Jewish Thought: Sources, Currents and Great Questions

Neither mere philosophy nor simply a code of laws, Jewish thought is a way of reading, questioning and living on the basis of the Torah. Where does it come from, what are its great currents, what questions does it ask, and how does one begin? A comprehensive overview, drawing on the lectures of Rav Raphaël Benizri.

Jewish thought is the reflection that the Jewish people has pursued for more than three thousand years on the basis of the Torah: about G-d, about man, about the world, about history and about how to live. It cannot be reduced to philosophy in the Greek sense of the word, nor to halakhah (practical Jewish law) alone. It encompasses the Written Torah and the Oral Torah, the Talmud and the Midrash, the great commentators, the Jewish philosophers of the Middle Ages, Kabbalah, mussar (ethics) and Hasidism. Its most constant feature is a method: one thinks by reading a received text, by discussing with the masters of earlier generations, and by transmitting what one has understood.

This article presents its sources, its great questions and the way to approach it. Throughout, it draws on the lectures of Rav Raphaël Benizri published on this site, each of which is an example of Jewish thought at work: a verse, a midrash, a mishnah, and the fundamental question they open up.

A definition: thinking from a received text

In Hebrew, one speaks of machshevet Yisrael, “the thought of Israel,” or of hashkafah, the “worldview” that flows from the Torah. The two terms say the same thing from two angles: there is reflection, and that reflection commits one to a way of looking at life. Jewish thought is not a closed system, written once and for all by a single author. It is a conversation that spans the centuries, in which each generation takes up the texts of the one before and discovers something new in them.

Rav Benizri offers a striking image of this in his introduction to Pirkei Avot. The word Torah, he explains, is connected to a root that evokes conception: a pregnant woman is said to be harah. The Torah is therefore “in perpetual gestation”: its essence is there like a seed, which must develop and give birth to other aspects. It is frozen only for someone who would confine it to his own reading.

This is what distinguishes Jewish thought from a philosophy that starts from scratch. In his lecture on the chain of transmission, the Rav contrasts two attitudes. Socrates claimed to know only that he knew nothing, and thereby cut himself off from the past; Kant asserted that one does not learn a philosophy, one only learns to philosophize. Pirkei Avot says the opposite: we have a tradition, fathers, foundations, and we cannot sever our knowledge from revelation itself. Without an absolute point of reference, the Rav observes, each person would remain locked in the subjectivity of his own thought.

But receiving is not repeating. In the same lecture, the Rav notes that the first mishnah of Avot does not say that Moshe received the Torah “from G-d,” but “from Sinai.” One receives only what one is capable of receiving: Sinai is the place where the divine and the human meet. And the verse from Proverbs, “Hear, my son, the instruction of your father, and do not forsake the teaching of your mother” (Mishlei 1:8), is read as follows: the father’s instruction is the dictated Torah; the mother’s teaching is the assembly of Israel, which has its own share of discovery. That, the Rav concludes, is how each person’s Torah becomes his very own.

The sources of Jewish thought

To understand Jewish thought, one must know its sources. They form a layered whole, in which each layer comments on the one before it without ever replacing it.

The Written Torah

The foundation of everything is the Written Torah (Torah she-bikhtav): the five books of Moshe — Bereshit (Genesis), Shemot (Exodus), Vayikra (Leviticus), Bamidbar (Numbers) and Devarim (Deuteronomy). Around them, the Hebrew Bible includes the Prophets (Nevi’im) and the Writings (Ketuvim), among them Psalms, Mishlei (Proverbs), Iyov (Job), Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) and the Song of Songs. The whole is called the Tanakh, a name formed from the initials of its three parts.

Each week, a section of the Torah, the parashah, is read in the synagogue; over a year, all five books are completed. That is why the weekly parashah remains the most natural gateway into Jewish thought: in it, following the order of the text, one encounters all the great questions.

The Oral Torah: Mishnah and Talmud

Jewish tradition teaches that the Written Torah was given together with an Oral Torah (Torah she-be’al peh) that explains it: without it, many commandments would be incomprehensible. The first mishnah of Pirkei Avot (1:1) traces its lineage: “Moshe received the Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Yehoshua, Yehoshua to the Elders, the Elders to the Prophets, and the Prophets transmitted it to the Men of the Great Assembly.”

