Deuteronomy 1:3 identifies the first day of the month we now call Shevat as the beginning of Moses’ last address to the Israelite people. While we often imagine Moses as the source of the written Torah, carrying the engraved tablets down from Mount Sinai, in Deuteronomy he is the messenger of the spoken Torah. All we have left of that experience is the written record, but still, it is a story of speaking — not of writing. And that spoken Torah begins to be transmitted on the new moon of Shevat.
The categories of written and spoken (or oral) Torah were of great importance to the ancient rabbis, who understood their own project as an expression of spoken Torah. One of the interesting differences between these two categories is that written Torah exists as a text-subject outside the person who is transmitting it. But spoken Torah is intrinsically bound to the speaker. As in all oral cultures, in the rabbinic tradition memory is not totally separate from creativity. Fidelity to tradition includes input from the transmitter.
This particular quality of spoken Torah as both received and created is addressed by the Zohar when it identifies Moses’ speech as paradigmatic of spoken Torah:
We call the spoken Torah a well, as is written: “Moses undertook to expound this Torah; he said –”
The crux of this teaching is the double meaning of the Hebrew word be’er. While in the context of the verse in Deuteronomy it means to teach or to expound, in other contexts it is the Hebrew word for a well of water. The Zohar merges these two meanings to suggest that Moses’ teaching embodies the qualities of a well that define spoken Torah.
What are those qualities? For that we must look elsewhere in the Zohar:
Come, envision this: A well that brings forth water holds a supernal secret, it is part of the inner level of divine dynamics. This well has within it a water source, and a cistern which the water source fills. These two aspects are one, male and female, united as they should be.
The Zohar invites us to envision a well as a way to connect to the inner level of divine dynamics (raza d’mehemnuta in Aramaic, literally, the secret of faith). This expression is commonly used by the Zohar to refer to the relationships between the various sefirot.
In this case, the divine dynamic the Zohar wants us to focus on is that of giving and receiving — commonly represented as male and female in the Zohar. (To avoid gender essentialism, I will set that aspect of the Zohar’s teaching aside.) In exploring the image of a well, the Zohar points out that it is neither a spring gushing forth nor a cistern gathering rain water. Rather, it is both a source of water in itself and a cistern that contains that water. It is at every moment a giver and a receiver simultaneously.
Come, envision this as well: The water source and the cistern are one — it is the combination which we call a well. The source never stops flowing in, and the cistern is always receiving. When you look at this well, you see the inner secret of divine dynamics. This is symbolized in the efforts of our ancestors to dig wells of water. There is a supernal secret in this: The source and the cistern can never be separated. They are all one.
The image of the ancients digging wells serves as a metaphor for the search for divine balance, in which every action and perhaps even every moment holds both giving and receiving. But it may also be that the search was only for the consciousness of this dynamic, as at the inner level of divine truth the source and the cistern can never be separated, they are always one.
What does the well paradigm mean for spoken Torah? Often in our learning and teaching we are careful to distinguish between knowledge received and knowledge that is one’s own. This distinction is a fundamental building block of all academic study. In response, the Zohar might say this is the practice of learning written Torah. But to engage with spoken Torah, you must enter a different mode of consciousness. You must give yourself totally to the receiving of what has come before you so that a source of Torah can rise from within you. But having submitted yourself to the Torah you receive from your predecessors, that Torah which rises from within is no longer separate from the Torah that came before you. They have merged and become one flow originating from the celestial Sinai.
This is the well mode of Torah that Moses modeled for us on the first of Shevat. This model may also hold an answer to one of the oldest puzzles of the Zohar. Textually and historically, the Zohar is undoubtedly a product of 13th century Spain. Why then does it present itself as the work of Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai and his students who lived in the land of Israel in the second century?
The cynical response, put forward already by some of the Zohar’s contemporaries, is that the book is a fake, presented as ancient in order to enhance its market value. But it is also possible to imagine that the members of the circle from which the Zohar emerged were practitioners of the very mode of spoken Torah described above. In first offering themselves to Torah as cisterns, they opened the inner spring inside them. And in drawing from that well where past and present merge in the flow of Torah, who is to say that it was not Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai speaking in 13th-century Spain?
