Thank you very much Rabbi Reichman. Bish'chus harabbanim, morai verabbosai. The question which Rabbi Reichman posed about understanding the human role in determining what the Torah wants of us. Why is it that Hashem assigns such a role? And to understand, so on two levels. The first level is that Hashem wants that at least on its highest level, that study of Torah, Talmud Torah, should be a creative process. Now what that means is that the sages throughout the generations who have studied, taught, and transmitted Torah are not just tape recorders, they're not just, I guess that's a little bit of an outdated term, they're not just iPods or, I'm not sure, I'm sorry, not, whatever. Once upon a time when I was your age, it was a tape recorder, so they're not just, they're not just tape recorders, but they also interpret and they also flesh out what the Torah wants from us. And in that sense, so the act of Talmud Torah, the act of studying Torah becomes again something which is a creative act. Now but let's understand how that happens and how is it if studying Torah is something creative, so how at the end of the day is it that what it says in the Shulchan Aruch is something which we know represents the will of Hashem if there's human creativity involved in interpreting and in fleshing out what it is that Hashem wants? If that's also reflected in the Shulchan Aruch, so how can we say, no, that when I get up in the morning and everything I do all day long, I'm trying to do according to the will of Hashem? So there is in Torah basically, there's three areas. There's white and black in Torah, and then there's a gray area in Torah as well. What does that mean? Just to illustrate. Rashi comments in his commentary on Sefer Shemos, he says that the Torah is intentionally vague when the Torah discusses what liability a person has who rents an object from someone else. If I rent a car from you and I park it in my driveway at night securely, with the bar or whatever, with the club, yeah, thank you Shai, with the club there, you know, I take the normal precautions and then it gets stolen, gets stolen. So the question is whether or not as a renter, so is that something for which I have liability or not? So the Torah is, Rashi says in Sefer Shemos, intentionally vague. In other cases, the Torah is quite explicit. When the Torah talks about let's say I didn't rent something from you, but I voluntarily agree to watch your object, I voluntarily agree to accept it as a deposit, known as a shomer chinam, so the Torah is pretty explicit that I don't have liability if it's stolen. If I wasn't neglectful, I don't have liability if it was stolen. If on the other hand I'm a paid watchman, so then I do have liability if it's stolen. There the Torah is explicit. What happens if I'm not a watchman but I'm a renter? So the Torah is intentionally vague. So this is a perfect illustration of what we're talking about, that the Torah consists of white and black, and then intentionally there's a gray area as well. Oh, but this gives us our first point of insight, which is that before anyone can offer an opinion as to as Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Yehuda in the Mishnah do, but before anyone can offer an opinion as to what the liability of the renter should be, he has to have mastered all the white and black of Torah. So only... Those those those great great individuals who master again everything which is explicit in Torah. And there's so much which is explicit in Torah where Hakadosh Baruch Hu didn't leave it to our creativity. Again, what the what the halacha should be, what the liability should be for someone who's who's watching something just as a favor, he's not getting paid. The Torah didn't leave that to our imagination. What the liability of a paid watchman is, the Torah didn't leave to our imagination either. What the halacha, what the liability of a renter should be, so there the Torah was was intentionally vague. Now, so the sort of the example is, let's say if you if you play tennis. So it's true, you don't have to there's a certain range of where you can where you can hit the ball, but there's there's out of bounds also. So the Torah the Torah begins and tells us a lot which is white and black. Before anyone can can can have a an authoritative opinion as to the gray areas in Torah, he has to master the white and black. Having done so, then he can he is then in a position to have an opinion, to to develop an opinion and interpretation of what, consistent with the white and black of Torah, the halacha should be in the gray areas. But let's understand something else as well. Take the following following mashal. Let's say a man he founds a business. He has a business Baruch Hashem, the the business is successful as the years pass, as the years pass his children grow older. So now he has sons who want to go into the business, and he has sons-in-law who are going to go into the to the business. So he's