’s true—he does not recognize the things in that garment. But they are things that came from him; they passed through that garment and were clothed in a garment when they reached me. And I think this is true for anyone who studied under some teacher, anyone knows this phenomenon. Some more, some less. It’s like that, it is obviously like that. Sometimes he himself, in my opinion, does not understand what he said. Because these jokes about Maimonides—we talked about all that, right—what does Frank understand in Maimonides, those jokes. So it’s the same idea. Maimonides himself would not agree with what Rabbi Chaim puts into him. But Rabbi Chaim is right, at the principled level. You can argue with Rabbi Chaim about many things, you can argue with him, but at the principled level, the fact that Maimonides doesn’t agree with him is no indication of anything. It’s not interesting. Because ultimately, in the conceptual system of Rabbi Chaim’s time—or of our time, for the sake of discussion—we understand better than Maimonides what he meant. Because he really did mean that; he just did not live in that conceptual world, so he did not—like Moses our teacher going to the study hall of Rabbi Akiva. Right, that’s the story. I mentioned that midrash. Yes, Moses our teacher in the study hall of Rabbi Akiva. That is exactly what it says. That is what the midrash says. The plain meaning of the midrash, not some homiletics.

I perhaps want to illustrate this more. I have mentioned more than once Kant’s distinction between the thing in itself and the thing as it appears to us. Almost everything we say about something is a description of it, meaning it refers to its characteristics. Almost nothing refers to the thing itself. Right, if we say this lectern is slanted, or made of wood, or brown, tall, short, with metal legs—those are all characteristics of the lectern. But the lectern as object, yes, the lectern in its very self—what do I know how to say about it? The bearer of the characteristics, the object whose characteristics those are. Right, the lectern as it is in itself. What? The wood and the thing, what do you mean? There is some wood here, something tangible, and all this wood here is what we call a lectern. No, the lectern is not only the wood. This whole assemblage is the lectern. Wood and iron, fine, whatever. But who is the bearer of these properties? And who is the thing made of wood and iron? You reminded me of a story—I don’t know if Ra’anan—it all gets mixed together here. There is a story by Borges, the Argentine writer. Whenever I speak about him I lavish praise on him—the man was a genius, a dead genius of a writer. There is a story of his called “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in some collection called Ficciones. And that is the first or second story there, one of the early stories. There he describes a planet called Tlön, insane story, a completely insane story, a planet called Tlön populated by idealists, solipsists. Meaning, people who do not believe in the existence of an external world, but everything exists within our consciousness—Berkeley and all the idealist philosophers. And in the story he toys with that position and presents it in all sorts of truly brilliant ways; it’s simply a piece of philosophical genius, that story. Among other things, he speaks there about the language of the planet—the northern part of the planet, never mind—and they found there some dictionary of the northern part of that planet. And in the language of the northern part there were no nouns, because there are no objects; there are only my perceptions. Everything exists in my consciousness according to the idealists, so there are no things in the world itself. And I myself am also not in the world? Good question, ask the idealists. They were operating here at the level of these bizarre theses. But what is nice there—and this is the answer to Aryeh—is that in that dictionary not only are there no nouns, but any collection of characteristics can function as an object. Meaning, the bird’s cry in space together with the color of that wall and the weather together are called yankedah, that collection of characteristics. Because if you do not accept the existence of objects, then what ties the slant with being made of wood and with having metal legs? There is no object of which all these are the characteristics, only a collection of characteristics. But if so, then any collection of characteristics can constitute an object, right? There should not be any particular connection among them. And then he goes wild there with all kinds of collections of characteristics of all kinds. In their language, for example, you cannot say “the moon rose above the river,” because moon and river are nouns. So what one says is: “there was a whitening mooning above the flowing streamness.” There is no river. There are only characteristics of a river, namely that it flows. And there is no moon. There is only white mooning. There are only characteristics; there are no objects. So in that language there is only a language of characteristics, no objects. But in the language of the northern hemisphere there are objects, but done in a totally arbitrary way. Meaning, any collection of characteristics you can gather together and define as an object. No problem. Why? And this is basically what follows from the idealist view. Because in the idealist view there really are no objects that are the substances described by the characteristics. There are none. Only the characteristics exist. So what’s the problem? What ties these collections of characteristics into constituting an object? Any collection of characteristics I can make into an object. Okay. And if I assume there is something that this collection of characteristics describes or belongs to, and therefore specifically this collection of characteristics constitutes an object and not just some random assortment of whatever you want, then that means there is some such thing there. There is someone who is the bearer of the characteristics, right? That is basically the claim.

