The academic environment here at Yeshivat Maaleh Gilboa is like none I’ve ever experienced. It’s one that is propelled on all accounts by sheer force of will; there are no tests, no punishments, no rewards, only the drive to continue to learn. Here, Torah learning is l’shma, literally “for its name,” for its own sake entirely. What this means is that students totally submerge themselves into texts for the sake of engaging tradition in dialogue, and the learning itself becomes its own reward in the sense that the process of absorbing knowledge is just as essential as the end result, if not more so.
To return to a theme from my first piece from a few months ago, I think this ethos can be carried over, and it is here at the Yeshiva, to all realms of learning. Learning with an agenda—seeking out facts while ignoring others, selectively choosing messages—can extremely limit and devalue the process of learning. Sources must first be understood on their own terms, and when you attempt to learn from them, you must attempt to learn within the comprehensive mindset of the author, not to simply approach the text as it makes sense within your own personal framework. For example, the word “holy” or “modest” can conceivably mean something entirely different to a Greek-influenced philosopher living in 12th century Ottoman-controlled Egypt, than to my Western, 21st century, post-modern ears. It’s just barely beginning to sink into my learning, though, as obvious as it sounds, that Kal Victor and Maimonides view the world in radically different ways, and that those differences can’t be ignored when they intersect.
The question of how to proceed in my studies with this newfound realization starting to take root in my mind, is still something I am wrestling with. Rabbi Elisha Ancelovis, one of the Rabbis here who teaches Halakhic theory to the Americans, someone who is an important proponent and architect at Maale Gilboa of the type of learning I’ve discussed above, might answer that question by telling me to begin by first understanding what it was like to live in Spain and Egypt during Rambam’s lifetime by studying the popular culture and language of those locales. Then, of course, you can begin to dissect, decipher, and absorb Rambam’s philosophy as it presents itself in his book, the Mishneh Torah, (a work of Halakha le’maaseh—Halakhic rulings meant to be the final, action-producing word in an argument), thereby understanding what his conception of an ideal life looks like, intellectually enmeshing yourself within both Rambam’s theoretical world and the reality in which he conceived it. This way of leaning is really the same fusion of experience and Torah I alluded to in my prior blog. Rav Elisha’s approach is one that necessitates both emotional and intellectual investment in texts; it necessitates empathy, understanding, and the desertion of one’s comfort zone. This is the learning that God wants the Israelites to undergo as slaves who become free, a learning that demands the melding of history and future, the means and the ultimate goal, as Rav Yehuda Gilad so aptly put it in his parsha class on Bo.
I just finished learning in chevruta with my friend, Brad Goldstein Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Man. While there are many ideas the Rav puts forth that I don’t identify with, the book is replete with rich and provocative insights into Halakha. In it, Rav Soloveitchik articulates a similar idea about the timeless transcendence of the Divine law. To me, the Rav beautifully encapsulates what it means to learn and experience simultaneously, just as Rav Elisha’s approach would inspire one to do, just as the Torah itself inspires us by its very nature—with its laws and narrative, Halakha le’maaseh and agadata (legends or stories in the Talmud), with its indissoluble, concurrent call to action and call to study. The Rav writes as follows:
The whole thrust of the various commandments of remembrance set forth in the Torah—for example, the remembrance of the Exodus, the remembrance (according to Nachmanides) of the revelation at Mount Sinai…, the remembrance of the Sabbath day (through the recitation of Kiddush), the remembrance of Amalek—is directed toward the integration of these ancient events into man’s time consciousness. The Exodus from Egypt, the divine revelation on Mount Sinai, the creation of the world, all are transformed into an integral part of the concept of man’s present consciousness, into a powerful, direct experience…The infinite past enters into the present moment. The fleeting evanescent moment is transformed into eternity…Not only the infinite past, but also the infinite future, that future in which their gleams the reflection of the image of eternity, also the splendor of the eschatological vision, arise out of the present moment, fleeting as a dream. Temporal life is adorned with the crown of everlasting life.
While this all makes sense to me on paper, and while I’ve been attempting to adopt Rav Elisha’s leaning methodology in many scenarios, I couldn’t help but still be perturbed by the fact that some of my learning hasn’t provided the type of real meaning I feel compelled to seek. I had a few discussions with some of my Rabbis recently about the difficulty of processing my learning and overcoming that same feeling of self-distraction I wrote about in part one of this blog series. Much of what they said, coupled with my own thoughts and other texts, has really helped me define how I want to go about tackling this dilemma. The discussions about education almost always bled into discussions about meaning in Halakha. Although all of my conversations were intended to address only one topic, both subjects always came up, and that is no coincidence.
