How to understand the Torah. Most people reading the Torah are not Jewish.
So how does one with limited background understand Torah? Simple. Sefer Hachinuch, and the Horev from Shimshon Refael Hirsch. Also Rav Kook, if you can find his books.
These three people give a good idea of what the Old Testament is about in an accurate way that is not watered down, and yet understandable. And they deal directly with the question of "How to live according to the Torah?" and show this from the Torah itself.
They also are far from cultist doctrines that are so much a part of the world of the insane religious world today.
The first step towards understanding Torah is to run away from anything that smells like a cult where people are long practiced at falsifying Torah. Things that smell like cults as a rule are cults.[And I am unhappy with cults. Jewish or not. My recommendation is to get rid of them with as much force as necessary. I could make a list but I am sure no one needs one. What is a cult is only too abundantly clear,]
"Scripture alone" and or individual interpretation is not a principle in understanding Torah.
In the Christian world this, in fact, was a principle. The only authority for the radical reformers was scripture, sola scriptura, scripture only. Then they start realizing that different people can interpret scripture differently. They were very familiar with medieval Christian ways of interpreting scripture to have several different meanings and layers of meanings. And so they say, well the predominant guide of scripture isn't going to be just scripture; it's going to be one particular meaning of scripture. And that's sensus literalis.
Now it's rather debatable what they meant by "the literal sense" because some of these reformers said that the literal sense of scripture could even be a prophetic sense, so they still said that the literal sense of scripture could be in a Psalm when the Psalm says, "The Lord said to my Lord, 'Sit at my right hand.'" Well they knew that the text if you're interested in an ancient text would be referring to the Davidic King, but they also said that Psalm also could refer to Jesus, even in its literal sense. The literal sense that they were talking about in the Reformation was not necessarily what we would call the historical critical sense. It was what they took it to be the most fundamental plain sense meaning of the text. So that was the literal sense. Then again they realized the more they did this that Protestant churches started splitting all over the place. Presbyterians and Calvinists split off from the Lutherans, the Anabaptists split off from the Reformation. And then you have a rise of so many Protestant movements that the idea that scripture alone could settle debates and give you a foundation started becoming questionable.
There is a lot to talk about here but the advantage of Rav Kook and Rav Shimshon Hirsch is there is a basic idea that the laws of the Torah were meant to be obeyed. That is a good step in understanding Torah. And they don't read into it what they want. No eisegesis.
On the other hand there still has not come any book that deals with the problem of cults in a Jewish context. The reason being that the insane religious world as it exists today is a large cult with lots of sub cults within. Many of these sub cults in the insane religious world are utterly and clinically insane. even though they have vast sums of money with which to scam people.
Furthermore most are enemies of Israel.
Appendix:
(1) To understand Torah in a more detailed way if you have finished the books of the Old Testament, Shimshon Refael Hirsch, and Rav Kook. then it is time to do the Oral Law.
That means to do a 1/2 page of Talmud in order every day with Rashi and Tosphot. [This should take no more than ten minutes per day.] You should just say the words and go on. If you don't understand at first, don't worry because eventually you will understand when you review the material again. And if there remain some things you don't understand, so what? For the greatness of a lot of learning goes above and beyond everything else.
And what you don't understand in this world you will merit to understand in the next world.
Then at that point you should start the Jerusalem Talmud. After that then the Sifra, Sifi, Tosefta and Midrashim. In this way you will have finished the entire Oral Law after a couple of years. All in an easy simple way that leaves you time for your other important activities. [And in fact, if you could expand on your learning Torah time, that might be recommended as Torah is above everything.]
(2) The idea in this essay is how to understand Torah. I am not dealing here with how to answer questions on Torah after you have understood it. Reason perceives universals. Universals as applied to the human realm are moral values. But desire for social acceptance and other things makes that people ignore reason when it comes to moral values. So we need some kind of non intuitive immediate knowledge in order to maintain any kind of moral standard. That is what Torah is.
But to defend Torah in more detail I think would take a larger process than a short essay. And to do so I would have to trace my own thought in this matter over several years.
Mainly I came to Torah by means of two things. One is I was raised Jewish. But of course that is not enough. I was also something I saw in my parent's home that impressed me. Some kind of wholesomeness and love and purity. Something amazing. And then there was a certain amount of philosophical reading outside my regular courses in school. Buddhism, Dante, Spinoza, Plato, Karl Marx, Sartre, Camus, Herman Hesse and the little known 1001 Chinese philosophies. After all that there was something about Torah.
