Prologue to a Theory of Law

Location, location, location. The old adage in real estate also translates into the layout of ideas in the space of a book. Placement matters. It can also be bewildering, and perhaps nowhere more so than in the vast landscape of the Babylonian Talmud. Rather than the linear organization of a grid system which suggests the foresight of a city planner, the thickets of windy roads, seemingly inexplicable dead ends, circuitous paths, blind alleys, shoots and ladders, make this textual tapestry maddening to novice eyes. Taking a queue from textiles, the design of the Talmud is an immense hypertext project, the Ironman competition of associative mental athleticism. Yet, location and context still retain their relevance and may be shown to play an even more critical role as routing hubs for larger networks of information. Consequently it is remarkable that a body of legal discussion such as this would save a critical part of the derivation of the operative word for all of Jewish law for the last page and paragraph.

At the closing of this virtually endless rabbinic conversation we are taken to the conceptual heart of the word, ‘halacha,’ a word which might strike some as an odd choice for the entire enterprise of Jewish legality, particularly with the availability of a multitude of familiar alternatives (chuk, mishpat, din, etc…) some of which clearly predate the selection of this overarching term. Transporting ourselves to the passage from Niddah 73a we read the following:

A Baraita [literally ‘an outside text’] of the academy of Eliyahu: “Whoever learns halachot [laws] everyday is assured that he is destined for the world to come [olam haba] for it states [Habakkuk 3:6] ‘the ways of the world are His [God’s].’ Do not read halichot [ways], but halchot [laws].”

What is astonishing about this citation is that it ends the ‘inside’ of the Talmudic exchange with a reference to what is formally outside of itself. The ‘end’ of the inside is the outside. A Baraita, which refers to a collection of non-canonical texts (those which did not make it into the distillation of the Oral Torah known as the Mishnah), is employed as if to suggest that the inside gains strength and validity from its absorption of the outside, to entertain both insider and outsider perspectives simultaneously. This implies that a legal system has to be self-transcending. It must be subject to both internal and external review. It must speak within itself and beyond itself at the same time. And finally, it must recognize that its identity is to some degree constituted by its other.

Now to reclaim the lost bags of signification that we jettisoned when we cited the customary translation above we must break it down word by word. ‘Whoever learns laws’ is a rendering of ‘chol hashoneh halachot.’ Recovering the broader meaning of ‘chol’ (every, all) does not simply limit it to the human sphere (whoever). Everything participates in the learning of law–even the entire universe and all that it contains.

In order to get a handle on this implication, we must summon the supporting insights from Rabbi Avraham Yehoshua Heshel (1748-1825) known commonly as the Apter Rov or Rebbe. As one of the early Chassidic masters, he contributed a profound work of original mystical ideas known as the Oheiv Yisrael [Lover of Israel] wherein he explains this passage as referring to all of Creation [see his commentary to Parshat Beshalach]. The extended significance of this citation promotes a dependance of objective reality upon the learning of the human subject. For the Apter Rebbe, if the world derives from the Torah and depends upon it (not only as its model but also as its source code), then any change in our understanding of that code will effect a subsequent change in the reality the code generates. In the spirit of John Wheeler’s axiom “It from Bit” the informational foundation of the physical plane of existence and the objective sphere suggests that alterations in one immediately impact the other.

What this leaves us with is a radical sense of the world following after the way (halicha) one learns the law (Halacha). As we have been dealing with position, measurement and observation from within the confines of Habakkak 3:6, we can now continue and say that law is a function of those aforementioned ingredients. It is terraforming. The outcome of our judgements does not merely disclose a preexisting topography but co-creates it. Learning itself becomes the ultimate augmented reality. Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear! They are so close in fact that they are tied to our observation of them and need our input to finalize their form.

For the Apter Rebbe, this is why the Talmudic statement inserts the clause mandating that learning be everyday. This introduces the temporalization of the law. Unlike a static and petrified legal system, the Jewish conception of law is rooted in walking (halicha). Not merely walking the road or plotting a course through a fixed environment but traversal of an ocean. The image of the people walking out of Egypt through the split sea is metaphorically spun as the sociological navigation of a chaotic backdrop of unclarified reality that suddenly and spontaneously opens up a ‘dry path’ where one did not exist previously as the emergence of an objective distinction from a primal state of non-distinction.

On the one hand, this would account for the often perceived contingency of law whose cuts and divisions of our unbroken and continuous experience of life into discreet units and sections (each with their assigned meaning) would come as an imposition (like our newfound dry land amidst the natural water world). Everyday this activity must be enacted anew. Each moment affords us this ability to complete the bare possibilities of Creation and witness our own hand in the formative process. Time seals, unseals and reseals the deal repeatedly.

By championing the role of the observer played by the learner in this way, the Talmud, in the mind of the Apter Rebbe, transfers one of the vital engines of creativity into the domain of the human mind. Since each day brings with it novel dimensions and interpretations of the law, the law is itself in a state of becoming. Perhaps we could say that it is in a ‘fixed’ state of becoming. Moreover, as the law becomes or evolves so too does Creation itself. We do not simply decorate the objective world–we are subcontracted designers working under the Chief Architect or Master Builder (often taken as synonyms for a Divine Creator) with a full budget and bulging box of trade tools. At issue is the relationship between theoretical and applied science. Our ability to theorize the world ends in our fashioning the world in the image of that theory with the model limiting our access to the real. Alterations in the theory will get translated into the perception of novel possibilities popping out of an ever growing universe.

Our ‘sourcing’ of the generative prowess of learning law will continue in Part Eight.

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/position-measurement-and-observation-part-8/

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/position-measurement-and-observation-part-6/

Print PDF