Experiential Torah

Translated and Adapted by Braha Bender

To perform a mitzvah (Torah commandment) is to plug in to the live current of divine energy vivifying every spiritual and material entity in existence. You’re touching the marrow, cutting to the quick, pulsing. This is the essence of why we came here. Can you feel it?

The intellectual meaning behind every mitzvah (Torah commandment) is extraordinarily profound, interconnected in a vast, exquisite web with every other commandment and concept in the entire corpus of G-d’s word and creation. Torah engages our intellectual capacities to 100% maximum capacity, but Torah is not limited to our finite human intellect either.

Torah’s wisdom is infinite and encompasses every aspect of the human experience. As such, the meaning of mitzvos are also an experiential reality. The intellect leads, but unless the heart, the hands, and all the rest of the body follow suit, the Jew’s actualization of his or her spiritual potential is incomplete.

Intellectual Joyride

Some of our early sages even warned against becoming too involved in the intellectual panorama backing up mitzvah performance. Worried that we would become wildly enamored of the Torah’s stunning intellectual joyride, they were concerned we might forget that every mitzvah has an infinite number of meanings, and that G-d’s Torah cannot be contained between the small space making up our cranium. The rush for the gold of intellectual achievement would get us so rich so quick that our own arrogance might begin to overshadow the true greatness of the infinite Torah.

Another truth that those sages were concerned we would lose sight of is that, as rich and fascinating an intellectual landscape as the Torah provides to explore, certain depths of meaning can only be accessed directly: “Taste and see that G-d is good” (Psalms 34:9).

Certain mitzvos called chukim tap into the human capacity for experiential learning directly. The intellectual meaning behind these mitzvos is simply inaccessible within the limited intellectual processes human beings are capable of. However, they reflect a fundamental wisdom applicable to all mitzvos, a truth even deeper than that of all of the intellectual fireworks.

The Truth About Chukim

One example of such a mitzvah is commonly referred to as the mitzvah of para adumah, the red heifer. This mitzvah involves sprinkling the ashes of a red heifer over a person who has entered in to a state of tumah, spiritual blockage. The touch of the ashes transforms his state of tumah into a state of tahara, spiritual receptivity. However, the self-same ashes touching a person who is in a state of tahara makes them tameh, spiritually blocked. Though the symbolism of the red heifer is rich and fascinating, the actual spiritual mechanism behind these effects was designed to elude the intellect completely.

Take it from Solomon. Scripture writes of Shlomo (Solomon), “G-d gave wisdom to Shlomo … and he was the wisest of men” (Kings I 5:9-11). Despite his wisdom, when confronted with the mystery of the red heifer, Shlomo admitted, “I seek wisdom, but it eludes me” (Ecclesiastes 7:23).

What truths hide behind the few mitzvos referred to as chukim, laws woven into the threads that make up our existence but that are impossible for us to intellectually grasp?

The Jewish People declared at Sinai, “We will do, and we will understand” (Exodus 24:7). The sequence of their declaration went against the grain. Understanding generally is demanded before commitment. Sinai was different, though. The Jewish People had tapped into an existential truth: it is “doing” that begets true understanding -- and a genuine experience of meaning.

This truth continues to affect us today. As much as we can learn about the technicalities, mechanics, and looks-good-on-paper ideas about the meaning of mitzvos, we don’t really know what we’re talking about until we dive in and taste it. Chocolate, swimming in cool water, the green flash at sunset over the Indian Ocean, keeping Shabbos – you can talk all you want, but, as one of the Jazz greats put it, “You don’t know a thing if you ain’t got that swing.”

Freed at Sinai

Unfortunately, the converse is true as well. Eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil brought death into the world. Instead of leaning in to their relationship with the Almighty and trusting the infinite wisdom of His commandment, Adam and Chava (Eve) relied on their own, limited powers of deduction. The Almighty had said that they should not eat the fruit, but it sure looked great to them. Were they right? No! They were – excuse the pun – dead wrong. Their lack of humility in the face of the wisdom of the Divine introduced the mortality that would define the course of human history.

The Almighty gave us the means to overcome the laws of nature: the mitzvos in His Torah. In fact, for a moment at Sinai, we were freed. As the Jewish People stood like a single person with a single heart and declared, “We will do and we will understand,” they freed themselves from the shackles of mortality.

That following the Almighty made sense was obvious – His love for us and His infinite power had both been proven. The triumph was that for a moment we overcame the scrambling, desperate, defensive human impulse to backtrack, to say for the umpteenth time, “Does that really make sense?” It did make sense. We had gotten clarity and now chose to act on it. We made ourselves whole, committing to act on that clarity come what may, no matter how dark it would become. We had reached the hilt of human understanding and were ready to go beyond, no longer limited by our human intellectual capacities.

Don’t get it wrong: Torah encourages questioning and study above almost all else. It’s just that, at Sinai, every step of the intellectual ladder had already been climbed. We had reached the top rung, and then stepped off into pure space, pure weightlessness, pure freedom. G-d’s wisdom would carry us now. We were free – and death, the greatest human limitation of all, no longer had any power over us.

Ready to Fly

It’s grown pretty dark over the centuries since then. Holocausts, pogroms, expulsions, and tragedies beyond recall have colored our years. A fine film of exhaustion challenges us to give into the voice that says that immediate gratification, including immediate intellectual gratification, would be so much easier.

But don’t be fooled. The intellect is not the measure by which the Torah is to be judged. The Torah is the measure by which the intellect is to be judged. Once your mind has taken you as far as it can go and you have confirmed Torah’s truth, consistence, and legitimacy, it’s time to let go. It’s time to fly.

Our freedom from death at Sinai lasted only precious moments until we fell once again with the sin of the golden calf. We asserted our own limited understanding as superior to the infinite understanding of the Almighty. We stepped right back into death’s clutches. We had chosen to be ruled by human limitations, including mortality.

But the ashes of the red heifer are sprinkled by means of the common hyssop, a symbol of humility. The red heifer, and all other chukim, take us back to the foundation of true wisdom: realizing that we are inherently limited. The laws of the Red Heifer are one of those things we just can’t understand.

It is when we acknowledge that Torah is limitless, not us, that we become tahor, spiritually receptive. We become ready to pour our whole being into the Torah; intellect, heart, and body. We become ready to fly. If the human intellect has achieved great things, just imagine where the Torah might take us...