I want to open by thanking the WebYeshiva for hosting these posts, and repeating how much I hope that readers will also contribute to a lively discussion in the comments section of the blog. We closed last time with the promise to offer reasons to value this project. As I said there, I will be striving to show what all Orthodox Jews should have to accept as mission-shaping and central aspects of their religiosity.

Opposition and the Value of Overcoming It

In the tradition of “two Jews, three opinions,” that claim might seem quixotic or Pollyannaish. This is especially true given the many important contemporary thinkers—whose ideas we will get to in upcoming posts– who would reject my definition of Orthodoxy’s mission as too minimal, too trivial, or simply wrong.

Since the tenor of the times seems so against the ideas I intend to demonstrate, I want to kick-start our enthusiasm by describing the upsides of the project, the advantages of knowing the unequivocally central elements of Orthodoxy and what individuals, communities, and the world would get out of coming to understand these truths.

My starting point is what I call the economics of spiritual energy, a term that takes full account of the fact that almost all human beings necessarily make choices about where to devote their religious efforts. Once we accept that, we can also begin to expect that Judaism would have guided us on how to make those choices most felicitously, by giving us an identifiable mission.

The Economics of Religious Energy and the Necessity of Budgeting

Ordinary economics is the study of scarcity, of how people apportion resources that are not so abundant as to supply all those who would like it in the amounts they would like. People deal with scarcity in two main ways. First, they seek (and often find) ways to expand the availability of resources, whether through improved technology (more fuel-efficient cars, for example) or new supplies (such as a new oil well, or, perhaps, a more abundant alternative fuel). Second, they budget or ration the resource, such as through markets and pricing mechanisms.

I make no claims to economic sophistication, but the basic model has much to commend itself to our discussion of religion. As with money or other limited resources, the vast majority of people have limited energy to give to their religious lives; once the account has been depleted, their ability to do more, or give further, is drained.

Today, many Jews do not recognize that our human limitations force decisions, conscious or not, about what aspects of religion are essential, but Scripture forthrightly recognized that none of us is perfect (1). Once knowing that, I would think we would immediately say to ourselves, well, if I’m not perfect and can’t do all that God wants, what are the most vital aspects of God’s demands, the ones God wants me to be absolutely sure to accomplish? Not only would I assume we would ask ourselves that question, I would expect Tanach, Scripture, to guide us to an answer, since it has already recognized our inability to do it all.

Geniuses of the Spirit and Their Difficulty in Accepting Others’ Limitations

That we do not hear this question discussed more frequently stems primarily, I think, from two causes. First, the central figures of Jewish law, the rabbinic sages of each generation, are often those blessed with such an abundance of religious energy that fulfilling the entire system seems to them a plausible option (2). While they, too, recognize the inevitability of failure, it is for them a failure of will, a failure of self-control, but not an expression of any general impossibility.

When such giants (read: gedolim, Torah giants) answer questions on the minutiae of halacha, they do so with the assumption that each detail supports and complements the central goals of the religion, not replaces them. For them, it is never a choice of x or y, it is that x will lead to greater fulfillment of y as well. Too, these rabbis are posed questions from all areas of halacha, so that they experience a Jewish world in which the entire range of the religion is being discussed, analyzed, and, to the extent possible, put into practice.

Only by recognizing that their breadth of vision and wealth of religious spirit characterizes too few of us to serve as a practical model do we come to understand the necessity of the budgeting I am suggesting here. The assumption that people can keep all of the religion if only they try leads us to focus on encouraging efforts to expand our religious resources—to study more Torah, attend public worship more often, treat others with greater consideration.

Laudable as that strategy is, its natural limitations mean we still need to advise people poorer in religious energy how to make rational decisions about how to invest their resources. It is partially the failure to internalize this, I think, which leads to identifiable situations today where people pay a great deal more attention to relatively minor practices, while largely neglecting more significant ones. For some examples, the recitation of kaddish, the giving of multiple, elaborate משלוח מנות, food packages to friends on Purim, and the first recitation of Selichot, on a Saturday night before Rosh haShana, are all given much greater attention and energy than practices that are more clearly central to the religion’s goals. One reason this occurs is that we have failed to make clear how the religion wants us to budget our religious energies.

