Rav Hirsch on Bad Biographies

The Torah content for this week has been sponsored by Courtney K.

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Artwork: horrific AI attempt to produce a portrait of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch

Rav Hirsch on Bad Biographies

I recently started reading a book by Hillel Goldberg called, Between Berlin and Slobodka: Jewish Transition Figures From Eastern Europe (1989), featuring biographies of six towering intellects: R’ Israel Salanter, Harry A. Wolfson, R’ Isaac Hutner, R’ Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Abraham J. Heschel, and Rabbi Joseph Z. Lipovitz. I bought it because Amazon was selling it for only $6 (!) and I figured that it would be beneficial to learn about the impact these six influential men had on Jewry.

I enjoyed reading the book from the get-go. The author is a gifted writer with an engaging style. The blurb on cover testifies that he “spent two decades in research on this biography” – a claim bolstered by the extensive endnotes and bibliography, which fill a whopping 102 pages. I read through the biographies of the first three figures, about whom I had little prior knowledge, and felt like I was learning something … until my reading was brought to a screeching halt by a critical review.

Lawrence J. Kaplan is Professor of Rabbinics and Jewish Philosophy in the Department of Jewish Studies at McGill University. He has written extensively on a wide range of topics and is regarded as one of the foremost experts on the thought of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, whose Ish ha-Halakhah (Halakhic Man) he translated into English. When I posted an excerpt from Goldberg’s book on my Facebook wall, Professor Kaplan suggested that I read his critical review essay, published in Daat: A Journal of Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah (no.35, pp. V-XXXIV, summer 1995).

Any attempt on my part to summarize Kaplan’s review would fail to do it justice. Its power comes from its thoroughness in exposing the gaps and prejudices in Goldberg’s treatment of his subjects. Instead, I will cite his closing paragraphs:

Two general points emerge from my lengthy examination and critique of Goldberg's treatment of his four central transition figures; the first is negative, the second, positive. First, to return to my starting point, while Goldberg claims to evaluate these figures in terms of their success at integrating the various clashing worlds within them, I believe I have shown that his evaluations cannot be sustained and that what he is really offering us is a purely theological judgment in a scholarly garb. Second, my own alternative analysis of the thought of these figures, while necessarily sketchy and incomplete, leads to the tentative conclusion that they, to use Goldberg's ostensible criterion, were, despite tensions and even contradictions, considerably more successful in integrating these worlds than Goldberg would have us think.

Have I been too harsh on Between Berlin and Slobodka? Did I not state earlier that it deals with a large and important subject and did I not concede to it many considerable strengths? Why then the sharpness of my tone?

If I have taken the book to task in so uncompromising and critical a fashion, it is precisely because I, like my old friend Hillel Goldberg, am simultaneously committed to the values of Jewish Orthodoxy and intellectual responsibility, and because I believe that Goldberg has, in writing this work, allowed, however unwittingly, the former value to override the latter. I am sure I need not remind Goldberg that the rabbinic tradition itself affirms, "Truth is the seal of the Holy one, blessed be He," and, that Rav Kook, whose strict Orthodoxy Goldberg would certainly not wish to deny, adds, "The truth is more beloved than everything, and precisely in it will the Exalted One, blessed be He, be praised.”

Anyone wishing to study the phenomenon of Jewish transition figures from Eastern Europe in the twentieth century will find much valuable data and many stimulating and incisive observations and insights in Between Berlin and Slobodka. The book as a whole, however, falls far short of its stated goals.

Kaplan’s review shook me on two levels. First, it reminded me of how dependent we are on experts in fields outside of our own expertise, and how easy it is to misplace our trust without realizing it. I had never heard of Hillel Goldberg, but I trusted him because he published a book which appeared to be based on copious amounts of research. I then shifted my trust to Kaplan based on the substance of his critique, strengthened by my small measure of firsthand familiarity with his scholarly prowess. But what would happen if another expert I trusted penned an essay defending Goldberg’s analysis? I would be left with compelling cases on both sides, and I would feel helpless to draw my own conclusions. The obvious “solution” of “go forth, study the collective works of Rav Hutner in light of all biographical data, and form your own conclusions” is not practical. This dilemma is not unique to intellectual biographies, and that’s what scares me. I realize this isn’t a new or profound insight. Just a rude reminder of an unavoidable limitation on the human intellect.

Second, Kaplan’s critique reminded me of how much subjectivity is involved in any attempt to capture the essence of a human life in writing. This, in turn, prompted me to recall Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch’s critique of Heinreich Graetz’s seminal work, History of the Jews. For those who are unfamiliar, here is an informational blurb excerpted from Collected Writings of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch: Volume V (1988, Feldheim):

The historian Dr. Heinrich Graetz (1817-1891) was a professor at the Judisch-Theologische Seminar in Breslau where he published his eleven-volume History of the Jews (1853-1870). He reflected the ideological tendencies of his academic institution by accepting Biblical criticism and by believing in the historical evolution, rather than the Divine origin, of the Oral Law … Although Graetz was personally traditional in practice (and a student of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch while the latter was Rabbi in Oldenburg), his work was used by those who wished to reform Orthodox Judaism. Recognizing its danger to Torah Judaism, Hirsch reacted strongly with a “critical examination” of Graetz’s fourth volume. In a series of twelve articles in his journal Jeschurun, Hirsch quoted the pertinent passages from Graetz’s History and then disproved his theses regarding the Oral Law.

Here is Rav Hirsch’s scathing critique of Graetz’s work, which I will present here in full. (Parenthetically, I hope you’ll be able to see why this ranks among my favorite written reviews of anything, ever.)

I once had a young friend who was a deaf-mute. He was a rather popular artist in one of the German provincial capitals. All his portraits looked very much alike, yet they were not truly alike. He had a habit – we called it a peculiarity – of painting all his pictures in colossal dimensions. All his paintings were much larger than life and therefore had a strange, spectral look. One could readily surmise that the subject had sat for the portrait, but one could not state with certainty that this was indeed the one. Recognition was not the result of a visual impression, but of reflection. The portrait hinted at the identity of the subject, but it was clear that the artist had not painted his subject in terms of objective reality. He had only captured the subjective impression made upon him by the personality of his subject.

When it comes to a human subject, the artist’s eye is not his only medium of perception; the portraitist is influenced also by his emotions. Any contemplation of a human subject entails the conception of an intellectual personality. The subjective image of a subject, which is largely influenced by personal likes and dislikes, will unconsciously guide the brush in the artist’s hand. Such an image may often be entirely inaccurate. In addition, it may be further influenced by accidental poses of the subject, or even by the subject’s – or the artist’s – momentary state of health or ill-health.

This should explain the many portraits which, though they cannot be dismissed out of hand as “bad,” show features so unlike the subject and are so much at variance with his true character, that those better acquainted with him – especially his closest friends and relations – will categorically reject the portrait. The artist has captured in his work a trait that is transient or accidental (and colored by the artist’s own subjective impressions) as if it were a permanent aspect of his subject’s personality. In fact, the portrait flagrantly contradicts the character of the person they know. Regarding our deaf-mute friend, it might be worthwhile to make a psychological study to establish whether deaf-mute artists see their human subjects in a light so basically different from normal portraitists that there must always be something unusual about any portrait painted by a deaf-mute. 

Now imagine an artist whose natural angle of vision causes him to see his subjects not larger, but smaller than life. Imagine further that, over many years, this artist created portraits for which his subjects never sat. He based his work on some isolated trait in his subjects that may have come to his attention by accident and that, in addition, may have been distorted by the artist’s hasty judgment or misinterpretation. This artist then brings his creative imagination into play, using this one trait as a basis for interpreting the personality of the subject as a whole. He portrays his subjects as he saw them once, in unguarded moods, positions or activities: the one in a playful mood, the other in a pensive state; the one laughing, the other weeping; the one angry, the other joking. Some of his subjects are made to appear indignant, arrogant or impudent, while others look depressed, anxious, humble or embarrassed. But in thus portraying a person, the artist has seized upon only one note in that person’s whole range of emotions, a note which, in fact, may have been played only once in the person’s lifetime, but which the artist has perpetuated as the keynote, the dominant character. 

