Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinion, their lives a mimicking, their passions a quotation.
--Oscar Wilde (who would have appreciated the Kotzker, if not vice-versa.)

No lie can live forever. They must find it difficult, those who have taken authority as truth, rather than truth as authority.
--Gerald Massey

Who ya gonna believe, me, or your own eyes?
--Chico Marx

What if the cure is worse than the disease?
--Joan Osborne

Maybe Shammai was right.

I’m sure that most of us here have heard the story of the heathen who came to the great sage Shammai and claimed that he would be willing to convert to Judaism if Shammai could teach him “kol haTorah Kula”, the entire Torah, in the time that he could stand on one foot. As we know, Shammai picked up his builder’s measure and hit the poor guy over the head with it, chasing him away... whereupon he went to Hillel, who converted him. Hillel did in fact offer a summation of the entire Torah in one line, saying “What is hateful to you do not do to your fellow. The rest is commentary, now go and study.”

Hillel's view became much beloved because of it's epigrammatic nature and because of its courageous assertion that the very foundation of all that the Torah teaches is the dignity and decency that must be accorded to every human being by dint of being created as a Tzelem Elokim, as an Image of God. Indeed Rabbi Akiva also taught this same principle in a positive sense, saying “Love your fellow human being as yourself.” More on that in a moment – for now, in the spirit of the Rabbis' comment that there are shivim panim laTorah, that truth has many facets and dimensions,  I’d like to suggest that there is also considerable merit in Shammai's view...for perhaps what Shammai was trying to tell us was that in matters of Torah and the spirit there truly are no shortcuts. Go and struggle your own struggles, Shammai says; learn and work through the issues on your own; view the words of Torah through the prism of what you have learned in your years here on earth and according to the insights of your own heart, and then you’ll know Torah. It cannot be given in a nutshell. You can’t reap the spiritual benefits of another’s lifelong journey in but a few seconds; it just doesn’t work that way.

There is a passage in the Gemara in Masechet Sanhedrin 64a that says that God’s seal, his Chotem or Gushpanka, is truth. The Kotzker Rebbe asks: of all the attributes of God, only truth, Emet, is said to be His seal. Why is this? Because a seal is something that cannot be counterfeited; there is only one. And it is the same with regard to truth - everything else in the world can be copied and imitated, but you cannot imitate truth; try to do so, and all you'll get is a lie. This is so because at some level another’s truth cannot be your own. You can study truth, you can read the record of other people’s search for truth and even the revelation of God Himself – but ultimately you must seek it out, become its lover, and establish your own independent relationship with it. Anything else is mere imitation, and the Kotzker taught that there is literally nothing worse than believing something because someone else believes it, doing something because someone else does it – or even doing something simply because you yourself did it the day before! Nothing is more poisonous to truth and religious authenticity than imitation, because it takes one’s self out of the picture. I suspect that Shammai and the Kotzker would have intuitively understood each other.

And yet. There is another side to this issue, of course. Back to Rabbi Akiva. As we saw, he taught that you must love your neighbor as yourself, but seemingly, in a different place, he also taught the exact opposite. Listen:

The Talmud (TB Bava Metzia 62a) discusses the situation of two individuals who are travelling through the desert with one of them in possession of a jug of water. The situation is such that if they share the water neither will survive, but if the owner would drink it all himself he could make it. Ben Petura argued that they must share the water, because this way the one would not be left to observe the death of the other. He urged a pure application of "Love your fellow as yourself". Rabbi Akiva argued that the Torah teaches "V'chai achicha imach - Your brother shall live together with you" (Vayikra 25:36):  For R. Akiva, this means that it is only once your own survival is assured that you are obliged to concern yourself with the well-being of the other, and therefore that he who holds the water may drink it to keep himself alive even if doing so means that his companion will die. 

