Learning
Erin Leib Smokler
Erin Leib Smokler is Director of Spiritual Development and Publications Editor at Yeshivat Maharat, where she teaches Hasidism and Pastoral Torah. She is a National Jewish Book Award winner for her collection Torah in a Time of Plague: Historical and Contemporary Jewish Reflections (2021).
Credit: Jewish Life Photo Bank, Laura Ben David
A famous story is told in the Babylonian Talmud, Menahot 29b, imagining Moses as a befuddled student in the classroom of Rabbi Akiva:
Rav Yehuda says that Rav says: When Moses ascended on High, he found the Holy One, Blessed be He, sitting and tying crowns on the letters of the Torah. Moses said before God: Master of the Universe, who is preventing You from giving the Torah without these additions? God said to him: There is a man who is destined to be born after several generations, and Akiva ben Yosef is his name; he is destined to derive from each and every thorn of these crowns mounds upon mounds of halakhot. It is for his sake that the crowns must be added to the letters of the Torah.
Moses said before God: Master of the Universe, show him to me. God said to him: Return behind you. Moses went and sat at the end of the eighth row in Rabbi Akiva’s study hall and did not understand what they were saying. Moses’ strength waned, as he thought his Torah knowledge was deficient. When Rabbi Akiva arrived at the discussion of one matter, his students said to him: My teacher, from where do you derive this? Rabbi Akiva said to them: It is a halakhah transmitted to Moses from Sinai. When Moses heard this, his mind was put at ease, nityashvah da’ato.
Rabbi Akiva’s subsequent fate, and Moses’s protest of it, follows. And much has been said about this tale and its implications for Jewish theodicy.[1] But what are we to make of the classroom itself? What might we learn about Jewish teaching and Jewish learning from it?
Note the timing of this story: “When Moses ascended ‘on High.’” This story is said to have taken place on Mount Sinai, during the grand revelation of the Torah. It seems that during that 40-day period, God had some last-minute flourishes to add to the written text. In response to Moses’s curiosity about these flourishes, he is transported generations forward to the classroom, the beit midrash, of Rabbi Akiva to witness and learn from Rabbi Akiva’s teaching. Revelation, then, in some sense, took place in a classroom of the future and was a profound pedagogical experience. In receiving Torah, Moses learned how to learn Torah.
There is no methodology outlined here. No curriculum or systematic theory of education offered. Instead, there is a performance of transformative learning. Rabbi Akiva’s interrogation of the crowns of letters is inscrutable to Moses. Moses, situated as a student (8 rows back), is completely deflated, tashash kocho, utterly lost in the abstruse musings on details of the Torah he perhaps never even noticed before. He is arguably stunned into silence. It is only after another student in the classroom voices their confusion—seeking some anchor, some way to tame the wild teaching—that Moses can quiet his own storm. “Our teacher, from where do you derive this?” says the contemporary of Rabbi Akiva. “It is a halakhah transmitted to Moses at Sinai,” replies Rabbi Akiva. Moses’s “mind was put at ease.”
Why? Why was Moses calmed by this assertion of a throughline from himself to the future? He did not garner new information or acquire some fact hitherto unknown. He did, however, take in a novel truth—that wisdom can evolve and shape-shift and even defy or mystify its author, so long as it roots itself back to, holds itself accountable to, or stays in conversation with, the ages. The revelation of the Revelation was that the beit midrash—the confusing, dynamic, trans-generational classroom—would be the site for the ongoing development of Torat Moshe, the Torah of Moses.
This experience of good teaching and deep learning occasioned, in Moses, yishuv da’at, literally, a settling of the mind. He did not necessarily emerge smarter or more pious or more knowledgeable. He found ease, an inner quiet, the ability to sit. Consciousness of the eternal throughline, from Sinai on, allowed him to rest, secure in knowing that Torah would still speak, even in languages alien to him. There was and is a kol gadol ve-lo yasaf, “a great voice that has not ceased.” (Deut. 5:19) And this sound of eternity yields a unique peace.
