Imu Shalev: Hello and welcome to Into the Verse, where we share new and unexpected insights about the parsha, diving deep into the verses to uncover the Torah’s own commentary on itself.

Hi, I’m Imu Shalev. This week, we’re going to talk about something we don’t talk about all that much here, and that’s the Torah Shebe’al Peh, the Oral Torah. One of our passions at Aleph Beta is to show some of the amazing depth and insight that sometimes gets overlooked in the Written Torah, the Five Books of Moses. But there’s an Oral Torah, which was eventually written down in the Mishnah and Talmud, that’s a companion to the Written Torah, explaining what exactly the laws mean and how to apply them in everyday situations.

Today, we’re going to talk about one of the really confusing things about this written Torah Oral Torah setup, and that is, why is it necessary? For example, in this week’s parsha, we hear about the law, לֹא־תְבַשֵּׁל גְּדִי בַּחֲלֵב אִמּוֹ (Deuteronomy 14:21) - the law against cooking a kid in its mothers milk. Great, I’ll be sure not to cook a kid in its mothers milk. Come along those pesky rabbis in the Oral law and tell you, “no eating milk and meat together.” Huh? Where’d they get that from? Is that what the Oral law is? A place for Rabbis to let out their legal creative juices?

So, we obviously don’t think that, we think the sages were careful readers and interpreters of Torah text. But how are we meant to think of the Oral law and how it works with the Torah? Rabbi Fohrman tackles this crucial question in today’s episode. Here he is.

Rabbi David Fohrman: All right guys, cheeseburgers everybody, it's the classic non-Kosher food and it's not Kosher not just because the meat wasn't slaughtered properly, even if you have slaughtered the meat according to Jewish law, it's still not Kosher.

According to Torah law milk and meat cannot be cooked together, but the problem is if you actually look in the Torah you will never find a verse that actually says this, 'milk and meat cannot be cooked together.'

It would seem like such a simple thing to say, 'don't cook milk and meat together', and yet that's not how the Torah says it. The actual Written Torah expresses this law very differently. The verse that's the source for not cooking milk and meat together is a verse in this week's parsha: לֹא־תְבַשֵּׁל גְּדִי בַּחֲלֵב אִמּוֹ, do not boil a kid, baby goat, in its mother's milk.

So you say, “How come I can't eat my cheeseburger? I'm not boiling a kid in its mother's milk when I eat a cheeseburger!” What is going on here? Why does the Written Torah say one thing, and the Oral Torah that explains these laws to me,  tells me something else?

Now there are reasons for this. Our belief is that the Oral Torah, at least the main principles and interpretations of the Oral Torah, were passed to Moses along with the Written Torah at Sinai, and these interpretations were passed down from generation to generation orally.

But what I want to talk with you about is, what the rationale behind that is. Why have a Written Law and an Oral Law at all? The Written Law says what it says, why don't I just do that? How come there has to be a discrepancy at all between the Written Law and the Halakhic, legal expression of that law?

So I think to attack this point, we really need to look at the role of law itself within the Torah as a whole. Because I might just take the devil's advocate position, that why do I have to have so many laws? Six hundred and thirteen laws in the Torah?

If the Torah is trying to guide me spiritually, why doesn't the Torah talk about lofty, overarching concepts like love? Why don't I spend my days in meditation? What am I doing keeping to this legal code? Legal codes don't seem so spiritual. How can you have a religion based upon law? What is the role of law in the Torah?

I want to just point out by way of observation that in this question about law being so mundane, we might respond to that by saying, in a sense law fits life, because life is mundane. It's not just law that is mundane, life is mundane. Life is like a cross-country trip. I remember driving cross country in 2001 with my kids. Every once in a while you get to something really spectacular – Mount Rushmore, Yosemite, Zion National Park – and these things are really inspiring. But other than that it's cornfields. I mean there's a lot of cornfields out there and one just looks like the other. That's kind of like life.

Life has a lot of routine in it; it's board meetings, it's picking up the kids from carpool, it's making lunch, it's bedtime, filing reports for your boss, it's all of these things. Yes, there are these grand, symphonic moments in your life; your wedding day, 10th anniversary, these glorious family vacations to Disneyland, the Alps, and all of that stuff. But those are just the things that punctuate our regular mundane existence, it's not the main stuff that life is made out of.

So is it mostly about just living for the grand moments, and that's the exciting thing, and I just have to put up with the cornfields? Or is there spirituality in the cornfields also?

