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