Is the recent Pew survey of American Jewry of any value to Orthodox Jews other than as a window into the dire straits in which our nonobservant brethren find themselves? More specifically ought this study be cause for any sort of self-reflection regarding our own religious lives as it has been for at least some Jews beyond our world? I believe it should be but for a reason you aren’t likely to find in any of the scores of essays addressing the Pew findings.

Consider an article Dennis Prager wrote recently in Los Angeles’s Jewish Journal to explain why “Orthodoxy is prevailing and … the non-Orthodox denominations are diminishing.” He lists numerous reasons:

Orthodoxy makes more religious demands on its followers … the more Orthodox one is the more he or she is likely to live among Orthodox Jews … the great majority of Orthodox Jews send their children to Orthodox Jewish day schools … more Orthodox Jews marry; they marry younger and they have more children than non-Orthodox Jews….[A]s if all of the above were not enough Orthodox Jews believe G-d chose the Jews and is the ultimate author of the Torah [and] it is inconceivable that Judaism can long survive among Jews who do not believe that G-d created the world took the Jews out of Egypt and gave the Torah….

Despite Prager’s admirable attempt to explain why Orthodoxy is flourishing he makes two mistakes. First he implies that belief in a G-d Who runs the world’s affairs and authored the Torah is just another reason among many for Orthodoxy’s success. In fact it is the singular reason from which all the others flow.

In other words the reason frum Jews are prepared to live religiously demanding lives and put their children through many years of intensive Jewish education even at great cost is that they really do believe G-d is the Author of both Torah and history. Likewise frum Jews associate largely with each other for the same reason any person whose life is deeply committed to and revolves around certain principles and practices will seek out the company of like-minded people.

Our focus on marriage and children too is based on our membership in a nation with a Divinely ordained mission to reveal kvod Shamayim in the world. It’s only natural then for us to believe that the more people we can bring into this world to be nurtured and taught to join in that mission the better.

More importantly for all that Prager identifies some of the defining differences between Orthodox and other Jews he omits what is perhaps the most essential distinction of all. Imagine someone standing on a pier next to two boats docked side by side explaining why one works and the other doesn’t. If in listing the various features one has that the other doesn’t he neglects to mention that only one has an engine he hasn’t neglected a mere detail — he’s missed the boat entirely.

The veritable engine driving energizing ennobling all of Jewish life communal and individual is limud haTorah. Even in a Jewish life or family or community chock-full of mitzvos and maasim tovim Torah learning is the indispensable element that infuses those acts with spiritual life and potency. I’ve quoted here before the powerful words of Rav Chaim Volozhiner in Nefesh HaChaim:

[T]here is no comparison at all between the kedushah and ohr of the mitzvos and the great kedushah and ohr of the holy Torah that dwells upon a person who studies it properly…. Not only that but even that kedushah and the chiyus and ohr of the mitzvos that sanctify and bring life to the person who fulfills them derive and emanate only from the kedushah and ohr of the holy Torah because a mitzvah has no inherent chiyus and kedushah and ohr of its own at all only by virtue of the kedushah of the letters of the Torah that are written regarding that mitzvah.…

Even the heterodox movements l’mineihem have “ritual practices” and holidays of a sort. Those practices bear a striking resemblance to mitzvos and Yamim Tovim until one remembers that their members are allowed nay encouraged to pick and choose which ones they “feel commanded in ” as Reform’s past president Eric Yoffie was wont to put it.

And these movements too have something they call “prayer” although tragically for many of their adherents it’s not clear if Anyone is home at the other end of the line to respond. The prevailing theology after all is that of the Conservative clergyman-cum-popular author Harold Kushner who has taught his millions of readers in Judaism’s name that as the author David Klinghoffer describes it “G-d can do nothing to prevent our suffering…. Like President Clinton the L-rd of the Universe feels our pain.” Otherwise Kushner pictures Him impotent weeping quietly in some corner of Heaven plucking tissues out of a Kleenex box the size of Jupiter.

But as for limud haTorah the Jews who have been robbed of it by their movements know not even what it is or that it exists. In-depth Gemara learning the layer upon layer of Rishonim and Acharonim the thrust-and-parry of pilpul the conquest of a masechta the roar of the kol Torah rising from a packed beis medrash in full swing — all these are as foreign to the vast majority of non-frum Jews as are l’havdil Shinto shrine rites (hopefully not more so).

One reason for the gaping unfamiliarity is that when these schismatic groups rummaged through three millennia of Jewish tradition looking for things with which to create an ersatz Judaism they privileged those practices that had analogs in the Christianity they sought to ape and the non-Jewish society into which they hoped to seamlessly blend. And so: Prayer? Check. Holidays? Check. Various rituals? We’ll take some of those too.

But Torah study even in its most basic form — and all the more so Torah as an all-engrossing endeavor into which one invests brain heart and soul the notions of reden in lernen trachten in lernen ligen in lernen — for these there are no neat category boxes one can borrow from the nice people at the Episcopalian church down the block. One will search all through William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience and find nary a reference to the study of abstruse texts as a way to encounter and commune with the Divine.

What is lost when Jews are denied the experience of limud haTorah? Not only the fulfillment of the Torah’s greatest mitzvah; not only access to knowledge of their glorious history and literature and heroic ancestors; and not only the information and inspiration they need to live meaningful Jewish lives. Above and beyond all that they are left bereft of the unique effects both conscious and unconscious that Torah works upon its students. 

On the metaphysical level there is the chiyus and the kedushah and the ohr of which Rav Chaim Volozhiner spoke which the lomeid Torah merits. And on the conscious level of heart and mind there is the feeling that fills one’s entire being as he delves into a blatt Gemara that there’s nowhere else he’d rather be at that moment that he’s doing exactly what a Jew ought to be doing every moment he can.

There is the sense of connection to Jews throughout the generations and at that very moment around the world all of whom have pored and puzzled over the very same lines. There is the humbling realization that dawns as he sits down to the Gemara that Rav Simcha Wasserman ztz”l called a “brain-grinding tool ” of just how brilliant our Chazal were and what an immense edifice this Torah of ours truly is.

But the Jew far from Torah misses out entirely on this experiential dimension. He will not get the rush of Jewish pride endorphins the balm for his soul the intellectual certainty that these old tomes were written by giants and contain the unvarnished truth — all of the things that his frum brother gets when he learns Torah. And what a crying shame that is.

That alone is the primary reason all these denominations are withering and in the process of shutting down despite the ocean of ink that has been spent since Pew emerged to analyze heterodoxy’s woes. The explanation is physiological not sociological: Just as the body degenerates and eventually shuts down when starved of nutrients and antibodies so too does the soul.

But if indeed talmud Torah is the engine of both a Jewish community and its constituent members without which it cannot possibly survive let alone thrive we ought to be asking: How’s that engine of ours doing?

We’ll take this up in coming weeks. —