Torah and Torah Study, Lesson 11

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] As we did last time, we’ll move on to the next part. We spoke about the relationship between Written Torah and Oral Torah. I said that there are basically two main differences. One difference is that in Oral Torah, what is sacred is the sanctity of the content, whereas in Written Torah what is sacred is also the wording. Not only the wording, but also the wording. And the second difference is that in Oral Torah there is no sanctity to the book as such, to the object-status of the book. In Written Torah the book itself is a holy book. And that has all kinds of implications: we rescue it from a fire, it renders the hands impure. We spoke about the fact that in the language of the Sages they use the halakhic implications to express the point that it possesses sanctity. So they say we rescue it from a fire, it renders the hands impure—those are all halakhic implications of the fact that the book is considered a holy book. After that I spoke about the difference between the two approaches regarding the holy tongue—Maimonides versus Nachmanides and Raavad and the Kuzari—and I said that at least according to those other later approaches, not Maimonides, it seems that the difference between the holy tongue and other languages is that in the holy tongue there is the formulation—

[Speaker B] I think that “tongue” is both masculine and feminine, I’m not sure, never mind.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In any case, Ibn Ezra writes: “Anything that has no living spirit, refer to it as either masculine or feminine.” If it’s not a living being, then what does it mean whether it’s masculine or feminine? What, things have female or male gender? A road, or a fork, or I don’t know, a cloud. Why attach that to it? And also in other languages, you know, different languages divide it differently. Things considered masculine in other languages are treated as feminine, and vice versa.

[Speaker C] But does Ibn Ezra say that as a description of how it appears in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), or is he saying that in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) it doesn’t work that way?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He says it as a grammatical rule of biblical Hebrew. We know that there are shifts back and forth between masculine and feminine here and there, and you can never really know, because even if something is always repeated in the masculine, that doesn’t mean you can’t also say it in the feminine. They say it in the masculine—who said the feminine is illegal? You can never know that. Apparently there are shifts between masculine and feminine here and there in the language of the Sages as well, by the way. At the beginning of tractate Kiddushin there’s a topic that several medieval authorities (Rishonim) say is a Savoraic topic, a Savoraic addition. On the first page of Kiddushin they discuss whether “in three ways” or “by three ways” a woman is acquired, as written in the Mishnah. In the Talmud they discuss whether “way” is masculine or feminine. And they bring proofs from here and proofs from there; the Talmudic discussion is very strange—anyone familiar with the Talmud knows there aren’t sugyot like that. Just seeing it, I understood that something here belongs to the researchers; whatever is going on here cannot be original. And then I saw that there are medieval authorities (Rishonim) who write that it’s a Savoraic addition. Okay, anyway, where were we? Right. So we saw that the characteristic of the holy tongue according to those medieval authorities (Rishonim) is that it constitutes a precise expression of the content. Or, in other words, the three contractions I spoke about—from the abstract thing called Torah to the collection of ideas in which the Torah is clothed, that’s the first contraction. The second contraction is the formulation of the ideas in words. And the third contraction is the interpretations and applications. So the second contraction does not exist in the holy tongue. The passage from ideas to words does not reduce anything, because the verbal description is precise. And that was the claim. Then that casts a somewhat different light on the claim that sacred writings have sanctity of wording. Because in the usual conception, what’s the difference between sanctity of wording and sanctity of content? That there’s some kind of mystical quality. We spoke at the beginning of this topic—I spoke a bit about the question of to what extent this can even be called Torah study at all, to what extent it’s meaningful. You study there that now the king went here and the maidservant went there, that he said this. You can see that in principle, you can see it in other places too, other sources, find it in archaeology, I don’t know exactly what—but it’s hard to accept this notion of holy facts; we spoke about that then. And I expanded there about Torah in the person and Torah in the object and that whole complicated model of what is called Torah. Now in light of what we saw last time, could it be that the sanctity of wording that exists in Scripture is not necessarily some scriptural decree like that, some mystical thing where when you murmur these words something happens? As opposed to, say, the Talmud, where you say Talmud, Talmud, but really the content that you’re studying is sacred content that has the meaning of Torah. So if you learned it, then you learned Torah. But in Scripture the obvious interpretation is that there the very murmuring itself has some value; this wording is sacred wording. Okay? And maybe in light of what we spoke about last time regarding the holy tongue, maybe this doesn’t need to be presented so extremely. Rather, it’s sanctity of content and not of wording. So unlike the Talmud, in the Torah the wording is wording that is absolutely precise in describing the Torah, and therefore the sanctity of the content is expressed in this wording, this specific wording. The moment you change that wording, something in the content simply ceases to be precise. As opposed to that, in the Talmud, if you understood the content correctly, then even if you say it in English or in your own language or in one interpretation or another, it doesn’t matter, because there’s no guarantee of that precision that exists in the wording of the Talmud. The wording of the Talmud does not—it doesn’t have that quality of expressing the content with complete precision, meaning the second contraction doesn’t disappear there. In the Talmud it is reduced, meaning the verbal formulation reduces the contents. And then maybe you don’t need to get to all kinds of mystical ideas that murmuring these words of Torah does something, even though in the ordinary sense it doesn’t seem that there is significant learning here. What did I learn there? I didn’t learn anything there. For all kinds of reasons—we discussed that at length. First of all, because everything depends on interpretation, and the interpretation is always what I already think in advance, so I really didn’t learn anything new. We discussed that at great length. Now, what exactly is expressed in the words? If it’s the ideas, and we spoke about three contractions—if it’s the ideas from the first contraction to the second contraction, from the ideas to the words—then I still haven’t solved the problem. Because my problem in studying Scripture was: what do those ideas mean, what importance do they have? I learned it in Genesis, okay, so did I learn something new? What’s the meaning? There are new things—Abraham said such-and-such to Sarah, that Sarah no longer had the manner of women. Sort of holy facts. So what? Why should I care? What does that give me? What do I learn from there? Okay? So I’m saying: if the verbal description precisely describes the ideas, and that’s the meaning of sanctity of wording, then that still doesn’t really solve the problem of what the value of the learning is. Fine, it precisely describes the idea that Sarah no longer had the manner of women. Okay, so what? My problem is still with the idea, not with the words. What’s important about that idea? Why is it important that I learned that fact? It could be that here it actually skips the first formulation—the first contraction, sorry. Meaning that what is expressed—and this does come back a bit to mysticism—that what is expressed precisely in the words of Written Torah is that abstract matter that really is the Torah itself. That’s why the Holy One, blessed be He, writes the Torah; people don’t formulate it in their own language. Unlike prophecy, by the way. In prophecy, no two prophets prophesy in the same style. Meaning the very same prophecy—if two different prophets receive it, they will formulate it differently; that’s what it says in the Talmud. And therefore that means that in the formulation of prophecy it already undergoes some kind of processing; it’s not the content that the Holy One, blessed be He, revealed to the prophet as is.

