Fred,

I think it is much more (certainly for me!) like when you go to a museum and you admire the works of art and say how nice, look at the aesthetics, consider this and that, consider what influenced the artist to do this and how what he or she did influenced others to do that –but you don’t then go home and attempt to create those works of art yourself . And of course, you also don’t share the base belief (in this case g-d) of the people who created those works of art.

And actually, I would argue –and have a great deal of historical proof –that study of the Talmud is something that has always been done by the few within our culture (e.g., the Rabbis and those with rabbinic inclinations) and not by the average Jew. The Hasidic movement for instance started back in Poland in the 1700s as an attempt to bring Torah to the people because the current studiers of Talmud at the time had become very involved in the minutae of the laws and had very little contact with the average Jew in his community (the merchants, bankers, beggers and so forth –actually had quite a bit of disdain for the “uneducated” masses) and the average Jew had very little connection to the religion itself save through the traditions passed down, the food, and being branded as an outcast by the wider community in which he lived because he or she was a Jew. If you go back and read the writings of the Ba’al Shem Tov and his disciples at the time you can see how he laments that most Jews were not keeping the sabbath.