The first teacher I spoke to was Rav Bigman. Rav Bigman, in his typical fashion, put things into words that I had been desperately trying to articulate myself, as well as pointed out the things, oftentimes simple and obvious, that I had overlooked. I won’t go into our entire discussion here, but I’ll share some of details that really struck me. Rav Bigman is a strong proponent of Yeshiva learning as a means to glean insight into standards of morality and ethical behavior. I told Rav Bigman that while I could see such a connection in learning about commandments such as hashavat aveida (returning a lost object), it was hard for me to detect the linkage with morality and ethical behavior when puzzling over the minutiae of Halakha—the nitty-gritty detail, which seems to be at the forefront of the learning enterprise for many people. After first criticizing the obsession over minutiae that has seemed to pervade the Halakhic community, Rav Bigman proceeded to explain his views on learning Torah and living a Halakhic lifestyle—two inextricable parts of the broader whole of religious meaning for observant Jews—by using a fascinating metaphor. Rav Bigman compared Halakha to a play he had attended in his childhood, where the audience was called up to the stage to join in and improvise with the players. While I’m not entirely sure what he intended by this (I’m having a follow-up conversation soon, hopefully), I read into it what made sense to me, and I was left with a fascinating and profound insight into the world of Halakha. The metaphor expressed, to me, that Halakha is a comprehensive lifestyle where decisions are made by the “professionals” (sages and rabbis) within a traditional (rehearsed, if you will) framework, but at any given time, every individual is asked to jump in, participate, and improvise, ensuring that the decisions made are relevant and palatable to his or her own sensibilities and to those of the community at large. I proceeded to ask him about what happens when someone doesn’t necessarily find meaning in the Halakhic lifestyle, when someone can’t find it relevant to their lives and, therefore, can’t seem to connect to it. His answer was twofold. His first point was that the Halakhic lifestyle is just that, a lifestyle, and it can only resonate when one is immersed within it. It is a framework in which your understanding of the world and the system itself can only be full when you live it, when it is a part of your daily thoughts and actions. His second point was that how you relate to the Halakhic system is not based on one concrete ideological decision, but rather contingent upon everything from the different phases in your life to your current mood. He gave an example of how meaning associated with Halachic observance is likely to shift with one’s personal contexts, e.g. how a father might relate to Shabbat observance in a dramatically different way than, say, a student.
His message was supplemented by the words of some of my other teachers, as well. I spoke to Rav Meir Rubenstein, my Ram (Rav and moreh, teacher) for morning seder, about how he relates to limud Torah, Talmud specifically, as it has been the hardest area of study for me to connect to personally. He provided a different answer to my question about the seemingly inordinate focus on pilpul (literally meaning pepper, the word denotes, often with a negative connotation, a type of hairsplitting in Talmudic study) at the expense of the broader ideals and ideas behind it. He quoted Rav Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief Rabbi of the British mandate of Palestine, who said “ba’katon yesh gadol,” literally “in that which is small there is [something] big.” For Rav Meir, the act of learning, the act of wracking your brains over even the smallest detail, is both a symbolic and a very real gesture. When we immerse ourselves in learning, focusing even on the micro aspects of Halakha, we’re forging a complete, all encompassing awareness, a macro-consciousness where every detail is attuned to a larger significance in that it is a thread woven with countless others to create a rich tapestry, a Halakhic mindset and way of life.
I also spoke to Rav Yossi Slotnick, who has always been there to talk to when I’ve been struggling with something, whether it was waking up on time or finding a personal connection to Talmud study. For him, the study of Talmud and its commentators is the chance to engage with some of the most intelligent thinkers and Halakhists of all time and stand as their equal, in a partnership to reach the larger Halakhic truth, as well as to simply engage in a rigorous, inter-generational intellectual ping-pong match, which has its own merits beyond a search for Halakha le’maaseh.
I even got a chance to speak to Rabbi Saul Berman and his wife Shellee, two of my friends and mentors from my community in New York, who were visiting Israel and took the time to see me in Jerusalem. Rabbi Berman’s approach to learning Talmud was one in which Talmud functions as a sort of mental training, a way to condition your mind to sort out problems in a manner where it can identify key issues and priorities, learn to subsume details within the broader categories they reflect, and extract lessons from stories. Rabbi Berman explained how this type of thinking is also very useful for litigating in secular courts, for tackling the broader existential issues that tend to become overwhelming and hazily defined (as in my case), and for identifying the ethical or moral imperatives that underlie both Halakhic and secular law.