Now let us imagine that, years later, this artist presents to us these sketches as true-to-life portraits, committing the error of explaining the transient moods in which he painted his subjects as typical of their character. “Look,” he says, “this one was always laughing; that one had an evil temper; this one was forever playing games; that one was always deep in thought.” Even worse, he passes off these products of his imagination not only as authentic character sketches of his subjects but as prototypes of all their contemporaries; thus, “during this period, people were laughing all the time; during this other period, they tended to be depressed; this era was one of arrogance; that era was an age of anxiety and timidity.”

Now let us say that, in reply to our look of disbelief, the artist cites ancient chronicles in support of his presentation: “During that year the cherries were sour; as a result, everyone alive at the time had a sour look on his face,” or, “During this year the future looked bright; as a result, everyone was in an unusually friendly mood.” Say, further, that this artist clings to his fancies as if they were absolute truth, so much so that wherever he needs a historical reference to authenticate his portrait he feels free to invent a reference to suit the portrait. Consider all these caprices of artistic fancy, and you have the History of the Jews by Dr. H. Graetz. 

These lines were written to a friend who wanted to hear my opinion of this History soon after its publication. They reflect the impressions which the book made upon me after I read it through only once, without subjecting the author’s views and descriptions to detailed tests in the light of the data and the sources he cites in their support. Even a superficial glance at this so-called “History of the Jews” should be sufficient for anyone with even a slight knowledge of the literature cited by the author as his source material to see that this work presents more fiction than fact.

Since then, I have examined this work in detail and checked it against the cited sources. Leaving aside the religious philosophy for which it is intended as an ideological basis and which its conclusions are meant to support, I have found it to be, even from a purely scientific point of view, a product of the most outrageous, irresponsible superficiality. I therefore consider it my sacred duty to present the results of my investigation to the public.

The main point of Rav Hirsch’s analogy is that, at the end of the day, a biography is a subjective portrait. The force of his analogy lies in its depiction of just how much the author’s subjectivity can skew the accuracy of the biography. According to Kaplan, Goldberg was a tragic victim of his own subjectivity. I say “victim” because his distortion was not intentional, and I say “tragic” because of how much he misrepresents the ideas of these individuals in his account of their contributions. Kaplan goes so far as to write: “In the case of Harry Wolfson and, perhaps also, Abraham Joshua Heschel what Goldberg presents us with are not so much portraits as caricatures.”

On a personal level, I am left with one question: Do I finish reading Goldberg’s book? One the one hand, my newfound awareness of its flaws will help me to take everything I read with a heaping tablespoon of salt. Additionally, Kaplan acknowledged at the end of his review that readers will still “find much valuable data and many stimulating and incisive observations and insights.” He even encouraged me on Facebook to continue reading and to share my thoughts when I’m finished. At the same time, I’m wary about knowingly allowing inaccuracies to enter my mind and take root. Reading the chapter on Rabbi Soloveitchik might not be so bad, since I already have a wealth of diverse biographical snapshots and enough firsthand knowledge of his Torah to form my own views. But do I really want my introduction to Abraham J. Heschel to be a biography that is so slanted by the author’s value judgments that it borders on caricature? 

Although I haven’t made my decision yet, I am inclined to finish the book. Considering what I wrote above about the unavoidable perils of relying on experts and the inherent hazards in every biography, I might as well lean into the process, exposing myself to as many different takes as possible. Theoretically, I will build up a healthy skepticism from the diversity of views while accumulating a core composite image where the differing accounts overlap. Errors will be unavoidable, but that’s par for the course of being a human being with a limited intellect.

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If you've gained from what you've learned here, please consider contributing to my Patreon at www.patreon.com/rabbischneeweiss. Alternatively, if you would like to make a direct contribution to the "Rabbi Schneeweiss Torah Content Fund," my Venmo is @Matt-Schneeweiss, and my Zelle and PayPal are mattschneeweiss at gmail.com. Even a small contribution goes a long way to covering the costs of my podcasts, and will provide me with the financial freedom to produce even more Torah content for you.

If you would like to sponsor a day's or a week's worth of content, or if you are interested in enlisting my services as a teacher or tutor, you can reach me at rabbischneeweiss at gmail.com. Thank you to my listeners for listening, thank you to my readers for reading, and thank you to my supporters for supporting my efforts to make Torah ideas available and accessible to everyone.

Be sure to check out my YouTube channel and my podcasts: "The Mishlei Podcast", "The Stoic Jew" Podcast, "Rambam Bekius" Podcast, "Machshavah Lab" Podcast, "The Tefilah Podcast"  Email me if you'd like to be added to my WhatsApp group where I share all of my content and public shiur info. 

State of the Blog: Summer 2022

This week's Torah content has been sponsored by Naomi Mann in honor of Rabbi Moskowitz zt"l, whose shloshim is this week.

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Artwork: Mishra's Factory (Summer), by Kaja and Phil Foglio

State of the Blog: Summer 2022

Last year at around this time I launched The One-Page Article: a Summer 2021 Experiment with four objectives in mind. Foremost among these objectives was my own mental health, which was at a low point due to the burnout I experienced from teaching 850+ shiurim during that stressful 2020-2021 school year of covid. The experiment was a success: I wrote 31 one-page articles over the course of that summer, and was proud of each one. This allowed me to keep up my usual daily summer writing without the added pressure I sometimes felt in past years to write a full-length article each day. Better yet, the self-imposed word limit helped me to grow as a writer, enabling me to write about ideas that I never would have written about in the past, as I detailed in Hunting for Treasure vs. Panning for Gold on the Beaches of Nome.

You may have noticed that I’ve continued in one-page mode this summer. It’s been great! I love finding the “right-sized ideas” to write about, I love the challenge of presenting these ideas as concisely as possible, and I love the feeling of accomplishment that caps off each weekday of the summer. I’m sure I’ll return to feature-length articles at some point, but for now, I’m really enjoying this.

I am scheduled to fly out to Hawaii to visit Popo (my 97-year-old grandma) tomorrow. I’ll be there from June 28th through July 7th. As such, I find myself confronted with the question: Should I stick to my article-a-day schedule while I’m in Hawaii or should I take a break? To many people, this might be a no-brainer: “Of course not! Take a break! Enjoy your time in Hawaii!” But to a recovering perfectionist, workaholic, self-appointed self-taskmaster, this is a tough decision. Whether it stems from rational or irrational considerations, I don’t want to interrupt the flow of Torah content. Also, I thoroughly enjoy the process of writing, even while on vacation. Writing Torah articles in Hawaii has been a part of my summer since 2007. At the same time, it would be wonderful to take a break from being on a content-production schedule – especially at the outset of my summer vacation, when I’m feeling the burnout from the year.

After giving this some thought, I’ve settled on something of a compromise: I will continue writing my articles while in Hawaii, but I will not post anything until my return. This will relieve me of the pressure to meet my self-imposed deadlines every day while simultaneously granting me the freedom to write, to be, and – more importantly to my psyche – to feel productive. There’s a non-zero chance that I’ll make an exception for this Friday, since parashas ha’shavua articles are “time-sensitive,” but other than that, I’ll do my best to hold back until the second week of July.

And while we’re taking care of “book-keeping” (as Rabbi Moskowitz would call it), I figure I should mention another summer project I plan to undertake. I would love to design a website which will serve as a hub for ALL my Torah content: YouTube videos, podcast episodes, articles, shiur announcements, Zoom info, links to Torah resources, etc. Had I known in September 2020 that I would be publicizing all my Torah content, I would have set something like this up then, but all my energy was devoted to the actual preparation of said content that I simply didn’t have time. I’d like to rectify that going into 2022-2023.

If anyone has any suggestions for which service or platform to use, let me know! As of now, before doing any research, I’m leaning towards using something tried-and-true, like WordPress. I plan to fund this site with donations from Patreon and sponsorships, so if you plan on making a donation in the near future and would like to contribute specifically to the website, I’d love to give you public thanks on the page.

See you back here on July 11th! In the meantime, feel free to read or reread the hundreds of past articles!

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If you've gained from what you've learned here, please consider contributing to my Patreon at www.patreon.com/rabbischneeweiss. Alternatively, if you would like to make a direct contribution to the "Rabbi Schneeweiss Torah Content Fund," my Venmo is @Matt-Schneeweiss, and my Zelle and PayPal are mattschneeweiss at gmail.com. Even a small contribution goes a long way to covering the costs of my podcasts, and will provide me with the financial freedom to produce even more Torah content for you.

