Hi friends! Welcome back to Talmud Daily, where every day, just ten minutes a day, we’re going to give you a tour of the entirety of the Talmud.
Now today, I’d like to focus on really the actual practice. Something that you can bring practically into your life. We introduced the world of the avos and imahos, the story of the founding of the Jewish people. We moved on to the story of the golden calf, the breaking of the first set of tablets and eventually the second set of tablets, which come to embody that real ongoing partnership between God and the Jewish people and the creation of Torah.
There’s something I want to introduce right at the outset, and it is really one of the most remarkable parts of Judaism, and that is what is known as the blessing on the Torah. In Hebrew that is called Birkhas HaTorah. Now you may be familiar with this from attending a bar mitzvah and seeing some young twelve-year-old wrestle their way through this blessing. That is not the blessing that we are going to talk about, although there is some overlap.
There is a daily blessing that we recite on the Torah and that is called Birkhas HaTorah, and it is recited every single morning, and it is so beautiful and profound that it is worth reading together. Now just to explain and to take a moment, because sometimes these things are lost on us, it’s so moving and beautiful that we make a blessing before we study Torah. There is no other book that we are doing where you kind of make an introductory blessing before you read.
I understand why you might make a blessing before you do some ritual commandment, maybe shaking a lulav, an esrog. I understand why you would make a blessing even before you eat food which isn’t an inherently religious act. But making a blessing before you study Torah is kind of strange because the act of studying Torah is in some ways inherently religious. But as we will see, this blessing is really meant to reinforce that revelation, that godliness, still speaks through us in our daily lives. And more importantly, it’s not just a blessing; it is actually a prayer where we are praying that Torah and Torah study and the commitment to Torah life actually has an effect in changing and shaping who we are.
Now the source for this blessing is quite clear in the Talmud. The Talmud discusses it on page 21a in Tractate Berakhot, which is the first tractate in the Talmud, and it derives the source for making this blessing from the following verse: it is in Devarim, which is Deuteronomy, thirty-second chapter, the third verse. It says: “כי שם ה’ אקרא הבו גודל לאלקינו (Ki shem Hashem ekra, havu godel l’Elokeinu) /When I call out the name of God, let me remark, let me bring greatness to our God.” And this is so interesting that this is the source for making a blessing on the Torah, a source that many commentators say is biblical in origin.
This is a very important blessing. If it were up to me, and I’m not giving any ideas. You know if you’ve ever seen in Chabad, they always go around and they ask people did you put on tefillin today, which is one of the most beautiful customs and kind of is a reminder of Jewish identity. If it were up to me, I don’t have the courage or guts to do this, but I would go around making a Birkhas HaTorah with people. This is the one daily prayer that I think it is worth a blessing to start every morning with, which is really a reflection on Jewish identity itself and what it is all about.
When you listen to that verse: Ki shem Hashem ekra /When I call out the name of God. Havu godel l’Elokeinu / Let me bring greatness to our God. We literally refer to Torah over here as the name of God. It is how we learn the name of God. The Ramban, Nachmanides in his introduction to Torah literally refers to the entirety of Torah as the name of God.
When we talk about the name of God, we are acknowledging the fact that we don’t have a typical relationship with God. We don’t have a, you know, “Hey who are you? What are you about?” It’s not the relationship that we have with another human being or with an animal or even with a tree or with a plant. No, it is extraordinarily different. But one of the great gifts that God gave us is the name of God.
You can have somebody, and if you know somebody’s name, you can call out to literally their essence. You know if you’ve ever noticed when you’re falling asleep and you’re like kind of tired. Somebody calls your name, you wake up. It right away calls to your deepest essence.
You could describe somebody and call out, “Hey everybody with brown hair or everybody with white hair,” in my case, “look up.” I’m not going to look up right away, but the moment you call out my name Dovid, I call to attention. The name of God is extraordinarily powerful, and the ultimate name of God we have is the Torah itself. It is a way that we can bring relationship with God into our lives. And this is the blessing on the Torah, I’m going to read it in Hebrew and then of course translate.
Baruch Atah Hashem, Elokeinu Melech ha’olam / Blessed are you our God, sovereign of the world /asher kideshanu bemitzvotav /who has sanctified us with your commandments /vetzivanu al /as commanded us / la’asok bedivrei Torah /to engage, to engage in words of Torah. And now this is a very unusual blessing, it goes on and has a closing.
