Prologue to a Theory of Law

If we want to consider the naturalness of law (whether it corresponds to anything in the real or if it is just an overlay atop it) then our inquiry will have to focus on the concluding quotation from the Talmud from Niddah 73a which will also help us wrap up our analysis of Habakkuk 3:6 with the final phrase “the ways of the world are His.” Here ‘ways’ may be read as ‘laws’ which establish that the actual functioning of the world conforms with law. They are one and the same. The law does not merely name the ways of the world; it is the ways of the world. The only a question is how one chooses to vocalize the word–halicha [ways] or halacha [laws]. In the end, they are interwoven into a single sign. Jewish law then is all about dynamics–lines of force that slice through the chaotic thereby permitting rhythmic striations to surface and with them a semblance of order. Most importantly it is a ‘natural’ or naturalizing law but with respect to how it determines nature and is not determined by nature.

Furthermore, we see that learning and teaching also come glued together. The Talmudic passage above speaks of whomever learns (hashoneh) the law but this word equally implies teaching. Most significantly the word can also denote repetition. I teach-learn or influence and am influenced in a infinite ongoing manner. The repetition occurs in the jump from the teacher to the learner with each person being encouraged to play both parts.

Above and beyond the aforementioned, it is noteworthy that this same root (shin-nun-hei from hashoneh) can carry with it the additional sense of change (shinui). The compound meaning would entail both repetition and change. Every repetition would involve an alteration. What reoccurs is difference itself and not sameness (which is also why each day the teaching-learning yields novel aspects of the law and the world). All learning teaches and all teaching learns as evidenced by another Talmudic precept (Ta’anit 7a): “I leaned much from my teachers, more from my peers, but most of all from my students.” When combined, our revised translation would have to be something like ‘differential repetition’ (a phrase beloved by the philosopher Giles Deleuze). The fulcrum of teaching and learning (even when they are superimposed on each other) lies in the ‘differencing’ brought about by reiteration. You can never traverse the same text twice. You cannot even do it once.

The flux of our input-output, learning-teaching, repeats differences and stresses the dynamism and becoming of law. It also (as stated in the previous article) promises us admission into the world to come. Whereas the ‘world to come’ ordinarily takes on the grandiose significance of a time after time or a postscript to history or life after life, it can also be seen as a continual coming of the future into the present. Admission into the future–the future world or novel reality, comes at the price of availing ourselves to the lessons of law as differential repetition. The different world, the altered reality, is a result of our efforts of differentiating the law.

Yet this does not even begin to exhaust the nuances of the expression “ben olam haba” [literally “a child of the world to come”]. For starters, the ‘to come’ of the world (haba in Hebrew) relates to the notion of beyah which is a euphemism for sexual relations. Abstractly this signals the idea of creative connections, inner integrations and reproductive networks. Thus, the future world, under the influence of the proper legal dynamics, is a holistic one. The juxtaposition of ‘this world‘ [olam hazeh] and the ‘world to come’ [olam haba] in Kabbalah compares dualistic separateness and discreet identities (zeh or ‘this’ relates to zehut or ‘thisness’ in the sense of individual identity) with the non-dual oneness that discovers the self within the other and the other within the self (symbolized by the logic of sexuation).

Returning to the writings of the Apter Rebbe once more (this time in his commentary to Parshat Toldot), he teases out of the words “the ways of the world are His” and offers an alternative readings of “His” (lo). Perhaps naively we assumed (via slight interpolation) that this third person pronoun referred to the Divine. Clearly, an omnipotent Creator would wield the ‘ways of the world.’ Divine law would constitute an existential insistency. Such direct attribution nonetheless obscures another option pregnant within the ambiguity of the verse. It is this comparatively minor scale (relative to the major scale implicating the Divine) that attributes ‘him’ (now in the lowercase) to the human agent who engages in the teaching-learning of the Torah that the Apter Rebbe seizes upon.

By virtue of our novel insights into the reasons and meaning behind the law that come from instilling the Torah with a new soul each day (as though the march of time awakens slumbering dimensions) we alter the workings of Creation. The theoretical and the attending states of consciousness that it cultivates informs the applied and practical and ultimately supplies the means of transforming the world at large. More specifically, the Apter Rebbe outlines three ways in which this is accomplished: First, we may originate modifications with the workings of Creation. Second, we are licensed to create new worlds (running the gamut from social-psychological worlds to physical ones in the spirit of literal terraforming). And third, we are granted the capacity to unite and connect worlds together. In the best sense of the ‘internet of things,’ the awaking of dumb stuff into the transformed state of ‘smart matter’ at the service of computation (everything is sublimated into ‘thinking substance’) gives us a taste of what this might entail.

Bottom line: innovations in the law make the world ours (as the curators of the law who also cultivate it). This is a profound decoding of being a ‘ben olam haba’ [child of the world to come]. In Kabbalah, the world to come refers to the faculty of binah or understanding. Our innate capacity for constructing (binah relates to the word boneh meaning ‘to build’) a representation of the world within the mind is really the staging area and antechamber to encountering the external one which gives the impression of being outside of the mind. The child of understanding (the world that is coming, that is maturing in consciousness where ben, ‘child,’ also stems from boneh or ‘building’ and is the offspring or product of understanding) would be the emotive sphere of the psyche. How I feel about the ‘objective’ world has its genesis in my cognitive processes which read, write and edit it. Idealism breads innovation. The mind gets a producer credit for the operations of the body and the recordings of its antennas. Understanding is even equated with being the ‘source of the Torah’ [makor haTorah] and as such suggests that tracing the intellectual origins of the world is part and parcel of any engagement in law.

For the Apter Rebbe the fundamental ambiguity in the conclusion of the verse from Habakkak 3:6 [which is also the conclusion of the Talmud and the conclusion of the law] rests on whether it is the Creator or the created being (God or humanity) which possesses the world through the teaching-learning of law. The Torah maintains that it is both. There is greater perfection in sustaining the undecidablity than in preemptively or prematurely tipping the attribution to one side (as though the sides were real and not merely virtual to begin with).

Linking back to one of the most earth shattering (for it unquestionably breaks up the simple and unassuming realism of the objective world) lines in the Genesis narrative (2:4), the Apter Rebbe points out that “This is the history [here ‘history’ (toldot) also means generations or the generative in general–my insertion] of the heavens and the earth when they were created [b’hebaram (בהבראם)]” has a midrashic interpretation that rearranges the letters of “when there were created” such that they spell ‘with Avraham’ (באברהם).

In other words, Avraham [Abraham] (as a central figure in the Torah of whom it is said that he contained within himself the entire Torah–all of the laws even in their fine details) manifested via his inner engagement with the Torah the power to co-create the heavens and the earth. When were they created? Each and every day. The Apter Rebbe plainly says that through Abraham and those like him the world is created (in part) by virtue of their internalization of the Torah in its entirety. The transcendent creative capacity (even the ability to create laws) is shifted into the immanent domain.

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/position-measurement-and-observation-part-7/

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/position-measurement-and-observation-part-1/

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