Torah Study for the End of the World

When the pandemic began, some people started baking bread. 

My family started studying Torah. 

Week by week, portion by portion, we began making our way through the five books of Moses, and then the books of the prophets and the sacred writings. 

Being a rabbinical student, Torah study was already a regular part of my daily life. For my father, aunt, uncle and brother, however, the unmediated Hebrew Bible was foreign territory. 

In a different sense, this was foreign territory for me as well. After seven years in Tel Aviv, I had become an absent presence in my own family — an empty chair at holidays and events. Now I was home, and I found myself eager to connect and to bring together. I didn’t know why it seemed so urgent at the time, but I sensed it was something we needed as a family, as Jews, and as human beings. 

A year later and I now understand. Torah study is perfect for the end of the world.

Of course, the pandemic wasn’t really the end of the world. Not even close, but for a moment there, it felt like it was—at the very least—a dress rehearsal for the real thing. 

Things were falling away. Businesses shuttered and schools closed. Grocery store shelves went bare and hospitals were filled past capacity. That which was enduring was revealed to be transient. That which was stable was revealed to be changeable. That which was safe was revealed to be menacing. 

Amidst these bewilderments, we came together to learn. In the Torah, we discovered a book of impermanence, filled with stories of wanderers in a precarious and ephemeral world learning to trust in God on their way to a promised land. 

As for the promised land, itself, however, the story ends with our protagonists hovering on its threshold. We don’t see them cross the finish line into the place where they will make their permanent homes and trade in their portable sanctuary for a Temple of stone. 

If there is a more beautiful symbol of making oneself at home in ephemerality, I cannot imagine it. If there is a more effective guide book for the end of the world, I have not found it. 

If the pandemic is a “dress rehearsal” for a truly existential threat, then surely that threat is climate change. 

The globe is heating. The ice caps are melting. Species are dying. Meanwhile, we continue to consume and waste — as individuals, corporations, countries, and societies — as though the crisis were imaginary.

There are a number of questions we can ask about such a time. We might ask what comes next. There are answers. Our best scientists believe that entire regions will become unlivable, that we will see increased famine and drought, as well as the mass migration of climate refugees on a dire scale. 

We might also ask what we can do. Here, too, there are answers. We can become activists. We can change our consumer behaviors and our diets. We can support politicians who take the crisis seriously. 

Finally, we can ask how we should be. This one is harder to answer, but as a writer and a rabbi-in-training, this question concerns me. 

Confronted with the end of the world, how do we live? What meaning do we make of our lives? How do we speak and relate to one another? 

It could be that we manage to avoid the worst possible consequences of climate change. It could also be, however, that we do not. Both options—survival and extinction—lie before us. 

Whatever the result, however, we will be indelibly transformed by the crisis. No longer will it be possible to believe, as perhaps we once did, that our continued existence on this planet is a given. This, then, is what I mean when I say “the end of the world.” It is the end of the illusion of permanence. It is an awareness of our mortality as a species—whether we make it through this particular crisis or not. 

We are not the first to confront our collective mortality. In my parents’ generation, it was the nuclear bomb that prompted this reckoning. In my grandparents’ generation, it was the Holocaust. And there were other ends of the world before this.

Between crises, we tend to forget what we have learned. We suppose, once again, that we are safe, that things are solid, that there are guarantees. Perhaps we find this comforting, but we do ourselves no favors. 

Between crises, we tend to forget what we have learned. We suppose, once again, that we are safe, that things are solid, that there are guarantees. Perhaps we find this comforting, but we do ourselves no favors. A deeper experience of life awaits us when we accept that we are sojourners in an uncertain world where nothing lasts forever and nothing can be owned. 

The Jewish people learned this lesson in the year 70 AD when the holy Temple in Jerusalem was ransacked by invading Romans. Its structure was toppled and burned. The people of Jerusalem were starved, tortured, carried off and murdered. 

For the Israelites, the Temple had been the very house of permanence. Its laws were known as “eternal statues.” The flame of the altar was to be perpetually burning. The incense was to be forever laid out before God and the daily sacrifices were known as the “Eternal Offerings.” 

When the Temple was destroyed, permanence was destroyed with it.

The Judaism that we have today is not a relic of this lost house of permanence. Rather, it is the product of the minds and souls who lived past that end of the world—who had learned, by dreadful necessity, how to stay with the trouble, how to make themselves at home in transience. 

The central rite of this new Judaism was not sacrifice but rather study. 

And so, I invite those who find themselves unsettled—by this end of the world, by the ends that have come before, by the end that lies in wait—to find a partner, to open the Torah, to study. 

More than a text, it is a dwelling place—a portable sanctuary in an ephemeral world. There, between the spaces of those ancient letters and words, voices from the past and future gather, joining your own in this eternal now—this unbounded present—of shared learning.

More than anything else, it is this that we have kept when things fell away, when buildings crumbled, when worlds ended. 

In its pages, you will not find comforts—no sweet palliative words that make one sigh. Instead, you will find trouble—the story of what it means to be human in a bewildering and beautiful wilderness.

Matthew Schultz is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (2020). He is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.