I think that all of the above opinions, although different from one another in many ways, reflect the need I discussed primarily in the first part of the blog to find meaning in both the ambits of Torah study and life, and the profound connection the two share. This was all put into new perspective after our Yeshiva visited the Charedi and Chassidic city of Bnei Brak to spend a Shabbat in that quite special environment. Throughout the weekend, a theme that underscored nearly every Dvar Torah and presentation we heard, was that the desire to learn Torah was both the beginning and the end of Jewish life, the ultimate goal and the foundational assumption of Jewish existence. While this might sound, like a lofty and beautiful sentiment (and in some ways it is, in my opinion), I think there is something deeply flawed in a philosophy of learning that precludes the type of experience where the lessons learned are actualized, challenged, and refined within the real world. The Jewish lifestyle, in my mind, demands openness and interaction with the world at large, where Torah doesn’t remain exclusively in the beit midrash, but is brought out to engage with every facet of life, to enhance learning and living, to instill ethical behavior and meaningful ideas into everything. While they saw the call to learn Torah as a call to forsake everything else, sealing themselves in an insular community that exists to ensure that no “distractions” pervade and detract from learning, I believe the call to learn Torah is a call to bring the divine will down to earthly reality, as well as elevate our earthly existence and knowledge to a holier plain. But these transcendent ideals don’t exist in a vacuum, they are deeply enmeshed with our own human reality—our needs, concerns, and morality.
A friend and I ate lunch at an exceedingly hospitable Charedi family’s home. The meal ended and the host made a grand announcement that for me was bittersweet. He explained how wonderful it was to see two American Jews who are going to learn with goyim in university (his daughters had asked us what goyim look like at an earlier point in the meal), who still cherished the same niggunim (traditional, wordless melodies), the same weekly Torah portion, and the same grace after meals. Although a beautiful, hopeful observation, I couldn’t help but wonder if that was all we shared—texts and history, and not much else.
As I’ve understood it, the notion of a willfully secluded community is aberrant in the grand scheme of Jewish history. The shtetls and ghettos existed, of course, but they were never self-imposed until the Haskallah (Jewish Enlightenment), when the Chatam Sopher, with his banner of “chadash assur min ha’Torah” (a pun deriving from a Talmudic ruling about new grain being forbidden before the grain sacrifice called the Korban Omer, used cleverly to prohibit the exposure to new Enlightenment, specifically Reform, philosophy and thought), decided to forsake a crucial element of Judaism in favor of isolationism. Whether it was the Rabbis of the Talmud debating entry into a Roman bathhouse, the Rambam appropriating Aristotelian logic for proofs of God’s existence, or Rav Soloveitchik citing the Kierkegaardian leap of faith in an essay, the Jewish faith has not only been in constant dialogue with secular thought and culture, but it has shared its input and unique perspective on relevant issues with the world at large, often even integrating the most contemporary ideas into its very core tenets and principles, without compromising tradition. And that, to me, is the beauty of Judaism’s “time consciousness,” as the Rav described it. We do not remain, like much of the Bnei Brak community, entrenched in outmoded beliefs and rituals, turning our religion into a kitschy remnant of the past, turning everything modern and new into contagions, but rather, our chain of tradition has been just that, a chain, that has not ruptured under the pressures of modernity, but has expanded and thrived with the passage of time, remaining perpetually important to all who choose to be a part of it, and even those who don’t.
Something in the nature of the religion necessitates this type of a relationship with the world, whether you chock it up to the emphasis on intellectual pursuits, commandments like “love thy neighbor” or tikkun olam (literally repairing the world), or simply an inherent tenacity built from years of perseverance in the face of oppression, there is no ignoring that the Jewish religion exists in conjunction with the world around it, not in opposition. This is why learning cannot exist in a bubble, why Halakha, by its nature, is contextualized both within the wisdom of ancient texts and the most current philosophies. By the very fact that Halakha is both a system of action (the Hebrew word Halakha is derived from the root meaning “walk”) and a subject of study, it necessitates the fusion of the maaseh (deed) and the learning behind it. The ideas behind Halakha don’t gain meaning until they are implemented and experienced by the individual, and the actions themselves don’t pave the path to personal meaning until they are studied. What arises when one does not shirk their duties to both study and live Halakha is a unique consciousness, a part of which the Rav described in the quote above, that perpetuates itself, that imbues actions with insights and brings insights into the realm of actions.
Thanks,
Kal
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