I recently heard a couple of provocative, and ancient ideas, in an interview with the entrepreneur Kunal Shah on the Farnam Street Podcast. He said two things that stuck with me deeply. He said that a, “spiritual life is inefficient,” and “standardizing is the enemy of soulfulness.” I want to think through each one here, though it was the first that spoke to me more deeply.
The educational world, perhaps the religious world altogether, is deeply influenced by our surrounding culture, and it is, like Silicon Valley, a culture that likes to ‘move quickly and break things’; it hopes for quick change and impact; it asks for constant innovation. But religious life, Shah contends (and I agree with him) is by definition not quick, but slow. In religious life sparks of insight are infrequent, may pass by us altogether, and even when grasped, are temporary. In religious life we recognize that there is wisdom from those who have practiced before us. Wisdom, spirituality, is not so much like technology that it always moves forward and builds on itself, since human beings are not so different than they were a generation or ten generations ago. Each person’s spiritual accomplishments are hard won, and tread the same ground as those who have come before.
Religious growth is a slow, simmering stew, cooked over a long period of time (I hesitate to use the ‘cholent’ metaphor for the all different allusions it would raise here that I’d rather avoid!). It demands the process of maturity and insight from experience, and the slow reflection and realization from failure. Anyone who hopes for something quicker wants something else entirely. A friend once spoke to me about being an ‘inspiration junky’ – he always needed another fix. This is the opposite of religious depth, even though it’s common, and frankly, entirely understandable. It feels good, and does serve a meaningful, if limited purpose. The ‘work’ here is not necessarily intellectual – it may not be intellectual at all. It is reflective, open-hearted, and humble. It takes time, and with time, lots of patience. A spiritual patience. Davening takes time; developing a sense of Hashem in one’s life takes time; learning enough to understand how the Torah system works takes time. There is no hack. This is a hard thing to explain to a young person, or even perhaps an adult.
We all need spiritual patience because a Torah life is inefficient. But it’s an inefficiency that produces exceptional outcomes.
On to his second idea. I think there is an old theme in the Torah about the challenges that standardization presents to ‘soulfulness’. From the mishna in Pirkei Avot about not making your ‘tefilah keva’ or rote, to understanding that Hashem creates the world anew each day (like in the brachot of shacharit) and our need to bring a fresh mind to our daily learning and experiences, the notion of pushing back again standardization and rote spirituality has a long history.
But the challenge goes deeper, as it lies in the deep standardization of halacha as a communal practice. This has two aspects to it. The first is that to exist as a community we have to submit ourselves, to some degree, to norms that we may not want for ourselves as individuals. The second and related point is that the law, halacha, needs standardization to operate. Each person cannot have their own law and have it still function as law – it must be consistent and relatively standard. As such, there is an ongoing tension between the challenge this structure presents, which is entirely necessary for us to function as a community, and yet it remains difficult for us as individuals.
This is different from the tension between autonomy, what I want, and heteronomy, what I’m obligated to do (the Torah). It’s about the fact that even within a world in which I know I’m obligated, I have to find ways to negotiate the tension between what’s proscribed or standardized, and the need for what Shah calls soulfulness, or we might call ruchniyut.
To the degree that there is a ‘solution’ to this problem, I think the Torah’s ‘golden mean’ lies in each person’s discovery, over time, of the meaning embedded within the norms we all agree to, which are the ta’amei hamitzvot. Ta’am means not only reasons (which implies that without those reasons we wouldn’t do these actions, entirely untrue in a Torah context) but taste, perhaps a more accurate translation here. The ta’am of mitzvot, in this sense, are not the substance of the mitzvah, but what allows it to ‘taste good’ for each individual. This is where we are able to push back on rote or standardized spirituality, by discovering and reflecting on the meaning mitzvot have for us. This is the soulfulness within standardization.
Both of Shah’s ideas are about the ways in which the Torah is set against the norms of our culture. This makes Torah harder to feel connected to, to understand its ‘agenda’ or process, so to speak. Torah is countercultural, not in a 60s sense, but insofar as it deviates from norms we are exposed to in the general culture, and which many of us have internalized as our default. Recognizing this is helpful, I think, in making sense of why we and our children struggle, and hopefully how we can begin to think about helping them, and ourselves, move forward and more deeply into a life of Torah.