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The Talmud here imagined Jewish learning as a creative, iterative, unpredictable enterprise, but that is not how the practice of talmud Torah largely developed. Particularly in the modern era, particularly in the Eastern European tradition, highly sophisticated conceptual analysis, known as pilpul, became the focus of yeshiva learning, followed by the Brisker method of Rabbi Chaim Soloveitchik of Brisk. To learn Torah was to engage in intense intellectual casuistry, parsing each legal phrase, precisely clarifying each concept that undergirds it, and thereby unlocking the inner workings of the Word. This laborious intellectual work aimed to reveal ahistorical objective truths latent in the divine law. This is, of course, a highly reduced picture of a majestic tradition, but it captures an ethos of learning that has been dominant for some time.[2]
There have always been alternative approaches, though, oftentimes on the margins of Jewish community. Approaches that have been less elitist, more spiritually oriented, more alive to the situatedness of interpretation, more invested in learning as a personally transformational endeavor. There have always been daring Rabbi Akivas confounding more traditional Moseses, and there have always been students seeking yishuv da’at, deep existential ease, more than epistemic Truth. The Hasidic movement, born of the Baal Shem Tov (Rabbi Yisrael b. Eliezer, 1698-1760), became a home for these students, and it seems that this once-marginal approach has become far more resonant in recent times as well. Regardless of whether the content of study is Hasidic, I would argue that a Hasidic orientation toward text (though not teacher) has taken hold.[3]
Let us look back at early Hasidism then and its approach to Jewish learning in order to understand the current phenomenon. Here is one description of the Hasidic encounter between teacher (rebbe), student, and text, based on the famed oral teachings of the Maggid of Mezritch (1704-1772):
The Yiddish language as spoken by the Hasidic community has a special term for [the rebbe’s drasha, or teaching], a usage found only among Hasidim. The phrase is zogn Toireh, “to say [or speak] Torah”: Der rebbe zogt Toireh, “the master speaks Torah.” A non-Hasidic teacher might say a devar Torah, “a word of Torah,” or even just a vort, “a word,” meaning a brief exposition of a Torah teaching, but he will not zog Toireh in the same sense as a rebbe. Here is a linguistic expression of a theological viewpoint: the rebbe’s speech is a continuation of the great font of revelation that opened at Sinai, reading Deuteronomy 5:19’s kol gadol ve-lo yasaf to mean “a great voice that has not ceased.”[4]
The Hasidic rebbe “speaks Torah” in the sense that what he says about Torah is Torah. Commentary on a Biblical verse, for example, is not an explanation of what the verse “really means,” so much as it is a statement about what it means right now—in this time, in this place, to these people. That interpretation is the revelation of the hour, and not merely a transmission of a revelation of times past.
This understanding of ever-evolving revelation must notably be spoken because it is oral in nature. It is an unstable address—always relational, always fleeting. Every teaching is particular—to a certain individual or individuals, in certain circumstances. Records of these encounters threaten to petrify what is fundamentally fluid. Later teachers of Hasidic texts (myself included) must heed this concern, lest the written word be stripped of its orality. To “speak Torah” is not only to expand what counts as Torah into the current moment, but to foreground the dynamism and specificity of interpersonal communication that is its essential medium.
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Beyond “speaking Torah,” we must also learn how to read it. Nehemia Polen, a scholar of Hasidism, points out a different dimension of Hasidic learning and hermeneutics, what he calls “gracious reading.” He roots this concept in a teaching of Rabbi Yaacov Leiner of Izbica-Radzyn (1828-1878) on Genesis 47:29. There, Jacob confronts his imminent death and worries about the fate of his bones:
And when the time approached for Israel to die, he summoned his son Joseph and said to him, “Please, if I have found grace (chen) in your eyes, place your hand under my thigh as a pledge of your steadfast loyalty: please do not bury me in Egypt. (Gen. 47:29)
Leiner wonders why Jacob invoked chen, grace or favor. Did he not trust Joseph to fulfill his dying wish? He writes, in his book Bet Yaacov:
There are places in Torah which on the surface appear uninspiring. To the person who just sees their surface meaning, they appear as a lifeless, immobile body. Such a lackluster appearance is akin to being buried. However, for someone who sees the words of Torah in a gracious, favorable light, there is no passage in Torah that is uninspiring, for by means of the gracious regard (chen) he has for Torah, his heart is aligned with and resonates with the depth of these seemingly buried passages.[5]
In other words, Jacob understood that sometimes important people, and important ideas, die. That is, they lose their vitality, their presence, their power to stir souls. He begged his son—and by extension, all of b’nei Yisrael, the children of Jacob—to hold those desiccated bones with grace. Do not exile them. Do not bury them or abandon them. Take them with you, he says. Carry them into the next chapter, the next place, and give them a new home. Plant them, so to speak, in new soil so that they may rise again. So that they may thrive again. The gift of grace is the patience to hold onto the lifeless until one can find just the right way to breathe new life into it.
