Do we all have the same Torah?

It is not uncommon for people to disagree on Torah topics and we are all familiar with this. It is a part of the background of aTorah life. However, it pays to ask, "Why?".

Many of us have had the experience of encountering knowledgeable Torah learned people who not only hold different opinion than we on many matters but hold opinions so outrageous and so obviousely different from what we perceive the Torah to teach that it is hard to believe that we all belong to the same religion. This is not only true in many debates in halacha where one says that a thing is permitted and another that is forbidden and even esteemed authorities come to radically opposed conclusions. It is also so in regard to basic hashkafa where it is not uncommon to find that one group holds something to be good and desirable and another group views it to be bad and outside the pale. There are those who are convinced that Zionism is an authentic and indipensable Jewish teaching and others who view it as a betrayal of religion. Some consider secular studies to be essential and others shun them. There are opposing views on so many matters of practice and doctrine.

Why is it so and shouldn't we attempt to understand it?

On the practical level, one encounters people who believe that Torah requires them to fight with all possible means "for the sake of truth" and others who will compromise every esssential belief and practice for the "sake of peace". There are those who light fires because they argue that the Torah requires them to do so and others who work only thorough peaceful and pleasant ways and  "turn away wrath". Though my sympathies lie with the latter and not the former, they also deserve to be understood - with respect, and not dismissed as psychologically or morally unbalanced.

We know, of course, that machlokes exist and always existed. But why do we, in this generation and place, disagree so profoundly and with so much conviction on so many subjects?

Chazal do say that there seventy faces to Torah ((Bamidbar Rabbah 13:15) or in other places, that there are fourty nine faces to Torah (Sofrim 16:5). Both statements might be true: the Gaon writes: " In the Torah there are seventy faces to the Orally transmitted Torah and 49 faces to the written Torah (Song of Songs 2:4). Another way to understand it is as  per Pesikta Rabbati (21:4, see Eruvin 13b), where we read: R. Yanai said: The Torah which God gave to Mosheh included forty-nine arguments in favor of purity and forty-nine arguments in favor of impurity [on any given question]...[Mosheh] asked: "How should we rule?" - to which God answered: "If those who argue in favor of impurity are the majority, it is impure; if those who argue in favor of purity are the majority, it is pure."

There is really no disagreement. In P'ninim mi'Shulchan ha'G'ro it says that  the seventy souls that went down to Egypt correspond to the seventy 'faces' via which Torah can be expounded, and b. the total of forty-nine of the children of Leah (33, including her daughter Serach) and her maidservant Zilpah (16), correspond to the forty-nine 'faces' of Taharah, and forty-nine 'faces' of Tum'ah via which the Torah can be expounded (Gen. 46).This we can handle. So far so good. However, here is a statement from Shaar Hagilgulim of R. Chiam Vitalm Hakdomo 17, that at first glance one might call "outrageous".

"Torah is the root of the souls of Israel for they were hewn out of it and rooted in it. This is why in the Torah there 600.000.00 explanations in pshat, 600.000.00 in derush, 600.00.00 in remez and 6000.00.00 in sod."... In the Future, each one will will achieve that explanation through which he was born...".The commentary Benei Aharon connects that second part of the statement to the Lurianic teaching that seventy "nitsosos" of Adam generate six hundred thousand souls. That explains the second part of what we quoted but how can one explain that every word and statement of the Torah can be explained in 600.000.00 different ways on the level of pshat. We can perhaps envision that derush and sod, even remez, can produce many differing explanations, but how can you generatesix hundred thousand explanations according to pshat?

Benei Aharon suggests that you can take this statement to refer to a chapter or topic. If so one can to produce many variations. So, for example if there are two words in a chapter that can each have two different explanations, there would be the following combinaitons: AB and BA. If there are three words or phrases that can have different explanations, we can have abc, acb, bac, bca, cab, cba. The general formula is n(n-1). (For the pruposes of Tsirufei Osios it would be divided by 2 because of duplications (i.e. abc and cba is the same etc).)