This oral tradition was committed to writing in stages, when persecution threatened its transmission. Around the year 200 of the Common Era, Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi compiled the Mishnah, organized into six orders: Zera’im (agriculture and blessings), Mo’ed (Shabbat and the festivals), Nashim (marriage and family), Nezikin (civil and criminal law), Kodashim (the Temple and the sacrifices) and Taharot (purity). The discussions of the following generations on the Mishnah form the Gemara; Mishnah and Gemara together make up the Talmud, in its two versions, the Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud, which is the more widely studied.

In his introduction to Pirkei Avot, Rav Benizri emphasizes that the oral law preceded the written law. Avraham, he recalls, had no written law: he already lived by what would later be called the Oral Torah. The written law is fixed — its letters have even been counted — while the oral law remains “on the move.” In his lecture on Lag BaOmer and the light of the Zohar, he takes up the famous story in tractate Menachot (29b): Moshe ascends to heaven and finds G-d adorning the letters of the Torah with little crowns. He learns that a man, in the future, will derive mountains of laws from each of these crowns: Rabbi Akiva. The Rav draws the lesson: Moshe carries the written law, Rabbi Akiva opens the oral law, the law that is measured by each person’s perception.

The Midrash

The Midrash (from the verb darash, “to seek, to inquire”) gathers the commentaries of the Sages of the Talmud on the verses of the Bible. One distinguishes halakhic midrash, which derives laws from the text, and aggadic midrash, which draws stories, parables and teachings from it. The most famous collection on Genesis is Bereshit Rabbah, which Rav Benizri has studied at length.

The Midrash is a laboratory of Jewish thought, because it places very different readings of the same verse side by side without deciding between them. In Bereshit Rabbah 39, Part 3, the Rav presents three midrashim on the call addressed to Avram: one reads it from the angle of wisdom, another from that of the failure of the message addressed to Babel, a third from that of a dialogue in which Avraham dares to reproach G-d for His way of judging. None of these readings erases the others: they answer one another.

The great commentators

In the Middle Ages, the classical commentators on the Bible and the Talmud appeared. Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki, Troyes, 1040-1105) explains the literal meaning of the text, the peshat, with a clarity that still makes his the first commentary one studies today. Around him, Rabbi Avraham Ibn Ezra, the Ramban (Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman, Nachmanides) and many others each open a perspective: grammatical, philosophical or mystical. The standard editions of the Torah, the Mikra’ot Gedolot, arrange these commentaries around the verse, like an assembly of masters debating on the same page.

The Rav often relies on them. In his lecture on the chain of transmission, he cites the Ramban’s reading of the verse “you shall do what is right and good” (Devarim 6:18): beyond the dictated laws, the Torah leaves to man the discovery of what he can understand by himself. Morality, the Rav sums up, is not the Torah: it is its “beyond.”

Jewish philosophy

In contact with Greek thought, and later with Arabic philosophy, Jewish thinkers set out the faith of Israel in the language of reason. Rabbi Saadia Gaon wrote the Book of Beliefs and Opinions in the tenth century; Rabbi Bachya ibn Pakuda, in the eleventh century, the Duties of the Heart; Rabbi Yehudah HaLevi, in the twelfth, the Kuzari, a dialogue between a king in search of truth and a Jewish sage. The summit of this current is the Rambam (Maimonides, 1138-1204), author of the thirteen principles of faith, formulated in his commentary on the Mishnah, and of the Guide for the Perplexed. Later would come the Maharal of Prague in the sixteenth century and, closer to our time, Rav Kook and many others.

In the same introduction to Avot, Rav Benizri dwells on the Rambam’s attitude toward outside wisdom. In the introduction to his commentary on Avot, the Shemonah Perakim (“Eight Chapters”), the Rambam says he drew on the midrashim of the Sages, but also on the philosophers, even those of other traditions — without saying where each idea came from, so that a thought would not be judged by its origin. The Rav concludes that certain elements of wisdom are found in every human being, and that the Jewish people, throughout its history, developed its currents of thought partly thanks to the insights of other peoples. He recalls that Rabbi Meir was reproached for keeping books of general culture on his person, but that a judge must know the ideas of the nations, if only in order to know how to guard against them.

