An Obligation to Wonder?

Thoughts on the Jewish Education and The Future of The Humanities

Mayim rabim lo yuchlu l’chabot et ha’ahava. “Great waters cannot extinguish love.” So says the Song of Songs (8:7).

Rabbi Nachman of Breslov glosses the verse differently: the great waters of erudition cannot extinguish the love of learning that first sent you seeking. It is a paradox that cuts. The very accumulation of knowledge becomes the greatest threat to the eros that made knowledge worth seeking. Philosophy begins in wonder, says Plato, and ends, too often, in a credential.

I spent twelve years in formal higher education. The risk of losing wonder in that time was real and constant, and it was a major determinant in my eventually leaving the academy to become an independent scholar, and now an entrepreneur. The Jewish tradition holds, in largely unexamined form, a set of answers to a crisis now confronting Western education. Not answers that translate easily. But answers that are real, tested across catastrophe, and available to anyone willing to learn from them.

Western education, in its current form, has failed in two distinct and almost opposite ways.

The first failure is the positivist model: the university as a machine for producing accurate, credentialed, morally weightless professionals. Facts without values. Analysis without formation. Bertrand Russell, one of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers, was once challenged by a student who pointed out that he taught ethics while living as a serial adulterer. Russell’s response has become famous: does a geometry teacher have to be a triangle? The analogy is brilliant and damning. It captures exactly what academic philosophy became, a set of formal procedures deliberately insulated from the question of how one ought to live. The result is a university system that produces extraordinary specialists who have no idea what their expertise is for.

The second failure is the political model: the hermeneutics of suspicion that has dominated the humanities for the last forty years. It began as a legitimate corrective, a reasonable insistence that texts carry the fingerprints of their authors’ interests, that power shapes knowledge, that the reader’s position matters. Ricoeur, who coined the phrase, thought suspicion was necessary: you had to unmask ideology before you could recover meaning. The problem is that the students of the masters of suspicion dropped the second half. Correction curdled into conclusion. Where the positivist said I have no view, the activist says your view is a power move. Every text has an agenda. Identity determines credibility. Inquiry yields to solidarity. At least the dry professor left the student alone to wonder. The activist professor tells the student what to conclude, wrapping coercion in the language of liberation.

Between them, they have destroyed what the liberal arts are for: the formation of flourishing, self-directed citizens.

Judaism did not begin as an explicitly intellectual culture. The Torah reads on a basic level as Bronze Age document for a people enjoined to conquer a land and build a good society. Its concerns are agricultural, social, and political.

In the year 70 CE, the Romans destroyed the Second Temple. The religion built around sacrifice and sovereignty was suddenly inoperative. Judaism could have died. Instead it reinvented itself. Two practices replaced the temple: prayer and study. Prayer, the tradition says, is how you speak to God. Study is how God speaks to you. Study was not a supplement to religious life; it became religious life. The Talmud, 3,000 pages of debate, legal argument, digression, story, and cosmic speculation developed and edited over four centuries, was the new temple. A practice, not a building. Portable across every exile, destructible by no army.

The Talmud makes the stakes explicit: Jerusalem was destroyed only because children stopped going to school (Shabbat 119b). A culture which stops transmitting its learning does not merely lose its past. It loses its future.

The innovation of Jewish learning culture is not its content but its motivational structure. Learning, in the traditional Jewish framework, is an obligation. A duty that precedes you, that you did not choose, that admits of no completion.

Every morning, a practicing Jew recites a blessing over the study of Torah. The blessing is not gratitude for something received. It is acknowledgment of a duty that arrives fresh with each day. And the duty is constitutively unfinishable. Maimonides rules that the obligation to study never ceases, not in illness, not in old age, not at the end of one’s life (Hilchot Talmud Torah 1:8). Unlike almost every other religious obligation, Torah study has no moment of completion. There is no such thing as having learned enough.

This structure cannot be imported into liberal consumer culture, which can only motivate through incentives: the grade, the credential, the career outcome. Those motivators work, but instrumentally, and instrumental motivation is fragile. It dissolves the moment the incentive disappears or the cost rises. The rabbinic tradition understood something deeper: if learning requires an external reason, you will always eventually find a reason not to do it.

