Torah Study Blog

Each week before we delve into our session, we start with a blessing:

Barukh atah Adonai, Eloheinu melekh ha’olam, asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav, v’tzivanu la’asok b’divrei torah.

Blessed are You, Adonai our God, ruler of the universe, who sanctifies us with commandments, and commands us to la’asok ourselves in the words of torah.

The word “la-asok” could be translated a few different ways. Common translations are immerse, or occupy, or engage. Rabbi Roberts’s preferred translation in this case is “engage.”

This week Rabbi Roberts decided to engage with the words of that blessing and to help us to understand where they might have come from because – surprise, surprise – they do not come from the Torah!

The Torah did not come together as a body of writing until approximately 250 BCE. So, when we are instructed to immerse ourselves in the words of the torah, which “words” might we be talking about?

From the Torah, the closest we can get to instruction comes from the book of Deuteronomy:

When he is seated on his royal throne, he shall have a copy of this Teaching written for him on a scroll by the Levitical priests. Let it remain with him and let him read in it all his life, so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God, to observe faithfully every word of this Teaching as well as these laws. (Deuteronomy 17:18)

Scholars believe this passage was written in the 7th century BCE, when it was likely that the king at that time was illiterate, and he could not read anything! Today it is understood that we do not necessarily mean the “words” of the Torah, which are composed of just the first five books of the

Hebrew Bible. Nor does it mean the entire Hebrew Bible, also called the Tanakh, which has three parts: The Torah, The Prophets, and The Writings. The word torah in this blessing refers to all available scholarship that relates to the topic we are studying. That includes the Talmud, medieval scholarship, modern scholarship, and even the Christian Bible. Anything that can add to our understanding.

Also from the book of Deuteronomy, the people, who were almost all illiterate, were told the words recited in the V’ahavta:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. Take to heart these instructions with which I charge you this day. Impress them upon your children. Recite them when you stay at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up. Bind them as a sign on your hand and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead; inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 6:5-9)

The V’ahavta does not say that we should actively study the words, or immerse or engage ourselves with the words. The V’ahavta says we should “take” them and “recite” them.

The blessing that we say before Torah Study comes from The Rabbis. But, in the early centuries there was not a group of people who sat around and said, “We are The Rabbis!”

The first Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. At some point the concept of synagogues emerged. The word “synagogue” is actually a Greek word and it simply means a meeting place. Along with the synagogue, there were also Beit Midrash, or houses of study. It is possible that the Jews were influenced by the Greek form of symposium, which was an opportunity to sit and converse.

The Rabbis were from an elite class and would have found it fun for them to sit with their peers and discuss the ancient writings of our people. If this is hard to believe, keep in mind that the people who attend Torah Study at Temple Israel today think is it fun! We engage with similarly curious people about a topic that interests us. People 2500 years ago were no different.

The religion we practice today is not the biblical religion of the Torah. No one is sacrificing animals at the Temple anymore. What we do instead is the rabbinic religion that The Rabbis created. The Rabbis believed that studying was important, and they incorporated that into our ritual. As part of the Shabbat morning prayers we pray to “engage with the words of Torah,” and to be “students of Your Torah,” and, “For those who study Torah here and everywhere, may they be blessed with all they need, and let us say, Amen.”

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misquotes or misunderstandings in what Rabbi Roberts taught us are the responsibility of Tara Keiter