This same openness nonetheless has a limit, which the Rav draws in Hanukkah: A Jewish Re-education. When the voice of prophecy fell silent, Greek culture sought to take its place. The verse “May G-d enlarge Yefet, and may he dwell in the tents of Shem” (Bereshit 9:27) admits Greek beauty into the tent of Israel — on condition that it does not claim to replace the Torah. Greek thought, the Rav says, set boundaries on thought, and those boundaries halt the flow of transmission.

Kabbalah

Kabbalah (literally “reception”) refers to the mystical tradition of Israel. Its central book, the Zohar (“Radiance”), is attributed to Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, a disciple of Rabbi Akiva; it was disseminated in Spain at the end of the thirteenth century. In the sixteenth century, in Safed, Rabbi Yitzchak Luria, known as the Ari, gave it new depth. Kabbalah asks how the infinite relates to the finite world, what the hidden meaning of the letters and divine names is, and what role man plays in repairing the world.

Tradition distinguishes four levels of reading the Torah, summed up by the word PaRDeS (“orchard”): peshat, the literal meaning; remez, allusion; derash, interpretation; sod, the secret. In his lecture on Lag BaOmer, Rav Benizri explains that reducing the Torah to pure reason alone is “a lost cause.” He adds an original reading of sod: from the verse “let my soul not enter their council (be-sodam)” (Bereshit 49:6), he shows that the secret is also an assembly. Whoever cuts off and isolates a teaching is left with only “his own” Torah; the Torah of G-d is the one that gathers all the currents together. Finally, he presents the Zohar as a Torah of renewal: halakhah is settled, while sod is renewed each day, just as the Creator renews His creation. The task, he says, is to unite rational thought and prophetic thought.

Mussar

Mussar (“education, correction”) is the branch of Jewish thought devoted to the refinement of character. It includes Rabbi Bachya’s Duties of the Heart, the Path of the Just (Mesillat Yesharim) by the Ramchal (Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, eighteenth century), and later the Mussar movement founded in nineteenth-century Lithuania by Rabbi Yisrael Salanter. The tractate Pirkei Avot, a collection of maxims of the Sages of the Mishnah, is its oldest and most studied source.

Yet Rav Benizri begins his study of Avot with a surprising remark: the very word mussar is “somewhat foreign” to the Torah, which is not a moralizing catechism. It really appears only in Devarim, the spiritual testament of Moshe. Morality, he explains, is lived in a personal way, which is why the Rambam asked whether it could be taught at all. In his lecture on the chain of transmission, the Rav also cites the criterion the Ramchal gives for measuring love: a son who waits for his father to express a wish before carrying it out has not yet given his love its full dimension; the true son anticipates his father. That, the Rav concludes, is the moral dimension. To go further, see the complete series on Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers.

Hasidism

Hasidism arose in the eighteenth century in Eastern Europe around Rabbi Yisrael Baal Shem Tov (c. 1698-1760). It emphasizes joy, the divine presence in all things, fervor in prayer and the worth of every Jew, even the simplest. Its masters produced an immense literature, including the Tanya of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, which brings Kabbalah into dialogue with each person’s inner life.

The word hasid comes from chesed, kindness. In his introduction to Avot, Rav Benizri contrasts two figures. The tzaddik, the righteous man, like Noah, “walks with G-d”: he advances step by step, neither lagging behind nor going ahead; he is the man of reason. The hasid walks ahead: he may stumble, but he is the herald of a revealed word, and that is Avraham, the man of chesed. In the same lecture, the Rav relates that the Baal Shem Tov would beseech G-d to save His people and, if He judged that they did not deserve it, to save the other nations, because through their deliverance the liberation of Israel would come as well.

The great questions of Jewish thought

All these sources revolve around a few great questions. None is settled once and for all; each generation takes them up again.

What does it mean to believe?