If you would like to sponsor a day's or a week's worth of content, or if you are interested in enlisting my services as a teacher or tutor, you can reach me at rabbischneeweiss at gmail.com. Thank you to my listeners for listening, thank you to my readers for reading, and thank you to my supporters for supporting my efforts to make Torah ideas available and accessible to everyone.

Be sure to check out my YouTube channel and my podcasts: "The Mishlei Podcast", "The Stoic Jew" Podcast, "Rambam Bekius" Podcast, "Machshavah Lab" Podcast, "The Tefilah Podcast"  

Hunting for Treasure vs. Panning for Gold on the Beaches of Nome

This week's Torah content is sponsored by the Reznik family in dedication to the loving memory of Silvia Tanzer (Sora Hesha bas Chaim Moshe) and Irving Tanzer (Yisroel ben Yechezkel).

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Hunting for Treasure vs. Panning for Gold on the Beaches of Nome

According to Mishlei (Proverbs), you will achieve success in your quest for chochmah (wisdom) and tevunah (understanding) if you search for it “like you search for hidden treasures” (2:4). Rabbeinu Yonah explains:

[This means] that the wisdom is sweet to his soul, and working for it will not be a toil for him, due to the abundant love, in the manner of: “it was like a few days in his eyes, due to his love of her” (Bereishis 29:29). It will be like one who searches for hidden treasures, who is told that there is a treasure in this house or in this valley: the quest for the hidden treasure will not be a toil for him, due to [the prospect in] his mind of finding great wealth in one location and becoming instantly rich.

In other words, if you learn with the mentality of a treasure hunter who hopes to hit the mother lode, then learning will not be a toil for you, since it will be fueled by excitement and the hope of being rewarded with instant wealth. But unlike the treasure hunter, whose hope will likely prove to be a fantasy, the seeker of chochmah and tevunah really can strike it rich!

Thank God, the more I learn, the more this treasure hunting mentality has come to characterize my own learning. However, this same mentality has occasionally proven to be an impediment when it comes to teaching. When I was a high school teacher, I had no problem teaching “basic ideas,” since my students were all new to learning. Once I started teaching in yeshiva in the Fall of 2020, I felt a tremendous pressure to come up with major chidushim (new insights) in everything I taught. I’d feel this way in many of my daily shiurim and especially when I’d give a shiur to the whole community. But this wasn’t the first time I’ve experienced this type of pressure. I’ve gone through phases in which my writing suffers from the same problem. I end up feeling like I shouldn’t write an article unless it contains some groundbreaking chidush that will be seen as valuable to all, laypeople and chachamim alike, and this leads to writer’s block.

I am pleased to report that my “Summer 2021 Experiment” of writing one-page articles has counteracted this pressure. I am reminded of another Mishleic mashal (metaphor) for chochmah, stated in the previous chapter: “Chochmah calls out in the streets, in the public squares she gives forth her voice, at the heads of noisy [streets], at the entrances of gates, she gives forth her words” (1:20-21). In contrast to the treasure hunting mashal of Chapter 2, which depicts the scarcity and hidden nature of chochmah, the mashal of Chapter 1 emphasizes its ubiquity and vociferousness: chochmah is on every street corner, wherever you look, and it’s constantly shouting and clamoring to get your attention! In my case, now that I’m looking for “one-page ideas” to write about, I’m noticing them everywhere, which is fantastic!

If I were to create a highly specific mashal which combines these two mashalim, I’d borrow from Shlomo ha’Melech’s comparison of chochmah to gold (see 8:10,18 and 16:16) and I would liken my Summer 2021 experience to panning for gold on the golden beaches of Nome. According to Wikipedia:

The Nome Gold Rush was a gold rush in Nome, Alaska, approximately 1899–1909. It is separated from other gold rushes by the ease with which gold could be obtained. Much of the gold was lying in the beach sand of the landing place and could be recovered without any need for a claim. Total production of gold from the area is estimated to be 112 metric tons.

Chochmah is like Nome’s gold: it’s there in the sand, ready for the taking, and there’s plenty to share.

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If you've gained from what you've learned here, please consider contributing to my Patreon at www.patreon.com/rabbischneeweiss. Alternatively, if you would like to make a direct contribution to the "Rabbi Schneeweiss Torah Content Fund," my Venmo is @Matt-Schneeweiss, and my Zelle/Chase QuickPay and PayPal are mattschneeweiss at gmail.com. Even a small contribution goes a long way to covering the costs of my podcasts, and will provide me with the financial freedom to produce even more Torah content for you. 

If you would like to sponsor an article, shiur, or podcast episode, or if you are interested in enlisting my services as a teacher or tutor, you can reach me at rabbischneeweiss at gmail.com. Thank you to my listeners for listening, thank you to my readers for reading, and thank you to my supporters for supporting my efforts to make Torah ideas available and accessible to everyone. 

Be sure to check out my YouTube channel and my podcasts: "The Mishlei Podcast", "The Stoic Jew" Podcast, "Rambam Bekius" Podcast, "Machshavah Lab" Podcast, "The Tefilah Podcast"  For the full guide to all of my Torah content, click here. 

The One-Page Article: a Summer 2021 Experiment

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Artwork: Revitalize, by Justin and Alexis Hernandez

The One-Page Article: a Summer 2021 Experiment

In his discussion of silence and the ideal of minimizing speech, the Rambam (Hilchos Deios 2:4) writes:

Likewise, in matters of Torah and matters of wisdom, the words of a chacham (wise man) should be few, but their ideational content abundant. This is what the Sages commanded, saying: a person should always teach his student in a concise manner. But if the words are many and the ideational content is sparse, this is foolishness. Regarding this it is stated: "for a dream comes in an abundance of concern, and the voice of a fool in an abundance of words" (Koheles 5:2).

This summer I intend to conduct an experiment in short-form writing. Specifically, I am going to see what happens if I limit each article to a single page. There are four reasons for this experiment:

(1) Mental Health: Those who have followed me on social media are aware that last year was fulfilling but stressful. Although my usual practice has been to publish one blog post every weekday during the summer, I no longer think this is a realistic plan. I need to scale back my prolificacy during the summer so that I can return to my demanding teaching job rejuvenated and healthy in the fall. At the same time, I do want to write. One of the reasons why I stuck to the “one article each day” format in previous summers was because it prompted me to produce but also set up a cut-off mechanism. No matter what happened, I knew I had to finish a blog post by day’s end. My theory is that the one-page format will set up a similar cut-off. I will be impelled to produce a daily page of Torah, but without the pressure generated by the potential for “infinite” writing.

(2) Sustainability: This past year I taught an average of 30 shiurim each week. This left zero time for writing. This coming year my teaching schedule has been reduced by a third. Theoretically, this will give me time to write (unless I need to use that time for tutoring to pay the bills – a factor which remains to be seen). If I can afford to write this year, the one-page format is likely to be far more sustainable than the “write as long of an article as necessary until it’s perfect” format.

(3) To See What Happens: Mark Rosewater, the head designer of Magic: the Gathering, is fond of saying: “Restrictions breed creativity!” Believe it or not, I’ve rejected many ideas for blog posts in past years because I feel like they’re too minimal to warrant an entire article. This experiment will reverse the trend, forcing me to write about ideas which would NOT fill an entire article.

(4) To Practice Brevity: The last and least important reason is what the Rambam wrote above. I’ve honed my writing craft mostly through practice, but occasionally I’ll try to consciously work on a specific quality, and in this case, it’s brevity. I’ve been told that my writing is clear. The question is: Can I achieve the same level of clarity, but in fewer words? It’s time to attempt to practice what Bruce Lee taught: “It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential!”

To those who fear that my “feature-length” articles will become a thing of the past – fear not! I do intend to allow myself to write my normal-length articles when the content or the mood dictates, and when time allows, but I’d like to make these short-form articles the bread and butter of my blog for the summer. I’ve already written a few of these, just to see how it went, and I loved how they turned out! I’m excited to see where this summer's writing leads. Here’s to the adventure of experimentation!

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If you've gained from what you've learned here, please consider contributing to my Patreon at www.patreon.com/rabbischneeweiss. Alternatively, if you would like to make a direct contribution to the "Rabbi Schneeweiss Torah Content Fund," my Venmo is @Matt-Schneeweiss, and my Zelle/Chase QuickPay and PayPal are mattschneeweiss at gmail.com. Even a small contribution goes a long way to covering the costs of my podcasts, and will provide me with the financial freedom to produce even more Torah content for you. 

