Torah — Written and Oral

The written Torah is meant to be read. It’s wisdom is meant to be given over as is.

As far as how we apply the wisdom of the Torah — that is meant to be an oral tradition. 

Application changes with each scenario, and as such, we need honest Rabbis who understand the Torah, to consistently re-examine the situation and reapply the wisdom. To show us the proper way to internalize the Torah’s teachings.

I see these as the perfect paths of the Written Torah and the Oral Torah — the דרך הממוצע — but there are also extremes on both sides of each path that we can fall into. 

One can say that the Torah is outdated, old fashioned, and beneath us. Or that the Torah is too holy, beyond our reach, and above us. 

We can claim that high levels of spirituality are made up and complete fairy tales. Or we can claim that they are so high and holy that we can never reach them.

We can choose not to read the Written Torah at all, or we can choose to only follow the Written Torah — without accepting any sort of oral tradition.

We can be completely heretical or overly literal.

Too open minded or too dogmatic. 

An אפיקורס or a צדוקי. 

Either way the real Torah is lost — exiled from where it belongs — separated from the Truth.

Both of these extremes are Klipot — counter productive ways of thinking — ערב רב וערב זעיר. 

Both of these extremes conceal the true fruit. That the Torah is full of supernal wisdom which we can and should learn, understand, embody, and incorporate into our lives. 

The same sort of extremes can be found within the study and application of the Oral Torah. 

We can say that the Rabbis completely made things up, or we can regard what they said as the written word. 

We can say that they were ignorant men who had no idea what they were talking about, or we can say that they were absolute angels and every word they uttered was the word of God.

Again — we can be too open minded or too dogmatic. 

Too secular or too orthodox.

We can learn the Oral Torah and overextend our ability to interpret and apply it:

״אפילו אומר לך על ימין שהוא שמאל ועל שמאל שהוא ימין״

— essentially putting the Torah beneath us and telling it what it means — selling the priesthood to the highest bidder — listening to false prophets — serving foreign gods and idols. Or, we can go to the opposite extreme and forget that it must be re-examined and reapplied. We wrote down what was supposed to be oral. As such, the Oral tradition was concretized, placed on a pedestal, and now it’s difficult to bring it back down to earth in different manifestations for each different scenario.

In short, these are just a few issues that I wanted to rant about today. These are but a few extremes that we can fall into along our journey.

May we somehow find the middle path.