Why Teach the Fetus Torah and then Make it Forget that Toarh?
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ואין לך ימים שאדם שרוי בטובה יותר מאותן הימים שנאמר (איוב כט, ב) מי יתנני כירחי קדם כימי אלוה ישמרני ואיזהו ימים שיש בהם ירחים ואין בהם שנים הוי אומר אלו ירחי לידה ומלמדין אותו כל התורה כולה שנאמר (משלי ד ד) ויורני ויאמר לי יתמך דברי לבך שמור מצותי וחיה ואומר (איוב כט, ד) בסוד אלוה עלי אהלי מאי ואומר וכי תימא נביא הוא דקאמר ת"ש בסוד אלוה עלי אהלי וכיון שבא לאויר העולם בא מלאך וסטרו על פיו ומשכחו כל התורה כולה שנאמר (בראשית ד, ז) לפתח חטאת רובץ
And there are no days when a person is in a more blissful state than those days when he is a fetus in his mother’s womb, as it is stated in the previous verse: “If only I were as in the months of old, as in the days when God watched over me” (Job 29:2). And the proof that this verse is referring to gestation is as follows: Which are the days that have months but do not have years? You must say that these are the months of gestation. And a fetus is taught the entire Torah while in the womb, as it is stated: “And He taught me and said to me: Let your heart hold fast My words; keep My commandments, and live” (Proverbs 4:4). And it also states: “As I was in the days of my youth, when the converse of God was upon my tent” (Job 29:4). The Gemara asks: What is the purpose of the statement: And it also states: “When the converse of God was upon my tent”? Why is it necessary to cite this verse in addition to the previously quoted verse from Proverbs? The Gemara explains: And if you would say that the verse in Proverbs is insufficient, as it is a prophet who is saying that he was taught the entire Torah in his mother’s womb, but this does not apply to ordinary people, come and hear the verse in Job: “When the converse of God was upon my tent.” And once the fetus emerges into the airspace of the world, an angel comes and slaps it on its mouth, causing it to forget the entire Torah, as it is stated: “Sin crouches at the entrance” (Genesis 4:7), i.e., when a person enters the world he is immediately liable to sin due to his loss of Torah knowledge.
Tzvi Sinensky, "Talmud Torah as Self-Actualization"
What could this possibly mean? Why learn in order to forget?
As Rav Soloveitchik notes in his article “Redemption, Prayer, Talmud Torah” (Tradition 17:2, pp. 55-72),[7] this passage is highly reminiscent of the Platonic theory of anamnesis, which asserts that all learning is really a form of recollection.[8] While at least in some instances Plato presents this notion on the basis of the immortality of the soul, the Gemara does not invoke the transmigration of the soul. Instead, as the Rav contends, the Rabbis seem to be suggesting that the Torah is an essential part of our identity. In the Rav’s words:
R. Simlai wanted to tell us that when a Jew studies Torah he is confronted with something which is not foreign and extraneous, but rather intimate and already familiar, because he has already studied it, and the knowledge was stored up in the recesses of his memory and became part of him. He studies, in effect, his own stuff. Learning is the recollection of something familiar. The Jew studying Torah is like the amnesia victim who tries to reconstruct from fragments the beautiful world he once experienced. In other words, by learning Torah man returns to his own self; man finds himself, and advances toward a charted, illuminated and speaking I-existence. Once he finds himself, he finds redemption. (ibid. 69)
How the Talmud’s Depiction of Fetuses Learning the Entire Torah Differs from Its Platonic Parallel
According to a talmudic passage, a candle burning above the head of a fetus in utero enables it to “look and gaze from one end of the world to the other”; moreover, the fetus is taught the entire Torah. But at the moment of birth an angel smacks the child on the mouth, causing it to forget what it has learned. Inevitably, this teaching has invited comparison with Plato’s theory that the immortal soul is all-knowing, and that all learning is in fact recollection of what was once known. Alex Ozar argues, however, that the differences between the two teachings are more salient than their similarities:
[I]t would seem that [the Talmud] depicts the fetus as wholly without knowledge at some point it in time. But that cannot be, according to the Greek conception. Whatever knowledge you have, you’ve always had. . . . The soul has simply seen it all, and seen it with its own eyes. This is important, because Plato holds that teaching—the gift of knowledge from one person to another—is fundamentally impossible. . . .
