We are already well into summer when many of us have more free time for reading than during the year. To those whose summer reading tastes do not run to escapist page-turners about shark attacks or haunted houses I’d like to commend In Search of Torah Wisdom: Questions You Forgot to Ask Your Rebbi by Rabbi Yisroel Miller.
In Search of Torah Wisdom is by no means light reading — it touches in one way or another the most basic issues of Jewish belief and conduct — but it is reader-friendly. Divided into nine sections and 75 or so separate chapters there are many pesuchos and stumos that allow the reader to think about what he has just read and absorb the implications.
For once the title (and particularly the subtitle) pretty much describes the book. This is not a work for baalei teshuvah though baalei teshuvah will also benefit from it. Almost every question posed presupposes a level of sociological knowledge of the Torah community and at least the amount of Torah knowledge that every yeshivah student will absorb by osmosis over a decade or more.
InEurope yeshivos were primarily elite institutions. The ubiquitous poverty ofEastern Europedictated that only a small percentage of Jewish young men could pursue full-time Torah studies long past bar mitzvah age. Only those of exceptional ability or with exceptional desire to learn continued in the great Lithuanian yeshivos.
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