“Torah lishmah.” Many people believe this phrase means studying Torah for no other purpose than attaining and assimilating divine knowledge.
Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch evidently disagrees. Professor Moshe Miller – an expert on the thought of Rav Hirsch – claims that Rav Hirsch “believed, on the basis of earlier authorities, that Torah lishmah does not mean studying Torah for the sake of just knowing Torah, but studying for the sake of being able to carry it out in our lives.”
Moshe Rabbeinu exhorts the Jewish people in this week’s parshah to “learn…and take care to fulfill” the “statutes and social ordinances” he is teaching them (Deuteronomy 5:1). On the words “take care to fulfill,” Rav Hirsch comments: “Mere theoretical knowledge without practical fulfillment has no value; it does not even become the right knowledge if it is only striven for as an intellectual game and not with the serious intention of carrying it out.”
And then Rav Hirsch quotes this amazing Talmudic passage: “Whoever says, ‘I have nothing other than Torah’…even Torah he doesn’t have. Why? Rav Papa said: Because the Torah states, ‘And you should learn them and take care to fulfill them.’ Whoever is [engaged] in fulfilling is [engaged] in learning. Whoever isn’t [engaged] in fulfilling isn’t [engaged] in learning” (Yevamos 109b).
So serious is the duty to study Torah for the sake of fulfilling it that G-d destroyed the Beis Hamikdash when the Jewish people abandoned this principle. Rav Hirsch writes in The Nineteen Letters that “shelo barchu baTorah techilah” – which is the reason given in the Gemara (Bava Metzia 85a) for the Temple’s destruction – means that “the Torah was not studied with the resolve to fulfill it – that is, in relation to life, for the sake of living it.”
Pilpulim on arcane topics that have no relevance to practical life may sharpen the mind, but G-d doesn’t care for them, according to Rav Hirsch. G-d wants His people to study for the sake of doing.
Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888) – head of the Jewish community in Frankfurt, Germany for over 35 years – was a prolific writer whose ideas, passion, and brilliance helped save German Jewry from the onslaught of modernity.
Elliot Resnick, PhD, is the host of “The Elliot Resnick Show” and the editor of an upcoming work on etymological explanations in Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch’s commentary on Chumash.