The Acronym
These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart. Deuteronomy 6:6 NASB
Heart – What is an acronym? Technically, “an abbreviation formed from the initial letters of other words and pronounced as a word.” You’ll know a few of these from their current usage in modern English. For example, LOL, ASAP, ZIP, and PIN. But did you know that there are acronyms in the Hebrew text of the Bible?
“The name לָמֶד, for learning, is an acronym of לֵב מֵבִיו דַעַת, a heart that understands wisdom (Osios R’ Akiva). The goal of learning Torah is to absorb its teachings into one’s לֵב, heart. Genuine learning penetrates the heart, as the Torah demands . . . Deuteronomy 6:6”[1]
Rabbi Munk points out that the root for “to learn” doesn’t appear in the Torah until this verse in Deuteronomy. Considering the amount of material dedicated to instruction in the Pentateuch, this is rather amazing. While Deuteronomy is the second recitation of the Law, only here does the command to internalize God’s instruction appear. As Munk writes, “But Torah study per se is insufficient if it is not translated into action. . . If one’s deeds exceed his knowledge, his knowledge will endure. But if one’s knowledge exceeds his deeds, his knowledge will not endure (from [Pirke] Avos 1:17).”[2] As we have noted many times, Hebrew education is not about the collection of facts. It’s about the application of wisdom. Without doing there is no knowing.
Consider all the investigations we’ve done together over these many years, now more than two decades. Hopefully, we’ve learned a lot. We’ve discovered all kinds of important things about the formation of the biblical text, about the intricacies and surprises in the grammar, about the great themes of the Bible, and, perhaps most importantly, the Hebraic paradigm of the apostolic material. But Munk reminds us that all of this won’t last until we put it to use. In other words, without practical experience it will all be forgotten. The lessons learned will fade from memory and we’ll end up right back where we started, victims of our inherited paradigm. All this effort will count for nothing unless we do something with it. In fact, Torah is not really a theological or religious document at all. It’s really a guide book. It tells us how to live and what to do through stories, instruction, and commandments. And unless we put it into action, it will eventually become just one more ancient manuscript consigned to the shelf. That’s what happened when the Church decided that Christianity was really an apostolic religion. The Tanakh no longer provided life-applications. It was just the history of another people who were replaced. So, you could insert a page between the “Old” and the “New” and never think anything was amiss.
Topical Index: learn, heart, acronym, Michael Munk, Deuteronomy 6:6
[1] Rabbi Michael L. Munk, The Wisdom in the Hebrew Alphabet (Mesorah Publications, 1983), p. 139.
[2] Ibid.