I spoke—I don’t remember when or where—about Leibniz and the principle of the identity of indiscernibles. Leibniz argues that two objects that have the same set of characteristics are not two; they are the very same object. And he even has a proof. The proof goes like this: let’s say they are two substances, by reductio, let us say they are two different substances, not different in their characteristics, but they are two, not one. Okay? Two that are not distinguished by their characteristics but still are two. So he says, then one has the property—that A has the property of not being B, and that property B does not have—so that means their properties are not identical, and therefore it cannot be that they are. And he leads us to a contradiction. The opposite assumption, that we are dealing with two substances, leads us to a contradiction, therefore that assumption must be false. This is a reductio proof. Of course he assumes the conclusion he wants, as every logical argument assumes the point at issue. And what is his assumption? What is the opposing view? The opposing view says that there can be two objects which are two even though their collection of characteristics is identical. Right? That is the thesis against which he argues. What does that thesis actually mean? That thesis says there is in fact something beyond the collection of characteristics—the essence, the thing itself, that bearer of the characteristics, right? By contrast, Leibniz assumes that a substance is nothing but a collection of characteristics, and therefore he says: fine, if there are two identical collections of characteristics, then it is the same substance itself, because there is nothing there other than the collection of characteristics. That is the dispute, right? But if that is indeed so, then his reductio proof collapses. Because when he says that B has the property of not being A, clearly that is not a property. Not being A is not a property. Not resembling A is a property, but not being A—when you yourself are not A but something else, or you look different, or have some other property, or you are simply other, you are not A—is that a property? Because that is exactly the assumption that there is something here that is not one of the properties. It is the bearer of the properties, that which all the properties describe, the essence. And that is the dispute. Exactly. So that is the dispute, and therefore his assumption begs the question. Fine.

My claim basically is that the properties are properties of something. And that something—for example, to say that that something exists, that is a statement about it itself. That is a statement about the object, not about its properties. Say that it exists, or say that it is one and not two. And I once recalled a student of mine from the women’s seminary in Yerucham, and we discussed this matter, and she said that in her opinion love too is directed toward the object and not toward the properties. And in fact this is what Ethics of the Fathers says: “Any love that depends on a thing—when the thing ceases, the love ceases. Any love that does not depend on a thing—when the thing ceases, the love does not cease.” What does it mean, love that does not depend on a thing? If you love someone because of his traits, traits can change. You can get, I don’t know, some kind of brain injury and all the traits can change, right? Do you stop loving him? If so, then that is love that depends on a thing; it is love of the traits. But if the love does not change even though the traits change, what does that mean? That this love is directed not toward the traits but toward the bearer of the traits. And therefore even if the traits change, the love can remain. If it remains, then that is love that does not depend on a thing, because the bearer of the traits never changes. He is himself. You can change all his traits except for the very fact that he is he. Okay. Are there such loves? I don’t know. In Ethics of the Fathers they apparently assume there are—love that does not depend on a thing. Huh? Not sure—in Ethics of the Fathers maybe the intent is to an external thing, as opposed to the person in himself. Love that does not depend on a thing means that even if everything changes, the love remains. Yes, but not necessarily that “everything changes” means an internal state, like a brain injury that resets the whole personality. Never mind. But what is that thing toward which the love turns, such that whatever changes won’t affect it? Toward the person. The person as a whole, including the traits. But what does “including the traits” mean? All his traits changed, and now you still love him? So Ethics of the Fathers says in such a case this is love that does not depend on a thing, whereas that does depend on a thing. The question is what you mean by “thing.” It says: any love that depends on a thing, when the thing ceases, the love ceases. Love that does not depend on a thing means that even if everything changes, the love remains. That is the simple meaning of the mishnah. Yes, but the question is what that means. If, in context, it means that you separate the person and refer separately to the person himself and to the traits? No—the way the mishnah relates to it, right. I am not assuming anything. I am asking what the mishnah says. “When the thing ceases”—it could be that “thing” means external things, meaning if he loses his status, loses his money, things like that. But love that does not depend on a thing means that nothing—“many waters cannot extinguish love, nor can rivers sweep it away”—nothing that changes will change it. So what does that mean? That there is something there that remains the same despite all the changes. Everything can change, but there is one thing there that remains, and when the love is directed at that, that is love that does not depend on a thing. So this point, when I analyze love—then what is it? So the love is not directed to that thing. I am only bringing this as an example of the fact that most things we say about certain objects or about people refer to their properties. Very little of what we say refers to the thing itself or the person himself. The fact that it exists refers to the thing itself. Love, perhaps, as I discussed before. The fact that it is one and not two, perhaps; or that it is not something else, meaning that he is Yankele and not Berel, for the sake of discussion, that is a statement about him, not about one of his properties. Okay? Maybe a few other things, I don’t know. Very little. Most of what we say, we say about the properties of things.

