Imu Shalev: Welcome to Meaningful Judaism, where we try to answer why we do what we do in Jewish life. Meaningful Judaism is a project of Aleph Beta Labs, and I'm your host, Imu Shalev. 

This week, we're going to do something a little bit different. Instead of focusing in on one mitzvah and searching for its meaning, we’re going to take a step back and have a frank conversation in which we question the entire premise of this podcast.

I've always been on a quest to understand the meaning behind our various rituals and practices in Judaism, but when I studied in yeshiva, the pushback that I got - explicitly or merely implied - is that the pursuit of meaning in mitzvos is not something that serious people do. 

I remember having a heated debate with one of the top students at my yeshiva, who looked at me with a bit of pity. He said something like, Imu, come on. We can't know the mind of God. We can't know His reasoning. And it's dangerous to pursue the meaning behind a mitzvah, because it weakens the main reason we keep any mitzvot - our loyalty to God. That's why we have chukim (laws with no clear reason). We can be commanded the strangest of mitzvot, that seem to have no reason at all. And we keep them because they're God's commands. 

Hearing him, I felt kind of embarrassed, like maybe if I was searching for the meaning behind mitzvos, it meant my emunah, my belief in God, wasn't strong enough. 

And here's a challenge that I find even more threatening: The meanings behind the mitzvos that we've been uncovering throughout our studies of the Torah text - they don't match up with what I learned in day school, what I learned in yeshiva, what I see in my shul. So what do I do with that? Am I saying that the traditional interpretations of mitzvos are mistaken? Everyone's been getting it wrong, until thank God, I came along to enlighten them? 

So, I sat down with Aleph Beta Lead Scholar and my rebbi, Rabbi David Fohrman, to honestly consider these challenges - and I'm pretty glad I did. I'm gonna play that conversation for you now.

Rabbi Fohrman and I start off with that first challenge: Where do we get off searching for the meaning behind mitzvos in the first place? 

All right, here it goes. 

Do Mitzvot Need "Meanings" to Be Meaningful?

Imu: Welcome, Rabbi Fohrman, to Meaningful Judaism. I'm really excited to have this conversation with you, and I'm gonna dive right in with my first question: Where do we get off dedicating an entire podcast to researching the meaning behind laws? Isn't it better to simply observe the laws because they're God's laws? What would you say to that? 

Rabbi David Fohrman: So I honestly think that having a mitzvah that you have no understanding of, and saying, you know, I'm gonna commit to doing that because God asked that of me - there's meaning in that, for all sorts of reasons. 

You know, one of the things we talk about in a video on Parshas Vayakhel that always resonates with me is the notion that God made a world for us, and in doing so, He observed the laws, and those are the laws of physics - the inverse square law of gravity, and Newton's three laws of thermodynamics, and Einstein's special theory of relativity. And Richard Feynman says calculus is the language that God speaks, and you know, you really should learn it, if you want to know God's language. In a very real way, God is the very first observer of laws.

Imu: By the way, just so you know, this is the second time Rabbi Fohrman, this week, has shamed me for not knowing calculus. Literally, the second time.

Rabbi Fohrman:Yeah, I didn't do very well in calculus either. But, there's this notion that God was the very first keeper of laws. The laws were not Godly laws, but human laws, in the sense that these are the laws necessary for human life to come to existence in the universe. And God's the one who observes them, out of love - not because they're meaningful to Him, not because He's finding any great inspiration from them, but because this is what it takes to make an environment that works for your beloved. 

And at some level, I think there's a very, very deep sense of meaning, that even before we get to anything fancy, even before we have this great mind-blowing insight in the laws of tzitzis, or the laws of Shabbos, or the laws of niddah (family purity), or any of these other laws, but just to say that I'm reciprocating what my Creator did for me. Right? My Creator was the first observer of laws, and did so out of love for another; I, too, want to make a place for my Beloved in my world. I want to make a place for God in my world, and that requires me to observe certain laws to make God feel comfortable hanging out with me. That's the way I give myself in love to God, and that's meaningful. The amount of meaning that comes from doing something out of love to make your Creator at home in your world - it’s full of richness and  meaning. 

