Halakhic string theory, part 2

[hatam_soferet]

Yesterday, we saw a midrash which links the act of adultery to every single one of the Ten Commandments. I said then that this is showing that halakhot are all interconnected with one another in ways you mightn’t expect, and today we’re going to explore a graphical representation of that idea.

Halakhic data points. They might be any of a number of things – biblical verses, perhaps; facts of life (”men cannot give birth”); real objects (”this woman”); theoretical constructs (”love,” “justice”); combinations thereof (”my husband;” “the Temple”). They seem to be pretty independent of one another.

Indeed, you might think you can remove a data point here and there (”this woman,” say, or “the Temple”) and the others will be pretty unaffected, although of course you’ll still be able to see the holes where they were.

This is where we start to get a little abstract. I am winding string around the pins to create string-patterns, to represent the connections that exist between halakhic data points. The connections could be exegetical, or theoretical, or they could just be other halakhic data points. Together, the strings and the pins represent the mass of laws and ideas and facts that together make up the halakhic system, and I am asking you to consider the mashal, the parable, on its own terms, without trying overly hard to work out exactly what represents what. The halakhic data points are all connected, is what we are saying here.

Indeed, they are all interconnected, each one to every other. This is a lesson of yesterday’s Tanhuma. (Now do you get why I titled these posts “halakhic string theory”?)

And if we remove one of the data points – say, “Do not commit adultery,” or “The Holy Temple” – all the things that were directly connected to that certainly go wobbly…

…but so do other things that weren’t apparently connected at all. You wouldn’t have thought adultery would be connected to violating Shabbat, but we make the effort to show that it is, and that’s because we don’t want to forget about all the knock-on effects.

With a bit of tweaking, you can create something that works pretty well, even minus the missing data points. We do this all the time when people die. “It’s not proper Judaism without my parents,” you might say. “Life isn’t the same any more.” And you go through mourning, and you rearrange the remaining datapoints in your halakhic world, and you come up with something workable, and life goes on.

Similarly, the Temple got destroyed, but rabbinic Judaism pulled itself together somehow, nonetheless. It used the flexibility – to use the language of the mashal – inherent in one loop of string twined around pins to create a different pattern, one which still works pretty neatly. Isn’t that valid?

Tomorrow we’ll see a Talmudic text which says no, that’s not how it’s supposed to work.

In the meantime, check this out. It’s the string art of John Eichinger, whose creation features at left. This is what proper string art looks like – not the massively-simplified, crude versions I have above – and halakha is even more complicated than that.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.