Vayera (Hasidism)

“Abraham observed the Entire Torah”

One of the interesting questions, prompted by one of the verses in this week’s parsha, is whether or not the patriarchs observed the actual laws of the Torah even before Sinai. Gen 18:8 states that Abraham, upon receiving the angels who brought the tidings of Sarah’s miraculous pregnancy, took “butter [or: curds?] and milk and the calf they had prepared, and placed them before them.” What about the laws of milk and meat? Did Abraham ignore them? Or does the sequence of the items in the verse imply that they ate first the dairy items and only thereafter the meat, as is permitted? Or perhaps, following a strict reading of Exod 23:19 and parallels, as the milk and meat weren’t actually cooked together, it was still minimally kosher according to Torah law?

This problem (and other patriarchal violations of Torah law, such as Jacob’s marriage to two sisters, and Amram marrying his own aunt) exercised the rabbis. Some held that the patriarchs observed the Torah even before it was given, knowing it intuitively, through their extraordinary attunement to the Divine; while others said that of course they did not, and that their Divine worship was of a more spiritual, free-form nature. In the following passage from Meor Einayim, R. Nahum of Chernobyl addresses this issue, taking it in an interesting direction:

“Abraham our Father fulfilled the entire Torah before it was given” [Yoma 28b]. For the Torah devolves from Wisdom, and Wisdom is a called “a point.” And there the entire Torah is embodied and enwrapped in a single point, and therefore it is hidden from the eyes of every living creature, and from the birds of heaven, since the entire Torah is incorporated in one point. Therefore it says, “And God spoke all these things” [Exod 20:1]. And our Rabbis interpreted this, that He spoke the entire Torah in a single utterance [Mekhilta, Yitro, Ch 4]. That is, He spoke the entire Torah from the supernal point called Wisdom, which is the yod of the name YHWH.

This passage develops the concept of Hokhmah: the Divine Wisdom, the primal Logos or Word, that sefirah or Divine potentiality most closely identified with God as He is in Himself, prior to Creation and His interaction with the created universe, in the hidden recesses of the Infinite. This force—so holy and hidden that it is only rarely discussed in Kabbalah—is depicted as a concentrated, singular force, symbolized by the letter yod, which is little more than a point. Creation (and Revelation) is then envisioned as a process of emanation, of expansion, of development from that single, concentrated point. The very first page of the Zohar contains a description of Creation beginning from the nekudah penima’ah, the “innermost point.” Creation is then seen as an act of expansion, in length and breadth, of Divine potential. No wonder some have seen the “big bang” theory as immanent in the Zohar. And just as God existed in this way before Creation, so too the Torah, the force or map with which the universe was created, was pre-existent. But unlike the Torah as we know it, with its 600,000 letters and 285 columns, the Torah was concentrated within one word (like Shamor and Zakhor, “observe” and “remember” of the Shabbat commandment that were seen as being spoken in one word).

But who can apprehend the entire Torah from one point? Therefore Israel said [to Moses], “Speak with us, and we shall listen…” [Exod 20:16]. That is, that it shall devolve and come to the level of Comprehension [da’at], which is the attribute of Moses. And this is, “Moses spoke, and God answered him with a voice” [Exod 19:19]. It devolved and descended to the attribute of Voice [kol], which is the drawing down represented by the letter vav of the divine name, in which Wisdom descended to Understanding [binah], and from thence to the attribute of Voice. And then Israel could apprehend it.

Revelation—and Creation—is seen as a process of devolution and expansion—that is, of spreading out of Divine potential throughout the universe. Moses’ repetition to the people of what he heard from God make it comprehensible to the ordinary human mind. Creation is thus a spreading out, a spelling out of what was before very concentrated, existing (at least from the human viewpoint) only in potential. The four letters of the Divine name symbolize the dynamic process by which the Divine light or power or energy descends into the universe. If yod is the origin, and the first heh is the process of expansion and extension that is Creation, then vav, a straight up-and-down line, represents the process of flow from the upper realms into our mundane, lowly world.

But Abraham our Father, peace be upon him, was a vessel for this attribute, which is the supernal point of the yod of the Divine Name, and he apprehended the entire Torah as it is, in the supernal point. Therefore it is written, “and God appeared to him” [Gen 18:1], simply thus, and it is not written there “to Abraham.” For he was a vehicle of the supernal wisdom, and it was hidden from every living thing, and Abraham our Father came to a world which is very hidden and secret; therefore he cannot be called by his name, because he came to a place that was very hidden.

Moses and Abraham embody the two aspects symbolized by yod and vav. Moses is the teacher -- the elaborator, the explicator, who translates the concepts of Torah to the people and makes it comprehensible. Abraham , “the beloved of God,” lives on the level of pristine spirituality, of the pre-Sinai expression of Torah. He has a kind of intuitive grasp of the entire Torah all at once; he apprehends the Torah (which is also God’s name) in a powerful, condensed way; there is no need for it to be spelled out.

Hasidut contains many images of great teachers and mystics who have this kind of grasp of Torah. A central image in Hasidic legend is that of the Baal Shem Tov looking into the Zohar (which is itself not merely a text, an esoteric midrash, but a kind of key or tool for deciphering the Torah, a code to the universe itself) and seeing things happening far away. After such a contemplation, he may hitch up his horses, utter certain Holy Names, and instantly be where he needs to be—perhaps in Prague, to restore a recalcitrant, assimilated husband, whose face he saw in the pages of the Zohar, to his abandoned wife.

Therefore it is written: ”These were the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created” [behibaram; Gen 2:4]. Do not read “when they were created” but “with Abraham” [be-Avraham; a juxtaposition of the same letters; Tanhuma, Bereshit 2]. For he was the existence of the world. For he was the vehicle for the above attribute of Wisdom….

To return to our original question about the patriarch’s observance of the Torah: Abraham, as the “vehicle” for the attribute of Wisdom, transcends the Torah in the form of concrete laws, but is united with it on a pristine, spiritual plane. We have here a clear typology of spiritual and material forms of service. Arthur Green, in his important study, Devotion and Commandment, surveys the development of this idea, through the treatment of precisely this issue, from Rabbinic times through the Kabbalah, devoting particular attention to Hasidism. He speaks there of the conflict between institutionalized forms and the impulse of the heart, of “the two faces of the human religious enterprise… religion as the striving of the individual for inwardness, transcendence, or direct access to divinity, and religion as a group’s articulation of its system of meaning, the ‘social construction of reality.’”

Perhaps we have here a kind of suppressed rebellion against the incessant, strict demands of the halakhah; a kind of nostalgia, a subterranean yearning for the non-structured, for a purely emotional, ecstatic attachment to God without constant niggling worries about the myriad details of the halakhah. This same impulse, after all, was that which gave birth to Pauline Christianity. Not that R. Nahum or the other early Hasidic masters advocate overthrowing a single stricture of halakhah, but that they sought to restore the place of the spirit, of that which cannot be defined or measured, to its rightful place on the agenda of the religious Jew. Here it is celebrated by projecting it into the dim mists of the past: Abraham as a spiritual “vehicle for the Shekhinah.”