And what we're doing here, I think, is an extension of that, which is that we can begin to get some insights and tendrils of understanding into, you know, what are some of the things that might lie behind these things? And so therefore, I would, you know, sort of encourage you, as you go forward in this podcast, to be sort of aware of shades of gray and meaning. It's not just black and white. It's not like, hey, this was meaningless and crazy, and now it's full of meaning and richness. No! It starts off being meaningful in different ways. 

Ultimately, to say that you can know the mind of another - with a human being is arrogant; all the more so it is with God. Like, you don't know. Like if I would say, Imu, what's in your head right now? What are you really thinking? What do you really think of me? What do you really think of your producer, Beth? I don't really know. I can surmise, based upon my conversation, but all I have are external signs. I have no direct link into your internal experience. All the more so, we have no direct link into God's internal experience and what God's mind really is. The best we can do is work our way off of evidence.

So I think the watchword is humility here. As long as we are not arrogant, as long as you don't come out of there and say shofar meant nothing to you before, right, but now it means everything, because we found this. That's wrong. It's wrong in two ways. It's wrong because it didn't mean nothing before. And it's not like now it means everything. It didn't mean nothing before, because it's okay for you to listen to the shofar as an act of love and to say, God, I'm here. You asked me to do this. This is meaningful. And also even afterwards, even after your mind is blown and you see all of this richness, you still haven't arrived at the meaning. It's a meaning in the mitzvah. It’s the beginning of meaning in it. 

There Is a Precedent for Seeking Meaning Behind Mitzvot

Rabbi Fohrman: You know, it's interesting, because ta’amei hamitzvos, trying to understand the meaning of mitzvos, is something which has basis in our tradition. Many commentators before us have tried to do this, long before Aleph Beta came into the world. 

One of the most famous is the Chinuch himself, an unknown author who wrote a book for his child called Sefer HaChinuch (The Book of Education) to try to give him some sort of window into mitzvos. What he does is not just tell him about the basics of the laws, but tells him about some of the meaning behind the laws. But the language he uses is really interesting. I was kind of meditating on that this morning, just before this podcast. The language that he always uses to describe meaning in mitzvos is misharshei mitzvah zu, which in English would translate to “from the roots of this mitzvah are the following,” and then he would suggest something. But what he's suggesting is that this is one of the roots of this mitzvah, and I would suggest that, humbly, we should adopt that kind of perspective of the Chinuch. We're trying to uncover some of the roots of this mitzvah, and some of the meaning which animates it. And when you discover a root, it's a very exciting thing, but I think humility is in order. Everything which we've found in this podcast, as mind-blowing as it is, is probably just a crumb in the larger cake of the meaning of that mitzvah. 

Isn't the Torah Begging Us to Search for Meaning?

Imu: So let me push back just a little bit, because, between the two of us, I'm far more of an extremist. The way I would've answered that question - Isn't it fraught to seek out taamei hamitzvos? - I would've said, what do you want from me? I wasn't really seeking it out, but once I'm looking at the Bible, I realize that taamei hamitzvos, the reasons for the mitzvos, are all over the place. Yeah, they may not be explicit, like, hey, over here! This is the reason! But with an intellectual parallel here and a chiasm over there, you start to see these beautiful, subtle, rich resonances, and all kinds of meaning that emerges. It doesn't feel like God was trying to test you, and put the meaning there but then wanted you really not to look for it. It feels like He's inviting you to look for it! Once you start to see that, once you start to glimpse that the meaning is there, then, I don't know - I have been guilty of feeling many times at my career at Aleph Beta that isn't it chaval, isn't it a tragedy, that not everybody knows this? What I heard you saying is, it was meaningful before and don't get too enamored by the meaning, but, I don't know, I get pretty enamored by the meaning! Like, once I see that the meaning is there, I do feel like climbing to the rooftops and saying - and I don’t believe this anymore, but I've been guilty at times - saying, Hey, everybody, you've been practicing Shavuos wrong! You got Shavuos wrong. We've been getting Rosh Hashanah wrong! It's the wrong Rosh Hashanah, and I now know the right way, because I studied with Rabbi Fohrman.

