Although his interview style keeps him in the background most of the time, letting his subjects present their work, when he does jump in he displays impressive erudition, both about the subject at hand and the history of the books that relate to it. He’ll often point to obscure editions of texts that the interviewees aren’t aware of, or to tangential works that have just been published or reissued, enlightening both the audience and the expert being interviewed.
In between the academics and the Ḥaredim, however, SeforimChatter features many of the same sorts of enthusiasts whose work fills the pages of Ḥakirah. Mitchell First, a lawyer who wrote a historical study of the book of Esther, described how an initial article of his was rejected by Hakirah, at which point someone suggested he try the AJS Review, a premier academic Jewish-studies journal—which accepted it. Steve Weiss, a doctor in Los Angeles who owns the world’s largest collection of commentaries to Pirkei Avot (a talmudic tractate dealing with ethics), discussed his just-published bibliography of everything written on the subject (you can apparently get a free copy by emailing avotmaven@gmail.com). Yossel Housman, who works for Lakewood’s Beth Medrash Govoha (and tweets prolifically using the handle @yeshevav), has visited the podcast to discuss the history of Ḥasidism, as well as the origin of the Tisha b’Av lamentations.
What links the vast majority of guests on the SeforimChatter podcast with one another, as well as with the writers at Ḥakirah, is the story of how they began researching their respective topics of interest. Listening to their accounts is like listening to someone describe a romance: first falling in love and then developing a deep connection to the topic they’re drawn to.
Rabbi Housman describes himself chancing upon a religious book one day while perusing the synagogue bookshelves, and reading about the workings of Sephardi liturgical poetry (piyyutim). These poems tend to employ complex metrical and rhyme schemes, are highly allusive, and often use deliberately arcane language; they are rarely, if ever, studied formally as part of a yeshiva curriculum.
He was immediately fascinated, and as he started to read more on the subject, he wandered into a ḥaredi bookstore asking for books about Solomon Ibn Gabirol, one of the genre’s greatest practitioners. The shopkeeper had no idea how to help him, but a passerby overheard their conversation and took an almost proprietary affront at a novice making such an inquiry: “why do you want to know this?” When the stranger (neither an academic nor a rabbi) was convinced Rabbi Housman was worthy of the subject, he took his number and called him later that night to give him an hour-long introduction to the field. At that point Housman was clearly smitten—he describes the aesthetic beauty of some piyyutim; the meter, the rhymes, the wordplay; the sophisticated subject matter; the biblical, talmudic, and midrashic references; and the joy of solving the riddles and puzzles in each line.
The serendipitous beginnings to these love stories repeat themselves in nearly every episode of the podcast. Weiss describes buying a shelf of seforim on Pirkei Avot from a store on the Lower East Side in the 1970s. Rabbi Hartman describes walking into the office of the eminent sage, Rabbi Yitzchok Hutner, and offering an explanation of the Hanukkah story that led to Hutner yelling at him that his explanation was complete nonsense, and that if he wanted to understand the holiday properly he should consult the writings of the Maharal. Robert Brody obliquely refers to the fact that he was a math prodigy as a young man (“I got a bit of a way down that track . . .”), but got interested enough in rabbinic literature to switch fields. Puzzled by the absence of information on the geonim—the chief rabbis of Iraqi Jewry in the early medieval period—he started researching them. Now a professor at Hebrew University, he is the world’s leading authority on the subject.
A standard SeforimChatter origin story begins with a question or puzzle, a chance encounter, or the explicit realization of love at first sight that blossoms into a mature and enduring relationship with the subject. As Professor Shalom Sabar explains, in describing his work on Jewish illuminated manuscripts, which grew out of a course of doctoral study originally focused on medieval Christian art: “I got an offer to work at the Jewish museum in Los Angeles, the Skirball Museum. . . . I fell in love with the k’tubah [marriage contract] collection, and since then I’m in Jewish art.”
A common trope
in stories and biographies of great rabbis that have become popular among contemporary Ḥaredim is that these sages thought about Torah every second of the day. This is a lot less impressive to me now that I pursue study of Torah she-lo li-shmah, not (only) for the sake of heaven, but for the love of the subject itself. Now, the idea of thinking about the study I love at all times is obvious and banal.