I think the Torah's position is very firmly, there's spirituality in those cornfields – and that's where law comes in. The purpose of law is to take some of those lofty ideals and to find ways to bring them into everyday life.

There's a poem that I really like from Emily Dickinson – I'm a fan in general of her poetry – there's one called "Deed," and it talks about this. The poem goes like this:

A deed knocks first at Thought

And then – it knocks at Will –

That is the manufacturing spot

And Will at Home and well

It then goes out an Act

Or is entombed so still

That only to the ear of God

Its doom is audible –

Now what was she talking about here? She was talking about why it's important that we actually do things in life and not just hold on to abstract ideas. She's arguing that anything that we do, if you kind of take it apart, there's a three-step process involved.

Before we do it, it begins as a thought, we have to think about some sort of ideal that we want to reach for. Wouldn't it be great if there was less drunk driving on the roads? But then that thought has to go knocking on a door, the door of will, emotion, passion. In other words, the next question is, can that thought engage your emotions and get you to feel fired up, interested and passionate about it?

You see the pain in the face of a mother who lost her child to a drunk driver, and you say, that's terrible, you get fired up about that. The next thing you do, is you say, I'm going to do something about that, which is the poem's next line. Will, that's the manufacturing spot for a deed.

After you get will, passion, engaged, it then goes out an act – that thought is transformed into an act, you're going to do something with it. You're going to be the founder or the charter member of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Its first meeting is going to be in your living room.

So yes, if that thought can get your heart excited about it, that you can have some passion and will behind that thought, then the deed will go out as an act. But if it doesn't, if you never succeed in transforming that deed into some sort of act that you actually do in real life, then the deed dies, and the emotion dies, and the thought dies. It's all entombed so still that only to the ear of God its doom is audible. No one but God will have ever known that that thought was ever there in your head in the first place.

So the upshot is, ideals are important, but how do you take those ideals and make them a part of the cornfields – everyday life?

Imagine a guy who is into an ideal, how special his wife is, he sits on the stone floor and meditates upon this all day long; how special is my wife. He sits there with eyes closed and candles burning, just meditating about how in love he is with his wife. How impressed is his wife going to be with this?

You know, after a couple of days, his wife is going to come knocking on the door, it's like, do you think maybe you could help out in the kitchen, change a diaper, something? It's like, if you really love me, that love, that feeling, would have to translate somehow into action, even a mundane action, something. And if it doesn't, that love will die.

Because in the human soul thoughts don't last, and even emotions don't last, unless they can find an expression in the world of action. I don't care if it's a mundane expression, a mundane action, but that mundane action is a lifeboat for the thought, for the passion, for the ideal. It allows it to survive in real life.

So the Torah talks to us about laws, but there's two elements in laws. There are the grand ideals, and then there are the ways to express those grand ideals in mundane, everyday life – the details of the laws.

So I can talk about law from each of these two perspectives. One way to talk about law is to express the grand ideals. Another way to talk about law is to express ways in which to filter down those ideals into everyday life. The first job, more or less, is done by the Written Torah. The second job, more or less, is done by the Oral Torah.

So what that means is this: in Torah Shebichtav – in the Written Torah – the Torah will sometimes express law in terms of the ideals. The Oral Torah will find a way to translate that law into particular details, so that I can bring the ideals into daily life.

Imu: Imu here. Rabbi Fohrman is making a fascinating claim, that the Written Torah is the place where we get an idealized, kind of pure version of a law, and the Oral Torah is where the law gets translated into everyday life. But that’s all very abstract. What does this look like in real life, with an actual law? In fact, let’s ask what it looks like for milk and meat. How is not cooking a kid in its mothers milk an ideal? And how is not eating a cheeseburger a mundane way of expressing that ideal? That’s what Rabbi Fohrman gets into next.

Rabbi Fohrman: So in our case, there is an overriding ideal, think about it. In creation, God originally did not give man the right to consume meat. It involved killing another living, breathing being, and you weren't supposed to do that. The original man was vegetarian. He and the animals shared a common food source: the grasses of the field, the vegetation of the ground, the fruits of the trees. But then after the flood God gave man the ability to consume animals. And yet, there are limits. You have to understand what you're doing when you're taking another life, killing another mammal like yourself for food.

Milk. Milk isn't something you buy in a store, it's a sacred liquid for a mammal, it's how a mother nurtures a child. Meat is the opposite of that milk, it's the death of the animal. Life is nurtured through milk, but meat is about the death of that which was nurtured.

