#possibly the unnecessarily sexiest description of torah study ever???

[karamazovim]

“A blazing passion permeated all intellectual activities. It is an untold, perhaps incommunicable story of how mind and heart could merge into one. Immersed in complicated legal discussions, they could at the same time feel the anguish of the Divine Presence that abides in exile. In endeavoring to unravel some perplexity raised by a seventeenth-century commentary on a commentary on the Talmud, they were able in the same breath to throb with sympathy for [Am Yisrael] and all afflicted people. Study was a technique for sublimating feeling into thought, for transposing dreams into syllogisms, for expressing grief in difficult theoretical formulations, and joy by finding a solution to a difficult passage in Maimonides. Tension of the soul found an outlet in contriving clever, almost insolvable, riddles. In inventing new logical devices to explain the Word of God, they thrilled with yearning after the Holy. To contrive an answer to gnawing doubts with the highest joy. Indeed, there was a whole world of subdued gaiety and sober frolic in the playful subtleties of their pilpul [dialectic].

Their conscious aim, of course, was not to indulge in self-expression— they were far from being intent upon exploiting the Torah— but humbly to partake of spiritual beauty. Carried away by the mellow, melting chant of Talmud-reading, one’s mind soared high in the pure realm of thought, away from the world of facts and worries, away from the boundaries of the here and now, to a region where the Divine Presence listens to what Jews create in the study of His Word.”

— Abraham Heschel

#possibly the unnecessarily sexiest description of torah study ever??? #/hj #/pos #worth noting that the book I took this excerpt from does acknowledge that it’s a romanticized account #they admit that ‘scholarship often denegrated into abysmal scholasticism’ #because of course it did #still a sexy passage tho #excerpt #jewish #judaism