And Yet It Is All of It Important

Each time I mention the idea of budgeting, though, I am reminded of a second reason to resist such discussions, the fear that it leads to a too-casual abandoning of the attempt to fulfill the entirety of the religion. To use the examples I just mentioned, no serious Jew could imply that we should do anything other than recite kaddish when Jewish custom has ordained doing so, give משלוח מנות as a necessary part of properly celebrating Purim, and recite Selichot when the time comes; to point to other practices as competing with these comes uncomfortably close to saying these are not important.

So, too, when Don Isaac Abarbanel encountered Rambam’s Principles of Faith (a topic we will have much to say about in future posts), he wrote ראש אמנה, a work that objected in principle to identifying some parts of the religion or creed as more important or vital than others. I had a similar experience towards the end of my first year of teaching.

At a meeting planning the Chumash curriculum for the following year, the assembled faculty wrangled over which of the Five Books to teach. I wondered aloud how many chapters teachers had managed to get to that year, given the limited time and other challenges they faced. When I found out that the fastest-paced teacher had gotten to fifteen chapters(3), I suggested that instead of talking about “books” to teach, we might best focus on which sixty chapters– the greatest amount we could expect a student to cover in four years at that school– were most vital to a student’s Jewish education.

A teacher much senior to me objected, saying, “We can’t even talk like that, they’re all important; you can’t say which are more or less important.” This view, which has its merits, precludes the kind of economic thinking I am suggesting. Especially since he was right, that the entirety of the system of Torah and mitzvot is vitally important, and a faithful Jew must always strive to keep it all, the idea of labeling some practices or beliefs as more important might seem misguided, even dangerous (spiritually, at least).

In that regard, I need to say as often as I can how far that is from my intention. I fully accept that Orthodox Jews must do their absolute best to keep every aspect of the religion. Given two people, one of whom observes x percent or aspects of Judaism, and another who does the same x and more (with similar levels of internal focus and motivation), it is clear that the latter has more successfully actualized the religion in his or her life, and must be viewed accordingly.

As with money, we would all prefer to have enough money to do all we would like. One strategy, which avoids hard choices, is to grow religious wealth, to develop the energy for all the aspirations of the religion, study more Torah, pray more fervently, perform more acts of kindness, give more charity, perfect God’s world better, and so on.
Until that happens, it is as unrealistic as spending wildly expecting that our money will always grow to cover our tastes. To avoid going deeply in debt or becoming bankrupt, financially or spiritually, we need to budget, to take stock of what must be included in a religious life, to insure that the basics are covered before moving on to other interests, however important those might be. It is in search of the guidelines for how to budget that I have taken on this project.

Behavior Is Belief: The Economics of Spiritual Energy as an Indicator of a Mission of Judaism

One could argue, though, that God is agnostic among mitzvot as long as we do our best. If so, it would mean that a Jew who focuses his or her religious efforts overwhelmingly on sacrifices (or, today, prayer) might be no better or worse than another doing so for Torah study, a third on business ethics, a fourth on kosher laws, a fifth on Sabbath and holiday laws. Despite each letting the other areas fall by the wayside, their doing their best would be all that mattered.

I cannot prove a priori that that is not true, but there are early indications. First, without consulting any specific texts, it is well known that the נביאים, the Prophets, repeatedly complained about the focus on sacrifice as opposed to ordinary righteousness, so that option would seem to have been rejected. Second, as we have mentioned, since the time of Rambam, Jewish thinkers have accepted the view that there are טעמי מצוות, underlying values to the system of Torah and mitzvot which human beings can discover by reading the sources of tradition carefully.

Reasons, though, imply a framework of values, meaning, inherently, a hierarchy of importance within that framework. While we cannot use that hierarchy to willfully neglect any parts of the system—God clearly prefers the broad and deep observance of the entirety of Torah (4) —it may offer some guidance as to parts of the system more indispensable than others.

Different such frameworks, however, might produce different hierarchies, and yet the reality of human beings’ limited energy is true of us all. This suggests to me that not only should we be thinking about how to budget those energies, but that God would have shown us ways to make that budget. Although we will see this in practice when we get to actual texts, the idea of a mission statement provides exactly the kind of framework for decisions we are seeking.

Corporations—which face choices that are not purely financial, such as the ethos of their workplace, the attitude they bring to their business decisions, the partnerships they choose to forge, etc.— use mission statements to maintain their focus on what is most vital, to insure that they not get so caught up in ancillary parts of their operation as to lose sight of the overall goals.

