The Talmud in Masechet Niddah (30b) teaches that ineutero a fetus knows all the Torah. But when a baby is born, an angel comes and slaps it on the mouth and causes it to forget all the Torah it used to know.
The obvious question is why did Gd bother to teach the fetus all the Torah if one of the angels was going to cause him to forget it anyway? Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik has a great answer. The Talmud, he says, wanted to teach us that when a Jew studies Torah she encounters something that is not foreign or extraneous, but rather intimate and familiar. She has already studied it! The stored knowledge is already part of her. She studies, in effect, her own stuff! Learning is the recollection of something familiar. The Jew, says Rabbi Soloveitchik, who studies Torah is like the amnesia victim who tries to reconstruct from fragments the beautiful world he or she once experienced.
Jewish learning truly is a journey of self-discovery.
Musings and Meditations from the Senior Rabbi of Congregation Beth El, Cherry Hill and Voorhees, New Jersey. Dedicated to sharing the beauty of Jewish tradition, the warmth and openness of Congregation Beth El, and his hopes for the next generation...
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- RabbiKrupnick
- Rabbi Krupnick has been the Rabbi of Beth El in South Jersey since 1994. He was ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1988.
3 comments:
Someone once told me that the "divot" in our upper lip came about when, at birth, the angel put a finger over our lips and said "shhhh".
Where does the Rav say that? The passage in Nidda seems to be related to the Platonic theory of knowledge as recollection (Meno).--Which of course the Rav would have known.
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