Rabbi Fohrman: So I would say that the meaning of these mitzvos is about the God of life, and you're talking to me about the God of good and evil. Right? So the God of good and evil would say, you've got Rosh Hashanah wrong. And I would say the God of life would say, you got a little bit of the pulsating meaning of Rosh Hashanah, just in connecting to the mitzvah at its most basic sense. But there's so much more vibrancy there. I wouldn't say that you've gotten Shavuos wrong. I would just shift the paradigm, into life. There's so much more life to suck out of Shavuos than what you're aware of; let me show you some things. There's so much more life to suck out of your Rosh Hashanah; let me show you some things.

Imu: All right, so I'm mindful of the fact that this may be the first time you're hearing about the God of life and the God of good and evil. Rabbi Fohrman is alluding to some mind-blowing Torah that he and I have learned together. This is actually a framework that we keep coming back to in our own chevrusa (partner study, but if it's new to you, don't worry. In just another minute, he's gonna explain what these terms mean and where they come from. So, sit tight. 

Rabbi Fohrman: And I too have that feeling of shouting from the rooftops. I'll admit it. Right? I vividly remember when you and I had stumbled upon that meaning in Rosh Hashanah and it was such a different way of seeing things. And I remember, I had just made this Aleph Beta video with you, and thousands of people were due to see it, so you know, if you interviewed me then, you might say, well, Fohrman, isn't that enough for you? You've made your video. It's out there on the internet, it's available for the whole world. So just go and do the next thing with your life. But I couldn't do that. Here I was, at a family gathering, with all my nephews gathered around, and, like, I had to turn to the people around the table and say, guys, what do you think zichron teru’ah (from Leviticus 23:24) means? What do you think it means that we remember the teru’ah? And it's like, a bunch of blank faces from all of my nephews, who, God bless their souls, are yeshiva-educated. They're all in the finest yeshiva, they're rabbinical students, and I was like, nobody ever really thought of that. And I'm thinking, like, I should just really stop this whole thing right now. There's a sheva brachos (post-wedding celebration) going on, and people are talking about sheva brachos and all that, and I really felt like just getting up in front of the room, like, I'm sorry, I really just need to cancel this whole celebration. Rosh Hashanah is right around the corner and I really need to share something with all of you. I mean, that's how I felt. 

So I totally understand that feeling. I just think that it's more helpful to come from the God of life perspective than the God of good and evil perspective. And to say that, look, you know, you don't have to understand the Biblical roots for this to be the beginnings of a life-giving to you. But it can be more and more life-giving, the more you understand and the more you mine those understandings. 

Imu: Are you saying that the reason to focus on this God of life versus God of good and evil thing - is that because it's more pleasant to do that? Is that because Rabbi Fohrman thinks that it’s better to, you know, be a nice guy than to be a firebrand? Where do you get that approach from?

Two Paths To Torah

Rabbi Fohrman: I mean, it has to do with what we’ve talked about - I would refer people to our podcast, A Book Like No Other, in which we talked about these two trees, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the Tree of Life. And what we suggest in that podcast is that there are two approaches to take to Torah. 

One approach is a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil approach. The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil approach basically says that there is something that the Torah gives me, it gives me guidance as to how to live my life in the world, and one way to think of that guidance is that there's a right way to do things and there's a wrong way to do things - there's good and there's evil. We all have certain feelings of what good and bad might mean, but we all kind of sense that we could use some help in figuring out what good and bad are, and so the Torah gives us that help and says, here's a code of morality. And that's a great gift. 

But - it's not the only reason we learn Torah, to know what to do. Ask any yeshiva student, and they'll tell you there's another reason why they learn Torah. It's not the reason why you would learn it 24 hours a day. It's not the reason why you would wake up in the morning and the first thing on your lips would be Torah. It's not the reason why you would go to sleep and the last thing on your lips would be Torah. It's not the reason why the Shema itself tells you to learn Torah.

The Shema tells you the reason to learn Torah. It's because: וְאָהַבְתָּ אֵת יְקוָק אֱלֹקיךָ בְּכָל־לְבָבְךָ וּבְכָל־נַפְשְׁךָ - You should love the Lord your God, with all your heart and with all your soul (Deuteronomy 6:5). And what does that mean? It means: וְהָיוּ הַדְּבָרִים הָאֵלֶּה אֲשֶׁר אָנֹכִי מְצַוְּךָ הַיּוֹם - that those laws that I command you today (verse 6) - what is the most logical end of that sentence? If I feed that to ChatGPT, and I ask them to just predict the next words based on context, well, I say they're laws, and they're laws that I command you today. If there's a commander, and he's God, and He gives you these laws, what should you do with laws that you're commanded?