What is true for a financial corporation would seem likely for a spiritual one; a statement of Judaism’s mission, the concerns that capture its core or essential contribution to the world, would be useful and, therefore, we might expect God to provide it. That would be the system’s way of telling us how to evaluate our choices about our religious concerns, to guide us as to what is more or less valuable to accomplish within our limitations, and what is indispensable regardless of what we think of as our limitations.

This mission statement, I stress, cannot be too broad, because then it loses its value as a yardstick by which to evaluate one’s choices. Some might, for example, agree that Judaism has a mission, and express it as bringing the Messiah, which includes a national return to Israel and the restoration of a Jewish state (5). But we have no well-attested methods from bringing the Messiah other than getting better at observing the entirety of Torah, and it was our inability to pay the same careful attention to the entirety of Torah that led us here in the first place.

The Size of Torah and Triaging Our Religious Energies

Lest I have not yet been convincing about the necessity of choices; lest readers still think that if only they tried a little harder, they could really get to all of Torah, let me offer some statistics that I think both make my point and show us how different our religious experience will be depending on the choices we make.

Shulchan Aruch (6), often pointed to as the definition of Orthodox Judaism (7)<.span>, was written to briefly encapsulate the practical ruling of Jewish law, out of the recognition that many Jews could not study Torah in the proper depth (8). The work has 1600 chapters, some quite lengthy, yet only deals with areas of halacha that have practical ramifications in our current historical era. With all that cutting, I wonder how many Jews, at least in our times, can keep those 1600 chapters fully in mind, let alone observe them.

Other popular books of Jewish learning make the necessity of choices– and the different outcomes to which those choices will lead, whether or not we make them consciously or deliberately– even clearer. First, let us consider Minchat Chinuch, written as an ostensible commentary on Sefer haChinuch, a thirteenth-century compilation of the 613 commandments. Sefer haChinuch itself made significant and drastic choices as to what to include in his work, striving for a brief presentation with a few central rules and rationales for each mitzva. Minchat Chinuch offers a richer, more detailed presentation, such that it is usually thought of as a book of its own. It runs more than 1400 dense pages in the recent Machon Yerushalayim edition.

This length is all the more impressive– and proves further that we make choices about what to observe all the time, whether we admit it or not– when we consider that R. Babad, the author, repeatedly reminds readers that he sees his work as extraordinarily brief. He frequently comments that he will not address most issues of rabbinic law or topics already well-covered in other literature, protests that he has not studied a topic fully, or notes that he hopes to return to it in the fullness of time. Perhaps most revealing, for at least seventy-five mitzvot, he mentions that a full exposition would require an independent free-standing work of its own.

Minchat Chinuch is echoing what has long been known by traditional writers, that Torah is ארוכה מארץ מדה ורחבה מני ים (9), longer than the Earth in measure and broader than the sea. Given its well-accepted resistance to complete mastery, the idea that we cannot make well-thought choices on what to emphasize or highlight seems mistaken.

Our Choices Are Who We Are

To put it more colloquially, Mary T. Grasso, Director of the Principals’ Program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, tells educators that “behavior is belief.” In our terms, that means that the subset of mitzvot we observe, however large, will end up being the expression of our religious persona. If, as in the time of the First Temple, we focus on sacrificial rites, we will be enacting a very different set of beliefs from people who focus on the kosher laws, the holidays, or the interpersonal commandments.

The ramifications of such choices become clearer when we consider two recent works. In 1999, R. David Ribiat published The 39 Melachos, an elaboration of the prohibited categories of labor on Shabbat (10). The four volumes contain over 1400 pages of English text, supplemented by over a thousand pages of Hebrew footnotes, elaborating the legal issues analyzed.

In 2006, R. Joseph Telushkin published You Shall Be Holy, the first volume of a projected Code of Jewish Ethics (11). In the author’s description, the first volume

deals primarily with issues of character development…The second volume, Love Your Neighbor (12), … on interpersonal relations…issues such as tzedaka (charity), obligations to society’s weakest and most vulnerable members [and more]…The third volume will deal with issues of family, friendship, and community(13).

The two published volumes run over 500 pages each. Without comparing anything about the works other than their relatively equal size, two facts should be immediately clear. First, if we need 1500 English pages to cover each major Torah topic (14), only a vanishing minority of Jews will educate themselves about any topic, let alone all of them.