If you would like to sponsor an article, shiur, or podcast episode, or if you are interested in enlisting my services as a teacher or tutor, you can reach me at rabbischneeweiss at gmail.com. Thank you to my listeners for listening, thank you to my readers for reading, and thank you to my supporters for supporting my efforts to make Torah ideas available and accessible to everyone. 

Be sure to check out my YouTube channel and my podcasts: "The Mishlei Podcast", "The Stoic Jew" Podcast, "Rambam Bekius" Podcast, "Machshavah Lab" Podcast, "The Tefilah Podcast"  For the full guide to all of my Torah content, click here. 

Why I Write

Half of this was originally published in January 2012; the other half is new. Click here for a printer-friendly version of this blog post.

Artwork: Memory Jar, by Donato Giancola

Why I Write

This morning I was thinking about how I preoccupied I used to be with my blog stats. I would obsess about how many clicks each blog post got, and when the numbers were higher or lower than average, I'd wrack my brain to figure out why, so that I could keep giving the public what they wanted.

This obsession proved to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it helped me to be a better writer, since I cared about the number of regular readers I had. On the other hand, it created undue pressure which often made it harder to write.

This got me thinking about why I write, in general.

Specifically, it got me thinking about why I have cared less and less about numbers with each year that goes by. And, as writers are wont to do, I had a desire to write about this topic.

At first I planned to write out my own thoughts on this matter. However, I've been perusing what other writers have written about writing - many of whom write for the same reasons as I do. In this post, I'd like to share some of these excerpts. Maybe some day I'll write my own post on why I write.

Here are excerpts from three writers whose reasons for writing align with my own:

George Orwell: Writing for "Political" Purposes

I'll begin with a short quotation from George Orwell's Why I Write (1946). Orwell states that "Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose." Of these four motives, I find that I relate most to the fourth, which he terms "political purpose." He explains that he is "using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after." Here is the paragraph that jumped out to me:

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, "I am going to produce a work of art." I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. 

I have chosen to lead with this Orwell quotation because it reflects my original motive for writing. When I was in high school I used to want to be a journalist. Once I converted to Judaism and began learning Torah, some of that journalistic zeal and integrity (in that order) became diverted towards the goal of bringing awareness to "authentic Judaism." As a convert who found himself among many FFB (frum from birth) Jews who didn't understand what they were doing or why they were doing it, I felt the urge to reveal the truth that I had learned and share it with others. 

Unfortunately, due to the sorry state that Klal Yisrael is in - and due to my fiery personality - many of these posts ended up with a greater emphasis on sur me'ra ("turn away from bad") than aseh tov ("do good"). My old blog was filled with polemical posts and polemical language. I really didn't hold back, especially when I felt that "sense of injustice ... because there is some lie that I want to expose." 

Over the years I've definitely dialed down the tone in my writing and teaching. I now focus more on what Torah is than what Torah is not. Yet, there is still a strong political character (as defined by Orwell) to my writing, which is also present in my teaching. I am still passionate when it comes to sharing my understanding of Judaism and contrasting it with other views that are out there. I'm just not as "in your face" as I was in my younger days. 
William Stafford: Writing for Discovery

The next few excerpts are from A Way of Writing (1970) by the poet William Stafford. (Full disclosure: I'm not a poetry guy, and haven't read any of Stafford's writings except for what I'm about to share.) This first quotation is the main reason why I write:

A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them. That is, he does not draw on a reservoir; instead, he engages in an activity that brings to him a whole succession of unforeseen stories, poems, essays, plays, laws, philosophies, religions, or--but wait! …

For me, writing is a method of thinking. I can achieve a depth of understanding and a degree of clarity in writing that I can't obtain in any other way. Most of the time when I set out to write a blog post, the full idea isn't completely formed in my mind. The process of writing brings the idea to fruition. 

Stafford continues with a point that touches upon one of the major obstacles I face from time to time: the unwillingness to allow myself to "fail":

I must be willing to fail. If I am to keep on writing, I cannot bother to insist on high standards. I must get into action and not let anything stop me, or even slow me much. By "standards" I do not mean "correctness" spelling, punctuation, and so on. These details become mechanical for anyone who writes for a while. I am thinking about such matters as social significance, positive values, consistency, etc. ... I resolutely disregard these. Something better, greater, is happening! I am following a process that leads so wildly and originally into new territory that no judgment can at the moment be made about values, significance, and so on. I am making something new, something that has not been judged before. Later others -- and maybe I myself -- will make judgments. Now, I am headlong to discover. Any distraction may harm the creating.

I write best when I'm not worried about meeting my self-imposed standards. I have learned to ignore my inner need to write chidushim (innovations), or posts of "importance," or posts that people will care about. The ability to do this has not come easily. I have written about this struggle at length in Playing with Torah and Am I Qualified to Write this Blog? 

Chazal (Avos 4:1) teach: "ein ha'bayshan lomeid" ("One who is embarrassed doesn't learn"). If you wish to advance when learning with your rebbi, with your chavrusa, or even by yourself, you must be willing to "fail." I use the quotation marks because I don't consider this to be a failure. To realize that you've erred is a success, since it allows you to move closer to the truth.

When I write a blog post, I know it's possible that I'll make mistakes - but if I allowed this to stop me, then my writing would suffer, and so would my learning. (And so would the readers who gain from what I write.)

Stafford concludes with a beautiful summary of the activity of writing:

[Writing] itself is one of the great, free human activities. There is scope for individuality, and elation, and discovery, in writing. For the person who follows with trust and forgiveness what occurs to him, the world remains always ready and deep, an inexhaustible environment, with the combined vividness of an actuality and flexibility of a dream. Working back and forth between experience and thought, writers have more than space and time can offer. They have the whole unexplored realm of human vision.

I thrive off of this experience of freedom in the process of writing. This is what allows me to sit down and write in an uninterrupted flow for hours on end. The joy of intellectual exploration and expression is intoxicating.

Richard Mitchell: Writing for Self-knowledge

The third and final excerpt is from a speech given by one of my favorite writers, Richard Mitchell. The speech, entitled Writing Against Your Life (1986), was given by Mitchell at a writers' conference in Southern Carolina. This speech became the basis of Richard Mitchell's greatest book, The Gift of Fire (1999), which is one of my favorite books of all time.

I am really tempted to excerpt the entire speech, but I'm afraid that will make this post appear too long. Here is the conclusion of the speech, which is my favorite part. I encourage you to read the whole thing, if you have time. Bear in mind that Mitchell was speaking to aspiring writers:

I am talking here of course of the kind of writing that I do. I don't write fiction, I don't know how to write fiction; I don't make characters, I don't know how to make characters; I don't have plots, I don't know how to make plots--all I do is try to think on the page--but I have read numbers of the works of those who makes plots, and write fiction, and know how to do that, and there is no difference. There is no difference there whatsoever. They make, insofar as they can, the truth. They make true human beings, who in true human predicaments, seek the truth for themselves. They make there all of the agony and joy, both, that it is to be a human being, coming into self-knowledge or suffering in its lack. As a matter of fact they make it far better than any discursive writer -- like this one -- can do, and they make it in drama, and they make it in lit, and they make it in living before our eyes, and it is the search for truth ... and whether or not you know, the difference between a good book and a bad book, I don't know -- and I don't know the difference between a good book and a bad book -- but you do know the difference between a true book and a false book. That is the real distinction. And if you will think about it a false book is whoring, or a false book is parroting; or a false book is a book in which the author -- I loved what you said about this this morning, Jane -- you write for yourself. And it goes further: I think you write because of yourself. It is you who are illuminated by what you write; and what is the nature of that illumination? It has one simple name -- although the terms underneath the name are numerous and complicated -- and that is self-knowledge ...

Now, if you take up writing seriously, I can't promise this, but I can hope this: I hope that it will make you profoundly unhappy. I hope that every day will bring you some bad news from the frontier of that unknown territory in which you work. I hope every day you rise up from your desk and say, "God, what a fool I was yesterday!" So that you can say that again tomorrow. And thus write against your life.  

