One of the most intriguing and troubling passages in Pirkei Avot, a comment of Rabbi Yaakov (some versions say “Rabbi Shimon), asserts that “one who is studying while strolling, and interrupts the learning to remark, ‘what a beautiful tree,’ or ‘what a lovely field,’ Scripture considers as having committed a capital offense.”
What an odd remark: merely looking up from your studies to notice the beauty of the world is seen as having forfeited your soul! What is so terrible about appreciating the world? Why is it that Rabbi Yaakov is so exorcised by the student’s vision soaring beyond the words of Torah?
What is going on here?
While this verse has troubled commentators throughout the ages, its basis lies in Rabbi Yaakov’s understanding of how a Jew should seek to know God. Taken on its own, this mishnah insists that the only way to know God’s will, the only Jewish vehicle for building a relationship with God is through study, through the written record of Jewish spirituality, law, and thought. By studying Torah, by learning Mishnah and Talmud, by immersing our minds in midrash and philosophy, we can expose our souls to the greatness of our tradition’s vision of God and to the profundity of a life of mitzvot. Primary, in this understanding, is a reliance on the words and wisdom of scholars of Torah, whose brilliant comments and commentary can reveal aspects of our brit that we would never encounter on our own. Just as the word “halakhah (Jewish law)” comes from the word “to walk” the path on which the Jewish soul must walk is the words of our tradition, and the place that path leads is inside the Beit Midrash, house of study.
For millennia, we Jews have been a people more at home with the Beit Midrash than with the glories of nature, more associated with a thick book than with the exaltation of the outdoors. Jewish spirituality focused on textual interpretation and on inner visions. For the last 1500 years, we have strictly followed Rabbi Yaakov’s dictates: we rarely stopped to notice the beauty of the world around us. We have become the people of the book, and we neglected Creation.
Of late, that emphasis has shifted again. Standing in the Twenty-First Century, modern men and women know too well the dangers and the foolishness of neglecting the world. Our focus on human artifacts and the satisfaction of human desire, without limit, has produced a danger far greater than any previous threat to human survival. In a few short centuries, our technology and our appetites have become a primary factor of environmental change, and, often, of degradation. Our shortsighted pursuit of self-interest has produced a dangerous cycle of increased reliance on human knowledge and technology, leading to new and unforeseen problems, leading to greater reliance on technology to solve these new problems, leading to ever new problems. On and on we become enmeshed in a trap of our own making.
Perhaps the time has come to look up from our books, our computer screens, and our arrogant self-absorption. Perhaps it is time to seek out a more-worldly model of Jewish spirituality and obedience.
In the words of Scripture, paradoxically the words Jews have lovingly studied through the ages, we can find a piety that is keenly aware of God as Creator, and of the importance of personal experience and of regular exposure to the majesty of God’s Creation. In today’s Torah portion, for example, Moses describes God as the One “who shows deeds of greatness.” God’s deeds of greatness are precisely those things Rabbi Yaakov would have us ignore — the beautiful trees, the rolling fields, the oceans, stars, mountains, and the teeming life that makes our planet such a mystery and a miracle.
The wisdom of the Bible is that the world, itself, constitutes God’s greatest text. “Ha-shamayim m’saprim kevod El, the heavens declare the glory of God.” But they only reveal that glory if we accustom ourselves to read the text of the world, to walk lovingly and attentively in God’s garden.
That doesn’t mean neglecting the Torah and its commentaries, God forbid. And it doesn’t require abandoning the Beit Midrash. Instead, the call of our age is to see the text and the world as partners, each teaching essential truths about God, spirit, and our responsibilities to the rest of God’s creation.
Rabbi Brad says, “One who walks in the fields and leaves off studying in order to appreciate the beauty of the trees and fields will return to the studying able to see deeper truths in our ancient books. And one who appreciates a beautiful field after immersing in Torah study will know that God relies on us to preserve the beauty of the field and to care for all living things.”
On such a balance of book and world, of tradition and experience, the world relies. Don’t forget to study, and don’t forget to look up.
Shabbat shalom.