The Jews revere the Torah as the word of God inscribed, and the Talmud as the word of God made explicit. Explicit in the sense of ‘made tangible by engagement’. The Talmud is a series of discussions, predicated on the memories of an oral tradition (Mishnah), and the rigorous obsessions of rational minds seeking perfection.
Emmanuel Levinas was a post-war French philosopher, operating in the tradition of Husserlian phenomenology, and once a student of the wondrous mystery and mystic Monsieur Chouchani.
Language, ideology, universality
The Jewish sages perceived transcendental significance in their language. God – they taught – created the world with language, and so to understand words is to understand the world. As one learned more languages one became closer to perceiving wisdom. But translation was also a risk, and meaning could be both lost and preserved in the very shapes and sounds of letters, as well as the words whose meanings were always greater than anyone could know.
The early Rabbis translated their Torah into Greek with great trepidation. Greek was wise in abstractions, in universal communication, but in doing so it reduced everything to forms and ideas. All men are equal because all men are the same (rational, mortal, animals). Not so for the Hebrew, on two counts.
Firstly because this Semitic transmission expressed its universality through the unique and singular, insisting upon “analyses that never lost themselves in generalities but returned to their examples – resisting invariable conceptual entities”. Every biblical story projects itself into meanings and interpretations, but these never become new anchors for thought; the perennial source and vista of truth is always the original text (and its words and stories).
And secondly (and similarly) because the Hebrews saw universality of personhood as a formation that devolves from exception; they perceived “the universal insofar as it unites persons without reducing them to an abstraction in which their singularity of unique beings is sacrificed to the genus; universality in which uniqueness has already been approached in love”. The proof that all men are brothers is made manifest by the very individuality of the Hebrew, and the ability to sympathize with the Other (nations) whose difference need not be bridged.
Universality and transcendence of meaning, whether in persons or in their language (and the Hebrews might have thought this distinction redundant), is dependent on the exploration of that which occurs (in history, in life, in the world), and that which occurs is necessarily sui generis.
But if everything – every story and every person – is an unprecedented entity, where and how is one to find wisdom? Can the wandering gaze of the egocentric eye discover infinity when confronted with a world of infinite heterogeneous monads, each promising absolute truth within their own realm?
Texts that draw out their own meaning across the canvas of a tautological history
The following is a matter of faith for the Jew: The Torah is a product of God, and it is both a container and reflection for all truths, including individuals’ truths, including truths that unfold through time.
A legend says that God read the Torah and then created the world. Thus: the minutiae, tedium, and transience of the biblical stories are simultaneously narrations (of the events therein described), and also encoded reflections and refractions of era upon era, name upon name, within an arrow of time that spans the invariably shortest distance between the first point and the last moment.
The proof that an event was ordained by the Torah’s blueprint is that it happened in history. The Rabbi studying the Torah sees its imprint seeping through every frame and at every scale.
The Torah thus becomes the atemporal stage, never changing ever manifesting. Every act and scene in the bible is an archetype for every act and scene of history. The secret of transmuting the singular perfection of the Torah is an exercise in transmutation into the myriad and particular.
If the Torah is the word of God then the Jews know that its meaning is a translation of a singular will and vision and idea, made manifest though the divisions and fractures of words. If the whole is to be seen then every mote must be understood in relation to every other, and every pattern a template reimagining every other.
In the Talmud the sages engage the will of an inscribed god, seeking to press their minds against the veins and grains that are the metaphors overlaying the metaphors ad infinitum.
The individual qua chosen thus becomes a channel that – when perceived by a perspective that itself is a will subsumed against the asymptote of a sublime will – paradoxically reveals a universal truth.
Conclusion: The nexus of hermeneutics, individuality, and an unfolding tradition
In its raw form, the Talmud appears as a set of legalistic arguments, surrounded by a thick tangle of commentators who seek to clarify and direct. To study the Talmud is to pit one’s own mind (reason and imagination) against the contours of the necessities of logic (if a then b, but why mention c?) and meaning (why the parallels of vocabulary, or the trajectories of ethos?), forever challenging the text, seeking to test oneself by confronting and absorbing everything.
The giant tomes of the Talmud are crisscrossed by names; the elders and schools of the Talmud itself, and the giant commentators whose fine print fills the giant margins and appendix upon appendix. Every name is a synecdoche for a maelstrom of opinions, perceptions, experiences, all of which have been honed and focused against the primary text. To join these individuals in their engagement of the text is to see the universal through the angles of their prism.
Every generation is presented with the eternal words of the Torah and the Talmud. And every generation is presented with a chronology of perspectives on those words. Every generation comes to terms with the meaning of eternity concentrated into a singularity that is the manifested present. And every generation learns to see that even the very manifestation of a present is also a manifestation of a continuing past.
To study the Talmud is to believe and perceive the possibility of an Aleph – an Archimedean point of infinite truth – and to know that the only way of ever coming to know that Aleph is by aligning one’s will as best one knows with the shapes overlaying fathomless depths; and then projecting that intelligence outwards towards (the very Aleph’s wills’) fathomless presentations. The outcome might be a wisdom.