[Speaker B] Maybe the Holy One, blessed be He, tailored the formulation to each prophet?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it seems from there that the meaning is that it depends on the prophet’s character, on his conceptions and personality. At least that’s how I understood it. I don’t know—maybe you could also say that—but simply, I think that’s the intention. And therefore I’m saying that in the case of Scripture, of Written Torah, if indeed the words describe the ideas with precision, then you still haven’t really solved the problem. But if the words are some kind of precise or unreduced expression of that abstract matter, of that Torah which even the angels studied—even though they have no father and mother and they don’t work six days and they didn’t leave Egypt and they don’t murder and they don’t steal and nothing of the sort—if that somehow finds exact expression through the words, then maybe that is already more understandable. Because then it means that although we have no direct access to that abstract thing called Torah, when we say the words of Written Torah, that is really our way of touching—or I don’t know what to call it—of encountering that abstract content called Torah, meaning before the first contraction.

[Speaker B] I don’t really understand, though, what you’re saying about the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, and so on. Isn’t it important for us to know whom and why the Holy One, blessed be He, decided to choose as His people, to give them the Torah? After all, everything rolls forward to Mount Sinai in the end.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] After all—

[Speaker B] That history comes to say why the Holy One, blessed be He, does all these things.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, so I did mention Rashi’s first comment on Genesis.

[Speaker B] He was talking more about the creation of the world.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, he was talking about everything. Rashi—that’s exactly the point, I noted it. Rashi asks there, Rabbi Yitzhak said: Why did the Torah not begin with “This month shall be for you the beginning of months”? Why? Because that is the first commandment we received, in Parashat Bo. So he answers: “He declared to His people the power of His works, to give them the inheritance of the nations,” so that when they come to the Land, if the nations say to us, “You are bandits, you conquered the inheritance of the seven nations,” and so on. So that’s nice, it’s interesting, and it gives me an answer for the first two chapters of Genesis. Meaning, it shows me that the Holy One, blessed be He, created the world and therefore He can give it to whom He deems upright.

[Speaker B] But why do you need the whole book and everything else that follows?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai is a direct result of that whole unfolding of the generations and everything that happens there. Your answer—but Rashi asked the question about the whole thing, and he answered the first two chapters. So where is Rashi’s answer? After all, Rashi asked that question. So I said that now when Rashi writes this, I think he is precise in writing that it was given to whom He deemed upright. “The Book of the Upright” is the Sages’ name for Genesis. The Netziv elaborates on this in his introduction. The book of Genesis, the Book of the Upright—Genesis is the book of the upright. And I think Rashi really means exactly that. Meaning that Genesis comes to describe for us why the Holy One, blessed be He, chose the patriarchs, or their descendants, to receive the Torah. So the first two chapters teach us that He created the world and therefore He has the right to decide to whom He gives what. The continuation comes to show us that the decision was not arbitrary. Meaning, He didn’t just decide randomly; it’s not merely that He has authority, end of story. Rather, He decided to give it because He had good reason, because these are people He relies on, because “For I have known him, that he will command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord, to do righteousness and justice.” But that explains to us why the Torah was written; it doesn’t explain to me why I need to study it. I spoke about this then. Because when I come to Genesis, do I learn from it something in the sense of upright people, how to be upright? I don’t. So what does it tell you? It tells me nothing. If I see something Jacob did that seems to me not upright—and we already discussed this at length—but that seems to me not upright, then from my standpoint it’s a problem of Torah and morality. Why? If Genesis is the source that teaches me what is moral and what is not, then here Jacob lied, say, to his father, Rebecca with the theft of the blessings and all that. Excellent. So I learned that you’re allowed to lie to your father in order to get the blessings. What’s the problem? What’s difficult? What’s difficult is that it’s obvious to me that that’s not true, because it’s immoral. Meaning morality is not learned from Genesis. On the contrary: where Genesis doesn’t fit what I regard as moral, from my standpoint that is a difficulty that requires straightening out. But at the bottom line, in the end, what I think is moral is just what I think is moral, not what I learned from the Torah.

[Speaker B] But as part of the Jewish people, don’t I have to learn everything we say about why the Holy One, blessed be He, chose the patriarchs? I need to know it and pass it on.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m saying: I don’t deny that one has to study it. I’m only asking why I’m to blame. You’re asking what it gives me, how meaningful the study is. And I said: I can’t say that it isn’t Torah study. It would be absurd to say that studying the Torah given by the Holy One, blessed be He, is not Torah study, while studying the ends and corners is. But on the other hand I’m saying: why am I to blame? The world needs tanners, certainly—but I don’t teach my son to be a tanner, as the Talmud says. The world needs the tanner. But this is not meaningful study; I learn nothing from it. It gives me nothing. It’s simply study—and from my perspective boring too—and besides that it gives me nothing. I don’t learn values from it, I don’t learn anything there, nothing at all. Really nothing. There’s a collection of facts there, the journey and what happened, they went down to Egypt—fine, all that I know already. I learned it in kindergarten. I know there was Joseph and his brothers and they went down to Egypt and there was a famine and they went down. Okay, I got that. But all the interpretations, what’s happening in this verse and that verse and the commentators around the Torah and all the things they do around it—what does that give me?

[Speaker B] It gives me nothing. I don’t know. Now I’m saying once again, I can’t—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —say it isn’t Torah; who am I to say such a thing? But on the other hand it sounds meaningless. I usually wait for that moment to end, but okay, everyone has their own thing.

[Speaker B] Unless you’re the one giving it. Unless you’re the one giving it, then we’re the ones waiting for it to end.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. In any case, on the contrary—that’s exactly the example. People really don’t wait for it; most of them are usually asleep.

[Speaker C] Especially when he talks about Jewish law on Friday night, I think even less.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because people aren’t interested in that, but you can’t say they don’t learn something from it. When a rabbi talks about the weekly Torah portion, maybe people are interested, but they learn nothing from it. Nothing new occurs to them, nothing. Again, another interesting interpretation of a verse. A lesson at the end, a conclusion, some kind of takeaway—I’ve never heard, never seen a takeaway come out of a Bible class. Never in my life, I haven’t encountered such a thing. I’m not talking only about the bad little sermonettes you hear, which is also most of the time—leave that aside. Even the good things. The good things are an interpretive flash of brilliance. We talked about that: it’s an interpretive flash of brilliance. So someone shows me that these verses are conveying some message I wouldn’t have thought of. I didn’t see that message in the verses at first glance, and then someone comes and shows me some nice interpretive insight. But the message itself that I learned from the verse is always trivial. It’s a message I know even without the class. I invite you to bring examples—we’ve talked about this before—I sound a bit skeptical. Yes, skeptical. Fine, but okay, I’d be happy to hear examples. I don’t know of such an example. And on the site they tried too, and not—

[Speaker B] So explain it to me on the level of an ox that gored a cow and so on. Everything you learn from the Talmud—what did you learn?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That an ox that gores a cow is liable to pay half damages for the first three gorings and full damages on the fourth goring.

