R. Avi Strausberg on Shavuot: Forgetting the Torah

Ta Shma

While I love learning Torah, I have a very poor memory for it. More often than not, when I re-encounter a piece of Torah that I have surely learned before, it’s as if it’s for the first time.

Given on the one hand, my love for Torah and a genuine desire to learn Talmud and Midrash, Hasidut and Musar, and on the other, the inevitability that I will forget all of this Torah I learn, I find myself wondering on this Shavuot, what is the point? What is the point of staying up late all night long learning Torah that I know at worst by next year’s time I will have already forgotten and, at best, will just become a shady shift-shaping memory of something I once learned? Often I have the experience of feeling the shadows of Torah I once learned shimmering on the peripheries of my brain, so close and so far, unable to be recalled into concrete existence.