“He had to force himself to stop thinking about Torah in the bathroom!” these hagiographies frequently exclaim, referring to the prohibition on contemplating sacred matters in the toilet.
So?
Who wouldn’t? If you really love Torah, of course you have to make a conscious effort to stop thinking about it. Otherwise, as with all objects of love, your mind will continue to whirl, wrapped up in every detail. Torah study that works its way into your life is with you in every part of life, and if you want to keep it out of the bathroom, it’s going to take effort.
None of this to say that the yeshiva, with all of its structure and formality, doesn’t breed this type of love. It does, and often. Walk into any beit midrash at any time of day or night and you will find people puzzling through their projects, wrestling with some problem they can neither solve nor let go, and enthusiastically arguing with their study partners about the meaning of a passage. For some, the entire edifice of Torah study is itself an object of love; for others, every new topic (whatever it may be) is a new pleasure.
But this is not usually the type of love that produces an article in Ḥakirah or a visit to SeforimChatter. For that the yeshiva student has to encounter something that grabs him (and unlike in Ḥakirah or on SeforimChatter, it is always “him”): “Why hasn’t anyone written about this?” “Why doesn’t anyone recognize this fundamental mistake in the logic of this passage?” or even “what is the application of this view to the potential existence of aliens?”
The culture of scholarship developed by the yeshiva system, rigid as it may be, produces a society that is peppered with hidden scholars: accountants, lawyers, and businessmen, who may have day jobs, but whose internal life is wrapped up in their own personal pursuit of Torah. It remains a source of great amazement to me, even after all these years, to see just how incredibly learned yeshiva graduates can be. Sometimes, this learning is simply a product of cultural norms, and remains secondary to their professional, personal, and religious lives, but frequently it is more than that: it is the product of a passion that they just couldn’t let go of.
Critics of ḥaredi yeshivas often disparage universal Talmud study as economically unsustainable, historically inauthentic, and a waste of time for all but the very top students.
Perhaps.
But the yeshiva also creates the environment in which individuals can encounter something worth investigating, something they can explore, understand, and make their own. Paradoxically, it is the very structure and rigidity of the yeshiva curriculum—driven by the belief that studying Talmud all day and every day is the holy work that Judaism demands—that produces an army of self-directed secret scholars, often using serious academic techniques, pursuing topics of interest in Judaism.
The yeshiva system that asks all students to pursue Torah li-shmah full time is a product of our modern age. It’s just one mode among others that Orthodox Jewish communities use to negotiate a world that does not share their underlying assumptions about reality or the purpose of life. Ḥasidic Jews have their own strategies, as do the non-ḥaredi Orthodox. And like all attempts to maintain a religious culture in a secular world, this approach has strengths and weaknesses. There will always be kids who just can’t keep their fingers “on the place.” Yet, even for students who follow the curriculum meticulously, who are paragons of Torah for its own sake, yeshiva education will still support independent exploration—as long as they get comfortable enough not to treat the material as too holy to touch.
Through the rigorous and in-depth study facilitated by the beit midrash, students are exposed to a tremendous amount of pure Torah content, and they explore it to its greatest depths; it is inevitable that many of them will, at some point in their study, stumble over something that stops them in their tracks and takes their breath away. “Now that’s interesting . . . ”
You might even say that the greatest virtue of the yeshiva system is that it turns a classic talmudic aphorism on its head. While the Talmud states that one should study Torah even not for its own sake—she-lo li-shmah—because doing so will ultimately lead to study that is li-shmah, the yeshiva system may achieve something of even higher value: from study li-shmah one may come to she-lo li-shmah, via Torah for the sake of Heaven I might achieve Torah for my own sake.
Mosaic Magazine: More about: Jewish education, Jewish studies, Religion & Holidays, Talmud, Yeshiva
https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/religion-holidays/2021/11/the-intellectual-fireworks-of-talmud-study-move-outside-the-yeshiva/
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