Why Learn Torah at All?

(Thank you to Jonah Sieger who created this sheet originally, to which I added a couple of additional sources and some of my own questions.)

Rav Dov Zinger:

“Even when you supposedly reach a new answer to life, suddenly a new search opens up, and a new question is asked of you. You can never rest and say 'I got it'.

In contrast to the picture that presents a religious life as the source of satisfaction and a life of contentment, Rebbe Nachman says that a religious life does not cause satisfaction. A religious life may be a meaningful life, but it is not a life of satisfaction. A Jew is always in the process of searching.”

Franz Rosenzweig, "Upon Opening the Jewish Lehrhaus"

Learning -- there are by now, I should say, very few among you unable to catch the curious note the word sounds, even today, when it is used in a Jewish context. It is to a book, the Book, that we owe our survival-- that Book which we use, not by accident, in the very form in which it has existed for millenia: it is the only book
of antiquity that is still in living use as a scroll. The learning of this book became an affair of the people, filling the bounds of Jewish life, completely. Everything was really within this learning of the Book. There have been "outside books," but studying them was looked upon as the first step toward heresy. Occasionally such "outside" elements -- Aristotle, for example -- have been successfully naturalized. But in the past few centuries the strength to do this would seem to have petered out.

Then came the Emancipation. At one blow it vastly enlarged the intellectual horizons of thought and soon, very soon afterwards, of actual living. Jewish "studying"or "learning" has not been able to keep pace with this rapid extension. What is new is not so much the collapse of the outer barriers; even previously, while the ghetto had certainly sheltered the Jew, it had not shut him off. He moved beyond its bounds, and what the ghetto gave him was only peace, home, a home for his spirit. What is new, is not that the Jew's feet could now take him farther than ever before--in the Middle Ages the Jew was not an especially sedentary, but rather a comparatively mobile element of medieval society. The new feature is that the wanderer no longer returns at dusk. The gates of the ghetto no longer close behind him, allowing him to spend the night in solitary learning. To abandon the figure of speech-he finds his spiritual and intellectual home outside the Jewish world.

Rabbi Dr. Abraham Joshua Heschel, "God in Search of Man"

“Religious thinking, believing, feeling are among the most deceptive activities of the human spirit. We often assume it is God we believe in, but in reality it may be a symbol of personal interests that we dwell upon. We may assume that we feel drawn to God, but in reality it may be a power within the world that is the object of our adoration. We may assume it is God we care for, but it may be our own ego we are concerned with. To examine our religious existence is, therefore, a task to be performed constantly.

To understand what we mean is the task of philosophy. We think in words, but to employ words is not the same as to understand what they mean. Moreover, the relation between words and their meanings is elastic. Words remain, while meanings are subject to change. The expression "our father in heaven" may evoke in some a mental picture of a bodily figure sitting on a throne, and may mean to others the maximum of all majesty, used as a figure of speech, to indicate Him who is beyond all expression.”