JClock Learning Method

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Book of Proverbs, Chapter 25:

"(כה) מַיִם קָרִים עַל־נֶפֶשׁ עֲיֵפָה וּשְׁמוּעָה טוֹבָה מֵאֶרֶץ מֶרְחָק:...(כז) אָכֹל דְּבַשׁ הַרְבּוֹת לֹא טוֹב וְחֵקֶר כְּבֹדָם כָּבוֹד:"

Book of Ecclesiastes, Chapter 12:

"(יב) וְיֹתֵר מֵהֵמָּה בְּנִי הִזָּהֵר עֲשׂוֹת סְפָרִים הַרְבֵּה אֵין קֵץ וְלַהַג הַרְבֵּה יְגִעַת בָּשָׂר"

Where does this gap come from?

On one side, there is a true wish to hear something new in Torah.

On the other side, there can be a strong and sudden need to be seen inside the Jewish bookshelf — maybe even to keep my own name there — instead of simply being what I first wanted to be: a learner, one person among the group, learning in a simple way.

My deep pain from the book “Shulchan Aruch” does not come from disrespect for Maran Rabbi Yosef Karo, God forbid.

It is the opposite.

It comes because I am trying to listen very carefully to the wish that he himself wrote in his introduction.

Maran wanted to place before the Jewish people a book that every learner could know well. He wanted a book that could be divided into thirty parts, so that a person could learn one part each day, and every month review his learning again.

This means that the first wish was to create a living way of learning: clear, simple, practical, and connected to a monthly cycle.

In this way, the Torah would not stay like a heavy book sitting on a shelf. It would become part of a person’s daily life.

But here is where the break happened.

The book that wanted to be a “set table” for every person became, over many generations, something huge, full, wide, and heavy.

Instead of a living monthly cycle, there is sometimes a feeling of an endless sea.

Instead of simplicity that brings the learner back to halachah, there can be so much material that a person loses the courage to begin, to continue, to review, and to live with Torah inside real time.

This is my pain:

There is a gap between the first intention and the result.

The dream was monthly learning: ordered, clear, and remembered by the mouth.

But today, a learner stands before a very large world of halachic books. Sometimes he feels that he cannot cover it, cannot review it, and cannot turn it into something simple and steady in his heart and actions.

That is why the path I suggest does not come to cancel Maran’s wish.

It comes to be faithful to that wish again.

The learning method of the Jerusalem Clock wants to return Torah to cycles of time: a monthly cycle, a two-year cycle, a Jubilee cycle, and a cycle between two people.

It wants to connect depth with new understanding, steadiness with simplicity, personal learning with responsibility for the message and for the written word.

Instead of placing more and more books on a person without end, this method tries to give the learner a living frame.

Each month has a clear section.

It is learned at a clear time.

It is connected to the new moon, to time, to the person, and to the cycle of life.

In this way, a person can learn deeply, and also learn with a wide view.

He can be faithful to tradition, and also bring living renewal.

He can respect what was written in the past, and also say something clear to our own generation.

So the question about the book is not:

“Why was it written?”

The question is:

Where did the first wish remain?

Where is the monthly learning?

Where is the living review?

Where is the simplicity that lets a person in our generation enter Torah without breaking under the huge amount of material?

The path I suggest is an attempt to answer this question.

Not to run away from Torah, but to bring Torah back into the order of life.

Not to make halachah smaller, but to turn it into learning that a person can carry with responsibility: in the month, in the year, in the Jubilee, and in the connection between one person and another.

This is a path that wants to be faithful to Maran’s first wish —

before the learning became tied to all the many layers of books that came before it, and to all the expansions that came after it.

It wants to return Torah to its natural place:

living wisdom,

reviewed again and again,

steady,

renewed,

simple,

and responsible.