Author: Hollisa Alewine

One of the most distressing…if not THE most distressing thing…about learning Torah within a community is that it too frequently leads to learning Torah outside a community. In our livestream on Shabbat, I plan to present a simple overview of leadership principles that may help you whether you are a congregational leader, home fellowship leader, family leader, or just want to learn how to be a good follower.

Those community principles are often challenged because we don’t have good study tools in our toolbox, and without them, we can adopt all kinds of variations of understanding and practice from a single commandment. Those variations become divisive when it affects what the community can observe together.

In this week’s newsletter, I’d like to pass on to you what I spent lots of time and money learning in college. No charge! It can be of tremendous help when navigating through divergent understandings of Scripture. If we understand the difference between meaning and significance, it could squash a lot of arguments over what a Scripture means, especially when we look as smug as our friend up there when we’re convinced we found THE explanation instead of ONE explanation.

For instance, over the last couple of years, we’ve been studying the Song of Songs. It is a parable, poetry, song, commentary, elucidation of Torah, and prophecy, so it is rich in symbolism, and we’ve enjoyed deriving lots of interpretations of each verse’s significance based on passages with similar context and even Hebrew wordplay. When one encounters Biblical symbolism, it is important to remember:

When parsing a passage of Scripture, the application of wordplay should not derive a new meaning even though a new significance is expected.

Let’s review these two principles of hermeneutics and the definition of hermeneutics.