Pirke Avot, verse two: Torah

We’re on the second verse, which I’ll set up here in the Hertz translation:

Simon the Just was one of the last survivors of the Great Assembly: He used to say, Upon three things the world is based: upon the Torah, upon Divine service, and upon the practice of charity.

The first of the stool’s legs is Torah.

Torah, of course, is the Scripture, and is used to describe the sifrei Torah, the actual scroll of the five books of Moses, or to describe the tanach, roughly corresponding to the Old Testament in the Christian Scriptures, or to describe the entirety of the Divine Revelation at Sinai, including the Oral Law, which would be the tanach, the mishnah and the Talmud. Including, I should add, this text here.

Torah also means law, however, it is possible to interpret this as saying that the world rests on observance of the law. In this view, if the law is not observed, the foundation of the world is shaken. A powerful statement.

Most translations, however, translate torah as Torah, as Scripture, and that’s how I read it as well (don’t worry, we’ll go back to the other in a bit). And the commentary tends to the idea that it is not the Scripture itself but the study of Scripture that is the leg of the stool. There is a rabbinic idea that the entire universe was created so that Jews could study Scripture, and although my instinct is to mock the egocentrism of that view, I also sympathize with it. Scripture is (in my view) the lasting miracle of Judaism.

And here we begin to get into the central metaphor of the saying, and how your view of that stool affects the three legs. Is Simon saying that the world is precariously balanced? Maybe instead of thinking of a stool, we should be thinking of a wicket, with the three metaphorical stumps holding up the bails that keep us from being sent off. The slightest touch will make the wicket fall, so we should be defending them with a big wooden bat. OK, the metaphor only stretches so far. But that’s one way of looking at it. The other way is that these are enormous pilings, bored deep beneath us and towering over us, the unshakeable foundations on which we can rely utterly. If you incline to the latter view, then we may choose to think of the leg torah (which, as you may know, is a tree of life to those that cling to her) as the Scripture itself, an eternal miracle. If the former, you may think of it as the study of Scripture the ongoing Jewish project of transmitting an ever deeper and broader body of interpretation and illumination, generation to generation.

I think it works either way, and at any given moment I may incline to one or the other, and find solace or inspiration or instruction in the one I need at the moment. I can, after all, take it as my own world that is under discussion (was it not for me that the universe was created?), so I take it as advice to return to the Text, that there is always something new to be learned from it. Rather than a leg of the stool, I look at it as one of the inexhaustible wells of energy and wisdom, and the advice is never to be far from it.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.