looking to expand the business. Okay, he's going to expand the business, so then he's not going to be able to handle everything himself the way he has until now. So what's he going to do? So he's not going to throw he's not going to put his son who's straight out of high school in charge of some multi-million dollar account. No, first he's going to teach the son the ropes. He's going to teach him the business, and he's going to have the son follow him around and he's going to show the son how he deals with clients, how he looks at potential investments, what the decision-making process is. And he's going to do that with each of his sons or each of his sons-in-law or whoever else he's going to bring on board. After he mentors them for a long period of time, so then he'll delegate authority to them. And then yes, and then the the younger generation will be given the responsibility and authority to make decisions. And the business is going to become too big for him to necessarily sign off on every decision, but he will have mentored them. Now, if we ask the question when the sons or whoever the the managers are who he brings in as the business expands. So if we ask, well, who's making the decision? When they make the decisions on should we go after this account, should we make this investment, should we open a new store here, shouldn't we? So whose decision is it? So on the one hand, it's their decision because it was delegated to them, right? So it's their decision. So what does that mean? That the father, the founder of the business, is is totally removed from from the decision and that his business acumen or that his business values are not reflected in the decision? It doesn't mean that either, right? Because where did they get their business sense from? Where did they get their business intuition from? They they got their business training, they got their business intuition from the father. So it's true that the decisions are being made by the by the sons, by the younger generation, and it's certainly true that there's room for their creativity and their input, but it's simultaneously true that even while it's their creativity and their input of the younger generation in the business, that ultimately ultimately it all reflects back faithfully on the founder of the business, right? And and that's the way the business will will continue on the same track on which the founder established it. Right? So the analog is It is clearer, rabosai. When the sages throughout the generations are mastering what we call the white and black of of Torah. So in so doing, they're not only mastering a certain body of information, they're also their minds become attuned to how the Torah thinks. Again, it's not only, well, they're learning which categories of work are forbidden on Shabbos and they're they're committing that to memory and they know what it says in the Mishna about this and they know what it says in the Gemara about this. Yes, that's all true, but much more than that is true also. Their minds are being trained to think and even more importantly to intuit the way the Torah wants us to think and the way the Torah would have us intuit. Again, remember the example, remember the moshal we gave again to the to the father, to the founder of the business, who's training his his children, he's training the next generation to participate in the in the business. Rav Soloveitchik in in describing the the methodology of his his grandfather, the the famous Reb Chaim of Brisk, said that for all of his grandfather's genius notwithstanding, the Rav was fond of of recounting that there was someone he knew who in his youth had studied under Reb Chaim and then later had had gone off into the sciences and worked together with Einstein. And the Rav knew him when he was in Berlin, and this person used to like to reminisce about about the two lehavdil, lehavdil, lehavdil, the two different masters he had he had served, Einstein and and Reb Chaim. And and he used to say, well, intellectually, yeah, you could mention them in the same breath, although there was no question that Reb Chaim was was was far superior, but you could you could mention you could mention Einstein together in the same league. And then he would go on to say, and maybe we'll have time to talk about this a little bit later also, but when it came to acts of kindness and chesed, so then he said that Einstein wasn't fit to shine Reb Chaim's shoes. Now that was his. So in describing Reb Chaim, again, whose genius was off the charts, off the charts, so the Rav said that ultimately he thinks that the the crux of his grandfather's approach was a certain intuition. That that his grandfather again studied and worked so hard in in training himself to think the way the Torah would have us think that he had a certain intuition, a certain pure Torah intuition. I think Reb Chaim himself is is quoted as as having said that the way one is supposed to study Torah is from