... 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.