I’ve taken to thinking that Shammai got a raw deal, being held up as the villain in the Hillel-Shammai cage match. On the other hand, as the main difference in attitude between the two was Hillel’s (comparative) lenience versus Shammai’s (comparative) strictness, my preference is a Hillel outlook. Still. We think of Shammai as a short-tempered grouchy sort of guy, which doesn’t really fit with today’s verse, here in R. Travers Herford’s translation:
Shammai said—Make thy Torah a fixed duty. Say little and do much; and receive every man with a cheerful expression of face.
Mr. Herford italicizes duty to indicate that the Hebrew doesn’t include the word but that it is implied, by tradition and text. The usual interpretation is that you should set aside a fixed and regular time for Torah study, rather than saying you will study when you get the chance. Good advice, I think.
As far as my own situation, I do Torah study only when I have a fixed time for it, and an audience as well. I began doing serious regular study when I was given the task of leading the discussions at our weekly service; I didn’t necessarily have a fixed time during the week, but I knew that I would be up in front of my friends on Saturday just after the Torah was read, so I prepared (at least a little). I also started throwing the occasional note up here, largely in case the Gentle Readers could supply some assistance, but I didn’t make of it a serious and regular thing. I started that last year, writing notes on the Haftorah portions most weeks, aware that even if they were accruing very few comments, they were being read. Or perhaps that was my imagination. At any rate, this more or less coincided with my having the all-day Saturday shift at the circ desk, with little pressure from my employer to get anything done other than attend to the occasional needs of the patrons.
The Saturday shift made it impossible for me to attend Shabbat Shacharit service, of course, which is my favorite in the liturgy and besides is my fixed time for Torah study, as Shammai advises. With time and computer access, I replaced the morning service with a morning spent typing away at some sort of Scripture, which has been lovely for me. I don’t really know if Gentle Readers notice when I miss a week or two, but I can imagine that y’all do, which is enough motivation to keep me at that fixed study. Which has done me good, so score one for Shammai.
Before I leave the fixed part, the other strand of interpretation is the metaphor of a drafting compass. make your Torah (toratecha second person singular possessive, if I understand the grammar, which I don’t) fixed, and everything around you is encompassed. In this metaphor, you can look at your life and see if there are fixed points, and if those points are what they should be. Do you circle around your job, your house, your status, your car? Your family, your blog, your hobby, your body, your art? Your grievances? Your joys? Some people circle around false points, changeable ones, and some never find a center at all, or take a long time to do it. The advantage to Scripture as your fixed point (from Shammai’s point of view) is that not only is it fixed, really and truly, and not only is it Divine, and therefore not illusory or bad, but that it really does encompass everything.
When I was a risibly incompetent math major, back in the day, we had a fellow come in to give a job talk. He talked about the idea that geometric proofs (straight-edge and compass stuff) were done on the geometric plane, and that therefore we can imagine that lines go on as long as they need to, and that circles can have radius n, no matter what n is. But what if you are actually drawing these things out on paper? What are your limits, then? And what if (to use the one example I really remember) your paper has a big whole in it, right in the middle, probably where you tore it using the compass earlier? In the world of geometric proof, you don’t have that, or if you did, you could just take your infinitely long straight-edge and run it on to the other side, but on the paper, can you be sure that the line on the other side of the gap is the same line? It was a fun talk, and afterwards I tried to sketch out what he was talking about and couldn’t remember (or understand) enough of the details, which, you know, not altogether surprising. And the fellow didn’t get the job. I hope he’s happily teaching some good students somewhere, though; it was a hell of a job talk.
What I’m saying is that in our drafting metaphor, the world is not the geometric plane but the torn sheet of paper. It’s crumpled. It has gaps. Our ordinary tools are not altogether adequate for proving our that our pattern-matching ability has given us the right rules of angles and squares. Keeping one foot fixed in the Torah allows us to move the other foot around the bumpy old world without losing our way altogether. And how do I try to keep that foot fixed? With regular study, fixed study, or I won’t do it at all.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
Well put!!