What is Torah, and what is Torah study?

Why it matters

We have seen that in our day, when God hardly intervenes, the focus of serving God moves from prayer to Torah study. And if so, two basic questions must be asked: what is “study” anyway? And what is “Torah”? The questions sound simple, but the answer changes the whole picture.

What is “study”?

Seemingly, we learn from everything. Whoever observes the street, the line at the grocery store, a film or a good book, can come away with important insights about Torah and about the world. A creative person will learn something even from a bird in flight. But is that “study”? In a certain sense, yes: it affects us and changes us, usually without our noticing. But in the sense that interests us here, “study” is something else: a deliberate occupation, whose aim is to understand a certain thing in depth. Whoever watches a film and gets an insight has not “studied.” Whoever sits down to delve into a sugya in order to understand it has studied.

What is “Torah”? A source of authority or a source of inspiration

And what makes a text “Torah”? The answer proposed here: Torah is a sacred source, and what makes it sacred is that it expresses God’s will. From it we learn what God wants of us. And from this follows its most important property: Torah is a source of authority. If I understand that the Torah says something, I am bound by it, because it is the word of God.

That is what distinguishes it from any other text. A good book can arouse important insights in me, and if I am convinced they are true, I adopt them. But if not, I am free to reject them. That is, an ordinary text is a source of inspiration. The Torah is a source of authority.

And what about the commentaries on the Torah? The Written Torah on its own does not say much without interpretation. So the commentaries too, the discussions and disputes that try to clarify what the Torah says, are part of the Torah. They are the way to reveal its content. And this is true even when I do not agree with a particular commentary: it too is an attempt to clarify the word of God.

“Cheftza” and “gavra”

And now a question arises. If commentaries are part of the Torah, because they help clarify it, then philosophy, literature and science can also help clarify Torah ideas. Are they too “Torah”? Maimonides himself wrote that “the account of creation” and “the account of the chariot,” the deepest parts of the Torah, are really physics and metaphysics. That is, in his view the study of such fields is Torah study in every respect. And if so, perhaps every field of knowledge is Torah?

To answer, we need a distinction. In the yeshiva world two concepts are used: “cheftza” (the object, the thing itself) and “gavra” (the person who acts). A rule “be’cheftza” is a rule that follows from the thing itself. A rule “be’gavra” is a rule that follows from the person and his intention.

Torah in the object is a text whose very study is Torah study, regardless of the learner’s intention: the text that contains the word of God, and its commentaries. Torah in the person is any other occupation, which becomes Torah only by virtue of the learner’s intention: if he studies in order to understand God’s will and the world, it is Torah. If not, not.

One can picture this as two circles. In the inner circle are the sacred sources themselves. In the broad circle are all fields of knowledge. The inner circle is Torah in the object. The broad circle can be Torah in the person. And there are three approaches here. The classic approach sees only the inner circle as Torah, and everything else is “profane.” The broad approach, following Maimonides, sees every field of knowledge as Torah. And the approach proposed here is a combination: there is Torah in the object, and there is Torah in the person, and both have value.

The surprise: Bible and aggadah are “Torah in the person”

And now comes the novelty. It is commonly thought that all Torah texts, Bible, aggadah, midrash, halakha, are “Torah” to the same degree. But when one checks, something surprising emerges: when one studies Bible or aggadah, the conclusions almost always match what the learner thought beforehand. The lessons drawn from a biblical passage or an aggadic story are usually values we all know: to be humble, to have compassion for others, to cope with suffering. And if there is a disputed value, tell me who the learner is, and I will tell you what he will find. The socialist will find socialism in the Bible, and the liberal will find liberalism. That is, in practice, Bible and aggadah do not really function as a source of authority. They are a source of inspiration. And that is why they are “Torah in the person.”

Why is this so? There are three reasons.

The first reason: morality is universal. We rely on our conscience, and on the principles of morality, as a reliable compass. So if we find in the Bible or the aggadah a value that seems immoral to us, we will not accept it: we will interpret otherwise, or reject it. We have never heard of a religious learner who abandoned the value of equality, for example, because he was convinced by the Talmud that it is forbidden. He will always find an interpretation.

The second reason: interpretive flexibility. The first reason on its own is not enough. If the biblical text were unambiguous, perhaps we would be forced to accept it even when it does not suit us. But texts of Bible and aggadah are open to very many interpretations, and so one can almost always find in them what one is looking for.

The third reason: there is no authority over facts. The facts described in the Bible are not “sacred.” Historical facts can be learned from other books too, sometimes more accurately. What matters in the biblical story is the lesson, and the lesson, as we saw, belongs to the learner.

Halakha: “Torah in the object”

And what about halakha? Here a good objection arises: in halakha too there is human interpretation, and there too the Sages bring in their values. The Sages said that the “stubborn and rebellious son” (a son the Torah commands to be put to death) “never was and never will be,” that is, they restricted the law until it would never be applied. They interpreted “an eye for an eye” as monetary payment, against the plain meaning. So perhaps halakha too is really a source of inspiration?

