beyond the letter of the law

[cellio]

Last Thursday after morning services the rabbi was telling me about a d'var torah on parshat Kedoshim, which begins "you shall be holy". The d'var (which I found online after he emailed me a copy of it) talks about the concept of the "naval birshut ha-torah", the one who is (essentially) a rogue within the domain of the torah. That is, you can fulfill the letter of the law and still be doing bad things; "kedoshim tih'yu" (you shall be holy) calls on us to do more than what's strictly required.

(Which, ok, raises the question that if it's the torah telling us this, then isn't that really within the scope of the black-letter law to begin with? But I digress.)

Anyway, the reason we were having this conversation is that the author of the d'var torah, Rabbi Artson at the Ziegler School, talks a lot about a guy named Naval who wasn't a nice person. The phrase "naval birshut ha-torah" originally comes from the Ramban (Nachmanides), who probably didn't use capitalization (Hebrew doesn't), and (according to the rabbi with whom I was speaking) the word "naval" has the more general meaning of a rogue or cheat or the like. So the question arose: was the Ramban talking about Naval or a naval? I don't have the correct references available; if someone reading this does, please speak up.

Why does it matter? If the Ramban meant Naval, then it might -- within the letter of the law :-) -- be correct to draw more specific conclusions about behaviors that are not in keeping with "you shall be holy". Anything Naval did would be included, but for other negative behaviors, you would have to make an argument tying them to Naval indirectly somehow. On the other hand, if we're talking about a naval, then broader interpretation is called for from the start.

In one sense it doesn't matter; I strive to go beyond the letter of the law and be a better person than I "have" to be no matter what the Ramban meant. But I'm still curious about what he actually meant and what his context was.

Comments

[zevabe.livejournal.com]

I always thought it referred to a naval, rather than the specific person Naval from Book of Samuel (he was married to Abigail, who married David after Naval died).

[cellio]

Thanks. It's entirely possible that either the person is named for the word or the word is derived from the person's name, but I'm not sure how one could determine that absent an explicit reference in text.

[geekosaur]

I'm pretty sure it's a naval, and the likely explanation of the person is that he was named based on his attribute (remember, names meant something back then, and one changed one's name — or others did, by using the new name — to indicate one's status).

As for your question about it being part of the letter of the law, IIRC the Ramban was stating an asmachta: an allusion the Torah makes without explicitly saying it, specifically so that it wouldn't qualify directly as Torah law but instead points to ways one can improve oneself within the constraints of the law. Somewhere or other there's a comparison of asmachtot vs. explicit ways of going beyond ordinary Torah law which are therefore much stricter and less forgiving of mistakes (e.g. nezirut).