Remembrance of Torah Past

Right beneath your nose, just above your upper lip, is something called the philtrum. The origins and purpose of that small indentation are, for most of us, a mystery. And while I hope none of us spend much time thinking about our philtrums (or to be more precise, philtra), you may be interested to learn the rabbinic etiology of the philtrum, the Talmudic explanation for how we all received this seemingly functionless facial feature.

According to legend, before we are born, a divine light shining from one end of the universe to the other infuses our souls with wisdom; in fact, the entire Torah is in our possession. At the moment we enter the world, an angel reaches out and raps us on the upper lip, creating the indentation and causing us to forget all our Torah. The hard drive, as it were, is wiped clean. With all of our Torah gone, the rabbis explain that the educational trajectory of our lives is the process of relearning the Torah that we actually once knew.

It is a fanciful tale, and probably as strong an explanation as anyone has for this oddity of human anatomy. The question on my mind, however, is what is the point of the story? Apart from demonstrating rabbinic creativity, is there a redeeming lesson to the fable? Perhaps, some say, the purpose of the story is to democratize knowledge, to teach each of us that we are all equally capable of learning Torah; after all, there was a time that each of us possessed it in its entirety. You may have a formal Jewish education, you may not; you may have high or low board scores; you may be rich or poor, young or old. The gift of God’s Torah is equally accessible to all. Or, the message could be a bit more cynical, namely, that God believes that there are limits to what human beings should know. While we may have once known the entirety of the Torah, the Almighty, just as in the Garden of Eden, has set boundaries on human knowledge, stop measures if you will, preventing us from knowing too much.

I don’t know which answer is right. The rabbis never actually unpack the story. I think, at its most basic level, the point of the philtrum story is to explain the nature of Jewish learning. The essential message seems to be that the process of learning in our lifetime, at least Jewishly, is not primarily the act of acquiring new knowledge, but rather reclaiming that which we once knew. Just as the groove above our lip is a part of us, so each of us once possessed the Torah. The learning we do in our lives is a process of remembering – remembering the past, the Torah that was once ours.

Learning happens in all sorts of ways. We learn by experience, inductive learning, deductive learning, acquiring emotional and social intelligence. As the father of four young children, I constantly think about how children learn, what they need to know, how one teaches a child to think. As the rabbi and chief educator of this congregation, I spend quite a bit of time thinking about the necessary canon of Jewish knowledge and how best to impart that body of knowledge to the next generation. I ask myself and the educators around me how we want our children to approach Jewish learning: critically, sympathetically, reverentially, or otherwise. As we re-imagine congregational education and the terms by which it takes place, I wonder if there is a mode of learning sanctioned by the Jewish past and compelling to the Jewish future?

A good starting point is to acknowledge that Jewish learning must be an act of growth and retrieval. Authentic Jewish learning begins with a certain assumption about our hard wiring – that what we learn is not actually constructing new knowledge. We are not a tabula rasa; rather, we are engaging with the substratum of our consciousness, or more precisely, with the pre-consciousness of our existence. We move to new ground, and yet return to the familiar.

Look at this week’s Torah portion, the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. There is an indisputable sense of something new, the bold and thunderous gift of the Torah hitherto unknown to the Jewish people. Yet, there also exists a very rich tradition of Torah that was present before Mount Sinai. After all, how could the Israelites be punished last week for collecting manna on Shabbat, if only this week they receive the law of the Sabbath, the fourth commandment? The laws regarding Passover, the laws regarding circumcision, the obligation to be fruitful and multiply, the reprimand of Cain after Abel’s death, the universal laws given following the Flood, and many others – there is a clear legal consciousness prior to Sinai. What is more, the rabbinic tradition imagines the matriarchs and patriarchs to be fully aware of the Torah – studying it, observing it, embodying it – a Torah that predates the events of Mount Sinai. Perhaps most extraordinary are a series of midrashim, rabbinic legends, that indicate that the Torah existed even before the world existed, that the Torah was God’s blueprint for creation itself.

In this schema, the moment of Sinai is actually an act of retrieval or affirmation, a rejuvenation of an ancient idiom, not the articulation of something totally new. The rabbis do not miss the point that Torah is referred to as the “inheritance of Jacob.” (Deut. 33:4) We did not discover or invent Torah, we are merely reclaiming our birthright. The story about the philtrum is instructive because it encapsulates the broader message of the biblical narrative itself – namely, that Jewish learning is really a quest to return to our original state of knowledge.

What does this mean in practical terms? It means that every Jewish learning experience should seek both to be a moment of growth and to engender a sense of belonging, familiarity, and return. Many congregants think I am absolutely crazy to go on an Israel trip with young families this summer. After all, why schlep all the way there if the kids are too young to really understand the particulars of Israel? I want our parents to take our kids now while they are young because when our kids are older, I want their trip to Israel to be a return to a homeland – the stamp already in their physical and metaphysical passport. As we develop the Congregational School curriculum, I want it to be crafted like an ascending spiral, so that each year when our kids learn about Purim or any holiday, they are both returning to a series of familiar songs, symbols, and stories and learning new insights about the festival and about themselves. When you walk into a prayer service, today or any other day, I want you to feel that you are both reaching new heights and reconnecting with the substratum of your spirit, that you are hearing melodies both new and familiar. Our Shabbat outreach program is called “Reclaiming Shabbat.” I didn’t invent the idea of hosting people for Shabbat – I want you to take possession of what is rightfully yours. The list goes on. The problem with Jewish education today is that too often it either possesses an iterative Groundhog Day-like aspect that stifles personal growth, or it is so innovative that it is bears no connection to the roots that actually give it life.

Authentic Jewish learning consists of a lifetime of “aha” moments whereby we arrive at truths about ourselves and our shared humanity, with a sense that those truths have always been there waiting to be discovered. Proust commented in In Search of Lost Time that every reader of his novel would recognize in himself what the book says, and that this recognition would be the proof of its veracity. When we learn or do or pray Jewishly, we have succeeded when there is an element of memory and insight, a remembrance of Torah past.

To say it bluntly, this model places a huge educational responsibility on you, the Jewish parent or grandparent. Because while some may believe in angels and philtra, I believe in good parenting. You have to take your children to Israel, you have to light Shabbat candles, celebrate the holidays, bring your children to shul, talk to them about Jewish identity, provide them with the inheritance that is rightfully theirs. If your children are empty vessels, then they have nothing to return to, nothing to remember, every Jewish experience will be new ground, inauthentic and potentially alienating. I will take care of what happens in this building, but recognize that we are in a partnership. In your educational institution – your home and your children’s home – I need you to provide the substratum, filling the grooves of young Jewish minds.

In describing the effects of a good book, J.D. Salinger explained, speaking in the voice of Holden Caufield:

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.

What is good Jewish education? It is when our children read the Book of Books, the Torah; when they turn to it again and again throughout their lives, both in its newness and familiarity; when after each reading our children wish they could call up its Author – their terrific friend, the Divine giver of Torah, thrilled by new insight and wondering how it is God knew what they were thinking all along. I suspect, in fact I wholeheartedly believe, that at such moments they will feel a divine smile from above, ear to ear, philtrum and all.