[Speaker B] And that speaks to you more?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, not that it speaks to me. It’s new. It’s something I wouldn’t know without it. It’s not something I came with. In Torah, what I get out are the things I came with. If I have a value that one must not lie, then if I find in Genesis that someone lied, then somehow I have to explain why he didn’t really lie. So what did I learn from here? That one must not lie? I came in already holding that one must not lie. I didn’t learn that from there. What I learned from there is how I can manipulate the portion so that it comes out that he didn’t lie. Fine. And if not, what difference does it make in terms of the lesson I take with me? There’s nothing new there. I’ll bring you something later. Okay, maybe—but where are you going to bring it from? More power to you, I can imagine. What? What? It can sometimes, it can—

[Speaker C] It can, okay, leave it, it doesn’t matter.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine. In any case, back to our topic. So if I can understand any value at all in murmuring these words of Scripture, maybe it’s because through these words, in some precise way, what passes through is precisely the abstract thing—not the ideas, not the immediate content of the words, but that abstract thing as it becomes clothed, clothed in these words. And then maybe that’s the value, because it’s really something that apparently can be encountered—or brushed up against in some way—only through Scripture. Okay, but I don’t know. These are conjectures, and I can’t say anything about them other than raise the possibility. So that’s regarding Written Torah and Oral Torah.

[Speaker C] The Rabbi spoke earlier about the distinction that stories may have educational power.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Educational power, maybe they do. And content has power—

[Speaker C] And that doesn’t count, that doesn’t define it as Torah study because it isn’t study but influence.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, we spoke about that.

[Speaker B] No—

[Speaker C] But here maybe the question comes up—meaning, maybe the study is study because that’s the definition of Torah study, that learning these verses is Torah study by virtue of the fact that they are verses. What’s the logic of that if there’s—if there’s some educational power in these verses?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I said—we talked about the definition of study. I said that by the usual definitions of study, it doesn’t qualify. Rather, there’s some mystical value here of one kind or another. Fine, I can’t argue with that.

[Speaker C] No, not mystical, also—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Besides that, it’s influence, and that isn’t study—the things the Torah can bring.

[Speaker C] No, but the study is that I learn where Abraham went and what he saw.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s what I asked—what’s the value—

[Speaker C] No, what’s the study value in that kind of learning?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not what added value it gives me in other contexts. That too is possible. It gets my mental wheels turning and prevents my Alzheimer’s. Fine, that’s also a value, but that isn’t called Torah study. I’m asking what study value I produced from it, not what other side benefits. Even character improvement—we talked about that—working on one’s character is not Torah study. No, character work is inner spiritual work. It’s something valuable; I’m not saying it isn’t. But it isn’t Torah study. Study has its own definitions—what is study?

[Speaker C] No, that’s why I’m saying—but I’m saying the study is because, simply because these are the verses, therefore I learn.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So it’s because—but I asked what the study here is.

[Speaker C] Where Abraham went and what he did.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Those are holy facts; we’re back to holy facts.

[Speaker C] So now why is that holy? Is it because that’s just how it is also, or what—like, is the order the problem?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And that brings me back to what I told you before. The output I derive from this process is not a study output; it’s an output of influence. Fine, there is influence. But I’m asking what the value of this study is as study. I’m not disputing that there is a commandment of Torah study here—I said that. I’m only asking why I’m to blame. I have no interest in this kind of study; it doesn’t interest me. As long as I haven’t finished the ends and corners, I have no reason—

[Speaker B] —to bother with it; it doesn’t interest me.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, not interest—not in the sense of inclination. It may interest you very much, and even then they still wouldn’t need to study it, even if it interests them. Because it teaches us nothing. Not because it isn’t interesting in the sense of personal taste—me, it also doesn’t interest. But I’m saying: it’s not a matter of personal taste. The whole question is whether there is added study value here. I think there isn’t.

[Speaker C] But there is added educational value in it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Educational, fine. Character work and all sorts of reasons—you can also do meditation, that also helps the soul a lot—but that isn’t Torah study.

[Speaker C] Yes, but there is a value of Torah study here because these are verses.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And this too is two separate laws that aren’t connected to each other. Fine, there’s still no learning here, no added educational value here, let’s put it that way. I’m saying, it is Torah study, that’s true. That there’s value in it, I’m willing to accept; that’s all true. But the value here is not an educational value in this matter. Okay, at the end of last time I tried to distinguish between the two parameters that characterize Written Torah. I said there are really two parameters. One is the sanctity of the wording, and the second is that the book itself has sanctity. The object is a sacred object. The practical difference is that it renders the hands impure, we save it from a fire, and all sorts of things—there are halakhic implications, or of course it has to be placed in genizah, there are the direct consequences of sanctity. So how does that work? And then I started talking about the Scroll of Esther, because the Scroll of Esther can actually be seen, through several halakhic aspects, as fulfilling only one of the two characteristics of Written Torah. Meaning, it has sanctity of wording, but it is not a book. That’s the claim. So this is very interesting. People always say that a newspaper will publish a man who bit a dog, not a dog that bit a man. In science too, people mistakenly think science is interested in exotic phenomena. That’s not true. Science is interested דווקא in ordinary phenomena. Exotic cases help build or sharpen what characterizes the ordinary world. You create special, unusual situations in which you can clarify a certain aspect, sharpen it, distinguish it from others. We’ll get to that later; I’ll talk—I spoke once about okimtot, I’ll come back to that a bit later. Here too, meaning, the Scroll of Esther doesn’t interest me in and of itself. Through it I’m trying to show that in regular Written Torah there are two aspects. And I show that through the case of the Scroll of Esther, where only one of the aspects is present and not the other. So that helps sharpen why in the regular sacred writings there are these two aspects: both sanctity of wording and sanctity of the book. So where do you see that in the Scroll of Esther? We saw first of all that there’s a difference between the laws of the book and the laws of the reading. The scroll is valid even if it has only fifty-plus-epsilon percent of what should be written. Half the scroll could be missing and the megillah is still valid. A megillah is a valid megillah. Half, a little less than half, as long as there’s a majority. Okay? On the other hand, in the reading you’re not allowed to miss even one letter. Right, that’s why you always have to listen very carefully and fulfill your obligation and not doze off in the middle, and noise-makers and all kinds of things like that, because you’re not allowed to miss even one letter, otherwise you haven’t fulfilled your obligation. What does that mean? Now the question is—and by the way, this question is a dispute among the halakhic decisors, I think I mentioned it—so how do you do that? After all, you have to read from a scroll. So if I take a megillah in which forty-nine percent of the letters are missing, or the words are missing, okay? And I read it, and the listeners—or it doesn’t matter, or I myself—actually have to read everything, including what isn’t written. Because the letters create the setup, right? So it comes out that a large part of the megillah, almost half the megillah, I didn’t read from a scroll at all. The question is whether that’s valid. In the Shulchan Arukh it says yes. You can read the rest by heart and that counts as though I read from a scroll. That’s very interesting. Why?

