By Rabbi Gidon Rothstein

These were the words of one listener who heard me speak for seventeen precious minutes one Shabbat morning in shul. He hastened to add that he did not mind my length, but thought he would let me know the rule. Lest we think of him as an aberration, consider that our society runs on compressed information—memos, bullets, headlines, all of which assume that the essentials of a topic can be covered meaningfully and usefully in a few words. For some of us, this creates an environment in which we are loath to read an article that goes beyond five pages. Up until that point, we can expect a compact, concise statement of an argument; beyond, we have entered a whole new level of commitment to the topic, one we are often not willing to offer.
The previous paragraph may give the impression that I intend to complain about our skill at pre-digesting information, but that is only partially true. As a person who has suffered through articles and speeches that were longer than they needed to be, who has met numerous pedants who insisted that without knowing everything one really knows nothing, I am not fooled by their claims to superiority of thought or intellect.
I recall a professor of mine telling of a conversation with a colleague, who was teaching a course in (I could have the details wrong) the history of Germany from 1884-91. Sardonically, my professor said, “So many years?” Taking him seriously, the reply was, “I know, but if I do fewer, they’ll tell me I’m being too narrow.” Such people abound, but their excessive focus on detail does not itself raise any worries about our preference for brief presentations.
Yet that cannot be the whole story. In some situations, comprehensive knowledge, or at least fairly deep and grounded knowledge, is the minimum that allows for a well-reasoned and well-founded grappling with an issue. I would hate to be operated on by someone who had not spent arduous years training for that task (and even then egregious errors occur). When I seek a rabbinic opinion on a matter, I am looking for someone whose knowledge is at the expert level not only on the topic at hand, but on enough topics to qualify him (or, increasingly, her) as a savant of the system and its workings.
While each view of how much knowledge is necessary to understand a topic has its place, we encounter many examples of people applying the wrong standard. Since more people err on the side of thinking that too little knowledge suffices, we can spend most of our time discussing that.
For a person making a business decision, who already has a background in the topics being discussed, the relevant issues can often be successfully boiled down to a two-page memo, a 10-minute Power Point, or whatever other presentation works. When Donald Trump needs to know whom to fire on The Apprentice, a summary of the results of that episode’s task and the two-minute conclusions of his trusted aides is enough to make a valid decision about whom to keep.
Many of life’s most important areas—exercise, medicine, peace of mind, psychological health, spirituality, religion (which is not the same)—are so specialized and/or broad that they require more than ten minutes or five pages even to properly raise an issue for further consideration, let alone develop a reasonable opinion of one’s own.
To pretend to have an opinion on such issues is folly, but a folly many of us engage in regularly. I have frequently sat at meetings or meals where people confidently assert their view of topics that I actually have some knowledge about, and am quite clear that these people have not thought through minimally, let alone developed a mature and well-reasoned perspective of the issue.
I had a debate along these lines years ago, although my disputant did not realize it at the time. He was a scientist in some discipline, we’ll say chemistry for the sake of the story, and I was a graduate student in Jewish history. Trying to make polite conversation, I asked him what he did. He asked me “Do you know chemistry?” I said I had some background, and expected to receive a thumbnail sketch of his research. Instead, he said, “Then I do chemistry.”
In one sense he was right, and yet I also felt offended. Had I given him the impression that I expected to gain a full understanding of his life’s work in two minutes, he would have been right to brush me off. I assumed, then and now, that he could have captured the gist of what he did without implying that his description detailed all the sublime beauty of his work.
The second part of the conversation was at least as interesting. He asked what I did. I said “Jewish history,” and he said “But what in Jewish history?” Still hurt by his reply, I responded, “Do you know Jewish history?” He ignored or missed the sarcasm, and said “Yes”. He knew that I could not understand what he did, but was confident he knew enough to understand the history I was studying.
What he needed to learn, as do we all, is that every area of human endeavor can be presented at varying levels of depth and sophistication, each legitimate depending on the goal. As we recognize that, we should equally understand that we need to calibrate our sense of mastery over a topic with our level of immersion in it. This comes up most obviously in politics, which I won’t touch here, but even more importantly in religion.
The question we always need to wonder about in Jewish life is who has standing to have an opinion. Some would say that only gedolim have any right to any opinion on any significant issue, but I write from within a community where the opposite is our greater challenge, where people feel comfortable acting in halachically significant ways without the requisite background or authority.
In a current example, R. Mendel Shapiro published an article in the Edah journal five years ago, arguing that there was room, in certain circumstances, for women to read from the Torah in Orthodox services. (Point of personal disclosure: I strongly disagree with his method and conclusions, and hope to soon publish an article in Tradition detailing some of my disagreements). He has the right to his views, but the phenomenon of congregations accepting his conclusions, when their members have not read the article in its entirety nor absorbed its implications, is inherently problematic.
We need to internalize the truth that different levels of knowledge and immersion bring with them different rights. On a specific matter of halachah (or politics, or medicine, or…), an intelligent person armed with a general background can achieve meaningful sophistication in a relatively short period of time; with more effort, he might even become expert. That does not safeguard that person against errors of method or result, but it does mean that they could feel comfortable discussing the issues with recognized experts in the field. Without that effort, hearing or reading a brief presentation cannot suffice.
The shifting, sliding scale of expertise challenges us to question where and on what issues we each leave open the mental energy to earn the right to an opinion, if not full expertise. On which issues, if any, are we ready to make the time to read a book, or at least a fifteen-page article? For too many of us, I fear, the rush of life has buried that activity by the wayside. We will read a two-page presentation and enjoy it, but if it’s more than five pages or ten minutes, ouch.
One last personal example. I email a weekly shiur on the haftarah (to those who want it; if you’re interested email me at ). While I continually work to improve the user-friendliness of the presentation, for most of this year, the shiur was five pages of single-spaced type, analyzing that week’s portion of navi. Some people read it and claimed to enjoy it, such as my mother; many, including good friends and others who have enjoyed my speaking and writing, simply did not have the time or mental energy to keep up with the presentations.
I mention that because it is the kind of reality that should affect our self-perceptions. It should instill some humility in us when we deal with rabbis and scholars, since they are actively involved in thinking about and researching topics of concern to us all. I do not fully understand how we feel comfortable taking a vigorous stand on Israel, disengagement, women in Judaism, what kind of schools our children ought to go to, and hosts of other issues, if we cannot even devote the time and mental energy to reading concentrated discussions of the different views of those topics.
More importantly, it should goad us to develop more mental room for concentrated thought. If many of the brightest among us (I have heard of this unwillingness, inability, or lack of mental energy from lawyers, doctors, investment bankers, and highly placed Jewish communal professionals) cannot be bothered to think carefully and deeply about issues that affect their religious practice, how can we call ourselves a religious community?
We must recapture (or capture, depending on your view of Jewish history) a time when the lives of the members of our community life involved work, family, leisure, and a commitment to a continuing search for deep knowledge and understanding on the issues of the day (including, especially, Torah, and the demands it makes on us), the kind that cannot come in ten minutes or five pages. That knowledge is the sine qua nonof being a full-fledged Jewish adult, one empowered and qualified to make decisions about what constitutes a properly life, especially in Jewish terms. Since I am rapidly approaching the limits of my time and space, I’ll end here, with the hope that we can have more in-depth analyses and discussions in the near future.

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