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Thought for the Day: the Torah Is Meant to Be Lived -- Therefore It Must Be Learned and Taught

A question was posed to me concerning a difficulty in reconciling Rashi in two places.  In Shmos 20:8, Rashi notes that שמור and זכור regarding Shabbos in the עשרת הדיברות/Ten Commandments were actually said as one. However, on Vayikra 1:10 (the first open space between parshios in sefer Vayikra), Rashi comments that the breaks in the written text indicate where Moshe Rabbeinu was given a break/breather to contemplate and process the lesson he had just learned from HaShem. How can there be breaks when everything was said on once?

I first would like to note that the question is stronger than just asking about two conflicting medrashim. We know from מסורה/authentic tradition that medrashim do not need to all work together. Each medrash has a homiletical  message to deliver; the messages form one unified whole, but not necessarily the delivery vehicles. Rashi's job, though, is to weave statements from Chazal into a unified whole to understand a basic reading of the text. The question, therefore is fair and demands an answer.

My approach to problems like this is to see if I can't find a more fundamental difficulty of which this is just one example. (This technique works very well in both Torah and physics; that is, both Truth and truth are amenable to this approach. After all, truth will out.) One Chazal tells us the עשרת הדיברות (and, by implication, the entire Torah) was given בדיבור אחד/all in one expression. Another Chazal, though, tells us that we only heard the first two directly from HaShem, and the other 611 from Moshe Rabbeinu. (It is from there, in fact, that we learn there are 613 commandments; the gematria of תורה is 611 plus the two that we heard directly from HaShem.) The accepted resolution of this apparent paradox is that the entire Torah was first essentially implanted in us, then was taught to us word by word, concept by concept. We can apply that same resolution to our current question.

As it happens, with this answer I expressed the same though as the S'fas Emes! (I have a added a snippet from the S'fas Emes at the end so you can see for yourself.) I have now and then found a chiddush of mine to have already been expressed by one of our sages over the centuries. The experience is always at one exhilarating and unsettling.  Exhilarating to feel I am making progress on "re-minding" myself into someone whose thought processes are in consonance with reality. Unsettling because it reminds me that I have so much more to learn. In any case, I shall use the exhilaration to give me the (more free than usual) license to express additional chidushim on this topic. One technical, one more fundamental.

The technical question is: Once I know the entire Torah was given בדיבור אחד, what is added by telling me that two words of the Torah -- שמור and זכור -- were given בדיבור אחד? I answer that with a classic "I would have thought to say.... but now I understand differently" argument. I would have thought that the entire Torah was given בדיבור אחד meant each and every non-conflicting statement was "fitted into place" at once, but two dimensions of a single topic -- here the שמור dimension and זכור dimension of Shabbos -- would not have been included. That is, the part of my brain that understands about kosher food was programmed at the same time the Shabbos part of my brain was being programmed; but not two topics into one compartment. Therefore Chazal come to explain that even topics that seem to demand serialization were given in parallel.

The more fundamental question is: why? If would could just have the entire Torah implanted into us, what's the point of the laborious teaching and learning process? If it had to be learned, what was the point of implanting it into us?

The Torah is fundamentally and wholly Divine; it transcends human understanding. The Torah perforce had to be implanted; it can't go in any other way. On the other hand, the Torah is meant to be lived by human beings, not executed like a program by angels.

The Torah was given first -- without breaks or pauses בדיבור אחד --  was so we would know it. The process of learning Torah, in fact, is different than any other kind of learning. Learning Torah is more akin go mining for gems and precious metals. As a consequence, how to learn Torah is part and parcel of learning Torah. The second time (with spaces, pauses, and punctuation) was to teach us so we would know how to teach. HaShem would teach Moshe Rabbeinu a lesson, then Moshe Rabbeinu would contemplate how to transfer that knowledge to the his talmidim in a way that they could process the information it a way that made sense to them.

The Torah is living and the process of transmitting Torah is living; rebbi to talmid, generation to generation.

S'fas Emes on the initial question:

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