In the first quarter of the twentieth century, two great Jewish thinkers wrote essays with the same title, “Halakha v’Agadda,” or Law and Lore. Both Hayim Nachman Bialik1 and Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Bloch2 offered their own approaches to this binary view of Jewish texts. They both start by outlining what they take to be the wrong way to view the relationship between the two fields, and then they offer their own unique syntheses.
Here is Bialik’s opening:
For the halakha—a frown; for the aggada—a smile. The one is strict, harsh, unyielding as iron—the quality of justice. The other is permissive, softer than oil—the quality of mercy. The one gives orders without exception—her allowance is an allowance and her proscription is a proscription; the other gives advice relevant to each's strength and knowledge; allowance and proscription and moderation are hers. The one—the shell, the body, the act; the other—the interior, the soul, the intent.
Rav Bloch opens his essay with an assertion that halakha and aggada are two different worlds that simply do not intersect with one another.
The halakha, in its essence, is wisdom. Just as in regards to wisdom; whose entire essence is intellect and human thought and demands that the one who seeks to acquire it must toil with his mind and thought. So too halakha—the way of its learning is with intellect and thought. As opposed to this we have aggada, which is an expression of feelings and the heart. Therefore the path to its expression is dependent on spiritual aliveness and lofty emotional awareness. However, toiling with the intellect and using the faculty of careful analysis are not necessary, and their absence does not stop one from understanding the issues.
Both Bialik and Rav Block then break down their own dichotomies and make it clear that in fact the worlds of halakha and aggada indeed overlap to a great extent.
Rav Bloch says:
Behold, as it pertains to a judge who seeks to judge truthfully, deciding the law is dependant on the depth of his heartfelt human understanding…and even if it were clear to him from that which is written in the law—in the absence of the depth of heartfelt human understanding, he cannot decide the matter.”
Rav Bloch and Bialik were speaking to two very different communities, but they shared the same message: the law does not exist in some kind of ideal Platonic vacuum apart from the heart and denuded of ethics. In addition, our heartfelt human intuition must be guided by the texts and contexts of halakha. This mutually-enriching interaction guides the way that I teach and pasken halakha every day. I want to share some of that beautiful interweaving web of law and lore with you.
I hope that you will join me on a journey this year through some of the major Jewish holidays as well as some of the topics that I am teaching this year in Hilkhot Nidda. I hope to unpack key themes that help frame the holiday as well as share insights into Hilkhot Nidda that emerge from the Maharat Beit Midrash. Just as both Bialik and Rav Bloch understood that the two worlds of “Law and Lore” were meant to overlap, I hope to present approaches to various topics that seek that same kind of inter-connection.
1. Bialik’s essay was originally published in 1917 in the midst of the first World War in -
כנסת: דברי־ספרות /העורך – ח. נ. ביאליק (אודיסה : בהוצאת הקרן לתמיכת סופרים מיסודו של הלל זלטופולסקי, תרע״ז
2. שיעורי דעת הגרא"י מטלז זצוק"ל הי"ד, מהדורה שניה ירושלים ה'תש"ע עמ' קטו.
Rabbi Jeffrey S. Fox, Rosh HaYeshiva and Dean of Faculty at Maharat, was the first graduate of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah. Upon graduation he served as the Rabbi of Kehilat Kesher: The Community Synagogue of Tenafly and Englewood for seven years. In Rabbi Fox’s tenure at Kesher, the community grew three-fold from 30 families to nearly 100. During that time Rabbi Fox also taught at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah as well as in the Florence Melton Adult Education School in Bergen County. He also served on the board of the Synagogue Leadership Initiative of the UJA of NNJ. Rabbi Fox was a Senior Rabbinic Fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute and has also been a member of the faculty of the Drisha Institute, the Florence Melton Adult Education School in Westchester County, and Hadar.