Edgar Bronfman learns Torah regularly. Not an astounding revelation, I admit, but an interesting indicator of a growing phenomenon. Edgar Bronfman, a multi-billionaire and renowned philanthropist, has found satisfaction and a key to his Jewish heritage through textual study, through poring over the same literary, poetic, and rigorously legal texts that have baffled, fascinated, and occupied scholars, laymen, and sages for countless generations. Accompanying him on his quest through thousands of years of scholarship made murky by their repeated layering are different rabbis and confidantes of the business mogul, men and women of the book who are desperately trying to satisfy the needs of a newly born hunger. What has Mr. Seagrams landed upon? Why do prominent American rabbis pick their brains weekly to deliver an innovative "D'var Torah" to President Clinton in time for the Sabbath? What secret has been uncovered by these curious world leaders?

There is no way to write an introduction to Jewish learning other than to examine the name of the ritual itself. We do not study, ask, or answer except as part of a greater process of Òlearning;Ó even the greatest experts and geniuses are students and subjects of the great and vast material just as the most ignorant layman is, and in order to succeed, these great teachers must be eventually learning from the material as well. The Talmud recalls the statement of a famous teacher, who lauded the teachings of his parents and rabbis, but claimed to have received the most from his students, a statement I can humbly attempt to echo after having taught Talmud for a week to teenagers in Minsk who had never before opened the book. I was not only stunned by their curiosity and fascination by the material; I was literally taught new explanations of the tractate I was claiming to be expounding by infant students to Talmudic exegesis.

The Talmud stands alone at the forefront of Jewish learning. Though our Bible has lasted longer and is the paradigmatic text for many world religions, and though the Talmud is essentially only a drawn out commentary and addition to the Pentateuch, it remains the definitive Jewish texts. A new reader finds a confused series of debates and stories, all substantiated by hearsay accounts and all clear indicators of having been part of an oral tradition that simply got out of hand. Models of Platonic debate in clarifying points of dispute are joined through logical but often farfetched reasoning with fantastic and charismatic hagiography about rabbinical scholars and biblical heroes. Debates are often unfinished, sometimes with the result mysteriously being left to be settled by divine intervention; and most remarkably, as any rabbinical student can attest, we rarely if ever determine practical Jewish law, Halacha, from the resulting victorious Talmudic opinion. But that is simply part of the mystique.

The Talmud is a colorful painting of Jewish history. From the sages who expounded the tale of the exodus until morning, to rabbis in Belarus who innovated a new dialectic approach to Talmudic study, to two young women in Columbia who use that method every day trying to unearth whether the obligation to shake the lulav branch emanates from an obligation imposed on the person or on the object, the fixture and fixation of Jewish learning has been dialogue and debate. Rarely does the Talmud report that the debate has gone too far; the Talmud only settles when every last question, every thread opened by a spiraling debate, has been answered to satisfaction. Toss in to the mix the commentaries appended to the text by medieval and later commentators, or the critical method developed by Rabbi Halivni among others, and the debate becomes eternal. I vividly remember visiting a yeshiva at a young age and watching two young men nearly tear each other apart, screaming at one another about the status of some defective chicken. I then saw myself years later elevated to the same emotional frenzy by some equally important issue raised by the Talmud, drawn into the fire by questions which tempt one with their simplicity but eventually are unanswerable.

We are all stuck here in a search for truth Ð it seems a passionate statement, yet only the wildest hedonist would deny that mankind is in search of meaning. The canon of Jewish learning is like a cave and a maze at the same time. We try to uncover hidden truths in each corner, we try to find solutions, we look to innovate at every corner. It is never sufficient to simply cover ground; everything, including the process, must be internalized. And yet we are not in search of clues or some answer to everything to spring out at us. We are instructed on how to live our lives by the texts themselves in a very straightforward fashion.

But through these texts we do look for the meaning behind our lives. We quest to find God; at the same time we are conducting an all out search for ourselves. How we interpret each biblical event, whether we choose to read into or out of a text, is as indicative and telling about ourselves as each interpretation is. The Torah we study becomes our Torah. The Talmud relates how one rabbi, blinded by the brilliance of his own explanation of one law but befuddled by the disagreement he faced among his peers, called for divine recognition of his answer, which was miraculously granted. His senior opponent shrugged and uttered the famous words, "The Torah is not in heaven." Perhaps the greatest source of our problems is also our greatest source of pride; God has given us his greatest gift, the manual the Midrash describes the God used to create the world, and has forced us to find the answers and the writer within. There is no silver platter.