within. Never ever to try to understand Torah in terms of categories which are imported from the outside, but within. Again, that same idea of becoming attuned again to the rhythms, to the thought patterns of of of the Torah. It's for this reason that on the one hand, it's entirely true that studying Torah again and the more advanced one becomes, the more true this this is, is a very creative enterprise, it's a very creative process and endeavor and yet it's simultaneously true that the conclusions, again, the human creativity and input notwithstanding, absolutely reflect again the will of Hakadosh Baruch Hu. That's before one even takes into account that that we certainly believe that there's a special a special divine providence and divine assistance to to people who are immersing themselves in in Torah study. There's a very beautiful story about one of the one of the the giants of the generation, one of the Acharonim in the 18th century, the Noda BiYehuda. So the beginning of the story is is could be told of others as well, there are similar stories. that others as well, so in his youth he was a prodigy and he was appointed to a very distinguished rabbinical post as a young man. So as is, as is unfortunately sometimes the case, if you have enough people, there's a skeptic or two or a skeptic or two amongst them who are not necessarily going to be so favorably inclined or disposed to someone who comes with such a sterling reputation. So one such skeptic devises a plan that he's going to try to show up the Noda BiYehuda, Rabbi Yechezkel Landau, and show people he's not what he's reputed to be, he's not such an outstanding scholar. So he concocts a very, very complicated question and presents it as though it were a real, a practical question that he needed the answer to, and brings it to the Noda BiYehuda. So the Noda BiYehuda says, okay, it's a complicated question, you'll come back a little bit later and I have to think about it, I'll have to work on it. So he begins taking the books off of the bookshelf, the Gemaras and the Rambams and the Shulchan Aruchs. So he can't get it, he can't get a grasp on what the halacha should be in this case. So then he asks his attendant, he asks his shammas to send for the person who had presented the question, says, I'm ready for him. So the guy comes back, he walks into the room, Noda BiYehuda turns on him and says, again in a loud voice, and the guy is so taken aback and says, you're a faker, you're a fraud, this question never was and you have no such question, the whole thing you concocted the whole thing. So the guy is just, he's terrified that how does Noda BiYehuda, is he reads minds? I mean, how does Noda, so he confesses, you're right, I did concoct the whole thing, but how did you know? It could have been, how could you see through it? So Noda BiYehuda says, whenever a rav has to paskin, whenever a rav has to adjudicate a question, again if he's a competent rav who is handling a question which he's qualified for handling, so he merits heavenly assistance. He says, I was working on this question and I didn't feel that heavenly assistance and I knew that there could only be one explanation for that was that it wasn't a real question. So that's how I knew that the question was fraudulent. Okay. So again, in terms of the human role, Talmud Torah is creative, it's creative within the gray areas. Again, the white and black areas are very, very vast. There is a story they tell, we mentioned Rav Chaim earlier, there is a story that someone once came over to Rav Chaim and said to Rav Chaim, and says, why are the rabbis always arguing? He says, the Talmud is full of arguments, he says, why are they arguing about all the time, isn't there anything they agree on? And Rav Chaim answers him without missing a beat, Rav Chaim says, there are many, many more things in the Talmud where everyone agrees than where there's disagreement. So this story, I'm not sure about this detail, I don't know if the Chafetz Chaim was present, I think maybe the Chafetz Chaim was present, the author of the Mishna Berura and Chafetz Chaim and many, many other seminal works. I think maybe he was actually present and witnessed this encounter or maybe it was related to him, I think it was the former. So after this happened, so he was silent for a long time, he sort of withdrew into himself, he was silent. And then after a certain time elapsed, he turns to his traveling companion and says, Rav Chaim, such a gaon, Rav Chaim such a genius. What was it? The Chafetz Chaim was reviewing in his mind, he was reviewing the Talmud and he was amazed that Rav Chaim knew just like that that there are so many more things. So that's something we also sometimes don't have accurate perspective on. Of course, there are many, many disagreements and a little bit more in a moment about the validity of both opinions when there's a disagreement, but there's much, much more in our tradition where everyone agrees than