Q&A: The Torah in Relation to Other Fields of Knowledge
The Torah in Relation to Other Fields of Knowledge
Question
Happy holidays.
I’m amazed by the power of the Torah—not by its unique spiritual value, but by its intellectual value.
Whether it’s analyzing a Talmudic passage in depth with close attention to the wording of the medieval authorities (Rishonim) and later authorities (Acharonim), or just reading a puzzling Maimonides and the brilliant explanation of Rabbi Chaim.
And there is an enormous amount of material (I wonder whether this is the field in which the most books have been written in the world), and a lot of it is deep and brilliant. Every famous book, like Ketzot HaChoshen, has been critiqued and re-critiqued over the generations by the greatest of our sages (there’s a rumor that they never found a mistake in Rabbi Akiva Eiger, but that doesn’t seem right to me), and it’s amazing.
I haven’t really studied other fields of knowledge properly (only touched on them), and my question is: on the intellectual level, is the Torah above all of them, or not?
Answer
In my estimation, absolutely not. It has qualities that I don’t find in other fields, but in terms of depth, complexity, and difficulty, it doesn’t compete with physics or mathematics, for example. At least for me, the Torah is much less difficult, less complex, and less awe-inspiring than those fields. The way it combines insights from different areas and creates from them a single fabric that also touches life is truly fascinating and unique.
Discussion on Answer
That’s a subjective question, and I don’t know how he determines it. In my view, definitely not.
What do you mean by insights from different fields?
Logic, philosophy, psychology, law, metaphysics, economics, and society, etc.
What do you mean by “a subjective question”? Seemingly this is completely empirical. (An encyclopedia containing all the accumulated material in mathematics [even if we add all the books that came out, like Euclid and so on] takes up much less space on a shelf compared to the number of commentators on Maimonides alone.) Do you mean the quantity and scope of the ideas?
I understood “the largest literature” to mean the deepest and of the greatest literary value.
But even if the intention is the scope of the material, I’m really not sure about that either. If you collect the ideas rather than the printed pages, in my opinion mathematics and physics have no less. And even regarding printed pages, I’m not sure you’re right. It’s also a question of how you classify the fields (should one compare geometry to Jewish law, or all fields of mathematics, or perhaps mathematics to Taharot or Orach Chayim, or the laws of the Sabbath, or perhaps all branches of academia to all branches of Torah, and so on and so on).
In short, neither of us has any way to answer this seriously. Even on the question of how many printed pages there are, in my opinion you are very far from knowing the answer. Are you familiar with all the mathematical material in Russian that was never published outside the Soviet bloc? And in Chinese? Should all textbooks be taken into account? Solved exercises?
And as for the question whether this is the largest body of literature in the world, Middot LeCheker HaHalakha, at the beginning of its introduction, claims that it is.