 You can see how you can quickly work this up to 600.000.00 combinations with only  a few different explanation as long as you are looking at a chapter of a group of verses.

I would like to suggest something else.  At the basis of it is the statement that  "once a talmid chacham learns Torah, it becomes his, as it says, "for in the Torah of Hashem is his desire and his (own Torah he engages day and night (Tehillim 1) ( A"Z 19a). I used to explain this with a parable of a puzzzle or a mosaic. Imagine that an artist is given most of the pieces of a mosaic but not all the pieces and not the the overal plan. He would start by matching pieces and come out with some kind of a partial picture. He would then extrapolate and fill the missing pieces as well as he can, based on his own udnerstanding and imagination. In order to complete the picture, he will have to extrapolate from the partial picture to the overall image and then manufacture pieces to fill in what is missing. This is essentially what a talmid chacham does nowadays. We do have many pieces of the mosaic, but, through forgetfullness and loss, not all of them. Every scholar constructs his own version of what the entire picture must have looked like. Not surprisingly these reconstructions can look very differentlly.  It is because of this that talmidei chochomim can disagree and diverge so greatly.

This is a good explanation but it still does not fully explain why different scholars come out with different overall reconstructions of the original intent.

The statement of Shaar Hagilgulim helps in this regard. As is now appreciated, words do not have a single meaning and many if not most words mean different things to different people. The more abstract a word or concept, the less do people share the same understanding ot it. To some people Love means control, to others abrogation of control and giving freedom and autonomy. Some  view "spirituality" as self-abnegation, others as redemptive self -fulfillment and so on... This is especially true in Lashon Hakodesh. In other words, words have a whole range of different meanings and different people have slightly different, sometimes very different understandings of the same word. In fact it would not be wrong to say that there are 6000.000.00 different understandings of the same word or concept. In everyday communication we share enough agreement about the basic meaning of words to understand each other. However, once we go farther, to interpreting complex and complicated verbal structures, we begin to understand words and their applications very differently.

There are six hundred thousand different souls and so, there are also that many ways to understand even a single word. We can now see that this kabbalistic teaching is not purely technical but, at its core, philosophical and practical.  

So, yes, we all have the same Torah but we do not all understand it the same - because each one draws an understanding according to his own soul-level. The Shaar Hagilgulim goes on to say that higher neshomos, ones that incorporate several different "roots' can possess multiple understandings at the same time. The ultimate in this regard was Moshe Rabbeinu, who was the source and encompassed all the six hundred thousand souls of Israel and could understand and contain all possible explanations.

Comments

[Yehonasan]

Related concept from Bilvavi Mishkan Evneh, Peirush on Etz Chaim, p 49:

"There is only one Existence, but it has multiple appearances; each [creature] perceives Existence according to its valence, for this is the deep meaning of the Toras HaArachin, Torah of Relativity, for those who understand. ...Contradictory appearances are [merely] in the eye of the beholder. ...The [ultimate] root is the perception of unity, for everything is one. Anyone who differs with this lacks the perception of the light of unity. That is the general state of the souls of BY"A. For the light of unity can only be perceived by souls of Atzilus and above."

[Yehonasan]

Hence not everybody's views are equally true. The more of the various appearances of Existence a person can embrace the more true to Existence is their perspective. If a person can only acknowledge one way of perceiving Existence, their perspective has only one small degree of truth.

[steve mcqueen]

Your explanation fits well for someone who prefers a path of peace and can repsect others' views, but how does it work to explain the behaviour of someone who fights strongly for "his" version of truth - is such a person just limited because he does not see as far as this model would allow?

[steve mcqueen]

sorry, " " should have been around "truth", not "his"

[avakesh]

He is, of course, limited. However, part of his "truth" is that truth is limited.

[avakesh]

I forgot to mention that the Alter Rebbe speaks of this concept in the Compiler's Introduction to Tanya