Now here, when Kant made this distinction between the thing in itself and the thing as it appears to us, many commentators on Kant—now “many,” I don’t know, I am not sufficiently expert to know who the majority is and what each one says—but many of Kant’s commentators treat our inability to encounter the thing itself, but only the properties, the thing as it appears to us, as a limitation. It is some kind of limitation. We fail to encounter the thing itself, we are limited by our senses, by our forms of perception, and therefore there is some kind of limitation here: we cannot grasp the thing itself. And I claim that this is not a limitation. It is simply the definition of the concept of perception. To perceive the thing means to bring it into my conceptual system so that I can perceive it. Therefore, by definition, perception is always done through my conceptual system. That is not a limitation; that is what is called perceiving.

For example, I’ll give an example from Bertrand Russell. People ask themselves, what is the color yellow? So the answer they give is: an electromagnetic wave of such-and-such wavelength. That is nonsense. The color yellow is the phenomenon of consciousness, what I recognize as the color yellow. The electromagnetic wave of a certain wavelength is the cause of this sensation of the color yellow. That is a phenomenon in the world, a physical phenomenon. It is not a color. Color exists only in my consciousness. Like the noise in the forest. Yes, like the famous question of a tree falling in the forest—if no one is there, does the tree make a sound? And the answer is of course no. Obviously it does not make a sound if no one is there. It moves air. And people are convinced the answer is yes. Obviously not—the answer is no. And this is not a philosophical question; it is a fact. It does not make a sound. What it does is move air; it creates an acoustic wave. When there is an ear there, or an eardrum that the acoustic wave strikes, then a consciousness of sound is created. The eardrum is not enough; there also has to be consciousness. Of course, the whole process. Okay? Then sound is created. Sound is a phenomenon of consciousness. Without a person perceiving what is happening there, there is no sound. What there is is an acoustic wave. Animals—whoever generates sounds, I don’t know, whatever creatures translate acoustic waves into sounds—then for them there is sound. I don’t know who has that and who doesn’t; it doesn’t matter. But as long as there is no such creature there, what exists is an acoustic wave, not sound. Okay? So when I perceive a tree falling, among other things I perceive it in terms of the sound it makes. Right? So have I perceived the fall itself? The phenomenon of the fall itself? I claim yes. Perceiving that phenomenon means translating it into my conceptual consciousness-system—for example sounds, sights, all sorts of things, taste, smell, touch, all these things. That is the form or language that thing wears when it enters my cognitive system. But that is not a limitation. That is how one perceives the thing itself. I perceive the thing itself, not something else. To perceive the thing itself means to clothe it in my conceptual system. That is what it means to perceive the thing itself.

