You might know the Tamudic story about Hillel, who was asked to teach a gentile the whole Torah while he, the gentile, stood on one foot. Hillel answered, "Do not do unto your neighbor as you would not wish him to do to you. The rest is commentary. Now go study!"

We'll come back to Hillel. But now let's fast foward 2,000 years. Jeffrey Goldberg wrote an op-ed column in The New York Times a few months ago, where he said that the danger of a nuclear attack on American soil was a real and perhaps imminent threat. He wrote that compared with such a prospect, "everything else--Fannie Mae, health care reform, energy independence--is commentary."

What Goldberg meant by the last few words is that in comparison with the threat of nuclear attack, everything else is secondary, incidental. In fact, this phrase, "the rest is commentary," is catching on in modern English. It's a way of saying that once we have established our main point, everything else falls into place almost by itself. I wonder how many people realize that this phrase derives from the Talmud.

But the Talmud doesn't mean what Jeffrey Goldberg means. When Hillel said "the rest is commentary," he didn't mean that all of Judaism consists in not harming your neighbor and therefore the rest of it is trivial. Au contraire, Hillel said, "the rest is commentary. Now go study!!" In Hillel's mind, the "rest" is crucial. The "commentary" must be studied and understood and internalized. Hillel meant that the golden rule is indeed the guiding principle of Judaism, but he equally meant that you won't know how to apply it unless you study the commentary.

In today's world, there is too much readiness to dismiss "the commentary." People want sound bites. They don't necessarily want to think about what those bites might imply. Look at the decision to invade Iraq without an exit strategy. We might paraphrase Hillel, and follow the distorted reading of his powerful teaching, by saying "Let's turn Iraq into a democracy. The rest is commentary."

But of course, the rest wasn't commentary. The world would have been much better off if the "commentary" had been thought about and analyzed and planned, instead of, as seems quite clearly to have been the case, dismissed as an afterthough because the principle of making democrats out of Arabs seemed like such a great idea.

Young people today say "whatever." It's a great word -- for those who aren't interested in their parents' guidence or their teachers; instructions or in anything else that bespeaks the wisdom of their elders. It's easy to mumble "whatever" and go skulking off. We who are Jews, the heirs of Hillel, do not say and cannot afford to say "whatever," by which we mean to brush off as so much commentary the fact that there is, in life, follow-through and accountability and consequence to our actions. Too much is at stake for those who take the world seriously, as we Jews do.

Yes, friends, it is true that "The rest is commentary. Now go study." It is from the commentary that we learn how to live and how to act and how to think.