Just last week we posted a discussion (“Material wealth, human needs: when does a luxury become a necessity?”, here) on Rabban Gamliel ben Rebbi’s dictum (Avot 2:2) on getting the right balance between learning Torah and earning a living:
יָפֶה
תַּלְמוּד תּוֹרָה עִם דֶּֽרֶךְ אֶֽרֶץ, שֶׁיְּגִיעַת שְׁנֵיהֶם מַשְׁכַּֽחַת
עָוֹן, וְכָל תּוֹרָה שֶׁאֵין עִמָּהּ מְלָאכָה סוֹפָהּ בְּטֵלָה וְגוֹרֶֽרֶת
עָוֹן
Torah study is good together with
earning a living, for the exertion of them both makes sin forgotten. All Torah
study that is not joined with work will cease in the end, and leads to sin.
The earlier post addressed the extent to which one’s
material wants and needs should be allowed to compete with the imperative
requirement of learning Torah. I’ve just found a different slant on this
teaching, focusing on the risk a Torah student takes in seeking to establish
the right balance. This comes from Rabbi Norman Lamm—a champion of Torah Umadda—effectively
the pursuit of all forms of knowledge for the purpose of enriching one’s Torah
understanding and bringing one’s understanding to bear in the contemporary world.
Rabbi Lamm’s premise is that, however important Torah learning may be, every
community depends for its survival on some people working for a living and
occupying themselves with acts that do not constitute Torah learning. This is a
truism in respect of any and every Jewish community—we all need doctors,
lawyers, accountants and others whose professional skill set lies outside the
covers of the Talmud and its commentators. But ultimately the decision as to
how to balance learning with work is placed on the shoulders of the individual
and, for each of us, getting the right balance is just a euphemism for taking a
risk and getting away with it.
In Foundation of Faith he comments on this mishnah:
An educated, intelligent and perceptive Jew, comfortable with
his Jewish knowledge base and secure in his own identity, should be able to
weigh up the non-Jewish ideas he encounters when acquiring and practising a
profession. But there is a warning:
“…[I]nstead of looking at [an
idea that originates from a non-Torah source] critically, the student will
embrace I, especially because Torah Jews are a cognitive minority … even within
the Jewish community, and it is very difficult to live as a lone wolf, as it were,
intellectually. So there is a tendency to give in, and that’s the danger”.
At this point the reader may be wondering why, given the
risk of adopting ideas antithetical to the Torah, Rabbi Lamm should be so keen
for a Torah-observant Jew to do so. Here’s his answer:
“[I]t’s worth taking that risk
because doing the opposite means that we have given up our commission of being
a goy kadosh umamlekhet kohanim. We are in danger of no longer
being “a holy nation and a Kingdom of Priests” but, instead, becoming a safe
sect and a denomination of Priests, and that is not exactly what we were told to
do at Har Sinai”.
I wonder if I am alone in finding Rabbi Lamm’s argument, for
all its power and passion, quite unpersuasive. Is it true in any meaningful
sense that “any knowledge that can never be dangerous is also never worth
striving for”? How does one go about verifying this assertion? Why is no
apparent distinction drawn between “knowledge” and “ideas”? And why are we any less a “holy nation and a
Kingdom of Priests” if we absorb our own Jewish ideas and share them other
nations? Thoughts, anyone?
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