Every intelligent person who studies Gemara has the same question: How can the Sages derive far-reaching laws from minutiae like extra letters and words in the Torah? If a word, for example, has an extra “vav,” how in the world do the Sages know that it’s supposed to teach us law X? Why not law Y or law Z? And is this “vav” really so obviously superfluous that it should teach us any law at all?
One standard answer is that the Sages didn’t really derive anything from extra letters or words. Rather, they knew the laws from tradition and merely anchored them in the written Torah. This explanation works but still leaves something to be desired, in my opinion.
A more compelling explanation (l’fi aniyas dati) appears at the beginning of Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch’s commentary to this week’s parsha. He compares the written Torah to “short notes on a full and extensive lecture on any scientific subject” and explains:
“For the student who has heard the whole lecture, short notes are quite sufficient to bring back afresh to his mind at any time the whole subject of the lecture. For him, a word, an added mark of interrogation or exclamation, a dot, the underlining of a word, etc. etc. is often quite sufficient to recall to his mind a whole series of thoughts…. For those who had not heard the lecture from the master, such notes would be completely useless.”
We received the Torah at Mt. Sinai and lived in accordance with its dictates for a “full 40 years before Moshe, just before his death,” gave us the written Torah. This written document is thus not the basis of Judaism’s laws according to Rav Hirsch. It merely is “an aid to memory and reference.” The real source of Judaism’s laws is the Oral Tradition.
So yes, when you study Gemara, many of the Sages’ expositions may seem ridiculous. Indeed, Rav Hirsch notes that the “truths that the initiated reproduce from [extra letters, etc.]…are sneered at by the uninitiated as being merely a clever or witty play of words or empty dreams without any real foundation.”
But that’s only because these people did not attend “the lecture.” To them, the “lecture notes” seem unintelligible, and extra dots or letters indicate nothing, or strike them as “unmeaning sphinxes.” To those who attended “the lecture,” though – or diligently studied it from their forbears – these extra dots, letters, etc. are “instructive guiding stars to the wisdom that had been taught and learnt” throughout the course of Jewish history.
Very interesting! This explanation completes changes the way one looks at the written Torah and makes the halakhic expositions of Chazal far more understandable, I believe.
Elliot Resnick, PhD, is the host of “The Elliot Resnick Show” and the editor of an upcoming work on etymological explanations in Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch’s commentary on Chumash.