When I was younger and imagining what it was that rabbis and their students did when they studied the Talmud, our 37 volume collection of legal commentaries and rabbinic stories that come to elucidate the meaning of Torah, I imagined individuals pondering and unfolding the mysteries of the universe. I imagined revelations of truth and discoveries of the secrets to life and happiness. Talmud study, in reality, is a lot like going on a multi-day hike. You walk and walk and walk, and you come over some hill, looking for the camp site or the river or the lake that is your lunch stop or your final destination for the day. And at the top of a hill or around a bend, you find another hill, or another bend. It is only in the moment or as you stop obsessing about whats over the next hill that you appreciate the trees and the rocks and views of that which you are immersed in right at that moment. One of my teachers once constantly advised us, when learning Talmud, to be here now.
I’ve been learning Talmud with Beth Shalom’s Monday Talmud group since I arrived in Pittsburgh in the fall of 2018. After five years completing the entire tractate of Rosh Hashanah, which has four chapters and 35 pages, we moved on this past year to Bava Kamma, which is 10 chapters long and has 119 pages, of which we’ve covered about 9 pages this past year. All of that text has been dealing with a pretty basic question: who is liable for damages when a pedestrian or passerby is injured or receives property damage? That of course leads to a zillion subsequent questions. When is an owner responsible for damages caused by their ox, or a pit dug in a public thoroughfare, or for a fire on their land that spread to the house or the field next door? What if I take precautions to cover the pit or put up an orange cone? What if I tie us the ox? What if I asked my cousin Bob to watch my ox for the weekend and the ox got out? What if the fire had died down to just embers? As I said before, it’s easy for the Talmud to get caught up in the minutiae of any one of these specific problems, and for our class to spend several months on one tiny facet of detail. There are different categories of oxen that do damage; there are different rules for what land must be given in compensation. Don’t even get me started on the question of what to do when an ox off its leash falls in a pit.
The other day, we came to one of these little convoluted sidequests the Talmud likes to engage in. If an owner entrusts another person with guarding a hazard like a pit or an ox or a fire, and nevertheless damage is caused, the second individual, the one entrusted with guarding, is liable. However, there are many mitigating factors. If an owner entrusts one of these items to one who is not competent, like a child below the age of 13, the owner is still the responsible party, because children cannot be held liable. So the rabbis add several follow up questions. What if the child was given a covered pit, or a tethered ox, or the embers or coals from a fire? Hold that thought.
Shavuot as a holiday is often said to be the holiday of revelation, of the day the Torah was given. Of course, the way we celebrate Shavuot doesn’t exactly reflect this - we don’t so much celebrate or approximate or relive the moment that God gives the Torah on Mount Sinai, with the fires and the sounds of the shofar on this holiday. Our major modes of unique recognition are all-night Torah study and dairy foods - which are a celebration of Torah or its specific regulations and not the moment the Torah was actually given. Shavuot also falls at graduation time in America, and is often celebrated as part of the Jewish education cycle - it was rolled into Confirmation in many Reform and Conservative synagogues and used to mark a milestone in Jewish learning. Jewish education is the formal way we pass on our traditions and our knowledge from one generation to the next. We have a passion for text, for stories, for legal knowledge, and we want our children or the generation after us to see what we see - that it is valuable - and invest their time and energy in it. We have a fire, and we want to kindle their fire for it as well.
This is no small feat. Having been a full time Jewish educator for 12 years and a part-time Jewish educator for 24 years, it is not easy to pass on a love of Torah from one generation to the next. It isn’t immediately apparent to a child why a bunch of laws purportedly composed by a nomadic desert tribe about the pegs and rings in their portable prayer tent is relevant. It is hard to demonstrate the relevance of the laws of torts and bailees as they apply to oxen to a new generation. When I was a high school Judaics teacher, it was hard to compete for the attention of the students who knew that the history of entry into the Vietnam War would be on the AP US History exam, but that they did not need to know the reasoning behind why you were permitted to take 2 kilograms of scattered grain when they left the walls of the day school.
This problem should feel fairly familiar to all of you. It is essentially the same question as ‘why did you get up and come to synagogue today - to take a vacation day from your secular job to observe your religion?’ It is also the question of ‘what is the value of religion in a modern world where scientific discovery and power politics and post-modern moral ambiguity have crowded out the very meaning and purpose of God and religion?’ We don’t need Torah to lead a happy life - we have material consumption, and antidepressants, and AirBnB vacations to France.
Shavuot is a weird holiday, as I said, because it is a celebration of the moment Torah was given, but it is also sort of a holiday of the learning of Torah. These ideas are diametrically opposed. At the giving of Torah, the people who accepted it had no idea what they were getting. And yet, of course, they famously said ‘naaseh venishmah’ - we will do and [parenthesis] dot dot dot at some point at a later time [end parenthesis] we will hear and understand. I have heard many sermons about how this moment is an extreme expression of faith by the Israelites that we should all emulate, blah blah blah. I am less convinced and less impressed by this moment. The moment you get into to university is filled with elation and excitement. That moment feels a lot less glorious nine months later, when it is 3 oclock in the morning, and you’ve been cramming for 7 hours for a freshman year final that you and all your classmates are petrified of - but the university experience - other than the beer and the parties - is about the four years of work you put in.
