Thank you. I think I understood the Rabbi’s words and the distinction the Rabbi made. But is it not correct to say that here too and there too, from the standpoint of the inner experience, there is doubt? For example, just as in the Tanakh there can be 3 interpretations of one word (for example, I Kings 22:38), so too in Jewish law—for example, some say that tithing money is Torah-level, some say rabbinic, and some say it is a pious practice (although the whole matter of tithing money is itself an innovation).

Of course there can be several interpretations in Jewish law. That is obvious. So what? What’s wrong with that? Beyond that, I also claim that when there are several interpretations, it does not necessarily mean they are all correct, nor that I am necessarily supposed to take them all into account. As far as I’m concerned, what obligates me is my own interpretation, and I will examine the other interpretations in order to formulate it as correctly as possible. A Talmudic determination is of course binding, but post-Talmudic interpretations are not binding (the great medieval and later authorities carry weight, but not absolute weight).

And the commandments themselves are not learned from the Tanakh?
So why did the Rabbi devote years of his life to clarifying the logic of the Talmud’s derivations from the Tanakh?
And what about morality and proper conduct—to what category do they belong? Also to worldview?
And can extreme libertarianism in the style of Sodom, which forbids giving charity to the poor, also be learned from the Tanakh?
And what about “we compel against the trait of Sodom”—how can you implement that if you do not clarify what the trait of Sodom is?
And in general, from where would we learn the very need to obey if not from the Tanakh (and don’t tell me Talmud, because the Talmud itself learns it from the Tanakh)?

It seems to me that this whole division between Tanakh and Talmud is mistaken. In the end, it is one continuous sequence. And you can find derashot in the Tanakh itself (for example, King Amaziah’s exposition of the verse “Children shall not be put to death for their fathers,” because of which he did not punish the sons of his father’s murderers, and which Ran learned from as Jewish law against collective punishment in Sanhedrin). You can find internal interpretation of the Tanakh, for example Ezekiel on Sodom: “Behold, this was the iniquity of your sister Sodom: pride, fullness of bread, and careless ease were in her and in her daughters, and she did not strengthen the hand of the poor and needy” (16:49), and so it continues down to our own day.

I agree that you cannot learn a civic worldview such as capitalism and socialism from the Torah (when by Torah I include Talmud, medieval authorities, later authorities, books of thought, interpretation of the Tanakh, and more), because these are different autonomous roles that cannot be reduced to one another. Torah is the service of God, and all the books I mentioned are directed toward that. A civic worldview stems from our responsibility as citizens in a democratic state to determine policy. That responsibility does not stem from the service of God, and therefore it cannot be determined by it. On the other hand, the service of God is likewise not determined as a result of our civic role, and therefore any attempt to derive one from the other will fail.

And yet one can always learn the service of God from the Tanakh, and therefore the claim that there is nothing to learn from the Tanakh is, well, a bit strange.

Y.D.,
all these are just slogans. I asked for an example of a value that can be learned from the Tanakh that I would not have thought of without it. All the values you “learn” from the Tanakh are applications of things you would think even without it. For example, the law (?) of compelling against the trait of Sodom assumes our own a priori understanding of what the trait of Sodom is. You did not learn anything about that from the Tanakh. “They did not strengthen the hand of the poor and needy” is some innovation you would not have known without Ezekiel? Are you kidding me, or just reciting formulas?

First of all, thank you.
Besides that, the very fact that the Talmud goes to the trouble of learning each and every law in the Mishnah from a verse (and the Mishnah itself already does this) shows that without the Torah the Talmud did not think it had much to say. You yourself wrote in column 72 that without the Torah, values are empty and only the Torah teaches us the good. In other words, we need the Torah in order to discover the good. The Talmud is only the internal authority for what we learn from the Torah in practical Jewish law, but it is not the source of the command. The source is the Torah (whose general rules and details were learned at Sinai). And the fact that what is learned from the Torah but is not in the Talmud lacks the authority of the Talmud does not mean it has no value. It has value as part of the revelation at Sinai, but it lacks concrete authority for practice.

As for civic values, I do not expect to find them in the Torah, because the Torah does not deal with our role as citizens. Our conduct as citizens is autonomous vis-à-vis the Torah (does the fact that we are citizens in a democratic state have any connection to the service of God?), because a state is secular by its essence, and that is as it should be. And even if there is a holy dimension to the state, as Rabbi Kook claimed, that does not change the fact that I as a citizen am required to make an autonomous decision regarding the conduct of the state.