There was a very popular whoring book around lately -- I don't know, it hasn't been for some time, I can't remember when, it was called "I'm Okay" -- uh, something -- "I'm Okay, You're Okay." Oh, what pleasant news. Believe me, you'll never lose money by telling people how nice they are. You'll never lose money by telling people, "Hey! Don't worry about your miserable rotten behavior and your perversions, and your lies, and your thefts! You're okay!" No one will blame you for this, and you may actually do quite well. I don't know about you -- I suspect, but I don't know about you -- however I will tell you this: I am not okay. I am not okay. I do not carefully define my terms when I think. I do not test, rigidly, as though I were a stranger, every one of my quaint and curious notions, prejudices, and beliefs, I do not do this, I am not okay. I lie. Whether I lie to you is none of your damn business; I lie to me, as to what I am and how it is in me. And I am not okay. (And I don't think you're okay either, but all I can do is suspect that.)  

Okayness does not ever come; I'm sure of that. But writing is the path towards it, and it's a path that hurts.  

The main point of the gift of Prometheus (i.e. the gift of mind), I think, is this. He made of us, with that gift -- by the way I'm a literal fundamentalist where the myth of Prometheus is concerned, you'll understand -- but by that gift, he made us absolutely unique in the universe, as far as we know. Before, all blindly floundering on, which is roughly as Aeschylus puts it, we were like the zebras, or the gnus (it's always good to mention the gnus): When bumped from the left, we veered to the right. And when bumped from the right, we veered to the left. We responded, perhaps very successfully as the zebras and the gnus do, matter of fact; but in a sense we lived what I think of as a satellite life. We lived, really, like moons. The moon ... shines. But not of herself. The moon is beautiful, but her beauty is provided for us by another power, the sun. The sun ... the sun does the sun. We do not see the sun by reflected light, we see the sun by its own light, and the day after Prometheus gave us that gift we who were satellites, creatures like others, entirely -- flowing -- where influence came, we became a new creature, something entirely different, all of us. You, you, you did. From having been a moon, you became a sun. The energy is in you. It starts in here. It has its home, its dwelling place, in here. Not in the world. Not in society. Not in your family. Not in your political party. Not in your church -- here is the life, and here is the light. Who of us knows that light? And who of us knows much about it? Damn few.  

Any serious work that a human being does must be looking for this light. And if you don't find this light, you will be able to write, and to be a writer -- either as a parrot or a whore, of course. But you'll never find the truth. Perhaps you'll never miss it, as a matter of fact I think the worst of them don't. But you will miss it. Because I am telling you this. I am a very arrogant schoolteacher; when people sit before me as though they are students, I imagine that they want to hear what I have to say and so I tell them what I have to say, and I tell them that because I have told you this, now you must be different, or deliberately reject some light. Go ahead and do that, if you will. But if you do pursue it, if you take this step from unknowing into knowing, you do walk a dangerous, perhaps even a deadly path; but it's the only path. I encourage no one to do this. But those of you who do it, and will do it, I will tell you this -- and I will tell you this as a command, because you can walk out now before you hear this command, but I'm going to give you this command:  

Don't -- shine.  

Don't seek to shine.  

Burn.

Wow! The first time I read this, I felt like Mitchell was speaking directly to me. He made me realize why I am driven to write: I write to know myself. I write because writing allows me to get my beliefs, values, and feelings out there, on paper (or a screen), at arm's length, so that I can examine them and get to know who I am - and by doing this, become a better person. 

Seneca

At the beginning of this post I mentioned that I used to be obsessed with tracking the number of readers I had, and that this obsession gradually wore off. Somewhere along the way I came across a quotation from Seneca in Letter #7 which explained to me why I became less focused on the number of readers:

Equally good is the answer given by the person, whoever it was (his identity is uncertain), who when asked what was the object of all the trouble he took over a piece of craftsmanship when it would never reach more than a very few people, replied: “A few is enough for me; so is one; and so is none.”

The more I have developed as a writer, the more this statement has resonated with me. All of the writing-motives I've listed here - Stafford's, Mitchell's, and in my case, even Orwell's - are selfish motives. I write primarily for myself, and although there is more potential for constructive criticism when more readers read by writing, the act of writing is something I do by myself, and for myself. Thus, even if nobody reads what I have written - and believe me, I've labored for hours on posts which have never seen the light of day - then the effort was still worthwhile for all of the aforementioned reasons. 

Conclusion

I laughed just now because I know that this is one of the blog posts I write which will get fewer readers than average ... and I really don't care! And that makes me happy! 

Here I have outlined three of my reasons for writing, at this stage of my life. Moreover, my writing of these three reasons is in line with these three reasons. This post was written to make a point about writing (political), and to help me clarify my thoughts about writing (discovery), and to help me come to terms with why I write (self-knowledge). 

That, to my mind, makes this a successful blog post. And with all due respect to my readers, my mind matters to me the most. :)

Richard Mitchell: On Knowing vs. Knowing About

Last week's post from Richard Mitchell's The Gift of Fire reminded me of another of my many favorite ideas from that book. This one is from Mitchell's introduction. Since his introduction is so short and rich with ideas, I have decided to post the entire thing. I would like to call special attention to the three passages I've emphasized in bold towards the end. 

Originally posted in June, 2009.

Artwork: Ancestral Recall, by Ryan Pancoast

Richard Mitchell: On Knowing vs. Knowing About

- Introduction to The Gift of Fire

I SUSPECT THAT THOSE WHO have read some of my other works will be a little surprised by this one. I am a little surprised by this one.

That, in itself, is nothing new. I have never yet written anything, long or short, that did not surprise me. That is, for me at least, the greatest worth of writing, which is only incidentally a way of telling others what you think. Its first use is for the making of what you think, for the discovery of understanding, an act that happens only in language.

I have habitually found it convenient, and perhaps just a little too easy, to look for understanding by paying close attention to failures of understanding, which always take the form of bad language. Just as there is nothing but language in which to make sense, there is nothing but language in which to make nonsense. So, in my works, at least, the examination of sense and nonsense has ordinarily been a sometimes clever and amusing castigation of fools, who can be shown to imagine that they make sense when they don't.

The castigation of fools is, of course, an ancient and honorable task of writers and, unless very poorly done, an enterprise that will usually entertain those who behold it. No matter what else we imagine that we believe about the propriety of compassion for the unfortunate, we do like to see fools exposed. It's funny. And it is not only funny; it is the great theme of Comedy, and a mild, domestic counterpart of the great theme of Tragedy, in which we rejoice, however sadly, to see villains brought down.

So it is that the habitual contemplation of folly, which does not seem to be the worst thing in the world, leads little by little to some consideration of vice, which does seem to be the worst thing in the world. It is troubling to notice that when we are foolish or "only foolish," as we easily deem it, we find ourselves all the more likely to do bad things. And when we can see, as I think I have so often managed to demonstrate, that some very foolish people are in a position to bring the consequences of their folly not only on themselves but on others, we do have the suspicion that something bad is going on. Surely, if we could certainly pronounce certain persons wise, we would think it a good thing to fall under their influence, and it seems only natural and inescapably right to expect some badness from the influence of fools. So it was that I gradually found, in my own considerations of nonsense, less play and more brooding, less glee and more melancholy, and the growing conviction that the silly mind, just as much as the wicked mind, if there is such a thing, makes bad things happen. And my meditations on foolish language, my own included, grew somber and satirical.

Satire is a cunning, landless opportunist who poaches along the borders of the two great realms of Tragedy and Comedy. The hunting is good, no doubt, for the satirist is nourished by folly and vice, of which there is said to be never any shortage. But, perhaps because I was reared in Comedy's fair land, I am not convinced of that. Folly is thick on the ground, no doubt, but where is vice? I know, I truly do know and can demonstrate, just as surely as one can provide a proof in geometry, that certain influential persons, especially in the schools, do bad things to other people. But they are not villains. They do not will badness. On the contrary, probably far more than most of us, they deliberately intend to do good things. And I am certain that they would do good things, if only they could make sense.

But all of that, obviously, could be said of any one of us. Outside of the pages of fantastic fiction, there is no one who says in the heart, I will do evil. We all intend the good, and would, at least often, do it if we could. But we don't always understand what the good is.

That is hardly a new idea. But, while I have known about it for a long time, heard it with the hearing of the ear, as it were, I haven't truly known it. Between those conditions -- knowing about, and knowing -- I think there is a very big difference. The point of this book was, for me, the discovery of that understanding. True education is not knowing about, but knowing. It is the cure of folly and the curb of vice, and our only hope of escaping what Socrates once called "the greatest peril of this our life" -- not sickness or death, as most of us would say, but the failure to make sense about the better and the worse, and thus to choose the wrong one, thinking it the other.

