Enlightening the World One Halacha at a Time
February 8, 2008
Can one Actually Learn all of the Torah
This week's parsha, Teruma, goes into great detail on how the keylim (utensils) of the miskan are to be built. The dimensions of the Ahron, mandated in the torah, are 2.5 amos by 1.5 amah by 1.5 amah. There is a famous dvar torah that asks, why are all the dimensions on the Ahron not whole numbers, yet by all other items there is at least one side that is a full number. The answer given is that while you can be full and complete in every aspect of life, completing your requirement to learn torah is never complete. The Ahron which symbolizes torah as it held the luchos received by Moshe is never complete.
Isn't that a difficult thing to say? Torah is vast, but surely someone in the history of time has toiled through it and emerged victorious knowing it all. So you will tell me if Shlomo Hamelech didn't understand Parah Adumah and he was the smartest man of all time- check the Guinness book it's in there- then it must be impossible. But hypothetically, if you knew the whole torah would there still remain a requirement to learn?
Rav Moshe brings down what at first glance is a contradiction in the Rambam. The Rambam writes (Talmud Torah 1:8) everyone has a requirement to set aside a fixed time to learn both at day and at night. Yet 2 halachos later (1:10) the Rambam goes on to say any time not spent learning is an aveirah causing you to forget the torah you learnt. But didn't the Rambam just say a little during the day, a little during the night and your fine????
Rav Moshe answers that it is not a contradiction, you just need to understand something about Torah. Torah isn't physics (thank G-d) or math (if it was I wouldn't learn it) or even grammar (I'd lie on a bed of nails before learning it). Torah is Hashem's blueprint of the world. In regards to secular studies (as they are called, which is a separate topic but not for now) one could toil and master it. There have in fact been geniuses that knew everything about a certain field and once they did they could sit back and relax. However, Torah is different because even if you knew all the torah, if you were to sin, Hashem would cause you to forget (happened to Moshe, Yehoshua and others). So, in an ideal world where you wouldn't sin a little during the day and a little night is fine (because you wouldn't forget and would eventually know it all). But since none of us are ideal, and we all occasionally (and hopefully not more) sin the Rambam commands us to learn all day. For if we didn't learn all day we would inevitably sin and forget what we learnt and be back at square one.
So for us the requirement is to learn all day (obviously you are allowed to go to the bathroom, eat, and earn a parnassah), but ideally it wouldn't be that way. Rav Moshe proves that in the time of the Gemara, the Tannaim (the Rabbis in the time) never forgot what they learnt- they were that pure and sin-free, but for us the torah lesson of the Ahron applies. It is a pursuit with no finish line, but a race we must run.
You ever wonder why you can remember a line from a show you haven't seen in 10 years, or the lyrics to a song you haven't heard in ages- but every time we start the torah again you don't remember the story line?????
Ask yourself this: Can you name the mother of Jesus?? Can you name the father of Avraham?? If you feel like you just got a 50 on my pop quiz- don't be disappointed. 99.5% of Jews answered Yes to the first question and no to the second.
But let's begin to work at it.
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