When you ask me, wait, but what is the true color of things as they are there, not the color as I see it—that is the question of someone who does not understand what he is talking about. There is no color of the thing as it is in itself. Color exists only in my consciousness. Color is a cognitive phenomenon. There is no color of the thing as it is in itself. There is in the thing as it is in itself some abstract something, which in this case is called an electromagnetic wave. Although anything you try to say about that electromagnetic wave will always involve mixing in something from your conceptual world. Even to say there is an electromagnetic wave there is really to make a statement that belongs to my conceptual world. I know that there is something there. That something I call an electromagnetic wave. It is a name. Anything you say about it involves admixture from your conceptual world. That it has a wavelength, that it looks like this, that it has such-and-such a color—all of that is in our conceptual world. Wavelength too is some form of description from our conceptual world, though more abstract than the color I experience directly. But it is still my conceptual system. If there were another creature who perceived things differently, he would not speak about it in terms of wavelengths and this and that. He would perhaps speak in a totally different language. He would be talking about that same thing itself. But because his world of consciousness or senses is different, if there are senses at all and whatever that means, the language he uses would be totally different. He would be talking about the same thing itself.

Like we once discussed—I spoke about this once when I discussed the feminist critique in Gadi Taub’s book The Limping Revolt—there he brings various bizarre feminists who claim that women don’t succeed in physics because men formulated physics, and expressed it in their language, and that doesn’t allow women to understand it. That’s all. But men have no advantage over women in physics. Men don’t succeed in physics more for that reason; it’s simply because they formulated it in a male language. What? But is there a difference in language? What is language? Not English—language in the sense of modes of thinking, the language, the concepts. So is there a difference between men and women in modes of thinking? Yes, that is the view that appears there in the extreme version. I don’t want to put words in their mouths. There are many feminists; it depends. There are those who say everything is social construction—that’s one kind. And there is another kind who, on the contrary, recognize the depth of the difference, and therefore say that nothing depends on that difference. One could have produced physics in feminine language, the same physics, and then women would have been stars and men would not have succeeded in physics. So Gadi Taub writes in his book that he would not want to fly on an airplane built on the basis of feminine physics. Because physics is physics—correct physics or incorrect physics; there aren’t many physicses. And I think he is wrong. I think he is wrong in this case. You know, even a stopped clock shows the correct time twice a day. Rudyard Kipling says that. Only a stopped clock. Right? Or a clock that runs—one that runs wrong never shows the correct time. It has some lag, so it never… It might show it once, depending on the stroboscopic rate, depending on how fast it accumulates the lag relative—or else it always shows it correctly, but then you can’t reduce it. Or it never happens, or if it is a perfectly accurate clock then it never shows the correct time, and if it runs at a slightly different pace, then it shows the correct time every so often, depending on its rate of lag or gain. So yes, even the radical feminists, with all the stupidity and frustration, said something right, the way a stopped clock shows the right time.

I think he is wrong in this case. I think in principle one can describe the world—again, I don’t know how to do it—but in principle one can describe the world of physics in a completely different conceptual system. The laws will look totally different, and it will all be the same thing. They will describe the same system, the same set of phenomena. Think of a person—think of a person, right—whose eyes are connected directly to the auditory center. Fine? The eyes transmit information to the auditory center in the brain, not to the visual center. Then what we see, he would hear. Right? For him an electromagnetic wave would be a sound. Right? There would be no light. Now who is right? There is no right and wrong here. We are not more right than he is. We are built this way and he is built that way. There is no right or wrong here. But if he works correctly, then the airplane he builds will fly well. Even though when he gives the plans for how to build the airplane, he will give them in the form of concerts, not in the form of pictures that we can follow and see how to build an airplane. And formulas more… Yes, concerts, musical notation, I don’t know, other things. I don’t know what. Okay? And there is no impediment in the world—in fact, to me it is obvious—that there are infinitely many ways to describe correct physics, in completely different forms. There could be descriptions of physics that do not use mathematics at all, or use different mathematics, or I don’t know exactly what. Something else. In our world, in our conceptual world, we use mathematics. What? You once gave the example of optics according to Snell’s laws or according to Fermat’s minimum time. Yes, exactly. That is a teleological description and a causal description of the same thing. Someone who builds binoculars or whatever—it is the same thing, and it’s simple. Those are even two descriptions we know and know to be equivalent. That is why it is such a good example. But it is a simple example. I’m talking about things we don’t understand at all. When we discussed Zeno’s arrow—I think in that context we discussed this—the paradox of the arrow in flight, and I spoke there about different forms of description in quantum theory. There is the momentum representation and the position representation. You can describe everything in terms of velocities, and you can describe everything in terms of positions: the properties of a body as a function of its velocity and as a function of its position. It really doesn’t matter. These are two modes of description, each of which can describe all of physics. You can describe physics in the position representation, you can describe physics in the momentum representation, and both are correct descriptions. There is no correct and incorrect here. I spoke about the Doppler effect. The Doppler effect defines velocity, so you can define velocity by the difference in place divided by the difference in time, how long it took you to pass a certain distance, and you can measure velocity not by measuring positions and dividing by time, but through the Doppler effect: send a beam, measure the change in frequency. That change in frequency is proportional to the velocity. And that has nothing to do with differences in position divided by differences in time. And it gives the same result.

