A Torah of Connection

When a person contracts the Torah into detached study, he may think he is protecting it, but in truth he is distancing himself from it and distancing it from life. The Torah was not given to be a theoretical or abstract idea. It was given to guide life itself, to connect us to reality, to teach us how to live here in this world out of holiness, wisdom, and inner integrity. When the Torah is severed from life, it loses its power to heal and to repair. But when it is planted in the ground, when it has roots in the world, when it accompanies the building of the state, the institutions of education and justice, the culture and the army, the street and the home, then it truly becomes a Torah of life. In the State of Israel the Torah does not seek merely to be preserved; it seeks to create, and whoever contracts it into the boundaries of study alone, without contact with the human being, without responsibility for the world, without the intention to repair and to build, extinguishes within himself the great light it bears.

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