Jewish learning defines knowledge in a fragmented world - opinion

In an age of algorithmic distraction and information overload, the question is no longer theoretical; it is urgent. And for most Jews, even educated, engaged, and committed ones, it remains unanswered.

I was fortunate to have someone to ask.

My father, Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, spent his life making Jewish knowledge accessible to anyone willing to reach for it. When I asked him what a person must actually learn – not everything, but enough to move from ignorance to genuine understanding – he gave me a clear answer.

It was a good answer, but it was not his truest one.

His truest answer was not something he said. It was something he did.

Over more than five decades, my father dedicated his scholarship to producing commentaries and accessible editions of the texts he believed every Jew needed to encounter.

He did not write a commentary on the Zohar. He did not produce an edition of the Shulhan Aruch. What he actually did, where he invested his years, his intellectual energy, and his life, points to a different and more precise canon: five pillars, not four.

The Tanach. The Mishna. The Talmud. The Tanya. The Rambam.

Each is a world. The Tanach is the foundation, the story, the covenant, and the language through which everything else is read. The Mishna is the first great act of preservation, the moment the Oral Law was committed to writing, so it would not be lost.

The Talmud is the conversation that never ends, the record of a people thinking together across centuries. The Rambam, Maimonides, writing in the twelfth century, is the great organizer, the one who took the sprawling wilderness of Jewish law and mapped it into a complete and navigable system.

The Tanya is the inner dimension, the hassidic language of the soul, which asks not only what a Jew must do, but who a Jew must become.

Together, they do not merely represent Jewish knowledge. They constitute it.

This was not a list my father recited. It was a life he lived. And it is, I believe, his most honest and enduring answer to the question every serious Jewish learner eventually asks.

The work of the Steinsaltz Center is to carry that answer forward.

In a landscape where Jewish knowledge is increasingly fragmented, dispersed across apps, podcasts, and disconnected study sessions, there is a genuine need for a center of gravity, where the foundational texts of the tradition are made accessible with clarity, integrity, and coherence.

That work takes on particular significance with the recent publication of the first volume of the Mishneh Torah in English through Koren, now available in the United States.

This is the only work in Jewish history that attempts to organize the entirety of Jewish law, from the nature of God to the laws of the Temple, from personal ethics to communal responsibility, into a single, coherent, readable structure. Nothing like it exists.

What makes this edition worth noting is not merely that it translates the Rambam. Translations exist. What distinguishes it is that it is usable for a contemporary reader without years of prior preparation, without a teacher guiding every page.

Several features serve this goal. Practical guidance throughout the text clarifies what is actually observed in lived Jewish practice today.

Most significantly, this edition includes, for the first time in English, the glosses of Rabbi Abraham ben David of Posquières, one of the Rambam’s sharpest and most consequential critics.

He did not write to dismiss the Rambam. He wrote to engage him, to push back, to force the questions deeper. A text worth arguing with is a text that matters. That dialogue has been alive for eight centuries. This edition brings it into English for the first time.

He established a global learning cycle, structured in both one-year and three-year tracks – not to produce halachic authorities, but to ensure that every Jew could hold the full map of Jewish knowledge in their hands.

The goal was breadth. Access, not expertise as a prerequisite.

That goal matters now more than ever.

We live in a moment of genuine fragmentation, not only in Jewish life, but in the life of the mind generally. Sustained attention is rare. Coherent frameworks are rarer. Most people consume information in fragments, and fragments, however valuable individually, do not add up to understanding.

The Rambam is an antidote to this. It does not require hours – 10 to 15 minutes a day is genuinely sufficient to complete a unit of thought, a defined concept, or a piece of the larger map.

Over months, those pieces become a structure. Over the years, that structure becomes fluent.

There is also something the Rambam offers that goes beyond content. Clarity at this level is not merely intellectual; it steadies a person. To know where you stand within a tradition, to hold its logic, its arc, and its internal coherence, is to move through life differently, with more ground beneath your feet.

My father spent his life building that ground for others. He believed, with complete seriousness, that Jewish knowledge was not the property of scholars, but that it belonged to every Jew willing to reach for it.

The Mishneh Torah is now available in English.

The map is accessible. The question is simply whether you are willing to open it.