[Avodah] Halachic who is right from "The Lost Scotch"

[Ken Bloom]

On Thursday 29 March 2007 10:48, Daniel Israel wrote:
> On Thu, 29 Mar 2007 08:32:23 -0600 Ken Bloom <kbloom at gmail.com>
>
> wrote:
> >On Wednesday 28 March 2007 14:56, Daniel Israel wrote:
> >> It's a beautiful vort, and a fascinating philosophical jumping of
> >> point, but I'm not convinced that you have to read the Gemara that
> >> way.  Is "kol HaTorah kulah" meant literally, or, given the fact
> >> that this was an answer to a perhaps unanswerable question, can't
> >> we say Hillel was giving a closest possible answer, but without the
> >> deeper ramification you are suggesing?
> >
> >You should have a look at Sefer Ahavat Yisrael by the Baba Sali,where
> >he explains how 127 different mitzvot are hinted at in the verse
> >v'ahavta l'reiecha kamocha.
>
> Thanks for adding another fascinating data point (seriously), but
> it still doesn't answer my question.

Certainly the Baba Sali took "kol HaTorah kulah" literally, and that's 
why he wrote this book.

Perhaps Micha's conclusion about the torah being instinctive goes beyond 
what the Baba Sali thought the implications of this were. On the other 
hand, I'd imagine that you're familiar with the idea that we're on a 
lower spiritual level today, with more hester panim than in the past, 
and so many mitzvot are harder.

> Going from a pasuk to 
> Hillel's klal added a remez to another 486 mitzvos!?

I don't think that going from a paseuk to Hillel's klal added the other 
486 mitzvot.

I'm unsure as to why the Baba Sali didn't complete the list to cover all 
613 mitzvot, but certainly there are many more mitzvot covered there 
than I could figure out how to connect on my own. (Consider especially 
that the Chofetz Chaim concluded that less than half of the 613 mitzvot 
were applicable today, and a good number of those are things like 
kashrut, avodah zarah, shabbat and moadim) I take the existance of a 
list of 127 to mean that he feels all 613 can be explained by remez 
from "v'ahavta l'reiacha kamocha" and other considerations prevented 
him from publishing a complete list.

--Ken

-- 
Ken Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/
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