Daf Yomi, Marriage Counseling, Psychotherapy, Rabbi Simcha Feuerman, Torah and Psychology
Our Gemara on Amud Aleph rules that though we have a custom to make several knots tying the tzitzis to the garment, “the uppermost knot is a Torah requirement.”
Sefer Daf al Daf quotes Rav Menachem Ziemba as deriving a hidden meaning from a play on words. The phrase literally, without punctuation, may read as: “The connection to the Uppermost is Torah.” The phrase thus appears to answer an implied question: “How can one actually be connected to God, the Uppermost? He is so great as to be potentially inaccessible.” The answer is that one connects to the Uppermost via the Torah.
There is a mystical belief that God, the Torah, and the Jewish people are one. (The origin of this phrase is murky. There is some similarity to it in the Zohar (III 73a, Acharei Mos), and some attribute it to the Ramchal’s commentary on Idra Rabbah 467–507.) What does this mean? In a general sense, we can understand it as follows: Hashem is all wisdom and truth. The Torah is a form of expressing this, or a manifestation of it, revealed in our world. The Jewish people, if faithful and successful in living according to the terms of the Torah, become the physical enactment of those truths. God is the programmer, the Torah is the program, but man in the world is the server that runs the program. This is how we can understand how Hashem “needs” us to fulfill the Torah. While the programmer needs neither the program nor the computer, he does need the computer to execute the program.
Translations Courtesy of Sefaria, except when, sometimes, I disagree with the translation
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Rabbi Simcha Feuerman, Rabbi Simcha Feuerman, LCSW-R, LMFT, DHL is a psychotherapist who works with high conflict couples and families. He can be reached via email at simchafeuerman@gmail.com