The Mishnah puts it plainly: Do not say, “I will study when I have time,” lest you never have time (Avot 2:5). Hillel’s aphorism is not a productivity tip. It is a diagnosis of the human tendency to defer the most important things indefinitely in the presence of the urgent. The tradition’s response was structural: remove the deferral by making the obligation daily, unconditional, prior to circumstance.

The canonical formulation appears in the daily liturgy and in the Talmud both: Talmud Torah k’neged kulam, the study of Torah is equal to all other commandments combined (Shabbat 127a).

Jewish learning is structurally dialogical. The chavruta (the study partnership) is not a pedagogical technique. It is a metaphysical commitment: the idea that thinking alone is thinking poorly, that a position untested by a serious opponent is not yet a position.

The beit midrash, the house of study, was not a library. It was an arena. You came to be challenged. The goal was not to absorb information but to produce a chiddush, a genuinely novel interpretation, something the tradition had not seen before. The standard for a master was severe: a member of the Sanhedrin had to be capable of arguing 71 ways to acquit and 71 ways to convict any defendant (Sanhedrin 17a). Not because truth is relative, but because conviction that cannot survive the strongest counterargument is not conviction. It is preference dressed in formal wear.

The Talmud records a story that haunts me. Rabbi Yochanan and Reish Lakish were the great sparring partners of their generation; their debates fill hundreds of pages of Talmud. When Reish Lakish died, Rabbi Yochanan was given a brilliant student as a replacement. The student agreed with everything Rabbi Yochanan said, offering support and elaboration for each position. Rabbi Yochanan was devastated. “Bar Lakish!” he cried. “When I would state a law, he would raise twenty-four objections, and I would answer them, and through this the law would become clarified.” The flattering student was worse than no student. He had deprived Rabbi Yochanan of the friction that makes thinking real (Bava Metzia 84a).

In the contemporary academy, disagreement is increasingly treated as harm. In the beit midrash, agreement was the danger. The objection is an act of love. The absence of a worthy opponent became, literally, a cause for grief.

There is another dimension of Jewish learning culture that deserves its own account. The beit midrash was the first institution in the ancient world where a son of a water-carrier could become the most respected figure of his generation, not by wealth, not by priestly lineage, not by political connection, but by the quality of his argument. In Athenian democracy, birth still determined who could speak in the assembly. In the Roman legal tradition, class structured access to rhetorical education. The beit midrash dissolved both filters. What mattered was the argument itself.

Ben Zoma’s formulation in Avot captures the aspiration: Who is wise? One who learns from every person (Avot 4:1).

When the obligation to study was extended to all Jewish men, not only the priestly class, not only the wealthy, it generated a literacy rate in the ancient world that had no parallel. The gap between teacher and student was never as wide in Jewish culture as it was in the surrounding civilizations, because the tradition refused to treat learning as a mark of class. You were obligated to learn because you were Jewish, not because of what you could become by learning.

These features of Jewish education, obligation without instrumentality, debate without safe harbor, close reading as philosophical method, meritocracy of the mind, are not ethnographic curiosities. They are answers to problems the secular world has been unable to solve.

The obvious rejoinder is that these solutions are load-bearing on a theological infrastructure that secular institutions cannot replicate. Obligation to whom, exactly? The structural insights, I would argue, can travel without the theology that generated them.

The age of AI makes this more urgent. When answers are commodified, when any factual question can be resolved in three seconds, when the summarized version of any argument is available on demand, the ability to ask a better question becomes the central intellectual skill. This is precisely what the Talmudic tradition was designed to produce. The limits of my ability to use AI well are the limits of my prompting. And the limit of my prompting is the limit of my thinking.

The crisis of liberal education is, at its root, a motivational crisis. What do you learn, and why? The Jewish answer is both demanding and clarifying: you learn everything, because the obligation to learn is not indexed to usefulness. And you learn in community, because thinking alone is thinking poorly.

Torah, in Hebrew, means instruction. When you study it, the tradition assumes you are not merely trying to understand what the author meant. You are asking what this requires of you. How you need to live. The humanities were, originally, an attempt to hold that question open, to insist that reading Plato or Augustine or Montaigne was not an antiquarian exercise but a form of self-interrogation. What happened to Western education is that it lost confidence in that question, and substituted for it the easier questions of method and politics. It stopped asking what does this demand of me and started asking how do I analyze this and whose interests does this serve. But great waters cannot drown out enduring questions.

Some reflections as I continue to think about how to inspire learning as a way of life at Alexandria - Zohar