The answer: in halakha the situation is different. It is true there are such cases, but they are few. Mostly, when a law presents a difficulty, the Sages do not change the law to suit their values. On the contrary, they look for creative explanations to understand the law, and leave it as it is. Creativity in halakha is not meant to fit the law to our conceptions, but to fit our conceptions to the law. The law remains in force, whether we agree with it or not. And even the exceptional cases, like “an eye for an eye,” are not adaptation of the law to values, but the use of systematic rules of interpretation, which the Sages knew and followed.

And so halakha has three things that aggadah lacks. It has a binding text: verses and sources that command explicitly. It has an interpretive tradition: rules of decision and a mechanism for deciding. And it has an interpretive consciousness: whoever studies and decides halakha feels that he is discovering something that already exists, and not inventing it.

An example: the prohibition of pork. The source is explicit verses. The halakhic discussion deals with details: what counts as “pig,” what counts as “eating,” what the law is for a mixture. And all of this discussion, even when it is complicated, is a clarification of what the Torah said.

And what about the academic scholar?

And what about an academic scholar who studies halakhic sugyot? If he studies the Talmud as he would study the law of another ancient culture, he is not engaged in Torah study, even when he studies exactly the same texts. For Torah study is occupation with the word of God as the word of God, and not as research material.

And what is the main part of study?

And from here a practical conclusion: whoever already has a settled view on the foundations of faith should devote the main part of his study to halakha. That is the heart of the Torah. But that does not mean the other fields are without value. There are people and situations in which it is precisely Torah in the person that is more needed. Whoever is still clarifying his way, the questions of faith and values, must also engage in these clarifications, and sometimes mainly in them, as long as he needs to.

And what about the Bible itself?

Here there is a genuine hesitation. The Written Torah is certainly the word of God, including its narrative parts. And so occupying oneself with it is, in a certain sense, Torah in the object: it has value from the very fact that one is occupied with the word of God. And it does have holiness: a Torah scroll is written precisely, letter by letter. But one must distinguish two things. The holiness of the text: the words themselves are holy. And the holiness of the content: the messages are binding. In the narrative parts there is holiness of the text, but, as we saw, their content does not really function as a source of authority. And so it is hard to see what exactly the Torah “added value” is from studying the content of the stories, beyond the inspiration they give.

And there is a hint of this in Rashi’s first comment on the Torah. Rashi brings the question of Rabbi Yitzchak: why did the Torah not open with “This month shall be for you,” the first commandment Israel was given? After all, the main part of the Torah is the commandments. And Rashi answers that the creation story comes to teach that the whole world belongs to God, and so he may give the Land of Israel to whomever he wishes. But the very question shows that the Sages too assumed that the main part of the Torah is the halakhic part, and that the narrative parts need a justification.

Why don’t people see it this way?

Many enjoy studying Bible and aggadah much more than studying halakha. Why? There are several possible reasons. First, it is much more pleasant to study something that fits what you already think than to bend again and again before commands you do not understand. Second, the Bible deals with things close to life: providence, prophecy, people and emotions, kings and wars, good and evil. And third, the theological context: it is commonly thought that everything connected to holiness is one piece, and every Torah text is “Torah” to the same degree.

A historical view

The approach presented here differs from the common one in two directions. On the one hand, it narrows: “Torah in the object” is mainly halakha. On the other hand, it broadens: “Torah in the person” includes not only the other Torah texts, but every field of knowledge, according to the learner’s intention. And this is not entirely new. In the Lithuanian yeshivas, which laid the foundations for study in most yeshivas today, works beyond halakha and Talmudic analysis were not treated as “Torah” in the full sense, and no time was devoted to them in the study schedule.

Jewish thought: Torah or creation?

And now to the question for which we gathered. What is Jewish thought? If Maimonides took an idea from Aristotle, did the idea become “Torah”? And if Thomas Aquinas, the Christian theologian, wrote a similar idea, is it less Torah? The origin of an idea determines neither whether it is true nor whether it is Torah. Maimonides did not receive these ideas at Sinai. He thought them. One can call this a “conversion” of ideas, but conversion does not change their nature.

And there is also a difference of consciousness. In halakha, whoever studies and decides feels that he is interpreting the sources, even when he is really putting his own insights into them. In thought, the thinker, if he is honest with himself, knows that he is not really interpreting, but building a system of his own. Like the difference between someone who interprets an aggadah and someone who creates a new aggadah. So Jewish thought is mainly a human creation, and not an interpretation of the word of God. It can be Torah in the person, like any philosophy, according to the learner’s intention, but it is not Torah in the object.

To sum up

Torah is what was given to us from on high as the word of God, and comes down to us through tradition. Around it interpretations and expansions form, and they too are Torah, to the extent that they reveal its intent. Halakha is the only domain that meets all the criteria of Torah in the object: a binding text, a tradition of interpretation and decision, and an interpretive consciousness. Everything else, Bible as a source of lessons, aggadah, thought, philosophy and science, can be Torah in the person, according to the learner’s intention. And that is not little, but it is something else.