Now, these are phenomena we know, so it is easy to demonstrate with them. But there is no issue here. Other creatures may come, whose minds are built differently, whose mode of perception is built differently, and the physics they describe will be completely different. And that reminds you of Moses our teacher in the study hall of Rabbi Akiva. That is exactly it, in my view. Because ultimately Moses our teacher arrived with his own conceptual system. And he heard in Rabbi Akiva’s study hall how they studied Torah, and he understood nothing. Then they told him: this is a law given to Moses at Sinai, and he calmed down. Why? Because he understood that they were speaking in the position representation and he was speaking in the momentum representation. Simply different representations in a different conceptual world. We are describing the same thing. This is exactly the same Torah. And that is exactly the abstraction I spoke of earlier, when I said the Torah can pass through flower arranging or archery. It really doesn’t matter. These are only different conceptual systems in which this abstract thing can clothe itself, and it will be the same thing itself. It is clothed in a different conceptual system, and you learn something that seems completely different, but you are learning the same thing itself. So that is basically the claim.

And there is a difference between the garment of… the Torah of the Holy One, blessed be He, which was really clothed in Torah and matters—and not the first clothing. Yes, the first clothing. “If an ox gores an ox… the one who kindles the fire shall surely pay.” There are verses where the Holy One, blessed be He, did the first clothing. From there onward we work with the garments He made; we do not construct the garments. He clothed it in garments taken from our world. There is no doubt that we make mistakes in interpretation. I am not claiming we do not make mistakes in interpretation and that all interpretations are right—absolutely not. What I am claiming is that we are engaged in the same Torah. There can be mistakes about it. Obviously we make mistakes; I have no doubt we make mistakes. We are engaged in the same Torah even though we are dealing with oxen and cows. And therefore people who think that engaging in Torah, engaging in these strange ideas, is some kind of anachronism, that you are engaged in some dead world of bulls and oxen and cows and things that no longer exist today, or all kinds of ancient implements and so on—as though Torah is irrelevant—they do not understand what Torah is. Torah is not dealing at all with oxen, cows, a sieve and a sifter and… winnowing, selecting, and sifting. Those three labors. Winnowing, selecting, and sifting are actually three labors described in the concepts of the laws of our world, right? But they actually do the same thing: they separate waste from food. That is essentially what they do. Okay, so this is a kind of concretization, for example, of an abstract idea, producing three different concretizations. Then the Talmud says that if not for the fact that all three were in the Tabernacle, it would have been one labor and not three labors, or three primary categories. Right—we know such things from our world too. All of this, of course, is from our world, and from this I am trying to learn what happens in the earlier abstractions. What happened before it reached our world. I think that is what this midrash is saying: the Torah of the angels underwent concretization to the world of creation and formation; our Torah underwent a further concretization—not abstraction, concretization—to the world of action. Now we work with oxen and cows and parents and Sabbath observance and “six days you shall labor” and all these things. That is all from our world. But that is the end—or flower arranging, it really doesn’t matter. The goal is not to know the law of an ox that gores a cow. That is indeed the goal of practical study; after all that is how we study. But through this route of oxen and cows, abstract ideas pass to us, ideas we have no other way to speak about except within this conceptual system.

