dogs

I see many dogs on my mail route. I'll bet there's not one type of mutt or mongrel I haven't run across. If you ask me, they have no business living amongst us. Vile, USELESS BEASTS . . .

c'neged culam

I hear often in the frum world that Torah study is the greatest mitzvah, that even one word of it equals all the other mitzvos, and sometimes it seems that it's the only mitzvah that the charedi yeshiva world cares about. One hears phrases like "learning isn't just another mitzvah" a phrase that seems degrading to mitzvos to me. I find it also demotivating because I as a woman don't have the chiyuv of Torah study in the way that they mean. You can tell me that my support of his study 'counts' as study but it doesn't feel like study. I'm still not experiencing it. I'm happy to experience mitzvos but this becomes problematic when mitzvos are degraded. Also, my husband as a baal habayis has limited time for study. Even if we do all that we can to squeeze out more time, study is a fraction of the day. Most of our lives are mitzvos but the mitzvos seem to be looked at as nuisances. Yet Shlomo says at the end of Koheles that "the sum of the matter is to fear God and keep His commandments." He doesn't say that the sum of the matter is to study Gemara. In trying to rebuild yeshivos and scholarship after the Shoah, have we as a community gone too far and gotten off track? 

As a part II to this question (maybe it's an entirely separate question) I'm 100% sure that one or all of the panelists are going to reference the Mishnah "Talmud Torah c'neged culam" as proof that the current sentiment is correct. Yet, it doesn't seem so simple to me. Since when does c'neged mean equal?  The common translation of ezer cnegdo is helpmate with cnegdo meaning mate as in mated to. This fits in well with the Talmudic idea that learning is great because it leads to doing. It is mated, connected to doing. Moreover, we have several similar statements of Chazal regarding things being cneged such as Eretz Yisroel is cneged culam, tzitzis is cneged culam, Shabbos is cneged culam. Even lashon hara is cneged culam. They can't all be greater than each other. That's logically impossible. Rather, they all are mitzvos or aveiros that have tentacles in all other mitzvos, they influence all the other ones.