Bringing the torah everywhere

After college, I studied Hebrew on kibbutz at Sde Eliyahu, a dati leumi kibbutz. We worked on the farm as needed, and one days we were asked to sort potatoes. So we were sitting by the conveyor belt, sorting potatoes, and a girl, Pessie, opposite me on the belt, out of nowhere starts talking about Rashi’s comment to the first verse of the bible.
Beautiful, it’s an interesting verse, an interesting conversation, but pardon me asking, why did she bring it up? In the veahafta, it says to discuss torah when you’re walking on the way, when you lie down, when you get up, all the time. So we should study torah even when we’re sorting potatoes.
Parshat Vayavo details the events on last day of Moses’ life. Moses transfers leadership to Joshua, teaches a song to everyone which we will read last week, and also writes a Torah
Contemporary scholars say that the term “torah” here refers to legal parts of Deuteronomy, not what we call the Torah, i.e. the 5 books of Moses.
Tradition says that it refers to a complete torah scroll, the one dictated by God. This scroll included the final passage detailing about Moses’ death. Imagine writing about your own death? The midrash says, Moses wrote the final verse with his tears. This torah was placed on the side of the ark, and travels with the Jews wherever the ark travels.
The idea is that wherever we go, whatever we do, we take the Torah with us, both as a people and as individuals. We have carried the Torah throughout the world, all hand copied from the original scroll.
One way to understand this idea is that torah should apply to every situation, has to inform every decision we make. I need to take Torah in with me to my house, to my kitchen, my bedroom, to my workplace, to the watercooler at work. I need to apply torah everywhere.
A more literal way to understand this is like Pessie’s potato conversation: we should always be immersing ourselves in torah, wherever we go.
A humorous story is told about R Hayyim Shmuelevitz, the head of the Mir yeshivah, who was given permission to enter the US from Shanghai. The boat trip took a month. And while all the other passengers spent their days pacing around, impatient to see some sign of progress, he spent every day studying the work Shev Shemaitsa. And while everyone else was anxious, he was at ease, totally concentrated on his studies. One of his students gazed out at the sea, and asked him, “where are we?” R. Chaim immediately answered, “In shemaise gimel, in the third chapter.”
The story is almost extreme. It is extreme in the sense that he didn’t notice what was going on. And this is certainly the danger, which we see happening in the untraorthodox world at times, being so immersed in traditional studies that we ignore the real world around us. In this case, though, there was nothing to notice. Once he needed to look up and see where he was, I hope that he would.
For sure, we shouldn’t immerse in torah study so much we don’t notice what’s happening in the world—we should be worldly. We should read the newspaper. We should keep up with contemporary medicine and science.
But we also shouldn’t be so immersed in daily life that it takes us away from torah study.
How many people here read/ watch/ hear the newspaper every day?
How many people here read the Talmud or another sefer every day?
Sadly, so many of us in the liberal world aren’t really immersed in Jewish study; we are completely immersed in the contemporary world.
The truth is, you need to immerse yourself in jewish study to get somewhere with it. For me, studying full time in yeshiva in Israel brought me lightning years ahead in my studies. Just going to shul weekly is not enough. You need to work your way through a sacred book systematically. Even if we immerse ourselves one hour a day in Jewish study, it will make an amazing difference in our spiritual life, and in our ability to think jewishly about the contemporary world.
Many people have asked me to talk about current events, which I am going to try to do, and I am working on a number of sermon series on specific topics.
But it’s also important to go systematically through torah, through Talmud, through other seforim, to build a thorough Jewish knowledge, to build the kind of thought process that will approach current events from a jewish perspective. I want to challenge you: spend as much time studying a sefer every day as you do on the news (at least as a start).
This is what Pirke Avot calls tov Talmud torah im derech eretz—it’s good to combine torah and worldly pursuits.