Why Learn Gemara - Part III: The Conversion of Will

In the next few posts on this topic we will discuss how learning Torah, and specially gemara, changes all aspects of a person. We begin with perhaps the most fundamental aspect of Man - his will.

A person is born with a yetzer hara, a drive for self-gratification seperate from the service of Hashem. It is our goal throughout life to identify more and more with the will of Hashem. The study of Torah, specifically Shas and Poskim, accomplishes just that; it removes a person from being focused on his own self-centered desires and teaches him to “make His will your will." The intense search for the will of Hashem, that is the halmark of any serious and genuine Torah study, naturally uplifts a person's will to the will of Hashem. This is why R. Yisrael Salanter taught that if one wants to be more careful or stringent about a particular mitzvah he should learn the associated halakhot (Ohr Yisrael, Letter seven).

According to this explanation the search for the will of Hashem is perhaps more important than actually finding it. Support for this is found in the Tanchuma (Parshat Noach # 3) which emphasizes the difficulty in learning Talmud and that only one who loves Hashem will exert themselves sufficiently. Thus, we see, that learning is an exercise in Ahavat Hashem. Love, though, is not about finding the will of the Beloved, but caring about it. A clumsy husband who cares is much better than a slick husband who doesn't care.

However, if learning is intended to uplift our will to His will, then the greatness of learning over doing is difficult to understand. One would think that doing His will demonstrates more love than meditating on it! One way to understand the principle, that knowing the will of Hashem trumps doing it, is as follows: Man is limited in the amount of experiences he may have in his lifetime. It is impossible for one person to experience all that life has to offer – the good and the bad. Therefore, it is impossible for a person to keep all of Halakha, which covers all of human existence. Through learning he sanctifies these imaginary experiences by infusing them with the will of Hashem. Thus the Shelah and others teach that one who learns the halakhot of the Beit ha’Mikdash is considered as if he fulfilled it.

"Through perfectly knowing the revealed Torah in all it's details a person knows how to fulfill all of the mitzvot. He also perfects his soul with the jewelry of Torah concepts...[Learning Torah] produces an image of true concepts on the soul, which is the perfection of the soul, for the laws of Hashem are true, and when they are imagined in the soul, she is crowned and filled with glory and holiness (Eyn Aya, Berachot, pg. 2)".

Models of Torah I - The Torah as a Song

What is the Torah? Indeed it is the revelation of Hashem's wisdom and will, but what that means and how the system of Torah works is still in question. Why is revelation even necessary? What makes it into the written or oral Torah? What does the structure of the Torah teach us? How do derashot work, and what is the role of p'shat? What is the goal of halakha and does it develop? What is the relationship between Biblical and Rabbinic law? How are Jews today bound by the same covenant forged 3,000 years ago? And so on...

The Torah, like the world, is too big to be captured by one description, and thus requires models or metaphors to get a glimpse of its essence. The models that we will explore are found in the Tanakh itself, Chazal, Rishonim, and Achronim, but are often by own elaborations or meditations. Thus "kol hamarbeh harei ze meshubach!" - your comments are welcome.

The first model comes from this weeks parsha (a Dvar Torah I wrote about six years ago).

The Torah as a Song

“Now, write this Song for yourselves and teach it” (Deuteronomy 31:19)

Among the central issues confronting Judaism throughout the generations, from Paul to Spinoza and until this very day, is to create an alive and unique religious personality within the confines of the law. The Torah is referred to in the above verse as a song1 and this is true in several ways. Two perspectives of how this is true give us a radical shift in our perspective on the conflict between law and spirit.

The mark of the greatest musicians, painters and geniuses of other creative fields is first and foremost their technical mastery over their art. Although this is a very important requirement it is only the first step to authentic creativity. The key to creativity is the ability to work within a given set of rules or an emotion controlled by an idea.2 Many people can play basketball like Michael Jordan, doing amazing feats on the court, but few have the self-control to exhibit them while keeping the rules. Likewise many people can paint like Jackson Pollock or play drums like Ringo Starr but few can do it while maintaining precision and never overstepping their boundaries.

There is a very deep relationship between the Torah and the arts: they both require authentic creativity. In order to properly live Torah, and create art, the first step is to become intimately involved in mastering its world. We must remember though that it is not in “novelty that one reaches the deepest of all human creative experiences, but in the capacity to descend to the depths of what is already given.”3

The plight of modern America is our “existential vacuum”4, which is resolved through various techniques such as adventure (reality television) or through numbing one’s boredom with distractions (regular television). All of these forms of entertainment are merely an imitation of real amazement. However everybody has experienced real amazement one time or another, either in hearing a song or seeing beautiful artwork. Therefore authentic creativity is amazement and transcendence contracted into this world. For example, musicians are clearly not satisfied with the abstraction of music because without the notes the music has no reality and can not be experienced. Judaism is not opposed to transcendence but rather is not satisfied with the vagueness and transience of the subjective religious experience5, Judaism rather opts for “the appearance of transcendence within empirical reality and the act of objectification and qualification of that religious subjectivity that flows from hidden sources.”6

This comparison between Torah and art also helps us understand the apparent conformity that is a result of Jewish law. Does G-d really want all of us to be the same? Why can we not express ourselves spontaneously and with our unique strengths? Each time a song is played the musician can put different emotions into it, so much so that it sounds like a different song. This is even more apparent when different musicians are playing the same song. Just as when playing or hearing a song numerous times there are different emotions, so too with Torah: each act of learning and doing give us the unique opportunity to deepen our religious experience and make Torah into a song for ourselves.