The first of the Rambam’s thirteen principles affirms the existence of a Creator, and the famous verse “Hear, O Israel, Hashem is our G-d, Hashem is One” (Devarim 6:4) affirms His unity. But what is faith, emunah? In Lech Lecha: Man’s Relationship with G-d, Rav Benizri starts from the verse “he believed in Hashem, and He counted it to him as righteousness” (Bereshit 15:6). Until then, it was Avram who discovered G-d and taught others about Him: why does the text need to say that he believed? Because, the Rav explains, a faith deduced from the truth is no longer faith: it is a logical conclusion. Faith is bound up with the very feeling of existing. And he reverses the usual formula: faith is “the dwelling place of truth,” for without it, even a discovered truth would not be practiced the moment it contradicted our interests.

Who is man?

The Torah teaches that man is created “in the image of G-d” (Bereshit 1:27). Jewish thought never stops asking what this means: freedom, responsibility, the capacity to create. In Pesach: Where Should the Haggadah Begin?, the Rav explains that being in the image of G-d means embracing His attributes: the Torah shows the Creator clothing man, visiting the ailing Avraham, burying Moshe. Resembling is not enough; one must participate. He cites the midrash in which G-d casts truth to the ground (based on Daniel 8:12): this is not throwing it away, says the Rav, but sowing it; G-d wants truth to “spring up from the earth” (Tehillim 85:12) and man to take part in revelation.

In Bereshit Rabbah 39, the Rav also describes the four Hebrew names for man as four stages: Enosh, the small man who consumes everything; Gever, the adolescent who wants to show his strength; Ish, the mature man of morality and principle; and finally Adam, which has neither feminine nor plural, and designates the spiritual dimension of the human being. These levels, he specifies, have no age: one can still be an Enosh at seventy.

What are the commandments for?

The Torah contains 613 commandments (mitzvot). The Talmud (Makkot 23b-24a) reports the teaching of Rabbi Simlai: 365 prohibitions, corresponding to the days of the solar year, and 248 positive commandments, corresponding to the limbs of the body. It then shows how the prophets reduced them to a few principles: David to eleven (Tehillim 15), Yeshayahu to six (Yeshayahu 33:15), Michah to three — “to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d” (Michah 6:8) — Yeshayahu to two (Yeshayahu 56:1), and Amos to a single one: “Seek Me and live” (Amos 5:4). The Talmud then also proposes the verse of Chavakuk: “the righteous shall live by his faith” (Chavakuk 2:4).

In his introduction to the book of Mishlei, the Rav takes up this text and concludes that this single search covers the whole Torah. He adds the teaching of Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah in Pirkei Avot (chapter 3): “If there is no Torah, there is no derech eretz (proper conduct); if there is no derech eretz, there is no Torah,” up to “if there is no flour, there is no Torah.” This prosaic ending is in fact the summit, says the Rav: the goal is to raise the profane to the level of the sacred.

Why evil and suffering?

The question is as old as the Bible: Avraham raises it before Sodom, “Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?” (Bereshit 18:25), and the entire book of Job is devoted to it. Jewish thought does not evade it. In Bereshit Rabbah 39, Part 3, the Rav shows that the midrash goes so far as to put a protest in Avraham’s mouth: if You want the world, there cannot be absolute justice; if You want absolute justice, the world cannot endure. There must be mercy within judgment. Asked about the Shoah, the Rav refuses easy explanations: he sees in it a total absence of justice, a world of confusion ruled by fear, and acknowledges that the great question remains that of G-d’s silence. See also his lecture Tisha BeAv: The Book of Iyov (Job).

Israel, the nations and the universal

Finally, Jewish thought asks about the place of the Jewish people within humanity. Rav Benizri often stresses the universal dimension of this thought. In Lech Lecha: The Dialogue of Revelation, he reads the change of name from Avram to Avraham, “father of a multitude of nations” (Bereshit 17:5): not the leader of an inward-looking elite, but a father in the midst of the nations, who thinks about the future of his children. In Noah: Discovering Elokim, he contrasts Noah’s teivah, the ark in which one withdraws, with Avraham’s milah, circumcision, a word that also means “word”: an opening and a dialogue. And in his introduction to Pirkei Avot, he sums up: he is only teaching the thought of our Sages, and that thought is universalist, even if its translation into reality remains distant for us.

A way of thinking: the question, the debate, the chain

Beyond its content, Jewish thought is recognizable by its method. Three features characterize it.