This is the charge of “gracious reading,” according to Polen.
Only a gracious reading reframes, re-deposits, spatially translates, re-contextualizes, and restores life to such [seemingly dead] passages…. Gracious reading opens the heart to meaning, bringing frozen passages to warmth and life…. [The school of] Izbica knows where the bodies are buried, and it is not shy about pointing them out, digging to reposition them so they may speak with renewed life.[6]
The Hasidic reader approaches text with grace. She holds it gently in its stillness. It is not yet audible. It does not yet rattle the soul. But then she finds a way to revivify what seemed dead. Courageously and audaciously, she is willing to disinter it from a calcified context and move it to a fresh one. Note the activism here. Note the willingness to point out the graves—to name what is dead—and to insist that it return to the land of the living. Reading graciously is an act of humble preservation, and it is an act of brave creation.
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After speaking and reading Torah, where might the learning land us? What is its telos? Here the words of the Sefat Emet, Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter of Ger (1847-1905), are instructive. Long before Jacob’s death, Jacob spent much of his life on the run. In Genesis 28:10-11, we are told:
Jacob left Beer-sheba and set out for Haran. He came upon a certain place (vayifga bamakom), and stopped there (vayalen sham) for the night, for the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of that place (hamakom), he put it under his head and lay down in that place (vayishkav bamakom).
Jacob has fled home from his brother Esau, from whom he has just stolen a blessing, and comes upon a suitable place to rest. Soon he will dream of a ladder full of angels.
The Sefat Emet notes the repetition of the word makom, place, in verse 11 and offers the following teaching:
Now the Torah portion Va-yetzei (Gen. 28:10-32:3) presents our patriarch Jacob’s provision of a remedy and pathway even for such people who are not privileged to be within, such as our own generations—we who have been expelled from our home, our life source. In fact, there is a remedy (tikkun) to be found everywhere, by the power of Torah…. The Torah gives location and stability to everything. This is what our Sages intended when they taught, “There is nothing that does not have its place” (mAvot 4:3). This is the meaning of the words “He came upon a certain place … [and he took] stones of the place” (Gen. 28:11).
My teacher, my grandfather, [Rabbi Isaac Meir Alter] of blessed memory, explained that the letters [of the Hebrew alphabet] are called stones. Those letters—the signifying traces of Torah—are to be found everywhere…. This is the meaning of the continuation of the verse in Genesis “and [Jacob] took from the stones of the place and positioned [them] under his head.” (Gen. 28:11) “Positioning” is synonymous with “arranging,”… Therefore, Scripture gives us Jacob’s statement: “And this stone that I have placed as a monument will be a house of God” (Gen. 28:22). This means that Jacob arranged and built a structure and a home from letters.[7]
Exiled from home, Jacob created a home for himself. He came upon a place (vayifga). He stopped there (vayalan). And then he lay down (vayishkav). He found a way to rest, to be at ease. And he did so through an act of collection. Contingency brought him into this particular set of circumstances. He paused to take it all in, to notice where he had arrived. And then he made it his own, one stone at a time. He gathered local treasures and made them a new source of support for his weary head.
For the Sefat Emet, this is the pathway for all who find themselves in exile. Collect local beauties—letters of the Torah, refractions of the Divine—and make them into your pillow. Create an edifice not only of meaning but of soft comfort. A place where you can lie down. A place, perhaps, where you can find yishuv da’at.
On this view, Jewish learning, maybe even Jewish living, is about arranging the letters of the Torah in a way that is site-specific, person-specific, and deeply supportive. It is generated by local language, the idiom of a particular time and place. Its aim, notably, is not just to collect things or to aggregate knowledge, but to find a way to spiritually, existentially rest. To be at home, fully and wholly, in the world.
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Through the lens of three different Hasidic masters—the Maggid of Mezritch, the Ishbitzer Rebbe, and the Gerer Rebbe—three defining features of hasidically-inflected Torah learning come into view, three features that seem to capture some of the zeitgeist of Jewish learning today. The Maggid highlights the experiential dimension of “speaking Torah,” enlarging the corpus of what counts as Torah and who counts as a purveyor of it. He asserts that learning Torah is an essentially oral and essentially a dynamic, interpersonal activity. The Ishbitzer accents the importance of reading graciously, patiently, and oftentimes, radically. He invites the identification of dead texts and calls boldly for their revival. The Gerrer Rebbe, through the image of collecting stones to buttress one’s head, suggests that all this personalization, revivification, and radical interpretation are ultimately aimed at a spiritual settling, an attempt to find one’s makom (place) with Hamakom (The Place/God) in the world.
