"He Make Crowns for the Letters"
STUDENT SUMMARIES OF SICHOT OF THE ROSHEI YESHIVA
PARASHAT SHELACH
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Sicha by
He Made Crowns for the Letters
Adapted by
Translated by
Commenting on our parasha, Rashi
recounts the midrash that describes Moshe ascending to heaven and seeing God
writing in the Torah the description of Himself as "long suffering" (erekh
apayim). Moshe asks God why He does not add "to the righteous, and God
responds that His patience extends even to the wicked. Moshe finds this
difficult to understand. Later on, after the sin of spies, when God wants to
destroy the entire nation, Moshe beseeches that He treat them mercifully,
because He is "long suffering." God then reminds Moshe, "But you said, 'only to
the righteous'" and Moshe responds that God Himself testified that His
patience extends also to the wicked.
Another aggada (Menachot
29b) records that when Moshe ascended to heaven, he has a vision of Rabbi Akiva
delving into minute details of Torah, which he himself has trouble
understanding, and he questions why the Torah is being given to him, rather than
to Rabbi Akiva. Eventually he is appeased when he understands that even the
great Rabbi Akiva was taught, ultimately, by himself.
These midrashim convey a lack of
understanding on Moshe's part: In the first story he fails to understand why God
is patient even towards the wicked; in the second story, he fails to understand
why God has chosen him to teach the nation, since he cannot understand Rabbi
Akiva's lessons.
In order to understand the fundamentally
different views of reality reflected here, let us start by trying to understand
what Chazal mean when they say that Moshe did not understand what Rabbi
Akiva was teaching. Chazal describe Rabbi Akiva "making crowns (kosher
ketarim) for the letters, and the conventional interpretation is that Rabbi
Akiva was deriving details of laws from the "crowns" that adorn some of the
letters in the Torah script. However, this explanation is problematic, since
nowhere in the Gemara is there any indication that Rabbi Akiva arrived at his
knowledge in this manner nor is this permissible; the law is to be derived
from the words themselves.
We might therefore propose a different
understanding of the scene: Rabbi Akiva paid attention not only to the letters
themselves but, in his greatness, was also able to grasp the depth of every
letter in the Torah and thereby to expand the idea behind it. This is what
Chazal mean by saying that he "made crowns for the letters": he expanded the
letters beyond their apparent proportions, thereby arriving at new laws the
Oral Law. The Gemara refers to this expansion as "crowns (ketarim) for
the letters" because, in his ability to expand the letters, Rabbi Akiva attained
the sefira of keter of each and every letter. When he plumbed the
depths of halakha and understood the deeper significance and meaning of each
letter, he was able to expand the laws and elaborate on them.
Moshe's approach to the Torah was
precisely the opposite. He perceived the letter itself, as it was, without
looking beyond the words. For this reason, Moshe cannot understand why God would
extend patience even to the wicked because, from a reasonable, logical
perspective, the wicked are indeed not deserving of forgiveness. However, God
Who views the infinite depth of every matter all the way to its very source
sees that the wicked, too, ultimately perform God's will, and that they, too,
possess an inner spark of truth, and therefore they too are worthy of His
long-suffering approach.
For the same reason, Moshe does not
understand Rabbi Akiva's teachings. Rabbi Akiva's insights arise from a
perspective of "keter" the deepest meaning underlying the written
letters of the Torah while Moshe views the letters and words themselves,
rather than the profound meaning behind them. It is therefore Rabbi Akiva who is
capable of building the Oral Law, while Moshe conveys the Written Law. To hand
over and convey Torah one has to be a transparent channel that carries a message
with the highest fidelity and the least interference or distortion. For this
purpose Moshe had to see only what God was actually giving, and to pass it on as
it was, without any innovation or elaboration. This is Moshe's uniqueness. Rabbi
Akiva, on the other hand, creates new Torah the Oral Law and for this
purpose he needs to perceive what lies behind the words themselves, their deeper
meaning, in order to be able to arrive at new insights.
It is through the in-depth understanding
of the letters of the Torah that one is able to illuminate new insights in the
Oral Law, which is the system that connects the Torah to our reality. In order
to connect Torah to reality, one has to have a far deeper understanding of it
than what appears to us superficially. This is the deeper meaning of the
connection between "keter" and "malkhut, because as we have
seen the deeper perspective of Rabbi Akiva reflects 'keter, and it is
only through this perspective that there can be innovation in the Oral Law,
which is 'malkhut. Every time one steps outside one needs a deeper and
deeper understanding of Torah, and is through this in-depth study, with its
attempt to attain the deepest meaning of the Torah, that one is able to connect
Torah with reality, and to bring the light of Torah into the very physical
reality of this world.
(This sicha
was delivered on Shabbat parashat Shelach 5765 [2005].)
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