Torah and the Other Wisdoms

The Gaon said that all the secular wisdoms depend on Torah, are needed to understand it fully, and are contained in it, among them algebra, trigonometry, geometry and music. He held that without music many of the taamim, the secrets of the songs of the Leviim and the Tikkunim of the Zohar cannot be understood, and that its sweet melody can cause people to expire or be revived. He described niggunim that Moshe Rabbeinu knew from Har Sinai, while the rest come from the Torah SheBeal Peh. He wanted to study pharmaceutical medicine and the secrets of herbal remedies from the experts of his time, but his father stopped him, afraid that he would be constantly called to heal the sick and lose time from learning. He believed that the Sanhedrin and Tannaim knew a whole body of wisdom about magic and sorcery, and that one should be well versed in it, as Shas shows. He lacked only knowledge of certain plants, and tried to learn to identify them from villagers, but the rugged outings proved too much for his constitution. He studied philosophy as well, and concluded that he learned only two things from it, the seventy powers of the soul of man, as he writes in his commentary to Yeshayah 11:1, and one other thing that he did not name. The rest, he said, is rubbish and can be cast away.