In the previous portion we opened chapter 5 and studied its first lines. The subject of the chapter is the immense preciousness of Torah study: when a Jew learns and understands, and his mind is occupied with the wisdom of Torah, his intellect becomes one with the wisdom of the Holy One, blessed be He, in a union that has no parallel anywhere else in the world, not even something comparable to it, and all this happens even when he grasps a simple piece of Torah reasoning, as expressed in the verse from Shir HaShirim brought at the end of chapter 4. We also examined the two states that come into being at the moment of study: a person's mind encompasses the halachah once he has understood it, and his mind is encompassed by it, since he is immersed within it.
We are on daf 9b, at the top of the page, and the discussion itself is best begun from the last four words of daf 9a.
"והנה הלכה זו היא חכמתו ורצונו של הקדוש ברוך הוא"
"Now, this halachah is the wisdom and the will of the Holy One, blessed be He."
What the Jew learns and understands is the wisdom of the Holy One, blessed be He, and the ruling that emerges from his study is the will of the Holy One, blessed be He. It turns out that the Divine wisdom and the Divine will are both invested in that particular halachah the person is studying. "שעלה ברצונו שכשיטען ראובן כך וכך ושמעון כך וכך יהא הפסק ביניהם כך וכך" ("for it arose in His will that when Reuven claims such and such and Shimon claims such and such, the ruling between them shall be such and such"): when a person opens a Shulchan Aruch and studies a given halachah, at that very moment he is studying the Divine will as it has clothed itself in the wisdom he is grasping. So it is with the laws of Choshen Mishpat: a dispute between two neighbors, two men holding on to a garment and the like, Reuven claims one thing and Shimon claims the opposite, and the Divine will determines what the ruling shall be in this situation. At the very moment he sits in his home or in the beis midrash and learns that halachah, he becomes one and joined with the wisdom and will of the Creator of the world. In the previous lesson we dwelled at length on the precision of the Alter Rebbe's language in this passage.
"ואף אם לא היה ולא יהיה הדבר הזה לעולם"
"And even if this matter never was and never will be."
The Alter Rebbe continues that even if we are dealing with a case that is clearly known never to have occurred in history and never to occur in the future, "לבוא למשפט על טענות ותביעות אלו" ("to come to judgment over such claims and counterclaims"), meaning a whole chain of complicated circumstances that stands no chance of ever being brought before a beis din, and nevertheless the halachah discusses them, weighing reasoning this way and reasoning that way, a person might simply think he is wasting his time on it for nothing.
The standard examples of this are discussions in the Talmud. Take Maseches Yevamos, which describes tangled scenarios of marriages, yibum and chalitzah among relatives, cases that are not remotely realistic. So too in Choshen Mishpat there are disputes and cases that are hardly likely ever to have taken place or to take place. And in fact we find in several places in the Written Torah itself a detailed set of laws governing cases that never happened and never will.
For example, the Written Torah devotes lengthy verses to the ir hanidachas, the wayward city, whose law is that all its spoil and the entire city are to be burned. In Maseches Sanhedrin a beraisa is brought: "עיר הנידחת לא הייתה ולא עתידה להיות", there never was an ir hanidachas and there never will be one. The Gemara asks, "ולמה נכתבה?", why then was it written? And it answers, "דרוש וקבל שכר", expound it and receive reward. The Torah wrote this subject so that a person should study the wisdom of Hashem and receive reward for uniting with the Creator of the world, and not because of any practical benefit standing before him.
The Gemara brings support for this from the opinion of Rabbi Eliezer, that any city containing even a single mezuzah does not become an ir hanidachas, and therefore no such city can exist in reality. And nevertheless whole verses were written about it, and whole pages of Gemara are devoted to it, with give and take and reasoning in both directions.
The difference between the Torah of Hashem and the wisdoms of the world:
All the wisdoms of the nations of the world, the patents, the inventions, the analyses and the theories, take up a subject only because it is relevant in practice. In the sciences a matter is tested by experiment: if the experiment shows the theory holds, that is a sign the wisdom is true; and if not, it remains in doubt until it can be proven, and when it turns out otherwise, everything is erased. Nobody enrolls in a course of study in a field he has been told in advance no longer exists and will never be of any use; a person studies a particular science because there is a chance he will be able to apply it.