[Speaker B] Even though half of it I read from…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, because the scroll was a valid scroll, and I derived the words from the scroll, so that counts as having read from the scroll, even though almost half of what I read I actually said by heart. Others want to argue not so. The scroll will be a valid scroll, the megillah will be a valid megillah, but you’d have to use two scrolls—one has this fifty-one percent and the other has that fifty-one percent—and when you read the megillah you simply have to read every word from a scroll, just making sure that there is always a valid scroll from which you’re reading; it doesn’t have to be the same scroll. Okay, it’s a bit like the story about the Rogatchover. Someone once said about him that he would travel by train for an hour and go over half of Shas. They asked him, which half? He said, whichever half you want. So what does this difference between the reading and what is written actually tell us? It basically says that in a Torah scroll it’s not like that. Clearly, if even the tip of a yod is missing, the scroll is invalid. It’s specifically the Scroll of Esther that isn’t really a book. But on the other hand, the wording—unlike Oral Torah, in the Talmud you can’t say that if you missed a letter or a word or changed something, you didn’t fulfill your obligation or didn’t learn correctly. Nonsense. You can do it in whatever language you want, as long as the idea gets across. It’s just that in the Scroll of Esther there is something similar to Written Torah—what? That it has sanctity of wording. The wording is precise down to the last letter; that’s why Esther was said with divine inspiration. We saw in the Talmudic texts: Esther was said with divine inspiration. But the book—the Scroll of Esther—is not a book. In that sense it isn’t Written Torah. And I said that the Scroll of Esther stands in between, historically too, between the period of Written Torah and the period of Oral Torah. After all, the Scroll of Esther is the end of the exile after the First Temple, the beginning of the Second Temple, basically the end of prophecy, together with Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, who were in the Men of the Great Assembly. And when Esther sends to the sages, “Write me for future generations,” what she basically means is: I still want to be considered Written Torah, like the prophets up until my period. I don’t want you to already throw me into the next period, which is Oral Torah. And the sages seemingly respond to her, but we saw that there is a threefold exposition on the verse about the Scroll of Esther, and it seems that in light of the halakhic implications, they do not fully respond to her, only partially. They respond to her in the sense that they recognize that the wording was said with divine inspiration, and in that sense it is like Written Torah—there is sanctity of wording, the wording is precise. But they do not accept that it should be a book; it is not a book in that sense. It is really the connecting link between Written Torah and Oral Torah, the hyphen between Written Torah and Oral Torah. That intermediate state is basically the Scroll of Esther. You can see this in the Rashba in that same place. I brought this, after all, from the Shulchan Arukh, this law that you don’t need all the words and letters to be written. And the source of the matter is in the Talmud, in Megillah 18. The Talmud says: “The Rabbis taught: If the scribe omitted letters or verses from it, and the reader read them like a translator translating, he has fulfilled his obligation. An objection was raised: If it had blurred or torn letters, if their form is recognizable it is valid, and if not it is invalid. This is not difficult: one refers to all of it, the other to part of it.” And from here they learn that if part of it is missing, that’s fine; if most of it is missing, that invalidates the megillah. So it does have a dimension of a book—it’s not completely not a book—but it’s an intermediate state. So on that the Rashba writes there—he raises a difficulty from another passage, not important right now—he says that at the beginning and the end it may not be missing, and that is indeed brought in the Shulchan Arukh afterward, this law. But in the course of his comments he says: “And in the megillah, since it is called a letter, we are not exacting about its errors when they are in part of it, and when there are errors in it up to the majority it is invalid, since it is called a book. But if what is missing is from its beginning until ‘There was a Jewish man,’ even though it is a small amount, it is like a deficient book, and one must read it from a complete book.” Therefore at the beginning it cannot be missing; it has to have the form of a book, beginning and end, but in the middle half can be missing. So he learned this from the fact that the Scroll of Esther is called a book and is called a letter. After all, “the words of this letter,” and regarding the Scroll of Esther itself, “to send books by the hand of couriers”—there are books and there are also letters. Why is it sometimes called a book and sometimes a letter? The Talmud here says it. Here, yes, in Megillah 19: “And Rabbi Helbo said that Rabbi Hama bar Gurya said that Rav said: The megillah is called a book and is called a letter. It is called a book so that if one sewed it with linen threads it is invalid, and it is called a letter so that if one inserted into it three sinew threads it is valid.” Meaning, what would not work in a book can work in the Scroll of Esther. Rava said, “provided they are tripled,” doesn’t matter, there are limitations. So it’s something between a book and a letter. What is the difference between a book and a letter? What is a letter? A book is something that is written and is meant to remain on the shelf over time, part of the library. A letter is something that reaches me, I read it, I finish reading it, and I throw it in the trash. So in a letter, writing serves to convey the ideas, to convey the message, the content, and after that it’s over; the thing itself has no significance in itself. Right? You read it, understood the content, throw it in the trash. The letter itself has no significance. A book has significance even after I’ve read it. I don’t throw it in the trash after I finish reading it; I put it in the library. It has a standing in itself, not only as a bearer of content. Okay? And the Scroll of Esther is called a book and is called a letter. A letter—that’s Oral Torah; the Talmud is a letter, because basically it comes to convey the content to me, and as a book in itself it isn’t really significant. And the Scroll of Esther is called a book and is called a letter—that’s what the Rashba says. Therefore indeed this law, that half the megillah can be missing and it still be valid, is because of that, says the Rashba: because it is called a book and is called a letter; it isn’t arranged as a full book. When the sages answered Esther, who asked them, “Write me for future generations,” they did not answer her fully. Not fully. It didn’t really become part of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), it’s not a book in every respect. There is a very interesting place where you see this. It’s a very beloved passage in the yeshivot, and it’s the passage about scoring lines. There is a law that when writing a Torah scroll one must score lines in the text; one must etch lines into the scroll so that the writing will be straight. That’s part of the beauty of the book. And the Talmud says, in Megillah 16: “Words of peace and truth”—a quotation from the megillah—Rabbi Tanhum said, and some say Rabbi Assi said: this teaches that it requires scoring lines like the truth of Torah. And the Scroll of Esther also requires scoring lines. What does ‘like the truth of Torah’ mean? So Rashi there writes: ‘like the truth of Torah’—like a Torah scroll itself. Meaning like the Torah, like a Torah scroll; scoring lines is a law given to Moses at Sinai. And Rashi says the law of scoring lines in a Torah scroll is a law given to Moses at Sinai, and the Scroll of Esther requires scoring lines like a Torah scroll. That is apparently a rabbinic law, I don’t know, because with the Scroll of Esther it can’t be a Torah-level law, but it requires scoring lines like a Torah scroll. Tosafot there asks about this—not there, it’s in Menachot. Tosafot—there are several Tosafot on this issue—says as follows: “It may be said that they were not accustomed to score lines in a Torah scroll or tefillin, since they do not require scoring lines.” You don’t need to score lines in a Torah scroll. That’s what Tosafot says. “As we say in the Jerusalem Talmud, first chapter of Sabbath: anyone who writes from it and does so is called an ignoramus.” You don’t need to score lines, and one who does so is called an ignoramus. “And in Seder Rav Amram he brings it,” and Rav Amram Gaon in the siddur of Rav Amram Gaon brings this Jerusalem Talmud. “And that which we say at the end of the first chapter of Megillah”—the passage we just saw—“‘Words of peace and truth’ teaches that it requires scoring lines like the truth of Torah, not as the commentary there explained, that it refers to a Torah scroll itself.” Rashi is not right there that it means a Torah scroll. A Torah scroll, according to Tosafot, does not need scoring lines. “Rather it refers to a mezuzah, which is the truth of Torah, since it contains the sovereignty of Heaven.” And that is what it means: a mezuzah. “And you should know”—there is proof for Tosafot. What is the proof? “For if it referred to a Torah scroll, as the commentary explains”—if Rashi were right, that when it says the megillah requires scoring lines like the truth of Torah it means like a Torah scroll and not like a mezuzah, as Tosafot says—“it should have derived it from the fact that it is called a book, just as we derive there another exposition from the fact that it is called a book.” And according to Rashi it’s not clear why the Talmud learns this from “words of peace and truth,” from which we learn that it requires scoring lines like the truth of Torah. From the fact that the Scroll of Esther is called a book, and a Torah scroll needs scoring lines, we would learn that the megillah too requires scoring lines. Why do we need the special source? In other words, not even just from the word itself, but because books require scoring lines. So if the Scroll of Esther is a book, then it needs scoring lines like a Torah scroll. Why do we need a special source for this from the verse “words of peace and truth,” teaching that it requires scoring lines like the truth of Torah? Tosafot asks against Rashi. He offers an answer even according to Rashi, but it’s not important; we won’t get into the details now. Now Maimonides writes as follows: “It is a law given to Moses at Sinai that one does not write a Torah scroll or a mezuzah except with scoring lines. But tefillin do not require scoring lines because they are not exposed.” Rabbeinu Tam also says this, because they are not seen. So you don’t need to beautify the script so it will be straight, because no one sees them from the outside. But something that is seen needs to be straight, to be beautiful. But tefillin—the passages are inside the compartment, no one sees them, so there you don’t need it. But a Torah scroll and a mezuzah require scoring lines. That’s in the laws of tefillin, chapter 1. In the laws of Megillah, chapter 2, he writes as follows: “One writes the megillah only with ink on gvil or klaf, like a Torah scroll. And if he wrote it with gall-nut water and copper sulfate it is valid”—types of ink, not important—“and it requires scoring lines like Torah itself. And its hide does not require processing for its own sake,” and so on. What is he writing here? On the one hand Maimonides writes that a Torah scroll and a mezuzah require scoring lines. Not like Tosafot—like Rashi, right? On the other hand he says that it requires scoring lines like Torah itself. That is of course taken from the Talmud we saw earlier: “Words of peace and truth” teaches that it requires scoring lines like the truth of Torah. It is explicitly like Rashi. But this is very difficult in Maimonides, because Maimonides brings here all the laws of the book—how a megillah differs from the definition of an ordinary book. These are like scribal laws. Let me read it again: “One writes the megillah only with ink on gvil or on klaf like a Torah scroll.” It resembles a Torah scroll; all the laws of a Torah scroll also apply to a megillah. “And if he wrote it with gall-nut water and copper sulfate it is valid,” which also is not like a Torah scroll. Here he explains where it is like a Torah scroll and where it isn’t. “If he wrote it with other colors it is invalid,” and so on, “and it requires scoring lines like Torah itself.” Why did you insert that into the list? “One writes the megillah only with ink on gvil or on klaf and with scoring lines like a Torah scroll.” Why is that two separate things? There’s the whole list of Torah scroll laws that he brings in one group, and then afterward he suddenly remembers, oh yes, and there are things not like a Torah scroll, oh yes, and it also requires scoring lines like Torah itself. That’s a flaw in the halakhah. Put the scoring lines in the list of all the things where the megillah is the same as a Torah scroll. He was speaking about ink, so he mentioned the ink, yes.

