The mishnah in Avos (1:15) teaches: “Make your Torah keva.” And, per the Vilna Gaon’s commentary there, the text continues, “and make your work arai,” with keva meaning permanent and fixed, and arai, impermanent and variable. Where else do those two contrasting terms appear?

The Gemara in Succah (28b) states: “All seven days of Succos, a person should make his succah keva and his house arai.” How many people do you know who really, but really, treat their succah as their home for the week of Yom Tov?

However we’re to gauge attitude and mindset about something like this — whether it’s how much time is spent in the succah, or whether we furnish it in a way that makes it possible to actually treat it as our abode — the prevailing reality is that for a great many of us, the succah is an eating (and perhaps also sleeping) booth. But it’s not home. That house standing nearby loses none of its primacy in our minds.

Sure, we discharge our basic mitzvah obligation, but the larger sense of the mitzvah — its meta-narrative, in contemporary-speak — is often lost upon us. Making our succah keva and house arai requires us not only to do specific actions, but also to surrender our hearts and minds to this precious mitzvah, to create a mental and emotional paradigm shift.

A similar dynamic is at play regarding the keva-arai pairing of limud haTorah and work. Torah learning, after all, isn’t just one mitzvah among many, but one that outweighs all the others combined (Yerushalmi, Pei’ah 1:1). Torah learning’s preeminence is expressed by the fact that we don’t suspend it to fulfill any mitzvah that others can perform instead of us, since every word of Torah learned is a self-contained fulfillment of the mitzvah of talmud Torah (Sh’nos Eliyahu, Pei’ah 1:1).

But what the “make your Torah keva” imperative conveys is that Torah study is sui generis not only in degree but also in kind. Talmud Torah is the only mitzvah that is never ending, with not one day on the calendar or time of day or night when it’s not in force. But that doesn’t just set limud haTorah apart quantitatively; it also bespeaks qualitative uniqueness. Torah study is the elemental stuff of a Jewish man’s life, its default setting. Whatever else he does — even spending eight, ten, twelve hours daily at work, far from the beis medrash — is but an external interposition into his Torah-suffused life stream.

“Make your Torah keva” is a charge to make Torah our business, our constant, the centering mainstay of our everyday lives, with all the rest of life as the variables. Torah — a he’arah, a chiddush, a vort — needs to be what’s cool to schmooze about when friends meet up, when family gets together, with a total stranger while waiting on line. The Rambam writes (Tum’as Tzara’as 16:10) that “the conversation of k’sherei Yisrael” — not gedolim or tzaddikim, but k’sherei Yisrael, good Jews — “is only about words of Torah and wisdom.”

Torah is not some “learning booth” we enter for an hour in the morning or evening, after which we can check our Jewish scorecard’s “limud Torah” box. It’s meant to be the running internal sound track, with “What’s pshat in that pasuk/Mishnah/Gemara/Rabi Akiva Eiger?” competing for mental space with “Where am I getting project funding from?” Those kinds of questions should be the things that, as they’d say in yeshivah, “s’art dir,” that bother you, giving you no rest until resolved.

An idea: Having a good vort on the parshah always at the ready is great, but how about also having one good daily kushya (Rav Dovid Cohen’s V’im Tomar is a great source) to chew on and share with others?

Another meaning of “keva,” according to the Tiferes Yisrael’s commentary, is “snatching,” with the Mishnah directing us to grab time away for Torah amidst our hectic lives. But how are we to do that, practically speaking? Perhaps by just doing it.

Rav Moshe Mordechai Shulsinger once related that a newly engaged young man approached Rav Chatzkel Abramsky for a brachah to merit lifelong learning. Said Rav Chatzkel, “Instead of a brachah, I’ll give you some advice based on life experience: Always learn without hachanos, preparations. Not, ‘I’ll take care of this and then I’ll immediately start learning,’ because those tasks will never end…. Just sit down and learn. Without hachanos. When you wake up in the morning, wash negel vasser, say birchas haTorah — and learn. When it’s time for tefillah, daven well — and learn. If it’s time to eat, do so, and when done — learn. All without hachanos. That’s how you’ll succeed.”

Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 750. Eytan Kobre may be contacted directly at kobre@mishpacha.com