1.
Let's talk about Torah study. The holiday of Shavuot has an agricultural dimension, being the festival of the wheat harvest, during which the first fruits were brought to Jerusalem. However, it also has a spiritual dimension: the holiday of the Giving of the Torah. No one intends to leave these great eternal treasures to others. The Quran refers to us as the "People of the Book" ("Ahl al-Kitab"), but I used to tell Italians that we are the "People of the Books," because, throughout our thousands of years of existence, we have managed to build an immense textual and intellectual skyscraper that no other nation in history has bequeathed its descendants. And all Hebrew speakers have the right and privilege to visit any floor we so desire in this building, and to draw from their treasures of knowledge, wisdom, and morality.
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To draw from the well of knowledge is utilitarian. "You're not productive," is an epithet that has often been directed at Torah scholars more than once. Indeed, Torah study among our people has evolved over the years from an engagement with our ancient legal codex, Halacha, to a focus on learning itself. A Jew sits in front of a book, as generations before him have done, he delves into it, connects with the ideas within it, and with the philosophical and legal discussions contained in that book, the formative stories that have shaped us. He toils in his studies. The act of studying itself is a value in its own right, even before considering the benefits that the scholar will draw from study, even before he has understood what he is studying. It is that we build an ethos that elevates learning to the chiefest joy of our nation. And wherever we were exiled, we took care, first and foremost, of the teachers of young children, those who would pass on the ancient wisdom to the next generation.
2.
In a period when in Europe, about ninety percent of the population couldn't read or write, and they relied on religious clerics to mediate knowledge, about ninety percent of the Jewish people were literate. Thus, we created an ethos of excellence. Yet, the secret does not lie solely there, but in our spiritual connection to the books, in the intellectual and emotional bond with the worn-out pages and with the small black letters that generation after generation built the first floors of that intellectual building, adding their own floors for future generations.
And behold what a wonder, every time someone attempted to summarize the Torah in a single book, to ease the burden on learners and the masses who couldn't navigate the vast maze of halachic literature, a tremendous philosophical and textual eruption followed in the generations after.
Toward the end of the second century CE, in the Galilee, Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi (Judah the Prince) gathered the various traditions and schools of thought and compiled them into the six orders of the Mishnah, so that the Torah would not be forgotten. The result, in the centuries that followed, was the two Talmuds, the Babylonian and Jerusalem (which actually was written in the Galilee) Talmuds, immense treasures of Halacha and philosophy, theology and ethics, history and customs, legend and folklore.
In the 12th century, Maimonides composed his work "Mishneh Torah," in which he summarized in 14 volumes all Jewish law and thought up to his time while settling various disputes. In the centuries that followed, the result was a vast literature surrounding his composition, including scholars and decisors who debated his positions and presented equally sophisticated intellectual structures.
In the 16th century in Safed, Rabbi Joseph Karo, who was only four years old when expelled from Spain, completed a similar work. He gathered the entire body of Jewish law until his time into four divisions in his monumental work the "Shulchan Aruch" ("Set Table"). He hoped that the book would organize the laws and concepts in an accessible and clear manner, in a way that could be compared to a person who sits down at a table that is already set and all they have to do is to begin the meal. The result, in the centuries that followed, was a tremendous literary, intellectual, and halachic eruption, including works by decisors who either disagreed with his rulings or had different interpretations of his words. And thus, the chain continues to our time and will extend from our generation to future generations.
3.
In this incredible textual skyscraper, there are different and diverse floors, and each one of us can find a floor where we feel at home, the place where one's heart desires to study: be it the Torah, the books of the prophets, the wisdom literature, poetry, or the return to Zion. After the Bible, there is the Apocrypha (extraneous books) that did not enter the biblical canon but are part of the creative spirit of the nation, especially the books of the Maccabees, which tell the story of the Hasmonean revolt in the second century BCE and what followed. The Midrash literature in its various shades, the Mishnah and the Talmud, biblical interpretation in the medieval and modern periods, Jewish philosophy, the mystical literature (such as the Zohar), Medieval Hebrew poetry, Hasidic and ethical literature (sifrut musar), and so on. And thus, we come to the floors added by more recent generations, including reflections on the social and spiritual revolutions in the world and among our people, including the secular revolution, Zionism, the Holocaust, and the establishment of the State of Israel, and all the way up to contemporary literature.
When a person enters a house of study (a classic Beit Midrash), even if they don't understand the subject being debated, they will hear that the verbs employed by learners, no matter the era, are not in the past tense but in the present tense: King David "says," Rabbi Akiva "argues," Rashi "interprets," Maimonides "adjudicates," the Zohar "reads" the verse in an original way, the Shulchan Aruch "determines," Ramchal (Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzato) "speaks" to us today in his book "Mesillat Yesharim" (Path of the Upright), and so on. This is because our texts have not remained on the shelf of a museum of the past but continue to surround us today and engage us in an ongoing dialogue. This is one of the meanings of the expression "Torah of life."
4.
This magnificent treasure has sustained us as a people, even when we had no territory, and the national body was dismembered and scattered throughout the four corners of the earth. The Torah was the land in which we lived, and through it, we also preserved the dormant national core that awaited the right moment. The Zionist revolution of the return of our people to Zion and the establishment of the state could not have happened without the existential ethos of constant learning and study of Torah, even during the most difficult periods.
But the value of Torah study did not end with the establishment of the state. We continue to need it today in order to exist. We are a people connected by the bonds of a glorious shared historical fate. True, we argue and quarrel with one another over our destiny, but there is nothing new about that. We have done the same in every generation that preceded us, since the first argument between our nation's founder and God over the fate of Sodom. "Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have fought with God and with men, and have prevailed," the angel of God said to our third patriarch when he gave him his new name. Our name embodies within it the eternal struggle with God; in other words, with our identity.
5.
Constant debate is deeply connected to the ethos of study and love of wisdom, and it is the secret of our existence throughout history. From it stems, among other things, the unparalleled phenomenon of how we became the "Start-Up Nation" which in such a small land generates more discoveries and innovations than any other place on the planet. We are in constant debate with God and men, with our identity, with every logical and philosophical argument ever made, with every legal, moral, and theological determination – raising against them mountains of contradictory reasoning. This Talmudic dialectic has not remained confined to fading ancient texts but has been copied to the planes of modern study and research that have challenged every assumption or reality and sought solutions and innovations to contemporary problems.
On the holiday of Shavuot, we will go to the House of Study, choose a book that we connect with, and will join the chain of generations, reading from the beginning (Genesis). For they are our life and the length of our days.
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