As Jews around the world prepare for the annual Shavuot festival, marking the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, it’s worth considering the paradoxical legacy of global Torah study.
In Israel, many haredim continue to pursue Torah learning as their exclusive way of life, sacrificing material comfort to the extent that they have become a serious “economic underclass.” In the words of Bar-Ilan University professor Noah Efron, “ultra-Orthodox males probably spend more time in formal study than any other class of humans ever has in the history of the planet. But small stipends do not easily support large families… as each generation exceeds the poverty of the last. Families of a dozen live in 600-square-foot apartments.”
Efron, among others, argues that such a situation, in which the secular world is utterly shunned and hence necessary life skills to create economic opportunity are never incorporated, may not be sustainable for much longer: “Torah study thrives and children go to school in thrice-patched pants with an ache in their belly. Something has to give.”
It’s strange to compare this picture with that of many other contemporary Jews, for whom Torah study is an endeavour that takes place on a distant planet, one they have neither the inclination nor the inspiration to visit. Seen as an archaic remnant of a prehistoric culture, Torah is a curiosity at best, and at worst, an oppressive reminder of the days before science “enlightened” us all. In this version, only the profane is holy.
It seems difficult in the landscape of these polar opposites to recall that Judaism and Torah study is the inheritance of the entire Jewish people. The late philosopher Emmanuel Levinas suggests that this sentiment isn’t just a canard used by Jewish educators, but rather a profound truth about what Torah really means.
In his seminal essay Revelation in the Jewish Tradition, Levinas writes that the Revelation calls to that which is singular in each of us, “as if every person, through his uniqueness, were the guarantee of the revelation of a unique aspect of truth, and some of its points would never have been revealed if some people had been absent from mankind.”
As much as we need Jewish texts to enrich us, they need each of us to unlock some dimension that would have remained hidden, like a house with an infinite number of doors requiring each of us to open them with our own set of keys.
When a teacher asks a student to comment on how they understand a Torah text, it would be a a grave error to think that this is just a pro forma exercise and that all of the “real” meanings of Torah are already spoken for in thousands of years of dense commentary. Rather, the business of each person coming to own the Torah text, to fuse our particular sensibilities with the ancient and eternal words, creates a synthesis and hence an illumination that has been waiting for millenia for the student to be born, grow up and add their voice to Torah.
Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook used to divide reality into “that which is holy and that which is not yet holy.” The chosen poverty of haredim implies a lack of complete clarity about how to fuse all of the parts of God’s world. Another kind of poverty, the lack of a generation of non-literate Jews, awaits remediation.