Second, Jews’ religiosity will be markedly affected by their choices of reading material. The Jew who devotes the effort to study and imbibe Minchat Chinuch carefully will absorb different attitudes and religious messages than those who devote that time to R. Ribiat’s book or R. Telushkin’s. At this point, we certainly could not make universal recommendations for how to choose what to read, but we can at least see whether traditional literature offers insight into the pros and cons of such choices.

These three factors—our human limitations, the assumption that Judaism has a mission, and the recognition that behavior is belief—are what lead me to see my project as not only valuable but urgent. Corporations that lose sight of their mission, people who spend their money without thinking about where it is going, or who do not consider the impact of the sum total of their actions on who they are as people, find themselves having drifted from where they wanted to be in serious and significant ways.

Let me close with a personal story. At the end of my year studying at Yeshivat Har Etzion, I was faced with the choice of staying for another year and attending an ordinary liberal arts college, or going straight to Yeshiva College for my university studies. When I sought the advice of the Rosh Yeshiva, R. Lichtenstein, he could not see why it was an either/or choice, why I couldn’t take a second year at Har Etzion and then attend Yeshiva College. It took awhile to convince him that those were the only options, and to secure the advice I eventually followed.

That resistance to choosing among inferior possibilities first of all characterizes gedolim, who shame us all with their ability to achieve worlds more than the rest of us can hope, and, second, shows why knowing the standards by which to make such choices is important and useful for any of us who ever need to act in a way that is less than ideal.

It is to avoid that, and to help us find our way to the most productive engagement with the religion possible, that I am entering into this investigation. With thanks to the WebYeshiva for hosting these posts (and a reminder to check out their course offerings), I look forward to continuing with you next time, when we think about some of the objections to my approach.

(1) Ecclesiastes 7:20—כי אדם אין צדיק בארץ אשר יעשה טוב ולא יחטא, for there is not a man righteous in the earth who shall do good and not sin.

(2) I remember once hearing a rebbe of mine take for granted—this was in the context of suggesting that Rambam held that the sanctification of the Moon is actually accomplished each month even now by an implicit beit din, court, which had to include scholars familiar with all of Torah– that in each generation the Land of Israel has hosted at least three Torah scholars who knew the entirety of Torah. When I questioned whether that had really been true historically, he seemed surprised, since, for him, it was obvious that it had; for him, the “entirety of Torah” was less daunting than it seemed to me, then or now.

(3) Another issue, of course, is whether that is a reasonable pace, as I will discuss towards the end of this project. Those kinds of questions, though, do not have unequivocal answers.

(4) As פרקי אבות, Ethics of the Fathers, reminds us in 2;1: הוי זהיר במצוה קלה כבחמורה, שאי אתה יודע מתן שכרן של מצוות, be as careful with a ‘light’ mitzva as a ‘stringent’ one, for you do not know the reward for mitzvot. In his comments on that Mishna, R. Yona gives the analogy of a garden, which is improved by having a variety of plants and flowers in it. In order to nudge his gardeners into producing such a garden, a king would choose not to reveal the price he would pay for various plants and flowers. I note the comment because it accepts that there are more and less valuable mitzvot, but that God hides that fact out of a desire to foster a mix of observances.

(5) A possibility I discussed in Murderer in the Mikdash.

(6) The Code of Jewish Law, authored by R. Joseph Caro in 1565, with the glosses of R. Moses Isserles, known as Rema.

(7) So that people will say things along the lines of “The mission of Orthodoxy? Observing Shulchan Aruch.” In the next post, I will explain why I think this is untrue; right now, I simply want to note that it is unrealistic.

(8) Indeed, many have noted that R. Yosef Caro himself seems to have placed greater stock in his Beit Yosef, a much longer work that gives the background to halachic discussions, not just their conclusion.

(9) Job 11:9.

(10) D. Ribiat, The 39 Melochos (Feldheim: Jerusalem, 1999).

(11) J. Telushkin, A Code of Jewish Ethics: Volume 1, You Shall Be Holy (Bell Tower: New York, 2006).

(12) Now published, A Code of Jewish Ethics, Volume 2: Love Your Neighbor As Yourself (Bell Tower: New York, 2009).

(13) Telushkin, above note 7, p. 4.

(14) The Hebrew Jewish literature is no less voluminous, as Minchat Chinuch shows.