Read A Book

Watch What Happens

When I first started rabbinical school, one of our get-to-know-you activities was to share some of the inspiration for why we wanted to be rabbis. I had a classmate who would always answer this question through the lens of Jewish literacy. He had grown up without much access to Jewish texts, had that world opened up to him by a teacher, and in turn, wanted to offer that gift to others.

I was befuddled every time I heard this. What about ritual observance? What about connecting people through prayer? As the years have gone on, I have thought back to that moment many times because I think he was right on.

That’s not to say there is one “right” answer to help Judaism flourish. It will require a herculean effort including a multitude of approaches. But as I have grown individually as a person of faith and have experienced working with young people and their families on their journeys, I am more and more convinced that unless we get people to start reading our “books,” Judaism will ossify.

And by read, I don’t mean to become a Talmud scholar or be able to participate in the international Torah quiz championships (although admittedly that is a wildly entertaining event). Rather, we need to help people develop a sense of relationship with the texts such that they feel empowered to engage with them independently.

I have had way too many interactions with people where they have offloaded their engagement with tradition to a proxy, not just for ritual behavior, but also for our textual traditions. Literacy held in the hands of a few will render the wisdom it reflects obsolete. The goal is to illustrate its relevance. Judaism’s texts speak to immensely complex problems and have been doing so for thousands of years.

This is not my own soapbox either. I’ve been mulling over this piece this week which has a lot to say about the current trends in religion in America. You should peruse at your own pace but the author’s main point is that the growth of secularism has become stunted as people have now turned back to their faith to help provide meaning and stability in their lives. In the previous path, people felt like they had to choose but in truth, the two can exist simultaneously.

She offers a number of compelling reasons for why faith-based initiatives can offer something secular places cannot but this area of literacy should be part of that conversation. In part this is because, she notes:

People also want to belong to richer, more robust communities, ones that wrestle with hard questions about how to live. They’re looking to heady concepts — confession, atonement, forgiveness, grace and redemption — for answers.

Change out a few of those words and it’s exactly why Judaism’s wisdom tradition is more relevant than ever. People are overwhelmed at dealing with the world’s complexity and one potential solution, I humbly offer, is to learn more of our texts.

A powerful way to reflect on that comes from the Esh Kodesh, our old friend Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the de facto Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto. Commenting on the holiday of Shavuot, a day associated with the revelation of the Torah, the day we are currently counting up toward, he writes:

והיא גודל ההתקשרות בינו יתברך לישראל בקבלת התורה, כיון שאליהם דיבר ונתקשר אליהם עצם המדבר בחינת “אנכי ד'” לא הדיבורים לבד, רק בחינת “אנא נפשאי כתבית יהבית” (שבת קה), “נפשאי” כביכול נתגלה לישראל על ידי לימוד התורה שלמד ד’ עמנו

This is the magnitude of connection between God and Israel at the receiving of the Torah: since God spoke to them and connected to them the essence of the Speaker, in the aspect of “I am the Eternal One” not only in words but also in the aspect of “I myself wrote and gave [the Torah]”, (Shabbat 105) “Myself,” as it were, was revealed to Israel through the study of Torah that God taught/studied with us.

Without going into too much of the original talmudic discourse he’s riffing on, the Esh Kodesh is noting the power of what happens when we learn. Namely, it’s not just that we’re studying something preserved in amber, as it were. We’re making it come alive when we fully engage with it. And not that alone, but something godly or dare I say, Godly, comes out of it. He literally believes that when we study Jewish texts, a Divine presence is right there with us.

I think many of us know that feeling. When we are really learning a text, especially when it’s being taught by a master teacher, the power of the Torah shatters the space-time continuum. You’re looking at something that has been learned by millions of people over thousands of years and you feel like it’s speaking directly to your heart and soul. It’s chill-inducing. That’s what a real relationship with text can create.

There’s an additional benefit, he argues:

לכן בשבועות זמן קבלת התורה וכן תמיד כשלומדים תורה הוא עת ישועה, ואין מקטרג יכול לשלוט אז חס וחלילה בישראל כיון שהוא יתברך מדבר עמנו ועצם אנכי מתגלה

Thus, on Shavuot, the time of receiving the Torah, and always, when we study Torah, it is a time of salvation/triumph, in which no detractor is able to rule over Israel, God forbid, since God speaks to us and the essence of Anokhi [“I” i.e. the Divine essence] becomes revealed.

That revelation, when feel a spark of divinity when we’re really learning, has power to make us feel safe and enveloped in something that protects us from events surrounding us. In my own life, that’s where my love of hasidut came from. In the early pandemic days, I couldn’t read anything online without being sent into a panic.

Before those years, I had always thought of hasidut as flowery, full of mumbo-jumbo, and not tethered to reality. In that moment though, a switch flipped and even if I only understand 5% of it, that scintilla of understanding was like a divine forcefield. I felt called to it because I understand that it came from authors who freely spoke about the very same brokenness of the world that I was now experiencing.

That’s the power of what being in relationship with our texts can offer. It builds a something of substance, no matter when we start the engagement, that has the potential to provide warmth, light, and security if we tend to it. It’s why education remains an important part of the work that I do even though I am no longer in the pulpit. One particularly outlandish idea I have is to go to the Big Bs (the Jewish philanthropic billionaires) and ask them to allocate enough money to create a free Jewish education system for any Jewishly identified person in the United States. If we did it to send people to Israel for the last two decades for free, we certainly can do it for this.

But even if we can’t reach that goal, we can all be participants in some way in this endeavor. There are ample resources online. You can do it with a teacher. Reach out to me for help with that! Or go to them for help (they’re awesome!) This is (really) (one of the ways) how we might save Judaism. So get on it; open a book, webpage, or app. This is your tradition as much as it is mine. You never know what might jump out of that page and into your heart.

Shabbat Shalom and Happy Weekend!