Imu: Obey.

Rabbi Fohrman: The answer would obviously be obey. You should obey those laws. But that's not the end of the sentence. וְהָיוּ הַדְּבָרִים הָאֵלֶּה אֲשֶׁר אָנֹכִי מְצַוְּךָ הַיּוֹם - Those laws that I command you today - עַל־לְבָבֶךָ - they should be on your heart. What an incredible thing to say about laws! Laws should be in your heart. God says: you should have an emotional relationship to those laws. They should matter to you. They are the love letters that I give you. Of course you should obey them. We're not talking about whether you should obey them or not. 

Imu: This is actually a very interesting point to think about, right? Imagine, you know, Congress passes a few laws, and the very next thing we all do is we all go into our communal centers and into our schools, and we place the laws on our heart, right? It’s absurd. Nobody does that with laws.

Rabbi Fohrman: You wouldn't do that, right? You don't do that with laws. You obey the laws! Nobody has an emotional relationship with laws. But if it's God, and you love God with all your heart, with all your soul - what does love entail? What does it mean you would do with the God that you love? You can't touch Him. You can't feel Him. You would want to give this God a hug. You know, the analogy I sometimes give is, imagine you were fighting in Normandy and you were in love with a nurse back in Iowa and, you know, you can't touch her, you can't give her a hug. But if she wrote you a letter, what would you do with that letter? You would take that letter, and you would hold it close to your heart. It would be the symbol that you have of your beloved every time you fight and go into another hedgerow, throw a grenade ahead, not knowing if you're gonna live or die the next day, you'd have that letter close to your heart. And that's what God says. 

These laws that I command you today, I don't want you to just relate to them as commands. You have to relate to them as things that give you life. They literally give you the courage and the strength and the happiness and the sense of beauty and the sense of meaning to go on, because you're in love. Right? And therefore, you should teach them, because all teaching is overflowing. Right? If I know something, and I want to shout it from the rooftops, then I am a teacher. And therefore, וְשִׁנַּנְתָּם לְבָנֶיךָ וְדִבַּרְתָּ בָּם - You should talk about them, like a lovestruck person (verse 7). The same way a lovestruck person wakes up and talks about their beloved, you should talk about them at home, you should talk about them on the road. These laws should sort of suffuse your mind. 

And so what happens is that there's all this meaning in Torah, and we have to also live in a world of good and evil. So, we have this thing called halacha, which tries to take these commands and actually give us a path through life to actualize these commands. So halacha comes to the Shema and says, Hmm, how are we gonna take this ideal of love, this passionate ideal of love, and allow people in a mundane world to touch that idea every single day? I know! A person in love would just wake up in the morning and talk Torah, and go to sleep talking Torah. You should take a little piece of Torah, and you should say it in the morning, right around the time that you wake up, and you should take a little piece of Torah and you should say it at night, right around the time you go to sleep. And that becomes the laws of Kriat Shema (the halachic recitation of Shema). But if you come along and say, I did the right thing because I said Shema by that morning time, and I did the wrong thing because I missed the morning, and I did the right thing because I remembered to say Ma’ariv, and I did the wrong thing because I fell asleep before Ma’ariv - you'd be missing out on a whole world of the meaning of the God of life, this whole life and connection and love that you get from Torah, which is actualized in the world of good and evil through the laws. 

And I think, you know, what you're doing by creating these journeys into the meaning of these mitzvos is that you're helping people touch not just the world of halacha, the world of right and wrong. You're helping people understand the meaning behind the right and wrong, in deeper and deeper ways, through a journey, and the journey connects them with the God of life. And what you're shouting from the rooftops, what I think you're really shouting from the rooftops, is: I feel so energized in my connection with God, and my connection to His book, and my connection to His laws, through this journey that I'm taking in meaning; can I share some of that with you? And I think when I was trying to do that with my nephews, if you asked me what I wanted outta that - I didn't want just that they could write an essay that's more meaningful about Rosh Hashanah. I wanted to see the light in their eyes. I wanted to see them relate to this holiday and relate to God in a way that was ever so slightly different, with greater love, passion, and awe. That's, I think, the real payoff here.