This is, I'm afraid, a presumptuous book. It is a book about how to live by a man who doesn't know how to live, but who has begun to learn that he doesn't know how.

Am I Qualified to Write this Blog?

I have tried to cut down on the number of "personal" posts I write here, compared to the old blog. Nevertheless, I have found that "learning" and "my relationship with learning" are so inextricably bound together in my mind that I can't help but write posts on the latter. This is one of those posts.

Artwork: Reckless Scholar, by Steve Prescott

Am I Qualified to Write this Blog?

“Not everything that is thought should be said, not everything that is said should be written, and not everything that is written should be published.” 

I have seen this quotation attributed to Rav Chaim Soloveitchik, Rav Yisrael Salanter, Rav Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, and possibly others. But the last time I heard this was a couple of years ago, when someone gave me some unsolicited advice which basically amounted to: "you shouldn't be blogging." 

This fellow went on to explain that Briskers (read: "such as ourselves") were known for being extremely reluctant to commit any of their Torah to writing, and when they did, they only published it after much deliberation and countless revisions. Based on this, he then went on to chastise me for my prolific blogging and suggested that I only publish something after extensive and complete analysis, and thorough review (preferably by my peers), until I reach the point where I am absolutely certain about what I am writing. He certainly would not approve of my summer plan of publishing one blog post every weekday. 

It is at times like these that I question whether or not I should be blogging altogether. After all, I can't exactly say that this guy was wrong about any of his points. Am I too quick to write and publish? Should I really be "thinking out loud" in writing, or should I keep my ideas to myself until they are fully developed and refined? Am I really qualified to be writing on Torah topics? Maybe I should stop ...

But whenever I have moments of self-doubt regarding my decision to write, I recall the words of Rabbeinu Bachya ibn Paquda. In his introduction to Chovos ha'Levavos (Duties of the Heart) Rabbeinu Bachya recounts the train of thought which led him to write this book. After stating all the reasons why he should write the book, he tells us why he almost didn't write the book:

But when I thought of proceeding to carry out my decision to write this book, I saw that a man like myself is not fit to compose a work like this. I estimated that my ability was insufficient to properly divide its parts, for subject was too daunting in my eyes, my knowledge too inadequate, and my intellect too weak to grasp the concepts. Furthermore, I am not an expert in the subtleties of the Arabic language which it would need to be in, due to this being the easiest language for most of my contemporaries to grasp. I feared that I would be toiling excessively at a task and that I would thus be exceeding the proper bounds [of my own limitations]. I therefore, told my soul to retract the thought and to draw back from what it had resolved on. 

Rabbeinu Bachya deemed himself to be inadequate on multiple levels. He felt he was intellectually unqualified, that the subject matter was too vast and daunting, and that he lacked the proper skills as a writer. He worried that his efforts would be misplaced, and that he would be toiling in vain.

These doubts resonate with me as well. Although I do not share Rabbeinu Bachya's hesitation about writing in the native language of my country of residence, I definitely feel under-qualified as an authority on Torah. When I compare myself to my peers - and certainly my rabbeim - I cower in recognition of the paucity of my Torah knowledge and intellectual abilities. Who am I to represent Torah in a public venue? Is what I know worthy of sharing with the world? Am I doing more harm than good by expressing my thoughts and ideas in writing? 

And then I recall Rabbeinu Bachya's response to his own self-doubting:

When I then decided to relieve myself of the burden of this toilsome burden and give up my plan of composing this work, I again suspected my soul of having chosen tranquility, to dwell in the abode of laziness, in peace and quiet. I feared that perhaps this decision to abandon the project stemmed from the desire for pleasure, and that this is what had inclined me to the way of peace and tranquility, to decide to abandon this in order to sit in the company of laziness. 

I knew that many [works of] intelligence were lost due to fear, and many losses were caused by concern. I remembered the saying: "part of caution is not to be overly cautious." I told myself, if every person who ever composed a good work or who ever taught the upright and proper path had waited until all his wishes were fulfilled, no person would have ever uttered a word after the prophets, whom God had chosen as His agents and strengthened with His divine help. If every person who had wished to attain all good qualities but was unable to attain them, had abandoned whatever he could attain of them, then all human beings would be devoid of all good and lacking all excellencies. They would have been perpetually pursuing after false hopes, the paths of righteousness would have been desolate, and the abodes of kindness would have been abandoned.  

I understood that while men's souls lust greatly to attain evil ends, they are sluggish to toil in the pursuit of what is noble. They are lazy in seeking the good, and always walk in the paths of laughter and rejoicing. If a vision of lust appears to them and beckons to them, they invent falsehoods so that they may turn to it. They bolster up its arguments to make its deception seem upright, to strengthen its lies, to make firm its looseness. But when the light of truth invitingly shines before them, they make up idle pretexts to refrain from turning to it. They argue against it, declare its courses misleading and contradict its assertions, so as to make it appear inconsistent and thus have an excuse to part from it. Every man's enemy is between his own ribs, unless he has an aid from his God, a rebuker always ready for [rebuking] his soul, a powerful governor, that will harness his soul with the saddle of service, and will muzzle it with the bridle of righteousness, strike it with the stick of discipline; and when he resolves to do good, he should not delay, and if his heart entices him to a different path, he should scold it and overpower it.  

Therefore, I found myself obligated to force my soul to bear the task of composing this book, and resolved to expound its topics with whatever language or analogy would make the matters readily understandable. Among all the duties of the heart, I will only mention those which suggest themselves to me, and will not trouble to expound all of them, so that the book will not be too long. I will, however, cite among the things necessary for the clarification of each of its roots in the section allocated to it. And from God, the true Unity, may I receive aid. On Him, I place my trust and to Him I ask to teach me the right path which He desires, and which is pleasing and acceptable to Him, in word and deed, in inner and outer conduct. 

Rabbeinu Bachya realized that even if his reasons for not writing were valid, it is likely that he was just rationalizing his laziness and his pleasure-seeking. Despite his inadequacies, the work that he set out to do was extremely important, and it would be a tragedy if his abundance of caution prevented him from bringing this work to light. He recognized that if everyone with any deficiencies refrained from committing their Torah knowledge to writing, then we would be left only with the books of the prophets and nothing more. And with that, Rabbeinu Bachya threw caution to the wind (as an act of caution), trusted in God, and set himself to the task of writing the book he knew he had to write - in spite of his shortcomings.

The same is true regarding me and my blog. I am not the best writer, and I am nowhere near the most qualified Torah scholar or thinker. Nevertheless, I believe that I do have some meager Torah knowledge to offer the world, and if I refrain from writing on account of my feelings of inadequacy, this benefit will be lost. Enough people have expressed their appreciation for what I write to convince me that the good I am doing outweighs any of the harm, and as long as that remains true, I will continue to write.

If you are a reader of this blog, and have any thoughts to share on this topic, I would appreciate your input! Thank you for letting me vent my thoughts on this matter. 

Addendum

While we're here, there is one more point I'd like to make. For a while I struggled with what type of language to use in my blog, and what kind of audience to write for. Should I allow myself to use jargon and write for an advanced audience? Should I cater to those who know very little, and provide background information in detail? 

Ultimately, I settled on approach similar to the one Rabbeinu Bachya chose:

I propose to take the most direct (easiest) method of arousing, teaching, and instructing, using language clear, direct, and familiar, so that my words will be more easily understood. I will refrain from deep language, unusual terms, and the arguments in the way of "defeat" (nitzuach), which the logicians call in Arabic "Algidal", and likewise for remote inquiries which cannot be resolved in this work, for I only brought such arguments as are satisfactory and convincing according to the methods proper to the science of theology.

Likewise, I have decided to write in the plainest, clearest, and most direct manner possible for a lay audience, but on a range of topics that spans many different audiences. Some of my posts are on basic points and are geared towards beginners. Others are for the more enfranchised members of the Torah community. And some posts I write primarily for myself, because the ideas are of interest to me and I wish to clarify them by expressing them in writing. 

I hope that my decision to write in this manner has enabled me to reach the broadest audience possible, but to make my readers feel that I my blog posts are addressed to someone like them. 

Playing with Torah (Updated for 2015)

Apparently, I feel the need to repost this every few years - mostly because I need a good reminder. Each time I post it, it is for a slightly different reason, which I write about in the last section of the post. That time has come once again. Enjoy!

