Torah Study
Torah Study as Part of Mussar
[The following passage is from chapter thirteen of Rabbi Stone's A Responsible Life: The Spiritual Path of Mussar. Aviv Press, 2006.]
Torah is the heart of Mussar spirituality. It is a text, a history; an interpretive stance in the world, a call from the Other and a response to another. Its multi-dimensionality serves as an outline to the multi-dimensionality of the contemporary Mussar personality. Let us begin our discussion ofTorah by providing some definitions.
The Torah is not a text but a library of texts. It is, of course, the text contained in the Sefer Torah (Torah scroll), the Five Books of Moses. It includes, additionally, the rest of the books of the Bible. Taken together, these texts are known as the Written Torah. Understood even more broadly, "Torah" also includes those texts that constitute the Oral Torah. This group is forever fluid. The Mishnah, the Talmud, the midrash, the medieval poets, philosophers and exegetes, and commentators down to our own time—down to this very book—are part of the ongoing conversation about the tradition that is included in our notion of Oral Torah. The vastness of the literature can be daunting. Even to master the variety of languages in which the literature is written can be daunting. However, mastery is not our initial goal. Acquisition is our initial goal.
We have already seen in Hokhmah U-Mussar that acquisition of Torah depends on bearing the burden of another. What is it that we acquire when we acquire Torah? We acquire a thirst for a call or claim upon us. We acquire a desire to be called upon by another and another and another . . . an infinite desire. It is this desire that we bring to the texts of the tradition and that, in turn, we find in the texts of the tradition. That is, we study Torah in order to acquire Torah. The study of this ancient and venerable literature has always required a motivation. As children, we may have heard simplistic motivations, such as: "Torah will make us better people" or "Torah is the wisdom of our people and will somehow transform us." However, these do not suffice for most contemporary Jews, because we have not really understood the sentences we have heard. "Torah will make us better people" means: the acquisition of Torah will make us better people. And becoming better people will, in turn, give us the "eye" with which to learn and study more Torah. All Torah that we will learn will be Oral Torah, since the very act of reading the Written Torah—bringing our own perspective to bear—creates the next layer of Oral Torah. Our motivation is not simply that studying Torah will make us better people. Rather, as people who have accepted the burden of the other, we are now motivated to delve deeper and deeper, to discover additional possibilities for accepting even greater responsibility for others than were discovered by the masters of our tradition in the past.
We thus claim that Torah has a history, and for contemporary Mussar spirituality there can be no blindness, no sleep, in the face of this history Despite the ancient tradition of delving more and more deeply into the level of responsibility we have for another which is Torah, we know that people were more or less diverted from the true acquisition of Torah in different periods of history. We therefore have a mandate to apply our Mussar sensibility to the accumulated tradition of Torah and to make changes to that tradition that will aid us in better acquiring Torah. Despite the best intentions of many, some crying voices in past ages went unheard. Despite our best intentions, some crying voices in our own time will also go unheard. Only at the messianic horizon would the acquisition of Torah be perfect. And we have learned that any messianic claim of perfection is a false claim. Thus the history of Torah must be part of our contemporary spiritual quest.
For Mussar, the crucial question is always: To what extent does an act or thought better enable us to bear the burden of another? It is this question that is the defining interpretive stance that we take vis-a-vis both the accumulated Torah tradition and the world. Torah is therefore a questioning. Being in the presence of Torah does—and should—unsettle our complacencies. It should refuse us sleep, since it is a part of the critical Mussar project of wakefulness. Thus, to the extent that we avoid contact with Torah, we allow ourselves to sleep the sleep of the guilty who think they are innocent. Since the Torah comes to us orally, since it is always carried by the human voice that reads it and studies it, it constitutes a voice that calls us from outside and above. In this it is divine, since an infinite voice calls infinitely in every word that has come into being as Torah. The vastness of the literature belies the fact that each word rings with the same voice. The vastness of the literature only emphasizes the vastness of the call and the lengths that we go to when we try to avoid it: staying asleep turns out to be just as much work—if not more—than staying awake. The depth of the call in every word is so compelling, that the attraction of this depth can also militate against the excuse of its vastness that we use to avoid study. There is way too much Torah to study; that is part of its miraculous nature. But every word of Torah yields a world in which to study. Thus contemporary Mussar seekers do not try to study the entirety of the Torah literature. Rather, they savor the world of a single word or phrase: singing it, memorizing it, chanting it, it becomes a part of their consciousness. They learn to live it in every act, and thus are motivated to take on the next word or phrase. The goal is not mastery but acquisition. We acquire Torah by bearing the burden of another, and in the pleasure thereby derived we delve into the text for a word or phrase that will intensify this pleasure. Each phrase thus sought will stimulate the desire to seek another person and to bear yet another burden. What ultimately matters is not how much Torah is learned, but how much Torah is acquired.
The Torah contains a call, and we must respond to that call; the nature and extent of our response will determine how much Torah we learn, or acquire. As we have seen, involvement in the social structures of the community and taking on the yoke of teaching are both acts contingent on the acquisition of Torah. The Mussar student will thus strive to take on more and more of the vastness of the tradition, and then take it out into the world. Despite the difficulty of the literature, Torah-study will thrive when it is undertaken as a response to the call implicit in it. In our own time, the proliferation of texts in translation has, to some degree, eased some of the difficulties associated with text-study, and this is indeed a blessing. We will deal with how to study and what to study in a bit more detail below. But practical questions are irrelevant until we internalize the theoretical question: Why study? Ultimately, we study Torah because the acquisition of Torah consequent on the bearing of the burden of another can transform who we are as human beings.