[Speaker B] He didn’t go back to the list.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ink on gvil or on klaf. No, he was also speaking about what you write on, all the laws. Put the whole list—oh, this too is also learned from a Torah scroll. Why doesn’t he bring it? Because it isn’t learned from a Torah scroll. It’s learned from “words of peace and truth.” It isn’t one of the laws of the book. If it were a law of the book, he would have brought it in the first list. It isn’t a law of the book; it’s learned from “words of peace and truth.” But why? After all, a Torah scroll needs scoring lines—that’s what Tosafot asked about Rashi. A Torah scroll needs scoring lines, so what’s the problem? Why do we need “words of peace and truth”? Learn it from the Torah scroll, like all the other laws of the book, that a megillah too requires scoring lines. Rabbi Chaim says on Maimonides here, on these laws—and the Brisker Rav also says very similar things—that indeed the law of scoring lines is not one of the laws of the book. The law of scoring lines is not one of the laws of the book, but rather one of the laws of the content. Meaning, for example, writing on gvil with a certain ink, sewing, and things like that—those are laws of the book, how you construct a book, meaning this object called a Torah scroll, this sacred object called a sacred book. Scoring lines is not a condition in the book; it is a way of giving honor to the content of the book. It is a law in the content, not in the book. Therefore you can’t learn scoring lines from the laws of the book, and therefore you need a special source. That’s how he answers Tosafot’s question against Rashi.

[Speaker B] How is scoring lines a law in the content? What is that? It’s completely technical.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] True, but it characterizes the writing. Gvil, sewing, and all that tells you how to build the book itself, this lump called a book. The content of the book is the writing. Now, in order to write the writing properly, you make scoring lines. The scoring lines serve the writing.

[Speaker B] The ink serves the writing less than the scoring lines serve the writing?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. The ink is a law of the book. And why?

[Speaker B] Why? What difference does it make? Why is ink less related to the content than scoring lines?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because with ink, for example, one of the standards is durability—simply that it remain written. The ink does not serve the writing.

[Speaker B] The scoring lines are so it will be straight. Right.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So what will be straight? What is written will be straight. The line. Not the book. The form.