So once you realize that, yes, I give you permission to eat animals, yes, I give you permission to consume milk, but would you boil a kid, a baby goat in its mother's milk? You wouldn't do that, right? That would be a kind of desecration of sorts, you'd be treating that food – the milk and the meat – just as things, as mere ingredients, that you can just mix and match together.

Okay, so that's the ideal, but how many times a day are you faced with the opportunity of boiling a baby goat in its mother's milk? It's a particular vision of an ideal, but how does that make its way into my life in a daily way? For that we have the Oral Torah, and the Oral Law comes along and says, let me show you how we're going to translate that ideal into daily life; we're going to keep milk and meat separate.

Every day when I have a cup of milk, every single day when I have meat, I can understand that these things shouldn't be mixed, don't cook them together, don't eat the products of cooking them together, they don't go together. If you don't mix milk and meat in that way, you elevate your experience of eating, you elevate your experience of shopping. Milk and meat aren't just things anymore, you've taken an ideal and made it part of your daily life, and you've therefore worked to save that ideal. It will survive through your mundane actions.

Even though your life may look like a lot of cornfields, those cornfields suddenly won't seem quite as mundane as they used to be, as all of a sudden something as simple as a trip to a store or a bite of food can become a little embodiment of a higher consciousness. A little embodiment of holiness itself.

Imu: So, I’m not going to lie. This presentation by Rabbi Fohrman totally changed my life. I don’t know about you, but I grew up in a Kosher home, two sinks, two ovens, two dishwashers, two sets of dishes, fairly well versed in the minutiae of the laws of how to separate milk and meat. If the dairy spoon went into the fleischig, meat pot, would we need to rend our garments in agony of the major violation, or would it all be okay, because it is cold, and we just made a mistake?

I went through decades of life without it occurring to me that the laws are expressions of a higher value. Of a sensitivity to the animals that we eat for food and the milk that they provide for their own young. We make the separation between milk and meat, between life and death, and I’ve got to tell you, there’s something magical that happened. These laws that had felt very mundane, infused with this higher value, all the little legal minutiae, the little laws, felt like moments to reflect, moments to connect to that larger value. And it makes me think that you kind of need both. The higher order value of being sensitive to the source of your food and appreciating the life of the animal. That's a nice fluffy ideal to pledge allegiance to. So you need law to express that ideal. If, on the other hand, all you had was law then, well, you had my childhood: a lot of rules, but I don’t think I was really sensitive or aware of what those laws were meant to inculcate. Which is a pretty crazy concept. You can follow all the rules, but unless they’re tied to a value, you could be missing the deeper point.

And it's not just kashrus. I was once in the car with another Yeshiva friend of mine, and a third person, who was sort of annoyed with the many Halakhot, the many laws of Sabbath observance. And she said, you know, does God really care if I press an elevator button on the Sabbath? I get it - so the light behind the button is perfecting the number 15, so it's a sort of writing. Who cares? Why would God care about something like that? And my friend rightly answered, you know, when you're a part of a legal system, you follow all the rules. When you buy into the system, you don't get to decide the laws that count and the laws that don't. And I think that's true, but I think my friend answered from the space of the cornfields, the particulars of Law. I wanted to answer her from the values. What I said to her is that Shabbos is about taking one day out of every seven to remember that we are not the creators of the world, but there is a Creator. And part of the way we do that is we ourselves desist from creative activity, what we call Melakhah. And you can see how writing is creative. So we desist from writing, in all its particulars. We take a day to just be, as a testimony to the fact that God is the Creator.

I don't know if she found it particularly meaningful, but I do. Because knowing the value elevates the law and gives it meaning, sort of frees it from being a burden, allows it to be an expression of something that I actually care about. So I say that this piece changed my life because it changed my relationship to Torah, to Mitzvot, to Halakhah, and encouraged me to find the beautiful interaction between the higher-order values and their legal expression, to delve into the depths of rules and particulars, and find the values and the beauty that animates them. It’s the study of Torah of this sort that helps me find great meaning. Thanks for listening.

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Credits

This episode was written and recorded by our lead scholar, Rabbi David Fohrman.

When this episode originally aired on Aleph Beta, it was edited by Rivky Stern.

Into the Verse editing was done by Sarah Penso.

Our audio editor is Hillary Guttman.

Our editorial director is me, Imu Shalev.

Thank you so much for listening.