Take it to Heart
And then take it with you into the world
Question:
I’ve been reading Torah articles and books, and going to Torah classes since my early 20s. At some point though, I started to realize that the way I was scrolling through Torah articles had become as mindlessly robotic as my scrolling through sports highlights and cat videos on Instagram. It seems that somewhere along the way, I lost my connection, but kept “consuming” Torah out of habit, I suppose...
I’m really not happy about it though. I very much want to reconnect and feel that spark of growth again, but I don’t know how. My Judaism doesn’t feel light and spiritual anymore. It feels clunky and heavy and kind of hopeless, to be honest.
What do you suggest? Reading more clearly isn’t going to do it for me…
Advice from the Sages:
As a huge fan of Torah learning myself, I completely relate to your struggle.
The wisdom of Torah is the wisdom of life. Once you discover this, nothing can be more enjoyable than the pleasure of these ideas clicking in your mind. And, in an important sense, nothing can be more bluntly painful than life losing its lustre — which you know is there to be seen because you’ve seen it before, but no longer can.
Here’s the problem with wisdom:
Wisdom makes you feel like you’ve arrived when you’ve only just begun.
It is this dilemma that one of the greatest teachers of the Talmud, known as Rava (4th century CE, Persia) worked so hard to impress upon his students:
…מַרְגְּלָא בְּפוּמֵּיהּ דְּרָבָא: תַּכְלִית חָכְמָה — תְּשׁוּבָה וּמַעֲשִׂים טוֹבִים
A pearl in the mouth of Rava: the ultimate purpose of wisdom is to change yourself for the better and perform good deeds…
Truthfully, Rava’s concern was downstream from your concern, and as a result, more grave. Rava had seen too many disciples learn, learn, learn and then spurn the ones who had taught them out of arrogance and ingratitude. The Torah’s wisdom had entered their heads, but not their hearts.
The root, however, of the problem Rava was grappling with is the same as the one you are grappling with. Learning wisdom is meant to be the beginning of a process of integration and transformation of the self, and a guide for doing good in the world. Wisdom is not the destination. It just feels like it is because it so clearly and succinctly seems to explain everything.
It is this issue that is at the heart of what my own rabbi, Rabbi Beryl Gershenfeld calls “BTDs” (“Baal Teshuva Diseases”). People who start learning and living according to the Torah later in life (“Baalei Teshuva”) have a tendency, in their initial phase of growth, to look condescendingly and moralizingly towards others. The reason is because getting onto the spiritual high horse is relatively easy since it’s primarily a cognitive movement.
Take me, for example. It took me all of three weeks of studying in a yeshiva to decide that it was time for me to begin “preaching the gospel” to all of my contacts with a weekly Torah newsletter based on what I had just learned that week. Naturally, but naively, I felt that I had understood life because I had come to “possess” wisdom — or so I had thought.
It turns out that wisdom is only possessed by those who have done the work of integrating it into the fiber of their beings.
As the preeminent Torah teacher of his time, Rava was deeply bothered by this issue, and thought about it and spoke about it constantly. This is why this kernel of wisdom is called by the Talmud a “pearl in Rava’s mouth.”
Pearls are formed by a grain of sand agitating the soft inner tissue of a clam. The agitation causes a secretion of a substance called “nacre,” which over time produces a luminous, precious, organic gem that is a pearl.
There is a parallel process of taking ideas to heart, allowing yourself to chew on them, and be bothered by them. This is itself part of the wisdom process. Mulling over ideas that may cause you to change your life if you take them seriously, as opposed to avoiding the discomfort they may cause you, is essential to producing pearls of wisdom that have the brilliance to speak as deeply to others as they did to you.
All of us — especially those of us who love reading, thinking and learning — need the regular reminder that the purpose of wisdom is not wisdom itself, but teshuva (becoming a better person) and maasim tovim (doing good for others).
Wisdom in our minds is just the beginning.
Wisdom, ultimately, must come to reside in our hearts (our intuitions and natural emotional responses), our bodies (our habits and instincts), and our surroundings (the way we set up our homes, workplaces and communities).
All of this leads us, of course, to ask ourselves:
What are some simple, practical steps we can all take to integrate THIS pearl of wisdom into our lives and do more good with it?
Here are the TWO EXTRA LEARNING STEPS TO INTEGRATE THE TORAH YOU ARE ALREADY LEARNING:1
Step 1:
Once you have the Torah idea you are reading more or less clear in your mind, ask yourself honestly if you fully “buy” the idea as it’s been presented. Are there any points that still bother you? Are there any stones left unturned that you can think of?
This may feel slightly “heretical,” as you are questioning your faith, but it’s actually critical to come to any kind of real, sturdy belief. If you don’t believe that your “beliefs” can withstand questioning, how can you say that you truly believe in them. This is the same idea as the internal agitation that produces pearls.
If you add this step, you’re going to find that a) it will reengage you in your learning process by reawakening your innate curiosity that fell asleep in your “religiosity,” and b) will lead you to hatch ideas that live much deeper inside you heart precisely because you’ve subjected them to the critical thinking that you intuitively knew they demanded, but never pursued.
Step 2:
Once you’ve developed the idea through your battery of questions, now you are ready to ask yourself: “how can this idea can change my life?”
Going back to Rava’s statement:
How can this idea change me as a person for the better? How might it speak to my habits and outlooks as they stand today? (i.e. teshuva)
How can this idea make the world better? How can this idea improve my relationships? Be more thoughtful? More compassionate? More effective at bringing about positive change in the real world? (i.e. maasim tovim)
If Rava’s idea sounds too simple and obvious, maybe mull it over some more and see if it brings out its brilliance, and your own.
These two steps are actually Steps 3 & 4 of the “4 STEPS FOR LEARNING RASHI,” which I feel very fortunate to have received from my rabbi Rabbi Gershenfeld, whom I mentioned above. They really require practice to appreciate, but here’s a synopsis.
When learning any Rashi, you should ask yourself the following questions in order:
What was bothering Rashi in the text of the Torah? How might you understand what he’s saying to stem from a question the Torah itself seems to be communicating through its unusual syntax or word choice?
How does Rashi’s comment answer that textual anomaly you noted in Step 1? Because Rashi’s textual starting point is often tacit in his comments, this step is harder than it may sound.
What questions do you have after having learned Rashi’s comment? Perhaps something about his comments have left you dissatisfied. What exactly is bothering you? Humbly push back! Perhaps his comments have inspired new questions for you, which you had never thought about. What are they? Trust your curiosity!
What are your take-home messages from this learning experience? How can your life and you be better as a result? What are practices you can adopt — even small things — that can bring to life what you’ve learned?