... The rest is commentary

There is a famous story in the gemara (Shabbos 31a) about three prospective converts who each came to Shammai saying that they want to convert but only if he meets some absurd condition. In all three cases, Shammai turns them away, they go to Hillel, who accepts them, they convert and they drop their requirement. The gemara describes the second one as follows:

Again it happened that a non-Jew came before Shammai and said to him, "Make me a proselyte, on condition that you teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot." Thereupon he pushed him away with the builder's ammah-stick which was in his hand. When he went before Hillel, he said to him, "What you hate, do not do to your peer: that is the whole Torah, the rest is the commentary. Go and learn it."

There is much to be said about the story. For example, the prospective convert uses the idiom "while I stand on one leg", rather than saying "summarize". And Hillel's reply is to establish the whole Torah on one leg, on one principle. Perhaps Shammai's response is that Torah is about the measures and sizes, and can't be explained without all the details of the halakhah. That the Torah is about the legal structure that Hashem and the Jewish people build in a redemptive partnership (to describe it in terminology from Ish haHalakhah).

But the point that hit me this morning that motivated this post was something else.

Is there a natural morality, an innate sense of right and wrong? Somehow all of humanity labels theft and murder as evil. Everyone has a yeitzer hatov calling him to good and yeitzer hara pulling the other way. And yet, a tinoq shenishba, a child raised in a home devoid of Torah values, is judged more leniently because of that experience. We do not assume it's innate in him as well.

Rav Soloveitchik notes on a number of occasions that every mitzvah in the Torah has an element of choq, of incomprehensible law followed purely because G-d said so -- the opposite of a natural morality. For example, without the revelation of halakhah, would we know whether the concept of murder should or shouldn't include abortion? What about euthanasia? At what point is a person already dead? Do you endanger many to save one life? Halakhah gives us the tools to make determinations that innate morality is not equipped to answer.

Natural morality is based on empathy. ""What you hate, do not do to your peer." In a somewhat flawed way, it drives the Notzri Golden Rule, as well as the Hindu concept of Karma. (The Golden Rule, by the way, would require my giving away all I own to the next person I meet, wait hand on foot on others, etc... Taken at its word, the creed is un-livable.) I know something is wrong because I wouldn't like it -- and I am aware of another's pain when I do it to them.

But that morality from empathy is limited, as we pointed out above. It gives general guidelines, but no tools for navigating the grey areas and the questions that involve conflicting values and priorities. Therefore one needs commentary to explain further. And that commentary one must "go and learn". It goes beyond the innate.

War

I am not a political pundit, so I don't have much to say about current events. But how can we not discuss this topic?

The Hebrew for war is milchamah. The root of the word is /לחם/ (bread or food in general). The gemara notes this point in Sukkah 52a, when it , and just read the conjugation, we need to know whether war is the primary meaning of the root and bread/food the derived meaning, or the other way around.

R' Yosef ibn Kaspi, in Sharshos Kesef (a seifer dedicated to this kind of thing), takes the first approach. He says that the root's primary meaning connotes opposition, and food is in opposition to that which is fed. In this, he cites Artistotle's "On the Soul".

Another approach is to identify lechem in contrast to matzah. I.e. symbolic of the vanity of being "puffed up", of lacking motivation (the haste needed to make matzah), and a lack of contemplation. Thus lechem is emblematic of man's inner battle.

A more Marxian stand would be to note that wealthy people are less likely to make war. National leadership must keep the masses impoverished if it desires to turn many of them into "suicide bombers". It is when there is a shortage of resources that nations strive to enlarge their borders. From this angle, one would say that the allegedly religious motivation of those currently attacking Israel is actually more about being able to control more of the world by getting them to follow Shia -- as they guide them to.

However, in Judaism wealth is not inherently good or evil. A life that's about the pursuit of wealth and the control that gives you is evil. But a life of acquiring honestly and with purity and using one's resources to better serve Hashem... "The righteous value their wealth more than their own bodies" (Chulin 91a) since it is the greater leverage for doing good than one's biological resources.

People who spend all day merely surviving, trying to eke out enough calories to stay alive, don't have the luxury of thinking about religion. Greater resources means more ability to do something -- but whether that "something" is noble or dehumanizing is up to the owner of the resources.

For example, we fought the seven nations under Yehoshua. Yes -- by getting rid of them we purified the land from evil Canaanite practices and culture. But the primary focus of the book is getting land and resources. Is the location on earth with the greatest "spiritual leverage" used for orgies in worship of Asheirah, or to promulgate Judaism's message of a G-d Who taught us how to maximize the gifts He gives humanity?

Perhaps the synthesis of these ideas is suggested by the gemara in Sukkah (52a):

"If your enemy is hungry, feed him lechem, and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink. For you will stoke coals over his head and Hashem will yeshaleim (pay/repay) you." (Mishlei 25:21-22) Do not read it "yeshaleim", but "yashilemanu lakh -- will grant you peace".

To which Rashi elaborates (proof-texts elided):

Feed him lechem: exert him in the wars of Torah....
Give him water to drink: Torah...
Will grant you peace: That your yeitzer hara be shaleim (whole and at peace) with you, and will love you, and will not drag you to sin and to be lost from the world.

Rashi understands the gemara in a manner that suggests ibn Kaspi's idea that lechem refers to opposition and exertion. But it is also a means of feeding and satisfying the yeitzer hara and thus refers to the Torah. True shalom on the internal front is described as using the war to get the means to satisfy oneself as well as the enemy. Peace comes from a win-win resolution that unifies the parties through mutual satiation. That is shalom as in sheleimus, wholeness.

As I wrote on this blog in the past, my rebbe (halevai I were his talmid!), Rav Dovid Lifshitz, spoke about this concept of shalom often. Shalom is embodied by the words of the tefillah, "Veyei'asu kulam agudah achas la'asos retzonekha beleivav shaleim -- and they will all be made into a single union to do Your will with a whole, a shaleim heart."

To apply this idea to our cousins and neighbors in the Middle East will take a long journey.

Yotzeir Or, part I

(I was on vacation and so there was no shiur last week.)

This week's shiur picks up with Borkhu and the question of what makes it, or any other prayer (including at least Qaddish and Qedushuah) a davar shebiqdushah (a declaration of holiness).

The majority of the shiur was dedicated to opening of the berakhah of Yotzeir Or. We discussed the structure and topics of the berakhos that surround Shema and their relationship to Shema itself, some of the basic thrust of this particular berakhah, and the history behind its opening sentence. The opening of the berakhah was explained in relationship to the pasuq which it paraphrases, a message Hashem gave the prophet Yeshaiah to record for King Cyrus of Persia to eventually receive.

The bulk of the shiur was a discussion of evil, the nature of evil -- both as the tragedy in people lives and the evil people do, the question of what defines evil (one Jewish resolution to Plato's Euthyphro's Dilemma), and finally four different ways in which tragedy forces us to respond. (The last point is expressed also in my essay "The Four Sons Confront Tragedy", relating these responses to the responses each of the four sons of the Hagaddah have to the seider.)