That is the difference between reading the Scroll of Esther and studying Ketzot—the abstract world. So why is this called in-depth and that is not in-depth? No, I said, it’s a joke. I said because… No, but why is it a joke? It’s a joke because the Written Torah has sanctity of wording, and the Scroll of Esther is part of the Written Torah. And the sanctity of the wording basically means that if you engage in it, you are engaging in that abstract thing we are talking about. Okay, but for example, as I said in previous classes, when you deal with Guide of the Perplexed or the aggadot of the Sages, they do not have sanctity of wording. If it doesn’t say something to you, then it is worth nothing. Here you do not have that guarantee that something will be clothed in some garment, and if you engage in the garment you are embracing the king through his garment. It doesn’t matter; ultimately you are embracing the king himself. That is exactly what happens in Torah in the object and does not happen in Torah in the person, like the categories I discussed in previous classes. Because in Torah in the person, it is content. And if you engage in the content and you understand and derive something from it, then you gained. But the engagement itself, if you derived nothing from it, is just plain neglect of Torah study. That is why I said that in my view Guide of the Perplexed, Crime and Punishment, or Critique of Pure Reason are the same thing. They are not really different from one another. If it contributes something to you, then it is Torah in the person, subjective Torah, Torah in terms of what it contributed to me. But the object itself, the thing itself, is not Torah. It is not Torah.

So therefore I say that everything I said now, in terms of clothing, all of it is said about Torah in the object. I said that at the beginning. All of it is said about Torah in the object. Torah in the object can clothe itself in many things, and when you engage in them you are apparently engaging in something abstract called Torah, which I don’t know how to define. It is called Torah. The Holy One, blessed be He, who clothed it in this, called it Torah, so apparently there is something in it that is Torah. But things that are human creations—if they contribute something to you and add something to your worldview, your values, your spiritual dimensions, then they can be Torah in the person. But if not, then you did nothing, you just wasted Torah study. That is human Torah.

I’ll give an example—or before I give that example. I described earlier the abstraction of an abstract thing and its clothing in thought, speech, and action, which are basically three garments. The abstract thing is none of the three; it is the thing clothed in the three. When we formulate it in language, thought passes to… thought is the first garment: honoring parents, the idea of honoring parents. Now when I say “honoring parents,” I have already clothed it in language, so the thought has already become more concrete. I once mentioned this article in Nature that I read, about a one-two-many system, I think, a tribe in Brazil that counted one, two, and four. Those were the numbers in their language: one, two, and four. That’s it. They had no more numbers. They couldn’t answer that, because that’s a lot and that’s a lot. Language, on the one hand, is nourished by thought, but on the other hand it also helps thought. And when we conceptualize things in language, first, of course somehow there has to be some idea there, otherwise one could not conceptualize it and place it inside concepts, inside language. But on the other hand, conceptualization sharpens the ideas. Meaning, language also helps us think. It does not only express thought; it also helps us think.

There is an interesting Talmudic passage… why not? Here it’s not… yes. These things are not simple. There is the Talmud in tractate Berakhot—I’ll come back in a moment. The Talmud in Berakhot says: “One who recited Shema but did not make it audible to his own ear has fulfilled his obligation. Rabbi Yosei says: he has not fulfilled it.” Mishnah, right? “If he recited it but did not pronounce its letters precisely, Rabbi Yosei says he fulfilled it; Rabbi Yehuda says he did not fulfill it,” right? The Talmud asks: what is Rabbi Yosei’s reason? Because it is written: “Hear”—make your ear hear what your mouth utters. Fine? And Rabbi Yosei says that if he did not make it audible to his own ear, he did not fulfill it. Why? Because it says “Hear, O Israel.” In the matter of reading Shema, right? You must make your ear hear what your mouth utters. And the first opinion holds: “Hear” means in any language that you hear. He learns something else from the verse “Hear, O Israel”: that one can say it in any language. And the Rashba says: and Rabbi Yosei learns two things from it. Rabbi Yosei learns from “Hear, O Israel” two things: both that you must make your ear hear, and that it may be in any language. On that the Rashba asks: “Rabbi Yosei could tell you that from it one also learns ‘in any language that you hear,’ as Rashi of blessed memory said, and thus two things are learned from it. For since he expounds from it also ‘in any language,’ it follows as well that one must make it audible to his ear.” Two things are learned. “And this is not clear,” says the Rashba. “How does he know that two things are learned from it? And moreover, it is not what is meant by ‘it follows automatically.’ What does ‘automatically’ mean? You learn two things from it; that is not automatic.” So the Rashba says: “It appears that this is what it means: since he derives from it ‘in any language that you hear,’ it automatically follows that one must make it audible to his ear. For otherwise, why would the Merciful One need to permit every language that one hears? That is obvious. For if one need not make it audible to his ear, then even mere mental reflection should be permitted, as we find later regarding one who had a seminal emission. And with mental reflection, the notion of language is irrelevant. So it automatically follows that there is no insistence on the holy tongue as opposed to other languages. Rather, from the fact that the Merciful One needed to permit any language, it automatically follows that one must make it audible to his ear.”