Feynman: Playing with Physics

I've been reading a lot of Richard Feynman stories lately. For those of you who aren't familiar, Feynman (1918-1988) was the fun-loving, Nobel Prize winning theoretical physicist who grew up in Far Rockaway, NY. The many anecdotes about him are chronicled in various books: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985), What Do You Care What Other People Think? (1988), No Ordinary Genius (1994), "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1999), and elsewhere. Not only are these stories insightful, but they are SO much fun to read! I recommend them to everyone - but only after watching some Feynman videos on YouTube to get a feel for the way he talks.

Anyway, there's one story I'd like to talk about today. It's rather long, but it is one of my absolute favorites. The story takes place in 1945, shortly after World War II. Now that Feynman was no longer needed for his work on the Manhattan Project, he accepted a professorship at Cornell. Feynman tells the story best, so I'll let him take over now. The story can be found in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" on p.171-174 in the paperback edition, and p.66-67 in the PDF version. The italics are his, but the bold is mine:

At Cornell, I'd work on preparing my courses, and I'd go over to the library a lot and read through the Arabian Nights and ogle the girls that would go by. But when it came time to do some research, I couldn't get to work. I was a little tired; I was not interested; I couldn't do research! This went on for what I felt was a few years, but when I go back and calculate the timing, it couldn't have been that long. Perhaps nowadays I wouldn't think it was such a long time, but then, it seemed to go on for a very long time. I simply couldn't get started on any problem: I remember writing one or two sentences about some problem in gamma rays and then I couldn't go any further. I was convinced that from the war and everything else (the death of my wife) I had simply burned myself out ...

During this period I would get offers from different places -- universities and industry -- with salaries higher than my own. And each time I got something like that I would get a little more depressed. I would say to myself, "Look, they're giving me these wonderful offers, but they don't realize that I'm burned out! Of course I can't accept them. They expect me to accomplish something, and I can't accomplish anything! I have no ideas ..."

Finally there came in the mail an invitation from the Institute for Advanced Study: Einstein ... von Neumann ... Wyl ... all these great minds! They write to me, and invite me to be a professor there! And not just a regular professor. Somehow they knew my feelings about the Institute: how it's too theoretical; how there's not enough real activity and challenge. So they write, "We appreciate that you have a considerable interest in experiments and in teaching, so we have made arrangements to create a special type of professorship, if you wish: half professor at Princeton University, and half at the Institute."

Institute for Advanced Study! Special exception! A position better than Einstein, even! It was ideal; it was perfect; it was absurd!

It was absurd. The other offers had made me feel worse, up to a point. They were expecting me to accomplish something. But this offer was so ridiculous, so impossible for me ever to live up to, so ridiculously out of proportion. The other ones were just mistakes; this was an absurdity! I laughed at it while I was shaving, thinking about it.

And then I thought to myself, "You know, what they think of you is so fantastic, it's impossible to live up to it. You have no responsibility to live up to it!"

It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.

It wasn't a failure on my part that the Institute for Advanced Study expected me to be that good; it was impossible. It was clearly a mistake-and the moment I appreciated the possibility that they might be wrong, I realized that it was also true of all the other places, including my own university. I am what I am, and if they expected me to be good and they're offering me some money for it, it's their hard luck.

Then, within the day, by some strange miracle -- perhaps he overheard me talking about it, or maybe he just understood me -- Bob Wilson, who was head of the laboratory there at Cornell, called me in to see him. He said, in a serious tone, "Feynman, you're teaching your classes well; you're doing a good job, and we're very satisfied. Any other expectations we might have are a matter of luck. When we hire a professor, we're taking all the risks. If it comes out good, all right. If it doesn't, too bad. But you shouldn't worry about what you're doing or not doing." He said it much better than that, and it released me from the feeling of guilt.

Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing -- it didn't have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with. When I was in high school, I'd see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn't have to do it; it wasn't important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn't make any difference: I'd invent things and play with things for my own entertainment.

So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything, I've got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I'm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.

Within a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling.

I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate -- two to one. It came out of a complicated equation! Then I thought, "Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics, why it's two to one?"

I don't remember how I did it, but I ultimately worked out what the motion of the mass particles is, and how all the accelerations balance to make it come out two to one.

I still remember going to Hans Bethe and saying, "Hey, Hans! I noticed something interesting. Here the plate goes around so, and the reason it's two to one is . . ." and I showed him the accelerations.

He says, "Feynman, that's pretty interesting, but what's the importance of it? Why are you doing it?"

"Hah!" I say. "There's no importance whatsoever. I'm just doing it for the fun of it." His reaction didn't discourage me; I had made up my mind I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.

I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there's the Dirac Equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was "playing" --working, really -- with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned, wonderful things.

It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.

This isn't the only time that Feynman spoke of the importance of "playing." In No Ordinary Genius, pp.17-18, Feynman was asked by the author whether he ever wonders about where his great thinking ability came from. Feynman answers, "No." The author persists, saying, "Perhaps you just don't find it interesting, but when a mathematical prodigy like, say, Ramanujan turns up out of nowhere, surely one does wonder how he could have got hold of such extraordinary mathematical abilities?" Feynman answers:

I find in the world very many interesting questions such as this one, but I have no way to know the answer to it, and no way to find out. It's not that I am not interested, I simply don't know anything about it, and I don't like to speculate about things I don't know very much about. It's much more interesting for me (unless I'm working on it) to leave a mystery a mystery, rather than to make believe I know an answer to it. So I can't tell you where Ramanujan got his mathematical desires - I should call them desires, because that's what you really require first. Not so much the ability, but the desire to play around, and to notice. That's what he had to do - to find out funny things about numbers and to explore some more, play with the numbers until he had played enough to discover things that nobody else knew. He was playing, that's all. He had to have the desire to play, and I don't know where that came from.

I've always played around. It's hard to explain it very well. When I was a kid I had a laboratory. Although I'm now in theoretical work, I originally played experimentally. It's a bad term - I mean that I fooled about. I never did experiments in a scientific sense, to find out something. I would make radios, or try to make a photocell work. I had a spark plug from an old Ford car that I would set up and use to burn holes in paper, or see what would happen when I tried to put a spark through a vacuum tube. But I never kept a notebook of things I did every day, or made careful measurements. I wasn't that kind of "scientist," so to speak. I was just playing, like a child playing, but with different toys. 

So much for the anecdotes about the importance of "play" in knowledge. 

The Moral of the Story (and Support from Mesorah)

In my opinion, the moral of the story is pretty much what Feynman said: when it comes to learning, you should forget about all goals, objectives, and accomplishments; forget about distinctions of "important" and "not important"; forget about how much of a contribution you're making to your field, and whether you are going to justify your work to your peers; forget about all expectations and totally disregard the expectations of others; forget about achievement, forget about mastery, forget about what everyone else is doing or not doing, and just enjoy learning. Learn what you love to learn, be realistic and intellectually honest, and follow your mind wherever it takes you.

The irony is that the best way to achieve your goals is to not worry about achieving them! If you follow the path described by Feynman, you'll likely to be way more successful than you would have been any other way! Perhaps this is what the Rambam means in Hilchos Teshuvah 10:2 when he writes:

One who serves [God] out of love occupies himself with Torah and mitzvos and follows the paths of wisdom not because of anything in this world, neither out of fear of the bad nor in order to inherit the good. Rather, he does what is true because it is true - and ultimately, the good will come on its own.

Not surprisingly, Chazal preempted Feynman's realization by centuries. People usually quote Rava's formulation of the principle: "Le'olam yilmad adam Torah b'makom she'libo chafetz - a person should always learn Torah where his heart desires" (Avodah Zarah 19b), which is a prescriptive statement. Personally, I prefer R' Yehudah ha'Nasi's formulation: "Ein adam lomeid Torah ela mi'makom she'libo chafetz - a person does not learn Torah except from where his heart desires" (ibid.), which is a descriptive statement. In other words, this isn't just a rule that a person should follow in his learning, but rather, it is a description of reality. If your heart isn't into it then you won't really learn it, but if your heart is into it then you'll really learn!

A few days after I reading this story, I realized that we ask Hashem to enable us to reach Feynman's level each and every morning. We say:

Please, Hashem, our God, sweeten the words of Your Torah in our mouth and in the mouth of Your people, the family of Israel. May we and our offspring and the offspring of Your people, the House of Israel - all of us - know Your Name and learn Your Torah lishmah (for its own sake). Blessed are You, Hashem, Who teaches Torah to His people Israel.

