A few years ago, I spent a Shabbat at Bahad 1, the Israel Defense Force’s officers’ school. During the Friday evening meal, two non-religious soldiers delivered discourses on the weekly parasha, Haazinu. One cadet explained something that Rashi says. He asks why the eagle carries her young on her wings, and replies, “It is better that the arrow pierce me than that it should pierce my young” (Rashi on Deuteronomy 32:11). The cadet equated the eagle’s treatment of her young to the proper conduct of an officer toward the soldiers under his command. Then one of the commanders of the courses linked the nearing end of the cycle of Torah readings to the impending graduation of yet another class of officer cadets.
I am amazed by the capacity of the weekly parasha to speak to the heart of every person – wherever they may be – and provide them with the existential meanings they need. There is a kabbalistic idea that says that the soul of every Jewish person is linked to a different letter of the Torah (Zohar Ĥadash on Song of Songs 91b), and that Hebrew word for Israel, Yisrael, is an acronym for “There are 600,000 letters in the Torah” (“Yesh shishim ribo otiyot laTorah”). The number 600,000 stands for the overall number of Jews, implying that each Jew has a unique connection to the Torah. The truth is that even one’s personal letter is not fixed but rather dynamic – as one’s life changes so does one’s reading of the Torah portions. One is constantly reading them with fresh eyes and gleaning new inspiration from them.
The Face of the Torah and the Face of Humankind
The Lord’s greatness, the Mishna says, lies in His creation – out of a single person – of all of humanity, with its vast variety, in which each individual is unique:
It was for this reason that man was first created as one person…to express the grandeur of the Holy One blessed be He: for a man strikes many coins from the same die, and all the coins are alike. But the King, the King of kings, the Holy One blessed be, He strikes every man from the die of the First Man, and yet no man is quite like his friend. Therefore, every person must say, “For my sake the world was created.” (Mishna Sanhedrin 4:5)
The above also applies in relation to the Torah. The Talmud – in commenting on the verse “God hath spoken once, twice have I heard this: that strength belongeth unto God” (Ps. 62:12) – explains: “One biblical verse may convey several teachings” (Sanhedrin 34a). The Lord’s strength is apparent in the fact that each person hears something else in each of His utterances. There are a multitude of interpretations for the Torah, and no two are alike.
The truth is that the Torah’s multifaceted nature can already be derived from the mishna in Sanhedrin, for it springs from the multifaceted nature of humanity. Because every individual is unique, each of us interprets the Torah differently, thus revealing a novel aspect of it.
Text and Interpretation
New ideas regarding the nature of hermeneutics can help us understand how a multitude of interpretations can all be authentic expressions of the text, and how each can be said to be “the words of the living God” (Eiruvin 13b). The classic understanding of interpretation sees it as an uncovering of an original meaning intended by the author. There is one truth that we must strive for, and only one correct interpretation. The postmodern philosophy of our age denies the existence of a “text” with a single meaning, and sees the reader’s subjective narrative as the be-all and end-all. But there is a third option, and that is that meaning is generated through the encounter between the interpretation and the text.
The idea that there are two Torahs – written and oral – derives from the understanding that there is both text and commentary, and that commentary has its own independent status. Rav Kook explains that the uniqueness of the written Torah lies in the fact that it is utterly divine, whereas the special quality of the oral Torah is generated by its human dimension:
With the oral Torah we descend into life…. We sense that the spirit of the nation, which is bound to the light of the true Torah like a flame to an ember, gave rise, by way of its own special quality, to the oral Torah being created in its unique form. Certainly, this human Torah is part and parcel of the Lord’s Torah; it too is the Lord’s Torah…. All was conveyed to Moses at Sinai – even the future innovations of a veteran disciple. And these two beacons generate a complete world, in which heaven and earth converge. (Shemona Kevatzim 2:57)
On one hand, the oral Torah draws upon the written Torah and is bound to it “like a flame to an ember.” On the other, it has a unique shape, formed by the singular characters of its commentators. This shape is dynamic and is “being created,” as Rav Kook writes, in the present tense. The Torah is an amalgam of the text and the commentator, of the divine and the human.
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