So he says like this: if a special derivation was needed to teach that you may say it in any language, then it is obvious that it also means you must make it audible to your ear. That is Rashi’s “automatically.” Why? Because if mere reflection were enough, then obviously it could be in any language. There is no need to teach me “in any language.” Does language even apply to reflection? So says the Rashba. In a moment we’ll see. Thus the Rashba argues. The Sha’agat Aryeh asks against the Rashba from the first opinion, because the first opinion proves the opposite. The first opinion says one can fail to make it audible to his ear, right? That is how it disagrees with Rabbi Yosei. So what does it do with “Hear, O Israel”? It must be: in any language that you hear. Right? But if you don’t need to make it audible to your ear, then why do I need a verse to tell me “in any language that you hear”? That is a difficult objection to the Rashba according to the first opinion. So he explains Rabbi Yosei, but according to the first opinion it is difficult. Therefore, clearly the Rashba is not right—so claims the Sha’agat Aryeh. I think he is not right, the Sha’agat Aryeh. The Rashba does not mean to say—and the Chazon Ish tries to say this, and the Rashash learned that way—no, that is not correct. The Rashba does not mean to say that speech is impossible in thought. He thinks there is speech in thought; we think in speech. But the Rashba argues that if something is a matter of thought and not of speech, then I do not care in what language you do it. Because it is not a matter of language; it is a matter of the idea that the language expresses. So even if you think in words, if you only think it and do not say it, then the words are merely the means. What matters is the thought you are thinking by means of the words. Only if you actually speak can I discuss with you what language—holy language, this language, that language. But when you think, the Rashba did not mean to say that you do not think in language. It may even be that you always think in language. I’m not sure you’re right about that. But perhaps even if so. What the Rashba meant is that this is not a law about language. Meaning, if it is a law of thought and not of speech, then obviously the language does not interest me, because what matters is what you are thinking. What difference does it make what language you are using?

So that is basically the claim—a very interesting claim. But even according to this softened interpretation, it remains, and perhaps is even strengthened. Because basically what he claims is that when a person thinks, expresses something in words, obviously there is some idea that the words express. When I say “honoring parents,” I have said something in words. But there is some idea that I am expressing with those words. That is the second abstraction, from thought to speech. The first abstraction, I said, is from the abstract thing to thought. The second abstraction is from thought to speech. That is basically what the Rashba is speaking about here. And from speech, of course, it passes into action, but that is already obvious, we know that. That is the third abstraction. The most concrete abstraction. What? The most concrete abstraction. Yes, all of them, upward, are abstraction. Yes.

There is a Rashash in tractate Shabbat page 40. Tosafot discusses whether one who had a seminal emission may think words of Torah, and whether one may think words of Torah in filthy alleyways. Tosafot says: “Even though it is forbidden to think, the practical difference would be that it is forbidden to think in the holy tongue, but he thought in a secular language.” So the Rashash says about that that this is against the Rashba. It is proof in support of a contradiction against the Rashba, because you see that language does apply to reflection. I do not think this is proof against the Rashba. Of course language applies to reflection—you can think in one language or another. But when there is a law to do something in thought and not in speech, I do not care in what language you do it. A prohibition on thinking in filthy alleyways may be a prohibition specifically on thinking in the holy tongue—that I do not know. Therefore I do not think this Tosafot is necessarily against the Rashba. Once we see that there is, the claim there was that there was no need to say it because he is thinking. As for the prohibition of reflection—the prohibition on reflection—it may be that there is a prohibition on reflection specifically in the holy tongue. You need to say “Hear, O Israel” in thought. There I do not care in what language you say it, because what you need is to say the content. Yes, yes, I understand that these are different laws. But I’m saying that the assumption there was, according to the Rashba, that there was no need to say it. It was self-evident that if reflection was permitted, then it would not matter. Although in the prohibition in filthy alleyways language has halakhic significance, in the case of Shema it is self-evident. Apparently, after all, we see that this is halakhically significant, so why assume it would be self-evident in another context? A simple reasoning: in Shema, if you do not have to say it, then what you need is to think the idea. What difference does it make what language you think the idea in? If it doesn’t matter what language you think the idea in, then in filthy alleyways… No, because in filthy alleyways there is a law not to speak in the holy tongue, and I don’t care if you speak in thought as well, not because of the idea. The prohibition is not to speak. Yes, therefore I don’t care if you speak in thought too, because the problem is that the language is holy, it is the holy tongue. That is the problem. Why do I care that you are speaking—speaking in thought?

