Beyond Faith: The Unexpected Joy of Torah Study

As Moses gives his parting advice to generations to come, he uses a word not mentioned in the previous books of the Torah. The word is limmud, the source for both teaching and learning. And we watch the rabbis try to keep this genie in the bottle. Welcome to Madlik. My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik, we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast channel and now on YouTube. We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show notes.

If you’re listening and you like what you hear, why don’t you give us a few stars and say something nice? This week’s Parasha is Va’etchanan. Judaism is dedicated to, even infatuated with learning and teaching. So we are a little surprised to find the word limmud appear only now in Devarim, where Moses provides the tools for the future. The rabbis want us to learn in order to do, but we explore the power of pure as opposed to applied learning in rabbinic and later literature.

Rabbi, I couldn’t help but think, as I was wanting to prepare, that it was Tisha B’Av and we’re not allowed to learn on Tisha B’Av. It’s the only day of the year we’re not allowed to learn. And why is that? The Talmud in Taanit says, because the precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart. It’s too much joy in learning.

Adam Mintz [2:16 – 2:24]: It’s remarkable, isn’t it, that learning Torah is so much fun that we can’t have that fun on Tisha B’Av.

Geoffrey Stern [2:24 – 4:10]: You know, there’s a word that we use in the yeshiva. It’s called taiva. If you have a taiva for chocolate cake, you just can’t resist it. I am telling you, Rabbi, the rabbis of the Talmud—and I think we—I’m guilty as charged, just love to learn. And therefore you have to get into, well, what are my intentions? Am I doing it for the right intention? It’s absolutely amazing.

I want to start with a story that I heard from Rabbi Riskin and I did a Google search, and I searched and I searched, and I finally found this story in Tradition magazine in the 70s. We might get into it in more detail later, but the context is can apikorsim, can non-believers study Torah? And here’s the story that Rabbi Riskin tells. He says there’s an archetypal story told about the European shtetl Jew who would badger the rabbi with heretical questions for an hour after Havdalah each Saturday night.

“If this is your opinion, why do you persist in coming to shul every Sabbath?” ultimately asked the exasperated rabbi. Came the response, “An apikoros I am, a goy I’m not.” The idea was that even a non-believer loves to study Torah. And where else can he study but the study hall? Where else can he study but the shul?

I think there was an archetypal image that I have, and I tried to find it in Yiddish literature, of the heretics studying Talmud on Shabbos with a cigar. But wasn’t there every… didn’t every town have that apikores?

Adam Mintz [4:10 – 4:21]: There’s no question about it. There are famous stories about the yeshivas in Eastern Europe and how they used to keep their secular books inside of their Talmuds.

Geoffrey Stern [4:22 – 4:31]: Okay, but that’s a little bit… That’s slightly different, but you’re right. They love… the Talmudists loved to study the secular world. Loved to.

Adam Mintz [4:31 – 4:42]: That’s correct. That’s really the opposite. The Talmudists like to study secular studies. The secularists like to study the Talmud. Yeah. Okay, good. So I gave you the flip side of your example.

Geoffrey Stern [4:42 – 5:37]: You know what, Rabbi? We’re gonna get to the flip side. We’re gonna get there. But for now, let’s just look at the verses in Deuteronomy 4. It says, “And now, O Israel, give heed to the laws and rules that I am instructing you to observe so that you may live to enter and occupy the land that God, the God of your fathers, is giving to you.”

In Hebrew, it says, “Yisrael, shema el hachukim,” listen to the commandments, “ve’el ha’mishpatim,” and the laws. asher anochi melamed etchem l’asot. limmud is to learn. Melamed is a teacher. limmud is study. So I couldn’t believe it, Rabbi. I looked it up in the concordance and limmud and no word using the shoresh lamed mem dalet is anywhere else in the five books of Moses besides Devarim. I had never realized that before.

Adam Mintz [5:38 – 5:55]: It’s a Devarim word because limmud has to do with transmission to the next generation. And Devarim is the book where Moshe wants to transmit to the next generation. So it’s not surprising that’s the only place it appears. But that is very interesting.

