Why "What Vocabulary Did Your Predecessors Have Access To?" is an Important Question

Notes on an Obsession of Mine

If I want to describe my feelings and thoughts in 2024 in the written word of the English language, I have a lot of vocabulary to draw on, possibly more vocabulary than anyone’s ever had in the history of humanity. I can go with the classics (happy, sad) or move on to more advanced vocabulary you learn for standardized tests and college essays. I can go with some imagery, similes, metaphors, quotes, memes, clinical language from psychology and therapy, language borrowed from academic disciplines, whether the humanities (literary theory, history, philosophy,) or sciences (physics, biology, etc etc), or political movements (Left, right, center, Marxism, anarchism) even from movements on the fringes of society, (New Age, Woo), as well as vocabulary and terminology from my own tradition, Orthodox Judaism. The wealth of vocabulary that the English language affords me is a luxury I have difficulty relinquishing, and I have had trouble picking up other languages when I am so used to expressing myself with such a rich palette of paints

But that wealth is nourished not only by knowing more words from your English and composition classes, but also from a well-rounded education, however one achieves that. Each area of knowledge has its own jargon, its own unique vocabulary it uses to express abstract ideas and construct its picture of reality. Each area of expertise has its own set of terms that it has come to consensus on to communicate within the discipline. So every area of human knowledge contributes its own way to talk about and describe reality. And my writing and communicating is enriched by not just mastering one way of speaking, but being able to adapt other jargons and vocabularies to communicate ideas I couldn’t otherwise communicate and to people that would otherwise ignore what I was trying to say. So in a way, I speak multiple languages within the English language, able to vary my tone and presentation and use ideas from multiple disciplines to make the point I am trying to make.

But the fact that language has that ability endlessly fascinates me. I am fascinated by how the same reality gets described in different words according to different axiomatic assumptions, like how tomatoes can be either a fruit or a vegetable depending on whether you’re a botanist or a chef, or how the same reality can be described differently not even due to having different axioms but just from a different tradition, like how mystical texts can be both universal in the states they describe and particularist in the vocabulary they use to describe them (and thus, by extension, construct their perception of them). And my idea of fun is seeing how far these vocabularies can stretch. I used to, when writing a devar torah, challenge myself to write my ideas in such a way that it would appeal to people who I wouldn’t have expected to agree with it if I had formulated the idea as it had initially appeared in my head.¹ Like writing a “kids these days should get off my lawn!” piece but writing it in such a way that I could get the kids these days to see my point. ² I also take a perverse thrill in the “justify anything using leftist jargon” game, or at least used to, until it became not funny anymore when I that game being played for real when justifying the murder of my family.

The little academic work I have done tends to be on this theme. My personal favorite paper I ever wrote was about how biblical interpretation coming from the Jewish mystical tradition should not be disregarded as having nothing to contribute to our understanding of the text’s simple meaning (peshat), because there is stuff that is present in the biblical text that the Jewish mystical tradition is simply better equipped to notice and discuss, namely mythological motifs like God battling sea-monsters and literary macro-themes like the men of the tribe of Yehuda consistently overcoming temptation and obstacles as part of a redemptive process. Another paper I liked writing³ was about how the Rambam’s philosophy (which is deeply steeped in the tradition and vocabulary of medieval philosophy) gets understood by moderns (who have more or less no use for Medieval Philosophy)⁴, and my favorite conclusion from it was that the only people who still use the Rambam’s philosophy in its totality are the people who would have opposed him in the medieval era; various mystics who use the Rambam’s philosophy because it overlaps conceptually with kabbalah due to their shared incorporation of Neo-Platonism.⁵

But what also interests me is the barrier we have to understanding the past and the texts written in the past not because we lack the ability to translate literally what they were saying, but because the vocabulary we use to express our ideas is so much richer and more expansive than what they had access to, and so we fail to realize when they are expressing things we can understand and make sense of if we were to use our own anachronistic vocabulary to describe it. Our predecessors in our tradition were just as intelligent as us and able to think through the complexity that is existence in God’s created world with as much facility as we can. They only differed in the vocabulary they had available to express those ideas, and part of taking tradition seriously is giving your predecessors that benefit of the doubt.

My favorite example of this is the Ramban, how it was explained to me once that part of the reasons he is notoriously difficult to read is because the words that we use to express similar ideas hadn’t been invented yet. This rings true from what I know, because the Ramban is shockingly ahead of his time in many ways that we have only recently caught up to. His gemara analysis in particular is seen as prefiguring the conceptual analysis movement in 19th century Lithuanian yeshivot, which means it took everyone 700 years to catch up to him.

