Q&A: Seventy Faces of the Torah or Seventy Excuses for the Torah
Seventy Faces of the Torah or Seventy Excuses for the Torah
Question
With God's help,
Hello Rabbi, regarding the idea that the Torah can be interpreted in many different and strange ways:
1) Why did the Holy One, blessed be He, establish this rule? After all, it comes out that we don't really know what the truth is.
2) Likewise regarding the midrashim, etc. … Was it really too hard for the Holy One, blessed be He, to give us one source that would contain the full and exact truth of reality—of what happened in the past and of the laws?
3) It seems as though interpretation—Heaven forbid—at least regarding the Big Bang and evolution, "adapts" itself to scientific reality; that is, science discovers something that does not at all fit the Torah outlook (the age of the world, evolution…), and then interpretations pop up showing how the Torah can be reconciled with science…
From all this it seems as though this whole enterprise of interpretation is a kind of "chewing gum," Heaven forbid, used to deal with difficulties raised against the Torah.
Answer
- I'm not sure the Holy One, blessed be He, established this rule. It seems to me that the Sages established it because they saw that there really are several possible interpretations. And well known are the words of the Geonim and Maimonides about the disputes that began with the students of Hillel and Shammai, who did not sufficiently attend upon their teachers.
- Midrash is not the actualization of God's intention. For some of the products of midrash, He probably did not intend them at all. But that is what seemed correct to the Sages, and they were given permission (and perhaps even an obligation) to expound the Torah according to their understanding.
- The adaptation to the findings of science is another indication of what I have written more than once: studying the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) does not teach us anything. On the value plane, people always adapt it to our values, and so too on the scientific plane. So what is the point of doing it? But I do not see this as a problem with respect to the Torah itself. What it itself means—I do not know. Perhaps it means something that is actually true. It's just that we do not know what is actually true, and that keeps getting updated according to scientific knowledge.
Discussion on Answer
I still haven't understood, and I'd appreciate a bit more explanation.
1. When the Sages said "seventy faces of the Torah," did they mean that there are several different and correct interpretations on the plain-sense level? (I don't really understand what that means, because what practical difference would the plain sense make? It would help a lot if there were an example of such a claim.) Or did they mean that the same verse bears both its plain meaning and also several halakhic midrashim ("creative" interpretations, in your terminology)? If it's like the second interpretation, then surely this general relationship between plain sense and midrash, and between one midrash and another (directed, etc.), was given at Sinai. Or not even that? Could something so central—whether one verse can, with the highest certainty, be interpreted in more than one way—not be transmitted through tradition? About this the astonished would say: can something that is practiced and ongoing be something over which the Sages disagree?
2. When you say that midrash is not the actualization of God's intention, what do you mean? That the Sages were not trying at all to actualize *anything*, or that they did try but sometimes erred (just as anyone can err on the plain-sense level and not only in midrash)? Or do you mean that they were not trying to actualize God's intention at the time of the giving of the Torah, but rather the text as it stood before their eyes, since "it is not in heaven"? Either way, I did not understand whether there is some special point here regarding midrashim, or whether this is general to all interpretation.
1. There is a whole collection of questions here, and I'm not sure I understood them. In principle, several interpretations of the same text are possible, and not only in the Torah. This has two possible meanings: a. the author intended all of them from the outset. b. we don't know what he intended, but any interpretation a person finds in the text, if it fits, is considered a valid interpretation of the text (certainly if this was authorized in advance by the author of the text). In our case one can say it either way. In both possibilities, I don't see any necessity for there to be a tradition about it. It can be the result of the Sages' observation that there really are several convincing interpretations of the same text. I don't see any fundamental problem with that. The question of the relationship of midrash to the plain sense is a different question, and I expanded on it in my book Spirit of Justice and elsewhere. As a rule, Maimonides claims that there is only one plain-sense interpretation for each verse (and perhaps for each text?), and therefore he argues in the second principle that midrash is not interpretation of the text but an extension of it (like branches that emerge from roots). Nachmanides, in his glosses there, disagrees with him, and in his opinion this is included in "seventy faces of the Torah"; that is, he sees midrash as revealing the meaning of the text itself, like the plain-sense interpretation.
2. It could be this way and it could be that way. I'm not sure there are really two different possibilities here. After all, it may be that what the Sage draws out of the text using the tools of midrash is, by definition, God's intention in this text.
Thank you very much. I still have some money, but apparently the book Spirit of Justice (I see it's available here on the site! the second section, about 200 pages) will be the money-changer's table before which I will spend it.
It is worth noting that the expression "seventy faces of the Torah" originates in Numbers Rabbah 13:15, and there the verse "one bowl" is also expounded—that the Torah is one, and there is no contradiction between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah.
It therefore seems that the seventy faces spoken of by the midrash do not contradict one another, but rather complement one another, and each "face" shows part of a great and complex truth.
This also seems to follow from the words of Ibn Ezra in his introduction to his Torah commentary: "And as for midrash, the way of the plain sense does not depart, for the Torah has seventy faces"—implying that we are speaking of two layers of the will of God, not contradictory understandings.
With holiday blessings,
S. Tz.
There are also statements of the Sages about disputing opinions, such as the dispute between Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel, where "these and those are the words of the living God"—that each of the opinions reflects a correct Torah consideration, and therefore it is important to study and understand all the approaches and their reasons, since each one reflects part of the complex system of considerations standing before the halakhic decisor. But in the case of disputing opinions, the aspiration is to reach a decision between the views: "these and those are the words of the living God"—but "the Jewish law follows Beit Hillel."
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It therefore seems that the seventy faces…
I understand.
Thank you very much.