Geoffrey Stern [5:55 – 7:09]: And once you raise your antenna like that, then you start reading farther on. In our parasha, in Devarim 6, it says, “Impress them upon your children.” This is part of the Shema that we say two times a day, and it is here that we learn. There is a mitzvah to teach your children Torah, to study Torah. In Devarim Yud Aleph, in Devarim 11, it says, “And if you faithfully keep all this instruction that I command you, loving your God…” Here it says, this is a formulation that I think we’re more used to, “which I have commanded you to do.”

What is going to strike the rabbis is that in our verse, it says, “that which I taught you to do.” And they’re going to make some interesting connections as opposed to “mezaveh etchem le’asot.” That is going to have a big impact on what the rabbis start learning already now, with the first mention of limmud, is how you’re supposed to learn.

Adam Mintz [7:10 – 7:13]: Fantastic. Okay, let’s see what they have to say.

Geoffrey Stern [7:13 – 8:55]: So in Mishneh Torah, the positive mitzvah, the 11th Commandment, is to study Torah and teach it to others, as it says in Deuteronomy 6:7, “And you shall teach them to your children.” So the word that it uses that we find in the Shema is “V’shinantem.” That comes from the word Mishnah, to repeat over and to teach. But clearly, our sense of limmud has more to do than simply teaching your child.

Let’s read a little bit from the Mishneh Torah. Just as a person is obligated to teach his son, so too he is obligated to teach his grandson. There we go, Rabbi, we learned something new today. We have to teach our grandsons. Or alternatively, it’s a mitzvah to teach our grandsons: “You shall teach them to your children.” Furthermore, this charge is not confined to one’s children and grandchildren alone. Rather, it is a mitzvah for each and every wise man to teach all students, even though they are not children. For as it says in Deuteronomy 6:7, from our parasha, “And you shall teach them to your sons.” The oral teaching explains: “Your sons,” these are your students. For students are also called sons.

And it goes on a little bit like that. Rabbi, I think what it’s doing is it’s giving a basis for what you said. You said that the reason why limmud teaching is in Deuteronomy is because in Deuteronomy, Moses is giving the people of Israel the tools to transmit into the future. He’s giving his last words of guidance. And the most important tool that he gives them is to teach. To teach your children and to teach your students as if they were your children.

Adam Mintz [8:56 – 9:05]: Right. There’s no question about that. And Rambam understands that. And that’s exactly what Moshe is trying to pass on to the next generation. Good.

Geoffrey Stern [9:06 – 10:00]: So now we’re going to start splitting the hairs here about the different types of learnings or maybe the different intentions.

In Mishnah Pirkei Avot, it says, Rabbi Ishmael, his son, said, he who learns in order to teach, it is granted to him to study and to teach. But he who learns in order to practice, it is granted to him to learn and to teach and to practice. So all of a sudden, we’re starting to get into different reasons to learn. There’s the reason to learn, which is to kind of carry on the tradition with your children, by extension with your students. And then there’s a higher level, and I call this applied science or applied learning. This is to study in order to do. And if you do that, it includes everything.

Adam Mintz [10:01 – 10:18]: Fantastic. Okay. I mean, we study Pirkei Avot in the summer. And it’s interesting that Pirkei Avot is about study and that we come to the word l’ilmod in Sefer Devarim, which also is a summer word. So I’m sure that’s not by chance.

Geoffrey Stern [10:19 – 12:06]: So I. Well, one of my takeaways from this is if you teach in order to practice, you get everything because you set an example. I’ve always thought there are no silver bullets, especially living in America, when we try to transfer our Judaism to the next generation. But there are those outward teachings and then there’s watch me. And I think kids are much more impacted by what they see their parents do and they see others do than what those people tell them to do. So that was one of my takeaways.

