https://jewishcontemplatives.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-torah-of-heart-shavuot-2021.html

The Torah of the Heart

The heart is our intuitive intellect. The soul is our very life-force. The Torah of the Heart is eternally given and when we receive it intentionally, it produces a connecting link between our intellect and our life-force. Our tangible experiences and our spiritual perceptions are thus bound up with our essential soul root, and from there, bound up with our G-d.

When we open up this channel we deepen our relationship with the Supernal Torah, because our obedience to the commands of the Torah would be incomplete if love and true internalisation were absent.

G-d speaks to all of us through the Torah She-bi’chtav (Written Torah) and the Torah She-ba’al Peh (Oral Torah). He also speaks to us in our own prayers and in our own private study and meditation. When we read the scriptures with pauses for meditation or when we meditate in silent prayer, we are hoping to access the Torah of the Heart.

R’ Avraham ben HaRambam (in Sefer HaMaspik Chapter 1) distinguishes three levels of Torah study: the reflective,the meditative,and the contemplative, and he suggests that the contemplative way is the one followed by an ‘Intimate Servant of G-d’ who finds “bliss in his Maker as His sublime lights enter him” as he begins to perceive the “profound bonds with G-d that are generated by the intellect and the Torah”.

When we lay tefillin and bind the written texts of the Torah on our head and arm we make a highly symbolic statement to underline this process:

“Therefore you shall lay up these words in your heart and in your soul and you shall bind them for a sign on your hand and as frontlets before your eyes.”

Devarim 11:18

When we lay tefillin, the Pure Words of the Supernal Torah are transmuted, laid-up, and stored in the file-system of our heart and soul. The ritual is like a daily program update that renews and refreshes our communication with our G-d. Perhaps as ‘signs’, tefillin can speak to us more clearly than words. Perhaps these signs are closer to the Pure Words of G-d Himself than we realise. Perhaps they are laid-up (stored) in our heart and soul because it is only there—beyond the limitations of our intellect— that we can hold all of His Torah.

The Torah of the Heart is the medium whereby the Supernal Torah is revealed to the individual soul. The task of the contemplative is to make this explicit by intentionally running to receive it daily.

Nachman Davies

May 2021

(There is much more on this topic in THIS ESSAY from which the above is taken.)