But the language of the text is very strange - usually it would say “amar Rabbi Akiva” or “Rabbi Akiva amar”, (“Rabbi Akiva said”) but here it says “ad sheba rabi akiva vlimed” (“until Rabbi Akiva appeared and taught us”)– in other words the sages thought that the law was according to ben Petura’s view until Rabbi Akiva appeared and taught them otherwise. This wording implies that perhaps it was something about Rabbi Akiva himself that changed the sages’ minds and caused the sages to adopt his view. The RIM, Rabbi Yitzchak Meir of Ger, an important early Chassidic master who was a disciple of the Kotzker and a brilliantly intuitive student of psychology as well as Torah, makes the following observation by way of explanation: What would you say, in this case, if YOU were the person without the water and the one who had the jug looked at you and told you that he’s sorry but he comes first and he has a right to drink all the water? You probably wouldn’t believe him, because you’d think, quite naturally, that the person was projecting his self onto the Torah – in other words, that he wasn’t interpreting the Torah objectively but was bending it to fit his own desires and interests. And that, says the Rim, is why it says “ad sheba rabbi akiva vlimed” – remember how R. Akiva died? He was martyred by the Romans for teaching Torah, his flesh ripped from his living body with iron combs, expiring with the shma on his lips - and his students, who were amazed at the serene expression on his face asked him “Rebbe, are you a wizard that you can withstand such pain”? And he answered them: “I am no wizard. But I always wondered what the Torah meant when it tells us that we must be prepared to love God ‘b’chol levavcha u’v’chol nafshecha” with all your heart and with your very soul, your very self – and now I know, so I am happy to be able to fulfill this commandment.”

In other words, Akiva was a person who was willing to give up his very self for God – and that, says the RIM, is the point of the story about the jug of water and the reason for the phrase “ad sheba Rabbi Akiva v’limed”– when a person who claims no ultimate ownership even of his own self because he is willing to sacrifice his very life for God says “MY self comes first”, THAT person we believe, because only such a person could never be suspected of projecting his self-interest onto the Torah.

As modern thinking Jews we face two opposing challenges in defining our relationship to Torah, which I think each of these texts, in a way, describes. On the one hand, as the Chiddushei haRim’s point aptly illustrates, we need to avoid the type of thinking in which Torah is forced to conform to the dictates of our own perceptions, desires, and prejudices. To approach Torah study this way ultimately makes Revelation into nothing more than a reflection of our selves; it distorts Torah’s authentic message because it is essentially dishonest. This is a pitfall into which those in the religiously liberal camp sometimes fall. The result is that Torah effectively loses its power as a sanction because of humanity’s failure to honestly acknowledge and confront Torah’s claim to represent a transcendent wisdom. Such wisdom is not subject to being gerrymandered out of existence to satisfy anyone’s requirements of political correctness, taste, fashion, or social milieu. This teaching represents, I think, an additional way in which we might understand the Kotzker’s warning not to imitate truth: There are truths that only you can perceive, and to own truth you must authentically appropriate it for yourself and make it your own. But do not think this means that you can set yourself up against God as the ultimate arbiter and source of what truth is. If everything is subjective, then in the final analysis we worship only ourselves. When someone offers a “truth” that seems to conveniently cohere with their own self-interest, and when movements offer versions of “truth” which have no courage to stand against the tide or defy the zeitgeist, then purveyors of such truths should be suspected. We are forbidden to set ourselves up as Judge instead of God. Says the Kotzker: “I would not bother to worship a God that I could understand.” Because such a God would be no more than a reflection of the worshipper, or an apotheosis of what the worshipper wants Him to be.

On the other hand, and this is what I think we can learn from Shammai’s response to the prospective convert, we can and should refuse to allow ourselves to become a negligible component in our own spirituality. The Ari haKadosh taught that there are 600,000 gates to Torah, corresponding to each Jewish soul. This means that each one of us has a perspective that nobody else has. Each of us is gifted with unique insights that are divinely precious. As Franz Rosenzweig put it, "My eyes are indeed only my own eyes..but it would be folly to think that I must pluck them out in order to see straight."  No one else can seek God in your place. You cannot fulfill your spiritual potential by proxy. Your relationship to Torah and to Truth MUST be unmediated, it must be something that you forge yourself,  or it is just imitation – and we know what the Kotzker said about that. :)

Our challenge, in our studies and in our lives, is to synthesize these two principles and resolve, or at least authentically balance, the tension between them. To do so we must avoid both the sort of subjectivity which leads to idolatry of the self as well as the mindless, unquestioning authoritarianism and slavishly "copycat" religiosity to which some in the Orthodox camp succumb. To be confident in our knowledge that fear of questions is not the same thing as faith, conformity is not the same thing as piety, and the transitory whim of our own conscience or desire is not the word of God. Like Yin and Yang, like the cosmic interplay between Din (strict justice) and Chesed (Mercy), we must pay due homage to both opposing sides and somehow maintain our balance. Our Torah must truly be our own Torah. But we must also never lose sight of Who we serve. So let's never hesitate to think for ourselves, be open to all questions, but above all,  we must know before Whom we stand. If we can achieve this in a spirit of honesty and humility, surely our learning and our inner lives will have much hatzlacha.

With thanks to Rabbi Meir Fund, who first showed me the passage in the Chiddushei haRim many years ago.