I had a lot of trouble convincing my wife that it is a mitzvah to learn Torah not for money.
And when things got tough for me, I had trouble convincing myself of the same.
I mean we all know that when people that seem to be following a certain path act badly this reflects on the path itself. If you hear about Buddhist monks complaining about a certain alternative group of Buddhists you think automatically that maybe the whole path itself is wrong.
So it is a challenge to defend the idea that learning Torah is a big deal.
So it is a matter of faith. Fine but what I want to bring here is the story. The story started early for me. I think from a very age Torah held a kind of fascination for me. And when I first arrived at yeshiva I felt like a fish that had been out of the water for so long that I could hardly breath and then someone had the kindness to throw me back into the water. There was nothing rational about it at all. It was a deep gut reaction I had to Torah.
When I told my future wife about yeshiva she also got the "bug" and jumped into the beautiful amazing world of Torah. But it was not easy to explain to her the idea that learning Torah is the purpose of life kind of idea of the usual Lithuanian yeshiva. Lots of people had the idea that learning Torah was to become a rabbi [God forbid] and to make money [may Heaven save us].
In fact outside of Brooklyn and Bnei Brak the idea of Torah for its own sake was unknown.
And nowadays the idea may have faded out completely. Even people in kollel tell the general public that learning Torah is a legitimate profession. The idea of Torah for its own sake seems so foreign to people that they think it is absurd.
The main obstacle to Torah is people that do not know Torah, nor learn Torah, nor keep Torah, but put on an act that they do. They give the holy Torah a bad name. If not for them it might be easier to define the idea of learning Torah as the goal of life.
There are times when prayer does not work because it is after the Divine decree. At that time when prayer does not help one needs to dress the request in statements, not prayers. In this way we see that learning Torah is not just a kind of prayer but in fact is even more effective than prayer.
But in the ultimate analysis the value of doing Torah and learning Torah is that it connects a person to God through the moral realm. Its value is only in so far as it connects you to objective morality.
That is insofar as the laws in fact correspond to objective morality and learning them causes one to keep them.
Since people are primates there seems to be an obstacle in becoming moral. For we have reason which perceives moral values but we also have our primate nature which goes in the opposite direction. So it does seem clear there is a need for work to get ourselves in alignment with objective morality.
In any case to be able to defend this any further I would have to go the the Guide and the commentary on the Guide by Joseph Albo. And there are limitations on my being able to do that.
So it is a challenge to defend the idea that learning Torah is a big deal.
So it is a matter of faith. Fine but what I want to bring here is the story. The story started early for me. I think from a very age Torah held a kind of fascination for me. And when I first arrived at yeshiva I felt like a fish that had been out of the water for so long that I could hardly breath and then someone had the kindness to throw me back into the water. There was nothing rational about it at all. It was a deep gut reaction I had to Torah.
When I told my future wife about yeshiva she also got the "bug" and jumped into the beautiful amazing world of Torah. But it was not easy to explain to her the idea that learning Torah is the purpose of life kind of idea of the usual Lithuanian yeshiva. Lots of people had the idea that learning Torah was to become a rabbi [God forbid] and to make money [may Heaven save us].
In fact outside of Brooklyn and Bnei Brak the idea of Torah for its own sake was unknown.
And nowadays the idea may have faded out completely. Even people in kollel tell the general public that learning Torah is a legitimate profession. The idea of Torah for its own sake seems so foreign to people that they think it is absurd.
The main obstacle to Torah is people that do not know Torah, nor learn Torah, nor keep Torah, but put on an act that they do. They give the holy Torah a bad name. If not for them it might be easier to define the idea of learning Torah as the goal of life.
There are times when prayer does not work because it is after the Divine decree. At that time when prayer does not help one needs to dress the request in statements, not prayers. In this way we see that learning Torah is not just a kind of prayer but in fact is even more effective than prayer.
But in the ultimate analysis the value of doing Torah and learning Torah is that it connects a person to God through the moral realm. Its value is only in so far as it connects you to objective morality.
That is insofar as the laws in fact correspond to objective morality and learning them causes one to keep them.
Since people are primates there seems to be an obstacle in becoming moral. For we have reason which perceives moral values but we also have our primate nature which goes in the opposite direction. So it does seem clear there is a need for work to get ourselves in alignment with objective morality.
In any case to be able to defend this any further I would have to go the the Guide and the commentary on the Guide by Joseph Albo. And there are limitations on my being able to do that.
