Community Magazine June 2016

18 COMMUNITY MAGAZINE I was initially very hesitant, wondering how long such an undertaking could last. As anyone who learns Gemara knows, the material is extremely intricate and difficult. There is a hardly a line in the Talmud upon which pages upon pages of commentary have not been written. And so while I know that many Jews around the world follow the Daf Yomi program, I wondered whether I’d be able to properly and meaningfully study an entire page with a group of men each day. I decided to try, and sure enough, we persisted. Day after day, one masechet (tractate) after another. After seven-and-a- half years, we completed the entire Talmud. Afterward, we considered stopping and moving on to something else. Now that we’ve been through the entire Talmud, we figured, perhaps we should choose some other text for our daily learning session. What we found, however, was that we were simply unable to stop. After imbibing the words of the Talmud each morning for so many years, we couldn’t manage without it. It was like our morning coffee. We couldn’t give it up. And so we began studying again from the beginning. This is what we might call a “kosher addiction” – getting “hooked” on something positive and worthwhile. Other examples of “kosher addictions” are charity and hesed . If a person has the practice of putting a dollar in the charity box each day, he is “hooked,” and will not easily give it up. If a person attends the annual fundraiser of a certain organization each year, without fail, for many years, he can’t stop. He’s addicted. And I would venture to say that all men are “addicted” to tefillin each day, and that we are all “hooked” on Shabbat. When we do something consistently over an extended period of time, and it becomes part and parcel of our expected routine, we find it difficult to just give it up. Of course, there are negative and destructive addictions, as well. Smokers and alcoholics are where they are not because they smoked one cigarette or drank one drink – though obviously this is how it began – but rather because they did so repeatedly until they formed an addiction. Repeating actions creates a pattern of behavior which in turn becomes, on one level or another, addictive. Our challenge is to avoid the harmful addictions and develop the “kosher” addictions. We need to establish healthy routines and then stick to them until they become habitual and difficult to break. The Midrash tells that several great sages were asked to identify the most important verse in the entire Torah. The most famous answer is that of Rabbi Akiva, who pointed to the command, “ Ve’ahavta le’re’acha kamocha – You shall love your fellow as yourself.” Less famous, though no less understandable, is the response given by a different rabbi, who cited the first verse of the Shema text: “ Shema Yisrael, Hashem Elokenu Hashem Ehad – Hear O Israel, Hashem our God – Hashem is one.” There is, however, a third answer given to this question, one which might, at first glance, strike us as unusual. One rabbi responded by citing a verse later in the Book of Bamidbar (28:4) describing the mitzvah of the korban tamid – the daily sacrifice in the Bet Hamikdash : “ Et hakeves ha’ehad taaseh baboker ve’et hakeves hasheni taaseh ben ha’arbayim – You shall Dedicated in memory of the pure neshamot of the Sassoon children