[I]n the talmudic passage, it is noteworthy that the initial mention of fetal omniscience really does seem to be of the Platonic, internally self-sufficient kind: “And above its head a candle is lit, and it gazes and looks from one end of the world to the other.” This is a depiction of supernal enlightenment, with the soul transcending the narrow confines of any worldly here-and-now, enjoying an instantaneous view of the whole not from a finite somewhere but from the infinite everywhere. But . . . notice that this is emphatically not how the incipient child comes by its knowledge of Torah, [which] is not simply swallowed in a flash of enlightenment. Rather, “they teach it the whole entirety of the Torah.”
In the context of Platonic philosophy, then, the point made by the text is that, in direct contrast to worldly wisdom, knowledge of Torah is not merely known or recalled but taught and learned. And so . . . it follows that learning Torah involves a relationship between teacher and disciple, a relationship for which the unique identities of the teacher and the student and the intercourse between them make all the difference. It is not an impersonal, objective exercise, but rather a relationship between personal subjects. . . .
[I]f you have been privileged to know the walls of the beit midrash from the inside, you know that the fruits of your labor there are forever marked by the unique personalities of your teachers, your relationships with your peers, the fellowship of learners there and everywhere, and the sheer fact of your Jewish identity indelibly linking you to the whole of the Jewish past, present, and future.
See more at
https://thelehrhaus.com/scholarship/born-to-return/
Rabbi Avi Strausburg, "Forgetting the Torah"
What is the point of God teaching us all of the Torah if only to take it away from us before we enter the world? What kind of gift is this?
Despite the text’s ending in which we are made to forget all of the Torah that we have learned, I imagine, after the fact, there still remains an impression, a remnant of that close encounter. I wonder if God teaches us all of the Torah not so that we should actually know the Torah but for the sake of the impression that it leaves on us, a trace of something we once knew....There is some subconscious part of us that remembers this close encounter with God and wants to get back to that Torah. If we never learned the Torah, perhaps there would be nothing to draw us back to it; there would be no impression calling us home.
According to a midrash, it is actually a good thing that we forget the Torah that we learn. In Midrash Kohelet Rabbah (Kohelet Rabbah 1:13), R. Abahu teaches quite simply: This is the manner of Torah, a person learns Torah and forgets it....It is for her benefit that a person learns Torah and forgets, because if a person learned Torah and did not forget it, she would engage with Torah two or three years and then return and engage with her work, and she would not invest in it all of her days, rather instead because a person learns and forgets it, she doesn’t move herself from the words of Torah....
In Sihot ha-Ran (26), Rebbe Nahman similarly teaches that there is great benefit in forgetting. He shares the following parable about one who learns and forgets. Once, there were people who were hired to fill barrels. Unfortunately, these barrels had holes such that whenever the workers filled them, the contents would simply spill out. Now, the ones who didn’t quite get it, when their contents would spill out, they’d grow frustrated and say, why should we struggle to fill these again if they are just going to spill again. However, the smart ones—they would say, well, since we’re being paid by day for our labor, what difference does it matter if the contents spill out, since I will still be paid. So too, Rebbe Nahman teaches about one who learns and forgets.
Day in and day out, we fill our barrels. We center our lives around learning; we keep the words of the Torah on our lips. The point is not how much Torah we know at the end of the day; the point is that we have oriented our lives around Torah. This is a central part of what it means to be Jewish: וְהָגִיתָ בּוֹ יוֹמָם וָלַיְלָה.
Summary and Expansions
All Torah learning is recollection.
It's not the static quantity of Torah that is of utmost importance but the dynamic dedication to Torah study that is valued most.
Having forgetten what we learned, we are more motivated to re-acquire what we once knew.
Torah is of utmost value when it is learned/taught in the context of and in relation to the real world, and not an ivory tower academic discpline.
Torah study is best acquired and perhaps most enduring in a social context (outside the womb).
