42 | MARCH 2 • 2023
B
eethoven rose each
morning at dawn and
made himself coffee.
He was fastidious about this:
Each cup had to be made with
exactly 60 beans, which he
counted out each
time. He would
then sit at his desk
and compose
until 2 or 3 p.m.
in the afternoon.
Subsequently, he
would go for a
long walk, taking
with him a pencil and some
sheets of music paper to record
any ideas that came to him on
the way. Each night after supper,
he would have a beer, smoke a
pipe and go to bed early, 10 p.m.
at the latest.
Anthony Trollope, who as
his day job worked for the Post
Office, paid a groom to wake
him every day at 5 a.m. By 5:30
a.m. he would be at his desk,
and he then proceeded to write
for exactly three hours, working
against the clock to produce 250
words each quarter-hour. This
way he wrote 47 novels, many of
them three volumes in length,
as well as 16 other books. If he
finished a novel before the day’s
three hours were over, he would
immediately take a fresh piece of
paper and begin the next.
Immanuel Kant, the most
brilliant philosopher of mod-
ern times, was famous for his
routine. As Heinrich Heine put
it, “Getting up, drinking coffee,
writing, giving lectures, eating,
taking a walk, everything had its
set time, and the neighbors knew
precisely that the time was 3:30
p.m. when Kant stepped outside
his door with his gray coat and
the Spanish stick in his hand.
”
These details, together with
more than 150 other examples
drawn from the great philoso-
phers, artists, composers and
writers, come from a book
by Mason Currey titled Daily
Rituals: How Great Minds Make
Time, Find Inspiration, and Get
to Work. The book’s point is sim-
ple. Most creative people have
daily rituals. These form the
soil in which the seeds of their
invention grow.
In some cases, they deliber-
ately took on jobs they did not
need to do, simply to establish
structure and routine in their
lives. A typical example was the
poet Wallace Stevens, who took
a position as an insurance lawyer
at the Hartford Accident and
Indemnity Company where he
worked until his death. He said
that having a job was one of the
best things that could happen
to him because “it introduces
discipline and regularity into
one’s life.
”
Note the paradox. These were
all innovators, pioneers, ground-
breakers, trailblazers, who for-
mulated new ideas, originated
new forms of expression, did
things no one had done before
in quite that way. They broke the
mold. They changed the land-
scape. They ventured into the
unknown.
RITUAL AND ROUTINE
Yet their daily lives were the
opposite: ritualized and rou-
tine. One could even call them
boring. Why so? Because — the
saying is famous, though we
don’t know who first said it —
genius is 1 percent inspiration,
99 percent perspiration. The
paradigm-shifting scientific
discovery, the path-breaking
research, the wildly successful
new product, the brilliant novel,
the award-winning film are
almost always the result of many
years of long hours and attention
to detail. Being creative involves
hard work.
The ancient Hebrew word for
hard work is avodah. It is also
the word that means “serving
God.
” What applies in the arts,
sciences, business and industry,
applies equally to the life of the
spirit. Achieving any form of
spiritual growth requires sus-
tained effort and daily rituals.
Hence the remarkable aggadic
passage in which various Sages
put forward their idea of klal
gadol ba Torah, “the great princi-
ple of the Torah.
” Ben Azzai says
it is the verse, “This is the book
of the chronicles of man: On
the day that God created man,
He made him in the likeness of
God” (Gen. 5:1).
Ben Zoma says that there is
a more embracing principle,
“Listen, Israel, the Lord our God,
the Lord is one.
” Ben Nannas
says there is a yet more embrac-
ing principle: “Love your neigh-
bor as yourself.
”
Ben Pazzi says we find a more
embracing principle still. He
quotes a verse from this week’s
parshah: “One sheep shall be
offered in the morning, and a
second in the afternoon” (Ex.
29:39) — or, as we might say
nowadays, Shacharit, Minchah
and Maariv. In a word: “routine.
”
The passage concludes: The law
follows Ben Pazzi.
The meaning of Ben Pazzi’s
statement is clear: All the high
ideals in the world — the human
person as God’s image, belief
in God’s unity and the love of
neighbor — count for little until
they are turned into habits of
action that become habits of the
heart. We can all recall moments
of insight when we had a great
idea, a transformative thought,
the glimpse of a project that
could change our lives. A day, a
week or a year later, the thought
has been forgotten or become a
distant memory, at best a might-
have-been.
The people who change the
world, whether in small or epic
ways, are those who turn peak
experiences into daily routines,
who know that the details mat-
ter, and who have developed
the discipline of hard work, sus-
tained over time.
Judaism’s greatness is that it
takes high ideals and exalted
SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH
Inspiration
Inspiration
& Perspiration
& Perspiration
Rabbi Lord
Jonathan
Sacks