where people disagree. One of the great decisors, one of the great poskim of the latter half of the late 19th century was the Aruch HaShulchan. So Aruch HaShulchan has in the introduction to one of his volumes, I think it's in the introduction to the part on Choshen Mishpat, which deals with monetary laws, he makes exactly this point. He says, go look at the Jewish communities... throughout the world. Okay, so you'll never find a Jewish community that doesn't observe Shabbos on the seventh day. You'll never, that there's a difference of opinion whether Shabbos is supposed to be the first day of the week, whether Shabbos is supposed to be the last day of the week. You'll never find anyone who doesn't count the month of Nissan as the first month of the year, etcetera, etcetera and he goes on to illustrate how on all the major fundamentals of halacha there never has been any disagreement. There are, again, not to minimize, there are disagreements and there were supposed to be disagreements about details of halacha, again, for the reasons we discussed. Now, what about when we have these, when we have these disagreements? How do we, how do we relate to it? Does it mean that one of the rabbis got it right and the other one, you know, better luck next time, and the other one didn't get it right? So the Talmud has a fascinating concept of אלו ואלו דברי אלוהים חיים which means the way we're going to understand it this morning, it's a longer topic than we have time for to do exhaustively, which means that even though very often one of the two opinions will emerge as the normative one, as the one which is going to be followed practically in terms of practical halacha, but they're both equally true. How is it possible if I say it's permitted and someone else says it's forbidden? I say it's tamei, he that it's ritually impure, the other one says no, that it's not, it's still ritually pure. How can you say that they're both right? So the answer is as follows, again remember our model here. The Torah has white, the Torah has black, and then there's an intentionally gray area. How do you fill in the gray area? How do the sages throughout the generations, how do they again with their Torah intuition, so how did they arrive at opinions in terms of the gray area? So the answer is, well again, in light of everything you know from the white and black, so what do you think is the most valid comparison? What do you think is the closest parallel from which we should extrapolate? Within that, you can have two equally compelling and valid answers. Again, very often the validity of both notwithstanding, maybe one will represent the majority, the other will represent the minority, one will be accepted normatively as what one does practically, the other not. To fully understand the role that the Torah assigns to the sages throughout the generation again in the halachic process, so I think we need to know something and I'm sort of inferring from what Rabbi Reichman said that this is something which Rav Cohn spoke about so I'm not sure, maybe there's going to be some overlap here, I'm not sure. But we need to understand something about Talmud Torah and about the people, the sages of our tradition throughout the generation. Do we have any, sorry, from within the oral law there's a lot of disagreements that you mentioned. Now, are those arguments from things that were passed down from God to Moshe? I know that there's arguments like based on tradition which is fine because you know some Jews in one part did it one way and then the ones in another place did it different place then they have conflict and they try to figure it out. But how about things, how do you get a conflict between rabbis when it's supposed to come from Moshe which came from God and this is like the oral law? How do you have these arguments in the first place when it's supposed to have been perfectly transmitted down? And we're supposed to know what to do the right way. I mean, I know that it says you know he's right and he's right in one of these stories, you know, like God's voice comes down and says he's right and he's right, but really there is only one right and why is it that they don't have that right way? So depending upon what example we'll take of your question, there are different sort of components, different parts to the answer. One part to the answer would be the following. There is a very, very beautiful passage in the Jerusalem Talmud which is quoted, which says that when Moses ascended to Mount Sinai, so Hashem deliberated with him many, many questions in halakha, and that Hashem told him forty-nine arguments in favor of this position and forty-nine counterarguments in favor of the other position, at which point Moshe Rabbeinu said, nu, maybe he didn't say nu, at which point Moshe Rabbeinu said, so he raised his hand, he didn't say nu, he raised his hand and says, so what's the halakha, like which is right? And Hashem told him that it says in the