ADD made me the kind of Jew that I am

This post is dedicated to my long-time readers--if there are any left--who asked why I was always complaining that I was an am ha-aretz (Jewishly-illiterate Jew) and asking for explanations rather than trying to catch up on all the learning that I hadn't had an opportunity to do as a child.

 

Some years ago, our son gave me an “armchair diagnosis,” telling me that he thought I had a mild case of Attention Deficit Disorder.  I think he’s right—I’m easily distracted, and find multi-tasking difficult. 

That’s a problem for a Jew.

Pick up any volume of the Talmud, turn it to any page, and you’ll see a “primary” text only a few lines long surrounded by a page and a half of commentaries, if not more.  It’s impossible for me to focus on such a written jungle—texts that aren’t “linear” distract me.

The same thing is true of studying Torah using a multi-volume text, where three lines of Torah ShehBichtav (the Written Law) are surrounded by Rashi, Rambam, and company, literally centuries worth of commentaries.

That’s why I describe myself as “a p’shat kind of person.”  My way of reading the parashot (weekly Torah/Bible readings) is to look at the written text directly and draw my own conclusions.  I joke that I can spot a midrash from a mile away.  😊

But there’s one area of Jewish tradition that’s almost completely linear—you can ignore any commentary or midrashim with impunity.  And that area is tefillah, prayer.

I’m just a Hebrew School grad with a limited knowledge of Hebrew (which I’ve found challenging to learn).  I had to teach myself how to daven in Hebrew—I prayed almost exclusively in English until I was in my early twenties.  Learning to pray in Hebrew has been my Jewish project for a good chunk of my life.  You can read about my prayer-learning project in my Monday, July 22, 2019 post, Learning, the hard way, or learning from the inside out: An am haaretz teaches herself to davven

Some folks focus on learning.  I’ve never been able to do that because non-linear learning is a major challenge for me.  So I’ve made teaching myself to pray my way to be a Jew.