The Pirkei Avot continues. And it says, Rabbi Tzadok said, do not make them a crown for self-exaltation or a spade with which to dig. They already were looking at Talmudic rabbinic Torah knowledge as something that could be used, misused. Don’t use the Torah as an atarah lehitgadel bahen. Don’t use it to build yourself up for pride. Don’t use it to dig with, to make a living, maybe to get rich with. All of a sudden, the rabbis are talking about what you can’t do with the Torah. But also it’s starting to say something about the society we live in.

Rabbi, if you have an agricultural society that no one studies and somebody becomes a great scholar, I would say nine out of ten societies will make fun of that person. They’re not going to admire him. They’re not going to say, oh, he’s using the Torah. It has to come from a society that values learning. It’s already saying something about the Israelite society that they have to warn and don’t use this to aggrandize yourself.

Adam Mintz [12:07 – 13:16]: So that’s so interesting. It’s not only have to value Torah, they have to value Torah as a value in itself. Torah is not important so that you will be important. It’s almost like you say, people value their work, they go to work every day. But the truth is they don’t actually value their work. They value the salary they’re going to make from their work. So the value is as a way of getting to the ultimate goal. But his point is, and the Lithuanians make a big point about this, is that the value of Torah is Torah. You know, the Hasidim, I’ll just take a second to say this. The Hasidim believe that you study Torah, that you pray as a way to get closer to God. But the Lithuanians always said that that’s not true. They quote Geoffrey, the sources that we’re talking about, and they say the value of Torah is Torah. Not what will come from Torah, but it’s Torah itself.

Geoffrey Stern [13:17 – 14:21]: It just struck me though, that in a society that we live in, even today, that learning and academia and knowledge is not that valued. You would not have to warn somebody. Don’t misuse it. Build yourself up with your Torah learning. Don’t use it to make a living. It really says something so profound about the society, but also about the people in it.

I mean, they really, I said in the beginning they let the genie out of the bottle. Torah is something that attracts people like me and you. We spend every week studying it. We have to be careful because it is so engaging. It’s so wonderful. At least that’s the world they came from. I just love that that’s the benchmark. It’s not as though they’re saying, you know, you can eat but don’t overeat. You can eat, but don’t do this. We’re talking about learning here, and they feel they have to put so many guardrails in because you might misuse it. I just find that fascinating.

Adam Mintz [14:21 – 14:47]: I’ll tell you, I saw a Tisha B’Av an amazing story. It was a story about a rabbi who after a long Tisha B’Av, rather than sitting down to eat, he would first study. Because on Tisha B’Av you don’t eat and you don’t study. But what he missed more than the food was the fact that he couldn’t study. That just shows that’s what you referred to at the beginning, the taiva for learning.

Geoffrey Stern [14:48 – 17:46]: It’s just amazing. And again, I think the story that Rabbi Riskin told about the guy who says, a heretic I might be, but a goy I’m not. In other words, he had the taiva. The taiva remains. It is such a profound part of the DNA of the Jewish people, this love of learning. There’s a reason we’re called the people of the book.

So about 15 years ago, and you know this story, there was an amazing woman from Alma who became a member of the Knesset, and she taught Talmud in front of the whole Knesset, in front of the Haredim and everybody. And all of a sudden people started thinking what’s called secular Yeshivot. And there is a current scholar, a guy named Gil Student, who asks the question in a blog post, is secular study of the Torah permissible? I mean, it’s a fascinating question. Rabbi, who would have even thought that you would need to ask that?

So he brings the sources. He says, non-observant Jews study Talmud for two main reasons, either devotional or intellectual. While these need not be mutually exclusive, the first attitude represents a religious act or a form of worship, even if denying the Talmud’s full religious authority. The second considers Talmud study an intellectual exercise, a broadening of cultural awareness, but is potentially problematic from a Talmudic perspective. So I thank him for the sources that we’re going to use.

In Berakhot 16B, it says, after his prayer, Rav Safra said the following: May it be your will, Lord our God, that you establish peace in the heavenly entourage of angels, each of whom is a minister, and so on and so forth. And then he says that he should be among the disciples engaged in the study of your Torah, whether they engage in its study for its own sake or not for its own sake. And all those engaged in Torah study not for its own sake, may it be your will that they will come to engage in its study for its own sake.