Torah in Sefer Shemot, Acharei Rabbim Lehatot, that the majority opinion should prevail. Or in other words, and again this goes back to what we were trying to depict with the white, black, and gray, is that many things in our tradition were left intentionally open that the rabbis should be the ones, again based on comparisons, extrapolating based on all the white and black, should be the ones to clarify this point. There are many things again, to illustrate the white and the black, so Maimonides gives his two famous examples. He says that even though it says in the Torah both in Sefer Shemot and in Sefer Vayikra, an eye for an eye, right, that if one person, God forbid, blinds another person, so an eye for an eye, a hand for a hand, etc. So we know that the Oral Law tells us that that doesn't mean that literally, but really it means compensation. So Maimonides says that this is an example of something which where Hashem didn't leave this as gray. This is an example of the white and the black, and that's why he says you'll never ever find anywhere throughout Talmudic literature anywhere, anyone ever disputing that halakha. The other example he gives is when the Torah tells us in Sefer Vayikra of the mitzvah on Sukkot of the four species, of the lulav, the etrog, the hadas and arava. So the Torah doesn't say well you take a citrus fruit which is very similar to a lemon but not exactly a lemon, the Torah says you take a pri etz hadar, which just seems to translate as a beautiful fruit. So how do we know that that means an etrog, maybe it denotes some other fruit? So the answer is that this too was something that was communicated to Moses on Mount Sinai and that's why there never ever was any dispute as to the identification of what that species is supposed to be. So that's one component, again depending on sort of what issue you use to illustrate your question, there are other components as well. So let's understand a little bit more about who these people are, again to whom Hashem assigned again this role of being able to intuit His will instead of just memorizing as a tape recorder but being able to intuit His will. So it's very... I think many of us here are familiar with what the Talmud says why Hashem chose Mount Sinai to give the Torah. Anyone familiar with what the rabbis say in that, why didn't He choose Mount Everest, why didn't He choose the Alps, certainly would have made for a better picture postcard? Because it was the smallest mountain. It was the smallest mountain from which we derive, right, because Mount Sinai because it wasn't impressive, because it was, as mountains go, very unassuming and very unpretentious and very unimpressive, so that's why Hashem chose to give the Torah on Mount Sinai from which the Talmud says that we learn the lesson that a person has to be humble. Now there are other sources in the Torah as well for humility. For instance, the Torah says when discussing the halakhot which pertain to a Jewish king, so the Torah says לבלתי רום לבבו מאחיו that... that lest his his heart lest he feel elevated, lest he feel like he's any better than anyone else, lest he become haughty, at which point Nachmanides comments that here's a source for the prohibition against, against haughtiness, arrogance and and the mandate to be humble. Or alternately a different pasuk in Sefer Devarim where the Torah says ורם לבבך ושכחת את ה' א-להיך. Again, your heart will become haughty and and you'll forget Hakadosh Baruch Hu. So why do we sort of have two different sources for this mandate that a person has to be humble? So the answer is as follows: that humility is, is crucial just as a proper character trait for anyone and everyone. Anyone and everyone, we all need to be exceedingly humble. But especially in the context of Torah, so there humility becomes doubly important. And that's why if you look in, in Ethics of the Fathers, in the sixth chapter where it lists the forty-eight things through which a person acquires Torah, so one of those forty-eight again is humility. But humility again, even if I'm not looking to acquire Torah, that doesn't give me license to, to be arrogant. I still have to be humble. A person walks before God, he has to be humble, even if he's not looking to acquire Torah. So the answer is yes, that's true, but again it's of special relevance and importance when it comes to learning Torah. Why is that? Because only a person who's exceedingly humble, again will his study of Torah be pure. Meaning, let's say as so often happens, right, we're wrestling over what does this Rashi in Chumash mean? What does this pasuk mean? What does this Mishna mean? What does this line in the Gemara mean? So I think it means one thing, my chavrusa thinks it means something else. Right? There's a natural tendency, everyone likes to be right. That's why it's very hard to say when it's, right, it's not Rosh Hashanah, but teshuva is is, repentance is always a timely topic. It's so hard to