Imu: I think that whole approach, I really appreciate it. Just the notion that you can approach Judaism and Torah from the perspective of good and evil, and you'll get a lot of law and you'll get a lot of obligation, but if you take it too far, though, you'll probably get a lot of conflict, because you'll be telling other people what the right and the wrong is. And there's this whole other element, the Torah of chaim - that, to me, has been something that I've sort of had to mature and accept. You know, there is a tension, on the one hand, between the very basic keeping of mitzvot because you do, because you keep them, because this is what God told you to do, versus this whole other dimension of meaning and beauty and relevance and journey and discovery and life. And you know, I think that's something that you've taught me to do, which is, we put it out there and we offer it to our audience, right? Like, we're not dogmatic, we're not out to change anybody. We're putting forward a presentation that means something to us and we hope that it means something to you. And that's it. And I think it's not pashut, it's not simple, that that's even an approach we take. Certainly in my life, there has been the temptation to take a much more aggressive stance, and this feels a whole lot better. And it feels like it reflects the depth and the meaning and the beauty of the methodology itself. So thank you for that. 

The Yin/Yang of Values and Practice

Imu: I do have another question at the tip of my tongue that I want to ask. You talked about this beautiful way of seeing Rosh Hashanah, and we talk about the meaning of niddah, and we talk about the meaning of Shabbos and kashrus. And the question is, why isn't that out there? In my experience of Judaism, why is that not what I see in my shul? Why is that not what's taught in school? It's very, I'll say this word, threatening, to not see these meanings that we're arriving at reflected in our day-to-day practice. What's your approach to that? Are we getting it wrong? Are they getting it wrong? Leave the wrong behind?

Rabbi Fohrman: First of all, I don't want to use a generic “they”; that feels a little bit uncomfortable to me. 

Imu: I'll give you two examples; maybe that’ll ground it. One is Rosh Hashanah, right, that this is just a very different thing…

Here what I am referring to is Rabbi Fohrman’s course on Rosh Hashanah that completely changed the way I relate to the holiday. He argues that we are so used to thinking of Rosh Hashanah as this scary day where we’re quaking in our boots, terrified of God judging us for our sins - but, you look at the Biblical text, actually it is supposed to be a really joyful day. It’s essentially about remembering and celebrating Sinai. Anyway, I’m not going to go into the whole argument here; you’ll be able to follow the rest of our conversation without it. But I put a link to the course in the show notes, in case you want to check it out. I really recommend it.

Imu: Rosh Hashanah as a day of remembering Sinai is really different than… 

Rabbi Fohrman: Yeah, look, so I will grant you that there are misconceptions that are broadly out there. Even in, you know, straight up Orthodox Judaism, and people who have been the yeshiva for ages, are subject to some very unfortunate misconceptions, and it would be nice if some minds were changed - by listening to a podcast like this! But it doesn't have to be a podcast like this - listening to any - or literally opening your machzor and reading it, instead of just listening to what I learned in fifth grade that was a little bit off base, right? Like, for example, Imu, for all of those people who are plagued by this notion that Rosh Hashanah is supposed to be Guilt Day, and I'm supposed to be trying to do teshuvah (repentance) all day long and trying to repent for my sins, because how am I gonna face God - look how little support you get in the machzor for that, right? 

Imu: I'm very worried about you opening this line, because I'll point you straight to Unetaneh Tokef…

Rabbi Fohrman: Yes… 

Imu: …the scariest prayer of the day! 

Rabbi Fohrman: Absolutely. And you know, I remember ArtScroll, in their advertisements for Rosh Hashanah, the machzor was open specifically to that page. And you know why it was open specifically to that page, when the machzor has 1200 pages in it? Because it's the only page that they could use, in 1200 pages, to come up with some sort of fearful understanding of Rosh Hashanah. Literally the only page. Right? Because every other page doesn't support it. And historically, how old is Unetaneh Tokef? It's the newest thing in the machzor, the most newfangled thing in the machzor. The part where we started, probably, to get it wrong! I mean, I hate to say that, but it's actually new. It's almost like a break with tradition. Because you don't find this quest for teshuvah and this quaking fear earlier on in the machzor. You don't find people saying ashamnu, bagadnu in Viduy (the confessional recited on Yom Kippur). That's just not what you find. You find the theme of the kingdom of God, of coronating a King. 