We beseech Hashem to make our learning of Torah sweet and enjoyable, and to facilitate yedias Hashem (knowledge of God) and Torah lishmah (learning Torah for its own sake). To learn Torah lishmah means to learn it as an end in and of itself - not in order to accomplish, to achieve, or as a means toward some objective. This is exactly the type of learning that Feynman was describing. His mind was drawn to unraveling the mystery of the wobbling plate. He allowed himself to be totally guided by his natural curiosity and didn't feel any need to justify it or explain the importance of what he was doing. He was seeking knowledge of reality lishmah, and it was sweet.

There is even support in the Mesorah for Feynman's choice of the verb "play" to describe his involvement in physics. I don't think I need to define what he means by "playing." Everyone knows what it means to play. What I realized was that this is actually encouraged in Torah! Tehilim 119 is filled with references to David ha'Melech "playing with Torah" and regarding Torah as "a plaything" - at least, according to the translation of the root שעשע by Radak and Metzudos. Check it out:

"I play with Your statutes, I will not forget Your word" (Tehilim 119:16); "Indeed, Your testimonies are my plaything and my counselors" (ibid. 24); "I will play with Your mitzvos that I love" (ibid. 47); "Their heart grew thick as fat; but as for me, Your Torah is my plaything" (ibid. 70); "May Your mercies come upon me so that I may live, for Your Torah is my plaything" (ibid. 77); "Had Your Torah not been my plaything, then I would have perished in my affliction" (ibid. 92); "Distress and anguish have overtaken me, Your mitzvos are my plaything" (ibid. 143); "I crave Your salvation, O Hashem, and Your Torah is my plaything" (ibid. 174)

Shlomo ha'Melech utilizes this metaphor in Mishlei to depict the relationship between Hashem and chochmah:

Hashem made me [chochmah] as the beginning of His way, before His deeds of yore . . . I was then His nursling, I was then His delightful plaything every day, playing before Him at all times, playing in the inhabited areas of His earth, delightfully playing with the sons of man (Mishlei 8:22, 30-31).

I can't say that I experience this every time I learn, but thank God, I do have this experience on a consistent basis in one area of learning: Mishlei. I'd say that 95% of the times I sit down to learn Mishlei with my students, my friends, and my teachers, I experience the sweetness of Torah lishmah. I actually used the metaphor of "plaything" to describe my learning of Mishlei before I was aware of the pesukim in Tehilim. When I learn Mishlei, I see each pasuk as a puzzle that I get to work out. The experience is fun, challenging, and rewarding - and I get the benefit of learning useful techniques for living an enjoyable life! What could be better?

Relevance to the Blog: as of 2010

I founded my first blog in April of 2007. Over the next five months I wrote 96 blog posts. Over the course of the following academic year I wrote 77 posts, and in the next academic year I wrote 81. This year, however, [editor's note: 2010] I've only written ten posts, and only three of these contained any original content. The question is: What happened? Why the dip in prolificacy?

The simplest explanation is that this was my first year "outside" of yeshiva. For a period of seven wonderful years, from September '02 until June '09, I was blessed with the privilege of learning in yeshiva full-time, or part-time while going to college (which was practically full-time). But in September '09 I got my first teaching job, and since then, I've devoted a great deal of time to my students. Time that was once spent writing blog posts was now spent preparing lessons and responding to students' questions via email and text messaging.

This explanation, while true, is not the whole truth. After reading the story of the wobbling plate I realized that my relationship to my blog has changed over the years. When I first started blogging, I did it for my own enjoyment. I love writing! Actually, that's not entirely accurate. I love thinking through writing. By that I mean formulating and organizing my ideas in writing, and discussing them with others in writing. My blog was originally conceived of as a venue for me to do what I love, for essentially selfish reasons.

But over time, as more and more people started reading my blog, I started to feel obligated to write. This had several negative effects: 

1. I felt increasingly restricted in the writing topics I chose. Instead of writing what I wanted to write about, I felt like I had to write about what others would be interested in. And when someone asked me to take up a certain topic or answer a certain question, I felt responsible for following through on the request.
   
2. My perfectionist tendencies were horrendously exacerbated. In the good ole' days I felt comfortable posting whatever I was thinking about: musings, questions, observations, insights, partial ideas, ideas in development, my feelings about certain ideas, my feelings toward learning in general, and the like. But as time went on, I felt the need to only post "publishable" material - the type of stuff that I would feel comfortable submitting to a newsletter or online publication. That cut out a lot of potentially "post-worthy" posts.
   
3. Likewise, I started to spend a longer and longer time tweaking, editing, and rewriting posts - many of which have never seen the light of day because they haven't met my unrealistic perfectionist standards. (Fun fact: Did you know that I have 106 drafts in my draft folder? That's 106 blog posts in various stages of completion, which I have "put on hold" because my perfectionist tendencies prevented me from finishing them. Sickening, isn't it?) [Editor's note: Since 2010, this number has increased twofold - or perhaps even threefold.]
   
4. For the same reason, I began to feel pressured to write "comprehensive" treatments of whatever topic I chose to write about. This was another unrealistic obstacle which compounded all of the other problems.
   
5. I felt increasing pressure to be prolific. If I didn't post a certain number of posts per week, I'd feel guilty or remiss in my duty as a writer. And when I didn't meet that self-imposed quota, I would start to ignore the blog altogether. It was a vicious cycle.
   
6. I used to write as a learner, but I somehow allowed myself to get into the mode of trying to teach through my blog. In retrospect, this was a mistake. There is a place for teaching and a place for learning, and for me, this blog is the latter. All of my feelings of obligation and responsibility are built on the premise that I am writing in the capacity of teacher. But if I'm just a guy thinking out loud and talking ideas with other people, then why should I have any responsibilities towards others? "If you have become wise, you have become wise for yourself, and if you have scoffed, then you alone will bear responsibility" (Mishlei 9:12). 

There may have been more, but that's all I can think of right now. The point is that I stopped enjoying writing on my blog, and consequently, I stopped trying. Whenever I did try, I didn't get anywhere. I'd either become frustrated, or obsessed with "getting it perfect," or disinterested. It just wasn't fun anymore.

And so, freshly inspired by Feynman's example, I'm going to set one more goal for myself: NOT to be goal-oriented in writing for my blog. I want to rekindle the original spirit of the blog. Starting this week, I'm going to go back to writing for my own benefit and my own enjoyment. I'm going to (try to) forget about my own expectations and the expectations of others and just have fun thinking in writing.

If I succeed, then this will be good for me and for the blog. If I fail, then things will remain as they have been. Either way, I've got nothing to lose. Wish me luck!

Relevance to the Blog: as of 2015

I began this blog last summer. My goal then was the same goal I had during the previous summer: to publish one blog post each weekday of the summer. This summer was slightly different: instead of prioritizing new blog posts, I made it my goal to edit and republish posts from the old blog. Thankfully, it appears that this has been a success. 

This week I will begin preparing for the classes I will be teaching during the upcoming school year. Last year at this time, I decided it would be prudent to stop writing new posts for the blog. During the school year, I barely wrote anything. I had consciously decided - for a number of reasons - to invest all of my learning/teaching energy into the classes I was teaching. In retrospect, I believe this was a mistake. Rereading these Feynman anecdotes helped me to understand why this is the case. In short: I need an outlet for "playing" with Torah, and this blog is that outlet.

As much as I incorporate the "playing" attitude into the way I teach my students, and in my chavrusa learning, neither of these activities can substitute for my own need to play with Torah. I need a venue in which I can freely play with ideas, without the responsibility of "teaching" or of being viewed as authority or even of "being a good chavrusa." I need the freedom to think out loud and explore questions and ideas which interest me, and I need to do this by writing in a public format. 

Why can I only satisfy this need in this manner? Who knows! I only know that it is true, and that I must do it. During this past school year, my teaching and my learning suffered because I wasn't playing with Torah through writing. I see now how critical it is for me to continue playing with Torah even during the school year. 

And so I am pleased to announce on the record that although my daily blogging will discontinue for the summer, I definitely plan to continue writing and posting for the remainder of the month, and - God willing - for the remainder of the year. I hope and pray that I will be successful in this endeavor, and that my efforts will not be thwarted by forces from within or from without. Thank you for your support!