So the Hebrew words are Torah oskim shelo lishma and oskim lishma. But the question is already in the Talmudic period. First of all, it identifies, I think, a social institution that there were those people who learned Torah lo lishma, they’re not learning it necessarily to do it, to fulfill the commandments. They’re just learning it. And his belief was it’s okay because lo lishma ba lishma. If you study Torah not for the right intentionality, you’re studying it because of comparative religion, because of its wonderful stories, its access to human nature. Ultimately, you will fall so much in love that you will start doing the commandments.

Adam Mintz [17:46 – 18:00]: That idea of if you do it for the wrong reason, you’ll come to do it for the right reason, Geoffrey, that shows how powerful Torah is, that Torah will win you over.

Geoffrey Stern [18:02 – 18:59]: At least he believed it did. And he wasn’t afraid. He didn’t ask the question that was posed in this thing is, do we let everybody read Torah? Do we let everybody learn Torah? He wasn’t afraid. There are other opinions who are not so much. There’s Rabba once said, he who does them not for their own sake, it would have been preferable for him not to have been created. There is this concept. Rabbi, as much as we can say that learning the Torah has this great attraction.

It’s a sam HaChaim. It’s almost like a medicine that makes you alive. They were also afraid of what people could do with that knowledge. Maybe they could turn it against them. There was a line of reasoning that said, do not let the unbelievers study our texts.

Adam Mintz [19:00 – 19:18]: Right? I mean, you know, what is. Let’s analyze that for a minute. What does that tell you that you don’t want non-believers to study the Torah? You know, simply, I think what that says is that they’re gonna misinterpret the Torah, right? Isn’t that the risk?

Geoffrey Stern [19:19 – 19:23]: Okay, so let’s say higher biblical criticism, right?

Adam Mintz [19:23 – 19:47]: They misinterpret the Torah. That Torah isn’t just reading the text, it’s understanding it. That’s what we always talk about, the written Torah and the oral Torah. So therefore someone who’s a non-believer is going to misinterpret Torah. And misinterpreted Torah is worse than no Torah at all.

Geoffrey Stern [19:48 – 21:54]: At least that would be that opinion. So we’re getting different trains of thought here. Again, in Taanit, we do have that understanding that you can find good in Torah and you can find bad in Torah. You can have Torah that drives you to be a better person. And maybe you can find things in the Torah that are not so.

Rav Bana’a would say, anyone who engages in the Torah for its own sake, his Torah shall be an elixir of life for him, as it is “Etz Haim hi l’machazikim ba.” It is a tree of life. To them who hold it, it shall be your navel. And whoever finds me finds life. But he who engages in Torah not for its own sake, and this is interesting, not for its own sake, all of a sudden now he has ulterior motives. Maybe this is an elixir of death.

“My doctrine shall drop as the rain.” And “arifa” means nothing other than killing. So really there was strong argumentation about the danger, the potency of Torah. There’s in Pesachim, it says even a mitzvah performed with ulterior motives, God gives as a reward. As Rav Yehuda said, a person should always engage in Torah study and performance of mitzvot, even if he does it not for their own sake, as through the performance. So this is the lo lishma ba lishma.

But again, it comes down to a real discussion of, number one, what Torah is. Is it only to apply it so that you keep the commandments? In some of the texts, they start talking about, you know, it teaches you to honor your parents, it teaches you to have a good heart, it teaches you to do other things. And then, of course, as you say, there’s the potential for misunderstanding it, for using it to undermine the religion. But it is so profound that they really recognize the potency of Torah and they start wanting to draw conclusions.

Adam Mintz [21:56 – 21:59]: Yeah, it is remarkable. Okay, great.