But more interesting to me for the purposes of this argument is that one of the things he does in his commentary on the Torah is talk about how events that happen to the Avot and events that happen later in the Torah (and also in Jewish history), which he calls “Maaseh Avot Siman L’Banim”, “The Actions of the Fathers are a Sign for the Children”. What he’s doing is absolutely literary analysis; he is looking at a text and noting that certain ideas or themes or motifs get repeated and that is something that deserves noticing and interpretation. But he doesn’t have the words “literary analysis”, or “themes”, or “motifs”, what he has is the conceptual richness of the Jewish tradition (and no one in history mastered the diversity of the Jewish tradition to the same extent the Ramban did) and he uses those concepts to interpret the text.
I wrote this as an aside in one of my divrei Torah, which sums up what I’m saying better than I’m doing now:

A thing I will always come back to is that in order to understand the ideas and explanations of interpreters of previous generations, you need to understand the vocabulary they had access to. There was no vocabulary to describe literary phenomena, no word for theme, motif, foreshadowing, stuff like that. The vocabulary they did have access to was the vocabulary available to traditional interpreters. Rather than something being a theme for a character, they could tell you that “they merited x because of x” or “were punished for y because of y”. Rather than noting recurring archetypes in Tanach, they would refer to certain characters as reincarnations of other ones. This is not to say they didn’t really believe what they said literally, only that they were attentive readers of the text who had a different vocabulary and conceptual universe for what the text said. And it is often the commentaries that seem to be farther from the peshat that pick up on macro literary devices. Read your ancestors seriously.

So one of the things that I think any interpreter of tradition has to keep in mind is that even the straightforward meaning of a given text can be a misunderstanding if you fail to ask yourself

1. what idea were they trying to express here

2. what vocabulary did they have at their disposal to express that idea

3. Is there something they were grasping at that goes beyond what I necessarily expect there to be in this text?

This is where I think the mystical traditions of Judaism come more in handy than people with my type of background and temperament (rationalist, academic, dismissive of superstition and similar) tend to give it credit for. Kabbalah just provides a much richer religious vocabulary, not only in terms of religious thinkers trying to express their ideas, but also to religious interpreters trying to understand their predecessors. Kabbalah, at least to my mildly trained eye, is the set of vocabulary that conceptually maps the Jewish unconscious, revealing the way our predecessors thought through abstract concepts. Even when a given thinker is not expressly using that vocabulary, I think using it to try and understand the stuff that is beneath the surface of that written communication, the stuff that gets left out when abstract pre-thought must be formed into words and then expressed. Kabbalah simply has a more robust set of tools for reaching beyond writer’s block, by which I mean not only the block of one trying to formulate pre-thought into thought, but an interpreter trying to piece together what the writer blocked when forming pre-thoughts into something that can be communicated.⁶

Another corollary of the idea I’m presenting here, to not be fooled by the simple meaning of a text when it is possible it is grasping at vocabulary inaccessible to it, is that one should be very careful when assuming the reasons Chazal present for the laws they legislated, be they prohibitions or obligations, are necessarily the real reasons such that when the reason no longer applies, the law ought not to apply. My main example of this is the rabbinic laws of Shabbos, where we see the rabbis prohibit a whole bunch of actions because “you might come to _______”, to the point the phrase has almost become a cliche. Can’t take medicine on Shabbos, you might come to grind the medicine. Can’t ride a horse, might come to break a branch off a tree to whip the horse. Can’t play a musical instrument, might come to fix it. Can’t swim, might come to build a boat.

It gets to a point where an exasperated student might ask “these fears seem contrived and random and far fetched! I mean, do you really think people go casually from swimming to building a boat?!”

But I don’t think the reasons presented by the rabbis are the real reason for why they prohibited these actions. Nor do I think they were lying about their reasons, or hiding them, or being in any way dishonest. I just think that what is and isn’t prohibited on Shabbos is much more an intuitive decision based on whether a given action fits with the experience of Shabbos, something that can only be determined by those who keep shabbos and have an understanding of the laws that have thus far accumulated.⁷

And when the rabbis are deriving these particular “you might come to” laws, what they are doing is not prohibiting something which was previously permitted because of fear, but starting with the presumption “this is not a shabbosdik activity” and working backwards to find analogies. And that their presumption that “this is not a shabbosdik activity” is based not just on intuition of what a day of rest looks like, but ideas of what Restfulness is that they simply did not have the kind of abstract vocabulary to describe. And rather than simply disregard the stated reasons as insufficient, we ought to be asking, when taken as a whole, what do Chazal’s laws tell us about how they understood Shabbos? And the sense I get is that they saw Shabbos as a day of rest from all human areas of achievement: Not just the obvious stuff about building stuff with hammer and nails, but stuff like medicine, horseback riding, swimming, making music, or as how I’d put it: Applications of human ingenuity to the conquering of nature and production of art. That in of itself is not a wholly satisfactory description, but it is the kind of thing that Chazal would not have necessarily had the vocabulary to use as a justification for their legislation.

And we see this pattern, of identification of something as “not shabbosdik” and then the backwards fitting of argument by analogy, throughout the history of shabbos laws. The most obvious example of this is electricity. It was more or less immediately identified as something that would have to be in some way prohibited on Shabbos, the only question was which analogy best fit the facts on the ground. Fire? Building? Is completing a circuit makeh b’patish? At the end of the day, the prohibition was not based on an analogy from previous laws, it was only justified on that basis, but the real reason was, we know intuitively what keeping Shabbos means and turning lights on ain’t part of it, for reasons we can’t quite put into words but make perfect sense. ⁸

My points is, when you read the sources and texts of whatever tradition you are part of, pay attention not just to what they’re saying but what they’re trying to say. Your predecessors are trying to communicate with you. Use every tool you can to get at what is being communicated.

I will, knowing me, probably return to this idea every so often. But its good to have it written out