A non-Jewish acquaintance, who grew up knowing very few if any Jews, recently confided in me that he had been taught by his father to admire the Jewish people because of our reverence for and pursuit of knowledge.
The Jewish respect for knowledge and appreciation of its value has ancient roots going back to the scriptures. Deuteronomy commands us to “teach our children diligently” (6:7). In the context of the Torah, the knowledge that is to be conveyed is focused on familiarity with and understanding of God’s commandments and on learning and identifying with the sacred history of Israel (God’s deliverance of the people from bondage in Egypt and entering into a covenant with them at Mount Sinai).
In the wisdom books of the scriptures (Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes) knowledge took on a more expansive meaning. The content of these books ranges from the conventional (practical instruction on succeeding in life and avoiding temptation) to the profound (wrestling with the meaning of life and the vexing question of why evil and suffering exist).
The rabbis of the first five centuries of the Common Era saw study of the Torah as a paramount value in and of itself, transcending its practical application to determining and adjudicating the law. The ideal religious personality was the sage, who was familiar with the scriptures and other sacred writings and had the ability to interpret them and to instruct others. According to the rabbis, an ignorant person cannot be truly pious. In their imagination, at Mount Sinai and during the course of Israel’s wanderings in the wilderness, God appeared to Moses in the guise of a schoolteacher, teaching him the contents of the Torah. In Jewish law, a teacher, who is taking on the responsibility originally conferred on parents, is to be given the same and, in some instances, even greater respect than a parent.
Jewish intellectual life was never totally sealed off from the surrounding culture and from secular knowledge. Interpretation of rabbinic law often required a knowledge of the science of the day. The liturgical poets of the synagogue emulated the style and format of their non-Jewish contemporaries. Jewish thinkers who lived in multi-cultural environments employed the tools of classical philosophy to defend their faith against the arguments of sceptics and of other faith traditions that claimed to have superseded Judaism.
When the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and the process of Emancipation in western and central Europe over the course of the nineteenth offered Jews the opportunity to leave the isolation of the ghetto and participate in the social, economic, political and cultural life of the countries in which they resided, they, for the most part, embraced it. For many of them this entailed the pursuit of secular knowledge and attendance at an institution of higher learning, a choice to which they may have been predisposed by Judaism’s stress on knowledge and learning.
In our prayers every day, we address God with these words: “You grace us with knowledge and teach humans understanding.” God is the ultimate source of understanding and wisdom, but it is our teachers who are the repositories of these gifts and who transmit it to their students, and we are grateful for their instruction and their example.
I was too young and self-absorbed at the time to appreciate it, but in retrospect I am grateful for all of my teachers and for what I learned from them. I am thankful for the Hebrew teacher who lived in my neighborhood and with whom I studied every morning during the course of summer vacation and for my English teacher during my senior year of high school who taught me how to write clearly and effectively and for so many others from whom I have learned.
Gratitude and humility are becoming. We have made astounding progress in our times in so many fields – in communications, medicine and technology. But in everything we do, we are standing on the shoulders of those who have gone before, building on their insights, learning even from their misconceptions and errors, The wisdom of the past is still sorely needed in teaching us how to live, how to find meaning and purpose in life, how to see ourselves as part of a larger whole, and how to avoid becoming captive to our own self-destructive impulses.
Rabbi Barry Marks is rabbi emeritus of Temple Israel in Springfield.
This article appears in February 5-11, 2026.