Geoffrey Stern [22:00 – 24:22]: So what I wanted to get to a little bit is Norman Lamm, by the way, who is another one of my teachers. We’re mentioning Rabbi Riskin and we’re mentioning Rabbi Lamm. He wrote a whole book on this subject. And in it, he starts to bring the different opinions, quotes Tosafot that believes that the study of Torah should never be pursued with a conscious preclusion of the resulting implementation of the precepts, “limud al menat shelo la’asot.”

And this takes it to a very next extreme, where one is studying as a critic, maybe one is studying and saying, no, no, no, I’m not here to buy into this movement. I just want to understand the Torah. There are others. In the words of Rav Chaim Volozhin, he says the transformation of the study of Torah from a religio-intellectual to a cultural exercise is sinful. A secularist, detached Uncommitted study of Torah is considered by Rav Chaim a subversion of his definition of lishma and his understanding of the purpose of the study of Torah.

Rabbi, I am continually struck as we read these texts that the Torah was so powerful that it was constantly attracting people who wanted to study it to get other things out of it. Listen to Rabbi David Zvi Hoffman. He says the Torah of Israel is not a song or poem that you study in order to understand Jewish religion, but its purpose is learning in order to practice. They have this text that is so powerful. They have this body of law that is so fascinating. They have this Talmud that is full of insight into the human condition. And they have to say, no, no, no, it’s not a song, it’s not a poem, it’s not literature, it’s not drama. I just find it’s an amazing commentary on the power of Torah. And frankly, I am attracted to the songs and the poems and the lyricism and the human nature. And I’m impressed that they were so aware of it.

Adam Mintz [24:23 – 26:12]: So, I mean, Rabbi Lamm’s book, “Torah Lishmah,” which was his doctoral dissertation back in the 1960s, is actually a discussion of Rabbi Chaim Volozhin’s definition of “Torah lishma” as a reaction to the Hasidim. When Rabbi Chaim says that “Torah lishma” for its own sake means for the sake of studying Torah, that as opposed to the Hasidim, the Hasidic community, the Hasidic rabbis who believe that you study Torah to get close to God, the non-Hasidim didn’t like that. They didn’t like this idea. They thought even that was a misuse of Torah.

And that, Geoffrey, is amazing that the idea of using Torah to get close to God, that in itself is not allowed. And I’ll tell you a Rabbi Riskin story. When I was in 11th grade, I was in Rabbi Riskin’s high school in Riverdale, and Rabbi Riskin, as you know, once a week, I don’t remember what it was, Wednesday night maybe, used to give a lecture, right? That was the most famous lecture. It was the hottest ticket in New York. And we used to go sometimes to go listen to his lecture.

And one week, Rabbi Riskin was talking about this, and he said, and what does “Torah lishma” mean? And he turned around, you know, Lincoln Square is in the round. He turned around and he looked at me and he said, Adam, what does Tora lishma mean? I can’t believe I got the right answer. I was so petrified that I can’t believe I even knew how to talk. But he was proud. I gave him the right answer. I told him, Torah for its own sake. He was happy.

Geoffrey Stern [26:13 – 27:57]: Just amazing. It’s just amazing. But again, it cuts both ways. Torah for its own sake, in a sense, if it’s, you know, that’s where it becomes so fascinating to me, the amount of splitting and cutting and slicing and dicing to understand this amazing cultural phenomenon. And I think you could dedicate a whole podcast just to look at the different ways the Hasidic and the Lithuanian communities did look at Torah’s study. But I want to end with the takeaways from both.

This rabbi Student who talks about the secular yeshivas and we’ll go to Rabbi Riskin. So a student says, does a secular yeshiva teach the same Torah that religious yeshivas teach? In one sense, no. If the secular approach to the Talmud spreads, we will find our sacred texts profaned widely in society. Abayi and Rava will be two ancient debaters whose words are twisted beyond recognition in the public arena. We will also see religion challenged by a foreign textual sensibility that is difficult for the unintimidated to identify and reject.