[Speaker B] But it serves—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The form, what is written, not the book. After all, the content here too is not just something abstract; the content is not things spoken orally, the content is what is written. But the scoring lines serve what is written. They give the proper relation to what is written. They don’t create the physical framework within which the writing sits; rather they are part of the writing itself, so they serve the writing. Therefore he says it is not a law of the book—you can see this in Maimonides. And therefore a special source is needed, and therefore pay attention also to the wording. After all, according to Rashi the wording is difficult: it requires scoring lines “like the truth of Torah.” What is this poetic phrase? It requires scoring lines like a Torah scroll. What is “like the truth of Torah”? And what is “words of peace and truth”? After all, we learn it from “words of peace and truth.” The whole point is—Rabbi Chaim here, regarding the plain meaning of the verses and the Talmud—that “words of peace and truth” means the words of the megillah are words of truth. Its wording was said with divine inspiration. It is not a book—the megillah has sanctity of wording, it does not have sanctity of book. But in a Torah scroll, when scoring lines are required, you would think that’s one of the laws of the book. The verse comes and tells you: “words of peace and truth”—no, no. Scoring lines in a Torah scroll is a law in the content, and therefore it must also be done in the megillah. Not all the laws of the book are learned from the Torah scroll to the megillah; some are and some aren’t. But content, yes, because sanctity of wording exists in the megillah. Book—no. But the wording is the wording of Written Torah, said with divine inspiration. So all the laws connected to the wording also exist in the megillah. Now we have to check—it could be that all the laws, by the way. You could continue and ask: perhaps all the laws stated about the megillah as being like a Torah scroll are really not laws of the book but laws connected to the content. And the laws that do not transfer from Torah scroll to megillah, like sewing with sinews, and in threes, and things like that, are perhaps indeed laws in the book itself, and then in the megillah you don’t need to do that. I haven’t checked this. Each one would need some proof that the whole list works that way. But with scoring lines it’s pretty clear that it does. So here this is basically an expression, a halakhic expression, of this distinction: that the Scroll of Esther really fulfills only one of the two characteristics of Written Torah. It has sanctity of wording; the content, or rather the wording, is precise, said with divine inspiration; the content is sacred content. But it does not have sanctity of the book. It is not a book in the full sense, at least—not fully, maybe partial sanctity, but not in the full sense. So once again this is an expression of that intermediate level called the Scroll of Esther, between Written Torah and Oral Torah. And therefore what Esther asks of the sages—“Write me for future generations”—and they say okay, we’ll write, but a book it won’t be. So the response is a partial response. By the way, I think that’s also the reason that the passage about scoring lines, in the yeshivot too, they always study it in Gittin and in Megillah—the passage about scoring lines revolves around the megillah. Nowhere in the Talmud does scoring lines appear regarding a Torah scroll. Therefore, if you ask medieval authorities (Rishonim) and later authorities (Acharonim), does a Torah scroll require scoring lines? Obviously it does. Maimonides and Rashi say yes. Where do they say yes? From here. That the Scroll of Esther requires scoring lines like the truth of Torah—meaning like a Torah scroll; that is how they understood it. So state the law of scoring lines for a Torah scroll, and then say that in the megillah it’s the same. Why do you state the law of scoring lines in the megillah and only explain to me that it’s like a Torah scroll? Indirectly, somehow, you also teach me the law of the Torah scroll. There’s a didactic point here. Say: a Torah scroll requires scoring lines, and the megillah too, like a Torah scroll, requires scoring lines. They say it specifically about the megillah because they want to tell you that in a Torah scroll too, when scoring lines are required, it is a law in the content and not in the book. Therefore they tell you that the Scroll of Esther requires scoring lines, so that you’ll understand that even the scoring lines of the Torah scroll is only a law in the content. And the proof is that in the Scroll of Esther what exists is only the law in the wording and not in the book itself. Therefore the law of scoring lines is stated specifically in connection with the Scroll of Esther in the passage. It seems to me that on this point this is the correct explanation, at least that’s how it seems to me. In the Jerusalem Talmud, in Megillah chapter 1, it says as follows: Rabbi Helbo, Rabbi Huna in the name of Rav, expound the verse “And these days are remembered and observed.” “Remembered”—through reading; “observed”—through a feast. That is how they expound the verse “And these days are remembered and observed”: in order to remember these days, one reads the Scroll of Esther in order to remember, and what is “the days are observed”? What do we do? That is the commandment of the feast. The Purim feast is the deed, the practical commandment. Meaning, the Talmud says that the Scroll of Esther was given to be expounded. In other words, we see that one can expound the verses of the Scroll of Esther. Why wouldn’t one be able to expound them? What? Why do you need proof for this—that you can expound the verses of the Scroll of Esther? It seems obvious. You can’t expound the Talmud. The Talmud you can understand, read, explain, interpret. To expound is only where the wording is sacred. If there is precise, sacred wording that can be expounded—there’s an extra word here, there’s a letter here, there’s this—then wait, why this and why that? Because everything is supposed to be exact, everything is divine inspiration. You don’t expound the Talmud. Why not? Because the wording has no sanctity. An extra word—well, whoever wrote the extra word did so to make it clearer, or just happened to write it that way, or wrote it differently; the main thing is the content and the versions. Yes, the main thing is the content—that’s not the point. Regarding the Scroll of Esther there was an initial assumption that it was not given to be expounded, an initial assumption that it was Oral Torah. So it just tells the story—what do you mean expound it? Why should every word here be written so exactly? No, no—it was given to be expounded, because the Scroll of Esther was written with divine inspiration. The wording is precise wording, so every letter is an exact letter; you can expound it. Sanctity of the book—no. But sanctity of the wording—yes. The wording is precise. And this has many, many halakhic implications. By the way, what does the Jerusalem Talmud bring immediately afterward? Look at something nice. Meaning, the Scroll of Esther was given to be expounded. Immediately after that: Rabbi Helbo, Rabbi Yasa in the name of Rabbi Elazar: “Here it says ‘words of peace and truth,’ and there it says ‘Buy truth and do not sell it’; therefore it is like the truth of Torah. Just as that requires scoring lines, so too this requires scoring lines. Just as that was given to be expounded, so too this was given to be expounded.” What’s the connection? How did scoring lines suddenly get here? First of all, this is in the Jerusalem Talmud; in the Jerusalem Talmud it appears here. Why? Because it’s the same law. Scoring lines is a law in the content. Or in the wording, yes. After they explain to you that in the Scroll of Esther the wording is the wording of Written Torah—sanctity of book there is none—to what implications does that lead? Two. One is scoring lines, because scoring lines is a law in the content. The second is that it can be expounded. Because once it can be expounded, the wording has standing, and then you can expound it. Whether there is sanctity of book or not is irrelevant. These are the two implications of the fact that there is sanctity of wording here. Therefore the Jerusalem Talmud brings them together. And they learn it of course from the verse “words of peace and truth.” Because it’s exactly right, because it means that the words, the content of the megillah, are truth—that is, they are precise, the wording is wording through divine inspiration. This has nothing to do with the book; the book is not sacred. But the words are words of peace and truth, so you can expound them. And therefore they require scoring lines. By the way, this is interesting. Maimonides brings a midrash—and Maimonides brings this in the laws of Megillah—“All the books of the prophets and all the Writings are destined to be nullified in the days of the Messiah except for the Scroll of Esther.” And Purim too, by the way, unlike the festivals. “It remains like the Five Books of the Torah and like all the laws of Oral Torah, which are never nullified.” There is something in the Scroll of Esther that is apparently closer to the Five Books of the Torah than to the books of the Prophets and Writings. Why? What is special there? Maybe—I don’t know. But here you really see that there is something in the wording. I said that with prophets, no two prophets prophesy in the same style. So in prophecy there is some subjective dimension of the prophet; it’s not the word of God as-is, so to speak. Maybe what is written here is that in this respect the Scroll of Esther is really like the Five Books of the Torah. Even though it has no sanctity of book, on the one hand it is closer to the Five Books of the Torah, and on the other hand it has no sanctity of book at all, only sanctity of wording. That too is an interesting observation. Maybe it’s right and maybe not; I don’t know.

