Your Very Life

September 14, 2007
Rabbi Seymour Rossel

Imagine Moses and Joshua standing before the people of Israel. The people are primed and ready to cross the Jordan River. Moses recites the poem in this week's parashah, along with a personal blessing for each tribe. Then the Torah adds these three verses:

When Moses finished reciting all these words to all Israel, he said to them: Take to heart all the words with which I have warned you this day. Transmit [these words] to your children so they will know to faithfully observe all the terms of this Torah. For this is not a trifling matter for you: your very life depends on it; through [Torah] you shall long endure on the land that you are to possess upon crossing the Jordan (Deuteronomy 32:45-47).

This is the charge that Moses leaves us: that we should take the words of the Torah to heart and transmit the Torah to our children. As he says, "your very life depends on it."

Now it is obvious that "your very life" depends on securing proper food, clothing, and shelter. So we might understand this warning better if Moses added warnings like: "wear good clothing so you do not catch a cold," "avoid being killed in war," "don't live in a place that hurricanes visit," "watch out for scorpions in the Promised Land," and "remember to eat three healthy meals a day." Every one of those warnings makes sense: "your very life" depends on them.

It is far from obvious that "your very life" actually depends on whether or not you study the words of the Torah and pass the words of the Torah on to your children. But, let us not pretend to be dense. We know what Moses means. Food, clothing, and shelter can only provide existence; and existence is life, but only in a physical sense. Studying the words of Torah provides life in a far different dimension. It provides a life of consciousness, a life of awareness, a life that passes knowledge from parents to children. Even when there is not enough food, people discover that they can acquire life through learning. In the Warsaw Ghetto, when Jews were near starving, when they knew that every day could bring them death, they attended lectures on the Torah, produced and attended dramatic events and musical events, and organized scholarly studies of the history and sociology of the Warsaw Ghetto. They organized mini-universities and, believe it or not, the most popular subject for study was the English language. They were dying physically, but they adamantly refused to die spiritually. Their "very life" did not depend on the limited calories they were permitted each day, it depended on studying together and teaching one another.

In the first chapter of the Book of Joshua, God gives Joshua his marching orders, saying,

Be strong and very courageous, that you may learn to live according to the entire Torah ... Do not turn away from it to the right hand or to the left and you will prosper in your every path. This Book of the Torah shall not depart from your mouth. You shall meditate on it day and night ... (Joshua 1:7-8).

It is clear that "your very life" depends on food, clothing, and shelter every day, and--now that the Torah is available--Moses and Joshua make it clear that "your very life" depends on a daily regimen of study and teaching. As God told Joshua, "This Book of the Torah shall not depart from your mouth. You shall meditate on it day and night."

But what does this mean to us? How can we insure our lives? That is the question that occupied the sages of the Talmud. They were rabbis, but they also had professions. How could they possibly keep this command that the words of Torah should never depart from their lips and they should think about the Torah day and night? And, yet, they knew very well that their "very lives" depended on their keeping it.

Rabbi Yochanan remembered what Rabbi Simeon bar Yochai had taught him. The mystic Simeon said that a person could fulfill this commandment just by saying the Shema once in the morning and again in the evening. After all, the words of the Shema are the words of the Torah, so this simple practice--saying the Shema when you wake up and saying it again when you lie down to sleep--would mean that the words of Torah never departed from your lips and you meditated on them day and night.

Whoa! The other sages said it is forbidden to repeat that teaching to average Jews. If average Jews learn that all you have to do to study Torah is say the Shema twice each day, they may never study any more Torah than the words of the Shema. But Raba, one of the leading sages, said, On the contrary, allowing average Jews a simple way to study Torah day and night is a perfectly wonderful teaching and it should be taught.

More than any other, Rabbi Ishmael was strict about the rule to study Torah constantly. When he was asked, "If I am commanded to study the Torah day and night and never allow its words to depart from my lips, can I also study science and astronomy and all the wisdom of the Greeks?" he replied, "Find a time that is neither day nor night and study those other subjects then." In other words, "forget it. You should only study Torah."

But Rabbi Samuel bar Nachmani disagreed with Rabbi Ishmael. You do not understand the true meaning of the words, he said. My teacher always taught me that this verse is not a duty and it is not a command. It is a blessing! When God saw that Joshua loved the Torah as much as Moses, God said to Joshua, "Since the words of the Torah are so precious to you, I assure you, ‘this book of the law shall never depart from your lips! (Talmud, Menachot 99b).

Your very life depends on this blessing. Study any other subject that interests you. Become a banker, a doctor, a nurse, an artist, a collector, a lawyer, a dentist, a producer, a salesman, a president, a statistician, or a computer programmer, but remember that your very life depends on your love of the Torah, the wisdom that you learn from the generation of your parents and that you pass to the generation of your children; the teachings of kindness, and mercy, and peace and how to achieve these goals through the way we live our lives.

It is even enough if you just repeat the Shema twice each day, once in the morning when you awake, and once when you lie down to sleep, so long as you teach your children to do the same thing, and so long as you let them know that this teaching keeps the words of the Torah alive. It is only if the words of the Torah die, that we die. Your very life depends on these words. When they die, your awareness dies, your consciousness dies. You may continue to eat at Wendy's and Popeye's, but you will be dead inside, deader than any Jew who perished in the Warsaw Ghetto.

The Torah is a blessing because it nourishes your soul. "It is a tree of life to those who cling to it; and all its paths lead to wholeness and completion" for you and for your children. A man once appeared before his rabbi and complained, "I am old and my days are short, but my wife has presented me with a new son. Perhaps I will not live long enough to see him educated. Rabbi, please pray for my son that he will become a scholar."

The rabbi replied, "It is never too late. The answer to your prayer is in your hands. You yourself must study Torah. If you study Torah, your child will become a great scholar. If you turn away from Torah, you are already dead and the only thing I can do for your child is to teach him to recite the Kaddish for his dear departed father."

"The words of the Torah shall not depart from your lips. You shall meditate on the Torah day and night"--"your very life depends on this." To learn and to teach is to live a life of awareness and consciousness, to learn and to teach is to realize a life of mercy and compassion, and in the end to learn and to teach is to achieve shalom, "peace," "wholeness," and "completion." You should not look upon studying Torah as a debt that you owe, feeling guilty because you do not take the time to study it. This coming year, as you are considering how to be a better person than you were last year, consider this: Studying your Jewish heritage is not a debt, any more than finding food, clothing, and shelter is a debt. Knowing the wisdom of the ages is a necessity. When it comes to your soul and the souls of your children, "your very life depends on it."

If you can't come and study with us in our many offerings here at CJCN, if you can't make time to read my sermons at the CJCN web site or perhaps to settle down with one of the books I have written or perhaps to study on your own with the many other Jewish books published each year, than do the least at least: make time to say the Shema twice a day so that the words of the Torah may never depart from your lips. Your very life depends on it. And let us say: Amen.