Of course, universities celebrate your graduation and not your admission. With Torah study, admission begins at birth, and there is no graduation, not even at death, so it is harder to figure out how one should celebrate, and when. The rabbis imagine in at least one version of olam haba, the world to come, that it is a place with no material entanglements to slow us down - no dishes to wash, no nine to five job to go to - just Torah study all day long, and thus even death to the rabbis does not mark the end of Torah study.
Talmud learning is similarly uninterested in milestones and culminations. The final words in every tractate of the 37 volumes of Talmud include the words ‘hadran alecha’ - we will return to you. There’s no such thing as ‘done’ in Torah study. There’s just a whole lot of ‘see you later, alligator.’ To reference my hiking analogy from about, it is a lot of hills to climb which reveal more hills to climb. And the process of climbing all those hills, day after day, year after year, helps Torah learners to realize that they should be less focused on whats over that next hill and become more focused with appreciating what they have in front in them. It is the secret joy of every middle school or high school Judaics teacher that we aren’t actually teaching kids rote information about oxen and pits and lost objects and tithed produce. We are teaching them how to think; how to reason; how to work through a problem; how to consider from multiple perspectives; how to be patient; and how to apply moral reasoning to a situation. We are teaching that how you solve a problem is at least as important as the solution you come up with. We are wearing little grooves in their brains that will show them how our people think and how we ought to think - and that is deeply, and patiently, and carefully, and with kindness and morality. This is the tradition that we are attempting to pass on - a tradition counter to some of the modern conveniences of instant gratification and material consumption. It is slower and more deliberate. It revels in complexity and nuance.
I am simultaneously concerned about the future of Judaism, and certain that I have nothing to worry about. I am concerned because I see what you see - there are fewer Jews joining synagogues today, and Hebrew school enrollments are getting smaller, and day school enrollment is down over the past 20 years. All of this is a reflection of our modern society - that Americans are less religious, less communal, and less willing to invest patiently in things that take many many years to pay off. However, I am also completed sure that in the long run, Judaism will maintain its relevance - because the Talmud hasn’t been literally applicable in almost 2000 years and nevertheless we are still studying it intently. Torah study is the long game. Our people’s flame does not go out easily.
At Sinai, there was fire. Or, some say, there was smoke without the fire. The Torah tells us in Exodus 19:18 - “Now Mount Sinai was all in smoke, for Adonai had come down upon it in fire; the smoke rose like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain trembled violently.” God is the fire, but Sinai was in smoke. This whole aspect of fire and smoke and God and Torah slowly dawned on me several days after our Talmud class learned that section in Bava Kamma 9b about the liability for transferring responsibility for an ox or a fire to your minor child. The Talmud tells us
“Reish Lakish say in the name of Ĥizkiyya: They taught that one is exempt from damage caused by a fire only in a case where he transferred an ember to a minor who then fanned it into a flame. But if he transferred a flame to him, the one who transferred the flame to him is liable for any damage caused. What is the reason? He is responsible because the capacity for it to cause damage is certain.”
In other words, handing the smoldering embers of a flame to a minor is not the same as transferring a fire to minor. You can do something with a fire; but to take coals or embers and make fire, one must fan it carefully and add fuel. The Talmud here is warning us about who is liable for fire that is dangerous, but if we look at it in the other direction, that fire is a tool, or a metaphor for our passion for Torah, then it takes on a different meaning. The adults responsibility, perhaps, is to pass on the coals of the fire to the next generation, for them to fan into a flame. Or perhaps the Talmud is telling us that passing on the coals is not enough - that coals in and of themselves are not the fire, and that passing on coals does not ensure that our children will make a fire of them. In this metaphor, we might say that passing on the information of Judaism without the passion, or that passing on a Judaism that is frozen and unchangeable is a recipe for disaster. It is the next generation that will receive the tradition and make something of it that lives and breathes like a fire. That said, we do need to feed the flames. We need to provide support for the next generation of Torah learners. We should always be a forward looking religion that is willing to spend our time and our money on the younger generation and what they need. Even though Jewish synagogue and communal involvement skews older, we should always invest a disproportionate amount of our funds in young people and their education. To do this is to plant a seed that takes many years to grow. Support for Jewish education, even in times of declining Jewish engagement, is the nurturing of a glowing coal that will rekindle into a flame, each and every generation.
Sinai was not on fire. God was the fire. Sinai was the smoking embers of a fire, and the people chose to fan it into flame, and to keep it going. Good yuntiff.
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