[Speaker B] There can’t be a situation where it has sanctity of book but not sanctity of the content in it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I don’t know of such a thing. No. Okay, now I want to move on, but it continues the same theme. There is here—I won’t dwell on it, but we spoke about it once again—about the definition of poetry, and we spoke a bit, right? At some point, I don’t remember when. So very briefly, in Deuteronomy we have a commandment to write a Torah scroll. It says as follows: “And now write for yourselves this song, and teach it to the children of Israel, place it in their mouths, in order that this song may be for Me a witness among the children of Israel. For I will bring him to the land that I swore to his fathers, flowing with milk and honey, and he will eat and be sated and grow fat and turn to other gods and worship them and provoke Me and break My covenant. And it shall be that when many evils and troubles befall him, then this song shall answer before him as a witness, for it shall not be forgotten from the mouths of his descendants, for I know his inclination which he acts upon today, before I bring him to the land that I swore.” “And this song shall answer before him as a witness, for it shall not be forgotten from the mouths of his descendants, for I know his inclination which he acts upon today, before I bring him to the land that I swore. And Moses wrote this song on that day and taught it to the children of Israel. And He commanded Joshua son of Nun and said: Be strong and courageous, for you shall bring the children of Israel to the land that I swore to them, and I will be with you.” What is “this song”? That is the Song of Ha’azinu. Right? Clearly, in context, it is the introduction to the Song of Ha’azinu. Immediately after that, the next verse: “And it was, when Moses finished writing the words of this Torah in a book until they were complete.” Now He told him, write the words of the song—so how did you suddenly get to writing the words of the Torah? You wrote the song. “And Moses commanded the Levites who carried the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord, saying: Take this book of the Torah and place it beside the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord your God, and it shall be there as a witness against you. For I know your rebelliousness,” and so on. And then he concludes: “And Moses spoke in the ears of the entire assembly of Israel the words of this song until they were complete.” Again we return to the song. We started with the song, which is the Song of Ha’azinu; “Moses wrote the book of the Torah” and all the words of the Torah; “and Moses spoke all the words of this song until they were complete.” Now, on the level of plain meaning, one could say that the commandment to write the song means the Song of Ha’azinu. And the point is that the Song of Ha’azinu basically concludes Written Torah, and “and this is the blessing” is the blessing that Moses blessed the children of Israel with—it looks a bit like an appendix. The Torah itself basically ends with the Song of Ha’azinu. Then on the plain meaning I could say that what is written here is basically a commandment to write the song. After you wrote the song, basically the writing of the Torah is finished; this is the end of the Torah. Then “when Moses finished writing the words of this Torah until they were complete” does not refer to the song. After he finished the song, then the words of the Torah were complete; he taught it to the children of Israel, and he also spoke in the ears of the whole assembly of Israel the words of the song until they were complete. But “until they were complete” and “until they were complete,” and so on—I think the sages did not read it that way. The sages understood—after all, this is where we learn the law of writing a Torah scroll from, that there is a commandment to write a Torah scroll. This is where it is learned from. And the sages—“And now write for yourselves this song”—from this they learn… what does that have to do with it? There is a commandment for Moses our teacher to write the Song of Ha’azinu. What does that have to do with a commandment for each individual to write a Torah scroll? The sages apparently understood that “song” and “Torah” are interchangeable terms here. And that what is written, “write for yourselves this song,” means the Torah scroll, not the song. And therefore they learn from here the commandment to write a Torah scroll. But why? Why not? Why assume that “song” refers to the Torah and not to the Song of Ha’azinu? Why is the Torah called a song? Why say it in that way? And why specifically at the moment when we are commanded to write a Torah scroll—why specifically there do they choose to refer to the Torah as a song? There is an interesting comment here by the Sha’agat Aryeh. He has an interesting little insight. It is written that one does not write the Torah in separate scrolls. Meaning, it is forbidden to write a certain part of the Torah. If you write a book, you write a complete book—the whole Five Books of the Torah. It is forbidden to write only part of it, section by section. And then the question is about tefillin and a mezuzah—not important now, maybe that is a law given to Moses at Sinai. In principle there is a prohibition against writing the Torah section by section. So the Sha’agat Aryeh says that in fact “And now write for yourselves this song” means the Song of Ha’azinu. Since there is a prohibition against writing the Torah section by section, there is no choice but to write the entire Torah. Therefore the commandment to write a Torah scroll is just a technical consequence, a technical consequence—but really what I need to write is the Song of Ha’azinu. That sounds a little over-pilpulistic and problematic. I think that’s the Sha’agat Aryeh’s homiletic reading. Yes, exactly. Even though he writes it on the level of plain meaning; he does not see it as a homily. He was a very sharp man. As for the Sha’agat Aryeh, I once debated: there are two ways to understand him. You can understand it as really just a technical matter: you need to write the song, the Song of Ha’azinu. Since you don’t write the Torah section by section, you end up writing the Torah. But basically the commandment is only to write the song. Suppose I wrote only the song—the practical difference is if I wrote only the song and not the Torah. So I violated the prohibition of writing the Torah section by section, but I fulfilled the commandment “write for yourselves this song,” right? Or you can understand it differently. The Torah itself knew that there is a prohibition against writing the Torah section by section. So when it tells us to write the song, and it knows that we know that it is forbidden to write only the song and that we will write the whole Torah, then basically its original intention was that we write the whole Torah. It says it to us in that way. But in essence the commandment is to write the whole Torah. And if so, then someone who writes only the song has done nothing. It can be said either way. In any case, for our purposes, I think the simpler plain meaning is that the sages understood that what is written here, “song,” means the Torah. The entire Torah is a song; this is not the Song of Ha’azinu, but the Torah itself. Again, perhaps this is more midrash than plain meaning, I don’t know, but that is how they learn from here the commandment to write a Torah scroll. What is the idea here? So here indeed I think—why… I said there are two questions: first, why is the Torah called a song, and second, why does this appear specifically in the place where we are commanded to write the Torah? Why specifically there do they choose this description of the Torah as though it were a song? Here we have to get a bit into the question: what is poetry? I won’t make this long. I have a big series, five posts on the site—probably more, I think—where I tried, somewhat systematically, to define this concept. This concept is very hard, very hard to define. The first time I encountered it and had to speak here in Demunkacz, in the synagogue here on the corner, on Shabbat Shirah, I wanted to speak about what poetry is, and about the Song at the Sea and so on. So I opened the Hebrew Encyclopedia—I had the encyclopedia at home—and I looked up the entry for “poetry,” to understand what this was about. And what did I find? There is no such entry. There is no entry for poetry in the Hebrew Encyclopedia. Which is very interesting. I assume it’s because they didn’t really… they didn’t know how to define the concept, that’s my assumption at least; I don’t know. Otherwise it’s hard to understand why it doesn’t appear there. And in fact after that I tried to search and search where one might find definitions—what is this thing, poetry? And I didn’t really find much. What I did find was mostly what is called ars poetica. Ars poetica is all kinds of poets who write poems about what poetry is. But you won’t find a definition there. Various descriptions, a kind of lyrical musing on the concept, but not… you won’t find a systematic definition there, an academic definition of the concept of poetry. And the truth is that it is very hard to define. My discussion after that Shabbat in Demunkacz—I posted it on Atzur Kan Choshevim, in the internet forum Atzur Kan Choshevim. I tried to draw out from the people there what is called poetry. Some would say fragmentation, something you attach a melody to, broken-up writing, short lines, the structure of a stanza or rhyme, all kinds of things like that. None of these stands up to the… empirical test. What do we call poetry? There are many things without meter and without rhyme and of course without melody. None of those seems to be a necessary condition for the concept of poetry. So the question is: what does? What defines the concept of poetry? Someone there did a very nice trick. He took my opening post in the thread, vocalized it and broke it into lines and turned it into a poem. He simply turned it into a poem, and suddenly you see how if people had seen it that way they would have called it a poem. It was only after I wrote it as prose and he vocalized it and broke it up that suddenly it was obvious to everyone that this was just mockery. In short, there was a long discussion there. So I gave a kind of series of lessons there on the issue of what poetry is. Briefly, it seems to me that I can define it perhaps better by way of negation. In order to define what poetry is, I first want to relate to the opposite pole. What is prose? Prose is the opposite of poetry. What is prose? Of course, prose too has different shades. There are ballads and sagas and plays and belles-lettres and encyclopedia entries and a user manual for this device or that. There are all kinds of prose. When I try to think what pure prose is, what is the thing I can call prose in its purest form, it seems to me that it is an encyclopedia entry. Because in literature… because an encyclopedia entry is a collection of words whose purpose is to convey content to me. That’s all, right? Meaning, its whole point is to do so in the most efficient way. That’s its significance. Don’t start making homilies out of it, and don’t look at the structure, how they wrote the entry—that’s nonsense. Anyone who does that doesn’t understand the medium. Meaning, what you need to do is read and understand what is written there, understand each sentence literally, what it means, translate each word—and that’s all. That is prose in its purity. Okay. So if I identify pure prose in this way, then what are all the other things that we call prose? They are things in which prose does not appear in a pure form. Right? Plays, and even belles-lettres, aside from plays. That too is not pure prose, because in literature structure has significance; there is significance to the fact that simply paraphrasing the sentences verbally won’t give you the meaning.

