In one of its most sublime breaks with many other religious traditions, the Torah retains the record of God's insistence that the sacred writings of Israel belong to the entire people, not simply to one holy caste or exclusive one aristocracy. The Torah of Israel belongs to all Israel.
In today's Torah portion, we recall that premise in stirring words: "Surely, this Instruction which I enjoin you this day is not too baffling for you, nor is it beyond your reach.... It is not in the heavens...neither is it beyond the sea... No, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it."
While we may all be moved by these lovely words and their lofty sentiment, our community's stark ignorance of the contents of the Torah and the widespread abandonment of the path of living that the Torah represents should provoke us to ask the question: do we really still mean these words?
Do we, the Jewish people, still possess the Torah?
Do we still want to accept the Torah as a gift of God's love and as our sacred duty? Or would we rather preserve the Torah exclusively on the level of a symbol--a scroll that stands for something else, and therefore need never be unrolled, rarely read, and only sporadically observed?
One of the greatest challenges for those Jews who would like to learn more about our sacred heritage, who would like to lay claim to what is their birthright, is the sheer quantity of Torah and its off-shoots in rabbinic traditions. The amount of writing, the depth of analysis, and the profundity of ideas is so vast that it can look too daunting for any but the specialist or the full-time student. Perhaps, given our ignorance and our lack of time, it is simply no longer possible for us to learn Torah?
While the problem may seem new to us, in actuality, it is not. The very fact that Moses is impelled to insist that the Torah isn't too hard or too lofty must imply that Jews in his day felt that Jewish study and observance was beyond them. Certainly by the Talmudic period (between the years 70-600 C.E.), the Rabbis were often in the position of having to encourage a reluctant Jewry to take the first steps in Jewish living.
One of the most effective ways to avoid learning Torah is to adhere to an all-or-nothing approach that devalues anything short of absolute fluency and mastery. Given the impossibility of attaining scholarly excellence, insisting on this as the only goal is a sure disenfranchisement of the Jewish people, a guaranteed way to sunder us from our heritage.
Midrash Devarim Rabbah pays eloquent testimony to the self-defeating attitude of one who allows the sheer volume of Jewish learning to prevent that first step:
The Rabbis say, "The fool enters the synagogue and, seeing there people occupying themselves with the Torah, asks, 'How does one begin to learn the Torah?' They answer the fool, "First, one reads from a Scroll containing a portion of the Torah, then from the Book itself, then from the prophets, and then Ketuvim (the third section of the Hebrew Bible). After completing the study of Scripture, one learns the Talmud and then the halakhot (rabbinic laws) and then the haggadot (rabbinic legends)." After hearing all this, the fool says, "I can't learn all this! and he turns back from the gate.
The fool is quite reasonable if the only acceptable result is the mastery of the entire corpus of Jewish learning, just as one would never learn to walk if we first had to guarantee that we would become triathaletes. The fool's mistake is to confuse the optimal goal with a more reasonable and attainable first step. The first step is simply to take that first step. Later on, there will be plenty of time to worry about the next step. In contradistinction to the fool, the wise person "learns one chapter every day until completing the whole law." That gradual approach, always making progress--always growing in learning and in observance--is the only sound approach to keep the Torah ours.
The challenge before us, then, is not to become either omniscient or saints. It is to have the courage to become Jews. Open a book; do a mitzvah. The rest will follow in due course.
Shabbat Shalom!