Kavanot: Let Me Count the Ways ו

מא ויבאני חסדך ה׳; תשועתך כאמרתך׃
מב ואענה חרפי דבר; כי בטחתי בדברך׃
מג ואל תצל מפי דבר אמת עד מאד; כי למשפטך יחלתי׃
מד ואשמרה תורתך תמיד לעולם ועד׃
מה ואתהלכה ברחבה; כי פקדיך דרשתי׃
מו ואדברה בעדתיך נגד מלכים; ולא אבוש׃
מז ואשתעשע במצותיך אשר אהבתי׃
מח ואשא כפי אל מצותיך אשר אהבתי; ואשיחה בחקיך׃

אם יאמר לך אדם יש חכמה בגוים תאמן…יש תורה בגוים אל תאמן.

Cf. C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (London, 1958), ch. 3, “the Cursings.” While written from an explicitly Christian point of view—and hence not wholly palatable for a Jewish reader—the chapter contains some valuable insights.

ח תורת ה׳ תמימה משיבת נפש; עדות ה׳ נאמנה מחכימת פתי׃ … יא הנחמדים מזהב ומפז רב; ומתוקים מדבש ונפת צופים׃

In Racine’s tragedy of Athalie the chorus of Jewish girls sing an ode about the original giving of the Law on Mount Sinai, which has the remarkable refrain ô charmante loi…How we should translate charmante I don’t know; ‘enchanting’? ‘delightful’? ‘beautiful’? None of them quite fits. What is, however, certain is that Racine (a mighty poet and steeped in the Bible) is here coming nearer than any modern writer I know to a feeling very characteristic of certain Psalms. And it is a feeling which I found at first utterly bewildering.

‘…sweeter also than honey and the honey-comb ’ (19:10). One can well understand this being said of G-d’s mercies, G-d’s visitations, His attributes. But what the poet is actually talking about is G-d’s law, His commands…

This was to me at first very mysterious. ‘Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not commit adultery’—I can understand that a man can, and must, respect these ‘statutes’, and try to obey them, and assent to them in his heart. But it is very hard to find how they could be, so to speak, delicious, how they exhilarate…[S]urely it could be more aptly compared to the dentist’s forceps or the front line than to anything enjoyable or sweet.

A…great scholar to whom I once put this question said he thought the poets were referring to the satisfaction men felt in knowing they had obeyed the Law; in other words, to the ‘pleasures of a good conscience’…The difficulty is that the Psalmists never seem to me to say anything very like this.

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We can guess at once that [the Psalmist] felt about the Law somewhat as he felt about his poetry: both involved exact and loving conformity to an intricate pattern…It may be the delight in Order, the pleasure of getting things ‘just so’—as in dancing a minuet…

But there is something else in to our purpose in this grave poem [Psalm 119]. On three occasions the poet asserts that the Law is ‘true’ or ‘the truth’ (vv. 86, 138, 142)…They mean that in the Law you find the ‘real’ or ‘correct’ or stable, well-grounded, directions for living…His laws have emeth, ‘truth’, intrinsic validity, rock-bottom reality, being rooted in His own nature, and are therefore as solid as that Nature which He has created…Their delight in the Law is a delight in having touched firmness; like the pedestrian’s delight in feeling the hard road beneath his feet after a false short cut has long entangled him in muddy fields.

How can finite man commune with an infinite G-d? To both Christians and Jews, G-d himself has made that possible by irrupting into the temporal world…To Catholic, Orthodox, and some Protestant Christians, communion involves partaking of the physical real presence of G-d in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. By contrast, the Torah draws the Jew into engagement with G-d’s infinite mind. Torah learning is the definitive Jewish mode of communion with G-d. Although the Torah contains in potential all that G-d wants to teach us, all the generations of Israel labor together to make this manifest. Because the Torah is infinite and inexhaustible, learning Torah yields new insights—what the rabbis called hiddushim, or innovations. That is how the Torah sustains and renews Israel’s love affair with G-d. A love nourished by the Torah may seem obscure to Christians, and perhaps even more obscure to loosely affiliated Jews…But G-d has made Israel his partner in sanctification by giving a Torah that requires the human mind to engage the mind of G-d.

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The Jewish rejection of incarnation, though, does not leave G-d at a distance, remote and inaccessible. Judaism approaches G-d through the observance of his commandments, the most important of which, equal to all the others combined, is Torah learning: the intellectual engagement with the divine author of the commandments. The liturgical dictum that the meta-commandment of Torah learning surpasses all other commandments makes clear that Jewish observance is not merely a matter of mechanical submission. Torah learning elicits a divine-human partnership, a continuing relationship of teacher and taught, of lover and beloved. It is not submission but communion, in which the engagement of the intellect is essential to approaching G-d.

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That C. S. Lewis, a mind sensitive to religious questions, struggled to explain the psalmist’s delight suggests that the source of Torah’s surpassing sweetness is not intuitively obvious to Christians. Learning Torah proceeds from intense faith, but it is not merely a matter of faith. The encounter with the Divine takes place through lifelong intellectual engagement with God’s infinite mind, which surpasses all praise and, by implication, all belief.

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What, then, makes the Torah, as the psalmist says, “sweeter than honeycombs”? The answer lies in the joy of discovering G-d’s mind.

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In the world of Torah learning, communion with the mind of G-d is not Aquinas’s beatific vision; it is a practical exercise. Its object is not a transcendent vision of perfection; instead, one seeks the specific shape of G-d’s intent to sanctify our daily lives. The Neoplatonic tradition seeks the mind of God in the transcendent forms of things, of which our quotidian world seems a mere hint or shadow. In communion with the mind of the G-d of Israel, one seeks not the ideal forms but, rather, proper use of the pots and pans in a kosher kitchen, the candles and wine of the Sabbath table, and the laws governing Jewish birth, marriage, and death. Socrates spoke of philosophy as a way of escaping this world by way of a cognitive grasp of the transcendent perfection of the next. In contrast, the rabbis spoke of the afterlife as the “Heavenly Academy,” whose divine Teacher and immortal pupils concern themselves with the here and now.