Several years ago, I sat at a Shabbat table in Boulder, Colorado with a visiting rabbi whom most people sitting at the table had met previously. They had developed enough of a relationship with this rabbi to know that they could ask him anything, and a woman in the community opened up the conversation with a piercing question: "Why is the door to Judaism so ugly?" Others at the table followed, through that meal and the succeeding Shabbat meals, with every question in the book. Why is Judaism so male-centered? Why is the prayer service so long and filled with so much stuff, and only a few verses are ones to which I can connect? Why is there such an emphasis on so many seemingly trite details, and why is the beauty that lies beneath so hard to access? The rabbi, who happened to be Rav Natan Greenberg, the rosh yeshiva of Bat Ayin, responded to each question without derision and without apologetics. But over and over, at the end of each response, he repeated his real answer.
"You have to learn," he said. "You have to learn." He repeated this throughout the day, like a mantra. Essentially he was saying these are real questions, but the answers aren't so simple. Judaism offers beauty, and it offers depth that can be applied to any situation in life. But this beauty and this depth don't come easy. After spending much of the last year focused on Torah study, I can attest to the beauty and the depth, and I understand, I believe, why it is so difficult.
I have spent the past three months studying a section of the Talmud that deals with civil damages. I have been breaking my head trying to understand what our Oral Torah has to say about the liability in a case where an ox eats another person's vegetables, or where a pit that was mainly dug by one person, but then completed by another, kills that ox. "This is spirituality?" I often ask myself. "This has something to do with connecting to the world's Creator and knowing what it is this Being wants me to do to fix this world?"
The sub-section we learned most recently taught us specifically what happens if two people share a field for the purposes of letting their oxen graze, but only one of them has the right to also grow fruit there. Who is responsible for damages if the ox of the one without fruit eats the fruit of the other? It seemed to me, logically, that the one who has both an ox and the fruit should be responsible, for he knew of the possible consequences to his fruit when agreeing to the arrangement. But the Talmud isn't satisfied with this logic. Our Sages believe that the "richer" of the two, the one with the ox and the fruit, is actually the weaker party here. This one, because he has more to lose, will be careful to tie his ox up so that it cannot eat the fruit. The "poorer" party, if he cannot be held liable for these damages, will have nothing to lose, so perhaps he won't make an effort to prevent his animal from causing damages. Here it is the richer party that needs protection, and the Talmud provides it.
As I sat in class discussing this, I suddenly understood, that in all of these seemingly crazy scenarios, the Talmud is demanding justice. If the world were a simpler place, perhaps all the beautiful quotes and ideas that make up the sweet inspirational books so popular today would be enough to teach us to live honestly. Justice would exist and all the difficulties in the world just wouldn't be. But the world isn't so simple, and the Torah is the Jewish people's guide to learning how to be just.
So why is the path to this knowledge so difficult? Because the path to living a just life is difficult, and the learning isn't a means to the end, rather it is an end in and of itself. The difficult process of learning is the process through which Jews connect to themselves, to others, and to God. How do I know this? Only because I've done it. When the nation of Israel stands at Mt. Sinai ready to accept the Torah, they promise "naase v' nishma" - we will do and we will listen. How can this be? How could they promise to fulfill the Torah without having heard what it says? A friend recently suggested to me that it is possible that the people "heard" the teachings of the Torah before saying "na'ase", if heard is in the sense of the Hebrew word, "l'ha'azin" - to listen with one's ears. But "nishma" is something different; nishma is a type of hearing that resonates inside of you. This isn't meant this as an esoteric spiritual teaching. Everybody knows the difference between hearing noise, and hearing something in way that truly speaks to him. The only way Am Yisrael could hear Torah like this, the only way they could really know it, was to live it. This was true for the Jews who stood and Mt. Sinai and this is true for us today.
Something that I "shoma'at" - that I hear deep inside after less than a year of deep Torah study - is that study itself really is fixing the world. I wouldn't have - I couldn't have - known that without diving into the study itself.