apologize. The reason it's so hard for us to apologize is because everyone wants to be right and and it's very hard for us, it goes against the grain to admit being, to admit being wrong. So the same thing happens when we're sort of tussling over what the correct understanding is of a, of a verse in, in the Chumash or of Rashi's comment on that verse. So since I thought that it meant this originally, so then I sort of have this vested interest that, that what I said should ultimately emerge as the correct understanding, and you might have a similar vested interest. But if a person is totally, totally free of ego, a person again is a tremendously humble, exceedingly humble person, so then his talmud Torah is very pure. He's not again, he's not looking to be right. There's no agenda associated with the talmud Torah. Ultimately, what it means to be a humble person is a person doesn't have his own, again in the negative, egotistical sense of the word, his own human-driven agenda. Again the person is just so humble, he just wants to know what it says in the Torah. And that's why the Torah stresses so much again, the, the centrality of humility in the context of, of talmud Torah. Now Rav Moshe Feinstein, the, the one of the greatest of the, the decisors of the, the second half of the twentieth century, so he has a very, very beautiful responsum in which someone wrote, believe it or not, rebuking him over they thought he had done something which was inappropriate. They thought he was driving in a car too close to Shabbos. So and and the person clearly in writing the letter was a little bit uncomfortable in, in rebuking Rav Moshe Feinstein and Rav Moshe begins by saying, no chas v'shalom, you shouldn't, you shouldn't feel in the least hesitant about doing it and and thank you and and I'm glad that you care so much. He goes on to explain to the person that that, his objections were, were not well-founded. And and then he concludes the letter again, thanking him and you shouldn't have any, any such hesitation. The, the sages throughout the generations were That’s also something again which contributes to the the purity and the integrity of the process again that this isn’t there’s no again it’s people whose sole desire is to understand again how the Torah how the Torah thinks what the Torah wants and how that should be applied and and extrapolated to the gray areas. Maybe just in conclusion I’ll tell you one last story that there was a generation or so ago in in the Yeshiva here so one of the the outstanding Rabbeim was Rabbi Nissan Alpert Zichrono Livracha. He had been a very very close disciple of of Rabbi Moshe Feinstein. So when when he when he died tragically young so at his funeral so one of the people who eulogized was Reb Moshe's son Yibadel L'Chaim Reb Reuven Feinstein. He gave one he delivered one of the the eulogies and he told the following he told the following story how once I don’t know exactly when this was I don’t know maybe in the 50s early 60s maybe 40s somewhere within that 20 year range how this is the this is the pre cell phone era this is when when you wanted to call someone you called a pay phone and and so the pay phone in in the Yeshiva where Reb Moshe Feinstein was the Rosh Yeshiva Tifereth Yerushalayim aka MTJ so rang and it was Reb Aharon Kotler again another one of the giants of the generation on the phone there was some emergency question with of great import that he wanted to talk to Reb Moshe Feinstein about. Reb Moshe wasn’t wasn’t there no one knew if he was at at a different number so so Reb Reuven continued to tell the story that Reb Aharon Kotler asked well who’s in the Beis Medrash? Who’s in the Beis Medrash? So they mentioned one of the names they mentioned was well Reb Nissan Alpert is sitting and and learning in the Beis Medrash. So Reb Aharon Kotler said good so please ask him to come to the phone because he’ll know what his Rebbe would say. So that’s exactly what what we’re talking about yes that there’s a human role and there’s human creativity but that human role that human creativity is that the disciple knows what his master would say and the beginning of that chain right the first teacher right when we say the blessings on the Torah every morning so we conclude the first long Bracha which begins אשר קדשנו במצותיו וצונו לעסוק בדברי תורה and we conclude it with ברוך אתה ה' המלמד תורה לעמו ישראל. That Hashem is the first and ultimate teacher so a good a prime disciple knows what his master what his Rebbe would say and the prime disciples of the teacher capital T the sages throughout the generations develop an intuition to know what range of opinions are valid that Hashem would want from us and that’s how we have on the one hand again the human creativity on the other hand because they’re so invested again to learn to think how the Torah thinks with such a purity that at the same time it’s also 100% represents the the will of Hakadosh Baruch Hu. Thank you very much.