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Rav Kook – Ginzei Re’iah 137; Shemonah Kevatzim 8:124
And now, write for yourselves this song, and teach it to the Children of Israel. Place it into their mouths, in order that this song will be My witness for the children of Israel. (Devarim 31:19)
If you want to understand the inner life of a nation, you must examine its songs. While there is much to learn from a nation’s writers, it is song that truly expresses the essence of a nation’s spiritual life. Song is the deepest and most profound conception of inner truth. Song is the domain of holiness, while prose belongs to the world of חול.
What then is the song of Israel? Where do we find the root of our existence, salvation, wisdom and comprehension? What raises us above the constricted lowliness of physical reality and into the world of the spirit? In the above verse, Moshe Rabbeinu reveals the answer – “And now, write for yourselves this song.” According to the plain sense of the verse, G-d was referring to the song of Ha’azinu in the following chapter. However, our Sages have a different and much wider interpretation, understanding it as a command for every Jew to write, or at least take some part in writing, a Sefer Torah. The Torah is our song.
This is counterintuitive. Torah is many things, but a song does not seem like one of them. Torah is G-d’s revealed wisdom – but not music. It is prose – but not poetry. To refer to the Torah as a ‘song’ seems to ignore its commandments. It also seems inconsistent with how the Torah presents itself – i.e. a body of rigorous, precisely defined and exacting Divine laws. Where in the edifice of the 613 mitzvot does this ‘song’ emerge from?
A broader perspective will help resolve these questions. Yes, the Torah is a collection of words and laws that G-d expects us to follow – but that is not all it is. Its words and laws reflect a higher spiritual order and revelation of G-dliness. That higher dimension of the Torah is what Moshe refers to as a song. The precisely defined categories of Torah law – the world of chochmah – flow from the higher reality of song. Law comes to articulate and expand on the Torah’s song, to create ‘vessels’ for it.[1]A song must have structure and rules, or else it will degenerate into disorder and mere discordant noise. Every mitzvah, every halachic detail,[2]and every line of the Shulchan Aruch is a note in this G-dly symphony.
We must teach ourselves that the Torah’s song is always there, and habituate ourselves to its truth. If we are sensitive enough, we will realize that Torah is not burdensome. To serve G-d as if compelled, as if one is a slave, is small-minded blindness. The Divine Law is the greatest imaginable perfection. As our Sages put it,[3]שכר מצוה מצוה, “The reward for a mitzvah is the mitzvah.” Or, to put it differently – just as there are rules of poetry, so too, there is poetry in rules.
[1]Indeed, according to Radak and Maharal (גור אריה, בראשית א:א), the very word ‘Torah’ comes from the word הוראה, i.e. ‘instruction,’ ‘law.’
[2]It is clear from many places in Rav Kook’s writing that this is true of all aspects of religious observance – not only Torah commandments, but also rabbinic ordinances and even minhagim.
[3]Pirkei Avot, Chapter 4.
Food for Thought
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: The Netziv interprets… that the whole Torah should be read as poetry, not prose; the word shira in Hebrew means both a song and a poem. To be sure, most of the Torah is written in prose, but the Netziv argued that it has two characteristics of poetry. First, it is allusive rather than explicit. It leaves unsaid more than is said. Secondly, like poetry, it hints at deeper reservoirs of meaning, sometimes by the use of an unusual word or sentence construction. Descriptive prose carries its meaning on the surface. The Torah, like poetry, does not.
A completely different aspect is alluded to by Rabbi Yechiel Michel Epstein, author of the halachic code Aruch HaShulchan. Epstein points out that the rabbinic literature is full of arguments, about which the Sages said: “These and those are the words of the living G-d.” This, says Epstein, is one of the reasons the Torah is called “a song” – because a song becomes more beautiful when scored for many voices interwoven in complex harmonies. I would suggest a third dimension. The 613th command is not simply about the Torah, but about the duty to make the Torah new in each generation. To make the Torah live anew, it is not enough to hand it on cognitively – as mere history and law. It must speak to us affectively, emotionally.
Judaism is a religion of words, and yet whenever the language of Judaism aspires to the spiritual it breaks into song, as if the words themselves sought escape from the gravitational pull of finite meanings. There is something about melody that intimates a reality beyond our grasp, what William Wordsworth called the sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused/Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns/And the round ocean and the living air.Words are the language of the mind. Music is the language of the soul.
The 613th command, to make the Torah new in every generation, symbolizes the fact that though the Torah was given once, it must be received many times, as each of us, through our study and practice, strives to recapture the pristine voice heard at Mount Sinai. That requires emotion, not just intellect. It means treating Torah not just as words read, but also as a melody sung.
Zohar (Beha’alotkha 152a): Woe to the person who says that the Torah comes to give instructions and tell descriptive stories or simple tales. If this were true, even in our own time we would be able to make our own ‘Torah’ out of simple stories, and embellish them even better than the Torah’s stories… Of course this is not the case. Every word in the Torah reflects higher wisdom and higher secrets… The narratives of the Torah are only the ‘outer garments’ of the Torah. Whoever thinks that this outer clothing is in fact the Torah and there is nothing underneath is spiritually backward and has no portion in the World to Come. So it was that King David begged, “Open my eyes, that I may see wondrous things in Your Torah.” (Tehillim 119:18)
This ‘body’ of Torah is dressed in stories from this world. The fools of this world only look at this outer clothing of stories. They don’t delve into what is contained beneath the outer shell. Those who know better gaze upon the body beneath the outer shell. The wise ones, servants of the Highest King, those who stood at Mount Sinai, see through to the soul of the Torah that is truly her essence…
Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo: Our Sages teach (in Gemara Megilla 32a) that “If one reads the Torah without a melody, or repeats the Mishnah without a tune, of him Scripture says: ‘So, too, I gave them statutes that were not good and laws by which they could not live.’” When one learns Torah without spiritual sweetness symbolized in a melody, which takes the words far beyond their literary meaning, the biblical text turns into a deadly poison. Similarly, to observe a commandment without sweetness is like consuming a medicine in which the healing components have gone bad. They are not only neutralized but have become mortally dangerous.
The function of music is to connect the Word with Heaven. It is not so much the music that man plays on an instrument or sings, but the music of his soul, which is externalized through the use of an instrument or song. It leads man to the edge of the infinite and allows him to gaze, just for a few moments, into the Other. Music is the art of word exegesis. While a word on its own is dead, it is resurrected when touched by music. Music is the refutation of human finality. As such, it is the sweetness that G-d added to His Word when the Word alone was wreaking havoc. It is able to revive man when he dies as he is confronted with the bare Word at Sinai. Life without music is death—poignantly bitter when one realizes that one has never really lived.
There is little meaning in living by Halacha if one does not hear its grace…We need… a life of experiencing Halacha as a daily living music recital. Observance alone does not propel man to a level of existence where he realizes that there is more to life than the mind can grasp.
Questions for Discussion
- In what part of Torah observance is it easy or hard for you to hear the ‘song’ Rav Kook describes? Why?
- How can we train ourselves to hear the Torah’s song, as described by Rav Kook?
- Rav Kook highlights one way that Torah is like a song. Can you think of others?
- In one of his famous poems (titled משורר התשובה, lit. ‘Singer of Teshuva’), Rav Kook refers to teshuva as a ‘song.’ In what way is teshuva like a song?
- What kind of person is drawn to the song of the Torah? What kind of person is drawn to its prose, i.e. meticulous halachic observance?
- Do you have a role model who exemplifies the Torah’s song in their life? If not, how could you find one?
