Mystical Musical Meditations in Jerusalem
I have a yearning to be a Torah 24/7 type of person, always involved in Torah. This is not something I’ve lived up to 100%, but I have a very deep yearning for it. I’ve had a life that full-time, 24/7 Torah people have, the blessings of a life in which your support is often coming from others, so you just need to get in there and learn learn learn!
Our Torah Sages teach how important this whole idea is, the idea of being inside of Torah as much as possible, 24/7. Learning Torah, there is no time of day or night, or of your life when you’re not both blessed and able and commanded to learn Torah.
King David learned Torah until the very end. In fact, he understood that if he was inside of Torah, then the Angel of Death could not grab him. The Angel of Death had to fool him and take him outside of Torah in order to take his life.
The greatest Sages say to learn until you can’t anymore, until you drop from exhaustion, basically, and that’s how great scholars and Torah sages learn.
The idea is to meditate on it day and night, that’s the verse in Joshua 1:8 that says there is no time of day or night that you’re not commanded to meditate on.
The idea is to meditate on it day and night, that’s the verse in Joshua 1:8 that says there is no time of day or night that you’re not commanded to meditate on.
That’s a blessing and that’s a commandment. The Rambam, one of the greatest Jewish thinkers of all time, taught us that there will always be a tribe of Levites, whether they are from the tribe of Levi or not, there always will be a portion of the Jewish people who will want to dedicate their entire life to Torah learning. We’ve had incredible people who have learned up to 22 hours per day without stopping. It’s the most powerful post-life preparation that you can have.
A person who is inside of Torah is not susceptible to any type of impurities at all. A person who is inside of Torah is inside of Hashem, and only connected to all kinds of goodness and perfection.
A person who is inside of Torah is not susceptible to any type of impurities at all. A person who is inside of Torah is inside of Hashem, and only connected to all kinds of goodness and perfection.
A person who is inside of Torah in a very deep way is a person who has freedom, a free person. A person who is inside of Torah is connected to something that is a cure-all for whatever it is that ails him, whether it’s physical or emotional or any other aspect of the human experience.
A person who is inside of Torah is a person who is fixing up all five levels of their soul. Torah learning, our Sages say, is more important than any other Mitzvah [commandment]. It’s a form of worship, a form of connection to Hashem.
A person who is inside of Torah is a person who is fixing up all five levels of their soul. Torah learning, our Sages say, is more important than any other Mitzvah [commandment]. It’s a form of worship, a form of connection to Hashem.
People who have been deeply inside of Torah for many, many years of their lives think in terms of Torah. They have what is called Da’at Torah, which is the perspective, it's the glasses or the lenses of Torah.
Torah is brought as a metaphor in The Zohar, that of a princess who represents the Torah, who shows a little bit of herself to a man walking by her. He becomes enamored, he is stricken, he’s in love, and then she hides herself. Then this man, throughout his entire life, seeks and wonders, “How I can find that princess, the one who let me experience the sweet elixir of life that she let me taste?”
The Sages say this about Torah - if you turn it around and turn it around, everything is in it. All manner of wisdom in the world is found inside of it. It is an antidote to the evil inclination, an antidote to illness. It’s like water in its purifying power, with the dwelling of the divine presence inside of it. The entire world exists on it, because of it.
So, how you do you do it? How can I do it? How can I be a person with a legacy of yearning for it? How can I be a person who can be inside of Torah 24/7?
The one thing I can do is to understand that everything that is coming my way is actually Torah. Our Sages teach us that Hashem looked into the Torah and created the world, which means that all worldly wisdom can be found in Torah, or alternately speaking, all worldly wisdom is a form of Torah sometimes in a fallen state. It’s our job to bring that fallen, exiled Torah back home. If everything is Torah, then you can be in Torah at all times. If you ask yourself questions, if you’re walking down the street with questions, about Torah, about different aspects, different topics, about what Torah would say about this or that or the other, and you ask other people, and you ask your own mind, and you become a constant researcher, then you can begin to be in Torah full-time.
If the Torah that you’re learning is in order to teach to other people, then you are going to learn Torah in a much clearer and more powerful way and you can be in Torah full-time. If you try, like I’m trying, to take Torah and transform it into tools, and practical meditations and poetry that anybody and everybody can grab onto, then your Torah becomes much more of a full-time, 24/7 Torah.
The Sages say this about Torah - if you turn it around and turn it around, everything is in it. All manner of wisdom in the world is found inside of it. It is an antidote to the evil inclination, an antidote to illness. It’s like water in its purifying power, with the dwelling of the divine presence inside of it. The entire world exists on it, because of it.
So, how you do you do it? How can I do it? How can I be a person with a legacy of yearning for it? How can I be a person who can be inside of Torah 24/7?
The one thing I can do is to understand that everything that is coming my way is actually Torah. Our Sages teach us that Hashem looked into the Torah and created the world, which means that all worldly wisdom can be found in Torah, or alternately speaking, all worldly wisdom is a form of Torah sometimes in a fallen state. It’s our job to bring that fallen, exiled Torah back home. If everything is Torah, then you can be in Torah at all times. If you ask yourself questions, if you’re walking down the street with questions, about Torah, about different aspects, different topics, about what Torah would say about this or that or the other, and you ask other people, and you ask your own mind, and you become a constant researcher, then you can begin to be in Torah full-time.
If the Torah that you’re learning is in order to teach to other people, then you are going to learn Torah in a much clearer and more powerful way and you can be in Torah full-time. If you try, like I’m trying, to take Torah and transform it into tools, and practical meditations and poetry that anybody and everybody can grab onto, then your Torah becomes much more of a full-time, 24/7 Torah.
If you understand that every piece of Torah you are learning has reverberations forever, in the post-life, then you are going to constantly want to be inside of Torah. You can find somebody who can support your Torah, you can make a business deal exchanging their support for the merit that the Torah gives [though this merit is never lost even to yourself in such a deal], and you can be a full-time Torah person.
If you understand that all the Kabbalah that you learned is an encoded, very highly technical system of life applications, of how to live your life, and work on translating that, then you can be in Torah full-time. You can use creative approaches to get to your Torah.
If you understand that all the Kabbalah that you learned is an encoded, very highly technical system of life applications, of how to live your life, and work on translating that, then you can be in Torah full-time. You can use creative approaches to get to your Torah.
At one point I wrote an essay about 32 creative ways to approach Torah. Then you can be in Torah full-time. If you can understand that everybody has a little bit of Torah you can find, everybody has a spark, everybody has some piece of wisdom that nobody else has, then you can spend your whole life seeing people as potential Torah sources, as wellsprings of Torah, a cafeteria of Torah, then you can be in Torah full-time.
If you spend your time trying to know what you know, and plunging into your memory and what is already inside of your mind, then you can be in Torah full-time. That’s my goal, that’s my yearning, and that hopefully, when all is said and done, will be my legacy, that I’m yearning to live, a life of Torah 24/7.
If you spend your time trying to know what you know, and plunging into your memory and what is already inside of your mind, then you can be in Torah full-time. That’s my goal, that’s my yearning, and that hopefully, when all is said and done, will be my legacy, that I’m yearning to live, a life of Torah 24/7.
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