Perhaps our classrooms, like that of Rabbi Akiva, would confound Moses, but they might also bring him—and us—a great deal of yishuv da’at.
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I teach Hasidism and I’d like to believe that I teach hasidically. Here’s what Moses might see in my classroom, my hybrid Zoom and room, at Yeshivat Maharat in Riverdale, NY. In the beit midrash: all women pursuing Orthodox semikha, young and old, pious and irreverent, progressive and conservative, and everything in between. On the screen: representatives from Israel, Europe, South Africa, Australia, and all over North America. We learn from books. We learn from digital media. We puzzle over the crowns of letters.
It is the week of parashat Chayei Sarah and we are studying the writings of the Meor Eynayim, Rabbi Menachem Nachum Twerski of Chernobyl (1730-1797). Genesis 24:1 states: “And Abraham was old (zaken), advanced in age, and the Lord had blessed Abraham in all things.” The Chernobler Rebbe is interested in the word zaken, old, and it gives him occasion to speak about the rather abstruse Kabbalistic notion of God’s beard (zakan).
We know that there are thirteen attributes of God, sometimes called the thirteen qualities of the beard [or, “the elder”]. These are Y-H-W-H! Y-H-W-H! God merciful and compassionate.... (Exod. 34:6) They are the glory and majesty of God, just as (though different in a thousand, even in infinite, ways) the beard is considered the glory of a man's face. In a spiritual sense that is utterly to be distinguished from the corporeal parallel, these thirteen attributes of God's “beard” are His glory and greatness, by means of which He conducts the affairs of His worlds and creatures.[8]
If ever there was a dead idea, God’s beard may very well qualify. How might a room full of women contend with a God who is not only distinctly male, but possesses “the glory of man’s face” in the form of a flowing beard?
We carry these dead bones forward, though, reading graciously, expansively, and personally. We think about hair more broadly as a metaphor for that which is of the body and not; as something that is both alive and dead; something that flows beyond the self; something that can be beautiful and grotesque; something that can be cut off and regrow, something that can be concealed and revealed.
In my class, one student, a cancer patient in Chicago, reflects on the meaning of hair loss. Another, a trans woman from New York, on the experience of growing hair and impeding its growth. A third, all the way in New Zealand, on the magnificence of one homeless man’s beard and the way that it draws people toward him. All find something sacred in these experiences and encounters. All find a Torah of the Beard that—most unexpectedly—resonates with and revives them. All find some solace in stormy circumstances through this study, in conversation with peers, in conversation with age-old texts and traditions. Nityashvah da’atan, their minds are put at ease.
Endnotes
[1] See, for example, Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, “Talmudic Stories and Their Rewards,” in Paul Socken, ed., Why Study Talmud in the Twenty-First Century? (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 177-194.
[2] For a generous overview of the meaning and philosophy of pilpul, see Daniel Boyarin, “‘Pilpul’: The Logic of Commentary” in Dor Ledor 3 (1986): 82–106.
[3] The rebbe or zaddik, a charismatic teacher/preacher/leader, was central to each branch of Hasidism and would serve as the anchor, if not the medium, of its learning. The claims of this article pertain to some of the modalities of Jewish learning exemplified by Hasidism, but not its orientation toward its teachers.
[4] Arthur Green, “The Hasidic Homily: Mystical Performance and Hermeneutical Process,” in Bentsi Cohen, ed., As a Perennial Spring: A Festschrift Honoring Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm (New York: 2013), 241. Please note that this citation and any that follow are not an endorsement of the character of the author, but an acknowledgement of his scholarship.
[5] Bet Ya’acov (1906; reprint, Jerusalem: 1977), 15b-16a.
[6] Nehemiah Polen, “Hasidic Derashah as Illuminated Exegesis,” in Michael Zank and Ingrid Anderson, eds., The Value of the Particular: Lessons from Judaism and the Modern Jewish Experience: Festschrift for Steven T. Katz on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 58.
[7] Sefat Emet, Vayetzei, 1884. For this translation and a beautiful interpretation of it, see Nehemia Polen, “Jacob’s Remedy: A Prayer for the Dislocated” in Jewish Mysticism and Spiritual Life, eds. Lawrence Fine, Eitan Fishbane, and Or Rose (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publications, 2011), 201-208.
[8] Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl, The Light of the Eyes, trans. Arthur Green (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021), p. 247.