And so, you know, I remember as a kid, in high school, my mind was changed about Rosh Hashanah - because I’d learned it the same way everybody else learned it, and I was all fearful. And I remember that I had this chaburah (learning group) with Rabbi Ezra Newberger, who's currently the Rosh Kollel of Ner Israel Rabbinical College. Back then, he was a single guy who was pretty wise, and he used to give us a chaburah at 11:00 on Thursday nights. And I remember the very first chaburah was like, okay, boys and girls, we're gonna talk about Rosh Hashanah today. And my mind was blown. It was like, this is not Guilt Day! This is not even Teshuvah Day. It's Coronation Day. And if you take your eye off that ball, you've literally missed everything that Rosh Hashanah is talking about. Now, I think that the work we did in 2017 deepens that idea of Coronation Day and takes it back to its roots in Sinai. So it's almost like putting on glasses and helping that vision.

Imu: It also, you know, it bridged the gap. We even sort of justify judgment day, right? And we talked about how judgment lines up with a very joyful day, as described in the book of Nehemiah - which I really appreciate. Right? That you're not dismissive at all of, not just Chazal, but also Jewish practice. You do as much as possible to try to bridge the gap, but not in an apologetic way. I really appreciate that about you, that you're actually trying to read things most honestly, without an agenda. Not one way and not the other way. And then you're delighted to discover that, you know, Chazal and our tradition, oftentimes, we're seeing those things as connected.

Rabbi Fohrman: Yeah. 

As a personal full disclosure, one of the things I have a hard time with is Unetaneh Tokef. But you have to understand historically how new that is. It's not Chazal, it's not the Midrash. It's not even a Rishon (medieval authority). It's an unknown piyut (liturgical poem), probably from the times of the Crusades. And in all fairness, if I were living through Rosh Hashanah in the times of the Crusades, I probably would've seen it like Unetaneh Tokef too! I mean, you're living in a time when horsemen are coming from town to town, ripping babies out of the arms of their mothers and killing them, in the name of a different religion, and setting synagogues on fire with people in them, and wondering if you're next. And in that kind of world, sure, I would be quaking in fear. And if I'm in the High Holidays and hearing the pitter patter of horsemen on the cobblestone streets, I too would give some sort of expression to that fear in the poetry that I choose to compose on that day. And so I can't be so smug in 2023 and look back on that and say, you know, I'm sorry, that's wrong. 

Imu: Can I give you a different example? Let's maybe talk about milk and meat for a second.

Rabbi Fohrman: Sure. 

Imu: In general, some of the approaches we take here on kashrus suggest that kashrus really is about being sensitive to the animal world and understanding the source of your food. But much of our practice is purely legal, and very little of it is about values. What would you say there, about this meaning behind kashrus not quite matching the experience of kashrus, which is, you know certifying various restaurants and grocery stores so that I can buy you know, kosher meat.

Rabbi Fohrman:  So I think to some extent you're talking about the difference between the world of the God of life and the world of the God of good and evil - and both are true. Right? In other words, you can't have a beef with the idea of halacha. The idea of halacha is not going to be a meaning-filled kind of world. What halacha tries to do is to take ideas that are meaningful and give people, in the mundane aspects of their life, a way of touching that, through the mundane. The notion of the mundane is, to some extent, intention with the notion of meaning. 

If you lived your entire life with meaning, your brain would explode. Your brain forces you to routinize your day. You have to! The amount of decisions which you actually make every day, versus the amount of actions which you go through, right, is literally a ratio of 99 to one. You do 99 actions for every real decision you make. How much did you really choose what you were gonna eat this morning, what you were gonna put on this morning, whether you were gonna brush your teeth at night, how you were gonna brush your teeth? Are you gonna start on the left side of your mouth or the right side of your mouth, or are you gonna have strokes going up and down or not? Routinization is the name of the day. Habits are the name of the day. And halacha deals with the world of habit. Right? But habits can be your friend, because you can choose your habits, and in choosing your habits, you choose the kind of person you become. Because we are creatures of habit. And when you do something day after day after day, since we are bodily people, it ingrains in our bodies, the ground of our being, something that does change us. 