[Speaker B] Right, because perhaps it’s belles-lettres?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. Right? It has some kind of aesthetic value. In an encyclopedia, talking about the aesthetics of the entry has no meaning; that’s not the point. In belles-lettres there is a poetic dimension, and that’s why it is so hard to define poetry. And I think that the definition—I’m skipping in giant leaps here—but I think that the definition, the closest thing to a definition that can be suggested, is that poetry is something that is not prose. Anything that is not prose, in that sense along this axis, is poetry. Or if I formulate the two extreme, pure poles very sharply: prose is an encyclopedia entry. Any poetic addition around the literal meaning of the words is already poetics, already a poetic dimension. Pure poetry is something that has only poetics in it; it has no message at all, no content in the words at all, only poetics. Now there is no such thing, because you can’t—there is no form without matter. Meaning, you need words in order to give them form, and you cannot read words detached from their content. And that is why it is so hard to define the concept of poetry, because it never appears in its pure form.

[Speaker B] It’s a bit similar to the heap paradox, the paradox of the heap.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, I even brought this up there in one of the presentations, I remember. Yes. Meaning, there is basically some kind of metamorphosis between these two poles, of how present the poetic dimension is. But a one-hundred-percent poetic dimension—there’s no such thing, because then it would be without words altogether. And that brings us back to the abstract Torah, even before it enters into words; there maybe you can speak about poetry in the pure sense, but it’s not accessible to us. Meaning, that’s why you need the first abstraction, and that’s the descent of things into ideas, and after that the descent of ideas into words. And pure prose can be defined, because pure prose we do know, and therefore it’s more convenient to begin the analysis from the side of prose on this axis, not from the side of poetry. And poetry is defined by negation.

Meaning, now when we see a poem—I don’t know, yes, my favorite poem, which I brought there too I think, “Once there was a lonely lamp at the edge of a neighborhood,” yes, a poem by Alexander Penn, I like it very much. There, all right, ostensibly he describes that there was a lamp and they played there and mother called them to come back—”just one more moment, mother, wait a moment, don’t turn it off”—you could have written it as a story, but it isn’t written as a story. Why not? Because the subject of the poem is not coming to tell you about a lamp, or a soccer game, or a mother. It’s coming to convey to you some atmosphere of days gone by, of a neighborhood, of children playing soccer in the yard, and so on. It has nothing to do with that specifically; you could have conveyed it in a completely different way. And that really brings us back already to Zen and to the abstract Torah we talked about—that you could have conveyed it through target shooting, through fencing, through flower arrangement or a tea ceremony, and you would be conveying that very same thing.

And that abstract thing, before it enters into words, that is basically what you can call poetry. The moment you already put it into words, there is already some prosaic dimension here. You’re already conveying a lamp and a game and a woman and a mother calling; there are already events, there is already some specific content that you are conveying, there is already a dimension of prose here. A pure poem—there’s no such thing. The more abstract it is—by the way, in the context of poetry, modern art, by the way, for all my contempt for it—I think that is what it is trying to do. Meaning, it is trying to remove all the prosaic things and leave only the poetic dimension. Now, you can’t, so they go wild. But I think that that is their tendency. All right? It’s just that they try to do it in practice, and in my eyes that’s the nonsense. But I think their tendency stems from a correct perception. Because all art is like this; it’s not just poetry, by the way, not at all.

That’s what I think—in that same context I spoke about a series of articles by someone from Tel Aviv University named Thomas Kulka, who sits in cafés like that—he dealt with, there was a series of articles that dealt with the question of what kitsch is: the crying child against the sunset, yes, a melancholy sunset. And he says that it’s very hard to define what kitsch is, because he brought there the accepted definitions of the artistic value of things. Good kitsch works meet all of them. So why, for example, is it inferior art? He offered a very nice definition of this. He argued that when you see, say, a painting or some sculpture, it doesn’t matter, any kind of art—if the emotion is caused in you by the content of what is depicted, that is not art. Art means that the emotion caused in you comes from the artist’s added value, not from the situation he is depicting. In kitsch, you get the setup—you are moved by the situation itself; they can paint you that crying child in the sunset, and then there is no added value from the artist. Rather, what moves you is the situation, not the artistic added value of the matter. An ordinary photographer would do it better. And therefore, he says, it has no artistic value.

Now, on the graphic, technical level, you can be a fantastic painter; there are kitsch works of excellent technical quality. But there is no artistic value there, because there is no added value. The same thing in poetry. The artistic dimension is only the added value, but there is no such thing as added value without something on which it is based. Therefore it’s hard to grasp, and therefore the theory of the Song of Songs. Because the less you understand the poem, the more it becomes a poem; the moment you understand it, you have turned it into prose. And therefore the theory of the Song of Songs, and that abstract thing from which we began—that is basically art.