In short, values of the service of God such as fear of Heaven, modesty, alacrity in performing commandments, accepting judgment, humility, admitting wrongdoing, supporting the poor, silence, and so on—these can definitely be learned from the Torah, and only from the Torah (you will not learn them from the writings of Aristotle and Plato or Confucius and Buddha). Democratic values of free market versus economic centralization, individual rights versus individual obligations, and so on—you will not learn from the Torah.

We are still in the realm of slogans. Don’t bring me a priori proofs about the role and necessity of the Tanakh, nor declarations about what the Talmud thought. I asked that you bring one example of something non-trivial that one learns from some passage in the Tanakh. All the values you brought here do not require learning Tanakh for them. Every child knows all of them without opening a Tanakh.

First of all, thanks again.
Every child knows them because there is a Tanakh. These were not the values of the Romans, Egyptians, Greeks, Indians, philosophers, or Buddhists. These were our values because of the Tanakh. The Tanakh is what revealed them to the world.
Aristotle did not believe in them. Alexander the Great did not believe in them. Julius Caesar and Cicero did not believe in them. Buddha did not believe in them. We believed in them, and we spread them throughout the world. And in a world where people do not read the Tanakh or study it, they disappear.

Now the revolution has been completed, and you ask, so why do we need the Tanakh? We all know these values. In essence, you are returning to the approach of Rabbeinu Tam that everything is mixed into the Talmud. And yet the sages return again and again to study the Tanakh and discover new meanings in it. You yourself write about the intuitions added by the Ari, or other sages of Kabbalah. They did not just find them out of nowhere. They found them because they returned and studied the Tanakh again and again. And so too in our generation with the scholars of the Gush.

I do not think the Tanakh is the main thing, and Maimonides already wrote that in the future the books of prophecy will be nullified, but it is still strange that a person lives inside the revolution created by the Tanakh and says, “But these things are self-evident…” They are not.

Y.D., according to this solid logic, you ought now to be engaged in propaganda throughout the world for the establishment of the State of Israel. True, it has already been established, but eighty years ago that was still relevant. So what if the mission has been completed? And likewise it would be worthwhile to study the writings of Euclid and “a ram is a triangle.” So what if geometry has in the meantime advanced tenfold? Back then it was very relevant. And if the mission has been completed, is that a reason to think it has been completed? Of course not—if it has been completed, we should assume it has not been completed and live the past in its highest perfection.
Really solid logic. I have no words. So I’ll now allude to my lack of words.

I don’t know.
It is clear that the Written Torah has the status of testimony and not only of study, and therefore it is found in the synagogue and read publicly at designated times—unlike the view of Ezra Fleischer, who held that its main reading was for study (and this is how he explained the change made in the Land of Israel to a triennial division). A synagogue is called a “minor sanctuary” not only because it contains a place for our prayer directed toward Him, but also because the testimony from Him to us is displayed there (similar to the Ark containing the Tablets of the Testimony, and not for nothing did the sages claim that a Torah scroll also stood beside it). By nature, the weekly engagement with the weekly Torah portion yielded quite a few interpretations of the Written Torah. In the Prophets and Writings, by contrast, people engaged less. That perhaps supports your point that there is not much to do there and it is preferable simply to read more advanced sources that present the arguments in a more orderly way.
There is no doubt that interpretive revolutions such as derash in the Talmudic period, the appearance of grammar in the period of the medieval authorities, and literary analysis in our day, yield a burst of interpretive activity that uses the new interpretive methods to clarify the texts anew. Thus, for example, Menahem ben Saruq, Dunash ben Labrat, Judah ibn Hayyuj, Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Nachmanides, and Radak exhausted the grammatical revolution to the utmost. In our day, Rabbi David Zvi Hoffmann, Buber and Rosenzweig, Nehama Leibowitz, and the scholars of the Gush are exhausting the revolution of literary analysis, although afterward the situation usually returns to being sleepy.

Hello,
1) If I understand your last answer here correctly—you agree with the claim that the Tanakh brought about a moral revolution and today that seems obvious to us, but you hold that because of that there is no longer anything to learn from it?
Or perhaps you also do not agree with the first claim?
2) Have you written in an article/in one of your books at length about why you see no reason to study Tanakh, with deep analysis and examples as you do in other topics? I looked and didn’t find anything; I’d be happy for direction if there is such a place. Your approach on this topic interests me very much.
Thanks 🙂

Columns were written about this, and also talkbacks that expanded with examples. Search the site. In the second book of the trilogy there is a section that deals with Torah study, including the Tanakh.

With God’s help, 1 Kislev 5781

To Y.D.—Greetings,

The values of the “free market” most certainly are learned from the Torah. First of all, the Torah sanctifies a person’s private property. The Flood that came upon humanity came because of robbery. And the Torah forbids not only stealing and robbing another’s property, but even coveting and craving another person’s property. And not only is the rich person forbidden to rob the poor—also the poor person is commanded to be careful with the rich person’s property, and even the judge is commanded not to favor the poor: “Neither shall you honor the poor in his cause.”