So how does one with limited background understand Torah? Simple. Sefer Hachinuch, and the Horev from Shimshon Refael Hirsch. Also Rav Kook, if you can find his books.
These three people give a good idea of what the Old Testament is about in an accurate way that is not watered down, and yet understandable. And they deal directly with the question of "How to live according to the Torah?" and show this from the Torah itself.
They also are far from cultist doctrines that are so much a part of the world of the insane religious world today.
The first step towards understanding Torah is to run away from anything that smells like a cult where people are long practiced at falsifying Torah. Things that smell like cults as a rule are cults.[And I am unhappy with cults. Jewish or not. My recommendation is to get rid of them with as much force as necessary. I could make a list but I am sure no one needs one. What is a cult is only too abundantly clear,]
"Scripture alone" and or individual interpretation is not a principle in understanding Torah.
In the Christian world this, in fact, was a principle. The only authority for the radical reformers was scripture, sola scriptura, scripture only. Then they start realizing that different people can interpret scripture differently. They were very familiar with medieval Christian ways of interpreting scripture to have several different meanings and layers of meanings. And so they say, well the predominant guide of scripture isn't going to be just scripture; it's going to be one particular meaning of scripture. And that's sensus literalis.
Now it's rather debatable what they meant by "the literal sense" because some of these reformers said that the literal sense of scripture could even be a prophetic sense, so they still said that the literal sense of scripture could be in a Psalm when the Psalm says, "The Lord said to my Lord, 'Sit at my right hand.'" Well they knew that the text if you're interested in an ancient text would be referring to the Davidic King, but they also said that Psalm also could refer to Jesus, even in its literal sense. The literal sense that they were talking about in the Reformation was not necessarily what we would call the historical critical sense. It was what they took it to be the most fundamental plain sense meaning of the text. So that was the literal sense. Then again they realized the more they did this that Protestant churches started splitting all over the place. Presbyterians and Calvinists split off from the Lutherans, the Anabaptists split off from the Reformation. And then you have a rise of so many Protestant movements that the idea that scripture alone could settle debates and give you a foundation started becoming questionable.
There is a lot to talk about here but the advantage of Rav Kook and Rav Shimshon Hirsch is there is a basic idea that the laws of the Torah were meant to be obeyed. That is a good step in understanding Torah. And they don't read into it what they want. No eisegesis.
On the other hand there still has not come any book that deals with the problem of cults in a Jewish context. The reason being that the insane religious world as it exists today is a large cult with lots of sub cults within. Many of these sub cults in the insane religious world are utterly and clinically insane. even though they have vast sums of money with which to scam people.
Furthermore most are enemies of Israel.
Appendix:
(1) To understand Torah in a more detailed way if you have finished the books of the Old Testament, Shimshon Refael Hirsch, and Rav Kook. then it is time to do the Oral Law.
That means to do a 1/2 page of Talmud in order every day with Rashi and Tosphot. [This should take no more than ten minutes per day.] You should just say the words and go on. If you don't understand at first, don't worry because eventually you will understand when you review the material again. And if there remain some things you don't understand, so what? For the greatness of a lot of learning goes above and beyond everything else.
And what you don't understand in this world you will merit to understand in the next world.
Then at that point you should start the Jerusalem Talmud. After that then the Sifra, Sifi, Tosefta and Midrashim. In this way you will have finished the entire Oral Law after a couple of years. All in an easy simple way that leaves you time for your other important activities. [And in fact, if you could expand on your learning Torah time, that might be recommended as Torah is above everything.]
(2) The idea in this essay is how to understand Torah. I am not dealing here with how to answer questions on Torah after you have understood it. Reason perceives universals. Universals as applied to the human realm are moral values. But desire for social acceptance and other things makes that people ignore reason when it comes to moral values. So we need some kind of non intuitive immediate knowledge in order to maintain any kind of moral standard. That is what Torah is.
But to defend Torah in more detail I think would take a larger process than a short essay. And to do so I would have to trace my own thought in this matter over several years.
Mainly I came to Torah by means of two things. One is I was raised Jewish. But of course that is not enough. I was also something I saw in my parent's home that impressed me. Some kind of wholesomeness and love and purity. Something amazing. And then there was a certain amount of philosophical reading outside my regular courses in school. Buddhism, Dante, Spinoza, Plato, Karl Marx, Sartre, Camus, Herman Hesse and the little known 1001 Chinese philosophies. After all that there was something about Torah.