This is not a matter of protecting rabbis from challenge, but protecting the Talmud’s sanctity open to all students who accept it as a sacred text. So at the end of the day, he questions whether you can study a sacred text in a sense. In the end he says, however, I can’t object to a secular yeshiva because Israeli society is so shallow that even a little religion, even if subversive, is a blessing. But I see the dilemma.

Adam Mintz [27:57 – 27:58]: That’s a great paragraph.

Geoffrey Stern [27:59 – 28:29]: Rabbi Riskin goes slightly differently. He tells the story of that heretic that comes to shul every Friday night.

And he ends up saying that nowadays, he says, what we are afraid of is not heretics, but Yiddish goyim who have no relationship whatsoever with any synagogue, not even for Yizkor services on Yom Kippur due to our lower birth rate and high assimilation rate according to the latest statistics. He says any excuse to study Torah is better than none. We must galvanize all of our forces to create Torah institutions.

In this particular article, he’s talking about how we dare not waste any of our precious resources and energy in the kind of inter-religious strife. He’s saying Reform is good, Conservative is good, Reconstructionist is good. Any exposure to Torah, who is it for us to criticize?

The fascinating thing is, Rabbi, you brought up in the beginning, and I want to end with this, you had that yeshiva student looking for the secular book in the Talmud in the stenda And I said, no, no, no, that’s something else. But the truth is, at the end of the day, what about all of those secular Jews learning Torah? What about the Torah that we study at Madlik? Isn’t it possible that we come up with some insights that might be of interest to the other community, to the totally dedicated community? And I think that’s what’s fascinating.

We live in an age, Rabbi, where women are studying Talmud and Torah for the first time. And I’ve got to believe at Maharat, where you teach, there are going to be times where, because we’re studying it with a new demographic or in a new way, we’re going to come up with chidushim (novel interpretations) that have never been heard before.

So, that really raises the question, can you study Torah from someone who is studying Lo Lishma? And the most famous example of that is Rabbi Meir and Elisha ben Abuya. Elisha ben Abuya is the penultimate heretic. He has been kotzets baNatiot. He has destroyed all the roots of Judaism, but he is still a Talmud Chacham. The Talmud refers to him as, “others say”, “acherim omrim”. There is this amazing story of Rabbi Meir, one of the greats who was his student. Rabbi Meir is walking with Elisha ben Abuya on Shabbat, and they are learning Torah. Elisha ben Abuya, Rabbi, is that Kofrim, that heretic on a donkey. As they approach the Techum Shabbat, which is the 2000 amot, outside of which you cannot walk on Shabbat, Elisha ben Abuya says to Rabbi Meir, we’ve reached the border, you should go back. And of course, Rabbi Meir turns to him and says, “No, oh, Acher, maybe you should come back.”

One is talking spatially and the other one is talking spiritually. But what happens at the end is when Acher passed away, the heavenly court declared that he should not be judged nor brought into the world to come. Rabbi Meir said, it is better that he be judged properly and be brought into the world to come. When I die, I will request this of heaven, and I will cause smoke to rise up from his grave as a sign that he is being sentenced to Gehennom. The Gemara relates, when Rabbi Meir passed away, smoke rose up from the grave of Acher, meaning that Rabbi Meir’s wishes were granted. Rabbi Meir learned from Elisha ben Abuya.

And I think that’s the additional answer to that of Rabbi Riskin and Rabbi Student. We live in a golden age when so many people are studying Torah. We should not necessarily be criticizing; we should be learning. What are they seeing in our text that we might have missed or that we have overlooked?

That’s amazing. I recommend everyone should read the book “As a Driven Leaf,” which is a historical novel written by Rabbi Milton Steinberg, who talks about the relationship between Rabbi Meir and Elisha ben Abuya. It’s an amazing book. He was the rabbi of Park Avenue Synagogue.

And it’s an amazing Shabbat Shalom, everybody. No matter how you learn, no matter why you learn, you’ll always have a place at Madlik. We should just learn Torah. It’s an amazing thing. It’s not Tisha B’Av. Let’s enjoy Torah.

Fantastic Shabbat Shalom to see everybody next week.