Question

Hello Rabbi, lately I’ve been listening to your lecture series, "Torah and Torah Study."
I have to say that I’m really enjoying the lectures, which are well organized and very well reasoned, and thank you very much as well for uploading them and helping bring order to this topic.
There are a few points I wanted to raise, and also ask about, in order to sharpen my understanding:
My first point is about the definition of "Torah"—I didn’t fully understand why it initially seemed reasonable to you to narrow the definition of "Torah" to a source of authority, and in our case, a source of religious authority. I ask this because in my opinion the simplest definition of Torah study is: the word of God and its interpretations.
In addition, from the way I understood your words [in lecture 8], when you qualify the approach you end up more or less with that definition, with the addition of another layer that you call "Torah in the person," and I personally tend to agree that this is not called Torah study but rather something else of value (though I’m not expert in all the halakhic sources).
I think it’s possible that you initially defined "Torah" as a source of authority and not in the way I described above because from the outset you didn’t see what value there is in a kind of study like the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) (which is the word of God and therefore falls under the second definition), since Torah study of that sort seems like study that has nothing concrete in it (neither authority nor, often, much actual learning), and therefore you don’t see it as an ideal form from the outset.
But wouldn’t it be preferable to stick with the definition of Torah study that is more sensible and that in the end one cannot avoid returning to anyway (after all, it is absurd that the Hebrew Bible should not count as Torah study), and instead emphasize more that one needs to study the Hebrew Bible seriously (so that the study will count as study), and that it is not so clear why one needs to study the Hebrew Bible, but since it is Torah study, one must?
By the way, there are thinkers like Rabbi Kook, for example, who spoke about the matter of studying the Written Torah, and if someone connects to that, all the better (for Rabbi Kook this appears in chapter 1 of Orot HaTorah).
My second point is about "converting texts." During the lectures you said that you do not understand why it is relevant who wrote a certain text. I think the relevance here is essential and not some kind of "ethnic" relevance, as you suggested.
The relevance is that when we read things in Maimonides and in our other rabbis, we believe that they wrote their works for the sake of Heaven—a belief which I assume stems from the reasoning that people committed to Jewish law and religiously serious at the level that, as far as we know, they were, are generally God-fearing people—and therefore in their writings as well they are aiming at that same goal.
Therefore it is easier to read works written by our rabbis, in which the need to "filter out" things that are not directed toward the same goal that a person acting for the sake of Heaven wants to achieve is much smaller.
Of course, you can ask me why someone would need "filtered" texts, since truth is truth; and the answer to that question is that a person does not always trust his own intellect to distinguish between what is true and what is false, and sometimes he prefers to rely on people with more knowledge and greater intellectual ability in these matters, who are also aiming at the same goal as he is (for the sake of Heaven).
And even if it were exactly the same text in Maimonides as in Aristotle, or in Rabbi Kook as in Hegel or Kant, or exactly the same line of thought, it is clear from what I said that this is no argument; because although there are excellent things in all of them, the question is whether that particular reader will have the ability to distinguish between this page (which Maimonides copied word for word) and the page after it (which he did not copy).
Of course, none of this removes from the learner the obligation to be critical if he wants to adhere to his goal, but it is clear that there will be less to filter out in Jewish thought than in philosophy when a person is aiming for the sake of Heaven.
In addition, in my opinion for the same reason texts of Jewish thought have more value than philosophical texts for a person who wants to cleave to God, and this is only because of the technical point that you know the authors of those texts share the same goal as you. Of course, if someone becomes convinced that Rosenzweig had no less fear of Heaven than Judah Halevi, and that he leads him even better toward his goal, then Rosenzweig’s texts will also gain greater value for him; but at least initially, the texts of Judah Halevi have greater value for a person with that goal.
That too is, in my opinion, the reason why yeshiva teachers initially direct students to study those thinkers.
There is perhaps another reason, which is also connected to aggadah, and that is that as you have argued many times, trivial conclusions often emerge from these discussions; therefore for students beginning to study these things, they are extremely useful, because for someone who lacks a foundation they provide one, and for someone who has a foundation they reinforce it with arguments and show the path to it (something which, in my opinion, really does need improvement, but that is not the topic), and this is important in my view. I personally have already found myself discussing with people lines of reasoning that led against the most trivial of opinions.
A note: in my second point I assumed that the goal of those who speak about "converting texts" is to study for the sake of Heaven, meaning building a worldview on Torah topics, seeking closeness to God, and so on.
A third point: during the lectures you brought midrashim / aggadot, sometimes as part of the line of argument and sometimes naturally as evidence against a claim made against you. I think one could say that the most prominent aggadah is the one about Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua. What was the value in bringing the midrashim? Are they not an authority or support for the meta-halakhic approach you presented?