There is a saying of the Rebbe Rayatz that expresses this: the laws of the world, traffic laws, monetary laws and all the rest, are produced by life, and therefore when life changes the laws change with it; whereas the laws of the Torah are not produced by life, rather they produce life. The laws of the world are contingent on the technical, the practical, the applicable, and the Torah of Hashem is not contingent on that at all: even if "לא היה ולא יהיה הדבר הזה לעולם", this matter never was and never will be, it is nevertheless the wisdom and will of the Holy One, blessed be He. This is how it arose in His will and in His wisdom.
This can be explained further by way of a mashal:
A wise man, even one who is not on the level of Shlomo HaMelech, sits and immerses himself in abstract theories and speculations. Suddenly a practical difficulty confronts him: he has no lace for his shoe, and he has to come up with a solution. He sits, thinks, and finds one. The thought about the shoelace is a thought bound up with action, and it would be ridiculous to measure the depth of his wisdom by that solution. The depth of his wisdom shows itself precisely in those theories that deal with matters far removed from the material, physical world; and to the very degree that he harnesses his intellect to a practical matter, we are dealing with the external dimension of his wisdom.
The same is true of the wisdom of Torah: it is precisely because this wisdom need not be relevant in practice that it is revealed to be an infinite Divine will. There is no requirement that every matter in Torah find a place in the physical world of action; on the contrary, this wisdom is above the physical world and abstracted from it. And if a person studies a ruling that has no practical application, that is no deficiency whatsoever. He is studying the Divine wisdom itself, and in the language of the Gemara, "דרוש וקבל שכר", and through this study he is joined with the will and wisdom of the Holy One, blessed be He.
"משיג ותופס ומקיף בשכלו"
"He grasps, holds and encompasses in his mind."
And so the Alter Rebbe continues: "הרי כשאדם יודע ומשיג בשכלו פסק זה כהלכה ערוכה במשנה או גמרא או פוסקים" ("when a person knows and grasps with his intellect this ruling as a halachah set out in the Mishnah or Gemara or the poskim"), in whatever area of Torah he studies, whether Mishnah, Gemara or poskim, "הרי זה משיג ותופס ומקיף בשכלו רצונו וחכמתו של הקדוש ברוך הוא" ("he thereby grasps, holds and encompasses in his mind the will and wisdom of the Holy One, blessed be He"). At the opening of the chapter the Alter Rebbe explained the term "tefisah," holding: when a person takes hold of something, he has internalized it into his mind. And once he has grasped and taken hold of it, his intellect encompasses the will and wisdom of the Holy One, blessed be He.
Now, Eliyahu HaNavi says "דלית מחשבה תפיסא ביה", no thought can take hold of Him, and not of His will and His wisdom either. And nevertheless there is one single way in which they can be grasped: "כי אם בהתלבשותם בהלכות הערוכות לפנינו" ("only as they are clothed in the halachos set out before us"), when a person studies the Divine wisdom as it has invested itself in the halachos lying before him in the Shulchan Aruch.
And the Alter Rebbe adds: "וגם שכלו מלובש בהם" ("and his intellect is also clothed within them"). Here we have the two dimensions we spoke about at the beginning of the chapter: his mind encompasses the halachah, and his mind is encompassed by it, like the mashal of a person embracing the king while the king embraces him.
To summarize: in this portion we learned that the halachah a person studies is the wisdom and will of the Holy One, blessed be He, for so it arose in His will that this should be the ruling between Reuven and Shimon; and even if that situation never was and never will be, like the ir hanidachas of which they said "it never was and never will be" and "expound it and receive reward," this is no deficiency at all. We examined the difference between the Torah of Hashem and the wisdoms of the world, which are contingent on practical usefulness, and the mashal of the wise man whose depth of wisdom shows itself precisely in speculations abstracted from action. Finally we learned that in the halachos set out before us the will and wisdom of the Holy One, blessed be He, are grasped, even though "no thought can take hold of Him," and that through this study a person's intellect both encompasses them and is clothed within them.
In the next portion we will continue with the Alter Rebbe's words in chapter 5 and delve into the wondrous, unparalleled union that comes into being between a person's mind and the wisdom of Hashem at the time of study.