And we are far from limited to traditional explanations or the texts I have already mentioned. Even a bible critic is forced to answer why the biblical compilation survived so long, or how its followers remained so devout. Why are people still intrigued by bible codes? The Bible has remained the paradigm of world literature, with so many of its phrases and so many of its stories absorbed into the lexicons of society and culture. The bible stories, at their core, strike at some "truth" buried within us that forces us to return to them over and over. It is amazing to watch the yearly cycle of the Torah reading; every September we finish the cycle in the synagogue and dutifully restart reading successive portions each Saturday morning. And yet every year the speaker in the synagogue or at the family table at home is anxious to expound anew on the creation story, with new ideas, fully cognizant of his own annual recreation.

I heard from my teacher Rabbi Aaron Lichtenstein two pieces of "his Torah" which stand out most in my mind from all that he taught me in the two years that I studied in his yeshiva in Israel. He expounded the verse when King David asks for one request: To dwell in the house of God and to visit his temple. But are these not two requests? It is a parable for Torah study Ð when revisiting a familiar passage, we should feel comfortable with the text, having gradually internalized it as a resident in the house of God. And yet every time we encounter it we should be awash with the excitement of having seen it as if it were new and should examine it with the same curiosity for what we may have missed. The second bit of wisdom comes from a speech in which he echoed the sentiments of his great father-in-law Rabbi Soloveitchik, saying that when someone is so immersed in Torah study, his encounter with the text parallels the giving over of the law on Mount Sinai. Such is the relationship that the text establishes between the reader and the Creator; that these texts are designed as an encounter, as the fodder for a relationship wherein the ÒlearnerÓ quests and desperately searches for He who stands behind the worn pages.

And yet while I am among the leading torch bearers of intellectually honest and fair Torah study, I am well aware of the emotional component that lies within the study of Torah and the students of Torah. I watched last year as a friend of mine wistfully and slowly walked out of Earl Hall after one Wednesday Night Learning Program. She wasnÕt short on work; but as she explained to me, she hadn't enough time in her schedule to learn regularly, and it took its emotional toll weekly as she left the building, having given a token of time to something which had become so precious to her. It was a wonderful moment for me when I realized, several years ago, that I not only felt compelled to learn, I truly enjoyed it. Since then the time I have committed to study has become indispensable to me; it keeps me going. For some people, learning is an escape to a comfortable place; for some, an intellectual exercise, for the unlucky, it is a burden they feel they need to keep as a token of their Judaism or of their past Hebrew school or yeshiva experience. But for so many, for Edgar Bronfman, for Rabbi Lichtenstein Ð Torah keeps their focus and is their antidote to spiritual hunger, and keeps them questing and coming back for more.

We have a Beit Midrash Ð a house of study Ð here at Columbia. Go into Earl Hall, upstairs, come on in and have a look. As a member of its steering committee, I issue everyone an open invitation. It can be quite a scary place for a newcomer, I am sure; there are so many students so well-versed in Torah study, speaking the language and making the right gestures, that the atmosphere for a new student can be foreboding. I see curiosity for Torah before my eyes every day, whether in the form of a curious question from a bystander or in the upraised eyebrows at a biblical passage in CC.

This is not a religiously coercive platform. The canon is so wide and so vast, and it itself claims that there "seventy facets to Torah." Jewish learning is the key to Jewish renaissance. Without coercing us yet while challenging us, learning connects us to our past while letting us shape our future. The quest for innovation is an old one Ð how many times have I thought of a new explanation, only to find it already written by some twelfth century kabbalist in Safed! -- yet each innovation is new, and each time I am rebuffed in my quest for chidush my efforts are redoubled and I once again dig deeper and deeper.

That, I believe, is the key to our future as Jews. While the image of the Jew has been recast from its original depiction of an old man bent over a text with oppression circling, and we claim to stand upright, the intellectual curiosity and the emotional attachment to a God who left us an instruction manual still remains. Our Talmudic debates are as alive as the encounters between Moses and the face of God. Using study as our playing field, we can cast our eyes back and take from our past, we can violently Ð yet openly Ð debate our present, and we can together mold our future.