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1 Sanhedrin 21b, Menachot 30a
2 G-d in Search of Man, by R. Abraham Joshua Heschel, page 300
3 Halacha as Symphony, by R. Nathan Lopez Cardozo, page 30
4 Mans Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl, pages 128-130
5 Worship of the Heart, by R. Joseph ber Soloveitchik, page 16-17
6 Halakhic Man, by R. Joseph ber Soloveitchik, page 108

Deeper is Higher - Part II

We previously discussed evidence in favor of telepathy. Now we turn to the related phenomenon of psychokinesis (PK), or telekinesis. Again there are many ways to interpret the evidence, assuming it is accepted, but it seems to be impossible to understand it within conventional materialistic philosophy. Thus it will either influence the way we understand mind or the way we understand matter.

I will mostly discuss examples that 1) were observed in the laboratory, 2) where action occurred at a considerable distance, and 3) which involve conscious will, not emotion, such as the typical Poltergeist cases.

"Ingo Swamm in 1974 was asked to influence a magnetometer which had previously been found to be extremely well-shielded and which was showing the periodic curve of the decay of a magnetic field. Swann asked where and what the apparatus was; was told to find out for himself; tried to use ESP to do so; reported success and gave a description of it which the listening physicists accepted as accurate - and at the moment he reported finding the apparatus, the previously regular decay curve flattened out. As Swann's attention turned to the group, the decay curve became regular again. An observer then asked Swann to try to increase the decay rate, and for another short interval, the decay rate became much faster (Psychokinesis, ed. Stanley Krippner, pg. 100)."

"This device [a cloud chamber] ordinarily is used to trace high energy atomic particles, whose tracks are marked by formation of fog droplets. When the healer [Olga Worrall] placed a hand at each side of the chamber, a broad wavelike fog pattern appeared. It was entirely different from that ordinarily caused by ionizing particles. Two months later, Worrall at her home about 600 miles distant tried at a prearranged time to influence the cloud chamber. Three minutes later the experimenters observed again the anomalous wavelike cloud formation. The test was repeated successfully the same evening (ibid. pg. 63)."

PK has been studied in the laboratory for over seventy years. J.B. Rhine in 1934 at Duke University began to test the idea that the fall of dice may be influenced by mental intention. In these and subsequent experiments the general populace was tested, not self-proclaimed psychics. Rhine reported affirmative findings, which spurred fifty years of further research on dice and other objects and, of course, harsh criticism. Nevertheless, most parapsychologists were convinced that PK did occur and the focus of the research turned from "proof-oriented" to "process-oriented" research; the role of mood, personality, altered states of consciousness, skepticism, individual ego identity, and other variables were tested to see how that influenced PK performance. In 1989 Dean Radin, using meta-analysis of the best experiments (based on the criteria of the critics) from 1935 to 1987, concluded that the overall hit rate for all control studies was 50.2 percent, and for all experimental studies was 51.2 percent. Statistically this results in odds against chance of more that a billion to one (The Conscious Universe, pg. 134).

In the 1969 Helmut Schmidt created a random-number generator (RNG), an electric circuit that generates either a I or 0. In short, it is an electric coin tosser.Schmidt and a host of other researches found consistently significant results and moved on to "process-oriented" research (even testing animal's ability at PK with some positive results). Radin using meta-analysis found that the RNG findings were consistent with the dice experiments (about 51 percent), and produced odds against chance beyond a trillion to one (pg. 140). Interestingly, Radin, along with Nelson and Bierman, studied the effect that groups of people could have on an RNG. They chose times where hundreds of millions or billions of people would be focused on a single place. For example, RNG's located in Princeton and University of Amsterdam were recorded during the O.J. Simpson verdict. They predicted that five independent RNG's would show unexpected order when the verdict was announced. And indeed all five RNG's suddenly peaked to its highest point in the two hours of recorded data (pg. 166).

We have barely touched the basics of PK research. For a good up-to-date summary of the research see The PK Zone by Heath.

Therein she summarizes the different theories attempting to explain PK. Energy Transfer theories, of the Eastern or Western schools, postulate some sort of semi-physical energetic force within a person which connects to the world energy. Electromagnetic theories maintain that waves carry telepathic or psychokinetic information. Acausal theories maintain that PK is the result of ESP. Mind-Matter Interplay theories suggests that the universe will change itself to match the desires of the mind. This could work in different ways: 1) the world conforms to the will of the performer, 2) PK is an illusion and the mind is informed of the right time or place to get its desired response, or 3) the mind is not separate from the universe, and to change one is to alter the other.

Although she favors Mind-Matter Interplay theories, she concludes that PK is probably not a uniform process and there is no need for only one explanation. However, what is important for us is that PK demonstrates that the power of the mind is not limited to the individual mindbody, and this suggests that it cannot be reduced to the brain, and perhaps it is of a non-physical nature.

Kesiva v'Chasima Tova

Artist: Elana Flerova