Imu: So would you say that Judaism, or Orthodox Judaism, is in a position where we could pay more attention to the spirituality and the meaning? Because we do pay a fair amount of attention to the law. And I'm not, you know, as you said, I'm not discounting that. But it does sort of feel like in, certainly in our education…

Rabbi Fohrman: Let me put it to you this way. The concept of brachot, right? A bracha is an amazing spiritual thing. So, how do you relate to a bracha? I think most of us mumble a bracha. We say shehakol nihiyeh b’dvaro (a blessing stating that everything that exists is by God’s word); we don't really give it a lot of thought. But in some way, our lives are different because we mumble those words before we pop food in our mouth. And the notion of popping food in our mouth without mumbling those words is anathema to us. And it's good that it's anathema to us, because it means that there is some level in the mundane aspects of our life that we rebel against the notion that food is just there. It's not just there. 

Now, what could I do with a bracha? You can meditate on a bracha and your mind would explode. You can meditate on this idea, shehakol nihiyeh b’dvaro, that everything that exists literally exists through God's word. Not even that God created everything actively, but the living God is such a powerful force that actually all that comes to be, all that is, is a dynamic process of His word that exists in the world. That every string and string theory that binds together the muons, and that make up the neutrons and the electrons and the atoms, that it's all just resonances of God's word, and that is all shehakol nihiyeh b’dvaro, and that strawberry that you're eating is something that is literally a vibrating music piece of God's word that you're taking into your mouth. 

All of that is true and beautiful, and yet if I tried to think about that every time that I ate a strawberry, I would starve, because it would take me too long to eat! My body wouldn't have the nutrition. Life forces me into a routinization. And therefore, there is a kind of yin and yang, I think, between meaning and practice.

The Shema and Touching Meaning

I feel bad. Here I am, I created a whole piece on Shema, which one of these days I hope to produce on Aleph Beta. When I came up with that, my brain was exploding with the meaning of Shema. I couldn't - it took me 45 minutes sometimes to say Shema! It changed my life. I walked around a different human being. Now? I hate to tell you, but I still say Shema kind of quickly, and if you actually ask me and say, Fohrman, you came up with this amazing thing, it must take you forever to daven in the morning. It's like, I don't know, occasionally I think back on it, right? But in my actual practice, I don't so much. So, are you a failure? You came to this incredible meaning; where is it in your life? I touch it. I touch it every once in a while, during the day, I come back: you know, that Shema that you said earlier today? It really is about this oneness idea, about taking this idea of love and merging it with its idea of justice. Do you understand how powerful that is? And then my mind gets there. And so it's enough for me to just touch it. But I can't have it forefront in my mind or my brain would explode all the time. I can't live that way. It's true in Aleph Beta. I - it exhausts me. Sometimes I need to be careful when I enter into a research session, because I'll come out three hours later breathless. I'll be, like, panting for breath. It's like, I can't, I need a rest. The type of things that I feel that I've seen, and I'm spiritually invigorated, and I can travel… 

Imu: There have been many, many times where I've come home either exhausted, or I'll be going to sleep, and I'll wake up in the middle of the night and, like, something will have clicked. I'll be, like, oh my God! Or I'll just be mulling these pesukim over and mumbling them. It’s crazy. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Right! So isn't there a part of you Imu, that when I say to you, I wonder if you have some time, I have this new insight I want to delve into with you. Isn't there a part - and you can be honest - where it's like, that sounds really fascinating, Fohrman, I'd really love to do that, but I don't know if I have enough spiritual energy.

I think that's gonna be draining. I've got a lot in my life, like, maybe we can push that to next week? I think I could find some time in my calendar next week. Because as exciting as it is, it's an absorbing experience, right? That's the world you're touching in Meaningful Judaism. You're playing in that sandbox, and you have to understand the power of that sandbox. It's a pretty powerful sandbox, and its counterpoint is the routinization of halacha, which tries to touch some of that and take some of that into daily life, but it looks different in daily life.