The question. On the night of Pesach, the Haggadah begins with a child’s questions. In The Four Questions of Ma Nishtana, the Rav notes that the verb shanah means at once to repeat, to change and to study: it is by returning to a text that one absorbs it, and a change necessarily takes place. He also recalls that the opposite of the wise man is not the wicked one, who at least has a critical sense, but the one with whom no dialogue is possible. In his introduction to Mishlei, he adds that the text is not merely read: it “cries out,” it calls to us, it awaits an answer and opens the discussion.

The debate. The Talmud preserves the rejected opinions alongside those that are accepted. Regarding the debates between the schools of Hillel and Shammai, it declares: “these and these are the words of the living G-d” (Eruvin 13b), even though the law follows Beit Hillel. It is also said that the Torah has “seventy faces.” The Rav illustrates this with an image: when the prophet announces that the earth will be filled with the knowledge of G-d “as the waters cover the sea” (Yeshayahu 11:9), one imagines a flat surface; yet there are hills and mountains at the bottom of the seas. There are different levels of perception of the Torah, and each person receives according to his capacity.

The chain. Finally, Jewish thought is transmitted. Our Sages compared the words of the wise to a ball passed from hand to hand, the Rav recalls: a ball is passed on whole; one does not let it drop. He also cites Rabbi Chanina: “I have learned much from my teachers, more from my colleagues, and from my students more than from all of them” (Ta’anit 7a). His conclusion: do not keep your thought as private property; it is by rubbing it against other minds that one forms oneself.

What Rav Raphaël Benizri teaches: Jewish thought at work

Rav Benizri’s lectures show concretely how this thought works: one starts from a detail of the text, takes it seriously, and it opens a fundamental question. A few examples, among dozens.

Idolatry as arrested thought. We imagine idolatry as a crude cult. In Bereshit Rabbah 39, Part One, the Rav defines it rather as a stereotype of thought that has been allowed to grow old: Terach, Avram’s father, a seller of idols, becomes a merchant of currents of thought. In Part 3, he adds: idols are “arrested thoughts,” structured so as never to move again. Avram, the Ivri, “the man from the other side,” is the one whose thought sets out on its way. This is a key to all of Jewish thought: it is alive only if it moves forward.

Awe before love. Why does the verse say that “the beginning of wisdom is the fear of Hashem” (Tehillim 111:10) and not love? Because awe restrains, the Rav explains in Bereshit Rabbah 39, Part 3: it allows one to walk step by step without crushing anything, whereas love pushes forward. In the introduction to Mishlei, he specifies that this awe is not fear: it is a thirst to know accompanied by respect, the desire to feel G-d’s closeness “without getting burned.”

Three men, three stages. In his lecture on Noah, the Rav describes three ways of standing before G-d: Adam, who leans on G-d because the world frightens him; Noah, who keeps his values to himself and ends up withdrawing into the ark; Avraham, who wants to share his experience with his entire generation. These are not three opposing paths, he specifies, but three steps of a single spiritual maturation. And spirituality, he adds, is measured by the middot, the qualities of character, more than by piety or knowledge.

Three books, three ages. In the introduction to Mishlei, the Rav situates the three books of King Shlomo: the Song of Songs, read on Pesach, is the love of youth; Mishlei, which he associates with Shavuot, the culmination of maturity; Kohelet, read on Sukkot, confronts that maturity with other cultures. He draws from this a lesson about study itself: maturity is not an acquired state. Whoever stops at what he understood at twenty will still hold, at eighty, the understanding of his twenties.

Returning to one’s sources. In Elul: Returning to One’s Sources, the Rav recalls that nothing is uniform: just as there is a variety of plants and minerals, there is a variety of flavors in the perception of spiritual values. The Torah is the minimum required; beyond it, each interpretation discovers other essences. To go back up the chain, from father to father all the way to Avraham, is to return to one’s sources.

The Rav’s own thought is presented more fully on the Jewish Philosophy page and in the Rav’s books.

How to study Jewish thought

Jewish thought is not learned like a school subject. Our Sages say that study is great because it leads to action (Kiddushin 40b). Here are a few pointers to get started.