It says as follows:Veha’arev na / Please make it sweet /Hashem Elokeinu, es divrei torasecha b’finu u’v’fi amcha Beis Yisrael /Make these words, dear God, the words of Torah sweet in my mouth and in the mouths of the entirety of the house of the Jewish people /V’nih’yeh anachnu v’tze’etza’einu v’tze’etza’ei amcha /and we and future generations and the generations to come from those generations /amcha beit Yisrael /the entirety of the intergenerational collective body of the Jewish people /kullanu yodei shemecha /who know your name and should know your name /velomdei Toratcha lishma /and learn Torah for its own sake.
We’re not learning Torah to get smart or to get credentials or even to get honor. We want to learn Torah lishma, for its own sake, because Torah is a partnership. We want to develop Torah, we want to bring Torah into our life. And the blessing closes, Baruch ata Adonai / Blessed are you God / ha’melamed Torah l’amo Yisrael /who teaches Torah to the Jewish people.
The second part of the blessing is Baruch Atah Hashem, Elokeinu Melech ha’olam, asher bachar banu mikol ha’amim v’nasan lanu es Toraso.
Bachar banu mikol ha’amim / Who has chosen us from all of the nations/v’nasan lanu es Toraso / and gave us your Torah /Baruch Atah Hashem, nosein haTorah. The giver, it’s in present tense, still giving Torah still, revelation is still happening in our lives, the giver of the Torah.
I want to talk about something very unusual about this blessing and why we are having a prayer in the middle of a blessing. We don’t just say we have to be involved in Torah. We don’t just thank God for giving us the Torah. We actually have a prayer in the middle and that prayer is Veha’arev na / Please make the words of Torah sweet.
I think this is incredibly profound and an important part of all religious journey. You know when you’re taking first steps in religious life, it is very easy to feel a sense of superiority, it is very easy to feel a sense of judgment, it is very easy to almost feel a sense of frustration about your own education, your own background, your own past. I know in my family, my father began studying Torah much later in life and there are very real frustrations. You can have frustrations about your own parents, your own upbringing, your own teachers, etc. etc. Religious life is a journey towards idealism and idealism can come at a cost, and that cost can be at the way that we look at ourselves, our own life, and certainly the way that we look at others.
The blessing of the Torah begins with a plea, with a prayer: Veha’arev na / this should be sweet. We’re asking God and we’re making a prayer that the effect that this pursuit towards spiritual idealism should have on me and my life, that the way I look at myself, the way that I look at those around me, should only become sweeter. I heard from a teacher of mine that the ultimate litmus test for somebody’s religiosity and spirituality is how they treat those closest to them. Does it change your relationship with your parents, with your siblings, with your children, with your friends? Religious life and the journey towards idealism have some very obvious difficulties that can come out.
Veha’arev na / Make it sweet. Making it sweet for myself, for all future generations, is emphasizing the ultimate litmus test of real Torah lishma, Torah for its own sake. Torah for its own sake is not a competitive race. It’s not who knows the most. It’s not who’s the smartest. It is who is bringing out the divinity that resides within them out into the world. It should make everybody around you, them and their lives, feel so much sweeter.
And there’s one other explanation that I want to share for what the term veha’arev / make it sweet means. There is another meaning to this word and it’s not just making it sweet. Veha’arev can also mean from the term arvut, which means responsibility. Veha’arev na is not only a plea to making Torah sweet. It is a plea that we should be able to take responsibility for our role in Torah life itself. That we should take responsibility and have a real sense of commitment.
Torah, religious life, Judaism, Yiddishkeit—we don’t do it because it’s easy. We do it because the rigor and the depth and the substance of this journey, the responsibility that we have as Jews, requires us, demands of us, to learn about who you are, who we are. And it’s that responsibility that connects us both to our past and our future that we have as a plea in the beginning. So that opening plea in the blessing of the Torah, v‘ha’arev na / make it sweet, is also a plea for rigor and commitment and intensity. And that both of those are working together. We plead that our focus and commitment doesn’t come at the cost of sweetness and positivity, and we hope that our sweetness and positivity doesn’t come at the cost of the rigor and the responsibility that Torah requires. Because it really needs both.
We need to make it sweet, and we need to take responsibility. And both of these values are embedded at the center of Birkas HaTorah, the daily blessing that we should make and can make every single day, acknowledging and celebrating the incredible wisdom of Jewish life, the Torah itself.
Thank you so much for listening to Talmud Daily. Let’s keep making Torah sweet.