Fixing one's Torah

At Avot 1:15 Shammai teaches:

עֲשֵׂה תוֹרָתְךָ קְבַע, אֱמוֹר מְעַט וַעֲשֵׂה הַרְבֵּה, וֶהֱוֵי מְקַבֵּל אֶת כָּל הָאָדָם בְּסֵֽבֶר פָּנִים יָפוֹת

Make your Torah fixed; say little and do much—and receive everyone with a pleasant countenance.

It’s easy to understand the bits about “say little and do much” and “receive everyone with a pleasant countenance”, even if we don’t always live up to those lofty ideals. But what does Shammai mean by “make your Torah fixed”?

Classical commentaries know that Shammai, as a Tanna and a man who was steeped in Torah learning himself, is concerned to buttress this learning against any outside threats and temptations as possible. Let us examine some of them.

The Bartenura tells us that Shammai intends us to make Torah learning the main fixture of our days and our nights. Only when we are too tired to carry on learning should we take a break and do some work. From what we know of the Bartenura, he spent some time as a banker and would appear to have enjoyed the benefit of independent means, so he may not have needed to trouble himself about working for a living. Even so, one wonders what sort of remunerative work a man might find only when he was worn out from Torah study.  Rambam and the Meiri also go for a ‘minimum work’ option: just keep learning Torah and wait to see if any work opportunities arise.

Fortunately the Bartenura offers an additional explanation of Shammai’s teaching that is within everyone’s grasp: “fixing” one’s Torah means being consistent when applying it. In other words, don’t be strict with yourself but lenient with others, or vice versa. Another sort of consistency is advocated by R’ Rafael Emanuel Chai Riki (Hon Ashir), who argues that what needs to be fixed is one’s own chiddushim, novel interpretations, so that they are properly thought-out and don’t contradict each other.

The commentary ascribed to Rashi also offers two explanations, but they contradict one another. First, one should not fix specific times each day for learning Torah but should fix the whole day for doing so. Secondly, one should fix specific times so that one can be sure to learn four or five chapters daily.

R’ Avraham Azulai (Ahavah beTa’anugim) adheres to the “fixed times in the day” principle, but with the proviso that, during those times, one is absolutely disturbance-proof, regardless of any reasons that might justify a breach of those times.

Modern commentators, living in a world where most sorts of work are not casual but demand commitment, regular hours and often lengthy training, tend to be more relaxed about the thing which is fixed, though not about the “fixing” requirement. How so?

R’ Abraham J. Twerski (Visions of the Fathers) regards fixing as a process of absorbing the notion of Torah as the priority in one’s life to the point that, as he puts it:

A person may do a full day’s work, yet be absorbed in Torah, looking for opportunities when he can seize a few moments to study a mishnah or two.

This might strike the Torah scholar as a somewhat minimalistic approach, but it is well in line with the exigences of modern life.

R’ Yisroel Miller (The Wisdom of Avot) ties “fixing” to the second part of the mishnah, about saying a little but doing a lot”: it’s better to fix for oneself as little as even two hours a day for learning than to say “I will learn as much as I can” since, human nature being what it is, identifying a manageable target and sticking to it is more likely to succeed than stating an open-ended objective, how laudable it may have sounded. Following the lead of R’ Shimshon Rephael Hirsch, Gila Ross (Living Beautifully) puts it differently, expressing herself in terms of the value of routine: for Torah and spiritual values to be firmly established in our personalities and become our life choices, they have to be a regular part of our routine. Still with routine, R’ Yitz Greenberg (Sage Advice) comments that “regular study add[s] up to a knowledgeable person whose life is guided by Torah”. He then quotes R’ Israel Salanter as coming out firmly in favour of a minimalist definition of a talmid chacham:

A Torah scholar … is not one who studies everything, but one who studies every day.

The Maharal’s approach (Derech Chaim) is to view “fixing” as a metaphor for truly internalising the Torah one learns so that one completely acquires it. Following the same line, one of the explanations offered by R’ Yaakov Hillel (Eternal Ethics from Sinai, vol.1) is that “we may have studied vast amounts of Torah, and yet we have not truly acquired it—it is not ours”. He then refers to the 48 ways of acquiring Torah listed in Avot 6:6. For him, that is what fixing one’s Torah means.

 So where does this leave us? We live in a world in which we are increasingly torn from our Torah studies by the demands of feeding and clothing our families, keeping a roof over our heads, paying our school bills and other regular overheads and generally worrying about a wide range of things that don’t look like learning in the traditional Jewish sense. But the rabbis have recognised that, if we can’t leave the real world to enter the world of Torah and stay there, we can at least bring the Torah into our daily world and live it to the best of our abilities.