The first attempt in history to create a “centralized society,” in which all humanity joined together to create one centralized mega-project, ended with divine intervention that scattered the giant enterprise in every direction. Even the mention that the first city was built by Cain does not indicate that the Torah has any special fondness for “urbanization.”

The patriarchs of the nation—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—are described as people who made a lot of money and property. Abraham and Jacob in shepherding, and Isaac in agriculture, amassed much “silver and gold and male and female slaves and camels and donkeys”—successful “capitalists” who are not ashamed to be rich, except that they make sure their property comes by “the way of the Lord, to do righteousness and justice,” and is used to do kindness for those in need.

One could call the way of the patriarchs: “solidarity capitalism.”

With blessing, S.Z.

The one who did create a “centralized society” was Joseph, who created in Egypt a society in which all the land belonged to the king and all the residents were his tenant farmers. But here too one should note that this system enabled and encouraged each farmer to increase his income. He gives twenty percent to the king, but eighty percent belongs to the farmer himself, and the more he invests in and develops his field, the more profitable it is both for the king and for the farmer (as opposed to a kolkhoz, where the entire yield goes to the state).

The agrarian system that Joseph developed in Egypt is a prototype for the land-ownership arrangements in the Land of Israel. On the one hand, the land belongs to the King of kings, to whom the farmer gives about a fifth in tithes and offerings, but the more he invests in developing his field, the greater his yield, and both he and “the Levite, the stranger, the orphan, and the widow” profit.

The farmer may trade not only in his produce, but also sell his land. But here there is a limitation on the “free market.” There cannot be a situation in which the rich completely swallow up the poor and utterly dispossess him of his inheritance, and therefore after fifty years the situation returns to its original state, so that each person remains with his inheritance. “Free market,” yes—but with limitations, so that it does not become “piggish capitalism.”

Paragraph 5, line 2
… belongs to the King of kings…

With God’s help, Rosh Chodesh Kislev 5781

Just going over the Ten Commandments is enough to check which of them have become trivial values in the world, and to discover that “the road is still long.”

Idolatry may have been abolished in the Western world at the level of principle, but still hundreds of millions believe that God has a son, and worship and pray to him—not to mention a billion idol worshipers in India and East Asia. And in the West there are many atheists, who see the first commandment, “I am the Lord your God,” as a bizarre statement of the sort of “the celestial teapot” or “the Flying Spaghetti Monster.”

“Honor your father and your mother”—is that a universal world value? Or rather insolence and contempt for tradition in the name of the “value of autonomy”? “Remember the Sabbath day, to sanctify it,” or sanctifying Friday and Sunday? Even in the state of the Jews, the Sabbath has become for a large segment either a day of entertainment or an ordinary workday.

Instead of “You shall not commit adultery,” people openly permit polyamory. Homosexuality, considered by the Torah an “abomination” and “the practice of the land of Egypt,” has been turned into a “sacred” value, and anyone who disagrees is denounced as a benighted “homophobe.” And “You shall not covet” is publicly attacked by a whole system of fashion and advertising that objectifies the woman’s body in order to promote sales.

Instead of “You shall not go about as a talebearer,” people sanctify “the public’s right to know,” and in the manner of Ham there is a developed media industry devoted entirely to exposing the nakedness and disgrace of “anyone who moves.” And the prohibition of interest has become a foundation of the Western economy, to the point that even commandment-observant Jews are forced to use a sale permit that is not simple. An economy without interest exists only in Japan and Saudi Arabia 🙂

In short: there is still a lot of work to do…

With blessings for a good month, S.Z.

Interest? The Torah accidentally let slip an unsuccessful prohibition, and our sages and rabbis did well to smooth over the embarrassment. In Islam too they felt the need to cover themselves and found formal mechanisms of legal circumvention.

With God’s help, 1 Kislev 5781

To M.B.—Greetings,

In the Wikipedia entry “Interest-free economy,” it is told of an Islamic interest-free bank called JAK operating in Sweden since 1965. Which is to say: 55 years!

It also notes there that Islamic banks operating without interest survived the 2008 economic crisis better than Western banks, which sparked renewed discussions regarding the economic necessity of interest.

I am no great expert in economics, but it seems that interest leads banks to encourage their customers to take loans, and thus they enter into greater economic risks. And as is well known, already on the bank’s door it says: “Draw” 🙂

With blessing, S.Z.

The original heter iska mentioned by the sages is a partnership in profit and loss, akin to an equity investment.