Imu: I think that was a really beautiful - that whole approach is gorgeous, and I don't even think I'm disagreeing, but like, I wouldn't be Imu if I didn't say, after my rebbi just very eloquently said what he said, that I think we could use more meaning and spirituality in our Judaism today. I do! I don't think that our educational systems are necessarily the way they are purely to shield us from mind-explosion syndrome. I think we could use more.

The Mind-Exploding Nature of Tanakh Study

Rabbi Fohrman: I'll buy that as well. Right? It only works if there's a yin and a yang if there's only a yin and no yang, right? If we haven't even helped people understand that there could be. 

You know, a daughter of mine wanted me to speak at her seminary. Her seminary - their girls are going to Ivy League schools and trying to get like the very best in the highest forms of learning they could possibly do, and they naturally gravitate towards, you know, if you think, what are the most advanced forms of learning I can do in Judaism? So I wanna learn Talmud. I want to try to learn it with the most sophisticated approach, with the Achronim and the Rishonim, because you know, that's what it is. That's what we think really sophisticated Torah learning is. And she said, Abba, can you just come and speak once, just do one of your Tanakh things with them? And I said, what's your goal? She says, I just want them to see that there is a whole sophisticated world within Tanakh that they just aren't aware of. And I did. And it changed her friends’ way of seeing things. And it was really meaningful to her. It gave them another vision of what it could be. And I think if we could just do that, if we could just help people understand that, you know, there's a real world of meaning here, let me show it to you once. 

I remember, by the way, one of the things that turned me on to the approach, which eventually became the methodology that Aleph Beta is based upon, was a talk given by my English principal in high school, Peter Abelow. And I listened to a talk that he gave on the story of Yehuda and Tamar, and he had this mind-blowing insight where he took a Rashi that was seemingly meaningless and strange, and he just showed the connection between what Rashi was saying and this vast idea world of peshat. And it began to open my mind up to the world of possibilities in Yehuda and Tamar. Later, I would go back to Yehuda and Tamar, and it became one of the first stories that I really built out. And I remember thinking, you know, if there's this kind of mind-blowing meaning in that one story, it's gotta be everywhere. We're just not seeing it. It's gotta be everywhere. And that alone changed my whole view of this book. It's like, oh my God! 

Imu: And I just got the chills, because, I'm surprised you had that moment, because I had that moment after listening to your piece on Abraham's journey. It's exactly that feeling of, like, if there's so much richness and meaning in this story, that means this whole book has so much richness and beauty and so much to tell us.

Rabbi Fohrman: Yeah. Yeah. And that was mind blowing. And if we could do that for kids, just that, show them one piece, one mitzvah, that the roots are deep here, and their minds are blown, then that changes their relationship to the world of halacha in a way that is, I think, really powerful and lasting. I'd love to see that. 

Imu: Rabbi Fohrman, thank you so much for having this conversation with me, but more than anything, for being this incredible force in my life who's infused my Judaism with tremendous meaning. And that was never even your intention. Like, you really weren't the kiruv (outreach) rabbi who wanted to put his arm around my shoulder and bring me in and change me. No, you were just delighted with this book and enthusiastic to share it with anyone who listens. And then what emerges from it is this tremendous meaning, and it's changed my relationship with Torah, changed my relationship with mitzvos, and changed all of my relationships subsequently in life in general. So thank you. 

Rabbi Fohrman: And thank you, Imu, for creating this podcast and dedicating yourself to what I see as a chance to begin to actualize that feeling that you want to shout it from the rooftops. This is a “shout it from the rooftops” podcast, where we get a chance to share some of that enthusiasm and love that's in our hearts for this book and its laws, and the connection that we can get to the living God through those laws. I hope that the same way that this has resonated in your heart, it begins to resonate in the hearts of many of your listeners.

Credits

This episode was recorded by Rabbi David Fohrman and Imu Shalev. 

The scholar for this episode is Rabbi David Fohrman.

The senior editor was Beth Lesch.

Our audio editor is me, Hillary Guttman. 

Our Production Manager is Adina Blaustein.

Meaningful Judaism’s editorial director is Imu Shalev.

Thank you for listening, and we’ll see you next week.