What are you Learning?

Nu? What are you learning?

This is taken from an essay, by Rabbi Daniel Bouskila, found in a recent edition of
The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

Nine years ago while attending the United Jewish Communities’ General Assembly [GA] in Chicago, I had the privilege and pleasure of hearing Pulitzer Prize-winning author Herman Wouk (now residing in the Palm Springs area, jp) known for bestsellers like “The Cain Mutiny” and “The Winds of War” address the opening plenary. What many do not know is that Wouk is a yeshiva-trained Orthodox Jew who studies Talmud daily.

In his address to the GA, Wouk described the way people who haven’t seen one another for a long time typically greet each other, “How’s the family, how’s your health, how’s your business?” – these are some of the typical greetings, Wouk told us.

“Let me tell you about the world that I come from,” Wouk said. “I come from the yeshiva world, where people bond though the study of Torah texts, and friendships are shaped based on learning together. Therefore, if one bumps into an old friend or rabbi from yeshiva and they haven’t seen each other for many years; the greeting we typically exchange is ‘What are you learning?’”

….

Maimonides teaches: “Moses established a system for the Jewish people, that they should read from the Torah in public on Shabbat, plus every Monday and Thursday morning, so that they should never go for three days without hearing words of Torah” (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Prayer, 12:1).


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Talmud Torah Lishmah: Study of Torah for Its own Sake…
or: “Nu! Lomir lernen a shtikl Torah."


There is a story that I recently learned about a great Polish rabbi from Gur. He saw many of his colleagues and family members perish in the Shoah. He survived that horrible page in 20th Century (CE) history and made his way to Eretz Israel where he continued his life as a scholar. He did learn that of all of his family, only one nephew had survived the fiery furnaces of Nazi Germany. Even so it was many years later before this nephew, now a rabbi himself, was able to journey to Israel to meet his famous uncle and Talmud Scholar.

As his nephew approached the door of his uncle, he took a few moments reflecting on this event and finally knocked on the door. His uncle opened the door and they stood there looking at each other for several long moments and finally this scholarly elderly man said to his only living relative, “It has been so long… you have suffered much and now you have traveled far. You must go at once to the Beit Midrash and learn. Go! There is much to study. Go, and do not waste time. Go and learn, my beloved nephew; go.”


You are interpreters; you are poets; you are mad. Only gradually will you learn to know it, only gradually, because your lifetime is to be a preparation for interpreting. Every lifetime well spent is a life of study – wherever that study may be applied: in the streets, in the household, in the law courts, in the laboratory, in the labor unions, in the prisons, in the parliaments, in the marketplace, in the house of prayer, in the solitude of oneself. But all of this is dangerous.
…from the Second Jewish Catalog


Go.
Learn.