There is also Rabbenu Tam, who says that even a vow can be made in thought, even though it requires explicit articulation. He understands that there is speech in thought, that you speak in thought, like the position of Tosafot that explicit articulation is required. That is a fascinating novelty. Because according to Rabbenu Tam, a vow requires explicit articulation, but you do not have to speak. So what is explicit articulation? Speaking in thought. But if you vow in such a way that you only think the idea and do not speak it, that would not be a vow according to Rabbenu Tam. You have to speak in thought without uttering the vow with your mouth, and then it takes effect. And speech of charity. A doubt regarding charity. Charity, yes. Okay.

So the Rashash says this Tosafot is against the Rashba. I think he is right. And this sharpens exactly this point: that when we think in words, there are two levels in our mind. There are the words, the sentence we are thinking, and the idea that the sentence expresses. When we think, we think the idea; we use words in order to think the idea. But we are not thinking the words. We are speaking in our heads. But when we think, we think the idea, not the words. And perhaps we ourselves do not know in what language we are… cannot even define it. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, depending on what Nir said earlier. It may be yes, it may be no, I don’t know. I tend to think one can think without language. Sometimes we think of things without language. They take shape, and in the end they are cast into it. After all, logically I think it cannot be otherwise, because how do we think language? Obviously the idea creates the sentence and not the sentence the idea. We generate a sentence in our head when we think some idea, right? So by definition we must be thinking the idea, but we do it by means of language. It cannot be otherwise. Otherwise language would create the idea and not the reverse. Okay?

So what I’m really saying, to summarize—there is an interesting passage by Bialik. He has a very beautiful essay called Revelation and Concealment in Language. There is a passage there where he writes as follows: “What is there to wonder at? At that sense of confidence and that peace of mind that accompany a person when he speaks, as though he truly transfers his thought or feeling, expressed over tranquil waters on an iron bridge, to the listener. He does not imagine at all how rickety that bridge of words is, how deep and dark the abyss gaping beneath it, and how much of a miraculous act there is in every step taken safely.” Right? There is a kind of miracle in the very fact that we manage to convey some idea to someone through words. Because communication with someone else is never in thought; it is always through words. But the communication takes place after two garments already—after thought and speech—and we are trying to pass that abstract thing which has already gone through these two concretizations to the other person. So he says it is an open miracle that you manage to convey anything at all. We are so sure—there is no doubt in our minds that what we intended is exactly what the other person received. We have no doubt that this is true. That is Rabbi Eliezer, who heard from his teachers things no ear had ever heard before. Right?

All right, in short, he goes on from there further, but this is basically his claim: that it is a miracle that communication is possible at all. We once talked about the philosophers’ palace, right? How do you know at all that what you see as red is also what I see as red? And what I call red may be what you call yellow. We have simply gotten used to synchronizing the speech, and whenever you speak of red I also speak of red, but the conscious experiences accompanying that speech are completely different. And sometimes it might even be a concert, not a color at all, but something entirely different. And you have no way to know that it really is the same thing for both of you. Subjective consciousness. It synchronizes only in the language of speech, and not even in thought—not even in the first garment. Only in the second garment can we begin to synchronize. Which is rather amazing. The question is how far we can really be convinced that the first garment is synchronized, not to mention the abstract thing that we feel in our thought.