Questions on Ralbag Paper

Hi Rabbi,

I have a few questions on your Ralbag paper:

1) You said Ralbag remarks that his shift away from language focus was transformational in his own development.  Where does he say this?

2) You say the conventional approach's focus on small units of text does not demand that the reader have mastery of Torah literature as a whole.  This statement implies that Ralbag's approach does, in fact, demand that the reader have mastery of Torah literature as a whole.  But isn't that a catch 22?  Ralbag is an aid to gaining mastery of Torah literature, but at the same time one must have a mastery of Torah literature before understanding Ralbag's approach???  Which one is the means and which one is the end?

3) You speak of Ralbag's overall theory of Torah.  What is this theory and where does he state it?

4) You say Ralbag presents introductions that extend this theory to certain key Torah stories.  Which stories?  Where and how does he do this?

Thanks,
Dan

Confusion

Rabbi,

On Sunday we spoke about asking the right type of question on Chumash - a question on the book instead of a question on the specifics of a story.  But I thought the questions on my previous post (the Dibros) were the right types of questions, yet you said to move away from the Dibros and focus on something else.  Plus you said that the order of when Moshe received the Torah and the Dibros and the strange presentation of the whole thing, were not questions you focused on, rather, you focused more on the Dibros themselves, which again confused me because I thought those would have been the right type of questions.

I think what would really help me out at this point would be to give me an example of the right type of question, the type of question we're looking for.  That way I could just imitate it, instead of talking about it and guessing.

Structure and Method

Adler recommends to read through a book as fast as possible to get an over-all feeling for the book, before analyzing the specific parts of the book.  I attempted to do that with the Chumash.  Everything was going well until we got to Har Sinai.  If I had to describe the Chumash until Har Sinai, I would say it is the telling of the account of creation through the event at Har Sinai from the perspective of education of humanity of their place in creation.

But right around the Dibros, it gets confusing.  Moshe comes down from the mountain and tells the nation the Dibros.  Then there are many laws (Parshas Mishpatim).  Then after the Mishpatim, Moshe is on the mountain for 40 days and nights (which I assume is when he received the Written and Oral Torahs).

So it is all very confusing and there are many questions.  Did Moshe already receive the Torah when he told the nation the Dibros?  If so, why is it told out of order?  Why does Mishpatim break the story up?  How did Moshe even have the laws of Mishpatim yet if he didn't even receive the Torah yet?  If this is one of the most important parts of the Torah (Har Sinai and the events surrounding it), then why is it so confusing?

I'm not as interested in the specific answers to these questions as I am in getting an approach on how to learn from the odd presentation of the Written Torah.  That's why I titled this post structure and method - structure of the Five Books and the method of how to learn them.

I'm not sure if this is what you had in mind when you said in your post "Chumash piece", but this is where my mind took me.

Publish Post

Mission Statement

The purpose of this blog is twofold:
1) To understand the Five Books of Moses as a thing in it of itself.
2) To understand the Five Books of Moses in a way that it is a preparation to understand the Mishna Torah (as the Rambam explains in the introduction).