Start from the text of the week. Each week, read the parashah with Rashi’s commentary, then listen to a lecture on the same section. The weekly parashah page gathers the Rav’s lectures, section by section.
Study in pairs. “Make for yourself a teacher and acquire for yourself a companion,” says Pirkei Avot (1:6). Studying in pairs, chavruta, forces one to formulate, to object, to defend a reading.
Read Pirkei Avot. Short and accessible, it is the most widely read text of the Mishnah, and a natural gateway to the thought of the Sages. See the Rav’s series on Pirkei Avot.
Follow the calendar. Each festival carries an idea: freedom on Pesach, the giving of the Torah on Shavuot, teshuvah (return) on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The lectures on the Jewish festivals follow this rhythm.
Ask questions. The downloadable booklets offer, for each parashah and each festival, questions to discuss as a family, with the Rav’s answer and its source.
Get to know the vocabulary. The glossary explains the Hebrew words that recur in the lectures.
Return and go deeper. Ben Bag Bag teaches at the end of chapter 5 of Avot: “Turn it over and turn it over again, for everything is in it.” A text reread is never the same.

To find out which lectures to begin with according to your level, the Where to Start? page offers a guided path. For questions of practice, always consult a competent rabbi.

Frequently asked questions

Are Jewish thought and Jewish philosophy the same thing?

Not quite. Jewish philosophy, in the strict sense, refers to works that set out the faith of Israel with the tools of philosophical reason: Saadia Gaon, Yehudah HaLevi, the Rambam, and others. Jewish thought is broader: it also includes the Midrash, Kabbalah, mussar and Hasidism, that is, all reflection pursued on the basis of the Torah. Rav Benizri also points out, in his introduction to Mishlei, that confining oneself to purely intellectual knowledge “has no place in Judaism”: thought must be translated into a way of being.

Do you need to know Hebrew to study Jewish thought?

Not to begin with: many texts and lectures are available in translation, and all of Rav Benizri’s lectures are given in French. But Hebrew opens up depths that no translation can convey. The Rav shows this constantly, for example when he links milah, circumcision, and milah, word. In his lecture on the dialogue of revelation, he notes that for someone who understands the original, a translation narrows the field of interpretation. Gradually learning a few key words, with the glossary, is a good start.

What is the place of Kabbalah?

Kabbalah is the inner dimension of the Torah, the sod, the fourth level of reading. It has profoundly shaped prayer, customs and Hasidism. Traditionally, one approaches it after acquiring a solid grounding in the Written and Oral Torah. Rav Benizri presents it as a complement to reason, not as its opposite: the task is to unite rational thought and prophetic thought.

Is Jewish thought also addressed to non-Jews?

It has a universal dimension: the seven laws of the children of Noah concern all of humanity, and Avraham is called “father of a multitude of nations.” Rav Benizri emphasizes that the Rambam wanted Pirkei Avot not to be “a possession belonging to the Jewish people alone,” because every human being can carry within himself the principle of morality. Many non-Jewish readers study Jewish thought and profit from it.

Can one study Jewish thought without practicing?

One can begin with study, and many have done so. But Jewish thought itself binds study and action together: the practice of the laws is “an art of being,” says the Rav, more than a body of knowledge. Hillel summed up the Torah for a non-Jew who wanted to learn it “on one foot”: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow; that is the whole Torah, the rest is commentary: go and study” (Shabbat 31a). Study leads naturally toward practice, at its own pace; for concrete questions, turn to a rabbi.

Which text should I start with?

Three gateways are particularly accessible: the weekly parashah, Pirkei Avot and the festivals of the calendar. For a suitable path, see the Where to Start? page and the introduction to the Rav’s lectures.

Conclusion: a chain in which each person is a link

Jewish thought is at once a heritage and a task. A heritage, because it comes from Sinai, through Moshe, the prophets, the Sages of the Talmud and the masters of every generation. A task, because each person must, in the Rav’s words, discover his own share in this legacy. The Tanna’im, the masters of the Mishnah, are only one link in the chain, he says: we continue it, and it is not finished.

The lectures of Rav Raphaël Benizri, on the parashah, the Midrash, Pirkei Avot, Mishlei and the festivals, are an invitation to enter this conversation. The simplest way is to choose a text, listen to a lecture, and ask the first question.

What Is Jewish Thought? Sources, Great Questions and How to Study It